When Should You Read Literary Novels?

Puddlepaws, the Gratuitously Adorable Kitten, from The Initiate

None of this post will apply if you regularly read (or write) in the literary genre.

I love literary writing…in small dribbles. There are are certain gorgeous books, with such exquisite sentences and turns of phrase that they seduce my inner logophile into rapturous sighs of bliss. I can usually make it half-way through such a book before I realize I’m…bored.

The rest of the journey is a slog. Often, I’ll find that the true power of the story doesn’t hit until the end. So it’s worth it to push through that boring part. It’s not like the boring part of a badly written story, which you’d be better off without. It’s drawing you in to the character’s world or mind, making you love this person against all logic and expectation.

Literary novels revolve around people who aren’t admirable doing things that aren’t interesting. The literary writer’s job is to write so beautifully that you don’t notice. Also this brings us to the rule of thumb: You can write about dull things in an exciting way and you can write about exciting things in a dull way, and some bastards can even write about exciting things in an exciting way, but if you write about dull things in a dull way, no one will read your book.

I have found, however, the perfect time to read a literary novel, or short story collection, is when I am editing.

Plot pushes my stories around, piling up activities for the characters, the way a mom in a supermarket grabs boxed cereals for the next month of breakfasts. My characters engage in all sorts of angst and drama, but sometimes my dialogue is too “on the nose,” as they say in screenwriting, rather than subtle and realistic.

Reading some exquisite crown of word-jewels during the editing reminds me that sentences can be beautiful, they can be complex, they can be unexpected. This helps me polish my prose, dial back the obvious where it was slamming the reader in the face, put on a shirt and shoes to go eat in the restaurant and not stomp around like a barbarian.

The time I try to avoid reading literary works is while I am brainstorming, outlining and drafting the manuscript (i.e. most of the time). What I read inspires what I write, so if I read literary novels while brainstorming a new book, I start to delude myself this time I’ll write a literary book. Mustn’t have that! Also, I start trying to Me Rite Purty too soon.

Trying to write beautiful sentences before I have the plot and the character arcs worked out would be deadly for the kind of story I want to write. It would risk it becoming…boring.

Have you noticed what an offensive post this is? I’ve managed to insult both literary and genre writing. This is what happens when I’m in Editing Mindset.

One Ridiculously Easy Way To Improve Your Manuscript

So you want your writing not to suck. There’s a ridiculously effective way to improve it. It’s easy–once you know how:

Put your manuscript on a diet!

I have a guest post from writing coach extraordinaire, Rayne Hall, with some tips.

Check out all Rayne Hall’s books!

Buy this for $2.99

Countdown to the Release of Wing, Book 5 of The Unfinished Song

You’ve been waiting.

You’ve been asking.

You deserve to know…

When is Wing coming out?!

And the answer is: Oct 12, Friday, 2012.

If you aren’t on the list to receive a free copy, go sign up now and I’ll squeeze you in!

The Hobbit And the Lego Hobbit Trailer

And at last you can build your own Lego hobbit habitats… I know you’ve been waiting for that as long as I have!

You can also play Lego Lord of the Rings. Lego games, by the way, are awesome. I don’t have this one yet, but I’ve played Lego Raiders of the Last Ark and Lego Star Wars, and they were really fun. It’s strange that watching videos of toys should be that enjoyable…really strange, now that I think about it…but it is.

http://romancebookwyrm.blogspot.com/2012/09/top-ten-tuesday-top-ten-series-i-havent.html

That Dread Brought On By The Middle Of A Book

Over at Six Words for a Hat, Scott, who writes both fast and well (damn him) is in the middle of a manuscript:

Thirty-thousand words puts me somewhere in the middle of the novel, or somewhere toward the sixty percent mark if I stick with the plan of making it a 50,000-word novella. In either case, I’m now in the middle of the middle. I discovered this project middleness not by figuring the word count of the draft, but rather by noticing that I have been feeling a powerful sense of disquiet about writing. The feeling that this novel is an empty, pointless thing and that indeed every novel I’ve written is an empty, pointless and likely embarrassing book is a sure sign that I’ve arrived at that stage in the drafting process where I’ve got to just brass my way forward through the writing and work toward the final act, which I recall once thinking was a good idea to write. This feeling is so familiar and so predictable that I am almost bored by it. Yes of course, I say. Right on schedule. The temptation is to abandon the novel, to spend more time reading or exercising, to think about other things. But of course I won’t, because I’ve been here before and I know how it works.

Apparently Scott is writing this novel without an outline “in the shape of leaves blown off a tree in an autumn windstorm.” That’s exactly the shape I’m trying to avoid at the moment–it’s too much like what my house looks like, thanks very much–but the Middle Dread I’m feeling is the same.

I have a draft of Book 6, but I’m suddenly confronted with the fact that despite my careful outlining, there’s a huge lopesideness about the story, which must be corrected. My first two corrective attempts were insufficient.

Last night, my 2 year old son crawled into my bed while I was asleep. Usually I wake up, but I was particularly tired and didn’t.

 Not, that is, until a huge THUMP, as of something precious and expensive breaking, woke me up. I’m ashamed to say that my first fearful thought was that my laptop had (somehow) fallen off the bed. I hope that doesn’t secretly reveal my priorities!

Because the second thought through my head was the fear that it was a child, and then a wail confirmed this.

 Lights on! Leap from the bed! Check the wailing child for life-threatening injuries!

 There were none, but now that I’d had more adrenaline shot into my system than coke in a junkie, it was impossible for me to get to sleep. Instead, I lay awake, fretting over my book.

This is exactly what writing the middle of a book is like, lying awake at night, fearing that you’ve forgotten something important which is going to roll off the bed and get hurt.