What novel is worth writing, really?

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Kirsten

I am writing a beautiful tale about corpses. Very seasonable weather for it.

–Evelyn Waugh

Here’s the problem with self-publishing: no one cares about your book. That’s it in a nutshell. There are somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 books published every year in the US alone, depending on which stats you believe. Many of those – perhaps as many as half or even more – are self-published. On average, they sell less than 250 copies each. Your book won’t stand out. Hilary Clinton’s will. Yours won’t.

–Nick Morgan, Thinking of Self-Publishing Your Book in 2013? Here’s What You Need to Know, Forbes, 2013

If you’ve ever written, or have tried to write, or hope to write a novel, I suppose you sometimes think thoughts like the ones I’m thinking today.

Why am I doing this?

What am I trying to do, exactly?

I know I left that novel idea around here, somewhere. And yes, I’m a loon.

I’m a decent writer. Above average, perhaps. But in this sea of writers — this sea of millions and millions of books — all that being “above average” means is that my head bobs up above the surface once in a while.

Just long enough for me to suck in a quick gasp of air before I disappear again.

I am also, arguably, a confused writer.

I’m envious of writers who live and breathe genre, because if you’re a passionate fan of genre, and then you decide to write genre, a big chunk of the “why” question is automatically answered. You’re writing to contribute to the genre. Genre readers are always looking for more genre to read. What you’re doing is participatory — reciprocal.

I like genre. I’ve read a fair share of genre. But I have never honestly felt completely at home in any genre community.

And look. Here’s what someone posted in a new review on my novel, Can Job:

Really 3.5 stars because it’s solid, but it never makes up its mind about what genre it wants to be.

You get a sense that this is going to be a romantic chick-lit romp from the cover and some of the scenes, but the majority of it reads like an attempt at big business satire.

Is it “art” if you look like you don’t know what you’re doing?

A totally fair critique, I’m sure. From someone who obviously reads a lot and who doesn’t know me, and so isn’t even subconsciously inclined to just “go along with it” when I color, awkwardly, outside the lines.

And the thing is, it’s intentional. I’m doing this to myself, on purpose.

Sigh.

So I’m working on another novel, one of 3 or 4 WIPs in various stages of done-ness. And wrestling with the same kinds of questions.

What kind of book is this?

What am I trying to say?

I mean: what am I really really trying to say?

Let’s go back again to Faust.

Start in the 1500s with Historia & Tale of Doctor Johannes Faustus.

Faust is the arrogant guy who renounces Christianity and trades his soul in exchange for, basically, magical powers.

Peel that back and the story asks the questions: what is good? what is evil? what is truly most important and why are some people foolish enough to trade the most important away?

The answers are based on the assumed 16th century virtues of obedience and faith. Faust, like Lucifer in the Historia’s tale-within-a-tale of that angel’s fall, “rose up in insolence and vanity.” He thought he was too (good? smart? something) to heed the guidance of the Church.

Goethe’s Faust, written some 300 years later, asks the same questions but frames them completely differently.

Romanticism, suddenly aware of dynamic (even irrational) principles underlying both man and nature, took striving–tentative progression and development, and pure endeavor–and made it the defining quality of mankind.

From “Masterpieces of Romanticism,” edited by Howard E. Hugo, in The Continental Edition of World Masterpieces.

A being of searchings and questionings, living a life of constant aspiration towards goals but dimly seen–this, as described by God, is the being He has created in His own image.

And of the devil’s pact with Goethe’s Faust:

Here is no simple temptation to be naughty …

If Mephistopholes can destroy Faust’s sense of aspiration, if Faust can say of any single moment in time that this is complete fulfillment of desire–then the devil wins, and God and man are defeated.

I.e. “evil” is the cessation of striving toward something.

That something is still God. But it’s not obedience to God in the narrow sense articulated by the first Faust chapbooks. To Goethe, to be “good” is to be an active participant in God’s plan–to actively fulfill your part in God’s plan for humanity.

Obviously we see, here, the ideas of Progressivism in its modern/political sense, stirring in the minds of 19th Century Romantics. Or anyway, in a 1956 essay on Romanticism by an English professor at Berkeley ;)

So two final things and then I hit “publish.”

First, here I am in 2018 pondering two versions of Faust, one of which was published 450 years ago, and the other 200-ish.

