Tag: writing

Book Review: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

A link to this edition’s real source. Please support her site: A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, 1928

Not a novel, but a long essay about women authors, notably novelists, and their historical restrictions. The bottom line is straightforward. Writing takes time. It requires some place, some space, to write in (Jane Austin having the exceptional ability to write in a room often crowded with activity), and also the means (money from one source or another) to sustain oneself while engaged in the process. Historically, Woolf notes, women have had none of these things.

Woolf begins by illustrating the restrictions placed on women’s time and space. While visiting Oxford, she was not allowed into the libraries without a male escort or a letter of recommendation. Late in her essay, she mentions Sappho (a Roman erotic poetess of Lesbos whose work is known today only in fragments) and Shikibu Murasaki, a member of the Japanese Royal Court credited with the world’s first “true novel” (Tale of Genji) in 1050 C.E. We don’t know much about Sappho, but Murasaki’s royal status allowed her the time and space to write an absurdly long novel. She explores a few examples of 18th-century female poetry suffused with bitterness about women’s place in the world. 

Moving up, Woolf notes that the 19th century’s four great female novelists, Austin, Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, were all childless. Child-rearing, especially when one has more than a couple of them, takes a lot of time unless there is wealth to afford nannies; even then, household management is left mostly to the woman. Why, Woolf asks, did women writers gravitate to novels? Novels were, she surmises, the new form, drama and poetry—including epic poetry—having been worked over by men for a few thousand years, while nonfiction demanded scholarship from which most women were excluded (as in Woolf’s chapter one Oxford story).

Lastly, in the 20th century, women wrote everything: fiction, nonfiction, stories, drama, and poetry, made possible by fairer property laws, the right to vote, and the ability to work in traditionally male occupations. She wonders whether these changes, while lifting women from the status of chattel, wouldn’t end up thrusting her into a pitiless competition with men across all professional and social spheres. Much of her speculation has come to pass, but Woolf would at least applaud what women writers have achieved. At the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, in each year, there are more published female than male novelists!

A long and delightful literary essay (would Woolf write anything less?) whose lesson can be summarized in two sentences: Writing takes time and requires some space in which to focus. Not until the 20th century did women, beyond a rare few, gain that time and space.

Review: How Fiction Works by James Wood

How Fiction Works by James Wood (2018)

One of my favorite books on the subject of fiction (a few others are listed at the end). Not how to write a novel, but more focused on how to read them. He doesn’t say much about plot because whatever it is, the magic in fiction is how a good author embeds us in the story. This book is about the linguistic tricks (if you will) that form the technical structure of that embedding. 

For example, in his chapter on character, we learn that Wood is not so enamored of distinctions like “round” and “flat” characters. Both can be important to the story, and importantly, some of the flat ones turn out to be highly memorable, while character rounding, as it has evolved from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries, has changed markedly. A modern author writing like Balzac or Eliot sounds hackneyed, imitative, “overdone.” But the modern has the advantage that, once the long form of character has been articulated and the technique becomes well known, the modern author can use evolved and much shorter techniques to invoke a fully rounded character (or environment); or as Thomas Hardy wrote (Tess of the d’Ubervilles 1891) “…we wander the long paths many times to discover the short ones” (my paraphrase)

This works for other aspects of what is called “realism” as well. All of modern genre fiction, from romance to action-adventure, mystery, and so on, is made possible by reference to this history. Wood points this out in his last chapter. Is realism in literature real? Not in the sense that it encompasses all of reality. Yet there is truth in it. The art (and this is true of all fine art) is arranged so that what it reveals of reality enhances whatever truth—insight—the artist wants to convey.

There are chapters on narration, detail, form (organization), language, character development, dialogue, and consciousness in literature—the invention and evolution of “free indirect discourse” being, in Wood’s opinion, the keystone in the development of the modern novel. Many, many authors are referenced, some of whom I’ve read, a few I’ve never heard of. There are two chapters focused on Flaubert (1821-1880), the lynchpin of “realism”, with supporting reference to Austin, Eliot, and Balzac, and more. How these nineteenth-century developments transform in late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century novels—with examples—is also addressed

How Fiction Works is a well-crafted examination of how to read a novel and appreciate the literary mechanisms behind the magic. I first read this book six or seven years ago, having never read (other than Shakespeare) any of the canonical authors mentioned. This review is based on a re-read after having read at least one novel from many of them.

