A Writer's Notes

You missed a button

2011-04-13T16:09:00.000-07:00

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

2011-03-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-14T10:13:00.000-08:00

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

2011-01-10T09:49:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-25T12:45:00.000-07:00

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

2010-09-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

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?

2010-09-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

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.

Read these first . . .

2010-09-01T09:25:00.001-07:00

before you begin work on your next project.

Facing the Blank Page:

http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/scriptsarc08/index.cgi?read=132988

Writing from Theme:

http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/writing-from-theme

Writing is Rewriting:

http://www.wordplayer.com/forums/scriptsarc08/index.cgi?read=133760

Door Number Three:

http://www.wordplayer.com/pros/pr03.Marsilii.Bill.html

Death to Readers:

http://www.wordplayer.com/columns/wp05.Death.to.Readers.html

A Unified Theory of Excess Baggage

2010-01-05T08:45:00.000-08:00

In writing, as in almost everything else, it's all about the fundamentals. But what isn't about the fundamentals? I've yet to find any area of life where I'm dealing with the nuances and subtleties - no, it's always the same damn thing: blocking and tackling, keeping the swing on-plane, the clubface square at impact, not forgetting to buy milk and Crystal Lite; it’s always about the fundamentals.

Here's another. Ever read the advice that whatever doesn't move the story forward shouldn’t be there?

What the heck's that all about?

Here's how it strikes me.

The Writer and the Reader

To write well, you have no choice but to be two people. You need to be the writer, W, but then on the other hand, you need to be your Typical Reader, TR. ("Your" meaning the reader you are specifically writing for.)

I know that right away some writers are going to start yammering that they are not writing for a reader at all, they are writing for THEMSELVES, they write to please themselves only, not some yahoo browsing the graphic novel shelves at Barnes & Noble. Okay, okay, okay. Do we have to go back over that ground again? Isn't the writer, in that case, writing for the reader who is his or her ownself? And now some ink-spattered hand will go up and a young person with dandruff on his glasses and a copy of "Ectoplasm" sticking out of his bib overalls will remark that, in the interests of a more pure artistic endeavour, his goal is to write a novel that he, personally, finds completely boring and uninteresting, and this certainly disproves right from the git-go what was just said.

At this point the only sensible response is to have the sergeant at arms take the young person in question out to the courtyard, stand him up against the wall and shoot him, saving us all quite a bit of anguish. As President Obama forthrightly said in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, sometimes violence is the best way to work things out (I paraphrase).

Whispering the TR

Some writers can only be one person at a time. First they write and then some period of time later they can take the ms. out of the drawer and pretend to be the TR and start revising. Others (and I think this tends to happen, if it ever does, after lots and lots of writing) can handle both roles pretty much at the same time without having the TR overwhelm and inhibit the W (that inhibition generally the cause of writer's block).

The key thing in this W-TR interaction is that the TR needs to be imperceptibly led along the narrative trail by a lead rope that (key point) always "seems to" (but doesn't really, it's an illusion) have some slack in it.

Did you ever read the The Man Who Listens to Horses: The Story of a Real-Life Horse Whisperer? I'm talking about Monty Roberts, not Robert Redford. Monty found that if he stood in a certain way a wild horse would amble over and stand behind his shoulder, in effect "link up" with the whisperer. Then the whisperer could walk around the corral and the wild horse would willingly follow.

That's what good narrative does. The opening sets something in motion that generates in the reader a flicker of curiosity that causes her to want to know more about whatever it is you've started (the inclination to link-up, sometimes called the willing suspension of disbelief). And then the next sentence is both responsive to that flicker of curiosity and causes the reader to be interested in . . . and yes, there it is in the next paragraph, just what the reader wanted to know at that point, and the reader thinks, "this is getting good."

It's when the writer does anything other than this that problems like overwriting, digressing, getting wordy, self-indulgence, purple prose, etc. crop up. These are all ways of saying that the fundamental transaction that the TR desires isn't taking place the way the TR wants it to. It's as if the writer arbitrarily decides this is what I want to stick in at this point, or I really need to get this stuff in at this point, ignoring the prior expectations (if any) that have been set up in the TR's mind. The TR doesn't like this. It's not entertaining, it starts to feel more like work than entertainment. It's not what the TR signed up for.

When the W is acting like the horse whisperer, when the TR is being gently led through the story but isn't aware of the lead rope much less the halter, then that's what I think of as transparency - it's as if the text almost isn't even there and the TR is caught up in simply watching the story unroll in her mind's eye.

Adverbs

The dreaded adverbs fit right into this theory.

Here's the adverb problem:

"You have no chance with me," she said sneeringly.

It's as if the W doesn't think the TR is going to quite get the right understanding just from the dialogue alone, and so tightens up the lead rope and gives the TR a jerk along the trail, causing the TR to roll his eyes. It's as if the W says in case you didn't notice, here's how to interpret the significance of that line (dummy). Give the TR enough jerks on the lead rope and the TR puts down the book. In reality and most often, of course, the W doesn’t think at all, but sticks in the adverb because the W doesn't know any better, which is a way of saying, I guess, that the W hasn't yet developed a TR that's sensitive enough to have a good awareness of the nature of the W - TR relationship and how to make it work. That seems to me to be the fundamental process in learning to write - learning to stand in the reader's shoes and look back at the text and see how it plays for the TR. That's the essential skill. I know my saying this will make some writers crazy. They just cannot tolerate the notion that some nobody from nowhere is going to read their stuff and render a judgment. Of course this circles back to the writing-for-myself argument mentioned earlier. I have no problem with someone who wants to write only for his or her ownself. Fine, do it. But don't go posting your manuscript on some board for others to read and criticize. The act of doing that is an admission that you are (despite your protests) writing for readers, and welcome to the cesspool.

But back to the adverbs. Here's a section taken from a published novel that pretty clearly shows what not to do:

"Well," Alma said, "we better get out of here and let him rest, whatever happens. How does it feel now?"

"Okay," he said, "a little sore." He could feel himself grinning sillily like he always did when he was in pain and he had to choke back a hunger to laugh.

"I'll give you another sedative, if you want," Alma said.

"I don't much like them things," he grinned sillily.

"They can't hurt you any."

"I couldn't sleep anyway," he grinned sillily. "Whynt you save them for tonight."

"That would be the best idea," Georgette said.

"I hate to see you in such pain," Alma said nervously.

"Hell, this ain't nothin," he grinned sillily. "Lemme tell you about the time I broke my arm on the bum and dint have no dough to go to a doctor."

"Come on," Georgette said, "Lets get out of here and leave him alone."

Yes, let's leave him alone before he writes "grinned sillily" once again.

Here's something that may surprise you: The novel in which this section appears was a run-away best-seller. Maybe more surprising: It won the National Book Award and was ranked number 62 on Modern Library's list of Best 20th Century Novels. The movie of the novel won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture.

The book: From Here to Eternity. It's full of adverbs.

This might lead you to consider the proposition that for a novelist, it's not so much about the "writing" as it is about the story-telling.

Making the TR Want What You Want to Give Her

Let's put all possible story data into two categories: there's what you (the writer) must somehow convey to the TR so that you can get along with the next development, and then there's what the TR wants to know.

If there's something you want to tell the TR, it's a good idea to take the preliminary step of making the TR want to know it. Say you want to include the description of a house. Before you get to the description, you need to generate in the TR at least an inclination, and hopefully an interest, in reading it.

The driver slowed and turned into a long, cinder drive.

In the backseat, Anna put her hand on Phil's leg and leaned close to whisper in his ear. "They say that every woman who has ever spent the night in the mansion had a baby nine months later."

Phil turned to her with a raised eyebrow. "Even if she spent the night alone?"

"Even then."

"Some Goddamn house," Phil said.

In order to justify and motivate the description of the house, I made it into something of a character in the story. What if you don't want to make the house a character in the story? If it's not a character in the story, why bother describing it? Because you want to? Because you happen to have composed a dynamite description of the house? Maybe those aren't reasons enough.

Here's an example in another genre:

"You think we are entirely without resources? You think we haven't done this before, that we are virgins at extracting information?" Shevchenko grinned, the scar on his cheek livid.

"We have a mansion," he went on, "yes, right here in the heart of Kew Gardens, quite an amazing mansion. Would you like to know why the mansion is so unusual?"

Phil flexed his wrists; the ropes were iron-hard, no give at all. He wished he were back with Anna, in that amazing, baby-making house. But he wasn't. He'd made a wrong turn, probably a lethal wrong turn. He had to play for time; he didn't have much of anything else to play for.

"Yeah, okay, Vladimir, what's the big deal with the Goddamn house?"

"It's invisible," Shevchenko said. "To all intents and purposes, it's not there. The neighbors, the passersby - no one ever sees it. They don’t see who goes in, they don’t see who comes out. And most important, no one ever hears anything from it. It's as if the mansion were not there at all."

"Your full of shit," Phil said. "You're as full of shit as a Christmas Goose."

"Enough!" Shevchenko barked. "Throw him in the car, in the trunk this time! Don't be gentle!"

Probably another mistake, Phil thought, rattling the Ukranian's chain.

For both examples, the TR has been primed, and the next paragraph can begin "The mansion . . ." and the TR will be interested in reading something about this unusual house.

Yet Another Dimension

I think all this is reasonable, as far as it goes, of course it's all just my guessing about things, it's just a hypothesis, but to add one further guess, it doesn't go quite far enough. I think at least one other factor is involved in this equation: dramatic tension. I think it works like this: the higher the level of tension, the more leeway the writer has in going off into left field (i.e., digressing, including something that otherwise might tax the TR's patience). But I think it's important to keep in mind it's leeway I'm talking about, not an open-ended license. And I think the opposite also may apply: the lower the dramatic tension, the more careful the writer must be not to veer away from the story line (i.e., what the W has set up the TR to anticipate).

Here's an example of how, when you get the tension nice and high, you can wander off almost anywhere that really has nothing at all to do with what's going on.

I was finished.

Flat on my back. My left arm hurt like hell where the slug had gone through my bicep. El Gordo stood over me holding the .45 pointed at the middle of my chest, five feet away.

I had no way to get up, much less get up fast. And to get out of the way of a .45 slug coming at a thousand feet per second, when it's only five feet away - no chance. None at all.

El Gordo sneered. "You think you can be like the straight people?" he said. "Doan make me laugh. You one of us, you on our side a the fence. You can't go over that fence. It ain't in you. You done too much over here to go try and clean up your act over there. It ain't never going to happen, homey."

The bastard. It sounded true, and I hated that it sounded true.

I sank back, let it all go, felt my body mold itself into the damp earth beneath me. I gave up. Here I would end. Finito. Adios.

I could see Gordo's big brown hand wrapped around the pistol's grip, his big fat finger starting to tighten on the trigger.

I didn't want to watch. And I sure didn't want to think about what was happening to Taylor, left alone back there with that evil bastard they called Facil. Yeah, he was easy, all right. Easy to hate.

I looked up. We were out in the orange grove. I saw the tops of the trees, the green leaves, and beyond them the blue sky. I could hear tires humming along the distant highway as a car sped past. I pictured the people in the car. A guy at the wheel, a pretty girl beside him. Happy, laughing, smoking cigarettes, listening to music. No idea what was going on in the middle of that orchard over there.

A bird called out. A bird that didn't have sense enough to get away from what was going down in his neighborhood.

Stupid bird.

I guess I said it out loud.

"Huh?" Gordo said.

One hell of a blast made me flinch like a girl, and I must have closed my eyes. The thought went thorough my head: that's it, I'm dead. It didn't even hurt! And I can still think. Hell, this being dead, it's not so bad.

Then I opened my eyes and it was all in slow motion: Gordo standing there, except now where the .45 had been, where his hand had been, now there was only a bloody stump on the end of his arm and there was a misty spray of blood settling out of the air.

Gordo's eyes were open even wider than mine. He turned his head, took a half step and looked over to the side of clearing.

I looked, too, and there was Taylor, cradling a Winchester 12-gauge shotgun at hip level, a wisp of smoke rising from the barrel. She was naked to the waist, a skinny girl with a wild look in her eyes, blood on her cheeks and dripping from her chin, blood on her chest, her arms and hands. She jacked the action on the Winchester to put another shell in the chamber, and it made that steel-on-steel racking sound they make. She was holding it loose and low with the muzzle pointed right at my head and I froze in fright, even more scared than I'd been when I thought Gordo was about to off me. If she'd been squeezing the trigger when she jacked that shotgun, I wouldn't be here telling you about it.

These examples are like a room painted by a new homeowner with a roller from Home Depot - it get's the the color up on the walls, but it ain't exactly the King's Grand Apartment at the Palace at Versailles. For that we need to go to a dude who really knew how to whisper the TR:

The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed.

"Wake up, Philip," she said.

She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.

"Your mother wants you," she said.

She opened the door of a room on the floor below and took the child over to a bed in which a woman was lying. It was his mother. She stretched out her arms, and the child nestled by her side. He did not ask why he had been awakened. The woman kissed his eyes, and with thin, small hands felt the warm body through his white flannel nightgown. She pressed him closer to herself.

"Are you sleepy, darling?" she said.

Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms about him. He tried to make himself smaller still as he cuddled up against his mother, and he kissed her sleepily. In a moment he closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The doctor came forward and stood by the bed-side.

"Oh, don't take him away yet," she moaned.

In the next few paragraphs the sick woman in the bed feels Philip's feet, especially his club foot. And then she dies, and the main character of the novel is Philip, who is growing up an orphan with a club foot (story problem). This excerpt is the beginning of W. Somerset Maugham's masterpiece, Of Human Bondage.

That is about as subtle and intuitive as leading the reader that I can imagine.

Then there's the way he shifts the pov around, and he does it so deftly that the reader never really notices or cares -- he does it without a single jarring note to the reader. First there's the weather report, objective, author's pov. Then a woman servant comes into a room where a child is sleeping. Author's pov. Then the servant looks out the window and this justifies the author's putting in the architectural details. It would be quite awkward to stick in anything about stucco houses and porticos without the servant's look. So we have a bit from the servant's pov, then we have a bit from the sick mother's pov, and then we have a bit from Philip's pov. Just like that. And it works perfectly smoothly. Actually, it's even more complicated than this, because in the next paragraph or two we get the doctor's pov.

It seems to me that Maugham's genius in this is his feeling for providing just the information that the reader wants, and supplying it just before the reader realizes he wants it. So that when the next sentence does arrive, it gives the reader a sense of movement in a direction that makes perfect sense. It would be so easy to write a scene like this and make a complete hash of it. Can that kind of sensitivity be learned? I have no idea. Like most things, it can probably be improved with practice and application.

Not every reader "likes" every writer. There's The Fermata by Nicholson Baker and then there's Harry Potter. Each W has his or her own certain style, subject matter, emotional availability, the level of detail and the pace of story that suits the W's personality and taste. That's something that always comes across in the opening paragraphs, and if it resonates with the reader, then it does, and if not, not, and that's what makes a horse race.

The chances are the W will write the kind of thing the W likes to read and be most successful drilling in that layer of rock. But not necessarily and not always. As one who used to earn a living hunched up over a keyboard like a monkey humping a football, I know from experience that when the buckarooskies are on the line, when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro (as Hunter Thompson said so memorably). And down in the engine room, amid the steam pipes and junction boxes, when one gets greasy and knuckles are bleeding because the damn pipe wrench keeps slipping, if one keeps at it (and if one has no other choice) one generally finds enough interest and enthusiasm to finish the job and then feel pride at a machine that is finally made to run, in the ability to produce a well-crafted piece, even if it's not one at the end of the day you'd prefer to have sitting on top of your marker in Westminster Abbey.

Of course, the disclaimer: none of this will help you as a writer.

And that's enough of that.

Overwriting

2009-10-27T18:09:00.000-07:00

Here’s a question someone asked on one of the online boards:

What exactly do you mean by 'over writing'? I’m curious: I've heard it said a lot, and have always suspected it as being shorthand for just not liking a writer's style. Does it mean more flowery, too many adjectives, stuff like that? Or sentences overloaded with ideas?

I think “overwriting” is ubiquitous and can refer to several causes/symptoms.

Sometimes it's the use of three descriptors where one is enough. Often it's senseless and endless exaggeration; everything has to be the most, the biggest, the people (especially the women) beautiful beyond compare, etc. This boils down to too many adjectives and adverbs and sometimes a misperception of the audience.

Often the root cause of too many adjectives and adverbs is the writer’s desire to describe whatever it is absolutely down to a gnat’s eyebrow, so that the reader is forced, forced I tell you, to see it just the way the writer wants it seen. Caving in to this desire is probably almost always a mistake. Stephen King has described this problem, and its cure, elsewhere online, so I won’t go into a lot of detail on it here. I think it’s enough to say that written narration is a pretty broad-brush medium. The writer only needs to get things down generally, and each reader’s mind’s eye will supply the specifics. Exposition is almost always overdone – too much of it too specifically gone into. A good example of how little exposition is needed is “No Country for Old Men.” Just pick it up and start reading from the beginning and notice how little exposition there is and how you don’t miss it at all.

But overwriting, its causes and cures, can be more complicated. When reading someone’s manuscript, it’s difficult to separate out what is consciously intentional from what just happens to arrive at the point at which the writer needed something, i.e., what’s more toward the unintentional vs. the on-purpose end of the spectrum. What I mean by that is what’s written down in full awareness and what comes from habit, the writer’s more-or-less unexamined proclivities and tendencies. What I think I’ve learned about writing fiction is that until one becomes aware of it, the basics of the writer’s personal behavior patterns often get superimposed on the characters and their interactions without the writer really being too much consciously aware of it. I think this is particularly true of the writer’s personal modes of handling emotional issues and behavior. This no doubt is mostly the case for writers who haven’t yet reached a point where they’ve got their characters over there in another part of their mind where they are characters and not in some sense “the writer” in another guise. Of course, in another sense, everyone and everything must be by definition part of the writer (since it all comes out of his/her mind). Down this path lies endless back and forth, and I’m not going there; you know what I mean. Of course they’re all you, but when you’re more experienced (hardened? deft? facile? schizophrenic?), not that much you.

I think the root causes can be a lack of confidence in the writing and a lack of understanding how fiction works its magic in the mind of the reader. Getting this right is for a lot of people probably a pretty intuitive thing, but I don't think it has to be kept at that level. I would contend that the more conscious you make the process the better the writer you'll be.

Here’s a snippet of scene (a re-write by me of someone else’s purposefully bad example):

"You've got to be kidding," the hooker said. They stood on the corner, a light drizzle turning the midnight streets to inky blackness. "You've got a freaking beard down to your bellybutton, and you want me to do what to you?" She laughed. "You are one sick dude!"

Take just this phrase: the light drizzle made the streets an inky blackness. The true-life fact is that is pretty far from being an accurate description of how a dark, asphalt street really looks in a light rain. But what I was consciously aware of when I wrote it was that all I needed was a rough brushstroke or two that would get the idea across, because what it generates in the reader's brainstem is a vague memory of all those wonderful movie shots where they have wetted down the streets beforehand because it makes them look so damned dramatic. No one’s mind’s eye sees a real street; everyone imagines the movie image, which is so much better.

I think a lot of the art of writing well is to stay what could be called "below the line." By this I mean restrain yourself in the writing (or in the editing) process so that you allow the reader to bring his/her own images and associations to what you're doing. In the most powerful writing, the connections occur in the reader’s mind.

If you'd like more examples of how to do it, I always suggest finding a copy of "Lie Down in Darkness," William Styron's first novel. It is filled with such an abundance. I just picked it up and flopped it open and here's what I saw on page 126:

"Wait, no!" she began. " As God is my witness—" But only watched those smooth young wanton legs, limp-kneed, moving across the lawn, and into the house. Milton sitting spraddle-legged in his chair, glass in hand, turning lazily to see Peyton disappear beyond the door, his red neck swelling, enlarging as Helen approached on the run, digging in with her heels past the lawn chair.

Not a lot of words to create an indelible impression of a rather complicated bit of business. And don't you just love those young wanton legs? And don't you see Milton spraddle-legged, glass in hand, turning lazily, his red neck swelling? You don't need to have clarified just how drunk he is.

Of course, “Lie Down in Darkness” is probably unique in the annals of American fiction; it’s certainly one of a kind so far as I know. I’m unaware of any modern English novel that’s as richly layered.

What, you haven’t read it?

You should do that right away.

Got a story?

2009-07-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

I’ve critiqued a couple stories recently where I’ve made comments like “where’s the story?” and “when is the story going to start?”

It’s got to be really frustrating and damned annoying to have such an impertinent question asked, especially if it gets repeated every few paragraphs.

I halfway expect a reply to come back, “the story was what you were reading, you nitwit. What did you think it was?”

But so far no one has responded with that, though they’ve probably been thinking it.

By saying “where’s the story?” and “when is the story going to start?” I pretty much imply that I know what a story is and that I can detect whether or not one is taking place.

I think I can (and of course you may think otherwise).

Here’s how I think I know that a story has started and that I’m reading one: I feel a tingle of anticipation mingled with uncertainty. I’m at least a little bit worried, a little fearful about what might happen to the major character, and I have a feeling something’s going to happen. (Well, I’m usually on one of the early pages of a 300 page novel, so certainly something is definitely going to happen.)

The thing that makes me feel this way is what professional writers call the story question.

“Story question” has some varied definitions you’ll find on the web, but so far in my searches I haven’t turned up a really good and reliable and useful and entirely practical explanation. Entirely practical. I’m an American, born and bred, so of course practical is for me a primary consideration.

The story question often is not a question that is specifically included in the narrative, though sometimes it is. But it is always a question that gets lodged in the reader’s mind.

Exactly where and how that happens in the reader’s mind is something I’ve thought about a little, and have some theories about. That’s a subject for another time, perhaps. But I’ll say this much about it now: I don’t really think about it as being lodged in the reader’s mind so much as in the reader’s stomach, in that part of the anatomy where the autonomic nervous system operates. (Is it the autonomic or parasympathetic? I forget. One of them, anyway, the one that deals with feelings vs. concepts.) In other words, the reader doesn’t really think intellectually about the story question: rather, he/she feels it. It’s what the writer causes the reader to feel when the reader reads his/her story.

One thing I am sure of: The stomach is the place where we feel fear.

And the story question always embodies fear. Always? That’s pretty unequivocal. Yes, I think always. Always. If somebody has another idea, I’m open to hear it, but you better have a pretty good case to back you up.

Fear is the common denominator word for the feeling, but it’s not an on/off kind of feeling. There’s such a thing as just a little hint of fear: call it uncertainty, apprehension, unease. Then there’s a whole lot of fear. We call that terror, dread, horror, panic.

A key part of the fear (or apprehension or uncertainty or unease or terror or dread) is what might happen next. That’s an integral element. You are terrified at the top of that first hill before the rollercoaster plunges downward — the fear is an anticipation of onrushing pain, death or dismemberment, or perhaps just the deep humiliation and mess of projectile vomiting. Certainly something unpleasant. You are terrified when Freddie jumps out from behind the door because of what Freddie is going to do next with those knives that stick out of his hands. In both these instances, and in all cases of fear, what we fear is what is going to happen next.

So reading a story, I’m looking for at least some mild form of fear. I usually think of it as the phrase that Alexander Mackendrick uses in “On Film,” (an early chapter devoted to “story:” anticipation mingled with uncertainty. To make me think the story has started, you have to give me the signals that make me at least just a tiny bit fearful that things are going to turn out badly for your major character. I have to fear for the outcome. So it has to be uncertain.

I have actually read at least one unpublished story that included in the first or second paragraph (I don’t remember exactly and it’s been some time ago) words to the effect that “after it was all over Jack had won the day and lived happily ever after.”

My reaction to that was to think well if you tell me that right at the beginning you’ve just taken all the fun out of it. Because the fun is the uncertainty (fear) I’m going to experience as I read your story.

Fear is fun? Yes, it certainly is. Do you know how popular the teenage horror movies are today? Do those kids go to those horror movies because they don’t want to be scared? No, quite the opposite. They walk out laughing and relieved, saying things like “When that dead guy lifted up out of the casket and reached for her I almost peed my pants.”

So forget what you might have assumed, fear is bad, something to be avoided. If you want to write a rattling good story, or a deeply touching drama, or any kind of fiction that works, engrave this into your writer’s way of thinking: fear is fun, fear is what you are out to generate. Maybe not a lot of fear (being the ultimate prose stylist that you are), maybe only a smidgen of fear. But you need to get at least a little anticipation and uncertainty in there, and the sooner the better.

The way you generate that fear in the reader is this: you plant the story question in their gut.

