Celtic celebration of Samhain, or Halloween, where a door opens briefly to the other world.

Perhaps one of the most profound mysteries we are confronted with might be simply stated as "why is there something instead of nothing?"  Countless philosophers, theologians, and scientists have addressed this question, some from the seemingly unprovable first cause principle--a prime mover, or God.  Others, most often the scientists, are apt to point out we just are not there yet, but look how far we've already come in understanding our universe.  We can even demonstrate all that exists today, starting from a distant Big Bang event, which happened some 14 billion years ago, and the complete, scientific answer is just around the corner.

Well, since this is a fiction writer's blog we are hesitant to delve too deeply into the philosophical or rhetorical arguments that support either camp.  However,  might we sometimes ponder about what view of God's existence was held by certain characters in our reading?  If the author had had an opportunity to seamlessly integrate a spiritual viewpoint in the fiction, might it have given even greater depth, some flesh and bones, to the character, and the choices he makes in the story?

Some of this thought process springs from the reading of The March, by E. L. Doctorow.  The historical fiction covers the devastating Civil War march through the southern heartland, by General William Tecumseh Sherman.  Sherman's army of about 60,000 Union soldiers carried out a scorched earth campaign through Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, as the war neared a close and a collapse of the Confederacy.  Like many, if not most, soldiers in either army, it seems safe to assume from writings of that era that the existential view of the combatants was Christian, fundamental Protestantism.  However, most of the officers of that conflict were trained at West Point Academy, which would have had a tradition from the Founding Fathers of the U.S. for a belief in God, but not necessarily in a dogma of any established religion.  And so the concepts of sin, resurrection, and eternal life in heaven, may not have been the uniform view of officers from the Academy.  It was rewarding to read the following, given as internal dialogue of Gen. Sherman before the battle of Savannah:

But these troops, too, who have battled and eaten and drunk and fallen asleep with some justifiable self-satisfaction: what is their imagination of death who can lie down with it?  They are no more appreciative of its meaning than I...

In this war among the states, why should the reason for the fighting count for anything?  For if death doesn't matter, why should life matter?
But of course I can't believe this or I will lose my mind.  Willie, my son Willie, oh my son, my son, shall I say his life didn't matter to me?  And the thought of his body lying in its grave terrifies me no less to think he is not imprisoned in his dreams as he is in his coffin.  It is insupportable, in any event.
It is in fear of my own death, whatever it is, that I would wrest immortality from the killing war I wage.  I would live forever down the generations.
And so the world in its beliefs snaps back into place.  Yes.  There is now Savannah to see to.  I will invest it and call for its surrender.  I have a cause.  I have a command.  And what I do I do well.  And, God help me, but I am thrilled to be praised by my peers and revered by my countrymen.  There are men and nations, there is right and wrong.  There is this Union.  And it must not fall.
Sherman drank off his wine and flung the cup over the entrenchment.  He lurched to his feet and peered every which way in the moonlight.  But where is my drummer boy? he said.

 And where else might a writer also go to study a moving portrayal of the metaphysical views of a major literary character in American literature: perhaps Moby Dick, by Herman Melville:

"What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new-mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths—Starbuck!"
But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Ahab, too, is of an earlier era when fundamental Protestantism was the rule of the land, though his First Mate, Starbuck, finds Ahab to be of a frighteningly blasphemous nature.  Note the ornate dialect, almost as if reading from the King James bible, and which makes the passage doubly dramatic.

So far, the discussion relates only to how a central character struggles to express some understanding of a God-based meaning of life, usually falling somewhere within the tenets of written Scriptures of three major monotheistic religions, and on reflections of the character's own life experiences.  A big hurdle is that, however inspired the Scriptures may have been, they were written about two thousand years ago and by men of uncertain erudition.  Since then, vast amounts of human learning and experience has occurred, but religious dogma, once established, changes only at glacial speed.  It might be refreshing to have a few characters express new visions of what a God-based vision of life is for them, where some rational account is taken of the exponential growth of experience and knowledge gained in that two millenniums.

The strange perplexities of quantum mechanics comes to mind as a potential backdrop for new, innovative fiction.  A recent NY Times article discusses ongoing confirmations for a proof of entanglement theory in subatomic physics.  In essence, subatomic particles, like electrons and photons, have an infinite but measurable range of properties, such as velocity, location, and spin.  However, as soon as a measurement is made of a property in one particle of any entangled pair,  the entire range of potential properties collapses into finite, correlated values in each of the particles.  Experiments demonstrate that this happens no matter the distance  introduced between the particles, presumably happening for a distance even  to the far side of our universe.  Einstein did not like the idea, and he and other major scientists fought it.  There was 'the finger of God' aspect in it for them.  Nevertheless, the theoretical underpinnings and the experimental data have continued to hold up through today.

What new kind of characterization of God might this prompt in literary fiction writing?  Perhaps it might lead to concepts far more sophisticated than the anthropomorphic characterization we presently are constrained with in our stories.  

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A new book on Vladimir Nabokov was published recently, Nabokov in America--on the road to Lolita, by Robert Roper.  Reading it gave occasion to reflect on Nabokov's writing of Lolita, one of the most widely known novels in contemporary American literature.  Lolita is the story of a middle-aged man who pursues an obsessive love relationship with a twelve-year old girl, a stunningly controversial theme for mainstream literature at the time.  Early editions came out in Europe in the mid-fifties, and by 1958, a first edition in America.  Many of Nabokov's academic circle and some editors warned him it would not be well received; nonetheless, it proved a literary and financial success.

Although this first-person narrative seemed moderately engaging, it did not exert as powerful an influence as some critics have ascribed to it.  Humbert is a unique, sophisticated though demented, character, who is also a blundering assassin.  The reader may find some sympathy for his character, but it gets harder and harder to sustain as Humbert reveals his near murder of Lolita's mother, and toward the end his actual murder of a rival for Lolita's favors.  As for Lolita, she remains almost a cipher to the end, regarding her inner emotions or hopes, or the level of comprehension she may have regarding the two men who dominate her life.

In contrast, the third-person limited, simple but powerful novella length Member Of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers, 1946, tells the story of another twelve-year old girl coming into a growing awareness of an inner, vaguely sensual nature, a coming-of-age anxiety, which eventually leads her into a harrowing, near-rape experience with a drunken serviceman in her hometown.

The first-person narrative of Humbert doesn't really allow us to reach into the consciousness of Lolita, and how could we believe much of what this demented person tells us about Lolita, anyhow?  We can observe how Lolita physically acts in various scenes--sometimes she initiates the intimacies--but that doesn't help us to know her very deeply or on what level we can sympathize with her.

In Member, the writer easily moves us into and out of the consciousness of the girl, Frankie, without the many constraints and prejudices potentially imposed on a first-person narrator.  In consequence, we get to know Frankie more deeply
than her counterpart Lolita, and become more moved by her story.

No doubt there were many considerations Nabokov weighed in choosing to write his story as a first-person narrative, including the writing strategies of a rambling journey across the American landscape of sterile motels, a chance for him to use stream-of-consciousness Joycean dialog, chances for literary allusions, and other perks that appealed to his imaginative and writing powers.  His story was well received by many other readers.

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Monks and Scribes Guild Seeks Injunction Against New Self-Publisher, Gutenberg

Recently we've discussed some of the attractions that no-cost self-publishing providers offer to book writers.  Amazon's KDP for e-books, and CreateSpace for printed books, were the focus of our earlier discussions, though there are also other providers.  I published a Young Adult novel, Leaving Major Tela, in both formats with these providers, and found it a generally interesting and encouraging experience.  Now, another new development has arrived: reader-powered publishing.

It reminds one of how the music industry's decades-long, rigid control of who gets to have their music made available to the public, and how much it should cost, crumbled with the arrival of internet alternatives.  Some, like pirating, were not valid alternatives, but others like You Tube gave artists a chance to gain an audience, and revenues, from a large, potential fan base without going through the major labels.  Here's how things have evolved in a related way for book publishing.

Legacy publishers are the long-serving, traditional publishers for the book industry.  Over time, many of these publishers and their imprints have been acquired and merged into a fewer number of mega-corporations.  The modern business practices and required profit margins imposed by the mega-corporations on their new publishing divisions have led to smaller editorial staff to acquire new manuscripts, guide them through the publication process, and conduct the marketing program.  Since they have trimmed their work force to far fewer skilled editorial staff to do this work, the initial acquisition process has largely been farmed out to private, literary agents, who now act as the industry's first-line gatekeepers--at no cost to the mega-corporation.

Gatekeepers--there appear to be many literary agents available to do this job, but they all must compete to sell to the same mega-corporations.  The marketability of any manuscript may depend on genres and themes that are currently in vogue, as researched by the mega-corporations, and a new writer working with a theme in any other area has difficulties getting past the gatekeepers.  Agents, without a sufficient number of well-known writers contributing material to them, may choose to resort to passing along part of their overhead and operating costs to their hopeful, new writers--an increased price of admission for the writer.

The mega-corporations also depend to a much greater extent now on enlisting the free services of authors in their marketing campaigns, such as making book-signing tours.  Some authors may relish this, others may not.

