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Posts Tagged ‘Writing’

The Good, the Bad, the Idiotic

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , on 20 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

There’s a lot of chatter on the blogs about bad reviews and what to do about them (like The Misfortune of Wondering). Bad reviews are a fact of writing life; they cannot be avoided. You’ll get them from critics, from readers, from family and friends, and at times, from fellow writers (those are the worst). But no matter the source, there is only one acceptable response.

What is that acceptable response? Well, it isn’t is to fire off a flaming bitch-fest where you call the reviewer an illiterate berk and question his paternity. Despite the immediate satisfaction this activity provides, it is definitely not the way to go. If you must, write it and then delete it.

However, neither is it acceptable to write a reasonable, point-by-point rebuttal to the critique, noting how this scene is obviously an allusion to Homer’s “The Odyssey,” depicting the character’s inner journey, and how your hero’s deformed limb is a device to mirror Richard III, which should be clear to anyone with an education. These refutations always come across as whiny and insecure (yes, pompous can and often does come across as insecurity).

In short, a response is never acceptable, because (a) you never convince the reviewer you’re right, and (b) because you (the writer) never appear in a good light. A response always makes the writer look silly, pedantic, immature, petulant, patronizing, or just plain stupid. There are as many reasons for a bad review as there are bad reviews. Some people just don’t like the sort of stuff you write. Some may like the genre, but just didn’t like the book. Some nitpickingly comb through any book and tag the writer for any flaw, real or imagined. Some reviewers, including a few professional ones, are bitter, small-minded people for whom tearing down someone else’s work is a way to make them feel better about themselves. And then there are some reviewers who have read the book, considered it with a well-educated mind, and simply found it to be flawed.

No book is perfect. No book will please every reader. No book is immune from the bad review. Just go out on Amazon; even the critically-acclaimed and best-selling titles have bad reviews. I’ve had bad reviews a-plenty. One reviewer panned my entire novel because of one perceived factual error (it wasn’t an error). Another reviewer panned me because he didn’t like the historical Custer, and didn’t want to read a novel with him as a character (this is substantive?) I’ve had bad reviews of every stripe, and responding to these bad reviews is futile, useless, and possibly career-damaging.

The only acceptable response is to read them and consider them. Just like you would consider the feedback from a fellow writer or a writers’ workshop, consider the feedback from a bad review. In both cases, the feedback may be meaningful; the reviewer may have touched upon a flaw you hadn’t seen before. If the feedback is valuable, use it; if not, dump it.

Here’s the crux: if someone doesn’t “get” something you wrote, if someone doesn’t understand that character’s motivation or what that scene really meant, then you screwed up, not the reader. The book is perfect in your head, but it’s never perfect on the page.

k

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Grammar Guardian Lite

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , , , , on 18 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiI’ve been known to be…overenthusiastic…about proper grammar. However, I have been loosening the laces on my jackboots, of late, as my definition of “proper” English usage evolves. A recent opinion piece in the NY Times, however, has shifted my perspective even more.

The example in that piece that really spoke to me was the 19th century difference between “first two” and “two first,” when speaking of people in a queue. Today, we wouldn’t blink twice at anyone who used either one or the other to signify the two people at the front of the line. Back in Edith Wharton’s day, though, the “two first” people meant the two people at the front of a line, while the “first two” people meant the first couple in a line of couples.

What started this evolution of attitude? Without a doubt, it was Shakespeare. For years I struggled with the “rule” to never end a sentence with a preposition, and so my was peppered with convoluted sentence syntax where the “which” in the center got me out of a prepositional-ending jam. Necessarily, I sometimes came out with sentences almost as bad as the anecdotal Churchill line: “That, madam, is something up with which I shall not put!”

But if Shakespeare–my all-time favorite writer–if Shakespeare didn’t have a qualm about ending a clause with a preposition (“..the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to…”), who the hell am I to quibble? And while Edith Wharton–whose work I truly admire–did quibble over “first two” and “two first,” what about Austen, Thackeray, and a host of others I also adore who used language that today would be considered downright wrong?

