Random things I've been thinking about

I've been thinking about some things lately, but since I haven't come to any conclusions about any of them, I'm just going to put them in bullet points.
 

*The craft task for my critique group recently was to write a single really long sentence (250-300 words) from my main character's point of view, then a second long sentence, still from their point of view, but about their imagining what someone else is thinking.  I didn't like the long sentence part for a lot of reasons--mostly because there needed to be a short sentence between the two to break it up and release some tension.  But it got me thinking: my characters often assume what other people are thinking, because I always assume what other people are thinking (usually in a self-conscious kind of way).  Apparently, from both the book my group is using and from the other people in my critique group, this is not a common thing.  I do it a lot, and it always always always gets called as for a point of view error.  So I go back and add something like "Steve supposed Betty was horrified" or "It looked to Steve like Betty was horrified," but then I'm giving Steve way too much credit, because Steve isn't self-aware enough to think "I'm making an assumption that Betty is horrified."  No, he's thinking, "Betty's horrified!" and takes it as a fact.  So putting that qualifier in there changes Steve's characterization.  So I usually end up taking the sentence out altogether or changing it to a description of Betty's face.  But!  Maybe there's something to this long sentence idea as a way to get everything in there.


* The Bechdel test is a really simple test that asks if a work of fiction has two female characters who have a conversation that's not about a man.  I've been thinking about how a story can pass this test if it's written in close third person or first person from a man's point of view.  So let's say it's from Steve's point of view, so he's in every scene and every scene is filtered through him. 

• He can overhear two women talking, either by eaves-dropping or because the women don't care that he's there, they're having their own conversation and ignoring him.
• He can be involved in the conversation.
• There can be a story in a story.  Steve watches TV or sees a play, where two women are talking.  A female character tells him about a conversation she had with another woman.

Even though none of these are cheating, they all feel insufficient.  Steve is horning in on some women's conversation or he's listening in and violating their privacy.  On the other hand, two characters having a conversation in Steve's story about something that's not Steve or Steve's problems has its own problems (like that it'll get cut in editing). The truth is, having a male perspective just structurally is going to remove the reader a step from female interaction.  That's just how it is.  So the way to have the female characters have a substantial impact is to work more on how each of them is portrayed and how each of them comes off as flushed out, dimensional, and possessing agency.  They need to have relationships and motivations beyond men, which is what the Bechdel test is getting at in a surface kind of way, but by nature of how the narrative is set up, those won't be front and center. 

Jane Steele Review

This week's novel is Jane Steele, a retelling of Jane Eyre with more murder, by Lyndsay Faye. 

Orphaned Jane is mistreated by her bitter aunt, and (after she accidentally kills her creepy cousin) she is sent to boarding school where she's mistreated by her creepy headmaster.  She decides that since she's already a murderer, she might as well keep it up to protect the people she loves who have no agency of their own, and if she ends up going to hell, at least she'll be reunited with her suicidal mother.  When he aunt dies, Jane takes a job as a governess in the house in which she used to live.  She learns that the new master of the house, Mr. Thornfield, is surly, all the servants have knives, and there's a mystery involving stolen jewels and the East India Company.  Secrets!  Lies!  Murder!

Full disclosure: I did not like Jane Eyre at all.  This book was a lot of fun.

I think my main problem with Jayne Eyre was that Mr. Rochester is THE WORST.  I don't like him, I don't like that Jane Eyre thought he was so great, and I don't like that our culture romanticizes his behavior.  Remember how he called her "pet"?  Remember how he dressed up like a "gypsy woman" to try to trick her into admitting that she liked him?  Remember how he kept his wife locked in the attic? 

In this book, Mr. Thornfield doesn't do any of this nonsense.  He's blunt and he swears, he was raised in Punjab and is Sikh and more open minded than the English people think he ought to be.  His secrets honestly aren't hurting anyone.  He's surly, but he's affectionate with his ward and with his staff.  Early on, Jane mistakes him for a bandit and pulls a knife on him, swearing a blue streak, and he makes fun of it for her for it while letting her know he heartily approves.  He's not verbally abusive and he never threatens Jane or his staff or his ward.  He's more sassy along the lines of Howl from Howl's moving Castle, and I can get behind that.

So my main irritation against Jane Eyre wasn't there.

