The Intern's Handbook Review

I recently finished The Intern's Handbook by Shane Kuhn.  I think this one was recommended to me by Goodreads in one of their monthly e-mails about what was coming out that month, the interesting synopsis got it added to the To Read list.

In this one, assassins pose as interns in prestigious companies in order to kill executives.  The idea is that interns are invisible.  They work right under everyone's nose and no one remembers their name.  At the same time, they can gain all kinds of access by doing work vitally necessary for the functioning of the company but so boring and tedious that no one getting paid wants to do it.

It's presented as a kind of handbook with rules and tips, written by John, an assassin about to retire, for newbie assassins to read.  Instead of just a series of rules, he walks the newbies through his last assignment, pointing out rules as necessary.  So it ends up being like a memoir, where we get the story of his last job and the story of his life.  Meanwhile, there is a second framing device where this handbook has been intercepted by the FBI and is being sent to field agents.

I've gone full cycle with this one.  I had a lot of fun during the six or so hours it took me to read it.  But when I was done and started thinking about it, it stopped making any sense at all.  Then I started to think that maaaaybe this weirdness was intentional.

Let's start with the plot holes.  Why, once John has continuously screwed up the super important job and proved himself untrustworthy, does his boss insist that (even though he'd usually kill him) John can't be replaced mid job, even though the job was switching to phase two and it would have been a perfect opportunity to change guys? Why would the FBI agent offer to help John find his father, and how did John manage to give her enough information to do that without blowing his cover?  Just.  What?  As I was reading, I assumed this was hand-wavy on the part of the author to keep the plot chugging along.  I rolled my eyes and moved on.  Towards the end of the novel, it turned out that most of these plot holes were holes in the narrative to manipulate John.  People were lying to him and even in the world of the novel this doesn't make sense.  That meant the author had covered himself, filling in his own plot holes.  But then...John's supposed to be the best.  If I picked up that something was screwy, why didn't he? 

Then John consistently breaks his own rules, screwing himself over in the process and repeatedly messing up the job.  There's many examples, but let's stick with the big rule: to stay unnoticed.  That's the premise of the book.  He breaks it almost immediately and then keeps breaking it throughout the book.  He contradicts himself in other ways too.  For example, he says that his early development has made him incapable of having feelings or strong emotions, which makes him such a good assassin.  But then he gets downright tearful at least twice. 

Then I start to wonder.  Who is this handbook even for?  By the time the book is over, the newbie assassins would have heard of him and how he completely bungled this job.  He even embarrasses himself in front of them at one point in the story.  Does he actually expect these people to read his memoir when he sends it to them?  

And this is where things almost start making sense again, because Yes.  Yes, he does.

He's so deluded that he thinks people will want to read his crazy manifesto.  He doesn't realize that he actually does have emotions or that that contradicts anything he's said.  He thinks he's the best of the best, even after missing giant red flags and screwing things up over and over.  

That's part of what this book does really well.  Every now and then there are transcripts provided by the FBI.  Afterwards, it will go back to the handbook, where John will summarize the conversation in a way that it most definitely did not go down.  Some conversations he won't mention at all.  It's clear that he is completely full of shit.

The FBI part comes through in another way too.  John addresses the junior assassins several times with the second person "you."  However, the stuff he says does not describe me at all.  It throws the reader out of the narrative, but then the FBI framework catches the reader as they're thrown out.  John's not talking to me.  He's talking to newbie assassins and I'm listening in.  It sets up a sense of voyeurism that works remarkably well.

So, it was really hard to tell how much was intentional and how much was me trying to reason through this one.  I'm going to go with that it was intentional, because I don't like giving bad reviews.

NaNo Update Week 2

Things are still going well.  Being forgiving of myself is still working very well.  I've realized that if I get to 30,000 words this month, I'll have felt accomplished.  This is 1,000 words a day, which is completely doable if I have an hour to myself. It also means I'm right on track.  The outline is also still working well.  I'm about to finish two pages of an eight page outline.  So that means if I stay at this pace, I'll get it done the end of December (or middle of January with traveling for the holidays).  Writing on my phone has gotten better over the last few days, but it's still not ideal and I've found that I'm much less likely to be in the mood to write on my phone than I am likely to be in the mood to write at night when I'm tired.