I had read about all this stuff I’ve just discussed, but I had not really integrated it into my writing mind until I managed to actually make it happen in a manuscript. The descriptions I’d read hadn’t been couched in the specific, direct way I’ve tried above to describe the mechanism. I didn’t really understand it in the way that I think it needs to be understood until I wrote something that actually caused it to happen.

I don’t know if you’re at all like me in this situation, or if (unlike me) you can learn without the doing. But I had to actually have the experience of doing it in order to learn it. In golf it’s akin to the experience of making contact with the ball in the middle of the clubface, with the clubface and the swing square to the intended line of flight. There is a sound and a feeling and when it happens you know that is what you’ve been seeking. Ben Hogan once described it as a feeling that comes up the club shaft and goes right into your heart. That, I think, has a lot to do with the fatal allure of golf.

When professionals talk about the “story question” I think that is what they mean.

How do you get a story question into your manuscript? There are probably as many ways as there are writers. Or as some of us say when faced with a seemingly intractable problem, there’s always a way.

One way is this: simply put the story question into the title.

“Snakes on a Plane” It might not be your cup of tea, exactly, but to a certain cultural milieu, the appeal is immediate. Here’s what it brings to mind: An airplane at 35,000 feet, no way to get off or open a window, and you’ve got a whole mess of dangerous snakes. I’ve got to see it! (i.e. what happens next?) You might think it would be a simple thing to write. But perhaps not. It took two guys to write the screenplay, John Heffeman and Sebastian Gutierrez, and this after the story was written by David Dalessandro and John Heffeman.

Sometimes the story question is right there in the first line:

“I can’t come anymore.” This hilarious little story was written by Jill Soloway. It’s called “Courtney Cox’s Asshole.” A serious problem, not being able to come, and it generates in the reader’s stomach anticipation mingled with uncertainty. And then there’s identification with the character: If she can’t come anymore, maybe it can happen to me? In any event, I feel anticipation and uncertainty for the protagonist.

Here’s a classic:

“Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.” This hallowed traditional way to open a genre novel was written by Graham Greene in 1937 for “Brighton Rock.” Greene called it perhaps his best novel, critics call it his first masterpiece.

Here’s what looks like the story question from the first chapter of “Downtown Owl” by Chuck Klosterman, published in January 2009 (it says in the New York Times). But I think the first chapter from which this is drawn is a flashback:

Mitch was not clutch. Nobody said this, but everybody knew. It was the biggest problem in his life.

So you don’t necessarily get points for being subtle. Come right out and say it: the biggest problem in his life.

“The Shadow Factory,” by James Bamford, published January 9, 2009, from the first chapter:

Mihdhar was at the ops center when he received the phone call he had been waiting for. He and Hazmi were instructed to leave in a few days for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where their final, fatal mission to the U.S. would begin. Now Mihdhar had to make a decision.

At that moment, seven time zones and 7,282 miles to the west, the phone call was captured and recorded by America's big ear, the ultra-secret National Security Agency.

Is it cheesy? Definitely. But some agent thought enough to take it on, and some publisher believed there was an audience for it and published it.

Okay, you might be thinking at this point, maybe I don’t have one of those stupid story questions in my manuscript. If not, what was all that stuff you were reading when you were so rudely bitching about there not being a story?

As Dwight Swain (author of "Techniques of the Selling Writer") says, at the beginning of every story the reader subconsciously asks four questions:

1 where am I?

2 what’s going on?

3 who’s involved? and

4 whose skin am I in?

There will probably be some who disagree with even this basic description of things, and for some artsy-fartsy experimental writing, there may be exceptions. Fine. Noted. But can we confine ourselves to generally accepted principles of commercial fiction that might possibly find a publisher in today's ever-tightening market?

The answers to those four questions are the exposition, that stuff you know you’ve gotta get in there somehow so the reader knows what the hell’s going on.

Before I had a good idea of “story question” and the implications of it, I knew exposition when I saw it, but I didn’t make nearly as strong distinction as I do now between what is exposition and what is story.

When I wrote “Nikki” (posted here) I had no idea what I’d done until I had about the third draft done. Then reading back over it I realized that everything that happens prior to the story question is all exposition.

The story question doesn’t appear until page 4. So everything up to then is exposition. (Actually, there are foreshadowings of the story question, but let’s not split hairs.) I was very surprised at the realization at the time that this stuff was mostly exposition, and I wondered why it worked (I thought then and I still think the story does work pretty well; of course, no one’s interested in publishing it, but that’s another issue).

So I realized it was exposition but it felt like story. It didn’t feel like exposition. Why not? I think because the character appears in a situation where there is dramatic tension. The reader doesn’t know exactly what the deal is in all respects, but he/she does see that the character is unhappy and facing an immediate unhappiness (going home with Benjamin) and maybe something else. As a result there is uncertainty and anticipation and the exposition feels like story.

When things happen in scenes and there is the uncertainty to the outcome, it has dramatic tension and it feels like story.

Huckleberry Finn must escape the clutches of civilization that are smothering him. Will this backwoods kid manage to find a life for himself? Then Pap catches him. Will Huck escape Pap’s clutches? Then he meets Jim, the escaped Nigger, on an island. Will he help Jim evade a terrible capture, help him find and reunite his family? And all the time lurking back there in our mind is the first, over-arching story question: will Huck find a place in life where he can live happily ever after?

So once you’ve got that first story question planted somehow, you’re not finished. It’s on to the next one which creates the next complication (or vice versa), and the next and the next.

Finally there are the parts of the manuscript that are neither exposition nor story. These are events that are not related in some way to any story question and are not exposition (or rather, are not exposition that the reader has a need to know). Events generally don’t have any dramatic tension, no conflict, no goal for the protagonist, the story is not moving forward. These are things you need to cut. These may be your very most favorite things, scenes and images you absolutely adore. Sorry. Cut ’em all. I can’t find any examples of empty events in published manuscripts (which is in itself, of course, a pretty good indicator), but there are examples in manuscripts on writing sites. I don’t want to embarrass anyone by citing them. When you’re reading along and you start to wonder what this has to do with the story, you’re probably reading an event. Some events can start out sounding like they’re going to be story, and then they end and something else starts, and if you wonder what that part you just read has to do with the story. That was empty event.

Anyway, that’s enough of this. Hope it helps.

Ten questions to ask about your story

2009-07-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

I think I found this somewhere on the web or in a book. Can't remember where. Not great, might be of interest to some.

Here are ten questions you can ask yourself about your story while you are developing it, writing it, and when you are finished.

1) What do you want to say with your story about...?
The state of the world?
Relationships?
Governments?
Religions?
Life in general?
People?

2) How will readers react to your story? Is the story...
Interesting?
Believable?
Credible?
Compelling?

3) Where does your story begin?
What is the set up?
What happens when you start reading at the second or third paragraph?
Is the protagonist in a crisis or facing an external problem or difficulty of some kind?
Have you established your story world? The rules? The restrictions?

4) Where does your story end?
What is the outcome or resolution? And why?
Do you answer any and all questions presented?
Is your ending both inevitable (given what has gone before) and at the same time surprising?
Did you fulfill the premise of the story?

5) Is there rising tension?
Is there tension (hopefully dramatic tension) in every scene?
Are there suprises?
How does the conflict escalate?
Is there a climax?

6) Your characters?
Are they likable? (or at least dislikable in a sympathetic way, i.e. Humbert Humbert?)
Interesting? Unique or different?
Bigger than life?
Will an audience care about him/her/them?

7) What is your protagonist like?
Can audiences empathize with them?
What do they want? Do they care very much about something?
What are their goals in life? Needs?
What's at stake for them?
Are they tied to the problem they face? No turning back?

8) What is your character's motivation?
Are these motivations shown?
Justified?
Woven into the story?

9) Who or what is the antagonist?
Why are they trying to stop your protagonist?
Is the antagonist a worthy foe?
What drives them?
What do they want or need?

10) Do you over explain your story?
Do you begin way before things get interesting?
Is everything spelled out too clearly?
Is the set up "messy" and too busy?
Do events get explained rather than unfold dramatically?
Do key events take place out of view of the reader?

How to write a scene

2009-07-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

I thought this was pretty good stuff. The subject is screenwriting, but it seems to me it applies equally well to stories and novels.

How to write a scene

By John August (www.johnaugust.com)

One of the things I admire most about Jane Espenson’s blog is that she talks very directly about the words on the page, giving names to techniques I use but never really think about. The two-percenter, for example.

So one of my goals for 2007 is to get a little more granular in my advice-giving, and talk less about Screenwriting and more about screenwriting — in particular, scene writing.

Spend a few years as a screenwriter, and writing a scene becomes an almost unconscious process. It’s like driving a car. Most of us don’t think about the ignition and the pedals and the turn signals — but we used to, back when we were learning. It used to flummox the hell out of us. Every intersection was unbelievably stressful, with worries of stalling the car and/or killing everyone on board.

It’s the same with writing a scene. The first few are brutal and clumsy. But once you’ve written (and rewritten) say, 500 scenes, the individual steps sort of vanish. But they’re still there, under the surface. It’s just that your instinct is making a lot of the decisions your conscious brain used to handle.

So here’s my attempt to introspect and describe what I’m doing that I’m not even aware I’m doing. Here’s How to Write a Scene.

1. Ask: What needs to happen in this scene?

Many screenwriting books will tell you to focus on what the characters want. This is wrong. The characters are not responsible for the story. You are. If characters were allowed to control their scenes, most characters would chose to avoid conflict, and movies would be crushingly boring.

The question is not, “What could happen?” or “What should happen?” It is only, “What needs to happen?” If you wrote an outline, this is the time to look at it.1 If you didn’t, just come up one or two sentences that explain what absolutely must happen in the scene.

2. Ask: What’s the worst that would happen if this scene were omitted?

Imagine the projectionist screwed up and accidentally lopped off this scene. Would the movie still make sense? If the answer is “yes,” then you don’t really need the scene, and shouldn’t bother writing it.

But it’s so dramatic! you say. But it’s so funny!

Tough. Put that drama or that comedy into scenes that are crucial to the movie.2 One thing you learn after a few produced movies is that anything that can be cut will be cut, so put your best material into moments that will absolutely be there when it’s done.

3. Ask: Who needs to be in the scene?

Scripts are often clogged with characters who have no business being there. But because words are small, it’s easy to overlook that “Haversmith” hasn’t said or done anything for five pages. And sadly, sometimes that’s not realized until after filming.3

4. Ask: Where could the scene take place?

The most obvious setting for a scene is generally the least interesting, so don’t be too quick to set your scene in the police bullpen, a living room, or a parking garage. Always consider what the characters could be doing, even if it’s not directly related to the focus of the scene. A father-and-son bonding moment at a slaughter house will play differently than the same dialogue at a lawn bowling tournament.

5. Ask: What’s the most surprising thing that could happen in the scene?

Give yourself permission to step away from your outline and consider some wild possibilities. What if a car smashed through the wall? What if your hero choked and died? What if a young boy vomited up a finger?

Most of your scenes won’t have one of these out-of-nowhere aspects. But your movie needs to have a few moments that are completely unexpected, so always ask yourself, could this be one of them?

6. Ask: Is this a long scene or a short scene?

There’s nothing so dispiriting as writing a great three-page mega-scene and realizing that you could have accomplished just as much in two-eighths of a page.4 So ask yourself up front: How much screen time am I willing to give to this scene?

7. Brainstorm three different ways it could begin.

The classic advice is to come into a scene as late as you possibly can. Of course, to do that, you really need to know how the previous scene ended. There’s often a natural momentum that suggests what first image or line of dialogue would be perfect to open the scene. But don’t stop at the first option. Find a couple, then…

8. Play it on the screen in your head.

At least 50% of screenwriting is simply sitting there with your eyes closed, watching the unwritten scene loop in your head. The first couple of times through, it’s really rough: a blocking rehearsal. But eventually, you start to hear the characters talk to each other, and the vague motions become distinct actions. Don’t worry if you can’t always get the scene to play through to the end — you’re more likely to find the exit in the writing than in the imagining.

Don’t rush this step. Let the scene percolate. Mumble the dialogue. Immerse yourself as fully into the moment as you can.

9. Write a scribble version.

A “scribble version” is essentially a cheat sheet so you’ll remember the great scene you just saw in your head. Don’t write sentences; don’t write full dialogue. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes. Just get the bare minimum down so that you won’t forget the scene in the next hour as you’re writing it.

