Jennifer Crusie's Blog, page 155

My Mother Was a Terrible Cook

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I was thinking the other day, “I’d like some Chop Suey like Mom used to make.  Except, you know, good.”  Jo did not shine in the kitchen.  Her recipes are not recipes anybody would greet with delight. Although in my family’s defense, my cousin Russ who used to be the food editor at the LA Times, says one of the paper’s most requested recipes was Grandma Smith’s cranberry sauce, which always boggles my mind because my memories of Grandma Smith are of her eating raw hamburger and missing part of her thumb which had come off in a basement door incident.

Where was I?  Right, food my mama used to make.

I have no idea why I yearn for this food.  It’s not like I had a happy childhood.  So what draws me back to Jo’s bean soup with dumplings (doughy and terrible) and roast-carrots-and-potatoes (overcooked) and Chop Suey (the Chinese would spit)?  Look, my mom worked six days a week, and for my father, to boot, so it’s not like she had time to scan through Gourmet Magazine or whisk a cream sauce.  The woman was exhausted 24/7, and that was before she got home to me and my brother, fighting and screaming.  (My brother is a lovely man and we’re just fine now, no worries.). And she kept us alive, even if she looked with suspicion on any veg that wasn’t a potato, a carrot, a bean, a celery stalk, or an onion.  And yet, even with the memory of pale gravy and gray meat, every now and then, I start to crave the food of my childhood.  

This week it’s Chop Suey.

I know Chop Suey is not Chinese cuisine.  Most of the blogs I’ve looked at call it Chinese American cuisine which I figure is a cute way of saying, “A bunch of American housewives thought this is what Chinese cooking was.”  That was definitely my mother’s approach.  I think she might have put water chestnuts in, which was a complete waste because my father, brother, and I ate around them.  Otherwise, it was beef broth and beef (tough but cut into small chunks) with mushrooms and onions and celery over those crispy noodles whose name I have forgotten.  But I really loved my mother’s Chop Suey.  If you ignored the meat which was like little pillows of Nerf, the broth and veggies were salty and tasty and the crunchy noodles were divine.  

I think Jo’s Chop Suey is where I picked up my undying love of celery cooked in salty broth.  I put celery in everything; it’s 90% water so it’s non-fattening and it never fails to be unobtrusively delicious.   My basic starter for an meal is celery, onion, and mushroom.  Stir fry?  Sure, celery, onion, and mushroom.  Cashew chicken?  Absolutely, celery, onion, and mushroom.  Noodle soup?  You bet, celery, onion, and . . .   I made brownies the other day and had to restrain myself from reaching for vegetable crisper.  (In my defense, I have other basic combos, like shallots, peppercorns, white wine, and heavy cream, which I could probably live on, but not for Chop Suey.  I’m not insane.)

So I looked up Chop Suey on the net and here’s a fun fact: chop suey appears to be “whatever your mother threw in the pot.”  Seriously, all these food blogs with “My mother’s Chop Suey” are all different.  Plus some of them call for rice.  I was appalled.  Those little crunchy noodles are an essential part of the whole drippy Chop Suey experience.  I love rice, I eat tons of rice, but not with Chop Suey.  My god, what are they thinking?

On the other hand, I could see where my mother’s habit of tossing in a can of Campbell’s beef broth and hoping for the best was not going to cut it.  Neither was dumping all the veggies into the broth and boiling the hell out of them with the meat.  I have some standards.  Plus Chop Suey is an excellent way to get vegetables into me, so in addition to the essential celery, mushroom, and onion, there should be garlic (there should always be garlic), and snow peas, and bok choy (my answer to water chestnuts which I still can’t stand) and possibly some cabbage and a carrot if I have some lying around.  Which is when I realized I was basically making stir fry and then throwing in some beef broth and dumping it all on crispy noodles.  

This is one of the big ah-ha moments from the months-long experiment I’ve been making with meal services:  There are basically only about about a dozen recipes in the world (cooking, not baking) and everything is just a variation on those.  Meat with pan sauce, stir fry, stew, oven roasted veg, you can change some of the ingredients, but it’s pretty much the same recipes over and over again.  So my mother wasn’t that far off the path with her basic repertoire.  

