Roy Miller's Blog, page 280
February 7, 2017
IDW Publishing Sales Slipped in Fiscal 2016
Led by a huge jump in revenue from its television production division, total sales at IDW Media Holdings rose 32.2% in the fiscal year ended October 31, 2016 over fiscal 2015, hitting $65.3 million. Net income rose to $3.7 million from $3.1 million in fiscal 2015.
Revenue in the company’s IDW publishing group in fiscal 2016, however, slipped 2.3%, to $27.9 million. The publishing group includes IDW’s comic book and graphic novel publishing operations as well as games business.
In its filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, IDW attributed the dip in publishing revenue to general softness in the comic book publishing industry, fewer blockbuster titles, timing of when new titles were released, and competitive pressure from the major publishers.
The company reported that its publishing group’s direct and non-direct publishing revenue decreased by $455,000 in the year, other publishing revenue fell $1.2 million—principally due to the timing of IDW’s publication of specialty books—and digital revenue dropped $210,000. The declines were offset by growth in licensing revenue of $1.1 million, an increase in games revenue of $383,000, and a net decrease in other revenue categories of $231,000, the company said.
The publishing division finished the year with strong results with sales up 15.8%, to $9.4 million in the fourth quarter ended October 31, 2016, compared to the final quarter of fiscal 2015. IDW said the improvement was due to the success of its March books, plus sales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles board game.
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Binding the Nation in Its Love of Meatloaf
On the chilly evening before President Trump was inaugurated, Mr. Bruni and Ms. Steinhauer sat down in a loud bourbon bar not far from the Capitol to discuss meatloaf, a topic far from the political drama playing out on the big screen over their heads.
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Then again, maybe not all that far. “It’s a quintessential American dish that can bind a nation!” Mr. Bruni proclaimed.
Together, they have embraced the loaf in a book that comes out this week: (Grand Central Life & Style, $24). It is cast as a love letter, perhaps as much to their friendship as to a food whose very name screams mundane.
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The book contains recipes from several sources, including politicians, chefs and journalists.
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Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Propelled by their own Proustian meatloaf memories and leveraging their connections to politicians, chefs and other journalists, Mr. Bruni and Ms. Steinhauer have attempted the seemingly impossible: a comprehensive and compelling collection of 49 recipes for meatloaf.
Friends since they met at The Times in the mid-1990s, the two talk in the shorthand of an old married couple. In the amount of time it takes to finish a cocktail, they will have discussed Hill politics, office politics and sex, and made two references to Nora Ephron, to whom the book is dedicated.
The idea came from Mr. Bruni, 52; meatloaf is the only dish he has complete confidence cooking. He had long nursed a fantasy that one day he would add a meatloaf cookbook to his literary oeuvre, which includes books about President George W. Bush, college admission anxiety and his own struggle with weight.
Ms. Steinhauer, 48, who occasionally writes about food for The Times and the food blog Food52, just came off a good run with the snack cookbook “Treat Yourself,” which had taken her to QVC and the “Today” show. She was casting around for the next one. Mr. Bruni offered his meatloaf idea. She talked him into doing it together.
“At some point we thought, ‘Isn’t this a moment for meatloaf?’” Ms. Steinhauer said. “‘Can we make meatloaf ecumenical?’”
The book’s first recipe is essentially the Chevy of meatloaves, built from ground beef seasoned with onions and topped with tomato sauce. It’s from Mr. Bruni’s mother, Leslie Bruni.
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The authors call it a populist meatloaf, but soon the recipes that follow take a pluralist turn. Dry Spanish chorizo and manchego cheese marry inside a loaf of ground pork. Chopped ahi tuna is covered with a clove-scented sauce of mushrooms, tomatoes and red wine. There are loaves infused with the flavors of Japan and China. Lamb, their favorite meat to make into a loaf, is punctuated with mint, pine nuts, couscous and harissa.
There is a Frito pie meatloaf, a hamburger and French fries meatloaf, and a chicken meatloaf that tastes like a Buffalo wing dipped in blue cheese dressing.
Meatloaf, they write, is the “Talented Mr. Ripley” of food because it can impersonate anything.
“When you start researching meatloaf varieties, you realize how many people have done meatloaves that essentially mimic other dishes,” Mr. Bruni said. “If you eat our taco meatloaf and you close your eyes, you really think you are eating a hard-shelled beef taco.”
Perhaps not every dish can be represented in meatloaf. Mr. Bruni’s Waterloo was the chicken cordon bleu meatloaf. After three versions, he gave up.
Still, poultry — at least dark meat — can be a perfect canvas. “Poultry’s blank stare allows the other flavors and textures to strut,” Ms. Steinhauer writes, pointing readers to a chicken eggplant loaf scented with fennel seeds, donated by the chef Michael White.
Other celebrity chefs contributed, and with the exception of Daniel Patterson’s vegetarian zucchini loaf with lentils and barley, they make intricate projects out of a humble dish. Bobby Flay devised a Korean-style meatloaf with deep-fried shallots and fried eggs. Mario Batali offered a technique-heavy Italian stuffed meatloaf. April Bloomfield’s recipe is built on lamb shoulder that she suggests cooks grind at home.
The authors make passionate arguments for sautéing onions before mixing them into meatloaf batter. They deeply consider the crucial role of binders, those unsung starchy players like rice, bread and potatoes that hold each loaf together.
They hand down rules: Hand-chopping vegetables produces a better texture than using a food processor. Meat should be almost at room temperature before supporting ingredients are mixed in. And always use your hands instead of a spoon.
They learned, too, that meatloaf likes spice, and a lot of it. The lesson came when Anne Kornblut, a former Washington Post editor who is now a Facebook executive, sent her recipe for a Moroccan-influenced lamb loaf that called for such an unruly parade of garlic and spices that the authors feared it would be a disaster.
