Books

Bestselling mystery writer Diane Mott Davidson told the Richmond Times Dispatch that she has an unusual method of staying in touch with her characters.  She writes letters to them… and they write back to her.

"The way that I get into the voice of Goldy is to write, ‘Tell me what happened when you went into the law firm and found the body.’ Then she writes  back. It just helps me immensely, I guess because I love to write letters
anyway.

She’s been keeping up with her characters this way since her first mystery, "Catering to Nobody" The latest, "Double Shot," has been on the New York Times’ best-seller list for three weeks. It’s the 12th in the series that features a  caterer as the amateur sleuth.

But don’t get the wrong idea about Diane’s letter writing: We’re not talking
about some kind of mystical channeling here. It’s simply the way she pays
attention to her characters and lets them lead the way through her books.

It’s also the way Diane, who went to boarding school in Charlottesville,
connects with her characters’ emotions. "You can’t manipulate that. I know as a
reader myself that if I feel manipulated, if a character just doesn’t ring true,
I’m not going to read the book.

"I want to get inside a character’s head, but I also want to get inside a
character’s heart. When I’m writing a book, I need to know: ‘What’s in your
heart? What are you feeling?’ A letter is such an intimate way to find out. It’s
even more intimate than talking to someone in person, I think. Because you’re
not looking at them, you can let your heart spill out.

"This will sound funny, but Goldy has even written me letters that say, ‘I
don’t want this in the book.’"

I’ve never heard of that novel-writing method before. It seems to me like she’s doing twice as much writing as necessary… but hey, whatever works. And it certainly has for her.

I wonder if she actually mails the letters back and forth, just to add that touch of realism to the experience…

A few days ago, in a post about Clive Cussler, I mentioned that I’d read a bestselling thriller that was riddled with cliches. I didn’t mention the name of the books because the author is a friend of mine.

So, on the heels of finishing that book, I picked a mystery off my shelf written by another friend of mine, a buddy who has many books to his credit, though he’s yet to crack the best seller lists (this is the first book of his, though, that I’ve read). I’m 200 pages into his latest book… and I am astonished by how lazy his writing is. These cliches appear on just one page…

• "He has a rap sheet as long as his arm."
• "When his father died, he went right off the deep end. It took him a while to get his act together. For the past few years, though, he’s managed to keep his nose clean."
• "He didn’t have a leg to stand on."
• "I should never have stuck my neck out."
• "He’s a real piece of work."(by the way, what does "he’s a piece of work" really mean? And is it that bad to be a real "piece of work" as opposed to just your run-of-the-mill, ordinary "piece of work?").

Like I said, this litany of cliches was on one page.  You can imagine what the rest of the book has been like. One cliche line after another, mostly in dialogue. It’s relentless.

This book was written by a friend of mine. I am tempted, as a friend, to point these cliches out to him and tell him he should really be more careful. 

Then again, this book was published and was a big success (if not a best seller). Who the hell am I to criticize him? He certainly didn’t ask for my advice. Am I being more of a friend by keeping my opinion to myself?

The Los Angeles Times today published a scathing review of the BLACK WIND, the latest Dirk Pitt novel. 

But Cussler’s prose is uniformly and relentlessly awful. Not just in the occasional howler ("You have an annoying proclivity for survival, Mr. Pitt, which is exceeded only by your irritating penchant for intrusion"), but sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, it’s hurried, sloppy, ungrammatical, clichéd.

We finish "Black Wind" with profound relief — that the world has been saved once again, and that we don’t have to read more.

I haven’t read a Dirk Pitt novel in years, but the following story point is enough to keep me from ever reading this one:

Cussler, assisted by his real son Dirk, is a good mechanical plotter. Every few chapters, he puts the Pitts or other good guys in seemingly hopeless predicaments — shot out of the sky in a helicopter, trapped in deep-sea wreckage with air running out, imprisoned in a sinking ship, tied to a platform under a rocket about to be launched — and dares us to guess how they’ll escape. Once, for the fun of it, he cheats. Dirk Junior and Summer, swimming a five-mile-wide river, chased by thugs in a speedboat, are rescued by a restored Chinese junk piloted by … Clive Cussler himself.

