You missed a button

There's a wonderful moment in one of the "Rubicon" shows that I thought I'd mention. Actually, there are a lot of wonderful moments in all of the "Rubicon" shows.

In this one, Kale Ingram, the mysterious ex-CIA boss, is telling Will Travers, the protagonist, that he needs to take a closer look at Tanya, one of the security analysts that works for him. "A plethora of late nights bleeding into morning. Then you have security risks, performance degradation."

Kale tells Will, "Never forget the stakes," (thus reminding us, the viewers of the stakes). "She's your responsibility, not your peer."

"I'll talk to her," Will says.

Kale turns to go, then, not bothering to turn and look back at Will, he says, "You missed a button."

As the camera pulls back, Will runs his hands down the front of his shirt, finds the un-done button and does it up.

You missed a button. It's several things: the snapper at the end of the scene implying that perhaps Will is not paying close enough attention; it shows Kale as exceptionally observant and coldly judgmental; and at the same time it ramps up the the intensity of the scene you've just seen.

Such good writing. Last season's "Rubicon" is currently airing in re-runs on cable channel AMC in the States. I've got my DVR set to record it.

The Quality of Being

I can certainly understand how someone would really like your piece. It does have a quality of reaching out, and it is written with a good deal of confidence in the voice -- it doesn't seem at all uncertain of itself. And the key idea of the transformation at the end is twisty and insightful and a surprise.

But what is the *quality* of that twisty, clever, surprising turn at the end?

Based on my own experience writing stuff, I have this intuition that along with everything that it carries with it, each idea has a sort of a *quality* to it, a basic something about it that causes it to be perceived in a certain way. Its Zeitgeist maybe or its atman. I haven't got a good way of defining it. But it seems to me that because of this *quality*, each idea has an affinity for a certain way that it wishes to be handled.

One time I went to a big-time traveling exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts of Monet's paintings. One of the things I noticed particularly was a series of paintings of the same haystack in the same field. I forget exactly, it's been a long time, but maybe six or eight of them, not very big, maybe letter size. All painted from the same place, the same field and haystack, nothing added or taken away from any of them. The only difference was the time of day at which each was painted, resulting in a change in palette of the field, the haystack and the sky. The question that occurred to me was why had Monet done this? He kept going back to this same spot, painting the same haystack. What was he trying to get at? What was he curious about? Was it the haystack's atman, was it the light and the turning of the earth, or was it that he had boinked a milkmaid in that particular haystack when he was fifteen and now he was eighty?

Perhaps, for a painter, this thing I'm talking about, this *quality*, also relates to any given subject for a painting, and perhaps this *quality* inherent in each subject has a particular affinity for a certain kind of treatment and sometimes you have to fool around and try different stuff to figure out what that affinity might be.

And why, in the first place, choose this idea or that subject to fool around with instead of the one over there?

If you've taken their money, then that's the basis for the selection, for the one that pays the piper calls the tune, but if you're working on spec, as they say, with only yourself to answer to, then the question is there, though it doesn't seem often to be addressed.

And then, of course, as soon as you do start to think about it, you are confronted with the first corollary: Do you choose the subject or does the subject choose you? Or is some sort of compromise involved?

And I guess that's what keeps it interesting.

Well, for some of us.

I'm done with craft

This morning I got an email from a colleague with publishing problems, and that got me going.

Here's some of what I said:

Exactly. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, there's no publicity about it, and so you feel like the only one in the world who finds herself pushed down in the mud by the rolling wheel of American commerce, which of course rolls on and has a teeny tiny little rearview mirror.

Writing is one thing, art is something else, and publishing is another field altogether. Sometimes they have something to do with one another. Sometimes.

You'll see the strengths and weaknesses of "Rock, Paper, Tiger" (a first novel by Lisa Brackmann). It wouldn't surprise me to learn that she'd read some of your stuff on YouWriteOn. But probably not. It's always so easy to see what's wrong with the other guy's golf swing, and almost impossible to figure out what's wrong with your own. Even if one has an absolute and total commitment to objectivity (which I, for one, possess in limitless quantities), even though this, it is still at best damn hard to do. I think writing is exactly the same in this respect.

