Lisa asked this week if I would blog about my financial (read: survival) strategy of building multiple income streams. Well, okay, but I think it’s going to have to be a series!
The principle we’re talking about is like the financial strategy of a balanced portfolio. A lot of people derive income from just their job, and so it’s devastating if anything happens to that job – as we’ve seen all over the country and for so many people we know since the financial crash four years ago. But there are other financial philosophies that would caution strongly against having income from just one source (and to cultivate as many sources of passive income, like investments and royalties, as possible.) And the very interesting thing about consciously cultivating multiple income streams is that these don’t have to be massive rivers of cash to support you. Every stream is meaningful, and every stream will probably wax and wane. If you’re invested in the stock market, you know sometimes a stock is up, and sometimes it’s down. But if you spread your investments over a wide range of KINDS of stocks, or sectors, and also have some of your savings in cash, and some in bonds, then it doesn’t matter so much if one sector is down, because your other sectors will cover the loss until that troublesome sector picks up again.
This works with this concept of income streams, too.
This week I’m going to talk a little about one of my income streams – the teaching, since I’m coming up on what may be my favorite teaching gig, the West Texas Writers Academy, at Texas A&M University.
This was not something I ever expected to be doing. But when sold my first novel and got involved in the conference circuit, I saw an opportunity to create an income stream that would be a no-brainer and actual fun for me.
The occasional teaching gigs I have, which are a very welcome income stream, I get because of my blog and because I go to conferences.
I’ve said here before that I started blogging on craft because I was out of things to say about myself. Well, it’s true. But I also was being asked to teach screenwriting workshops at novel writing conferences, and I would always start those workshops like this:
“Who here lives in LA?” (Almost never any hands up).
“Who plans to move to L.A.?” (No hands here, either).
“Then you’re not going to be a screenwriter. So here’s how you can use screenwriting tricks to write better novels, which is way more satisfying and more likely to earn you money anyway.”
It may sound harsh, but I think it’s despicable how many struggling screenwriters take money for teaching workshops on screenwriting and somehow fail to mention what the actual requirements of the job are. Selling false hope is a crime. (Of course, if there are people in the workshop under 30 or so, who say they want to be screenwriters, I tell them to move to L.A. if they’re serious. Under 30 you still have a chance to catch that train.)
Well, people were responding so enthusiastically to the techniques I was teaching that I started blogging about what I was teaching, and teaching about what I was blogging, and pretty soon so many groups were asking me to teach workshops that I could never possibly do it and do all of my fiction writing, too, so I started asking for a lot more money for the workshops and choosing only places I really wanted to go.
And that craft blogging and occasional workshop turned into a really nice double income stream when I wrote my Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbook and put it out as an e book, and then wrote another and put that one up…. that’s now a very solid passive income stream (the very best kind, because it means the money flows in without me doing a thing) that I can count on every month, and I know I can always do another and create another income stream…
And more than that, it all turned into a kind of calling.
The thing is, I love teaching because it’s – well, performance. These days I spend most of every day chained to a desk, and I do it because that’s how writing gets done, but it’s very hard for me to sit still and to be alone for such a large chunk of every day. I spent OH so many years on the boards, or the street, elevators, balconies, wherever, all the world’s a stage… and I still do the performance thing a couple times a year thanks to my friend, bestselling author/singer/goddess Heather Graham, and her gypsy theater troupe, the Slush Pile Players. Yes, and there’s the occasional drunken karaoke. I like to dress up, and sing and dance and have no boundaries with my fellow players. Steve asked last week about our reincarnational hangovers – well, the traveling theater troupe is surely one of mine. When I die you can bury me in unconsecrated ground with the other prostitutes-slash-actors, thank you very much; at least I’ll know I’ll be spending eternity having wild fun with wildly interesting people.
And I think I bring something a little different to the workshop experience for a couple of reasons. First, I’ve taught dance, which is a very visceral and immediate thing to do. And more than that, it’s so INTIMATE. You need to figure out exactly what a dancer’s issue is and correct it on the spot (usually with a lot of touching) so they can do better on the next run-through, or maybe even break through to excellence. Well, that applies to writers, too – alas, without the touching. But one thing I’m really good at from dance is knowing how intimate the process is, and not being afraid to be intimate about it, so the dancer (or writer) isn’t afraid to be intimate, too. Otherwise – how are we ever going to engage our readers’ emotions, desires, and soul?
And then of course there were all those years of spitballing in film development meetings. When my first script sold, my partner and I had about a million meetings in the first two months, but one of the first was with a couple of young hotshot producers who are now film industry moguls, and in that breakfast (I think) meeting, one of them was prodding me to rewrite the script in front of him and I said, naively, that I would have to go home and think about it, and he said, “What kind of bullshit is that? Tell me NOW. I want to SEE you think.”
Total, immediate awakening to what my actual job as a screenwriter was, which was to be creative RIGHT NOW, in front of whoever was asking me. And be entertaining about it, too, by the way.
Well, so, from dance and from screenwriting, and from theatrical directing too, for sure, I’m very good at identifying the immediate creative problem and solving it right there. I can do it pretty much on command. Which makes me a good teacher. I LOVE to solve story problems. Please don’t ask me to play charades or Scrabble or chess, but if there’s a story problem? I’m your girl. Even if I’m asleep, the challenge will inevitably wake me up. I’m not unusual in that at all, that’s how creative people are wired.
But I never expected to be doing the teaching along with writing. In fact I resisted anything that resembled teaching for a very long time because my mother, the teacher, was always doing that really annoying thing that parents do with their creative offspring: “You know, you could always fall back on…”
(Personally I think I’m a professional writer because I refused to consider a fallback position.)
But it turns out that teaching a workshop maybe once every other month, and writing the Screenwriting Tricks workbooks one blog at a time, has been not just a practical supplement to my fiction writing income, but sort of lifesaving, psychologically speaking, because I’ve realized I NEED that interaction with creative people over creative ideas. I need to be able to move around a big space and gesticulate wildly and joke with a room full of people once in a while to break the monotony of hunching over a computer.
Teaching opportunities abound for professional writers, and I’ve discovered they don’t have to take up a lot of time. They’re also a great way to have someone else subsidize my rather alarming and terribly expensive travel habit. One huge upside of the author life is that you get to meet and befriend people from all over the country. One huge downside is that your friends are all over the country and you never get to see them except at conferences. Except now I can take a teaching gig nearby and see people I want to see. Or even go someplace fabulous, like, well, the Gold Coast of Australia, where I’m doing a Screenwriting Tricks workshop in August.
It’s a perfect income stream for me because of all of the above and because of its infinite flexibility; I can do it just as much as is fun for me and that works into my regular writing schedule. And it’s also automatic promotion for me as an author; there’s always a big book signing attached to these workshops, so I’m selling books and building my readership, too. But now people pay ME to travel and promote myself instead of me shelling out for it, a very good deal.
I don’t need my teaching to pay the mortgage, but it pays for a lot more than I ever expected it to.
So the financial lesson here is – be alert for opportunities to turn what you are doing anyway and love to do into an income stream. It doesn’t have to be teaching! There are so many writing-related services that could turn into an income stream for you: designing book covers, formatting e books, social media assistance to the overbooked… the list is really endless.
The question is, what are you good at and how can you make it pay?
So, do you practice multiple income streams, in investing, saving, writing, or whatever? Or is this a new concept that might work for you financially? How ARE people making ends meet in this most definitely improving, but still precarious economy?