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“I thought, ‘I am going to have to fix it, which is boring, and I’m going to have to tell her, which is painful,’” Ms. Steinhauer said. As it turned out, the recipe was brilliant.
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Meatloaf with Moroccan flair.
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Melina Hammer for The New York Times
Eventually, the two even asked politicians for recipes because “you’ve got to get to 50 meatloaves somehow,” Mr. Bruni said.
They called a simple beef recipe from Senator Susan Collins, a Republican known for cooperating with her Democratic colleagues, the bipartisan loaf. The office of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, sent a recipe for a Cal-Ital meatloaf that mixes veal and bison with ciabatta bread, rosemary and cilantro. They said she makes it with her granddaughter.
“Anyone who has worked with Pelosi can imagine what it was like to try to get a recipe from her,” Ms. Steinhauer said.
The book’s narrative binding agent is a series of chatty exchanges based on the writers’ near-daily communication through email, texts and phone calls. They’ve tagged on 10 side-dish recipes, including the macaroni and cheese that the chef Garret Fleming serves at Barrel, the Hill hangout where the two discussed their book. With five cheeses, heavy cream and crisp, buttery panko crumbs, it stopped all conversation when it arrived at the table.
Then, as happens a lot these days, talk turned to Mr. Trump. He loves meatloaf (the dish, not the singer who once appeared on “Celebrity Apprentice” and encouraged him to run for president).
Mr. Trump’s mother made it for him as a child, and a version of her recipe has had a star turn on the menus at his hotels and resorts. He and his wife, Melania, even made meatloaf sandwiches on Martha Stewart’s show.
Of course, when they were writing the book, neither Mr. Bruni nor Ms. Steinhauer knew that Mr. Trump would become president, or that the nation would be spinning with political disruption. But their timing proved to be perfect.
“I don’t think meatloaf can save the world,” Mr. Bruni said. “But I certainly think in the coming tomorrows there will be a healthier appetite for comfort.”
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Recipe: Meatloaf With Moroccan Spices
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George Washington: ‘Citizens By Birth Or Choice’ Will Make America Great
John Avlon will appear at the February 7t House of SpeakEasy event “Failing Up,” alongside Janna Levin, Idra Novey, and Mitchell S. Jackson. Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, doors at 6pm. Buy tickets here .
John Avlon’s new book, Washington’s Farewell (Simon & Schuster), was a timely arrival last month. Elections always see a spike in public interest in presidential history. But last year’s vote was exceptional: none in recent history has thrown into such stark relief the past left behind and the potential hazards ahead. A well-reasoned, impeccably researched reminder of George Washington’s warning to the future would appear to be just the ticket. And the reading public confirmed it: after just eight days in stores, Washington’s Farewell was already in its third printing.
“In times of uncertainty,” Avlon told me this week, “with storm clouds all around us, I think people can find comfort and courage from studying history. After all, perspective is the thing we have least of in our politics, and now is the time to look for clarity and perspective in first principles and durable wisdom. That’s what Washington’s Farewell Address provides.”
The address, “a retirement notice that would change the world,” was published in the American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, as Washington himself was on the road home to Mount Vernon at the end of two exhausting terms as president. Over the next two and a quarter centuries, it would inspire generations of Americans and, in different ways, each of Washington’s 44 successors. Long in the gestation, and bearing the fingerprints not only of POTUS 1.0 but also of Alexander Hamilton, the farewell is a clear-eyed, almost clairvoyant document. “It is that rarest of things,” Avlon says, “a memo written by the first founding father to future generations about the forces he felt could destroy our democratic republic: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt, and foreign wars.” Sound familiar? Yes, Avlon concedes: “His warnings are ripped from the headlines today, and by studying them we’re reminded how seriously we’ve got to take the challenges we face—while remembering that vigorous citizenship is the ultimate backstop in a self-governing society.”
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Looking back, in setting the farewell in its proper context, Avlon reminds us that there is no “pre-partisan Eden” to be found in American history. In-fighting between the founding fathers was rife, with Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, by the latter’s admission, “daily pitted in the cabinet like two cocks.” But to focus too much on these disputes is to miss the point, argues Avlon. “To the extent that the bitter fights between the founding fathers are often used by partisans to excuse extreme behavior on their own side, that fundamentally misreads the real lesson, which is that the founding fathers regretted much of the bitterness and division that they indulged in. It was unwise and beneath their best selves.”
Interpreting the founding fathers’ words and deeds is of course fundamental to the American project; it’s unavoidable when dealing with a constitution. How should the task be approached? “We do ourselves a disservice when we make the founding fathers seem perfect and unapproachable. They were, of course, flawed human beings—that makes their wisdom much more accessible. Individual human nature doesn’t change much over the centuries, though cultural standards change, hopefully reflecting a fitful evolution to form a more perfect union. But it’s a mistake to judge the founding fathers through the cultural lens of our own time. We need to try to understand them in the context within which they lived. When I interviewed Lin-Manuel Miranda for the book—because the song “One Last Time,” from Hamilton, is solely about the Farewell Address—he spoke passionately about the idea that we need to embrace the contradictions—and in doing so we make the old stories new again. We don’t need to idolize the founding fathers beyond reason, but we do need to seek out enduring wisdom and remind ourselves that if we cut ourselves off from the wisdom of the past we remain willfully ignorant about history, and then we’ll be doomed to repeat it.”
Of course, Washington’s wisdom was not always recognized as such. It’s easy to forget, given the veneration accorded him by most sides today, but Washington was beset throughout his presidency by criticism from all comers. His opponents even raised toasts to his “speedy death.” “One of my favorite chapters in the book is titled ‘Hating George Washington,'” says Avlon. “It’s a reminder that even though we often put George Washington on a pedestal and see him as fundamentally above the partisan fray and political criticism, he was attacked in often overheated and sometimes unhinged terms. And that offers, I think, a helpful reality check. Whenever we might feel wounded in the political arena, it’s helpful to remember that even George Washington had to confront his ‘haters.’ But his character, moderation, and virtue ultimately carried the day.”
