Category Archives: Stephen King

Parched For Readers

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A few years ago I met a gentleman in New Orleans who had never heard of Stephen King. He was thirty-three years old at the time, a musician for whom a classical education even at the elementary level had never been a priority but who nevertheless was still knowledgeable of pop culture. Still, he was unfamiliar with King and Carrie, The Stand, The Shining, and the other King books which had been adapted for film. He didn’t have a book in his house; neither, as it happened, did his mother, or the five of his eight siblings whose homes I visited.
Stephen King, I think I can safely say, is a household name, so people such as my acquaintance who have never heard of him are probably the exception rather than the rule. That no-book thing, however…that bothers me. I know people who watch Castle, which begins its sixth season next month, who haven’t read a mystery novel in decades, if ever. Dexter? Longmire? I still find people who have no idea that these popular dramas are based on novels. Justified slyly winked at Raylan Givens’ literary origins a couple of years ago but I doubt it increased sales of Raylan, which was published on season premiere night.
James Bell’s question from last week regarding the future of publishing was an interesting one which evoked a number of interesting responses. Almost all of them, however, implicitly made an assumption that I don’t think we can make anymore, in this era of entertainment everywhere: we’re each and all of us assuming that there will still be readers. Do you walk into homes without books in evidence? When you’re out somewhere and see people reading, how many do you not see reading? How many times in the past month have you been talking to someone about the last book you’ve read and heard them say, “Gee, I haven’t read a book in years. I just don’t have the time”?
I’m not attempting to be an alarmist here, or a Chicken Little. What I think I’m seeing, however, is a situation where the problem isn’t that we’re drowning in books; it’s that we’re parched for readers, and we’re fighting a battle of attrition. There are plenty of books out there worth reading. For every book I read there is at least one, often more, that I don’t get to and that winds up on my “someday” list. That’s not the problem, as I see it. The difficulty is that for everyone one of me, and you, there are, it seems, five or six who just don’t care. They’d rather watch reality television or something like that.

Am I wrong here? Or am I pointing out the 800 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all trying to studiously ignore?

How Things Have Changed

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A new Stephen King book hit the bookstores this week. It’s titled JOYLAND, and it’s much more like THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON than THE STAND or MISERY or DESPERATION or the Tower series or any of a couple dozen books that I could name. It’s published under the wonderful, indispensable, and at this point venerable Hard Case Crime imprint. The book’s appearance made some major news in those places where books are still news because if you want to buy the book, you’re going to have to buy The Book. There will not be an e-book version of JOYLAND for the foreseeable  future; yes, you’ll be able to obtain an audiobook, but something for your Kindle or Nook or other e-reader isn’t going to happen for awhile, unless you want to buy a copy of the book, tear out each page, paste it on Your Precious and…of course, you are not going to do that. 
There is a bit of irony here, given that one of the first e-books by a mainstream writer to be published solely as an ebook  — not as we know them now, but it was an ebook nonetheless — was a novella entitled “Riding the Bullet,” a chilling little ten-finger exercise that was written by, uh, Stephen King. You had to download some (free) software called “SoftLock” in order to read it. This occurred way back in 2000. There were other ebooks published, including a pay-as-you-go serial by King titled “The Plant,” but the format never really caught on until some smart folks at Amazon came up with what they came up with. King, however, was there at the beginning. There accordingly have been some who have now taken King to task over what they perceive to be his apparent one-eighty, somehow finding him to blame for the popularity of the electronic format since he was one of the first to embrace it with the same fervor that Jack Torrance embraced that rotting corpse in THE SHINING. I would disagree. King has made quite clear that his reason for limiting the format of JOYLAND to physical form isn’t to disown the child he midwifed at the turn of the century; he is doing it to help physical booksellers. This is not something new for King; those of us of some age will recall that King did an unapologetic tour of indy stores in 1994 to promote INSOMNIA, riding his motorcycle from city to city and making appearances to yes, mobs of people. There’s also a more recent model for this. A growing number of musicians are occasionally releasing some new songs only on vinyl, to support independent record stores.  Is he taking a risk financially, by limiting the format to physical books, and cutting out the impulse buyer? Possibly. Is Hard Case Crime? Almost certainly. JOYLAND won’t be available at the press of a button; it’s going to take some effort, and yes, some waiting to get it, maybe even some inconvenience. Some folks may feel it’s not worth the hassle.
But can I tell you something, as someone who loves his Kindle? JOYLAND is worth whatever it takes for you to get it. Let me go further than that: this is a book that should only see the light of day as an actual book. It’s a coming of age novel, with some mystery and romance and a bit of the supernatural thrown in, and it works as a physical book. JOYLAND is set in 1973, at a downheel amusement park on the coast of North Carolina, and I swear that as I turned the pages I could smell — very faintly — popcorn and taffy and ocean water and hear ferris wheel music rising up from between the pages. Am I given to imagining things? Maybe. But isn’t that what reading is all about? I don’t think it would be quite the same on an e-reader.
Let me now ask you: what was the last physical book (and we’ll count audio books in the mix) that you purchased? How long ago was it? And what do you think of what King and Hard Case Crime are doing with JOYLAND? Do you think that limiting its format to a physical product is a good idea or a huge mistake?

