Review: Silver by Rhiannon Held

My review of the new novel Silver is up at the magazine New Myths. And yes, there's a few typos, but hey, at least it's just a few. Here's the first half of the review:

Writers like Patricia Briggs and Kelley Armstrong have taught us that wolf pack politics is a tricky thing—one part subtle machinations and two parts brute force. Rhiannon Held continues in this tradition with her debut novel Silver.

The urban fantasy Silver has a certain grit and intelligence to it which is apparent from the get-go. Someone has performed unspeakable acts of experimentation and torture on an entire pack of werewolves, systematically burning them with silver and injecting it into their veins. The only werewolf to escape is a young woman who’s retreated so far into herself, she can’t recall her own name and adopts the moniker Silver. Andrew Dare, a pack enforcer, tracks Silver down when she crosses his pack’s territory. Andrew expects to have to meet the stray werewolf with violence and threats, instead he meets the half-crazy, rambling, injured Silver, which sets Andrew down the track of finding the person who hurt her and killed her pack. But first he has to find out who Silver really is and where she came from. Read the second half of the review...

Short version: I liked Silver. Is this novel going to revolutionize urban fantasy? Probably not. But it's an interesting new chapter in personable-but-aggressive werewolf fiction.

[Silver by Rhiannon Held came out from Tor, June 2012. I received a complimentary advanced proof via New Myths to complete this review.]

To collect or to novel?

When fiction writers get to the end of their MFA they're expected to produce a project that is "book length," but they face the decision: do I make a collection of short stories or do I write a novel?

The short story collection tends to be the favorite in practice while the novel is what everyone says they'd like to do until they face having to do it.

There's points in favor of each.

Short Story Collection
The reason I say the short story collection tends to be what most people do is because it's what MFA workshops have set you up to do. In workshop you write and submit short stories, you get feedback, you find things to change and you make them better. Now, all you need to do is edit those stories on your own and you're halfway to a collection.

For people whom revision is easier than drafting, this is a the option of choice.

For people who can't get their minds around the length or structure of a novel, then the collection is, without question, the way to go. Often MFA programs don't have coursework on writing novels, or it's not as in depth as the course work on writing the short story.

Often, the collection seems like the ready-made option. Particularly when you have that moment of realization where you realize that the path of least resistance to your degree is to brush off a group of desperate stories whose only connective tissue is that you wrote them and call them "collected." It seems like a cop out to me, but a reasonable cop out. Particularly if your style/subject matter hasn't changed much while you've been in the MFA program. Then your stories are probably much more cohesive than mine as I tried a bunch of different styles and then switched gears from realism to fantasy.

Also, the "MFA project" asks you to present the fruits of your education. It is not specifically designed to ask you to produce something that anyone would ever want to publish as a book.

Which brings me to: short story collections are hard to sell.

There are three main ways to get a short story collection sold. (1) You win one of the short story collection contests that have publication attached to them like the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, or the AWP Award Series (there are a couple others but they don't come to mind). (2) You get a contract for a novel in which your agent convinces them to buy your collection as a "bonus"--mostly this is a "bonus" for the writer and a grudgingly accepted ultimatum for the publisher, and another reason why agents are so cool. (3) You get 3-12 stories published by The New Yorker and some publisher wants to collect and reprint them. There are other ways, but those are the three big ones. All other ways are extremely hard sells.*

Now consider how many MFA thesis collections are out there in the world and you're suddenly wondering why you'd want to put energy into a collection when you could be putting it into a novel -- or at least that's what I'm wondering.

The Novel
The big thing the novel has going for it is that it can be sold. That is, it's likely that (all prose being considered equal) someone will want to publish it. All that time, effort, and editing will result in a bound, typeset version of something with your name on it. Even if the cover sucks it's still your book.

The big downside to writing the novel as MFA thesis is that the MFA is not geared toward getting you to produce a novel. As mentioned above, it's the short story that's the perfect size and shape for weekly workshops, not the baggy monsters. Therefore, you'll likely be generating new material and editing it in a shorter span of time.

