L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 25

Why You Should Never Mess with a Writer

The longer I live in this world, the more people I encounter whose only goal seems to be to upset others. These sociopaths vary in their degrees of intensity but there are a lot of them out there. We encounter them in our working lives and in our personal lives. And when we leave one behind, another one appears disconcertingly to take their unpleasant place.

I’m not fond of confrontations so when I come across these people, I tend to hold my tongue, partly to retain my own emotional health and partly because when I’m later holding my pen, my revenge will be more satisfying and more long-lasting than any face-to-face clash ever could be.

And that, of course, is why you should never mess with a writer. Because a writer will generally have the ability and the motivation to take his or her revenge in a form that could end up in print for thousands, tens of thousands, potentially millions of people to read and remember long after the initial incident.

Jeffrey Archer is a great example. He was an MP when he unwittingly invested his life savings in a fraudulent cleaning company, which ultimately went belly up and which drove him to the brink of bankruptcy. Although I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as the fast track to riches these days, Archer wrote his first book, Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less, in order to pay back his creditors. The plot? A group of men cheated out of their hard-earned money scheme to get it back without the fraudster realising it, a million dollars exactly, not a penny more, not a penny loss.

Luckily, I’ve never experienced the sort of bad luck (or the sort of good luck) that Jeffrey Archer has but I’ve come across my fair share of sociopaths. I don’t need to write about them here because all you need to do is read my first book, Enemies Closer, to discover a few of them. They aren’t all in one character but spread out across several people. They are the villains, the incompetents, the minions and they often end up dead as a result of their own greed or stupidity. And if they don’t end up dead, they often end up the victims of injuries that make male readers pass out at just the idea of the things I describe. Cassandra Broderick, the main character in Enemies Closer, demonstrating to a male minion why women wear stilettos (or at least why she does) remains one of my favourite scenes.

I’m a fan of revenge but I’m also a fan of subtext. I love the Sara Bareilles song “Love Song”, which sounds like a woman telling a man that she won’t write him a love song just because it seems like a great way to express her love for him. I love it even more because it was actually inspired by Sara’s music label constantly asking her to write a pop song, a love song, and this was her unintentionally yet incredibly successful way of telling them to go jump.

A tip for making a sociopath think twice about making you their target: let them know that you’re a writer and that in your writing, you are God. You make all the decisions and everything you experience (good and bad) will end up in your writing. It might not end up making a difference but when you finally take your revenge, the sociopath certainly won’t be able to claim they weren’t forewarned.

And a few tips for taking your revenge in your writing:

*Disguise characters based on real people at least a little bit – your revenge will hardly be satisfying if it’s closely followed by a libel lawsuit.

*Take your revenge on each sociopath only once – any more than that and it starts to seem like an obsession. Besides, if there’s anything a sociopath hates more than being ridiculed, it’s being forgotten.

*Revenge alone isn’t a good enough reason to write – you also need to have a great story to weave it into. After all, writing success is the best revenge of all.

The Unusual and Irrational Obsessions of Writers

Miranda Margulies: We can get the Times to write something. Or that nut from the Observer.

Kathleen Kelly: Wait, what… what nut from the Observer?

Miranda Margulies: Frank something? The one who’s so in love with his typewriter. This is just the sort of thing that would outrage him!

You’ve Got Mail

Most writers have unusual obsessions. For Frank Navasky in You’ve Got Mail, it was his typewriters (yes, plural – he had several). For me, it’s my dictionaries (yes, plural – I have more dictionaries than Frank had typewriters). I’ve written previously about how my dictionary is the one book I can’t live without, specifically my Macquarie International English Dictionary.

But the version I have was published in 2004 (which was when I bought it), making it twelve years old and meaning it doesn’t contain any of the words invented in the intervening period or reflect changes in how English is used (and as much as pedants would prefer there weren’t, there are always changes).

Last year, when I was using it to ensuring spelling accuracy and consistency as I edited Project December: A Book about Writing, I thought it would do the job well enough. But it was in the back of my mind that I wouldn’t be able to put off buying a new dictionary for much longer. And this year, when I was hired (and subsequently paid) to edit an autobiography, I knew the time had come.

So I am now the owner of a brand new, sixth edition Macquarie Dictionary, self-described as Australia’s national dictionary. And I’m using it. But I still have an irrational attachment to my old dictionary.

Irrational how? you might ask. Well, I had the opportunity to give it away, to pass it on to a place where it would be used. My sister complained that the school-approved dictionary my nephew, currently in Grade 4, owned and was using was severely deficient. Words on his spelling list (such as “beautiful”) weren’t in his condensed dictionary and words that children in Grade 4 really don’t need to be checking the spelling and definitions of (such as “masturbate”, “rape” and “sex”) were sprinkled liberally throughout the book.