Hunting Down The Muse

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By Boyd Morrison

I’m in a situation that I haven’t been in for four years. Now that I’ve delivered my latest book, I’m no longer under contract to a publisher expecting my next novel. This is the first time since I signed my first publishing contract in 2009 that I don’t have a hard deadline. It’s both a scary and liberating scenario because I have to decide what to write next.

Like every other author, I often get the dreaded question, Where do you get your ideas? I can usually come up with a response that sounds reasonable and interesting, but the real answer is that I don’t know where they come from. I wish I did. It would make everything so much easier. I wish I could flip a switch in my mind that goes, “Okay, Brain, time for the next idea. What sounds good to you?”

Instead, Brain usually tells me to buzz off. It’s much too busy forcing me to watch TV or worrying about whether I forgot to lock the car when I left it in the mall parking lot. Other times, Brain is throwing ideas at me left and right, many of which are versions of stories that have already been done, but dumber.

Brain: Hey, what about a book about a sea creature that terrorizes a small coastal town, but this time it’s a crazed man-eating jellyfish?

Me: I hate you.

But ideas typically aren’t a problem for an author. I’ve got plenty of ideas. I just have no clue whether any of them will make good stories. I’ve started at least eight books that never made it past page 150. A few of them never made it past page ten. Some of them may grow into full novels one day, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if none of them did.

The question for me is, how should I get started on the next book? Do I need a breather to gather a bunch of new ideas and select the right one or should I plunge back into it and trust that the alchemy will produce something worthwhile?

Some authors, like Stephen King, stick to their word count every day no matter what. They force themselves to hunt down the muse and throttle it until it gives up the goods. Other authors, like Chuck Palahniuk, can take a year off to recharge and explore the world until the pressure builds up so much that they have to sit down and write the story. The muse tells them when the story is ready to go.

I think Stephen King’s process works well for “pantsers,” authors who don’t outline and write without knowing where the story will take them. But I don’t know how that can work if you are a “plotter” and you outline and research to see how a story fits together. How can you write to a word count that day if you haven’t plotted out how the next scene contributes to the story?

One technique that I’m trying was suggested by my agent. It’s called the List of Twenty. You come up with a list of twenty of ideas for a novel. The first ten or so will be obvious, so obvious that someone else may be having the same idea as you’re typing (which is why we end up with situations like two movies this year about the White House being taken over by terrorists).

But when you exhaust those first ten ideas, you start having to come up with more unusual and off-the-wall ideas, and that’s where you find the gold. Those are the ideas likelier to be unique and amazing.

Even then, you may still come up with an idea similar to someone else’s, but your spin on it might be so intriguing that it’s worth doing anyway (look at how Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games explored a different take on the kids-fighting-to-the-death scenario that Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale had already established).

