This post is inspired by an interesting post I read in Writer’s Digest recently about the rules of writing and the terms we hear like kill your darlings, grow a thick skin, write everyday etc and I thought I would comment on a couple of them.

We’ve all heard phrases like kill your darlings often related to the fact we have a tendency to overwrite. As word nerds we all love to play with the narrative and create those lovely expressions that are gonna wow you readers. But over-doing this actually weakens the writing, the real trick is in being able to prune it down to only the best words, where we have too much we actually lose the power of the prose. It’s a little like the over-use of metaphors and similes. One or two really great ones stand out, a whole ton of them and they lose their magic. So even you are a very wordy writer, try not to over-flower so we can’t see the wood for the flowers.

I like to think that while killing the darlings is something to consider, don’t actually kill them, store them away in a bits n bobs file where you might just use them later. Although oddly, the more we write and the better we get, the less we open that file; preferring to allow new darlings to be created.

The other thing we often hear is how we write crappy first drafts. Well, yes maybe there are issues with the plot, the narrative flow and yes it most certainly still needs a lot of work, but it’s just part of the process. Not writing a shitty first draft, but having to think it out as you write. Things always change as you create and it makes more sense to get it written than to repeatedly go back without getting to the end. So see this as part of the process.

What you write in the first draft is vital to the development of the whole. So it isn’t just shitty.

A mess can be fixed. Shit is just waste. And a first draft is never wasted.
—Nancy Kress

What I’m saying is we learn from everything we write, good and bad. Basically just write.

And get good feedback from someone who’s writing you respect. Be prepared to take it on the chin and learn from what people say.

It is true we need thick skin but we must also not be resistant to change and remain open to suggestions in order to grow. How else will you emerge as a butterfly? Take it in but don’t get upset. As I have said many many times on this Blog, rejection is another part of the writing process.  There are the straight out rejections and then there are the good ones. We learn more from those that say why the book wasn’t accepted. But sometimes we reach a place where we’re getting those I don’t quite love you enough rejections, which is close.  You are getting closer.  So as I always say DON’T GIVE UP.

Know the rules well enough to break them.

And learn as you go. You will never stop learning.

Believe…

It's there if you believe it is...

Flickr photo by Alana Elliott"

In “What to do When Your Novel Stalls” (Writer’s Digest, January 2011), John Dufresne revealed that he’d been in my home, at my desk, watching me struggle with my current WIP, The Cat Lady’s Secret. I never saw him, but he must’ve been here. How else could he describe my frustrations so well?

There is no experience quite so humbling and disheartening as the inevitable creative slump that arrives in the middle of writing your novel. It’s the price you pay for your hubris. . . [Y]ou’re starting to panic now because you’ve invested so much time and energy, and you’d hate to see it all go to waste. (It won’t of course, because everything you write today informs everything you will ever write. But that’s no consolation because right now you’re thinking you may never write again.)

Your confidence flags, your resolve weakens. You’re losing faith in your material. You’re intimidated by the magnitude of the undertaking, shamed by your vaulting ambition. What seemed like an exciting and noble endeavor now seems foolish and impossible.

See what I mean? He was here. He witnessed my angst. He understood. And because he offered hope to this despondent woman, he is now my NBF: my New Best Friend.

In the article, he told me to ask myself why I’m bogged down and to write an honest answer. I didn’t have to write it down. I know: once again, I’m solving the problems I’ve presented to my characters before I reach my word count, and that fact paralyzes me. I’m roughly fifteen thousand words from finishing my novel, and thirty thousand words from reaching my goal.

How can a person who loves to talk as much as I do suffer from word count shortage?

I’m at the point where adding any more twists to the novel will cause a major rewrite to set them up. Adding new characters usually helps increase word count, but Cat Lady is already so well populated that another character will add confusion.

About the time I decided to double up on my adverbs and adjectives and toss in pages worth of flowery description, I found John’s article. He offered words of comfort about my first draft: “It will be a failure.”

