A review of Robert J Ray’s Murdock Tackles Taos

Invisible to all but the most astute reader, yet tools of the trade to the writer, modular scenes are the core of the mystery novel. Modular scenes are those universal elements every mystery has or it’s not a mystery. To name a few:

Crime Scene
Sleuth on Stage
Victim
Killer on Stage
First encounter—Victim and Killer
First encounter—Killer and Sleuth
Object links
Victim’s lair
Killer’s lair
Return to the crime scene
Killer confrontation.

Modular scenes are frames that contain the story. In the hands of an amateur, the modulars are clunky and obvious. In the hands of a master, such as Robert J. Ray, the modular frame dissolves leaving character, action, image, lust and desire.

Every Murdock mystery has two defining characteristics:

Good writing and control of the elements.

Good Writing: Buried in the action sequences in this novel there are, for example, subtle techniques of language that harken back to the rhetorical past:
“He drove a Humvee. Humvees smelled of money, money in her life was like manna, manna made her thighs quiver.”
In sentences such as this, Ray pays homage to Aristotle and the Trivium all in the context of a 21^st Century detective novel…which, by the way, I believe Mr. Ray is in the process of reinventing by sticking with tradition while bringing a 21^st Century social conscience to the genre. The writing in this novel is, in a word, stupendous. Crafted, controlled, wild and crazy when needed, the words create a world in which the rich eat the poor.

Control of the Elements: Ray defines character in just a few words but he gives us everything—whether we know it or not:
The Victim: “She wore hiking shorts with those bulbous pockets. Her skin, even in death, looked white and smooth, with a patina of sunburn starting. It was hard to estimate the height and weight of a corpse, but she was perhaps five feet five, weight around one-fifty. Her feet were bare, white, and scabby with blood. One green flip flop lay in the dirt beside her left foot.”

The key to the entire mystery in Murdock Tackles Taos  is one phrase: weight around one-fifty. You’ll have to read the novel to see why. As you read you will see that the mystery wraps itself up in that phrase which has, by the way, many transformations, all of which add up to the final revelation that will shock, enthrall, thrill, and at the same time challenge your belief in the goodness of human beings.

Object link: “Helene leaned on him as she framed the corpse in the view window of her camera. A soft click, her throat contracting. Then a quick shot of the downed bow-hunters. Without the man’s hand on her arm, without him to lean against, she would have fallen. As they started down the hill, her hip bumping his, she still didn’t know his name.”

As with all good mysteries, objects become characters as they move through the story.  The Maltese Falcon is nothing without the Black Bird. The Big Sleep  hinges on a photograph of little sister Carmen. In Murdock Tackles Taos, that camera, an object of small consequence at the beginning, lives on what Mr. Ray calls “a plot track.” The camera grows in importance as Ray unveils the mystery until, at one point, you ask yourself—Why didn’t I see that. Again, in mystery writing, the writer knows what the reader finds out, and Mr. Ray knows more than just a little bit about the craft.

I won’t tell you the story here—for that you’ll want to read the novel, and I won’t tell you who the killer is, but when you make that first encounter you might want to bring a towel to your reading to wipe off the slime.

This is a good mystery, maybe Mr. Ray’s finest. I understand that there is another in the works so will have to withhold judgment.

Eddie Iturbi

Part 2.  I am a literary artist.

© All Rights Reserved. Molly Best Tinsley.

I invite you to repeat along with me:

I am a literary artist.  My work affirms the creative process, which takes place in the special world of the imagination, a world apart from time and money, deadlines and the commercial exchange of commodities.

Even though many of the people around me don’t respect this process, because it “wastes time” and doesn’t make money, I maintain my commitment to discover and express my unique vision.

Even though the mainstream publishing industry is no longer dedicated to fostering the next American classic, but to guessing the next blockbuster, I won’t let that get me down.  I won’t let that stop me from telling my stories.  I won’t let that stop me from making art, because a society without original art is a society without a soul.

In my last post on this blog, I sketched the parallel devolution of legacy publishing and my career as a writer of literary fiction over the last thirty years.  Now I’d like to propose a campaign.  Because we do have a fight on our hands.  At stake are all those lost souls wandering around the shopping malls asking each other, “Did you find anything?”  Or numbed out in front of TV watching some mindless reality show.

