Monday, April 15, 2019

"The Magazine" reveals skulduggery at a magazine

Kasia Moreno and her husband Hugo each have a couple decades of experience working at financial magazines such as Forbes and SmartMoney. (I'm quoting their book's biographical note; my fact-checking staff is on vacation this week.) With that background, they apparently thought, why not write a revenge thriller in which virtually all the main characters are connected to a financial magazine that is arrogant enough to call itself The Magazine?

The Morenos' novel, titled The Magazine, begins with a change at the top of the magazine's masthead on June 13, 1997. (The chapters are all dated to help readers keep track of the pell mell activity; the book ends on October 9, 1999.) The editor-in-chief is stepping down and, to select a replacement, he asks each of four candidates on the staff to come up with an outstanding story and may the best reporter win.

Rebecca, one of the candidates, sniffs out a potential blockbuster and works flat out for more than a week, ignoring sleep, ignoring food, barely drinking enough liquid to remain functional, and ignoring her widowed father's phone messages. (He's gregarious; she's focused on her story.)

At the end of the editorial competition she learns the fix was in from the beginning. The outgoing editor had chosen a successor before the contest but used it to spur the four reporters to outdo themselves for the next issue. Rebecca gets more bad news: Her beloved father had been one of many terminated at his long-time employer after Tom Richardson, a billionaire hedge-fund manager bought the company. The father who'd been trying to reach his daughter all week to tell her he'd lost the job he loved terminated himself by jumping off the company's roof. Rebecca. shattered, quits The Magazine to work for its competition.

Tom Richardson is handsome, middle-aged, wealthy, and currently single. Twenty years earlier at Yale he had an affair with an Africa-American fellow student that  resulted in a daughter, Kimmie. Richardson supported Kimmie and her mother but had no contact with the girl who, early in the book, shows up at his Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. Kimmie, after a stint at Morgan-Stanley, obtains a reporting job at The Magazine. 

The book's fourth main character is Helen who, when she isn't named editor-in-chief, apparently becomes The Magazine's managing editor. She meets Richardson, they fall in love, and he asks her to marry him.

So, the pieces are on the board and the game's underway: Rebecca wants to avenge her father's suicide by destroying the man who inadvertently (indeed, unknowingly) caused it: Tom Richardson. Kimmie wants to punish her father for his years of neglect. Helen wants to protect her finance.

Because the Morenos are writing from the inside, virtually all of the information about financial reporting and life on a national magazine ring true: how you find stories, relationship with sources, editorial idiosyncrasies (I myself had an editor who made changes at the last moment just because he could), and more. And because the book is set at the end of the 1990s, The Magazine's publisher does not yet have to lose sleep over the internet and what it is going to do to advertising and circulation.

The novel does raise a question: What is the point of it all? The Magazine's readers are, presumably, looking for an edge. an insight that a skilled reporter can tease out of SEC filings, analysts' reports, hints, and rumors. With the insight investors can confidently buy more stock, sell what they have, or short it in the expectation the price will drop. But how, the disinterested reader might ask, does this add to the country's wealth? It doesn't add to the country's stock of scientific or technological knowledge. It doesn't build a house, school, hospital, bridge, transportation system, or anything else. But that's a subject for another book.

The Magazine held my interest all the way through and not only because I have a background in magazine publishing myself. By the time I began to be less willing suspend my disbelief in the Morenos' complex plot I was hooked. How do you destroy a billionaire who can (and does) recruit one of the best private detectives in New York City and has an army of lawyers? How does a crack reporter protect her story from another crack reporter? How do you booby trap a loft apartment with nothing more than a screwdriver? Read—and enjoy—The Magazine to find out.

Saturday, April 6, 2019

Why writers should listen to Daemon Voices

Philip Pullman, the author most famous for the His Dark Materials trilogy, has collected thirty-two essays, speeches, and introductions in Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling. He wrote the oldest in 1997, the newest in 2014. While there is a certain amount of inevitable repetition, they are all fascinating. Here's a working writer letting you into his head for 436 pages to show you what he's learned about himself as a writer and what he knows about storytelling.

