Progressive Book Club! Analysis: Fire and Ice by Dana Stabenow

This week, instead of reading a mystery just for review, I read with the intention of studying how the story was laid out and developed.  I'll admit that, since I kept getting caught up in the story, it only partly worked.  Dana Stabenow is a good writer; it's hard to ignore the story and study the structure even in a book I've already read (I chose a re-read so I could pay more attention.  Maybe I should have done one I read last week, not a few years ago!).
NOTE: THIS ANALYSIS DOES INCLUDE MILD SPOILERS!

Here's the scoop on the book I read, since this does amount to a review of sorts:
Title: Fire and Ice, by Dana Stabenow
Publisher: Signet, 1999, 286 pages (paperback).
Source: Library

The Plan:
My plan was to read the book and note plot and character development, creation and destruction of red herrings, means of inserting back story, etc.  I was doing this in the interests of improving my own craft as I'm nearing completion of my first mystery and starting to rewrite my second (yes, I am aware that this would have been a good thing to do before I started writing either book.  Isn't hindsight a wonderful thing?).  As noted, the plan suffered a bit because the book was too good to read purely as an exercise in the construction of a mystery novel.  Maybe I should have dissected a bad mystery.

The Lessons:
1.  We start with a bang, almost.  In fact, the first 3.5 pages are scene-setting, establishing the nature of the main character, Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell, through his assessments of his fellow-passengers on the flight to his new posting (most of whom turn out, of course, to be his new neighbors).  We also get the geography by watching the flight with Liam.  Then we are let a little into his history, so that we know right off that there's a problem with his personal life and maybe in his professional life.  Then, on page 5, we get a corpse.
My assessment: it's a bit chancy, even 3.5 pages of scene-setting.  Stabenow can do it, because she's a known writer and her readers know she'll make use of this.  But the beginning is actually kind of passive, and there's quite of bit of exposition.   I'd love to be able to offer exposition like that, that makes you wonder only how it's going to play out in the story, not if.  But that might be something you need to be trusted to get away with.

2. Keep things moving.  Campbell is hustled from crisis to crisis, and neither his investigation nor his personal life is allowed to do anything the easy way, though once or twice it looks like it might.
This is where Stabenow brings in the humor that is her hallmark; the things that complicate Liam Campbell's life are almost absurd, yet still real.  The murder investigation is never funny.

3.  Everyone is lying.  I've seen this noted before in discussions of writing mysteries, and it seems to be true here.  Everyone is lying, hiding something, or just unwilling to talk to a Trooper.  That makes nearly everyone a suspect at least until their lies have been sorted out, and maybe after, too.
Don't be nice to your characters.  Campbell has to deal with the fact that the one person he most trusts and most wants to be innocent is lying to him right and left.

4.  Keep the pressure on.  Campbell can remove a few suspects from the list, but he can't remove the ones that most matter.  And at the same time he can see a growing threat to other people.

SPOILER!
5.  Killing off the bad guys is tidy, but not always totally satisfying.  Stabenow deals with the perps in this one by having them end up dead, and that leaves some questions hanging.  Maybe okay.  I'd use it with caution.  It also makes for a pretty high body count, which is okay for her, but not so good in a cozy (what I write).  The mystery is wrapped up just enough, and in this case there is a nice circularity to the deaths.  Campbell's personal life shows modest forward movement but is still a mess--we are clearly left expecting more about him.  This is in keeping with generic conventions.

6.  Still thinking about character development.  Stabenow is really good about dropping the little bits of both description and backstory in without being obvious, and she's in no hurry.  I can also see her using little things to tag a character: Liam Campbell is terrified of flying, we learn in the first pages.  Not only does that tell us something about him, but it adds some nice tension in his personal life, since he's in love with a bush pilot.  Most characters get physical description through his eyes, which works very nicely as he's a cop, but it's all done with one or two key points (except maybe a couple of the women, who get more attention, if you know what I mean).
I have concluded that character development and backstory are the hardest things to do smoothly.  I'll probably have to be content with doing okay at first and getting better with practice.

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Full Disclosure: I borrowed Fire and Ice  from my  library, and received nothing from the writer or publisher in exchange for my honest review.  The opinions expressed are my own and those of no one else.  I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255: "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Kid Lit Blog Hop: Little Lord Fauntleroy

 

Review:

Little Lord Fauntleroy, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 149 pages

Orig. Publication: 1877.

Source: Library e-book.