We need to become literary activists.  It’s wonderful and valuable that we are willing to sit down at our computers and weather the loneliness of creating literature.  But we also have to be more aggressive in reaching and building audiences for our work.

In an essay called “Memory and Imagination,” the wise memoirist Patricia Hampl warns that if we give up on creating our stories, expressing our truths, we will have to live with someone else’s, which may limit and demean us.  I know we reside in a country that purports to honor democracy and pluralism.  But originality, idiosyncrasy, the exceptions to the rule—the stuff of art—none of that is particularly favored by authority, which would prefer lots of round pegs slipping docilely into the round holes laid out for them.  As Hampl concludes:  writing is both intensely personal and surprisingly political.

When I heard gates clanging shut on my fiction, I wrote a one-act play.  I submitted it to a summer theatre festival in Washington, DC, and it was chosen for production.  I conferred with my director, I sat in on rehearsals—after the bloodless interactions of fiction publishing, the collaborative process made the acceptance of my work all that more exhilarating.  I shifted all my energy into playwriting, thinking it would always be that satisfying.  Well, of course, that first production had been lucky, and soon the ratio of submissions to rejections began to approach my fiction record.  But although Broadway hadn’t come calling, I did discover the abundant opportunities to have plays produced at the grass-roots, locally and regionally, particularly if you’re willing to do some of the work.  I joined a Playwrights’ Unit, sponsored by a small theatre in Ashland, and we orchestrated sell-out evenings of ten-minute plays several times a year.  We had  audiences; they responded:  that is the lifeblood of art.

It was just a matter of time before I realized that doing some of the work could also apply to publishing narrative.  The epiphany came after Karetta Hubbard, a long-time friend in Washington, DC, who’d done consulting work for the CIA, talked me into collaborating on a spy thriller, Satan’s Chamber.  (I’ve taken a lot of guff from my literary friends for that title.)  The challenge was to craft a page-turning story without sacrificing fresh language and dimensional characters.  By the time we’d finished our cross-country project, it was 2009.  The economy was in a shambles; the publishing world essentially frozen.  Emboldened by Karetta’s track record as a successful businesswoman, we founded Fuze Publishing, and brought out the book.  Even before we released it, we’d begun to identify several first-time writers whose work was not likely to receive the support of Culture, Incorporated.

Four years after its founding, Fuze has published ten books, with five more in the pipeline.  Our list encompasses a variety of narrative genres, from mysteries to memoir and including a children’s book, but in all our works, our aim is to fuse the stylistic polish of the literary narrative with the compelling momentum of the popular page-turner.  We also confess to a thematic sweet-spot:  to illuminate cultural differences and affirm human connections.

Crafting plays taught me something that working at publishing confirms:  keep your eye on your audience.  I’m not talking about the person who prefers to think thoughts of no more than 140 characters, but a hypothetical, savvy person, who has picked up your work in the hopes of being captivated and guided on a unique journey.  This journey can’t be simply a meandering from one arresting image to another; it must be precise and meaningful, even though the meaning may not be instantly or superficially clear.

In other words, audiences expect to be caught up and supported by the structure of a story. And storytelling is an art just as challenging as the art of description, characterization, and scene-making.  It hinges on psychological strategy— stimulating curiosity, conscious timing and pacing, managing tension, eliciting revulsion or sympathy.

As I’ve begun to pay more attention to story, and structure, and plot, in my own writing, I can’t help wondering if perhaps literary fiction, at least in its longer forms, has been complicit in its own demise.  So many of us write well—lyrically, humorously, accurately, eloquently.  We can create quirky, dimensional characters and crisp dialogue.  But is that enough? Think of Dickens, whose deep sense of humanity and rich language serves riveting, sometimes outrageously manipulative stories.  In Karetta and my next novel, “Hotel Limbo,” due for release this fall, we’re hoping to bring a whole world to rich, linguistic life around a compelling story.

Each week our Fuze offers a free e-newsletter featuring articles about publishing industry trends and other treats for both avid readers and aspiring writers.  To enjoy the next issue of our lively, informative missive, visit our website at www.fuzepublishing.com, and click Join our Newsletter on the Homepage to subscribe.  (Please note that you can unsubscribe at any time.)  We look forward to having you with us!

