Using Goodreads to learn from bestsellers

This evening, I had a consultation with a young author, who'd asked for feedback on his novella in progress, a kind of bildungsroman in which a Boston boy tries to figure out how to be a man. Good pacing, realistic dialogue; not bad, all told!

I did encourage him to work on tuning his prose style, making it more specifically his own -- to shake off the generic. The narrative and the characters all work, but now the sentences need to be recognizably his.

I had the idea of calling up examples from some recent best-sellers, to show him how three authors who aren't trying to turn verbal somersaults nonetheless create effects that belong distinctly to the genre they're working in. For a touch of poetic flair, I told him -- look at Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See. For a clear trade fiction style with a hint of noir, Paula Hawkins' The Girl on the Train. And finally, for a kind of unabashed sentimentality, Jojo Moyes, Me Before You.

Here's a trick of the trade, if you want to learn from the prose style of best-selling books that you don't happen to have on your shelf at this morning. Go to the Goodreads pages for each of the books you're interested in. There, you'll find there a compilation of reader-favorited excerpts.

Thanks to Goodreads, I was able to source a quick list of exemplary sentences for my author friend. I sent him away not just with recommendations that he check those three books out, but with a typed sheet of illustrative examples that he can readily look over and learn from as he prepares to go over his own book manuscript for an extra polish.

- ZB

Regarding lit mag submissions and prior publication

(Annals of an Editor, #75)

This weekend I was at a reading for a group of plein air poets whose work had been gathered together for yet another chapbook by editor Susan Richmond. The poets had been invited to visit the orchards and sculpture gardens of Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Mass., where each of them selected a spot to stand or sit, and in that moment take in the landscape, as a painter does when capturing a scene in the moment. The poems produced in response were each in accordance with this year’s theme: “memoir.”

(At the reading, many people said it was a perfect day for poetry, commenting on the bright sunshine, on the late summer gold in the air. I rather felt that this was a terrible day for poetry… A day suitable for a picnic, or sitting beside the beach, is not a good day for a poem. Snowy days, foggy days, thunderstorm days—any day you have to stay inside, that’s a good day for poetry reading.)

After the reading, we two dozen poets and sixty-something guests mingled on the grass beside the mill pond and ate canapés and drank lemonade while we chatted. More than once, I was asked about our new publication, Hawk & Whippoorwill. Or rather, not a new publication, but one renewed, for H&W was first published in the 60s, edited by August Derleth of Arkham House; and then again in a “new series”, edited by a group of Boston-based writers, about a decade ago. This latest revival is therefore the third life for the magazine.

Given that the order of the day at Old Frog Pond Farm was plein air poetry, it was natural enough that people wanted to talk about the new Hawk & Whippoorwill, the focus of which is poems “of humanity and nature.” It turns out that my call for submissions had been circulating among this crowd, and more than one person there had already submitted. And here is where I get to the point of today’s post.

More than one poet expressed concern that they had committed a faux pas by submitting material that has previously appeared somewhere, be it a blog, chapbook, or even, in one case, as a spoken word performance on the radio.

Here’s what I told them: They should not have patience, as I do not have patience, with publications that give a damn about prior appearances.