The Confabulator Cafe

Author: pswearingen

  • The “Flavia de Luce” mystery series, by Alan Bradley (book review)

    Imagine, if you will, an eleven-year-old girl who loves chemistry and Gladys, her battered bicycle, and always seems to be the first to find dead bodies in a series of novels with such titles as The Sweetness At the Bottom Of the Pie, The Weed That Strings the Hangman’s Bag, A Red Herring Without Mustard, I Am Half-sick Of Shadows, and Speaking from Among the Bones; an author who first started writing serious fiction in his mid-fifties and started to achieve fame for them in his sixties; and the extremely detailed setting of the novels was in a country he’d never visited.

    If your imagination is still trying to assemble all that, here are the missing pieces to this award-winning series of mystery novels: Flavia de Luce, the young heroine; Alan Bradley, the Canadian author; 1951 England, the setting. And if you haven’t read any of these stories, why not? They’re the best fiction to come down the pike in a long time. (more…)

  • The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (Book Review)

    imagesThe Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is the first of a series of three crime novels that Stieg Larsson completed before his death of a massive heart attack at age 50. It is a “phenomenon” novel and runaway best-seller in spite of some serious flaws: it starts with a prologue which does not involve the main characters; it ends with a summary that draws the novel well beyond the climax; after the prologue it moves slowly and describes the outcome of a trial; its dialogue is often wooden and serves as the author’s mouthpiece; its point of view sometimes wanders bewilderingly; descriptions are either perfunctory or very detailed, especially in the case of computer specifications; the Swedish-into-British English translation at times is quaint if not distracting; most of the characters in it have the same last name of Vanger, making the family tree thoughtfully included a vital but clumsy reference.

    So how could Larsson achieve the second-highest number of book sales in 2008 with all these shortcomings?

    (more…)

  • What is your preferred point of view?

    I’ve always had a problem with separating my characters from myself when I’m writing fiction, and so more of my main characters have been female than male and the POV third-person limited. Makes the POV less connected to me that way.

    Nevertheless, I did experiment with writing one novel in first person from a male’s POV, and after some slips at the beginning, the novel took off on its own, and I finished it successfully.

    The latest trend is for YA authors to use present tense (a few even use second, at least in a few separated spots), but present tense just doesn’t fit my style.

  • Influence

    W. Someset Maugham has been credited with stating “Write what you know.” He also has been quoted as say, “There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately no one knows what they are.”

    Sounds as if he might have had his good days and bad days in the creative process, too. And not only that, his edict to “write what you know” has been misused by many composition teachers and abused by their students who seem to prefer the second quote …

    Nevertheless, I write what I know. And then I slip into my “what if …?” mode, steal from every single author I’ve read and every person I’ve known, and assemble my stories out of bits and pieces, and what I end up with is a jigsaw-puzzle-like story of life.

    Most of my characters are assimilation and assemblages, but a few of them are directly based on one or two people I’ve known, at least at the beginning of their “lives” in my novels, until they take off on their own while I follow them and jot down their exploits in “What if …? Land”. What if I gave the sunny-faced girl I remember from my first period Junior English class more responsibility than she can handle? What if I dropped a black basketball player into a small town and forced him to play football? What if I placed a metal detector into the hands of a gay kid and sent him to the scene of a crime sixty years ago? What if I killed almost everyone off except for a teenager who has run away from home and manages to find a place of safety?

    Author influences on me are many and varied, but most of them are from the first books I read while growing up. Walter R. Brooks taught me how to generate humor in his “Freddy the Pig” series as did Hugh Lofting in the Dr. Dolittle novels. Nevil Shute showed me how to create happy endings that could be both satisfying and believable. Robert A. Heinlein was at least the first writer to create living, breathing creatures for me, and his contemporary, Arthur C. Clarke, taught me how to create settings that never existed out of what I knew, or at least suspected. Mackinlay Kantor and Jan de Hartog showed me how to create alternate histories and populate them with almost-real characters. And the list goes on.

