I’ve just added the first post from Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward over at Booklifenow, an excerpt from their great writing book Writing the Other. I love Writing the Other because it espouses in a very specific and detailed way what I’ve always thought about writing characters, and even about writing minor characters: you need to fully inhabit them. Which is to say, if your characters aren’t going to just be carbon copies of you and your own experience of the world, you need to be able to see clearly through other people’s eyes.

I’d definitely pair Writing the Other with Carol Bly’s The Passionate, Accurate Story, because the books share a subset of similar concerns. In Bly’s case she talks in depth about the dereliction of duty on a writer’s part when, for example, writing about a character who works for a major corporation doing something illegal (say, dumping toxic waste illegally) without having any sense of how that affects their moral compass or how they see the world. This is an unsubtle, half-remembered example, but the point is: clear seeing from other perspectives is incredibly important to writing nuanced and powerful fiction.

Both Writing the Other and The Passionate, Accurate Story are recommended books in my own Booklife.

(Chapbook cover for Finch limited edition, available through Underland.)

This is the fourth of a series of posts on my novel Finch. Finch is set in my fantastical city of Ambergris, but also borrows heavily from such genres as the spy novel, the noir mystery novel, and certain types of political thrillers. In the novel, an inhuman subterranean species called gray caps has risen up to take control of the city and subjugate the human population. As in Paris during Nazi control, the gray caps attempt to give a semblance of normality by providing institutions of order like a police force, even though these institutions are often merely a façade or horrible/absurd in nature. Against this backdrop, reluctant detective John Finch must solve a strange double murder.

You can find the other entries here:

Finch and Black Hawk Down: Repurposing Technique

Finch’s Opening–intro post

Finch’s Opening–discarded approaches

You can read the first 68 pages of Finch here.

To recap, I felt I had four possible entry points to the novel:

(1) John Finch, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).
(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.
(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.
(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all four of these approaches, but finally settled on #2. Why? See below.

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…and what was different when you came back?

An issue that pertains to some extent to a few of the current discussions within genre, posted on Booklifenow.

And, just so it’s not lost in the shuffle–Bruce Holland Rogers first put forth the six points in my post at Booklifenow. I, with his permission, paraphrased them (as noted); Everything on gender after the first couple of sentences are my observations or quotes from others. Also, Rachel Swirsky has posted a blog entry related to the discussion here.

Excerpt:

As one female writer who wished to remain anonymous put it in an email to me: “[The significance of sacrifice is] wrapped up for me in the stress/struggle I have as a female writer, on the losing end of gender expectations. There a number of things I always felt like I should do: cook healthy meals, exercise, keep the house clean for me and my significant other, remember my friends’ and family’s birthdays, be there for my five younger siblings whenever they need me, etc. Yet I’m constantly aware of the fact that all the time I spend on those good things is time that I’m not writing. I constantly feel guilty — either guilty because I’m not writing, or guilty because I’m not keeping up with the tasks mentioned above. I think women are probably more prone to that feeling of guilt and personal failing than men, though perhaps that’s just a stereotype.”

(The timeline I decided not to include–without the context of events in the novel, terms like “Hoegbotton” wouldn’t have any weight.)

As per my post from Tuesday, this is the first of two follow-up entries on the opening of my novel Finch. Finch is set in my fantastical city of Ambergris, but also borrows heavily from such genres as the spy novel, the noir mystery novel, and certain types of political thrillers. In the novel, an inhuman subterranean species called gray caps has risen up to take control of the city and subjugate the human population. As in Paris during Nazi control, the gray caps attempt to give a semblance of normality by providing institutions of order like a police force, even though these institutions are often merely a façade or horrible/absurd in nature. Against this backdrop, reluctant detective John Finch must solve a strange double murder.

The discussion that follows is by no mean complete with regard to what the opening of the novel is trying to do. Nor is authorial intent always paramount, in that when readers encounter a text, the text changes. Neither am I claiming the opening of Finch is perfect. I am simply relating the process that led to the final versions of those first two chapters.

You can read the first two chapters here.

To recap, I felt I had four possible entry points to the novel:

(1) John Finch, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).
(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.
(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.
(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all four of these approaches, but finally settled on #2.

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>>This is the second post in a continuing series on craft centered around discussion of my novel, Finch.

Sometimes the most complex effects rely on simple decisions. If you don’t put thought and effort into such decisions, the foundation of your novel is flawed and nothing you build on that foundation will be truly sound. (See Vladimir Nabokov’s Cornell lectures, which discuss things like the floorplan of a house in Jane Austen’s work, for example.)

In Finch, I had several decisions on how to begin the novel, each of which would’ve made a big difference to its tone and its later effects.

Choices on where to begin included:

(1) John Finch, reluctant detective, standing over two dead bodies, at the crime scene. Beside him are his inhuman gray cap boss, Heretic, and a Partial (a kind of traitor willingly working for the gray caps).

(2) John Finch poised at the door to the apartment, inside of which are the bodies, the Partial, and Heretic.

(3) John Finch at the police station, receiving the call from Heretic about the murders, telling him to come to the apartment.

(4) John Finch in some guise giving readers an overview of the fantastical city of Ambergris in which the story takes place before being called to the crime scene.

I tried all of these openings. Only one stuck.

>>>If you’ve read the novel, you know what I settled on. Do you know why I chose it? I’d love to hear reader speculation.

>>>If you haven’t read the novel (or even if you have), what do you think are the pros and cons of each approach above?

(If you participated in one of these discussions during my book tour, it’d be great if you’d chime in after a day or two, allowing others to comment first.)

I’ve prescheduled a longer post for Thursday explaining my own point of view on the various approaches so that you can read my thoughts prior to me factoring in your comments, and then we can discuss further if anyone’s interested. (I’ll include further analysis of the opening two chapters, as well.)

If you’d like to read the beginning of Finch, the publisher has the first chapters online.

(Our ketubah, or marriage contract, from 2002, with a border created by Scott Eagle, who has contributed art to several of our covers.)

Despite having been very active in the 1990s, it’s in the 2000s that Ann and I came into our own as a creative partnership, and I reached what one might call mid-career (I’m now 41). We had many, many opportunities, were tendered many kindnesses by people too many to mention for fear of leaving someone out, and, throughout the decade, put our all into every project, even when it sometimes threw our lives out of whack. (A book is often an obsession; an obsession is often a type of love.)

As the decade comes to an end, I would just like to thank Ann—my partner, my best friend, my wife—for her creativity, generosity of spirit, smarts, and comradery on so many projects over the past years. Not only has she accomplished so much, but she’s done it while devoting thousands of hours to her synagogue as a teacher and dealing with a full-time, often very demanding day job.

As the decade comes to an end, I’d also like to showcase the books and other physical artifacts we’ve created. We love books. We love the people associated with books. They are still the most potent symbol of a reading, writing, and editing life. They provide the physicality that gives one the satisfaction of a job well done. There are other measures of the decade–family, friends, teaching, etc.–but our books also often encompass those elements, in terms of the back story behind them.

So thanks to all of the readers and everyone else who has been supportive. The book business is not an easy one–it is filled with treacherous pitfalls, reversals, unexpected bad luck, and unexpected good fortune (which can be just as perilous). Sometimes a kind word or gesture by a reader or colleague has been instrumental in giving us the energy to complete a project. But, as I say, we’ve been blessed this decade, and we’ve made a good run of it. I don’t think either of us has any regrets (except I wish I would sometimes would learn not to comment on blog posts on the internet).

Here, then, is our decade in review, through books/magazines we wrote, edited, or published, leaving out over forty foreign language editions and most reprint editions…

UPDATE: Or you can always go the short route and just click here.

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Matt Staggs has a great post at Booklifenow about avoiding rookie mistakes when books are submitted to reviewers or review editors, featuring four high-powered interviewees.

As the year comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about leverage, which I talk about in Booklife. But in Booklife, while I have a separate section on paying it forward and contributing to community, I’m not sure I fully tie the idea of leverage to the idea of paying it forward.

Your writerly “leverage,” as I define it, is a kind of political capital. You can amass it based on your visibility through your online presence and your books, published short stories, etc. It consists of intangibles beyond audience, too. The respect and affection others have for you affects your leverage–how people perceive you as both writer and human being.

You use leverage to make your projects, your books, successful–leverage breeds leverage–but it serves, or should serve, another purpose. You should use your leverage (or position or privilege) to be of use to other people in the writing community (or even outside of it). No matter what level you’re at, there’s something you can do to help someone else.

I’ve met writers who hoard leverage or privilege, who feel that concealing their contacts, masking their methodology, building closed cliques, ignoring talented people who ask for help, is the best way of helping their careers.

Maybe this is true in the short term, but the fact is the best way to build leverage long-term is to be open and useful to others–as much as you can be without disrupting your own time for writing and other creative endeavor.

Paying it forward, contributing to community, can at times be controversial or uncomfortable or actually cause you to lose prestige or respect temporarily. The whole point, at times, of using your position is to expend it like rocket fuel–in a short burst that is of immeasurable value to someone else.

I think about this, too, because sometimes people get into positions of power by being miserly with their leverage…and never realize that they’ve reached a position where they can afford to take a stand, be publicly controversial for the greater good. And so they don’t.

Whatever level you’re at now, don’t be that person. If you die without calling in all your markers, for others, for yourself…you lose.

What I’m saying is this: whether you’re a writer with one published story or a writer with twenty novels out, you have some leverage. What you can do might be tiny in scope, but might mean a lot to someone.

As we enter 2010, in a perilous publishing atmosphere, with a lot of uncertainty ahead, we should all be thinking of about not just ourselves but others. Trust me when I say the more connectivity you build, the more good works you foster, on whatever level, the more you, too, will benefit in the long run.

This is a rare cross-post to Booklifenow.com

(What does a scene in the movie Black Hawk Down have to do with fiction? Read on below…)

In a general way, TV and movies have often had a terrible influence on fiction, in that some writers substitute received experience and received ideas from mass media for their own personal vision–some even think the structure of most TV shows is perfectly suitable, untranslated, for novels and stories. A lot of this material, reading like scripts or in other ways underwhelming, appears on editor slushpiles every day.

But there are also specific ways in which other media enhance and influence fiction. One example common to most fiction now is the cut-away from scene to scene, wherein you don’t get, for example, our hero or heroine driving from point A to point B. One reason that Lord of the Rings feels dated sometimes is because Tolkien doesn’t cut away for the most part, leaving in pastoral bits of quest that slow the pacing and don’t always resonate with a modern reader.

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