Storyteller's Rulebook: Let Absurdity Clash with Meaning

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is beloved by nerds everywhere, many of whom, like myself, are atheists, and indeed Adams defined himself as a “radical atheist”, but he followed that up with “I love to keep poking and prodding at it. I've thought about it so much over the years that that fascination is bound to spill over into my writing.”  Indeed, let’s look at that prodding.  First we get this exchange, about the Babel fish:

• Now, it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some have chosen to see it as the final proof of the NON-existence of God. The argument goes something like this:
• “I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
• “But,” says Man, “the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves that You exist, and so therefore, by Your own arguments, You don't. QED”
• “Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn't thought of that,” and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
• “Oh, that was easy,” says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

But of course, God is right there having this conversation, isn’t he? He doesn’t stand up to logical scrutiny, so he must go, but only after he created the universe: “In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very unhappy and has widely been regarded as a bad move.”

So, setting aside what we know of Adams, the theism of the book is ambiguous. What about Christianity specifically? Right there on the first page, we get praise for Jesus...

• And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…

Then there’s the issue of the larger quest. We later find out that humankind has a greater purpose. It has been determined that the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything is “42”, but then what’s the question? It turns out that Earth were invented to discover that question. In other words, life on Earth is a search for meaning.

By the fourth book, Earth has been recreated, and presumably that search is still going on, but the characters get distracted by another quest, to find “God’s final message to his creation”. The fact that they even seek this out is telling. It turns out the message is “WE APOLOGISE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.” So we get the sense that Adams, and by extension, his characters, are really deists: God created us, and gave us a purpose, but then we banished him with a “puff of logic” and now have to search out his meaning on our own, using the scraps he’s left behind.

We love these books for their absurdity, but Adams’s grappling with God give them a lot of their power. Absurdity is more powerful if it clashes with meaning.

The Meddler: Making Arthur a More Satisfying Hero in “Hitchhiker’s Guide”

Arthur Dent in “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” starts off as a very effective hero. We get everything we need in the first few pages to believe, care, and invest:

• Believe: We get odd little specifics about his life, like the fact that his beloved house has oddly unpleasing windows. This makes us say, “oh, I’ve never heard that detail before, but it sounds like a real concern, so this must be a real person.”
• Care: Arthur realizes the house is about to be torn down, and he’s been treated in a way that makes us burn with indignation.
• Invest: Arthur then acts heroically to save the house, lying down in the mud to block the bulldozers. This is a hero willing to do what it takes.

So we’re off to the races, right? But we quickly have problems:

• Arthur is, it seems at first, the only survivor of the destruction of the planet Earth, which is a perfect set-up for a hero, but one key reason is missing: Why? What did he do differently than everybody else?
• The bigger problem is that Arthur then suddenly becomes very passive for most of the book. Once Ford sweeps back into his life, Arthur just stumbles after him, mouth agape, for basically the rest of the book (and the next two) passively taking in information and complying with Ford’s orders semi-competently.

So let’s meddle with it.  Two minor fixes:

• We never have a sense of how Arthur and Ford became friends. I think that it would greatly strengthen Arthur as a hero to show a moment in the past where he did something nice for Ford. That nice action would then result in Ford saving his life someday, making Arthur more the hero of his own story.
• It’s okay for Arthur to be trailing behind Ford for a lot of the book if he comes into his own in the final quarter, and the book kind of does that by having the rest of the gang get sidelined while Arthur meets with Slartibartfast the planet-builder, but that meeting is too inconsequential and Arthur doesn’t say much. Give Arthur a little moment where he convinces Slartibartfast to recreate the Earth just as it was (so that we can keep trying to find the question to the answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything).

The movie did a slightly better job with this: Giving Arthur a moment in his restored home before he decides to travel the galaxy some more, but ultimately it, too, was unsatisfying.

In some ways, this series is like “A Song of Ice and Fire”: a writer who seemed allergic to satisfying endings kept stretching out the story into sequel after sequel. In this case, the fears of Martin fans were realized: Adams died young after writing a particularly unsatisfying installment, before he could provide the happy ending Arthur deserved. Martin fans, beware!

