We Read Fiction to Make Sense of Life’s Disorder

January 22, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Life is often disordered, but fiction cannot be. We read fiction to make sense of life’s disorder, and we demand that things make sense. No matter how well ordered the rest of the plot, when a stranger comes and simply hands the hero the one element he needs to complete his mission, we feel cheated. The hero should have to work for his goals.

This same order must be inherent in every bit of the book, characters as well as plot. Foolish and spontaneous actions, arbitrary decisions and behavior make the story unbelievable. A character can’t simply wake up one morning with a desire to change jobs, or go on a quest, or hunt for a murderer. While such whims are a part of our lives, they are not part of fictional characters’ lives. All their decisions must be motivated.

A character can wake up one morning with a desire to change jobs, for example, but the author needs to add a few words to explain why: a quarrel with a boss, a promised promotion that doesn’t materialize, a backbiting co-worker. If a character must quit on a whim, the author has to establish motive from within the character. Perhaps the character always acts on whim, in which case the author needs to show that. Or perhaps it’s June; the scents seeping in the open window remind the character of the long summer days of childhood, and he has an overwhelming need to experience that freedom again.

Readers will believe almost anything an author wants them to believe, as long as it is motivated.

At the beginning of my book, More Deaths Than One, (which can be seen by clicking on the My First Chapters link off to the right) I have Kerry, a graveyard-shift waitress, showing an interest in Bob, the quiet hero, who stopped by the coffee shop every night for a hot chocolate. I always thought it was enough that she was bored and was playing games with him, trying to get him to talk, but a reader told me she found Kerry’s motivation for involving herself with Bob a bit thin.

Because Bob is debilitated by headaches and nightmares, I need Kerry to push him into action when he discovers that the mother he buried twenty years ago is dead again and that he has a doppelganger living what could have been his life. If her motivation for involving herself with Bob isn’t believable, then the whole book falls apart.

I thought I was finished with Bob and Kerry. More Deaths Than One was the first book I wrote, also the third and the fifth, and now it looks like it might be the seventh.

In life, as in fiction, we have to work for our goals, but I wouldn’t mind if a stranger came and simply handed me a publishing contract.

Posted in books, culture, fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , . 6 Comments »

Mafia Cat Rejects Hilter. Hitler Breaks Off German-Italian Alliance. War Ends.

January 18, 2008 — Pat Bertram

I once read that certain topics were guaranteed attention getters. The only four from that list I remember are Hitler, the Mafia, war, and cats, to which I would add rejection. My post “A Rejection So Pleasant It Was Almost an Acceptance” attracted more attention than the last four combined. The title of this post is a 12-word short story based on those five attention getters (it got you here, didn’t it?) but the one I will be focusing on is rejection.

Rejection is hard to deal with because we feel so . . . rejected. Writers aspiring to be published, however, need to learn how to deal with it. There are hundreds of thousands of books written each year by unpublished novelists, and only a couple of hundred will be accepted by major publishers. Rejection, then, is part of the game.

A fellow writer pointed out that my great rejection letter scored high on the etiquette scale, but it was very likely a form letter. He could be right. I once got a rejection letter from an agent that was printed out on a computer and addressed to me personally. The letter spoke of my writing ability, mentioned the name of my book and how they had considered taking it on but had to pass because the subject matter was not quite right for their agency. Pleased with the personal touch and believing I was close to finding representation, I checked to see which of my novels would be a better fit, shot off another query, and received the same basic rejection letter in return. Definitely a case of a form letter that scored high on the etiquette scale.

If it is possible to write rejection letters that make the recipient feel good, why do agents and editors send letters that are cold, almost cruel? Because, despite what they say, they do not want to be queried. They get thousands of queries a year, and each of those queries mean unpaid work.

My advice? Briefly glance at any letter you receive to make sure it is a rejection, then shred it. Get it out of your sight. Send out more queries; to a certain extent, the more you are rejected, the more you become inured to it. Also, learn to see rejection letters for what they are: an attempt at keeping you from bothering that agent or editor again.

