Gone Girl and the Pitfalls of the Big Twist

The last book I read was a nail-biter, the kind of book that kept me up all night desperate to know how it ends. The answer was true to Amazon reviews: disappointingly. But don’t worry, I won’t spoil the ending, because that would ruin the whole thing.

So I'll only spoil the middle.

Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn, is a psychological suspense novel about a missing wife and a marriage that has gone horribly wrong. If you haven’t read it yet, don’t read the reviews that spoil the ending. Go out and buy it - I’m still 40th on our library waiting list- then read 219 pages and get back to me. (If you can’t tear yourself away from this post, then I assure you the spoilage will change how you read this book but not ruin it. It might even make you like it better. Or it might not. No money-back guarantees in the blogging business, my friends.)

Go on. I'll just hang out here and wait.

By Leyo (Own work) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-2.5-ch]via Wikimedia Commons

I'm betting you didn't stop at 219. Couldn't put it down, right? I assume it’s Tuesday and you’re checking back in. 

So you’ve started Part 2. For the first half of the book, the narrative has alternated between Nick’s POV in the present day and Amy’s diary entries beginning years earlier. On the day Nick's story began, Amy disappeared from the house, leaving traces of blood and signs of a struggle. Nick has been muddling through the police investigation while Amy's diary has reflected increasing strain between them.

Now we’ve gotten to know both Nick and Amy a bit, and we know something isn’t adding up. Their marriage is clearly troubled, and he is lying to the cops and might even be lying to us, the readers, because there’s something sketchy about Nick. And Amy seems oblivious sometimes, even as she seems to understand their dynamic so well.

If you’re like me, you’ve seen a little more of yourself in Amy than you’d like to admit. The way she tries so hard to be an easy wife, to not let his little guy habits get to her. The way she compares them with other couples while pretending not to. The way she seems to be trying to create a picture of happiness while not being entirely sure if she’s actually feeling it.

If you’re like me, you might have put the book down few chapters in, when you were starting to see how Amy might drive Nick insane, and said to your husband, “So, ah, promise not to murder me, okay?” And he might have frowned and said, “I already promised not to push you down the stairs after you watched that Lifetime movie and I am not making any more promises because I really. Shouldn’t. Have to.” And then you might have pouted for a minute before sinking back into your book, pushing aside the feeling that the author knew you too well.

This was in the beginning, before things got weird. You just suspected Nick was angrier than he seemed and Amy was more desperate than she seemed, and it all was a little too keen, as though the author had taken a shadow and managed to give it form, then sharpened that form to a blade and sliced open every marriage ever.

Or maybe you were just engrossed in the story. To each her own.

You got sucked in deeper, stayed up later, and found yourself on page 219. The midpoint reveal. You knew there had to be one, because nothing added up so far. You may have even floated this in your head, or maybe you positively saw it coming all along. I worried the story might go off the rails, but never anticipated the degree to which Flynn carries her twist through. Whether or not you guessed the twist, if you are like me, even a little bit, you were not happy with this turn of events.

Because if you are like me, you love reading about characters who betray each other but you are less enthusiastic about characters who betray you, the reader.

Okay. This is your final chance to catch up. I'm not going anywhere. Spoilers come after the manatee.

By Chris Muenzer (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Ah, you’re back.

Page 219: Not only did Amy fake her own death, she faked all those diary entries. That character who hit a little close to home, whose vulnerabilities were so perfectly blended into an everywoman that I could understand and envy and pity all at the same time? Yeah, she was fake. The real Amy made her up. The real Amy played a joke on everyone, including the reader. And since the real Amy is not real, but made up by the real author, I had some less than kind thoughts for Ms. Flynn on page 219.

I knew there had to be a twist in order for the story to make sense, but I still groaned out loud when this was it. It took me another fifty pages to get over the resentment and get into the new story - the one featuring a sociopath instead of a victim.

Elements of the TWIST FAIL:

Not everyone will be as bothered by this plot twist as I was, and you can’t please everyone all the time, but if you want to please this cranky blogger I recommend avoiding two pitfalls of a big twist:

1. Abusing the Reader’s Trust

Unreliable narrators can be tricky, but they can also work. If you’ve made it this far, you know that Nick is having an affair, and he didn’t tell the reader upfront. Instead, when his girlfriend forces her way onstage, he makes a reluctant confession to the reader:

I have a mistress. Now is the part where I have to tell you I have a mistress and you stop liking me. If you liked me to begin with. I have a pretty, young, very young mistress, and her name is Andie.

I know. It’s bad.

Nick has committed some lies of omission in his narrative, making him an unreliable narrator. But Andie doesn’t contradict the picture of Nick. She fills out another piece of the puzzle, and it fits with everything that came before.

As I reader, I don't feel like I bit into my next Goober and got a Raisinet instead.

Amy's twist, on the other hand, is like having your delicious chocolate covered peanut snack replaced by chocolate covered raisins in the middle of the movie. And I have always thought that fruit and chocolate is something a person needs time to get used to.

I was invested in Amy's character. I knew she was holding back, but I thought I related to her. Finding out those diary entries were all supposed to be a lie was kind of like spending 200 pages of my life with a someone I think might be a friend and instead turns out to be doing market research. A lot like that, actually. Maybe I should spend more time with real people. But that's for another post.

2. Forgetting the Limits of Your Authorly Control

Books are at a disadvantage compared to movies. A movie always has one ultimate viewpoint: the camera’s. You can stick with one character, or have voiceovers, but basically what the camera sees is what the audience sees. In The Sixth Sense (a.k.a. best twist ever), we could go back and see all the bits that the camera caught that we had missed, all the ways to look at a scene differently once we understood that there was another angle.

A movie never relinquishes control to the viewer. We might puzzle over things or even miss them entirely, but we don’t generally fill in any details with our imaginations. In a movie, you get what you get.