(And now I see I've started to write my next blog entry, so this isn't just an email to you.)

I've been thinking about something else. I've been thinking that I will turn my writing blog (do you ever look at it?) from the subject that has been its focus since I started it -- craft -- and now I will take up the next topic which seems to me to be next, which is art.

I don't have any more to say about craft. Craft can be learned by anyone interested in learning it. Most people who "want to write," i.e., those who have access to Microsoft Word, make only half-hearted attempts at learning it. They would rather follow the less demanding process of hackers everywhere. This process is trial and error.

There are two qualities of writer in the world: those to whom it mostly comes gift wrapped in an intuitive understanding of how to manipulate mirror neurons, people like 10th grade dropout Louis L'amour, and then there are the rest of us. The Louis L'amours are at this very minute doing what they enjoy, probably writing their next novel. The rest of us, on the other hand, are snooping around the web, looking for insight, looking tips, looking for hints, wondering if we should buy the software scheme that promises to help develop characters or generate plot lines. We are like the guy who bought that laser thingie that tracks on the floor his swing plane, who suffered the humiliation of going to the practice range and strapping on the gizmo that is supposed to give him a feel for a good swing. We're like the guy on the range hitting the big banana ball who finally on the twentieth try hits one straight, and is from then on absolutely convinced that eventually this trial and error technique will pay off. He doesn't understand that about every 20th ball is going to be better than the others, no matter what he does, and that, in Ben Hogan's words, everything works the first time you try it. There's a parallel here to the guy who gets a ten and a face card with the first five bucks he shoves out on the table at Binion's and goes on to run up the limit on his Visa card, the same psychological mechanism is at work, but I won't go into that.

What got me deciding to move on from craft to art? For one, I've been bored with craft for quite a while. I've absorbed a lot of craft, enough so that I feel like I don't need any more (despite what anyone else might think). I believe I've got enough craft to do whatever it is I want to do (which isn't much, I have little ambition). Craft is over for me, has been for some time, but it took a while and certain events to bring this to my attention (I'm a pretty slow learner).

Yesterday at one of the writing sites, I read a piece by a hopeful writer that had some of the worst dialogue I'd ever encountered. I read it, and I realized there was nothing I could say other than it was terrible. Could I explain why it was bad? No. That would involve psychotherapy. ("Let's talk about what you were reading what movies you were seeing when you were thirteen years old and how you've felt about your own self-image down through the years. Let's start there.")

I think dialogue can be learned, but I have absolutely no idea how one can even begin to teach it. Somebody else probably does (there's always someone, isn't there? or someone who at least claims they can?), but not me.

Here is Bill's Zen dialogue on learning to write dialogue.

"Hey, Bill, can you help me learn to write better dialogue?"

"Sure, glad to help. Here's what you do: pay attention."

"Pay attention to what?"

"What have you got?"

"That isn't very helpful."

"Try it."

"Try what?"

"Paying attention."

"Paying attention to what, exactly?"

"What is there?"

"Well, there's everything."

"Okay. Pay attention to that."

Yes, that's how it works. The Magic Theater. Not for Everybody. And just when you think you might be getting somewhere, the curtain comes down, the house lights go up, the ashtrays are full, the drinks have been spilled, someone has barfed in the mens room and the janitor has thrown up his hands and walked out in disgust.

"Show" and "Tell" and the Hook

It's one of the drum beats of the online writing boards: show don't tell.

The inner urge to set the scene, to explain, to paint a picture of the endlessly clever fantasy world you've just created, this impulse can be almost irresistible. Usually it's not a great idea.

It often doesn't work because the explanation, background, world-creation -- whatever it might be -- just isn't that interesting. The writer and the writer's mom and some best friends might think it's nifty -- How in the world does Ruth Ann think this stuff up? -- but for the rest of us it's just one more commonplace float in the passing parade.

