by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Before there was James Patterson there was Sidney Sheldon.

His second novel, The Other Side of Midnight (1973) was a monster bestseller. A string of #1 NYT bestsellers followed. Sheldon sold an estimated 400 million books before he died.

And he didn’t start writing fiction until he was in his early 50s!

Before that Sidney Sheldon led, if you’ll pardon the expression, a storied life.

He was born in Chicago in 1917, to Russian-Jewish parents. He almost committed suicide at age 17 (it wasn’t until decades later that he was diagnosed as bipolar). What pulled him back from the brink was writing. He pursued it with passion, and the results were astounding.

He had two hit shows on Broadway at the age of twenty-seven.

After World War II, he became a studio writer in Hollywood. His screenplay for the Cary Grant comedy The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer won the Academy Award for best screenplay of 1947. Sheldon was 30 years old.

Not that all this was a smooth trajectory toward the top. Far from it. Sheldon suffered as many setbacks as he had triumphs. He described the writer’s life (especially in Hollywood) as being on an elevator. Sometimes it’s up. Sometimes it’d down. And if it stays down, you need to get off.

Sheldon continued to ride that elevator in the 1950s. Up and down. He even had a great idea for a Broadway show ripped off from him.

In the early 60s he decided to take a crack at television. He created the hit series The Patty Duke Show, and get this: Sidney Sheldon himself wrote virtually every episode himself. Over 100 in all!

Do you know how absolutely amazing that is? To be that sharp and funny week after week? And all this while suffering from what at the time was called manic-depression.

But even more amazing was the personal strength and courage he and his wife showed through two highly emotional tragedies.

They had a baby girl born with spina bifida and, despite all the best medical care, she died in infancy. After a long period of mourning they decided to adopt a child. An unwed mother whose boyfriend had left her gave the baby up. They brought her home and for six months loved her and bonded with her.

But under California law at that time, the biological mother could change her mind within six months. This mother did, and one day the authorities came and took the Sheldon’s baby daughter away.

Sheldon and his wife turned to religion for solace. Sidney (now being treated with Lithium) continued to work. He started developing a new television show from an idea he’d had for a long time. It was about an astronaut who finds a bottle on the beach and frees a genie. But this genie would not be the big, lumbering, male giant of tradition. Oh no. This one would be a babe. That’s how I Dream of Jeannie was born.

During this time, the 1960s, Sheldon kept noodling on a thriller idea about a psychiatrist who is marked for murder though he has no enemies. He must use his professional skill to figure out who is stalking him. That became Sheldon’s first novel, The Naked Face. It was published in 1970 and won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America.

Sheldon caught the novel-writing bug, big time. Here he could create whatever world he wanted, without regard to budgets, sets, actors, or restrictions of any kind—especially the story-by-committee nonsense of Hollywood.

He had an unsold screenplay in his drawer and turned it into The Other Side of Midnight. Sheldon was 56 when this novel rocketed him into the literary stratosphere.

His last thriller, Are You Afraid of the Dark, was published in 2004, when Sheldon was 87.

Sidney Sheldon is the only writer ever to have won a Tony, an Oscar, and an Edgar Award. Let’s see if anybody ever does that again!

In The Writer’s Handbook 1989, Sheldon talked about his method. Here’s some of what he said.

The Secret

Sheldon was asked, What are some of the devices you have found most successful in getting your readers to ask breathlessly, “What’s next?”

The secret is simple: Take a group of interesting characters and put them in harrowing situations. I try to end each chapter with a cliffhanger, so that the reader must turn just one more page to find out what happens next. Another thing I do is to cut out everything that is extraneous to the story I am telling.

Simple to understand, yes. To put into practice book after book, well, that’s something else again. But you can learn how to write more interesting characters, how to make a form of death (physical, professional, psychological) hang over every scene (“harrowing situations”), and ways to end a scene or chapter with what I call a “Read On Prompt.” This is all to be filed under Craft Study.

Process

Sheldon was a “discovery writer” or “pantser.” But let’s hear what that actually meant.

When he began a book, all he had in mind was a character. He then dictated to his secretary, developing the character, bringing others in, letting them interact. “I have no idea where the story is going to lead me.”

But that is only for the first draft. Then came the work.

The first rewrite will be very extensive. I will discard a hundred or two hundred pages at a time, tightening the book and clarifying the characters.

A hundred to two hundred pages? Yikes! There’s more: “I usually do up to a dozen rewrites of a manuscript.” Yikes and gulp!

He would spend a year or year-and-a-half rewriting and polishing a book. This paid off, of course. Big time.

He did have a caveat:

I want to emphasize that I do not recommend this way of working for any but the most experienced writers, since writing without an outline can lead to a lot of blind alleys. For a beginning writer, I think an outline is very important…It is a good idea to have a road map to tell you where you are going.

The Leave-Off Trick

Like Hemingway, Sheldon would end his day’s work after beginning a new scene. Sometimes he’d quit mid-sentence. “In the morning, when you are ready to go to work, you have already begun the new scene.”

Also, he would begin his writing sessions by lightly going over the previous day’s work.

The Mid-Plot Blues

Sheldon said he usually wanted to give up in the middle of his novels. I experienced this early in my career and came to call it the 30k Brick Wall. I found that several successful writers reported the same thing.

Why should this be? Maybe because by 30k you’ve got the engine revved up and are now staring at that long middle, wondering if you’ve got the right foundation and enough plot to make it to the end. The writing willies, if you will.

Formerly, my solution was simply to take a day to brood and imagine and jot notes, maybe adding a new character or two. Then, once I started up again, one scene at a time, I would get back into the flow. That works.

