I Finished My Novel in Paris

I started my novel in the year 1999. The first idea was to write a novel about a woman who was pregnant for the first time. I was also pregnant for the first time. This level of imagination was about all I could manage as a newly pregnant person. Before pregnancy, I was always a bit of a live wire. While my first two books are questionable in terms of lasting literary value, no one can say they weren't lively. While pregnant, I was reduced to simple declarative sentences. Most of them started with "I" and ended with "am nauseated" or variations on that theme. I wanted to write about a person making the transition from being a person into being a mother. Mostly all I could manage was to talk about puking. I remember that my character at one point climbed to the top of a ladder and then puked. And that was the conflict in the scene.

Then I had the baby and lost all ability to write about anything that didn't end well. Because I so earnestly wanted the baby to be safe and happy, I could only create fiction in a safe and happy world. Which was boring. And disastrous to the plot. Everyone felt fine, did nice things, and tried to blend in. Instead of writing vomit-related conflict, I wrote no conflict. Which may be therapeutic, but does not make a novel. I still wanted to write about motherhood, but had no ability to get beyond the level of "Motherhood is nice."

My second idea for tackling this material was to write about three sisters and a cul de sac. Babe, the oldest, was unmarried, a rover. Ronnie, the middle one, was married with two children. Kate, the youngest, was married and pregnant for the first time. They were mother, wife, girlfriend -- their characters illustrated the transition that I was trying to unpack, from single girl to mother. Ronnie had bought a house on the cul de sac when she was first married, and now Kate had bought the house next to her. There was one house left and they were trying to get Babe to settle down with her boyfriend and move into it. The novel was going to be called, brilliantly, Cul de Sac. I introduced some conflicts. Someone was sleeping with someone else's husband. I wrote quite a lot of this draft.

Then I got pregnant again. On purpose, even. Goodbye, brain.

My third idea, upon emerging from that second stupor, was that the three women would actually be one woman. My next idea was that the woman would be bald. Other ideas stacked with that one -- that she would have an astronaut husband (thanks Susannah), that she would already have one child (with autism), that her mother would be sick and dying. Everything came together from that point. I staggered, stalled, and sprinted, and when we left for France in summer of 2010, I was within a few thousand words of finishing. I had taken some days off of parenting, I had had help with the children, but mostly I had fought it out in spite of my job as a homeschooling mother -- stealing time between lessons, or usually at 1 am, with the children upstairs asleep.

When we reached Paris at the end of our month-long adventure, I was immediately inspired. I sat down and wrote a thousand words the first night. We were, after all, in Paris. I had read the relevant Hemingway. I had read in fact the guidebook that told me exactly where to go to follow the path that Hemingway took when he wheeled Joyce home in a wheelbarrow after a night out drinking. This is what I'd always had in my head -- a trip to Paris, a literary explosion, my hands on fire, my brain turned to molten ideas. My husband, beautifully compliant after a month of climbing Alps on his bicycle and following the Tour de France, agreed to take the children out in the city so I could work. And I did work. I worked with the floor-to-ceiling balcony windows open behind me on an antique table in a mirrored room. I worked with gritty coffee next to me, and then French wine, and then more coffee. I worked fueled by awesome cheese and some sort of internal engine. I worked so much that I was within one scene of the end of the book, and then I stopped.

I had an idea. To finish my novel, I would go out into the proper neighborhood. I would walk from our swank apartment in the 8th arrondissement down to Pont Alma, Joyce's favorite bridge. There I would stand where he stood, dictating Finnegan's Wake, and I would think very important, excellent thoughts. Then I would take the Metro over to the Left Bank, and I would walk around down there, scuffing my shoes where Gertrude Stein walked, treading the path that Hemingway trod, and then I would wind up with my netbook at Les Deux Magots, where Fitzgerald and Joyce and the rest of them drank, and I would open the netbook and finish the novel, right there, in the midst of it.

