Blog

Dec122010

Cheating on Book Club: Monsters by the Sea

I say without any intended irony that I think the Percy Jackson books are a thoroughly American series. Despite their emphasis on the Greek myths, the characters have a focus on American food and soda brands, but Percy also has a directness and mindset that impresses me more than a certain British boy wizard.

At a wedding in Mexico, with some time to lounge, I picked up book two in the series: the Sea of Monsters, and we got along quite well; so well that I wouldn’t have minded having the third book available while digging my toes into the sand and watching the sea roil.

While reading Atonement and other literary fiction works mental muscles that need developing, reading a good fantasy or two, even those for a younger audience, reminds me why I love my genre.

The second volume picks up the pace and pulls in the slack. It’s slimmer than the Lightning Thief and a better read. Rick Riordan draws on the Odyssey in funny ways, with a witty jab at Penelope’s adventures in weaving and an update to certain other bits that I won’t spoil. I appreciated a toning down of the sillier mythic reinventions, something that cluttered up the first book for me, though if you know the tales, you’ll quickly spot where chapters are going.

The main character, Percy, grows a bit. He’s not perfect, and his flaws are human and relatable. They fit a boy moving towards adulthood. His demi-god powers take a major leap forward, but Percy gets some setbacks too, which was a nice touch.
The Sea of Monsters is a breezy read. There’s not a lot else to say. I liked it, and it ended on a great twist which makes me anxious to see where things go. If I’ve a critique of the book it’s that the chapter headings often act as spoilers. Major developments are given away there. For the younger reader, to whom the book is written, this might not be the case; but I wouldn’t have minded if Riordan had stretched out the surprises. My other critique is copy editing. This book is slight, and I spotted two copy problems. The first was early, on page eight. It’s an area I’m working hard on in my own work so it really jumps out at me when such a best-selling book makes errors.

Nov62010

Flashbacks and Memories


Memory is a deep component of our personal story. As writers, it’s a source of material and a means to add texture to our characters. While I fight nostalgia when writing, afraid to create something that is too sanitized or sentimental, when I become stuck on a scene or plot point, it helps to look back in my life and find how a younger self would have dealt with something. This a key quality in writing young adult fiction, imbuing it with senses and reactions appropriate to the protagonists’ age when everything was just a bit more intensely.

Characters arrive with memories of their own, and they can bring their memories to life in vivid detail. Writing allows for time travel in many ways, not the least being the use of flashbacks to explore the past.

For flashbacks to function, they have to deeply impact the current chronology without overwhelming its story. Like points of view, they need to possess both merit and resonance. I always think of Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye as the gold standard for flashbacks: the chronology in that book synchs past and present, with the present usually being the weaker of the two.

As I write the current work-in-progress, I’m struggling with the use of flashbacks. Fully half of the book is planned to occur in the main character’s past. But as I read through the current draft to find the rhythm, I find the pace slows when I hit the first memory. It soon picks up again, but any drag on the story is a problem. In genre fiction, pace can be everything. I want my readers turning the pages, into the night, over-sleeping and being late to work because they could not stop reading my books. Backstory is often boring and so often very unnecessary. If events in a character’s past are so important to their lives, shouldn’t those events be the plot of the book?

Some books, like the Steel Remains, limit the flashback sequences to either small vignettes or single scenes which reveal the key moments of a character’s history. This keeps the story moving and only derails the chronology to give you what is essential in the character’s past. Flashbacks can only hold so much tension: you already know the main character has survived. Death is not a potential. Perhaps he was greatly affected by those events, even shaped by them: but like all good fiction, the boring parts should be left out. An important part of making flashbacks work is to twist readers’ expectations one way in the present, but unfold events in an unexpected means in the past. You know he survived, but there are unknowns in the how or the things he had to do to keep himself alive.

Flashbacks are more than memories. They are scenes in a character’s life, and they should be given as much life as possible in order to keep them active and engaging. It’s just one more place where “show don’t tell” is the rule.

Oct132010

Book Club: Atonement

In case you missed it in the comments, the novel for book club this month is Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Sorry for the delay on this post. I’ll work at being more prompt.

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.

© 2026 David R Slayton | Site built by Todd Jackson