Lisa M. Lilly's Blog, page 18
September 1, 2015
Live to Work or Work to Live: Thoughts on Work/Life Balance
The other day on a podcast, entrepreneur and author Joanna Penn said something like you only worry about work/life balance when you dislike what you do. This caught my ear. My feelings about how work fits in my life, or how it "should" fit, have changed during the last six months, partly because I've shifted professionally so that most of my work time relates to my thriller writing. Even so, I'm not sure I completely agree with Joanna's comment.
During the 14+ years when the majority of my work time (the majority of all my time, for that matter) was spent practicing law, I strived to keep a sharp divide between what I did to earn a living and the rest of life. That seemed vital because I worked so many hours, first at a large law firm and then running my own law practice. I rarely worked at law projects at home and rarely handled anything personal from my office. I also tried to designate certain times of the week--Saturday evening, all day Sunday--whenever I could as non-work time. My thriller and horror writing, though also work, was my great love, so I counted it on the "life" side of the balance.
My view as I write this post.Now that I spend most of my professional life writing, and a smaller amount practicing law and teaching, work/life balance isn't a big focus for me, yet I'm happier. I sometimes choose to research or write legal motions and briefs Saturday and Sunday mornings so I can send my final product off to a client or file it in a court early, leaving the rest of the week for revising the third thriller in my Awakening series. Likewise, I might grade the papers my law students write while taking Amtrak to visit family, despite that it's officially vacation, because it helps pass the long train ride. Or I'll sit out on my deck and dictate parts of a blog post into my phone while watching a beautiful sunset, which is how I began this entry.
At first I struggled against this migration of work into evenings and weekends--those times I'd tried so hard, often without success, to keep sacred when I labored primarily at law. But being too rigid led to me feeling both busier and as if I weren't getting as much done, as I always felt I ought to be doing something else. Paying bills during 9-5 when I'm most sharp and productive seemed like a waste, as did going to the grocery store during evenings or weekends when everyone else is there. When I felt freer to handle tasks when I'd be most productive at them or enjoy them more regardless of the time or place, I discovered I found it easier to relax during downtime, plus I had more of it. Letting myself open my laptop on a Saturday morning to rewrite a scene that had sifted through my mind during the night gave me more than one uninterrupted hour to read a novel during the week. Immersing myself in reading that way is something I loved from childhood on but hadn't done regularly since before I'd started law school. From then on, reading for pleasure happened only in 10-20 minute increments unless I was on vacation.
------------------------------------------------------------------Join Lisa M. Lilly's M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) Reader Group and receive Ninevah, a short horror story published exclusively for subscribers, free. Your email address will never be shared or sold.-------------------------------------------------------------------Now I wonder if, while I was practicing law full time, I might have been happier had I allowed myself the same flexibility. I liked my work, and I loved running my own business. But I got depressed, feeling like the only person in the whole world working when I stayed at my office every night until 7 p.m. At the big law firm where I'd practiced, seven was a normal time to leave work, but on my own most of the people where I shared offices left by 5 or 6. And on weekends, it was just me and the security guards. I might have felt happier doing routine administrative tasks at home with a glass of wine and John Fogerty playing on the stereo.
One of the things I do identify with that Joanna Penn said is that because she loves writing and everything connected to it, her leisure time and social interactions all often relate to her work, and she enjoys that. Authors need to read, and that's a great love of mine. I've also made very close friends at writing conferences and more recently through writing communities on line. We've become sounding boards for one another for our careers and for other parts of life. Plus we have fun. I recently had a great time eating good food and drinking wine at Lady Gregory in Chicago with my friend Patty, who runs Path to Essential Health. Yet we were having a business meeting about a creativity workshop we're putting together.
At the same time, I remember when I started my law firm I was also delighted at the many ways business and social came together. At the large firm, the hours of legal work required to meet guidelines left little time for any type of social life--business related or not. On my own, I was thrilled that I could eat lunch often with friends, attend bar association events, and host get togethers at my firm. That a side effect often was sharing good business advice or connecting one another with potential clients or vendors was icing on the cake. Three or four years later, though, when my practice had grown almost beyond me, I felt burnt out and tired. I still loved seeing my friends, but the hours in the office felt less rewarding, and I began to resent the lack of time away.
It's tempting to believe that'll never happen with my writing, and with the business side of writing, because I love it more. And that's probably true in part. But the author of The E-Myth Revisted, a book about entrepreneurs with small businesses, talks about the dangers of growth without a plan. The author gives examples of small business owners who survive the all important first five years (during which most small business fail) only to confront a challenge they never expected: too much success, resulting in working too much for too long and no longer loving the business. I recognized myself right away and realized that within a year of opening my doors I ought to have hired a full time legal assistant rather than doing so much myself with office support only on a project basis.
I plan to learn from that experience, so much as I love writing and everything connected with it, I'll make a a little nod to work/life balance more often than I feel the need to. Also thanks to Joanna's podcast, I've started scheduling my tasks for the following work day the night before. It helps me get more done and, as important, I schedule in breaks and I know when I'm finished for the day. And I'm keeping an eye on what additional aspects of my writing business and law practice I will outsource if I hit a point where I feel all I do is work.
What about you? Does whether you love your work affect your need for work/life balance? What tips can you offer on enjoying your life inside and outside of work?
---------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower.
During the 14+ years when the majority of my work time (the majority of all my time, for that matter) was spent practicing law, I strived to keep a sharp divide between what I did to earn a living and the rest of life. That seemed vital because I worked so many hours, first at a large law firm and then running my own law practice. I rarely worked at law projects at home and rarely handled anything personal from my office. I also tried to designate certain times of the week--Saturday evening, all day Sunday--whenever I could as non-work time. My thriller and horror writing, though also work, was my great love, so I counted it on the "life" side of the balance.
My view as I write this post.Now that I spend most of my professional life writing, and a smaller amount practicing law and teaching, work/life balance isn't a big focus for me, yet I'm happier. I sometimes choose to research or write legal motions and briefs Saturday and Sunday mornings so I can send my final product off to a client or file it in a court early, leaving the rest of the week for revising the third thriller in my Awakening series. Likewise, I might grade the papers my law students write while taking Amtrak to visit family, despite that it's officially vacation, because it helps pass the long train ride. Or I'll sit out on my deck and dictate parts of a blog post into my phone while watching a beautiful sunset, which is how I began this entry.At first I struggled against this migration of work into evenings and weekends--those times I'd tried so hard, often without success, to keep sacred when I labored primarily at law. But being too rigid led to me feeling both busier and as if I weren't getting as much done, as I always felt I ought to be doing something else. Paying bills during 9-5 when I'm most sharp and productive seemed like a waste, as did going to the grocery store during evenings or weekends when everyone else is there. When I felt freer to handle tasks when I'd be most productive at them or enjoy them more regardless of the time or place, I discovered I found it easier to relax during downtime, plus I had more of it. Letting myself open my laptop on a Saturday morning to rewrite a scene that had sifted through my mind during the night gave me more than one uninterrupted hour to read a novel during the week. Immersing myself in reading that way is something I loved from childhood on but hadn't done regularly since before I'd started law school. From then on, reading for pleasure happened only in 10-20 minute increments unless I was on vacation.
------------------------------------------------------------------Join Lisa M. Lilly's M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) Reader Group and receive Ninevah, a short horror story published exclusively for subscribers, free. Your email address will never be shared or sold.-------------------------------------------------------------------Now I wonder if, while I was practicing law full time, I might have been happier had I allowed myself the same flexibility. I liked my work, and I loved running my own business. But I got depressed, feeling like the only person in the whole world working when I stayed at my office every night until 7 p.m. At the big law firm where I'd practiced, seven was a normal time to leave work, but on my own most of the people where I shared offices left by 5 or 6. And on weekends, it was just me and the security guards. I might have felt happier doing routine administrative tasks at home with a glass of wine and John Fogerty playing on the stereo.
One of the things I do identify with that Joanna Penn said is that because she loves writing and everything connected to it, her leisure time and social interactions all often relate to her work, and she enjoys that. Authors need to read, and that's a great love of mine. I've also made very close friends at writing conferences and more recently through writing communities on line. We've become sounding boards for one another for our careers and for other parts of life. Plus we have fun. I recently had a great time eating good food and drinking wine at Lady Gregory in Chicago with my friend Patty, who runs Path to Essential Health. Yet we were having a business meeting about a creativity workshop we're putting together.
At the same time, I remember when I started my law firm I was also delighted at the many ways business and social came together. At the large firm, the hours of legal work required to meet guidelines left little time for any type of social life--business related or not. On my own, I was thrilled that I could eat lunch often with friends, attend bar association events, and host get togethers at my firm. That a side effect often was sharing good business advice or connecting one another with potential clients or vendors was icing on the cake. Three or four years later, though, when my practice had grown almost beyond me, I felt burnt out and tired. I still loved seeing my friends, but the hours in the office felt less rewarding, and I began to resent the lack of time away.
It's tempting to believe that'll never happen with my writing, and with the business side of writing, because I love it more. And that's probably true in part. But the author of The E-Myth Revisted, a book about entrepreneurs with small businesses, talks about the dangers of growth without a plan. The author gives examples of small business owners who survive the all important first five years (during which most small business fail) only to confront a challenge they never expected: too much success, resulting in working too much for too long and no longer loving the business. I recognized myself right away and realized that within a year of opening my doors I ought to have hired a full time legal assistant rather than doing so much myself with office support only on a project basis.
I plan to learn from that experience, so much as I love writing and everything connected with it, I'll make a a little nod to work/life balance more often than I feel the need to. Also thanks to Joanna's podcast, I've started scheduling my tasks for the following work day the night before. It helps me get more done and, as important, I schedule in breaks and I know when I'm finished for the day. And I'm keeping an eye on what additional aspects of my writing business and law practice I will outsource if I hit a point where I feel all I do is work.
What about you? Does whether you love your work affect your need for work/life balance? What tips can you offer on enjoying your life inside and outside of work?
---------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower.
July 7, 2015
Listening to Fiction and Talking with Shiromi Arserio
I'm one of those people who thought I would never read on an electronic device. I love paper books. During the four years I worked full time and attended law school at night, on those rare days I took off from both, I wandered book stores. I scanned titles in all their fabulous and varied fonts, ran my hands over book covers, inhaled the combined smell of paper and ink. So I had a certain amount of sympathy when a friend said she would never buy a Kindle, because there was no problem there that needed fixing. Books were perfect as is.
Yet I love the Kindle, too. The ideal vacation for me is a pool, a view of the ocean, and a giant stack of books. (Plus, as you might guess from my photo, a lot of SPF 50 sunscreen.) The Kindle allowed me to not only bring that stack on one small device but to order more with a click. The first time I finished a series and ordered the next, I felt just like a mouse must presented with the lever to get more cheese. Click, click, click.
Enter audiobooks. I bought a Kindle when I decided to publish my thriller The Awakening on it. I felt I ought to know what that reading experience was like. Similarly, a while back, I began hearing more about authors and publishers releasing audiobooks. I was skeptical. My experience was with tapes (yes, I'm old enough for that) and CDs that I bought, aspired to listen to, and never did. I couldn't imagine that I'd ever buy more than one or two audiobooks. Or listen to podcasts for that matter.
Now I listen to one or the other frequently on my iPhone during the day using the Audible app. (My favorite podcast is Dusted by Storywonk, which analyzes Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.) When I read, I do so to shut off everything else. But with an audiobook, I listen to accompany other tasks, and compelling books motivate me to continue whatever I'm doing so I can hear more. If I'm listening to a book a I love, my condo is very, very clean, my bills are paid well in advance, and my checkbook is balanced. And I'm in great shape, as treadmills are wonderful for listening.
------------------------------------------------------------------Would you like to receive Lisa M. Lilly's e-newsletter with M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) book and film reviews? Your email address will not be shared or sold. Join here today and you'll also receive Ninevah, a short story exclusively for subscribers.-------------------------------------------------------------------For both listening and reading, I enjoy thrillers because they pull me right in and keep me engaged. I also like non-fiction on audio, but if the concepts are too complex, that doesn't work. On paper, I can slow down or reread a paragraph and ponder it. While Audible allows skipping back 30 seconds at a time, that doesn't match seeing words on the page or easily flipping through an earlier section.
