Book Review — The Lost Goddess

I just finished reading The Lost Goddess, by Tom Knox.  I listened to the Recorded Books version on audiotape, narrated by Christopher Evan Welch.  This is the first book I’ve read by Knox.  From the blurb, it promised to be an interesting historical thriller.  I’d say it delivered.

The book follows the lives of two people whose paths are destined to connect.  Julia Kerrigan is an American archaeologist digging at a site in a French cave.  Jake Thurby is a British photographer trying to snap money-making pictures in Southeast Asia.  The novel alternates point-of-view between these characters throughout.

The novel is exciting, gritty, and packed with mystery and adventure.  The scene-setting is very good, especially the detailed descriptions of Cambodia and Laos.  The author really puts you right there, close to both the beauty and the ugliness.  I see by his website that he conducted considerable research on that region.  I thought the Julia character was well drawn; she seemed strong and had believable motivations.  There’s some interesting sexual tension, though not between Julia and Jake, but this is no romance.  The secret mystery of the book is compelling and fascinating; a great weaving together of some historical facts into a grand and fairly believable theory.  I won’t spoil anything for you, but you won’t put it all together until near the end.  Some readers might find the mystery’s explanation morally objectionable, but I’d encourage them to lighten up and remember this is a work of fiction.

On the negative side, I found the title a bit of a misnomer.  Oddly, the book is sold under a different (and better) title in the United Kingdom — Bible of the Dead.  While I said Julia was a strong character, Jake is not.  He seems almost pathetic and stupid at times, always asking for explanations, seemingly swept along by events.  Not the kind of character I care much about.  Normally I have kind things to say about the narrator readers of audio books, and it’s not a bad performance by Mr. Welch.  It’s just that sometimes it’s hard to tell that he’s speaking in Jake’s voice when Jake is speaking.  The book’s ending seems to drag on a bit long.

Although I’m giving the book a rating of three seahorses according to my unique seahorse rating system, I recommend the book to lovers of mystery-adventure books set in exotic locales.  Those readers will really enjoy The Lost Goddess.  I enjoyed it, but I can only speak for–

                                                                                  Poseidon’s Scribe

 

 

 

March 21, 2012Permalink

Being Prolific — Is That the Secret?

Should you aim to be prolific?  To be prolific as a writer means to be highly productive, to write a lot, and (one hopes) to be published a lot.  Should that be your goal? If so, what is the key to being prolific?

The ultimate aims of writers vary, but a short list of such goals could include:

  1. I want to be a famous writer, popular in my own time.
  2. I want my books to be remembered through the ages.
  3. I just have an inner need to tell a story.
  4. I want to maximize my financial earnings.
  5. I want to publish as many books as possible.
  6. I seek a combination of some of the above goals.

I was tempted to set up a graph with high quantity (being prolific) at one end and high quality at the other, and plot each goal on the graph.  For example, you might think goals 1 and 2 have to do with quality, while goals 4 and 5 are more concerned with quantity.  Such an analysis would have told you whether to churn out a lot of words, or self-edit like crazy to ensure each book is perfect.

Here’s the problem.  As Joseph Stalin was supposed to have said, (even an evil dictator can utter one true statement) “Quantity has a quality all its own.”  In a previous post, I mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about becoming a genius in any particular field.  One element of that was practicing for 10,000 hours.  That implies quantity is a necessary step to quality.  To write well, you must first write a lot.

There are different ways to spend that 10,000 hours of practice, of course.  As I implied above, you might write your first draft, then do just enough editing to send it off and sell a mediocre story, then move on to the next one.  Or you could refine and polish every word, as a poet does, going over and over your story until you achieve earthly perfection.  At the end of that process, you might have a book that could satisfy goals 1 or 2 or both.

There’s a list of prolific writers and one of my favorites–Dr. Isaac Asimov–is on that list.  He’s not at the top, though.  That honor belongs to María del Socorro Tellado López, who wrote mostly under the name Corín Tellado.  She lived from 1927-2009 and wrote over 4,000 novellas.

If you hope to surpass her record, you’d better get busy.

