Storytellersunplugged

It was Sunday at the L.A. Book Festival.  I’d just met Joe Hill for the first time (a quick greeting and a few words while on a signing line) and had hurried off to get Raymond E. Feist’s signature on some of his early work, thus to increase the books’ future salability.  Unfortunately, Feist wasn’t there; a personal emergency had come up.  I was left with one book left unsigned, by an author who was due to hold a signing in three hours.Rather than loiter at the festival, my companion and I left.  (And this is a lesson for all first-time convention or festival attendees: if you can avoid it, don’t have your panel, signing, or reading scheduled for late Sunday afternoon.  Even early Saturday morning, when many people will be too tired and/or hung over to attend, is a better time slot.)  While walking across the UCLA campus, she asked me an interesting question: After all the time I’ve been getting books signed, and with all of the autographed merchandise I have, had I gotten to a point where requesting one more signature wasn’t as exciting as it used to be?As with most good questions, the answer is both no and yes.  I thought it would be worthwhile to explain that here, as a means of insight into the minds of collectors, fans and dealers.

With Mother’s Day coming up, I’ve been thinking a lot about how my mom’s choices made me into the adult, the father and the writer I’ve become. (Thinking is easier and cheaper than shopping.)

And aside from concluding that my mom is better than your mom, I realized that she gave me a gift I don’t suppose many horror writers really ever got from their parents and other family. My mom didn’t just teach me to read, or encourage me to write, draw or make music; she never once, to my recollection, discouraged me from reading or writing horror, and never tried to make me feel guilty about honestly expressing myself, beyond her inveterate critical comment, “I think I’m getting a migraine.”

Many reading this might disagree, but I believe that much of horror lit’s inferiority complex begins in the home, and it’s deeply rooted in the writer’s psyche, by the time we start making friends and picking fights on message boards.

We all grew up reading the same anthologies in the 80’s boom, and each and every one was prefaced with variants, sometimes elegant, often pugnacious, on the defense of horror; proclaiming its prehistoric pedigree and its sneaky presence in so many mainstream classics, and maybe taking a stab at the catharsis argument, or a more daring poke at the real appeal such atrocious stories could offer to damaged/enlightened souls, and the subtle, superhuman powers conferred on them thereby. We shook our heads at the ignorance of our elders for banning EC Comics and marginalizing and editing Cronenberg and Carpenter movies, but we must have internalized the judgment on horror as frivolous and morbid at best, and corrupting trash, at worst.

Reading Stephen King, I have always wrestled with the paradox of how the most successful writer of all time could so plainly feel a deep stigma about doing what he loved to do. But King’s predicament always seemed weirder to me than it might to most, because I started reading King at age 8.

When I complained to my third-grade teacher about the lame in-class reading books, she gave me The Shining. She knew I loved monsters because I drew them on every piece of schoolwork, and she knew my mom, because I attended the school where my mom taught (never in her class, but got beat up monthly, just the same, thanks, Mom!). She did not clear it with my mom specifically, but she also took me to see Dawn Of The Dead and bought me my first Fangoria. (And yes, there were times when I wished Ms. Robbins was my mom. Two stupid times.)

My mom was not into horror at all; she loves anything heavier than Kurt Vonnegut would put her into catatleptic fits. I once tricked her into going to see Children Of The Corn, and she had a continuous panic attack from the opening meat slicer scene to the ludicrous flaming tomato god climax, but she didn’t drag me out, and she never asked me why I couldn’t stop laughing at the gory bits.

I hear a lot of other writers talk about how their families have problems with their work. Some of us who come from deeply religious backgrounds or conservative parts of the country often say that they have to lie or even hide what they write about, and while I think this conflict might give more of an edge to the work than otherwise, it often leads to a sameness of tone, that makes so much of modern horror collectively, I think, kind of a bummer.

