Classic of the Week: Gulliver's Travels

The Classic of the Week is one that most of you will have heard of, but probably not read in the original unless you’ve studied it in school. This writer was from the 18^th century (so a fair bit later than Shakespeare) and he wrote satire, which was a fairly common genre at the time. He was also the author of one of the earliest novels, which is evident by the fact that some of the paragraphs go on for three pages! What is this book? It’s:

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

You’ve probably all heard of this book, especially with the Jack Black movie just out. I’ve known of it for about as long as I can remember, since we had a little children’s book telling the story of Gulliver with the little people (the Lilliputians). When I was about twelve we drove to Ontario as a family (about 18 hours) and we listened to it on tape. That wasn’t the most fun drive in the world, but even Gulliver’s Travels was better than bickering with my siblings.

Gulliver’s Travels is a fairly famous book that isn’t really read that much anymore. It’s composed of four parts. The first is where Gulliver visits the Lilliputians. The second has Gulliver in the land of the Giants. The third takes him to the world of the philosophers/university professors who live in the clouds, and in the fourth he journeys to a land where the horses rule the humans (who are very ape-like and called yahoos). Each of these four parts tries to make fun of something, and the satire becomes more evident as the story goes along.

That’s probably why the first few parts are so much more famous. The idea of the big man held prisoner by the tiny people is quite fascinating, especially to children. Also interesting, but slightly scarier, is the idea of us being dwarfed by some immense race of people. While there certainly is satire here, mainly to do with either how small and insignificant, or how large and oaf-like, humans are, it’s less obvious and the actual plot is more fun.

 

The later books are almost exclusively satire. The third book, featuring Gulliver on the floating ship with the philosophers, makes little sense unless you understand what he’s trying to make fun of. As a child, I was just bored. And as for the last section, where the humans are virtually apes, I hated it, and I still do now. It’s such a low, disgusting picture of humanity. Since I believe that humans were created by God and in His image, not evolved from apes, this last part just felt so wrong. It was such a depressing way to end the story.

All in all, Gulliver’s Travels does certainly have its moments of brilliance. There is one scene in particular, in the first book, where the little people are searching through Gulliver’s pockets and describing the contents, that I absolutely love. Like most classics, this is not something you just read for an entertaining story. This is a book to be read for the satire, and for Swift’s dry wit. If you can get past the slightly difficult prose, Gulliver’s Travels is incredibly funny. 

How to Keep Readers Reading

Last week I wrote a post about what makes me stop reading a book. To recap quickly, the main reason I would put down a book is too much sexual content, like with Discord’s Apple. In that case, not only was I disgusted by some of the scenes, the story didn’t begin to interest me. I’ve read so many books where I could just have put them down and forgotten all about them. As an author, you have to avoid that at all costs. Your job is to make your readers not just want to keep reading, but need to.

Sounds like a really high goal, right? For now, let’s tackle just one small part: making the book impossible to put down. And how do you do that? By not giving them a place to stop.

If you’re like me, you like to stop reading at a place where you can easily pick up again. Most often, this will be a chapter ending. Sometimes chapter endings can be the perfect places to let your readers take a quick breather, but they’re also the best spots for a reader to stick a bookmark in, drop the book in a drawer and forget all about it. How do you keep them from doing this? Give them a good cliffhanger.

Now, this doesn’t mean giving them a cheap Nancy Drew style ‘I opened the door and gasped’ chapter ending. Ending a chapter with a surprise that is immediately explained in the first paragraph of the next chapter doesn’t help. You need something shocking to the overall plot. Suzanne Collins is a master at this. I just looked over the ending of the first chapters of Catching Fire and they all end at the perfect moment. President Snow arrives. She needs to marry Peeta. A person is murdered. She fails at something. (Sorry those were all vague; I don’t want to give spoilers). In short, each chapter ending only plunges the reader farther into the conflict and makes them need to know what happens next.

 

This doesn’t apply just to chapter endings, but also chapters as whole. If each chapter only increases the conflict then you don’t even need a cliffhanger. Just keep increasing the stakes and the tension. You’re allowed to give the reader a couple moments of rest (your MC could win a major battle, or finally meet their true love) but always keep a major threat hanging over them. If there’s no conflict, your reader is bored. If you can keep increasing the stakes, they’ll have no choice but to keep reading.

Best of luck to all you writers out there. J

IMM

This week's IMM is going to be pretty short, despite the fact that it's spanning two weeks. Basically, I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare recently since my course starts today. I have a test on Wednesday already (on Macbeth) so I'm working on my second read-through. I've got to say, Shakespeare makes a lot more sense the second time around, after reading a synopsis...

Anyways... on to the books.

I caught a friend reading this one day and she said it was fairly good, so I promptly arranged to steal borrow it from her. She loved it at first, but after a second reading said it wasn't as good, so I'll see what I think.

I still haven't read Pretty Little Liars, but the premise of this story (girl finds out that she has a twin sister who was just murdered because of a secret) sounds a lot more interesting. 

