Charles Emery’s voice

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I’m working on a middle grade series. I’ve recently paused writing the second story to edit the first.

At a conference last fall I had the opportunity to read the first six pages of the first novel aloud to a group of twenty-five writers and the accomplished author/editor Arthur A. Levine.  In preparation I spent a day tweaking the brief introduction to the book. Arthur’s advice was to carry the voice of the narrator in that introduction throughout the novel, and I might have something worthwhile.

After the conference, I reread my manuscript and discovered serious inconsistencies in the narration. One voice was enthusiastic and immature.; another, brusque and flashy.  A third seemed unfocused. The only voice worth hearing was indeed the the plain, confident one in the introduction. Who was that? I searched my memory for the face of someone I knew who spoke like that. One wrong face after another appeared in my imagination before I recalled that of Charles Emery (pictured).

The late Mr. Emery was my high school coach and English teacher at the Fountain Valley School of Colorado.  He was an extremely reserved but approachable man in his forties. His teaching manner can best be described as deliberate. He gave good lectures supporting his positions with historical facts and passages from the text. Students could always tell when Mr. Emery was about to read. He would lean back in his chair, lower his half-moon glasses, and tip his head up slightly.   He read us Chaucer, Shakespeare and Donne in his naturally low timbre. There was a resonant, Gregorian hum to his voice that caught the ear. He spoke almost without inflection. The poignancy and emotion of the stories were carried rather in the occasional pause or drop in volume.  He read to a room filled with sixteen-year-old boys, none of whom ever spoke over him. I recall closing my own eyes or staring out through the window, not to avoid his performance, but to focus on it more intently.

Mr. Emery – Chuck, as he insisted I call him in our few correspondences years later - was a decorate war hero (UDT in WWII). He was a champion handball player and had been a scholar at Columbia University. He never spoke of any of this to us. We learned about it in murmurs from the seniors. I never saw him brag, or swagger, or speak sharply to anyone.

I’ll never have Charles Emery’s voice, but always carry it with me, perhaps feebly into my own little stories.

Here’s a bit more about Mr. Emery from the school. As you will see, I’m hardly alone in my praise of him.

http://www.fvs.edu/podium/default.aspx?t=204&tn=FVS+bids+goodbye+to+Senior+Master+Emeritus+Charles+F.+Emery+’38&nid=367998&ptid=39771&sdb=False&pf=pgr&mode=0&vcm=True

you can not control what you do not measure

 

 

 

 

 

“You can not control what you do not measure.” It’s a phrase in business with murky origins. Someone is said to have coined it, but it seems that he was misquoted or a poorly paraphrased. Whatever the phrase’s beginnings, its meaning is profound.

There is a time to be unaware of one’s position: a dream, a moment of creation, a walk with the one you love. But I have discovered that if I do not gauge my progress, I am likely to make little of it. I count my pages now. I focus on milestones and personal deadlines. It’s made a huge difference in my writing. Everything counts, not with the same level of importance, but it matters nonetheless.

page 132 of the new novel

Shaking with fear and guilt, Erin told the Nighthawk,”We want to fix what my parents did, and save your islands from the Coal People. But we’re just kids, and we’re lost in time!”

Current Word Count: 32, 613

From Chapter Twelve of the new novel

As the girls entered the building, Erin was struck by the enormity of the lobby and everything in it.

The room was the size of Central Train Station. Forty-feet above the floor, the ceiling was a backlit blue-glass dome supported by thick brass arches. On each of the side walls hung a huge steel clock with giant brass gears that turned at various speeds. High on the wall ahead was mounted an enormous glass map of the world with brass continents. Blue neon tubes radiated from Xdom across the amber oceans to the great ports of the world. Beneath the map, was a steel-clad reception desk.  Behind it, a line of tall, powerfully built guards paced menacingly in their black suits. Their keen eyes shifted quickly amongst the visitors milling about the room and scattered among the chairs of the waiting area.

The room gave Erin a chill, which she believed was intentional. The high ceiling and the big men would naturally make the visitors feel small. Standing between the huge clocks gave the impression that the company’s time was more important than the minutes tracked by the visitors’ little watches. And the massive world map with its glowing tendrils spreading across the vast globe made the company seem like a planetary spider.