I don’t think even a plurality of us came from physically abusive homes, and yet child abuse is a horror staple as ubiquitous as the showoff serial killer and the sexy kickass vampire hunter who’s also a vampire. I won’t say so much, but I’ll ask the peanut gallery, if their families disapprove of what they do, and how they cope, and most importantly, how it affects their writing.
But oh yeah, I was talking about my mom…
My childhood was messy even by 70’s standards, and I am told that I was a very angry kid. She claims not to remember big chunks of it, but I remember always feeling loved, despite all the awful things I did. (My worst fallout from reading The Shining was, I called another kid an “officious little prick” at school; he broke a clipboard over my head, and I stabbed him with a pencil… but he later claimed that the “big words” hurt the worst.)
My mom never spanked me; the worst punishment I could get was solitary confinement in the bathroom, until I turned twelve and she found my Walkman and comic books. She worried about me, but she didn’t try to medicate or change me. We went to therapy for a while, and it was kind of fun, and we went to church a few times in my whole childhood, always a different one. Maybe it was because she was feeling spiritually insecure, but I sometimes think she just wanted me to see what it was like. Now, she irregularly attends a nondenominational syncretic church with surfing monks, because nothing about it gives her a headache.
We traveled a lot on the cheap when I was a kid, and backpacked for weeks at a time in the Sierras. I read a King-sized novel almost every day, ate a box of Captain Crunch on the road (the only time I got sugary cereals was on the trail), and I learned to respect total silence, and to put complex streams of thought together over hours and days. I brought that peace back with me, and I can still have it, whenever I need it.
She seldom put her foot down about what entertainment I could consume, and sharpened my wiles with her feeble efforts to thwart me staying up all night watching Godzilla movies, or sneaking into Scanners or The Thing, instead of Popeye or Megaforce.
What I guess I’m trying to say is, my mom somehow nurtured my creative adult self without ever trying to tame it, so I never had to defend what I loved to do to anyone, until I started writing for money. I would never have become the writer I am today, I believe, if I were made to feel I was just printing the devil’s toilet paper.
Thanks, mom. (How’s your head?)

When I was a kid, and on into my teenage years, and a few occasions after that, by which time I really should’ve known better, I would sunburn on a world-class level. Still could, I suppose, but … no thanks. The fun’s gone out of it.

It’s these ancestral Northern Euro genes, which drained my hide of every last picoliter of ancient ancestral melanin. The result: sunburns so spectacular that, even after dark, having me around was like having a radiant sliver of the sun in the room. With pincers instead of fingers and my eyeballs mounted on stalks, I could’ve had a swell sideshow career as the Boiled Lobster Boy. For a time, it was even a point of masochistic pride, just seeing the drop-jawed reactions I’d get from friends.

Well, I’m paying for the good times now, eh?

Now I go to the dermatologist for annual damage control: precautionary, nip-it-in-the-bud stuff, tracking down any tiny pre-cancerous spots that, if left unchecked, could blossom into a problem one of these years. He nukes them with a few aerosol shots of liquid nitrogen. The stuff sits on the exam room countertop in a serious-looking stainless steel canister. Rupture a tanker truck full of it and you could freeze a T-1000 Terminator made of liquid metal — yeah, that stuff.

He puts the nozzle to my skin and pumps the trigger a few times. Under the burst of white vapor, the first couple never hurt. Then it starts to feel like a needle-sharp shard of ice being driven into the skin. So cold it burns — I’d heard that phrase all my life, but never truly grasped it until that first round of liquid nitrogen a few years ago.

What’s left in the aftermath is a whitish dab, flash-frozen, no longer skin-toned. Dead-looking, actually. The color comes back when it goes through similar stages as a burn: reddening, swelling, blistering, scabbing.

So as I sit here a few days after the latest round, my left forearm looks as though someone tried three times to stub out a skinny cigarette on it. A Virginia Slim, maybe. Three more in a line, like a strafing run, up my right cheekbone. The patch on the bridge of the nose, where the skin is thinner, has looked, fittingly enough, like a highly localized sunburn.

Unsightly? You bet. I look like I lost a bar fight to a VFW drinkslinger named Gladys.

After another few days, though, will come what always strikes me as a small miracle of resilience and regeneration. The skin will look fresh and smooth, a healthy pink rather than inflamed red. Baby skin, almost. The latent trouble that had been at the center of the spot — a perpetually dry flake, or a scaly patch the size of a pinhead — will be gone. A few more mistakes of callow youth, eradicated.

This time, though, it occurs to me that a similar process is taking place on the inside.

Under the skin, I’m a red, swollen, scabby blister.

Sorry if you’re eating right now.

