Stealing Plots

I previously wrote about “stealing” characters.  In that essay, I described several characters from popular fiction and how they might be seen as variations on the same character template.  I suggested that a writer can modify and reimagine existing characters to create new ones.  Actually, I think that is probably how most characters are born, even if the authors aren’t consciously aware of it.

Similarly, plots can be “stolen.”  Some have suggested that there are a very limited number of plots, so in a sense all writers are stealing from a small pool.  On the other hand, there is a lot more to a story than just the plot, so it may not matter.  Let me illustrate the idea with some examples.

A Christmas Carol is one of the most popular, and I think one of the best, ghost stories ever written.  Charles Dickens’ novella was first published in 1843.  The story has been adapted to the stage (including opera), many films, radio, television (my wife and I are fond of the 1984 version with George C. Scott as Scrooge), comic books, and numerous pastiches.

The plot is well known.  Ebenezer Scrooge begins as a miser.  On a certain Christmas Eve, he is confronted by the ghost of his former business partner and three spirits who represent Christmases past, present and future.  The visions they show him convince Scrooge that his single-minded pursuit of money has deprived him of life.  He awakes Christmas morning as a new man committed to relating to his fellow man and putting his money to use.

Let’s reverse Scrooge.  Make him an extremely generous person instead of a miser.  In that case, he might be something like George Bailey.  Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, was the generous man at the heart of It’s a Wonderful Life.  His dream is to travel the world.  Instead, he delays his dream again and again to help his neighbors, his brother, and eventually his own wife and children.  It comes to a head when a mistake by his uncle brings imminent ruin to the savings and loan George runs. Faced with ruin, George sees himself as an utter failure.  He contemplates suicide in hopes that his insurance policy will rescue his family from financial ruin.

At this point, he receives a spiritual visit like Ebenezer.  In this case it is a single spirit, an angel named Clarence.  Like the Christmas ghosts, Clarence shows George a vision.  This is also an inversion of Dickens’ tale.  Instead of showing him a history of missed opportunities and blindness to the needs of others, Clarence reveals an alternate world in which George and his generous acts did not exist.  His brother is dead.  His wife is a frightened spinster (it’s hard to believe Donna Reed would have been overlooked by the marriageable men of Bedford Falls even holed up in the library with her glasses on).  The people are mired in poverty because he hadn’t been there to fight for access to credit so they could build homes and businesses.  The town is under the thumb of the miserly landlord Mr. Potter, himself a type of unreformed Scrooge.

Like Scrooge, George is changed by his vision.  He sees that his life is worth something and that his sacrifices bought him a lot of love.  In the end, returned from his walk in the dark alternate universe, that love is displayed by a return of generosity from his many friends that saves him.

These beloved stories don’t have the same plot.  However, one is a variation or alteration of the plot of the other.  This plot archetype doesn’t have to be so serious.

Topper, either the book by Thorne Smith or the movie starring Cary Grant, is an example of this plot played for laughs.  Cosmo Topper is a banker.  He is bored with his job.  He is somewhat alienated from his wife who clings to respectability.  He has money and status, even what might have been considered a good marriage in a time when such relationships were as much about business as love, but he has no fun and it is wearing on him.

The ghosts are a piece of work, too.  George and Marion Kerby are a wealthy couple who die in a car accident.  Instead of shuffling off to the afterlife, they find themselves stuck on earth.  They have never done something substantive, either good or bad, in their entirely frivolous lives.  They decide to fix the situation by helping their old friend Topper.

In this case, all the major characters are a type of Scrooge.  Topper has let his job, money, and status keep him from a life of fun and serious connection.  The Kerbys had so little meaningful connection to other people that they neither helped nor harmed another soul.  Even Topper’s wife Clara has sacrificed intimacy in her marriage to focus on social climbing.

So Topper is visited by spirits like Scrooge and Bailey.  Instead of taking a serious look at life, it is presents a screwball comedy.  The Kerbys drag Topper into all kind of risqué situations he would normally not get into.  Misunderstandings abound and Topper is embarrassed repeatedly.  The ghosts are have good intentions, but they are not very competent.  Topper feigns irritation at the hijinks, but in his heart is having a ball and doesn’t want the haunting to end.  Clara feels humiliated by all the trouble Topper is getting into, but fear of losing him to a wild life reminds her of how much she loves him.

