fiction writing

Margaret Atwood Burns the Pages

Posted on by Tom Bentley

I will be the one person to praise Margaret Atwood’s work. Well, make that the millionth and one person—she’s that good. I have read five of her novels, but, rudely, she has published 40 or more, so it’s likely I’ll never catch up. And then there are the poetry books. Books of essays. Reams of awards. 

She’s even a prolific tweeter. Damn.

So, in talking about her latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, the words of which span the years 2004–2021, I likely won’t be shocking Atwood fans to say to say she is sharp, ironic, funny, lamenting, biting and delightful. But as the subtitle, “Essays and Occasional Pieces” implies, many of the works aren’t full-blown essays: many were from presentations or lectures, many are ecological observations with a political bent, many are breezy and self-effacing musings on her past publications.

Some of the breezy ones are a mere page and a half, but if you’ve swallowed much Atwood, her breezy can contain some whipping winds. Though it’s an easy target, in later pieces she’s unsparing of the Trump administration’s mocking of democracy, and incisive on the way our global institutions are bleeding the planet dry. 

To (and From) the Woods They Shall Go

I was fascinated to learn that her father was a forest entomologist, and that the family spent many months yearly in the woods, retreating to cities (notably Toronto) for the snowy winters. Thus her sense of the natural world (and the collision with the unnatural world) was seeded. But for writing that can sometimes have a doomsayer tone, she is yet credible in presenting that the world can still be saved, but it needs a stern hand, which is yet wavering.

There are also many warm and informative testimonials to other writers, such as Alice Munro, Ursula LeGuin and Barry Lopez. Some pieces seem slight, but it’s a collection, after all. Try to read any few of these without a smile and a nod to her wryness and her good sense. 

Jealous of Margaret Atwood’s continent-wide talents? Not me. (You can’t see my face, can you?)

[Note: I actually won an ARC of this book through Goodreads, after applying for many others. Funny to go through a book that’s just on the verge of publication, and find a fair amount of typos and a bunch of blank pages where the acknowledgments and index will be. Didn’t dilute the book’s strengths though.]

Memoir Maneuvers

I am moving along in publication prep of my memoir of my years of lunatic shoplifting during my high school days. I’ll soon see the refined cover (designed by Studiolo Secondari).  There will be a lot more info about that (including some free book downloads) and more in my monthly newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Links to Thinks

Below, a few articles on psychic good cheer, something to cheer about these days.

A new method to boost your creativity gets rave reviews
“… stories are essential to humans making sense of the world. Interpreting the stories of everyday life leads thinkers to solve problems. Imagining new stories prompts novel inventions to weave those stories into reality. Creativity arises by envisioning ourselves as thoughtful agents in our own stories as well as others’.

5 Ways to Make Your Mornings Better, According to Science
“I suggest keeping movements and stretches so light in the morning that you can barely feel them initially,” Szado explains. “Continually focus on relaxing the muscle and letting the stretch relax to a point where you can’t feel it.”

HOW ONE MUNDANE CHANGE TO YOUR EVERYDAY LIFE CAN BRING POWERFUL HEALTH BENEFITS
“Routines have the power to help us manage our health and our work, home, and community lives. Two years after the pandemic changed everyone’s lives, people now have an opportunity to consider the routines they want to keep and the meaningful things they need in their daily lives to stay productive, happy, and healthy.”

12 Hard Things You Can Do Today
“There you have it, twelve activities that will make your day just a little bit worse, but in a good way. A skipped lunch here and a casual ruck plate there, and you’ll be on the path to freeing yourself from the tyranny of comfort. Your next step is a misogi, and soon you’ll be crying tears of pain on the regular. (That means it’s working.)”

Flying on Other Writers’ Fiction

Posted on by Tom Bentley

Me and My Muse, Discussing Lunch

I’ll use the pandemic, politics and general pissiness for an excuse, but I haven’t written any fiction—other than some absurdist flash—in more than two years. That surprises and distresses me, because I love the stuff: I love its whooshing of you into another world, the anxieties and delights you can feel for certain characters, the textures of place and time.