Authors don't have that kind of control. We readers have to form our own images, and we use our imaginations on every single page to make the world of the story richer. Characters and settings become uniquely three-dimensional in our minds. I kept picturing Nick and Amy in a house just like one I’d seen when my husband and I were house hunting several years ago. If I read a detail that contradicted my image, I’d adjust. But the image was there already, based on only a few details from the author and the pictures my brain had in storage. I’ve never been to Missouri, so the suburbs I pictured were more like Michigan, because that’s what my mind filled in. Gillian Flynn couldn’t have stopped me. The author can't control every detail, or decide how invested a reader becomes in his or her imagination.

This means that changing critical things late in the game is dangerous.

If you give a few telling details about a woman - a hunched back, a shuffling gait, gray hair - and for 200 pages, I picture an old lady, it won't work to say on page 201 that she’s actually a young woman. No matter how many details you tell me, it would take some mind-blowing writerly chops to make me to picture something that could be either an old lady or a young woman without giving away your surprise.

As I read, I create images based on my interpretation of the story. In a movie, I have no choice but to interpret the image you show me. In that case, painting a picture that can be seen two ways is easy peasy lemon squeezy:

Maybe I wasn't supposed to relate to Amy as much as I did. Maybe I was supposed to smell that she was off from the outset, or maybe I wasn't supposed to be rooting for her. Maybe I wasn't supposed to picture the diary entries as vividly as I did, or get so attached to them. But Ms. Flynn couldn't have controlled that without giving away the surprise.

A book might be born in one person's creative mind, but the experience of reading it is always collaborative, a meeting of the author's words and the reader's imagination. So before you introduce a twist, ask yourself if you’ve anchored the reader in the right images, and if the promises you made along the way are the ones you meant to make. Some people love surprises and some people hate them, but no one likes a broken promise.

For a great analysis of what makes a twist really work, see MaryAnn's brilliant post: Pulling off The Big Twist.  

I'm off to order Gillian Flynn's other novels. Story critiques aside (we haven't even talked about the ENDING!), Gone Girl was a heckuva fun read and I can't wait to do it again.

Amateur is NOT a Bad Word

Sarah here. I am thrilled to be guest posting for MaryAnn this week. Thanks for having me back, everyone! I am tempted to wave at the screen like you can see me. This must stop. On to the post...

I am constantly rearranging my living room. I can’t help myself. The furniture doesn’t fit. There’s no good place for a TV. A support post divides the room into odd shapes, with a fireplace on the wrong wall. And then there’s the Steinway grand piano.

My parents dipped into my college fund to buy this piano when I was 13. It was understood that I would take the piano someday, when I had a house of my own. (Also that I would go college in-state. Wahoowa!) My husband and I searched and searched for a house in our price range that could accommodate it. That turned out to be an impossible dream in 2007 Los Angeles, so we went all in on what we could afford and gave up on the grand.

Then my parents retired and sold my childhood home to move across the country, and the piano was homeless. My husband and I looked at our living room, measured a few things, looked some more, and agreed. We would fit it. Sort of. 

The Beast. I don't know if I picked the right spot, but I can't move it.

Family and friends all thought this was a bad idea, space-wise. They were right. The piano is lovely, but it is not helping my decorating problems. I fantasize about selling it, and how nice it would be to have a normal living room with an entertainment center along the piano wall and space to walk around the furniture.

I can’t sell it.

Music vs. Writing: Upping the Ante

I used to practice almost every day, until I decided to focus more on writing. As a mom of young children and a Netflix addict, I don’t have the time or discipline for two passions.

I discovered a huge difference between playing piano and writing novels, although I do think the former helps my typing. Novels come with expectations. People find out I write and ask, “Have you been published?” Then they tell me about a friend who has been trying to sell his novel for the last twenty-five years.

The grand piano is humble in its hobby-ness. No one ever asks me, “Where have you performed?” Or, “Do you have any recordings?” Because that would be idiotic.

99.99% chance of not being the next
Evgeny Kissin, but oh well.

In high school, I was stumbling over arpeggios at a lesson when my teacher took a phone call from a new student's parent. She hung up and shook her head. The parent had said something piano teachers hear a lot: “We aren’t training little Johnny to be a concert pianist.”

My teacher laughed and said to me, “Do you know how many concert pianists there are in the world? I can count them on my fingers. I can promise little Johnny is not going to be a concert pianist."

To my knowledge, she was right. But I bet he learned a lot from her, like how to study tone and rhythm and dynamics and follow them down a predictable path to unpredictable beauty. That's what I learned, anyway.

Writing is different. Writing is seductive in its accessibility. Who hasn’t read a mediocre book, even a best-seller, and thought, “I could have written that”? When we get bitten by the writing bug, it’s easy to decide we’re going to be professionals. We encourage each other to cultivate the dogged determination to get published. We complain that other writers who talk a big game should, ahem, make with the number two or vacate the lavatory. We have the optimism of knowing that success is something we might realistically achieve, but we bear the weight of that same knowledge. 

Do what you love and the money will... matter less.

Determination is good. Treating writing like a job is good… if it works. But all that pressure can backfire. If you’re feeling like you should have landed an agent by now or you should be writing faster or you should be improving faster, then I have a suggestion: Be an amateur. Be an amateur the way musicians who practice every day are amateurs. Be an amateur the way kids taking piano lessons get to be amateurs. 

The thing you have when you’re young and never, ever appreciate (aside from glowing skin and miracle metabolism) is the freedom to concentrate on whatever interests you and work at getting better. Once you have bills and kids and all those grown-up responsibilities, it’s hard to let yourself work at things that aren’t paid (or just plain necessary, if you’re an at-home parent).

It’s hard to justify hours at the piano bench when no one will ever make a direct deposit to hear your Chopin. It’s hard to justify hours at your computer when you don’t know if what you’re writing will sell or rot in a drawer. Meanwhile, a little voice is saying you wouldn’t feel guilty about the time if you just made some money at it.

Treating “amateur” like an insult can make us forget where the word comes from, which is love. Love is what turns work into play and play into work.

I think that’s why the piano continues to dominate my living room, and maybe why my husband is as attached to it as I am. It's more than sentimental; it’s a physical reminder that losing yourself in something you love has value beyond money. Or space for the TV.