*

In another folder on this computer, a Word file is growing. Not as fast as I’d like, but then, do they ever? It’s a novel that bears almost no resemblance to any I’ve done before. That’s as much by compulsion as choice.

It isn’t a comfortable process, but then, is it ever? Actually, it can be, at least by degrees, although I didn’t recognize the trappings of a comfort zone until I’d evicted myself from it. A lot of the writerly tricks I could rely on before are gone. They have no place here.

The novel is old enough to talk now, not as fluently as I hope it will someday, after it’s a bit older, but already it knows something of the world and human apprehension. We peer at one another through the window of liquid crystal.

“Do you trust me?” I ask.

It doesn’t answer right away. I don’t blame it for waiting. It’s seen me at high points and low, and the mood swings probably unsettle it. I’m pretty sure it’s registered the disappointment in my eyes when I find it doesn’t look as good today as I thought it did yesterday. When I’m expecting rugged beauty, and instead discover what’s waiting for me is this slimy, cruikshanked homunculus, stewed from my own blood and incubating in a vat of horse manure.

Maybe it notices the recent scabs and thinks I’m no prize either.

“You’re all I have,” it finally says, almost like an accusation. “Do you trust yourself?”

What a question. I keep showing up, don’t I? It’s not like I don’t have other folders to go to. Or could create from scratch, if it came to that. There’s always more blood and horseshit where that came from.

“Well enough to know I needed to make a change,” I tell it. “I … I just wish I’d met you earlier.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Because it knows better. Even when half-formed, novels possess their own wisdom, with insights unbound by time. “You wouldn’t have known what to do with me. You’re different now than you were then.”

“Better, you mean?” I ask, hopeful.

But it doesn’t say anything, not yet, and so I try not to read all the wrong things in the silence.

*

It may be the liquid nitrogen talking, but there’s a little part of me that wonders if, as a writer, I didn’t leapfrog from earnest hopeful to fledgling professional a bit too soon. I sold my first two novels back-to-back, a few months apart, when I was in my mid-twenties. They were things I’d been working on since my early twenties, and in part drew on influences and life episodes from earlier still.

Too soon? I know, I know, it’s heresy to even think such a thing. To anyone clawing for an inch of headway and digging behind the couch cushions for crumbs to feed their hope, there’s no such thing as too soon. Those tandem sales were the culmination of years of tenacity, and the weeks and months of waiting seemed to pass like bullet time in The Matrix.

But, in a way, they also set a template for the future. A path of least resistance. And now, so much of what was in those novels, and the things that informed them, and the path they opened up to keep following … not much of it seems particularly relevant any more.

Make no mistake, I loved those first two novels, and the other early ones that followed. Loved them one and all. How I burned to write them. How they got under my skin.

But that was a skin that started to slough off somewhere along the way.

It can happen in any walk of life: waking up one morning, or one year, to realize that the skin you’ve fashioned for yourself no longer feels quite right. The fit is wrong. It’s not you anymore. It mirrors something other than what you now feel inside.

A writer, as few others can, at least has the luxury of trying on new skins, and some are adept enough at it to become shapeshifters, switching back and forth between the old and the new. And it’s enough.

Sometimes, though, a skin just needs to be shed, by whatever means feel right and necessary. All at once, if that gets the job done. Or maybe by subjecting it to the slow freeze of a long, cold winter, winter on the inside, an icy stasis in which the plants die and the sap stops running, but with time enough to ruminate, too, and wonder what it is about this cold place that makes you want to take that skin you know and wrap it around yourself just that much tighter.

At least until the spring that you know has to come sometime.

*

The novel still hasn’t answered, even though its last words continue to hang between us: “You wouldn’t have known what to do with me. You’re different now than you were then.”

“Better, you mean?” I try again.

It bides its time, doesn’t quite want to commit, doesn’t want to lie, either. “Just … different.”

Fair enough.

And so we keep going for another day, a page or two or three at a time.  Slowly. The same way the best kind of trust builds.

GONE WITH THE WIND AND OTHER WORDS OF WISDOM

There are questions that many new or would-be writers ask me, an old or has-been writer, and I thought this a good month in which to share those questions.

Also my answers.

Q: Is it true that a good title is the most important selling point for a book?