Through a series of screwy events, the characters undergo a Scrooge-like change.  The Toppers loosen up and rekindle their love.  They discover that their intimacy as a couple is more important than jobs, wealth or status, though they don’t have to completely give up those things.  The Kerbys take responsibility for themselves and their actions.  They finally put Topper’s needs ahead of their own and do something substantively good, opening the doors of heaven.

You can probably see that these stories are related by more than similarities in plot.  They have a common theme.  All of these stories are about connecting to others in relationships.  Bailey is a little different from the others in that he starts out blind to all the good that has resulted from his seemingly humble touching of the lives of others.  Scrooge, the Toppers and the Kerbys are isolated for various reasons, mostly of their own making, and need to discover that relating to others is the main thing.

Google

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

Reed, Kit. Mastering Fiction Writing. Cincinnati, OH: Writer’s Digest Books, 1991.

Kit Reed doesn’t believe there is a magic book that will tell you everything you need to know about writing. Her book, Mastering Fiction Writing, will help you get started and contains a lot of advice on making your stories better.

The first key is that learning to write comes from practicing writing. If you’re not writing, you’re not a writer. No story is perfect, so start writing and improve your work as you proceed.



An encouraging tip from Reed is that you already have a great storehouse of experience to draw upon as a writer. All the experiences of your own life, the lives of people you know and everything you’ve heard about and learned are the raw material you already have in your head. As a writer, you’ll use all of this, not directly but transformed for the purposes of your stories.

Reed is not a fan of plot, believing that stories are developed and preferring let her characters and what they want lead her. She does believe in outlining. An outline can help a beginning writer get a story in shape and avoid problems before starting. Even in the middle of a story, outlining can help with diagnosing problems and figuring out where the story needs to go.

The book also covers other common elements of fiction writing. This includes style, character, point of view, voice, rewriting and establishing your work habits.

A particularly useful element of the book is that almost every chapter contains a list of questions you can ask yourself about that element in your story. You could use these questions at any point in developing a story to help you recognize problems and create solutions.

The final chapter is also particularly useful. It deals with discipline. A writer isn’t going to produce stories, and especially not books, if he doesn’t do the work, deal with the problems and overcome the occasional boredom, hard work and temptation to quit.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card
No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

How to Write Mysteries by Shannon OCork

OCork, Shannon. How to Write Mysteries. Cincinnati, OH: Writers’ Digest Books, 1989.

How to Write Mysteries is a quick summary of writing crime novels from start to finish. It doesn’t deal much with what it’s going to take to get you to set down and do it, but it is full of advice on what make mysteries work.

To OCork, a mystery is a like a game you play with your readers. A mystery novel is puzzle and the reader is trying to solve it by figuring out who committed the crime, typically murder. The writer must play fair by providing all the clues needed to figure it out, but at the same time provide an interesting story that obfuscates and distracts.

OCork speaks of this in terms of the real story and the apparent story. The real story is the solving of the mystery. The apparent story is all the stuff the characters must go through, some directly related to unraveling the crime and some tangential, to accomplish it.



The book deals with the mechanics of writing a mystery novel: types of mysteries, plot development, style, character development, pace, dialogue and more. It also covers what to do after you've written your book: manuscript preparation, submitting to publishers and starting your next book.

OCork uses examples throughout to illustrate her point. Some come from published works, but many come from a story she makes up for the purpose of illustration. It’s not a novel, but it does illustrate how one thing builds on another, from plot to the full story. Using this common example shows how everything ties together.

In one chapter, OCork addresses the writer’s life. It is a lot of work. If you’re making a living as a writer, or hoping to, it is your work. That means making the sacrifices needed to do the work you want, but also enjoying the fruit of it.

What I Read

Back at the end of 2004, I received from my wife a small journal in which to record the book I’d read and a few notes on them. I didn’t record in this journal every book I read since, but I’ve recorded those that seemed especially noteworthy or interesting to me at the time.