I’ve had a good story idea in the wings for a couple of years, with notes and references, but type a word of narrative?

No.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped reading. If I stop reading, it’s time to put me down. That dog isn’t breathing.

I just finished Jonathan Franzen’s latest, Crossroads, a 600-page sprawler, though it’s set in a narrow phase of time, December 1971, and in a sometimes claustrophobic family situation in suburban Chicago, which at moments spirals into mania. Three of the family’s children are in high school or recently out, and two of them have a torqued involvement with a Christian youth group, as I also did during that period.

If you ever read The Corrections, another of Franzen’s novels, you know that he has more than small skills in depicting family dynamics, especially if those dynamics involve much self-deception, unfounded hopes, absolute lies, love, desire and a highlight reel of human folly. He goes into that ring and everybody gets a good workout; at times his depictions of some mental illness and drug-addled actions had my heart beating (maybe because of my own suppressed depression and drug addlement during the 70s, about which I’m writing a memoir now).

I can’t give the book five stars though—there were some long sections of backstory that plodded along for me, and that seemed curious in light of Franzen’s talents. And occasionally the whininess and entitlement of all of the main characters was grating, even though it served the plot. Plus, I think he could have shaved 100 pages off, and not missed a beat with his themes and story arc. Nonetheless, worth the read.

I am also a sweep of the second hand from finishing Einstein’s Dreams, a much more compact fiction work. Or works, as it is a collection of very short stories, vignettes even, on the nature of time, what it does to us, what we do with it, and how it slips away. Or in the case of several stories, stops.

There are 1905 title time stamps on all the stories, though none of the tales take that as a starting point. For Einstein, 1905 was his so-called “miracle year,” when he published 4 groundbreaking (clock breaking) papers. The great man himself is a peripheral character in a few of the stories, but most of them center on unnamed men or women or places and objects in Berne, Switzerland and elsewhere in the country.

For these men and women, they are subjects of memory leaks, jarring and soft movements through the past, a variety of parallel worlds and futures, baffling fulfillments or thwartings of their desires, bizarre time effects on bodies and minds.

The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist himself, who naturally has poured the bucket of relativity theory over his own head more than once. I admire his use of lyrical and often economical language, and perhaps I absorbed some remote-starlight glimmer of the scientific dissection of time tricks, though I doubt it. No matter: There is a romantic wistfulness in many of the stories, which are often just three or four pages long. People meant well, but time got in the way. I loved this one.

And for the people of Ukraine, and of Europe, and to we Americans, Godspeed in the hell to come. Now is a time that should happen only in a parallel universe, and one from which we could step away.

Links to Thinks

I said in my last monthly newsletter that I was going to park all of the links to articles on psychic health and good cheer I’ve been curating only in that newsletter, but instead, fickle boy, I’m going to split them between there and the blog. Here are a couple:

HOW TO SHUT OFF YOUR BRAIN: 4 SCIENCE-BACKED TIPS TO STOP THINKING AND RELAX
“This silent internal dialogue is vitally important to our ability to problem solve, cultivate a sense of self, and understand our place in the world. But our inner coach can become our inner critic.”

How to make a difficult decision
“Avoiding a decision is in fact a decision. It can be tempting to kick a difficult decision down the road – but that itself is actually a decision, and probably the wrong one.”

Making a Home for a Connecticut Yankee

Posted on by Tom Bentley

If you know my handwriting, you know I didn’t work on this

I spend a lot of time reading, on a desktop screen. Some of it is my own writing, some the works of others, fiction and non, the subjects often about writing and the arts. Too much is the dreary news of the day, which mostly equals the dreary news of yesterday and a good bet to equal the misery of days to come. And I read the occasional novel on an iPad too.

But I always read a physical book during the day (or night) as well. Even when I read a great piece of writing online, something that moves me or provokes me, even when I nod in concert with the thoughts, note a sharp sentence, promise to look at something else the author’s written, something yet is missing.