Given the differences I experienced in reading versus listening, I became curious about how narrating an audiobook differs from other types of performances. So I asked producer/narrator Shiromi Arserio.
Shiromi and I have similar tastes. I wanted to work with her on The Unbelievers, Book 2 in my series, because one of the first audiobooks I ever listened to, a sci fi thriller with a female main character, was one she narrated. I also was very excited that Shiromi has appeared in a few Lost episodes. (Which has nothing to do with producing audiobooks, I just thought it was cool.) And we both love Michael Biehn, the actor who played Kyle Reese in the first Terminator movie. Cyril Woods, the antagonist/almost love interest in The Awakening is modeled a tiny bit after Biehn's portrayal of Reese, so I knew Shiromi would understand how I saw and heard Cyril.
Her answers to my questions are below. (Notice how I didn't ask her what things about working with authors drive her crazy or make her want to throw things.)
Are the skills you need for narrating different from those you use when acting?
When you're acting, even if it's for a video game, you're playing one character at a time. In an audiobook you are doing an entire play by yourself. Jumping from male to female characters, changing accents. It's a lot to keep track of. Also, as a narrator, you have to remember that it's not about the actor's performance. You want someone to remember how good the story is, not how memorable the actor was.
When you read a book you’re preparing to narrate, do you hear each character’s voice in your mind? Do you need to think about it for a while?
Some characters pop in my head fully formed. I have a clear idea who the character is and how they should sound. Sometimes I’ll have to go away and think about it. Maybe get the author's input, if I can. The more well-developed the character is on the page, the easier it is to “hear” the voice.
How do you handle a character’s interior thoughts? Is it hard to differentiate that from dialogue?
Interior thoughts can be really challenging. For one of my early books I used a slight reverb effect to change the sound of the thoughts, but it's time consuming and generally ACX (the production platform) doesn’t approve of effects in audiobooks. And most people are listening through tiny headphones while on the way to work or going for a run, and can't even hear the reverb. So now I just get a little closer to the mic and drop my voice as though I'm talking to myself.
What is your favorite type of book to read? To listen to? Is there a difference between the two when it comes to favorites?
I'm a geek, so I love to read or listen to scifi, horror, fantasy. However, with audiobooks I tend to go for ones that are more involved. There are certain books that I just process easier listening to rather than reading. The A Song of Ice and Fire series is like that for me. I read Game of Thrones, but it was a bit of a slog. The first time I read it, I kept losing my place and not realising I’d jumped ahead. Listening to Roy Dotrice's narration became a much more enjoyable way to experience Westeros.
Do you have a type of listener or a particular person in mind when you narrate, a sort of ideal audience, the way some authors do when they write? Who is that person?
I don't necessarily have an ideal listener. To be honest, usually I find myself getting lost in the story. But when I am thinking about the listener and how I’m telling the story, I try to imagine that he or she is sitting right here with me. I'll glance over to a spot in my booth, like I’m making eye contact, just as I would if I were telling a story in person.
I enjoyed working with Shiromi throughout the production of The Unbelievers, which was released a few days ago. (You can listen to a sample of Shiromi's narration of the book here). She currently has a handful of audiobooks in various stages of production, and she also does a lot of video game work. In a game called Infinifactory, where you build "factories that assemble products for your alien overlords, and try not to die in the process," she plays four different characters.
What about you? What do you do while listening to audiobooks, and what types do you like best? If you're an author or narrator, what experiences have you had?
-------------------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. Both are available in paperback and ebook editions and as audiobooks on Amazon or Audible. She is currently working on Book 3 in the four-book series.
Yet I love the Kindle, too. The ideal vacation for me is a pool, a view of the ocean, and a giant stack of books. (Plus, as you might guess from my photo, a lot of SPF 50 sunscreen.) The Kindle allowed me to not only bring that stack on one small device but to order more with a click. The first time I finished a series and ordered the next, I felt just like a mouse must presented with the lever to get more cheese. Click, click, click.
Enter audiobooks. I bought a Kindle when I decided to publish my thriller The Awakening on it. I felt I ought to know what that reading experience was like. Similarly, a while back, I began hearing more about authors and publishers releasing audiobooks. I was skeptical. My experience was with tapes (yes, I'm old enough for that) and CDs that I bought, aspired to listen to, and never did. I couldn't imagine that I'd ever buy more than one or two audiobooks. Or listen to podcasts for that matter.Now I listen to one or the other frequently on my iPhone during the day using the Audible app. (My favorite podcast is Dusted by Storywonk, which analyzes Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes.) When I read, I do so to shut off everything else. But with an audiobook, I listen to accompany other tasks, and compelling books motivate me to continue whatever I'm doing so I can hear more. If I'm listening to a book a I love, my condo is very, very clean, my bills are paid well in advance, and my checkbook is balanced. And I'm in great shape, as treadmills are wonderful for listening.
------------------------------------------------------------------Would you like to receive Lisa M. Lilly's e-newsletter with M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) book and film reviews? Your email address will not be shared or sold. Join here today and you'll also receive Ninevah, a short story exclusively for subscribers.-------------------------------------------------------------------For both listening and reading, I enjoy thrillers because they pull me right in and keep me engaged. I also like non-fiction on audio, but if the concepts are too complex, that doesn't work. On paper, I can slow down or reread a paragraph and ponder it. While Audible allows skipping back 30 seconds at a time, that doesn't match seeing words on the page or easily flipping through an earlier section.
Given the differences I experienced in reading versus listening, I became curious about how narrating an audiobook differs from other types of performances. So I asked producer/narrator Shiromi Arserio.
Shiromi and I have similar tastes. I wanted to work with her on The Unbelievers, Book 2 in my series, because one of the first audiobooks I ever listened to, a sci fi thriller with a female main character, was one she narrated. I also was very excited that Shiromi has appeared in a few Lost episodes. (Which has nothing to do with producing audiobooks, I just thought it was cool.) And we both love Michael Biehn, the actor who played Kyle Reese in the first Terminator movie. Cyril Woods, the antagonist/almost love interest in The Awakening is modeled a tiny bit after Biehn's portrayal of Reese, so I knew Shiromi would understand how I saw and heard Cyril.
Her answers to my questions are below. (Notice how I didn't ask her what things about working with authors drive her crazy or make her want to throw things.)
Are the skills you need for narrating different from those you use when acting?
When you're acting, even if it's for a video game, you're playing one character at a time. In an audiobook you are doing an entire play by yourself. Jumping from male to female characters, changing accents. It's a lot to keep track of. Also, as a narrator, you have to remember that it's not about the actor's performance. You want someone to remember how good the story is, not how memorable the actor was.
When you read a book you’re preparing to narrate, do you hear each character’s voice in your mind? Do you need to think about it for a while?
Some characters pop in my head fully formed. I have a clear idea who the character is and how they should sound. Sometimes I’ll have to go away and think about it. Maybe get the author's input, if I can. The more well-developed the character is on the page, the easier it is to “hear” the voice.
How do you handle a character’s interior thoughts? Is it hard to differentiate that from dialogue?
Interior thoughts can be really challenging. For one of my early books I used a slight reverb effect to change the sound of the thoughts, but it's time consuming and generally ACX (the production platform) doesn’t approve of effects in audiobooks. And most people are listening through tiny headphones while on the way to work or going for a run, and can't even hear the reverb. So now I just get a little closer to the mic and drop my voice as though I'm talking to myself.
What is your favorite type of book to read? To listen to? Is there a difference between the two when it comes to favorites?
I'm a geek, so I love to read or listen to scifi, horror, fantasy. However, with audiobooks I tend to go for ones that are more involved. There are certain books that I just process easier listening to rather than reading. The A Song of Ice and Fire series is like that for me. I read Game of Thrones, but it was a bit of a slog. The first time I read it, I kept losing my place and not realising I’d jumped ahead. Listening to Roy Dotrice's narration became a much more enjoyable way to experience Westeros.
Do you have a type of listener or a particular person in mind when you narrate, a sort of ideal audience, the way some authors do when they write? Who is that person?
I don't necessarily have an ideal listener. To be honest, usually I find myself getting lost in the story. But when I am thinking about the listener and how I’m telling the story, I try to imagine that he or she is sitting right here with me. I'll glance over to a spot in my booth, like I’m making eye contact, just as I would if I were telling a story in person.
I enjoyed working with Shiromi throughout the production of The Unbelievers, which was released a few days ago. (You can listen to a sample of Shiromi's narration of the book here). She currently has a handful of audiobooks in various stages of production, and she also does a lot of video game work. In a game called Infinifactory, where you build "factories that assemble products for your alien overlords, and try not to die in the process," she plays four different characters.
What about you? What do you do while listening to audiobooks, and what types do you like best? If you're an author or narrator, what experiences have you had?
-------------------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. Both are available in paperback and ebook editions and as audiobooks on Amazon or Audible. She is currently working on Book 3 in the four-book series.
June 30, 2015
Are Books Written by Women More Likely to be Labeled "Trash"?
Have you ever heard someone say with an air of apology, “I read trash”? Or has anyone dismissed what you read that way? Once a friend referred to an early Mary Higgins Clark book as trash. If Clark has heard her work called that, I imagine she doesn’t lose sleep over it given that she’s known as the Queen of Suspense, has sold over 100 million books in her lifetime, and receives advances of over $10 million per novel. But the comment made me wonder, what is it that makes one book or author more likely than another to be labeled trash?
It seems like some subjects, genres, or aspects of writing should make the distinction easy to draw, but I suspect other not so obvious factors are at work. For example, last month my women’s book group read a book I normally would never have picked up. It’s a coming of age novel told by a first person narrator. The story, to the extent there is one, revolves around sexual tastes and practices the general public considers unusual. The dialogue struck me as preposterous, and the narrative includes annoying catch phrases and repetition. All my critiques makes this sounds like a book in one of those genres that’s most often labeled trash, such as erotica or romance. Fifty Shades of Grey, perhaps. But no, what I read was In One Person by John Irving. After the book was released in 2012, Time magazine called Irving a “literary legend.”
For those not that familiar with the two novels, Fifty Shades was initially self-published as an e-book in 2011. It is about a young woman who is a virgin. Her first sexual relationship is with a man whose proclivities include bondage and discipline. In One Person was traditionally published. Written as if it were a memoir of a man in his sixties or seventies, it focuses on the narrator’s first sexual relationship, which is with a transsexual (this is the word the author uses), as well as his many subsequent sexual experiences as he matures. I did not like either book. After the first chapter, I skimmed both. The critiques I listed above I had about both books. Yet E.L. James (the pen name of the Fifty Shades author) is generally considered a writer of trash and John Irving is lauded as a literary giant.
Here are my ideas about why:
------------------------------------------------------------------Ninevah: a free short horror story published exclusively for Lisa M. Lilly's subscribersclick here to join email list and receive your free copy -------------------------------------------------------------------
Emotional Distance or Closeness: One reason I don’t like many literary novels is that, as with Irving’s book, I often feel disconnected from the characters. While I didn’t love Fifty Shades, I had no doubt how narrator Anastasia felt about her love interest, her life, her sex life, her friends, etc. I had empathy for her. In contrast, I never quite feel what Irving’s main character, whose name I’ve forgotten, feels. His sex scenes are detailed to say the least—I’ve never read or heard anything that included so many uses of words for male and female anatomy—but, to me, not compelling. They are told with a tone of irony and detached observation. Most novels I was required to read in high school and college had that type of distance between the author’s voice and the characters. Most were written using an omniscient narrator. In that style, the narrator knows all about everything, sometimes even intruding and commenting on the plot or the characters’ choices, but stays a bit removed and above it all. Current fiction tends to set the reader right in the characters’ hearts and minds. I think this has led to associating “literature” with distance and popular fiction (which for some equals “trash”) with emotional connection. Though certainly there are literary writers, such as Dorothy Allison, whose work I find almost too hard to read due to the depth of the characters’ emotions.