I’ll be reproducing that journal here, in a web-enhanced version. You might think of these notes as micro-reviews. I hope you find them useful and interesting.
Date: February 15, 2005
Title: Zig: The Autobiography of Zig Ziglar Author: Zig Ziglar
Thoughts: I enjoyed See You at the Top and Over the Top. I’m encouraged that he learned this over time and overcame setbacks—some surprisingly recent. I hope soon to put aside being a “wandering generality” and start living the life God made for me.



Date: February 17, 2005
Title: No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days Author: Chris Baty
Thoughts: I’m not sure I’ll undertake this challenge. I do need a kick in the pants to jumpstart my creativity. I hardly do anything anymore simply for the joy of doing it. I need to get some fun back in my life and do some thing I like doing.



Date: March 1, 2005
Title: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living Author: Dale Carnegie
Thoughts: “Therefore, do not worry saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father know you need all these things” (Matthew 6:31-32).



Date: March 3, 2005
Title: Independent Consulting
Author: David Kintler with Bob Adams
Thoughts: This is one of the books I read while preparing to start a consulting and training business.



Date: March 7, 2005
Title: Forever Ruined for the Ordinary Author: Joy Dawson
Thoughts: I read this book quickly, but there is much in it I’d like to ponder.

First Kings

First Kings is a history of the kings of Israel and Judah beginning with the transition for David to his son Solomon.  The book also recounts some of the notable prophets of the time, particularly Elijah and Elisha.

Solomon was David’s contested successor.  David had many sons older than Solomon, though some were dead, notably Absalom who had tried to usurp the throne.  David’s son Adonijah was preparing to succeed his father, and even organized an elaborate celebration to court the favor of important aristocrats.  The prophet Nathan discovered the plot.  He, Solomon, David, and Bathsheba, Solomon’s mother, arranged to elevate Solomon to the throne while his father still lived.

Solomon was notable for his wisdom.  God offered to the young king what he wanted.  He asked for wisdom to govern the people rightly.  God was pleased with the answer and gave Solomon wealth and power in addition to wisdom.

Wisdom didn’t keep Solomon out of trouble.  He had many wives (no doubt trouble by itself), and he permitted his foreign wives to continue practicing their religions, so the worship of false gods was allowed in the kingdom.  Idol-worship would be common amongst Solomon’s successors.

After Solomon, the kingdom was divided.  The ten northern tribes formed a kingdom generally referred to as Israel.  Two southern tribes made Judah.  Throughout this period, idol-worship prevailed in Israel.  Some kings of Judah served God, but many did not, and the godly kings did not succeed in eradicating idolatry.

Following Solomon, most of the kings of both the north and the south are summed up briefly.   Some just get a paragraph.  We see the kingdom rise and fall based on the faithfulness of the people.  When they sought God, even imperfectly, He blessed them and they thrived.  When they sought to gratify themselves and follow false gods, they quickly ran into trouble.  This is a pattern in the history of ancient Israel that started before the kings and continued after them.

First Kings ends with the reign of Ahab, famously married to Jezebel.    These monarchs promoted the worship of Baal and suppressed the worship of God.  They were opposed by the prophet Elijah.  Elijah is associated with some spectacular miracles.  God withheld rain from the land until Elijah called an end to the drought.  Elijah called out the prophets of Baal in a contest to call down fire from heaven  Baal did not answer his worshippers, but God sent fire for Elijah, who that day executed hundreds of Baal’s priests.  This put him in serious conflict with Ahab and Jezebel.

Elijah is also well known in that he did not die, at least not in a conventional sense.  He was taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire.  He appeared to Christ and a few disciples on during the Transfiguration.

It is clear that First Kings is intended to be a summary.  It frequently refers to records of the actions of the kings as if these might be available to a reader who wanted to confirm the recounting of find more information.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

First and Second Samuel

Luke

Mark

Matthew

Proverbs

First Kings.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Google

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

We are all writers. Language and writing come naturally to us. We learn the notion that we are bad writers somewhere along the way, most likely in school. We are trained to be self-conscious and anxious about writing; we need to break that training and start having fun.

