Category: writing

The cautionary tale of H. P. Lovecraft

A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore with a friend and he suggested that I should pick up a collection of H. P. Lovecraft short stories.  After listening to my friend praise Lovecraft, I bought the book and eagerly started reading it when I got home.

I soon discovered that reading Lovecraft could be a very frustrating experience.  There’s no doubt he was very creative.  His Cthulhu mythos is tremendously rich and I enjoyed the many cross-references he managed to work into his stories.

Despite the rich world he built, I was less than impressed with the quality of his actual writing.  His prose is filled with tortuous sentences that groan under the weight of their hyperbole.  He also demonstrates an inability to murder his darlings.  A case in point would be his (over)use of ‘blasphemous’.  The first time you come across a reference to ‘blasphemous tracks’ or the like, it’s an interesting and unconventional use of the adjective.  But Lovecraft seems rather impressed with his cleverness and so he uses the word again and again so that, by its fifteenth appearance, it’s just annoying and repetitive.

Lovecraft also frequently describes things as being too monstrous for the human mind to behold.  That’s fine once or twice, but when it’s repeated across many stories, it just comes across as something of a cop out.

That being said, there are a few Lovecraft pieces that I do enjoy.  “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” provided some of the inspiration for the plot of A Theft of Bones and “At the Mountains of Madness” does a nice job of using the Antarctic setting to convey terror and isolation.

But, for me at least, Lovecraft’s greatest value lies in his vivid demonstrations of how not to write.  A good writers’ group or a critique partner would have probably improved Lovecraft’s writing immensely, allowing him to be a great writer instead of being  America’s greatest bad writer.

Blurbage

As an aide to writing the inevitable Dreaded Query Letter, I’ve been trying to come up with a concise-yet-interesting description of the plot of A Theft of Bones (that’s the working title of my WIP).  So far, I have this:

The day college freshman Andrew Mackay is attacked in the woods by an undead creature turns out to be one of the luckiest days of his life.  That attack brings him to the attention of the Guardian Order,  the law enforcement arm of magical society.  No sooner has Andrew started training to become a Guardian than he and his new friends are confronted with a puzzling series of grave robberies where someone is using daimons to reanimate the dead.  The signs eventually point to the Children of the Emim, a fringe group of magicians that most people have written off as a bunch of cranks.  Now Andrew and his fellow Guardians must discover if the Children are as harmless as they seem, or if there might be a sinister truth behind their strange lore.

How does it sound?  If you saw this blurb on a book cover, would it pique your interest enough to buy it?

A replacement for Scrivener?

In an earlier post, I mentioned that one of the best things about having a Mac was that it allowed me to use Scrivener, a great word processing tool designed for creative writers.  Since it’s a Mac-only program, I thought I’d have to make do with Word from now on.  Now, I’m happy to report that I may have found a replacement for Scrivener that will run on Windows.  It’s called PageFour and I discovered it through a link on the Scrivener website.  Scrivener’s creator had all sorts of good things to say about it, so I thought I’d give it a whirl.

My initial impression was that PageFour is basically Scrivener for Windows.  It has the same binder format that I loved in Scrivener, though here it’s called a ‘Notebook’.  It also has the snapshot functionality that proved to be so useful when I was working on the first draft of my WIP (basically, it allows you to take a ‘picture’ of the page you’re working on that you can easily revert to if you don’t like the subsequent changes you’ve made).  In fact, the snapshot tool was originally a part of PageFour and the creator of Scrivener liked it so much that he borrowed it for his program.  PageFour also has a ‘Smart Edit’ feature that allows you to scan your text for repeated words or phrases, making it easier to identify and murder your darlings.   I also think it’s easier to format text in PageFour since you have a toolbar that allows you to position text and change its attributes.  With Scrivener, you had to do all that through a pull-down menu.

PageFour isn’t a carbon copy of Scrivener and it’s missing some of the bells and whistles of its Mac cousin.  For example, it doesn’t have anything like the corkboard or the notecards.  It also doesn’t look as polished (like almost all Mac programs, Scrivener was pretty).  These issues aside, I really like Scrivener and I think I’ll end up purchasing the full version.

