Making something of it

I attend a writer's workshop sponsored by a local library and led by a writer friend. Why, you ask, do you attend a workshop when you have ghostwritten twenty-one business books and published three novels? For what do you need a workshop?

I do not believe I need a workshop. I do believe I can still learn something, that I can be stimulated to try something new. One of the new things I tried is an exercise called "Make Something of It."

Take a list of random phrases and turn them into sentences in a poem, a story, an essay. In each case, the subject and verb must appear in which they appear in the list. Their relationship must remain the same and they must appear in the order in which they are listed. Beyond that you are invited to decorate or elaborate upon the sentence as you will. Can you make something of the following?

Springtime mattered.
Sophie recoiled.
The twins bled.
The Volkswagen lurched.
The mountains glowed.
The children wept.
Wayne stole.
Alice tripped.
Run Sue.
Bruce felt down.
Scott breathed.
Darkness fell.

Not easy, is it? Here—without boring you about my struggle to hammer the phrases into some semblance of sense and coherence—is what I was able to come up with:

Springtime mattered because without it
We perish in the boundless ice.
Sophie recoiled at the vision
Of winter interminable.
As the twins bled, their feet raw,
And the Volkswagen lurched
Through slushy ruts,
The mountains glowed, indifferent,
While the children wept in the dusk.

Wayne stole kindling, firewood.
Alice tripped at the threshold.
Run, Sue, run! Fetch a burning ember!
Bruce felt down at the sight of living flame.
Scott breathed wood smoke, perfume
In the warming air.
Darkness fell.

Good luck coming up with your own version.

The story begins with 31 wonderful stories by Tobias Wolff

I tell people who tell me they want to write to do two things:

(1) Write something every day.

(2) Read the best stuff you can get your hands on. Our story begins: New and Selected Stories by Tobias Wolff is one of the best things I've gotten my hands on recently.

The book published in 2008, contains 21 stories from earlier collections, plus 10 new

stories. In his author's note, Wolff asked himself about this book: "Should I present my stories, of whatever vintage [some are 30 years old], in their original form? Or should I allow myself the liberty of revisiting them here and there?"

I am sure every writer, looking at earlier work, sees ways to improve, to tinker, to touch up. While there is a good argument for leaving the published text alone, there is, I believe, a better one to edit. "The truth is that I have never regarded my stories as sacred texts," writes Woolf. "If I see a clumsy or superfluous passage, so will you, and why should I throw you out of the story with an irritation I could have prevented? Where I have felt the need for something better I have answered the need as best I can, for now."

Because Woolf wrote the 31 stories over a 30-year period, they cover an enormous range of subjects, themes, and settings. We are in the peacetime Army, in prep school, teaching college, married, single, a child. "For two days now, Miller has been standing in the rain with the rest of Bravo Company, waiting for some men from another company to blunder down the logging road where Bravo waits in ambush."  So begins "The Other Miller" putting the reader into a muddy foxhole with Miller.

"'A prep school in March is like a ship in the doldrums.' Our history master said this, as if to himself, while we were waiting for the bell to ring after class." So beings "Smorgasbord" putting the reader into the head of a prep student narrator.

"The number 64 bus stops at St. Peter's, so it's always crammed with pilgrims or suckers, depending on your pont of view—a happy hunting ground for pickpockets. Mallon was not a pilgrim, or by his own reckoning a sucker." So begins "The Benefit of the Doubt," in which Mallon, in Rome, indulges the Gypsy who has attempted to pick his pocket.

Although Wolff is widely anthologized, I recognized only one story, "A White Bible," perhaps because I read it in Best American Short Stories; it is unforgettable. A female schoolteacher is accosted at her car and forced to drive to a remote spot by a man who turns out to be a student's father. The confrontation between a single American woman who has actually had an alcoholic drink on a Friday after work and a puritanical immigrant Islamic man who only wants the best for his son is powerful, convincing, and moving.

All I can say is, see if you can get your hands on a copy of Our story begins.