Which brings me back to her Chop Suey.  The problem with messing with a remembered recipe is that then it doesn’t taste like you remembered it.  OTOH, my mother’s Chop Suey was a mixed memory, so what I had to do was isolate the good stuff.  What I really wanted was hot, salty beef broth with celery and mushrooms over crunchy noodles, but if that’s what I made, I wouldn’t like it, it would be too bland.  It had to be hot, salty beef broth with celery and mushrooms and onion and garlic (everything is better with garlic) and maybe oyster sauce instead of the soy sauce I remember my mother pumping into the broth, and possibly some sesame oil.  And marinate the beef and sear it until it’s still rare and then let it rest and finally cut into squares and put it in the finished stir fry so it stays rare.  And add a little cornstarch so the beef broth gets some body to it, although I’ve heard potato starch is even better for thickening so I ordered some of that.  But, I decided, no carrots.  I like carrots but not in Mom’s Chop Suey 2019.  Chop Suey should be pale green and brown, like our living room carpet was, not orange.

So what I ended up with was more Chop Memory than Chop Suey, but it was good.  It made me think of watching black and white TV and the knotty pine cabinets in our old kitchen and that green carpet in the living room, none of which I really wanted to remember, but the broth was salty and the celery was delicious and I could go face down into those crunchy noodles which have no nutritional value whatsoever but who cares?  

Tomorrow I’m making stroganoff, another comfort meal.  My mother never made stroganoff–sour cream was for fancy people–but I made it all the time when Mollie was growing up.  

I wonder if Mollie ever thinks, “I’d like some stroganoff, like my mother used to make, except, you know, good.”  

Anybody have memories of your mom’s cooking you want to share?  Good or bad, we don’t judge.

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Blooming Happiness

I was curled up in bed reading with dogs snoozing next to me and was suddenly struck with the most immense feeling of contentment.  Not joy or glee or passion or excitement, just the sense that where I am right now is exactly where I’m supposed to be, that the whole “bloom where you are planted” bit is backwards and what I’ve been doing my whole life is planting myself in different places, making different connections, trying to find a place to bloom, and then suddenly, after decades of re-potting and transplanting, I’ve taken root here in the quiet middle of nowhere and now there are buds all over the damn place.

What I’m saying is, I’m happy.  No reason.  Just happy.  So I’m wallowing in my contentment.

How did you wallow this week?

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Wear the Lilac and Carry Your Towel on the Glorious 25th of May

Today is Wear the Lilac Day and also Towel Day in honor of two of the greatest writers of our time, Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams, who gave us Discworld and the Hitchhiker’s Guide and many other wonderful worlds. It’s a time to remember things worth fighting for (“Reasonably priced love!”) and not to panic. It’s also Cherry Saturday, but that happens every week; the Lilac/Towel Day is special.

Every year when I write this post, my heart clutches a little at what we’ve lost with their deaths, but as Pratchett once wrote, “Do you not know that a man is not dead while his name is still spoken?” Their names are still spoken, their books are still cherished, and today is the day to remember them and read.

I’m going back to Thief of Time.

Also there’s this in six days:

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This is a Good Book Thursday, May 23, 2019

I read a new book this week, but it did not enthrall, so I went back to some old stuff, more Michael Gilbert and Wodehouse’s Leave It To Psmith because sometimes you just need farce.  I kept getting visual migraines, which are not headaches but these weird zigzag patterns in my vision, and that made it hard to read, too.  I know: audio books.  But I hate being read to.   Still Psmith was a great comfort to everyone except Baxter, who deserves whatever he gets, including a flower pot to the head.

What did you read this week?

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Working Wednesday

I remember when I thought it would be a good idea to be a writer.  No pantyhose and I could work in bed.  Maybe I should have explored other options for those requirements.  

So what did you work on this week?

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Questionable: Sociology vs. Psychology in Writing Story

Jinx asked about a Scientific American essay called “The Real Reason Fans Hated the Last Season of Game of Thrones.” by Zeynep Tufekci: 

“I read a recent article from Scientific American . . .  with a thesis . . . that the series broke its implicit promise to viewers because when it reached the end of the author’s previously published material, the new showrunners switched from Martin’s more sociological approach to plotting and character development to one that is common to most film and tv writing these days, with a purely psychological perspective.  So… individuals moving through their conflicts with others, in place of individuals within a social framework adapting to others and finding their place in a complex social world.”

Criticism and analysis can be thought-provoking and insightful, but it’s rarely good writing advice.  It’s not meant to be writing advice, it’s not craft, it’s theory.  So while Tufekci’s analysis is interesting, it’s not a practical application for writers (which was not her intention, so not a flaw in her work).  The essay reminded me of my PhD course work (no I never finished the dissertation) when I did a ton of literary criticism, then started to write novels, then did my general exams.  One of my profs said, “Your criticism really changed once you started to write fiction.”  Well, yeah.  After publishing, I was on the inside looking out instead of on the outside looking in.  Big difference.

