Learn Writing with Uncle Jim, Volume 1

Re: Elevator

The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first.

I agree with those who said there's something wrong here. An "and" instead of a "but" would have helped. Outside the elevator, waiting in line, the narrator might plausibly not see a man behind him.

When people enter an elevator, they push a button (or check that their button is already lit) and stay facing the front, where the doors and buttons are. Or they turn to face into the elevator's interior. Or they go stand against a wall and face forward or into the interior. Or, if the elevator is crowded, they move toward the back and face forward. Nobody takes a place against a wall and faces that wall. Consequently, you see everyone who enters after you, unless you're still messing with the buttons, or sneezing or reading or adjusting your Walkman or something. The narrator works in this building; he wouldn't take long to find and push his floor button. So "at first" can't mean more than a few seconds.

Maybe Grisham meant to suggest that the narrator isn't alert enough and this will get him in trouble later? Saying "but I didn't see him" creates a contrast between external reality and what the narrator is aware of. Too big a gap there and anyone would be in for some surprises.

I think you can write "My cousin got married in August and I didn't hear about it until October" without breaking POV, but it subtracts some immediacy. In cinematic terms, you then have a long shot, not a close-up.

Re: Catching Up Part II

Couldn't he just frigging start with:

The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me. I hadn't noticed him at first, but I'd smelled him...

That would keep him in a tight POV and the moment. And I agree, although we understand the story here, there's something intinctively not right about the logistics in the elevator....

Also, generally I find Grisham, as illustrated here, a pretty good narrator, but he tells too much sometimes, or explains a little too much instead of letting the readers "get it." To me, I think narration such as "he didn't belong" is clumsy and unnecessary. He sets up the situation and mystery well enough -- no need to extra verbiage to tell the same thing. He should trust the readers more.

See

"See" also means "notice," "be aware of," or "pay attention to."

Re: Grisham

Yes, but "see" can also be taken literally and in this case, the context suggests the literal meaning of "see." If "choosing the right word" is a guideline to follow, he should have used "notice" instead of "see" to avoid any ambiguity.

Boy, I sound like I'm in an Eng Lit class...

Re: Catching Up Part II

The man with the rubber boots was standing in the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first.

Not only does this sentence make it clear that the man with the rubber boots is the focus of the scene, it also gives you a sense of the author's style and, as it is written in first person, it tells you something about the POV character. You know right away that this is not an English professor from an Ivy League college.

Say the line out loud. Add the second line:

I smelled him though . . .

Listen to the wording and the rhythm. This sentence was written the way the POV character would say it if they were telling you the tale over drinks. It has a friendly quality to it that lets the reader feel sympathetic to this character. Who hasn't had the unpleasant experience of being trapped in a small public space with an odoriferous stranger?

And it's important that we feel sympathetic to this character as early as possible because in the next few paragraphs they shows a serious lack of empathy for those less fortunate.

Just another street bum in from the cold. Happened all the time in downtown Washington. But we had security guards to deal with the riffraff.

At least, that's my opinion based on the text we have available. I confess, I have not read this or any other Grisham novel.

Jen

Re: Catching Up Part II

I do think Uncle Jim's line-by-line analysis is very interesting and informative. We can learn quite a lot of what works and what doesn't by looking at other people's work (best selling novels, for example) analytically.

I've started a little exercise in SYW: p197.ezboard.com/fabsolut...=571.topic

I think it'd be interesting to see how we can use the same kind of analysis on each other's works. What do you think?

Re: Catching Up Part II

Listen to the wording and the rhythm. This sentence was written the way the POV character would say it if they were telling you the tale over drinks. It has a friendly quality to it that lets the reader feel sympathetic to this character. Who hasn't had the unpleasant experience of being trapped in a small public space with an odoriferous stranger?

i do see your point, and to be honest, i might imagine anyone who read the scene the first time "got the point" and kept reading, as i did. The quibbles here are arising because we're analyzing the prose, obviously.

However... since we ARE analysing... i say, it's probably not the best idea for any writer to even think for a second that "as long as my flow is adequate, i don't need to dot my I's and cross my T's." Maybe if the book is read once and tossed into the shelf or the recycle pile, then precision is less imperative... just as long as the reader doesn't put the book down during that 'precious' first reading.

