Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

Write Awesomely

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

JSB, Grand Canyon

In last week’s post I mentioned I would be driving all day, and that was quite true. Mrs. B and I needed to get out, get away, do something different. Cindy suggested we motor to the Grand Canyon, just to spend a day looking at something big, majestic, unsullied and quiet.

Turns out my wife’s instinct was right on the money. Scientific research suggests that several benefits flow from the experience of awe—“from happiness and health to perhaps more unexpected benefits such as generosity, humility, and critical thinking.”

In The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, Florence Williams emphasizes the need to get away from anthrophone. This refers to the soundscapes created by things like cities, cars, planes, machines, lawn mowers, sirens, neighbors with a teenager who is taking up the drums, and such like. The thing is, that noise goes into our brains and triggers our “fight or flight” receptors. Over time this can create chronic stress, a very real danger to our collective health and well-being.

On the other hand, natural sounds like a gentle breeze, flowing water, and singing birds are interpreted by our brains as relaxing and rejuvenating. In this state we are more creative and less hostile toward other human beings (hmmm…maybe people should only be allowed to tweet when in a forest).

Photo by JSB

The Grand Canyon is something to behold. If you’ve never been there, put it on your bucket list. Plan to spend at least four hours just looking at it. You can drive to various viewpoints, or take a shuttle bus tour, a helicopter flight, or even ride a mule for an overnight stay at the bottom. We opted for the viewpoints.

Grand Canyon = Awesome. Good for the soul.

Writing awesomely = Good for the reader.

What does it mean to write awesomely? At the very least, it means giving your readers more than a by-the-numbers story. Help them feel something beyond numbers. Tap into the inspirational. After all, that’s what the great myths were for. A hero overcomes tremendous odds so that we, the audience, might exhibit the same courage on our own journey through life.

Heracles kills the Hydra. He does so with a mixture of courage, strength and thought. Since cutting off one of the Hydra’s heads means two more heads replace it, Heracles has his nephew, Iolas, put a torch to each cut to cauterize it. And thus he dispatches the monster. Hey, maybe you can do the same when it seems your bills are like Hydra’s heads.

Or maybe you face a seemingly insoluble problem. If you approach it wisely, like Theseus in the Labyrinth, you can kill your personal Minotaur and find a way back to the world.

In our modern storytelling, we have mythic heroes of various stripes teaching us valuable lessons. Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) in Now, Voyager, shows us that inner strength and beauty can be developed even under the worst of circumstances. Atticus Finch teaches us that sometimes a losing battle is morally imperative. Heck, even Dirty Harry Callahan shows us that sometimes you have to do whatever it takes to save the innocent—especially a busload of children in the grip of a mad killer. Do you believe that? “Well do ya, punk?”

Driving home with Elixir in the trunk.

So one of the ways to be awesome is to be intentional about the meaning of your story. In my book, The Last Fifty Pages, I talk about the idea of a “life lesson learned.” My friend Chris Vogler, in The Writer’s Journey, calls this the “Return With the Elixir.” It’s what takes a story from tale to myth, from entertainment to exaltation. Why not go for it, every time out?

To prepare, take a little time each day to get away from the anthrophone. There are abundant apps and sites with nature sights and sounds. A fifteen-minute break every now and then seems almost a health mandate these days. So get quiet, forget about Twitter, and maybe the boys in the basement will mix you some elixir.

What is awesome to you? What natural sites have lifted your soul? 

What works of fiction have elevated you, given you a takeaway that is more than entertainment?

Reader Friday: Best Part of Your Writing Day

Posted on by

Jack Dann (Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons)

“Give the best part of every day to yourself. Get up early and write if you can. Once you’ve put words to paper, you’ve conquered the day. Then you can put bread on the table and beer in the icebox.” — Jack Dann

Do you have a best time to write? Are you able to get there consistently?

