Reading as a Writer: C. L. Moore

Once in a while, I succumb to someone pressing an author and a book on me, urging me to read them because that someone thinks I’d love them as much as he or she does.  Like set-up dates, these rarely end the way the well-intentioned someone imagined.  You’d think I would have learned to graciously decline the proffered book and leave it at that.  But then someone comes along and insists, as the acquaintance did who loaned me Northwest Smith by C. L. Moore.

 

C. L. Moore (Wikipedia)

C. L. Moore has the distinction of being one of the first women to write and publish science fiction and fantasy fiction.  She is especially renowned for her Northwest Smith short stories that she wrote in the 1930′s.  She also wrote a series of fantasy fiction.  The book my acquaintance loaned me was a collection of Northwest Smith stories.

I would give Moore high marks for imagination in describing an alien world, alien beings and creating a strange, foreign situation and place.  She remains in our solar system.  For locations close to her characters, however, she skimps on description, making me long for more.  I wanted to see the inside of the boarding house or hotel or whatever it was where Smith stayed.  I wanted to see more clearly what the “Earthmen camp town” looked like — the buildings, streets, stores, etc.

Northwest Smith has few thoughts and fewer words, and remains two-dimensional despite any challenges he faces.  What really bugged me was Moore’s description of him, especially his “colorless” eyes.  This highlighted her absolutely terrible prose style and writing.  Her descriptions tend to be vague for the most part when a few specific details could reveal character and bring him into focus in a reader’s mind.  For example, rather than colorless, something like “slate-gray eyes so pale they appeared to have no color at all” would have added a fragile stone that could suggest Smith’s weakness for females from any planet but his stoniness emotionally.  As it is, Smith is as colorless a character as his eyes.

In Shambleau, probably Moore’s most famous short story and science fiction horror, she does an excellent job of describing the title character, giving her an eerie creepiness that remains constant through the story.  Why Smith couldn’t see this creepiness makes him implausible to me.  By the end, I would not have been disappointed if the Shambleau had prevailed instead of Smith and his Venusian buddy who barely misses being a deus ex machina.

Moore seemed to think that the mere repetition of something creates suspense, rather than the repetition of something suspenseful.  The needless repetition slowed the pace and annoyed me as a reader.  It also made for melodramatic prose.  This may have worked in the 1930′s, when these stories were first published, but now, they look like padding and the work of an amateur.  For example:

“From deeps of sound sleep he awoke much later.  He awoke suddenly and completely, and with that inner excitement that presages something momentous.  He awoke to brilliant moonlight, turning the room so bright that he could see the scarlet of the girl’s rags…..“

Another example of Moore’s prose:

“Lakkdarol roars by night, as Earthmen’s camp-towns have a way of doing on every planet where Earth’s outposts are, and it was beginning lustily as Smith went down among the awakening lights toward the center of town.  His business there does not concern us.”

Well, why not?  Moore mentions he has business there so why not give the reader an idea of what exactly he does to earn his money?  I also wanted to see more about how Lakkdarol roars by night, where Earth’s outposts are or don’t mention it, and cut “lustily” which says little.  Granted, prose styles change over the years, but other writers of that time and earlier were able to focus their prose more expertly.

Needless to say, I stopped reading halfway through the second story in the collection, wondering why my acquaintance believed I would be as in love with this writer as he was.  As a homage to the Medusa story, Shambleau was interesting and I thought Moore’s description of the Shambleau quite good.  So why did she skimp on everything else in this story?  Clearly C. L. Moore’s writing is not my cup of tea.  I’m afraid I can not recommend it, either.

 

Reading as a Writer: “Imperfect Prayers”

Available at Amazon

Richard Carr’s latest poetry collection, Imperfect Prayers, arrived a couple months ago.  I had just finished reading it when life/health matters interrupted my writing life.  Last night, I  again all at once, and I’m glad I did.  A lot of my original thinking about it remains the same, but I also wondered if Carr hadn’t included a bit subtle humor in some of the poems that I missed the first time around, especially those poems that describe “I” in his/her everyday life.