As the editor's introduction points out, Pullman is interested in the discoveries of science, the freedoms of democracy, the evils of authoritarianism, the pitfalls of education, the arguments of religion, and "above all, in human nature, how we live and love and fight and betray and console one another. How we explain ourselves to ourselves." The essays all have a single theme however: storytelling.

To make such a variegated miscellany more accessible, the book includes a Topic Finder (and an index) to group together essays which touch on the themes. Topics include Children's Literature;  Education and Story; His Dark Materials; My Other Books; Reading; The Writer; and The Practice of Writing.

You need not have read Pullman's trilogy—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass—to enjoy Daemon Voices. (Although if you haven't, I recommend you do for the trilogy's own reward.) Rather, if you write fiction or aspire to write fiction, you can cherry-pick Daemon Voices for the insights it can give you and, ideally, help you become a better writer.

For example, Pullman believes the basic storytelling question is: "Where do you see the scene from? What do you tell the reader about it? What's your stance toward the characters?" One way to avoid the difficulties these problems cause "is to use a first-person and present tense way of telling the story . . . So I'm not surprised when writers choose the present tense, because it helps them to feel neutral, uncommitted, objective, and to avoid making the wrong choice of camera position." But the writer is not neutral, uncommitted, objective. Not ever.

"You privilege this over that by the mere fact of focusing on it," say Pullman. "What you give up when you write in the present tense is a whole wide range of stuff that you could say, and which is available to you through the grammar—the rich field of time itself, continuing time, or intermittent time, or time that was and now is no longer, or time that might come one day."

Pullman uses the metaphor of the wood and the path to talk about stories. The wood—or forest or jungle if you will—is all of reality, the place in which anything can happen. It is everything there is, or might be, or is not but we write stories about anyway: space aliens, ghosts, travel between alternate universes, even (pace Philip) God.

The path is structure. It leads from here to there, and even when it doubles back and crosses itself it has a purpose. "Each novel or story is a path (because it's linear, because it begins on page one and goes on steadily through all the pages in the usual order until it gets to the end) that goes through a wood," he writes. "The wood is the world in which the characters live and have their being; it's the realm of all the things that could possibly happen to them; it's the notional space where their histories exist, and where their future lives are going to continue after the story reaches the last page."

As a writer, I find these ideas (just a snippet from the book) useful. Where does the story start? In what wood does the story take place? To cite examples from my own writing: In Cleveland hotel room? A Japanese town? A New York City housing project? And what does the reader need to know about this particular woodland? How little is not enough and how much is too much?

I have told writing students who didn't know better that there are no rules in writing fiction (or, there are only two rules but no one knows what they are). Pullman argues there are rules, the first is that stories must begin. You can begin anywhere, but if you start with pages describing the weather, or the history of Charles II, or the recipe for beef Wellington without any reference to human involvement, it's probably not the most engaging way to begin.

Another rule concerns consistency. Would "such-and-such a move violate a unity or destroy a mood or contradict a proposition?" If, two chapters from the end of the book, the detective is suddenly able to read minds, you've violated this rule even if it makes it easier to solve the murder. Pullman also argues for consistency of tone. And he says one rule is so important he's written it on a piece of paper and stuck it above  his desk: "Don't be afraid of the obvious." Writers violate this rule when, in an effort to avoid stock situations, stereotyped characters, and second-hand plot devices, they no longer tell a story but instead make it perfectly clear they they're "too exquisite and fastidious to be taken in by any trite common little idea." How often have you read a book where the writing—the sentences, the vocabulary—is more vivid than the story?

You may not agree with every one of Pullman's ideas, but I believe they are all worth considering. I found Daemon Voices so rich, so thought-provoking I plan to read it again.