And most importantly – do you EXPECT to be paid for doing the things you love, if you are doing them well? Or have you bought into the idea that artists must starve and struggle?
Today I’m going to use my Murderati post to make a mass call for opinions! Help!
I’m currently working on a novel set in Ireland. I’d like to give the reader an idea of the Irish accent without confusing them.
Now, here’s the thing. I know most books on writing say NOT to actually write in a character’s slang or accents (or to do so very sparingly). And when I’m teaching dialogue, this is the guideline I suggest budding writers follow. But now I’m going against that advice and actually writing the accent. So I need your help 🙂
Below is an excerpt from chapter 3 of Grounded Spirits, my next Pippa Dee novel, and I’m keen to get your thoughts. I have flagged the main pronunciation difference in the actual book (as it’s written below) and am wondering if this is enough. I should also say it’s a young adult novel so it needs to be clear for younger readers, too. This is the main character’s first encounter with an Irish person – an Irish woman in her 50s who works at the hotel where she’s staying.
Suddenly Fiona felt a warm breath near her ear. She jumped, letting out a little yelp, and then spun around to face the breath’s source. No ghost, just the waitress. In stealth mode, obviously.
“So you’ve seen her, den,” the waitress said.
Fiona noticed her thick Irish accent, including the “d” instead of a “th”—“den” instead of “then”.
“’Tis one of our resident ghosts, so dey say,” the woman continued.
“A ghost?” But not the one Fiona had seen yesterday … if it had even been a ghost, of course.
“Dey had a scientist in and all. See de face … doesn’t even exist in terms of paint. Like actual paint,” she whispered, leaning in toward the painting with Fiona. “According to de expert, ’tis de same pigment dere, as dere.” The woman pointed to the different shades that formed the face, careful not to touch the surface of the painting. “But ’tisn’t de same color, ’tis it?”
“No.” Fiona’s excitement was building. “A scientist examined it? Really?”
“So dey say. Wasn’t here myself.” She paused and looked up. “I’m Maggie, love.” She held out her hand.
“Hi. I’m Fiona.” Fiona shook Maggie’s hand. Maggie’s accent was a little difficult to follow, but Fiona had tuned into it enough that she could understand. And obviously every word that started with “th” was replaced with a “d” sound.
“Fiona…” Maggie smiled at her. “Dat’s a grand Irish name. Do you have Irish folk in yer family, den?”
“Yes, three generations ago.”
Maggie nodded, and then they both stared silently at the painting.
Maggie broke the silence. “Do you like ghost stories?”
“I’m getting a bit old for them now, really.” Fiona knew that she looked a lot younger than she was, and she hated it.
“Ah, yer never too old.”
“But you don’t actually believe in them, do you?” Fiona asked.
“Believe in ’em? I seen ’em wit me own eyes.”
“Ghosts?”
“Of course.” Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Dis hotel late at night…dere’s nothing else to explain what goes on. ’Tis ghosts all right. And more dan one, I’d say.”
First the boy in the window, and now this face? Could it really be that the Old Ground hotel was haunted? The building was old, ancient even, that’s for sure.
######
So, Rati, did you find the dialogue confusing or clear? Did the written-in accent add value or distract you? Finally, was it good that I pointed out the “th”/”d” thing twice or overkill? I’m looking forward to everyone’s thoughts.
By the way, this is a closeup of the face from the painting the characters are talking about. It’s a real painting! Spooky, huh?
Note: In case you’re interested, the Irish language (Gaelic) doesn’t have a “th” sound and this characteristic transferred when the Irish started speaking English— and it’s still part of their pronunciation today. My husband is Irish and “th” becomes either just “t” or “d” depending on the context. So it’s dis instead of this, dere instead of there, Tursday instead of Thursday, etc.
When I saw this photo of an Amstrad PCW in Zoë’s recent post about her return to her writing roots . . .
. . . a huge smile spread across my face, because it immediately made me nostalgic for the days in which I was writing on my own dinosaur of a word processing machine. That dinosaur was a Zenith Z-161 portable computer, and it looked like this:
I use the word “portable” because that’s how it was described in all the brochures, but this thing was about as portable as an anvil in a suitcase. Lugging it up a flight of stairs was more exerting than any pulmonary stress test your doctor could possibly give you.
But I loved it.
Not for its looks (though I did find it rather handsome), but for its functionality, which was damn near as limited as that of a toaster. With its 9-inch, monochrome screen and pathetic 256K of memory, there was one thing, and one thing only, I could do on my Z-161: write. Type on the keyboard, fill the screen with words, and save those words on a big, black floppy disk. Wanna play games? Forget about it. Surf the web? There was no web back then. Play music? Get serious.
It was the perfect machine for an aspiring author, because it made what aspiring authors do best — avoid the actual work of becoming a published writer — as boring an undertaking as possible. If you turned the Z-161 on and didn’t write, all it would do in return was stare back at you, little yellow cursor soundlessly blinking against a solid black CRT screen.
I wrote most of my first two novels on my Z-161 at home, in the evenings and on the weekends. I was living with the (now ex-) wife, our two daughters and my step-son in a small two bedroom apartment in Encino at the time, and one corner of the kids’ bedroom was the best I could do for a private workspace.
After a while, as you might imagine, family distractions grew to the extent that I begged my manager — I was working full-time as a computer technician in those days — to let me write in our El Segundo office a few nights every week. He agreed, and so I began to write, at least part of the time, alone in an empty office building with just the book in my head and an IBM desktop PC that was every bit as singular of purpose as my Z-161.
I can’t say the writing always came easy on those two machines — but I can say it always got done.
I won’t go into all the sources of distraction that now come with personal computers — games, email, online social networks, movies and music, instant messaging, etc. — because anyone reading this blog already knows what they are and how difficult they make it for writers today to get anything done. But they bear mentioning here only to make the point that I don’t think it’s a coincidence my rate of output has never been better than it was when I was writing on machines that offered me no entertaining excuses whatsoever not to write.
My wife Tessa speaks Spanish fluently, and when I say “fluently,” I mean she regularly draws double-takes from native Spanish speakers when she uses the language at length. They can’t believe their eyes or ears. But Tessa didn’t learn Spanish from a book, in a classroom, or by listening to a series of lessons on CD. She initially learned it by using it, almost exclusively, for three weeks in El Salvador and one in Guatemala, in the early ’90s. In other words, she learned to speak and understand Spanish the way some people teach themselves to swim: by jumping into the deep end of the pool, where you either fight to stay afloat or drown.
This is called the immersion method of learning.
I believe there’s an immersion method of writing, as well, and that’s the method I was inadvertantly using (because I had no other choice, frankly) when I was doing all my writing on a Zenith Z-161 and an IBM desktop. But it wasn’t just the archaic computers I was using that made my immersion possible; the environments I was writing in were key, as well: a tiny little bedroom with a single window and no TV or radio, and a closed computer company office as silent and vacant as a tomb. In both cases, the only thing I ever had to keep me company was the book I was writing, and my only alternative to working on that book was twiddling my thumbs and whistling in the dark.
I chose to work on the books.