I generally hand-write a scribble version in tiny print — sometimes literally on the back of an envelope — but you can also type. This is what a scribble version consists of for me:

0. DUNCAN waiting edge of seat
0. ITO
0. I was one of the doctors who worked on your wife
0. accident
0. injuries severe, trauma team, sorry, couldn’t save her
0. (sits, reflex)
0. nature of injuries, concern fetus wouldn’t survive in utero. paramedic able deliver caesarian boy healthy
0. (nodding not hearing)
0. nurse can take you to see him, know a lot to handle
0. what
0. a lot to handle
0. take me to see him?
0. yes
0. see who?
0. your son. paramedic was able to
0. (grabs clipboard)
0. I know this may seem
0. My wife wasn’t pregnant
0. Your wife didn’t tell you…
0. My wife has never been pregnant. been trying three years. fertility clinic last week
0. I examined the baby myself. nearly at term.
0. I don’t know whose baby, not hers.
0.
0.
It’s kind of a mess, and really wouldn’t make sense to anyone but me — and only shortly after I wrote it. But that doesn’t matter. The scribble version is only there so you don’t get lost or confused while writing the full version of the scene. Yes, it’s finally time to…

10. Write the full scene.

If you typed up the scribble version, don’t just try to fatten it out. Start clean. The scribble version is deliberately crappy, and rewritten crap is still crap.

The scribble version is your outline for the scene. Yes, allow yourself the chance to detour from your scribble version if a truly better idea comes along. But if you’ve really spent the time to play it through in your head (#8), it’s probably on the right track already.

Depending on the nature of the scene, getting the dialogue right may be most of the work. Regardless, focus on choosing the best words to describe the characters, the action and tone, so your readers will see the same scene in their heads.

Repeat 200 times. ===

Clarification on point one

In my previous post on How to write a scene, I wrote that the first question a screenwriter should ask is, “What needs to happen in this scene?” Not only that…
Many screenwriting books will tell you to focus on what the characters want. This is wrong. The characters are not responsible for the story. You are. If characters were allowed to control their scenes, most characters would chose to avoid conflict, and movies would be crushingly boring.

As I typed this, I anticipated a sea of hands shooting into the air, a chorus of But! But! Buts! So I added a lengthy disclaimer in which I wrote about terms like “character driven” and “character motivation.” But then I decided to cut it, just to get the reaction:

John, are you fucking retarded? A character must act his character not whatâ€™s most convenient for you. — Chris

Now that Chris has lectured the professional screenwriter on the craft, we can take a look at why I stand by my point.

We’ve all seen dull, mechanical movies where the characters are pretty much spectators. The story is driven by external events, without any real engagement or decision-making by the so-called hero. Sure, at times they may discover information or get in a gunfight, but they’re basically zombies. Plot-bots.

This is a fundamental structural issue, not a scene problem. From the conceptual stage, the characters were placed in the wrong seat of the car. They’re in the passenger seat, staring out the window, when they should be behind the wheel. The best scene-work in the world isn’t going to solve this problem.

Remember: This is a tutorial about how to write one scene. The first question is, “What needs to happen in this scene?” Or, to rephrase it, “What do I need to show the audience?” Yes, the character should be responsible for his or her actions and decisions inside the movie, but you, the writer, are responsible for deciding which moments the audience gets to see.

Think of yourself as a documentary editor. You have hundreds of hours of footage. Which bits are you going to use to tell your story?

In your movie–an inspiring drama set against the majestic backdrop of Alaska–the hero may want to win the igloo-building championship to prove his dead architect father’s theories correct and reconnect with his Inuit half-brother. But in this particular scene, what needs to happen is that the judges rule that ice blocks must be quadrilateral, thus thwarting the hero’s geodesic ambitions.

Clear? Great. Now let’s talk about situations when “what a character wants” does become scene-specific.

Actors and directors often talk of “character motivation,” using phrases like, “What’s the character’s motivation in this scene?” That’s a valid if somewhat dispiriting question, particularly on the set; either they’ve shown up without doing their homework, or the script really is that confusing. You may find yourself explaining that the hero is trying to rescue his son from the avalanche because he loves him.

If you re-read my how-to, at no point was I advising forcing your characters to act against their natures. But I was telling you to take control. My post was about writing a single scene, and a single meandering scene can derail a script. The argument that, “But my hero really wanted to watch TV for a couple of hours!” won’t win you accolades for your dedication to the craft.

Joshua James on emotional content

2009-07-28T09:41:00.000-07:00

I thought this was pretty good. It’s by Joshua James, a screenwriter who blogs. The original (and a lot of other columns) are here:

http://writerjoshuajames.com/dailydojo/?p=665

Rapping On Writing - Emotional Content

Lee: What was that? An exhibition? It needs emotional content.

The above quote is from the martial arts classic Enter The Dragon, though you won’t find it on the quote page, it’s in the film, when Bruce Lee teaches his student Lao how to properly kick.

And it’s very pertinent to what I wish to share with y’all about writing stories and screenwriting in particular.

This is a follow-up post to On Character, Ya Gotta Have Soul, in which I share my own small opinion that character matters slightly more than the other elements in screenwriting. I believe Character IS story, on some level.

Keep in mind this is only my opinion, no more, no less.

I’m sharing what I feel works, and anyone else is free to share their experiences as well. I’m sharing stuff that has come up from talking to my friends about what works and what doesn’t work FOR US.

This will be a fairly long post, and then I’ll shut up for awhile, heh-heh.

So the question today is:

What makes a story special?

My answer?

EMOTIONAL CONTENT.  

Let me be clear.

Usually when folks hear the words EMOTIONAL CONTENT, often they misunderstand that to mean one of two things:

One: I (the reader / viewer) like the characters.

Two: There’s lots of crying / shouting / emotional outbursts in the story.

And to my eye, that’s not really what EMOTIONAL CONTENT means, in terms of story.

What I believe it means is thus:

THE EMOTIONAL CONNECTION of the characters TO THEIR ACTIONS.

They are emotionally connected to what they do. That’s going to be the theme of this post, and so it’s gonna be repeated, but for good reason.

Too often, when I read a script that has a good idea to it, and good writing, I see that the characters aren’t emotionally invested in their actions.

By that, I mean the things that they do in a story (save a cat, drink a beer, smack a guy) aren’t powered by emotional logic, and so it feels more like a construct (this is where my hero does this action) rather than something not only would that person CHOOSE to do, but that person HAS to do.

And that’s the dirty secret not only of storytelling, but of life itself.

We are creatures of emotion.

Even the most intellectual of us make decisions based on emotional reasons.

We make choices based on avoiding pain and satisfying our emotional needs.

We take actions based on emotional choices.

Even when we detach ourselves emotionally, from something we don’t wish to think about, that in itself is AN EMOTIONAL CHOICE.

Here’s a personal example.

My friends would tell you that, on the street, if I witnessed a man harassing a woman on the street, it would be HARD if not nearly IMPOSSIBLE for me not to intervene. I’ve have intervened several times, the last as recently as last summer.

This is probably at times possibly dangerous and maybe a wee bit stupid. But I do it anyway.

This is due to my past, experiences in my life that formed an emotional belief system, a logic that makes sense to me.

*Stephen King writes in his book ON WRITING that of all the fiction characters he’s killed in all the stories and books he’s written, the one that outraged people the most, generating loads of hate-filled letters and anger, was the murder of a farm dog in the beginning of his book THE DEAD ZONE, killed by the bad guy, Greg Stilson. King got LOADS of hate mail for brutally killing that dog. King would write them back and point out, A) He didn’t kill a dog, Greg did, Greg’s a bad guy, and his killing a dog just for kicks is evidence of that and more importantly B) the story is fictional, therefore the dog is fictional, and no dogs were killed by anyone, anywhere, exception in the imagination. Didn’t matter. People were outraged that a horror writer killed a dog in one of his books.

**On a side note, I find it interesting that most people wouldn’t stand for someone beating the crap out of a dog, but watching a parent beat the daylights out of their kid on the street, that’s considered okay. Not everywhere, but in far too many places (I’m looking at you, Texas) it’s considered reasonable to beat a child but not a dog. I’m not saying anything. I’m just saying.

We all have that.

For instance, it’d be hard if not impossible for anyone here to stand by and do nothing if they saw someone beating a *dog terribly.

We’d call the cops, throw bricks at the guy, we’d do something.

The majority of us just wouldn’t stand there and do nothing as a dog gets beaten.

We’d take action.

We’d have to, because we don’t want to be the kind of people who just watch a man do something terrible to a dog** without doing something about it.

We won’t FEEL GOOD about ourselves if we didn’t do something. We’d hate ourselves.

There are those things.

Those choices we make based on our own emotional logic, that makes us who we are.

I’ve written about it before, but the way to profile a character is based on how Federal Investigators do it, which is WHAT PLUS WHY EQUALS WHO.

In other words, WHAT you do and WHY you do it makes you who you are.

And the WHY is always, always an emotional choice.

Even when you couch it in logic, the logic is employed to make you feel RIGHT about your choice.

Does that make sense?

We all have our own emotional logic, a sensibility based on our emotional experiences.

I have a good friend who, in his youth, attended Catholic school. And, for reasons best not gone into, hated it.

And to this day, whenever given advice or directions, even if he asked for the advice himself, he won’t follow it exactly. He’ll always quietly do it his way, he’ll always quietly rebel, and he knows he’s doing it, he admits it, but in a way he can’t help himself, it’s his reaction to the harsh do-what-I-say discipline of Catholic school, which turned him into a permanent rebel.

That’s not the sum total of his character, but it’s an interesting truth to why he does what he does. We’re all loaded with them, all of us.

And the key to writing great characters is finding those truths.

Think about the great movies you’ve seen, and the great characters within them.

Why do they do what they do?

Think about SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, a great, great film - that specific question is answered by Clarice, forced out of her by Lector, and explains why she’s in the FBI and why she’s so determined to save the girl at all costs.

Because of an emotional experience she had when she was young that altered her forever.

She made a choice with her life, an emotional choice, and it’s part and parcel of all the choices she makes. She not only chooses to do it, she HAS to.

She’s now defined by it, and will put herself in jeopardy to fulfill the need to silence the lambs.

We’ll put ourselves through great pain to satisfy our emotional needs. We’ll go to great lengths to avoid anxiety and that which we fear. We rationalize it, of course, but those rationalizations are done to satisfy our emotional needs.

When you’re creating a story, you need to know WHY your characters are doing WHAT they do.

They don’t need to know it, nor does it need to be spelled out for the audience, but as author, YOU need to.

I want to repeat. It doesn’t need to be explained for the audience, it only needs to feel emotionally real.

In L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, we know that Bud White (Russell Crowe) hates wife-beaters. We know it because we see him beat one up and rescue the victimized wife.

We don’t know why he does that. Nor do we really need to, for the film to work.

In the book, it’s explained what happened to him as a youngster, it’s explained that he suffered through something terrible that makes him extremely unforgiving to abusive men, but it doesn’t matter that we don’t know it in the film.

Because Bud’s actions are connected to his emotional choices and it’s clear, he just hates them and has to do what he does.

We all know Indiana Jones hates snakes right?

He’s totally terrified by them.

And we don’t even find out WHY he fears them until the third film.

Does it matter? No.

It only needs to be BELIEVABLE, emotionally. The reasons matter to the people constructing the character, but in the end, it only needs to be emotionally connected and emotionally believable.

As an actor, it’s often called FINDING MOTIVATION. It’s what actors do when deconstructing a scene, they ask questions to figure things out, such as, Am I avoiding a fight here, am I trying to get laid, what am I trying to do? What do “I” want?

Even selfless actions are, at their core, self-motivated (see Clarice, above) and one way of feeling good about yourself. You give to charity or to the Katrina fund because of how it makes you feel.

This is an important point, so I’m gonna repeat it. People are SELF-MOTIVATED.

Sometimes they’re selfish, sometimes they’re not selfish, but they’re always self-motivated.

In other words, the actions people choose serve their needs and serves the idea they have of who they are.

And because our emotional makeup as people is vast and complex, and because it also sometimes changes (key word, sometimes, not always, people fight change) you get contradictions within that emotional framework as differing actions are chosen for differing needs within the same psyche’.

For example, a surgeon who saves lives every day, who’s dedicated his life toward helping others, treats people terribly (HOUSE) and is incredibly egotistical and selfish.

A HERO named Indiana Jones who’s courageous when it comes to jumping on trucks or fighting Nazis, nerves of steel, but put a snake in front of him and he turns to jello.

I have my own contradiction. As a former bouncer, I’m pretty comfortable with physical confrontation. But emotional confrontations I prefer to avoid, I had to fire an actor from a play a few years back, the actor just wasn’t doing the job, was hurting the whole show and had to be let go. I fired the actor, but before I did, I threw up in the bathroom.

