David R Slayton

Oct132010

Book Club: Art and Memory

There’s a theme in literature that explores the powerful connection between art and memory. The best example I know of is Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye, otherwise known as my favorite book. But it’s something we all experience. I can’t always remember the fashion or music of a certain time in my life, but I can tell you want I was reading and how it affected me.

The Madonnas of Leningrad, by Debra Dean, takes the connection between art and memory and lets it casually supplant everything else in the characters’ lives. As Marina’s memory dissolves with age, she recalls her time in the Hermitage Museum of Leningrad during World War II. Flashback is tricky. It has to be used wisely, but like the best books that alternate points of view, the important trick is to make both time periods engaging enough that the reader gets a little anxious when you change the channel, then they find themselves captivated by the new chapter before you reverse course again. Dean manages Marina’s past with a delicate touch and a compelling perspective, but each time you find yourself in Marina’s present, you are anxious to get back to the past.

As with so many recent entries in literary fiction, Madonnas is a brief book, only an inch thick and 228 pages. Yet it captures important turning points in a human life. If good writing is “life with all the boring parts taken out,” then Dean accomplishes her goal. Not that the book is all action, plot, or event. Little touches run through the narrative, humanizing moments that reinforce the difference in the chronology. Unfortunately these grounding elements are also some of the weaker points in the narrative, though still they manage to help tease out the mystery. In a way, the chronological shifting also hurts the book’s plot, as you know certain outcomes are inevitable: Marina and her husband Dmitri will survive the war. They will be reunited. Still, Dean had my full attention for most of this novel. She drew me in with the vignettes on art, digressions into discussions of the museum’s missing treasures.

Madonnas is a touching, memorable little book, but I have to echo Alfred’s comment that the daughter’s point of view was a distraction. It made me wonder what history is slipping away from us as our grandparents pass. What learning techniques? What arts? A vast history of personal experience slips constantly away from us, ineffable, and ever eroded. It made me want to sit down with my grandfather and ask him to poor out his own memories of the War before they vanish.

Oct122010

The Power of Language

As writers, language is our greatest tool and weapon. We wield it daily in our craft, but it is just as easily turned to hate. In the last few years I’ve backed off the “politically correct” censoring of certain terms. I now consider that a mistake.

My friend Laura doesn’t blog too often, but her post today is a can’t miss on the power of language and its effect upon us.

http://someblundersandabsurdities.blogspot.com/2010/10/thoughts-on-coming-out-day-2010.html

I encourage you to read Laura’s post and leave her a supportive comment.

Oct72010

Can You Help a Betsy Out?

Betsy Lerner has released an updated Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers. This is one of my top books on writing. It mixes the practical advice with some digestable inspiration for keeping at it.

I’ve bought more than one friend a copy over the years (you know who you are); but if you want to write, or publish, I’d recommend picking up a fresh copy to see what new insights she’s brought to bear.

This is a book I reach for when I get bummed by the publishing process. Help Betsy get a bestseller and pay her back for all the help she’s given aspiring writers.

Oct52010

Giving Death His Due

Now our luck may have died and our love may be cold
But with you forever I’ll stay
Were goin out where the sands turnin to gold
Put on your stockins baby, `cause the nights getting cold
And maybe evrything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe evrything that dies someday comes back

– Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City

Halloween is coming, and everywhere I look, death seems to haunt popular culture. The undead have ruled supreme over genre fiction for a good while. Some of the hottest shows on television involve bloodsucking monsters. Even the X-men are fighting vampires in the Marvel universe, which tells me that vampires have definitely jumped the zombie were-shark.

With so many dead walking about, I’m starting to think Death hasn’t just taken a holiday. He’s moved to Maui and taken up residence in Margaritaville. Characters keep sneaking back in the door well after they’re properly dead and buried. Zombie apocalypses happen so often in fiction that Hades is close to empty and insurance companies raise your rates if you live near a cemetery.

The idea that death isn’t permanent in comic books has become enough of a cliché that whole crossovers, like DC’s Blackest Night, have been devoted to putting some power back into the Reaper’s hands. The dead walk, talk, and romance the living so often I’m surprised they haven’t unionized under a chant of “What do we want? Brains! When do we want them? Now!”

