My Family

Seeing the Strings

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I’ve been catching up on my sister-in-law Wendy’s fascinating ruminations on writing. She raised a point in one of her thoughtful postings that’s stuck with me all day. In this age of rampant blogging, where personal contact with your favorite author is only a mouse-click away, are we destroying the illusion behind our fiction? Are our readers getting to know us too well?

Wendy describes what it was like becoming a regular reader of an author’s blog… and then reading the author’s subsequent novels:

Through her blog, I found her to be charming, witty, and insightful. I returned again the next day. And the next. I lurked until eventually, I left a comment. She responded, she laughed out loud, she said we were kindred sprits.

Why hadn’t I done this before? It was nothing of what I feared. Her site became a daily stop for me. I found the voice of her blog to be separate and distinct from her author voice. I loved reading both.

Things, as they are apt to do, started to change.

In a recent release her heroine broke character with a rant that sounded a lot like the author’s ever increasing web rants. I thought I saw a flash of nylon fishing line. In her following release, the subtext I had previously loved was missing from her dialog. Well, I knew she rushed, too much to write with a deadline on screaming approach. Now, I’m certain—I saw the puppeteer’s hand.

I often wonder as I write this blog, and as I enjoy the blogs of other writers,  if there’s a danger that the people reading our books, or watching our TV shows, will find it increasingly difficult to suspend their disbelief, to become lost in the fictional worlds we create…. that our personalities will overwhelm our work and our audience  will, instead, only be hearing and seeing the writer behind the words. 

You tell me.

The Whole Family is Blogging

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My lovely and talented sister-in-law Wendy Duren is blogging about what she’s doing, what she’s reading, and what she’s writing.  While she mostly talks about novels, she mentions that she found inspiration the other night in a  scene in an episode of LOST.

It
accomplished everything dialog should: it revealed character, revealed
the characters’ emotional states, communicated information, moved the
story along, and, my favorite, was chucked full of subtext. And, it did all that very quickly. It was to the point, without side trips, without the mental meanderings that often trip up dialog in romances. I love stumbling across things like this. I feel inspired and motivated to write. My creative well has been filled at a time when I didn’t notice the level was low. All that and eye candy too. Wow.

It’s not often you find novelists conceding that TV writing is writing… and that spoken dialogue can inspire you the same way the written word can.

Sisters on Sojourn

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My sisters Linda and Karen are off to Cinncinnati this weekend for the big photo shoot for their art journaling book, which will be out in late 2005. While packing, Linda made a discovery.

KandlbeachWe leave for Cincinnati this weekend and I have been packing up all my art supplies for the photo shoot. How
come pretty much every supply I own fits nicely in a box that is
20"x14"x14" yet my workspace (which is bigger than a box) feels too
small for all my stuff? Of course our art journaling philosophy is that
you don’t really need much more than your imagination and emotions
to create an artful journal-so-this enforces my belief that all these
stacks of things here are just cluttering up my space when all I really
need is in that 20"x14"x14" box (and in the small box that rests on my
neck). Somehow I stopped practicing what I preach for ten minutes and
chaos happened.

I know I’m much better giving the writers who work for me notes than I am at following those notes myself in my writing. By the way, my sisters will be teaching another one of their incredibly popular art courses soon…

Low Carb Madness

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A year ago, I lost 20 pounds on the Atkins Diet… then I broke both my arms and, over the following months, gained most of the weight back. It’s hard to stick to a diet when you’re being hand-fed, you’re in tremendous pain, and you want all the comfort food you can get.

Now I’m getting back on the Atkins diet and am healed enough (after two surgeries) to engage in some cautious exercise. I’m counting carbs again and loading up on those helpful Atkins products.  Is it just me, or have they changed the formula of those Atkins bars? They don’t taste like chemical-covered sawdust anymore. They actually taste good. Or am I delusional?

It’s easy for me to stick to the Atkins diet. I love meat. There are some drawbacks, though.
Not to sound like my brother Tod, but it sure would be nice  to have a bowel movement some time this month…

(Is Atkins a cult? Check out Patrick Hynes’ amusing essay)

I Hear Voices

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My brother Tod has started an interesting discussion on his blog about the role of  voice in fiction.

When someone tells me that they hear me in a book or story (fiction
only here — in my essays and columns, you often are getting unfiltered
Tod) I feel disappointed. My characters aren’t me and if you see me,
hear me in the narration, that 4th wall is broken.  I want you to hear
the narrator, whomever that might be. If it feels like I’m sitting
there telling you a story, I believe I’ve failed.

His comments were provoked by a blog posting from author Amy Garvey, who was thrilled when one of her readers "heard" her in her prose.