Reading Imperfect Prayers in one sitting brought to mind reading Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play J.B. when I was in high school.  As is true for MacLeish’s play, there’s a lot of Job in Carr’s Imperfect Prayers.  I was also trying to figure out if Carr’s “God” is only a Christian God or if it is all-inclusive of any belief system that has an omnipotent deity.  I found no clues for all-inclusiveness, so I decided Carr’s God was specifically Christian.  I suspect that it could be applied also to any of the Abrahamic religions, however.  Finally, Carr gave “God” human attributes at times and this bugged me.  I realized that my own beliefs concerning religion, deities, and human life were trying to stamp on Carr’s poetry.  So fair warning, some readers may readily identify with Carr’s subject matter in this collection, but other readers may find themselves at odds with it.  In order to read and enjoy Carr’s poetic images and situations in this collection, I’d urge readers to set aside their own religious beliefs until after they’ve finished reading the collection.  Then it might be interesting (or not) for readers to ask themselves how they relate to the “I” vs. “God” struggle Carr depicts.

Who is “I”?  Usually in Carr’s poetry, the first person pronoun does not refer to him, but encourages the reader to be the “I” as she reads, pulling the reader deeper into the poems.  I think in this collection, Carr includes himself in the “I” at times.  These poems felt far more personal and intimate than the poems in previous collections.  The struggle is between “I” and “God” as “I” tries to understand his relationship with “God.”  Unlike in J.B., Satan does not really enter into the picture.  He remains on the periphery, a character in God’s universe.

Immediately in the first poem, we have God ordering the I/me to “make poems about his creation,” and that creation focuses more on an urban landscape than a rural, on flies but not other insects, fish, animals or humans.  In fact, as the flies “buzz loops in the air,” the I “will fly loops in the sky,” identifying I with flies.  Hmmm, not very high self esteem, but perhaps in comparison to an omnipotent God, it seems like we are all only flies.

In each poem, Carr seems to create an arc that begins with the first line, traverses the middle lines, and concludes with the last line.  I started just reading the first and last lines as if they made all one sentence and this sometimes gave me insight into the rest of the poem.  For example, in Poem 5: “God sympathizes, knowing precisely the origin of evil.”  The I wants to blame God for all the problems and evil in the world, but God knows who’s really responsible.

Richard uses words to create some startling images.  For example, “the mystery of suffering, the protruding bone of it” or “a cat melting into the rain/among tomato plants,” or “hitting the airbag in a hard kiss.”  Then there are times when God seems to become I, e.g. in Poem 35: “God skips work some days, stays home in bed staring at the ceiling,” but then separates again in Poem 36 as I is “at home in my solitude.” There is no outright acknowledgment of the struggle being one of good vs. bad or self vs. self.  My favorite poem in this collection is Poem 52, in which I and his anger become the wind and rain.  I found myself really identifying with this metaphor.

Imperfect Prayers challenges the reader in a more personal and intimate way than Carr’s previous collections.  It’s that kind of poetry collection that can yield insights with each successive reading.  Carr’s images are to savor, his use of English reveals the language’s true power in words.  I highly recommend Imperfect Prayers….

 

 

 

What is Success?

Success?

This question is a lot harder to answer than it looks.  Answers will vary from individual to individual, culture to culture.  In American culture, we tend to define success in terms of the acquisition of money, influence, power and fame.  No one doubts that Bill Gates is successful.  Or Oprah Winfrey.  “The American Dream” has given Americans a goal to work toward for generations and it promises success.  But for writers (artists, in general, also), defining success becomes a mighty wrestle between belief and reality, culture and the personal.

Start with defining a specific goal.  What are the actions needed to achieve that goal?  Each completed action represents success — you finished something! — and a step closer to the goal.  Once you’ve achieved your goal, you’re a success.  This is a very basic definition of success — achieving a goal — and a template.  We do this everyday in one form or another, so we can claim, at the end of the day, that we are a success or have achieved success.

But there’s more.  If we step back and look at the landscape of our lives, we can see that in each area there is the possibility for long-term goals as well as short-term.  Want to get married?  Retire at 55?  Maintain good health and physical fitness?  Graduate from college?  Become CEO of a company?  We can choose, then, to define our success in a different way than the culture does.  Or not.  If consumerism or materialism are not your thing, if you have no desire to make headlines with your personal life or have Bill Clinton’s cell phone number, then success must mean something different to you.  It’s important to find out what it means if you haven’t already.