Language evolves. We’ve been “verbing nouns” and changing the meaning of words ever since we learned to speak. Do you know the difference between a present and a gift? There is a difference, and I know what that difference is, but in this day of the “free gift” (a redundancy if ever there was one), should I ding someone if they use the wrong one?

I will hold tight to certain tenets of my Grammarian Faith–the simple truth of correct spelling and apostrophe use; my adherence to the Oxford comma; my belief that almost any sentence ending in “at” doesn’t need that word; and the simple, common-sense rule that if your writing is unclear or can be misconstrued, it’s improper–but I really need to chill when it comes to a lot of other cringe-worthy uses.

The language is changing around us. No stopping it.

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Going Old School

Posted in Fallen Cloud Saga, Low Tech, Writing, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on 12 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

1972 Sheaffer Stylist White Dot Fountain PenI used to be much more disciplined about “writing time.” I also used to have crushing deadlines, which were a great motivator. Now, I have less time, my monkey-boy-day-job is more demanding, and it’s just damned hard to find time to shut myself in the back room, sit down at the computer, alone, without distractions, and pump a couple thousand words past the CPU.

To counter this, I’ve tried many tactics. First, I bought a netbook, thinking it would allow me to work anywhere; it turned out to be too slow and underpowered to provide any real convenience. Then, I bought a keyboard for my iPad, but while faster, it proved to be too clumsy to balance on the bus and still required a larger chunk of time in order to be productive.

So, I went Old School, returning to my writerly roots, as it were. As some of you know, my first books were written longhand, with pen on paper. Yes, kids, I actually wrote four whole novels without the aid of a computer. I swear it’s true; FC:I-II and PC:I-II were all written with a Uni-Ball pen on Cambridge steno pads.

This new/old method has increased my productivity for several reasons. Primarily, it is more suited to my Basher style; cudgeling out a few dozen or maybe a hundred words at a time is much easier than trying to force out a couple thousand words. It is also perfectly suited to my catch-as-catch-can writing schedule, allowing me to squeeze out a couple of lines at the bus stop, en route to the transit station, while waiting for a program to compile, or as I’m cooling down after my workout.

There’s also another, less obvious benefit: because writing with pen and paper is slower than typing, the resulting prose is the product of a more thoughtful and deliberate process. Writing with pen on paper increases the lyricism of my prose, and what ends up on the page is tighter, less cluttered by unnecessary wiggle-words, and is closer to what I really wanted to say. Yes, there are lots of cross-outs and insertions (see picture), which yes, looks as if I editing as I go along (Bad writer! No biscuit!), but this isn’t really editing; this is searching for the narrative path.

Moreover, writing with pen and paper just makes me feel like a writer. It is how almost all of my favorite authors composed. It’s an organic, completely natural way to create, completely divested of the trappings and necessities of computers and cables and cords. It’s immediate, it’s personal, and to me, it’s more than processing words; it’s writing.

k

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The New Dark Age

Posted in Low Tech, Writing, tagged , , , on 09 Jul 2012| 1 Comment »

Welcome to the New Dark Age.

How’s that, you say? Let me explain.

We are moving through a time when the majority of information is being stored digitally, and only digitally. Memos, letters, pictures, books, even movies, all only exist—in an increasingly large percentage—only as binary ones and zeroes on some form of digital media. Add to this all the information that exists only on websites, and you have a staggering amount if information that is, essentially, ephemeral. The British Library warns that we are already losing information, some of it important cultural information, from websites that come and go with the cultural tides. Additionally, irreplaceable scientific data may have already been lost through our inexorable march from one media to the other.

Have any old cassette tapes? Any old 3.5″ floppy disks? A tape drive for your old PC? Have any music or video stored in MP2 format? I do, and all that data—old music, pictures, stories, poems—is lost because I can no longer access it.

