Tuesdays with Story

Tom Clancy: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

Tuesdays With Story Writers Mail, May 13, 2010
by Carol Shay Hornung

Tuesday Night at the Bookstore. . .

A whopping eight folks turned up for an evening of critiques and laughter. We were joined by Jen Wilcher and newcomer Patrick Tomlinson.

Jack Freiburger read a rewritten scene from Path to Bray’s Head. The revision really worked – the pictures each helped bring out the history. Holly thought the dialog was good, and it had nice flow. Watch tenses, though. Had and has were both used in describing one picture.

Holly Bonnickson-Jones read her rewritten scene from Coming up for Air. Annie really liked the dimensions of the character (especially after reading the whole manuscript recently). Sympathy shifted to the daughter and that works. Jack suggested trimming out some words & phrases to help tighten things up a bit. Patrick thought the fight was too balanced – maybe it should spin out of control a bit more. Jen suggested using more body language and posture to express emotion.

Terry Hoffman presented scene three of The Journal. Jack said the first couple of paragraphs were choppy – way to many “I” sentences. Holly liked the poetic description – wanted more. Patrick thought there should be a stronger reaction to the hallucination.

Annie Potter – Comeuppance. Holly loves how the kid gives it right back to the abusive stepfather. Details and descriptions were amazing. Carol and Anne wanted to find out the stepfather’s reaction to the ruined shirts. Patrick suggested breaking up some of the longer paragraphs.

Carol Hornung presented THE END of Asperger Sunset (possibly the end of the book’s future, too, as Asperger’s Syndrome may be dropped from the new edition of the DSM, the Bible of the psychiatric world. Argh). Russ is changing, but his thinking still should stay logical. Be careful of the phrases he uses. The talk of the two “worlds” seemed vague to Holly. And, of course, it needs more color!

Patrick Tomlinson read a short story about a supernatural detective in a city very much like Chicago. Groaner of a pun at the beginning, but a fun story. Enjoyed the bit with the ticket taker being a siren. Terry thought stopping after the character was paid, “less the cost of the pepper jar” would make sense.

Who’s Up Next
May 18th (1st and 3rd)
Kim Simmons (chapters 20-21, James Hyde)
Nicole Rosario (chapter)
Alicia Connolly-Lohr (chapter 40, epilogue, and preface, Lawyer Lincoln)
Jen Wilcher (chapter 3, Memories Awakened)
John Schneller (synopsis)
Judith – radio play (rollover from last time)

May 25 (2nd & 4th)
Jen Wilcher (chapter, And So We Meet Again)
Jack Freiburger (Path To Bray’s Head)
Terry Hoffman (The Journal)
Patrick Tomlinson (short story)
Annie Potter (memoir)

June 1st (1st and 3rd)
Amber – chapter
Greg Spry (novella/part 1, Goodbye, Mars)
Clayton – chapter (rollover from May)
Kim Simmons (chapters 22-23, James Hyde)
Jerry Peterson (chapter 10, For Want of a Hand)

The Importance of Middles
When my daughter was young, I read her a bedtime story every night. If I didn’t read a story, I made one up. It was our nightly ritual. We rarely missed a night for years. One night, after a particularly rough day at work, exhausted and with a headache, it was time to tuck her in and read her a story. I tried to beg off. “No story tonight, sweetheart. Your daddy doesn’t feel very good.” “But Daddy, you have to. You can make up a short one.” It’s hard to deny a little girl who wants a bedtime story. “Okay, a short one.” “Okay.” “Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after. Now, go to sleep.” “That’s not a story.” “Sure it was. It had a beginning and an end.” “But it didn’t have a middle.” Well, she had me there, didn’t she? A story isn’t a story without a middle. The next day after work, daughter and I sat at the kitchen table and shared some cookies and milk. She twisted her Oreo apart and ate all the cream from the inside, then handed me the two hard, black cookies. “I don’t want these,” I said. “There’s no creamy goodness in the middle.” “Kind of like your story, Daddy.” So there’s a writing lesson there. You can have a great beginning, and a great ending, but unless you’ve got the creamy goodness in the middle holding it all together, it’s just not a cookie.
From Robb Grindstaff, via Facebook.
Check out Writers Right – it’s at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=92772807817

Book Review – Millie Mader
Sail by James Patterson

Sail is a 2008 novel that whirls like a bullet train through each chapter. Action jumps out of every page, as the protagonist and her dysfunctional kids prepare for a Caribbean sailing getaway.

