Subtle Tools

My last post was about characterization. I used cinematic examples, something I often do because the odds are better that you've all seen the same movies than that you've read the same books. Unfortunately, I feel that I managed to snare myself a little bit there.

You see, talking about movies, it's too easy to fall into the visual language of film. Too easy to overlook some of the novelist's finest tools.

Sure, there are some things movies do that books can't. The best car chases I've ever read (all by George Pelecanos, as it happens) still struggle to compare to the average Hollywood action movie. And the fine fight scenes of John D MacDonald, Joe R Lansdale, John Connolly or Lee Child still don't compare to the adrenalin rush of watching Jason Bourne, Daniel Craig's Bond or Jet Li.

Movies do visual. They do it well, brilliantly even. But that is also Hollywood's weakness: they can only put an image on the screen.

Novelists have a wonderful array of much, much more subtle tools at their disposal.

I'll use the former example of a 'Clark Kent' character, someone who may seem mild on the outside but the reader is to understand possesses hidden depths.

Thoughts: It may seem too obvious, but we do have the power to let our readers in on our characters' thoughts. Way back when, mild-mannered Clark might have thought, "Janet doesn't suspect that I am Secret Heroman, the one she seeks." These days, it's more fashionable and effective to have another character give that information to the reader:

Janet watched Clark move around the room. He always came off like a big shaggy dog, sort of clumsy and sweet, but Janet was never able to escape the sense that Clark was a steel trap, coiled and ready to spring.

Now, no matter what a dishrag Clark is over the next few chapters, we'll still have that little seed in the back of our minds. And notice that in addition to moving into another character's head for the thoughts, I also didn't present those thoughts as dialogue.

Small Reactions: Movies do a pretty fair job with the big reactions, and a particularly gifted actor can express a wide array of subtle emotions just by lifting an eyebrow. But a filmmaker cannot be sure of getting their star of choice, or of the shot they want. And there's no guarantee the folks in the seats will see interpret that raised eyebrow the right way, or even notice it. With prose, we can isolate these expressions and make sure the reader knows what it means.

Janet's eyes narrowed. That car had come within inches of hitting them, and Clark didn't seem to care. Her own heart was racing, her breath short. Clark was cool and calm, quiet and poised. Almost bored.

"That maniac could have killed us," he said.

We know how we would react to a minor crisis like a near hit and run. Clark's unusual reaction, and Janet's careful appraisal, plant that crucial seed. Also, her more normal reactions are there for contrast.

Outright Exposition: This tool isn't subtle, but one of our strengths as novelists is the length of story that we have to work with. Every second of screen-time in a movie costs a small fortune, quite a bit more than a page of print.

"You stand around there, looking all sleepy and slow and not too bright, but you don't fool me." The old man shook his head and laughed. "I was there that night the Jonas brothers showed up drunk and high and God knows what else. They were pure tearing the hell out of the place, and you just stood there like a big dope watching. Right up until those boys laid a hand on Miss Polly."

This time the old man laughed until he coughed, and he coughed until he spat, thin and brown.

"I was there, boy. You can't fool me."

John D MacDonald used this one a fair bit. Yeah, it sidetracks us from the narrative. Yeah, there are more economical ways to drop this hint. So what. You make it entertaining enough and your readers will be too busy imagining what happened that night with the Jonas brothers to notice that they were sidelined.

Environment: This one's great fun. You get to be all poetical and stuff. Basically, you take some quality of the environment or element of the natural world and juxtapose it against your character to make a point.

"The wallet, dickhead. Give it." The gun in the mugger's hand was a little block of chrome, no bigger than a child's toy. To Janet the barrel looked as wide as the Holland Tunnel.

It was a beautiful summer day in the park. Children played on the swings, students threw a frisbee on the lawn and an urban hawk wheeled overhead, still and slow.

Clark stood. He held his hands low and out to his sides.

"You hear me, dickhead? The wallet."

Janet thought she might wet her pants. If the gun in the mugger's hand bothered Clark, he gave no sign. His eyes moved from the children to the students and back to the man with the gun. He pulled a flat square of dark leather from his front pocket. The hawk's shadow glided over the grass at his feet.

The mugger grabbed the wallet and ran. Janet bent over, knees shaking. Tears rose hot and shameful, blinding her.

"Goddammit, Clark, why couldn't you do something? God damn it!"

Clark said nothing. The hawk plummeted, a dark shadow out of the blue sky, seizing its prey.

