A Book I Should Have Read Ages Ago
Sep. 7th, 2006 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousYou know those old toys with the pull-strings and the tape loops? Pull the string, and a suitable catch phrase emanates from the doll's mouth.
Most people have those strings, too. My tape loop says: I'm not picky, I'm not proud. I'll go to school on anybody who knows something I don't.
Except it's not entirely true. For a long time, I delayed going to school on someone I really should have been watching. Sometimes my vast pretentiousness superpowers can be a disadvantage.
When I first started corresponding with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
awritersweekend, she told me I needed to read Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel. But the cover is so very ugly, and when I first got my hands on a copy and flipped it open, I found obvious typos, and Maass keeps tripping on the that/who distinction. One hazard of teaching grammar is that very petty errors come to be disproportionately irritating, but these errors in the that/who distinction bug me for a reason: a writer is a person, not an object, and so should be a who, not a that. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read a book by an agent who talked about writers as if we weren't even people. Dan Brown is one writer that knows his business--well, maybe Dan Brown is a that, but dammit, I'm a writer who's a who.
And then, there was the famous tension exercise. Whenever I heard folks talk about what it was in Maass's book that had helped them, they mentioned the same advice: look at your manuscript one page at a time, and find one way to increase the tension on every page. In these conversations, I would hear writers talk about pacing a novel so as to drag the reader by the hair from the first page to the last.
And I would think, but not say, If the reader needs to be dragged by the hair to get to the end of your story, then maybe you're writing the wrong book. If your voice is too weak to stand up to a moment's pause in the mayhem, then maybe you're in the wrong line of work. The tension exercise sounded gimmicky to me. I was in academia long enough to learn this from the long Deconstruction craze: Any method that produces the same answer regardless of the object under scrutiny is a method with a problem. I figured, after slogging through the fucking Deconstructors (some of them in fucking French, for fuck's sake), I knew a dressed-up gimmick when I saw one.
Of course, I was wrong about Maass.
Last week, when I still couldn't get myself excited about the Stisele project (yeah, the project an editor actually wants to see a synopsis and partial for at some point in the next month or two), I finally felt desperate enough to try anything. Firewalking, acupuncture, seances, anything, even buying a book with typos and an ugly cover by a guy whose characteristic grammatical tic intermittently forces him to talk about writers as if we were inanimate objects.
What nobody told me is that Maass is playing a deep game. I have no idea what he's like in person, but there's nothing cynical in his authorial persona. This is a person who cares about storytelling enough to examine a hundred successful novels he admires and to ask himself, without assumptions, what they have in common. I figured I'd be watching someone on a guru trip, proffering his personal preferences as dogma, but instead he arrived at his conclusions through an inductive process that even my dissertation director would have respected. Moreover, Maass has an eye for which of the qualities that make those books successful might be teachable. He thinks like a teacher--that's praise I don't give lightly. He also appears to care about whether a book has meaning. Nothing in all those conversations about the tension exercise would have led me to expect he'd make a case for telling stories that mean something
The cheap ego-boost I got from reading him is that, every time he described one more characteristic shared by breakout novels, I recognized something the finished draft of the Big Book is already doing. I seem to have blundered into getting a bunch of things right. A breakout novel can also afford to get a number of other things wrong, if it gets the core things right--thank goodness, because the Big Book is too big to have avoided accumulating flaws, whether I can see them or not.
The useful thing about seeing how he taxonomizes the virtues of the breakout novel, and how he lays out the techniques to bring those virtues into being, is that now I stand a better chance of getting right on purpose the things I had to blunder into getting right last time. I would really like to be more efficient about it this time around.
Maass has a companion workbook. A workbook...am I the only one having PTSD flashbacks about public schools with their assembly-line overreliance on workbooks? In that other world, a workbook is a deadening thing, a substitute for thought, a substitute for actual teaching, a long spike with which to nail students' feet to the floor. I'm trying to forgive the workbook for being a workbook. It seems actually to be helping me clarify why I loved writing Stisele in the first place. I predict that, by the time I get to the end, it will have helped me clarify plenty more.
I'm less stuck than I was three days ago. Less stuck isn't quite unstuck, but a girl can hope.
Most people have those strings, too. My tape loop says: I'm not picky, I'm not proud. I'll go to school on anybody who knows something I don't.
Except it's not entirely true. For a long time, I delayed going to school on someone I really should have been watching. Sometimes my vast pretentiousness superpowers can be a disadvantage.
When I first started corresponding with
awritersweekend, she told me I needed to read Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel. But the cover is so very ugly, and when I first got my hands on a copy and flipped it open, I found obvious typos, and Maass keeps tripping on the that/who distinction. One hazard of teaching grammar is that very petty errors come to be disproportionately irritating, but these errors in the that/who distinction bug me for a reason: a writer is a person, not an object, and so should be a who, not a that. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to read a book by an agent who talked about writers as if we weren't even people. Dan Brown is one writer that knows his business--well, maybe Dan Brown is a that, but dammit, I'm a writer who's a who.And then, there was the famous tension exercise. Whenever I heard folks talk about what it was in Maass's book that had helped them, they mentioned the same advice: look at your manuscript one page at a time, and find one way to increase the tension on every page. In these conversations, I would hear writers talk about pacing a novel so as to drag the reader by the hair from the first page to the last.
And I would think, but not say, If the reader needs to be dragged by the hair to get to the end of your story, then maybe you're writing the wrong book. If your voice is too weak to stand up to a moment's pause in the mayhem, then maybe you're in the wrong line of work. The tension exercise sounded gimmicky to me. I was in academia long enough to learn this from the long Deconstruction craze: Any method that produces the same answer regardless of the object under scrutiny is a method with a problem. I figured, after slogging through the fucking Deconstructors (some of them in fucking French, for fuck's sake), I knew a dressed-up gimmick when I saw one.
Of course, I was wrong about Maass.
Last week, when I still couldn't get myself excited about the Stisele project (yeah, the project an editor actually wants to see a synopsis and partial for at some point in the next month or two), I finally felt desperate enough to try anything. Firewalking, acupuncture, seances, anything, even buying a book with typos and an ugly cover by a guy whose characteristic grammatical tic intermittently forces him to talk about writers as if we were inanimate objects.
What nobody told me is that Maass is playing a deep game. I have no idea what he's like in person, but there's nothing cynical in his authorial persona. This is a person who cares about storytelling enough to examine a hundred successful novels he admires and to ask himself, without assumptions, what they have in common. I figured I'd be watching someone on a guru trip, proffering his personal preferences as dogma, but instead he arrived at his conclusions through an inductive process that even my dissertation director would have respected. Moreover, Maass has an eye for which of the qualities that make those books successful might be teachable. He thinks like a teacher--that's praise I don't give lightly. He also appears to care about whether a book has meaning. Nothing in all those conversations about the tension exercise would have led me to expect he'd make a case for telling stories that mean something
The cheap ego-boost I got from reading him is that, every time he described one more characteristic shared by breakout novels, I recognized something the finished draft of the Big Book is already doing. I seem to have blundered into getting a bunch of things right. A breakout novel can also afford to get a number of other things wrong, if it gets the core things right--thank goodness, because the Big Book is too big to have avoided accumulating flaws, whether I can see them or not.
The useful thing about seeing how he taxonomizes the virtues of the breakout novel, and how he lays out the techniques to bring those virtues into being, is that now I stand a better chance of getting right on purpose the things I had to blunder into getting right last time. I would really like to be more efficient about it this time around.
Maass has a companion workbook. A workbook...am I the only one having PTSD flashbacks about public schools with their assembly-line overreliance on workbooks? In that other world, a workbook is a deadening thing, a substitute for thought, a substitute for actual teaching, a long spike with which to nail students' feet to the floor. I'm trying to forgive the workbook for being a workbook. It seems actually to be helping me clarify why I loved writing Stisele in the first place. I predict that, by the time I get to the end, it will have helped me clarify plenty more.
I'm less stuck than I was three days ago. Less stuck isn't quite unstuck, but a girl can hope.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 07:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-08 09:44 pm (UTC)it's not bad, the workbook. I don't have a big book to do, but it's helped me a lot with the little ones.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-09 06:31 am (UTC)