Book: North and South

Title: North and South
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Genre: Classic Fiction
Length: 452 pgs

Summary: Margaret Hale, a English southerner who migrates to Milton, a northern industrial town, is shocked by the working and living conditions of the cotton mill workers who provide the wealth of the young man her father tutors, Mr Thornton. Her determination to help the mill workers puts her at odds with the charismatic Mr Thornton, who dismisses her concerns as the ignorance of highly-bred woman who cannot understand the political and economic reasons why things are the way they are.

Excerpts:
pg 17 – If the look on [Margaret's] face was, in general, too dignified and reserved for one so young, now, talking to her father, it was bright as the morning,–full of dimples, and glances that spoke of childish gladness, and boundless hope in the future.

pg 62 – Mr Thornton was in the habits of authority himself, but [Margaret] seemed to assume some kind of rule over him at once. He had been getting impatient at the loss of his time on a market-day, the moment before she appeared, yet now he calmly took a set at her bidding.

pg 322 – Oh, how unhappy this last year has been! I have passed out of childhood into old age. I have no youth–no womanhood; the hopes of womanhood have closed for me–for I shall never marry; and I anticipate cares and sorrows just as if I were an old woman, and with the same fearful spirit. I am weary of this continual call upon me for strength.

pg 336 – [Margaret] sat quite still, after the first momentary glance of grieved surprise, that made her eyes look like some child’s who has met with an unexpected rebuff; they slowly dilated into mournful, reproachful sadness; and then they fell, and she bent over her work, and did not speak again. But [Mr Thornton] could not help looking at her, and he saw a sigh tremble over her body, as if she quivered in some unwonted chill. …He gave sharp answers; he was uneasy and cross, unable to discern between jest and earnest; anxious only for a look, a word of hers, before which to prostrate himself in penitent humility. …She could not care for him, he thought, or else the passionate fervor of his wish would have forced her to raise those eyes, but if for an instant, to read the late repentance in his.

Why should you read this book?
I never thought it possible, but this book supplanted Pride and Prejudice as my favorite romance, reasons being that it brings outside philosophical, political, and economic pressures into the romance. The romance is not just that there are misunderstandings and ruined reputations, but that there are actual lives at stake; entire towns that could fall if the mill workers refuse to work; people could be killed in riots; there is communal strife and an inability to communicate between the social classes.

This is an ambitious work that I am head over heels in love with because the prose is poetic, the themes are strong, and the characters sympathetic. Gaskell gives the secondary and tertiary characters all the love, compassion, and motive that is usually reserved for main characters alone. I could go into a detailed analysis of the writing tricks Gaskell uses to appeal to her audience (the sympathetic Victorian woman), such as describing the illnesses of those around Margaret, the way Margaret’s eyes sometimes exhibit a childlike wonder or surprised pain (see pg 336 excerpt above), and the way Margaret shoulders the problems of those around her for that is her role as the daughter in the family (really, this is a brilliant piece of Victorian literature), but I won’t.

I will tell you that if you like reading classics (my childhood was defined by classics, and I desperately miss the feeling of losing myself in that world), you must read this book. If your writing tends toward the classical style, this is a great example to take note of. There are moments when Margaret almost reminds me of Jane Eyre in her contemplations of her role as a female in the world, which makes sense because Mrs Gaskell was actually a sort of social friend of Charlotte Bronte’s. In fact, Mrs Gaskell wrote the first biography of Charlotte, and helped create the rather mythological story behind the woman who wrote such great works as Jane Eyre and Villette.

P.S. The BBC made a two-part miniseries of this book in 2007, and it is excellent. Things have been changed, obviously, to fit the book into a four-hour showing, but it is a great adaptation and the reason why I read the book in the first place.

Beta Males Revisted

Just a quick entry to let you know about an interesting discussion that’s happening at Redlines and Deadlines about beta males in fiction/romance.

In case you don’t remember, I wrote a similar entry two years ago, Mr Beta Male, and Romancing the Blog has written about the beta hero as well as his counterpart, the beta heroine. For you writers who are interested in using the underdog in the romance world as the love interest in your WIP, I suggest taking a look at all these articles to make up your mind.