I can’t write on that old Zenith “portable” anymore. Though it’s still in my possession, it’s too slow and cumbersome for my purposes. And I no longer have access to that office down in El Segundo, nor that tiny, one-windowed bedroom out in Encino. What I can do, however, is simulate the state of immersion those machines and locations forced me to write in, once upon a time, by turning my desk away from the window in the home office I write in today, and pretend the laptop I write on at present has no internet connection and no installed software other than Microsoft Word. The idea is to get back to that time and place in which only two things existed for me in the whole world: my latest WIP and a device to write it on. If I can get there, I may not have much fun — but I bet you I’ll have a completed manuscript in a lot less time than it’s been taking me lately to crank one out.
Quickly, Sherman! To the Wayback Machine!
Questions for the Class: Writers, does the immersion method work for you? Or do you need sources of distraction swirling all around you to do your best work?
When trying to figure out how best to be entertaining with this Wildcard stint, I realized I couldn’t do better than to have a chat with Carmelo Pietro “Charlie” Stella, former mob knockaround, playwright, author of seven crime novels—his eighth, Rough Riders, is due out this July—and numerous short stories, father of three, opera lover, dog lover, drummer, blues afficionado (with a special fondness for Cream), power lifter, avid Bills fan, and most importantly (in his book) devoted husband to the singularly astonishing Ann Marie Cucci-Stella. (Rumor has it he wrote his first novel to impress her.)
He’s one of the most generous and self-effacing guys I know, in or out of the writing racket, and one of the funniest to boot. More to the point, he’s also one of the most talented. (For more about Charlie, his books and his world—and trust me, you’re going to want more, lots more—check out his website or his blog)
Johnny Porno is one of those books that just turns your head around, a gem of a novel, rich in detail and color with some of the absolute best dialog you will ever read.
Don’t take it from me, read what the Washington Post had to say:
Stella is a kind of obscene Ring Lardner, finding a lean, rancid poetry in his characters’ vernacular, and rendering it with flawless precision and humor.
Or this from Robert Wade, writing in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
Combine equal parts Mario Puzo and Elmore Leonard, throw in a dash of George V. Higgins and Donald E. Westlake, and who do you get? Charlie Stella, that’s who.
Turns out Charlie’s life has taken an interesting turn of late. Let’s have him tell you about it.
David: So I hear you’re back in school, getting an MFA. Excuse me for a second if I indulge in a bit of fantasy concerning your thesis: Johnny Porno Goes to College. What inspired this return to academe and how’s it going?
Charlie: Originally, it was more a pragmatic decision because the job I’ve been doing on and off for 30 years now, word processing, has been effectively outsourced. My wife is a word processing supervisor and she also saw the writing on the wall. Three years ago she went to school nights while working full-time and earned her RN degree. Her reward has been to work 2 jobs now (12 days on, 2 days off). I felt if there was a job left that couldn’t be outsourced other than RN, which I could never do, it was teaching.
I would need a master’s degree wherever I taught (whether high school or college) and although I’d probably take an even greater cut in salary than outsourcing has cost word processors (and would probably have to move to wherever I could find work), at least it would be rewarding work.
A few years back I worked 7 days a week for nearly two years and was rewarded with paying an extra $26K in taxes for my efforts (and I’m sure Wall Street appreciated my contribution, those cocksuckers). Both jobs I used to work have since been outsourced. It took six months to find another word processing job with a law firm in Jersey last year and they’ve just gone through some layoffs.
The way I feel about it now, regarding the MFA program, it has been one of the rare smart moves I’ve made this life. I couldn’t enjoy the program more. I was a playwright before a crime novelist and had always been fascinated with relationships of all kinds. The program reading lists alone have been worth the coin I’m spending for the degree. I’m reading writers I never would have read (from sheer ignorance of not knowing who they were/what they wrote). My world wasn’t as big as it should’ve been and now it’s at least somewhat bigger.
The mentors provide not only their literary knowledge and skills, they are a source of the always important inspiration I often need to stay focused. I may never write something deemed worthy enough to be published in the literary field, but that’s not why I’m there. Nor is it a second career priority these days. I enjoy learning. It has been a wonderful experience; something I won’t regret whether I can find a teaching job or not. I only wish the program was longer than 4 semesters.
I go into my third semester this June and if all goes well, I’ll graduate next June, after which I will immediately apply for an MA in American literature because I know that what I’ve been reading this last year is but the tip of the iceberg. These days I enjoy reading as much as writing and that’s been a blessing.
My first question to you: Okay, so I’m plowing through your very cool website the other night and I find this new project of yours, The Art of Character: Mastering the Craft of Characterization for Fiction, Film and TV. What prompted this foray into writing about writing?
David: Ironically enough, given all you just said: teaching. I’ve been giving classes the past couple of years on a number of writing-related topics, and character was my first online course (through the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program).
Writing out the lectures gave me the initial raw material for a book, and I decided to expand on it. Turned out to be an amazing experience, similar to your MFA program. I had to read a variety of books I’d never read before, or had to re-read books I knew from the far too distant past, and analyze them and think about them in ways I’d never really done before.
Amazing how different the reading experience becomes now that you’re focused on the plumbing.
And I had to reverse engineer my own understanding of characterization, because I work pretty intuitively in my own fiction. I had to break down what I did naturally, without destroying my own work. I think I did okay.
And I didn’t want to write just another handbook on character. I wanted to write something that was written so readers would feel not just instructed but inspired. I took the style as seriously as I did for any of my novels, and the result has my editor at Penguin, Rebecca Hunt, really jazzed about the book. We’ll see how that turns out.
What books in particular that you’ve read in the MFA process have opened your eyes, or inspired you, or just knocked on the door of your imagination and demanded to be let in? Have any given you ideas for your own work?
Charlie: Pretty much the entire reading list, but those I found particularly interesting were new reads for me. Richard Bausch, Alice Munro, Mario Vargas Llosa, Frederick Busch and Jay McInerney. I’ve read several books beyond the requirements of these authors because their works just intrigued me no end.
Rereads of authors I’d already read (and will continue to read) include Andre Dubus, Flannery O’Connor, James Joyce and probably my favorite, Richard Yates. I’ll be doing my intensive critical essay on Yates this semester, covering a huge portion of his collective works.
Regarding my own thesis, I floundered back and forth a few times (short story collection, novel and back again) and “think” I’ve settled on a second person fictional memoir born of the McInerney novel (Bright Lights, Big City). Although Richard Bausch is someone I prefer to read more than the rest (because he’s still so new to me), McInerney’s second person style is permitting me to handle some personal stuff from my youth I couldn’t approach writing first or third person.
My mentors are trying their best to get me out of my comfort zone and that’s been a challenge. I loved writing for theatre and dialogue-driven crime novels, but the program has me trying new things in new ways and it’s been the challenge it should be.
As regards the reading … it seems we get a little bit more with each reread of something we might’ve skirted over in the past or read so long ago we forget the inherent brilliance. I’m a notorious re-reader of novels (crime and literary), as well as plays. I appreciate the works I do reread all the more with each new approach. I’m always amazed at how I receive a particular book I read as recently as two years ago, never mind something I read ten or more years ago. I’m doing a lot of catching up because of a misspent youth.
Question: This is a great line from your answer above. “Amazing how different the reading experience becomes now that you’re focused on the plumbing.” You have 15 years of private investigative work behind you, including some very high profile cases. Empirical experience vs. knowledge of craft. I suspect both are optimal, but going forward do you see yourself adjusting away from experience and favoring the plumbing (or vice versa)?
David: First, what a great reading list — and a thesis on Yates. I’m jealous. The thing I miss most about writing + teaching + day job is time to read.
