You are browsing the archive for book.

← Previous Entries
Next Entries →

It’s coming along nicely (my book)

May 9, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, Novel, On Writing, Study

So I met up with my supervisor again recently, and the feedback was good.  Much better than I had anticipated.

To be honest, it was a bit of a lazy effort on my part — not in all the sleepless nights I had trying to think of different ways to approach the writing and the countless hours I spent piecing it all together — but rather, in terms of the actual amount of time I spent writing and editing.

After our first meeting, I dumped what was supposed to be the first chapter and started again.  Looking back at it now, it was the right decision because it wasn’t what I wanted to write.  It didn’t matter if it was any good.  What mattered was that it wasn’t the type of book I intended.  So out it went and I started over.

This time, I just typed down whatever came to me.  It was easy and I sped through it.  I think it was as close to ‘free writing’ as I’ve come in a long time.  It’s been a really long time, considering free writing was one of the first things I wrote about on this blog like two years ago, and I haven’t done much of it since.  I just belted out the story without worrying about form or structure, deciding that I was not going to worry about it now and will fix everything up later.  The only bit I put a bit more effort into was chapter one, but even that was a pretty casual effort.

As it turned out, it was the best thing I could have done.  The result was a little raw, somewhat rough around the edges, but it was the type of book I wanted to write.  Finally, I was getting close to discovering the right voice.  And my supervisor was happy with how it was progressing.  Joy.

It’s going to be a busy few weeks coming up.  I still have to finish a couple of books I borrowed from the library, plus another book I bought from the Book Depository — all three will supposedly help me with finding my stylistic mojo.  I have a book launch to attend at an upcoming writers’ festival (And yes, it’s MY book!  Well, mine and a bunch of other people’s, but it’s still MINE!), and most of all, I need to do a lot more writing with the project deadline coming up in a little over a month.

The next step is to write a bit more (I have a few chapters lined up, actually), but because the project does not requre me to finish the entire book, I will have to do some serious rewriting shortly.  The key is to develop the humour so that’s punchier, more even and with less cheap shots (I have a tendency to go for the low blow) and craft each chapter so that it can stand on its own, almost like a short story.

A weird analogy here but I’m looking for inspiration in some of the shows that Larry David wrote, such as Seinfeld and Curb.  I’m in awe of David’s ability to create various strands in an episode and allowing them to intertwine before bringing them all together at the end and making the story go full circle.  That’s the type of legendary stuff I need to come up with.

PS: On another note, on one sleepless night I came up with a new idea for a book. It’s not a novel, but is a potentially lucrative idea.  Or so I reckon.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
No Comments »

Book Review: ‘Open’ by Andre Agassi

April 19, 2011 in Best Of, Book Reviews, Reviews

I’m supposed to be reading all the books I borrowed from the university library in preparation for my novel, but I couldn’t help myself.  My physical bookshelves are just about out of space, crammed with books I bought over the last couple of years but haven’t yet started reading, so naturally I went and bought some e-books as well.

As some of you may know, Borders in Australia is in administration and are offering discounts of up to 30% on their books, including e-books (which doesn’t make much sense considering it is the piling inventory that’s killing them).  So I went ahead and got myself a bunch of e-books, one of them being Andre Agassi’s controversial autobiography Open.

I know I like to make fun of Andre (as I did in satirical posts A and B, two of the most popular ever on this blog), but he’s always been one of my favourite tennis players and one of the most entertaining players to watch on and off the court.  And ditto for Steffi Graf, who also has this graceful beauty about her.

I never thought I would enjoy Open as much as I did, and I certainly never expected to devour this relatively long book (400 pages in paperback form) in just a couple of days.  To put it simply, Open is arguably one of the greatest sports autobiographies ever written.

Much of it has to do with the fact that Agassi simply lived a fascinating life.  He was a tennis prodigy that grew up in Las Vegas with an overbearing, terrifying father that forced him to hit 2500 balls every single day against a suped-up ball machine.  From the moment he was born, Agassi’s life was nothing but tennis, which he claims he hated, but it was all he knew.  He knew everything about tennis but nothing about himself or who he was.  When he became pro, he was essentially regarded as an underachieving, disrespectful punk, but by the time he retired, he was one of the most revered players on tour, an outstanding philanthropist, and widely considered one of the greatest to ever swing a racquet.

