"Come, thou Fount of Every Blessing."
It is, quite simply, my favorite hymn. Spiritual, beautifully written, simple and direct in its meaning. I'm listening to it as I begin to write this. One day -- long from now, I hope -- it will be sung at my funeral.
But this blog isn't about something so deep, spiritual or religious. It is about words. In particular, one word.
Now as a writer, I love words, of course. But there are some words I just love more than others. For example, there's both loquacious and logorrhea. Anyone who has actually spoken to me -- or, more correctly, who has listened to me -- would certainly say both can be applied to me, particularly when I'm nervous.
Then there's serendipity. I love the meaning but it's the wonderful sound of the word that truly touches me.
Serendipity.
And, of course, there's callipygian.
I started with the word callipygian in mind when I wrote an entire Kendall Hunter murder mystery story. It was my sole inspiration. (You can find my story titled Callipygian in The Fine Art of Murder, a short story anthology published by Blue River Press for the Speed City chapter of Sisters in Crime.) Plus, those who know me well will certainly testify as to why I love this adjective.
All this gets me to the single word I am thinking about today.
Fount.
It is such a niffy little word. Middle English, I think.
Although I am sure I have heard or seen it used before, I don't remember the word fount used in any context other than in the hymn, "Come, thou Fount of Every Blessing." It means source, of course, so in the hymn, the source of every blessing refers to Jesus.
Like I said, a niffy little word.
But I need to correct something. I didn't remember seeing the word used other than in the hymn until I ran across it last week while reading Rhys Bowen's newest book, In Farleigh Field. And when I read it, I sat up and poked my wife. She knows how much I love the hymn.
A character in Rhys' novel used it to describe his father as being a fount of knowledge about history. And he was right. The old man was.
So there you have it. A word I love. A word I find inspirational. A word I will probably start randomly dropping on people.
Now go forth and be a fount of knowledge about something.
And thanks for reading.
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Words. Show all posts
Thursday, March 2, 2017
Monday, April 9, 2012
The 100 best first lines
More than a year ago I came across a list of the 100 Best First Lines in novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University. This is mostly literary fiction and goes back as far as the 17th century. But there are novels from the 21st century.
First lines are difficult. You want to get them right because they can propel the reader further into the novel. But getting the length, tone, structure, language, feeling and all the other elements correct is a very difficult task.
From the list below, which starts with truly the best first line (from Melville's Moby Dick), I tend to think the best lines are short and descriptive. Some are punchy, some not so much. The truly long ones, such as No. 95 (Double or Nothing) are boring.
Of my novels, my famous first line is from An Untidy Affair. It goes: I'm sometimes called a dick and I abhor the term.
Actually, I thought of it a week before I wrote it down because I knew it was going to be a first-person POV of a struggling private eye, but I hadn't worked out the entire story yet. I didn't want to start it before I knew the end.
I'm going to post the entire list below -- and mention the copyright at the end -- but here are the numbers of some of my favorites: Nos. 6, 13, 18, 26, 29, 38, 39, 40, 49, 54 (which I truly believe), 61, 62, 65, 80, 81, 94 and 99. I won't even begin to mention the ones I hate.
What are some of your favorites on this list? Are there some you think should be on the list that aren't? You can let me know.
Anyway, enjoy. Thanks for reading.
___
Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University:
1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. - Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. - James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. - Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. - Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. - Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. - William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." - Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. - John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn't. - Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. - William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. - Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. - Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; - Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. - Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. - Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. - Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. - C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. - Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. - Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. - Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. - Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. - George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? - Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. - G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. - David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. - Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. - Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. - GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. - Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. - Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. - Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. - Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
80. Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. - William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. - J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." - Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. - John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. - William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. - Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city —and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. - Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. - John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. - Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. - Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. - Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. - Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. - Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
97. He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. - Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. - David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. - Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Copyright 2011 pantagraph.com.
First lines are difficult. You want to get them right because they can propel the reader further into the novel. But getting the length, tone, structure, language, feeling and all the other elements correct is a very difficult task.
From the list below, which starts with truly the best first line (from Melville's Moby Dick), I tend to think the best lines are short and descriptive. Some are punchy, some not so much. The truly long ones, such as No. 95 (Double or Nothing) are boring.
Of my novels, my famous first line is from An Untidy Affair. It goes: I'm sometimes called a dick and I abhor the term.
Actually, I thought of it a week before I wrote it down because I knew it was going to be a first-person POV of a struggling private eye, but I hadn't worked out the entire story yet. I didn't want to start it before I knew the end.
I'm going to post the entire list below -- and mention the copyright at the end -- but here are the numbers of some of my favorites: Nos. 6, 13, 18, 26, 29, 38, 39, 40, 49, 54 (which I truly believe), 61, 62, 65, 80, 81, 94 and 99. I won't even begin to mention the ones I hate.
What are some of your favorites on this list? Are there some you think should be on the list that aren't? You can let me know.
Anyway, enjoy. Thanks for reading.