As my writing goals evolve, the biggest one is to never stop being an amateur at heart, a person who does what she does because the reward is in the doing. I hope the same for everyone who is lucky enough to love something.

~Sarah

On Writing, rules, and life

This is going to be my last blog post, for a while at least, so as a farewell I decided to condense all of my stored-up wisdom into a crash course in Sarah-thought. The textbook for this course is Stephen King’s On Writing. Don’t worry if you haven’t done the reading; I quote the important parts.

Writers love rules. They give us goals, guidelines for revision, and nits to pick—not to mention fodder for arguments. On Writing has rules about everything from active voice to daily word counts. King advocates pantsing over plotting, though he doesn't acknowledge the level of storytelling genius he brings to that equation. He is a Strunk & White devotee, as every writer should be. Most famously, he admonishes against adverbs and overzealous dialogue tags:

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

If you have a rotten tomato handy, get ready to throw it at me. (That was a metaphor. I am not responsible for damage to your screen.) 

Here goes: I think the occasional adverb can useful. Consider:

Option 1: “I trust your judgment,” he said, but she knew from the tone of his voice and the faraway look in his eyes that he wasn’t really paying attention.

Option 2: “I trust your judgment,” he said absently.

The first is more descriptive, but what if that extra sentence slows down my pacing? I don’t buy the argument that tone can always be inferred from well-crafted dialogue. Sometimes I want a mismatch between what is said and how it’s said. An adverb can handle that problem just fine. You may call it lazy; I call it efficient.

I know better than to argue for an adverb beyond the confines of this post. But while I'm still on my soapbox, I’ve gotta say what’s in my rebel (gangsta) heart: Adverbs are just words, yo.

Mary Sue and Gary Stu's love triangle
has a heartbreak-free resolution,
 and all utterances are adverbial.
Travesty... or delightful classic? 

“To write adverbs is human, to write he said and she said is divine.”

Simplicity in dialogue tags seems as much a fashion as a rule. I just finished reading my well-worn copy of Maysie Greig’s Janice, a pulp romance published in 1932 that elevates creative dialogue attribution to art. The characters are pinnacles of propriety and there isn’t a hint of sex anywhere in the book, yet the male love interest managed to ejaculate twice. That was the only tag that gave me pause, but maybe my reaction says more about loss of innocence than abuse of vocabulary. The book was still a page-turner, still rich with well-crafted detail, and still one of my favorites.

The Heart of the Matter

I may quibble, but all of King’s advice is solid. My real argument is with those who quote his rules of mechanics while ignoring the heart of the book, which is this:

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end, it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life, as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. […] Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink.

Drink and be filled up.”

The Unbreakables

Back to rules. Maybe it’s the beach living, but as I get older I’m becoming one of those free spirits who owns a few too many peasant skirts and tends to say: Rules, schmules. I advocate learning rules only so that breaking them becomes a conscious choice.

Even in my most contrary moods, though, I still think two of King's rules are unbreakable. The first is a practical matter:

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

The second is about finding balance:

“It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around."

Moving Furniture 

Sadly, not my actual desk.

I have to say thank you to the wonderful Prosers who invited me here. Thank you for your support, for your friendship, for the chance to have my voice heard. The inspiration I’ve found from your posts is part of what helped me recognize when I was starting to lose my way. When I was getting busy instead of getting happy.

It’s time to push my metaphorical desk into the corner. Writing isn’t the only water that’s free, that sustains me, that’s magic. My five-year-old read Hop on Pop to me the other night. He truly read, and he was so proud of himself. 

During the hour or two I can steal while the kids are in school, I want to focus on finishing a first novel that I might be at least a little bit proud of, starting a sure-to-be-better second novel, and reconnecting with the joy in fiction. But when the school bell rings, my laptop really ought to turn into a pumpkin. 

(Don't worry. You'll find me lurking around these parts after dark, like a vampire...)

With love to Sheena, MaryAnn, Sabrina, Susan, and Melanie. Drink and be filled up.

~Sarah

Dark Themes in Young People's Literature

The YA community rallied in response
 to the WSJ article, and Maureen Johnson 
sold t-shirts (for charity, of course!).

or: Why English Teachers are Awesome

With the mania surrounding The Hunger Games this weekend, the question of the day is once again: How dark is too dark for kids? Blog posts and op-eds are weighing in on the topic, many referencing a controversial article published in the Wall Street Journal last June, in which children's book reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon called The Hunger Games "hyper-violent" and included it in a list of books that exemplified what she viewed as a troubling trend in books for young people.

I read and loved The Hunger Games, but I haven't read many of the other books mentioned in the article, so I'll have to stick with what I know, most of which was written before YA took up half the bookstore. 

I chaperoned my younger son's class trip to the zoo yesterday, and had the surprise pleasure of sharing my seat on the bus with a high school English teacher. Talking to her got me thinking about books I loved when I was young. I wasn’t an avid reader until college, which might be why most of my favorite books were required reading.  

Elementary school: Across Five Aprils, Bridge to Terabithia, A Separate Peace. Each year the 5th grade class had to write and put on a play of Johnny Tremain, and I still can’t resist bringing it up in spirited family arguments about religion and government. Junior High: Flowers for Algernon and Ivanhoe and Watership Down and Fahrenheit 451. High School: Romeo and Juliet, Main Street, The Great Gatsby, The Jungle, Our Town, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, Lord of the Flies, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet... 

I loved almost every book that was ever assigned (with the possible exception of As I Lay Dying).

In 9th grade we read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and I was spellbound from the first page to the last. We had to write a paper comparing one of the works of fiction we’d read to a non-fiction book of our choice; I still remember writing mine on Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Bridge at Andau, about the Hungarian revolution. Examining the parallels was thrilling, like watching a huge jumbled puzzle come together into a coherent image. History has always been my worst subject, and books were the only place history ever came alive for me. 

If your goal in life is to be a subversive influence on young minds, don’t write books. Don’t teach history or government. Teach English.

