Back in the saddle

Well, I started writing the novel again. But I had to read through the whole thing first. And the fun thing about that is this: The last thing I had written is now the preface to the book. A section of text that would have been buried in the middle of the book fits quite well at the beginning. It was like the proverbial lightbulb came on. Sometimes I guess you just have to step away from something for awhile...

I also decided to break up my chapters. So, some of them are actually pretty short -- about two pages. Personally, I think it works great. I'm just making chapters wherever there's a natural scene change, or a change in tone. So, if you're following this blog -- and you're probably not -- keep your fingers crossed that I continue. I have renewed faith in this thing and I want to keep that passion alive.

Someone Knows My Name

Today, I have read nearly 100 pages of Lawrence Hill's Someone Knows My Name.

Amazing book. It's so real, I can't believe it's fiction!

(I want to write like him)

Tragedy dodged

This is a piece of sound advice from someone who almost screwed up royally:

BACK UP YOUR FILES!!!

This past Monday, I went to pull my jump drive from my pocket and it wasn't there. As panic slowly trickled through my body, I began to realize that more than 30 pages of my thesis (and more than half of my novel) were lost. For two days, my wife and I scoured every inch of our house, our cars and my office to no avail. I retraced my steps and called almost every restaurant I've visited since last Thursday. Then, at 5 p.m. this evening, a co-worker asked if I'd called a restaurant that we visited on Monday.

Guess what. That's where it was!

Thank you, Lord! And thanks to my awesome wife for putting up with a frazzled grad student.

I was ready to throw in the towel and bypass a spring graduation and shoot for the summer. Now, I have a renewed hope to finish this thesis and graduate on May 16.

So please, if you pray, drop one in for me -- that I might stay motivated to complete my thesis, pass my comprehensive exams, graduate and continue writing my novel!!

A new book I'm reading

I hate to admit that I once again put down Sinclair Lewis' Main Street!

A colleague in the Missouri State University's Special Collections and Archives recommended Erik Larson's Devil in the White City. WOW!! This is a great historic novel -- so far. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble in Denver. I started reading it yesterday, and I can't put it down. It's the true story of a cunning and vicious serial killer who was taking advantage of the 1898 World's Fair in Chicago to lure and kill his victims. Larson switches each chapter between the architechts of the fair and the killer -- who could seriously be one of the sickest, most-vile in history. Larson (a former feature writer for the Wall Street Journal, shows that he pays attention to each and every sentence. Well done. I can't wait to get back to it!

It's also very encouraging, since my thesis is creative nonfiction.

Sinclair Lewis

OK...I know little to nothing about Sinclair Lewis, but I DO know that he changed my life.

How's that, you say?

Glad you asked.

As some of you might know, I am a former newspaper reporter. Back in 2001, while working for the Springfield News-Leader, I had the pleasure of working for an executive editor named David Ledford. I don't think that I impressed him much as a writer, but he took a chance and devoted a lot of time to me. When I struggled with a story, he'd sit with me until the early morning hours to make sure I got it right. When I needed a push, he was there to give it. He's a gruff fellow, and not everyone enjoyed his approach to editing, but he knew how to motivate me.

Ledford encouraged his reporters to let the readers "see" what we were seeing as reporters. He drilled into us the importance of narrative writing. He held workshops, sent us to seminars, etc.

One day, he called me into his office and he asked, "Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis' Main Street?"

"Um, no."

"Read that and you'll know how to write."

That was the first time I'd ever heard an editor or any instructor of journalism say that reporters should read literature to become better news writers! What a novel idea!

So, to keep up my good standing with my boss, I went to the library and checked out Main Street. I read the first dozen pages and caught on to what he was talking about -- but that was as far as I'd ever been with that book. However, I did decide, at that point, to concentrate on my storytelling, to become the best writer I could possibly be. I got away from "just the facts ma'am" reporting and became a storyteller -- trying to let the readers "see" what I was seeing. And since then, I've taken a new approach to all writing -- whether it's a news article, press release, magazine feature, etc.