Of course it will be. It’s a first draft.

Then he encouraged me: “Writers are the ones who don’t let failure stop them.”

Right. I’m a writer. Sometimes I need to be reminded.

Finally, although my problem isn’t one he addressed in his article, he gave me practical advice: Read your manuscript from the beginning and “look for moments there that are begging for embellishment, exploration and resonance, for opportunities that you wrote into the scenes but have yet to exploit.”

Embellish! Exploit! Yes! I can do that! Explore! Add Resonance! Yes, yes, yes!

Although most of Part 1 in the novel is as perfect as I can get it, this Part 2 is definitely rough. I’ve concentrated so much on finishing this thing that I haven’t gone back for any other reason than to see where I left off. There is no doubt in my mind I can find places to fatten up.

So, John, if you see this, accept my heart-felt thanks, and if you send me your address, I’ll mail you your favorite bottle of cheap wine. Better yet, come on out and we’ll clink our glasses together.

All of the books I have read have given me precious insights and new visions towards both what fiction is and as what it could be, but some are ones that I come back to over and over again.

I will not discuss the obvious selections: Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction, Stephen King’s On Writing, Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, and Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down The Bones.  These are all highly recommended books, books any ambitious writer ought to study, but to be fair, they are also either about theory or spiritual attitude. More importantly, they do not focus as deeply on story and story-telling as the selections I have listed, at least not in a way that is both theoretical and also organic.  The short list I compiled below is about some books I’ve been able to use to give me and my students practical guidance as well as a theoretical understanding of what makes story work.

You may notice that most of the books I’ve listed address story-telling far more thoroughly then they address other important issue of craft.  These reflect my personal obstacles and attitudes about writing fiction.  While voice, character, point of view, setting, and style are all truly important elements of the craft, what separates fiction (and screenwriting) from other genres for me is the all important issue of plot.

Plot is the mystery unsolved, and the reason I am often driven again and again to study myth, fable, and fairy tale: to uncover what it is about the human journey that so compels the soul.  Why do mythical and archetypal structures seem to speak to us through millennia?  Why do the same stories and the same heros and heroines appear again and again in muted form through the culture of all peoples?   Plot is what makes the writing of fiction a journey into the fascinating mysteries of the human mind.  My list reflects this belief of mine.

I hope you find this list useful, and also that you might contribute your own favorites.  I have a huge pile of books on the subject that I’ve yet to read, but I will get to them, sooner or later, and I will get to all of your suggestions, too, if you’re kind enough to post them.

From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. Robert Olen Butler.

This is an edited and adapted version of Robert Olen’s Butler’s lectures at the University of Florida about his own journey into the subconscious and his writing process.  Olen subscribes to the notion that stories are born deep in the subconscious, in a place he calls “the white hot center” of our spirit.  He admits that for any writer wishing to write art, journeying to this “white hot center” is uncomfortable, even disturbing on some level.  However, he doesn’t stop at philosophizing about the difficulties of tapping into such a place of deep exploration, but gives invaluable advice for how to deal with the process, and for how to avoid writers’ block.  For one thing, I appreciate the primary importance he gives to dreaming one’s story, outside of writing lines on a page or index card.  Butler points out that for every novel he has ever written, he has taken time, daily, to actually visualize every scene in the story before he even sat down to write the first line. Some of the many pieces of valuable advice that I took out of reading this is Butler’s five ways of rendering emotion.  While I have been using his methods, unknowingly, for some time, had I understood all the subtleties of it when I first started writing, I might have saved myself years of rejection letters. Sure, every writer says you have to write every day, but Butler suggests it is important to a fiction writer not just to write (and dream) every day, but also to write every day using this method.   While he does not state this specifically, it is implicit in the rest of the lecture that fiction writing demands more than just putting thoughts on a page.  Pondering abstractedly about your philosophy of life, even if you spend hours writing it down, won’t help a fiction writer train for her craft. There is more, including a step by step demonstration of how to dive into the subconscious for a story and bring it back to the page.  The book comes with a link to a website where hours of Butler’s seminars were recorded.  This was definitely a great find for me, addressing both a strong theory of fiction, and a practical method for applying it to my own writing.