It was these attributes that Washington put to use in the crafting of the farewell, distilling his unique experience into a mere 6,000 words that he hoped would reflect “a plain style,” that they may be “handed to the public in an honest, unaffected, simple garb.” Despite the mixed feelings he engendered, it was well received, with one publication recommending that its readers preserve that week’s paper “as a choice legacy of experience, wisdom, and patriotism” that may be “transmitted as an inheritance to our children.”
Avlon describes how this has happened, through public recitals, generations of public-school teaching, and periodic revivals by Washington’s successors. More recently, he concedes, it has “faded from the frontal lobe of American politics,” replaced by shorter set pieces like the Gettysburg Address and soundbites half remembered from Kennedy’s inaugural. But that may be about to change. Historians’ ears across the nation pricked up on January 10 when, in his own valedictory address, President Obama quoted Washington’s Farewell and echoed his calls for an end to divisive partisanship and the rejection of “‘the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest or to enfeeble the sacred ties’ that make us one.”
Avlon was watching. “President Obama extended the idea of the ‘warning from a parting friend’ that George Washington established with his own Farewell Address. Obama’s ‘warning’ was about threats to our democracy—a reminder that we can’t take our gains for granted. That they need to be secured and expanded by each generation. But some of his remedies were very similar to those advanced by George Washington. Particularly, President Obama advocated vigorous citizenship as the backstop for self-governing people. Both men recognized there was no substitute in a self-governing society for vigorous citizens taking responsibility for the direction of their nation. That wasn’t simply the job of rulers, but average people, to stay engaged. Both Washington and Obama expressed passionate belief in the idea that our independence as a nation is inseparable from our interdependence as a people. That has been the secret of our success as a nation founded on an idea that is open to all who wish to seek it—as Washington said, ‘Citizens by birth or choice.'”
The recent transition (indeed much of the last election cycle) has reaffirmed the existence of many other political beliefs and trends that Avlon finds nascent in the late 18th century. “In researching Washington’s Farewell, it was fascinating to find that the basic fault lines of American political debates have remained remarkably consistent, while they parade under different party names at different times. Even going back to the Constitutional Convention, you had a collection of people who argued for national unity, and a strong and energetic central government. These people tended to be from urban areas. But they squared off against people from more rural areas, who identify primarily with states’ rights and feared the encroaching power of the federal government that seemed to be crowding out their way of life. Both sides thought they were fighting for freedom. Washington attempted to reconcile the two. All of which is to say that the red-state/blue-state divide we sometimes obsess over is not new, and in fact the deeper divides are urban versus rural. Those were reflected in Hamilton and Jefferson’s debates, and they exist today. We’ll probably not ever be able to entirely transcend them, but if we consciously try to bridge those divides we can heal much, if not all, the polarization in our country. If we exacerbate those divides, we’ll see further trouble in our future—but nothing compared to the Civil War we suffered only 90 years after America’s independence.”
Besides internal divides, Washington was also deeply concerned about “the danger of foreign influence on our democracy”. I wonder if current affairs, as they unfolded over the course of 2016, affected Avlon’s thinking as he was writing Washington’s Farewell. “In ways that I couldn’t have anticipated, when I was writing the book, Washington’s warnings about the dangers of foreign powers trying to interfere with and influence domestic politics to subvert our sovereignty has taken on new urgency. Vladimir Putin didn’t invent this playbook all by himself. Washington understood that this was a way that democratic republics have fallen in the past. While I think public opinion is beginning to consolidate around still emerging facts about the extent to which Russian hacks and the spread of fake news influenced the election outcome, there’s no question that the election results were a stark reminder that we do depend on enlightened opinion in democracies—and that means we need to elevate civic education. People need to go out to vote and participate in our political process. Self-government is our collective and individual responsibility. It can’t be passed off or ignored—or, if we do, we run the danger of amusing ourselves to death.”
But general enlightenment has rarely seemed further off. With knowledge and facts now routinely brought into ontological dispute, how might those charged with guarding the public record help us get back on track? “Partisan newspapers were a painful fact of life in Washington’s time. They drove political divisions and wounded Washington in deeply personal terms. Which is to say that partisan news has been with us in some form for a long time – but it has become institutionalized in different ways because of the fragmentation of the media and the rise of the Internet, which has allowed people to self-segregate into separate political realities. We need to push back on these trends by restoring the media’s reputation for independent journalism delivered without fear or favor. That means being willing to hit both sides but it also means insisting on a fact-based debate. We all need to remember the wisdom once expressed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: ‘Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.’ And we need to work, perhaps even a bit harder, to make the important stories interesting.”
This chimes with Avlon’s editorial policy at the Daily Beast, which he has helmed since 2013. “I’ve always described our political point of view as ‘non-partisan but not neutral’. That means that we’ll hit both sides as the facts demand, without descending into the swamp of ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ moral relativism. We have a readership of well over a million readers a day. It’s fair to say that many of our readers come from more urban areas. And we’ve always made it a point to avoid a trap of predictability. For example, having a roster of columnists that run the gambit between liberal and libertarian. When I get a chance to write my own columns, and in my own commentary to CNN, I’ll often invoke history because it does impose a sense of perspective on our politics. That’s valuable, especially at a time when there is an attempt to unmoor us from many of our best traditions.”
