Californication

Maybe you have seen Californication. It is on Netflix and concerns a novelist who has a lot of sex and does a lot of drugs and drives a Porche. Wow. Not only that he is able to tell everyone how he feels and confronts people in movie theatres because they are talking on their phone and faces off with very tough husbands whose wives he is having sex with but he has no real worries and comes out smelling like a rose as he jets off in his Porche.

But the novelist has problems. He cannot write. He is not happy with the movie version of his movie. Poor baby. Still he has the Porche and a great apartment and lives in San Francisco and basically jets around doing a lot of nothing except for bumping into women at bookstores who are reading his book and then he goes to bed with them.

Now he does have an ex wife and a daughter whom he is trying kind of to be a better dad. I have to laugh or cry at Hollywood's depiction of the working novelist. His good fortune is so glossed over that it hurts the fantasy,. I really want to believe that this novelist life is out there. It is so full of sex and drugs and good times that it is really more of the rock star. It really would be something to strive for and it supposes that people still care about writers and the books they write.

Very cool. Too bad we live on earth.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
Real Santa..."If someone doesn't make a movie out of this book then there is something wrong with the world."

 

The Fantasy of Max Perkins

I have been reading Scott Berg's Biography of Max Perkins and it is really just unbelievable. This man was something of a Saint and after that he was Santa Claus. And after that he was brilliant. It really is a world Gone with The Wind. Take the financing of F Scott Fitzgerald after The Great Gatsby tanked in sales (unbelievable right) and he was broke again. Perkins would then gin up a collection of short stories and front him the money. Or he would front him the money against a possible movie sale on the novel he was working on or on serialization rights. Or he would just loan him the money.

Or how about discovering Ernest Hemingway and going to bat for words he could not bare to utter himself. Perkins could not stand profanity yet he went against the owner of Charles Scribner's and Sons to pull for Hemingway's right to include such words. Or how about discovering a young Fitzgerald and sending back the novel three times (This Side of Paradise) for rewrites and then going against the powers that be at Scribners and threatening to resign if they didn't publish him. And he had just started there!

Or how about taking Tom Wolfe's novel Look Homeward Angel and editing it from a the rambling mess to a cohesive book and then doing it again for his second novel that was more than a million words. And taking the author into his house while he did the editing and enduring his  verbal drunken abuse all the while he did him the biggest favor anybody would ever do for him by publishing what would have been an unintelligible mess.

These stories of go on and on. I have a great editor and I have no complaints,  but Max Perkins belongs to a different world when writers were Gods and editors were angels of mercy. Pure fantasy in the year 2013.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have

The Kamikaze writing the Big Book

My mother in law asked me what I was working on. Usually I just say something vague, but I told her I was working on a big book and that I was six hundred and sixty pages into it. She paused, then looked at me and said "who the hell wants to read a book that big?" Fair enough. It gets worse because I will probably break a thousand. But when writing the big book you are a bit like a kamikaze where you are not sure you are coming back from this one.

First of all no one wants a really big book anymore. They are expensive to publish. And there is that old thing that peoples attention span is getting shorter not longer. Look at Kindle singles. Look at what is selling. Look at twitter! And there you go, writing an opus along the lines of Gone With the Wind or War and Peace. Talk about insane. Your agent doesn't want you to do it and yet you persist. Why?

Maybe because you can. Maybe because you wont ever do it again. Maybe you just want to see if you can write the big book and take a swipe at the "whats it all about sweepstakes." Why not? You have written everything else. Why not throw in everything but the kitchen sink and go for it. You only live once right? And so you strap yourself in, start the motor, and fly toward your final destination. A human torpedo headed for total destruction or total nirvana.

That's the big book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

No New Books under the Sun

Just had a friend tell me there is a book out very similar to the one I just finished. Whoa! You mean that book I just spent two years writing... someone else wrote? That is your first thought. So you scurry and download the sucker onto your Kindle because you want to find out if somehow somewhere somebody busted out your book before you could. Yeah the plot is similar. Heart pounding now you read along and the main character does seem like yours and now you are into the thick of the reviews and synopsis and yes there are more similarities and you might even think this book influenced yours, because the character and the plot and the action are all similar....but....it's not your book.

Not by a long shot. You didn't write it. This is not Hollywood. You did not just come up with the Horse Whisperer ala high concept plot that someone else can steal and then produce and you are out half a million on that screenplay that would have been produced. This is a novel.. And novels are individual. Period. When I wrote Tobacco Sticks everyone said it had been done. To Kill A Mockingbird. Trial.Twelve year old narrator. South. Racism. Nope. Been done. So the publishers kept saying right up to the auction with ten publishers bidding.

Why? Because there is nothing new under the sun in terms of plot, but there is everything new with every book. It is simply you. A book is your view, your voice, your breath. It is everything about you and somebody might write the same book, same plot, same characters, but it really doesn't matter. The reader doesn't care about that. Look at sequels. People know a sequel is the exact same story just done a little differently and they pay to see it again. Why? Because people are always up for a good story.

So when someone tells you, hey I just read a book like the one you just wrote. Say, yeah. I know. But it wasn't my book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Advantages or Reading and Writing Fiction

The New York Times Sunday Review just had an article about the neuroscience of reading novels or fiction. The upshot is that reading fiction is good for your brain. Apparently all those neurons like the connotation of metaphors and description. Your brain lights up like its on crack from reading fiction and goes dark like a dead bulb watching television. But there is more. People who read fiction have more social intelligence and pick up on social cues faster. They seem able to decipher human relationships and understand people more quickly  as opposed to their nonfiction reading breathen. To those of us who have been reading and writing fiction for years there is nothing new here.

You always knew that your ability to finish other peoples sentences, pick the word for them while they said,..what that's word...I know it...was related somehow to all those books you read that no one else cared about. Or the way you could know somebody from a single sentence, gesture, nuance. It just happens like that. Reading fiction is probably the most intelligent thing anyone can do because as the NY Times article points out more of your brain is used in the process than sucking in information via digital land.This makes perfect sense.

You quickly saw your ability to speak when reading fiction shoot up. Reading a novel or a poem allows you to simply think faster. There is something totally engaging about a great story that probably allows your brain to play in a way it cannot when stuck in some turgid nonfiction task. Great fiction really gets you going because it engages your humanity and probably touches your soul. Now you are really getting a great bang for your buck from that novel...it is simply teaching you how to be.

And if you want to knock it down to a more utilitarian sense...fiction blows out your vocabulary and allows you to connect the dots quicker and understand situations faster that your non novel reading friends. So you can make the sale, get the friend, win the girl, and appear witty, conversant, and more than all that, well read.

What more can you ask of a book? Or a Kindle?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Even writers have to throw a punch

Ebooks are all the rage but ubiquity should not be a cover for getting free downloads. The Internet enjoys free reign because it is new and this has allowed it to keep one step ahead of the great fist of restraint. But authors and everyone else with a book knows that what happened to the music business is happening to publishing. Just because you can get a book on the Internet does not mean we should just go oh well anybody can download anything they want now. They can't.

The IPOD motif of books has not arrived. The Kindle while  very good is a poor substitute for the book. It just isnt the same. Sorry. But reading from a screen is reading from a screen. Now as an author who wants exposure I don't particularly mind the free downloads. The writers first goal after getting published is to get read and availability is a big deal. But right behind that you wouldn't mind getting paid either. This is hard stuff for writers who are used to existing on nothing. Average income for writers...nine grand. Och.

So you have these creatures who are used to getting screwed over  and making very little. Now they are going to have to stand up and say don't download my book for free! Thank God for the Authors Guild. They do most of the heavy lifting but individual writers have to decide if they want their books disseminated for free or not. Again you are torn between getting read and getting paid. The big hitters not so much.

But when you come down to it, getting paid legitimizes the work. You have to give value to your work first and hopefully the public will follow. These are changing times, but writers are used to that. The difference now is that people who are used to working alone will have to stand up for themselves and their work and get involved  or risk being pushed around yet again.

Even writers have to learn to throw a punch.
http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Serial Sex Murders and the State of Publishing

I had  a friend say to me he was glad he had published his two books when he did and gotten the contract he did then because now it would be impossible Maybe that is why a film company is bringing out a 3D version of The Great Gatsby. They said it would allow them to give a faithful telling of the novel by bringing a stage quality (3D) to the film. Hmmm. Or like my dad said the other day, the only  people getting published are those that do something notorious (branding/celebrity) and suggested I go ride a motorcycle off a mountain or leap from this planet to the next and write a book about it. Thanks dad.

