misconstrue

On Literary Ambition (Blind-item Monday)

Richard Melo — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:05:29 +0000

Image from the Hubble

By the time I hit 40, I could look back and realize I know quite a few writers. The story of one stands out. I will not name the writer, although the writer’s name is familiar to many. I will refer to him as he, though she could also be a she.

I was friends with the writer for a while but stopped. He was always looking to make friends with writers more successful than himself, and when he had a higher class of friends, he stopped being mine. To this day, he won’t interact or help out aspiring writers, won’t read others’ work, except in cases when it will assist his upward mobility. When he meets a writer more successful than himself, he has a new BFF.

Okay, so without the details, it’s not that great a story. It does call attention to how writers approach their ambition. I am as ambitious as anyone I’ve met, but I am not like the writer I describe above.

Literary ambition and competition fall into two distinct views of reality.

1. The Ayn Rand school
This is the view that publishing is dominated by scarcity. While more books than ever are getting published (largely due to ebooks and self-publishing) there are fewer publishing dollars spread among more writers, and review outlets that can build a writer’s reputation are shrinking. It’s a dog-eat-dog world and you resent the success of others because it should have happened to you. You only like people who can help you. Everyone else is just trying to take your potential success away.

2. The Clay Shirky school
If writers put out good books, readers will like them and seek out other good books, and opportunities grow. There’s room at the top for everyone. It’s good to talk to people and help out aspiring writers. You never know who might help your career and who might write a book that gets readers excited about reading.

Certain elements of each school hold truth to them, but writers tend to fall predominantly into one camp or the other.

There are elements within the writer culture that support the different realities. People who get together and start a new online or print literary journal are expanding the playing field and belong in the Clay Shirky school. People who start a writing contest are in the Ayn Rand school, as ultimately contests are about winners, losers, and scarcity. Writers on Twitter who engage in conversation are in the Clay Shirky school. Writers on Twitter who feed their ego by gathering as many followers as possible while following back the smallest possible number belong to Ayn Rand.

Of Pinterest to writers

Richard Melo — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 01:15:47 +0000

While Pinterest is catching on big time with everyone else, it seems like writers are moving into it slowly. It makes sense. Something like Twitter is a writer’s medium. Pinterest might be more for, well, shoppers and celebrity watchers. That doesn’t mean writers can’t take hold!

I’m enjoying Pinterest. For me, it’s like fun without words. I can scan a page filled with dozens of images and zero in on one I like to explore more about the image or the person who posted it.

It also has so many uses for writers. Keeping in mind I’ve been on the site less than a week, I haven’t filled in the boards I’ve started as fully as I’ve planned. Still I’m seeing the potential. I have a box of Hollywood stills from the 70s I’m migrating online on a Pinterest board, another featuring strange book jackets of mass market paperbacks sitting on my shelf, and of course, a growing list of images of writers I admire.

The most interesting Pinterest experiment, though, is a board I created to collect images from around the Internet that reflect scenes from my novel, Happy Talk. I started filling it images late at night, and the page is still in its infancy, but I can see the possibilities. Potential readers who stumble on the board can in a glance, catch many of the book’s references, ranging from Skylab to street theatre in Golden Gate Park to Ben Vereen to Maya Deren. When I put the effort in to gather the best possible images on the board, it will be a powerful resource. Like a self-guided book trailer.

The best part may be still to come. Others in the Pinterest community can post images on boards featuring books like mine. It would be a way readers can post images that remind them of what they read in a book they liked.

Add me, and check out my boards here http://pinterest.com/misconstrue/ and in particular the one of found images from Happy Talk: http://pinterest.com/misconstrue/found-images-that-catch-that-happy-talk-spirit/

Galleycat also has articles about Pinterest of interest to writers:
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/pinterest-boards-for-book-lovers_b46811
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/pinterest-tips-for-writers_b46019

Writing novel copy

Richard Melo — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:40:02 +0000

R.E.M.: The band you grew up with

I’ve had a couple of epiphanies lately when it comes to writing copy that creates interest in books. For anyone more immersed in the book world than I am, these two ideas might come across as obvious. For the rest of us, here goes:

1. Tell the truth about a book without exaggeration. I’m saying this as a reader who has been duped time and again by promises of the next big thing, or the best book in 10 years, or a book that you won’t be able to put down. Readers are smart, and if you fool them into reading something with promises the book cannot live up to, you have not only disappointed a reader, you might also have lost someone who could have supported you in the future. I get the feeling that exaggeration occurs when someone writing copy (or a jacket blurb or review) can’t articulate what’s appealing in a book. My thought is that if you can’t find what’s appealing in a work (or the work is just that dull), what’s the point of writing copy?