I told her he could have one of my “proper” dictionaries. I had plenty to spare, I assured her, especially since I was planning to buy a new one. I went home and took my favourite dictionary from the shelf and almost immediately put it back. Because I couldn’t bring myself to give it away. My emotional attachment to it was just too strong. Instead, I gave him another dictionary, a perfectly serviceable dictionary, a proper unabridged dictionary.

I also gave my two nephews aged eight and ten a challenge. If they could find a mistake in the dictionary I gave them, I would hand over one hundred dollars. I have no idea if there are any mistakes in their dictionary but I’ve never seen two children more interested in reading a reference book. They haven’t yet figured out that it was a carefully crafted ploy to get them reading. They read plenty, every day by themselves and every night as a family, but I thought maybe I could make them love reading the dictionary as much as I do. We’ll see. I haven’t had to pay out that one hundred dollars yet but I’ve seen them poring over the dictionary entries, trying their little hearts out.

Perhaps I should do the same – put my favourite old dictionary away and pore over the new one. I might learn to love it in the same way.

But I doubt it.

Book Review: The Bee Hut by Dorothy Porter

Back in May 2016, I reviewed poetry – some books, some poets – en masse but they were books and poets that I knew and loved. This is the first time I have chosen to read and review a book of poetry by a poet and with poems I’m not familiar with. Reading poetry can be very hit and miss. Something that speaks in whispers to one person might speak to another in a scream or not speak to them at all. For the most part, this book was like a recording that needed the volume turned up. Sometimes I could make out what was being said but mostly it was too quiet.

Dorothy Porter died in 2008 and The Bee Hut was published after her death, bringing together poems from the last five years of her life. Because it was published after her death, I wondered if part of the reason why I couldn’t find as much magic in these poems as I want to find in poetry is because she never had a chance to review, to revise, to change her mind, to exclude, to re-order the poems, that maybe they were simply abandoned rather than finished through no fault of her own.

I could only find one whole poem of brilliance, which this extract was taken from:

and any gay,

determined to make

their own way,

will tell you straight –

blood is no reliable

home

nor fix

against intolerance.

From “Sister-in-Law”

The rest of the poems had a sense of almost rhymes (something that drives me bananas) and felt like an endless exercise in name dropping – of other poets Porter will never be in same league as and countries around the world she extensively travelled to – but there are moments of brilliance:

We were never married, Dido.

Believe me, I’m sad too that you can’t

sweeten me and I can’t comfort you.

From “Aeneas Remembers Domestic Bliss”

Every poet wants to write the poem

that penetrates

with the ice-cold shock

of the Devil’s prick.

The poem that will fuck you awake

or kill you.

From “Three Sonnets”

I am not here

silent and alone

Do you hear

the fighting hiss

of this geyser

in me?

I stand my ground

in the undaunted spray

and company

of my own words.

From “The Ninth Hour”

It heartbreakingly ends with the last poem Porter wrote from her hospital room before her death and confirms that despite her challenges, she was more often than not happy, satisfied and aware of her general good fortune:

Something in me

despite everything

can’t believe my luck.

From “View from 417”

It’s the nature of poems that once we know the subtext, they often get better but without that knowledge, the meaning and the poignancy can elude us. They have eluded me a little here. But there were enough small moments to save The Bee Hut from me not liking it at all.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 June 2016

All Things in Moderation and Some Things Hardly Ever

When it comes to character development, there are certain things that have so much more impact when a character does them sparingly instead of frequently. Here are a few things that I think pack more punch when they aren’t happening all the time.

Smoking

Smoking has to be the number one activity that has more impact when it’s used infrequently. A cigarette to settle the nerves. A cigarette to show how the smoker’s hands are shaking uncontrollably. One last cigarette before the execution. Apart from anything else, if a character has enough time to be a pack a day smoker, then I doubt there is enough going on in the story. And it’s such a clichéd affectation for the bad guy, we might as well just put him in a black hat.

I read James Salter’s book, All That Is, last year (you can read my review here) and I was struck by the fact that everyone in it seemed to be smoking all the time. It reminded me of an old black-and-white movie from the forties when smoking was still the epitome of cool. Considering it was a much more recent novel and how smoking is perceived now, it felt strange to me.

Until a few months ago, I had never written a character smoking. I’m not a smoker and it has never really occurred to me to write a character smoking. And then I began to write the third part of my novel Trine, which is from the perspective of a character who spends a good deal of time stalking and simply watching another character. It’s not exactly eventful. When he steals a car and finds a pack of cigarettes in it, given he didn’t have much else to do, I thought, “Why not?”