This impulse to moderation, to the calm presentation of differing views, is not exactly emulated across the board. Cool-headed reportage is in short supply, and it seems to be part of the problem. The way things are is not reflected in the public mood. “Donald Trump will be giving his first State of the Union address at the end of this month,” Avlon points out, “and by any measure, the State of our Nation is divided and dispirited, lurching between fear and anger. What’s frustrating is, by almost every measure, President Obama’s two terms left us far better off than we were when he inherited the Oval Office, during the depths of the fiscal crisis. But despite the fact of an economic recovery, Donald Trump was able to do something out of character in the American presidential elections. Remember, demagogues usually do well in economic downturns. It’s rare to have a demagogic campaign succeed during a period of recovery. But the recovery was unequally dispersed, and Trump was able to play into the anger and resentment of many white working-class voters. Normally, of course, a president would seek to unite the nation, to reach out beyond his base. But with the lowest approval ratings ever for a newly elected president, Donald Trump seems determined to compound the problem by relying on the demagogue’s playbook and continuing to divide the world into ‘us against them.'”
The hazard inherent in such an approach is largely just potential at this stage. There’s still time, I suggest, for President Trump to pick up a copy of Washington’s Farewell.
“One of the reasons it continues to resonate is that there are aspects of its wisdom you can connect with, liberals and conservatives alike,” Avlon says. “Lyndon Johnson used to love to quote his warning about the importance of education. Ronald Reagan loved quoting from Washington’s advocacy of religious pluralism, and the importance of virtue and morality to a self-governing people. But I think the most urgent issue of our time is the poisonous hyper-partisanship that has artificially polarized the nation and led us to where we are today. I’d recommend that Donald Trump start reciting Washington’s warnings against hyper-partisanship on a regular basis. President Trump apparently does not read books, so perhaps we’ll have to get him the audio version. But however the idea is ingested, the wisdom still holds.”
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Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental
When a review of my novel, Well-Heeled, took special note of the protagonist’s estranged husband, Larry the Loser, my real husband was not amused.
“Larry the Loser is me,” he lamented.
“What are you talking about?” I said to him. “Larry the Loser is a character in my book. He doesn’t exist.”
“How come his name begins with an L, just like mine?”
I argued that I had first named the protagonist’s husband Harold. I was looking for an ordinary American name that many Jewish men had. I changed the name to Larry when I realized I had already assigned Harold to another character.
“Larry the Loser watches WWII movies on TV, just like me,” he said sadly. “That proves it.”
“It proves nothing,” I protested. “Half the men in the country watch WWII movies. That’s why they are always on TV.”
“He likes vintage watches, just like me.”
“So do thousands of other men. Look at all the stores that sell them.”
Hawthorne once had to plead that he was not writing fiction but “the truth of the human heart” in order to satisfy his critics, while in order to satisfy mine, I have to claim that I’m not telling the truth about anything.
The real truth, however, is that all fiction is grounded in some truth, somewhere. Even in the most far-fetched, loopy sci-fi novels, the characters think, feel, and act like us—or else some cockeyed version of us—and somewhere there is an intersection with “the truth of the human heart,” where real details keep the story from flying off into space.
Since writing teachers always say “ write what you know.” I started my creative process with a neighborhood—the Upper West Side of New York—where I have lived most of my adult life. I created a protagonist who also lived there.
My protagonist and I, however, very quickly diverged, after I posed a series of “what if” questions to myself: What if the protagonist left her husband instead of staying with him? What if she had no children instead of two? What if she were the owner of a discount shoe store instead of an editor at a publishing company?
Once these became the protagonist’s circumstances, she set out on a road that would lead her further and further from me. She would have to be braver, bolder, poorer, and more impulsive than me. She would interact with illegal immigrants, confidence men, cross-dressers, gamblers, gangsters, and local “entrepreneurs” with questionable business practices, the kind of people I have only passed on the street. Instead of children, she would have a ditzy sister to take care of. She would thrive on danger, run toward risky situations and become attracted to a cop.
The more I wrote, the more not-me the protagonist became.
All that said, since we both live in the same neighborhood, are close in age, and both Jewish, it is inevitable that we would share certain attitudes and traits—liberal politics, an interest in books, a love of argument. My protagonist and I sometimes jog in Central Park; we both enjoy an occasional vodka when things go wrong. These details help make my protagonist feel real—but they do not make her real. And they certainly do not make her me.
Part of the fun in writing fiction is scrambling up real details with invented ones, concocting an imaginary character out of bits and pieces of real ones like pasting the wild red hair of my neighbor Louise, a kindergarten teacher, on the head of Natasha, a runner for the Russian mafia, transferring the political principles of my dentist, Morris Shapiro, onto the back of Jose, a Puerto Rican newspaper delivery boy, and tacking a few marital infidelities, leaked by my Aunt Sadie after too much wine, onto Larry the Loser.
Since my real husband is the only husband I have ever had, it was inevitable that some aspects of his personality would seep into my novel, but only after being put through the blender of my imagination.
In vain, however, I invoke “poetic license”; assert that particular details illuminate universal truths; repeat Arthur Miller’s words that after every performance of A View from the Bridge, someone claims, “You have told my story.”
For my part, I don’t think my husband has anything to complain about. Now, Erica Jong’s ex-husband, whose “ hairless balls” were described in Fear of Flying? He had a reason to complain—although if he did, I imagine her defense would have been similar to my own.
Roz Siegel, an editor and writer for more than 25 years, is the author of the mysteries Goodie One Shoes and Well-Heeled.
A version of this article appeared in the 07/13/2015 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Any Resemblance Is Purely Coincidental
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February 6, 2017
Blackstone Audio Buys Audio Editions
Ashland, Ore.-based Blackstone Audio has acquired Audio Editions, the Auburn, Calif., direct-to-consumer audiobook retailer. Audio Editions will remain fully operational in its Auburn location, retaining its current staff.
