Cheese Puffs, Part 3

Part 1 & Part 2

The first thing (after the punching) that struck me was the huge difference in the quantity of proper nouns between these two pieces, even in just a couple paragraphs. (And I will say, this probably jumped out at me because it’s something I’m guilty of doing myself.)

TROE: Lux, London, Northern Line

TOFGB: Friday, Hastings Channel 8, Friday, Hyundai, 7-Eleven, Mother Teresa, Hastings Gas & Electric, Whittle Advertising, Mother Teresa, Pencil Face, HG&E

Obviously some proper nouns are necessary. If it’s something/someone that’s going to come up again, you need to be able to refer to it w/o launching into a sentence-long description every time. Others are necessary to establish certain facts (like where the story takes place). But others are just noise. It seems to me that if you’re using proper nouns as shorthand, then maybe an actual description would be a better choice. In some cases, a generic would do just as well and be less distracting. (It would definitely wear better over the long-term.)

TROE:

  • Lux. Raises questions. Who is Lux and why is her presence unsettling? Probably the most important of the three words.
  • London. Establishes setting. Even if you’ve never been there, the word “London” is very evocative. That one word contains a whole bundle of images/sounds/textures/etc.
  • Northern Line. Adds authenticity to setting. I’ve never been to London, so I couldn’t tell you if there actually is a Northern Line, but it sounds real, and that makes the author and, in turn her narrator, sound like she knows what she’s talking about.

TOFGB:

  • Friday. Establishes that it’s the end of a long, hard week.
  • Hastings Channel 8. Establishes that the narrator works for a TV station in “Hastings”. The problem I have with “Hastings” is that it’s meaningless. Unlike London, I don’t get an immediate picture when I hear the word, and, in fact, I assume that it’s fictional. Just “Channel 8” or the “local TV station” would have worked here.
  • Friday. —
  • Hyundai. Establishes that the narrator drives an economy car that she doesn’t maintain, but is the brand of the car important? My “crappy car” or my “crappy hatchback” would probably work just as well.
  • 7-Eleven. Establishes that the narrator purchases her morning coffee at a convenience store, despite the fact she doesn’t seem to enjoy it. Probably means she gets up too late to make her own coffee (or that she doesn’t know how). Probably also means that she’s too broke to purchase a better cup of coffee at a coffeeshop. All good. But again, brand-name isn’t really important. “Cheap convenience store coffee” would have worked as well.
  • Mother Teresa. Pop culture reference, used as shorthand to mean a good person.
  • Hastings Gas & Electric. Establishes the little guy / Big Guy dynamic. Meant to ally the reader with the narrator. A proper name makes it easier to refer to later on. But it also implies that the town has its own independent electric utility—which makes me wonder how big a “Big Guy” it can be.
  • Whittle Advertising. Establishes that narrator lost her advertising job (and now has a job she hates) because of someone else’s mistake. The name of the agency doesn’t really add anything (it is the name of the narrator’s former boss), but it makes it easier to refer to later.
  • Mother Teresa. —
  • Pencil Face. A nickname the narrator has given the defense lawyer. Meant to further ally the reader with the narrator. This can be effective in moderation.
  • HG&E. —

These two excerpts have approximately the same number of words, but the TROE excerpt consists of 16 sentences (longest sentence: 28 words), while the TOFGB excerpt consists of just 8 sentences (longest sentence: 51 words). I don’t know if that’s typical of the literary/mainstream divide–obviously I’d have to look at more examples to say for sure–but I thought it was striking.

To be continued…

Cheese Puffs, Part 2

Part 1 is here.

I had been opening The Rules of Engagement and reading random passages. Writing this post got me thinking about the concrete differences between litfic and fluff. I usually chalk it up to intangibles and had never really sat down and analyzed what it is that sets them apart. But as I sat there, I realized I had a self-described (by the author) chick lit book that I could look at. (I picked it up this summer because of a six-degrees thing w/ the author–she once paid my writing a compliment that I’ve never forgotten.)

So. This is the opening of The Rules of Engagement:

Lux was coming. Already she was somewhere in the wide expanse of London. My awareness of her presence unsettled me vaguely. Sometimes, before she flew into visit, I dreamed strange dreams. Like a breeze, she stirred up things.

Midafternoon, I rode the Northern Line home to meet her and stared at the people scrunched on the surrounding banks of seats. Across the aisle, a man in aviator shades sat sketching in a notebook–I wondered if wearing dark glasses in the underground made the world easier to draw. Another man, sweating profusely, clutched a tabloid paper without reading it. Beside him, a woman in a golden sari clamped two polythene bags of groceries between her feet. Out of curiosity, I tried to imagine how each would look transformed by anger. How would the soft, relaxed line of the first man’s lips contort, or the sad-eyed desolation of the second man’s face, or the woman’s dreamy distraction? I studied the first man’s hands, dark fingers grasping a pencil, the thick wales of ruddy skin over the other man’s knuckles. The woman’s fingers were laced and folded over the pleats of cloth in her lap. I wondered what violence each was capable of and what was the worst act of violence they had committed in their lives so far. Had any of them ever punched someone, or drawn blood? If so, how did they explain their actions to themselves?

Okay, so the interesting (fortuitous?) thing is that the story opens with Catherine Bush’s narrator contemplating whether any of her seatmates have ever punched someone.

Well. Lani Diane Rich’s Time Off For Good Behavior starts with her narrator actually punching someone. At least, she tries. (Could I have picked a better comparison if I had done it on purpose? Ha!) The swing-and-miss actually comes a few pages in, so I skip a bit after the opening paragraphs:

The court date fell on the Friday of what had been a very bad week for me as an account executive at Hastings Channel 8. Any week in which you take people’s money and give them airtime is a bad week, but that week had been unusually degrading, seeing as I’d dropped my card off at more than thirty businesses and had, in no particular order, been screamed at, spit on, and called a bloodsucking leech.

On that Friday morning, I put runs in two separate pairs of panty hose, was forced to wake up my landlady so she could get her nephew in 2B to give my crappy Hyundai a jump, and stained my favorite skirt with cheap, 7-Eleven coffee. By the time the bailiff escorted me to the witness stand, I was already in a bad mood and would have been snippy with Mother Teresa. As it was, the defense lawyer representing the sleazeballs at Hastings Gas & Electric, who were responsible for the explosion three years ago that destroyed Whittle Advertising and nearly killed me, was definitely not Mother Teresa.

…

I almost heard it, the pop and hiss as my fury erupted. I pulled my arm back and swung at Pencil Face [the defense lawyer]. He’d turned to glance at his sleazy HG&E guys, so he didn’t see me coming.

To be continued…

Catching up

I’ve been sick, sick, sick this past week. Yes, that sentence did require three sicks. I get sick very rarely, but when I do, woo! I go all out. Maybe it’s because I only catch the Really Evil Virii (“virii” just sounds so much more evil than “viruses”). Anyhow. That’s where I’ve been.