Pretty crazy, right? I’ve tackled muggers on the street (though I’m probably getting too old for that these days) without thought or pause, but got screaming butterflies in my stomach before having to tell an actor it wasn’t working out.

Logically it doesn’t make sense that any of the characters above (including me) would BE that way, but emotionally it totally does. That’s their emotional logic.

Think about that, think about the people you know, especially the fascinating ones, and think about each person’s individual emotional logic. I’m telling you, they’re as distinct as fingerprints.

Think about BUTCH from Pulp Fiction.

He gets away with ripping off a mobster for a lot of money, all he has to do is hide out until it’s time to take the train out of town.

But his girlfriend forgets his father’s watch back at their apartment. And Butch decides to go back for it.

Now we know it makes NO SENSE for him to risk his life for a watch. We know they’re probably waiting for him there, and he knows it, too.

But he goes back anyway. Because of the emotional attachment to the watch, and to his father, and to who he is.

Now if it had been written some other way, let’s say Butch says, “Oops, I forgot my watch. I better go back for it so I don’t have to buy another one,” it wouldn’t work for us. We wouldn’t buy it. It seems like it’s only a setup for a confrontation, because in that scenario, Butch doesn’t HAVE to go back, he’s just sort of randomly doing it for no emotional reason other than laziness and stupidity.

But in the film version, we know the reason he chooses to go back, and we also know he HAS to.

That makes the confrontations that follow not only more satisfying but believable. Because Butch knows WHY and makes us buy it completely.

What they do and why they do it, most important. And it has to have, like the side kicks Master Lee teaches, EMOTIONAL CONTENT. (For a bit more on that, check out The Last Gasp.)

So when constructing your characters, ask yourself why they do what they do. And what makes them unique.

Better yet, ask why YOU do what you do.

Seriously, think about one day in your life. Why do you eat that for breakfast? Why do you read the paper? Why watch that show? Why do you do this job, if you hate it?

Think about the EMOTIONAL ANSWERS to those questions.

Some choices you make you’re less attached to than others. You eat this breakfast because it’s the simplest. You read the Daily News because the Post pisses you off and the Times is too much trouble to unfold. You watch LOST because, when you think about it when you’re alone, it makes you tear up. You do this job because it allows you the time to do the thing you love in the downtime, and THAT is more important than anything else.

Take it further. What if you were faced with an extraordinary situation. A monster tearing up New York. A mobster waiting for you in your bathroom. You suddenly develop spider powers.

Now. What emotional choices would you make?

Get how it works?

Anything any character does in your script, at some point there was an emotional reason for it, large or small. Even if it’s “I don’t want to deal with this right now” to “That guy looks like the jerk who dumped me” or “you threaten my kids again and I’ll kill you”.

(Not room enough in the thread, for the balance of the article, click on the link at top.)

What I'm not reading

2009-07-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

That's it, I said to myself. I'm not reading any more stories that have anyone, I mean anyone, vomiting in the opening. And also spousal abuse, or actually cruel and abusive treatment of anyone. Certainly not in the opening. Maybe, just maybe later on in the story, if it is completely justified and if the one getting beat up actually deserves it. And no more dying parents and suicides. For me it's just not an appealing opening, having someone die like that, especially if they're old and it's about time anyway. Yeah, sure it does happen every day, and it's happened to many of us. But it just doesn't appeal to me as the opening of a story (whether short or long). I guess it's just me, but parental death just doesn't suck me in and make me want to turn the metaphorical page (i.e., scroll down).

And when you start with the vomit and the death and the spousal abuse, where do you go from there?

I've never seen "East Enders," but I have the impression that too many of you are watching it and letting it influence your choice of subject matter.

I read this on wordplayer.com and this is what started me on putting this entry together:

FWIW, (for what it's worth) newer writers focus on the telling, competent writers focus on inventing good stuff to happen. I've read several interviews with reaaalllly good writers who worry about having a good idea--presumably they've learned how to do the first two, they are now looking a kernel that will allow them to invent the best story possible.

I'm not talking about the writing, I'm talking about deciding which story to write, or the question, when you have something in mind: Is this story a good idea.

I'm certainly not setting myself up as an example of someone with good ideas. My two most recent examples are 1) some narrow, selfish, self-centered people we don't really like compared to some old broke-down Mexican gardener and 2) an actress gives a producer a blow job and doesn't get the part, so of course she questions her place in the universe (after all, she *is* an actress).

I wrote 'em as well as I was able. But so what? Is this the kind of stuff any particular segment of the Reading Public is interested in? Certainly when you put a teenage boy with a gigantic, immense hard-on into a story, you're taking what we might call a "readership risk." Ewww! Kind of distasteful. Now the situation is probably true (after all, he *is* a teenage boy), but who needs to imagine it? Not me.

My kind of stuff is not geared toward that audience that likes what they call "cozys." I'm not exactly sure who does read cozys, but I'm pretty sure they are not my kind of people. I've been sending my stories out to the big contests, the ones where first prize is at least a thousand, and sometimes three thousand bucks. What are my chances? Probably about zero.

I went to one of the sites (Narrative Magazine). Here are the ten openings from ten "Stories of the Week." Just the openings, no authors, no title, no credits, and most of these people have won fellowships and published several novels and collections. And not one gigantic hard-on or blow-job in the bunch. But also no vomit, no parental death, no spousal abuse.

Story 1:

What to make of loneliness. Can you imagine? Three-fifteen a.m. and you lie spread-eagled in bed in your cocoon of a bed in your ripe swollen cocoon of a body while I drive through the snowy drizzle querying myself about life.

Driving along a deserted boulevard. Yellow street lights high atop slender poles. Rain, snow. Mist. Wind. What to make of loneliness. Not anger, not rage, not the wish to die or even the wish to murder. I’m too exhausted for all that. Just loneliness. What to make of it. Aloneness. Can you hear me? Can you guess? Never. You are eight months pregnant now and lie sleepless beside my lover, your spine aching, your stomach bloated, you are a beached bewildered mammalian creature gasping in the air.

Can you guess at me? Never.

But do you sense me, do you fear me?

Three-sixteen a.m. on a Friday morning, or do I mean a Thursday night. I drive too fast, and then slow down, skidding on a patch of ice a quarter-mile from your bed.

My loneliness has turned sinister.

I can’t be trusted.

Story 2

The two men sat across from each other. A pair of car keys rested on the table between them. One of the men held a glass mug, the other his head in his hands. A waitress stood by, waiting for their order. She coughed and scuffed her sneaker across the floor.

Get to it, Bill finally said.

What?

Order something.

Order for me.

I don’t know what you want.

Neither do I.

Bill looked at the waitress, tapped his mug. Two Buds.

Draft or bottles? she asked.

Either.

Which?

Bottles.
Bill watched her walk away. He whistled and winked at Ted.

Story 3

“Oh, mon dieu,” she said, “this is your first time, isn’t it?”

Had it been a question—Is this your first time?—you could have, would have, said no. But it was a statement, a proclamation. C’est ta première fois, she’d said, and you knew you’d been found out.
“Well, in that case,” she said, “let’s make it good.” And she started to unzip her dress. You stopped her. Much as you wanted to see her brown body naked, to feel her naked against you naked, you didn’t have time for good. You had locked the lobby entry, with one lodger still out on the town. If he came back and found it locked, he would bang on the glass, which would certainly wake the bosses, however deaf they might be, and you would be out of a job. Or worse. The hotel’s owners lived on the ground floor; the door to their apartment was behind the very desk that you had left unattended in order to bring this prostitute up to the second-floor laundry room. She’d stopped by, she told you, to thank you for having treated her so courteously these many months, but especially for coming to her rescue during what she called the calamity of last night.

Story 4

Jesse didn’t know a valley could be so vast, making those back home in West Virginia seem like hollows. When he wrote California on his dream sheet at the recruiter’s office in Elkins, he imagined beaches, not orchards, and never rice fields like those in Vietnam War movies. Jesse joined the military, as his brothers did before him, to get the hell away from lurching coal trucks, winding unemployment lines, his only sister’s grave, her candlelit photo recalling all the plain and lonesome mountain girls he knew in high school. He’s been in the Sacramento Valley exactly a week when he sees Helen sitting cross-legged on a pool table, singing “Blessed Assurance” to a group of shit-faced airmen like himself. She’s dressed in shorts and an Air Force T-shirt tied in a knot at her waist. Hair bleached blond and wearing entirely too much lipstick, Helen—like the other girls from town who hang out in the dorms—looks to him anything but plain.

Story 5

Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband’s death.

It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband’s friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard’s name leading the list of “killed.” He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister’s arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

Story 6

The boy in row nineteen has a cold.

“Don’t lean on my armrest,” he cautions his sister. “You’ll get germs. They’ll stuff you up, it will hurt to fly, and like last vacation we’ll all have to listen to you whining, ‘I can’t unplug my ears.’ ”

The boy sits on the aisle and his sister, a little girl in braids, has the window, although—germs aside—she’s agreed to switch seats halfway through the flight, which means she gets to see the plane rise from Detroit, and he to see it land in Paris. She’ll probably grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet, nor with the censorship that physical beauty can sometimes impose. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she sings an unrecognizable song, no doubt inspired by the view, as its only lyric seems to be floating, floating, floating . . .

Story 7

By the time the sun was over the ridge, Carl Veltre had already been up for three hours. He had milked the Holsteins before Lynne was awake, washed down the milking house while the kids were eating breakfast, and brought the school bus around to the house just as Lynne was handing lunch bags to their two boys and sending them down the driveway. For the past forty-odd minutes, he had nursed the aging bus along winding back roads, practically standing on the gas pedal to get it to crawl up the steep hills and stopping at all the least convenient places—blind corners, the very bottoms of long climbs—to pick up kids as young as five and as old as nineteen, an age bracket that, on mornings like this, Carl understood as the widest range of possibilities for obnoxiousness that the school system would allow.

“Hey, you all,” he shouted to the wide, oblong mirror that framed pretty much the whole bus. “Whoever threw whatever that was I saw come from somewhere back there—are you smilin’ at me?—whoever that was better not be smilin’ an’ better not do it again, neither.”

Story 8

“So,” Gwen began breezily, “Ethan invited this woman tonight. He thinks she’s, like, this amazing journalist. Apparently she got hooked on heroin for a while when she was undercover with some street kids.”

That was all Gwen said, but Denise understood. Gwen wouldn’t get any closer to admitting she was worried about her husband’s interest in another woman.

Denise feigned an extravagant yawn. “Ooh, heroin addiction. I must have missed the press release.”

The door buzzer sounded, and Ethan yelled, “I got it” from upstairs.

The apartment was all upside down: the main entrance was upstairs, along with the bedroom and bathroom. So now a wet-haired Ethan led a skittish-looking couple down the narrow staircase to the living room and kitchen, where Denise and Gwen were setting out wine glasses and napkins. A patch of dirt lay beyond the vaultlike back door. “Wow, garden access?” the blinky-eyed girl said, peering out a filthy little window. “Great apartment.”

The third or fourth buzz produced a woman who wore a black vintage dress and heavy black boots. She paused at the top of the stairs and surveyed the room. As she came down to the living room, her silver jewelry jangled.

On a hunch, Denise stepped up and introduced herself. “I’m an old friend of—” she overenunciated—“Ethan and Gwen’s.”

Unsmiling, Michelle held out a hand. Denise was ready to loathe her.

Story 9

At first she acts like she is looking past you, like she is reading the sign on the restaurant behind you. She stands across the street, but it’s a narrow street, so you can clearly see her face, those blue blue eyes, she isn’t any older than thirty, and you see that she has this smile that isn’t related to a mere restaurant sign, it’s a smile like she’s looking at something familiar, something sweet, but maybe a little sad too, like it reminds her of her grandmother who is buried deep in South Dakota. You turn to see if something smiley and somber is going on in the restaurant, and of course nothing is—it’s dead in there—but when you turn back, she’s looking straight at you, and contrary to your normal avert-your-eyes manner, you look right back at her, you connect with this stranger across the street in a way that you consider rare.

So without taking your eyes off her, without looking for cars in either direction, you cross the street to talk to her. Who wouldn’t?

As you approach, you see that she is chewing gum, all casual and relaxed, like this happens to her every day: girl gives boy look, boy crosses street and makes a fool of himself.