I hate it when real-life authors literally insert themselves into their fictional stories as characters… it’s very, very rare when an author can actually pull it off without making the reader cringe (I understand Stephen King manages to make it work in his latest book).

But this review also points out a pet peeve of mine… the rampant use of cliches in bestselling novels. Aren’t editors editing any more? I found the following cliches on just one page of a recent, bestselling thriller:

1. Let’s rock and roll.
2. They had all the bells and whistles.
3. He took one look at her and wanted to head for the hills.
4. We got down to the nitty-gritty.
5. Close but no cigar.
6. He entered the picture and swept me off my feet. He was my knight in shining armor.

How could any author write that last line, in particular, and not hit the delete key? One writer I know defends using cliches like those above by arguing "That’s how people talk."

To me, it’s just bad writing… and more and more of the most successful writers in the mystery-suspense field are doing it and that saddens me, particularly when it’s one of my favorite authors. Perhaps its the pressure of turning out a book a year that’s making them sloppy… or perhaps it’s hubris, getting so big they think they’re "beyond" editing any more. I don’t know. What’s your take?

From the desk of Lee’s still better looking and, apparently, filled-with-free-time younger brother Tod, keeping the site warm until Lee’s return from prison.

An Open Letter to Kurt & Karen Krueger, Proponents of Book Banning,

Dear Kurt and Karen,

Your kids are going to hate you. Seriously. They are going to hate you. Do you want to know why? Because you’ve done the one thing that children recognize as bullshit: you’ve made an issue out of your own parenting, or, perhaps, your own lack of confidence in how you raise your children. You recently asked the school board in your town of Merton, Wisconsin to ban "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" by Stephen Chbosky, "Like Water for Chocolate," by Laura Esquivel, "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and "The Joy Luck Club," by Amy Tan from an elective course in contemporary literature. You said that these books should be removed from the reading list because they "are filled with suicide and things that don’t reflect the standards of the community," including, you noted, oral sex, masturbation and, that most dreaded scourge, homosexuality.

Fortunately, people with an advanced sense of humanity voted this week not to ban the books you think are ruining the moral fiber of your city from the course, but to require parental consent forms, which, in my opinion, is almost as bad. At any rate, Mr. & Mrs. Krueger, you decided that now that you’ve lost that appeal, the book should be banned all together, lest children learn how to give blow jobs, masturbate or, worse, turn to same sex love.

"Now I want it banned," said Karen Krueger, who had argued all along that she wasn’t asking for the book to be completely removed from the school. "Their parental notification is ineffective."

Mr. and Mrs. Krueger, you do understand that books are fiction, that life is real, and that words only do harm to those sheltered by reality. Teenagers have oral sex. Teenagers masturbate (a lot). Teenagers kill themselves and teenagers are gay. Members of the adult community in your city do likewise, and worse. Asking intellectual property to be banned invites your children to be close minded and unprepared for life. Asking for a book to be removed from a school because it goes against your moral code and then impressing it upon other children not your own is dangerous and borders on the malicious. If you don’t want your children giving or receiving blow jobs, masturbating or becoming gay, I suggest keeping them locked in the closet, because those are the types of things that happen in the real world, with or without books you don’t like.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Kruger, I suggest you read a book or two. I say, start with Fahrenheit 451 and work your way back to reality.

Sincerely,

Tod

About a month ago, an anonymous romance writer — or at least she was anonymously interviewed, but apparently other romance authors sussed her out — claimed that the government came in and seized her computers and work under the guise of the Patriot Act, ostensibly because of the research she was doing

(From Necessary Dissent, which posted this from an article in the Romance Writers Of America trade magazine): 

SB: What type of story were you researching?

