Body Language in Literature

Body Language is a form of human non-verbal communication accomplished by a series of body postures, facial expressions and eye movements. We subconsciously know if someone is happy or sad, bored or excited, thrilled or sleepy just by looking at him. Even though an estimated 60-90% of all human communication consists of body language (verbal is only about 7%), we were ignorant of this language until the late 1960's when the first course appeared in an American university.

In spite of our academic ignorance, a number of professionals had managed to control their body language on a practical level for specific ends. Good actors for example, took the appropriate body postures and facial expressions to effectively communicate the feelings of the character they portrayed to their audience. Successful salesmen also used body language to gain the trust of their customers. So did swindlers and politicians. A good speaker knew when his audience was bored so that he could change his pace or his subject to reestablish the communication.

PureText and Other Free Goodies

We do it every day. We copy text from a document or a web page and paste it to another document for whatever reason. It's immediately apparent that the copied and the original text's fonts, their size, the line spacing and all the other goodies that determine how text appears on a page are all different. If we wish to incorporate the copied text to our present document form we must correct it. This is not a difficult process but if you do it a number of times you will become exasperated. Years ago you would have ripped the page off your typewriter, crumbled it and threw it into the trashcan. But in this age of computers crumbling laptops could prove awfully expensive. So what do you do?

"PuretText" is a tiny (28 kB!) computer program you may run in your Windows computer. It sits on your task bar. You copy anything you wish from anywhere and click the PT symbol on your task bar. This changes whatever is on your clipboard to pure text. When you now proceed to paste it to where you want it, presto! It immediately matches the form of the rest of your document. Life is good again. And like most good things in life, PureText is free (without any small print, advertising or what have you). Just visit the PureText home page above to learn to use it and download.

The Mechanics of Good Dialogue

I once took my car to an insurance evaluator. He walked around it in semi-darkness and immediately told me all the details of every collision I had been involved in. He knew exactly what to look for and how to interpret it.

In the same way you can open a novel in a random page, look at the dialogue, and say with some certitude how well the particular author handles dialogue without even reading the dialogue itself. Good dialogue in a novel can easily be distinguished by its mechanics. Here are three things you have to look for to spot bad dialogue:

a) The emotions of characters are described.

Does the author find it necessary to tell you that John is angry, happy, sad, astonished or surprised after someone said something? Then you are reading bad dialogue. In good dialogue, the author doesn't have to describe the emotions of the characters involved. The words in the dialogue should carry the emotions of the characters to the reader. And the reader will evolve his personal take on the character. Good dialogue allows the reader to feel the speaker's or listener's emotions.

Skyfall—A Highly Distinctive Blend From a Fifty-Year-Old Vintage

Skyfall, the twenty-third James Bond film which started playing this month, has wisely kept the trademarks of the fifty year old series while at the same time invested weight and complexity to its characters and story. The result is not just one of the best Bond films ever made, but a fine movie, period.

When Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, resigned from his job in naval intelligence at the end of the war he promised to his friends that he would “write a spy novel that would be read as literature”. Although Eric Ambler had made this leap before the war, Fleming didn't manage it. Casino Royale, the first James Bond adventure published in 1952, did have a number of interesting characters, but it was closer to pulp than literature. The Bond adventures that followed it did little to close the gap. The cinematic James Bond was even further down the line. His first adventures were a clever mixture of reality and fantasy, but in just a few years reality had gone out the window and given its place to outright male fantasy. The movie Bond was mostly an adult fairy-tale figure who moved on the fine line between absurdity and over the top. There were a couple of small detours towards reality (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, License to Kill) but that's exactly what they were—detours.

The Ultimate Escape Story

I have just three entries in my shortlist for the ultimate escape story. If you prefer fact to fiction, the real story of how 76 allied prisoners of war managed to escape from a Nazi top security prison camp in Germany in 1944 is tops. Paul Brickhill's The Great Escape (1951) contains real life resourcefulness, team-work and bravery that lead to tragedy. If you lean towards fantasy, you can't beat James Bond's offbeat escape from a cell, deep inside Dr No's lair. In chapters 17 and 18 of Ian Fleming's Dr No (1958), James Bond has to go through an obstacle course set-up along a shoulder wide shaft that terminates with a face-off against a carnivore in a sea pool. But if you want to read a classic short story of sheer ingenuity that narrates like a mystery then this has to be Jacques Futrelle's The Problem of Cell 13 (1905).

Jacques Futrelle (1875-1912) was an American journalist and mystery writer. He worked for a number of newspapers including The Atlanta Journal, the New York Herald, the Boston Post and the Boston American. He resigned from journalism in 1906 to devote himself to writing fiction. He published over seven books and many short stories. He is best known for his character Professor Augustus S.F.X Van Dusen, also known as “The Thinking Machine”. In 1912, after an extended trip to Europe where he made his works known, he returned home aboard the RMS Titanic. Unlike the fantastic escapes in many of his stories he simply perished after forcing his wife to take her seat aboard a lifeboat without him. He is best known for his short story The Problem of Cell 13, which is included in many lists as one of the best mystery stories ever written.

Can Sentence Length Induce Emotion?

A sentence is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. It begins with a capital letter and ends with a dot which we call a period or full stop. This dot, and most punctuation marks, were invented by Aristophanes of Byzantium, around 200 BC. It didn't originally indicate the end of a sentence but the place someone who was reading out loud could pause to breathe. Somewhere in elementary school, we were all told that whenever we reach a period, we should take a deep breath, and I think we mostly do!

You might think that nothing could be further from the truth. To begin with, you don't normally read out loud. You can hardly remember who your elementary school teacher was, much less what she had said. And breathing is a necessity of life that usually occurs without much thought. So how can periods possibly control your breathing when you read to yourself? Nonsense right? Dead wrong! The average reader has somehow been trained by experience to take a full breath every time he reaches a period. Try reading a long sentence that has no commas (without thinking about it), and you'll think that you are asthmatic. You'll practically gasp for breath, almost choke. But where as a poor author by improper use of the period may suffocate his reader, a good one can use the period to affect his emotional state!

Love and the Great Illusion

It had never occurred to me until I read it in E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel (1927). Novels differ from life in two major ways. First they have a plot, and second, boy and girl always live happily ever after. Think of a novel, in a vague sense, and you can almost always think of a man or a woman who strive to be united, and by the end they mostly succeed and live happily ever after. Think of your own life, generally, and you are left with a very different and a more complex impression. So why is it that love is so prominent in novels (and movies) and why does it last forever?

Humanity is defined by two major instincts: survival and perpetuation. They literally drive us. Take them away and we perish. Today our lives are secure from danger and for most of the adult population, marriage places a barrier on falling in love. We are seemingly in equilibrium but we are not. Survival and the sexual instinct—and the emotions we associate with them: fear and falling in love—are well embedded in our genes. The less they appear in everyday life, the more we desire them. And if we are imaginative and too lazy to bungee jump or start an extramarital affair, we turn to literature (and the movies) to extinguish our desires. And by the same token, an author's mind constantly wonders over fear and falling in love for the same reasons. We all need a love story to fuel our sexual instinct and so the author and his reader meet on the printed page and love becomes prominent in literature.

The Ultimate Sex Scene

He (Rhett Butler) swung her (Scarlett O'Hara) off her feet and into his arms and started up the stairs. Her head was crushed against his chest and she heard the hard hammering of his heart beneath her ears. He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up the stairs he went in the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with fear. He was a mad stranger and this was a black darkness she did not know, darker than death...

They say that these two paragraphs in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind are arguably the most famous sex scene in English (language) literature. Simple words are used and there are no explicit or anatomical details. A sure sign of sophistication, most critics or editors have argued.

Reader I have a confession to make. When I first read this scene I got more anxious than aroused. Was there something wrong with me? Was I a latent homosexual taken out of the closet by Margaret Mitchell's sophisticated language? Had I wasted my valuable adolescent allowance buying Playboy when I should have bought sophisticated literature? I tried to control my breathing and reread the two famous paragraphs. And then I knew what was wrong.

Susan Cain: Quiet

Susan Cain's best seller Quiet (2012) is a book that examines the differences between introverts and extroverts and how they communicate between themselves and with each other. It is easily the best psychology book I have read in the past ten years because it has helped me to better understand myself and the world around me.

Susan Cain is a Princeton and Harvard lawyer who gave up her profession in 2005 to research and write this book. Beyond examining the most important books and research papers available, she has also talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of pertinent people about the subject. She starts by explaining how Carl Jung's Psychological Types (1921) first popularized the terms introvert and extrovert and proceeds to a short test of twenty questions to help you determine what you are. Although no all-purpose definition is available, introverts generally feel right with less outside stimulation, they would rather sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle or read a book as opposed to getting a bang from meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes and cranking up the stereo. They work slowly and deliberately, they focus on one task at the time, they dislike conflict and are relatively immune to the lures of wealth and fame. Note here that introvert is not a synonym for hermit, shyness or misanthrope. Extroverts tend to prefer talking to listening, add life to a party, become assertive and dominant and prefer conflict to solitude. I had bypassed many a dinner invitation (in fact dinner itself) for a good book so I knew I was an introvert although the extent surprised me: I scored 95%. It turns out that a third to a half of the human population is made of introverts, so we are hardly a minority!

