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Category Archives: Writing
Seeing Your Scenes
by Mark Alpert
I started having eye problems a few months ago. My eyes got dry and irritated while I slept, and my vision was blurry when I awoke. My ophthalmologist said this was a common, age-related problem. He recommended eye drops and a humidifier. It’s not a big deal, just annoying. I hate the fact that my body doesn’t work as well as it used to.
And it made me think about the importance of eyesight to a writer. Most writers are also voracious readers, so we ruin our eyes on novels and newspapers, not to mention all the hours spent rereading our own manuscripts. What’s more, so much of our memory and imagination is visual, at least for writers with normal eyesight. For better or worse, I rely on my eyes more than my other senses, blithely ignoring entire universes of sound, smell and touch. When I think of my childhood, I see mental snapshots of my family’s old apartment in Queens, along with a half-remembered collage of classrooms, playgrounds and birthday parties. And when I use my imagination to construct fictional scenes, the building blocks are mostly visual: what the setting looks like, what the characters look like, how their expressions change, and so on.
In my latest novel, which will come out in a couple of months, I take this idea to its logical extreme: you are what you see. One of the characters in the book, a brilliant bioengineer, figures out how to build brain implants that can copy and download a person’s visual memories. The technology has great commercial potential; millions of people would surely pay for the implants so they could archive their lives or share their favorite memories on Facebook. But the bioengineer has an ulterior motive. He’s dying of cancer, and he believes he can resurrect himself by downloading all his visual memories to a powerful computer that can mimic the functions of the human brain. The computer would be programmed to generate new thoughts and emotions based on his memories, and because memories are the building blocks of personality and identity, the intelligence inside the computer would be identical to the bioengineer’s intelligence (in theory at least).
This idea, I hasten to add, isn’t my own invention. It’s the Holy Grail of the Singularity movement, which has been inspired by the writings of futurist Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity is Near) and others. My twist on the notion is to focus on visual memories. Scientists understand the visual cortex better than other brain regions, because it’s relatively easy to do experiments that involve visual stimuli. Researchers have constructed elaborate, spaghetti-like maps showing how visual information moves from one part of the brain to another, traveling to the regions that store memories (so you can recognize the objects you’re looking at) as well as the regions that control muscle movements (so you can catch the baseball that’s speeding toward you). Because we already know a lot about the visual cortex, the prospect of building a computer that mimics this brain region seemed somewhat believable to me — more like a thriller, and less like science fiction.
In my novel, the bioengineer’s technology goes awry, of course. (I won’t say any more, because I want you to read the book!) But while I was writing the novel I became convinced that the underlying premise — you are what you see — may have some truth to it. I don’t believe there’s any need to assume the existence of some intangible, unobservable entity (soul, spirit, whatever) to explain the mysteries of consciousness and personality. The brain can assemble an identity out of the memories of early childhood, because the interconnected whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Strictly speaking, some of the parts aren’t really memories — they’re instincts genetically hard-wired into the brain, which govern an infant’s life until learned behaviors can take over. And memories of sound, smell, taste and touch also have powerful influences, particularly on the development of language and emotions. But for someone like me, who relies so much on eyesight, life is like a long, meandering movie, a film that’s being constantly re-edited as I watch it.
And this brings me back to fiction. When I’m working on a novel, I see the scenes in my mind’s eye before I put them down on paper. I can’t start writing until I can see, at least blurrily, where the characters are and what they look like. As I write the scene, the setting and characters usually come into better focus, and when I’m finished I can go back to the blurry parts at the beginning and sharpen them by adding more detail. I also add sounds and smells if they’re relevant and compelling; it’s a good idea to describe taste sensations when the characters are eating, and tactile sensations are vital to any description of sex or violence. But for me, the process starts with images. I have to see it to believe it.
I’m not alone on this one, am I? Do most authors visualize their scenes before writing them? And does anyone else have this nighttime dry-eye problem? I’d appreciate any advice, because it’s driving me crazy.
Reader Friday: Titles That You’ve Sent to the Shredder?
Grabbing the Zebra, and Other Survival Tactics for Writers
Earlier this week, a dear writer friend shared her most important survival instinct with me.
My friend–I’ll call her “Jane”–is the creator of a popular children’s sitcom, and an uber-successful writer. She also happens to be deathly afraid of animals. Especially wild animals.
Jane’s fear of the wild is regularly put to the test during production season, mostly because her show’s cast includes a 7-foot Asian Water Monitor Lizard. Although Mr. Lizard looks like a refugee from Jurassic Park, he’s usually a docile fellow. (But, as Jane notes, “His handlers make sure to feed him before he goes onstage.” Hungry 7-foot Asian Water Monitor Lizards get cranky, evidently.)
In addition to the lizard, last week Jane’s show featured a zebra: It was a cute but extremely nervous zebra. (Sharing walkons with a dinosaur probably didn’t help the zebra’s stage fright).