As for PI work—actually, I may be going back to it for the money, my day job as I write and teach. Alexandra Sokoloff, who blogs here every other Friday, has managed to make an honest buck with teaching and writing and I admire the hell out of her. But I don’t write quickly — I’m ridiculously slow, actually — and so the two-books-a-year pace that the ebook revolution seems to require has left me in the dust. I’m doing okay with the teaching but I’m hoping with the character book I can parlay what I know into a bit more swag. For now it’s hit or miss — for which I blame my (lack of) marketing skills.
As for the question — my PI work gives me a perspective that’s similar to a jounalist’s. I see what really goes on in the legal system and it ain’t “the whole truth” the court congratulates itself on welcoming. There’s also the seamy underbelly side of life that gets nowhere near a courtroom, the crazy lover shakedowns and one drug dealer stealing another’s rainy day fund. But that’s the material end of things. As you say, plumbing is craft, and teaching has made me even more aware of it. I read with much more of an eye toward “How did she do that?” than “What just happened?”
Now that I’ve put my own words down on the page and had to muddle my way through things, I see how much I still have to learn, and your mentors are right: The way to learn it is to try new things — new ways to say things, new character approaches, new voice perspectives.
Which gets me back to what you wrote in your last response. What really hit me is your decision to use the second person in your memoir. In my character book I joke that authors of writing manuals will forever be grateful to Jay McInerney for providing an example of extended second person narrative. Lorrie Moore’s Self Help is another one, and brilliant.
But it’s tricky. I think of it as stealth first person. There still needs to be a distinct narrative perspective or it’s just a catalog of observations tethered to an otherwise nameless “you.” And that narrator, revealed through what he chooses to say and how he says it, is in almost every particular an “I.”
But there is a distancing, a sort of heightened self-awareness, as though the narrator isn’t confessing or confiding so much as observing himself. Is this why you decided to use it—to provide that observational remove?
Oh, and I think that taking yourself out of your comfort zone takes incredible courage. You’ve written some of the best dialog I’ve ever read—I recommend you to my students who are having problems getting their dialog to sound both natural and interesting. To think that you’re not going to rely on it for this fictional memoir intrigues the living hell out of me. Can you talk about that a little more, or will that gum up the process?
Charlie: Right now it is so in an infant stage it couldn’t possibly gum up anything. I had tried several times to deal with family relationships writing plays. I could only get so far before the internal exposure was too much to handle.
At this point, I continue to spew from birth forward. I have no idea how far I’ll get; if I can get further than X amount and if I can keep it interesting. It has been such a dramatic twist in the style I’m familiar/comfortable with that I think I shocked my mentor a bit. She’s encouraged me to keep at it and I haven’t been able not to keep at it. I keep going over it (endless rewrites) but that’s part of what makes it fun as well as frustrating. Had I not read Bright Lights, Big City I never would have attempted this new project. I’ve since ordered a few second person stories/novels, including Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and, you named it … Lorrie Moore’s Self Help.
My project may be a 3-part novella or 3-part novel or a trilogy. Who knows? At this point, it’s all about getting it down and not freezing from fear of: “Oh, shit, I can’t let them know that.” I’m writing in memoir form now but will switch to fictional memoir to protect people, but it isn’t what most people might suspect. It isn’t about the mundane mob stuff, although what leads to that will play a part down the road. Right now I’m working on very personal stuff (some of it dark, some of it comical) and it starts at a very young age. I’m having fun and hope to make some kind of sense of it over the next year.
The weird thing is my best paragraphs thus far (at least the ones my mentor noted), were those I wrote like a dervish, just gut spilling, stream of conscious spewing without thinking too hard about how it read (although I do read my work aloud at some point and revise accordingly).
Here’s two of her favorites bits thus far, after a teacher called home to give me up to my old man:
You swallow hard and take another few left-right open hand combinations before this life’s lesson is over, and although he manages not to draw blood, your head is swimming pretty good when you finally get banished to your room to study.
This second paragraph occurs after me and my friends run a portable basketball backboard into a wall in the basement of a Catholic school and the priest (Ryan) lines us up for some comeuppance:
It’s maximum torque this time; the smack so loud and hard even Ryan takes a step back as DaVitto spins like a top, does a complete 360 and corkscrews down to one knee. His face is welted red where the Giant’s paw has struck. DaVitto is clearly dazed and tearing, but he won’t cry either, no way. You’ve all got street creds to earn; crying isn’t something you can do, at least not in public.
I just realized there’s a common theme here—smacks.
My question for you: Besides being a successful novelist and having such an incredibly diverse background, you’re also one of the most articulate bloggers on the scene. Seriously, dude, even here in your questions and responses, you’re as adroit as it gets. I don’t have the time sometimes (and it’s wrong of me) to spend too much time on my weekly blog posts. Yours are incredible. You say you write slow so I’ll assume you’re a stone polisher (making it right as you go rather than spewing and polishing later). What about the blogging? Do you spend time putting something together?
David: Thanks for the attaboy. I have to confess something: I cheat. Some of my blogs are pieces I’ve cobbled together for other purposes, articles I’ve written or oral pieces I’ve performed. But some just spill out. It’s an odd mix. (I’ll leave you guessing which are which.)
Like you, sometimes my best work comes when I turn the censor off and just go. But yeah, I tend to work and rework stuff. I seldom just plow ahead, even though I know that’s the best and sometimes only way. I think by the time I exit the stage I’ll finally have some idea of how to be a reasonably good writer. But like we’ve both said here over and over — there’s so much to learn. It’s exciting and humbling and challenging and strange.
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Okay, now we promised ourselves we wouldn’t just stick to lit. So I’m going to alert our readers to the fact that we’re both football geeks, and want to share a little pigskin love here as we wind up. If they don’t share the groove, they can pop on down to the Q&A section and the Jukebox Hero of the Week.
Your team is the Bills, and they’ve stocked up big on defense in the offseason. The Patriots have reloaded (as always) and the Jets have Tebow, the Fish have a whole new everything as they so often do, with the same crap results. I know you’re concerned about Fitzpatrick and his picks, but I think he’s a leader and has a cannon, he just needed to get his first year at the helm behind him. I think your guys have a real shot. You, eternal pessimist, seem to think not. You envy my Niners with Hardball Harbaugh and Alex Smith. Now, let me tell you, envying Alex Smith is something that would get you skewered on a lot of comment threads. What makes him so special, and what do you see in Iron Jim Harbaugh that makes you jealous—and how do you honestly see the Bills doing this year?
Charlie: I’m VERY old school … guys like Lombardi, Parcells, Coughlin and now the Harbaughs (both John and Jim) are the guys I want to go to war with. Old school DEFENSE first, run the ball down their throats second and mix it up third. I HATE gimmicks … and although the NFL has gone the route of MLB and ALWAYS enhances scoring (although they haven’t figured out how to make the field shorter for the offense just yet), I still believe it’s team like the Moonachie Giants and San Francisco 49ers (their new and much improved look) that are the ones to admire.
I think back to Super Bowl XXV (I was there with my 2nd wife) and it was devastating to watch the coaching clinic Parcells put on for Marv Levy (a nice guy/lousy coach who four times failed to get rings for what I believe was a dynasty team). I can see that entire game in my head over and over. The Bills that year started out like rockem-sockem robots, mauling people with defense and a running game, then went crazy with the no-huddle (no-win-super-bowl) offense … especially after wiping out a no-defense Oakland Raider team in the conference championship. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened, because the Giants had to go to war with your 49ers to get to the dance and they came ready (with a brilliant and obvious game plan—Hostetler watched the play clock run down and shortened the game just enough in the end to keep us out of Norwood’s range); we came cocky … and they won.