Then there's the whole has anybody taught you how to write a novel? question which seems to trip people up. I've heard quiet a few people say that they won't try to write a novel (including well published short storyists) because they just don't know how to put one together. Although if you look outside your MFA you can almost always find someone to teach you or materials to use to teach yourself. (Screenplay structure, as I understand it, is where to start looking.)

Then there's the not to be overlooked notion of having an idea big enough to fill a novel.

Where I'm at
See, I thought I had a plan (a novel). Then I had another plan (a story collection)--a plan I put in writing this time! And now I don't know if that plan is as good as the new-new plan (a novel, different from the first novel which I now know I couldn't sustain).

The new-new plan is, albeit, new and shiny. But I might be in the throws of saying hey, if my short story collection idea is going to be as much work as my novel idea then why don't I write the novel, have more fun, and end up with a more viable product at the end?

My advisor recently asked me to crunch numbers and find out where I'm at so that we can think about how best to spend my time. She didn't commit to one side of the debate or the other, but the mere suggestion of number crunching had me thinking all weekend.

The question is not as easy to answer as one would think. I've known a lot of people who said they were going to write a novel for their thesis project. It was only logical, and when it came down to it, logic changed and the logical thing to do was a collection. And now I don't know where I'm going to land with four months until it's due.


*This, of course, makes me laugh. Like any of those three are particularly easy.

Don't be so "serious"

Laura Miller addresses why writers shouldn't strive to be "serious," and makes other helpful noises from one reader to all those writers out there.

In another essay, I found out that the phrase "Writing is rewriting" is apparently an "old saying." While I agree with the sentiment, I can't say I've ever heard the phrase before, new, old or otherwise. Otherwise, this essay is full of good stuff to think about when editing. I know I mentioned recently that the "literary types" are horrible at teaching novel writing (they're more of if you build it, they will come which is fine when you're Kevin Costner, but when you're me? Not so much).  So I've been hunting down novel writing instruction from the genre people, which is better but not as good as what you'll find at the bottom of the article on editing.  Screenwriters.  I should have already known that screenwriters-turned-novelists are the gold standard for teaching structure in long-form storytelling.  Because they are.  And the only teacher I've ever had who was willing to tackle teaching novel writing was a screenwriter-turned-novelist.

But before the writer gets to that, she stars off the essay by listing all the things she was "before she was a writer," which makes me sad and frustrated. Lately I've been thinking about my own "before I was a writer" list of jobs and, honestly, I'd rather just get to the damn writing part. I'm coming up on some "free time" between semesters. I could spend it visiting friends and family, or I could get the damnwriting done.

I recently had an acquaintance who took a week off of work and in ten days she kicked out a 50,000 word first draft of the novel she's been toying with for months. It's ... well, it's many things, including crazy, but it's also inspiring.

I too have notes and notes and notes drafted for two different popular novel projects. Two weeks, fourteen days, 70,000 words between the end of April and the middle part of May.  I'd be crazy to do it. I'd be crazy not to do it. Better to do the damnwriting than keep adding bizarre jobs to my "before I was a writer" list.

Deprived

So I'm supposed to be doing reading deprivation this week to show myself what I do when I am given a significant chunk of time back.

What have I learned that I do with that "extra" time? Watch movies and read.

Yes. That's it. When I deprive myself of reading I binge read. I didn't even make it a whole week before I sat down on my couch and tried to start reading every book on the side table at once. I kid you not. I opened one book then thought of the book beneath it in the stack -- I'll read one chapter from that! I thought. It's non-fiction and sectioned, so once I'm done with the section I can pick up this novel again. All the while I had a book lying open but face down on my lap to mark my page in that text.

My binge burned me out pretty quickly and I didn't finish a section from any of those books but I did read at least a few pages of all of them -- some more than others. My lesson learned: reading deprivation makes me kinda kooky and spastic.