Normally any book with a title like that would NOT interest me. I'm not counting on this to become a favourite of mine, but I've heard that Sarah Ockler writes really good characters and emotions, so I'm looking forward to it. 

So, that's it for me. What did you get in your mailbox this week? Have you read any of these books? Do you have anything you'd like me to read/review? I'm always looking for more great books! And just so you know, feel free to add me on Goodreads. I'll accept any request, as long as you tell me you read my blog. 

How to Get Published 4: Querying

Supposing you’ve followed the first three steps, writing a brilliant novel, obtaining feedback and revising according to that feedback, you should now be ready to query. Simply put, a query is a short letter, no more than 500 words, that makes an agent want to read your manuscript. Like anything in the writing business, there’s a whole list of rules for query writing. These rules can occasionally be broken, but unless you’re absolutely brilliant, following the format is by far the best way to snag an agent.

Firstly, you’ll need to find agents. Agentquery is a great place, and you can search by genre and whether or not they’re open to queries at the time. It’s also a good idea to look in books that you liked and read the acknowledgements. The author will almost always thank their agent. It’s always good to mention in your query that you’ve read and enjoyed other books the agent has represented.

Then you need to get to know the agent. Do you actually want this agent representing you? An author/agent partnership will affect the rest of your career, so chose wisely. Look at the sort of books the agent sells. I want an agent with tastes similar to mine, so I wouldn’t pick one who sells a lot of paranormal romance or erotica. As an unpublished author, it sometimes feels like just getting any agent would be amazing, but honestly, no agent is better than a bad agent.

Once you have a list of agents you would like representing you, you need to send out your query. I’m not going to tell you how to write a query; Nathan Bransford, Query Shark and Elana Johnson can teach you that much better than I can. Once you have the query, send it out to a couple agents, perhaps ten at a time. Make sure you follow the individual agent’s guidelines. Some will just want a query, others will want the first couple pages of manuscript and a synopsis (though it's almost always a good idea to paste the first chapter or two in the email unless the agent specifically requests that you don't. Agents always like to get a feel for your writing style. But whatever you do, DON'T send an attachment!). Always address your query to the agent by name; nothing kills a query faster than ‘Dear Mister/Madam.’ These may seem like little things, but your first impression is so important.

And then… prepare for rejections, because you will get them. I’ve only heard of one author who got their agent first time. Everyone else had to go through many, many rejections. Leigh Fallon, the first inkpopper to get published by HarperTeen, didn’t get an agent the first time around. Don’t respond to the rejections; just delete them or store them away somewhere, and move on.

At last, at some point, you should hopefully get a request for a partial or full. You’ll send this off to the agent formatted as they request, and then prepare for another rejection. If you’re amazingly lucky, this is where you get an offer of representation. The agent will call, you’ll talk, and if you think this agent would be a good fit for you… Ta da! You’ve got an agent! 

New WIP: The Web

The other day I learned that I won't be starting work until the end of May (I work in a restaurant, so it doesn't get busy until the tourist season starts) so I decided that May was going to become MyNoWriMo. Last fall I really enjoyed doing NaNoWriMo, and I managed to finish WANDER in just 19 days. This year I'm not expecting to be able to write that fast, since my Shakespeare summer course starts next week, but I still believe I can reach the goal of 50k. I've got 5115 words so far, over three days.

Anyways, the novel I'm working on is a YA dystopian Sci-fi thriller (yeah, I know, way too many tags, right?). Here's the pitch I created:

With the New American Union at war with the European Alliance, it takes sixteen-year-old Cognate protégé, Astrid, to pre-fight all the battles in her mind.

As the youngest Cognate—the intelligent elite— on the Island, Astrid is the only one with the perfect brain to run the complex mental simulation known as The Web. Astrid is the ultimate weapon; in The Web, she can fight upcoming battles over and over to come up with the perfect strategy, allowing the NAU to win every time. It seems like the European Alliance is helpless against this superior technology, until Astrid meets a strange boy inside The Web.

The next morning, the NAU loses their first battle. An hour later, Astrid’s older brother fails the Cognate test and is banished from the Island. That evening, Astrid receives a new brother, Caiden—the mysterious boy from The Web. Astrid hopes that Caiden will explain what’s happening, but there’s one problem. He doesn’t remember a thing. Now Astrid is stuck fighting a losing battle and slowly falling in love with the boy who is legally her brother.

Astrid is convinced that Caiden is innocent, but there’s no denying that the NAU is losing the war. The only way to end the war is to kill the boy she loves, or destroy The Web forever. 

Does this sound like something you'd read? If you're on inkpop, I'd be happy to add you to the notification list. For samples, check out The Prologue or Sample Chapter. This cover is just one I created really quickly; I'll have a better one made by the time I'm done. 