And the ideas communicated by these two works are effing immense. You almost can’t get your head around them, they’re so big. Poke at them and they start to rattle you.

And part of me wonders, what is the point of writing a novel that is any less than this — that is any smaller?

Second: what kind of mind could possibly wrap itself around these same questions today?

Set aside that I wouldn’t dare to suggest I am personally capable of such a feat. I’m not that smart, and my world–including my intellectual world–is far too parochial. Pains me to know this, but I know this.

The fact is, it’s quite possible nobody could pull off a new Faust today. We’re drowning in noise–and we’re so fractured by social technology that no one mind can hope to bridge us.

And yet, I keep writing, and I keep thinking there’s no other novel that’s really worth writing, except a novel that tries …

In which I confess: I’ve been completely rethinking my latest draft novel

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Kirsten

Yeah, I’ve been busy doing other things as well. Work stuff.

But I haven’t stopped working on current novel. It’s just that the work has been going on “underground.”

Here’s the quick version.

As a writer, I operate on a kind of cusp. I aspire to writing novels that are well-plotted, because to me action is what entertains. But the questions that most interest me personally — and that (naturally) I want to explore with my books — operate at a non-surface level.

Let’s make this concrete. Suppose you have a heroine being chased by a monster. The action is all about her attempts to elude, outsmart, or fight her pursuer. And you need all that ducking and weaving and swordplay and making-of-alliances. It’s what pulls us into stories.

But no monster worth the name is “just” a physical threat. What makes monsters truly scary is that they evoke an existential threat. A monster that is “just” a monster is a cartoon. What really frightens us are things like suffering and death — things the monster represents.

Pick up that thread and follow it a bit and we find even more interesting fears. For me, for example, the fear of death is paired closely with the fear of “as if I never was.” All these memories, these experiences, the people who love me and think about me! Will that really all be wiped out one day, lost forever? Horrible!

Another closely related fear is the fear of losing control. This comes into play when people start thinking of “how” they would prefer to die. Compare “peacefully, in bed, surrounded by loved ones” with having your life snatched away from you unexpectedly. No chance to say good-byes, wrap up loose ends, settle back and take some part in the process (“more morphine please, nurse.”)

What’s scarier?

In The Philosophy of Horror, Noel Carroll writes that “art-horror” works by imbuing monsters with qualities that invoke dread, disgust, and “the idea that unavowed, unknown and perhaps concealed and inexplicable forces rule the universe.”

Scary!

And that’s just one dimension of our heroine + monster scenario. A novel has so many layers, subplots, relationships. Ultimately they must all work together, and on that same under-the-surface level.

The novels that I truly love –that I find transporting — operate almost as if the novel itself is a psyche. I’m thinking of novels like The Book of Ebenezer LePage (GB Edwards). Everything about a novel like that seems to be part of a single psychic entity.

It’s not something you’re naturally conscious of (although people who write about GB Edwards’ book are likely to observe that the island shapes the characters, somehow. “You couldn’t write the same book if you set it on the mainland” etc.) But on an unconscious level, there’s a wholeness that transcends the categories we normally think of: character, setting, plot, conflict.

Okay, I said this post would be “the quick version” of what’s going on with my current novel.

So let me wrap it up by saying that I’ve re-titled it. It’s not Third, any more. The title is now Parthenon.Which I adore.

And it went from being basically “done” to being a WIP.

And it’s given me a constant headache as I have wrestled with how to show you, my presumed reader, something that I *know* in my bones about this place I’m writing about, which is fictional and yet not. I want to take you to this place, and show it to you, so that when you return to “the real world” you understand something you didn’t before.

That’s a tall order. I probably can’t pull it off. But I’m going to try :)

Chick lit, Women’s lit, and Fiction’s Dark Arts

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Kirsten

“It is no longer a passion hidden in my veins: it is the goddess Venus herself fastened on her prey.” — Racine

One of the odd pleasures about writing fiction is that you don’t always know what you’re doing until after you’ve done it.

There are parts of the mind (the parts that Jungian psychologist Robert Johnson refers to as the Shadow) that meddle with your fiction behind your back.

You have little or no awareness of the meddling as you write.

You’re too focused on all those conscious tasks that require your attention. The characters, the plot, your deadlines, your typos . . .

