BIBLIOGRIND
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Archive for The Letters of Mark Beyer
February 13, 2012 at 10:19 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
The answer is “Yes!” … and with a big ‘ole happy face on that anchor for the exclamation point. Of course manuscripts end – and must end – because otherwise the project never sees the light outside the writing room. What’s more, it has to end because the story can’t go on forever. Even Proust had to stop! And death is the ultimate THE END (unless you’re writing horror sequels).
I used to tell my writing students – when asked – that the author must decide “where” the story ends as well as “when.” These are often opposed to each other, but they have a strong relationship. The when, the where, the how: once you have them in mind, the proverbial “light” winks from not so long a distance.
But what I really meant when I asked of myself such a question, is all the “publishing” stuff involved once the ms is complete, finished, ready for galleys. Hell, I’ve been through with WHAT BEAUTY for weeks and weeks; the story is practically out of my mind, now that it has found its complete life on the page. I’m only scrubbing the typos.
The fun part is over. This is another thing I used to tell students. “The most fun you’ll ever have is writing the fucking story; cuz once you have to publish it, the work covers you like Agent-fucking-Orange. Editors; Publicity; interviews & book signings. This work goes on for weeks, at first, then months, and into a year or more. There is no end to publicizing your book because an author needs to sell books to make the rent / wine bill / equestrian lessons.
Fun? Hell yes! But the work; my god my god the work.
Give me a story to write that drives me crazy. That’s the writing life.
January 26, 2012 at 2:24 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
The other day I commented on a LinkedIN discussion thread, where a writer recommended to (I can only imagine) inexperienced writers that dialogue should be paramount to a story. Something on the ratio of 70% dialogue to 30% narrative, is how she broke it down. Further, she relegated narrative as “boring” and likely to “drive readers away,” while dialogue will tell story more effectively and move the story along. She also suggested that writers should rewrite narrative passages into dialogue-driven “story.” I think she is wrong on several grounds.
Here’s my take on the uses of dialogue:
While dialogue is important to establish character and, yes, to move story forward, by putting dialogue in front of narrative, as a rule, does two harms. Firstly, dialogue that is used in place of narrative usually rings false because the “information” (i.e., setting, description, and story narrative) we otherwise get in the narrative is often already known or should be known by the characters. Or, the narrative is important history of these characters (or place or the characters themselves) and cannot be fudged into dialogue. Or else such dialogue leaves the reader curious about “what” is happening and “why” it has happened.
An example of a bad dialogue story (80%+ dialogue-to-narrative ratio) can be found in Ethan Hawke’s “The Hottest State” — where we get the story (what little there is) from characters who merely walk around (and talk) or sit somewhere (and talk). The effect of this type of story is that seldom does the reader understand where the hell this scene is taking place, or when (night or day?), or how (where did these people come from; how did they get there; what the hell is happening outside their immediate environment?). In other words, the story lacks the narrative “thread” that holds together character with “the story behind, or of, the character.”
It ceases to be “narrative fiction” and is otherwise a theater playscript or film script. The difference is in technique of storytelling, naturally, but lacking story narrative hurts both the characters (they come off wordy and long-winded) and the overall story. At least when you read a play or film script, you get prompts of setting, position, time of day, etc. But plays and scripts are meant to be performed, not read. This is the difference I speak of.
Of course, you can find fiction in which dialogue is made the centerpiece. Philip Roth’s “Deception” is a perfect example (as is Julian Barnes’ “Talking it Over”). There is, by just a cursory look, nearly 90% dialogue. This is intentional, whereby Roth wants to draw you into the purely verbal world of these characters. Setting is implied (or given as dialogue that develops the scene; but never as a simple marker — “Oh, isn’t this hide-away lovers’ hotel perfect!” Blech!).
The reader is immediately drawn in because, despite the lack of narrative (for place, time-span, scene development) the dialogue is both compelling and illustrative of the situation. We don’t need narrative here because these scenes are, at once, intimate and secret, and made to be independent of each other. The story works because we know this going in (or at least within the first five pages; after which we don’t miss narrative, don’t need it, and can find that it gets in the way of these characters who successfully volley their repartee as stage characters are demanded to hold).
