THE DREADED WTF MOMENT

by Gar Anthony Haywood

I’m presently reading an espionage thriller by a bestselling author I’ve never read before and I’ve really been enjoying it. Or at least, I had been up until page 184.

Prior to page 184, I had been thrilled — no pun intended — to discover that the writer in question is quite good at just about everything I think is important. He knows his subject — international terrorism and the associated U.S. political backbiting — backwards and forwards, yet he never burdens the reader with more detailed info than is necessary. His book’s general premise is intriguing and relatively plausible. And his dialogue, for the most part, rings with just the right balance of drama and authenticity.

Don’t get me wrong — this guy’s no le Carre. (Not that anybody other than John le Carre himself really is.) His requisite villain — a professional assassin with a code name plucked from the animal kingdom — is as standard issue as they come: brilliant, unfeeling, feared by all who know him, capable of killing a man with nothing more than the feather pulled from a down pillow, blah blah blah. When his generally fine dialogue does take an occasional dip for the worse — usually during a lover’s quarrel unrelated to matters of national security — it tends to hit bottom with a real thud. And his protagonist — a CIA desk jockey with limited field experience — couldn’t be a more obvious stand-in for Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan were he to enter every scene whistling the end title music from Patriot Games.

(I know what you must be thinking right about now: This was a book you were enjoying, Gar?)

Still, for all the annoyances noted above, the author’s overall writing was solid enough, and the story he was telling sufficiently compelling, that I was happy to go right on riding the train he was piloting.

Until I hit the dreaded WTF moment at page 184.

For those unable to guess what I mean when I refer to a “WTF moment,” I’m talking about the specific place in some books where the wheels come flying off. Not just one or two wheels but all four, bringing what had been a perfectly enjoyable journey of the mind to a rude and unexpected halt. Because the author has just done something too dumb, or lazy, or transparently manipulative, for you, the reader, to forgive. The trust you had in him to tell his tale with skill and precision has been broken, and there’s no getting it back.

That’s the WTF moment.

On occasion, this insult comes with the added injury of malice aforethought. Not only has the book’s author abruptly yanked you out of his story, he’s done so by way of underestimating your intelligence. He’s tried to get an elephant-sized plot device out of the room right under your very nose, preferring sleight-of-hand to fixing something he knows damn good and well is broken, and he’s counting on you to be too dim-witted to notice. Or, if you do notice, that you’ll be too mesmerized by his genius in general to give a damn.

Most WTF moments aren’t quite as sinister as all that, however. They’re just innocent mistakes. Giant, momentum killing errors in judgment that a good editor should have caught but didn’t. WTF moments of this kind aren’t infuriating, they’re simply deflating, because they’re indicative of either a breakdown in the system or a writer who’s not quite as good as you were hoping he’d turn out to be.

Let’s take pages 184 thru 187 of the spy novel I’ve been reading as a prime example. Here’s the set-up:

A female newspaper Reporter in Washington, D.C., as headstrong as she is beautiful, is about to turn a story in to her editor that will blow the lid off a huge conspiracy involving members of White House staff. Naturally, said members want all copies of her story destroyed before her editor or anyone else can read it, so a Thug For Hire (TFH) is ordered to break into her apartment and steal/erase all her computer files while she’s out on her nightly run with her trusted dog Bruno.

Unfortunately for her, the Reporter twists an ankle badly at the start of her run and returns to her apartment sooner than expected, while the Thug For Hire is still up in the study on the second floor.

Okay, people, let’s pause for a moment to think this through. Assuming killing the Reporter is not part of the TFH’s assignment — and it isn’t —what’s the most logical sequence of events at this point? I’ll give you a few seconds to consider the question . . .

Ready? All right, the following is how things actually go down in the book:

The Reporter closes the apartment’s front door behind her, sits down on the living room couch to remove her shoes and inspect her tender ankle. She hobbles into the kitchen, fills a freezer bag with ice, and grabs a beer from the fridge. Now she limps upstairs to the bathroom, removes some pain reliever from the medicine cabinet, washes a couple pills down with the beer, and closes the cabinet’s mirrored door — revealing the reflection of the Thug For Hire, suddenly standing in the bathroom’s open doorway behind her!

She starts to scream but the TFH grabs her, clamps a hand over her mouth and uses very impolite language to tell her to keep quiet or she’s dead.

The Reporter (as headstrong as she is beautiful, remember) heel strikes the TFH’s shin, then whirls to drive an elbow into his cheek, forcing him to release her. She flees into the hallway, then the study, noticing as she enters the latter that the intruder has been screwing around with her MacBook. She grabs the phone, picks up the receiver, starts to dial
9-1-1 . . .

. . . but the Thug For Hire reappears in the doorway to point a gun directly at her face. He drops some more impolite language to demand she put down the phone.

“Who are you?” the Reporter wants to know.

The TFH tells her again to hang up the phone and promises not to hurt her if she complies.

Bruno — who hasn’t been mentioned once since he and the Reporter returned home — barrels up the stairs to the rescue, barking like the house is on fire. But barking is all the big guy’s up for, apparently, because upon reaching the staircase landing, he stops to flash his teeth and bark some more at the man in the hallway threatening his master with a gun. The TFH promptly shoots the animal dead.

“You asshole!” the Reporter screams, then just for good measure, issues the insult again with some impolite language of her own tacked onto the end. Still holding the phone, she goes on to ask the TFH twice if (Name of Evil White House Staff Person) sent him. (He did.) “Answer me, goddamnit!” she cries. (He doesn’t.)

Instead, the TFH orders her one more time to put down the phone. “Now!”

Headstrong as ever, the Reporter presses on with her call to 911. The Thug For Hire shoots her in the head. He moves in to finish her off. She begs him not to shoot her in the face. “Please, God, anywhere but in the face!” His angry scowl softens and he grants her wish, firing two silenced rounds into her chest before leaving her apartment for good.

Riiiiiight . . .

If nothing about what you’ve just read had you thinking “What The F?”, nothing ever will, and you may feel free to exit this blog post, stage left, to spare yourself another minute of my ridiculous nitpicking. On the other hand, if you, like me, hardly know where to begin to list all the jaw-dropping missteps our bestselling thriller writer made in the scene above, let’s just give it a try anyway, shall we?

Why the hell didn’t the Thug For Hire slip out of the apartment while the Reporter was a) massaging her ankle in the living room; b) refrigerator-diving for ice and beer in the kitchen; or c) downing some aspirin with her back turned to the bathroom door? Or better yet, why didn’t he just knock her unconscious so as to finish his work in her home undisturbed? As he wasn’t wearing a mask, choosing to reveal himself to her instead all but guaranteed he would have to kill her, which wasn’t part of his employer’s instructions.

When the Reporter breaks free from the TFH in the bathroom, she can’t make it downstairs to the front door on that bad ankle, but shouldn’t she at least start screaming her head off? Or try locking the study door behind her to buy some time while she calls for help?

Looking down the barrel of a silenced handgun, why does the Reporter choose to subject the TFH aiming it at her to a Q & A, rather than put down the phone as instructed? What makes her think this guy won’t pull the trigger if she doesn’t do what he says?

Exactly what kind of golden retriever is Bruno, anyway? The olfactory-challenged kind that abhors violence? It takes him what feels like forty minutes to realize an intruder is in the Reporter’s home, and when he finally does, he roars up the stairs only to stop in the hallway to bark at his master’s assailant from a distance, as if he hates to bury his teeth in a man pointing a gun at his owner until such nastiness becomes absolutely, positively necessary.

Does the Reporter have a death wish we haven’t been told about? The TFH has just killed her dog in cold blood, proving he is indeed capable of using the weapon he’s threatening her with. And not only is she still not ready to put down the phone as directed, she wants to call the guy an asshole to his face and continue grilling him: Who are you, who sent you, answer me, goddamnit!

