I was stunned this morning by the news that YouTube, Twitter and Facebook are going to merge. They will all conglomerate onto one massive site called YouTwitFace.
Yes, this is April 1, and also Reader Friday. So when have you been fooled big time? Or, on the other hand, what tomfoolery have you unleashed on others?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
What is the most famous ending of all time?
I’ll cast my vote for Casablanca. It is certainly the most popular. The first time you see it you can’t help but be moved. Some people weep. Others feel an uplifted respect for things like duty and honor.
And then it hits us with the famous last line: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Why does this work so well?
Let’s start at the beginning. Rick Blaine is an American running a night club in French occupied Morocco during World War II. He sticks his neck out for nobody. He’s trying to forget being betrayed by the woman he loved, Ilsa Lund.
And then she and her husband, Victor Laszlo, turn up at the club.
You know the story.
If you don’t, shame on you. Go watch the movie before you write another word.
Intrigue follows, until at the end Rick is at the airport with Ilsa, who looks remarkably like Ingrid Bergman, and she’s ready to leave her husband and go away with him.
But then Rick stops and tells her no, this is wrong. If we go through with it we’ll regret it, maybe not now but soon and for the rest of our lives.
And yet: “We’ll always have Paris. Here’s looking at you, kid.”
Rick has sacrificed the thing he wants most in this world. He has done it for a higher good (no longer will he say, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”).
He’s also put his very life on the line, for he has killed the Nazi major in front of the French police captain, Louis.
But in a stunning reversal, Louis does not arrest Rick. Instead, moved by Rick’s moral courage, he himself sacrifices his position of power to go off and fight the Nazis with Rick.
What’s happened?
Rick, who has been living as an isolated dead man walking, has offered to sacrifice his life … and has been resurrected.
Hm, why am I thinking about that on this particular Sunday?
Because the central Christian message of sacrifice and resurrection is the shaping force of our civilization. Even if one does not celebrate Easter, or is not religious at all, it must be acknowledged that there is something in us that vitally responds to a sacrifice for the greater good.
Which is why Casablanca resonates.
And why sacrifice in fiction moves us.
It can happen in genre fiction, such as Dashiell Hammet’s classic, The Maltese Falcon. At the end Sam Spade has within his reach the woman he’s fallen for, Brigid O’Shaughnessy. He loves her even though he knows she’s a liar and manipulator. But he’s a sneaky PI who had an affair with his partner’s wife, so maybe they actually belong together!
But Spade gives it up, because there’s a principle involved:
“I don’t care who loves who I’m not going to play the sap for you. . . . When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it.”
After Spade goes through his reasons, he says to Brigid:
“Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.”
“You know,” she whispered, “whether or not you do.”
“I don’t. It’s easy enough to be nuts about you.” He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. “But I don’t know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever?”
Finally, Brigid plays her big card.
She put her face up to his face. Her mouth was slightly open with lips a little thrust out. She whispered: “If you loved me you’d need nothing more on that side.”
Spade set the edges of his teeth together and said through them: “I won’t play the sap for you.”
She put her mouth to his, slowly, her arms around him, and came into his arms. She was in his arms when the door-bell rang.
Spade, left arm around Brigid O’Shaughnessy, opened the corridor-door. Lieutenant Dundy, Detective-sergeant Tom Polhaus, and two other detectives were there.
Spade said: “Hello, Tom. Get them?”
Polhaus said: “Got them.”
“Swell. Come in. Here’s another one for you.” Spade pressed the girl forward. “She killed Miles.”
So Spade lets the police cart Brigid off to her inevitable appointment with the noose. With this sacrifice, Spade “wins” because he has upheld the moral order of his particular universe.
Even before Christ, the resonance of sacrifice and resurrection was inside us––almost as if we’d been wired for it. Around 438 BC the Athenian playwright Euripides presented Alcestis. In this play a king named Admetus is due to kick the bucket. But he is given a gift by the gods––he does not have to die if he can find someone to take his place.
No one is anxious to step in for that particular service, except his wife, Queen Alcestis. She does this so her children will not be left fatherless and she a grieving widow. Plus, she knows he is a good king and the people need him.
Sacrifice!
Off she goes with Death, toward her eternal destiny.
Meanwhile, Heracles (the Greek name for Hercules, which is the Roman name for Steve Reeves), hears this sad tale and vows to battle Death and bring Alcestis back from the 
dead.
Which he does. He returns to the palace with a veiled Alcestis. King Admetus doesn’t know her at first. But then he lefts her veil and there she is. Interestingly, she cannot speak for three days, and then is fully restored.
Sacrifice is powerful. Perhaps the reason is this: we know life is tough, and that to stand up for the good usually comes at a cost. Fictional characters who fight for what’s right are going to be wounded. Otherwise, the thing they’re standing up for isn’t all that important.
When they offer their lives, it is the ultimate sacrifice. If they survive, it is like a resurrection.
But even if they do not survive, there is still a resurrection. Their spirit will live on. Their sacrifice inspires others to change for the better and carry on the fight. Think of William Wallace in Braveheart. He can end his torture simply by confessing to treason. Instead he shouts, “Freedom!” just before the ax falls. His death inspires his followers, most notably Robert the Bruce, so they may all go on to fight like free men.
Or even the comedy Mister Roberts. The book, play and movie (starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon and James Cagney) were huge successes, in large part because the ending hits us with a somber jolt that is followed by the rebirth of one Ensign Pulver.
In other words, the sacrificial ending works all over the place, in any type of fiction.
But even if you don’t end with a sacrifice, at least have the conflict of the novel cost the Lead something essential. He will then emerge as a different or stronger person at the end. That’s the essence of story in a nutshell.
Happy Easter. May this day bring you blessings, joy, creativity … and some very good words for your WIP!
