Ghost, Ghouls, and Spirits

I adore ghost stories. When I travel, I try to pick up books that chronicle local ghost stories. But my favorite new ghost story is total fiction--Jenny Crusie’s Maybe This Time. What follows is a mini-review and then an invitation for you to share your favorite ghost story with me!

Maybe This Time, Jennifer Crusie’s nineteenth novel, published in September, is a tour de force contemporary gothic romance. Commitment-phobic heroine Andromeda (Andie) Miller journeys to a remote English estate relocated in Ohio to play governess to her ex-husband’s troubled wards. Once there, she falls in love, first, with the kids, then, with her distant ex-husband, North Archer, when he steps in to fix her problem with the resident ghosts who are attached to the two-hundred-year-old house.

Crusie’s Ph.D. roots show in this book as they do in all her works. She uses references, both literal and metaphoric, to Henry James, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Lewis Carroll, and Mary Stewart. She taps in to the rich literary history that laid the ground work for popular fiction today--those seminal works that gave birth to both the popular romance genre and the popular horror genre.

On her website, Crusie says she “pays homage” with Maybe This Time to Henry James’s 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw, a Victorian ghost story. Maybe This Time is a contemporary gothic romance which combines equal parts romance, a woman’s journey tale, and a creepy ghost story. At its core is a love story where second chances are possible. Yet, it’s a riveting, scary ghost story, at times, where no one is safe. The children are in jeopardy and anyone who tries to save the kids are a target of an elusive ghoulish murderer. While this novel is a romance at heart and we know the happy ending is a trope conventional to the genre, the reader worries until the very end if the hero and the heroine will ever reconnect and stay together permanently. It isn’t until the most dangerous and manipulative of the three ghosts, who wants North Archer for reasons that finally become evident at the end, invades Andie’s territory and threatens to take over that we understand what’s truly at stake and why it matters.

Who could have guessed that revisiting the classics of old could be quite so funny, entertaining, sad, scary, or hot for contemporary readers? In Crusie’s masterful hands, a ghost story is all that and more!

Okay, so now you’ve heard all about my new favorite “published” ghost story. (I say published because two of my critique partners--one local and one from school--have wonderful ghost stories pending publication.) Go, grab a copy of Crusie’s Maybe This Time. You’ll love it. I promise. Now . . . tell me all about your favorite ghost story. I dare you.

Make Mine Well Done

One topic has kept the Rockville 8 buzzing all week: Stakes.

Global stakes. Personal stakes.
Good novels have both. Juicy stakes enhance characterization, fuel conflict, and keep elements like pace on track. But what I’ve recently realized is, the novels I love embed one stake in the other. And if you and I want readers to sink their teeth into our books, maybe we need to embed one stake, like the personal stake, within the other as well.

Pick a novel. Any novel.
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Dashiell Hammett’s Maltese Falcon. William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Lisa Scottoline’s Dirty Blonde. Patricia Cornwell’s Body Farm. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code. Harlan Coben’s Long Lost. Their authors all know the trick of linking personal stakes to the global ones.

So let’s look at three novels. You’ll see what I mean. If you haven’t read the following books – SPOILER ALERT – consider skipping to the comments section. But better yet, keep reading, pick up these books, and see what you think...

Carl Sagan’s Contact
Influenced by her father who died when she was young, Ellie grows up to be a scientist, searching the skies for signs of intelligent life. She and her colleagues receive an extraterrestrial signal: build a device and the conversation will begin. Talk about a global stake!

But Ellie’s personal stake is tied up in the success or failure of the project. Why? Her father taught her listening to the stars was to listen to those we’ve loved and lost. The grown Ellie knows this can’t be true, but she dares to hope she might speak with her father once again. However, as terrorists threaten the project, both the global stake, and Ellie’s personal one, are at risk and the action is nonstop — because one stake is embedded in the other.

Jennifer Crusie’s Bet Me
Global stakes don’t have to be about saving the world from nuclear disaster. But are global stakes compatible with a genre like romance? You betcha! Global stakes apply to the world. Any world.

When we read Bet Me, we watch prickly Min Dobbs reluctantly fall for Cal Morrisey. Min has clear-cut personal stakes. But what is going on in the wider world Min inhabits? Her beloved sister is getting married. And Min’s determined Diana will have the perfect wedding before living happily ever after. That’s quite a global stake.

Every time Diana’s happiness, the global stake, is in jeopardy, Min must accept Cal’s help to make it right. So her personal stake rises in relation to the global stake. Since the stakes are linked, they make for a fun book that stays with the reader.

Kathy Reichs’s Fatal Voyage
For me, Fatal Voyage, more than any other novel, demonstrates the power of connecting personal stakes to global ones. It opens with global stakes. Forensic anthropologist Tempe Brennan must identify the cause of a plane crash, otherwise, other travelers may be in jeopardy. That’s a great global stake. But an error in the recovery mission could cost Tempe her job, her reputation, and her career. This has personal stake written all over it, and it’s linked to the global one.

Tempe turns to her lawyer ex-husband for advice, and unfortunately, a night of comfort. Now, he wants to reconcile. When her would-be boyfriend arrives, he ups the global stakes by revealing his partner died in the crash while transporting a witness, and he ups the personal ones.
When the error begins to look like a cover-up to hide a crime, both sets of stakes jump again.