If the thought of getting shot in the face was so terrifying to the Reporter, why didn’t she put the friggin’ phone down when a man aiming a gun at her face ordered her to — THREE TIMES???

Do Thugs For Hire generally grant a victim’s final request to be shot in the body part of his or her choice? Or is this particular TFH, beneath all the foul language and propensity for violence, just a really nice guy?

Needless to say, all these WTF moments rolled into one has seriously dampened my enthusiasm for this book. Which is a real shame because I’d been thinking it was a great read up to this point.

But was it really?

One of the things that happens when I hit the wall of a WTF moment is that I begin to wonder what other, similarly egregious flaws in a book I might have missed earlier. So I go back to look, scanning the pages with a more critical eye this time, and lo and behold, more often than not, I find even more things amiss. Suddenly, a fine but imperfect read has just become an ordinary one, and a writer I was beginning to think could be a new favorite of mine has instead been reduced to just another piker.

As an author myself, I understand how and why most WTF moments happen. The writer has a plan for his characters and he needs things to go down for them according to that plan. The reason Bruno didn’t fly up the stairs immediately upon the Reporter’s return to her apartment to attack the intruder within, like almost any dog with a working nose would have, is that, had he done so, none of what followed could have reasonably occurred. So Bruno had to stay downstairs, silent and invisible, until his owner could discover the intruder herself and engage in a little suspenseful hand-to-hand combat with him. The TFH remained in her apartment, rather than slink out unnoticed while he had the chance, for the very same reason, logic be damned.

Whether the thriller writer in question resorted to such a series of cheats consciously or not, he lost me as a reader for good at page 184, and that’s really all that counts. So let this be a lesson to you, my friends. To hell with typos and misspellings — scour every line of your next novel, first and foremost, for WTF moments — those scenes in which you’ve written something that defies all common sense — and eliminate them. Because your editor might not notice them, “editing” being what it is today, but a discerning reader most likely will.

And it’s your reputation that will take the hit.

Questions for the class: Am I being overly critical here, or do you suffer WTF moments as unkindly as I do? What’s the biggest WTF moment you’ve ever encountered as a reader, and what’s the biggest one you’ve ever caught in your own writing prior to its publication?

Double You Three

By Cornelia Read

I gotta say, I totally love me some Writer’s Almanac. I first got turned on to this when I was driving my kids to school in Berkeley, as it came on the Bay Area’s NPR station every morning at nine a.m. If you are not familiar with this fine institution, it’s basically Garrison Keillor telling you about which writers’ (and writerly persons’) birthdays it is, every day. And then reading a groovy poem out loud. Which is kind of awesome, really.

These days, since I have outlived the maximum-chauffeur years, child-wise, I get it as an email around midnight every night. I miss the lagniappe of Mr. Keillor’s voice, and the poem comes at the beginning rather than the end, but it’s still pretty damn amazing on a daily basis. Just, Snacks-‘o-Thought, in a rather lovely way. And sometimes the conjunction of people born on the same day seems almost prophetic or something. Like, better than a horoscope.

But last night was an especially good one, at least for provoking snacks ‘o thought on my part. First off, today is Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s birthday.

And I never knew before that he went through a total shitstorm in his life while quite young and gave up writing for ten years, commenting later: “I suffered what seemed to me to shatter all my life so that I desired to die rather than to live…” which just, well… mon semblable, mon frere. Let’s leave it at that.

AND it’s also the day Anne Hathaway died. Shakespeare’s wife, to whom he left his “second-best” bed.

AND it’s the day that Robert Burns was roundly and publicly chastised in church for having knocked up a chick to whom he was not yet married–with fraternal twins.

While perhaps having also gotten another chick pregnant (that would be the OTHER chick, pictured above, whom he called his “Highland Mary.”) And even though he THEN got published and all of a sudden chick numero uno’s parents welcomed him with open arms as a son-in-law and stuff, and they went on to have a boatload more children–and he had a separate boatload along the way with a bunch of OTHER chicks, apparently. Which state of affairs (ahem) was accepted with grace by his wife, the former Jean Armour:

She bore his philandering with patience and apparent good cheer, just as she continued to bear him children — the ninth was born on the day of Robert Burns’ funeral in 1796. “Our Robbie should have had twa [two] wives,” she is said to have exclaimed upon taking in one of his illegitimate daughters to raise.

Oh, AND today South Carolina delegate John Rutledge “presented a first draft of the United States Constitution to the Constitutional Convention, in 1781,”

while it’s also the day that Jane Austen finished writing Persuasion.

So all of that seems pretty damn auspicious, to me, but I think my favorite bit from today’s Almanac is the following, in that the innovation has been quite literally and profoundly life-altering for me (and probably you, too, if you’re reading this, which we must presume you are):

It was 20 years ago today that British physicist Tim Berners-Lee posted a description of a project he called the “World Wide Web” to an online newsgroup, effectively revolutionizing modern life.

Working for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, Berners-Lee invented his service to allow scientists to easily share and access information via the Internet. Although the infrastructure of the “Net” had been growing for years, it was until then a highly technical system known mostly to academics and scientists like Berners-Lee. The World Wide Web, as Berners-Lee conceived it, would use the Net to connect documents with clickable links — or hypertext — and make them searchable.

Under the encouraging headline “Try it,” Berners-Lee’s post included information on accessing the first Web server and a Web browser prototype, and gave the address — or “coordinates,” as he called it then — of an example website he’d created. This Web page — the world’s very first — further explained the project he’d nicknamed “W3,” explaining how to search the Web and how to build your own page. Academia began using the service first, then industry. In early 1993, Mosaic was released, the first Web-browsing software for PCs and Apple Macintosh computers. Anyone with an Internet connection could now surf — and help create — the Web.

Berners-Lee had written in that first post: “The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone.” Today the word “much” seems quite an understatement, and “academic” almost laughable. But it is astonishing to be reminded that so much of what’s on the Web is “freely available” because Berners-Lee created the Web for free. For his donation, he was named by Timemagazine as one of the top 20 thinkers of the 20th century, and was awarded a knighthood in 2004.

Berners-Lee said: “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.”

I mean, DUDE–THE FUCKING INTERNET, right? Or the worldwideweb or whatever. I get kind of confused. But still… I mean, here are ten things that happened to me because of the internet (in reverse temporal order):

I signed up for The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference, and ended up meeting Lee Child and a whole slew of other groovers, including many of the people who’ve written for this blog.
I found my mystery-writing group in Berkeley on craigslist, and got published five years later with the help of all those good folk.
I (earlier, slightly) found epinions.com, which landed me smack-dab in the middle of a bunch of burgeoning writers who were AWESOME and funny and talented and wonderful, right when my life had totally turned to shit. They gave me my chops back, as a writer and as a human being. Seriously.
Part of the reason my life had turned to shit is that I found out my husband had been fucking the secretary at his office in Boulder, shortly after I learned how to do email. Because I found their emails. (Okay, this one SUCKED, but still–life altering.) We were in Cambridge by that point, but still…
I got to meet a really groovy writer named Dick Pollak (because of an autism chat group on Compuserve) who wrote a deeply amazing book about Bruno Bettelheim, who was such a giant shitheel I would still like to dig him up from his grave and hit him over the head with a shovel. Even though he was cremated. (Bettelheim, not Dick. Dick is excellent.)
Well, I can’t even begin to enumerate all the amazing shit that the world wide web has wrought in my life… because it’s just totally stunning and mind-boggling and FUCKING AMAZING. So I will stop at six.

But I am hugely, hugely grateful to Tim Berners-Lee. DUDE–YOU ROCK!!! THANK YOU!!!!

What’s the best thing that’s happened in your life because of the web, o dearest ‘Ratis? What’s the shittiest? What would you be doing right now instead of reading Murderati, if this whole shebang hadn’t been invented?

Marked Flesh and Media Whores

by JT Ellison

I’ve finally started reading THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.

