New Zealand and the Hobsonville 7/8th grade class

     New Zealand reminds me of California, and Auckland reminds me a bit of San Francisco – both places that I love. It’s something about the freshness of the air, the richness of the blue sky, the emerald green grass, and strangely, the trees, many of which species I thought I recognized from my teenage days running through SF’s Golden Gate park. In any case, NZ is a beautiful place, and though we had been told constantly by our daughter that it rains a lot, we had nothing but good weather during the two weeks we were there. A highlight was driving three hours north of Auckland to the Bay of Islands, taking a ferry to the town of Russell, eating at some great restaurants, and para-sailing a thousand feet in the air on a spectacularly clear and beautiful morning.

    Another highlight was Brad, my son-in-law, inviting me to teach two creative writing classes to his 7/8^th  grade students at Hobsonville Grammar school in West Harbor just across the bay from Auckland. What a great experience! I don’t normally get to talk to kids that age, and I was blown away by their eagerness to learn, their respectfulness, and their degree of participation. I wish everyone could meet Brad’s class. If they did, they’d come away with a renewed confidence in the future. These kids were bright, fun, and highly imaginative. We did some writing exercises, including a fun one where they got to write a paragraph using only single syllable words. Try it sometime and you’ll learn a lot about the power and versatility of small words! I also left two copies of Einstein’s Trunk – autographed, of course – as a prize for a writing contest they’ll be having once they are back from vacation.

     While on holiday, I also had a chance to read several thrillers including an early one by Martin Cruz Smith called Stallion Gate, and two by Olen Steinhauer: Liberation Movements and The Bridge of Sighs. Let me preface my remarks by saying that both men are exceptionally gifted writers. The problem is that both have written masterpieces and by that standard, for me at least, none of these books was quite up to their best work. However, all were still a quantum leap better written than the average thriller you’d pull off a book shelf. For example, as soon as I finished Liberation Movement, I picked up a thriller that came highly recommended on the Amazon Kindle book site. Compared to Smith and Steinhauer the writing quality was sophomoric. I read ten pages and put it down.

    Next posting, perhaps an update on the battle to publish A Thousand Suns and the necessity to be true to yourself as a writer.

Best regards,

Jim

Auckland, New Zealand

Viva Stockholm!

     It’s been a busy month at work and home lately, hence, it’s been four weeks since my last posting. However, despite my neglect, my blog did hit a milestone last week, having reached its 2000^th hit.  I’ve been flying around a bit including visiting Stockholm, one of my most favorite cities and Las Vegas one of my least. What I like most about Stockholm are the Swedish people: direct but friendly, outspoken but honest. And a bit of a puzzle as well. Here they are, the poster child for European socialism and yet their economy is booming along just fine.

     While at dinner a few nights ago a native Swede explained to me how their safety net worked. If a woman has a baby, she and the father get a total 500 or 600 days paid leave. To encourage fatherly involvement, a minimum 50 of those days has to be used by the man. Since there are only 5 working days in a week, 500 days paid leave would amount to 100 weeks paid vacation. The man and woman could split the days equally if they wanted. On top of that all education is free up through college. Also, there is universal medical coverage for everyone in the country, not just citizens. What else? Unemployment benefits aren’t a lot, maybe $2,000 per month. But it lasts until you find a job. The Swedish people sustain all this through pretty heavy taxation – perhaps over 50% for most taxpayers. The people I learned this from all agreed that the system works because Swedish people are socialists at heart. They don’t believe individuals should be able to amass great wealth, plus they work hard and have a culture that discourages welfare fraud.

     Las Vegas, on the other hand, is the city I joke is dedicated to people who flunked math in high school. The morning I left the Aria, a magnificent 4000 room hotel, I had to walk through a bustling casino at 6:30 a.m. Yes, that’s right, roulette wheels spinning, black jack tables and craps tables full. The party never ends. I guess the economy must be picking up. The one positive thing I can say is that Las Vegas can teach the world a thing or two about customer service. The hotel staff was impeccably trained. Also, saw a few shows, including David Copperfield, who, I am convinced, would have been burned at the stake if he’d been born 400 years earlier.

