Won't You Be My Sidekick?

A writer's newsletter I receive urged all its readers to consider adding a sidekick to their books, to liven things up and get the protagonist out of his own head. Without actually having read the article, I've been meditating on their many useful purposes:

1. To make the protagonist look less idiotic. Think of Batman and Robin. If your hero runs around in a dark mask with tiny bat ears and throws little bat-shaped boomerangs, you definitely want him accompanied by an even more ludicrous young fellow clad in primary colors and a minimal eye mask that wouldn't fool anyone.

2. To give the protagonist a reason to talk about what he's thinking and feeling without making him appear utterly self-absorbed. Where would Pocahontas be without Grandmother Willow and that annoying hummingbird-raccoon combo? She couldn't express her innermost thoughts to John Smith, after all, since they didn't speak the same language. Oh--I forgot--they did speak the same language after about five minutes.

3. To make the protagonist appear likeable. Sure, there have been plenty of books and movies about repellent loners, but if you don't happen to be writing about a serial killer or other psychopath, likeability isn't a bad thing. (And even Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had each other in Capote's IN COLD BLOOD.) Lack of sidekick may have been the reason Bella Swan wore people out eventually in the TWILIGHT series: if the girl had absolutely no friends besides a few vampires and overgrown wolves, maybe we shouldn't be hanging out with her either.

All of which is to say, I'm looking for a few sidekicks at some upcoming book events. Think about poor authors sitting at tables by themselves while strangers scuttle by, eyes averted, thinking, "Oh, my, what an idiotic, self-absorbed, unlikeable person!" With your engaging presence, people are more likely to think, "Wow! What charming readers this author attracts. Perhaps if I purchase that book, I might be another such person."

Let us enhance each other. Catch me at:

Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle
Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010, at 7:00 p.m.
(And, no, I'm not the abortion doctor advertised on the site)

And, for variety, I'll be talking about being a writer who happens to be Christian and the intersection of Christians and culture at Seattle University's "Search for Meaning: Pacific NW Spirituality Book Festival" on Saturday, Feb 13, 2010, at 1:00 p.m. in Rm 106, Pigott Auditorium.
(If you get bored during my session, you can run next door and catch Robert "All I Really Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten" Fulghum! Even my own husband heard who I was up against and said, "Nobody will come to your session!")

You complete me. See you then.

Enough about Me, Let's Talk about Me

Yesterday the Senior Adult Fellowship from church hosted me, and, delighted with them and with the three varieties of Jell-O salad I found at the event, I urged each and every one of them to write his (or her) memoir. As a gift to his offspring and descendants on down the line. Now, I didn't urge every last person to write his memoir and then foist it on the world, just on those whom it would be most likely to interest.

And sooner or later, our family histories interest us. Maybe because we interest us, and family histories are extensions of our own story. My husband's aunt recently wrote a memoir of the family's early years, growing up homeless in the Depression with their amazing, they-don't-make-'em-like-they-used-to mother, and believe you me, every family member was glued to the couch last Christmas, reading that memoir. What can we say? We love to read about us.

Perhaps because of our own self-absorption, other people's self-absorption can annoy. Since it isn't polite to talk about ME all the time, and I'm not super interested in talking about YOU all the time, we agree, when we read books, to talk about a third person. Here's where memoirs get tricky.

After all, what is a publicly-published memoir but one person's conviction that his life is so inordinately thrilling that you will want to know about it? The literary equivalent of a stage-hogging monologue. At least with a biography, you have one other person (i.e., the biographer) agreeing with you that your life is thrilling and worthy of taking up another person's precious free time. Don't get me wrong--some lives and memoirs are absolute treasures: THE COLOR OF WATER by James MacBride and THE GLASS CASTLE by Jeannette Walls I put in this category. But even with those, I wonder if it wasn't the writers' greater focus on larger-than-life parents and issues that makes them so compelling.

I have memoirs on the brain because of the whole JULIE AND JULIA thing, and then my book club's most recent read, Kathleen Flinn's THE SHARPER YOUR KNIFE, THE LESS YOU CRY. The book--about the author going to Le Cordon Bleu and marrying Mr. Perfect--garnered ratings from members ranging from 3.3 to 7 out of a possible 10, and, as a friend pointed out, three people who rated the book 5 or higher had not even found it compelling enough to finish. I plead guilty, Your Honor. And the most damning criticism? "I got tired of hearing how everyone thought she was so amazing and wonderful." True. This can barely be borne in a fictional character (rent ANNE OF GREEN GABLES and count how many times another character declares, "You're so wonderful, Anne!"), much less a real person writing about herself.

All of which is to say, if you're considering writing a memoir to share with the world at large, you may want to run it by a few, unbiased readers. Unfortunately, I cannot be one of those readers for you because I am so busy blogging about myself. Oh, and speaking of Me, I read today's Humbling Thought in an interview with Terry Castle, an 18th-century Lit professor at Stanford who was my advisor for all of one meeting before I switched to Renaissance: "Blogging is like having your own vanity press. What’s not to like?"