Beyond that, the style of this novel does a nice job of mimicking Bronte.  The diction and sentence structure are similar.  Take the tag line, for example: "Reader, I murdered him."  Perfect.  The story beats align--a bit to the story's detriment because that second-act-breakup was a bit flimsy and I kept waiting for there to be a wife locked in the attic (I have good news on this front). 

It was similar, but the more proactive protagonist made it more fun.  I would say the story is also changed with a more modern sensibility, but I'm not sure that's accurate.  It's not true that in Victorian England there were no people of color and it's not true that in Victorian England women didn't have special-men-friends or think about sex.  It's just that they wrote about it way less in literature of that era.  So the presence of people of color is a more modern way of telling a story and fits more with what I want to read.

It's fun, but there's still an awful lot of violence against women.  Furthermore, I apparently have no understanding of how the East India Company works, because this all sounds ridiculous.  I think I'll survive with not understanding.

***

Next week: The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, short stories by Ken Liu.

A Trip to the American Writers Museum

The American Writers Museum opened in downtown Chicago in May, and my combined love for writing and museums meant I've been trying to find time to go for two months.  I managed yesterday.

It's a small place on the second floor of a skyscraper off Michigan, so you have to go in the lobby and take one of the elevators up a single floor while the person you share the elevator with goes up to floor 18.  The gift shop is a wall of shelves with coffee mugs and magnets with inspirational writing quotes, and you pay for the merchandise at the front desk where you bought your admission.  The museum itself is a circular hallway that flows from one gallery to the next, and it took me about an hour to make my way through, back to the gift shop and the kids manning the front desk.

There's a gallery of children's literature, which points out that you can tell a culture's morals, fears, their goals for their children and their biases by looking at what they read to their children.  They go into depth with just a few examples: The Wizard of Oz, Charlotte's Web, Little Women, and Where the Wild Things Are.  They tell stories about the authors' motivations, large scale edits, publication history, and public reception.  My favorite part was reading about how Maurice Sendak's mother used to call him Wild Thing! in Yiddish, and how the wild things in the book are how he remembers members of his extended family with rolling eyes and big teeth.

There was a temporary exhibit: a dark hall filled with plants and rain forest sounds, where I sat on a bench and listened to poetry about palm leave read aloud on a looped track.  It was peaceful, and gave the poems some context while also giving me a peaceful place to just listen and absorb and find my own meaning.

There was a hall with a long row of 100 American authors, put in historical order from the 1400s to the 20th century (Vonnegut was just a few from the end).  Each author had a big picture and then a rotating info box with three sides of facts about them.  With this setup, they were able to show how historical events affected literature.  There was a big group focused on abolitionists and a big group around the Vietnam War.  They were able to show how authors started movements and trends, influencing later authors.  I could see an active intention to include diverse voices, but with the exhibit's intention to tell a historical narrative (which had a mostly white perspective), and with the desire to display authors from the American canon (who people are going to expect to see at the American Writers Museum, and who are overwhelmingly white) the authors were still a pretty pale bunch.  There was also not much room given to genre fiction, which is my bag.

Other highlights include Kerouac's original scroll of On the Road in a temporary exhibit.  I was expecting a reading room that was on a listicle that's been floating around of the 10 best places to sit and write in Chicago, so I brought my computer, but the reading room is like three uncomfortable looking sofas, no tables, and a steady stream of museum visitors going past, so my suspicions that that list is nonsense has been confirmed.  I also found out there's a kid's story time where children's authors come and read, so I'll be back with toddler in tow. 

A Million Worlds with You Review

This week's novel is A Million Worlds with You by Claudia Gray, the final book in the Firebird Series.

The awful Triad Corporation has a hideous scheme to completely destroy a bunch of the alternate universes.  Marguerite's parents and their grad students have found a way to protect the universes, but an evil version of Marguerite (dubbed "Wicked") is jumping through the universes, setting up all the versions of herself to die so our Marguerite can no longer enter those universes to save them.  Marguerite must jump from universe to universe, following Wicked, saving herself over and over, and stalling for time so her parents can save all the universes they can.