    During my travels, I found time to read a few books including two by Olen Steinhauer, i.e., 36 Yalta Boulevard  and Olen’s latest, American Spy.  Wow, that man can write. Just like fellow thriller writer Martin Cruz Smith, Olen manages to weave an extremely complex and rich story, seemingly effortlessly, slipping in details and descriptions as part of the plot and action. This is a gift and extremely difficult to master. Most writers stop the action in the book to describe the scene or a person. Steinhauer keeps pushing the action and dialogue while weaving his clear, vivid descriptions. For example, rather than pausing to describe a person directly by saying something like, “the man had a double chin,’ he will instead write, “The man pulled at his double-chin,” or “the shattered window reminded Milo of the pieces of his life he’d left behind.” This sounds easy to do when it’s only for a sentence or two, but try doing it for an entire book and for practically every description. It’s an art, and the effect is to keep the plot moving relentlessly.

     My next posting will be from New Zealand as my wife and I are traveling there to visit my beloved step-daughter and her husband. It will be our first visit there. Should be an experience.

All the best,

Jim

Zurich, Switzerland

A Rose by any other author would not read so sweet

Anyone following my blog surely knows that I greatly admire the writing style of Martin Cruz Smith, the author of Gorky Park and the subsequent series of books about Arkady Renko, the Moscow police detective. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of reading a less well known creation of Smith’s called Rose. This was a story of a British mining engineer recalled from Africa by his capitalist employer to find his daughter’s missing fiance in a coal mining town in 19^th century England. While doing so, the engineer uncovers several intrigues and falls in love with a mine worker named Rose.  

The book is gritty – you can feel the coal dust in the air and the vapor of darkness that covered the landscape from the constantly running furnaces powering the coal mine’s operations. Did you know that in those mile deep mines in Lancashire county that fresh air was circulated throughout the miles of tunnels by a single huge, roaring furnace at the bottom of the mine fed with 60 tons of coal 24 hours per day, 365 days per year? The fumes were vented through a chimney that ran to the surface but the almost volcanic heat of the furnace sucked oxygen from the surface deep into the bowels of the mine. If the furnace ever went out, everyone in the mine would suffocate.

Another curious feature was the elevator that ran from the surface down to the heart of the mine over a mile below. It dropped at a speed of 40 miles per hour and had no automatic braking system. The elevator was controlled by a man called a ‘winder’ who sat above ground watching the dials indicating the elevator’s progress and manually braked the elevator. This was his single job the entire day. If his mind wandered and he forgot to brake at the right time, the elevator with 30 men in it would crash at the bottom killing all. Same thing coming up. The elevator, if not braked, would come flying out of its shaft destroying its support beams and then plunge down again out of control to the bottom of the mine with all aboard. The winder worked in a shack by himself completely undisturbed. His concentration had to be absolute. It was said that the foremen knew to only put illiterate men in that job, because literate men could not concentrate all day on the dials.  

The work in the mines was incredibly dangerous. Thousands died (they really did have canaries in the mine to warn of bad air) and yet thousands more were eager to take their place because it was a job. And men needed jobs to support their families and for their own self respect. If you focused on the living conditions in the mines, Rose was a sad story of desperate, hard-scrabble lives held in virtual bondage by capitalist owners who never thought of themselves as evil but rather as clever businessmen trying to maximize the value of their capital. After all, they didn’t force the men to take these jobs – they could quit at any time. After I read Rose I watched a documentary on BBC on British coal mines in the early 1900’s (conditions hadn’t changed much since the 1800’s) and it told of one mining disaster that took the lives of almost 200 men and the owner didn’t pay the widows the salary of their husbands for the day they died – after all, they hadn’t finished their shift.

But in the end, Rose wasn’t a sad story. Somehow love always manages to trump attempts to snuff out the human spirit. In the end, the title character tells the protagonist that if he takes her with him back to Africa ‘I will love ya till my dying breath’(or words to that effect). Rose - an altogether uplifting and informative historical novel with something to say about the effects of unregulated capitalism on the lives of average people.

My next blog post will be a brief discussion of how South Africa fits into my future writing plans.  

Best regards,

Jim

Zurich

Writing Style - Likes and Dislikes

Like many people I have read hundreds of books in my life and count the moments sitting on a couch with a storm raging outside and a good book to read as one of life’s most enjoyable moments. But until I actually wrote a book myself, I didn’t have a clear appreciation of how much a writer’s style influenced my enjoyment of a book.

