Author vs. English Teacher

You see this meme repeatedly on Facebook—a Venn diagram showing the small intersection between what the author meant and what the English teacher thinks the author meant. Usually it’s posted by an author who’s convinced that English teachers are evil witches distorting an author’s true meaning. English teachers, say the authors, should just stick to grammar and leave literature alone.

I’ve got a sort of unique perspective here since I’m an author and a retired English teacher. I’ve taught literature and I’ve taught grammar, and I’ve enjoyed both. Moreover, I agree with the poet Donald Hall who once said that a lot of people go into teaching English because they love to read and want to talk about books (Hall thought that was a problem, but I’m not sure I agree). I’ve also encountered the same kind of hostility toward interpretation that you get in that meme.

But here’s the thing: the meme implies that there’s only one meaning in a book, and it’s the meaning put there by the author. On the other side of that idea is reading theory, which holds that the meaning of a book rests with the reader, and that it changes with each person who opens the book. As a teacher, author, and reader, I’d say the truth lies somewhere between those two poles. Reading isn’t anarchy—some readings clearly have more validity than others. But authors don’t always see what readers see, and a work that can only be understood one way can be tiresome to read.

But what about those totally weird interpretations English teachers come up with? That goes back to the whole multiple meanings idea. Like other readers, English teachers come to books with a particular point of view. Some English teachers like to look at history (e.g., what was going on in Shakespeare’s England when he wrote King Lear?). Some prefer cultural criticism (e.g., how does nineteenth century colonialism inform Joseph Conrad’s work?). Some are feminists or psychologists or close readers who delight in language. Their interpretations seem weird only if you assume that there’s only one way to read—a meaning the author built in originally.

I’ve occasionally had people claim that reading that arrives at an interpretation other than the author’s “ruins” a book. One of my husband’s relatives once accused me of spoiling Huck Finn by suggesting it was a lot more than a “simple children’s book.” A quick aside: Huck Finn includes child abuse and murder, along with some shocking violence. I wouldn’t suggest giving it to a child unless that child is beyond the age of nightmares.

As an English teacher, I felt honor bound to push my students into looking beyond their kneejerk reactions to a book. That doesn’t “ruin” the book. That makes it richer.

In reality, English teachers can be authors’ friends. They’re sort of “super-readers”: people who love books and language, and who want to pass that love on to others. When they press students to go beyond their initial impressions of a book, they’re pressing them to think about what they’re reading. To pay attention to features like characterization and language, along with plot. Students who come out of a good English teacher’s class are more likely to be people who love to read. They’re not our enemies, folks, they’re our allies.

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Forget Perfect

Peter Elbow was one of the leaders in revising the way we teach writing during the seventies and eighties. His books Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power were beloved by teachers and students alike for their multitude of ideas about getting the whole writing process going. Back in the days when I taught Freshman Composition, I used Elbow’s writing heuristics to get my students over their worries about having nothing to say or not knowing how to say what they wanted to.

But to me, the most valuable thing Elbow proclaimed was the need to get rid of the perfect. In his studies of writing among students, Elbow took a long hard look at writers block. He suggested that one sure way to become blocked was to expect your first draft to be perfect, or even to expect it to be very good. First drafts are just that: the first version. There will be (and should be) several versions after that. Get rid of your expectations of perfection, and get to work.

I thought of this the other day when I was closing in on the end of my Work In Progress (WIP). Because I wanted to quit. All of a sudden, I became convinced that what I’d written—all sixty thousand plus words of it—was crap. And though I could see the end, I wasn’t sure it was worth pursuing. The thing is, though, I often feel this way about something I’m working on. And as a result, I often feel like just chucking it in. But for the most part I don’t. I know it’s a temporary feeling, and that I’ll change my mind once I start working the manuscript over. Moreover, my work ethic won’t let me throw something away unless I absolutely have to.

I’m guessing most writers feel this way at some time or another. Part of it is that your WIP is always better in your head than it is on the page. You come up with all these clever turns of phrase and interesting plot twists, but when it comes time to write them down, there’s nothing clever about them. And what had seemed so exciting in your head now seems like pure drudgery.