I'm not sure how well being motivated is work for me.  This is unexpected since I figured being excited to write is always a good thing.  Turns out it's a good thing when I can scrounge up the time to write.  But if I can't find the time, the excitement starts to bubble into an itch--a build up of creative energy without an outlet.  And then it turns into guilt.  I really could do the full 1,667 words if I would just suck it up and stay up another half hour.  Or Why am I not writing on my phone right now?  This is precious time that I'm wasting, even if I would have to spend it with a tiny key board.  So it's turned into a war between being motivated and being forgiving.  Thankfully, the forgiveness is winning so far.

On Thursday, I took the baby to a write-in at the Edgewater Workbench, which is a workshop for artist.  It smells pleasantly of wood shavings and hot glue.  It was a really low key affair, just my friend, Jim, and the two people that own the shop.  The baby and I came in, made introductions, and caught up a bit.  The baby sat in his sling, staring at the 3D printer as it jerked back and forth.  With the first onset of fussiness, I turned him around to sit in my lap where he could use his distracting cartoon eyes to stare at Jim.  Then Pooh Bear came out.  Pooh Bear makes more jingling noises than Jim and was more readily accessible for gnawing, and was therefore far more interesting.  Then we were out of distractions and, with the next wave of fussiness, had to leave.  I clocked our write-in time at 45 minutes.

Jim apologized that it wasn't more productive, which confused me because that was the longest I'd been able to sit and write in weeks despite the distractions of catching up with Jim and asking the baby, "What do you see?  Yeah, that 3D printer's pretty cool."  I also met about half my word goal for the day.  I wasn't upset at all, and I felt accomplished rather than regretful or itchy.

Oh how my life has changed.

We ended up getting a shout out on NaNoWriPod.  I feel famous.

Jim pointed out that I do this weird thing with NaNo where I'll stick with the project and finish off the draft after November, then go back and edit it.  It's been kicking around in the background of these posts, but I've never explicitly stated that that's one of my NaNo goals.  This doesn't end in November.  It starts in November.





 

Wool Review

I recently finished Wool by Hugh Howey, as recommended to me by my friend Eric.  Eric has earned himself a gold star.

This is a series of scifi novellas about a society that lives in an underground silo.  At the top of the silo, there's a jumbotron that shows continuous footage of what it's like outside.  As this is post-apocalyptic, it's pretty bleak, which generally keeps people from wanting to leave.  The acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you get the image of barren desert all gunky over time.  So if anyone starts spouting crazy talk about wanting to go outside, they get sent out to clean the cameras for the jumbotron, and then promptly die of acid and sand and radiation or what-have-you.  The mystery is: why does every person sent to their death--every single one throughout silo history--clean the cameras?  What's in it for them?  It's bonkers!

I really enjoyed this one  The five novellas all together were about 500 pages, but it was a page turner and I went through it in about three days.  The chapters are short and end on cliffhangers involving ghostly people running around in the dark or running out of oxygen while submerged underwater in a hand made scuba suit...okay, I feel like I'm not selling it very well, but I was having trouble sleeping and this did not help.

I cared about all the characters.  The main character shifts for each of the first three novellas (Holston, Jahns, then Jules), then jumps around between several characters for the fourth and fifth.  I didn't slow down enough to remember that this is something I usually don't like, and didn't stop to think about it until I was done.  I usually get attached to characters and then get irritated when I don't hear about them anymore and have to start from scratch to forge a new relationship with a new character.  But here I think it worked for a few reasons.  First, the next point of view character was introduced in the preceding story, and not only introduced, but I was made to like them before the shift.  During Holston's story, I got to appreciate Jahns, and during Jahns' story I got to appreciate Jules.  So I wasn't really starting from scratch each time.  Secondly, when the point of view shifts in the second and third novellas, I felt content with Holston and Jahns' stories.  Their stories were over and I was okay with moving on from them.

I also thought the world was cool.  The silo is a self contained world with farms, water treatment, recycling, shops, schools, apartments, doctors, judges, security guards, a power plant, an IT department.  It's 144 floors, connected by a huge central spiraling staircase, and to get from one place to another, you have to hike up and down the stairs.  If this sounds really inconvenient, that's because it is.  It was designed that way.  The visual is just so cool, and it acts as both a setting and a physical barrier against anything the characters try to get done.