Happy Memorial Day

Writer’s Digest published my book, so they might be biased, but it’s nice to get a bit of a shout-out for the work we do here. (Yes, the irony is that I’m using a review praising me for posting often as an excuse not to post today.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: A Masterclass in Comedy (And One Pet Peeve)

“A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is one of the funniest books ever written and any writer can learn a lot from it, whether you aim to be a comedic writer or simply sprinkle some comedy into any kind of book. In many ways, the humor is particularly British, but that’s no reason that anybody can’t emulate it. Let’s look at some of Douglas Adams’s tricks:

• It’s always funny to try to be precise about imprecise things: “four windows set in the front of a size and proportion which more or less exactly failed to please the eye” (Of course, “42” is the ultimate example of this.)
• A list of mundane things with something bizarre in the middle that the hero fails to register: “At eight o’clock on Thursday morning Arthur didn’t feel very good. He woke up blearily, got up, wandered blearily round his room, opened a window, saw a bulldozer, found his slippers, and stomped off to the bathroom to wash.”
• Connected to that, obliviousness to danger is always funny. In that case it was unconscious, but it can also be willful: Ford finds Arthur blocking bulldozers and says, “look, are you busy?”
• It’s always good to use inherently funny words: “squelching”, “cajoleries”
• Alliteration is always good for creating comedic verbal rhythms: “Thereafter, staggering semiparalytic down the night streets, he would often ask passing policemen if they knew the way to Betelgeuse”

And there’s a lot more to learn here. But there’s also one example of a pet peeve of mine. Adams mostly gets away with it, but I’ve been really tripped up on examples of this in comedic script and novels I’ve given notes on. This is the final dialogue of the opening chapter:

• “Myself I’d trust him to the end of the Earth,” said Ford.
• “Oh yes,” said Arthur, “and how far’s that?”
• “About twelve minutes away,” said Ford, “come on, I need a drink.”

The problem, of course, is that Arthur would never ask that question. He’s only asking it to set up the punchline. This is hoary sitcom stuff (I suppose that before that they would have called it hoary vaudeville stuff.) Can you get away with it? A few times, maybe, but the effort shows, whereas most of Adams’s stuff seem effortlessly witty. Avoid heavy lifting.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Extend the Trend Lines

Nothing makes one feel older that rereading a science-fiction book from one’s youth only to find that it’s come true in the meantime.

I had previously read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” at age nine (I was precocious) back in 1984. At the time, the notion of an electronic book with a leather cover (my ipad today has a leather cover) was pretty strange, as was the notion of that device containing a nearly-infinite crowd-sourced encyclopedia that covered almost every conceivable topic, which was filled with errors, but nonetheless good enough to eclipse the popularity of traditional encyclopedias.

But it all came true. I’ve always said that Wikipedia is one of the most utopian aspects of our modern world, and this seems to confirm it.

And so I think to myself, “Boy, if I could go back in time and tell my younger self that this book would come true in his lifetime, wouldn’t he be surprised?” And then I realize, “No, he wouldn’t be.” If I were to go back and tell my 1984 self, “Hey, can you believe that the world is really different in 2018?” my 9-year old self would say, “Well I should fucking hope so—that’s the distant future! Do you live on the moon?” Then I would have to say, “Well no…In fact, we’ve abandoned manned space travel…But we all have computers in our pockets!”

(This is another area where Adams seems prescient. Indeed, one of the most dated aspects of the era in which it was written is that digital watches still seemed cool at the time. He correctly looked at that development and said “Um, we shouldn’t be so impressed by these. Better stuff is coming.”)

This book is far from hard science-fiction, but in creating the character of Ford Prefect, Adams wanted to show that he was cooler than anyone on Earth, so he invented something that made him cool: the guide. And now we’re all that cool. And that’s pretty neat.

In 1979, post-apocalyptic fiction was all the rage, and this book certainly fits into that category, but thankfully it turned out to be wrong about that, so far. You could say that the world is still tottering on the edge of apocalypse, but so far only the cool tech from this book has come to pass. At least I’d have a little good news to report to my 1984 self.

(I was going to illustrate this with a still from the movie, only to discover another thing the movie messed up: The book doesn’t have “Don’t Panic” on the cover!  This was the best I was able to find, though it hardly fits the description in the book.)

The Annotation Project: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

See, I told you we’d get around to it! This is a very funny book. One reason that it got pushed pack was that I’d never finished the series, so I decided to finally read all four of the original books (everyone including Adams was imploring me to skip the belated fifth one, so I did.) I’ll have more to say about it! Download the doc here.

Straying from the Party Line: Showing Some Compassion in “Beloved”

Generally speaking, you want to make things hard for your characters. Everything feels better if it’s earned. Readers want to watch your characters struggle to overcome their problems so that they can feel like they’re learning problem-solving methods for their own lives, and so that they can feel like they too have suffered along with your characters and earned the ending.

But there are exceptions. “Beloved” is a novel about characters who have endured an unfathomable amount of suffering. Sethe has a long story of whippings and rapes as a slave, all before she had to cut her own baby’s throat, only to have that baby’s ghost violently haunt her house and drive both her boys away. That’s a lot.

What sort of mind could even conceive of that much horror to inflict on one character? Is Morrison, like the last author we looked at, a sadist, torturing her character and the reader, preying on our masochism? No, she’s not. Morrison overflows with empathy and sympathy for her poor beleaguered characters.