But if you are a fiction writer then there is a bit of feeling of yelling into a void. It would seem that Fitzgerald might reach more people in his 3D format than the original pulp version. Or that might friend might not get the contract he got before or maybe I really should jump into the next universe and write about it. But certainly a lot of the rules governing fiction might be on their head between the Kindle, the economy, and the more brazen publish somebody famous and play it safe.

Saying all that you have to believe good fiction by unknown writers is still being published. I remember a letter I received when I first started out and she said I had a good novel (an agent) but that serial sex murderers are what get published now. But for me to keep at it, "quietly good books do get published" One would like to believe that but maybe that quietly is the undoing of it all now. Quietly might not suffice in the age of the Internet.

We live in a loud polymorphic culture of multiple stimuli. I run my UVERSE from my phone and DVR movies while I  sit in the dentist office so I hae them to watch when I get home. That is a lot of  options to have in the palm of ones hand. And yet there those novels I still flip off the television to go read. I am a writer, so I may be the exception, but maybe those "quiet books" are the ones that people will still seek out. But you have to have a publisher take a chance on those people who will turn from the media of the age.

I have to say though, a good story should be the determining factor. As a novelist you have to cling to that notion and ignore everything else. So in a way I guess I am back to to battling it out with the serial sex murders with the book quietly published. Let's hope it still gets published.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

It's called Fiction Folks

That question.You get it on the tip of the tongue. So what do you do supplement your incom? It is asked as the innocent probe sandwiched in there with how are the kids. And you treat it the same way. Oh, a little of this and that because what they are really asking is how do you keep writing? Why are  you not working a job like I am? And they are pleasant. You still have your house? My last novel was about a man who was losing his house and a financial wreck. Rocket Man It's called fiction.

But in the reality of our reality age there is no line anymore. Of course you are writing about yourself otherwise why would you write? So I get the looks, the side glances. Does your wife work? No. That throws them off but they keep coming. Well I hope you are still with her and she can put up with someone like you. Where do you go with that one.. But the last novel also had a crappy marriage at the center. Again, you surely are not writing about someone else!

Writers get this kind of stuff  all the time. It goes with the territory. So is your dad really that much of an asshole. Did you really blast off all those rockets? Did you really cut down the sign to your subdivision? Oh your poor wife. So when are you moving? Do you really hate the suburbs that much? And what other jobs do you work?

It called fiction folks. Remember. Suspension of disbelief. You make it up. Right. Sure you do.

www.billhazelgrove.com

How Most Writers End Up

We like to think famous writers have some sense of how they will eventually end up. That becoming rich and famous is a continuing movement that puts writers into mansions with retirement funds or a least a fat bank account. But the truth is most writers end up broke at the end of their life with their works out of print or they just plain fall into obscurity. Fitzgerald is a famous writer that comes to mind who ended up with his work out of print and in debt. He died with barely enough money to bury him.

Another write is Paul Nelson who wrote for Rolling Stone and was one of the premier music scribes of the rock and roll world of the seventies. A recent review (today) in the NY Times of a book on his life: The Life and Writings of Paul Nelson by Ken Avery chronicled his life from the high times of the seventies to his fall in the eighties and nineties. What struck me was a quote that said "it was terrible that Avery had ended up as a clerk in a video store at the end of his life and died sick and broke The quote went on to say here was the best  writer of his time being a clerk in a video store.

What most people don't understand is that writers have very little control over what happens to them and what happens is that they lose the ability to make money. Broke. Most writers end up broke if they ever rose above this baseline in the first place. And what follows this is illness and obscurity, and meaningless jobs to just make ends meet...like being a clerk in a video store. The truth is there are brilliant writers all over the world being clerks in a stores and working as starving real estate agents, janitors, waiters. And they do this until they die. 

That's how most writers begin and that's how most writers end up. A hard truth.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Why Are Books Sales Up?

According to the New York Times books sales are up after Black Friday and I'm not talking about Ebooks. We are talking about the old pulp and cover books. Booksellers were surprised to find people reaching for the Desotas of publishing when everyone had written off the old paper and ink behemoths as DOA. But people have a funny way of surprising you and readers surprise everybody. Like writers, readers do not follow trends.