James Lee Burke is really the master at this. His latest book features a brilliant scene in which a mild-seeming man confronts an underworld figure. The man's words are quiet, his manner assured. On the far side of the picture window, a shark menaces a group of swimmer's. The hitman's true nature, and the danger he represents are clear.

There are probably a few more I could think of, but right about now I need to be getting back to the ol' novel...

Introducing Clark Kent

It's an old rule, but a good (and important) one: Always, always, *always* bring 'em onstage in character.

How many Bond movies have you seen? How many Batman? Notice they usually start with a big action splash? Sometimes it hooks into the ongoing story; others, it simply stands to intorduce the hero. At any rate, within a few seconds of the movie starting, you know you're looking at a man of action.

Or how about Jack Reacher? Every book in the series starts with Reacher being cool and collected, kicking ass and on the move. Even Tarzan's first adult appearance (after opening chapters describing his infancy and childhood) involves him hunting the deadly and feared black panther.

How do we meet Bridget Jones? Hapless, eating, drinking and smoking too much, embarrassed by her mother and about to make a horrible faux pas-- pretty much her character in a nutshell.

Robert DeNiro in Ronin: He stands outside the small French cafe, looking in. He wanders around the back to scout the exit, leaves a gun hidden where he can reach it in a hurry. That way, he gets through the frisk at the entrance, still knows how to get out and get lethal, should the need arise. We know right away, here's a guy who thinks ahead. Way ahead.

Hmmm... villains? Well, this is a writer's place to shine-- you get to show that son of a bitch being a true son of a bitch, even if he's trying to hide it.

Which brings me to the crux of my issue: how do you introduce Clark Kent?

For the few comics-imparied among you (and in which case, why *are* you reading this blog?) Clark Kent is Superman's alter ego. To decompress from the pressures of being God on Earth, Supes likes to unwind by being a bit of a pantywaist. Ahem, excuse me... 'mild mannered'.

So how do you bring the mild-mannered pantywaist onstage without losing your reader? And how do you hint that behind those glasses and that stutter, he's actually faster than a speeding bullet?

Tonight I saw 'From Paris With Love'. (Small confession: I'll go see ANYTHING Luc Besson does-- he's a master storyteller. If the man wants to adapt Green Eggs and Ham, he'll make one fine and gripping thriller out of it!)

We first meet Reese (played by new heartthrob Jonathon Rhys Meyers) in his Clark Kent role at the US Embassy in Paris. I watched him spend several seconds receiving a fax and thought, 'ah Jeez...'

Seriously, like five or ten seconds of film time, his hand is hovering over the paper as it comes out of the fax machine. It just doesn't get any more dweebish than that.

Until he talks. Poor Reese is a flunky to the Ambassador, the guy who brings coffee and schedules appointments and reminds his boss of people's names. So how do we show the hero hidden under this zero?

Well, as he flunkies about, he's also kicking his boss's ass at chess. We see him in action, see him thinking several moves ahead of a guy who fancies himself something of an expert. And before the scene is done, he gets the call from his spy-handler sending him on a mission.

You can show us the dweeb, but you've got under a minute to let those glasses slip. Lois Lane (or the US Ambassador, or whoever) may not notice, but the reader has to see that there's something more than mild manners under that facade.

Same goes for hidden villains. If your villain is posing as a friend at first, let us see a little something that shows what a real sumbitch he really is!

Daniel Cleever comes to mind. Hugh Grant needs nothing more than a two-second look to show us what kind of man he is, and how foolish Bridget would be to get involved with him.

Fagan comes off as a friend to Oliver Twist, but the other kids are afraid of him.

Eleanor starts The Haunting of Hill House with a blatant appeal to our sympathy (her life really, really, *really* sucks) and a bit of Grand Theft Auto. Come to think of it, that book ends on a note every bit as ambiguous as it begins. I guess journeys really do end in lovers meeting...

Character and Stereotype

When I started doing comics, one of the hardest things for me to bend my head around was the necessity of stereotypes. But the sad truth is, they *are* necessary.

In real life, the deadly Mossad assassin probably looks like a plumber. The best martial artists are often either thick, rubbery and potbellied or downright emaciated. And your friendly neighborhood tattooist may be a fan of opera who speaks five languages.

Too bad. In the modern campfire tales we tell in print, a certain amount of stereotyping aids believability. If I bring Mossad assassins into a comics panel, they'd better look like Carrie Anne Moss in The Matrix or I'd better have a damn good reason. Same if my martial arts master doesn't carry at least a whiff of Bruce Lee or Jet Li, or better still, a frail little old man who just sort of smiles when threatened.