We are always looking for strong manuscripts that fit our parameters and expand our themes.  Please take a look at our titles for concrete examples of all those abstractions.  If you wish to send a synopsis of under 150 words, 25 pp. of the ms., and a resume to  fuzepublishing@gmail.com, we’ll take a look and respond.

© All Rights Reserved. Molly Best Tinsley.

What’s Become of Literary Fiction? Part I

© All Rights Reserved. Molly Best Tinsley.

 Thirty years ago, I was finally following my passion.  Completing a Ph. D. dissertation in literature had taught me a surprise lesson:  I did not want to spend my life writing literary criticism.  I wanted to write literary fiction.  Two National Endowment of the Arts fellowships and a bunch of awards later, it seemed I’d made the right choice.  Then my first novel, My Life with Darwin, came out to positive reviews but modest sales, and from the point of view of mainstream publishing, my writing career was over.  Houghton Mifflin, the publisher, passed on my story collection and a second novel.  So did the other big publishing houses.  In the late eighties and early nineties, when all this was happening, I was too busy wrestling the pain of rejection into creative defiance to grasp the larger picture.

Older and cooler now, I tend to view my problematic literary debut as an accident of history.  It happened to coincide with a cataclysmic change in the publishing landscape.  Pardon the drama, but it’s as if the devolution of contemporary publishing has been tattooed on my heart.  Of course, I wasn’t the only casualty.  I had friends in the same boat, and they had friends.  The ranks of outcast writers were swelling.  They still are.  For those of us who still berate ourselves and doubt our talents, I offer the following story.

In 1979, the Supreme Court handed down the Thor Power Ruling—it was against a tool company, but it changed tax law for book publishers and reshaped practices in the industry for good.  Before this ruling publishers could write off on their taxes the inventory of unsold books stored in their warehouses.  After it they couldn’t.  Hanging onto unsold books suddenly became more expensive.  Better to shred them.  Literary euthanasia for the failed blockbuster was way cheaper than life-support that might allow it to build a following over time.  (This was the fate of Darwin:  about a year after its release, Houghton Mifflin offered to sell me some boxes of the book at cost plus shipping.  What I didn’t rescue, they would destroy.)

Then came the eighties, when deregulation under Reagan spurred the free-for-all growth of corporations.  Eventually they began swallowing publishing houses, and as soon as they did, they jacked up the traditional profit margins of five per cent to fifteen (and higher), a 300% increase.  By the mid-nineties, when I was shopping around my story collection, Throwing Knives, mainstream publishing had become firmly entrenched in the profit-obsessed business mindset.

I decided to submit my story collection on my own.  Small, independent presses and  numerous university presses run annual contests for manuscripts in the effort to take up the slack in literary publishing left by the big houses in New York.  Good news:  the second year of entering a few of these, my stories won the Sandstone Prize at Ohio State University Press.  Bad news:  the press is under-funded, and their marketing and distribution methods are geared to academia rather than the general reader.   I learned too late that review copies were never sent to the list I provided.

I can’t resist this sidebar to the story of literary fiction, because it sadly confirms the toxic impact of business on culture and the arts.  Twenty years ago, I teamed with a colleague of mine at the U. S. Naval Academy to craft a textbook for creative writing.  We had similar approaches to teaching it—lots of free writing in response to prompts—and we were tired of Xeroxing handouts.  The Creative Process was published by St Martin’s textbook division.  It’s still in print and selling steadily.  I still receive royalties!  But a book that we wrote expressly to be small, manageable, no excess bullshit, all muscle, and affordable at $14, now costs $50.  (The royalties are calculated on the original price, by the way.)   Thus the profit-motive strikes again, to exploit a captive market of already debt-laden students.

Today after decades of mergers, mainstream publishing has consolidated into five international corporations more interested in making money than supporting new voices and developing original art.  In fact, the current gatekeepers know little about writing or literature.  A decade ago, my agent defected from the publishing scene to go back to school in early childhood education:  she said she was no longer able to sell the kind of book she liked to read.  My original editor was hired by a larger house, then left editing altogether to become an agent–for non-fiction only.

