Every once in a while–say every five or ten years–I read a short story that blows me away. I still remember mulling over O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Maupassant’s “The Necklace” (the MOST agonizing story ever written) as a fairly young kid, and Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” when I was a bit older, moving on and up through O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” Shaw’s “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and Olsen’s “Tell Me a Riddle” (which is arguably more novella than short story).

But nothing in recent years has blown me away like the two stories I just read, both by Nathan Englander.

”Free Fruit for Young Widows” was my first exposure to him.  I’d never even heard of Englander before, but I stumbled across this short story in The New Yorker. (You can still read it online on their website.)  I thought it was incredible, so I checked Englander’s short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges out of the library.

The whole collection is worth reading but the first story, “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is simply one of the best things I’ve ever read in my life. Period. It’s compassionate, harrowing, funny, poignant, horrifying . . . all in a few pages. And should be taught in every high school in this country. (An aside: there’s a character in it who has autism–at least I think he does; it’s not stated–and it was the most original, compassionate portrayal of autism I’ve seen since Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.)

I’ve recommended these two Englander short stories to a bunch of people, ranging from Kim (who reads everything) to my father (who’s in his eighties) to my brother (who mostly reads scientific articles) and everyone has said it’s simply one of the best things he or she has ever read.

I don’t gush about a lot of modern writers, as anyone who reads these pages knows.  I was an English major in college, reading Dickens, Austen, Bronte and the like.  Most modern literature leaves me cold.  I don’t find the stories exciting or the people engaging.  It feels like the majority of short stories I read fall into the same pattern: a description of someone leading your basic life of quiet desperation, somewhat alienated from the people around him, with lots dialogue and details that sum up the meaninglessness of our daily pursuits, and a minor emotional epiphany at the end that leads to precisely nowhere.

But Englander tells a real story and he tells it like no one else.  His stories aren’t “familiar” but they are page-turners.  Frankly, I don’t need to recognize the boring, soul-sucking details of my own daily life in the stories I read: I’d much rather recognize something huge and painful about the way people torture and also love one another, about how compassion is the only healing force in the face of cruelty, about how parents can and should teach their children that, and about how we shouldn’t judge anyone until we know what his life has been.

Englander’s stories remind me of a beautiful and poignant quote from Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle:

“Heritage.  How have we come from our savage past, how no longer to be savages–this to teach.  To look back and learn what humanizes–this to teach.  To smash all ghettos that divide us–not to go back, not to go back–this to teach.”

This is what Englander teaches.  Only he does it in the best way possible: by writing a story you can’t put down.

Seriously, people’s tastes are so drastically different you have to know your audience.  My father told me to read Elegance of the Hedgehog because he loved it, so I borrowed Kim’s copy.  When I returned it to her, admitting I had given up halfway through because it was so much NOT my kind of book, she laughed and said, “You’ll notice I didn’t tell you you should read it.  I didn’t think you’d like it.”  Kim knows me well enough to know what to recommend to me–and what not.  For instance, every good friend or relative of mine knows never to tell me to read a book where a child gets bullied or abused in any way, because I won’t sleep for a month, and I’ll blame them.

And I know Kim doesn’t share my love for graphic novels or fantasy, so I wouldn’t go around telling her to read any of my favorites, although I will rush to tell my sister or my oldest son about any new good one, since they love that stuff too.

But I’m reading a book right now that I think anyone who’s into books at all would enjoy.  It’s funny, for one thing–and who among us can’t use a good laugh right around now?  Can’t think of a soul–but even more importantly, it has insights about publishing and book-writing that are so unbelievably on target, it’s basically a primer in how to write and sell books.

The book is How I Became a Famous Novelist by Steve Hely.  (Full disclosure: my husband’s met Hely a few times and they have some mutual friends, which is why he read the book in the first place and passed it on to me.  But I’ve never even met the guy and, sadly, I don’t get any commission or recognition for recommending his book.  Of course, if Steve reads this post and wants to send me a muffin basket, I’ll be all “STEVE!  BUDDY!” so I hope someone sends it on to him and he feels inspired . . .)

Most of this book is laugh out loud funny–when Rob was lying on the bed, reading the book to himself, I got annoyed at how often he’d chortle.  I think that’s rude if no one else can share the joke, don’t you?  (Note: it isn’t rude when I do it.)  Pete, the protagonist, is stuck in a dead-end job, but when his former girlfriend invites him to her wedding, he realizes he needs to become a success before then.  He decides he’ll write a best-selling book and sets about figuring a formula that will work for him.

