Notes towards a definition of bad writing

Opening paragraphs, as any Creative Writing teacher will tell you in Week 1, are crucial to any writing venture but most particularly short stories or novels. Here's how not to do it (NB this is a real book):

Rose Season stood at the threshold of her sister's bedroom and silently watched the shadows of an oncoming storm stretch like plum-coloured talons across the empty bed. A great gust of icy wind from Lake Michigan howled at the windows.

Now then:

1) Calling your introductory and therefore likely-to-be-major character Rose Season ensures that the reader will not be able to take her seriously. You might as well have called her Cherry Season, or Rose Blight.

2) By 'at the threshold' do you mean 'in the doorway', which is more concrete (whereas 'at the threshold' is often used figuratively) and therefore easier for the reader to visualise the scene? [Reader thinks: 'Ooh look, a door', but probably not 'Ooh look, a threshold.']

3) 'Silently' is redundant. Presumably if Rose were not silent then she would be talking, and there would be dialogue.

4) Shadows are not plum-coloured, indeed they are not any colour, just a blockage of light. If you mean that the clouds are plum-coloured, say that.

[Here an internal warning is sounded to the reader: this writer apparently cannot think her way out of a paper bag and presumably neither can her editor -- either that, or her editor couldn't persuade her to change it. Either way, the horrible prospect of 445 pages of woolly thinking stands before one.]

5) Talons are not plum-coloured, either. Mixed metaphor.

6) Where there is a talon-shaped shadow, it is almost always the shadow of a talon, or, more usually, several talons, since talons tend to occur in groups. It's very rarely the shadow of a cloud. You are thinking of horror movies, or Foghorn Leghorn cartoons with chicken hawks in them.

7) You need to get rid of at least one of 'great', 'icy' or 'howled'. Three exclamatory adjectives in one short sentence is at least one too many, and in any case all three are clichés.

8) Do gusts howl? Are gusts not, rather, more inclined to bang?

9) And in any case, wind is by definition a thing in motion, but in order to howl at a window, don't you need to stand still at it?

First paragraph FAIL.

Brothers, sisters and anthologies : oh the irony

So when I got home this afternoon from fifteen rounds with a sibling -- the ferocious upfront one, all teeth and claws all the time, and no backing down until one of you dies -- so stratospherically stressed out that my eyeballs and teeth were aching and there was a strange metallic taste in my mouth that no amount of medicinal chocolate would shift, I found two things in the mail.

One was a copy, kindly sent by Allen & Unwin, of Charlotte Wood's new themed anthology of specially-commissioned stories by Australian writers about siblings, entitled Brothers and Sisters. The other was my copy of the current Australian Book Review, in which critic Peter Craven continues his attack on the team of scholars of Australian literature (of which he is not one) who edited the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, including moi, that he began in his magisterially and savagely opinionated review of the anthology in the previous issue.

I've been a fan of Charlotte Wood's since I read her novel The Children, in which she shows great interest in the sibling dynamic and great skill in representing it, an impression further borne out by the brilliant, funny, moving introduction to this new book. And after reading the ABR correspondence pages I'm considering the possibility that one way to understand the shifting, endlessly complex dynamics of the literary scene and all its tortured interrelationships is to think of it in terms of sibling relations, where the keynote is intensity for better or worse, and where endless fights for territory, dominance, independence, sentimental vases and Mummy and Daddy's approval all take place in the hothouse arena of shared interests and common experience.

At the very least, I find that thinking about these things anthropologically and psychoanalytically helps me to get some distance on them, to back away from the rage. It's that or the bottle shop, and I have too much work to do tonight for the bottle shop to be an option. Besides, I want to be fully alert when Germaine takes on Planet Janet on Q&A.


Cross-posted at Australian Literature Diary

In which she finally sees why people kept telling her to read Salley Vickers

She was wondering whether it would be nosy to ask Miss Foot why she was on the ship when her companion said, 'I am travelling to New York to visit my sister. We've not met for fifty years. She has cancer and would like to see me again. I shall try to help her but I fear she is resistant to help. That is the true sin against the Holy Ghost -- the refusal of grace and mercy.'

'Yes,' said Vi. 'I think you might be right about that.'

'She is intense,' Miss Foot went on. 'But intensity is not an index of spiritual depth.'

'Certainly not.'

'I would not be surprised, though naturally I shall not say this, if it were not the intensity that led to the cancer. Misdirected it can be malign.'

'I am sure.'

'Well, I'll be off to my bed. I am reading Moby Dick. I felt I should acquaint myself a little more with the Americans in preparation for this trip. The writing is very energetic -- the Americans are energetic, I admire them for that -- but it could do with some editing. There is far too much about harpoons.'

'Yes,' said Vi. 'I agree with you about that too.'

'Well, goodnight, dear.'