But even that character isn’t a smoker as such. “I don’t smoke much unless someone offers me one – it costs too much – but there was a packet in the car when I took it,” he tells the reader. And later he offers, “I’d been smoking that pack of cigarettes for almost a week and my lungs couldn’t face another hike. I was almost glad it was nearly empty.”

Smoking can sometimes be used as a lazy type of character development as well because it implies so many other things – rebel, addictive personality, old school, death wish, hygiene deficient, peer pressure, irrational. I’d rather read about characters who have a real sense of distinctive personality about them.

Swearing

There are plenty of people out there in real life who pepper their language with swear words but I think our job as writers is to transcend reality, especially when it comes to dialogue. I couldn’t read an entire book that was composed of more than a handful of swear words but when I’m reading a book that has none and then one suddenly appears, it has an immense power. I know for sure that the character is in deep trouble.

Apart from anything else, a book littered with swear words is also limiting its potential audience. Most people don’t want to hear it, not even from the lips of a character they can close the book cover on. If they did, they’d buy tickets and sit in the cheap seats of a monster truck rally.

In fiction, a well thought out insult is so much more satisfying. Two prime examples are Hannibal Lecter and Hans Gruber. They are so much scarier because of how polite they are. Leave the swearing to the minions and keep it to a minimum in your dialogue.

Talking About Feelings

Everyone who has ever read a romance novel will know that the characters don’t talk about their true feelings until the very end of the story where it all spills out, unable to be held in any longer. Yes, it’s a trite formula but it’s one that works very well because we don’t want to listen to a bunch of whiners talking about their feelings for an entire book. We want action, we want sex, we want drama and uncertainty.

In real life, talking about your feelings and not bottling things up is important. In therapy, it’s compulsory. In fiction, holding it in until your character is about to burst creates wonderful tension. So spare us, at least until the last few pages.

Peeing, Pooping and Farting

Everyone poops (and pees and farts)! It’s a great children’s book as well as an excellent seduction technique (the book, not the pooping), as demonstrated so hilariously by Steve Carell in Dan In Real Life. However, peeing, pooping and farting are almost never crucial to any story. (Off the top of my head, the only instance I can remember of it being crucial to the story is in Red Dawn – the original, not the awful remake – when Danny pees in the radiator after the truck breaks down.)

For some reason, though, writers of modern literature are obsessed with peeing, pooping and farting as if it makes some kind of important statement about their characters. I don’t know about anybody else but I read to experience something different, not to experience the things we all do every single day. I’m not even requesting this be a rarity. Unless it’s an essential plot point, leave it out completely.

How readers choose what to read

There are so many books to choose from that sometimes readers can be overwhelmed by the choice. So how do they end up making their decisions?

There are a number of factors and individual readers will rely on a unique combination of each. As writers, having an awareness of these factors may help us as we attempt to write and market our books.

Genre

It doesn’t matter whether the reader is old school and buys books in a book store or an early adapter of technology onto their third or fourth ereader, all books available for sale are grouped into their genre because as a general rule, readers like to read widely within individual categories.

Genre is a decision we make as a writer very early in the writing process and it’s often outside of our direct control, simply a product of the story we have chosen to tell. But one genre rather than another can be critical. It can be the difference between your book resting between James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell on the popular fiction shelves at the front of the store or hidden away in the much smaller literature section in the back.

However, making a decision on what to write or how to market your book based on genre alone can be fraught with danger. I would always recommend writing whatever is in your heart to write and letting the genres fall where they may.

Author

It’s not much help for new authors but once a reader has read a book by an author they like, they will tend to read more of the same author. However, I’ve seen stickers on the front of books by new authors proclaiming, “If you like James Patterson, you’ll love John Smith.”

I’ve even seen manuscript submission forms on publishers’ websites asking the author who is submitting their unpublished novel which other author their writing most closely resembles. (That was hard for me. When I did that online test to find out which famous author I write like by pasting in a couple of paragraphs of my book, the response came back that I write like JD Salinger. At the time, I’d never read any of his work. Having since read – and hated – The Catcher in the Rye, I’m a little bit miffed.)

It’s a difficult exercise to undertake by yourself. It requires honesty and objectivity. Your beta readers might be better placed to decide which famous author or series of books you and your novel most resemble and might similarly appeal to. But remember that this isn’t genre. Just because your book is about zombies doesn’t mean you should compare it to other books about zombies. This is about writing style.

