I finished A Sane Woman. I have to say, I NEVER saw the ending coming. It was brilliantly written, and I enjoyed it tremendously.
Those very kinds words are from Emerald Barnes, who graciously allowed me to post them here. Thanks, Emerald. I also added them to the “Reactions from Readers” page over at the ASW blog.
In this blog post, it was suggested that writers make lists of the things they like about their books. I think this was intended for those who are more self-critical than I am, but I decided to do it anyway.
Ten things I like about A Sane Woman
1. It has proved to be a strong foundation. I started it around 1990 and wrote most of it in the 1990s, and everything I've written since has been in the same world with the same characters, but I've never wished I'd done something differently or thought that I'd painted myself into a corner. Hey, once he wrote Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had to go back and change some things in The Hobbit. I've never wanted to do that (referring to ASW, not to The Hobbit, of course 🙂 ).
2. I like the way it starts in chaos, showing the reader a series of characters without immediately revealing who they are or how they are related to each other (but, I think, in such a way as to draw the reader in). One of the many lessons I've tried to learn from Robert Altman.
3. Parts of it are really funny. (Well, I always laugh when I read them).
4. I like the reverse chronology. First two chapters in the "present," next few chapters three weeks before, next three chapters twenty years before that, then coming back to the present. I tried to make it clear what was happening by using chapter titles like "Three Weeks Earlier" and "Twenty Years Earlier," since the point was not to confuse the reader but just to reveal the mystery and the solution in the proper order. (I also called the last chapter "The Solution," in case some readers might be nervous that the mystery would never be solved.)
5. The book owes a big debt to Sherlock Holmes, and I acknowledge it (the first thing the detective says, after all, is, "The game's afoot!").
6. I think it does a real good job of "show, don't tell." There is almost no exposition, and certainly no info dumps. Everything is revealed through action and dialogue, and the backstory that the characters do tell each other may or may not be true.
I saw this blog post recently, and it has some good rules for writers, some of which I think I followed.
7. Write the book you want to read. I did that. I still like to read it.
8. Use your hands. I do this (mostly I write with a fountain pen on paper), but this is also why I really like the cover. How many books these days have a cover which was drawn by hand, with a pen and ink on paper? Almost all covers these days are made on computers.
9. Creativity is subtraction. When I laid it out on paper, I found out the word count for the first time. Just a bit over 45,000 words, not even technically a novel. I consider that a good thing, as padding it up to 50,000 would have been easy, but I left out all that unnecessary exposition.
(I do have to mention that the blog post I just linked to is awfully long for a post that praises the value of concision.)
10. Oh, and one more Robert Altman lesson: don't over-resolve. Some questions are answered by the end of the book, but some are not. One character is still a complete mystery.
My friend Don just finished A Sane Woman, and he sent me some comments:
(The parts in italics are my responses to his points.)
First of all, congratulations on going back to finish something you started so many years ago. I couldn’t really tell where you picked it up again unless it was the part where it changed from 3rd to 1st person.
That was it, partly because I didn’t think I could really write in quite the same way again, and partly because it jumped into the whole Holmes & Watson dynamic, where the sidekick tells the story of the detective’s investigations. I find it very easy to write first person with Marshall, and I’ve done it again in U-town and the current novel when it was appropriate.
I should note that during my last sitting I was interupted somewhere in chapter 15, after finding out xxxx xxxxxxx xxx xxxxxx, and I’ve not yet reached the Epilogue.
The Epilogue, as you may know by now, is very short.
The strongest aspects of this were the mechanics (if that’s the right word) of your writing; sentence structure, choice of words and keeping a consistently straighforward tone in the narrative. This is the fundamental stuff that makes something readable or not, right? In this area, it’s strong.
Glad to hear it. That’s one good thing about going back to it again after so many years, I was able to be sort of detached about that, not all possessive about what I’d written, since it was so long ago. I did try to respect my style back then, which has changed since, but to even out the rough spots.
A friend of mine is writing some stories and I’m critiquing them for her, and one thing I point out is where I think specific words are just wrong and interrupt the flow (like being out for a nice walk and suddenly stubbing your toe on a rock). She doesn’t have a lot of those, but it makes it even more distracting when you do hit one.
It was also strong in attention to detail. I mentioned something about this a while ago when I started reading it. There are descriptive moments having to do with coffee mugs or newspapers or what have you that make the scenes come to life.
I don’t always describe a lot of things in detail, I like to pick specific details rather than tell everything. For example, I describe what Jan Sleet wears because it’s unusual, and because it’s indicative of her character and how she sees herself, but I mostly don’t describe what everybody else wears. One or two details can tell a lot more than ten, in a lot of cases (and it keeps things moving better, too).
I found a couple things to be problematic/challenging to an easily distracted reader like myself (I’ve started several interesting books over the last year and abandoned them somewhere near the middle when something else caught my attention). The trouble spots have to do with overall choices.
1) Character Names. From the first few paragraphs, there were a lot of names introduced with no clue as to who these people were. Though I was pretty sure that I would soon enough find out who they were, my first impression was “uh oh.”
This was intended to bring in the reader right away, as Robert Altman’s movies do sometimes. I hope that, from the immediate point of view of “who the heck are these people?” it starts to answer that pretty quickly.
Also, when the first chapters were originally written, they were being published in little chapbooks, each with a character list in it. I do that in U-town (there are a series of character lists, growing as more characters get introduced). Would this be a good idea in A Sane Woman, too?
Also, a few of the names are gender-neutral (Alex, Terry, Sam, Nicky) which made it harder to keep track of who’s who. Some middle gound between this and the Springsteen approach (Bobby, Mary, Janey, Johnny….duuuuhhh!) might have made it easier for me.
