Category: Ruminations

NaNoWriMo

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations9 Comments

As I’m sure you know, we’re coming up on November.  And as many in the writing and blogging community will know, that means National Novel Writers Month–NaNoWriMo in the shorthand, or NaNo if you want to make it really quick.

The goal of NaNo is to write a novel in a month–50,000 words, or about 1,600 a day.  People come together, in person or over the internet, and support each other in their goal.  It is, by all accounts, a fun way to connect with other writers, and to hopefully produce some writing–which everyone expects will require vast amounts of revision.  But the point isn’t so much to write a good novel–just to get something written, and you can always revise it later.

I’ve been hearing about NaNo for years, but I’ve never actually participated.  November never seemed like a good month for a vast amount of writing.  In school, November is just when everything’s gearing up with major papers and final exams.  Last November, I was busy starting a blog.  🙂

But I’ve decided that this is the year–I’m finally going to give NaNo a try.  I have a full-time job and plenty of social activities, not to mention a blog, but I know lots of people with crazier schedules than mine make an attempt on NaNo!

I already write most days, but I tend to fit in just a little time at the end of the day, and I’d like to write more.  I figure NaNo will force me to–and hopefully I can make some habits I can keep following after November.  I’m finishing up the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for about a year and a half, so the timing is perfect to launch off into something else.

I’ve had an idea percolating for a while that I want to explore.  As I think regular readers all know very well 🙂 I love fairy tale retellings.  Lately, I’ve been drawn to “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.”  After reading a lot of retellings, I re-read the original in Grimm’s (“The Shoes that Were Danced to Pieces.”)  There was plenty there that had been in most of the retellings, but there was one line that suddenly jumped at me:

“Each Prince danced with the girl he loved.”

I found myself re-examining the entire story.  In every retelling I’ve been able to find, the Princes are evil demons, the Princesses are forced to go dancing, and the King is a well-meaning man who does his best to help his daughters.

But that’s not in Grimm.  In Grimm, the Princes never do anything evil, the Princesses seem perfectly willing (even eager) to go dancing, and the King is locking up his daughters and chopping off champions’ heads.

Which leads me to ask–what if the villain of the story is not who everyone has been making it out to be?  What if everyone’s motivations, and everyone’s desires, are entirely different than what we’ve come to expect them to be?

So that’s what I’ll spend November answering!

Obviously I plan to focus on novel writing for the month, which will mean less blog-writing of the usual kind.  I expect there to still be a few book reviews and a few other things like Favorites Friday posts–and if the novel-writing goes well, I’ll share excerpts!  But don’t be surprised if the usual posts are less frequent for a few weeks.  I still plan to post often though–so that I can let you know how the novel-writing goes, and keep myself accountable!

If you’re participating in NaNo too, I’d love to hear how it goes for you; you can find me over on the NaNo website.  My username is cherylmahoney.

I have another horror novel review for Halloween, and then the novel-writing starts next Tuesday–wish me luck!

Oh the Horror! Maybe.

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

I was recently reading a book that got me thinking when it used a particular narrative device.  I’ve noticed this before, but I don’t know if there’s a name for it.  Maybe I’ll coin one.  Let’s call it the Hidden Horror.  And since I’ve been posting about spooky books for Halloween, it seems like the appropriate time to talk about this!

The Hidden Horror is when SOMETHING happens (or has happened).  A character knows about it and reacts, saying, “Oh, the horror!”  Sometimes that’s literally what they say 🙂 but the point is that somehow it’s conveyed to the reader that the character feels SOMETHING really awful and horrible and excruciatingly bad has happened.  But we don’t know what it is yet.  The narrator holds onto the secret, and makes us keep reading to find out what the SOMETHING is.  Sooner or later, of course, it’s revealed, and of course we’re supposed to echo, “Oh, the horror!  Now I see what was so awful!”

The trouble is, usually I don’t.  Most of the time, if a writer makes me wait to find out what the Hidden Horror is, I get a complete anticlimax.  My reaction is usually, “Really?  That’s not that bad.”