The early business models of the new, self-publishing providers seem designed to give authors greater access to getting their book produced in e-book or printed versions, with minimal gatekeeping hurdles, and at essentially no cost to the author.  However, there has been little marketing followup by the self-publishing provider, aside from displaying an attractive webpage wherein the book description and its contents may be sampled online by the prospective reader, and which provides the reader an opportunity to click on the ordering button.  But how to coax the reader to find that page?  Providing links on your own blogging pages, or getting the book reviewed by other bloggers, are typical author strategies.  An author can also make his book more attractive to the casual web surfer by publicizing favorable reviews from prominent readers' websites, like ReadersFavorites.com, or GoodReads.com.    Such marketing is hard, and requires a degree of luck to get a following, but it can be done in a writer's available time, and from his own office.

The newest business model of "reader-powered" publishing" is the (Amazon) Kindle Scout venture.  In this model:

Authors who want to get their books published submit to Kindle Scout and accept the Submission & Publishing Agreement. The first pages (about 5,000 words) from each book are posted on the Kindle Scout website for a 30-day scouting period where readers can nominate up to three books at a time. The more nominations a book receives, the more likely it gets discovered by the Kindle Scout team. If selected, the book will be published by Kindle Press and all the readers who nominated the book will receive an early, free copy and be invited to leave reviews. 

When an author's book is selected by this process,  Kindle Press offers a $1,500 advance and 50% e-book royalties.   Kindle Press books will be enrolled and earn royalties for participation in the Kindle Owners' Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited, as well as be eligible for targeted email campaigns and promotions.  The advance and e-book royalties seem acceptable, but the proposed Lending Library and Kindle Unlimited compensation is not specifically given.  In the past my opinion of those programs in the earlier (and ongoing) business model has been they provide library content to serve as free perks to attract subscription-based customer programs, but provide little or no compensation to the writers.

I think I might like to submit a manuscript to Kindle Scout, and if so, would report more on the experience later.

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Begin -- and find the personality

Last week one of our leading authors of fiction died--E. L. Doctorow.  He was noted for creating fiction in a historical setting and mingling real persons of the period along with his fictional characters.  For example, in his novel, Ragtime, he has a fictional episode with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, sharing a ride at Coney Island.  NPR aired an earlier radio interview with Doctorow in which he said he preferred to think of such writing as 'national' fiction, instead of historical fiction.  Perhaps because he veers more widely from the known historical script for the characters and period, though he captures the true characters and place settings of the era all the same.

In the radio interview, Doctorow discussed his writing of Billy Bathgate.  He had spent a lot of time thinking out the character of Billy and the elements of plot and motif, but was having a difficult time getting started with the actual writing.  It wasn't until he wrote out the first line of Billy himself telling us who he was, that Doctorow knew where he was heading and what Billy was to be about.  From there on it was a process of learning from his characters what had to follow, and how best to get there.  The method strongly suggests a process of listening to some inner muse, or the author's subconscious, to commune with the characters in writing the most authentic, compelling fiction.

This process is at the other end of a writing spectrum for starting a work of fiction, wherein it has been suggested to first develop a written outline of the novel before beginning to write, and maybe even a preliminary storyboard (a graphic, sequential display of the principal plot elements, as was discussed in an earlier post.)

The hazard of starting a new work without a well developed outline can lead beginning writers to "spaghetti-ing,"  a term coined by Jon Franklin, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, in his book, Writing for Story.  Franklin's book is honed toward creative non-fiction writers, but he stresses his advice is meant as well for fiction writers, too.  His point being that as any story moves along, more and more complications can arise; precedents that have been established seem to be falling by the wayside; motivations seem to be clashing; and so, the flow "is taking on the consistency of horse-hoof glue."  Seems like an apt description for a manuscript in trouble, nonetheless, one can allow that a writer as gifted as Doctorow may avoid such calamities, even without an outline, by being truly in communion with the characters, and practiced enough to consult his muse at key points about where the ongoing plot may be leading.  I've usually been a follower of Franklin's advice, but I think I might have written enough over the years to dare taking Doctorow's approach, even if just occasionally.  It certainly seems a bit more exciting and perhaps more creative--in skilled hands.

So, we have Doctorow's concrete example of how he began a specific, highly acclaimed novel (which led to a movie of the same name, featuring Dustin Hoffman); Doctorow had his character tell us who he was and what he was about.  This also presented an early opportunity to establish a unique voice for Billy, an eventual 'must' for any character in a compelling piece of literature.

  Another often used competing motif is to start with a description of time and place setting for the story.  The thought being these are principal screening criteria for many readers trying to decide whether to go any further before choosing a book.  Recalling another frequent advisory, there are arguably only three to five pages to capture a reader, agent, or editor.  Although place can indeed be an important element in a story, almost as compelling in stature so as to be a 'character' in itself, this choice might also easily devolve into some static, overly wrought descriptive language for opening a story.

 A closing thought on choosing a beginning motif is to consider the use of in medias res (into the middle of a narrative, into the midst of things.)  It might also provide a good opportunity for incorporating voice and place setting together, and right up front.  Select some dramatic scene that was visualized for later in the story and bring it forward, perhaps a scene that shows the principal character in action and speaking in his own, unique voice.  Keep in mind, three-to-five pages, at most, before your reader might, perchance, add the book to his cart and proceed to checkout. 

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Gaelwriter, 1990, on wilderness hike in Sweetwater Mountains, CA

One of the universal themes in fiction writing is "leaving." Our main character has been left by another, or he/she has left someone else.  The event, whether it be a death, divorce, abandonment, or dismissal, typically sets off a powerful series of predictable emotional grief stages, which might be exploited by the writer in plotting an arc for a novel.  These stages are variously described in the literature (esp. E. Kubler-Ross's On Death and Dying) as including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  Some studies have suggested adding a couple more stages, but Kubler-Ross' basic five will do for our discussion.


A recently published book, Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, provides a vivid example of writing a story with a theme of leaving (Wild is actually a memoir).  Like her mom, somewhat independent and venturesome as a young woman, and strongly attached to her mother, Cheryl is stunned when her still early-forties mom is diagnosed with inoperable cancer. At the time, the mom, with her second husband, and Cheryl, and two younger siblings are living in comfortable but spartan, homestead-like conditions in a wooded area of Minnesota.  


There is the first stage of the leaving theme, where Cheryl angrily denies the likelihood of her mother dying, and vents her anger toward the medical staff, as well as toward her siblings, for failing to meet her expectations to support their mother.  Then, as things look very bleak, the inevitable bargaining with God, and more anger when it seems God will not respond.  A sort of depression follows the mom's death, as Cheryl, married just a couple of years earlier at nineteen, plummets into a long period of risky and sordid behavior, involving random, extra-marital sex, drinking, and drugs.  She was determined to ruin her own marriage, and does, and goes on to wallow in depression.  During her spiral down, she happens to read a guide book for hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, a very long trail that traverses desert and mountains across California, Oregon, and Washington, to Canada.  Although never having done anything like this trek, she's had a very woodsy upbringing, and feels this could be a sort of redemptive journey for herself.

From the very beginning, when she starts out alone and with a backpack she can barely lift, at first hiking only six or seven miles a day, she has some mesmerizing adventures and encounters on her epic three months, eleven-hundred mile long journey along that part of the PCT reaching from the Mojave Desert in California to the Bridge of the Gods at the Washington state border.   Refusing to quit through all the adversities and fearful encounters along the PCT, Cheryl succeeds in finding her way through her final stages of grief following her mother's departure--to a genuine acceptance of herself.

A really engrossing, well-written memoir.  Reminded me a bit, just a bit, of my own, much shorter wilderness hiikes, though mine also had a strenuous element of total fasting, just water during a special, four-day "Vision Quest" segment on each of those trips.  The three trips, all in California wilderness areas, included Sweetwater Mountains, Inyo Mountains, and Death Valley.  The photo above harkens back more years than one remembers easily.

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Backstory

We sometimes begin our stories in medias res, in the midst of things, with no preamble as to who these characters are, or how this situation developed.  It's often a good strategy, and can help capture a reader in the crucial early pages of a book.

A competing strategy for a writer is to first spend some time characterizing the protagonist(s), the principal problem(s) he faces, and the obstacles or opponents he must overcome.  In this strategy, a tendency exists for the writer to load the development of a story with too much detail, before a reader might even have had a chance to become invested in the characters or the problem of the story.

Depending on our chosen writing strategy, if we need to reveal some important facet of the character's life, or the development of the problem, before the time of the narrative, i.e., a backstory, the writer will often resort to a 'flashback.'  The flashback can be as short as a few sentences, or it might encompass an entire chapter embedded within the narrative of the current story.  Regardless, an effective flashback can be difficult to use without disturbing the 'fictional dream' (John Gardner, The Art of Fiction) for the reader, and possibly losing our reader.

It was interesting to note how how author Marilynne Robinson addressed the absence of any backstory for an otherwise quite interesting character, Lila, who appeared in Gilead, her 2005 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  Lila was an intriguing young woman who appeared out of nowhere to marry a much older preacher in this spare, beautifully written story set in the mid-ninteenth century Iowa plains.

Robinson devoted a subsequent novel, Lila, to explain this unique woman.  I'm in the middle of reading it, and a confluence of yesterdays's life drawing session, see my watercolor sketch above, and this week's evening readings of Lila, gave rise to the musings about a use of backstory in fiction.  I hope it's been interesting.

