Reading the words, not just seeing them

I almost never watch television. When I do, it's a cable news channel and I listen more than watch.  I'm also almost always doing something in addition to listening to the program.  Sometimes I'm reading or writing a blog post or editing photos for my Etsy shop or sewing or making jewelry.  The idea of sitting and watching television and doing nothing else is almost beyond my comprehension.

Movies are the same.  I don't "go to the movies."  That's a concept even more outrageous to me than watching television.  To sit in the dark and do nothing but passively watch other people doing things on the screen, and be surrounded by a bunch of strangers?  Nope, it's just not for me.

Reading is different. Reading requires me to participate in creating the action.  There are words on the page, but there are no sights, no sounds, no hot or cold or windy or rainy.  No smell of freshly baked bread or new-mown hay or exotic perfume.  My brain has to supply all those things; I have to complete what the author has begun.  Ours is a collaboration, or at least it should be.

Tonight I tried to read one of the many (hundreds?) of free Kindle books I've recently acquired.  This was a boxed set of four "cozy mysteries" packaged under the title Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery 4-Book Bundle by Deany Ray.  The copyright date is 2016, but there's no other publication information in the books' front matter nor on the Amazon listing.  I'm going to assume, safely or not, that Deany Ray publishes her own books.

Whether or not she has an editor of any kind is questionable.

I will at least credit Deany with making the first of the four books look like a real book.  Paragraphs are indented without extra spaces between them.  

Beyond that, I don't have much good to say about the eight pages I was able to read before giving up.  My eye muscles can't take that much rolling.

After reading those eight pages, then reading them again two more times, I couldn't make much sense of the story, but I did get a sense of how someone could write something like that.  I've seen this before many times over the years and I've tried to explain to the writers what's wrong with it, but I never understood why they didn't get it.  I think now, finally, I do.

They are writers who don't read, or if they do, they watch more television and/or movies than they read -- and they've been doing it longer.

The bottom line is that they don't know how to read.  They see the words, they know what the words mean, but they don't know how to convert those words into mental images and sensations, into tastes and smells and textures. Therefore, when they write, they just put down words that don't -- that can't -- create the experience a reader wants.

Let me explain.  Or at least try to.

This is the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton's 1986 contemporary romance The Edge of Forever.  I have never read it, though I have the digital edition on my Kindle.

Joe Alessio stood on the top step of St. John's Episcopal, poised for escape. All around him, New England was ablaze with color, the great rush of splendor before the winterkill. It would be easy to pretend he was a tourist, come to northern New Hampshire for a little leaf-peeping R&R, but the heavy wooden doors of the old church weren’t thick enough to keep the minister's words from spilling out and bringing reality with them. 

“. . . so I tell you that Anna Kennedy isn’t really gone . . . “

Bretton, Barbara. The Edge of Forever: A Classic Romance - Book 4 . Free Spirit Press. Kindle Edition.

Here's what Ms. Bretton -- whom I met a couple times at RWA conferences more than 20 years ago and that's about it -- has shown the reader already.

Joe Alessio is standing outside a church and he doesn't want to be there.  He wants to escape.  It's autumn and the trees of New England are changing color.  Joe lives here or at least he used to, because he's not a tourist.  Whoever Anna Kennedy is, or was, the reality of her death is something Joe would like to be able to deny but can't.

A reader who is accustomed to reading doesn't even think about this; it's taken for granted because that's the way readers read and the way writers write.

The reader is also brought into a situation that's fraught with emotion.  There's been a death, and even before we get to the next paragraph, we already have a taste (pun intended) of Joe's feelings.  Maybe he's glad that this Anna Kennedy is gone, but I don't think so.  He wanted to escape, remember?  That's probably a metaphor for wishing to escape the reality mentioned at the end of the paragraph.

As a reader, I'm already intrigued.  Who is/was Anna Kennedy?  What does Joe feel about her?  Why didn't he go into the church, or why has he already left it while the minister is still speaking?

What's crucial here is that each sentence builds directly on what the previous sentences have started.  The focus is on Joe Alessio, standing on the church steps but wanting to run, surrounded by New England autumn, hearing the minister's words that he doesn't want to hear.

It's very much like the opening scene of a movie, but the reader has to do the camera work.  Tight in on Joe, then pulling back to show the church, then the trees in their fall foliage, finally the minister's voice.

This is showing, not telling.

Two paragraphs, no more.

Now let's look at the opening two paragraphs of Deany Ray's first book of the boxed set, A Sweet Chunk of Madness.