After having completed six novels, I thought this process would have gotten easier. It hasn’t, and I don’t think it ever will. But when that inspiration does strike and the muse becomes your partner in crime, the exhilaration makes all of the struggle worth it. For me, that’s the thrill of the hunt.

Living in the Past

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I received a nice present in the mail this week from one of my best and oldest buds,  he being former radio personality extraordinaire, editor, movie critic and all around good guy Jeff Gelb. Jeff was and is a huge fan of popular culture, including detective fiction. He was at a Pulp Fiction Festival (the genre, not the film) in Los Angeles recently, visited the dealer room, and popped for a couple of old magazines from my past: Real Detective and For Men Only. Don’t tell anybody, but I got a little misty-eyed when I opened up that plain brown envelope and found those treasures.


Those magazines were a part of my childhood. I grew up in an era when gentlemen got haircuts every two to three weeks whether they needed it or not. The barber shops didn’t have all of the frou-frou crap that they have now. Amenities consisted of a barber pole in front, leather chairs to sit in while you waited for a barber, a gumball machine, and magazines. None of the barbers — not stylists, but barbers — would have been mistaken for Ru-Paul, either. Each and all would be squared away, wearing pressed black pants and white collarless button-up shirts, like they were interns or something, with their tools of the trade on a sink behind them. Hair tonics like Vitalis, Brylcreem and Wildroot were lined up with military precision, with different styles and lengths of scissors laying at the ready next to them. The big deal at the barbershop, however, was the reading material. There were comic books, sure, but there were also stacks and stacks of different magazines, such as the Field & Stream and Popular Mechanics.  And then there were the marginal publications that weren’t quite of the level of Playboy but were “gateway” literature, if you will. One or more of the barbers might frown if you were in short pants and busily thumbing through such lurid articles as “Babes, Brawls and Border Smashing” — many was the time I missed hearing my name called, so absorbed was I in the reading material — but the general rule was that if you were old enough to get your hair cut without mommy waiting with you then it was none of their business. The drugstore and supermarket didn’t consider their magazine sections to be the library, but at the barbershop you could read

 Stag and  Saga and the aforementioned For Men Only. The covers were always adventure-themed, with generic, very capable-looking Marlboro men rescuing women in danger of losing their lives or their underwear, in no particular order. The so-called “true detective” magazines ran a close second, with exciting article titles gracing lurid covers. A publication that met readers of both types of magazines was an irresistible piece of trashy wonder titled The National Police Gazette. The latter was an extremely popular periodical, though no one would admit it. When I was an altar boy (yes, I was) my school was selling magazine subscriptions as a fundraiser.  I asked a geriatric priest I knew if he would be interested in purchasing any subscriptions. He asked, with a smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye, “Ya got Police Gazette?” I responded “I wish!” which brought a coughing fit on him so severe that I thought we were going to have to call the emergency squad.

Those magazines are long gone. Stag and the like reached a point where they had to, uh, up (or maybe down) their game to compete with such upstarts as Penthouse and such and just couldn’t meet the production quality (yeah, I know, I know).  The true detective magazines collapsed under their own weight; there were just too many of them. Still, I miss those magazines, and I didn’t have any of them (the “why” is a tale for another time), which is why my friend’s generous gift meant so much.  One of the many sad things about their absence is that they provided a good place for fledgling authors to hone their chops and make some money along the way. Lawrence Block, Stephen King, and Harlan Ellison all paid for electricity and food and diapers with stories in such magazines. The issue of For Men Only which I received contains an excerpt from a new (at the time) book by Alistair MacLean titled THE WOMEN TAKERS, which, we are helpfully informed, is a $5.95 bestseller (that is what a hardback book would set you back in 1968). The same issue contains some lurid but well-written short fiction written by Donald Horig, who would go on to become a well-respected and prominent baseball writer. Horig is still alive, probably cringing at the mention of the story, entitled “The Taming of Mona.” If he’s embarrassed,he should not be.  There are still a few avenues for writers to display their wares — the science fiction and mystery digests come immediately to mind — but  there aren’t many. They’ve gone the way of the traditional barber shop. I miss both.