2. Suggest an experience. Erotica and horror play upon specific emotional responses as a selling point. What do you do with general fiction without sex and violence as its draw?

[Cue the theme from Mad Men here.]

Nostalgia is a powerful driver when it comes to behavior. It’s so mysterious that when people experience pangs of nostalgia (that often feel like obsessions), they might not realize that nostalgia is the origin. Even more mysterious is the ability of nostalgia to infect those whose pasts don’t align with the memories that nostalgia stirs.

One of the dirty, little secrets of the novel is that when a reader enjoys a book, the memory of other, happy reading experiences is often a key. Even books without a trace of nostalgia in them can still stir the response. Nostalgia comes from the act of reading a novel as much from the novel itself.

Without drifting too far from the point, effective book copy often suggests a past reading or lived experience that triggers fond memories. Here’s an example from outside the book world that caught me big time. It was several years ago when I saw a new R.E.M. record with a sticker that read something like, “New music from the band you grew up with.” In my case, I had grown up with R.E.M. and recalled many summers when a new R.E.M. record played as the soundtrack. That pithy little piece of copy created an impression that the new record could recreate moments of a happy past. Even though by that time I had lost interest in R.E.M., it caught my attention and wouldn’t let go.

Effective book copy sneaks in similar nostalgic suggestions.

It’s why namedropping in copy works so well. If you describe a book as an experience like reading F. Scott Fitzgerald (and the description is accurate), you not only resonate with Fitzgerald readers but also people with an idea of what The Great Gatsby is like even if they have never read a page. It’s also why cultural touchstones are effective (for example, using a phrase like ‘post-9/11 paranoia.’) Shared experiences resonate. You remember something and want to read a book that feeds the hunger the memory creates.

While I do have a book coming out this year, and the Internet is littered with bits of text I’ve written to catch a reader’s eye, I have not yet applied this principle to my own stuff. More to come.

Dialogue on dialogue: These happy days are yours and mine

Richard Melo — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 18:36:14 +0000

[This is the second installment of a multi-part conversation on dialogue between Augustine Case and Richard Melo, drawing examples from Melo's new novel, 'Happy Talk.']

AC: Our conversation turns now to conducting research to guide the writing of dialogue for a novel. What’s the point of doing research?

RM: Most of my work has been centered in the era between the 1950s and 1980s, and even though the language is still English, there are subtle variations in the idioms people use in everyday speech. Getting them right adds color and authenticity to dialogue. I love Mad Men, and with so much period detail in the costumes and sets, the writers often blow it when it comes to dialogue. In the second episode, there is a reference to a “play date,” which didn’t come into the vernacular until recently. I have this belief that a work of art depicting a past era should give the impression it was created in that era. I don’t know why I feel so strongly about that. I just do.

AC: So what’s your process for doing research?

RM: It’s not that mysterious. Mostly, I read books and watch movies from the era I am trying to recreate. I take notes on language that tickles the ear. There are a couple of catches. First, it’s not flashy phrasing I’m looking for. I know this might be obvious, but if you’re throwing in liberal use of hubba hubba or groovy or tubular, you might not create the illusion of authenticity to your readers. It’s the subtle expressions that work best.

For example, in the late 60s, people didn’t make comments on other people’s bodies. Instead, a physique was referred to as a person’s build. I collect linguistic observations like that in notebooks, and make an effort to give each line a ring of authenticity. When I’m writing a first draft, I don’t worry as much about the authenticity of the dialogue, but in the editing process, I try to use expressions that are as authentic as possible and avoid phrasing that comes across as contemporary.

