Writer's Notebook - James Rafferty Blog

Book Review: On Writing

Several years ago, I participated in the National Writing Month (a.k.a.NANOWRIMO) and one of my writing friends hosted an online "writeoff."  A few of us participated and we all cranked out a fair number of words that night.  The host kindly offered a couple of prizes and I ended up choosing Stephen King's book about writing: On Writing - A Memoir of the Craft.  I'd heard good things about the book and added it to my writing shelf.  Some five years later, I was looking for my next book to read and decided the time had come to gain Mr. King's perspective on writing. 

As it turns out, I should have opened up this book much sooner, since it offers sage and practical advice on writing. I found I could start applying his suggestions immediately. The subtitle on being a memoir of the craft is accurate. The first portion of the book recounts his time growing up in a household with his mom and older brother David.  They lived in several locations, but eventually settled in the small town of Durham, Maine. Stephen admired his older brother David and they often got into hijinks together. By the time Stephen was a teenager, he was already writing stories and began collecting rejection slips, but eventually also started getting handwritten notes suggesting he submit again.  

Over time he developed his writing chops writing for a newsletter produced by his brother Dave and then later for his high school newspaper. He eventually landed a job covering local sports for a town newspaper and wrote up some stories on the results of games.  Even better, he began to get advice from the editor John Gould. Gould showed him how to tighten up his stories by 1) keeping the best parts and 2) taking out the parts that weren't essential to the story. This anecdote introduced a couple of key themes of the book, notably about making sure that the story gets told and also how re-writes can help achieve that. 

Over the next several years, King kept working at writing stories and over time started getting success in getting them published in magazines. He met Tabby, a younger woman who was also a writer and eventually they married and started a family.  King's mother had suggested he also get a teaching credential, which he garnered at the University of Maine.  He landed a job teaching English at a high school, but continued writing stories in his free time, all the while, getting encouragement from his wife to keep at the writing. He began to write the novel Carrie, but literally threw the first few pages away, before Tabby retrieved them and told King she wanted to hear the rest of the story.  He turned memories of hard times in high school and a couple of reviled girls into a horror story, with some help on salient details from Tabby.  He sent the book off to an editor at Doubleday and continued with his regular routine of teaching high school. The book was accepted and King got a $2500 advance. Not exactly life changing, but several months later, Doubleday sold the paperback rights for Carrie to Signet for the stunning amount of $400,000 dollars and would pay half of that amount to King. After years of hard work, success had arrived.  

King continued the memoir portion of the book, recounting several subsequent major book sales, but he also acknowledged that over this same period, he'd become an alcoholic. To his credit, he eventually turned away from drink and drugs and re-engaged with his love of writing with the help of the family and friends who cared for him.  His love of writing comes through very clearly in this book, both in the memoir section and the craft sections which follow.  

I'll continue my review on the craft portion of the book in a separate post.  

 

 

Connecting - Crossing to Safety

I recently returned from a unique trip to one of my favorite places, Asheville, North Carolina.  Despite all of the obstacles, my wife Cindy and I took a road trip to get there and helped our oldest son Jason pack up both his art studio and the apartment he shares with his fiance as they made plans moving to a new locale to attend graduate school in the Fall. The trip doubled as a vacation, though with lots of constraints. 

Here's a picture as we crossed the border into Tennessee and checked out their wonderful Welcome Center a few miles before we crossed into North Carolina through local mountains:  

After a 3 day ride to Asheville, we settled in at our Airbnb in West Asheville and started planning the month. Both Cindy and I had decided to do some reading during our stay and I'd brought along a couple books to read, but was open to getting more. Early on, Jason took me to one of the few bookstores that was open during this pandemic period, Mr. K's, which sells used books and CDs. The title of this post mentions connecting and here we go. In early June, A.O. Scott  published a wonderful profile about the writer Wallace Stegner, introducing him as a writer who had profiled the American West and influenced other writers, notably one of my favorites, Robert Stone. So, in Mr. K's, I went looking for a book by Stegner and found Crossing to Safety.  