For increasingly the Big Five opt for book-like objects, how-to’s, celebrity memoirs, “histories” of current events.  In fiction, they prefer formulaic genre stuff, cranked out by a stable of authors at the rate of at least one per author per year.

So that’s the picture.  In the current world, mid-list books are freaks–the ones that take several years to write, whose covers have no metallic lettering, which don’t debut to blockbuster sales, but rather build their readership slowly.  In the current world, profit-worship discourages original writing, emotional nuance, subversive vision.  My favorite rejection excuse for that second novel, by the way:  it was “too quiet and intelligent.”

Placing your creative efforts in their historical context helps you see that for the most part rejection isn’t about you.  It’s no excuse, though, to give up the work that infuses your life with meaning.  I remember taking a workshop once with the poet David Ray, which he began with this advice, “If you can quit writing, do so.”  Obviously he was trying to emphasize the ego-shattering challenges of life in the arts, but I’d propose just the opposite.  “It’s easy to quit writing, but we can’t.”  Standing up for our creativity has become a political act.

© All Rights Reserved. Molly Best Tinsley.

This is Susan’s second piece as Guest Writer. Her first was The Auto-Body Connection.

 Treasure Trysts

© All Rights Reserved. Susan Canavarro.

This week I received a meaningful and thoughtful gift from my stepmother Lois. The treasure box was full of old photos of my father’s paintings, a few 8×10 photos of me, a 1972 letter to the editor written by Dad concerning the construction of a nuclear power plant in Point Arena on the California Coast, and a small booklet of pen and ink and watercolor sketches by my sister Veneé. After discovering the gifts inside this box, tears rolled down my blotchy-rosacea cheeks for thirty minutes or more.

You may ask why this gift moved me so strongly, but perhaps first, before telling the story of the package and its contents, I need to tell you a bit about my life prior to this point—specifically, my kinetic life after my marriage dissolved.

In the summer of 1987 I packed my car with as many of my “things” as I could stuff into it, said a tearful goodbye to my husband and drove off. Caught the ferry to Anacortes and drove all the way to Monterey. This break-up was not the first. I had left several times before but always came back. Ultimately, I felt like I was going crazy and that leaving was the only solution. If I were on my own, I could finally be my own person, not a wife and not an emotionally distraught step-mother. To some degree, that came about when I left this last time, especially after I reentered college.

With only what I could carry in my car, I left everything behind. I had to start anew. Get an apartment, get a job, and buy all new bed and blankets, and chairs and kitchen equipment. I virtually lived on the floor of my apartment in Monterey for months.

Along the way, after leaving my husband and after a half-assed attempt to get back together again, I moved several times. I moved to Chico to go to school, from there to San Jose for graduate school, then on the Monterey to be close to my demented mother who died one week after I moved, and then I moved north to Fort Bragg. From Fort Bragg I moved east to Sacramento, and then finally on up to Florence, Oregon. With each move I downgraded my living situation and I gave away more of my possessions and wound up buying more items again, like beds and chairs and computers, etc., only to have to give them away upon my next move. Here in Florence I had to move out of my first good apartment and into a small, narrow, cold, and moldy old travel trailer. Out of necessity, I got rid of more things and bought lots of plastic to cover all the non-thermal-pane windows. Finally after 3 years in the funky trailer, I was old enough to get into low-income senior housing, where I’ve been since early 2009, with only one move to a downstairs unit, and in the process of that last move and all its attending frustrations, I tossed many more things into the dumpster. Those things held memories of bad relationships and difficult times. I let go of a lot anger in the process.

But, in 2003, before moving to Florence, I planned for the real possibility that I might actually become homeless and have to live in my car behind some lonely and/or isolated gas station. I gave my brand new bed and other furnishings to Salvation Army; I gave several framed paintings and a Futon sofa/bed to my good friends in Merced—I should say they were gracious to take my paintings off my hands. I gave away my top-notch stereo system to the son of a friend who had done some work repairing my PC. I gave my desktop PC to him also. I gave away my smaller portable record player used for folk dancing sessions and all of my dance music and notes. All of my precious art books, collected and well-used for over 27 years, I donated to the Sacramento Fine Arts Center to do with what they pleased. I gave away my first drawing and painting table and stool, purchased when I had finally gotten my first dedicated artist studio in our 2500 square foot house on Orcas Island. I gave away all the large and heavy items I knew I could not carry in my car.