This was an exciting set up.  Marguerite can't jump into a universe where Wicked already is, so she has to wait until Wicked moves on.  Wicked can't flat out kill herself in another universe or she'll die too, so she has to set events into motion that will kill her and then jump out of the universe real fast.  This gives Marguerite a short window to get in, figure out what the trap is, stop it, and then wait while Wicked sets up some other elaborate booby trap in the next universe.  The traps are exciting, but there's tension in the uncertainty as to how the traps will spring, where the traps are, what's gone wrong this time.  And then once Marguerite has saved herself, there's the tension of waiting and wondering what Wicked is up to.  The tension stays high and that's a lot of fun.

I also liked how Marguerite has moved past "if this one version of a person is bad, then every version of that person is bad and just hasn't been bad yet" and moved on to putting herself in Wicked's place and thinking about what parts of her personality if put in the situation Wicked was in would make her act that way.  It made Wicked more sympathetic, but also made Marguerite more sympathetic, and it was rewarding to see how she'd matured about the situation and how she was able to empathize.  It's still a little off-putting (understandable and believable, but still off-putting) that she comes to this realization when faced with an evil version of herself.  When faced with an evil Theo in the first book, she was convinced that her Theo was evil too.  Then in the second book, when faced with violent versions of Paul (her boyfriend), she was more forgiving, but still uncomfortable.  It was only when she was faced with an evil version of herself that she really started to find forgiveness.

And then Marguerite's reactions to Paul's "brokenness" drove me nuts.  In the last book, Paul's soul was splintered into pieces and Marguerite collected them all and brought them back together.  When we last saw Paul, he was distressed over witnessing what other versions of himself were capable of.  It's been a while since I read it, but my reaction was, "Poor Paul needs some hugs and ice cream and maybe some therapy."  Marguerite's reaction was, "Paul is broken forever."  She'd spoken to Paul about it once and they did no research and about an hour and a half had passed since his soul came back together.  Let the guy take a nap before you give up on him!  It made me angry.  Eventually, she and Paul do talk about it, and they get an oscilloscope to look at his brain and get some graphs that look like bad news, but then neither one of them knows how to read oscilloscope-brain-graphs, so who knows.  At this point Paul decides that he's broken forever (which is obnoxious).  Marguerite hears him say this, and--just to be contrary--decides he'll be fine and they'll work it out.  Even though I agree with her, it was still annoying because she was still making decisions about someone else's brain without any scientific evidence and without listening to what Paul's saying.  I know I'm doing the same thing and I don't know why it gets me so rankled, but it does.

Anyway.  Aside from how much I don't want to hear about Marguerite's personal drama when universes are being ripped apart in epic volcano-doomed glory, this was an exciting book and a fun series.

***

Next week: Jane Steele, a retelling of Jane Eyre with more homicide, by Lyndsay Faye.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns Review

This week's novel is The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson.

Elisa, the younger, less thin princess was chosen by God as a baby to do a great act of service, as evidenced by the stone in her navel that warms with her prayers.  On her sixteenth birthday, she's married to the king of the neighboring kingdom, who is about to be invaded by an army led by wizards.  It starts like a book that will be about Elisa growing to love her new husband, but at the half way point she gets kidnapped and taken to the desert, where she ends up leading a guerrilla war against the invaders.

The setting of this is really cool because it's Spanish inspired (Carson names Spanish Morocco and the Mexican Caribbean as influences).  I don't see a lot of that, it's always fun to read about a world that's lush and immersive and not set in Europe in the middle ages.  (You know I don't care about Europe in the middle ages.)

Somewhat related to that, I liked what a strong presence religion had to the cultures in the book, just as Catholicism has a strong presence in the Spanish speaking world.  Religion gets left out a lot in fantasy as something authors don't want to touch because they don't care for it or because they don't want to offend to turn readers off.  I can see from other reviews of this book that it did turn some people off.  But I liked it, because religion and culture are so bound together that when you create a culture and just pretend they don't have a religion it feels incomplete.  This religion, although a Catholic analog, was mined pretty deeply.  There were primary religious texts and secondary religious texts, rituals and interpretations and worshipers with various levels of belief.  Faith comes up as a theme over and over, both faith in God and Elisa's faith in herself.


I don't know how I feel about Elisa's weight.  I like that there was a plus sized heroine who had her act together and she got respect by being smart and pious.  I liked that she gave zero shits about how she looked when she was eating, because the food was delicious.  She truly enjoyed food.  And I liked that we got some mouthwatering descriptions of meals out of that.  However, when she's kidnapped and marched through the desert for months, she loses weight because she's marching all day through the desert and sweating and eating rationed food and drinking rationed water.  So she loses weight in the story around the same time that she gains self-confidence.  There's not a direct relation between the two, but...there is.