Later in the month, I began reading the book and brought it back with me to Massachusetts. The novel was simply superb. Stegner published the novel late in his long career, in 1987, but the writing still felt fresh and contemporary. In the book, we meet a young couple, Larry and Sally Morgan, who are beginning a new life in Wisconsin, where Larry has gained a teaching position in the English department. Larry is also a writer and is in the early stages of getting his stories published.  They meet another young couple, Sid and Charity Lang, and the two couples find that rare experience of meeting people with whom they connect very well. Stegner writes the book from Larry's point of view and we bounce between these early scenes and others that take place some 40 years later, but the shifts aren't difficult to follow and we gradually learn so much about each of these characters and how their lives are intertwined.

I can heartily recommend the book to virtually anybody who enjoys well written prose and deep character development. But my own connection was deeper than that. The novel reminded me of why I fell in love with both reading and writing, and the aspirations many of us have when we are young to make a mark in the world and do things that matter. In this novel, all of the characters wrestle with what they want and could be and we get to see these perspectives at multiple points in their lives. There's also a remarkable chapter where all four of them journey to Florence during a period when Larry has a sabbatical and hopes to take this time to write a novel, yet they also all take some time to see the country and gain unique experiences in the Tuscan countryside.  The novel also speaks to the present moment -- the year of the pandemic -- in a sense as one of the characters falls victim to a disease common to this period, polio, and we see how this changes the lives for all of the characters.  

Noting the theme of connections, the article I read in June led to my selection of this book in July at Mr. K's and then I connected deeply with this novel during the past few weeks. Crossing to Safety is a powerful story and quite inspiring as well. It serves as a reminder to remember our dreams and what we truly value, both in our worldly or creative goals and in our relationships, and then act upon them while we still can. I look forward to reading more of Wallace Stegner's works, but he also has pushed me to carefully consider my own way forward as I continue to wrestle with life's challenges during a time of transition.       

Here's a glimpse of a rainbow that we encountered one day when we were returning to Asheville during a rainstorm, one of many inspiring moments during this one month vacation.  

 

Walking in Asheville

This past week, I spent several days visiting Asheville, North Carolina. It's a great city for walking and I stayed in an apartment which wasn't too far from the downtown. I found myself taking long walks on most days, either in the city or nearby. On my first full day, the rains came. Merrimon Avenue filled with water on either side and I decided to wait out the storm in a fine music store called the Musician's Workshop. I tried out an Ibanez hollow body electric guitar and messed around with a crazy pedal called Superego + that had multiple effects and even allowed overlays of one effect on another. It was fun, but really getting the most out of this kind of effects pedal would take more time than I currently have. Maybe someday. 

When I looked up, the rain had stopped and I decided to take a walk at the Botanical Center right next to UNC Asheville just down the road. Normally, a quiet stream curls through the center, but not on this day. Here's a glimpse of the churning brown waters of the stream that afternoon. 

The next day, I walked into downtown late in the morning. Most of the trees in town were still green, but here's an exception I saw along the way walking on Broadway.  

My favorite stop in downtown is the Malaprop's bookstore. This week I had a gift card at the store, so I had the luxury of browsing through titles in various sections of the store.  I did my research on one day, then bought the books on another day.  I like science fiction books, so I looked at those possibilities, but I also checked out books of regional interest and the general fiction area as well. The store is replete with other sections such as Banned Books and Staff Picks, so those books are also worth checking out. On prior visits, I had seen books such as 1984 and the Just Kids memoir from Patti Smith that I later read.  

But since it was lunchtime, I walked downhill toward the Green Sage on Broadway. This restaurant has great coffee and tea selections, and also has innovative fare for lunch or breakfast.  On this day, the temperatures had dropped a bit, so I wanted a lunch with both hot and filling foods. After asking a few questions when I got to the head of the queue, I made my selections and they were brought to my table a few minutes later. My sandwich was called a Rainbow Wrap and its mix of veggies included beets, carrots, lettuce and alfalfa sprouts, augmented by olives and small hunks of feta. Very tasty. My soup was intriguing and warm -- lentils served in a curry-based soup.  The piece de resistance was a spicy chai cider which brought the rest of the meal together and whose hot spicy taste felt like a pure burst of autumn. Green Sage is a magnet for a diverse group of people -- single, couples or in groups -- and ages ranging from students to retirees. Across the street, a new building is being erected, which will house a mix of condos and hotel rooms; the city continues to evolve from the one I first encountered about 8 years ago, with a big push toward providing more rooms in and around the downtown. 

