Research your criminals

Last night I attended a talk by Peter James, "Britain's #1 bestselling crime author," at the offices of HarperCollins Canada. It was, appropriately, a dark and stormy night, which we had a great view of from the floor-to-ceiling windows in HCC's fabulous 20th-storey offices.

James spoke to an intimate audience of crime writers and fans about his writing process, his sources of inspiration, and the effect on his psyche of writing about gory murders all day. (Apparently the antidote is vodka martinis.)

To add realism to his stories, James has been cultivating relationships with police, criminals, and victims for decades. He goes out on patrol, witnesses arrests, hangs out in jails...the whole bit.

While not all authors have the luxury of totally immersing themselves in the world of their stories, I think any author could benefit from the general lesson of seeking inspiration through research. So often in manuscripts I find that the very best writing comes from what the author knows best, that the most developed characters and settings are the ones that are clear stand-ins from the author's life experience, and that the characters and plot points that are the most "made up" are the haziest, even if the author means them to be interesting and important.

The best thing about this is that it's an infallible excuse for field trips! So go feed into that author stereotype thing where you get to do all kinds of weird, fun things because it's "research for your book." I think I am going to start researching a book about a horseback-riding ballerina who hangs out in tea shops reading her brand-new stack of British crime thrillers now.

Also, he's totally talking to me in this picture. I am Britain's #1 crime author by association.

Can you make my book a best-seller?

As much as I hate to say it, sometimes nothing but weird, dumb luck can make your book a best-seller. It can be a wonderfully written book in a sizzling hot genre written by an A-list celebrity, and it can still fizzle out before it's even picked up by an agent. Alternatively, it can be a middling book written by a working-class single mom in a genre that was considered passé two hundred years ago, and it can sell more books than the Bible.

So no, I can't make your book a best-seller, and any editor who says he can is a quack. I can make your book better. I can improve its chances in the shark-ridden seas of agent-finding by making sure you don't turn off agents by doing things like using your thesaurus to find 5000 synonyms for "said" in your dialogue. But editing, the way I see it, has very little to do with the actual sales of a novel. Once reviewers and consumers have your book in their hands, good editing will ensure that your book isn't tossed into the reject pile right off the bat. But to get it there, you need your cover, your radio appearances, your local bookstore support, and everything else that goes into a good marketing effort.

I just tend to get a lot of inquiries asking whether I can magically get some book, sight unseen, into the NYT lists. The authors who ask me this question invariably disappear off the face of the earth after I respond that no, no editor can do that. I worry that these people are being suckered into paying huge amounts of money to unscrupulous "editors" who claim they possess the golden fleece of sales or something.

Honestly, if I knew the secret to best-sellerdom, I'd be churning out Harlequins like there was no tomorrow. But that would be sad. What a book really needs is magic - the magic that you as the author bring to it and no editor can ever duplicate from scratch. So go work your magic, and let a good editor help you polish the results so they're ready to present to the world.

A giggle from Craigslist

Saw this on Craigslist today and thought it was pretty cute.

*********

Auther: needs Publisher

I am looking for an honest publisher able to take-on a timly, controversial and important project.
Must be prepaired to make enemies within the spheres of Establishment & disreguard them.
((for more info plz enquire inside.
Thanx !

Compensation: This is for Book Publishers themselves looking for new material

**********

Clearly this guy isn't going to be bringing down any "Establishments" any time soon, but how good of a character would this be in a story? "Writer of groundbreaking manifestos, too irate to proofread, seeks publisher willing to make enemies...and then disregard them!"

I wonder what percentage of authors hit up Craigslist for character and plot ideas?

What we can learn about writing from...hockey playoffs!

I'm not going to lie - from now until at least next week, and hopefully well into May, pretty much all I'm going to be concentrating on is hockey playoffs. And work, of course. But really, hockey!

Montreal is making such an improbable run right now that I wouldn't put it past them to win the Stanley Cup (that's the Superbowl of hockey, you Americans) just because it would be so darn shocking.

Which brings us to this week's lesson in...perspective! Yay!

Very brief primer in hockey - The NHL is broken up into two halves: East and West. Each half has sixteen teams who play during the year. Based on how much they win during the year, the top eight teams make the playoffs. In the first round of the playoffs, the #1 team plays the #8 team, the #2 team plays the #7 team, etc.

The result of this is that the #1 team - which has probably had an amazing year and is feeling really good about itself - plays the #8 team, which has probably had a very middling year and squeaked in by the seat of its pants. Thus was the situation of Montreal (#8) vs Washington (#1 and for God's sake they have Ovechkin).

