Posts by Rosina Lippi
Sherri — a regular reader at my weblog — asked me recently what books I’d recommend to somebody who has just started writing fiction. It’s a reasonable question, as there are about a bazillion how-to-write-a best-selling-novel-and-get-published books out there.
There are several distinct subcategories of the writing-related how-to books — craft, theory, inspiration, marketing/sales, reference, exercise — and in each of these there are good and bad (that is, less than useful) books. I personally am primarily interested in books that fall into the areas of craft, inspiration, and reference.
Reference books aimed directly at writers have to be approached with great caution. Some of them are expertly put together. For example:
Read MoreOne of the regular commenters on my own weblog asked me recently to write about genre. She wanted to know if an author starts out with a particular genre in mind, and if so, how is such a thing planned? How do you write yourself into a genre?
I’ve been thinking about this for days, and getting crankier by the minute (which has nothing to do with the person who asked the question; she just hit one of my buttons). Genre is not one of my favorite words. Before I go on, a confession: I know what I’m wishing for is impossible.
This is what I want: abolition of the idea and practice of genre in writing and shelving fiction.
Think about this for a moment. You walk into a bookstore because you want the latest Walter Moseley or Eloisa James or A.S. Byatt, and you head straight for the section where you’ve found those authors before: hard-boiled crime, romance, literary fiction, respectively. Once you get there, you pause to have a look at what else is new in that section, and then you pay and leave.
On the way out you may be passing a novel you would fall in love with, but you don’t see it. You’ve got genre blinders on, and it doesn’t occur to you that there might be something worth reading in science fiction or horror or historical fiction. I can almost feel you shifting uncomfortably in your seat. You’re thinking: but I don’t read horror. Horror is for … other people. I read serious fiction. I read fiction with literary merit.
You know it’s true: Many people will simply refuse to browse in the horror section (or crime, or romance etc) because they’ve been told that so-called popular fiction is inherently less valuable, and they don’t want to be seen there. Theoretically, of course, a novel sitting in the horror section could be very serious, and even fulfill some of the self-aggrandizing characteristics of literary fiction. It might have both complex, evolving characterizations and plot.
Genre is a marketing convenience; it is also a straight-jacket for creativity.
Read MoreI have good friends — a married couple — who are both well established and widely published poets. Their work is very different in tone and subject matter, as is the way they approach the creative process. Bruce (Beasley) is always coming up with interesting ways to generate poem ideas, whereas Suzanne (Paola) seems to work more from deep introspection of small triggers.
A couple years ago Bruce wrote a whole series of poems that were based on a daily exercise. He’d open the dictionary at random, close his eyes, and put his finger on a word. He took that as his starting point.
Poetry is the marrow of storytelling, where every word, every bit of white space, every punctuation mark has meaning. This is why academics are so very adamant about critical editions of poetry. That means that the editor hasn’t taken it upon him or herself to change even the smallest thing about the poem. Not a comma, or a spelling. Nothing. (Wikipedia defines a critical edition as “The ultimate objective of the textual critic’s work […] the production of a “critical edition” containing a text most closely approximating the original.)
Fiction is, of course, less exacting. Though every writer of fiction (me included) would benefit from such a painstaking process that involves the weighing of single words in comparison to each other, it’s not something novelists normally do for obvious reasons. However. fiction writers can approach their work in a variety of ways, and even adapt the kind of exercise Bruce uses to generate new ideas.
I haven’t ever tried to write on the basis on a word chosen at random, but I do write spontaneously from photos, all the time. I am what is generally called a visual-spatial learner, which explains why I have to have some kind of visual prompt to develop a character. I spend a lot of time looking at images when I’m in the early stages of writing a new person, drifting around flickr and the weblogs of photojournalists. Sometimes I’ll be looking for a hook into character x when I’ll come across character y, and recognize him or her immediately. Sometimes I have to draw the character before I can really settle into writing. I draw badly, but I am sincere and I work hard at it. The short of it is, I think in pictures.
Thus, Bruce’s exercise (picking a word at random) doesn’t work for me very well, but choosing an image at random does.
Read MoreWhen I started writing historical fiction seriously (approximately 1995) I was still on the faculty at the University of Michigan. This meant that I had a fantastic library at my disposal. Faculty could (and probably still can) send an email or call and say, here’s a list of books and articles I need. Later that day, the books would arrive at your office door. The article would be copied and delivered, too, even if it had to come from another library.
You could keep the book as long as you needed it, unless it was recalled by another faculty member or student. I held onto some books for the full ten-plus years I was there. If it turned out to be no use to me, the library person would take it away again.
Spoiled? You betcha. And blissfully happy.
Then I left academia and for a good long while I was really stuck. In the early 2000s, there was not much available online. I ended up buying a couple hundred books — some of them which turned out to be no use to me — and paying for the copying of hundreds of articles. Some books were simply out of my budget range. Sometimes I was able to get a banged up reading copy. Thacher’s New American Dispensatory (1802) was something I really needed, but the copies I found were all between $500 and $3,000. I eventually got hold of a so-called reading copy, which means the book is in such bad shape that it’s not really collectible. I paid $60 for it, and it was well worth the expense.
In general though, this process of tracking down references was frustrating to the extreme, not to mention expensive. If I wanted to collect books, I would not be complaining. In fact, many of the books I need I would like to have in hard cover, but this is for research and I don’t need the beautiful tooled leather and gilded edges.
I keep thinking I could put at least fifty books (all out of print) up for sale at Amazon or Ebay or one of the bigger used-book conglomerates. Eventually I’ll do that. But even if I regained a good portion of what I spent, that wouldn’t address the bigger problem. Public libraries are generally really good about inter-library loans, but the things I need are often so unusual and rare that the ILL system soon sways under the burden.