Jane was onstage typing up some production notes when the zebra’s handlers let him stretch his legs nearby. Somehow the animal managed to slip his rope, whereupon he bolted. And of course, he bolted straight toward Jane.
Jane kept her head. She pushed Save. Only then did she add, “Would someone grab that zebra?”
Yes, ladies and gentlemen–even under the most extreme duress, my courageous writer friend remembered to Save Her Work.
So that’s Jane’s most valuable tip for the week. What about yours? What’s your most important habit as a writer, the one that has gotten you through thick and thin? We want to know!
Moving time!
Well, it’s officially moving time and for the second time in two years the Langley-Hawthorne’s are moving continents. Moving from one side of the world to the other is one of the most stressful things you can do, yet we’ve decided to do it twice in as many years! Next thing you know we’ll be moving to somewhere like Singapore. We’re joking, of course, but if we were to do something like that, we’d seriously have to consider somewhere like Piermont Grand as a living space. One move at a time though, I guess! This time we’re headed from Melbourne, Australia to Denver, Colorado and I can tell you that moving (especially when combined with the end of the school year, my twins’ 8th birthday as well as Christmas) can be rather stressful! I wish we had hired a queens moving company to make the move easier, but if we move again, we’re definitely going to look into it! The stress hasn’t been fun at all! Although, a perk of moving is it can be a great opportunity to review how much you are paying for bills and maybe even look online for things like the best broadband deals to see if you save some money by switching. But as we hang on in there, I’ve been enjoying seeing all the ‘top 10 lists’ that inevitably emerge at this time of year.
It felt strange, however, watching a recent countdown of the ‘Top 10 Australian books to read before you die‘, not because I hadn’t read most of them (I had – forced to at school!) but because I realized how disconnected I feel to many of these so called ‘classics’. Even the more recent books, like top-ranked Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, failed to resonate with me and I had to wonder why. Was it because I was just too dim-witted to ‘get’ these books or did it run deeper than that? Am I just not Australian enough to appreciate them?
So have any of you felt the same level of disconnection from your own country’s ‘must read’ lists? If you had a ‘top 10 books to read before you die‘, what book would be at the top? Do you feel a level of kinship to your own country’s writers and books or does that rarely enter into the equation for you?
Reader Friday: Which Cliches are You Dying to Kill in 2013?
The Poetic Thriller
by Mark Alpert
One of the many embarrassing secrets from my past is that I once considered myself a poet. Now, there’s nothing inherently embarrassing about poetry; the shame comes from writing bad poetry, and I was a pretty bad poet. I started writing the stuff when I was a senior in high school and continued through my college years and into grad school. As you might expect, the most common subjects of my bad poems were attractive girls I admired from afar. Like every adolescent I had strong romantic feelings, but instead of expressing them in the usual manner — saying hello to the girl, asking for her phone number, etc. — I recorded my yearnings in torrid verse.
To maximize my mortification, I feel obliged to provide an example. The following poem is titled “Katie.” It’s named after a Vassar coed I met at a college party in November 1979 and never saw again.
Dearest Katie, passing splendor,
my much too brief delight,
please say that you’ll remember me
on some cold November night.
Too quick you left my fierce embrace,
too slow was I to follow,
too many the miles of endless waste
that tear me from your special grace,
each step a cause for sorrow.
The poem is embarrassing enough on its own, but the story behind it is even worse. You might assume from the words “fierce embrace” and “much too brief delight” that Katie and I shared a night of wild, passionate sex, but that was just wishful thinking on my part. In truth, our physical contact didn’t go beyond shaking hands. At the party she was more interested in dancing with one of my friends (Duncan, if you’re reading this: that’s you) than with me. And the Tolkienesque phrase “miles of endless waste” is another overstatement; it refers to the relatively short drive between Princeton and Vassar, which I could’ve navigated easily enough if I’d had the nerve.
But I want to focus on the last line: “each step a cause for sorrow.” Even in my youthful ignorance, I realized this line was better than the rest of the poem. It had a certain romantic grandness. And it was a lucky accident that the best line came at the end. I’ve always admired poems with strong endings. One of my English professors in college used to say that the last line of a poem should give you the sense that a door is closing, a lid is being snapped shut. In other words, the best poems end with a bang. Just consider these great closers:
…And I remain despairing of the port.
…Fled is that music: – Do I wake or sleep?
…First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
…and empty grows every bed.
This brings me to the connection between poetry and thrillers. Good suspense writing also ends with a bang. The last chapter of a thriller should have the fiercest battles, the biggest explosions, the most satisfying emotional payoffs. And in each of the book’s chapters, the concluding lines should deliver some kind of punch — a surprise, a reversal, a revelation, a cliffhanger. It’s even true on the level of individual paragraphs and sentences. Consider the following two sentences:
He held a gun in his right hand.
In his right hand he held a gun.
The latter sentence is more effective, right? The most powerful, interesting, surprising word should come at the end.
I’m curious: Are there any other closet poets out there who made the leap to the mystery/thriller world? And are there other lessons from poetry that you’ve applied to writing suspense fiction?