___
Following is a list of the 100 best first lines from novels, as decided by the American Book Review, a nonprofit journal published at the Unit for Contemporary Literature at Illinois State University:
1. Call me Ishmael. - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
2. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
3. A screaming comes across the sky. - Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
4. Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. - Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967; trans. Gregory Rabassa)
5. Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. - Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955)
6. Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. - Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1877; trans. Constance Garnett)
7. riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. - James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (1939)
8. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. - George Orwell, 1984 (1949)
9. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. - Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
10. I am an invisible man. - Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952)
11. The Miss Lonelyhearts of the New York Post-Dispatch (Are you in trouble?—Do-you-need-advice?—Write-to-Miss-Lonelyhearts-and-she-will-help-you) sat at his desk and stared at a piece of white cardboard. - Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933)
12. You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. —Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
13. Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested. —Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; trans. Breon Mitchell)
14. You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. —Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler (1979; trans. William Weaver)
15. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. —Samuel Beckett, Murphy (1938)
16. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. - J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
17. Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo. - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
18. This is the saddest story I have ever heard. - Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier (1915)
19. I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost:—Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly,—I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world, from that, in which the reader is likely to see me. - Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759n1767)
20. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. - Charles Dickens, David Copperfield (1850)
21. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. - James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
22. It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
23. One summer afternoon Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. - Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
24. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. - Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)
25. Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. - William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
26. 124 was spiteful. - Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
27. Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. - Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605; trans. Edith Grossman)
28. Mother died today. - Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942; trans. Stuart Gilbert)
29. Every summer Lin Kong returned to Goose Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. - Ha Jin, Waiting (1999)
30. The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. - William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
31. I am a sick man . . . I am a spiteful man. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground (1864; trans. Michael R. Katz)
32. Where now? Who now? When now? - Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (1953; trans. Patrick Bowles)
33. Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree." - Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1925)
34. In a sense, I am Jacob Horner. - John Barth, The End of the Road (1958)
35. It was like so, but wasn't. - Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2 (1995)
36. —Money . . . in a voice that rustled. - William Gaddis, J R (1975)
37. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. - Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
38. All this happened, more or less. - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
39. They shoot the white girl first. - Toni Morrison, Paradise (1998)
40. For a long time, I went to bed early. - Marcel Proust, Swann's Way (1913; trans. Lydia Davis)
41. The moment one learns English, complications set in. - Felipe Alfau, Chromos (1990)
42. Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. - Anita Brookner, The Debut (1981)
43. I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane; - Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
44. Ships at a distance have every man's wish on board. - Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
45. I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story. - Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome (1911)
46. Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement . . . anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. - Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
47. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. - C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952)
48. He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. - Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
49. It was the day my grandmother exploded. - Iain M. Banks, The Crow Road (1992)
50. I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. - Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002)
51. Elmer Gantry was drunk. - Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (1927)
52. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. - Louise Erdrich, Tracks (1988)
53. It was a pleasure to burn. - Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
54. A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. - Graham Greene, The End of the Affair (1951)
55. Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. - Flann O'Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939)
56. I was born in the Year 1632, in the City of York, of a good Family, tho' not of that Country, my Father being a Foreigner of Bremen, who settled first at Hull; He got a good Estate by Merchandise, and leaving off his Trade, lived afterward at York, from whence he had married my Mother, whose Relations were named Robinson, a very good Family in that Country, and from whom I was called Robinson Kreutznaer; but by the usual Corruption of Words in England, we are now called, nay we call our selves, and write our Name Crusoe, and so my Companions always call'd me. - Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
57. In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street. - David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress (1988)
58. Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. - George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
59. It was love at first sight. - Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (1961)
60. What if this young woman, who writes such bad poems, in competition with her husband, whose poems are equally bad, should stretch her remarkably long and well-made legs out before you, so that her skirt slips up to the tops of her stockings? - Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)
61. I have never begun a novel with more misgiving. - W. Somerset Maugham, The Razor's Edge (1944)
62. Once upon a time, there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. - Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups (2001)
63. The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. - G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
64. In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. - F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
65. You better not never tell nobody but God. - Alice Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
66. "To be born again," sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, "first you have to die." - Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988)
67. It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York. - Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963)
68. Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. - David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System (1987)
69. If I am out of my mind, it's all right with me, thought Moses Herzog. - Saul Bellow, Herzog (1964)
70. Francis Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up. - Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear it Away (1960)
71. Granted: I am an inmate of a mental hospital; my keeper is watching me, he never lets me out of his sight; there's a peephole in the door, and my keeper's eye is the shade of brown that can never see through a blue-eyed type like me. - GŸnter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959; trans. Ralph Manheim)
72. When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson. - Stanley Elkin, The Dick Gibson Show (1971)