Hawke doesn’t assume this same intent. And by not assuming it directly, immediately, he shows his inexperience as a writer and his poor understanding of what makes story work; he’s an actor who has worked with dialogue as a career demand, and now has tried to write a narrative story relying on dialogue to carry its weight. The story fails (partly) through this technique (but otherwise fails because Hawke just isn’t a very good writer with narrative or dialogue). Genre fiction writers often rely on such dialogue-driven techniques, which is my hunch why the writer answering the LinkedIN thread made such a comment; genre fiction that sells a lot of books is often confused with good writing.
What I have found from reading the best writers who wrote during the last century (book-award winners; Nobel Prize recipients), and from my own 30 years’ writing experience, is that the use of dialogue can be most powerful when used for 1) direct interaction between two characters (of course!), and 2) within or between narrative passages, thereby reinforcing the narrative; this use of narrative is spartan, a device (if you will) that energizes the narrative around which the dialogue is found.
John Updike uses this second technique often, and well, in his novel “In the Beauty of the Lilies.” At one point he develops five pages of dialogue to describe a young girl’s upbringing in small-town Delaware, how the family lives on its low income, where she plays, what her dad does to entertain her, what her mother does to instruct her. Central to this narrative development is the movie house in town, and what she remembers of being told about her grandfather, who found refuge in movie houses after his religious faith deserted him. At the end of this narrative we get this dialogue:
“On the walk home, they passed the Roxie, where ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL STARRING DEANNE DURBIN was spelled out on the marquee. ‘Please, Momma,” Essie begged. “I want to go.’
‘But Daddy and I can’t take you,’ her mother told her, in that singing, spaced-out, too-clear voice she used when being a mother. ‘I have to help Grandpa and Grandma in the greenhouse this afternoon, and Daddy and I are going to play cards with Aunt Esther and Uncle Peter this evening while Ama takes care of you and Danny.’ ”
The effect of this small bit of “talking” between mother and daughter is far weightier, more powerful, and says so much more about both Essie and her mother than if (by way of turning most of that narrative into dialogue) Updike had made the characters talk and talk and talk.
Writing dialogue is itself a careful task; the writer wants to effect the speech of THIS and only THIS character, while making the words ring true to any reader. To put so much importance on dialogue, then, to carry a story, is to dilute the power that rich dialogue can create for a story. If the writer doesn’t get that dialogue right, and right every single time, the story fails.
January 16, 2012 at 6:01 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
I noted on my FB page that my latest novel, WHAT BEAUTY, was soon to be in galley pages, and this was a good time to get that story out of my system. The best way to begin that process is to start working through my notes on the next novel, its working title “Max the Blind Guy.”
Max and Greta, after 40 years of marriage, are still together, but have had their problems. This is the crux, the linchpin, the beauty, and the utter horror of their story. How could they possibly still be together after all that has happened? I guess I’ll learn that myself, when I finish the novel in another 3 years or so.
The beginning of any project for me is one that finds me writing notes of variable length: two sentences of dialogue; an image for a scene (say the flattened grass beneath a pear tree after outdoor sex); the name of a character and where he/she went to school, what was studied, and why. When one of my rotating notebooks (one for home, one for “out of the house”) becomes fat with notes, it’s time for me to transfer that writing into the computer.
This is as much for safety (archiving) as it is a chance to do some editing/re-writing, and seeing more of the story or characters, and building scenes that I hadn’t yet thought existed (because they hadn’t; only while looking through the notebook do I make further discoveries).
This, in a nutshell, is my writing method, these days, when beginning a new project. Only after six month or so, maybe sooner if the narrative arc and a sense of the story’s continuity is solidly in my mind, will I begin to shuffle these scenes into shape, some order, a timeline, a scene progression. When that sense of the story is available to me, that’s when I can “begin writing” … from the beginning.
Until that time, I’ll simply let my mind wander in all the possibilities of Max and Greta.
January 12, 2012 at 9:21 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
Immortalization is a slippery word, these days. If you’re online, you can be immortalized by inclusion in an article, but if/when that article is deep-six archived, you lose that imprimatur of deathlessness. That’s when you are eulogized, I suppose.
