Tag Archives: novels

Why Write?

Posted on by
Comment

Money.

Author Mickey Spillane died last week at age 88. He was the creator of hard boiled detective Mike Hammer.

I don’t recall reading any Mickey Spillane, but I must have. I’m a huge fan of hard boiled detective fiction — a la Chandler and Hammett. But reviewers don’t usually use the names Spillane, Chandler, and Hammett in the same sentence unless it is to comment on how Spillane fails to stack up to the two masters of the genre.

Spillane’s writing has been called “hard boiled boilerplate,” full of cliches and odd visualizations. The critics were not kind to him. But he didn’t write to please the critics. He wrote to make money, as CNN’s obituary piece confirms:

Spillane, a bearish man who wrote on an old manual Smith Corona, always claimed he didn’t care about reviews. He considered himself a “writer” as opposed to an “author,” defining a writer as someone whose books sell.

“This is an income-generating job,” he told The Associated Press during a 2001 interview. “Fame was never anything to me unless it afforded me a good livelihood.”

Which got me thinking.

I’ve often been criticized by writing acquaintances — you know, the folks who want to be authors and are always working on short stories and novels but never actually publishing them — for “selling out.” In their eyes, writing non-fiction (computer how-to books, of all things) isn’t quite as impressive as creating art by writing fiction.

But they obviously don’t understand why I write computer books. It isn’t because I love composing sentences like: “Choose File > Open. The Open dialog appears. Locate and select the file you want to open. Click Open.” It’s because I like to eat, have a roof over my head, and buy cool toys like helicopters.

Yes, it’s true. I write computer books for the same reason most people go to the office every day. The same reason Mickey Spillane wrote books with titles like The Erection Set.

As Spillane once said,

“I have no fans. You know what I got? Customers. And customers are your friends.”

Ah, if only I could have as many friends like that.

Unnatural Causes

Posted on by
Comment

An Adam Dalgliesh mystery by P.D. James.

Unnatural CausesI mentioned in a previous post that I’d taken two novels with me to the hospital for something to do while recovering from surgery. In that same post, I also mentioned that drugs kept me unable to read for the entire time I was there. I caught up yesterday by reading one of the two books I’d lugged down to Phoenix and back: Unnatural Causes by P.D. James.

I’m a big reader of mysteries, but for some reason I’ve always shied away from P.D. James. I think I must have had a bad P.D. James experience in my past. You know what I mean. You get a book from the library and have every intention of reading it, but when you open the book and begin to read, the book fails to grasp your attention. You put it aside, planning to pick it up later to read it, and wind up just returning it to the library — late, of course — with a new idea in the back of your mind: you don’t really care for that author’s work.

I don’t remember this happening to me with a P.D. James book, but it must have. There’s no other explanation for why I have avoided her work for so long.

The Great P.D. James Avoidance, however, ended last week when I picked up one of her books at Wickenburg’s local library. And yesterday’s reading of Unnatural Causes dissolved any preconceived notions I had about her work.

The book, which was originally published in 1967, concerns the discovery of a dinghy carrying the body of a dead man whose hands have been cut off. The dinghy washes ashore at the seaside town where it originated, which is also the same place the victim lived: Monksmere. The town has an unusually high percentage of full- and part-time residents who are either writers or crititcs. The dead man was a writer.

The book is nearly 40 years old now and it shows its age. Not in a bad way, mind you. More like a “look back” way. A part of the plot concerns the typing (on a typewriter) of the dead man’s manuscripts with and without carbon paper. If you’re old enough to remember typewriters, you’re likely to remember carbon paper, too. Not only did it give you the ability to make a copy of a document as you typed it, but it preserved that document on its shiny blue or black side — until you reused it so many times that you couldn’t read the carbon. Remember the days? Glad they’re gone? Me, too!

I won’t go into any more detail about the story line or suspects because I don’t want to spoil the book for any future reader who likes a good British “cosy” mystery. That’s what this is, through and through. P.D. James and Agatha Christie were cut from similar molds, although I think James has better use of the English language and much better descriptive skills. Her desciptions of the coastal town were so clear that they brought me there — from central Arizona! — and I was able to hear the waves and feel the dampness of the sea air. There’s something to be said for an author who can do that.

My final word? If you like mysteries and haven’t read any P.D. James, Unnatural Causes is a good place to start.

More Plagiarism in the News

Posted on by
4

Now this is plagiarism!

The Dan Brown plagiarism case is now history. He won — I thought he should in that particular case — and the plaintiffs will be using all their future royalties to pay legal fees.