73. Hiram Clegg, together with his wife Emma and four friends of the faith from Randolph Junction, were summoned by the Spirit and Mrs. Clara Collins, widow of the beloved Nazarene preacher Ely Collins, to West Condon on the weekend of the eighteenth and nineteenth of April, there to await the End of the World. - Robert Coover, The Origin of the Brunists (1966)
74. She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face positively pale with the irritation that had brought her to the point of going away without sight of him. - Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (1902)
75. In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. - Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
76. "Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. - Rose Macaulay, The Towers of Trebizond (1956)
77. He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. - Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900)
78. The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. - L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between (1953)
79. On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadnt ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen. - Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (1980)
80. Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law. - William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own (1994)
81. Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. - J. G. Ballard, Crash (1973)
82. I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. - Dodie Smith, I Capture the Castle (1948)
83. "When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets," Papa would say, "she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing." - Katherine Dunn, Geek Love (1983)
84. In the last years of the Seventeenth Century there was to be found among the fops and fools of the London coffee-houses one rangy, gangling flitch called Ebenezer Cooke, more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent, who, like his friends-in-folly, all of whom were supposed to be educating at Oxford or Cambridge, had found the sound of Mother English more fun to game with than her sense to labor over, and so rather than applying himself to the pains of scholarship, had learned the knack of versifying, and ground out quires of couplets after the fashion of the day, afroth with Joves and Jupiters, aclang with jarring rhymes, and string-taut with similes stretched to the snapping-point. - John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor (1960)
85. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. - James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss (1978)
86. It was just noon that Sunday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole county too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man. - William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948)
87. I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles) who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot," or "That Claudius," or "Claudius the Stammerer," or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius," am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the "golden predicament" from which I have never since become disentangled. - Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934)
88. Of all the things that drive men to sea, the most common disaster, I've come to learn, is women. - Charles Johnson, Middle Passage (1990)
89. I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city —and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. - Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
90. The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods. - Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
91. I will tell you in a few words who I am: lover of the hummingbird that darts to the flower beyond the rotted sill where my feet are propped; lover of bright needlepoint and the bright stitching fingers of humorless old ladies bent to their sweet and infamous designs; lover of parasols made from the same puffy stuff as a young girl's underdrawers; still lover of that small naval boat which somehow survived the distressing years of my life between her decks or in her pilothouse; and also lover of poor dear black Sonny, my mess boy, fellow victim and confidant, and of my wife and child. But most of all, lover of my harmless and sanguine self. - John Hawkes, Second Skin (1964)
92. He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. - Raphael Sabatini, Scaramouche (1921)
93. Psychics can see the color of time it's blue. - Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away (1986)
94. In the town, there were two mutes and they were always together. - Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)
95. Once upon a time two or three weeks ago, a rather stubborn and determined middle-aged man decided to record for posterity, exactly as it happened, word by word and step by step, the story of another man for indeed what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal, a somewhat paranoiac fellow unmarried, unattached, and quite irresponsible, who had decided to lock himself in a room a furnished room with a private bath, cooking facilities, a bed, a table, and at least one chair, in New York City, for a year 365 days to be precise, to write the story of another person—a shy young man about of 19 years old—who, after the war the Second World War, had come to America the land of opportunities from France under the sponsorship of his uncle—a journalist, fluent in five languages—who himself had come to America from Europe Poland it seems, though this was not clearly established sometime during the war after a series of rather gruesome adventures, and who, at the end of the war, wrote to the father his cousin by marriage of the young man whom he considered as a nephew, curious to know if he the father and his family had survived the German occupation, and indeed was deeply saddened to learn, in a letter from the young man—a long and touching letter written in English, not by the young man, however, who did not know a damn word of English, but by a good friend of his who had studied English in school—that his parents both his father and mother and his two sisters one older and the other younger than he had been deported they were Jewish to a German concentration camp Auschwitz probably and never returned, no doubt having been exterminated deliberately X * X * X * X, and that, therefore, the young man who was now an orphan, a displaced person, who, during the war, had managed to escape deportation by working very hard on a farm in Southern France, would be happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to come to America that great country he had heard so much about and yet knew so little about to start a new life, possibly go to school, learn a trade, and become a good, loyal citizen. - Raymond Federman, Double or Nothing (1971)
96. Time is not a line but a dimension, like the dimensions of space. - Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye (1988)
97. He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. - Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
98. High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. - David Lodge, Changing Places (1975)
99. They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. - Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
100. The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. - Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
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Monday, January 17, 2011
Endings . . . and redemptions
I am struck by the fact that I like happy endings, particularly in stories. Sentimental, yes, I know that. But it's not like I can't find satisfaction in a sad ending because I can. That is as long as the ending makes sense and there is some degree of redemption in the story.
So that brings me to my critique group. I won't mention names here, of course, but they all know I enjoy their stories and value them comments on my writing.
There is one woman in the group -- I will call her Kia -- who loves dark, creepy stories. I don't care for them much but I truly love her writing. She is a brilliant storyteller, has vivid descriptions and snappy dialogue. But she loves the dark side.
This week, we read a short story by another woman -- I will call her Angie -- that was full of mystical elements, which I could accept, and a surprising and shocking ending, where the protag is murdered. Now the protag wasn't a particularly likable person, certainly wasn't in the beginning. She was full of anger and pain. But Angie was wonderfully able paint a fuller picture of her as the story developed and there was a level of redemption in her life.
Then she is killed off.
Ninety to 95 percent of the story was great but Angie destroyed it in the last 300 words. I hated it and didn't pick it up again until my critique group meeting, though it was on my mind a lot. And I wondered how Kia, who loves the dark side, felt about Angie's story.
She disliked it, too.
The problem was nothing in the story up until that point -- not in its details or in its tone -- suggested the type of ending. It cheated the reader because there was little redemption and no justice in the outcome. It was like having a story about puppy dogs, and kitty cats, and unicorns, and daisies, and sunshine. Then suddenly at the end, having Freddie Kruger show up and stuff the kitties into a wood chipper. Despite the mere horror of it all, the ending would make no sense.