Speaking for myself I have becomes less enchanted with the ebook. I had thought this would be my preferred way of reading with the quick download of yet another book right after finishing one. But I missed the physicality of a book. I missed looking at the cover and knowing how much more I had to read and getting jelly and coffee all over the pages. I missed turning down the pages and throwing it in my backpack to whip out at a coffee house.

Of course the thought is that the IPOD will be the format for the IBook and the kindle will spread like wildfire and of course it has. But books are not songs. There is a difference and reading Virginia Woolf will not be the same on a small lit up screen. It just isn't. But of course economics dictate the day eventually, but readers are not to be corralled so easily. They might just buck the trend of the buck. As Mr. Fezziwick said in A Christmas Carol...there are more important things than making money sir.

So there is.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Agent Etiquette or the agony of Waiting

There is such a thing as agent etiquette. Most writers get their first agent and the relationship goes wrong very quickly. This is because no one knows the ground rules and there are ground rules. You finally get an agent and you are ready for the next step, getting a publisher or selling your next book. Since agents have taken on the role of editor in fiction  you spend a lot of time working with your agent getting your book ready. Then it is ready and this is when the agent does  his or her thing. ]And you...wait.

Here is the first place where things go bad. The writer is axnious naturally. Years have gone into your book and now you are just going to sit and wait? A week passes. Another week passes. You are going crazy. The third week passes and you call or email. The agent lets you know that there have been a few rejections but he or she will press on. You wait. A week passes. Another week passes. Another week passes. This time you pick up the phone to get to the bottom of what the hell is going on.

Your agent tells you that yes there have been a few passes and you make some suggestions and call the editors idiots and begin to doubt your agent. You email suggestions. A week passes and you call again. Your agent doesn't take your call this time. Now you freak. You call and call and call. He or she  gets fed up with you and you get fed up with them. You are done.

Agent etiquette can be summed up in one simple sentence: grace under pressure. Or;  never let them see you sweat. Your agent will let you know when he or she sells your book. Believe me. Until then you just have to put it out of your mind and let them do their thing. Unless you are ready to switch. Like a marriage a lot of times the relationship goes bad. But when you find a good one, then leave them alone.

http://www.billhazelgrove.conm/

My Best Writer Job

The best writer job I ever had was Gonella bread. I worked the night shift and took the bread orders . Everyone spoke Italian and yelled at each other all night long. Men covered in flour with aprons would scream obscenities then go back and work side by side wall night long. The long loaves and short bread would float around the bakery on a conveyor belts and fall all night long with a plopping sound I can still hear now. The bread that fell would be kicked to the side by the baggers.

The baggers all had red ink on their tennis shoes. That's because they would hold the Gonnella bags with the red ink against their shoes while they slipped the bread in. They stood all night long at the end of the conveyors bagging hundreds of loaves. They were different from the bakers who worked upstairs and were covered with flour. They walked around in their white t shirts and ignored the baggers. When it got really hot upstairs the bakers wore little white 1970s shorts and strutted around with their potbellies.

Why you read all them fuckin books jack? That's what I heard all night long. I told them I was a writer and they shook their heads. The bread orders died down at about two AM and I could read the rest of the night until the drivers came in for their routes. They asked the same question. Why all you read them fuckin books jack? After I while I didn't bother to answer.

At the end of the night I stuffed my leather jacket with warm bread and rode through the streets of Chicago in the early light. When I got home I took the bread out and my wife and I had some before she went to her job in an office building. That was a good job.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Points For Reading the Nutty Books

When I was learning to write fiction I felt I had to read all the books that made no sense. I started with Ulysses and then went to Finnegan's Wake and then finished with The Sound and the Fury and then to really confuse myself I read Infinite Jest. Quite certain I had completed my literary education by not understanding the prose of these very established writers I sat down and wrote my own very plain and simple novels. A bit like learning classical to play rock and roll.

And now I am reading the review of 1Q84, Murakamis's new novel and the review of the book makes no sense and I am quite sure the book makes less. Still I think, I should read this. And even the reviewer had a hard time getting over the fact that this nine hundred plus book made less sense than a mad hatter in a mad house still he felt it was a worthy book. And of course this begs the question of who is left to tackle these type of nutty books now.

