No, I haven't taken up ranching. This is a title of a book by Tom Robbins, the same guy, by the way, who wrote Still Life with Woodpecker. I read both of these books when I was in college, and in fact, they continue to yellow on my family room bookshelf. I'm thinking they may simply be there as evidence of my desire to remain "cool" after all these years (or possibly the image that I once was), but in truth, their musty condition might be a clue to the exact opposite.
But the reason I even bring up these fine literary works in the first place is that I have no memory whatsoever of what either one is about...nothing, nil, nada. Nonetheless, you have to admit that the titles, all on their own, are worth some recognition (that and the fact that Still Life has a picture of a pack of Camel cigarettes on the cover...talk about marketing to children...). And as luck would have it, titles are something I've been thinking a lot about lately.
Personally, I think I have done a pretty good job coming up with catchy titles...apparently Scraps of Eternity was especially intriguing, at least according to my fan club. Okay, maybe that was just my husband's opinion...I forget. Might even be one and the same, now that I think about it. But I realized recently that the reason I work so hard at creating good titles is that this is often the basis of my own reading choices, the result of which, by the way, I give mixed reviews.
I once assumed, for example, that a book called Clock Without Hands would be enormously fascinating, especially since the author was one of the more intriguing short story writers I encountered in my teaching career. I never did get all the way through that one. Another thing I learned from my teaching career, however, was that there are a significant number of novels with extremely boring titles that have somehow risen to great literary renown. War and Peace, for example; doesn't that kind of sum up where the plot is going without having to slog through all 1200+ pages? I can't really picture Tolstoy finishing his manuscript and then saying to himself, "hmmm...what shall I call this thing to get people to buy it? I know, War and Peace, that'll be the perfect hook!"
Mark Twain came up with a pretty good idea also. Instead of just titling one of his first books Tom Sawyer, he called it The Adventures of Tom Sawyer...I don't know about you, but if someone is not just out there, but actually having "adventures," then I'm all in. Of course, just to be on the safe side, when later Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he started the story with Huck telling the reader: "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer..."
See what Twain did there? Not only did he not have to come up with a creative new title for this new book, but he managed to get in a pitch for the previous one; i.e., the reader feels that if he happened to overlook the first novel, he really must go back and read it now, in order to get the full effect of the sequel.
My favorite titles for teaching purposes were Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms. Both were good for at least one 40-minute period of discussion and analysis, if not a test essay question (provided there was no advance notice prompting the proverbial Spark note response...do kids really think we teachers haven't read these?) Anyhow, it was only after a number of years of teaching and research of both authors, that I came to realize neither had intended any deep inner meaning in their choice of titles.
Both men were heavy drinkers, if not downright alcoholics, and also great buddies during many of their prolific years. Can't you just picture them tossing down a few at the Dome in Paris and saying, "I know what's let's do...let's create some crazy enigmatic titles for our next books that will drive those high school English teachers nuts for the next 100 years or so!" Then Fitzgerald, always looking to make an extra buck, says, "how about we also write these stupid little summaries with a lot of inane analyses of our books to make high school students look dumber than dumb." And Hemingway says, "yeah, we'll call them Spark Notes, because there is not a spark of intelligence in any of them anywhere!"
So, what to do...I still envy Robbins' title talent and then there's Anne Tyler (A Spool of Blue Thread? How cool is that?) and how about Sara Gruen's irresistible Water for Elephants? On the other hand, I truly loved Jane Eyre and The Help. I know. Maybe I'll just title my next book This is a Great Book and You Should Read It...Yeah, okay, that could work.
Saturday 23 March 2019
Wednesday 13 March 2019
The Inevitable Writer's Block
I knew it would happen sooner or later...that I would run out of story ideas or energy to develop new ones, or both. My understanding is that it's not a permanent condition, but it is a startling one, nonetheless. My laptop was open and my five published novels sat proudly on the coffee table in front of me, but nothing, absolutely nothing spilled out on the screen in front of me, no matter how long I sat there.
"I can't think of anything to write about," I complained to my husband. "I just can't seem to come up with any new ideas."
"Write about car picnics," he said.
"About what?" I asked.
"About our car picnics," he repeated. "All the beautiful Cape places we go and all the great stuff we see out there."
First, for those of you non-Cape Codders, I should explain what a car picnic is. When one lives on the Cape, one is always surrounded by natural beauty, and no matter what the weather, it is therefore impossible to stay inside. We are the population for whom a raging Nor'easter is just another day at the beach (or at the very least, a command performance one has no choice but to attend).