In my stories, I strive for them to make sense. I end them where I do because that's where the end is. I always want the ending to leave the reader satisfied, even if it's not totally happy.
Angie's story is a case study in what I will avoid.
Thanks for reading, and keep writing.
So that brings me to my critique group. I won't mention names here, of course, but they all know I enjoy their stories and value them comments on my writing.
There is one woman in the group -- I will call her Kia -- who loves dark, creepy stories. I don't care for them much but I truly love her writing. She is a brilliant storyteller, has vivid descriptions and snappy dialogue. But she loves the dark side.
This week, we read a short story by another woman -- I will call her Angie -- that was full of mystical elements, which I could accept, and a surprising and shocking ending, where the protag is murdered. Now the protag wasn't a particularly likable person, certainly wasn't in the beginning. She was full of anger and pain. But Angie was wonderfully able paint a fuller picture of her as the story developed and there was a level of redemption in her life.
Then she is killed off.
Ninety to 95 percent of the story was great but Angie destroyed it in the last 300 words. I hated it and didn't pick it up again until my critique group meeting, though it was on my mind a lot. And I wondered how Kia, who loves the dark side, felt about Angie's story.
She disliked it, too.
The problem was nothing in the story up until that point -- not in its details or in its tone -- suggested the type of ending. It cheated the reader because there was little redemption and no justice in the outcome. It was like having a story about puppy dogs, and kitty cats, and unicorns, and daisies, and sunshine. Then suddenly at the end, having Freddie Kruger show up and stuff the kitties into a wood chipper. Despite the mere horror of it all, the ending would make no sense.
In my stories, I strive for them to make sense. I end them where I do because that's where the end is. I always want the ending to leave the reader satisfied, even if it's not totally happy.
Angie's story is a case study in what I will avoid.
Thanks for reading, and keep writing.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Word count
I need some advice from any writers out there.
My current murder mystery, AN UNTIDY AFFAIR, clocks in at just under 72,000 words. Is that too short? Do I need to bump it up, somehow, to more than 75,000 words, with a target of 80,000 to 85,000.
As a journalist, I have always believed that you should write the story until it's complete. It is better, and easier, to cut it down, than to try to pad it.
The novel is the length that it is because that is the length of the story. I'm not sure what to add in order to increase the length. I see the story as complete at just over 71,500 words.
Send me a comment below or send me an e-mail with your thoughts please. Thanks.
And thanks, as always, for reading.
My current murder mystery, AN UNTIDY AFFAIR, clocks in at just under 72,000 words. Is that too short? Do I need to bump it up, somehow, to more than 75,000 words, with a target of 80,000 to 85,000.
As a journalist, I have always believed that you should write the story until it's complete. It is better, and easier, to cut it down, than to try to pad it.
The novel is the length that it is because that is the length of the story. I'm not sure what to add in order to increase the length. I see the story as complete at just over 71,500 words.
Send me a comment below or send me an e-mail with your thoughts please. Thanks.
And thanks, as always, for reading.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Gotta stop building a watch
Years ago, while I was working as a reporter at United Press International, a fellow reporter jokingly said whenever someone asks me the time, I tell them how to build a watch. I tell people more than they need to know.
I have always thought that was funny, though I have to admit he was right to some degree.
I got the same sort of comment last Saturday at my writing critique group. There are times when I just write too much. I take two paragraphs to say what I should say in one sentence. (A long sentence, I asked. No, was the reply.)
Sherita Campbell, a wonderful and funny little woman who would read Tarot cards for me if I'd let her, said I would increase the tension in my writing if sometimes I just got straight to the point by saying, "I walked in the room. There was a blond. I shot her."
I laughed -- it really is funny, don't you think? -- but I have also been trying to take it to heart. (Can't tell by this posting, though.)
Instead of telling someone how to build a watch, I will get to the point! -- and shoot someone.
Thanks, Steve Morgan (wherever you are) and Sherita Campbell.
I have always thought that was funny, though I have to admit he was right to some degree.
I got the same sort of comment last Saturday at my writing critique group. There are times when I just write too much. I take two paragraphs to say what I should say in one sentence. (A long sentence, I asked. No, was the reply.)
Sherita Campbell, a wonderful and funny little woman who would read Tarot cards for me if I'd let her, said I would increase the tension in my writing if sometimes I just got straight to the point by saying, "I walked in the room. There was a blond. I shot her."
I laughed -- it really is funny, don't you think? -- but I have also been trying to take it to heart. (Can't tell by this posting, though.)
Instead of telling someone how to build a watch, I will get to the point! -- and shoot someone.
Thanks, Steve Morgan (wherever you are) and Sherita Campbell.
Saturday, June 5, 2010
I couldn't see
I am generally very careful about my reading glasses -- when I carry them out of the house, where I take them, when I wear them and where I put them down. And the reason is simple. They are the only pair I have. Since I started wearing reading glasses more than a decade ago, this is my favorite pair.