Gimmickry and Re-Hashes

At one point in the movie Julie and Julia, Julie Powell receives secondhand feedback that Julia Child--whose recipes she has been cooking and blogging about exhaustively for the better part of a year--is not thrilled with the whole enterprise. "Does she think I'm using her?" Julie asks her long-suffering husband (who, if Powell's follow-up book CLEAVING is any indication, has not yet really begun to suffer).

"Using" Julia Child? You mean, clinging to the coat-tails of her hard work and fame to gain notoriety? Umm...was this really a soul-searching question? I would have put it in the no-brainer category. Not that I blame Powell. The whole half of the movie that dealt with her, I was kicking myself that: (1) I hadn't thought of such a blog first; and, (2) Was it too late to come up with my own gimmick?; (3) Which famous person could I suck off of?; and, (4) How could I get my blog attached to Salon.com?

After some late-night thought I came up with "The Kristina/Kama Sutra Project: 365 Days, Untold Numbers of Positions," with the byline, "It pays to be flexible." Unfortunately, before you all and the rest of humanity could sign up to follow such a--ahem!--titillating blog, a friend informed me that it would have to be vetoed because my pastor husband would "receive emails." That, and I suppose, if it were ever adapted into a movie, it would not receive a family-friendly rating. Sigh.

Gimmicks and re-hashes are time-honored traditions in the arts. Consider Shakespeare, who openly borrowed just about every one of his plots from popular publishing, headlines, history books, and foreign plays. Consider how people pitch their book and movie ideas: "It's TWILIGHT set in a pre-school that's remarkably like Hogwarts." The trick is bringing something new to it, which Shakespeare always, always did. We were watching the Anthony Hopkins movie TITUS (Julie Taymor's adaptation of Shakespeare's TITUS ANDRONICUS), and we marveled at how eloquently Goth Queen Tamora could plead for Titus not to hack her oldest son into bits and burn his entrails. Could not have put it better myself.

Which is why, if you've seen the accusation going around that AVATAR is just Pocahontas in Outer Space, that shouldn't necessarily be a strike against it. Did or did not James Cameron bring something new to the table? (JULIE AND JULIA at least yielded Meryl Streep's wondrous and charming performance--the best in the role since Dan Ackroyd.) Haven't yet seen AVATAR, but I do know from movie posters that Cameron made his "Natives" blue, and that counts as new and different in my book. Could you do any better?

Dad-Blasted Youth

Last week was the Widows' Book Club group at church, and they graciously invited me to come talk about MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA. I don't imagine any of them read this blog, but if this turns out to be my final post, tell someone that I was bludgeoned to death by women wearing purple.

In most book clubs I've visited, we spend a lot of time talking about the writing process: how do I get my ideas? how do I find the time? how does (self-)publishing work? and so on. And those things were touched on this time, but one woman happened to be in attendance who belonged to the weekly Bible study I co-lead, and she steered the conversation toward the Eastside Academy students we host every several weeks. This in turn brought up two controversial subjects: Cussing and Today's Youth.

I spend a fair amount of time defending the cussing in the book, and you blog devotees know that I've blogged about it more than once. For certain demographics (read: the rather-churchy and Widows' Book Clubs), I do try to warn people ahead of time, but I hadn't gotten to this group. Sure enough, when it came to discussing the f-bombs, I could see one woman's eyebrows going up and up and up. Finally, she burst out with, "Now, I haven't read the book--" (nor will she now, I imagine) "--but I want to know why young people have such terrible mouths! We have such a beautiful language, and those words--!"

This, at least, was a new twist. Usually the cuss-scientious objectors object to me, the Christian, the pastor's wife, using such language. Thankfully I cannot be made to answer for Today's Youth, and I took refuge in a "Well, f--- me, that's kind of beyond the scope of this discussion" (kidding) (about the expletive). Other than recommending she avoid my book, movies PG-13 or higher, and THE SKINHEAD HAMLET, I had nothing more to advise.

So much for cussing. Next came the Youth. I had launched into a paraphrase of the speech delivered by Mark Henneman to the would-be mentors in the book, all about Youth needing adults in their lives and the wonders of being such an adult. Controversy #2. "Has anyone ever sat down with those kids," demanded Eyebrows, "and told them that, if they don't graduate high school, in a few years they'll be homeless?"

"Umm...actually, those kinds of discussions don't go over very well," I answered. "You know kids. It's why the smoking ads don't work--they never think it has anything to do with them." Heck, those kinds of discussions don't work on me. I know very well that never exercising and eating loads of sugar will one day turn me into a diabetic blob who suffers a massive heart attack when she tries to struggle up from her La-Z-Boy, but I think, in that case, I'd better enjoy all the lumping around and dessert I can get in the meantime.

Anyhow, nothing like a little blood-pumping excitement at book clubs. Eyebrows even said, "We'll see you again when you write your next book," and presumably she meant it invitingly, rather than so-I-can-rake-you-over-the-cultural-coals-again. We'll see--next book pimping stop is the Senior Adult Fellowship, which includes lunch and men!

Say What?