The last thing I will say about this is that I’ve found it easier to pluck authentic-sounding phrasing out of B-movies than well written ones. In B-movies, actors talk the only way they know how, like themselves and like how they think people should talk, and unwittingly capture their era in their performance. Roger Corman movies are excellent examples.

AC: Can we take a peek at a sample?

RM: Here is a scene from Happy Talk that’s actually about writing dialogue. The set up is a crew of American playwrights stuck in rural Haiti are taking in a public showing of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. Air raid sirens (likely a drill but possibly signaling an atomic attack) blare, and panic ensues. Not everyone panics. Here goes:

In one case, the choice is to hightail it out of there or stay and kiss the boy she’s been dying to kiss all night. To get away from the mob, they climb the stage. The film flickers on top of them. Their mouths devour each other. Their faces become one. Who could have seen a kiss like this coming?

[...]

The scene quiets after the panic-stricken have fled and the sirens cease. The stragglers who remain don’t know what will happen next. The kissing pair is not waiting to find out.
Lyle Mislove approaches the lovebirds and tugs on the young man’s jacket sleeve and hands him a slip of paper.

–What’s this?

–I wrote you dialogue, Mislove explains to the lovebirds.

–You read it, the young man says, handing the paper back to Lyle.

Lyle clears his throat and reads,

‘SHE: My lips just won’t stay on.’
‘HE: They stay on me just fine.’

Lyle hands the strip of paper back to the young man. –Your turn.

The young man laughs and crumples up the paper, tosses it on the floor.

–Now where was I? he asks.

–Right here, she replies, and off they go again.

–Did you see what just happened? Lafferty asks.

–How could I have missed it, Mislove replies.

–They just wrote their own dialogue, McKenna says.

Mislove offers his thoughts, –He says to her, ‘Now where was I?’ She comes back with ‘Right here,’ and they kiss. It’s banal, it’s cliché. I love it, it’s perfect. Damn it, I wish I could write dialogue like that.

–You could always steal it to use in your plays

–That’s just it. I could do that and all the critics would write how banal and cliché the dialogue is and pin it on me. I have a reputation to live up to.

AC: As a side question, you say you weren’t even born in the 50s and you’ve never been to Haiti. What was your motivation behind Happy Talk?

RM: Part of it was dread. My first novel included several characters my own age who lived in the same places as me and I might have even known if they had ever existed. When I went on a book tour, one question that was always asked was, ‘How much of the book is true?’ I never gave a satisfying answer, because it seemed like people wanted it to be true, at least parts, and it sounded like a cop out to say I made all of it up or that it’s based loosely (very loosely) on things that kind of happened. I think my reaction to the question guided me to write something that no one would think happened to me.

At the same time, there is a good chunk of myself lurking in there. My experience of the 1950s was through a 1970s childhood lens (Sha-Na-Na, American Grafitti, Happy Days, etc.), and there are places in my book where I throw authenticity to the wind and give the 1950s a touch of Fonzie, just for kicks.

AC: Like, ‘Sit on it, Potsie’?

RM: Exactly.

Five Songs (January 20, 2012)

Richard Melo — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 03:35:36 +0000

[On Fridays, I am writing five song reviews in 140 characters or less with the aim of capturing what I hear as the song's essence. There is no rhyme or reason for the songs I am selecting.]

Carolina, the Pop Flies: After intro, guitar player crashes off his chair. Eighties powerpop that lingers on the word ‘and.’ Brilliant

One More Time, by Full Time Men: Sonic collision of first taste of beer, a crush & great music taste. P. Buck 12-string, Fleshtones, baby

I Can’t Stop Smiling, Velocity Girl: 90s noise pop with 60s feel, catchy bom-boms, loudest soft rock ever. Moves the brain & the hips

Gretchen’s New Dish: Vintage song poem, hired singer loses it when the lyrics take a hysterical turn. Dialect is mix of Latino & German

Eloise, Barry Ryan: 1968, more grand than MacArthur Park, guy sings like he means it, orchestra makes up for dumb lyrics

Dialogue on dialogue: ‘Happy Talk’ is a curious book

Richard Melo — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 18:24:05 +0000

[This is the first installment of a multi-part conversation on dialogue between Augustine Case and Richard Melo, drawing examples from Melo's new novel, Happy Talk.]