I still remember exactly how and when my love affair with assigned reading began. In 4th grade, we read a story that admitted, outright and without a hint of sugar coating, that children are awful little creatures. Being surrounded by children and also still a child myself, I found this admission both terrifying and long overdue.

1959 collection containing
All Summer in a Day

The story was All Summer in a Day, by Ray Bradbury. It imagines children living on Venus, where rain falls constantly and the sun only shines for an hour every seven years. On the day the rain is supposed to stop, the children turn against Margot, the misfit girl who is the only one to remember the sun. They lock her in a closet, forgetting about her until after the sun has come and gone.

I didn’t know who Ray Bradbury was and I didn’t think about whether this story was famous or important. I only knew that it had been written for me. (I was both tender-hearted and narcissistic.) 

I hadn’t grown up enough to understand that almost everyone has some Margot inside, and the difference is only in how we express it. I didn’t know yet that adults often hide their own insecurities—their fears that the world could turn on them on a whim, that the pillars of stability might one day be confetti blown away by the winds of luck, circumstance, or the baser parts of human nature. What I understood was only this: Someone else knew what I knew.

When I was reading All Summer in a Day, grownups didn’t lecture about bullying and no one ever got in trouble for using the word “stupid,” or for saying anything that wasn’t on George Carlin’s infamous list. The current generation of parents aims to enforce kinder, gentler childhoods. The jury is out on how well that’s working. I don’t think children have changed much. They still delight in pressing each other's buttons with a sharp stick. They still vie for power, they still play King of the Hill, they still test the boundaries between cruelty and guilt and empathy and self-preservation. In other words, they are still human. 

And the playground, no matter how much we sanitize it, is still a jungle. 

As a parent, I understand the need grownups have to pretend the world is nicer than it is, and that the rules are a little more straightforward than they are. I understand why we might be intolerant of the melancholy and angst that plague some young people more than others. After all, that kind of thinking can lead an innocent astray—to becoming, at best, an outsider, and at worst, a drifter who has chosen to reject the societal delusion of money and now lives shoeless on the beach where he sports disturbingly long toenails. We want our children to be happy and productive and safe in the world they've inherited, because the alternatives are terrifying.

But children are smart, and eventually they figure out that Sesame Street doesn’t tell the whole story. Nothing is so disrespectful and alienating to a child or adolescent as to say, “You don't know enough about the world to feel what you think you feel. Now go play.” They do know. They know so much more than we want them to.

Many of the books I loved were exhilarating for their darkness, and darkness belongs to children as much as adults. Young people know how to explore heavy themes without imploding. All Summer in a Day is their story. Lord of the Flies is their story. Hunger Games is their story. Writers dive into aspects of human nature that adults often either won’t admit or can’t explain, and no one ever has to put on a brave and happy face for a book.

I wish parenting were only about sharing wonder and joy. I wish I could shield my children's innocence forever. I wish I could promise that nothing—no individual, group, government, business, church, band of zombies or act of God—could ever change their world for the worse. That they will always be autonomous. That their happiness and their survival will always be in their control. That they will always do the right thing.

But of course, I can't. I can only hope that the connection I forge with them is strong enough to carry us all through the rough spots of growing up.

Great books don't make promises and they don't gloss over the messy parts of life, and best of all, children don't need or expect them to. Great books invite young, thoughtful warriors to the literature club with open arms. “Come in, friend. Think what you think and feel what you feel. We are all and none alone here.”

Find the real story beneath your BIG IDEA

Are you putting the finishing touches on your dystopian YA novel about kids who are chosen by lottery to fight to the death on national television? If so, this post is for you.

MaryAnn’s enlightening post on emotional resonance has had me pondering what else poetry can teach us about story. A few years ago, I had the pleasure of attending a poetry workshop with Richard Jones and subsequently falling in love with his collected poems in The Blessing. He talked about where he got his ideas, and how everyday things can inspire poems like The Altar, about the joys of sharpening a pencil. But he also said that some themes come up again and again, such as the tragic death of his young nephew. His analysis of whether this was a problem, which I'm paraphrasing from patchy memory, was something along the lines of: So what? Mary Oliver's been writing the same poem for thirty years.

If you’ve read much Mary Oliver you’ll know why everyone laughed. You’ll also know she’s one of the most universally loved poets of the last few decades. 

To say that reading one Mary Oliver poem is like reading them all would be like saying that every time you hug your child is exactly the same as every other. Of course it isn’t. He grows and changes and sometimes he hugs hard and sometimes he hugs soft, and sometimes he asks in a whisper if reindeers get Christmas presents and sometimes he tells you I love you the best of all, Mommy, except also I love Daddy the same because I don’t want to hurt his feelings.

You wouldn’t ever not want another hug, just because you’d had hugs before.

Storytellers seem to diverge from poets here. No one wants to reinvent the wheel, or more pessimistically, beat a dead horse. (Even worse: a flesh-eating horse that won't die.)

The speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons publishes two laugh-out-loud lists of dead horses: Stories We've Seen Too Often and Horror stories We've Seen Too Often. 

When I'd finally caught my breath again after imagining the horrors of being a slush reader for Strange Horizons, I noticed that star-crossed lovers, man vs. nature, kidnap & rescue, and any others of the 1, 3, 7, 20, 36 or 42* basic plots were not on these lists. Maybe that’s because it’s a speculative fiction magazine, but my money is on the fact that classic plots don't hinge on clever world-building or twist endings.  They are frameworks for universal experience and emotion.

Some authors do amplify their stories with fascinating new ideas, which is exciting. It’s also rare. And relying on originality to sell a story is risky; someone else may have had the light bulb go off just before you did. 

When I think about what makes poetry work, I realize that a unique premise is overrated.  I think this is true even in that skeleton of the literary closet called genre fiction. 

My current, never-ending work-in-progress has vampire characters. Sometimes I wish I had a 12-step meetings for vampire writers where I could publicly admit I write them and everyone would nod and welcome me and we’d all drink weak coffee in styrofoam cups. 

