- The biggest problem is tense change and constant shifting
- We do not know the Why of the book even though we are several chapters in.
- The characters are faceless to us - they have no clear personality or image,
save for a few who have some (the gay teacher, for example) but other than that
few have "faces". So far, the Mother seems to have the most personality - Trying to be Holden Caufield, yet his story meanders too much and unlike Holden,
it's unclear what journey he is on. Which passage is he going through? Is he changing
or going through a catharsis of some kind that makes sense or is clear?
Since all of you are keeping problem sheets, i expect you to add some of the problems you have found with the manuscript that we have discussed in glass. I don't expect you to share your entire problem sheet (because it is part of your final grade, so understood you wouldn't want to share it all,) but this said, I would want and do want you to list several problems that you have noted with the manuscript, so please write these in the comments section and be sure to sign your name.
We will keep an ongoing problem sheet on this blog as we go on...
Thanks all, and I look forward to your contributions.
S.R.P.
7 comments:
The author does a lot of telling, rather than showing; the characters don't speak for themselves.
The only passages the reader knows exactly what is going on are with the gay teacher and the sex scene with Mandy. Otherwise, scenes are light on description.
There are scenes that should be deleted because they don't add anything to the story, for example, the Lorna and Mandy sex scenes.
The story uses flashbacks, which makes it difficult to know where you are in time. Still, readers should have a clear sense of chronology.
I agree with Leslie!!
I think it would help to add description and show what's happening, rather that try to tell, through stilted dialogue. The biggest reoccurring problem I have found in the manuscript is that there is rarely dialogue attribution, or description following the dialogue. Besides making it difficult sometimes to know who is even speaking, without further description it's hard to get a sense of tone and visualize the scene. Thus, I feel like lot of the scenes come off as contrived and just plain uninteresting.
In the instances that some detail is provided, I find it hard to make any sense of the information. For example, in the last edit, why in the world does the astrophysicist matter? And why would he give a 16 year-old boy a BMW--used or not?
I also feel like we don't know Mandy at all. We know her parents, we know that she's eventually a bigger success in the "real world" than Max (though to what degree is still unclear), but we don't know anything about her character, what made him really LOVE her rather than just lust after her. He hasn't let us in on the personal side of the relationship.
Which brings me to another flaw: the narrator is unreliable to a degree that keeps him entirely disconnected from the reader. We can't feel empathy for him--or even sympathy, at this point--because we don't know enough about him or the people in his life or the "why" of his life to care.
One of the major, if not the major flaw of this book is that it fails to give us the whole premise of the story to keep our interest and keep us reading. This is central. The author assumes he has a cliff hanger here (he doesn't) and that we will continue reading because he has piqued our interest (he has not). In order to succeed at this very difficult construct he has set up, he needs to really make it fantastic and that's hard for anyone - i wonder if john irving could write a book like this! I think it would be far better if Max had written the entire book in one tense, the past tense, and instead of jumping back and forth in time, this book could hugely benefit from being put into a linear order. It's not that he's a "bad" writer, he's just a "fresh" and "young" writer and by "young" i don't even necessarily mean in age, i mean in attitude - it's an immature book and as long as the author remains touchy about edits, it will remain so; sub par, appealing to a very small segment of the market, I think.
The first major flaw in the manuscript stems from the author’s own confusion. What kind of audience is he writing the book for? At first there was an alternate YA and Fiction sequence (judging by the standard of the content) that collided perfectly with the Now and Then time period of the m/s, but lately it is lost.
The author is still not clear about the personality of the characters in his m/s. Either there is a forever stagnation in their emotional development or they are oscillating drastically between drastic transformations, which leaves the reader either bored or clueless. The under developed characters thus also face a problem with the tone they must stick to. Their inability lets the artificiality seeps in, and unveils the weakness in the words. On a personal level, I feel this is also because of the author’s failed attempt to use stream of consciousness technique.
The second major flaw is the author’s attempt to put in all his life long collected knowledge in one manuscript whether it is Jungian theory or LSD or cars.
The third flaw is the so-called ethical point of view that the author is so desperately trying to keep. I feel that fiction is ninety-fiver percent non-fiction, or so you want your readers to believe. So if this is the goal, why chose an ethical view point. It should be partial and judgmental, and convincing, which this manuscript is not.
The fourth flaw is anxiety that has driven the author to write this novel, and submit the very first draft. The problems in his manuscript are very common in the first draft, that is, the potholes, lack of imagery, inappropriate foreshadowing, poor usage of words, inability to follow the action, flat characters, unattractive first page Vs the setting the mind, and uninviting style. Everything is fixable but it is author’s responsibility not the editor’s.
Anu,
Your anaylsis is right. The awful is lost and dwindling and the book is or was initially difficult to categorize because it had so many divergent paths and the 'voice' of the book was immature. Now it is just a stream of consciousness journey that leads us nowhere that we want to go, and tells us nothing of the characters, nothing of their foibles and shortcomings or the essential premise of the book; it's 80 pages in and we have no idea what the book is about really.
The author is "young" in every way most likely; certainly his 'voice' is young, and that he is so touchy about edits would indicate that he is an unexperienced writer who doesn't want a word of his precious prose changed.
I could go on and on... it's interesting to see what you all are finding, which are the same issues i have with the manuscript...
sadi
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