Category: Reviews

My thoughts on something I read, watched, or experienced.

Catching Up on Reading as I Drive

~ Scott W. Baker ~ Leave a comment

Often I hear of urban dwellers using commute time to do their reading: on a train, bus, or subway.  I drive.  There aren’t a lot of options here.  But I still like to spend that time catching up on good books.  Thank heavens for audio books. Let’s face it, listening to a book is not the same as reading it.  It’s a close second, though, particularly an unabridged version.  It can, however, reveal some of your favorite authors’ faults the same way that reading your own work out loud can reveal flaws in your stories.

I have listened to the first five Harry Potter books on tape or disc, though it’s been years.  I wanted to reread them but couldn’t justify the time away from my perpetually growing reading list that I already neglect far too much.  A coworker had the HP audios and I borrowed one.  The performance by Jim Dale is awesome.  His voices are great and his delivery is spot on for the wizarding world.  I consider his performance the industry standard.  If you haven’t heard him, get one of those books and listen.  If I find other books he reads, I may get them just for his voice.  Of course I haven’t gone looking…yet.

More recently I listened to K-PAX by Gene Brewer.  If you’ve seen the movie, you got the gist of the story.  There were differences, but the movie was well done, as was the book.  The novel’s style lends itself well to audio performance.  It was no Jim Dale, but it was good.

nextAt the same time I purchased K-PAX, I bought Michael Crichton’s Next.  Both were in a discount bin at the local bookstore.  I guess I’m about halfway through it.  I’ve never really read Crichton.  I hope his other books are better.  Considering that every version of Next (hardcover, paperback, and audio) were marked way down, I assume it is a sub-par example of his work. It’s extra tough as an audiobook; I keep wanting to flip around to make sure I know which character he’s talking about.  It took five of the thirteen or so discs to get to the main plot.  I’ll keep this example in mind as I write my own novels.

I also bought a book off iTunes, intending to listen on my iPod but it found its home on my school computer.  The book is Dune.  Yes, I am a SF heretic that has never read Frank Herbert’s classic of classics.  I have good reason.  I had a college roommate who watched three different movies EVERY night as he fell asleep: Dune, Waterworld, or The Muppet Movie.  Muppet nights always led to better dreams.  What was more, I married a woman addicted to the David Lynch film.  Just looking at the title sent images of Brad Dourif and Sting.  It was a borderline phobia.

Classic and 100% Sting free.
Classic and 100% Sting free.

Anyway, the audiobook was a safer approach for me.  The book is (obviously) much better than the film, though the movie does color many of my mental images.  I’m glad I’m “reading” it this way.  Numerous voices lend their talent to the presentation.  I just absorb a chapter or two while I grade tests or homework during my planning period.  It’s nice, relaxing, efficient.

I love audio performances.  The new Amazon Kindle 2 reportedly has an automated “read aloud” option.  Not the same.  I don’t know that I could take more than a page of robo-speak.  Reviews I have seen call the Kindle’s vocal technique “serviceable”.  I’m looking for a voice that adds to the telling, not detracts.  Still, as a writer (even one far from audio contracts), I am concerned  what the auto-read will do to audiobook rights.  Will licensing a book to Kindle reduce the value of the audio rights?  Infringe upon previous rights?  There is a fair amount of discussion out there already about this, most writers groups preferring Amazon include an option to block the audio feature.  Sounds like n inexpensive solution to me, especially if it causes problems with the Kindle acquiring key authors.  Maybe Oprah could get behind the writers’ initiative.  Anyway, I love audiobooks and would hate to see anything inhibit their continued production.

-Oso

Good for reading, but do you want it reading to you?
Good for reading, but do you want it reading to you?

Writing Books

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 3 Comments

I wanted to run through a list of the top ten books I use/have used to learn to write. I have no formal training to write, never took a creative writing class, didn’t even take my comp classes in college (exempt by ACT score). I took the basic English classes in high school. A lot of what I know came from reading fiction, but I have used a fair number of books for writers to hone my craft and a lot of trial and error. So here they are in roughly the order they proved helpful (1 being helpful when I was a beginner, 10 being helpful today).