But much of the weather on this defiant sandbar can be mighty inhospitable, especially in the winter...just ask any Pilgrim. They left for Plymouth as soon as possible. Thus, the resolution to the conflict between wanting to be being outside, and dealing with angry wind, cold rain, and other vicissitudes of coastal living, is to pack a lunch, drive to a pretty spot, and eat it in the car; aka, car picnic. Binoculars are another necessity, by the way, preferably waterproof ones.
Try as I might, however, I could not create an entire novel, much less a short story, about a car picnic. A brief poem was the best I could do and even that wasn't very good. It's not that I haven't written anything at all recently, it's just that every time I plunge into something, it stalls. In fact, I have a folder full of stories labelled "Need Work" that I haven't looked at in several months. I also have five novels in various stages of completion ...scratch that...more like various stages of despair.
The first one is called Reunion and I've actually written about 100 pages of that one, detailing the past and present expectations, dreams, and realities of four friends about to attend their 50th high school reunion (this, in itself, should frighten at least three of you). The reunion is still a month away in the story line, and all of a sudden, I don't really care what happens to any of them or how they feel about it.
Another one of my unfinished novels has more hope, at least in terms of setting. It takes place in Tuscany and the characters are modeled after my grandchildren, as I imagine they will be when they grow up. I even learned how to use Google Translator in order to insert relevant Italian phrases into the narrative. The problem here is, that I started writing it seven or eight years ago, and my grandchildren have insisted on growing up in the meantime and are gradually negating my initial impressions of their future selves. It's also supposed to be a love story, and in the entire 200 completed pages, I have yet to get any of the characters to cooperate in terms of falling for another.
Then there was my recent decision to write a historical novel. In the last two months I've written all of 20 pages of that one, largely because the era I chose as a backdrop, the one I "knew so much about it," is a much larger factual mystery to me than I originally envisioned. Somehow the hours of research I have already committed to the project don't seem to be materializing into anything that resembles a creative format.
So, I went back to Hemingway's mantra to write about what I know. This resulted in some initial chapters of two novels that take place on Cape Cod. In the first, I created a Portuguese family starting an ice cream business in Chatham; this was before I read that the ethnicity population ratio in Chatham is 97% Caucasian, so I moved them to Provincetown. Then I read Patry Francis's The Orphans of Race Point and discovered that no matter how much research I did, I would never master the cultural distinctions (much less the language) of this proud population.
I also read Kristen Hannah's 400 page masterpiece, The Great Alone. This immediately humbled any ambitions I had in the second of these Cape novels to rely on the wild beauty of where I live in order to hold together a shaky plot line, and the dubious set of characters I chose to illustrate via this setting.
The good news is, as my co-conspirators in this dubious profession of authorship have, as previously noted, all assured me, writer's block is not a permanent condition; that sooner or later a sudden burst of inspiration will arrive, and I will wipe the dust off my laptop and plunge in once again. Maybe I will even write about car picnics...or maybe I'll just start a blog.
"I can't think of anything to write about," I complained to my husband. "I just can't seem to come up with any new ideas."
"Write about car picnics," he said.
"About what?" I asked.
"About our car picnics," he repeated. "All the beautiful Cape places we go and all the great stuff we see out there."
First, for those of you non-Cape Codders, I should explain what a car picnic is. When one lives on the Cape, one is always surrounded by natural beauty, and no matter what the weather, it is therefore impossible to stay inside. We are the population for whom a raging Nor'easter is just another day at the beach (or at the very least, a command performance one has no choice but to attend).
But much of the weather on this defiant sandbar can be mighty inhospitable, especially in the winter...just ask any Pilgrim. They left for Plymouth as soon as possible. Thus, the resolution to the conflict between wanting to be being outside, and dealing with angry wind, cold rain, and other vicissitudes of coastal living, is to pack a lunch, drive to a pretty spot, and eat it in the car; aka, car picnic. Binoculars are another necessity, by the way, preferably waterproof ones.
Try as I might, however, I could not create an entire novel, much less a short story, about a car picnic. A brief poem was the best I could do and even that wasn't very good. It's not that I haven't written anything at all recently, it's just that every time I plunge into something, it stalls. In fact, I have a folder full of stories labelled "Need Work" that I haven't looked at in several months. I also have five novels in various stages of completion ...scratch that...more like various stages of despair.
The first one is called Reunion and I've actually written about 100 pages of that one, detailing the past and present expectations, dreams, and realities of four friends about to attend their 50th high school reunion (this, in itself, should frighten at least three of you). The reunion is still a month away in the story line, and all of a sudden, I don't really care what happens to any of them or how they feel about it.