A mystery set in the capital of Mali

White Leopard by Laurent Guillaume, hard-boiled, noir mystery, is interesting on several levels: It is set in Mali, about which I suspect few American reader know much; I certainly don't. Its narrator is Souleymane Camara, called Solo, a half-African/half-French ex-cop

private detective. In France, he was regarded as black; in Mali, he's regarded as white. Solo is the quixotic figure: a (mostly) just man seeking justice in a corrupt world.

The book begins stereotypically with a beautiful dame, a French lawyer, showing up in Solo's office with a problem she wants him to solve. Her younger sister has been arrested as a drug mule. Solo needs to get her out of prison. No problem—or no big problem. Solo knows who to bribe and the sister is released.

Then the sister's mutilated body is pulled out of the river, and shortly after two exceptionally brutal thugs chop off the hand of Solo's elderly gardinier, which is what "Bamako residents call someone who tends the grounds and garden." They do it to warn off Solo, the old man dies, and, needless to say, Solo is not warned off. By the book's end, Solo has found himself involved in an international drug trafficking ring, a gay Ukrainian crook who's not what he seems, an upcountry gold mine, a shore-side standoff between the military and himself, and more.

White Leopard, translated gracefully from the French by Sophie Weiner, is Guillaume's first book to be published in English. He is apparently writing from the inside. A former police officer, he worked on anti-gang, narcotics, and financial crimes. He also served on a number of international cooperation missions, including one as a police adviser in Mali, particularly for issues related to drug trafficking. He has six thrillers published in France (French readers: take note).

I said above I know nothing about Mali, but now I know something: "Mali was once the French Sudan, and even though it has been an independent nation for a half century, vestiges of French rule still remain." A painless way to assimilate geopolitical information. And while Mali may be a third world country, technology thrives: "It took me a good ten minutes to find Ronny's magnetic GPS tracker underneath the engine block [of my Land Cruiser]. I pulled it off and examined the casing. It had a cable with a male USB  port. I hooked it up to my computer and quickly figured out how to download the correct application. Fifteen minutes later, the GPS's location showed up on Google Earth. Satisfied, I charged the battery before going to bed."

While White Leopard contains some grisly violence, I never felt the bloodshed was gratuitous or overdone. Solo operates in a violent and corrupt milieu. Readers who would enjoy a safe visit to that world as they watch Solo untangle the mystery surrounding the sister's death will enjoy White Leopard.

Here I am, the interviewer as interviewee

Nancy Christie, fellow member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, is a full-time professional writer, whose passion is for fiction. In addition to her two e-books, Annabelle and Alice in Wonderland, her short stories can be found in literary publications such as Hypertext, Full of Crow, Fiction365, Red Fez, Wanderings, The Chaffin Journal and Xtreme. In addition, she maintains an interesting blog: "One one One: Insights into the Writer's Life" where she interviews writers in unusual depth. Recently, she interviewed me.

Because Christie herself is a writer, she asks interesting questions about a writer's background, writing experience, writing process and more. The interviews are long, so long she posts them in two parts. But because they are so long and because interviewees are free to respond at length they are unusually insightful. I found the experience of answering her questions both challenging and stimulating.

For example, she asks, "What does the act of writing bring into your life? Why do you want to write?" I was tempted to give the answer Victoria Page gives to a similar question in the movie The Red Shoes: "Why do you want to live?" But that begs the question.

More good questions that made me think: "What stimulates your creativity or serves as a writing inspiration? . . . What part of the writing process do you enjoy the most? The least? . . . What is the message of your book? What do you want readers to come away with after they read your book? . . . Who has inspired you — either at a personal level or as a writer?"

These are not easy questions, and I'm glad I didn't have to answer them off the top of my head but had a chance to think about them and write answers. That might mean the interview lost a certain spontaneity, but surely gained some depth. All in all, I found it a thought-provoking experience.

In "Birds of America" the language soars

Now that I've read (and written about) Stanley Fish on sentences, I've been thinking about my sentences and have become sensitive to other writers' sentences. Fish talks about the

importance of first sentences, and I've just finished reading a short story collection that is a model of how to write a first sentence that pulls the reader into the story.

