Fiction is Dusty Work

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The fact is that the materials of the fiction writer are the humblest. Fiction is about everything human and we are made of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty than you shouldn't write fiction. It's not a grand enough job for you. -- Flannery O'Connor
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A lukewarm main character is incredibly dissatisfying. Life happens to them. They don't engage the menace. They stand back and wait to be rescued. I know this. I plot and develop characters with this in mind, and then, in the first draft, I invariably wimp out. My main character faces a milksoppy obstruction, not a knee-knocking malignancy.
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I honesty thought I'd written an engaged character in Lucy, the heroine of my WIP. She starts her quest with only modest equivocation and then spurs her "horse" onward.
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Then I took a long, hot shower. And, for me, there is no better place to discover the flaws of my writing. I'm too possessive of my words to delete them before my very eyes. Oh, the agony!
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Back to the story...Lucy faced a menace in my first draft--Is my ambiguity driving you nuts yet?--but her monster wasn't bloodthirsty enough. Losing the battle only meant a modest setback, not catastrophe. I had to up the stakes for her to truly reach hero status.
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But that meant getting really, really dusty--feeling revulsion, fear, helplessness.
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I rewrote the weak pages, and the story is stronger. I'm excited about returning to it, not only to fulfill my daily word count but to find out what happens to Lucy, to see what amazing things she'll do to overcome her nemesis--real or internal or both.
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I don't think Ms. O'Connor spoke exclusively for writers of fiction to portray the underbelly of humanity. She was speaking to authenticity, and authenticity has its transcendence too. I think of Alcott's Little Women. Their menace was the Civil War, the possible death of their father, and the loss of all they knew and held dear. And yet, they loved, forgave, and created. Louisa May Alcott got dusty.
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Having said that, let me acknowledge that the Christ follower has another layer of authenticity to portray--that which ought to be. What ought to be provides the best possible source for internal conflict, but our readers also want to see how this sense of "ought to be" plays out in the human experience.
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Pardon my meandering thoughts today. It's Sunday. Company's coming. I have no business trying to write a cohesive blog for such amazingly thoughtful readers as you. My apologies. Hopefully, I have given you some ideas to tickle your creative souls.
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Have you read something lately in which the author allowed him- or herself to get dusty? What hinders you from getting dusty? Is it harder to write underbelly or transcendence? How do you balance the "ought to be" in your fiction?

What Do You Want On Your Tombstone?

Just after my son’s wedding this week, I picked up A Writer’s Commonplace Book, by Rosemary Friedman. When you’ve hosted a large rehearsal dinner and a much larger wedding reception on two consecutive evenings, you have just enough umph left to read a couple of quotes in a nice little book, and this was one of them:

“A writer’s obituary should read: He wrote books then he died.” ~William Faulkner

Gosh, really? I’d hoped mine would say a bit more, something perhaps about sucking the marrow from the bones of life (that’s Thoreau). Or perhaps simply that I loved my family and friends even more than my books.

Curious, I looked Faulkner up on Wikipedia, to see if he’d gotten much done besides writing, and the answer was yes, he had. He’d won two National Book Awards, two Pulitzers, and The Nobel Prize in Literature. Of course, you could argue that his awards only meant that he had written very good books, so his record was safe from clutter. Earlier in life, he’d joined first the Canadian and then the British Royal Air Force (too short for the US military), but had not seen any action. Ah, but then, once he’d won his awards, he’d gone and donated part of the prize money to establish scholarships for African-American education majors as well as the Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. A writer who wants his obituary to span no more than six words should be more careful. After all, if you run a print preview of his entry on Wikipedia, you get nine pages of material.

Ernest Hemingway would have pointed out that the military experience - paltry though it was, compared with his own - would come in handy for a writer penning war novels. He himself had won the Silver Medal of Honor during WWI, the Bronze Star during WWII, and two medals for bull-fighting! Oh, and he’d won an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Pulitzer and The Nobel Prize in Literature as well.

Know how many pages you could print out about him on Wikipedia? Nineteen, more than double that of the modest Faulkner.

He had his own take on the life and death question:

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” ~Ernest Hemingway

For myself, I think I could gladly leave off the bull fights from my life story. And I’m sure I’d make a terrible soldier. In fact, if I had to live Hemingway’s life to be an author, I might be tempted to give up writing and take up cross-stitch.