But then you re-read what you’ve done and there it is, like the smudgey remnants of an alien footprint — an alien footprint that also seems disturbingly familiar. Continue reading →

The Eight Stages of Short Story Writing

Posted on February 7, 2013 by Kirsten

1. Excitement. Something has popped into your head–an idea, a hook, a scene. You’re positive that a terrific story will unfold around it. You sit down and commit your idea to the page. Yep. This just might work . . .

2. Fear. You realize that everything else about the story except your original idea is — oh no! — utterly invisible. What you have written so far isn’t nearly enough — but it’s impossible to know what else might be there or how you’ll ever find it. You fight an overwhelming tendency to avoid the story altogether. You almost wish you’d never started it in the first place. Failure seems like such a sweet option . . . Continue reading →

#Amediting

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Kirsten

No, these are not rattlesnakes. They are garter snakes. But you get the idea.

Dream a couple nights ago.

Rattlesnake infestation.

But I was handling it, in typical “made sense at the time” dream logic: I was picking them up (no, not with my hands! with a stick!) and . . . putting them into books.

Large, thick books, they were, with the pages partially scooped out in the middle. Plenty heavy enough to contain a rattlesnake.

And as it happens, I’m editing Loose Dog — and one of the things I’m doing is fleshing out a couple of the characters a bit more.

Which means I’m making them more human.

Which means I’m showing a bit more of how slithery they can be.

Get into the book, you slithery character, you ;-)

Incidentally, I’m also working on the plotting.

I can show that here without the use of random nature photos, because I use stickies to help me visualize the relationship between plots and subplots.

Here’s what the book looked like a couple weeks ago.

I’d front-loaded the backstory about my protag’s relationship with her ex-fiance (blue stickies on the left). Decided that didn’t work — gave away too much too early.

Another weakness in the plot was that too much of my main counterplot (protag breaks up a dog fighting ring) was clumped at the end (orange stickies on the far right).

Here’s how it looks now.

So.

More slither.

Plot a bit more mixed up.

Progress, I think . . .

I am editing. Loose Dog.

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Kirsten

So I’ve got this novel, you see.

I love the concept. It’s a first person novel, narrated by a woman who is an animal control officer.

And she’s got problems.

Man problems, for starters. Her ex-fiance has shown back up in her life. And here, she thought she was completely over him.

Before you know it, she also ends up with dog problems — particularly when she stumbles on evidence of a dog fighting ring that is out of her official jurisdiction but very much on her conscience.

I first drafted Loose Dog several years ago. Shopped it to exactly one agent, who requested a full, but eventually passed on it.

I should probably have kept pushing, but instead I set it aside and wrote Libby, and a bit after that Can Job.

And you know what? That was the right decision. Because what that one agent told me is that Loose Dog was well-written but needed work on pacing. So I focused on improving my plotting, and as you can see from my Amazon reviews, plotting is one of the things readers like about my novels.

So now I’m back to Loose Dog, and my first New Year’s resolution for 2012 is to tweak it until I absolutely love it.

Get ready, world :-)

UPDATE: Out now…

Can you think a good book?

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Kirsten

That’s a serious question.

I’m pondering it because of the explosion of writerly advice that crops up all over the intertubes these days.

Like this piece, which has a lot to offer, don’t get me wrong.

And goodness knows craft is important.

But I wonder sometimes.

For the first couple hundred years after the birth of “the novel,” writers didn’t worry about things like “structure.” Yet they managed to turn out very nice books.

How?

Okay, devil’s advocate. Maybe only *some* of them turned out very nice books. Maybe I don’t realize how many terrible novels were written by contemporaries of Fielding and Tolstoy and Dostoevski and James and Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Maybe there were hundreds or thousands of self-pubbed novels along the way that were such crap it was good riddance to them the second they were forgotten.

But that still doesn’t explain how someone working with pen and paper or typewriter could turn out an Anna Karenina or Great Gatsby without first having consumed a library’s worth of books on the craft of writing.

How could that happen?

Well. Maybe it has to do with oral story-telling.

Maybe great writers — in the classical sense — are (were?) actually great listeners. And I mean listening in the sense of paying attention to how how language — and more specifically story-telling — affects other people.

Can you tell, when you’re relating something that happened to you while you were at the grocery store last week, when your audience has begun to lose interest?

(Ooh, I hope so!)

