James Scott Bell’s “Write your novel from the middle”

(from the perspective of having a completed draft)

The premise is that we can find at the center of a novel’s manuscript a scene that defines what the story is all about. And within that scene there is often a particular moment that brings theme, plot, and character into focus, sometimes as bright and faceted as a diamond. Bell calls it a “look in the mirror moment.” His examples help explain what he means, and they are convincing.

It is this center moment that, during revision, a writer can rewrite towards or away from, before and after. It is a fulcrum point, the center nougat of the candy. Which is why Bell’s book is of considerable value to a novelist stuck in the throes of a long revision, unable to fix the path from page one to The End. Bell’s little secret finds the heart, if indeed it’s there. I don’t imagine any author consciously produces a mid-point that represents his entire book. It just happens. Bell uses the term magic.

I was surprised as hell to find the middle moment in my own comparatively unstructured draft. I divided the page count by two and there it was, obvious and lucid – my book’s thematic moment. Not perfect and absolute but pretty damn close. This was inspiring to say the least, as some sort of wizardry affirmation that my book does have a heart. This discovery has been very helpful in the surrounding revisions before and after that point. For this magic trick, I’d buy Mr. Bell a drink if I ever ran into him.

Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons, by Herbert Warren Wind

What’s a golf book doing among the rest of these literary books? Because it has stylized, lofty, quirky writing. It’s the most interesting and entertaining book about how to swing a golf club that I ever read.

Herbert Warren Wind was a sportswriter, of golf primarily. He wrote for Sports Illustrated a while and for The New Yorker for several decades. He lived to nearly 90 and died in 2005. The Hogan book came out in 1957.

It is the most famous golf instruction book ever produced. Many golf books after it are repackaged derivatives. The language is formal and wordy and over-wrought. Half Eisenhower didactic and half Victorian ornate. The info is still there.

Hogan said he actually meant to understate his golf tips and allow the readers to study and learn by implication. The aha! moments would make them better golfers. The dense eloquence of Wind’s stern and repetitive instructions makes this difficult. But the advice is there, ready to be mined and refined. There are subtleties if one looks for them. The expert drawings by Tony Ravielli help make the book succeed.

Some examples of Wind’s eccentric writing style (based on Hogan’s SME input, of course):

“It may seem that we have gone into unwarranted detail about the elements of the correct grip. This is anything but the case. Too often golfers mistake the generality for the detail.”

“While it is dynamically important for a golfer not to depart from his plane at any time during the second part of his swing, being consciously attentive to it does not help him the way a consciousness of his backswing plane promotes a fine, functional backswing.”

“Interestingly enough, drinking some ginger ale, because of its effect on the kidneys, seems to prevent the hands from feeling too fat and puffy.”

“Consciously trying to control the face of the club at impact is folly. You cannot time such a delicate and devillish thing.”

“Don’t groove your waggles.”

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

The wisdom and knowledge in Forster’s essays are revealed in direct proportion to the reader’s experience as a novelist.

Published in 1927, it is definitely not a book of quick-reference tenets set in boldface font, like we see in contemporary writing guides. Forster’s aspects are just that: aspects or features employed in famous novels that can be perceived and patiently considered, even modeled, by the growingly astute (and eventually graying) reader-slash-writer.

The range goes from what is story to the necessary ingredients, such as the required vitality of rounded characters and their expression through actions, to the intent of the whole and its weight by design. We get a few instructive gems along the way:

“The king died, and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

Consider what Forster discusses in the “rhythm” of a novel. Similar to the repeating “dididdy dum” of Beethoven’s Fifth, prose can have a recurring beat (cf. Kerouac and jazz). In masterwork novels, deeper rhythms are also at play and harder to recognize. These are persisting images or actions that play to our cognizance of theme, like symphonic leitmotifs in language. Proust, as shown in an example, does this sort of thing with food and plants and snippets of a sonata, items that are weaved into the overall product as touch-points to something resonant and more centrally important – something artfully made familiar to us.