This year my Bills will be a better team, but so long as we stick with a gimmick offense, we’ll be a shit team. Even with a fairly weak schedule, we’ll be lucky to go 8-8. Keeping Stevie Johnson, as talented as he is, was a mistake. There’s no room in coach Stella’s world for assholes who take stupid penalties because they need to see themselves on ESPN. There’s enough talent out there to find a kid who wants to make it and will play with his head outside his ass. Fitz has to learn how to throw as if there ARE runners on base; that wind-up motion of his will kill us again if somebody doesn’t shorten his delivery.
So long as we beat the Cheatriots and Moonachie Yets once each, I’ll be a happy man … and the Yets have invited one boatload of trouble with Tebow. I almost feel bad for Sanchez.
Now I reverse it on you, my friend. What’s wrong with Alex Smith? Did you not notice how far they went? Did you not notice how Hostetler and Phil Simms won rings behind great defenses and a solid running game? Come on, man! You’ve got a GREAT team up there. One I admire more than the Montana and Young teams (because they’re hard-nosed rockem-sockem bad boys). Tell me what’s wrong with just missing against a genuine super bowl winner? Are you spoiled, sir?
David: Are you nuts, of course I’m spoiled. I started rooting for the Niners as soon as I hit the west coast in the late 1970s, when the had two wins per season and Walsh was still at Stanford. When he came over to the Niners I thought: This could get interesting. I just didn’t realize five Super Bowls interesting.
But in maligning them—I could almost hear you whispering that dreaded phrase, “finesse team”—you forget how dominant their defenses were. Ronnie Lott and Fred Dean and Hacksaw Reynolds and Ken Norton and Charles Haley were crucial to their success.
And Walsh, who rose up through the Steeler and Bengal organizations, believed in the running game, especially the trapping game: They won that first NFC championship with a drive that everyone remembers for The Catch, but most of the yardage was gained on quick-hitting inside traps with Lenvil Elliott and Ricky Patton—not exactly household names. (BTW: both Harbaughs are fruit of the Walsh coaching tree.)
And I didn’t say I had anything against Alex Smith—I just know a lot of other people do. I happen to think they’re insane.
I’m a huge maniac for underdogs, and I always cheered for Steve Young when he was catching a whirlwind of crap from the locals for displacing Montana. Smith has that same mental toughness. Maybe it’s a Mormon thing.
But the guy he really reminds me of is Jim Plunkett, another number one QB pick everyone gave up on who did, um, not so shabby at the end of his career. Smith just doesn’t have the mechanics, because he didn’t have the coaching Montana and Young had. He’s getting it now from Harbaugh and his crew, and this offseason Smith has reportedly improved immensely.
They also got him some weapons—Randy Moss, Mario Manningham, this rookie out of Illinois: A.J. Jenkins. The real steal though was LaMichael James in the second round: he’s small but he’s mighty. Trust me, they’re going to have a lot more weapons this year, the offense is going to be much more unpredictable, but still with an in-the-trenches mentality.
What I also like about Harbaugh is his ability to forge a team, and his emphasis on character and intelligence as well as talent in draft picks. This isn’t just a hard-nosed team, it’s a smart team. Most importantly, it’s a team. But the schedule’s a lot tougher, injuries are always a possibility, and the NFC West isn’t quite the sleepwalk it was last year. So: We shall see, said the blind man.
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So, Murderateros: Have you made any mid-life career changes like Charlie’s? What prompted the move? How’s it going?
Has anyone else recently matriculated through academe—what was it like, what were the demands, the rewards? Was it worth it?
Wanna talk some football? Opera? Politics? (Don’t get him started.)
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Jukebox Hero of the Week: I handed the controls over to Charlie, who had this to say about his selection: “Every morning I send my wife an email: “Buon Giorno, Principessa!” It’s a line repeated several times from one of my favorite movies, la vita è bella. It’s the movie that provided the final link between us. Once I knew my wife cried over this movie, I knew she had soul and we were meant for each other … a very beautiful thing.”
So Green Lantern is gay. Or at least the Alan Scott version from Earth 2 is gay, not Hal Jordan or John Stewart. nd, judging by column inches expended on the internet in the last few days, some people still think, incredibly, that this is a big deal.
Especially One Million Moms. I’m sure you’ve heard of them. They’re a front organisation for the American Family Association which was set up by far right preacher Donald Wildmon, officially recognised by the Southern Poverty Law Centre as a hate group. They took to their Facebook page to protest and eventually had to close it down because of the torrent of comments against them. They claimed to be taking time off for ‘Vacational Bible Study’. Victory for Green Lantern!
I hope they spend a long time studying the Bible. It might teach them a few things. Homosexuality is one of the list of sins in the Old Testament book of Leveticus that also includes eating shellfish, wearing clothes made of mixed fibres, planting two different crops in the same field, cutting your hair, trimming your beard or getting a tattoo. Or my particular favourites, putting things in front of blind people so they fall over or calling deaf people names. Somehow, these have become acceptable (apart from the blind and deaf ones, of course) but they still get overexcited about homosexuality. There’s currently a photo doing the rounds on the internet of someone proudly displaying their tattoo of the verse from Leviticus calling homosexuality a sin, ignorant of the fact that next verse condemns tattoos as being just as sinful. And for the record, how many times does Jesus say homosexuality is a sin? Not one.
The main objection these people have against homosexuality is that it’s a lifestyle choice and a deliberate sin against God. I’m continually staggered that in the twenty first century, where I have more computing power in my mobile phone that was used to send a man to the moon and bring him back, that we still hear this argument. Homosexuality is as much a lifestyle choice as being lefthanded or having freckles is. I used to live in a shared house in London and a couple of the guys were gay. They were two of the bravest men I ever knew. They came from a very rough, working class housing estate in the north of England where any kind of deviation from the norm was brutally punished. Yet they were openly gay. Despite neither of them being physically impressive or able to handle themselves in a fight, they stood up to threats of violence, intimidation, bullies of every stripe. They fought for the right to be themselves. And they even won respect as a result.
I must admit, religious intolerance – of whatever stripe – is something of a bugbear of mine. David spoke recently (and very eloquently) about how traumatising a strict Catholic education could be. Linda, the other half of Tania Carver, had a similar experience at the hands of the nuns. I’ve had far right evangelical Christians trying to indoctrinate me at a very young and impressionable age. (They even claimed that having a sense of humour came from the devil.) So when Wildmon’s latest hate group stunt backfired, I was very pleased.
After all that please don’t get the impression I’m against religion as such. I’ve known a lot of very good, strong, positive people who are religious. And not just Christians. One of the most inspiring people I ever met was the former Governor at Huntercombe Young Offenders Institution where I used to be Writer in Residence. He was tolerant, kind, honest and used his Christian faith to affect positive changes in the boys lives. It didn’t always work but it often did and it was an honour to be part of his team. The prison chaplain was a great guy too. An ex-biker, he had no trouble inspiring the boys in his care. And there have been others too that I’ve know, decent men and women who follow their hearts and try to improve their part of the world. That’s why people like Wildmon make me even angrier.