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
There are some writers who do very well writing one thing, and one thing only. An author named Lee Child has written only thrillers about a character named Reacher. He’s done pretty well with that, and may break into big sales soon.
There are writers who concentrate on one genre, though they may create different series characters or stand alones. Michael Connelly is like that, and so was Robert B. Parker.
Then there are writers known for one type of book who get restless and take a flyer on another kind. John Grisham wrote A Painted House (literary) after a string of hugely successful legal thrillers. Dennis Lehane, known for gritty contemporary crime, came out a few years ago with a sweeping historical, The Given Day.
Some fiction writers cross over into non-fiction. Ray Bradbury was a writer whose fertile imagination and curious mind could not be contained in fictional worlds only. He wrote numerous essays and opinion pieces, many of which have been collected into volumes, like Bradbury Speaks.
Saroyan
And then there is one of my favorite writers, William Saroyan. His name is not as widely known today as some of his contemporaries (Hemingway, Steinbeck), but in the 30s and 40s he was considered a literary lion, winner of the Pulitzer Prize (which he famously turned down), and author of short stories (e.g., My Name is Aram), novels (e.g., The Human Comedy), and plays (e.g., The Time of Your Life).
When his fiction sales tailed off in the early 50s, Saroyan turned to the quirky memoir, writing several volumes of remembrance, observation, and opinion. Examples include The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills and Places Where I’ve Done Time.
For Saroyan, writing was life and life was writing. And, indeed, death was the only thing that stopped him. His final words were: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?”
A few years before his death Saroyan came out with a book unlike anything I’d ever read before. Obituaries was a large collection of short pieces, each one a riff on a name from the list of movie industry people who had died in 1976 and listed in a special edition of Variety.
What’s so nuts about the book is that it contains no paragraph breaks and no indentations. Each entry is just one solid block of text that goes on until Saroyan is finished with what he has to say.
And what he says varies with where his mind takes him. He starts with the name of the deceased, whether he knew the person or not, and off he goes. Then he’ll switch mid-stream-of-consciousness and go in a completely different direction.
This crazy book was nominated for the American Book Award and named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times. I own a first edition.
Anyway, early last year I was thinking about ways to increase my writing production, and found myself reading the obituary of Anita Ekberg, the Swedish actress. Something in me clicked, like a switch, and a sluice gate opened in my brain, and all these words starting pouring out on a page. It was different and it was fun. What was coming out was part essay, a little bit of memoir, and “parts unknown.”
So I decided to keep going, and spent a goodly portion of 2015 reflecting on obituaries. Many of them are of famous people, but I also looked at local obits from small town papers, and found myself using those, too. Every life has a story if we’re willing to listen.
When I looked up on January 1, 2016, I had a full-length collection. And here it is. If you want to get a flavor of it, just click on the PREVIEW button below. You can scroll through the preview and you’ll stay right here on TKZ.
It’s a book you don’t have to read in one sitting. In fact it’s set up for when you’re waiting in line for coffee, or at the doctor’s, even in the checkout lane at the grocery store. I do, however, advise against reading it in commuter traffic.
Have you felt the pull to write something completely different? Well, what’s stopping you? Here are three tips:
Pick a subject you love, or a topic you’re mad, sad or glad about. Write like a wildfire about that subject. Shut off your inner editor completely. Even if you never publish the entries you are at the very least stretching your writer’s mind beyond self-contained borders. That will help you in all your writing.
If you do decide to publish something new, go at it objectively. Make sure you edit your words so they mean what you want them to mean, and what you want other people to see. Get feedback from beta readers. Not everything that flies off your fingers is ready for prime time. Write hot, but revise cool.
Digital self-publishing is the greatest boon to writers since Gutenberg. It’s even better than old Johannes’s regime, because there you had to own a printing press, and get paper, and ink, and binding, and distribution. Only a few big companies could do that in the modern era, and thus many more books were rejected than published.
Not anymore. While some decry the “tsunami of content” in digital, for writers who write, who love to write, who—dare I say—live to write, there is a free marketplace. If you’ve got something to say, say it. Work it, polish it and then put it out there. Let the readers decide what to do with it.
So what about you? Do you have a secret pet project you’d like to write someday? What’s holding you back?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
While I am a firm believer in the adage that to be a writer it takes an iron butt, and also that a pro can’t afford to sit around waiting for the Muse, I do believe in inspiration. Just like a football team gets a locker-room speech, so the writer can use the occasional boost in motivation.
That’s why I like writing quotes. Over the years I’ve collected hundreds of them. I glance at them from time to time and, depending on my particular writing challenge of the moment, I usually find a quote that speaks to it.
Today, I thought I’d share a few of them with you, along with some annotations.
Leonard Bishop
If you boldly risk writing a novel that might be acclaimed as great, and fail, you could succeed in writing a book that is splendid. – Leonard Bishop
You get what you dare, baby, and if you want big, you dare big. – Leonard Bishop
Leonard Bishop was a novelist and author of one of the first craft books I ever purchased, Dare To Be a Great Writer. I still love that book and have it sticky-noted all over the place. Here, Bishop advocates the setting of high standards. I join him in saying, Go for it! Look at your own work and assess it according to what I call “The 7 Critical Success Factors of Fiction”—plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice, and meaning—and determine to kick each of them up a notch in your writing.
One needs natural talent, much physical energy (which calls for a strict regimen of diet and exercise), and the resilience to bounce back after the most shattering disappointment and frustration. – L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp was a writer from the golden age of science fiction, the America of the 1930’s, and continued writing until his death in 2000 at the age of 92. He was the author of over 120 science fiction and fantasy novels, and several hundred short stories. The kind of writer I admire, one who worked hard at his craft and kept producing pages. Why? Because if he didn’t, he didn’t eat.
Let’s talk about talent. You do need some, but in my opinion it is the least important of the attributes for writerly success. It’s taking the talent you have to the highest level you can that counts.