Don't tell us about it, show it happening, is the recommendation.

But -- you knew that was coming, didn't you? -- contrary to this often-cited good advice, in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, "tell" can work and work exceptionally well.

Here's how Maile Meloy begins the first story, "Travis, B." in her collection "Both Ways is the Only Way I want It" (Riverhead Books, New York, 2009). The first paragraph:

Chet Moran grew up in Logan, Montana, at a time when kids weren't supposed to get polio anymore. In Logan, they still did, and he had it before he was two. He recovered, but his right hip never fit in the socket, and his mother always thought he would die young.

The plain, Western (in the U.S. sense), flat prose of that first sentence makes it easy to read, and sets up just enough of a question in the reader's mind (or did in mine) to keep me going. The last sentence really pulls me in. His mother always thought he would die young.

I think one of the reasons the paragraph works so well is because it doesn't try to explain anything for the reader. It simply states the facts, doesn't ask for any sympathy, doesn't show anybody's feelings. But it does make the reader feel a certain way. It makes the reader root for this crippled kid whose mother expects him to die young. You pretty much can't help it. The characteristics the writer has shown by that paragraph are restraint -- lots of restraint -- and a trust that if you set out the facts with no window dressing, and if you've got some good stuff in mind, it will work just fine. You feel like your in the hands of a writer you can trust.

But after that first paragraph, where do you (as a writer) go? Meloy keeps up the pace:

When he was fourteen, he started riding spoiled and unbroken horses, to prove to her that he was invincible. They bucked and kicked and piled up on him again and again. He developed a theory that horses didn't kick or shy because they were wild; they kicked and shied because for millions of years they'd had the instinct to move fast or be lion meat.

The first phrase of that second paragraph jumps the reader forward ten years, answering any question of survival, and (I think this is important) letting the reader know that this isn't one of those stories that's going to bog down. We're going to fly right along, the writer seems to be saying, and everything in here is essential stuff, trust me. Then the sentence goes right on with what Chet did and why he did it. I don't know about you, but I can't think of any way to make that first sentence any more direct, any simpler or any better. The next sentence tells what happened in damn few words, and the third sentence tells us the theory Chet developed.

He's fourteen, he's got a bum hip, he out to prove he's damn tough despite it and he thinks about things.

How are you not rooting for this character?

That is a hook.

The hook has the Character component: Chet, the kid we root for. It also has a good subject matter component: You're going to get another way of looking at things from this story, viz. in the second paragraph we're into a theory of animal behavior. And it has a third component that lets you know that this writer is not going to bore you, not going to drag things out; this writer is going to tell you only those things about Chet that are worth telling. No digressions, nothing superfluous. We'll skip ahead ten years here and there, whatever it takes.

There's something about the way Meloy writes about the West that particularly appeals to me because I'm a child of that country. A great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Kansas, I was born in Spokane, went to school in Idaho, and at one time or another criss-crossed plenty of that country on two-lane road, not always paved. With nothing much to listen to on the radio, you look out at the fields that sweep away to rolling hills, sometimes to mountains, the tick of telephone poles passing, and there's not much to see but the land fenced off with what must be a million million miles of bobwire. Sometimes the fence posts are modern painted steel. Sometimes they're perfect smooth round wood posts. But every once in a while you come across a stretch that goes way back, with the barbed wire all rusty and sagging and pulled out of the posts to curl back against itself. The fence posts are triangular in cross-section, have been hacked out of pine logs with axes or maybe a sledge and a wedge. You can see in their twisted shapes where the limbs were cut away. That's what Meloy's prose reminds me of, land like that and all the work and sweat that went into fencing it off.

Just a few more paragraphs, because they're too good not to include:

You mean because they're wild," his father had said when Chet advanced this theory.

He couldn't explain, but he thought his father was wrong. He thought there was a difference, and that what people meant when they called a thing "wild" was not what he saw in the green horses at all.