Heroes have a unique relationship to Death. They cheat him, beat him, often bringing their entire supporting cast along for the ride, at the cost of the story’s impact. When a series reaches a major turning point, or milestone, you need to see a price for the victory. Otherwise, it rings hollow. Heroes can descend to the underworld and return, they’re heroes after all, but doing so is a major effort.

Comics have third stringer death down. When a new creative team takes over a book, one of their first moves often involves killing off the supporting cast to make room for their own creations. Even then, return is always possible, should another writer see the need to bring a dead character back into play. Only the poor redshirts beaming down with Captain Kirk aren’t coming back. Usually nameless and indiscriminate, they’re convenient in their disposability. They stick out, like the sweet girl in the zombie flick, only there to die.

Sometimes heroes don’t return. They lose the fight or their victory is Pyrrhic. The good fall and stay down. Returning becomes the sole province of the villain, such as in Harry Potter, where resurrection is only made possible through black magic and wicked deeds. Great evils often re-arise in fantasy, putting themselves back together after long centuries, and a new group of misfit heroes must sally forth to save the day.

Whether it involves heroes or villains, when the gates to the underworld are a revolving door, it becomes difficult to create a world where death has meaning. The hard part is keeping the balance. I’ve read quite a few books where the stakes of the plot were high, but every hero and side character squeaks through. When you’re reading a series, and this pattern repeats book after book, you start to doubt that anyone can truly die. Fiction is strongest when it reflects reality, and the reality is that we must die. It is one of the incontrovertible truths of our lives, and it should be true for our characters as well.

Sep182010

Everyone Needs a Breather: A Little More on Pace

We all have periods when it seems everything goes wrong: life enters cascade failure, and one crisis after another piles on. You’ve probably met someone who just seems cursed. A personal loss is followed by a car wreck, then a flooded house, then an illness. You start to wonder which god they pissed on to create such calamity. You pity them, but you fear them a bit too. Stand too close and lightning might strike. Conflict is a rule of life and fiction, but fortunately there are good times as well as bad. Even the bleakest existence is mercifully punctuated with a bit of hope.

In fiction, and in life, everyone needs a breather, a time out, or just a break. Sometimes we can’t control the pace of reality, but as writers we get to show our characters some mercy from time to time.

I return to the issue of pacing as I consume urban fantasy at a voracious rate. In Florida I tore through the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse catalog and started on Simon Green’s Nightside books. The first book in the Age of Misrule series is next. One book that came highly recommended, but that I can’t seem to complete, is Vickie Pettersson’s Scent of Shadows.

Green, Harris, and Pettersson all work in the first person, the standard point of view for urban fantasy. This prevents the problem Kristin Nelson recently discussed, of having the action in the second chapter not flow directly from the action in the first. Doors get opened, characters are presented with a conflict, and work towards a resolution. All three share the nuts and bolt of a good read: the protagonists are compelling, the antagonist is stronger, and you want to know where the plot will go. In Harris’s series, Sookie takes regular breaks from the supernatural. I was surprised to note how much of the books deal with her domestic issues and money woes. Green uses his fantastic setting, the magical heart of London, to punctuate the action with colorful anecdotes and asides. But Pettersson never seems to come up for air. Tension in a book should build, driving the reader to keep turning the pages, but even the most action-oriented horror films have to insert quieter moments to bring things down before you reveal the next monster.

Pettersson hits her protagonist, Joanna Archer, with one shock after another. She’s brutally attacked, then reunited with her lost first love. She’s disowned by her father. She suffers a brutal personal loss. She’s dropped into a confusing supernatural battle. All of this is perhaps in the first hundred pages. With these revelations out of the way, I thought things would slow for a moment; but the revelations continue. Joanna is given the need to struggle with a legacy inherited from the mother who abandoned her, her new allies don’t trust her, she destroys a life. She’s not what they expected. Her love thinks she’s dead. He’s been targeted. She’s . . . and I put the book down.

Reading Scent of Shadows is rather like lunch with that perpetually unlucky friend. You’re obligated to go (and it is the rare book I don’t finish), but you scheduled the meeting as a lunch because you’re not sure how much more tragedy you can absorb. Hearing about his endless travails, time after time, start to wear you out.