Writing style is a combination of vocabulary, sentence structure, emotional honesty, powers of observation, and perspective. And a thousand other things. Style can make or break a good story. Style can pull you in or push you away.

In my previous post, I focused on the style of Ernest Hemingway – a short, clear, no frills style that for me and many others touches our emotions in a way out of all proportion to the simplicity of the language. But I also admire the more intricate and layered style of Martin Cruz Smith in Gorky Park and Polar Star. Likewise the swirling, evocative, gritty style of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.  Strangely, all those vastly different styles have the same effect on me – they pull me into their world where now I hear the sounds, smell the smells, and most importantly, feel the emotions of a reality that exists outside my mind only as marks on a piece of paper. What a miracle a great book is!

But there are also styles I don’t like. And if I had to generalize, I would say that I question any style that breaks me out of the story – that makes the ‘movie’ of the story that I’m seeing in my mind’s eye stutter like a film that has slipped off the sprockets. Sometimes this can be little things such as wrong word choice, repetitive sentence structure, characters that aren’t emotionally congruous or consistent, overlong descriptions, or obvious plot holes and ridiculous coincidences. But usually I can endure those types of errors as long as the book has other redeeming qualities. But for me there is one ‘style’ that absolutely ruins a book, movie, or  T.V. show, and that is one that attempts any form of manipulation of the reader or viewer.

An example of this are books and T.V shows where every chapter or episode ends with a contrived, unanswered question or secret calculated to keep the pages turning by cynically manipulating the reader’s curiosity. Or they have ‘obligatory’ sex scenes, gratuitous bad language and violence. For those authors, it appears to be not about telling a good story well so much as running down a checklist of required elements.

So, for me, as with people I meet, I have more tolerance for an earnest, sincere but unpolished writer than I do for a suave, skillful writer who is otherwise shallow, manipulative, and insincere.

My next post will be a plug for two underrated movies, The Eagle and Battle for Los Angeles and what I learned about writing stories from watching them.

Jim Haberkorn

Zurich

The Excellence of Martin Cruz Smith

    There are many good thriller writers out there, but there are only a few that are mentioned in the same breath as serious literary writers. At least for me, the ones that come first to mind are: Robert Goddard in his prime, John LeCarre, and, Martin Cruz Smith. LeCarre and Smith have the added distinction of writing novels that defined an entire era for a generation of readers. For LeCarre it was the Cold War. For Smith it’s Russia both before and after Communism.

     Here is why I appreciate Martin Cruz Smith. First, when you have finished one of his books, you have tasted, smelled, felt, heard, and seen the story. If the scene is in Moscow, you see the grime on the old buildings and feel the apathy of the people, you smell the food and the garbage, you sense the despair and the daily grind of life, the long waiting in lines – and all this while an incredibly exciting and intellectually fascinating crime story unfolds.

    Second, the characters are amazingly well-drawn. Before I ever read Gorky Park, Smith’s first Arkady Renko thriller, I read a blurb from a review where it said that Smith develops characters in a way other thriller writers can only dream of – or words to that effect. And how true that was! Read the scene in Gorky Park where Arkady talks to his father. Absolutely amazingly well drawn. No literary tricks. No formulaic writing. Pure art – using words to paint a true picture of an unforgettable character.

    One of the subtle things Smith does is he sometimes has Arkady uncover a clue but then only reveals that Arkady understands the significance of it later through Arkady’s actions. For example, in Havana Bay Arkady has been trying to guess the password into a dead man’s computer. He’s tried for days, and then he happens to talk to a woman who mentions the name of the man’s pet turtle. Smith doesn’t have Arkady think ‘Ah-ha!’ while the women is talking. But later, Arkady goes to the man’s apartment, types in the name, and gets into the computer. It’s a small thing, but so many other writers would have let the cat out of the bag immediately. For some reason, I find that device very effective.

    Finally, Smith does an amazing amount of research and so artfully blends the background information within the story that you hardly know he’s doing it. And, of course, his writing style, his sentence structure, and his descriptions are all creative, unique, and varied.  

    For my next blog, I will write about Revenge in Einstein’s Trunk.   

Jim Haberkorn

Zurich, April 14, 2011