However, for the time being, I’ve been added to the ranks of Wikipedia under Mark Beyer (novelist). This addition, while flattering, naturally, can also be a bit embarrassing. Do I deserve such recognition? Well, here’s when I tell myself, “Calm down, pal; don’t get self-indulgent.”
A former student recently got in touch via Facebook, and she’s a Wiki editor; one msg led to another, and I provided her with some references and info that could make up an article. She has come through on her promise, and quickly (I might add). The Wiki people have labeled it a “stub,” which means it’s no more than the basic info. I remembered this morning that what could be added are my two awards for writing: 1998, for short fiction, and 2005 for news features. Big Wow, as we used to say in 6th grade.
“Down, big guy, down!”
January 7, 2012 at 6:26 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer, The Prague Blog
I only just signed up with Twitter today: @bibliogrind ….
My first “tweets” went to a poet in brooklyn, ny (she likes Norman Rush’s “Mating”; a literary fiction society; my Chamonix mate, Chris’s “Living Websites” blog (as a thanks for promoting THE VILLAGE WIT); and to Alfred A. Knopf publishers (“Yes, writers need to tweet to show what human lies behind the written word, the characters, the wonderful lies&makebelieve”) ….
The word “tweet” reminds me of Tweetie Bird from the Warner Bros. Loony Toons shorts of the ’60s-’70s. It fits, though, because at a mere 140 characters, any message is the sound of bird in a cage.
Short messages — or super-short-short short stories — also remind me of the anecdote by Ernest Hemingway, who said the saddest story he ever heard was the six words he read in a newspaper’s classified ads: “For Sale, baby shoes. Never used.” A factual story or not, Hem summed up devastating emotional pain in 33 words.
January 3, 2012 at 8:40 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
There is always a lot of talk online among writers and editors about the importance of having one’s manuscript “professionally edited.” I couldn’t agree more: this question is of the utmost importance, and can decide for you whether your manuscript gets published or not (or is even publishable). Writers are often on the fence; editors always say they’re ready to do the job. So far, pretty obvious opinions and responses.
But all of this leads to many more questions than solves this riddle: Who do you trust to edit your manuscript?
New writers seem to think they can get away with doing little, once they’ve finally wrenched the words from their brains. They often send out manuscripts that shouldn’t have even found the bottom of a drawer for two years before they came to their senses and used it to stoke the fire.
Seasoned writers understand that, at the very least, someone who knows books and can read critically must have a go at their “readable” draft before they take (another) “final” look at the manuscript. This could be a literary friend, or a professional editor. The difference between these two methods shows that new writers are yet married to their words, while seasoned writers accept that their first good effort (which could be the 4th draft!) may need a lot more work than they had thought.
This brings us to The Professional Editor.
While editors are schooled in the art of editing (you’d better believe that editing is an art — my 20 yrs of experience has taught me at least that much) — seeing the global picture, understanding structure, how characters work, how narrative flows &etc — they are human beings, with all the potential for error in judgment, aptitude, and practice. We writers want to believe in editors; we want to trust our editor. But in the end, our story is our creation; few of us want to be told to cut this, change that, take out this character, or build a new character from scratch, as these (one or all) “can make your book better!”
“Better” is a loaded term. So are “marketable” and “readable” and “great!”
Professional editors may be just as suspect as pub houses these days (and their contracts). You can group agents in this same category. While an agent will want you to get your book edited before they take you on (they have lots of names “on file” that they’ll gladly “share” with you) this brings in all possible scenarios of suggested changes. Are you ready, or willing, to make those changes? Next, the pub house an agent helps you to sign with will then assign you an editor, who, likely, will see the book in yet another light, and suggest (or dictate) further changes.
Are you seeing what can happen to your book? Do you understand how your story can suddenly be written by committee?
There is a different approach to the trust question. Writers need to understand that they need to be their own best editor; to understand what the story is about, how the characters fit and work, and then how to properly write and re-write that story (as a wordsmith, not a story typist). Only then will writers understand how to judge professional editors. Remember, editors are just like any other human, but who (hopefully) have read more and can understand a manuscript and a story (AND, especially, your story). Oftentimes, editors are not the best of writers (that’s why they’re editors). I learned that the best editors are also pretty damn good writers themselves.