The sun blazed through my beige drapes as I opened my eyes and directed them to the alarm clock on my nightstand. Ten to seven. Ten more minutes of sleep until the alarm went off. Only I was so excited to bake the recipe of sour cream rhubarb coffee cake that I jumped out of bed, almost knocking the lamp on the nightstand.

After a quick shower and a quick look in the mirror, I put on my favorite pair of jeans and the light blue t-shirt I worked in and headed off into town.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.

At this point, the reader knows not even a fraction about what's going on that she knows after reading two paragraphs of the Bretton book.  No setting, no emotion, no tension.  We know the color of the drapes and the character's t-shirt. We don't even know what she sees in the mirror.

Am I being unfair?  Why?  Barbara Bretton did it; why should Deany Ray be held to a lower standard?  Is it because the two books are in a different genre?  Does Deany get a pass because her book is free?

Here's the next paragraph of Deany's book.

My name is Becky Chambers and I live in Ouna Bay. After my parents died in a car crash, I took on their pastry store-slash-coffee shop. Well, actually, my aunt and uncle took on the business since I was only five years old when the crash happened. When I was twenty, they moved to Florida and I continued to run the café, which came only natural to me, since I spent almost every free minute there.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.

Besides the fact that this is rather lackluster writing style, the information doesn't show the reader anything.  There's nothing in this paragraph to help the reader visualize the scene or any action.  Why is it important that the reader know now, right away, on page one, that Becky's parents died in a car crash when she was five?  Why is it important for the reader to know, right now, on page one, that Becky's aunt and uncle moved to Florida when she was twenty?  

Where is Ouna Bay?

Why should I care?

I gave Deany Ray, Becky Chambers, and everyone in Ouna Bay eight full pages to hook me into the story. It never happened.  

Deany Ray is telling me things, things bout Ouna Bay and about Becky and about her friend Rosalie, but there's no story happening.  Not until page eight, when the newspaper vendor Dev informs Becky that some man asked for directions to her café, is there even a hint of anything the tiniest bit mysterious.

“Oh, before I forget. There was a man here earlier asking about your café,” Dev said. 

That caught my attention and I looked up. 

“A man asked about my café?”

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 8). Kindle Edition.

If you're a reader who is accustomed to automatically creating the action of the story in your imagination, page eight is way too late.  Remember how much drama Barbara Bretton was able to pack into her opening two paragraphs?

When I wrote in an earlier post about Christopher Vogler's book The Writer's Journey, I also mentioned an article published in the February 1982 edition of The Writer magazine.  Written by Shelly Lowenkopf, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel" explains what needs to go into a novel's first three pages to grab the reader's -- editor's, agent's -- attention.  In today's publishing environment of free digital downloads. that applies to consumers as well.

 "Start with important action," Lowenkopf advises. "Involve someone of consequence in an event of consequence or with a threat of significant impact."

Setting aside the measurement of just how much is "three pages," after eight pages of Deany Ray's book, nothing has happened. I know a few things about Becky -- her friend Rosalie is forgetful and Becky buys lots of magazines and someone is jealous of Becky's brownies -- but so what?

Deany Ray hasn't made me care what happens next.  Maybe Becky is going to go through her day and nothing worse will befall her than she mismeasures the sugar for her cake. 

I want more than that.  I want a hint that there's going to be more, and I want it at the beginning, not somewhere after eight pages.

Maybe it's just me.  Maybe I'm the same generation as Barbara Bretton, and we grew up reading books rather than watching television all day.  Maybe the problem is ours.  And that may very well be true, because books like Deany Ray's A Sweet Chunk of Madness  seem to get a lot of five-star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon.

Here's the stats block as of 9 April 2021 from Goodreads: 

 The book has 140 ratings, of which 98 are five- and four-stars.  Only four readers rated it one-star, and only one of them left a review.

Are all the other readers lying?  I don't think so.  What I do think is that they read the words but don't take the time or make the effort to put those words into  a viable context.

A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a book that she considered one of the best she had read in a while. The Kindle edition was free, so I "bought" the book and tried to read it.  On something like the first or second page there was a glaring error, the kind of mistake where one character is standing to another's left and then without moving they're to that character's right, or some such.  It was so noticeable that I went back and reread it several times, trying to figure out how it could not be the writer's mistake but instead be mine.  It wasn't.

So I asked my friend if she had noticed the error. Oh, no, she didn't notice, but she said she never pays attention to things like that.  She "just reads." 

