Writing Fiction

Farewell to a good editor

I was sad to see this obituary in this morning's Globe and Mail: A behind-the-scenes force guiding books onto shelves. Excerpt:

Saeko Usukawa's long hours bent over draft manuscripts and her quietly persuasive work with authors helped guide hundreds of books onto bookstore shelves. 

As an editor for more than four decades, she was a behind-the-scenes leader in the Canadian publishing world. She edited books by award-winning authors including Wayson Choy, Douglas Coupland, Sky Lee, Bill Richardson and many others, covering genres as diverse as literary fiction, first nation studies, visual art, and cookery.

The obituary mentions that she started at Douglas & McIntyre in 1979, so I must have been one of her first authors: I still recall with pride the memo she sent Scott McIntyre after reading the manuscript of Icequake. 

I also recall her remarkable editing style: She was very quiet, very gentle, and simply not to be argued with. She understood books better than the authors did--better than I understood mine, anyway--and she would softly point out where the problems were and what the solutions should be.

I've been very lucky with most of my editors, so I have trouble understanding authors who've battled theirs. I look forward to getting the editor's take on a manuscript--to see what I've missed in my own story, and where the story is working well. Even when I don't agree with an editor's suggestion, I'm careful to reconsider my own opinion.

Much of what I know about writing, both fiction and nonfiction, I learned from editors. And Saeko was one of my finest teachers.

The "Connecticut Yankee" novel

The other day I found a new paperback in the local library: Into the Storm. It was another spin on a genre I call the Connecticut Yankee novel.

In the CY genre, some guy (or bunch of guys) goes back in time to face a hell of a problem with the tools of modern technology. In Mark Twain's original, "Sir Boss" goes back to King Arthur's court with the engineering skills of the late 19th century. Before long firearms are going off and knights are riding to battle on bicycles.

The genre really took off with Lest Darkness Fall, by the late and beloved L. Sprague DeCamp. Here an archaeologist, visiting the ruined Coliseum, is hit by lightning and finds himself on the same spot in the early 6th century. Before long, he's running the world's first newspaper and distilling brandy.

Plenty of others have explored (and exploited) the genre, and a recent development has been the "alternate history" CY novel, in which we see how events might have worked out if the South had won the Civil War and then fought the North with bombers, tanks, and nuclear weapons. S.M. Stirling has built a saga out of putting Nantucket Island into the third millennium B.C.

I confess I'm a sucker for the genre, but its basic premises deserve some careful scrutiny.

In Into the Storm, a decrepit 1914-vintage US destroyer, fleeing the Japanese in early 1942, finds itself transported to an alternate world where humans didn't evolve and a horrendous war is under way between mammalian lemurs and wicked, wicked raptor-like human-size dinosaurs. Lots of explosions ensue, and of course the story must run into at least three volumes.

What gets me about the genre is the iron-clad faith in technology. If only the American (or at least Western) gadgets and weapons of the 20th or 21st century are available to our heroes, American values will prevail and everyone, except the raptors, will be happy. (Never mind that lemurs branched off our evolutionary tree long before the apes did, and would find humans as incomprehensible as we would find lemurs' evolved descendants.)

This faith in technology has led the US and its allies into any number of miserable wars, coups, and assassinations in the last 60 years, with notable lack of success. B-52s dropped bombs on Vietnamese guys pushing bikes down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and the bike-pushers won. Helicopters, drones, and satellites have scanned the Tora Bora for almost a decade, and Osama bin Laden is still at large.

Even real history doesn't back up this view of technology as social redeemer. In the late 18th century, the Nootka of Vancouver Island captured a British trading ship, plundered it, and killed all the crew except for John Jewitt, the ship's blacksmith.

For the next few years, Jewitt was the slave of a chief named Maquinna, making iron-tipped weapons and doing what he was damned well told to do. The Nootka had a strong and complex culture that used iron, and Jewitt, for its own purposes. It was not about to be transformed just because Jewitt understood some high-tech techniques.

But some SF readers still eat up CY novels, imagining the fun of thwarting the Mongols' invasion of Poland (The Crosstime Engineer) or some other unfortunate event. I eat them up too.

Mark Twain, the father of the genre, understood it better than his followers: The Connecticut Yankee fails to bring Dark Age Britain up to modern standards. In fact, his technology only makes darkness fall that much faster.

A thoughtful SF writer should bear this mind when inspired by a Connecticut Yankee idea for a story.

Should you ignore these great novels?

A literary blog called The Second Pass has posted a list of ten books you shouldn't bother to read, regardless of their prestige. I agree with some and strongly disagree with others:

White Noise, by Don DeLillo: I can't read anything by DeLillo, no matter how primed I am by his glowing reviews. Accepted.

Absalom, Absalom, by William Faulkner. Faulkner was a Hollywood drinking buddy of my grandfather, and I liked a couple of his novels when forced to read them in college (Light in August and The Sound and the Fury), but I never sought out any of his novels, so I'll go with this dismissal.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez. Nonsense. It took me a couple of tries to get into it, when I was young and dumb, but I've read it three or four times since then and found more every time. A writer who hasn't read it is a writer who doesn't know how how tough the competition really is.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. No argument. I went to some effort to demolish this awful book in a Tyee review, yet it still sold by the hundreds of thousands. That told me the real end of the world has already happened, and it's a lot worse than McCarthy's version.

The Rainbow, by D.H. Lawrence. Lawrence struck me as a boring idiot when I first encountered him as a college student, and I have since lived a long and happy Lawrence-free life.

