bookfraud

Ever see this card trick, available at a Website near you?

You may have been alerted to it by an e-mail forwarded from your uncle’s best friend’s sister’s dogsitter’s third cousin. (It’s been floating around for years.) Simply pick one of the cards below:

Concentrate on that card. Really hard! Don’t look at anything else for 15 minutes! Then click to a new screen, and viola! Your card has disappeared!

Of course, the card you picked disappeared because all the cards have disappeared. Though they resemble each other, the cards on each screen are different. The trick is predicated on the fact that you can’t remember all the cards from the first screen to the second, because you weren’t paying attention. Showing all the cards on one screen makes it obvious.

When I lined up the cards next to each other, as above, and, remembering how this trick fooled me, I thought, “I shouldn’t have put lead paint chips on my baloney sandwiches growing up, even though the chips gave it that pure crunchy goodness.”

While people pay copious sums to Ricky Jay and Penn and Teller to dazzle them, for absent-minded folks like myself, this attention deficit disorder can be a killer in the fiction game.

When we are writing fiction — really in a groove, riding that caffeinated buzz or just high on life — our attention is so sharply focused that we could cut a frozen steak with it.

If only I could keep that going. I get up to pace. I get interrupted by a phone call. I need to eat something. And so on.

Perhaps more importantly, we are constantly reminded as writers to read fiction for more than entertainment: examine the structure, characterization, symbolism, and language. Learn from Moby-Dick rather than simply enjoying it, though most people enjoy getting their thumb staple-gunned to a wall than reading Moby-Dick.

Future novelists

Wife is particularly good at this kind of reading, because she has reservoirs of discipline that never welled up in me, much less evaporated over the years. For instance, when we’re discussing books we’ve both read, wife will say something like, “The narrative voice in Ragtime is unlike anything else, and the plotting remarkable, in how the connective tissue of the historical characters all fit perfectly.

“And Doctorow can get away with so much because he has the perfect voice — the prose just flows off the page. I’ve learned so much from that book that I can use in my own writing.”

“Yes, I agree” I say, thinking, “Well, I know I liked it.”

I can blame this propensity on my abject, dissolute inability to concentrate on anything for more than six minutes, which in turn I can blame on being brought up on the television farm. I can hum the theme song from “The Price Is Right,” but I can’t verbalize what I learned from reading “Invisible Man,” one of my favorite books, other than “In order to be a great writer like Ralph Ellison, you have to write really, really great.”

(It’s unclear to me what would have happened had I been born in the era before television, particularly in the 19th Century. Ignoring the fact that I would have been a peasant in The Pale, I may have been more focused. There was no “Price Is Right.” Hell, there was no radio. All you did for fun was push a hoop with a stick, study Torah, and hide in the basement during Monday Night Pogrom.)

I have a sorry history of wanting to quit something if I can’t do it right the first time. That’s why I don’t play guitar, speak French, juggle four balls, or bother to put the cap on the toothpaste.

I don’t know art, but I know what I like

I am curious if there are others who write fiction yet do not consciously “study” novels or stories, or who have microscopic attention spans. Do you also burn everything you cook? Miss the plot twists in a movie? Have gotten into three (3) or more automobile accidents when you were driving?

Admittedly, I’ve been in three accidents when I was behind the wheel, but only two were my fault. Nobody was hurt. And one happened when I was 18, so it doesn’t count. Right?

Dear Bookfraud: My agent has run out of publishers to send my novel. I’m afraid that if I rewrite and try with a new agent, the editors will recognize my book and won’t bother to read it. But I don’t to change agents. What should I do?
—I Want to Be Published

Dear And I Want to Play Centerfield for the Cubs: Take the book, burn it, and do the same with your computer. Then quit your job, move to another town, and go into witness protection. It’s the only way.

Dear Bookfraud: Help! I keep switching the voice from first to third person in my book. What should I do?
—Really Confused!

Dear Hearing Voices: Most people would say you should pick one and stick with it. But why don’t you do something different? Combine the two, and go to fourth person. Or maybe you can also add the second-person plural with the first-person singular, and you can write it in the seventh person.

Deer Boofraud: Im in a MF.A program near NYxity. In workshop everybodytells me; my novel about a dairy farmer and his lover in Spottsville, Wis. I’m going to take a tripthere next month!) set in the 1930:s is “grate (workshop really are a nurtring, caring warm p;lace) and the only criticizms are minr, like my spelling an stuff. But when I send to agents they say,

But my teachrs and class friends loves it. What amI doing rong!?
—helpme!