This critic is on the outside looking in, which is the best place to do criticism; you need distance for insight.  But the writer must be on the inside of the fictional world that she creates, immersed in the story elements not because they make academic sense but because those are the things that she’s obsessed with, that drive her to write.  I am willing to accept Tufekci’s thesis that George R. R. Martin as a writer is more interested in the sociological impact on character than the psychological (I’ve never read nor watched Game of Thrones), but an analysis that says, “Pick a lane and this lane is more valuable” is too reductive to be helpful as a writing tool for two reasons.  

First, no good story is ever all psychologically or sociologically based.  Your deep psychological story is meaningless without a sociological context; as Eudora Welty once put it, “Nothing happens nowhere.”  Where your characters are standing–time, place, community, social beliefs–has a huge impact on how those characters move.  But an epic story about a society in transition is not much without vivid characters with distinct personalities who arc throughout the story.  I know who Arya and Dany and Cersei and Jon Snow are just from the drive-by commentary I read.  I know what happened at the Red Wedding because people were so upset about the characters.  I have no idea what the sociological aspects are in this story–it’s a medieval society with lots of rape and murder and dog killing?–but everywhere I turned people were obsessing over the characters.  Why?  Because we don’t connect with societies, we connect with people.  Societies are an abstract, people are us. But people are also the societies they live in, the non-conscious ideologies they absorb, so we need setting and context. We need both to tell stories.

So think of storytelling psychology and sociology not as two lanes but as a spectrum.  On one end is characters talking about their feelings.  On the other end is characters fighting for or against social forces that threaten their world.  It’s a continuum, and somewhere on that continuum is where you are drawn to place your stories.  Definitely examine both aspects, but arguing that one is more valuable than the other is like the original Dumb Question of Writing Theory: Which is more important, plot or character? You need both or you don’t have story. Where your emphasis is going to fall depends on the story you’re going to tell and–above all–the kind of writer you are.

Which brings me to the second problem I have with this essay: Tufekci seems to think that America’s current political nightmare requires sociological narrative, that fiction is somehow better if it has a social responsibility and writers are more valuable if they provide that: “In a historic moment that requires a lot of institution building and incentive changing (technological challenges, climate change, inequality and accountability) we need all the sociological imagination we can get, and fantasy dragons or not, it was nice to have a show that encouraged just that while it lasted.”  But writers have only one overriding responsibility: To tell the stories we need to tell as honestly and as selflessly as possible. Good storytelling is not didactic, it does not seek to educate people or change society.  Good non-fiction can do that, but good storytelling has to first and foremost be an honest expression of its writer’s heart; if it’s true it will often naturally reflect important ideas and change those who read it, but that can’t be its purpose or it becomes just another screed with characters shoved through the plot line as an illustration of an idea.  That way lies story death.  “It’s more valuable for writers to base stories in sociological imagination as opposed to psychological character exploration” makes as much sense as “Writers should write about dogs.” Good writers write about the things that move them. Period.

Which brings me to the real reason Game of Thrones changed: They switched writers, and when they switched writers, they inevitably switched stories.  THIS ALWAYS HAPPENS. Even if both the old and new writers have the same psychological or sociological focus, every time a show switches writers, it changes (see West Wing, Gilmore Girls, Buffy).  Every time a book series is taken over by another writer, it changes (see the post-mortem Rex Stout stories, Ngaio Marsh stories, Dick Francis stories). The change has nothing to do with society, determinism, or Hollywood modes. Writers can only write their own stories; therefore a change in writers changes the story which breaks the contract with the reader.   It’s like switching spouses in mid-marriage: You’re gonna notice a difference.

This is why I have a problem with Tufekci’s conclusion: “Unfortunately, most of our storytelling—in fiction and also in mass media nonfiction—remains stuck in the hero/antihero narrative.”  Our storytelling is not stuck in protagonist mode, it’s not stuck in any mode. Our storytelling is inevitably and intrinsically a reflection of the stories we need to tell.   So just write the truth as you are compelled to put it on the page and don’t worry about sociology, psychology, or anything else you took your freshman year in college. It’s the story you need to tell that’s important because only you can tell that story.

Also, write about dogs.

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Questionable: Explain the writing process, maintaining continuity, best writing software, the secret of life . . .

