His longing for the a glimpse of the world outside the lab/facility/farm where he lives underground, is so real and so pathetic (and I mean that in the good way—he’s pathetic and he makes me sympathetic). If you felt for poor Harry Potter, living under the stairs, and getting a broken hanger and a pair of his uncle’s old socks for his birthday, consider poor Martyr, who has never seen the sky.

And he’s such a nice boy.

Martyr, the star of Jill Williamson’s Replication, lives in a horrible place, full of lies and hopeless boys and sadistic “doctors” doing things that ought not be done to human beings.

The horrible place is inside of a wonderful place—Alaska. Jason Farms could have been right near the house I lived in for twenty years, in the Matanuska Susitna Valley. Knowing how beautiful Alaska is made it harder for me to think of Martyr, buried underground and unable to see the sky.

This book delves into what it means to be human by looking at a new kind of slave—clones.

Strengths? Martyr was adorable. His personality was adorable, his voice was adorable, and his need for love was adorable. (I do love the orphan boys.) The look at cloning from a Christian perspective was great. The use of a clone allowed Williamson to preach the gospel without coming across as too preachy. I mean, the clone had never heard about sin or about Jesus, so it was no stretch to have the Christians spell the gospel out for him.

Weaknesses? I think the book felt a tad preachy simply because some of the adults were not as smart as they should have been—they were not three-dimensional characters. As lovely as the main characters were, the secondary characters were a little thin. I also thought the ending was rushed.

The strengths far outweigh the weaknesses and I’m glad I read this one. I am watching for Williamson’s next offering.

I’ve been thinking more about description. Or, more specifically, settings that are described well.

In thinking back over the books I loved when I was a kid, I think I may have to say it was the magical places those books took me, that grabbed me. So, I think I have to go with Characters are important–if I didn’t love the characters, I wouldn’t want to travel with them, but what I remember most was setting.

Settings don’t have to be fantastical—I loved Narnia, but I also loved Treasure Island. Or Island Stallion–did anyone read that? It was my favorite stallion book because I loved the secret hideaway on the island. I loved Anne’s PE Island. I loved Laura’s little houses whether they were in the big woods or in the bank of Plum Creek or out on the prairie.

I have always said that character was most important to me, because the characters in the books I loved felt real to me. I loved them and I wanted them to succeed. And I wished I could sit down with them and talk. I wished I could go on adventures with them.

But now I begin to think that setting is what first draws people in and setting is what sticks with people years later. I remember Narnia better than the kings and queens of Narnia. I remember Miri’s mountain world better than I remember Miri.

I think Anne had a personality that was bigger than her place and Heidi was bigger than the mountain she lived on, but I’m not sure I can think of any other characters that I remember better than the worlds in which they lived.

What about you? Which settings do you remember best? Which characters are more memorable than their settings?

It’s good for the soul to get away from the computer every now and again.

But here I am, back again, with a burning need to rant write. I’m currently reading a book that is so frustrating.

It’s a wonderful story with a heroine I love. She’s on a great adventure. And this is exactly the kind of story I love. Strong heroine, coping with unfair circumstances, all alone, on an adventure trying to survive. There is romance coming, I’m pretty sure. There is so much I love about this book.

And yet, I’m struggling to get through it. I keep falling asleep. Now, granted, I’ve been sick and I’m falling asleep on everything I read. But I find it telling that I’ll be reading along, into the book, loving it, and  then…I hit a patch of description. And my eyes glaze over.

There are several small, irritating things that should have been edited out. But those I can ignore. What gets me are the patches of description that I’m pretty sure were edited in. I suspect these sections were added in after the book was written, because they don’t fit the flow of the story. I’m reading along and the sentences are varied and interesting and the story is flowing, and then the character will enter a room and all action will stop while the narrator tells us what the room looks like. The narrator sees every room in about five sentences all with the same structure. So these patches of description look like this:

The floor was covered with a thick purple rug. There were three windows in the left wall. The back wall had a fireplace. A table was in the middle of the room. Chairs were around the table.

OK so what am I whining about? Five short sentences. This method of description is quick and effective, I suppose. I know what the room looks like. But when you have these short descriptions dropped in every time you enter a new room and every time a new character comes on the scene, it gets old pretty fast. It’s one thing to stop on the top of a mountain and take time to drink in the view. It’s quite another thing to stop in the middle of the story action, to remark on all the furniture in every. Single. Room. You. Enter.

We do need the author to paint the scene, but we don’t need authors to stop the action while they describe people and rooms. It takes longer to describe a room in the midst of the action, and it feels counter-intuitive. It feels like the added words will slow the book down. But just the opposite is true, I think.