Dear MF.A student: You’re writing.

Dear Bookfraud: The first stories I ever wrote were published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review, and I have several offers to publish my first novel. But I’m 22, and still confused about what to do next. Should I take the one-book deal for $450,000, or the two-book deal at $800,000? Also, how do I deal with all the attention? I do readings all over the country, and women are all over me!
—Young and Successful

Dear Mr. Big: You should take the two-book deal, shag all the gals you can, and get all the attention you deserve!

Too bad your first novel will bomb, you won’t be able to finish the second, the publisher will take your advance back, and you will catch a variety of sexually transmitted diseases that will result in oozing green pustules on your genitalia.

Bad idea? I dunno

Dear Bookfraud: As the head of a literary agency and blogger, I get dozens of queries and e-mail a day. I have to hand off many of these to my Harvard-educated assistant, who is young but, like me, has impeccable taste. But when word got out about my assistant, many of my readers were upset — shocked, even. What can I tell them to calm them down?
—Miss Agent

Dear Agent Provocateur: Of course, you’re swamped and you need help. But you didn’t need to advertise it. You’ve crossed the Rubicon and your readers want blood. Fire your Harvard-educated assistant, read my book, and get me a serious advance like the dickweed 22-year old.

Dear Bookfraud: My 900-page debut novel, Killing Hearts, Killing Minds, was published to great acclaim. I came in third at the 1977 Toronto Book Fair contest, and I received teaching gigs at several community colleges as a result. But I haven’t published anything in the last 30 years. I really need your help.
—Unknown Genius

Dear Literary Einstein: Lay off sauce and stop banging 19-year-old community college students. Then you’d have time to write.

Also, destroy all copies of Killing Hearts, Killing Minds. You’ll then have focus to write something new.

Dear Bookfraud: I am the editor of a literary magazine with a peculiar problem. All my submissions these days are subpar! But I can’t tell this to our readers, who expect the best fiction in North America. I’m really stuck.

—Highbrow Literary Editor

Dear Sucky Submissions: You rejected me three times, you heartless bastard. Meanwhile, you run stories that read like they were barfed out by a U.N. subcommittee on malaria. Your readers know this and you are going to be out of business in two days.

Yes

Dear Bookfraud: Recently, I bought a white iPod 5G 60GB. What music should I put on it?

Podmiester: If you’d gotten the black iPod, I could help you, but I don’t know how the white one works.

Send any and all questions to bookfraud@yahoo.com. Due to the volume of mail we receive, we cannot guarantee we can answer all of your queries, but we do have a Harvard-educated assistant who will read them first.

Unsurprising to anyone who knows me, there have been times when I feel the urge to kill someone. Not to the point of actually doing it, of course, though with my neighbors, I’ve come close.

You may wonder just what it is about the couple upstairs (and the two ill-tempered brat-monsters they call “children”) that makes me want to toss them into Mount St. Helens. Without getting into too much detail, they are rude, selfish, loud, insane, and utterly unconcerned about the welfare of anyone else in the apartment building in which Wife and I reside.

If it isn’t clear, I despise these loathsome excuses for humanity, and that makes me want to kill them. I’m sure you know the feeling.

But what about killing those you love? If you write fiction, your answer is, Been there, done that.

A recent article in a reputable publication chronicled the inability of a prominent author to kill off his characters, even those who should be 293 years old. Being that I have had similar struggles — and, as I streamline my novel and remove sections with as much delicacy as a farmhand wielding a scythe — I wonder how much difficulty other writers have with this, even the really good ones. (Especially the really good ones.)

Rinse and repeat

The old writing saw about “giving away your children” is sadly true. Writers tend to fall in love with sections of their work that really has no business being in a particular piece. This is true for both scenes and characters. The reasoning is that because it entertains us, the writers, it’s got to be good, no?

When you have to cut out something that is well-written, it’s like admitting to your partner that she was right about any domestic matter. Humiliating, yes, but necessary to keep the peace.

For instance, there was one scene in my novel that chronicled a meeting between the teen-age narrator and his (much older) tormentor, taking place at the latter’s house, a faux-Graceland, complete with gates and jungle room. The older man was a professional wrestler who had graduated magna cum laude from Yale and had one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary Jesus art.

