Writing craft: Constructive criticism

Just got back my manuscript Undertow with comments from one of my Constant Readers, my good friend Erik. Not only did he read the story and give me his overall opinion, but he marked up the manuscript as well, calling out things he liked, and things that need work.

I cannot stress enough the value of this. No writer can be an impartial judge of his or her work. For example, the writer can't always be a good judge of  a scene's effectiveness. Does the foreshadowing work? Is that scene that's supposed to be scary actually scary? Will anyone but the writer give a damn about any of the characters? And let's not forget those odd little typos that the writer's radar doesn't catch because the writer knew what they meant to say but didn't communicate it clearly enough to the typing fingers.

Sending one's work to friends or family for review isn't always easy. Writers have a good deal of emotional investment in their work (they should, anyway). When a reader points out a problem in a manuscript, anything beyond a typo or spacing glitch can raise the writer's hackles. ("I spent months on this novel! I stayed up late working on it while you plebes were eating bonbons and watching Cops! Who are you to say my story arc is cliched!")  

But as soothing as it might be to the ego to huffily reject criticism, that stance results in a poorer manuscript. The right Constant Readers will find the problems that the writer doesn't see because he or she is too close to the manuscript, whether those are factual errors or problems with the character arcs.  It's well worth the temporary ego blow, because when those same Constant Readers tell you something is good, they mean it, and you know they mean it.

A writer once told me that she knew she'd put in too many scenes set at the breakfast table when one of her constant readers remarked, "These people sure do eat a lot of pancakes, don't they?" 

One caveat: A writer doesn't have to include every change that every constant reader asks for. If you  have 10 readers and 1 says that X should be more Y, that's a minority opinion and it's up to the writer to make that change. However, if 9 out of 10 constant readers say that X should be Y, then it behooves the writer to make the change.

Not every constant reader enjoys her work. But I hope she's the exception rather than the rule.

Watch this now

All the Great Operas in 10 Minutes. Funny stuff.

Review: Four Flies on Grey Velvet

My review of Dario Argento's Four Flies on Grey Velvet proves that it takes more than a nifty title to make a good movie. Check it out.

Word count odometer, and using things I've overheard

Last night the word count odometer on the work in progress rolled over to 70,000 words!  Yes! Progress! It's been a slow few weeks so this was particularly delightful. 

The weekend's writing was also noteworthy for another reason. I keep a mental filing cabinet of interesting or wacky things I've overheard people (primarily but not limited to friends and family) say.  Few things make me happier than using one of these lines, and it's especially fun when a friend recognizes the dialogue in question (i.e., the line "Women. Bitches. All of them!" in my book Reckoning). 

Anyway, one of these overheards has been in my head since college, and I finally found a situation and character to say it. 

So I celebrated all this with a Reese's peanut butter egg. (My guilty pleasure every Easter.)

The overheard line, by the way, is: "Yeah, he thinks he's such a socialist, but he buys Twinkies at the grocery store just like everyone else." (Originally spoken by a fellow student, referring to our Poli Sci professor.)

Things you wish you could experience for the first time again

Over at The Onion's AV Club, there's a roundtable where the writers talk about the books, movies, TV shows, music, and more that they wish they could experience for the first time again. Read it here.

Now, I love to rewatch movies over and over again, and re-reading books endlessly is how I justify my big ol' library. (Just the fiction alone you can see listed at LibraryThing under "KCozy"). But certain things leave their mark on you the first time in a way that can never be recaptured. Here's a few of mine (but ask on a different day and you may get different answers).

Poem: T. S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Read it in high school and had such an epiphany. One of those "This is IT!" moments.

Movies: Oh, so many to choose from, but two that stand out are Terry Gilliam's Brazil, which literally left me breathless, or Peter Weir's The Last Wave, which I saw at an early age and which warped my brain forever.

Novel: Again, it's hard to narrow the choices down. For fantasy, C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia is one choice, though I have to give a shout-out to the underrated Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander. Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye gave me a shock of recognition for its portrayal of Mean Girls and the damage they can do. For horror, it's Stephen King's The Shining; for mystery, James Ellroy's L. A. Confidential; for dystopian fiction, it's George Orwell's 1984.  For short stories, Ray Bradbury's "The Aqueduct" literally made me scream the first time I read it.

TV: Any number of Twilight Zone episodes spring to mind. But what I'd most love to re-experience is the first episode of Blackadder Season 2. The first minute in this clip made me laugh so hard I nearly hurt myself, the first time I saw it.