Book: Wildford’s Daughter

Title: Wildford’s Daughter
Author: Alexandra Manners
Genre: Regency Romance
Length: 257 pgs

Summary: Emma Wildford, seeing how her society-addled mother ruined her parents’ marriage, decided to live with her practical-thinking father when her family split apart. But now that Emma is interested in marriage, she finds her father jealous of the idea. Both the sensible Captain Ringan and the opportunistic Mr Critchley show interest in Emma, confusing her, and so she turns to her friend Mrs Fry. With Mrs Fry’s help, Emma looks past the immediate pleasures the Regency period to visit the miserable female inmates of Newgate Prison, showing her just how lucky she is, and who she really has feelings for.

Excerpts:
pg 92 – Her eyes, accustomed to the gloom, saw the white scar. He spoke so well that he must once have been a gentleman. What was he now?
“I’m a ruffian, as you well know,” Ringan said. “You are so delightfully open, Miss Emma. Your eyes mirror your thoughts.”
“Father says I’m too much so for my own good.”

pg 137 – Emma let herself into the house and fastened the bolt. He had not moved. She leaned against the glossy panel and listened. There was still no sound of footsteps on the gravel. Something touched the door as though he had slid a hand or arm across it. Her pulse quickened. She wished he would go away. It was altogether too disturbing to know that he lingered. But it was Emma who went first.

Why should you read this book?
I actually found this book in my library while looking for Love in the time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Marquez’s book was out, for the curious, so I picked up this one). I’ve never read a book by Manners before, but I really enjoyed this. Some characters are flat, but the majority are flush, amusing, and heartening to read. The romance(s) are all interesting, and have a wonderful quality of reality. Manners does little to hide the underside of the Regency, which I love, because it’s different from the typical comedy of manners (no pun intended) we usually see in Regency Romance. A lot of themes are tackled in this book: paternal piety, loyalty, love, murder, prisons, etc; altogether, they make an entertaining and thoughtful read that made me feel better for reading it, which is rare these days.

“Gender Genie” saves the day

So about a week ago I read about an author who was having trouble with her hero’s voice… that is, she couldn’t seem to make him actually sound like a man. And then she remembered a great online tool created from an actual study in which some academics discovered men and women do, in fact, speak differently: The Gender Genie. They even came up with an algorithm that predicts whether the person speaking was a man or a woman.

So that got me thinking, “Goodness, I wonder if Alexander sounds like a man or a woman? I think he’s a man, but maybe I’m wrong…” I copied and pasted a series of his chatter into the Gender Genie, provided by the BookBlog. Saints preserve me, the genie thought he was a he! But I only pasted in the first couple hundred words spoken, and the genie says it has a better idea after five-hundred words.

Picture me going through my text and copying my hero’s dialogue from the first 2.5 chapters. Result: my character is a male! But only just so, by two hundred words, more or less. Which worries me. Apparently I also have to take out pronouns and the like, since men tend not to refer to people as much as women do. Apparently men are a little more comfortable talking about objects. Who knew?

Now I know all of you are testing out the tool for yourself, so, you have to tell me… How do your characters fare?

A Recent Conversation

Mina: So how is the new work-in-progress going?
Me: Really well! I mean, I got up to chapter 18 and I was flowing and everything. Wrote a couple thousand words last month, but then… (sigh)
Mina: …?
Me: Well, I was writing, and everything was going fine, but then my young, energetic, American female character strong-armed a young man to the ground. I don’t know how it happened! One minute she was being very nice and chatty, the next, strong-arming him to the ground! That would have never happened in 1887 Victorian London!
Mina: (laughs)
Me: So I’m hitting the books again. I need to give her something else to do, something that will cause a scandal but still interest the English aristocracy, not scare them away. (I shake my head.) Strong-arming a guy to the ground. Who does that?

It’s one thing to be unique, but to be so modern! I’m appalled. But thanks to my character, I’m learning a lot about how the 1870s Anglomania (specifically in New York, Boston, Washington DC, Ohio, etc) started. Despite the fact that the English aristocracy most staunchly supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War, a mere ten years earlier.

