Hello, amazing fellow creatives! Here’s to more fun perusing the library’s new releases to see what strikes our fancy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve retitled Story Cuppings to better fit the premise of the podcast.
As writers, we hear all the time that we’ve got to hook readers in just the first few pages or else. We’ve got to hook agents in the first few pages or else.
Whether you’re looking to get published or just hoping to hook your reader, first impressions are vital. Compelling opening scenes are the key to catching an agent or editor’s attention, and are crucial for keeping your reader engaged.
JEFF GERKE, THE FIRST 50 PAGES
Well then, let’s study those first few pages in other people’s stories, shall we?
The first sentence of Revelator by Daryl Gregory alludes to a kid meeting “the family god,” so I just don’t know how the stakes can go down from there. What will you, fellow creatives, make of these first five pages? Let’s find out!
This story’s got a feeling of the Southern Gothic in its voice and style, a dark, murky magic hidden in its green Kentucky valleys. The setting is beautiful, but it is not safe. I find Gregory’s prose in this tale to be positively intoxicating with its various rhythms and inflections, the dropped words and intention alliterations. The first pages not only provide an authentic voice for the little girl Stella, but a sense of true dread as we follow the adventurous child down a path into a church embedded in the mountain. What could possibly go wrong in such a place? I’m going to guess a lot.
As always, I love hearing what’s on the shelves of your own libraries. Libraries Rock!
Hello, amazing fellow creatives! Here’s to more fun perusing the library’s new releases to see what strikes our fancy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve retitled Story Cuppings to better fit the premise of the podcast.
As writers, we hear all the time that we’ve got to hook readers in just the first few pages or else. We’ve got to hook agents in the first few pages or else.
Whether you’re looking to get published or just hoping to hook your reader, first impressions are vital. Compelling opening scenes are the key to catching an agent or editor’s attention, and are crucial for keeping your reader engaged.
JEFF GERKE, THE FIRST 50 PAGES
Well then, let’s study those first few pages in other people’s stories, shall we?
The first pages of Joan is Okay by Weike Wang are unlike anything we’ve read on previous episodes of this podcast. We’re not diving into genre fiction here–no fantasy, no science fiction, no horror, etc. This is life, and it’s the life of an Asian American woman who is forced to take on the journey of grief by returning to China for her father’s funeral. What will you, fellow creatives, make of these first five pages? Let’s find out!
The prose is sharp and cuts to the bone in its lack of emotion, which makes readers wonder just what the relationship between the narrator and her family had been. As one who also lost her father suddenly, the journey of grief is not an easy one to walk alone, so I am naturally drawn to Wang’s storytelling here. The blurbs on the back promise wit and humor, which I didn’t see in the opening pages, but I found the narrator’s fixation on the surface-level aspects of her coworkers rather intriguing. It makes me wonder just how well this narrator knows the people in her life–and how well she truly knows herself.
As always, I love hearing what’s on the shelves of your own libraries. Libraries Rock!
Welcome back, my fellow creatives! I’m thrilled to continue sharing some lovely indie authors I’ve met in our community. This month, please welcome the mysterious Bryan R. Quinn!
You have a unique history in the publishing industry as well as in technical writing. From your experience, what do you consider to be the most unethical practice in the publishing industry, and what can be done about it?
Vanity publishing scams that milk naïve and, perhaps, desperate writers dry who haven’t done their due diligence are concerning. I hate to see writers, or anyone for that matter, get swindled. Writers need to investigate online publishers before trusting them with their hard-earned money.
Do you see your work as a technical writer influence your prose style as a fiction writer? Technical writing must be precise and concise, so I apply this precision and concision to my prose. At least I believe I do. I try to make my sentences lean as possible, even when they are long.
What other authors are you friends with, and how do they help you become a better writer? Sandra Johnson and Wendy Waters, who I met on Twitter, reviewed NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED before I published it. They gave me valuable advice about some of the characters and their motivations.
What is your writing Kryptonite? (Mine is a call from my sons’ school principal.) When my wife tells me to find a real job. I’ve been out of the workforce for eight years now, so it’s real tough getting back in.
Have you ever gotten reader’s block? Original question. There are times, and they are rare, when I don’t feel like reading a book, whether fiction or non-fiction. In those moments I’ll watch a DVD or surf the Web.
I think it’s safe to say we all have thosemoments when we need that visual stimulation over the written word! Still, that doesn’t mean language has no hold on us. What was an early experience where you learned that language had power? Way back when I wrote a young woman a farewell letter that had sprung from my heart. We lived far apart at the time. Through a mutual friend I learned she felt my letter read like poetry. That was a real surprise to me. I wish I had a copy of that letter.