Perhaps the author who best exemplifies Faulkner’s ideal would be Emily Dickenson. She spent most of her adult life voluntarily confined to her home, caring for her parents while they lived, writing poems she never meant to publish, lowering gingerbread to children on the street by means of a rope and a basket. She wrote poems - that were later put into books - and she died.

No Nobel Prizes. No Pulitzers. But in the hundred and some years since her death, people have described this poet with her basketful of cookies as “daring,” “sophisticated,” “pre-modernist.” William Dean Howells once wrote that "If nothing else had come out of our life but this strange poetry, we should feel that in the work of Emily Dickinson, America, or New England rather, had made a distinctive addition to the literature of the world, and could not be left out of any record of it."

Sixteen pages on Wikipedia. This woman who asked that her poems be burned when she died. What was her answer to Faulkner and Hemingway?

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.” ~Emily Dickenson

What’s your answer? How ought a writer live her life?

We’d love to read your thoughts.

The Journey of the Hero (or Heroine)

(Psst! It's Bonnie Grove's birthday today! She's 29 - again!)

I’ve been mulling over what Patti said in her comments on the April 29^th post. (Sure, that was three months ago: I burn slow, but I burn hot; and haven’t been able to get what she said out of my mind.)

She said, “I've modified The Hero's Journey with its "pattern" of ordinary life being interrupted by an inciting incident with a mentor thrown in and a climatic confrontation with the antagonist, usually internal conflict. The story is propelled by rising antagonism and the active pursuit of desire. Again, the antagonism is external and internal.

How to modify this for women's fiction? First, the ordinary world is not perfect but known, but then something forces the protag to decide what she's going to do about the disequilibrium. Her nest is disheveled, and the action is all about getting that nest (relationships) back into a more comfortable order. 



Well, I don’t know about you but when I read Patti’s erudite comment I felt immediately intimidated because I didn’t know what the “hero’s journey” was. Don’t ask me where I was in the folklore, Bible as literature, and classics classes I took in college. I guess I missed that day. (In all the classes.) I had only a vague idea of what Patti was talking about.

Joseph Campbell explained the concept when he said, “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

Campbell said that most cultural heroes such as Buddha, Moses, Osiris, and Jesus all shared this journey structure. (I’m trying to think how the real, historic, divine Jesus could be thought to begin in “the world of common day.” John 1:1 blows that theory into bits, but for someone who believes Jesus was not divine nor eternal, the pattern would hold.)

However, I do see how such a journey is a satisfying way to tell a story. It has structure -- and perhaps even the familiarity to us adults of that structure leads us to expect it to follow a certain path-- plus the excitement of conflict, and justice.

(Interestingly enough, the two traditions of Christianity --Western and Eastern -- emphasize different elements of Jesus' hero story. In most western religious art, the focus is on His suffering and atonement; so you would most often see a crucifix. In eastern iconography, His triumph over death and hell is more often emphasized: the Resurrection.)

At any rate, the journey is important to many readers. Do you look for such a journey in the novels you read? In those which have been most deeply rewarding to you, in what ways is it because of the sense of justice and “necessary structure” being satisfied?

Prequels, Sequels and Stand-Alones

When it comes to movies you almost always hear, "The sequel wasn't nearly as good." That's true as far back as Dirty Harry and The Godfather -- which are the first movies I can recall with sequels. Sure, there are outstanding exceptions, such as the Starwars films, but for the most part, if there's a II, III ... VII after a movie title I tend to say, "No thanks." I'm perfectly content to let my imagination figure out what happens to the characters after "The End." Mind you, I'm not talking about an epic such as The Lord of the Rings, which had to be three movies in order to be true to Tolkien's triolgy. I'm talking about a script that's thrown together to ride the coattails of success of what was meant to be a stand-alone movie.
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Yet producers continue to pour tons of money into one sequel after another on the chance that movie goers will be drawn in by a popular title. There's even the fairly recent phenomenon of the movie prequel, which sets out to show how the story began ... which seems to me to be the purpose of the original movie -- but what do I know?