Well writers  for one. They will read just about anything set in front of them that is deemed literary and cutting edge even if it make absolutely no sense. And of course this begs the question of does this type of reading help the writer. Yes and no. It did help me read Ulysses. It did not help me to read Finnegan's Wake. The Sound and the Fury maybe. Infinite Jest, sadly, no. I just didn't get the necessary kickback for me, but of course others might just find these books incredibly rewarding. And I am a slave to the dictum that writers should read the difficult books.

And what about the reading public. No. For the main these books will find few mainstream readers and maybe they shouldn't. They were not written for the mainstream anyway.  But then who is reading them and do you get points for attempting them? Saul Bellow once said there is no place in heaven for men who read boring books. Hmmm. I wouldn't say boring, but certainly nutty would fit Murakami's book that people will buy even if they don't understand it.

Maybe it is just that another human wrote something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake and you are really curious as to what the hell they are up too...even if you have no idea.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Between Books

Nothing prepares you for life between books. You are in a void. When writing a book you occupy the very pleasant world of that particular novel. You literally live in the book and life continues outside of it in a hazy distance. But then the books ends and you wait on your publisher or agent or whoever is involved in the process and you turn to all the things you have put off. For the first week you feel free and go after those tasks like the prisoner unleashed.

By the second week you hit the wall. You don't quite know what to do. You can't start another book because thee current one could come back with revisions. Some authors like to work on several books at once. I am not one of them. So you try and structure your day to make sense and get all those life things accomplished. But without the framework of the novel to order your day, you simply have lost your raison detre and you drift.

It is noon and you have cut the grass. Or spackled a hole. Or chalked the bathroom. That's it. Financial matters yawn before you that are immense. These require time and sitting in front of the computer. You go back to spackiling the hole in the ceiling. These tasks lose their manual labor appeal. A rodent is lose in the basement. You and the dog go down to hunt for the elusive chipmunk for several hours. The dog is interested but then finds old cookie crumbs and becomes sidetracked. The chipmunk is nowhere to be found. It is now late afternoon.

Dinner and the kids appear on the horizon. You should read something but reading has lost it's appeal without the novel to back it up. You don't feel like you will ever write again. Your mind just isn't there anymore. It's amazing you ever wrote anything. How did you do that? Tomorrow you will get a jump on the day. You will get up early and attack financial matters, clean the office, clean the garage, and then....then...

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The newspaper at the end of the drive

Sunday mornings I stagger out and walk down the drive in the dew filled morning with the Canadian geese honking and my neighbors homes looking less suburban in the christening light of dawn and there on the end of the drive in blue is my newspaper. It is a fat rolled information log of New York Times descent that I scoop up and carry back in for my coffee and pancakes to start my Sunday ritual. That is until about a week ago when the my delivery was unceremoniously halted for nonpayment. The digital age just took another small step into my life.

I had the three day delivery package of Friday Saturday and Sunday. My suburb of Chicago is a bit of a stones throw from NY so I pay a little  more I figure. And I have bounced along paying my roughly forty dollars a month for the extreme pleasure of seeing that blue rolled harbinger of the world at the end of my driveway. I cant tell you how upset I was the few times it did not arrive, harassing some poor customer service rep who assured me it would appear in a few hours. It never did, but that was related to the fifteen or sixteen year old or the mom working the night shift who flung my paper in the wee hours of dawn.

But the reason my delivery stopped was that my bill had grown out of control. I am not sure why but suddenly  I was down one hundred and forty bucks. And the bill had a way of climbing. Maybe late fees, maybe I missed a payment. But suddenly I was coasting toward two hundred bucks for the privilege of having a newspaper at the end my driveway. Times being what they are I let it go and the Times declared my account suspended and my Sunday ritual changed. No longer was the paper there waiting for me and no longer did I feel that excitement when I picked up the voice of the world.

It had been replaced by a nanosecond of anticipation in my Kindle. .99 was the cost for a quick download and just like that the newspaper at the end of my drive had been replaced. I was not crazy about this development but I was used to reading on my Kindle and like everything else it had become driven by economics. Sitting down with my coffee and small screen may not be the same as the spread out newspaper, but it was better than nothing and I could afford it.

I promise myself that I will straighten out my account and pay up and get my delivery fired up again. I do want that moment of seeing the paper lying there waiting for me as a sort of postscript of the week. It had become a marker for one week ending and another beginning. But there is that feeling that this ritual might be historical and I might just get used to the digital paper and never go back.