But, does any author honestly want to create material that doesn't hold up to basic scrutiny?

With all that in mind, i just don't like the way this opening scene is constructed. It seems fundamentally flawed underneath the style, the flow, the prose--and not only as far as the spatial problem or the unclear wording or whatnot. The main trouble is that the author and editor seem to have forgotten to take reality into account, as far how a metropolitan building and vicinity operate.

-We aren't told where the elevator is located; is it in a parking garage, or a lobby? A vagrant might sneak into a poorly monitored parking garage, but that would be very unlikely to happen in a typical corporate lobby. The lack of this detail makes it hard to guage the credibility of the scene.

-We aren't told about the area: a seedy part of town might be infested with vagrants, but ironically that might imply better measures and a higher awareness to keeping them out... while a higher-scale commercial zone wouldn't have many vagrants in the first place, so any in the area would draw a higher reaction. Again, the lack of this detail makes it hard to gauge the credibility of the scene.

-We are told that somehow vagrants "come in all the time", yet we're also told that "there are security guards to deal with them". So... these guards aren't deployed at the points of street access to the lobby/parking garage/elevators/whathaveyou? This seems like a baldfaced error.

-We are told that the protagonist first detects the intruder by smell, but as noted the footwear would more likely attract initial attention, especially as they're alone in a non-noisy vicinity. Another glaring error.

Perhaps these seem like nitpicky details. But ask: if these problems arose in the first few minutes of a movie or televsion show, wouldn't they stand out badly? Imagine an episode of "NYPD Blue" or "Law and Order", where big-city corporate buildings are often featured. Do vagrants typically surface in plain sight around the buildings, cold weather or not? Do parking garages and lobbies to law firms typically lack security? Do guards typically lurk far from points of entry?

If the answer is 'no' to these simple inquiries, then the man in the rubber boots wouldn't have reached the upper floors of the law building... and therefore the book dies a subtle death on the first page.

Re: Catching Up Part II

You're allowed one whopper per book (whether it be space aliens or street bums in office buildings). If you're telling a whopper, the first page is a great place for it.

Literal meanings aren't the only things that authors have to balance. There's also the connotations of words, and the words' sounds. Then there's sentence rhythm. You have to balance it all.

Re: Catching Up Part II

You're allowed one whopper per book (whether it be space aliens or street bums in office buildings). If you're telling a whopper, the first page is a great place for it.

Plausible. My questions would be... why tell any if they can be avoided? And, is it best to strain the suspension of disbelief on a first page set in a stable, predictable environment?

(An example: with science fiction, an entire sf story is a 'whopper', in a way, since it demands that the reader accept the fictional science involved--aliens, FTL travel, etc--right from the first sentence. Thus, there is room to stretch a yarn, so to speak. By contrast, your average thriller set in everyday New York has to play by set groundrules, and thus has much less margin for plausible deviation from the expected unless that deviation is well-explained.)


Literal meanings aren't the only things that authors have to balance. There's also the connotations of words, and the words' sounds. Then there's sentence rhythm. You have to balance it all.

Certainly. i might draw a comparison with computer programming; i had a brief chat with a coder in particular who was dithering over whether to make a significant change in his ongoing project. When i tried to help by asking him what the point of the changes would be, he responded that they would be primarily aesthetic... he places a high value on cleanly-written code that looks pleasing to the programming eye. Yet, he also valued the simple efficiency of the code he had already written, and so was loathe to commit to extensive changes just to 'make it look better'. As the issue was black-and-white--either make the change, or not--there wasn't a grey area to balance the extremes, thus he found it tough to make up his mind.

An author's struggle is similar, it's a balance between crafting good prose versus simply communicating an entertaining story. Ideally, one would strike a balance between both, so that the story would leap to life in the reader's mind while still showcasing a concise, elegant wordsmithing.

Relating all this back to Grisham's opening page... i think it does adequately as far as communicating the point, but i have to dock it severely for the plotting problems. On a second read, the apparent errors make the point seem hard to swallow.

As far as his crafting of the prose... well, his style had a rocky start in the very first sentence, since there's a clear bit of mangling in the syntax. But in general, it recovers well enough thereafter to suffice in a workmanlike way.