This viewpoint is the starting point for Julia Cameron’s advice to writers in The Right to Write. She envisions millions of people writing. They’ll write naturally and organically for the joy of writing.

That is the other major theme that runs through the book: write for the sake of writing. Writing has a lot of benefits even if you only write for your own eyes. It is a way for us to express ourselves and examine our lives.

Cameron has a lot of advice for writers but it is generally not prescriptive. Each writer has his own way. Cameron’s advice is aimed at helping him discover it. That does not mean her advice is impractical. She has some hardnosed comments about what it takes to overcome the blocks would-be writers create (or accept) to their own development.

As Cameron describes it, the writing life is not about being a writer. It is more about becoming the person and writer you can be. It is a process of learning and discovery. She tells several stories of writers who, for various reasons, stop learning and stop being open. The result is that they stop writing or find it difficult. Always be learning is good advice for anyone who wants to improve at something, whatever it may be.

Writing should be integrated into life. Your life, interests, experiences, relationships, emotions, and all the things you take in through the senses are fuel for writing. The more you live, the more you’ll have to write about and the more you’ll want to write.

The book contains many exercises to help a budding writer develop. One of the main things is simply to write every day. She describes daily writing that is intended to get one used to writing without the inner censor putting on the breaks. You also get used to writing even when not in the mood, though once you start writing your mood is likely to come around.

If you’re looking for a step-by-step guide for writing a popular genre novel, this isn’t it. If you want some practical advice and encouragement from a professional writer who thinks you can write something worthwhile, and enjoy it, then The Right to Write is a good choice.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Cameron, Julia. The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1998.

Second Samuel

Second Samuel.  The Holy Bible.  New King James Version.  Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

The prophet Samuel died before the events described in this second book named for him.  Like First Samuel, this book continues the history of the establishment of a monarchy in Israel.  In particular, it covers most of the reign of David.

The book begins with the death of Saul.  He was the king who preceded David and the father of David’s close friend Jonathan, who died in the same battle.  David mourned the loss of the king and his friend, even though he knew it cleared the way for him to take the crown.

David’s ascension to the throne was rocky even though he had been selected by God to fill the position.  The southern tribes, Judah, received David as king, but the rest of Israel was led by Saul’s son Ishbosheth.  The two were at war, which ended when Ishbosheth was killed by two of his own men.

That is only the beginnings of the intrigues that plagued David’s reign.  No doubt part of this was the instability of a new kingdom, where many people were seeking to acquire and consolidate power.

Part of this instability may have come from David himself.  At his best he was described as a man after God’s own heart.  He loved God.  He was brave and generous. He was a great military leader and a canny diplomat.  He was all too human as well.  He was lustful.  He didn’t want to face trouble, especially within his own family, which led to an insurrection led by his son Absalom.  He allowed his office to remove him from his people, his troops, and his family, and the isolation made him vulnerable.  Sometimes his temper got the better of him.

On the whole, though, David is remembered as a great king.  He consolidated his country.  He defeated foreign enemies.  He surrounded himself with faithful and capable advisers and assistants.  He especially was faithful to God; even though he slipped he returned to God, acknowledging Him and seeking His way for himself and the kingdom.

There is a lot of exciting history in this book.  Most of it is very tightly summarized.  If someone wanted to novelize this book, expanding and fictionalizing the detailed plot, they could probably produce a series of thick novels packed with enough intrigue and action to keep even a jaded reader of thrillers engaged.  For a religious book that you might think would want to polish and aggrandize the reputation of a powerful and beloved king, the Biblical historians are surprisingly frank.  They do not turn away from David’s shortcomings or the swirl of conniving in his court.

Google

Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Shut Up & Write! is a guide for new writers by author and teacher Judy Bridges. It is one of the most straightforward and simple writing guides I’ve seen, which I like. As you go through it and read about the process and techniques described, you may feel she is describing the very process she use to write the book in your hands.