A. Yes. For that reason, you should call your novel GONE WITH THE WIND.

Unless it’s a diet book, for which you might find a more suitable title.

Unless your original diet book title was THE LOW FAT, NO CARBS, FAT ASS DIET, which is almost as good as GONE WITH THE WIND.

Q. I’ve heard that poetry is booming. Should I pursue my interest in poetry with a thought to making it my career?

A. Take a look and you will see that most major cities that still have newspapers have column after column of “Poets Wanted” in the job listings. Poets are in every bit as much demand as radio repair technicians and buggy whip socket installers.

Think … Your Future in Poetry!

Q. If Oprah chooses my book will I become an overnight sensation, wealthy beyond my wildest dreams?

A. Yes, but it won’t happen. Oprah and I spoke yesterday. She says she doesn’t like you.

Q. There are many colleges offering degrees in creative writing. Should I think about creative writing as a major as opposed to computer science?

A. Definitely. There are over 400 USA colleges in the Associated Writing Program granting degrees at Bachelor’s or Graduate levels and more than a few of them employ my friends–while Columbia College in Chicago employs me. I’d like to see that employment continue.

Q. What can a writer expect to earn a year?

A. I don’t feel like showing you my W-2s or 1099s, but you should know that I now set aside one day a week, the day the Purolator truck arrives, just to count money.

You will not earn money like, say, a podiatrist or a the Minister of Recreation and Leisure in Iraq, but you’ll do more than all right.

Q. Why do so many writers have trouble with alcohol?

A. I’ll tell you if you buy me a drink.

Q. Should writers be active politically?

A. If I didn’t think this were so, if I didn’t believe that writers must be engaged in and active citizens of their world, then I wouldn’t be supporting Norman Thomas in the race for the White House.

Q. How come so many bad books get published every year?

A. You are buying into a common misconception. Research clearly shows that no bad books get published. Only good books get published.

Okay, there was once a bad book published. It was called GONE WITH THE BREEZE.

But Oprah didn’t choose it.

So it tanked.

Q. Why do so many writers like jazz?

A. They dig jazz, they dig it. That’s because Louis Armstrong gave advice to the band and to all of us when he said, “Not too slow, not too fast. Not half slow, not half fast.”

Q. Why isn’t there more substance to your column this time around?

A. Because last night I worked late to finish up a novella you’ll be able to read in DOORWAYS magazine. It’s called THE DOCTOR, THE KIDS, AND THE GHOSTS IN THE LAKE and it’s part of my “Imagined Hemingways” fictions and I’m at least 86% pleased with it.

Because today I taught a four hour class in writing and had conferences with two students, one of which was kinda tough, because the student is working on some reality based fiction dealing with his harrowing experiences in a recent war.

Because soon SOUTH PARK will be on and my wife Jane and I like to watch SOUTH PARK, thereby proving that we are hip AARP members.

Because sometimes these STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED columns can be just a little fun fluff foo-foo to write without the world suddenly shifting off-axis and heading for a collision with the planet Mongo.

Because I need a wee break before—tomorrow–I undertake writing my big new novel: GONE WITH THE MONSOON.

(Which Oprah’s already said she likes.)

So, yeah, I’ve been having a hell of a spring. I’ve been missing deadlines, having to back out of promised projects, and having constant sourceless panic attacks and bouts of serious doubt about the quality of my work and my ability to do it. It’s a precarious way to make a living, this writing gig, and there’s always the fear that you’re going to lose the mojo and that will be the end of that.

Anyway, I talked to my editor on the current book, and had to tell her that I just wasn’t going to get it done on deadline. I’ve never missed a novel deadline before; I still feel kind of awful about it. (It’s a bit of a point of pride for me to get work in early.)

But here I was having this experience where I could not think, or plot, or write, and it felt like every word was being dragged out of me as if with red-hot pliers. Usually, I write by inhabiting my characters, and suddenly, I couldn’t get into their heads. Usually, I feel story structures as a shape, a thing with dimension and weight and movement, and that had utterly deserted me. I had no sense of how anything worked, or if it balanced.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been so scared in my life.

So the past four months has been a learning experience. Especially since I could not figure out what was wrong with me.