And hope that one day you will become so well known that those agents will seek you out, and then you can send them rejection letters.

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

A Rejection So Pleasant It Was Almost an Acceptance

January 16, 2008 — Pat Bertram

 Yesterday I received two encouraging emails. The first was a rejection letter from an agent:

“Thank you for allowing us to review your manuscript for Light Bringer. Your writing is very impressive and, on a personal level, I enjoyed the story immensely. Unfortunately, at this time, we are not prepared to offer a contract for representation.

“I know it is disappointing to receive a rejection, but this is certainly not meant to suggest that your work is without merit. Rather, given the small size of our agency and the fluctuating nature of the market, our literary needs change periodically and sometimes we must pass on good writing simply because it doesn’t match those needs.

“Given the quality of your work, it really is just a matter of time and persistence before you find the right agent or publisher.”

The second email was a notice from Amazon regarding my novel Daughter Am I:

“Thank you for participating in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. We received thousands of submissions and were impressed by the incredible talent and creativity seen in the entries. We are happy to inform you that you have been selected as a semi-finalist.

“You can find your entry on Amazon.com via the following link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00121WDKQ.

“Now that you’re a semi-finalist, feel free to encourage friends and family to review yours and others’ entries.”

It sounds as if I had a good day, which I did, but at the end of it, I am still unpublished. Persistence is something I can do, but I could also use some help. If you get a chance, will you check out my ABNA entry? You can download it by clicking on the above link.

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On Writing: Gifts from the Muses

January 15, 2008 — Pat Bertram

When I begin to get immersed in a creating a book, whether by writing or simply by working it out in my mind, I look twice at everything that comes my way, wondering if it is a gift from the muses.

Today I received a begging letter from The Nature Conservancy, which described the Karner blue butterfly, and what they are doing to preserve it. I tossed the letter into the trash, then immediately fished it out. I’m familiar with blue wasps, and recently I saw a huge blue bee, but I had never seen a blue butterfly, and the thought captured my imagination.

I could see it, a scene in my new novel — a savannah of blue lupines, clouds of blue butterflies, a swarm of blue bees, a few blue wasps daubing in the mud. My characters would be filled with awe as they made their way through the blue, but it would be so strange that they would also be fearful.

Of course, like all gods and goddesses, the muses are fickle and love to play tricks on us humans. I wouldn’t be surprised if by the time I finished writing my book and got it published, blue would have been done to death. The nine muses will be out there somewhere in the great blue yonder, laughing at me and my gullibility in thinking I was original.

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Creating a Character — Part V

January 10, 2008 — Pat Bertram

Interesting characters make interesting stories, not the other way around. Cardboard cutouts and comic book heroes serve the needs of many popular books today, but I want more than that for my current work. A tongue-in-cheek apocalyptic novel, it could easily dissolve into foolishness without a well-developed character to give it credibility. During my last few posts, I have been profiling this character, but he is still not fleshed out. He needs physical characteristics, though not all characters are defined by the way they look. If I remember correctly, Mark Twain never described Huckleberry Finn.

Does it matter what my character looks like? I won’t know for sure until I start writing the book, but I doubt it. He is an ordinary guy who becomes extraordinary because of all he endures. Now that I think about it, that is the basic plot of all of my books, and one I never get tired of reading or writing. I realize that to sell in this tight market, a book has to immediately capture the attention of an agent, an editor, a reader, and to do that you need more than an average guy. But I am so tired of reading about gutsy females, stone-cold business executives, leftover war heroes, beaten-down cops, bitchy/successful/beautiful/rich women, muscle-bound gunslingers, that an average guy suits me and my story just fine.

My main characters all tend to be stoic, which make them seem unbelievable or standoffish. Most people like to experience emotions vicariously, and if characters react stoically, it makes it hard for readers to identify with them. So I need a character tag: a habit or trait that helps Chip stand out from the page. It’s a simple thing, but I decided he likes candy — not just any candy, but something specific like licorice or butterscotch. He always carries a few pieces with him, and then one day not long after the world ends, he reaches into his pocket for a candy that isn’t there. This, more than anything else he has experienced, tells him that the world he knew is gone, and his stoicism slips. Does he cry? Scream? Have a temper tantrum? Throw things?