I entrusted into the care of my sister our family photo album, consisting of pictures of our childhood years with photos representing us through all the grades on into high school and in all the front yards of our many lived-in houses; photos of our parents when they were younger and celebrating their marriage with a photo taken at a Hollywood lounge; pictures of our automobiles, pictures of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and pictures of our family dogs and cats and chickens and roosters and ducks and nasty angry geese that we had cared for over the years; images of my mother’s garden before it and she became ravaged by dementia. Images, each representing a miniscule part of who I was and who I’ve become, given away when I gave custody of those items to my sister in 2003 just before my final trip north. I also entrusted to her my wedding album which not only included pictures of our wedding in one of Dad’s unfinished houses, but also pictures of the husband’s family, all our Christmases spent with his brothers and sisters, his mother, pictures of our stepson, and his growing years; Christmases on Carmel beach at the mouth of the Carmel River on cool, blue-sky sunny days.

I knew Veneé would take care of these photo albums. She had done an extensive genealogical study of our family and had been tacitly elected as the family archivist. Little did I know at the time that she would be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2008. Dreams gone, lost, dead, buried in the dark depths of my sister’s subsequent struggle with Alzheimer’s. I have no idea what happened to all of her things, to the family albums and to the book she had created about our family history.

I loaded my car up with a new laptop so I could stay in touch with people, and my clothing, a few kitchen items, a small TV, paintings and art supplies, and drove to Florence. I shipped six boxes of books via UPS, so they could haul them up the stairs for me! I made three trips with my car loaded with small items. Again, I lived off the floor in my new Oregon apartment. I slept on an air mattress, ate and worked at my simple portable table. I bought an unfinished door and placed it across two plastic light-weight saw horses and this became my new painting table with a high art stool.

Along each step of the way, with each looming move, I gave up more of my precious belongings. It was just stuff you might say. You can buy more stuff when you get settled somewhere, you might say. That may be true, but only if one had the extra money to do so. After moving to Florence, I didn’t. And you cannot replace all those old photos if they disappear into a black hole. Due to financial necessity, I had adjusted to living light, to living without my old belongings and without much new stuff, but I felt the loss. I not only lost my husband to his errant ways, but I lost the stuff of my life. At each step of the way I gave away a bit of my self, never to be found again, except in memories, and those were fading fast.

Photo of Susan Need Canavarro, by Scrib, 1964

When Lois’ package arrived this week filled with old photos of Dad’s paintings and sketches, photos of me learning how to throw a pot on the potter’s wheel, and of my sister’s wonderful watercolor sketches, and the insightful and revealing letter to the editor written by my father in 1972, it opened a flood gate letting loose the waters—I was awash with memories and emotions. I remembered who I was when I was 17, 18 and 19— that trusting, fresh, young spirit—and it reminded me of long losses of time between then and now at age 66, but I am so pleased to have these old images filling in my memory gaps.

In the old brown portfolio were several 8×10 black and white photos of me. One, an image of my face as I leaned against the upstairs window sash looking out of an old abandoned building in Mendocino. My eyes, shielded by lowered eyelids and dark lashes, looked down at Scrib the garbage collector as he pointed his camera at me. A professional photographer, yet he supported his family by collecting garbage and hauling it off to the bluffs and dumping the trash into the ocean and on to the rocks. For decades that’s how the north coast folks got rid of their garbage.

I wrote about Scrib in my memoir Fragments: Growing Up Bohemian Poor in Dementia’s House:

There I was in 1964, not yet 18, in Mendocino at my father’s place, insecure and on the brink of a breakdown for fear of being unlovable. So what do I do? I fall in love with the married garbage man. I had a thing about falling in love with unavailable men—married, gay or just plain emotionally, physically or intellectually unavailable.

Rapunzel – Save Me! Save Me!