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Modern Vampire

The classic story of Dracula, by Bram Stoker, originally published in 1887, has had a long, and continuing run with readers of fiction--or was it even fiction?  In the 2008 special edition by W. W. Norton, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman, and annotated by Leslie S. Klinger, we read in the preface by Klinger:

My principal aim...has been to restore a sense of wonder, excitement, and sheer fun to this great work.  To that end, perhaps for the first time, I examine Stoker's published compilation of letters, journals, and recordings as Stoker wished: I employ a gentle fiction here, as I did in The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, that the events described in Dracula "really took place" and that the work presents the recollections of real persons, whom Stoker has renamed and whose papers (termed the "Harker Papers" in my notes) he has recast, ostensibly to conceal their identities.

As Stoker wished.  What did that entire sentence above actually mean?

I have been reading this book as the Feb - April quarterly selection of a Goodreads-Ireland discussion group.   I saw the Bela Lugosi movie many years ago, and have been more than a little surprised by the popular interest in all things 'vampire' over the past decade--Anne Rice's books, TV series like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," lots of YA novels, etc.  However, I had not previously been drawn to read anything in the genre.  Once I decided to read this volume, I just glossed over the preface and introduction and waded into Stoker's originally published manuscript.  I liked the writing and the story quite well, and at first I mostly ignored the numerous annotations made by Klinger on almost every page.  The story flowed well and was quite mysterious.  However, as the plot unfolded through the Transylvania region, I began referring to the annotations, many of them quite informative, but kept noticing earnest arguments for and against the veracity of certain events and geography.  It began to seem like Klinger was taking care to point out things that did not match some real, but little known history of the vampire, Dracula.  

As the story progresses, and Dracula makes his way to England, his depredations become more ghoulish.  Klinger's notes begin to compare the attacks of the vampire, and the countering strategies employed by the four men and one woman opposing Dracula, contrasted with previously known folklore, or testaments as to the powers and habits of vampires. The reader begins to be seduced into believing there might be a quasi-historical foundation for vampirism.  However, the 'fictional dream' state necessary to sustain good fiction suffers somewhat whenever the reader's attention is drawn from the flow and suspense of the storyline to check on what Klinger has to say about events.  Sometimes what he has to say has a strong rational skepticism--like when Professor Van Helsing makes on-the-spot transfusions of blood to one of Dracula's victims on three separate mornings, using different volunteer donors each time from among the men.  Klinger remarks how fortunate that these transfusions were all successful:

Truly remarkable doctoring.  Although the science of blood transfusing was still in its infancy, there was some understanding that compatibility of donor and recipient was important.  Having transfused Lucy twice successfully (by blind luck), Van Helsing rolls the dice a third time, risking serious problems, rather than fall back on a tested donor.

 Klinger's point seems valid, but it seems unlikely that the "blind luck" aspect would otherwise have jumped out at the reader enough to disrupt a continuity of the 'fictional dream'.  Other critical annotations might question distances traveled in elapsed time periods, conflicting dates of diary entries, etc., unethical legal behavior of the solicitor, Jonathan Harker, credulousness of Professor Van Helsing, criticisms of Helsing's dialect (I disliked it, too) etc.  However, many such items were not likely to cause the reader too much difficulty in staying with the story. There were only a few items pointing out an inconsistency in the powers available to the vampire which might have given me some pause even without the annotation.

I liked the overall story line and wished I'd read it through completely before looking at any annotations.  However, once I had discovered the annotations referring repeatedly to differences or agreements with the "Harker Papers," which I'd been alerted to in Klinger's preface before starting the story, I felt I needed to stay aware of how they fit into the scheme of things.  At the end, however, I realized the "Harker Papers" were a fictional construct of Klinger.  He wanted to suggest that the events of Dracula really took place, and that this was "as Stoker wished."

The actual documentation left by Stoker for his conceptualization and writing of the Dracula novel are a collection of Notes, prepared circa 1890-1896, and held by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and an interim manuscript prepared sometime prior to the published version of 1897.  The interim manuscript is currently held by a private owner, Mr. Paul G. Allen.  Klinger had reviewed all of these documents for the annotated volume published by Norton.  It appears the "Harker Papers" are only a terminology used by him for interviews we are to presume were made by Stoker with real people, and who were involved in real events described in Dracula.  Klinger suggests that the existing Notes were subsequently prepared from those interviews, after changing names to protect identities of the real people.  An original set of "Harker Papers" predating Stoker's Notes are thus Klinger's "gentle fiction."

The idea of the interviews suggested by Klinger are not so far-fetched, however. The creative process followed by Bram Stoker employs typical elements that some, if not most, writers might consider in developing such a novel.  The concept is the usual first step, followed perhaps by an outline. Not all writers will employ the outline, preferring to give the first draft free rein without any such constraint. However, before starting a first draft, some writers will conduct a written interview, as if it actually happened, with one or more of their main characters.  Such a process can help a writer find a unique 'voice' and personality for a character, and how they might be disposed to act, given the tensions anticipated in playing out the concept of the story.  Thus, the idea proposed by Klinger that a collection of interviews of real people by Stoker actually fits as a conceivable step in the writing of Dracula.

It is recommended to read the story through at least once without reference to the annotations, to enjoy the full mystery and atmosphere of a compelling story, and then enjoy reading it again with reference to the annotations by Klinger.  Many are rich in content, others perhaps a little carping, but writers will appreciate both Stoker's, and Klinger's, feats of imagination; first in the creation, and secondly in heightening, the mystery of Dracula.

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Fand, Celtic Goddess of the Sea, soaking up the rays

Dialect, "a particular form of a language specific to a certain region or group" as one dictionary has it,  can be an alluring facet for writing a fictional work.  It can lend an air of greater embedment in the unfolding of a tale, an immediacy of being among, or of the characters, instead of hearing a more grammatical narrator speaking in his own voice to give a report of dialog between story characters--which is effectively a translation of their dialect, and perhaps, as translations do, loses some of the native emotive content.

A character in a short story I wrote some years ago was a young, partially-disabled vet, working on a produce farm alongside migrant farm workers from out-of-state.  They were black, and he was white.  The migrants had a rich, rural southern, dialect, and the vet had a northern, lower working class, dialect.  A lot of the story included raucous episodes the migrant workers lied and joked about during their long hours of creeping forward on the soil beds, harvesting the vegetables as they went.  I wrote the story using a voice and idioms of other farm migrants I had worked alongside, part-time, for several years as a teenager.  I then rewrote the story in a third-person limited POV, using proper, grammatical diction.  I thought the dialect version seemed richer, but they're still just drafts.

I was thinking about the pros and cons of using dialect as I read Foreign Gods, Inc., by Oke Ndibe, a Nigerian-born writer who also teaches African and African Diaspora literatures here in the US.  The theme of the story involves a Nigerian immigrant to the US who earned an economics degree here, but had been unsuccessful in landing a job in his field.  After hearing more than enough criticisms of his accent, Ike has given up pursuing that career path, and has been driving a taxi for thirteen years.  Reading an article about a dealer in foreign gods in his resident city of NY, he visits the establishment, Foreign Gods, Inc.  He proposes to sell them an ancient war deity from his village in Nigeria, but the dealer is reluctant to estimate any potential value until he can inspect the actual piece, and sees some documents or publications attesting to the provenance of the deity.  Ike borrows from friends and maxes out his credit card to make the trip back to his village in Nigeria.

A major part of the story following includes a Nigerian dialect, incorporating a sort of local, pidgin English.  Often it results in very humorous mashups of Nigerian and American diction.  In the story, Ike has neglected for some time, because of a gambling addiction developed back in the US, to send any money for his mother and sister.  Now he's come back to rob the village of their deity, Ngene. Wouldn't matter to the mother and sister, since they, with a large portion of the village, have fallen for the new allure of the Christian gospel as promulgated by a slick, duplicitous local minister.  He had viewed Ike as a probable easy American mark for $50K to build him a new church.  There's a comical, if a little unsettling, bible belt preacher vs. smug religious cynic sort of opera going on here, but it holds together well enough.  The tension created by Ike's need to purloin the deity from a sort of Elk's Lodge temple, presided over by Ngene's high priest, Ike's beloved uncle, is almost palpably painful.

I would say that Ndibe has written a pretty good story, but I found his extensive use of such an idiosyncratic dialect wore me down a bit in the reading.

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Second Person Point-of-View  (archaic)

Perhaps it is getting to be the season to consider writing fiction in second person point-of-view (POV-2).  Our last exploration of POV-2 was October, 2014, and a new article on the topic has just come out in the February issue of Writer's Chronicle, by James Chesbro, titled: "Notes to You--Second Person in Creative Nonfiction."  Chesbro's examples are taken from essay and memoir writers, but the techniques will be the same for fiction writers.  His article is sometimes a bit complex and difficult to follow, but can further an understanding of the effects in using POV-2.  

In many, perhaps most, cases, the persona or real identity of the protagonist addressed by the "you" of POV-2 is actually the narrator of the story.  For example, in the case of a memoir the person "you" addresses is often the narrator himself at some earlier age.  However, intermittently, and sometimes in the same paragraph, the "you" being addressed may be the reader.  This slipperiness might be used to good effect in conflating the tensions felt by the protagonist with those felt by the reader.  When the reader is cast in the role of "you," he or she becomes more intimately associated with the protagonist.  He or she becomes the protagonist.  

