Writer Unboxed

Dissecting The Bear and The Nightingale

May 19, 2019 By Natalie Hart 1 Comment

Katherine Arden so effectively writes about life under the unrelenting Medieval Russian winter that reading The Bear and the Nightingale could probably be used as air conditioning. This is the first line: “It was late winter in northern Rus’, the air sullen with wet that was neither rain nor snow.” That’s the kind of damp cold that seeps in under collars and keeps scarves and gloves feeling constantly damp. Brrr.

While the Writer Unboxed Breakout Novel Dissection (BND) group didn’t test out that theory, we appreciated Arden’s worldbuilding skills. We are a Facebook book club for writers; four times a year we choose a breakout novel to take apart using questions derived from Donald Maass’s craft books and mine it for insights we can use in our own fiction.

Although with this book, some of Arden’s strengths contain within them a weakness:

The fairy tale structure provided a strong hook and organizing principle, but also kept some readers from emotional engagement with the protagonist.
Her characterization was strong and we were able to keep a large cast of characters distinct because of it. We even got to know the antagonists well enough that we could have compassion for them. However, internal conflict was lacking in the protagonist.
The word “superpower” was mentioned a number of times about her worldbuilding–physical setting, culture, politics, supernatural as well as natural elements–but some found the wealth of detail overwhelming.

We will explore the writerly lessons we learned from The Bear and the Nightingale (TBatN) here, but we cannot do so without revealing some spoilers. Read on at your own peril.

Fairytale structure

The novel begins with an old woman telling the family she serves an old Russian story about the frost-demon and Winter King judging the sacrifice of one brave girl well and gives her a large dowry, and punishing a complaining girl and a greedy mother with an icy finger of death.

After that, the story centers around Vasya, a girl born to a Russian boyar, although she doesn’t enter the scene until chapter 3, and her mother dies giving birth to her. Vasya can see the household spirits (and other, less kindly demons) the Russians learned about in their folk tales, but who they have begun to deny due to the relatively new teachings of Christianity: little beings that live in the large ovens that heat their homes, in the barns and take care of the horses, in trees, in water, etc. Soon, she learns she can speak with them, and with horses; she takes responsibility to feed them, which puts her increasingly at odds with her changing society. When we add her desire to combine traditional Russian and new Christian spirituality to her very strong rejection of traditional women’s roles, her inability to do any of this quietly, and the tiny matter of being chosen by the Winter King, we have a big engine for conflict.

But, oddly, Vasya is the character with the least amount of internal conflict.

[Read more…]

The Hack’s Guide to Finding Time to Write

May 18, 2019 By Bill Ferris 2 Comments

Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.

Nobody has time to write. I myself didn’t have time to write this column, yet here you are reading it. How’d I do it? What’s my secret? Well, my creative writing professor in college always used to say, “If something is important, you figure out a way to make it happen.” And since getting praise and validation from countless online strangers is important to me, I made the sacrifices necessary to write an article where you can say nice things about me in the comments section.

But I’m an online advice columnist who’s been doing this for a while. Not everybody starts out knowing the incantations and precise measurements of blood required stop the flow of time for long enough to scratch out a monthly article. I started with a few tips and tricks for finding time to write, which I’ll share with you here.

Carry a notebook everywhere

Something that can fit in your pocket, like a Moleskine or one of those little pads that TV detectives use. The blank page of a new notebook is a vacuum that will suck the words out of you, which is a natural and not-gross way to think about writing. The great thing about carrying a notebook is that it’s a constant reminder to focus on your craft. You used to only feel Writer’s Guilt while you were squandering your free time after the kids went to bed. Now you can feel it all the time!

Use your spare moments

Those few minutes you normally use to check Twitter or drive to work? Those are ideal times to jot down ideas. Every time you check Twitter, exercise your prose muscles by writing at least one tweet first. During your morning commute, open up your phone’s voice-recorder app and craft a tragic narrative as you rehearse all the arguments you’d like to have with your ex if only the moment was right.

[Read more…]

The Place of Place in Our Writings

May 17, 2019 By Porter Anderson (@Porter_Anderson) 5 Comments

Joyce Carol Oates gives an acceptance speech at the opening of the Jerusalem International Book Forum on receiving the Jerusalem Prize on May 12. Image: Porter Anderson

To Start in a ‘Nowhere Place’

Overnight, we’ve had news from Wales of the win by Guy Gunaratne of the 2019 Dylan Thomas Prize for writers 39 or younger. Gunaratne’s debut novel, which also was longlisted for the Booker, is In Our Mad and Furious City. In the States, it’s published by Macmillan/FSG.

And in his comments on winning the award, which carries a purse of US$38,347, Gunaratne made an intersting point about place–his own place, in a sense, and where it lies in his work. His reference to Neasden is about the northwest London suburb in which he grew up. He said:

“After winning this prize, my mind really just goes to all the other writers, or aspiring writers, who are writing from a place similar to where I began. A place like Neasden, somewhere I always thought was a nowhere place. But to make art out of the world, the language, the voices I grew up around I always felt was important. That’s all I tried to do with this book.”

The book’s politically charged story is set in northwest London and has to do with young members of minorities in London’s vast, swirling mix of so much glorious diversity–a reality sorely strained by the Brexitian bigotry that grips the UK–and the European Union with it–with unresolved hostility.

And I was struck in Gunaratne’s remarks with his concept of his home turf, his calling it “a nowhere place.” That’s familiar to many of us. My own childhood haunts in the Methodist backwaters of my father’s ministerial career seemed (and still do) like very nowhere places.