You have to win 4 games (out of a possible 7) to win the round and go on to the next one. Nobody expected Montreal to win even one game - they were meant to be a mere speed bump on Washington's path to inevitable glory and immortality.

But Montreal won. HAH! It was insane. We partied in the streets.

Now - here's what to think about - there are (at least) four perspectives you can look at this kind of classic underdog scenario from.

1 - You like the #1 team, and they win
2 - You like the #1 team, and they lose
3 - You like the #8 team, and they win
4 - You like the #8 team, and they lose

If you were writing a story like this, you'd have to examine all four of these and decide which one you want to go with. Which has the most drama/catharsis/rapture/agony? Is a win more exciting if you like the strong team or the underdog? What are the different effects of a loss from each perspective?

#3 - the underdog win - is your classic Disney scenario. And yes, it's awesome when you actually live through it. But in fiction, that's really what people expect, and it can get very old if it's not well done. Is there a way to make a compelling story out of the strong team winning, or the weak one losing? You bet there is! You just have to figure out how.

Final point. Even if you've decided already whether your main character is strong or weak, and whether they win or lose, it's really crucial to writing a rounded story that you look at all these other perspectives. So your underdog character wins. How would she have felt if she lost? Is she determined not to lose, terrified of losing, or resigned to probably having to lose? If your strong character loses, how badly did he want to win? Was he sabotaged by his own arrogance, or was he tired of the pressure of winning all the time?

Hmm....

It's the second sentence, stupid

At some point in the evening on my birthday a couple weeks ago, I was curled up on a real live divan in the chicest apartment I am aware of in all of Montreal, talking to some of my favorite people about writing. Because that's how I roll.

I'd had a brainstorm on the metro for a possible first line of a novel. I'd been quite pleased with it, but then I realized it was, of course, totally cliché. To the point where it had several points of intersection with the first line of Twilight. So I'd fiddled with it to remove the similarities, but now I wasn't so sure I liked it.

At this point in my gripping narrative, the owner of the apartment (who is certainly a better writer than I'll ever be) said "Really, though, it's the second sentence that makes it." Or something to that effect.

And I think she was totally right. It's almost always the second sentence that really hooks me. The first sentence will get me interested, and if it's good or intriguing it's like standing on the edge of a cliff. I feel excited, hopeful...full of anticipation to see if the author can follow up. And then I read the second sentence, and if it's blah I feel kind of let down. But if it's good, I smile and sigh happily and settle in. It doesn't have to be brilliant, but the two sentences have to really work together.

A sampling from the most recent books I've been reading -

"The temperature hit ninety degrees the day she arrived. New York was steaming--an angry concrete animal caught unawares in an unseasonable hot spell."

--The Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann

"I first met Perkus Tooth in an office. Not an office where he worked, though I was confused about this at the time."

--Chronic City, Jonathan Letham

"My company was charming. Opposite me by the massive Renaissance fireplace sat Venus; she was not a casual woman of the half-world, who under this pseudonym wages war against the opposite sex, like Mademoiselle Cleopatra, but the real, true goddess of love."

--Venus in Furs, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

"Elspeth died while Robert was standing in front of a vending machine watching tea shoot into a small plastic cup. Later he would remember walking down the hospital corridor with the cup of horrible tea in his hand, alone under the fluorescent lights, retracing his steps to the room where Elspeth lay surrounded by machines."

--Her Fearful Symmetry, Audrey Niffenegger

"'So you're all set for money, then?' the boy named Crow asks in his typical sluggish voice. The kind of voice like when you've just woken up and your mouth still feels heavy and dull."

--Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami

With the possible exception of Her Fearful Symmetry, all of these sucked me in on the second sentence, not the first. And even in HFS, it's the second sentence that seals the deal. The first sentence of each of these was interesting enough to keep me reading. It's a teaser. But so many people try to cram their hook into the first sentence like it's a hard-and-fast rule. But there you have it - 5 out of 6 of the last books that hooked me had the hook in the second sentence. The exception?

"At that very moment, in the very sort of Park Avenue co-op apartment that so obsessed the Mayor...twelve-foot ceilings...two wings, one for the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who own the place and one for the help...Sherman McCoy was kneeling in his front hall trying to put a leash on a dachshund."

--The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe

So, how about it? Is this important variation getting lost in the shuffle with the common fixation on "hooking with the first sentence"?