What’s missing is what I can hold in my hands: a “real” book. So I had a special thrill when my girlfriend Alice’s sister moved out of San Francisco and into the Napa area recently, and engaged us to box up her book collection. She has a couple of different collector’s editions of literary works, back and forward from the 18th century to the 20th, all bound in lovely leather, various sizes and colors. It was tremendous fun simply to move them from shelf to box and gape at their glory.

So when she gave me as a reward A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, one of Mark Twain’s farcical fancies, I was stoked. It’s a hefty book, though only 300 pages. But broad enough so you could put a big sandwich on it, a glass of beer, an apple and some pie and still sneak in some peanuts.

The book is from the Collector’s Edition of Famous Editions, published by Easton Press in Connecticut, fitting for something about a Connecticut Yankee. The work is richly illustrated by Honoré Guilbeau, with the kind of chapter-heading red-ink rubrics you might see in a medieval monk’s manuscript, beholding to the 6th-century setting of the novel. It came with a bookplate, a book ribbon, a nicely done small brochure on its composition, and an intro written by Carl Van Doren in 1946 that includes some musings on medieval times, plus some pungent biographical notes on Twain.

I’d already read (and laughed through) Connecticut Yankee a couple times—it’s vintage Twain, railing against imperial estates and trappings, while throwing in many an inventive absurdity of the “fish out of water” type, though this big fish in this instance is shrewdly capable.

But it’s this book’s bookishness I want to remark on: such a pleasure to touch and smell its leather, flip through its flamboyant pages, feel its heft, admire its careful typography and design. However, it doesn’t take a collector’s edition of anything for me to take to a book like a fish in water. The paperback novel I’m reading right now (Ordinary Grace, by William Kent Krueger) and the nonfiction hardcover (Surviving Paradise, by Peter Rudiak-Gould) I’m stepping through—both appealing books, those solid, unflappable transports to other worlds.

And good for putting on the bedside table and putting your glasses on top of at retiring time.

I published a piece on Medium a bit ago about how my mom’s obvious love of reading when I was a kid influenced my path in life; I expressed in more detail my feelings about books there.

Many are the benefits of electronic reading, but a book will always feel more like a friend to me.

How about you? Electrons or paper?

Linkability

Here are a couple of my recent articles, followed by some from other writers, mostly on the mental health front, and which have been helpful in these unhelpful times.

Purple Prose and the Word Surgeon’s Scalpel

Unconsciously using too many “justs,” “verys,” “actuallys,” and other fluff evildoers in your prose? Cast them out! And those big words too. (Well, not all of them. Some are fetching.) Published by the fine folks at WriterUnboxed in August 2021.

What One Distillery Did To Gain A New Whiskey Still With A Grand History

My piece on Stumpy’s Spirits, a small Illinois distillery that recently bought a large amount of 100-year-old still components—from Belgium, off the internet—and has reconstructed them for their own use. These guys did a whole lotta work. Published in August 2021 by the WhiskeyWash newsletter.

Other Writers Posts

Five Small, Achievable Steps To Improving Your Wellbeing
“Being kind to another provides us with a sense of fulfilment, even if that is on a small level,” says Dr Charlotte Armitage, a Harley Street psychologist and psychotherapist. “Where we project kindness, this is usually reciprocated. This results in a feeling of connectedness, which encourages the release of oxytocin and dopamine in the brain. Both of these chemicals help us to feel good.”

How to Sleep Better: 5 Hacks for More Rest and Less Stress
“Sleep is probably the single most important health behavior we do every day,” Prichard says. “Pretty much all systems are enhanced when you get enough sleep and are impaired when you don’t get enough.”

10 things you can do now to save our planet
“Resist excessive consumption: We do not need all those possessions. Buy less, and buy better. Reject the idea that consumption makes us happier and that we must always have new things to enhance our lives.

Our Brains Aren’t Built to Handle This Much Bad News
“There’s a ton of lifestyle stuff that will obviously help, too (exercise, healthy food, sleep). But more important than all that is monitoring your relationship to the news. Quit the doomscrolling. It’s not helping. It’s like a drive-by on your brain; no wonder you can’t wrap your head around 650,000 deaths, or a house that’s had its roof ripped off, if you’re staring for six seconds or so before moving on to the next thing.”

