Disecting Books

Either I'm getting so heavily into researching how to write I can't stand to read or the stuff I'm reading is not that good. Either way, it isn't nearly as much fun anymore. One of my favorite authors is Ted Dekker. I hate to say his early stuff is better than his later stuff, but when I review the order in which I read his works, most of his very early works were the last ones I read. I thought it appropriate that within 2 years of learning of his work I had read his entire published collection culminating with Obsession. He has since come out with 3 more books. One, Immanuel's Veins, I found to be a quick read, but was very base. There were plenty of ties to his Books of History that made you slap your forehead and say, "Nice!" but the characters did not seem to leap off the page like Thomas Hunter.

Despite the fact that I bought The Priest's Graveyard the first week it was out, I have not yet been able to finish it. After 2 weeks of trying to find time to read in my splintered life, I am 29 chapters into it and it has hit its typical Dekker-esque page turning point where you'd rather read then put it down. But throughout the book I have found no fewer than 3 characters acting in a way that is not consistent with the way a real person would act. Despite this, the interwoven plot twists and turns on itself in such a way that even though you look for the unexpected bits you may just barely miss them. The techniques, the writing skill, the parallel paths of characters, the rising action leading to the point so beautifully, skillfully, and subtly pointed out at the beginning is nearly textbook by comparison. Is Dekker as bold and brazen with his demonstration of truth woven through fiction? Maybe not as clearly as Thunder of Heaven or When Heaven Weeps, but it is still there.

So my question is this. do we put up with minor flaws in one part of a book in order to be "wowed" by another? The bits I'm complaining about are easily overlooked, blips in the digital mesh, hardly worth a mention really, when compared to the overall mastery of the work.

For the record, it isn't just Dekker, his just happens to be the work I have most recently read. I also found Hemingway a bit disappointing after recently finishing The Sun Also Rises.

Years ago I discovered that when I did things like running the soundboard at church I missed the message. Paying close attention to the minor nuances of things trying to make it so that they did not distract others from the message at hand had made me more of a technician than a listener. I suspect that the same is coming true of my reading. Has anyone else shared a similar event?

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Who Do You Write Like?

I stumbled across a website on my way to stop blogging and write that posed the question, Who Do You Write Like? This looked fun so I took a few paragraphs from my allegorical novella and plugged them in. This is what I got:

I write like William Gibson

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Not content to be told I'm like the father of CyberPunk (a great compliment by the way), I took a few paragraphs from my current work in progress, The Trouble with Travel. And it gave me this:

I write like James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

 Now that's one I can really hang my hat on because I am constantly afraid that my literary meanings are buried too deeply and that no one will understand them. Clearly this means I'm right.

It's been said, rightly so, that being an engineer is not a career, it's a character trait. So in that vein I wanted to make sure it wasn't just spitting out names. Perish the thought of something on the internet being false. So I left out the last paragraph I copied to get Joyce and re-sent it. Without that one paragraph I got:

I write like Chuck Palahniuk

I Write Like by Mémoires, journal software. Analyze your writing!

I do not have a clue who Palahniuk is, though I'll Google him later. It made me really wonder about that paragraph. I re-pasted the whole bit and got Joyce again. Could it be that just the one paragraph did it? I tried just that one paragraph, one I particularly liked mind you, and just that one paragraph did tell me I write (or wrote that) like James Joyce.

 What does all this mean? It means I have too much time on my hands to worry about things that really don't matter. But while I'm at it, who do you write like?

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Author C. Clarke

In one of my opening pages I mentioned authors who have had profound effects on me and my writing style. Strangely, despite my well-entrenched faith in God, two of them had no faith, and one of them is the first I have chosen to discuss. In a parallel coincidence, the other agnostic author also had trouble writing a trilogy in three parts. Two days ago we had an asteroid pass close to the earth. Close here is a relative term, it was astronomically close. My father, who has long used the pretentious initials TN behind his name (that one has its own long story) has been into astronomy since he was a Star Scout. In high school he built a telescope and went to the National Science Fair with it. Growing up I was often awakened in the middle of the night to see through it the moon, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, and other passing stars. Twice a year I would go across the street to Uncle Jimmy's yard (highest elevation in town at nearly 35 feet) to watch meteor showers. So it was natural (to me) when he warned me of the miss to tell him that I knew it was coming because Arthur C. Clarke had told me.There are many innovations and ideas that Clarke wrote in his books that became science fact rather than science fiction. Thankfully, his predictions of asteroids becoming meteorites have not yet come to pass.

The first Clarke book I read was Rendezvous with Rama where said predictions occur. It was a fascinating read that showed me the history of the future in an unadulterated form. The words leapt from the page and painted a deeply coloured picture of Clarke's images. For those who haven't read it, an oft-repeated point is that the Ramans do everything in threes. Most who know me probably think that my thought after reading it was "Is this was where we get the noodles from," but that wasn't it. It was, "Where are the other 2 books?"

I never got into a dedicated binge of reading Arthur C. Clarke, but I did read many of his works. I especially liked the off the wall works that no one ever talks about, like The City and the Stars and The Fountains of Paradise. After reading The City and the Stars, my American Eskimo puppy, Jake, chewed the book to pieces. I took it to the library and told them I didn't mind paying for it, but ONLY if they bought another copy of it to put on the shelf. They did. 

Years later he finally did come out with sequels to Rendezvous. Three to be precise. The fourth book seemed overkill, especially because of the errors I found in the story. That book was one co-written with Gentry Lee. I wrote Arthur C. Clarke after that one telling him of some problems in the book. Imagine that, a kid sending a letter to a world renown and famous author, telling him what was wrong with what he wrote. In reply, he sent me a form letter, which was a bit disappointing at first. Then I recognized, he had scratched out "Dear Respondent" and hand-written "Jonathan" as well as some other notes at the bottom. He signed it, then promoted a website he was promoting at the time.

Arthur C. Clarke wasn't the first author I sent a letter to, and he wasn't the last. He is one I only communicated with once, and part of that is my fault. Arthur C. Clarke was a great man, a great author, and his legacy continues to live on. He doesn't, but his work does. My current work was spurred into creation after reading The Fountains of Paradise shortly after his death. Unlike him, my work contains hidden and obvious references to God and His path for eternal life through grace. What I learned from him was that when an altar boy tells the pope he's messed up mass the pope can either put him in his place or thank him in a way that makes him realize what he did without making it look bad.

Article on Asteroid 2011MD

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