    So – write what you know, but then be prepared to break any and all rules of writing. Works for me!

  • Salt (Flash Fiction)

    He slowly crawled out of his tent and looked around, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun. For at least a mile in any direction, right up to the foothills that surrounded the plain, he could see nothing but sharp-edged salt formations that he knew would lacerate his bare feet and break his ankles if he tried to walk across the formations. At least that’s what he’d been informed after the trial.

    The snow-streaked mountains in the distance seemed to dance and shimmer as he gazed at them, and he tried not to recall the military judge’s final pronouncement: “The jury has declared you guilty of the crime of second-degree murder by negligence of three civilians. You shall now serve a ten-year sentence which also will result in either your complete rehabilitation or your death. You will be placed in isolation for a term of not less than six months in an inescapable setting known as the Devil’s Golf Course and then returned to a prison stockade, the location to be determined. You will be monitored and returned to your camp if you do attempt to escape, and you will not be provided with anything more than the basic means of survival – a regular supply of food and water and soap, shelter, toilet facilities, but certainly no electronic device to allow you to communicate with others, especially not one similar to the texting device you employed to cause the deaths for which you have been hereby adjudged as directly responsible. So rules the court.”

    He glanced back at his one-man tent, and sure enough, a package about the size of a basketball had been placed behind it during the night. Probably a gallon jug of water, some fresh vegetables and fruit, another MRE, a container for his waste. He knew that already from his last briefing.

    His thumbs moved involuntarily, and he shook his hands and jumped up and down until his body was calm again, but not until after sweat had popped out on his forehead. Even during an early morning in late October, the temperature in Death Valley was already climbing, and in spite of the anti-heat inoculation he’d received, he did not feel comfortable.

    The images that had been imprinted on his brain pushed into his consciousness … the three mangled, bloody, and burnt bodies inside the crumpled vehicle from which the roof had been removed after his transport vehicle had ridden over it and crushed before it caught fire. The medical officer had told him that in time they’d fade away, but he’d dreamed last night, all night, each dream starting with him texting his fiancée and ending with him staring down at the nest of bodies in the car.

    Breakfast? Why not? He certainly wasn’t going to bash out his brains with a rock or a piece of salt, or stop eating and drinking and die of dehydration, and even if he did try to commit suicide the hidden cameras would alert a supervisor who would be on top of him before he could shed more than a few drops of blood. And then he’d be yanked out of here so quickly that his sweat wouldn’t have a chance to dry before he’d be dumped in a cell underground, with stale air pumped in and out and a single bulb in the ceiling, protected by a grill, instead of the sun and fresh, if overheated, air he had out here.

    He lit the propane burner and poured a little over a cup of water into a disposable aluminum pan and waited for it to boil while he pulled the tab on a  cinnamon-oatmeal mush MRE. He dropped a rounded spoonful of instant coffee into an enameled cup, and when the water started to roil he poured it into the cup, turned down the flame, and placed the MRE atop of it, wondering how long he should leave it. And how long he should wait until the next MRE, and whether it would be turkey or pork or beef pot pie, and when the next time would be that he would see an actual human being, and if his fiancée would be thinking of him now, and what the high temperature today would be and the low tonight, and whether the relatives of the three people he’d kill would hunt him down and enact vengeance … and he slowly crumpled to his knees, salty tears running down his face and into the salt crystals that made up much of the ground, knowing that the wet crystals might melt for an instant, but at least they’d be whole again when they dried.

  • Which is more important to you: plot or character?

    I can barely separate and prioritize plot/character when I write, as they are so closely intertwined in fiction. Nevertheless, I consider the prime purpose of writing fiction to be storytelling, so “plot” gets the nod, followed by character and then setting, also vitally important to fiction.