Dilyn: Mainstream women’s fiction adventure. It was set in (Cambodia, all about the theft of antiquities. In my research I learned, about the atrocities that still go on there even today, much of it coming from one the Al Qaeda-linked groups. I actually went back though my book and deleted those specific terrorist references after 9/11 and changed the terrorists to a rogue band of thieves because of 9/11 and terrorist sensitivity.

It turns out, this anonymous writer is actually not anonymous at all…and that they seized her computers because, as the Associated Press and FOX News in Indianapolis reports, she was under criminal investigation for something entirely different:

Marion County prosecutors have charged a husband and wife in connection to a social security scam. They’re accused of allegedly bilking the government agency out of nearly $83,000 in unentitled disability benefits.
Police arrested the Dianne Holmes-Despain, 51, and her husband Joel Despain, 43, Tuesday morning. They’re being held at the Marion County Jail.
Prosecutors say an anonymous tip to the social security fraud hotline started the investigation rolling last year. Holmes-Despain is charged with theft, fraud and 14 counts of forgery. She began receiving disability benefits in 1985 when she was determined to be eligable claiming she had rheumatoid arthritis and couldn’t work. However, prosecutors say she was getting disability checks while she continued to teach education classes at IUPUI.
They also say she was writing romance novels and books at the time under different aliases like J.J. Despain and Dianne Drake and getting paid.
Many are books about cheating the system titled "Government Secrets, "Money Secrets" and "Inside Info: The Secrets You Should Know."
Allegedly she used her husband’s social security number to conceal her income. Joel Despain is charged with conspiracy to commit welfare fraud.
"I think they put a substantial amount of effort into keeping this a secret. I mean that seems to be what she was doing. She writes about keeping secrets, she writes about government secrets and publishing secrets and the whole time the biggest secret of all is that she’s not disabled," Marion County Prosecutor Carl Brizzi said. In the end the couple collected about $83-thousand dollars over a nine year period. Holmes-Despain could spend as many as 16 years in prison. Her husband could be looking at eight.

Nothing too romantic about that, he interjected tersely.

From the desk of Tod Goldberg, Lee’s better looking, fully ambulatory brother:

Lily Tuck has won the National Book Award in fiction for  The News From Paraguay, a novel I haven’t read, but which literally dozens of other folks have, which I don’t think is a knock in any way against her nomination and eventual victory. When I was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for my novel Living Dead Girl my competition was Scott Turow, George Pelecanos, Henning Mankell and Stephen L. Carter, which, aside from Carter, whose book The Emperor of Ocean Park I found to be unreadable crap, made me feel like I was in some pretty fancy company, irrespective of book sales. Good is good, no matter how many people choose to buy the book, which, in the case of Living Dead Girl, was strikingly small in comparison. I, for one, was happy the NBA wasn’t all about Phillip Roth and stuffy men in bad sweaters, though I thought for certain my favorite book of the year would be nominated, at least.

The New York Times has the full rundown of winners.

Author Laurell Hamilton writes in her blog:

There are two main methods that writers choose for deciding how to measure their productivity on a book. One, is page count, how many pages you can do per day. Two, is at this time of day you sit down and you can’t get up again for two hours, or four hours, or whatever. Or a variant of method two, is whatever time you sit down at your desk you work for two hours, and until two hours are up, you cannot leave your desk. Yesterday was a day that reminded me why I’ve always done page count and never hours at the desk…

Laurell is a "Page Count" person because her day is too hectic and unpredictable to schedule a block of uninterrupted writing time. Me, I don’t use either method. I just ask myself if I feel I’ve done good work today… or at least given it my best effort. (Or, in the case of a TV script, at the rate I am going, will the teleplay be ready in time for Prep?)

I don’t think that five pages of shit or eight hours spent staring at the screen until your eyes are bloodshot really measures anything. For me, it’s quality, not quantity, whether you’re measuring pages or hours. What about you?