-- Salley Vickers, Dancing Backwards (2009)

Me and Leonard Bast, we're like *that*

For those of you who may not remember Leonard Bast, he is the failed aspirational with whose shabby umbrella the heedless Helena Bonham Carter Helen Schlegel makes away from the Beethoven concert in Howards End (both the film and the book and yes, no apostrophe there, can't think why), who later fathers Helen's baby in a peculiarly bloodless and as it were offstage encounter*, and who comes to a highly symbolic end when a Wilcox** attacks him with the flat of a decorative ceremonial sword, whereupon he has a heart attack and grabs a bookcase to stop himself falling, and the bookcase falls on him and showers him with books.

Which is to say, he is hit in the head by an out-of-control swarm of the books he so loves, and his heart fails him. And I know exactly how he felt.

Nonetheless, I have been out into the garden for long enough to report, on this second day of Spring,


the following eruption of yellow, white, and yellow-and-white things:

Banksia roses
Climbing white roses
Daisies
Freesias
Honey-eaters' chests
Jasmine
Lime blossom
Lemon blossom
Lemons
Nasturtiums





* Later ridiculed by Katherine Mansfield, who concluded that the baby had been fathered by the umbrella.

** The pragmatic, business-minded 'telegrams and anger' and 'panic and emptiness' family, later recalled in the name of Vic Wilcox in David Lodge's 1986 (?) novel Nice Work, which, like some of Margaret Drabble's from that period, recalls and formally echoes the narrative mode, characters and concerns of the 19th century 'condition of England' novel, in which the urbane, cosmopolitan, well-off South of England is contrasted with the struggling industrial North.

Biblical world view legitimised: Australian feminist icon turns in grave

What with first the longlist and then the shortlist, I'm not really all that surprised that the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award has been won by what was by far the safer choice of the two front runners, a novel in which a bitter, twisted woman called Eva (geddit? geddit?) corrupts the young hero, takes away his innocence and warps his psyche for life with her nasty dangerous bent sick non-missionary sexing-on ways. She robs our hero of Paradise, that's what she does; she pushes him into his fall from grace.

Because, as we all know, that's what women do. The Bible tells us so.

I reviewed Tim Winton's Breath for the Oz and I bent over backwards, to the point of indecency really and no it's not something you'd like to see, to be fair. I have great respect for Winton's considerable fiction-writing skills, and I wouldn't like to seem to be dissing the people who like his work. Yes it's a 'good novel', no argument there from me. But. But. Butbutbut.

It's completely incredible to me that in 2009 there are still people who don't get this, but looking at comments around the blog and MSM literary traps there clearly are, so let me spell it out once more:

It's not just some simple-minded essentialist thing about equal numbers of men and women. It's not a case to be met with 'We don't need feminism any more because we're equal now' (I assume this lot are actually unconscious, or trapped in a big plastic bubble, or living in some parallel universe like the Magic Faraway Tree). It's not about 'But can't they just be chosen on literary merit?', a common bleat that begs the question of what literary merit is, whose values infuse it, whether it can ever be objective or absolute, who decides what it is, and what sorts of values have dominated literature and the judgement of literature and the formation of its canons for centuries. A quick read of A Room of One's Own is all that's needed for answers to most of these questions.

No, it's this: that the masculine world view is still the norm, the feminine world view a lesser variant; that the masculine representation of women is still accepted as the truth, while female resistance to that representation is seen as some kind of wilful rebellion; that masculine values are still (mis)taken as universal values, and feminine ones seen as aberrant and unimportant in the world. Simone de Beauvoir still puts it best, even after all this time. 'There are two types of people in this world: human beings and women.'

And spare a thought for the dedicated, hardworking feminist Miles Franklin, who scrimped and saved and ran herself short to amass the capital for the establishment of this prize in the 1950s. In her name, let me record here that in the chronological catchment area for this prize, the following excellent novels, most of which have won at least one major literary prize, were published (NB Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog was eligible last year, not this year, but likewise came nowhere):

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey
The Good Parents by Joan London

All were eligible for the prize, within the terms of Franklin's will: of 'the highest literary merit', and dealing with 'Australian life in any of its phases'.

None of them even made the longlist.

Yes, as anyone who's ever been on one knows, the judging panels for prizes of all kinds are weird beasts, and their ways are a mystery even to themselves. Goddess knows I know that this is true.

But still. But. Butbutbut.

In which ThirdCat's book is launched

Finally at 2 am this yesterday morning I put this book down, about half-finished in one hit, and went to bed, but I didn't want to.




It's the story of two women, loosely and obliquely connected through family ties, and their complicated relationship with the South Australian town -- regional and industrial -- to which they are very attached, but which they fear may be making their children sick. It's a poet's novel, but it's also an activist's one.

Longtime readers of ThirdCat's blogs, especially the unique and wonderful 'blogopera' Adelaide Sprawls, will be familiar with her style and technique: restrained, almost minimalist, but with a turn of phrase and of observation that nails something you sort of already knew but would never have thought of putting quite like that.