Later on the trip, I took a ride up into the hills of the Blue Ridge Parkway. Asheville has beautiful views even from the downtown, but it's magnified up on the parkway. Here's a couple glimpses of what I saw:  

 

 Back in Asheville, one can encounter some surprising sights. Here's the side of the original Moog studio off of Broadway:  

 Whether it's music, books, food, wine. beer or the outdoors, it seems there's always another adventure lurking around the corner in Asheville.  

Reading Just Kids

Last October, I browsed books in Malaprops, one of my favorite bookstores in Asheville, North Carolina and started to read Patti Smith's memoir of her early days living in New York City -- Just Kids.  The words were riveting and I made a mental note to read the book. 

I liked the book a lot. Like Patti, I am both a musician and a writer, so there was common ground from the start. But this book is really about her time with Robert Mapplethorpe in the city and the life they led together as they pursued their ambitions to be artists. Just Kids works on many levels. Like many young artists, they struggled not only to work on their art, but also just to survive in the hard-edged Brooklyn and New York of the late Sixties and early Seventies. It's also an improbable love story, as two very different people grow to find their common threads both as artists and at the human level. They both later grew to be famous -- Patti as a punk rock star and Robert as a brilliant but controversial photographer of highly sexualized images -- but this book is mostly about the period before all of that happened.  Any artist needs to find their way and the stories about Patti's early love of books and teenage aspirations to make art a part of her life are powerful. She talks about her dreams of working side by side with another artist.  

At age twenty, she picks up stake from her home in southern New Jersey and takes a bus trip to New York with drawing pencils, notebook and a few possessions in tow. It's the summer of 1967. Patti sleeps on park benches and fights hunger before she gains the first of several jobs at bookstores. Soon after, she meets Robert and they gradually get to know each other and find places to stay in Brooklyn where he has some friends. Robert shows her his paintings and they realize they have a common love of art. 

The book walks through a chronology of the late Sixties and they both pursue their art -- Robert with his drawings and Patti both in drawing and words. They fall in and out of love, but revolve around each other like twin satellites, each caring for and nurturing the other.  

Many people have this image of artists or musicians rapidly finding their way and becoming stars at a young age, but this book reveals more typical stories, where both Patti and  Robert struggle to find their North Star and have many bumps and side trips along the way. Patti's interest in music evolves slowly, but she sees musicians and performers such as Jim Morrison and internalizes a sense that she also could do that.  Robert does cut and paste of the photographs of others and only gradually gets to learn and use the Polaroid instant camera technology which became his prototypical medium.  

The book is also a fascinating journey into the world of New York during this period. When they move to a set of apartments called the Chelsea, they find a broader community of artists, both known and aspiring. Along the way, Patti meets famous musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter, beat poet Gregory Corso and both Robert and Patti start to hang out at Max's Kansas City in the village and get drawn into the circle of Andy Warhol's followers. They both continue to develop their art and stay close, even though they are drawn to other partners.  

In time, Patti dives deep into a love of music and performing, but never lets go of her interests in visual arts and writing, while Robert continues along his path as a photographic artist.  One of the touching scenes is when their paths cross again in the late Seventies as they collaborate on a joint show at a New York gallery. By this time, Robert has congratulated Patti on becoming famous first -- her hit "Because the Night" has been released -- and he contributed to her work by posing her for photos which became the covers of her albums. 

The book has a sad and poignant coda. The two artists have both become famous for doing what they loved, but Robert contracts AIDS in the mid-Eighties. Patti re-connects with him and she finds ways to help him out. Even as his health declines, Robert helps create more images of Patti for her albums.  

Just Kids is powerful and I'd recommend it to any creative person who wants to hear how other artists have found their way to create their art or music and make a living. But it is also a human story, of two people who care for each other no matter what comes their way. Patti's writing is eloquent and fully up to the task of sharing this journey.  

 

 

Thoughts on Fridays at Enrico's

I just finished reading the novel Friday's at Enrico's by Don Carpenter, with editing by noted contemporary novelist Jonathan Lethem. This is the first book I've read by Carpenter, who wrote novels from 1965 up until his death in 1995. The back story is that Carpenter wrote this book while trying to grapple with the death of his close friend Richard Brautigan, but this novel quickly generates its own distinct energy. The book is about writers and how they deal with the process and challenges of writing. Most of the first half of the book is set in Portland, where several local writers are in the early stages of trying to make it as writers of novels or short stories.  

