Glenda Larke

The Adelaide Advertiser had a review of Heart of the Mirage the other day, written by Scott Moore, which included the following:

“This skilfully written work may be fantasy, but the issues at its heart – political expediency, cultural imperialism and intolerance – are shamefully real.”

And it ends:

“Bring on part two.”

Nice one. I am very pleased with the reviews of the book so far, and with the feedback from readers, too. It seems to be a story that resonates with those that read it – and what more can an author ask for than that?

Ok, here’s the first of what is going to be a regular Sunday thing.

Today’s tip is all about the word: “that“.

Take a look at this rather silly sentence:
That that that, that one that we see here, can be removed is not in doubt.

This sentence is actually grammatically correct. It’s also hideous, of course. (If you can’t make any sense of it, think of it as being spoken by someone pointing to the word “that” in a written passage.)

Unfortunately the word ‘that’ is far too easy to over-use – partly because it can be so many things:
An adjective. He has that belief in his talent...
Or an adverb. Only six or seven, if that many…
Or a conjunction. He decided that she should know the whole story.
Or a relative pronoun. …a list of books that influenced me…
(I hope I am remembering my grammar terms correctly here – years since I taught this stuff!!)

It might pay to ask your word processor to do a search of your final MS and see if you have too many of the pesky little things. If they turn up like a bad case of acne spots in every sentence, then try to re-word some of them.

That as a Conjunction
Conjunctions are “joining” words like and or but or if or although – or, sometimes, that. Copy editors are often biased one way or another on using ‘that’ as a conjunction. My Australian copy editor tends to re-insert all the ones I have left out. I then alter at least half of them back again! Another Australian copy editor I know religiously tries to get rid of them all in her clients’ work.
Who is correct?
Grammatically, I believe he is right is just as correct as I believe that he is right.

So what’s a bewildered writer to do?
Well, remember this: I believe he is right is more colloquial, the other more formal. That might help you make a decision. Just be careful of dropping the ‘that’ if the result ends up lacking clarity. For example: They announced all teachers, regardless of gender, must wear trousers seems odd when you start reading it. Much better to insert the ‘that’ after ‘announced’ so the reader doesn’t do a doubletake as he tries to figure out how teachers get announced or misreads it as “renounced”.

‘That’ as a Relative Pronoun (relative pronouns are words like “which”, “what” and “who”)
Here’s one way to get rid of a ‘that’ relative pronoun. Use a partial form of the verb.

It’s up to you to decide what sounds best in context – sometimes it is the first way, sometimes the other.

And that’s that about thats.

I have decided to organise my blog better in future.

I am going to start with a regular weekly post that gives writing tips (not to be confused with tips on getting published, or writing a novel in general, which I do talk about sometimes anyway).

This will deal with problems at sentence or paragraph level. Grammar, style, that sort of thing. Yeah, I used to be an Engish teacher, for my sins. Some of it will be basic, some of it more advanced…so drop by on Sundays if you are interested.

ANOTHER REVIEW :
From Donna Hanson over at the Australian speculative fiction site: Specusphere

On the writing: “Larke’s writing too is so vivid and solid that at times it leaves me breathless or just plain green with envy.”
On the main character: “As a character, Ligea is fearless, bloodthirsty, vicious, sexy and determined…”
“This character’s conflict and transformation was entirely convincing and satisfying to read.”

On the world: “Heart of the Mirage has aspects of Havenstar’s inventiveness, with an interactive landscape that is highly imaginative and entertaining.”

Oh wow. I think she liked it!

Bali Starlings, white and blue and gorgeous, are truly rare in the wild. Caught and sold for the captive bird trade, they ended up in cages round the world, but almost extinct on their native island. A captive breeding and release programme has had only limited success and wild birds are still subject to poaching. I’ve been to Bali, twice, but I just saw my first Bali Starling last week – in New York.

I love New York. Great, wild, untidy, luxuriant…the scenery of another planet!
In the face of the exuberance of Manhattan life, you forget to see the dirt, the ugliness, the seamier side; only the splendour of the whole is obvious. Superlatives abound: buildings lour over Central Park, impossibly tall, like comic stereotypes; some streets truly are canyons; Fifth Avenue really is packed with the trappings of the obscenely rich. Stores are bigger, wealth is greater; life is larger; poverty – when seen in the world’s most famous city in the world’s richest nation – is sadder. Manhattan pulses, a living breathing dragon lying there beneath your feet…

Yeah, quite. See what the place does to my writing even?

