Back again for its first 2009 engagement! Books I quit reading.

[mrissa]

1. If you want to write a memoir, write a memoir. If you want to write a book about something else with memoir bits in it, you have to make sure that the memoir bits are roughly on a par with as interesting as your topic, or else really really short. Or else I will run away and read some other book on your topic whose author is not convinced that their own life is the most fascinating thing ever.

2. I remember being a teenager. It was not a built-in excuse for being an asshole. So whining that your parents are mean because they're poor? No. Sometimes it's not enough that the narrative be aware that the character is an asshole--you're still sticking me with a big chunk of text all about this asshole, and if they're not an entertaining asshole, I'm going to read something else.

3. Hockey is not everything. I mean this in a philosophical sense, but also in a very literal sense: hockey is not the building of Hadrian's Wall. Hockey is not the Silk Road. Trying to argue that various historical events were the True Beginning Of Hockey is likely to make me roll my hockey-loving eyes and move on.

4. Unrelieved doom. Next.

5. I know and care about several people who stammer. They do not go, "Th-this s-sentence is s-stupid." That is not how it works. It's not cute, it's not funny, quit doing it.

6. If your entire plot/premise is predicated around someone learning not to worry their pretty little head about big hard questions, go directly to hell and take your book with you.

7. If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this.

8. If you're going to compare your parents to Hitler--as an adult writing nonfiction--you need to be aware of the scale differences. No, seriously. Unconscious hyperbole is not our friend.

9. You had no respect for yourself, your reader, or your characters. Next.

10. Women do not constantly think of ourselves as though we were describing ourselves for phone sex purposes. I promise. Even lesbians and bisexual women, who may quite rightly be assumed to be fonder of women's bodies than the average straight gal, do not get their Rice Krispies while thinking of the pertness of their own breasts. In fact, I am a bit skeptical that any woman ever has gone around thinking of her own breasts as pert. Or lush. Mostly I think of mine as...mine. Like my ear or my elbow. Because...follow me carefully here...when you've had breasts for decades, you sort of get used to them, almost like they're a body part a person might have.

11. If you're going to hit a dozen genre conventions on the first two pages, you need to do it in a way that tells me that the story will not simply be a string of conventions. Three pages later, you still hadn't left the stencil. Fail.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I told my students that describing female characters via their cup size was a pretty good way to put a giant neon sign on the story saying "O HAI THIS WRITER IS A GUY."

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I like you. A lot. This just intensifies that.

Also? So funny! I almost laughed, even!

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fond of you as well, actually.

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

in re: #8, I feel I must note that my father did, for a period of time, sport a truly unfortunate moustache.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a very high degree of unfortunate.

[redbird]

I particularly like the phrasing on book 3.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Well, *my* breasts are distractingly pert, I tell you what. I can hardly ever get anything done. But I stopped worrying my pretty little head over that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That must be a relief.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I think about my breast as pert sometimes. Or something like that, anyway. But it's generally when I'm contemplating what to wear for exercise or otherwise putting on a bra and feeling thankful that my mom trained me early to give them proper support.

I figure this characteristic will go away once I have kids, so I might as well enjoy it now, right? Because it's also a feature that seems due to the fact that they aren't exactly, um... big. (I figured if I said lush I might get beaten to death with an olive loaf.)

Breasts are weird. But yes, mine are mostly just... mine. And I often get annoyed when people treat them as something sexual when they were busy just being part of my chest.

Still, I might remember fondly from time to time that Steve categorized them as "pirate breasts" and said that was his favorite kind...

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I only think of mine when they're doing something interesting ("You are very big right now. What is going on? Should I worry?") or considering a corset ("No.").

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Re #10: even comparisons between women from narrator voice strike me as ... I dunno, just not how a person thinks about it. There's a bit in one of de Lint's stories where he talks about how Jilly Coppercorn and her friend Sophie look alike except Sophie has bigger breasts which always throws me out of the story, like coming out from underwater spluttering. I think it's even odder because he's not usually quite that clumsy; I vaguely remember something about Sophie thinking she doesn't like a particular sort of neckline that seemed much more natural (this is why it's only a vague memory - it's not a giant weirdness stuck in the story).