I believe that people like that and those of that other hate group, the Westboro Baptist Church are trying to use the supposed respectable veneer of religion as a shield to hide their hatred behind. And why do they hate so much? Especially homosexuals? Well, I think it’s a case of protesting too much. I wrote a short story a few years ago called ‘Love’ about a white supremacist teenage skinhead who joins in with his mates in attacking anyone with a different ethnicity or sexuality to himself but who discovers he’s gay when through having sex with a black drug dealer. The story was nominated for an award, didn’t win, but has been well-reviewed and reprinted a few times so I guess it struck a chord.
We fear what we don’t understand. Or more to the point, we fear that we may become the thing we don’t understand. And that fear, nourished by ignorance and intolerance, becomes hate. And hate, when hidden behind something perceived as legitimate such as a flag or a religious symbol or even the colours of a sports team, becomes legitimised in the eyes of the hater. And then it’s easier to act upon.
But this is a blog about crime fiction. What does all this have to do with crime fiction? Everything. Fear leads to hatred. Hatred leads to violence. Violence leads to . . . what? Hurt? Despair? Maiming? Death? And we, as crime novelists, are there to document it all. Or we should be. I read crime fiction – and write it – because it helps me understand the world we live in. We have a degree of social engagement that writers in other genres often don’t have. What makes someone want to hurt another human being because their skin is a different olour or they’re attracted to their own sex? What makes the Wildmons of this world get so angry about the sexual orientation of a comic strip character? I believe it’s our job to find out and write about it. We tell stories. As my friend the brilliant writer Stav Sherez says, ‘We use narrative to explain the world.’
It can come as a dream, at times, but mostly it’s the place my mind goes as I’m going to sleep.
Like last night – I saw a javelin fall from the sky and impale me in bed. Terrifying, but oddly comforting, as well.
All my life I’ve had visions of handling a sword. I remember the first time it really struck me – I was watching Oliver Stone’s Platoon and saw a scene where a battle-weary American soldier leans against a tree and falls asleep. Suddenly, his eyes pop open. The camera pushes in, then out, then in again, and he looks down to see that he is being bayonetted by a Vietnamese soldier. There’s nothing he can do but watch himself die.
At that moment I realized that, in a previous life, I had experienced a similar death.
My whole life I’ve felt the weight of a sword in my hand; like a phantom metal limb. When I feel anxious or encounter conflict I imagine wielding my sword and fighting off my oppressors. The sword-play feels graceful, as in a ballet.
Oddly, I’ve never explored this obsession outside my own thoughts. Only once, maybe twenty years ago, when the images of sword-fighting taunted me nightly. I went to a sword shop and explained my visions to the owner. I asked if I could handle a number of different swords. I knew I’d recognize the right sword by its weight. We tried a few and most were too heavy. Finally, he handed me one that felt like an extension of my hand. It was light and thin and had a silver, cupped hilt.
“This feels right,” I said.
“It’s a Spanish rapier,” he said. “What Zorro uses.”
That’s as far as I took it. I couldn’t afford the sword, so I didn’t buy it. And I’ve been too busy in life to take fencing lessons, or to justify taking the time away from more immediate concerns.
However, when I went to Scotland last year I visited the Edinburgh Castle and entered a room with hundreds, if not thousands, of original, period swords.
In addition to the giant Highland Claymores, I saw dozens of rapiers fitting the size and shape of the sword I held in the shop years before. I wanted to linger there forever, trying one sword after another. Only through trick photography did I achieve any satisfaction:
And the vision of being gutted continues. Every day, every night. I’m in battle, fencing like one of the Musketeers. Sometimes I prevail, other times I fail. The memory-thought of that sword sinking into my belly used to horrify me. Now, after all these years, it’s become an old friend. And why not? It was the key that opened the door to the life I would experience next.
Someday I’d like to explore this further. Get one of those past-life regressions. Take some fencing lessons. Buy a sword or two. It’s odd that, as persistent as this feeling is, I’ve never felt compelled to take real action. It’s remained my own private obsession.
I wonder what we bring from lives we’ve lived before. What events so punctuate our psyches that their ghosts follow us from one life to the next?
I think of other things that might have their genesis somewhere else. Like my passion for the color purple. Lavender, to be exact. Nothing compares to it. The color strikes my eye with such force that I imagine it as an opening to another dimension. When the Jacaranda trees bloom in Los Angeles, in the month of May, when the entire city erupts in lavender, I am born again.
I had a girlfriend in high school who used this knowledge to her advantage – she wore a pair of tight, purple Dittos to school almost every day. It worked like a charm.
I wonder if these obsessions have their origins in previous lives or if they develop early on, in our present (and perhaps only) life. How are we instilled with such absolute conviction?
At age seven I became a vegetarian. I remember the moment I discovered that meat came from animals. I was five years old, maybe younger. I was sitting on a counter-top and our house-keeper mentioned something about meat coming from cows. From killing cows, to be exact. I remember my feet swinging to a stop, and my face dropping, and my voice repeating the phrase as a question, “Meat comes from cows?”
A couple years later my sister, four years my senior, visited a meat-packing company on her sixth-grade field trip. (Really? You’re really going to take a bunch of sixth-grade kids on a field trip to a slaughter-house?) When she came home she told me what she saw. We both decided to become vegetarians on the spot. Two days later she was back to eating meat. Two weeks later my mom realized I was really serious about this thing.
It’s felt right, for forty years now.
Like the weight of that sword in my hand.
Like the flowering Jacaranda in May.
It makes you wonder where we get this stuff.
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Do you have any life-long traits or obsessions that might come from a past life? Do you explore them or let them be? Do you use them in your writing?
You may have noticed that I’ve been somewhat absent from the T’interweb in general for the best part of a week … Oh, so you hadn’t noticed? Ah …
Anyway, I’ve been gadding about somewhat, taking advantage of the several days of hot weather that I fear will constitute summer this year.
As well as teaching a crime writing workshop at the Central Library in Derby on May 19th, and talking to two combined local writing groups over an extremely fine lunch at Soulby Village Hall on May 29th, I’ve been at the CrimeFest conference in Bristol.
This year was the fifth anniversary of the event, which grew out of Left Coast Crime in Bristol back in 2006. This year was the busiest yet, with sold-out tickets and standing-room-only panels. No doubt this was helped by the stellar line-up co-chairs Myles Allfrey, Donna Moore and Adrian Muller had organised.
And here are the CrimeFest Angels (left to right) Adrian, Donna and Myles, looking, I suspect, as you may not have seen them before …
As always, conferences like this are a heaven-sent opportunity to network and exchange information, as well as gossip, drink, and giggle. It was a great chance to catch up with old friends, like Lee Child, and Jeffery Deaver, and meet other favourite authors like Frederick Forsyth, Sue Grafton and James Sallis for the first time.
I was lucky enough to be on two panels at CrimeFest, one moderated by Stanley Trollip (one half of the writing duo the Michael Stanley with his partner Michael Sears) on Law or Justice? How does your Protagonist Choose? Also on the panel were Gerard O’Donovan, James Sallis and Andrew Taylor. In the emails that circulated afterwards I commented that I was honoured to be among such distinguished writers and felt I must have been included for light relief. To which Andrew Taylor responded that he felt I was there to add gravitas. (Nice sentiment, Andrew, but I know my role is simply to lower the tone …)
The second panel was the one that had me just a little nervous. I was tasked with moderating Lee Child, Sue Grafton, Brian McGilloway and Jacqueline Winspear on the topic of Kicking Ass: Spirited Protagonists and Tricky Situations. It was only as I was putting the panel info together, using my moderator’s Word doc from last year as a guide for layout, that I realised the format my introduction would take, listing the connections between the five of us.