So does bouncing back. The writing life has myriad ways to disappoint, frustrate, and even anger you. The trick is never to take any setback lying down. Get up and keep writing.
You have to evolve a permanent set of values to serve as motivation. – Leon Uris
Leon Uris’s books have sold over 150 million copies worldwide and have been translated
Leon Uris
into 29 languages. There has to be a reason for this.
Values may be the heart of it. Uris was a Marine in World War II, and thus his novels have a certain fundamental nobility. Uris’s protagonists are full of passion for justice, and often involved in wider battles for freedom. Battle Cry, Exodus, QB VII, and Trinity each reached the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list.
What are you most passionate beliefs? Transfer that fire to your protagonist. What would he die for? If nothing, he’s probably not that interesting.
At every significant juncture in a story, consciously look at the situation from the viewpoint of every character involved – and let each of them make the best move they can from his or her own point of view. – Stanley Schmidt
Stanley Schmidt is the science-fiction author of such books as Newton and the Quasi-Apple (1970), Lifeboat Earth (1978) and Tweedlioop (1986). From 1978 to 2012 he was the editor of Analog, the noted SF magazine. Schmidt knows story.
Here he emphasizes a key rule of the craft, that of “maximum capacity.” Every character should be in the story for a reason, and the reason must matter greatly to that character (see the previous entry). When shove comes to slap, the characters all should be thinking how they can get their licks in. Don’t ever let the opponents of the Lead operate half-heartedly, lest the readers feel cheated. Don’t ever let the allies of the Lead just “hang around.”
Take a look at your WIP and assess the drive of each major character. Now turn those into overdrive.
Keep working. Don’t wait for inspiration. Work inspires inspiration. Keep working. – Michael Crichton
The best cure for not writing is writing. The best antidote for the writing blues is writing.
Michael Crichton
The best thing to do if you can’t face the blank page or screen is . . . write!
But what about the writers block deal we’ve been talking about here at TKZ? Is that real? Only if you don’t attack it by typing or moving a pen.
You don’t have to write on the project that’s stalling you. Work on something else. Have several projects going.
Isaac Asimov had a number of typewriters around his apartment, and when he was stalled on one project he’d get up, stretch, and walk to another typewriter, with a page in it, on some completely different subject, and he’d type some more.
So if you stall on your WIP, work on something else. Anything. Write your obituary. Truly. How do you want to be remembered? This is a great way to focus the mind and get your life in order.
Journal. Talk to yourself on paper or screen.
Heck, you can even be creative with your grocery list. Make it a thing of beauty. Turn it into a series of mini-essays, on the questionable identity of beets, and the pleasures of DiGiorno Pizza.
Once the brain starts cooking with words you’ll be back in the flow in no time.
Do you have a favorite writing quote? Let’s hear it!
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
The outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. I was with my high school church group, taking a week in the summer 
to do volunteer work for the Hopi. Our bus had stopped for the night and we brought our sleeping bags and duffels into the fellowship hall of a local church. We were told by our adult leaders to relax, read, play games, listen to the radio––but by all means stay inside the hall! Which of course my friend Randy and I interpreted as meaning: “Feel free to wander into town and find some trouble to get into.”
Ever ready to follow instructions as we understood them, Randy and I slipped out the side doors and started a nocturnal tour of the bustling Flagstaff metropolis, which seemed to have, as they used to say, rolled up the sidewalks.
So we walked and talked and came to a railroad crossing, moving therefrom into the soft red-and-yellow neon of a LIQUOR STORE sign. To a couple of seventeen-year-olds on a nighttime prowl, such illumination is catnip. Randy suggested we baptize our adventure with a bottle.
I agreed, as Randy Winter was my brother from another mother, my closest friend, with whom I laughed much and talked deeply. We would discuss with equal fervor the mystery of girls and the character of God (whose reputation, by the way, we were failing to uphold as we schemed how to lay our hands on some demon intoxicant).
Our first order of business was what manner of spirits to acquire. As an athlete who was not a member of the party circuit, I was not an imbiber of any sort. I did not like the taste of beer. I’d snuck a nip of gin once in my parents’ liquor cabinet and wondered why on earth anyone would want to drink gasoline.
So Randy suggested we try some wine. He’d heard that Boone’s Farm Apple Wine went down nicely, and the decision was made.
Then the next step: to lurk in the shadows of the parking lot until a car drove up, then casually approach the driver with a request that he be our procurer. This was nervous time, for who knew what kind of personality we would engage? What if it was an off-duty cop? Or some old Veteran of Foreign Wars who’d want to lecture us on the evils of drink?
A chance we would have to take. Which we did presently when a car drove in, and out stepped a man of about thirty, with long hair. Long hair! A good sign. A hippie perhaps, or at least a musician. In either case, cool. We emerged from our hiding spot and said, “Excuse me …”
The man stopped and read our faces in the soft, primrose light. “You want me to get you a bottle, don’t you?” he said.
We nodded. My face felt flush, as if the entire world were witnessing my iniquity.
The man laughed. “I used to do the same thing. What do you want?”
We gave the man a couple of fins, our pooled resources, and Randy said, “Boone’s Farm Apple Wine.”
It seemed to me the man hesitated, as if to give us one last chance to reconsider our fate. And then he went through the door.
Randy and I high-fived our success. And soon thereafter we had in our hands a brown paper bag and some change, passed to us with a “Good luck” sentiment from our partner in crime.
We left the scene of our misdemeanor, went back near the railroad tracks, and sat cross-legged on the ground.
Randy unscrewed the top. We were too unsophisticated to smell the cap.
Then he drank and passed the bottle to me. I took a tentative sip. Ah, I thought. Sprightly, with a conversational fruitiness and subdued notes of summer. (Actually, what I really thought was, This isn’t so bad.)