How I’ve managed to go this long without knowing the actual storyline of the book is remarkable – especially since it was the very first ebook I ever bought. I haven’t read a single review. I don’t know any details at all. I know it swept the world away, but today, 100 pages in, realizing it’s a story about a missing woman… the set up seems utterly prosaic. Though I am invested in the story, I am afraid to be disappointed by going forward and finding that this is simply a regular tale, one not mythic, not life-changing, not genre-transcending.

All of that is in direct conflict with the books’ backstory, and current about to be a blockbuster movie status. The dead author, one who’s been in turns accused of gross misogyny and tender enlightenment, who witnessed a girl’s rape in his teens and by all accounts spent the next 15 years trying to rid himself of that mental horror. The battle for his estate. The films, heralded, revered, and soon to be released in the US. In all honestly, I didn’t feel there was any way the book could possibly live up to the standards of which the media shrieks set forth.

But how could that be? The idea that this book (these books) aren’t supremely special in some way is anathema to me. There must be more. There has to be something unique and brilliant about them, or else they’re just another mystery and we’ve all bought into the hype and that ultimately lessens the craft.

What, at its most base, is this whole spectacle about?

A story that explores the mystery behind a missing girl.

When I realized that, I went – That’s it?

No way. There is so much more to this story – I can already see that. And as I read, all the bits and pieces from the past few years, the details I’ve purposefully obfuscated, are coming into focus.

I didn’t want to read this book. I’m not sure why. I adore a good thriller. Maybe it’s because I’d just tried and failed with Jo Nesbo’s REDBREAST (just wasn’t in the proper intellectual space at the time) and the whole Scandinavian thing scared me. Or maybe it was the warnings about the financial stuff at the beginning. Being told the first 50 pages of a book are boring, but to stick with it isn’t exactly the way to get me on board.

I’ll be honest, I bought it, and I’ve glanced longingly at the cover several times, but it wasn’t until the US movie casting that I decided I was going to give this a chance. The whole Daniel Craig as Blomkvist is a beautiful thing, but that wasn’t it. It was sweet-faced Rooney Mara, who was asked to transform into hard-edged Lisbeth Salander.

Before

After

It was that transformative process that got me interested in the story, in actually finding out what all the fuss was about. For at one time, Lisbeth Salander was, on the surface at least, a fresh faced ingénue as well.

The choice to mar flesh is one made for a variety of reasons. I have several piercings and a couple of tattoos. Unlike many babies I see nowadays, I wasn’t allowed to pierce my ears until I was ten – and that event stays firmly lodged in my mind. My hands shaking on the long drive to the store. The smelly black marker, perfectly aligning the spot where the needle would go. The cold alcohol wipe. The sharp snap of the gun shooting the hard metal through my tender lobes. The euphoria when they held up the mirror and the two twin glints peeked from either side of my head. I felt like such a woman walking out of the mall with my small gold studs. I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. At my birthday present. The marking of my flesh for the first time.

There’s something quite… addictive about it. Ask anyone who’s pierced themselves and they’ll tell you. Tattoos too. It’s strange, really. Incomprehensible to some, yet—dare I say?—a turn on for others.

I didn’t feel the lure to mark myself again until I was in my teens and decided to double pierce my left ear. Not both ears. Just the left one. The asymmetry appealed to me. Unbalanced. Off-kilter. It fit my personality.

The method was exactly the same as six years earlier. I felt that same rush.

My father, on the other hand, had kittens. Several litters, in fact.

Eventually he forgave me, in the form of a gorgeous little diamond. Just one. Only for that spot. I wore that stud in my left ear for years, a secret acceptance from him, the first true acknowledgement of my autonomy, the powerful knowledge that I could be myself and yet still be loved, and was heartbroken when it was stolen, along with the small diamond earrings my grandmother gave me for graduation, on my honeymoon.

I haven’t worn a diamond in its place since.

The next marking came in the form of a triple piercing in that same left ear, which I let close soon after, because it just looked strange to me. But in ’95 I went for something different – a helix, through the cartilage atop my left ear. I still have that piercing, a small silver tension hoop. I’ll never take it out.

The belly button was next – it took separate piercings to get it right, too. Then the tragus – that’s the bit of cartilage in your ear closest to your face. I wanted to do my nose too, but Darling Husband drew the line.

So I started on the tattoos.

Trust me, as good little pearl-ed, bow-ed, preppy college republican was replaced by the hippy Goth artist within—replaced, ha. Eradicated is more like it—the folks around me started to wonder.

Why, exactly, was I doing this?

That is a very hard question to answer.

A, I think it looks cool. B, while having needles poked into your flesh hurts, it’s a different kind of pain. C, there are times you want to make sure you remember. Good times, and bad.

The first tattoo, the Chinese symbol for strength, was designed to give me just that, a tangible, physical, always apparent symbolic reminder to stop, breathe, and remember that my strength comes from within. It was a very serious tattoo. The second, the symbol for rebirth, was inked when I felt I’d achieved that exact moment of true inner strength: the stasis of my life was suddenly over and I was hurtling forward into the world I live in now. It is a joyous mark, and I had no idea until later that the combination of the two meant Phoenix Rising. From the ashes. I couldn’t have picked something more apropos if I tried, and as such it means so much more.

The little purple butterfly I just thought was pretty, but as our Alex pointed out to me years after the fact, apparently my subconscious needed the evidence of that shattered chrysalis in a more permanent form. It is a delicate little fancy.

I was five tattoos in when I realized I may have gone to far. I had wanted an Ichthys on the inside of my foot below my left ankle, but was talked out of it. (Tattoo artist: “I can’t guarantee this won’t rub off eventually.” Me: “Well, then I need to do something different – I want something permanent.”) Idiots, the both of us. He wanted to get paid more and I was too naïve to realize it. I ended up with what was supposed to be a rising sun but instead we referred to as the Death Star – and he did the colors backwards so I had to have it redone. Two layers of ink – one orange, topped with red and yellow.

I chose to remove that one, a process which more than made up for my idiocy by putting me through some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. I do hear removal is better now, but at the time, I was a laser stricken guinea pig.

The phantom of that tat lingers on my left ankle. One day I’ll go to a cosmetic tattoo artist and have them ink the areas that hyper pigmented back to a more natural skin tone. But for now, it’s a reminder to me to think things through a little more. To look before I leap, which isn’t the easiest thing for me.

So I’m settled at five and one-half piercings (the tragus I stupidly removed trying to endear myself to some Nashville Junior Leaguers and it closed up, but I’m going to have it redone) and three tattoos – the small butterfly in profile on my left shoulder blade, and the two Chinese symbols on the inside of my right ankle. I adore all three and would never, ever mess with them. The ankle especially.

That doesn’t mean I’m not considering a fourth, one in a slightly less obvious place so I wouldn’t have to show it off if I didn’t want to.

A dragon is always foremost in the considerations.

Which brings me back to Mara Rooney, about to be immortalized as the girl with the dragon tattoo. For the movie, the piercings she did were all real – lip, brow, nose, nipples, four holes in each ear. The tattoos are drawn on, but the piercings – that took some guts. If you don’t have this particular predilection… well, suffice it to say, I’ll be a fan of the movies because of what Rooney did for her art.

Click Photo for full poster (NSFW)

I haven’t finished the book yet. But I already like Lisbeth. I’m rooting for her. And now I’m dying to find out exactly what each of her markings are about.

Have you marked yourself in some way? Do you regret it, or are you glad for it?

Wine of the Week: Snap Dragon Red

10,000 words in one day? No way…WAY!

By PD Martin

I know there are some freaks of nature whose normal output is 6,000-10,000 words a day, but for most writers it’s anywhere between 1K-4K words per day. And so, it sounds impossible when you first hear or think about writing 10,000 words in one day. But it IS possible…I’ve done it (many times). In fact, on my debut 10K day I wrote 12,000 words!

