The Problem with Prologues

New novelists are often told not to write prologues. Rarely are they handled well, they are told. But the new writer sees prologues everywhere, most often in Sci-Fi and Fantasy, although they pop up fairly often in mainstream commercial novels as well. The new writer naturally asks, if they can do it, why can’t I? The answer usually given is that these are experienced authors who know how to do it.

The problem with this answer? They can’t do it either. They’re just allowed to get away with it by timid, inexperienced, or overworked editors. One of my favorite novels, Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, has a prologue. What it actually is though, is an information dump, an easy way to get background out before the beginning of the novel. It is lazy writing. In Nobody’s Fool, most of it was unnecessary and what was necessary could easily have been worked into the novel. But at least the prologue in Nobody’s Fool was relatively short, five pages or so as I recall. I tolerated it and the rest of the book was well worth the initial annoyance, so I tracked down one of Russo’s most loved novels, Empire falls. Once again, it opened with a prologue, the history of the town and it’s social connections and dysfunctions. It was far longer than the prologue in Nobody’s Fool, but I persevered, knowing what a good story lay beyond the exposition dump. And it was a good story. So I turned to Russo’s latest, Bridge of Sighs, expecting another good story from the chronicler of small-town, upstate New York life. I never did get to the story. This Mother of All Prologues was chapter length, at least. And like most prologues I have read, it was written in a distant narrative voice that did not engage me as a reader. I just could not slog through it. I closed Bridge of Sighs mid-prologue, never to open it again.

Last week a friend gave me the John Grisham novel The Chamber. I wanted to find out how commercially successful authors handle the beginnings of their novels, so I read the first chapter. It was a prologue. Sure, it was called chapter one, but it had all the earmarks of a prologue: info dump, characters not introduced or introduced only superficially, no dialog, no scene, too much narrative distance. While it was competently written, I did not care. Grisham wasted an entire chapter with a structural error that lost me. As it is a legal mystery/thriller, he could have easily sprinkled the facts throughout the book more effectively, say as part of the trial, and introduced the main character early and in a way that involved me emotionally. He did not. The experience was akin to reading a newspaper account of the action.

Readers will put up with a lot once they come to like a certain writer. The feedback loop that rewards a well written book with good sales and tanks a bad book, gets broken when an author becomes a franchise. Grisham fans or David Baldacci fans or Patricia Cornwell fans will keep buying their books, but begin to skim the parts that bore or lose them. And they easily forgive these literary transgressions and come back again anyway. That does not mean that each and every book by such authors is well written. Many aren’t. Like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, these authors have come to “depend on the kindness of strangers.” A new author cannot count on similar good will. They must write a good book, without the clumsy, lazy and boring prologue.

The Road (to bad writing)

My friend Jen called last night. She has been trying to read The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. It was recommended to her by several people at work who told her she just had to read it. The critics simply couldn’t say enough good things about The Road and the taciturn genius who wrote it.

But Jen hated it. She wasn’t quite sure why. It won a Pulitzer for fiction and a bunch of other hyphenated prizes that critics like to create and hand out to reinforce their positions as the arbiters of literary worth. “And they made a movie out of it, after all! So it must be good, right?” Jen’s not a writer, of course. She just likes to read fiction, so she couldn’t really put her finger on why she didn’t like it. Though a smart and fairly well-read woman, she doubted her own intelligence rather than question the literary experts. But to quote her, “Am I stupid or something? Because I think this book sucks.” I agree.

McCarthy gets endless props for his “dark vision” and innovative style. About that innovative writing . . . McCarthy uses no quotation marks for dialog. Okay, James Joyce tried that, using dashes before each line of dialog instead of quotation marks. It didn’t catch on, probably because it was not in any way an improvement on the existing norm. It was a solution to a non-existent problem. McCarthy also runs lines of dialog together in the same paragraph, confusing the reader as to who is speaking. Yeah, even Hemingway lost track in long runs of unattributed dialog now and then. But at least he used quotation marks. We are to think this is edgy writing because McCarthy is too great a writer to use the conventions that mere mortals employ. This is part of what Jen couldn’t put her finger on. For authors like McCarthy, it is the reader’s job to forget conventions, re-learn and adapt to his style and absorb his genius. If a passage seems obtuse or unclear, you have the problem, not him. A better word than genius for this would be hubris. McCarthy seems not to care a whit about his actual readers. The way I see it, a carpenter doesn’t build a house to find unique ways to use a hammer—no one who needs a house cares. And no one who needs good stories cares about McCarthy’s effort to join the pantheon of literary greats by sneering at conventions meant to make meaning clear.