And so ‘neath the Arizona stars Randy Winter and I shared a bottle of what was generously classified as wine, and discovered something interesting about the human body, namely, that there is a lag time between the ingestion of alcoholic content and its effect on one’s physiology.
Which meant, at one point, it suddenly felt as if a switch was flipped in my brain. The disco ball lit up and went round and round, and I heard myself say something like, “Rammy, my headth pinning” before I teetered backward and ended up on the gravel, looking up at the stars as they raced around the heavens like sparkling emergency room nurses shouting, “Stat! Stat!”
Which is the last thing I remember about that night. In the morning I was in my sleeping bag on the church floor. At least I think it was my sleeping bag. My stomach felt like a balloon of toxic gasses. Two miniature railroad workers were on either side of my head, driving spikes into my temples with their sledgehammers.
The adult leaders were none too pleased with Randy and me. We knew we’d messed up, crossed the line, failed to represent our church. We were threatened with expulsion, which would mean a long and humiliating drive for our parents to come pick us up. We threw ourselves upon the mercy of the court and were granted a temporary stay. I began then to truly appreciate the power of forgiveness. Plus, I was ready to swear off booze for good.
Honest, hard work kept Randy and me on the straight and narrow for at least a week. There’s a victory in there somewhere.
I don’t know why I’m writing about this now, except that I was thinking about Randy the other day, as I do often. He died at the age of nineteen. Leukemia. When I think about him, and all the good times we had, this particular memory is the one that surfaces first.
Why is that? Maybe because it typified our friendship. We took risks together, got in trouble on occasion, but mostly laughed. A couple of times there were tears. There’s something deeply meaningful to me in all this, and if I explore it I sense it will tell me something about what I write and why. It may also be a story idea trying to get out.
Memories are the deep soil of strong fiction. We do well to work that land from time to time. Journal about it. Record it. Listen to it.
Early in his career Ray Bradbury started making lists of nouns, many of them based on childhood memories. Things like The Lake, The Night, The Crickets, The Ravine.
“These lists were the provocations,” he writes in Zen in the Art of Writing, “that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.”
Open up your own trapdoor. You’ll get to really good stuff that way. You can use it outright as the basis for a piece of fiction, or tap it for characters, emotions, scenes. Nothing is wasted. All of life is material.
And it will teach you, too, if you’re open. For I don’t believe I’ve had a taste of Boone’s Farm wine since that night. Nothing against it, you understand, but I prefer a nice California cab. In fact, I think I’ll have a glass tonight––just one––and raise a toast to my best friend, Randy Winter.
What about you? What friend from your youth do you remember, and why?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Writers and other artists are a touchy lot. We love our independence. We should all go around humming that song from Woody Allen’s Bananas, the one the guerilla leader sings:
Rebels are we!
Born to be free!
Just like the fish in the sea!
In short, we don’t like to hear the word rules. Don’t fence me in! Give me land, lots of land! Rules? We don’t need no stinking rules!
And yet, and yet … there are some things that are fundamental to storytelling and the fiction craft, so called because, guess what, THEY WORK! They help a writer weave a story that readers can actually relate to and get lost in. Imagine that!
Yeah, but So-and-so breaks the rules and writes bestsellers!
Sure, and how many So-and-sos are there? And maybe, just maybe, So-and-so compensates for the “rule breaking” by doing something absolutely astonishing somewhere else. Maybe So-and-so knows exactly what he’s doing when he breaks a rule.
In fact, I’d say good old So-and-so is actually the exception that proves the rule!
Let me show you what I mean.
I have a rule—or, if your hackles are starting to gather for a protest––a guideline or axiom: Act first, explain later. By this I mean it is much more engaging and compelling to begin your book with an actual scene in progress, with a character in motion, than it is to lard backstory and description and exposition all over the first couple of pages.
Is there an exception to this rule? Yes, one that proves it. The exception is this: a style that can enrapture you with the power of the writing alone. Almost always this is found in so-called literary fiction.
Example: here is the opening of Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. (Note: The ellipses are Kesey’s):
Along the western slopes of the Oregon Coastal Range … come look: the hysterical crashing of tributaries as they merge into the Wakonda Auga River …
The first little washes flashing like thick rushing winds through sheep sorrel and clover, ghost fern and nettle, sheering, cutting … forming branches. Then, through bearberry and salmonberry, blueberry and blackberry, the branches crashing into creeks, into streams. Finally, in the foothills, through tamarack and sugar pine, shittim bark and silver spruce––and the green and blue mosaic of Douglas fir––the actual river falls five hundred feet … and look: opens out upon the fields.
Metallic and first, seen from the highway down through the trees, like an aluminum rainbow, like a slice of alloy moon. Closer, becoming organic, a vast smile of water with broken and rotting pilings jagged along both gums, foam clinging to the lips. Closer still, it flattens into a river, flat as a street, cement-gray with a texture of rain. Flat as a rain-textured street even during flood season because of a channel so deep and a bed so smooth: no shallows to set up buckwater rapids, no rocks to rile the surface … nothing to indicate movement except the swirling clots of yellow foam skimming seaward with the wind, and the thrusting groves of flooded bam, bend taut and trembling by the pull of silent, dark momentum.
A river smooth and seeming calm, hiding the cruel file-edge of its current beneath a smooth and calm-seeming surface.
Kesey reaches out with his wrestler’s arms and lifts you off the mat. It works for me. It may not for others, but that’s the point. Kesey knows exactly what he’s doing here, eschewing act first, explain later. The exception that proves the rule is a dazzling literary style.
