John Ramsey Miller

A friend of mine called me last week and said an old friend of his gave him a short story written by this friend’s 14-year-old son. He thought it was very good, and asked if I would read it and see if I agreed. Kids need encouragement, and I always try to offer an eye and encouragement if I can. We’ve all read drek by the bucket load, and since I have free time here and there, I said sure. We’ve all seen these stories written by young people, and mostly they don’t amount to much. I mean they show some glimmer of promise or they don’t, but judging the potential of a young person by a few pages doesn’t mean much. The 7 pages were single-spaced, and printed on both sides of the pages, and in blue ink. When I got them, I was working on building a structure on the place, so I folded the envelope and stuck in into my back pocket. I forgot about the pages, it was hot, I sweated, and the ink ran some.

Two days later, I finally unfolded the pages and read them, and they were excellent. This kid needs to mature, but I believe he has what it takes. Opens on a rainy night in an alley––a man with a freshly killed (huge) corpse lying on asphalt. Here’s an exert:

“He was here. It was done. Nothing left to do except run. He fumbled with the gun for a moment, wondering whether to dispose of it, or carry it with him. He shoved down in the pocket of his gray trench coat. As he pivoted away from the body and turned onto the sidewalk, he reached into his left coat pocket for his cigarettes. The pack was drenched, but inside there were dry ones left. He stepped underneath the awning in front of a closed-down pawnshop and fished his lighter out of his pants pocket, with some difficulty in maneuvering around his trench coat. He attempted to light the cigarette, but failed. He was out of lighter fluid. He reached into his other pockets looking for matches, but could find none. It was all right, because he was trying to cut back.”

I forget when I was reading that a fourteen-year old wrote it. The short story is well done and entertaining, but mostly it’s exciting to find a young person who thinks about something other than video games and who seems to have been called to tell stories. The kid is thoughtful and already understands character, economy of words, how to set a mood, and he plays his story play out like fishing line …with a nice sharp hook at the end. Yes, it is amateurish in many respects, but there’s a lot of talent there and I am sure this young man will evolve and mature and add something to the world that is hungry for new voices and stories.

How many of us have discovered a young voice and offered encouragement? And how many of these offerings have we had to trudge through to find one that makes it all worthwhile.

By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com/

Have you ever stopped to think about what the reading process really is? We process spots on the page as letters, which we then combine to form words. Each word has a precise meaning, and when we combine them in our heads, the words form images that can be every bit as vivid as an image projected onto a screen. When you sit down to read a “good book” (the phrase means different things to different people), the images become more real than the physical environment in which you are reading. The plight of the characters who are trying to survive become far more compelling than the reality of your reading chair.

When I teach writing classes, I refer to this process as the magical transference, and I try to get students to recognize just how fragile it is. As a reader, when you’re in The Zone, it only takes a single word, or a single abberant act on the part of a single character to eject you out of the story. Once ejected, you may or may not return. For me, when I look back on a terrific read, my judgement has a lot to do with how thoroughly I have felt connected with the story.

As an author, I realize that none of that is coincidental. Just as my connection with the stories I love was intentionally engineered by the authors of the books I love, I bear the sole responsibility for providing that same experience to my readers.

It’s about “voice.”

People who know me tell me that when they read my books, they hear my voice telling the story in their heads, and it sort of creeps them out. From where I sit, it’s the highest compliment. And it’s not accidental.

When I write a scene I’m always keenly and consciously aware of what the scene is meant o convey. If it’s a relationship scene, I can take my time. I can use longer sentences with more complicated structure. If it’s an action scene, on the other hand–say a shootout–then rapid-fire staccatto sentences are the order of the day. And through it all, I strive to be invisible. I have no interest in impressing readers with my vocabulary (as if it were big enough to do that), and I have no plan for them to marvel at my turns of phrase. At the end of the day, I just want them to become lost in my stories.

My formula is to bond readers to my work through my characters. A friend of mine, whose books outsell mine by a factor of ten, freely admits that his chacaters are an afterthought–that plot twists drive his plots. At then end of the day, we both get to the same place–a good story well-told–but our routes of travel couldn’t be more different.

What do you think? How important is the magic spell that defines reading? How aware are you at every moment when writing that every new word threatens the magical spell? How do you make it all work for you?

At the end of the day, is it all just pure f%$#ing magic?

By John Ramsey Miller

http://www.johnramseymiller.com

When I was in Miami, 17 years ago, a boy of sixteen was killed by one of two off-duty policemen late one night. Andrew Morello was the sixteen-year-old son of dear friends of mine. That was terrible enough, but what followed was a cover-up by the police for a bad shooting. I didn’t write the story for the Miami Herald because I was too close and emotionally involved at the time. And I was involved because I knew Andrew, and I knew he was a good kid who loved his parents. Andrew was dead for being in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time. What might have been a tragedy turned into a life destroying event because of several things that happened afterward.

