The Jetsam

Dear Lara
your book truly fascinates in content and style. a pleasure to read
backed

Dear , Since I have already backed & commented on your book, I will now put you on my watchlist to help your book advance more. Thank you for backing "He Loves Me." :) To help mine advance, would you please back & comment on my edited version? "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not." Ever so grateful, Susie :)

Dear Lara, I love history & biography That's where it's at! :) The spacing & wording at the opening of your book is fantastic. It is a good read because you create interest by having short paragraphs (you might want to cut the longer ones in two) which makes me want to keep reading to find out what's going to happen next. I'm BACKING/COMMENTING on your book to help advance it. :) PLEASE take a moment to BACK/COMMENT on my TWO Books, ... "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" ... and the UNEDITED version? ... "Tell Me True Love Stories"
Thanks, Susie :)

Superb. Backed.

From history to literature you have it all in this collection under the garment of your beautiful prose. Your comparison of Wilde and Cheklov is insightful. The style of the other articles are deserving of lengthier criticism. There definitely is something precious out here and I would love to see some more articles, as great as these. A little P.S: You could work with the paragraphing.

You, authoress, have my vote.

Efadul Huq

Hi Lara

I'll admit- I feel completely unqualified to crit this, your beautiful and in-depth writing. You tackle huge subjects with absolute verve. You have a wonderful sense of place and people.

Very well done.
All the best...and this goes on my shelf for a while.

Elaina

Hi Lara,
Well, this really appeals to me! I enjoyed every minute of reading. You have clearly researched well and this knowledge shows in your writing which is both careful and confident. I particularly like the story relating to Hadrian and Antinous and the possibilty you present regarding his death. This is the kind of work I like to keep around me so that I can dip in and out of it. You write well with attention to detail and a wealth of information which is presented in an appealing way. I will read on for sure when I can. In the meanwhile, on my shelf and good luck.
Bests,
AnnabelleP
(Adelaide Short)

Hi Janet. The story you’ve mentioned is only my view of the story of Hadrian and Antinous, one of its sequel. Fictionalized. But the next essays are much more historical texts, I assure you, they are related to Oscar Wilde, Chekhov, Nabokov, ancient writers and Antinous again. I am about to add more chapters as far as new essays are complete. Thank you for your time.

Hi Lara.

Holy ta-moley. You need to change your pitch because it does not do your work justice. I thought I was going to read a historical text with a few fictional characters, something nice. But then when you started talking about a simple illusion of our ancestors who nearly lost their subconsciousness I perked up. I meditate and I totally get it. And so do you! I reread lines of your peotry repeatedly, not because they were confusing to very deep and difficult to digest, but because they were on target. BEAUTIFUL. You verbalize man's inner knowledge which I thought was impossible. I thought there were no words to express the wisdom you roll onto your scroll. Then you sheft into narrative which I expected to change in style. But no. Your descriptions of the parting trees and the marble alter and the man on his knees lifting his head- oh no, not a murder scene. Shew! More beautiful profound stuff the likes of me isn't capable of verbalizing. Great return to your beautiful style- listening to his breath and sinking into your depth he sets off in search of truth again itll he gets exhausted and smiles bitter in the face of his dream. I felt sad. Bingo! Now everyone knows how to find happiness. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho without being translated.

Definitely on my shelf. Warmest regards.

Janet Marie, Spirit Prisoners.

Many many thanks Henrik. You know, I suspected I had some annoying errors in the texts (being too fascinated with the themes), and now, after your kind message, I hasten to edit my work according to your remark. Thank you for your priceless comment again. Hope to hear from you soon. --Lara

Having read two of the essays, I can see that you are a writer with carefully considered and original thoughts on important subjects.

You have obviously taken some trouble to explore the background of Antinous, and the strange and perplexing nature of his death. You highlight well the way that history is almost always partial, and the “implications” of deifying someone. However your theory that he was murdered I think has to remain just that.

“Homosexual Culture and Nabokov” tells me a lot about a famous writer whom I have never read and about whom I knew next to nothing. Yet more evidence of the homophobe as someone fleeing from something a bit too close to home. I also wonder though, given that Sergei appears to have been s “stereotype” in his behaviour and mannerism, whether it was that behaviour as much as his sexuality that would have worried Vladimir.

You make one or two rather sweeping statements, e.g. “All gay writers prefer a lonely individual as a main character.” – All gay writers? Well a lot, yes, which tends to reflect the way gay people have been isolated – and many “straight” writers have lonely characters in conflict. As gay people (at least in the west) become less isolated and less hidden, this is very likely to change. – Take Armistead Maupin, as just one example.

While the base of the writing is strong, there are also a lot of the small but telling mistakes that one tends to find in non-native English speakers, even very proficient ones.

Just a few examples:

“There are not proves to any theory” – there are no proofs for any of the theories
“The above evidence is scanty source” - the above evidence provides only a scanty source
“The Emperor’s sequent behaviour” – the Emperor’s subsequent behaviour
“his poems have not been survived” – “his poems have not survived”
”the man who I lover” – “the man who is my lover”

And, by definition, a 12 years old cannot be a “teenager”

Still there is much worth reading here. It’s worth getting a native English speaker to go through and correct this.

I am shelving it on the basis of the intellectual content.

We in the yahoogroup love Antinous:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ekklesia_antinoou/
As for my essay on him, it is a part of Volume 2 of my novel La Lune Blanche.
Thank you for your time.

Poor old Antinous.

This is all very esoteric. I find I am fascinated...you have an eclectic imagination. I have backed this, but god knows what you are going to do with it.

Poor old Antinous.

