Flogging the Quill

Kudos for Koontz

I decided to park my blogging, editing, and writing over the Thanksgiving holiday and take it easy. There would be one family-filled day, but there were many other hours free to enjoy. I opted to splurge for a book. But it needed to be an escape. Take me away, author, set me free for several sweet hours…and I want it to be effortless ‘cause I’ve used up my quota of effort for the time being. You know the feeling.

This is not as easy as it sounds. More and more it’s difficult for me to enjoy commercial novels, a la The Da Vinci Code, because I come across so much poor craft that my hand itches for a red pen.

Luckily, on a drugstore book rack, I came across Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz. I’ve read Koontz before and, while sometimes his writing seemed a little overly informative to me, he surely has an imagination and can tell a tale, and it had been a few years. A cover blurb from Publishers Weekly promised that Odd Thomas was “Marvelous…this is Koontz working at his pinnacle.” I took a chance.

I was well rewarded, but with more than an entertaining story. Mr. Koontz’s firm grip on craft made me forget for a time previous abuses by less apt authors. Here are some of my thank-yous.

Dialogue tags: Deliciously few and far between. And, when they occurred, 99% of the time it was “said.” So clean, so smooth. You get a bonus lesson in dialogue tags in this book.

Storytelling: Sure, there were blurbs on the book cover that let me know about paranormal elements in the novel, but there wasn't much of a hint in the first 15 pages of the story. No, Koontz started with a charming, self-effacing character, narrating in the first person to lay down delicious little foreshadows. For example, he wakes on the morning of the story and sees, in his room…

The life-size cardboard figure of Elvis, part of a theater-lobby display promoting Blue Hawaii, was where I’d left it. Occasionally, it moves—or is moved—during the night.

That’s the first clue that not all is normal in this man’s world. But Koontz drops it there and we carry on with no more hints. Odd Thomas leaves for work and finds a girl waiting outside.

Penny Kallisto waited like a shell on a shore. She wore red sneakers, white shorts, and a sleeveless white blouse.

This is on page 9, and all seems perfectly normal. The girl leads him to a confrontation with the man who killed her. Yep, she’s a dead person, but Koontz doesn’t let us know that until page 15.

Characterization & tone: Koontz’s writing is fun and his character spins the yarn with a tongue-in-cheek tone that lightens the story throughout. For example, when Odd’s (that’s his first name) girlfriend wonders if his gift for seeing dead people is a gift or a curse, our protagonist says,

“It’s a gift.” Tapping my head, I said, “I’ve still got the box it came in.”

With a simple gesture and a twist of imagery, you get a feeling for the man. Here’s a swift turn of phrase characterizing the man who murdered the girl…

“…a diseased and twisted bramble of a soul, thorny and cankerous.”

Shudder. But then we meet a friend’s fearsome cat, Terrible Chester, that likes to pee on the protagonist’s shoes.

He regarded me appraisingly with contempt so thick that I expected to hear it drizzle to the floor with a spattering sound.

Thanks to foreshadowing and the gradual accumulation of events in this alternate reality, you are not surprised when our hero gets into a car and finds the ghost of Elvis sitting in the passenger seat. Apparently Elvis hangs out in this small town.

Odd Thomas is quirky and packed with wall-to-wall with impossibilities, but Koontz’s skill with storytelling makes it what I wanted for the holiday—a good read.

However…lest you think this is some kind of paean, I think there were opportunities to make the opening of the novel more compelling. Koontz spends a page or so with a tensionless (though well written) rendition of how unqualified and uninteresting his character is. Then he springs the line that I thought would make a great beginning:

I lead an unusual life.

Given that at the very beginning to raise questions and then the contrast of seeming mediocrity would have generated tension in me right from the start. The cachet of Koontz’s reputation allows him to ease into a story, but I wonder if he would have been as low-key in his early years.

Nonetheless, thank you, Dean Koontz, for a fun story and, even better, smooth craft that let me take it all in without thinking of my red pen.

If I can help with a question about writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

Computer tip: use the comment feature for better storytelling

Word’s Comment feature is a hugely useful tool. You can insert an invisible note for yourself or someone else, such as an editor. I’m in an e-mail critique group, and we use comments in our critiques, along with line editing with Track changes turned on. WordPerfect also provides a Comment tool.