Forster says there are novels of fantasy and novels of prophecy, and the second is higher in his regard because it addresses universal themes and reaches mythic proportions. His commentary and examples are intriguing, He invites us to read the great books and brings them alive by argument and illustration.

Forster dishes about major novels of his time and some prior to, including Emily Bronte and Wuthering Heights with a brooding milieu that is itself the ultimate mythic character; Joyce’s Ulysses (he calls it mud-slinging at traditional novel values); DH Lawrence (gets his high esteem as “prophecy” writing); character Scheherazade (the ideal story presenter using cause and effect plus suspense); George Eliot (grand, but valued more by quantity than artfulness); Melville (immense and grand, and the novel Moby Dick is a whaling yarn sandwiched by poetry).

By book’s end we have taken a survey course on Essentials of a Novel and can re-join Forster’s class and learn more on each annual visit. Provided we re-read carefuly and study in light of our own writing. His afterword contains anxiety about the future of the form, which of course still exists nearly ninety years later. Maybe the ongoing strength and perpetuity of the novel is due to on-going honor paid to many of the aspects described. Forster’s documentation is therefore, among other virtues, heroic.

Mosley’s Added Lesson about Fiction Narrative

From Walter Mosley’s writing handbook, it’s an exercise ostensibly to get rid of flat prose or to create something out of nothing. Mosley doesn’t like non-contributing sentences. It’s the only specific workshop type of lesson he includes in his book. It’s subtle. At first I wasn’t sure where he meant us to go. Then I did. It has power and nuance, this lesson of his.

Example of flaccid prose Mosley presents:

I went to the store and bought a dozen apples. After that I came home and decided to call Marion. She told me that she was busy and so she couldn’t make it to the dance.

Exercise Mosley proposes: “…Take these three sentences and turn them into something more. Consider the character who is speaking, the potential drama behind Marion’s reason for not going to the dance, the missing details, and the misconnections. From this, make the lines into some kind of beginning for a novel. Don’t write more than a page. Pretend that it was written by some writer friend who wants to tell a story but is lost somehow.”

(from p. 92 “This Year You Write Your Novel,” Walter Mosley, Little Brown, 2009)

Raymond Chandler – Selected Anthology

Venerable black-cover anthology from Library of America. I’m not much on detective stories and mysteries and have a low threshold. I always return to it because Chandler was such a terrific writer.

I keep going back to read “Red Wind.” Not for the story as much as Chandler’s writing style, especially in the opening scene. As with most of Chandler’s stuff, there are clever, memorable lines and a succinct presentation of California ambience surrounding the characters.

Some of Chandler’s narrative tone can sound dated now, co-opted and twisted by years of TV detective shows and b-grade movies. Chandler is much better than that sort of tough-guy stuff. He was an artist, not merely someone who produced pot boilers. The guy could crank out great sentences and imagery. His narrative talent is legend among California’s struggling writer types, so a West Coast correspondent informed me. Chandler is someone to emulate on the path to a movie script.

Of the shorter pieces in the collection, I think the best is “Spanish Blood.” It has all the right ingredients of a short story and is more straight-ahead and satisfying. It’s not so puzzling and convoluted like the majority of mystery stories tend to be.

Ben Lerner’s “Leaving the Atocha Station”

It’s a druggy and brooding account of a young man’s experiences abroad. Our narrator in Madrid is an insecure poetry scholar away from home with an at&t calling card and an unease about his conversational Spanish abilities. He’s also a pothead, as evidenced in his vivid and introspective descriptions of getting high in strange places and vice versa. A trick in parts of the storytelling is the narrator’s concern about language, which enables him to zig-zag and restate phrases as if trying to interpret the Spanish and present the possibilities of what he hears in English. So there is wiggle room in stating things with precision, a circumstance that suits our intelligent but often stoned-out and shy narrator. As the novel progresses we see he is much better at communicating than he himself believes.