But that’s where Peter Elbow comes in. Forget perfect. Just get it down. It isn’t like you have to have a perfectly written draft this time. You just need a written draft, period. Like Nora Roberts says, “I can always fix a bad page. I can’t fix a blank one.”

Whatever problems you may find (and usually you find quite a few), you can solve them once you’re finished. Multiple drafts mean multiple chances to get it right. And if you just give yourself time and space you can do it. We all can.

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The Narrative Problem: Points of View

Most romances are written in third person. It’s not a requirement, mind you. There are first person romances, some of them classics (Jane Eyre springs to mind). But using third person allows you to use multiple points of view, switching back and forth between hero and heroine, for example, with the villain thrown in sometimes for a little variety. First person tends to be somewhat hermetic, locking the reader into a form of deliberate tunnel vision. Since romance delights in showing what both partners in a relationship feel, third person frequently works best.

Mysteries and thrillers, in contrast, use first person more often. It gives mystery writers the opportunity to play games with narrators, including the ultimate unreliable narrator, the murderer himself. And since mysteries can benefit from having a limited point of view (more opportunities to overlook vital evidence and to be deluded by preconceptions, for example), first person can work well.

But things start to get murky when authors want to introduce more than one point of view. If getting one voice right is tricky (and it is), getting more than one right is a real balancing act. Still, both romance and mystery writers have found interesting ways to experiment with multiple narrators—as well as some familiar ways to fail.

One recent mystery example is Margaret Maron’s Long Upon the Land, part of Maron’s Judge Deborah Knott series. The series began as simple first person, all narrated by Deborah. But at a certain point, Maron decided to add another point of view through Deborah’s husband, Dwight. Rather than having two first person narrators, however, she writes Dwight’s chapters in third person and Deborah’s in first. Long Upon the Land also adds another third person point of view, a series of flashbacks showing the love affair between Deborah’s parents. The great advantage of using both first and third person comes in making a clean demarcation between points of view: if the chapter is in first person, you know it’s Deborah; if it’s third, it’s either Dwight or a flashback. Maron succeeds in making these three voices distinct and readable. Judith Merkle Riley does something similar in Serpent Garden. The heroine narrates her sections, with a engagingly quirky, first person voice. The sections focusing on the hero or the various supernatural characters are written in third person, switching the point of view from the heroine’s more limited, sometimes confused perspective to a deliberately omniscient overview.

Using more than one first person narrator is also possible, although a great deal trickier. Linda Fairstein’s Devil’s Bridge uses two first person narrators, the heroine, Alex Cooper, and the hero, Mike Chapman. Unfortunately, Devil’s Bridge illustrates all the problems that come with that technique, chiefly that these two voices, supposedly from two very different people, sound remarkably similar. We know that we’re reading Mike’s narration because Alex is missing for most of the book, but it might as well be Alex. There’s nothing distinctive about the voice—when Mike makes references to Alex’s Porthault sheets and Chanel perfume I found myself wondering why a tough NYC detective would know or care what brands his girlfriend uses. The answer, I’m afraid, is that both Alex and Fairstein care, not Mike.

So what choice is best? Hard to say since it depends a great deal on the skill of the author involved. To me, multiple first person narrators are tough, but I can see the attraction. The main thing is that all these point of view choices have to arise from the story. In the wrong hands, both first and third person can be clunky. In the right hands, they can sing.

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Lost Authors

So I discovered this new-to-me author last week: Judith Merkle Riley. Her historical novel, Serpent Garden, is set in Tudor England and France, and it’s an absolute delight. Riley juggles multiple points of view, a complex mixture of historical fact and conjecture, ingenious details of her period setting, and a whiff of the supernatural. All this plus an engaging first-person narrator whose love story bounces along happily.

After reading the first part of Serpent Garden, I did what I usually do when I find an author who grabs my interest—I went to Amazon to find what other books she had available. There were six more novels, three of them a YA trilogy. Interesting. I wondered what she was currently working on and looked for her website. And this is where things started to get, well, strange. Her website consisted of a single page, a list of her six novels with links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Given the number of positive reviews Riley’s books had from major sources like Kirkus, I was amazed. Why didn’t she have a more developed website?
Then I happened to glance at the short bio for Riley that was posted on Google. The most important information was right there at the top, her birth date and her death date. Riley died in 2010. I had two reactions to this news: I was saddened, first of all. But then, selfishly, I was stricken by the thought that six novels was all we’d ever have.