Your Reading Habits

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I was an early adopter of the Kindle. Like everyone else, I was amazed that I could have, say, the complete works of Charles Dickens—for 99¢ yet!—sitting inside this little device. And I could keep adding books to it, many of which came via deals in the Amazon store. Why else would I have downloaded Cybill Shepherd’s autobiography if it hadn’t been free?

The Kindle was my constant companion when I traveled by plane. In those early years it was a great conversation starter. People in adjoining seats would say things like, “Is that one of them Kandles?” I would happily expound on the volume and cost of my electronic library.

The Kindle has evolved, of course, and now comes in several styles and sizes, including a tablet. The coolest, and therefore most expensive, model is the Oasis. I’ve been toying with buying this for over a year…but then noticed something. I’ve been spending more and more of my reading time with the following:

1. The Kindle app on my phone. I rarely use my old Kindle now because the phone is always with me and I can easily access my library that way. The downside is I’m not reading e-ink, and therefore can’t read in sunlight. But I don’t do that much reading outside anyway. When I read on my phone I make sure I have my blue-light filter on and the screen a bit dimmer than normal, so my peepers don’t get overtaxed.

2. Audio books. Great for the treadmill or a long drive. The way I get most of these titles is via the Libby app on my phone.

3. Actual, honest-to-goodness physical books, with paper pages and everything! This has been the most surprising development for me. When I first got the Kindle I thought that’s how I—and everybody else—would be reading books from now on. But I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of holding a physical book in a comfortable chair. And so have younger readers. Millennials, for example, overwhelmingly prefer print books, and make healthy use of the local library. Imagine that.

So…how do you do most of your reading on these days? Do you use a dedicated e-reader (e.g., Kindle, Nook, Kobo)? A reading app on your phone? Or do you still like to crack open a physical book?

How much of your reading time is with audio books?

Are you mostly a book buyer or book borrower?

I am going to be on the road—literally, driving a car on a long strip of asphalt—most of the day. So please, talk amongst yourselves! I will try to check in later.

Should a Fiction Writer Use a Thesaurus?

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Dr. Peter Mark Roget

In college my roommates and I used to play a game with a dictionary. We cleverly called it “The Dictionary Game.” It was played with a big dictionary and scraps of paper. When it was your turn you’d look through the dictionary until you came across a word no one was familiar with. You wrote down the correct definition. The other players made up fake definitions that sounded right. The object was to fool as many people in the game as you could. You got a point if you guessed the correct definition. You got a point if somebody guessed your fake definition. The person who chose the word would get a point for every wrong guess.

I learned some cool words this way. The one that has stayed with me for over forty years is borborygmus. It means a “rumbling in the bowels caused by gas.”

This still cracks me up. It’s an onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like the thing it describes (although onomatopoeia itself is definitely not an onomatopoeia). And it makes for a great insult: You borborygmic swine! That’ll stop a bad guy in his tracks!

Which brings me to the subject of word choices. We have them. We have a whole passel of them (passel: a large number or amount). We even have a resource dedicated to word choices—the thesaurus (brainchild of Dr. Peter Mark Roget [1779 – 1869], a British physician and lexicographer).

Which invites (not begs) the question: should a fiction writer use a thesaurus? Mr. Stephen King has an oft-quoted opinion on this matter, as expressed in “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully—in Ten Minutes.” This article appears in the 1989 edition of The Writer’s Handbook, which I just happen to have on my shelf (you can also find King’s essay here).

You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.

Well now! What are we to think … I mean, what are we to surmise, suppose, conjecture, conclude, and determine about Mr. King’s rule?

Some might call it bunk (balderdash, bosh, codswallop, twaddle). But the context of this quote comes under the heading: Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. King wants you to get that story down, in flow. So much so that he has advice on another form of flow:

When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else but go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Ahem.

Anyway, I mostly agree with King. When you’re first setting down your tale, you should do so as expeditiously (swiftly, rapidly, efficiently) as possible. Don’t stop and go looking for a ten-dollar word when a buck or a fiver will do the job.

