Roger Alan Bonner's Blog, page 2

Readers

Hi there,

You know what’s new these days? Readers. I have readers now, people who buy my books, read them, and once in a while review them. How cool is that?

Now, some readers… a few, actually… don’t like one of my books. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not complaining. I believe that every reader has a first amendment right to interpret a story however they want to. So I don’t criticize any reader, ever, no exceptions. If they don’t like it, then they don’t like it. Period.

All you can say is, well, I hope you find something out there to enjoy.

One young lady started to read one of my books, but just couldn’t do it. The story never grabbed her, and she put the book down without finishing.

I think everyone knows what that’s like. What can you say? Better luck next time.

But a couple things are cool. First, readers can surprise me when they describe how they see a story. They can interpret the story in ways that never crossed my mind, and that interests me because it teaches me something about how the reader reacts to the story, or the dialogue, or something else that I’ve slipped into the story.

The other thing that’s cool is that some readers really like a book… a lot. And that feels great.

Writing fiction takes a long time and a lot of work. Editing is a nightmare; don’t get me started. So to write, you spend hours and hours. It makes no sense, unless you’ve got a taste for it.

The point is, it’s easy to feel like The Last Man on Earth.

So when a reader says they liked a book, it’s like a ray of sunshine in the spring.

Editing

A few months ago, I learned that I had made a serious mistake, that I had published my novels before the writing was clean enough for an audience. It was entirely my fault; I simply did not know how much work it took to produce a clean manuscript which read well. I learned that through a few reviews which came back saying, more or less, “I loved the story, despite a handful of typos and simple errors.”

Ouch! Grrrrrrrrrrr.

So, for the last few months, I’ve been editing. As a new writer writing new stories, I have sold next to nothing and cannot therefore afford a real editor (deserving an essay unto itself).

So I have been using editing software. Now, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, there are good editing software packages which handle spelling and basic grammar questions quite well. That’s important for two reasons. First, regardless of genre, no reader reacts well to a typo. So vanquish them! Vanquish them all!! Second, a person cannot catch every mistake simply by reading the text. Familiarity or boredom or exhaustion creeps in, and the reader overlooks the obvious error.

In other words, we’re not robots, and that is the problem, easily fixed. The software, whatever its limitations, does not overlook anything. Ever.

But beyond this point, we encounter difficulty. Some software packages go beyond spelling and grammar, claiming to edit for readability, style, and all sorts of other good things. “Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be Shakespeare by Thursday.” That sort of thing. The software often touts artificial intelligence as the new driver of these capabilities.

Guys and girls, I hate to say this – I wish the claims were all true. It would certainly make my writing easier, for then I could simply write the story as I feel it should be told and rely on the computer to clean up the writing. But the software tests for “good writing” strike me as the sad invention of software people and technies, not writers. Certainly not writers of fiction.

For example, I am told that “Mary was murdered” is bad writing because it is passive, not active. For my tastes – and perhaps this identifies all bad writers – the alternatives to “Mary was murdered” are clunky.  You could say, “Peter murdered Mary.” That’s active. But say it three of four times, and the reader will think, “Yes, I know. You told me, remember?” The reader has lost the story; that’s bad.

So I usually and stubbornly characterize “Mary was murdered” by writing “Mary was murdered,” especially when no one cares who the murderer was (that can happen).

And if that’s not active, then why is Mary dead, eh?

Emotion means something in our stories. For example, someone hears a knock on the door, what do they say? “Who’s there?” The answer is, “It’s me.”  That’s bad grammar. Good grammar would be, “It is I.” But the reader who reads that will infer that the person at the door is either the King of Denmark, someone pompous, or a graduate of Oxford, and they’d better be right about that. So which is good writing?

“It’s me.”

As another example, some software tells you to minimize your use of the most commonly used English words – and, but, it, if, then, when, more, less, and so on. Apply this test, and your writing will become unusual and special, or so it is said. I have had a bit more luck with this test. Sometimes, it is possible to rewrite a sentence with fewer words without losing one iota of content. That is always a pleasure, and the sentence is often easier and more fun to read. Therefore, good writing. But it occurs to me, the words used most often are perhaps used most often for a reason. What could it be? Logic and clarity come to mind, and there may be other reasons as well.

So I think I am finding that editing software can be beneficial, but the benefits fall short of the claims. Perhaps that is also true of human editors. In the end, the writer has to use his or her own judgment in telling the story. That process involves applying their vast human experience to the characters, situations, and progress of the story.

Technological progress, like rust, never sleeps. I expect that one of these days, someone will train AI software to write fiction. I wonder how the software will emulate and describe human experience, or those aspects of emotion that are so important to fiction. I imagine an engineer might guide the software through millions or billions of  conversations on a social network as a surrogate for human experience.

In that event, I eagerly await those tense and engrossing stories about “my puppy” and “what I had for breakfast this morning.”

Snark!

 

First Post

Greetings, Everybody,

Goodreads said I should start a blog, so here it is. If you don't want to participate, I understand. It's okay.

