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At what point is it okay not to finish reading a book? Ten pages in? Fifty? This is a quandary I have been facing this week as I’ve worked my way through the opening chapters of a novel that, by all accounts, I should like. It has been well-received by critics. The topic is one that I generally find interesting. The characters are believable. And the writing style, while not as artful as others I’ve encountered, is sufficiently engaging to keep my interest. Yet there have been a several moments as the story has unfolded (specifically, uncanny “coincidences” in the plotline) that have given me the urge to chuck the book into the trashcan and move on to the something else.

You see, I’m one of those readers who tends to see a book through to the end no matter what. Maybe it’s my Midwestern upbringing or my Protestant work ethic, but somewhere deep in my psyche is the conviction that, once a chosen task is begun, I have a moral obligation to complete it. Over the years, I’ve wasted an enormous amount of time reading all sorts of books that, in retrospect, were not particularly good and really weren’t worth the effort. But I finished them, dang it!

Recently, however, something has changed. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and I realize that life is short, or perhaps it’s the result of reading hundreds of really bad student essays during my decade and a half teaching high school English. For whatever the reason, I no longer want to read books I don’t like.

Yet does this reflect a growing shallowness on my part? Have I fallen victim to the same social and cultural forces that have conditioned my students to retreat from anything that is not immediately engaging or may require some sort of sustained effort on their part to fully reap its rewards? I can think of plenty of books (particularly some of the “classics” that were assigned by my teachers in high school and college) which were not particularly riveting at first, but they turned out to be some of the most memorable books I’ve experienced. At the same time, how many books have I blazed through that I found delightfully entertaining while I was reading them but have long since forgotten?

As C.S. Lewis notes, good readers can learn something valuable from even the worst books. The question is, at what point is it fair to say that a book is simply not worth the trouble? Personally, I’ve going to give my current novel another twenty pages or so. Okay, maybe thirty. We’ll see how it goes.

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Cover of Yoko Ono

 

We’ve seen it plenty of times. A group of guys who’ve been friends for years suddenly find their world disrupted by the arrival of a new female. She typically enters the scene on the arm of one of the fellows, and the others tolerate her because of their loyalty to their buddy. But before long, things begin to change. The guys start to see less of their friend, or if he does come around, the girl is always with him. In subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) ways, she manages drive a wedge between her man and his old comrades until finally, she comes to dominate every aspect of his life. Their pal’s fun-loving personality gradually drains away, and he becomes a mere shadow of his former self. Things soon fall apart: the band breaks up, friendships are jeopardized—all because of a manipulative, soul-sucking female.

Yoko Ono’s infiltration of the Beatles is the most obvious modern example of this phenomenon. (In fact, the Urban Dictionary defines the “Yoko Effect” as: “The aftermath of an individual in a group of friends dating a nut-case girlfriend or boyfriend. The significant other will intentionally or unintentionally control the group member’s entire life and eventually stomp out anyone he or she sees as ‘unfit’ based on arbitrary criteria.”)

In the realm of storytelling, the roots of this archetype run deep. For instance, the goddess Circe turns Odysseus’ warriors into swine in order to keep her man by her side. It’s not until Odysseus recognizes Circe’s ploys that they are finally able to break free and resume their journey. Likewise, medieval folk legends surrounding the character of Lilith reflect the notion that certain females (succubi) will use their sexuality to corrupt men and drain them of life. The temptress in John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” fits this model, as does King Arthur’s faithless wife, Genevieve, whose actions are instrumental in destroying Camelot.

In modern cinema, examples of the succubus archetype abound. Who can forget David St. Hubbins’ girlfriend, Jeanine Pettibone, in the “rockumentary” This Is Spinal Tap? Or what about Judith (Amanda Peet’s character) from the movie Saving Silverman? Of course, there is also the girlfriend of Jack Black’s roommate, Patty DiMarco (played by Sarah Silverman), in The School of Rock. Vinnie Chase (the movie star heartthrob on HBO’s Entourage) has a run-in with a vegan yoga fanatic (Fiona) whose behavior is eerily reminiscent of Yoko’s. And let’s not forget Stu’s passive-aggressive wife, Melissa, from recent hit film, The Hangover.