I guess I’ll just admit it online and make my own coffee.

This novel was never supposed to be about vampires. Supernatural undead aren’t the point of the story. Fear, love, courage, family, finding your way out of a rock and a hard place… those are the point of the story. I could change the vampires to some other ambiguous evil, or even take out the supernatural altogether, and I may someday. Paranormal stuff is fun to write, but the premise is not the story.

Most of the items on the Strange Horizons lists are ideas where the premise is the story. For instance, #12 on the Horror List:

Initiate into religion discovers that the religion is actually killing/destroying its initiates.

Before we continue, I must review the warning from the fiction list:

One more thing: We know it's tempting to look at this list as a challenge. Please don't. In particular, please don't send us stories that intentionally incorporate one or more of these items.

In other words, don't try this exercise at home. And if you do, don’t send it to Strange Horizons.

Back to business: I don’t know that this plot isn’t salvageable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I do know that if the whole story is just building up to this horrifying revelation, you will never meet the challenge that you were already advised not to take but we’re hypothetically taking anyway.

Let’s say you already started this story, and now you stumble across this list and bang your head on your desk. You declare you’re done with fiction forever because you’re a writer, and prone to histrionics.

There’s a good chance you initially approached your story with the time-honored question: What if? Perhaps: What if a religion’s sole purpose in recruiting new initiates was to kill them? You were very proud of your idea until you read that website, or this post.

I say the game isn’t over! Maybe, just maybe, the premise isn’t your problem. Maybe it’s the question. 

What if? is a great question. I support what-iffing. But if you think your story has already been written, you might need to ask, What would it feel like?

What emotional state makes a person vulnerable to a predatory cult in the first place? How does it feel to find acceptance? What does it feel like to have your sense of meaning—of purpose, of life and death, of God—crumble under the weight of betrayal? How do you find the will to fight?

When a timid voice of intuition tells you something is wrong, what does the air feel like on your skin? What do you smell? What seeps through the filter of your senses?

These aren’t light questions. These are heavy questions. Some of them are questions that poetry asks all the time. Poems grapple with love, friendship, grief, loss, meaning, death… They tackle these over and over and over again, and yet poetry has never been exhausted. 

Neither have stories.

Whether you’ve written The Hunger Games, Twilight, or murderous cult story #12, don’t despair. Figure out what your story is really about—not the cool what if idea, but the story underneath. The what would that feel like? story. That's the story that only you can write, and when you find it, the rest is fixable. I think.

And if you lose your way, read some Mary Oliver. That same poem she’s been writing over and over? It never gets old.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own…

                                               From "The Journey"; Dream Work 

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

                                                From "Wild Geese"; Dream Work

*Okay I made up that last number. It just seems like there should be 42 basic plots.

Sarah's Poetry Corner: A Cacophony of Words

"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, 
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!"
Illustration by Peter Newell

We don’t usually think of cacophony as a good thing. It’s the word people use to describe an orchestra warming up—a hundred insruments playing, none in sync, none in harmony. It sounds… bad.

Poetry often evokes thoughts of something smooth and fluid, pleasing to the ear. This is euphony. Sounds good, right?

But in truth, poetry is image in rhythm and sound. And it takes all kinds of rhythms, and all kinds of sounds.

Why is a Proser writing about poetry, you ask? Three reasons:

1. All writing seeks to elicit emotions in the reader. Poetry just  does it efficiently.
2. Almost all poetic techniques can be applied directly or adapted to the novel.
3. I dig it.

According to Encyclopædia Brittanica's entry on euphony and cacophony, “Inadvertent cacophony is a mark of a defective style.” There's a simple answer to this: Don't do anything by accident.

Sometimes an unpleasant image or emotion requires sound effects to match. Something scary can be made scarier by clashing, dissonant words. Or it can be made scarier still by unexpected euphony, like opening a horror movie with a lullaby.

Perhaps the most famous example of cacophony is Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!"

Contrast the fluid melodies of Edna St.Vincent Millay, as in Sonnet XLIII:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, 
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain 
Under my head till morning; but the rain 
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh 
Upon the glass and listen for reply, 
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain 
For unremembered lads that not again 
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. 

Thus in winter stands the lonely tree, 
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, 
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: 
I cannot say what loves have come and gone, 
I only know that summer sang in me 
A little while, that in me sings no more.

And because I can, I'll self-blog-publish an exercise I did with writing teacher/genius Jack Grapes, which he calls "teeth and mouth." The point of the exercise is to write something that will exercise your mouth and use plenty of teeth when you read it out loud, which is similar to cacophony. That constraint forced my mind to come up with some unexpected images. (Do try this at home; you won't believe how fun it is.)

Newspaper-Sourced Instruction to California Nature Enthusiasts

Should you come across a cougar,
hiking through sagebrush, rattlesnake country
caressed by the central star's direct heat foiling spf fifty—
Should you come across a cougar,
resist urges prompting statuesque stillness,
the benedict trick temptation to cower
from the stalker's muscular dance of strength
that shames your thumb-gifted awkward carriage.

Should you come across a cougar,
first clutch straggling children close.
Scream, stretch, enlarge,
throw backpacks, keys, recyclable bottles, rocks, twigs, shoes,
flap your unzipped puffy quilted vest to mimic the hawk's expanse,
ornithological person-beast cultivating cowardice in
the black-belt kung fu sharp-toothed rabid mouth
ultimate fighting champion
of rippled silk furred physique.

Do not approach
to waste opportunity on stupidity's cruel punishment.
You have without coincidence happened upon a puma
who arranged the tête-à-tête
in the shadows of your casual hiker's gait.
Fight back if attacked.

Emerge from this match a braggart
back in your choking concrete habitat,
but forget not gratitude
for fortune's pickled choice
for each sacred creature
for a park ranger lecture on cat-specific technique,
and for the fact
that it wasn't
a bear.

Note 1: This blog post originally consisted of only the above poem without an accompanying discussion. Apologies to my intrepid initial commenters, who may have been, ah, confused.