A lot of the characters were underdeveloped.  At one point Elisa decides she's in love with one of these characters, and I realized I hadn't bothered to remember his name because he hadn't done anything, and hadn't stood out from the other people in his group enough to get a name in my head behind "One of X Group Guys."  Everyone is so closed off and distant that I assumed everyone was planning to betray Elisa.  Only two of them did, but I was convinced eight of them were going to.

***

Next week: Million Worlds with You, the final book in the Firebird Trillogy by Claudia Gray.

Real Places and Real Struggles

This week, I was trying to describe a place that actually exists.  You can go there.  People know about it.  You can look it up on Google Maps.  It was just a couple paragraphs of description of a place with which I'm familiar, a place that fills me with an unique emotion that I was excited to share with the world. 

And it was the most painful couple of paragraphs.  After an hour I had two hundred words, which is nothing.  I hadn't even finished the description enough to move on, so I took a break to do something I don't even remember like watch Netflix or play Pic-a-pix.  And those two hundred words weren't even good.  They were boring and flat and confusing.  I had no motivation to write that section, to write any other section, or write at all.

So I got to thinking about why this was so awful.  I don't think it was that I wanted to be accurate.  I don't think it was that I cared that someone would read and go, "That's not the right kind of tree, you hack!"  Although, I did spend a lot of time looking at pictures of the area, then looking at info graphics of different tree types to describe them correctly.  But I think this quest for acuracy is more of a symptom than the root of the problem.

Eventually I realized that the passage felt flat because it wasn't conveying the feeling I wanted to express.  I have a very distinct emotion when I'm in this place and I wanted that to come through in the writing.  That was the goal, not description of the landscape, but a description of how the landscape affects the character.  But I was going about this by describing what it looks like and expecting the reader to have that same reaction. 

I was going about it like if I described the breadth of the sky and the crunch of the grass and the contrast between the road and the foliage, the reader would get the same sense of awe that I feel in a country that runs wild.  When that emotion wasn't coming across, my first instinct was that I wasn't describing it as fully as I should, thus the quest for accuracy in my descriptions.  But the way I went about accuracy made the passage feel even more distant and even more like a slog for me to write.  I didn't know the tree I had in my head was a buckeye, and I won't remember that next week, so why would I expect a reader to have an emotional reaction there?  No, I need to describe what it is about a buckeye that stands out, that makes it part of the landscape, that makes it important. 

I need to describe the way this setting affects the character.

Caraval Review

This week's novel is Caraval by Stephanie Garber.

Scarlett is trying to get herself and her sister away from their abusive father and believes the only way to do that is an arranged marriage that will take her away.  A week before her wedding, she gets tickets to Caraval, a magical carnival/game.  When her sister is kidnapped as part of the game's mystery and it turns out there's history between the Caraval master and Scarlett's family, Scarlett has to win the game or see her sister killed and Scarlett's marriage and escape from her father ruined.

There's good kissing in this.  I'm particular about what I like in romantic relationships built on lies, but this one turned into shades of "Charade" as Scarlett knew the guy was full of lies and his story changed so often that there wasn't any point in believing anything he said.  And the kissing was good.

It took some space for me to figure out why this book didn't work for me.  I think what happened was that Caraval is only vaguely defined to the point where I made up some expectations that were never fulfilled.  Not explaining Caraval and an intrisic sense of confusion over what's part of the game and what isn't are major parts of Caraval, so I can understand why this happened.  However, it's described as "magical" and filled with "the greatest performers" and it's called Caraval, which brings to mid Carnival.  So I was expecting magical jugglers and acrobats and fire breathers and musicians.  I was expecting a parade and fun-loving debauchery.  That's not what Caraval is, and it did take me until I was done with the book to sit back and realize what it was.  Caraval is more like a Renaissance Fair or a big LARP.  The performers are actors and the magic is mostly that you can buy extravagant (and possibly magical) items in exchange for telling your greatest fear or giving a day of your life.  Most of the players at Caraval are there to shop.

Presented like this, Caraval is pretty straight forward: there's a game like a murder mystery dinner, a bunch of actors who give clues, and some magical glowing buildings and food thrown in for ambiance.  Maybe explaining it would make it too straight forward and undermine some of the dream logic and confusion about what's real and what's not.  But I feel like from the stories about Caraval with which Scarlett grew up, she would have understood this.