An Eye for an Eye?

Fantasy Land is my novel of revenge, or more precisely, of a revenge that is planned but not carried out. And this seems to be the chief objection of some of my readers, as expressed to me in person or by mail. They claim that they were not emotionally justified by the result. Reader I know that when someone slaps you in the face you want to slap them right back. But let me explain to you why this is not the wisest course to follow.

Revenge or retaliation is the infliction of deliberate harm on somebody in response to a harm they have done to you. Revenge is basically an emotional response to being hurt, and being an emotional response, it goes way back to primitive man. It was, and is, common to most societies emerging from savagery and tribalism toward some sort of civilization.

Two important documents of the ancient world (both about 700 BC) show us that retaliation was a justifiable as well as an advisable course of action back then. In the Hebrew Book of Exodus, (21:23-25) we read that “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” This line, often quoted, in essence justifies revenge.

Where do Fiction Authors Write?

I admire Hemingway's writing and his iceberg principle. I know he hung out in a bar in Havana and I would have loved to meet him for a quiet chat. I have heard that he wrote standing up. Now that's kind of weird, but whether you are standing up, sitting or lying down, writing is hardly exciting to watch. Reader I will readily agree with you: observing someone write is undeniably boring. What's important is the process in the author's head and what's even more important is his work. Where this process takes place is immaterial. Still, it is one of the questions that have plagued me since adolescence.

Why is it important to me? Do I want to have a mental picture? Do I desire to mimic? Or is it something beyond that? The bottom line is I don't care why it's important to me, so why would you? What's interesting is that this meaningless question, or its answer has been associated with most authors I know. I was on a bus tour of Edinburgh the other day and as I was staring out the window our tour guide pointed out a tea and coffee shop called The Elephant House. Now what exciting thing could have happened there, in the midst of historic Edinburgh? A meeting of great politicians or the planning of a revolution? “That's where J K Rawling wrote her first Harry Potter book,” said the mechanical voice. You see? My curiosity is hardly unique.

Eric Ambler: From Pulp to Literature

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is not only “unquestionably our best thriller writer”, as Graham Greene said, but also the master of the modern thriller when it involves international intrigue and espionage. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene ran the course on the sidelines but Ambler ploughed head on. Within a few years he not only bridged the gap between serious literature and the pulp thrillers of John Buchan and Sapper but significantly overlapped it.

He was born in London, studied Engineering at London University but settled on a career as an advertising copywriter. He travelled extensively in Europe and became a full-time writer in 1937. Between 1936 and 1940 he wrote six critically acclaimed novels of intrigue which took the thriller from pulp to literature. He served in the British army (1940-46) as a film-maker with the likes of Peter Ustinov and John Huston. After the war he wrote screenplays for various films including The Passionate Friends, The Cruel Sea, A Night to Remember, The Wreck of the Mary Deare and Mutiny on the Bounty (uncredited). He married Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock's screenwriter, and created an American TV show of his own: Checkmate. He also wrote twelve more highly acclaimed novels (most of which were filmed as movies or mini TV series) and five more in collaboration with Charles Rodda. He won countless literary awards including four Gold Daggers and an Edgar.

The Blueprints of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a great American short story writer and poet. Most people know him for his tales of mystery and the macabre but he was so much more than that. He was a master of innovation and most of his short stories became the prototypes for several genres or important classical works.

He was born Edgar Poe in Boston. His father abandoned his family a year later and his mother died when he was two. John Allan acted as a foster parent but he disowned him when Poe incurred large gambling debts after he registered at the University of Virginia to study languages. He enlisted in the American artillery to support himself and later as a cadet at West Point but resigned to follow a career in writing. He worked as a magazine editor, literary critic and publisher and was one of the first Americans who tried to make a living out of writing alone resulting in a financially difficult career. He secretly married his 13 year old cousin Virginia and because she suffered for many years from tuberculosis, Poe turned to drink. His poem The Raven became a popular sensation and made Poe a household name overnight. After Virginia's death his behaviour became erratic until his death in the streets of Baltimore under mysterious circumstances.

The Hook

The first few sentences of a novel must lure the reader away from the real world we all inhabit and into the imaginary world of the author. It is part of the author's art to make this transition as quick and as pleasant as possible. That is why a novel's beginning cannot just lure, it has to “hook”. 