Covers

No matter how much we agree with the saying that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover”, many people do. I sometimes do. I look at those romance books with flowery font types and men in cowboy hats and women in lingerie and I am repelled. For those that enjoy that particular type of book, their reaction is likely the opposite. And it helps them out because they know automatically that it’s going to be one of those books they want to read.

A well-designed cover will always attract a reader’s eye, which is why so many people offering writing advice recommend having it done by a book cover designer or just a designer in general who understands the principles of good design.

Standing out from the crowd is difficult in an area that everyone has on their bucket list – writing a book – but a great cover is a good start.

Titles

A great title or series of titles can really turn readers’ heads. I’ve written before about terrific titles and because I know how hard it is to come up with the right ones, I pay homage to those who’ve done it well. There are a few routes you can follow:

*State the bleeding obvious – Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

*State half the bleeding obvious – Project December: A Book about Writing

*Use half of a well-known phrase – Kiss the Girls (and we immediately think, “And make them cry”) or (keep your friends close and your) Enemies Closer

*Come up with a theme – this is especially important if there will be sequels such as in Twilight, Eclipse, New Moon, Breaking Dawn

*Let poetry inspire you – For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway but it’s also part of a wonderful poem by John Donne that ends, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, It tolls for thee.” And there are a lot of other titles taken from poems. I’m dying to write a book and call it “The Unforgiving Minute”, which is from a Rudyard Kipling poem, but I still don’t know what the book should be about.

*Go crazy – there are plenty of book titles that make little to no sense like The Sound of One Hand Clapping. (Isn’t that actually waving? And isn’t the sound it makes no sound at all? Granted, I haven’t read this book yet – it’s sitting amongst the pile waiting to be read – so maybe it makes complete sense. I’ll let you know.)

The thing about titles is the more successful a book becomes, the more brilliant the title can seem but before you know anything about a book’s success, the primary function of a title is to – like the book cover – attract the reader’s initial attention.

Blurbs

If the cover and the title have done their jobs, then the blurb is a way to seal the deal. Whether it explains exactly what the book is about, whether it eschews a traditional description for a memorable few paragraphs within the book, whether it barely resembles the book it is attempting to sell, it must be intriguing. It must ask a question that the reader is dying to know the answer to. Usually that question is, “What happens next?”

I’ve picked up plenty of books on the basis of the cover and title, only to read the blurb and then put them straight back down. It’s not always about how well the blurb is written. Sometimes it confirms what I was already thinking. Sometimes it deviates too far from what I was thinking. But I would never choose to read a book without having read the blurb first. I doubt I’m the only one.

Word of Mouth/Hype/FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)

There is nothing greater for a book than to have everybody talking about it. I remember when Fifty Shades of Grey first came out (great title, by the way), everybody I knew seemed to be reading it. Nobody thought it was good but that didn’t seem to matter. It was the book that “you just had to read”. My sister was reading it. My colleagues at work were reading it. My friends were reading it. Everyone everywhere seemed to be reading it. EL James’s sales figures would seem to confirm this.

It might come as a shock, then, that I still to this day haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey. The closest I came, when the book was amongst a bunch of others available for sale in the lunch room at work, was randomly flicking to somewhere within the first third of the book, reading a few pages and being unable to stop laughing. I’d fallen for the hype when The Da Vinci Code came out and I’d sworn after that that I wouldn’t be sucked in again.

Of course, I have been sucked in plenty of times. I’ve read Twilight. I’ve read The Dressmaker. I’ve read The Catcher in the Rye. I’ve read The Bone Season. All books I would never have read if it hadn’t been for the hype. Sometimes the hype is right. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s just about being able to contribute to the discussion that everybody seems to be having.

But readers respond to word of mouth, to hype, even to that fear of missing out when everyone seems to be reading the same book. It’s hard to generate. It mostly seems to be organic. But when it gets on a roll, it’s more important than the genre, the author, the cover, the title and the blurb all mixed together.

*****

As writers, if we can understand the impulses that turn browsers into buyers, our book sales might move into respectable territory. But then again, sometimes it’s all just a lucky dip.

Book Review: Shopgirl by Steve Martin

Steve Martin is well known as a comedic actor but he is a jack of all trades, including music and writing. Shopgirl was his first novella, published in 2000, although Martin has been writing for most of his life, winning an Emmy when he was 23 as part of a comedy writing team.

The titular shopgirl is Mirabelle, although like most artists, she is a shopgirl only so she can pay the bills because the few drawings she has sold aren’t enough to support herself with. She mans the glove counter in Nieman’s and is rarely disturbed by customers. She meets Jeremy in a laundromat. He’s an artist, too. Sort of. He stencils logos on amplifiers for musicians. He hardly inspires her passion but most people think she’s weird so she agrees to go out with him. They have a few awkward encounters before Jeremy disappears.