What’s impressive to me now, in looking at his book, is that he found a way deep enough into the “nowhere-ness” of his background to realize that it seemed to be right where his work needed to land: it reflects today’s struggles in which whole populations in some of the most advanced places on Earth–London, for God’s sake–feel that they’re growing up “nowhere.”

It takes a lot of perspective to get to that. You have to climb way up into the tree of your own personality to get a high enough view. It’s not easy to see your own milieu for how it might resonate with others. Granted, there can be many complex emotional and psychological reasons to write, or not, about your background, your origination, “your people,” and so on.

I once bought a large, arresting photo for my mantelpiece by a gifted artist named Timothy Sellers once. Its title is “You Will Be Found in the Place Where You Were Born” and it’s a fleeting self-portrait, the artist sighted, vulnerable for an instant, in a dense tropical greenhouse environment, an organic entity spotted on the way to some kind of unavoidable, entropic appointment.

Maybe the right question isn’t whether we can ever go home again, Mr. Wolfe, but whether we can ever really get away.

Joyce in Jerusalem

Provocations graphic by Liam Walsh

As a provocation today, I’ll tell you about something that would seem to be another author’s long, successful flight from home for tremendous accolades–and how tightly she held onto “the place where she was born” when she got there.

Joyce Carol Oates was given the Jerusalem Prize for literature at the opening of the Jerusalem International Book Forum on Sunday evening (May 12), feted with lavish appraisals of her work and music of Mozart, his 15th quartet. And it was striking to see Oates at the podium, standing in the temple-like interior of the auditorium there in Israel, giving an acceptance speech about discovering reading as a child in Lockport, New York.

Her main influence–in fact, the only family member who knew books or culture and who could have gotten her to a library–was her paternal grandmother, Blanche. Oates credits Blanche’s generosity and care in introducing her to reading–and giving her an Olivetti typewriter at age 14. As Oates had some early successes in school with her writing, her grandmother’s comment, she told us in Jerusalem, was one many of us heard from such steadfast mentors in our earlier years: “I knew you could do it.”

After Blanche died, Oates learned that her grandmother had concealed a Jewish background. The trauma of what had brought the family to the States, of course, was enough to make many hide it. But in a peculiar turn of events, Oates had grown up without any real contact with the Jewish element, however subtle, in her own backround.

[Read more…]

UnConference Scholarship Winners!

May 17, 2019 By Writer Unboxed Leave a Comment

Huge congratulations to our three UnConference Scholarship winners, who will each receive a ticket to the event and a $600 stipend:

Leesa Brown

Amelia Loken

and

Thomas Womack!

Our thanks to all who applied. You are a talented group of writers, and you made our choice very difficult indeed.

Thanks to all who donated to our cash stipend fund, and also to the generous artists who contributed to the WU auction event, Lisa Janice Cohen, Deb Lacativa, and Marta Pelrine-Bacon. Your generosity directly impacted this event by enabling us to provide stipends to three people vs. one person. And to auction winners Brian B King, Melissa Hed, and Sharon Bially: Thank you for your support.

Thank you to all who participated in the auction via bids and through social media shares, too. We appreciate you!

Early Bird Window Closing Soon

Early registration for the WU UnConference ends on May 31st, in just two weeks. Thirty tickets remain, and we’d love for one of them to have your name on it. Learn more about the WU UnConference on our Eventbrite page. [Read more…]

Flog a Pro: would you pay to turn the first page of this bestseller?

May 16, 2019 By Ray Rhamey 23 Comments

Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page.

Here’s the question:

Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents.

So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 cents for the rest of the chapter every time you sample a book’s first page. In a sense, time is money for a literary agent working her way through a raft of submissions, and she is spending that resource whenever she turns a page.

Please judge by storytelling quality, not by genre or content—some reject an opening page immediately because of genre, but that’s not a good enough reason when the point is to analyze for storytelling strength.

This novel was number one on the New York Times paperback trade fiction bestseller list for May 19, 2019. How strong is the prologue—would this narrative, all on its own, hook an agent if it came in from an unpublished writer? Following are what would be the first 17 manuscript lines of the first chapter.

Who the hell is this timid creature standing in my hallway? I’m completely bemused. Have I seen her before? An image from a forgotten dream develops like a Polaroid in my memory, an angel in blue hovering at my bedside. But that was days ago. Could it have been her? And now she’s here, rooted to the hallway floor, her impish face pale, her eyes downcast. Her knuckles grow whiter as she clasps the broom handle tighter and tighter, as if it’s anchoring her to the Earth. The headscarf conceals her hair, and an oversize, old-fashioned nylon housecoat swamps her small frame. She looks totally out of place.

“Who are you?” I ask again, but in a softer tone, not wanting to alarm her. Wide eyes, the color of a fine espresso and framed by the longest lashes I’ve ever seen, look up at me, then back at the floor.

Shit!

One peek from her dark, fathomless eyes and I’m…unsettled. She’s at least a head shorter than me, perhaps five feet five to my six feet two. Her features are delicate: high cheekbones, an upturned nose, clear fair skin, and pale lips.

It’s obvious that she’s cleaning. But why her? Why here? Has she replaced my old daily? “Where’s Krystyna?” I ask, growing a little frustrated at her silence. Perhaps she’s Krystyna’s daughter—or granddaughter.

You can turn the page and read more here.

[Read more…]