    By definition, a piece of fiction (novel or short story) moves one or more characters through settings. Ideally, the character undergoes conflicts at various points in the plot until s/he must conform to the various pressures – i. e., change – and then move on through life. This process is essentially the same in a novel or short story, although by definition (again) a short story revolves around only one main character who learns one truth about life (at the climax), whereas a novel involves several major characters who may experience a number of “a-HA!” moments when learning various truths about life.

    A character’s personality, therefore, depends up on what happens to him/her and how he reacts as the plot progresses, although a character can certainly influence the progression of the story.

    Nevertheless, without plot a story is not a story; without character it is a description of setting; and in essence character and plot must combine to produce a story which takes place in a setting.

    Complicated, yes – but so is life, and since Poe allegedly invented the short story, the process has worked, and the two fictional forms of novel and short story have entertained readers well.

  • Character development

    In the past – say around Dickens’ time – often writers would employ the clunky technique of establishing characters by stopping the story and then describing a character in detail: clothing, shape of brow, past indiscretions, jaw shape, blemishes, the whole bit. Characters were doomed to their roles from the start by birthmarks, the shape of their heads, club feet, curly hair, a “laughing mouth” – both negative and positive visual descriptors chosen by authors to pre-dispose their characters.

    Of course, that method was passé when Hemingway started his writing career in the 1920’s and thoroughly obsolete within another ten years as authors realized that stories should be developed by characters who reacted to forces around them and revealed their true natures as the story progressed.

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  • Self-publishing

    I’ve e-published six YA novels myself so far. I’ve purchased a few printed self-published books and downloaded several e-books. And my thoughts as I read most of the self-published books ran mostly to ‘hasn’t this writer ever heard of editing?’

    At the bottom end, many e-books are simply gawdawful (and I’m not talking about 2,000-word wonders uploaded by seventh-graders; I’m talking about novels that never should have been placed where the public can see them!). At the other extreme you can find well-written novels, including those that have been brought back into print by their authors.

    I hope that the e-book industry would soon find some kind of filter, other than low or no sales for crap. My guess is that everyone who thinks he’s an author has been glutting Smashwords, Amazon, et al, with “stuff” that no one would otherwise pick up, so that the effective agent filtering-out process of junk has been bypassed. Sooner or later, however, those who cannot spell or punctuate will grow tired of uploading and seeing few, if any downloads after readers reject their offerings, and those of us who do have a command of the English language will be able to “rise above” the current flow of trash so that readers will not have to wade through the glut to make reading choices.

    I’ve actually experienced fair sales of my six novels (well, five out of six – the new High School Series novel was placed on Smashwords and Amazon 1-1-12). My current market strategy is to offer the first title in the series for free and charge minimally for the others. I can’t say that the technique is a raging success, but I can say that downloads of the titles are steady, if slow.

  • How much is your own writing like your favorite author’s?

    I would have to say that my writing style is mostly unique, although I’ve snagged techniques from practically everyone I’ve read. Nevertheless, I try to provide a happy ending, or at least a satisfactory outcome, to my novels (I mean, how awful to kill off a YA character?!?), and so did one of my favorite authors, Nevil Shute, whose novels almost always beat up the main character all the way only to find him in the arms of his true love at the end. I may not go that far, but I do try to keep my MC alive through the story and reunited with a loved one at the end, too.

  • Writing routine and devices

    In spite of being old enough to be a registered Luddite, I use a Mac computer (either MacBook Pro or G4-hotrodded-to-G5-speed desktop) exclusively to write. I don’t think I’ll ever have to worry about Alzheimer’s, and my mind works way too fast for me to trust a typewriter or pen (although I keep my Olympia Standard and Parker 51 around for nostalgia’s sake).

    I follow no special writing routine, except during Nanowrimo, when I start after breakfast and write until my wrists hurt – literally (which is how I passed 50K words this year in 6 days). But otherwise, I write when I’ve finished up other daily tasks, as if I don’t, they may never be completed – I write like I read, quickly and voraciously.