Enough with the present tense

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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The oddest things annoy me. One is this [insert creative phrases that would ruin my cuss-o-meter score here] trend of writing novels in the present tense :

She opens the letter. The handwriting looks familiar but she cannot place it. It is unsigned. "What's that?" asks Floyd. He puts down his gun and looks over her shoulder.

I used to love Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta mysteries. But sometime in the past few years she quit writing normal and started the whole walk-through thing.

(Well, OK, I also got sick of Scarpetta pining for Benton Wesley or Wesley Benton, or whatever her dreary mopey boyfriend's name is. Even emotionally-anesthetized psychiatrist Alex Delaware and his emotionally-unavailable eternal girlfriend Robin are functional compared to that pair. But I probably would've stayed with the series just because the plots are often interesting. I still read Kellerman's novels and no matter how much Robin irritates me, Kellerman never present-tenses his books.)

Present tense has ruined for me other books that I ordinarily would love. I like historical mysteries, lapped up Instance of the Fingerpost, which dragged for some people, heard about Crimson Petal and the White and couldn't wait to read it. Then I saw it was a walk-through. I put it back and moved on.

Why am I calling present-tense novels "walk-throughs"?. Because I think I have diagnosed the origin of this virus which is now running rampant through publishing. It's rooted -- just my opinion -- in gaming. Originally, in Dungeons & Dragons player manuals, then in guides for video gamers which include blow-by-blow "walk-throughs." Present-tense fiction is not a new invention, but it has mushroomed in the past few years, or so it seems to me. Something's up. I diagnose it as an attempt to sell fiction to gamers.

I never got into video games much, though I did find Need For Speed hysterically funny. But Larry did for awhile and I therefore have read enough game walk-throughs to see the similarity :

Enter the cave. Straight ahead, you see a door. Do not open it! Dick Cheney will shoot you! Look right. You see a freezer. Open the freezer and remove banded bundles of cash. Turn around and walk toward the curtained doorway in the far wall. Six trolls come through the curtain. Quickly throw blocks of frozen cash at them and escape up the silver ladder to your left.

Publishers may be seeking novels that they think may appeal to the gaming population. That's -- I grudgingly admit -- smart. Cultivating a market that's still going to have both pulses and disposable income in 40-50 years is smart business, and might even get more young people reading books.

Anyway, dislike of present tense fiction may be a peculiarity of my own, but it irritates the bejeezus out of me, and here it came again this week. I was ordering something for Larry and had a choice between paying postage, or adding another book to get the over-$25 free shipping. Yeah, I know, like I need more books. Well, anyway, I ran across Away, by Amy Bloom. It looked tailor-made for my taste; female protagonist on a journey through 1920's America. Raunchy, some reviewers warn, but I like dirty books I don't object to explicit passages when a novel has literary merit. Then I checked the text. Present tense.

Why this annoys me so much is kind of a mystery to me. 30 years ago Ordinary People really grabbed me, and that as-it-happens structure worked like a charm. But something changed. Now I want to be told what happened after it happens. First versus third person? Don't care, like 'em both. But the tense matters.

Do I like "knowing" that the events I'm reading about, fictitious though they are, are over before the author tells me about them? Do I find some feeling of security in that?

That's not it though. I can enjoy following an as-it-happens story if it's written in past tense. There must be a literary term for that. What I mean is, each passage is written as though it just happened, but as though the next one hasn't yet. Like this:

Chapter 4

Elizabeth walked into my office and threw a pie at me today.

Chapter 5

This morning Bingley told me that it was Elizabeth's parking space that I stole yesterday.

It really is the present tense itself that bugs me.

I'm going to order Away and give it a chance, but I still wish more reviewers would mention this tense thing while they're earnestly telling us what to expect if we buy this book. Not all books have enough searchable text to reveal it. Sheesh, doesn't everybody understand that if it's important to me then it's just plain important?

Book mending

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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Odd, for this time of year -- instead of the typical now-it's-here, now-it's-gone afternoon thunderstorm, we had a relatively cool, quiet day of steady rain. Good day to spend mending a few of the world's tatters by repairing books.

This is more a How I spent My Day post than an advice essay, but here's what I did, for what it's worth.

1. I repair a book only when I'm willing to destroy its value. Honest - if you even think it may have value, repair will most likely destroy that value. When in doubt, don't. Repair it only if you want to use it! I don't repair them if I plan to sell them. The ones I mended were only for me and others who asked.