  1. How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy (Card): This really helps put the genre in perspective.  I like to reread this one for inspiration, but it was priceless when I got started.  Anything by Card is fantastic.  (Need a good fiction read with great characters?  Try Ender’s Game.)
  2. Get through the slush pile.
    Get through the slush pile.
    The First Five Pages (Lukeman): So many of my stories had trouble getting started.  This book helped me figure out what to look for and how to fix it.  Lukeman’s follow-up book, The Plot Thickens, was far less useful to me, more a guide on how to build a story from the ground up.  It’s got its place, but First Five is an excellent guide to getting editors to read the story rather than skim and reject.
  3. The 38 Most Common Fiction Writing Mistakes (Bickham): I confess, when I first read this book, my stories were guilty of about ten.  It’s a good guide for training your eye what to look for when revising.  I still like to flip through the list every few months just to remind myself what to look for.  You don’t have to avoid every mistake, you just need to know when you break a rule.
  4. Harbrace College Handbook (Hodges): This is the collegiate bible for grammar and punctuation usage.  It doesn’t matter much what year your Harbrace was written since rules in fiction writing aren’t set in stone.  Again, it’s nice to know what convention is (or was) if you intend to break it.
    5. Find the best word.
    Find the best word.
  5. Flip Dictionary (Kipfer): It serves basically the same function as a Thesaurus but includes a lot of phrases and/or concepts related to a word.  For instance, you want to know what you call the referee in a baseball game.  You can look up either “referee” or “baseball” and get to “umpire”.  It’s also handy for finding words related to words related to something.  The “Flip” in the title refers more to how you’ll flip through the pages than having the definitions and words flipped around (although that description works, too).
  6. Self Editing for Fiction Writers (Browne & King): This is similar to 38…Mistakes but goes a lot deeper into the parts of the story, looking at larger pieces and more subtle adjustments like tone and voice.  The sections on dialogue are quite good, as is most of the advice in the book.  I reread this recently to fish out some of the concepts that might still be eluding me.
  7. Creating Short Fiction (Knight): Damon Knight knew what he was doing.  His knowledge has guided many writers to professionalism.  Not me yet, but it’s got me going a good direction.  This is an especially good book for dealing with writer’s block or with stories that just won’t come out right (consult Fred).  A lot of the information in this book is also in Kate Wilhelm’s Storyteller, which focusesa lot on the Clarion workshop, too.
  8. Writing the Breakout Novel (Maass): Eventually I had to ask myself why my stuff isn’t selling when I see a lot of junk out there that does.  I came up with two reasons: connections and X-factor.  I have found no book for establishing connections, but this book tries to take some of the mystery out of the X-factor that can make even schlock sell.  Maass, a big time literary agent, makes that X-factor something you can plan and work toward.  It’s still hard to know if I’ve got it, but it gets you moving that way.  (I think I’m around the V-factor right now.)
  9. charviewElements of Writing Fiction Series (Card, Kress, Noble, Bickham, and others): I cheated a bit here.  I had trouble selecting one book from this series, so I put the whole thing.  I found Character and Viewpoint very useful early on while Beginnings, Middles, and Ends was a bit more advanced and Plot fell pretty well in the middle.  Each book in the series was good, though Description was a little to poetic for my taste.
  10. Paragons (Wilson, ed.): This is a book of short stories by masters, each story followed by an essay by the author regarding how they achieved whatever the story was renowned for (characters, plot, tone, etc.)  I have had this book a long time and have not yet begun to use it effectively.  It was published as a masterclass to follow Clarion.  There’s a lot of skill and subtlety outlined in this book and I intend to read through it again as soon as I remember to bring it home from school.

There are a lot of other books I have used.  Many of them repeat the same information that the above books spell out better.  Some just plain sucked.  It is worth noting that I have never used or read The Elements of Style (Strunk and White) which is a renowned tool for all writers.  I think it does a lot of what I use Harbrace for.  The bottom line for me is whichever books are readable and offer advice that improves your writing (directly or indirectly) is a good book.  I hope this list might help some beginners (and non-beginners) find resources improve their craft and might inspire some discussion on other books I might have missed.

-Oso