I have to admit: the scene had real drama, snappy dialog, and (dare I say it) some evocative writing. The house is rendered in fine detail, and the characters are full and flawed. The scene just rocks, in my humble opinion.

So of course, I had to nuke it, because the scene had absolutely nothing to do with the story. Ostensibly a plot device, this meeting turned out to be a nice set piece to show off my chops and nothing more. It was hard to pull the trigger, but I had to rid myself of about 2,000 words that were pretty durn good.

If you write fiction long enough, you will end up offing more characters than a serial killer. I know of one writer who doesn’t rewrite — a brilliant talent, to be sure — who simply starts from scratch when a story isn’t working out. Us mere mortals can’t indulge in such luxuries. We revise and revise and revise (and sometimes, it still sucks).

More killing needed

I’ve ruined perfectly good short stories with extraneous crap, which to some might be the natural inclination of a novelist, but to others, the indication of a someone who just can’t edit for shit.

What characters or scenes have you had to trash from your fiction? Or, better yet, what novels did you wish had trashed a few characters and scenes? I’ll start off with “Anna Karenina,” chock full of so much lard that it resembles the vat at a rendering plant, and let you take it from there.

If you want to rant about your asshole neighbors, that’s cool, too.

Dear Mr. President:

Wow, I’ve never written a letter to the president before! Not to Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter, or even Nixon, who I thought could have avoided that whole impeachment thing if he’d just gotten a dye job. Congressmen prefer blondes!

Ha, ha, just kidding. Seriously, Mr. President, I usually don’t write letters to politicians, and I usually waste my time pretending to write fiction and, in my blog, writing about pretending to write fiction.

But when I saw you on television, saying that we needed “alternative means” of interrogating terrorists, I just had to send you a note. Of course you were right that we need torture to fight terrorists, just like you’ve been correct about everything else in this war!

You were really mad at those senators who oppose your plan, even though they’re Repubs and they served in the military. They seem to think that torturing people is inhumane, violates international law, and puts our soldiers at risk. They trotted out some legal mumbo-jumbo about how confessions and evidence gotten through torture shouldn’t be introduced in court. Then they said something about hurting innocent people (what’s a few thousand ruined innocent lives in a war?).

Hey, just because John McCain was being tortured in Vietnam while you were doing bong hits in the National Guard doesn’t make him right and you wrong!

Dick hearts

But I’ve got an idea. If we need to do stuff like “waterboard” prisoners at Guantanamo and send them off to police state nations where they get wires attached to their sacs, we really need to think about bringing those torture jobs back to the good old U.S.A. instead of having Syrians and Marines in Cuba do the work.

We don’t need to outsource torture! Think of all the jobs you could generate by setting up Torture U.S.A.! centers across the country! Millions of underpaid, underworked Americans can quit their boring jobs and live out their dreams as federal employees! And the franchising rights would generate billions in dollars to pay for more tax cuts for the needy rich.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. All those liberal types worried about “civil rites” will say, “As much as I like to spend taxpayers’ money, there’s not enough Arabs to torture. Even if you wanted, you couldn’t fill up Torture U.S.A.! centers to make them work.”

Here’s where my plan really shines. It’s a truism that that everybody has a secret. Nobody really knows if that secret is important or not to fight Osama. But those are the types of secrets — like where I really go out when I tell Wife I’m getting some milk and I return three days later with lipstick on my collar, smelling like cheap perfume — that people are only going to reveal under extreme durress.

So, doesn’t it make sense that every American man, woman, and child should get tortured? Torture U.S.A.! centers can get this information out of them, even when they don’t realize they have it! Every patriotic American will line up to have their fingernails torn off and their heads dunked in water to help fight the evildoers!

If someone doesn’t ask to be tortured, they obviously have something to hide. And you can only get that out of them through torturing them!

I know what your critics say: that you are power-mad, that you are using the “war on terror” to gain unchecked power, and that if you and your team weren’t a bunch of incompetent bozos, you wouldn’t need to resort to torture, eavesdropping on Americans, or denying the right of the accused to see evidence against them.

Pretend to listen and ignore them, just like you’ve always done!

Think about it! You could torture all of your tormentors in Congress, Michael Moore, and that band that does the “My Humps” song. Not to mention someone dressed up like Kim Jong Il.