(left to right: Brian, Sue, Lee, Jackie, & me, pic courtesy of Kate Kinchen)
It was a fun panel, absolutely packed out, and nobody objected when I warned before the audience Q&A that anyone mentioning a certain Mr T Cruise could pick a window because they would be leaving.
On the Thursday evening — and against my better judgement after dire performances in previous years — I was suckered into joining the quiz team of Faber editor Katherine Armstrong. Along with fellow authors Chris Ewan, Tom Harper, Claire McGowan and Tom Wood, I persuaded them to moderate our expectations by picking a suitably downbeat team name — The Greek Ministry of Finance. But to our amazement (well, mine anyway) we were a close second on the night, winning a bag of books and the DVD of Jim Sallis’s movie, Drive. All the more exciting for being totally unexpected.
It was a relief to meet my fellow judges from the Flashbang Flash Fiction competition and discover that they almost all agreed with my choice of winning entry. We had an entertaining dinner out on Friday night during which we all of us foolishly agreed to come back for a second attempt next year.
Of course, when it comes to what really goes on at such conferences, you have to be there. So, if you want to know why Simon Kernick is denying the comment he made to me in the bar on Saturday night, even though I took a photo specially, or why Adrian Magson won a Man-card (provided by Kate Kinchen) for his sterling moderating performance, or even who had the most awkward panelist going and how they avoided fisticuffs, you’re going to have to go along and find out. I should also mention that Peter Guttridge celebrated his birthday in fine style at CrimeFest, not only with cake and candles, but also by winning the Criminal Mastermind contest on the Sunday.
Finally, in what was to be a complete contrast to all the rushing about, I stayed with friends in Wiltshire on the way down and went out for a very stately and sedate pub lunch in their 1912 FN. All that and sunshine, too. Who could ask for more?
So, ‘Rati, what’s your favourite conference or convention? What makes it so special? If you haven’t been to one, why not and would you consider it? And if you are a regular, what do you feel you gain from the experience — besides a large bar tab and a lack of sleep?
This week’s Word of the Week is comity meaning courteousness or civility, from which we also get comity of nations, Latin comitas gentium, the international courtesy between nations in which recognition is accorded to the laws and customs of each state by others; a group of nations adhering to this code of behaviour.
Memorial Day is a good time to reflect on what heroism means. That hit home with particular force this year as, last Thursday, one of the kindest, smartest, funniest, most generous, caring and beautiful women I’ve ever known passed away after a valiant battle with breast cancer.
Her name was Kathi Kamen Goldmark, and she didn’t just crank out the courage in fighting her illness. She had that particular kind of courage that too often gets overlooked: The courage to be happy. And she had a particular gift for welcoming others into that happiness.
Or as David Phillips, the pedal steel player for Kathi’s band, Los Train Wreck, put it:
“Kathi’s job was to make sure everybody sang.”
Briefly, a bio: Kathi was not just the lead singer, rhythm guitarist (with her trademark leopard-skin Stratocaster), and heart and soul of Los Train Wreck, she was also a novelist—the marvelous And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You— plus a contributor and co-writer for a number of anthologies and other books, a founder and the lead Remainderette for the all-writer rock band The Rock Bottom Reminders—which included Amy Tan, Dave Barry, Scott Turow, Stephen King and Ridley Pearson among others—as well as the most deeply appreciated literary escort in the San Francisco Bay Area (perhaps the known world). So Kathi knew a host of writers who loved her deeply and miss her bitterly.
There are a number of tributes to Kathi on the web, and you can access many of them through the Facebook page of her husband, Sam Barry, himself a big-hearted mensch and old soul.
[Luis and I met through Kathi, a friendship that “matured” into a collaboration on a short story titled “Who Stole My Monkey?” for Lone Star Noir, which was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2011, something Kathi got a particular kick out of.]
But this is a post about what it means to be brave. Or as Kathi sometimes put it: “I like to think I’m ready for anything.”
I saw in Kathi many of the same qualities I saw in my late wife, Terri—a fundamental decency, honesty and openness, a focus on others that was always generous and good-hearted. She was also wickedly funny and, yes, ready for damn near anything.
But when you got together with her one-on-one she was always fully present, even when she was sick. It was simply her nature. When you were with her, you were the only person who mattered.
April Sinclair told me that when she and Kathi spoke the Sunday before her death, “She was so warm and caring as always,” even as death was settling in.
And one of the stories making the rounds at the informal wake at Kathi’s and Sam’s house Thursday evening was that, as she wavered in and out of consciousness near the end, she gestured Sam over at one point, had him bend down toward her so she could whisper, “Rosebuuuuuud.”
I hope I can muster half that sang-froid when death comes for me.
In crafting our heroes, we implicitly recognize the need to be a little more than we’ve allowed ourselves to be, recognize that the fault lies within, as does the remedy.
When my wife, Terri, died, I was assaulted with well-meaning advice on how to deal with the loss, a lot of which was largely beside the point. But I saw in those attempts to be kind and caring a message I did indeed need to hear: I couldn’t live with a ghost strapped to my back.
That, in the end, was the message I took away from my grief: I had to find a way to live when the most important person in my life—my best friend, my lover, my bride—had been devoured by a savage, indifferent disease.
And after the battles with despair and rage I decided that each day I would try to be a little braver, more truthful, more forgiving. I thought if I kept it that simple—three virtues: courage, honesty and love—I might be able to manage it. And I’d live up to Terri’s example, for she was the bravest, most devoutly honest and most selflessly caring human being I’ve ever met.
I can’t read those words today, a mere few weeks after I wrote them, and not think of Kathi as well. She too is my hero. If I can be a bit more like her each day, I’ll be okay.
Christ, I’ll be grand.
Isn’t that what the heroes in our stories do—inspire not just their fellow characters but us? How often does the hero resist or ignore the sound advice of a crucial ally until that ally suffers terribly or dies, at which point the journey is doomed unless the hero recognizes his error, embraces the ally’s example, and ventures on?
How many of us have lost someone irreplaceable, and felt broken by grief until somehow we managed to not just honor our memories of that person but take them fully to heart, let our remembrance change us?
These days the cineplex is full of superheroes with inhuman powers and mythic echoes, as well as all variety of werewolves, vampires, zombies. It’s almost as though we can’t believe in heroism unless it’s supersized, even while our men and women in uniform perform astonishing acts of courage large and small every day. And women like Kathi live life and face death with incredible gentleness and courage and largeness of spirit.
I can’t see much to emulate in the Hulk. But I see much to admire and imitate in Kathi. I hope I do that. I’ve no one to blame but myself if I don’t.
The time for heroes, as always, is here and now.
Everybody sing.
* * * * *
I’d love to hear from you on this. Have you lost someone close to you who’s inspired you to be a little better, a little larger in spirit: braver, wiser, more loving?
Who in your life has represented heroism? How has his or her example changed you?
Have you written about that person, or has she inspired one of your characters?