I first heard about the 10K day at a writers’ meeting in Melbourne. I was well and truly intrigued — and excited. I tend to write between 2,000 and 3,000 words a day (and I’ve been told that’s quite a high output) but the thought of quadrupling that was mind-boggling. So I Googled 10K day to find out what it was all about. The basic rules are:

You write for four two-hour blocks (NO interruptions whatsoever).
You take a 10-15-minute break between stints.
You stock up on food and drink in between each block so you don’t have to leave your seat during each session.
You clear your schedule COMPLETELY for that day.
You unplug the phone and internet (I know it’s hard, but you can do it).
You don’t edit or review anything you’ve written – just keep writing (perhaps the hardest one to follow).
You turn off your word processor’s spelling and grammar check so you’re not distracted by red or green lines.
You complete any necessary research and/or plot outlining work before the 10K day (or you fill in the research later).

It also helps to have a writing buddy. This commits you to the full day, and serves as further motivation when you phone each other or chat online (yes, you can turn the internet back on for the short breaks). It’s not only support, but I guess a bit of healthy competition too.

My 10K days generally look like this:
9am-11am – First writing block
11-11.15am – Contact writing buddy for a few minutes, then stretch and stock up on food/drink
11.15-1.15 – Second writing block
1.15-1.30 – Second break (as above)
1.30-3.30 – Third writing block
3.30-3.45 – Third break (as above)
3.45-5.45 – Final writing block
5.45 – Chat to writing buddy
5.50 – Collapse into a chair, almost catatonic (like this woman)

Coffee and chocolate can also come in handy. My preference is for quality coffee and chocolate (I love the Aussie brand, Haighs). Anyway…

What’s the output like?

The first question I get when talking about 10K days tends to be focused on the quality of the writing. Most people’s initial response is that the words on the page must be crap. Not so, I say.

First off, by not reading what you’ve just written, you’re cutting off the inner critic. So instead of thinking: “That sounds crap, how else can I put it?” or “Oh no, that’s all wrong!” you keep writing and eventually the critical voice realises you’re not listening to them today and gives up. And let me tell you, it’s incredibly liberating to silence that sucker!

Secondly, by not re-reading your work and virtually not stopping, you’re effectively following a ‘stream of consciousness’ writing style. Many times when I’ve read what I’ve written in my 10K day I don’t even remember writing it. And I’m almost always pleasantly surprised.

Admittedly the 10K day works really well for me because I don’t plan/plot, which means I can do a 10K day whenever I can clear one full day. I don’t have to plan for it by plotting out what’s going to happen in the next few chapters. I do, however, do a lot of research. But that’s easy to overcome in a 10K day. Your sentence might look something like this: She rested her hand on her gun, relishing the cold feel of the (gun make and model here) under her fingertips. Or maybe your character turns up at a crime scene that needs some detailed description. Simple: She pulled in behind the black and white. (Description of street/house here)

The point is, you don’t stop. You don’t stop for editing, for the inner critic, for research or for plot decisions. You just keep writing.

So by the end of the day, you’ve got 10,000 words, and rather than deleting those words you usually end up adding to them. You add in research details, you add in dialogue tags and you add in descriptions. Of course, you also edit to refine your writing, tweaking word choice and sentence structure as you go.

10K days are particularly amazing for dialogue (like I said, you can add the tags in later) and for moving the plot forward. In contrast, I can see they probably wouldn’t work well for literary writers.

Of course, you can’t use the 10K day to write a first draft in 8-10 days. At least I don’t think you could! I find the 10K day too much of a brain-drain for a daily or even weekly part of my schedule, but once a month seems perfect for me. And, let’s face it, a 10K day is a great way to get a large chunk of work done while also getting a more direct sub-conscious-to-page experience happening.

Try it out for yourself! You may not get the full 10,000 words, but I reckon you’ll approximately quadruple your normal output. A fellow writer friend who was my 10K buddy one day only wrote 5,000 words, but when her normal output is 1,000 she was overjoyed with 5K. And in some of my more recent 10K days I’ve only made it to 8,000 words or so. But who’s complaining? Not me! I juggle my writing with a pre-schooler and this year I’ve also been taking on corporate work so 8,000 words is massive for me.

So, what do you think of the 10K day concept?

PS I’ll be overseas when this goes live (in Ireland for my sister-in-law’s wedding) and I’m not sure if I’ll have internet access on 4 August. But I will check back in and reply to all the comments, so hit the notify check-box when you post.

PPS My daughter Grace is the flowergirl…so exciting!!!!

Muckabout, Outcast, Hero

David Corbett

Alexandra and Allison this past week blogged about heroes, and I mentioned in a comment that my favorite heroes are seldom the kind so many others seem to find so compelling. I realize this may seem like apostasy, but as much as I enjoyed Reacher and Harry Bosch and Dave Robicheaux (my favorite series hero), I felt no great need to revisit them. One bite of the apple and I was pretty much sated.

I know. Shoot me.

What can I say—I prefer the muckabout or lost soul, the guy down on his luck and wildly imperfect but not contemptible or contemptuous, the despised or disregarded outcast who comes through in a selfless act of courage.

Not only does this sort of hero feel more real and thus convincing to me, his arc is more gratifying because it travels a more difficult and unlikely trajectory. I can’t buy in to a final victory if it’s foretold all along by the hero’s too-conspicuous strengths and virtues.

And the hero I’m talking about can’t just possess a flaw, or a haunted past, or a lack of foresight. The flaw has to undermine his abilities or his will in such a way the climactic confrontation is realistically in doubt until the very end. That’s what creates suspense for me—not plot twists or overwhelming odds. The sheer complicated noble blind perversity of the human heart.

This type of hero appears in more permutations that one might think at first blush—everyone from Gal Dove in Sexy Beast:

To Kid Collins in After Dark, My Sweet:

To Freddy Heflin in Copland:

To Mickey Ward in The Fighter:

To, yes, Seabiscuit (the horse everyone gave up on):

I think heroes reflect a kind of love affair. We don’t choose who we’re attracted to, who we fall in love with. That’s done for us by forces in our hearts and minds—and bodies—far beyond the radar’s sweep. And what can I say, the heroes so many others love often leave me cold. They remind me too much of the star quarterback, whereas I’ve always admired the guys in the trenches, the big uglies with muck and blood on their faces and hands, who fight and claw with little recognition, out of honor or pride or just cussed meanness. The Grunt, not the Officer & Gentleman. Sergeant Rock, not Captain America.

Now, it may well be that this love affair I’m describing is self-love. The kinds of heroes I like best are an almost embarrassingly obvious reflection of myself. They strike a chord because I see You Know Who in them.

But they also remind me of my father, whom I loved deeply and admired, whom I watched every morning dress for work like a warrior putting on his armor—this man my mother savaged with ridicule throughout their marriage, and left to die alone in a nursing home thousands of miles away. I wanted to rescue this proud man from his lovelessness, to redeem both him and me.

But I’m not sure pursuing this from an overly personal perspective gets us anywhere, so I’d like to discuss it in terms of one particular book and film, a relatively little known crime story from George Harrison’s HandMade Films titled Bellman & True (1987), and the novel by Desmond Lowden on which it’s based.

Here’s a trailer for the film, and the similarity to Sexy Beast should be obvious.

They’re both British crime capers with a bank heist at their cores, with similar themes of the hero being drawn in against his will. But Bellman & True‘s Hiller lacks Gal Dove’s fallen-angel sex appeal — something that, in the end, strangely works to Hiller’s advantage.

The title comes from an old Cumberland song titled “D’ye Ken John Peel,” specifically the lyric:

Yes, I ken John Peel and Ruby too.

Ranter and Ringwood, Bellman and True.

From a find to a check, from a check to a view,

From a view to a death in the morning.