Let me put it this way: I have, on my desk, an edition of the Bible, printed in 1701 (pictured), complete with explications and marginalia. I can read this just as easily today as Isaac Newton could have (okay, not quite as easily, as my Latin isn’t as good as his was). I have a book, purchased in the late 90s, for use with my REB1000 eBook reader (yes, I was one of the first to try an e-reader). I cannot read it. My REB1000 is long gone, and the book’s proprietary format is indecipherable. Think about that: I can read the first book, in its original form, three centuries after it was published, and yet I can’t even view the one I bought less than twenty years ago. And don’t get me started on how many times I’ve had to buy The White Album…

Fast-forward 300 years…what will future historians find, looking back on this time? All the websites from our time are gone (What? You think Google is backing them up? Think again!). All the music, stored and delivered digitally, is in a format they can’t decode. Billions upon billions of photos, personal and professional, were lost simply through hard drive crashes. And books? The explosion of the e-book/e-reader market crushed the hardcopy publishing industry and many books, bestsellers in their day, were published only in electronic format. Think that 300-year old Kindle will fire up?

It’s not that we can’t retain all this data, and it’s not that we can’t transfer or convert all these media as new formats emerge. It’s just that we aren’t doing so.

As a species, we have all the foresight of a bug flying down the interstate. Time and again, we simply do not see the semi heading toward us until we’re splattered on the windscreen. The future may look bright and shiny, from our point of view, but from up there in the future, the view back may be much darker than we imagine.

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Grey Hats

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , on 06 Jul 2012| 2 Comments »

Kurt R.A. GiambastianiGrey is the new black.

Moral ambiguity. It’s everywhere you look in popular culture. Television, movies, politics, books. We have taken away all the black hats and white hats; now everyone wears a grey hat. To an extent, this can be a good thing, but more and more I see it simply as a way to be “edgy” or “raw.”

I’ll use two examples, one of which worked for me and one for which the jury is still out.

As an example of the latter: We’ve been bingeing on “Breaking Bad” this past week (having a summer cold leaves us energy for little else). Through Seasons One and Two, we watched the moral decline of Walt (the main character) until, by the finale of Season Two, he commits a sin so egregious, so callous and cold, that I wasn’t sure I cared to continue on to Season Three. The writers were able to take me along on Walt’s descent into criminality, and I was interested only insofar as (a) I understood it, and (b) could empathize with it. However, when the writers finished Season Two, Walt was no longer any one I cared about; his acts, his behavior, and his internal justification had become muddy, lost, or obscured. In short, I no longer understood him, and, once a character goes over into Crazy Land, I don’t care what happens to him.

To their credit, the writers of “Breaking Bad” had provided enough to carry me forward. They may have lost me with their main character, but I was willing to push onward just to see what happened to the secondary roles. As I write, we are in the middle of Season Three and I’m not sure if they can turn it around, as now it seems that everyone is in a downward spiral.

On the flipside, I give you the re-dux of “Battlestar Galactica.” The level of moral ambiguity in this show was very high, uncomfortably so at times. We saw characters change, both in reaction to events and in response to their own ambitions. “Good guys” became murderers, “bad guys” became heroic, and some characters were just so facile that you couldn’t pin down their moral direction for more than a scene at a time.

Regardless of a character’s relative morality/amorality, though, I always understood the reasons for action or change. I was always cognizant of why a character did something that was immoral/amoral. Whether or not I agreed with the reasoning, I could comprehend why the character thought it was a logical move.

And there is the difference. In “BSG,” the characters acted in agreement with their own internal logic, whereas in “Breaking Bad” the writers are either hiding or obscuring that internal logic, or it doesn’t seem to exist at all. When a character acts against his or her own moral code, we need to understand why. Otherwise the acts (usually violent) seem gratuitous, and it seems that the writers put it in just to add an “edge” to the episode.

Now please, don’t misunderstand me; I’m not some bluestocking crying out for a reincarnation of the Hays Office to ensure the “bad guys” always pay for their crimes and “good” always triumphs in the end. I am not advocating anything like it. What I am advocating is making the motivations of characters comprehensible, and not putting in morally ambiguous actions for their own sake.