She says that her name is Blue, like the color, and even though you’ve never met anyone named after a color, it doesn’t surprise you, there was something blue in her smile after all. You tell her your name, you tell her that you’re nervous, but at least you crossed the street safely. She says, “You didn’t get run over. That’s a good sign.”

“So what now?” she asks.

Story 10

At first glance, it looked very much like all the others facedown on the table, which probably accounts for the otherwise odd fact that no one gasped when it appeared. It’s possible too that no one gasped because when guys get together in stag situations they tend to be extra careful to avoid displays of emotion that might make them seem like women. We were at Bobby Cravinho’s dark-paneled place in the Heights, the four of us regulars, and using Bobby’s vintage Coca-Cola deck, with the headshot of the happy vintage babe holding a Coke bottle in a swimming pool and the tagline Sign of Good Taste. It takes a pretty good eye to spot this particular joker-card, for the features of the girl in the bathing suit are just slightly altered, suggesting an indefinite mixed-race origin, though I have to say she looks, without question, way less than happy. In any case, suddenly prostrate in the middle of Bobby’s water-ringed, cigarette-singed, cork-top table, the card with its morphed visage possessed all the sour gravity of a Supreme Court justice. You can imagine what ensued: initial shock, a silent stop-action in the game, throat-pumping gulps from our Heinekens, and then a mounting recognition and acceptance of the inevitable—the dread thing was there, it wouldn’t go away, and no one was going to take responsibility for having played it. Indeed, everybody would adamantly deny having played it.

Drinka

2009-07-15T09:44:00.000-07:00

Added Drinka to "Stories."

The reality of being a best-seller

2009-04-24T08:52:00.000-07:00

How good is the money, really?

Click here to find out.

.

The language of storytelling

2008-12-28T08:51:00.000-08:00

Our local art house/foreign film theatre used to run a trailer that had a line narrated voice-over in several languages, concluding with a woman with a fake British accent: “The language of fil-um is universal.”

(A fil-um is something quite distinct from and far superior to a mere movie.)

Whenever we went to this theatre I always made fun of the trailer, the logo line, saying it in my awful Indian accent, my terrible Irish accent, my appalling English accent, and sometimes, if I timed it right, catching her a little by surprise, getting a derisive laugh, or at least a smile, from my wife.

And then this morning I realized, all kidding aside, that’s it’s actually true. More than true. Yes, the language of film is universal. But it’s not the language of film that’s universal, it’s the language of storytelling.

The language of storytelling works below the level of spoken or written language. At its most fundamental, it only requires a few gestures and a surprisingly simple music track. And the music track is probably optional.

You can see for yourself how it works if you happen to have the right laboratory available for the experiment. My test subject is a chubby female age eleven months named Avery. Experimental conditions often take place during her noon meal, when she is sitting in her high chair with the tray before her waiting impatiently for lunch. The story begins when the narrator taps the fingernails of two fingers on the tray in front of her, and the two fingers begin marching this way and that, just a few small steps, accompanied by a little “toot toot toot” marching music. The musical quality of the tune doesn’t seem to matter. But I do like my stories to have what we professionals call production values, so I softly breathe a little cheerful tune that provides a mood and a rhythm for the marching fingers.

Avery’s attention immediately fastens on those two fingers. Throughout the rest of the story, her attention stays fixed; never once does she look up at me “breaking the fourth wall” as they say. This gives additional depth to Henry James’s “willing suspension of disbelief.”

Clearly the suspension of disbelief is not merely willing. It is abject surrender. Even that, I think, doesn’t go far enough. It seems to be simply lapsed into, it is attention given in a relaxed state. After all, seeing a movie, reading a book, these are forms of relaxation, aren’t they?

The marching fingers seem to bring the immediate appeal of entertainment. Or certainly that far end of the entertainment spectrum that starts with diversion; something at least barely more than nothing.

The fingers march for a moment then approach one of Avery’s hands resting on her tray. With a little hop they are on her hand and marching up her arm. She doesn’t move as this happens, yet somehow I can feel her excitement grow, the dramatic tension heightens, she almost seems to vibrate. This is it! And suddenly the fingers borrow beneath her arm and she wiggles and laughs. The fingers withdraw and Avery looks up at the writer-producer-director and bestows her version of a bouquet of roses. Her look clearly says please, shall we do it again?

And so it goes, the same basic play with a variation here or there, again and again.

And now comes the boring part, the theory.

I think the little playlet works because it recreates in a safe way the fundamental fear that even an eleven-month-old child has of the near approach of an unusual creature of some kind. The immediate situation has an element of fear, yet overall it is safe, for certainly Avery can see that the fingers are attached to Grandpa.

I think the basis for “story” is no more complicated than this. I also think at the same time it is just this profound.

It’s fundamental. It’s pre-language, it’s in-born. It’s anticipation mingled with uncertainty.

Making a collage

2008-11-23T10:28:00.000-08:00

Talking about a new story of mine I put up on www. bookshed.eu:

The reason the story can be read on all those levels, and it’s a lot of fun for me to see you do it, is that it’s a collage. I guess every story is, at least to some degree. And when you make a collage, one of the things you want to do is confuse the eye; having it going first here, then there. The next time you see a collage, stop and take it apart, piece by piece. You’ll see it’s not really as complicated in parts as it seems in overall impression, that the eye is really pretty easy to fool, and that the mind loves, absolutely adores almost above everything else glomming onto a pattern, making sense out of chaos.

Suspense, identification, Hitchcock, etc.

2008-09-20T08:50:00.000-07:00

Lemmy Caution read this post:

http://blackwood.dk/PDF/Elements_of_suspense.pdf

And commented:

Now that essay was very simplistic, and, in some cases, just plain wrong. It wasn't compassion that Hitchcock elicited for his characters, but identification - a very different thing. Many times in a Hitchcock movie you are siding with a bad guy (sometimes just for a few moments - because you want him to get away with it) even if he is nasty.

But putting the audience in 'superior' position (audience knowing more than the characters) is a classic movie technique - but one which seems much less applicable to literature (perhaps you can come up with some examples to prove me wrong).

And of course, Hitchcock used this technique not just for scenes, but for whole movies. In 'Vertigo' he gives away the denouement relatively early on in the film (in the story it was based on, we don't find out the Kim Novak character is one and the same as the woman she resembles till the very end) and he creates the delicious tension as we watch the characters struggle to discover what we already know. Vertigo, like Marnie, becomes as much a tale of male sexual obsession as it does a thriller.

I don't think Lemmy's got it quite right.

One other way maybe it works in fiction is when the "superior" knowledge given to the reader is implied rather that explicit.

I'm just coming off the top here, but when I tried the "character in major jeopardy" thing at the beginning of a couple pieces, just showing what was happening and not telling anything, I was very surprised to see how the implications of the situation got planted in the reader. Not in the reader's top-level "now thinking" awareness, but just below that, where an understanding is more felt in the autonomous nervous system rather than considered rationally.

This leads me to an understanding of human perception of mind mechanics that is maybe a little more nuanced and complicated than that generally considered: that there is not a conscious/unconscious mechanism to the mind, but rather a top-most level "now" kind of awareness, then a gradual shading with no perceptible lines of division all the way down to the deepest "reptile" brainstem mind where an earthquake is sensed a few hours before it occurs.

In reading a book, because of the nature of the medium and the direct mind-to-mind transfer between writer and reader, a tighter, closer relationship than that between the silver screen and the viewer, and also a relationship in which the writer can take whole paragraphs to convey a subtle atmosphere of impending this or that or whatever, something that certainly modern commercial film has no room for, because of the nature of this medium, the writer can convey to the reader a "superior knowledge" that the reader really doesn't think about, and yet that reader feels in his bones the ticking bomb beneath the table.

fragment

2008-09-14T09:32:00.001-07:00

The sun was almost down, swath of neon pink sunset splashed across the western horizon. The tide had turned and the waves were small, little more than a gentle wash that rolled softly up the beach then expired with a sigh.

As she watched, the mercury vapor street lights came on and were reflected from the wet sand where the waves receded. Someone had their window open and their stereo turned up. The immaculate cadences of a Mozart piano concerto floated out upon the evening air, seeming to settle all about her, like a benediction.

Beginnings

2008-09-14T09:14:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about this stuff and went and looked at a couple things, and this resulted:

I think the opening of a story or novel is the single most important part. Well, that’s a dumb thing to say if you’re thinking in terms of getting something published. At one point in my checkered career I had access to the slush pile at Holt, Rinehart & Winston in New York. Hmm, thought I, pretty interesting opportunity. I picked up the ms. off the top and started read. With each paragraph, with each page, I kept waiting and hoping it would get better. It didn’t. Lesson 1: it never gets any better than the beginning. Lesson 2: you don’t have to read ten pages; if the first page isn’t good, the next 300 won’t be good, either.

So: openings. What makes a good beginning? I'm sure everyone has his own ideas. Here's mine.

Take a look at this opening:

On an exceptionally hot evening early in July, a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, toward K. bridge.

He had successfully avoided meeting his landlady on the staircase. His garret was under the roof of a high, five-storied house and was more like a cupboard than a room. The landlady who provided him with garret, dinners, and attendance, lived on the floor below, and every time he went out he was obliged to pass her kitchen, the door of which invariably stood open. And each time he passed, the young man had a sick, frightened feeling, which made him scowl and feel ashamed. He was hopelessly in debt to his landlady, and was afraid of meeting her.

And another:

The day broke gray and dull. The clouds hung heavily, and there was a rawness in the air that suggested snow. A woman servant came into a room in which a child was sleeping and drew the curtains. She glanced mechanically at the house opposite, a stucco house with a portico, and went to the child's bed.

"Wake up, Philip," she said.

She pulled down the bed-clothes, took him in her arms, and carried him downstairs. He was only half awake.

"Your mother wants you," she said.

She opened the door of a room on the floor below and took the child over to a bed in which a woman was lying. It was his mother. She stretched out her arms, and the child nestled by her side. He did not ask why he had been awakened. The woman kissed his eyes, and with thin, small hands felt the warm body through his white flannel nightgown. She pressed him closer to herself.

"Are you sleepy, darling?" she said.

Her voice was so weak that it seemed to come already from a great distance. The child did not answer, but smiled comfortably. He was very happy in the large, warm bed, with those soft arms about him. He tried to make himself smaller still as he cuddled up against his mother, and he kissed her sleepily. In a moment he closed his eyes and was fast asleep. The doctor came forward and stood by the bed-side.

"Oh, don't take him away yet," she moaned.

Both openings do two things that I think are absolutely essential: establish the plight of the main character in a way that draws the reader in. But just the fact of showing (as opposed to telling about) the plight from the character's pov tends to accomplish this. This assumes that the plight the writer has chosen is sufficiently serious and of a nature and with a character that is appealing.

The first is, of course, "Crime and Punishment." The second is W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage."

What's interesting about them is that they both start the same way, with the day and a weather report of a sort. I think up until the media revolution in the second half of the 20th Century this was a much more typical way to begin a novel. But one more interesting thing about this technique is that it is also the conventional way of starting scene in a film: first the overall establishing shot, then either zoom or cut to something more specific within that overview. How many movies do you see, even today, that start with the pan across a cityscape or a countryside or a moving shot going somewhere? All the transitions in the TV show Seinfeld were exteriors of the outsides of buildings. It’s a convention, a shorthand, like pronouns.

Dostoevsky makes one simple, straight-forward and definite point about his main character. No digressions.

Maugham's example is far more complicated, and I haven't really included enough of it, but in the next few paragraphs the sick woman in the bed feels Philip's feet, especially his one club foot. And then she dies, and the main character of the novel is Philip, whose plight is that he is growing up an orphan with a club foot.

In terms of technique, though, the really interesting thing about Maugham's opening is how he shifts the pov around, and he does it so deftly that the reader never really notices or cares -- he does it without a single jarring note to the reader. First there's the weather report, completely objective, author's pov. Then a woman servant comes into a room where a child is sleeping. Author's pov. Then the servant looks out the window and this justifies the author's putting in the architectural details. It would be quite awkward to stick in anything about stucco houses and porticos without the servant's look. So we have a bit from the servant's pov, then we have a bit from the sick mother's pov, and then we have a bit from Philip's pov. Just like that. And it works perfectly smoothly. Actually, it's even more complicated than this, because in the next paragraph or two we get the doctor's pov.

I think it's the fundamentals are what's important, especially in the opening. Simplicity, directness, showing clearly in a dramatic way the point you want to make, the direction you're going.

Maybe you don't have to know the point and the direction when you first write it down, but I think you certainly have to be working from that pov when you go back and edit your stuff.