Lerner’s prose can sparkle. For example he has a nice description of the nights typical to many tourists and Madrileños: sidewalks where there is the endless racket of plates and silverware on metal cafe tables, a constant thrumming of traffic, and couples meeting as the city comes alive late at night. The revelers go from bar to bar then to disco then to make-out sessions. At night’s end they share an iced chocolate before going home. The narrator describes the smell of Madrid as “wet stone.”

I’m prejudiced as far as finding keen interest this book. I was a student in Spain long ago myself. Doing drugs at that time (before the country was Westernized and still under Franco’s Guardia Civil grip) was not as prevalent and also very risky business. One of Lermer’s scenes presents a woman who makes gin and tonics “as a Spaniard would,” with a glass of ice filled with gin and a mere splash of mixer. That sounds more like the Spain I visited.

His prose can also nail the elusive aspects and feelings of a relationship, especially when one party (our lead character and narrator) is less than truthful. In fact he makes up some whoppers: dead mom, fascist dad, he’s rich, etc. As the story gets deeper, he has to contend with his own lies. In a terrific stretch of writing he compensates by acting out another lie. Unable to afford it, he takes a girl to an exclusive restaurant and buys everything in sight, then beds with her in a pricey room at the Ritz Hotel. All of the damage is run up on his parents’ credit card. Meanwhile, terrorists have blown apart a train at the Atocha station, and as a result protests are occurring throughout Madrid. While his friends and love interest are participating activists, he is on the sidelines, a self-absorbed lump. He fails romantically with two extraordinarily patient and adorable Spanish women. You want to shake him. His poems are his only grace.

“Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” by Edwin LeFevre

I’ve found no stock trading book as fun to read as this one. Cramer’s first Mad Money book is the only one I’d rate as even partially enjoyable. This one happens to be 100% enjoyable. It’s a novel, a memoir, incidentally a manual, and a bit of philosophy all rolled into one. The narrator is Livingston, a boyhood wonder with a keen memory for figures and an intuitive eye for fluctuations. His career tale is about boom and bust, reputation and ostracism, the constant ups and downs, the cycle of repeats and his need to secure and then raise the stakes. The author LeFevre presents the stock operator’s account in a conversational 1st person voice that is likeable and durable.

This book was written in 1923. Of course the technology and forecasting game has been vastly affected by computer technology, but many of the fundamental rules of playing the market remain the same. The novel presents advice in the context of the story. For example:

“…after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It was never my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!”

It’s a fine novel with an interesting story, even without the aspects of being a lesson book in Market wisdom and attitude. It demonstrates by action as much as it tells. Livingston believes there is nothing the stock market hasn’t already experienced. It’s up to a trader/investor to read the signs and take some risks in order to be a profitable player. The reader will need to be willing to extrapolate in time and find the underlying market dynamics and psychology of traders as applied to Now. This story can make you want to lay out a stake, open a wildcat portfolio, and play the ticker with a Zen sort of knowing recklessness.