Brian opened the door and surveyed the room. The first thing he noticed was the thick, dark purple rug. Why was he not surprised? It matched Lucretia’s brooding personality. On the far side of the room a fire burned in the grate, the flames greedily licking the bottom of a cast iron pot. On the table in the middle of the room, Brian found a hot pad, and he used it to pick up the pot. No telling what evil brew the old woman was cooking up. Maybe it was harmless, but why take chances? He crossed to the windows in the west wall and drew back the curtains, letting the morning sun flood in. Then he cranked open one sash and dumped the contents of the pot onto the bushes below.

OK. Much longer. But you are discovering what the room looks like without bringing the story to a screeching halt. And you are getting some clues about Brian, and about the person who lives in the room besides. You’re getting a lot more than simple, straight description.

What do you think? I realize that taste comes into play here. Obviously the person who edited the book I’m reading, likes to have rooms and people described right away. What about you? Do you like the longer version or the shorter? Or is there a third option?

I posted on Novel Rocket, today, comparing the way Collins got her message across in The Hunger Games to the way the point came across in the movie October Baby.

I loved October Baby. Really loved it. I am going to take my children to it and I encourage everyone to see it. And yet, I posted on Novel Rocket, saying that a couple of the scenes were preachy.

I want to talk a little more about that here.

Spoilers follow.

There were two scenes that stand out as preachy. One is when Hannah, the nineteen-year-old main character who has found out she was adopted and, worse, that she was born alive after a botched abortion, goes to a cathedral and talks to a priest. Another preachy scene is when she meets with a nurse that was present at her birth.

I used to think that as long as the preaching came through the mouth of a character, and not the author, it would work. If the character was saying something that he would naturally say—if he wasn’t coerced to preach for the author—then the message wouldn’t sound preachy.

I see now, that this is not the case.

The priest told Hannah that she needed to forgive her birth mother, which is exactly what a priest would say. It still didn’t work, because the priest was not part of her life. She’d never been to the Cathedral. The explanation about why she was going there, was not strong enough. I was left believing that she went to meet the priest, because the writer wanted her to go get the sermon.

And the nurse? She defended her actions. Which is what a nurse in real life would have probably done. She told Hannah she didn’t know what she was doing when she participated in abortions. She was told that the babies were just a mass of tissue. She was told the babies weren’t alive. But then she saw the baby born and she didn’t see a mass of tissue. She saw life. She never participated in another abortion. In fact she left nursing completely.

I have no doubt that many nurses bought into the “it’s nothing more than a tumor” argument that was offered back in the seventies and eighties. I can see a nurse who has changed her mind about abortion wanting to explain why she worked in an abortion clinic.

And yet the scene was preachy, because this movie was about the aborted girl, not about the nurse. If I’m Hannah, I’m wanting to know what the procedure was, and how I lived through it. But Hannah asks nothing about the abortion. She just sits while the nurse tells about how she learned that the baby was not a tumor.

It’s not enough to have a character say what her real-life counterpart would say, then. We have to break up the long monologues. We have to have one character accuse and another character defend. We have to never lose sight of what the main character wants. She has to drive the scene rather than sitting passively while others give messages to the audience using tired arguments which may be true but are too familiar to have any positive impact.

I’m not saying this to diss the movie. I loved the movie. The acting was good. The romance was sweet. The adoptive parents and the birth mother were believable. The priest and the nurse were good, even as they delivered preachy lines.

I’m only looking at this because of what we can learn about writing. Whether we’re preaching a pro-abortion message or a pro-life message doesn’t matter, if we don’t want to be preachy we have to consider these things.

Don’t go with the cliché. Don’t have the priest give the forgiveness talk. What if the girl who hated Hannah had given the forgiveness talk? What if she would have screamed something that was meant to make Hannah hate her birth mother and instead it made Hannah forgive?

Don’t give in to the temptation to have one character telling another character something even though the characters would do that in real life. Fiction isn’t real life. We didn’t need the “forgiveness” talk or the “mass of tissue” talk. Really. There wasn’t a person in that audience who didn’t get that Hannah was more than a mass of tissue. And none of us thought she could go on living without forgiving.

One thing the producers said in the after-credits interviews was that they wanted to be sensitive to post-abortive women.

I can understand them wanting to do that, but any time you put a limit on yourself—I have to make sure this doesn’t offend my mother, my minister, my mailman, or  my post-abortive neighbor—you are probably going to hurt your story. I have no desire to be mean to post-abortive women—I am a post-abortive woman, for crying out loud. But this movie was about a girl who had been aborted and lived. If the writers had been concerned with Hannah and not with the post-abortive women or the nurses, the characters might have screamed and hit each other and there might have been healing in the end.