I ask this question primarily of older readers, but you younger folks can absolutely join in the fun as well: what magazines do you miss, ones that you read during your childhood and teen years but are no longer published? It can be anything from Pageant  to  Humpty Dumpty to Photoplay to, yeah,  The National Police Gazette, but what do you miss? And why?

How to Write a Short Story

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A novelist friend recently asked, What is it that defines a short story? What’s the key to writing one? How is it different from a novel or novella?
My “boys in the basement” have been working on it, and the other day sent up a message. It said, “A short story is about one shattering moment.”
I pondered that for awhile. Could it really be so? What about the different genres? There are literary short stories (e.g., Raymond Carver), but also horror (Stephen King), science fiction (Harlan Ellison), crime (Jeffery Deaver) and the like. They couldn’t all be about one shattering moment, could they?

I decided to have a cheeseburger and forget the whole thing.
But the boys would not let me drop it. And now I think they’re right (as usual). So let’s take it apart.
When I took a writing workshop with one of the recognized masters of the modern short story, Raymond Carver, I found his genius lay in the “telling detail,” a way to illuminate, with a minimalist image or line of dialogue, a shattering emotional moment in the life of a character.
The story we studied in his workshop was “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” A married couple, middle class with two young kids, have a conversation one night. The wife brings up an incident at a party a couple of years before. Slowly, we realize she needs to confess something, needs to be forgiven. She’d slept with another man that night. That is the shattering moment in the story, the husband’s realization of what his wife did.
This happens in the middle. The rest of the story is about the emotional aftermath of that moment. Thus, the structure of the story looks like this:
This is the same structure as Hemingway’s classic, “Hills Like White Elephants.” In this story about a couple conversing at a train station, the shattering emotional moment occurs inside the woman. It’s when she accedes to her boyfriend’s desire that she have an abortion (amazingly, the word abortion is never used in the story). We see what’s happened to her almost entirely via dialogue. In fact, she has a line much like the husband’s in the Carver story. She says, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”
We know at the end of both these stories that the characters will never be the same, that life for them has been ineluctably altered. That’s what a shattering moment does.
Structurally, this moment can come at the end of the story. When it works, it’s like an emotional bomb going off. Two literary stories that do this are “The Swimmer” by John Cheever, and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates. That structure looks like this:
Now let’s move to the genre short story. Here, the same idea applies. The shattering moment is usually one that is outside (i.e., a plot moment) as opposed to inside (i.e., a character moment). Often, that moment is a “twist” at the end of the story. The most famous example is, no doubt, O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi.”
Jeffery Deaver is a master of this type (see his collections Twistedand More Twisted.) Get your hands on his story “Chapter and Verse” (from More Twisted) to see what I mean.  It’s one of my all-time favorites.
My recent crime short story, “Autumnal,” follows this pattern as well. We think the story is going one way, but at the end it is quite another.
This is also the structure most often used in The Twilight Zone. Think about some of the classic episodes:
“To Serve Man.” Remember the shattering shout at the end? “It’s a cook book!”
“Time Enough at Last.” Always voted the most memorable episode, because of its heartbreaking twist at the end. This is the one where the loner with the thick glasses emerges after nuclear war has killed everyone, but now has time enough at last to read all the books he wants. And then…
“The Eye of the Beholder.” This one blew me away as a kid. It’s the one where the surgeons, in shadows all the way through, are working to save the disfigured face of a patient. One of the all time great twists.
This pattern is just like the one described above for literary short stories, only now it’s a shattering plot twist at the end:

And, you guessed it, you can also do a story with the shattering moment somewhere in the opening pages, and work out the aftermath in the rest of the tale. Lawrence Block’s “A Candle for the Bag Lady” is like that (You can find this story in Block’s collection, Enough Rope). The structure looks like this:

