A Gentlemn in Moscow's Achilles Heel

I’m in the midst of reading A Gentleman In Moscow by Amor Towles and for the most part like it. He creates a version of Soviet era Moscow that is overly benign, to the point of being cute, and the premise that the protagonist would be confined to house arrest for years if not decades in the finest hotel in Moscow is a bit much.

But he isn’t trying to recreate reality. He’s using a real place and time to pursue an ambience and atmosphere similar to movie director Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. The similarities between the movie and book are fairly stark though not in the stories they tell, largely.

Anyway, what struck me through the first third of the book—and my point—is that Towles displays a significant writer’s Achilles heel. These are issues that all writers have and they consistently pop up in our work almost no matter what we do to get rid of them. In my case it’s the repetition of certain phrases or words such as suddenly, additionally, merely, etc. To help me avoid their overuse I’ve created a list that I add to as I identify additional problematic words and phrases. When I finish a piece of writing I search for these phrases and words and revise to remove them.

Common Achilles heels include overloading sentences and/or paragraphs with too many ideas or concepts so that they are long and unreadable or book and chapter openings that meander as the writer works to find their way.

In Towles’ case, he uses the phrase had been to such a degree that it became hard to read the book. In one paragraph he used had been five times. Ugh. Too much. One would think that his publisher would have noticed this and encouraged him to revise some of these instances, but it didn’t happen.

Obviously, people still love this book and I like it, too. But I had to put it down a few times. The over use of this phrase—as well as passive voice in general—was enough to pull me out of the narrative and show that Towles is an excellent storyteller but relatively new to creative writing. Perhaps he isn’t, but that’s the effect it had.

The Light Between Oceans

I read this after seeing it in my mom’s collection of books—she had good tastes—and thought I’d make a quick note of it.

I liked it, though it is prone to melodrama. But, it does very well one critical thing that I think a lot of writing misses: It tells a very good story. The desire to find out what happens next to these characters and the emotions (empathy for their plight) it pulled from me were true.

It’s a good read that shows the power of simply telling and telling simply a good or great story.

Mom, Books and Regret

My mother passed away recently at age 84 after a long illness. She loved reading, but she did not write. I’m not sure why other than to say that I guess she was never bitten by the bug. Maybe, too, she believed books held a certain magic and if she wrote it would somehow break that magic.

But knowing my mom, she probably didn’t have the time. She loved people—teaching middle schoolers was her perfect job—and always wanted to be around people and engaged in some pursuit, whether it be politics (an ardent Democrat and Quaker, Trump is her antithesis), improving her local library, substitute teaching (everyday after retirement from her job as principal at Westtown, a Quaker school), to singing with the choir at the local Congregational Church (Quakers don’t have choirs).

The exception was reading. I’ve often compared her to a tomato because both thrive on hot, humid weather with lots of sun. When I was a kid, she would lay out on her metal folding lounge chair with a diet Pepsi reading. Then she would talk for hours with her mother and her friends (Kathy, Kit, Robin) about what she and they were reading.

Eventually, I joined her ad hoc book club. I first had to pass through my relatively terrible teen years, but by about age twenty I’d discovered how lovely it was to talk with mom about books.

In her last months, I took care of her. She couldn’t read but she still loved to talk about books and reading. My greatest failing as a son is that I didn’t take more time to read to her. I regret that deeply.

She was surrounded by books in her shared room at the skilled nursing facility as well as photos of her grandchildren (when I asked her what she would like me to say to them she said, “There’s so much I want to say, but that I love each and everyone of you so very much and am proud of you all.”) and many other reminders of how much she was loved.

The day she died, in an emotional state whose color I would say was slate gray, I packed her belongings and brought them to my house. The books, by far, are the heaviest and most numerous items. I didn’t cry that day. I was numb. The next day I saw her favorite sweater among her things, and for the rest of that day my sadness came in deep sobs.