Dick Dubonet has just sold his first story to Playboy and is admired by the local writers for his breakthrough. He has fallen in love with Linda, who knows the leading lights of the San Francisco Beat community and is well connected in the publishing industry. Charlie, a Korean war veteran, has just moved up to the area with his wife Jaime; they are both writers, but write in different styles. Charlie gets a job teaching writing and meets a young man named Stan who has no formal education, but wants to write stories and get away from his shadow life as a burglar.  

Charlie tries to help Stan by having Dick Dubonet read a story Stan wrote. Dick doesn't think much of it, but Linda loves it and helps Stan by re-typing it to fix grammar and by making a few edits. The writers and Linda all get to know each other and we watch as they push themselves to get better with mixed results.  

This novel digs deep into the minds of writers as they fight to master their craft and navigate between the shoals of the literary and commercial worlds of writing.  The pressures get to some of the writers and we spend a lot of time with them in various bars and cafes.    

The second half of the book shifts into the Bay area, where Charlie and Jaime eventually settled.  In time, most of the characters from the Portland crowd show up again in later scenes -- years older, but still wrestling with many of the same demons.

I liked this book a lot. It's one of the more honest books I've read about the lonely journey of unknown writers as they struggle to learn their craft and then shift into the challenging task of marketing their work. Even though it's set in periods going as far back as the fifties, the characters feel fresh. Their quests to get published remind me of the experiences I've had as an aspiring writer. I also like the depiction of this informal Portland writers community and the mix of cameraderie and rivalry as each of these writers tries to find their way.     

 

Book Review - That Old Cape Magic

I just finished That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo. It's a book which intersects with my own experiences in a few ways. I first started thumbing through this book a few years on a stormy Columbus Day weekend in Brewster, shortly after it was first published in hard cover.  Russo's novel centers on the story of a small family -- a couple of university professors with a single son -- and their yearly experience with Cape Cod. They love the Cape, but it never quite lives up to their expections. Nonetheless, they kept coming back year after year.  

My own family has it's own experiences with the Cape.  My first visit was when I was about 12 and the family took a ride up north while on a stay with relatives. We drove all the way up to Provincetown and walked around Commercial Street downtown.  Some ten years later I returned to P-town and it had become a much different place -- quite outre compared to my home town in Connecticut, but fascinating to watch. But Provincetown is just a single community on the Cape and we found others that were much more comfortable for us when I returned some 15 years later with my own small family.  And I'd say that's one of the things that gives the Cape a kind of magic. I suspect every visiting family has its own version of the Cape which acts like a magnet and draws them back year after year.  

In the novel, Jack Griffin is visiting the Cape to attend a wedding, but just crossing the Sagamore Bridge brings back a fusillade of memories about his parents and their dysfunctional relationship. His elderly Dad had died recently, but Jack's mother is still only a phone call away and is quick to offer a caustic critique about Jack's own marriage to his wife Joy and her extended family. The novel shifts between the current day and all of those memories. We learn that Jack's own marriage is on shaky ground.  Can two people from radically different families manage to bury all of those differences and wind their own way through life together?  Russo explores this theme in real time with Jack and Joy, but by extension we dip back into the years before and watch as the relationship of his parents goes through its own twists and turns.  

Russo makes the reader work, but we do learn to care about these characters and their attempts to  live a life that's meaningful even as some of their dreams fall apart. We can learn a lot about our spouses by watching their parents and Russo forces the reader to take a hard look at Jack's parents and the differences between them and Joy's bouyant parents Harve and Jill.  

The novel lurches ahead with its own momentum, framed by two weddings -- one held on the Cape and one in Southern Maine.  And by the end, we are willing to suspend disbelief and agree that the old Cape does exert a kind of magic that mends lives in mysterious ways.   

This book isn't for everybody. The constant flashbacks and interaction between Jack and the voices in his head require close reading to follow.  But the setting on the Cape and in Maine draws us in and Russo interweaving narrative eventually tells us a lot about these people and their stories. As a writer, I like it when an author conveys a real sense of place and we can smell the salt air of the Cape as Russo's characters move from place to place.  