Erin drifted toward a placard marked “History of X Energy.” Perhaps it could tell them what had happened to their beautiful city. But before she reached it, she was stopped by Monique’s exclamation.

“Oh, my Gosh, it’s THEM!”

Erin turned back toward the reception counter where the guards stared back at the girls like hawks on a wire eyeing a couple of mice.

She turned her attention to two extraordinary men moving toward Monique and Erin.

Monique was right. It was THEM.

Current Word Count: 27,077

most of the great art in the world is about …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Art is what you make when you’re not feeling cool.  Not that feeling uncool is the basis for art, but that coolness - prevents the creation of real art. The reason is simple: You can’t be thinking about your image.  Doing so creates a distance – a duality if you will, between you and the deeper thing you’re trying to express. There can be no such boundary. This is why art is so rare. I’ve only felt it a couple of times and even then, I’m not so sure.

Here’s the best expression I ever heard of this truth. It’s from Cameron Crowe’s film Almost Famous, a story about the coming of age of a critic.

Lester Bangs: Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was fun.
Lester Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey. I met you. You are not cool.
William Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn’t.
Lester Bangs: That’s because we’re uncool. And while women will always be a problem for us, most of the great art in the world is about that very same problem. Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.
William Miller: I can really see that now.
Lester Bangs: Yeah, great art is about conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love… and let’s face it, you got a big head start.
William Miller: I’m glad you were home.
Lester Bangs: I’m always home. I’m uncool.
William Miller: Me too!
Lester Bangs: The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.
William Miller: I feel better.
Lester Bangs: My advice to you. I know you think those guys are your friends. You wanna be a true friend to them? Be honest, and unmerciful.

Hornblower and the Hotspur

Hornbower and the Hotspur

For background for my sea story I’m reading Hornblower and the Hotspur by C. S. Forester.  The Hornblower series is set in the Napoleonic Wars, some eighty years after the period of my story. The characters are decidedly not pirates.  They’re the Royal Navy side of my tale.  For the pirate side I will read other books.

I read the Forester books to glean the nautical terms, the commands, the ship handling and the battle scenes which would have been very similar to the 1720′s when mine is set.

Apropos to children and sea stories, this series was among my father’s favorites.  He started reading them in 1937 at age 34, when the first two were published.  The last was written in the late ’60s.  Lord Horatio Nelson, hero of Trafalgar, was a boyhood hero of my dad’s.  Clearly he was influenced as a child by sea stories. His youth was at the time when Teddy Roosevelt and the emergence of American sea power were in vogue. You can see his stalwart nature and his passion for the navy in this precious portrait of Judge Wilmer Brady Hunt, my dad, when he was, as he would say, still in short pants.

A few lines from my current project.

Pettiprig's Stern

Admiral Squeamish Pettiprig raised an eyebrow. “My three ships can certainly sink Darkrunner’s one,” he said.

“But what if he’s with Nell Flanders?” Roderick asked wagging a finger at the admiral.

Pettiprig shrunk back for a moment before steeling himself once again. “I have good intelligence,” he replied. “That she’s careened her ship on the beach at Flamingo Petite.”

Minutes later Pettiprig’s flotilla sailed off in a rush to Port Left with Foppy Sniggers, who no one noticed lay unconscious on the floor of the wine locker.

Eighth-graders on Eighties Day

Eighth-grade Critique Group

This was the second round of criticism for these students.  They read a very early version of The Inventors’ Daughter – so early, in fact, that it was called Erin Isabelle and the Wicked Uncle.  All of those who read the first draft were invited by their teacher Brian to read the second.  I don’t know if one can draw a strong conclusion from this, but only girls volunteered to critique the rewrite. 

As you can tell from the photograph, they are a wonderful and spirited group, and they were very generous in their opinions and support.   Though their comments were somewhat more detailed, they agreed with the assessment of the fifth-grade group entirely.  (See next post above.)  Those points were exactly what I was looking for.  I tend to ignore a single person’s comments, unless they resonate with my own feelings.  But I take the unanimous enthusiasm for the work and the pinpoint critiques of sixteen middle-grade readers very seriously indeed.

One thing that inspired me about this group is how close they are.  Obviously they know one another well after at least three years together, but there is something else.  The very fact that they volunteered to re-read a manuscript demonstrates a shared intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm for exchanging ideas that is a credit to their school, their teacher and most especially to themselves.