But I will offer a wee (used in the sense of little) exception. When King wrote his piece we were only in the beginnings of the personal computer age. At the time, King was using a dedicated word processor—a big (huge, bulky, Brobdingnagian) machine that did only one thing: saved your typing on floppy disks. Thesauruses (Thesauri?) were bound, paper books. It would take you precious flow-minutes to look up a word.

Now, of course, we all have personal computers with a Dictionary/Thesaurus app. I use mine most often to find a synonym for something mundane, like walk. Sure, a character can walk into a room. That doesn’t do much for the reader. So I open my computer thesaurus and in five seconds find: stroll, saunter, amble, trudge, plod, dawdle, hike, tramp, tromp, slog, stomp, trek, march, stride, sashay, glide, troop, limp, stumble, and lurch.

Recently, I was working on my NIP (novella in progress). I was writing a scene with a drug kingpin and his pet monkey. The monkey keeps shrieking. But I didn’t want to use that same word over and over. So I popped open the thesaurus and immediately found: scream, screech, squeal, squawk, roar, howl, shout, yelp. Just what I needed. I used five of them.

The alternative to using the thesaurus in this manner is that you sit at the keyboard for several minutes trying to come up with alternatives. But in this case “the hunt”— to use Mr. King’s term (expression, phrase, idiom, locution) — is faster and more efficient with a thesaurus app.

Is there another exception to Mr. King’s rule? I think so. I like to lightly edit my previous day’s work before jumping back into the first draft. When I do this I’ll sometimes find a spot where I wish to apply Mark Twain’s dictum: “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” A minute or two here pays off in stylistic coin that will please your readers.

So I’m not ready to discard (jettison, scrap, chuck, dump, dish) my thesaurus.

What about you?

Reader Friday: Songs and Memories

Posted on by

“Whenever I think of the past, it brings back so many memories.” — Steven Wright

What song brings back a vivid memory, every time you hear it? “It’s Too Late” from Carole King’s album Tapestry always takes me back to a high school summer, driving my Ford Maverick to Zuma Beach with my best friend, Randy Winter. Everything was so right then.

Kick the Writing Blues to the Curb

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Last month I wrote about the real effects to the brain from having to “slow think” through the current cultural miasma. Things like prolonged lockdowns, animalistic politics, and rampant lawlessness can lead to the blahs or the blues, with the consequent lack of enthusiasm for what we do—write.

Of course, writing resistance is nothing new. It can occur even in the best of times. Back when my career was getting off the ground I noticed something happening around the 1/3 mark of every manuscript. It was like hitting a wall. I’d realize I had a heckuva lot of book left to write. I’d freeze up at the thought. Did I have enough material? Was the premise solid enough? Were the characters sufficiently engaging?

To my relief, I found that other writers—even well-known ones—went through something similar. Their advice was pretty much the same, along the lines of “just keep writing.” Well, okay…but was that all?

There is a more strategic way to go about it. I hit on this recently after recalling something from Anne Lamott’s book on writing, Bird by Bird. She talks about actual panic setting in when you’re trying to write a full-length novel. You come to a point where you feel like you’re “trying to scale a glacier.” As you’re slipping around, negative thoughts “arrive at the desk like your sickest, most secretive relatives. And they pull up chairs in a semicircle around the computer…” She starts to feel as if “the well has run dry and that my future is behind me and I’m going to have to get a job only I’m completely unemployable…”

It’s then that she takes a deep breath and looks a blank, one-inch picture frame on her desk, to remind her that

all I have to do is write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame. This is all I have to bite off for the time being. All I am going to do right now, for example, is write that one paragraph that sets the story in my hometown, in the late fifties, when the trains were still running. I am going to paint a picture of it, in words, on my word processor. Or all I am going to do is to describe the main character the very first time we meet her, when she first walks out the front door and onto the porch….just what I can see through the one-inch picture frame…

The other day I came to my computer to work on my NIP (novella-in-progress) and got hit by the blahs. That semicircle of negativity Lamott describes was starting to form around my desk. I remembered the one-inch frame, and decided to make it even smaller. I determined that I would write just one line in the stalled scene, the next beat of action or dialogue. I also told myself that it would be enough for the day. Of course, that was a mental trick. I knew that if I wrote one beat I’d want to write another. And maybe another.