The methods of these soul-suckers range from manipulative puppet-masters at one end of the shrewish spectrum to selfish, emasculating harpies at the other. Yet all of these gals have one goal in mind: to separate their men from the group. For awhile, the women are successful. However in the end, it’s the men’s buddies who rescue them from these girls’ conniving feminine clutches. If only Paul, George, and Ringo could have been so lucky. But then again, maybe we can all learn a thing or two from their example as well.

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I once heard someone jokingly define literary fiction as: “A type of book where nothing really happens, but you still feel sad at the end anyway.” While this may be something of an exaggeration (albeit a slight one), much of what today’s literati label as “moving” or “evocative” is often devoid of what most readers inwardly hope for when they crack open the pages of a critically-acclaimed novel—a good story. This is not to say that for a book to be engaging it must be exclusively plot-driven. It’s just that many of today’s novelists, in an effort to be taken seriously as writers, focus primarily on developing “style” rather than crafting engaging characters or storylines.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who has noticed this trend in modern fiction. In the introduction to his recent memoir entitled My Reading Life, the novelist Pat Conroy notes:

“The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself. I was born into the century in which novels lost their stories, poems their rhymes, paintings their form, and music its beauty, but that does not mean I had to like that trend or go along with it. I fight against these movements with every book I write.”

While there’s truth in Leo Tolstoy’s assertion that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way (and certainly, Conroy makes ample use of dysfunctional families in his own writing—i.e., Prince of Tides, Lords of Discipline), not every unhappy family is a worthy subject for a novel. Unfortunately, many of today’s writers miss this point, and instead of crafting stories that truly have something insightful to say, they focus too much on trying to sound “original.” But as we all know, originality is no guarantee for success. (Take Finnegan’s Wake or the film Ishtar, for example). Without engaging characters and a solid story to cling to, even the best-wrought phrases are in danger of falling away into the abyss of literary oblivion. And as Conroy states, “The writers who scoff at the idea of primacy of stories either are idiots or cannot write them.”

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Up until now I’ve avoided opera—not out of malice or a disdain for the music (my dad had a large collection of classical LPs he used to play when I was a kid which included a number of opera scores, and I remember enjoying them), but simply because I didn’t feel qualified to give an intelligent appraisal of the art. So when I was invited to join some friends for an operatic performance of Carmen, I thought it my duty to experience this centuries-old art form for myself.

You see, pretty much everything I know about opera I learned from Gilligan’s Island and certain Warner Brothers cartoons. (Who can forget Elmer Fudd dressed as a Valkyrie singing “Kill da Wabbit!” or Bugs Bunny performing a Barber of Seville-style haircut?) I enjoy most types of music, and as a musician, I’ve played in a variety of settings over the years, from orchestras and jazz ensembles to rock bands and Irish pub groups. But in my three decades of playing music, I had yet to see a classical opera. I must say my experience watching Carmen was certainly illuminating.

I’m a firm believer that, in the world of the arts (as in most areas of life), nothing equals the experience of being in the presence of people who are masters of their crafts. Whether it’s Yo Yo Ma coaxing notes from his cello, Paddy Maloney churning out jigs and reels on his uilleann pipes with The Chieftains, or Randy Johnson throwing a perfectly placed fastball or slider (yes, I do consider top-level athletes to be just as much artists as dancers or singers), I’ve always been enamored by people who are really good at what they do.

Without a doubt, the cast members of Carmen were indeed superb, and my hat goes off to people who dedicate their lives to such a demanding art. In addition to the singing and the dancing, these performers must be able to play their parts convincingly in a show that runs nearly three hours in length. To all of these talented individuals, I say, “Bravo!”

This is not to say that I am now an ardent devotee of the operatic arts. As in many of life’s endeavors, some tastes are acquired (like coffee or beer). For an opera novice like myself, there are several hurdles to be overcome, such as the communication gap.

