I came across a title over at a critique group that rung a bell.  I was very sure that I’d seen this title before.  I took a peek.  Yep.  I had seen this one before.  Some four or five years previous.  Same title, same start, same exact story, different critique venue, but same flaws. 

…Same flaws.  Not so much as a misplaced comma adjusted.

Worse, the author was the same, too — snide, argumentative, whiny, obstreperous. (OBSTREPEROUS: noisily, stubbornly, aggressively defiant.)  No matter how many times this author receives feedback — the same feedback, variably worded depending on the source — it is ignored.  The advice is ignored, but not the poor saps who give it.  For them, the blade-sharp edge of the author’s tongue, including public calls for tar and feathering.  

Luckily, each time I’ve come across this manuscript, I’ve sat back in my chair with idle fingers.  Not so for a close friend who is a legitimate editor.  He barrelled in and the author fled, tail between legs.  We all gave a huge sigh of relief. 

So here the same manuscript and its author surfaces again.  And my friend, having retired, isn’t a part of this venue, damn it.  Me? I’m still idling.  Won’t go near it, thanks.  If the author so believes in this book, why isn’t it being shopped?  Why does it appear repeatedly in critique venues around the Net year after year?  What’s the point of offering opinion on something when everything that could possibly be said concerning it has already been typed?

In this particular critique venue, it has been making its rounds since 2006 and still isn’t getting the much desired standing ovations.  Does the author so believe the book to be noteworthy?  Good.  It’s good for authors to believe in themselves.  So why seek the opinions of those, many of them published, whom one obviously feels stand far below one’s own literary expertise?

I will say one thing.  The author is certainly loyal to this manuscript’s each and every word. That’s self-confidence.  That’s dedication.   A lot of us could take some lessons here.

Well, it’s been a lo-ong haul, getting back in the saddle, again.  While I’m writing, what I’m writing isn’t fiction.  It’s articles and reviews.  Right now, aside from submitting articles to some online magazines, I’m critiquing two novel manuscripts for their authors.  Doing this allows me to ease back into working on my own novels.  I get excited about creating, again, when reading the creations of others.  I get “used to” putting myself inside different voices and characters, again.

What I am doing with my own work, right now, is reevaluating it, examining it with a critical eye, and working through small adjustments to the works.  One manuscript in particular, having received such a thorough and unhealthy beating from a reader, I’m seriously thinking of taking all the way back to draft form — starting it classically as I did originally, rather than writing it according to today’s demands. It’s a chancy choice, because classic starts are not the stuff and substance many of today’s readers enjoy.  We’ll see, though.  It was an excellent and intriguing start.

Stay tuned.

E. J.

Moving, I’ve discovered, is tough on writers and their novels — at least on this writer, anyway. Finding the rhythm, getting back into the routine, and finding “the zone,” is difficult in a fresh, new environment, especially since we’ve still not got a solid household routine.

I’m finding it terribly difficult to return to work-in-progress novel manuscripts, and even to final works which are pretty much done except for their edits. Instead, it is like the new environment is fostering the seeds of new books, rather than allowing me to get back into my “groove.”

At best, I’m in a “pending” zone. At worst, I’m suffering an odd form of brain rebellion that just insists that, no, it doesn’t want to work on that book or that book or that book, either.

We are moved.  Including animals, plants (the whole garden), furniture, et cetera.  We’re still having DSL problems.  Sometimes it’s there; sometimes it’s not there, at all.  It’s no fun.  And Verizon has even sent in the “big guns” to try to troubleshoot it.  It’s a gremlin, I’m sure, because it just keeps doing strange anomalies that don’t make any sense.  Here this minute, gone the next, with varying symptoms.  So, I’m guessing it is going to be awhile before I can safely say, “I’m online.”  Meanwhile, what happens is that I click open the browser and, if I get somewhere instantly, then I can count on at least 2 minutes of connectivity before the whole thing drops out for some twenty-four hours.  *Sigh.*

I’ll be offline for a week, starting May 12. We’re — family and I — are moving to a new home.