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not that I've never thought of something in comparative terms, either; fairly recently I was trying to remember which person a friend was talking about, in terms of the photos he'd posted of friends recently, and when I got more data, I wound up thinking, "Oh, sure, the one who's generally about my size but less ath...um."

(Because thinking of myself as "more athletic" than other people is weird and new, though often accurate.)

But it's the tone that throws me out when people try comparisons as a method of character description. When they get it right, it's golden. But it's so very easy to get wrong.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Mostly, the adjective I personally apply to my own personal breasts--when forced to notice them--is in the way. Either that or ow.

And there was one very memorable occasion which was both.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Only one? Gosh.

[carbonel]

This is as good a place as any to mention that I zipped through Enclave, and enjoyed the experience. But it's a cotton-candy book -- the entire rationale for the enclave turns out to have been bogus, and you never find out all that much about the world outside, except that it was bad enough for parents to think they were doing a Good Thing by committing their children to the place.

And in the end? Nothing really changed.

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

You are very funny, especially when you are blunt.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

She does blunt so very, very well.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

1) I do hope I haven't done that in my fairy book.

10) There's a very nice book by James Alan Gardner called Committment Hour in which kids change gender every year, and then they have to decide which to stick with as a grownup. And there's a scene in that book where these horny fourteen-year-old boys are talking, about a month before they change into girls for a year, and they say things like "I'm going to spend the first week just stroking my breasts, oh man I can't wait..." There are other nifty things about the book, but this was one of the things I especially liked. Because if you switched over, you'd notice.

Personally I think about my breasts about as often as my elbows. They're there, they stick out, big deal.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

1) was meant to be nonfiction subjects, not fiction.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this.

SNERK.

[joeboo-k.livejournal.com]

5. I know and care about several people who stammer. They do not go, "Th-this s-sentence is s-stupid." That is not how it works. It's not cute, it's not funny, quit doing it.

I can't recall running across a stammer / stutter / blockage in fiction which I felt was remotely plausible.

Then again, most real life examples will be different from each other anyway, so how do you portray that? Someone who mostly only blocks on hard sounds vs someone who suffers on the "s" or "r" vs someone who mostly speaks fluently until they block vs someone who clicks vs...yeah.

I'm not sure anyone would really want to read a true fictionalized stutter. Imagine taking up a half page of repetition and restarts, avoidance of certain words the speaker really wants to say but knows he can't get out, extended syllables - and then continuing that throughout the entire book because it just doesn't get better on its own.

Not saying some folks don't have such a mild stutter where they only repeat one sound each, but no, I don't buy it either.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, in theory I would want it to be handled the way we handle unimpeded dialog: artfully edited for readability. In practice I'm not sure there's a good way to do that without sacrificing plausibility.

And while the book I gave up on was not speculative, having a Quick And Easy Magical Cure so that the author could write two pages of it at the beginning and move on would probably make me incandescent with rage, too, so I guess I am just very difficult to please here.

[rosindust.livejournal.com]

My fave memoir (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_(book)) moment is in Shostakovich's, where he insists that he was never scared of Stalin. He might have sweated a bit, but at least he never crapped his pants.

Apparently Stalin had this "look" that made men crap themselves, so his office was always equipped with two male nurses whose sole job was to drag people away and clean them up after an interview.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My goodness.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

#1--I have a copy of Simon Winchester's A Crack in the Edge of World which has convinced me to never, ever buy, borrow or even read the blurb for another of his books. My only problem now--do I release this book into the wilds as in, or do I give in to the urge to deface this by adding a note to the endpaper to the effect that the earthquake bits are interesting, but are unfortunately framed by less-interesting bits about Mr. Winchester. I don't know if this sort of memoir by pretense is more often done by Brits or not, but most of the examples I've run into seem to be--although I'm sure pretentious and annoying American gits are hard at work on their own versions even as I type this.