Improve A Low Mood With These 6 Ideas
“Walk. Often, our negative, repetitive thought-loops can be interrupted simply by a change in scenery combined with gentle exercise. A walk outside accomplishes both.”

Help—AI Algorithms Stole My Keyboard!

Posted on by Tom Bentley

I have seen the future of writing. And it might not include me, but I can always clean up stray punctuation.

We all know automation is threaded through today’s workforce, from Amazon robots picking your favorite paper towels off shelves in a galaxy far, far away, to artificial intelligence (AI) reading your x-rays with a precision that many radiologists can’t approach.

But we writers thought that soulless machines, bland blocks of code, couldn’t invade the field of creatives. Our work takes a unique combination of insight and awareness, experiment and structure, flash and incubation not afforded to the canned collection of inputs that machine learning extracted from countless texts. Doesn’t it?

Not so fast, me hearties. You may have heard of GPT-3, a language-prediction AI that has devoured mountains of text, fiction and non, so that when fed some kind of text anew, it can draw upon its wide database of how particulars of expression are built, and spit out some new material relevant to the initial input.

This is substantively more clever—and repeatable—than those legendary monkeys finally typing a Shakespeare play after eons of gibberish. But surely the unseen hand here is just dry bones wielding a dull brush, not a vibrant painter of imagery and language? Not exactly. Not Margaret Atwood yet, but if Margaret were a four-year-old today, she might get into weaving as a backup profession.

I had a chance to try a beta of Sudowrite, a creative writing tool based on GPT-3. And the results were intriguing, if not unsettling.

I wrote a couple of goofy paragraphs for Sudo AI to get cooking:

The ogre was moody today. Every one of his horns felt itchy. His mother hadn’t called him in two weeks. His oldest child lit a village on fire yesterday, trying to cook some marshmallows.
But the worst was his painting! All his ideas, bright in the mind, came out derivative and dull. He needed a change.

 
I asked the Wormhole function (which then gives you five paragraphs of distinctly different elaborations on your prompt, trying to harmonize tone, characters and voice) of the software to provide me with some more story strides; I chose one of the five:

Ogre turned to his advisor and asked, “What do you see in my painting?”
The advisor paused in the middle of feeding himself from the tub of acid.
“I see…darkness,” he said, eyes flashing deep within his skull. “I see a tribe of cowards making a garden in a forest. A tribe of cowards—no, it’s actually a tribe of cows. But belligerent cows, with nasty attitudes. I think they are protesting the price of Netflix subscriptions for bovines.

 
I accepted the AI’s first three Wormhole sentences, but then meddled: Sudo gave me a tribe of cowards, but I decided that wasn’t as fanciful as a tribe of belligerent cows, which I edited in. Then I put forth:

The ogre pondered. “Yes, but what does that have to do with me?”

 
My advisor, abandoning caution through the Wormhole, let loose:

The advisor stood on a stool, letting the acid eat from his ripped robe and slippers down to the bone. “You are the darkness in their garden, the anger behind the bovine protest. You are the beast at the doorstep, the teacher that will teach us all lessons. But above all—you are the ooze that will devour this section of the canvas, because no one has made anything creative in ages, and the old ideas stink.”

 
Always good to ponder the words of someone on acid, or someone with acid on them. I agreed and offered my advisor a 10% raise in the story.

The program then suggested that the ogre should fight his oldest child. Here’s part of that:

“Is that wise?” the advisor gagged. “He’s got horns like a gazelle. A merciless killer.”
“If you want me to paint anything worthwhile, I’ll have to win this battle,” the ogre stated.
“Don’t forget my raise.”

 
I should have advised that ogre to never make personnel promises you can’t keep, but too late on the raise.

