Juvenilia

Flickr: Claudio

The latest book I read is called Parrot in the Oven and it’s by Victor Martinez. It’s intended for YA audiences.

It’s a very well written book. Compared to the two other YA books I read this summer, Bully and Ragged Dick, Parrot in the Oven is easily the best of the three. Martinez is most impressive when he uses his highly imaginative similes — and he has a lot of them in this book. Here’s a sampling:

“My fingers were as rubbery as old carrots”

“The girlish pitch of their voices sliced through the noise like a paper cut”

“Without work, I was empty as a Coke bottle”

They’re very impressive, and it seems like every paragraph has one. The quality of writing is the best part of the book.

But it’s also a confusing book because I’m not sure exactly what it is. The book isn’t quite a novel, it isn’t quite a short story collection, and it isn’t quite a memoir. Instead, it’s all three of these things at once. I suppose one source of my confusion is the blurb on the back cover, which suggests that the book is something that it isn’t. Here’s the blurb:

Fourteen-year-old Manny Hernandez wants to be more than just a penny. He wants to be a vato firme, the kind of guy people respect. But that’s not easy when your father is abusive, your brother can’t hold a job, and your mother scrubs the house as if she can wash her troubles away.

In Manny’s neighborhood, the way to get respect  is to be in a gang. But Manny’s not sure that joining a gang is the solution. Because, after all, it’s his life–and he wants to be one to decide what happens to it.

That sounds interesting, right? Well, the trouble is, that isn’t really what the book is about. Or, to be more precise, the last two chapters of the book deal with the gang subplot, but the first nine chapters of the book have nothing to do with that. At all! It’s like someone’s pulled a bait-and-switch on me.

All of the chapters (except, maybe, for the last two) feel more like short stories rather than parts of a larger, unified story. Manny may be the narrator throughout the book, but he isn’t always the main character. As often as not, one of the other characters takes on the role of the protagonist. The book keeps changing from chapter to chapter, and that left me confused. Just as I was starting to enjoy a story, Martinez changes direction and starts a new story.

Maybe I shouldn’t be expecting unity at all, or maybe Martinez is one of those writers who, after cutting their teeth on short stories, try to write a novel — but just end up writing more short stories.

Flickr: darkmatter

Another one of my books on my summer reading list was Strange Future by Joshua Smith. It’s another science fiction novel (this is my summer of sci-fi, apparently).

It’s sort of a time travel story. The protagonist, Thomas, and two other characters from the early 21st century are cryogenically frozen and wake up 200 years in the future. They struggle to overcome their culture shock and fit in to the brave new world. It’s said that science fiction is always less about the future and more about the present. That’s true here. Smith uses the journey to the future to satirize and critique our contemporary culture.

Although Smith’s novel has little in common with anything I’m writing, I still felt like I was looking into a mirror as I was reading.

Joshua Smith self-published Strange Future. I didn’t want to mention this fact because I know that self-publishing still has a bad reputation, and calling attention to that detail can be the kiss of death for a new self-published author. It doesn’t matter that there are more and more good, quality authors self-publishing good, quality books and stories; “self-publishing” is still haunted by the idea that it is the last refuge of the failed writer. Readers expect to open a self-published novel and find sentences riddled with typos and grammatical errors.

You don’t find those kinds of surface errors in Strange Future. Smith did a very good job proofreading his book. His words are spelled correctly; he understands how to punctuate sentences; his subjects agree with his verbs. Kudos to him!

But . . . (you knew a “but” was coming, didn’t you?) as I read Smith’s novel, I saw a bigger a problem — a problem that’s not quite as obvious as a page full of misspelled words, but a problem that is just as disturbing. It’s disturbing because it was the same problem I faced years and years ago with my first edition of Leah. The problem is that while Strange Future is proofread very well, it does not seem to have been revised.

Some examples:

In one chapter, Thomas and his friends eat lunch at an Indian restaurant in London. Smith does a good job of describing the restaurant, the waiter, the food, and how much the characters enjoy their meal. But nothing happens. The chapter could have been cut from the novel completely and nothing would have been lost. Too many scenes are like this. I feel like half the novel could have been deleted and the story wouldn’t be any different.

