Little, Big by John Crowley

The universe was telling to me read this book. It's been recommended to me so many times over the last few years by so many people whose opinions I respect that I just couldn't go another day without reading it, so I ran out and bought it.

That was over two months ago and I still haven't finished it. It's a strange book. I've never read John Crowley before and had no idea what to expect. For all the people who raved about the book, no one ever really talked about what it was about, or what happened, or maybe they did and it didn't stick in my mind, and when you read the back cover you're like okay, okay, okay, but then you're still not sure what kind of novel you're standing in line to buy. And that feeling has followed me through my reading experience. I'd be enjoying the book, but when people asked me about it, I found myself oddly tongue tied. It's about this guy, Smokey, who marries this girl Daily Alice who lives in a five-sided house, each side done in a different architectural style, and seemingly more vast on the inside than the outside, and somehow a portal into another world or dimension, for some characters. And the story is so big, like family saga big, because we keep getting stories of Daily Alice's ancestors and their encounters (or lack of encounters) with "them" the people in the other world, (who I thought of as elves), and the history of the house. It was really hard for me to get a hold on this story. I'd feel like I had a pretty strong handle on it, and I'd feel involved, until I stopped to think about it a little harder, and then it all would slip away and get foggy. It's like when you're figuring out a new piece of music and you just have to trust your fingers to know what to do and where to go and if you try too hard you'll lose it altogether.

Because of this quality, I'm reading this book very slowly. So slowly that I've finished eight other books since I've started it (Robert McCammon's Mr. Slaughter, John Hart's The Last Child, Ron Rash's One Foot in Eden, Michael Connolly's The Closers, Kathryn Stockett's The Help, Dan Simmons' Hyperion, A. Lee Martinez's Gil's All Fright Diner, and Steig Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo). All of which are fabulous books that were page-turners for me and easy to understand. I was surprised when I was supposed to be surprised. With Little, Big I was more or less in a continual state of surprise or raised eyebrows. The characters never reacted like I expected them to. I couldn't adjust to their world. This led me to a philosophical question: was the author thwarting my expectations on purpose, or was I bringing my commercial expectations to a book where they just didn't apply?

The best way to describe my experience of this book is through movies. So many movies have the same narrative arc. The main character wants something. People tell them it's unattainable. Their family and friends are not supportive, or indifferent. The person does it anyhow, against enormous odds and multiple setbacks. Then you watch a movie like Once, which is about a Scottish musician working as a Hoover repairman. He wants to record an album. He doesn't have any money, but he teams up with a Czech pianist, and gets some guys off the street to play drums and backup and whatever. His dad, instead of being a nay saying asshole, is supportive. The studio guys are skeptical, but quickly won over by his talent. I kept waiting for the scene where they'd steal his album and screw him, but that didn't come. In the end, he made this beautiful album. Nothing really went wrong. I spent the whole movie full of anxiety, waiting for the axe that never fell.

Which is how I feel reading Little, Big. Is it just me, or does the author keep setting me up for something bad to happen when nothing bad does? Smokey has to jump through all these hoops to marry Daily Alice and I'm thinking, this whole book is going to be about him trying to marry her and things are going to keep going wrong and they'll never get to spend their lives together... but they actually get married pretty quickly and have four kids. Then Smokey sleeps with Daily Alice's sister and I'm thinking okay, the shit's gonna really hit the fan now, but Daily Alice is fine with it and the situation is diffused. I guess all these characters just have bigger things to worry about, like those elves that never get explained.

People who have read Little, Big: I need your encouragement. I'm half way through, and while the writing is incredible, I'm losing steam. Should I finish this thing?

How to Break The Rules

This post is on behalf of the San Francisco Writers Conference, where I'm giving a talk about The Rules of Writing, and how to break them. The conference suggested this post as an alternative to showing up with 100 photocopied handouts, which would have meant not having enough space for all those little 3oz bottles and an extra pair of shoes (thank you internet!). If you attend the conference and don't receive a handout, this is for you. And for all you other rebel writers out there.

Before we can break any rules, we must first establish some. I think it's important to be mindful of when you are doing something unconventional, and do it with good reason and style. Let's start with Kurt Vonnegut's 8 Rules of Writing:*

1) Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that they will not feel the time was wasted.

2) Give the reader at least one character they can root for.

3) Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4) Every sentence must do one of two things - reveal character or advance the plot.

5) Start as close to the end as possible.

6) Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them - in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7) Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8) Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

I find most of Kurt Vonnegut's rules hard to argue with. Sure, you can cast an antihero as your main character, like American Psycho's Pat Bateman, or pretty much everyone in a Chuck Palaniuk novel, or even Amir from The Kite Runner, but if the reader doesn't find some reason to root for them they will probably stop turning the pages.

Here are Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing:

1) Never open a book with the weather.

2) Avoid prologs.

3) Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialog.

4) Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"

5) Keep your exclamation points under control.

6) Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose"

7) Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.

8) Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.

9) Don't go into great detail describing places and things.

10) Try to leave out the parts the readers tend to skip.

Elmore Leonard's rules are much more particular. Most of these rules are easy to break and are broken regularly.

And to fill in any that Kurt and Elmore missed, here's my own list which includes rules we've all heard before:

Show, don't tell

You can't have nothing happening / bring characters on with action

Don't lecture

No dreams

Don't describe scenery

Don't bog down your opening with backstory

The protagonists shouldn't keep secrets from the reader

Write what you know

These are all wonderful rules. Writing a book is challenging enough, and most writers will find these rules instructive instead of restrictive. Following them can help you tell your story in the most entertaining and accessible way possible. But some of you people are just ornery, or chafe against any restraints, and believe that rules were made to be broken. Fair enough. You think the best way to start your novel is by describing the weather? Have a hankering for prologs? Want to keep key elements of your story a secret until the very end? Prefer to open your novel with a discourse on morality? You can do it, but you'll want to tread carefully. And you'll want to study the authors who have broken these Rules, and figure out how they got away with it.

Rule #1: Show, Don't Tell

Rule Breaker: Carolyn Parkhurst, Dogs of Babel - first page

The first paragraph of this novel breaks one of the most well-known rules of writing, the ubiquitous Show, Don't Tell. The narrator tells us very plainly that one afternoon his wife climbed an apple tree in their backyard and fell to her death. He states the date and gives his wife's full name, as if issuing a report. This opening is most assuredly Told, Not Shown. Yet somehow it is full of emotion. And I'm guessing that most of you, after reading it, want to read more.

How did she successfully break the most basic rule of writing? First, she chose to flatly narrate, or "tell" a very intriguing bit of information. The wouldn't have worked if she was "telling" about the character brushing his teeth or driving to work. Also, this is a scene that most writers would sensationalize, and her unconventional choice calls attention to itself. If you read carefully I think you can pick up on how the narrator is using this removed style in order to distance himself from the reality of his wife's bizarre death.

Rule #2: No Prologs

Rule Breaker: Donna Tartt, The Secret History - prologue

This rule is broken often and well. I chose this example, but there are hundreds of others that come to mind, particularly in the mystery and thriller genres. Prologs don't tend to work so well when they feature a character who isn't the main character, or a point in time deep in the novel's (or the universe's) past. This particular prolog works beautifully. The opening line is: "The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." This prolog is narrated from the novel's future, after the story has ended. In a different novel, Bunny's death would be quite the spoiler, since he doesn't die until at least half way through the story. But here, knowing that Bunny will die, and knowing that the narrator will have something to do with it adds a lot of tension and suspense, and allows the author to take a lot of time developing characters and atmosphere and to linger over details that might make the book drag if you didn't know one of the main characters was going to eventually be killed by the other main characters.

Rule #3: Don't Lecture

Rule Breaker: Jed Rubenfeld, The Interpretation of Murder - first page

The opening of this novel suggests that man must chose between happiness and meaning. Live for the present moment and be happy, or live in your past to find meaning. It should be real buzz kill of an opening, but somehow it's not. How does he get away with this, and how can you? First, he keeps it short. Second, he ties it in directly to what's happening to him at that specific moment, instead of tying it to some vague impending life crisis he's been on the verge of having. The key is that he makes the lecture immediately relevant, and travels very quickly from the abstract to the specific, and to the here and now. The narrator has always chose meaning over happiness. Which is how he found himself waiting for the arrival of the "steamship George Washington, bound from Bremen, carrying to our shores the one man in the world I wanted most to meet." The author has tied the hypothetical to something important happening now.