Then one day Mirabelle comes home from work to find a box at her door. When she unwraps it, the box contains a pair of gloves she sold to a customer the week before along with an invitation to dinner. And when Ray Porter shows up in person at Nieman’s to repeat the offer, she agrees. Ray is twice her age and wealthy, divorced and completely clueless about women. Although he is attracted to her, he makes it perfectly clear that their relationship will be casual and he will continue seeing other women. At least, he thinks he makes it clear. Mirabelle thinks he is just afraid to let himself fall in love with her and will come around eventually.

Ray lives in Seattle but he and Mirabelle date whenever he is in Los Angeles. They spend Thanksgiving together and Ray pays off Mirabelle’s debts and buys her a more reliable car. She gives him a drawing of herself. He supports her when her depression medication stops working and she has to wean and start a new one.

The blurb positions the book as Mirabelle making a choice between Ray and Jeremy, who reappears later in the book having become successful, but it really isn’t like that. The two don’t actually overlap. Each relationship starts and finishes before the other begins. It’s actually more about all three characters trying to find themselves. Jeremy is the only one who manages to do it on his own while Mirabelle and Ray try – and fail – to do it together.

I was a little concerned about what the book implies about professional success being necessary before relationships can be successful, too. And I think it’s more of an aphrodisiac to be wanted rather than needed but Mirabelle needs these men as she negotiates her growth as an adult. This might be a man/woman thing. Maybe men enjoy being needed.

Martin’s style is unique. I’ve never read another book written in the same way. It’s prose heavy and dialogue light and narrated in the third person by someone who knows the characters better than the characters – or their friends or their families or their therapists – will ever know themselves, revealing depths the characters will come to understand only long after the book is over.

There is no plot in the traditional sense. Mirabelle works, dates, draws, goes to the doctor, to galleries, to her home in Vermont to visit her family. I suspect in anyone else’s hands, this story would fall flat. But Martin coaxes interest out of the things that we could easily recognise as dull in our own lives.

This isn’t the kind of book that will change anyone’s life but it’s a wonderful insight into the world of Los Angeles beyond the stereotypes. There are rich people and cosmetically altered people and famous people but they all exist on the edge of the story as evidence of their ridiculousness and in contrast to the main characters, even though they are anything but suburban or ordinary.

This also isn’t the kind of book, the kind of writing, that I could read a succession of. I think part of its magic is in the fact that it is a complete departure from the book before it and the book after it.

I’m not especially inspired to read Martin’s other work based on this book but neither am I completely against the idea. I think he’s a wonderful writer but I also think he likes to write about people and stories that diverge away from where my interests lie. Still, I can recognise this as an achievement.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 June 2016

Recycled writing: breathing new life into old words

When I was studying for my master’s degree in writing, each week students were required to write a five hundred word piece on whatever topic was occupying the class at the time. I did eight subjects that were each twelve weeks long, so by the time I graduated, I had ninety-six pieces of writing.

If you’ve read the 2007 writing journal I published on this blog in July, you’ll know that as far back as then I was already thinking about how I could use all those pieces to create a book about writing (with the very unoriginal title “Everything I Know About Writing”). You’ll know I was trying to get out of having to write that writing journal by creating a book about writing. You’ll also know it didn’t work out and I ended up writing the writing journal anyway. But the idea never really went away.

When I started this blog in 2015, I quickly realised that I didn’t have nearly enough content to keep to the posting schedule I decided on. In addition to the novels I was writing, I would have to start producing blog posts, original blog posts, a lot of blog posts.

It was a daunting prospect. If you go all the way back to the beginning of my blog, you’ll see there is the occasional original blog post sandwiched between poems, novel chapters, a lot of things I wrote a long time ago. It was never going to be enough. And then I remembered those ninety-six pieces of writing.

When I dug them out of the folder they’d been hibernating in since 2007 (and some since before then), I knew immediately that I couldn’t post them as they were. They were written for academic purposes – academic writing purposes, yes, but academic purposes nonetheless. But what they could do was inform the new posts I wanted to write. So I created a list of topics and the associated piece of writing so I could refer to it as I wrote and gradually went about writing new pieces.

At the end of 2015, just nine months after I started the blog, I had written so much, so many blog posts, that I had enough (and in the right non-academic style) to put them together and publish them as the book that became Project December: A Book about Writing.

Not every single piece was something I’d written about during my master’s degree. The thing about writing is that it tends to raise more questions than it answers, more thoughts and ideas, so no sooner had I written about one idea and erased it from my ideas board, the empty space was filled up by something else I wanted to write about.