 

Reading High Fidelity -- A Different Take on Coming of Age

Two years ago, I shared an excerpt of my unpublished first novel, Growing Up Single, with a literary agent at the Muse and the Marketplace writer's conference in Boston sponsored by Grub Street.  We needed to specify a genre, so I said that my book was a Coming of Age novel, but it was set over a span of a few decades.  The reaction of the agent to this classification was interesting.  She said that I should position this as a Coming of Age novel ala Nick Hornby.   

Two years later, I've now just finished reading Nick's breakout novel -- High Fidelity -- and I totally get why the agent (who I'll leave unnamed) made the comparison.  High Fidelity is set over a period of about thirty years and covers classic ground that is found in Coming of Age novels, but the main narrative action and the issues that are addressed face the protagonist Rob as he reaches the age of 36 and feels like his life is falling apart.   Hornby writes a lot about relationships -- much as one might find in a romance novel -- but he offers the guy's point of view, so that creates a much different perspective.   One example of the difference is that Rob starts the book by sharing is "Top 5" girlfriends list and makes a point of saying that it doesn't include Laura, who just left him for another man.   

Rob's life is full of delayed decisions.  Today we might say he is "commitment challenged," since he likes having a woman in his life -- that significant other -- but something has always gone wrong and he's still single in his mid-thirties, unlike many friends who have found that special someone and gotten married.  In his work, he's barely scraping by in running a record shop whose specialty is vinyl records during that transition period in the late Eighties to early Nineties where the CD has become mass market and vinyl is mostly for high fidelity aficionados (hence the title).  

My book Growing Up Single has some similarities.  The main character, Jack Reilly, is still single at age 35 and tells the story of how he got to that point.  Jack has had a series of relationships, but for various reasons, they've never worked out.  As the book progresses, he's already crashed and burned in his first career choice and moved on to be part of a computer software startup.  As the book approaches its denouement, Jack needs to make a series of decisions about his love life and his career -- the two are somewhat in conflict -- and he agonizes over which way to go.  

As a writer, we are encouraged to find books like the ones we have written, so that we can pitch them to agents and publishers and they can get some idea of why your book is like somebody else's success, but is also different.  Having now read both books, if there was a shelf of books written from a man's perspective that covered the territory of relationships and coming to grips with potential life changing issues on both the career and the personal side, both High Fidelity and Growing Up Single would fit nicely on that shelf.  

I have not been actively pitching Growing Up Single while I've been writing my second novel -- coming soon -- but I've still gotten a couple of nibbles from small publishers in the past couple of years when I told them about the book.  I'm grateful to the agent who told me about Nick Hornby, since I now know about one more book which delves into some of the same issues and I can use that at some future point when talking to other people about the book.  

I'd recommend High Fidelity to male readers who want to see how another guy dealt with the desire to find a more mature approach to relationships and their careers, or to anybody who would like to read more books in the seemingly non-existant genre of Men's Fiction.  I'd also recommend this book to women who'd like to get a guy's point of view on romance.  There are many elements of this book that sprawl over into the territory of romance novels -- the pursuit of love, the tension of breakups and the attempt to re-kindle a lost relationship -- but the male perspective gives the work a different twist. Hornby also has a good sense of humor, so there's a lot of funny material in the book as Rob works through his various issues.  

For those readers who'd like my take on the Coming of Age story as told in Growing Up Single, get in touch. 

Celebrating the Book - Boston Bookfest 2011

This past Saturday I attended the third Boston Book Festival, which took over Copley Square and environs for the day. We had cooperative weather -- mostly sunny and with temperatures in the sixties -- though the occasional gusts of wind were a reminder that we'd recently slipped into October. This was the place to be for anybody in the Boston area who loves books and thousands joined in.

I began the day by attending a workshop on Navigating the Publishing World. This session was conducted by Alan Rinzler, who has edited numerous well known writers including Tom Robbins and Hunter Thompson.  He's old school, but knows the publishing industry very well and recognizes the massive changes underway. He reviewed statistics from the first half of 2011, noting that ebooks make up about ten percent of the business, but are growing at a phenomenal rate of 163 percent. This compares to a decline in hard copy sales of 22.9 percent during the same period. He summarized the current situation by saying that the publishing industry is in a state of crisis, but couldn't resist saying that in his experience, "this has always been the case".