I think the problem is that as soon as the character reacts, I start imagining what horrible thing it could be.  Horror is in a way a strangely personal thing.  One scenario may feel far more horrible to me than it would to you–and something that would seriously disturb you wouldn’t really bother me.  Maybe you can’t stand spiders, while I’m much more upset by snakes.  So when I start imagining the horrible thing, I imagine whatever would be most horrible to me.  And after I’ve had time to imagine that, how can the horrible imagining of the author–distant, third-party, impersonal–compare to whatever I conjured up?  While if I hadn’t had time to imagine it, I probably would have appreciated the author’s horrible event.

I love plot twists (even when I guess them), and I love knowing there’s some secret in the narrative that I have to keep reading to learn.  I love suspense–when you know the story is building up towards something, which will probably be horrible when it arrives.  Perhaps the key difference is that, if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s not being hidden.  It’s just approaching, and I’m not trying to imagine it in the same way because I’m still waiting for it to arrive.

It may also be a problem of over-emphasis.  When the characters go on and on about the awfulness, when the author goes to great lengths to convince me it’s horrible, almost anything would be an anticlimax.

I think reading helps writing in so many ways–it helps build a feel for language, sparks ideas, and lets us see clever things other writers have done.  And sometimes, it’s just as helpful to see what doesn’t work.

Oh, and despite the recent discussion on suspense in The Hound of the Baskervilles, that wasn’t the book that inspired this post.  Doyle knows how to do suspense.

2011 Reading Challenges – Three-Quarters There!

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations6 Comments

It’s the end of another quarter, which probably means lots of things in the business world, but around here means it’s time for an update on reading challenges!

It’s been a solid quarter on just about every challenge (and I went a little crazy on the retold fairy tales!) Things may slow down in November and December, so I’m glad I got more read now.  I still need to work on First in a Series; it’s the hardest one to go look for somehow, so any suggestions of favorite series are welcome!

Linked titles go to my review of the book.   Asterisks indicate I have a review coming soon.  If you see something you’re curious about that doesn’t have a review or one promised, let me know!  If I don’t feel like I have enough to say for a full post, I’ll at least let you know what I thought in a reply-comment.  Rereads are designated with an R for all but the Library challenge, and aren’t counted.

Here’s what I’ve read so far Continue reading “2011 Reading Challenges – Three-Quarters There!” →

Fantastical–and Logical

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

You’ve probably heard people say things like this.

“It didn’t really make sense when the character did that…but it is a story about dragons, after all.”

Or, “I thought there were some leaps in logic, but what can you expect from a story about talking mice?”

This is wrong.  When people say things like that directly to me, I argue, and I’ll tell you why.

A fantasy element and a logical flaw are two completely different things.  A story set in a world with dragons is a story in which dragons are logical.  A character who acts out of character is out of character in any world, whether they live in Brooklyn, or in a cave with dragons.

Men can’t fly.  But if Superman flies past a cry for help without stopping, the problem here is not that he’s flying.

If anything, I think fantasy and science fiction books have to be even more firm in their logic, in their reasoning, in their premise and their characters, because they are already trying to make the reader accept something which is impossible.  The reader is invited into an impossible world, and everything that goes on inside of it needs to be internally consistent and internally reasonable, or the story won’t be believable–and not because there are dragons.

A writing teacher discussed this once.  She explained certain options in what you have happen in your story:

There are impossible probabilities: men can’t fly, but if one could, we find it probable that he would use that ability to help people (or to take over the world, depending on what character we’re looking at).  It’s impossible, but once you accept the impossible, the rest is probable.

There are improbable possibilities: it’s possible for someone who has previously shown an inclination to help people to ignore someone in need–nothing in the laws of physics prevents it–but we’d find it improbable.

You can also have possible probabilities, those are well-written stories set in the real world, and improbable impossibilities, which are fantasy stories that don’t make sense.

The point is that a good fantasy has to make sense too.  Having a fantastical element in a story doesn’t excuse that story from being any less well-reasoned than the most down to earth story there is.