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That begs the questions, does the same hold true for books? Are sequels and series worth the money publishers put into them? We all know the phenomenal success of the Left Behind series -- and we can debate the merit of that all day -- as well as the success of the Mitford series, which is much easier to understand from a craft perspective. But I believe their success is the exception to the rule. I'm currently reading the second book in a trilogy, the first of which I thoroughly enjoyed, but this second one ... not so much. Maybe because I'm not as engaged with the POV character this time around, or maybe because the writing and the story are not on the same par as the first book. I have to say I'm really disappointed. I wanted this and the next book to be as good as the first. But once again, it didn't happen.

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Still, publishers seem to like sequels and series, so they must be profitable. But do readers buy books 2, 3, 4, etc., in the hope they'll be as good as the first, much as movie goers buy admission tickets with the same hope, only to be disappointed on both fronts?
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In Charles Dickens' day "serialization" was a popular way to present a novel, publishing a chapter at a time in monthly periodicals (which I wouldn't like one bit). But sequels and series in fiction, as in movies, are a fairly new practice. I mean, can you imagine The Grapes of Wrath: The California Years, or Moby Dick: Let's Have Another Go? What would that even look like?

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As an author I've yet to entertain the idea of writing a sequel or a series, though I've been asked many times if I were planning a sequel to either Every Good & Perfect Gift or Lying on Sunday. Sure, it's bittersweet to say goodbye to my characters at the end of a book; still I'm always ready to move on to another story and another set of characters.

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As readers, are you attracted to sequels and series? If so, how often are you satisfied/ disappointed?

Audience-With-An-Agent Contest

Our first Audience with an Agent Contest is a rousing success!

Yesterday was the deadline, and the contest is now closed to entries.

The last entry arrived with only four hours to spare! Many of the entries made the most of the time afforded to polish and perfect those manuscripts - a wise choice, we think.

Now, we at Novel Matters will cuddle into our couches and start reading - and looking for treasures.

Here is how the contest will be judged:

While it would be fun to just go on warm fuzzy feelings (fun for us, anyway), we've devised a ruling grid that takes into account and grades the major points of novel writing (plot, story, characters, dialogue, grammar, storytelling, conflict, etc).

Each entry will be blind read six times (each Novel Matters' author will read each entry once, grading it without the name of the author at the top - so we won't know whose manuscript we are reading until all the grades are in and matched with the author). Grades will be assigned by each of us. We will pool our results, and the top six entries will be declared winners of the first round of the contest. Those lucky six (Luck? Hardly!) will have their synopsis and first chapter sent to Wendy Lawton of Books & Such Literary Agency. We will contact each of the six authors, and their names will be posted on the blog. The first round winners will be announced September 30th.

Wendy does not guarantee she will sign any of the authors. But she will read all six. She will finish with the manuscripts and announce any signings November 2, 2009.

Are you excited yet? We are!

So, the hard work is done - um, except you are all still working on those manuscripts, we hope! and it's all over but the waiting, and praying.

Ah, the praying. It is our prayer that God will lead you in perfect peace and perfect His plan for your life and your work. In all things, may His will be done.

Happily Ever After

Remember that today is the last day to get your entries submitted for our 'Audience with an Agent Contest.' Please see our 'Promotions' section for details. We can't wait to read your entry!


Some people won't read a book if they learn beforehand that the ending is not a happy one. In fact, I once had it explained to me this way: "It's fine to give your story a down ending, so long as you are ready to accept that you are writing to a smaller audience. A much smaller audience."

I get it. It's a great feeling to turn the last page of a book knowing all the characters you've come to love are safe and sound. Our day to day lives are fraught with uncertainty, so when we enter a story, we like to know that in the end, all our worries will be put to rest, that everything is going to work out fine.

The only problem with a happy ending is that we know what it will be, generally by the end of the first chapter. The boy will get the girl. David will triumph over the giant. It can be fun learning how he triumphs, but really, at some point toward the end of the book it will no longer be necessary to continue reading. You could write the ending yourself. In his wonderful book, Story, Robert McKee tells us, "Anyone can deliver a happy ending. Just give the characters everything they want."

But there are more ways than one to write a happy - or let's say a sort of happy - ending. Last night I finished reading a novel that ended very differently from the way I'd imagined it would. (I'd give you the title, but I hope you will read this one someday, and I don't want to spoil it.)

I'd thought the character would ultimately mend the troubled relationship with his father. Instead, just when things looked hopeful, he did the one thing that would smash that relationship all to bits, and was thereafter separated from his family and all he loved, perhaps forever.

A terrible ending.

And yet...

And yet he walked away with a new understanding of his own power to wound. He walked away a wiser, better man.

A bit more from Story by Robert McKee:

"In Aristotle's words, an ending must be both "inevitable and unexpected." Inevitable in the sense that as the Inciting Incident occurs, everything and anything becomes possible, but at Climax, as the audience looks back through the telling, it should seem that the path the telling took was the only path. Given the characters and their world as we've come to understand it, the climax was inevitable and satisfying. But at the same time it must be unexpected, happening in a way the audience could not have expected."

The ending I described above was unexpected, but it was also inevitable. The fact that the story remained true to itself to the last was what made the novel different from a million lesser novels that have given me the endings I wanted.

How about you? Do you demand a happy ending, will a "sort of" happy ending do, or are you fine with any ending that rings true? We love to read what you think.

Salty Stories

I hear it all the time – it’s the big debate in Christian fiction, the one that writers and readers buzz about, the one that makes us stop typing and ask, “Is this passage preachy?”

I think it’s a good discussion, one we should continue to have because it helps us shape the industry of Christian books. However, it is a mistake to think that Christians are the only ones who need to ask if our literature is “preachy” and packed with messages that hammer rather than whisper.

General fiction has just as much reason to worry as Christian fiction does that it’s preachy.
I read broadly, as I suspect the vast majority of us do. In my fictional travels I’ve come across general market fiction that was so preachy it made me put the book aside. The adage that “no one likes to be preached to” is one mainstream writers need to heed every bit as much as religious minded writers do.

I’ve been reading The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson, a book I wanted very much to like for many reasons. First, the author is Canadian (from Winnipeg). I read vast amounts of Canadian fiction (and I recommend you do too – there is a delectable “otherness” about Canadian fiction that is at once familiar and foreign), and I was happy to add Davidson’s name to the list, especially after I heard about the large advance he secured for this, his debut novel. The premise is so strong and compelling, it’s no wonder publishers snapped him up. So, I bought the book.

Remember – I wanted to believe. I wanted to love this book.

There are two things that keep me from falling in love with The Gargoyle. First, the writing – with a wobbly voice that never finds its track, to Davidson’s habit of writing in a way that minimizes emotional impact, to his lack of knowledge of the psychological, the writing left me feeling – well…cheated. Still, there are moments in the book that shine, and I would have overlooked (on tip-toe, mind you) the writing if only he would have refrained from his preaching.

But the real reason I couldn’t love the book was because several times I had to check the front cover to ensure I had not, by accident picked up a book titled “I am atheist, hear me roar” or something of that nature. He spoke his beliefs loudly and from the soapbox on the corner street Christians are so often accused of standing on. He didn’t let the story just tell the story of a man who didn’t believe in God yet couldn’t explain the things that were happening to him.

I don’t mean to pick on Davidson and his book. But, for the sake of blog post brevity, I wanted to highlight a concrete example of what I am talking about. All of us, regardless of the religious/political/ethical messages we wish to incorporate into our fiction, need to remember to respect the reader, and respect the story.

For the Christian, that means creating salty stories – fiction that is flavored throughout with the truth of God and His character. You would never sit down to a meal and drown it with salt, covering your plate until all you saw was white. We use salt in measure and allow it to bump up against the rest of the ingredients, soak in, and change the flavor of the entire meal for the better.

Jesus said we were to be salt and light to the world. These two things are perfect examples of how God wants us to write as well as live. Salt and light both are, in and of themselves, overpowering elements when taken in large quantity. Salt burns the tongue, light burns the eyes. But used wisely and in measure they are indispensable. Keep in mind though, it isn’t the salt or light that matter most, but the effect the salt has on the food, and the effect that light has on a darkened room that make them transformative elements.

What have you been reading or writing lately that uses salt in proper measure? How did the writer accomplish this?