Re: Catching Up Part II

To quote U.J. - use it if it works.

I have been slagging Grisham lately, even though I'm a fan, but I've got to say, this openning works.

All of the efforts to tighten it up just seem to lose something.

As for not describing the elevator and the surroundings in full, I think this is deliberate. Grisham knows how to get the reader to fill in the gaps. He could easily have given us endless details, but that slows down the story and he can't afford to do this in the openning of a book.

I think this opening is really amazing. It doesn't have what I call a big hook. It relies on every sentence being interesting enough for the reader to continue on to the next. He just sucks us in with line after line of interesting characterisation.

If an author has a big hook in paragraph one, then the author can afford to have a few slow paragraphs. A good murder or mystery in the first paragraph will keep the reader going for a few pages while the writer establishes the story.

Grisham doesn't do this. He gets away with tight writing and characterisation.

Grisham

But perfect grammar and grammatically perfect sentences are not necessarily 'good writing'.

If, as writers, we only concentrate on pleasing other writers and not on getting the story we're telling written down as honestly as we can then the story suffers.

Whilst I don't like Grisham's type of 'legal' book very much I think that he wrote a very effective opening. Read it aloud. Listen to the rhythms. That 'but' is a strong beat. You get a clear idea of the sort of man the POV character is. You don't need more details yet. You've had just enough to keep you reading and wanting to know more. Clever writing!

grisham

I agree to pdr here. Good writing. I don't care for grammar in such cases

Re: Catching Up Part II

I don't dispute Grisham is a good storyteller and he has a keen sense of what works in his particular genre (incidentally, he writes differently in his "other" stuff such as A Painted House, which ironically has a very slow start). And I sure am not bashing him here. But aren't we just a bit hero worshiping? I think recently he's become somewhat a lazy writer (just my opinions, of course). For example, Skipping Christmas opens well and draws me in right away, but it just fizzles -- and I mean fizzle -- by mid-book and the whole thing is very unrealistic to me, even as a satire.

I don't care for grammar in such cases

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I'm sorry, but that's a wrong thing to say to writers.



p.s. I don't think an edit like the following would "ruin" the opening:

The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, and I didn't notice him at first.

Re: Catching Up Part II

Writers earn the ability to start their current works slow by ending their last works strong.

The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, and I didn't notice him at first.

I'd go with 'but' rather than 'and.'

Re: Catching Up Part II

But aren't we just a bit hero worshiping?

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I don't read Grisham, so I feel safe in saying no to that question. If anything, I sense a bit of star-bashing.

I doubt there is a single published book that would withstand scrutiny by a group of writers. While there are standards, writing a good story is still a subjective endeavor. There will always be something to quibble about--such as the use of the word "notice" vs. "see" or using "and" instead of "but".

The real question here is did you want to turn the page? Clearly some found Grisham's choice of words a hindrance to the story. Lesson to be learned there. You can't please everyone all the time. There reaches a point when you have to resist the urge to write by committee and trust your own voice.

Jen

Re: grisham

I don't this this is so much bashing as it is learning. We, as writers, are playing around with something already established to see how it becomes something different based on small changes.

Personally, I'm not a big Grisham fan. Just not what I like to read. But I am enjoying the "Masters Class" that Jim strives to give. By pulling apart someone else's work and seeing what makes it tick, makes our writing stronger.

Re: Catching Up Part II

The real question here is did you want to turn the page? Clearly some found Grisham's choice of words a hindrance to the story. Lesson to be learned there. You can't please everyone all the time. There reaches a point when you have to resist the urge to write by committee and trust your own voice.

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Is "turning the page" the only criterion of a good book, though?

I stand by my original question: What if Grisham were not a famous writer (say, he disguised himself as Maestrowork on AW) and posted his WIP on SYW?

Re: Catching Up Part II

Please remember that the smallest unit of meaning in our stories isn't the sentence, it's the paragraph.

(Paragraphs can consist of nothing more than a fragment of a word, but still....)