McCarthy imparts his “dark vision” via language called bad poetry in good English departments. Here is a line describing, in part, the bodies in burned out cars:

“. . .Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts."

Ensepulchred? Trapped is too pedestrian for him. Even entombed is too run-of-the-mill for Cormac McArt-y. And crozzled? Being just a redneck boy from the country without a single hyphenated award to my name, I had to look that one up on the internet. It wasn’t in the tattered old college dictionary on my desk. Turns out it’s a cooking term, new to the lexicon of literature. Innovative. Genius.

Or how about this:

"All of this like some ancient anointing. So be it. Evoke the forms. Where you've nothing else construct ceremonies out of the air and breathe upon them." He strokes the boy's head and thinks: "Golden chalice, good to house a god."

This is what good fiction teachers call a “purple patch,” a passage so over-written that gothic romance editors would have stricken it from the first draft as a bad imitation of Shakespeare. But McCarthy has not a single editor with the courage to override the judgment of an award-winning and certified genius. And the critics dance and chant around the fire of McCarthy’s brilliance and leave people like Jen to think they are not bright enough to read good fiction.

I’m not the only one tired of having bad writing pushed on me and told the problem lies with me, the reader, if I don’t like it. Folks like Jen and me are allowed to assume—or are even told outright—that we lack the education, sensitivity or sophistication to appreciate writers like McCarthy. The corollary to that argument is that those critics who like his writing are fellow travelers on the genius train.

I call bullshit. Critics who lavished praise on The Road fell in love with the wrong part of the book: the style. And the style is what sucks. And that’s too bad, because McCarthy knows what makes a good story. He just doesn’t know how to tell it without pissing me off. My grandfather could make me listen to a story of his for fifteen minutes before I realized he was telling me how he mowed the lawn. He knew how to use language to rivet the listener to a boring tale. McCarthy has the opposite problem; he ignores useful conventions and uses out of place, pompous, high-minded language to wreck a fine story. Yes, they did make a movie out of it, but there are a bevy of screenwriters who make a comfortable living turning bad books into good scripts.

No, Jen, you are not stupid. You just instinctively know crap when you read it.

Not So Great Expectations: How the Hell Did I Become a Writer?

I grew up in a very small town in a working class family. No one on either side of the family had ever gone to college, let alone graduate. We knew no one famous or rich or noteworthy, though my father once went on a three-day bender and somehow got Chuck Connor’s number in Los Angeles, waking him at three in the morning so I could tell him how much I loved The Rifleman. If expectations for me and my brother and sister were openly spoken of at all, it was usually in terms of getting a job after high school. My family worked and drank and played. Long range planning meant making sure the next mortgage payment got to the bank before the grace period expired.

That pretty much described our neighbors, too. Some worked harder and drank less, their ambitions reaching as high as starting their own roofing business or becoming a floor supervisor at the local wire harness factory or inheriting the family dairy. There were a few folks in town who had gone to college, or at least were planning for their kids to go, but they were regarded by my family and most of our neighbors as snooty. Uppity strivers. We rarely interacted with them. Some of us harbored secret knowledge, often not admitted even to ourselves, that they were somehow superior to us and, by extension, we were unworthy to mingle with them.

One thing that was vitally important to all of us non-strivers was entertainment. Our day-to-day lives changed little. We looked forward to the joy and distraction of TV and books and movies at the drive-in (we kids hidden on the floor behind the front seats, a blanket thrown over us so my parents could save the six bucks admission). My Mom liked to read, mostly the novels of Louis L’Amour. She got me a library card and I read Jack London and Robert Louis Stevenson and Vince Lombardi on Football. But it never occurred to us that these things came from somewhere, that some living person made them for us. They just appeared, like that day in May when the leaves seem to materialize where none had been the day before. If it did cross our minds that someone actually made movies and TV shows and books, they were other-worldly creatures from strange places like New York and Los Angeles, places where people were born with different kinds of brains or some mutant super-power of creativity. Certainly I would never have dreamed that I would write and come to know others who wrote books and screenplays and TV scripts.

My scholastic career certainly gave no indication that I might go on to something so exotic as writing. I kept my grades just barely good enough to stay on the football team in the fall, the wrestling team in the winter, and the baseball team in the spring. I slept through English class and only passed because the teacher let me outline the entire textbook the last day of school.

