Welcome, WriteOn writers and readers. This winter, various diarists are alternating with SensibleShoes —posting Thursdays as usual but at 7pm eastkos/4 pm leftkost (and all in between, e.g., about 2 am or so ANZACS time?)— who is someplace with very limited internet connection as she works on her next book. Since more readers than writers may be here tonight, and your diarist of the evening cannot be said to fill the footwear of our fearless leader, tonight's diary may be longish and apparently a review of a novelist whose methods, politics, and skill make her a favorite of mine. There is relevance, I promise. But feel free to skim down if you'd rather get to the writing challenges sooner.
The author at hand is Kerry Greenwood (go ahead and look — I'll wait right here, and all the links in this diary should open parallel tabs in your browser so you don't have to back-arrow to return here), probably best known for her 1920's delightfully subversive WWI-ambulance-driver turned traitor-to-her-late-acquired-class aristocratic sleuth Phryne Fisher (also on television, depending where you live, such as Australia); and, more foodily and recently, the Corinna Chapman mysteries set in a present-day Melbourne the author calls "an artefact of my imagination".
But WriteOn is not focused on mystery novels, you say? True! But genres are always merging at the edges or further (see Diana Gabaldon's intro here). These days, much of them involve a core of enigma that protagonists must come to recognize and deal with if they're to win any aims of their own. The readership seems to expect it across the board, perhaps a postmodern realization that the unknown (be it political, social, economic, climatic or other) constantly influences our lives long before we begin to grasp what's brewing just beyond the ordinary range of vision. Fiction takes us there.
And Greenwood pushes the envelope of overlap, to the point that her U.S. publisher, Poisoned Pen Press (in Arizona!) seems to have found necessary to notify aspiring submitters:
...We almost never consider manuscripts which use the following themes as the central focus of the story:
Incest of any kind.
Murder of children; child abuse.
Abuse when it’s a pivotal point or supplied motivation all by itself.
Serial killers whose point of views are part of the narrative.
Serial killings or psychopathologies that depend on exceptional gore or weird twists.
Drugs, including drug abuse and/or smuggling of illegal substances.
Vampires, witches, werewolves, paranormals, aliens, future realities, and New Age psychics as protagonists.
Thrillers. We define thriller as a duel or escalating contest between two characters or groups. Thrillers usually include global stakes and a world stage of conspiracies, espionage, and intelligence such as CIA, MI5, NSA, presidents and high government officials, military force or technologies, international drug rings, terrorists, or mafia. A “soft thriller” may interest us if the story is tightly contained and local, not political or global; for example, a jewel robbery, theft of a painting, or action packed into a small location among its residents.
Greenwood's mysteries involve nearly all these elements, yet
masterfully and without sensationalism (which must be what it takes for this publisher), and
with an adamant spirit of opposing abuse of human rights. And of championing diversity of cultures, backgrounds, identity and life-path, with compassion for survival coping mechanisms and acknowledging the tension of gray areas all in between. Somehow, she manages to do it with humor, positivity, and the occasional potshot at GW Bush as well as political figures closer to home. As a reader, I've never felt so
at home! As a writer, I'm intrigued with how she seamlessly taps into the world we all share, as well as genres and reader interests (including, yes, recipes,
luscious stuff), creating what may be kind of a model for fiction to adapt to a market and readership that expects a lot from writers while constantly in subtle or sudden but always inexorable flux.
Alas, how to do justice to the delightfully engaging cast of characters who inhabit these books? And who offer readers unusual identification with this or that portrayal — readers who otherwise might not be so very interested. Like the ideals these characters enact, they may represent a certain hardheaded pragmatism on the author's part that's pretty damned impressive. (I don't know if it's unique, but if longevity is any measure, it's effective!)