He was small and wiry, but his hip made it hard for him to scramble out from under the horses, and he broke his right kneecap, his right foot, and his left femur before he was eighteen. His father drove him to Great Falls, where the doctors put a steel rod in his good leg from hip to knee. From then on, he walked as though he were turning to himself to ask a question.

Yes, there are damn fine story openings that use "tell."

Untangling the not-so-great writing disconnect

Someone posted this not long ago on one of the writing sites:

How do authors like Barbara Taylor Bradford get away with writing so badly? Why does she get published and I don't???

With all due respect, I think that's the wrong question. I think the right question is this: despite all the less than stellar writing, what is it that makes BTB such a popular author? Looking into that question is a wonderful opportunity to see how fiction works.

This is the same thing that bugs the hell out of writers when they comment about The DaVinci Code. Jeez! Such awful writing! But the damn thing has sold 40 million copies. How do you resolve the facts with your personal standards of what makes good writing?

My suggestion asks that you change your point of view. Stop looking at the writing and investigate the storytelling. Which do you think is more important? If you answered "writing," then in terms of popular fiction (oh, do you really want to write UNpopular fiction?), I think you might be on a questionable detour.

BTB's latest, "Playing the Game" is on Amazon with the "look inside" feature enabled. So I read the prologue. It's certainly not my cup of tea, but if I put on my professional/objective viewpoint, I can understand the appeal.

Quite a few people like you and me are living reasonably contented, generally mostly serene lives. Then add in the people who are downright unhappy. This adds up to a whole lot of potential audience not involved in crimes of passion (on one side or the other), high crimes and misdemeanors (ditto), or intense celebrity tomfoolery. Let me put that in plain terms: Normal life is fairly humdrum most of the time.

This is why so many people like rollercoasters and horror movies — it's fun to be frightened (when you know you're really safe).

I think this is a key fundamental underlying the appeal of popular fiction. Fear comes in a wide range of colors. Feelings of terror, horror, dread could be said to be at one end of the spectrum, and a lightly felt concern or vague unease at the other. At one end you have rollercoasters, horror movies and Stephen King, at the other you have Miss Marple and "cozys," where the key description might be "gentle." (Perhaps which genre of fear you prefer is really a measure of how much adrenaline in your system feels like "entertainment.")

To my way of thinking fear at some level or other is one key ingredient of fiction and wish-fulfillment is another.

One way of looking at "wish-fulfillment" is envy. To the extent a protagonist arouses our admiration, we wish or dream even a little bit that we could be just a little more like him or her. Envy might be one end of the wish-fulfillment spectrum, and a vague aspiration to be a little more decisive or forthcoming might be at the other. On the one hand you have Brangelina (the most enviable twosome on the planet, according to grocery store tabloid sales) and on the other the dedicated high school teacher of "Stand By Me." Thus the fictional appeal of characters as diverse as Agent 007 and the plucky heroine who goes up against the misguided social worker. ("Tut-tut," Amanda said, her normally smooth brow wrinkling in consternation. "Just because Carlos has a devil tattoo, that doesn't necessarily make him a bad boy.") So there's wish-fulfillment in the sense of wanting to emulate a character with some enviable (heroic) characteristics. Emulate, to copy or mirror. Mirror? Wait a second, have you read anything about "mirror neurons"? See "What's Up with Mirror Neurons?" on the list at the top of the page. A key sentence: Anytime you watch someone else doing something (or even starting to do something), the corresponding mirror neuron might fire in your brain, thereby allowing you to "read" and understand another's intentions, and thus to develop a sophisticated "theory of other minds." Or, another way of putting it, you experience empathy.

Envy is one dimension of wish fulfillment, probably the most obvious, but in Freud's view, dreams were all forms of wish-fulfillment — attempts by the unconscious to resolve a conflict of some sort (that's from Wikipedia.)