There are several other things to like about this book. I’ll mention a few here in no particular order except the last.

The book is broad; it covers the writing process from idea to publication. It remains a short book, though, and doesn’t get into excessive detail. I think it is enough to have a generally direction. As a beginning writer, you should be writing and making your work as good as you can; you can figure out the details you need as you go.

Bridges doesn’t elevate fiction writing over nonfiction. If someone writes histories, news articles, technical manuals or advertising copy, they are still writing. Many of the same skills and requirements apply to any type of writing.

I like Bridges’ suggestions for organizing or plotting a story. It is very simple and visual. It is also something that could work for a short piece or a long book. Good planning tools should help one write, not spend a lot of effort on planning.

Possibly the best thing about the Bridges’ advices is that she does not sugarcoat how hard it is to write a book—at least a good one. She tells her readers to put at least two years into a book. Admittedly, many of her students and the audience for this book will be aspiring or part-time writers with limited time, but writing a quality book is about more than time. This realistic expectation will help readers who hope to write a book get in the right mindset.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Keeping a Journal You Love by Sheila Bender

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Write Your Heart Out by Rebecca McClanahan

Bridges, Judy. Shut Up & Write! Milwaukee, WI: Redbird Studio Press, 2011.

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Aczel, Amir D. Descartes’ Secret Notebook. New York: Broadway, 2005.

A famous mathematician with suspected ties to a secretive cabal of global reformers dies from possible poisoning at the hand of a doctor employed by a European power. A French official surveys his papers, including a coded notebook, and has them quietly sent to the safekeeping of a relative. Years later, another brilliant mathematician, suffering from attacks on his reputation, seeks out the notebook to uncover its secrets.

It sounds like the plot of a thriller. Amir Aczel uses it to frame his biography of philosopher and mathematician René Descartes.

Descartes’ greatest hit as a philosopher was, “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). He was a leader in rationalism, a philosophy that emphasizes the discovery of truth by use of reason. His method focused on methodical doubt by which he aimed to find truth (to him, all knowledge was connected, not discreet, unrelated truths) by reasoning out those things that could not be doubted. Thusly he reasoned his existence because he couldn’t very well doubt it when he was sitting there thinking about it. His method set him against the prevailing philosophy of the day, scholasticism, which focused on learning from authoritative figures and sources, particularly Aristotle.

High school algebra students will immediately recognize Descartes’ contribution to math. From today’s perspective, it may be hard to understand why it was such a big deal in the 17th Century. Descartes created analytic geometry, which uses algebraic equations to describe and understand geometric shapes. Before this, geometry and algebra were distinct fields, not parts of a unified mathematics. As part of this, he gave us Cartesian coordinates, the familiar x,y graph that has makes so many high school kids cross-eyed. Despite complaints that they’ll never use it, behind the scenes Cartesian coordinates are ubiquitous.


Descartes was not part of a secret society. He was a devout Catholic and was careful not to publish anything that would put him in direct conflict with the church. Even so, the writings of the Rosicrucians, a group of philosophers who sought political and religious reform and the advancement of science, influenced him. He even knew one of the brotherhood, though he may have been unaware of it. Despite his efforts to distance himself from the Rosy Cross, his books used terms that made some believe he was a Rosicrucian and his notebook included alchemical symbols that the group used.

Gottfried Leibniz, co-creator of calculus, was under attack from proponents of Isaac Newton, who independently created calculus contemporaneously with Leibniz. Other accused Leibniz of deriving his work from Descartes, which is why he diligently tracked down the Frenchman’s papers.

What did Descartes’ secret notebook contain? Leibniz handily decoded it. Descartes discovered Euler’s theorem. For polyhedrons, the sum of the number of faces (F) and the number of vertices (V) minus the number of edges (E) is 2 (F + V – E = 2). Descartes kept his discovery secret because some may have construed it as supporting a theory of Johann Kepler that used regular polyhedrons to describe planetary orbits in a Copernican model of the solar system. This was contrary to the teaching of the church, which Descartes wanted to avoid because of his personal devotion and because conflict with the Inquisition could be a career-ending (and life-ending) move.