Summary:

This less-read work by the author of The Secret Garden follows the fortunes of young Cedric Errol, an American boy whose English father died when he was very young, leaving him and his mother to get on as best they can.  But when Ceddie is seven, an astonishing thing happens: it is revealed (to him; his mother knew all along) that his father was the youngest son of the Earl of Dorincourt.  Further, it seems that his father's two older brothers have both died without having sons, and Ceddie is now Lord Fauntleroy, heir to the earldom.  Transplanted to England and the home of his crusty, selfish, self-indulgent grandfather, Cedric is too pure and innocent to see anything but good in others (even his dreadful grandfather), and so brings about a miraculous transformation, with a little more help from fate.

Review:

As you can tell from my summary, the book is in some ways deserving of the reputation it has, though it by no means deserves it all.  I grew up knowing that a "little lord fauntleroy" was an over-dressed kid and probably a stuck-up prig into the bargain.  Actually, neither is true taken in context of the book.  Cedric's mother dresses him as nicely as she can, in the fashion of the time for a boy of good family, and this is continued when he comes to England.  But little of the book's focus is on his clothing.

It is Cedric's pure nature that is the focus of the book, and here the criticism is somewhat more deserved.  No child ever was or could be so pure, innocent, and good.  He's not awful; I've seen worse in the literature from the period, but he lacks that imperfect humanity that makes Mary in Secret Garden someone we can like and relate too.  The only reason Cedric isn't too perfect to live is that he is so naive.  I mean, really.  He lived seven years on the tough streets of New York and never noticed that not everyone is good?

And yet.  I can't despise him.  I can't like him as well as I like Mary, because he's just not enough of a human being (being only 7 is probably part of that.  He's just too young to be that interesting, especially as Burnett wrote his naivete more like he was five).  But I can't despise him.  I still rooted for him, and was glad when he got to keep his title and his inheritance.  Besides, unless he's totally spoiled, which is definitely a possibility (and no wonder the Earl's own sons mostly turned out badly if his idea of parenting is to give a boy whatever he wants, and no school as far as I can tell!) he'll be an improvement over his grandfather as manager of the estate.

Of Burnett's three books, this one does the least for me, largely because not only does Cedric not have a personality developed as fully as Mary or Sarah Crewe (A Little Princess), but he doesn't really have any adversity to overcome.  And that, more than his too-good nature, I think is the root of the problem of this book.  It might almost stand as a cautionary tale for those of us who hate to make our characters suffer.  Because, as our mothers all told us, suffering builds character(s).  Without some kind of challenge that the protagonist himself must overcome, you just have a bunch of things happening to a bit of fluff in the wind.

Full disclosure: I borrowed this book from the  library and received nothing from the author or the publisher for this review.  The opinions expressed herein are my own and those of no one else.

Plotting, Outlining, and Editing

I've been in book editing mode for several months, which has made me do a lot of thinking not only about editing but about outlines, planning, and making the first draft closer to where I want it to be.

I also just picked off my shelf and started reading a book that's been mouldering there for several years, Donald Maass's Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook.  (I picked it up at the library booksale for cheap, and then never read it).

It's giving me a lot of food for thought about character development and more.  But even before I picked it up, I'd been doing some things I've never done before: plotting the story, and writing back-story on leading characters.  

I've also gone back for another look at How to Write Good by John Vorhaus to refresh my mind about pivots and turning points.

Partly, I'm doing this because I want to make my next book easier to write and--especially--easier to edit.  And I want to do that partly because I want to shoot for a NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel Writing Month, which is November) head start (the target for NaNo is 50,000 words, which is not a full draft of a genre paperback).

My Ninja Librarian novels were really collections of short stories that offered a modest story arc overall.  But this one is a murder mystery (a sequel to one I'm currently editing, which is partly how I know the first version needs to be better!).  And a mystery requires a tight plot, and that seems to be requiring a lot of thinking about a lot of things.

Here's what I've been doing:
--"Outlining" using the "question method," where I start asking questions and as I answer them ask more, until I have a pretty good idea what the story will look like
--creating more characters
--world-building: creating the people, geography, and layout of Pismawallops Island
My efforts to draw maps for this book, as well as for the current WIP, a middle grade fantasy I'm currently calling Halitor the Hero, are laughable, or enough to make you cry.  I need to find a better way to get my mental geography onto paper (it may involve bribing Eldest Son, who creates gorgeous maps of real and fictional places).

I'm hoping that by November, I'll not only know what the story will look like, but more about the town and the people than I will need for this book--I want the world firmly in place in my mind so that I can keep expanding and developing with future books.

Wish me luck!  And leave your tips and tricks and ideas in the comments.  I can use all the help I can get.