Katherine Dunne is a wealthy, workaholic cardiologist, who has been widowed for four years. Her sixteen-year-old son is a “stoner” without ambition or motivation. The daughter, eighteen, is an overindulged, self centered bulimic with a nasty mouth, and the youngest is showing signs of too much chubbiness for his ten years. Katherine knows he eats too much due to stress. She has a sense of guilt over her recent second marriage to Peter, a highly respected Manhattan lawyer. She feels this sailing trip will, hopefully, bring her bickering and selfish children into a world of family togetherness, respect and reality.

She and her late husband had enjoyed a luxurious sailboat, which she has kept. Her ex brother-in-law, Jake, is a laid back, personable and highly accomplished sailor. He’s the only person the kids care at all about, and he agrees to be the ship’s captain. Peter cannot accompany them due to an important upcoming case. Just as well, Katherine thinks, with a twinge of guilt. She needs this journey alone with her family.

A series of crises develop almost immediately upon sailing, and with whiplash speed.

The reader is allowed a glimpse of what, who and why the events are occurring. Dark, swirling currents and evil secrets are hinted at as we progress through this family’s horrific encounters. First comes the storm, then the explosion and fire, then unspeakable pain. For four days the family barely exists on an inflatable lifeboat, running out of water and food. They are miles from their intended goal, with no flares and no means of communication. Ultimately they wash up on a tiny, uninhabited island

Katherine feels that they are all doomed, but her ultimate goal is taking shape. Even as she reassures her kids that they will survive, she hears them assuring each other. Their voices are kind and concerned. Whoever you are up there, I thank you for this. Katherine sends up a silent prayer, and sinks into semi-consciousness.

Two heroes emerge—an intuitive and relentless DEA agent, and an equally astute Coast Guard Lieutenant. These two follow their instincts, their lives in constant peril. How they accomplish their intended goal makes for “stay up late” reading.

The closing chapters detail mind bending courtroom scenes. The end is unexpected, and typical James Patterson.

Was Shakespeare’s Ghost Writer … Shakespeare?
by Todd Leopold, CNN

(CNN) — To most people, the literary debate over who wrote the works of William Shakespeare would appear to be much ado about nothing. After all, the play’s the thing, right? What does it matter who wrote it?

To James Shapiro, however, it matters a great deal.

The Columbia University professor and Shakespeare scholar spent 15 years working on his 2005 book, “A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599.” The work exhaustively details a key year in the Bard’s career, when he wrote “Henry V” and “Julius Caesar” and became the man thought of as history’s greatest English-language dramatist.

And yet he couldn’t convince the doubters, who believe that the name “William Shakespeare” is a front for the real author.

“I thought I did a damned good job showing that it could only have been Shakespeare who wrote the plays we attributed to him,” he said. “And I naively thought, that will slow people down who think that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare. And they kind of stepped around it.

“And I thought, I have to stop and really address this.”

The result is Shapiro’s new book, “Contested Will.” In it, Shapiro chronicles the history of the anti-Stratfordian movement, which has believed that any number of people — the essayist Francis Bacon, the nobleman the Earl of Oxford, Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe — wrote the plays ascribed to the glovemaker’s son from Stratford-upon-Avon, born 446 years ago. It’s a theory that has attracted some famous minds — including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud — and will soon be coming to the screen as Roland (“2012”) Emmerich’s latest film, “Anonymous.”

To the anti-Stratfordians, Shakespeare — who left behind, by modern standards, relatively little in the way of personal records — was too unworldly, too unromantic (in his will, he famously left his widow his “second best bed”), too ordinary to have written some of the greatest plays and poems known to man. It’s a theory Shapiro roundly rejects. He says that modern audiences are reading Shakespeare through modern sensibilities, believing that the author’s work is autobiographical — which was not the case in Shakespeare’s day.

“We read today anachronistically — we expect to find things in books that were written 400 years ago that people writing 400 years ago would not have put in those books,” he says. “But the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not [autobiographical]. … They made stuff up based on stories they read.”

So much is at stake in Shakespeare. In the great game of capture the literary flag, this is it.”

The distinction is important, he adds.

“Part of the authorship question is about trying to find whose life you can line up with the life of the author of the plays. Oxfordians will say, hey, our guy had three daughters and was captured by pirates. Your guy had two daughters and was never captured by pirates. Therefore, our guy has a greater likelihood to have written the plays. And that way madness lies, because then you end up with 50 or 60 contenders.”

Naturally, Oxfordians disagree. Shapiro’s book has been wounded in its Amazon rankings by reviewers who don’t believe Shapiro’s thesis and criticized by anti-Stratfordian websites.