He confirmed that traditional publishing firms work exclusively via agents and wasn't very encouraging about the prospects for writers to find an effective agent. But he also said that doing well in self publishing is a good way to convince publishers and agents that a writer has both a platform and an audience. It was a good example of how the conventional wisdom on self publishing has changed radically in the past year due to success stories like Amanda Hocking.

After a brief diversion for lunch at the Atantic Fish Company on Boyleston Street -- which offered a delectable crab cake melt -- I returned to the Trinity Church and stepped into the magnificent chapel just in time to attend a session on Frontiers in Science. The three speakers covered very different subjects -- the ancient philosopher poet Lucretius, the current state of cosmological physics and cancer -- but offered a stimulating discussion that took me way out of my normal areas of knowledge, but reminded me of why I'd fallen in love with books in the first place.

The next session I attended took me to more familiar territory. Bob Blumenthal talked about his experiences getting to know jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins and following his work over the past fifty years. He recently collaborated on a book devoted to Rollins with photographer John Abbott. The next speaker was Tim Riley, who's recently been getting quite a bit of attention for his biography of John Lennon. Some of his more interesting comments were about the way that Lennon is viewed very differently by Americans as compared to the British. It seems when John re-located to New York and never came back to the UK, many of his countrymen were upset.

Next, I attended another workshop called Jumpstart Your Writing conducted by author and instructor Lynne Griffin. She had lots of energy and walked us through several warmup strategies.  She likes journals or free writing to warm up the writing muscles and tap the unconscious to write more deeply. After listening to other writers speak during the past several hours, I relished the chance to do a bit of writing myself.

My final session of the day was on learning. I had to leave early to catch my train, but first got to hear Nicolas Negroponte and Sugata Mita of the MIT Media Lab talk about their labor of love in trying to put laptops and tablet PCs into the hands of children within third world countries. Both of them shared numerous success stories on how young childen could quickly learn to use computers and how, with guidance, they could work together to solve complex problems. This was easily the most fascinating session of the day.

The entire day pulled me out of my normal patterns and help me reconnect with my love of books and lifetime learning. This is what weekends are all about.

If you love books, be on the lookout for book related events in your area. There is so much amazing work being published. This is an industry going through turmoil, but the book -- be it electronic or hard copy -- can still evoke the sense of wonder which originally drew me to books in my childhood.

Writer's Notebook: Book Review of Rock Paper Tiger

Several years ago, I finished my first novel and began looking for a way to get it published.   A few months into the process, I heard about a contest for novelists being held by Gather.com, a social network.  I entered the contest by submitting my novel’s first chapter.  By contest’s end, over 2500 entries had joined mine in the contest. 

Many of the writers stayed on Gather to comment on entries and watch the final stages of the contest play out.  Around this time, one of the other contest participants wrote an extended post expressing her frustration with the contest and all of the antics she’d seen to game the system.   A like-minded group of writers joined in and we had a lively exchange on this particular Gather conversation “thread.” In addition to discussion about the pros and cons of the contest, we talked about writing and the various routes to publication.  We were having fun with this, so she was cajoled to write a second post and the “Writin' Wombats” online writing group officially launched under her leadership.  

What does this have to do with the new novel, Rock Paper Tiger, published by Soho Press?   The woman who wrote that first thread on writing and formed the writing group was Lisa Brackmann and Rock Paper Tiger is her first published novel.  I’ve just finished reading the book and have to say that Lisa has written a thriller that really delivers the goods. 

Rock Paper Tiger begins in Beijing and we follow the first person account of Ellie (known to her Chinese friends as Yili), an American whose life is China is beginning to fall apart.   The first thirty pages set the stage well.    Ellie has an artist friend named Lao Zhang who lives in an out of the way suburb called Mati Village.   She takes the subway to see him, but he’s acting strangely.  Along the way, Ellie meets a few of Zhang’s acquaintances – lots of people like to hang around him.   She also begins to hear that some foreigners in suits are looking for her.  

Ellie takes us on a tour of the underside of Beijing as she moves around and it’s not always pretty.  The book is set after the 2008 Olympics have taken place and the city is a mix of the glossy new and much else that is run down.  Ellie loves Beijing, but is a foreigner and is never allowed to forget it.  When the men in the suits start getting nasty and Lao Zhang decides to leave Beijing for a while, Ellie decides to hit the road and visits several other Chinese cities.  