I have written…or, more accurately, am writing one book in first person. The only reason that book is being written in first person is that, when I try to change it to my favored third person point-of-view, it loses its snap. Somehow, “The fumes he exuded made my eyes water” has more zing than does “The fumes he exuded made her eyes water.” And not just that small portion loses its zip, but the book loses it all the way through when placed into anything but first.

First person point-of-view is, however, limiting. It makes the writer stick very closely inside the protagonist’s perspective, unless one resorts to omniscient or employs a less conventional method of mixing first and either second or third points-of-view. Omniscient, however, is a tool only for the most adroit; the use of second and third POV’s requires a book with a large scope and unconventional plot. Unfortunately, my first person book’s scope does not permit this latter method of irregular construction.

Creating a work in first person, however, runs the danger of main character self-indulgence, which renders the read B-O-R-I-N-G. And that’s the huge pitfall of ‘first’.

Happily, every one of my other books is nicely set in third person, whether a single or a multiple point-of-view is employed by, respectively, a single main character, or several main and secondary characters. So I am content to allow one novel to deviate from my own self-imposed traditions, traditions which I feel best serve putting story above everything else, and especially above author intrusion and, worst, self-indulgence.

By its very nature, the ‘I’ perspective, first person point-of-view, is laden with hazards of self-emoting and self-indulgence. It is too easy for an author to begin to wallow in a character’s inner narratives and flounder in that character’s angst, especially since the character springs from the author’s subconscious. And self-indulgence and emotive wallowing is where ‘boring’ starts for a reader — at least this reader. It is where ‘tedium’ lives when I run my eye down any book shop’s shelf containing a majority of works written in first person. Sadly, that majority starts and ends in ‘I’, not with plot. Predictably, these ‘I’s’ (so favored, I understand, by angsty tween and teen crowd readers) are self-saturated with cloyingly emotive crud. Sadly, these stories, were they done from third, might have some glimmer and gleam of worthiness. Instead, they reek of self-infatuated flatulence.

In short, except in the hands of an author in complete control of his or her creation, the I’s don’t have it.

Absence, they say, makes the heart grow fonder…or is that “absence makes the heart a’wander?” Either way, just a note to let all my friends know that, no, I didn’t get eaten by my novel.

So what’s happening? First, the sad news.

1. I still haven’t snagged an agent, though one partial is still out.
2. Norman Riffe died, an honorable, ethical, delightful gentleman. I’ll miss him.

And the good news is:

1. We’re moving into a beautiful new house that’s three times the size of the one we presently occupy. The flip side of the joy is, the whole garden has to be dug up, potted, and transported, then reset into its new home.
2. I was invited into an absolutely wonderful writer’s critique circle. Not only can I just concentrate on writing and critiquing in an interface and application that is nicely intuitive and responsive to the needs of the activity, but my three critique partners are phenomenal writers with a no-holds barred, refreshing honesty.
3. And, last, my next novel is hot on the trail toward completion.

That’s the news. Now I have to catch up on my reading around here.

Have a good one.

Scott Heim reads from We Disappear at last reading at Chelsea

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7 (Conclusion)

Today in the New York Times:

In the sprawling slum of Haiti’s Cité Soleil, Placide Simone, 29, offered one of her five offspring to a stranger. “Take one,” she said, cradling a listless baby and motioning toward four rail-thin toddlers, none of whom had eaten that day. “You pick. Just feed them.” http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/world/americas/18food.html

World hunger is getting worse — much worse — and the world needs to do something, including the U.S., or face dire consequences. Food should not be channeled into bio-fuels when it creates scarcity for those in need, driving the price out of reach for the poor and downtrodden.

A critter and a beta reader’s job is to honestly tell the author the problems they find in a manuscript, including:

1. what they like and do not like in a story or its writing,
2. where they lost interest, if they lost interest at all,
3. what they think does and doesn’t work.

Their job is NOT to dictate to the author that the story or writing MUST be changed, how the author MUST write it, or when the author MUST write it. That’s an editor’s prerogative when considering a story or novel for publication, and, if those demands are contingent for acceptance for publication, it is the author’s prerogative to comply or refuse.

A few weeks back, I wrote a short story. Putting it before my critique circle for a beta read before submitting it, I expected the group to find certain faults with it. And they did. I adjusted it according to much of their input — a word here, a phrase added there — because I agreed.