And that’s exactly what happened.

Soon I had 350 words done. Instead of keeping on, I took a break. I’d done a “Nifty 350” (which is how I like to start the day). I gave myself permission to stop. If I didn’t reach my quota on this day, no problem. I’m the boss. I can give myself a holiday.

But I found after awhile that I wanted to get back to the scene. When I did, I told myself to just write the next beat. Let the action unfold. And before I knew it I’d added another 250 words. This made me so happy I did take the rest of the day off. The boss was most accommodating.

So that’s my medicine for the writing blues. Just write that next beat. Let’s say you’re writing a scene where a cop is in a gunfight on the street. You know it’s a crucial scene. The anxiety begins to creep in. You’re not even sure how the scene will end. Write the next beat, and that’s all:

Harry wiped a bead of sweat from his eye.

Yes, the bad guys are out there, shooting at him. Don’t even think about them yet. Just write the next beat:

He blinked a couple of times to clear his vision.

What will be the next beat? Maybe firing shot…or maybe not. Maybe at this point you realize that going slo-mo is just right for this action scene (it often is). So for your next beat, you get inside Harry’s head.

What was it Donahue always drummed into him? “Ninety percent of a good shoot is vision. The other half is mental.”

And then it’s time for an action beat:

A brick exploded over his head.

What next? It’s up to you. By this time you’ll be feeling it again, getting into the flow. Stay with it for awhile. Bird by bird, word by word. Soon you’ll look up and have a Nifty 250. Maybe even 350.

Guess what? Do that consistently and in less than a year you’ll have a full-length book. That’s how you kick the blues to the curb.

Getting in your kicks lately?

Fun With Bloopers

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

We had some fun with typos recently. Fun, sure, except when they happen to you. I hate typos! They are the sand fleas of publishing. You shake off the sand from the beach, and you think you’ve got rid of them all. But sure enough, when you get in the car and start driving away, one shows up in your armpit.

So it is with typos. Even after paying a proofreader, you’re apt to get an email from an astute reader who will point out that a character should be eating out of “wooden bowl,” not a “wooden bowel” (an actual typo in a novel by a friend of mine).

Yes, typos can provide a chuckle. Even more amusing are bloopers, those verbal miscues from actors and speakers uttered over various airwaves.

The word “blooper” was popularized by a radio producer named Kermit Schaefer, who was the first to research and document these fluffs. He put out several books and a couple of LPs with them (in the latter, he sometimes reproduced the blooper with actors when he couldn’t secure a copy of the sound recording. But they were otherwise legit).

The blooper that got Schaefer started was made by radio announcer Harry von Zell in a 1931 broadcast honoring President Herbert Hoover. Von Zell told the audience they would next hear from President “Hoobert Heever.”

Oops. And on live radio there are no re-takes.

So, because I wanted to have some laughs today, here are a few of my favorite bloopers:

“And Dad will love Wonder Bread’s delicious flavor, too. So remember, get Wonder Bread for the breast in bed.”

“This is the British Broadcasting Corporation. Our next program comes to you from the bathroom at Pump…pardon me, the Pumproom at Bath.”

“And just now we’ve received a new stock of Reis Sanforized sports shirts for men with 15 or 17 necks.”

“Mrs. Manning’s are the finest pork and beans you ever ate. So when you order pork and beans, make sure Mrs. Manning is on the can.”

Laundromat commercial: “Ladies who care to drive by and drop off their clothes will receive prompt attention.”

Fight night broadcast: “It’s a hot night in the Garden, folks, and I see at ringside several ladies in gownless evening straps.”