Or not.

Either way, the viewer would have benefited.

Healing is great—if it’s earned.

The healing between the father and daughter felt earned to me. Hannah’s forgiveness of her post-abortive mother…a little less so. In a way it was an anti-climax. I wondered if the writers, trying to avoid a huge, melodramatic, preachy, syrupy scene, chose to do away with the confrontation between the two. I can’t say it was a horrible choice. I don’t know how one would resolve such a hard thing any more satisfactorily in a short movie.

I’m going to be chewing this over, though. Because I’m a writer—I can’t read or view any story without doing some dissection. Sorry.

October Baby is a good, good movie, over all. Really. Go see it.

When you’re good enough to publish traditionally. That’s the short answer.

But it seems that a lot of people don’t like that short answer. Why, you ask?

My answer may surprise you.  Even I’m a little shocked to hear myself, the biggest conference junkie around, say that I think writers’ conferences are partly to blame for some of the bad books being self-published.

This is on my mind because I’ve been reading over the posts in which Mike Duran and Wendy Lawton have been fielding comments from self-published writers who feel marginalized by people who work within the traditional publishing model. If you want to go scrap, head over to those posts.

I’m not against self-publishing. I may self-publish someday, myself. I have friends who have self published or who are going to self-publish and I’m behind them all the way—confident that they are making the right call. There are some people who can self-publish well.

But the majority? Not so much. The majority of self-published books make a gigantic slush pile, the likes of which the world has never seen before.

Why is it that so many people think that if they want to write, that means they should publish books whether they are any good or not? Many people want to play pro-ball but how many do what Vince Papale did? Or how many others start their own leagues, saying, “Screw you,” to the pro coaches who have passed them by?

How many people flunked out of medical school and went on to start their own indie surgery services?

What is the deal with writing that makes people think they should be published even when all the professionals have told them they aren’t good enough?

This is where I think writers’ conferences have to shoulder some of the blame.

At conferences, we hear over and over and over that we should persevere. Talented people dropped out and weren’t published, while people with lesser talents persevered and were published.

This is true. In the world of writing, Vince Papales abound. Why is that? Because you can keep on working on your writing into your forties, fifties, sixties and on and on. Ball players have to give up at a certain age. Writers can keep working and working and working until they are finally good enough to find a publisher.

This message used to work for conferences. Keep working. Don’t give up. It was good for the conferences, because writers kept coming back to learn and to meet editors and agents. It was good for the writers because they kept working. It was good for publishers because they got to pick from people who were committed and hardworking.

In this changing publishing world, though, no one has to wait or attend a conference. Anyone can publish. It costs very little and with a little work you can put together a nice looking product.

What happens to the message that says we need to persevere, then? Published authors say, “I was rejected sixty times and I went on to sell a million copies, so persevere,” and unpublished writers hear, “I was rejected sixty times and I went on to sell a million copies, so self-publish.”

Here’s my question: How many times did the writer tweak the manuscript as the rejections rolled in? Was the story he finally published and sold a million times over, the same story he first submitted ten years earlier?

Persevere means persevere. It doesn’t mean self-publish.

If you’re ready, you may self-publish or go with a small press, or go with a NY house. It doesn’t matter who you publish with as much as it matters that you persevere long enough to become a really good writer.

This is not a battle between self-publishing and traditional publishing. It is a battle between people putting out books before they’re ready and people biding their time, putting in blood and sweat and prayer into the crafting part before they jump into the marketing part.

Some people publish at the age of sixteen. Others don’t publish until they’re eighty. Some people publish after writing for a year. Others take twenty years to learn. It’s not about a set time to persevere. It’s about persevering for as long as it takes you to be ready.

Most self-published books are put out by people who have not persevered and who are not ready. That’s the truth. So I think conference speakers should tweak their message a bit, and say, “If you self-publish you need to hire an editor who doesn’t love you and who won’t go easy on you because you’re paying the bills, and you need to make sure you listen to your editor and don’t ignore half of what she tells you because you’re the boss. And if you self-publish be sure to hire a great design team that knows about book covers and layout. And don’t think you know more than the design team.”

Most writers are blind to the flaws in their work, just as parents are blind to flaws in their babies. If you want to self-publish, hire professionals and listen to them.

I’m not saying people shouldn’t self publish. I’m saying most don’t do it well. I don’t think that point is debatable.