And that’s the part I love: he breaks down the different genres and gives you sample pages from various authors (yes, they’re fictional, and, yes, you will be able to tell almost immediately which real-life bestselling author they’re based on).  He even offers up a mock New York Times bestsellers list with book titles that are so close to the real thing, I was tempted to try a few of them on my agent and editors.

The book wouldn’t work if it were too broad, if Pete’s ideas were silly and implausible.  No, they’re silly and very, very plausible.  And the “excerpts” from various different writers’ works are dead-on accurate, which makes you wonder how hard it really is to do what Dan Brown does, especially when Hely’s outline of a published book called The Darwin Enigma offers up about as convincing a storyline as anything Brown writes.

As the main character breaks down–scientifically–what you need to include to have a bestseller, you realize how most bestsellers today really have fallen into a genre-trap and can easily be quantified.  Pete does pay a visit to some “serious” writers, who are teaching or getting their masters at a place that sounds a lot like Iowa and reading their overly detailed and gently nuanced stories to one another.  Hely does a pretty good job of capturing that world, too (and the kind of writing it encourages).  As he points out, why bother with that when you can just hammer out a bestseller?  He’s not actually contemptuous of these people, though: Pete comes away with a vague sense that maybe they’re trying to do something more honest and less cynical than what he’s doing.

Hely does an amazing job of dissecting the story and creative elements of successful detective novels, thrillers, memoirs, and philosophical ruminations along the lines of a Life of Pi kind of thing.

In Hely’s book, book editors have no idea what they’re doing and spend their lives terrified they’ll reject the one book that will go on to be a bestseller for someone else.  Success is dependent on luck, and when his own book starts to pick up steam, it’s for no merit of its own, but some weird confluence of events that brings it unexpected attention.  We should all be so lucky.

Anyway, my point is: this book is brilliantly accurate.  So much so that as I read it, I kept saying, “Actually, that’s a really good idea.  That’s a great title.  Wow, I’d watch a movie with that scene” (Oh, yeah, Pete also has a stint in Hollywood, meeting with a brilliant, crazy screenwriter who’s got a movie about chess and Russian mobsters that I swear could get greenlighted tomorrow if someone pitched it for real).

Let me leave you with one example from Hely’s New York Times bestseller list parody:

“EXPENSE THE BURBERRY, by Eve Smoot (Simon & Schuster, $23.95.)  A young woman in Manhattan spends her days testing luxury goods and her nights partying and complaining.”

Expense the Burberry.  Why oh why didn’t I think of that title first?  There’s bestselling gold in this book.  Too bad Hely’s only interested in satire.

It’s awards season, the time when people all across our great country are thinking, “I could write a better screenplay than THAT.”  In an incredible show of goodguyship, my husband Rob took a break  from writing episodes of “The Simpsons” to read and review some of the top screenwriting how-to guides for those who want to plunge in.  The rest of this post is all him:

Aspiring novelists who walk the fiction aisles at the bookstore wonder how it must feel to finally have a book published after years of hard work, and then they all have the same thought:  maybe I should just write a screenplay.  Movie scripts are a lot shorter, pay a LOT better than novels, and if you do sell one, you’ll have time and money to write your novel, for which, of course, you’ll write the screenplay.  Or maybe you should just write the screenplay first.

The problem is, how do you go about writing a script?  Might there possibly be a book out there that tells you in insufferable detail how to go about the process?  Actually, there are several hundred of those–leading to the thought that maybe the aspiring writer should skip both the novel and the screenplay and go right to publishing his own writing guide.

Anyway,  Claire and Kim asked me to come up with a list of the best screenwriting how-to books, but after agreeing, I realized that I haven’t bought one of these books in years.

So I headed over to The Writer’s Store in Los Angeles.  I spoke with Anthony, one of their extremely knowledgeable salesmen, and asked him to name their top-selling screenwriting book.  He immediately said, “Save the Cat” and pointed to a big empty space on the shelves where it sits when it’s not sold out.  I bought several others he recommended, found my old favorites, and borrowed Save the Cat from a friend, knowing full well that just because it was the flavor-of-the-month didn’t mean it belonged on my list.  From those choices I compiled my top-five list of screenwriting books:

1. Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder. If your goal is to write a marketable movie script, this is the book to buy.  Snyder is one of the few guys to write a screenwriting guide who has actually sold a bunch of scripts (and had a couple made).  His tastes are grossly commercial (he turns up his nose at the film Memento, choosing instead to give a structural analysis of the Sandra Bullock movie Miss Congeniality), but he has good advice on every page.  He breaks your unwritten movie down into fifteen parts, even telling you what page things need to happen on — “Catalyst, p. 12.”  “Bad guys close in:  pp. 55-75.”  While he backs up his theories with lots of examples from movies (including a few too many from his own scripts), Snyder follows a rule that the other authors on this list have forgotten:  keep it entertaining and short.
2. Writing for Emotional Impact, by Karl Iglesias.  Iglesias begins his book,  “There are three kinds of feelings when reading a story – boredom, interest, and WOW!”  (When I read this to my friend Joel Cohen, he said, “What about, ‘WOW, this is boring’?”)  You’d be forgiven for closing the book after this opening, but it is worth forging ahead.  The book is filled with good lessons, especially when it sticks to its theme.  In fact, I’d say it’s too filled with good advice:  if you were to read the whole book, I think the appropriate response would be to feel overwhelmed by the writing task ahead of you, drink yourself into a stupor, and not start a screenplay.  At least, that’s what I did.  But you should buy it.
3. Screenplay:  the Foundations of Screenwriting, by Syd Field.  This is the granddaddy of script writing books, published first in 1979, and a generation of movie and TV writers made fun of it, while at the same time following everything Syd told them to do.  Screenplay was a break-through book that laid out the three-act structure of the screenplay, and explained, in a somewhat hectoring tone, what should happen in each act.  And if you love the movie Chinatown, this is the book for you, because Syd loves Chinatown much more than you do.
4. Making a Good Script Great, by Linda Seger.  Another book getting a little long in the tooth, but if you’ve already written a script and are stumped about ways to improve it, there are helpful ideas in here, from re-structuring, to re-envisioning character.
5. The Screenwriter’s Bible, by David Trottier.  This makes the list mostly because it has an excellent section on how to format your script.  Even if you’re using screenwriting software like Final Draft, you’re still going to have lots of questions, such as when to use ANGLE ON and when to use REACTION SHOT.  Trottier has a pretty complete set of instructions.

I also have to recommend William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, which is not technically a screenwriting book, but which still has insightful advice within it, amidst great stories about the business.

And for general books about the writing process, my personal favorites are Stephen King’s On Writing and Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, which I think has the best advice of all for how to write a screenplay:  tell your inner demons to shut up, then get up off your ass and write.

I’m Bitten

We spend Thanksgiving in Yosemite with many friends and family.  Six weeks ago I badly sprained my ankle and it hasn’t healed as quickly as I hoped, so hiking, even walking any real distance, was out.  This sent me into a funk before we left.  The best cure for a funk?  An engrossing book.  As the mother of Kelsey, my 11 year old, it was imperative that I take her and her girlfriends to see the movie “Twilight” the weekend it opened.  Guess who is the most surprised that I liked the movie the best?  It’s an old-fashioned schmaltzy love story with a vampire thrown in.  I was hooked.  SPOILER ALERT – PLOT DETAILS FURTHER IN POST

I devoured Twilight on Tuesday in Yosemite (really Wednesday morning because it was 2:30AM) and panicked because I didn’t have New Moon.  Reprieve arrived at breakfast with Maya, a teenager in our group, who was reading Twilight and had New Moon.  It was read by 1:30AM Thursday morning.  I began to wonder, all of this unproductively in the nation, is it due to economics or are we all just reading the Twilight  saga and mentally living in Forks, WA?

Phooey to the Criticism

My girlfriend, Kenwyn, a retired lawyer and fellow book group member, admitted she raced through the Saga, and then the partial Midnight Sun on the Internet.  We chuckled about the people who criticize the book because of the writing (no Pulitzer material here) or the sexism (most romance books have sexism) or the fact that Edward is decades older than Bella in human years.  These books will not stand up to analysis, there’s nothing really to discuss other than the atmosphere they create.  The point of the books is to have a fun engrossing experience.  They’re plot oriented, so read them fast to get to the plot.  As a reader, don’t think about the story, just follow it and be swept away. 

One issue is the appropriate age of the reader.  Kelsey read all but the last one while away at church camp, so I didn’t have much of a decision.  The first three books are totally innocent.  Gail Collins in a recent New York Times column described the series as four books with a variety of reasons not to have sex before marriage.  Edward and Bella make love in the fourth book, after they’re married, but there are not any sex scenes, just before and after scenes.  Stephenie Meyer describes the experience of having sex as wonderful, but she never talks about sex.  I’m fairly strict with what my kids read and watch and I’m okay with Kelsey reading the books.  However, if you want to limit your daughter’s exposure, stop after New Moon.  The third book, Eclipse, is completely innocent but it ends just before the wedding and the fourth book (with the non-sex scenes) starts with the wedding.  It feels like cruel and unusual treatment to have to stop after book three just before they get married.