Links! Sequels!

I'm as yet unsure about links posts. Personally, I normally don't read them...they don't tell me anything in themselves, and by their very nature they create the threat of Opening More Tabs, which causes me to stress out. Will the article be worth it? What if it's on a page where there's tons of stuff that I need to look at and I end up having to spend hours getting caught up? Better just not to find out.

However, here are two links. And one of them's a comic. I hereby promise that if I do links posts, there will only be two links and one of them will be a comic.

1. Sequels - The Nathan Bransford report. Because almost everybody is writing a series and leaving important things out of the first book because they're "saving it for the sequels" and no matter how much I tell them the only thing that will accomplish is that the first book won't be as good as it could be and nobody will buy it and they need to just view it as a stand-alone and then think about sequels when and if a publisher actually takes the first book...nobody believes me. They keep insisting that it's got to be a series, and they've got to write it all now and there's no need to resolve plot threads and characterizations because it will all happen "in the next book." But it won't happen, because the first book won't get bought, so the sequel won't get written.

2. Comic. About DRM and how it's the worst thing ever.

Hm...

Are TV crime shows the reason that so many people are writing so many walking-down-hallways-thinking scenes?

The Avatar school of really basic writing success

So, I went to see Avatar the other week. Did you? I bet you did! Did we like it? I thought it was pretty shiny...it kept my attention for three hours, which is a pretty handy trick. Made me a little motion-sick for a bit in the beginning though.

The storyline and plotting were extremely simple, which made me think this would be a great illustration of a couple of basic writing points that get made all the time and authors never seem to quite buy into. To whit:

1. "You don't have to overdo the back story. Readers can fill in a lot from just a few hints, and they don't need to know everything."

Authors love writing back story. They love their characters, know them inside and out, and want to tell you every little thing that the main character's best friend's great-aunt went through when she immigrated to America and endured great hardships.

There is, of course, a time and a place for back story. But what Avatar proves is that given the opportunity, audiences will happily truck along with the barest information. Did they tell us how that guy lost his legs, or what he and his brother did as kids, or where any of the minor characters were from, or what was going on back on earth, or how technology had gotten to awesome or the history of the avatar program or...anything? They did not.

They couldn't get around explaining why everyone's on this planet, so they show us that rock in that one tiny scene and tell us it's really, really expensive and it exists on this planet. Not who discovered it, not what it does or why people pay so much for it, just the bare essentials - it's a thing, and it's expensive.

Based on this absolutely scant amount of background, pretty much everybody on Earth was able to watch, understand, and enjoy this movie. And those points they skip over aren't boring, irrelevant ones. Any one of them could be a whole story on its own. Audiences would probably love to know all that stuff, if they had five hundred hours to spend watching the extended version.

Again, this isn't to say that you should oversimplify your work and cut out all the back story. It's just to point out how smart your audience is, and how much they can guess without being explicitly told anything.

2 - "Introduce important stuff early, in context, and be subtle about it."

I think there's a lot of fear, especially with less experienced authors, that readers will miss any point they aren't beaten over the head with. The danger is, of course, that if it's totally obvious that something is going to be relevant later in the book, readers won't get any surprise or pleasure out of the reprisal.

To be fair, Avatar is pretty obvious. It's clear that the big dragon thing will be relevant later, as will the thing where the people get unplugged and their avatars fall down, and the thing where the tree has the power to bring people back to life as their avatars.

But still, everything is introduced plausibly, in context, and as part of a scene and a plotline, which is where I see a lot of struggling occur among authors. If it's really important, make a scene about it. And be creative! Don't just force a scene where some random character happens to be talking about some topic that will be relevant later. Make it really fit, an integral part of the story. Unless, you know, you're writing a satire.

Goodness, I've rambled. I hope some of that is helpful!

Bonus Tiger Woods post

Because grammar stuff is funny even when I'm supposed to be taking a break, here's an important syntax lesson, brought to you by the Superficial's blog post about Today's interview with the Daily Beast's Gerald Posner regarding anonymous sources speaking about the Tiger Woods Crash. Because if you're not six degrees separated from your celebrity gossip, life isn't really worth living.

So. Tiger and Elin have a fight. Tiger takes some sleeping pills and conks out, because apparently this is a valid way for husbands to end fights now. What happens then? You might well ask!

"While asleep, Elin looked through Woods' cellphone, both sources tell Posner."