Until I went away on a business trip and forgot to bring my daily multivitamin along. And whammo! Within two days, the panic attacks stopped, my confidence and usual sunny demeanor (hah!) re-established themselves, and I was thinking about stories. And the stories seemed interesting to me.

When I got home, I took my vitamin–and within two hours, I was back where I had been before I stopped.

Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I threw the damned things in the trash.

And today, one week later, I wrote 781 words that were not an agonizing grovel through misery and broken glass, and which I think actually contribute to the story I’m trying to write.

I think I’m cured. By Jove!

And I’m even more convinced than I ever was that brain chemistry, man, is a powerful and mysterious force. Oh, and also, I won’t be taking that brand of vitamin again.

And my editor has given me an extension on the manuscript, and if we bust our butts, we may not even have to reschedule.

…hey, check it out. A happy ending!

by Matteo Curtoni

I don’t know if it’s the same for some (or all) of you, but my stories are hungry. They’re always hungry and some of them are more than hungry - they’re ravenous. Of course they’re hungry for  love and attention, for the hours I spend working on them. But the hunger I’m talking about now is something different. It’s the hunger for the things that stories want to find inside my head when I’m writing, I guess. They sink their teeth into paintings and photographs that I just vaguely remember sometimes, into songs from obscure or not-so-obscure bands that I happen to find on Myspace, into pages from authors I love or I loved a long time ago, into pieces of news half-heard on the radio while I’m having a coffee in a bar. Anything, really. But I don’t think it’s up to me to look for the words and sounds and images that they need to feed on, so I let them find all that stuff where and the way they want - and I must admit that usually chance helps them with their hunger more than I could ever hope to do, even if I decided to try.
These days I’m writing a new novel called A Sud dell’Inferno - which means South of Hell - that’s coming out in January 2009, here in Italy. It’s set in Milan and deals with a sort of modern-day Sawney Bean Clan. (By the way, mesdames et monsieurs, if you’re not familiar with the deeds of Sawney Bean and his lovely wife Black Agnes Douglas, I warmly recommend you to check out their terribly amazing story.) And South of Hell is really, really ravenous… indeed one of the most ravenous stories I’ve ever written. While I was still working on the plot, it devoured Johnny Cash and Rob Zombie, 16 Horsepower and O’Death and The Flesh Eaters, passages from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary that had been haunting me for a long time and still haunt me today,  Harvey Bennett Stafford’s Muerte! - Death in Mexican Popular Culture and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Russ Meyer and Daniel Pennac’s Le Dictateur et le Hamac. It chewed and swallowed so many true crime stories that its belly’s still aching to this day and later it ate news about the fires that every goddamn summer turn some of Southern Italy to a wasteland of ashes and smoke and even ate some scenes from Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trailer.
I told you: it’s a ravenous book, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of it.
Now that I’m working on it full time (until last week I was working my head off translating The Mike Hammer Collection Vol. 1 and I didn’t have much time for anything else) it keeps feeding and feeding and I guess that’s appropriate enough, since hunger is one of its central themes.
I never, never try to find out why a certain story’s hungry for the things it feeds on. It would be a waste of time, probably, and I guess that it would feel somewhat unfair. I just let them chase their appetites the way they want, without asking questions, without investigating too much. I’m sure it’s not a matter of influences - literary and/or creative influences are something deeper and older and much more complex for me than the banquets that stories consume inside my head. Rather, I think it’s a landscape that stories ask me to create for them, a landscape made of pages and sounds and hints and fragments, that won’t necessarily be visible or perceptible between the lines once the novel will be written but that somehow creates a much more deeper focus on the creative process of writing.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I gotta go now.
There’s a ravenous novel that’s demanding for my attention.
Bon appetit to all your stories.
Best,
M.

by Gerard Houarner

Another in an occasional series of over-intellectualized approaches to writing which, at worst, will send you screaming into the internet abyss after the first paragraph or, if you get through a few lines, may remind you or jog into place a more coherent version of the notion you’ve had all along.

I’m not promising anything, I’m just throwing a bunch of suff out there….

Filters.

This is what you could call what folks, and characters, use to include and exclude information about themselves and the world.  Taking a look at characters in terms of the filters they use can be a means of generating and resolving conflict and developing emotionally satisfying characters.

I’m just saying….