All this to say that I've finally gotten around to picking up my copy of Main Street and I'm devoted to reading it this winter. It's a pretty good book so far, and I'm excited to get lost in Gopher Prairie.

Have any of you read this book?

P.S. I'm sorry I haven't posted in awhile (I know that's a cardinal sin with blogging), but I've been busy with "end-of-semester" things like papers and a linguistics final -- and, of course, making arrangements to finish my thesis. By the way, I received an A in my linguistics course, so all I have left are comprehensive exams and this thesis! Keep me in your prayers.

A great mystery is dialogue, hmm?

My 4-year-old son has been watching the original three Star Wars movies for the past few months. Not too long ago (and not too far far away), he came up to me and said, "Love you I do" in his best Yoda voice. It was hilarious!

I am taking a pretty confusing linguistics theory class at the moment -- my fault, not the professor's -- so I used the prompt from my son to write my final paper on "Yoda-speak" and the Jedi Master's use of sentence inversion in The Empire Strikes Back.

What I realized while writing this paper is that Yoda's lexicon defines him as much as his green skin, diminutive size or his masterful use of The Force.

That made me analyze the dialogue in my novel, as well as pose some other dialogue-related questions:

1. Does my dialogue help define my characters?
2. Have I fallen into any dialogue traps? (using useless words, writing dialogue when I could paraphrase, etc.?
3. Can individual lexicons be over-used? (Personally, I think Yoda's has been overdone in subsequent films)
4. What are some good examples of great dialogue? Some Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind.
5. Are there any good dialogue resources out there?

Thanks for listening...er, reading.

First Chapters

I recently had a noted author write to me with this advice: "First chapters are critical in getting the attention of an agent, and agents are critical in getting your work before publishers."

Personally, from a reader's standpoint, I find that "first chapters are critical in getting the attention of the reader" too!

Some people judge a book by its cover. I often judge one by the first two or three pages -- and if the writing's good, the first chapter.

One of my favorite pastimes is going to Borders or Barnes and Noble, grabbing a half dozen titles from the stacks and sitting down to read with a cafe mocha. Last Sunday, my wife and I had the rare opportunity to break away from the kids and go to Barnes and Noble to do just that.

I brought my pile of books back to the tiny table and began to read. I was really excited about one particular author, so I grabbed several of his books. Unfortunately, I wasn't hooked by his writing style, so I put them down and picked up a random book from the "new fiction" shelf. I was captivated.

The book: Leo Furey's The Long Run

Wow! I haven't had a book grip my attention like that in awhile. I read the first chapter and was amazed at the emotions I went through. I literally laughed outloud at one character, Brother McCann, and then found myself ready to reach through the pages and kick him in the head until he was comatose. I was very impressed, and I can't wait to buy the book (My finances that night were going toward a movie -- American Gangster -- that was worth every inflated penny). I only hope the entire novel can live up to "first chapter" expectations.

The last few books that really caught my attention like that were Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

A very good resource for "first chapters" is the NY Times "First Chapters" site.

A few discussion questions:

1. What are some books with first chapters that grabbed your attention?


2. Do you find that subsequent chapters -- even endings -- often don't live up to first chapters?


3. Do you often trudge through clunky first chapters because you know that a good story is around the bend?


4. For writers, how much importance do you place on the first chapter?

Resident Tiller of the Soil

Are you the "resident tiller of the soil" or "the trading seaman?"

In Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov", the author examines these two groups.

Experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which
all storytellers have drawn. And among those who have written down the tales, it
is the great ones whose written version differs least from the speech of the
many nameless storytellers. Incidentally, among the last named there are two
groups which, to be sure, overlap in many ways. And the figure of the
storyteller gets its full corporeality only for the one who can picture them
both. “When someone goes on a trip, he has something to tell about,” goes
the German saying, and people imagine the storyteller as someone who has come
from afar. But they enjoy no less listening to the man who has stayed at home,
making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions. If one
wants to picture these two groups through their archaic representatives, one is
embodied in the resident tiller of the soil, and the other in the trading
seaman. Indeed, each sphere of life has, as it were, produced its own tribe of
storytellers. ...