Guilt/Entertainment: Many people feel guilty about enjoying reading. If a book is fun and they can’t put it down, they believe it must not have literary merit. On the other hand, if most people groan when they hear the title and say, “Ugh, yeah, I had to read that in school,” or if at the very least it takes effort and planning to get yourself to sit on the couch and open it, then a novel must be good, it must be literary. So a fast read like a Jonathan Kellerman or a Mary Higgins Clark is trash, and a novel that plods along where you don’t care one way or another about the characters must be literary. Again, I think this is a holdover from high school and college.
What the Book is About: I don’t mean the subject of the main storyline. In One Person and Fifty Shades of Grey are both about sexual awakening and experiences. But the former also explores sociological and political questions such as how the main character’s family responds to him and his orientation, what role heredity and environment may or may not play in sexuality, and how society treated and treats people who are bisexual. In contrast, for the most part, Fifty Shades focuses on the personal relationship between Anastasia and her love interest and leaves larger questions about society untouched. This is not to say that a reader couldn’t extrapolate from Anastasia’s experiences and feelings to a larger theme, but, to me at least, that isn’t in the text of the book. (Perhaps this is why I saw Irving’s book referred to as “literary porn,” while Fifty Shades is often called “mommy porn.”) This criteria is one that, for me, often divides what I think of as pure of-the-moment entertainment versus a book that makes me keep thinking about it long after I’ve finished. But I’ve felt this way about both books that are considered literary and those that are considered genre or mainstream fiction, such as certain Stephen King novels, my favorite being The Dead Zone.
The Education Needed to Read And Understand the Book: By education, I don’t mean level in school, but the breadth of knowledge a person needs to understand the book. I suspect this is a principal reason Shakespeare was considered entertainment for the masses when originally performed and is now considered literary. For most of us, enjoying Shakespeare’s plays takes a certain amount of knowledge of the times in which they were written and the changes in the language since then. That can be gained through reading an annotated text or joining literature classes or discussion groups, but it takes more effort than, say, a detective novel. So readers of Shakespeare and similar books may see themselves as smarter, more educated, and more like serious readers even if they only read a few books a year, while I tend to think of serious readers as those who love to read book after book after book.
The Gender of the Author and the Main Character: Look at any overall list of best literary fiction and you’ll find it dominated by men, and white men at that. This is starting to change, so now you’ll find women writers and writers of color included in literary book lists for recent years. All the same, being male helps if you want to be considered a serious author. Something else I’ve noticed is that a coming of age book about a young woman is generally considered a genre or young adult book (think Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, or anything else by Judy Blume if you’re my age or the Hunger Games or Divergent novels), and thus, to some people, a lesser sort of book—a sentiment with which I disagree. A coming of age book about a young man, however, is often considered literary. Think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye. There are exceptions; for instance, I found To Kill a Mockingbird on one list of literary coming of age novels (along with 9 books about boys/men). Likewise, when women write about sexual or romantic love, by and large it is considered trash—think of the view of most everyone you know about romance or “women’s” novels. When men write about sexual exploits, though, it is literary. Ask Vladimir Nabokov and John Irving.
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The Track Record of the Author: This is the one that probably applies most directly to the two books I’ve been comparing. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction (fiction where the writer adopts characters of an already existing book, movie, or television show) based on the Twilight series. The author was an unknown in the fiction world. Only after she self-published it as an e-book and it became wildly popular did a traditional publisher take it on. John Irving, in contrast, had twelve novels published before In One Person, for the most part to critical acclaim. Based on his pedigree, I assumed when reading In One Person that Irving deliberately chose for stylistic reasons to have the narrator retell various anecdotes and refer to his uncle and other characters a gazillion times by nicknames such as “The Racket Man.” (Or “racquetman,” I’m not sure, as I listened rather than read and didn’t care enough about any of the characters to track it down or figure it out from context.) On the other hand, knowing the history of Fifty Shades of Grey, I assumed that when the entire contract between the narrator and her love interest was included word-for-word more than once, it was because the story initially had been told in serial fashion, so the author had repeated it for readers who hadn’t started at the beginning, then not thought to edit it out when transforming the work into one complete novel. Similarly, I ascribed catch phrases that made me cringe to inexperienced writing. In short, while I didn’t like either writing style, I concluded Irving was trying to achieve an effect that just didn’t work for me, while E.L. James’ novel needed another round or two of rewriting or editing. Accurate in either case? Maybe, maybe not.
As to for my own writing, as in reading fiction, plot matters to me most, then character, then the writing style, but I strive for all three to be as strong as possible. And I don’t consider anything I read “trash,” just a book or style or subject that’s not for me. What about you? Do read—or write—anything you would call trash? If so, what does that mean to you?
-----------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies click here.
It seems like some subjects, genres, or aspects of writing should make the distinction easy to draw, but I suspect other not so obvious factors are at work. For example, last month my women’s book group read a book I normally would never have picked up. It’s a coming of age novel told by a first person narrator. The story, to the extent there is one, revolves around sexual tastes and practices the general public considers unusual. The dialogue struck me as preposterous, and the narrative includes annoying catch phrases and repetition. All my critiques makes this sounds like a book in one of those genres that’s most often labeled trash, such as erotica or romance. Fifty Shades of Grey, perhaps. But no, what I read was In One Person by John Irving. After the book was released in 2012, Time magazine called Irving a “literary legend.”For those not that familiar with the two novels, Fifty Shades was initially self-published as an e-book in 2011. It is about a young woman who is a virgin. Her first sexual relationship is with a man whose proclivities include bondage and discipline. In One Person was traditionally published. Written as if it were a memoir of a man in his sixties or seventies, it focuses on the narrator’s first sexual relationship, which is with a transsexual (this is the word the author uses), as well as his many subsequent sexual experiences as he matures. I did not like either book. After the first chapter, I skimmed both. The critiques I listed above I had about both books. Yet E.L. James (the pen name of the Fifty Shades author) is generally considered a writer of trash and John Irving is lauded as a literary giant.
Here are my ideas about why:
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Emotional Distance or Closeness: One reason I don’t like many literary novels is that, as with Irving’s book, I often feel disconnected from the characters. While I didn’t love Fifty Shades, I had no doubt how narrator Anastasia felt about her love interest, her life, her sex life, her friends, etc. I had empathy for her. In contrast, I never quite feel what Irving’s main character, whose name I’ve forgotten, feels. His sex scenes are detailed to say the least—I’ve never read or heard anything that included so many uses of words for male and female anatomy—but, to me, not compelling. They are told with a tone of irony and detached observation. Most novels I was required to read in high school and college had that type of distance between the author’s voice and the characters. Most were written using an omniscient narrator. In that style, the narrator knows all about everything, sometimes even intruding and commenting on the plot or the characters’ choices, but stays a bit removed and above it all. Current fiction tends to set the reader right in the characters’ hearts and minds. I think this has led to associating “literature” with distance and popular fiction (which for some equals “trash”) with emotional connection. Though certainly there are literary writers, such as Dorothy Allison, whose work I find almost too hard to read due to the depth of the characters’ emotions.
Guilt/Entertainment: Many people feel guilty about enjoying reading. If a book is fun and they can’t put it down, they believe it must not have literary merit. On the other hand, if most people groan when they hear the title and say, “Ugh, yeah, I had to read that in school,” or if at the very least it takes effort and planning to get yourself to sit on the couch and open it, then a novel must be good, it must be literary. So a fast read like a Jonathan Kellerman or a Mary Higgins Clark is trash, and a novel that plods along where you don’t care one way or another about the characters must be literary. Again, I think this is a holdover from high school and college.
What the Book is About: I don’t mean the subject of the main storyline. In One Person and Fifty Shades of Grey are both about sexual awakening and experiences. But the former also explores sociological and political questions such as how the main character’s family responds to him and his orientation, what role heredity and environment may or may not play in sexuality, and how society treated and treats people who are bisexual. In contrast, for the most part, Fifty Shades focuses on the personal relationship between Anastasia and her love interest and leaves larger questions about society untouched. This is not to say that a reader couldn’t extrapolate from Anastasia’s experiences and feelings to a larger theme, but, to me at least, that isn’t in the text of the book. (Perhaps this is why I saw Irving’s book referred to as “literary porn,” while Fifty Shades is often called “mommy porn.”) This criteria is one that, for me, often divides what I think of as pure of-the-moment entertainment versus a book that makes me keep thinking about it long after I’ve finished. But I’ve felt this way about both books that are considered literary and those that are considered genre or mainstream fiction, such as certain Stephen King novels, my favorite being The Dead Zone.
The Education Needed to Read And Understand the Book: By education, I don’t mean level in school, but the breadth of knowledge a person needs to understand the book. I suspect this is a principal reason Shakespeare was considered entertainment for the masses when originally performed and is now considered literary. For most of us, enjoying Shakespeare’s plays takes a certain amount of knowledge of the times in which they were written and the changes in the language since then. That can be gained through reading an annotated text or joining literature classes or discussion groups, but it takes more effort than, say, a detective novel. So readers of Shakespeare and similar books may see themselves as smarter, more educated, and more like serious readers even if they only read a few books a year, while I tend to think of serious readers as those who love to read book after book after book.
The Gender of the Author and the Main Character: Look at any overall list of best literary fiction and you’ll find it dominated by men, and white men at that. This is starting to change, so now you’ll find women writers and writers of color included in literary book lists for recent years. All the same, being male helps if you want to be considered a serious author. Something else I’ve noticed is that a coming of age book about a young woman is generally considered a genre or young adult book (think Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, or anything else by Judy Blume if you’re my age or the Hunger Games or Divergent novels), and thus, to some people, a lesser sort of book—a sentiment with which I disagree. A coming of age book about a young man, however, is often considered literary. Think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye. There are exceptions; for instance, I found To Kill a Mockingbird on one list of literary coming of age novels (along with 9 books about boys/men). Likewise, when women write about sexual or romantic love, by and large it is considered trash—think of the view of most everyone you know about romance or “women’s” novels. When men write about sexual exploits, though, it is literary. Ask Vladimir Nabokov and John Irving.
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The Track Record of the Author: This is the one that probably applies most directly to the two books I’ve been comparing. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction (fiction where the writer adopts characters of an already existing book, movie, or television show) based on the Twilight series. The author was an unknown in the fiction world. Only after she self-published it as an e-book and it became wildly popular did a traditional publisher take it on. John Irving, in contrast, had twelve novels published before In One Person, for the most part to critical acclaim. Based on his pedigree, I assumed when reading In One Person that Irving deliberately chose for stylistic reasons to have the narrator retell various anecdotes and refer to his uncle and other characters a gazillion times by nicknames such as “The Racket Man.” (Or “racquetman,” I’m not sure, as I listened rather than read and didn’t care enough about any of the characters to track it down or figure it out from context.) On the other hand, knowing the history of Fifty Shades of Grey, I assumed that when the entire contract between the narrator and her love interest was included word-for-word more than once, it was because the story initially had been told in serial fashion, so the author had repeated it for readers who hadn’t started at the beginning, then not thought to edit it out when transforming the work into one complete novel. Similarly, I ascribed catch phrases that made me cringe to inexperienced writing. In short, while I didn’t like either writing style, I concluded Irving was trying to achieve an effect that just didn’t work for me, while E.L. James’ novel needed another round or two of rewriting or editing. Accurate in either case? Maybe, maybe not.
As to for my own writing, as in reading fiction, plot matters to me most, then character, then the writing style, but I strive for all three to be as strong as possible. And I don’t consider anything I read “trash,” just a book or style or subject that’s not for me. What about you? Do read—or write—anything you would call trash? If so, what does that mean to you?
-----------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies click here.
Do You Read Trash?
Have you ever heard someone say with an air of apology, “I read trash”? Or has anyone dismissed what you read that way? Once a friend referred to an early Mary Higgins Clark book as trash. If Clark has heard her work called that, I imagine she doesn’t lose sleep over it given that she’s known as the Queen of Suspense, has sold over 100 million books in her lifetime, and receives advances of over $10 million per novel. But the comment made me wonder, what is it that makes one book or author more likely than another to be labeled trash?