A friend of mine gave me the ultimate compliment recently. (Sadly,
it wasn’t about how much I look like Nicole Kidman.) She’s not much of
a romance reader, but she was interested to see what I’d written. So I
gave her my first book and got an email back which read, “It is so
‘you.’ I feel like you are sitting there telling me the story.”

Not
impressed? I was. Because what it meant to me was that beneath the
story, this reader had heard “my” voice——the writer lurking behind the
characters and the plot.

I may not agree with exactly how Ms. Garvey phrased it ( I don’t think I want the reader to sense the writer and, with it, the construction work behind the story), but I understand her being pleased that her readers heard her voice.

I think the author’s voice is important.    Some of my favorite authors have a very distinct voice that carries through all their books, regardless
of the stories they are telling or the characters they are writing about ( Larry McMurtry, Stephen King,  Elmore
Leonard, and John Irving immediately come to mind). I think that voice is part of
what makes their books special. Other authors take on the voice of their lead character, and that’s fine, too… but I don’t think either approach is technically superior when it comes to sustaining the "fiction" that the events we are reading about are real.

Tod vs The Fanficcers

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Once again, my brother Tod takes on the fanfic universe.  First he did it with his column, now he’s doing it with Letters to The Editor.  He wrote to Writers Digest this month, criticizing them for an idiotic article (then again, aren’t most of the articles in that magazine pretty lame?)  that suggested that writing fanfic might be a good way to learn how to write.  As a successful novelist and acclaimed teacher of creative writing, Tod thinks otherswise. In part, he said:

Being handed a character…isn’t equal to the organic process you must
go through to create real, living characters. Writing fiction isn’t
about getting a shorthand lesson in creativity via someone else’s
established characters; rather, it’s the process of learning how to
create vivid characters and story lines from your own minds. Writing
fanfiction to learn how to write a novel is like filling in a crossword
puzzle with the belief that someone will hand you a doctorate
afterward.

Naturally, this has pissed off a lot of fanficcers, including some folks who are writing their own Harry Potter novels. Like this woman, for instance…

Well, Tod Goldberg, I majorly disagree. To begin with, I think
fanfiction gives people the courage to write. One, because you can put
up your work in a welcoming atmosphere and not have to go through the
self-esteem destruction of trying to get published. Two, you can get
your work read by someone other than your mother. Even if you
write something and set up a web site for people to read, you’re not
likely to get the draw that you would putting up a story at a fanfic
site. Three, you don’t have to go through the very hard work of making
up a background, allowing a writer to jump write in and write!

She has, of course, just proven Tod’s point…but I doubt she noticed.  But far be it from me to dive back into that  debate again.  I’ll leave that to Tod over on his blog.

Sidelined

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Sorry there have been so few postings here over the last couple of days… somehow I managed to throw out my back and am hobbling around like a guy who’s testicles have been crushed in a vice.  Feels kind of like that, too. Strange thing is, I have no idea how I hurt myself.  A visit to the chiropractor today hasn’t improved my condition.  And I’m still in physical therapy three mornings a week for my arm… and wearing a new splint/torture device that basically makes it impossible for me to type with my right arm for three hours each day.

In the midst of all this, I’m also working hard to finish my sixth Diagnosis Murder novel to meet a March deadline…knowing that, between now and then, I’m attending/speaking at the San Francisco Writers Conference and Left Coast Crime in El Paso.

Maybe that’s what hurt my back… sitting at my desk writing.

Who knew writing could be so strenuous?

C’mon Get Happy!

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My sisters Karen & Linda have a gripe.

Lee often quotes Tod in his blog but he rarely quotes either of us, his two really funny and talented sisters. However, we won’t harp on that because we don’t really talk about all that mystery shmistery stuff that his fans (or in some cases, his enemies) like to read.

That is about to change.  My sisters, my brother, and I all have new books coming out in November — Linda Woods & Karen Dinino’s  art book VISUAL CHRONICLES, Tod Goldberg’s short story collection SIMPLIFY, and my detective yarn THE MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE.  PartridgefamWe’re going to hit the road together, like the Partridge Family. I’m Keith, of course. Tod is Danny. Karen is Laurie. And Linda is Tracy.  We aren’t going to sing… but we’ll sign books, tell lies, and probably make an art project or two.

My art-minded sisters have also launched a new feature on their blog of interest to folks here.

We do know something about books, and in an effort to bind the 4 of us in the literary world, a new feature of this blog is born… Judging a Book by its Cover.

Be sure to check it out… and watch this space over the coming months for more news about my sisters and their first book.