The actual extension of the realm of storytelling in its full historical breadth is inconceivable without the most intimate interpenetration of these two archaic types. Such an interpenetration was achieved particularly by the Middle Ages in their trade structure. The resident master craftsman and the traveling journeymen worked together in the same rooms; and every master had been a traveling journeyman before he settled down in his home town or somewhere else. If peasants and seamen were past masters of storytelling, the artisan class was its university. In it was
combined the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home,
with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives of a place.

At this point in my "career" I consider myself a resident tiller of the soil -- "the man who has stayed at home, making an honest living, and who knows the local tales and traditions."

As a journalist, I have taken what others have told me, organized it, and passed it on. So far, that's been my form of storytelling (which, Benjamin would argue -- along with the novel -- is a step down from the oral tradition).

There's a lot more to the essay than what I've shown here, but I like the imagery of digging up the stories and sharing them with others. As writers, that's our job -- whether the stories come from others or from our own personal experiences, expressed in both fiction and non-fiction.

What do you think?

(Actually, I think I confused myself in all of this ...)

A few questions

What's in a name?

Do you ever have trouble naming your characters? My protagonist is Thomas "Tommy" Richter. I wanted a good German name, but now I'm re-thinking my choice -- Is the name "Tommy" appropriate for a 30-something? My thinking is that he's "Tommy" to the people in his neighborhood and "Thomas" in the workplace. Is that too distracting? Are there any really good resources out there for character naming?

Using real places?

Are there any dangers having your characters going to real places, like real universities? Right now, I have Tommy as a graduate of St. Louis University, but it's basically a place-holder until I can do some more research. Tommy is a journalist, but I haven't checked to see if SLU has a journalism program. I went to a Missouri school with a journalism program, but it's not in St. Louis. I want Tommy to go to a school in St. Louis. Does "creating" a university -- even if it's just a brief mention -- give the story less credibility?

Any good examples out there of dream sequences?

I'm looking for a creative way to insert a dream -- in real time -- into my story. Do you know of any good examples?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Three hours of writing!!

This was an amazing night. Very unusual, as I had three hours of time to write. My older son went to bed early, and our baby went down soon after. So, I fought the temptation to channel surf and buckled down to write. I reworked the first chapter and I love the changes I've made.

It's still not perfect, but it's time to move on to chapter two.

The original version led off with my protagonist, Tommy, sitting in the back of a Catholic church wating his turn to jump in the communion line. But after much consternation and a nagging feeling that it was all wrong, I went back and changed it -- not the story line, just the opening pages.

Now, I lead off with a pretty nice narrative of the church (a central theme to this novel) and I put Tommy at home in bed as the church bells begin to ring -- waking him up to the realization that he is late, again. It's odd, but this slight change has allowed me to better define Tommy, to give him more depth and to introduce several integral elements that need to be revisited throughout the story.

I was just so excited to actually have the time to sit and write. If I had any alcohol in the house, I'd make a toast!

Also, I have begun to receive some comments on this blog. That is very exciting too. Please keep them coming, and I will try my best to make this site worth visiting. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

One author finds time

I was reading a story in the New York Times about Anne Enright, the winner of Britain's 2007 Man Booker Prize for her novel "The Gathering." (I haven't read the book, but it must be pretty good.)


Of interest to me were a few paragraphs at the end of the article regarding Anne's writing time:

“The kids go to school; I sit down and write,” she
said. “The kids go to bed; I sit down and write.” Her husband, Martin Murphy, who runs a theater outside Dublin, works at night, which makes finding time to be together a challenge. “At the Booker dinner I thought maybe we could talk about our holiday plans,” she said, laughing. But in different ways they were both too nervous.