What if you get bogged down at some plot point? Sudo AI dodges bogs by giving you the Twist function, which supplies you with a number of varying paths. Here are some small excerpts of some twists (the full excerpts are too long for the post):

• The ogre discovers that he’s not an ogre at all; he’s a Tcho-Tcho, a race of dwarves who’ve been living underground the whole time.
• The advisor is the brother, who thinks he is the ogre.
• The king’s brother is really the king’s long-lost son; the advisor is really a demon sent by his father to con the king out of his fortune [Sudo seems to have decided the ogre is a king]

Or left wanting for some piquant spicing, you could choose a word and use the Describe function to elaborate on the selected term. I chose “advisor” here:

• Advisor is a tall man with a tousled beard and approachable smile. His eyes look like a dragon’s—he’s pasty white and jaundiced.
• His breath even carries the smell of old parchment, the stale odor of a library that’s been locked up for decades.

or, with gusto (and a pileus):

• He was a little old man covered in ash and soot, with a wrinkled, crinkled face and skin as taut as a drum. He had a beard of celery, callused hands, and a pileus made of vegetable leaves. He wore plaid clothing from the chest up and straw sandals from the waist down.

If you read the Joanna Penn Sudowrite article linked above, you can see the AI software offers other intriguing story-building functions. That article also looks at some of the broader ramifications and applications of such software. Since the company’s founder is the interviewee, he is judicious with disclaimers about such software “replacing” writers or it being used to flood markets—or at least Amazon—with haphazardly written self-published novels and stories.

I’m agnostic about those matters for now, but in seeing how the program rapidly produced variant story developments and characters in my frothy tale, I sensed both danger and delight. I see how a stuck writer could become unglued by seeing provocative hints on pushing a story forward, or become beguiled by a character trait or behavior they wouldn’t have considered otherwise. And use the suggestions, with modifications. Or none?

Many of the suggestions from software functions were clumsily worded or simply “off,” but many did give me pause to think, “Now that’s a [phrase, character, development, etc.] I wouldn’t have come up with,” or wouldn’t have taken to that degree or style. I should have taken the time to try to write something other than this fanciful tale to see where “serious” writing would go, but my beta ran out before I tried.

Check the software out, if you’re interested. Let me know if this is a great new notion or the downfall of existence. I can fall back on being a bartender if this writing thing doesn’t work out (though I hear that robot bartenders are on the ascendance).

[Author’s Note: All of the manipulated electrons in this post are the handiwork of the writer, other than the specified AI entries. But how can you be sure? Check your pileus.]

The Mother of All Books

Posted on by Tom Bentley

 

From my early boyhood, I always wanted to be a pro baseball player. When my limitations as a ballplayer became more evident, I thought that being a writer would be just as good (and you didn’t have to try and hit a curveball). I don’t have to search around for why I wanted to be a writer—the answer is as easy as the one for why I’m around: my mother.

Since I was a toddling thing, I saw my mother reading. I saw her reading magazines and newspapers; I saw her reading books. And she wasn’t reading dime-store westerns (though that would have been fine too), but big novels, books that thumped when she set them down on the living room tables. I saw her reading books, enjoying books, getting more books.

My deep thoughts at the time: “Mom likes books. Books are good.”

Reading, Writing (and No Rithmetic)

So, I started reading too. She was right: books are good. The more I read, the more I wanted to write, so I started writing too. Writing is good. (Except when it gives me, as Mark Twain would say, the fantods.)

My mom continued to love reading until about 10 years ago, when her macular degeneration made words on the page a blurry mess. For a while, because she still hankered for that mess, she read with a giant magnifying glass, slowly but steadily, until that became too hard as well. I’ve written a number of books, and she had them all, even those published after she’d stopped reading. She loved books, after all.

She died at her assisted-living home in mid-June, after a stroke in late April. She was a remarkably kind and good person, funny and chatty, and fond of social gatherings and people in general. Even though she was 97, and lived a long and good life, it’s still a shock to have her gone. Whatever part of her I have is the best part of me.

Here’s the obit my sister and I wrote, which gives you a bit of her character:

Eileen Agnes Bentley

Thanks mom, for opening up the world of words, and all of their enchantments, to me. I hold you in my heart forever.