So there you have it. If you want to write a short story, find that moment that is emotionally life-changing, or craftily plot-twisting. Then write everything around that moment. Structurally, it’s simple to understand. But the short story is, in my view, the most difficult form of fiction to master. So why try? Two reasons: First, when it works, it can be one of the most powerful reading experiences there is. And second, with digital self-publishing, there’s an actual market for these works again. The short story form was pretty much dead outside of a few journals. Now, in digital, you can make some Starbucks money with them. That’s what the Force of Habit and Irish Jimmy Gallagher stories have done for me. And when I put together a collection, I expect to make even more.
And nothing will give your writing chops a workout like a short story. Why not make them part of your career plan?

Who Is Reading What

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Who Is Reading What

It seems as if I’ve spent the last two weeks doing nothing but driving. That of course isn’t entirely true but for various reasons I’ve had to make two or three round trips into downtown each day for the last fortnight, and while it has been interesting in some ways it has been mind-numbingly boring in others. I don’t have any witty advice (even of the half variety) wry observations, or heartfelt descriptions, sappy or otherwise, of what has occurred recently, at least that I care to recount right now. Maybe next time.

So…I thought I would just cut to the chase and ask a question: what book are you currently reading? I’ll go first. I am reading two books, actually. One is THE BOYFRIEND by Thomas Perry. It may be his best work so far. It concerns a private investigator in pursuit of a man who is killing high-priced escorts of a certain type, though never more than one in any specific city. The other is an extremely sure-footed debut novel by Becky Masterman and which is titled RAGE AGAINST THE DYING. It is narrated by its protagonist, a fifty-nine year old ex- FBI agent named Brigid Quinn. The book will go on sale on March 12; read the first sentence in the book and you will want to read the rest. That first sentence does everything it is supposed to do and more: it draws you in, makes you curious, scares the hell out of you and leads to even better things.

That’s me. My wife is reading ONE DAY AT A TIME by Danielle Steel and  listening to another Steel book. MISERY by Stephen King is being read in fits and starts by my younger daughter (how in heaven’s name do you read MISERY in fits and starts? I read it once a year on a day which I set aside for that express purpose). My older son, for his part, is juggling a couple of John Sandford’s Lucas Davenport novels, as he works his way through the canon with the kind and occasional permission of my six year-old granddaughter, who in turn is reading an issue of Highlights for Children.

And you? And yours?