What happens when a writer doesn’t dazzle, but ignores the rule anyway? You end up with something like this:
The trip by jeep from the small village near Luena to Malanje in Angola, in southwest Africa, followed by a train ride to Luanda, the capital, had taken seven hours. The drive from Luena was long and arduous due to unexploded land mines in the area, which required extreme diligence and caution to avoid as they drove. After forty years of conflict and civil war, the country was still ravaged and in desperate need of all the help outside sources could provide, which was why Ginny Carter had been there, sent by SOS Human Rights. SOS/ HR was a private foundation based in New York that sent human rights workers around the globe. Her assignments were usually two or three months long in any given location, occasionally longer. She was sent in as part of a support team, to address whatever human rights issues were being violated or in question, typically to assist women and children, or even to address the most pressing physical needs in a trouble spot somewhere, like lack of food, water, medicine, or shelter. She frequently got involved in legal issues, visiting women in prisons, interfacing with attorneys, and trying to get the women fair trials. SOS took good care of their workers and was a responsible organization, but the work was dangerous at times. She had taken an in-depth training course before they sent her into the field initially, and had been taught about everything from digging ditches and purifying water, to extensive first aid, but nothing had prepared her for what she had seen since. She had learned a great deal about man’s cruelty to man and the plight of people in undeveloped countries and emerging nations since she’d started working for SOS/HR.
So help me, that is the first page and a half of a published novel. If it had not been written by an A-lister who could sell her parking tickets, no agent or editor would have let this through. (For the identity of the author and feedback about this passage, go here.)
I will note there are superb writers in familiar genres who sometimes begin with a literary style. Michael Connelly comes to mind (e.g., the opening of The Narrows).
The point, gentle writer, is that no matter what you call them––rules, guidelines, fundamentals, axioms––they survive because they work every single time. That’s what I said. There is never a time when act first, explain later doesn’t work as an opening move.
But if you want to try something different, go for it. I’m all for spreading your writing wings. Just be aware of what you’re doing and why. Because if it doesn’t work out, guess what? You can always go back to the rules!
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
So the other day I was sitting in my living room, taking a short break from the keyboard. I think I was putting on some shoes. I don’t wear shoes if I can avoid it. For me, flip flops are a form of dressing up.
And then boom.
I mean, a literal boom, contemporaneous with a slight shaking of the house.
Having grown up in L.A., and been shaken and stirred many times, my immediate thought was that we were having a small earthquake. But what was that boom? It sounded like an over-caffeinated UPS guy trying to get me to the front door.
I sat and listened and waited. No more shakes. No more booms. A quick look out the window. No UPS guy.
Back to work. Half an hour later my wife comes home and says that the major street near us is completely blocked off, with cop cars and fire trucks all over the place. She asked me if I knew what happened.
I reported the boom and said, “Let’s go see.”
We walked around the corner and found yellow police tape across the intersection and a traffic cop diverting cars. We walked to the opposite side of the street and down to where all the action was. Somebody said a house had caught on fire.
I went up to an LAPD officer and told him about the boom. He took my statement. Then a news van pulled up at the corner and a reporter with her camera guy comes striding toward me.
“Do you know what’s going on?” she says.
I told her about the boom and the shake.
“Can I put you on camera?” she asked.
Twist my arm. It took her camera guy about fifteen seconds to set up. And then it was a go. She asked, “Tell me what you heard.”
I said, “Well, I was sitting at home working on my latest James Scott Bell bestselling thriller, when …”
Uh, no. I let that opportunity slip away. I merely reported the facts.
What had happened was that a detached garage blew up and caught on fire. They pulled out two charred bodies. Which had me thinking meth lab or some other illicit activity gone bad. But there were no immediate answers.
That evening I was on the news. You can catch my five seconds of fame here:
Two days later Cindy and I decided to walk past the scene from the alley, where the garage door faced. There we encountered a man in boots and heavy gloves, raking the debris. We introduced ourselves to Tom Pierce, an independent fire investigator with about forty years experience. He was most friendly, and when I subtly mentioned I was a thriller writer, he gave us a little seminar on his investigatory techniques.
Turns out the victims were a mother and son, Guatemalan. She was in her seventies, he in his thirties. The arson team didn’t find enough butane or propane for a drug lab, but there was a heavy smell of gasoline. One theory is that the guy was cleaning something with gasoline and the fumes built up and someone struck a match. Whatever it was, there was instant conflagration, and the two residents didn’t have a chance.
This sad scenario is obviously fodder for the thriller mind. So were the details that Mr. Pierce shared with me—burn patterns, how he breaks up the scene into quadrants, the possible sources of ignition. All now safely packed away in my mental filing cabinet.
Because, for a writer, all of life is material. And it doesn’t have to be something as big as an explosion in your own neighborhood. It could be as small as a bit of snagged conversation, or the curious way one person is looking at another.
So remember:
Everything you encounter can lead to ideas, plots, characters, scenes, bits, beginnings, endings. Keeping your mind in an open and unlocked position is easy once you get into the habit.
When you see something that lights a little fire in your imagination, add some wood to it (I can’t seem to get away from fire metaphors). The wood is What if? Let it burn.
When you’re in this creative state, let yourself go. Turn off your “inner editor.” Even more, push yourself off a cliff and grow wings on your way down (a favorite recipe of the late, great Ray Bradbury). Some of your best stuff will be found on that marvelous trajectory.
Finally, remember this bit of advice from Ann Lamott: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
So what about you? How often does “real life” play into your fiction? Your creativity?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Some time ago the astute Kristine Kathryn Rusch posted about what she calls The Popcorn Kitten Problem. It’s based on the video below. Take a look at a bit of it:
Now that is what an indie writer’s mind can often feel like. So much freedom! So many things to write! And yet so many marketing hats to put on, and a ton of petty tasks that seem to repeat, over and over again.
Lest ye think this is just an indie conundrum, it’s also increasingly a picture of a tradpub author’s brain, because so much of the marketing onus now falls upon the writer. Publishers are insisting upon “platform” before they offer contracts. When a book is released the harried in-house publicity person (if there is one) has little time for any single author. So you better be out there doing a hundred different things…every day!