Writing Rejections Give You a Glimmer of Hope

Posted on by Tom Bentley


Having been a freelancer writing both nonfiction and fiction for many years, you get used to writing rejections. They used to chafe more years ago, but my skin has thickened, so that I normally can simply say “Next!” and mean it without too much teeth-gritting. Not too much.

But once in a while, rejections are motivational. And not just in the sense of “That blasted editor doesn’t know a good story from a cucumber! I’ll show him/her/it!” (“It” because I’m sure AI will soon be used to make editorial decisions in some offices.) Vengeance can certainly be motivational, but here I speak more of a connective motivation, an empathetic one.

Case in point: Glimmer Train, the fine literary journal and press, has been publishing writers for nearly 30 years. They often champion unknown writers, and are willing to dig around the edges in fiction and nonfiction to bring interesting and exciting voices to the page. I haven’t subscribed to their journal (shame!), but I’ve picked it up in bookstores here and there over the years, and have always been delighted in the reading.

And the yearning.

Getting to the Counter Before the Shop Closes

The yearning is this: I’ve known for a while that Glimmer Train is one of the premiere literary journals, and that to be published there is a new feather in any writer’s quill pen. But I haven’t had confidence in many of my short stories, so I’ve sent only a few pieces over the years. Looking at my submissions spreadsheet (I started tracking electronically in 2003), I sent GT stories in 2007, 2013, and 2014.

Here’s where the motivational parts come in. Early this year, I heard that Glimmer Train was going to shut down in 2019. Not from lack of success, far from it. The reason is easy to understand: the two sisters (one of the appealing things about the magazine—it’s been run by two sisters, all this time) have been the conductors of the train for 30 years, and they are ready to close the station. They read every story that’s submitted: I read somewhere that they read thousands of stories a year. Crickey, I’d be tired too.

In early May, I didn’t send them a story, but a note:

Glimmer Sisters, my stomach dropped when I read that you guys were going to pull the shades on the train and picnic in green pastures. You have done such great work for writers for so long, it seemed like you were a perennial season—Spring comes to mind.

Thank you for your deep and generous work, Tom Bentley

And got this back the same day:

What a kind message, Tom. Thank you. Susan
P.S. Our stomachs dropped, too!

Sending the Story Before It Turns into a Pumpkin

At that point, I hadn’t been writing fiction for a while, spending all my time getting a novel published and marketed. But knowing that the train was pulling into the station, I was motivated. I’d had a story idea for a while and went for it; I sent it off to one of GT’s summer contests, hoping not to get a lump of coal. The “Sorry, no dice” form letter came through yesterday.

That didn’t cut too deep, despite my disappointment, so I sent them this message:

Susan and Linda, thanks for taking a look. Hope things are going well as you prepare your final salutes to a fine publication.

thanks, Tom

And again, a same-day response:

What a kind – and welcome! – message. Thank you, Tom. Susan

Motivation again: they are still accepting submissions through May of 2019. I have another idea for a short story. They are going to get it first.

You have to take your writing motivations where you can get them. If they come from the (rejection) kindness of strangers, all the better.

This Is Your Brain on Writing

Posted on by Tom Bentley

Photo by Johannes Plenio from Pexels

I wrote a newsletter post last month about the weird compost-heap-of-the-mind phenomenon that happens with writers: you witness some event—and it might seem trivial at the time—in your past, put it on ice in the frosted back fridge of your brain for years, and one day you’re eating your pickled rutabagas for lunch and it happens: the event resurfaces, and you think: Why, that’s a story, that is!

And sometimes the prompt might even be something you’d read long ago, and even if you don’t dredge up the adjectives and adverbs, the tingling verb of the original story touches you: Why, I could make a story out of that story! Heck, it might even happen to you when you’re listening to a Paul Simon song and you think, Man, that guy’s short. No, I mean, you think: That song puts me in mind of a story.

You don’t even have to eat rutabagas for that to happen.

