I read the story that Ray refers to (”The Lake”) recently and it really is a tremendous piece of work.
Archive for the 'Writing' Category
Okay, so I haven’t been showing Crabapple Cove much love of late, but I’ve been feeling a little tired and uninspired. I’m sure you know the drill. There’s also another reason — I’ve been moonlighting. I ran across a solicitation for contributors from national site Examiner.com. I cycled through their wants, did not see a listing for a correspondent for cartoons and animation, and politely asked if they’d be interested in having one. Oddly enough, they were. After a surprisingly rigorous application process, they offered me the gig. Actually, I shouldn’t use the word “gig” since that implies there’s money to be had. While there is some compensation, it’s pretty minimal — but cash wasn’t really why I signed on. I’ve been doing the column for almost a month and, while I’m still finding my voice and drafting my long-term plan, I am rather enjoying the process.
Stop by, have a look, and tell me what you think…
I must confess that I’m not too familiar with Ira Glass (or his radio program This American Life), but his advice on writing and storytelling is very direct and reasonable. Check out what the man has to say…
“I will not carry a gun… I’ll carry your books, I’ll carry a torch, I’ll carry a tune, I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even hari-kari if you show me how, but I will NOT carry a gun!”
This blog is called “Crabapple Cove” because that small town in Maine is the birthplace of Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, the comic hero from the television show MASH. That program began its eleven year run on CBS in 1972, but I’m sure I didn’t become hip to it until it hit syndication (I was, after all, only six when it debuted). I have vivid memories of watching MASH on the tiny black and white TV in my parents’ bedroom. Invariably, in these memories, the sun is still up and I am stretched out on the carpet in my pajamas. Though I was definitely not six, I was probably still much younger than the show’s target demographic. MASH just latched onto my young brain and has not let go since those earlier, simpler times. Why do I think that is? A knee-jerk response would be ‘Because it was funny’, but the real answer is Hawkeye. That character, with his deep-seated distrust of authority and his facility for lobbing witticisms in from the sidelines, had a tremendous impact on my burgeoning psyche.
I’m sure I didn’t realize it at the time, but there are two reasons why Dr. Pierce was so vivid to me as a child. The first was Alan Alda’s performance. It was impeccable. With charm and sincerity, Alda made Hawkeye someone I wanted to emulate. The second reason was Larry Gelbart. Mr. Gelbart, a brilliant comedy writer, was given stewardship of MASH by the network, and it’s his comic sensibilities that permeate the first four or five seasons. Go back and check out some of the early shows on DVD and you’ll see what I’m talking about. MASH isn’t just funny, it’s idiosyncratically funny. It has a point of view and a rhythm which indicates — to me at least — that a single man with a vision was at the helm. Mr. Gelbart was the originator of said vision. He wrote the words and Alan Alda made them sing.
Larry Gelbart died a few days ago and I didn’t want to let the occasion pass without a tip of my metaphorical chapeau. Mr. Gelbart was an unwitting architect in the shaping of my own sense of humor, and I just wanted to thank him properly for all the laughs.
Post Script:
The aforementioned Mr. Alda has weighed in with his thoughts on the matter. Check it out.
Also, here’s Mr. Gelbart’s last interview, given to Vanity Fair Magazine. (Actually, this is an excerpt from the book And Here’s the Kicker, which I reviewed here. A terrific book.)
Harlan Ellison: Dreams with Sharp Teeth is a documentary about writer Harlan Ellison. Ellison, who’s name has come up a time or two on this blog, is a well-respected and prolific author of essays, teleplays and short stories. Within the literary and science fiction communities, he’s something of a legend. That being said, however, he’s hardly the household name that he, perhaps, deserves to be. I can well understand how some of you reading this might say ‘I don’t know this Ellison guy… Should I bother with the movie?’ The answer to that question is a resounding ‘Hell, yes.’
First of all, let me just say that if you haven’t read Ellison’s work, you should seek it out. The guy writes like a proverbial sumbitch. He’s really very, very good. Experiencing his work, as I say, is not a prerequisite to enjoying the documentary, however. The simple reason for that is that Harlan himself is enormously entertaining. If there were a competition for World’s Angriest Jew (and, by God, don’t you think there ought to be?), Harlan would be right there in the running. The depth and breadth of his ire (on a wide range of topics) is damn funny — partly because you can’t believe just how incensed he can get and partly because you agree with nearly everything he says. I laughed a lot watching “Dreams with Sharp Teeth”, and by the end, I was thinking I should pull my copy of The Essential Ellison down off the shelf again. The entertainer (and the businessman) in Harlan Ellison would no doubt be very pleased.
