Literary Choices

I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of lightweight fiction. It's true that The Sun Also Rises is my favorite book and that I adore C.S. Lewis. I'm currently reading a book of short stories by Shirley Jackson, and I recently bought a collection of Updike stories and two of Orwell's novels to revisit. But the kind of books I've just described make up, perhaps, 10% of my reading. I devour disposable fiction at the speed of light. Despite the fact that I have a full time job and a child to raise, a new Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker novel will be devoured in two days--one if it's a weekend. I'm not above stretching out a bubble bath long enough to finish an entire paperback.

While I've occasionally felt a little guilty about buying these $8 candy bars, I've never had any qualms about reading them. A well-turned phrase is a well-turned phrase regardless of the complexity of the story, and sometimes you just don't want to work at it. But this week I started trying to update my Shelfari shelf and I was in for a surprise. Since I started reading adult books in my early teens, I would conservatively estimate that I've read 3,000 books. There have actually been long periods of time during which I averaged about five books a week, but I calculated using an average of two per week. And after a lot of work, I've managed to get my Shelfari list up to roughly 400. And it's those little books I've been inhaling on the fly all my life that I can't seem to recall.

I know exactly which of Orwell's novels I've read; I remember the misplaced commas in Atlas Shrugged and the way Jane Austen used apostrophes in "hers". Ray Bradbury springs to mind, along with Salinger and Steinbeck. But do I know which James Patterson novels I've read and which I haven't? Can I even tell when I read the descriptions which of Lisa Scottoline's books I actually read and which I just scanned the jacket copy? No.

As a reader, that raises one set of questions, but as a writer it raises another. What is the goal in publishing a book? To make money? To gain fame? To achieve critical success? To bring people enjoyment? To change the way people think? To leave a lasting impression? Some authors, I suspect, would say "all of the above", while others (myself among them) might say that it was none of those things. The more important question in my mind is, "Does it matter what we set out to do?" That is, does the author who writes the kind of fiction that slides across my brain and then is gone set out to provide a delicious snack? Can one decide to write something more meaningful, or is that a question of insight and talent and whatever other intangible factors might have an impact? Should we even be asking these questions, or is it better just to write and take the result for what it is?

So the Thing Is...I'm a Novelist

Let me begin with apologies and a hat tip to my favorite blogger, Barb Cooper, who would have a trademark on the phrase "So, the thing is..." if it weren't too common to be protectable. I've really endeavored to avoid that phrase in my writing over the past six or seven years, since I was first introduced to Barb's funny and enlightening column. But the truth is, I used it a lot before I met Barb, and sometimes it's simply called for. In this case, I think it's especially appropriate because Barb's column was all about underlying truths, and this is a big one.

I've made my living in a variety of ways, from making salads to practicing law and virtually everything in between. I've taught, trained, consulted, written curriculum and I've answered phones, placed calls, run cash registers, poured coffee, sorted mail, typed letters and even fried eggs. And, for many years, I've been fortunate enough to make my living writing.

I've written for newspapers, magazines and websites. I've written educational materials, consumer legal information, parenting articles, musician bios, writing and publishing advice, local histories, and profiles...and those are just some of the things I've been paid for writing. I even wrote a book. And the fact that I'm able to make my living working with words is an unbelievable blessing.

But here's the thing: I'm a novelist. I wrote my first novel at 10. I wrote most of another one in college and finished one while I was practicing law. I finished another one during NaNo six or seven years ago and a third during the same period three years ago. I also have a fourth half-finished and a fifth barely begun but which I'm entirely in love. Whenever I get a free minute, I write a novel...and I almost mean that literally, since two of my novels have been written in less than a month while I was working full time.

Here's what I don't do: I don't sell them. It isn't that I CAN'T sell them (or at least, if it is that, I haven't found it out yet). It's simply that in almost two decades of writing novels, I've sent out exactly three submissions. And guess what? The only novel I've ever submitted is the one that I care least about, the one that I'm not invested in.