This novel begins in a way that risks feeling too easy. Lonely Sethe comes home one day to discover a nearly perfect man simply waiting for her on her porch. A guy she always liked from back in the day who now just wants to love her, make love to her, and exorcise her ghost problem. True, he is later seduced by the ghost when she returns as a grown woman, but in the end he is happily reunited with Sethe.

You have to love your characters, and that means that you have to cut them a break sometimes. The reader is overwhelmed by the horrors of Sethe’s life, and we want her to have this happiness. Finding a great man so easily would be unsatisfying if this was just a romance, but there’s so much more going on here, and the ease of this romance is a nice counterpoint to everything else.

And of course, because these people are so damaged, there still is a certain amount of conflict. She begins by asking “Is that you?” and he responds, “What’s left,” which is a great beginning for a romance story. Soon we get:

• “That's some of what I came for. The rest is you. But if all the truth be known, I go anywhere these days. Anywhere they let me sit down.”
• “You looking good.”
• “Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.” He looked at her and the word “bad” took on another meaning.
• Sethe smiled. This is the way they were--had been. All of the Sweet Home men, before and after Halle, treated her to a mild brotherly flirtation, so subtle you had to scratch for it.

Morrison is still making her heroine scratch for it, under all the layers of scar tissue. Both sides earnestly deflect the other’s compliments, feeling too traumatized to ever be desirablie. She’s giving her heroine a big-hearted gift, but nothing is easy for characters this scarred.

People enjoy reading “Beloved”. It was very popular on Oprah’s Book Club. It’s draining and painful, but also heart-swelling and powerful. Morrison isn’t saying, “The slaves had to suffer and therefore I will make you suffer.”  The text has horrors and rewards, as most stories should.

Rulebook Casefile: The Power of Objects and Kitchens in “Beloved”

You can marvel over just about any paragraph from “Beloved”, but let’s look at this one:

• The fat white circles of dough lined the pan in rows. Once more Sethe touched a wet forefinger to the stove. She opened the oven door and slid the pan of biscuits in. As she raised up from the heat she felt Paul D behind her and his hands under her breasts. She straightened up and knew, but could not feel, that his cheek was pressing into the branches of her chokecherry tree.

I’ve written before, both here and in my book, about the value of placing scenes in kitchens. In this case we have a semi sex-scene in a kitchen, and because of the stove we already have a wet finger and rising heat before the man has crossed the room. The kitchen does half the work of getting characters where they want to go.

(And speaking of food, can we talk about how great the word “chokecherry” is? Sethe’s back has been whipped so badly that the scar tissue resembles a tree, but not just any generic tree, a very specific chokecherry tree. When Morrison encountered this word, you know she fell in love with it and cherished it until she found a devastating place to deploy it.)

At the end of the chapter, Sethe goes upstairs with Paul D, leaving her dejected daughter Denver downstairs:

• Now her mother was upstairs with the man who had gotten rid of the only other company she had. Denver dipped a bit of bread into the jelly. Slowly, methodically, miserably she ate it.

Denver isn’t just sitting there feeling miserable, she’s got some food in her hand and she’s eating it slowly, methodically, and miserably. The object allows Morrison to describe a state that is physically visible, instead of her inner turmoil. Seeing is believing. Behavior is better than internal description.  Put objects in their hands.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Humanize the Inhuman

It’s hard to conceive of the horrors of slavery. The word that keeps coming to mind is “inhuman”. Inhuman cruelty leading to inhuman suffering. But as writers it’s our job to humanize. If the slavers were characters in “Beloved”, Morrison would have to humanize their cruelty. They’re not, which is just as well, which means she can focus on the victims. She has to humanize their inhuman suffering.

The only way that Denver and her mother-in-law Baby Suggs have survived is by cauterizing their wounds. This is literally true for Denver, who has lost all feeling in her back from her whippings, but Baby Suggs, too, has developed some calluses.

• “You lucky. You got three left. Three pulling at your skirts and just one raising hell from the other side. Be thankful, why don't you? I had eight. Every one of them gone away from me. Four taken, four chased, and all, I expect, worrying somebody's house into evil.” Baby Suggs rubbed her eyebrows.
• “My first-born. All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread. Can you beat that? Eight children and that’s all I remember.”
• “That’s all you let yourself remember,” Sethe had told her

They have blocked off their feelings, but it’s Morrison’s job to pick at those scabs, rip off the dead skin, and expose their pain to us in a way that we’ll feel it. How do you make the audience understand what it’s like?

Losing eight kids is unimaginable to modern readers, but you have to make us imagine it. The first mistake would be to have Baby Suggs scream about the injustice of it, which is of course something she would have stopped doing long ago. Morrison does the opposite: summons up our shock and horror by showing how casual Baby Suggs is about it. Our horror is in inverse proportion to hers.

