When ignorance meets ego

You get things like the alleged first chapter I saw yesterday.

I was going to talk about writing from the POV of the truly evil, until this thing derailed me. It is an amazing demonstration of just how bad something can be when written by someone who has so little knowledge of the writer's craft they can't tell that what they're doing isn't a masterpiece. By about the same margin as the Pacific Ocean isn't wet.

This is, incidentally, a well known principle. The incompetent have no idea they're incompetent because they don't know enough to realize. By comparison, the most skilled are also the least secure in their skills, because they know their abilities so well they focus on their weaknesses instead of their strengths. Short-short-version - if someone tells you they're the greatest writer since Shakespeare (or anyone else), run. Fast.

This piece has so much wrong with it it's difficult to know where to start. It opens with someone arriving at the ER of a hospital - by taxi - after having been run over by a bicycle messenger at the presumably nearby airport, and he's hauling his luggage. Despite a broken wrist. Apart from the clunky prose, there's no mention of the injuries the messenger must have suffered - because anyone who gets hit by a cyclist hard enough to break a wrist is sending that cyclist ass over apex to land on a rather unforgiving surface. The gentleman with the broken wrist is certainly not going to get up and hail a taxi. He's going to be evaluated on-site by the airport security staff, who *will* call an ambulance to get him and the cyclist treated either on-site or at the nearest hospital.

This, ladies, gentlemen, and others, is why we need to use a little intelligence when we work out what happens in a scene of our novels and short stories. If you need your character to arrive at a hospital with a specific injury, first learn what kinds of actions cause that particular injury, then figure out a way to have it happen without any complications you don't want. While you're at it, do a little research into what happens when people are admitted to hospitals, and how critical cases enter.

Yes, the author got that wrong, too. Firstly, any half decent hospital with an ER facility has a separate entrance for ambulance arrivals than the one walk-ins use. There is no horde of uniformed doctors and nurses in white coats milling around the door waiting for a critical case. There will be an organized path aimed at getting the incoming patient from the ambulance to treatment at the fastest possible speed, usually involving the paramedics and ambulance drivers running while carrying IV gear and anything else needed. They don't stop to gossip about the casualty, they don't let any bystanders get close enough to potentially infect the casualty, and they sure as hell don't accept the word of random patients awaiting triage about offering to donate organs. More likely, said random patient would be in for a quick trip to psych eval after a dose of knockout juice and treatment for broken wrist. Anyone who doubts this would be advised to read this from start to finish. As well as the graveyard humor, there's a lot of information about how hospitals operate buried in there, and testament to the dedication of ER and other medical staff.

That's the plot of the chapter the author posted - and absolutely everything is wrong. In the middle of it all of our putative hero with the broken wrist reminisces about how much he likes being a school teacher (and speaking as a former teacher, I guarantee you THAT is wrong, too), and infodumpuses about a particularly vile serial killer due for execution (in a state notorious for not holding executions, no less). Neither has any noticeable connection to the alleged hero's actions, or to the reason the prison chaplain is brought in with injuries that amount to DOA, not ER (knifed in BOTH kidneys, open head wound leaking spinal fluid and brain plus assorted other trauma? Not unless he got those injuries right outside the hospital carpark).

How can anybody think this is how things work? Or am I just too damned optimistic in thinking this sort of thing is too stupid for words?

Letting go - the post partum blues

Now speaking of books and stories-as-children I'm the old woman who lived in a shoe (well, silver-bearded old lady living in a miner's boot) with somewhere between 30-40 out and I find myself doing something like the famous "You -yes you - you live here. I KNOW you're one of mine. I'll find out just what your name is again eventually," about some of my stories. OK so maybe not quite that vague, or that many, but I find readers who just read RATS BATS and VATS expect me to remember the precise details of a dialogue I wrote 10 years back... interesting delusions they have about my memory! Hells teeth, my mind is an anti-computer collating vast amounts of good data and turning it into chaos, not the other way around.

But that doesn't mean I've forgotten just how hard it is to send your beloved manuscript out there (it actually gets harder, not easier, because unless you're that rarer than diamonds author who sold for vast sums off that first submission you know that there is a good chance it'll bounce back with a rejection that really doesn't suit your present needs. I've done it with a huge number of proposals and stories. I have seventy-four rejection slips in my top drawer.)

That doesn't mean that you don't have to do it, be it ever so hard.

My boys have just gone back to Uni, and them going hurts. I miss them. I worry about them. I would also be insane not to help them to go. To do go off into a life where I probably won't see them often. They're my sons, and I want the best for them. That means letting them go out there, letting them get into trouble, accepting that they may come home with their tail between their legs, needing succour, and yes, sometimes listening to unpalatable comments about them... and learning from that. A book or a story isn't a child... really. Nothing like as important in final analysis (although listening to the outraged squeals when someone dares to not love the little authorial oeuver you might think otherwise), but the same kind of rules apply to making it a success. (You know: 'beat the keyboard to sleep with a broken bottle and make it get up from the family home in the middle of the road, three hours before it goes to bed, lick the Encycloepeadia Britannica clean of ink with tongue and then go and work seventy hours a day down pit - we writers 'ad it tough - but you tell the young authors of today and they won't believe yer' - with apologies to Monty Python) or give it the best prep you can and send on to the best place to go further that you can... and prepare for that wholly inadequate rejection.