Barring the possibility that sleep-snooping is a Nordic model superpower, this sentence fails. I see a surprising number of sentences that make this error in my line of work, and it never fails to confound me. So here's the thing: In a sentence of the form "While [QUALITY], [NAME(SUBJECT)][ACTION]", the subject of the action is also the one with the quality. To give the quality to somebody else, you gotta do "While Tiger was asleep/While Tiger slept, Elin looked..."

I know it's a couple extra words, but one of the times you're allowed to add more words is when the additional words change the sentence from one that doesn't mean what you're trying to say into one that does.

Filtering

Ignore the fact that I've completely missed Tuesday. Saturday is like Tuesday in many ways.

Something that comes up in nearly every self-published book I edit and review is the overuse of filtering perceptions through a character. So, you want to say that the sky is blue, and instead of saying "The sky was blue that day," you say "Jim noticed that the sky was blue that day."

Check this out when you've got any kind of sensory information coming in - do you need to say that John saw the deer cross the street, or Andy smelled the salty sea air? Sometimes this is nice, but very, very often it's just adding both extra words and an extra layer of separation for the reader between themselves and the observations in question. Compare...

John descended into the cellar, his body trembling with fear. A gust of moldy air blew past him as he opened the door, and something creaked in the darkness.

with

John noticed that his body was trembling with fear as he descended into the cellar. As he opened the door, he felt a gust of moldy air blow past him, and heard something creak in the darkness.

At best, it just doesn't add anything but extra words. At worst, it's awful - it reminds the reader at every step that this is happening to John and they aren't there. You know how with the best books you always say "I was just sucked into the world the author created, and I could feel everything like it was happening to me" ? Filtering is a great way to make sure your readers don't have that experience.

A quick fix: Do a search for "notice/note." If you're feeling ambitious, also search for variants of the other sensory words - feel, smell, hear, see, taste. But "notice" will catch the most obvious ones.

Microsoft is annoying me

I'm working on Word 2007. I've been working on Word 2007 for ages, but all of a sudden it seems to be doing weird things. In addition to the weird things I'm accustomed to it doing, like turning my apostrophes into open-quotes and trying to persuade me to turn all my thats into whiches.

Namely, it's auto-capitalizing my i's even when they're part of a word I haven't yet finished typing. I'm just typing away at a normal speed, and my instead reads as Instead before I've actually gotten to the end of the word. I know I can just turn off that auto-correct feature, but it's the weirdness of it suddenly starting this strange behavior that's kind of freaking me out.

Secondly, it just auto-corrected a your to you're. Which was wrong. For no reason. I'd been noticing weird homonym things when I re-read my edits for a project recently, and thought that I was just typing too fast or something and making embarrassing mistakes. But now I have to be paranoid that my own word-processor is trying to get me in trouble. I think it's time to suck it up and turn the auto-correct off entirely...I'll just have to capitalize the first words of sentences all by myself. Sigh. My lazy pinkies will not be happy.

First sentences, part one

First off, I found a great example on Authonomy of what I was talking about in this post on telling readers that business is proceeding as usual. First sentence of the book - "Joe Schmo found himself, as always in the downtown area of City, State." It's actually a good example of the over/underusing commas thing too. But yeah, thought that was cute. I can write one too - "As the character began her existence at the beginning of the book, she discovered that she had been placed by the author in the town that she was now aware that she lived in." I'm sure Chris can write a better one, but you get the drift.

Secondly, I was paging through my book review notes, and discovered an old favorite that I've never mentioned here. The novel begins with a sentence something like this - "The last thing Vampy McVampire expected when he walked home from school that day was to be attacked by a werewolf." That's hokey enough in itself (and please don't start your book with a sentence about the last thing your character expected), but what's worse, within the next one page, the author proceeds to establish that his character is a vampire, walking home alone late at night, outside of his school, where over the past several days a large number of werewolf attacks on vampires have occurred. Soooooo....probably not the smartest bat in the cave if the last thing he's expecting is an attack which is clearly extremely likely.

As it turned out, the book was pretty iffy all the way through so it didn't really matter if the author lost the reader's trust right away or five pages later. But if you've written a book with integrity and continuity, and then you blow the reader's trust with a first line designed for impact but without care for how it meshes with the rest of the book...that's a bad thing. Once you lose your reader and they're not sure if they can believe you, it's nigh impossible to win them back. And it's no fun to read a book when you're not sure the author took care to ensure he actually means what he says.