The Anatomy of Story.  John Truby.

Truby is primarily a screenwriter, so the book, while written for both novelists and screen writers, it tends to skim over certain types of literary writing, for example, what he calls the twentieth century’s “anti-plot” movement.  (He writes about it accurately and respectfully, but he doesn’t give us advice on how to approach this type of writing if we wish to). However I found this book one of the best books that I have ever read in terms of breaking down plot step by step and explaining each element’s role within a structure that involves both plot and character arc.  (If you’re a fiction writer you probably know that plot and character arc are one and the same, but it does serve us to make the distinction when we try to analyze the process).  Truby pays close attention to what Edgar Alan Poe termed the “inner conflict” and its relationship to the outer conflict.  Although Truby makes no mention of Poe’s theory, his explication of the importance of identifying a moral dilemma in the protagonist, and in differentiating it with a psychological need builds on Poe’s premises to create a solid and wholesome theory of character development that, as far as I can see, is truly fool proof and will lead to compelling and textured writing.  Moreover, his step by step break down of the hero’s journey is accurate, as far as I can tell, although it ignores feminine narrative structures. At times the book gets a little bit too prescriptive, betraying the writer’s preference for screen writing and its inflexible and demanding form, but every chapter comes equipped with generous examples from both literature and film, and with an exercise that leads the student through deep analysis of the more elusive elements of writing: character’s reasoning, motivations, psychological processes, emotional life, and more.  Sometimes I think this should be required reading for all advanced fiction classes.

Story.  Robert McKee.

Another screenwriter, and let me be upfront: this is about screenwriting.  All the same, as Robert Olen Butler says, “Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common.”  There is more in common between these two genres than there is not, and as long as you understand the fundamental differences, studying one will enhance and inform the other.  I recently attended a fiction seminar at the awesome Books and Books Cayman Island Writers Conference led by the amazing Ann Hood.  She revealed that she uses one of McKee’s methods outlined in this book, that of emotional polarity within a scene to build tension, and ever since then, I have also begun to implement this method, not just in my writing but also in my classes.  McKee tells us that every scene should land on the exact emotional opposite of where it began.  I have since began to study my favorite short stories and find that each scene must have this important change in order for it to be effective.  There are other things I find immeasurably valuable in McKee’s methods. I loved his explanation of the different types of ironies encountered in plot.  As I am a big fan of Aristotle and of his application of irony and reversal, I found McKee’s classification to be both practical and insightful.  There is certainly much that fiction writers can learn from their brethren on the silver screen.

The Writers’ Journey.  Christopher Vogler.

Another film student turned me on to this book years ago.  To my knowledge this book has been in print for at least three decades.  It is essentially Joseph Cambell’s The Hero of A Thousand Faces, simplified and adapted for writers, primarily, writers of film, but also for writers of novels.  The first chapter alone is worth the purchase of the book, but I really enjoyed Vogler’s thorough exploration of Cambpell’s archetypes and hero figures.  This is a great supplemental read for Truby’s book, because when Truby explains the character net, it is essential to have an understanding of archetypes and their roles in expressing a story.  Since it’s my belief that writers of fiction are writers of myth, exploring the various facets of the human subconscious and its expression in culture (through heros and archetypal characters) is certainly required knowledge for all serious students of fiction.  One could read Campbell’s work, of course, and I recommend it, but if you’re looking for a text to use for your classes or a simple yet thorough and applicable guide for your own writing, this is the book that will strike the best balance between scholarship and practicality.