According to a statement from Josh Stanton, Blackstone president and CEO, "the two companies are a natural fit, sharing similar business practices and company cultures that mesh well." Blackstone said it plans to update Audio Editions’ website and offer digital downloads to patrons.
Audio Editions currently offers over 50,000 audiobook titles from all major publishers, in cassette, CD, and MP3-CD. In addition to publishing over 10,000 audiobook titles, Blackstone has its own retail site, Downpour.com. Downpour also sells audio titles from other publishers.
Grady Hesters, owner of Audio Editions, will stay on as a consultant.
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How to Turn Elements of Your Novel Into a Masterpiece
As an author and writing coach, I’m always searching for new ways to understand the novel form. Recently while standing with my drums, cymbals and bells in the back row of the orchestra I play in, it struck me that music, specifically the symphony form, is an apt analogy for the interplay of harmonizing elements that must come together in the crafting of a novel.
Some symphonies are crowd-pleasers: Beethoven’s Fifth, Dvorak’s Ninth (“The New World”), Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” And some require a bit more effort to get in touch with: Ives’ Fourth and Mahler’s Seventh, perhaps.
This guest post is by bestselling author and writing authority Elizabeth Sims. She’s the author of seven popular novels in two series, including The Rita Farmer Mysteries and The Lillian Byrd Crime series. She’s also the author of the excellent resource for writers, You’ve Got a Book in You: A Stress-Free Guide to Writing the Book of Your Dreams, published by Writer’s Digest Books. Click here to order now.
It’s the same way with novels, which is why my local library buys 12 copies each of the latest bodice-rippers but carries next to nothing by the German existentialists.
The vast instrumental sweep of a symphony exists purely to engage the listener’s emotions, to give pleasure, to entertain, to provoke, to challenge, perhaps to tell a story in the most abstract of terms. To achieve this, every composer writes as dramatic a score as possible, full of conflict, interplay, development and transformation. The process is as important as the tools.
Given that we, as novelists, must also engage our readers’ emotions first and foremost, we can learn much from the symphonic form. And we can learn even more from the deep, rich process of composing. Because I think too often writers get fragmented by considering the elements of fiction individually: theme, setting, character, dialogue and so forth. We can get so enamored by a slick premise or an exotic setting that we forget that a successful novel, like a great symphony, is vastly more than the sum of its parts; it’s how they come together in harmony.
Here’s how to orchestrate all the instruments, melodies and dynamics at work—the elements of your novel—like a master composer.
[21 Fast Hacks to Fuel Your Story With Suspense]
Theme: Elements of Your Novel’s Melody
Theme is the seed from which a symphony grows. The most compelling symphonies begin with a basic, uncluttered melody, which is then developed, repeated, explicated, obscured, revealed, torn to bits, resurrected. A major symphony can feature several themes, which play together and transform one another before resolving. The best composers can make incredible music out of small, humble melodies, and they do it by bringing theme to bear on all the other elements of the symphony. This is a terrific lesson for authors, because theme is also the defining element of the novel.
For instance, two themes Harper Lee worked into To Kill a Mockingbird are good vs. evil and one brave individual can make a difference. Lee developed these themes individually and together: We see that the good intentions of the townspeople can’t overcome the evil of a few determined individuals, and that someone who is brave enough to act is needed. Enter Atticus Finch; enter Boo Radley, the mockingbird. Furthermore, Lee developed her themes in conjunction with her characters and setting: an impoverished white family, an honorable black man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, the Jim Crow South.
How can you take your theme to symphonic levels?
Put serious thought into themes from the start. Only when you have a firm grasp on what your themes are can you powerfully compose the harmonies around them.
Simple is best when it comes to theme. Why? Because a simple theme can be expanded and ornamented, but a complex theme is difficult to simplify without destroying it. The power of love is a terrific simple theme that can take you from zero to Alpha Centauri, while a person who has been abused will never truly love unless she gets lots of counseling isn’t likely to be much of a springboard beyond itself.
Let theme grow and develop with your characters. The power of love, being pure and easy to understand, can work in tandem with many other themes. For an example, let’s choose life is random and unfair.
Now, if you want to start with a bang, you could put a couple of honeymooners on a plane and make it crash. However, if you start with an attractive businessman who exchanges exasperated glances with a beautiful actress in the security line at the airport, then they find themselves in the coffee line together and have instant chemistry (the power of love emerges, a small but thrilling melody), and suddenly he proposes on the spot, and on impulse she accepts because she’s on the rebound (complexity builds), and they board the plane and plan their life together, lost in each other’s eyes—and then the plane falls out of the sky … now you’ve got something. You’ve established and intensified your power of love theme before adding the second theme that life is random and unfair. From there you can get into obstacles overcome, lessons learned, beauty discovered.
Let’s say the couple is found alive in the fiery wreckage but they are permanently disfigured—her face is gravely damaged and he’s lost his hands. What variations you can play! Readers with romantic streaks will want the couple’s love to grow after this catastrophe, to be found to be real, forged on the anvil of adversity. You could do this, and you could further test their love by inflicting yet more misfortune on them: a reconstructive surgery gone wrong, a stillborn child. In consciously making theme work on character, when your characters then respond to those situations, you can make character work on theme. (Love is rejected, only to be found again; love is shown to be less powerful than fear; one character’s idea of love differs from another’s, etc.)
Let theme drive plot. In my novel The Extra, I wanted dogs to be symbolically tied to my themes, and I wanted to have fun doing it. I constructed a subplot where a prize-winning beagle stud goes missing and a detective reluctantly agrees to find it. Beyond that, I put in references to dogs throughout the novel: It’s sweltering hot (“the dog days”); in the night skies, Sirius, the dog star, is rising; the protagonist’s child wants a dog and goes to some lengths to get one; a feral pack of canines roams the city; and so on. These dogs come together sooner or later (for instance, the missing stud is found to have joined the feral pack) so that the big themes harmonize with the small, symbolic ones: Tenacity and fatal secrecy are both further illustrated by the dog elements.