If I'm telling a drama, my hero needs to look heroic, or readers won't buy it. In comedy, I can send a Woody Allen lookalike charging through that door, but not drama.

Novels are not as bad as comics that way. Mostly because in prose the reader makes his own mental picture. The novelist does have more flexibility, but only some. We still don't want Jack Reacher short and tubby with a bald spot, Scarlett O'Hara with a lazy eye and halitosis, Conan with bad teeth or the creepy inbred inhabitants of Dunwhich to host an annual festival to boost tourism.

Stereotypes enable a quick scan. They're sensory filters, a part of our hunter/gatherer instincts, a general-classification thing that's hardwired into our brains. It was useful when our lives were all about edible/inedible, predator/prey, safety/danger. In the same way our ancient ancestors didn't carefully examine every single blackberry on each and every bush before eating, we modern types use that general-classification thing to navigate a bewildering variety of social encounters. Intimacy takes time, it takes interest, it requires the sort of deeper exchange that really pisses off everyone waiting behind you at the drive-thru window.

Same as intimacy takes time in real life, it takes time in a story. Same as it's not always appropriate in real life (they still won't let me back to that Burger King), it's not worth getting to know each and every character in your novel. So the big question, the one should be hanging in front of every writer's mind is, is it worth getting to know this character? How deeply?

Your first-person protagonist can be a tangled nest of contradictions. Most of us are. We understand this about ourselves, and we'll understand these contradictions in the person we spend 300 pages with. The supporting cast too. Less so, in the same way that we understand our friends. They don't tell us everything (any more than we share our every dark secret with them), but enough. The kid at the drive-thru? Probably best to let it go at a mention of his paper hat and his acne, if you need to mention him at all.

And that, really, is the heart of the matter. It's a choice, always a choice. And it's a choice that needs to be intelligently made. In Pulp Fiction, Quentin Tarantino brilliantly shattered the hitman stereotype as Vince and Jules make small talk right up to 'We ought to have shotguns.' But just as brilliantly, he leaves Marsellus, Lance, Fabienne and The Wolf pretty much as we find them. Crime boss, dealer, girlfriend, fixer. Expanding them further would have killed the narrative flow.

Next post, I just may well argue the opposite position. You see, it too is true...

Shady Pasts and Fifty-Three Tangled Blue Words

We live in an age of economical storytelling. Wherever you can, let your readers fill in the gaps. Instead of pausing each character in front of a mirror (*shudder*), just tell us he's tall and dark, she's short, with gray eyes. And for heaven's sakes, give us as little history as possible!

I've seen this a fair bit recently in my reading, and I've been ruthlessly pruning it in my editing: characters with a compulsion to provide detailed histories upon introduction. Sure, it's customary in opera, Elizabethan theatre and superhero comics for a new hero or villain to take a moment, leave the action, step down to the front of the stage and wax eloquent about their origins, hopes, dreams and how they came to be in this place at this time.

And in those stylized, hermetic worlds, this works. Kinda.

Modern storytelling? Not so much.

I put three books down this week because they introduced a dark and mysterious protagonist, only to have him/her spill their whole history before page fifty. Oddly, it dimished the heroes and heroines in my eyes: the pasts on the page weren't as interesting as the pasts I'd imagined!

Take two great mysterious strangers: Shane and Rick the American.

Shane's just passing through. The man's trouble, and he looks it. The boy's dad runs him off at gunpoint, and the rancher's thugs don't dare mess with him. And this is *before* he pulls his sidearm out of storage!

What do we know about Shane? He's a restless man, always on the move. He's a gunslinger, disenchanted by the violent nature that's always so close to the surface of his actions. He's got the hots for the boy's mom but respects the boy's dad. And he knows there's no place in their peaceful world for men like him.

These four facts drive a great story. Jack Schaefer's prose is lean and hard. In the face of the boy's (and our) questions, Shane's silence about his own history makes him compelling.

Rick doesn't even have a last name. He's just Rick the American, owner of a North African nightclub and a man who 'sticks his neck out for no one'. His past is shady and mysterious: all we get from the Gestapo's file is that he was a gunrunner who backed the good guys, even when they lost.

We don't need Rick's history. We need his present. If you ask me, Casablanca would be even better without that damn Paris flashback: it stops the action dead to tell us what we already know. When Ilsa walks into that bar, Rick's reaction is all the history we need.

