![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shalannaThis afternoon, the Richardson/Plano (Texas) Guild of NaNoWriMo members had a meeting at the Atlanta Bread Company. A good time was had by all, as far as I could tell. Two of 'em were trying to write, but when I came in, I got them all grousing about the election results, what's unfair in the world, publishing and the sorry state everything is in, weddings with bad DJs and crappy cash bars (can you imagine?!), and the like. I still think that was more fun than working. Somebody should write all that up.
At the very end, while I was complaining about a published novel that was a NaNo book (but which has serious flaws that could've--SHOULD've--been corrected fairly easily before publication, IMHO), we accidentally segued into something actually useful, a talk about Sarah's plot and whether her setup is plausible. Her setup was good and didn't have any flaws like that published book. I am looking forward to seeing what she does with her setup. I still think she has the makings of a Southern gothic mystery. I'm partial to Southern gothics (think Fried Green Tomatoes and the like).
Yes, I'm still b*tching about that published book with the flaws. I really like the author and whatnot, but the opening of that book has factual errors/logical flaws that strained my credibility (if a person is the victim of an explosion caused by a gas leak under a building, the natural gas company rushes to that person trying to settle immediately; there would be no such thing as a court trial to try to "prove" that it was the character's own fault so the gas company would get off scot-free, and no such thing as a boss who could say that she wasn't going to share the settlement with that employee who was burned. Certainly not in Texas (though the book is set elsewhere, but it's similar in other areas.) And there's no such thing as a head injury that keeps you in a coma for a week, but then you just wake up and rest a little and then go about your business--no, you have to get your strength back, and you aren't always yourself again (ever). My aunt's house had an explosion/fire and Lone Star Gas raced the lawyers to the hospital to try to settle with her; they would never try to accuse the victim of being guilty of not leaving when she smelled gas, even though they say you need to get out and take any animals and children IMMEDIATELY and don't touch any phones or light switches!)
But I could have lived with that setup, if not for the *next* plot hole. An abusive ex was chasing the character (and made a threat to the extent that the character had to go stay with others, first her new boyfriend and then a new woman friend), but the ex never gets "close" to where she is or leaves any clues--just is mentioned a couple of times, apparently merely as a device to keep the heroine at her friend's house where she can Learn A Life Lesson or two. Where the "black moment" should have been, instead of the ultimate confrontation with that ex, during which the character saves herself through her own actions and efforts . . . she gets a phone call that his body has been found and she needs to come identify it. WTF?!?! The most rudimentary of critique groups would have called this author on that. It would have been WAAAY more effective had this guy just suddenly shown up and she'd have had to deal with him as a final challenge. Instead, she identifies the body, feels sad for a minute, gets a drastically new hairstyle, and wow Bob's your uncle. Cheat! This is cheating the reader. (Dwight V. Swain covers this, I am sure, as does his protege Jack Bickham. See their many valuable books on writing popular and literary fiction.) I am not just making this up. Does anyone else follow my argument here?
It could be I'm just a bitter old loser who hasn't managed to sell her own ChickLit novel, and therefore finds fault with others. Gov. Ah-nuld said, "Why should I listen to the LOSERS?" and that's pretty much society's take on it. Still, I think I have made the case here that revisions would have improved this novel.
I really do like this author a lot. She and I exchanged chapters way long ago and corresponded on the 'net a little bit before she got her big break. I am not trying to say anything nasty about her. I am just observing how unfair and uneven the business is. She did not HAVE to revise the book because she got an agent who liked it as it was, and she sold it as is, so why *should* she worry about this? Well, MY reasoning would be, foremost of all we need artistic intention and integrity. I try to put out the best possible product. If someone feels that my work has a flaw and points it out to me, and I see that flaw, then I would feel that I needed to make changes until I felt that flaw was gone. That's so that readers can have the best experience of the story. And so that, if the work survives me, it's something to be proud of. Maybe this is just a boatload of hot air . . . but it makes sense to ME. I don't know how these points "slipped past" the editor(s).
All I know is: If *I* had sent that book to an agent, the agent would have sent me a revision letter to this effect. The reason I am so sure of this is that when I completed my first post-college novel (it was a coming-of-age book that was woe-is-me stuff and had several flaws, but still had some really kickass scenes), back in the Dark Ages, I used the same kind of device to create what my professor said was false tension and then "rip off" the reader by having the guy commit suicide instead of confronting my girl who had decided that she'd have to leave him. Dr. Marshall Terry told me that if I wanted to ask readers to give up valuable hours out of their lives to read my story, I should deliver on the promise of a good story that fulfills the expectations that readers have, expectations that you as author have set up. He didn't pick me out as his protege (dang), nor does he probably remember me at all (this was 1981, after all), and he didn't tell me that my work was ready for prime time when it wasn't. At that time, my craft was not what it is now, and that novel's plot had egregious holes. He would not have done me any favors by telling me it was ready. And had it been published back then, I'd be embarrassed by it now. (Dean Koontz tells in his book How to Write Best-Selling Fiction of going around buying up all the rights to the early books he wrote, including SF/fantasy, westerns, and erotica. He said he needed to make them disappear.) Of course, maybe I am taking this all too seriously . . . maybe it's all about the money and the flash and the promotional hype. Maybe it doesn't matter, if readers don't notice.