They will be familiar, too, with her subject matter: the lives, circumstances and feelings of 'ordinary people' and all the stuff that seethes under the surface of their days and the physical objects and actions of daily life, the tea-making, the hair-washing and the car-fixing; the unresolved tensions, the suppressed exclamations, the half-understood feelings, the quality and complexity of emotional responses and transactions, the tiny fluctuations of feeling between people, the mysteries that reside in what is not said.

... she had not needed a card to know who the roses were from. But she didn't know what they meant.

Even going over the words they had said on the phone she couldn't work it out. They could mean sorry or I miss you or goodbye, because in the end she had pushed him to say, I will get over you, if that's what you make me do.

(Recycling disclosure: I have said some of this about Tracy's writing before, and it will look familiar to her if not to anyone else.) It's all there in Black Dust Dancing, though less concentrated and intense, making more room, as is proper in a novel, for the story and the setting.

So this afternoon at Sturt Street Primary School, icon and symbol of all that is best in the history of South Australian education and school to both of Tracy's boys, an assortment of family, friends and fans assembled to celebrate her achievement, buy her novel, and queue up to get her to sign it,




and then to see it officially launched by Adelaide's Sheridan Stewart, artist, comedian, radio presenter and MC of the comedy show Titters, which featured Tracy in her other life as a standup comedian and which was practically booked out for the duration of the Adelaide Fringe.


(Sheridan Stewart attended by Wakefield Press publisher Michael Bollen, behind whose left hip you can just see a bottle of the fabled Fox Creek Verdelho.)

Sheridan made a funny, warm speech but was upstaged by Tracy's boys, who came purposefully up to the bar behind her and fetched a cup of what was probably apple juice, but looked a lot like white wine, each, and melted back into the crowd, to its general appreciation. Tracy then made an excellent thank-you speech,




dividing the thankees into thoughtful categories instead of naming names, which is always a minefield.

Before and after the ceremonials I had a nice talk with the lovely Deborah from In A Strange Land and met her beautiful daughters.

Tracy and the boys and the mister have to fly back to Abu Dhabi tomorrow morning. I'm guessing she might try to have a bit of a nap on the plane.

If it's got a brick in its mouth, it must be a vampire

Only last night I was saying to a friend that vampire novels still seem to be hot (I cannot believe they've made a movie of Let the Right One In*) and I ought to try to make some money by writing one ... and behold, this morning someone turns up with an absolutely cracking story just begging to be used.

I'm thinking a marriage of genres. Vampire romance has been done, and so has vampire crime, which is practically a tautology, but has anyone written a vampire western yet?

All ideas gratefully received.


*Here's my review of it for the SMH in March 2007:

Let the Right One In
By John Ajvide Lindqvist
Text, 528 pp, $32.95

This is an energetic, noisy, highly imaginative novel that blends the most extreme kind of vampire-story schlock-horror with a complicated and triangulated love story, a profoundly gory sequence of murders, and some rather good domestic realism about life in suburban 1980s Stockholm.

A number of contemporary scholars and critics including Melbourne’s Ken Gelder have written in detail about the complex cultural meanings attached to vampires, and Lindqvist, while he seems to be mostly having fun with the idea, has clearly also thought carefully about the issues of blood, death, infection and starvation that sit at the heart of the vampire myth, to say nothing of close connection between vampirism and eroticism.

Vampires aren’t the most logical creatures in the world nor the most emotionally straightforward, which makes for a certain amount of confusion in a book where so much happens, especially considering the violence of most of it. The book is clever and well written, but some of it is sufficiently gruesome to give even a strong-stomached reader pause.

BELATED UPDATE: James at City of Tongues saw this more than a week before I did, which just goes to show that I should update my blogroll more often.

In today's mail ...

... I received this flyer:






For some detailed and fascinating insights from the novelist's own mouth pen keyboard about some of the processes by which her novel has ended up on this flyer, go here.

A question

On page 263 of John Grisham's new novel The Associate, which in most respects I'm enjoying for all the usual Grisham things, there appear the expressions 'second-tier' (referring to schools) and, two paragraphs later, 'C-list' (referring to Hollywood agents).

Can anyone who knows either Grisham or contemporary America (or, ideally, both) better than I do give me a clue as to whether there is any authorial irony at all attached to his use of these expressions? I'm damned if I can tell whether he shares his characters' unquestioning acceptance of these hierarchies as gospel or not. I'm hoping that the way the plot turns out will give me a clue.

Thought for the week

The number of people in the world who would ever dream of picking up a hitherto unfamiliar musical instrument and expecting to be able to play Mozart on it is presumably very small, so why is the number who think they can write a good novel without ever thinking or bothering to read up on the history, the theory or the techniques of novel-writing, or indeed without ever (apparently) having read a novel at all, so very very large?

This is a constant and undiminished source of astonishment.

Then again, a constant and undiminished capacity for astonishment is one of the paths to a happy, or at least a non-disappointed, middle age. So at least there's something in it for me.