The stakes leapfrog at least one more time before the satisfying ending to this novel. And that ending has stayed with me. Because of the interdependence of the stakes.

Now, I’m determined.
In my own work, when it comes to stakes, I want to make mine well done. Now, the Rockville 8 wants to know... What do the stakes in your favorite books say to you?

Voice and Writing

"All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen." (from "A Child's Christmas in Wales" by Dylan Thomas)

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a very unevenly edited book and contains many passages that simply seemed to its editors like a good idea at the time.
One of these (the one Arthur now came across) supposedly relates the experiences of one Veet Voojagig, a quiet young student at the University of Maximegalon, who pursued a brilliant academic career studying ancient philology, transformational ethics and the wave harmonic theory of historical perception, and then, after a night of drinking Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters with Zaphod Beeblebrox, became increasingly obsessed with the problem of what had happened to all the ballpoints he'd bought over the past few years." (from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams)

"Lula and the couch were almost identical shades of brown, with the exception of Lula's hair, which happened to be cherry red today.
"I always feel sort of anemic when I stand next to Lula. I'm a third-generation American of Italian-Hungarian heritage. I have my mother's pale skin and blue eyes and good metabolism, which allows me to eat birthday cake and still (almost always) buttoning the top snap on my Levi's. From my father's side of the family I've inherited a lot of unmanageable brown hair and a penchant for Italian hand gestures. On my own, on a good day with a ton of mascara and four-inch heels, I can attract some attention. Next to Lula I'm wallpaper." (from Seven Up by Janet Evanovich)

"She started to laugh. She couldn't help it, she had to, and then she couldn't stop, even when Shane knocked on the door and said, "Agnes?" she still couldn't stop, and he rattled the door but she'd locked it, so he kicked it in and came in and held her and said, "It's okay," and she held on to him and said, "I know," and cried and then after a while she stopped, and he kissed the top of her head and patted her back, and she said, "That was bad," and he said, "Yeah," and she said, "I won't do it again," and he said, "I thought you meant the shooting," and she said, "That, too," and let go of him and got dressed and put on her glasses.
"When she had herself together again, she went out to the kitchen and got Rhett a dog biscuit in case he'd been traumatized. "At least is won't ever get any worse than this," she told him. He seemed comforted by that.
"Then as Brenda's goddamned son of a bitch ugly black grandfather clock gonged midnight in the front hall, she went out onto the porch to wait for somebody named Carpenter to come and clean the blood out of her kitchen." (from Agnes and the Hitman by Jennifer Crusie and Bob Mayer)

Voice. I've quoted above four of the most distinct voices in 20th or 21th century fiction. Certainly not the only authors I could have selected, but four that I happened to have on my bookshelf and four of whom I actually read on a fairly regular basis. Dylan Thomas, Douglas Adams, Janet Evanovich and Jennifer Crusie.

Voice. Can you hear it? If I lined up Brian May, Eric Clapton, The Edge and Mark Knopfler, I might make Yvonne's ears bleed. But as well, I could tell you within 2 chords, if it took that long, which of those four men was currently playing. Even if they each were playing the one song I've conquered on the guitar - Jamaica A E-minor C - I'd recognize their individual guitarist's voice.

Voice. What is it? Barbara Samuel tells me, "Voice is the potato, style is the French fry." Voice is the ingredients that I have shopped for literally all my life. It is in part my grandfather's humming and stacking and restacking cutlery at the dinner table and my grandmother's yearly family reunions; it is my eldest siblings learning Spanish when I was two, teaching my absorbent mind to count to 10 in Spanish before I could in English. It was my minister's Welsh accent and my weekly Scottish Country Dance lessons with an English neighbor. It was the first book I ever read by myself, Fraidy Cat, and the first song I learned in another language, "Frere Jacques."

Voice. What is it? Kathy Gilles Seidel tells me, "Voice is the result of everything -- who you choose to write about, where you set your books, what you notice in your descriptions, your values, your interests, pretty much everything about you as a person/writer."

Voice. Can you figure out someone elses? When I read Dylan Thomas, I can hear the sound of the sea in his language, in the rhythm of his words which comes from the rhythm of the Welsh language and accent. But what about in popular fiction or genre fiction rather than literary poetic-prose? Can I hear Cambridge in Douglas Adams' voice? Or the Fens? Did he listen to the Rolling Stones and the Yard Birds? How obvious is the Mid-West in Jenny's writing or Jersey in Janet's. At least if Jenny's weren't situated in Ohio or Janet's in Trenton?

Voice. Can it be nurtured? Can it be killed? Because Style is different than voice, an author's voice should shine through no matter what he's written. Be it an opinion piece he wrote for Entertainment magazine, his memoir On Writing, or Cujo, Stephen King's voice resonates through all of his writing. What if he hadn't written Carrie, though? What if he had tried a different genre? Cozy mysteries. Fantasy. Romance. Would he still be Stephen King, multi-million selling, bestseller-writing author? Or did he stumble onto a style that fit his voice?

Voice. Do I have one? It is one thing to write about myself and my opinion and another to write about a fictional character or world. As an author, I must try and fail and try again and experiment in order to discover where my voice best fits. While I'm fairly certain it isn't in tech manuals, and I hope it isn't in hard science fiction as I have no interest there, the rest is as yet unsettled.
What about you? Can you see or hear your distinct voice? Have you ever thought about where it came from? Or do you think it's all hokum, and an author just needs to write a good story?