It seems like some subjects, genres, or aspects of writing should make the distinction easy to draw, but I suspect other not so obvious factors are at work. For example, last month my women’s book group read a book I normally would never have picked up. It’s a coming of age novel told by a first person narrator. The story, to the extent there is one, revolves around sexual tastes and practices the general public considers unusual. The dialogue struck me as preposterous, and the narrative includes annoying catch phrases and repetition. All my critiques makes this sounds like a book in one of those genres that’s most often labeled trash, such as erotica or romance. Fifty Shades of Grey, perhaps. But no, what I read was In One Person by John Irving. After the book was released in 2012, Time magazine called Irving a “literary legend.”
For those not that familiar with the two novels, Fifty Shades was initially self-published as an e-book in 2011. It is about a young woman who is a virgin. Her first sexual relationship is with a man whose proclivities include bondage and discipline. In One Person was traditionally published. Written as if it were a memoir of a man in his sixties or seventies, it focuses on the narrator’s first sexual relationship, which is with a transsexual (this is the word the author uses), as well as his many subsequent sexual experiences as he matures. I did not like either book. After the first chapter, I skimmed both. The critiques I listed above I had about both books. Yet E.L. James (the pen name of the Fifty Shades author) is generally considered a writer of trash and John Irving is lauded as a literary giant.
Here are my ideas about why:
------------------------------------------------------------------Receive a free short horror story published exclusively for Lisa M. Lilly's subscribers. Ninevah: When new management takes over, one woman must cast her lot with the incoming regime or get out while she can. The consequences of her choice may be worse she ever could have imagined....click here to join and receive your free copy. -------------------------------------------------------------------
Emotional Distance or Closeness: One reason I don’t like many literary novels is that, as with Irving’s book, I often feel disconnected from the characters. While I didn’t love Fifty Shades, I had no doubt how narrator Anastasia felt about her love interest, her life, her sex life, her friends, etc. I had empathy for her. In contrast, I never quite feel what Irving’s main character, whose name I’ve forgotten, feels. His sex scenes are detailed to say the least—I’ve never read or heard anything that included so many uses of words for male and female anatomy—but, to me, not compelling. They are told with a tone of irony and detached observation. Most novels I was required to read in high school and college had that type of distance between the author’s voice and the characters. Most were written using an omniscient narrator. In that style, the narrator knows all about everything, sometimes even intruding and commenting on the plot or the characters’ choices, but stays a bit removed and above it all. Current fiction tends to set the reader right in the characters’ hearts and minds. I think this has led to associating “literature” with distance and popular fiction (which for some equals “trash”) with emotional connection. Though certainly there are literary writers, such as Dorothy Allison, whose work I find almost too hard to read due to the depth of the characters’ emotions.
Guilt/Entertainment: Many people feel guilty about enjoying reading. If a book is fun and they can’t put it down, they believe it must not have literary merit. On the other hand, if most people groan when they hear the title and say, “Ugh, yeah, I had to read that in school,” or if at the very least it takes effort and planning to get yourself to sit on the couch and open it, then a novel must be good, it must be literary. So a fast read like a Jonathan Kellerman or a Mary Higgins Clark is trash, and a novel that plods along where you don’t care one way or another about the characters must be literary. Again, I think this is a holdover from high school and college.
What the Book is About: I don’t mean the subject of the main storyline. In One Person and Fifty Shades of Grey are both about sexual awakening and experiences. But the former also explores sociological and political questions such as how the main character’s family responds to him and his orientation, what role heredity and environment may or may not play in sexuality, and how society treated and treats people who are bisexual. In contrast, for the most part, Fifty Shades focuses on the personal relationship between Anastasia and her love interest and leaves larger questions about society untouched. This is not to say that a reader couldn’t extrapolate from Anastasia’s experiences and feelings to a larger theme, but, to me at least, that isn’t in the text of the book. (Perhaps this is why I saw Irving’s book referred to as “literary porn,” while Fifty Shades is often called “mommy porn.”) This criteria is one that, for me, often divides what I think of as pure of-the-moment entertainment versus a book that makes me keep thinking about it long after I’ve finished. But I’ve felt this way about both books that are considered literary and those that are considered genre or mainstream fiction, such as certain Stephen King novels, my favorite being The Dead Zone.
The Education Needed to Read And Understand the Book: By education, I don’t mean level in school, but the breadth of knowledge a person needs to understand the book. I suspect this is a principal reason Shakespeare was considered entertainment for the masses when originally performed and is now considered literary. For most of us, enjoying Shakespeare’s plays takes a certain amount of knowledge of the times in which they were written and the changes in the language since then. That can be gained through reading an annotated text or joining literature classes or discussion groups, but it takes more effort than, say, a detective novel. So readers of Shakespeare and similar books may see themselves as smarter, more educated, and more like serious readers even if they only read a few books a year, while I tend to think of serious readers as those who love to read book after book after book.
The Gender of the Author and the Main Character: Look at any overall list of best literary fiction and you’ll find it dominated by men, and white men at that. This is starting to change, so now you’ll find women writers and writers of color included in literary book lists for recent years. All the same, being male helps if you want to be considered a serious author. Something else I’ve noticed is that a coming of age book about a young woman is generally considered a genre or young adult book (think Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, or anything else by Judy Blume if you’re my age or the Hunger Games or Divergent novels), and thus, to some people, a lesser sort of book—a sentiment with which I disagree. A coming of age book about a young man, however, is often considered literary. Think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye. There are exceptions; for instance, I found To Kill a Mockingbird on one list of literary coming of age novels (along with 9 books about boys/men). Likewise, when women write about sexual or romantic love, by and large it is considered trash—think of the view of most everyone you know about romance or “women’s” novels. When men write about sexual exploits, though, it is literary. Ask Vladimir Nabokov and John Irving.
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The Track Record of the Author: This is the one that probably applies most directly to the two books I’ve been comparing. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction (fiction where the writer adopts characters of an already existing book, movie, or television show) based on the Twilight series. The author was an unknown in the fiction world. Only after she self-published it as an e-book and it became wildly popular did a traditional publisher take it on. John Irving, in contrast, had twelve novels published before In One Person, for the most part to critical acclaim. Based on his pedigree, I assumed when reading In One Person that Irving deliberately chose for stylistic reasons to have the narrator retell various anecdotes and refer to his uncle and other characters a gazillion times by nicknames such as “The Racket Man.” (Or “racquetman,” I’m not sure, as I listened rather than read and didn’t care enough about any of the characters to track it down or figure it out from context.) On the other hand, knowing the history of Fifty Shades of Grey, I assumed that when the entire contract between the narrator and her love interest was included word-for-word more than once, it was because the story initially had been told in serial fashion, so the author had repeated it for readers who hadn’t started at the beginning, then not thought to edit it out when transforming the work into one complete novel. Similarly, I ascribed catch phrases that made me cringe to inexperienced writing. In short, while I didn’t like either writing style, I concluded Irving was trying to achieve an effect that just didn’t work for me, while E.L. James’ novel needed another round or two of rewriting or editing. Accurate in either case? Maybe, maybe not.
As to for my own writing, as in reading fiction, plot matters to me most, then character, then the writing style, but I strive for all three to be as strong as possible. And I don’t consider anything I read “trash,” just a book or style or subject that’s not for me. What about you? Do read—or write—anything you would call trash? If so, what does that mean to you?
----------------- Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies click here.
It seems like some subjects, genres, or aspects of writing should make the distinction easy to draw, but I suspect other not so obvious factors are at work. For example, last month my women’s book group read a book I normally would never have picked up. It’s a coming of age novel told by a first person narrator. The story, to the extent there is one, revolves around sexual tastes and practices the general public considers unusual. The dialogue struck me as preposterous, and the narrative includes annoying catch phrases and repetition. All my critiques makes this sounds like a book in one of those genres that’s most often labeled trash, such as erotica or romance. Fifty Shades of Grey, perhaps. But no, what I read was In One Person by John Irving. After the book was released in 2012, Time magazine called Irving a “literary legend.”For those not that familiar with the two novels, Fifty Shades was initially self-published as an e-book in 2011. It is about a young woman who is a virgin. Her first sexual relationship is with a man whose proclivities include bondage and discipline. In One Person was traditionally published. Written as if it were a memoir of a man in his sixties or seventies, it focuses on the narrator’s first sexual relationship, which is with a transsexual (this is the word the author uses), as well as his many subsequent sexual experiences as he matures. I did not like either book. After the first chapter, I skimmed both. The critiques I listed above I had about both books. Yet E.L. James (the pen name of the Fifty Shades author) is generally considered a writer of trash and John Irving is lauded as a literary giant.
Here are my ideas about why:
------------------------------------------------------------------Receive a free short horror story published exclusively for Lisa M. Lilly's subscribers. Ninevah: When new management takes over, one woman must cast her lot with the incoming regime or get out while she can. The consequences of her choice may be worse she ever could have imagined....click here to join and receive your free copy. -------------------------------------------------------------------
Emotional Distance or Closeness: One reason I don’t like many literary novels is that, as with Irving’s book, I often feel disconnected from the characters. While I didn’t love Fifty Shades, I had no doubt how narrator Anastasia felt about her love interest, her life, her sex life, her friends, etc. I had empathy for her. In contrast, I never quite feel what Irving’s main character, whose name I’ve forgotten, feels. His sex scenes are detailed to say the least—I’ve never read or heard anything that included so many uses of words for male and female anatomy—but, to me, not compelling. They are told with a tone of irony and detached observation. Most novels I was required to read in high school and college had that type of distance between the author’s voice and the characters. Most were written using an omniscient narrator. In that style, the narrator knows all about everything, sometimes even intruding and commenting on the plot or the characters’ choices, but stays a bit removed and above it all. Current fiction tends to set the reader right in the characters’ hearts and minds. I think this has led to associating “literature” with distance and popular fiction (which for some equals “trash”) with emotional connection. Though certainly there are literary writers, such as Dorothy Allison, whose work I find almost too hard to read due to the depth of the characters’ emotions.
Guilt/Entertainment: Many people feel guilty about enjoying reading. If a book is fun and they can’t put it down, they believe it must not have literary merit. On the other hand, if most people groan when they hear the title and say, “Ugh, yeah, I had to read that in school,” or if at the very least it takes effort and planning to get yourself to sit on the couch and open it, then a novel must be good, it must be literary. So a fast read like a Jonathan Kellerman or a Mary Higgins Clark is trash, and a novel that plods along where you don’t care one way or another about the characters must be literary. Again, I think this is a holdover from high school and college.
What the Book is About: I don’t mean the subject of the main storyline. In One Person and Fifty Shades of Grey are both about sexual awakening and experiences. But the former also explores sociological and political questions such as how the main character’s family responds to him and his orientation, what role heredity and environment may or may not play in sexuality, and how society treated and treats people who are bisexual. In contrast, for the most part, Fifty Shades focuses on the personal relationship between Anastasia and her love interest and leaves larger questions about society untouched. This is not to say that a reader couldn’t extrapolate from Anastasia’s experiences and feelings to a larger theme, but, to me at least, that isn’t in the text of the book. (Perhaps this is why I saw Irving’s book referred to as “literary porn,” while Fifty Shades is often called “mommy porn.”) This criteria is one that, for me, often divides what I think of as pure of-the-moment entertainment versus a book that makes me keep thinking about it long after I’ve finished. But I’ve felt this way about both books that are considered literary and those that are considered genre or mainstream fiction, such as certain Stephen King novels, my favorite being The Dead Zone.
The Education Needed to Read And Understand the Book: By education, I don’t mean level in school, but the breadth of knowledge a person needs to understand the book. I suspect this is a principal reason Shakespeare was considered entertainment for the masses when originally performed and is now considered literary. For most of us, enjoying Shakespeare’s plays takes a certain amount of knowledge of the times in which they were written and the changes in the language since then. That can be gained through reading an annotated text or joining literature classes or discussion groups, but it takes more effort than, say, a detective novel. So readers of Shakespeare and similar books may see themselves as smarter, more educated, and more like serious readers even if they only read a few books a year, while I tend to think of serious readers as those who love to read book after book after book.