Author Neil Gaiman (who’s gotten a fair share of virtual ink here at the Cove) appeared on Comedy Central’s Colbert Report last night. Here’s the clip (I particularly like the bit about The Lord of the Rings):
Colbert very clearly is a dyed-in-the-wool geek — which makes him strangely endearing.
Harlan Ellison is at it again…
According to chud.com, the venerable writer is suing Paramount and the Writer’s Guild of America for lack of proper compensation related to “City on the Edge of Forever”, the 1967 episode of Star Trek which he penned and which is widely regarded as a classic entry from the original TV series. Here’s a snippet from the Chud piece:
Ellison is known almost as much for his fierce protection of his work as he is for the work itself, and has frequently gone to court to seek vindication. The issue in the past has been how much of it was warranted and how much was frivolous ego-tripping. In this case, Ellison’s suit states, “To some extent, this case is about the degree to which the producers have co-opted the WGA and how the WGA in various ways improperly screens out contractually legitimate claims by its individual members to avoid rocking the boat,” The dollar figure isn’t stated in the suit, but Ellison is going for the deluxe litigation package of performance, compensatory, consequential and punitive damages.
I love this guy!
Here’s a link to the whole story on chud [and I think their original source was Variety].
This is by far the best three and a half minutes I spent all day. [It's Harlan Ellison so, yes, there's some salty language.]
Here is the second of my Flash Fiction experiments. Obviously, I went a little overboard with the length this time (it’s something like 1800 words as opposed to 850 like the last one).
And, just so we’re clear, I’m not passing off any of these stories as be-all-end-alls. My goal at this point is to finish as many of these stories as possible and, after a period of time, find that I am happy enough with some of them to evaluate them for re-writes.
Anyway, hope you enjoy…
Morningstar:
I’d spent the morning canvassing West Hollywood – talking to bartenders, beat cops, and some friends of Lilith’s who lived on the border to Beverly Hills. At eleven a.m. sharp, a black sedan pulled up beside me and a brutish voice said, “Get in”. Actually, I’d expected them sooner.
Two hours later, they dumped me at Union Station downtown. Their car was still moving and I rolled to a stop in the gutter – tired, wet, and badly beaten. From out of nowhere, a long, well-manicured hand slid into my bleary-eyed view. I took it and it helped me out of the street and onto the sidewalk. Rance (the owner of the hand) was dumbstruck by sudden appearance. “How’d you know I was here? I was gonna call you.”
I bent my spine back until it cracked and this made my new companion wince. “They’ve been following you too. Actually, they were tickled that you were already at the train station. They said the two of us could fuck off together. Maybe share a sandwich on the train.”
“Charming. Hey, you look like hell.”
There it was: Rance’s penetrating observational gift. “It’s been a rough morning. I spent most of the last hour with my head submerged in a toilet bowl. Forcibly, before you ask.”
“It looks like your nose is broken.”
“Yeah, something about me sticking it where it doesn’t belong. These guys’ve obviously seen too many gangster movies.”
We started walking toward the station, and I was drawing some disdainful stares. A cop near the entrance was minding our business a little too closely for my tastes.
“What’d you find out before you got pinched?” Rance asked, clearly eager to get to his own findings.
“Nothing useful. I traced Lilith’s movements on Friday night; got a picture of her state of mind. People that knew her said she wasn’t herself. Her behavior was erratic; she was scared. No one saw her more than eight hours before her body was found. At least no one honest.”
Rance smiled a smile full of mean little teeth. “Looks like I’m a better Sam Spade Junior than you.” He removed a tiny manila envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “Maybe I’m the one that should’ve gotten the beating.”
“The day’s still young.” I opened the envelope and dropped a silver key into my palm.
“Goes to a locker,” Rance said. “A locker in there.” He pointed toward Union Station and seemed about to bust with pride.
“Handy. Where did it come from?”
Some of Rance’s enthusiasm melted away, and his voice dropped to a more sympathetic register. “Lilith’s stomach. The autopsy. We had a man on the inside.”
“Don’t we always? So, you’re telling me Lilith ate this key before she was killed?”
He nodded once.
I held the key up so that I could see it more clearly. Etched into it was the number six-sixty-six. The locker number and Lilith’s idea of a joke.