Is Scent of Shadows a bad book? I don’t think so. There are a lot of good ideas here, including one great twist I never saw coming and thought was genius. Pettersson just hits Joanna with too much at once, without enough time for any of the revelations to really connect to the reader’s consciousness. There are enough major life events, changes, and thresholds crossed for three books in the first half of Scent of Shadows, and the compression is a problem of pacing. A little downtime here and there would help the book a lot. At least it would help keep me caught up in the story. The characters might be super human and able to absorb endless punishment, but as a reader, I’m not. I need the protagonist to catch her breath. Lesley, who recommended it, has good taste and assures me the series improves dramatically. The story has been compelling enough for Pettersson to put five of them out there, so I’m hoping to return to the story when I’m ready for more.

Aug282010

September’s Book Club Book: The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

This is the first book of literary fiction recommended by Jo Dunn. The goal is to have it read by the end of September.

Aug282010

Experience is Research

Florida isn’t my usual comfort zone, but here I am, sitting on the little patio at my hotel suite, coffee in hand, laptop on lap, watching a lizard (I think it’s an anole) try to sneak up on me. He’s not terribly subtle, being the color of a fresh leaf and flaring the little flap on the underside of his neck. The Florida air couldn’t be less like Colorado: it’s not even nine am and I’m already steaming. I always feel a bit greasy here, despite the best efforts of the ubiquitous air conditioning. I can’t believe I need to iron anything. I would think the air itself would flatten the crease in my work shirts.

There’s a lot of swagger in Tampa. Men are bulkier than in Denver, where we all bike, run, hike, something. Women seem thinner, more inclined to wearing as little as possible (and I couldn’t blame them if they went full-on nudist in this climate). My former impressions of this place led me to think of it as monolithic: polluted, traditional, and unhealthy. I’m seeing that there’s more to it than that. There’s a strata of progressive culture and diversity mixed in. I’ve been to Whole Foods and found a yoga studio. The food, which I’d thought of as solidly corporate chain, has proven to have a mix of diversity. Today I’m trying a divey little Greek place and last night I sampled an off the map Thai place next to a head shop.

I’m down here for the day job, but I’ve stolen this morning to do a little writing and catch up with my personal email. When I travel I get a lot of ideas, but few of them are immediately useful. They get stored away, put into the notebook, tucked into the eaves, and hopefully when I draw them out later, I’ll find them useful. They’re research, fodder for the creative compost, and when I need to bring a scene to life, they serve me well. I write a lot of about my theory of craft, and one thing I want to stress again is that experience is research.

Getting out of our comfort zones can be so hard, and unfortunately, it’s often not by choice. The person with the tragic life can share experiences we hope to never have. Yet we crave reading about them. We get a thrill from the vicarious experience. We imbibe a sip of what happens to another, never really able to fully experience what they did. Isn’t this the heart of fiction, possibly of reading? The vicarious experience drives it all. We feel the danger faced by heroes, we empathize with tragedy, feel a twinge of our own romantic longing when we read a good love story. It’s an incredibly powerful contrast: we need the safety of the distance reading gives us to judge or evaluate a story. Yet we also need connection in order to empathize with the character. A fully unlikeable protagonist can’t lure us back for a series’ worth of reading.

Imbuing a story with real experiences can be tricky: after all, so much of what we experience may connect us as people, but it’s also usually pretty boring. Some of the first advice you get in writing is to avoid staring with characters waking up, brushing their teeth, or doing anything too mundane or regular. Yet all of us have unique experiences, witness interesting anecdotes as they happen, get a peek into human nature day by day. These are just experiences that relate to character. As I sit here, in the sun, I feel the air warm. I’m sweating. I never sweat in Colorado. There’s a vegetable smell, like something in sweet decay, lacing the air. Just this contrast with the Denver air is an experience I can use for setting. If I wrote about a tropical heat without having felt it myself, it would likely come across as stilted. Obviously, we can’t experience the bite of a vampire or the prick of a killer’s knife (and we wanted to), but we can fill in the gaps. One reason I think the Sookie Stackhouse novels work so well is that they’re firmly grounded in Sookie’s financial troubles. Not a book goes by without her expending a little energy on domestic issues like cleaning. These experiences are universal and help anchor a story. There’s a balance to using these experiences in your work, as there seems to be so often in writing. You want to anchor without boring, captivate without droning on or worse, taking your readers off track. I’ll work on blogging some more while I’m here, but for now I’m off to the beach.