In the FB and Twitter inboxes this morning I found competing advice. The first article declared that, if you're an unagented author, you have a better chance of being kidnapped by aliens and forced to do embarrassing things (my words, not hers, but that was the gist), than of getting an editor at a publishing house to consider your manuscript. The second article talked about how nearly-impossible it was to get an agent these days (unless you've been kidnapped by aliens and forced to do embarrassing things and thus gotten on Oprah) because you need to be mediagenic with a built-in platform to buy your books (cf. Sarah Palin and Steve Martin, among others). It isn't that the time-honored technique of sleeping with the right people no longer works--it's just you can't even get--without much perseverance--to the people you're supposed to sleep with, and nowadays there seem to be stables of people that must be slept with, to make anything happen. Can a boob job be written off on your taxes?

I'm just mulling this over hypothetically, of course. There are plenty of would-be published authors who will become published authors in a matter of time (my cousin, included) because they have the talent and the do-or-die stick-to-it-ness to get there, but I'm beginning to think I'm not among them. For one, I ran out of gas approaching agents after, what, five tries? I'm cutting my conference attendance in 2010 by 50% (one conference, instead of two), and I've grown a little weary of pimping my book. I just want to write and get copies in the hands of friends!

Of course, right after I decided I was going into semi-retirement as a book pimper, I heard back from Third Place Books in Ravenna (Seattle)--see ya there on Tuesday, February 9, at 7:00 p.m. But after that, and the Seattle U Book Festival, I'm outie. At least for now.

Bass-ackwards

Last week at my kids' swim practice, I was chatting with another mom and, since I knew she'd been reading MBC, I asked her if she'd finished yet. She got rather squirmy all of a sudden.

"What?"

"Well, I--I--"

"You hated it?"

"No--I got very anxious while I was reading it, so I skipped ahead and read the ending. Then, after I knew how it was going to turn out, now I'm going back and enjoying it slowly." (Series of exclamation points!)

I thought reading the ending before you read the story was something only my sister did--the girl who watches movies only in the romantic comedy and fantasy genres. No dramas for her.

How widespread is this? I myself never read the endings first and get very ticked, in fact, if I read the "introduction" or "an interview with the author" and find all kinds of spoilers. Granted, I discover I can still enjoy the book, but still...the twists and turns are part of the fun, even if they're torturous. Maybe especially if they're torturous. Besides, I think it was pretty clear from the overall tone of MBC that things would turn out largely all right--oftentimes the author drops clues or you can guess where the book is headed. I suppose once you get to know an author better, you can imagine what lies in store. If it's Edith Wharton, there's going to be hell to pay. If it's Nicholas Sparks, a main character will be pushing up daisies by the end. If it's Jane Austen, everyone will get their happy ending, even if it feels slightly tacked-on.

Since I've joined Goodreads, I'm thinking of putting this out there as a reader poll. If this is a common practice, I might have to tack a false ending on my next book, just so everyone is still surprised!

Here Go Ten Minutes

Okay, I vowed I would do some writing today because I haven't for a couple weeks. So after revising Chapter 4 of my unnamed sequel for twenty minutes, I'm ducking out again. Really, I'm approaching halfway done, if I'm not already there (on the whole dinged book), but there are so many distractions!

1. Goodreads.com. I know this site has been around forever (in cyberspace terms), but I finally got on because I was reading the publishing industry's eulogies for Kirkus Reviews--which now claims it's got a few more gasps left in it--and one commenter said she didn't read the professional reviews anymore. She just checked it out on Goodreads. Hmmm...Wondering if you readers tend to go with the professional blurbs, Amazon, Goodreads, or friends' recommendations. It's always a bonus to find like-minded readers, so you know whether or not you'll agree with their reviews. I just joined a group on Goodreads called "Madam, Want to Talk about Author Mary Stewart?" because I figure they have potential.
2. The avalanche of e-readers threatening to bury us. The publishing industry is also abuzz with the many, many e-readers launching in 2010 to challenge the Kindle. The Kindle, which already had some wringing their hands because the pricing didn't allow everyone to get a big enough piece of the pie. I haven't spent much time weeping over the publishing industry because I opted out, but I remain very interested in the whole electronic thing. MOURNING BECOMES CASSANDRA is already available on Kindle, and I'm in process with the Google Books version and queued up with Barnes & Noble. For the forseeable future I'll always want a printed, physical copy of my book(s), and I'll print some up for others without e-readers, but it certainly is terribly expensive. Had I sold every copy of MBC as a Kindle version, I would have been able to take that dream cruise to Antarctica now, even with the cut Amazon takes. As it is, I'm in the black but will have to dig into the savings to bring out the next one.
3. My cholesterol. For the first time it's approaching the Highway to the Danger Zone, and I really ought to take more walks.
4. Rock Band. Got it for Christmas and played plenty down in California, so it's irritating to come back up here and find that we have hardly any songs and have to start over. My avatar couldn't even afford the hoodie I wanted her to have, so I had to play a whole bunch after I sent the kids to bed to get money for the hoodie. Plus, the microphone was defective, and I had to sort that out. Plus plus, I now have a blister from drumming.

Okay, the ten minutes are up (and then some). Back to writing.