This is an excellent point, and one which I’ve never thought about (and which nobody else has ever commented on). Because I’m so familiar with some of these characters, it never occurred to me (in this context) that Terry and Sam, for example, were gender-neutral names. I’ll definitely keep this in mind from now on.
The problem is that I find it impossible to change the names of characters I’ve been writing for a long time (35 years in a few cases). When I returned to A Sane Woman, I wanted to change Nicky & Sarah’s names, since there are other characters coming later with similar names, but I couldn’t do it. At a certain point they are people to me, and I would have as much trouble thinking of Sarah as Celia as I would suddenly thinking of you as Fred (and I’ve known Sarah a lot longer than I’ve known you).
Also, specifically, I realized I couldn’t change Sarah to Celia because the three siblings (Sam, David and Sarah) all have to have Biblical names because of how religious their parents were.
By the way, someday someone who know the Bible will probably point out to me how appropriate or inappropriate those names are for those characters, because I have no idea. 🙂
2) Progressive Flashbacks. I don’t know if that’s what you call it, but while it’s not unusual for a mystery novel to begin in the present and then flashback, I think it is unusual to flashback, then flashback further, then further, etc. I question this approach, but I assume there are reasons why you did it this way. Maybe a more focused reader wouldn’t be thrown off.
I think of it not so much as progressive flashbacks but as showing something, then pulling the camera back and showing it again, with the audience seeing more of what’s surrounding the central action.
For example, you see Nicky & Sarah as a couple, then go back and you see how they met and you realize that there’s a mystery there, too.
I also do this in Utown, as you’ll see.
I think I mostly learned this from The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The first book, “Justine,” is about an affair the narrator has with a married woman. In the second book, another character tells the narrator that he was wrong, that the woman (Justine) wasn’t in love with him at all, he was the “beard,” for her real lover, because her husband was so jealous. Then the third book pulls the camera back so far that it’s in 3rd person and the narrator of the first two books is barely in it. Then the fourth book shows what happened after the first three.
The one flashback in A Sane Woman which may be a bit of a leap is the one into the farther past, to the small town (which is really in the style of a couple of the Sherlock Holmes novels, the one thing about Doyle’s writing which almost nobody imitates). That’s there because, as you know, the mystery Jan Sleet is trying to solve is not exactly the mystery you think she’s trying to solve.
This week’s featured character is Terry Nelson.
Perry Nelson, who has been mentioned before, is a very successful writer, even though still quite young. This is very frustrating for his step-sister Terry, since she has aspirations of being a writer as well, and she is quite a bit older than the child prodigy novelist.
She teaches school to make a living, but her spare time is mostly spent at the typewriter, with occasional visits to and from her long distance boyfriend Sam Little. He always advises her to relax, that she’s a good writer, too, even if she never gets to be as successful as Perry.
He continues to advise this, even though whenever they talk about it they usually end up in a fight. To Sam, his point of view is only rational. To Terry, it seems defeatist and condescending.
Tall, blonde, with straight hair to her shoulders. She wears glasses and is very thin. Sam considers her incredibly sexy. Some of Sam’s friends and family don’t really see this, but they are probably reacting to the fact that Terry’s personality can be somewhat acerbic.
Terry’s first appearance in A Sane Woman is near the beginning.
This week’s featured character is Sam Little
Sam is the oldest of three siblings. He lives with his young sister Sarah, with occasional visits from his lover Terry Nelson. The girl called Nicky Porter also lived there for a few months, when she was Sarah’s girlfriend.
Sam earns his living as a proofreader, working for a temp agency. It’s an uncertain source of income, but the work is fairly easy and Sam is not much for changing things unless he has to.
The middle sibling is David, who lives in another apartment in the same building. Someone once pointed out that it was funny they were named Sam and Dave, like the soul singers, but Sam and David only laughed. Their parents had been very religious, and only sacred music had ever been played in their house. They had never heard of Sam & Dave.
Both parents had been murdered, together, in church, by a lunatic woman who had apparently only come in to use the bathroom.
David and Sarah are both gay, and Sam is not likely to ever marry his lover, so he is secretly just as glad his parents aren’t around to see what their offspring are up to.
Sam’s first appearance in A Sane Woman is right near the beginning. He is on a bus, with Terry, bringing her for a weekend visit.
He only appears briefly in U-town.
Hi.
It's my 50th birthday.
About 15 years ago, I started a novel, a mystery, called A Sane Woman. I was publishing the chapters in monthly installments, in little chapbooks, but then I discovered BBSs (computer bulletin boards), and I wanted to post my writing there.
But A Sane Woman didn't fit into that format, you had to read whole chapters in order to get the right effect, and on BBSs (as on the internet more recently) things worked better in smaller doses. So, I put A Sane Woman aside and started another project, with no plan and no preconceptions. A few sysops (the people who ran the BBSs) gave me space to work. I posted a lot of messages, and gradually it began to turn in a novel as well, a much longer and more complex one than A Sane Woman would have been.
But then the BBS scene was killed by the internet, and that project fizzed out, too.
More recently, it started to bother me that neither book had ever been finished. So, I went back and finished them, and posted them on the web. And I'm pretty happy with how they turned out.
One of the problems with writing for the web (unlike the BBSs and unlike paper), is that everything is always subject to revision, nothing is ever finished. So, I decided that I would finish both books on my 50th birthday. And here they are:
A Sane Woman is shorter. It's a mystery story.
U-town is longer. It's a gritty, urban, magical realist story.
A Sane Woman takes place earlier (they involve some of the same characters), so it's probably better (but not essential) to read them in order.
Hope you like them.