Now reader I know that you are not a fish. You might think that this is unnecessary. After all, millions of people have read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's Name Of The Rose and in doing so had to plough through the first ...hundred and eighty tedious pages before they were actually hooked. But if you are not a masochist, wouldn't you prefer to be hooked into a book quickly and consume it rather than labour through it? Say for example that you are standing in a bookstore or a library and you see an interesting title and like the cover. Now if you know nothing else about the book, if you haven't read any raving reviews or listened to admiring words of mouth, you would probably start to read it. How long would you give the author before you decide to take the book home or put it back on the shelf? A few pages? Most people would just read a few sentences. So those opening few lines have a commercial as well as a practical purpose. And that's why most authors take care on how they start. 

Characters in Fiction

A novel's primary purpose is to tell a story but people make the story happen. In real life, each of us is entirely unique; we are far too complex to understand or describe. In literature, characters are abbreviated to what is necessary for the story. E. M. Forster in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927) divides the characters we find in fiction into FLAT and ROUND.

FLAT characters (also called humours, types, or caricatures) in their purest form are constructed around a single idea or quality. If, for example, in all dialogue and narration of a novel, all we learn about George is that he hates his mother, then George is a flat character. He might never actually utter the words “I hate you” to his mother, but if in all his dialogue, action and thoughts he has no existence outside that phrase, no private life like the rest of us, no other pleasure other then hating his mother, then George is as flat a character as he can be. In fact he is not a character but an idea personified. Anything more we learn about George, his physical description, his hobbies, his relationship with other people, etc, work to make him more round.

Jane Austen: Emma

Jane Austen's Emma (1815) is not as accomplished as Pride and Prejudice but it is one of her better novels.

The twenty-one year old title character is described in the first sentence as handsome, clever and rich and a little later (on chapter 10) she confesses to a friend that she has “very little intention of ever marrying at all”. This appears to be terribly upsetting as we know Jane Austen's novels are virtually about women in quest of a marriage with financial security. Otherwise, we are in Austen's world. We get acquainted with a number of characters and join their dinners and dances, eavesdrop on their conversations and take walks or picnics in the country. We find out how they dress, what they eat, how they talk and think. Men “of advantage” occasionally disappear for business and their women have precious little to occupy themselves with. Servants are the silent majority. I don't remember a significant dialogue with any of them or a single name being given. I think that today's authors are far more generous with things because sometimes they do give the brand of a car or a vacuum cleaner.

The Fear Conspiracy

Have you ever wondered what makes a thriller work? I mean sure, the better it is, the more it thrills you, but what are its nuts and bolts? What is that basic emotion that the author must manipulate in order to succeed? It all comes down to one dirty four letter word: Fear.

Fear is what pushes us to survive and survival is the chief human instinct. So fear can be no less than the most basic human emotion. I know love is way more fun, but in the human condition our sexual instinct is a poor second. Fear comes first. It might not feel good to be scared, people (like the military) may have made us think that it is something we ought to be ashamed of, but the truth of the matter is that fear is good. Take fear away from humans and you wouldn't have a human race. Take fear away from a thriller and you wouldn't have a thriller.

So when I sit with my laptop in a seaside hotel and make-up a story to thrill you, do you think that it sort of happens that the story will scare you? Would I leave the most important ingredient of my story to chance? Reader, I have a confession to make. Getting you scared is no accident. I conspire against you. I sit for hours on end to answer a single question: How can I make you shit in your pants?

Why pay for an e-book? ---- Part IV: Will books survive?

In parts I and II we have discovered that because e-books are expensive, many people are trying to find ways to avoid paying for them. In part III it was shown that bookstores are already disappearing, and publishers will follow. So if there are no bookstores and no publishers will there still be books? Will we need authors to write them?

We can look at these questions in various ways. The most immediate one is to notice that it's not that books are not being read or not being written. The army of middlemen is disappearing. On an average $15 book, the author makes $1.50, the bookstore $5 and the publisher (who does the editing, the printing, transportation, storage and takes the risk) the remainder. But nowadays an author may write a book on his computer, transfer it to a server, sell it to a customer through his website who will then read the book on his e-reader.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part III: Bookstores and Publishers

In parts I & II we have discovered that some publishers of e-books charge more for an e-book than a paperback copy even though their e-book expenses are practically zero. This has resulted in people attempting to get the e-book for free in various ways. These include downloading the book from dubious sites or buying a single copy, breaking the protection and sharing. When an estimated 60-80% of the population is engaged in these activities I wonder if the word legal has any meaning. Sound familiar?