If this theory works in fiction (maybe it doesn't just happen in dream-dreams but in fiction-dreams as well), then perhaps whenever you have a conflict going on in your manuscript, you automatically have generated wish-fulfillment chemistry in your reader (those mirror neurons are firing). I can see how that would work. No conflict is ever absolutely even. There's always one side we favor. And if there's a conflict, then there's the apprehension (fear) that the person we favor (probably the protagonist) will lose. So the wish to be fulfilled becomes the reader's inner goal as well as the character's story dilemma. This gives two dimensions to wish-fulfillment. One is character based (Agent 007) and the other is more story based, i.e., will Elizabeth Bennett somehow overcome the disdainful and snobbish but attractive and wealthy Miss Bingley and win the affections of the apparently arrogant but actually all-too lovable and lonely Mr. Darcy? Oh, Lord, how I wish it to be so! (Because if Elizabeth Bennet can win in this unfair competition (conflict), then maybe there's hope for me. Especially if I can learn to be a bit more like her.)

What does all this have to do with the popularity of Barbara Taylor Bradford and the opinion some writers have of her work?

Many do like reading about wish-fulfillment characters like Annette Remington, the attractive and smart owner of famous art gallery who has just sold a Rembrandt painting (a painting she has personally rehabilitated) for twenty million pounds. Annette has a fascinating, busy life, rich with social connections to wealthy, witty, charming and famous people. Despite all these wonderful things going for her, Annette (at the end of the prologue) 

" . . . leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, sinking down into the past, thinking of those early years, of all the terrible things she had buried deep because she did not want to remember them. She shivered, and goose flesh sprung up on her arms. She felt a trickle of fear run through her. So many secrets, so much to hide . . ."

Barbara Taylor Bradford sets it up with a lot of character-based wish-fulfillment, then lays out the first layer of the story question, generating story-based wish-fulfillment.

BTB has other things going for her. She has built an audience with the 26 novels she's published. If you would like the same success, then you must wake up early and get to work about 30 years ago. Yeah, authors with that kind of track record get their books rushed into print with no quibbles because they are publishers' cash machines.

There are a lot of people posting manuscripts at various writing sites who write pretty well, probably as well as BTB. But not that many of them are good storytellers, or, to perhaps put it in a more nuanced way, are willing to do what you have to do to become good storytellers. Often they don't choose a protagonist and situation with sufficient reader appeal and when they do they have trouble structuring a story that generates a sufficient level of apprehension, anticipation and uncertainty.

Easy to say, not so easy to do.

Not for everybody

An email this a.m. from a colleague referring me to an online thread with multiple posts on the use of third person vs. first person.

First person, third person, for me any argument seems silly. The writer writes it the way it seems to need to be written, and it may work for some and not for others, but that's always the way with everything. Back in the day when I was working for a living, I soon realized that 20% of any reader group wasn't going to like it, no matter what it was. Stand on any street corner, I would say to people, and hand out $20 bills. You'll find 20% of the people won't go for the offer. They'll know there's some nefarious scheme involved and refused to be tricked.

The tense, like other conventions in fiction, tends to disappear in direct proportion to the depth of the reader's engagement in the story. Writing fiction is in one sense very much like a magic trick, the kind of magic that practitioners call close work, where the cards or coins or whatever seem to appear and vanish not on some distant stage, but right there under your nose, over a dinner table or standing at a bar. You can smell the magician's aftershave, but damned if you know how the queen of hearts turned out to be the card when you were the one that did the choosing.

To someone who knows the two-handed pass, the answer is simple (isn't the answer in both magic tricks and fiction always, more or less, simple?). The artistry is making the two-handed pass transparent, so deft it disappears. And so it is with fiction, making the story and character (always a blend as tightly wound as strands of DNA) so agile, nimble, dextrous and proficient in the telling that the language, the tense, the words and punctuation -- all the elements of the two-handed pass -- become transparent, disappear, and all that's left is the effect -- the magic.

It doesn't matter how you do it, only that you stumble across the doorway, perhaps the one in the ivy-covered stone wall in the Hermann Hesse novel, the entrance to the Magic Theatre, and you step through, ignoring the warning, Not For Everybody.

Is the Bitch Dead or What?