Elevate your story by adding thematic details to your settings. Let’s say one of your themes is abandonment, and one of your settings is a pool hall. You could describe the pool hall as shunned by polite society; it could be populated by derelicts; it could be in a part of town forgotten by the urban redevelopment projects. Themes can also interact ironically with your settings; for example, the theme of abandonment can be brought to a luxury condo in Honolulu—far from being warm, this dwelling might be cold and sterile, abandoned by human feeling.
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Your Ensemble: A Stage Full of Voices
A great composer, in writing a symphony, will be sure to differentiate between the voices of the ensemble. Think of the whole orchestra playing the exact same scale, all together, slowly—it might sound pleasant enough, but it will also sound bland.
The act of highlighting different instruments lets the composer create the ultimate in musical riches: conflict. A composer will write solos for individual voices, bringing them to bear on the themes and variations of the sonic material: the plangent cello, the vainglorious trumpet, the clashing cymbals, the luminous French horn, the piercing piccolo. The instruments play duets, trios, they chase one another in scherzos, they mock one another in rondos, they fight one another in fugues.
Particularly noteworthy ensemble-cast novels are Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools and James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential. In these books the authors establish their characters rapidly and distinctly, give them star turns, and let group dynamics form alliances, then shift, destroy and recreate them.
Listen to your characters. Treat your ensemble of characters as if it has the massive range of an orchestra. Listen to their voices with your deepest self as you write; open your core to them. Go on and get a little metaphysical! Just as composers can be inspired by the instruments at their disposal, so it can be with your characters and you.
Give them solos. An easy way to highlight and develop a character—and leave him open for conflict with others—is to give him periodic solo passages. Letting him go off on his own could be as simple as a short passage of inner monologue or as complex as a subplot.
Let’s say we want to explore how gutsy our maimed businessman is. He could decide to pursue competitive sports, or to go on a spiritual quest into the wilderness. Perhaps he takes along a hired nursing aide, and what began as a solo turns into a duet. Perhaps the aide turns out to be a con artist or a maniac or an inventor who, gazing at a thunderstorm one afternoon during his own solo turn, makes a mental breakthrough that results in a partnership in which he and the businessman develop prosthetic hands the likes of which the world has never seen.
Pass the spotlight. A literal, and perfectly effective, way to switch solos from one character to the next is to shift the point of view. You can do this either by writing separate sections from different characters’ POVs, as Kathryn Stockett did in The Help, or by using an omniscient POV and concentrating on individual characters from time to time (action scenes are great for passing the spotlight). Either way, this technique can generate wonderful tension.
If you’re employing the protagonist’s first-person POV exclusively, try bringing other characters in and out of your hero’s life in high relief. For instance, to give a murder suspect a solo, you can have your detective protagonist interview her, drawing out information. While doing so he observes her intensely, from personal presentation to vocabulary to body language. He raises questions, draws conclusions and prepares a plan of action.
Do this, and you will immediately see new ways your characters can harmonize, clash and crescendo.
[How to Map Out Your Hero’s Adventure in Your Manuscript]
Tempo, Dynamics & Mood: Powerful Tools
Good symphonic composers will use the full dynamic range of the ensemble, from one lone small voice—say, an oboe introducing a mournful melody from the obscure center of the orchestra—to the full ensemble in maximum fortissimo, detonating chords in a rapid finale.
When an entire orchestra plays a passage very softly, suspense builds. We know the musicians have the power to blast us out of our seats, yet there they are, whispering to us, beckoning slowly. They know what’s coming, but we don’t, and we sit spellbound with the tense joy of anticipation.
Some thriller authors are masters at varying their dynamics and tempo to heart-clutching effect. John D. MacDonald’s Cape Fear (formerly titled The Executioners), for instance, cranks the volume up and down, alternating between scary and reassuring, between fast and slow action, while swinging the variances wider and wider, as we helplessly, masochistically, wait for the final payoff.
Be overt. Write a storm scene followed by a quiet love scene, followed by a messenger with devastating news, followed by a winning lottery ticket. An action sequence like a car chase can certainly represent a dynamic shift, but so can a silent multimillion-dollar museum heist.
Change keys. Generally speaking, major keys furnish harmony, a mood of communion or playfulness, and minor keys challenge harmony with a darker atmosphere. Consider the first sentence of Anita Brookner’s quiet, Man Booker Prize–winning novel Hotel du Lac: “From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey.” I’d certainly call that an opening in a minor key. Brookner exploits and expands that atmosphere in electron-microscope detail, so that we get thirsty for some major-key relief, which comes soon enough in the form of the subtle yet needle-sharp wit the author is loved for.
A good simple way to shift atmosphere is to use description to foretell what is to come. Something like this:
We laughed and hugged, relief flooding us like cool water. A minute later, however, a large, fast-moving shadow passed overhead. “What the hell was that?” Philip said. “All the birds are supposed to be dead.”
Use the small stuff. A small but effective atmosphere-changing tool is sentence structure: Short, blunt sentences on the heels of a long, flowing passage change the rhythm, the feel. Another is dialogue: Imagine a conversation between a person who is angry and a person who is not. Right away you can see how their vocabulary and diction can establish suspense, develop a scene and lead to action.
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Your Finale: Emotion Amplified
Over and over, I counsel aspiring novelists to take their time writing their climax and wrap-up. I’m reminded here of a quotation from Emerson: “Adopt the pace of nature: Her secret is patience.” Be like top composers and authors and don’t rush your payoffs. That doesn’t mean to make your climactic scenes slow; it means to give them your full attention. Don’t hurry the reader through them.