Maybe that's how everyone reads, and I'm the odd person out.  But then there's that single one-star review on Goodreads:  "This read like a fanfic, and not the good kind," reader Annemarie wrote.  She described the writing as "clunky," and I have to agree.

What does that mean?  In the case of A Sweet Chunk of Madness it means the writing doesn't flow.  The individual sentences are all right, but as Goodreader Annemarie writes, the text had ". . . sentences awkwardly put together to make longer ones."  

In good writing, one sentence leads seamlessly into the next.  In the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton, the first sentence is about Joe Alessio.  The next one is about what's around Joe.  The next is about what Joe is doing there, and then about what he's hearing.  Each sentence carries on what the previous sentence started.

That's almost completely missing from Deany Ray's writing.  The sun and the beige drapes don't enhance our understanding of Becky's waking ten minutes before the alarm.  She's excited about baking, then she's in the shower, then she's heading into town . . . and then she's telling us about her past.  

And then we get details about her café and Ouna Bay.  Those details make no sense at all.

The Blue Bay Café was situated in the middle of Ouna Bay, attracting the town natives as much as the summer tourists. Ouna Bay is located near Lake Erie and it borders the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. The view of the beautiful bay and the small but charming harbor in the distance can be savored from the two wooden tables by the window. Those tables are the most coveted in the entire café.

Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.  

Wait a minute.  Is Ouna Bay an actual bay, as in a part of a body of water, or is that just the name of the town?  Oh, it's "located near Lake Erie," so I'm going to guess it's a town not actually on the lake shore but inland some short distance.  But mountains? What mountains?  And sea?  What sea?  Lake Erie is one of the Great Lakes, a body of fresh water hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.  There are no mountains along the lake.  And how does the border the mountains on one side and the sea on the other?  Wouldn't they border the town?

I'm getting confused.  A second reading doesn't help much.

If Ouna Bay is a town located "near" Lake Erie, how can this little café have a view of "the bay" and a "charming harbor" in the distance?  Is the harbor in the bay?

Does Deany Ray even know what these words really mean?

If the café isn't right on the waterfront, it's not likely to be able to afford a view of the waterfront. This is optics, or physics, or topography, or something.

A reader who takes in the words on the page and turns them into a mental vision is going to be stumped trying to translate these sentences into a "scene."  On the other hand, a reader who just sees words and doesn't want to or need to make them into a coherent whole may be able to enjoy this kind of book just fine.  Kinda like Jabberwocky.

One of the criticisms leveled at Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey is that it lays out such a rigid template that film makers -- more than creators of books or other forms of Story -- are unable to experiment with other narratives, and that this is why Hollywood keeps remaking the same tired stories over and over and over.  What happens, however, when a writer strays from the tried and true template?  Do we get the wow factor in a "new" template?  Or do we get incomprehensible drivel that doesn't satisfy anyone?

The new writer has far more freedom to experiment than the new producer playing with someone else's millions of dollars.  Just as we have conventions of grammar and spelling to make our writing comprehensible for all readers, so we have conventions of plotting and characterization to make all Stories comprehensible to all readers.  If the new writer wants to ignore those conventions, they're allowed to.  They can make up their own spelling, their own alphabet, their own syntax.  But then they have to deal with the audience that doesn't get it.  

When a reader embarks on the adventure of reading a book, she does so with certain expectations, but each individual reader has her own expectations.  The author who assumes (!) all readers have the same expectations runs a risk of disappointing some, and perhaps most, of those readers whose expectations are . . . different.

Whether the differences are intentional or just the result of incompetence, Deany Ray's stories in Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set just didn't meet my expectations.  I gave them a chance; I'm not going to read any more.

Words on Writing, Part 1: The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler

 If I were asked to recommend the single most essential book for writers of popular fiction, I would not hesitate to name The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler.

 If your budget only has room for one book, get this one.  I know other teachers and bloggers and mentors will recommend others, but you asked me, so there's my answer.

I currently have two copies, the first edition from 1992, which is subtitled "Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters," and the third edition published in 2007, with the subtitle as above.  There is also a 25th Anniversary Edition which was released in 2020.  Even though I have two of the earlier editions, I just ordered the new one.  It's that important.

So, why this book?  Why not Strunk and White's Elements of Style?  Or Stephen King's On Writing?  Or Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird?

Because. 

I've never liked Elements of Style.  While it may be a good resource for grammar and syntax, its emphasis on brevity doesn't work as well for fiction as it does for non-fiction.  Grammar, spelling, and writing style are important facets of skill no matter what you write, but fiction requires something way beyond that.