I miss her terribly and so does Kathy, the last of mom’s friends. She called this morning to say that she and mom would have had an open line going during the Michael Cohen hearings today to lament the disaster that is Trump (these are women born during Franklin Roosevelt, lived though Eisenhower as kids, became adults and parents with Kennedy then Johnson, sobbed at the loss of Bobby Kennedy, knew Nixon was a crook and deeply admired Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama) and just talk, deeply, laughing, about life and stories and in ways that only they could understand.

“Where did she go, Jamie,” she asked rhetorically but with some seriousness. “There isn’t anyone else I know who just gets it, who gets me, that I can talk to like that.”

The things I would do or trade for just ten minutes with her. One more chance to read to her and talk about stories.

The Orchard: A Memoir

It is hard for me to fathom that I have not yet used a blog post to recommend (very highly) a book that I have loved for many years.

The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson (not to be confused with a book by the same name) is beautiful. What more could I say? It will teach you more about great writing than anything I or anyone else could say.

The Hyper-Important Top Ten List of Why One Book Fails and Another Succeeds

1. I don’t know.

2. Couldn’t even begin to guess.

3. Scratching my head.

4. What do I know?

5. Beyond me.

6. Well, don’t that beat all.

7. Dunno.

8. Too many adjectives?

9. A conspiracy?

10. I can only guess.

Obviously, with this list I’m being kind of a jerk.

But the point is, it’s hard to say when all things are equal—quality of writing, etc.—why one book can slide through the publishing process and find a large audience when an equally as compelling book can’t even get published or goes unnoticed. There are factors but at the end of the day I absolutely hated (hated) Eat Pray Love. The whole thing was phony, contrived, and narcissistic. And yet, many hundreds of thousands of people loved it and found something in it they couldn’t find anywhere else.

Meanwhile, The Orchard by Adele Crockett Robertson—a stunningly beautiful and meaningful memoir—is virtually unheard of. Why? Couldn’t tell you*. But I would say to anyone: GO READ THE ORCHARD. It truly is an incredible book of beauty that offers more true lessons (and more true sentences) in one paragraph than that other book musters in its entirety.

But what does any of these mean to writers?

Write for love and beauty, write for your reader, and do your best. The business of writing is tough and fickle so love the process.

*Obviously, the publisher for Eat Pray Love wanted to make back their advance—which paid for the author to go on her (hokey and completely inauthentic) trip—so they put a lot of marketing resources behind it whereas the author of The Orchard (actually her daughter) probably didn’t get the same level of backing. So I could ask, why would a publisher pay an author to go on a hokey year-long journey of discovery and then spend on a big marketing push for one book, but not do the same for an incredibly beautiful (and non-hokey narrative journey) book? I have no idea, but it’s a shame.

Real versus Stock Dialogue

I’m working on turning a narrative nonfiction book I wrote into a movie screenplay and as I prepare to write I’ve been going through the manuscript again to identify scenes, set pieces, etc. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed some truly cringe-worthy dialogue moments. Fortunately, not a lot, but enough to identify yet another Achilles heel in my writing.

First lesson learned is that it is really important to give any piece of writing time to cool before going back and editing. These mistakes aren’t mortal to the piece, but now that I’m coming back to it some years later, my perspective is clearer and I can see things that I could’ve improved. I don’t think a writer needs to wait years, it’s more that a writer needs to take enough time away to regain perspective.

The dialogue issue I noticed is subtle. I think. Basically, I want to convey a sense of the emotion of the moment through a character in conversation with another but failed do so in a way that does not create a sensation for me that resembles a skip in a record. The dialogue conveys—without being obvious or overly direct—what I wanted conveyed but as I read it back it feels as if the character isn’t truly speaking to the other person in the conversation.

The feeling is that the character is trying to speak to both the reader and the other character simultaneously, which no character in dialogue should do. Dialogue should be aimed at whomever the person is trying to influence or in conflict with. The reader should—if done properly—easily infer the emotional quality that the writer wants to communicate via the dialogue and contextual circumstances (micro-expressions, prior dialogue, etc.) without getting in the way of the expression.