Proust “Swann’s Way” & Other Books: Fall Blogarama Complete

A great read, though there were plenty of parts I skimmed. A Proust initiate’s reactions so far….Streaming syntactical parades loaded with the narrator’s sentiment. Dozens of sensory images. The first section involves the recollections of his sleeplessness as a boy, and his persistent attachment to his mother in order to sleep. Raised rich and privileged, boy Marcel’s stuck in his bedroom with a sort of childhood Brian Wilson syndrome. There are lots of food smells and tastes and lots of plants meticulously described. Of course the big deal is the infamous memory-provoking madeleine cake with tea made by the house cook-servant Francoise (cf. old theme of hired help and the dominant power thereof). When boy Marcel turns to fiction, Proust includes some interesting digressions about novels. The comments are erudite and expressed by the author. On returning more specifically to boy Marcel, the author describes the unaffected joy of reading books in one’s youth. It’s Part I in Combray. Towards section’s end, about 150 pages deep, the writing picks up pace and is more engaging. Our narrator has emerged and is an observer of the people around him now, outside his bedroom. There is a lot of content about Legrandin who is emblematic of effeminate and pompous bores. Proust may have set him there to make the appearance of Swann look even better by contrast. The young narrator (I imagine him now as being ten to twelve) expands his horizons and takes long walks away from his aunt Leonie’s property. We learn that there are two walking routes, one of which is the more scenic and interesting – “Swann’s Way.” As he roams, he begins to think of nymphs and women’s bodies. He meets a love object, the strawberry blond daughter of Swann, Gilberte. Mlle Swann is contemptuous of him at this point and gives him an obscene Paris street gesture (which begs for research). Further firing the adolescent fantasies of our narrator is the by-chance sighting of Mlle Viileul meeting with her lesbian lover. Strong stuff for a novel dating back so far. But this is the rich and luxuriant canvas Proust paints of decadent bourgeois France. Near the end of Part 1 we see young Marcel the narrator present us with his first serious attempt at writing, the famous “Three Steeples” scene. When Part 1 ends, he is awakened by the rosy finger of dawn (right out of Homer), and the Combray section ends as if it had been a long night’s sleep ever since the insomnia and Mom’s kiss and the smells of tea and madeleine. Apparently, M. Swann himself has a bad rap for marrying beneath his station to the demimonde Odette, and this is the central story of Marcel’s more omniscient voice narrating Part 2.

At this point, before starting “Swann in Love,” I turned back pages to read the intro by the translator Lydia Davis. It confirmed some things — it let me know I was getting it. My reading had not been that haphazard. Proust is very readable. Brilliant and digressing, with layers of symbology (e.g. plants and flowers, hawthorn for one). At times I skim over passages of the narrator’s vagaries, then a section comes along that pins me word by word to the pages. Davis says to be patient. Everyone has a different reaction to the book. But I’d say anyone who has not read at least 200 pages deep would never understand her intro, much less what Proust is gifting us with.

In Part 2, the superficial relationship between Swann the Dope and Odette the Sponge is grating my nerves. The pretentiously unpretentious circle of friends has set the chapter’s tone, which is flippant and slightly sour. Proust goes metafictional or at least self-author-referential in one passage that describes how one character in the inner circle (the artist) is such a talker and can go on and on and riff on any topic. Really? Meanwhile, the Verdurin crowd’s patience is wearing thin with the Teflon nature of M. Swann who is dodgy and attends not to join the group as a kindred soul but only to play his absurdly transparent love games with Odette. The group sees her as a shapely bundle and a male agitator, and Swann as a stick man with no point of view, and both as lacking keen wit or conversational vigor. We’re told rich Swann’s funds are sinking low as he pays out to “keep” her. It is not clear if he is fucking her, but he is johnny-on-the-spot to both appease and manipulate her. When she goes her own way he falls apart at the seams and sinks into a juvenile state of insecure curiosity and exaggerated concern over losing her. It’s pathetic, of course, but the beauty is in Proust’s command of words to depict Swann’s sorry condition. The section title is now dripping with irony. Swann is in love only with the game of behaving like he’s in love. The reader soon sees Swann’s “cattleya” goo-goo sexual approach and his piano sonata heart-throbbing …all of it is pathos. It remains to be seen how this unfolds. Or crashes. Meanwhile M. Swann is losing ground as Odette has her way with him and keeps him at a distance. The original “I” narrator vanished in Part 2 and became 3rd person narrative god (little Charles/Marcel becomes author Marcel Proust). In the last part of the novel, the “I” voice returns. Young Marcel seems still pre-teen though it isn’t specified, and is a reflection of Swann who he admires and emulates. He develops the same sort of fawning lovesick behavior towards his daughter Gilberte, who in turn is a reflection of her mother Odette (an unhappy surprise…Swann married her) by way of her aloof and cold disdain for the affections of boy Marcel. There is an implication he also has a thing for Odette and can sense her allure even at his early age. These will be topics in Proust’s second volume, In the Shadows of Young Girls in Flower. Not sure I’ll ever go there, but this first volume turned on the lights about a famous writer and the works that I have avoided and kept in the dark for years. A fine revelation and worth the reading effort.