For those of us plebeians in the audience whose college major was something other than Romance Languages, the company provided subtitled lyrics which were projected onto a narrow screen above the stage. While this was certainly helpful (for non-French speakers, it was essential—although even for a native Frenchman, it would have been difficult to decipher the singers’ lines through all the operatic warbling), it also created a sort of paradox; I realized as the words were flashed before me that it seemed to take an eternity for the singers to say whatever it was they were trying to communicate. There was one character in particular who spent ten minutes trying to relay four lines of dialogue to her boyfriend. (And every time she took the stage, she said the same thing: “Here’s a message from your mother.”) About two hours into the show, I started glancing down at my wristwatch, and there were a couple of moments when I would’ve sworn I saw the date change.

Of course, much of my problem with the time factor could be attributed to my own limited attention span. We moderns are used to two-hour movies and thirty-minute sitcoms. Elizabethans, by contrast, thought a preacher was just getting warmed up when his sermon reached the three-hour mark. Oh, how times have changed.

According to the historical information printed in the Carmen playbill, the 16th century composers who helped introduced the world to opera believed that the “current state of dramatic and musical expression was inadequate to convey the complexity of human emotion.” I don’t know about that. Sophocles used music and poetry to tell stories pretty effectively. And of course, there’s always Shakespeare. I think his narratives came out alright—even without the song-and-dance numbers and the ten minute arias. But hey, what do I know? I’m just an amateur who likes cartoons that feature speech-impaired hunters chasing rabbits around with spears.

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In a recent post to the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) website, an elementary school Reading teacher shared an exercise that she does with her students. The idea is for the students to write down 100 things about themselves as readers. The point of the activity is to help the students become aware of their own reading habits and tastes.

Here’s a link:  http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2010/10/100-things-about-me-as-reader.html

I decided to take up the challenge myself, and here are some of the items I came up with:

1. I tend to divide my reading time equally between fiction and non-fiction (particularly, history).

2. To me, literature and history go hand-in-hand. You can’t truly understand (or appreciate) one without the other.

3. Starting in Junior High, I began reading everything by J.R.R. Tolkien I could get my hands on. This served to introduce me to elements of the Arthurian legend, which consequently led me to scores of other old stories. Thus, I give Tolkien credit for my career choice. (I’m an English teacher.)

4. I don’t skip around much when I read. I tend to read every paragraph of the books I choose (even the boring parts). This slows me down a bit, but that’s okay. I can usually learn something from even the most tedious passages (such as how not to write something).

5. I don’t necessarily have to like the characters in a book to enjoy it, but I do have to at least find the characters interesting.

6. There are only a handful of books that I go back to and reread. Yet I have trouble getting rid of the others, even if I know I will probably never look at them again. (Maybe it’s an illness!)

7. I find that sometimes even the worst books will have a least a few redeeming qualities.

8. I don’t like it when someone tries to strong-arm me into reading a book. I’d rather the choice be entirely my own (even if the book turns out to be the same one that the person recommended). I’m sort of like a cat in this regard. It’s my time, damn it, and I’m going to read what I want to when I want to!

Obviously, my list hasn’t made it all the way to 100 yet, but I’m working on it. How about you? What are some things you could say about your own reading habits? How has your reading impacted your writing?

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I find it curious that my all of favorite writers were smokers. J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, Edward Abbey, William Faulkner—all of these wordsmiths were avid devotees of either pipes or cigars (or both). So why is it that writing and tobacco seem to be such close bedfellows?

For some, it is part of the writing ritual. Like making a fresh cup of coffee or sharpening a row of pencils, the process of filling a briar or lighting a cigar helps many writers get into their “writing space”—that delicate frame of mind where ideas are born and where (if you’re lucky) they make the awkward transition from abstract conceptualization to concrete form.

Of course, tobacco is also a stimulant, and a little stimulation never hurts when you are trying to crank out a steady number of manuscript pages. More importantly, perhaps, the rituals associated with smoking provide a type of distraction which is sometimes helpful in generating ideas. For me, some of my most creative moments have occurred when I wasn’t thinking about writing at all. Instead, I was doing something mundane, like mowing the grass or talking a walk. Maybe for these authors, smoking did something similar.