AC: Happy Talk is a curious book. What makes it different?

RM: For starters, it’s written with a different approach than most fiction books. Most writers seem to focus on plot and character, and edit out material that distracts from plot and character. My approach is to focus on dialogue and atmosphere, and to reveal plot and character through voice and mood.

AC: So Happy Talk is experimental fiction?

RM: I don’t think so. Novels like J R and The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, are examples of a highly developed storytelling-through-dialogue style. Dostoevsky also pioneered how to tell a story through dialogue to great effect in Crime and Punishment. Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is composed of short, cascading monologues that reveal the characters’ inner lives. Happy Talk’s form is based on these and other examples, so it’s not like I was trying out anything that I didn’t think works.

AC: Can we take a look at a sample?

RM: Sure. The scene I selected is just a few lines, but I think illustrates what I am hoping to do with dialogue. The setting is an American school for student nurses in a remote part of Haiti in 1955. The students have been abandoned by the head nurse and doctor-instructors, when suddenly they have a patient, a skywriter who crashed his plane after getting drunk off the fumes. In a realistic piece, the student nurses would go seek help; since this is a comedy, they rely on their collective wits to treat the patient. The only other thing you need to know about this scene is that the patient, Culprit Clutch, is present yet silent.

–You’ve come all the way to Haiti, and you still get the best medical care in the world, the same exact care you’d get back home in the U.S.A. We’ve run a battery of tests on you, and we’ll send your samples back to Washington, and when they write back and tell us what’s wrong with you, we’ll know how to treat you.

–In the meantime, we’ll set your bones in a plaster cast. It looks like you broke a few.

–Samantha Sound says you have 400 bones when 206 are all you need.

–Which bones does Samantha say are broken?

–I think it’s fair to say they all are, or pretty close.

–Let’s set even the unbroken ones for good measure.

–Poor thing, let’s at least give him morphine.

–Shhh.

–Why? I know the protocol is only to administer morphine to dying soldiers in the field of battle, but we are at peace, and he probably feels like he’s dying. It’s fair to give him a few cc’s.

–We’re out of morphine.

–How can we be out of morphine?

–This is a nursing school, not a dispensary. Who do you think we are? We never practice on live patients.

–What do we have here, then? Chopped liver?

–Opal, what happened to the morphine?

–I get a headache every month, and morphine is the only way to kill the pain.

–But we had so much.

–Sometimes, the headaches come more than once a month.

–What should we tell our friend here?

–Tell him I’m not the only girl around here who gets a headache.

–Why don’t you explain it to him yourself.

–Consider yourself lucky you’re not a woman, Mister.

AC: Why do you prefer ‘storytelling through dialogue’ over more plot- and character-based approaches?

RM: It’s all about comedy, and jokes seem funnier and more crisp through dialogue than narration. In dialogue, you get to explore a character’s blindspots, self-deceptions, white lies, etc. It all makes for compelling storytelling, and it comes across as different since not many writers are doing it.

AC: I noticed you rarely identify speakers.

RM: My thought is that sometimes it doesn’t matter who’s speaking to follow the story. Attributions are clumsy and get in the way. There are a bunch of people in the room. It matters less who is saying what than the things they are saying. Let’s get more into this in another installment.

AC: Do you draw from theatrical writing to create your dialogue?

Although I write long passages of uninterrupted dialogue, I feel they are still more novelistic than theatrical. In my own eye, the lines work better on the page than spoken. I think if someone were to write dialogue based on theatre training, it’s best to avoid the dogma inflicted on actor’s and playwrights of basing their works on a character’s motivation. The problem is that in a sustained dialogue a character’s most frequent motivation is, ‘What am I going to say next?’ I work hard to write dialogue that seems like it’s either off the cuff or well thought out, depending on the context, and I work hard to make it look like I didn’t work hard.

AC: Do you have advice for writers who are inspired to expand their use of dialogue?