But there’s a pun in the term “bellman.” It also refers to a criminal who specializes in getting past bank alarms.

As good as the movie is—and it’s not just one of my favorite crime films, but one of my favorite films, period—I recently spent a sunny Sunday reading the book on which it’s based. I’ve now ordered everything else I can find that Desmond Lowden’s written—most of which, sadly, is long out of print and can be had for a song.

Don’t confuse obscurity with lack of talent—in writers or heroes.

This book provided me with one of the most gratifying reading experiences I’ve had lately. As I said, I read it in a day—it’s a mere 183 pages—almost in one sitting. (I’ve only done that with two other books: Double Indemnity and Kim Addonizio’s brilliant poetry collection, Tell Me.)

The book is briskly paced, deftly executed, with brilliant dialog and a well-researched and richly detailed high-tech heist at its core. But what makes it truly unforgettable is the writing, especially the characters.

Consider the following sketches, which are deceptively simple:

Of Hiller, the hapless hero: He was middle-aged, with thinning hair, but there was something of the schoolboy about him. It was the tweed suit, ready-made, from a High Street tailor’s. The sort of suit you bought on leaving school for your first job. The man had kept to the same style ever since, though heavier now in the stomach and seat. And he’d looked after them well, as he walked he kept the suitcases carefully away from his trouser creases.

Of Hiller’s stepson, known only as the boy: He was small, the back of his head was soft and rounded. But his face was pale, sharply pointed with the effort of being eleven years old.

Of Anna, a former high-priced call girl (“on the game, what you’d call the big game, South Africa and the Bahamas”): She wore no make-up, she was strangely neutral, like a fashion model walking from one job to another, her face and hair in her handbag, and no expression for the journey in between.

Of a minor character, a shop clerk: The man was grey-haired. He had bacon and a suburban train-ride on his breath, and he caught the smell of whiskey on Hiller’s.

Even the setting descriptions enhance character, in this case Hiller’s again:

The room, when they reached it, was small. There was an old striped carpet, and a basin in the corner held up by its plumbing. Hiller went straight to the window. He stood close to the glass and smelled the sourness of other people’s breath. Across the street he saw the four houses in a row that were empty, their insides gutted and piled at the kerb, their insides dark. And Hiller felt safe. No-one could see he was here.

But the book rewards most poignantly in the interactions between Hiller and the boy, specifically the stories Hiller tells him to keep him entertained—stories about Lulu Land, where they only had Wagner on the jukebox, and about the Princess, who only smoked French cigarettes and was beautiful when she wasn’t looking.

In one particularly revealing bit of storytelling early in the narrative, accomplished with sly indirection, using subtext beneath the dialog, we observe Hiller’s struggle with drink and his tender if troubled relationship with the boy; we see flickers of mawkish anger beneath his wit, especially anger at vapid bourgeois pretension—and resentment of the financial success that has eluded him, or which he himself has sabotaged; we learn of the Princess, who is the boy’s mother, and the infatuation they share for her, despite her cruel desertion of them both; and we feel that desertion bitterly, even though (or perhaps because) its extremes are merely hinted at.

The other great joy of the book is watching Hiller’s character solidify—and his love for the boy deepen. It’s easy to assume that Hiller is doomed, because of the feckless oblivion that’s led to his involvement with men far more ruthless than he realizes. But it’s not as simple as that, and Hiller is not that simple a man. His fondness and concern for the boy crystallize with a mutual realization that they only have each other, and it’s never been otherwise.

Hiller engages me in ways more conventional mystery/thriller heroes just don’t (which no doubt explains a great deal about my career). He’s not just the clichéd “tarnished hero,” nor can he be tidily tucked into the anti-hero drawer. He’s a recognizable man with a complex past and an insidious, almost overwhelming problem in the present, caused by his own thoughtless flirtation with darkness, his ongoing accommodation with despair.

And by the end he isn’t the same just more so, like so many heroes one comes across, especially in the genre. Without giving too much away, he achieves a distinct nobility, that of a man who gets up off his knees—if only to prove he can.

Note: The film was remade (and butchered) for American audiences by the same director (Richard Loncraine) with Harrison Ford in the lead. Curiously, this version, titled FIREWALL, includes no mention of Lowden in the credits. When I mentioned this to Don Winslow, he conjectured that Lowden got paid and “told to fuck off,” an all-too-frequent arrangement in the film world. Oh, and the American version is godawful. Harrison Ford has never sleepwalked through a performance more shamelessly. He looks like he’s expecting every scene to climax in an enema.

So, Murderati: Are you drawn to heroes with a crucial flaw, one that renders the likelihood of their prevailing always in doubt? Or do you prefer knights of a conspicuously whiter and more reassuring shade? In either case — why?

And ever notice how easy it is to mistype herpes for heroes?

Last–yes, I recognize the parallel between Hiller and the boy and my father and me—though I didn’t until Monday, when I wrote this piece. Talk about oblivious. Sheesh…

* * * * *

Jukebox Hero of the Week: In keeping with my theme, here’s a video of Bettye Lavette, who for almost 40 years wandered the desert of R&B obscurity, until she gave the following performance of The Who’s “Love Reign O’er Me” at the Lincoln Center, and revealed not just that the woman has a soulful voice, but a cagey, fierce, indomitable spirit:

Happy Birthday!

By Louise Ure

I turned sixty this weekend and had a lovely time doing it.

My sister and her boyfriend came up from Carmel and we ate and drank our way across the San Francisco summer day. Lots of other friends wrote, called, texted, dropped by during the day or slid improbably wonderful gifts through the mail slot.

All in all, a great way to grow older.

I’ve never worried overmuch about birthdays. In fact, I’ve been saying I’m sixty for several years now, just to encourage compliments. (If you tell someone you’re 56 or 57, you can see the thought bubble above their head: “And you look every inch of it.” If you tell them a few years early that you are sixty, they are more likely to say: “God, you look good for sixty.”) I am shameless in my pursuit of the empty compliment.

In my family, every child got exactly what he wanted to eat on his birthday, and each year I would ask my mother for corned beef and cabbage, followed by strawberry shortcake. It would probably still be my “Last Night Before Execution” meal. It wasn’t so easy to get corned beef in July back in those days. That was a meat offered only around St. Patrick’s Day. She would be brining and corning all day long, just to fulfill my wishes.

In later decades, no mater where I lived, the only other constant on my birthday was a phone call from my brother Jim and his family, singing “Happy Birthday” in four-part harmony into a speaker phone. Whether I was in Singapore or Sydney, Paris or Seattle, they figured out how to find me. And there was no more perfect sound.

Bruce and I never really had a birthday ritual except for the roses. Each year he would carpet the house in red roses. Dozens and dozens, all of the same hue. I could have slept on a mattress of rose petals for a week. This year, my friend Jessie fulfilled that role, and brought the most beautiful long stem roses in a red so lush and deep that I knew she’d been channeling Bruce with the purchase.

One of my favorite birthdays might have been my 30^th. I was single. A bit wild. And certainly ready to party. A group of friends from the ad agency took me out to a country and western bar for a night of drinking and dancing. At some point, my friend Tina approached the table where I sat, pulling a sinewy young cowboy by the elbow. Black hat. Plate-sized silver belt buckle. Blue eyes as clear as a madman’s.

“This is Jake. He’s your birthday present.” (I truly don’t remember his name. It was one syllable, and ended with a hard “K” sound. Jake. Mike. Rick.)

Oh Lord. The answer to my newly-30-year old prayer. I wanted to eat him up and blow him out like a birthday cake. Cake. Maybe that was his name. In any case, he was perhaps my best birthday present ever.

So here it is Tuesday. Two days post B-day celebration and I’m still celebrating. My sister is still visiting. Two Aussie buddies are in town. I had a gorgeous evening with my foster kids and their entourages. I’m still throwing the party right between my eyes.

