Talking About Detective Fiction by P. D. James

Talking About Detective Fiction
by P. D. James
Knopf, 2009
198 pages

When I was growing up, my mother had a shelf full of P.D. James. I used to take the books down and look at them, fascinated by the highly stylized and candy-coloured blood drops on the covers. I particularly liked Shroud for a Nightingale and Cover Her Face, if I recall correctly. Later on I read Cover Her Face, and enjoyed it quite a lot, though I haven't picked up anything else by her since. I can't say why.

But at night now, with smallfry being Very Awake because she prefers sleeping in to going to bed early (she is a child after her parents' own hearts) fishy and I have started reading to each other. And as we're both interested in reading and writing, and both fans of mysteries, P.D. James' Talking About Detective Fiction seemed like a great place to go. fishy had already read it once, but he was doing some thinking about detective stories and wanted to read it again anyways.

Really, one couldn't ask for a better, more well-informed and well-read overview of the genre. James has the additional advantage of a long life lived; for example, she was reading the Golden Age detective novels as they came out, long before she thought to write a mystery of her own. This book isn't what I would call a guide, exactly, though she certainly has recommendations and in-depth discussions about some of the key works and players in detective fiction over the years. It goes approximately chronologically from Wilkie Collins to the Golden Age to modern detective fiction, does a bit of a side-trip through the American hardboiled sub-genre and spends a good chunk of time talking about the four grand ladies of the Golden Age (Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, and Christie), offering personal notes and observations on the genre as well as the observations of other critics and writers, and observations on literature and writing in general.

What makes this book great as opposed to just good and interesting is James' writing. She has a wonderful, distinct style, somewhat chatty but always impeccable, and she also has a very dry sense of humour that sneaks its way into the writing. As we were reading to each other, every once in a while one of us would laugh out loud. It's not always an easy book to read aloud; some of her sentence structures are a little convoluted, such that you'd start reading a sentence and it would turn out to be something completely different and by the end you'd have lost where you were supposed to put the emphasis... but generally the writing is clear and smart. It gives me high hopes for Death Comes to Pemberley, which I am quite looking forward to reading at some point in the future -- my favourite Austen characters couldn't be in better hands.

It doesn't hurt to have one of the grand masters of the genre take you for a bit of a tour of the last hundred and fifty years; P.D. James knows her stuff, has read a lot of books, and is cheerfully opinionated about the topic. As a librarian, I know that mystery is one of the most enduring and popular genres on the shelves, and James gives a pretty good argument as to why this is and should be the case. All in all, I'd recommend this little volume to anyone interested in detective or crime fiction, or anyone interested in literature in general even if you're not (or don't think you are) a fan of detective novels. Particularly recommended for people who work with the reading public and can't figure out why mysteries are so popular; this book will give you a direct line to why.

Your Hate Mail will be Graded by John Scalzi

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

by John Scalzi

Tor Books, 2010

368 pages

I have to admit: I have never read any of John Scalzi's fiction. I keep meaning to get to Old Man's War, but you know how that goes. And yet, I am a huge fan of his blog, Whatever, and so it was kind of a no-brainer for me to pick up this book, a collection of archival Whatever entries, when I noticed it in the local bookstore. See, the thing is, there's a lot of great material in the Whatever archives, but I only started reading in 2009 and I'm not about to go back all the way to 1998 to see what I missed. So I thoroughly enjoyed having someone pull out the best of Whatever and plunk it in a book for me to read.

I think the ideal place for this book, and this is not an insult, would be the bathroom. (Ironic, as I know Scalzi does some work for the Uncle John series of readers, too, heh). The entries are generally no more than two or three pages long, and range in topic from political, to parenting, to writing, to financial, to clones, to cheese. Perfect lengths for bathroom reading, and rarely the same thing twice. Also, they can be read in any and all orders -- there is absolutely no order to the entries, as they're not arranged chronologically nor topically. So you can read the last one without feeling like you've missed anything.

There can be trouble in assuming that what one writes on a blog will translate well into a book. I think part of the success here is that Scalzi is interesting. He's got big opinions, he thinks about things thoroughly, and he doesn't just discuss the minutiae. But what makes Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded work is that not only is Scalzi interesting, he can write. He can write really, really well. Well enough that a book full of his blog entries don't start to feel repetitive or samey.

The entries are often informative, and always entertaining, even when I don't agree with everything Scalzi says. That said, I seem to agree with the vast portion of it, which perhaps makes me an ideal reader for this book. I could see his style grating a bit on people who don't agree with what he says, especially, but that's quite deliberate. The current tagline for Whatever is "Taunting the Tauntable since 1998." His style can be hyperbolic, his metaphors can be vulgar (not in a bad way, to my mind), his sense of humour is always pointed and very sarcastic, his arguments somewhat steam-roller-like. But the metaphors, if unexpected, are always apt, and the arguments he makes are exceedingly well-reasoned. And I laughed out loud and often while reading this.

I wouldn't recommend this for a straight read-through, if just because it starts to be a lot. It would be like spending a full day just reading blog entries; your brain goes numb after a while. As above, it's less likely to go numb with Scalzi at the helm than it would be with many other bloggers out there (I include myself in this; most of us aren't award-winning authors). For someone who is having trouble committing to an entire narrative, this is the perfect pick-it-up-put-it-down read. It had me giggling, it had me thinking, and it had me thoroughly engaged. The best part about it? Reading Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded, like reading Whatever, makes me have some hope for humanity, if there are people like Scalzi out there thinking and writing and being alive in this world.