Let's look at an example given by Chesbro, from the essay, "Swimming With Canoes," by John McPhee:

The canoe rocks, slaps the lake, moves forward.  Sooner or later, you lose your balance and fall into the water, because the gunwales are slender rails and the stern deck is somewhat smaller than a pennant.  From waters deeper than you were tall, you climbed back into your canoe.  If you think that's easy, try it.

In the early part of the paragraph the narrator's "you" is self referring, in a scene that took place when he was a young boy.  The reader may be gripped by the risks and dangers faced by the boy, but can keep some distance from what is happening.  However, in the last sentence of the paragraph, Chesbro suggests a slippery switch by the author from self address to direct address of the reader:

"(which) can trick the mind of the reader into placing himself on the gunwales of the canoe and slip just as the boy character slips into these complex and elusive aspects of you. We can deduce that the conflation of direct and self address is a purposeful affect of McPhee's multi-faceted utilization of second person construction."

 Fair enough, "If you think that's easy, try it," does indeed have an effect of causing the reader to more directly imagine just what he might have done in that same incident.  

Let's move now to another example from Chesbro, a beautifully straightforward example of POV-2: "If You Should Want Flowers for Your Table (Advice to a Daughter)," a 565 word essay by Marsha McGregor. The second person construction serves here as a direct address to the narrator's daughter.  The mother's voice is part of what makes this undemanding use of second person work so well.  Ostensibly, the mother is advising her daughter on how to care for flowers, but "we can see the metaphors on conduct, morality, and how to live."  In excerpts from McGregor:

"A small garden patch to call your own is lovely, but even a sad, weed-choked spot near the highway will yield plenty...Last week I veered off the road near that custard stand you loved, parked the car on the shoulder and waded into a riotous patch of wild sweet peas, all tangled tendrils and wiry stems, reminding me of the way you looked as a child when you slept...If you pursue the wild things, love, look out for bad drivers and poison ivy.  Be careful."

Gorgeous writing.

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A few authors of contemporary literary fiction have used unconventional styles or non-grammatical constructions in writing novels, and it poses questions about the pros and cons of doing this.  A classic example may be Joyce's "Ulysses," with its stream-of-consciousness narration, which has its delights, but makes for difficult reading over the lengthy work.  Another classic example can be found in Cormac McCarthy's writing, including "All the Pretty Horses." No quotation marks enclose any of McCarthy's dialogue.  It did not seem at all distracting or confusing, and it could be said that it produced a cleaner, less busy-looking text.  Such an approach might need a closer editing by the author, however, to avoid any ambiguities for the reader.

Gathering swell of fertile bud catches whisper of Memento Mori: Remember (you have to) die, and hastens to loose unripe seed

A more complex questioning arises where an author chooses to use non-grammatical constructions, as in a recent novel, "A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing," by Eimear McBride."  In a review by Fintan O'Toole in the NY Review of Books (Nov. 20, 2014), he characterizes the book as a feminist novel. He draws on a statement made by McBride that since men had already written everything, there was, for the female novelist, "only one small plot left to tell: the terra incognito of herself, as she knew herself to be, not as men had imagined her."

In McBride's book, the thematic structure portrays a female narrator (she remains unnamed throughout the book) who, in the words of O'Toole, "cannot build a self because the foundations of her childhood have been undermined by sexual exploitation.  The central event is the rape of the narrator as a needy, rebellious thirteen-year-old by the uncle who takes advantage of her as-yet indistinct desires. It is an event she is compelled to repeat again and again in crude encounters with strangers and with the uncle who abused her."

It seems there is a lot of subjective psychology used in the review, and the book, to see the girl's actions as self-punishment ("horrible can be a good act of contrition"), but let's go on to the grammatical construction that is so unique to McBride.  In a passage quoted in the review, the girl tests any power she may have over the uncle by forcing him to replay the original rape:

So he hits til I fall over.  Crushing under.  Hits again.  He hits til something's click and the blood begins to run.  Jesus he says.  I feel sick.  But I'm rush with feeling.  Wide and.  He thinks he's bad when he fucks me now.  And so he is.  I'm better though.  In fact I am almost best.

 The cognitive and grammatical form certainly elicit anguish, despair, and revulsion in the reader, but aside from questions about how reliable a state of mind might exist in the narrator, can such form sustain a memorable reading experience over some 227 pages? Evidently it did for O'Toole.  "McBride is not playing with form, she is playing with what has yet to be fully formed: language caught in its moment of transition between thought and articulation...The brilliance of the book is that this linguistic strategy exactly parallels the struggle of the narrator, who is also trying to come into being."

I shall read the book through mostly because I'd like to better assess the overall effect of McBride's writing strategy, but I would not be pleased to find to the end an unrelieved construction of the victim mentality.  Some captivating literature has included works of protagonist as victim, though they seem to show more hope and energy of the protagonist, if not some native intelligence, in trying to find a personal salvation or epiphany.

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Bronze of "David," by Verrocchio

Our May 31, 2014 blog discussion included a concept of "ekphrasis," a term referenced by writer Stephanie Coyne DeGhett as a "literary representation of visual art."  DeGhett explored, among other things, the ways that accomplished writers, including Oscar Wilde, Steven Millhauser, Stanley Elkin, and A. S. Byatt, have incorporated actual works of art as focal points in their works of fiction; i.e., in Byatt's Matisse stories.  

There are many ways that visual art might point the way to creating interest and satisfaction in literary constructs, and it has been a topic in several past postings. In this post let's explore how some creative energies that seem evident in a particular work of visual art might prove useful in drawing out a main character's own emotional space, and in a most natural manner.  


I've chosen an example from my recent YA novel, "Leaving Major Tela," about a young woman, Caitlin, reared by a strict, army officer mom, and given an opportunity to find her independence while having to temporarily live with her divorced dad:



Caitlin and her friend, Luka, are at a neighborhood party, gathering material on student use of recreational drugs for their school newspaper article.  Caitlin's brief meeting and discussion with the new character, Jay, presented an opportunity to explore a number of his personality traits, and suggest possibilities for a relationship with Caitlin.  The statue of David, by Verrocchio, shows Jay having a sensitive nature--he sometimes attends art shows--and knows something about art.  He affects a macho attitude toward this powerful sculpture, but also seems impressed by Caitlin's response to it.

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There are not many stories written in second-person point of view, at least not many that are well-known.  In books on writing, a handful of examples are given that are often repeated among the discussions, but from time to time a new use of the mode will be undertaken by a fresh, contemporary fiction writer.

A very good example of second-person writing (and an excellent work of fiction) is given in a recent short story, "The Rhett Butlers," by Katherine Heiny (The Atlantic, Oct. 2014).  Second-person writing is sometimes described as simply substituting 'you' for ' I ' in what would otherwise be first-person writing.  That's largely true, but just that exchange can have a major effect on how the reader responds to a story.  Moreover, there are many other nuances that also can be called into play with the second-person technique.  Let's just shorten the terminology to POV-2, and for first-person writing, POV-1, etc., for our following discussion.

Heiny's story is about a seventeen-year old girl student who becomes involved with her 40-yr. old history teacher.  It's a story that would probably most often be attempted in POV-1, but how reliable might the girl character be in revealing her motivations and emotional state when she herself might be expected to prevaricate about such things.  By using POV-2 we might be able to challenge her views, and allow her some sidestepping or irony in revealing her motivations. The POV-2 can also be useful in having the second-person narrator reveal some backstory or exposition that might seem unnatural or forced if left to the girl to furnish to the reader.  It will be useful to examine a few excerpts from the story to show the style and nuances that Heiny employs.  Here is one of the early paragraphs that will help set up the story as well as show the POV-2 style she so deftly uses:

YOU AND MR. EAGLETON are becoming regulars at the Starlite Motel.  The first time you stayed in the car while Mr. Eagleton checked in, but now you go in with him to see what name he uses when he signs the register.  He always chooses characters from your favorite novels: Mr. and Mrs. Gatsby, Mr. and Mrs. Caulfield, Mr. and Mrs. Finch, Mr. and Mrs. Twist.  This idea seems very romantic to you, even though you would never change your name, and certainly not to Eagleton.

The woman behind the counter seems to like Mr. and Mrs. Butler best.  "Ah, the Rhett Butlers," she says every time.  "Welcome back."
She is a large, motherly woman, who looks a lot like Mrs. Harrison, the womanwho drives the Children's Bookmobile.  She always has the TV on, and always on a channel showing Wheel of Fortune.  She's unbelievably good--you once saw her guess "Apocalypse Now" just from the letter C.

 This woman makes you feel a lot better.  Nothing bad can happen to you here. 

Notice how the narrator can fill in the reader on the prior frequency of visits, and show an equanimity of the girl, as well as her naivete, and other background things that would have been a lot more awkward in first-person exposition.  

Here is a slightly later paragraph that also illustrates the nuanced values of POV-2:

MARCY TELLS HER PARENTS that she's sleeping at your home.  This way she can stay out past her curfew or even all night.  She's going over to Jeff Lipencott's house; his parents are out of town.

 You agree.  Of course you do--think of all the times Marcy has covered for you.  You sit in the TV room, wearing sweats and your glasses and eating cold Pop-Tarts.  You wish only the very best for Marcy, but you feel forlorn picturing her at Jeff Lippencott's, maybe lying in his parent's bed, leading a real life.