We readers are voracious, and we always want more. Once we discover a novelist we like, we keep demanding product. Some writers, like Grace Burrowes, are remarkably productive, giving us book after book to feed our habits. Some, like Susan Elizabeth Phillips, work more slowly, so that each book becomes a kind of event.

And some authors simply opt out. Julia Ross wrote wonderfully ornate historical novels a few years ago, including The Seduction, Clandestine, and Games of Pleasure. But after several years of turning out one novel after another, she hit the wall. She simply couldn’t write anymore, as she herself explains. Another of my favorite writers, Judith Ivory, simply disappeared after a bout of ill health.

So are we readers at fault when writers go missing? Nope. But it might be a good idea occasionally to think about those writers whose books you depend on. Maybe they need a little encouragement, or even a little gratitude. So please Sherry Thomas, Joanna Bourne, Loretta Chase, and Mary Balogh keep writing—I love everything you’ve done. Please Anna Cowan, write a second book: Untamed was awesome. Please Karen Rose and Tess Gerritsen keep bringing those thrillers out, even though writing them must take a toll. And oh, Jane Haddam, please don’t stop. I need my Gregor Demarkian fix each year.

And Judith Merkle Riley I wish I’d found you a few years ago. I really wish I could have told you what a wonderful writer you really are. Now all I can do is leave a review on Amazon and feel sad.

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The Scam Artist

So the romance world has another outrage to deal with, but this time it’s been perpetrated on us rather than by us. A writer named John Havel decided to “expose” Amazon’s bestseller list practices by plagiarizing a novel and then manipulating it onto the list. Havel justified himself by saying that all the profits he made through his project would be donated to charity. So even though his whole enterprise was based on theft of someone else’s labor, it was okay because he was both demonstrating Amazon’s dishonesty and not keeping the profits for himself. Kat Mayo has summarized this entire saga, and you can read about it here.

This whole project was, of course, ethically suspect from the beginning. But it might have been less so had Havel chosen a book that was truly in the public domain (Moby-Dick with a sexy new cover, for example). But instead, he chose a Harlequin Sensation, Untamed Billionaire, Undressed Virgin, by Australian author Anna Cleary. Cleary, needless to say, knew nothing about this since Havel didn’t bother to ask her permission or to explain his project. She only found out that someone had taken her book, changed the names of her characters and her title, and posted it online for his own profit when other writers informed her.

All of this is sordid enough, but the real source of the outrage (beyond outrage for Cleary and her stolen royalties) is Havel’s reason for choosing her book. It was a romance. Romance, we are told, “sells big,” is easy to scam, and is an object of contempt as far as Havel is concerned. Reading Mayo, you get the impression that Havel doesn’t consider romance novels to be “real” books. Apparently those of us who write in the genre are scam artists ourselves; therefore, our books are open to plagiarism without consequence.

Romance writers confront contempt frequently. It’s never fun, but it can usually be dealt with in one of two ways. First, you can say that reading is all about personal taste and that our readers enjoy what we write. Second, if the contemptuous one seems amenable, you can list a few of the many romance authors who might confound his/her expectations and recommend a little reading.

However, we shouldn’t have to argue that our books belong to us. That they’re real, and that it took a lot of effort to write them.

Havel’s ultimate argument—as Mayo points out—is that all romance books are the same, thus their readers are so gullible that they’re asking to be scammed. As Havel sneers, “Plus, don’t you remember seeing cheesy paperbacks with Fabio on the cover at the grocery store check out? How’s this different?” But the thing is, Mr. Havel, those “cheesy paperbacks” weren’t all the same. They were written by different authors with different approaches and levels of skill and different readers, as you’d know if you’d ever bothered to read a few. The fact that you didn’t like their covers doesn’t mean the books themselves were something you could treat as a joke. And it sure as hell doesn’t give you license to steal them.