And I hadn’t gotten around to exploring every one of those recycled ideas. Not until the piece I posted on Wednesday about writing the book or character that will headline a writer’s obituary.

The link was tenuous. The idea on my ideas board read, “Are you conscious of the reader as you write?” (a very academic writing question, I’m sure you’ll agree). And the piece that I’d written all those years ago was a strict discussion of that question. Because my answer to that question has for a long time been a very simply “No”, I’d struggled with how to turn it into an entire blog post. In fact, that last recycled idea had been on my ideas board long after all the others had been erased.

But the idea of being conscious of the reader as we write linked back to the idea of trying to write what we think readers want to read, which linked back to trying to write with the legacy we want to leave behind in mind, which linked back to writing the book or character that will headline a writer’s obituary.

That academic piece of writing has now actually spawned two blog posts because one of the things I was discussing in it was me, as a woman, writing male characters and worrying about men who read my work thinking that the males in my books were kind of girly sounding. (Months and months after I first wrote and published, “Can Women Write Male Characters? Can Men Write Female Characters?”, it remains my most popular post. I like to think that’s because it’s good writing. But I suspect it has more to do with the ongoing debate writers have with themselves about whether they can do justice when writing characters of the opposite sex. I think it also has something to do with the fact that there seems to be a link to it on a student reading list at the City University of New York. The list is gated so I can’t get in and have a look but WordPress tells me that an awful lot of people are coming to read that piece from that link. If anyone can shed any light on precisely why, I’d love to hear it.)

The whole point of this post is to create awareness that one piece of writing can spawn many others. An old piece of writing can inspire you to write a new piece. When I dug out the first significant piece of writing I ever did, a novella, it inspired me to write a blog post on “The Embarrassment of Early Writing”. When I was reading my dictionary not long after I’d written a post about how much I love to read my dictionary, I found a description of a type of poem I’d never heard of and was inspired to write two poems. When I was writing Wednesday’s post on the book or character that will headline a writer’s obituary, I was inspired to write this Friday’s post about recycling writing.

We all know that writing is a journey and that we evolve as writers as we go on it. We write things along the way that we love and that we hate. But hold onto everything you write. You never know when it might turn into something you don’t hate as much as you used to. You never know when it might inspire the next thing you write (or the next book you write). You never know when your old words might re-emerge in a new and different light.

Writing the book or character that will headline your obituary

Earlier this year, while scanning news headlines (as I do frequently each day), I came across the following:

“Legends of the Fall author Jim Harrison dies aged 78”

Even though I’ve seen the movie of Legends of the Fall, starring Brad Pitt and Anthony Hopkins, I didn’t know it was based on Jim Harrison’s book. In fact, I didn’t know who Jim Harrison was.

Now I know (because I did a little research before writing this blog post) that Jim Harrison started writing while he was recovering after falling off a cliff, that he was rather prolific, that Legends of the Fall is actually a novella, that he specialised in novellas and that I’ve never heard of any of his other works. Which explains why the writer of the headline felt it necessary to include the name of his most famous work.

There are plenty of writers who, when it comes time for their obituaries to be published, won’t need to have their most famous book or character included in the headline. Stephen King, Jeffrey Archer, James Patterson.

There are plenty of authors who have already passed on who don’t even need their entire names published in order for us to recognise them. Hemingway, Dickens, Austen.

There are plenty of authors who are famous but whose books and characters are even more famous than them so tend to get mentioned anyway. Harry Potter author JK Rowling. Twilight author Stephenie Meyer. James Bond author Ian Fleming.

But it is really the mid-list author, the one famous credit author, the someone-once-made-a-movie-of-their-book author who will have their book or character acknowledged in their obituary headline. They are really the authors that readers need a little context for. Like Jim Harrison. Like Roderick Thorp, who wrote the book that Die Hard was based on. Like Winston Groom, who wrote the book of Forrest Gump.

As is typical of me, getting ahead of myself, I started wondering if I had already written the book or the character that will headline my obituary. Then I started wondering if I would have an obituary written about me. I’m not famous. I’m not even a mid-list author yet. Yes, I’ve got plenty of time (I hope) before I really need to start worrying about such things. And when I write, I don’t generally think about the writing legacy I will be leaving behind.

But neither do most authors upon writing the book or character that is obituary worthy. When JK Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, she received thirteen rejections before finally being signed by Bloomsbury. Bloomsbury wasn’t so sure either because the first print run of the book was only 500 copies and 300 of those were donated to public libraries. Her agent told her the story wasn’t commercial enough to be super successful. Even after Scholastica paid $105,000 for the US rights to Harry Potter, JK Rowling herself wasn’t convinced that her success would be ongoing rather than a one-off, so she worked full-time as a French teacher while writing the second Harry Potter book.