We don’t, but he does

Also, I heard that the vice president gets turned on by torture, so you would giving the old man some serious boners — without Viagra! That should help cut the Medicare deficit!

I know my plan is so great, that you, Dick, and Rummy will want to be the first to be tortured! You will spill any secrets that imperil national security. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t volunteer.

After all, what do you have to hide?

Yours,

Bookfraud

Anyone can be nice, but sincerity is a gift.

I discovered this many years ago when I was a single. Too introverted to be the pick-up artist yet too horny not to try, I discovered a fool-proof method to start conversations with ladies: ask about their shoes.

I commented to a lady on the bus about her pink suede loafers, and got her phone number. I got a date when a woman spotted me staring at her shiny green heels. “Sorry, not to be rude,” I said, “but I couldn’t help but notice your shoes. They’re really cool.”

This comment was able to complete three objectives without coming off as craven. First, I got a response — always. Second, I was able to flatter them; noticing the shoes shows one’s attention to detail. Third, I got a boner. I mean telephone number.

And if I didn’t get phone numbers from all these women, I was able to gain their interest. But there was a caveat: I had to mean it. I really had to think they had cool shoes. Women can spot false flattery a mile away, at least in those of us who are not sociopaths.

If I were to ask some comely lass about her Nikes, she would think, “That pathetic horndog.” Or she would just say it. Wife certainly does.

You could also say that sincerity — footwear related or not — is an attractive feature in a man, because it shows genuine interest in the other person. You don’t have to fake it.

My pitiful advice on skirt-chasing is not without a lesson in the realm of writing, that activity for which millions of loyal readers tune in to this space twice weekly. Sincerity is one of the hardest thing for me to convey in my writing, and at its worst, characters come off as plot devices or stand-ins for emotion or symbols.

Nice shoe, babe

You have have sincerity in your characters to make them whole, to make them believable. Readers can smell half-assed attempts at sincerity better than that really, really, beautiful redhead who nearly slapped me on the “L” when I said I thought her shoes were interesting. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have called them “fuck me pumps.”)

One of the main characters in my novel, the narrator’s maternal grandfather, is a brilliant, deceitful, manic, petty, and downright evil tyrant who also happens to be one of the world’s greatest cotton traders and a bowling aficionado, the intersection of which fuels much of the book’s plot. My agent loves this character, who he calls “almost Biblical” (I took it as a compliment).

The easy part of the old codger are his tics and madness; with a few strokes, one can illustrate the grandfather’s insanity. You show him having a breakdown, or committing a particularly cruel act upon his issue, or paying retail for that suit that my Uncle Izzy on the Lower East Side could have gotten him for wholesale! It’s crazy to pay retail!

But the hard part, the stuff that makes me crazy, is creating a character sincere enough to be believable. The best characters have lives completely divorced from the page, independent of the person creating them. They laugh, they cry, they eat Sphincter McNuggets and spend long hours in the bathroom, etc. And that requires showing complete sides to characters, their good and bad, their tender and mean, their generous and avaricious.

You don’t have to be a lit major to understand what I’m talking about when I say that it’s about making characters three-dimensional. The classic example of a writer accused of “two-dimensional” characterization is Charles Dickens, though I would cut off my right one to write a book like “Great Expectations,” even if Magwitch and Miss Havisham are as flat as a coffee filter.

Writing outrageous characters is easy; writing complex ones is hard.

Worth a nut

I think that’s why you get dull, artless prose a la Raymond Carver or supercharged rocket fuel from someone like T. C. Boyle. Staking a middle ground means amping up the volume while keeping it below a level that will blow out the eardrums.

One of the few writing teachers I actually respect said to love all of your characters, even the ones readers hate. Which means I could never write a character based on myself.

Now I have to go back and write my latest effort, about a megamanical movie star belonging to a cult whose recent marriage produced a baby unseen by the world. Don’t say I lack imagination.

Also, I hope that every horndog who Googled “how to pick up women” and landed here appreciates what I’ve done for them. I feel bad for you. After all, if you rely upon Bookfraud for pick up tips, you must be a wee bit desperate.

My vacation is sadly over, but I will not tell you of soaring mountain peaks, turquoise lakes, and waterfalls that appeared around every corner (though Wife’s pictures work well, in any case).

No, I want to tell you what I learned. But unlike the scenery in Canada’s Banff National Park, not all of it is pretty.