If you don’t watch out the resulting stress might grab your good endorphins like an amped-up Conor McGregor and slam them to mat.
Enough of that and you could end up tired or with a chronic case of the blues.
Here’s how a typical popcorn kitten scenario might play out:
You’re writing your WIP, an essential scene where your protagonist has to apply for a new job. In your pre-planning you decided that job would be as a hairdresser. Or, since you are a notorious pantser, you came up with that on the spot.
You don’t know all that much about the hairdressing business. If you are a wise writer, you put a mark in your manuscript that will tell you to do the research later. Then you’ll write as much of the scene as you can, based on what you know about human nature and job interviews—and if you don’t know about either of these, you should quit writing and join the Navy. Then get out and write a novel about the Navy.
Instead, you decide to leave your WIP and jump on the internet for some “quick” research. As you look at search results, you see a book called What Every Writer Needs To Know About Writing Hairdresser Interview Scenes, and you click over to Amazon to check it out. Seems reasonable at $2.99, but just to make sure you don’t spend your discretionary Starbucks money like a fool, you download the free sample.
But while you are on Amazon you see a recommendation for a mystery series about hairdressers. You know the author. She’s someone you met at Bouchercon. You hop over to the book page and see 125 five-star reviews and a rank of 1,286 in the paid Kindle store. At a price of $4.99. What? Your self-published stand-alone mystery is only $2.99 and it’s ranked 423,679.
You wonder what this other author has that you don’t. So you look at her Amazon author page and check out her covers. Wow. Great! Your cover was done by your cousin Axel, a budding commercial artist who lives with his poet girlfriend, Moonglow. Well, you admit, you got what you paid for.
You do a little more research and find out who did this author’s covers. You check out the artist’s portfolio online and what he charges. Whoa! That’s a healthy chunk!
So you do a little research on how to judge the worth of a book cover. There are many blog posts on this, and you read a few of them. Something else catches your eye on the last one. It’s about the importance of book description copy in selling a book. You recall that when you did yours you had a nagging suspicion it was rather plain vanilla, but you were anxious to get the book out because everyone in your critique group was making money self-publishing and you didn’t want to be the chump standing on the dock as the ship took off for the Bahamas with all your friends.
You go back to Amazon and find a book called Book Description Copy for Former Chumps Like Yourself, and you download that sample. You read that sample, and from the Table of Contents figure out some of what your own description was missing, so you open up a new doc and start writing afresh.
Ten minutes into that a thought pops into your head. You don’t want to have your protagonist apply for a hairdresser job. No! She should be an insurance investigator!
So you hop back on Google looking for “How to become an insurance investigator.” Lo and behold, there’s a book called Insurance Investigation for Former Chumps Like Yourself. The author has a website. You go to the website and see he has a blog. Gold!
Which reminds you, you were going to try to do some guest posts for various blogs when your book came out. That’s publicity! Where was that list again? You search for it … you need to send out some emails!
You look at the clock. Uh-oh, it’s almost time to pick up Lydia from school, and what have you done on your WIP? Fifty-seven words! The last word you typed was hairdresser…
I’m sure you can relate. Just as a Molinist theologian can contemplate an infinite number of contingent realities, so you, the writer, have an infinite number of ways you can get distracted, going off in different directions based upon a single pop of a cerebral synapse, one little soft-pawed frolic of a popcorn kitten.
So what’s the cure?
Here is a simple trick that can change your life. All it requires is some paper and a little mental discipline.
I call it Nab, Stab and Tab.
First step is to nab that thought. Recognize it for what it is—a siren’s song to leave what
you’re focused on and slide into Alice’s rabbit hole. You might even say it out loud. “My crazy mind wants me to go on Google right now!”
Next step, stab. You want to nail the thought to your desk so it doesn’t hop around in your head. You do this by writing it down. That’s all. I have scratch paper nearby for just this purpose. So in the scenario above, if I suddenly remembered I want to explore guest blogging, I’d write guest blogging on the paper.
Then I immediately forget about it and get back on task! This is the key moment, the forgetting. Get back to work on your WIP!
Finally, when I come up for air and have some time, I’ll give each thought a tab—I assign it a level of importance, using the A, B, C method (which I detail in my monograph, How to Manage the Time of Your Life).
A is for highly important, must-do.
B is for what I’d like to do.
C is for items that can wait.
If there is more than one A item, I prioritize these with A1, A2. Same with any Bs and Cs.
Next, I estimate how much time each task will take. I use quarter hour increments. So a task might take me .25 hour or .5 or a full 1 or 2. Whatever.
Finally, I put the A tasks into my weekly schedule in priority order. If there’s enough time, I’ll put in the Bs. The Cs I usually put off.
This may sound complicated, but it takes only a few seconds to nab and stab. And only a few minutes to tab and schedule.
Yet the benefits are profound. Less stress, more focus on you primary work.
The kittens will start to purr, and then they’ll go to sleep.
And you’ll sleep better, too.
So can you relate to kittens bouncing around in your mind? How do you usually handle it?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Forgive my second sports-related post in a row, but come on! It’s Super Bowl Sunday! Across America––and indeed the world––fans will gather around big screens in homes and bars to watch the most exciting spectacle of the viewing year: funny commercials!
Oh yes, and a football game.
This one has drama. On the one side we have the Denver Broncos and their quarterback Peyton Manning. Manning is without question one of the greatest QBs of all time, a lock first-ballot Hall of Famer. But injuries and Father Time have taken their toll. Thus, this will likely be Manning’s final game and his last chance to win one more Super Bowl ring.
On the other side is the new kid, the immensely talented Cam Newton. This guy is huge––6’5”, 260, with a cannon of an arm and legs that can go. He led his Carolina Panthers to an amazing 17-1 season. And now he makes his Super Bowl debut.