How many of you have had a character that broke out of his or her time period so completely? What have you done to rein them in? Or have you changed your story/time period to fit the character?

Book: Stardust

Title: Stardust
Author: Neil Gaiman
Genre: Fantasy
Length: 235 pgs

Summary: In the town of Wall there is a young man named Tristran Thorn, and he is in love with a young woman named Victoria Forester. Victoria, young, beautiful, and completely aware of the fact, sends Tristran on a fool’s errand: to fetch the fallen star on the horizon. And so, Tristran steps across the border from the everyday to the mystical.

Excerpts:
pg 23 – He entertained these thoughts awkwardly, as a man entertains unexpected guests. Then, as he reached his objective, he pushed these thoughts away, as a man apologizes to his guests, and leaves them, muttering something abuot a prior engagement.

pg 36 – “Anyway,” said Cecilia Hempstock, Louisa’s cousin, “he has already been married. I would not wish to marry someone who has already been married. It would be,” she opined, “like having someone else break in one’s own pony.”
“Personally, I would imagine that to be the sole advantage of marrying a widdower,” said Amelia Robinson. “That someone else would have removed the rough edges; broken him in, if you will. Also, I would imagine that by that age his lusts would long since have been sated, and abated, which would free one from a number of indignities.”

pg 131 – “A nymph. I was a wood-nymph. But I got pursued by a prince, not a nice prince, the other kind, and, well, you’d think a prince, even the wrong kind, would understand about boundaries, wouldn’t you?”
“You would?”
“Exactly what I think. But he didn’t, so I did a bit of invoking while I was running, and–ba-boom!–tree. What do you think?”
“Well,” said Tristran. “I do not know what you were like as a wood-nymph, madam, but you are a magnificent tree.
“I was pretty cute as a nymph, too.”

pg 224 – He wondered how it could have taken him so long to realize how much he cared for her, and he told her so, and she called him an idiot, and he decalred that it was the finest thing that ever a man had been called.

Why should you read this book?
Because it’s Neil Gaiman, and everyone should read one Gaiman book at some point. This book begged to be read aloud, and I almost wish (now this is a shocker) that I had the audio version. The narration is simple yet intriguing and complex; I want to read it again just to figure out how he was able to convey so much with so little. Which is exactly why you should read this book. Long sentences and over-the-top vocabulary are gimicks easily pointed out…they hide bad plots and expose worse execution. Gaiman’s simple narration is a quick read, yet, there are important themes discussed.

Plus, the movie comes out on my birthday. So, read the book before you watch the movie, as the movie is almost never as good as the original.

Hurting Our Characters

Well, it’s Finals Week™, so we all know what that means: I get to start writing again! At the end of every quarter as assignments trickle to a halt and I’m left with more free time, all those little nuggets of inspiration that came to me earlier (but I couldn’t encourage because I had to be in school-mode) are now free to take over. What does this mean, Worderella? What are you trying to tell us?

It means that I’ve written another couple of thousand words over the last few days, which is a cause for celebration. Assuming I keep my overall goal of approximately 85 000 words (the range for a full-length novel is anywhere from 80 000 to 100 000+), then I can safely say I am 39.5% complete with this draft.

But I’ve hit a slight roadblock. Attempting to be a diligent creator of characters and plot, I have just re-introduced a man from my main character’s past who hurt her, and is about to do it again. For the first time in my writing life, I don’t want to hurt my main character anymore. I kind of feel like she’s gone through a lot as is, and I like her. Why would I continue to want to hurt her?

Well, because that’s what you’re supposed to do in order to make the character grow and change. And because if you didn’t throw everything and the bath tub at her, your story is going to be boring and you’ll get tired of writing it. And because it will help you, as a writer, and perhaps even a person, to learn that conflict is a necessary evil.

This is often a topic of discussion between and me. I’m usually on the side of “Throw more at them! Make them squirm!”, because I love to see how a character can change. And now I find myself completely understanding ‘s dilemma. I suppose I’ve never had a character that I liked this much, so it hurts to hurt her. Maybe it’s because the situation I’m about to put her in is exceedingly uncomfortable, and forces me to deal with my own feelings on the same thing that happened to me. Perhaps I relate to the main character too much, so, rather than experiencing it through her perspective, I’m reliving the experience myself. Logical theories, all.