But then Morrison shows how important unique-but-universal details are. If she said of her firstborn, “All I remember of her is her smile,” we would gape at the horror of that loss, but we wouldn’t really feel it. Instead, Morrison says “All I can remember of her is how she loved the burned bottom of bread”. This is a detail I’ve never heard used in a story before, nor in real life, but it feels totally real in a universal way. It feels so real, and so it makes the suffering so real.

The inhuman has become human. A writer’s most powerful tool is specificity.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Authority Goes a Long Way

“Beloved” is a great ghost story, a great family story, and, just as important, a vital story about the legacy of slavery. Crucially, Morrison could not have more authority to tell this story. When she dedicates her book to the 60 million who are estimated to have been killed in the middle passage, she’s not only tapping into her blackness, but the power of her depictions of racial injustice in her three previous novels, which established her as the ideal writer for this topic. When Morrison turned her attention to the 19th century, everyone was eager to hear what she would have to say.  The result was a Great American Novel.

But what if you lack that sort of authority?

I’ve been asked to read two books by white people about slavery. The first was a real heartbreaker. When “We Need Diverse Books” was rising, a published author, who was a white southern man, was asked by his publisher to write something to something set in the Civil War about race. They knew he was a great writer who could handle it.

But while he was writing it, the tide of public opinion shifted to “Own Voices”, with extreme scrutiny on white writers writing about race (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) The publisher was in a bad position: They had requested this book, and the writer had really knocked it out of the park with a beautifully written book, but now they were worried about publishing it.

So they sent it out to sensitivity readers, but they also sent it out to me to see if I could help make sure all of the characters, black and white, were fully humanized. The writer liked my notes, so he paid me for a second round after revisions, and I was really impressed by his dedication to making his novel better and more sensitive.

But he was never able to convince the publisher to publish it. They thought it was great, but they were afraid of Twitter. They shelved it.

I inevitably kept this experience in mind when I got a later manuscript about slavery, this one from an unpublished author. I couldn’t guess from her name, so I felt compelled to ask up front if she was white or black. She responded with the worst possible answer: She was white, but she too had experienced oppression. I told her flat out to never say that to anybody else! Nevertheless, I could tell that she was genuine and I was eager to give her novel an unbiased reading.

Her novel was also very good but I worried about several aspects. To pick one example, the family had an exceptionally kind master who liberated them. This wasn’t typical of the era by any means, and a white writer could be accused of choosing this story out of an urge to show that slavery wasn’t so bad (though that wasn’t at all her intent). Ultimately, I gave her a lot of notes to help revise the (already very good) text, as I do with everyone, but I felt I had to warn the writer that she was very unlikely to find a publisher.

In any type of writing, authority goes a long way. This is one reason to “write what your know”: nobody can question your right to write it. Morrison writes with devastating authority. Of course, in theory, anybody can write about anything if they do enough research and write it well enough. But that theory is being tested.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Literary Doesn’t Have to Mean Hide-n-Seek

We’ve done a lot of popular fiction, so I wanted to do something “literary”, but something that most people have read. I chose “Beloved”, but I’ve got a problem: It’s not a good example of a “difficult” book, if that’s what I was looking for. Let’s look at the remarkable opening paragraph:

• 124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them.

Morrison is taking full advantage of her omniscient POV to just tell us everything we could want to know about her novel, right up front. We have a genre (horror), a subgenre (haunted house), a setting (124 Bluestone Road outside Cincinatti), a villain (the ghost baby, who is so far unnamed), two heroes (Sethe and her daughter Denver), a description of the rest of the family and what happened to them (except the unmentioned father), and most importantly, the dramatic question: Can Sethe and Denver survive the spiteful wrath of the ghost? And we’re off to the races!

Not exactly difficult to read, is it? And yet the book could not have a more literary reputation, having won the Nobel prize and many more. I’ll have to find another example of a tough nut to crack!

Literary fiction doesn’t have to play hide-n-seek. There’s a place for difficult fiction, but it doesn’t have an exclusive claim to greatness. That’s a great opening paragraph, no matter what your aspirations are.

The Annotation Project: Beloved

Hey guys, I was going to do Hitchhiker’s Guide next, but I didn’t want to do two nerdy-white-guy books in a row, so instead I figured we should look at our first really literary book, stamped with a Nobel and every other prize (but don’t worry it’s still a spooky genre story, too.) It’s hard not to love this book. It’s the oldest one we’ve done, but the style is still very modern. I’ll have lots more to say about it in forthcoming posts. Update: Here’s a downloadable Doc.

Guest Appearance on the Story Makers Podcast!

Hi guys, I’m almost ready with new material, but in the meantime, check me out on the Story Makers podcast, which has no overlap with my last podcast appearance, so it’s worth a listen. We talk about “A Game of Thrones” a lot and the reader’s experience of “pleasurable masochism” while reading it. We also range over lots of fun topics, like irony and why we tell each other stories. I also mention the next book we’ll be doing (though I think it won’t actually be next.)