Charismatic, intelligent and witty, Scrib drove a large green garbage truck. In those days detritus was garbage and recycling non-existent, but for dumping it all back into the sea from whence we all came. Scrib backed the old rusty truck up to the edge of the bluffs just off Main Street and tipped the bucket, spilling garbage on to the rocks and sand 100 feet below. Ultimately, all of it dispersed by the ocean’s crashing waves.

Even though I knew he was married and had two kids, I flirted with him. He didn’t seem to mind. When he was not acting the garbage man, he was a fine art photographer, a writer and poet. We had trysts in derelict buildings that dotted Mendocino. He shot many photographs of me standing in front of open doors and windows in the streaking dust-filled sunlight. With long brown hair and hazel-green eyes, I was his Rapunzel, flaunting my sexuality, enticing my prince of a trash collector to climb the blackberry vines and pick me. Choose me, my heart called out. Save me! Save me!

After I moved to Santa Rosa to attend Junior College, Scrib surprised me by showing up at the motel where I was staying. My roommates were a bit surprised that the quiet and shy Susan had an older boyfriend. However it appeared, though, ours was only a brief summer platonic encounter. My romance with Scrib was seemingly innocent and safe. We were sexually attracted to each other, but no sex beyond kissing. I trusted him implicitly. He was married. I didn’t have to make a commitment, nor did he. We both knew this and we both knew it was morally wrong.

I missed seeing Scrib, I missed his attentions and pined for him after he left that day, but I very quickly fell in love with another unavailable man—oh so cool Dan, a Santa Rosa guitar player/folk singer.

My relationship with Scrib remained platonic probably because at age 17, I knew nothing about sexual matters, and of course, he knew I was too young.

I thought Scrib’s photos of me were lost. To see one of them again was a sweet treat. It brings back my carefree summer salad days in 1964 -1967 Mendocino. Whether I want to or not, I recall all the young men I flirted with and dreamed about, for whom I pined and suffered countless hurts: Scrib the married garbage man and a photographer who took many photos of me on our secret trysts; Philip the writer and poet who once wrote me a love poem that I carried in my wallet for over 25 years; Dan the coffee-house singer and guitarist I stalked at the Santa Rosa Coffee house and as fate would have it, whom I sat next to on the bus to San Francisco and thus began our brief encounter; the fishermen boys from UC Berkeley, John a pianist and Gil a classical guitarist, both students wigged out on pot and other drugs and the Beatles and now gone; then on to beautiful and handsome Peter, a counselor at a youth camp near Philo and stealing away together in the middle of the night to climb down the bluffs on the Bodega coast; and Russell the intellectual with his blond hair falling in his eyes, his rough pock-marked face oh so serious yet smiling at me in the Caffe Mediterraneum living in his tiny purple Berkeley apartment with the orange kitchen, and who cared for me when I needed caring; and Lee the blonde film student from San Francisco State who created a short film with me and a young man running through the dappled sunlit forest to a romantic tryst—after all these years, I now understand this proverbial love scene has been used by many film students and commercial movies. Not very original.

In 1968 another John showed up in my life in Pacific Grove. He enlisted and went to  Vietnam soon after we met and came home married to a Vietnamese woman. The man I married, Antonio who played classical guitar and with whom I had secret liaisons at the Monterey Peninsula Cemetery was married and his wife was wont to show up on campus. I knew all along that if he would cheat on his wife with me, he would eventually find others while we were married, but in my bliss, I ignored all the signs.

It’s a long tragic list for which I do have a few fond memories and many unpleasant and embarrassing moments. I was cute, flirtatious and alluring and I easily became infatuated with every man who crossed my path.  A romantic addict, I wanted to be loved and to be in love. I often wonder how I survived. What strength I must have had to survive that time of hippies and drugs, innocence and ignorance without becoming a drug or alcohol addict? How did I survive falling in love so many times yet remain so naïve and trusting? Or was it that I was too frightened to get drawn into all that free love and sex, and the reckless lifestyle of drugs? I often think all of my neurotic fears saved me. They kept me out of serious trouble!

© All Rights Reserved. Susan Canavarro.

