Book Covers are Crucial

I've always heard that a good book cover design is crucial to a successful novel. It should be carefully crafted to relate to the story, but not give away all your secrets. And of course, it must be eye-catching. I always knew that the cover was important, but I didn't realize how important until recently.

I have a four-year-old who loves to read, but he cannot read alone yet. However, he really likes to go to the library and pick out some of his own books. I take him to the library, he grabs a basket, we walk over to the children's section, I plop down on a bench, and he starts looking for books. This usually involves him finding a small section and shelf and stopping there.

He can't read the titles, so his only criteria for picking a book is looking at the cover. He doesn't even open it up to look at the pictures inside. He pulls a book off the shelf, looks at it, and sets it in his basket. He continues to do this, pulling from the same location until I tell him he has enough books. Our last trip took us 20 minutes total, including driving time.

For him, if it has an interesting cover, it will be an interesting book.

Now, as we get older, we certainly look at other criteria, such as recommendations, the teaser on the back cover, or a favorite author. But much of this early fascination with the cover lingers. If it didn't, why would we have an entire industry of professionals working to make a book cover perfect?

So pay attention next time you choose a book to read. How much credence do you give simply to what it looks like, regardless of what it says? If the cover doesn't catch your eye, do you even take time to read the teaser on the back?

Movies as Literature

I watched a movie last night that I thought was fantastic. It was called Equilibrium with Christian Bale. Not only was the storyline great, but the presentation was fantastic as well.
This was a movie I was introduced to in my Utopian/dystopian literature class over the summer. It is a futuristic dystopian that has created peace by drugging everyone to eliminate emotion. Bale is the main character who is basically secret police seeking out those who are "feeling" by refusing to take their serum each day. One morning, he accidentally breaks his last vial, and before he can get a replacement, he starts to feel emotion. From that point forward, he decides he would rather not take the serum, and instead tries to help the Underground.

Although a movie, it was presented very symbolically like literature. The most obvious symbol was a play on black/white symbolism. The "bad guys" were always in black, and when Bale becomes the "good guy," he wears white. 

Not only is black and white utilized, but basic intensity of color is used. I assume they probably used filters on their cameras, but the effect is that when there is a lack of feeling/emotion, the colors are muted (somewhat like an old photograph); when strong emotion is present, the colors are strong and intense.

Their are a lot of gun battles in the movie, but they are based around martial arts, so they are very artistic. Although there is a lot of violence, there is actually very little gore. What gore is shown in the movie is done so for effect. At one point, Bale has a small amount of blood on his shirt collar and fingers. This gore is used as he smears the blood across a TV screen showing the leader of this society.

All in all, this is a fascinating movie, both for its story and its presentation. It is rated R, but I am still trying to figure out why. There are one or two scenes with swearing, but they don't even appear until at least halfway through the movie. And as I said there is somewhat a lot of violence, but very little gore, which is what is usually associated with R-rated violence. There is no sex, nudity, or drugs either. In short, I would highly recommend this movie as entertainment and a literary presentation.

Teaching by Showing

In my academic and educational training, they spoke a lot about modeling, or "Guided Reading" and "Guided Writing." The idea behind these theories is that inexperienced readers and writers don't really know how to think through their process; they need someone to give them an example.

For instance, a Guided Reading lesson would involve the teacher reading a selected passage (perhaps a page or so long), while students follow along with an overhead or personal copy.  Periodically, the teacher will stop the reading and basically voice his/her thoughts out loud. That commentary that goes on inside our heads is spoken aurally to the students.  The idea is that as they see how an experienced reader makes connections to their reading, students will begin to have that internal dialog themselves.  Guided Writing is similar only a teacher writes/revises and voices the decisions they make as a writer.

I never disbelieved this theory, but its relevance has been made more clear to me recently.

I just recently accepted a teaching job. I am also completing my final class in my Master's program (today was the last day). Thus, my mind has been on both my final essay, and my future responsibilities. As I revised my essay, I made various changes, mostly to wording and some rearrangement of sentences. The revisions I made were primarily ones of taste, but there were still very specific reasons why I made them; they expressed a certain meaning or interpretation that wasn't as obvious with my first draft.

As I went through these, I realized how valuable it would have been for another (inexperienced) writer to be sitting next to me just to see my rationalizations. There wasn't anything technically "wrong" with my writing, but my revisions made it clearer, more concise, and stronger. Isn't that exactly what we want students to be able to do? And how can they learn it unless we who are more experienced explicitly share it with them rather than keep it inside our heads?

Thus, writing is somewhat like an apprenticeship: in order to become a master at the craft, you must learn the techniques from those who have already mastered it.

Authorial Tone

So during my musings today, I made a discovery that there is an important aspect of writing that I can recognize, but I have no idea how to produce: tone.

I will be taking a utopian/dystopian literature class in a couple of weeks and I'm reading some of the novels in preparation for it. I didn't realize how much dystopian literature I had read until addressed so directly by this class. I was reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. Fascinating work.

In describing the novel to my husband, I realized that (unlike a lot of dystopian literature), Huxley was not specifically creating a dystopian society; instead he was satirizing/warning about where he thought his society was heading. The tone of the novel is somehow different.

But I can't figure out how. I can tell there is a difference, and intellectually I know that it has to do a lot with word choice, but I can't tell you what words are creating the tone. To me, it all just seems to be written matter-of-factly, a technique used often in multicultural literature to get the reader to empathize with the different culture. But there is a decidedly disapproving tone overall to the work itself.

