6. The only way to write fiction that will take someone else by surprise is to let your work take you by surprise too. Get lost. Be scared. Have no idea where you’re headed. All those wrong directions are really right directions because they get you where you want to go.
7. You’ll know you’re at the end when you write something utterly unexpected and surprising to you, and then, when you try to write past it, you can’t. You’ll realize that without saying what you thought you were going to say, you’ve said it.
Tag Archives: Fiction
11: T is for Trespass
T is for Trespass by Sue Grafton
Another 55 cent book from the Book Sale. Hardcover, with a jacket, and another that was not a library book.
Previously on The Remainder Table…
[S is for Silence] flips between Kinsey’s 1987 world and flashbacks to 1953 (various characters). Since Kinsey is not a party to the 1953 flashbacks, the reader always knows more than she does. I’m not thrilled with this device. In a detective story, I think it’s best if we stick to the detective’s PoV—this is the only way the reader can play along (and isn’t that what a detective story is about?).
I’d forgotten about this. In T, while most of the story is told from Kinsey’s PoV, some of the chapters are told from the villain’s PoV. As with the flashbacks in S, I wasn’t excited about this device—I don’t think Grafton provided any insights into the character that we couldn’t have gotten another way. And it mitigated the suspense. Sure, there was still the “what is she going to do?” suspense, but there was no “who’s the villain?” More importantly, it put the reader ahead of Kinsey from the very beginning, which made Kinsey look kind of slow when she finally did catch on (which seems kind of unfair to the character).
I’m guessing that Grafton couldn’t think of a way to create doubt as to who the villain was with this particular storyline, so that’s why she went this route. But I think it would have been possible, if some of the minor characters had been played up more.
In T, what would normally be the side plot turns into the main plot. Kinsey’s neighbor, 89-year-old Gus, falls and dislocates his shoulder. He needs help while he recovers, but his only relative is a great-great-niece in NY. Kinsey manages to locate the niece, and she makes a brief visit to Santa Teresa. But because Gus is a Grumpy Old Man, she has trouble finding a home care nurse for him. When she finally finds someone, she only has Kinsey do a cursory background check, because she is eager to get back to her life in NY. Duh-duh-duh!
I enjoyed T more than S. But I know if I think about it too much, the whole thing will fall apart. (So I’m not going to ;-))
Here’s the thing. I know Kinsey Millhone isn’t great literature, but also know if I come across another in the series, I will probably read it. It’s reading junk food! nomnomnom It’s not even so much about the series itself, but about the fact that reading it also reminds me of reading the first books in the series, back when my favorite TV show was Remington Steele and my career aspiration was to be either a police detective, a private investigator, or a cat burglar.
Random tidbit: Grafton’s pet word is “ease”: people are forever easing onto stools, cars easing out of driveways, etc. etc.
Haha. It’s true! She still likes ease, but its noticeability was eclipsed by her new pet word (phrase?): “thumb lock.” I assume she means a deadbolt. I’ve never heard them referred to as thumb locks before.
10: The End of East
The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee
Another hardcover picked up at the book sale (I’m starting to feel repetitive…). This one was actually a library book—gently-used, as they say. The dust jacket was in good condition.
I was pretty excited to read this book because it’s not only set in Vancouver, it’s set on the east side.
If you’re not familiar, the east side of the City of Vancouver is generally referred to as “East Van.” The west side, otoh, is just referred to as the west side. This is because there’s already West Vancouver—a different city, to the north(west) of Vancouver. There is also the West End, which is the neighborhood near Stanley Park. (If you think that’s confusing, to the east of West Vancouver are not one, but two, North Vancouvers.)
Bonus Fun Fact: most people think of the east and west sides being divided by Main Street. But this is incorrect! The east/west divide is actually Ontario Street. This leaves a two-block strip of east-side addresses for Realtors to tout as “west of Main!” This has cachet because the west is the more affluent side of the city.
And my blathering is less of a digression than you might think when you consider the title…
Anyhow, I could very much visualize the areas she described, but I did start to wonder how much of that was my own pre-existing knowledge. Was there too much of a reliance on street names as a shorthand? I’m not sure. If you’re not from Vancouver and you read it, let me know what you think.
The End of East is Jen Sookfong Lee’s first novel. It’s about three generations of the Chan family, but more broadly about the difficulties Chinese immigrants to Canada faced due to racist immigration laws.