King's book is half memoir, half how-to, and while his personal history is interesting and gives insight into his writing, that very intimacy relegates the how-to half more to a "How I do it," as though what Stephen King does will work for everyone.

I've never read  Bird by Bird.  I never felt the need to.

I didn't discover The Writer's Journey until 1997, right before a writer's conference at which Christopher Vogler was going to be one of the featured speakers.  I bought the book a week or so before the conference and devoured it.  Vogler's presentation was supposed to last an hour; it stretched into almost three.  He was far and away the best speaker I've ever heard.

That still doesn't answer your question.  I'm getting to that.

Writing fiction, and in particular book-length popular genre fiction (as opposed to literary fiction, whatever that is), requires two skills: the ability to write and the ability to create stories.  Most of us can be taught the basics of how to write. We learn the rudiments in school, even if we forget most of them and/or never use them after they're no longer required for graduation.  Creating stories, on the other hand, isn't so easy to learn or to teach.  It's more a process of recognizing whether or not you have that skill and then putting it into practice if in fact you do have it.  If you don't, well . . . .

That may not be a popular opinion.  No one who really wants to  be a writer wants to be told they don't have the requisite story-telling talent.  And in this age of digital self-publishing, even being told that isn't a barrier to publishing.  It remains a sad fact, however, that there are many, many, many author-published books out there that just aren't very good.

For many of them, the author didn't have sufficient writing skill; even if there were a decent story in there, the writer couldn't bring it to life.  For many others, the writing is passable, but the story isn't.

If the story is there, the writing can be fixed.  If there's no story, no amount of fixing the writing will help.

The Writer's Journey explains what "story" is, how it's constructed of various parts, how those parts work together to complete the whole.  Perhaps most important, Vogler explains how and why this structure is virtually universal, over time and across genres and through various media, by giving numerous examples.  

"But but but, my story is different!"

No, my dear, it almost certainly is not.

Think about it.  What makes us keep reading, keep turning the pages, even if they're only digital pages on electronic screens.  "I need to know what happens next.  Will they be eaten by the monster?  Will she find her lost sister?  Is the grandmother the killer?  Will the volcano erupt?  Who changed the nuclear codes?"

"I need to know what happens next."

That's the essence of story structure: How each element logically, naturally, and emotionally satisfyingly leads to the next.   

Vogler's analysis is based on the works of Joseph Campbell and C.G. Jung, but being familiar with them is not at all necessary to understanding The Writer's Journey.  While Campbell analyzed myth as a historical -- and universal -- form of narrative, Vogler applies the form to the process of contemporary storytelling.  Campbell explains the hero's journey; Vogler shows you, the writer, how to create your own hero's journey and then make the journey with them.

As Shelly Lowenkopf pointed out in his 1982 article in The Writer magazine, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel," you have to hook the reader at the beginning. Back then, the first person who read your (laboriously typed) manuscript on its journey to publication (or, more likely, rejection) might give you as many as three double-spaced pages to set that hook.  Lowenkopf knew even then that many beginning writers are shocked to learn editors, agents, and the other gatekeepers of the traditional publishing business don't routinely read the whole book. 

"But but but, mine is different!"

No, it probably isn't, and if it is, you still have to prove it.  And you have to prove it in the first three pages.  Or less.

As Josh Olson has written, 

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't.

(By the way, here's a simple way to find out if you're a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you're not a writer.  Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

Josh Olson, "I will not read your fucking script," Village Voice, Sept 9, 2009.

There's an even older adage that goes, "Write chapter one, write chapter two, throw away chapter one."  In other words, you've probably put too much "stuff" in the first chapter that really doesn't need to be there.  Get to the effing story already.  The reader wants to know what's happening.

And that means starting your characters, your hero, on the journey.  Where they will go, what adventures they will have, what problems they will encounter, what defeats and victories they will experience, all are part of that journey.  

If you're not already a voracious reader, you probably won't be successful as a writer, but don't take just Josh Olson's word for it.  Throughout The Writer's Journey Chris Vogler gives example after example of movies and books that follow the same mythic structure. You can read the books, you can watch the movies.  The structure is there.

Vogler states clearly that it's not a "format."  You can't just plug your individual characters and setting into a template and walk away with a successful, satisfying novel, regardless of genre.  It's more of a palimpsest, an older, almost erased document of which parts remain and on which newer tales have been superimposed.  

When I write, that structure is always at the back of my creative mind, the blueprint on which an entire novel will be built.  It's also at the front of my mind when I'm writing a review.  Is it there when I'm reading?  I hope not!  I want to read for enjoyment; I want the words on the page to disappear so completely that I'm immersed in the scene, the action, the emotions of the book.  If I'm not, then the writer has done something wrong.