Sounds like fear, I know, but I think it's just laziness. See, a funny thing happens to me when I write a piece, whether it's a book or an article or a blog post. I finish it, and then it's over for me. I move on. I don't look back. I've never read most of my articles in print; I don't even have copies of most of them. It's all in the writing for me.

But a long time ago I had to make a decision about writing. I never needed anyone to read what I wrote and so I didn't bother to publish for a long time...and then I realized that so long as I didn't sell my writing, I was always going to have to do something else for a living. I realized that publishing was the ticket to having time to write. For some reason, it's taken me another decade to realize that that principle extends to novels, too...and it's novels I really want to be writing.

So this is it. It's purely coincidence that this realization dawned on New Year's Eve, and I don't make New Year's resolutions. But this year, I'm going to start acting like a novelist.

Jacquelyn Mitchard's No Time to Wave Goodbye

The sequel to Jacquelyn Mitchard's first bestselling novel, The Deep End of the Ocean, came out yesterday...and I don't have it yet. Of course, I wasted no time in ordering No Time to Wave Goodbye, but I ordered it through Amazon--not because I didn't want to or have time to run out and pick it up at Borders, but because it doesn't take all that many sales in a short period of time to make the various Amazon lists that boost publicity and, in turn, more sales. Now that it's in transit, though, I'm having a hard time getting interested in reading anything else.

If you've been here before, you know that I am a constant admirer of Mitchard's writing. I love her style and, above all, I love the truths that are dropped into her writing like surprise chips of chocolate in a creamy vanilla ice cream. As I've mentioned before, her novels always make me nod. "Yes, that's true...that's exactly right." Even though, of course, I might never have consciously entertained that thought before.

So I haven't even had the opportunity to start No Time to Wave Goodbye, and I can't comment intelligently on it. But the book's release does have me thinking about character development. It's been thirteen years since The Deep End of the Ocean made its splash, and we've all lived a lot of life in the interim. My daughter was an infant when I read it, and now she's teetering dangerously close to high school. We've all lived, laughed, cried: some of us have married and divorced (or divorced and married), some of us have had children, graduated from college, watched parents die, moved across the country. We are, most of us, in some way different people than we were in 1996. And yet, we care what became of this fictional family.

That's what we have to do, as writers, isn't it? Create stories and people so rich and deep that we forget that nothing actually happened to those characters after the book ended and feel as if they're somehow out there continuing to live their lives and their struggles?

The Conundrum of Successful Characters

Like most writers I know (perhaps most HUMANS), I am a fan of Robert Parker. I'm not particular, either. Naturally, I started with Spenser, but I love Sunny Randall and I'll take Jesse Stone. Since Parker published his first Spenser novel when I was 8 and seems to have put out a new book approximately every 14 minutes for several years, I still sometimes discover novels I haven't yet read. I'm always delighted when that happens, and I couldn't have been more delighted when I discovered that I'd never read the very FIRST Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript.

I brought it home, dove right in, and....didn't like it.

Now, this happens sometimes: I'll read one or two books by an author and get all swept away, and then I'll pick up another and be disappointed. But I'd hazard a guess that I've read between 25 and 30 Robert Parker novels, and I enjoyed them all.

The thing is, in The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser wasn't yet the character he is today. He didn't HAVE the character he has today. When people told him that he wasn't as amusing as he thought he was, they were right. And he drank too much and didn't make very good decisions. I didn't like him all that much.

Obviously, over time, his character evolved; undoubtedly, when Parker turned out that first novel, he didn't know that Spenser would become a cultural icon. If I hadn't been 8 years old when this book came out, if it had been the first Spenser novel I ever read, I'm not sure that I would ever have discovered the others.

But something else jumped out at me that made even more of an impression than the evolution of the character. Spenser described himself, in 1973, as "approaching 40". That was 36 years ago, which has the man currently "approaching 76". Of course, that's glossed over--his character remains perpetually middle-aged, as he must if Parker is going to continue to crank out those books (and I hope he does). But an author gets into a bit of a bind when he announces an age like that. It's important to character development, sure, but who thinks, when he's describing a character, "I'm going to have to have this guy viable in a street fight 36 years from now"? I'm guessing no one--and suspecting that if anyone did, it would paralyze his writing and pretty much ensure that his character didn't have this kind of longevity issue.

But it raises an interesting issue for fiction writers. Should we expect our characters to take on lives of their own and move beyond the plans we have for them? And if so, how do we keep their options open while still fitting them into the stories we've woven?

Characters and Character Traits

Recently, a passing comment in a discussion about favorite characters triggered some big questions in my mind--questions I don't think I'd ever considered in all my years as a reader and a writer. Another writer in the discussion seemed to indicate that the same characteristics drew her to a character as drew her to real-life people.

I was surprised, not so much to hear that that was true as to realize that I'd never thought about whether or not it was true for me. I quick mental scan revealed the high probability that it was not.

The writer who made the comment blogs about conversations overheard; perhaps it makes sense that the line between character and real person would not be a very bright one in her mind. She has a real knack for spinning people into characters after hearing only brief conversations.

For me, though, I think the things that make a character interesting and compelling are often things I wouldn't in a million years want to encounter in real life. Popular fiction alone is replete with examples. In fact, I think that the very thing that makes what I think of as "throwaway fiction" so appealing is the taste it offers of a life we'd never live.

• Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum is a walking disaster--and that's exactly what makes it possible to whip through the novels in which she stars in a couple of hours, with a recurrent smile. The sexual tension she maintains with two men, alternately or simultaneously depending upon the book, keeps things interesting. But in real life? She blunders into things she doesn't understand, keeps the people around her constantly worried, and lives her entire life on balanced on the praecipice of infidelity. NOT someone I'd want to hang out with.
• Robert Parker's Hawk is one of my all-time favorite characters in popular fiction. The contrast between his erudite literary tastes and his unfortunate choice of profession (hired killer) is compelling on paper--and to the string of educated professional women his character dates--but in real life? Hello...he KILLS people? A bit of a stumbling block, anyone?
• My daughter is quite intrigued by the character of Bellatrix LeStrange in the Harry Potter series. Bellatrix is, outside the primary villain in the series, perhaps the closest thing to pure, unconflicted evil presented in all of those 3,000+ pages. She has a certain attitude, a certain voice, that's a bit entertaining in that "love to hate" way...but one that would certainly (I hope) inspire disdain in real life.

The same is true, in less blatant fashion, in more literary fiction. One example that springs to mind is the character of Ole, the old man, in Ernest Hemingway's short story, "The Killers". Ole, when advised by teenage Nick Adams, that men have come to town to kill him, he simply rolls toward the wall. There's little to admire either in his implied past or in his resignation, but his few simple actions speak volumes.

Often, in fact, it's the things that are most reprehensible about a character, or saddest, or most lacking, or that the character himself is unable to see or to learn, that allow us to learn the most from him. Piet Hanema, in Updike's Couples, provides an excellent illustration.

Granted, these aren't necessarily the things that make a character likable, but they are often the things that make a character memorable, interesting, educational or critical to plot.

From a writer's perspective, that means that the characters we design to be heroes aren't necessarily going to be the ones who hold a reader's attention, or that it might be the flaws and dichotomies as much as the admirable traits that make a character memorable. Is that important to keep in mind? I'm not sure. I've been writing for more than 30 years, and the whole question came as something of a shock to me--but in retrospect, I find that hasn't affected my character development or kept me from creating characters who might not be the people I'd want living next door or working in my office.

The Best Book I've Ever Read? "BEST"? What Exactly does "best" mean?

I saw a posting in a forum this afternoon asking that question--"what's the best book you've ever read?"

As always when presented with questions that are at once subjective and categorical, I became paralyzed by questions and clarifications. It was an interesting question that got me thinking, but it wasn't one I could answer with the name of a book.

The roots of my inability to answer might lie in my internal dichotomy; when I was a teenager and the most important place in my life was a little wooden desk with a blue plastic Smith-Corona typewriter on it, the walls above that desk were adorned with two black and white posters: Rick Springfield and Ernest Hemingway.

But it might be more complicated than that, too. It might simply be that "best" means something different in one moment, in one context, in one shade of light, than it does in another. What is it that makes those books stand out in our minds as "best" and stay there for years to come? I don't know. But as writers, if we can figure it out, it can only help.

The first book I can remember really falling in love with was Willard Motley's Knock on Any Door. I think that I was thirteen or fourteen when I read it, which might explain a lot--teenage girls do seem to have a penchant for good-hearted bad boys. But maybe there was more to it than that: the book was set in Chicago, the hometown of my heart; it highlighted the way the criminal justice system often does more harm than good, a topic near and dear to my heart long before I became a criminal defense attorney; maybe the character development was very strong--Nick Romano certainly seemed a flesh-and-blood person to me then, though I haven't read the book in many years.

But then, if you asked me for my favorite book, I'd probably say The Sun Also Rises without even stopping to think. The stark, unemotional revelation of some of the hard realities of human nature couldn't be more different from the tender-hearted expression of Knock on Any Door. Hemingway made me nod sagely; Motley made me reach out unconsciously and plead with Nick not to take the next step.

Were either of them the best book I ever read? I think, at least at one time, that I'd have awarded that designation to A Severe Mercy. A Severe Mercy is the only book I can recall having sent me on a truly obsessive quest for all of the author's previous works--I even tracked down Sheldon Vanauken's master's thesis! But when someone asks for the best book I've ever read, I think there's a bit of a request for a recommendation in there, a recommendation that isn't entirely subjective, and Vanauken's best-known book is a biographical account of his conversion to Christianity and the death of his young wife, interspersed with correspondence between the author and C.S. Lewis. Not for everyone, I suspect. Which also keeps me from giving the title to The Life You Save May be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. It was a huge hardcover book, but I carried it with me on the train, anyway. I balanced it on the edge of the sink and read it while I brushed my teeth. It seemed endless and ended too quickly. It was the most artful blending of tangentially-related stories I have ever seen anywhere in literature, fiction or non-fiction. But it's a mingled biography of Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day and Walker Percy. Again, not necessarily targeting a broad market.

So what about some normal books, hm?

I'm in love with Jacquelyn Mitchard. I want to be her when I grow up, but it's a problem, because I'm already 41. Jacquelyn mitchard writes books that fit into the category I'd usually call "throwaway novels"--and I don't mean that in a bad sense. I've been known to write one or two of those myself. They're simply books that we probably aren't going to buy in hardcover and keep forever on the shelf in the den. They're a good read and then you move on. Except Mitchard does something a little bit special in hers, at least for me. Whenever I read one of her books, I find myself nodding at various points and saying, "Yes, that's true. That's exactly right." Sometimes it's something I've observed before, and sometimes it's a bit of a revelation. But in every book, I find myself recognizing larger truths in the actions and reactions of Mitchard's characters. I'm still not enshrining leather-bound copies of her books, but I do keep them, and sometimes I re-read them, because they're quick and easy novels full of not-so-quick-and-easy thoughts, and some of those thoughts bear revisiting.

And I see that I've neglected to mention here that C.S. Lewis is my favorite author.

I think, though, that there is a common thread. For me, it seems that what makes a book memorable is the truth it uncovers, the layer it peels away. Hemingway did that without adjectives, without emotion, with a matter-of-fact depiction. Sheldon Vanauken did it by revealing his own aversion to the truths, and carrying the reader along his own confused and reluctant path. Willard Motley did it by painting rich emotion. Jacquelyn Mitchard does it subtly, with a sentence here and an observation there, woven so tightly in to the story and the dialogue that you're free to gloss right over those truths if you want to. But for me, I think the presence of those truths is what makes a "great book". I still don't know which one is BEST.