Still chugging along on the summer novel. Progress has been stop and go this past week as I'm still trying to recover from a trip home to visit family which broke my writing routine. Now the novel is in difficult territory. I have to find a way to transition and raise the stakes again while letting my heroine grow. She's been fairly traumatized so far and I need to give her a little bit of time to breathe and start to feel secure before I traumatize her again ... but at the same time I don't want to let the story flat line. Perhaps this would be a good time to "grow" the characters surrounding her.

Do You NaNo?

I do.

NaNoWriMo is quickly approaching. It's already October 22 which means there is just a little more than a week until November 1 and the beginning of the 10th year of NaNoWriMo.

If you don't know, NaNoWriMo is the crazy acronym for Chris Baty's pet project with the really long name of "November is National Novel Writing Month."

The event, its website and the corresponding book, No Plot? No Problem!, have a jubilant and, at times, silly tone -- if you couldn't already derive that from the fact that this year's graphic involves a viking helmet for no obviously identifiable reason. But it all translates into a you can do it! atmosphere, one that makes it baltantly obvious that the only obsticle to writing your novel is yourself. A fact that is true all year round but unavoidable for the month of November.

I'm both heartened and amused to see the more scholarly set of writers jumping on board this year. My experience is that the majority of NaNo-ers are genre writers ... but then again aren't the majority of fiction writers genre writers? As far as living writings go, they take up the most shelf space in book stores. Not to make value statements about types of writing or people who do writing only in one vein, but I enjoy seeing the MFAers contemplating this crazy-outside-the-box-of-notions-of-serious-writer event.

Somehow turning out 1667 words per day for 30 days while being encouraged to write drivel just to pad your word count and get on to the next thing, the next idea, the next covnersation you can go back and edit the rest later, doesn't fit with many writer's romantic notion of Hemingway in a Paris cafe.

Then again I think most students entrenched in their MFA, and most successful writers in general, will tell you there is no romantic notion, that it's simply a matter of constantly learning craft and getting the words down on the page.

That, and I hate Hemingway.

So now that I've jumped on the NaNo wagon, I just have to decide what it is that I'm going to write.

This past January I completed a different nano-style event (aptly named JanNo) and it was great. The novel I turned out was rubbish -- I went for cliche genre fiction (trust me, you don't want to read it) just to prove to myself that I could put together a plot that was that long -- but the sense of accomplishment was great. And -- bonus! -- I was so engaged in writing that I turned out two brand new short stories during that month that had nothing to do with my 50k word novel.

While I am certain that I will do a NaNo this year -- BTW don't you love how NaNo is simultaneously proper noun, general noun and verb? -- I'm still contemplating what it is that I'll be working on.

My first thought was to write 50k of literary fiction that I could possibly work into an MFA thesis -- or, better yet, try and get published in the next three years. Novels take an insane amount of time in the editing-submitting-agenting scheme of things so I will undoubtedly be on the job market before I have a published book unless I write a draft of one this year.

Anyway, the novel.

It was going to be this character moving to a new city (so that I could incorporate all my "new city" experiences into her story) because this was the city her sister had gone to college in and lived in for five years -- with all sorts of nitty-gritty issues to pick apart there.

But then I stepped back from that idea. It sounds way too much like my undergrad fiction where the character spends most of her time watching other people and delivering commentary. Gotta move past that.

My next thought was to jump into what many in my MFA program are describing as their side or pet project: a young adult novel. It would be fantasy, not because that's what's hot on the YA market (although that's a plus) but because that's what I read when I was 12. The best part of this would be that it would be a mental break from the work I'm doing in grad school but still be writing.

The next option is to go for something contemporary, something that could still be considered thesis material, but it has a little bit more plot to it. I've ened up layering a bunch of "types" into it: the return of the prodigal son, the three sisters/family story, a contemporary coming of age (or is it second coming of age when we do the adrift at 25 story?) It's set in a Detroit suburb during the month of June ... and I've only ever tried to write it in the summer months because that's when those details ring the truest to me. I wonder if I can stretch myself to write about it in bleak November?