Book Reports

[Eliza Mimski]

How did the book help you as a writer? What overall aspects of it taught you something?

 

What two or three major lessons did you learn from the book that you can apply to your writing and/or your novel?

 

Was there anything in the books that obviously conflicted with lessons and readings in our novel writing program. If so, what were they?

 

 

David Maass

 

Writing the Breakout Novel has become my bible of sorts I find it vastly helpful, from David Maass' advice on upping the stakes to creating tension on every page to remembering to like my villain to having successful subplots to ...

 

I found writing out of story dialogues between the author and characters very helpful. I was having trouble getting my character Bobby to show up, and did this exercise where I wrote back and forth with him and it helped me to understand him better. I also found it helpful to bend this exercise a little and write dialogues between him and other characters (dialogues that I wouldn't use but did simply for the purpose of understanding how the characters thought), and one character told me how the plot was advancing too quickly and I needed to slow it down. Amazing!

 

Another part of the book that I felt was helpful, although I didn't want it to be because I'd have to change things, was Chapter Four's Time and Place. So many of my scenes are in living rooms and bedrooms and although some need to be because of what's going on, I'm moving the others into more dynamic settings where there is more town flavor. I do notice that my scenes in the waxing parlor, poolside, during the parade and at quirky cafes have a lot more punch.

 

Here is a list of possible new settings:

 

In the Samantha Jones Recreation Center;

In the Mae West Ballroom;

Movie night at the hotel where tourists watch reruns of The Graduate;

In the streets;

Taxis and shuttles;

In the hotel lobby...

 

I realized while reading the section entitled The Psychology of Place that a little like a science fiction novel, I am “world building,” or creating an alternate reality. My fictional town in South America hosts elderly women and the young men who adore them. However, I haven't included enough of the “world” – Maass writes that the “world” is not just the physical setting, but the way people think, what they wear, their outlook on life. I am going to pay a lot more attention to this in my re-write.

 

Question three doesn't apply.

 

Annie Dillard

 

I reread Annie Dillard's book while flying from San Francisco to Birmingham, Alabama. I liked reading it the second time around for many of the same reasons as my first read -- the language is so pretty and she is able to say what I feel about writing in both a poetic and a clear way. For example, it helped to be reminded of how writing is first a vision of what the work will be, or the intellectual framework, and over time the form of the work changes when it "grows into itself." This aptly explains the feelings I go through when writing and she does it with such eloquence. I also like the facts she includes such as how it takes between two and ten years to write a novel, finding this encouraging as I always think everyone else is so much faster at writing than me.

 

One of my favorite vignettes is when a reader asks her who will teach her to write, and she answers that it is the process of putting in the desk time with the blank page that is the teacher. This is something that I need to continually remind myself of for it is only in the doing that I learn, taking the action of confronting the blank page when I don't know where the writing is going.

 

Question three doesn't apply.

 

Elizabeth George

 

I found this book much harder to get into and it didn't really speak to me. Perhaps it was because I had just read Writing the Breakout Novel which was so helpful. I did get a few things from Elizabeth George though.

 

In the chapter entitled Knowledge is Power, Technique is Glory, I enjoyed her examples of different sentence structures from simple sentences to deliberate run-ons, and how the use of different sentence types convey different moods in writing. I tried this in my novel and found it effective.

 

Her list of THADS, or Talking Head Avoidance Devices were helpful. These are activities that characters can engage in like laying carpet or beating a rug or doing an autopsy (!!) that can keep a scene from becoming just a dialogue without anything grounding it. I have some scenes like this and found some activities on her list that I used.

 

In terms of characterization, it was helpful reading about character's core needs, which is where their motivation springs from. And if their core needs are denied, this causes psychopathology, or what a character does while under stress. My character of Skeeter longs for a home of her own, and when she finds herself threatened and perhaps out of a home, she resorts to cheating in a big way. My character of Bobby is not as well thought out as Skeeter, and I realize I need to pay attention to his core needs, once I figure them out.

 

Question three doesn't apply.

 

John Gardner

 

The Art of Fiction by John Gardner is the last of the four books I am reading. He's very chatty and theoretical and I prefer Maass' book which is more down to earth and easier to find your way around.

 

In his section on plotting, he writes that the reader must be shown dramatically why each character believes what they do and why each cannot sympathize with the values of their antagonist. This made me stop and pause as both Zelda and Reina operate from the position that they must win the beauty contest at any cost, that losing is not an option. Zelda is motivated because she feels she has never reached her true potential and winning will get her there, whereas Reina is used to winning and is motivated by greed. I started wondering if these two characters are too much alike, and if I should give Reina a deeper reason for her desire to win. Something more than just greed. The jury is still out on this.

 

I liked reading the section about the fictional dream, how the writing needs to be vivid to all the senses in order for the dream to continue. Clumsy writing breaks the fictional dream, and he describes clumsy writing as the excessive use of the passive voice, introductory phrases containing infinite verbs, lack of sentence variety, needless explanation and more. I often find myself writing in passive voice and this is one of the hardest habits of mine to break. I am guilty of the other no-no's as well, and definitely needed a reminder to work on them.

 

I am a big lover of writing exercises and I found the exercises at the end of the book very helpful, especially the ones where you describe something from a certain pov but don't mention the pov. For example, "Describe a landscape as seen by a bird, but don't mention the bird." I tried this exercise describing my setting from Zelda's pov, a 75 year old woman in love with young men, and then from Skeeter's pov, a twenty one year old woman who resents old women stealing from her pool of resources. They came out so very different..

 

Question three doesn't apply.

 

 

.