As I write this, it’s 2009 on the East Coast. We still have three hours here to go on the left side, so I’m safe in squeezing in a quick New Year’s resolution — but first, a book review…
The Review:
Immediate Fiction by Jerry Cleaver is about as “no-frills” a book on writing as you’re likely to find. Cleaver has a very simple philosophy regarding craft and he doesn’t waste a lot of time with the bells and whistles. In fact, he’s very superstitious of most of the things you’re likely to find in other books of this kind. He refers to things like beginning, middle and end; character progression; and theme as “critic words”. They’re not things the working writer thinks about (at least not unduly) when he is crafting his tales. Apart from a very straightforward rule-set, Cleaver stresses that there are no substitutes for intuition and good, old fashioned hard work. The ethos presented here strikes me as very Blue Collar. Writing is treated like a job — albeit a creative job that calls upon different personal resources than, say, digging ditches. Cleaver doesn’t shy away completely from the “touchy-feely” aspects in that he does do a chapter on Writer’s Block. But even this section of the book is direct and doesn’t overindulge in hand-holding. I do have one (relatively serious) complaint about Immediate Fiction before I move on to the Resolution part of this post… Given the “meat and potatoes” nature of Cleaver’s approach, I felt there was an unnecessary amount of reiteration in the book — almost as though the author was padding the text just so he could reach standard book length. I suppose that one could argue that reiteration is a part of teaching, but, even still, I thought there was a bit too much of it here.
Qualms aside, I was left admiring Immediate Fiction, and I feel that the philosophy it espouses is fairly close to my own nascent approach. Which brings me to the Resolution…
The Resolution:
I’m glad I enjoyed Immediate Fiction since it will be the last book on writing I will read in quite some time — at least through calendar year 2009. It’s time that I faced a few simple facts:
- Talking about writing isn’t writing.
- Thinking about writing isn’t writing.
- Reading about writing isn’t writing.
- Only writing is writing.
So then, my goal in 2009 is to become productive. I’ve already begun this process by starting with very short short stories — preferably less than 1000 words (the first of those stories appears here). I do three drafts per story and the I move on to the next one (I’m currently on story number two). My expectation is that, during the course of the year, I will allow myself to write longer stories, but I want to make sure I finish each one before I start another one. Of course, it would be terrific if I could start a novel during the year, but I will only do so if I feel like I have a firm grip on the process.
Anyway, wish me luck.
Long story short, I’ve been getting more into both reading and writing lately. It’s a comfortable place for me to return to in these troubled times, and I’m digging on both activities immensely. Recently, in surfing around ye olde blogosphere, I stumbled across a term I’d not heard before: Flash Fiction. I’ve seen multiple definitions on just what F.F. truly is, but basically, it’s just really short short stories — say, 1000 words or below. The form came into vogue primarily because of the internet; a story that length can easily be slapped up onto a web page and digested by the user in a reasonable amount of time. ‘Intriguing,’ thought I. ‘Maybe I should try my hand and this, how you say, Flash Fiction…’ And so I have. Here’s my first ever short short story made especially in a bite-sized chunk. I found cranking this baby out to be a pleasurable experience, so I expect I’ll do more. Let me know what you think…
Awake:
Underneath the searing pain, Ruth saw a tiny, beckoning glimmer, and she recognized it for what it was: relief. The question would no longer be hers to answer; the responsibility would fall to someone else. Another wave of agony rolled through her. The chest into the arm, the chest into the arm – the left arm. Her vision contracted to a pinhole, a rippling tear surrounded by black. Through it, the porch. The porch Henry had painted three days before he died. Her home for the last fifty-two years. A fitting place for this. She listened, but she did not hear Daniel’s voice, or the clomp-clomp-clomp of his sneakered feet. “Now,” she whispered. “Now would be good.”
The pinhole dilated closed, completing the ebon field. Sound collapsed away too, like the inrush of too much water into the ears. Then the separating, the tingly disjointedness. The pinhole reopened, and the porch was replaced with… replaced with… One word came to mind: “Disney”. Amber, orange, blue, red, green, purple, yellow, and white – like a Technicolor cartoon of the forties, and everything was suffused with the scent of honeysuckle. A momentary flash of herself as a child – maybe six – standing by the fence of her parents’ home, patiently drawing the white tube from the heart of a honeysuckle flower, placing it in her mouth, and relishing the tiny beads of nectar.
“Take my hand.” The voice was Sharon’s – to the right and clear in a way that no voice had ever been. Without ears, without ear canals, without cartilage, bone or blood to obscure the sound. This was a voice not heard in almost four years and it was all the sweeter for its heart-breaking clarity. Ruth held out what she thought was her hand and she felt Sharon take it. She felt every line, every fold, every crease of their palms conjoin, and she felt their two pulses synch in their rhythm and become one.