Marcy knocks on the window a little after 11.  You open it and she steps over the window ledge, shaking little diamonds of cold rain from her hair, and says, "Oh my God, he's such an asshole!  He spent the whole time doing hand stands with his friends, and I didn't know anyone and wound up helping his little sister weave pot holders."

 This story should make you feel lots better.  It should make you happy to be you again.  But it doesn't.

The choice of POV-2 for this story seemed so right.  Check out the full story in The Atlantic.  You owe it to your career.  Another interesting story in POV-2, a novel actually, Chris Lynch's, "Freewill," a Printz Honor Award book.  Lynch has a long list of good YA titles, and is such a fine writer that it was inevitable he'd take up the challenge to write an intriguing POV-2 classic.  Read this one, too.

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Irish curragh secured onshore at Tory Island

Glossing the new book releases and early reviews, and finding a novel that gathers up far-flung place settings of nostalgic relevance to me, loaded with topics of special interest, and all in one tidy package, seemed like an invitation to further self-discovery.  No Country, by Kalyan Ray, jumped out as promising.  The novel is a family generational saga spanning about 150 years, beginning with the mid-nineteenth century famine years in colonial Ireland, and moving to India in the years of the British Raj, before independence from England, and finally to North America--Canada and the United States.

Over that great a span of time, there are more than a few generations to deal with.  Throw in a complicating roster of intermarriage and trying to track family lines, and the average reader may feel challenged to fully appreciate the sweeping themes of a family's struggles, reversals, and successes, always at risk of being truncated into obscurity with the potential failure of any one generation.  The book is only moderately long; nonetheless, Ray moves his characters through a number of epochal historic events: the famine that destroyed perhaps a quarter of the Irish population; the pestilent voyages of coffin ships that finished off a similar number fleeing the famine to North America; the years of pre-independence revolution and terror in India faced by an Irishman who fled there, and later by his Anglo-Indian descendants; and ultimately, their immigration to the New World and the tough decades following, with the  inner tempering and annealing of spirit demanded for life in a new, industrial age unfolding there.

I enjoyed getting Ray's slant on some of the topics I felt somewhat familiar with, like the Great Hunger, An Gorta Mor.  My Irish grandparents were born shortly after the worst of those years. and left when they reached their twenties.  One can be disheartened reading about the callousness and politics that exacerbated The Great Hunger.  And be no less shocked by the callousness and politics practiced by the authorities in attempting to smother the gathering storm of Indian rebellion against colonial rule by Britain.  Ray uses the deliberate massacre of an unarmed civilian population at Jallianwala bagh to stunning effect.  One has to remember we also had our own My Lai during the Vietnam war, lest we think modern humanity has relegated all such events to the past.

One of the topics I had been interested in was Ray's take on the life of Anglo-Indian residents living in India, which was his own life growing up there.  I had worked in Pakistan (once northern India) as an engineer on a dam and had come in contact with a number of workers from the nearby mountains who stood out from their compatriots as fair-skinned, light-haired, Anglo types.  I often thought of the large number of soldiers in the British Raj Army who had been recruited from Ireland.  On holiday trips through the Khyber Pass to Afghanistan I sometimes stopped to inspect the British Raj regimental crests chiseled into the sandstone along the Pass.  Some of these seemed old enough to have been the crests of units that had participated in the British-Afghan Wars of the nineteenth century.  Whole Raj armies had been swallowed up in Afghanistan, and I wondered how many of the present day Anglo-Indian, or perhaps more precisely, Hiberno-Indian, were descendants of those soldiers who fell there.

A reader can be repulsed reading of the oppressive use of police and intelligence services, paid or coerced informers, and repressive laws, in the dying period of the Raj, and in pre-independence Ireland, designed to contain perceived threats of public dissent to political and economic interests.  That is perhaps not much different than what is practiced in many places today.

I think one difficulty with the structure of No Country is a blurring sweep of characters as the story moves through the generations.  There's not much space to become acquainted with each character.  The main progenitor, Padraig, both biological and adoptive to the cascading line of descendants, is aptly revealed in the beginning as a young man in Ireland, as well as is his best friend, Brendan. When Padraig is compelled to flee to India, the situation of Brendan and Padraig's daughter, Maeve, becomes desperate in the famine, and when there is no news of Padraig for over a year, they board one of the coffin ships for North America.  We get to know young Maeve fairly well on the voyage, and it's an endearing characterization.  After a harrowing ordeal they reach Canada, and that's about the last of expansive characterizations for any of the successive generations.

Another concern from a writer's viewpoint might be the introduction of startling coincidental material into an already ambitious plot.  One of the young woman protagonists travels to New York to seek the young man she had known in Canada, and becomes employed in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory there, the locale of a historic fire tragedy.  It was a dramatic episode in the telling, but it seems not entirely organic to the story thread.  Another coincidental element was a chance crossing of paths with a psychopathic character when a Padraig-descendant's family purchases their home from the psychopath's family, which led to diabolical consequences.

All in all, No Country is an engrossing read and is well recommended.

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My current novel-in-progress will fit a loosely defined literary genre of historical fiction.  That is, it will be fiction artistically grounded in a period of American history--an era in the mid-1870s--when an organized labor movement began its contest with the laissez-faire business interests of the period.  The story moves through the violent birth and tragic demise of the Molly Maguires, a secret society of Irish immigrant mine workers who struck back at the railroad magnots who owned the mines and the lives of the mineworkers.  The railroad owners, often called the 'robber-barons' in American history, also owned the justice system of Pennsylvania at the time, a state where the deep underground anthracite coal mines were fueling American industry.  After the robber barons crushed an early attempt by the miners to form a labor union, they embarked on a campaign to exterminate a continued, violent resistance of the Mollies to the desperate wages and deplorable working conditions in the mines.

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Like a book, someone, somewhere, might be interested in it if they knew it was available, and where?

There has been much discussion in this blog over the past seven or eight years about concepts and guidelines for writing fiction that were collected from academic studies, years of reading essays by published writers, reviews by literary critics, and interviews or biographies of favorite writers.  As I read new fiction, the acquired palette and toolbox of writing often hovers in my thoughts as I pause to reflect on the twists and turns a story has taken, where it may be going, and how well the author has crafted his art thus far.  Am I locked in yet to where I must find out how this tale ends?  Or, am I now close to bailing out on the author?  It's a terrible disappointment when I decide to abandon a book, and I usually feel a bit guilty.

Since I live in a remote, rural location, the books I select to read are often the result of reading book reviews in email feeds from online sources, or hearing brief radio reviews of books and their authors.  There is only one bookstore within a 35 mile radius to peruse the shelves and make any selections.

Since independent bookstores are a dwindling species these days, even in cities, and considering that chances of my getting regional/national reviews are pretty limited, I thought I'd use this month's post to feature chapter one of my recent YA novel, "Leaving Major Tela," and invite comments from any of my readers who might care to comment.  I think the first chapter sets up the story well enough that the usual bookflap description meant to attract the casual shopper isn't really needed.  A link to the description, the chance to read additional chapters, and opportunity to purchase is given in the blog sidebar on the top right side.   I hope you might find the story interesting and would appreciate any comments.  See the comments link at the bottom of the blog.

CHAPTER 1

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Several earlier posts discussed independent self-publishing platforms (ISP) for both e-books and printed books.  My experience with Amazon in producing a Kindle edition and a print edition of a YA novel (the print edition with CreateSpace, an Amazon-owned company) was a very satisfying experience, and did not cost me anything.  Special support services (formatting, editing, cover design)were available for a fee, but are not necessary for most authors with average skills.

However, after creating and making the book available through an ISP company, the role of marketing the book seems to be left more or less to the author.  A wide gamut of on-line vendors, like Amazon Books, Google Books, Barnes & Noble, and others, can be selected to list the book and collect an agreed royalty amount on any sales; however, there may be very little effort by those vendors to find and direct readers to the book.  This had been one of the valuable services provided by traditional publishing companies.  Besides being gatekeepers of which books can be published, the traditional companies would generally send out copies of the finished book to their lists of nationwide book reviewers and media columnists to help generate an awareness and demand for the book.  They might also arrange book tours (one has to smile to think of them trying to get J. D. Salinger to do a book tour).  To some extent, the ISP author can do some of this work by searching  for independent or organizational reviewers on the Internet, and providing them with the necessary digital or print copies of the book.  Some reviews might be provided free, and others by prestigious organizations can cost up to a couple of hundred dollars.  The author has better prospects to enlist a reviewer if the book is newly published or has been published within the last two or three months.  Consequently, one can see from all this that it would be most effective if the ISP author had some sort of plan, and/or arrangements made, before he ever clicks on the 'publish' button with the ISP.

Some of the positives and drawbacks of the ISP option for an author are illustrated in an interview with author John Edgar Wideman, reported by Sejal Shah in The Writer's Chronicle of May/Summer 2014.  Wideman has a son, Danny, who worked for an ISP, named Lulu, and decided to publish a book titled Briefs with them.

Briefs was an experiment.  It got all the reviews you could want, under the circumstances.  And also because Danny worked there I got a lot of services that if you self-published in Lulu, you'd have to pay for.  For example, the expensive business of sending books to reviewers.  My self-published electronic book was treated a bit like the old way that my hard copy books had been.  A publicity service sent books to the media and tried to get me interviews.  A publicity person promoted and followed the book's progress.  Books were made available in conventional hard copy format, so that was cheating in a way.  The results don't tell a lot about self-publishing or electronic publishing per se.  My conclusion after the whole thing was that even with the extras I got, a self-publishing venture was premature.  It still is premature, for a person of my status, used to having a certain kind of attention.  You're taking a real leap of faith and financially, you're giving up, in my case, what might be a substantial advance. 