The Gender of the Author and the Main Character: Look at any overall list of best literary fiction and you’ll find it dominated by men, and white men at that. This is starting to change, so now you’ll find women writers and writers of color included in literary book lists for recent years. All the same, being male helps if you want to be considered a serious author. Something else I’ve noticed is that a coming of age book about a young woman is generally considered a genre or young adult book (think Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret, or anything else by Judy Blume if you’re my age or the Hunger Games or Divergent novels), and thus, to some people, a lesser sort of book—a sentiment with which I disagree. A coming of age book about a young man, however, is often considered literary. Think about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye. There are exceptions; for instance, I found To Kill a Mockingbird on one list of literary coming of age novels (along with 9 books about boys/men). Likewise, when women write about sexual or romantic love, by and large it is considered trash—think of the view of most everyone you know about romance or “women’s” novels. When men write about sexual exploits, though, it is literary. Ask Vladimir Nabokov and John Irving.
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The Track Record of the Author: This is the one that probably applies most directly to the two books I’ve been comparing. Fifty Shades of Grey began as fan fiction (fiction where the writer adopts characters of an already existing book, movie, or television show) based on the Twilight series. The author was an unknown in the fiction world. Only after she self-published it as an e-book and it became wildly popular did a traditional publisher take it on. John Irving, in contrast, had twelve novels published before In One Person, for the most part to critical acclaim. Based on his pedigree, I assumed when reading In One Person that Irving deliberately chose for stylistic reasons to have the narrator retell various anecdotes and refer to his uncle and other characters a gazillion times by nicknames such as “The Racket Man.” (Or “racquetman,” I’m not sure, as I listened rather than read and didn’t care enough about any of the characters to track it down or figure it out from context.) On the other hand, knowing the history of Fifty Shades of Grey, I assumed that when the entire contract between the narrator and her love interest was included word-for-word more than once, it was because the story initially had been told in serial fashion, so the author had repeated it for readers who hadn’t started at the beginning, then not thought to edit it out when transforming the work into one complete novel. Similarly, I ascribed catch phrases that made me cringe to inexperienced writing. In short, while I didn’t like either writing style, I concluded Irving was trying to achieve an effect that just didn’t work for me, while E.L. James’ novel needed another round or two of rewriting or editing. Accurate in either case? Maybe, maybe not.
As to for my own writing, as in reading fiction, plot matters to me most, then character, then the writing style, but I strive for all three to be as strong as possible. And I don’t consider anything I read “trash,” just a book or style or subject that’s not for me. What about you? Do read—or write—anything you would call trash? If so, what does that mean to you?
----------------- Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews of M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) books and movies click here.
May 25, 2015
War, the Roads, and the Value of Life
Recently I read Unbroken for my women's book group. It made me think about my father, who is pictured below, and it seemed appropriate to write about it on Memorial Day.
WWII Naval Aviator Francis G. Lilly with his motherLike Louis Zamperini, whose life Unbroken chronicles, my dad was a WWII naval aviator. Dad tried to join the Army and was turned down because he had flat feet. He was then not only accepted by the Navy, but trained to be a pilot. He enlisted just before the Pearl Harbor attack and remained in the service six months after the war ended so he could keep flying. (He commented as an aside once that the Navy nurses really liked getting rides in the planes when he did his flights to keep certification during that time period, but I never could get much more detail about that. Perhaps because my mom was usually around when I was talking with my dad.)
What I didn't understand until I read Unbroken was the great danger to aviators and their crews even when not in combat. Like Zamperini, my dad was stationed in the Pacific. He never said a whole lot about the war, only that he loved flying and that he hadn't seen combat. One of his squadron mates, when I called about my dad’s funeral, told me they had a running joke at the reunion based on my dad setting the record for crashing the most planes during maneuvers. What was left out of that statement, I'm guessing, is that he was the pilot who crashed the most planes and survived. I learned from Unbroken that a high percentage of aviators died training, preparing, and practicing maneuvers--exactly what my dad did during his years in the Navy--regardless whether they flew in battles. I'm sure that percentage is even higher for those stationed on aircraft carriers, as my dad was. After reading the book, I searched Google for my dad's name and found it on a list of Navy and Marine aircraft accidents for which reports have been collected.
------------------------------------------------------------------Would you like to receive Lisa M. Lilly's e-newsletter with M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) book and film reviews? Your email address will not be shared or sold. Join here. -------------------------------------------------------------------Dad always made it sound exciting when he talked about parachuting out at the last moment. It never occurred to me to ask him about those who did not make it, and there must have been many, which may be why he didn't talk about his time in the war. I also am guessing that his experience flying and understanding and avoiding danger is part of why he emphasized safety so much when teaching us to drive. I remember him telling me that whenever I was on the road, I should glance at the rear and side view mirrors regularly to be sure I was aware of what other cars were doing. Also, he said, I should assess the traffic around me at all times and mentally prepare for what I would do if someone stopped suddenly, ran out in front of me, or swerved toward me. Always know your escape route.
Unbroken author Laura Hillenbrand quotes an ordnance officer who describes various safety issues with WWII aircraft that resulted in accidental deaths and says, “Life is cheap in war.” According to the statistics in the book, 35,946 personnel in the air corps died in WWII in non-combat situations, mostly in accidental crashes.
My dad, who survived WWII and lived for many years after, was killed at age 88 by a drunk driver, along with my mother, who was 84. According to the NHTSA, in 2007, the year my parents died, intoxicated drivers caused 12,998 deaths. On our streets and highways, too, life is cheap.
So on this Memorial Day, my hope is that as the human race continues to evolve, we will value life more and more, that our roads will be safer, and our battles fewer.
And to all our women and men in the military, then and now, thank you for your service.
--------------Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
WWII Naval Aviator Francis G. Lilly with his motherLike Louis Zamperini, whose life Unbroken chronicles, my dad was a WWII naval aviator. Dad tried to join the Army and was turned down because he had flat feet. He was then not only accepted by the Navy, but trained to be a pilot. He enlisted just before the Pearl Harbor attack and remained in the service six months after the war ended so he could keep flying. (He commented as an aside once that the Navy nurses really liked getting rides in the planes when he did his flights to keep certification during that time period, but I never could get much more detail about that. Perhaps because my mom was usually around when I was talking with my dad.)What I didn't understand until I read Unbroken was the great danger to aviators and their crews even when not in combat. Like Zamperini, my dad was stationed in the Pacific. He never said a whole lot about the war, only that he loved flying and that he hadn't seen combat. One of his squadron mates, when I called about my dad’s funeral, told me they had a running joke at the reunion based on my dad setting the record for crashing the most planes during maneuvers. What was left out of that statement, I'm guessing, is that he was the pilot who crashed the most planes and survived. I learned from Unbroken that a high percentage of aviators died training, preparing, and practicing maneuvers--exactly what my dad did during his years in the Navy--regardless whether they flew in battles. I'm sure that percentage is even higher for those stationed on aircraft carriers, as my dad was. After reading the book, I searched Google for my dad's name and found it on a list of Navy and Marine aircraft accidents for which reports have been collected.
------------------------------------------------------------------Would you like to receive Lisa M. Lilly's e-newsletter with M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller) book and film reviews? Your email address will not be shared or sold. Join here. -------------------------------------------------------------------Dad always made it sound exciting when he talked about parachuting out at the last moment. It never occurred to me to ask him about those who did not make it, and there must have been many, which may be why he didn't talk about his time in the war. I also am guessing that his experience flying and understanding and avoiding danger is part of why he emphasized safety so much when teaching us to drive. I remember him telling me that whenever I was on the road, I should glance at the rear and side view mirrors regularly to be sure I was aware of what other cars were doing. Also, he said, I should assess the traffic around me at all times and mentally prepare for what I would do if someone stopped suddenly, ran out in front of me, or swerved toward me. Always know your escape route.
Unbroken author Laura Hillenbrand quotes an ordnance officer who describes various safety issues with WWII aircraft that resulted in accidental deaths and says, “Life is cheap in war.” According to the statistics in the book, 35,946 personnel in the air corps died in WWII in non-combat situations, mostly in accidental crashes.
My dad, who survived WWII and lived for many years after, was killed at age 88 by a drunk driver, along with my mother, who was 84. According to the NHTSA, in 2007, the year my parents died, intoxicated drivers caused 12,998 deaths. On our streets and highways, too, life is cheap.
So on this Memorial Day, my hope is that as the human race continues to evolve, we will value life more and more, that our roads will be safer, and our battles fewer.
And to all our women and men in the military, then and now, thank you for your service.
--------------Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
May 12, 2015
Unreliable Narrators Abound in Life, Law, and Fiction
Recently I attended a talk by Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl. A week later I read The Girl on the Train. Both books are hugely popular and both feature more than one first person narrator who may be unreliable. Which led me to wonder: is that part of why readers enjoyed both books so much? And if so, why?
The Encyclopeadia Britannica offers this definition of an unreliable narrator “…one who does not understand the full import of a situation or one who makes incorrect conclusions and assumptions about events witnessed…” This may occur because the character lacks the age or capacity to understand or convey accurately what is happening, such as where she or he suffers from mental illness (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), has blackouts due to alcoholism (The Girl on the Train), or is a child (Room). Unreliable narrators can also be viewpoint characters that deliberately lie or withhold information from the reader.
This literary device is not a new one. Articles and lists on the topic usually include classics such as Lolita, Huckleberry Finn, and The Great Gatsby. But when I did a Google search about why readers enjoy such stories, most of the results were articles and posts directed at writers, not readers.
Personally, I can think of three reasons for our love of these types of stories.
First, a tale told by one or more than one unreliable narrator creates a puzzle for the reader, or adds more layers to an already-existing mystery, as in both Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train. In a typical suspense novel, the reader attempts to put together what she sees and learns through the viewpoint character’s eyes to solve a mystery or guess how the plot will unfold. Adding one or more narrators who might not be telling the whole truth means the reader must assess the characters’ honesty, knowledge, and understanding, requiring more reading between the lines. This allows a higher level of reader engagement and is more satisfying for the reader who unravels one or more story questions or successfully spots misrepresentations. It can also lead to anger and disappointment if the reader feels the author didn’t play fair; for instance, by not sufficiently signaling that the narrator may not be fully truthful. (I felt this way about Presumed Innocent but, to be fair, the cues might have been there and I missed them.)Second, on a related note, unreliable narration adds to the surprises or twists many readers enjoy in novels. By making the resolution less predictable and what actually occurred less clear, there is more room for a turn in the story that is well supported and yet still a shock. Also, revelations about how true or false a particular character’s narration is can come at different points during the book, adding to the intrigue and providing many plot turns.
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Finally, and most significant, unreliable narration reflects real life. In both reality and fiction, every narrator is unreliable to some degree, as we all see the world through the lenses of our own personal experiences, knowledge, and emotions. If that weren’t so, there would be far less conflict, and far fewer lawsuits, diminishing my work in my other life as a lawyer. Try asking two different family members who attended the same holiday gathering and had an argument to describe it. What each remembers about what was said and done will be different. And even if both remember the same words, the meaning that’s drawn from them will vary. Likewise, the courts are full of disputes where business partners discover after the fact that they had completely different understandings of contracts to which they agreed. Because no one knew what was in the other person’s mind, everything went smoothly until it was time to sell the business, or one partner wanted out, or another decided to hire his or her child as the president.
Our political process offers yet another example of this phenomenon. If you read the responses of the two major political parties to the same words spoken by the president, you might easily conclude that two different speeches were given. And one need only look at the reactions to the changes in the laws regarding health insurance to see the same effect on a personal level. I believe the new health insurance laws are wonderful for small businesses. Any number of owners of small businesses might disagree with me, starting with what counts as a small business. Right now, I’m a business of one, so I’m definitely small. But depending upon the industry, the Small Business Administration includes companies with as many as 1,500 employees as a “small business.” It’s unlikely a 1,500-employee company and I will have the same view of how a law affects our livelihoods.
And to segue to a topic more interesting than health insurance (and what isn’t), consider romance. There’s a reason He Said, She Said is the title of a 1990s RomCom and has been the basis for hundreds of thousands if not millions of books, plays, and movies throughout the ages.