It doesn’t have to be when you tell a story in the formal sense. We all constantly narrate our lives to other people. We’re constantly telling stories. When someone asks you how you’re doing, and you say, “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” you’re telling a story. A very dull story incidentally. Please spice it up next time. Give your story some structure!

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — five minutes she said, right, it was more like an hour, and the kid has this horrific cold, she soaked a box and a half of Kleenex easily before mom toodled back up on her scooter again, and of course three days later I wake up all stuffy, fever of a hundred and two, omg, please bring soup!

But that’s not all. If at any point during your tale about your self-centered neighbor and her snot-nosed urchin you notice your audience’s attention is starting to wane — you edit. Immediately. On the spot.

I was about to walk out the door when my neighbor — you know, the one who can’t afford a car so she rides that ridiculous power scooter everywhere — asked me to look after her kid (again? are you kidding me???) — well long story short, the kid had a cold, gave it to me, I’m miserable, please bring soup!

We’d get a lot closer to spinning good stories on paper if we paid attention to how our stories hold people’s attention when we spin stories orally.

So yeah. I think there was a time when writers honed the aspect of the craft we now label with words like “structure” by telling stories — or more specifically, by paying attention to the way people react as they listen to stories.

Tell you something else. When writers began to play with the novel as if it were a painting — moving words around as if they were objects, rather than written versions of oral language — and in that way devised what in its most extreme form we’d call experimental fiction, they began to separate the novel from the connection it once had with with oral story telling.

It amounted to a distortion, of course. So maybe one reason some people need to study “craft,” now, is because the “the novel” became so distorted that post mid 20th century writers are . . . not ignorant, exactly, but maybe the connection of the novel to oral story telling isn’t as obvious to writers today as it once was, and as it needs to be.

I’m not sure, however, that this is something that can be taught from the head. Which gets back, finally, to the title of this post. The ability to pick up on the non-verbal signals people give off, when they’re listening to a story, is not something you do with your intellect.

It’s something you do with your whole self — your body, your heart.

Imposing rules on a novel via your head might result in a novel that is well-thought-out.

But is that the same as “good”?

Writing, seriously

Posted on January 22, 2007 by Kirsten

If you’re looking for a Serious Article about Serious Writing, here’s a dish served up by the Guardian [UPDATE, article gone, sorry] from U.K. writer Zadie Smith.

Smith starts by asking why it’s so difficult to write a perfect novel. She doesn’t try to define “a perfect novel” however, and right off the bat dismisses critics, falling back instead on an assertion that writers aren’t ever satisfied with their own books, ergo, their books can’t be considered “perfect.” This dissatisfaction, she says, can be traced back to dissatisfaction with one’s ability to fully and truthfully capture “the truth of experience”:

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called “The Great American Novel” and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man … Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible – it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve-

Hmmmmm.

Obviously this refers to literary novels, since a novel’s entertainment value plays no part in the equation. There’s no room here for the perfect “page turner” ha ha ha, nor for the sort of innocent reading my daughter enjoys, where she loves books for the pure pleasure of being lost in their pages.

Literary novels, on the contrary, are Serious; writing them is no less than a moral act, as per part 2 of the piece:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

A case of morals. Yeah. “I’m a writer, and I’ve come down with a baaad case of morals.”

Interestingly enough, there’s nothing really about craft / writing process in either of these lengthy piece’s two lengthy parts.

Maybe craft is assumed . . .

(RELATED: I’ve shared more thoughts on literary versus commercial/popular fiction here and here.)

Here you go

Posted on October 14, 2006 by Kirsten

Lit agent Rachel Vater has some questions you can ask to help you understand what your strengths are as a writer. Here’s one:

What feeling do you want when you read a book? (This is a more important question than it would seem — Not as obvious of an answer as you might expect.)

Great question, eh?

The feeling I want when I read a book is transported. I want to be lifted out of the here & now and taken to vantage point where reality is framed in archetypal or even small-d divine terms. The redemption may be through love, or joy, or coming to terms with one’s self, doesn’t matter really, as long as I’m lifted. This applies to non-fiction as well incidentally; for instance, Peter Ackroyd’s histories transport me by shifting my perspective via point-in-time.

Vater has also summarized the main strengths of a number of writers, wonderful way to put ourselves in an agent’s place as she experience our writing.

kirsten mortensen

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Tag Archives: the writing process