It also hurts that Scarlett is a huge wet blanket who refuses to get involved in the experience even though she's dreamed about it her whole life.  She's like the new person your friend brought to your D&D campaign, who won't get in character and is continuously saying, "This is weird, you guys."  It sucks out some of the magic for the reader, and it makes it so that if cool things were happening at Caraval like I had imagined the reader doesn't get to see them becuase Scarlett doesn't care and we're following her point of view.

***

Next week's novel: The Girl of Fire and Thorns, Spanish inspired YA fantasy by Rae Carson

Gorgeous Language

My critique group is working through Ursula LeGuin's craft book, Steering the Craft.  We take turns presenting sections, and I was up first with the first chapter ("the sound of your writing" which is about lyrical prose) and the second chapter ("punctuation and grammar" which is about using punctuation to control speed and rhythm). 

I had everyone in the group do a version of one of the exercises LeGuin suggests in the first chapter.  She says, "Write a paragraph to a page of narrative that's meant to be read aloud.  Use onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect--any kind of sound effect you like--but NOT rhyme or meter."  I said, "Write half a page max." 

People got stuck on WHAT they should write about.  Just write a beautiful paragraph?  About what?  It was so open ended as to be intimidating.  In the end, their paragraphs leaned towards action, towards events that had a natural rhythm.  Other paragraphs showed moments of heightened emotions, more introspective moments where lyrical language could come out.

We talked about how absurd it would be to write a full piece--a novel or a short story--entirely in this style.  I think that's completely true, because in order for these moments to stand out, there needs to be a baseline that juxtaposes them from which they can pop.  It's like those movies that are non-stop action!, where you just get tired 2/3 of the way through and stop even caring.  So this ties back to the moments that people picked to convey lyrically: moments of heightened action or heightened emotion.  Those are the moments that need to jump out from a story, and those are the moments that lend themselves to lyrical language.

I will usually go through a story and note sections that need to be more rhythmic, or scan better, or where I could use words that are more resonant.  But I had trouble in this exercise, because when I do what I usually do I get one of two outcomes: either it works and people thing "wow, this section is lovely!" or it doesn't work and people read straight through it, blissfully ignorant that I tried something that didn't work.  But for this example, my group knew that I was trying to be lovely, so if it didn't work people would know and that would be embarrassing.  It made me self-conscious.

Then we moved on to stage two, the prospect of which I had been excited about for three weeks, but when revealed made everyone else groan.  Everyone passed their paragraph to the person on their left, who read it aloud for the group.  I know how I intend my work to sound, and when I read it out-loud I can make it sound that way.  But it's hard to know how a reader will read your work when they're off on their own.  It might not have the cadence I intended, or maybe their accent or mine makes the words sound different.  So we listened to someone else read our work, and then compared it with our vision and then we talked about how we could use punctuation to to make it closer to what we intended (chapter 2). 

The paragraph I read aloud was about a strenuous hike and it used long clauses that I had trouble saying in a single breath.  I, the reader, was breathless by the end, almost as though I was the one hiking. 

There was one passage made up Jabberwocky style of made up words, and two different people read it aloud.  The first person made it sound playful, like a children's book.  The second person made it sound more grave, like this was the climax from the audio book of a thousand page epic-fantasy.

It was fun, and I'm pretty proud of myself.

***

My favorite part of these two LeGuin chapters is unrelated to this post, but it's so perfect that I want to share it. 

"Correctness isn't a moral issue but a social and political one, often a definition of social class.  Correct usage is defined by a group of those who speak and write English a certain way, and used as a test or shibboleth to form an in-group of those who speak and write English that way and an out-group of those who don't.  And guess which group has the power?

I detest the self-righteousness of the correctness bullies, and I distrust their motives.  But I have to walk a razor's edge in this book, because the fact is that usage, particularly in writing, is a social matter, a general social agreement about how we make ourselves understood.  Incoherent syntax, mistaken words, misplaced punctuation, all cripple meaning.  Ignorance of the rules makes harsh of the sentences.  In written prose, incorrect usage, unless part of a conscious, consistent dialect or personal voice, is disastrous.  An egregious mistake in usage can invalidate a whole story."