Over the sound of their commingled heartbeat, Ruth heard a new rhythm, a familiar rhythm which unnerved her and which she tried to ignore.
A Dirty Little Secret:
Let me preface this, my third article on plot, by making a little confession: I talk to myself, albeit in written form. Some people reach a conclusion by thinking out loud. Me, I write out loud. Whenever I have a problem to work through, I begin to write, dissecting all of the aspects of the situation until I reach some logical conclusion. Let me give you a for instance: I follow the practice quite a bit when I’m hashing out a storyline. Opening a trusty spiral notebook, I will ask myself a question like “What is this character’s motivation?”, and then I will write until a lucid train of thought evolves (or, as is sometimes the case, doesn’t). My personal notebooks are shot through with these little solo conversations. Needless to say, I don’t share these rambling discourses with anyone, and that’s a good thing since I fear I would have been institutionalized long ago had I made them public. The funny thing is, with these semi-recurring entries on “plotcraft”, I’ve outed myself as “therapeutic essayist”. But the cat’s out of the bag now, so let’s forge ahead…
Third Time’s The Charm:
In looking over Plot Envy Part One and Plot Envy Part Two again recently, I noticed a lot of the neurotic self-bantering I alluded to above. Clearly, here is a guy who, after two essays, is still conflicted on the subject of plot. In part one, I make a gutsy promise to forgo Old Habits and get a handle on plotting once and for all. In part two, I belittle the guy who wrote part one, and I mount a hasty defense of the aforementioned Old Habits. Let me just say that I think there are valid points in both articles, but strangely, neither of them mention an irrefutably vital element of all drama. This omission is very telling and it points up my longstanding Achilles Heel as regards plotcraft. Here now is that irrefutably vital element: Conflict.
There’s an old axiom: “drama is conflict”. Without conflict, you have two guys in an empty room with nothing interesting to say or do. If you want a story you’re going to have to get the two guys mad at one another. But, let’s be clear: Here’s a charmingly folksy definition of conflict… One guy (let’s call him “The Protagonist”) wants something. Another guy (let’s call him “The Antagonist”) doesn’t want him to have it. The Protagonist, seeing The Antagonist as a clear obstacle to his want, takes action until one or the other of them falls and the whole thing comes to a (hopefully) satisfying conclusion. The tug o’ war between those two guys is the essence of conflict and thus the essence of drama and thus the essence of plot. Of course all of this is a fairly grotesque oversimplification, but it is, I feel, a reasonably good definition of the plot mechanic. Simple, right? So, why do you suppose it is it took me three essays to reach this conclusion? Well, I’ll tell you: I’m not good with conflict. I have a tendency to avoid it in real life and that impulse, sadly, carries over into my fiction writing. But here’s something I’ve been telling myself lately and I’m coming to believe it’s true: At least in terms of crafting plot, Politeness Doesn’t Pay. If everyone’s getting along, then what you have is a boring, stillborn story. Make your characters mad at one another, have your hero want something and take it away from him; then you’ve got something. Do you want to craft a good story? Be mean to your hero.
Anyway, I think I’m feeling comfortable enough with this whole notion of plot to let it lie for now. No doubt I will have more to say on the subject of writing, but this particular thought train has reached the station. Until my next bout of public neurosis, I bid you adieu.
I worry sometimes about how my writing style has evolved in this bullet-point-only, blog-on-demand world where so much of our communication is overly-chummy and, worse, unclear. I’m all for writing which speaks directly to the reader, but I also enjoy a point — preferably a point which is delivered artfully with clean English sentences. After completing my recent freelance writing gig, my head was stuck in Non-fiction Prose Land. The fact that I am re-reading Roger Ebert’s terrific “Great Movies” essays has only served to keep me there. Last week I found myself wondering if there was an equivalent to By Cunning and Craft for non-fiction writers. I’m happy to report that not only is there such a book, it can be had cheaply.
On Writing Well by William Zinsser has been in print for over thirty years and I’ve been ignoring it for close to twenty. I think it’s the title: On Writing Well sounds like a philosophical treatise for grammarians. Since I’d rather read a compendium of celebrity laundry lists than a treatise for grammarians, I never gave “Writing Well” a proper looking over. As it turns out, this was my loss. The book, though it does get into technique, is never stuffy or preoccupied with rules of usage. The chapters on craft all deal with clean, clear communication. Zinsser, a veteran writer for newspapers and magazines and a former teacher at Yale, also delves into writing for particular markets. Travel, Sports, Science & Technology, Humor, the Arts, and Business each get their own concise, well-reasoned essay. But the thing which impressed me most about On Writing Well was Zinsser’s emphasis on the writer’s voice. He encourages aspirants to use first person and to allow opinion and personal experience to inform the work. As a writer, he argues, your most valuable asset is you — your style and your point of view. He drives this point home with surprising warmth and with clean English sentences.