When I moved back to the Midwest from Philadelphia in January 2002, it was in the middle of the school year and we had not sold our house. So it was months before the family -- wife and daughters -- moved here. During that time, my oldest daughter was reading Harry Potter. I wasn't into Potter (though I certainly am now) but I promised to read the books and we'd talk about them on the phone in the evenings.
One week after I got here, I accidentally stepped on my eyeglasses which had fallen out of my shirt pocket. Given that I was an editor and needed them to read, I went to an eye doctor the next day. The frames I loved best happened to be Harry Potter frames. I considered not getting them but I did love the glasses.
I have used the same frames for the last eight years.
Last week at a black journalist meeting I left my eyes on the conference room table at the television station where we were meeting. I didn't notice it until later that evening when I got home. But it meant when I was writing on Friday, I had to increase the print size on my computer screen to 125 percent of normal. Otherwise, I'd have a hard time seeing.
Seeing what you are writing is an important aspect of writing and one that I suggest all writers accomplish. And I know this is a pretty weak blog posting. I had intended to blog about the word choices on Friday but I had a hard time seeing. So today I decided on a little whimsy.
Sue it!
But in the meantime, have a nice day. Thanks for reading and get back to writing.
When I moved back to the Midwest from Philadelphia in January 2002, it was in the middle of the school year and we had not sold our house. So it was months before the family -- wife and daughters -- moved here. During that time, my oldest daughter was reading Harry Potter. I wasn't into Potter (though I certainly am now) but I promised to read the books and we'd talk about them on the phone in the evenings.
One week after I got here, I accidentally stepped on my eyeglasses which had fallen out of my shirt pocket. Given that I was an editor and needed them to read, I went to an eye doctor the next day. The frames I loved best happened to be Harry Potter frames. I considered not getting them but I did love the glasses.
I have used the same frames for the last eight years.
Last week at a black journalist meeting I left my eyes on the conference room table at the television station where we were meeting. I didn't notice it until later that evening when I got home. But it meant when I was writing on Friday, I had to increase the print size on my computer screen to 125 percent of normal. Otherwise, I'd have a hard time seeing.
Seeing what you are writing is an important aspect of writing and one that I suggest all writers accomplish. And I know this is a pretty weak blog posting. I had intended to blog about the word choices on Friday but I had a hard time seeing. So today I decided on a little whimsy.
Sue it!
But in the meantime, have a nice day. Thanks for reading and get back to writing.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
MOVE
First of all, MOVE is not an acronym. If I'm not mistaken, the full name is On the MOVE.
Today is May 13. And MOVE, a radical, urban, back-to-nature group -- yes, I realize that urban and back-to-nature in this case is an oxymoron -- had its last major confrontation with Philadelphia police 25 years ago on May 13, 1985.
City authorities wanted to evict MOVE members from their West Philly home. After a day-long confrontation (with authorities using bullets and full-pressure water hoses), police dropped a satchel of explosives -- read: bomb -- on the roof of the MOVE house in a misguided attempt to knock a fortified bunker off the top of the building. The attempt failed.
The bunker and the roof caught fire. The fire department did not immediately turn on water hoses once the blaze became apparent and, ultimately, the burning bunker collapsed into the second story of the structure instead of falling off of the house and into the street, as officials had hoped.
The resulting fire eventually went to five or six alarms, destroyed 61 houses, left 250 people homeless and cost 11 people, including five children, their lives. All of the dead were from the MOVE house.
Though the neighborhood was rebuilt, it was shoddy and now, 25 years later, the city owns 37 of the rebuilt houses and apparently has left them abandoned.
I mention this because the MOVE confrontation plays a minor, yet crucial role in my current novel, AN UNTIDY AFFAIR. Affair is a murder mystery and isn't in the least bit a political novel. But when I decided to have it set in Philadelphia, I wanted to use a major event as a backdrop for the developing murder story. And there is no event in Philly's recent history -- say, the last 50 years -- that is bigger than the 1985 MOVE confrontation.
In my novel, there is another body found in the debris left by the bombing and fire, though it is not in the MOVE house. It is in a house further down the block. Figuring out who it is and why they were killed is the mystery in the book.
I don't mind using that sad day as a prop in my story. It's attention-getting. And it is the biggest story I have ever covered.
But as I reflect on that day and the days that immediately followed, I remember working the story. I remember standing with other reporters watching the entire neighborhood burn to the ground. I remember a day or so later standing with a resident in front of the remains of her property. The only thing that was vaguely recognizable was the burnt frame of a window air-conditioner. Everything else she had was gone. And I remember standing on some one's porch looking down the block of burned down houses as the coroner removed the first of the 11 dead bodies. I wasn't suppose to be on the porch -- officials restricted the media's access -- but a kindly elderly woman let me into her home and I was the first journalist in the world to report that they had dead bodies and were moving them.
I hoped then that my reporting and writing accurately described the events without bias. And as an author, I hope my readers one day get a sense of the misery of that day and the following days. I made one of the characters in my book a resident whose house was destroyed. It was a time of incredible sadness but I still had a job to do and I think I did it well, remaining fair and balanced. I was respectful of the victims and didn't pull any punches for those responsible, though several of the city officials I respected and one or two I really liked.