Note 2: MaryAnn recommended another poem: The Panther, by Rainer Maria Rilke. The words flow in a quiet melody that beautifully enhances its meaning. Rilke was known for his musicality, and if you listen to the German version, below, you will get a sense of that music even if you don't speak a word of German. Translators have a lot to think about, don't they?

Bloggers, Run for Your Lives!

I got a tweet last week from D. D. Syrdal telling me I'd been tagged. I had no idea what that meant, but her blog post explained that it's a fun way for bloggers to get to know each other. What’s great about blog tag is that asthmatics can play without their inhalers.

So, verbatim from D.D.'s post on Filling Spaces, here are the rules:

1. Post the rules. 

2. Tag up to eleven bloggers by posting links to their blogs, and let them know.

3. Create eleven questions for the people you’ve tagged. 

4. Answer the questions your tagger posed for you. 

5. Have fun!

Choosing blogs to tag was HARD. Finding great blogs is easy, but guessing which bloggers might be willing to play along is more challenging. So, fabulous bloggers, please note that there is no pressure to participate. 

Does this image make the game seem creepy?

Tag! You’re it:

J. Lea Lopez 

Sarah Belliston

Nicholas Olivo

Wendy S. Russo

October Weeks

Beth Dolgner

Ana Ramsey

Marguerite Butler

Adam Slade

Rebecca Hamilton

Melanie Crouse (Howdy, fellow Proser!)

Your questions:

1. What should you really be doing right now instead of blogging?
2. What was the last book you read that you couldn’t put down?
3. What’s your guilty pleasure? (That's bloggable without a content warning, of course.)
4. Based on what’s in your house right now, how prepared are you for the zombie apocalypse?
5. If you could be the main character in any fiction genre, which genre would you choose?
6. You tumble through the looking glass or the magic closet or whatever, and find yourself the kickass heroine in an urban fantasy novel. Describe your tramp stamp. 
7. What is your kickass weapon of choice? (Kickboxing, magic, nunchuks…)
8. You go into your local dive bar to look for information about the seedy magical underbelly of your urban fantasy world. You order the usual. What is it?
9. A vampire, a werewolf, and a zombie walk in to the bar.* After you kill the zombie, which one do you flirt with to further your romantic subplot?
10. Another looking glass sends you into a historical romance. What is the time period and setting of your story?
11. How long is your love interest’s hair?

* Bonus: Prizes awarded for turning that line into a joke.

If you decide to play along, please come back and post a link!

My answers to D.D. Syrdal's questions:

1. If they were making a movie about your life, who would you choose to play you?

In addition to my circus-side-show height, I also have close-set eyes. I've always known I could never be a movie star because model-looks include good eye spacing. I asked my eye doctor, who confirmed I'm practically a cyclops.

Since there aren't any actresses who look like me, I'll say Anne Hathaway. I'd like very much to look like her. 

2. If you could be given another talent or ability, what would you want it to be?  Have you ever – really – tried to perfect this ability in yourself?

Growing up, I always wished I'd taken ballet, height and coordination issues be damned. Once upon a time I took private ballroom dance lessons. It was wonderful, because I danced with a pro who knew how to make me feel like Ginger Rogers. When I convinced my husband to join me, the magic was replaced by four left feet.  

3. If you could take one trip back in time, when and where would you go?

It’d be cool to see Jesus if I spoke Aramaic. Visiting one of the early American colonies populated by my much shorter ancestors would also be interesting. And who doesn’t want to see a Scottish castle in its heyday? 

Still, I really like indoor plumbing, and asthma medicine, and deciding when to have children. Those things have been awesome. I think I’d rather just visit in ghost form, like Scrooge. That way I wouldn’t catch the plague or get stoned to death.

4. Do you have a favorite movie that you can watch over and over?

I don't have a lot of patience with movies I've already seen. One exception that comes to mind is Lady Jane, which I watched over and over as a teenager. (Side note: I don't want to time-travel to the court of the Nine Days' Queen. It would ruin the movie.)

5. If you could choose to stay a certain age forever, what age would it be?

From my real life: 28. The year after my first child was born was one of my happiest times.

If I could do things differently: 18. I'd wear skinny jeans and a tight, low-cut top every day that it was too cold for a bikini. And I'd get a better haircut.

6. What is one of your favorite quotes?

Oh, that's too hard! One of my favorite poems is The Peace of Wild Things, by Wendell Berry. It feels wrong to quote just one line. You have to read the whole (short) thing.

7. If you could be any fictional character, who would you be?

Anne of Green Gables, but after she got together with Gilbert. I don't need all the teenage angst.

8. What sound do you love? 

The ocean. Barking sea lions and fog horns optional.

9. What superpower would you like to have? 

Matisse: Dishes and Fruit (1901)

Flying sounds fantastic, but it would be hard to use without causing a scene. Getting the house to clean itself with a wiggle of my nose would give much more bang for my super-powered buck. Yes, I think I'll stick with the practical one. I have a family, after all.

10. Do you have a favorite artist? Who?

I don't know much about art, but I've never met a Matisse I didn't like.

11. Have you ever wanted to invent something to make your life easier? What?

I’d like to take the wide elastic band on maternity jeans and turn them into a mainstream fashion trend. Why should only pregnant women get to have their designer jean cake and eat a whole lot, too?

Woo-hoo! Initial results are in...
Sarah Belliston wins the prize for promptness with her post. Thanks, Sarah!

Cooking up Stories

Once in a long while, I read a book that doesn’t just stay with me, but changes how I see the world in some fundamental way. This week I read one of those books: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler. 

I hate to be bossy, but I will: Buy it. You’ll want it in hardback. You’ll want to read it over and over again. You’ll want to underline passages—some for wisdom, some for practicality, and some for sheer beauty. You’ll find yourself looking forward to grocery shopping, without a list, eager to buy whatever vegetables look fresh and trusting you will find a way to enjoy them.