Casey asked (and asked and asked):

Writing process! I’d like to go over the writing process. I realize this is tackled a lot and by varying degrees from many different people, but I still haven’t found my sweet spot. Pantser vs. Plotter, some variation thereof? I’d love to hear about the process of taking an idea to a full-on novel. Maybe using one of your past books as a guide from conception to finished product?

Uh, that would be a book length answer.  The short version:

Do your discovery draft where you just write what comes to mind, anything goes, nobody sees it but you.
Read through the discovery draft and break it down into acts and turning points, looking for escalation, moving stuff around as needed until you have a coherent narrative.
Step back and ask yourself what the book is about.  What kind of book is it, what’s the theme, where are the character arcs and what do they mean.  Revise again to sharpen all of that.
When it’s a good as you can make it, send it to beta readers you trust and ask what doesn’t work and what must be kept.

Maintaining continuity throughout a book. How do you accomplish that task through 300+ pages? Do you use a special tool? Is it done during the editing process? 

During the discovery process, I don’t worry about it.
During the rewrite process, I make notes about it.
During the final rewrite before the betas, I run through and make sure I’ve fixed any glitches in continuity, including language specific to characters (Button says “Crap,” Nita doesn’t; Nita says “Asshat” Button doesn’t, until midway through the book when they start picking up each other’s language.)
I also go through and read the book in the PoV of any major character to make sure each one is on the page with his or her own goals and personality.  That is, I read through as Button so that even in the scenes in somebody else’s PoV, she still sounds and acts like Button.  It’s also a good way to see who you’ve dropped; if you have to skim a hundred pages until that character shows up again, what has she or he been doing? What happened.

Basically, you fix continuity in the rewrite.

Software! I’ve gotten THE BEST software recommendations from this blog. I’d love to hear about any new stuff you’ve found that has been a life changer or that anyone else on Argh is using, too. Having said that, I’m also interested to hear your thoughts on when software is helpful and when it gets in the way of the writing.

This is probably heresy, but I cannot make Scrivener work for me.  I don’t know why.   My go-tos are Word and Curio (for collage and mapping) and VooDoo Pad (for wikis and organizing info).  I would love to master a good timeline program, but I’ve never taken the time needed to do it.  For graphics, I love Acorn.  But that’s it: Word, Curio, VooDoo Pad, Acorn, and if I ever figure it out, Aeon Timeline (I’m using Word tables for timelines at the moment).

Finishing. This is, perhaps, my biggest problem. I’m easily distracted by the shiny. How do you keep yourself focused on a single story through to fruition? Do you let some shiny in throughout to get it out of your system and then return to your main project? How do you refocus on the main project after a hiatus?

You’re asking a woman who hadn’t finished a book in ten years. 

I am SO CURIOUS about serials and can’t seem to find some really good information on what the deal is with these nowadays. I know that they’ve gotten big again since the influx of eBooks, but that’s, unfortunately, all I know. Are serials being rebranded as short stories? Are they still popular after the initial boom of readily available eReading material? And along that vein, what about short stories? Amazon markets them based on the time that it will take you to read it, so the length is all over the place where short stories are concerned. Are they the new serial? What’s their appeal? Are they appealing?

On series (not serials), three words: Worlds, communities, and characters.  Readers who really loved spending time in a book want that book again, only different.  Series give them a new story in the same world.

Short stories: very difficult to write (much harder than novels) and very difficult to make satisfying.  I would imagine their appeal is that they don’t take long to read, so if they’re well written they give you the satisfaction of a novel in half an hour. I’ve written them, but they take forever to get right, and my natural length is the novel, so I haven’t really looked into them.  No idea what’s happening with them right now on Amazon, but somebody in the comments will know.  Argh people know everything.

And to coincide with all of that — because I realize those are somewhat more along publishing questions and not necessarily writing questions — what elements make a really good serial? How is writing a serial, a short story, or both different from writing a full novel? What elements — particularly in the romance genre — go into making quality written serials, short stories, or both? 

You’re asking about two different things, I think, unless I’m misunderstanding your use of “serials.”  Are they really publishing serials now?  That is stories told in parts, only releasing one part at a time, like a mini-series? If so, I know nothing about that. Sorry.  If a serial is just a novel released in parts, then there’s probably no difference in writing them and novels, aside from needing a hook/turning point at the end of each section to keep people reading (but you need that in a novel, too, so . . .).

