Easy-Peasy Grammar

From Brian Clark of Copyblogger, who said it's okay to embed this (really)! Think before you write.


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A Luckies Giveaway

--SORRY, THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED--

As any writer knows, coming up with just the right title can seem like an impossible task. We of The Lucky 13s were just talking about this on one of our frequent online whine fests chats.

No, really, it's hard to hit on an evocative title that sings about your book. But Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner, lately authors of Wrecked, have done just that. Wrecked is now and forevermore These Broken Stars. What a gorgeous handle! And to celebrate, they're hosting a giveaway over on Amie's blog and over on Meagan's blog, so get on over and enter. Just remember, I'm probably going to win.

Review: CAIN HIS BROTHER

Historical Mystery

Fawcett, 1995

432 pages  $15.00

First of all, to clarify: There are people who devour mystery novels by the bellyful. Some have read dozens, even hundreds, of mysteries. And judging from the space the genre takes up at my local bookstore, that fan base isn’t shrinking.

I have to admit, I can’t live on a steady diet of mysteries. In summer, whether or not I find myself on a beach, I like to read a few. Then my interest fades and I return to literary fiction, fantasy, and even, increasingly, good nonfiction. So I choose my mysteries carefully.

Anne Perry is an author I can always trust. I’ve read a few featuring her amnesiac PI William Monk, who picks his way through the grimy underworld of Victorian London, barely containing his disgust. In Cain His Brother Monk still faces his own unfamiliar identity while he tracks a missing businessman. The missing man’s wife suspects his vicious criminal twin has offed him.

The story is compelling, and includes a few surprises—Monk is always coming up against his old, forgotten self, which he discovers wasn’t always the nicest guy—but it’s the characters that make the story. We would all love to think of Victorian England as bright and merry, full of genteel ladies, parlors and tea, balls and carriages. But while the rich party on, the poor sink ever further into squalor, battling one horror after another. Monk’s prickly friend, Crimean nurse Hester Latterly, nurses a community through an epidemic of typhoid in this book. It seeps even into the upper crust of society, which is revealed to be just as human as its underbelly.

Perry’s unparalleled descriptions, concrete detail, and mastery of human nature make this a pleasure to read. Was I stunned at the conclusion? Not exactly. But I didn’t mind. I was happy enough just to be borne along into another world and time, while still able to sit in my comfortable home and be grateful for clean-running toilets.

Really.

If you're experiencing déjà vu, do not adjust your TV. A version of this post appeared in an another blog in 2008.

Come On, You Know You Want To

Source: flickr.com via Miss on Pinterest

As many as you can ... go!

Congratulations, Megan!

Today I just had to pass on some congratulations squeals for my Lucky 13 colleague, Megan Shepherd. Megan's YA debut, Madman's Daughter (Balzer + Bray, 2013), has been optioned by Paramount Pictures. This juicy gothic novel, the first in a trilogy, promises to be a page turner, and if all goes well, it will be on the big screen too! Read more about Madman's Daughter on Megan's site. Variety has the story about the option at this link. Again, kudos and confetti to Megan!

What Writers Can Learn from Lauren Oliver

Here's something I almost never do: Check out a book from the library, read it, and fall so in love with it that I must own it. So yes--I go out and buy a book I've already read.

That's what I did with Liesl & Po by Lauren Oliver. Here was my gut reaction: I read this book, closed the cover, and heaved that delicious but grief-stricken sigh that I do when I know a great book is done but I wish it would live on.


Now I could just write a review of this book, but I thought it might be more helpful to think about why it's so good--and what can we as writers learn from it? I'll break this post into three parts: Writing/Prose, Characters, and Plotting.

First, let's talk about the writing--just the prose. Great writing doesn't have to be flowery--in fact, it really shouldn't be--but it has to be precise. It has to hit you in all the right ways. Consider this sentence, from a scene in which Liesl is trying hard to remember something important:

And so she squeezed her eyes tight and climbed down the tower of months she had been in the attic, reaching back and back into the rooms of her memory that were so dusty and dim she could catch only little, flickering glances of things.

That sentence, like so many gems in this book, resonated with me. It's that aha! moment when you say, Yes, that's exactly how it feels when I'm trying to remember something!

How does Oliver create this image? She goes straight to the heart of the matter. Liesl squeezes her eyes tight. So much is conveyed in that simple phrase--anxiety, the physical sensation, that otherworldly feeling of entering your own mind and closing off the outside world. Then she climbed down the tower of months--what a lovely phrase. Again, Oliver just describes what the rest of us feel. Searching for a memory is like climbing back through time. In this case, it makes even more sense because Liesl has been trapped in an attic, so she must climb down to the real world again in her mind as well as climb through her memory. And then, the memories themselves: little, flickering glances. Isn't that what you see when you try to access long-forgotten scenes from your life? Flashes, bits and pieces, like stills from an old movie?

I don't know what Oliver's writing method is, but if you find yourself writing a bland sentence like, Liesl closed her eyes and tried to remember, it might help to think about what it really feels like to remember. If you had to remember something crucial, what motions would you go through? Would your character go through those motions, or do something different because of who he/she is? Describe the sensations--all of them.

And speaking of sensations, here's another, from the scene where Will visits Mr. Gray:

No matter how many times he came for a pickup, Will could never get used to it: a bitter, scorching smell mixed with the smell of bodies, like a fire lit in the very center of a dirty stable.

I've never lit a fire in a stable, but that sentence resonated too: I could smell it, the warm musk of animals and the sharp sting of smoke as the hay catches on fire. It all makes sense, of course, because Mr. Gray runs a crematorium.

Note how Oliver focuses on one sense, smell, to create this image. Why a stable? Besides having animal scents to mix with the fire, the stable also conveys a sense of being closed in and trapped. A fire in a stable is a dangerous thing--the smoke would choke you (there's no chimney), the straw would ignite like newspaper, the whole flimsy structure would soon collapse. That's how Will feels, and we feel it along with him.

As writers, we too need to look for unusual ways to draw our readers in with scents and sounds and touch. Remember that smell, especially, is the most evocative of the senses, able to waken memories in an instant. I'm not sure why--maybe because it's so primal and instinctual? But we can use that to our advantage. What do scents conjure for you? Think about damp, freshly mown grass; a basket of strawberries; raw garlic; sizzling steaks on the grill; a dog drenched with rainwater. These are strong smells. What memories do they evoke? Use that. Use it all.

A Whole Lotta Bologna

Oh, how I wish I could have joined the crowd in Bologna last week! For those of you who don't know, the Children's Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, is one of the biggest events of the year for kidlit. While it sounds like a great big kids' bookstore, it's really a place for industry pros to mingle and see what everyone else has cooking for the coming season. It's not primarily an authors' event--more of an agents' and publishers' event. One of the big reasons agents like to go is to see if they can sell foreign rights for their properties to publishers from around the world.

So no, I didn't get to go. But The Key and the Flame did! Michael Stearns of Upstart Crow took my baby in his briefcase to see what interest he could drum up. No word yet on whether his drumming proved fruitful, but we did get a little mention in Publishers Weekly, which gives me a shiver of goosebumps. After all, it's the first time my book has been mentioned in a publication! Click on the link to read about TKTF and some of the other new books coming out in 2013.

For more photos of the fair, check out this montage from PW.