Not being on bookstore shelves killed Briefs.  Someone browsing in that nice bookstore ...is not going to see Briefs.  A bookstore has to pay for copies of Briefs, and then they own the copies, can't return them.  The other thing is the Times refused to review Briefs, because it was self-published ...They did run a story about the manner in which Briefs was published, but it was not a review.  Almost all the articles about the book were not reviews; they were general interest pieces about the publishing industry.  That meant no reviews of the book, and at the same time no one was going to trip over the book in a bookstore.  So why would anyone buy it?  Where would they find it?  As far as merchandising strategy, Briefs fell into very predictable cracks.  I was disappointed, but I'd do it again.  I liked the adventure; I liked working with Danny; and I learned a hell of a lot.

 As might be concluded from the foregoing discussions and interview excerpt, ISP is a works in progress.  There are pluses and minuses in it for most authors, but the business model of the traditional publisher has contemporary issues that need to be addressed, also.  One thinks of the music recording industry, which had a business model that served them handsomely for many years and did well for a relatively small number of artists, too.  However, the internet opened up possibilities for many more artists that had been shut out by the traditional gatekeepers' system,  and brought with it upheavals to the business model that are still ongoing.  Now, the book publishing model's turn may have come.

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Revealing a Concept, in Painting or Fiction

Several of the past blogs in gaelwriter have discussed concepts of enriching literary fiction by keeping in mind design principles used by visual artists to heighten the aesthetic appeal of their own creations.   For example, Alex Powers, in his book, Painting People in Watercolor--a design approach, states:

The design principles are the organizing aesthetic ideas that guide your use of elements in a painting.  They are

1. dominance (emphasis, focal point)

2. movement (rhythm, direction, gesture, transmission)

3. variety (contrast, conflict, tension)

4. unity (harmony, balance)

 These four principles seem pretty good for enhancing the aesthetics of reading pleasure in a literary fiction work, too, don't they?  A writer may have little difficulty in envisioning the counterpart of each of these principles for a literary work; i.e., referencing to the same item numbers: 1) major conflict, 2) plot or story structure, 3) sub-plots and resolutions, 4) major resolution or denouement.

Next, the nine important design elements described by Powers that comprise tools for a visual artist in executing a successful painting are listed below, followed by typical application modes, in parentheses. Immediately after the visual art application modes, a few equivalent application modes for fiction writers have been suggested (in a brown font) within a second set of parentheses.

1. shape (pattern, form, mass, object, subject matter) (plot, place)

2. value (light and dark, tone, tint) (characters, moral/ethical issues)

3. space (the illusion of three-dimensional depth and two-dimensional flatness) (multi-faceted characters, situational ethics, environmental)

4. edges (blurred and sharp, lost and found) (uncertainty, ambiguity)

5. color temperature (warm and cold) (emotion, environment)

6. texture (surface variation) (sophistication, coarseness)

7. line (drawing) (language, syntax)

8. color hue (red, yellow, etc., local and arbitrary) (dialect, colloquial)

9. color intensity (brightness) (tonal quality of speech)

  The main objective of our discussion concerns learning what are some key principles, together with examples of their applications, for producing successful works of art.  The idea being that the most universal experience of what the public has considered to be great art may incorporate these same principles, whether the art be visual or written.

Revisiting this topic was prompted after reading a recent article in The Writer's Chronicle (May/Summer, 2014), titled Paintings in Fiction--Ten Lessons from the Masters of Ekphrasis, by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett.  First, ekphrasis is a term referenced by DeGhett as a "literary representation of visual art."  Her article is not, for the most part, about using the principles and tools of the artist to conceive an original piece of fiction as we have been discussing in this blog. De Ghett explores the ways that accomplished writers, including Oscar Wilde, Steven Millhauser, Stanley Elkin, and A. S. Byatt, have incorporated actual works of art as focal points in their works of fiction.  A well-known painting influences and motivates the fictional characters in each of those writers' stories.  I've read A. S. Byatt's The Matisse Stories which employ the ekphrasis approach; I liked some of the stories, but the direct allusions sometimes appeared a little forced.

The ekphrasis approach seems too derivative of the original act of creation, the painting itself.  It is a little too much like the creative writing workshop assignment of taking a newspaper story, or some topical subject, and writing a story based on the referenced material. The germ of the idea is not organic to the writer's compulsion for exploring his own deeply intuitive material.  The former may provide good writing experience, but is less likely to produce an original work of literary art. The same for basing the story on the actual painting. 

Although our blog has been exploring the most effective principles and tools of distinguished visual artists that might be brought to bear on writing our own stories, perhaps the enterprise is doomed.  From DeGhett's article we read the following.

In an essay about literary ekphrasis, Paola Spinozzi quotes Leonardo da Vinci from his Treatise on Painting:

 Your pen will be worn out before you can fully describe what the painter can represent forthwith by the aid of his science.  And your tongue will be parched with thirst and your body will be overcome by sleep and hunger before you can show with words what a painter can show you in an instant.

Yes, but...

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Still life and bread crumbs, by Anna Quindlen, is a recent novel that moves at a comfortable pace, fully engaging the reader with characters whose lives seem to follow a script of diminished expectations, which we recognize from our own experience of the world, but the characters seem unique enough to maybe prove us wrong.  At the same time, we might feel it would not be very literary if the writer allowed things to finish up too nicely, with our admired protagonist still on her feet unbowed by all the challenges, but if she doesn't exactly win, surely she must show some true grit.  The so-called Hollywood ending.  Think Rocky and on through Rocky-4.  Unfortunately, we also have dark premonitions from reading the classics, think Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary, that everything is just going to turn out horribly.  And yet, when done well, with a feeling of genuineness in plot turns and attention to intelligent language, it could turn out to be fine, and the reader might feel a little bit ennobled by the time spent with these characters.  What actually does happen?

In Still Life... Rebecca had been a renown photographer in the art world and her work had been featured in galleries and covered by art critics nationwide.   The title of the book is taken from one of her most famous photographs.  However, her career has lately been in decline, she is now 60 yrs. old, and her agent hasn't been selling many of her photographs.  With her income falling off, and the financial burdens of paying expenses for her mother in a care facility, while also attempting to help her son, Peter, a recent college graduate, she's beginning to become worried about solvency.  Divorced from her philandering, Oxford-educated, professor husband since Peter was a boy, she needs to cut her living expenses--by renting out the expensive New York City apartment she owns and moving to a less expensive setting.  Like this rustic rented cabin in rural upstate New York.  The new place has been badly misrepresented to her and is quite primitive, but Rebecca is determined to see it through, at least for a while.

Like many such locales, it has its share of characters and they are mildly interesting.  The gruff roofer, Jim, who helps her keep her house intact, becomes a fairly well-developed character and an interesting counterpoint to Rebecca's character.  In addition to his trade, he's a volunteer environmental worker as well as a subsistence hunter--a unique combo, perhaps.  Jim also has a bi-polar younger sister whom he is trying to help as she copes in survival mode at her trailer home nearby in the woods.  A key turnaround experience for Rebecca occurs on her daily walks in the forest, where she begins to find strange little sites, each exhibiting crude wood crosses, accompanied by some small object, like a doll, or an athletic trophy, and she artfully records each of these sites on film.  The mystery is eventually revealed, and the photo collection becomes a key to her reentry to her profession.  Her relationship to Jim goes through several wrenching turns--he is sixteen years younger--but always the relationship seems so well done by the writer.

The author taps into a number of universal themes in constructing this story:  

• A decline in professional recognition of a story character, whether in arts, business, or academia (usually in that order of severity) as she ages.
• The challenges to physical and mental well-being of a story character displaced into a very altered environment.
• An Autumn-Spring romantic relationship of two story characters.
• A social class hurdle existing between attracted story characters.

That comprises a formidable list, and so Quindlen is able to tap into the psyches of a great many readers with it, and she does it very well.  

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Crowd-sourcing an iOS publishing venture

Back in January 2009 I published a blog with the title Cellphone Novelists, discussing the new development of authors in Japan using cellphones to write and publish serial novels, some while commuting to work on the bullet train, and occasional total word counts up to and above 100,000 words.

 A similar development had gotten underway in Canada in 2006 when two tech entrepreneurs started Wattpad, a new website service envisioning a mobile reading app and hosting, initially, about 17000 public domain books. However, until the introduction of the iPhone and the Kindle, the Wattpad venture struggled to gain any momentum.   Thereafter, writers began to post original works with the app and it took off (Article by David Streitfeld, NY Times, 3/24/2014; quotes in this blog are from the NYTimes article).  "This is writing re-imagined for a mobile world, where attention is fragmentary," mused the reporter.  "Almost all our writers serialize their content," Allen Lau, Wattpad's chief executive said.  "Two thousand words is roughly 10 minutes of reading.  That makes the story more digestible, something you can do when standing in line."

The Wattpad app allows for reader comments, and for some authors these involve huge numbers, generally complimentary, since the author can moderate comments before they are published and can use the delete button to eliminate any brutish trolls.  For a conscientious author trying to keep up with responding to comments by fans, the task can be staggering.  One author reports 14000 unread messages pending in her Wattpad inbox.

