What Works

by Sheila Connolly

This past weekend I read a book by an author I know and admire.  It wasn’t a recent book, but rather one that crawled out of my endless To-Be-Read pile (I'm trying to sort through my books, and papers, and supplies, and…).  I don't recall when or where I got it.  

I like this writer.  I've read a number of her earlier books and enjoyed them.  Actually, I enjoyed this book too, but kind of in spite of myself.

On the plus side:  she has a great voice—sharp and funny.  She's honest about the fact that her male characters (mostly macho military types) tend to think from, uh, below the belt—and they acknowledge it, although that doesn't stop them.  She's great at portraying romantic confusion, and almost all her lovers are definitely starcrossed (and communication-challenged).

So why am I complaining?  Here's why:

Too many characters.  In the writer's defense, I will say that she writes a kind of multi-character series that focuses on only a few characters (and usually pairs) in each book.  So in theory we know almost all of them each time we dip into the latest book.  But in this case…I flat out lost count.  I believe there are at least ten major characters, equally split between the genders, and they all end up paired off by the end, if they weren't already.  Or weren't in an earlier book before some of that miscommunication happened and one or the other stormed off in a confused huff, usually to some dangerous foreign assignment where people shoot at them.

But even recognizing a few of the names here didn't help.  I simply couldn't keep them all straight, and worse, the chapters bounced around from one to another willy nilly.  Two names even started with the same first letter (not fair!).  Look, I liked all the characters, and found them convincing, or at least entertaining—but not all at once, in the same book. (I did have to wonder how the heck the author kept everybody straight when she was writing this—she must have had a massive whiteboard or a whole lot of sticky notes.)

Where's the plot? As I said, I really like this writer's voice, so I didn't mind letting things unwind at the author's pace.  It's not a short book (477 pages in hardcover), so there was no hurry to get the story rolling.  But…by the time I reached p. 122 and still had no idea what the plot was going to be, I began to worry.  Maybe if I were to go back with a microscope, I might find a few hints of what was to come, but my general response was, when's this thing going to start?  I'll concede that the author did pull it all together by the end, but she took her own sweet time about it (I guess if you're a New York Times bestseller, you can get away with that).

Why do I care?  Well, I'm a writer and I want to know what makes a book work.  I've read—or more accurately, started—quite a few books that I dropped after a few chapters, saying, this really isn't working for me.  Sometimes I can say why, like the characters are simply not believable, or the language is clunky and dull.  But sometimes I can't put a finger on what I don't like—I simply know that I don't.  And life is too short to read books you don't like.

I've also read books that I loved, where the plot looked like Swiss cheese but I really didn't care because I was so caught up in the flow of the author's words, or the excitement of the story, that I just kept plunging right along.  It's a guilty pleasure—but I don't have to critique everything I read, do I? Can't I just enjoy, now and then?

That's why this particular book was such an anomaly for me. I finished it. In fact, I spent a lot of this past weekend reading this book (because it was cooler than doing anything else, like moving).  I did finally get caught up in it, somewhere in the middle.  But what it proved is that the characters and the voice trumped the pacing and the plot for me, as a reader.  I'm not sure how to use it myself.  Note to self:  make sure your characters are appealing and well-drawn.  And throwing in some sex doesn't hurt either.

What draws you into a book and keeps you reading?  Character, plot, style, or some combination of all of those that just clicks for you?

PACING YOURSELF

by Sheila Connolly

By now I should be feeling very mellow, and I'll still have almost a week to enjoy in Ireland.  Since, as I said last week, I'm not sure about what Internet connections I may have, I'm writing and posting these ahead.  I choose to believe that it is a benevolent universe and I will be having a wonderful time and not thinking about all the things I left waiting for me on my desk.

As I mentioned last time, the pace of things in Ireland is (or was, the last time I looked) simply different. Case in point: I was staying in a bed and breakfast last time with a lovely young couple who were musicians from Texas. They were scheduled for a radio interview in Cork City, about an hour away, and they were running late--and being American, they were anxious.  The landlady said, "sure and they'll wait for you, won't they?  You're the show, after all."

As writers we worry a lot about pacing. As mystery writers there are those who insist that we have to have a body in the first chapter and introduce all the major characters immediately, which is not always easy. Then if we get past that, we have to worry about building suspense gradually, taking two steps forward and one step back. Once at a writers conference I saw a visual representation of this:  the suspense is a straight line with an upward slope, but your story is an oscillating line that winds itself over and under the first line.

I'm not going to compare American, English and Irish writers and their use of pacing--I simply haven't read broadly enough (although I'll try to correct some of that). But I might suggest that we American writers are a bit more rushed.  And I blame television.

My generation was the first for whom television was a significant presence in our lives, and that applied to a higher degree to children, who don't know enough about the world to judge critically. For a time there was a concern that watching violent television shows--like all those westerns with people shooting each other--would make us more violent.  Maybe that idea was debunked when our most vocal representatives became hippies and tried to stop a war. Anyway, I can safely say that I am anything but violent.

But back in the day, shows were rigidly structured with commercial breaks every fifteen minutes. The result was that you had four discrete segments for any one-hour show (the longer ones were mostly dramas, as I remember), and you had to have a crescendo, a cliff-hanger, right before the commercial, so your audience wouldn't wander away looking for a sandwich and never come back. I could probably draw a picture of that too, if I were so inspired.

It's not the same any more. For one thing, there are more frequent commercials (and longer commercial breaks), at slightly more erratic intervals, so it's harder to build to a mini-climax. The final segment is now reduced to ten minutes maximum, and sometimes I'm watching a show and know the ending is going to be rushed because that's just not long enough to wrap up all the loose ends.

It has been a slow and subtle evolution, that kind of sneaked up on us. You recognize it when you see reruns of older shows, because you become aware of the fade-to-black moment that signalled the commercial in the old days, and there's a peculiar flatness when the next scene shows up immediately.  In addition, the new commercials are often thrown in awkwardly, with no regard to the plot. It's hard to stay engaged in the story, although luckily we're probably watching the old shows because we've seen them before.

Why are we as Americans in such a hurry? It's not a new phenomenon. As a genealogist I've long been aware that we are an impatient people.  Our earliest ancestors settled in a new world, and within a generation they began to feel crowded and started moving westward.  And they did it again, and again. Luckily we have a large country, and it took a while until they hit the Pacific Ocean and ran out of room. But that restlessness, that urgency, has been part of who we are for a long time.

Does that spill over to our writing style? Are we capable of enjoying a story that evolves slowly, one where we can get to know the characters? Or must we have action, action, action immediately?  Bang, you're dead--and you have 223 pages to figure out whodunnit and why?

Did I mention that Ireland has a very low murder rate? The local police may wonder why this strange American is asking them odd questions, but I hope they'll have the time to answer.