This is all very esoteric. I find I am fascinated...you have an eclectic imagination. I have backed this, but god knows what you are going to do with it.

Dear Lara,


Some beautiful writing here. Your essays and notes on literature The Jetsam are on my bookshelf. Nice work.

I found some of your long paragraphs daunting and would have preferred to receive them divided into smaller portions.

The notes below relate to fiction writing and I pass them on in the hope they are of interest.

Over the past five months I have spent three hundred hours providing page-long critiques but can no longer keep up with the volume.

So I’m trying another way of passing on information.

I will attempt to do better than critique your work by indicating how you might judge it yourself. Rather along the lines of give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish, feed him for life. You may or may not agree with everything and I admit I do not always stick to these thoughts either.

What I have set out below are guide-lines based on what I myself have learnt from being published.

The pitch is critically important as among the book-lists which editors scan, your pitch stands alone with no support from the synopsis. I write the synopsis first, because a key sentence there is usually appropriate for the pitch.

A synopsis is not a dust-jacket advertisement. Aimed at a professional editor, it is a no-nonsense summary of what happens in the novel, including how the novel ends. Don’t leave the editor dangling and don’t ask her questions. Tell her.

Somerset Maugham said, ‘There are three rules for writing a successful novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.’

Correct. There are no rules for creativity. Think of Richard Bach’s Jonathon Livingstone Seagull. So way out, so creative it was rejected over a hundred times. Then it became a best seller.

There is one criterion though……. entertainment. Our writing must entertain from the very first sentence. There is no other reason for story-telling whether around a camp fire or in print..

I have struggled nine years to write three novels. Each written three times. One published, one lying fallow, Fig Tree currently in the process of being rewritten for the fifth time. Two literary agents requested the full manuscript but threw it back at me for narrative story telling. So I am rewriting, converting narrative to dialogue.

Based on what has happened to me, these are my thoughts on what editors want from us…………….


Plunge directly into the story. Do not set the scene or back-story first. When we go to a play and the curtain rises, we don’t see stage hands putting the props in place. The stage is already set. Likewise our opening paragraphs to the reader, the actors should immediately get on with it.

I have found that our opening chapter isn’t necessarily the first one we write. It might only occur to us when the novel is completed.

Let our characters drive the story-telling via dialogue, interplay and direct action. It’s stupid (although I am guilty of this) to have a stage set and silent characters frozen, while an off-stage narrator bores the audience with what is supposed to be happening on the stage.

Write minimal words because research shows that our readers’ brains race ahead of our words, visualizing the scene themselves, anticipating how our sentences end…… four times faster than they are reading. They become bored and frustrated by our overwriting, over description, unnecessary information. (I have been hauled over the coals for this.)

Write tight, sparse, lean, stark, bare bones. Adjectives and adverbs are for people who need a crutch to support their unimaginative nouns and verbs. As far as possible, always seek the appropriate noun and verb.

(Read John Steinbeck’s field notes Journal of a Novel which he jotted down while he was writing East of Eden. He edited out as many adjectives and adverbs as possible, finding the appropriate noun or verb instead.)

And yet, in my rewrite I am horrified to find superfluous words, adjectives, adverbs and general waffling which I am getting rid of. I am embarrassed at my own work.

My vocabulary is poor, so I use Roget’s Thesaurus which is a treasure. A real work-horse and a delight to use. It’s a companion that provides thousands of alternative words. Appropriate nouns and verbs are there for the picking.

Don’t write your scenes. Live them. Experience them. Meditate. Daydream yourself into them Watch what is happening. Listen to what the characters are saying. Smell the sweat or the aroma or whatever. Touch what the characters are touching. What do you feel? Taste the bile, the coffee, or the skin of the lover.

All communication is made through our five senses. I wear earmuffs when I write, to help me leave this world, experience the emotions and the senses and disappear into another universe which is the scene I’m trying to paint.

Are we stirring the emotions of the reader? Feeling is critically important. This can be achieved through good dialogue. Speak your dialogue aloud to hear what it sounds like. Is it natural? Do people really speak like that? Is it too formal? In the real world, we often don’t speak complete sentences. So dialogue can be truncated too to make it more natural.

In my opinion a novel must generate its own momentum, so readers experience it rather than read it. This can be achieved by dreaming it, experiencing it, living it, rather than writing it.

To avoid clumsiness I edit out the past participle ‘had’. I change ‘he had done it’ to ‘he did it’ It seems to make the action more immediate and more relevant.

I also dump words ending in ‘-ly’……. seemingly, clearly, obviously. actually, strangely, finally, eventually………. and all the others. Somehow they weaken our writing and make it vague.

And I am finding that much of the dialogue reads better if the ‘he said, she said’ is deleted.

Taking words out of our sentences and taking sentences out of long narrative paragraphs, in my opinion, is the secret to better writing. I can easily cut my stuff between 20% and 50%.

I learnt this when a literary agent demanded I delete 40,000 words from my first novel of 120,000 words. I was shocked but I cut it back to 80,000 words and the novel was published.

Fig Tree has already shed 16,000 words and I am currently rewriting it for the fifth time, changing the dialogue, cutting the narrative and tightening the writing as much as possible. I might dump another 6,000 words.

You may be interested in The Video Inside Our Heads, which is part of a confession I made about my idiocies in attempting to write. See, ‘How I Wrote and Sold My First Novel’ in Forum’s Writing section. It’s quite insane and you’ll probably laugh at me but it did work and I suppose that’s what matters..

I trust this is better than a critique and provides a bit of food for thought..


Kind regards,



Pierre Van Rooyen.

The Little Girl in the Fig Tree.