Can’t Keep the Books in Stock, Buy all Four at Once

I had to wait until Saturday to buy Eclipse  when I visited Willow Bridge Books.  But they didn’t have a single book in the series.  The store can’t keep them in stock or get the publisher to send them fast enough.  One of the employees said that whenever someone buys Twilight she rings them up and says “see you tomorrow.”  She advises people to buy all the books at once because they could be out of stock when the reader returns.  Leslie, my bookstore visiting buddy, ordered New Moon for her daughter from Willow Bridge Books for the same price as Amazon and only $2.50 for shipping to Los Angeles.  She said $2.50 was a tiny price to pay for supporting an independent bookstore (that’s why she’s my bookstore visiting buddy). 

Driving home to Los Angeles takes five hours without traffic so I was determined to buy Eclipse on the way home rather than lose all of that reading time (I bought a comedy series for Keith to listen to as he drove).  We stopped at Fig Garden Bookstore, a lovely gift store and bookstore in Fresno, but they too cannot keep the books in stock.  They are on order, but as soon as they arrive they’re sold and the publisher is slow in restocking them.  Curious, I called B&N in Fresno and they had a few.  So I succumbed and bought from a big box, I was addicted to the series and couldn’t give up 5 hours (more if we were lucky enough to hit traffic) of free reading time.  B&N sometimes runs short of the books, but nothing like the independent stores because they buy in such huge volume.  The cashier said all the books they had were on the shelves with a box in the back saying “no more.”  The woman behind me was buying New Moon, I suggested she buy the last two at the same time because you never know.

Midnight Sun on the Internet

So New Moon was done by 11PM on Sunday.  I read Breaking Dawn, which thankfully Kelsey owned, by 8PM on Monday.  Just as I was feeling the withdrawals of leaving Forks, WA and returning to my life, I remembered the partial draft of Midnight Sun on the Internet.  It’s Twilight, but from Edward’s perspective.  Ms. Meyer wrote it as a character exercise and loved it.  Unfortunately, some immoral person posted a draft on the Internet causing Ms. Meyer to lose interest in the project.  However, she posted a draft on her own website so fans wouldn’t have to sneak around and has decided to write the full version.  I’ll be standing in line at midnight to buy it.

Twilight Road Trip

Apparently, Ms. Meyers chose Forks, WA after researching weather reports and hadn’t been there before Twilight was published.  Now it has a booming tourist trade.  The movie sites in Oregon are attracting attention also.  Leslie and I took our daughters on a literary trip in the past, to Minnesota and S. Dakota to visit the places in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books, and we’re looking forward to visiting the Cambridge, Massachusetts area.  I think we’re going to have to add a trip up through the Pacific Northwest to follow in the imaginary steps of Edward and Bella.

Now, I admit all this with chagrin as I remember Claire and I chuckling at a grown woman reading Twilight, a tweeners book.  But books that provide a wonderful escape provide a real sense of magic in a hectic life.

Ms. Kilikevicius includes a calendar action plan that I loved.  It covers November, December and January with week by week tasks.  I read it last week, so I’m just learning about her suggestions for November, but they are so doable I don’t feel weeks behind.  Throughout the action plan and elsewhere in the book, the author reiterates that we don’t have to do everything.  When I read this admonition for the fourth or fifth time, I actually started to believe it and think about paring down to what was essential for this Christmas. 

I especially enjoyed the chapters on celebrating advent before Christmas and then the twelve nights of Christmas after the holiday.  It moves the focus from solely Christmas Day to a meaningful time before the holiday and a reflective time afterward.  The book describes preparing an advent wreath (I have a permanent one that I can bring out every year) and provides suggestions for family time each Sunday before Christmas and then on Christmas Day.  I’m going to try incorporating her thoughts on the twelve nights after Christmas to enhance a reflective time for the family as the hoop-la ends and everything is packed away for another year.

The author discusses various ways to keep focused on the meaning of Christmas rather than the commercialization of Christmas. In the chapter on children Ms. Kilikevicius stresses protecting the spirit of Christmas.  She suggests not taking the kids to stores crammed with eye candy, keeping them away from the television with commercial after commercial telling them what they must have, finding ways for family time, and giving children crafts and cards to make.

For decorating, the book describes an efficient way for hanging lights, decorating the tree, creating gift wrap, etc, all with the thought that some years a sting of lights and a couple of candles in a relaxed home are better than a crazed home with beautiful decorations.  Because always remember, some years you can’t do it all.