Geek Monthly magazine

I don't subscribe to many magazines, mostly because I don't have time to read them. I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly and The Writer. (I let my subscription to Bon Appetit lapse because their recipes were getting too esoteric even for me - I mean, really, green tea cheesecake? - and because I've already got a huge backlog of recipes I've clipped and haven't tried yet.)

But I've just added Geek Monthly to my list of subscriptions. I only just heard of it, and probably wouldn't have picked it up if it hadn't had Nathan Fillion, my imaginary boyfriend du jour, on the cover. Fine interview (and pictures!) with Mr. Fillion aside, it's a fun little magazine that covers many areas of geekiness. Some sections aren't of interest to me (such as anime and game console reviews) but there's also Blu-Ray reviews that are honest about whether you need to trade up on your DVDs, interviews with and articles about such diverse people as Wallace Shawn and Takashi Miike, and more. 

They had me at an article that singles out Ray Harryhausen's ten greatest moments ... and did not have to explain who Harryhausen is. This magazine speaks my language. Check it out at geekmonthly.com.

Books into Celluloid: Catch-22

My latest Books into Celluloid column, comparing book and movie of Catch-22, is up at BookBalloon. Here it is.

Watch this now

Need a laugh this morning?

Watch this now.

Now that's what I call writing: Anthony O'Neill

From Anthony O'Neill's fascinating thriller The Lamplighter, this little bit of heaven for book lovers.

It was beyond the limits of his wildest dreams. A cavernous library greater than anything in London, the Vatican, or historical Alexandria. Glassed cabinets, polished mahogany bookcases, and sturdy oaken shelves swept ten stories high and half a mile deep, complete with spiral staircases, ladders on greased rails, and carpeted balconies that trailed into infinity. There were reading carrels, escritoires, cozy armchairs, blazing hearths, silent clocks, drinking fountains, innumerable writing utensils, reams of blank notepaper, a row of magnifying glasses...even a pipe rack. And all of it illuminated with more lamp cabinets and gas mantels than there were stars in the firmament. He might never leave. 

He exhaled heartily, surveying both the gold-embossed spines already arranged on the shelves and the crates spilling over with folios, quartos, octavos, and priceless manuscripts waiting to be catalogued. He barely knew where to begin. But as the appointed curator he had a lifetime, and he doubted his excitement would ever wane.

Now that's what I call a library!

The Lamplighter isn't a well-known book - I found it in my search for another addition to my "Naughty, Nutty, and Slutty Victorians" shelf - but it's a suspense novel that goes beyond what you'd expect. Highly recommended.

The fine art of smiting

This is one of my favorite Far Side cartoons.

It's a bit hard to read, but the caption says "God at His computer" and he's about to press the "Smite" button and make the piano fall down on that unlucky bastard.

Why do I like this cartoon? Because writers are a lot like God at His computer. Characters, many of them perfectly nice people, are diddy-bopping along with their lives when the writer decides to hit the "Smite" button and BAM! Said character is toast.

What a lot of my friends readers don't seem to understand is that I writers don't want to smite characters.* The story makes us do it, I swear! Do you think I want to kill off the  nicest characters? It's not my fault! I blame the Muse!

This topic provoked a debate this last Saturday when I took my Constant Readers Erik and Gerry to the Blue Bayou at Disneyland (I had the mahi mahi - yum!). I held the position that a smiting only counts if the character dies during the course of the narrative. People who die before the story begins (i.e., the character whose murder drives the story in my mystery Undertow) do not count.

Erik and Gerry respectfully disagreed, saying that any character death that was relevant to the story counted, including characters who died before the narrative began or whose deaths happened in flashback. (It took them a while to arrive at this admittedly reasonable position - at one point in the debate they were trying to blame me for the death of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol. I suspect they still haven't forgiven me for a couple of the smitings that have been in my books.)

I concede they have a point but now I have to readjust all my smite tallies for my books. Yes I keep smite tallies. In the work-in-progress I'm up to two...SO FAR! MUWAHAHAHA! MINE IS AN EVIL LAUGH!

* Not unless they really deserve it. **

** Or unless it will really vex my friends. Erik and Alyca, I'm looking at you.

I take requests

Had a bathtime conversation with my 6-year-old son this evening, in which he requested that I write a book that met the following criteria:

• 620,000 words
  
• includes giant dragonflies that turn into macaroni
  
• has a giant salami monster
  
• has oviraptors that fight military bomber jets (I asked if the jets went back in time to fight the oviraptors or the oviraptors went forward in time to fight the jets - he said they both time traveled and met halfway, so I guess this story takes place in the dark ages)
  
• something about robots
  
• has a scene when 100 people burp so loud it makes the bombs fall off the fighter jets and the oviraptors eat the bombs
  
• will be illustrated
  
• must include the word "patootie" at some point
  

It's a tall order but I may be able to come up with something.