We have a collection of these filters: ways of looking at the world driven by biological and psychological engines. They are ways we pick and choose (consciously and unconsciously) what we see, allow ourselves understand or influence us, or ignore. They range between logic based on “facts” (the belief in one’s logic and facts is, obviously, also a filter) and the purely emotional.

I know, they’re also called beliefs – religious, political – as well as values, interests, passions, biases, prejudices, perspectives, agendas, sensitivities, tragic flaws, faith, fetishes, appetites. They’re the (complicated) rules of the game we play, or don’t play, with ourselves and everyone around us.

But I’m looking for a term more specific than the usual “needs and wants” that sometimes serves as a basic sketch we might draw for characters as they come to life in our stories, and something not as limiting as those terms. I’m reaching for a framework that considers anything that could influence in an individual’s choices and still allow the imagination some room to play.

I’m choosing “filters” as the operative word because it describes the function of all those other aspects of ourselves and our characters. Like lens and noise and air conditioning filters, they alter our perception of the nature our environment, and our interactions with it as well as with ourselves. Their interplay determines what’s available to our particular decision making.

I’m also choosing filters because it implies active, constant choices being made, often unconscious.

We operate in spheres of perception – personality/background/training/culture/environment contribute to the filters we use to shape the reality that we perceive. And we swim through a world filled with resources, information, dangers and distractions, using filters to screen for what we want (again, consciously and unconsciously) to reach us and block out what we consider irrelevant.

As I writer, I’m on the look out for story and character ideas, and for material scratching my particular itches in urban environments, deserts, mythology and folklore, the bizarre and the fantastic. Those are some of my particular filters.

Apparently, I have filters designed to ignore all kinds of real money-making opportunities.

For others, significant filters may be based on a love for the Boston Red Sox or the latest fashions. Or a fear of water bugs or closed spaces.

For all of this filters stuff, volcanoes erupting, bombs dropping and asteroids crashing are pretty concrete aspects of reality that cut through all psychological games. Big stuff crashes through filters, re-shapes perceptions, which is also important to telling a story – as in The Stand and apocalypse stories in general.

But I’m thinking of the kinds of conflict that generate interesting stories that happen when spheres of perception intersect and culture/psychology filters clash, from two people sitting at a bar to two empires straddling a world.

On a personal level, filters you discovered or were taught to use, that helped someone get through a mad household or a tough neighborhood or an exclusive and socially pressured private school, are obviously conflict points once settings change. What worked in one place won’t in another. And other characters’ filters serve as barriers, or as resources and even solutions to problems.

(I don’t think I’m talking about Big Evil and Grand Good characters, here – Sauron is a force of nature, and frankly the elves and dwarves and Ents are pretty much one with what they are. But by the time you get down to the gaggle of hobbits, I think you can see the kind of external and even internal conflict I’m talking about that’s generated by different sets of filters.)

For example, if I screen out information that reinforces the fact that I am a 52 year old male with “limited” looks and athletic abilities (for whatever deep-seated psychological reasons, or simply because I’m an idiot), and instead allow information like “Telly Savalas was bald and he was still considered cute and studly” and “that waitress was nice to me so she must think I’m hot” through my reality filters, I allow for a lot of both tragic and comedic possibilities in my own private world as well as public and family life.

No, there are no examples on YouTube .

Besides glaring (and hopefully more subtle) “blind spots,” finely tuned filters also set up powerful character strengths – detectives, crusaders, mass murderers, that sort of thing.  They allow a character to be focused.  And as we all know, there is a cost for excluding information from our world even as there is a reward for specializing in a absorbing a particular set of facts and skills.

Being thrust into new situations leads to the discovery or the development of a brand new set of filters (and talents, of course).

Filters bring people together, and most interestingly, a single common way of looking at the world can form an allegiance among wildly different people (like, oh I don’t know, strangers trying to survive a haunted house or rampaging monster).

Obviously I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know about people and stories.

But sometimes, switching perspective on a writing problem can reveal interesting solutions. Since characters drive plot/story (sorry, one of my filters doesn’t let me see a plot driving a character – cars don’t drive people), it can be vital to dig a little deeper into the heads of even minor characters and see the world through their eyes, their filters, and find new ways they might behave and so contribute to the story.