An audience will instinctively appreciate any sort of resolution. But they will feel it deeply and emotionally only if they are given disharmony and discordance first. The contrast provides context, and this makes a huge difference.
So, as you build to the end, take away your readers’ soft bed and let them sleep on rocks for a night or two. They will positively kiss their pillows once you take them home again.
The world offers us countless ways to stimulate our creativity as novelists. I believe that the metaphor of music is largely untapped by fiction writers, and I think we’ve just scratched the surface of a lode of riches here. Try some of these ideas, and then dig into them in your own way.
Do a good job, and you’ll get a standing ovation—and play to a packed house next time.
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In Search of the Slave Who Defied George Washington
Most scholars who have written about Judge’s escape have used it as a lens onto Washington’s evolving ideas about slavery. But “Never Caught,” published on Tuesday by 37 Ink, flips the perspective, focusing on what freedom meant to the people he kept in bondage.
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“We have the famous fugitives, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass,” Ms. Dunbar, a professor of black studies and history at the University of Delaware, said in an interview in Mount Vernon’s 18th-century-style food court. “But decades before them, Ona Judge did this. I want people to know her story.”
Research on slavery has exploded in the two decades since Mount Vernon, Monticello and other founder home sites introduced slavery-themed tours and other prominent acknowledgments of the enslaved. “Lives Bound Together,” which runs through September 2018, was originally going to fill one 1,100-square-foot room in the museum here, but soon expanded to include six other galleries normally dedicated to the decorative and fine arts, books and manuscripts.
Photo
An installation about Ona Judge, often referred to by the diminutive Oney, in the exhibition “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.”
Credit
Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
“We had so much material, and it’s such an important story,” Susan P. Schoelwer, the curator at Mount Vernon, said. “We realized we could take many of the objects already on view and reframe them.”
The exhibition makes it clear just who poured from the elegant teapots and did the backbreaking work on the 8,000-acre estate. But integrating the harsh reality of slavery into the heroic story of Washington — “a leader of character,” as the title of the permanent exhibition across from the slavery show calls him — remains unfinished work, some scholars say.
“He’s a much more mythic figure than Jefferson,” said Annette Gordon-Reed, the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello” and a Harvard professor. “Many people want to see him as perfect in some way.”
But his determined pursuit of Judge, she said, as much as his will freeing his slaves, reflects the basic mind-set of slave owners. “It’s saying, ‘Whatever I might think about slavery in the abstract, I should be able to do what I want with my property,’” she said.
Photo
An advertisement from Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser on May 26, 1796, offering a reward for the return of Ona Judge, an enslaved woman belonging to Martha Washington who ran away from the president’s house in Philadelphia.
Ms. Dunbar, the author of “Never Caught,” first came across Ona Judge in the late 1990s, when she was a graduate student at Columbia researching free black women in Philadelphia. One day in the archives, she noticed a 1796 newspaper ad offering $10 for the return of “a light Mulatto girl, much freckled, with very black eyes and bushy hair” who had “absconded” from the president’s house.
“I said to myself: ‘Here I am, a scholar in this field. Why don’t I know about her?’” Ms. Dunbar recalled.
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Since then, Judge’s story has inspired several children’s books, and even an episode of “Drunk History.” But “Never Caught” is the first full-length nonfiction account, drawing on some newly unearthed sources to track her from Mount Vernon to New York City, Philadelphia and then New Hampshire, at a time when gradual abolition left the line between slavery and freedom ambiguous.
“There’s a myth of the North as free, but her story shows how complicated that was,” Ms. Dunbar said.
Photo
The women’s living quarters at Mount Vernon.
Credit
Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times
It is in the meticulous ledgers of Mount Vernon that we first see Ona Maria Judge, who was born around 1773 to an enslaved mother and a father who was a white indentured servant. At age 9 she was brought to live in the mansion house, eventually becoming Martha Washington’s personal maid.
When Washington became president, Judge followed the first couple to New York and then Philadelphia, home to a growing free black community.
Free blacks, Ms. Dunbar writes, aided Judge’s escape in the midst of a presidential dinner, after she had learned that she was to be given to Martha Washington’s granddaughter, Eliza. And it was free blacks who helped her catch a sailing ship to Portsmouth, N.H., where she married, had three children and lived on the edge of poverty, laboring in households far less exalted than the Washingtons’.
In two interviews published in abolitionist newspapers shortly before her death in 1848, Judge testified to the desire for freedom that drove her to run away from the Washington household, where she had “never received the least moral or mental instruction,” she said.
Photo
In the 1840s, Judge, living in New Hampshire, gave two interviews to abolitionist newspapers, one of the few known pieces of testimony by people enslaved by the Washingtons.
Judge’s story, Ms. Dunbar said, explodes any notion of “privileged” house slaves, or of the benevolence of the Washingtons, whose far from passive role in perpetuating slavery — and in doling out sometimes brutal punishment to the rebellious — is described in detail.
Ms. Dunbar describes how the Washingtons quietly maneuvered around Pennsylvania’s 1780 gradual abolition law, rotating their slaves in and out of the state every six months. And she recounts their shock at the “ingratitude” of Judge, who fled “without any provocation,” the president wrote.
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After hearing that Judge was in Portsmouth, Washington, offering a story that she had been “enticed away by a Frenchman,” discreetly sent a federal customs officer to bring her back, circumventing procedures laid out in the 1793 fugitive slave law he himself had signed.
When Judge agreed to return on condition that she be freed on Martha’s death, George Washington dismissed her demand as “totally inadmissible.” However much he might favor general emancipation, he wrote to the customs officer, granting Judge any say in her fate would only “reward unfaithfulness” and give ideas to others “far more deserving of favor.”
In August 1799, Washington, through another associate, tried again to capture her, but was foiled when Judge received a tip about the plot and disappeared.