Pipe smoking, in particular, is an inherently contemplative activity. If you try to rush it or fail to tend the flame properly, it won’t work—much like the act of writing itself. Thus you’d never picture Jack Kerouac furiously typing on his roll of computer paper with an imported meerschaum between his teeth. He, like John Steinbeck and Dylan Thomas, were cigarette guys, hard drinking and hard writing—not really the philosophical types.

So I wonder how many bowls of tobacco went into creating The Lord of the Rings or Huckleberry Finn? Both were years in the making, and had their authors not indulged in a bit of nicotine distraction, would these books have ever come about at all? Maybe in the next life we can sit down with these guys for a smoke and find out.

I cannot believe I am even putting these two activities together in a title. Individually, each carry enough anxiety to my heart and in some cases a huge amount of disappointment. At any given point in time, there is a huge possibility that goals set for either task are slipping further and further away.

Last week as I closed the velcro on my work out gloves for the 20th strength training session, I began thinking about my commitment to both exercise and writing and reached an epiphany. The ability to miss commitments in both are deeply rooted in reasons that are identical twins.

Try it for yourself. Make a quick list , your Top 3 reasons,  that are at the root of you blowing writing goals or skipping exercise commitments. Common reasons that often surface to the top are not enough time, too many distractions; fear of failure and not seeing positive results fast enough or not having a strong enough belief that your work will yield winning results. We are looking for the major win, the loss of weight quickly or the best seller right out of the shoot. Yet we know that most successful people take incremental steps with extreme discipline towards their goals. They master majoring in the minors. Start writing consistently, schedule writing time and shoot to hit it consistently for 10 straight times.

What would be your idea of something you could do this week to get back on track  or stay on track with your writing goals?  It’s likely to be found in the small minor things.  Take small steps and I’d love to hear what you are doing.

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One of our blog readers made an excellent point in response to Part I of this series of blog posts (Thank you Katie!). She stated that most mysteries are more plot-driven than character-driven. This explains why in some mystery novels, the characters seem a little flat.

Luckily, I believe I have found a mystery writer whose stories are both plot and character driven: Dennis Lehane. So far I have read two of his novels (and am almost done with a third): Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone. Both of these novels are compelling stories with fascinating and well-developed characters.

Shutter Island revolves around a U.S. Marshal traveling to an insane asylum on a remote island to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates. The characters and the plot of this story are quite complex. For instance, along the way we learn that U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is on the island for personal as well as professional reasons. I don’t want to give anything away (although many have probably seen the film), but suffice it to say that this is one “missing persons” mystery with a whole lot going on. If you pay close attention while reading the book, you may well figure out a significant part of the mystery, but the strength of this book is that even if you have figured it out before the end, the storytelling abilities of Mr. Lehane inspire you to read on.

In this novel the characters and the plot were very well-developed and as a writer I was fascinated to see how the author wove the complicated threads of the story together. For those of you that saw the movie without reading the book, I encourage you to pick up a copy. You will find the writing interesting and even knowing the end can’t take away from the power of the characters and the potency of a truly great mystery.

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Archetypes in the movies is certainly nothing new.  It’s almost impossible to discuss Star Wars (OT obviously) without talking about heroic archetypes and heroes’ journeys.  Many of those archetypes are so ancient that they are as old as storytelling itself.  Movies aren’t ancient but they seem to have had quite an effect on storytelling in barely over a century.  That effect is big enough that some characters seem to be becoming archetypes peculiar to the modern age.  Since this is the sort of stuff that fascinates me I guess you’re stuck reading it.  I have five in mind off the top of my head but I think I might find more as I ponder a bit.  Hopefully the comment sections will yield some I haven’t thought of.  Let’s start with…

The Rogue Cop.  This one is modern in part because the idea of a police force as we think of it is modern.  Not that much older than movies really.  Cops make good Hero archetypes naturally.  They’re good guys who stop bad guys.  They take oaths and carry shields.  Knight of the Round Table type stuff.