I will be with friends noshing sausages, pulled pork, chili, and items from the other essential food groups–the salted nut group, the nacho group, and of course the chocolate-covered anything group.
I hope the game is a good one. I’d love to see it go down to the final minutes. I’ll also be very happy if a kicker does not miss a last-second field goal and thus suffer from nightmares the rest of his life.
And let us hope the game is not marred by a lot of penalties! Hate to see those yellow flags all over the field.
It occurred to me there are some penalty flags that are thrown on writers. So in the interest of helping you write your best, here are some violations you must avoid lest you lose yardage (which, for writers, is measured in pages) and, much more important, readers.
Are you warming up your engines at the beginning of your novel? Do you spend too much time with exposition and backstory? Do you go several pages without a disturbance? Are you giving us “Happy People in Happy Land”? That’s a false start. Penalty: five pages.
Are you using too many adverbs to prop up weak verbs? Worse, are you using adverbs to prop up dialogue? Are you writing things like:
“Get out of here, you louse!” Sheila yelled angrily.
Or
“I’m gonna cut your heart out and feed it to the family dog,” he said threateningly.
If you do, you’ll be penalized, and it’s a big one: fifteen pages.
Also known as the illegal flashback. This is where you stop a narrative in its tracks to give us a long look backward at some scene from the past. Unless there is a dang good reason for this, you will get a yellow flag and docked ten pages.
Also known as author intrusion, this is when you try to sneak in some exposition that does not sound natural to the voice of the character (this penalty is explained more fully in the book VOICE: The Secret Power of Great Writing).
The skilled referee usually finds this in dialogue. The author wants to slip information to the reader through the characters’ words, but they are words the character would never use. Such as:
“Listen, Martha, you’re my lovely wife of twenty-eight years, and I wouldn’t be the head of surgery at Johns Hopkins without you. Especially after suffering that head injury in college when I foolishly went out for the rugby team. But dammit, you can’t dwell on your past as a stripper in a Nevada roadhouse when you were known as Cling Peaches. Please try to relax, like your sister Mary, who is two years younger than you, so we can go enjoy dinner in our hometown of Denver, Colorado.”
Encroachment is an automatic five pages, and loss of down.
Have you pushed your protagonist through the Doorway of No Return by the 20% mark of your novel? No? Then here’s a hard truth: it’s starting to drag. It doesn’t matter how quirky your characters. They have overstayed their welcome if they are not, by this time, into the struggle of Act II. Penalty: ten pages.
Do you introduce a major character after the midpoint? Near the end, do you have a minor character show up out of nowhere to solve a plot problem? If you do, you need to go back to the first half and plant these characters. Five pages.
League rules are protecting the antagonist more than ever. What do I mean by that? Simply this: if you have an antagonist who is evil, you must give him his due. You can’t just make him pure evil or insane. Boring! Every villain feels justified, and you the author must “make his case” in the book. Far from excusing his evil, this deepens the emotional currents in the reader and, ironically, makes the evil all the more scary. Fifteen page penalty for this one, plus the league may order you go to some rehab, like right here.
Have you fallen in love with your sentences? There’s a reason the axiom “kill your darlings” exists. I should explain that this doesn’t mean cut every sentence you like. You’re allowed to delight in your own good writing. But you have to make sure it works for your story, and is true to character and context. Ten pages if, in the judgment of the officials, your pretty prose is more showing off than storytelling.
Does your story feel unfocused during that long struggle through Act II? Are there scenes that meander? Have you lost narrative vitality? While this penalty is only five pages, enough of these violations will keep you backed up on your own goal line. One place to look for help is the “mirror moment.” This tells you what your novel is really all about so you can write scenes with organic unity and powerful forward drive.
Do you head out to social media without a plan and a brand? Do you fly off the handle when you tweet? Do you slip into unethical sockpuppetry in order to slam your perceived competition? This penalty is severe: you might get thrown out of the game. Worse, the league office may suspend you indefinitely.
A good football team knows how to move the ball. A great football team knows how to correct weaknesses. A championship football team does all that, and avoids the penalties that kill scoring drives.
May you write like a champion.
And enjoy the game! I know I will, even though I am completely impartial.
***(COUGH)GoPeyton(COUGH)***
Has your writing been penalty free lately?
by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell
Bob Mathias
One of the greatest athletes America ever produced was Bob Mathias. Listen to this: in 1948 Mathias was a high school student in Tulare, California. His track coach mentioned he ought to consider the decathlon. This is, of course, ten events, several of which Mathias had never attempted. They trained for three weeks. Three. Mathias won the local AAU decathlon. A short time later, he won the nationals and Olympic trials.
Mathias went to the London games and won the gold medal. He was seventeen-years-old, the youngest person ever to win a gold in track and field.
In 1952 he went to the Olympics in Helsinki, and did what no one had ever done before—he won the decathlon again. To top it all off, he starred as himself in the movie The Bob Mathias Story, which I watched several times as a kid.
I thought of Mathias a few days ago when I read this phrase once again: “A writing career is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” It suddenly occurred to me that this is inadequate. Why? Because it doesn’t matter if you run 26 miles if it’s in the wrong direction!
Instead, I think a successful writing career is more like a decathlon. There are at least ten “events” you must master in order to compete and win a medal. Here they are:
Are you willing to put in the work? Pay the price? Stick with it and not give up? Will you stay with this even though it’s going to take you years to get there?
Olympic champions start young and spend countless hours practicing, for years, for that one shot at gold. Similarly, it takes a long time and a lot of work to gain a writing foothold these days.
While there are no hard rules on this, suppose I told you that it’s going to take you five years and five quality books to start making solid income as a writer? Will you still go for it?
I hope so.