The Benefits of the Fermenting Brain

OK, that wonderful thing that is the fermenting brain does do some remarkable work, particularly when you just let it simmer for a bit. Case in point: in the article I referenced above, the idea for the story air-mailed itself into my mind like the cat grabbing for that live tuna you mistakenly left in your lap.

So I did write the story, with my usual hemming and hawing, delay and diversion. But I didn’t have an ending. Endings are a fine way to end a story, and I didn’t have one. But my sweetheart Alice gave me an ending opening: not the ending, just a suggestion for the vocations of some ancillary characters who come to visit my main character. Yeah, yeah, that’s good, that will add something.

It did: it added the ending. Just in the way that stories drop from the sky onto a writer’s addled pate, such did an ending for the story screech up in a taxi. And when I say that, I mean truly: this was a case of the entire ending, involving a full scene with all the story’s characters, coming into the brain like an injection. There’s something wonderful, scary and bizarre about how that happens.

Ponder and Incubate

I have read of many breakthroughs, often in science, where the scientist puzzles furiously over some insoluble problem for a week, then shuts the door on the problem while she relaxedly takes a bath—and zounds! The solution appears, a rabbit out of the hat. (Like all of you, I too wear a hat when I bathe.)

Here’s a short article, with a short video on this process, called The Four Stages of Creativity. It’s clear that you do have to engage the problem, in this case the ending of a story, before your story yeast is going to rise. There must be incubation. (Sorry I’m mixing cooking and gestation metaphors here, but the burners are on.) But the miracle of this is always so unexpected when an idea becomes bread, in an instant.

I don’t quite understand how it works, but I’m grateful. Now, whether the story is any good or not, that’s a different issue. I’m sending it out to see if anyone agrees. Have you had these hit-by-lightning story moments?

For Writers (and Readers), Sometimes Simple Is Best

Posted on by Tom Bentley

I jump around a lot in my reading, from fiction to nonfiction, genre to genre, era to era. My current novel is O Pioneers!, written by Willa Cather in 1913. At that point, she was living in New York, having left the hardscrabble life of the Great Plains far behind. But that hard land, with its hard light, was in her blood, the source of her Prairie Trilogy of novels, of which Pioneers is the first.

Below is a passage from late in the book, where an omniscient narrator is describing Alexandra, the contained, self-sufficient protagonist of the work. I read this passage several times, noting that its cadence, simple word choice and weight are carriers of what I so often admire in fiction—and perhaps, because my own writing is so different, a literary vein whose mind feels closed to me.

There are a number of authors whose work is painted with spare and simple language that in the reading delivers a kind of haunting gravity. I’m thinking of Marilynne Robinson’s many novels, Kent Haruf’s work, some of Cormac McCarthy’s, a story like Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. There’s a flinty character to how words are strung together that entrances me.

If you haven’t read the work, you won’t have the context of who Alexandra is (nor of Emil, her younger brother), so the impact will be softer. But still, read and listen to the work of the words:

Her personal life, her own realization of herself, was almost a subconscious existence; like an underground river that came to the surface only here and there, at intervals months apart, and then sank again to flow on under her own fields. Nevertheless, the underground stream was there, and it was because she had so much personality to put into her enterprises and succeeded in putting it into them so completely, that her affairs prospered better than those of her neighbors.

 

There were certain days in her life, outwardly uneventful, which Alexandra remembered as peculiarly happy; days when she was close to the flat, fallow world about her, and felt, as it were, in her own body the joyous germination in the soil. There were days, too, which she and Emil had spent together, upon which she loved to look back. There had been such a day when they were down on the river in the dry year, looking over the land. They had made an early start one morning and had driven a long way before noon. When Emil said he was hungry, they drew back from the road, gave Brigham his oats among the bushes, and climbed up to the top of a grassy bluff to eat their lunch under the shade of some little elm trees. The river was clear there, and shallow, since there had been no rain, and it ran in ripples over the sparkling sand. Under the overhanging willows of the opposite bank there was an inlet where the water was deeper and flowed so slowly that it seemed to sleep in the sun. In this little bay a single wild duck was swimming and diving and preening her feathers, disporting herself very happily in the flickering light and shade.