Aug32010

Writing to the Critic: Mr. Angry and the Workshop from Hell

I once took a writing workshop with an incredibly angry, aggressive man. His idea of poetry was a stream of expletives and rage. He’d start every class by loading himself up on sugar and caffeine before unleashing a wave of criticism in our workshop groups. There was quite literally a point or two when I worried about my safety. He was the exact personification of the reluctance I’d always had in taking a writing class.

Mr. Angry was eventually kicked out of the class, which was a relief to us all, but at the same time my writing suffered. Knowing I was going to face him every Tuesday and Thursday meant I’d been steeling my nerves, but I was also polishing my material. I began to adjust my short stories to withstand his critiques. I anticipated his attacks, and my writing was ready for him. How was such a negative presence in workshop helping me write better? I had given my internal editor a more aggressive face, a more bombastic personality, and a more critical eye. The supportive voices in class were helpful in some ways, but they never forced the same polish as Mr. Angry. I’ve since incorporated him as my internal critic and editor. He’s a frightening presence, not really a friend, and an important weapon in my arsenal in the battle for getting published.

To start writing we need a softer touch, a lot of encouragement, practice. We take baby steps into the craft, open our minds, discover our voice. Nurturing this stage of things is crucial, but if we’re going to publish we need a brutal reality check. Your mother might tell you she likes your work, but any critique that’s pure gush and not truly critical isn’t getting you where you need to be. So a crucial trick is knowing when to turn the internal Mr. Angry on and off. If he’s there from go you may never get a project started. He’s busy telling you that you suck, and listening may cost you your confidence. When you’re stuck, face down on the mat, you’ve got to shut that critic off or you won’t pull yourself up and get back to work. When you’re truly down is a good time to rely on your support network, get a little encouragement, go back to the well for some nurturing. Read a really good book, remember why you love a great read and why you want to contribute to the conversation. Get back to work.

But when the draft is done and you need to make your work into something that might actually sell, take Mr. Angry out of his box and start asking him questions. Let him pelt your writing with useful critique. Separate issues of confidence from issues of craft. In studying Philosophy you learn to counter argue, to question assumptions and keep digging until you break an argument. The person will invariably strengthen their position or abandon it. And sometimes you’ve got to abandon a bit of your writing. A story or worse, a novel, just isn’t publishable. It might be too derivative, too poorly written, or too predictable. A good way to avoid ending up with such a piece of writing is to critique it. Put it in front of Mr. Angry and let him rip. When he’s done, and you’ve plugged those holes, let him have another go. This is how counter-arguing works: you keep attacking the weak spots until they’re gone. When Mr. Angry is exhausted, and you’ve successfully revised away everything he spotted, get a critique group. Exchange your writing with other writers. Get their input. If you’ve honestly listened to your internal critic you’re going to find that you’ve hit the issues already. And if not, don’t despair, you need to refine your inner critic as well as your craft. He’ll grow as you do, adding new attacks as you add new techniques. The process will always be there, iterative, and evolving. Balance your inner editor/critic with the flow of your work. It can be tricky. You need to always improve, but you also need to always be working and striving. If Mr. Angry gets out of control and is stifling your work, kick him out for a while.

Aug12010

Book Club Review: Winterlong – I Can Feel the Cold

One need not be a chamber to be haunted,
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

– Emily Dickinson

What makes a good science fiction or fantasy book is what makes any good book: conflict, character, and strong writing. Yet with science fiction in particular, I find the more compelling books need to do more. They have to draw me into an alien world, present a changed or future Earth. Sometimes, as in Star Trek, they offer us a more ideal version of ourselves. World peace is achieved, we’re reaching for the stars, and the conflict comes from our contact with alien societies. Sometimes, as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, we look into a dystopian future where all is wrong with the world. We had it far better than we knew, and we let it slip away through greed or arrogance. Good fantasy sweeps me up in a world of magic. Good science fiction can chill me to the core.