So, ultimately, my take on the popularity of books with unreliable narrators is that these books more accurately reflect how we live from day-to-day. But who knows, my comments on this topic may be completely unreliable.
-----------------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
April 28, 2015
The It's-Not-Okay-To-Not-Have Children Act
I just finished reading The Children Act by Ian McEwan, this month's selection for my lawyer book group. (More on the lawyer book group here.) The main character is a 59-year-old judge who never chose to have children. At the opening of the book, the marriage is rocky, to say the least, and the judge is troubled by two cases that have come before her in court involving children. One was a set of conjoined twins who would die if not separated, but only one could survive if they were. The other is a seventeen-year-old refusing a blood transfusion for religious reasons.
Despite a thoughtful and long career and good relationships with her nieces and nephews, when divorce threatens, the judge feels her life is empty and suddenly laments the lack of children. I say "suddenly" because that's how it struck me. Perhaps it's not how the author meant it, but I didn't find any support for the longing being a more gradual realization or any indication the judge had ever felt particularly strongly about procreating. There was no discussion of whether the judge liked kids of any age or whether, growing up, she'd imagined herself having kids, or had a happy childhood herself, or had friends who enjoyed childrearing. I found myself checking the publication date, wondering if the book had been published in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s, when it might be more likely a woman would feel the need to say she longed for children whether she did or not. But no, ironically, the publication date is 2014, the same year Time reported that "More women in the U.S. are childless than at any other time since the government began keeping track...."
Protagonist Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger GamesCertainly, a character can be believable who experiences sadness and loss over not having children or who has a deep connection with a child. Elizabeth George created such a character, Deborah St. James, in her series of novels about Detectives Barbara Havers and Thomas Lynley. Deb desperately wants a child and is unable to have one, and an undercurrent of sadness runs through her plot lines because of this regardless what else is happening in the books. I'm not a big fan of Deb, not because of the children issue, but because she wallows in her grief, and I become impatient her. (Which is the sign of great characterization, as I react to her as if she were a real person, not a creation of the author.) But I believe in Deb's angst, and it has a basis. Her backstory supports it, though I won't detail it so as not to spoil it for those who might want to read the books and have not yet done so. Likewise, in The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins writes a moving portrait of a young woman whose love for her sister drives her to volunteer for what most believe is certain death and to fight others to the death. The feeling for her sister Prim doesn't come from nowhere for Katniss. Years before the first book starts, her father has died, her mother has become a shell of a woman, and Katniss has been supporting her little sister in every way she can.
In contrast, the author tells us in The Children Act that the judge and her husband discussed and considered having kids over the years, but between both their careers and other life events it never seemed quite the right time. There's no indication that as she neared an age when she might no longer physically be able to conceive that the judge gave the matter serious thought. And there's no indication that over the years she felt anything missing in her life until the author needed her to feel bad about not having children. It felt to me like a default. Woman - kids = sad.
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Ian McEwan is not the only author who seems to believe that saying a woman lacks children is sufficient to show that she is depressed or lonely. I see this often, and it rarely rings true. It feels like lazy writing. One of my favorite suspense authors is Jonathan Kellerman, who writes the Alex Delaware mysteries. A side character in some of those is Petra Connor, a thirtyish (or maybe fortyish, I can't recall now) woman who is distraught about not having kids yet. As a side character, I didn't mind that being a quick item we learn about Petra, and I didn't need more detail to buy it. But when I read Kellerman's first book with her as protagonist, I found it hard to see her as three-dimensional. Aside from solving the crime, her driving need was to find a way to have a child. But, again, there was no particular reason for it other than, apparently, biology. It seemed like a shorthand for dealing with the need for the main character to have some sort of personal story to go along with the mystery.
Men are not the only ones who write women characters this way. Another suspense writer I enjoy is Lisa Gardiner. What I don't like is that her single women characters tend to have no friends and spartan apartments, because apparently only married folk can shop at Ikea. (For a contrasting view of a single woman character, see Why I Love V.I.) And one of my favorite married characters plunges back into depression and alcoholism because she can't have a child. Gardiner does more with her characters than is done for the judge to show why they, individually, feel these strong desires. But something I heard Gardiner say when she was speaking at a thriller writing conference made me wonder. She said when she gets to know someone, she first asks if they are married, then if they have kids, then if they have pets. If the answer is No to all three, she doesn't know what to ask them because their lives seems empty to her. So perhaps authors who default to childless (or childfree, as some prefer) = sad and lonely are speaking from their own hearts. If what fills their lives and makes them happiest is a spouse and kids, then it might be easy for them to believe that anyone without one or the other of those must be terribly lonely.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Authors are supposed to use their imaginations. After all, some of these are writers who create complex, nuanced portraits of serial killers. Can they truly not imagine a happy woman without children?
-----------------Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
Despite a thoughtful and long career and good relationships with her nieces and nephews, when divorce threatens, the judge feels her life is empty and suddenly laments the lack of children. I say "suddenly" because that's how it struck me. Perhaps it's not how the author meant it, but I didn't find any support for the longing being a more gradual realization or any indication the judge had ever felt particularly strongly about procreating. There was no discussion of whether the judge liked kids of any age or whether, growing up, she'd imagined herself having kids, or had a happy childhood herself, or had friends who enjoyed childrearing. I found myself checking the publication date, wondering if the book had been published in the 1970s, 80s, or 90s, when it might be more likely a woman would feel the need to say she longed for children whether she did or not. But no, ironically, the publication date is 2014, the same year Time reported that "More women in the U.S. are childless than at any other time since the government began keeping track...."
Protagonist Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger GamesCertainly, a character can be believable who experiences sadness and loss over not having children or who has a deep connection with a child. Elizabeth George created such a character, Deborah St. James, in her series of novels about Detectives Barbara Havers and Thomas Lynley. Deb desperately wants a child and is unable to have one, and an undercurrent of sadness runs through her plot lines because of this regardless what else is happening in the books. I'm not a big fan of Deb, not because of the children issue, but because she wallows in her grief, and I become impatient her. (Which is the sign of great characterization, as I react to her as if she were a real person, not a creation of the author.) But I believe in Deb's angst, and it has a basis. Her backstory supports it, though I won't detail it so as not to spoil it for those who might want to read the books and have not yet done so. Likewise, in The Hunger Games trilogy, Suzanne Collins writes a moving portrait of a young woman whose love for her sister drives her to volunteer for what most believe is certain death and to fight others to the death. The feeling for her sister Prim doesn't come from nowhere for Katniss. Years before the first book starts, her father has died, her mother has become a shell of a woman, and Katniss has been supporting her little sister in every way she can.In contrast, the author tells us in The Children Act that the judge and her husband discussed and considered having kids over the years, but between both their careers and other life events it never seemed quite the right time. There's no indication that as she neared an age when she might no longer physically be able to conceive that the judge gave the matter serious thought. And there's no indication that over the years she felt anything missing in her life until the author needed her to feel bad about not having children. It felt to me like a default. Woman - kids = sad.
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Ian McEwan is not the only author who seems to believe that saying a woman lacks children is sufficient to show that she is depressed or lonely. I see this often, and it rarely rings true. It feels like lazy writing. One of my favorite suspense authors is Jonathan Kellerman, who writes the Alex Delaware mysteries. A side character in some of those is Petra Connor, a thirtyish (or maybe fortyish, I can't recall now) woman who is distraught about not having kids yet. As a side character, I didn't mind that being a quick item we learn about Petra, and I didn't need more detail to buy it. But when I read Kellerman's first book with her as protagonist, I found it hard to see her as three-dimensional. Aside from solving the crime, her driving need was to find a way to have a child. But, again, there was no particular reason for it other than, apparently, biology. It seemed like a shorthand for dealing with the need for the main character to have some sort of personal story to go along with the mystery.
Men are not the only ones who write women characters this way. Another suspense writer I enjoy is Lisa Gardiner. What I don't like is that her single women characters tend to have no friends and spartan apartments, because apparently only married folk can shop at Ikea. (For a contrasting view of a single woman character, see Why I Love V.I.) And one of my favorite married characters plunges back into depression and alcoholism because she can't have a child. Gardiner does more with her characters than is done for the judge to show why they, individually, feel these strong desires. But something I heard Gardiner say when she was speaking at a thriller writing conference made me wonder. She said when she gets to know someone, she first asks if they are married, then if they have kids, then if they have pets. If the answer is No to all three, she doesn't know what to ask them because their lives seems empty to her. So perhaps authors who default to childless (or childfree, as some prefer) = sad and lonely are speaking from their own hearts. If what fills their lives and makes them happiest is a spouse and kids, then it might be easy for them to believe that anyone without one or the other of those must be terribly lonely.
Still, that's not much of an excuse. Authors are supposed to use their imaginations. After all, some of these are writers who create complex, nuanced portraits of serial killers. Can they truly not imagine a happy woman without children?
-----------------Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
March 23, 2015
Why Do The Books We Love (Or Hate) Matter So Much To Us?
One of the two book groups I belong to consists of lawyers. (Yes, who knows why we set it up that way, but we did.) In the non-lawyer group, the participants express strong personal views about liking or disliking a book, a character, the writing style, the plot, etc., and usually listen with interest to others' impressions. The lawyer-readers comment on the same aspects of the books but are a lot more apt to pound the table and insist a particular book or author is excellent or horrible. The intense debates led me to wonder why people react so strongly, and yet in such different ways, to the same books, particularly novels. In the end, novels consist of words on a page (or, these days, on a handheld device) about people who don't exist and events that never happened, at least not in the way depicted in the fictional world. So why does how they are written and what happens in them hit people, even ones in the same profession who live in the same geographic area, in such very different ways?
Some of the varying reactions, I suspect, arise from differences in why people choose to read and what they hope to gain from the experience. Here are a few of the motives and goals I've observed:
To Decode The Text: I have a running dispute with one of the lawyer book group participants about what is and isn't good writing. In one novel (literary--not mystery or suspense), she said she reread a scene three times to figure out the identity of a character referred to only by the pronoun "she." My book group companion felt a sense of accomplishment upon determining that "she" meant the main character's mother. To me, it's just plain bad writing if it takes multiple readings to know who is in the room in a particular scene. But to others, including many critics, a book that requires the reader to parse out phrases, reexamine passages, and devise for herself what actually happened on the page is more interesting and engaging than one that sweeps the reader into a clear narrative with characters that, as written and without in-depth fill-in-the-blanks by the reader, are well-developed.
To Go Along For The Ride: I read for plot and character. This means that, for the most part, I both read and write genre fiction. My favorite books are ones that tell a compelling story and offer a significant theme or help me learn more about some part of the world or history or culture. But to get to the learning part, I first want a story and a character (or characters) who grab me on page one. This is partly because my law career involves reading convoluted case law and, often, insurance policies (yes, it's an exciting practice), so when I read for pleasure, I don't want to struggle. I want to escape. Suspense, thrillers, horror, mystery--all the genres I love tend to grab the reader on page one and pull her or him into the world of the story immediately. On the other hand, I tend to avoid fantasy and to a lesser extent, science fiction, because I become impatient with the time many sci fi and fantasy authors spend building the new worlds before getting to the story. Which is a bit ironic given that my Awakening series generally does well with science fiction readers, though it's not strictly sci fi. But I get to the story on page one, and I did a great deal of editing with the aim of folding in the background information the reader needs without slowing the story.
To Learn Through The Book: People loved The Da Vinci Code because it was a page turner, but also because, while racing through the plot, they learned a lot about aspects of Christianity and Catholicism that were unfamiliar to them. The book addressed how the role of women in the Christian movement was obscured and diminished as it became a more organized religion. (Interesting side note--the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, a non-fiction book which the authors asserted had a central theme that The Da Vinci Code drew from, sued the publisher of the novel. They were not successful.) Brown is particularly good at weaving background information into the plot without the reader feeling like she's sitting in a lecture, despite that sometimes his main character Professor Langdon literally gives lectures. In auditoriums. I appreciate an author who can do that well. For many years, James Michener was popular in part because a reader could learn so much about history by reading his novels. I could never get through one, though, as I wanted the story to start sooner than page 100 (see above, To Go Along For The Ride).
