By John Gilstrap

Back around the turn of the century (that would be 1999, give or take), I had the honor and distinct pleasure of splitting a bottle of good Italian wine with Thomas Harris.  For those who don’t recall, he is the brilliant writer who created Hannibal Lecter on the page.  I was writing the screenplay for reboot of Red Dragon at the time.  (No, my name is not on the film, and yes, I think I was screwed.  Royally so.)

Tom was (and is, I suppose) famously reclusive.  For the trade press back in the day, he was the get of all gets.  I asked him why he so vigorously avoided the press, and he told me that among other reasons, it was good for a thriller writer to be mysterious. I took that to mean that the fame should be about the work, not about the author.

Truthfully, I’m not sure that was ever the case, but it’s interesting to think about against today’s backdrop of social media and the narcissism it breeds.  And yes, I am a practitioner.  (Have I mentioned my YouTube channel or my Facebook page yet?) I don’t think it’s possible to go to a writers’ conference anywhere where the effective flogging of social media is not a main event.

That genie is out of the bottle now, and there’s no putting it back.  The question I grapple with is, where does the public Gilstrap end and the private Gilstrap begin?  Because let’s face it: As players in the entertainment business, we are all one Twitter shaming campaign away from being ruined. And there’s the fact that some things simply are nobody’s business.

I interact freely and openly with readers and watchers of my channel.  I encourage them to ask questions, and I promise honest answers.  If a question crosses the line, I don’t make a big deal of it; I just delete it and pretend it was never there.  And here’s why: There’s no point in engaging in any form of negative discourse in a public venue.  Ever.  I’ve build several successful careers around the inviolable rule that you always praise in public and correct in private.  That’s just simple respect.

I know several authors who paste copies of negative Amazon reviews on Facebook and then go on to excoriate the author of the review, presumably for the purpose of public humiliation.  What follows, of course, is a torrent of praise from his fans.  I don’t get it.  As longtime TKZers know, I am not a finger cymbals and incense kind of guy, but that kind of negative energy would exhaust me.

So, I thought I present my [until now, unwritten] rules about public discourse:

1. Never post politics. Sometimes my flesh is weaker than my spirit on this one.  We all know that I’m a gun guy and that gushy feel-goodism makes my teeth hurt, but I hope that comes out more as charming curmudgeonliness than political.  (Just stay off my lawn.) I can’t count the number of author buddies who post ill-considered, un-researched broadsides against the team they hate.  They get praise from their respective echo chambers, but they’ll never know the number of readers, followers, or would-be agents or publishers they turn off in the process.  Angry, insulted people rarely speak up.  They just quietly go away forever.
2. Never insult anyone for any reason. It’s fine to rail on about “the idiot who ran me off the road and then gave me the finger,” but I think it’s a mistake to say “Harriet Jones, my idiot neighbor ran me off the road . . .”  First of all, the part of the complaint that is relevant to a social media post is the act of being run off the road.  Mentioning Harriet’s name has no use other than to humiliate her–and in the process perhaps trigger some legal action against you in the future.
   1. And if you must insult someone, make sure it is never someone in the industry. The rumor mill in the publishing biz is swift and brutal.  Notwithstanding the power they wield over writers’ futures, agents and editors are notoriously thin-skinned.  Ditto movie producers.  Bottom line: they don’t need to take any crap from a newbie or a mid-lister, so many of them just won’t.
3. I never forget that mine is probably the bigger soapbox. This plays into #2 above.  As one’s social media presence grows, so does the need to recognize the responsibility that comes with it.  It would be a form of bullying for me to call out a freshman book that I thought was awful.  First of all, what the hell do I know?  Second, I remember how fragile a first book is.  Third, I may want a blurb from that author in a few years.
4. I never forget that lots of people have bigger soapboxes than mine. And that their rules may very well be different than mine.  There are issues that I simply won’t engage for fear of becoming chum for Twitter-hate.
5. I keep it positive. First of all, this resonates with my overall world view.  I’m a pretty optimistic guy.  There’s another reason why I keep things positive and I confess that I’m conflicted on my rationale.  Being part of the entertainment business, my business is to entertain.  People turn to fiction–and by extension to its creators–to find a release from the stresses of the day.  They neither want nor need the burden of my life’s stresses.  I’m blessed to have a great family and many wonderful and supportive friends, all of whom I can turn to for support in the dark times that we all face from time to time.  I don’t see a need to strong-arm people I’ve never met into giving me happy thoughts and supportive words.
   1. Health issues affect us all, whether directly or indirectly through those who are close to us.  I’ve been known to post about these things after-the-fact, but mostly to look at the funnier side and, more importantly, the hopeful side, as I did just about nine years ago exactly, when I posted Way Too Much Information, a journal of my gallbladder surgery.  After receiving some positive comments about that piece, I re-titled it My Cholesystectomy Adventure, and posted it on my website.  Every year, I get a dozen or so letters from patients who are facing that scary operation and find some comfort in my blunt, informative and pretty funny peek into the operating room.  And my urethra.
6. I keep my family out of it.  Everybody knows that I’m married to Joy, my best friend, and that we do a lot of things together.  She’s a huge part of my journey through life.  But she has her own business, and we both have extended families that are totally out of bounds for social media.
7. When I’m off-duty, I’m off-line. When night falls and the alarm is set, the social media machine is turned off.  Social media is part of my job, and my job requires me to be sociable and accessible.  But like any job, there’s a workday.  When I leave my office, I’m home.  And I never talk about what I do at home.