On an early TV game show called Two for the Money, a young lady was asked her occupation.
“I work for the Pittsburgh Natural Gas Company,” she said.
“And how is business?”“Wonderful. Over ninety percent of the people in Pittsburgh have gas.”

NBC radio: “Word comes to us from usually reliable White Horse souses.”

Disc jockey: “You’ve just heard the front side of Doris Day’s latest hit, “Secret Love.” Let’s take a look at her backside.”

Steve Allen

But my favorite blooper of all time is really a “save.” It was made by the great Steve Allen. Most youngsters today have no idea who Allen was, so I’m glad you asked. He was one of the great natural wits. As the first host of the Tonight Show, he set the stage for late-night comedy ever after. When he wasn’t being funny he was writing songs…lots and lots of songs (the most famous of which is “This Could Be the Start of Something Big.”) On top of that, he wrote several books on subjects as wide ranging as public speaking and religion.

Here is an example of Allen’s on-the-spot wit. He was to do a live commercial for Fiberglas. There was a Fiberglas chair on the stage, and Allen was to hit it with a hammer and then announce, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this chair is made of genuine Fiberglas!”

But when commercial time came around the temperature in the studio was colder than usual. So when Allen hit the chair, the hammer went right through it, leaving a gaping hole. A major visual blooper that would have had most hosts stymied. But Allen, without missing a beat, looked into the camera and said, “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this hammer is made of genuine Fiberglas!”

Priceless. Which is why, when you can swing it, giving your character something witty to say at just the right moment delights the reader. But it’s not easy to do. One method I suggest in my book, Writing Unforgettable Characters and in a post last month, is “curving the language.” Write out a plain vanilla line, then bend it and play with it.

So a line like, “She looked like a million dollars” (cliché) can become, “She looked like a million dollars tax free” (Harlan Ellison). Or, “I became a made man when you were in high school” can turn into, “I made my bones when you were goin’ out with cheerleaders!” (Moe Green to Michael Corleone in The Godfather).

Your characters will thank you for saving them from bloopers.

Do you have a favorite blooper, maybe even from your own life?

Write a Big Moment For All It’s Worth

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

We all have favorite scenes from books and movies, story moments that hit us so powerfully we never forget them. One of mine is the stump clearing scene in Shane.

Then there are the moments that happen in real life. They can be little things, like the police officer who lay down on the floor to comfort a little boy.

Or they can be big, with millions of people watching. Of this variety, my all time favorite is the Kirk Gibson home run in Game 1 of the 1988 World Series. You could not have scripted it any better—a hobbled hero given one shot to save the day against overwhelming odds. Here’s how it went down.

THE BACKSTORY

The Los Angeles Dodgers had been an under .500 team for two straight seasons. Then they got the opportunity to sign a premiere free agent, Kirk Gibson, age 31. The $4.5 million investment paid off. Gibson won the National League MVP award, batting .290 with 25 home runs, 76 RBIs, and 31 stolen bases. He led the Dodgers to their first division title in three years.

In the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers upset the New York Mets in seven games. Gibson hit home runs in Games 4 and 5. But his knees were hurting. He needed injections to play. And then in the last inning of Game 5, while sliding into second to break up a double play, Gibson pulled a hamstring. Which meant he would be unable to play against the Oakland A’s in the World Series. That made the Dodgers huge underdogs.

THE SET UP

Game 1 of the Series was at Dodger Stadium. The legendary Dodger announcer, Vin Scully, was calling the game for NBC, along with Joe Garagiola.

The Dodgers scored two runs in the first inning. The fans were excited. But in the second inning, Jose Conseco of the A’s, he of the huge (i.e., juiced) biceps, hit a screaming line drive with the bases loaded. The ball scorched over the centerfield fence and actually dented a TV camera. That’s how hard it was hit. Just like that, it was 4-2, A’s.