The Ghost of Writing Yet to Come

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When it came near him, Ebenezer Scribe bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
 “I am in the presence of the Ghost of Writing Yet To Come?” said Scribe.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its hand.
“You are about to show me shadows of the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,” Scribe pursued. “Is that so, Spirit?”
The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head. That was the only answer he received.
Scribe feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time to recover. It was something out of a Stephen King novel. Scribe, in his youth, had once wished to be “another Stephen King.”
“Ghost of the Future!” Scribe exclaimed, “I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another writer from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company. Will you not speak to me?”
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight before them. The Spirit guided him onward.
Presently, it stopped beside one little knot of writers at a local Starbucks. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scribe advanced to listen to their talk.
“No,” said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, “I don’t know much about it, either way. I only know he’s dead.”
“When did he die?” inquired another.
“Last night, I believe.”
“Why, what was the matter with him?” asked a third, breaking off a vast chunk of zucchini muffin and stuffing his cheek.
“God knows,” said the first, with a yawn.
“How many books did he actually write?” asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
“Not many,” said the man with the large chin, yawning again. “He quit writing some time ago. Didn’t think he was good enough. At least, not as good as we!”
This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.
“It’s likely to be a very cheap funeral,” said the same speaker; “for he did not make any money self-publishing.”
“Because he did not think of it as a business,” said the red-faced man. “Nor did he keep producing new work.”
“Which is what we should be doing,” said the one with the muffin.
“Oh shut up,” said the large-chinned man.
The Spirit beckoned Scribe to follow, and soon they were in an obscure part of the town, where Scribe had never penetrated before, although he recognized its situation, and its bad repute.
Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling shop. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal stove made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal, nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury of calm retirement.
Scribe and the Phantom came into the presence of this man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop. She opened the bundle before him and exposed three books.
“Here it is, Joe,” the woman said, laughing. “All the writing books he owned, poor soul.”
The old man removed his pipe and took each book up, one at a time. “Why, none of these books is highlighted,” he said with contempt.
“I was his housekeeper, I was,” the woman said, “and I never saw him study a single book. He always said writing couldn’t be learned, you know, and these books was gifts to ‘im, but I don’t see as how they did ‘im any good that way.”
“None at all,” Joe agreed. “He who ignores discipline comes to poverty and shame, the Good Book says, and if he fancied himself a writer he shouldn’t’ve listened to the likes of the naysayers.”
“He didn’t even have a word quota, more’s the pity.”
“And would I be in my exalted position if I did not practice industry daily?” Joe said. “Here, a sixpence for the lot and not a farthing more. I’ll sell ‘em to a young writer who actually has the moxie to write and never quit.”
“Spirit!” Scribe said. “This is a fearful place. Let us go!”
The Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger toward the books.
“Yes, I know I must study the craft,” Scribe returned, “and I know I must write to a quota, and I would do it if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have not the power!”
The Spirit tweaked Scribe on the head with a bony finger. Thwack!
“Ouch!” Scribe said. “Okay! I get it! Hear me! I am not the writer I was. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!”
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
“Good Spirit,” he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: “Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by a disciplined writing life!”
The kind hand now made the Okay sign.
“I will honor writing in my heart, and try to keep at it all the year! I will develop ideas and write novels and actually finish them! I will not shut out the lessons you teach!”
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom’s hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.
A bedpost Scribe was clutching with his hands.
He was back! In his own bed!
Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. “What’s to-day!” cried Scribe, calling downward to a boy.
“Eh?” returned the boy.
“What’s to-day, my fine fellow?” said Scribe.
“To-day!” replied the boy. “Why, it’s the start of NaNoWriMo!”
“NaNoWriMo!” said Scribe to himself. “Then I haven’t missed it!” And then to the boy: “Hallo, my fine fellow, do you know the grocers, in the next street but one, at the corner?”
“I should hope I did,” replied the lad.
“An intelligent boy!” said Scribe. “A remarkable boy! Run and fetch me as many packages of ground French Roast as this’ll buy!” He threw two twenties out the window to the boy. “Come back with the coffee in ten minutes and I’ll give you a shilling!”
“What’s a shilling?”
“Come back in less than ten minutes and I’ll give you half-a-crown!”
“Whatever,” said the lad, and ran away.
Scribe ran to his computer. He turned it on and opened a blank Word document and wrote “Chapter One” and skipped down two spaces. “In all the time I have left on this earth,” he said to himself, “I am going to write. I am never going to stop. I’m going to set a word goal for every week, and I’m going to study those books I have, and buy more! I am determined to get better with each project! And I’m going to develop more than one idea at a time! For I am a writer! That’s what the Spirits wanted me to know! And I can only be stopped if I give up!”
Scribe was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more. He completed his NaNoWriMo novel, self-edited it, got feedback from beta readers, edited it again, and had it edited by a professional. He became as disciplined a writer as the old city knew, or any other old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them. His own heart laughed, for he was a true writer now, and that was quite enough for him. For he knew that the writing game favors those who produce and risk and sometime fail, but always come back bravely to the page to risk and write again.
May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, God bless us, every one!