But now there’s a new case in the news. I just read about it on Slate in an article by Jack Shafer titled “Why Plagiarists Do It.” Mr. Shafer’s article was written in response to news that 19-year-old Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan (don’t ask me to prounouce that), who had gotten a $500,000 two-book contract while still in high school, had completed her first novel — with a little help from another author. It appears that Miss Viswanathan borrowed at least 29 bits and pieces from two similar novels by Megan F. McCafferty. Although she claimed it was accidental, Mr. Shafer sums up his opinion (and mine) on that as follows:

Please! Pinching one or two phrases from another book in the course of writing a 320-page novel might be accidental. But by the time a novelist does it 29 times, the effort is transparently intentional and conscious. Unless, of course, Viswanathan composed her entire novel during Ambien-induced sleep-writing episodes.

(It’s wit like that that keeps me coming back to Slate again and again.)

I read articles in the Harvard Crimson and the New York Times that provide plenty of examples of the borrowed phrases. This is a pretty clear-cut example of plagiarism — 29 instances of it. In fact, if this isn’t plagiarism, I don’t know what is.

Interestingly, Mr. Shafer’s article lists a bunch of reasons why someone might become a plagairist. None of them are flattering.

But I think that what pisses me off the most about this is that this kid got a half million bucks in advance money to write two novels and she rewards her publisher and editor and agent by stealing passages out of other books — books that probably didn’t earn a tenth of that.

I think it goes without saying that she should be ashamed of herself. Unfortunately, she probably isn’t.

I hope she loses her movie deal.

DaVinci Code Plagiarism?

Posted on by
Comment

What?

Okay, so we all know that I sometimes retreat into a cave where I have no knowledge of current events. But this isn’t even current. It’s been going on since February. And even I can’t stay in a cave that long.

I’m talking about the plagiarism lawsuit over The DaVinci Code.

I heard about it today and spent some time catching up on the news with some good old Google searching. It appears that the authors of The Holy Blood, The Holy Grail (HBHG), which I thought was a work of non-fiction, are suing the author of The DaVinci Code (DC), clearly a work of fiction, for “appropriating” the central theme of their book for his. The situation is summed up quite nicely in this article from the The Times of London.

I read both books. Here’s my take.

I read DC first, primarily because it was getting so much press. This was about two years ago. I found the story very interesting — in fact, it was the primary reason I kept reading. It had a lot of fascinating “facts” and puzzles. I’m a sucker for fiction based on little-known fact and this had me hooked with its wild premise — that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, who escaped to France with their child — based on a string of facts that could just make the premise true. But as for writing style, characterization, etc., Dan Brown missed the boat, at least as far as I’m concerned.

I’m not the only one who feels this way. Frank Wilson of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, quoted in Opus Dei, said:

In my view, the book is unexceptionally written, with minimal character development and a third-rate guidebook sense of place. It is, however, a quick and easy read, largely because most of the chapters are only a few pages long, and just about all of them end as cliffhangers.

If you don’t pay too much attention, but sort of let the book go in one eye and out the other, you’ll get to the end before you know it. [Emphasis added.]

And Peter Millar of The Times of London (again quoted in Opus Dei — they must love this stuff) said,

This is without doubt, the silliest, most inaccurate, ill-informed, stereotype- driven, cloth-eared, cardboard-cutout-populated piece of pulp fiction that I have read. And that’s saying something. [Emphasis added.]

They said it better than I could. But there was enough page turning action to get people to read it — I breezed through the first half in a day, then finished it up a few days later — and I think the premise was more than enough to get people talking about it. The result: a bestseller from a rather average piece of writing. (It wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last.)

After reading it, I remember wondering why it was a bestseller. Maybe I missed something? I read fast and that tends to lessen the reading experience. So I did double duty and I read Brown’s Angels and Demons, too. More of the same poor characterization but with better puzzles and an even less believable plot. I don’t need to read any more Dan Brown.

Anyone who thinks Dan Brown is a great writer must read an awful lot of crap. (I’m sure that statement will get me in trouble somewhere.)

Intrigued by the whole Jesus-was-married-and-the-Catholic-Church-tried-to-hide-it thing, I sought out HBHG. I found it in my local library, of all places. It was a slow read, even for me. But I slogged through it. Lots of fascinating stuff, in painstaking detail. (Too much detail for light reading, if you ask me.) It seemed to provide all the background information for DC — the well-researched facts to back up the book’s central premise.