Another one of my unfinished novels has more hope, at least in terms of setting. It takes place in Tuscany and the characters are modeled after my grandchildren, as I imagine they will be when they grow up. I even learned how to use Google Translator in order to insert relevant Italian phrases into the narrative. The problem here is, that I started writing it seven or eight years ago, and my grandchildren have insisted on growing up in the meantime and are gradually negating my initial impressions of their future selves. It's also supposed to be a love story, and in the entire 200 completed pages, I have yet to get any of the characters to cooperate in terms of falling for another.
Then there was my recent decision to write a historical novel. In the last two months I've written all of 20 pages of that one, largely because the era I chose as a backdrop, the one I "knew so much about it," is a much larger factual mystery to me than I originally envisioned. Somehow the hours of research I have already committed to the project don't seem to be materializing into anything that resembles a creative format.
So, I went back to Hemingway's mantra to write about what I know. This resulted in some initial chapters of two novels that take place on Cape Cod. In the first, I created a Portuguese family starting an ice cream business in Chatham; this was before I read that the ethnicity population ratio in Chatham is 97% Caucasian, so I moved them to Provincetown. Then I read Patry Francis's The Orphans of Race Point and discovered that no matter how much research I did, I would never master the cultural distinctions (much less the language) of this proud population.
I also read Kristen Hannah's 400 page masterpiece, The Great Alone. This immediately humbled any ambitions I had in the second of these Cape novels to rely on the wild beauty of where I live in order to hold together a shaky plot line, and the dubious set of characters I chose to illustrate via this setting.
The good news is, as my co-conspirators in this dubious profession of authorship have, as previously noted, all assured me, writer's block is not a permanent condition; that sooner or later a sudden burst of inspiration will arrive, and I will wipe the dust off my laptop and plunge in once again. Maybe I will even write about car picnics...or maybe I'll just start a blog.
Thursday 7 March 2019
The Fine Art of Rejection
Anyone who has ever looked for a job (and what person over the age of 18 hasn't?) has probably experienced some form of the infamous rejection letter. If not, then you can count yourself among the well-qualified, well-connected, or extremely lucky individuals who seem to coast through life unscathed by disappointment or failure. Either that, or you're unemployed and have been for some time.
The good news is that these demoralizing epistles have come a long way from their origins, back when typewriters were casually wielded by bored office workers for whom simple sentences were sometimes a challenge, and form letters were all the rage. In those days, the traditional rejection letter went something like this: "Dear Sir or Madame, we have reviewed your application for (insert name of position here) and have decided your qualifications are not the right fit at this time. We thank you for applying and will keep your resume on file for future consideration."
Never once did any of us consider how large that file had to be. I always wonder if one day I will get a call from the school in California where I applied for an English teaching job in 1979, asking me when I can come by for an interview. "We kept your resume on file!" (the caller would announce cheerfully), "and at last have an opening that perfectly fits your qualifications." Wouldn't you just love to know what that could possibly be? Might be worth the airfare just to find out.
In the field of writing, however, the art of rejection has reached a whole new level. Understanding that we authors, on the whole, are a sensitive lot, who tend to consider our literary output as closely akin to our biological offspring, the judges/editors/publishers to whom we send our creative treasures seemed to have adjusted, if not actually softened their approach.
First of all, new technology has allowed the rejection letter to be personalized, which permits the sender to use your actual name in the salutation. This makes the writer feel as if he or she is well-known to the sender and will most certainly be remembered for his or her unique talent. Unless, like me, your first name is somewhat androgynous; then the salutation frequently reads "Dear Mr. Johnson..." I give these letters directly to my husband, who although he is not a writer, I feel might like the idea of being considered one, as receiving a rejection letter is the first true acknowledgement.
Then there is the internal content of the letter itself. This, too, has been sensitively upgraded, I received one yesterday that actually thanked me for submitting my story and then went on to say how "we really enjoyed reading it." This, naturally, made me feel as if a number of judges had passed the story around a large conference table smiling and nodding approvingly. Plus, the letter then went on to say how "flattered" they were by the "interest in this contest," and how "lucky" they felt to have had "the chance to read all these wonderful stories."
The next paragraph cuts to the chase. They do say how "sorry" they are that you weren't "short-listed," adding that they "had to decline some excellent stories." This is very sweet and all, but what I want to know is, was mine one of those that was so excellent, in which case, why did you have to "decline" it? Another rejection letter I received was equally "sorry," but added that they were "grateful for the opportunity to read such high quality work."
Okay, so why not just join a book club...seems like an easier way to accomplish this. Who sends a rejection letter to John Grisham, for example? ("Dear Mr. Grisham, even though we enjoyed your novel tremendously, after reading it cover to cover while waiting to pick up our daughters from their ballet lessons, my book club and I decided we would rather just drink wine and gossip, instead of discussing your truly excellent plot and well-crafted characters.")