Rule #4: Don't Open with Backstory

Rule Breaker: Dennis Lehane, Mystic River - first three pages

Dennis Lehane opens his breakout book, Mystic River, with what can only be described as backstory. The three main characters are kids, and we hear about what their fathers did for a living, get a description of the neighborhood, where they go to school. It should be boring, but it isn't. Why? He's accomplishing a lot with this backstory. Where another writer might be content to simply set the scene and give us some character background Lehane takes this opportunity to set up a dichotomy that is critical to both his plot and character development. These paragraphs are doing double duty for him. And he does the job quickly, in sweeping strokes: "So while Sean went to Saint Mike's Parochial in black pants, black tie, and blue shirt, Jimmy and Dave went to Lewis M. Dewey School on Blaxston. Kids at the Looey & Dooey got to wear street clothes, which was cool, but they usually wore the same ones three out of five days, which wasn't." In just two sentences you have a clear idea of the differences between these characters, and the shape their conflicts will take.

Rule #5: Don't Describe Scenery / Can't have nothing happening

Rule Breaker: Jim Butcher, Dead Beat - first three pages

I'm pretty sure Jim Butcher breaks a couple of rules with the opening of this 7th book in the Dresden Files. He spends the first two pages pondering the story of Cain and Abel and describing his apartment. It shouldn't be compelling, but it is. His apartment is a complete wreck, and he uses the bible story to talk about his urge to kill his half brother. So there's a conflict sewn into the description, which makes it much more interesting to read. What he's done is made the description immediately relevant, and it's serving two purposes - 1) we getting a visual of where Dresden lives, and 2) with each item he tells is out of place or destroyed, we better understand his murderous frustration with his brother/roommate. Butcher also uses humor to keep us engaged. The lesson here is that description works best when it is not limited to merely describing something physical, like a house or a town or the weather, but when it uses these features to introduce a character conflict or some problem that the character is having. On the surface, nothing much is happening here, but after these three pages of description we know enough about these two characters and their issues to want to read more.

Lets now talk more generally about one of the rules, without any more drawn out examples. Vonnegut's last rule is (to paraphrase): Give your readers as much information as possible upfront so they have a complete understanding of what is going on. This is a rule that most writers of speculative fiction will break. If it's not broken well, the result can be a very frustrating reading experience. But many writers break this rule well, and hold back key elements of their world-building until late in the story. Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union and Richard Morgan's books come to mind. Had these authors explained the ins and outs of their worlds up front it would have created a huge infodump that may have had readers skimming. Instead, they waited to reveal the details of how their worlds work, or are different from ours, until it became absolutely necessary to the story that the reader (or the characters) have this information. It's a fine line between making sure readers don't feel lost and dumping a ton of information on them all at once.

To generalize, all these rule breakers break the rules as a way to springboard readers more effectively into their stories. If it's backstory or description or even a lecture they are giving, they make it necessary information for you to understand or more fully appreciate the conflict facing the main character.

I would love to hear your feedback. Which of your favorite authors are expert rule breakers? Or maybe the question should be, do any authors actually manage to follow all of these rules?

*Kurt Vonnegut's rules were written for short story writers, though I think that they can be easily apllied to novels (with the possible exception of the 8th rule). Vonnegut also qualifies his list of rules by saying that Flannery O'Connor broke all them except the first one.

About Last Year

2009 was a singular year for me. When I say singular I mean it in the Sherlock Holmes way, not the opposite-of-plural way. I've always had the habit of adopting certain words or speech patterns from the books I read, and I'm currently on a Sherlock Holmes bender. It could be worse. It has been worse. Like the time I tried to read The Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

If you don't count all the baby books and manuscripts I read last year, I didn't read a whole lot. Which partially explains the on-line silence. In truth, I was so busy figuring out how to balance my career and my new son and the death twitches of my social life that I didn't make time for pleasure reading, or blogging. That was 2009. This is 2010. I've recovered from the shock of parenthood, am moderately well-rested, and have resumed my old habits and ticks. I have goals. One of them is to update this blog at least every other week. I know, it's a big jump from twice annually. But here goes.

Another thing that got overlooked in 2009? Queries. Because when agents are crunched for time, that's one of the first things that gets pushed to the side. Queries don't seem as urgent or important as a pending translation deal, or a film contract, or submitting an author's manuscript, and for the most part, they aren't. However, for someone like me, who has found so many clients in the so called slush, I can't afford to let them go unread. I've recommitted myself to my query pile. I've vowed to do what it takes to read them within four weeks (as our website promises). Even if "what it takes" means late nights and overcaffeination and... (I'm loath to admit to this)... interns.

I've come to think of interns as publishing's dirty little secret. Sometimes I wonder if the industry would run without them. I've had interns in the past, but always to assist with the more mechanical and administrative aspects of my job. I've never trusted anyone to read my queries because, well, they're my queries and I feel absurdly protective of them. No one has quite my taste, so how will they be able to weed out what I'll like? What if they miss something? And don't I owe it to every author to personally read their query, since they personally chose to write to me? All valid concerns. But the reality was that I couldn't create enough time to read them. Interns have their drawbacks, but without one there was no way I'd be able to manage my queries efficiently give every author the response they deserve in something resembling a timely fashion.

