Wednesday, September 30, 2015

You too can write better sentences!

How to write a sentence. Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? There, I've just written two. In the second, I omitted the subject which should probably be "It"; that is, "It sounds simple . . . ." This "It" standing for "How to write a sentence," the second "it" standing in for "sound simple."

As a native English speaker, I can crank out sentences and analyses like these all day long. Why would I want to read Stanley Fish's thin book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One?

Because he will make me—and you—think about sentences, which are, after all, basic to the writer's trade. For example, what is a sentence? Fish points out that writing guides offer answers: "A sentence is a complete thought." "A sentence contains a subject or a predicate." "Sentences consist of one or more clauses that bear certain relationships to one another." He says that "far from being transparent and inclusive, these declarations come wrapped in a fog; they seem to skate on their own surface and simply don't go deep enough."

Okay, professor, what does go deeper? "Well, my bottom line can be summarized in two statements: (1) a sentence is an organization of items in the world; and (2) a sentence is a structure of logical relationships." A random list of items, for example, is not a sentence. He quotes Anthony Burgess: "And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning." In Fish's formula, "Sentence craft equals sentence comprehension equals sentence appreciation."

He discusses sentence form and how to turn a list of words into a sentence, using the Noam Chomsky example: "furiously sleep ideas green colorless" which can be turned into something meaningful (or more meaningful) as "colorless green ideas sleep furiously," which could be a line of poetry. The question one has to ask oneself when writing a sentence is "What am I trying to do?"

"It is often said," he writes, "that the job of language is to report or reflect or mirror reality, but the power of language is greater and more dangerous than that; it shapes reality, not of course in the literal sense—the world is one thing, words another—but in the sense that the order imposed on a piece of the world by a sentence is only one among innumerable possible orders." And every time you revise a sentence, add a modifier, delete a clause, change a tense you've changed that "reality."

Once Fish has discussed sentences generally, he spends three chapters describing the subordinating style, the additive style, and the satiric style of sentences with examples. Here is a sample of the satiric style.  J. L. Austin cautioning readers not to be impatient with the slow unfolding of his argument: "And we must at all costs avoid over-simplification, which one might be tempted to call the occupational disease of philosophers if it were not their occupation."

With practical suggestions of how to form an infinite number of sentences using a relatively few forms, Fish offers chapters on first sentences—"One day Karen DeCilia put a few observations together and realized her husband Frank was sleeping with a real estate woman in Boca" (Elmore Leonard)—and last—"He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance" (Mary Shelley). Wonderful stuff for any writer who is struggling to start a piece or finish one.

The last chapter, "Sentences That Are About Themselves (Aren't They All?)" summarizes and extends the discussion to works like Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier in which the narrator in telling one story is, as the reader comes to realize, unconsciously telling another story entirely.

Every serious writer should keep How to Write a Sentence on the bookshelf to take down every year or so and read once again.  


Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Hannah Ives solves a murder without supernatural help

Marcia Talley has created an interesting character in Hannah Ives. She's a woman of a certain age (as they say), happily married, curious and resourceful. She is not a detective, however, and not a former cop, and I was particularly interested in how Talley, in All Things Undying. was able to create a plausible and satisfying murder mystery with virtually no police involvement. In this ninth Hannah Ives mystery, Hannah and her husband Paul are vacationing for three weeks in Dartmouth, Devon, England. They have good friends locally so they are more than tourists, less than residents.

The action begins when a stranger stops Hannah on the street to give her a message from her long-dead mother. The medium is an American medium Susan Parker, host of a popular UK television show. "Your mother's apologizing. She says she's sorry for not being around when you needed her." Hannah is half-convinced by Susan's recital (and Paul is a thoroughgoing skeptic), and agrees to a private reading the morning after a live performance with audience participation. Before this can take place, however, a hit-and-run driver deliberately runs down and kills Susan. That's Mystery Number One.