Anyway, those are my thought for the day, in addition to the fact that I got a rejection e-mail today from one of my B-list agents. No big deal. I sent her a quick thank you e-mail and moved on.
Thanks for reading today and keep on the MOVE.
Today is May 13. And MOVE, a radical, urban, back-to-nature group -- yes, I realize that urban and back-to-nature in this case is an oxymoron -- had its last major confrontation with Philadelphia police 25 years ago on May 13, 1985.
City authorities wanted to evict MOVE members from their West Philly home. After a day-long confrontation (with authorities using bullets and full-pressure water hoses), police dropped a satchel of explosives -- read: bomb -- on the roof of the MOVE house in a misguided attempt to knock a fortified bunker off the top of the building. The attempt failed.
The bunker and the roof caught fire. The fire department did not immediately turn on water hoses once the blaze became apparent and, ultimately, the burning bunker collapsed into the second story of the structure instead of falling off of the house and into the street, as officials had hoped.
The resulting fire eventually went to five or six alarms, destroyed 61 houses, left 250 people homeless and cost 11 people, including five children, their lives. All of the dead were from the MOVE house.
Though the neighborhood was rebuilt, it was shoddy and now, 25 years later, the city owns 37 of the rebuilt houses and apparently has left them abandoned.
I mention this because the MOVE confrontation plays a minor, yet crucial role in my current novel, AN UNTIDY AFFAIR. Affair is a murder mystery and isn't in the least bit a political novel. But when I decided to have it set in Philadelphia, I wanted to use a major event as a backdrop for the developing murder story. And there is no event in Philly's recent history -- say, the last 50 years -- that is bigger than the 1985 MOVE confrontation.
In my novel, there is another body found in the debris left by the bombing and fire, though it is not in the MOVE house. It is in a house further down the block. Figuring out who it is and why they were killed is the mystery in the book.
I don't mind using that sad day as a prop in my story. It's attention-getting. And it is the biggest story I have ever covered.
But as I reflect on that day and the days that immediately followed, I remember working the story. I remember standing with other reporters watching the entire neighborhood burn to the ground. I remember a day or so later standing with a resident in front of the remains of her property. The only thing that was vaguely recognizable was the burnt frame of a window air-conditioner. Everything else she had was gone. And I remember standing on some one's porch looking down the block of burned down houses as the coroner removed the first of the 11 dead bodies. I wasn't suppose to be on the porch -- officials restricted the media's access -- but a kindly elderly woman let me into her home and I was the first journalist in the world to report that they had dead bodies and were moving them.
I hoped then that my reporting and writing accurately described the events without bias. And as an author, I hope my readers one day get a sense of the misery of that day and the following days. I made one of the characters in my book a resident whose house was destroyed. It was a time of incredible sadness but I still had a job to do and I think I did it well, remaining fair and balanced. I was respectful of the victims and didn't pull any punches for those responsible, though several of the city officials I respected and one or two I really liked.
Anyway, those are my thought for the day, in addition to the fact that I got a rejection e-mail today from one of my B-list agents. No big deal. I sent her a quick thank you e-mail and moved on.
Thanks for reading today and keep on the MOVE.
Monday, December 29, 2008
Gobbledy-gook
Long ago, I can't remember exactly when, my editor at United Press International, upon reading one of my news stories, pronounced it as being gobbledly-gook. At the time, I had been at UPI for a couple of years and had written numerous stories but none had gotten such a harsh response from my editor. For years after that, my fellow UNIPressers in the Philadelphia office ribbed me, in a good naturally way, about writing gobbledly-gook.
I left UPI 15 years ago and while I am occasionally in contact with one or two of my former colleagues, I doubt that any remember the comment. And I doubt that former editor does.
The editor, whose name is Bob, just published a book. I haven't spoken to him, I'm sure, in probably 15 years. But when I learned -- from a former UNIPresser, no less -- that Bob had written and published a book, I immediately e-mailed him a congrats and got back a nice reply.
The non-fiction book, which was regionally published in the Philadelphia area by a small press, is about two legal cases. The former colleague who informed me of Bob's book said it wasn't very good. In other words, gobbledly-gook. And I could understand that. I always thought Bob was a much better editor than writer.
But I looked up the book and was able to read the first two chapters online and they really were quite good. The writing was clear and compelling, and drew the reader further into the book, which is as it should be. I plan to order the book through Amazon and have Bob autograph it the next time I am in Philly.
And as I said to the UNIPresser who told me about book, Bob is to be congratulated. Writing a book is very difficult; getting published is even more so. That is something to be celebrated.
Hopefully, Bob one day will get to read one of my published books. I have confidence in my writing, just as I did back then. And I'm sure he won't call it gobbledly-gook.
Thanks for reading and keep writing.
I left UPI 15 years ago and while I am occasionally in contact with one or two of my former colleagues, I doubt that any remember the comment. And I doubt that former editor does.
The editor, whose name is Bob, just published a book. I haven't spoken to him, I'm sure, in probably 15 years. But when I learned -- from a former UNIPresser, no less -- that Bob had written and published a book, I immediately e-mailed him a congrats and got back a nice reply.