And then Google Books came along. Google decided to scan books — all books, every book they could get) and make them available and searchable online. This caused huge (and well founded) consternation among authors like me, who pay the mortgage with royalty checks. If you could read The Pajama Girls for Lambert Square for free, would you buy a copy? Most people would not. So the Authors Guild stepped in and the lawyers got busy and in the end there was an agreement and a settlement. The Electric Frontier Foundation summarizes the situation (read the whole article here):
Read MoreI have a muse, and my muse (her name is Maxine) has her own primary directive, which she holds to be inviolate:
Ignore me, and I will pay you back in kind. Piss me off, and I will turn my back on you. You may beg and grovel, but from me? Crumbs. Dribbles. Until I’m feeling generous again, which if I may be frank, don’t hold your breath.
Maxine looks something like Phyllis Diller in the 60s, but scarier. She’s a good six feet tall and smokes cigars. Imagine a cross between Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Doubt) and Gunnery Sargent Hartman (Full Metal Jacket). Sharp-edged, opinionated, relentless. Maxine has a strong north-side Chicago accent, which makes sense as that is where she came into being.
Lately we have been in a mammoth struggle. I don’t know why I fight her; I never win. She has all the power in our relationship. Lately she’s been spouting Nike ad copy: Just do it. When I tell her she’s a walking cliché, she laughs at me. Watch it, sister, she tells me. Or I’ll walk right on out of here.
Me: But you only gave me one image, and it’s hazy.
Maxine: Oh, please. Have you forgot your Gabriel Maria Marquez?
Read MorePlot Month continues on WU. Enjoy!
The distinction between story and plot is a deceptively simple one.
Story: what happened
Plot: the artful rearrangement of what happened in a way that keeps your readers engaged.
A police report is a story told as a series of facts, in chronological order:
August 29 2008. At approximately 10:16am Officer Rodriquez and I were dispatched to the site of an accident on northbound State Route 12, approximately 500 yards north of Exit 15. Witness J.M. Corrigan had called 911 and was still at the site with his passenger, Maria Corrigan, of Tyler. The witness stated he had been travelling behind a 2004 Ford Explorer when that vehicle suddenly veered sharply to the right, left the highway, broke through the guardrail, hit the cement barrier, flipped end-over-end and then plunged over the precipice falling approximately 200 feet. While the witnesses did not see the impact, they heard it clearly.
Witness JMC stated he had been travelling at about 70 mph, as was the accident vehicle. On examination and photographing of the scene we discovered no skid marks. Witnesses JMC and MC both stated unequivocally that the vehicle’s brakelights never flashed.
Multiple fire departments were at the impact site at the bottom of the cliff. The fire had been put out by the time we reached them. Two victims released to the coroner at approximately 11:45 am. No identifying documents survived the fire. The wreckage is still being processed. The case has been handed over to Detective Ann Uribe.
These are the facts, and they are singularly unsatisfying. Was this a mechanical malfunction, or something more sinister? Detective Uribe’s report will not directly address this questions. It will simply provide more facts and raise further questions.
The victims have been identified as Georgia Jackson, age 34 and her daughter Milly, age 3.
Forensics report no immediate evidence of mechanical failure. Preliminary findings from the coroner indicate no alcohol or drugs in the driver’s system. The mother’s driving record was clean. No criminal history. No history of psychiatric illness. The driver was a pediatric nurse at Stanley Memory Hospital. No overt hostilities with coworkers.
Married to Robert Jackson, a pediatrician. The marriage was, by all reports, a functional one without conflict or financial difficulties. One son survives, James, aged six.
Robert Jackson has no document history of drug abuse or any other compulsive behavior. Both father and son were visiting with Robert Jackson’s sister Rayanne and her family in Springfield, and had been there for three days at the time of the accident.
Six weeks ago Milly Jackson was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. According to the doctor treating her, she was responding well to treatment and her prognosis was very good. Interviews with family members, coworkers and friends indicate that there were no overt suicidal gestures. We have been unable to contact the driver’s mother, who is traveling in South America. An interview with her might provide more insight into her daughter’s state of mind.
There are some strong indications here of what might have happened, but we only have part of the story. And still, the facts you do have, the things you know add up to something that won’t let go. You want to know what happened, and why Georgia and her […]
Read MoreKath here. Today’s post is the first from WU’s newest contributor, Rosina Lippi. Enjoy!
For the historical novelist – for anyone interested in history – the internet has brought about a revolution. We are floating in a sea of information that deepens and spreads minute by minute. It’s incredibly empowering, but it also has its dangers.
If you came of age before the internet, you will remember how things were. An argument over supper about any given war could not be resolved by opening a laptop. If it was a Saturday night, you were most probably clueless until Monday, when you could call a reference librarian or go there yourself. A million questions, small and large, simply remained unanswered, and we lived with that. The capital of Peru, the author of Antigone, where Napoleon was held captive, when women got the vote – if you didn’t have access to a good encyclopedia, you wondered or started calling friends in the vain hope that one of them would know when Wrigley Field was built.
Since that time, we have gone from one extreme to the other. At two in the morning I can crawl through newspaper archives to find out the rent on a typical three bedroom apartment in Manhattan in the year 1900. I can look at museum exhibits on Edwardian dress or Bronze Age artifacts, or read an article on bovine diseases. As more and more becomes available on-line, things only get better. Or worse, depending on your perspective. My husband, the Mathematician, has developed a particular expression he puts on whenever I start a sentence did you know: Just interested enough to prove that he is listening; just distant enough to discourage me from telling him exactly how pencils were manufactured in 1800. If I’m particularly animated about something I’ve found, he will raise an eyebrow a half inch or so to acknowledge my discovery.
And that’s fair enough. I don’t understand anything about his work, either.
Read More