Another example: Smith does a pretty good job with dialogue — he gives his characters distinct personalities, and those personalities are reflected in their voices — but he also tends to let conversations run much too long. He allows them to talk about mundane things, like excusing themselves to use the bathroom, or planning a day’s shopping excursion in great (and needless) detail. Instead of sending the characters to the new setting and letting the story pick up from there, I have to sit and read about their odyssey to get out the front door (“Are you ready to go?” “Yes, are you ready?” “Yes, I’m ready. Is she ready?” “I don’t know. Let me ask. Are you ready, too.” “Yeah, I’m ready.” Etc.). The dialogue could have been so much better if it had been tighter.

Back in 2008, when I began revising Leah, I found hundreds and hundreds of sentences in my story that, although they were grammatically correct, they weren’t crafted as well as they could have been. I saw the same problem with Strange Future. Too many of his sentences just didn’t sound right — they didn’t sound finished. I eventually had to spend months rewriting and rewriting, trying to fix as much of those awful sentences as I could. Along the way, I gained an appreciation for the art of revising, and in fact I now believe that the revising stage is the most important stage of the writing process — more important than the first draft, more important than proofreading. It’s too bad that Smith hasn’t learned this lesson yet. Six more months of revising could have made a huge difference in his story.

This lack of revising is a problem I see too often from self-published writers. They spend a lot of time planning and drafting. They take care to proofread and edit, but they spend almost no time revising. Maybe they read through their story two or three times and made some changes, but because the revising stage is such hard work, and they’re anxious to be done with the project and get it published, they don’t spend as much time revising as they should.

I hope Smith revisits his story and revises it. That’s the great thing about self-publishing: a book never has to be “finished.” You can return to it, again and again, and keep improving it.

Flickr: kentclark333

Horatio Alger is one of those authors whose name everyone knows, but nowadays, no one reads. 125 years ago, though, he was the J.K. Rowling of his era. He wrote scores of novels for children and sold millions of copies of them. Unfortunately, all those novels were so formulaic in terms of plot and protagonist, that his name has become a cliche, synonymous with the rags-to-riches tale.

Until this summer, I had never read his work, but lately I’ve wanted to. I have in mind a future writing project which I describe as a sort of twisted, modern day take on the “Horatio Alger” story. I figure that if I’m going to use Alger as a model to mock that I ought to at least read one of his books.

So the other day, at a used book store, I found a 40-year-old paperback that contains two of Alger’s novels. The story I read is called Ragged Dick (an unfortunate title). It’s the story of a shoeshine boy in New York named Richard Hunter (even more unfortunate) who strives to better himself and his station in life.

One thing that became clear to me as I read was that Alger must not have spent a lot of time revising his novels. Indeed, since he probably wrote at least two or three titles a year, he might not have done any revising at all. Ragged Dick isn’t necessarily poorly written, but there were a lot of things that could have been revised or even cut. Take this, for example:

Micky himself had served two terms there; but confinement appeared to have had very little effect in amending his conduct, except, perhaps, in making him a little more cautious about an encounter with the ‘copps,’ as the members of the city police, are, for some unknown reason, styled among the Five-Point boys.

“For some unknown reason“? The etymology of “copp,” or “cop” as we say today, isn’t that mysterious, and a little bit of research could have given Alger the answer. And if he really couldn’t track it down, he should at least have omitted that phrase which doesn’t do him any credit at all as an author.

So there were lots of little things like that in the novel, but there were some good points too. Ragged Dick is a bit of a prankster and a wit, despite his young age, and he’s always ready with a pun. When Dick’s friend begins to teach Dick how to read, we get this silly exchange:

“The exercises generally commence with ringin’ the bell,” said Dick; “but as I ain’t got none, we’ll have to do without.”

“And the teacher is generally provided with a rod,” said Fosdick. “Isn’t there a poker handy, that I can use in case my scholar doesn’t behave well?”

“Tain’t lawful to use fire-arms,” said Dick.

