Among the Remainders

Before Christmas, an empty shop at my nearby shopping centre turned into a remainders book store, and I picked up several reference books on mythology, plus a fabulous Beisty book on castles (one for me, one as a gift for a friend). But we now have a chain of stores that regularly have remainder sales - Dirt Cheap Books. Much of what DCB has is of no interest to me - biographies of people I've never heard of, self help books that are last year's fad, mass market kid's books and those pretty gift books of sayings or quotes that sit on your coffee table and only get read when someone is totally bored.

But they do have novels. This is where I picked up my copy of Prep. Where I discovered authors like Peter James and Caro Ramsay. The novels of theirs are ones that didn't sell here, probably because they are not well-known crime writers in Australia. I guess publishers or book distributors bring in books in big numbers sometimes and they just don't leave the shelves. There are often piles of books by people who are well-known. Did someone vastly over-order? One day, I'd love to know the story behind how some of the books end up with DCB.

The thing is, even though I venture there when books are all $4.99, I've learnt that a cheap, enticing book is not necessarily a book I will read. Some of my earlier impulse buys sit and sit and sit, and then go to the charity bin. So now I'm firmer with myself. I read blurbs, and then I read first and second pages. Often I put books back. Sometimes I put them back after the first paragraph.

Of course, this is what editors do. The fact that all of these books were published meant that an editor somewhere kept reading and paid money to the author. The fact that I read a page and put a book back just means I didn't like it. What is it that makes us keep reading? The voice? Often, this is an important factor for me. The way the words sound, the way the writer has put them together. The way the character feels, acts, speaks. What happens on the first two pages. If nothing happens, or something happens that doesn't interest me much, I put it down. You could say it's indefinable - it's the "feel" of the writing and the story being told.

But it's also that whatever you read on pages 1 and 2, you'll get another 300 pages of it. Do you want another 300 pages? Do you want to spend the time and money on it? Now that books are around $35-38 here, it's an even bigger question. What makes you keep reading?

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

What is Voice?

The eternal question. Does it matter? Yes, it apparently does, especially when you hear editors and agents at conferences say, "A story with a great voice and a weak plot can be fixed; a story with a great plot and a voice that isn't working can't be fixed."
So, are they right?
Yes and no. Some stories emerge from voice. John Marsden says that he began the War series (which starts with Tomorrow When the War Began) when he heard Ellie's voice in his head - Ellie being the narrator. It's often the way it works for me. I started a story about a girl called Tracey Binns and her voice just took over - she was very demanding! But I have written other stories where the voice is not nearly so strong. With chapter books, it's not such an issue. In fact, I have a chapter book where the voice is probably stopping it being published, because the kid is pretty nerdy and weird.
In class, I try to get the students to do a lot of work on their characters, not because I think they need to know every single thing about their character's life (although it helps) but because in writing and imagining their main character, they can often "fall into" the voice. We do free writing, imagining our characters telling stories that begin, "Let me tell you how it happened ..." or in YA, perhaps, "This is how it went down ..." One good exercise I recommend is to interview your character via free writing, sit them down at a table, ask them questions and then let them answer. All kinds of strange and wonderful things can come out of this, including things that you didn't know were part of your character's life.
Back to the question - can you fix a weak/uninvolving voice? Yes, I think so, but it requires several things to happen:
1. That you put aside the manuscript and forget entirely about it.
2. That you focus on your character and spend a lot of time writing about them and writing things in their voice - role playing, imagining their world, and then working your way into seeing the world through their eyes. How your character sees/understands/filters/judges the world around them is, to me, an intrinsic part of voice.
3. That you create a whole, real life for your character - their family, friends, school/work, lovers, enemies etc.
4. And then you focus on their dreams, goals, ambitions and fears. Get your character to write secret thoughts about these things. Note I said "get your character to write" - by now, if you have really delved into who your character is, it really will be her or him writing about what they fear most, or what they want most in their lives.
If you haven't captured voice after doing all of those things, you need to ask yourself why not. And weird though it may seem, it might just be because you are too afraid to let your character be "real" to you.
Enough psychoanalysis-type stuff for one night.
I'm off to read some Peter Temple.