Take the Corinna series — a recurring theme is The Soup Run, a kitchen on wheels for street people. It's staffed not only by the tiny, indomitable nun who drives plus her sandwich-bagging broth-brewing volunteers, but also a lawyer to help homeless and victimized people with their legal rights; and nurses or doctors (some of them PTSD survivors themselves) giving medical care and supplies (e.g., clean needle kits); and a "Heavy" - an individual personally and professionally equipped to quell violence before it begins, because The Soup Run operates on the edge of sufferance of mainstream society in rolling from hub to hub of homeless clusters, where bullies and muggers are as likely as innocents, and desperation always simmers on the verge of eruption. The "Heavy" is a pragmatic side of idealism: violence not only further wrecks the wretched of the earth but enrages the secure society upon whose fringes helping effort is just barely tolerated. The instant that impinges on their own comforts, they'll make it gone.
Less dramatic if similar pragmatic idealism, the Soup Run volunteers pick up the soup'n'sandwich litter before they move on to the next stop. It's not just eco-friendly: comfortable society will retaliate if they don't. That's the way the real world wags.
Corinna is a university-trained CPA turned happily divorced Rubensesque bread-baker with three cats, of which two —the Mouse Police— are black'n'white organic alternatives to rodenticides in the bakery. Her beverage of choice is chateau collapseau. (Aussie slang for box-wine?) She delights in Tolkien, Terry Pratchett, Buffy, the X-Files, Star Trek, Georgette Heyer, Jade Forrester. Her friends and neighbors: a family of Greek/Hungarian restaurateurs, a practicing Wiccan, a stilletto-heeled leather queen and costumer who prefers comfy tweeds outside business hours, a retired Classics professor, a pair of under-age model-actresses (who clerk the bakery's shopfront), an apprentice who's a recovering drug addict, a geek trio of quasi-hackers DBA (doing business as) "The Lone Gunmen". Et cetera.
The Phryne novels are peopled by a pair of Wobbly wharfies turned cab-drivers and investigative accomplices while the 1928/29 port strike drags on, stray puppies, street urchins earning their single-parent families' only support, Chinese immigrants of every station, circus folk, Bohemians, "Sapphics", admirable capitalists and police officers as well as despicable ones, jazz musicians and folk choristers, Jewish tailors and scholars, wonderful women (a Scottish physician, a mercantile matriarch, an aviator or three, social service pioneers...), teenagers of all kinds who seem very worth knowing (I say this as a professional whose working life leaves me no great enthusiasm for that age), family worth loving and family that's abhorrent, unfortunates in desperate need of rescue, heroes in unlikely guise. (The Phryne novels include historical bibliographies and the occasional cocktail instructions, if fewer recipes.)
Considering the other writing Greenwood also does, and her legal aid lawyering, she's probably one of those irritating people who only need five hours sleep a night. I should loathe her and her over-achievingness, but I don't: as I've finished each of her books so far, I feel better companioned by them than any fiction I've ever read before (starting 1951, if of course The Story of Ferdinand and The Funny Thing {my first cookbook!}).
All in all, I'd have bet there's no way progressive fiction could be commercial, yet apparently it is: 29 novels just counting Corinna's and Phryne's alone (and Phryne's tv series - here, where Greenwood writes "Why I Did it", we get quite a bit about her process). Maybe the writerly yoga of shaping genre fiction to speak our era's ideals equally supplies the flexibility to flourish in the market. There's something so obnoxously hope-inspiring about this that I feel grumpy just considering the possibilities.
First and foremost, Greenwood is doing what novelists have to do for their books to sell: serve up elements for which the readers have a known appetite. With that apt if strained metaphor (sieved? collandered?), and in preparation for the evening's writing challenges, let's feed the imagination with treats Corinna and her friends cook for each other: just above this cover illustration, click on
"Look Inside" ↴
Then, down at the left in the
Search Inside This Book bar, type
"chocolate grog", click on the round red
GO button, then click the page 240 citation that says,
Beware of this—it is utterly delicious and very alcoholic.
It is Cocoa For Grown Ups. Thinking about it will put you over .05..."