And one day it won't come.

Your story will be out there making it's way in the world. But it can only do that if:

1)You keep sending it out. Really, it'll never get published from you hard-drive. And trust me, it's NOT going to be stolen. (and even if this wildly improbable thing happened is that worse than it sitting on your hard-drive or in your story trunk, rotting?)

2) If when you get that rejection or piece of advice from a fellow writer... you curl into a defensive ball and refuse to accept that it wasn't perfect (even for their needs/kneads). Sometimes, they are idiots. Yep. Happens all the time. Books are rejected and go on to become bestsellers with someone else. And sometimes they're NOT wrong. Sometimes the book is fruther edited and polished by the author... and sells. Be dispassionate and sensible. It's weird but it works ;-).

And sometimes it doesn't sell. Ever. (shrug) The best way forward is to write the next, and send it out again (and while you wait, write the next), until you're sure it doesn't have a home to go to. Because... well if you have one story you've obsessed about and tried to sell for 20 years... when the dam bursts there is no weight of manuscripts to sell. Otherwise, when the dam bursts finally on that 23rd manuscript... you might find a great future for all the other 22.

OK so who is sitting on those 'children' polishing them that little more more before letting them out? And who got really shirty at a vaguely harsh comment? And who wrote a snotty comment back to the rejector?

Don't all shout at once ;-)

Smart Running

I would never call myself a runner - more like a plodder - but I do enjoy pushing myself across a distance. I recently went for a run with a friend of mine who does 42 km marathons. He really likes to mix up his training program. He does 3km sprints, then walks, or does a longer distance but for two kilometers he runs for 50 paces, then walks for 30 paces, that sort of thing. I just stick with the same distance, pushing myself on at the same rate.

'Hey you run too much in your grey zone,' he says, with the relics of his Dutch accent and grammar.

'What do you mean?'

'You need to mix things up. You will never improve if you keep running the same.'

The whole thing just got me thinking. What I get out of running is a kind of pay-off for my own bloody-mindedness. I love pushing myself, exercising my determination to push on through exhaustion. Yet I am so inflexible. I resist things, such as different approaches that would really improve me.

I've always had that determination to go it alone. I don't know if its the fact that my Dad was a rare breed of righteous policeman that would actually book other cops for speeding (and after the notorious Fitzgerald Inquiry was named as the only honest cop in Queensland, but that's another story - guess how many friends he had), and this has rubbed off. But I always wanted to do it myself.

At university I got incredibly angry when a friend of mine asked me to cheat in an exam. I have had much the same reaction at panels when established writers calmly state they deliberately copied the styles of other writers early in their careers, aping the structure of their prose to such a degree that they wrote it out as an exercise in absorbing it. That kind of thing horrified me. Creativity is SELF expression. I was always determined I would succeed with my 'natural' style, with my own voice, perfected through my own sweat (there I go again pushing myself the distance - alone). I wanted my ideas. My prose.

But have I been shooting myself in the foot?

I am a natural structuralist. I try to cram all my ideas in with plots and subplots. Sometimes I end up with so much complexity that the story openings get hopelessly bogged down in 'necessary' backstory. In my frustration, I have finally relented and for the first time am actually studying the openings of other books to see how other writers balanced their work, handled character etc.

This might seem so basic to everyone else, but for me its just such a different approach. Almost like - gulp - asking for help.

How much do other people study other writers?

In the development of your own style, did you make a conscious effort to absorb the styles of writers you wanted to emulate? Is this cheating or just good sense?

It was a dark and stormy night:

Thus began Paul Clifford, a novel almost no-one remembers - but that opening is one that everyone recognizes. Edward Bulwer-Lytton is spinning fast enough to power a small city after what's been made of a novel that is not really that bad when you consider that it was published in 1830, and preferences have changed a lot since then.

Of course, that's not what I'm posting about. No, I'm posting about the "winners" of the 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Awards, this year's celebration of the overblown, bad, and truly bizarre opening sentence. Slush readers take heart - no, not from the authors in the slush pile, and not while they're still breathing - Bulwer-Lytton Award winners and dishonorable mentions are intentionally bad.

The bad can be as instructive as the good, and here we have the gloriously appalling, with plunges into bathos that rival the cleavage of an EE cup, puns that would make even Dave Freer blush, and run on sentences that meander around for a while before finally getting lost, or in at least one case, disappearing up its own virtual fundamental orifice.

So, go take a look at the winners, then come back here, and add your own Bulwer-Lytton-esque offerings.

To start the fun:

The circumstances of my birth are shrouded in mystery even to me, for though I may assume I have, or had, a mother and a father, I have never known either, nor wished to, for I was abandoned outside a Copenhagen perfumery, left in a discarded crate still heavily scented with the oil it had once held, thus forever sealing my fate as the little myrrh maid of Copenhagen.