I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out after I write the book.

Posted in books, fiction, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , . 8 Comments »

Creating a Character — Part III

January 8, 2008 — Pat Bertram

To be real, a character must have strengths and weaknesses. I have been creating a profile for Chip, the hero of my work in progress, and I know some of his strengths: he is independent, can cope with adversity, has high ethical standards. The only weakness I know about so far is that he is distrustful of women, which women see as a failure to commit.

Strengths and weaknesses are arbitrary. Independence can become an inability to depend on others, an ability to cope can be seen as indifference, high ethical standards can become intransigency. Which is great for the book: the resulting misunderstandings can cause conflicts among characters and the plot or subplots to thicken.

I can already see that Chip’s high ethical standards and principles will be a driving force in the story. He is a vegetarian and an animal lover who will be forced to kill to feed those dependent on him. His independence, exemplified by a need for freedom, is also at stake. He will be forced to decide how much of his freedom he is willing to give up for safety, and how much of his safety he is willing to give up for freedom.

So far, I haven’t been able to come up with a special strength or weakness that would set Chip apart from any other character, but since plot and character are so closely related, this may not be a bad thing. It does no good to assign a special strength or weakness to a character if it is not going to be tested during the story, and I don’t want to Chip to be constrained by a particular trait before he even begins his adventures. If he needs a special strength, I will write it in when necessary. The great thing about writing is that we are not stuck with what is past. We can always go back and recreate it to answer present needs.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if life outside the pages of our novels worked that way?

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Cook’s Cutting-Edge Plots and Cookie-Cutter Characters

January 5, 2008 — Pat Bertram

I read a Robin Cook book the other day. Doesn’t matter which one — they are all similar with their cutting-edge plots and cookie-cutter characters. After more than three decades of writing, he should have learned a bit about characterization, but apparently he doesn’t need to. He is a bestselling author.

That’s right: an author. Not the practicing physician he seems to want us to think he is, but an author. Wearing the accoutrements of a physician, he smirks at us from his book jackets, which announce that he is on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. Can you imagine his poor patients? After thirty-five years of hanging around his waiting room, they are getting blinder and deafer as the nurse says for the ten-thousandth time, “He’s on leave. Just be patient and he’ll get to you when he can.”

One point in Cook’s favor is that, ignoring what his picture says about him and concentrating on his books, he is an unpretentious author. He doesn’t expect us to believe he is a literary genius. He is what he wanted to be: a bestselling author.

When he embarked on a writing career, he read one hundred bestsellers and dissected them, then began writing his own. He is good at being a bestselling author, but he is terrible at characterization. Not one of his characters has ever leapt off the page into my imagination. They are simply types fulfilling specific roles.

I want more than that for my books. I may never be a bestselling author. I may never even be a published author, but by gum, I can learn how to write characters that people will love or love to hate. (And so could Robin Cook, if he wanted to.)

I am starting to write a new novel, one that has languished in the back of my mind for the past year, and I need to create a hero. A reader of this blog commented, “Why not blog a character? It will help you with thinking about personality, motivation, history, yet you won’t have to worry about where the story is going, and it won’t have the pressure of having to write a whole book.”

I’m not sure I know what “blogging a character” is, but I can certainly begin creating one here.

I’ll start tomorrow.

Posted in blogging, books, life, writing. Tags: , , . 3 Comments »

In the Beginning: Starting to Write a Novel

January 3, 2008 — Pat Bertram

I finished writing my fourth novel several months ago, and I feel as if I should be starting another one. After all, a writer writes, right?