I sometimes create a skeletal version of a scene that’s not fully developed in my mind and use Comment to leave a note about thoughts for fleshing it out. Or maybe there’s a description or action that I know needs work. In one of my novels I described a character as having a “pretty face.” A critiquer noted that this was pretty vague. When I came to that place in rewriting, I just wasn’t ready to deal with finding other language, so it was easy to highlight “pretty” and add this little note to myself: “better adjective/description—fine-boned, delicate features…” When I was good and ready, I took my time to do justice to the description.

The woman's face emerged--oval shape, delicate features and big eyes like you see in fashion models.

For me, that’s one of the best uses for comments--to annotate possibilities that occur to me when I don’t have the time or inclination to write them out. For example, in one scene  my character leaves an intense but brief scene with his boss in which he had quit and does this: In his office, Gabe slams the few personal things he doesn’t want to lose into his briefcase.

Later, when skimming through the chapter, I had a nagging sense that it had ended too abruptly, so I highlighted “In his office” and added this comment: “consider having the boss follow him into the hallway and finishing the confrontation.” I went back later and created a much stronger scene. Here’s the addition:

Gabe’s not ten feet down the hallway before Lawrence’s voice attacks from behind. “You hold on there!”

Gabe stops and turns. Lawrence advances on him, his face flushed, his movements stiff and tense. Gabe waits and watches.

Lawrence comes to a halt close enough for Gabe to smell the cigarette smoke in his breath. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

A weight lifts from his mind, and Gabe feels strong and free. “How about the right thing?”

Lawrence sucks in air as if Gabe had punched him in his flat belly. His face reddens even more. “You’re one more word from being out of a job.”

Out of a job. But this job, with Lawrence fouling his work and pulling on a leash, will be hell. Gabe’s been here before, suffering the daily insult and pain of working for a lesser man. Last time it cost him lots of sleep and the beginnings of an ulcer. He’d vowed to never suffer fools again.

“Lawrence, don’t you have some ass-kissing to do? I think Phil’s going to need a long, deep pucker if you want to keep him happy.”

Like a fish, complete with glassy eyes, Lawrence opens and shuts his mouth a couple of times. Then he spins and hurries back to the conference room. Gabe heads for his office, a flush of victory humming through him.

There are different ways to add a comment. In Word 2000 and earlier iterations, you highlight something where you want the comment to be, click Insert in the top menu, then click on Comment. A box will appear, you enter your note, then click Close. The comment becomes invisible until you want to see it, but yellow highlighting remains to show you where it is. NOTE: you can insert a comment without highlighting anything, but I wouldn’t—later there’s no way to see where the comment is. A keyboard shortcut for inserting a comment is to type Alt+Ctrl+m.

In Word 2002/XP, you insert comments in the same ways. A comment balloon appears into which you can type your comment. Annoyingly (to me), the balloon stays there. To make it go away, go to View and click on Markup. Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, these versions of Word leave no highlighting to tell you where the comment is—you have to click on View/Markup.

There are two ways in Word 2000 and earlier to later view a Comment note. My preference is to place my cursor over the yellow highlight, which causes the comment to appear in a pop-up box. Move the cursor away, it goes away. Right-click your mouse (click the right key if you have a 2-key mouse) and you get a menu that will let you edit or delete the comment. An alternative way to view a Comment is to click View on the top menu in Word. Then click Comments, and a window will appear with all the comments in them. You can scroll to get to the area you want to see. This is a handy way to review all of the reminders you’ve left in order to see what needs to be done.

In Word 2002/XP, click View and then Markup to see comments. To make them go away, return to View and click Markup. WordPerfect has a similar Comment feature.

 

In WordPerfect, to insert a comment click on Insert in the top menu bar, move your cursor to Comment, and click on Insert in the pop-up menu. To close the window that opens you have to click the X in the upper right corner. You can also navigate back and forth between your document and comment with Window on the main menu bar.

WordPerfect adds small “word balloons” to the left margin of your document to indicate the presence of a comment. Click on the work balloon to read the comment. Right-click on the comment to edit or delete it.

Instead of using the Insert menu, I add the Insert Comment icon to my main toolbar so it’s always handy. Here’s how: click Tools in the top menu bar. Click Customize. Click on the Commands tab. Click the Insert icon in the list that appears, then scroll down until the yellow Comment icon appears. Put your cursor over the icon graphic, press the left mouse key down and hold it. You can then “drag” the icon up to your toolbar. A marker will appear where it will be, and you can move the cursor to find the right spot. Then release the mouse key and the icon will appear in your toolbar. It should stay there, though in Word for the Mac, I’ve never figured out how to make it permanent.