Amir D. Aczel also wrote Chance.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
1089 and All That by David Acheson
Fortune’s Formula by William Poundstone
The Numbers behind NUMB3RS by Keith Devlin & Gary Lorden
The Unfinished Game by Keith Devlin

Holiday Inn (Film)

Holiday Inn. Writ. Claude Binyon and Elmer Rice. Dir. Mark Sandrich. With Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Paramount, 1942.

Holiday Inn is one of my favorite movies. It has great music by Irving Berlin. It has performance by Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire; they only appeared together in one other movie. It’s a good romantic comedy, too. The film works in each of these areas.

Berlin originally conceived it as a showcase for his music, with a song for every holiday. He wrote the song “White Christmas” for the film and it went on to become one of the most popular songs ever. All the songs are solid and some are nearly as good as “White Christmas.” I think the song for Washington’s Birthday is the weakest, especially in comparison to the great tune for Lincoln’s Birthday, but in light of where it fits in the movie I feel like cutting it a little slack. I’m especially fond of “You’re Easy to Dance With.”

Crosby and Astaire provide good acting performance, but audiences rightly expect them to sing and dance and they deliver. Two of Astaire’s dance numbers are worth particular mention; the first is supposedly drunk and the other involves firecrackers. These two dances themselves are enough to make the movie worth seeing.

It’s a fair romantic comedy. There is a lot of chemistry between Crosby and Astaire, who deliver clever lines with snap. There is also good chemistry between them and their leading ladies, Virginia Dale and Marjorie Reynolds. The basic plot is boy meets girl, they fall in love, girl is ambivalent about ambitions, conniving friend takes advantage and sweeps away girl, repeat.

The film is an interesting look into race relations at the start of World War II. The film only has three black characters, a female house servant (played by Louise Beavers) and her two children. As if the role of cook-maid isn’t stereotypical enough, she is even called Mamie. The film plainly shows how things would have been done at the time, but seems to have slight moments of reticence about it. Here is an example.



On Lincoln’s Birthday, the white server-performers at Holiday Inn have darkened skin. The actual black people stay in the kitchen, out of sight of the guests. The song for the holiday focuses on Lincoln’s role in ending slavery. The original plan is to play it straight, but at the last minute Crosby’s character decides to change it to a blackface number to hide the identity of a starlet, his love interest, from his rivals. Even in a celebration of the end of slavery, the segregation is so complete that the white guests come no closer to interacting with black people than the make-up darkened skin of white performers.

Even so, the film isn’t about race. It’s a fun love story. It has great music and singing. It has wonderful dance numbers. It’s worth seeing, especially around Christmas or New Year’s Eve.

Write Naked by Jennifer Probst

Romance writer Jennifer Probst has written more than a score of published books. In Write Naked, she shares her experiences, both successes and mistakes, of building her career as a professional writer.

Probst was not an immediate success. She wrote six books before writing one that was published. One of the lessons of the book is that it takes persistence, time and effort to develop you skill and find a place for your work. Even after writing successful books, the book you’re working on can be a struggle; Probst confesses to finding challenges in writing her most recent books.

Success itself can be a challenge. When she finally made it, she made it big, with a large sale and a book that hit the bestseller lists. After that, the pressure was on. She felt the expectations of her editor and readers to produce another hit that they would love. The pressure to meet those expectations made the next book much harder. It was successful, but not as successful, which she found very disappointing. She points out the reality that you won’t hit a home run every time you step up to the plate, but a base hit is still a success.

I admit that I’m not a fan of romance. However, I am a bit in awe of the ability to many successful romance writers to produce. They turn out books and their books sell. This requires work—they have to get it done. Probst’s advice includes dealing with that aspect of writing. She treats it as her business. She writes every day. She sets goals. She creates deadlines (or gets them from her editor) and meets them. She sets aside time to promote her books and interact with readers. She also says no to things that don’t fit her life and career as a writer so her time and energy isn’t drained away from where it is needed.