With the help of two brilliant interns I've now read everything that was sent to me in January, and most of what came in December and November. However, with so much new material coming in daily I've decided to focus my attention on the most recent queries. From here on out, I will not continue to read old e-mail queries: so much of the material is no longer available, or is being revised, and as you can imagine, authors aren't all that pleased to hear from me after such a delay, and are not shy about expressing their displeasure. So, if you sent me a query before November and have not heard back, please feel free to resubmit. I will do my best to respond within four weeks.

On most days there is a lot to do that is more immediately lucrative reading my queries. But something keeps bringing me back to them, day after day. It's that little thing called hope. Hope that the next query you read will transport you and give you that thrill of discovery. It's not dissimilar to the hope I imagine that writers feel when they send their query off into the ether. Most days I won't find anything. But one day I will. And it will make all the other days worth it.

Declaration

This weekend Amazon removed all of Macmillan's books, both print and electronic editions, from their store. What that means is that only used copies of these books are available on Amazon, so the author has no chance of making any money from any sales off Amazon. Amazon accounts for such a large percentage of overall book sales that removing these books, even just for a weekend, could be crippling.

What happened? Briefly, Macmillan wants electronic versions of hardcover new releases to be priced somewhere between $12 and $15, instead of Amazon's ubiquitous $9.99. When Amazon wouldn't budge on the price, Macmillan said they would delay the release of e-book editions 7 months after hardcover release. Maybe this was the point where Amazon went ape shit and pulled all of Macmillan's books, in a knee jerk show of anger and power.

Macmillan is the parent company to St. Martin's Press, Holt, FSG, Tor, Picador, and others. Our agency has quite a lot of authors with Macmillan, particularly with Tor and St. Martin's Press. Obviously, our authors are deeply impacted. They are puzzled over how quickly their books were taken hostage in this sudden corporate war. And they are pissed.

What really gets me is Amazon's school yard bully response. The debate is over e-book pricing, so if they had to flex their muscles and beat their chests why not just remove the electronic editions? Why extend this to print editions, when there is no issue with that format? It seems petty and mean. What could Amazon possibly gain? Not any sales, and not any good publicity. See John Scalzi's post for a play by play on how they've taken every opportunity to forfeit business and alienate customers.

Sunday afternoon Amazon caved and offered this explanation to its customers (though as of this posting none of the Macmillan titles I've checked are available of purchase). Here's the relevant part of the letter:

We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan's terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.

This made me laugh. I don't have a business degree or anything, but saying that Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, isn't that like complaining that Crest Toothpaste has a monopoly over Crest Toothpaste? In other words, can you really call having control over your own products a monopoly? It seems like Amazon is really trying to paint a picture where they're just some small honest retailer trying their damnedest to give their customers the best deal they can, but are being undermined by big bad Macmillan and their "monopoly." Give me a break. The relationship between publishers and retailers has been ludicrously lopsided for as long as I've been in the industry, with the lion's share of the power residing with the retailer. More and more books are packaged and repackaged to please Barnes & Noble, and an outdated returns systems protects retailers and guarantees that publishers foot the bill for any unsold stock. In this environment, publishers (even Macmillan), are the little guys. It's refreshing to see one of them stand up to a retailer, and win.

Which isn't to say that I'm happy with Macmillan. They recently rewrote their publishing contracts to stipulate that authors receive 20% of net for all e-books sold. This is significantly below what has been emerging as industry standard, and so far John Sargent has been unapologetic about such low-balling. I find his reasoning infuriating, and it's somewhat gratifying to see Amazon fall victim to his stubbornness. Also, it's possible that despite the price hike, the author's share may end up being less under this new model. No, I'm not normally disposed to take Macmillan's side, but it's an easy call here.

This latest Amazon stunt has pushed me over the edge. I can no longer in good conscious buy any more stuff from them. I've had this thought before, but hesitated to make such a declarative statement, not wanting to take it back later (and I can just spend hours reading Amazon's reader reviews). But this time it's personal. Amazon has just cost me money, and not in the I-can't-believe-I-actually-ordered-these-red-glitter-grips way. Not that they will miss my business. But I'm betting a lot of other authors (particularly Macmillan authors) feel the same way as I do. And the thing about authors? They buy a lot of books.