Let’s examine the productivity of Corín Tellado.  She sold her first novel in 1946, when she was about 19.  Her publishing house contracted with her to write a novella every week.  When I read that, I thought, “Okay, I could see having a very organized schedule that results in a novella each week.”  But look closer at the numbers.  Say she wrote continually from 1946 until her death in 2009, a period of about 63 years, or roughly 3,276 weeks.  Only 3,276 weeks, and yet she wrote over 4,000 novellas.  She was cranking out a novella, on average, every 5.7 days.

Corín Tellado is the extreme example of being prolific.  You probably won’t go that far, but imagine the discipline required, the organizational and time-management skills, the need to fill all available time with writing.  Not to mention the necessity to dream up numerous plotlines and characters.  These are the keys to being a prolific writer.

Whatever your goals as a writer, whether you aim for quantity or quality, I think you’re still going to need (or at least aim for) the skills and attributes of a prolific writer.  Do you agree or disagree?  Leave me a comment.  But keep it short; I’m a busy man and have to finish my next novella in 5.7 days, or I’m not–

                                                                       Poseidon’s Scribe

March 18, 2012Permalink

The Iron-Clad Discipline of Writing

Many years ago, I attended one of our nation’s service academies.  When, during a meal, one of the upperclassmen heard some unnecessary talking at the table by an underclassman, he would ask, “Mr. —–, how’s the discipline at that end of the table?”  The only correct answer was to bang your fist on the table and shout, “Iron-clad, sir!”  Discipline is a vital attribute of military service; is it also important in writing?

This excellent blog post by Jocelyn K. Glei explores the whole idea of discipline, including a fascinating psychological test for it, the Marshmallow Test.  Researchers took four-year-old kids and showed them a marshmallow and said they could eat it now, or wait fifteen minutes and they’d be given two.  All the kids wanted to wait, but not all could.   Years later when they were in high school, the children who’d waited for two marshmallows at age four still demonstrated more disciplined behavior.

The website also provides a simple twelve-question quiz you can take to measure your own discipline.  The article calls the quality ‘grit,’ but they mean that same tenacity and perseverance I’m talking about.  It produces results ranging from 1.0 (undisciplined) to 5.0 (very disciplined).

Obviously a certain amount of discipline is necessary to be a writer.  Something has to keep you in that chair, churning out words for hours on end.  There will come times when you’d prefer to be doing something else.  Authors joke about it often, that realization that a library book needs returning, or the floor under the bed needs cleaning, or the lawn needs mowing.  Anything other than writing.

I believe a lack of discipline may be the thing that discourages people from writing, more so than any other reason.  People will say things such as, “I could never write a novel.  I don’t know where writers get their ideas.”  But just about everyone has a story to tell.  Ideas aren’t the problem, in my view.  It’s the thought of devoting long hours alone to the task of generating the words, the paragraphs, the scenes.  The duration of the effort seems daunting.

That’s why, as the saying goes, writing a novel is a one-day event.  As in, “one day, I’m going to write a novel.”

So I do think a certain amount of doggedness is necessary, if only to get you through those tough times when the words won’t flow.  There must be some recognition of the value of delayed gratification; otherwise it would be too easy to just stop writing.

When I set out to blog about this topic, I assumed a writer couldn’t get too much discipline, that it was an attribute a writer needed in full measure.  Then I got to thinking about people with extreme discipline–people who never, ever give up.  They will pursue a project to completion with single-minded devotion, not letting anything get in their way.  Again, the way I’ve described it still may sound like a desirable trait, but consider there may be a certain lack of adaptability in extremely disciplined people.  They might not be so willing to abandon a course of action even if the situation changes.

For you as a writer, a story might not be working at all.  Try as you might, it’s not coming together.  Or perhaps the story you were writing would have been based on some real-life situation remaining unchanged, but it changed.  For example, your story might have been based on the continued existence of some famous person who then died while you were writing the story.

In such cases, a certain degree of flexibility might be more important than a 5.0 rating of discipline.  I’m not saying disciplined people always lack adaptability; the words aren’t antonyms.  I’m just saying both attributes are important to writers.