Often does a naïve tyro approach me with the age-old problem.

"Bill," they whine, "I'm at my wit's end. I need a title for my WIP. Something colloquial, idiomatic, with some snap to it."

My limpid brown eyes glistening with empathy, I speak not, but simply hand them a copy of Wendy Williams' (and in smaller type co-writer Karen Hunter's) second novel in the Ritz Harper trilogy, "Is the Bitch Dead or What?"

When I saw it in the new release section at the library, I couldn't resist. When I began reading, the payoff was immediate.

The first chapter opens with a third-person account from the point of view of Jacob Reese, and one of the first things I learned was, hey, if you want to highlight something, put it in caps:

(From page 2) "He sat for a minute and reflected on what he had just done. He already regretted it. But it was over. He was mad at himself, but he was FURIOUS at Ritz Harper for being such a dumb bitch—such a smarmy, money-grubbing bitch—that people would gladly pay to see her dead."

It's interesting the way Ms. Williams handles Jacob's characterization:

"He decided to do the thing he did best. He buried the thoughts he was having. Jacob was cursed with an uncanny ability to be totally delusional. He could fool himself into thinking anything he wanted. As a result, he didn't have many friends and he hadn't achieved anything in life."

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Dostoyevsky passed up just this nifty characterization opportunity with Raskolnikov. Saying the dude is totally delusional and letting it go at that works much better than a bunch of philosophical blather that everyone skims past anyway—and isn't the point more or less the same?

Being TD didn't work out well for R., and it's not working for Jacob, either:

(From page 3) "But the fronting was wearing thin on his psyche and his wallet. A woman can tell if a man is broke—it's in her DNA, like the mothering instinct—even if you give her all the X she can handle. Jacob had a steady supply, but not an eternal supply. One day, the keg of ecstasy would run dry, and he knew it. That was why he was desperate."

Whew! Talk about life lessons from literature! All these years I've been ladling out tabs of X the way a Bishop deals wafers on Easter morning, and yet that long line of babes all sensed somehow I was just an ink-stained scrivener without two dimes to rub together (sigh).

But seriously, look how Ms. Williams inserts Jacob's problem into the story and clearly highlights it for the reader. He has shattered his own self-image by murdering the bitch, and he knows that one day his keg of X will run dry. There you have it inside three brief pages: the inner, psychological weakness, and the outer need. (Budding novelists take note.)

But Mss. Williams and Hunter do not leave it at that. Jacob Reese has a Plan. A plan is, of course, one of John Truby's 22 points explained in his book, "Anatomy of Story." I forget which one, exactly, but one of them.

I think.

Ms. Williams explains Jacob's plan (page 3): "Jacob was determined to get to "the top"—whatever that meant—but he wasn't going to get there by being on the bottom of some powerful man. He was not going to be that new bitch; he was going to scratch and claw the hard way and make it on his own. Being a new bitch in the record industry wasn't much different from being a new inmate in a small cell on Rikers Island."

[I thought this an interesting comparison, but don't let me interrupt the narrative flow.]

"If you come into Rikers without a rep or street credibility or much muscle or hustle, or without somebody watching yur back, you are open to being eaten for lunch—literally."

[Unless cannibalism is now the norm at Rikers, I think the "literally" might be misplaced. But don't let me interrupt the narrative flow.]

"In the music business, if you come in new without any rep, or anybody who will stand up for you and have your back, you are subject to being the next Bentley the Butler, with an emphasis on the bent part, as in bent over and drilled in the butt by any mega rapper/rap mogul. There are lots of Bentley the Butlers in the music business, and very few of them actually get to be anything but. . . In the record industry, just like in jail, you either bend over and take it, hoping for the best, or you find another way. Jacob was determined to find that way."

Well, at that point I was hooked.

How it all turns out for Jacob, Ritz Harper and the characters in this novel? Like those poor victims taking the path that Jacob is trying to avoid, I'm hoping for the best. In the meantime, excuse me, but I've got a book to read.