I'm not much of a blogger, actually. I feel that blogging takes time away from writing and editing, and I stay quite busy with all that.

So I apologize in advance if I don't promptly respond to a question or a comment.

Outside of Goodreads, you can contact me at rogeralanbonner.com. The apology made above applies there as well.

Roger Alan Bonner

Reading

Before I started writing, I read a lot. When I was a kid, it was baseball, warfare, dinosaurs, rockets, fantasy. I even read a romance. Then I got serious about school, so for a long while it was science and mathematics – though you don’t exactly read mathematics. You do it, you don’t read it.

Then I was a professional economist for thirty five years, so I read a lot of journal articles, IMF reports, legal briefs. Heavy stuff. Once I was gainfully employed, I throttled back and began to read for fun. I hadn’t done that since childhood. I read all sorts of things, but still looked for science fiction. The Foundation Trilogy, Stranger in a Strange Land, Enders Game, Childhood’s End, IRobot, and lots of other things as well.

When I started studying fiction for the purpose of writing fiction, I learned a lot about literary devices, about the three act structure, about plot, and character arc, and about tension and thwarted desire. I learned how and why to hide information. And I learned other things as well.

All that was important to learning how to write stories and novels. I’m glad I learned it. But it ruined me as a reader. I can no longer fall into a story and enjoy the twists and turns and the strange voyage the writer wishes me to take. Instead, I find myself looking for the next trick to be played, and I often see it coming. That gets in the way. It’s a lot harder to enjoy a story when you’ve figured out how it will proceed.

It bugs me more than it should. For example, even in high school, I found myself figuring out stories before they were told. That’s not fun. I read Farewell to Arms, by Hemingway, then returned and read it again in middle age. Each time, I had the same reaction – you’re going to kill off the nurse, aren’t you Ernie? (Ernie and I are best buds, on a first name basis).

And rather than enjoy the story, I’d sit there and stew about the impending doom coming for the nurse. But really, while we’re on the subject, what exactly is the point of killing off the nurse? As hard as I look, I can’t see the benefit. It does not assist the ending of the story, quite the contrary, it is a speedbump that makes the ending bumpier and more awkward. It is not more interesting. I just think Ernie did it to inject a little tension into the story. But it’s phony tension.

There’s a lot of phony tension in literature these days. We’ve all been taught to write it. I don’t like it. It doesn’t make for a better story. Of course, I should point out, the writers who inject every page with tension are probably selling more than I am. At least, I hope they are.

Covers

They say you cannot judge a book by its cover. You would think that would be particularly true of ebooks, for which the cover is – let’s not mince words – a postage stamp.

Before we get too far, let’s note that the Post Office spends a lot of money making sure its stamps look nice. Hmmmm.

Moreover, the experts all seem to agree, it is important to put a nice cover, a professional cover, on the front of an ebook. I recently did that for the five ebooks I’ve written so far. Before that, I did my own covers. And, even though I liked them  – applauding courage, if not talent – I had to concede, they weren’t all that good. The new ones are a lot better.

Maybe that tells us why readers and writers like nice covers on ebooks. It is not because the cover says anything about the contents of the ebook.

It’s because the cover is just … cool. And fun to look at. You know?

They’re Art. They don’t need to be functional.

Okay. That sounds plausible. But it raises another question – why don’t authors put naked blonds – or firemen – on their covers?

That would be Art too.

Reviews

I’m having to deal with reviews these days – folks who opine about a piece of writing. In my case, that usually means a novel. New writers are often interested in reviews. I am.

There are two models of review. The ‘wise man’ model, where the reviewer is someone expert and/or well informed, and the ‘mob’ model, where the reviewer is a ‘normal’ person, often a customer. In the ‘mob’ model, the individual ratings are aggregated and offered collectively as the ‘views of buyers’.

When they communicate reviews, marketers like to use stars. In the wise man model, three stars means the wise man thought the work was average, or decent, or okay. Not bad, not great. In the mob model, three stars is usually an arithmetic average – you give one star for ‘hated it,’ five stars for ‘loved it more than I love my dog,’ then you average the numbers. The average summarizes, but does not describe, the variety of scores given by members of the mob.

Which one is better? That’s a good question. To answer it, let’s drill down into the market for literature, all of it fiction, all of it fabricated, none of it true (at this point, some of you might ask, does that include journalism? No it does not, and that’s not funny. Focus, people).

Now, the market for literature is incredibly fragmented. If fifty people read a book, they’ll have 50 different reactions. So in practice everybody selects from a miniscule subset of books which they usually like. They find authors they like, then they buy everything bearing the name of that author. They’d buy a paper bag with the author’s name on it (an unexploited marketing opportunity). Or they might buy according to genre; they might choose books from romance, or a small slice of that, from sci-fi, or a small slice of that, and so on and so forth.

So what can they do with a review? Well, maybe they know they share the views of a wise man. If the wise man likes a book, they will like the book. In that model, a few people follow the wise man; everyone else ignores him since he doesn’t reflect their views. In other words, if literature is fragmented, then as a result, the market for wise men will be equally fragmented.