“I do think there is an authorship question,” says Michael Egan, a retired English professor who edits the Oxfordian, the journal of the Shakespeare Oxford Society. Though he considers himself a Stratfordian, he says he’s “open-minded” about the issue and criticizes Shapiro for some of the arguments in “Contested Will.”

“The case for Oxford derives from the fact that almost everything we know about Shakespeare of Stratford doesn’t seem connectible to the author of the plays,” he says. “It’s that gap between what we could infer about the author, and what we know about Shakespeare of Stratford, which has raised the questions.”

It’s a battle that has, as Shapiro records, been filled with partisan rhetoric and bad blood since it began a little more than 200 years ago. Twain, for example, wrote a short book on the subject; his contemporary, Henry James, also questioned Shakespeare’s authorship. Others have created elaborate codes or sought biographical parallels. The Stratfordians stand by their proof; the anti-Stratfordians fill in the gaps.

In that respect, the battle over Shakespeare has much in common with other disputes. Kathy Olmsted, a history professor at the University of California-Davis and the author of “Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy,” observes that, in American history, conspiracy theories have often arisen from a perceived lack of information.

“When people don’t have that information or can’t get it, they like to sort of speculate on what the real story is,” she says. “People see those blank spots and they want to fill them in.”

And in for a penny, in for a pound, she adds: “It becomes like a religion. People who believe in these theories really get invested in them, and they don’t want to account for evidence that doesn’t fit their thesis.”

Which is why, for Shapiro, it’s so important to establish that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.

“So much is at stake in Shakespeare. In the great game of capture the literary flag, this is it,” he says. “If you can say something about Shakespeare, you can say something about how English literature and literature in general works.”

He’s particularly leery about Emmerich’s film, which is in production and stars Vanessa Redgrave, Rhys Ifans and Derek Jacobi — the latter a noted Shakespeare doubter.

“It’s going to be a disaster movie for people who teach Shakespeare,” he says. “In the great rock-paper-scissor of movie and book, movie beats book.”

Still, he’s hopeful that “Contested Will” will have an impact. “You can’t win that battle. But I can wage it, at any rate.”

Nevertheless, he’s ready to put the Baconians, Oxfordians, Marlovians and other anti-Stratfordians behind him.

“I can’t wait to get back to Shakespeare and writing a book. I actually get smarter wrestling with Shakespeare’s words — it’s very thrilling,” he says. “But spending five years thinking about people’s fantasies did not make me smarter at all. … Was it worth it? Probably. As long as the next book goes well.”

(Editor’s note: For a good fictitious romp in the world of “Did Shakespeare Write Shakespeare,” seek out Sarah Smith’s novel, Chasing Shakespeare. Lots of good information on handling old documents, dealing with forgeries, and witnessing the passion and conspiracy theories surrounding the greatest writer of western literature…)

On the Cutting Edge. . . (thanks to Jerry Peterson)
JOHN CUSACK tweets with his iPhone and, much like the characters he plays, his style is fast and loose. “I’m pretty new to it, and if there’s a spell check on an iPhone, I can’t find it,” he said by telephone. “So I basically get in the general ballpark and tweet it.”
Consequently, Mr. Cusack has birthed strange words like “breakfasy” and “hippocrite” and has given a more literary title to his new movie: “Hot Tub Tome Machine.”
Most of his followers ignore the gaffes. But a vocal minority abuse him about it nonstop, telling the star that as much as they liked “The Sure Thing,” his grammar and spelling sure stink. “If you’re going to be political, maybe learn how to spell Pakistan, and all words in general,” wrote one supposed fan.

“The vitriol was so intense that at first I didn’t think they were serious,” Mr. Cusack said. “Because, like, who would care?”

They do. A small but vocal subculture has emerged on Twitter of grammar and taste vigilantes who spend their time policing other people’s tweets — celebrities and nobodies alike. These are people who build their own algorithms to sniff out Twitter messages that are distasteful to them — tweets with typos or flawed grammar, or written in ALLCAPS — and then send scolding notes to the offenders. They see themselves as the guardians of an emerging behavior code: Twetiquette.

“It would be kind of nice if people cleaned up their grammar a little bit and typed in lowercase, and made the Internet a little bit smarter,” said one of them, Nate Fanaro, a 28-year-old computer programmer in Buffalo, whose Twitter handle is CapsCop.

Last October, Mr. Fanaro wrote a simple program that detects tweets written in capital letters and automatically sends one of several snappy responses, like “This isn’t MySpace so maybe you should turn your caps lock off.” So far, he has issued more than 130,000 of these helpful reminders, including at least 205 to one particular user, a woman in Singapore. (Oddly, with little effect.)