You might disagree with me.  That’s what the ‘leave a comment’ thing below is for.  For those of you dying of curiosity, my grit rating on the quiz was 3.92.  You might also be asking, “Mr. Poseidon’s Scribe, how’s discipline at that end of the internet?”  Bang!  Iron-clad, sir!”  At least, that’s the response from–

                                                                        Poseidon’s Scribe

March 11, 2012Permalink

Book Review – Behemoth

I enjoy a good steampunk novel.  Two years ago I read Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld, and it was high time to read the next book in the series.

That book is Behemoth, and I listened to the CD version put out by Recorded Books and read by Alan Cumming.  This series is aimed at the young adult market, grade 7 and up, and should appeal to either young girls or boys.

Whether you start the series by reading the first book or the second, Westerfeld transports you right into his world, and it’s different.  Some of the World War I setting is the same as our world’s history–the countries are involved in the war, languages and accents, etc.  However, in Westerfeld’s world, the main technologies of the 19th Century have evolved into two distinct branches.  Some countries chose one path, some the other, and some a mix of both.  One branch is mechanized, and includes the technologies of steam, gears, and even walking machines.  This is termed “clanker” technology and is represented by Germany and Austria-Hungary.  The other branch is the manipulation of DNA to form animals into creatures designed to be useful to man, including “message lizards” that can parrot human speech, and even living airships.  These are the Darwinists and are represented by the United Kingdom and Russia.  Other countries such as the U.S. and the Ottoman Empire employ mixtures of both branches.

Deryn is a young British girl who has chosen to disguise herself as a boy named Dylan and serve as a midshipman within the British airship Leviathan.  She is in constant fear of being found out.  Alek is a prince, legal heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, but he cannot claim the throne yet and is driven into hiding from the Germans who want to kill him, as they did his father.  Where Leviathan chronicled the separate adventures of the two teenagers, only having them meet near the end, in Behemoth, the two are together for much of the book when the airship arrives in Istanbul, giving a chance for their relationship to start to mature.

I found the world-building aspects of Behemoth to be excellent, with plenty of details to make Westerfeld’s world believable and interesting.  Deryn’s language is peppered with expressions such as “Barking spiders!” to indicate surprise, “beasties” as a term for various Darwinist creations, and “gone pear-shaped” (an actual British idiom) meaning “gone wrong.”  There’s plenty of action in the book including aerial attacks, secret underwater missions, and a revolutionary overthrow of a sultan featuring mechanical walking machines. The book’s characters are multi-dimensioned and complex, not steampunk tropes.  Westerfeld never talks down to young readers, and the book includes an Afterward that separates real history from the alternative history of the novel.  I found the book’s ending satisfying, which can’t always be said for first or second books of trilogies.  Lastly, the narration by Alan Cumming is excellent; he makes it easy to distinguish the characters by their accents and tone.

The book is so good I am tempted to give it my highest rating.  However, I find the plot to be rather contrived.  Westerfeld is determined to have both characters join up with revolutionaries in Istanbul who are bent on overthrowing the Ottoman sultan.  Their reasons for doing so seem out of character in the case of both Alek and Deryn.  However, the target audience is unlikely to object to this and will accept the situation and read on.

I’ll give this novel a rating of four seahorses using my trademarked seahorse rating scheme.  Still, it is very close to five.  I strongly recommend it for teenage boys or girls, who will find it easy to identify with the struggles of the characters.  Alek and Deryn each want to be accepted, but they also yearn to discover their true selves; Westerfeld conveys these conflicts well.  That’s the assessment of–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

March 10, 2012Permalink

Hook ‘em, So You Can Reel ‘em In

How will you begin your next story?  The beginning, called the ‘hook,’ is important.  These days readers don’t have much time.  Other things like TV, video games, and the Internet compete with your story for their attention.  If your first sentence or paragraph doesn’t grab them, they’re on to doing something else.