One beta reader, however, absolutely insisted that I must not only listen to her objections, but pay attention to her objections…and I did. I didn’t act on them, though, because the changes she wanted went contrary to my desire to use showing almost exclusively throughout the work, with little to no telling involved. So, while I agreed that her suggestions were valid for a typical short story and thanked her for the feedback, I didn’t implement her changes.

I expected that to be the end of it. However, she persisted in reinforcing her perspective and her complaints in post upon follow-up post to such a degree that I felt like she was pounding on me with a hammer, demanding me to address the changes she desired.

I finally did address her complaints, point by point, all the while reinforcing the fact that I did value her opinion, and agreeing that her objections would be salient if I meant for this story to be a typical narrative…which it wasn’t. (It is and was an enactment, not a narrative — strictly showing, never telling.) My efforts, however, “P I S S E D [her] O F F.” She didn’t want to know why I did what I did, nor why I was equally insistent that the work remain as I intended. Her issue? “…The writing, not the story.” The story she “loved.” It was “the writing” with which she took issue. It was as if she felt somehow that I had missed her meaning…which I hadn’t. In turn, I felt that she was demanding I change the work to comply with her ideas of how it should be delivered.

One of the devices of fiction writing is to show something. This allows the reader to decide what is happening and why it is happening. Then, a few lines later, the author will often provide the “tell,” reinforcing for the reader that what they thought or decided happened in the “showing,” was, indeed, true. This show-tell device is extremely effective for stimulating reader participation and for bringing along new questions within the reader’s mind. But, sometimes, especially in a short-short story, it is fun to deliver all of it by “showing” alone, letting the reader come to their own conclusions about “what happened.” If a writer can carry it off, what you have is a short story wherein the reader puzzles together clues and implications that are very similar to the way we humans puzzle together any incident that comes to our attention in life…like when we witness someone’s cousin visiting at the neighbor’s, her clothes tattered and torn, her face streaked with tears, later to see a police car drive up, an officer get out and go to the door, disappearing inside. We witness, and then we are reduced to conjecture.

In the incident of this short story and critique partner/beta reader, things were getting repetative. In fact, the posts were beyond reiterative, and I kept expecting that it would level off. It was, after all, a simple short-short story of a meer 770 words, and, between the two of us, we had already written more concerning her objections with the writing of the story than the story had words. Leaving the thread overnight, I was surprised to see even more hammering along with some rather harsh suggestions that I have a low comprehension and reading ability.

I suppose I should have simply let it be. Instead, I again explained how much I valued her opinion, her perspective, and her effort on my behalf. Then I stated outright that I wasn’t going to change the story, so she needed to deal with that fact and get off the subject.

That did not sit well. At all. In fact, she flounced off, taking her close friend, another long-term member, with her. Since then, the circle has had no activity at all, which leads me to believe that it’s dead or they’ve moved themselves, one and all, to another venue, all over 770 words and one woman’s opinion about those 770 words.

When I look back on this, I still find it very odd. This woman and I go back a very long way, and for such a trite thing to terminate a longtime friendship seems ludicrous and very bizarre. Then I start tallying up some of the changes in her attitude that I’ve seen in other posts since she’s become an editor, paid for her time, and I find telltale signs that something may be more deeply amiss:

1. She tells an author that they should change their method of draft to a method she considers best, or she will no longer read on;
2. She tells another author that they must not work on their novel after the first draft is complete for X amount of time, or else;

and none of this is done with the obligatory smilie to indicate humor and that she isn’t serious. In fact, she was serious, it seems. And this was not delivered to neophyte wannabe authors in need of guidance, but to professional ones who are successfully published.

Has the fact that this woman is now paid for editing gone to her head? Is she so inflated by this that she has become tantamount to a dictator to all of her peers? Or is her life so very stressful these days that her desperation is enacting itself in an aggressive need to control others in virtual because she has no control over those things which trouble her in real life?

I don’t know. I do know that I am saddened by the circumstances that bring us at odds and to this end, but I am not going to compromise my own work just because she tells me I must. If this means the termination of a long-term friendship along with the productive relationship, so be it. The choice was hers, not mine, and I find it a petty and unfortunate choice.