To fix these instances, I would shorten and tighten the dialogue and do whatever else is required to ensure the dialogue reads true, that it is directed at the other character and not the reader.

After all, the reader and narrator are eavesdropping on the conversation. They are not part of it.

By way of example, consider to two photos below:

Conversation 1

Conversation 2

The first photo feels exactly like what it is, a posed stock photograph where the emotions are too transparent to be real.

The second looks and feels true because it is. And therefore, I find it far more fascinating and artful than the first photo.

To be fair, the second photo is of Willem and Elaine de Kooning from the 1950s, so there already is some interest. But that’s kind of the point. I want my writing to read true, not feel like the stock photo. So anytime I write dialogue—or anything, really—I have to hyper focus on ensuring the needle doesn’t skip for the reader and they feel like I’m creating a staged stock photo as opposed to a real moment that they are eavesdropping on.

To do that with dialogue, the characters must always speak directly to each other. Anything else is staging showing through.

Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

In the fall, I read Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, a beautiful and true story of the West and striving.

But then a few weeks ago I read Crossing to Safety and I was deeply moved, affected, and entertained by this book. It takes place in Wisconsin and Vermont during the middle of the 20th Century. It is, on its surface, the story of two young couples—the men are professors at the same college in the beginning and the women easily their intellectual equals—who fall in love with each other one evening during the last few years of the Great Depression. And it moves on from there to explore the meaning of friendship, marriage/love, and the vagaries and tragedies of life.

I should note that when I say they fall in love, it is a deep friendship not a sharing of spouses or some other bit of sexual intrigue.

And, it feels true.

One note, I did find myself jealous of each couple. They live and breath an intellectual life, principally in academia, which is a life I’ve dreamed of living myself. So, I suppose this story hit a lot of buttons for me.

Theme: Avoid Cliche, Dig Deeper

As with all things writing these days there is a lot online at various writerly websites on the subject of theme.

This isn’t one of those posts.

The definition of theme is quite simple. It is an idea that recurs or pervades in a work of art or literature. Another way to say that, which comes from Websters, is that theme is a specific and distinctive quality, characteristic, or concern [in a piece of creative work].

I thi9nk of it as an idea or question that runs through a piece of written work. For example, when writing about a single survivor of the Holocaust is the theme survival, the Holocaust, struggle, or some similar idea? I think that writers who only take a glancing blow at the theme they are writing on would come up with a list like that. Instead, taking a deeper dive the writer would first ask what is it that would compel a person in a hopeless situation to endure. This writer would then go out and look for that answer and probably learn that it could be because the person has someone whom they love and that loves them that they believe they must live for. A classic example is a mother fighting all odds to live for her children.

But I don’t think that goes deep enough. It rings like cliche because you don’t have to go looking very far to find all sorts of stories where a mother survived for a child or a person survived some ordeal because they believed another person needed them to. Instead, dig a bit deeper. Look for an inobvious truth. Yes, the protagonist is driven to live for the love and needs of another, but they will still encounter hopelessness. What keeps them from laying down and dying?

Do some research and you might find someone who argues that love cannot exist in the presence of despair and that despair cannot live in the presence of love. There is an ever-present battle between love and despair—whether we know it or not—and so the theme can be centered on that battle.

Therefore, your story is an examination of the ebbing and flowing of love versus despair where one is always on the verge of winning out over the other. This theme will then color every scene, bit of dialogue, scenery (scenery is how the character/narrator sees it and is colored by their emotional state), and so on.

Now, if you were to hunt the internet for thematic ideas you will get lists such as this:

Love
Death
Good vs Evil
Coming of Age
Power and Corruption
Survival
Courage and Heroism
Prejudice
Individual vs Society
War

This is really just a list of words. And if you as a writer decide that your story will have a theme of, say, power and corruption, the Bible beat you to it as did everything written by the Greeks and Romans. You’re not being very original and because you aren’t being very original, you are making it harder for you to write a story that moves a reader’s emotions.