(Bear in mind that this conversation with my fiction writing prof at SMU was SO long ago that the manuscript was printed out with a dot matrix printer, and my prof had NEVER SEEN a "computer printout" because the Apple ][ was still so new, and complained that the paper had rough edges where I had torn off the perforated bits--if you can't imagine what I am talking about, you are too young to remember pinfeed paper.)
Perhaps the reason that agents, editors, and critique groups always call me on anything that they possibly can think of is that I have bad karma. I must have been a helluva Nazi, or Bacchanalian, or Pogrom director, in that past life, then, because man, it's been a tough row to hoe this time around. And the worst thing I ever did that I can think of is that back in 1977, I stopped speaking to my best friend because my then-boyfriend dumped me for her, and that wasn't even really her fault (she called to ask me if she could go out with him, and then she broke up with him, but my mother insisted she had betrayed me and I must totally ostracize her, which I did, because my mother said my anger and rage would go away if I did that. It didn't, and I still miss the girl.) Oh, and one time when I was a child and angry at my mother I found her 18-aquamarine ring, one that her old rodeo boyfriend had given her before she met my daddy, on the garage floor, and to be mean I just left it there thinking she'd be looking for it and be upset and I could be the hero and go find it, only I forgot about it, and then she got a call from her real estate office and backed the car out and ran over it and shattered all the gemstones, and of course the aquamarine is my birthstone and you can't find green ones any more, so that really backfired on *me* . . . I'm sure that when I grew up, she'd have let me wear it the way she let me wear other jewelry of hers. So anytime I ever did anything in anger, I have almost immediately had it circle around and take a huge chunk out of my own butt, and made long-lasting regrets. I cannot imagine why *I* have such shitty karma, and G. W. Bush (for example) has such lovely, fluffy, whipped cream, diamond-studded karma. It is just one of life's little ironic mysteries, I suppose.
But given the choice between no life at all and this one, I'll take this one every time, Universe, so don't get mad. As in the ending of "Birches" by Robert Frost, "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
At the very end, while I was complaining about a published novel that was a NaNo book (but which has serious flaws that could've--SHOULD've--been corrected fairly easily before publication, IMHO), we accidentally segued into something actually useful, a talk about Sarah's plot and whether her setup is plausible. Her setup was good and didn't have any flaws like that published book. I am looking forward to seeing what she does with her setup. I still think she has the makings of a Southern gothic mystery. I'm partial to Southern gothics (think Fried Green Tomatoes and the like).
Yes, I'm still b*tching about that published book with the flaws. I really like the author and whatnot, but the opening of that book has factual errors/logical flaws that strained my credibility (if a person is the victim of an explosion caused by a gas leak under a building, the natural gas company rushes to that person trying to settle immediately; there would be no such thing as a court trial to try to "prove" that it was the character's own fault so the gas company would get off scot-free, and no such thing as a boss who could say that she wasn't going to share the settlement with that employee who was burned. Certainly not in Texas (though the book is set elsewhere, but it's similar in other areas.) And there's no such thing as a head injury that keeps you in a coma for a week, but then you just wake up and rest a little and then go about your business--no, you have to get your strength back, and you aren't always yourself again (ever). My aunt's house had an explosion/fire and Lone Star Gas raced the lawyers to the hospital to try to settle with her; they would never try to accuse the victim of being guilty of not leaving when she smelled gas, even though they say you need to get out and take any animals and children IMMEDIATELY and don't touch any phones or light switches!)
But I could have lived with that setup, if not for the *next* plot hole. An abusive ex was chasing the character (and made a threat to the extent that the character had to go stay with others, first her new boyfriend and then a new woman friend), but the ex never gets "close" to where she is or leaves any clues--just is mentioned a couple of times, apparently merely as a device to keep the heroine at her friend's house where she can Learn A Life Lesson or two. Where the "black moment" should have been, instead of the ultimate confrontation with that ex, during which the character saves herself through her own actions and efforts . . . she gets a phone call that his body has been found and she needs to come identify it. WTF?!?! The most rudimentary of critique groups would have called this author on that. It would have been WAAAY more effective had this guy just suddenly shown up and she'd have had to deal with him as a final challenge. Instead, she identifies the body, feels sad for a minute, gets a drastically new hairstyle, and wow Bob's your uncle. Cheat! This is cheating the reader. (Dwight V. Swain covers this, I am sure, as does his protege Jack Bickham. See their many valuable books on writing popular and literary fiction.) I am not just making this up. Does anyone else follow my argument here?