Now I find that if I have my signpost scenes in place, especially the mirror moment, I don’t hit the wall anymore.

The Emotion Quotient

You get your readers emotionally involved in your characters by being emotionally involved yourself. Your characters must come alive for you. When you are writing about them, you have to feel all the emotions they are going through—hunger, pain, joy, despair. If you suffer along with them and care what happens to them, so will the reader.

Wise words with which we all should agree.

Minor Characters

I refer to minor characters as “spice.” They are an opportunity to delight readers, so don’t waste them by making them clichés.

Sheldon:

Every character should be as distinctive and colorful as possible. Make that character physically unusual, or give him an exotic background or philosophy. The reader should remember the minor characters as well as the protagonists.

I’ll close by recommending Sheldon’s memoir The Other Side of Me. I love reading bios of authors. This one is entertaining, instructive, and inspirational.

What do you think of Mr. Sheldon’s advice?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

The 20th Century gave us an explosion of legendary entertainers. So many on that list. A sampling in song would have to include Judy Garland, Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra. Music: Gershwin, Ellington, Glenn Miller. Comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel & Hardy. Dance: Astaire, Kelly, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. You can fill in your own favorites.

But there’s one name that deserves to be mentioned here, for he was a quadruple threat: he could sing, dance, and act equally well in comedy or drama. His star flew across stage, screen, TV, and Vegas.

His name was Sammy Davis, Jr. (the image capture is Sammy, age 6).

I recall seeing two of his movies as a kid. In Sergeants 3, a 1962 remake of Gunga Din set in the Old West, Davis plays Jonah (the Gunga Din role). He’s the company bugler. At the crucial moment the wounded Jonah crawls up to a cliff to sound an alarm on his bugle, saving the day. I don’t remember any other scene in the movie except that one.

The other movie is Robin and the 7 Hoods, a 1964 musical set in Prohibition-era Chicago. It has Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Bing Crosby. But it’s Davis who steals the show, especially with the song “Bang! Bang!” (again, the one scene I remember).

Davis began as a child-prodigy dancer, and moved easily into singing. His career took off in the 1950s. He made memorable appearances on TV shows—variety, drama, comedy—all the more notable because of two things: the entrenched racism of the time, and the near-fatal car accident that took one of his eyes.

He also battled inner demons, drugs, and alcohol—yet whenever he performed, he gave his all. Audiences knew that.

Which brings me to today’s subject. Are you a quadruple-threat writer?

Can you plot?

I love plot and its mate, structure. We all know there are two preferred methods to go about this. “Discovery writers” find their plot while wearing loose pants. “Plotters” develop it before the journey.

But find it you must, which means driving along Death Road.

The stakes of the plot must be death—physical, professional, or psychological. The road must have certain signposts, the markers of structure. You must know when and how to drive through the Doorway of No Return, stop for a look in the Mirror, and how to race to a surprising and satisfying ending where the reader will thank you and ask when your next book comes out.

Yes, some writers disdain the idea of plotting. I recall an article by a “literary writer” who admitted she was one of these. But then she learned the value of plot, and fell in love with it. Her book sales went up as a result.

Like Sammy Davis, Jr.—learning the basic steps in tap before he could start to set loose with his own style—you can learn the basic elements of plot. I humbly refer you to my book on the subject.

Can you character?

Do you have a Lead worth following? Is your Opposition stronger than the Lead, with a compelling reason to oppose? Are both these characters fresh in surprising ways?

Are the other members of you cast orchestrated—sufficiently different so they may be in potential conflict with everyone else?

Are even your minor characters delightfully distinct to add spice to the plot?

Characterization can be equated with the unique steps a dancer adds in tap. The fresher, the better.

Can you dialogue?

Is your fiction talk crisp? Do the characters use it as a compression and extension of action? Do they have different cadences so they don’t sound the same? Are you skilled at planting exposition and subtext within dialogue?

I’ve long held that dialogue is the fastest way to improve any manuscript. In you first-drafting, it’s where you can really play and improvise, like a great actor might in a scene. Then you can craft it into the kind of fiction talk that gets the attention of readers, agents, and editors.

Can you scene?

Are your scenes structured to include a clear objective, obstacles, and an outcome that is a setback (or a success that leads to a setback)? Do you get into most scenes in medias res (the middle of things) and end them so the reader is prompted to read on? Do you plant mysteries and secrets? Is there tension throughout, even when friends are involved?

Let’s watch an example.

This is Sammy in his last performance, in the joyous movie Tap. At this time he had the throat cancer that would kill him just a year later. Yet here he is, going toe-to-toe with the late, great Gregory Hines. The setup: a group of aging tap dancers live together in a combo rooming house and dance studio run by Mo (Davis). Max (Hines), just out of prison, comes for a visit. He and Mo get into some banter over dance style, when Max shades him with, “You ain’t got no legs.” Mo takes that as a “challenge.” A challenge is when all the tappers get together and try to outdo one another. Mo calls the oldsters in for the challenge. The subtext is that Mo is sick, and is not supposed to dance anymore. This is enforced by Mo’s daughter, Amy (Suzanne Douglas), who conveniently is not around. Every one of these tap dancers, in their 70s and 80s, are legends of the form, from Howard “Sandman” Sims to Harold Nicholas (not to mention another prodigy, young Savion Glover, watching). They proceed to strut their stuff, and oh, what stuff it is!

And then, at the end, Sammy Davis, Jr., the quadruple-threat entertainer, gives his all one last time:

Get proficient in plot, characterization, dialogue, and scenes. Then you, too, will become a master tapper…of the keyboard! You’ll be a quadruple-threat writer.