SIDEKICKS (novels also stacked by bedside for longterm reading, and only parts have been read so far. Maybe will split out into their own reports later)

“Our Mutual Friend,” Dickens’ last novel. Dark. More oblique and complex than his name novels. Opens at night with rival boats dragging for a body in the river. Gritty characterization of people in London the poor family kids, the dust heap hustlers, the wealthy consumer-conformists, greedy counselors and venal inheritance seekers, strange street dudes and informational posers of all varieties. Not far in, we get Twemlow the human furniture piece and the funny Veneerings who are as superficial as their name sounds.

“Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry’s writing in this one is like rodeo-talk mixed with the campy voice of “Dodge Ram tough.” Events can sometimes be absolutely trifling. But when the author shifts to events of more substance the writing comes with an accomplished ease. McMurtry’s material can be both banal and sublime, but he is always skilled and literate. There is no short-changing. He gives us honest prose. Enormous writing energy is required to create scene after scene over 700 pages, weaving the motives and desires of characters, making them vivid, and placing them in a setting and milieu that we can see and experience. Larry Mc is getting up there now. What a treasure he has been over the years in American fiction.

“Fortunata y Jacinta,” a novel studied in part when a Spanish language student many years ago. My professor hauled me along to an academic seminar at Mary Washington College. A series of speakers read esoteric papers about Benito Perez Galdos. I learned he was long since dead. A strange osmosis took place. My Florida novel has two Spanish-speaking sisters as characters, who I named after Galdos’s dos casadas. Full report on this great novel when I’ve time to read it all, maybe next year.

THREE ULTRA BRIEF REPORTS ON HELP-FOR-WRITERS BOOKS

1. MYSTERIES, edited by Sue Grafton

Collected essays composed by bigtime mystery authors. The tone sometimes seems self-congratulatory for doing what they do so well. I was surprised to read that their craft is as complex as atomic science, and their writers’ club is quite rigid and exclusive. Careful reading will reveal some practices helpful to us serfs and hacks out here who would dare now to even try after reading these bits of advice from on high. I put it in the trashcan, sorry.

2. MANUSCRIPT MAKEOVER by Elizabeth Lyon

Pretty good. Lots of padding but has useful sections with solid, conventional advice. Well written and practical, not meant as rah-rah. For the lack of rah-rah I give it a big rah.

3. Several short sentences about writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg

Readable and re-readable for life, a sort of Dhammapada handbook for good mechanics and fundamentally healthy attitudes about writing. Looking at it from fresh angles. Five stars. Where did this guy come from?

On the Road (the movie)

Expecting some other mood to the presentation, I was distracted during the first half. The screenplay emphasis is on free beatnik love, I suppose. Anyone with everyone, we get it. After repeated scenes like “Dean does Denver” the movie was beginning to seem like the Kristen Stewart SkinFlick Hour. It sells tickets, they say. And there’s no doubt she is nice looking.

I wondered why the opening half didn’t have more emphasis on Sal (Kerouac) the writer and his paradoxical visions of beauty and anguish, of life and the American culture, the countryside and its soul. Instead we get endless cigarettes and a repetitious display of Dean’s (Neal Cassady’s) fancy for nose inhalers. They gave us bebop music scenes but that was only one facet of Beat. Beat was about absorbing everything, living in the moment, not just Dean’s capacity for getting laid.

I’ve read the book more than twice, and never saw in it things the director included. I barely remember reading parts about Jack’s mom, and the movie showed her several times. The movie says Sal met Dean “after his father died” which is conveniently inconsistent with the book, in which Sal meets Dean right after Sal and his wife have split up.

OTR has no real compelling storyline. It must have driven the screenwriters crazy. Other parts are great: the visuals, the editing, the building interest in the guys as they journeyed through their passages. Good actors appear in bit parts. When Jack K’s writing was quoted, those narrations raised the hair on the back of my neck. The Ginsberg quotes did the same.