Extreme Fiction: Fabulists and Formalists.  Robin Hemley and Michael Martone

Up to now I have focused only on books about novel writing, but I also write short stories and like every other interested fiction writer out there, I am sensitive to the shifts that literature is taking in favor of innovative, fabulist, and other forms of experimental fiction.  This book is an anthology, and the stories included, I will admit, are not always my favorite.  Oftentimes innovation becomes a gimmick rather than an aid to narrative, something that I have observed and criticized in this otherwise favored genre of mine within the literary fiction umbrella.  However, the opening essay should be essential reading for any student of fiction, in my opinion.  It explains in terms both simple and thorough the various approaches and terminology assigned to this often misunderstood form of fiction, and it provides ambitious writers a glimpse into the vast landscape of possibilities of this imaginative, fantastical, and often still unexplored genre of ours.

The Art of Fiction.  John Gardner.

I am a fan of John Gardner’s work both as a novelist and as a critic.  His other touted book, On Being a Novelist, is another one of those classics on the required reading list of any aspiring novelist, but this other book has at least one chapter that I think should also be required reading for all students of fiction.  It’s the essay titled “Common Errors,” which discusses with abundant practical and insightful examples where beginning fiction often goes wrong.  The discussion spans everything from subtle shifts in point of view to faulty sentence structures.  Whenever I use this book (particularly, this chapter) in my classes I see the light strike the faces of my students.  We are then able to look at every piece and identify specifically stumbling blocks in the narrative and structure, and methods to address them that are both simple and effective.

The Lie That Tells The Truth.  John Dufresne.

I should say upfront that I’m a student of John Dufresne: I know his methods so well, I have subconsciously repossessed them and claimed them as my own.  By the time he wrote his book, I had already taken many of his classes and participated in his Friday Night Workshop at Florida International University for years, so I was familiar with everything in it.  Nonetheless his applications and methods are for me fundamental to understanding how a piece of fiction is crafted, and for how it should be read.  Dufresne is indisputably a literary writer, and also a great teacher.  His approach to character and plot are entrenched in the understanding that plot is an internal journey, and that every character action is motivated by psychological needs and obstacles.  I still use his methods in my classes for both beginning and advanced students.  This is the book to study for any serious literary writer.

All novels are burdened with the need to make life more interesting than it is. –Wright Morris

A good writer sells out everybody he knows, sooner or later. — Alice McDermott

When a writer is born into a family, that family is doomed. –Czeslaw Milosz

The problem with fiction is that it has to be plausible. That’s not true with non-fiction. — Tome Wolfe

What is remembered is what becomes reality. — Patricia Hampl

We owe respect to the living: to the dead we owe nothing but the truth. — Voltaire

(Of his wife on her deathbed.) I found myself, wihtout being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors — Edouard Manet

True to life become fiction when it perceives more than it observes. — Wright Morris

Everything one invents is true. — Gustave Flaubert

Transformation–taking the raw materials of your life, making small and large changes to turn what you know into fictional material. Transformation gives you power over events–life is disorganized, here you impose order; protects you–no one knows who he is; proves new insights by trying to see if from the point of view of your characters, not the people you knew; give you power over your story. –Kit Reed

This one is all about using people in fiction. It’s good to just have a section devoted to this because personal experience has told me it can be very rewarding or very upsetting. No one needs to go around and ask permission, but it is good to know what someone might see themselves and might want to kick your ass. Of course, the author also mentions the importance of taking your life and making it into a story.

When you use material from your life in your fiction you have the benefit of a familiar setting,; you have incidents or events that will become your scenes; you have characters you know, or you think you know.

Invention is inevitable.

Fiction is telling the truth, not telling the facts.

Most of what happens in our day is mundane. But fiction is not about trivialities.

Memory is a rascal.

He ends off with three exercises. Genealogy, Young Love, and Brush with the Stars. I bet you can figure out what they mean, but you’ll never know what they truly mean without reading this wonderful book.

On to the Quotes!

Wanting to write means, of course, that’s you’re not writing. And wanting to write but not writing will lead to frustration, guilt, and regret.

You have to be willing to fail, to see that you aren’t so half as clever as you thought you were.