Besides the rough quality of his writing, Alger gets trashed for offering a simplistic view of the world, but Alger was writing for children so I think he can be forgiven. Is it possible to realize your dreams through hard work, education, honesty, thrift, compassion, and a little luck? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But if Alger inspired a generation of boys to go to school, work hard, and save their money, then how can anyone find fault with that?

One thing that I enjoyed about the novel were the glimpses of life in mid-19th century New York. Alger records how much a modest apartment costs, how much a breakfast costs, how much a ferry ride costs. He also offers a short portrait of Central Park which is “under construction” at the time the story is set. Dick and his friend Frank speculate on how nice the park will look when it’s completed. Even if you don’t accept the novel as literature, it’s still a nice glimpse into American history.

I got clued in to a website called “I Write Like.” Here’s a link. What the site is supposed to do is analyze your writing and try to find the famous author that you supposedly resemble.

I decided to try it. First, I pasted the opening chapter of Leah. I clicked “Analyze” and immediately I got my report:

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Yay!

But then I thought, Wait a minute, I don’t write like James Joyce! Even I’m not that delusional. So I decided to try another chunk of text. This time, I pasted the first chapter of The Spring and again clicked “Analyze.” I write like Dan Brown. Nooooooooo!!!

So I tried again, I took the last chapter of The Spring, which is written in a very different voice than the rest of the novel. Click “Analyze.” Now I’m writing like Stephen King!

WTF?

So yeah, I’m not putting a lot of stock in this website, not when it’s giving me so many random responses. There was a news article about the site, which reported some famous authors trying the site and getting weird results too. Apparently, Margaret Atwood tried it and discovered she also writes like Stephen King. What’s funny is that “Margaret Atwood” is one of the possible results of the analysis. So even Margaret Atwood doesn’t write like Margaret Atwood!

Fatal Fame

by Mark McKenzie

The bleached-blonde newscaster came on, and Phil Robinson knew exactly what it meant: it was time for some “celebrity news.” Phil reached for the remote control, intending to mute the television, but over the newscaster’s shoulder he saw an image of his nemesis, the girl who had ruined his life and continued to make him miserable. Phil turned the sound up.

“In celebrity news today, the civil lawsuit brought against Sharon Sweeney by Phillip Thomas Robinson is still proceeding on schedule, even though the 18-year-old actress, who has starred in such blockbuster movies as The All American Girl and Lovable, was sentenced to a year and a half of probation by Los Angeles courts late last year. Miss Sweeney continues to claim that the car accident she was involved in was not her fault.” The screen cut to video of the young actress walking quickly down a street, apparently trying to flee from the horde of paparazzi and a cadre of “real” news reporters (on television, though, it was impossible to tell one group from the other) who were pursuing her and bombarding her with questions. Phil wondered why, if she really wanted to avoid the media, she didn’t just stay in her car? But then he remembered his foot and was glad that she wasn’t riding in a car, not even as a passenger. The suspension of her driver’s license was the only small victory he had achieved up till now. Breathless, the young actress pretended to be annoyed by the media circus she was leading down the street, but she still gladly gave an impromptu statement. She said, “I just don’t know why I’m being hounded by that guy! I think he just wants my money! You know how these people are! He’s trying to ruin my life and my career, and all because he wants to cash in on my fame! You see it all the time, but I never thought it would happen to me!” That was apparently all she wanted to say, but the crowd of photographers still pursued her, crying out, “Miss Sweeney! Miss Sweeney!”

The video cut back to the blonde newscaster who reported, “We contacted Everest Studios, which is about to start production on a sequel to Sharon Sweeney’s hit movie last summer, tentatively titled More Lovable. but they would not comment on the matter. However, our inside sources revealed that the studio is considering filing a lawsuit of their own against Phillip Robinson, the man suing Sharon Sweeney, if his lawsuit prevents the sequel from being made. In the meantime, we have our results from yesterday’s online celebrity poll! The question was, ‘Do you think the judge should dismiss the lawsuit against Sharon Sweeney?’ 90 percent of you said YES, 2 percent of you said NO, and another 8 percent texted us to say that you weren’t sure.”

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