Somehow over time my expectations for myself changed. I became aware of possibilities and potentials foreign to my family and hometown friends. The explanation, I think, lies in the company I kept after high school. My inability to make good life choices, my lack of sense when it came to choosing friends, lovers, jobs, and places to live, brought me into contact with people very unlike myself, with backgrounds unimaginable to me before we met. People who not only went to college but got doctorates, people who went to war, sold drugs, sailed, ran guns, flew planes, traveled in Europe and Asia, grew up in Germany, Venezuela, Mexico, the Philippines, backpacked in wilderness, fought in Bronx bars, scuba dived in caves, and had sex for no other reason than fun. And some wrote stories. They sat right there in front of me and made things up and wrote them down. Fantasies and daydreams traveled from mind to hand to page and became, to me, a real thing that real people did. And I was real people, wasn’t I? So one middle-aged day I lay down on my belly on the living room carpet with a pencil and notebook and no idea how to proceed and I wrote a story. It wasn’t a good story. But when I showed it to my girlfriend at the time—she knew every other dark secret of mine already, anyway—she didn’t laugh. The story was graphic and clumsy and artless, but she took it, took me, seriously. What a wonder. What a gift.

Once I accepted that I could write stories, I took a class, then another. I met other writers, published authors, editors and agents. My world expanded in direct proportion to how seriously I took myself as a writer. And the more I wrote and tried to improve, the more value I saw in my writing, the more others saw in it.

Now, when I see a movie, I wait for the credits to see who wrote the screenplay or the story from which it was adapted. I want to know who wrote the play and about their life as a writer. I make it my business find out who put the words in the actors mouths. I give the new novelist a chance to draw me into the world they imagined into existence. It has become natural to me to create people and places and incidents and put them on paper in a way that touches and entertains. And these days the people around me expect it.

Just a thought . . .

Teaching abstinence to a teenager is like trying to teach a starving man to fast.

bell can't-o

I have been in several different writers’ groups. I have been the only man in almost all of them. Still, much of what I have learned about writing, editing and criticizing fiction I owe to the women in those resilient little bands committed to long effort with few rewards. My gratitude to them knows no limits save for one: their reading recommendations.

Invariably someone in the group will rave about the latest book they have read. They swear I will love this one, despite my inability to appreciate the pure genius of the last half-dozen writers upon whom they have heaped praise at our meetings. I must develop an eye for subtlety, literary critics say. I have to give the story time to unfold or the character a chance to develop. The problem is usually with me, the reader, not with the sensitive and skilled author of the literary novel of the moment. They have been touched on the shoulder by a golden muse while I stagger about in the muck of impatience and stifled imagination. Their only problem as the writer blessed with literary talent beyond question is that their perfect and delicate work has fallen into the hands of a Neanderthal like me.

A possibility not often entertained by some of my writing cohorts or the righteous judges of literature ensconced in cushy New York Times reviewer gigs is that these books may just suck. From the undisciplined and unfocused poetry disguised as novels by authors such as Toni Morrison and Annie Proulx to the agonizingly slow pace and belly-button staring self-absorption of Jonathan Franzen I am given to understand that the problem lies with me. Never mind that Alice Sebold’s groundbreaking twist of having a dead narrator was creative ground well trodden when William Holden told us his story face down in a pool on Sunset Boulevard. Never mind that Ann Patchett commits every egregious structural error at the beginning of bel canto for which any new writer would be rightly chastised, turning what should be an exciting premise into a series of dull digressions into characters she is unable to make us care about.

I’m not the first or the only one to notice that the emperor has no clothes—B.R. Myers has said it as well as can be said in his tiny book A Reader’s Manifesto—but I think I have hit upon a couple of the why’s he did not address. Most notable is the emergence of graduate level, MFA writing programs that have sprouted like noxious weeds all over the English speaking world. No longer does the daydreaming English major with no other skills have to graduate and face the hard compromises of the working world. They may take refuge for another few years in an obscure MFA program at a tiny college, wrapped in the comforting delusions that support such places—that they have real talent unrecognized by the plebeians by whom they were previously surrounded, that here literary potential is revered and nurtured, that with perseverance and unwavering adherence to their own unique vision, they can be the next truly great writer. That English departments previously fallen on hard times now have an additional and reliable source of revenue fed by the feverish dreams of the young and hopeful is a cynical observation that never makes it into the glossy brochures touting illustrious resident authors and useful connections to publishing houses.