Write Away by Elizabeth George

I have never liked it when a blurb says "This book will change your life!" because a) do you know me? and b) no it won't. I mean, there are some books that do have an emotional or intellectual impact on a person, I am not saying that they can't, but the book, in and of itself, isn't going to change anything. It is going to sit there and be a book. Take the agency away from the book and put it where it belongs.

All of this said... it is possible that I am going to change my life a little in response to Elizabeth George's Write Away. I had a pretty major mental shift while I was reading this book, puzzling over what George writes and thinking about how it applies to the way I think and feel about writing. It got me excited about writing fiction, but it also really hit home for me that what I have been doing thus far, as far as writing, is barely even a hobby. A hobby implies that there is some sort of structure, some sort of goal. My writing to this point has been entirely, completely for fun and escape.

And let me say too, I have no qualms about that. It's a perfectly good reason to write, and I will continue to do that. Where the problem lies is this: I have always nursed the secret desire to actually write a novel. (Note: I say secret. Not so secret anymore, I guess; even writing that sentence was a little squirm-inducing.) Publishable or not, I have wanted to write a novel. I've written for NaNoWriMo, and I've even finished a few things (that's a big step in and of itself.) But what I have been considering as my writing up to this point is really never, ever going to come close to reaching something that is recognizable as a novel. Part of what this book has done for me is set it out in plain English: if I really want to write in any serious way, I've got to get serious about writing.

George says that there are three components of writing that are unteachable: art, passion, and discipline. (We'll discuss discipline in a moment, shall we?) And then there is the foundation skills, the craft of writing, which George argues is entirely teachable. She puts it this way: someone had to teach J.S. Bach how to read and write music. He wouldn't have become the composer he was if he didn't have the foundation of craft to build upon. So why should writing be treated any differently? The thing is, I believe I can put words together in a compelling way, when I'm on my game. I love doing it. I love getting the idea, I love meeting new characters in my head and letting them play in the sandbox that is my writing. I think, if I get serious, I can even pull out the discipline (which, incidentally, I do think is teachable -- I think I can train myself to glue myself to my seat and do what is necessary to actually produce; NaNoWriMo has taught me that). But I am missing, in many ways, the craft. I have never paid enough attention to craft as being important. So when I did decide that I should think seriously about writing, I floundered. Flailed, even. I drowned in bad habits and a complete lack of understanding of what writing, professionally, actually is. I have read about writing before -- how to write, what writing is, writing prompts, autobiographies of writers. But nothing has fired me up the way this book has.

But enough about me. Following are some of the most important things I liked about Write Away.

George is both adamant that writing craft can be taught, and emphatic that not everyone learns, teaches, or writes the same way. She provides examples of her process, and that of others to contrast it -- and there's no saying which one is "best" -- just what is best for her. She of course spends more time on her theories and processes, but one never gets the impression that she does that because she thinks its best, but because it's what she knows best.

At the beginning of every chapter she includes a paragraph from her various "Journals of a Novel." She does one for each novel she writes, and these paragraphs made a big impression on me. It's really fascinating to get just a tiny bit of insight into some of her insecurities and thoughts, as well as some of the things she says to cheer herself up and keep herself going.

In the first part of the book, she talks a lot about writing well -- an overview, essentially, of what makes a good novel. In the process she exposes some things about reading that I think are fundamental, but good to note. On character, for example, which is the very first thing she talks about, making it explicit that she believes developing good characters is the key to writing a good novel:

What we take away from our reading of a good novel mainly is the memory of character. This is because events -- both in real life and in fiction -- take on greater meaning once we know the people who are involved in them.

On choosing and creating setting:

One piece of advice that neophyte writers are always given is "write about your own backyard." Loosely translated this means to write about an environment with which you are familiar. Broadly translated it means write what you know.

To this I say balderdash.

YES! I've always wanted to write fantasy, which is bloody hard to consider my own physical backyard -- least the kind of fantasy I want to write. And I had teachers in public and high school who actively discouraged that sort of thing in creative writing using the "write what you know" maxim which is, to this day, a freaking monkey on my back. I should say I don't think they were being deliberately anti-fantasy, since they encouraged my fantasy and sci-fi reading inclinations. But taking "write what you know" literally (meaning: people like me, in places where I live, doing things I understand from personal experience) is an insidious little doubt-inducing habit and I hate it. In the above context, George goes on to say in this section that it's best to write about a place that excites you, whether that's a physically real place or a place in your head. She has a very high opinion of Herbert's world-building in Dune, for example.

On process, which was one of the paragraphs that induced some mental shifting:

Every writer has to develop her own process: what works for her time and time again. Having no process is like having no craft. It leaves you dangling out there over the abyss, a potential victim of writers' block. Having no process puts you at enormous risk because writing becomes a threat instead of a joy, something that you are terrified to begin each day because you are at the mercy of a Muse that you do not understand how to beckon.

Overall, if you like to write, or want to write, or think you might want to write someday, I recommend this book. I recommend it for readers, too, who want to know what goes into writing fiction. She really humanizes authors. Some of the things she talks about are quite basic, but in my case, I needed that. I have no illusions: this book will not change my life. But I might just attempt some changes for myself because of it.