The famous Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, barely touched Hemingway’s novels; made various minor suggestions to Fitzgerald; and worked hundreds of hours with Tom Wolfe. If you read their work, and know them, you’ll understand why. Should we all be Hems and Fitzes? Yes, why not; they knew their characters, they knew what they wanted to say, they did it in a concise (or at least needful) manner.
Here, then, are my four most important tips on how to chose an editor:
1. Be your own best editor, first of all (you can do this by being a damn good writer); understand your book and all that it is supposed to do for the audience. If/when you work with an editor, you can explain what you’ve done with your story, why, and why it works as you have written it. (of course, the story should need no explanation)
2. If you use an editor before you send out that ms to an agent or publisher, find an editor with a professional track record; an established House he/she has worked for helps; better yet, get referrals from authors, and read the authors’ stories the editor worked on.
3. Ask the editor if he/she writes; if the editor doesn’t write, tell him/her to have a nice day, and move on; for the editors who do write, ask to read their work.
4. Find an editor who edits your type of writing. If you write literary fiction, don’t work with a genre editor; and vise-verse.
December 31, 2011 at 4:21 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer, The Prague Blog
Deception by Philip Roth
An affair unfolds. Dialogue. Man & Woman, both married. She can’t let the husband go, and she can’t stop him from cheating. He is bored, adventuresome where his wife is not. They meet and talk, about what it is doing for them, why sex is one of the answers (or at least a diversion), and what it all means. Roth tells this intriguing story of love — and marriage’s remedy — through 95% dialogue. It’s a wonderful story, furiously delivered and ended on a note of … deception.
A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul
A writer has traveled back and forth from his homeland to the lands of his ancestors, the ancestors of other island inhabitants, and the antecedents of colonial power. Along the way, he finds stories that had been hidden, or suppressed, or nearly forgotten, or plainly kept for personal memory. Naipaul has used his life, and the life & history of Trinidad, as the springboard for most of his life’s work. We learn history here, but more so the stories of lives that have helped form history as we hadn’t heard it before.
The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
On a getaway holiday to a famous island (unnamed, but, eventually, obvious), a man and a woman meet strangers who befriend them for no apparent reason. The holiday is, at various times, slow, busy, drunken, sober, hot, chilled, light, dark, crowded, and deserted. In this world of holiday fantasy, anything seems likely to happen. And then happen it does. McEwan used such sparse space to create a language and image explosion as to keep you guessing, make you want, and then ask for more.
December 29, 2011 at 3:51 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
My second novel, title “What Beauty”, is complete. I put the final changes into the text, with a final re-reading, on December 22. The manuscript is ready for page proofs, then a proofreading, and final approval.
To tell the truth, I’m ready to be finished with this book, and this story. It has been a pleasure to write about Minus Orth, a Chicago sculptor living in NYC; and of his relationship with the once-famous writer, Karen Kosek, now a bag lady living on the Upper West Side. My emotional investment in these, and other, characters has been one of reflection on what it was like to live in NYC during my few years there, and for whom I met (including genuine homeless people) and worked with and fought against; reflection, too, on what it takes for an artist to create beauty. Not merely art, but something that is empirically beautiful; a beauty that transcends cultures, eras, and taste.
Likewise, to feel the emotions of characters in whom I created from nothing more than ideas, glimpses of what they look like, and how they see the world, is one of the highest achievements I think any artist can hope for. Poets, composers, dancers, and of course visual artists all make this commitment when they find their first image of “story.” I feel privileged to be a member of such a group.
Sometime in March, I think, my publisher, Siren and Muse, will have it available for online purchase. The ebook will follow shortly.
I’m excited about this book. Although its my sophomore effort to be published, it is my 5th completed novel. Not bad for 15 years of an apprenticeship. But then again, all the heavies in literary fiction have claimed that the learning process is a life-long achievement.
A book trailer is in the planning stages (see the trailer for my first novel, The Village Wit, here) I’d like to have that prepared before the book comes out. Two+ months seems short, but that also is the time for reviews, marketing, interviews, blog posts &etc. I’ll be busy.
“What Beauty” has taken me 2 1/2 years to complete. I’ve written three complete drafts, and have read through the book at least six times. Many changes have been done since the first, and rough, draft was completed nearly a year ago. It’s safe to say that I may have rewritten every sentence, in some ways. The book is 180,000 words. This is a good size for a novel; what used to be called “a full-length novel,” back when traditional publishers printed such works.
Here’s a bit of the novel, the first few paragraphs, something with which to tease:
What Beauty
by Mark Beyer
CHAPTER 1
The shoes give her away. People are otherwise fooled. She can walk the streets in anonymity without the shoes, only there they are. A straw hat, a child’s hat, covers the top of her head. She wears the hat in a manner to rival a queen’s crown. Its brim and crease are smeared black, the weaving pitted and torn. Her hair looks worse than the hat, if this is possible. Pigeon gray with stringy curls. The curls, like metal shavings, spill uncontrollably across her shoulders — and here’s a nice bit of added veil — the ends stuck together in pasty clumps, reminding me of a low-traveling dog which picks up detritus with its shuffle gait. The hair alone makes her unrecognizable. Added to this, this … cast … is an old corduroy jacket, fitted snugly over a yellow blouse, its original chroma (dark chocolate) yet visible under the arms, though faded to a weak coffee across the shoulders, the sleeves, and along the frayed lapels. All for the middling look, it strikes me, that an Ivy League prof from the Sixties would have liked, would have found anti-establishment. Straight off the pages of Life magazine, standing in front of a campus building, lacy vines in shadowy black & white, a grainy image. Maybe this coat is a twenty-five-year remnant accepted from the charity bin at the Salvation Army, or has been pulled from a dumpster behind a retirement home. Grease stains spot the lapels like sloganeer badges, the narrow cord ribs are crease-worn inside the elbows, and countless finger caresses have smoothed the cloth to halos behind the buttons. The collar on her blouse curls up at the points, high up under her chin, something a clown might invent using a lot of starch and imaginative ironing, a trick done to make children laugh (or cry). The linen blouse, faded to an off-yellow found in beach stones rattled in the surf, disappears into the waistband of canvas trousers, stained with white paint, like Christmas tree flock.
This grimy stew bum lacks the gestalt Karen Kosek wants. I’m certain of this; a certainty that touches me like religion touch others. I know this must not be the Karen Kosek that the world knows (or had known her) because she is none of these touchstone fragments. Except for the shoes and … something else.
Seeming to be a bag lady and being a bag lady are not the same. Go look at a bag lady and this becomes axiomatic: there’s a funky odor you smell ten feet around her — the stench of a sort that takes weeks to ferment; hair like matted sackcloth; watery eyes, blurred and vaguely unfocused, or else glaucomatous; pants crotch stained by piss, soaked and dried a dozen times (the root source of the reek?); green armpit stains of the perpetually unwashed, fading toward the edges and tinged white by perspiration salts; and the filthy skin whose grime penetrates the dermis so deeply you swear you’re in the presence of animal hide (no way to forge this look by rubbing fireplace ash like it’s a balm).
Yet here she is, in disguise.
Beneath her disguise, because it has to be that, I see Karen’s hygiene and vigor. Her skin is bright, not so loose around the eyes and mouth for a woman of her age (fifty? fifty-five?), what otherwise you’ll find on the indigent, the drunken, the commonly diseased; her fingernails gleam in manicured gloss when she stops to adjust the grip on two plastic bags; she takes a beat to look up into the sunshine, she smiles, and her teeth advertise money of a quantity having no use for group dental plans.
©2011-2012 mark beyer
December 17, 2011 at 12:33 pm · Filed under The Letters of Mark Beyer
This past week my former teacher and colleague, Patty McNair, the author of Temple of Air, featured me on her blog under the title “View from the Keyboard.” I got a chance to tell about my writing space, my writing life, and the connection between the two.
Here’s an excerpt:
I have tucked myself into a corner to write. It’s my best mental space, a corner; no distractions, books nearby, a comfortable chair, the tea kettle ten steps away. The overflowing cork-board has too many pins to make sense, so any peek at it sends me back to the sentence from which I jumped. The room has many windows that give wonderful light. At night, I draw the blinds to create a cave atmosphere; a very writerly space.