* * * * *
Jukebox Hero of the Week: Here’s a video of Kathi—that’s Harpman Sam, her husband, on the harmonica—with the Rock Bottom Remainders performing her signature tune, “Older Than Him (the Slut Song)”:
As fate would have it, it’s my turn for Wildcard Tuesday right on the day that the ITW’s new romantic suspense anthology Thriller 3: Love is Murder is released.
(Fate, hah. This was no doubt Liz Berry arranging things with the universe, in that sweetly inexorable way she has. Those of you who know Liz know what I mean.)
Anyway, it’s apropos, because this is a Murderati-heavy anthology – Our Allison Brennan co-edited with Sandra Brown, and it features stories by Allison, Rob Browne, JT Ellison, and me – along with Rati favorites Lee Child and Heather Graham and a whole lot of other great authors. As you can see from that lineup, it’s going to be a bit more heavy on the suspense than on the romance, but that’s what we like, right?
I’ve said here before I very rarely write short stories. For me it’s every bit as hard to come up with a great idea for a short story as it is for a novel, so my feeling has always been: why not push through and MAKE it a novel (or script) which will serve as an income stream instead of just a fun advertisement for your books that ARE income-producing?
I know that sounds horribly practical, but writers have to be practical if we want to eat.
But maybe I’m just a long-form writer by nature. I wrote my first short story, The Edge of Seventeen, only because I was asked to contribute to an anthology I thought was a really cool idea – stories about marginalized superheroes (people of color, women), and I thought I could probably manage a dark story about an alienated high-school girl who has to become a heroine in horrific circumstances. She’s dreaming about a terrible massacre at her school, and becomes convinced that she can stop the shooting with the help of a popular boy, her secret crush, who is having the same dream. I wrote it, loved it, and it went on to win a Thriller Award for Best Short Fiction. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the characters and the situations and it just kept nagging me that there was a lot more to it, and last year I finally just gave in to that pull and adapted the story as a VERY dark YA thriller, The Space Between.
I was right – there was a whole hell of a lot more to it, including quantum physics and parallel universes, and I’m actually now going to have to continue the whole thing as a trilogy.
And now that I’ve written my dreamlike Bahamian cat-and-mouse encounter In Atlantis for the Love is Murder anthology, I’m having the same thing happen – I can’t stop thinking about the characters and what happens for them next, and I know I’m going to end up expanding the story into a novel which may actually turn into a series.
So my very infrequent attempts at short stories seem to turn out to be springboards for future novels.
Yet people are always asking me to talk about how to structure a short story. And even though I don’t have much experience writing them myself, I can look at them analytically and come to conclusions that may be helpful (you know my prescription for everything by now – MAKE A LIST of ten of your favorites and see what the storytellers are doing and how they do it.)
I don’t read many short stories these days but I grew up compulsively reading Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthologies, and actively sought out stories by my favorite authors: Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier, Ray Bradbury, Poe of course, and Stephen King. The ones that I love have that great high concept premise, which usually includes a huge twist. I really think that the essence of a short story is the twist, and once you have that, you can set up the story with a basic three-act structure: You have someone who wants something very badly (The Act I setup) who is having trouble getting it (The Act II complications) and eventually DOESN’T get what they think and say want, but they get what they really need instead. (Which creates the Act III twist.)
Because of the restriction of length, often all a short story really does is take a premise and set it up (Set Up is generally just Act I of a novel or film) and pretty much cuts directly to the chase: the final battle and TWIST. The Edge of Seventeen was basically that set up and then the twist. As a matter of fact, when I actually sat down to write the first draft of the novel, I found I used most of the story almost directly as written as the first act!
So with a short story, you have a beginning and an end, but not much of the vast middle section that comprises a full-length novel or film.
I think that’s why shorts are so seductive (and arguably good practice) to more beginning writers. It’s pretty easy to write a first act. It’s the middle that’s hard. (I may just have gotten myself in a world of trouble, we’ll see!)
Another thing I think a short has to deliver – every bit as much as a full-length novel does – is the genre EXPERIENCE (or maybe I’m just a little obsessed with this aspect of writing, these days).
I had no premise at all in mind when I was asked to do a story for Love is Murder. I said yes because – well, seriously! It’s not like I could turn this opportunity down – with that lineup of writers, I was going to do whatever it took. But when I actually had to sit down and write something, I was in a very difficult place emotionally and I wasn’t feeling very romantic. Suspense I can do in my sleep, but love wasn’t the first thing on my mind. So I asked myself what would be a romantic escape, the kind of fantasy setting that I think really helps deliver the experience of romantic suspense? And the first thing that came to mind was my first trip to the Bahamas. We Left Coasters don’t generally do the Bahamas – we tend to go to the far closer paradise of Hawaii if we’re in the mood for an island, so the first time I was in those other islands it was truly an overwhelming experience.
I knew I could do the sensuality of that setting justice, and then I decided not to fight the emotional place that I was in, but rather use the experience of heartache and devastation as a jumping off point for the story. And once I’d put a wounded character into that lush setting, everything started coming alive – it’s just the magic of the process. I also took a huge hit of inspiration from the image of the Tarot Queen of Cups – that card was a touchstone for the main character, the Macguffin, and the whole story.
I layered water imagery and the theme of Atlantis and precious objects and art throughout, to make a kind of modern fairy tale (which I won’t talk too much about because it’s too easy to give away a short.). I did structure the story in three acts (I’d actually say that ALL stories are three acts, that’s what makes them stories), but I’m very aware that the first two acts of the short would be no more than a first act in a full length novel, and that the third act of the short would still be the third act of a novel – with many more twists and action, of course.
But I’m perfectly aware that I may just be looking at the structure of a short that way because it allows me to fit the longer-form ideas that I have into the format of a short.
I know that there are others here who are far more experienced at writing shorts than I am, so I’d like to hear from you all. Do you read a lot of shorts? Do you write them? How do you write them? Is my “Act I set up, then cut to the Act III chase” resonating with you (as a reader OR a writer) or do you find yourself doing something completely different?
Every year at this time, I think about writing a new post regarding Memorial Day . . . and every year, I find that this poem still sums up how I feel.
May your Memorial Day be filled with peace. Pari
Somewhere today . . .
Somewhere today a young woman sits in a muddy blind, her uniform wet through. She knows she needs to pay attention to what’s happening, that she has to distinguish between a clap of thunder and the burst of a gun. But all she can do is think of her baby graduating from kindergarten back home . . . without her.
Somewhere today a boy reaches for an automatic with only one hand. The wind blows dust into his teeth and eyes. He manages to prop his weapon against a sand-filled sack, using the stump of his other arm—the one where the rebels sliced it off at the elbow—to keep the rifle steady.
Somewhere today a mother waits on the tarmac, watching the military plane land. It bounces two times on the runway. Her son would’ve laughed at that. Through the blur of tired and salty tears, she sees them lift the unadorned casket.
Somewhere today a father stares at the last letter his daughter sent him. He has memorized every word, read between every line so often it has merged with the next in a confused gray. Three weeks and nothing. Not a note, not an email, no text. He looks to the blue sky and wonders where she is, if she’s all right.
Somewhere today a young woman is shot in a border town – wrong place, wrong time – the “collateral damage” of a drug war she’s never played a part in.
Somewhere today a group of young men claim a village for their tribe kicking children’s toys aside in the abandoned huts of former friends.
Somewhere today war will blast dreams away cut lives short and make sorrows long.
Somewhere, someday, I pray we’ll have no need for this holiday.
;)
