READING BOOKS CREATE NOVEL IDEAS

Reading books are a lifeline to another time.

Not everyone gets it; not everyone thinks they need a lifeline.

I don’t start reading a book with that in mind, but when I finish a good one it feels like the writer tossed me a line.

That’s the good news.

I’m of the mind that berating a book is a bad idea.

If I don’t like it I don’t leave a one star review.

I finished a book recently, an award winning story about a young mom.

The blurbs all celebrated the universal truths, the uncovered mysteries. I was an immediate fan.

Until the last chapter.

As things progressed I was expecting a breakthrough at the end.

The whole story was set up for a revelation and I looked forward to it.

I slow read it to make it last as long as I could, not to prolong my eventual disappointment.

The disappointment came when the first person narrator stepped aside and the writer became the character in the memory of the narrator.

It felt like one of those, “And I woke up from my dream,” endings.

I felt cheated, like the writing took a short-cut instead of finding a better path for the big finish.

And it deserved a big finish, a big wrap, instead of jumping from one interior monologue to another.

Maybe I should have guessed something was up with all the sex, drugs, and rock and roll.

How does that turn into a happy ending at twenty-seven?

Or any age?

If a dead person is a central character in a first person narrative, don’t turn the narrator into the dead person at the end.

That’s all I’m asking.

 

Asking For Less

My wife bought me a book for Father’s Day.

We do things like that.

I bought her the book I wrote about above for Mother’s Day.

We buy books we want to read and give them to each other as presents.

Sometimes we read them.

The one she bought me is on the fence. Here’s why:

It’s got six pages of blurbs, fifty of them.

Blurb:

 

As the persuasive summary of any book, film, or creative work, a blurb is a short promotional description.

Blurbs typically appear on the back cover of printed books and are intended to encourage readers to buy into the book.

 

Fifty blurbs is over-kill, over-selling, and putting me off.

They run from obscure newspapers expanding their reach, to obscure writers promoting their work disguised as a blurb.

All I’m doing is looking for a good read, not a good sales job.

It’s like putting up the No Knock sign on your gate and opening the door to an exterminator already into his pitch.

I opened the book to a random page. This I do because you ought to be able to get a feel for an author on every page.

The page I read included a paragraph on how taxing, how difficult, how inhumanly hard it is to produce a piece of writing every day for a set period of time like a week, a month, half a year, a year.

When a blogger like me reads that we appreciate how true it is, and how whiny.

Logging in with over 3700 posts does that.

The math works out to just better than ten years.

What does ten years of blogging feel like?

 

Expressing Feelings Is Good

This is Johnny Cash expressing something and doing a great job of it.

A lot of his songs have a similar feeling to them.

I don’t write with the bird in mind, or prison, or dying drunk in a ditch like Ira Hayes.

That’s Johnny’s lane.

I saw him live at the Oregon State Fair in 1987.

My wife was a big pregnant lady at the time and ready to go home, but I convinced her to stay for Johnny.

We stood beside a section of bleachers as the show started and June Carter Cash made fun of ‘Old Golden Throat.’

Two ladies in their fifties wearing panty hose, hot pants, and high heel shoes sat near where we stood.

We were in our early thirties, like thirty-one and thirty-two.

They scooted over and invited the pregnant lady to take a seat.

For the next hour and half we heard what big fans of Johnny they were.

They loved him with a fierce devotion and dressed up special for every show.

If I had to guess I’d say they knew their way around Nashville once upon a time.

If not, they’d still fit in with the country music version of rock fans.

When you open a book you hope to find characters like Johnny Cash working things out.

Opening a blog carries the same anticipation with: Please don’t waste my time.

I’m an open book in the beginning, ready and willing to believe everything.

Readers like me, a typical well-read baby boomer, don’t like amateur hour character-shifting that doesn’t serve the story.

We don’t like the hard-sell, over-blurbed, introduction to what feels like an agent-driven project of an essay a day compilation.

Am I saying I wouldn’t do the same thing with the same offer? Damn right I would.

But only two pages of blurbs, maybe three.

The work needs to stand on its own, so let it instead of propping it up.

I’ll still read it, but the start has problems.