Oddly enough, Ms. Enright said, having children — she has two, 4 and 7 — has made her work easier.

“I find that the whole sense of anxiety and largeness, the sense that you’re writing everything, the allness of it, disappears completely,” she said. “You have just three or four hours a day, and you’re going to write a book, and it just shrinks the work into its proper proportion.”

Obviously, Anne is a full-time writer. Personally, I can say with authority that having two kids doesn NOT make writing easier. It gives you something beautiful to write about, but the actual TIME to write all but disappears. I'm very thankful to God for providing me a wife who realizes this and does what she can to help me find the time.


Ahh...just more encouragement to make it, right?

Edith Wharton

In fall 2004, I took a Modern American Authors class at Missouri State University. We read eight novels that semester; five were written by Edith Wharton. When we were finished, the professor said something like, "It'll be a long time before I teach a class on Edith Wharton again." I believe most of us agreed. However, I feel that I learned a great deal about descriptive writing during that class.

Edith Wharton has the reputation of writing stories about the high society of which she was an integral part. That society can be found in her popular novels, The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, etc.

But I found her to be at her strongest when she stepped out of her comfort zone and wrote about the poor and desolate, particularly a handful of characters found in the staple Ethan Frome and my favorite Wharton novel, Summer.

In Summer, there is a scene when the main character Charity travels up "the Mountain" to see her mother, Mary. When she gets there, she learns that her mother is dead. Here is the scene:

"Mary's over there," someone said; and Mr. Miles, taking the bottle in his hand, passed behind the table. Charity followed him, and they stood before a mattress on the floor in a corner of the room. A woman lay on it, but she did not look like a dead woman; she seemed to have fallen across her squalid bed in a drunken sleep, and to have been left lying where she fell, in her ragged disordered clothes. One arm was flung above her head, one leg drawn up under a torn skirt that left the other bare to the knee: a swollen glistening leg with a ragged stocking rolled down about the ankle. The woman lay on her back, her eyes staring up unblinkingly at the candle that trembled in Mr. Miles's hand.

Later in the novel, Wharton describes a scene inside one of the cabins on the Mountain. This simple scene has stuck in my mind since I first read this novel:

CHARITY lay on the floor on a mattress, as her dead mother's body had lain. The room in which she lay was cold and dark and low-ceilinged, and even poorer and barer than the scene of Mary Hyatt's earthly pilgrimage. On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt's mother slept on a blanket, with two children--her grandchildren, she said--rolled up against her like sleeping puppies. They had their thin clothes spread over them, having given the only other blanket to their guest.

Can't you just imagine this scene? How powerful! "On the other side of the fireless stove Liff Hyatt's mother slept on a blanket, with two children -- her grandchildren, she said -- rolled up against her like sleeping puppies.

I truly enjoy great narrative, and this is some of the best that I've read. If you get a chance, pick up a copy of Summer. You won't regret it. Online text can be found here.

FYI...Wharton was good friends with Henry James, who I wrote about in an earlier post.

Maurice Medland

In the late 1990s, when I was preparing to graduate from Truman State University, I had the opportunity to meet Maurice Medland. At the time, Mr. Medland (a Truman alum) had recenlty published his first novel, Point of Honor, and he was signing copies at the university bookstore. We stood and talked for about twenty minutes. And during that brief time, he encouraged me to follow my dream to write. I purchased a copy of Point of Honor and Mr. Medland signed it for me. It was a very good read -- very suspenseful and extremely detailed. Mr. Medland was in the Navy, and his knowledge of ships is unparalleled.

For several years, I waited for a follow-up. That novel, China Star, is now available, and I look forward to reading it. I recently wrote to Mr. Medland and recounted the story of our brief meeting. Here is part of the response that I received:

I'm glad to hear that you're doing well--congrats to you on your marriage, your family, your career, and your studies. That's the very foundation we all need to pursue a writing career. When I was starting out, I corresponded with Dean Koontz a bit and he said, "It's a tough business, but stick with it; the rewards are great." He was right on both counts. I have to say that the fiction market is tougher than ever, but publication is still possible for those who learn the craft and have the talent to apply it. So stick with it, my friend. Don't let anyone or anything stop you.

