Style and Language or Plot?

What makes you love someone's books? Yes, it's the genre or the subject or the characters. But a novelist who writes different kinds of novels can still command a following, simply because they write so well that you feel like you'd read anything of theirs! I've felt this way about a few writers over time - Elizabeth Berg, Anne Tyler, Alice Munro, T.C. Boyle (even though at times TCB is so confronting!), to name a few.

Recently I read a Berg novel that left me floundering. Dream When You're Feeling Blue was a great read - I was particularly interested in how she dealt with historical details - until I reached the last 20 pages. At that point, the plot took a bizarre turn that, as a reader, I totally rejected. Perhaps if she had extended the novel by another 20 pages or more, she could have convinced me that what the characters did at the end was believable. Instead I felt short-changed, and somewhat tricked. Nevertheless, I do love her writing, her way with words, her ability to create a 'real' world and engaging, complex characters.

Sometimes we continue to read an author because they deliver the same quality goods, time after time. And then you grow out of it. I have loved Janet Evanovich's novels for years, and judged them by the number of times I laughed out loud or at least smiled. However, by Number 13, the whole scenario felt tired, very tired. There are only so many times a character can bounce between two hunky guys while solving crimes with a multitude of disasters along the way. When dollars for book buying are scarce, this is the kind of book I've stopped buying.

And sometimes, thanks to the public library nearby, we try someone new, or someone we haven't read for a while, and see how it goes. Some years ago, I did read a Nelson DeMille book - Plum Island. It was OK. And I watched the movie, The General's Daughter. So while browsing my public library shelves (something that's a lot harder to do online!), I thought I'd give The Gate House a try. Now, I have to admit that the story didn't totally grab me because the main character seemed a bit lame. Writers - beware lame characters! But at some point, around a third of the way through, I became aware that something strange was going on with the writing.

There was one chapter where the two characters kept smiling. He smiled, then she smiled. Then he smiled, and again, and she smiled. He smiled a lot more than her, maybe because he was lame and couldn't come up with anything more to offer her. But... hang on a moment ... isn't that the writer's job? To give us more from the characters than just a whole heap of smiling? If Mr DeMille was trying to convey that the main character was lame and all he had in his armoury of responses was a smile, then I think he needed to do a bit more work on his writing. From this reader's point of view, it wasn't technique, it was lazy writing, and maybe his editor needs to take this into consideration, too. (I know everyone always blames the editor, but I've worked with some great editors who do pay attention to this stuff and don't let you get away with it.)

Oh well, maybe I'm starting to sound like all those people who complained about JK Rowling's over-use of adverbs and dialogue tags. But writing is a craft, and a major part of that is both your use of language and your ability to rewrite and give the reader something that feels fresh and alive. That's what we have to work with - words. So let's make the most of them!
Have you got a great example of lazy language to tell us about? Or maybe you think that plot is more important and you can cheerfully ignore ordinary writing?

The Novel That Announces Itself

Over the past couple of weeks, our daily newspaper has been publishing short excerpts from a range of novels and nonfiction books. I'm not entirely sure that this has done some of the novelists a service. Yes, it's good to be noticed, but if you compare the experience for readers to something like picking up a book in a shop and reading the first couple of pages, I haven't seen one novel yet that I'd even borrow from the library, let alone buy.

But the exercise did highlight something for me about what I don't like to read. The novel that announces itself, importantly and somewhat pompously (to me) in the first couple of paragraphs. Like this:

Michael is sitting with Madeleine in the lounge room of her flat. There is a guitar on the floor. Everywhere, Michael imagines, in all the houses, on all the floors, there are guitars. The guitar and the decade go together. Once, it was the Age of the Piano. Pianos, he imagines, marked the leisurely passing of time in a more leisurely age than this.*

Zzzzz. I know there are some of you out there who will have no problem with this as an opening. You'll be intrigued to know who Michael is, why he is imagining these things. Not me. But I think my big complaint about this is the "announcing" tone of voice, that says, "Look at me, I'm thoughtful and deep and literary. And besides, I'm in first person."

How about this one?

This story begins within the walls of a castle, with the birth of a mouse. A small mouse. The last mouse born to his parents and the only one of his litter to be born alive.
"Where are my babies?" said the exhausted mother when the ordeal was through. "Show to me my babies."
The father mouse held the one small mouse up high. "There is only this one," he said. "The others are dead."**

This is a story that definitely and deliberately announces itself. The storytelling tone is part of the voice and style, and I've read articles where the author says the tone was how she chose to tell the story. Mind you, there was some criticism of it, with comments that said it sounded too old-fashioned.

Tone is something that is not much discussed in fiction writing. We tend to talk about voice, which can be confusing. Whose voice? The voice of the main character? The voice of the author? The voice of the story or narrator? What voice do you get when you use third person omniscient? Will it always be a narrator's voice? Take a look at Hemingway sometime. How would you describe the voice in "Hills Like White Elephants"? I'm not sure there is one. But I could certainly describe the tone, how it sounds to me. Passionately dispassionate! So much emotion, kept rigidly at arms length. But I'm afraid, to me, my first excerpt above sounds like "Look at me, look at me!" writing. Feel free to disagree!
* The Time We Have Taken by Steven Carroll (and yes, I know it won the Miles Franklin)
** The Tale of Despereaux by Kate Dicamillo

A Writer's State of Mind

How many times have you heard it said that a writer needs to read lots, and read widely? I've talked before about reading as a writer - today on someone's blog I was reading about how if you do a lot of analysis of plot and story structure, you can predict what is going to happen in most movies. (I try not to. Predict, that is.) But the edict is, in fact, true. The more you read, the more you read as a writer, the more your writing benefits.

Trouble is, my brain often isn't in the mood for certain books. When I'm very tired, when I've read a lot of student work, when I'm totally engrossed in a current project - I often can't read literary fiction. My concentration isn't up to the task. I have books that I keep on a reading pile for months, knowing that I'll manage them one day - just not right now. I indulge in what I love - crime fiction - instead.

So this is a good time of the year for me in terms of reading. I've been working up to it. A couple of months ago, I read The Spare Room by Helen Garner. I don't care if people are arguing over whether it's fiction or not. I just wanted to enjoy her evocative, cutting prose. I also read An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, and some literary short fiction. Now I'm reading Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. Every time I pick it up, I fall into a different world, and while I'm not reading it, I wonder what it is about literary fiction that makes it such a different experience.

A lot of readers talk about style, about voice, about language. Yes, it's all of that, but I've read (or tried to read) many literary novels that are nothing else but style and language, and it's been like watching paint dry. Endlessly pointless and mind-numbing. With a literary novel that draws you into the world of the story, there's more than language. Yes, it's a big part of it, but there is such a sense of rich detail, of depth of character, of the skill of being able to make small things and events so fascinating. I've never been to a prep school in the US, but while I read this novel I understand two things - what it's like in that kind of school, and what it's like for this viewpoint character, who is unlike any other character I've ever read about. And above all, I still empathise and understand and want to know what will happen to her.

Is there a plot? I would say it's a chronological, coming-of-age kind of story. No major crisis (so far) but there is growth and change. It gives the reader the satisfying experience of seeing a character evolve before she is aware of it herself. Yet she is aware, and is not that far behind. Will this end up being one of my favourites? Maybe not. But it will be memorable, and when someone asks me what I've read this year that I enjoyed, Prep will definitely be on my You Should Read This list, especially for writers.