Some might thing Probst’s revelation of her experience takes some of the romance out of writing. Of course, whether it is romantic or not, there are realities to making a career of writing. An aspiring writer will need to deal with it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Just Write by Walter Dean Myers

Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

No Plot? Not Problem! A Low Stress-High Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days by Chris Baty

The Right to Write by Julia Cameron

Shut Up & Write! by Judy Bridges

Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg

Probst, Jennifer. Write Naked: A Bestseller’s Guide to Writing Romance and Navigating the Path to Success. Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 2017.

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

I was going read only fiction over the holidays and give myself a break from writing reviews.  So I picked up Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.  I remembered I reviewed The Sherlockian by Graham Moore and began to feel obligated to review this other novel about Arthur Conan Doyle as well.

The books are very different.  The Sherlockian is a thriller and it is entirely fictional.  Barnes’ book is a more literary, historical novel based on real events.  If he had been writing a thriller, the story would have started when Doyle got involved in overturning the wrongful conviction of solicitor George Adelji for mutilating and killing animals in the rural community where he was raised by a Scottish mother and an Indian father who converted to Anglicanism and served as a vicar.  This doesn’t occur until you’ve already read 70 percent of the book.  Barnes doesn’t indulge the achronologic order a novel permits, but he does take his time, gets into the heads of his protagonists, and takes a long look at side stories.  This is why I refer to it as a literary novel in contrast to a thriller, which is more to-the-point and plot driven.

I wonder why Barnes decided to write a novel instead of a nonfiction account of the events.  I suspect there was plenty of source material.  Doyle was a prolific writer.  Newspapers abounded in England at the time.  Clues to the truth can be found in even the most obfuscatory court and government documents.  The Adelji case led to new laws, including the introduction of appeals courts to the British criminal justice system.  I suspect he wanted to explore themes that interested him without too strictly bound to a factual narrative.

There is the suggestion of a theme in the opening chapters.  Doyle and Adelji are introduced through their childhood exposures to death, something that would have been common in the 1800s.  Doyle famously became a spiritualist.  He was committed to the idea that death was passage into another life and that gifted people could communicate with the departed.  I do not know if Adelji’s views are on the record, but Barnes depicts him as something between neutral and skeptical.  He also seems indifferent and uncurious.  The only fact he is sure of is that everyone dies.  What happens after death, if anything, is unknown, and he finds the evidence of an afterlife to be weak.  These views are not contrasted; they are juxtaposed.

Ethics may be another theme.  Doyle derived his ethical view from his notions of chivalry.  Adelji, who comes across as a high-functioning person with Asperger’s syndrome, found his place in the order and logic of the law.  There was plenty of unethical activity, or at least human venality, presented in the story: racism, eugenic notions, sloppy police work, unjust courts, and heel-dragging bureaucrats.

I might have preferred a straight nonfiction account of the events.  Barnes novelization worked for me, though.  It was certainly more effective than the partial fictionalization attempted by David Gelernter in his history of the 1939 World’s Fair.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Barnes, Julian.  Arthur & George.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.

Google

Finding Your Writer’s Voice by Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall

Frank, Thaisa, and Dorothy Wall. Finding Your Writer’s Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.

Thaisa Frank and Dorothy wall take an organic view of writing. It begins with the voice.

Voice is not something abstract. They mean a person’s actual, natural voice. It is our native instrument of communication and expression. Like a musical instrument or a singer’s voice, it can be mastered by practice and the developing skill of the instrumentalist or vocalist.

The early chapters of the book are devoted to getting to know your instrument. This is your raw voice. Voice has the advantage of being uniquely yours and fitted to you. Using your raw voice is more than just doing what comes naturally. Like mastering other instruments, one learns is range and the variety of notes and timbres it can produce. Several exercises are offered to help you get to know your raw voice and to explore all you can do with it.

The voice of the story is more like that of a composer. It understands the instrument, the raw voice, but it also engaged in making decisions about key, tempo, and amplitude over an entire piece and each movement and how it all fits together. The raw and story voices work together as the writer works, making writing improvisational, like a jazz musician using his instrument spontaneously while leaning on a mastery of scales, techniques and musical conventions.