#10--mrissa FTW! People who have not had to deal with the complications of, um, lush breasts are more likely to think of lush breasts, rather than "These body parts which have to be shoved into clothing that covers them well enough that I can leave the house without constant harassment and discomfort" and so on. Although the Old Norse term "ship-chested" has its moments, I have to say, if only because there are moments when they seem to lead the way, like the prow of a batleship. I will also note,somewhat on the vein of truepenny and the pruning shears, that these are also people who have never had to live with significantly sunburned lush breasts (there is not enough Bactine or Noxema in the world, trust me on this). I am not negative about my breasts, but I am aware of them in somewhat different terms than those who ogle them, to say the very least.
The whole "describing oneself as if for phone sex" thing reminds me of the romances where an attractive woman runs over her looks in a severely critical manner while revealing to the reader that she's really pretty cute, although the target audiences are different. It is possible to study one's face in a mirror while thinking things like "Damn! I thought I got all that green clay goop off last night!" or "Is my hair sticking up?" or "I'm fifty freaking years old! Why do I have a zit?!" rather than "Oh, look! I have great big dark eyes that can sparkle with malicious mischief, and they are fringed with long, delicate lashes!"

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

There is at least a growing tendency for the girl to be 'Oh, I would be pretty, if only I could lose this last 10 pounds," and the guy to feel she's perfect with it. But yes. Unless you're in a regency where you can get away with things like "oh, plump blondes are in this season and sadly I am skinny and my hair is brown," it totally fails to be like, "oh, curse my too-full lower lip from keeping me from being truly hot."

[tanaise.livejournal.com]

re: 2. We were not ridiculously poor when I was a teenager, but my mom's salary + child support left her under the poverty level. And I'm not saying that how I felt was the same as how everyone in my situation felt, but rather than feeling my mother was mean for being poor, I worried ALL THE TIME about us having enough money. So I can't imagine feeling my parents were mean for being too poor for things. (I actually get into arguments with my mother--when I was supposed to be learning to drive, I was balancing my mother's checkbook. And I knew there was no way anyone would be paying for me to have a car/insurance/etc, so it never seemed important for me to learn to drive. Way more trouble than benefit. She says 'Oh, we could have managed." and she's wrong.)

10.) I find 'tip-tilted' more annoying than pert, as I find it even less likely to be used by ANYONE as a description of ANYTHING. I can imagine someone using pert (or perky), but there's a difference between how you look at your body, and how someone else looks at your body, and there's also differences in why you're looking at your body from time to time. And I think that's something that authors--particularly, but not limited to, male authors--overlook in descriptions. Lush might work for a going out dancing description (though, you're right that the word is still weird, even if the idea is defendable--I think most people i know would verbalize it as "I look hot" vs "wow, my lush figure is amazing."), but if I am getting ready for work it will be more like "oh, for the love of god, how much fabric do I need to cover these things, damnit?"

In related news, my chest has apparently figured out how to unbutton knit tops. I start the day at 'coy hint of cleavage' and by late afternoon it's "these puppies aren't going to stare at themselves!"

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Timprov and I were talking last night about how "pert" goes with "'n' popular" too much for us to feel comfortable with its use in describing just about anything human.

And yes, exactly--even if you're thinking something positive, it's "Damn, still got it!" or "Wooo!" and not, "My breasts, they have the lushness." It's a tone question.

[columbina.livejournal.com]

I have been trying to teach people - need it be said, male-type people? didn't think so - #10 for about five million years.

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Re #10: And a related problem is where women, especially straight women, describe other women in phone sex terms. Hint: if someone objectifies everyone they meet, that is a character trait. And a fairly prominent one. So not all characters should have it.

I kind of like "ship-chested," though.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

It's a useful variation on "imposing", for those of us who have gone past the "lush" and "buxom" stages and are moving to that point of "matronly" where we can pose for people who want to re-create Helen Hokinson's (http://www.plan59.com/av/av206.htm) work.

[haddayr.livejournal.com]

I love this list, and so do my pert breasts.

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Hee. I love these. *g*

[pameladean]

This is a particularly fine list, which I'm afraid probably means that you had a particularly annoying set of experiences. Very nice lemonade, though, not too sweet.

P.