Would chopping 400 pages make it a better book?

By page 300 of Hideo Yokoyama's novel Six Four, I was getting weary.  "Where's the editor?" I kept thinking. "Didn't someone have the courage to tell this guy his story isn't working?

The questions of a book critic and a manuscript editor are sometimes the same ones.  It was true as I prepared my review of Yokoyama's big bestseller for the pages of the Los Angeles Review of Books.  You can read my review by going here.

I found myself shifting gears and thinking of Yokoyama's book as I would about my clients. ( To find out about my editing services, visit here for more information.)

The normal reaction of many manuscript editors -- confronted by 500+ pages -- is a simple one:  Cut, cut, cut.   Any novel that crosses the 300-page threshold is liable to sell poorly (that's what some think, at any rate) unless it happens to have been written by J.K. Rowling or E.L. James.

I thought the same way when I first started Six Four, but the deeper I went into Yokoyama's story, the more I realized how essential everything was.  There's a purpose to every page, and it takes time to unfold what he has in mind.  I would have LOVED to have served as his editor and supported him in bringing this portrait of a Japanese police media relations officer to life.  (Obviously he already had that person!)  That's the type of editor you want (if I do say so myself!) for your work -- someone patient enough to wait and look for patterns and meanings.

I won't say more about that novel here, my beloved friends.  I'll instead encourage you to read about it at the LARB, which richly deserves all of our attention and support.

Onward, my friends.

Throwing John Fowles

A long time ago, my sister threw John Fowles across the room. Ok wait, yes, she was a powerful little Italian - rest in peace, dear Sis - but I don't mean that she actually  lifted up the man from Lyme Regis and tossed him like a sack of potatoes.  It was his book, The Collector, that took flight in my sister's family room and smacked against the wall.

Lately, I've been feeling the same way about another Fowles' novel, The Magus (which inspired the 1968 film with Candice Bergen, Anthony Quinn, Michael Caine, and Anna Karina), probably for the same reasons.

The ending.

When I look at the bestsellers lists of the New York Times and other outlets, I realize how far away is the world that celebrated and raved over Fowles's books and made him wealthy enough to be a writer and only a writer.  Everything on the bestsellers lists today with a few exceptions -- Colson Whitehead probably -- smells of symmetry and neatly-resolved endings.

But, my beloveds, I must confess to you, and only to you, that I am not writing this post from a lofty pulpit.  I am not some ultra-refined reader who appreciates only the fiction that's heavy on the meta- and light on happy endings.  Symmetry and resolutions appeal to me, too -- I'm not saying I need happy endings, just a resolution that makes sense, even if it's a tragic one.

I'm sure that some of you reading this feel the same way.

And yet. And yet.

Despite my annoyance with both The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman, I'm turning to Fowles again.  Which book?  The one that fueled my sister's fury, of course.

I want to give  his work another try, even though I feel, as I turn each page, like a guy in a dark room who knows there are ninjas hiding behind the furniture.

I'll tell you all about it when I'm done, my friends.  Or after that book hits a living room wall in our house.

Until then, onward.

A-holes: What kind of writer are you?

I've been away for a long time, my beloved friends. A new day job and the weird, twilight frenzy of revising my novel (if you go into the dictionary and look up the word "palimpsest," I'm sure it says "for an example, see Nick's book") -- it has been impossible for me to keep up, and I'm sorry for that.  

Even if I haven't felt capable of posting an original thought on Call of the Siren, I have been capable of reading other people's thoughts ... like Seamus Perry's piece in the TLS, "Angry, Difficult D.H. Lawrence."  Lawrence was not the kind of writer you would want to get close to; Richard Aldington, Perry writes, said Lawrence had a "wounding capacity for not adapting himself to others."

Perry's piece gives us one kind of writer; I'm also reminded of Evelyn Waugh's cold attitude to his children if they played too loudly and disturbed Daddy; I'm also reminded of a former professor friend meeting the author of The Once and Future King, T.H. White, and finding him to be the complete opposite of the generous, compassionate, bemused narrator that my friend cherished in that book (the photo accompanying this post shows White during a lecture at Boston College).  This leads to a simple conclusion.

Writers can be real a-holes.

So can plenty of other people, of course, and my own prolonged experience of trying to get my gothic novel right ... I almost said "ordeal" instead of "experience" ... has been good.  I've learned a lot.  It's given me a chance to think about what it means to be a writer from the writer's chair, not from the point of view of the admirer/critic/reader/outsider.

When my "litel bok" finally leaves its maker behind, I think he (meaning: me) will be far more patient and sympathetic than he was before; far more supportive of others; far more self-deprecating, too ... because this whole process has taught me more about how little I know than about anything else.  I can't imagine what geniuses like Lawrence must feel from their Olympian heights; the air up there must be so thin that it's difficult to breathe.

Maybe that, finally, is what turns/turned so many of them into a-holes.  I'm glad it hasn't come easy to me.

Getting published … an author's stats on herself

Everyone has an opinion about the ordeal of book publishing, but who can you really trust? Only the writers who have actually experienced it.

And that applies to Yi Shun Lai, author of the new novel Not A Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu (Shade Mountain Press), although "new" is a misleading term …. Lai is perfectly transparent on her blog about how long it's taken - agents queried,  months spent querying, etc. - to usher her engaging, funny, charming fictional memoir into print.

At The Good Dirt, Lai provides us with the numbers that every writer wants to know about, as well as the lessons that she's learned in her post "How I Landed My Publisher."

One of her best lessons, for me, has to do with balancing your book project with the rest of your life … and that means not letting it consume the rest of your life.

As Lai says, "if you really want to make this a part of your life, get on it."

Visit The Good Dirt for more of Lai's insights into finding that balance in your own writing life … and to learn more about the writer behind the one and only Marty.  She's a wonderful creation ... so funny and wise as she navigates between obstacles and her own soaring aspirations, advertising quotas and office tedium, and the steady nagging of an unforgettable Taiwanese tiger mom.  You'll want to get your hands on a copy of this book.

My beloveds, you'll be so glad you did.

Treat your fiction like an iceberg

Maybe it's because I spent too long in journalism -- I have a tendency to explain things too much.

Every proper noun (and even the improper ones) gets a descriptive clause … even when I'm talking.  Take this example from the other night at home:

My spouse: Hey, what do you want for dinner?

Me: I'm not in the mood for Italian, which we've already had this week.  It would be great to get some kebabs from that little restaurant, the one near the village over by the liquor store.

All I needed to say was "kebabs," right?

In the process of writing my novel, a big part of the revision process has entailed going over every sentence, in every chapter, and asking the same question: Am I explaining too much?

Let readers work for it, let their imaginations fill in what they can't see …. if the narration's in the first person, then the narrator's comments should be a bit fragmentary and gnomic sometimes (like real people's are).

Here's an example from Thomas Harris'Hannibal -- yes, I'm talking about the sequel to Silence of the Lambs -- that I read over the summer as a guilty pleasure.  Harris has some seriously good chops (and besides, anyone who can weave a lecture on Dante into a cat-and-mouse story involving a cannibal deserves some applause):

The screaming was awful to hear, but a fitting overture for the faces that came out of the woods, drawn to the screams announcing dinner.

That line's as chilling to me as any in M.R. James.  He's talking about a herd of hungry swine, and the incompleteness of his description of the animals -- "the faces that came out of the woods" -- leaves so much half-submerged.  Too much description, too much precision, and the horror effect would've been lost.

Which gets me to the headline for this post, about icebergs.  What  I've found is that writing's more effective when ...

…ah, my Beloved Friends, I'll leave that for you to finish.