Here are some examples of great hooks used in novels as chosen by the editors of American Book Review:

  • Call me Ishmael.  Moby-Dick, Herman Melville 
  • Marley was dead, to begin with.  A Christmas Carol,  Charles Dickens
  • It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.  1984, George Orwell
  • You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter.  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  • Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.  The Trial, Franz Kafka
  • Mother died today.  The Stranger, Albert Camus
  • There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.  The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C.S. Lewis
  • He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.  The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
  • It was a pleasure to burn.  Fahrenheit 451,  Ray Bradbury
  • The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.  The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane

These beginnings work well for several reasons.  They give us an early idea what the story will be about.  They establish the tone of the story, and something about the attitude of the narrator’s voice.

But most of all they seize our attention and compel us to want to read more.  What gives them this quality?  It’s hard to find a common attribute just by looking at them.  They seem to appeal for different reasons.

Writer Darcy Pattison has grouped the different beginnings into categories.  This is helpful since one category might work better for the start of your story than another.  Knowing the category can give you a starting point for developing your hook.

Many of the beginnings in the list start with a sense of the ordinary, and then give the reader something that clashes or is jarring somehow.  We’re left with a puzzle, an oddity, a question that can only be resolved by reading further.  So read on we must.

Those without that twist added to the ordinary seem to possess a different quality.  They settle us in, set a mood, fluff up our pillow, put on some appropriate music.  We’re now comfortably in the story, transported to the author’s world right from the start, and now that we’re there we might as well read on to see what the place is like.

Each of these beginnings without exception is easy to read.  None have rare or difficult words to stumble over.  All have rhythm, and almost poetic brevity.  Not a word is wasted.

How do you write an opening like these?  Heck if I know; these are some of the best ever written.  Ask one of the world’s greatest authors.

With that task added to your to-do list, perhaps we could set our sights a bit lower for now.  How do you write an effective story beginning?  For one thing, it takes time and many trials.  The beginning is the hardest part to write, usually takes the longest, and usually involves the most revisions.  You might decide to skip the hook and come back to it later as the story evolves.  You might like to write a first version of the hook knowing you’ll revisit it over and over.  In any case, be prepared to spend the time and thought to craft it right.

To learn much more about how to write story hooks, read Hooked by Les Edgerton.  What an invaluable resource!

With regard to beginnings, we’ve reached the end.  Remember to check back at this site next week for further ramblings about writing by–

                                                                 Poseidon’s Scribe

March 4, 2012Permalink

The Stories behind the Stories, Part II

Today I’ll continue my attempt to convey where my ideas come from by listing the remainder of my published short stories, and the source of the ideas for each one. If you missed Part I, here it is.   And now for the most recent seven stories:

“Blood in the River.”  At Ralan, I came across a request for submissions for a horror anthology about fish or fishing, to be called Dead Bait.  I had no desire to write horror fiction, and tried to move on to other writing projects.  My muse, however, wanted me to write it and whispered the story idea quite loudly.

 

“A Sea-Fairy Tale.”  As I recall, the discussion during one critique group session had turned to the then-current popularity of fairies in fantasy fiction.  Again, I had no desire to write anything of the sort, but my muse insisted.  I gave my fairy story a sea-going flair.  The story was published in The New Fairy Tales Anthology.

“The Finality.”  Another visit to Ralans showed me Severed Press was looking for submissions for an anthology about the Mayan 2012 prophesy, to be called 2012 AD.  I’m not one of those who thinks the world will end this December, but that Mayan calendar myth does make for good story material!

 

“Bringing the Future to You.”  My critique group decided to task ourselves with a writing exercise.  (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was inspired by just such a group challenge.)  We chose a phrase at random from a book of writing prompts.  The phrase was, “The fortune teller said…”  This story was published in the anthology Cheer Up, Universe!

 

“The Vessel.”  I got this idea at a science fiction conference.  I don’t remember the exact inspiration, but while at the conference I suddenly got a vision of Atlantean sailors returning in their ship to find their homeland, their island, gone.  The idea stuck with me for several months.  Then I had occasion to read Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond.  His non-fiction book deals with the interaction between high-technology and low-technology cultures in history.  There are elements of that book in my story.  “The Vessel” was published in Quest for Atlantis:  Legends of a Lost Continent.