I must confess that I am not a foodie. I don’t watch cooking shows. I have never tasted truffles and I don’t drink wine because I don’t like it. I also don’t like very spicy foods or anything that tastes like the sea. I had foie gras once, in the south of France, and it took all my willpower to swallow without gagging. I have never learned how to cut up a whole chicken and I have an unabashed love of ranch dressing.

With Ms. Adler’s guidance, I may still make friends with a raw chicken.

An Everlasting Meal is not a cookbook, or even a book about food. It is about reclaiming a relationship many of us have lost or never had between buying food and nourishing ourselves with it. The subtitle, Cooking with Economy and Grace, is apt, but could as easily be reworded Living with Economy and Grace. For me, this is a book about living. And, for me, a book about living is necessarily also a book about writing.

I’ve been working on my first novel for about two years. When I started, the experience was as all-consuming as any budding romance. I was swept away with the act of creation, with guiding characters through my twists and turns, with the unexplored corners of my own imagination. 

It turned out to be a bit of a turd.

So, I began a second draft, and then a third, learning more about story structure each time. The more I analyzed and reworked, the more my writing time started to evoke the same emotions as scrounging for dinner when I haven’t made it to the store, the kids are hungry, and it’s already 6:00. I get enough of that feeling when it actually is 6:00 and I haven’t made it to the store and the kids are hungry. The honeymoon was over.

I studied scene and sequel, pacing, inciting incidents, four-act structure, 8-sequence structure, plot points and pinch points, and the dreaded info-dump. I’ve learned a lot, but the problem is that good stories don’t come from recipes. 

In An Everlasting Meal, Ms. Adler includes recipes sparingly, explaining in the introduction:

But cooking is best approached from wherever you find yourself when you are hungry, and should extend long past the end of the page. There should be serving, and also eating, and storing away what’s left; there should be looking at meals' remainders with interest and imagining all the good things they will become.

Isn’t it the same with stories? You begin from wherever you find yourself. You begin with a character, or a scene, or a situation. You follow your imagination through all the loose ends and wind up with ideas that can’t be used but get thrown into the hearty stock of creative juices to season another meal. You write today’s pages and then let them marinate as you go about your day.

The opening essay, “How to Boil Water,” graces the act of boiling vegetables or pasta or chicken with a spiritual simplicity:

There is a prevailing theory that we need to know much more than we do in order to feed ourselves well. It isn’t true. Most of us already have water, a pot to put it in, and a way to light a fire. This gives us boiling water, in which we can do more good cooking than we know.

This, too, is how to build a story: put water (or characters) in a pot and light a fire.

People have told stories as long as they have had language, which is somewhere on the same scale of ancientness as starting fires. Yet, when my son asks for a story, I seize up the same way I do when it’s dinner time and I haven’t planned a recipe. What if I get it wrong? What if I leave something out? What if I don’t know what I’m doing?

The other night, I surveyed my refrigerator and found only a few odds and ends hastily purchased without a plan. I had ground turkey, a bunch of kale, half an onion, garlic, and sliced baby bella mushrooms. In the meat drawer I discovered a forgotten but unopened tube of cooked polenta.

I scoured the Internet for a recipe that didn’t require canned tomatoes, and came up with zilch. 

So I started where I was, browning turkey with onion and garlic and mushrooms. I smelled all the spices in my cabinet until I came to garam masala, bought long ago for one recipe, and my nose perked up. I added a little, tasted, found out it’s freaking delicious, and added more, plus kosher salt and fresh ground pepper, tension on the tongue. I added the kale, steaming to emerald green. I dug in the pantry and threw  in a handful of raisins for sweetness. I cut cubes of polenta and browned them in butter, then called it all dinner. It wasn’t pretty, but the kids cleaned their plates, even the kale. When John got home, they couldn’t wait to tell him how good dinner was. Even the kale!  

The next night’s bean stew didn’t go as well, but I know I can still save it. I have bacon up my sleeve.

Ms. Adler gives the moral of this tale in “How to Paint Without Brushes”:

If we were taught to cook as we are taught to walk, encouraged first to feel for pebbles with our toes, then to wobble forward and fall, then had our hands firmly tugged on so we would try again, we would learn that being good at it relies on something deeply rooted, akin to walking, to get good at which we need only guidance, senses, and a little faith.

I picture ancient people around the hearth, telling stories of gods and monsters and romance and adventure as they break bread together, and I think: I have stories to tell as surely as I have water and fire and the wisdom to add an onion.

I have countless teachers, authors, and friends to thank for guidance. I have human nature to thank for senses. And I have An Everlasting Meal and a well-used pot to thank for faith.

Yes, You Should Have Gotten a Flu Shot

But don't worry, Ryan Gosling's got your back.

It's been a wild week in the McCanless household. Under-parented children, over-medicated adults, and some kind of pink sugar-related holiday stuck in the middle of it all. I don't know if it's the flu or the Tamiflu, but I've been in too big a haze to even read, let alone write. So I'm keeping it simple tonight with ten things I learned over the last week:

1. Husbands are awesome, and mine is extra-super-special awesome, but they can’t be trusted to buy Valentines. That's why Kid #2 had to pass out Dora the Explorer cards to his mostly-boy Preppy Kindergarten class. There wasn't even any sort of compensating candy attached.

(Corollary: I do not like the little boy who refused to accept my child's offering because it was "for girls". He's on my poop list. I usually have another name for this list, but the kid is five.)

2. One day of gorging yourself on candy while your mother dozes in a semi-comatose state, with only her own hacking cough keeping her from complete oblivion, won't hurt your health. At least not measurably, in the short term, as far as the aforementioned mother can tell.

3. Argentine ants like to kick me when I'm down.

4. A five-year-old can figure out how to do his own temporary tattoos. So if you keep murmuring something about "Maybe later, honey, mommy's really sick," while he keeps asking for you to help with one of his Valentines, you may discover the next morning that he's got a tattoo on his neck. This may not strike you as terrible until you take him to his school in the slightly rougher part of town, where a significant number of parents have their own, permanent, neck tattoos. You may still decide that you are too busy sucking air into your gunky lungs to bother washing it off for a full 3 days.

If you're treating your fever like a slot machine,
that might be the fever talking.