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To Learn Because Of The Book: When the lawyer book group read The Three Musketeers, the book group member I mentioned above pulled out atlases, a French dictionary, and Google to understand where exactly the events took place and additional details about the historical and geographic context. She loves books that are enhanced by outside research, and I admire her for that. I've become a rather lazy reader and am inclined to move forward and pick up what I can from the context of the novel without doing anything extra. If I'm particularly interested, I might research when I'm finished. For instance, I read a suspense novel by Alexandra Sokoloff, The Unseen, that incorporated certain types of ESP cards and testing. I had read a non-fiction book about that as a teenager, so I did some research on the Internet to find out how much of what was in the novel was historical fact. I also sometimes research later to find the factual underpinnings of a book for my own education as a writer. Now that I'm writing full time and practicing law only part-time, I plan to do that more often, both for fun and to analyze other authors' efforts.
To Find Kindred Spirits: I recently read a scathing comment by a literary critic about readers who prefer likeable characters. The critic said it was a sad thing if a person needed to find friends in books. I disagree (no doubt because I find friends in books). There are characters I return to again and again because I admire them and enjoy their company. While as readers, we know the characters and events in novels aren't "real" in the sense of being alive and breathing, if they speak to us, we feel that the author, at least, understood something about who we are and how life appears to us. We've all had times when it seems as if we're the only person in the world who has felt a certain way or been through a difficult experience. Sometimes, through books, we can discover that at least someone else has been there, too. Also, there are times we can't sort out our feelings, and stepping into the shoes of a character who is in the same position can help us do that. After my parents' deaths were caused by a drunk driver, I often felt too angry and overwhelmed to talk with others. Reading offered me a safe place to explore my feelings and deal with pain.To Better Understand Others: A book with well-developed characters--ones whose motives, feelings, and previous life experience are explored--allows the reader to step into someone else's shoes for a little while or, more accurately, into someone else's mind and heart. I love when I feel that, in reading, I almost become someone else temporarily, and see through that person's eyes. I can only meet so many people in life, and most of them will never share their inmost feelings with me. In a novel, I see things from other perspectives and get glimpses into how the world looks to someone other than me. When you think about it, this is really the basis of nearly all advocacy, whether it's legal or political or otherwise. There's a reason politicians use anecdotes about welfare queens or Joe the Plumber--story resonates in a way that facts and figures do not.
To Be Inspired: Both fiction and non-fiction offer a chance to live through or follow people we admire. One of my favorite fictional characters is female private eye V.I. Warshawski (for more on this, see Why I Love V.I.). I admire her determination, courage, and loyalty. She inspired me to leave the large firm where I worked and start my own law practice because I so enjoyed seeing how she worked for herself and ran her business. (I did not want to get hit on the head or be near death quite as often as V.I., so I opted not to become a private detective.) Reading about people and characters I admire is a big part of why I love novels, and why I'm not a fan of books that are mainly about people who struggle through the entire book and fail entirely or who are the types of people I'd avoid in real life.
To Impose Order On The Universe: For a similar reason, I like horror, suspense, and thrillers because, usually, the protagonist prevails in the end. The victory may not be complete, but there is generally some sort of justice and a semblance of order is restored in the universe. This appeals to me precisely because I already know life is hard and terrible things happen. I can read that in the news every day. In fiction, I want there to be order and a progression toward a goal, however rocky the path. In that sense, I am very much a devotee of Ayn Rand's view of fiction--that it should depict humans as they might be and ought to be. I want a book to have a hero.
To Feel Less Alone: My love for heroes and order sometimes puts me at odds with those who prefer books about significantly dysfunctional people or families. What appeals to me as imposing order on a chaotic universe strikes other readers as too pollyannaish (I checked, that's a word). In the way that someone bubbling over with cheer at five a.m. is obnoxious to the non-morning person who got up early solely to catch a flight, the resolution and order I seek, that makes me feel less adrift in the universe, can grate on those who prefer more realism in fiction. Conversely, books that leave me ready to slit my wrists can comfort someone else. Both types of book can make the reader feel less alone, but which book does that for a particular reader can vary widely.
To Explore Issues: There's a reason preachers often speak in parables. As I noted above, storytelling can provide an engaging vehicle for exploring social issues or advocating causes. If it's done well, without preaching, it can change minds. My own views on gun control modified slightly after reading many of Dean Koontz's books. It's not that I thought I'd ever be in the situations that his protagonists face. But his often-used premise of the individual against the worst elements of government illustrated for me why many people fear a world where only the police and authorities can access guns, as there's no doubt that authority can be abused and that many governments oppress people. Some of Koontz's books are a bit heavy handed for me, and I'll probably never become an NRA member. But his narratives provided a perspective I otherwise lacked. Likewise, being a United States city dweller, reading stories set in other parts of the U.S. and in other countries helps me see why there are such vast political divisions over many issues. It's hard to understand a completely different political mindset while knowing next to nothing about the day-to-day life of anyone who holds it. Fiction and creative non-fiction can help remedy that.
To Escape: I read about a study years ago that said that people who read fiction in hospital waiting rooms are less stressed and more able to cope with their reason for being there than those who read non-fiction or don't read at all. No matter what types of novels a person reads, fiction offers an escape. It's a chance to step away from day-to-day life and be absorbed in another place and time.
To Connect With Other People: As my membership in two book groups shows, not only do many people love to read, they love to attend book groups. Books offer a chance to connect to one another, whether it's over sharing a love of the same book or character or to conduct a passionate debate about the merits or demerits of a work. Throwing in a glass or two of wine and/or a good dinner adds to the fun and the ambience. Regardless of disagreements, the shared love of fiction brings people together.
What pulls all of these reasons--and I'm sure I missed many--together for me is that while we may read for different reasons, fiction fulfills deep human needs. No wonder we sometimes passionately defend or advocate for our book choices.
What about you? Why do you read, and what differences have you noticed in your likes and dislikes versus those of your fellow and sister readers?
---------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of the occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers, Books 1 and 2 in the Awakening series. A short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases and read reviews on M.O.S.T. (Mystery, Occult, Suspense, Thriller), click here to join her email list.
January 9, 2015
6 Things I Learned In The Last Year About Writing And Business
During much of the last fourteen years, I worked full-time--and then some--as a lawyer and wrote fiction on the side. Last year, I gradually shifted gears so that now more than half my professional life is devoted to writing and to the business side of writing. Below are a few things I've learned along the way.
Get Out: Getting outside once a day, no matter what the weather, boosts my mental health. Much as writing all day at an antique desk in my home office sounds appealing when it's ten degrees with a six below windchill (can you tell I live in Chicago?), if I stay inside too much, I start feeling blue. I'm also less creative and less motivated. So if I'm working from home more than a day or two in a row, I make sure I meet someone for lunch, lug my laptop to the local coffeehouse, or at least walk a few blocks to the Container Store to admire the many wondrous things there. Despite the time it takes to layer on a fleece, winter coat, scarf, and double gloves (when it's zero or colder), I feel energized and ready to get back to work when I get home.
Flexibility: For years (actually, decades), I wrote, submitted manuscripts, and ascended the rejection ladder, graduating from form letters to personal notes to publication of some short stories, poems, and articles. I took a few breaks when my law practice became extremely busy and after my parents' deaths. When I came back and needed to decide what to do with my most recently-completed novel, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about authors having success with self-publishing. I hesitated because in my mind that wasn't "real" publishing. But the more I researched, the more excited I became. I believe in my work, and rather than spending so much energy and time persuading others to invest in it, I decided to bet on myself. Now my marketing time goes toward reaching readers directly. Likewise, I discovered I need to be flexible about genre. I think of my Awakening series as a thriller series despite occult elements, as it contains relatively little of the type of gore that's common these days in horror. (Though I disagree that gore is required.) Yet the books sell well when listed in Amazon's horror category. When my first fan email came in, it was from readers who love science fiction, a genre in which I hadn't imagined the books directly fit. That's when I realized that, by not reaching sci fi and other genre readers, I was missing entire audience sections.
Amazon helps those who help themselves: The more I do to advertise and promote my books, the more Amazon does to promote them and the more sales rise. This is a great relief. When I started running ads for The Awakening, I rarely recovered the price of the ad. Now ads in smaller publications nearly always pay for themselves, and an ad in a publication with a large subscription base such as BookBub usually earns me much more than it costs within the first day, plus prompts a string of sales for weeks to come. Having a second book in the series adds to this effect. While I'm sure longevity and past sales must be factored into Amazon's algorithms, this also reflects a larger truth in any business. At first, a huge amount of time and effort is spent getting the word out. But if you have a good product, eventually others start selling it for you. Not as a favor but because, if they are customers, they truly love the product and want to share it with others and, if they are vendors, because you are showing you can help make them money.
Consistency matters: There is a great quote that I don't remember word-for-word in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It goes something like "you are what your habits make you, and you can choose your habits." I thought of this as I began devoting more time and effort to writing and publishing. How does it relate? For the majority of authors, writing one book and publishing it on Amazon results in little more than a handful of sales to family and friends. Likewise, writing a blog post or two, occasionally tweeting, and creating a webpage won't sustain a career or a business. It's the effort that's made week after week, month after month, and year after year that has the most effect. Writing in particular is something a lot of people love doing, as is playing sports. That means for authors and athletes (and singers and actors and visual artists), there is a lot of competition. That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. It does mean a successful career will likely require effort day after day for years. This is something I keep in mind every time I read an "overnight" success story. Usually further research reveals that the novel the person wrote and sold a hundred thousand copies of was the fifth one that person finished, and the stunning sales record came not because of one ad but after months or years of seeking reviews from book bloggers, attending and speaking at conferences, and finding creative ways to reach readers.
No one owes it to me to be excited about what I'm doing: There are certain things that almost everyone in our culture universally expresses excitement about when women do them--mainly getting married and having children. Beyond that, it varies. For example, some people feel earning an advanced degree is a great accomplishment, others scoff at "professional students." When it comes to writing and particularly an author independently publishing her own work, there will always be people eager to downplay any success, or who view all artistic efforts as too much of a long shot to be worth noting. At first those attitudes surprised and disappointed me. Then I realized that everyone is entitled to her or his own opinion, and I don't need to share it, be concerned about it, or factor it into how I live my life. What's important is doing my best at what I love doing.
Many talented people are generous with their time and information: This is the flip side of the point above. For every person who is dismissive of self-publishing, there are three or four who freely offer information, advice, and support. I've learned tremendous amounts about writing, business, and marketing from blogs and websites created by authors like Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Bob Mayer, and Melissa Foster. I've also joined on-line communities where authors share what they've learned about writing, editing, and marketing. I had this same experience when I started my own law practice after many years of working at a large firm. It reaffirms my faith in human nature and in the value of being kind, professional, and considerate. It is almost always returned tenfold.
Questions or comments on these points or a few to add of your own? Please comment below or email me at lisa@lisalilly.com.
________________
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers . Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.
Get Out: Getting outside once a day, no matter what the weather, boosts my mental health. Much as writing all day at an antique desk in my home office sounds appealing when it's ten degrees with a six below windchill (can you tell I live in Chicago?), if I stay inside too much, I start feeling blue. I'm also less creative and less motivated. So if I'm working from home more than a day or two in a row, I make sure I meet someone for lunch, lug my laptop to the local coffeehouse, or at least walk a few blocks to the Container Store to admire the many wondrous things there. Despite the time it takes to layer on a fleece, winter coat, scarf, and double gloves (when it's zero or colder), I feel energized and ready to get back to work when I get home.
Flexibility: For years (actually, decades), I wrote, submitted manuscripts, and ascended the rejection ladder, graduating from form letters to personal notes to publication of some short stories, poems, and articles. I took a few breaks when my law practice became extremely busy and after my parents' deaths. When I came back and needed to decide what to do with my most recently-completed novel, I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about authors having success with self-publishing. I hesitated because in my mind that wasn't "real" publishing. But the more I researched, the more excited I became. I believe in my work, and rather than spending so much energy and time persuading others to invest in it, I decided to bet on myself. Now my marketing time goes toward reaching readers directly. Likewise, I discovered I need to be flexible about genre. I think of my Awakening series as a thriller series despite occult elements, as it contains relatively little of the type of gore that's common these days in horror. (Though I disagree that gore is required.) Yet the books sell well when listed in Amazon's horror category. When my first fan email came in, it was from readers who love science fiction, a genre in which I hadn't imagined the books directly fit. That's when I realized that, by not reaching sci fi and other genre readers, I was missing entire audience sections.