Winterlong, the first book chosen for our book club, certainly puts a bit of ice in my spine. It’s as lush as a One Hundred Years of Solitude, but like that book, every garden holds a deadly human danger. Being a bit hopeful about our future, I tend to shy from post-apocalyptic novels, but Elizabeth Hand crafts a world so far removed from us that our past is jumbled together with the society’s idea of us: religion, history, sexuality, mythology, even our museums are transformed, often beautifully, often horrifically, but rarely in a way we’d truly recognize. Children, particularly, meet terrible fates in this book. Innocence is either anathema to survival in Winterlong’s world or it is the key to unlocking far more terrible horrors. Doorways are opened and things we’ve always carried inside us are let loose.

Not for the faint of heart, Winterlong could be further compared to One Hundred Years of Solitude in that it shares traits with magical realism, though Hand’s world has science and the acts of mankind as cause for the terrible changes that descend without warning onto the landscape. At the novel’s center is a fairytale trait, a “garden within a garden,” a mythic archetype lurking in the mutated flowers. Death haunts these characters, at first from without, then soon from within, the scariest place it can dwell. Two tangling point of views come together. Distinct shards of a broken society are deeply explored, and Hand lets her characters’ Todestrieb, their death-instinct, out to play in an already terrible world.

I choose Winterlong for our inaugural book because it’s long been on my list. I suspect it will haunt me far longer. It’s a book I will read again, without enjoyment, but with a desire to untangle its puzzles and revisit its warnings.

Aug12010

Some Characters are Timeless

Lately I’ve taken to examining television series, how they’re constructed, how they arc, and how so many writers and producers can keep track of a story and push it forward. Comic books are a great resource for such analysis: Superman, Spiderman, and Wonder Woman have all been with us for years. Dozens of writers have touched their story, added to its framework, sometimes radically and sometimes by embracing the status quo. Supporting cast members get killed off. New characters arrive to offer a fresh point of view. At the heart of the lifelong series is the timeless character, someone we can relate to and touches us enough that new generations discover them and their appeal does not wane. But they can’t survive on nostalgia alone. That much is clear when an imprint tries to bring back a classic character without giving them enough connection to current times. A timeless character has to find relevance in the world of their audience.

As a kid, in Guthrie, Oklahoma, I’d try to wait up for my dad to get home. He’d make it in just after 10 pm, wake me, and we’d meet me in the living room to watch Doctor Who on PBS. That was my first timeless character, the first time my head filled with ideas about other worlds and histories long forgotten. Sure there was a lot of running and screaming, but there was a robot dog, and I came to love the series and stuck with it on public television through much of my childhood.

I’ve kept up with the current version, updated and straining to be more adult, but weighed down by sentiment and the vast history of the series. The acting could be very strong, with some good doses of just over the top. David Tennant and Catherine Tate especially brought a great interplay, but the sense of wonder had largely gone out of it for me. Still, I decided to follow the current season from the beginning, driven mostly by my affection for Steven Moffat.

I knew he’d written some of the strongest episodes of the last few years, and I knew he could write razor dialogue from his work on Coupling. I knew from his creation of River Song, that he could create strong characters who really embraced the concept of time travel and what it would entail for disjointed meetings and lost moments.

What I didn’t expect was to find him getting to the heart of the Doctor and his relationship to his companions and audience. In season five, Moffat takes the Doctor back into a childhood context, the place where I met him, and brings him forward into our adulthood. The companion this year, Amy Pond, acts as a surrogate for all of us who grew up with Doctor Who. Companions have always been a point of view character, a way for us to get our questions about the Doctor’s world answered and feel like we’re not the only ones looking into a strange new universe, but Amy meets the Doctor in her childhood. When he vanishes, she has to remember him anew, matching her fantasies to her reality.

A character with no sense of adventure gains it, a character running from the inevitability of growing up embraces it, and the Doctor begins to show an awareness of the vastness of his life. He starts to show a maturity and the uncertainty that comes with it as he learns that there are things even he does not know.

While Moffat reduces the show’s sentimentality, the weakest moments still come when it gets center stage (the third episode, with Winston Churchill, being the clearest example). The hints and nods to past continuity are for the most part, well placed Easter eggs that remind us of the show’s long history, but don’t bog us down in obscure lore. The plots work without a trip to Wikipedia, which isn’t always the case with long-standing comic book heroes.

I was deeply impressed by the finale, which moved me in ways I hadn’t expected. Doctor Who grew up a little and a childhood hero has managed to stay with me through the years.

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