WIP revision update

Despite a multitude of distractions, I’ve managed to make decent progress on revising my WIP.  At first, I was disheartened at the amount of red ink I was putting on the pages.  But when I took a step back and looked at what I was changing, I was relieved to see that it was fairly minor stuff.

The majority of the changes are prose tweaks and dialog improvements.  There are also a fair number of typo corrections.  The biggest changes so far have been adjustments to some subsidiary plot points and the consequential addition of a new scene.  But the main plot is holding up well, thankfully.

One of my main priorities in revising is tightening the text by cutting unnecessary words.  I’ve pulled a lot of these little buggers from my dialog.  When you first write a conversation, I think there’s a strong temptation to follow normal speech patterns as closely as possible and have your characters begin with a greeting and some small talk.  But those things are really nothing more than a waste of space.  In most cases they aren’t going to advance the plot and most readers are going to end up tuning them out as they read because they’re basically white noise.

Another issue I’m having is tagging speech in a long conversation.  I don’t want to overuse said because that gets repetitive, but, at the same time, I don’t want to reach for the thesaurus for increasingly obscure synonyms.  So I often try to indicate who’s speaking through a description of body language or movement.  But that too can get repetitive.  I’ve already noticed that my characters do a lot of nodding, and I don’t want people to think they’re a bunch of bobbleheads.

Shifting gears

Last spring, I took a break from my WIP and wrote a short story involving the novel’s antagonist.  I submitted the story to my writers’ group and, while it received generally favorable comments, one member made a particularly trenchant criticism: he said that my writing was too academic.

What he meant was that I had unknowingly structured my story much like a paper.  I started out with a ‘thesis’ and the rest of the story consisted of the ‘proofs.’  Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for suspense and, consequently, the story kind of plodded along.

That incident taught me that I’d have to unlearn (or at least ignore) a lot of the writing skills I’d picked up in grad school.  In academia, you’re supposed to make your point as clearly and concisely as possible with a minimum of obfuscation (though I’ve read many articles where that wasn’t the case!).  But in fiction writing, you must delight in deception in order to build a sense of suspense in the reader.  Instead of giving them a road map, you’re often giving them vague or even misleading directions.

As I work through the revisions of my WIP, I’m on the lookout for any instances of ‘academic’ writing.  Thankfully, I haven’t found any yet, so perhaps I learned my lesson.

Another journey begins

It’s time.  Time to start revising my novel, again.  I finished the first draft on January 1 and, eager to move forward, I started revising on January 7.  But I soon realized that I was actually doing myself a disservice by moving ahead so quickly.  As I reread the first few chapters, I realized that I couldn’t look at them objectively because I was still so euphoric from finishing the first draft.

It was then that I realized that there’s a reason why so many writers recommend taking some time off between finishing your draft and starting the revision process.  You need to put distance between yourself and your work so you can approach it as dispassionately as possible.  Also, since your writing won’t be fresh in your mind, you’ll be more likely to see plot holes and inconsistencies (when I read something right after I’ve written it, I often miss those little problems because my mind is still immersed in the story that’s in my head, rather than what’s on the page).

Once I realized that I was jumping the gun, I put my novel away and I’ve let it sit, untouched, for 47 days now.  Of course, it was difficult to ignore at first.  I wanted nothing more than to admire what I’d done and re-immerse myself in the world I’d created.  But I held out and, gradually, the novel drifted into the recesses of my mind.  Weeks went by without me giving it a single thought.  Then today I found the manuscript sitting on a chair and a little voice inside of me said “it’s time.”

So tonight I will crack open the manuscript, armed with my trusty red pen and spiral-bound notebook.  In order to avoid falling into an endless cycle of revisions, I’ve set myself a deadline of April 17 for completing the revisions.  Then it’ll be time for my Ideal Reader to have a look at it and give his verdict.

Wish me luck!