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and scroll down the page to the recipe, which "warms the cockles and all other places." It finishes on 241 immediately followed by my personal favorite, perhaps especially suited for writers who forgot to grocery-shop (or the budget's already gone),
French Onion Soup. I'm no gourmet, but I can't resist instructions like:
...Keep stirring. These are stirring times.
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Now that we're sufficiently liquored or souped up for
The Writing Challenge...
...recipes are just some of the prosaic real-life data writers have long found effective for drawing wider readership than genre might alone. Reasons to omit it might be: making a clear distinction between real life and escapism; finding little in real life that seems to apply; avoiding being too self-exposing; consequences of coming too out-of-left-field. (Greenwood sure doesn't write from right field!) Et cetera. Yet what we take for granted or dismiss as dull or too real in our own lives may be, on the page, the experiential texture that builds dimensions readers can climb into and inhabit alongside the characters — the vicarious experience that makes'em feel almost disoriented in their own real life when they look up from the novel's final page.
And after all, some day someone with $$$ to offer may say, "I like your ideas, but we're not publishing that material right now. Is there another approach you can show us?"
Here are some thoughts to limber up with for the challenges:
I was ... writing to a friend about the awful process of revision, and the word fell at the very end of the line. I had to hyphenate it. The word became RE-VISION. To see again. In that instant, ...the kind ...when the succession of ordinary words suddenly becomes unfamiliar, taking on a new and revelatory meaning, I knew. I was not simply rewriting. I was being handed a second change to dream. —JANE YOLEN
[Brenda Ueland on "Microscopic Truth"]: Describe something just as it is [all of it]. Do not worry if [the description] is angular or clumsy or how it comes out. Just look at something [real] and put down what you see. ...don't [marshal] thoughts to prove it; you don't have to prove it. Say it.
[And elsewhere:] Keep a careless, slovenly, impulsive, honest ...headlong, helter-skelter diary every day of your life. ...I don't mean a "had lunch" diary... But do this: Try to see better ...try to see people, just what they did and how they looked and felt [to you]. Then write it...as fast and carelessly as you possibly can... be awkward, quick, insolent ...unrestrained... In six months, look at it. ... You will see that what you have written with the most slovenly freedom — in those parts there will be vitality, brilliance, beauty. [By being so] reckless ... you will not write [with] lumbering justifications... timidly qualifying phrases... anxious vanity... [or] fear of failure... but truth... sometimes in as exact detail and as accurately as the Recording Angel...
THE CHALLENGE:.
Write an action or conflict scene with whatever characters and plot you like. Post it as a comment as usual. Then, if you feel inclined, choose one or more
rewrite options below.
Rewrite Option 1. Rewrite much the same scene but set somewhere in your real life that you know every touch, taste, feel, scent, sound, step, task, tool, material and furnishing of (a job you loathed, a city or street you adore...). Adapt the initial scene to its new (old to you) environment, using the reallife details to make the scene work. (If magic is fundamental in your original scene, of course it can translate across, don't change the basic nature of what you first wrote ... unless you want to.)
Post this rewrite as a comment replying to your original scene.
Rewrite Option 2. Re-imagine your original scene through the eyes of a long-past self you once really were, with all that mattered most to you back then, and all the often-excruciating sensibilities that are part of being so much younger.
Post this rewrite as a comment replying to your original scene, or as an additional comment replying to a prior rewrite, if you do more than one.
Rewrite Option 3. You're a cub reporter crouched in the shadows who's stumbled upon the scoop of six lifetimes that might save your about-to-be-fired desperately-adored job ...if the characters don't see you and kill you first! Text the scene to your editor (intelligibly! ... "editor" means reader of your novel) and sneak away...
Post this rewrite...etc.
Compare and contrast in 8,000 words. (Just kidding!)
;-)
SensibleShoes ends each week with this public service announcement:
Write On! will be a regular weekly diary until it isn't.
Before signing a contract with any agent or publisher, please be sure to check them out on Preditors and Editors, Absolute Write and/or Writer Beware.