Once Dean’s unhappy wives leave the script, the movie improves. The road scenes are good, the William Burroughs scenes are vivid, and the Mexico sequence artfully depicts a drunken nightmare of a trip. From that point, the novel (slash movie) hits its stride and pushes to a conclusion. At the end I felt like I had watched a movie of some merit, and one Francis Ford Coppola’s name is rightfully attached to.

Note on casting….the actor who played Sal didn’t look like Kerouac, but more like Rory McElroy.

SHORT SUMMER VISIT With SARTRE’s FICTION

Maybe we innately know what “existential” means and have even lived it, and can recognize its flavor and themes in works of fiction. Yet it’s not easy to have an on-the-ready, cogent definition. Reading Sartre’s fiction pieces did not, unfortunately, help me come up with one.

I did admire the stark writing and wandering investigations into the meaning of reality. As in Camus, hefty ideas are conveyed by scenes that provoke layered, individually selective (or random) reactions.

There is helpful information in the scholarly prefaces to Sartre’s stories. It’s a philosophy, after all. And one that concerns meaninglessness and superfluity. What the hell, it’s all madness, so how do we proceed sort of stuff.

My friend Tom Weathers has a scene in his novel Redux where two characters discuss its meaning over a meal. It’s as handy as anything I’ve read:

“…in the modern books that I read, I keep running across existentialism – you know, the French thing.” He looked at me to see if I knew what he was talking about.

I ate my last piece of pork chop. Pointing with my fork at his plate which he hadn’t touched, I said, “Yeah I know what existentialism is. But if you’re going to stay here it’s going to cost you. I want your pork chop.”

“Sure. OK.” He slid his tray and plate in my direction. “The thing is, none of the explanations that I read make sense. What does it mean, existence precedes essence? Everybody just assumes you know what they are talking about – but I don’t. It seems important, like if I don’t know this then I won’t know the rest, you know what I mean?”

He looked at me. I nodded and ate his pork chop.

“So can you tell me?”

“What existentialism means?”

“Yes.” He really seemed desperate.

I paused, knowing that I would sound pompous. “It means there is no built-in meaning to anything. There is no God-given truth. It all comes from you, from your own miserable little existence. You make your own truth.”

© Tom Weathers, “Redux” 2009.

wall

Nausea is a novel. The main character is a writer who is conflicted and unhappy. He experiences physical nausea over his heightened sense of the futility of things. He has unusual friends like Self Taught Man who acts as a sounding board for ideas, and also a female interest named Anny.

The Wall is a collection of five short stories. Some are straight-forward and amusing, some dark and dense. “Intimacy” was my favorite. It is about relationships and arbitrary preferences. The title story (Le Mur) is about a prisoner’s fate. There is random meaninglessness in the character’s avoidance of execution and the doom of another.

-wpm

Carver’s “What We Talk About” Stories

It’s superstitious, but for fear of disappointment I don’t want to read another Carver collection. This one, which I like to re-read every year, is totally satisfying. What other Carver book can match up? What’ll it give me extra? Like ordering two filet mignons, well maybe, or dessert and more wine but why?

This is the style and tenor that launched hundreds of national writing classes and made Carver the number one honcho at U. Iowa Workshop. Among its many attributes, the book is instructive, even to those of us who’ve been writing for decades. To some, the prose is too lean on the bone. It is and it isn’t. It defines the fat without having to add it.

Carver was famous, a Jim Morrison of the short story revolution. He wrote in an economy and impact unseen in fifty years since the salad days of Hemingway in Paris. Carver knew about Papa’s iceberg theory and the power of omission.

I don’t know what else to say. Other than, if you write you should read and study this. Put in on your top shelf with Joyce’s “Dubliners” and Hem’s “Complete Stories.” Bring in another modern and post-modern or two for balance: maybe the Barthelme’s, or Jennifer Egan, Joy Williams, or the highly underrated Richard Brautigan or good ole Elmore Leonard. The Carver book teaches writing and reading and inspires both.