How about your favorite childhood book?I know I always loved to adventure the fantastical lands in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader time and time again.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I received a copy of it from my parents on my 8th birthday. Many years later, I studied the hidden themes in this novel in an American literature course at university. It was a fascinating intellectual journey.
You have written both short fiction as well as novels. What process do you undertake to see how many words a story truly requires in order to be told? I look for gaps in the story much as one would look for missing pieces in a puzzle. Conversely, just like a puzzle, every piece in a story must belong there. To that end, I look for fat, that is, if I remove a chapter, would the story improve or worsen? I like to keep my stories as lean as my prose.
What is the most difficult part of your artistic process? I always know how my stories begin and end. How the story moves from beginning to end without seeming contrived is the difficult part.
Oh yes, that’s a familiar trouble. Goodness knows I’ve had my share of mishaps in plotting my way from first scene to last. Still, you’ve successfully conquered this journey recently for your new noir thriller. Congratulations! Please tell us all about it and what inspired it. The germ of NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED, a tale set in New York City, was planted by a sister. I polled my sisters for story ideas. My youngest sister suggested a story about the Mob’s treatment of its foot soldiers. The Mob is always good fodder for a story, so I combined that premise with the premise of a Manhattan billionaire falling into the clutches of the Mafia. But more than that, this is a cautionary tale about wealth and its seeming guarantee of protection from the vicissitudes of life; it is this false sense of security, this chink in the armor of the wealthy, that evil, in the guise of a Mafia don, exploits in this story.
Sounds like a delightfully dangerous read, Bryan! Thank you so much for stopping by for this chat. May your future storytelling take down other alleys unknown of mystery, murder, and mayhem.
~STAY TUNED!~
I’m still waiting on that frickin’ copy of the new Death on the Nile, but that’s okay. I’ve been finishing a trilogy a friend recommended, and it’s got me wondering about yet another problem many writers face: worldbuilding vs. character-building. Let’s discuss, shall we?
Hello, amazing fellow creatives! Here’s to more fun perusing the library’s new releases to see what strikes our fancy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve retitled Story Cuppings to better fit the premise of the podcast.
As writers, we hear all the time that we’ve got to hook readers in just the first few pages or else. We’ve got to hook agents in the first few pages or else.
Whether you’re looking to get published or just hoping to hook your reader, first impressions are vital. Compelling opening scenes are the key to catching an agent or editor’s attention, and are crucial for keeping your reader engaged.
JEFF GERKE, THE FIRST 50 PAGES
Well then, let’s study those first few pages in other people’s stories, shall we?
The first pages of Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes are brilliant. In the first three sentences alone, we have an injured protagonist hallucinating a dead person. By the end of two pages, we find out our protagonist is being interrogated because the rest of the character’s crew was murdered…in space! What will you, fellow creatives, make of these first few pages? Let’s find out!
Mystery fills the cosmos here, for we do not know how much we can trust this crew, this company, or the very soul telling us this story. The unreliable narrator can be a tricky element to utilize in storytelling, but when done right, it keeps both the story’s cast and reader on their toes. In the first few pages. Barnes nails it, so I’m excited to see where the story goes from here. It’s the perfect–albeit terrifying–escape to take during my brief term break!
As always, I love hearing what’s on the shelves of your own libraries. Libraries Rock!
Hello, amazing fellow creatives! Here’s to more fun perusing the library’s new releases to see what strikes our fancy. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve retitled Story Cuppings to better fit the premise of the podcast.
As writers, we hear all the time that we’ve got to hook readers in just the first few pages or else. We’ve got to hook agents in the first few pages or else.
Whether you’re looking to get published or just hoping to hook your reader, first impressions are vital. Compelling opening scenes are the key to catching an agent or editor’s attention, and are crucial for keeping your reader engaged.
JEFF GERKE, THE FIRST 50 PAGES
Well then, let’s study those first few pages in other people’s stories, shall we?
The first pages of The Berlin Exchange by Joseph Kanonbring readers to the 1960s and the height of the Cold War. We are to witness a prisoner exchange…only we are quickly transported back in time to before that exchange with the briefest allusions of what has brought one of the prisoners to that moment of exchange. Despite Kanon’s writing choices not following my preference for sensory detail and action in the first paragraph, I cannot help but be intrigued with both our narrator and enigmatic protagonist, Martin. What will you, fellow creatives, make of these first five pages? Let’s find out!
I’ll always be a sucker for Cold War-era espionage, but it’s the voice here that intrigued me the most. The stream-of-conscious paragraph on the fourth page reminded me of prose poetry, while the curt inserts in the exposition have me wondering just who is telling us the story. Is it Martin? Is it a separate narrator? I have to know!