You have no connective tissue nor a guiding principle—a north star—to organize your writing around. It makes crafting good dialogue harder as well as good everything harder.

So, do the work. Dig deeper. And then dig deeper again. Find a meaningful and original theme.

Yes, Women Can Shred a Bass

Not that it needs to be proved that women can play at the highest heights, but the video below is an incredible demonstration of how to play the bass.

Goddamn Smart Effing Phone

I'm not sure if I hate my cellphone or my daughter's cellphone more. My cellphone is a complete pain in my ass with its ringing, beeping, and seductive news, weather, and access to limitless distractions. Or my daughter's cellphone that keeps her perpetually connected to social media--nonstop social anxiety, bullying, and limitless ways to feel like you are less than everyone else--and inability to pull the thing from her face.

Fuck you Steve Jobs.

I have said--I think here previously, too--that there will be a booming industry of providing places for people--Millennials, Gen Xers, and whoever the new generation is--to unplug and find out what life was like before the Internet and cellphones. It is amazing to me that there is a generation of digital natives who have no idea what it was like to be bored and go for a walk. Or to have to go find a person to hang out rather than use an ap. Or simply not have this expensive, hurtful tether attached to you that requires constant tending.

Anyone want to invest?

So, then I saw the drawings above and below and thought I'd share them.

Pawel Kuczynski

Writers Need At Least Four Cats

This is why writers need at least four cats. And, they don't need to be walked.

Edward Gorey with cats

Jules Renard on How to be a Great Writer

In 1887, Jules Renard wrote the following in his journal:

"Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they swear, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses--the ones who toil eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort."

It is amazing to me that the book, the written word remains as powerful as ever, as does the draw of being a writer, and yet the advice of how to succeed has not changed in one hundred thirty years. It is a matter of doing the work. Just do the work.

Cat Person and the Dormant Power of the Short Story

I am not writing about the meaning of the short story Cat Person by Kristen Roupenian published in The New Yorker. Nor will I discuss its quality of story or writing.

Why?

I haven't read it yet. I will tonight and then probably write something tomorrow.

So, why write something now?

Because for the first time in a long while a short story has demonstrated what for too long has been the dormant power of the short story. Go to just about any writers retreat or conference and invariably some grizzled elder or a young, soon-to-be-something writer will attempt to answer the question: Is the novel dead?

Rarely, does anyone seem to want to ask about the short story.

This is why I call its power dormant. There are many good short stories out there. And some great ones, too. But the power to spark debate, thought, conversation, argument as well as to touch on the truth of what it means to be alive at this time is often missed. There is a problem of relevancy, not always, but often, and so the chance that a story can affect the world beyond the smallish subset of short story readers is diminished.

And by relevancy, I mean that the writer is not able to authentically hit the nail on the head. Too much MFA influence. Too much floating, not enough struggling to reach the surface for air in the life of the writer.

And so, the power of short stories to move people and create a reflection of their lives--fears to joys--that helps all of us understand not just ourselves, but each other, remains dormant.

So, we now have the Cat Person moment, which comes to us during a reckoning of male elites and their abuse of power and leverage for sex (or dominance) of one form or another. It is a reckoning that is long overdue, and into it comes this story that hits a nerve because through the experience of two characters, the protagonist in particular, there is something to learn. And with that, to dislike or appreciate.

No matter what your opinion of this story, it is relevant and because of that it has a life in the culture, well beyond the pages of The New Yorker.

Literary journal editors should take note.

Last, I do note a bit of incongruity in the above. After reading a brief interview of Roupenian and a bit of her bio, she is someone who I'm sure has worked hard, but has lived a life without much struggling to reach the surface for air. However, she has written a hotly relevant story and it's touched a serious nerve, because she writes about a personal experience (the story is based on that experience) that many women can relate to as well as many men.

George Witte of St. Martin's Press on Platforms

Through a coincidence of marriage (my brother's) I happily got to know and occasionally play tennis with George Witte, Editor-in-Chief of St. Martin's Press and established poet.