Compelling characters, exciting world building, and dystopian intrigue.  Fun times.

NaNo Week One Update

I'm one week into National Novel Writing Month, so this is a good time to do an assessment of how I'm doing. 

Quantitative assesments are pretty easy for Nano, what with all the graphs and stats they give to show word count.  But one of the steps of my four step plan of attack for this year is to be compassionate and forgiving to myself.  I'm making progress.  I made an effort.  So way to go me!  Great job! 

I'm kind of impressed that this is working so well.  I don't feel horribly guilty for how far behind I am or how horribly awful my product is, and I don't feel frustrated with my life and my family and my writing.  That's better than some of my non-Nano months.

Planning ahead of time has also worked out surprisingly well so far.  Every time I sit down to write, I check my outline, and I can see exactly what I'm going to write for the next half hour.  I've gone into my outline a few times to make some additions--little things that became clearer as I was writing--but I haven't made any drastic changes and no changes to anything I've already written.  The research I did before hand also helped, but not in that it's all done and usable now.  It's helping more because I did my research and then told myself I was done for November, and now when new things crop up that I didn't realize I would need to investigate, I'm SOL because research time is over.  Again, I'm kind of baffled that I've been able to let it go.  That's not like me.  But then again,iIt helps that I'm so strapped for time that there's just no way I'm going to manage to fool around on Wikipedia for ten minutes.  And by ten minutes, I mean an hour.

What's interesting is I think this is the closest I've ever been to doing Nano as the Official Nano Gods intended.  In previous years, I've had hours every day to write, so I've polished as I went along, taking my time to make the tone and the meter work for me, going back to incorporate my blossoming ideas.  But this year I have maybe a half hour before the baby wakes up and decides that he can't be in this coffee place for one more second, or before my husband comes into the bedroom where I've set up my laptop and closed the door for the illusion of an effective work space and says, "I've got a hungry baby!"  There is no editing.  There is no staring off into space to find the perfect phrasing.  There is just a mad dash to get as much down as I can.  There's just the cycle of setting Write or Die for 500 words for 30 minutes, then vomiting up sentences so the screen doesn't turn red.  Sometimes they're sentences.  Sometimes I don't even manage that.

It's by far the worst first draft I've ever written. 

It's just awful.  When I edit this thing in January, it's going to be a mess.  A painful, frustrating mess.  I'm going to have to relive this horror--or live it for the first time because right now I'm not even giving it the time to settle.  Tone, diction, exposition, epic dullness. You name it and it's a problem.  Today I wrote, "There was a fire metaphor in there somewhere, but he couldn't think of it," and then I wrote two hundred more words of equally stupid garbage.  It would be embarrassing if anyone read it, which they will over my dead body after they've figured out my laptop password and puzzled through which Untitled Document is the one I've updated most recently.

Bird by Bird Review

I just finished Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  This is a book full of writing advice recommended to me by some folks in my writing group.

Lamott says to make a shitty first draft.  No one will ever see it.  It can be sentimental and nonsensical and self-involved.  It's shittiness is okay because you can change it later.  I've heard this advice all over the place, that you should just vomit out whatever you're thinking and fix it later.  It's the cornerstone of National Novel Writing Month.  I happen to be writing the shittiest first draft ever to hide on Google Docs, so this advice pleases me.

She advises is to give yourself short, doable writing assignments.  She says you should write only what fits in a 1" by 1" picture frame.  My writing group tends to think this is weird when I talk about doing it.  Although, I talk about it differently.  While Lamott talks about just describing the kitchen or just writing how warm the sun feels, I make to do lists of a bunch o tiny things that need to get done.  This is usually when I'm editing.  "Figure out what that word is that means you're writing something that only you will enjoy and no one else will be interested.  'Self-involved' isn't quite right."  Or "Fix awkward sentence on page 84."  Or "This description of the sun is not singing like I'd like.  Try again."  So mine are almost always more about editing rather than writing, and therefore only fits in a 1" by 1" frame if the frame is even more metaphorical than the one she talks about.

She says to keep a flock of index cards all over the house so you can write down your ideas as they come to you.  This doesn't work for me at all, because I need to be obsessively organized or nothing.  I can't just have drifts of note cards floating around my house.  But then she talked about how it's not really having the note card and seeing it later that reminds you of the idea.  It's the act of writing the idea down on a note card that cements the idea in your mind.  This I can get behind.  I tell my students to do this all the time.  It works great for kinesthetic learners.  "It doesn't matter if you never come back to your notes, take them anyway."  And "The real purpose of a crib sheet is to make it, because making it makes you study all the material." 

So, as with all other books and all other advice, take what you can use and just leave the rest behind.

Two things she said and one thing she didn't say really stood out for me.

First, she talked about how her writing students would always ask her where to start and she would say something like "Write everything you remember about Kindergarten!" or "Write about school lunches!" and her students would be upset because that's completely random and not something they want to write about or not related to their big project.  But her point was that it gets you writing, and as you're writing some idea will pop up and that will strike you as what you want to write about.  Yes!  Exactly!  This is what I'm talking about with writing prompts and bingo prompts.  It's not really about the prompt.  It's about getting yourself moving until the story starts revealing things to you, until you circle around in the writing prompt you're doing to really writing for your big project. 

Second, she talked about radio station KFKD (K Fucked) that plays in your head while you're writing.  It tells you how awful you are.  Yes!  This!  This happens to me and this name is fantastic and I will forever refer to it as such.

Finally, every chapter in this book is kind of a piece of writing advice, kind of a personal story that relates in a subtle, interesting way to the piece of writing advice, because--after all--this is instructions on writing and life.  I've been thinking lately that this blog is just stupid.  It's full of itself and no one cares and I'm not saying anything thought out or new or eloquent or remotely researched.  And reading this I thought, "This is what I need to be doing."  I need to tell a story, which I think is actually something I've said before that I ought to be doing on this blog.  That's ringing a bell now. 

The part of me that has all this pent up creative energy with no outlet says, "Yes!  I want to do that.  That sounds great!  That will fix all my problems and make me a better writer and it'll be fun."

Then the part of me that lives in reality says, "But if I do that, I'll actually have to put some work into my posts.  I don't have time for that.  I barely have time for NaNo and showering.  I'll have to write a shitty first draft and edit and everything."

So now it's on my list of "Things I'll Do when I'm a Full Time Writer Again" where it will probably stay for a while.

The Magicians

I just finished reading The Magicians by Lev Grossman.

This book was recommended to me as "Harry Potter for grownups," which turns out to be an accurate description.  In it, Quentin, an overly intelligent guy who's constantly depressed because he's waiting for his real life to begin, for the big adventure that's going to make his life worthwhile, goes to a secret college for magicians.

From the outset, it seems that just the idea of going to a secret magic school and entering the hidden community of the magicians would make it like Harry Potter, and the inclusion of swearing, sex, and violence would make it for adults.  But there's more to it than that.  The way in which the magical world is presented echoes the prose in Harry Potter.  Details of the magical world are presented simply as existing, then there is a line about how the students feel about it or the subtle effect it has on their lives, and then the detail is never mentioned again*.  The difference is that in The Magicians, the students' response is some variant of "Ugh.  Fuck that."

"Quentin spent very little time in the Brakebills library.  Hardly anybody did if they could help it.  Visiting scholars had been so aggressive over the centuries in casting locator spells to find the books they wanted, and spells of concealment to hide those same books from rival scholars, that the entire area was more or less opaque to magic, like a palimpsest that has been scribbled on over and over, past the point of legibility."

The fact that little details like this are never mentioned again in a way makes the culture and traditions and history alive and immersive.  The characters take them for granted almost as part of the scenery, which makes the world feel lived in.

*Of course, in the Harry Potter books no detail is safe from being a major plot point later.  But in order for these details' importance to stay a surprise, they have to be buried in a bunch of other details that are unimportant or they'd be too obvious.

The Magicians extends this treatment of details to descriptions of characters.  The descriptions are minimal and focus more on Quentin's response that the color of each character's eyes and hair and nose shape.  This is something I love to read and love to write, even though I should do it more often than I do.

"Because he was plump and red-faced he looked like he should be jolly and easygoing, but in actuality he was turning out to be kind of a hard-ass."