As languages develop from pidgins into creoles, they add the marking rules of declination and specification to meet the need for greater imagery in discourse. Taking a cue from pidgins and creoles, a writer seeks to express the tale in image-evoking words. The richer the root verbs, the greater the visual stimulation they give the reader providing  a more vivid story experience. In speech, we add embellishments and ornamentation that can impede comprehension when written. The cognitive message here is simple: generic are boring. Overwrought prose loaded with adverbs and adjectives hide the story. Writing with action-loaded verbs–which I here call ‘strong’ verbs, sets off a chain reaction of verbal energy and connections in our reading brains.  Why? Everything in the universe is observed in two basic states, matter and energy. Nouns provide the matter and the verbs kick in the energy. Tell that to the adverbs.

Guest writer Frank P. Araujo gives his Linguistic Take on the Adverb.
Why do we dislike adverbs so much?  I know, I’ve heard all the arguments about how they slow down the action, the beauty of the language is in its raw simplicity, we should use action verbs instead of generic, and so on. However, one could argue these observations are merely matters of style and as such, these august pronouncements are just opinions. However, I think there’s a deeper reason for this that goes beyond mere stylistic choices.

The simple linguistic question that creeps up every time is how do words function syntactically?  If we’ve been able to glean anything out of the convoluted rules of optimality theory, it’s that generic is basic and marked is specific.  Marked structures are tighter, more emotion-packed and carry a finer degree of information.  Hence, in the sentence, ‘I see a dog,’ little more than the basic information is provided for the listener, so when we say, ‘I see the dog,’ the object is marked and the listener locates this mutt that has already been encountered in the discourse. For languages like English, Spanish, German and French, this is an important contrast. Some languages like the Slavic, Chinese and Japanese don’t have this distinction.

X-bar theorists note that the components of a phrase are a specifier that commands (dominates) a shell (the X-bar) which contains a head which in turn commands a compliment. Hence, Chomsky’s original S → NP, VP, then NP → (det) N, then VP → V, NP

The S is the XP which is split into a specifier (the NP) which dominates a shell, the X-bar, which in turn contains the VP, which in turn splits into the head (i.e., the verb) and its complement.

The interesting gimmick is that when we embellish the NP, with a AdjP, the adj becomes a specifier dominating the specifier, the noun.  This is the recursive feature of language and applies to prepositions as well.  However, when adverbs are inserted as specifiers to either Adj or V or other Adv, the effect of a specifier specifying another specifier has a “looping effect” that softens the impact of the phrase.  In other words, there are linguistic grounds for limiting adverb use because they do add curls to the flow of the discourse in much the same way that generic verbs add to the ambiguity which impedes the semantic load.  A lot of neophyte writers, just discovering the power of language, use a lot of generic verbs buffered by adverbs.

Minimalism is one of the guiding lights of structuralism.  The closer to the bone, the sweeter the meat. The nexus of linguistics and rhetoric is semantics, but also aesthetics. The song of the bard was expected to be pleasant on the ear as well as exciting to the heart.

Frank P. Araujo is a linguist, anthropologist and writer. His books range from children’s books—The Perfect Orange, The Magic Brocade, and Nekane, the Lamiña & the Bear—to the thrillers, The Q Quest and The Secrets of Don Pedro Miguel.

© 2013 All Rights Reserved. Frank P. Araujo.

]]> http://bobandjackswritingblog.com/style/frank-p-araujo-a-linguistic-take-on-the-adverb/feed/ 1 http://bobandjackswritingblog.com/rewrite/who-do-you-listen-to/ http://bobandjackswritingblog.com/rewrite/who-do-you-listen-to/#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 18:35:31 +0000 Jack Remick http://bobandjackswritingblog.com/?p=3526 Who Do You Listen To?

After I came across a very brave and unique novel titled: Taliban Escape by Aabra  which was reviewed in The Dark Phantom Review, I remembered an exchange I had with a fellow writer and former student. I want to post it here for anyone visiting this blog as a reminder of why we write:

Writer: I’m trying hard to maintain the last bit of writing advice you provided, “write what you want, the way you want.” That’s hard, especially with two friends criticizing it. Right now, if I take them seriously, I need to go back and almost start over with my work-in-progress.”