Excuses–we’ve got a million of them. In the writing world, however, excuses are irrelevant.

A story is a long conversation between you and the reader.

The first on my list is one I loved the moment I picked up, but when school got tough and I had to plow out a lot of writing, I lost interest in the book, but I just finished a chapter in it and though I don’t do this to non-class books, I took a highlighter and marked any phrases that held meaning to me.

As far as I know, Dufresne hasn’t written a lot of books. He is a college professor and he knows what he’s talking about. His various references to classic and modern writers resonance  with any writer. The quotes are wonderful as are the examples. Sometimes the writing exercises may seem done, but they’re jewels in the writing process. There are some aspects of writing that I am well aware of, but the book reminds me of these while entertaining me and many of his hints about the first sentence hit me hard.

Right now, I’m finishing the book and after that, I’m going to reread the book. After this, I will post some selected highlighted comments that go well out of content along with the quotes.

Isaac looks out at the canyon wall and sees two billion years into the past. He knows this because his father, the geologist, told him so, told him the story of the Grand Canyon from the Vishnu schist there at the bottom to the Kaibab limestone where he is standing now, or will be in, it looks like, another fifteen or twenty minutes. “Once upon a time there were mountains six miles high” the story began. What was it his father had called those rose-colored cliffs? Redstone? Redwall sandstone? Was that it? No, limestone. Redwall limestone. Created by a tropical sea 340 million years ago. Isaac sees a mountain goat and her kid stepping along a narrow ledge across the canyon.

Isaac’s father yells for Isaac to get a move on. Isaac points at his athletic shoes. “My feet, ” he says and he makes a pained expression. His father says, “I told you to wear boots.”

The hiking trip to the Canyon was his father’s idea, a last-minute escape, a final adventure before they head back to their universities, Isaac to finish his dissertation on “Time in a Language Without Tense: Aspectual Markers in Chinese” and his father to teach a seminar on Petroleum Resources and Environmental Problems.

Isaac’s foot slides over loose gravel, and he loses his balance. He falls to his back and slides toward the drop-off. He reaches for a black bush but can’t grab hold. This is absurd and embarrassing, he thinks. He has a second to stop his fall, to save his life, and, of course, he will because this is not a movie. He claws at the scree, jams his foot into the hardpan but gains no purchase. He yells to his father, “Dad, help me!”

His father turns. “Isaac, Isaac, where are you?” And then he sees his son drop and bounce off a ledge twenty feet below the trail, and tumble out into thin air with nothing beneath him for hundreds of feet.

All Isaac can do is hope for the miracle that will interrupt his acceleration into the past. And then, to his relief, he realizes what must have happened. He was knocked out when he struck the ledge, and this is a dream of what would have happened if he hadn’t been so lucky. When he comes to, when he opens his eyes, he’ll see his father and a ranger crouched beside him. This is the falling dream he’s been having all his life, and he always wakes up before he reaches the source of the gravity.

And then his shirt is ripped from his body, and he sees it rise above him and float. He screams to his father or maybe he just opens his mouth. Isaac doesn’t know how he manages it, but he turns to face the canyon floor and tries to flap his arms and kick his legs to slow himself. He can do this. He’s slowing down; he’s sure of it. Maybe he’s caught an updraft. If he can land on his feet, he’ll only break his legs. But his arms and legs don’t move and his writhing only starts him spinning and rolling, and he doesn’t know what’s up or what’s down.

Isaac’s father can’t see his son below, but he does see a man on the rim above. The man is looking at him through a coin-operated telescope. Isaac’s father waves at the man. The man smiles and waves back. The mountain goat watches the amazing flying boy and then bleats at her kid, and they step carefully along the ledge.

***

John Dufresne is the author of two story collections and four novels, most recently Requiem, Mass., and two books on writing fiction, The Lie That Tells a Truth and Is Life Like This? He teaches creative writing at Florida International University. His short story, “The Cross-Eyed Bear” will appear in Best American Mystery Stories 2010.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s just kind of mind-boggling.