Oh and by the way, John, Fabio hasn’t appeared on a romance cover since the nineties. But compared to the other things you seem ignorant of, that’s probably a minor point.

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Finding Mr. Right Now: Reviews

So Finding Mr. Right Now is out of my hands now. It’s been on the shelves since June 3, which marks the beginning of the final phase of the book’s life with the author: sales and reviews. I don’t have much influence over sales (and for a lot of reasons, I won’t really know much about the sales for a few more months). I do have some influence over reviews—at least I can make sure the book gets into the hands of potential reviewers.

Most authors have mixed feelings about reviews. In the old days, you only got reviewed by a few sources: Romantic Times magazine was the biggest, but there was also Affaire de Coeur and less specialized publications like Library Journal and Publishers Weekly. Needless to say, the internet changed all of that. Now there are dozens of review sites out there, from
Guilty Pleasures to Harlequin Junkie to Long and Short Reviews and beyond. But those are the professional and semi-professional reviewers. These days you also have the people who post reviews on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. The possibilities for reviews have grown by quantum measures, and so has authors’ agony.

A lot of authors I know say they don’t read reviews, but most of us do, whether we like it or not. The only way to read your reviews is to make the words “nobody can please everybody” your mantra. Because there will be blood, probably yours. You’ll get negative reviews because everybody does. Even authors I idolize, like Sherry Thomas and Joanna Bourne and Loretta Chase, get negative reviews (although when your reviews number in the hundreds, the negatives tend to get buried). But they still sting.

The worst thing you can do, of course, is argue. Or even comment. The net is full of stories (sometimes they seem to pop up weekly) of authors who become unhinged by what they consider to be unfair reviews. From The Greek Seaman controversy to famous authors misbehaving, we now have multiple examples of what not to do when reviewers hurt your feelings. This is even true with manifestly unfair reviews (of which there are now multiple examples). I read one of Sherry Thomas’s books during a single day’s drive from Lubbock to Denver, pausing only to wipe my tears. It was one of those incredible reading experiences against which other books can be measured. Later I checked the reviews and found that most readers agreed with me—it was a stunning book. Except for one jerk who not only wrote a snarky review but illustrated it with animated gifs. I was appalled, but the lesson is that even superb books get slammed. Also, of course, jerks will be jerks.

So Finding Mr. Right Now is on its way for better or worse. Go to it, book. Have a good life. Look for Love In the Morning, book 2 in the trilogy, come January. And the whole process begins again.

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Finding Mr. Right Now: Getting Ideas

If you write, sooner or later someone will ask you where you get your ideas. It’s a logical question, particularly for people who’d like to write but who aren’t sure how to go about getting started. Unfortunately, for me it’s a tough question to answer. Sometimes I remember how I got an idea, but most frequently I don’t.

Take Finding Mr. Right Now, my next book from Samhain (released on June 2 and available for preorder now). Finding Mr. Right Now is about a reality show, Finding Mr. Right. It’s (very) loosely based on the bachelor and bachelorette shows. But I have to admit—I don’t watch those shows and never have. The closest I’ve come is reading articles about the bachelors and bachelorettes in People and Us magazines (although once I started writing the book, I did check out some episodes on Hulu). Still, I sort of remember wondering what would happen if the bachelor or bachelorette happened to fall in love with the wrong person during the course of those shows.

That would be interesting. However, it’s not the plot of Finding Mr. Right Now. My problem was that as I considered the contestants on those shows, I just couldn’t figure out how to make them the heroes or heroines of the book. Being the bachelor or bachelorette requires a certain “willing suspension of disbelief.” Face it: trying to find your one true love among a group of strangers in front of millions of people isn’t exactly a romantic situation. It requires either a certain degree of naiveté or the willingness to pretend to be naïve about the chances of finding Mr. or Miss Right under those circumstances. Neither possibility appealed to me much for a hero or heroine. I didn’t really want to deal with either a naïve protagonist or a deceptive one.

