Brazil and DC and things

This is an intriguing collection of sketches that needs an editor. Your style is unabashed, the stories entertaining, the characters vivid, the chapters full of insights. I especially appreciate your Brazil tales, as I'm an expatriate American who lives in Rio and have authored a book on Brazilian music. But your staccato, sometimes telegraphic, prose needs to be tightened up, with gaps filled in, and there are a lot of typos and grammatical errors. And I'd also like to see more identification of the settings for your encounters and escapades. If you were to edit and polish this, you'd have a memorable travel-essay book on your hands.

Hi Richard,
I like the way you are describing your characters. The story is well written and easy to follow. The dialogues feel real. You have a lot of interesting characters in your story, all of them
colorful painted and realistic. Your language is full of humor and quite realistic too.
The book deserves a lot of readers.
I wish you good luck
Planet of Gold

Hi Richard.

Your protagonist has clever wit, which engages reader attention. Such as, his hope that the government employees make good money, his missing the bus. He doesn't hold back when describing people, always amuzing the reader by pointing out others' least flattering features. You constantly surprise the reader with sarcasm, for instance when your protagonist describes a book raved about and then states he hopes it will get better. Also when he is to translate technical information he doesn't understand. I worked for Siemens negotiating contracts for international utilities plants. Often times the purchasers did not speak English. You effectively convey the disorderly manner in which such relationships are handled. And it is quite humorous such significant documents can be finalized under such chaotic circumstances. And yes, the contant arguing over terms and conditions def nitely makes one reluctant to return to work the following day. Anyone who has worked for a large corporation will appreciate your humor and everyone who has had a job will appreicate your character.

On my shelf. Good luck.

Janet Marie - Spirit Prisoners.

Hi Richard This is an absolutely brilliant account of one man's personal voyage of discovery. I loved it!

Richard,

I just read through three chapters and I must say that this reads a bit like a documentary and I like documentaries. Real stuff; real life; real dialogue between real characters and thus a real story. I like it, I believed it as I read it and I put it on my shelf. I would only ask that when you read 'Semper-Fi" or another of my books that you would send me any comments or dialogue you might also have.

Kind Regards,

Keith G.

The narrative and narrator for that matter are both calming to read. For as I read I could feel myself relaxing into the lulling rhythm of your story. I think that part about the men wearing boiler uniform jumpers was a nice touch. How they talk saying Y'all and for sure. The way you describe in chapter 8 about there needing to be a non-snoring sections on planes and trains, that made me smile. There are subtle bits that are humorous and natural. Like life. Which i really appreciated. The characters are well developed and I liked this.

Wishing you the best.
Rachel May
Going Twice

Shelved.

Dear Richard,


Thank you very much indeed for your comments which are greatly appreciated. There are many faults with that manuscript which I am slowly trying to correct in a fifth rewrite. My biggest concern is episodic construction for which I have already been hammered and hesitant development of a shaky plot. Te-hee.

I have Brazil and DC and Things in front of me and have just placed your work on my bookshelf.

Nice to see non-fiction for a change. I smiled at the hours of work. Likewise here. People work six full days a week. And they work into the night too.

You write well and I’m certainly not going to say do this or do that. But you may be interested in publishers asking for non-fiction that reads like fiction and fiction that reads like non-fiction. I think I understand that in a strange sort of way.

The notes below relate to fiction and might be 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.

I liked this. I always think these are the most important sorts of books a person can write, because even if you don't get published (and 99% of us won't), you've always got what's effectively a family memoir.

From the point of view of its commercial value, it starts a little slowly, so you might want to think about bringing one of the more violent episodes in your career to the beginning just to hook the reader a little more effectively.

You've clearly met a lot of characters on your journeys. I chuckled at Melissa in chapter 2, trying to introduce the Brazilians to the notion of bringing liquor to her parties and failing miserably.

Although I think some of your sentences are a little overloaded and need chopping up a bit (this may be just personal preference, so ignore me if it doesn't ring true for you) Brazil and DC and Things definitely deserves higher than its current placing. Bookshelved.

Funny, yet sobering in it's reality. I'm hooked.