Response to Beekman review

This is our response to an abusive review of Murder for Old Times’ Sake

Criticism:  Even though Beeckman praises the storyline and plot of Murder for Old Times’ Sake as great and creative, inducing her to read to the end, she gives the book only one star.  What she doesn’t like is our writing style (including grammar), our character development (including voice), our use of local landmarks, or our knowledge of geography.  A few words about those concepts might help both our readers, our browsers, and curious writing students. 

My Credentials.  I’ve been writing almost every day of my life since I was a little girl. I’m now one-half the team using the pen name Margarite St. John.

I have a Ph.D. in literature from The University of Chicago, as well as a J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School.  I wrote my doctoral thesis on the mystery novels of Ross Macdonald.  Some of Macdonald’s Lew Archer novels were made into Hollywood movies.  I learned to like popular culture, especially the mystery genre, though I also knew I’d never write in the hard-boiled or noir genre of Macdonald.  Fortunately, my sister, who is just as literate and well read as I am, devises great mysteries in a style of her own.

For six years before becoming a lawyer I taught basic and creative writing and both American and English literature, including a graduate course on the novels of Jane Austen, at a Chicago college.  Even before becoming a college professor, I edited scientific and technical publications for the Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute in Chicago.  As a lawyer, I received an award for journalism from the Chicago Bar Association and wrote a weekly column for Illinois Legal Times for several years.  I wrote and published my first newsletter for the Junior Red Cross, distributed to all the schools in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, when I was a junior in high school and have edited several professional newsletters since then.  As a lawyer, I wrote hundreds of briefs. 

Our Readers:  We don’t know most of our readers, of course, but a few we do know.  They’re college educated women who have been or are still in the work force as engineers, teachers, librarians, secretaries, businesswomen, lawyers, nurses, artists, medical technicians, and similar professionals.  A few of our fans are men, including at least one we know of in his early twenties and another closer to my age.  Our readers are not limited to the United States.  All of them have a taste for mystery, a sense of humor, and an appreciation of good prose.

Voice:  Beeckman says we don’t know voice.  Here’s what we know about voice.

Voice refers to a character’s patterns of speech, thought, and emotion. 

As to speech, voice does not require that every character speak entirely differently in terms of vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, or word usage.  Some characters in our book have tag lines (Drago and Todd in particular); on occasion some speak ungrammatically; some speak in stream of consciousness (Todd again); some use different kinds of slang.  Such distinctions have to be used sparingly; if overdone, they irritate more than they entertain or illuminate.  Moreover, people from the same class with the same education living in the same part of the country in the same era speak in similar ways. 

What is markedly different is our characters’ patterns of thought and emotion, two other aspects of “voice.”  And those patterns differentiate our characters so that one cannot be confused with another, even in the same scene.  Compare Phyllis and her sister Ruth on the subject of mixed marriages and dead bodies; Rolie and Drago on their views of filial love; Lexie and Jean on work habits; Judge Grinderman and Bob Passwatter on the religious education of children; Xiu-Xiu and her sister Tiffany Jean on honesty and money; and so forth.  A reader has to work hard at confusing them. 

One more thing about dialogue.  It is the most misunderstood aspect of fiction writing.  No fictional dialogue is natural.  If it were, it would be unreadable.  The pauses, digressions, lack of antecedents for pronouns, needless repetitions, disagreements between subject and verb, incorrect verb tenses, dropped subjects, elisions, and misused words in spoken language, if set down verbatim, would make reading unbearable.  That’s why fiction is fiction, not a documentary.  Listen to yourself.  Or read the transcript of witness testimony in a trial (as I have).  Listen to a sportscaster nattering on without notes or a news anchor whose teleprompter malfunctions.  Suffer through our politicians’ off-the-cuff remarks.  It will drive you insane. 

Fort Wayne landmarks and names:  Beeckman doesn’t like the mention of Fort Wayne landmarks.  The use of locations is not a matter of right or wrong but of taste.  Most of our readers aren’t from Fort Wayne or even the Midwest; they enjoy the names. 

A novel is not a general story but a specific one, rooted in time and place.  Places have names.  Some of the names we give to places are real.  Some locations, especially those where a bad thing happens, are created to protect the innocent.  We do not use “big family [Fort Wayne] name(s)”; all are fictional.  We do not spell out locations in useless detail.  We keep it simple. 

For enlightenment on the use of location (even locations far more involved than ours and arguably unnecessary to describe) read Dominick Dunne and Peter Mayle. 

Geography of the Midwest:  Beeckman says we lack basic geographical knowledge of the states surrounding Indiana.  How strange!  We’ve lived in four of them and traveled to all fifty states.  As a Chicago lawyer, I traveled in and out of Chicago’s airports  at least two dozen times a year for forty years.

Rhetorical devices:  Beeckman believes starting several consecutive short sentences with the same two words is bad. 

Repeating a structure like “Set aside” (which Beeckman saw in a comment) is a rhetorical device for emphasis.  Its very point is to engage the reader.  Most readers have not taken courses in rhetoric or taught them, as I have, but rhetorical devices enliven prose even if a reader can’t spot or doesn’t care about the technique.  Fiction is all about persuading a reader that an imagined life is real enough to be engaging.  Thus rhetorical devices, which are basically techniques for persuasion and emphasis, are useful, even necessary in fiction. 

Educated readers like rhetorical devices.  Consider the Ten Commandments (“Thou shalt”) or Jesus’ Beatitudes (“Blessed are”).  Read the great orations of the ancient Greeks and Romans, Shakespeare’s plays, or C. S. Lewis’s wonderful essays on religion.

True, we merely write murder mysteries for entertainment.  Even if we wrote in a more serious genre, we would not be in the same league with those towering figures, of course.  But there’s no reason mystery writers should not employ all the techniques used by the best of the best.  

Grammar.  Our grammar is impeccable.  Beeckman mistakes the occasional proofreading error for a grammatical.  Grammar is about syntax and structure, not about punctuation, spelling, or the occasional proofreading error (though we try very hard not to overlook any little thing that might detract from the books).  True, a few middling style guides include spelling and punctuation with grammar, but that’s why they’re middling style guides.  Anyone who has made a proofreading error, raise your hand.  Oh, okay.  That’s a hundred percent of you!

Writing about what we know:  Beeckman advises us to write about what we know.  It’s a perversion of a truism that an author should write about what she knows.  If that truism were carried out literally, no fiction would ever be written -- at least none that anyone with a brain would read.  If it were, J.K. Rowling couldn’t have written the Harry Potter series, or Mary Higgins Clark her girl-in-trouble mysteries, or Stephen King his thrillers.  (I’m a little less sure of whether Stuart Woods has lived every minute of Stone Barrington’s life.)

Literary criticism:  Like most reviewers, Beeckman is not a trained literary critic.  I don’t expect her to be.  Reviewing a book is a casual, very personal exercise.  Reviewers don’t need to know what types of literary criticism are considered acceptable.  But the biographical or personal approach is the least favored because it requires so much uninformed inference rather than close attention to the text.  Trying to psychoanalyze an author the reader doesn’t know reveals too much about the reviewer and not enough about the book.  And it doesn’t help a browser decide whether to become a reader.