If you're a writer, do something right.  Read at least one edition of The Writer's Journey.  And if your budget allows it, buy a copy that you can have on hand to reference whenever necessary.  You'll be tested on it later.

 

 

Words on Words: Changing Directions

 I know, I know, I know.  I said at the very beginning that this blog wouldn't be for reviews.  Ten years ago, that was my intention.  There were other outlets for reviews where I believed they rightly belonged.  The world didn't need yet another book review blog.

Has that really changed?  Well yes, and no.  Amazon's reviews now have lots of requirements and caveats they didn't have then, but they're still often just as questionable as they were when I was busting the fiverr reviews.  Over the past couple of years, BookLikes has more or less gone defunct.  Goodreads, still the major review site, continues risky under the huge thumb of Amazon.

And there are a lot of bloggers who have left the business.  Sometimes it's just general burn-out.  Sometimes it's in response to harassment from thin-skinned authors and/or their "street teams" who demand only five-star reviews and no criticism.  Review blogs, in their view, should serve only to promote and sell books.

I could, if I had the discipline or desire, research some of the existing book review blogs to see how many of them limit reviews to "four stars and above, only" and similar high-rating requirements.  I have neither the desire nor the discipline.  What those reviewers do is their business.

So what can I do to set myself apart?

Well . . . .

It's been almost five years since I picked up the figurative romance writing pen and wrote The Looking-Glass Portrait.  I haven't done as much writing since then as I would have liked, and there are a lot of reasons for that.  One is that I tend to write more when I read more.  Reading serves to prime the pump, and I just haven't had much motivation to read. 

And there have been personal reasons, too.  Now I'm trying to get back to reading in order to get back to writing.

The Looking-Glass Portrait is a contemporary gothic romantic suspense.  There are real ghosts in it, a real murder, a real romance.  I had enormous fun writing it, and I realized in the process that this is one of my favorite romance sub-genres.  It had gone out of favor in the 1970s when my historical romance writing career got its real start, but I always enjoyed reading the older gothics and those few that were still being written by authors like Phyllis A. Whitney and Barbara Michaels and Daphne duMaurier.

 

 

Now I'm ramping up the writing of another contemporary gothic romance, and I need to prime the pump again, so to speak.  I have plenty of old paperback gothics to read, and I'll be treating you to reviews of some of those in the weeks and months to come.  But the books written and published in the 1950s and 1960s aren't always reflective of the current market.  I knew reading books being published today was essential.

As a retired person an a limited income, I rely a lot on the public library and free Kindle books to keep me in reading material that isn't tattered, often taped-together paperbacks.

 

 

If I had an unlimited book budget, I'd buy zillions of digital books because otherwise I'd be run out of house and home by stacks of paperbacks.  I don't have that unlimited budget, so I acquire my collection via sales and . . . Kindle freebies.

Kindle freebies are, of course, mostly published by the authors ("SPAs" self-publishing authors) or small, independent publishers ("Indies").  In the past dozen years or so since I've been reading digital books, I've learned that there is often -- not always, but often -- a sharp divide between the traditionally published and the author/indie published books in terms of quality.

Maybe readers don't care.  Maybe readers read without noticing the plot holes and the character inconsistencies, the errors of fact and the misspellings.  Maybe the writers don't care either.

But I do care.

My thought today, then, is that maybe it's time to put some reviews on this blog, particularly of the indie/SPA digital books as compared to the traditionally published, with a fond focus on the gothic and romantic suspense sub-genres, as they were then and as they are now.

Not all the traditionally published gothic romances are five-star quality, despite their reputations or even semi-classic status.  Over the past several years, I've done detailed analyses of some of those "classic" gothics, and the books have proven to be less than stellar, pun intended.  I plan to put some of those analyses on here as well because they illustrate how even the traditional authors, editors, and publishers get it wrong.

Normally, I consider reviews are for readers, and in a way the reviews that will appear here are no different: they'll be meant to alert readers to books that in my opinion are great or terrible or something in between, so that they can choose their reading material accordingly.  Reviews aren't for authors; they're supposed to get their critiques before they publish.

But the reviews I'm going to do are deconstructions, taking the story and the writing and even the presentation apart bit by bit to show what works and what doesn't and why.  In that sense, these are reviews for writers as much as for readers.  I want the books I read, whether Kindle freebies or library digital loans or any other format, to be well written and well structured, so I can lose myself in the words.  That's what it's all about.