The difference between short stories and novels is a simple one: length.  But that leads to bigger differences because you have very little real estate to build on in a short story, so it has to be extremely focused and extremely well structured.  There’s no room for error in a short story.  You don’t have acts, at most you have scene sequences and you probably don’t even have that; the whole story is probably a scene sequence or even just a scene.  And yet you still have to deliver that punch, that pay-off, you still have to make the reader sit back and think and then want to read again.  They’re very difficult to write well, the high wire act of fiction writing. 

The habits of a productive writer. What are they? Realizing this is different for everyone, maybe sharing yours and then getting Argh’s collective habits in the comments? 

You’re asking me?  Ask a productive writer.  The Argh people will undoubtedly speak to this in the comments.

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Hey, Happy People

How did you find joy this week?

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Cherry Saturday, May 18, 2019

Today is No Dirty Dishes Day, which in my house is Use Paper Plates Day or Hey, Let’s Go To the Diner Day.  There is a theory that if your dishes are clean every night and your bed is made every morning, the rest of the house will look fine.  These theorists have never seen my house, although I will admit to having a sink full of dirty dishes as I type this, so possibly until those are clean, I have no argument.  Anyway, wash those dishes today.  And then forget about it until next year. (Thank god, this only happens once a year; can you imagine if it was No Dirty Dishes Month?  Insanity.)

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Questionable: Why Can’t I Write?

Deb asked:
I used to love to write fiction – fantasy and romance especially. I hoped to publish someday but mostly I just enjoyed writing and living in those worlds. I went through a divorce awhile ago and it rattled some of the carefree feel to my writing but I carried on, believing in the romance and fantasy and hoping for love again. Two years ago, my mom died and going through that and the fallout with my relationship with my dad just broke whatever it was remaining in me that could pretend or believe in the dream. I sit down and try to write fiction and it turns into memoir or how-to or similar. . . . [D]o you have any suggestions on getting my real/dreamer self back? I had resigned myself to the fact that this is the new me, like it or not, but lately I am mourning that loss and just not feeling okay with it.

First, what’s wrong with memoir or how-to?  I love writing non-fiction (as anybody who reads this blog knows, I LOVE the sound of my own voice) and I don’t see it as a second-choice genre at all.  If that’s where your inclination lies now, embrace it.

But you say you’re not okay with it, so my next question is “What is the story you have to tell that you can’t not write?”   

I’m guessing there isn’t one.  That is, you miss the experience of writing fiction–the out-of-body retreat-into-a-different-world rush, the sense that you control the world you’re writing, the feeling of being under the skin of characters fighting the good fight and falling in love—without having a specific story that you must tell.

Somebody close to me recently asked me if I thought she’d be good at writing fiction. She’s a terrific writer in letters and e-mails, so she clearly has the writing chops.  But what I asked her was, “Do you have a story you have to tell?” And she doesn’t (right now), she just thought she’d like to write fiction.  But if she doesn’t have a story she’s compelled to tell, that she HAS to get on paper or it’ll nag at her brain until she goes mad, then she really doesn’t want to be a storyteller, which is a particular kind of writing.  If you don’t have a specific idea that you need to explore that will turn into a story that needs to be on paper right now, that you think about all the time, that seems realer than real life, then you don’t have to write it, and all the other stuff in your life (the big stuff) will get in the way.

The thing about writing fiction is that it’s really difficult, so if we can do something else, we will.  When the going gets tough, we’ll wander away from the book and do something else. (Let me tell you about the last ten years of my career.) If life is like a placid pond, you can probably write a book you’re not obsessed with (I assume, I’ve never had a placid pond life).  But if the book demands to be told, if you can’t not write it, then you’ll stick with it no matter what. 

In your case, you may have a story that wants to be told, but you can’t hear it because of all the noise in your head from all the trauma your life has been hit with. Until that noise goes away (I suggest therapy, it’s saved my life and my career several times), you won’t be able to get to your stories.  As soon as your brain is quiet enough that you can hear what the Girls are sending up, you’ll probably get a story that settles into your brain and won’t shut up. And if not, embrace non-fiction, a truly great genre; definitely look into narrative non-fiction which could be a great bridge to where you want to go.

Bottom line: It’s not your fault.  Stop beating yourself up and be kind to yourself until you can hear the muttering of your subconscious again. And don’t limit yourself, either. Maybe the Girls are muttering a mystery this time. I wrote Tell Me Lies because I wanted to kill my ex-husband and that seemed like the most civilized way to do it. Maybe that memoir is the start of a novel after all. Good luck!

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