He was a generous and invaluable font of advice and insight and I am forever grateful for that. For a variety of reasons I have not seen him in quite a while, but I did recently see an interview of him.

The interview can be found here. I found this interesting:

"When I’m reading, I’m really listening…for a voice, a sense of urgency, a passion for the subject that excites me even if I have no previous knowledge of or interest in the subject at hand.  Yes, other things are important: how many books on this subject have been published recently, how have they sold, and how is this proposed book different?  Does the author have a “platform,” which can mean anything from he/she is a journalist who has published widely on the subject, or is an academic writing for a general audience, or is an expert for some other reason, or has contacts with individuals, groups, organizations, and media that can help the publisher sell, market, and publicize the book.  But the key thing is the author’s voice, which no amount of proposal-laundering and packaging can supply.  The best books have a distinctive sound and it’s audible from the very first encounter."

Obviously, to get in his reading pile, you need an agent, but what the above hints at is there are considerations that outweigh the platform and that a platform can be many things.

Think different. Innovate. Be authentic. Be true. Be unique.

Or, as Saint Pio said, "Pray, hope, and don't worry." And focus on writing a damned good manuscript.

Writer's Platform: Way Too Crowded

One of the more challenging and vexing aspects of selling a book and gaining an agent is the requirement of an author's platform. You want to hint at it in your query and then hammer away at it in the book proposal.

The idea: I have so many blog followers and newsletter lovers and access to the morning news shows that I can guarantee this book will sell and sell big.

Translation: My platform is so big and strong and committed that you (agent/publisher) will barely have to lift a finger to get paid.

Whether you think this is bullshit or common business sense does not matter. Agents and publishers want to see your platform and if you don't have one, you will have a difficult time finding either.

There are ways to establish yourself as a credible marketer of your book, but in this day and age there are soooooo many people trying to create a platform that what used to work no longer really does.

Think of it this way: You go onto a new website or blog and instantly a popup appears pleading with you to join their mailing list. Something like: If you care about your wife and children then you better give me your email address. Even when they don't make threats, the insistence of the popup is annoying and cloying.

So, don't be like that. Just stop. Now. And recognize that everyo9ne, and I mean everyone from yoga instructors to plumbers to wanna be self helpers to every other author is trying to use social media and their blog to build a platform/following/network.

Think different. Find a counter-intuitive and more effective way to demonstrate your ability to speak to your audience. Don't be the person constantly staring at their blog counter and Twitter following wondering why you can't get above five-hundred.

My Piece At Rebelle Society

I have a piece published on the Rebelle Society's website about love and compulsion. I'd love for folks to take a look at it.

You can find it here.

Write What You Want to Read: Meh.

Write what you want to read is a fairly common bit of writing advice. On its face, it seems to make sense. Be excited about what you are writing because you are creating the book you've been looking for in the bookstore.

There is some truth to it, but what if no one really wants to read what you want to read?

Don't worry, the Internet has another piece of advice. Study the market for your genre or topic to see what people are buying before you start writing.

And with that, we have two opposing pieces of advice that often pose as rules and are often promoted simultaneously on the same website of some hard working writer trying to build their platform.

What's the truth, or at least the correct path? I don't know. I've written stories that I would want to read and have not found anyone to publish them. And I've written stories that come from my heart and I find people to publish them.

I've studied the market for ghostwriting clients--a good thing to do in that scenario--but not for my own writing. I have to feel something for what I am writing, which is often an emotional connection or an artistic desire. Sometimes, others get it and like it so they publish it, but not always.

So the rule, if you could call it that, is to write what I want to write and always write from the heart or as an artist seeking to broaden my palette.

Vacationland and John Hodgman

John Hodgman has done something quite nice in his new book Vacationland: True Stories from Painful Beaches: he's infused memoir and humor together to create an affecting piece of writing that centers on the idea that all anyone is trying to do is their best.

He doesn't say this explicitly in the book, but it comes through in numerous scenes. He spends an afternoon with a friend, stoned, at a river in western Massachusetts (a lovely area) building rock stacks. He discusses his mother's death in a way that is touching and vulnerable as well as authentic and flavored by the notion that his mother, like he, did her best to be a good parent.