On Writing Well is a terrific book for those interested in non-fiction styling and, as I mentioned, it can be had cheaply. I first examined the fifteen dollar paperback in the Writing and Publishing section of my local Borders. Then, on my way out and quite by accident, I stumbled upon the seven dollar hardcover in the Bargain section. Same content, cheaper price. Go figure.
A few months ago, I posted a jaunty little essay called Plot Envy wherein I vowed to pay greater heed to plotting in all of my personal fiction writing. While I admire the aplomb of my younger self, I’m forced to take issue with his naiveté. There’s a lot of posturing in Plot Envy but almost no strategy, a lot of what, but strangely little how.
In thinking about it further, I’ve concluded that plotting for plot’s sake is a mathematical exercise doomed to yield soulless results. Starting with plot and ending with plot isn’t storytelling, it’s puzzle-making. There is now and always has been a market for these sorts of puzzles – the Mystery and Science Fiction sections of your local bookstore are full of them – but that isn’t the sort of writing I’m interested in. To me, the best kinds of stories – the stories that last – are the ones that elicit genuine emotion or reinforce some core human value. This cannot be achieved without interesting characters with whom we empathize.
Oddly, I mock my own predisposition toward character in my original essay. Here’s a sample: “I tend to create a character and follow him to see where he goes, taking notes all the while like a cub reporter or some kind of half-assed literary peeping tom”. Upon reflection, I don’t see anything wrong with this approach as long as it isn’t allowed to proceed without regard to premise. My understanding of the word premise is that it is the springboard or gist upon which a plot can be built. Plot is the series of events which connect together to deliver on the promise of the premise. While either a strong character or a strong premise can provide the impetus which sets the writer to writing, both should be considered in conjunction with one another if the goal is a story with emotional resonance. As we’ve seen, if premise is fleshed out into plot without regard to character, the result is the Puzzle Story. If character is the springboard and premise is largely ignored, you get the Character Study. Again, both can be valid forms, but neither should be viewed as holistic. As an aside – and as something which is strictly a matter of personal taste – I would choose Character Study over Puzzle Story were I forced to adopt either approach. But then math never was my strong suit.
One of the observations I made in Plot Envy was that it is good to know your ending so that plot can be reverse engineered toward that conclusion. I am sure there is some truth to this, but taking it as a universal principle would be a mistake. I would wager that just as many writers don’t know their ending at the outset as do. Furthermore, I’m afraid there’s a danger in following the know-your-ending rule too assiduously. Down that path lies plot for plot’s sake and the awesome power of the unconscious mind to invent is waylaid. If an ending comes organically, then it should be honored. But since writing is not truly a mathematical exercise, it could be wrong to discard a story simply because an ending doesn’t immediately suggest itself. If the tale’s other elements – character, premise, setting, theme, etc. – are compelling, the work should be allowed to breathe for a while before it is aborted.
Anyway, here is my evolving strategy (such as it is): When plotting, throw two stones into a pond. One stone is character and the other is premise. Where the ripples intersect, plot begins to form. Perhaps this sort of thinking is at least a small step between the what and the how.
I mentioned in a previous post how most books on writing aren’t particularly useful. Part of why I think that is can be boiled down to just one word: mollycoddling. Half of the manuals on craft don’t belong in the “Writing & Publishing” section at all — they belong in “Self Help”. The tendency seems to be to view the wannabe author as a psychically wounded wreck who’s in need of a gentle hug. While I’m sure there’s some truth to this stereotype, relating to prospective writers in such a touchy-feely manner isn’t the way to get them writing consistently.
By Cunning and Craft by Peter Selgin never mollycoddles. In fact, reading this book made me nostalgic for my college days. I was fortunate enough to get my BA from a school with an excellent English department. In all of my writing classes we wrote, we talked about writing, and that was it. There was no psychobabble and precious little hand holding. The fact that Selgin is a published author and a teacher himself no doubt contributes to his no-nonsense approach. His advice is uniformly lucid and useful.
By Cunning and Craft was a pleasant surprise, and a book I will no doubt revisit.
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