Statistically (I’m guessing here, but it’s probably a good guess), writers have less of a chance to become blockbuster millionaires than winning the lottery.  And yet, for some novice writers, that is the goal — write a blockbuster and earn millions from it.  The writers who have achieved that goal probably (I’d guess again) didn’t set it as their goal.  They probably just wanted to write good, entertaining stories to be published, read, and enjoyed.

This past week, I was talking with a friend about success.  She had encouraged me years ago to define success for myself as it relates to all the areas of my life.  It helped me to identify goals that I hadn’t even thought of before.  For writing, she suggested that I focus more on short-term goals rather than long-term.  Fame’s siren song doesn’t call to me and I’m not interested in acquiring billions of dollars.  But I was interested in finishing a story, a novel, a screenplay.

However, I realized this week that I would like to write a blockbuster novel.  Why?  So I’d know that people were reading and enjoying the story I’d written.  That’s what success is to me.  I expressed it in an equation: publication + sales = success.  My friend challenged my notion of success — was it about the money (sales)?  Not really.  It’s about the recognition and appreciation.  If people buy my first novel and love it, they’re more likely to buy subsequent novels I write.  I’d love to hear from readers, too.  As a writer, I’m a storyteller, an entertainer, in search of an audience.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t want to earn a good living from my writing.  It would be nice not to worry anymore about how to pay the bills.

So, what is your definition of success as a writer?

Opening the Childhood Box

All writers are both devotees and prisoners of their childhoods….

–Pat Conroy in The Writer June 2012

Pat Conroy refers to fiction writers in the above quote.  As much as we try to escape our childhoods as adults, as writers we need it to reveal to us the great themes of our own lives.  That is, if we care to ferret around to find them in our memories and those of people close to us.  Whether we examine our own lives or not, I believe that our childhoods infuse our fiction.  We can pay attention to it, or we can focus on the more superficial layers of our writing.  And here’s the cherry on top: the writing is the writing whether or not we choose to delve deeper.  At least until some reader starts asking questions….

Credit: Deb Murphy

Some writers, like Pat Conroy, intentionally use images, details, personalities and situations from his childhood as raw material for their stories.  I think To Kill a Mockingbird endures as a great novel because it takes each reader back to her childhood, prods her into remembering and examining either for fun or insight.  Other writers  focus on the psychological or emotional terrain of childhood.  Still others announce adamantly that their fiction is not autobiographical in any way.  I fell into the last category.

By setting the Perceval novels in the near future, I thought I was escaping the past.  One scene inspired from my own childhood landed in the trash after a couple drafts — it didn’t work for what I wanted and it was too close to autobiography.  Determined to make the story total fiction, I weeded out anything that might come from my own life, even remotely.

Then I confronted Evan Quinn’s childhood.  I wanted him to want as an adult to escape the past which of course tenaciously clings to him through memory.  Developing his childhood, what it was like to grow up in a dystopian America, dovetailed nicely with the work I was doing at the time on researching the future.  As a child, Evan had no control over his immediate environment, as well as the larger political and social environments.  I needed to figure out what his family life was like, what his school and social life was like, his friends, his survival strategies, and his aspirations.  All pleasant, challenging and fun.

After I finished, I knew what Evan’s life’s foundation was and the things most important to him.  I did the same kind of work for most of the other characters as needed.  This gave me insight into how they’d interact with Evan.  It also deepened them as characters.  So, I decided that opening the childhood box for characters strengthened characterization and made them more human.

And to my surprise, I began to see themes emerging.  I don’t write to theme because I don’t want to sound preachy or didactic.  It took another 2-3 drafts of the first novel before I could see the themes clearly.  My first thought was, “Uh-oh.  Evan’s not finished here and wants a sequel.”  My next thought was about recognizing the themes as things important tome, not a character in the book.  Suddenly, I faced my own life experiences, my own childhood, and my psychology.

“Gotcha!”

The Perceval series is fiction and not autobiographical.  But I am the one writing the story.  No matter how diligent I am about deleting anything that could be autobiographical, my whole life (to date), my emotions, psychology, experiences, and the things most important to me stand behind the words giving them substance…..