I think the reason this “it’s not logical but it’s a fantasy” reasoning frustrates me is that it implies that fantasy are not as well put-together as other stories.  That they’re somehow excused from having good characters and a logical plot–which is just a hop and a leap from saying that fantasies tend not to have those things.

There are plenty of fantasies out there that have solid characters and believable plots.  They’re just impossible probabilities.

Every Book You Ever Read…

On By cherylmahoneyIn Ruminations4 Comments

This is something in between a book review and a reflection–a reflection prompted by a specific book.  I read The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger, after seeing it reviewed on two different blogs I follow.  It’s a very short graphic novel, almost a picture book for adults–but, despite outer appearance, not appropriate for children, mostly because of the ending.  The story follows Liz, who becomes so obsessed with reading that it takes over her life.  This begins when she encounters the Night Bookmobile, a traveling library that holds every book she has ever read, from childhood to the book she’s reading now.  The Night Bookmobile only appears sporadically, and she’s consumed with the desire to find it again.

A few quick comments on my thoughts on the book: I hated the ending, which I probably should have expected since I hated the ending (really the second half) of Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife too.  I couldn’t figure out the point–I think this was a warning about letting books consume your life, so I kept waiting for Liz to have a revelation…and instead it kind of worked out for her.  In a twisted way.  And despite her consuming obsession with the Night Bookmobile, I didn’t think she was really utilizing it to its potential; all she does when she finds it is vaguely wander the shelves and think how nice it is to see books she remembers reading.  You can do that at a library or a bookstore; you don’t need a magical bookmobile.

So much for the review part.  As to the reflection–I love the premise.  Not anything about Liz, but the idea of a magical library, mobile or otherwise, that holds everything you ever read…I want one of those!  But I wouldn’t waste time smiling at old editions of L. M. Montgomery books.  I can walk over to my own bookcase right now and do that.  I’d want to find the books I’ve forgotten about.  Or not exactly the ones I’ve forgotten–the ones I just barely remember.  The ones I read when I was six or nine or fourteen, and I remember a character or an incident or a little snatch of the plot, but not the title or the author or a character’s name.  In other words, nothing that will help me find it now.

Once a teacher read us a book aloud–it was about kids who went through a tunnel and ended up in this valley where there were cave people and dinosaurs.  They were hailed as gods and fought a T-Rex.  My family went on vacation (it was a summer program) just as we were getting to the end of the book, and the class finished it while we were gone.  So I never heard the ending, and I haven’t the faintest idea of the title.  I’ve tried a bit of Google searching, but I’ve never been able to find it.  I’d be searching the bookmobile for that one.

And I’d be in there with a pen and paper so I could write titles down.  I started keeping a  book journal my senior year of high school, and I wish I’d started a dozen or so years earlier.  The bookmobile would help me fill in a lot of gaps.

The bookmobile also has a librarian.  I’m not sure how I’d feel about that, about someone metaphorically peering over my shoulder to look at everything I read.  I’m not reading anything particularly embarrassing, but I wonder if it would make me self-conscious?  If I’d feel more of an impetus to read “impressive” things like Hardy and Dickens.  In a way I suppose it’s not unlike a book review blog–but this blog doesn’t record everything I’m reading.  I follow other bloggers who do review everything they read, so perhaps they’d know more what it would be like.

As to the theme of reading taking over your life, I’m sure it can happen, but I think it’s equally possible to be an enthusiastic reader without losing touch with the rest of the world.  I think I resent a bit the implication that reading cuts you off from the world.  I’ve bonded with and even met friends because of shared interest in books.  And reading doesn’t have to stop you from living.

I always think of reading as a way to live a thousand lives instead of just one.  Why stay only in this world when you can go to so many others?  Maybe it’s particularly apt for me because I read so much fiction, and so much of it fantasy, or otherwise very different from the world around me.  But having a rich inner book-life doesn’t mean I’m not living my outer life too.

So I didn’t particularly like The Night Bookmobile.  But it did prompt a lot of thoughts about reading.