Comments Off on And now I #amreading At Home by Bill Bryson & Broken Harbour (again)
I slow down on reading when I’m teaching a novel-writing class, naturally–having ten to fifteen student novels on the go takes up a certain amount of fiction-reading head space. It’s a regrettable side effect of an otherwise terrific process. So, as Novel Writing III wraps up, I’m crawling my way through Bill Bryson’s At Home: A Short History of Private Life
–which is written in a loveable, chatty style that makes one feel as though a good friend is telling you cool stuff just to please you–and the occasional chapter of Broken Harbor, by Tana French.
I’ve also read a number of Camille Alexa stories and poems this week, stuff from Push of the Sky. I’m getting to know CA better in real life; this is part of the process. But that too is something I’m taking slowly, mostly because the emotional intensity of some of the stories is cranked high enough to have made me cry on the bus, twice. I love intense, but sometimes you just can’t arrive at your destination an emotional wreck.
I have enjoyed rewatching S4. It’s been long enough that I forgot a lot of the nuances and hilarious lines, and frankly it’s easier to gently mock the episodes that are, oh, let’s say a little shaky. This may mean that after S5 the rewatches will get funnier and funnier; that’s my hope, anyway.
And while I’m all me, me, me, link!, ’tis the season to remind some of you that I have Nebula eligible fiction. There’s my novel, Blue Magic, which was out in April, my novelettes “Among the Silvering Herd” and “Wild Things,” on Tor.com, and a new squid story, “The Sweet Spot,” about the Fiend invasion of Hawaii, on Lightspeed.
A number of my students are reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn right now. It was on my list; Barb had recommended it to me, and I’d liked Sharp Objects a lot, so the timing seemed perfect.
A lot of the reader reaction I’ve seen online about this book boils down to omg, omg, wow, this is so good, so well constructed but then that last page… whuh?
So, here’s my answer to whuh? Agree or disagree, as you please.
My take on the end is simply this: what we are looking at in Gone Girl is a story where an abused spouse goes back to a partner who will, inevitably, kill them.
This is murked up–in a good way, I think–by a couple things. First, there’s the gender switch. Amy’s the abuser, Nick the victim. This is statistically atypical and in this piece of writing it serves to muffle the usual dynamics of abusive relationships. That is to say, it makes it all a little less obvious, especially because the power imbalance between Nick and Amy isn’t as unequal as it would be if he was female. She has the money and everyone’s on her side, but he’s got male privilege: he is bigger and stronger than Amy. He could throttle her and–but for the inconvenience of prosecution–be free of her.
The other reason we don’t all go “Oh, yes, Nick’s a battered husband, it’s sooooo clear,” of course, is that the man is no prize. He is spectacularly un-self-aware, emotionally shut down (this itself is a result of growing up with abuse in his family of origin) an almost pathological liar, desperate for approval, a conflict avoider and, of course, an adulterer.
He’s kind of awful, right? But you know what? This rings true to me: it accords with what I learned back when I was working in a transition house for battered women. Having a violent spouse doesn’t grow you a halo. You might have had one anyway, and maybe you can hang onto it. But usually, the life horrific will amplify your pre-existing unlovely qualities. Stress and terror don’t always make you a better person.
Anyway. Nick starts working towards breaking up his marriage, in his icky passive-aggressive adulterer way. Amy takes it into her head to kill him. If I can’t have you, nobody can. She puts him through a completely awful experience… and then desperation and his clever, craven begging draw her home to him.
So why does he stay with her?
–First, there’s a journalist-amplified version of the What will the neighbors think? effect. Everything that has happened to Nick has happened in a shiny and unforgiving media spotlight, and he knows that if he makes the wrong move, the whole country will cast him as a villain.
–Then there’s the fact that Amy has smoothly and glibly explained all his accusations to the cops, negating what legitimacy he might otherwise lay claim to. I don’t know where the silly boy gets these ideas. I would never hurt him!
–For awhile, there’s more fake evidence against him in Amy’s arsenal–it’s the I can still hurt you, honey, and nobody can help you, thing.
–She also convinces him that he can’t really exist without her love. That somehow it’s she who defines him. You’re nobody without me, baby. That’s his big epiphany.
–Finally, of course, there’s the actual baby. Given that he doesn’t believe he can get away, let alone get away with custody of a child, is he really gonna leave a kid to his wife’s tender mercies?
So Nick capitulates. He tells his sister and the one sympathetic cop that he’s giving up the fight, and he sinks into trying to dance to Amy’s tune. To fulfill her every whim. The scene with his sister is heartbreaking and, again, very true to life. The cop is philosophical–she’s seen this before.
On page the last, what we see (or confirm) is that Nick’s days are numbered. He can’t humor Amy perfectly, forever–nobody could. So we see that he’s made a remark–“I feel sorry for you”–that is sticking in her craw. And she’s shutting down the story when she says “I have to have the last word,” because now she’s wrapping up what went before, and moving on to her next project. It seems to me that this is the inevitable beginning of and justification for Amy’s next attempt to take on the role of Punch, to find a new way to murder her cheating, flawed and lamentably unlikable Judy.