5. Adults aren't allowed to run fevers as high as kids do. When you see your temperature climbing over 103, the appropriate response is to call the doctor. It is not to waste all of the (surprisingly expensive) plastic covers for the ear thermometer by obsessively betting against yourself on how high you can go.

6. The forehead-kissing method of fever detection does not work if the one doing the detecting also has a fever. This should be obvious, but somehow... Well, I apologize to everyone who comes down with this illness because I thought Kid #2 was fine.

7. How I Met Your Mother is funny.
8. I am blessed with people in my life who are kind and caring and there in a pinch. I couldn't have survived this week without friends covering carpools for me and inviting the kids over for playdates, teachers forgiving forgotten homeworks and missed volunteer shifts, and my husband being all-around wonderful even when he got the two days of sore throat and sniffles that were his version of "sick." (Corollary: I married hardy stock.)

9. Kid #2 is five now and not a baby anymore, but he's still the best little nap companion in the world. I mean, I hope he feels better and stuff, but until then... SNUGGLES!!!

10. I totally, absolutely, 100%, without a doubt should have gotten a flu shot.

Once I've sprayed the office with Raid and cleaned up the thousands of tiny dead ants, I will begin clawing my way back out of the hole I sank into this week. So, in the spirit of overdone Internet memes...

I Have A Fever Dream: Making peace with limits

Illness brings out
my inner child.

I am blogging with a moderately high fever. This should be illegal.

I recently finished The Lotus Blossom, by D.M. Kenyon. It was a wonderful read that planted thoughts in my mind like seeds—images and ideas that have kept growing beyond the last page. One of those seeds was a scene in which Madison (now called Lhamo) endures a grueling test at her dojo. She has to fight off a continual onslaught of attackers as long as possible before collapsing into unconsciousness.

Rinchen says that most people never know failure because they quit way before they fail. Quitting is choosing to surrender. It is the choice to stop before you are at the end of yourself. Failure is letting go of a need to reach the end, giving it your all and accepting whatever happens. It is a beautiful place, failure. Almost nobody ever really knows it.

-D. M. Kenyon, The Lotus Blossom                                    

I read this and thought: Have I ever pushed myself to my physical limit? I don't think so.

Growing up, I believed I was the kid who wasn't strong enough to really push herself, and I thought my character must be as weak as my body.

I was the kid who ended up gasping for air in the nurse’s office every time she had to run a mile in gym class. I was the kid who would be out for two weeks because of a cold, with doctors shrugging and saying, “That’s just you, kiddo.” I was the kid whose sister named her Kermit for the color of her snot.

I was the kid who fell out of the raft not once, but twice, on a Class I river.

I was the adult who slowly worked her way up from being a walker to a runner over the course of three months, only to end up with an angry sciatic nerve that, four years after the return to walking, still holds a grudge.

I'm a walker. That's me.
I'm a walker. Yippee.

I was the adult who finally found out she had asthma, then learned to stand up to doctors while she searched for the great ones who would take her seriously and help her take care of herself.

I am the adult who has been wanting to join a paranormal YA book club, but just had to cancel for the fourth month in a row (the second time for illness). I had to admit defeat, again, and all I can do is hope that the friend who invited me doesn't think I'm a freak, or a liar, or both.

Above all else, I am the adult who has to be an adult about her limits, because if I push past them, the aftermath affects my kids and my husband and anyone else who counts on me.

There’s a woman in my Pilates class who broke her knee from repetitive stress by running twenty miles on a treadmill.  She’s that kind of athlete—one who pushes on no matter what. She said she’d torn an achilles tendon on a mountain bike the same way, pushing through. It healed in six months and she went right back to training hard.

I’ve always believed that’s the kind of person you need to be if you want to be successful in life. If I were that kind of person, I’d probably have gone to medical school. I’d be thinner. I’d be richer. I’d be closer to perfect in every way. I should be like her… but I'm not.

Yesterday, at Kid #1’s baseball practice, I sat in the grass with Kid #2, feeling sorry for myself because I was short of breath and Kid #2 wanted to do something active and I just wanted to go to bed. I saw something move on my hand and stifled a little scream, and Kid #2 freaked out. He has inherited my fear of bugs. I forced myself to calm down and let the bug stay on my hand. I showed it to him. He scooted away from me, but he kept his eyes trained on the critter inching its way across my wrist. It looked a little like a caterpillar, but shorter and not very cute.

I Googled and found out it was a lady beetle larva, basically the juvenile form of the most beloved bug of all time. But I didn't know that! I was totally bluffing when I told Kid #2 it wasn't going to bite me. BLUFFING, I say!

Photo By Sanjay Acharya

Kid #2 didn’t get over his fear of bugs in one afternoon, nor did I. Eventually we had to move if I wanted him to sit in the grass again. Still, we had shared a moment.

In the grand scheme of things, I get disappointed in what my body can do, but I also don't take my good-enough health for granted. Maybe I really do need 8 hours of sleep. Maybe while my kids are young and acting as germ mules, I’ll end up canceling a lot of social events and feeling lame every time.

Maybe I accomplish things more slowly than I’d like. Maybe fighting that head-on is like trying to move the tide back out with a bucket.

We celebrate people who push themselves physically, but maybe I need to start thinking about other ways to push myself. I want to let go of my need to reach the end. To give it my all and accept whatever happens. To reach that beautiful place that Lhamo planted in my mind.

I want to take my kids camping and teach them not to be afraid of the creepy crawlies. I want to hear my husband’s worries or a child’s sadness and swallow my own feelings long enough to be their rock the way they are mine. I want to open my Scrivener file, panic that I have no idea what I’m doing and this writing thing was a huge mistake, and keep working anyway. And then I want to send it to my critique partner and say: This is me. This is the best I could do, but I’m not giving up.


After I get my full night’s rest, take two Sudafed, do my sinus rinse, steam my lungs, and sip chicken broth… I will still have choices. There will still be limits worth pushing and victories worth claiming.

But first, I need more soup.

~Sarah