‘Twas Two Weeks ‘fore Thanksgiving…

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Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away, but potential Christmas gifts are appearing on the shelves already. The one that most immediately comes to mind is a library-bound, digest-sized book entitled JACK REACHER’S RULES, which provides handy suggestions should you decide so far off the grid that you have to have sunlight shipped in, or want to set a building on fire; it’s great stuff, and just in time for the holidays for that Lee Child fan on your list who thinks they have everything.  I have made a good dent in my shopping already; of course, I want nothing for myself. I believe that I have commented elsewhere that at my somewhat advanced age I am no longer interested in acquiring more possessions; rather, I seek new experiences. Alas, those that I have suggested to my spouse have been, shall we say, shot down. I will leave it to your imagination what they might be, and why they won’t happen.
So, I am asking you, since Christmas is coming…what, as far as books are concerned, are going to be looking to find under the tree in about five or six weeks or so? What do you want Santamazon to leave for you? It can be anything from the grandiose — an entire library in the basement — to the simple — a new writing journal — to something that is somewhere in between, like that slip-cased copy of MY PRETTY PONY by Stephen King that you could have picked up in a bookstore twenty-three years ago for a song and dance. What about a new tablet, the better to read DC e-comics on? Or what if Santa finishes that new novel you’ve been working on, the one that seems to be missing a hundred pages or so in the middle? What would you like?

Baloney Advice Writers Should Ignore

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Some time ago I cheekily posted the three rules for writing a novel. It produced a spirited discussion on what is a “rule” and what is a “principle,” but by and large there was agreement that these three factors are essential to novels that sell.
Today I’d like to discuss some writing advice writers would do well to ignore.
Where does such advice come from? I have a theory that there is a mad scientist in Schenectady, New York, who cooks up writing advice memes and converts them to an invisible and odorless gas. He then secretly arranges for this gas to seep into critique groups across the land, infecting the members, who then begin to dispense the pernicious doctrine as if it were holy writ.
I now offer the antidote to the gas.
1. Don’t start with the weather
Verdict: Baloney
This meme may have started with Elmore Leonard, who once dashed off a list of “rules” that have become like sacred script for writers. If his advice were, “Don’t open a book with static, flat descriptions” I would absolutely agree.
But here is why the rule, as stated, is baloney: weather can add dimension and tone to the opening disturbance. If you use it in that fashion, weaving it into action, it’s a fine way to begin.
Look at the opening of Bleak House by Dickens, or the short story “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” by Stephen King. Or the quieter beginning of Ann Lamott’s Blue Shoe. All of them use weather to great effect. Here’s a Western, Hangman’s Territory, from a great writing teacher, Jack Bickham:
   The late spring storm was breaking. To the east, boiling blue-gray clouds moved on, raging toward Fort Gibson. To the west, the sun peered cautiously through a last veil of rain, slanting under the shelf of clouds and making the air a strange, silent bright yellow. The intense, muggy heat of the day had been broken, and now the early evening was cool and damp, and frogs had magically appeared everywhere in the red gumbo of the Indian Nations.
   Eck Jackson threw back the heavy canvas under which he had been waiting. His boots sank into the red mud as he clambered out of his shelter between two rocks and peered at the sky.
If you think of weather as interacting with the character’s mood and emotions, you’re just fine to start with it.
2. Don’t start with dialogue
Verdict: Baloney
Starting with dialogue creates instant conflict, which is what most unpublished manuscripts lack on the first pages. Sometimes this rule is stated as “Don’t start with unattributed dialogue.” Double baloney on rye with mustard. Here’s why: readers have imaginations which are patient and malleable. If they are hooked by dialogue, they will wait several lines before they find who’s talking and lose absolutely nothing in the process.
Examples:
“TOM!”
No answer.
“TOM!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy,  I wonder? You TOM!”
No answer.
The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room . . . 
        – (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
 “Any thoughts that you’d like to start with?”
“Thoughts on what?”
“Well, on anything. On the incident.”
“On the incident? Yes, I have some thoughts.”
She waited but he did not continue. He had decided before he even got to Chinatown that this would be the way he would be.
       –  (Michael Connelly, The Last Coyote)
“Name?”
“Robert Travis.”
“Occupation?”
“Mining engineer.”
“Place of residence?”
“Seventh Base, Jovian Development Unit, Ganymede.”
“Reason for visiting Luna?”
“I’m checking on performance of the new Dahlmeyer units in the Mare Nublum fields. We’re thinking of adapting them for use in our Trendart field on Ganymede.”
“I see . . .” The port inspector fumbled through my papers. “Where’s your celemental analysis sheet?”
– (Dwight V. Swain, The Transposed Man)
3. No backstory in the first fifty pages
Verdict: Spam (a step up from baloney)
If backstory is defined as a flashback segment, then this advice has merit. Readers will wait a long time for backstory information if something compelling is happening in front of them. But if you stop the forward momentum of your opening with a longish flashback, you’ve dropped the narrative ball.
However, when backstory refers to bits of a character’s history, then this advice is unsound. Backstory Bits (I call them BBs) are actually essential for bonding us with a character. If we don’t know anything about the characters in conflict, we are less involved in their trouble. (Read Koontz and King, who weave backstory masterfully into their opening pages).
I’ve given writing students a simple guideline: three sentences of backstory in the first ten pages. You may use them together, or space them apart. Then three paragraphsof backstory in the next ten pages, together or apart.
I’ve seen this work wonders for beginning manuscripts.
4. Write what you know
Verdict: Baloney
Sounder advice is this:
Write who you are.
Write what you love.
Write what you NEED to know.
5. Don’t ever follow any writing advice
Verdict: Stinky baloney
There may be a few literary savants out there who can do this thing naturally, without thinking about technique or craft. And those three people can form their own group and meet for Martinis.
Every other writer can benefit from putting in some time studying their craft. I’ve heard some writers say they don’t want to do that for fear of “stifling” the purity of their work. Some of them get a contract and their books comes out in a nice edition that sell 500 copies. And then they get bitter and start appearing at writer’s conferences raging how there is no such thing as structure and you’ve all wasted your money coming here, and you should just go home and write. (This has actually happened on several occasions that I know of).
So here is my final bit of advice for today: don’t be that kind of writer. 