Admitting defeat on local flavor
Our stay in Hong Kong and Taipei has been wonderful (We didn’t end up going to mainland China, because the jittery authorities there denied one of our party a visa); my attempts to absorb the local flavor including the cuisine, however, met an abrupt and decisive defeat.
On the final day of the stay we were treated to lavish meals including pigeon, fungus, sea cucumber, soup with the innards of some unspecified creature, duck feet (they might actually have been goose feet, they were so large), plus a dessert of curdled whey with mango chunks, which looked like something an orangutan might have yarped up. I tried to sample everything to avoid insulting my hosts. Three hours later, I was doing my own share of yarping back in the hotel bathroom. By the time this post is published I’ll be in the air on the way back to Los Angeles– if I make it past the airport health monitors in Hong Kong, that is. In Asia they come at you wearing masks and waving handheld thermometers as you walk past cameras that show you in infrared. I’m afraid they might mistake me and my husband, who is also sick, for a pair of Patient Zeroes. If we do get quarantined, at least it’ll be fodder for a story.
Either way I’ll be out of pocket on tuesday, so I’ll leave you with a question–what’s your favorite medical malady thriller of all time? Mine have got to be COMA and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN. I’ll never forget that image of the human bodies suspended from wires.
See you all stateside!
Shaken not Stirred
I’m chomping at the bit to see the latest James Bond movie, Skyfall, and hoping that through the fog of moving preparations and children illnesses I’ll get a chance to see it before it goes to DVD (sadly I only get to see most movies after this fact!).
Although I remember being taken to the Roger Moore movies as a child, I really didn’t fall in love with James Bond until I read the original Ian Fleming books. These were true Cold War classics – taut and tightly plotted – they were vastly different to the slightly-camp, bloated movies that peppered the 1980s. 
That was when I went back and watched the Sean Connery Bond movies which were closer to the feel of the books. Now, with the emergence of Daniel Craig as Bond I feel the tone is returning to the original Fleming ideal (though I’m sure some of you will disagree:)) and I have the urge to re-read the books. My only fear is that they will suffer from ‘re-reading fatigue’ (you know, when you read something you loved and realize it’s not as lovable second time round – I had a severe case of this with John Fowles’ The Magus…)
So who amongst you have read the Ian Fleming books? What do you think – should I risk picking them back up? Will they seem merely dated and dull, given the current calibre of thrillers and spy mysteries out there?
In the Bondian spirit of things, I have to confess Daniel Craig is my favorite Bond, followed closely by Sean Connery. Timothy Dalton was probably the most akin to the Bond of Ian Fleming’s books but it didn’t seem to resonate on film as it should have. My least favorite Bond was Roger Moore (And boy was Moonraker a dud!). The best movie for me is Daniel Craig’s version of Casino Royale followed by Dr No.
So what about you? What’s your favorite Bond actor and movie?Also what about villains? ( I have to confess the ‘Jaws’ guy is mine – just for sheer novelty value!) Why do we think after so many decades, James Bond can still pull a crowd (not to mention the girl)?
Are you thrilling or merely mysterious?
Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die.
By P.J Parrish
Isn’t that the best two lines of dialogue you’ve ever read?
I have been thinking about James Bond — and his creator Ian Fleming – a lot lately. Partly this is because I just saw “Skyfall” (terrific flick!) but also because I’m correcting the galleys of our next book HEART OF ICE and I realized it isn’t a thriller.
I’m supposed to be a thriller writer. Yet this new book is really more of a true mystery. Which has me noodling about about the differences between the two and how all the sub-genres in crime fiction are criss-crossing each other faster than panicked chickens.
Years ago, I was a judge for the International Thriller Writers first contest and our First Novel committee had a devil of a time trying to decide which books qualified as thrillers and which did not. You can’t limit the definition, as some still insist on doing, to the hoary formula: A common man thrust into extraordinary circumstances in (insert exotic locale here) faces down a (insert monster or menace here) with the help of the beautiful and mysterious (insert female stereotype here) to save (insert organization, country or world here) before the clock ticks down to the final second.
So what IS a thriller?
Beats me. And we won the ITW Thriller Award with our book AN UNQUIET GRAVE (which to my mind is not a thriller but a classic whodunit with a creepy grave exhumation). So while I try to get out of the weeds this week with my overdue galleys, I thought I’d turn over the thriller question to someone with a higher pay grade than mine – Ian Fleming. He wrote this essay in 1962 but it’s still got some really good advice in it for us all — especially that bit about rewriting –- no matter if you’re thrilling or merely mysterious.
HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER
By Ian Fleming
People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.” I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that.
We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, CASINO ROYALE, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.
We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.
Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy. My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.
One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work – whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat. To give my hands something to do, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.
The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.
But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript.
The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine. I write for about three hours in the morning and I do another hour’s work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.
I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.
I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.
When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.
They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.
Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author’s vanity to realise how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.
But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?
First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.
Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.