How Did You Like It?

 

Terry Shames here, answering our question of the week: 

When a reader takes the time to find your email address and compose a letter telling you they don’t like your books, how do you respond? How would you like to respond, if that’s different? 

 Since I’ve never had that happen, it’s a strange question to answer. I don’t know what I would do it someone took the trouble to write and say they didn’t like my books. Usually it’s the opposite—I’ve read all your books, now when is the next one coming out? 

Cover of the last Craddock book!

 But that doesn’t mean people don’t like them. I don’t often read my Amazon reviews, but I have seen a couple in which readers gifted me with less than sterling reviews because the books are “slow.” The fact is, they’re right. I write a small-town Texas police procedural. Samuel Craddock is an older protagonist. He’s methodical and thoughtful. 

There isn’t a lot of action, if you don’t count murder as action. I’m more interested in relationships, and how things go so bad for someone that murder seems their only way out. I’m also interested in how gossip and secrets work in a small town. I want to explore social issues in a setting in which people know each other well and a small shift in attitude can affect a lot of people. I’ve addressed issues of hypocrisy, greed, how the past affects the present, family dynamics, violence, and police brutality. I’ve never had anyone write to tell me I shouldn’t do that. 

 I’ve only had one really unhappy review, and I discovered it two years after the book was published. The reviewer thought the events in the book couldn’t possibly be true. I guess he’s never known a woman who was abused by a family member. The odd thing was that with that negative review, I felt as if I’d finally arrived as a full-fledged writer. Bad reviews are part of what we invite when we put our work out there. 

 Although I’ve never had a reader tell me they didn’t like my books, occasionally I get an email in which the writer tells me I’ve gotten something wrong. I had one from a man who wanted me to write more thoroughly about motorcycles. He went on for two pages about what I could have put into the book. But he wasn’t angry or upset, and he seemed to like the book—he just wanted more motorcycles. 

Another reader took umbrage with my description of alfalfa fields, telling me that alfalfa didn’t grow in Texas. I wrote back and thanked him for his correction, telling him that I relied on my daddy’s information. And, in fact, alfalfa does grow in Texas, but I decided not to argue. Yet another reader declared that I couldn’t actually be from Texas, and I actually knew nothing about the state because my characters didn’t use the terms “y’all” or “ain’t.” I didn’t use the terms because in my family the two terms were used ironically rather than in everyday speech. But she was right; those terms are widely used. In my next book, as an homage to her, I had a character who used both. 

 I recently had a talk with a book club whose members had carefully read my first book. They asked some tough questions about motivation and about the psychological life of the characters. A couple of them said they had “problems” with the motivation of one of the characters. I guess that ‘s the closest I’ve gotten to someone saying they didn’t like a book. And I hope it will always be that way.

Learning and Teaching that Elusive Core

Terry here. This week we are talking about whether getting formal training as a writer is useful, and whether we can teach writing.

I got my master’s degree in English with Creative Writing focus at San Francisco State University. I loved every minute of the program. When I was an undergraduate, on the advice of one of my professors, I veered off from majoring in English, and I majored in political science. He said he thought if I wanted to be a writer, I ought to broaden my knowledge of the world.  I liked my political science education and it left me with a strong background in government and politics which as continued to interest me.

At some point  I felt like my writing education had been stunted. There were books I hadn’t studied, courses I hadn’t taken,  so I went back to school. The curriculum It mostly consisted of literature courses that I had missed.

The classes on writing I hardly remember at all. I recently ran across stories that I wrote for the classes and found that I had made As in all of them. My take on that was, “So what?” I learned as much from just writing and participating in critique groups.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think it was valuable, I just don’t remember the fine points. I have no idea whether I would be the same writer today if I hadn’t taken the classes—or if I would have been a better writer, or a worse writer. No matter how many classes I took, I still struggle with the basics that every writer struggles with: voice, plot, description, dialogue, and character development.

What I don’t struggle with is how to write a sentence and a paragraph, how to state a theme, develop it, and end strong. You may not think that matters in fiction, but it does. In the opening of the book or short story you have to give the reader a sense of what she should expect: the theme. You use your sentences and paragraphs to build your story line, to populate it with characters, and to set scenes. Sentences work for paragraphs, paragraphs work for scenes, scenes work for chapters. And if you build the story properly, eventually you come upon the ending that satisfies the theme. Easy no?

Not exactly. As always, the devil is in the details. And that’s where writing workshops and  courses come in. Some writers who are not only natural storytellers, but know how to build a book properly as well, without formal help, without critique groups, without beta readers. But I think those are rare. Most writers—both fledgling and fully-formed—benefit from classes, whether they are attending or teaching. Preparing to teach a writing class can be just as valuable as being a student in one.

I never get tired of attending workshops, classes, panels at conferences, and critique groups. I don’t always hear new ideas, but I often hear old ideas presented in ways that I really “get” for the first time. That happened several years ago with a weekend workshop I attended. One of the instructors told us that to write a good book we had to reach deep inside and find the books that only we could write. Old advice, yes. But somehow the way she presented it made me hear it in a different way. I understood suddenly that this was not just the admonition to “write what you know.” It meant something deeper. It meant to dig for something you cherished, something you knew on a visceral level. Shortly afterwards, I started writing my Samuel Craddock series. I had written several books before that, but with that series I finally found my passion, my voice, my setting, and my characters.

I’ve never taught writing in school, but I have taught in workshops. I like to teach aspects of writing. I love to see the look on a student’s face when something clicks.

But I also like the preparation. Every time I put together a class, I dredge up important things that I may have forgotten. Sometimes I even think of something new--not a new concept, but a new way of looking at it that I hope will be useful for my students. I don’t think it’s necessary to have formal training, but taking classes may smooth the way for grasping that elusive core of writing that we all strive for.

Terry Shames
A Risky Undertaking for Loretta Singletary
www.Terryshames.com