As always, I love hearing what’s on the shelves of your own libraries. Libraries Rock!
Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don’t see them because I am reading the landscape.
Jamaica Kincaid
My love of nature is great, though my show of it is meager. The shadow of expectation, I suspect–my mother is an avid gardener with a number of bird feeders for the cardinals, orioles, woodpeckers, chickadees, and various other breeds flittering among Wisconsin’s trees. Those feeders are always stationed outside a window near the kitchen table, where no matter the season, my mother can enjoy her meal with the company of the nature she tends so lovingly.
My mom had a setup similar to this when we lived in the country. Noooo idea how she pulled this off.
Meanwhile, the bushes around my home have withered and died. Hostas–I think they’re hostas–have grown so wild and tangled in the back that I wouldn’t be surprised if the Rats of NIMH had made a second home beneath their roots. Our single shade tree’s losing its bark and many of its branches refuse to bud. Even the small potted cactus my mother had given me years ago for some sort of greenery in the house has long since died.
Years ago, I would simply blame all this botanical death on motherhood. I couldn’t focus on a garden with Biff and Bash running rampant. I couldn’t afford to garden when the basement flooded and we had to replace things like the furnace and air conditioner. I couldn’t afford to garden when the kids were in school because I was only working part-time and money’s needed elsewhere. I can’t afford to garden because I’m working full-time and time is always needed on the computer, not outside.
Yet my mother worked full-time all my life, and her gardens surrounding any home always thrived. Why?
The love was there. The passion. Just as she loved the beauty in growing things, I love the beauty of stories, of helping them grow. What has one to do with the other?
When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.
Jamaica kincaid
This book is the inspiration for this post. 🙂
We do our damndest to bring nature to us through artificial means–ambiance videos of forest sounds, for instance. Pretty desktop pictures of gardens.
Yet no matter what pretty picture or sound we acquire on our screens, we’re drawn to our windows, to our doors, our porches. We want to feel the breeze that lifts the dandelion seeds to the air. We want to smell the fresh earth tilled by farmers beyond our borders. We want to see those first bright shoots of green reach for sunlight. We want to reach for that sunlight. We want our senses to revel in Nature because we want our readers to feel the worlds we create for them to explore.
We must break through that thick dark that buries us, and reach. We must break through, and grow.
The gardener just has to accept that gardening is not a set-it-and-forget-it activity…A gardener must know his plot. He must think about what he wants it to look like. Then it is the daily cultivation that leads to beauty, in a landscape and a life, too.
Laura Vanderkam
No small feat, this.
The soil and all its mysteries, the shadow of my own mother’s accomplishments–I find myself taking small steps into tending nature. Caring for birds felt a safer, easier place to start. After all, it’s just a matter of supplying birdseed, yes? Plenty of wild birdseed to be had. But then there’s all those specialized suets and seeds for special birds, special feeders for different breeds. Damn, there’s a lot to work out. I begin with a general birdfeeder and a suet holder for the woodpeckers.
I need this birdfeeder!
Chickadees, sparrows, cardinals galore! The children especially love to spot the pairs of cardinals and guess where their nests could possibly be. Mornings are filled with birdsong outside our front window. I can stand with coffee in hand to watch the sun rise above houses and farmland, the sky awash in orange and pink behind those early risers perched upon the feeder. It’s a daily joy to see so many birds make themselves at home on my porch. The morning doves have even taken to hanging out upon the roof. Of course, this also leads to hawks occasionally stopping by for breakfast and leaving their leftovers in our yard, but that just creates a fresh science lesson for the kids.
No woodpeckers, though.
Not a one.
And still, I leave the suet in hope one comes.
Bo kisses my head as I once again stare at the suet holder. He shakes his head. “That suet’s getting moldy out there,” he says, and hooks a plastic bag on my fingers. He’s right, of course. Only a few small steps into nature, and I’m already stumbling.
But is that not the way with writing, too? Even the safest, smallest of steps into story-worlds isn’t without some risk of falling. We’ve all the unfinished prose and poetry that pain us to think on. Does the pain prevent us from writing?
Perhaps for a while. But never forever. We find new words, new worlds. We peer into the gifts from loved ones and find new seeds, a new feeder.
New life.
New hope.
~STAY TUNED!~
Since Death on the Nile is coming to video in early April, I’m just going to save my next Christie post for when I can rent the film and watch it. I refuse to be foiled by a lack of a babysitter! More indie author interviews are also on the way, and Blondie’s just about done with the third chapter of her Elementalsstory.
Jean Lee's World 