The fact of the matter is that I have to hurt my main character. I have to hurt all my characters, in some form or another, but most especially the main one. I have to bring her so low that she feels like she can’t go on, that there is nothing she can do to improve her situation…and then, because she is at the very bottom, have her realize that she can only go up from there. It’s the only way. I’m sure I’ll get past this, and will eventually shatter her (but oh! she’s already fragmented to begin with!).

Have you ever been in this situation where you feel like you have to do something awful to your character, but you can’t bring yourself to do it? What do you do about it? How does one get past this?

Book: The Thirteenth Tale

Title: The Thirteenth Tale
Author: Diane Setterfield
Genre: Fiction
Length: 406 pgs

Summary: Margaret Lea has a secret about her birth; a secret that haunts her to this day, and affects every decision she makes. She is the daughter of an antique book dealer, and so is his helpmate in running the bookshop that maintains their lifestyle. One day, a letter arrives for Margaret, written in an awful hand, requesting that she journey to the home of the infamous writer, Vida Winter. Miss Winter is infamous because of her past, or lack of it, for with every interview there is a new rendition, and none of them are true. There is no record of Miss Winter’s birth, her childhood…nothing to say who she was before she appeared in the literary world. Miss Winter, it seems, wants to tell the truth of her past for the first time, ever, and she has chosen Margaret for the job. After thirty (or forty, perhaps?) years of public speculation about the past of Miss Vida Winter, and the plot of the missing thirteenth tale from her book Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation (only twelve were released), Vida Winter is ready to speak the truth.

Excerpts:
pg 4 – (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

pg 5 – Some writers don’t like interviews of course. They get cross about it. “Same old questions,” they complain. Well, what do they expect? Reporters are hacks. We writers are the real thing. Just because they always ask the same questions, it doesn’t mean we have to give them the same answers, does it? I mean, making things up, it’s what we do for a living.

pg 32 – I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a yearning for the lost pleasure of books. [...] Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

pg 45 – People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them. I hardly suppose Wagner lost sleep worrying whether he’d hurt someone’s feelings. But then he was a genius.

pg 46 – “Readers,” continued Miss Winter, “are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer’s life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. [...] To write my books I needed my past left in peace, for time to do its work.”

pg 100 – You could hear the power of his brain in his voice, which was quiet but quick, with a facility for finding the right words for the right person at the right time. You could see it in his eyes: dark brown and very shiny, like a bird’s eyes, observant, intent, with strong, neat eyebrows above.

pg 177 – As he listened, he had been been rather struck by her queer little voice. Despite its distinctively feminine pitch it had more than a little masculine authority about it. She was articulate. She had an amusing habit of expressing views of her own with the same measured command as when she was explaining a theory by some authority she had read. And when she paused for breath at the end of a sentence, she would give him a quick look–he had found it disconcerting the first time, though he now found it rather droll–to let him know whether he was allowed to speak or whether she intended to go on speaking herself.

pg 220 – His voice had the unmistakable lightness of someone telling something extremely important. A story so cherished it had to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.

pg 289 – Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of the last one has had time to close behind you? You leave the previous book with ideas and themes–characters even–caught in the fibers of your clothes, and when you open the new book, they are still with you.

Why should you read this book?
Because it is a love story to readers and writers. This just might be my favorite book if 2007, just as Elantris was my favorite of 2006. I will be hard-pressed, I think, to find another book that immediately enfolded me in its mystery and charm, leaving me dazed in my everyday activities as I contemplated the characters and plot. Every character is tangible and sympathetic, the setting is distinct, and the plot is original (to me, at least). The style is romantic in the classic sense of the word, yet entirely believable given the narrator’s (Margaret) deep appreciation of books. We’re never given a time period, yet I’m left with the impression that Margaret lives in the 1930s, 40s, or perhaps even 1950s.

Reading this book left me with sensations of DuMarier’s Rebecca, Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, LeFanu’s The Wyvern Mystery, and other such romantic, gothic, books. Read it for the intense characterizations. Read it to know the language of a bibliophile speaking with another bibliophile, describing favorite works. I feel as though The Thirteenth Tale has changed me and so my writing: it’s let me believe that there are readers willing to entertain a more romantic and classic style from a modern author, and that is good news indeed.

From the Notebook: Bringing Fiction to Life

I’ve been cleaning my place, trying to get things in order since I’ve moved back to campus, and I found some old notes about how to bring fiction to life.

I only got as far as character surface life in terms of my detailed handwritten notes, with a character that I gave up, sadly enough. There are a couple things I wanted to post from my notes, however, since they seem useful.

* Take cues from other actors (characters) to know how the main (or other) character should be treated.

* Want to build suspense? Here are twelve ways to do so:

1. Objective – begins the reader anticipation, because now the character is working toward a goal.
2. Raise Stakes – this increases the importance of the objective.
3. Danger – increases the suspense because now lives might be at stake.
4. Ticking Clock – having a time limit/deadline always raises stakes. What happens if the goal isn’t reached by the time limit?
5. Obstacles – the inability to take action can be very frustrating. This frustration ups the suspense as the reader sympathizes with the character.
6. The Unknown – allows the reader to contemplate possibilities.
7. Sexual Tension – having an attraction to someone always raises the suspense. Life is hard as it is, but throw in feelings, and the uncertainty that they are reciprocated, and we have a whole subplot in the works.
8. Dramatic irony – this isn’t necessarily suspenseful for the character, but for the readers who are privy to the new information.
9. Living in the Future – the reader anticipates the difference between reality now, and what might happen in order for that reality to take place.
10. Lack of Resolution – end your scenes and chapters with cliffhangers!
11. Secret – “Secrets, secrets are no fun. Secrets, secrets hurt someone.” Keeping secrets is a dangerous business. Keep them from the characters, not from your reader, unless you want your story to be vague and hard to understand. In other words, don’t keep the secret from your reader if you want to be published.
12. Character Type – through knowing the character, the reader anticipates what the character might and might not do. This wonder whether the character will do as expected increases the reader’s suspsense.

Notes taken from The Plot Thickens: 8 Ways to Bring Fiction to Life by Noah Lukeman. St Martin’s Press 2002, New York, New York.

Creating Convincing Characters

Happy Labor Day!

Today is a list from The Writer (July 2006) that quickly describes how to create convincing characters by Corey Blake. Blake begins the article, Creating believable characters takes time and discipline. Creating dynamically real individuals and not imposing your own thoughts and impressions on them is not easy to do, and is often the difference between a novel or screenplay that sits in a closet and one that finds its way into the hands of audiences.

1. Label the desire essences of your main characters. Come up with lists of desires, fifty of them, and slowly condense them into twenty. Focus on the ones that feel right for each of your main characters, considering their religious beliefs, major life events, appearance, intelligence, siblings, education, parents, music, sex, etc, anything and everything a person in real life faces.
2. Label the fear essences of your main characters. This is a little easier now that you’ve come up with the desire essences. The fear essences are the “polar opposites” of the desires. They battle the desires, and at each decision, either the desire or the fear will win. Make the pairs, and discard the pairs the character doesn’t feel strongly about. Keep doing this until you have 10 pairs that excite you.
3. Get specific in the backstory to understand how these essences came to be. As Blake says, “A character’s current behavior is a battle between fear adn desire, and his or her immediate choices are made based on very specific (yet unconscious) experiences from the past–experiences that leave imprints.” Write as much as you can about each half of each pair, so you have pages and pages on the character describing how they think or would think in a given situation because you know the history behind that certain essence.
4. Describe their current behaviors. Take the essences and specific examples and determined the kinds of behavior your character has because of it.
5. Raise the stakes. Don’t be afraid to throw horrible obstacles at your characters! Watching them deal with obstacles is what makes a story interesting; no one wants to read about a girl who sails through life.
6. Don’t meddle. A “truthful story is going to grow from your willingness to let your characters make their own decisions based on how you defined them. As their parent, you have to let your children go.”
7. Let your characters play. At this point, your characters will be writing themselves.