Category Archives: Work Habits

How Chandler Overcame “Plot Constipation”

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Raymond Chandler

I’m having fun reading the selected letters of Raymond Chandler. He’s as entertaining in his correspondence as in his fiction. Plenty of opinions, yet also aware of his own foibles.

In 1945 he was under contract to Paramount (he had just written the classic screenplay for Double Indemnity, which was ironic as he loathed James M. Cain’s writing. “Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.”) The money was good, but the demand for original stories plagued him. That’s because Chandler was never one to grind stories out of “the sausage machine.” He believed that style and voice were more essential than plot, precisely the opposite of what Hollywood wanted.

But to keep a paycheck he needed to produce, and did, with mixed results.

A letter from this period talks about a method of writing Chandler happened upon out of necessity:

In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages like this: All dictated and never looked at until finished. It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not. But I don’t see why the method could not be adapted to novel writing, at least by me. Improvise the story as well as you can, in as much detail or as little as the mood seems to suggest, write dialogue or leave it out, but cover the movement, the characters and bring the thing to life. I begin to realize the great number of stories that are lost by us rather meticulous boys simply because we permit our minds to freeze on the faults rather than let them work for a while without the critical overseer sniping at everything that is not perfect.

Here at TKZ we’ve talked a lot about the tyranny of the “inner editor.” The writer, whether plotter or pantser, needs to get that first draft finished to truly know the story trying to emerge. Only then do you get to the “fixing” of it. In another letter Chandler wrote: “[Y]ou never quite know where your story is until you have written the first draft of it. So I always regard the first draft as raw material.”

I’ve told my students to write a first draft “as fast as you comfortably can.” Do a quick edit of the previous day’s work, then move on.

That broke through the “plot-constipation” for Chandler (although there’s no record of what became of that story; likely it went to the story department for an assessment and never got the interest of a producer).

In the same letter, however, Chandler identified a potential weakness:

I can see where a special vice might also come out of this kind of writing; in fact two: the strange delusion that something on paper has a meaning because it is written…Also, the tendency to worship production for its own sake. (Gardner suffers badly from this…grinding the stuff out of the sausage machine.)

Chandler nailed it. Just because you write something doesn’t make it good. And publishing junk over and over doesn’t make a career (it does make a persistent and rather annoying hobby). He believed that style (the writer’s “individual mark”) makes all the difference. Style (or voice) is a “projection of personality” but “you have to have a personality before you can project it.” Thus, if you’re cranking things out of the machine, or using a machine to crank things out for you, you may create something with, in Chandler’s words, “an immediate impact of competence,” but it will be “hollow underneath.”

Two lessons to draw from this:

  1. Write fast first drafts

When you get to a point of constipa…er, when you get stuck, jump ahead to another scene. You can go back to this spot later. Get to know your story first.

  1. Concentrate on voice as you write

Voice is not something you can fake. Neither can AI. I wrote a book about ways you can pan for the gold of your own voice. Put that on the page. It’s what will set you apart in this sea of conformity.

It’s also why we still read Raymond Chandler today.

Comments welcome.

Do You Bleed on the Page?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

One of the more ubiquitous quotes about writing out there, almost always attributed to Hemingway, is: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Great quote, eh? Only problem is, Hemingway never said it, never wrote it, and probably never even thought it.

So why is he considered the source? Because some quote aggregator back in the 1970s thought it sounded like something Hemingway would say. You know, the running-with-the-bulls guy, the likes-to-box guy. He’d be all about blood.

Not.

Later, the line was given to him in a mediocre TV movie called Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012). So now you see it almost daily on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, along with another thing Hemingway never said: “Write drunk. Edit sober.” I’m starting to feel like that Britney Spears guy. “Leave Ernest Hemingway alone!!!!”

The real source for the blood quote comes down to a choice between two writers: Paul Gallico (author of The Poseidon Adventure) and the great sports columnist Red Smith. In a 1946 book, Confessions of a Story Writer, Gallico wrote:

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don’t feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you’re wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

This is good advice. You can write competent fiction without feeling. Heck, that’s what AI does. But you won’t get that deep connection with the readers—and turn them into fans—unless you pour your own heart’s blood into the characters and your prose.

Shortly after Gallico’s book came out, the widely-syndicated columnist Walter Winchell quoted Red Smith as saying, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” It’s likely, then, that Winchell and/or Smith paraphrased Gallico.

Smith apparently liked the blood metaphor, for in a profile in 1961 in Time magazine, he was asked how hard it was to produce a sports column every day. “Writing a column is easy,” he replied. “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

This has a different meaning than the “bleed on the page” quote. It’s an obvious reference to the agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). Smith was talking about the agony of having to come up with a fresh column idea every 24 hours (not easy!) and then write it in his singular style.

Putting these two sentiments together, I find it essential to feel something when I write a scene. Music helps. I have a playlist of various moods taken from movie soundtracks. I need an inner vibration to make a scene come alive.

And while I wouldn’t describe myself as “agonizing” (Proust-like) over my style, I do go over my words at least three times. There’s the daily editing of the previous day’s work; then the first read-through in hard copy; and a final polish. I pursue that “unobtrusive poetry” John D. MacDonald talked about. The effort, for me at least, is entirely worth it.

Mega-bestselling author John Green (Turtles All the Way Down) put it this way:

[W]riting is difficult for me. Sometimes it is difficult because I do not know what I want to say, but usually it is difficult because I know exactly what I want to say but what I want to say has not yet taken the shape of language. When I’m writing, I’m trying to translate ideas and feelings and wild abstractions into language, and that translation is complicated and challenging work. (But it is also — in moments, anyway — fun.)

It is indeed fun, and fully satisfying, to sit back and look at something you’ve written and think, “Ya know, that’s pretty darn good.” Maybe that’s what Hemingway meant when he (really) said, “For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

So…do you ever think of yourself as “bleeding” on the page? Should you?