That Saturday morning I was in the shower in my home in Coconut Grove when my wife came into the bathroom and said, “John, Andrew Morello is dead. He was killed by the police.”

I learned that Andrew and three of his friends were stealing speakers from a vehicle, and the alarm went off and two off-duty cops ran out of their house and shot Andrew. He was shot in the heart, and his friends drove the van to his aunt’s house a few blocks away. She called 911. Someone cancelled the ambulance, saying it was not needed. The tape of the cancellation somehow was accidentally erased before a voice pattern could be charted. It was obvious that someone, nobody knows who, didn’t want him to live.

The female cop who shot the gun said Andrew was trying to run her down, but his two friends said he was backing up when the shot was fired. The windshield with the bullet hole in it was “accidentally” shattered by the cops before the Morellos’ independent investigators could test it. The CSI’s own test seemed to prove that the cop was not where she claimed to have been when the bullet hit the windshield and supported the evidence that Andrew was not driving toward the cop, but was turned in his seat so he could see while he was backing up away from the cops as the other boys testified. In the end, the two friends with him went to prison because Andrew died and they were taking a radio or speakers out of a Jeep. This was only really covered by the alternative newspaper, NEW TIMES, and it was covered well. The Herald wrote very little about it. The Morellos tried to have this tried by suing the police, but a judge ruled they couldn’t sue the police and closed the investigation, which was performed by the police department whose cops were involved.

The event put me at odds with Janet Reno, the Attorney General, and she and I had heated arguments about the fact that she would not investigate the police, but accepted their “evidence”, saying that I should bring her evidence of a cover-up. I told her that discovering evidence was her job. My wife can attest to her angry calls and our heated debates over the phone. At the time I knew Janet Reno a little, because I had done portraits of her for a NEW TIMES cover article. She was mad at me at the time for using a picture of her wearing bad glasses, but I doubt that was why she refused to investigate unless I came up with evidence of a cover up.

The Morellos have a large Italian family––a close knit bunch who live to love and love to live. Susie and I were taken into their family after I spent a week at the family’s pawn shop in North Miami Beach doing a piece for the Miami Herald’s Sunday Magazine titled “Pawnography”. Every Thanksgiving we had dinner with Joe and Andrea and their large extended family. Turkey and Lasagna. Andrew’s death all but destroyed that family. Not so much his death, as the unfortunate aftermath of it.

The point of this rehashing is that Andrew’s mother sent me an email saying that she wanted to write Andrew’s story. Not with a book in mind, but to tell the story from a mother’s perspective. She said a lot of her friends and family said she should forget it, that the past should left in the past. I sent her the Faulkner quote about the past. I want her to write that because I want to read it. It won’t matter whether or not it is published, because I think it will help Joe, and the family to heal and put it in their past. At least I hope so. I wrote Andrea that until she puts the past to bed, she can’t truly see her future. I know Andrew would want her to be able to do that. I received the first 13 pages and it was all I could do to read them. My wife cried as she read those pages. Of course it was personal for us and we saw the suffering first hand and love the people involved. Reliving the past can be painful but a healing experience. Losing a child is the worst fate a mother and father can experience, and after 17 years it is no easier for them.

And there were letters to the editor and calls and letters to the Morellos (all anonymous) who said all three boys should have been killed, and one that said that if they had raised Andrew right he would still be alive. How people can do this is simply beyond my ability to understand how people can be so cruel in the face of this heart-breaking event. Yes, Andrew was doing the wrong thing, at the wrong time, but he was a child being influenced by other kids. Andrews father owned a large pawnshop and he had tons of speakers that Andrew could have taken with Joe’s blessings, and that haunts his father. It all haunts his parents and friends, including myself. The Morellos are people of integrity and compassion and they didn’t deserve what happened. I believed that the shooter did nothing but make a huge mistake, and that what happened after was the true crime. I don’t believe the cops set out to murder a child, but that they over reacted in the worst way possible. Those cops, who were married, have to live with what happened––killing a child, and the rest of us have to live with the ramifications of their mistake. What haunts me most is that Andrew would have grown up and become a productive member of society because that was where he was headed, but he never got a chance to become that man.

The future is so uncertain that these days I think about the past more and more and it is clearer than it used to be. I guess my mind has polished the rough spots until it’s all glass smooth. Some things cannot be polished until they become smooth, and this is one of those. It was a horror and a tragedy and it changed all of us who were involved. Now when I write what loss does to good people, I do so from painful experience.

“The Past Isn’t Dead, it isn’t even past.”