The adventures of Just Bill, part 1

2008-09-10T08:29:00.000-07:00

Patti at the shed asked how I thought of myself, some kind of artist or what. I said I thought of myself as a craftsman, an artisan. Then I went off on it. It’s kind of a way, I guess, a story can get going, quite personal though highly romanticized (why not?), with a strong point-of-view. Sometimes it's just fun to post off-the-wall junk, whatever comes along:

Like one of those Indians in New Mexico who sits in a manufactured house at night making stuff listening to the baseball game on the radio, then goes out in the morning and sets up next to the highway. And drags out a display stand discarded from a movie house, a bigger than life-size cardboard cutout of Marilyn Monroe standing over the grate, her dress billowing around her hips, all legs and panties, puts a chief's feathered head dress on it and sits down to wait for a car to stop and a curious tourist family to browse the stuff laying out on the blanket, stare at the Indian in the black hat sitting cross-legged.

All morning the cars zinged past on the highway. Hardly anybody stopped and when they did nobody bought anything. By the middle of the afternoon the desert was baking and when the maroon Jaguar with New York plates pulled over and the man got out, Just Bill was feeling testy. He hated the guy from the moment his foot touched gravel. He was a literary agent, Bill would find out later. But at this point he saw a skinny guy with floppy hair, a supercilious smile and wraparound designer sunglasses, a chrome cigarette holder flipping in the fingers of one hand and a package of Players in the other. He stepped carefully coming over to Just Bill's tattered blanket and Bill could see why: he wore Italian leather "driving shoes," delicately handmade envelopes enabling a pretentious asshole to pretend that he could better sense the optimum moment to change gears in the preferred automobile of pretentious assholes.

As Bill expected, the guy tried to bargain over the most expensive item on the blanket, then unable to screw the dirty Indian down to a rip-off price, the smile still on his face, turned to go.

Bill was just a tad fed up. It had been a long, hot day, dry, nothing in it. He flipped back one side of the blanket, picked up his rifle, flicked off the safety and cradling the Springfield easy and loose in his arms, took out the near-side rear tire on the car. The shot from the .30-06 boomed away across the desert and a couple seconds later bounced back from the rimrock.

"What?" Bill said as the second and third diminishing echos rolled through the afternoon heat, "You didn't see anything you liked?"

(Will there be a part 2? Who knows?)

Transparency part 2, self-indulgence

2008-09-09T08:13:00.000-07:00

Nothing is all one way or the other way, just this or just that. And there's not one audience, there are dozens, maybe scores, perhaps hundreds, and each has its preferences.

I'm afraid my take is probably too one-dimensional because it seems to me that most of us are trying to figure out how to get something published, so when I read stuff I'm likely to be thinking of it as it slides across the agent's desk, is it likely to go in this pile or that?

The other thing I see so much of is self-indulgence and S.I. is so difficult to deal with, for the writer and for me when I comment on someone’s work. I know the writer's difficulty from my own proclivities and tendencies, but (like so much of this stuff) it's much easier to see in others. Please note I'm not accusing anyone of anything, and what comes out seeming to me to be self-indulgence probably starts out as the writer's strong emotional attachment to the material and maybe a sense of "this is how I think I should be writing" or "this is what good writing is like, the Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward Angel and not the Tom Wolfe of Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby."

And then there's the late-20th Century American Dictum: Do what feels good. (To which the response might be, Fine, go ahead and overdose and we'll be rid of you.)

Because I am so ancient, hopelessly so, I can't get myself away from the old ways. Back in 1937 the English novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) published in New Statesman and Nation a review of Somerset Maugham's "Theatre." I liked it when I read it when it first came out, so I've always saved it. (Just kidding, I’m not *that* old). She wrote in part:

"Not a phrase is there for its own sake; transparency to meaning is the object, not colour; not a phrase obtrudes [obtrude – become noticeable in an unwelcome or intrusive way] romantic complexity. For its activity, Mr. Maugham's style is stripped: there is no atmosphere, no American cuteness, no attempted poetry: it is professional writing, without a touch of amateur privilege -- and this is pretty rare now."

And little way on she writes:

"It might not be well to make Mr. Maugham a model, but he should set a precept: he might correct our tendencies to maunder, to exhibit or to denounce. With first-rate ability, but without high-class fuss, he drops a plumb-line into the subject. Here is a personality so positive, so pickled in experience it attracted, that it can use style impersonally. The professional has not time for stunts."

I love that line, and I think that generally if the writer is trying to drop a plumb-line right into the subject, he won't go far wrong.

I see the same commitment to subject in “The Dubliners” by James Joyce, and the opening of Madame Bovary, describing young MISTER Bovary coming into the classroom is (even in translation) for me about as perfect as writing gets.

So if somebody posts something up here that is literary in genre and very well written, I don't think I'd be complaining that there's no car chase and where's the robot? (But, let's face it, the long middle portion of "The Dead" isn't the most exciting thing to read, but to get to that ending I would wade through almost anything.)

My so-called writing life, part 1

2008-09-09T08:01:00.000-07:00

I'm a big fan of Dwight Swain's book, “Techniques of the Selling Writer”.

Here’s why.

It’s been six months or so since I discovered it and read it. Since then a lot of the stuff that’s in it feels like it has settled into my “writing mind” and as a result I feel like I have more technique available.

What is “technique” to a writer?

I think the main one and maybe the most important, yes definitely the most important, is how the writer is able to think about what he/she is working on. I remember years and years ago, during what I laughingly refer to as my Hollywood Period, it occurred to me that in order to write well, a person has to be able to think well. Now I’ve altered that definition a little. Now it seems to me that equally important is being able to think about a work in process in a variety of ways, rather than being stuck with just one way.

In the past much more so than at present, when I got an idea for a scene or vignette or story, my mind kind of locked into it; I saw it a certain way and that was the way I saw it and that was pretty much it. I could revise and line-edit and copy edit on it of course, but I felt like I was stuck with the fundamentals of what my “writing mind” was insisting on what the piece be like. The piece dictated to me, rather than the other way round.

The other major problem I felt like I was having was that I didn’t generally have ideas for stories, much less novels. I had ideas for a certain character in a certain setting. I could write those and they would come out pretty good, more often than not. But I really didn’t have an idea how to string them together into a story. And “stringing them together” seemed to me like the process that was involved, the way one strings pearls (hopefully pearls and not pearl-turd-pearl-turd) into a necklace. But it didn’t work that way. I didn’t really know quite how one was supposed to go about doing it, and I couldn’t get myself to do it and make it come out the way I wanted it to. So I couldn’t do it at all. I knew there was something I didn’t know, but I didn’t know what it was.

So for me as a writer increased technique means a looser, freer approach to whatever I happen to be trying to write at the moment.

A looser, freer approach to what, exactly? To the consideration of the component parts of the story, the characters, the rise and fall of dramatic action, the intensity of experience, the pace (the “step on the gas” or “take the foot off and maybe tap the brakes”), lengthen this, shorten that, maybe he should be a hare-lipped street juggler rather than a cartoonist at a big city newspaper, as in widely varying considerations.

But more important that any of these, a looser approach to making a story. Actually, an understanding of what “story” is and how to make one.

What anyone can know is limited by one’s ability to speak about it (think about it). I knew the same vocabulary everyone knows surrounding stories. This is mainly the vocabulary we learn in literature classes. One of the things I’ve noticed in recent months is the difference in approach between reading and writing, the difference between literature and creative writing. It’s like the difference between living in a house and building a house. Everyone knows how to live in a house, what it looks like in each room and so on, and mostly because houses are expressly designed to be convenient for living. If you queried a group of people, I’m sure that when it comes to living in a house, they would all rate themselves as experts. And if you can read and enjoy novels and afford a word processor, you can write a novel, right? If you love to read and enjoy it hugely, you consider yourself an expert reader.

But if the assignment is to design and build a house that is different than any house you’ve ever been in or seen, but to make it definitely another house (not a chicken coop), habitable and beautiful, or at least good-looking, and easy to live in, and maybe even better than all the other houses, now you need to learn about stuff that’s not at all necessary in order to live in a house, any house. I could push the analogy further, but I think you get the idea. And I think the analogy fits in a number of ways. For example for both houses and novels, a lot of the questions and problems are both practical and aesthetic, there’s the plumbing and the electrical and then there’s the gorgeous elevation (how it looks, all Mid-Century Modern, sitting on the hill above the lake) and inside there’s the scroll-work hiding the plumbing and electrical. It’s the age-old tradeoff between what works well and what looks good.

Now it’s possible for quite gifted, insightful and talented people, people who are one hell of a lot smarter than I am, to know everything they need to know about designing and building houses just from having the experience of living in a few houses and looking at a bunch of others. But I’m not one of them.

I’ve known for a long time I didn’t have a good idea of how to go about making stories, and naturally I looked around for information on the subject. There’s a lot of it out there. The “How to” section of my three ring binder has pages titled “The Fundamentals of Story Structure – My Basic Theories and Methodology” by Doran William Cannon. What a bunch of blather. Then “Plotting by Lary Crews.” This is a listing and précis of “20 master plots” from author Ronald Tobias. It says it will show you how to create a good plot, but it doesn’t. “The Rules of Writing” cites Mark Twain’s sarcastic twenty rules and then recommends one read Strunk, which I had pretty much committed to memory long before. “Secrets of the World’s Best Selling Writer” by Earle Stanley Gardner is an entire book, and happened to be in the public library. It worked for him, I’m sure. But he had the same three main characters over and over, the detective, his sidekick and Della Street, the beautiful flirtatious secretary. So his formulas didn’t really apply to my vague ramblings. It was how he did it, but it wasn’t about how anyone could do it.

So finally, out of frustration, I look an event a lawyer friend told me about, and using as a pattern James Joyce’s story “Three Gallants” in “The Dubliners,” I grafted my circumstances onto his structure. It was a way to do it. Won contests, sold it twice. Worked out to maybe 8¢ an hour. Not very efficient, production-wise. And I hadn’t really learned much of anything except how to graft a catchy idea onto a James Joyce structure. I learned some things from the experience, but not what I wanted to learn. I didn’t learn how to lay my own foundation, how to run the conduits for electrical and the pipes for water.

Then I stumbled across a book called “On Film-Making” by Alexander Mackendrick. Actually, I didn’t stumble across it at all. There are no accidents, there are only inclinations and predispositions. His chapter “What is story?” starts on page 9. I highlighted this passage: “It is rather a tension in the imagination of the audience that leads to feelings of curiosity, suspense and apprehension (for example the audience being torn between contradictory elements of a character).” He’s goes on to say that the effect is almost always anticipation mingled with uncertainty. I thought that was pretty good stuff. That’s what I wanted to do, write a novel that mingled anticipation with uncertainty, and then provided a surprise that was at the same time inevitable.

The book is basically the course that Mackendrick taught to would-be film directors at CalArts. And of course there are a great many parallels between directing a film and making a novel.

So I’d read a lot of stuff from a lot of different experts when I came across Dwight Swain’s book. And because the title is so prosaic and, for someone with even just a tiny increment of literary pretension, so, somehow, distasteful, like touching iron to your tongue — so I had my doubts.

When I started reading Swain’s book, the most elementary and beginning thing caught me off guard. I’d just never considered that what I was trying to do when I wrote was generate a particular feeling in the reader. Nothing I’d ever read had pointed that out, so I didn’t know it.

Oh, but not entirely. When I wrote humor, I knew exactly what feeling I was trying to create, and I knew I could sometimes succeed. For a couple years I owned and operated a weekly newspaper in a small town in the West. From the beginning I wrote a column each week, but not the usual publisher’s self-important congratulatory and civic-flattering blather. I wanted to entertain, so I wrote stuff that I thought was amusing. I knew I got something right when the typesetter, Delores, over on the other side of the newsroom, typing my copy into the Compugraphic, would laugh out loud. The other thing about it was the discipline: One column every week, two or three hours on Thursday afternoon to write it, no matter how I felt, no matter money worries, no matter if I had a cold and a stuffed-up head, no matter anything. Crank out the copy.

I think James Thurber said learning to write was about the application of the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Someone else of that era, maybe A.J. Liebling, advised writing a million words.

When I got up over what I estimated to be the million word mark, I found I did have a certain facility.

I wrote a long article about a notorious local scam-artist and sent it in to the features editor at the daily newspaper. He called me up, wanted to run it, but offered no payment, so I turned him down with a polite no thanks. Then he asked, “How’d you learn to write like that?” The question struck me, and still strikes me, as the dumbest question in the world. This was a guy who had the word “editor” printed on his business card. What I felt like saying was how the hell do you think I learned you idiot? How does *anyone* learn? But I said something like golly, gee, I dunno and said goodbye.

