Tuesdays with Story

Tuesdays with Story
January 25, 2020

The first word . . .

“Five common traits of good writers: (1) They have something to say. (2) They read widely and have done so since childhood. (3) They possess what Isaac Asimov calls a ‘capacity for clear thought,’ able to go from point to point in an orderly sequence, an A to Z approach. (4) They’re geniuses at putting their emotions into words. (5) They possess an insatiable curiosity, constantly asking Why and How.”
― James J. Kilpatrick (1920-2010), newspaper journalist, columnist, author, writer and grammarian

Tuesday evening at ye olde booksellers . . .

Seven hearty souls gathered around the tables—yes, we had two tables—at Barnes & Noble Westside to work over chapters of four of their colleagues. Here is some of what was said:

— Larry F. Sommers (chapters 38-39, Freedom’s Purchase) . . . Jerry wondered how Anders could hold a rag to Will’s head when they were walking to the hospital. He also noted there was too much detail on Grant’s military maneuvers, and a big dump of pointless information on Daniel’s activities before hiring on as a hospital aide. Amber was interested in the romantic possibilities of Anders’ possible demise. Jerry was bemused by the thought that maybe Maria, rather than Anders, is the main character—a possibility suggested by the structure of the story. Thanks to all for comments.

— Amit Trivedi (chapters 33, untitled novel) . . . Show Kedar as being proactive. Instead of “hiding,” taking some action. Show more physical action from Gauri Kaki. “Naming of Jaya” paragraph—check to see if it is necessary. Changes in Kedar and Uma’s characters are noticeable.

— Bob Kralapp (chapter 12, Capacity) . . . written from the perspective of Bishop, who works at the Bureau of Free Speech. Everyone seemed to get the jokes. Amber liked the character of Evelyn, the receptionist at the Bureau, who makes sly fun of Bishop. Amit felt that a different term should have been used to describe the workings of the Bureau’s security system.

— Jerry Peterson (chapters 27-29, Killing Ham) . . . While Larry liked the way the friends worked together in chapter 29, he questioned the value of all the musical theater stuff in chapter 27 and whether the confrontation between the police and the security guards inside Smithton’s headquarters was believable. “The security guards, seeing themselves confronted by a heavily-armed SWAT team, I don’t think they’re going to draw down on the police.” Paul caught a typo, Shotz calling Wads “a damn foul” rather than a damn fool. “Has he got some chicken blood in his ancestry?” Paul asked of Wads. “Oh, right, that’s fowl [with a ‘w’], not foul.” Amit picked up an error in the protocol for the 9-1-1 dispatcher. “He will do everything to keep the caller on the line,” he said. That didn’t happen in Jerry’s manuscript.

Who’s up next . . .

February 4

Amber Boudreau (chapter, Second Nature)

John Schneller (chapter, Broken rewrite)

Paul Wagner (???)

Amit Trivedi (chapter, untitled novel)

Larry Sommers (chapters, Freedom’s Purchase)

Mike Austin (short story, “Second Date” – Part 2)

Our editor . . .

Next month, it’s Mike Austin at the helm of Writer’s Mail. If you have something you want shared with the group, this is a good time to email it to Mike for the next issue.

A novel you may want to read . . .

American Dirt, by Jeanine Cummins, published by Flatirion Books and released this week. It’s an Oprah Book Club pick and Barnes & Noble’s Book Club selection for February.

Here’s the thumbnail description of the story: Lydia Pérez is an ordinary bookseller in Acapulco, Mexico, when an article by her journalist husband makes her family a target for a drug cartel. In an instant, Lydia and her family become migrants, fleeing for their lives.

Crime novelist Don Winslow calls the book “a Grapes of Wrath for our times.”

But according to USA Today reviewer Barbara VanDenburgh, it isn’t. On a rating scale of zero to four stars, she gave American Dirt a half a star. Here’s the link for her review: https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/jeanine-cummins-migrant-book-american-143853248.html

Read the review if for no other reason than VanDenburgh’s critique of Cummins’ writing: “Even on a sentence level, American Dirt is frequently cringeworthy. Lydia doesn’t just blink her eyes, she ‘funnels gratitude into the slow blink of her lashes.’ As a man plummets to his death from the top of a train, ‘his shadow makes the shape of grief as he hurtles toward the earth.’ One woman fighting off a rapist ‘can feel the hard club of his anatomy pushing against her stomach.’”

If Cummins were a member of TWS, would we have let her get away with such lines?

The last word . . .

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”
― George R.R. Martin (1948-), novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction