I love this prompt, which involves writing a story within the constraint of following alphabetical order. That is, the first word of each sentence follows alphabetical order. This prompt can lead your imagination into new places.

WARM-UP: First try this warm-up to start thinking alphabetically.

Write no more than 3 sentences, following an alphabetical order.

You can go for strict word-by-word alphabetical order: Ann brought Cate a delightful elephant, funnily gigantic. And so on…

Or you can be flexible, working in other words as well: Alex bought a cosy but deadly egg flipper–ghastly. He was involved in juvenile crime but kept a look so mild when his neighbour opined about prison being too qualmish for the rascals who stole his television, right under his nose one vacuous night. What excited Alex was being not only a youthful offender but a most zealous one.

Now you’re ready to try something more ambitious, a 26-sentence alphabetical story or poem.

How to structure the alphabetical story/poem

• The first sentence or main clause must start with a word that begins with ‘A‘, the second with a word that begins with ‘B‘ and so on. You can try to create a coherent story or comment within the alphabetical constraints, or you can simply freewrite a stream of alphabetised consciousness.

  You can use this exercise as a warm-up in a writing group, by creating a story out loud as a group, with each member in turn contributing the next sentence. The story can be totally spontaneous or the group can agree on a conflict and the characters before starting.

• Don’t make things too hard on yourself. Use a word starting with ‘ex’ instead trying to find one starting with ‘x’.
  You can use articles before the alphabetical word, of course. E.g., ‘A new toy?’, she asked, dubiously prodding the contraption. ‘An organisational triumph,’ he said with a mad grin.

• Go for variety in the length and style or construction of your sentences. Use description, exposition, and dialogue. Don’t take the lazy route and start each sentence with an adverb or adjective: Angrily, Sue stared at him. Bitterly, he stared back. Cruelly, she ate the last doughnut in front of him. Devastated, he turned away. You can use sentence fragments as needed.
  E.g., Unblinking, I thought some more. We, the world and myself were alike. Very much so, as it turned out.

• Want more flexibliity? Place your alphabetical words, still in sequence, but anywhere in a sentence or main clause. E.g.:Anyone can be a star. At least that’s what I thought before the battle started in our little group for the main role. How catty everyone became. Even Deborah, my best friend, started criticising my acting ability. Everyone was jumpy and I knew fur would fly on audition night.

Enjoy!

My reading this month. Star rating from 1 (poor, don’t bother) to 5 (excellent).

Violette Leduc’s In the Prison of My Skin. **

Memoir/fiction blend and the fraught relationship between a girl and her mother. Some good descriptive passages but ultimately, there’s not much to the story. Leduc was encouraged by Simone de Beauvoir and her fans included Genet, etc.

John Mullan’s How Novels Work. *****

Excellent overview of writing techniques used in novels. Mullan has drawn upon ideas from his column in the Guardian to identify the workings of various novels. Great for writers, serious readers, and reading groups wanting to learn about a wide range of techniques in fiction. What’s covered: beginnings, narration, people, genres, voices, structure, details, style, devices, literariness, and endings. To enjoy the book, it helps to have read many of the books he uses as examples–but this background is not essential to understanding his main points.

Graciela Espana’s En espanol: Rapid success in Spanish for beginners. 2003 ***

I’ve been struggling in my weekly Spanish class, and have been augmenting the lessons with Spanish CD programs and books from the public library. This program is as better than some of the others I’ve tried. It has 3 CDs and the difficulty of the material increases gradually. So unlike the Bertlitz course in Mandarin that I still remember with horror. The first lesson was relatively easy, Mandarin for ‘Hello, my name is….’ and ‘How are you?’ So far so good. But by lesson four, the sentences were alone the lines of ‘I enjoy the evening fragrance of the daphne growing along the stone wall in the western garden.’

Jennifer Vandever’s The Bronte Project: A novel of passion, desire, and good PR. 2005. ***

Sarah is a struggling Phd student on an endless and frustrating search for some lost letters of Charlotte Bronte. Her personal life seems on track, given her impending marriage to Paul, another Phd student. Suddenly, Claire comes onto the academic scene, a savvy young woman who promotes herself by being outrageous. Rather than compete in an established, competitive academic field, she creates a new one–Diane Studies–where she can be the expert and set the rules. Even Sarah gets caught up in Claire’s exotic world when Claire links the life of Princess Diana to that of Charlotte Bronte. Eventually, Sarah’s unsatisfactory life at the edges of academe is turned upside down and she has to make some difficult choices about love. I wanted something light to read because I was in bed with a sore throat. As an ex-academic in Humanities, I enjoyed Vandever’s oh-so-true depiction of academics chasing whatever is popular and can lead to funding.

Vandever starts each chapter with a sentence or two from Charlotte Bronte’s surviving letters. It keeps the link to Charlotte Bronte to the fore, but it’s unclear whether there’s much of a connection between the quotes and the chapters. Still, it’s a pleasant read, the characters are very well drawn, and the ending is a little surprising.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine **

Last week, I was holidaying at Gabo Island, at the northern tip of Victoria. In between watching whales on their annual migration north, looking for the fairy penguins at night, and visiting the lighthouse, I rummaged through the bookcases in the Assistant Lighthouse Keeper’s cottage where I was staying.

I love looking through the books that have somehow found a safe harbour in a holiday cottage. Many of the books here had a strong nautical theme. For example, Lighthouses of Australia, Prisoners of the Sea, Windswept, Sailormen’s Ghosts, and Mysteries of the Bass Straits. I found a few Christian books, some romances, some puzzle and games books, and some classics. I enjoyed reading old issues of the New York Review of Books. But the best treasure was a 1976 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It was a quarto sized, soft-cover magazine, printed on cheap yellowish paper–the traditional  ‘pulp fiction’. It was filled with short, enjoyable mystery stories. Now, back at home, I looked up the magazine and found that it’s still going.

The 1976 issue  included an interview with Isaac Asimov, plus news about trends in the genre. Reading the magazine felt very right for the situation I was in. My cottage had no TV or music, and no mobile phone reception, so the evenings were undisturbed except for the spooky sounds that fit with reading mysteries: a strong wind rattling the cottage’s windows, waves crashing on the red granite rocks, and fairy penguins making their eerie strangled whistles and squawks in the dark. As I sat in my art deco lounge chair in front of the space heater, a sherry at my elbow, it was the ideal site to read satisfying whodunits.

Steve Toltz, A Fraction of the Whole. Hamish Hamilton, 2008. ***

I raced through Steve Toltz’s 711-page paperback doorstopper. The story revolves ultimately around Jasper, the narrator, and his relationship with his crazy father.  The fast-paced plot twists and turns, and the story is filled with as many one-liners as a comedian on speed.

While reading it, I enjoyed some of the author’s funny comments and insights, but eventually the mass of details started to obscure the plot. It’s a clever book, but not particularly deep. It reminds me a bit of books by Stephen Fry or Ben Elton–satires about current society but keeping well on the surface. A positive is that the fast pace of the book means the author flings off great comedy scenes and humorous riffs without turning them stodgy by forcing them to take on too much psychological weight. I enjoyed the first part, felt the middle of the book wandered a bit, and the end part is strong.  Steve is a young writer and this is his first novel. I was impressed that he managed to keep a huge story going, not only by having changing events but also having the characters change significantly as well.

I had a quick squiz at some reviews of this book, and nearly all are positive. A few compare him to John Irving in terms of sprawling and humorous family sagas.

(I met Steve at the Katoomba part of the Sydney Writers’ Festival this year and included in an earlier blog entry some of his comments.)

Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Jeff Lindsay. 2004. Narrated by Nick Landrum ****

A friend recommended the Dexter series so I borrowed a talking book of Darkly Dreaming Dexter from the library, to listen to in the car on a drive down the coast. I wasn’t sure about this after my friend said Lindsay has written a a great series about a sociopathic killer who tortures then kills people who deserve it. That just didn’t seem like my kind of read. However, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Dexter’s psychological makeup is explored with sensitivity and odd humour. Dexter understands that he is a monster, but a monster who has modeled himself to be as ‘human’ as possible. In doing so, he starts to find that maybe he’s not so inhuman after all. The plot got my attention. Some parts are a big grim, especially if you have a good imagination. The characters are well developed. The only part I didn’t like was the ending, which is ambiguous.

The experience of listening to a talking book reminded me of the huge difference between reading a book yourself and listening to a trained actor make all the characters come to life. I wonder if I’d given ‘Dexie’ such a sympathetic treatment if I had been reading the book silently to myself. And being sympathetic to Dexter helps you as a reader understand him.

I’ve started reading more broadly in fiction. First, I dipped a toe into Mills & Boon romances. More recently, I read for the first time a novel by Danielle Steel.

I’ll never waste my time reading another. I don’t want this blog to turn into Grumpy Old Writing Companion, but I was amazed at how padded the story was.