The other thing I was really taken with was Lev Grossman's ability to tell the story of a series of books that the characters in The Magicians have read.  The series is called "Fillory and Further" and are basically a fictionalized Chronicles of Narnia.  A family of children visit the magical land of Fillory through a magic portal and there become kings and queens and talk to horses and rabbits before being send home by a pair of ram gods.  The exposition of the plots of these books are interwoven into the plot of The Magicians with exceptional skill.  Quentin loves these books, and so their plots and characters are presented in a similar way to the details I've already mentioned.  Quentin knows these books backwards and forwards and doesn't need to stop and explain.  He thinks about them often and he thinks about them well before they're needed in the plot of The Magicians.  It's cool.

So the Magicians and Harry Potter present the magical world in similar ways, but The Magicians is for adults because of the themes it explores.  Where Harry becomes an angsty teen, Quentin becomes a depressed man who has no one to understand his genius and his beautiful ennui (especially not women who could never understand him).  Where in Harry Potter, his life changes to what it's meant to be when Harry goes to Hogwarts, Quentin is still waiting for something better when he goes to magic school, he's still waiting even after he's graduated.  While in Harry Potter, bad people use bad magic and all the magic the good guys use is good and useful and harmless, The Magicians has a running theme that magic is dangerous and corrupting in how much power it gives to users.  It lets them live lives of excessive luxury where they lose themselves.  It lets them cause horrible accidents that get people killed and disrupt the boundaries between worlds.

"Just thinking about that place now gives me the howling fantods.  They're just kids, Quentin!  With all that power!...It's amazing that place is still standing."

Too Many Concepts in the Kitchen

Last week when I made my outline, it turned funny pretty quickly and I started thinking about this blog post.  Thankfully, I've made some breakthroughs since then and I get to ultimately talk about those.

A while back, I had a premise that was not enough to support a whole novel.  Then I had another idea, and again not for lack of trying) I couldn't extend it into a novel.  Maybe a short story.  Or a song.  And THEN I had a third idea for a novel that I probably could have written, but it turned boring what with being so flimsy and I lost interest.  Even after weeks spent flushing out motivations and back stories, side characters and wold building, these ideas stayed skeletal.  I had a surplus of ideas and I kept shifting them to the back burner in hopes one day a brainwave would strike to flush out one of them.

And a brainwave I got: what if I rolled them all together into one story?  Ben from story 3 replaces Hank in story 1, changing his motivations and changing his name to Trip.  Hank from story 1 then becomes a side character named Ben.  The guy from story 2 gets genderbent and the little girl from stories 2 and 3 get melded together.  Then I do all the plots at once.  Now that's a story!

I'm sure you will spot the problem I ran into faster than I did.

The first thing I did while outlining was to make a chart, diagramming the story strands, giving each storyline its own color of gel pen, putting each in order, then grouping them with events from other storylines that happen at the same time.

This is madness.  Cthulhu wrote this.

It was at this point that I realized that I had five stories going at the same time and aside from being a logistical mess, they felt wholly separate from each other. Each story arc happened to the same characters at the same time, but they had little effect on one another.  One had a mythical monster; one had a serial killer.  Even if I wrote it all in the same book, it wouldn't be one story.

I actually didn't set out to fix this immediately.  

I set out to fix a list of plot holes and things I hadn't settled yet.  Why is the plot line about the curse even happening?  Why would the serial killer show up at the climax?  Big problems, but almost expected at this early stage.

My breakthrough was this: I started fixing these plot holes using the other plotlines.  Why is he cursed?  Because a mythical monster hates him.  Things got knotted together.  Then things got streamlined.  The little girl(s) became a dog.  A big chunk of the serial murder story (including the woman who was the serial killer) got scrapped and replaced with "that guy from another plotline did it."  

Furthermore, while thinking about these plot holes, I started to see thematic similarities across story arcs.  This makes sense as I came up with all these concepts during the same period of my life.  These similarities could be expanded upon to bind them tighter.  Then I thought about the tone, how the main character is purposefully taking on too many things in order to stay busy and distract himself.  So I can use that chaotic feeling of jumping from one issue to the next to drive that home before the plotlines start interweaving.

In short, all the different branches of a story have to support one another.  They can't just come together, but they have to work together like a great sport team or the members of an orchestra.  I think I've got this in good shape, or at least in good enough shape that I can work on it.