What are these eager young MFA’s to do when their magnum opus fails to find a publisher upon yet another anxious graduation? Use those cultivated connections to become proof readers, slush-pile gatekeepers, literary critics in those media outlets that still have them, junior literary agents, assistant editors, and eventually, if they don’t get distracted again by their own literary ambitions, acquisition editors at publishing houses. Trained in what is and what is not “literature” at these MFA factories, their own sensitive proclivities supported and reinforced by the feminine writing culture that dominates these programs, they now constitute the filter through which most aspiring writer’s manuscripts must pass. And if you are a male writer in the vein of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, or Graham Greene, if your writing style is straight-forward and unadorned with the unnecessary or ornamental, if it is focused on serving the story rather than the writer, you will, if published at all, be relegated to the category of popular fiction, unworthy of serious review or literary recognition. You will be squeezed into an existing genre whether your work belongs there or not and marketed on that basis. Thus do writers of the quality of Larry McMurtry, whose literary ability cannot be ignored, have books like Lonesome Dove wedged into the western category because his style is not “literary.”

So, novels are sorted into commercial or literary and rarely are the two allowed to overlap. This artificial and arbitrary selection process, that I believe finds it’s genesis in the ubiquitous MFA programs as much as the avarice of the new titans of publishing, is responsible for and encourages the “split personality” noted by Motoko Rich in her New York Times article of November 26th. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing has temporarily ceased the acquisition of new works by it’s editors due to economic hardship. This while the Hachette Publishing Group paid bonuses to it’s employees. The difference between the two? (And to judge by the tone of Ms. Rich’s article, a difference unfathomable to her) The former has a stable of “commercial” authors who sell copies in the millions, the latter is a champion of experimental and “literary” authors who hope to sell 15,000 copies in hard cover.

This split between commercial and literary writing has been encouraged and exacerbated by the world view embraced by graduate writing programs. I find little mystery in the decline of literary reading in general (and the steeper decline in literary reading among men) in the NEA report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America. Most of the new novels being offered up are either shallow, plot driven and forgettable commercial fiction or the overly long, poetical blathering of undisciplined minds revered as “literature.” Is it any wonder that literary reading is in decline?

Of particular annoyance to me is the writing style and habits picked up by male authors in MFA world. To slot a particular kind of “literary” novel about what are assumed to be women’s concerns, from a woman’s point of view and most often written by a woman, in the chick lit category as distinct from other forms of literary fiction is a distinction without a difference. To this Neanderthal’s eye, nearly all literary fiction published these days is chic lit, whether written by men or women, about war or shopping, it all reads the same way: slow, over-written and needlessly, not to mention ineffectively poetical.

I rarely buy new fiction anymore. I go back and re-read what’s on my shelf, or take a book by a favorite author out of the library that I have not yet read. I do browse the bookstores for new releases now and then or find a book that has recently enthralled my writers group. I pick it up and read the first two or three pages. I almost always close it and put it back on the self, once again disappointed. If I buy a book at all it will be something of Hemingway’s or Graham Greene’s I haven’t read, the complete stories of Jack London or some such. If the big houses stop publishing these old timers, they’re gonna lose me, too.

What's up with the blog name?

I spent a lot of years doing jobs that skinned my knuckles and tested my patience and endurance. Many of those years were spent driving nails and making sawdust. I hate working for anyone and I hate being anybody’s boss. Consequently, I’ve had only a few carpenters I’ve worked with over the years. Guys whose skills and personality complimented my own. In those days when I thought I could successfully run a business—I can’t—I partnered with carpenter named Jeff.

Like many of us stiffs looking up at the bottom rung of the ladder of success, Jeff kept a roof over his head and food on the table by working with his hands. He is a skilled and careful carpenter. Careful because he needed to stay in the category of ten-fingered carpenters to engage in his real love, music. Jeff is a fine base player and song writer. He was a member of a very successful regional pop band. Though not in his nature to be hyper-ambitious, he did chase the mirage of fame and fortune for a while. Then he realized he really only wanted the fortune part. Base players edge toward the back of the stage for a reason.

Jeff was in on the very early stages of my transformation from over-educated construction worker to struggling author who still has to work. We fantasized to each other about becoming rich and famous. Our running joke was that the first one to become rich would buy the other the motorcycle of his choice. When I sent him an e-mail that my first novel was out, he replied that I was in the lead. He is pre-shopping for his bike even now. I told him not to put down a deposit just yet.

Well, that accounts for the name of the blog. It is not easy for me to promote myself or what I do. Feels too much like bragging to a redneck kid. But if it will help my friend Jeff get his motorcycle, I’ll do it, and put my goal right up front. All the stuff behind it is just me scratching and clawing, ranting and bitching and striving. If I’m lucky, I still have a lot of time to kill before that first shovel-full of dirt hits me in the face.