How to draw a novel

Novelist Solares (Don't Send Flowers) shares in these inventive and rewardingly off-kilter essays his idiosyncratic perspective on writing fiction. In "Doubles Cast in Shades of Night," Solares meditates on how authors create characters, calling them "red playdough in our hands" and suggesting they sometimes constitute "freer, more courageous" versions of the writer. The collection's most creative entry, "Structure's Ghost," expounds on classic novels by interpreting line drawing representations of their plots. For instance, Solares contends that the characters in Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter "are registered with such precision that it seems like their downfall is being witnessed by a sniper" and illustrates the book's plot as a wavy downward-sloping arrow with a sniper's crosshairs over the arrow's origin point. The author's mercurial focus flows in unexpected directions, mixing literary analysis, biographical tidbits ("Flaubert claimed to read passages of civil law every morning to steep himself in the concise and neutral style he needed to record his stories"), and punchy aphorisms ("If the first phrase of a novel is like riling up a bull, then the last must be like the end of a bullfight") in kaleidoscopic fashion, and the line drawings amuse (James Joyce's Ulysses is a series of loops inside a loop, the tail of which reads "yes"). It adds up to an audacious and unique consideration of the art of the novel. (Dec.)

The (graphic) art of fiction. In a variation on diagramming sentences, Mexican novelist Solares, author of Don't Send Flowers and The Black Minutes, encourages aspiring novelists to draw their stories. "Of all the ghosts that inhabit the novel, structure is one of the most elusive," he writes. "It is also the most exquisite." In the author's estimation, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is a looped line rising to a heart and descending to an arrow; Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is an upward sloping line with stitches along its length. These drawings--more like squiggles--are meant to represent the story's basic turning points, plot lines, atmosphere, and characters. The promise is that they will help authors to identify their novel's core sensibility. As Solares writes, we must "ask ourselves where the truth lies." When in doubt, simplify and do it visually, pen to paper. The author illustrates his advice with examples from North American, English, European, and Latin American authors. He also addresses themes common in how-to books on creative writing: character, beginnings, endings, titles, time, structure, and creating excitement and tension. A drawing of this book would be a jagged, discontinuous, wandering line. Solares strays from advice-giving to defend the novel against insults, consider the possibility of the perfect novel (candidates include Roberto Bolaño's The Savage Detectives and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace), relate a dream about being devoured by lions, compare the initial sketch to the draft to the final version of Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, and provide timelines for the novel's evolution, each novel with its own drawing. Like all such books, the value and the pleasure come as much from spending time with the author's likes and dislikes as the practical guidance being offered. A quirky, playful addition to the well-populated subgenre of fiction writers writing about writing fiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.