Review: 42nd Street Forever Vol. 4: Cooled by Refrigeration

My review of the latest 42nd Street Forever trailer compilations is up. Read it here.

Best book of the year so far

So as of March 1, the best book I've read this year is Joseph Heller's Catch-22. 

I took my time with this one, savoring it (translation: not reading it while cooking pasta). I'd read it once before, back in college, and it didn't click with me then. 

Now I get it. I'm flat amazed at the sheer amount of detail Heller was able to pack into his story, the deft characterizations, and most of all the tone. The slide from farce into outright horror is inexorable yet so subtly done that when we're finally given the full truth we're nearly as shaken as Heller's protagonist Yossarian is.  

Amazing.

Review: The Sentinel

My review of the 1970s big-budget shocker The Sentinel is up at Horrorview.com. Think "Love Boat" in a haunted house, only not as good.

Save the date: L. A. Times Festival of Books

The last weekend of April will be the Los Angeles Times annual Festival of Books. If you haven't been, it's held at UCLA campus and is nothing but books, books, books! Panels, performances, signings, and did I mention lots of lovely books to buy?

More information here. You better believe I'll be there with my jingle bells on.

Draft 2 - complete!

Finished the revised draft of my mystery novel Undertow, and it's now ready for distribution to the Constant Reader Brigade for feedback and comments.

I feel good about this one. I really enjoyed working with a first-person narration, which was new to me. The intimacy of that POV is nice, though I miss the chance to jump into other characters' heads. But first-person suited that particular story best. Third-person would not have worked nearly as well. 

First-person is ideal for mysteries because the reader finds things out as the narrator does, and it can prevent the reader from seeing things the narrator doesn't and then wondering why the narrator doesn't know that Character X is a red herring and Character Y is the murderer and how can the narrator be such a doofus, anyway?

In other writing news, I'm up to 51,000 words in the work in progress (don't worry, I'll think of a title). 

Books into Celluloid: The Painted Veil

My latest book vs. movie comparison column takes on The Painted Veil. 

Review: Stanley

My review of the snake horror film Stanley is now up at Horrorview.com. Enjoy.

Focus on the manuscript

The other weekend I did a do-it-myself writer's retreat, taking the manuscript of my mystery novel Undertow and holing up in a hotel room in Solvang. Armed with red pens (for corrections) and black pens (for major revisions) and lots of coffee and Milano cookies, I went through the entire manuscript and gave it a thorough edit. Once those edits have been implemented, I'll be able to distribute the MS to my Constant Reader Brigade and get their feedback.

I highly recommend this to all writers. Especially if, like me, you have to juggle writing with day jobs, family, and other responsibilities. The benefits are numerous.

To sum up: Focus. Total focus. I cannot emphasize this enough. You don't have to worry about getting dinner on the table, about helping the kid find his Crocs or the hubby find his glasses, or about anything but your manuscript.

My advice is to go somewhere a reasonable distance from your house. However, make your destination someplace familiar, that way you won't be tempted to go exploring, and you won't have to wonder where you're getting dinner that night.

Try to avoid distractions. Leave the iPod at home. Bring your laptop, but leave the internet cable at home. If you bring books, make sure they're old favorites you've read before so you aren't getting caught up in them. 

I find that even in my downtime, I'm not worrying about any of the myriad of things I normally have to think about. I can focus on one thing: my book.

In addition to the edits on Undertow, I brought Boswell The Laptop with me and was able to get work done on the work in progress. Up to 48,000 words now (technically I passed 50,000 but I realized that a chapter needs to be narrated by a different character and so I have to redo it).

I also did a bit of book shopping. Yes, I know I'd said I wasn't going to buy anything new until the Festival of Books in April (you in the back, stop laughing). But times are tough, Solvang is one of my favorite towns, and I supported local businesses like The Book Loft  and the newly opened use book store, Valley Books. Came home with books by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, P. G. Wodehouse, and Cormac McCarthy. Good times.

Oh, and I ate a lot of pancakes while I was at the retreat, too. Editing makes you hungry.

Now that's what I call writing: Tom Stoppard

Before I depart for a few days to do intensive editing on my manuscript Undertow, I'll leave you with a quote from Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead which, to me, sums up nicely why so much of fiction consists of bad things happening to people.

The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.

Guildenstern: Is that what people want?

The Player: It's what we do.