The one thing that all writers who make it big seem to have in common is the determination to write the stories that fill their hearts, that are bursting to get out of them, that fill them with excitement even when they can’t adequately explain to others why they feel that way about their stories. There is no thought given to their writing legacies, to what publishers might want, even to what readers might want.

Friedrich Nietzsche dismissed his readers outright: “Whoever knows the reader will henceforth do nothing for the reader.” And it’s a view echoed by a writer I greatly respect, Joss Whedon, who said, “I think it’s a mandate: Don’t give people what they want, give them what they need.”

Too much awareness of the potential audience can make it awfully hard to follow this advice but not enough awareness of it can severely limit a writer’s capacity to find an audience in the first place, to write that book or character that will headline an obituary. So what is the solution? To simply keep on writing.

As much as we would like to, we can’t pre-empt the response to or the success of anything we write. I’ve written and published nearly two dozen articles on LinkedIn. One received nearly 10,000 views and 650 likes while all the others have languished in relative reading obscurity, gathering between 10 and 500 views. And when I’m asked how that one article gained traction, how I got so many readers, I have to admit that I just don’t know.

It would seem that the key to writing success, whether small or large, boils down to this rough recipe: a concentrated cup of skill and a large sprinkling of luck mixed together at exactly the right time.

And as for the book or character that will headline your obituary? Don’t worry about it. You’ll already be dead. Like almost everything else in a writing career, it cannot be controlled. It will be left for someone else to decide upon. Maybe it’s a good thing. One less piece of writing over which to agonise. One less piece of writing to have to draft, review, edit, polish and finalise. One less piece of writing that may ultimately never be published. So that we writers, when our time comes, can rest in peace.

Book Review: Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier

“Girl with a Pearl Earring” is a reasonably famous painting by Johannes Vermeer and Tracy Chevalier has used it and a lot of historical research to imagine the circumstances – the people and the place – under which it might have been created. The girl is Griet. Her father, a skilled artisan who used to hand paint tiles, has been blinded in a kiln explosion and is unable to support his family anymore. His son, Frans, is already apprenticed at a tile factory and so Griet is forced to become a servant in the Vermeer household.

The head of the house is Vermeer’s mother-in-law, Maria Thins. Vermeer’s wife, Catharina, is pregnant and the child will be their sixth. There’s also a cook named Tanneke. So it’s a busy and crowded home. Griet is put in charge of the laundry, cleaning Vermeer’s studio, any chores Catharina cannot or will not do as her pregnancy progresses and anything else Tanneke asks of her. She allows herself to be courted by Pieter, the butcher’s son, as she makes her daily trip to the Meat Market and sleeps in the cellar where a “Catholic” painting offends her Protestant sensibilities.

But it is Vermeer and his paintings that consume her. As Griet cleans the floors and windows and around the props in the tableaus he is reproducing, she tries to understand what he is doing. He teaches her about colours and eventually asks her to crush the materials that are combined with oil to become his paints, although it remains a secret from the household – particularly his jealous wife – and she has to find the time to do it as well as all her other chores.

The book is ostensibly a love story, albeit an unconsummated one. Griet and Vermeer bond over his painting and eventually he paints her. He doesn’t really want to but the iconic painting he creates is a compromise. His patron will commission a large and expensive work and not insist that Griet sits for it with him (a seduction technique the patron has used before with maids) if Vermeer will paint Griet on her own so it can become part of the patron’s private collection. But this, too, must be done in secret. So they spend hours in the studio together simply looking at each other, Griet with her face thrown back towards her left shoulder and Vermeer with intense eyes as he tries to capture her essence.

Girl with a Pearl Earring is a subtle book. All the romance is in a glance here and a look there. The greatest eroticism comes when Griet is winding around her head the blue and yellow scarves that appear in the painting and Vermeer sees the hair she has managed to keep covered the entire time she has known him.

It might all be just a little too subtle. Griet is a pious and conservative girl but she often comes across as just plain boring. Her fascination with Vermeer seems to lack passion and though she has no real feelings for Pieter, she allows him to do things to her that a conservative girl really shouldn’t. On these occasions she seems like a different person altogether without any real justification for it.

The writing is restrained and formal, in the way that people writing in English make characters who aren’t English-speakers sound. The plot is thin and not particularly imaginative. The characters are cardboard cutouts – jealous wife, scheming daughter, randy patron, domineering mother-in-law, disappointed parents, demanding boyfriend, chaste maid and brooding artist. And, for some reason, this book managed to get the apostrophe rule wrong more than it got it right, which I found terribly annoying. Once might be an oversight but this book was clearly edited by someone who didn’t know the English language.