How about you, ‘Rati? What was your favorite birthday of all time? Or your favorite present? Or what would it be if you were creating it for yourself?

Story and Song

by Alafair Burke

While I was listening to Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” for the gamillionth time yesterday, I realized I had a video clip playing in my head, and it wasn’t footage of Adele performing her hit song. It was of Chuck and Blair from the season finale of Gossip Girl, clasping hands from their hoisted chairs at a crashed wedding, one final romantic night in their tragic union before Blair is to be married off to a prince.

Yes, I watch Gossip Girl. Go ahead. Laugh. I’ll wait. But the fact that I have the same taste in TV as your fourteen year old daughter is not the point of this post. My point is about a good soundtrack. Sometimes the connection between a song and the story it helps narrate becomes so indelibly etched into the brain that the two can never be separated.

If you don’t believe me, check out the love between these two doomed, slo-mo youngsters. “We could have had it all.” I’ll love this song forever, and it will forever remind me of Chuck and Blair.

Adele and Gossip Girl aren’t the only song/story combination linked together in my mind. My playlist seems to be filled with songs from soundtracks. Here are some of my favorite uses of song to accompany story.

Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” in Grosse Point Blank

You can feel John Cusack seeing the life he hasn’t lived in that adorable baby’s eyes. “Cause love’s such an old fashioned word, And love dares you to care for the people on the edge of the night, And love dares you to change our way of caring about ourselves. This is our last dance. Under Pressure.”

Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes” from Say Anything

And speaking of John Cusack, I see the life I could have lived with him everytime I hear “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel. “I see the doorway to a thousand churches in your eyes, the resolution of all the fruitless searches.”

Dear Husband, at some point before I die, I need to be serenaded with a boom box beneath my window. Oh, I want to be that complete.

Journey’s “Wheel in the Sky” in the Sopranos

David Chase used music brilliantly through this series. When it comes to Journey, most people will remember “Don’t Stop Believing” in that final, controversial scene, but I always remember “Wheel in the Sky” playing at the end of the episode Bust Out in season 2. Tony has just ended a particularly bad-behaving day, having ruined a friend’s sporting goods business and beaten a murder rap. He takes the helm of his new boat, leaving a trail of destruction in his wake. “The wheel in the sky keeps on turning, Don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow.” It’s Tony Soprano’s anthem.

Thompson Twins’ “If You Were Here” from Sixteen Candles

If you were a straight girl in the 80s, Admit it: A part of you is still in love with Jake Ryan. Dear Husband, I also need you to wait for me outside my sister’s wedding in a red Porsche, then sit crosslegged on a table with me and a birthday cake. “If you were here, I could deceive you. And if you were here, you would believe.”

Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” in Fast Times at Ridgemont High

Every time I see Jennifer Jason Leigh, I hear this song, and vice versa. Poor girl, losing her virginity to that scum bag in the high school dugout. “She’s gonna be somebody’s baby tonight.”

Cat Stevens’ “The Wind” in Almost Famous

Another Cameron Crowe movie, no surprise. Most people will remember that epic bus tour scene with the Elton John’s Tiny Dancer singalong, but I also love this scene with Penny Lane dancing to Cat Stevens. These kinds of moments in this film are the reason I still haven’t given up on Kate Hudson. “Where I’ll end up, well I think only God really knows.”

Cat Stevens’ “Don’t Be Shy” from Harold and Maude

And speaking of Cat Stevens, his song “Don’t Be Shy” always makes me think of the moment we met Harold as he was about to hang himself. “Don’t wear fear or nobody will know you’re there.”

Elliot Smith’s “Needle in the Hay” in Royal Tenenbaums

And speaking of songs to kill yourself by, I love the use of this song in this scene. “I’m going to kill myself tomorrow.”

Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work” in, Um, Everything

I just learned from Wikipedia that this Kate Bush song, one of my favorites, has been used in a slew of stuff I don’t watch, like CSI, Ghost Whisperer, Alias, Without a Trace, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But since the 80s (also known as the best era ever), the song always makes me cry thanks to this scene in She’s Having a Baby. “Give me these moments back, give them back to me.”

More recently, I also really enjoyed Ricky Gervais’ use of the song in the series finale of the Extras to show his friend Maggie’s plight.

I know that some writers find inspiration in music. Our own Jonathan Hayes even created a playlist to accompany A Hard Death (love his warning that it’s “not for kids, unless they’re bad kids”). I’m not one of those people, but did last year decide while listening to Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance that it was the perfect song to narrate 212. Here’s the resulting book trailer, complete with ads that pop up when you use copyrighted music on You Tube.

So, how about it? What are the songs and stories that are forever married in your minds?

Character Matters

By Allison Brennan

In light of Alex’s post regarding Hollywood’s choice of actors to play Jack Reacher, I changed my planned topic (a boring look at the proliferation of social media) to talking about character.

In fiction, characters who resonate with readers have staying power. This may mean a series character — Reacher, Jane Rizzoli, Eve Dallas, Myron Bolitar, Harry Bosch, Mickey Haller, Joe Pike, Lou Boldt, Tess Monaghan, D.D. Scott — or a stand alone like … well, because I’m writing this off the cuff, I can’t think of a stand-alone fiction hero off the top of my head. (That also might be because it’s 12:50 a.m. on Sunday morning and I still have 2,000 or so words to write to finish this short story that has turned into a novella.)

There are heroes (Harry Potter) and villains (Lord Voldemort) and anti-heroes (Snape) who resonate because we see ourselves in all of them.

A great hero has flaws. A great villain has strengths. Just like real people.

The power of character has never been made more clear to me than in the outpouring of public criticism over the actor playing Jack Reacher. To me, this isn’t about the strengths or weaknesses of Tom Cruise–it’s about the creation of a hero who people have connected with so strongly that they are emphatic about who should — and should not — portray him on the big screen.

My daughter is a huge reader, preferring fantasy and dark paranormal. She devoured THE HUNGER GAMES and, other than her annoyance that a blonde–dying her hair dark–was picked to portray Katniss, “sees” Katniss in the shots she’s seen of actress Jennifer Lawrence. Yet, she feels strongly that Peeta and Gale have been miscast and that her VISION of the two would have the actors (Josh Hutcherson-Peeta; Liam Hemsworth-Gale) reverse roles. When we were at RT in Los Angeles, the decisions had just been announced, and our roomie Lori Armstrong and my daughter Kelly ranted over the choices for Peeta and Gale.

Multiply THE HUNGER GAMES three books by five (coming on 15 Reacher books) and you have the depth of passion for the character of Jack Reacher.

To me, this passion is amazing. To pull in such a diverse audience across the world who are not only gripped by the stories, but powered by the hero, is rare and wonderful.

I’ve read all of Tess Gerritsen’s books. I’m such a huge fan, that a good friend of mine found her six original Harlequin Intrigues at a garage sale and bought them for me. I don’t generally read category romance, but when I love an author I’ll read everything they write. I so enjoy the Rizzoli & Isles books, that I read each release the week it comes out. I’ll admit, I wasn’t thrilled with the casting choice for Maura Isles because 1) she doesn’t look the part (Maura has short, chic dark hair) and 2) she doesn’t act the part (Maura doesn’t talk as much in the books, and is not as clueless about interpersonal relationships, except of course not recognizing that Anthony Sansone is … ok, I digress.) But the actress is growing on me.

Jane Rizzoli, however, I felt was perfectly cast. She was exactly how I pictured Jane, except maybe with a little more confidence.

But for me, it’s about character. The Rizzoli & Isles television series has a different feel than the books. It took me a full season to separate the voices, and now I can enjoy them both for what they are. I don’t picture Sasha Alexander as Maura Isles when I’m reading, but because Angie Harmon was far closer in looks and personality, I do picture her. And I love both the characters (except of course when Maura was seeing Daniel Brophy, but we can all hope that she’s seen the light–fully.)