Lights, Camera…

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Now it can be told.

Some of you may be aware of the fact that I am a jack of some trades though master of none. One of those trades is acting; I have a supporting role in the independent film LA-308 and am looking forward to appearing in another film which will begin shooting in November…though of what year, I’m not sure. In the interim, I co-starred this past April in a video project created to promote an e-book.

I have for the better part of my life been the friend of a gentleman named Michael Garrett. Michael, possessed of many talents, is perhaps most famously noted for being Stephen King’s first editor. He also, with another multi-talented fellow named Jeff Gelb, conceived and created the longstanding HOT BLOOD series of original horror fiction. Michael recently published DEADLY OBSESSIONS, a collection of his own short erotic horror fiction, and decided to use a video to make his particularly shiny needle stand out in the haystack known as Amazon. He explained the concept of the video, which he titled “Seducing the Shrink,” to me and asked if I would be interested in co-starring in it; I readily agreed. Michael proceeded to write the script, and after a few short weeks I found myself in suburban Birmingham, Alabama on a warm spring day, going over my lines and awaiting the arrival of Kimberly Heart, a talented and attractive Birmingham native who has been featured in publications such as Playboy and Maxim.

We filmed “Seducing the Shrink” in Michael’s home, using a quiet, sunlit family room which will undoubtedly never be the same for Michael. Since we all had some experience in such matters, things proceeded fairly quickly and smoothly, at least as such things go. In other words, it took us about three hours to shoot five minutes of video. Things go wrong, lines are missed, dogs whine out of tune off camera; maybe “this” camera angle looks better than “that” one, or the line of dialogue that rang so true the night before doesn’t work quite as well in the light of day and needs a change or two. I had the easy part, but the actors always do; it’s the people that are behind the cameras, getting the light right, directing,  editing, editing, editing, and writing, writing, writing, who do the heavy lifting that make five minutes of video or two hours at the local multiplex stand or fall on the merits.

Herewith is a link to the video (Rated ‘R’ for partial nudity): 

http://vimeo.com/46260651

 If you are not offended by such things please take a look, and by all means consider purchasing the wares which it advertises. And yes: in his weaker moments Michael is considering the scheduling of another session between Ms. Trott and Dr. Dillon.