It was a plan that did not happen. I could have done it. I was in the right place at the right time. My husband was going to take the children to a movie. However, when it came down to it, I had a breathtaking realization that this scenario would be all wrong. It would have been antithetical to the book I was writing to shed the trappings of my housewife life and try and inhabit some kind of imagined literary nirvana, deny the person I was in trying to emulate something that had nothing to do with me. I wrote my novel about becoming a mother, and I would write the ending as a mother would. It's the only thing that would work.

I did finish the novel in Paris. But I finished it at that dining room table, wearing my old brown shorts, with my hair twisted this way and that, my husband asleep in a room to the left, my children asleep in a room to the right, the window behind me open on the city -- not the city of Gertrude Stein, but the city I was living in right then. Kids, husband, reasonable sandals and all.

How to Query a Literary Magazine

I have a client who writes very tight, literary short stories. He has not been able to place them yet with a literary magazine, however. I asked to see his cover letter so I could critique it for him. The cover letter he was using was so representative of many earnest unpublished authors and so full of typical well-meaning noob mistakes, I thought I would make my critique public. A lot of people struggle with content on a query when they have nothing to say about writing career, previous publications, seemingly nothing to say at all. This letter follows all the rules of writing a query, and yet it's squeaking with awkwardness. It screams "Ignore me; I'm new."

The first step to a successful pitch to a literary journal is to write the best short story or poem you can possibly write. Write, rest, rewrite, rest, edit, line edit, format sensibly, print clearly.

The second step is to do a hell of a lot of research. Wear out your Google searching your target markets. If you can afford it, buy and read the physical publications. You will know within ten pages if your work is a fit for their editorial vision. The best story in the universe will not make it past the front door of a magazine that just doesn't do that type of thing.

The third step is to write a bitchin' query letter, or cover letter, and stick it on top.

Here's the original letter he sent me:

February 1, 2011

Fiction Editor

The Georgia Review

The University of Georgia

Athens, GA 30602-9009

To Whom it May Concern,

Please consider my 1,200-word, previously unpublished manuscript, "[Title Redacted]" for publication at The Georgia Review. I am a previously unpublished writer, but I work with earnest on the craft. This piece is a part of a collection of stories that will one day comprise a novel.

This piece is being simultaneously submitted. I will notify you immediately upon an

acceptance.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely yours,

[Name Redacted]

And here are my critiques:

1. Dude, find out the name of the editor you're addressing. It's not hard to do this research, especially with the internet. Even if you end up addressing it to someone more senior than the person who actually reads their slush, that's okay. It's better than "To Whom it May Concern." That is the kiss of death. For example, look here: http://www.uga.edu/garev/contact.html Out of the staff listed I'd choose David Ingle to query.

2. Don't say you're previously unpublished. The fact that you're not mentioning pub credits tells them that, and you don't need to draw attention to it. You also REALLY don't need to say that this story specifically is previously unpublished. Now you just put the words "previously unpublished" twice in as many sentences. Did you want to add a neon sign over that? ;D

3. Put a little more color into it. Personal color and literary color. You don't have a publishing resume but you can say something about yourself that makes your query sound a little warmer, a little less robotic.

4. Not necessary to say you're simultaneously submitting -- just let them know if it gets accepted elsewhere. Paper and ink literary magazines do not move at a blinding speed -- it will be alright if something good happens somewhere else and you have to withdraw the submission for some reason.

5. It's good to thank the editor, but yours sounds very formal and therefore insincere.

Try this:

February 1, 2011

David Ingle

Assistant Editor

The Georgia Review

The University of Georgia

Athens, GA 30602-9009

Hi David,

Please consider my 1,200-word, story, "[Title Redacted]," for publication at The Georgia Review. It's a Texas story, sparsely told, about a death in the family and also a death out in the yard. I'm a writer living in Mississippi with my wife, dog, and antique car collection.

Thanks for all you do -- I appreciate the time it takes to look this over, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely yours,

[Name Redacted]

I hope my client hits with this new query letter. His writing is great. However, his success in this will depend on his research skills, his ability to direct his work at the right market, and his willingness to exercise the same restraint in his pitch as he is able to pull off in his fiction. Play it cool, play it simple, play it warm but not hysterical, straight but not snippy.