I am just beginning to know Jaine Fenn because we’re both members of SF Novelists. She is a British SF writer who studied Linguistics and Astronomy and had a career in IT before swapping financial security for the chance to tell tales about how the future might be. Her Hidden Empire series is published by Gollancz. Downside Girls is hot off the presses as of two days ago, and is a set of interlinked stories set in her Hidden Empire universe. Here’s the cover:
Today, on Off My Lawn, Jaine talks about the advice, often give to aspiring writers, to write every day.
One piece of advice commonly found in writing ‘how to’ books is ‘Write Every Day’.
Okay then! Soon as I build my time machine I’ll get right onto that.
Apparently Stephen King writes every day. This grand master has lots of
useful advice:
So if a ‘Write Every Day’ regime is good enough for him then surely it should work for you and me. Well, I’m afraid it doesn’t work for me.
Firstly, there are not enough hours in the day. Most writers have families and/or day-jobs. We like to see our friends, to engage in hobbies and go on holiday. We generally require more than two hours sleep a night. For many of us, if we don’t cook/clean/shop/child-wrangle then we’ll end up starving/drowning in kipple/unwashed
underwear/feral children. Finding a significant amount of keyboard-time in our schedules isn’t always possible.
Ah, you may say, but you have to make time. Fine. I refer you to the second paragraph above. And if you’ve already got a time-machine, I’d like to borrow it please.
Often we end up snatching the odd hour or two, and if writing isn’t our main source of income, even that can be fraught with guilt. But yes, an hour is better than nothing. Of course it is. And even if you don’t make it to a keyboard, you can – and should – still be developing stories in your head.
Which brings me on to the second reason I don’t write every day, the one unrelated to excuses and a chaotic lifestyle. The one that comes down to how creativity works.
The act of creative writing has been likened to drawing water from a well. If you keep taking the words out – if you make yourself produce several thousand words every single day – you may well find that after a while all you’re bringing up is mud.
This isn’t true for everyone, but for those of us not blessed with Mr King’s prodigious talent, the well of creativity isn’t bottomless. It needs time to refill.
When up against a deadline, I can write three thousand words a day. But if I do that for too many days in a row then, deadline or not, those words are not going to end up in the finished story. They’re just noise. For some people, making that noise is a good thing, especially when they first start out. You might subscribe to that school
of thought, and write every day despite the sure knowledge that some days you’ll only dredge up mud. But that doesn’t work for everyone.
For me, it’s frustrating when what turns up on the page is wastage. I might learn some lessons from it, but it won’t earn me a living – nor should it, because no one wants to pay for mud. And I could have used that time to clean the bathroom.
Every few days, even on deadline death-marches, I’ll find myself vacuuming the stairs, or digging the garden, or just going for a walk, but in my case this isn’t just writing avoidance. I’m waiting for the well to refill. Ideas need time to ferment, plots to coalesce.
On a Venn diagram of ‘writers’ and ‘OCD sufferers’ you’ll find a big overlap. Writers are good at setting up, then knocking down, mechanisms allowing them to almost write every day. We reorganise our lives, then find creative reasons not to write, and often punish themselves for not doing so. When I was writing Queen of Nowhere I was in the interesting position of writing about an obsessive while behaving obsessively, and I found a few insights there, I can tell you.
Fortunately, it being my fifth book, I had my coping mechanisms in place. I did not write every day, and I did not punish myself for not doing so. I still made my deadline.
So, if you’re someone who has learnt enough of the craft to get the basics down and has a busy life, instead of “Write every day,” the advice I’d give is to write regularly. It might just be a few hours on Saturday mornings, during your lunch break on days when the job isn’t too crazy, or an hour or two while the kids are at school,
but schedule it in.
If you’re being paid to write to a deadline you’ll be able to justify that time, but even if no one is paying you to write your story put aside some time, regularly, to write. Just not every day.
______ Thank you, Jaine! What do you think, folks? When and how often do you write?
Here’s a little more about Downside Girls: The floating city of Khesh rests above the uninhabitable planet of Vellern. For the Topsiders life is about luxury and opulence, while for those of the Undertow day to day survival takes precedence. Khesh City is a democracy by assassination, where the Angels – deadly state-sponsored killers – remove those unworthy to hold office. When Vanna Agriet accidentally spills her drink over an Angel it could spell death, but instead it leads to a rather peculiar friendship.
by Gillian Flynn right now. It was on my list; Barb had recommended it to me, and I’d liked 
a lot, so the timing seemed perfect.
is hot off the presses as of two days ago, and is a set of interlinked stories set in her Hidden Empire universe. Here’s the cover:
I was in the interesting position of writing about an obsessive while behaving obsessively, and I found a few insights there, I can tell you.