Photo by [noone]I’m reading Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut.  It’s a strange book, but I’m finding it funny and interesting and absolutely worth anyone’s time.  I love reading just about anything he writes.  He is so entertaining and so readable—which can’t be said for most luminaries of literary fiction.  It really doesn’t matter what he is writing about.  He is deservedly considered one of the greatest American writers ever.

He gives his opinion of semicolons towards the end of the Timequake.

Let me note that Kilgore Trout and I have never used semicolons.  They don’t do anything, don’t suggest anything.  They are transvestite hermaphrodites.

Ponder that for a while.

Tags: authors, books, grammar, Vonnegut, Writing

Have you ever been reading a novel and part way through noticed a quirk in the author’s style of writing?  And then you can’t help but notice it every time it happens.  It can be distracting, can’t it?

I’ve started reading novels with the Kindle application for the iPod Touch.  I discovered it’s a surprisingly good platform for reading.  Since the iPod Touch is back-lit, it is especially useful for reading in the dark.  Amazon has also been giving away quite a few Kindle books—often the first book of a series.

The book I’m currently reading on the iPod is His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.  I’m about half-way through and I am enjoying it quite a bit.  Once done, I’m sure I’ll continue reading the series.  So in this case giving me the first taste for free will pay off.

There is one oddity I’ve noticed in this book—semicolons.  I have never seen so many semicolons in any other book in my life.  In fact, I believe after reading half of this book, that I’ve seen more semicolons in it than in every other book I’ve ever read combined.  I’m sure they are all being used properly, but it is unusual.  And I can’t help but notice almost every semicolon and think to myself, “semicolon!”  If Novik goes a whole paragraph without one, I find myself thinking about that.

I present you with an example paragraph:

Every feeling protested against the sacrifice of this dream; yet under the circumstances, he was not even sure he could honorably make Edith an offer which she might feel obliged to accept. And there was no question of courting someone else in her place; no woman of sense and character would deliberately engage her affections on an aviator, unless she was of the sort who preferred to have a complacent and absent husband leaving his purse in her hands, and to live apart from him even while he was in England; such an arrangement did not appeal to Laurence in the slightest.

Three in one paragraph.  Outstanding!

This has made me realize how developing tendencies as an author can create distractions for the reader.  Even something as small as a punctuation mark can cause a distraction as it did in this case.  Remembering this is especially important for writers who are not as skilled as Novik: the book is good enough and interesting enough that I don’t mind the distraction.

That leaves me with two choices, become such a good writer that readers are willing to ignore my distracting quirks or avoid the distracting quirks all-together.  Long term, I’m hoping for option one; short term, I’ll do my best to go with option two.

Will you look at that?  I used a semicolon.  And there is a slim probability I used it correctly.  I’ve still got a long way to go to become a master semicolonist.

Good day to you and semicolon!

Tags: authors, books, dragons, observations, Writing

Inexplicable Book Cover

The first line of a novel is the most important line in the most important paragraph on the most important page.  Sol Stein writes:

Some years ago I was involved in an informal study of the behavior of lunch-hour browsers in mid- Manhattan bookstores. In the fiction section, the most common pattern was for the browser to read the front flap of the book’s jacket and then go to page one. No browser went beyond page three before either taking the book to the cashier or putting the book down and picking up another to sample.

That was written almost 15 years ago.  I’m sure people have gotten even more impatient when decide whether they should buy a novel.  It’s quite a bit of pressure.  It’s also why writers look at the first lines of their favorite novels to provide inspiration.

One of my all-time favorite books is Treason by Orson Scott Card.  It’s actually a revised version of a previously published novel named A Planet Called Treason (which I’ve never actually read).  It being one of my favorites is the only reason I have chosen it for an example of a good first line.  Here it is, It gets the job done well.

I was the last to know what was happening to me.  Or at least I was the last to know that I knew.

Reading it, I want to know what the speaker now knows and what he now knows he now knows.  And look at that cover!  It has a guy in a space suit walking to a space ship and he’s walking with a cane.  Cool!  Except nowhere in the novel are there any space suits or space ships–there may be a cane but I don’t remember.  Did the artist even read the book’s blurb?  I hope to one day have to ask my publisher why there is a dragon fighting a spaceship in front of a destroyed city on the cover of my novel which contains none of those things.

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For a good laugh and many fine examples of horrible science-fiction and fantasy covers, check out Good Show Sir.

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This is my new favorite commercial.

I sit here having just passed the 10,000 word mark and I’m feeling pretty good.  When I first began this enterprise, I wasn’t sure how difficult I would find it to write the number of words necessary to fill an entire novel.  I worried that I would finish the story and discover I didn’t have much more than a short story.

In college, one of my biggest challenges was being able to write enough to satisfy the page requirements of papers I had been assigned.  I had to use all the formatting tricks available to fill the five or ten or twenty pages demanded by the professor.  I’d increase the margins, increase the spacing between the letters, use slightly more than double spacing, and of course use the Courier New font.  How I loved that font.

Photo by robotographyWhen I read what other authors have to say about their writing process, most of them write much more than they are planning to keep in the final version.  Then they slice and dice to get to their desired word count.  I hope I don’t have the opposite problem.

10,000 words has gotten me through four chapters and I’ve I still got a bit to go before my first major plot point.  I’d like to have another 10,000 words or more before I get there.  There’s a chance I’ll struggle doing that.  I might have to go back and add more detail to a few of the scenes.  I tried to avoid having too much detail—maybe too well.  Books describing every tree in the forest in exacting detail annoy me and I often end up putting them down—usually for good.

One of the most encouraging aspects of the writing I’ve done is how the words have come more easily the more I’ve written.  I had read that writing improves with practice and I believe I’m finding that to be true.  Here’s to hoping the improvement continues.

Aloha.

Tags: reflections, WIP, Writing