The home of fiction author Val Gryphin…

One of the books I read for this semester was the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Wow, I loved this book. Michael Chabon not only told a great story, but the amount of research he did on the history of comics, and then working it so well into the story was amazing. I love comics and it was so fascinating to read. There was one drawback that I found however, and that that was the way he foreshadowed the end of the story in the beginning – but didn’t follow it all the way though.
The very first page of the book with a snapshot description of comic book author Sam Clay in his later years, talking about what inspired him as a young man to turn towards comic book writing. Because of this setup, the main part of the story starts in flashback and moves on through Sam’s and his partner Joe Kavalier’s lives. But, by the end of the book, the reader is not returned to the beginning; instead it stops many years short. Because of this, the reader is left feeling like the story is unfinished because the expectation introduced in the beginning, of seeing Sam in his later years, is never fulfilled.

The first paragraph of the novel gives a clear image of Sam Clay in his later years, talking about his youth. Chabon uses the escape artist Houdini as an object to move the reader though the narration. The second paragraph uses Houdini as a mechanism to move into Sam’s childhood, and then through the first fifteen years of his life. Finally the third paragraph moves from the narrative summery that Chabon used until that point into a scene. While this works to draw the reader into the meat of the story, he also sets up the expectation that at some point the reader will be returned to the same time point they started at.

Chabon ends the story however with Clay leaving both his comic partner Joe, and Rosa, who was Sam’s wife and the mother of Joe’s son, behind in order to go to Los Angeles to find himself. Even without the way the beginning was set up this is a somewhat unsatisfying ending, as I really wanted to find out just a little bit of what happened to Sam, although a form resolution is hinted at. But because of the setup at the beginning of the book, the ending is completely unsatisfactory. Sam is heading out in his own direction, seeming to leave the comic book world and the people he is closest to. Yet, the scene in very beginning of the book seems to give a snapshot of a time much later then where the book stops. The beginning alludes to “later years,” when Sam talked to “aging comic book fans,” at places like “WonderCon or Angoulême”. This suggests that Sam was again very involved in the comic world at that point, but the ending offers no sort of connection between that beginning and where it leaves off.

Chabon wrote such a wonderful novel that kept me engaged all of the way to the end. The problem is though that even a well-written novel needs to be a complete narration. Without the foreshadowing beginning and the final ending being tied together the novel still feels slightly unfinished. When a story is started at a time point that is further along in the timeline the rest of the book, the reader needs to be tied into that beginning point by the end or they will feel like it is a broken circle.

Kiss of the Spider Woman by Manuel Puig. First published 1976.

I first found Kiss of the Spider Woman when we watched the film based on the novel in an undergrad world literature class. I then read the screenplay, and then the novel, backwards of my usual routine – I usually read the book first and then criticize the movie when I see it! The book was written by Manuel Puig, and it tells story of two prisoners in a South American prison, Molina and Valentin. (The movie is set in Brazil, but the book doesn’t say what country it is set in and Puig was an Argentinean who lived through brutal political struggles.) In the story, Molina has been sentenced to eight years for homosexual corruption of a minor, and Valentin is a political prisoner whom the warden is attempting to force information from. Although in the beginning of the story Molina is an unwilling informant for the warden, he slowly falls in love with Valentin and begins to protect him.

The book itself is told exclusively through dialogue, forgoing even basic dialogue tags. With the exception of the last two chapters and three short conversations Molina has with the Warden, the dialogue is exclusively between these two men. At first the lack of dialogue tags was disconcerting to me as a reader, as I am used to not only being told who is speaking, but also what is going on around the characters. Puig sucked me into his method of story telling however, by starting the book with Molina telling Valentin about a movie he loved, rather than jumping into the two men’s stories.Although I didn’t expect the whole book to be told in this conversational manor, this informal beginning allowed me to become used to the style. By the third scene the personalities of the two men were becoming quite clear, and when at the start of the second chapter the movie wasn’t even mentioned until a few pages in I didn’t feel thrown off at all.

The main reason that this novel succeeded, rather than ending up a spectacular flop, is that although there are no dialogue tags, each time a new speaker starts his words are preceded by a dash. This gives the reader a visual cue that a new speaker has started, so once I grew used to it, I had no problem following the conversation. Puig was extremely consistent in his format. He further clarified the conversations, as whenever there was a spot where the reader would expect the other man to respond, but he doesn’t, Puig marks this with the dash, followed by three ellipses, as -…  to symbolize the man’s silence.

In spite of the mechanics of the book, the story itself would not have succeeded had Puig not mastered writing dialogue. Puig had to be absolutely natural with the conversations to make them not only sound real, but to convey a lot of information in a natural way. Puig also had to be well aware of the fact that he could easily loose his readers in the constant dialogue, so he made sure that each of the protagonists’ characters were distinct. Molina is emotional and tends to see much of the world through rose-colored glasses, while Valentin refuses to try and see anything other than the brutal truth he perceives. Because they are so three-dimensional to start off with, the shifts that their personalities under go are totally believable.

It is a challenge to carry off just a short story told solely in dialogue, and I was really impressed to see how Puig pulled off for a novel-length piece. I am awed by Puig’s skill, and I have recommended this book as a study to writers who were struggling with writing dialogue.

Duotrope’s Digest

Over the years of submitting, I have accumulated a decent stack of rejection letters. Being the scattered, left-brained person that I am, keeping track of which magazine has which story out to them at any given point in time can be hard however, particularly when some markets take months to reply, or alternatively, when a market is very quick to reply and I then send the piece back out again. Or when a story has gone out to a bunch of different markets, I need to know where not to send it again!

In the beginning I just kept my growing stack of rejection letters close by so that I could see where a story had been to. Obviously that didn’t work well for me for long, so over the years I tried a number of different things, from typing up a list of what went where, to making an excel spreadsheet. At once point I had a little program that I liked, only to loose it when my hard drive fried. I have tested several other programs that tracked both submissions and markets, but while some of them had a decent setup, the markets change often, and the programs went out of date quickly. In addition to tracking my submissions, my list of bookmarks to markets was very long and unorganized, and I have Writer’s Markets dating back to the 90’s on my shelves.

Finally I came across Duotrope’s Digest. And this site seriously rocks. They bust butt to keep their markets updated, and keep abreast of who’s open, who’s dead, and who’s closed. They add new markets all the time, and their free submission tracker had been a godsend to me. I’ve been using it for almost exactly a year, and it has made tracking my submissions so smooth. For instance, right now I have 5 pieces out, 2 from last February (I’ve already followed up on one – still under consideration – and am about to on the other), one that is 161 days, one that is 51 days, and one that is 1 day. Along with 22 rejections, and an acceptance. Gotta love the numbers game.

Their only down side is that they don’t give me a way to track any markets who don’t have their guidelines online. While I’d like to be able to track all of my submissions through Duotrope’s , I can easily keep track of those few off-line ones by separately marking down their submissions, and keeping a paper copy of their guidelines in a file. However, this rarely comes up as almost everyone is online these days, and so this site is like magic to me. Their research and submission tracking power is awesome, and it was well worth it to me to donate to keep them running.