I learned many things, and not just that the Canadian Rockies has the world’s only triple-continental divide or that Alberta has the highest concentration of dinosaur bones on the planet. No, I learned more. Much more.

Lessons about life. About myself. And I’m going to share those lessons today.

Too bad for you.

•Recreational Vehicles are the bane of human existence. They inhale gas, pollute like mad, and, like elephants or teenagers, travel in packs, gumming up the road for miles.

However, I have a solution. A modest proposal, a la Swift. All RVs and their owners worldwide should be required to drive their vehicles into a giant crater. Once inside, the crater will be covered in dirt and hundreds of thermonuclear weapons will be detonated inside.

Evil incarnate

•Tangential to this, I learned that RV rental has become a popular way to tour the country. “CruiseAmerica” and other such outfits will rent a monster vehicle to anyone, apparently without any idea if these people are actually able to drive. Such folk seem to have a magical propensity to swerve while still going 20 miles per hour under the speed limit. They also seem to have particular trouble with turning, backing up, parking, stopping, and accelerating.

•I discovered that even in the midst of immense beauty, I am total curmudgeon.

Lake Louise — and not a postcard

•I missed writing fiction about as much as I missed George Bush, Brittney Spears, and cranial surgery. Yet upon my return, I felt an urgent need to write once again, along with voting Republican.

•On the other hand, I missed blogging about as much as I missed haircuts, steak, and movies starring Julia Roberts, which means I might have enjoyed doing so, but didn’t feel like I was missing anything. Yet upon my return, I started blogging once again. Because I am compulsive, see? Another thing that I’ve learned.

Drumheller’s Greatest Hit

•Alberta is one of the weirdest places on the planet. Mountains on one side, prairies on the other. We went to the flat, badlands-scarred Dinosaur Provincial Park and (the mountainous) Banff National Park on the same vacation. We saw the The World’s Biggest Dinosaur, in Drumheller, Alberta. It was the greatest moment of my life.

•Caught unprepared, Wife and I were captured and tried by Food Court at O’Hare airport, and were sentenced to several nauseating meals.

From this…

•Any discriminatory feelings I had towards groups of Japanese tourists were erased. It turns out that all tourists who travel in packs, no matter their country of origin, are obnoxious idiots. Americans, Canadians, Germans, British, French, French-Canadians, Chinese, Brazilians, Congolese, Israelis, Russians, it doesn’t matter. Get a group of them on a tour bus and they forget that the Great Outdoors is not a place to scream, litter, or complain loudly about the price of the skillet dinners at the Old Country Buffet.

•I could not bring myself to read fiction, as I waited in airports or rested in our hotel. Instead, I found myself engrossed in a book about Fermat’s Last Theorem, a volume previously owned by my late father, a man who loved mathematics and the mountains, who happened to honeymoon in the American Rockies. Now I’m reading another of my father’s books, also about math. I wonder what’s going on there.

…to this, all in one trip

•I learned I have tremendous self-control. In the Calgary airport, Wife and I saw Henry Winkler at our gate. I suppressed every fiber in my being and did not walk up to Mr. Winkler, thumbs up, and scream, “It’s the Fonz! Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

•The planet is screwed. We went to a glacier on the Columbia Icefield, a glacier that is melting due to global warming, and we want to see it before it retreats completely, but our attendance (via airplane and auto) only serves to accelerate global warming, which makes more tourists want to see it before it disappears, and…

•Sleeman’s Honey Brown is the best beer you’re never going to drink, stupid Americans!

You never know who you’ll see in Calgary

•I learned that if you want a job, go to Calgary, the center of Canada’s booming oil business. They’re paying fast-food workers over $10 an hour, and contractors can make six figures. The problem is that there’s no place to live. Homeless people are making $50,000 a year. Word.

•I also learned if you want a literary career, don’t go to Calgary.

•Finally, I discovered that Heaven is nature undisturbed.

•Hell is other people.

As you read this, Wife and I are in beautiful Alberta, Canada, enjoying a well-earned vacation. Yay! And I’ll be free of the burden known as the Internet for another week.

If you’re desperate for entertainment, I’ve posted a new piece on Storyfraud, a story that lit mags have rejected about 50 times. Probably for reasons that are obvious to everyone but me.

I’m posting “Final Resting Places” now so I don’t have to see any comments on it for a couple of weeks.

See you when September is one-third over.