A Report on "Report"

I make fun of formulaic writing -- you know the type: You pretty much know what's going to happen because you've seen it done a thousand times before, and, by golly you're right.

Then there's formulaic writing that's so damn good you don't. Notice. The formula.

That's how I feel after reading Robert C. O'Brien's "A Report from Group 17," a taut, adult thriller that kept me reading right to the end where I deliberately had to slow myself down so I wouldn't skip paragraphs to get to the end to see what happened.

And you know what? He doesn't let you off the hook. Well, off of one hook, but clearly not off the other. I won't go into further details so as not to spoil the story if you've never read it before.

This book is better than "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH," which I read as a child and constantly re-read. I never thought I'd say that about an O'Brien book (pity he only wrote four, and thanks to the Idaho Youth Ranch Thrift Store, I've now read all four of them). The sciencey bits are there in tons (even if the science is outdated; polywater, once heavily believed in and used as a plot device in no fewer than TWO Star Trek episodes, does not exist). But at the time it was plausible, and O'Brien's way of writing this into a formulaic science fiction mystery story is fresh as a daisy.

Yes, I enjoyed this book. On at least two levels. First and foremost, for the story. But secondarily, it's a wonderful exercise in how taut writing, an ear for detail, and a willingness to let the reader be one step ahead of the heroes but not so far ahead that they know what's going to happen turns formulaic writing into magic. O'Brien also follows the tenet of writing what you know, or at least what fascinates you, which is pretty much the same thing. He presents enough science to make the story eerily plausible; I haven't been this pleased with science in science fiction since I read Frank Herbert's "The White Plague."

So seriously, go read this book.

Collections

Way back in the third grade, I read Robert C. O'Brien's "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH" in Mrs. Barrett's classroom because, well, I liked the look of the cover.

For years after that, I looked for mice peeping out of fence posts as we walked and wandered and played in our neighborhood. It's from this book the desire within me began to grow to write books of my own (an as-yet unfulfilled desire, but at least I've got books written and being edited right now, though not yet published). Something about that little face, peering out at the world, trying to live in it, trying to understand it, just grips a part of my mind that won't let it go.

To me, it's a powerful book. I can't even take it off the shelf without feeling inadequate or in awe, knowing as an author I've got a lot to live up to.

Because of this power, I've kept an eye open for O'Brien's other books, and this week at the Idaho Youth Ranch thrift store, found the only one missing from y collection: "A Report from Group 17." For sixty-five cents, I was back in the third grade, sitting in that desk by the bookshelves in the back of the room, blissful, happy, not caring that recess would soon be there and I'd have to wander the playground alone far from that magical bookshelf.

I'm going slow through it. I'm already committed to two other books. But it's just as good as NIMH. More for me to aspire to.

There are other books I long to collect: E.W. Hildick's complete McGurk Mysteries series. A book whose title and author I've forgotten, but who wrote about boys battling a sinister takeover of the world by the girls in their school. I'll find it, one of these days.

The Writing Process

Most days, when I sit down to write, I end up feeling like Jeremy the Crow here from "The Secret of NIMH." First, I'm all tied up by the Muse. Then, someone comes along to set me free. I babble. Then my liberators decide the world was better off with me all tied up.

This I Believe

NOTE: Another bit for my Foundations English class.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

I sat in the back of Mrs. Barrett’s third grade classroom, next to the bookshelf.

When I got my school work done – and sometimes even before it was finished – I’d pull a book off the shelf to read. There I found the magical worlds of Robert C. O’Brien, Marie McSwigan, Beverly Cleary, Alexander Key.

As I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor, as I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, as I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the rats of NIMH, I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Then I promptly did nothing about it.

Oh, I did little things. A poem here, a short story there. But through several fits and starts, I never did what I set out to do, there in the back corner of Mrs. Barrett’s classroom at Lincoln Elementary.

Until 2010.

By then, I had a third-grader of my own, plus two other children. I was writing – but as a technical writer at a Department of Energy laboratory. During a lunch break in late January, however, I sat at my computer mulling the madelines of memory. I pecked out a few hundred words: two boys, bored at living in their primitive village, longing instead to climb the cliffs that ringed them in and climb toward the stars, then over and out the green pass that led to the world beyond.

Maybe, I thought, I have something.

So the next day, at lunch, I wrote some more.

Each day, it became an obsession. Write a few more hundred words about these curious boys, now departed from the only home they’ve known into a mysterious school training them to become –

I didn’t know. I kept writing, on the bus rides home, late into the night on weekends. And at lunches. Many lunches. I posted snippets of this growing story on my blog. If anyone ever read them, I didn’t know it. I knew a third-grader who was reading them. And he kept insisting, staring at those words in the ethers, that the story continue.

It did.

By January 2011, those first few hundred words turned into 114,000 words.

I’d written a novel.

It’s unpublished. It’s unedited. It’s raw. But there, in that little folder on my desktop, in that binder at home, on the thumb drives were I’ve stored it, my first novel awaits the finishing touch that may some day lead it to sit on a bookshelf in the back corner of some dusty classroom where another kid will pull it off the shelf and fall into the world I created because that third-grader who still loves the rats of NIMH told me I had to do it.

I believe, with the proper tools and motivation, one person can indeed move a mountain. Or feed the inner muse-child, staring longingly at the shelf of books not yet written.

Keeping the Fantasy Real

This is why I read a lot: I want to find out what I don’t like.

That sounds odd. Even odder than the title of this post.

Yes, it is an oxymoron. So let me explain:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Anthropomorphic up the wazoo, with rats gifted with intelligence due to human studies into such. Add to that a mouse who befriends a crow and is taken to see an owl and then has to drug a cat in order to save her home before the plow comes, and you’ve got a lot of fantasy.

 Used under the fair use doctrine for educational purposes.

But it’s real. Nothing other than a tractor and a shadowy bit of humanity intrudes on the story.

Not like the story I’m reading now, which, in the first few pages introduces me to a character who has grass and dandelions growing out of his head. That’s not all that bad. But he looks things up on eBay. On eBay, for heaven’s sake. But he’s in a version of our world – the story evidently takes place in New York City – where people can fly.

But eBay? Talk about a present-life experience intruding on fantasy time.

It’s a minor thing, I know. But you know what? It bugs me. Just like in Niel Hancock’s Squaring the Circle fantasies. I’m okay with everything in it, except for the modern guns and bombs and such. Why should all my fantasy swashbuckler? I don’t know. But I know I don’t like it when the bear and the otter who can turn into humans get handed rifles, of all things.

I do the same thing I my own writing, I know. So I’m going to have to re-read it. And see how much it bugs me.