“Some people don’t really understand that it’s just not good Internet etiquette” to type in all capital letters, Mr. Fanaro said.

Yes, he and the other Twitter cops do get quite a backlash, much to their delight. Mr. Fanaro posts a phone number on his Twitter profile page, and his voice mail is full of death threats and foulmouthed rants. For laughs, he sometimes takes his phone to a bar and plays the messages for his friends.

Provoking an irate reaction seems to be largely the point. GrammarCop, one of several people who seem to exist on Twitter solely to copy-edit others, recently received a beatdown from the actress Kirstie Alley, to whom he had recommended the use of a plural verb form instead of a singular. “Are you high?” Ms. Alley wrote back. “You really just linger around waiting for people to use incorrect grammer? you needs a life.” (One of Ms. Alley’s people said that the actress was too busy to comment for this article.)

A life, indeed. While some of us may live to host weight-loss shows, others find solace in pedantry. Fans of the late journalist and linguist William Safire may recall his “Gotcha! Gang,” readers who liked to point fingers at the occasional lapse in Mr. Safire’s weekly language column for The New York Times Magazine. He once described them as “a hardy tribe obsessed with accuracy and a lust for catching error in others.”

The same could be said of the Twitter gadflies, whose constant yipping at their victims gives a bit of an edge to the free-for-all dialogue on the site.

“There’s always this sarcastic humor pervading Twitter, where people will see something that someone has posted quite innocently, and they’ll respond to it in such a way that just is like a slap,” said Lance Ulanoff, editor of PCMag.com and a frequent tweeter. “Then what’s worse is that that gets re-tweeted, so now it’s like you got a bunch of people standing around you, pointing and laughing.”

Among the laughers and pointers is Jacob Morse, a 27-year-old user interface designer from Richardson, Tex. Last year, he and some friends started a Web site — Tweeting Too Hard — devoted to mocking self-important Twitter users. There, people can discuss fake-humble tweets like, “I gave my cleaning lady a raise today, even though she didn’t ask, as my own little contribution to fighting the recession.” Wrote one commenter: “Let’s hope she was grateful enough to overlook the bionic condescension.”

Each post on his site links to the Twitter account of the person who wrote it, helping her or him notice the ridicule. “There is something just inherently enjoyable about putting cocky people to shame,” Mr. Morse said. (Hecklers take note: Mr. Morse recently brag-tweeted about having his picture taken for this article.)

Enforcing etiquette on Twitter is basically begging to be called an idiot, but those who do it don’t seem to mind. “With Twitter particularly, the feedback is so intense and so immediate, it does something very particular to your ego that even the blogs don’t,” said Xeni Jardin, a partner in the blog site Boing Boing and a usual suspect on Twitter. “That feedback rush is like pouring plant food on weeds.”

It’s hard to tell, but the number of Twitter accounts devoted to pointing out other people’s language foibles does seem to be growing. Among the more mentionable ones are Grammar Fail, Grammar Hero, Your Or Youre, Word Police and Spelling Police, which for a time fixed Español malo.

A user called Twenglish Police monitors Australian tweets, inserting himself into other people’s conversations to offer advice like: “ ‘Funnest’ is not a word. Even if Apple used it. You’re welcome.”

“I don’t want to get them worked up,” said Tom Voirol, who runs the Twenglish Police from Sydney. “I just want to point things out.”

What is it about human nature that we seldom feel grateful for such guidance? Barbara Bailey, a 54-year-old Web developer from Littleton, Colo., runs a blog called Twitter Fail, where she mocks tweets that she considers stupid. She once made fun of a man who used multiple Twitter accounts to post the same things.

“He started calling all the phone numbers he could find that were associated with me, he started calling my clients, then he had some guy claiming to be his attorney call me,” Ms. Bailey said. She promptly took down the post about him.

For his part, Mr. Cusack has refused to be silenced. In early April he issued an ultimatum, threatening to block from his account anyone who sniped at his spelling or grammar.
It didn’t work. The people he blocked would return with new account names, “and they’d behave like cranky, obsessive trolls,” Mr. Cusack said.

He has been trying a new strategy, he explained by e-mail: first, he spells things wrong on purpose to get the critics riled up, and then “I blockthem executioer style now with no warning!!”

Newsletter duty roster
June – Jen
July – Greg
August – Clayton
We will need someone in September – let me know if you’d like to volunteer!

Fifth Tuesday
Fifth Tuesday is set for Tuesday, June 29th, hosted by the 2nd and 4th at Terry Hoffman’s place. Directions and the writing challenge to follow . . .

The Last Word
Zymotic.