Commas

Happy post-Thanksgiving to the Americans...and to me, because I have great Canadian in-laws who use me as an excuse to sneak in a second Thanksgiving :)

Today's post is more of an FYI than a how-to article, because commas are a much bigger topic than I'm prepared to handle right now.

In short, though - you may be using too many commas. Or not enough. For most practical purposes, you don't have to actually stress over every comma, you just have to avoid excess. If you're adding commas because you seem to remember your English teacher telling you to use commas in a certain context, you're probably using way too many. If you're cutting them when you think you need them because you read something about comma overuse and are trying not to use any, you're probably using way too few.

If commas really stress you out, it's worth picking up a style guide and reading up on them rather than blindly trying to strike out and add/smite at every opportunity.

Writing your own back cover copy

The fact that authors have to write their own blurbs and cover copy when they self publish is a very awkward thing. For the authors, I imagine it's akin to torture. Poor authors - you've written the book, you've gotten it all fixed up, you've said what you wanted to say in 70,000 words, and now you have to say it all again in 50.

The results usually aren't too bad...back-cover copy is pretty formulaic, and you can't go too far wrong just typing in the copy from a published book in your genre, and replacing the key words.

The key thing is that you're trying to sell your book, right? So you say things that you think will make people want to buy it. That's good thinking, but sometimes I wonder if the authors have actually read their own books, the cover-copy is so far off the mark. Comparisons are made to books without the faintest resemblance either in plot or voice to the book in question. Allusions to authors, styles, and literature movements that the author hasn't been exposed to since 11th grade Lit class 30 years ago are demurely smuggled in. Characters are identified as the main character who aren't the main character. Really.

I understand the need to talk up your book, but really* - don't compare yourself to Crime and Punishment if the only similarity is that a crime occurs in your book and the perpetrator suffers because of it. It's like comparing your book to the Bible because it has God in it. And don't say your book draws from the surrealist movement just because you threw in a couple of vaguely weird bits that nobody would have noticed if you hadn't made a character say "Wow, this is so weird, I feel like my watch ought to start melting soon."

Moral: Back cover copy should both sell and remotely resemble the book you have written. It's bloody hard, but I promise it can be done.

*titles and genres have been changed to protect the innocent

Overwhelming numbers of thoughts

Something I really get pleasure out of weeding out of manuscripts are these expressions like "thoughts flooded/pounded/stampeded through my mind." There are times and places for these expressions, but on the whole I find they get used way more often in writing than they do in life. In a bad way.

And also in a different way - when a real person really says "my mind was flooded with thoughts," (if that ever actually happens) there's often an implication that this person is overwhelmed - there's so much going on that he can't think clearly. In writing, though, this implication usually isn't there - it's more just a literal "I was standing there having lots of thoughts" kind of situation.

Primarily, though, the expression seems like a lazy attempt to evoke an emotional response in the reader. Like describing heartbeats speeding up and hands shaking and whatnot. It usually doesn't add anything, and it sounds silly. So go ahead - find a better way to say it :)

As usual

Starting a new project today - yippee! And it's a good one, too.

This week's helpful writing tip concerns this propensity writers seem to have for noting that things are happening the same way they always do.

So, like, "Just as she did every morning, Penny the Guinea Pig squeaked for her breakfast."

or, "I served Penny her favorite yummy grass in her usual dish."

or, "I knew as I woke up that Penny would be running circles in her cage yet again."

This is more common near the beginning of books, as authors try to establish routine before they mix things up. But honestly, it's not necessary.

"But Erin," you gasp breathlessly. "Your examples are all so clunky!"

Well, yes. And that's the thing with these kinds of sentences. They're pretty much always clunky. Like, when is it necessary to state that something's routine? I find it's used most often with really obviously routine things. Like, if a character is walking the dog, and the dog gets muddy feet, and the character thinks about what her mom will say when they go in the house. This is exactly the kind of situation that the "as usual" pops up in, presumably because the author feels like there's this question "where does the character get the idea that the mother will say this?" So they clarify - it's because this is what the mother always says. To which the reader says "Well, duh."

Unless something really weird is going on, readers will assume that what a character's doing at the beginning of a book is par for the course. Telling them that Cindy is making her usual cold cereal breakfast with her usual latte wearing her usual ratty sleeping sweats is insulting, and unnecessary. If any of those things weren't usual, we wouldn't even care. I promise.

It's easier to write when you know what you're writing about

If you feel like you're getting really bogged down in a section of something you're writing, it might be wise to consider whether what you're trying to write is clear to you.