But somehow it comes together and gets enough right to be an interesting, if not engrossing, read. Seventeenth-century Delft, where the book is set, comes to life – although this is no doubt helped by the reproduction of “View of Delft” by Johannes Vermeer on the front and back covers of the book. And there’s no doubting that the titular painting has that Mona Lisa quality where her eyes and her mouth tell competing stories.

It’s that kind of novel that thrills literary types who can look past things like a lack of ingenious plot and original characters and simply savour the writing. If you’re looking for more, you won’t find it here. But if you go in knowing what to expect, which is historical fiction and understated romance, you might be satisfied.

3 stars

*First published on Goodreads 4 June 2016

Why writers should call out other writers when they do poor work

Earlier in the year, my stepmother was dragged into a PR nightmare when the founder and owner of a program for gifted children became the subject of an article in a major Australian newspaper. My stepmother is a licensee of the program and a teacher, taking it into primary schools and offering additional educational challenges for children who have been assessed as gifted. The owner had made the mistake of posting opinion pieces on the business’s website and a concerned parent, upon seeing the controversial posts, immediately contacted the newspaper wanting to have it exposed.

That concerned parent had a point. The posts weren’t just controversial and inappropriately featured on the business’s website, they were also completely unacceptable in the context of the program being offered in schools. However, instead of the journalist making these points in a balanced piece of reporting, she instead decided to target and ridicule the elderly owner of the program.

The article contained more than a few factual inaccuracies and when contacted and informed about these errors – whether they were intentional for effect or genuine mistakes isn’t clear – the journalist didn’t issue a correction. Instead, she took quotes from my stepmother that appeared in an article I wrote and inserted them into her original article in an effort to reinforce her misguided approach and continue the ridicule. The quotes were not reproduced in full but selectively used and in some instances, the quotes had entire words changed, making them not quotes at all.

I don’t mind so much about having my literary work appropriated for this purpose because I wrote it in an effort to give my stepmother a voice and clarify the facts that were being shouted down by a journalist and a mob of uninformed readers who were more interested in a sensationalised story.

What I do mind is that this journalist is even able to call herself a journalist and tarnish what was once a genuinely respectable writing profession by doing such a poor job. Instead of speaking to the people who deliver the program in schools, she spoke only to the owner who, although she owns the content, isn’t teaching anymore and doesn’t have any direct contact with schools or children. And then she approached everyone she could think of including health professionals, education professionals and politicians, all of whom had no direct knowledge of the program, misinformed them about the program and then asked them for comment.

She accused the program of trying to indoctrinate children and compromise their health when it does nothing of the sort. She deliberately conflated the views of the founder with the content of the program, even though she had never seen the content of the program.

It was hardly surprising when the article was shared 10,000 times on Facebook by other concerned parents, including those whose children were already enrolled in, participating in and enjoying the program, which included such innocuous topics as Minding your Money, Basic Engineering, Ancient Egypt and Morphing Dirt into Diamonds. And, of course, once the comments began rolling in – informed, or more accurately uninformed by the article they read without knowing any better – the mob mentality made it a hundred times worse.

I don’t blame those readers. It’s a credit to the consumers of news that they still believe a major newspaper can be relied on for accurate and fair reporting. But it’s a real shame that neither the newspaper nor the journalist in this instance delivered it.

Writing is one of those skills that many, many people believe – often erroneously – that they can do. We’ve all seen plenty of bad examples – people who have interesting stories but no ability to execute the writing, people who have the ability to execute the writing but no understanding of what makes an interesting story, people who have neither and give it a go anyway.

But journalism requires another level of skill again. It requires the ability to put aside personal feelings and judgements. It requires the ability to fully investigate all sides of the story. It requires the ability to determine the facts and separate them from emotions and outright lies. And it requires full disclosure. Leaving out parts of the story because they don’t suit a pre-determined angle just won’t cut it.

If a journalist, or any kind of writer, can’t do these things and the result is poor writing – whether in investigation or execution – then they should expect to be called out. Poor writing, especially when it unwarrantedly results in destroyed careers, ruined reputations and negatively changed lives, is unacceptable. And those perpetrating it should be run out of the profession.

Previously, when I’ve seen examples of poor writing, I’ve stayed quiet thinking it isn’t my place to say anything, thinking that surely readers will be able to see through it, thinking that anyone who writes poorly won’t have a job writing for long. It doesn’t seem to be that way, though. So I’m not going to stay quiet anymore. Not now that I’ve seen how much damage just one piece of poor writing can do. It’s the duty of all writers.