Got any other advice for him? Should he leave out the bit about the antique cars? What's your go-to query line?

Trickle Down Timeline by Cris Mazza

In Trickle Down Timeline, Cris Mazza delivers another smart, abrasive collection of short stories you'll find yourself immersed in as if you were reading a novel. The collection is framed on the scaffolding of the 1980s, one story for each year of the decade. Between and throughout, facts and cultural references are sprinkled like commercials, reminders of other facets of a decade that has been boiled down to neon and gimmicks, excess and Ronald Reagan soundbytes. This is an alternative history, with tidbits like this: "Michael Jackson, who had purchased the entire Beatles music catalogue two years before, attempted to purchase the bones of the Elephant Man." Or this one: "A twelve-day-old baby, born with a cardiac malformation, lived for three weeks with a baboon heart." Anyone who lived through the decade with any level of consciousness will find themselves saying, "Oh, yeah, I remember that." And those who didn't experience it will see another side of a time period most people seem eager to reduce to its cheapest cultural icons. The Rubiks cube. The Delorean. Cheap stuff like that.

The stories are pulsing with Mazza's familiar in-your-face energy, that sort of gritty, at times unattractive realism that refuses to be ignored. This kind of reading is sometimes an intense joy but seldom what you'd call pleasant. It's like watching reality television, in the most grindingly mundane, and profoundly unelevated settings. But the cameras are never revealed, and the characters in all their flawed varieties just reveal themselves mercilessly, into the wide open space of Mazza's literary eye.

Is it voyeurism, that makes reading Cris Mazza so pleasurable? It feels like a guilty secret at times, like a VH1 show writ sublime, where there's beauty in the degradation, transcendence in the small moments of hopelessness, the banal details of everyday life for average characters transformed by the unflinching exactness of the description into something timeless. Until a woman trying to disgust her husband's friend by calling a meatball a bull's testicle becomes a statement on what it means to be female, and a dying dog becomes a symbol of a lifetime goal.

Brilliant, disturbing, disarming, Trickle-Down Timeline is an intimate collection with reverberations across a nation's zeitgeist.

Call Me Mario: What Video Games Teach Us About Writing Novels

Imagine Mario Brothers with no bombs, no carnivorous plants, no death pits, no deadly turtles. Imagine Donkey Kong with no giant monkey at the top of the ladder, throwing down barrels to kill you. Picture a version of Tomb Raider where Lara Croft just walks around picking things up and saying "Ah, nice, another priceless artifact. Better put it in my pack. My, I'm getting hungry." Sounds stultifyingly boring, and yet people write books on this model all the time.

In my work as a book doctor, I frequently run into pretty manuscripts with likeable characters and believable settings but no discernable plot. These books describe one average day after another, or a reasonable sequence of events which unfold without a hitch. The authors weave elaborate emotional landscapes and carefully illustrate relationships, but there's no problem, no conflict, no obstacle. There's no villain.

In trying to explain this issue to my clients, I realized that a book without a problem is like a video game where you can't die. Not very interesting, and why? Because nothing is at stake. If there are no problems, you're just running your character from left to right, enjoying the backgrounds and the soundtrack. And nobody is going to want to do that, without the aid of chemical stimulants.

What else can video games teach us about writing novels? Here are four important lessons:

RISK: Ever since Mario the plumber jumped on and smashed his first magic mushroom, video games have followed a very predictable formula. It's not about emotions or ideas, either. It's not about illuminating a slice of life. Game after game follows the the same exact framework: Character solves a problem by overcoming obstacles. That's it. The character saves the princess, liberates itself from a dungeon, defeats an evil ruler, or finds the missing gem by destroying enemies, avoiding obstacles, and solving puzzles. And the penalty for failure is death. Here's the truth: If you can't die, there's no point. And if there's no villain in a novel, no threat of destruction from some source, whether internal or external, there's no point either.