Okay, I’m sort of picking on Tess 🙂

Character matters. When we read characters who resonate with us, who make us want to be brave, who make as fearful, who bring out the best–or the worst–of our personalities, we have engaged with the story on an intimate level. We’re part of the story, not distant observers. And talented storytellers like Tess and Lee Child have given us those characters we can believe … believe in so strongly that we care not only how they are portrayed in film and television, but by whom.

But character is a two-way street. How we communicate our feelings shows our own character. The internet, and social media’s quick snippets of 140 characters, or 260 characters, or thousand word blogs, all give us a forum for voicing our opinions. And as a staunch defender of the first amendment, I’m glad so many people not only have an opinion, but a forum to share that opinion.

How we share our views shows our true character–it shows how we truly are, when no one is looking.

The Internet has create a world of anonymity even when it’s not truly anonymous. It’s so easy to voice our opinions instantly … but sometimes, even when we’re right or just think we are … maybe it’s better if we choose to remain silent. Or edit our opinion so it’s neither cruel nor personal nor a veiled threat.

Because character matters — in fiction, and in real life.

Who’s your favorite character and why? Who’s shown great character in real life?

Tom Cruise is Reacher

by Alexandra Sokoloff

I can’t believe I’m about to do this but lately I can’t go to any message board or listserv without running headlong into people from the mystery community whining about Tom Cruise signing on to play Jack Reacher in Lee Child’s One Shot.

I rarely find myself in the position of defending anything Hollywood does, but this tempest over Tom Cruise as Reacher demonstrates a ignorance not only of the workings of the film industry (which I actually hope any decent person has a healthy ignorance of) but an ignorance of filmmaking in general that is so vast and astonishing that I am just going to have to use my blog post today to rant. I mean, get this out of my system.

We’re book people, people, we’re supposed to be smart. And yet what are people obsessing over about this casting? “Cruise can’t play Reacher, Reacher is 6’5”.”

Seriously?

That’s all we’re getting out of that character and those books?

And here I had this idea that action has something to do with character. That there’s something about an iconic character that has to do with essence and soul. I thought that Reacher’s brains and the fact that he’s a walking (literally) archetype – a modern and completely fucked up – I mean wounded – knight errant had something more to do with his charm than – inches. I thought the actual stories – the Mission Impossible-like intricacy of Reacher’s plans and the way he is constantly able to rally the most unlikely teams of misfits to accomplish hopelessly lost causes had a little to do with the appeal of the books.

As much as I am in total favor of the objectification of male bodies, preferably as often as possible, to me Reacher’s size and six-pack are completely incidental to the man. But people are posting photos of their picks to play Reacher that would launch me into the mother of all feminist rants if people were posting the equivalent photos of female actor choices for – oh, say, Clarice Starling, Jane Tennison, Jane Rizzoli, Elizabeth Bennet. It’s embarrassing.

Would any one of us really want any of those slabs of beefcake who were hulking around the Reacher Creature party last Boucheron to play Reacher? Really?

I have seen some perfectly idiotic casting choices floated on boards and lists, and no, I’m not going to name names, because those actors might actually be fine actors. Or something. But we are not talking about repertory theater, here.

The height thing aside (and height in Hollywood is relative), there’s a whole hell of a lot more to playing a role like Reacher than acting. We are talking about a mega-million dollar movie that is supposed to turn into a multi-billion dollar franchise. You don’t just need an actor for Reacher, you need a movie star. You need more than a star – you need someone who can carry the movie. And not just carry the movie, but carry the franchise.

Carrying a film is something more than acting. It’s not a very tangible thing. It has to do with being able to be present as a unique character but also letting the audience inhabit you. It’s about being the point of view character, a vehicle for the audience, and the film’s authorial voice, all rolled into one. It’s why movie stars are rarely as good actors as the character actors around them are, and why character actors are almost never able to play leads. A lead actor can be acting his heart out and the movie will still be dead on arrival because the actor isn’t doing that other essential intangible thing.

And the more action and special effects going on, the more important it is to have a lead who can carry all that action.

Those wonderful actors who seemed to be rising really fast and suddenly disappear and are never heard from again? Well, maybe they’re on the rehab circuit, but just as probably they were cast in a film that was supposed to be their big breakout and they just weren’t able to carry the film.

Carrying this movie is going to be ten million times more important than size. I can think of a couple of actors, good actors, who seem to me physically perfect for Reacher, who in fact work just fine as Reacher in those random Reacher fantasies, you know the ones I mean – but who I wouldn’t want to gamble on being able to carry this film.

Tom Cruise has been carrying movies consistently since he was 21 years old. Ironically, what all these size-obsessed complainers don’t seem to realize is that Tom Cruise is one of the only actors on the planet BIG enough to carry a franchise that big.

And anyone who thinks Tom Cruise can’t act should go rent Collateral, or Magnolia. Or Jerry Maguire. Tom Cruise is a hell of an actor. You don’t have a string of dozens of successful movies over thirty years, the majority of which have made over two hundred million dollars each, and more, worldwide, without having something going on. Or would you like to try to argue that that list of movies succeeded in spite of Cruise?

Moreover, he is a terrific action star. He is a superb athlete and known for training for weeks on end to get the physicality of every action he performs in a film exactly right. Do you think it’s easy even to fire a gun convincingly on screen, much less perform the kinds of stunts he routinely does in the Mission Impossible films (not that I’m a huge fan of those, but that has nothing to do with Cruise)?

What exactly do all these naysayers know about casting, anyway? Give a major actor some credit for knowing what he can and can’t play. No one thought Dustin Hoffman could make a convincing woman and he only got cast in Tootsie by making demo films of himself as Dorothy Michaels to convince the powers that be that he actually could do it. But he knew. And after the fact, can you imagine anyone else in that role?

Well, newsflash: Tom Cruise knows a whole hell of a lot better than a bunch of mystery readers what he can do. This is not a man in the habit of doing things badly. Will he pull if off? Maybe, maybe not. Think about it. Any time we sit down to write a book we think we just might be able to do it some meager form of justice and from there we work like dogs and pray like hell. What makes anyone think it’s any different for an actor?

But we are talking about one of the hardest working and most passionately dedicated actors in Hollywood. I’d lay down money that Tom Cruise has a better idea of who and what Jack Reacher is than the vast majority of these posters. Character is his job and he’s been doing it brilliantly for over 30 years.

He’s a seasoned and successful producer as well, which I’m not going to get into, but you better believe it’s good news for the movie.

But I will say it is stupefying to me that a community of readers and writers, in all this ranting, seem to be saying not one word about what could go wrong with the script. Josh Olson, the original adaptor (adapted and was Oscar-nominated for A History of Violence) is smart, passionate, angry, iconoclastic – I was excited that he was writing the script. Christopher McQuarrie, attached as director, is doing his own adaptation of the book now. He’s most famous for writing and winning the Oscar for The Usual Suspects. All sounds good, right? But there’s no guarantee here that what ends up on screen will have anything to do with the story we know from the book. Personally I would hate to see the incredible ensemble energy of this particular story, the way all the seemingly minor characters come together as an unlikely and sympathetic team, get eviscerated to showcase Reacher going it alone. But that’s an optimistic view of what could actually happen, story-wise.

Instead of bitching about Cruise, we should be on our knees lighting candles to the movie gods that whoever ends up in creative control of this film (and that can change radically in between now and the film’s release) doesn’t decide… oh, let’s say… that the stakes aren’t big enough, and get the bright idea to make the villains the joint heads of the entire Russian mafia who have decided to take over the US and to do so have acquired a nuclear warhead which Reacher will be forced to dismantle while simultaneously trying to rescue his long lost and hitherto unknown son or daughter or, hey, twin son and daughter– with the loyal help of the dog the executives gave him to make him more “relatable”.

Oh yeah, there is a whole lot that could go wrong with this film.