RM: I do, but I don’t want to spoil our next installment on conducting research to write dialogue. I think it’s important to keep phrasings simple and use flashy lines sparingly (people usually don’t sound brilliant all the time). But for me, the art of writing dialogue comes the novelist’s ability to use expressions/phrasing/idioms that make a character come alive while moving the story forward. I love when I see that done well.

AC: On that note, we’ll end this installment of our Dialogue on Dialogue series. Next time, we’ll talk about your research on diction from the 50s and 60s in Happy Talk with more samples from your work.

Introducing Augustine Case

Richard Melo — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:08:34 +0000

When I first became aware of Augustine Case, I thought he was Thomas Pynchon. Of course, that would have made him a young child when he wrote and published V., which pretty much rules out the possibility. However, his steadfast denials each time I confront him are exactly what you’d expect from Thomas Ruggles Pynchon. So I am up in the air.

We met through email in 2005 (and to this day, never in person, which is another clue that he might be Pynchon.) My first novel had come out a year earlier, Mr. Case found it, read it, and wrote me. In his first email, he recounted the many errors and inaccuracies he found in the book. He also nailed many of the book’s subtle references and influences and gave profound insights that blew me away.

We have maintained email correspondence over the years, and he has helped my writing immeasurably. I’ve been a working novelist for 24 years [!], but my conversations with Mr. Case remind me that I’m still the kid I was back in October 1987 — a nineteen year old with a vision of writing a novel combining the Vietnam-era levitation of the Pentagon by anti-war protesters and the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s ‘She Belongs to Me’ and no clue how to start.

When it comes to Mr. Case’s writing career, he says that all he’s had are false starts. I would like to one day read what’s he’s written, even if it isn’t Gravity’s Rainbow (and I am not ruling out that it might just be Gravity’s Rainbow).

Mr. Case is always one step ahead of me. When I told him I was writing about an absurd video created by Shell Film Productions on how extracting oil is good for the environment, he mentions (and I had no idea about this) that Shell Oil has a long tradition of creating promotional films dating back to the early days of cinema, including the seminal ‘This is Shell’ produced in 1970.

His online presence is nil, but he does own a computer. We’ve agreed to collaborate on this blog. In particular, we are going to have a dialogue on dialogue. My second novel is coming out this year, and he has volunteered to help spread the word and find new readers. I pointed out that he was not on Goodreads, Twitter, or even Facebook (even though now he is). I’m going to help guide him through social media (not that I’m an expert), and this summer, after the book comes out, he’s going to teach me to surf.

Links
My first novel: http://harbor.co.at/jokerman8-2012.html
This is Shell: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWjT59S_wk

Five Songs (Jan 13, 2012)

Richard Melo — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:02:57 +0000

[On Fridays, I am writing five song reviews in 140 characters or less with the aim of capturing what I hear as the song's essence. There is no rhyme or reason for the songs I am selecting.]

The Replacements’ Unsatisfied: 12-string anthem for kids disaffected in Reagan America, flipside to Stones’ Satisfaction with more outrage

Von Otter’s version of Beach Boys’ You Still Believe in Me: You can hear her lose herself in song by 2nd verse, her training and her breath

Orpheus, by the Walker Bros.: Cringe-worthy lyrics, sounds like the theme to a James Bond movie directed by David Lynch, lush orchestration

The Police, Synchronicity II: Bassline like monster at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake. Strange hit song about alienation & mechanization

Waterloo Sunset, the Kinks: A rare love song about other people, heartfelt Ray Davies and angelic background singers. God save the Kinks

Doors?

Richard Melo — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 06:20:14 +0000

Just kidding. Children today will grow up with just as much awareness of doors as those in previous generations. Doors are a lasting technology.

Here’s the tweet to which this blog post responds.

The Rock Novel

Richard Melo — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 05:25:57 +0000

The rock novel has long been my obsession. I have a loose idea of what it is and made it midway through writing one without knowing what it is I am trying to do. Here’s the thing: Rock ‘n’ roll figured out long-form storytelling a long time ago (and called it ‘rock opera’ with Tommy, by the Who, as a prime example). Then, gosh dang, the movies figured out how to rock (with plentiful examples, ranging from Rock ‘n’ Roll High School to Rushmore to Rocky Horror Picture Show).