Amazon helps those who help themselves: The more I do to advertise and promote my books, the more Amazon does to promote them and the more sales rise. This is a great relief. When I started running ads for The Awakening, I rarely recovered the price of the ad. Now ads in smaller publications nearly always pay for themselves, and an ad in a publication with a large subscription base such as BookBub usually earns me much more than it costs within the first day, plus prompts a string of sales for weeks to come. Having a second book in the series adds to this effect. While I'm sure longevity and past sales must be factored into Amazon's algorithms, this also reflects a larger truth in any business. At first, a huge amount of time and effort is spent getting the word out. But if you have a good product, eventually others start selling it for you. Not as a favor but because, if they are customers, they truly love the product and want to share it with others and, if they are vendors, because you are showing you can help make them money.
Consistency matters: There is a great quote that I don't remember word-for-word in Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. It goes something like "you are what your habits make you, and you can choose your habits." I thought of this as I began devoting more time and effort to writing and publishing. How does it relate? For the majority of authors, writing one book and publishing it on Amazon results in little more than a handful of sales to family and friends. Likewise, writing a blog post or two, occasionally tweeting, and creating a webpage won't sustain a career or a business. It's the effort that's made week after week, month after month, and year after year that has the most effect. Writing in particular is something a lot of people love doing, as is playing sports. That means for authors and athletes (and singers and actors and visual artists), there is a lot of competition. That doesn't mean it's not worth pursuing. It does mean a successful career will likely require effort day after day for years. This is something I keep in mind every time I read an "overnight" success story. Usually further research reveals that the novel the person wrote and sold a hundred thousand copies of was the fifth one that person finished, and the stunning sales record came not because of one ad but after months or years of seeking reviews from book bloggers, attending and speaking at conferences, and finding creative ways to reach readers.
No one owes it to me to be excited about what I'm doing: There are certain things that almost everyone in our culture universally expresses excitement about when women do them--mainly getting married and having children. Beyond that, it varies. For example, some people feel earning an advanced degree is a great accomplishment, others scoff at "professional students." When it comes to writing and particularly an author independently publishing her own work, there will always be people eager to downplay any success, or who view all artistic efforts as too much of a long shot to be worth noting. At first those attitudes surprised and disappointed me. Then I realized that everyone is entitled to her or his own opinion, and I don't need to share it, be concerned about it, or factor it into how I live my life. What's important is doing my best at what I love doing.
Many talented people are generous with their time and information: This is the flip side of the point above. For every person who is dismissive of self-publishing, there are three or four who freely offer information, advice, and support. I've learned tremendous amounts about writing, business, and marketing from blogs and websites created by authors like Nick Stephenson, Joanna Penn, Bob Mayer, and Melissa Foster. I've also joined on-line communities where authors share what they've learned about writing, editing, and marketing. I had this same experience when I started my own law practice after many years of working at a large firm. It reaffirms my faith in human nature and in the value of being kind, professional, and considerate. It is almost always returned tenfold.
Questions or comments on these points or a few to add of your own? Please comment below or email me at lisa@lisalilly.com.
________________
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of occult thrillers The Awakening and The Unbelievers . Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.
November 28, 2014
What Books Are You Thankful You Read? (Favorite Books Post No. 4)
This year has been a good year, and I have more to be thankful for than I could put into a hundred posts. So, being a writer, I figured I'd narrow it down to books. Which still could take more than a hundred posts, so I decided to write about three books: one from childhood, one from college, one from the last few years.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
In first grade, my teacher left school for several months to have a baby, and we had a wonderful substitute teacher. Every day she read to us from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It captivated me instantly with the scene where Lucy hides in a wardrobe during hide-and-seek. She plunges into the furs hanging there, putting one hand out so she doesn't hit the back of the wardrobe. Instead, she finds herself in a forest with snow falling around her. I wasn't sure what a wardrobe was, but from context decided it was like a closet. After that, every closet I could get to, I felt along the back for a secret door to the land of Narnia. Similarly, I didn't know what Turkish Delight, the treat the Snow Queen gives little Edmund that only makes him long for more, was. (Okay, I still don't, so if anyone would like to fill me in, feel free). I imagined it tasted like my favorite candy, which was Watermelon Jolly Rancher hard candy, only liquid so it could be poured out of a bottle. I loved to read, and I'm sure I'd already read, or had read to me, other books that involved magical worlds, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first one that stands out in my mind. Lewis' vivid descriptions drew me into Narnia. And the story gave me the sense that there were amazing worlds and possibilities just a stretch of an arm away.
Atlas Shrugged
I came across Ayn Rand in a Philosophy 101 class. The textbook mentioned almost in passing a philosophy of enlightened self-interest that held a man's proper moral goal was his own happiness. (Ironically, that's how Rand phrased it, despite that she created one of my favorite women heroes.) My professor, when I asked to learn more, told me to read Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, and I did. On a practical level, Rand's heroes Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon gave me models of women and men excited and passionate about their work. Most people I knew viewed their jobs as a sort of a necessary evil, and each work week as something to be gotten through to get to the weekend. I knew few people who ran businesses or who finished college. On an emotional level, the idea that a person ought to pursue happiness changed my view of life. My mom, raised in a very poor immigrant family during the Depression, believed happiness was more likely in the next life than this one. At the time, the Catholic Church fostered that type of mindset. We were told most people needed to suffer after death in a place called Purgatory to pay for their sins. Then they could be allowed into heaven. If you suffered in life, that shortened your time in Purgatory. So my mom believed if you were too happy in life, you'd have to suffer for it later. In retrospect, I think this was her way of believing in some sort of fairness, a way to balance out that some people at least seemed to have better and happier lives than others. Atlas Shrugged gave me an alternative approach, one that said that achievement and happiness and success all fit together and that it was moral to want the same positive, good things in your own life that you believed were good for others.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy
I found this book while browsing in Borders one day. I love Buffy, and I'd never taken philosophy beyond the 101 class. This book seemed like a painless way to cover some of the ground I'd missed. But it turned out to do more than that. For one thing, I learned a lot about writing from it, particularly how ethics and a world view can make a story rich and layered without slowing it. Much as I'd liked Atlas Shrugged, it was as if Rand didn't trust her readers to draw the "right" conclusions, so she'd inserted treatises within the novel. Probably good for reaching someone like me who wasn't inclined to read her non-fiction cover-to-cover, but not a model of how I wanted to write fiction. Buffy and Philosophy peeled apart plots to show me how the ethics of Buffy creator Joss Whedon made the storylines stronger and the characters deeper without any preaching. The book also helped me understand my own world view and why Buffy spoke to me beyond just being a good show with strong characters. I'd long ago rejected most of Catholicism, though not the values I'd learned along the way. I struggled to articulate the source of my beliefs on right and wrong. The first essay in Buffy and Philosophy speaks to this, positing eudaimonism as the ethical basis of Buffy. Eudaimonism "holds that the basis of moral goodness is the fulfillment of human nature to its highest potential....The Buffyverse consistently reflects the Platonic view that a just person is always happier than an unjust person." (See the first essay, Faith and Plato, pp. 7-8.) The essay shows how this plays out throughout the show and in spinoff Angel, particularly through the dynamic of Buffy and Faith, initially drawn as the "good slayer" and "bad slayer."
So those are my three books. I'd love to hear about yours, so feel free to comment below. And Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving!
-----------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of Amazon occult best sellers The Awakening and The Unbelievers . Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.
The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe
In first grade, my teacher left school for several months to have a baby, and we had a wonderful substitute teacher. Every day she read to us from C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It captivated me instantly with the scene where Lucy hides in a wardrobe during hide-and-seek. She plunges into the furs hanging there, putting one hand out so she doesn't hit the back of the wardrobe. Instead, she finds herself in a forest with snow falling around her. I wasn't sure what a wardrobe was, but from context decided it was like a closet. After that, every closet I could get to, I felt along the back for a secret door to the land of Narnia. Similarly, I didn't know what Turkish Delight, the treat the Snow Queen gives little Edmund that only makes him long for more, was. (Okay, I still don't, so if anyone would like to fill me in, feel free). I imagined it tasted like my favorite candy, which was Watermelon Jolly Rancher hard candy, only liquid so it could be poured out of a bottle. I loved to read, and I'm sure I'd already read, or had read to me, other books that involved magical worlds, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the first one that stands out in my mind. Lewis' vivid descriptions drew me into Narnia. And the story gave me the sense that there were amazing worlds and possibilities just a stretch of an arm away.
Atlas Shrugged
I came across Ayn Rand in a Philosophy 101 class. The textbook mentioned almost in passing a philosophy of enlightened self-interest that held a man's proper moral goal was his own happiness. (Ironically, that's how Rand phrased it, despite that she created one of my favorite women heroes.) My professor, when I asked to learn more, told me to read Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, and I did. On a practical level, Rand's heroes Dagny Taggart and Hank Reardon gave me models of women and men excited and passionate about their work. Most people I knew viewed their jobs as a sort of a necessary evil, and each work week as something to be gotten through to get to the weekend. I knew few people who ran businesses or who finished college. On an emotional level, the idea that a person ought to pursue happiness changed my view of life. My mom, raised in a very poor immigrant family during the Depression, believed happiness was more likely in the next life than this one. At the time, the Catholic Church fostered that type of mindset. We were told most people needed to suffer after death in a place called Purgatory to pay for their sins. Then they could be allowed into heaven. If you suffered in life, that shortened your time in Purgatory. So my mom believed if you were too happy in life, you'd have to suffer for it later. In retrospect, I think this was her way of believing in some sort of fairness, a way to balance out that some people at least seemed to have better and happier lives than others. Atlas Shrugged gave me an alternative approach, one that said that achievement and happiness and success all fit together and that it was moral to want the same positive, good things in your own life that you believed were good for others.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy
I found this book while browsing in Borders one day. I love Buffy, and I'd never taken philosophy beyond the 101 class. This book seemed like a painless way to cover some of the ground I'd missed. But it turned out to do more than that. For one thing, I learned a lot about writing from it, particularly how ethics and a world view can make a story rich and layered without slowing it. Much as I'd liked Atlas Shrugged, it was as if Rand didn't trust her readers to draw the "right" conclusions, so she'd inserted treatises within the novel. Probably good for reaching someone like me who wasn't inclined to read her non-fiction cover-to-cover, but not a model of how I wanted to write fiction. Buffy and Philosophy peeled apart plots to show me how the ethics of Buffy creator Joss Whedon made the storylines stronger and the characters deeper without any preaching. The book also helped me understand my own world view and why Buffy spoke to me beyond just being a good show with strong characters. I'd long ago rejected most of Catholicism, though not the values I'd learned along the way. I struggled to articulate the source of my beliefs on right and wrong. The first essay in Buffy and Philosophy speaks to this, positing eudaimonism as the ethical basis of Buffy. Eudaimonism "holds that the basis of moral goodness is the fulfillment of human nature to its highest potential....The Buffyverse consistently reflects the Platonic view that a just person is always happier than an unjust person." (See the first essay, Faith and Plato, pp. 7-8.) The essay shows how this plays out throughout the show and in spinoff Angel, particularly through the dynamic of Buffy and Faith, initially drawn as the "good slayer" and "bad slayer."
So those are my three books. I'd love to hear about yours, so feel free to comment below. And Happy Day-After-Thanksgiving!
-----------------
Lisa M. Lilly is the author of Amazon occult best sellers The Awakening and The Unbelievers . Her poems and short fiction have appeared in numerous print and on-line magazines, including Parade of Phantoms, Strong Coffee, and Hair Trigger, and a short film of the title story of her collection The Tower Formerly Known as Sears and Two Other Tales of Urban Horror was recently produced under the title Willis Tower. If you'd like to be notified of new releases, click here to join her email list. The Awakening series is also available on barnesandnoble.com.