There is also his humble ownership of his life as a minor celebrity and the wealth and ease of life it's brought him--not to mention his father sold him a house in the Berkshires for a dollar. He does not claim to have been masterful and strategic. He only claims to have worked at his craft--writing and being funny--and being lucky to have been called by Jon Stewart to appear on The Daily Show, which gave his career a huge assist. And then the Apple commercials didn't hurt his bottom line. In all, he just says he did his best and with some luck (which is the intersection of preparedness and opportunity) he's built a nice life.

It is hard not to at least be a little envious of his life. Aspiring and striving writers (I place myself among the striving) will see a path that could open to them and hopefully someday will. With this may come a little why him and not me. Few of us can buy a house for a dollar.

But he does have talent--Vacationland proves that--and he does have humility.

He only claims to be doing his best, which is what we all are doing.

So, please read his book and enjoy it as I'm sure you will.

Things Writers Do

I've put together a succinct little guide to writing and living a writer's life I call Things Writers Do. Basically, we live life as an artist, we read good writers, we break the rules of writing except the ones that should not be broken, and we write sharp dialogue.

Oh, and most important, we don't listen to crap advice (I state this a few times). This, I know, sets me up to be a hypocrite and fraud, but I tried to include things that would be new and of value to writers. No lists. I promise.

It's cheap (less than five dollars by one penny) and easy to get (just go here).

Book Sales 2017

The online magazine Slate ran a story this morning that does a good job of dissecting book sales over the past year. In it, Laura Miller explains how the New York Times
 compiles its best sellers lists (it isn't broadly based on sales, but a survey of certain, secret bookstores), how it was gamed this year, and then examines subsets of fiction and nonfiction to see what has sold well.

In the midst of it, she explains some of the why these books did well, or not.

It is worth reading this story--I have to confess, I am not a huge fan of Slate--because Miller sums the year up well and as artists, we need to also have part of our brain in the business of our art.

“Important note: I advise that writers figure out ways as best they can to outsource certain aspects of the business of being a writer. Look at all the tasks and processes you have for sending out queries, etc. and see if there is a way to get someone to do it in a way that adds to your financial bottom line and ability to work without distraction.”

There are a couple of pullouts I noticed in Miller's report. The first is that books are not movies. Movies must make money right away in order to be viewed as a success. Unless it is from a well-known author (Dan Brown, Danielle Steele, JK Rowling, etc.) books rarely are breakout hits in their first week much less first year or even two.

Instead, most books that end up doing well from new or moderately known authors require a period of intensive selling. This can be months and even years.

So the takeaway is that we cannot and should not view book sales within the frame of a calendar year. Publishers should because they need to keep track of the bottom line, but everyone else should realize that books have lifespans and require effort.

The second piece is that Miller notes agents and publishers are sick of a genre related to the book Gone Girl. Yet, these books are selling well. If you write in this genre--intentionally or by happenstance--are you going to be rejected because the publishing establishment is sick of a genre that sells well? Or will you get short shrift because they are bored?

Last, the vaunted author's platform is getting harder and harder to create. In past posts I've written about the proliferation of insipid writing advice the often comes in the form of top ten lists, such as for dialogue, plot, etc. They are generally crap because the tips are obvious and bring nothing new to the conversation or understanding of how to write.

What they are designed to do is help a writer build a platform. Amazingly, it works for some and they have fairly healthy followings. However, because SO MANY ARE DOING THIS NOW, the competition for that audience is intense and I believe the wave has crested. The audience is looking for something better, more authentic, and that is new.

Further, the media is fractured. There are few media outlets (and social network sites) that can draw a large audience to what you've written or that can help you build a platform.

My advice is rather than build your own platform and drive yourself crazy watching your blog, Twitter, etc. followers never grow beyond about 500, leverage someone else's audience. There's ways to do this and you're welcome to give me a call or send an email and ask.