Last week, Southern Methodist University announced that they would be shutting down SMU Press, the oldest publishing house in Texas.

“It is with regret that we make the decision to suspend operations of the SMU Press, which has enjoyed a distinguished history of publishing,” Paul Ludden, the University’s provost and vice president for academic affairs said in a fairly disingenuous  statement.

The press, which has three employees and an annual budget of about $400,000, publishes about ten books a year.

There has been a bit of an uproar in protest.

There’s the expected Facebook page and famous writers speaking up.

“Closing SMU Press would be a disastrous decision,” wrote Ann Beattie.

“This a blow to the national literary community,” said John Dufresne.

It goes beyond that.

This is a decision that really goes to the heart of some of the greater problems facing the country, where we have our priorities. I’m not just talking about simple platitudes like housing not bombs or something.

SMU had enough money to successfully court the George W. Bush Presidential Library.

They’ve allowed their athletic department to lose more than $93 million over the past six years.

While SMU’s endowment fell about 25 percent last year to just more than $1 billion, they still have an endowment of JUST MORE THAN $1 BILLION!

They had enough money to pay their president more than $1 million, nearly three times the average salary of a university president.

SMU’s football coach, former football coach, basketball coach, provost, dean of the business school. athletic director were among the employees who had salaries greater than THE ENTIRE BUDGET of SMU Press.

I’m not saying fire any of these people.

But, think about this. If the football coach took a $200,000 pay cut — he would still make more than $1 million — and the basketball coach took a $150,000 pay cut — he would still make $400,000 — than there would only be a need to only come up with $50,000 to save the press.

OR —

The university could take $400,000 from their endowment and still have an endowment of more than $1 billion.

SMU, in its history has produced great literature, including some recent honorees.

I’ve argued before that we need to support small presses and literary magazines and I will do it until I am blue in the face.

In this world of IPads and Kindles and Nooks, we also need to look out for the traditional presses — especially the smaller ones — to help find the talent to create the “content” for people to read on their devices.

The message couldn’t be clearer:

SMU can’t be allowed to kill its press.

Anyway, I finally made a trip to the library last week, and I finished two really swell books: John Dufresne’s collection of short stories Johnny Too Bad and Mark Haddon’s novel A Spot of Bother.  They’ve both written other books, and I’m excited to read more of their work.

Johnny Too Bad was fun because many of the stories were related, about the life of a writer named John (how coincidental) and his very animated dog Spot.  I’m not sure why writers love to write about writers, but it’s very common.  What’s not so common is how Dufresne handled the matter.  Because not only does his protagonist share his name and vocation, but the character’s own fictional protagonist also bears striking resemblance to the character John.  John says in the title story, “I told Dad that Spot was in the book, that he belonged to the central character, a writer, not so unlike myself.  I told him the writer’s father had vision problems, so naturally he assumed the father is him.  I did not tell him that the writer and his father have a problematic relationship.  I did not want my father hurt by his misperception.  Even if I told him now that he’s not the character, he’ll think I’m lying.  Spot’s Spot, after all.  The writer’s a pathetic little scribbler who left his loving wife, after all.”  Ouch.

Dufresne is just as good at the long story as he is at flash fiction, and both types of story are displayed in this collection.  “Close By Me Forever” is a very powerful story about memory and love, and it packs a great twist at the end.  “Based on a True Story” plays with the form and condenses part of the story into a numbered list preceded by, “And then what happens is this.”  As much as I enjoyed Spot’s antics in the stories about John, I think “Died and Gone to Heaven” may have been my favorite story; it’s the kind of story that once you’ve finished, you can almost physically feel the author’s skill in crafting the tightly wound threads of the story.  For starters, the story opens with this magnificent two-page sentence, the kind you have to go back and start over a few times till you pick up on its rhythm.  It’s about an old murder, a family of really despicable people, and a police officer who can’t leave well enough alone.  The last sentences are every bit as beautiful as the first: “And he looked up into the clear night, saw the Milky Way splashed across the sky, and realized how everything in the universe was so far away, and was, he knew, speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.  He sank his hands into the soft clay of the bayou bank, shut his eyes, and held on.”  Another of my favorite lines appeared in “I Will Eat a Piece of the Roof and You Can Eat the Window,” after a funeral: “And while they laughed and drank, they were able, I suppose, to forget that they, too, were dying.”