On the Road, by Jack Kerouac. In grade 11 or 12 we nerds at Santa Monica High read Kerouac hot off the press, and thought he was pretty cool. We grew up. Kerouac and the Beat Generation did not. (But when I met Allen Ginsberg at a Columbia University event a couple of years later, I liked him a lot.)

The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Bought this as a Christmas present for my wife, who was instantly bored. Checked it myself and found that her literary taste, as usual, was bang-on.

The USA Trilogy, by John Dos Passos. When I read this as a teenager, I thought it was awesomely avant-garde (and Norman Mailer swiped some of Dos Passos's gimmicks for Naked and the Dead). Revisiting it a couple of years later, I found it just another rotting blowdown in an old forest.

Jacob's Room, by Virginia Woolf. OK, I never got Virginia Woolf. And I told myself as an undergraduate, circa 1961, that I would read her and Henry James when I was mature enough. That time has not yet come.

A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens. This is one of those novels everyone knows so well, they think they've read it. I know I haven't, so I'll pass on this one. But Bleak House, over 150 years after its first publication, remains one of the great must-reads of English literature.

Writers need to distinguish between best-sellers, most of which are forgotten in a year, and classics, which (as Northrop Frye observed) are books that refuse to go away. With a good graphic memory, I can recall several covers of Time Magazine from the 1950s glorifying great writers now vanished, like James Gould Cozzens and Herman Wouk.

Some of the books I've dismissed here will probably refuse to go away, like Jacob's Room and A Tale of Two Cities. One of the first reviews of The Great Gatsby called it "a book for the season only," one of the dumber judgements of all time. Such books, in effect, judge us, and find us wanting. 

But writers, especially, should read both classics and books for the season only, and judge themselves by what they find. Sometimes we'll meet a writer who's humiliatingly good, but at least shows us how well a human being can write. 

More often we'll find more evidence that any idiot can publish a book, and other idiots will write glowing reviews of it. This should give us encouragement: We too are idiots, after all. 

More about words and pages in a novel

"How Many Pages Make a Novel" now has a comment thread several years long, and it's actually awkward for me to track through the thread to try to answer the latest questions. So let me try to re-state some basic points, and to answer some recent questions in the process.

A short-short story is anywhere from 250 to maybe 1500 words. A short story is 1500 to 10,000 words. A novelette could be 10,000 to 30,000 words. A novella is 30,000 to 55,000-60,000 words, and anything longer is a novel. However—

These are all terms from the early part of the 20th century, when popular magazines ran a lot of fiction. A few writers made very comfortable livings selling short stories and novelettes to women's magazines, men's magazines, general-interest magazines like Saturday Evening Post, and even newspapers. 

One men's magazine built itself around not running fiction: it was called True, and every item in it was nonfiction. (I loved it, but I also loved Bluebook, a men's magazine that ran many early Robert Heinlein novels in serial form. This was so long ago that "men's magazines" didn't have pictures of naked girls.)

For a long time, the short-story and novelette market has been a ghost of its former self. The only "popular" markets are a handful of fantasy, SF, and mystery magazines. University-funded "little" magazines will sometimes run a short story or two, but they pay little or nothing. High-end magazines like The New Yorker and Harper's will run short fiction, but usually only by established authors.

The chief markets for a new writer, therefore, are genre novels for the mass market (SF, fantasy, thrillers, romances, etc.) or for the young-adult market. YA novels are usually shorter (20,000 to 40,000 words—but then there's Harry Potter!). Most genre novels for adults start at 60,000 words and work their way up to fantasy series in which each novel is maybe 125,000-250,000 words long...and the series goes on for as many titles as readers will buy.

Most publishers' websites, if they have a page of advice for contributors, indicate the general length of the books they publish. But you can also get a sense of that by simply counting the words on two or three random pages of a book, averaging the numbers, and multiplying by the number of pages.

But bear in mind that layout and design can influence the size of a book. Sometimes a short novel can be "bulked up" with wide spaces between lines of large text. This gives purchasers the illusion that they've bought a lot of reading for the price of the book.

I don't want to discourage anyone from writing at whatever length they like. Short stories can be great reading, and also great training for writers aiming at novels. Two or three novellas, published together, can be quite marketable (preferably, however, if the author's already well known).

In general, I'd advise writing long. It's easier to cut than to add material. So if you want to sell a romance and you know the length is going to be 55,000 words, shoot for 65,000...and then go back through the manuscript and cut the 10,000 weakest words.

Some good news

The last few months have been decidedly nonfiction for me: I got swamped by the arrival of swine flu, which hugely increased traffic on my site H5N1, and hugely reduced my free time. I was also finishing a new book, Write Your Nonfiction Online (the bad link is now fixed) and just this afternoon sent in the revised manuscript. And I've been writing and editing for The Tyee, which is enormous fun.

But I've also thrown some old irons back in the fire. My agent in Toronto is exploring TV/film possibilities for three of my books—the new edition of Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia, plus my novels Icequake and Lifter.

This isn't exactly a hot new development. Various people have inquired about film rights to the pioneers book over the years, and Lifter has been looked at a couple of times by the Disney people. When Icequake came out in 1979, a lot of people thought it would make a great but unproducible movie: The special effects would be too expensive. 

That, of course, was long before computer graphics came along. Now, Icequake could be pretty effective even in a made-for-TV movie.

Having grown up among movie people, I'm not holding my breath—and I'm not spending my percentage before I get it, either.

In the meantime, I've got a lot of new ideas for Henderson's Tenants, and while we were on holiday I got a single major idea for resurrecting a novel I did back in the late 90s—a project that never found a publisher. 

So now that the latest project is off my desk, I'm looking forward to doing some more fiction this summer.