Here are a few other books on structure in fiction:

How to Read Novels like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2008) 

How to Read Literature like a Professor (Thomas Foster 2005). This one is mostly about symbolism.

Aspects of the Novel (E. M. Forester 1927)

The Writing of Fiction (Edith Wharton 1925)

My Fiction

As of December 2024 there are four novels (five counting an anonymous novella) published on Amazon. All but the novella are published in Kindle (recommended) and paperback form. There are also reviews published here by guest author Wehttam Tropapar. I will link to Mr. Tropapar’s reviews below. There are links to the books on Amazon in each review.

Foreign Agent. 2021

Foreign Agent was conceived while I was taking a shower, having just finished joking with my girlfriend about Chinese technology (his television, Alexa, phones, etc.) monitoring our sex. I joked that I should invoice the Chinese. As I go off to my shower, I say to her: “The only fantasy in all of this is that the Chinese would pay me.” In the shower, I had an epiphany! “I could,” I said to myself, “simply make believe the Chinese would pay me”—not for sex, but for my geopolitical opinion! Sex was an added bonus. And so Foreign Agent was born.

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. 2022

Foreign Agent was to be a stand-alone novel. I had no thought to write another. But some months after the publication, in another shower, I had another epiphany. There was an element of the first novel, the aliens mentioned only in its last chapter, that could be the basis of a second novel, and so Foreign Agent the Last Chapter was born! This novel is closely tied to the first. The locale and characters are the same; only time has passed.

Cult of Aten. 2023

Once again, in the shower, I wistfully realize that my two novels are not selling very well—a few copies a year, maybe! But what might happen, I wonder, if the Cult of Aten (conceived in the second novel) were made real and took off? That became the basis of the third novel, the Cult and the first two books becoming wildly successful! But while the first two novels are ostensibly drafted by Francis Nash in Bangkok, this one is written by me-as-myself. The setting and characters—except for introductory mentions establishing context for the reader—are entirely different. If Foreign Agent and Foreign Agent the Last Chapter are brothers, Cult of Aten is more of a distant cousin and can be read as a stand-alone novel.

LoveMe Inc. 2024

My fourth novel, LoveMe Inc., is entirely independent of the other novels. Narrated by a 38-year-old Matthew (who is not supposed to be me), the novel takes place near Washington, D.C., in 2027-9 and is something of a political thriller. There are a dozen or so main characters, but the central trio includes a libido-charged artificial intelligence conspiring to take control of U.S. and international politics based on ideas found in its training documents—which happen to include—surprise, surprise—the three prior novels of Matthew Rapaport!

The Out of Town Buyer (Kindle only)

The Out of Town Buyer is a co-authored novella, my first non-short-story piece of literature, written in 2005-6 but not published until 2012. The authors are listed as Anonymous & Anonymous to reflect the joint authorship and also hide themselves as both were married (one still is) at the time of the writing. Discovering that J (the co-author) was herself a stimulating erotica writer, I proposed that we write a story together. She proposed that we get together to “do some research.”

The story idea was that each scene (the sex and what happens before and in between the sex) would be crafted in detail and that each author would take a paragraph or two to describe that part of the scene in first person from their own viewpoint, the shifting voices being signaled by a change in font. Together (sometimes in bed), they mapped out the story paragraph by paragraph.

Unlike the later novels, part story and part sex, the novella is, except for an introductory few pages where we meet, all about the sex. My primary aim was to coax J into describing her orgasms. The reader will have to judge my degree of success.

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Sex in the novels: Through the 1980s, 90s, and into the early 2000s, I wrote a half dozen pornographic short stories published on the Usenet (it was one of these stories, published in 2005 on Literotica, that brought J and me together to write The Out of Town Buyer). In those stories, excessively erotic explicitness is the backbone of the writing’s humor. This practice is only a little smoothed out in the novella, and sex remains over-described in the first two novels. When I wrote Cult of Aten, I decided it was too much of a good thing. In the longer form, the over-description got tiring. As a result, most of the over-description and even some, but by no means all, of the explicitness is removed in Cult of Aten, and this process advances in LoveMe Inc., where even more of the sex, but not all, is closer to soft-core.