I have a synopsis and a great hook, but I just can’t get into the story. I don’t know who my characters are or why anyone, including me, should like them. I am bored by the minutiae of their ordinary lives and I want to jump right into the extraordinary times that are coming, but I need the preamble to set up the story. I suppose I could start with the last chapter as Margaret Mitchell did for Gone With the Wind, and work my way toward the beginning, but my linear mind would rebel. Or I could start with a violent scene to get my adrenaline going. Books that start with violence sell better than ones that begin more passively, anyway.

I tell myself that, good or bad, I should just get the story down on paper and worry about rewriting later. Then I remember that it’s hard for me to find any words, so they need to be good.

Starting to write a novel is always difficult, even for professionals like Mary Higgins Clark who have been writing for decades. She admitted in an interview that it never gets easier. But still she writes.

Perhaps if I were writing for publication as she does, I would be motivated. There is nothing like the threat of having to return an advance to keep a writer churning out the words. I am not writing for publication yet, and I already have four unpublished novels packed away in the dusty reaches of my computer. Adding another seems pathetic.

So what’s the alternative? Blogging. It satisfies my writing urge, the posts are short and don’t require a big commitment of my time, and I don’t need to create interesting characters.

Characters are the key to a good beginning. Once you know who they are and what they want, they can help drive the story. But the only way to learn who they are and what they want is to write them. It’s a vicious circle.

For now, I’ll stick to blogging.

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On Writing: Giving 110% 24/7

December 30, 2007 — Pat Bertram

If I hear one more person say he is going to give a hundred and ten percent, I think I’ll scream or vomit or do something equally repulsive.

What does it mean, anyway? A hundred and ten percent of what? Once you go beyond one hundred percent, you get into a form of mathematics that I know nothing about. It could be a hundred and ten percent of two hundred percent, which isn’t good. Or it could be a hundred and ten percent of one thousand percent, which is worse.

Unless you flunked remedial math, in which case you might have an excuse for your ignorance, you should know that you cannot give more than one hundred percent. That is the maximum. I’m not certain it is even possible for a person to give the maximum effort. Your energy and fluids and muscles would be so debilitated that you might not be able to recover. But if it were possible to give a maximum effort, the world would be a great place to live because of all you special people.

The only expression ghastlier than a hundred and ten percent is 24/7. When speaking of a business, it might apply, but when it is used for a person, as in “I work twenty-four seven,” it becomes impossible. The only thing a person can do 24/7 is breathe, and with sleep apnea being so prevalent, a lot of people don’t even do that 24/7. You certainly can’t work 24/7. What about sleeping? Eating? Defecating? All these activities subtract from that 24/7. (If you continue to work while on the toilet, I don’t want to know about it.)

There is nothing wrong with hyperbole. It is an acceptable literary form. But please, if you must hyperbolize, be inventive. I’m certain that if you try you can come up with something even more annoying than giving a hundred and ten percent 24/7.

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On Writing: How to Deal With Rejection

December 3, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I got the first truly negative critique of my crime writing contest entry, More Deaths Than One, and it was savage. I emailed the guy, a POD publisher, and told him I appreciated his honesty, then it dawned on me his critique was no more honest than the ones from people who gave me great reviews hoping for a great review in return.

Though this was a comment left on an online contest entry and not strictly a rejection letter, it is basically the same thing. So how do we deal with rejection? After we calm down, we go through the critique line by line and see if it makes any valid points. (If you are interested in reading the chapter in question, you can find it at ptbertram.gather.com or off to the right under My First Chapters.)

This is what the publisher had to say:

“A lot of great comments, Pat, but I couldn’t get past the tenth paragraph. The opening scene just doesn’t compel me to continue reading. There are way too many pronouns, so much that the characters begin to appear as paper thin quite quickly. While there is probably a great deal to this story to warrant all the kudos this chapter has generated, I look at it as I would any submission I read, and my feeling is that the bookstore owners who read the first page are going to feel the same way. A first chapter has to bite the reader by the scruff of the neck and not let go. A mundane scene in a diner doesn’t do that. It doesn’t have to be over the top, but it has to fill the reader with the wonderment of the story.