One of the most popular Wattpad authors is Ali Novak, a 22-year old Wisconsin writer who has serialized four mobile novels.  Ms. Novak has been forced to limit her own involvement with her fans, some of whom apparently would like her to read samples of their work:

I am no longer taking reading/interview/trailer/cover requests, so all related messages will be ignored.  Sorry, but I just don't have the time.

A pullback that is quite understandable.  Ms. Novak's biggest hit, My Life With the Walter Boys--about a girl who moves in with a family of 12 sons--was published this month by Sourcebooks in revised and edited form as a paperback.  Ms. Novack reflects:

Since I was little, I've been obsessed with reading and collecting books.  I always dreamed of seeing my book in Barnes & Noble and picking it off the shelf and holding it in my hands.  That's one thing I could never do with Wattpad. 

Yes, there's something magical about hefting that physical, material thing that you've imbued with something of your own imagination, and to know it will continue to sit safely on your bookshelf even if your computer becomes obsolete, or the internet implodes into a black hole.

My recent e-book publication

Nonetheless, some accomplished authors have begun to publish exclusive e-book offerings. These authors have already made their mark in the traditional hard-copy publishing world, and include writers like Stephen King, and Neil Gaiman; consequently, I have been intrigued by the development.  Anyone who has gone down the road of submitting countless query letters with catchy hooks, brilliantly honed synopses or summaries, and sample pages, to literary agents or traditional publishing houses, whom these days may or may not even choose to acknowledge your submittal, might perhaps view the e-publishing opportunities as a liberating development.  The traditional gate keepers may have been displaced.

Of course, perhaps only a portion of what is e-published may have true literary quality, but the voting audience is much larger now, and one can hope that the good books will just as readily rise to the top.  I like the e-publishing idea and decided to give the experience a try with my most recent coming-of-age fiction, Leaving Major Tela.  It is already up in Kindle format at Amazon.  Click on the link in 'My Publications' at the top right corner of my blog for a visit to the Amazon page and a look inside the book.  I'll have a hardcopy edition ready at the same location shortly.

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Using divine proportion and its interior spiral to give shape and focus for a visual work of art

This is about the shape of a story.  It is not about choosing any specific formulaic approach to creating a fiction story, though there are some genres where the reading fraternity fully anticipates and looks forward to a story which hews close to a traditional formula, i.e., in romance novels.  In such cases the formula has been extensively tested over time in the market place, and is known to give its readers the enjoyment they seek.  Nothing wrong with such structured, formulaic writing, though it may diminish your chances of winning some coveted literary awards.

Screenwriting for a movie is thought to be somewhat formulaic, also.  A friend at a graduate creative writing program did some research into the structure of screenwriting works, to see whether he might uncover some useful techniques for writing young people's literature (Motion Picture Story Structure Techniques in Middle Grade Novels--a thesis, by C. Entwistle, Vermont College, 1999).  Generally, he found a consistent 120-page, three-act structure, with the inciting incident early in act one, the bleakest moment in latter part of act two, and the battle or climax in latter part of act three.  Each act rises to a point of crisis, the main character passes through a series of conflicts, and ultimately overcomes the major conflict.  Not surprising that it is a formula that works for a large global audience--some suspense, frightening moments, victories written both small and large,  and life returns to something worth living.

Now let's move away from the more formulaic ways of shaping a story and toward the more intuitive.  We've discussed in some past issues of this blog some affinities between the aesthetic processes of shaping and writing an interesting story and the shaping and design of an interesting painting, i.e., Hills Like White Elephants and other paintings, Aug. 27, 2009.  Some additional thoughts on the aesthetic and intuitive process involved in the shaping of another form of creative writing is given by the poet, Leslie Ullman, in her essay A Spiral Walk Through the Golden Mean, in The Writer's Chronicle, Oct/Nov 2013.

The Golden Mean, or Golden Rectangle, is also known as Divine Proportion in artist circles.  Divine Proportion involves a ratio of 1:1.618, or approximately 3:5, "said to form the most visually satisfying of all rectangles," and which can be related to "complex designs by Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and the builders of the Parthenon, as well as works by modern masters such as Le Corbusier and Mondrian," as stated by Ullman.

For example, our sketch of a model, above, was scanned into a computer and was slightly cropped from its original 3:5 golden rectangle.   A logarithmic spiral was generated on the computer monitor and was digitally drawn onto the sketch.  The spiral cuts across the corners of square grid lines superimposed on the sketch such that it bisected the adjacent 90-deg. segments of the grid lines at the golden rectangle's 3:5 ratio for the two lengths.  The resulting spiral begins in a broad curve at the outer margin of the sketch, and gradually tightens to a small tight loop just below the model's left breast.  The exercise suggests that the painter's natural focal point for light and dark value contrasts, lost and found edges, and perhaps color highlights, can be most effective when directed toward this area.

The fiction writer's analogy might have the spiral starting off with gradual introduction of characters and defining the conflict, then a gradual tightening of the conflict situation, and ultimately into the focus of dramatic conflict resolution at the end of the spiral.

Does the concept have much utility for getting that powerful literary story written? Can we inherently recognize the most beautiful proportions and path of a powerful work of fiction, effectively simulating the golden rectangle and its interior spiral? Michelangelo and Da Vinci might well have perfected this feel and intuition in their paintings.  Perhaps it is something we can think about, and possibly develop our own feel for the shape and path of beauty in fiction writing.

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The county library waiting list for a new novel, The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt, was almost up to 300 when I checked its availability online.  I was late in seeing a book review in the NY Times, or hearing one on National Public Radio, my two usual sources, and these early reviews for the book had been good.  Luckily, I noticed one of the library branches had a large-type edition, and the hold list for it was much shorter.  With my eyesight not as good as it once was, and with the standard font size edition clocking in at over 800 pages, I requested the large type book, which was over 1200 pages long!  The thought of holding a book that heavy each evening makes one think that a Kindle might not be such a bad thing.

After the Bookmobile dropped off my new treasure I settled in for some pleasurable evenings of reading.  At first the story seemed to have promise.  Scenes of a slightly selfish boy (think of This Boy's Life, by Tobias Wolff) and his art-loving mother, struggling to get by living in New York City, and their hurried visit one day to the art museum, which culminates in a terrorist bombing of the museum and death of the mother.  A compelling plot, so far.  Gradually, though, some overwrought language makes itself noticeable, in the form of catchy metaphors and weird similes which don't really elucidate anyone's feelings or situations, but which might make for some memorable rhythms in a rap tune.  I'm sometimes too quick to make negative judgements so I pressed on with my reading.  

After his mother's death the boy is given temporary refuge from the Children's Protective Society as the ward of a schoolmate's family, upperclass socialites.  Things look promising, but his deadbeat father, who'd abandoned his family years before, shows up with a druggie girlfriend and assumes custody of his son.  Dad and girlfriend take the son back with them to Las Vegas and a weirdly sterile world of McMansions, spacious buildings lingering in various states of arrested development since the bursting of the sub-prime mortgage bubble.  One of them is their rented home.  Dad is pursuing some sort of numerical scheme to defeat the odds at the gambling casinos, and doing well at it for a while--until he isn't.  Meanwhile, the boy hooks up with a streetwise, multi-lingual Russian kid, who introduces him to an astonishing assortment of pills and opiates.  They rarely seem to go to school, and their biggest problem is keeping food in the house, and the pizza bakery refuses to deliver out to this wasteland.

The father is killed, either a suicide or murdered when he is unable to pay his gambling debts.  The boy returns to New York, and pursues a brief, unrequited love for a girl his age who had lost her guardian in the same terrorist bombing at the museum.  The promising girl character disappears into the custody of an Aunt, to be raised in Europe.  A weird plot turn.  Flash forward, and the boy is a young man.  He is a success in the antiques business through highly dishonest dealings, and is still a heavy consumer of illegal drugs.

All things considered, the overwrought, bombastic language, unsatisfying plot turns, and shallow personality of the main character, defeated my attempts to stay engaged after I'd finished about two-thirds of the book.  I thought perhaps I'd been somehow unfair and very unkind to the author, but after reading a similarly critical review by Francine Proust in the NY Review of Books (Jan. 9, 2014) I have to conclude there really are big problems with the book.

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Yoni in the dunes

An earlier blog post, "love in all its dimensions" (Dec. 2009), discussed some current, new directions by movie scriptwriters, and urban subculture artists, exploring imaginary sexual relationships between sentient and insentient actors.  This usually involved a man playing his own real-life character, and a female-themed art object, like a puppet or a 2-D art piece, playing a role as his love interest. The movie discussed in the blog was "Lars and the Real Girl," and the subculture world was called Otaku. This is a Japanese slang term for "reclusive computer nerds, who often post screen shots of their (insentient lover) or go on real-life dates with (them on) their video-game console," and is discussed this month in the NYTimes 13Dec2013.

The same Times article, "Interactive Gets a New Meaning," by Alex Hawgood, besides other intrigues, discusses a new movie, "Her," just released by Hollywood.  It involves the Otaku-like relationship between the actor and the artificial-intelligence voice of a woman programmed on his smartphone operating system:

In "Her," the near-future romance film written and directed by Spike Jonze, there is an awkwardly remarkable moment in which the lead character, Theodore (played by Joaquin Phoenix), has an intimate encounter with Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) after returning home inebriated from a failed blind date with another woman.  Filmed with a close-up lens, it shows Theodore gently edging Samantha into arousal by telling her what he wishes to do to her body.  As things become increasingly explicit, the screen turns black, leaving the audience lingering in darkness as the characters reach their aural climax.