Mystery Number Two is what happened locally in 1944. The US Military cleared several square miles of coastline to practice the Normandy landings. Villages were emptied, farmers had to leave their farms. On April 28, 1944, German subs torpedoed two LSTs each carrying more than a thousand men; hundreds of GIs died and not all the bodies washed ashore. An American woman, born shortly after her father had been killed, has come to Dartmouth to find his remains. If Susan Parker can receive messages from the dead, perhaps the dead father will tell her what happened.

So Talley combines an historic tragedy with local culture, the supernatural (or is it) with actual death. And Hannah is in the middle of it all: "There I was, staring through the window of Mullin's Bakery at plain, ordinary everyday pork pasties while getting messages from my dead mother concerning my father's sex life."

Talley does not have to switch to another point of view to convey information to the reader. She is also able to write dialogue that sounds English without funny spellings; for example, " . . . the house is a tip" . . . "you'll need some wellies" . . .  "my solicitor think that since it's a cash deal, and there's no chain of sales, we can go to completion on the same day."

All Things Undying is satisfying on several levels. Hannah is able to tell the entire story in her own words. The book skillfully and convincingly weaves together actual history with plausible mystery. The murderer has good reasons for the killing. The issue of whether the dead can communicate somehow with the living is left open. And the scenes of Dartmouth made me want to make a reservation in one of the local B&Bs.

Friday, September 4, 2015

How to find reviewers for independently-published books

Do reviews sell books? I'm sure they do not sell as many books as word-of-mouth—a friend's recommendation—but they are more effective than advertising. Book reviews are just one of those things an author has to do to spread the word, and if you are publishing your book independently, few if any media outlets—The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, national magazines etc.—will review your book as a matter of economics and principle. It is, I suspect, just too expensive to try to identify the single jewel in the mountain of self-published pulp that is published every day. So what are we self-published authors to do?

You can pay for a review. A Kirkus Indie reviewer will evaluate your book for $425. You cannot control the review, and if you don't like what it says you can refuse to have it printed in the publication. A former Kirkus reviewer writing in Poets & Writers said that about three quarters of the authors she reviewed elected not to publish.

You can pay a service to contact reviewers for you. Word Slinger Publicity, for example, will "create a book review request, the single most important press release for authors, with our custom HTML template and your book information." Once you approve the release, "we send out your targeted press release to thousands of book reviewers using our own lists and in your genre." All this and more for $150.

Or you can invest time instead of money. Publishers Weekly's booklife now accepts free submissions. However, the website cautions that while "we want to give your book its best chance for a review. . . we can’t review every book that’s submitted." Nevertheless, I believe it's worth the cost of a couple books and postage for the possibility of a review.

Simon Royle maintains an exceptionally useful website, The Indie View, a compilation of 275 reviewers who review independently-published books. These reviewers do not charge for their reviews (or they're thrown off the list), and the listings indicate what exactly the individual reviewers want to see: i.e., "All except non-fiction and erotic fiction;" "non-fiction sports books;" "mostly chick lit-ish and romantic comedy books;" "paranormal romance/urban fantasy," and more and more and more.

As an author, I looked at the websites of all reviewers who seem interested in my genre and followed their instructions for consideration exactly. Start with a query letter that includes a synopsis of the book, a brief bio, and where the book is available. You have to be prepared to send a .mobi file (the Kindle system), or a PDF, or the book itself—it depends on the reviewer. Some want to know your Goodreads address, some are backed up and not currently accepting books, others are backed up but will allow your book to get in line.

Sending a query of course does not guarantee that a reviewer will want to see your book. That a reviewer sees your book of course does not guarantee a review will follow. And of course, you have no control over a reviewer's opinion. (Although, interestingly, many of the reviewers I approached say they will simply not finish a book or post a review if they find it offensive or badly written or edited or all three.)

All this takes time. It is worth it? I have to believe it is or I wouldn't do it. Will it sell books? Who knows? Certainly a positive review cannot hurt.