I won’t spoil the joys of this fantastic book by revealing anything more than that, because Open is a journey that sweeps up the reader and transports them into Agassi’s world.  It’s a world full of raw emotion, confusion and contradiction, but also filled with an unusual sense of fate and destiny (especially when it came to Brooke Shields and Steffi Graf).

There was a lot of hoopla when the book was released about how Agassi revealed he took crystal meth and lied his way out of a suspension and the unflattering things he said about some of his contemporaries (in particular his arch rival Pete Sampras), but all of that represents a miniscule part of the book.  They are explosive revelations, no doubt, but Open is so much richer than just those things.  I loved Agassi’s honesty, the way he described his relationships with some of the closest people in his life (particularly his right hand man Reyes) and his growth on and off the tennis court.

A big reason why Open is such a fantastic read is because of the way it was written.  The whole time I was reading it I kept thinking to myself: Wow, Agassi is a wonderful writer.  Is this seriously a guy that put zero effort in during school and left it altogether in the ninth grade?

As it turned out, Agassi didn’t really write the book, at least not the first draft.  He was honest enough to admit in the Acknowledgments at the end of the book that he acquired the assistance of Pulitzer Prize winner JR Moehringer, who moulded hours and hours of recorded conversations with Agassi into a ‘story’, which Agassi then worked on closely to punch into publishing shape.

Open is indeed a story, one that is expertly told and structured.  Each chapter has carefully defined parameters and themes, usually dealing with a mixture of Agassi’s tennis life and personal life.  It’s the kind of book that, even if you have a bit of an idea about what happened at various parts of Agassi’s life, you’ll still want to read on and find out the events from his perspective, through his eyes.

I guess the only ‘criticism’ I have of the book is that I wanted to know more about certain aspects of Agassi’s life because they were not discussed at length or not at all.  In particular, I didn’t think he dealt with his newfound wealth sufficiently.  We saw that he bought lots of new, expensive stuff, but we didn’t really get a sense of what he thought of all the money flooding into his life.  That said, maybe I’m being too greedy.  It’s not exactly easy to capture a person’s entire life in 400 pages.

My hat off to Mr Agassi (and Mr Moehringer) for such a great read.

5 out of 5

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments »

Book Review: He Died with a Felafel in His Hand

April 9, 2011 in Book Reviews, Reviews

My supervisor recommended a number of books to read to get myself into the mood and rhythm of the type of book I wanted to write, and one of them was John Birmingham’s He Died with a Felafel in His Hand.

The title of the book was something I was very familiar with, but to be honest I didn’t even know it was a book.  I had heard about it years ago as a film, a typically [insert adjective] Aussie film starring Noah Taylor.  To be fair, I never watched it, and don’t intend to.

So naturally, I was not convinced that the book would be a good read.  I was wrong. He Died with a Felafel in His Hand is a cracker of a book and John Birmingham is a ridiculously good writer.

The title (and the first line) of the book is a reference to one of the many housemates Birmingham lived with in share house accommodation during the 90s.  The whole book (and it’s a short one — my typo-riddled library-borrowed version was 214 pages) is filled with outrageous and hilarious vignettes about all the crazy housemates Birmingham encountered and the type of things they got up to, usually involving horrific hygiene, a plethora of drugs and bizarre, freaakish, unexplainable human behaviour.  All laugh out loud stuff.

It’s a very easy book to read because there is no real structure — there are chapters but he just goes from one housemate to another, from one house to another.  You do kind of get lost in all of it but it doesn’t really matter because all the stories are so well-written and funny.  There are also little side-stories told by his friends that are equally insane and disgusting, though it took me a while to realise that they were not Birmingham’s personal stories.

Birmingham’s voice and his style is right on the money.  It’s conversational, observational, extraordinarily sharp and witty.  It’s not overtly descriptive but each description manages to hit the bullseye in just a few words.  Definitely someone I can learn from.

I really enjoyed He Died with a Felafel in His Hand and will most probably read it again.

5 out of 5

[PS: I can totally understand, however, why a movie version would have flopped because it could not have been very faithful to a book like this where everything is all over the place and there is no real narrative thread.]