So I started modifying my original idea. What if the hero wasn’t a willing bachelor at all? What if he got dragged into the whole thing against his will? And just to up the ante a bit, what if he fell in love with the wrong someone while he was being an unwilling bachelor? That was the germ of the story that became Finding Mr. Right Now.

I made some other adjustments along the way. For example, I’d originally thought I’d make the bachelorette at the center of the show a villain. But once I started writing, I discovered that I really liked Ronnie Ventura, even though she was a little too naïve to be the heroine of the book (she grows up, though—look for her in book 3 of the trilogy). But the original idea still worked. An unwilling bachelor, his unexpected true love, and the town that supports them.

I’m still not sure where the idea came from, though. Maybe I’ll just blame my muse.

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Finding Mr. Right Now: Blurbs

If I were given a choice between writing a synopsis and writing a blurb (and believe me, that’s a horrible choice), I’d go with the synopsis. Synopses are basically summaries, and most of us have some experience with summarizing. You’ve got three or four pages, and your main job is to pick out the major incidents of the plot without getting too bogged down in detail. And, of course, you have to make the prose flow without constantly saying And then. They’re not fun to write, but I can usually knock one out in a couple of hours.

Blurbs, on the other hand, suck.

Blurbs are the copy found on the back of print books or at the front of ebooks. They’re also the copy that shows up in ads for the book and on Web pages. While you have three or four pages for synopses, you’ve got three or four paragraphs (at most) for the blurb. And the language has to be sort of “peppy.”

Basically, you’re writing ad copy, and for those of us who have never been in the advertising or marketing business, the process can be excruciating. My first impulse is always to overdo the peppiness. I use many, many exclamation marks!!!!! I may use italics with abandon. If I’m blurbing a contemporary romance, I emphasize fun, fun, fun.

After I’ve read over the first draft and started to moan, I settle down and try again. This time I try to think about what’s really going on in the book. What’s the real reason a person might enjoy reading it?

The extreme brevity means I’m never able to include everything that happens in the book, but I try to suggest the major themes, or at least some of them. Chances are, though, that I’ll end up leaving out something crucial just because I have to.

So about the blurb for Finding Mr. Right Now. As usual, I had a lot of professional help (most publishing houses have blurb editors who can kick your blurbs into shape). And as usual, not everything that happens in the book shows up in the blurb. But it does cover the basics: reality show, Colorado mountain town, hot couple.

Monica McKellar, associate producer of Finding Mr. Right, is desperate. One of the show’s bachelors has bailed one week before shooting starts. She not only needs a replacement ASAP, he has to get the temperamental bachelorette’s stamp of approval.

Fortunately there’s a hot guy right under her nose who’s a perfect fit. Unfortunately, he pushes all her hot buttons. Until the show’s over, her hands—and every other part of her body—are tied.

When Paul DeWitt signed on to write for the reality show, “Bachelor #10” wasn’t supposed to be in his job description. He fully expects to be cut early on, which will free him to focus on the real object of his attraction. Monica.

Instead, he’s a finalist, and they’re all packed in an SUV climbing the Continental Divide, headed for Salt Box, Colorado. Where stampeding horses, vindictive tabloid editors, and one capricious bachelorette’s waffling over suitors may conspire to end Paul and Monica’s romance before it even starts.

Finding Mr. Right Now is available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and All Romance Ebooks. It will be released on June 2.

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The Devil in the Details

A while ago I took a workshop in which the presenter recommended writing a sentence summing up the purpose of each paragraph in a chapter just to make sure all the paragraphs were necessary. At the time, that struck me as torture—and, to be honest, it still does. But the idea behind the exercise was legit. Nothing should be in your book that doesn’t serve a purpose.

No extraneous crap, in other words.

Drilling this down to the paragraph level may be taking things a bit far. But it’s still a good idea to consider the purpose of every detail you include in your story. Because every detail should be there for a reason. Now the reason isn’t always related to the plot. You can have details that relate to character, like your hero rattling change in his pocket to show that he’s nervous. Or you can have details relating to setting, like the insipid punch your heroine sips at Almack’s. And you can certainly have details relating to the story, like all the myriad of real and false clues that show up in most mysteries and thrillers. But everything you include should have some point behind it. If it doesn’t, you’re wasting your time—and your reader’s time.