Frank and Wall cover many of the things one might expect on a book on fiction writing: character, plot, point of view, tone, revision, and the writing life. In their book, voice serves the source and context of all these things. They spring forth from the raw voice of a person and are developed as a story by the polished voice of a writer. The craft of writing is developed on the job, working the materials supplied by the voice into stories.

Even in revising, there is an organic sense of spontaneity, improvisation and creative working within constraints. Revising is not a process of simple mechanics. It is a chance to creatively reengage a story, testing it with the creative force of raw voice and the helpful voice of internal editors who understand the workings of a story, a beautiful turn of phrase and how to get things write. Writers can easily get stymied at this stage, as they might at others, but frustration here is often an opportunity to take a story to a better level.

I should have given this book more time than I did (it was due back at the library). It’s a class for writers and, like most classes, getting the most out of it requires doing the homework.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Mastering Fiction Writing by Kit Reed

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

German physicist Max Planck was one of the most famous and well-respected scientists of his day. His work formed the foundation of quantum mechanics and is still relevant to physics today. He lived through both world wars, and these resulted in tragedy for his family.

Planck is a brief biography of the man by another physicist, Brandon R. Brown. Brown focuses his book on the last years of World War II, but from there reaches far back to his subject’s birth in 1858 and forward a little to his death in 1947. It is interesting that Brown did not choose to take a chronological approach given that entropy and the irreversibility of time were subjects of great interest to Planck. Perhaps he wants to readers to be somewhat unsettled, no doubt the way Planck must have been unsettled by events of his lifetime and the conclusions younger scientists drew from his own theories.

Brown presents Planck and as a flexible thinker who contributed to physics and accepted new theories at an age when most of his contemporaries were ready to shut the books on what could be learned. Apparently what most of us like to think of as middle-aged (at worst) is ancient for a physicist. His own work on thermal radiation established fundamental concepts of quantum theory, though he didn’t use the term “quanta.” When a young Albert Einstein proposed his special theory of relativity, Planck quick promote and build on it. He was slower to come around to general relativity (as wild as it is to us, it was insane to many in that time), and both men suffered philosophical heartburn from the quantum mechanics served up by the generation that came up under them.

Planck was very loyal to his country. His brother Hermann died in the Franco-Prussian War, and the family became intensely patriotic. At the start of World War I, he was hopeful that the war might strengthen and unify Germany. His oldest son, Karl, died at Verdun, and Germany fell on hard times.

Things were more complex when the Nazis took power. At times, his reputation as the nation’s most prominent scientist gave him leeway to resist anti-Semitic policies. At other times he acquiesced, hoping that the excesses of Nazi policies would be smoothed out or even reversed by the necessities of governing and the needs of the nation. He was so hopeful he even encouraged Jewish colleagues to stay. The Nazis saw no need for moderation, so Planck’s influence quickly waned. His son, Erwin, became involved in a resistance movement that hoped to topple the Nazis. He was implicated in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Though the Planck family appealed to every ear in and around the Nazi regime that might have sympathy, Erwin was convicted and eventually hanged. (Planck survived his first wife and four of his five children).

Brown doesn’t judge Planck too harshly, though some might. He had no love for the Nazis, but perhaps too much love for Germany, its scientific achievement, and its international standing, may have made him reluctant to boldly oppose them. This led to a break in his relationship with Einstein, though the younger eminence spoke very kindly of Planck even many years later. Because of he refused to embrace the Nazis, and he was well-liked by many foreign scientists, the Allies gave him a place in rebuilding the German scientific establishment after the war. The British, French, and Americans reorganized scientific institutes into the Max Planck Society, which is still active in supporting all manner of scientific endeavor.

I think the book is approachable for most adult readers who may have an interest in Planck or his times. Brown does not get so deep so deep into the science that he loses readers; he tries to explain it in a way that will make sense to a general audience. The structure of the book may make it difficult for a young reader to follow.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Einstein’s Clocks, Poincare’s Maps: Empires of Time by Peter Galison 

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

The Physics of Superheroes by James Kakalios

Brandon R. Brown. Planck: Driven by Vision, Broken by War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.