—In her last picture, the camera had lingered at the hip, the naked hip, and even though it wasn't her hip, she acquired a reputation for being willing.

—It was a fear greater than death, according to the magazines.

—I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom.

—When Olena was a little girl, she had called them lie-berries—a fibbing fruit, a story store—and now she had a job in one.

—Her mother had given her the name Agnes, believing that a good-looking woman was even more striking when her name was a homely one.

Five first sentences from the first five stories in Lorrie Moore's Birds of America. All different, all engaging. Indeed, I imagine that one of the challenges of writing so well at the sentence level is that readers will pay more attention to the writing than to the story. It may be a problem for Moore because more than once I was stopped by an absolutely lovely sentence, a perfect metaphor and briefly pulled out of the story.

But for Moore, I'll let it pass. It's a little like complaining that the meal was so delicious I couldn't eat.

While there are certain repeating themes in these dozen stories—people who are lost, couples who find it hard to live together, families in crisis—there is also lightness and humor. A woman who mourns the death of her cat goes through the five stages of grief: Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Häagen Dazs, Rage. And while I responded more to some stories than others, that I think is the nature of a story collection and another reader will find a story that did not engage me to be the best in the book.

I tell aspiring writers to read the best stuff they can get their hands on. One cannot do better than study Birds of America for its range, for its language, for its structures.

What's inside the blackman's coffin?

Faithful readers of this blog—both of you—know that I respond positively to mysteries that are (a) plausible, (b) have interesting characters, and (c) are set in recognizable locales. Blackman's Coffin by Mark de Castrique meets all three criterion.

You'll have to take my word for it that the mystery is plausible because to discuss the plot in any detail would be to give too much away.

The main character, however, is both original and sympathetic. Sam Blackburn, a Chief Warrant Officer in the US Army's Criminal Investigation Detachment, has his leg blown off in Iraq and is recovering in a North Carolina V.A. Hospital. Tikima Robertson, a former Marine, visits him in Chapter 1 and offers to help him find a place to live in Asheville and a job with her employer Armitage Security Services. Surprisingly (to Sam) she never returns.

When Sam is out of the hospital, he tries to connect with Tikima at Armitage. She was murdered the morning she'd visited Sam. It's now three weeks later, the police have no suspects, and it's becoming a cold case. After a memorial service for Tikima, Sam receives a phone call from an agitated Nakayla Robertson, Tikima's younger sister. Someone has broken into Tikima's apartment during the service but appeared to take nothing. On the other hand, the burglar may not have recognized the significance of something Tikima had left on a table.

Before Blackman's Coffin ends, the reader has learned something about Thomas "Look Homeward Angel" Wolfe and the brother who stayed behind in Asheville, the Biltmore estate (with the biggest private home in the United States), and North Carolina geology. Because de Castrique grew up in the mountains of western North Carolina he knows the landscape and perhaps because this is his fifth mystery he knows how to sketch a character and evoke a scene.

Blackman's Coffin is interesting for the exchange between Sam, the white, one-legged, former Army detective, and Nakayla, the black insurance investigator. de Castrique also manages to write convincingly what seems to be a 60-year-old journal, an early, unpublished work by Thomas Wolfe. The journal says more than appears on the surface and while Sam may have an artificial leg, the IED in Iraq did not destroy his sharp-wittedness.

Who do you trust to critique your writing?

It seems to be two problems with the comments you receive about your writing: One is to not take it seriously, to, for example, attribute maliciousness or ignorance to person giving the critique. The other problem is to accept the comments wholeheartedly, to assume the reader knows better than you.

The Writer's Circle has an excellent piece on taking feedback on your writing and when to trust it. It is short, to the point, and available at:

http://writerscircle.com/how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too/?utm_source=twc-twcfan&utm_medium=social-fb&utm_term=100115&utm_content=link&utm_campaign=how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too&origin=twc_twcfan_social_fb_link_how-to-take-feedback-and-trust-it-too_100115

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.  

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.

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.