By Mark Alpert

I just finished an amazing novel that was published last year, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain. It’s set in the not-too-distant past of the Bush era, when the war in Iraq was raging and the airwaves in America were full of over-the-top patriotic extravaganzas. The U.S. Army has organized a Victory Tour for a squad of infantrymen whose combat heroics were caught on video and broadcast on the evening news, making instant celebrities out of the young, rowdy soldiers. Billy Lynn is the baby of the squad, a 19-year-old who won the Silver Star for his valor during the firefight but can barely remember what happened. He’s overwhelmed and exhausted by all the fawning attention he gets from armchair warriors during the Victory Tour, which culminates in a farcical halftime show at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium on Thanksgiving Day. And he even toys with the idea of deserting, because the Army is planning to send him and his fellow grunts right back to Iraq as soon as the football game is over.

Billy went to Stovall, to the three-bedroom, two-bath brick ranch house on Cisco Street with sturdy access ramps front and back for his father’s wheelchair, a dark purple motorized job with fat whitewalls and an American flag decal stuck to the back. “The Beast,” Billy’s sister Kathryn called it, a flanged and humpbacked ride with all the grace of a tar cooker or giant dung beetle. “Damn thing gives me the willies,” she confessed to Billy, and Ray’s aggressive style of driving did in fact seem to strive for maximum creep effect. Whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr, he buzzed to the kitchen for his morning coffee, then whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr into the den for the day’s first hit of nicotine and Fox News, then whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr back to the kitchen for his breakfast, whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrrto the bathroom, whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrrto the den and the blathering TV, whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr, whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr, whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr, he jammed the joystick so hard around its vulcanized socket that the motor keened like a tattoo drill, the piercing eeeeeeennnnnhhhhhh contrapuntaling off the baseline whhhhhhhiiiiirrrrrrr to capture in sound, in stereophonic chorus no less, the very essence of the man’s personality. “He’s an asshole,” Kathryn said.

The novel is also brilliantly structured. It starts with the limo ride to the Cowboys stadium a couple of hours before kickoff and ends with the same limo picking up the soldiers after the game. In between we get to see the football players suiting up in the locker room, the team owner’s luxurious suite, the equipment room, the drunken fans, and of course the fabulous Cowboys cheerleaders. There are some flashbacks, but not too many. The only really extended one is the description of Billy’s depressing homecoming. I was expecting the author to eventually describe the heroic deeds of the infantrymen in the firefight in Iraq, but that expected flashback never arrives. We just get a few bits and pieces of it: Billy’s despair as one of his comrades dies in his lap, his sergeant’s pride in Billy’s heroism (expressed, jarringly, as a painful kiss after the battle). The omission is disappointing in a way — we want to know what happened there! — but it fits with the theme of the novel. The soldiers themselves don’t want to think about what happened. And when the fawning armchair warriors bombard them with thoughtless questions, asking them what they felt during the firefight, the grunts can’t respond. If you weren’t there, you can never really understand.

“Oh, ma’am, don’t worry about him,” Crack assures her. “We’re infantry, that’s kind of like being a dog or a mule, we’re too dumb to mind the weather. He’s fine, believe me, he don’t feel a thing.”

“No ma’am,” Mango chimes in. “We punch him every once in a while to keep his blood moving. See, like this.” He delivers a sharp whack to Lodis’s bicep. Lodis snarls and throws out his arms, but his eyes never open.

In short, I urge you to read this novel. There’s no better way to learn how to write fiction.  

Some of us have alter egos lurking deep within. If you were to invent the ultimate pen name for your hidden self, what would it be? 

By Boyd Morrison

After four months of living in Los Angeles, taking acting classes and learning about the business side of Hollywood, I head back to Seattle today full of new energy and knowledge. What’s surprising to me is how much of what I learned about acting can be applied both to writing and to life in general.

I’d like to share some of the best words of wisdom I heard while I was in LA. Many of them come either directly or indirectly from my instructor Howard Fine at the Howard Fine Acting Studio. I wish I could take every single class the studio offers, but the foundation I got will serve me for years to come.

I thought about explaining these quotes’ origins and meanings, but I’d rather let them speak for themselves. I hope you find a few that make you look at your life or your writing in a different way.

“I have time.” (Said to yourself before taking on a new endeavor)

“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”

“If you can’t change one thing, you can’t change anything.”

“We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions.”

“Control is a false god; do not pray to it.”

“Creativity does not live in the thinking mind.”

“It’s not who you know; it’s who knows you.”

“The tell of a lie is that the body has no muscle memory.”

“If a relationship is unimportant, the scene is unimportant.”

“Scenes are not about our emotions, but what we can do about our emotions.”

“Desire trumps everything.”

“Characters are in crisis at crossroads in moments of critical decision.”

“Comedy comes from one-hundred-percent investment in a silly issue.”

“Most people ask a question and want an immediate answer; an artist is willing to discover it.”

“You don’t need to be other than who you are, but all of who you are.”

“How we speak is conditioned by how we think we’ll be listened to.”

“You can’t make a mistake by caring too much. You can only make a mistake by not caring.”

“We care about the character in direct proportion to how much the character cares about anything.”

“Nobody wants less investment. The more you invest in the scene, the more the observer will be drawn in.”

“When you are interested, you become interesting.”

“You become self-conscious when your attention is on yourself, not on the other person in the scene.”

“If mistakes humiliate you, you will never create.”

 “Those who are the most present and have the most charisma are the ones who are most alive in their senses.”

“What becomes our truth is a story we tell ourselves over and over.”

Here is a first-page submission titled A BOTHER OF BODIES, followed by my comments.  Then we’d like everyone to jump in.

Note: I’m posting from Tokyo using my iPad, which isn’t Blogger-friendly under the best of circumstances. So please forgive any formatting errors!

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