Aaron C. Bennett's Writing Journal

Bearwalk

I am reading _Bearwalk_ by Lynne Sallot and Tom Peltier. They did a good job of researching the legends and culture for this book. If the book as a whole were written better, I imagine it would ring very true. I would feel like I was right there.
The book is full of amateurism writing. Their daughter dies and we have no real feeling about it. We were so detached from the character that it wasn't really even a character. This is a stark contrast to what King did in Pet Semetary. The dialogue is wooden at many points. People say things they wouldn't really say to further the plot. We also get awkward bits of telling mixed with showing. The bits the writers chose to show don't seem very planned. We3 don't really want to know the exact type of cup they poured the tea into, unless it's important to the story. We don't need to know that he took a piss in the bushes before he went to bed. The time jumps aren't done very well. It seems as if the story is always trying to catch up. By the time you have caught the reader up to what has happened in the median between the scenes, you are already halfway into the current scene, with nothing happening. It doesn't make for fast-paced reading. The telling gets more obtrusive in the descriptions. The writers do that thing that marks an amateur straight off, they stop all action while you get a paragraph description of the person/place/thing. I see how jarring this can be. It pulls me out of the book. It also doesn't help that these descriptions aren't when we first meet the person/thing. They are normally a few pages in, so by that point we have given up wondering what the hell the person/thing looks like. This withholding of information does not create suspense, it creates annoyance.
I liked the Indian raised in white society as the protagonist. His best friend in AIM set a nice doppelganger. It has become a little overused since the book was written, but it still works. This book was written in '77. It was the height of the American Indian Movement. Wounded Knee, Alcatraz Island, absolving of treaties, the general Civil Rights movement. With this backdrop, the protag who must find his roots fits very well. This could have been made very striking. He has married a woman from the same tribe who he met by chance in Chicago. He's a lawyer who must come back to save the reservation. The elements are there. They are handled most inexpertly. The characters become the stereotypes, and say the stereotypical things. This book could have been made better by a careful editing. This rings even more true today as the editing staffs at most houses have dwindled to a skeleton of what it was in the late 70's-early 80's. The burden more and more falls on the writer to deliver a great publishable work.