 

They sat for a long time, watching the solitary bird take its pleasure. No living thing had ever seemed to Alexandra as beautiful as that wild duck. Emil must have felt about it as she did, for afterward, when they were at home, he used sometimes to say, “Sister, you know our duck down there—” Alexandra remembered that day as one of the happiest in her life. Years afterward she thought of the duck as still there, swimming and diving all by herself in the sunlight, a kind of enchanted bird that did not know age or change.

 

Most of Alexandra’s happy memories were as impersonal as this one; yet to her they were very personal. Her mind was a white book, with clear writing about weather and beasts and growing things. Not many people would have cared to read it; only a happy few. She had never been in love, she had never indulged in sentimental reveries. Even as a girl she had looked upon men as work-fellows. She had grown up in serious times.

 

Simple Is Seductive

And if you lived through one of those late 19th-century Nebraska winters as Cather did, you’d have known serious times too. But what gets me about this little stretch of writing is its clarity and modesty. Its basis is that simple—perhaps entirely forgettable—memory between the siblings, and speaks of their deep bond, which is explored throughout the book, as well as Alexandra’s controlled yet-never-stiff reserve. Beautiful stuff.

Oh, another writer comes to mind too: Paul Bowles. The Sheltering Sky is an almost hallucinatory novel that uses razored, acute (and often very plain) language to describe shattering happenings in both the minds and lives of its characters and in the descriptive passages about North Africa. Whew! I have to read that again.

This care with language and the ability to weave existential weight into spare descriptions fascinates me. Something to aspire to in my own writing, but always to enjoy, regardless.

Save Yourself from Toxic Novels

Posted on by Tom Bentley

We all know that literature can rot your mind. Or was that candy corn? Regardless, many people don’t know that books are literally dangerous, particularly new releases. Here I examine my new novel, Aftershock, for cholera, plague, St. Vitus Dance and other conditions. All in the name of keeping you safe.

Books as Butterflies: Aftershock Takes Wing

Posted on by Tom Bentley


A couple of summers ago, my galpal Alice planted many milkweed plants in our flower beds and yard. Milkweed, besides having some lovely flowers, is a nesting site of sorts for monarch butterflies. Those fluttering lovelies lay their eggs on the flowers, eggs that produce some seriously striped caterpillars, who then devour the leaves like pizza from the heavens.

Nature, that big show-off, then insists that those caterpillars pupate: they manage to form themselves into a chrysalis, a stylish little pouch like the one above, which was hanging from our water valve fixture. If you look closely, you can see the faint outlines of the butterfly-to-be’s wings. Nature, also host to many outrages, sacrificed that chrysalis to some other hungry creature, but we have another in a more protected spot, who is much further along, the wings darkly defined.

We’ve been checking in on it many times a day, because pupas are supposed to hatch into mighty monarchs in a couple of weeks—and this dude is due.

What Strained Metaphor Is He Going to Use to Talk About His Book?

Glad you asked. The way we’ve been anxiously awaiting the emergence of the butterfly is akin to what I’ve done with a book of mine I’ve been messing with for years. Its chrysalis period has been longer than our monarchial one, but hey, time compresses and dilates, as you know. The important part is that the book is about to take wing.

I set up my new novel, Aftershock, for pre-order on Amazon. You can see its handsome cover above. I’m giving the first 10 blog readers who request a PDF copy of the book a chance to read it for free. All I ask of you is to consider reviewing the book on Amazon on or not long after the day of its release, which is March 10. You won’t be able to post a review until official publication.

No obligation to write a favorable review (or any review at all), of course, but if you do write one, please note therein that you were given an advance copy, so that no Amazonian shoots me with an arrow for being deceptive about my promotion.

Write to me at bentguy@charter.net if you’re interested. I will nag you once the day before publication about the review, but you are welcome to ignore me. Alice does it all the time.

Oh, and if you were wondering what the monarch larva look like before they spin their chrysalis, check it out:

Handsome devil, eh? Books as butterflies—what a concept.