My personal favorite rejection letter came recently from a competition I entered because it promised that the two editors of the publication "read and considered each and every entry personally." This definitely appealed to my inner socialist. The rejection letter was even signed "warmest regards" and then with their first names only! It was three lines long and with great enthusiasm, noted that even though my story was "not chosen this time," it was a "really good story and we were so happy to have read it!" At first, I wondered if I might have entered this contest before and that was why this letter sounded so familiar. Then I realized the response was identical to the one I received from my parents, when I wrote them what I felt was an award winning appeal for a raise in my allowance.
I recently bemoaned my collection of rejection letters to my teenage grandson, because, well, grandchildren will sympathize with anything as long as you are feeding them junk food at the time. He sat there contemplatively (chewing) for a few minutes, and then said, "Look at it this way...at least you didn't get a break-up text." Not so far, thankfully, but being that this is the computer age, I fear that might be next.
The good news is that these demoralizing epistles have come a long way from their origins, back when typewriters were casually wielded by bored office workers for whom simple sentences were sometimes a challenge, and form letters were all the rage. In those days, the traditional rejection letter went something like this: "Dear Sir or Madame, we have reviewed your application for (insert name of position here) and have decided your qualifications are not the right fit at this time. We thank you for applying and will keep your resume on file for future consideration."
Never once did any of us consider how large that file had to be. I always wonder if one day I will get a call from the school in California where I applied for an English teaching job in 1979, asking me when I can come by for an interview. "We kept your resume on file!" (the caller would announce cheerfully), "and at last have an opening that perfectly fits your qualifications." Wouldn't you just love to know what that could possibly be? Might be worth the airfare just to find out.
In the field of writing, however, the art of rejection has reached a whole new level. Understanding that we authors, on the whole, are a sensitive lot, who tend to consider our literary output as closely akin to our biological offspring, the judges/editors/publishers to whom we send our creative treasures seemed to have adjusted, if not actually softened their approach.
First of all, new technology has allowed the rejection letter to be personalized, which permits the sender to use your actual name in the salutation. This makes the writer feel as if he or she is well-known to the sender and will most certainly be remembered for his or her unique talent. Unless, like me, your first name is somewhat androgynous; then the salutation frequently reads "Dear Mr. Johnson..." I give these letters directly to my husband, who although he is not a writer, I feel might like the idea of being considered one, as receiving a rejection letter is the first true acknowledgement.
Then there is the internal content of the letter itself. This, too, has been sensitively upgraded, I received one yesterday that actually thanked me for submitting my story and then went on to say how "we really enjoyed reading it." This, naturally, made me feel as if a number of judges had passed the story around a large conference table smiling and nodding approvingly. Plus, the letter then went on to say how "flattered" they were by the "interest in this contest," and how "lucky" they felt to have had "the chance to read all these wonderful stories."
The next paragraph cuts to the chase. They do say how "sorry" they are that you weren't "short-listed," adding that they "had to decline some excellent stories." This is very sweet and all, but what I want to know is, was mine one of those that was so excellent, in which case, why did you have to "decline" it? Another rejection letter I received was equally "sorry," but added that they were "grateful for the opportunity to read such high quality work."
Okay, so why not just join a book club...seems like an easier way to accomplish this. Who sends a rejection letter to John Grisham, for example? ("Dear Mr. Grisham, even though we enjoyed your novel tremendously, after reading it cover to cover while waiting to pick up our daughters from their ballet lessons, my book club and I decided we would rather just drink wine and gossip, instead of discussing your truly excellent plot and well-crafted characters.")
My personal favorite rejection letter came recently from a competition I entered because it promised that the two editors of the publication "read and considered each and every entry personally." This definitely appealed to my inner socialist. The rejection letter was even signed "warmest regards" and then with their first names only! It was three lines long and with great enthusiasm, noted that even though my story was "not chosen this time," it was a "really good story and we were so happy to have read it!" At first, I wondered if I might have entered this contest before and that was why this letter sounded so familiar. Then I realized the response was identical to the one I received from my parents, when I wrote them what I felt was an award winning appeal for a raise in my allowance.
I recently bemoaned my collection of rejection letters to my teenage grandson, because, well, grandchildren will sympathize with anything as long as you are feeding them junk food at the time. He sat there contemplatively (chewing) for a few minutes, and then said, "Look at it this way...at least you didn't get a break-up text." Not so far, thankfully, but being that this is the computer age, I fear that might be next.
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