There are probably more, but that’s all that come to mind, and this post is running long anyway.  So, speak up, TKZ family.  What am I missing?

“Short fiction seems more targeted — hand grenades of ideas, if you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them.” ― Paolo Bacigalupi

By PJ Parrish

I’m of the age now where I can’t run like I used to.  I walk instead, sometimes for hours at a time, but it’s not as satisfying. I miss the endorphin buzz of intense running.  So lately I’ve taken to interval training. This is where you walk, and then you run like hell for a long as you can, then you walk again.

This is, I have found, a lot like writing a novel versus a short story. A novel is a long calculated walk. A short story is a sprint. I am clinging to this metaphor as I try this week to finish a short story.  Things are not going well. I really struggle with short stories.  I can count on two hands the number I have published. (If you’re interested, you can find my petite oeuvre here.)

Desperate to get out of second gear, I started re-reading Cheever. Didn’t help. Got moody and found myself drinking too many gin and tonics. Went back to John D. MacDonald’s The Good Old Stuff but it felt too familiar. So I went to the library and got a copy of Welcome to the Monkey House. I have read very little of Kurt Vonnegut’s work and none of his short stories.  It was like a good bracing walk on a wintery beach, maybe in Barnstable Village, Massachusetts.

There is something about coming cold to a writer’s work that makes you see your own work in new ways. Vonnegut had things to teach this old dog.  Although he’d maybe call that rot. In the preface to Monkey House, he writes:

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self taught. I have no theories about writing that will help others.  When I write, I become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing.

In the water, I am beautiful.

Even before reading the first story, I felt better just reading that. Because no matter how clumsy you might be in daily life, how hobbled you might feel because you can’t run anymore, you can still feel beautiful in the water.  Isn’t that how you feel when the writing is going well, that you’re effortlessly swimming?

I’m only a couple stories into the collection, but I wanted to share a couple thoughts about what I have read so far. The second story, “Harrison Bergeron,” appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1962. It’s a dystopian domestic mini-drama set in the year 2081, told almost totally in dialogue. It is funny and deeply disturbing. There is a moment where a man is lifting a ballerina and Vonnegut gives us this line:

They leaped like deer on the moon.

It hit me almost physically. A metaphor is a perfect stab of recognition, and that’s what I felt. Then I got to one of Vonnegut’s most famous stories, “All The King’s Horses.” Completely different style, but just as gut-wrenching. A pilot is shot down in Asia during the Cold War. On board are his crew as well as his wife and 10-year-old twin sons. As in all great short stories, we are dropped into a fast-moving narrative river, and all we can do is hang on.  The pilot’s Russian captor offers a bargain — the pilot must play a chess game for the lives of his crew and family.  Then comes the awful twist — the pilot’s men, wife and sons are to be the living chess pieces, moved on a checkerboard floor in a throne room. That’s all I will tell you, except that I gasped at one point.

When I started this post, I had forgotten that Vonnegut had — despite his disclaimer of having nothing to teach other writers — issued his Eight Tips For Writing a Good Short Story.  So of course, I looked them up. I think they work well for any kind of fiction, actually.  With a few caveats for us crime dogs, maybe. Some you might have heard before, but they bear repeating:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them-in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To hell with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The first one is great advice no matter what you’re writing — even a memo.

The second one I believe in wholeheartedly. Which is why I gave up on The Americans.  

Number three we’ve quoted many times here at TKZ when we talk about motivation. And the deeper you can plumb the depths of what a character wants, the richer your story will be.

Rule four is important. Every sentence should do something, be on the page for a reason. I read somewhere that Vonnegut disliked television, except for Cheers, which he called a comic masterpiece.  He said, “I’d rather have written Cheers than anything I’ve written. Every time anybody opens his or her mouth on that show, it’s significant. It’s funny.”

Now, we get to number five, which is critical for short stories but troublesome for novelists, given that we like to flap our gums sometimes before getting to the dramatic point. (ie weather, description, backstory).  But if you really think about it, you should never start your novel at too early a juncture. You should always find that prime dramatic moment to drop your reader into the action.

Six is a given. As James says here often, something must be disturbed in your protagonist’s world.

Number seven is about authenticity. If you set out to be James Patterson, you will fail. Yeah, be smart about today’s market, but write the book you were meant to write.

Now the last one is tricky. I am not quite sure what Vonnegut is talking about here. Because on its face, it goes against much of what we talk about here about NOT larding your early pages with too much information. You want some mystery in the beginning. You want to pose questions that beg answers. Maybe Vonnegut is just arguing for clarity in the writing itself?  The choreography (moving characters through time and space) must be clear. Confusion should be avoided. Maybe you all can help me out on this one.

As for me, it is back to the drawing board. While reading Vonnegut’s stories, I realized I had chosen the wrong point of entry for my own story. I was approaching my story too much like I would a novel. I need to figure out the end so I can begin closer to it.   I need to sprint instead of walk.

I want to leave you with one more Vonnegut metaphor. In the preface to Monkey House, he questions where the creative impulse originates from:

The New Yorker said that a book of mine, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, was a ‘series of narcissistic giggles.’ Perhaps it would be helpful to the reader to imagine me as the White Rock girl, kneeling on a boulder in her nightgown, either looking for minnows or adoring her own reflection.

I remember the White Rock girl well. When I was a kid, I thought she was Tinkerbell’s mother. And I always wondered what the heck she was looking at.  I still do. But ah, that’s the mystery, no?

p.s. If you’re wondering about the title of this post, listen to this “short story”: