Month: November 2021

Can’t Stop Editing

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Yup. Fits me. No doubt there are others out there who are also insecure perfectionists. Or just insecure.

Probably one reason for my inability to stop editing is that I have a slight (?) case of dyslexia. Someone who is even more of a fussbudget informed me that what I have is dysgraphia–a writing disability. Because of it, my high school typing class was sheer misery. I couldn’t even type a mailing label correctly the first time or the second. Anxiety dos not help matters. Thank goodness for word-processing programs.

Printing out your material and reading it out loud, with red pen in hand can help.

E.B. White was the author of the children’s books, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and Trumpet of the Swan. He wrote for The New Yorker magazine and was one of their contributing editors. And he was the co-author of The Elements of Style, a book that was a must for English majors. I once had two copies, which I read, but never memorized.

I don’t remember where I read the two anecdotes I relate here; it’s been ages since I came across them. I don’t know if they’re apocryphal, but they’re sure memorable.

Not White’s post office, but it could have looked much like this one.

E.B. White is said to have mailed a manuscript to his editor and promptly went to the postmaster in the small Maine town where he lived and begged to get the ms. back. He’d thought of some edits he could make. I can identify with that. 

I remember these pre-wordprocessor deleters.

One thing about publishing your novel on Amazon’s Kindle Vella is both good and bad. You can take down a chapter any time and do some more work on it. That’s what I’ve been doing the past few weeks even thought I have other stories to write. A  friend and I signed up for the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) this November. I started writing a new novel, got about a quarter of the way through, and stalled. I didn’t care enough, I guess.  A Home for an Exile’s Heart called me back and I answered the call to edit it some more. I can’t believe I thought it was finished.

Writers aren’t the only ones who can’t stop editing. 

I have no idea which of his paintings he was touching up.

A shocked museum guard once came across a man who’d gotten behind the velvet rope and was touching up a painting handing on the wall.

“Sir. stop! You can’t do that!” The dismayed guard exclaimed. “Don’t you know that’s a painting by Picasso?”

Man with palette and brush, “I am Picasso and it’s not finished!”

Whether it’s true or not, and I hope it is, I love this anecdote. I don’t recall if the artist in question was Picasso, but it seems a Picasso-like thing to do.

Would White have been able to write more books if he hadn’t been such a fussbudget? We’ll probably never know. No unpublished manuscripts have turned up.

For Picasso, who was a ceramicist, sculptor, printmaker, and stage designer, as well as a painter, that episode in the museum must have been a one-off. During his lifetime he created fifty thousand (!) works of art. Obviously, he knew when to let go and go on to the next project. The fact that he started to paint in his childhood and lived until he was ninety-one surely made a difference, as did being a genius.

Those of us who lack the confidence of geniuses have a harder time stopping editing and submitting our work to a publisher, or taking our portfolio to a gallery have a harder time figuring out when something we created is good. Or, if we had the gumption of Snoopy and wrote to the publisher to come get our mansuscripts.

Stop correcting and mail that manuscript. Most of us use email, but I had to post this photo because the mailboxes are so cute.

Throw in a Little Murder.

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Comments about The Giver of Stars, part 2

After months out in the weather, in the forest where wild animals roam, the body is still recognizable.

When I wrote my previous post about Jojo Moyes’s book, I hadn’t finished reading it. Now I have. I enjoyed her book very much until I got to the murder, then my eyes started rolling so much that it was hard to finish reading.

People who are not mystery writers should not write mystery novels. If they want to change genres, fine, just learn something about the genre first. It seems to me that Moyes wrote herself into a corner and did not know how to finish The Giver of Stars, so she threw in a murder. A totally preposterous murder.

Spoiler alert.

A book as a murder weapon supposedly used to bash in the back of a man’s head. Little Women, wielded by a woman. I supposed it could happen with a 759-page hardback book. And then this smart woman goes off and leaves the book behind to incriminate herself. Uh-huh.

We’re supposed to believe that a backwoods hillbilly wanted to read Little Women and when he finished it, conscientiously set off on foot, on a snowy, icy day, set off to return the book to the library. Never mind that the story is about packhorse librarians who not only deliver books to people living in the hills of Kentucky but also pick them up a week or two later and return them to the library. Then this dedicated reader slipped on ice, fell over backward, and cracked his skull on a rock, the book flew into the air and landed on his face leaving bruises.

A murder weapon. Really?

Months later, when the body is found, the now pregnant horseback librarian is arrested and held in jail for months where she eventually gives birth and months after that is put on trial. The motive for the murder is supposedly a blood feud that has lasted for generations and was started by the victim’s “descendants” (you read that right) that’s lasted for generations.

Wouldn’t the crunch of hoofs on an icy trail have alerted the victim? A question never asked.

I hate it when writers, for the sake of not spoiling their story, make smart characters behave stupidly. I’m a layman but I could have presented a better case for the defense than the lawyer in the book. Anyone could have been out in the woods. Anyone could have wielded the blunt instrument. The woods are full of rocks. But does the lawyer make that argument? Of course not. The book would have ended a hundred pages sooner if he had. No dramatic childbirth in the county jail. No heroic librarians striving to save their friend. No self-sacrificing suspect sending away her baby and child so they won’t be tainted by association with her.

 I won’t reveal the outcome of the trial, but you can probably guess.

There’s a very broad hint that the murder victim committed incest and impregnated his own daughter. Talk about a motive for murder, but that’s glossed over. Both his daughters are too mousy to commit homicide.

Will I be reading any of Moyes’s other books? I’m not sure but probably not. There are real mystery writers out there whose books I enjoy.

Moyes isn’t the only author who’s fallen into the trap of thinking that including a mysterious death in her story is a breeze. Elin Hilderbrand fell into the same trap in two of her books, The Castaways and The Perfect Couple.

The Castaways is the most annoying of the two. A married couple drowns under mysterious circumstances. They are part of a group of friends who are so irritating that I figured that they must have drowned themselves just to get away from these people. In between long, overly-detailed narratives about the history of these relationships, the local Nantucket cops investigate the deaths. The case comes to nothing.

The same cops investigate the drowning in The Perfect Couple. Once again, the case comes to nothing but the reader has wasted hours trying to figure out which of the annoying cast of characters “done it.”

Not that talented mystery writers don’t mess up. They do, especially if they’ve been writing best-selling books for years, have run out of ideas, and are now too big to edit.

It pays to read the blurb. Read reviews, not just newspaper reviews. As far as I know, there are no more Dorothy Parkers, who wrote things like, “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” Read reviews by fellow readers. Don’t read just the five-star reviews. Read the one and two-star reviews. They can save you time and money.

Poem: Amy Lowell

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American poet. 1874 – 1925

The Giver of Stars

Hold your soul open for my welcoming.
Let the quiet of your spirit bathe me
With its clear and rippled coolness,
That, loose-limbed and weary, I find rest,
Outstretched upon your peace, as on a bed of ivory.

Let the flickering flame of your soul play all about me,
That into my limbs may come the keenness of fire,
The life and joy of tongues of flame,
And, going out from you, tightly strung and in tune,
I may rouse the blear-eyed world,
And pour into it the beauty which you have begotten.

“The Giver of Stars” is also the title of a book by British author, Jojo Moyes. It’s in those pages that I found the first verse of this lovely poem.

Wiki describes Ms. Moyes as a romance writer. Since I’ve read only half of The Giver of Stars, and a summery of her first book, Me Before You, I can’t say for sure that I would agree with that description. Based on what I’ve read of “Stars” I can say that her books are most likely not what Americans would call romance novels even though she has twice won the Romance Novel of the Year award from the Romantic Novelists’ Association. The Giver of Stars seems more like women’s fiction, the story of friendship between five women.

The novel is based on the true stories of women who were traveling horseback librarians who, during the Depression, carried books to people who had no other access to reading materials.

The novel is set in rural Kentucky’s coal country. The main character is Alice Wright, a young English woman who marries a handsome American not just because she’s fallen in love with him, but in order to escape an unhappy home life. Her marriage proves to be a disappointment–a seemingly indifferent husband and an overbearing father-in-law with whom the young couple lives. Seeking escape from her suffocating new home, Alice volunteers to be one of four horseback librarians.

The Giver of Stars is an interesting book for its descriptions of life during the Thirties in rural Kentucky, the lives of the librarians, and the land they live in. Some of the details don’t seem all that believable to me. I’ve caught more than one anachronism. But, after all, this is fiction, not a textbook. The story is good enough for me to overlook minor mistakes. To me this seems like a gentle book. Yes, brutal things happen, but so far they are described innocuously.

Besides the inherent interest of the story, I’m also reading The Giver of Stars to learn why Ms. Moyes’ books have been translated into forty-six different languages and have sold eight million copies. I’m hoping to learn something from her that I can apply to my own writing.

“No-vember” Poem

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Thomas Hood, English Poet and Humorist 1799 – 1845

Today is very Novemberish, as describe in Thomas Hood’s poem. It’s wet, drab, and foggy. My aparment building is on a knoll from which I can usually see trees, houses, commercial buildings, hills, and mountains. Today I can’t even see across the small valley.

A foggy view from my balcony.
November

No sun — no moon!
No morn — no noon —
No dawn — no dusk — no proper time of day.
 
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member —
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! —
November!

For me this verse is no more than a bit of hyperbole. I’m lucky enough to live in a state where even in mid-winter it’s never really bleak. The sun makes an appearance, even if a brief one, almost every day. My state’s nickname is the Evergreen State for good reason. Not only do we have conifers, we also have madronas which never lose their leaves. The fog is never so thick that we can’t see anything. But even if things are never as bleak as Hood describes them, it can feel that way when it’s been raining without a break for days on end.

However, for Hood living in London during the Industrial Revolution his poem was most likely an accurate description of how things were. Coal was the chief source of energy. Contemporary writer Hugh Mill writes about “the lurid gloom of the atmosphere that overhangs it” (the city) and its “innumerable chimneys.” The smog used to be so bad that it entered buildings, homes, theaters, concert halls, among others. Add November’s gloomy weather and it must have been more gloomy than we can imagine. Is it any wonder that Hood died so young?