The non-fiction book, which was regionally published in the Philadelphia area by a small press, is about two legal cases. The former colleague who informed me of Bob's book said it wasn't very good. In other words, gobbledly-gook. And I could understand that. I always thought Bob was a much better editor than writer.
But I looked up the book and was able to read the first two chapters online and they really were quite good. The writing was clear and compelling, and drew the reader further into the book, which is as it should be. I plan to order the book through Amazon and have Bob autograph it the next time I am in Philly.
And as I said to the UNIPresser who told me about book, Bob is to be congratulated. Writing a book is very difficult; getting published is even more so. That is something to be celebrated.
Hopefully, Bob one day will get to read one of my published books. I have confidence in my writing, just as I did back then. And I'm sure he won't call it gobbledly-gook.
Thanks for reading and keep writing.
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Research II
My critique group met last weekend and I had the works of two authors to read. Both writers submitted short stories they intend to use in the next racing anthology that the local chapter of Sisters in Crime plans to publish in 2010.
In both cases, the writing was generally good and the stories were compelling. But I was struck with several lapses -- serious lapses -- that could fatally compromise the credibility of the book. In both cases, it was due to the lack of research.
I admire both of these writers but I think they already had murder stories in mind that they adapted for the book, which will focus on the Brickyard 400, which is a NASCAR event. But tere was a problem. They are not race fans, as far as I know, and they merely added racing-related material without doing much in the way of research into racing or NASCAR.
First in both cases, for example, the writers had NASCAR teams based in Indianapolis. If this were Indy car that wouldn't be a problem but not in NASCAR. There are no NASCAR teams based in Indy and certainly no prominent ones. No prominent team would.
It would be like a major fashion designer basing their operation in Peru, Indiana, instead of New York City.
I mentioned that example and others to the editor of the book so she would be aware and would be looking for problems in other stories. But the main problem still goes back to research.
You should always write what you know. I would never write a paranormal story or a western or a Gothic romance because I don't know anything about them. Even with a lot of research, I doubt I could create a plausible fictional setting for any of those genre. That is why I stick to what I know.
Again, that doesn't mean I pooh-pooh research. Not at all. I do research. I did research for the short story I wrote, I did it for both "Fighting Chaos" and "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal", and I am still doing research for "The Death of Art." But in each of those cases, I was looking for specifics, such as street names in far away places, or, for example, where a church is on the map in relationship to, say, a river.
I hope the other writers pay closer attention to some of those racing details because I think the Sisters in Crime chapter should market the upcoming book more aggressively than it did with "Racing can be Murder" (2007). If we can get it in front of NASCAR fans in the South, we can have a truly big fundraiser.
But the details have to be right. And fans will be critical. We have to be on top of things.
That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading and keep writing.
In both cases, the writing was generally good and the stories were compelling. But I was struck with several lapses -- serious lapses -- that could fatally compromise the credibility of the book. In both cases, it was due to the lack of research.
I admire both of these writers but I think they already had murder stories in mind that they adapted for the book, which will focus on the Brickyard 400, which is a NASCAR event. But tere was a problem. They are not race fans, as far as I know, and they merely added racing-related material without doing much in the way of research into racing or NASCAR.
First in both cases, for example, the writers had NASCAR teams based in Indianapolis. If this were Indy car that wouldn't be a problem but not in NASCAR. There are no NASCAR teams based in Indy and certainly no prominent ones. No prominent team would.
It would be like a major fashion designer basing their operation in Peru, Indiana, instead of New York City.
I mentioned that example and others to the editor of the book so she would be aware and would be looking for problems in other stories. But the main problem still goes back to research.
You should always write what you know. I would never write a paranormal story or a western or a Gothic romance because I don't know anything about them. Even with a lot of research, I doubt I could create a plausible fictional setting for any of those genre. That is why I stick to what I know.
Again, that doesn't mean I pooh-pooh research. Not at all. I do research. I did research for the short story I wrote, I did it for both "Fighting Chaos" and "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal", and I am still doing research for "The Death of Art." But in each of those cases, I was looking for specifics, such as street names in far away places, or, for example, where a church is on the map in relationship to, say, a river.
I hope the other writers pay closer attention to some of those racing details because I think the Sisters in Crime chapter should market the upcoming book more aggressively than it did with "Racing can be Murder" (2007). If we can get it in front of NASCAR fans in the South, we can have a truly big fundraiser.
But the details have to be right. And fans will be critical. We have to be on top of things.
That's all I have for now. Thanks for reading and keep writing.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Contractions
Some time ago, a fellow writer said I should use more contractions, particularly inside of quotes. She said it reads better.
Being that I greatly respect her opinions (although I don't always agree with them or always follow them) I decided to give the issue some thought. And I think she is right. Use of contractions, particularly in quotes, moves my story along.
But do I use them with nouns, either regular or proper? I decided that I do. There is nothing wrong with saying Mike's a great guy. It reads better than Mike is a great guy. (I am, by the way.) And I don't think there is a rule against it.
In the end, it is best to know a rule before you break it. In this case, there isn't a rule that applies. So, go with what feels best.
