6/24/2008

“… Messrs. Blathers and Duff came back again, as wise as they went.” From Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.
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It has been almost a month since I added something fresh to my blog. For me, the long pause has been justified. I don't want to post unless I've got something good enough to write about. Why waste your time and mine?

During this hiatus, I finally finished a novel by Charles Dickens. True, A Tale of Two Cities was required reading in my senior year of high school, but I didn’t read the whole thing, so it doesn’t really count. (As a footnote, my senior class celebrated their twenty-year reunion last summer, which I didn’t attend. I have never been emotionally attached to my alma mater) Since then, I have felt a pull to read Charles Dickens; however, I always went to some other writer as the size of a Dickens novel scared the … well, scared the Dickens out of me.

When I read, it is my goal to take away something of value. The thing I noticed early on about Charles Dickens was his clever use of sarcasm. The quote above comes from a chapter about halfway through the novel, where two bungling detectives investigate the attempted robery of a house. At first, Mr. Dickens played around with the dialogue between the detectives and the people in the house, a scene which reminded me of Peter Sellers playing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther movies. After that dialogue, then, Dickens followed the two detectives around before he closed off the scene with the indictment above. I only hope I can achieve his dry sense of sarcasm in my own writing.

Other gems I learned from Dickens came toward the end of the novel. As a story teller, he gripped me with violence that I had never expected from a literary classic. With his strong use of language, Dickens ripped my heart out as the evil Sikes slipped from a rooftop. The image of Sikes, the rope and the chimney have been burned in my imagination. Then, he took my breath away as Mr. Brownlow coldly dealt with Mr. Monks. While reading, I thought about my own stories, trying to capture such a hardness in my own characters. Finally, as I watched Fagin (what a name, by the way) writhe in his cell, going crazy, I was amazed by the effect that Dickens’s writing had on me. It reminded me of some advice I found in one of the Write Great Fiction series: if you want to milk the tension, slow the scene down. That chapter in Oliver Twist felt like it went on forever, and it made me squirm, agonizing just as much as the wretched old Fagin.

Yes, I know I’ve made an assumption that you have read Oliver Twist. If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend you add this book to your reading pile. As a writer, pay attention to how Dickens handled his scenes, how he used images--natural and otherwise--to set the tone, and how he worked his magic to have a lasting impact on his readers. There is certainly a lot to learn from someone as masterful as Dickens.

5/22/2008

For those who have continued to read my blog, you have come to expect my personal insights to the writing craft, mostly things I learn from reading. Today’s posting is just some personal mumbo-jumbo.

Every couple of months, Writer’s Digest Magazine invites writers to submit stories based upon the same prompt. Upon receiving all the submissions, the WD Staff sifts through the pile, selects five and then asks its Forum Members to cast votes. It had been a while since I submitted a story, and this time I was hopefully optimistic. The results were released this morning and…

Five other writers made the cut.

Oh well, that’s the way it goes. When the WD Staff has to sort through at least five hundred submissions, I only had a one percent chance of success. It would have been nice, but now I have the opportunity to submit the story elsewhere. So, submit I did, first thing after finding my name wasn’t included as a finalist in the WD Your Story competition. My fingers are crossed, and I am once again hopefully optimistic.

In the meantime, I will continue to write more short fiction, edit the ones I already have, and slowly grind out my novel. Yes, Greta, you and I both know that the polar ice caps will probably melt, and the world will flood, before I finish that novel. I will also take this holiday weekend to enjoy camping with the family, maybe take in an hour or two to go fishing, and probably take some time to read my latest collection from Elmore Leonard (so far, La Brava has proven to be funny and entertaining). What more can a red-blooded American boy want?

For all of you out there, I hope you have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend.

5/1/2008

“Let’s get two bottles,” I said. The bottle came. I poured a little in my glass, then a glass for Brett, then filled my glass. We touched glasses.

“Bung-o!” Brett said. I drank my glass and poured out another. Brett put her hand on my arm.

“Don’t get drunk, Jake,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

“How do you know?”

“Don’t” she said. “You’ll be all right.”

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The literary scholar will recognize the snippet above as part of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. One of my commitments for 2008 has been to submerge myself into some of the classics which I have never read before. So far this year, I have tackled Madame Bovary, Tom Sawyer and now The Sun Also Rises. On the shelf, I have other classics waiting for me, books by Jane Austen, Jack London and Charles Dickens.

Though I have read other Hemingway novels—The Old Man And The Sea and To Have And Have Not—this was the first time to read this classic story. Since it is widely considered his best, I chose it ahead of For Whom The Bell Tolls and A Farwell To Arms, both of which are also on my shelf. For me, Hemingway’s style is too choppy. I personally like sentences that flow like a smooth river, gentle to the mind, relaxing to the soul. Laura Lippman’s prose comes to mind. Jonathan King and James Lee Burke are other writers whose style agrees with my eyes. But this is not to trash Hemingway. In his book, I found characters so deep and rich the author never had to specifically tell the reader what the problems were. He let the characters live them out. Furthermore, there was not a single halo in the bunch. Not one. Every character had their flaws. The bankrupt cheapskate, who sponges off of everyone. The love struck man with a false impression of the world and a fiery temper. A woman so hungry for love that she sleeps with just about anyone. And then there is Jake, a man with so much pain that he tries to drink it away.

As writers, we love flawed characters. We don’t want harps and wings or horns and pitchforks. We want characters that have both redemptive and destructive traits. In short we want people who are so brutally written, so honest and pure, that our readers can relate to them. Hemingway gave his readers just that.

The problem though, as one friend put it lately, is how to present a character that is not too flawed, reckless or destructive that people don’t have compassion for them. Honestly, I first thought Hemingway had gone too far with the debauchery. Scene after scene, there was so much wine and booze I was left wondering: Can people really drink like this? And why all the drinking, anyway? By the end of the novel, though, I got it. And in that revelation, I gained the pity and compassion that my friend wants to achieve with her characters.

Looking back on it, I think the answer to the problem—flawed, but not too flawed—lies within the background. The only way for a reader to connect, to understand why, is to show the reader what has happened previously that drives a character to such destructive behavior. In Jake’s case, there’s the war, the inability to love like he wants, the countless imaginings of his friends and their sex lives. All of it works together, and it helped me to understand who Jake is at a deeper level. The other part of the answer lies in the character's redemptive qualities. At the end of the story, Hemingway blew me away with Brett’s comments. She is the one who is closest to Jake. She knows why he drinks so much. And this time, she doesn't want him to be drunk. Even though I think Brett is a slut, she is such a compassionate slut in this last scene that I have pity for her, too.