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments »

Starting Over…

April 7, 2011 in Misc, Novel, On Writing, Study

I had another extremely productive meeting with my supervisor last night, but in a nutshell — I probably need to start over with my novel.  If I was impressed last time, I was even more impressed this time.  Immediately, my supervisor pointed out that what I had written was not what I had planned to write.

In fact, it was the opposite of what I wanted to write.  My supervisor was 100% right.  After I had completed the first chapter, I looked at it and thought, this is not a bad story, but not particularly good either.  However, there was something that didn’t feel right. I didn’t realise it until it was pointed out to me, but I had written exactly what I said I didn’t want to do.  I said I didn’t want to write a coming of age story but what I had written was an intro to a coming of age story!  The thing is, my supervisor said if I wanted to change it into a coming of age story, this would have been an excellent start.  But I don’t care.  I’d rather write a crap version of what I intended as opposed to a great version of what I didn’t.

Another thing that was pointed out was that I seemed to suffer from an inability to separate my scenes.  I was writing it as a running narrative — this happened and then that happened and I saw this and I thought that.  There was never a break in the action.

A third problem was my descriptions.  As my supervisor pointed out, when you manage to come up with some brilliant descriptions, descriptions that capture the essence of a person or thing perfectly, your less impressive, more generic descriptions get exposed and become huge eye sores.  That’s three of three.  Hit the nail on the head every time!

If I might come across as a little down after that, I’m not.  I’m annoyed that I’ll have to spend a lot of time and effort, but I’m glad I didn’t write more before discovering that I was on the wrong track.  As my supervisor said, sometimes you have to write what you don’t want before you can figure out what you do want.

That said, it’s always easier said than done.  There’s no guarantee that the next time I sit down to write I’ll get what I want.  So what do I do?  My supervisor suggests that I just try.  If it’s not there, try a different approach, a different angle.  Eventually I’ll get it right.  Read more of the type of writing and voice I want to achieve.  It might turn out that what I end up writing is better than what I intended to write.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
3 Comments »

Pressure is a good thing

March 23, 2011 in Blogging, Misc, Novel, On Writing, Study

Source: ninemsn.com.au

I had a first meeting with my supervisor today for the major writing project I am to complete this semester.  Well, I probably won’t complete the whole thing, but the intention is to get at least 20,000 to 30,000 words done before June to put me in a position to actually finish it, with potential for publication down the track.

My supervisor is quite a well-known and critically successful author (though I assume not commercially successful enough to not have to teach).  That said, I was still very surprised and impressed by how many great suggestions he/she had for me.  Before leaving for Shanghai I had compiled a 1.5 page outline/proposal for my project, which he/she provided a little bit of feedback on.  Upon my return, I beefed it up to a comprehensive 4 page proposal.

Using that 4-pager, my supervisor was able to tell me which books and authors I should read, which shows and films I should see, what I should aim for and what I should steer clear from.  He/she also immediately grasped what I needed to concentrate on and the things I needed to turn these 4 pages of pretty rough ideas into a proper narrative that would capture audiences.  The advice was all spot on.  He/She hit everything right on the nail and set off multiple light bulbs in my head.  Don’t you love it when that happens?

Now, with the short China trip out of the way, it’s time to get down to business.  Our next meeting is in a couple of weeks and I need to have words for my supervisor to see.  I need to have words for my other class to workshop.  I need to finish my next magazine article (due for publication in June).  I have to find a publisher for one of the other articles I completed last year.  I have books I need to finish quickly because I have recommended books to read.  I have books and short stories to read for class.  I have pieces I need to read and workshop.  I have to submit an entry for a short story writing competition.  I have heaps of posts I need to catch up on.  I need to check on how my domain change is going (haven’t heard a peep for a month).  And while I am doing all of this, I need to keep an eye out for potential jobs, because I’ll be graduating in a few months.

Do I feel a bit of pressure?  Of course I do.  But strangely, I welcome it.  I’ve spent too long NOT having any pressure and it hasn’t been healthy for my motivations and ambitions.  Maybe that’s why certain authors can keep churning out books faster than printers even though they are already successful — because they have contracts that require them to write more books and adhere to deadlines.  Maybe that’s why first-time novelists take so bloody long to finish that first novel.  I feel like I need a bit of a push right now, since having no push hasn’t been doing it for me.

Come on!

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
2 Comments »

← Previous Entries
Next Entries →

Bad Behavior has blocked 1966 access attempts in the last 7 days.