JR: Yes, that’s a tough one. One short answer is to listen but choose what to change if anything. The way I see it, we have this ideal story in our heads. It’s endless, but when you write, the readers plug in what you write and if it doesn’t connect somewhere to the universal story, they get this disjunction and their pencils move. What that gives us then is the issue of who’s doing the writing. But even deeper is the question of vision–-readers want you to tell them the story they want to hear. It’s your job to tell them a story they’ve never heard. If you can’t get past the universal, then you add nothing to the inventory of art and vision. It’s the ones who teach through their writing who are important.
A longer answer might be here: Readers are conservative and they want to be safe. Unsafe writing makes them uncomfortable. Your critics probably attack your work either at the Story or the Style, but never at the Structural level. They have that right when you put it on the table, but you cannot listen to everything they say no matter how much you like them. Realize this: the need to be loved is so strong, most writers will abandon their vision in order to bring their story into synch with the safe and limiting minds of their readers. If you do this, you fall as a writer because you are no longer scaling the heights of creation and in so doing you acknowledge the stasis of existence–getting and spending–and you will always feel guilty about knowing what you have betrayed. Each of us is unique while being an evolved animal who shares an immense pool of history and truth with your fellows, but you are not them and the vision you carry as a writer is the exact thing that changes, as Rushdie reminds us, cucumbers into pickles. Think of the journey…a long road into light. It is easy to stay where you are, but at some point you have to turn your back on those following you and go directly to the light and say follow me…what you have, my friends, is a faded vision. They want to visit a museum. You want to create the object they go to the museum to see. No one will ever suggest that DaVinci should have colored the Mona Lisa’s robe pink. So? Who do you listen to? Shakespeare said it, I say it, be true to yourself. If yourself wants to be loved too much, then you will make the amends you need to make to be loved. But if you tell them, this is my vision, this was not here before, then you expand what is. As a writer, You bring an object to the museum. You have to. It is your job, as a writer, to bring, not an imitation to the Museum of Writing, but the real and very first piece of its kind. That is your obligation. Unfortunately it’s an obligation, that, if you meet it, won’t let you be normal. Resist the need to be loved. Be a writer of new things. Jack

Link to the video and reading from Gabriela and The Widow. Appearing soon on youtube as well.

Video Trailer for Gabriela and The Widow

Latest Q and A on the Virtual Tour: we talk aboug the Dead Zone, the Mythic Wave, and Taking Dictation. Check it out.

The Dead Zone, the Mythic Wave Q and A

Gabriela’s Blog Tour, like all expeditionary excursions, undergoes itinerary changes according to the terrain, weather, and geo-political upheavals. Here is the url with the latest additions, deletions, changes, hopes, fears etc.:http://storiesforchildren.tripod.com/worldofinknetwork/jack-remick-jan-feb-13.html

American Chronicle and Andi’s Realm came off without a hitch. Thanks to all for visiting those stops.

Jack

Here are the first of the January stops on the tour. I hope you’ll check them out because I did some writing for the Q and A sections that might interest you.  Note that the January 20th stop is a live blogtalk session with Ashley Fontainne. Feel free to share this with fellow writers and readers:

World of Ink Tour Schedule for Jack Remick
January 7^th
A Book Lover’s Library—Review & Guest Post
http://www.abookloverslibrary.com/
January 8^th
American Chronicle—Spotlight Interview
http://www.americanchronicle.com/
January 9^th
Andi’s Realm—Interview
http://andisrealm.blogspot.com
January 10^th
The New Book Review—Spotlight Review
http://www.TheNewBookReview.blogspot.com
January 11^th
The Writing Mama—Interview
http://thewritingmama.blogspot.com
January 14^th
Writing to the Hearts of Children…and Adults too—Book Review
http://terri-forehand.blogspot.com
January 15^th
BlogCritics—Author Spotlight
http://blogcritics.org/culture/feature/mom-prefers/
January 16^th
World of Ink Network—Spotlight
http://worldofinknetwork.blogspot.com
January 17^th
Fran Lewis Reviews
http://gabina49.wordpress.com/
January 18^th
Roth’s Inspiring Books & Products—Spotlight
http://rothsinspiringbooksandproducts.wordpress.com

January 20^th
The Ashley Fontainne Show on Artist First Radio Network
8pm EST at http://www.artistfirst.com/ashleyfontainne.htm