Book Review: Discord's Apple

By Carrie Vaughn


When Evie Walker goes home to spend time with her dying father, she discovers that his creaky old house in Hope’s Fort, Colorado, is not the only legacy she stands to inherit. Hidden behind the old basement door is a secret and magical storeroom, a place where wondrous treasures from myth and legend are kept safe until they are needed again. The magic of the storeroom prevents access to any who are not intended to use the items.

But just because it has never been done does not mean it cannot be done. And there are certainly those who will give anything to find a way in.

Evie must guard the storeroom against ancient and malicious forces, protecting the past and the future even as the present unravels around them. Old heroes and notorious villains alike will rise to fight on her side or to undermine her most desperate gambits. At stake is the fate of the world, and the prevention of nothing less than the apocalypse.

This is the first book since I started my blog that I decided not to finish. Since we were just talking about why we don't bother finishing books,  I decided to post this review to expand on my reasons. For future reference, all books that I don’t finish earn One Star (and that’s pretty much the only way a book will ever receive one star from me.) These reviews will basically list all the reasons I stopped reading.

With this book, the main reason was the sexual content. At first it just mentioned rape in passing and I thought that was okay, because, after all, it was talking about the fall of Troy. Then one of main characters gets raped. Then that character has sex with another character. Then I stopped reading. I have read books with sex scenes (mainly just implied sex scenes) before, when they actually had a reason for the plot, or if it’s treated as bad. In this book, the sex had no point whatsoever. It was just because the author wanted to write a sex scene. If that’s the kind of book it’s going to be, it’s not the kind of book I want to read.

Vaughn’s writing also annoyed me. In another of her books, Voice of Dragons, I was constantly annoyed by her poor action scenes. This book was similar in that any scene that had any action whatsoever managed to confuse me.

The plot also moved a little too quickly. There’s so much strange stuff going on and the MC accepts it all right off the bat. And can I say bizarre? There are random snippets from the fall of Troy (I did appreciate the classical references to Homer and Virgil) some bits from pioneer days, there’s an ancient Queen who needs to get inside a treasure trove… and guess what. This treasure trove is in the basement of the MC’s father’s house. People come, and the MC randomly gives them things… I know this isn’t very clear, but it wasn’t very clear in the story, either. It felt like a mishmash of a whole ton of genres.

The only thing I really did like about the story was how Vaughn creates a semi-futuristic world that feels really close to our own (cars, cell phones, etc…) but with a couple notable differences. There are checkpoints pretty much everywhere, grocery stores are kind of empty, Russia and China are at war… I love that sort of futuristic society, so I was disappointed the novel didn’t concentrate on that more. I also liked that the MC was a writer for a comic book series. I thought that was pretty cool.

All in all, I can’t exactly judge the book b/c I only read six chapters. Those six chapters, though, were enough to convince me that I didn’t really want to read the rest. From a Christian perspective, this is certainly not worth reading. Others may enjoy it, but I’m not going to recommend it. 

Classic of the Week: 1984

For my second Classic post I decided to write on a book I just recently finished. I had been planning to read this book forever, and then once I started reading it took me forever (almost a month) and I just finished now. The book is:

1948 –by George Orwell

Years ago I read Animal Farm and hated it because I was too young to understand the political satire and I still wanted happy endings. Going into 1984 I knew it wasn’t going to be a happy book, and especially with the big dystopia trend on now I’m more used to books on totalitarian societies. In that way, 1984 didn’t disappoint.

Set in a futuristic world where Oceania (America and England) is at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia and history is being constantly written, it follows the life of an ordinary worker named Winston who hates The Party yet has little interest in actually leading a rebellion or doing anything major against the party. For him, rebellion means having an affair with one of his beautiful young co-workers.

I was surprised by the level of sexual content in this book. Prostitution is mentioned and Winston writes in his diary about a time when he visits a prostitute. Winston and Julia do have sex many times, and it’s described the first time or two. Before they get together, Winston fantasizes about Julia’s body and when they do finally have sex it’s more of an act of rebellion than of love: he tells her that the more men she has slept with before, the more he loves her. And yet, he constantly says he loves her and he would rather do all sorts of horrible things rather than leave her. So, on the whole, the romance aspect was a little confusing to me and extremely chilling at the end.

The plot was slower than I expected. For the first third of the book very little happens. The set-up is really interesting, but there’s no real action until part two, where Winston and Julia finally get together. When that finally gets boring something really dramatic happens, and the rest of the book basically turns into a physiological treatise. In short, this is not something you read if you want a gripping story and compelling characters. I didn’t like the characters. This wasn’t because they were poorly written characters. They were perfectly written, showing how helpless and dark humans can be.

1984 is filled with many great insights. It’s scary, perhaps a little exaggerated, but still very true. It’s not a fast read, and certainly not happy. At times it can be slightly confusing and at others it can drag. This is not something you read for entertainment. I wouldn’t recommend it for readers under about 15/16 because it deals with a lot of tough political content. For anyone older, this should be required reading. It makes you see society in a whole new light.