Which thought also lead me to characterization. How does a great author make a bad (or even good) character sympathetic, or conversely, a good (or bad) character despicable?

This is something I need to study in depth to improve my own writing. But frankly I'm not even sure where to start my analysis. Not even to mention the amount of time...But I guess that's how truly great writers become great.

A Shout-Out to Graduates

Congratulations to all of you who have either graduated from college/university, or are about to graduate from high school. It's a big accomplishment.

I just graduated myself with my MA in English, and it has been a blast. I am sad that I'm already done because there are so many other classes I want to take. It has been a thrilling and exciting ride. I've honed my craft, had the opportunity to explore genres other than the typical academic ones, and been exposed to a variety of works of literature. I've begun to understand the reason why certain literature lives forever, and I can start to apply those principles into my own writing. I've learned from professors, books, and colleagues. I wouldn't change my experience one bit.

So not only is this a shout-out to the graduates, but it's also a shout-out for higher education. If you are debating on attending college, do it. If you are debating on earning your Master's degree, do it. You can learn things from higher education classes that are impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to learn without.

The Irony of Professional Criticism

So there's been a paradox I've noticed over the years that has become even more apparent to me the past couple of weeks. 

As a Master's student I have been expected to write professional-level critical essays, which is all fine and good. But what I find absolutely ironic is the conundrum the world of professional criticism has established for itself in recent decades.

Anymore, in order for a professional critical essay to be accepted for publication, its topic must be "new." In other words, you cannot just summarize what everyone else has said. You have to say your own thing, even if you are talking about something similar and just taking a different perspective from someone else.

Particularly when it comes to certain authors or works, sometimes it can become downright impossible to find something no one else has said yet. Like for example, what else can we say about Shakespeare that hasn't already been addressed? Especially when there are several journals dedicated solely to Shakespearian studies. So, one recent trend has been to find some obscure line, scene, character, etc. and focus an entire essay around "proving" something about that. Or apply a completely bizarre and unrelated style of criticism. Or talk about how an author's most obscure work ever published is really his/her most important one. Or even find an unknown author and prove how he/she should be included in every literary canon. Basically, saying a lot about something nobody really cares about - except the critical journal editors.

Now here's where the real kicker comes in -- you have to say something totally new and fresh, but unless you have someone to back you up and support what you're saying, then your argument is completely invalid.

What?!?

Well, I guess to be fair, you can actually refute what someone else has said and that can be just as effective as agreeing with them (provided you have textual support also for your own).

I have come across this particular paradox in my most recent paper. I am writing about one of Virginia Woolf's novels. She is one of the more highly criticized authors. In fact she has at least one entire journal dedicated to the studies of her works (Woolf Studies Annual). Well, in looking at some of the criticism out there, I found that basically everyone interpreted this novel the exact opposite way I did.

What a perfect paper topic, right?  Wrong.

I wrote my paper and provided lots of primary textual support for my thesis. Then I tried to find other works of criticism to support (refute) my argument. Two problems presented themselves:, first no one addressed my topic, so there goes any support; second, no one addressed my topic, so there goes any refutation. In other words, the other authors were trying so hard to have original topics that they were all obscure (like how quantum physics is discussed throughout her novel).

After skimming/reading through about 50 articles, I found five (yes, count them, five) articles that had one sentence embedded somewhere in their essay that I could take for either support or argument. And most of those sentences were an aside to the author's primary argument.

So in my essay of 16 pages, I have five sentences from other sources. And that pretty much invalidates my entire paper despite the fact that I have actual textual support about every two or three sentences throughout the entire essay.

Now to be fair, if I read every single thing out there about Woolf and/or this novel, I'd probably find some more similar criticism that I could draw from. But frankly, I don't care that much about it. My reasons are valid (I think), but I still don't care: first, I am writing this for a class, not publication; second, it's a class final paper, not a doctoral thesis, or life's work; third, I'm not a huge fan of Woolf or this novel. In fact, I am writing this essay topic because of how much I disliked a character in her book.

So, here's the real question that maybe the literati should consider: What's really important? A functional summary of ideas or something new? Textual proof of argument or predecessory writing?  Originality or conformity? Or maybe the literati could accept that all approaches are equally beneficial?

Out-of-Order Critiquing

So, a couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to take 5 pages of my novel to a critique session. It was a little bit different from previous sessions I had participated in, but it was a little refreshing too.

I had never had any critiquing-type of contact with any of the members in my group. I picked 5 pages that were a pretty important scene in my story, but was right in the middle of the book. When I handed the group my pages for them to read, they had absolutely no background, no character development, and no story line.

As one group member mentioned to me, it was kind of nice because then they had to critique my writing "based solely on its own merits."

It was nice, actually, because their involvement with the story (before and after this scene) did not color their judgments. And it was a unanimous concensus: show more; tell less.

Now, as I have admitted before, I am wordy, but I am trying to focus better on capturing my scenes in my writing. This critique group was good for me because it helped me realize that I am not there yet - especially in my crucial scenes. The group members suggested I use more dialog rather than telling the reader what the characters discussed. I'm not convinced on that point in this particular scene because I just finished a long dialog before these 5 pages and am going into another one after. But it let me know that my readers want to know/hear more from my characters too. so it provides food for thought.

I realized critiquing doesn't always have to be linear. In fact, it can be just as effective or helpful sometimes to break up your writing in your critique groups. The trick is learning from these jumbled segments and implementing the suggestions throughout the piece.