The relationship depicted in "Her," between Theodore and Samantha, seems eerily close to a rapport one can already notice between the driver of a vehicle, and the ethereal voice of the Siri woman emitted from his car's speaker system as she carries out his spoken commands to dial phone numbers, look up information, check the weather, etc.  Siri is uncomplainingly efficient, and pleasant too, so when you buy your next car maybe you ought to purchase the deluxe model of the voice command system and upgrade to a Samantha edition.

This concept of the interactive personal escort could be fertile ground for some amazing new fiction.

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Who hasn't been inspired by the historic photographs of stoic, and enduring men and women, poor by birthright, and struggling to survive the additional economic calamities of the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl.  Many Americans can recall the famous photograph, taken by Dorothea Lange, showing a migrant mother of two children in a camp for the homeless during the Great Depression.   Another famous photographer known for his work in the that era was Walker Evans, chosen as the partner of a writer, James Agee, in a reporting team sent by Fortune magazine in 1936 to document the living conditions of cotton tenant farmers in the Deep South.

A resulting article was written by Agee about the lives of the three farm families he observed during the two months in which he lived with one of the families, but his article was never published by Fortune.  No reason was given by the magazine.  It was fairly long, about 30,000 words, but tabling the article was perhaps in no small measure owing to the desperate, marginal living conditions documented by Agee for those poverty stricken families.  The sometimes overwrought language, and often scandalous opinions written by Agee on the character of the tenant farmer, or sharecropper, families, could presumably have been reworked by his editors, but perhaps the editors of a magazine extolling the noble virtues of capitalism and free market enterprise for achieving an upward mobility of workers might have seen in the article some powerful evidence to the contrary.

Agee was fresh out of Harvard when he went to work for the magazine, and so impressed his bosses with his work over the next four years that he was chosen to do the feature story on the lives of the cotton tenants, in the summer of 1936.  There seems little doubt from his original manuscript that his heart was with the plight of the tenant farmer, though his point-of-view (POV) as a writer seemed that of the omniscient narrator, imparting thoughts and motivations of individuals that were at best subjective, and often at a scandalous effect.  He must have known that if his story was published much of what he told might be seen as a sort of betrayal by those people he had lived among. 

The publisher released the original manuscript back to Agee after declining to publish it.  Agee worked the raw material for another several years and he published a novel from it in 1941, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," (an ironic title, taken from Ecclesiasticus).  It sold only 600 copies when first published, but became a bestseller when it was reissued in 1960.  

The typescript for the article written for Fortune was found by his daughter recently while going through her father's effects in the house he left to her. The rediscovered material was published in May, 2013, as "Cotton Tenants: Three Families," with some selected photographs taken by Walker Evans during their field assignment.   Follow-ups of the story told in "Famous Men," were done by other reporters in July, and August, of 1986, fifty years after Agee and Evans did their original field work.  The book that resulted, "And Their Children After Them," by David Maharidge and Michael Williamson, won the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction in 1990.  Of the surviving cotton tenant adults, and their children, some were offended by their story as told in "Famous Men," and others weren't.  In any case Agee died of alcoholism in 1955, at age 45, long before he might have had to face up to any in the tenant families who felt betrayed.  As one of the tenant families daughters told in her journal, speaking of Agee's book,

There's a whole lot in there that's true, and a whole lot that isn't true.  He was a mess.  My goodness, I could turn around and write a book on him. 

The story, the descriptions, and the photographs of "Cotton Tenants: Three Families," are mesmerizing, though some of Agee's subjective assessments and over-the-top language jar my own sense for a truer and more sympathetic telling of a then crushing way of life.  I spent some boyhood summer vacations in the late forties on cotton farms in the Deep South, and though times had changed dramatically by then--cotton farming was already disappearing as an important economic activity in the region--the plain cultural life of country folks, removed now from the penury of marginal existence imposed and maintained by the old tenancy or sharecropping system, held out many things to admire.  Some still ate biscuits and gravy with eye-watering salt pork for breakfast, with chicory coffee, and a crumbled, coarse corn bread in fresh-churned buttermilk eaten from a goblet with a spoon for an evening meal, and I came to enjoy such fare.  Except maybe the salt pork.  You can describe the tenant's diet as a greasy, fat-laden mess, destroying everyone's teeth, as Agee does, or you might choose to point out some similarities to the modern, healthy, Atkins high fat diet.  I needed a little levity here after the heavy sledding through Agee's hard-edged prose.

A good review of "Cotton Tenants: Three Families," appears in the Nov. 7, 2013 issue of NY Review of Books, written by Ian Frazier.

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If it embellishes the fictional dream, see him thread the minnow on the hook  rather than tell us what he's using as bait later.

Point of View, or POV, is often a dominant factor in creating a compelling story on paper.  The POV a writer chooses to tell his story, and a decision whether to use only one, or multiple POVs, can make all the difference in whether a writer fully exploits the opportunities presented by the choice of characters, the place setting of the story, and the drama of the plot.  After deciding POV, at first perhaps tentatively, the next aspect of writing strategy to be kept continuously in mind is maintaining the most effective psychological distance of narration.  The reader might, at some point, be kept at an objective, fly-on-the-wall distance as the scene unfolds before a POV character, and then might move deeper to describe the introspective thoughts of that character in response to the scene, and perhaps ultimately into the mind of the character expressing his thoughts in his own, silent diction.  However, equally important to a proper use of distancing, the writer should be wary of introducing disruptive distancing effects in his narration which could tend to jar a reader's sense of a continuous, fictional dream (see "The Art of Fiction," by John Gardner).

I am frequently reminded of this distancing aspect as I read for my own pleasure, and notice an author's seemingly inappropriate use of a distancing effect.  My attention was once drawn at a writers' workshop to the use by many authors of disruptive distancing, as when the author is in a third-person, objective point of view, and introduces a descriptive passage beginning "There was," or some variation of it.  The workshop recommendation was that, on the first revision of any completed draft, get rid of all such disruptive instances.  I immediately recognized how often I'd been using that sort of distancing, and how much more immediate a story seemed without it.  Just describe what the POV character is observing, without stepping back as if committing the scene to some recording document, or journal entry.

I just finished the novel, "Return to Oakpine," by Ron Carlson, and though I felt it to be a warm, sensitive story, some pages seemed to move at a dawdling pace, with lots of single line, he said and she said, volleys of idle dialog.  That effect is a sort of distancing too, and perhaps I should use a specific paragraph of 'Oakpine' containing a few of the distancing effects I've noted.  Bear in mind that the book has enjoyed some good critical review, and any successful novel might have things other writers could quibble about.  Sometimes it's simply a question of whether we might make a good book better.

The Pronghorn had been a little tavern three miles south of Gillette, a place the roughnecks could stop on the way back to town.  Over the years it had grown, first with a room on one side for four pool tables and then a large quonset in the rear with a hardwood floor for dancing. This area was lined with tables behind a low, wooden corral.  There were neon beer signs everywhere, red, and blue, and green, so the general glow added to the odd effect of having three ceilings of different heights in the gerrymandered room.  Tonight all the tables were full, two and three pitchers of beer on each, four, and the dance floor, too, was packed with a fluid, partisan crowd, groups of people churning forward, cheering their friends, under a glacial slip of cigarette smoke that drifted toward the high center.

First we might notice the use of historical exposition, which is a bit distancing from the story at hand; perhaps we could have just let a POV character see what he sees, and then move briefly into his thoughts on things he's noticed. Observe, too, that we have an instance of the journaling phrase,"There were...," and perhaps a few writers might choose to examine whether some stretched or odd adjectives like gerrymandered, fluid partisan, and glacial slip, are suitable for this rural Wyoming crowd.  If not, remember, any such 'flags' interrupting the fictional dream tend to introduce some distancing effect for the reader.

I decided to read again an old favorite, James Joyce, and see how he handled some of his elaborately descriptive scenes in his famous short story, "The Dead," without any seeming to be forced, or notably distancing.  Here's a paragraph describing the Christmas banquet of an upper class Dublin crowd:

A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on which lay a solid rectangle of Smyrna figs, a dish of custard topped with grated nutmeg, a small bowl of chocolates and sweets wrapped in gold and silver papers and a glass vase in which stood some tall celery stalks.  In the center of the table there stood, as sentries to a fruit-stand which upheld a pyramid of oranges and American apples, two squat old-fashioned decanters of cut glass, one containing port and the other dark sherry.  On the closed square piano a pudding in a huge yellow dish lay in waiting and behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colors of their uniforms, the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes.

The entire paragraph has an immediateness to it.  Joyce makes it seem as if you, the reader, are right there at the table, looking down the length of the table and marveling at the numbers and luxury of food and dessert items, without any noticeable authorial presence interposing distancing effects to interrupt a marvelous fictional dream (though I might have gotten rid of one 'there' and have written 'In the center of the table stood').  Some of the more emotional scenes elsewhere, when Joyce moves deeply into the minds of his characters, are enormously effective and memorable.  Check out this classic story.

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