Seid Quan immigrates to Vancouver in the early 1900s, at a time when Chinese immigrants were subject to the head tax. He settles in the Downtown Eastside, in Chinatown, and ends up taking over ownership of a barbershop. His village finances his immigration and his purchase of the shop and he works for many years to repay them. He is only able to return home a few times (for both financial and immigration law reasons). After many years alone in Canada, he is able to bring his son and his wife over. Eventually, his son marries and has five daughters, the first generation to be born in Canada. The story is narrated by the youngest, Samantha (Sammy).
Sammy’s parents and grandparents are nuanced characters, and her telling of their stories is unsentimental yet moving. I really liked the non-linear structure of the story. Instead of moving steadily forward in time we jump forward and back, learning different pieces of the story, until they all fit together in the end like a puzzle. Loved that. (And I think Lee’s ability to do this well in a first novel bodes well for her future books.)
The weak part of the book for me was Sammy. She’s just sort of… there. First you think, well, maybe she’s just there to tell her family’s story, a Scheherazade, if you will. Ok, I could get behind that. Except, not exactly. Because there is this sketchy backstory that doesn’t really go anywhere. And also this weird side-plot that doesn’t really go anywhere. And even these things would have been ok if they had been developed to that level but associated with another character, e.g. one of her sisters. The problem for me was that she’s a first-person narrator.
But this is a quibble. I liked this book very much, and I look forward to reading Lee’s second novel when it comes out.
9: Back Roads
Back Roads by Tawni O’Dell
I got this at the book sale, but it’s not a library book. Must have been a donation. Good condition hardcover, with dust jacket. The front cover is embossed with TLO. Author’s initials?
It’s odd reading this book, finally. Brings back memories of when it was first released and Oprah picked it and everyone and their dog was reading it. Back in the pre-TC days…!
- NY Times review from March 2000.
- Oprah Book Club page from March 2000.
Of course, I didn’t read it then, because I don’t like to jump on bandwagons. So it’s funny that after I finished reading and went poking around for a few links to add here, one of the first that popped up was a recent newspaper article that mentioned it’s being made into a movie. lol! Good thing I read it before all the dust jackets were replaced with movie-tie-in covers 😉
- April 2010 story in Pittsburgh Tribune-Review about Tawni O’Dell & the Back Roads movie.
Back Roads is narrated by 19-year-old Harley, who has been guardian of his three younger sisters since their mother went to prison for killing their father. He’s worried about money, being a virgin, and how to keep his sisters out of trouble. The eldest, Amber, is wild. The middle, Misty, is possibly insane. The youngest, Jody, is traumatized.
At the beginning, Harley is working two jobs and is infatuated with the mother (Callie) of one of Jody’s friends. He hasn’t seen his mother since she went to prison, although he takes his sisters to see her. He has court-mandated appointments with a psychologist. It’s a good set-up.
The flaw to this book, for me, was with the plot, which started out well, but careened out of control from about halfway to the end. I think one Big Secret was plenty. Two Big Secrets? Overkill. The thing is, Secret One, which was plenty huge and could have been developed much further than it was, kind of got swept away by the tsunami of Secret Two.
It was a bit of a let-down to have this big build to the first secret (there had already been a red herring subplot on the way to its reveal), only to have it brushed aside like it didn’t really matter (I think it did). I felt like I was being yanked around as a reader.
I realize the second secret led directly to the climax, but I think we could have got there another way.
But I liked this book. The voice, the characterization—so often when you have a bunch of siblings, they’re indistinguishable from one another aside from their names; here Harley’s three sisters were all distinct individuals—and the setting were all well done.
Not to mention it was refreshing to read a story without a single millionaire in it. Oh, wait. Maybe Callie was a millionaire. She did have all that land… 😉
Scribbling changes in the margins
[E]ven after living with [my first novel] for seven years I was still scribbling changes in the margins up to the very last minute of my very last deadline. I make changes still, in fact, every time I open the book. As Ben Marcus said, “It’s not entirely clear to me why publishing this book means I should stop working on it.”
Maybe we’re slow to finish our books because we can’t part with them. Truman Capote said, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”
Time is Needed
By and large really great writing from all wars comes a good time afterwards, when a person has had the time to let material develop and form itself, so that it’s not rhetorical. So that it’s not so heavily autobiographical. … It’s a bit like writing about cancer; there needs to be time. You need to find a way to transcend the tendency to put in every little detail. Just because it felt so important, it may not be important to the reader. And time is needed for imagination to come into play and to work with the material, to shape a story that may not be wholly in the real world, but only partly.
Write it all
[N]ever censor yourself while you are still writing the story. Save the censoring for the final draft.
Here’s why.