So all I’m saying is, along with writing “bios” on your characters, or researching your historical figures until you know where they went to school and with who, or pulling stuff out of the “air” as you zip through your story, it can be valuable to make connections between whatever “facts” you’ve established about your character and the way they’re looking at the events unfolding in the story. That is, really explore what they are excluding, and what they might be picking up on, and how those filters might bring characters together or drive them apart.

One last filter note – editors have them, too. They’re called guidelines.

The Great Blow-Off-Your-Deadline Award

**awarded with bitter grimaces and squeezed buttocks to those writers who fail to read the fine print and fulfill their commitments**

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working toward a May 30 deadline in an attempt to finish a 70,000 word novelization. My publishers are trying to coordinate the on-shelf date with the film’s in-theaters date. With four weeks left to go and 26K words under my belt, I thought I was doing swimmingly–which, I guess, means I was keeping my head above water.

Then, this morning, I received an e-mail from my editor. Let me first say that my editor has been fantastic. She’s professional when necessary, encouraging at all times, and someone I consider a friend. In her usual gracious manner, she asked how my manuscript was coming along since she hadn’t heard from me yet.

Yet?

It was due yesterday, the first of May, she informed me.

What!

In my 41 years, I’ve enjoyed great health, but I thought I was going to have a heart attack. And if that didn’t do me in, I’d put an end to things myself. How could I have been so stupid? I checked my calendars, my web site, my day planner…In all of them, I’d put May 30 as the deadline. I went through my old e-mails with my editor, pulled out my contract from the heavy box on the top shelf in my closet…They all showed May 1.

I guess it’s part of life. We all make mistakes. We get wrong ideas stuck in our heads that we can’t shake. The consequences of such things can vary from minor to drastic.

After a few panicky e-mails to my editor, involving self-loathing and bent-knee apologies, I worked out a compromise with her that should keep us close to our intended release date. Will I sleep much? Probably not. Will the quality of the story suffer? I can’t help but think it will, though I’m hoping for the best. Will I show a little more grace the next time my daughters tell me they thought their homework was due next week not tomorrow? I will certainly try.

And now, in the spirit of the moment, I’d like to give my award acceptance speech:

I hate to brag, I really do

Since the award I’ve been given

Is nothing new

I’ve received it before

Without even trying

Deadlines are due

And I’m the one dying.

(Pinch hitting today, so my apologies for the lateness of this post. - J)

A scene is the most basic building block of a novel.  String enough of them together in the correct way and you’ve got a page turner.  Do it incorrectly and you’re almost guaranteed to have a flop.  Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my time as a writer, this is the most fundamentally important in my view. 

The average novel contains anywhere from twenty to sixty scenes.  Go ahead; count them and see.  There is a particular flow to a good scene and it is important to understand this flow before you can start messing around with it to suit your own style.  This flow consists of six standard parts:

Goal

Conflict

Disaster

Reaction

Dilemma

Decision

In any particular scene, your character has a goal he wants to accomplish.  While pursuing that goal he encounters a conflict.  That conflict ends in disaster, which prevents him from reaching that goal.  The character reacts to the disaster, be it physically, mentally, or emotionally, which forces him into a dilemma.  Does he do X or does he do Y to continue trying to reach his goal?  He decides on a course of action and a new goal.  Then the process starts all over again.

Look at some of your favorite scenes.  Think about them with respect to the six aspects mentioned above.  Can you see where each section comes into play?

One of my favorite scenes can be found in Robert McCammon’s SWAN SONG.  Two of the main characters, a boy named Roland and a former soldier named Colonel Macklin, are trapped in the cave-in of a survivalist’s refuge.  Macklin is the only one who knows the way out of the complex.  But his hand is buried beneath a ton of debris.  Roland must gather his courage and chop Macklin’s hand off at the wrist in order to free the colonel, and ultimately, free himself.

The goal would be their mutual desire to get out of the complex.  The conflict is that neither of them trusts the other.  The disaster is, of course, Macklin’s trapped limb.  They react to it individually and then as a team.  A decision is made, an action taken, and a new goal is then assumed.

A series of good scenes built in this fashion soon turn into a good novel.