Of course it does: The music industry. In fact the music industry faced the same problems the book industry is facing today. They too had exorbitant prices (like $20 for 12 songs.) They too paid little to the creator (10-15%). The customer's money funded a feast for an army of middle men. Then the average Joe, armed with a computer and a CD drive made copies of his CDs for his friends and before you know it no one was buying CDs from record stores. It might have been wise for these guys to lower their prices, to make it a burden to copy a cheap CD when you can have the original with the jacket notes.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part II: Everything for Nothing

In my previous article I couldn't explain why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback when it costs next to nothing to make it available. In my attempt to find the same book cheaper I found that most torrent copies available for free are usually full of mistakes and not really worth bothering with. So what happens now? Are you going to pay $11.59 for a 72 page e-book written 60 years ago (Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea), when you suspect that someone is taking more than his fair cut?

Of course not! There's that great institution called the public library. Nowadays you don't even have to go there. Just find one you can borrow from, fill-in a couple of forms and the book is yours for free for a week or two.

But let's say you want to own the book for free. Well, that's not so difficult either. Although most torrent copies circulating on the net are OCR copies of the books that haven't been proofread (in other words worthless), lo and behold there are some websites that have good copies of the actual book.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part I: Something Worth Nothing

You have just bought an e-book reader or a tablet device and enjoy the reading experience. You appreciate that it can actually fit thousands of books which you can now take with you anywhere from your night table to Timbuktu. Now you want to get books to put in it. You've discovered that you can download most books published before 1922 for free from places like Gutenberg. Great, but you can't spend the rest of your life reading Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations. You want to get on to people like Faulkner, Orwell, Hemingway. Let's say you want to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. You look it up in Amazon and you discover that something is wrong with the prices. They are selling a 72 page paperback for $8.50 and the e-book for $11.59.

It doesn't make sense, does it? An e-book does not need paper or printing, it doesn't require a warehouse, and it has no transportation costs. It doesn't need a physical store to be sold in or staff to sell it to you. It's sold directly to the customer through an e-store. Hemingway's share couldn't be more than 10-15%, yet the publisher finds it necessary to boost his price a further 36%. What are his extra expenses?

A Book and a Child

"Every book is like a child" a phrase goes and I seem to be hearing a lot of it. It must have been started by people who have raised a child or written a book. But anyone who has done both knows that although books and children are creations, there the similarity ends.

A book is a creation of the author's imagination. The input depends on the author's genetic make-up, his character and his experiences. He has ideas and thoughts, he chooses words and the end result is exactly what he has compiled. A child on the other hand is God's (or nature's if you prefer) creation. The input here is the child's make-up (its DNA), the child's experiences and the parent's guidance. A parent may have ideas and thoughts, he can devise a plan or execute a method and put in his best effort. The end result might be close to what he wants, it might be approximate to what he wants but it may well be the exact opposite.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Roger Ebert, America's best known film critic, looks hard in the mirror and at his own life as if it were a movie.

He was the late child of a German electrician and an Irish catholic in Urbana, Illinois. “I turned to books as soon as I could read,” he says. “There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish”. He started out in public school by writing and publishing the Washington Street News and delivering it to his neighbours. In college he was a sportswriter for The News Gazette and editor for the Daily Illini. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois and went to the University of Cape Town, South Africa for his post graduate studies. He gave up his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. He envisaged himself as a column writer but one day someone retired and he was named the paper's film critic. “It was not my career goal” he says, and yet even with this random assignment his hard work earned him the Pulitzer price for his film writings. Furthermore his movie reviews with Gene Siskel were televised across America for twenty years. His sheer enthusiasm and intelligence make many of his reviews far more interesting and fun to read than the good movies they criticize.

Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine's second autobiography (the first being 1992's What's It All About) is like certain Western movie sets: a highly entertaining facade with nothing behind it.

Maurice Micklewhite started life in the London slums (Elephant & Castle) from working class parents and barely made a living in the theatre. Later in life he changed his name first to Michael Scott then to Michael Caine, became a movie star and moved to Hollywood. Mr Caine attributes it all to good luck and then goes on to recite countless stories or anecdotes of his experiences with his famous and very good friends. His language is straight forward and the book is highly entertaining. There is a laugh to be had at the end of every paragraph. The feeling you get is that you are having a quiet chat with him in a coffee shop. And after talking to you for an hour or two, I am sure he will call you his friend, and even give you the recipe of his delicious baked potatoes, which he does, near the end of the book. What a nice man!

If you want a coffee shop chat with Michael Caine, and haven't read What's It All About, I would highly recommend it. It's a longer and perhaps more interesting book. Not much has happened to him in the last eighteen years, and three quarters of this one is more or less an abbreviated repetition of his first one. But if you want to know something about the real Michael Caine, you are not in luck.