“So, I went back and read the entire chapter, feeling that if everyone else thought it was great, I was missing something. I didn’t see the writing get any better, to be frank. In fact, the diner scene was the most interesting. The story focuses on the embezzlement part of the story, which seemed like a fair hook to start a mystery, and you throw in the one little sentence about the disembodied hand in the culvert, with apparently enough evidence to indicate that the victim was tortured. The cemetery scene was so devoid of description that I didn’t really catch on the first time through that it was a cemetery scene. I am not even sure what the heck happened after the cemetery scene, which ended rather abruptly. As it is the key scene in the story, having read your description in your spam asking me to read this story, I am a bit disappointed that the key elements of this mystery were given so flimsily and without impact.

“The only question I am left with is the question that never gets answered: What about the boyfriend who embezzles from his own business? This was the only compelling point in the entire chapter.

“I would make this first chapter entirely in the diner, and leave the cemetery scene for its own Chapter 2, with full descriptive imagery. Let the diner scene twist entirely around the opening question of the boyfriend’s embezzlement and the headline of the disembodied hand. Then, as the chapter has given us an understanding of these characters, and Bob’s indifference to the two crimes at the center of the reader’s attention, he finds the obituary, and waitress he is beginning to care less and less about gives him so many questions that he can ‘t answer about the obituary, and maybe even offers to help him figure it out if Bob helps her catch her boyfriend in the act of embezzling.

“But told with enough description and detail, and with enough characterization tags that everything is not He and She and It, the concept is intriguing enough to hang a story on. If it involves too much “Twilight Zonery,” I would not regard it as a story for the crime fiction genre. If it works out that there are imposters, or perhaps Bob is not the man he thinks he is, this has some prime potential as a crime story. If it works out that this is more in the genre of a ghost story, I would again expect it to fall into a different genre. However, as it stands, I would not be reading beyond this chapter to find out.

“Another question I have to ask is why you are setting this in the time of the S&L scandals? Not far enough back to be of any historical interest, and not recent enough to be of interest to readers of contemporary novels. Instead, the story is dated. Unless the Silverado scandal or that period of time is central to the story, there is not much point in pushing the story back to that time. Most readers won’t even know that the name Silverado is meant to fix the time period, as this is entirely a cultural reference that even in the midst of the scandal was a bit of obscure trivia.”

Let’s look at this paragraph-by-paragraph. Bookstore owners? What is he talking about? Most books are sold online or in megastores or discount stores, and as I am willing to bet those corporate buyers don’t read any part of a book before buying it, we can cross off the first paragraph as irrelevant.

Next we come to the disembodied hand. There is no disembodied hand in the book. A brief mention of a decomposing corpse as an example of a news story is all. And the cemetery scene. Would you sit still for a description of a cemetery? I wouldn’t. I had one in there and took it out because there is no point in describing something of no importance especially when we all know what it looks like. Perhaps, as another commenter said, I could have mentioned the scent of lilacs or the feel of the leaves against his cheek, but that has no bearing on this particular critique of a critique.

We can forget any mention of the embezzlement, because it goes to the character of the waitress and is not a major part of the story. Since most readers thought the café scene too long, there is no reason to extend it (unless, of course, a publisher who offers me a contract wants it changed. Then I will do what I have to do.)

We can forget all about this particular publisher’s displeasure over pronouns; he’s probably right, but since he offers no suggestions of how to improve the writing, it falls under the category of criticism, not constructive criticism.

And we can ignore his diatribe about the timeframe since it is important to the story; the mention of the Broncos game and Silverado are necessary to put us there. As for Silverado being trivial . . . The son of the vice-president/president-elect and the brother of the current president was involved. This is more than a bit of obscure trivia. It is history and such an abominable misuse of power that we should have it seared on our brains.

So what are we left with? If “perhaps Bob is not the man he thinks he is, this has some prime potential as a crime story.” Since this is exactly what the story is about, and since elsewhere the publisher said that great writers welcome criticism, which I did, then what he is really saying is that I am a great writer and my story has some prime potential as a crime story.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Posted in life, writing. Tags: , . 3 Comments »
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