fundamentals?

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Fundamentals

I’m going to go out on a limb here.

It seems to me that if you’re going to write a story, the concept of setting characters in a physical place and having them interact is so completely fundamental it goes without saying. In fact, it is so self evident, having someone point out to a reader that in this story characters are set in a physical place and interact is actually insulting to the intelligence of everyone involved.

Nevertheless …

In a recent edition of the Winnipeg Free Press book column, a section was devoted to short blurbs on books coming out this fall. One of the blurbs tries to sell the novel involved by stating unequivocally that the author:

“takes four characters in various stages of their lives and brings them to a spacial and emotional intersection in the city in which they all live.”

And nothing more.

Gussy it up however you like, all that sentence says is that the novelist writes a book where she sets characters together in a physical place and they interact. And just in case you didn’t catch every nuance of the concept, the blurb makes certain you understand that this space is actually where the characters happen to live.

Wow! Do I ever want to read that! How revolutionary! To be so utterly and uncompromisingly self evident! And not worry about minor annoyances like, oh I don’t know, plot, theme, tension, specific circumstance, whatever.

I will be generous to the author here and assume she has no choice over how her novel is being publicized. We’ll assume there is more to her book than what’s being promoted. There must be! But still …

Far from being enticed to purchase this book by that blurb, I want to avoid it like the plague. It seems like the snootiest of approaches to making a sale. Like, we can tell these rubes anything if we make it sound pretentious and they’ll buy it. And why bother reading the book ahead of time to find out what it might really be about when we’ve got such a flushbrained turn of phrase ready to make it sell merely working from a natural assumption concerning the fundamentals of writing any story?

If this is what works in Canadian Literature today, obviously I’ve been approaching marketing my own material all wrong, when I’ve been sending queries out to publishers and agents.

For example, for Reality Fiction One, I sent out this description of the book:

A struggling Author acts on a vivid inspiration to self promote his unpublished works. Using the sure fire format of the popular Reality Television Elimination Show he product places his characters in a literary application of the same style – forty characters vying in thirty writing genres with the last character remaining to star in the author’s next novel.

However, the forty characters unexpectedly carry over conflicts and issues from their previous books, while unanticipated relationships blossom between personalities from different books who would never have met outside of this Contest.

Finally, the entire enterprise – and some of the characters’ lives – are placed in peril when an unnamed Antagonist arises whose unfathomable goal is to prevent the Contest from ever naming a winner.

What I should have written was something like this:

The author takes unique and sometimes repeating black marks and brings them to a combinational and significatory intersection on one page after another until implication and intention emerge.

After all, you don’t want to confuse people by implying you might actually have written something. They’d never know how to market it!

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REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Chapter Three of The Twitchy Gal posted on Monday, with Chapter Four coming on Friday, August 22nd at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Tish wakes up.