It could be I'm just a bitter old loser who hasn't managed to sell her own ChickLit novel, and therefore finds fault with others. Gov. Ah-nuld said, "Why should I listen to the LOSERS?" and that's pretty much society's take on it. Still, I think I have made the case here that revisions would have improved this novel.
I really do like this author a lot. She and I exchanged chapters way long ago and corresponded on the 'net a little bit before she got her big break. I am not trying to say anything nasty about her. I am just observing how unfair and uneven the business is. She did not HAVE to revise the book because she got an agent who liked it as it was, and she sold it as is, so why *should* she worry about this? Well, MY reasoning would be, foremost of all we need artistic intention and integrity. I try to put out the best possible product. If someone feels that my work has a flaw and points it out to me, and I see that flaw, then I would feel that I needed to make changes until I felt that flaw was gone. That's so that readers can have the best experience of the story. And so that, if the work survives me, it's something to be proud of. Maybe this is just a boatload of hot air . . . but it makes sense to ME. I don't know how these points "slipped past" the editor(s).
All I know is: If *I* had sent that book to an agent, the agent would have sent me a revision letter to this effect. The reason I am so sure of this is that when I completed my first post-college novel (it was a coming-of-age book that was woe-is-me stuff and had several flaws, but still had some really kickass scenes), back in the Dark Ages, I used the same kind of device to create what my professor said was false tension and then "rip off" the reader by having the guy commit suicide instead of confronting my girl who had decided that she'd have to leave him. Dr. Marshall Terry told me that if I wanted to ask readers to give up valuable hours out of their lives to read my story, I should deliver on the promise of a good story that fulfills the expectations that readers have, expectations that you as author have set up. He didn't pick me out as his protege (dang), nor does he probably remember me at all (this was 1981, after all), and he didn't tell me that my work was ready for prime time when it wasn't. At that time, my craft was not what it is now, and that novel's plot had egregious holes. He would not have done me any favors by telling me it was ready. And had it been published back then, I'd be embarrassed by it now. (Dean Koontz tells in his book How to Write Best-Selling Fiction of going around buying up all the rights to the early books he wrote, including SF/fantasy, westerns, and erotica. He said he needed to make them disappear.) Of course, maybe I am taking this all too seriously . . . maybe it's all about the money and the flash and the promotional hype. Maybe it doesn't matter, if readers don't notice.
(Bear in mind that this conversation with my fiction writing prof at SMU was SO long ago that the manuscript was printed out with a dot matrix printer, and my prof had NEVER SEEN a "computer printout" because the Apple ][ was still so new, and complained that the paper had rough edges where I had torn off the perforated bits--if you can't imagine what I am talking about, you are too young to remember pinfeed paper.)
Perhaps the reason that agents, editors, and critique groups always call me on anything that they possibly can think of is that I have bad karma. I must have been a helluva Nazi, or Bacchanalian, or Pogrom director, in that past life, then, because man, it's been a tough row to hoe this time around. And the worst thing I ever did that I can think of is that back in 1977, I stopped speaking to my best friend because my then-boyfriend dumped me for her, and that wasn't even really her fault (she called to ask me if she could go out with him, and then she broke up with him, but my mother insisted she had betrayed me and I must totally ostracize her, which I did, because my mother said my anger and rage would go away if I did that. It didn't, and I still miss the girl.) Oh, and one time when I was a child and angry at my mother I found her 18-aquamarine ring, one that her old rodeo boyfriend had given her before she met my daddy, on the garage floor, and to be mean I just left it there thinking she'd be looking for it and be upset and I could be the hero and go find it, only I forgot about it, and then she got a call from her real estate office and backed the car out and ran over it and shattered all the gemstones, and of course the aquamarine is my birthstone and you can't find green ones any more, so that really backfired on *me* . . . I'm sure that when I grew up, she'd have let me wear it the way she let me wear other jewelry of hers. So anytime I ever did anything in anger, I have almost immediately had it circle around and take a huge chunk out of my own butt, and made long-lasting regrets. I cannot imagine why *I* have such shitty karma, and G. W. Bush (for example) has such lovely, fluffy, whipped cream, diamond-studded karma. It is just one of life's little ironic mysteries, I suppose.
But given the choice between no life at all and this one, I'll take this one every time, Universe, so don't get mad. As in the ending of "Birches" by Robert Frost, "one could do worse than be a swinger of birches."