So what do you do to make your scenes stand-out and assume a life of their own?  Let us know in the comments.

by David Niall Wilson 

I find myself in an odd position, at least odd for me. I almost always approach the plotting and creation of a new novel by starting with one element and branching out. For instance, when I wrote “The Mote in Andrea’s Eye,” it was because Trish asked me “Why have no hurricanes disappeared into The Bermuda Triangle?” When I wrote “Ancient Eyes,” I started with the desire to expand on the hill folk that were depicted in the movie Next of Kin. I wrote “The Fall of the House of Escher” because of the title. In every case, one thing led to the next, and I was ready to rock and roll. The rest of those stories fell into place almost magically.

Now I have one that is refusing to fit the mold. It started with the good old ‘what if?’ foundation that has served me so well in the past. I’m going to share some things here and hope that, if someone sees it and takes it before I get it into print, you’ll all remember where you heard it first. Hell, for reasons you’re about to read, I may never get the first line completed anyway.

I’ve seen a number of movies in recent years where the premise involves some form of time travel, or dimension shifting. I’ve read a ton of articles and commentaries on genetic research, DNA, and genetic memory. It all sort of gelled when I watched the recent movie DÉJÀ VU, and I thought…if the mind is a computer, and DNA is data, and the mind can access that data…what if the mind of one person could tap into the data in another person’s DNA? There was my ‘what if?’ - and I was off and running.

My basic premise came easy. There is a detective. He loses his partner in a particularly nasty crime that goes unsolved. Someone approaches the detective and explains that they might be able to help. They introduce him to a research group - very hush hush - that is working on just what I ‘what iffed’ upstream. They have found a way to allow someone, for a short period of time, to tap into the genetic memory recorded on another person’s DNA.

Here’s the thing. Even though this gives you theoretical access to a crime - assuming you can snag the proper DNA specimen from your victim, for instance - you can still only know what that person knew. You don’t’ get a magic window to the killer. You might also gain memories and knowledge from ancestors of the person you bonded with. In my version of this, the bond is tenuous and begins to break down after about forty-eight hours. This, then, would be the basic body / scope of a novel about this particular detective…he has 48 hours to solve a crime using bits and pieces of memory and knowledge known to one person from the crime scene…maybe time to do a second if he recovers fast enough, but of course there will be some danger in the process…reasons to go slow, and easy with it. It gives the detective an edge, but not everything.

When I got this far I thought to myself, self - this would make a great novel series, not to mention a TV drama series and a heck of a movie - very Philip K. Dicksian…very cool.

So I thought I’d sit down and write an outline and plot out the first book / pilot / whatever it turned out to be. I thought that several months ago. I don’t know the exact date, but my agent could possibly tell you as I sent him the idea almost immediately, all full of how I was going to set the world on fire - like I get from time to time. If you’re reading this, Bob, I bet you remember. That’s when it started to twist out of my grip, and that’s why I’m writing this essay on this topic, hoping that it will gel - come to life for me in some way I’ve missed, and allow me to plow on.

The problem is simple. When it came down to putting together the crime that would be solved -the crime that took the detective’s partner, or brother, or wife, or whatever, the damnable unsolvable crime was going to be…I had / have nothing. It would seem like almost any crime would do, but it won’t. It has to be something with levels of subtlety that can be brought out through bonding with the memories of the victim, who obviously didn’t see it coming, or they would not BE a victim. It has to be tragic enough to make a detective risk job, sanity, and his life to find the answer to it. In point of fact, what I’ve learned about this book is that it isn’t about the ‘what if?’ at all, but about the crime, and I didn’t bother to provide myself with such a crime when I was getting excited over my great new idea. In fact, I didn’t even bother to warn myself just how hard crafting that perfect crime might be, or how integral it was to the whole shooting match…

So here I sit, great whopping ‘what if?’ in hand, pounding my noggin on the desktop in search of the perfect crime. The moral of my story? Simply this…

Processes are imperfect, recalcitrant, hateful things that evolve very slowly into something unreliable enough to make you scream…and they are the foundation of our words. Be careful not to get too comfortable with the way yours works, because it’s a whole lot harder to revise that process mid-stream if you don’t keep your eyes open for possible pitfalls, and if you trust what has come before to lead you through what happens next.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find the perfect crime - and solve it backwards to my opening line.

-DNW