 I guess I could leave my kindle on the end of the drive and pick that up. Or have the newspaper lady fling it there to give it authenticity. It might work.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Should a Writer Live in New York?

The conventional wisdom is that in the age of the Internet you can live anywhere. No longer do writers have to live in literary centers to be part of the world of publishing and agents and deals and other writers. It helps of course, but it really isn't necessary. Authors live all over the place and even the ones who live in New York have houses in other places. The successful ones that is.

Of course there is a nagging little caveat to all of this. Take Chad Harbachs novel The Art of Fielding. I read the Vanity Fair piece written by his buddy who started the literary magazine N1. He basically describes the process in which Harbachs novel was discovered by Michael Pietch. There is the usual rejected by many component and Harbach slaved away for ten years and people were beginning to worry. But then his friend from the lit magazine who had a book published, put the manuscript in front of the right agent and then the right publisher. Harbach was discovered.

And if you go down the literary heavyweight list of Jonathan Franzen type big novels it does seem a lot of these authors live in New York. Lets face it networking is part of life and being where publishing is centered (at least for now) is probably a good thing. People do business with people they know and if you are bouncing around New York you might bump into agents and publishers and authors who could help you. To say nothing of the wealth of material living in a large city like New York generates.

I...like a lot of writers, thought about moving to the Big Apple. Living in Chicago did seem at times like a second city, but I doubted my ability to find time to write in NY. Chicago just seemed friendlier. And sometimes I think I should have gone. You never know what can happen just by moving to a bigger pond. Probably this question has no answer except that you go where you can survive and write.

Still, living in New York as a writer.....city of dreams, right?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Brutal Truth About Publishing

The brutal truth is that publishing is harder and easier now. Anyone can produce a book and put it out there on for a Kindle download. The time from conception to e-publication is measured now in nanoseconds. Literally someone can write a book one day and publish it the next. It might not be any good but they can tell friends and neighbors to look them up on Amazon. But here is the brutal truth: no one will buy it because it will be a speck of sand among millions of other specks.

And so publishing in a strange way has become more rarefied. More exclusive. The dunning of millions of authors cancels out the playing field. The noise from three million books reaches a critical mass where no one can get their message out. Except for the few. The few who are published by the mainstream large publishers who put the muscle behind the book to blow right past the Hoover Dam of published authors. And they do it the old fashioned way; with lots of money.

Start with the million dollar advance. This author has a huge advantage over his kindle published brethren. For one he or she can make a living as an author. Right there the stream is narrowed drastically. But the publisher now has to make that million dollars back and they do it by pumping money into pushing that book. While the kindle author tries to get his book reviewed, five thousand galleys go flying out to bookstores, reviewers, bloggers. Publicists and marketers follow up and the word shoots out that this is a big book. The noise of all the self published authors is drowned out by a single tidal wave of publishing muscle.

Then the buzz starts and the author and the book steadily climb onto the bestseller list. The self published author sells a few copies and then simply disappears. Now there are exceptions. There are now authors selling a million ebooks on Amazon. We have all heard these stories and they are inspiring. But for the majority of authors who decide that watching their Amazon rankings tick a few times down and seeing their name in print is worth more than the years of learning their craft, the fate is a dismal one. Utter obscurity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there is no greater difference than that between the amateur and the professional in the arts.  This is probably more true today where the amateur runs to immediate gratification while the professional labors on in pursuit of their craft. There still is no substitute for first rate work even in the age of the internet and the digital word.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Helps Point of View

Novelists use lots of different points of view. First person is preferred by many because it is close to the reader and comfortable for the writer. First person is very American. Ever since Huckleberry Finn came long with his Missouri patois of Mississippi river idioms a love affair was born with the down home insider who gives us the real low down as we navigate our way through the novel. Many first novels, mine included, are first person narration because a single point of view naturally coalesces around the main character

The Help uses multiple points of view. Mostly in the first person of the characters. Faulkner did this in Absalom Absalom and really became the benchmark for this type of narration. Multiple viewpoints gets around the restriction of first person which is you are stuck inside the head of one character. This can be tricky in a novel that moves around and we have to have insight into areas the main character might not necessarily be involved in. Authors use tricks like the ones I used in Tobacco Sticks of sneaking my character around, putting him outside doors and literally peering in keyholes

But in Katherine Stockett gets around this problem in The Help by using the view points of the  maids and one of the women who also it turns out to be a writer. This allows us to move around in the story and yet get the inside scoop which is the essential element of The Help which is the maids point of view. So in that regard it works very well. The risk of multiple narrators is that the author cannot pull it off or these switches are jarring to the reader. When I first started The Help I was sad to leave Abilene, but then along came Minny who picked up the slack with a more fiery blunt point of view.