If you find other ways to put comments to work, please let me know and I’ll pass them on.

If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.

Ideas for creating distance to achieve better self-editing

To self-edit with any success at all, I need distance from my work, to somehow separate what I read there from intimate knowledge of my vision so that it’s the words that do the work, not my resident imaginings. With distance, it falls on the writing to evoke scenes no longer fresh in my mind. Not so amazingly, distance reveals holes in the pictures. And flat writing becomes visible for the first time, those lazy word choices or adverbs that got me through the task of getting the story down but don’t do diddly-squat to create the reader experience I need to provoke.

Once done with a draft, I try not to go back to a book for at least a month, though six weeks is better. However, unless I have other projects interesting enough to distract me, I find that very difficult to do. A few days go by and then, like a scab that needs picking because it keeps itching, I open the file and pick. Compulsive, I know, but I don’t see how anyone could write an entire novel without a healthy dose of compulsive behavior to keep giving the wheel a turn on tough days.

So I needed to find other ways to get around the fact that I refused to allow my book adequate time to chill. Here are some that might work for you.

You could do as George Carlin one talked of doing in the last stages of polishing his material--smoke a little pot. Failing that, what?

If you’ve been working exclusively onscreen, create a printout and go through a hard copy. That’s a must. But it’s the least you can do to gain a little psychological distance.

Read it aloud to yourself. For me, this ALWAYS reveals clumsy structure, or unwanted repetitions and echoes, or missing information, or too much information, or other flaws. I don’t do this often enough, probably because I simply forget about it.

Another technique that works for me is to reformat the narrative to look more like that in a book. Here’s how to do it using Microsoft Word (this is doable in WordPerfect as well).

1. Change the font. If you’re using Courier, it’ll never look like a book. If you’re using Times New Roman, it’s closer in appearance to a book’s text, but it’s a narrow newspaper font seldom used in a book. And it would be better to eye a different font anyway.

Author M.J. Rose, The Halo Effect, prints her manuscript out in a different font and then takes it somewhere else to read--2 or 3 hours a day at a library, or on a train from Connecticut to Boston and back all in one day.  I like that idea--your words have to overcome unaccustomed distractions. 

To change the font, type Ctrl+a (or Apple+a with a Mac). This should select all the text. Then go to the font window in your toolbar and change it to one of the book-style fonts: Garamond or Palatino or Georgia, if you have them. If you don’t, Times New Roman will do. Font size: 12.

2. While you’ve still got everything selected (or do Ctrl+a again to select all), change the spacing to be more book-like as well. Click Format>Paragraph. In the Line spacing box, use the drop-down menu to select Multiple. Then, in the “At:” box next to it, type 1.1 or 1.2 and click OK. Adjust to taste. This will give you a book-like spacing. But you’re not done yet.

3. Change the margins to create a bookish column of text on the page with about 10-15 words in a line. The margins I’ve found helpful are: top, 1”; bottom 1”; left and right, 1.7”. This will give you a very different look.

4. It’s fun to really go all the way and see how it would look book-style by doing this:

a. Change the page size. Click File>Page setup and go to the Paper size tab. Change the paper size to: Custom size and type in 5.5” for width and 8.5” for height. Or 6” by 9”.

b. Now change the margins to top: .66”, bottom, left and right to .6”.

c. Change the font and spacing as noted above. Might try a smaller font size, 11.5 or 11, depending on the font.

d. Justify the margins. Select all the text (Ctrl+a). Click Format>Paragraph. On the Indents and Spacing tab, go to the Alignment box, click the arrow to show the menu, and choose Justified. Then click OK.

I think you’ll find that the re-formatted narrative reads differently, either onscreen or in a printout. I’ve even printed out a book on 5.5” by 8.5” paper, using both sides of the paper and formatting just like a book (headers, page numbers, justified margins, font, spacing, etc.), and had it tape-bound at Kinko’s, which yielded something very much like a perfect-bound trade paperback. Now, that’s fun to hold in your hands—your book as a real book! It’s educational, too.

If you’ve found other ways to put a little distance between yourself and your words, please let me know and I’ll pass them on.

Let me hear from you. If I can help you with a question about your writing, email me and I’ll apply a beady eye to it. Tell me if I can share it in a post or if you want a “private consultation.”

All contents © Ray Rhamey 2004.