To give Ms Steel her due, she is incredibly successful as a novelist. Not only is she a financially independent writer (worth over $800 million a few years ago) but, according to Wikipedia:

• She has written over 70 novels in her 25-year career.
• Her novels have big print runs, are distributed internationally, and have been translated into 28 languages. By 2005, more than 530 million copies of her books had sold.
• She has earned a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for having her books on the New York Times Bestseller List for a record 381 consecutive weeks.

The novel I randomly picked, The Ranch, is her 39th, written in 1997. The plot is interesting enough. Three women in their 40s, who met when they were university students, now reunite for a fortnight (two weeks) at a dude ranch. All three come to the ranch during a major crisis in their lives. One woman’s third husband can’t handle her superstar status; the second woman’s marriage is falling apart after her son’s suicide; and the third woman has a major health issue.

What is unrealistic is that by the end of week one on the ranch, all three have fallen in love!

Putting the plot aside, what bored me most about the story was the padding, especially through repetition. For example, the story introduces Tanya, the superstar singer, who is very attractive, has long blonde hair, and looks younger than her age. Readers are told all this again, and again…and again. It’s the same for the other two main characters.

Why such padding? Does she think readers won’t buy her books unless she provides big doorstoppers, or what I call ‘books on steroids’? Is she thinking that her books are ‘airport reads’, where information has to be repeated because readers are distracted, e.g., Is my flight going ahead?, When is our meal being served? Does she think her readers lack the mental capacity to remember details?

The problem of writing down to her audience may have more to do with how Ms Steel produces her novels. The Wikipedia article states that she often releases several books in one year, and can be ‘researching one book while outlining another, then writing and editing additional books’. Whew!

Having won a huge audience who likes her work, Ms Steel can get away with poor writing. It’s similar to J.K. Rowling, whose later books in the Harry Potter series are incredibly padded. Australian Di Morrissey’s romance novels show the same problem. And when I started reading Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, I soon realised that I didn’t have to commit too many brain cells because the main bits of the plot and characters would be repeated ad nauseam.

I was interested to see that the author of the Wikipedia article agreed with my view of Ms Steel’s writing, saying that her books had been criticised for being ‘overly redundant and detailed….’ Because she so ‘explicitly [tells] the story to readers. . .’ readers ‘feel like they are on the outside looking in’ to the story rather than being immersed in it.

Some say you can’t argue with success. But I’d like to know exactly what her many fans find in her writing that makes them want to read more.

What link can I make between my experiences today and writing?

I had a phone call today from the guy who was to instal my new kitchen. Last week, he told me it was all systems go. How exciting — after weeks of planning a new kitchen, I’d finally see it. But today he told me the company had been sold.

It would have been worse if the company had closed halfway through installing my new kitchen. But now I have to go back to some of the kitchen installers I didn’t select and ask them to re-quote. And after working out exactly how I want my new kitchen, I’d like my plan to be followed. But installers–or kitchen designers as they now call themselves–have their own ideas of what’s doable and attractive. It could be a rocky road ahead.

Is there a lesson about writing in this experience? It certainly says something about handling disappointments, plus being prepared to make changes and keep going.

All writers have stories about publishing deals that don’t come off, broken promises, and big plans that go nowhere. Once a journal editor invited me to develop a series of articles on communication issues in the workplace. She was enthusiastic about the project and liked the synopsis I presented. But a few months later, she was impossible to contact. Instead of having the guts to tell me that a higher-up had vetoed the project, she let me dangle, wasting my time trying to work out what was going on. Another time, a co-author and I sent a research paper to an international journal. The editor, a senior academic, kept the paper for over six months and hid behind his secretary when we tried to find out if it was going to be published or not. We eventually withdrew it and published it elsewhere.

A positive from my kitchen disaster is that I still have a plan I like. In the same way, if your publishing plans vanish over the horizon, you still have your manuscript. You don’t have to start from scratch.

And a bad experience can help in the long run by making you more hard-nosed about writing transactions. Such as? Maybe it’s learning to ask more questions and to do this earlier. Or becoming more assertive about the fate of your manuscript. Or reading the fine print in a contract.

The good that can come out of bad experience in the writing market reminds me of the main character in Bonfire of the Vanities. He starts out thinking he’s invincible, a Master of the Universe. But then he has a string of bad experiences. However, by the book’s end he has evolved into a street-smart pragmatist, a survivor. And we all need to become street-smart when handling disappointments as we struggle to get our writing out there.