“Within Victorian Mists.”  I enjoy steampunk, and one night I was websurfing about the topic and saw some buzz about people bemoaning the lack of steampunk romance.  I didn’t want to write romance, but the muse prodded me to give it a try.  In thinking about what I could write, I remembered a mention, years earlier, of someone being surprised radio was invented before the laser.  That got me wondering what might have happened if someone had invented the laser in Victorian times.  This story was published by Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

“Leonardo’s Lion.”  Like many people, I’m fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci.  One aspect of his life is rarely mentioned; late in life he constructed a mechanical lion as entertainment for a royal party.  I got to thinking–what happened to that lion afterward?  Gypsy Shadow Publishing also published this one.  (Notice the clockwork gears on the cover.)

Some writers struggle to search for good story-writing ideas; some bump into ideas all the time.  Whichever you are, may you come across the inspirations you need, the ones that prompt you to write great stories.  That’s the wish of–

                                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

February 26, 2012Permalink

Book Review — Remarkable Creatures

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  To that I’d add “or its blurb.”  I just finished listening to a book on tape, Remarkable Creatures, © 2010 by Tracy Chevalier, put out by Recorded Books Productions, narrated by Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons.   More about that blurb below.

The novel is the story of a lower class woman in England in the early 1800s, and her dealings with an upper class spinster.  The story starts with the first woman, Mary Anning, as a child when the spinster, Elizabeth Philpot, is in her twenties.  They end up sharing an interest in gathering and understanding fossils.  Fossils had caused a stir in the scientific community since many seem to be from animals that no longer exist, which called Biblical teachings into question.  The two women develop a knowledge of these fossils that equals or surpasses some of the learned men of Europe, but it is a time when women were sadly powerless in many areas, including science.

The author really puts you in the timeframe, and you come to care about the characters.  If you don’t think you’re interested in fossils before you read the book, you might well be fascinated with them when you’re done.  You’ll be drawn in as the two women become frustrated with their inability to be recognized by the male scientific community, and with their lack of success in finding husbands.  All they really have is each other, and the author  skillfully leads you along the ups and downs of their relationship.

What I didn’t know when I began reading is, these women were real.  There really was a Mary Anning and an Elizabeth Philpot.  In fact, most of the characters and events in the book were real.  I had thought it was just a historical setting with made-up characters, but that is not so.

The narrators, Charlotte Parry and Susan Lyons, did a fine job in this audiobook.  The book alternates in point-of-view between Anning and Philpot, and the narrators take turns.  I wondered, at times, if it would have been more effective to have the ‘Mary’ narrator speak Mary’s actual lines and the ‘Elizabeth’ narrator speak Elizabeth’s lines, but Recorded Books chose the point-of-view method instead.

On the negative side, there is not a lot of action in the book.  Moreover the conflicts and problems of the characters are not well defined.  Fiction is about conflict and the attempted resolution of problems.  I understand it can be difficult to force such a fictional constraint on real historical people, but there is a reason real life tends to be more boring than fiction.  Fictional characters have well-understood goals and passions, and really important problems to solve.  It’s my understanding that someone has bought movie rights to this book, but if a movie is made, they’ll have to put more action scenes in it and make the conflicts more apparent and dramatic.  Either that or opt for a straight historical documentary.

I was enticed into reading the book by the blurb on the Recorded Books cover, including this intriguing sentence.  “Mary discovers she has the ability to ‘see’ and locate fossils buried deep in the cliffs near her village.”  That certainly makes it sound like she has some supernatural x-ray ability to see through rock, right?  Nothing of the sort.  Mary’s good at locating fossils, but due to the shifting of land in the area and the action of waves on the beach, new fossils become exposed on the surface quite often and it is these Mary can spot.  Although it was a good book, I feel a little cheated by the misleading blurb.  I can’t really fault the author for that, though, since she probably didn’t write it.

A surprisingly good book, I’ll give it a rating of four seahorses.  Whether you concur with my opinions or differ, I’d like to hear from you.  Just click on ‘leave a comment’ and you’ll get a reply from–

                                                                          Poseidon’s Scribe

February 25, 2012Permalink

The Stories behind the Stories, Part I

In these blog entries I’ve usually refrained from shameless promotion of my own stories, but today will be different.  However, since my purpose in these blogs is to offer help to beginning writers, I’ll couch my blatant self-advertising as instructive, educational matter.