Stockett gets in one jam and that is The League party where she goes omniscient or third person. She could not afford to be stuck in any ones head there because it moved around too much . But this chapter is by far the weakest and yet it is a center point of the novel. The third person is just too removed and we don't feel the pain or joy of the characters. She must have agonized over this decision and found it is the only thing that works. In a sense it is a violation of the POV, but I too cheated in Tobacco Sticks and went to third person for a brief chapter.

The novel dictates the point of view and so the only rule is that which works for the book,. Multiple narration clearly works for the bulk of The Help. Ultimately it is the authors call and demonstrates the basic maxim of all fiction. There are no rules.

http://www.billhazelgove.com/

Back to the Pony Express

Did you hear the Post Office could close this winter without funding from Congress? Five billion is due to fund retired health care costs and they don't have it. The volume of mail has dropped almost thirty percent and the layoffs will start commencing. They already have with 124000 on the chopping block, but the Union intends to fight it all the way. Saturday deliveries will be done away with in the new austerity program and even more heads will roll ,but lets face it, technology is kicking the postal service back to the days of the Pony Express. That is how low tech it has become.

And it is sad. The postman walking from door to door with our mail. It gives us a sense of community, something America is losing and desperately needs. What is in that mailbox? As a kid I walked down a long driveway to wait for my latest issue of Boys Life or the gadgets I sent away for with the order form from the back of comic books or cereal boxes. I remember vividly the time a crystal radio set came in the mail I had bought for two dollars. And then as an adult with all those rejection letters coming back in after bombing New York with hundreds of partial manuscripts. That one letter always was amazing, the one saying, sure send on the rest of the manuscript.

And not a lot has changed. My kids are the same way. They sent off for live turtles and checked the mailbox everyday. Did our turtles come? Did our turtles come? Not yet I said bringing up our diminishing mail since most of our bills come directly into our online banking account. Mail is certainly becoming as derivative and nonessential as a land line. We still have a land line, but I rarely use it and when it rings nobody answers it. Much like the mail. Yeah, there are things that still come as a surprise, but it is the assumption that whoever really wants to get hold of me will email is really the nail in the coffin of the perambulating postman.

Still, I hope the postal service can hang on. It still processes billions of pieces of mail and is vital, but technology has a nasty habit of making what is vital one day obsolete the next. But a real country should have a real postal service. We lose this one and you really have to wonder about the United States. Although, now that it is the hands of Congress to save the Post Office, maybe we better just start over and  post those signs: WANTED YOUNG MEN TO RIDE LONG HOURS OVER DESOLATE COUNTRY TO DELIVER THE MAIL. MUST HAVE OWN HORSE.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man ...The story of one mans search to find the new American Dream James Frey

The Rules of Fiction

There are no rules except the ones you make up. The rules knock down fiction. The dream has to be allowed to flow because without the flight of fancy you cannot go where you have to go. We see the rules of fiction in college and in high school. They are given to students who follow the road map and never know what real fiction is. In my sons writing classes they tear apart stories like building blocks and then assemble them like Legos. The problem is the teachers don't understand fiction so how can they teach it?

This is not confined to high school. I taught at a renowned college for fiction writing and there were clear rules. There was even a method copyrighted by the  head of the department. I wasn't allowed to teach the core fiction classes because I didn't use the method. In my classes I got the rejects who couldn't or wouldn't adapt .They complained bitterly about the constraints and then wrote like Gods when I told them to write about whatever they wanted. They eventually tossed me out as a nonconformist.

And of course we are taught to look for the rules. Art has none and so to instruct someone on how to produce art is impossible. When I was in college I received a D in composition because I could not follow the assignments. Every time my papers came back they had the same thing scrawled across the top. DID NOT FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. I even had to take summer school to make up for my D. I was passed after one essay. The rules for one did not seem to apply to the other.

But even after many novels you still have to remind yourself there are no rules. Just the ones you know are right for what you are doing. These are the rules you must follow: your own and no one elses. Then you have a chance at fiction.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/