From Sonic Hedgehog to God of War, there are a million ways to die in a video game. What would Pacman be without ghosts? Just a way to move a yellow disc around a screen in the four cardinal directions? Now, does the character in your literary novel need to be hovering on the brink of extinction every living second? No. But there must always be something at risk, something at stake, some goal that is being pursued and something valuable that can be lost if the goal is not reached. Put a ghost in the maze. Put a wolf in the cave. Otherwise it's just more geometry, more scenery, more background. And nobody's going to pay money to read that.

SCENE: Not only are there big obstacles in video games, big villains like Dr. Neo Cortex, or Eggman, but there are minor obstacles in every scene. Every single scene has a pit with spikes, or an attacking wolf, or a zombie horde, or something. What does this teach us about writing novels? Not only do we need obstacles, we need obstacles all the time. Never write a scene without tension -- real, tangible, physical tension, whether or not it's connected to the overarching plot. Does jumping on penguins relate directly to Crash Bandicoot's overarching plot to collect crystals and save the world? No. Neither does your conflict in every scene have to relate directly to your main plot arc. But it must be there.

Somebody's cold. There's a storm coming. Characters fight over where to sit at the movies. A lightbulb is burnt out. It's hard, rowing the boat. Time is running out. The soup is too salty. I challenge you to go through your novel right now, and look at every scene you've written, and think, "How could I improve this with a piranha plant? Or a pit of spikes? Or a rogue sniper?" It doesn't have to be Dahlia Gillespie in every scene. But it should be at least a storm trooper or two. There is never a scene in a video game where a character takes a walk in the woods and nothing memorable happens. There shouldn't be one in your novel either.

CHARACTER MOTIVATION: A character in a video game never wakes up in the morning wondering what to do. Characters in novels I have recently read indulge in peaceful reveries over morning coffees, wondering exactly what they should do, where they should go, what projects they should take on. This is not interesting to read. A character in a video game knows exactly what he has to do both long term and short term, including staying out of the way of that fire-breathing minotaur, unlocking that gate, and of course saving the world. Some games actually have a "Quest Log" or a blinking X on a map, or some other kind of visual/verbal reminder of exactly what the character is supposed to be accomplishing. Every one of these guys on the right has a numbered to-do list and none of the entries on the list are "Think about myself" or "Go about my usual activities." Accounts of people's usual activities are boring as dirt, my friend. Unless I am your grandmother or you are paying me to read it, I won't.

PACING: Most video games still follow the same plot structure the earliest ones did. You play a few levels fighting your way through minor bad guys, and then you play a boss (a major monster/bad guy). You play a few more levels fighting through bad guys who are a little bigger, and then you fight a bigger boss. Repeat until you get to the boss at the end of the game, who is the Mother Brain, or Diablo, or Sarah Kerrigan Hive Brain, or whatever. This same structure works in novels, and if you look at any "how to write" book you'll see something like this:



What video games teach us about this plot structure is that as the bosses get bigger the sword gets bigger, the spells get better, the armor gets more effective. As your character ascends the "rising action" toward the climax, he or she is changing shape, redefined by the course he has taken, affected by the scenes he has been through, the obstacles he has overcome. In many games (and novels), while the action intensifies, the situation seems to get worse and worse and worse as you approach that epicenter of awfulness, where the ultimate battle takes place between you and the ultimate bad guy. What video games show us overtly that novels also have to achieve is the transformation of the character that allows the climax to make sense, the fight to be won by that same character that was so feeble and feckless in scene one. The character has to change, from start to finish. in a video game, you can see it happening -- a +20 sword of smiting, a thousand power-ups, a flame thrower. In novels, it has to happen on the inside, but it's just as important.

Of course there are ways in which novels transcend the formulaic machinations of video games. But if you are looking for basics, they're all there, even in the very first Mario Brothers: an initiating incident, a problem, the fights, the obstacles, the villains, the rising action, the climax, and the denouement. Try it out: stand your novel up for comparison with your favorite video game, and see if your character needs a princess to rescue, a gorilla to fight, or maybe if more magic mushrooms are in order.