Poorly written sections often correspond with sections where the storyline doesn't quite work, or the section doesn't really tie in well with the plot, or the author seems to just be riffing on some idea that doesn't deserve so much space.

The flip side of that is totally-unrelated sections that are way, way better written than the rest of the book, because they're about something the author is passionate about. (Oh man, if I was English-teacher-style forcing that sentence not to end in a preposition, it would have been really bad!) Like, where the book's historical fiction, and it's kind of plodding, but all of a sudden there's this large, eloquent narrative interlude about the comparative merits of knitting over crocheting. You know? Where you can just tell that this is what the author is really into.

Oversimplified Moral: Love what you're writing, and make sure it makes sense.

Characters have to do Things, part 1

Okay, we have a problem.

I'm reading my review book, minding my own business, when suddenly it occurs to me - has the main character been truly active at all yet? I'm halfway through a 400-page book, and seriously this boy has been sick, captured, or both pretty much nonstop. He's a strapping young lad, handsome, hot with magic, good with the ladies...you'd think with that kind of setup he'd at least be on his feet occasionally. And he is from time to time, but really his non-sick/non-captured moments are the exceptions, falling between long bouts of swooning and puking and being in trances and comas.

Even when he is healthy, he's largely passive - he's learning things, or being told stories, or being introduced to new cultures. All of which is great, and on the whole I'm really enjoying the book, but it's just so frustrating when you want your main character to be, I don't know, smiting things, and instead he's always passed out in the back of the car.

This is part of a larger problem I've noticed among authors who are writing out of love for their characters rather than out of the hopes of entertaining their audience. It's great if you love your characters, but this isn't fan fiction (I hope) - this isn't like "oh, we all know how great Legolas is, and wouldn't it be great to read a story where he's always in distress and Aragorn has to sweep him up on his horse and protect him and carry him to safety and nurse him back to health and..." ahem. I'll stop there.

But yeah - that would be awesome, but your novel is not Legolas Aragorn Slash-Fic. It is a novel. We, the readers, need to meet your character and learn what's so great about him...and we can't do that if your character is always passed out. I'm sorry.

******EDIT******

This issue really seems to have been floating around in the cosmos this week - there are a couple other great blog posts on the same topic here and here.

Books about authors, Part 2

I mentioned this back in the Girl with The Dragon Tattoo post, and promised to follow up on it, so here goes.

I've been seeing a lot of both high-flying and unpublished authors presenting the following sub-plotline:

Character A is an author. He's writing a book. Maybe struggling with it, worrying if anyone will read it, having some writer's block. Definitely passionate about the subject though. Lalalaplotstuffplotstuff. Suddenly, something happens in the plot! And Mr. A's book is suddenly an internationally relevant topic of overwhelming public interest! People are storming the bookstores! Chasing him down for interviews! Women are flinging themselves at him in the street! OMG!

Alternately, Character A is already an internationally reknowned author, and gets piles of respect and opened doors everywhere he goes, thus facilitating his quest. (P.S.- I'm talking about you, Da Vinci Code. You don't fool me.)

You don't have to be a psychologist to see what's going on here. This is the author's greatest (sub)conscious dream playing out. The fantasy that he's playing out for himself every day as he writes, and every night before bed. And really, that's great! I'm glad we're thinking positive thoughts here. But I do find it amusing that these positive-visioning exercises are making it into so many books. Maybe I'm the only one who reads these and says "Ah. Authorial wet dream. Sigh." Or maybe I'm not. In any case, I'm putting it on my cliché list.

Survey : Meta-literature

What are your thoughts on fiction about authors and writing? Books where a major character is a writer trying to make art and having a hard time of it?

I tend to be skeptical...I mean, I love it conceptually, but in practice I'm almost always disappointed. You're encouraged to write what you know, of course, and what a lot of what many first-time authors know is, well, an author sitting at the computer failing to write a book. Most of the time I find this feels cheap, and even when I really like the author's style, I wish they were writing about something else.

I've seen films and read books that are like this, and have liked them very much. Swimming Pool, for instance, and my favorite book of all time, Hopscotch. Both use the struggling-author thing as a springboard for greater achievements, though, not just as an examination of the author's own psyche. Do we care that much about a random unknown author's psyche that we want to read a whole book about it? Not often, eh.

I guess my feelings on this are best summed up by that rhyme..."When it is good, it is very very good, but when it is bad it is horrid."

Your thoughts?