Would I want to live there? My daughter wants to, even though she already has, for two years when she was a post-grad student. She had a tiny shared apartment with a single window that looked out onto a brick wall. You couldn’t see the sky. I would have hated it.

But ah, the other things. To walk everywhere, as New Yorkers do, and be so close to everything. To have the theatre and museums and music and the restaurants…

But not this trip. This trip we went to the children’s playgrounds where the maids bring the kids to play, except at weekends when it’s mum and dad’s turn. We went to the children’s museum (ditto). We went to F.A.O. Schwarz, which is a toy store that has to be seen to be believed. We went to the Central Park Zoo, where I saw my first Bali Starling living in the rainforest exhibit. We breakfasted in diners, where no one is going to say much if an almost-two ups his scrambled egg all over the floor; we dined in the evening on pizza brought back to the room…

And I went to the Darwin exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History, while my daughter was dragged off by the almost-two to see lots of skeletons and stuffed animals. Especially large ones.

Much of my Isles of Glory is framed by the letters of an ethnographer who has visited the Isles. His character was his own, but his world was partly that of Joseph Banks, the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook (as did an ancestor of mine), and partly that of Charles Darwin and the voyage of the HMS Beagle in the following century. Thus this splendid exhibition – also a statement recognising the reality and wonder of the evolution of life on earth – was something very close to my heart. Ah, yes, there are times when I would indeed love to live in New York, to have access to exhibitions like this.

“The land is one great, wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse, made by Nature for herself. How great would be the desire in every admirer of Nature to behold, if such were possible, the scenery of another planet! Yet to every person it may truly be said, that the glories of another world are opened to him.”
(Charles Darwin, on seeing a tropical rainforest for the first time: condensed from the “Voyage of the Beagle”)

The plane was full from New York to Kuala Lumpur. The man sitting next to me was American.

‘Your first trip to Malaysia?’ I asked at some point, one of those casual questions you tend to ask of a fellow sufferer on a long flight.

No, he said. He had been an American Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia, back in the early 70s, he explained, and named the institution where he had been a lecturer.

I was startled. My husband had been one of the Malaysian initiators of that programme at a time when the country was short of tertiary science teachers prepared to teach in the Malay language and when many local educatonists and some politicians were scornful of the idea that science could ever be taught in the national language at university level. (From a modern perspective, this attitude seems incredibly strange. The past truly is another country.) A few dedicated Malaysians, a handful of Indonesians and members of the American Peace Corps proved the doom-sayers wrong.

Several among the Corps had become good friends to my husband and me. During the initial Malay language learning period, one American family was hosted by my in-laws in their village home. Much later, another – I’ll call him K – asked my husband to be his wakil (negotiating rep) for his engagement and marriage to a Malaysian. He’s looked us up on a more recent visit to Malaysia.

‘But you must know my husband!’ I exclaimed to my fellow passenger, and gave the name. ‘In fact, you and I have probably met before.’

He did indeed remember my husband, and yes, we probably had met a few times thirty-five years ago. ‘You’re an author, aren’t you,’ he said, ‘and you have a daughter in the US, and another who’s a musician in the UK.’

I was staggered. ‘How on earth did you know all that?’

‘Oh,’ he replied, ‘K drove me to the airport this evening, and he was telling me about you.’

K, of course, had no idea I had been in N.Y., let alone that on the plane I was going to be sitting next to the friend he had so kindly driven to Newark Airport. (Years before, he’d done the same good deed in reverse – he’d picked up our newly-arrived daughter at the airport and taken her to the Cornell post-grad campus in Manhattan.) Out of all the 300 plus people on that plane, none of whom I recognised, I was seated next to someone I had once met – who had been talking about me on the way to the airport!

Now that’s a coincidence.
They do happen. And many real-life coincidences are even odder than this one.

And yet coincidences are dangerous things to include in a story because, written down, they seem so trite and contrived. They jerk the reader out of his belief. The person who comes across them in literature tends to curl his lip up in a sneer, and mutter something about writers who think their readers must be pigeon-brained poodles to believe that sort of rubbish…Life Is Not Like That, they state.

Well, life is like that. But the good writer also has to be beware of writing too realistically. Sometime you can be too real for your own good.

There are ways of getting around the unbelievability of the coincidence, of course. Not confusing the unlikely with the impossible is a beginning. Having your characters comment on the unbelievability is (illogically) another way. Or you can, like Dan Brown, keep the action going at such a frenetic pace that the unlikely bits don’t have time to register on the reader…