Tom Simon's Blog, page 5
January 26, 2013
All hats are grey in the dark
The seventh essai in a series, following ‘Zeno’s mountains’. It first appeared in a slightly different form on LiveJournal in May, 2oo6.
So far in this series, I have dealt chiefly with points of style and technique. Now I propose to change tack and take up some points of subject matter. And first, because Sherwood Smith was good enough to remind me of it, I shall deal first with a very common fault that is all but guaranteed to knock me right out of a book: the villainous hero.
Now, I have no trouble with flawed heroes; I expect them, and rejoice to see them overcome their flaws, or find ways to succeed in spite of them. I can even find much to admire in anti-heroes. And I have patience with ironic protagonists, the Yossarians and Babbitts and Humbert Humberts, who are never represented as heroic in any way, and whose authors are well content to portray them as the schnooks, schnorrers, and schlemiels that they are. (How did we ever insult one another before Yiddish came along?) What offends me violently is when a character is represented as a Good and Upright and Virtuous Hero, when almost his every act betrays him as a villain of the most heinous kind.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 25, 2013
Font trouble
Upgraded today to WordPress 3.5.1. This broke the WebINK plugin, so my custom fonts no longer display correctly. (Oddly, they do appear on the site admin pages; just not on the site itself.)
I have issued a cry for help to the folks at WebINK, and may follow up with an APB on the WordPress forums. If anybody reading this has any ideas how to fix the plugin, please do let me know.
Meanwhile, I apologize to you all for the clumsiness of the default fonts. The design is still the same; only the typefaces have been changed to protect the innocent — or, in this case, the howlingly guilty.
Update, 18:10: My WebINK fonts display correctly in the default WP theme, and (for the most part) in the default theme for the Genesis framework. Genesis substitutes its own header fonts for mine; Prose substitutes header and body fonts.
More as events develop (or not).
Update, 18:13: Italics and bold type are displaying in Arno Pro, as they ought. Plain text is displaying in Palatino, as it definitely ought not. This bug has hidden depths.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
Zeno’s mountains
A new essai to follow ‘Death carries a camcorder’. The meme that gave rise to my original LiveJournal pieces asked for ‘ten things I hate in a book’; but being under no obligation to stick to the original terms, I add to the list ad libitum.
According to local legend, one of the first tourists to visit Calgary (then a Northwest Mounted Police fort with a few civilian outbuildings) was an Englishman of energetic habits but not, it seems, with any wide experience of the world. One morning, having rested from the rigours of his journey, he decided to take his morning constitutional by walking to the Rocky Mountains and back.
In those days you could see the mountains easily from the N.W.M.P. fort, small but sharp and clear on the western horizon. In England, of course, nothing looks sharp and clear more than a few miles away. In that mild and humid air, every distant object is more or less obscured and coloured by haze: minor English poets can always eke out their verses with facile rubbish about ‘blue remembered hills’. In the dry cold highlands of Alberta, there is no such haze; objects on the horizon, on a sunny day, are very nearly as clear as those immediately at hand. But our English tourist knew nothing of this, and set out with the idea of visiting the mountains and getting back to the fort in time for breakfast.
Five or six miles out, the Englishman, who must already have been rather footsore and perplexed, clambered up the long ridge that would later be called Signal Hill. Cresting the ridge, he would have been appalled to discover a wide plain sloping gently down for several miles before him. Beyond that rose the first tumbled range of the true foothills, towards which, disappointed but not daunted, he plodded on. Behind that range is the Kananaskis valley, and then the last range of foothills before the beginning of the actual mountains — some fifty miles west of Fort Calgary as the crow flies.
Several days later, a searching party found the Englishman and brought him back to the fort to recuperate.
Something rather similar happens to writers who visit Elfland; even today, when the map of that country has been scribbled over with marked trails and motorways, the lesson of distance is one that every traveller must discover for himself.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 22, 2013
Sorry for the interruption . . .
For the past week, I have been ill and unable to work. Now I am ill and able to work — some. Regular posting should resume tomorrow, D.V.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 15, 2013
Marc Cabot on why ‘crap’ sells
It turns out that having a book well-edited and written according to particular stylistic requirements wasn’t necessary to get it to sell well: it was necessary to get it published. And since books which aren’t published rarely sell well, editing and stylistic accomplishment were second-order requirements. Now that a book can be published without meeting them, lo and behold, books which aren’t edited and written in a particular style can sell well.
That isn’t to say that ceteris paribus a book which is well-edited and stylistically proper won’t do as well or better than a book which isn’t. It almost certainly will. But a book which isn’t and has a good story and good characters will do better than a book which is and doesn’t.
—Marc Cabot, in a comment on The Passive Voice
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 14, 2013
Death carries a camcorder
The fifth essai in a series, following ‘Teaching Pegasus to crawl’. The original appeared on LiveJournal in May, 2006.
Fiction is, among many other things, a game between writer and reader, a kind of mental strip-tease in which the writer slowly reveals the details of the story, and the reader tries to guess at their significance. Mystery stories exhibit the game in its purest form, of course; but the element of guessing ‘whodunit’ turns up in every kind of fiction.
As stories have grown more complex, and the telling more elliptical and compressed, guessing out the storyteller’s meaning has become a difficult and demanding skill. Usually we don’t think of it in those terms, because as readers, we began to develop that skill early in childhood; it was fun to do, and after all, children can take delight in the most fiendishly elaborate games. Generally speaking, we don’t notice the skill involved until it stops working — that is, until the writer breaks the rules of the game.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 13, 2013
How to invent realistic character names
Want just the right name for a character? A name that perfectly expresses his role in the story, without being a spoiler? A handle that reveals his unique quiddity, without revealing too much? A moniker that speaks from soul to soul? A collocation of vocables that grabs the reader right in the kishkes and won’t let go?
Look no further. You can use any one of these.
(Except ‘Dan Smith’. That would be ridiculous.)
You’re welcome.
Mirrored from .
January 11, 2013
The gentle art of making eyeballs bleed
The URL about says it all:
http://lousybookcovers.tumblr.com/
Kids, don’t try this at home. Please.
Now, for those who don’t want to end up with their covers being mocked on Tumblr, I can heartily recommend Joel Friedlander’s site, The Book Designer.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
January 10, 2013
J. Gordon Smith on literary fiction
Literary fiction is the fancy wine of the publishing world. The grapes have to struggle against chalky soil and harsh hot days with chilly nights. And then there is the two-buck-chuck blind taste off and what do we have? Or the incident where French and American wines were blind taste tested by French reviewers and the American wines won.
—J. Gordon Smith, on The Passive Voice
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: a letter to Frances Turnbull
Published in F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters. Hat tip to Brain Pickings via The Passive Voice.
I should like to call particular attention to the last sentence of the P.S.:
You have talent — which is the equivalent of a soldier having the right physical qualifications for entering West Point.
This is perhaps the best definition of talent, that obscure and much-abused term, that I have ever read. —T. S.
November 9, 1938
Dear Frances:
I’ve read the story carefully and, Frances, I’m afraid the price for doing professional work is a good deal higher than you are prepared to pay at present. You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions, not the little minor things that only touch you lightly, the little experiences that you might tell at dinner. This is especially true when you begin to write, when you have not yet developed the tricks of interesting people on paper, when you have none of the technique which it takes time to learn. When, in short, you have only your emotions to sell.
Mirrored from Bondwine Books.
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