This is the encouragement I needed, and I appreciate his counsel. I encourage you to pick up a copy of either book. I can definitely vouch for his debut, and I'm betting that the follow-up is just as fun.

Click here for the first two chapters of Point of Honor and the first chapter of China Star.

Enjoy -- and tell me what you think!

A chilling tale...

It's Halloween, and it's time to to be scared.

A few years back, I read (and subsequently wrote a paper about) Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw." The paper was crap, but the story was great -- scary!

The opening paragraph of this superb ghost story sets a frightening scene. I thought I would provide it here, along with a link to an online version of the tale in case anyone is interested.

From "The Turn of the Screw":

The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such a visitation had fallen on a child. The case, I may mention, was that of an apparition in just such an old house as had gathered us for the occasion -- an appearance, of a dreadful kind, to a little boy sleeping in the room with his mother and waking her up in the terror of it; waking her not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself, before she had succeeded in doing so, the same sight that had shaken him. It was this observation that drew from Douglas -- not immediately, but later in the evening -- a reply that had the interesting consequence to which I call attention. Someone else told a story not particularly effective, which I saw he was not following. This I took for a sign that he had himself something to produce and that we should only have to wait. We waited in fact till two nights later, but that same evening, before we scattered, he brought out what was in his mind.

For more of the text, go to the page at the University of Virginia's LibraryElectronic Text Center.

"Turn of the Screw" does not offer a clear explanation as to exactly what is happening. The novella has been the subject of much debate since it was first published. Is it real? Is it psychological? Psychosexual?

Read it and let's discuss.

Aside from "Turn," it's been awhile since I've read a truly scary story. Do you have any recommendations?

My novel

I've actually completed a fair amount of work with this project already. No, I haven't written a hundered pages. But I have a pretty nice outline, character biographies, plot points, etc. I've also written a rough first chapter.

I have an interesting organization. The story takes place over a period of two weeks. Each chapter is a day building up to the final day. I have some interesting characters. The protagonist, Thomas Richter (good German name) is a St. Louis newspaper reporter (write what you know, right?). He's facing a huge challenge that will alter his life forever, blah, blah, blah....Actually, it's a pretty good story. But, right now, the majority is only in my mind.

Time to get it on paper, right? So what am I doing taking up time writing here? Maybe it's the exercise of hitting the keyboard with a purpose -- sitting here, at night, when the kids are asleep and I could be vegging out watching a CSI rerun.

And what's up with that? The new season of CSI is less than a month old and they're already playing repeats? I don't watch too many television shows anymore, but I do flip channels like a mad man.

Should get to writing...

The Novel Approach -- why this blog exists

Has anyone ever told you, "You know? You should write a novel."

Or, have you said to yourself, "You know? I should write a novel."

Or, "That would make a great novel."

Or, "I've got a novel floating around in my head. I just have to write it down."

Or, "There's just no TIME!!!!"

It's maddening, isn't it? You know you can do it, but something always gets in the way.

Welcome to The Novel Approach.

The idea for this blog was sparked by a group of folks (several are friends or acquaintances of mine) who contribute to a blog devoted to running marathons. Members of this group post anything and everything about marathons: training techniques, news stories, personal essays, poems on marathon running, etc. But their most important contribution is encouragement.

They push each other to the proverbial finish line.

Well, writing a novel is like running a marathon. And writers need encouragement.

We also need tools, resources, prompts, and feedback.

That's the primary goal for The Novel Approach.

My name is Eric. I'm 30 years old. My wife, Corinn, tells me I should write a novel. I want to write a novel. I've got one floating around in my head. I just have to write it down. But with a full-time job, night school and two children, there's just no time.

If you're like me, it's time to make time. It's time to do it.