It is my theory that for the most part, in their own mind, no one ever commits a crime. Crimes are always justified, internally. Phrases such as “victimless crime,” “He needed killing,” and “He deserved it” all point to the internal logic and moral calculation that has preceded the act.  In my own writing, I work very hard to make every character’s thought processes logical and relatively clear. You may not like my bad guys, you may not agree with their chosen course of action, but you understand them. Violence and immorality are facts of life; we cannot ignore them. But neither should we add them in just to titillate or make our writing “edgy.”

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Write, Don’t Edit

Posted in Writing, tagged , , on 05 Jul 2012| 3 Comments »

Heinlein’s First Rule of Writing is:

  1. Write

Sounds simple, right? Yeah, but really, really hard to do. And to this rule, I would humbly add a corollary:

  1. Write, don’t edit

This is even harder. What Heinlein meant was, “Don’t just talk about writing; do it.” What I’m talking about is what that “do it” clause means.

Admittedly, for most of us, just collecting enough time, energy, and mental focus to put words on paper is a massive challenge, but once you finally start to “do it,” don’t screw it up by wasting that precious combination. Don’t edit every written word. When you stop to back up and edit your work it before it’s done, you’re interrupting the flow of the story and the flow of your creative mind. You are letting your analytical brain stand there like the TSA, holding up every word for inspection, examining each and every phrase with a critical eye, making your prose (essentially) take off its shoes and belt and stand there, hands in the air, hoping its pants won’t fall down. In this instance, your mind is your own worst enemy, with one hemisphere fighting against the other.

The logical, left hemisphere gets in the way of the creative, right hemisphere. Of course, when dealing with language and the written word, you can’t go “all right brain, all the time.” No, you need that left brain to help you turn the movie inside your head into scribbly bits on a white page. The struggle is in managing that left side; you need to rein it in until it listens to you, and no “left brain whisperer” exists. You need to use brute force, smash-down, alpha-brain techniques here. You need to squash your every left-brained impulse to edit as you right-brain write. And believe me, it’s hard.

The reason this is so difficult is because when I say “edit,” what you should read is “second-guess.” That’s really what we’re doing when we write and edit simultaneously. We’re second-guessing our every word, every phrase, every metaphor, description, scene, and chapter. And boy-o-boy does that take time away from what we really want to do: Write.

As I said before, this is my own personal bugbear, my own monster in the closet. Even writing this post, I’ve had to struggle against it. The first third of the article was written with every line written twice or three times as I went back and rehashed my prose. For the last two-thirds, I forced my editing mind into quiet submission, only giving it the occasional typo to fix as I went along. And here’s the kicker: in the same amount of time, I wrote twice as much.

There is a time to edit. Editing is an important part of the “Write” portion of Heinlein’s First Rule. But put it where it needs to be: after you finish.

Write. Finish. Then edit.

k

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A Double-Edged Blog

Posted in Writing, tagged , , , , on 02 Jul 2012| Leave a Comment »

No one has said it yet; they don’t have to. There’s already a little schoolmarm voice in my head that says it loud and clear:

You shouldn’t be wasting time with a blog! You should be writing!

True, and yet…

Working on posts and pages for this blog takes time; I cannot deny it. But what I have found is that the time spent on the blog isn’t really wasted. On the contrary, I find that writing here invigorates my drive to write and exercises my technique. It also reinforces my love of the written word as I play with phrases and concentrate on the structure and focus of the much shorter form a blog post requires.

Just as a musician must work at scales and etudes, and just as a painter may create a small study for a larger work, so must a writer flex and build up literary “muscle.” When I had more time (and to be honest, more discipline), I would exercise my chops by writing a short story, but that in itself is a large expenditure of effort, especially when compared to the usually small and isolated payoff.

Thus, most importantly, I find that a blog post gives me an immediate payoff, as well as providing possible feedback via comments and re-blogs. These two things are very strong motivators, and are simply not part of the long marathon of writing a novel (especially for a Basher, like me).

So now, when that schoolmarm voice goes off in my head, I shall remember that time spent on this blog is not necessarily time wasted, and that every art and skill requires practice and study.

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