I was writing commercial and industrial kinds of things first for one company, then another. But when it came to fiction, I didn’t know how to think. Stupid, yes, I know. But not unusual for me, for I’ve always been stupid in many ways.

But I could write, oh, yeah. Four of us wrote these marketing campaigns for television stations. They were 24-to 36-month promotional juggernauts covering all media—print (newspaper, TV Guide), billboards, radio and of course TV. We did them for stations in all parts of the country, and one of the last I worked on was for a Las Vegas television station. The creative teams was Ed, who owned the business and was the masterful marketer who talked the television stations into buying these “Total Image Concepts;” there was Tommy Two Tone, the art director, Captain Buzzword who wrote the musical intros and bumpers, and me, Billy Blue Sky. We wrote a bunch of these and it all sounds like a lot more fun than it actually was at the time. After the Las Vegas TV station produced the spots, they sent us some of the stuff they’d done. We put a tape in the VCR and there was Robert Goulet with that voice of his, looking into the camera, reading one of my spots, just the way I wrote it, word-for-word off the TelePrompter. What a trip it was for me, because he read it with exactly the intonation I heard in my head when I wrote it. That was the validation.

The first thing I realized about “feeling” when I read Swain and found out what a ground-level fundamental that was, was I understood how I imposed my own personal pattern of feeling expression on all my characters. My own emotional temperature is this: A while back a big fat guy slipped on a wet patch at the pool, fell down and couldn’t get up. A concerned group of five or six rushed to his aid, all jabbering at once, all reacting to him and the situation. I looked over, got up, walked over to the red phone which is there for that purpose, and dialed 911 (the all-purpose emergency number in the U.S.).

• Typical male head-case.
• Highly inappropriate to have all characters in novel display this particular reactive pattern.
• The characters need to be “not me” in that particular respect. And of course in many others, as well.

So if you happen to be a gushy, highly reactive female (an “emo” as today’s teenagers say), you need to take a look at who you are and think about which of your characters are not you and how they react emotionally that’s different from the way you react. Or to put that another way, you need to get outside your characters. And of course at the same time you need to be totally inside your characters, seeing the world they inhabit, the fiction world, through their own eyes.

I found all of Swain’s information to be helpful. Particularly so because I had a lot of partial manuscripts laying around that were good examples of stuff that needed fixing in so many respects, so as I read I found myself saying things like, “Oh, so that’s what wrong with that.”

An analogy to a writer without enough technique might be a composer who can’t figure out how to write a piece at a faster or slower tempo, or make it louder or softer.

In fiction, we don’t have the option of faster or slower. Well, actually we do, though you might not think so at first. Faster is when you come to the transitions and the glossing-over parts, like “Three hours later…” and you use very few words. Slower is when the tension is at a high pitch. The higher the pitch, the more words, the slower the pace. For an example take a look at “Audiobook: the climax.” Gordo is about to blow a hole in Joe’s chest, and Joe’s mind goes all the way out to the highway and into a passing car where he watches them light cigarettes and listen to the radio. And the reader goes along with it because it’s different from “his life passed before his eyes” and a hell of a lot more plausible as the description of what happens to the mind when it thinks it is about to be extinguished.

As for louder or softer, we’re stuck there, too. But there is a sort of louder or softer we can imply by using the long-shot and the close-up. First the long-shot, then the close-up, which is the traditional sequence: “Hours later after a long, sweaty climb, they reached a ridge. Looking down, the city of Rome lay before them, a sprawling jumble of buildings and streets rising and falling across seven hills.” Then the close-up: “She turned to find him looking down at her. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead, his mouth wore that little grin she had come to love, his eyes were dancing. She reached up and brushed a lock of curls back from his forehead. “We’ve made it,” she said.” It’s really simple when you think about it. The only real trick is knowing that the technique is there and available. Then just as a long time ago you absorbed the literary sense of “setting” into your autonomic nervous system and it became part of you, you will absorb long-shot, medium-shot and close-up, and they will become a natural and comfortable part of your writing vocabulary. What began as a manipulative trick will be integrated into simply how you write.

Good writing. Okay, let’s attempt a definition and see how it works:

The most basic of fundamentals is 1) the creation of a “story world,” the universe in which the story takes place, and 2) the author’s ability to spread the magic dust that leads a reader into and along a of line of narration in this world.

It’s hard for me to pin it down further than that. As to number 1, in my own experience I relate it back to the opinions of my teachers in elementary school. “He’s a dreamer,” they said, “he’s always day-dreaming.” But perhaps a bit more than day-dreaming. At one point, when I was in the third grade (about age 8 in the U.S.), the teacher would speak to me and I wouldn’t answer I was so out of it. Thinking that perhaps I was deaf, they had my hearing tested. Of course, it wasn’t my hearing at all. It was my mind that wanted to escape into a world that was more rewarding.

In adults we attribute stuff like this to “absent-mindedness” and being “distracted.” The stereotype is the absent-minded professor. For me it has reached significant proportions. There’s a story I sometimes tell on myself when I’ve been caught day-dreaming and I need to excuse it as being really a rather mild faux pas. Once when I was a “creative director,” sitting in my office writing something, the phone rang. I picked it up and a woman started talking to me about something that made no sense. I listened for five or ten seconds, then I interrupted her: “Wait a second, excuse me, who is this?” She told me here name. It didn’t register. “Who are you?” She was half-exasperated, half-laughing at me. It took another fifteen or twenty seconds for that other part of my mind to return, sort of like a hard-drive spinning up to speed. Then I realized it was a client, a significant client, whom I talked to on the phone several times a week.

One can think about this either as a propensity to day-dream (a problem) or as the ability to concentrate to the exclusion of all else (a possible advantage).

Whichever, I don’t think it’s special or unique.

If you are reading this, then you are probably a writer, and if you are a person who writes, you probably are somewhat like me in this “dreamer” category. We don’t want to be writers because we were voted Most Popular and never had time to go to the library.

I have for a long time considered myself an absolutely normal and typical specimen of my type. On all physiological and biological tests throughout my life, the results put me right in the middle of the probability distribution. And I think one of the fundamental things for a writer of fiction to believe is that what’s true for me is true for you. It seems to me to be pretty much a starting point for any attempt to write fiction that gets the idea across to another of the species.

Once, a long time a go, a very very long time ago when one did such things, Lee had come back from Tangiers with a small sampling of LSD. He split it into three doses, and Lee, Hub and I took it with orange juice, which was at the time the preferred method, and set off to the Seattle World’s Fair on the other side of town (driving, of course).

A few hours later the three of us, put our heads together, trying to figure out which one of us was going to have to go into a restaurant, ask the cashier for change and then operate the cigarette vending machine.

“Oh, shit, this is going to be really hard.”

“What are you seeing? Are you seeing a lot of strange stuff?”

“Yeah. For Chrissake, everything keeps bending and the colors all run together.”

“Okay, listen. When you get in there, DON’T LOOK at the front of the vending machine. Sometimes they have these colored lights and just DON’T LOOK.”

“How will I know which lever to pull? What kind to we want?”

“It doesn’t matter. Pull any lever. It’s not important, it doesn’t matter what kind, we’ll smoke anything.”

“But how about getting change? Oh, shit, this is going to be really hard. What is this? Is this a dollar? Is it a five?”

“It’s a five. Just keep it in your hand. Can you say change for the cigarette machine, please? Try it, go ahead.”

(Giggling) “Change for the cigarette machine, please.”

“Yeah, that’s good. Now don’t look at the guy’s face and don’t laugh. Can you say it without laughing?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“Well, it probably doesn’t matter. Just try not to forget why you’re in there. Try not to look at the guy’s face and then forget what you’re doing and stand there laughing.”

(Putting them on) “Why am I going in there again?”

(All three break up in laughter)

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to do this. Do we really need cigarettes? Are you sure you haven’t got any? Look in your pockets.”

“No, we’ve done that already. We did it three times. We haven’t got any and we need to buy some.”

“Why can’t we just bum them from people?”

“No, we need to have our own. You were going to go up to that cop and ask him for a cigarette.”

“That could have been a mistake.”

“Yeah, because you’d ask him for a cigarette and then stand there laughing.”

(Laughing) “That could have been a mistake.”

(All three break up in laughter.)

“So we’ve got to buy cigarettes.”

“How are we going to do this again?”

(All three break up in laughter.)

Politically correct accounts sometimes leave out how much fun drugs were. After all, people didn’t take them in order to be bored and listless.

Later, I remember we were standing in line to get into something, maybe to go to the top of the Space Needle, or “Space Noodle” as one of us insisted on calling it. There were two lines, I don’t remember why, probably two elevators. I went down the line of faces opposite, looking closely at each one with what felt like X-ray vision. It was all there, in each face, everything each person was, especially what each person wanted, their hopes and longings. I felt a deep conviction that what I was seeing was true and valid, an authentic perception of the reality behind the mask of every face I looked at. Trust that feeling, I said to myself. When all this is over, tomorrow, remember this and trust that feeling.

Of course it was all a drug-induced hallucination. Everything I thought about each face was what we would call years later in another context a stone-cold projection of what I thought of myself.

And yet who is to say that fitting a drug-induced insight into a sturdy left-brain rationale makes any more sense than any other way one might consider it?

And so the hall of mirrors opens out before us, the many ways the human mind can manipulate its so-called perception of reality. And I am reminded of something O.D. Hale would say at such times in a discussion of this nature, putting a capper on the conversation. Something he said (he’s dead now) which was probably a quote from something he read (it sounds kind of like Henry Miller): How clever we are, how aptly we word things.

Oh, excuse me. Where was I? Who are you again?

(Laughing)

Oh, yes, me, perfectly normal in all respects, particularly in the sense that twisted, warped, bent and bizarro is normal.

Ahem. Excuse, please. To resume.

As to point 2, the spreading of the dust of magic, well, that will have to wait for another time.

For now this is certainly enough, and probably too much.

spine

2008-09-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

Found this on the web. I thought it was interesting and helpful. Liked his caution about "So then she decides to..."

Stephen Gallagher wrote:

It comes up frequently in the "how-to" books and it's a favourite piece of jargon with the non-writing, note-giving executive. But what exactly is a story's "spine"?

The spine is the essential information that links in a logical sequence to deliver you to an ending that, if the logic is hard enough, will seem inevitable even if it comes as a surprise. Here's a test for a story spine; link every scene with a phrase like "So then they have to..." or "But they can't because..."

Beware of phrases like "So then she decides to..." It should be, "So then she has no choice but to..." The Americans call these "beats" - they're the significant pieces of new information, the points on which the story turns, and you should have a steady progression of them. I hated the term the first time I heard it, but it's grown on me; not least because it characterises the narrative process as a steady march forward with an unforgiving sense of drive. We're not allowed to be as random in stories as we can be in life. Coincidences are OK only if they work against your characters, never for them. Stories are machines; everything works with everything else but all you see from the outside is the overall motion.

Outside the spine, everything else takes the form of enhancement or qualification. In prose, you want to describe a locale? Look at the spine and find the point where it can be included as a relevant aside. Do it then and not before. In a script, you want a character to talk about his childhood? Then identify a point where he's going to have some clear reason to do it. The temptation is always to shove everything up front, like making your audience go through the rulebook and notes before being allowed to enter the game. They should be into the game before they even realise it, and fed essential information only at the moment when it's needed. A good narrative technique involves feeding the information for one purpose only to build on it later for another.

It's good practice to know your ending in advance. This means knowing where you're going, what point you ultimately plan to make, before you start. Every story has a point; not necessarily a message, but a point. How to define the point? Put simplistically, somebody learns something they didn't expect to learn.

Here's the source: http://www.stephengallagher.com/spine.htm

Transparency part 1

2008-09-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

I read somewhere something that a reviewer had written back in 1939 I think it was about Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” and she talked about the transparency of the prose.

Then I was reading just today a book by Robert Henri (1865-1929) called “The Art Spirit.” He wrote:

“Look at this drawing by Rembrandt. [Note: there are no illustrations in the book.] Your mind is at once engaged by the life of the person represented. The beauty of the lines of the drawing rest in the fact that you do not realize them as lines, but are only conscious of what they state of the living person.”

To me that was what the other writer mean by transparency. No awareness at all of words, phrases, sentence, but only the existence in the mind of the reader what was taking place on the page.