Four months later Washington was dead, freeing all his slaves in his will. Judge and the others held by Martha Washington remained her legal property.
Ms. Dunbar calls Washington’s act “no small thing,” but does not see the former president, who had no biological children to disinherit, as the hero of the story.
“When it was safe, he emancipated his slaves,” she said. “He dealt with it after his death. And you know what? That’s what all the founders did with slavery: They kicked the can down the road.”
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Bookstore News: February 6, 2017
Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Open Registration for Spring Show: The event will take place March 6-7 at the Crowne Plaza - Airport in Atlanta, and the theme is “Writing the Future of the Discovery Show." The event will feature a party at Peachtree Publishing and an evening gala dinner will star five authors, including Michael Knight and Gina Kolata. The Spring Show controversially had been planned to coincide with the Great American Bargain Book Fair, which has been cancelled.
Waterstones to Open Ten New Stores: The Bookseller magazine reports that Waterstones will open 10 new bookstores next year after turning a profit for the first time in five years. For the year ended April 30, 2016, the store made a pre-tax profit of £9.9 million ($12.5 million) on a sales hike of 4%, to £409.1 million ($511 million).
New Raleigh, N.C. Children's Bookstore to Open in April: Read With Me, A Children’s Book & Art Shop will open in Raleigh, N.C.on April 7. The store, which is owned by former schoolteacher Christine Brenner, is currently trying to raise $50,000 through an IndieGoGo campaign.
Michael Moore Tweets Support for The Bronx's Lit. Bar Bookstore Fundraiser: The filmmaker and advocate tweeted "1.4 million people in the Bronx -- and not a single bookstore! Please help. I did! https://igg.me/p/let-s-bring-a-goddam... … #indiegogo via @indiegogo"
Renovated Bookstore at Masters University Opens: The University Exchange, or UE, at Masters University in Santa Clarita, Ca. has been undergoing upgrades since last year. “It’s full of all kinds of materials, books, biographies, history books… this is a great thing for this university," said Master’s University president John MacArthur.
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Contrapuntal Poem: Poetic Form | WritersDigest.com
Let’s look at our first poetic form of February: the contrapuntal poem.
Contrapuntal Poems
I’ve had difficulty in hunting down who originated contrapuntal poems, but it does appear to be influenced by the music world. Contrapuntal music is composed of multiple melodies that are relatively independent that are sounded together. In the poetic world, contrapuntal poems are poems that intertwine two (or more) separate poems into a single composition–often by offering one line of poem A and before a corresponding line in poem B from start to finish.
In an attempt to show how this works, I’m going to share two short independent poems before sharing my attempt at a contrapuntal poem.
The Light at the End, by Robert Lee Brewer
Before leaving the house
I saw the storms approach
and thought here it comes:
the end, a bright flash
of light across my face.
Then, I heard the thunder.
The Tunnel, by Robert Lee Brewer
Wandering these empty rooms
dark and devoid of life–
lonely moments to bend.
Of every lost love letter,
I remember the desire
shaking me inside and out.
*****
Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
*****
Here’s my attempt at a Contrapuntal Poem:
The Light at the End of the Tunnel, by Robert Lee Brewer
Before leaving the house,
wandering these empty rooms,
I saw the storms approach,
dark and devoid of life,
and I thought, here it comes:
lonely moments to bend
the end. A bright flash
of every lost love letter
of light across my face,
I remember the desire…
Then, I heard the thunder
shaking me inside and out.
*****
This form was fun to write, because it forced me to think of how to get three meanings from my words at once: the meaning of the first poem, meaning of the second poem, and, of course, the meaning of them in harmony.
By the way, there are multiple ways to contrapuntal poems. Here are a few other nice examples (in other words, better than mine) I could find online:
*****
Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
*****
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Review: ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ Shows a President Haunted by Grief
The poems in “Spoon River” were narrated from beyond the grave by the dozens of souls “sleeping on the hill” in the local cemetery. One of those characters was Anne Rutledge, rumored to have been Lincoln’s first love, and whose untimely death — reportedly of typhoid at the age of 22 — was said to be a source of his often melancholy outlook on the world.
Photo
George Saunders
Credit
David Crosby
The similarities between “Spoon River” and Saunders’s new novel extend well beyond the Lincoln association and the graveyard confessions. Like Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919) — itself a notable influence on Saunders’s early short stories — and Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” (1938), “Lincoln in the Bardo” appropriates Masters’s multivoiced approach, using it to create a story that unfolds into a meditation on the dreams and disappointments of ordinary people, longing for connection but often left feeling isolated and alone.
Saunders’s short stories — “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,” “Pastoralia,” “In Persuasion Nation” and “Tenth of December” — tend to vacillate between two impulses: satire and black comedy, reminiscent of Nathanael West and Kurt Vonnegut; and a more empathetic mode, closer to Anderson and William Trevor. Though there are moments of dark humor in some of the ghost stories here, “Bardo” definitely falls into the more introspective part of that spectrum. In these pages, Saunders’s extraordinary verbal energy is harnessed, for the most part, in the service of capturing the pathos of everyday life — as experienced by the spirits of the dead, remembering missed opportunities; by Willie, as his life slips away and he enters the limbo of the bardo; and by Lincoln, as he struggles to come to terms with his son’s death and the devastation of a war that is ripping the country apart.
Saunders’s novel is at its most potent and compelling when it is focused on Lincoln: a grave, deeply compassionate figure, burdened by both personal grief and the weight of the war, and captured here in the full depth of his humanity. In fact, it is Saunders’s beautifully realized portrait of Lincoln — caught at this hinge moment in time, in his own personal bardo, as it were — that powers this book over its more static sections and attests to the author’s own fruitful transition from the short story to the long-distance form of the novel.
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“His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow,” Saunders writes of Lincoln, “toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow, that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone and, given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it.”
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