Decathletes have to spend a set amount of time every week in training. A writer has to spend a set amount of time every week writing.
You don’t produce books by not writing them. (Maybe I should go into the Zen koan business. Or not.)
Seriously, when I hear people say, “I just can’t write to a quota. I have to get into the mood,” I hear the sound of a cash register not ringing. (See? Zen master!)
In sports, practice does not make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. The precision of your drills is what makes the difference when it comes time for actual competition.
So the words you produce must be quality words. By quality I mean this: the best you can do while keeping your audience in mind.
Who is your audience? Readers. If you’re writing in a genre, you know those readers have certain expectations. You must serve those expectations at the same time you are exceeding them. How? By being an original, surprising them, elevating your book beyond the merely competent.
How do you get to that point? See #4.
A decathlete watches film of great athletes competing in certain events. Slow motion of champion pole vaulters, shot putters, discus and javelin throwers. You hone your skills partly by studying what others do well.
I can’t understand writers wanting to get ahead in the fiction game not making study of the craft a regular habit. I simply do not get it. Do you want some fresh-out-of-med-school doctor who doesn’t read the medical journals or observe experienced surgeons taking out your spleen?
At least when a writer makes mistakes nobody dies. But the interest of a reader does. And that can mean death to a career.
Did you know that every decathlete before 1968 used either the scissor kick or Western roll for the high jump? That’s because those two techniques were the only ones the dedicated high jumpers ever employed.
Then along came a guy named Dick Fosbury who, in high school, wasn’t able to win in the
Dick Fosbury
high jump using old-school technique. Over the course of time he experimented with methods until he started going over the bar backwards, something no one had ever contemplated before. He began to set records with “The Fosbury Flop” and he won the gold medal at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City.
All high jumpers and decathletes now use the Flop.
Writer, you need to nurture your creativity, try new things, play and explore. You still need to jump over the bar. How you do that is your individual style.
Great athletes give themselves benchmarks to shoot for, and put in place plans to reach them. These goals are measurable. In other words, they can be assessed according to what was done or not done, what was accomplished or not accomplished. Then there is a time for reassessment and recommitment.
Writers need to set goals, too. Not just word count, but the development of future projects, craft study objectives, social media presence, even personal health (which affects production). Goal setting is one of the essential skills of success.
I prepared a short monograph on this topic that can be found HERE.
Every champion athlete has had setbacks, losses, injuries. There are many, many times when quitting seems like an option. Those are the very times the great ones push on. Like Rocky Bleier, the Pittsburgh Steelers running back who came home from service in Vietnam with a right leg shredded by shrapnel. Coaches and doctors told him to give up football. He refused, and worked harder than everyone else. For two long years he struggled, and made the team again. Two years after that he was a starter. Two years after that he gained 1,000 yards for the season.
The writing life has plenty of frustration and disappointment. A rejection can feel like a shredding of your soul. That’s when you let it hurt for half an hour. Pound a pillow. Eat some ice cream. Cry if you must. But then take a deep breath and go to your keyboard and write something. Anything. You cannot be defeated if you keep pounding the keys.
In addition to perseverance, champions have times during an event where they must reach down deep and tap a reservoir of courage. That’s certainly true in the decathlon, the most demanding two days in all of sports. When Rafer Johnson competed for the United States in the Rome Olympics in 1960, he was coming off the effects of an auto accident the year before. His big rival (and UCLA teammate) was C. K. Yang, competing for Taiwan. It all came down to the final event, the grueling 1,500 meter run. Johnson needed to stay within ten seconds of Yang in order to win. But Yang was almost twenty seconds better at this event than Johnson. Johnson reached inside and willed himself to dog Yang’s heels. He finished only 1.2 seconds behind Yang, and took home the gold.
There are times in your writing when you have to dig deep, keep going, try harder. It may just mean hanging on for one last lap. The great thing is, even if things don’t turn out quite the way you want, you will be a stronger writer because of it. No effort is wasted.
Athletes have to give their bodies time to recover from an intense workout. There is a delicate balance between exertion and rest. And when it’s a young athlete, they have to figure in school work and a bit of a social life. The number of athletes who were driven too hard by an overzealous parent, and ended up out of athletics altogether, are legion. See, for example, Todd Marinovich.
There is a time to rest as a writer. Personally, I write six days a week. I take Sundays off. It’s hard. I’m like a horse that wants and expects to run on the track. But the day off gives my mind time to rest and recharge. I come to Monday raring to go.
And don’t forget the people in your life. Give them the time they deserve, even though you may have to explain that far off look you get sometimes. You know, the one where you’re thinking what a great scene this would make, or how that bartender over there would be a terrific minor character…
A champion athlete has to take joy in his event. Eric Liddell, the Scottish sprinter who won a gold medal in the 440 at the1924 games, was depicted in the movie Chariots of Fire. As the son of a missionary, he was expected to go to the mission field, leaving athletics behind. After his sister reprimands him, Liddel replies, “I believe God made me for a purpose, but He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
“In the great story-tellers, there is a sort of self-enjoyment in the exercise of the sense of narrative; and this, by sheer contagion, communicates enjoyment to the reader. Perhaps it may be called (by analogy with the familiar phrase, “the joy of living”) the joy of telling tales. The joy of telling tales which shines through Treasure Island is perhaps the main reason for the continued popularity of the story. The author is having such a good time in telling his tale that he gives us necessarily a good time in reading it.” – Clayton Meeker Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction (1919)
Just as the decathlon is the toughest of athletic contests, so the writing life is one of the toughest ways to make a buck. Yet isn’t that what makes it worthwhile? When you score a win, and you will––you’ll finish that novel, you’ll start to see some sales, you’ll get an email from a delighted reader––you’ll feel that joy of accomplishment that the ne’er do wells never do.
The easy road is for chumps.
Keep writing.