Hundreds of cards and letters and e-mails have been pouring in asking me one question.  Well, maybe dozens.  Okay, maybe it’s just a question I’ve been hoping others would ask me:  “Where do your ideas come from?”  I explored the topic last year, but today I’ll trace the origin of the ideas for each of my published short stories.  Perhaps in reading through these, you’ll see how ideas can occur any time and for any reason; good story ideas will come to you, too!

“Target Practice.” I wrote this story in 1999, and I honestly don’t remember what the inspiration was.  Back then I was in the midst of writing a novel, and I took time out to write this story and submit it for publication to a wonderful anthology, Lower than the Angels.  I think I just wanted to see if I could create a truly hopeless situation and figure a way for my protagonist to resolve the problem.

“The Steam Elephant.”  Seven years later, as I mentioned here, I was inspired by the book The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley and Eric Brown.  It contained short stories written by modern authors as tributes to Verne.  As a Verne enthusiast, I was thrilled by the book, but disappointed to find no stories echoing Verne’s two-part novel The Steam House.  I decided to write my own, and it was published in Steampunk Tales #5.

“The Wind-Sphere Ship.”  I’m not sure why, but at some point I must have been pondering why steamships weren’t invented much earlier.  After all, the power of steam was known to the ancients.  The Greek inventor Heron (or Hero) developed a steam toy in the first century A.D.  This suggested an alternate history story.  Gypsy Shadow Publishing put this story out in e-book form.

“Alexander’s Odyssey.”  I’ve long been fascinated by the history of submarine development.  One tale held that Alexander the Great descended under water in a glass-windowed barrel.  I  wondered how the sea god, Poseidon, would have reacted, and the story wrote itself.   It was first published in the anthology Magic & Mechanica and then later (in a longer version) by itself in e-book form.

“The Sea-Wagon of Yantai.”  I continued my quest to fictionalize, in short-story form, the development of the submarine.  I found tantalizing references to the Chinese having developed a submarine around the year 200 B.C.  However, I couldn’t find any details.  I figured that left me free to write the story as I wished.  My story was also loosely inspired by Ray Bradbury’s marvelous story, “The Flying Machine,” which I’d read in high school.  Eternal Press published my story.

“Seasteadia.”  Knowing of my interest in the sea, a fellow writer in my critique group sent me an article about the concept of seasteading.  I decided to write a series of stories about seasteading’s possible future.  “Seasteadia” is the first, and so far the only published one, and it appeared in the anthology Aurora of the Sun.

There are more, but I’ll save those for next week’s blog entry.  The point is, a writer’s story ideas come from many sources.  Who knows where your next story idea will originate?  After all, your creative mind works differently from that of–

                                                                Poseidon’s Scribe

February 19, 2012Permalink

Book Review – A Curse on the Cygnus

At DarkoverCon last November, I met author Kevin M. Houghton, and bought a copy of his book, A Curse on the Cygnus.  It’s the subject of today’s book review.

This steampunk novel follows Royal Defence Service agents Colonel Ian Grey and Lady Victoria Dallas on a trip aboard a British Imperial Airways airship called the Cygnus.  A murder occurs onboard, and the protagonists become involved in the investigation. The question is whether this is a straightforward, naturally explainable crime, or whether it has something to do with the airship’s cargo of ancient Egyptian treasures and an associated, rumored curse.

I found the story engaging and exciting; it’s high adventure in a wonderful steampunk setting.  The novel gives the reader a good feel of being in an airship, conveying a sense of being confined.  Lady Victoria Dallas is a strong character, well able to defend herself.  The author does a fine job of making clear the motivations of all the major characters so their actions are believable.  Tension builds nicely through the story to a dramatic conclusion.  Moreover, the book is short and written in an easy-to-read style.

However, most of the characters seemed rather stock steampunk characters to me.  I would have liked Ian and Victoria to each have an endearing character flaw to make them seem more human and compelling.  I found I didn’t care about them as much as I like to care about protagonists.  There were a lot of characters to keep track of, but the author did a pretty good job of giving the reader little reminding clues to keep them straight.

The story’s beginning was slow, it seemed to me.  I was confused by the Point of View throughout.  Third person POV is most common these days, but this novel seemed to either employ third person POV that flipped frequently within scenes (and once within a paragraph), or else employed omniscient POV.   I was never quite sure whose head I was in.  A large number of grammatical and editorial errors also detracted from my reading enjoyment.

Using my seahorse rating system, I give this novel three seahorses.  If you enjoy steampunk and like a good murder mystery with a touch of the supernatural, then I recommend you read A Curse on the Cygnus.  If you do so, and come away with a different impression, please leave a comment for–

                                                             Poseidon’s Scribe

February 18, 2012Permalink

Diagnosis: Writer’s Block

Have you experienced writer’s block?  That condition where you feel the desire or pressure to write but you can’t actually come up with any words?  It’s a real thing, an occupational “hazard” first diagnosed in 1947.

I think there are two forms of it–Major Writer’s Block and minor writer’s block.  I define MajWB as the state of being unable to start writing a new work, and of long duration.  On the other hand, minWB is a short-term state of being stuck while in the midst of a work.  MajWB can last for years or even be a career-ender.  But minWB is almost always temporary, lasting a few hours or days.  I have yet to experience MajWB, but get the minor version often.

In either case, the symptoms are pretty much the same.  Words won’t come out, try as you might, and after a while you don’t feel much like trying.  I pay attention to the blogs of writer Andrew Gudgel (full disclosure:  Andy and I are friends), and he wrote a great blog entry on writer’s block on May 3, 2011.  In it, he states that the condition of not writing is only a symptom, not the problem itself.  He makes the case that only when you know the problem can you begin to solve it, and that the problem itself points to the solution.

He divides the spectrum of possible problems into craft-related problems, and problems with other aspects of the writer’s life.  I’ll divide writing block problems a different way, as follows:

  • Story-related problems:
    • plotting problems–the story isn’t going in the right direction
    • character problems–a character isn’t fully fleshed out, or is taking over the story, or is otherwise not proving suitable
    • setting problems
    • other problems with the story itself
  • Craft-related problems that are writing-related, but not about the story:
    • overwhelmed by task
    • inferiority complex, thoughts that your writing won’t measure up
    • lost interest
    • pressured by deadline
    • paralyzed by own success
    • pressure of audience too close (more below)
  • Personal, but non-writing, problems:
    • illness
    • depression
    • relationship problems
    • financial difficulties

Again, identifying which real problem is present can point toward the solution.  The stress caused by any of the problems above can really inhibit the normal creative process.  What’s thought to happen in the short term to the human brain under stress is a shift of activity from the cerebral cortex to the limbic areas.  In other words, the focus shifts from the areas devoted to attention, consciousness, language, memory, and thought to the basic, instinctual fight-or-flight area we inherited from the dinosaurs.  Extended periods of stress damages brain cells, weakens memory, and causes depression.  All of that is bad news for writers.

Most of the items on the list of problems above are self-explanatory, but I thought I’d discuss the pressure of the audience in more detail.  Writing expert Dr. Peter Elbow wrote a much-discussed essay called “Closing My Eyes As I Speak.”  He claims writers feel the presence of an audience as they write.  Unlike performance artists such as singers or stand-up comedians, writers do not have their audience physically present, but they often imagine how readers will react to their work.  Dr. Elbow considers the pressure of this unseen audience can disrupt the flow of words, and suggests writers disregard the audience as they write their first drafts.  The writing will be more natural and genuine.

As a non-writing example, look at this picture of world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma in performance.  He often plays with eyes closed, as if he’s deliberately distancing himself from his audience and playing only for himself in his own private world.  Metaphorically, we should all write that way, too, at least in our first drafts.

I’ve discussed the condition of writer’s block and potential causes, but never got around yet to how to overcome it.  Getting unblocked will have to be the subject of a future blog post by–

                                                                            Poseidon’s Scribe

February 12, 2012Permalink