I haven’t read Haddon’s prize-winning novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but I’ll be picking it up very soon because I loved A Spot of Bother.  It’s about a man named George who finds a lesion on his hip, convinces himself that it’s cancerous, and subsequently develops a debilitating fear of death.  He sees death everywhere, and he suffers panic attacks wherein the floor falls out from underneath him, and he wedges himself between the toilet and the bathtub and softly recites nursery rhymes to himself.  Meanwhile, the rest of his family is falling apart: his wife Jean is having an affair; his daughter Katie is getting married, then not getting married, then getting married again; and his gay son Jamie is desperately trying to win back the love of his life before it’s too late.  Haddon is a marvelous writer, and he makes his characters’ unhappy lives very funny while still poignant.  And poor, dear George.  He must be the most sympathetic character I’ve read in quite a while; you just want to give him a big hug and tell him everything will be okay.

I’m headed out to the library again today.  Hopefully, I’ll find another couple of gems as delightful as these!  Happy reading, all.

This novel is a serial collaborataion of 13 of South Florida’s best writers and was originally written for The Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine.  David Barry writes the first chapter, passes it off to Les Standiford, Paul Levine, Edna Buchanan, James W. Hall, Carolina Hospital, Evelyn Mayerson, Tananarive Due, Brian Antoni, Vicki Hendricks, John Dufresne, Elmore Leonard, and Carl Hiaasen plays clean up in the last chapter.  A few of the authors’ serial characters show up- Buchanan’s Britt Montero, Standiford’s John Deal, and Levine’s Jake Lassiter.

A 102 year old woman rescues a man from the bay and he is in possession of a canister with shocking contents.  The canister is one of a pair, both containing the head of Fidel Castro.  There are chases, murders, confusion, and a multitude of characters, including Jimmy Carter and Fidel Castro.  And there is a very introspective manatee in the bay named Booger, who thinks of the 102 year old grandmother as his ‘ma’. 

This is an interesting experiment, but it is a hot mess of a novel.  There are characters that move in and out of the story with little or no explanation, each author wanting to add something new instead of trying to build on what’s there.  The last chapter where Carl Hiaasen tries to explain everything is pretty funny considering what he had to work with.  It was wacky in a good way, but it was probably best suited to it’s original form, as a weekly magazine installment.

I like books that allow you to lose yourself in them while encouraging emotions and thoughts. Love Warps the Mind A Little does just that.

Similarly to a previous post, I’d like to post a quotation from the novel that juxtaposes lightning to love at first sight.

Dufresne writes,

“It’s [Love at first sight's] the obliterating focus on the beloved and the eloquent shortness of breath. It’s a stroke of lightning, as the French say, a blast of passion.”

How does love at first sight and lightning correlate?

In the French language, love at first sight (le coup de foudre) translates as stroke of lightning in English.

Originally coup de foudre was used to mean any unexpected event similarly to the English saying out of the blue or the expression lightning never strikes twice referring to something that is generally considered improbable.

It’s quite interesting when you think about it.

The book reads, “I read somewhere that you get a warning before you’re hit by lightning. Your hair feels like it’s standing on edge and your skin tingles.”

Is this true?

According to the National Weather Service, it is.

Sometimes there are a few seconds of warning before a lightning strike. Your hair may stand on end, your skin may tingle, light metal objects may vibrate, or you may hear a crackling sound, the National Weather Service says.

I guess this author did his research.