Novels, though, are last to the party, because they never quite figured out rock.

Yes, there have been plenty of artistically and commercially successful rock novels (with Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, Dana Spiotta’s Stone Arabia, and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, as recent examples) but they don’t quite go all the way like those two kids in Meatloaf’s ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light.’

A typical rock novel germinates through a writer with a deep affection for music. Plots then follow a range of templates: The aging rocker trying to get by, the mysterious disappearance (and reappearance) of a superstar burned out by fame, a love triangle with one character a brooding rocker, small-town fans whose lives are made bearable by a band’s records, a group of quirky people coming together to form a band who get successful and realize they can’t stand each other, and a handful of others.

At its worst, a rock novel includes paragraphs of made-up rock lyrics (sometimes in all caps) that call attention to a novel’s inability to recreate the sonic experience of listening to a band like The Who.

For me, the best rock novels I’ve read are more embodied with rock than overtly about rock (for example, the novels of Kathy Acker and Tom Robbins). One way of looking at it, the more rock that goes into a novel, the less rock that’s in the novel.

So how do you go about writing a rock novel?

It’s helpful to start by figuring out the qualities of rock that can fuel the novel you want to write. Rock has reinvented itself and gone back to its roots (and sold itself out) so often, it’s not easy to know what the hell rock is. Here are a couple of the qualities of rock that are guiding my writing:

One way of understanding rock is hiding in plain site: in that forty-year-old catch phrase, Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll. There’s a reason why this phrase stuck. Sex, Drugs & Perry Como doesn’t have the same ring to it. S,D & RR captures what rock can do that other types of media experiences can’t. Sex, Drugs & Video Games doesn’t work; likewise Sex, Drugs & Novels doesn’t, either.

The terms sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll fit so well together in a phrase because of what they have in common. They point to visceral, experimental, and rebellious experiences — even more so among kids.

Though rock is fundamentally subversive (more than any other form of mass media when done right), it’s also true that you’ll find kids and their parents these days listening to the same music. However, it’s the way the music is experienced that differs. A 16 year old experiences rock as rock. Adults experience rock as nostalgia for being 16. (Rock doesn’t mean to be elitist, but you can’t stay 16 forever.) In no way does this sell short rock ‘n’ roll as experienced by adults — nostalgia stirs such powerful emotional states, it’s almost like being 16 all over again.

The novel, as a creative form, does not illicit visceral, experimental, and/or rebellious experiences in the same way, nor does its appeal necessarily differ among generations. That’s not the novel’s game. However, a novelist who draws from the qualities of rock ‘n’ roll in her writing and is dedicated to making it work might just make it work … with the end result, a rock novel.

To clarify, a rock novel doesn’t have to depict kids or sell to kids, any more than a rock novel needs to feature musicians. The point is that a rock novel is itself a kid, suspended in the throes of perpetual adolescence, capable of intense awkwardness, anger, and love.

If those themes suggest what underlies a rock novel, they doesn’t say anything about how rock ‘n’ roll storytelling unfolds. Admittedly, this has had me stumped for ages, until yesterday, and like Sex, Drugs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, the answer has been hiding in plain sight.

It goes back to the Who’s rock opera, Tommy, which is for me is a fantastic work as well as a template for rock ‘n’ roll narrative. It’s episodic, which makes sense for a rock opera made up of album cuts. Episodic storytelling works in novels, too. (In Poetics, Aristotle wrote that the worst kind of plots are episodic. You just can’t get any more Establishmentarian than Aristotle, and all the more reason why a rock novel should unfold in episodes.)

The big lesson I gathered from Tommy is the way characters enter to say their piece (or sing) to other characters or the audience (for example, Cousin Kevin, the Acid Queen, the Pinball Wizard). It’s not like Pete Townshend made up this technique, as it’s a common approach to musical theatre and opera. Townshend employed the technique as a way to make his rock opera work. A song in a rock novel does not need to be a song. It can be a monologue or conversation that carries a mood and moves the plot. Following the structure of a rock opera like Tommy might just be the way to make a rock novel work.