There also is a chance that a very smart movie could come out of this. And if it doesn’t, it’s not going to be because of Tom Cruise.

How about putting some energy into wishing for a great movie? It’s rare enough that that happens. Does everyone really want to jinx that with all this vitriol before they even start shooting?

Finally, let me just say this. Reacher fans are the last people who should be complaining. We can have Reacher in any form we want, every time we pick up one of the books. Cast at will. And I guarantee that not one of us sees him the same way. That’s the beauty of fictional characters.

But look, this is Murderati, we’re all friends, here. If you want to talk about who really should play Reacher, here’s your chance to do it. Share the fantasies. Go wild. Link to beefcake shots, or Youtube exotic videos, I’m not going to object. Or tell us some books-to-movies that were perfectly cast, and why.

So who do I see as Reacher? Lee Child. It is entirely mystifying to me that anyone could not think so. And there’s not a living actor in Hollywood who could come up to that level of brains and sexy. But it’s not going to happen, and it shouldn’t.

Let’s all just GET OVER IT.

– Alex

Oh, and if there’s anyone left after all of that, The Unseen comes out in the UK this week, with maybe my favorite cover ever, it actually gave me a bad nightmare. Just don’t ask me who I’d cast.

On Amazon UK

SYNERGY

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

That was the buzzword when I worked at Disney Studios. I was the assistant to the Director of Marketing for BVI, or Buena Vista International. Disney had just established its own network of international distribution, where I had worked as a long-term temp (three months) before getting a real job (with real benefits) in the marketing division. This was right when Aladdin came out, to give you a point of reference.

Synergy, synergy, synergy. It was the era of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s famous internal memo about what was broken and what needed to be fixed in Hollywood. The memo targeted Disney Studios in particular. At this point, Katzenberg was best known for putting Disney’s animation films back on the map and, when he didn’t get the number two spot (behind Eisner) after Frank Welles died, he left Disney Studios to form SKG with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen.

Synergy was about getting all the different departments to “work together” for the common good of the studio. We were encouraged to stop inter-office bickering and do what was necessary to create an environment of success. Lines of communication were opened and barriers to progress supposedly eliminated. There wasn’t an inter-office memo that crossed my desk that didn’t include the word “synergy” in paragraphs one, six and eight. There was a bit of a cultish feel to it and there were a few subversives, present company included, who felt we’d stepped into the pages of a George Orwell novel.

The whole thing didn’t really mean that much to me. I had my own agenda.

Behind my new boss’ back I wrote my own inter-office memo and I addressed it to Jeffrey Katzenberg himself. Before getting my temp job at Disney Studios I had been struggling away as an independent film maker, which meant that I was cash-advancing my credit cards and beg-borrow-stealing my way through a maze of production services in an attempt to make 16mm and 35mm films. I had just finished shooting a half-hour film (the last film that Chuck Connors ever did) and it had completely broken me and drained all the resources I never really had. By this time my fellow producers (aka college buddies) had moved on to find normal jobs capable of sustaining normal lifestyles and I was left to carry the weight of the project on my worn-out shoulders.

I needed to re-shoot a couple scenes before going into post-production, and I made a desperate plea to Jeffrey for help (Hollywood encourages its members to call the big guys by their first names – Jeffrey, Steven, David, etc. Of course, I was to be called “Mr. Schwartz” the day HR escorted me from the premises, but we’ll get to that).

A few days after I rolled the dice I received a phone call from the President of Production at Disney Studios.

“Jeffrey received a memo in his inter-office mail yesterday,” he said.

“Yes?” I replied.

“I have to admire your balls for sending it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Jeffrey wrote a note on the memo that reads, ‘See if you can help this guy out.'”

I was ecstatic. The President of Production at Disney Studios was going to help me finish my film with Jeffrey’s approval! That day I went into my boss’ office (remember, I was a lowly assistant–although he allowed me to use the title “Executive Assistant” to make me feel powerful– to the Director of International Marketing) and told him what I had done.

“I’m glad you told me after you sent the memo,” he said.

I knew he’d be cool with it, he was a renegade, too, which became much more evident months later when he “accidentally” sold the same promotion to McDonalds and Burger King simultaneously. He then announced he’d be leaving the Land of the Mouse for a studio on “the other side of the street.” His actions caused me to become the Executive Assistant to No One, which did not instill in me a particularly hopeful sense of job security.

But I digress.

I started getting my ducks in a row with the President of Production and discovered that they actually rented all their production equipment, so I wouldn’t be able to get any free services. If I’d only needed post-production I might have been able to make it work, but since I had to do some reshoots I was out of luck. They could get me some great discounts and take a budget of around $100,000 down to $20,000 or so, but by that time I was about $60,000 in the negative. In the meantime, the cast and crew had disassembled and entered the great Hollywood diaspora, which means they all went looking for jobs. And my big star was getting older.

One day I got a call from him – “You gonna finish this film before I die, Schwartz?”

“I’m trying, Chuck!” I said, full of youthful bullshit.

Chuck Connors died before I could finish the film. He gave me the best performance that no one will ever see.

So, the whole memo thing ended up being just a neat little anecdote left to dissolve in the lore of Hollywood history.

After the Director of International Marketing (my boss) left, the President of the Marketing division took me and another marketing person to lunch to see what there was to work with. Ever clueless, I told him about my big unfinished, thirty-minute film and my experience with the memo. The President spent the rest of the lunch talking about Synergy, ending with the memorable quote, “At BVI we market films, we don’t make them.”

I went to my little cubicle and printed his quote in Times New Roman 80 pt and slapped it on the wall next to my computer. It was a way to remind myself that I didn’t belong here and I wasn’t going to let myself slip into the “machine,” further away from my dream of writing and directing films. The little note did it’s job because about a week later I was downsized from Executive-Assistant-to-No-One to So-This-is-Unemployment.

Apparently, I was not the most synergistic cog in the machine.

I’ve always had this self-destructive tendency. I’ve lost or quit numerous jobs in an effort to advance my career.

When we work for people we give them our most valuable asset – our time. I’ve always known this, even while working piddly summer jobs during high school. I can put almost no dollar value to my time. And yet we all have to, we can’t help it. We have to make a living. And so I’ve taken the jobs I’ve had to take and the jobs I’ve been lucky to get and I’ve demanded that I get more in return. Not necessarily more money. Instead, more education, knowledge, access. It might take years for me to acquire the skills I need from a job — the skills that will help me in my own efforts to become a better writer or film maker, but once I reach the saturation point, once I’ve got the job down and I’m not learning anything new, I have to leave.

This was a lot easier to do when I was young and single.

I’m just happy I’ve been able to jump off the treadmill for a while. For now my time is my own. I’m writing a novel and a screenplay. The screenplay is an assignment, but it’s fun and it’s exactly what I want to do. It isn’t causing any pain. And the novel is what I have to do for my soul, regardless of what other work I need to do in order to survive.

When I worked at Disney I didn’t know that, twenty years later, I’d be using the things I learned there to help manage my future career. Things like Synergy.

At Disney I learned that everything needs to be working together if the company is going to succeed. Now I’m the company. So I have a literary agent, a film agent, a film manager, an accountant and an intern. I’ve got a publicist and a publisher and an editor and a publicity department working behind the scenes. My job is to get everyone working together for a common goal. It’s not so easy, as many of you know. It’s not like these people wake up every morning thinking about me. They’re not paid to think about my career 24/7. Neither am I, for that matter. But I do it.

What’s cool is that it’s working. Not in a Big Disney sort of way, where Aladdin hits two thousand screens simultaneously world-wide and every department in the Disney Universe claims they played a part in its success. But in a smaller, still-effective way, where Stephen writes a blog and it posts on Murderati and all the folks who work to help grow his career read it and think, “Well, it looks like Stephen is still out there. Maybe I’ll make that call and get him that deal he’s been wanting.”

Now, that’s Synergy.