Review: Tips from genre fiction add thrills to any writing

Review of: Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

Author: Benjamin Percy
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Grade: A

I’ve loved Benjamin Percy’s essays in Poets & Writers magazine, where he evoked the power of thrills and chills, horror and terror to inspire even the most literary of writers. He's a writer who can both contribute to Esquire and write comic book series. Now he’s gathered more than a dozen of his essays on writing into Thrill Me, a volume dedicated to putting the power of genre writing into literary fiction. Or, if you please, showing genre writers how to hone their most cherished tools without descending into clichés.

“When people ask if I grew up a reader, I say yes, but not the type of reader they image: a small, scholarly child with glasses perched on the end of his nose. . . A book was never far from my hand – balanced on my nightstand, shoved into a back pocket, tucked into the glove compartment of the truck – but usually it was a broken-spined mass-market paperback with an embossed title.”

From a boyhood immersed in the words of Zane Grey, Ian Fleming, Tom Clancy; fighting alongside Conan the Cimmerian; zipping breathlessly through hundreds of thousands of pages by the likes of Anne Rice and Stephen King, Percy dropped with a shock into a creative writing class whose rule was: no genre submissions. 

Miraculously, he survived and indeed fell in love with the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro and more, and realized that in spite of his omnivorous reading, he had failed to understand, “the careful carpentry of storytelling.” 

It was from those literary writers that he realized the basic rules of story had been in plain sight all along, even in the goriest and most shocking of genre tales. And in Thrill Me, he lays them out for his readers (and fellow writers). 

First things, though, Thrill Me isn’t a cook book. In fact, at one point Percy assures us that there are no rules. Except there are “rules” which writers are free to break – once they’ve mastered those rules and understand what they’re doing. And if they can make the breaking work.

However, for a refresher of “rules,” Percy starts with the first commandment of all storytelling: establish a clear narrative goal, and takes us through the steps needed to develop a sense of urgency in readers (“. . . the most basic reason we read (is) to discover what happens next”).

He follows this with discussions of how to stage the kind of “set pieces” – the pivotal scenes “that you cannot forget. . . that (readers) will take with them to their grave.” (Tip: be sure a short story has at least one such scene, a novel at least four.) And of the basic methods for designing suspense; how to deal with backstory (his preference is to eliminate backstory – except of course, when the backstory works); of the importance of setting; and the uses of interior monologue (“There is nothing wrong with characters thinking. . . so long as it is strategically employed”).

And yes, he tackles that bugaboo of genre writing: violence. “The concern here is not with what is moral, or right, or proper, but rather with what is effective, asking how depictions of violence best serve a story,” quoting that “dark-hearted godmother of literary fiction,” Flannery O’Connor: “the man in the violent situation reveals those qualities least dispensable in his personality, those qualities which are all he will have to take into eternity with him.”

But lest we forget, Percy warns us that merely splashing buckets of gore across the pages can throw readers out of our stories, in the manner of excessive special effects in movies – “I’m not weeping or laughing or even gripping my armrests . . . I’m simply marveling at the way computers can create illusions.”

One of the “rules” of writing – if it feels like writing, cut it – applies as well to depictions of violence as to depictions of pretty scenery.

More even than the how-tos of dealing with violence, I give Percy an A for his attitude toward revision. After spending a year rewriting his third novel, his editor’s take was “Fantastic. Exactly what we wanted. Now would you mind cutting. . . and fixing. . . and while we’re at it, how about let’s rethink the ending?”

It’s enough to make a writer cry. Of laugh, reread the rules, pick up the tools, and try again.

Review: A Filipina writer addresses her country’s diaspora

Review of: In the Country: Stories

Author: Mia Alvar

Publisher: Vintage

Source: Purchase, Barnes and Noble

Grade: A

How can words so easy to read be so heartbreaking? Each short story of Mia Alvar's collection, In the Country: Stories, chronicles, in clear and lovely prose, a different aspect of the Filipino diaspora she knows from personal experience. Most often, she explores the effect of having so many of her countrymen and women flee their homeland, often for economic reasons, but sometimes as political exiles.

Occasionally, Alvar even considers the reverse of Asian migration.

"Legends of the White Lady" features an over the hill American model looking for work in Manila, where, "in cities like these there is a demand for blue eyes and light hair and skin like milk." "Peaches and cream," her agent says of her, and she "loath(es) them all for loving something so commonplace -- even if that commonplace thing was me." "The Virgin of Monte Ramon" questions the Word War II legacy of Americans in the Philippines, and the children they sometimes left behind.

None of Alvar's characters escape their story without having their hopes, expectations, even their fears, turned upside down.

Sometimes they're adult children like the New York pharmacist of "The Kontrabida," traveling to Manila say goodbye to his dying, abusive father and the mother he thought was a saint in waiting, only to find his parents' roles the reverse of what he remembered.

Or Filipino guest workers in wealthy Middle Eastern countries (a situation Alvar is personally familiar with from her childhood in Bahrain), ex-pats such as those of "The Miracle Worker," "Shadow Families," and A Contract Overseas," living in, but never part of, the life of their host countries.

And then there are those who stayed behind against all odds, epitomized by the politically-active journalist of the final, novella-length story of Alvar's volume, "In the Country." Set against the repression of the Marcos regime, the husband's purity of purpose threatens the emotional well-being, and finally the lives, of his family. Who is good, who is evil, who is merely deluded? Alvar's stories offer her readers, no less than her characters, no easy answers. 

(So many events lately, I’ve gotten behind on book reviews. But I’ll do some catch up this week. Tomorrow: North Texas writer Deborah Crombie’s latest, Garden of Lamentations.)