Self-censorship isn’t an exact science. While you’re making sure not to write anything that will offend your parents, you may also be holding back some important emotional truth that will make your story rich and insightful. Don’t block the creative flow. Write it all. Every detail that occurs to you. Until it’s published, it’s private, so be honest, frank, and free.
7: The Nanny Diaries
The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
After finishing Dogs and Goddesses (shudder), I wanted to read something in a similar genre, rather than immediately fleeing to something I knew I’d like. The Nanny Diaries, also picked up at the VPL book sale, seemed to fit the bill: it’s not just chick lit; it’s also co-authored!
[Aside: I had this moment of cognitive dissonance when I first saw the authors’ names. Nicola Kraus? Didn’t I read another—very different—book by an author with that name? Well, close. That was Nicole Krauss.]
I picked this up mainly because I’d just seen the movie on TV and wondered how it compared. It turned out there wasn’t a whole lot of similarity between the two, and the only time Scarlett Johansson appeared in my head was when Nanny called Grayer “Grover” or “Grove” (for some reason, I heard Nanny say this—and only this—in Scarlett’s voice).
As a light read, this one works. There’s a single protagonist to focus on, an antagonist who is more than one-dimensional, and a story that takes adequate time to build and reach a conclusion. And, unlike the film, there’s no cliched happy ending. The book’s ending is much more ambiguous.
It’s supposed to be a satire (hence the X/Nanny thing), so the narrative focuses primarily on Nanny’s interactions with the X family, and leaves out the rest of her life when she is not with them. Nanny is mainly a filter (she doesn’t even get a real name) to showcase how awful the Xes (i.e. The Rich) are. I think we’re supposed to laugh at how ridiculous rich people are and thus feel better about our own, not rich, lives.
And it’s certainly readable on this level—but it’s also sort of throw away, you know? I think it would have been a better—more complete/complex—story if we had got more into Nanny’s head, spent more time with her, and understood her motivations better.
Nanny’s grandmother and parents live in NYC, and she is on speaking terms with them. So presumably, if she had to, she could have moved back home or moved in with grandma. We get the idea that she wants to support herself, live on her own (she shares a tiny apartment with a roommate), etc. but seems clear that—unlike most of the other nannies she comes into contact with—she has options. Not only the family safety net, but also other job options. She doesn’t have to be a nanny. So why is she doing it? The only clue that we get is that she’s studying early childhood education and she likes kids—oh, and she likes the pay.
She seems to come from (at least) an upper-middle-class background herself (went to a private school, is attending NYU, her grandmother seems to have connections, etc.). An explanation of NYC class relationships for those who aren’t familiar might have helped readers better understand why the Xes and their ilk would think this private-schooled, private university-attending young woman was so beneath them. Are they just insecure about their own status?
And then there’s school. She’s supposed to be a full-time student in her final year of undergrad—but this is totally glossed over! The only time it’s mentioned is when Mrs. X is preventing her from getting to class and/or paper-writing. She writes her thesis—her thesis—in 48 hours. I know it’s an undergrad thesis, but come on.
It would have been nice to see the Xes’ actions / Nanny’s commitment to the X family wreaking havoc on her education. That would be the logical consequence for someone in her situation, right? We see how other nannies are affected in terrible ways by the actions of their employers, but her year with the Xes seems to cost Nanny little more than lost sleep and a twinge of conscience over leaving Grayer; she breezes through school and even picks up a Harvard boyfriend along the way. This makes her a lot less sympathetic than she otherwise might have been.
All In
[A]lmost seven years after I landed in Shanghai, my novel has just been published. I know I’m supposed to celebrate, but the truth is that in letting go of it, I feel lost, even more lost than I felt in those first days in Shanghai. My primary consolation is that I’ve started writing a new novel. I’m still learning my way around, still learning the people who live there, but I’m all in. That, I’ve come to see, is the only way to write. Each story is where we live, unconditionally, as if for good—even knowing that, eventually, we’ll pack up and start again.
The empathy you are going to need
Writers are often motivated by something/someone that angers, irritates, or appalls them. Some people write to get even with a person who has hurt them, or to expose some sort of destructive force in their community. … If your story is going to be any good, you are going to have to get past this.
…
One thing I like to do is to write journal entries in the voices of other people, or even characters in my books. I sometimes do it for people who have hurt me deeply, so I can kind of get a grip on their behavior. The challenge is that you have to discover something new about the person or character. If your exercise reveals only what you came to the page with in the first place, then you have not tapped into the empathy you are going to need to write the story you want to write. The thing is that you are really going to have to want to understand that person, which means you may have to let go of that anger.
The Remainder Table 