So let's look at that whole first paragraph:

<BLOCKQUOTE>The man with the rubber boots stepped into the elevator behind me, but I didn't see him at first. I smelled him though -- the pungent odor of smoke and cheap wine and life on the street without soap. We were alone as we moved upward, and when I finally glanced over I saw the boots, black and dirty and much too large. A frayed and tattered trench coat fell to his knees. Under it, layers of foul clothing bunched around his mid-section, so that he appeared stocky, almost fat. But it wasn't from being well fed; in the wintertime in D.C., the street people wear everything they own, or so it seems.</BLOCKQUOTE>

Taken as a whole this is a physical description of one main character. (I also note this time around that the street person is wearing a trenchcoat, that is, the lawyer's uniform. I wonder if he'll turn out to be a lawyer who's down on his luck?)

This paragraph deals with appearances. "He appeared" ... "it seems." To me that suggests a contrast with reality.

Once we have the bum with a handgun in the lobby of a law office, and the shooting starts, we won't have a lot of time for descriptions.

Could this book have profitably started with our narrator hearing the shot, and coming around the corner to see the bum facing Madam Devier?

Re: Catching Up Part II

I stand by my original question: What if Grisham were not a famous writer (say, he disguised himself as Maestrowork on AW) and posted his WIP on SYW?

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I would ask the same about Uncle Jim's work.

Re: grisham

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Re: Catching Up Part II

Could this book have profitably started with our narrator hearing the shot, and coming around the corner to see the bum facing Madam Devier?

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Some people would argue that the book might start better with the shooting. I personally prefer the way he started it now, by describing the bum and the immediate events leading up to the shooting.

Again, what works? Some people may argue that you should not start a book describing a character or a setting. They'd prefer the book starts with the shooting, then rolls back to describe the bum and what the narrator knows about him...

On the other hand, some people may think it's important that the books starts with the narrator noticing the bum.... perhaps that knowledge is important later on, and it's sloppy to have to backtrack through the action.

That's why writing is an art. It's up for debate and interpretation.

Re: grisham

It would be torn apart by people who think they know better but don't.

Tell you what, HConn -- how about post two pages from either a) a published work, or b) an unpublished manuscript, without telling anyone which it is, right here, and see what we have to say?

Re: Catching Up Part II

Writers are not our targets. Readers are. Does the reader like it? Does the reader care? That's what matters.

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But isn't it subjective? For each reader who loves his book, there's someone who doesn't. What are the criteria? Book reviews? Sales? But for a writer as huge as he is, would there be any fair assessment at all? I mean, seriously, Grisham could write crap and still a million people will buy his book. So where is the objective assessment?

Beside, this is a writer's board. I think we need to make sure that we are consistent in our standards. I mean, if Maestrowork writes the same thing and posts it on SYW, he's not going to get the same treatment as someone who is Grisham? I mean if it's one of our works, people will point out "the plot is not realistic" or "the POV is sloppy" etc. etc. But since it's Grisham, we say "he's allowed to have one big whopper." And if we say otherwise, we're called "we don't know any better"?

*stepping down from soapbox*

Re: Catching Up Part II

But since it's Grisham, we say "he's allowed to have one big whopper."

Actually, I think I've been saying that since long before Grisham came under discussion.

Re: Catching Up Part II

@HConn:
Where is this quote from? Did anyone actually say this, or are you trying to put words in their mouth? Maybe I just missed it, but putting quotes around something no one has said is dishonest (unintentionally so, I'm sure).

Eh, let me provide the context. The forum user Detante first said:

Listen to the wording and the rhythm. This sentence was written the way the POV character would say it if they were telling you the tale over drinks...

i read this to be a critique that supported Grisham's method, based on the method's flow; i find the word "flow" is a reasonable way of encompassing "wording and rhythm", yes?

So, my response went on to agree that the piece does flow well enough as a page-turner. However, as i find that the first page has plotting problems, i went on to note that good flow wouldn't be an excuse to gloss over important details, and i phrased that point as:

... it's probably not the best idea for any writer to even think for a second that "as long as my flow is adequate, i don't need to dot my I's and cross my T's".

Thus my statement was clearly describing a hypothetical, potential attitude that i was warning against. The entire idea is that i do worry about possibly overlooking function for the sake of form, since i do it myself and have seen it in too many creative works.

(e.g. the movies that have rhythm enough to cover the plot holes and keep you in your seat on a first view, then fall apart thereafter--or the novels that begin with silly or lazy contrivances that are disguised by a lively flow.)