Category Archives: Reading

Compound-Complex Confession

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I confess.

I have committed a sin graver than enjoying the whale descriptions in Moby Dick.

Black and white painting of Cooper

James Fennimore Cooper by Brady (Wikipedia)

I like like James Fennimore Cooper.

No, it’s more than liking. I love and admire his style and diction, especially his mastery of the compound-complex sentence.

Now I believe I have found his modern day equal in the recently deceased Iain Banks, author of the Culture series of sci-fi philosophical novels as well as the masterful Wasp Factory.

I came upon the following paragraph on page 36 (hard copy) of his 1997 A Song of Stone:

I saw so many dances here. Each hall brought everyone of note from counties upon counties away; from each great house, from each plump farm, from over the wooded hills around and across that fertile plain they came, like iron filings to a magnet drawn; sclerotic grandees, rod-backed matrons, amiable buffoons ruddily ho-hoing, indulgent city relations down for a little country air or to kill for sport or find a spouse, beaming boys with faces polished as their shoes, cynical graduates come to sneer and feast, poised observers of the social scene cutting their drinks with the barbed remarks, dough-fresh country youths with invitations clutched, new blossomed maidens half embarrassed, half proud of their emergent allure; politicians, priests and the brave fighting men; the old money, the new money, the once-monied, the titled and the expleted, the fawn-shy and just the fawning, the well matured and the spoiled … the castle has room for them all.

I have been to that ball (and never been to any other).

Find me a two-sentence paragraph that describes more fully and yet so succinctly, that offers “plump farms,” “the fawn-shy and just the fawning” and “new blossomed maidens half embarrassed, half proud of their emergent allure.”

I do not hope to write so well, but I can certainly admire better than most.

After all, I like James Fennimore Cooper.

Do You Outline Your Writing?

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Are you an outliner or a pants-er?

You heard that frequently in the sessions and the hallways at ThrillerFest 2014.

What the questioner means is, do you outline your work or do you write by the seat of your pants?

I’m a pants-er. I start with the key character, a situation and a vague idea of how the story should end. Then I start writing. I learned very quickly the characters take the story where they want it to go; I’m just along for the ride. (I think this produces some unsatisfactory endings and rewrites, but that’s for another blog post.)

Seat of pants

Outline, or by the seat of your pants?

This week, I am learning the challenges of outlining as I convert a 53,000-word novella into a graphic novel. I have set aside these five days to draft a detailed scene outline. (Script writing and novel writing are very different, but again, that’s for another post.)

I’m into Day #3 of the outline, and I’m barely halfway through the novella. Getting the scenes right and adding just the right amount of detail takes a lot of time.

I understand why Jeffery Deaver takes six to eight months to produce a 150 to 200 page outline for one of his best-selling thrillers.

R. L. Stine, the prolific author of the Goosebumps horror stories for children, qualifies as an outliner.

He described his writing process at ThrillerFest:

  1. Start with the title. Until he has the title, he can go no further.
  2. Write the ending. The ending must meet audience expectations.
  3. Outline 20 pages for a 150-page book. He does all the thinking before he writes.
  4. Make a cheat sheet of all the characters
  5. Get his wife’s approval. She is his editor and he’s not allowed to go forward until she okays his outline.
  6. Write.

Raymond Khoury, screenwriter and author of The Last Templar, sets up the first 100 pages and then let’s the characters go.

Gayle Lynds, who writes spy thrillers that easily top 500 pages, developed her outline system through the drafting of her first three books.

She creates a bare-bones outline for each chapter describing the characters and the action for each. She also lays out the day and time of day as well as the location, because her books take place all over the world and are told from multiple points of view. (In this, she follows the screenplay model. More later.)

What sets her apart, in my mind, is how she color codes each character and when the initial outline is done, she flips back over the pages looking for characters who dominate too much or who disappear in the cracks until she has a map of the flow. Then she writes.

And at the opposite end of the spectrum, Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series, writes by the seat of his pants. Says he:

“I don’t want to know the ending before I get there.”

 

Coolest Author’s Secret from ThrillerFest

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I learned a lot at this year’s ThrillerFest (my first), but the coolest thing I learned came from David Morrell, the creator of Rambo.

Rambo was a fictional character in the thriller, First Blood, before he became Sylvester Stallone. (He died in the book version.)

First Blood cover photoAnd in the book, he did not have a first name. That (John) came from the movie producers.

How did he come to be named Rambo?

Morrell relates that he was working hard doing his writerly thing one day trying to come up with a name for his protagonist when his wife interrupted him and asked him to try a new type of apple. After repeated attempts to put her off, he finally gave in, took a bite, loved it as much as his wife had and asked, What kind of apple is that?

She replied, A Rambo.

Imagine if it had been a Fuji or Granny Smith.

I notice, however, that among the hundreds of varieties of apple, that you can find the
Antonovka Kamenichka, the Ard Cairn, Arthur Turner, Arthur W. Barnes and the Ashmead’s Kernel (Col. Ashmead, get it?). And Those are just the A’s. Next time I get stuck for a character’s name, I’m heading over the fruit aisle at the grocery store.