Sorry this is sort a short entry but that is all I have at the moment, other than my usual "Thanks for reading and keep writing."
Being that I greatly respect her opinions (although I don't always agree with them or always follow them) I decided to give the issue some thought. And I think she is right. Use of contractions, particularly in quotes, moves my story along.
But do I use them with nouns, either regular or proper? I decided that I do. There is nothing wrong with saying Mike's a great guy. It reads better than Mike is a great guy. (I am, by the way.) And I don't think there is a rule against it.
In the end, it is best to know a rule before you break it. In this case, there isn't a rule that applies. So, go with what feels best.
Sorry this is sort a short entry but that is all I have at the moment, other than my usual "Thanks for reading and keep writing."
Monday, June 30, 2008
Reading
When I was a child, I wasn't a good reader. And as I grew older and my reading ability and comprehension improved, I became very self-conscious about reading aloud. I always feared I would come across a word I didn't know and would be embarrassed. While I was in college, I refused to read aloud in English class.
Some time later I attended a church in which during Bible study we would take turns reading verses aloud. When I knew my turn was coming, I would silently read ahead and search for all the names I knew I'd have a hard time with. It is for that reason that I prefer the New Testament __ fewer difficult names.
I am still self-conscious about reading aloud, although I am willing to do it. When I read, it generally is with little infliction because mouth is several seconds behind my eyes and my mind, which are looking ahead for any difficult passages. With several seconds of lead time, I can work around some word with which I am unfamiliar.
I mention all this because I am self-conscious even if I am reading my own writing. If I ever get a book published, I can imagine having some reading and being so nervous about it ahead of time that I can barely go on. It would be better to just memorize vast portions of text and pretend to read them.
Reading your work aloud is good, however. I just spent the better part of an hour reading two chapters to my wife. Hearing your work read aloud helps you with pacing and in developing a true sense for how people will preceive it. There can be troublesome words or phases that you just don't pick up on without hearing your work aloud.
So find a good friend or loved one and read your work to them. Self-conscious or not, it will help.
Thanks for reading and keep writing.
Some time later I attended a church in which during Bible study we would take turns reading verses aloud. When I knew my turn was coming, I would silently read ahead and search for all the names I knew I'd have a hard time with. It is for that reason that I prefer the New Testament __ fewer difficult names.
I am still self-conscious about reading aloud, although I am willing to do it. When I read, it generally is with little infliction because mouth is several seconds behind my eyes and my mind, which are looking ahead for any difficult passages. With several seconds of lead time, I can work around some word with which I am unfamiliar.
I mention all this because I am self-conscious even if I am reading my own writing. If I ever get a book published, I can imagine having some reading and being so nervous about it ahead of time that I can barely go on. It would be better to just memorize vast portions of text and pretend to read them.
Reading your work aloud is good, however. I just spent the better part of an hour reading two chapters to my wife. Hearing your work read aloud helps you with pacing and in developing a true sense for how people will preceive it. There can be troublesome words or phases that you just don't pick up on without hearing your work aloud.
So find a good friend or loved one and read your work to them. Self-conscious or not, it will help.
Thanks for reading and keep writing.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
That word
There was a great news satire television program in the 1960s called "That Was The Week That Was." To people who remember it, it is just called TW3.
It is a great title for the program although it uses the word 'that,' one of the most overused words in the English language. The problem is it doesn't have much meaning yet is so often used. While I was in college, I remember the editor of our college paper lecturing us on eliminating the word from our writing. And it is something I have tried to do.
So imagine my surprise last Saturday when one of the other writers in my writing group who was conducting a critique on the first two chapters of my book cautioned me about using 'that' too often. I didn't realize it was a problem.
Well, apparently it is __ I checked.
In the nearly 57,000 words I have written for "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal" I used the word 'that' 647 times, which is nearly twice as many times as I use the name 'Jason,' which appears 396 times. And Jason is the main character in the book.
I highlighted every time I use 'that' and plan to go through and examine each case. But because it will be so time-consuming, I won't do it until before I start the second draft.
So be careful with 'that.' It may fit perfectly in TW3, but in other places it is overused and unnecessary.
Thanks for reading and have a great evening. And most of all, don't give up on writing.
It is a great title for the program although it uses the word 'that,' one of the most overused words in the English language. The problem is it doesn't have much meaning yet is so often used. While I was in college, I remember the editor of our college paper lecturing us on eliminating the word from our writing. And it is something I have tried to do.
So imagine my surprise last Saturday when one of the other writers in my writing group who was conducting a critique on the first two chapters of my book cautioned me about using 'that' too often. I didn't realize it was a problem.
Well, apparently it is __ I checked.
In the nearly 57,000 words I have written for "Death at the Jungle-bunny Journal" I used the word 'that' 647 times, which is nearly twice as many times as I use the name 'Jason,' which appears 396 times. And Jason is the main character in the book.
I highlighted every time I use 'that' and plan to go through and examine each case. But because it will be so time-consuming, I won't do it until before I start the second draft.
So be careful with 'that.' It may fit perfectly in TW3, but in other places it is overused and unnecessary.
Thanks for reading and have a great evening. And most of all, don't give up on writing.
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