2. The right paper and glue are a must. I go to the craft store and hit the scrapbooking section. This paper is designed to take glue without getting soggy, and it's acid-free, and you can get colors that approximate the various shades of vintage paper. You can also get acid-free glue, and it even comes in a bottle with a nice pinpoint tip. The wax paper is also a must.

3. If one little bit of the original connection is still hanging on, it's worthwhile to me to loosen it. I want to make a whole new hinge.

4. My method is to make a hinge by shingling a new piece under the free edge and then over the other, still-intact side.

5. This part is important and hard to describe: the new hinge needs to be tucked into the binding in a natural S-curve. Otherwise when I open the book after the glue dries, the paper "bridge" that spans the break will just split apart again. You can see this better on the 1912 bird book, its repair job illustrated below.

6. I place wax paper between the repair and the intact side, then close it to let the glue dry.

The last picture shows a wonderful bird book I repaired long ago. I add it because the color contrast of the paper shows the shingled hinge structure better.

Addendum: A comment already! 8~) and I need to add something:

The book I show the steps for, above, and this one also demonstrate that it doesn't matter much which direction the repair goes. If the better free end is on the inside cover (the demo book in the above photos) I use that and glue the hinge onto the free endpage. But if the free endpage edge gives me a better one, as it did in the bird book, I hinge under THAT one and glue it to the inside cover.

It's Chester A. Reed's Birds of Eastern North America. Doubleday, Page, 1912. Color on every page, and a bittersweet reminder of when the ivory-billed woodpecker was merely "rare."

Yep, I wanted to keep and handle this one, which is why I repaired it. It's a wonder I ever sell anything.

Undisciplined writing

[NOTE: This is a previously published entry, copied from my original blog.]
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Back when I was the Town Librarian, that apparently credentialed me as being knowledgeable about books (nothing could be less true) so the features editor asked me to write book reviews for the local paper. It wasn't usually much fun. The paper understandably wanted a focus on books of local or southern interest, whether they interested me or not. But once in awhile somebody would write, oh, say, a lesbian comic novel with a South Carolina setting. Cackling softly, I'd put it on my list.

I still had to write in a demure professional manner. And it was very valuable experience. I challenged myself to tighten and polish my prose to a point that would force the editor to print every word I turned in. I succeeded only occasionally (OK, like, twice, all right?!), but I felt triumphant when I did, and learned a lot about fine tuning my work.

But I always wanted to indulge in the total lack of self-discipline that I've found blogging. In later entries, I might investigate this issue more.

This is a review I wrote in 1991. You can blow up the picture and read the review if you like, but it's a basic, conventional review, written for the sensibilities of a community so concerned about Good Taste that a group made a formal complaint about the spine labels on the library books; they were not precisely aligned so that you could gaze down a row and see an even white line.

(Click if you'd like to enlarge)

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There are 3 things you can't do in a nice polite local paper feature. Well, probably more than 3, but I ran into 3 when I wrote this review.

1. You can't giggle like a 12-year-old over a dumb sex joke.
2. You can't digress at all, much less outrageously, and
3. you really shouldn't diss a classic too often. Choose your battles.

So because it's my blog and I'm no longer reigned in by an editor, here's what else I really wanted to say about The Revolution of Little Girls, by Blanche McCrary Boyd: This book had me literally sliding out of my chair with tears in my eyes, laughing.

Generally, it's a well-done fictional journey through reconnecting with buried memories of abuse. The funny passages that don't quite work are still not insensitive, just a little implausible, so the integrity of using humor in an abuse-memory plot remains intact. To take a comic approach to such a subject is risky and, remarkably, Boyd pulls it off and manages to be both moving and wickedly funny.

The episode that had me howling depicts the kids in the English class getting out of control, as the tension drains off following a confrontation between the teacher and another student. It all happens during a read-through of Our Town. So, OK, you'd maybe have to find Our Town as irritating as I do to find the passage so uproarious.

The novel's heroine, Ellen, forms a slightly obscene misinterpretation of a scene in Our Town. The scene in which Mrs. Gibbs bids her husband to come out to the garden and smell her heliotrope. Ellen collapses in hysterics. So did I.

Our Town is admittedly one skillful piece of work. You have to admire any writer who can take a view of both life and afterlife that makes Pet Sematary look warm and fuzzy, and snuggle it down into such a deceptively wholesome hometowny play that schools produce it on a regular basis. So when somebody like Boyd mocks it so well, I just kind of fall in love with her.

Anyway, I liked the book.