Interwoven within this story are flashbacks to Ellie’s experiences as a medic in Iraq, where she gets involved with a soldier named Trey and gets inadvertently pulled into treating prisoners who’ve been undergoing harsh interrogation.  Eventually we learn how she and Trey ended up in China and the tale cycles forward. 

Ellie is not always a likeable character, but she’s compelling and I found myself wanting to know what would happen to her even when it feels like every step she’s taking is the wrong one. Ellie moves from place to place but never manages to elude the “suits.” The tension mounts and leads toward an intense conclusion which draws together the threads of Ellie’s adventure in a satisfying way.  

Rock Paper Tiger dips into aspects of today’s headlines about China, including ethnic tensions, the aftermath of earthquakes and the censorship of online information, but all of this fits in well within the thriller and Ellie’s quest to make sense out of her life.  Brackmann puts the reader on the ground in China and we go way beyond the headlines and get a sense of what life in China is like -- both for the rising Chinese entrepreneurial class and for the many people who continue to live from day to day in lifestyles that haven’t changed for centuries.    The book feels like an insider’s look at today’s China, but manages to pull this off in the context of a character driven novel and a thriller with lots of bumps and chills along the way.   This is a fine novel and I recommend it to readers who enjoy thrillers, want to learn about today’s life in China or just want to read an offbeat, challenging novel written by a talented new writer.   

Writer's Notebook: Writer Idol at the Boston Book Festival

In my last post, I talked about my fun experiences attending the Boston Book Festival.  The event brimmed over with sessions that were helpful for writers who are on the path to publication.  

The first of these sessions was called the "Guided Open Mic," with our expert guide being author and investigative TV journalist Hank Phillipi Ryan.  Here's a picture of the Arbor Room of the Boston Public Library, where that session was held. 

I got a chance to do a reading at that session and had hoped to get my work read at a second session.  This one was across the street at the Old South Church about an hour later. 

Imagine this scene.  The room is packed with about 250 people.  Up on the stage, a panel of four publishing industry veterans is assembled, with representation from the literary agent, editing and publishing communities.  The session was named Writer Idol. 

Now that you've had a chance to visualize the scene, here's a photo of the session as it was about to begin (it's fuzzy, but you'll get the sense of it). 

The ground rules for Writer Idol were:

1. Participants were asked to bring in a 250 word beginning to a novel or piece of non-fiction and state the genre.
2. The entries were put in a box and a woman actor pulled them out and read from them.
3. There were four judges: a couple of agents and two other people from publishers.
4. The entries were read until two of the judges raised their hands to stop.

Depending upon your perspective, this might seem like either a writer's dream or, more ominously, their nightmare. 

 

I would estimate that about 40 entries were read over a one hour period.   My entry didn't get read, but the process was fascinating, a kind of live slush pile. The judges had different perspectives, so sometimes one hand would be raised but the reading would continue. Only a few pieces were read through to the end.

 

The process was anonymous; nobody knew who the writers were. However, there were some passages where the audience totally broke down with laughter, which no doubt was tough for the writers of those pieces.

For example, it turns out the judges REALLY did not like references to certain bodily functions that get activated when a character gets squeamish. TMI, I guess. There were three entries or so that went there; they all got shot down immediately.

Other no-no's included overuse of flowery adjectives, misuse of large words, and overuse of cliches. I'd imagine most writers that participated in a writing group wouldn't be surprised by these things, but seeing the panelists stop the reading because of these gotchas offered powerful reinforcement on these do's and don'ts.

 

My conclusion: Great session.  It's one thing to hear about what agents and editors want to see -- or not see -- but it's quite another to see it all play out in real time.  If you submit your work to an agent, they'll read what you submit and analyze it line by line just as they did here.  So, yes, you want to make your work compelling AND avoid miscues that will take the reader out of the scene and cause them to move on to the next item in the slush pile. 

 

That's it for this post, but I'd like to mention that I'll be having a guest blogger join me later this week on November 19.   Pat Bertram, author of Daughter Am I and two other novels published by Second Wind Publishing is on a whirlwind blog tour this month.  She and I have a lot of fun chatting together online and we've collaborated on an interview where we both talk about our writing and muse about topics such as writing outside of typical genres.  Please join us.