Then came Dirty Harry.  We love that guy.  Why?  There aren’t many reasonable people, including real life cops, who think a man like Harry Callahan should be walking free, let alone armed and carrying a badge.  Yet there aren’t many people, including real life cops, who don’t root for Harry.  He shoots people down rather than arrest them and apparently gets every partner he has killed as well.  Still, most people think of him as the good guy.  There has to be something there that we like or identify with.

I think it’s just the fact that he will always do what he thinks is right.  We all wish we were so confident about what to do that we can just go ahead and do it.  It doesn’t seem to matter that Callahan’s code isn’t legal and under the cold light of reason not particularly moral.  What matters is that it’s not relative.  Dirty Harry knows what has to be done and he’s the one to do it.  If you go against the code you go down.  Zero ambiguity.  Zero guilt.

I can’t really think of an ancient story Archetype that really fits the Rogue Cop.  Arthur’s knights were expected to follow the chivalric code at all times.  A knight that followed some made up code of his own just wasn’t a good guy.  Much of this is modern because of modern social structures of course.  Not just the idea of law enforcement but the idea of civil rights.  We tend to believe in civil rights but we can’t help but be pissed off when those rights protect those we know are bad guys.

So is Inspector Callahan and the Rogue Cop a true Archetype?  Well, what was the last movie you saw where a cop interviewed witnesses, filled out paperwork, got a warrant, gathered evidence, made an arrest (not by himself but with a squad of patrolmen), booked his man, filled out more paperwork, testified in a court of law, and then clocked out and went home?  How many people did Martin Riggs arrest compared to how many people he shot or just broke their necks with his bare hands?  I haven’t seen the last Die Hard movie but in the first three the only thing John Mclane does that even remotely resembles police work is flash his badge and say ‘I’m a cop’.  

The funny thing is real police makes pretty good story.  My wife is a True Crime addict and she got me hooked on The First 48, a show on A&E that follows real homicide detectives on real cases.  Fascinating stuff and real human drama but it takes the fantasy of movies to achieve the archetypal status and Dirty Harry is the gold standard.  

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Palimpsest is Gore Vidal’s first memoir. Early on in the book, he makes the point that this is not an autobiography, but a memoir. Too many autobiographies read like an excuse for the author’s failings and a platform for their supposed triumphs, as though they are getting their two cents in before someone else gives the final accounting. Vidal offers no excuses, even admitting in the beginning that he chose the title, and later realized he had been mispronouncing the word for years, and didn’t fully understand the origin of its meaning.

In Palimpsest he plays with time like a magician, deftly moving from one place to another, never losing the reader, an uncommon fluidity where most memoirs follow a strictly age based progression. There was no prose for prose sake, or lyrics over substance, yet his writing draws the reader in as though you were spending an evening listening to incisively funny repartee. He had me chuckling in the first few pages. Essentially, he’s the guy at a cocktail party you’d most like to spend the evening with.

He has an almost clinical insight into people and it doesn’t hurt that he’s known some of the icons of his age. His slant on Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jackie Onassis (they shared a stepfather) and countless other characters of his time are priceless. There is no lack of dysfunctional family dynamics, either. Though he doesn’t use his upbringing as anything more than a travelogue of how he got where he is. He continues to be the most erudite voice of the anti-establishment. You can catch vintage Vidal on YouTube sparring with William F. Buckley on a sixties talking head show in a game of wordsmanship.

For all his wittiness and fascinating stories, the real value is that his memoirs chronicle how his life as a writer evolved. At a critical juncture early in his career, he decided to go ahead with the publication of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, over the objections of his agent. It contained overt homosexual overtones and true to form, the publishing industry blackballed him for the content. That he chose truth over conformity, and the commercial success that comes with it, was a defining moment. It seems the writers who only give their audience exactly what’s expected end up being trapped by their success.

His decision led to Hollywood and Broadway, experiences that ultimately made up for the early rejection. It is what allowed him the freedom to produce a wide range of work, from Myra Breckenridge (a one finger salute to the entertainment industry), to Visit to a Small Planet, and historical fiction, Lincoln, being his most famous.

Palimpsest is a gift from Vidal.  He shared the essence of who he is with clarity, style and honesty. Isn’t that what art is all about?

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