I was reminded of this principle the other day while I was reading a thriller. The hero had just been reunited with the heroine, his one true love. He was bringing her back to his apartment in order to protect her from the bad guy. On the way in, he stopped to pick up his mail, then dropped it into one of the grocery bags he was carrying upstairs.

Let me tell you, I stayed fixated on that mail for the next five pages. Surely it would come back to be important in the plot. Maybe the mail included a letter with a crucial piece of information. Maybe the hero’s obsession with the heroine would distract him from finding a clue to the villain’s identity. Because surely the author wouldn’t just describe the hero picking up the mail for no particular reason.

Actually, that’s just what she did. The mail, and the fact that the hero stopped to pick it up, never came up again.

I have a good idea why the author chose to include the fact that the hero picked up his mail. She probably thought, “When I come home, I always pick up the mail, so he should do the same thing.” In other words, the author thought she was being realistic. But here’s the thing: real life includes all kinds of things that don’t show up in fiction. Part of the author’s job, in fact, is to pare away the details of life that don’t have any bearing on the story. And in this case, the author failed to do that—and failed pretty spectacularly.

If the mail had been the only detail the author included for no particular reason, it would only be a minor problem. But this particular author included lots of them, so many, in fact, that the plot started to bog down under their weight. And after a while, I just gave up.

Any story will wither if you throw in too much extraneous stuff. The reader may get so tired of trudging through the bog that she won’t stick around for the denouement. As an author, you have a central task. You decide what your readers need to know, and what they don’t. Then you tell them whatever it is they need. And then, dear Lord, you move on.

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Finding Mr. Right Now – Edits, Edits, Edits

Well, I have a lovely new cover (at left), but the MS is still being edited. Editing with fiction means several things since there are several rounds of edit for most novels.

The first edits come from your editor at the publishing house, and those are usually the most grueling. The editor isn’t particularly concerned with grammar (although she may point out a few obvious errors). She’s more interested in the book itself. Does the plot make sense? Do the characters seem well developed? Are things like motivation clearly explained?

In other words, the editor serves as a kind of highly skilled professional reader. She’ll point out problems that a reader would probably have with the first draft of the MS. Occasionally, a writer may disagree, but in my experience you’re wise to pay attention. If the editor says, “I don’t understand why he’s doing this now,” chances are good that a reader would say the same thing. The suggested changes that come from the editor usually take the most time to deal with. Early on, I had a couple of books with problematic endings. Cleaning those endings up took days of work and long discussions with my critique partners and my hubs.

After the MS meets the editor’s standards, it goes to the copyeditor. This is actually a different level of edit, one that concentrates almost entirely on issues of grammar, punctuation, and adherence to the publisher’s style book. I used to be a freelance copyeditor myself, and I actually taught a class in copyediting for several years. All of which should mean my MS is spotless, but of course it isn’t. One thing all authors would be wise to discover: copyediting your own work is almost impossible. To put it simply, you’ll read what should be there rather than what actually is there. You’ll probably miss incorrect words, unconsciously untangle garbled sentences, and overlook missing punctuation. You’re not stupid. You’re just supplying what you think is already there. This doesn’t include the inevitable problem words that all of us have. For me, it’s the distinction between farther and further, which disappears from my brain as soon as I start writing.

Run-ins with copyeditors are more frequent than run-ins with editors, however. One of the things I told students in my copyediting classes bears repeating: “The book belongs to the author.” Occasionally, you come across a copyeditor who’s a frustrated writer. Edits from these people sometimes have an edge of malice: “If I were writing this, I’d do it so much better than you.” These are the copyeditors who want to do extensive re-writes or who make changes with barely concealed contempt. When writers talk about how much they hate editors, it’s usually this kind of editing they’re talking about. In all honesty, however, I’ve rarely encountered editors like this, and fortunately for all concerned, my copyeditor on Finding Mr. Right Now was an absolute pro.

So that’s where I am at the moment. I have a release date—June 2, 2015. And I have a lovely cover. Now I wait for the next go round in the editing cycle.

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