As a corollary, if half of the readers are crazy, then half of the wise men will be equally and similarly crazy. In economics, we call that ‘derived demand’ (more or less).

Now, of what use is the mob model? Well, if the marketer only reports the average score, then the mob model is of little use. You don’t think so? Let’s ponder … Suppose a novel got an average score of three out of five. Is it a good novel? We don’t know. If everyone rated it with a three, then everyone thought it was average. In that case, you have to call it ‘average’.

But what if nobody thought it was average? What if half of the readers gave it a ‘one’, and that other half gave it a ‘five’? The average is still three, but in that case, the novel is a mega-hit. It’s going to be out there in leather binding, gold embossed pages, ebooks, paperbacks, and audiobooks, in each of seventy different languages. They’ll make movies out of it. The writer will be dating Beautiful People and driving a Ferrari or a gold-plated pickup truck. When they die, they can arrange to be buried in a crypt the size of the Astrodome. In Texas.

Same number, hugely different result.

Let’s keep drilling. In the USA, there might be a hundred million people who occasionally buy novels. That’s a guess, but probably not a bad one in a country with a population of 330 million. In that case, if a million people buy a novel, that is one out of every hundred readers. That doesn’t seem much.

But that novel would be a huge hit. Almost nobody sells a million copies of a novel, certainly not a recently published novel. That’s JK Rowling stuff. In that event, for every individual who is interested enough to buy the novel, there are ninety nine people who are not – they are indifferent or they dislike or even hate the novel, sight unseen.

Conclusion? A novelist does not need to be popular in order to be successful. What is necessary is that their ‘net public affection’ must be greater than zero. For everyone who hates you, there needs to be somebody who loves you. If everyone hates you, you’re in trouble.

It’s rather like life. For some, it is life.

So, let’s loop back to the point. What possible use could a reader have for a review, if the review does not describe the quality or popularity of the book? I can think of one – a person with time constraints, who might begrudge the several hours needed to read a novel, would find Cliff Notes useful. So if the reviewer simply summarizes the contents of the novel, spoils the plot and the ending, removes all surprise, a lot of people might find that useful.  They could talk about the novel with friends without having to spend the time reading it.

Uh, is it just me, or did all the fun just float out of the room?

My first post.

My first post.

Let me begin by saying, I don’t know what I’m doing setting up a website. At all. So you’ll need a bit of patience. The website is for discussing my fiction, or anyone’s fiction, or anything that anyone wants to discuss. The First Amendment applies here.

The site is not for commerce. I won’t be trying to do anything to move money or execute transactions. My ebooks are available on Amazon and Kobo. They handle the money, and I do not have ambitions for them to buy or sell anything but my ebooks (though I must admit, I every so often think to myself – say, that would be a good slogan on a t-shirt). But no … I’m not getting into t-shirts. Or politics, or anything else.

I have opinions, but I keep them to myself. I stay busy, and I don’t want to divert.

How did I get into writing fiction? That might be interesting. It was an accident. Seriously, years ago, an old girlfriend – a total flame, and a flameout on my part, long since married to someone else – came to DC on a job. We had lunch. She was thinking about writing a novel. We talked it over, and I thought, cool, that would be a very cool thing to do. It turned out, she never wrote a novel. I think she got  busy with other things.

But I did. I wrote a long novel on the invention of the warp drive. I never finished it; the story turned into The Tomato That Ate Cleveland. It got longer and longer, more and more convoluted, until I reached a point from which I could not gracefully end the novel.

It was like being epoxied to a situation. I was stuck. Time froze. I still have the files, and I like a lot of the scenes. But I could not finish it.

You’d think that common sense would prevail, but it did not. I got the bug and started writing other stories, things I could finish. A couple years later, when divorce hit, instead of being Mr. Bummed Out Divorced Guy, I got to be Mr. New Writer. I got into a great writing group, the Arlington Writers’ Group, of Arlington, VA. When I retired, I had a collection of stories to work on and publish.

So that’s how it all happened.

I have a PhD, but writing fiction is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Still, it’s going okay. I’ve got three novels and two novellas at Amazon and Kobo, with three other novels in the pipeline. It turns out, I’ve got a genuine taste for writing.

That’s kind of weird, actually. There are thousands of people who would love being a writer. It’s like being a movie star, or a rock star, or a major league baseball player (my dream til I was fourteen). But there are a lot fewer people who are comfortable plopping into a chair every day and writing. It’s a boatload of work, it’s unhealthy, and the pay is awful.

But you know what? There’s nothing like finishing a first draft and knowing that you’ll publish it one of these days.

Everyone says, don’t write fiction for money. And they’re right. At least, I think they’re right. The world is going from text to video. Nonetheless, when you publish a novel, it’ll be out there a long time. So who knows? Maybe you’ll pull a Tolkien – years after your death, the world will wake up to how cool your books and stories are, and you’ll be a legend after your own time. Your grandchildren can fight over your royalties. Even the most modest writer can dream about that.

How cool is that? How many jobs offer the opportunity to dream?