In fact, I always assumed that Dan Brown had read HBHG — he mentions it in DC — and had written a novel based on it. After all, how could he — a novelist — have come up with all that material by himself? It would take years to dig all that up. Or a reading list that included HBHG and a few other books that covered the same general topics.

Mind you, I don’t think it’s wrong to base a work of fiction on a work of non-fiction. And that’s where I’m having a problem with the lawsuit. Is it wrong? Am I wrong to think that it’s not?

My understanding of copyright law is that you cannot copyright an idea. Has someone changed that?

As a Guardian Unlimited article points out,

The case is also likely to clarify existing copyright laws over the extent to which an author can use other people’s research.

And that’s what scares me. Suppose I read a handful of books about Abraham Lincoln in preparation for writing a novel that takes place during his presidency. Suppose one of the books says something silly — like he was gay (hmmm, why does that sound so familiar?) — and that becomes one of the underlying themes of my book. Will the author that built the Lincoln-was-gay premise be able to turn around and sue me for plagiarism?

I guess if my book became a bestseller, anything is possible.

And then there’s Lewis Perdue, the author of Daughter of God, who claims that Dan Brown plagiarized his book. I guess he’ll be suing next. Until then, he’ll keep himself busy with his own blog, The Da Vinci Crock. I haven’t read his book, but if his claims are true, it would appear that he has a stronger case than the HBHG authors. Perhaps he just doesn’t have as much money for lawyers.

The lawsuit’s court case ended today, which is probably why I finally heard about it. You can read the Reuter’s coverage of the closing day here.

I’ll be waiting to hear how the judge rules.

Nothing by Chance

Posted on by
1

I reach for a book on my shelf and am pleasantly surprised.

I had a Grand Canyon charter the other day. Although most Canyon visitors like to walk along the rim and enjoy the view, I’ve been so tired from work lately that I thought I might like to spend my wait time in a comfortable chair in a hotel lobby, reading a book. So before leaving home on Wednesday morning, I went into our little library and pulled a paperback I hadn’t read yet off the shelf. The book was Nothing by Chance by Richard Bach.

I was introduced to Bach’s writing when I was in high school. His book, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a huge bestseller back then and all the students who liked to read read it. (Wow, is that a weird sentence construction: “…read read…”) I don’t remember the book very well and plan to read it again soon.

This book, which was published in 1969, is one of Bach’s flying books. He wrote several of them and they’re carried by most good pilot shops. I bought this copy at least two years ago from Aero Phoenix, the wholesale pilot supply shop I used to buy products for resale in the little pilot shop I had at Wickenburg Airport. I’d bought two other books by Bach on the same shopping expedition, but had chosen the wrong one to read first and hadn’t gotten any further.

The subtitle of the book, which doesn’t appear on the cover, is “A Gypsy Pilot’s Adventures in Modern America.” It pretty much sums up the nonfiction story. I’m almost halfway finished and the story so far has been about Richard and two friends as they “barnstorm” around the midwest, attracting crowds with aerobatics and parachute jumps, making money by taking people for rides in their two airplanes. The book is no longer “modern” — unless you still live in the 1960s — and the idea of $3 airplane rides takes you back to those days. It certainly takes me back to those days: my first ride in an aircraft was in the late 1960s, when I got a helicopter ride in what was probably a Bell 47. That ride, which I took with my dad, cost only $5 per person.

Bach’s writing borders on amazing. Take, for example, the very first paragraph of the book:

The river was wine beneath our wings — dark royal June Wisconsin wine. It poured deep purple from one side of the valley to the other, and back again.The highway leaped across it once, twice, twice more, a daring shuttlecock weaving a thread of hard concrete.

I read that paragraph and suddenly felt ashamed to call myself a writer.

Fortunately, the whole book is not like that. It’s a story that moves forward, with brief interludes of wonderful imagery and flashbacks to other times in the author’s past.

I can identify with the story. I often make extra money with my helicopter by bringing it to county fairs and other outdoor events. He talks about the spectators who watch but don’t step up with their money. About how dead business can be until a passenger or two climb aboard and get the whole thing started. About flying for hours with a long line of people waiting. About waiting for hours with no one wanting to fly. He talks about trying to keep count of the passengers, about their reactions to seeing familiar terrain from an unfamiliar perspective. About the responsibility of the pilot and the joy of flight through someone else’s eyes.

It’s clear that Bach loves (or is it loved?) to fly. We have that in common.

I’m glad I pulled this book off the shelf on Wednesday. But now I’m wishing I could write its sequel, as a barnstorming helicopter pilot in the 21st century.