The Dodgers got another run in the sixth, and that’s where things stayed until the bottom of the ninth. With the score 4-3, the Dodgers had to face the most feared relief pitcher in all of baseball, Dennis Eckersley. This future Hall of Famer simply did not lose ballgames. I will describe the mood of the crowd by lifting a line from Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s immortal poem “Casey at the Bat.” On that stricken multitude a death-like silence sat.

Gibson was in the Dodgers training room, bags of ice on his legs, watching the game on TV. Before the inning started, Vin Scully said the following: “If you’re in the ballpark with binoculars, your first thought would be, late in the game, is Kirk Gibson in the Dodgers dugout? The answer would appear to be no…There is no Gibson. The man who was the spearhead of the Dodgers’ offense throughout the year, who saved them in the league championship series, will not see any action tonight for sure. He is not even in the dugout.”

At which point Gibson sat up on the training table and said, “My ass.” He threw on his uniform and told the ball boy to set up a batting tee. After a few thwacks he told the boy to inform Tommy Lasorda, the manager, that he could hit.

Eckersley retired the first two batters. Lasorda sent Mike Davis in as a pinch hitter. Davis had not exactly set the league on fire. In his own words, “I sucked that season” Yet this journeyman somehow drew a walk from Eckersley! The tying run was now on first base.

And then Kirk Gibson came out of the dugout, bat in hand. As Vin Scully put it on the broadcast: “And look who’s coming up. All year long, they looked to him to light the fire, and all year long, he answered the demands, until he was unable to start tonight with two bad legs…and with two out, you talk about a roll of the dice, this is it.”

THE MOMENT

The fans at the stadium went wild. I went wild in front of my TV.

But we all became more subdued after the first two pitches. Gibson, looking feeble, fouled them off. The count was now 0-2, and I don’t think there was anyone on the planet—except perhaps Gibson himself—who thought he could survive. Eckersley himself remembers thinking, “I thought he was a lamb. I’m thinking I’m going to throw him a high fastball and he’s done.”

Meanwhile, Mike Davis was becoming a distraction down at first.

On the next pitch, Gibson hit a little dribbler up the first base line. As he hobbled toward the bag, the ball managed to roll past the foul line. A miraculous save!

But Gibson was still up there with two strikes. Eckersley’s next pitch was a ball…and the A’s catcher, Ron Hassey, almost picked off Mike Davis at first!

Sheesh, could this tension get stretched any further?

Of course it could.

Gibson fouled off the next pitch. Then another ball from Eckersley, putting the count at 2-2.

Another ball, and Mike Davis steals second!

Now we’ve got a full count, two outs, bottom of the ninth, the tying run on second. And all Gibson was thinking about was putting the ball in play to score Davis.

Then he played a little mind game on Eckersley. Just before the next pitch Gibson called for time and stepped out of the box. Let Eckersley think about it as the fans were screaming. At the same time, Gibson was remembering what a scout told him. If ever he faced Eckersley with a 3-2 count, you can bet your ranch he’ll come at you with a “backdoor slider.”

Which is exactly what Eckersley threw. Gibson stuck out his bat and flipped it with his wrists. It didn’t look like a hard swing at all, but it happened to meet the ball in just the right spot.

Vin Scully called it: “High fly ball into right field! She is gone!”

Gibson started limping around the bases. Scully, as he was wont to do, let the crowd noise do the talking for a long moment. And then, off the cuff, came up with one of his fabled phrases: “In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened!”

Gibson did not have another plate appearance in the Series, but the momentum from his home run carried the Dodgers to a five-game upset of the A’s.

Now that you know the story, you can have a look at it below. For me, this never gets old:

Lesson: When you write a big scene, write it for all it’s worth. Don’t hold back! Overwrite. Feel the emotions. Stretch all tension to the limit. You will edit the scene later to polish the rough edges. You may need to scale things back a bit for a greater effect. But get that raw material down first. Then your scene will have the potential to be a winning home run.

What’s a scene from a book or a movie—or real life—that has stayed with you? Why does it work?