Now imagine alternate drafts of those two stories.

Imagine Shane casually mentioning (a sequel told over some farmwork-y stage business) that he grew up on a little farm Back East, but that he ran away at sixteen to join the Marines. He served tours in Okinawa and the Phillipinnes, learned a little judo or karate (he uses oriental martial arts in the novel), won a few medals for marksmanship. After he mustered out, he spent a few years signing on for whoever paid. After a bad experience, he put that life behind him. Now he's wandering West, maybe to homestead a little place outside of Spokane, etc. etc. etc.

Or Rick, chatting to Louis about how he's from Ohio. Used to sell insurance, until he caught his wife cheating on him. After that the Spanish Civil War looked good, but a bad bout of influenza kept him out of action. He could still serve by running guns, though...

Two. Dead. Characters.

Those sequels, no matter how well written, add nothing to the story at hand. They actually take away from it! You've turned your exotic strangers with the mysterious pasts into a couple of schlubs! And it's not just the action/thrillers, either.

The Breakup dies right at the opening. 'Meet cute' in the baseball stadium, photo montage of the relationship, open with That Fateful Night. The dinner and its leadup where written well. The photos were inoffensive. But the meet? Not cute enough. And unnecessary. Too much history. Without that scene, we would have imagined something LOTS better.

You can pull this stunt and get published. The three books I dropped this week are proof of that. Thing is, your story will be better if you concentrate on the story. Not the events leading up to the story, but the story itself. Where you do need the past (and let's face it, you do need some past), be as economical as possible.

Take a cue from master storyteller Bob Dylan:

She was married when we first met, soon to be divorced.

I helped her out of a jam I guess, but I used a little too much force.

We drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west...

Split up on the docks that night, both agreeing it was best.

A whole novel's worth of story. Romance. Violence. Fugitives on the open road. The sorrow of loss.

Told in four lines. Fifty-three words.

Grappling Character

I write with a tight cast. I'm facinated by personalities driven into conflict with each other. When it works, hero and villain crash into each other at the end of an inevitable and ever-accelerating rocket-slide into their own personal hells.

I find myself driven to explore even the lowest-level henchman. Even if the information doesn't make it to the page, I need to know *why* they're on this adventure. Why don't the guards quit? Or call the cops or something? Why do those damn stormtroopers just stand in that hallway?

When one of my characters stays wooden on the page? The whole story lies dead.

Dead, dead, dead. Dead.

This becomes... upsetting.

For me, character is like grappling. Punching and kicking, the shot lands or it doesn't. That's like scene construction. The scene works, or it doesn't. Grappling is fluid: winner and loser can change in the blink of an eye, and everything's up in the air until a definitive hold locks on.

With Poison Door, my problem was my hero. Sarah Crane, my tough cop, notices runaways and street kids going missing. Pulling that thread unravels her life. I had a good grip on the villain and the street kid who acts as the bridge between the two, but Sarah, she just kind of showed up on time and said her lines, you know? No spark.

Two thirds of the way through the book, I was sweating bullets. Sarah was the damn hero, and she bored the hell out of me! One day, riding my bike in the city, I was humming a little tune in my head, One Hundred Punks Rule, by Generation X. Rolling past a couple of young'uns, plaid and piercings and colored mohawks, I had the usual whistful thought that my days in the mosh pit are behind me. For one thing, I'm not as keen as I once was. And even if I *was*, there's nothing creepier than the really old guy at the kids' party.

BAM! The arm-bar shot home, and I had my grip on Sarah. I went back through her sequels and wrote from the heart about the invisible and irrevocable membrane that seperates us from our youthful selves. Bits of her character began to dovetail, and by the time I got back to the point I'd left off, she was barrelling forward on greased rails.

Now, with Crossroad Blues, my problem was Jack Terrabonne. Jack's my Minor Bastard, a vain and selfish man whose ego makes the Major Bastard's evil possible. Jack's a washed-up country music star, putting off his eventual sunset in Las Vegas or Branson, Missouri and pretending to the vigour of his lost youth, living in the glories of his past and blind to his evils in his present.

Problem was, Jack was a little bit cardboard. Part of my problem was that I'm in a very different place in my life, and on a very different trajectory. Part of it is that I simply do not like this asshole. If Jack wasn't so self-involved, a lot of lives might have been saved.

So how do I write him? Where's my hold?

Well, I start with two articles of faith: 1) My subconscious has a reason for putting him in the story. 2) This guy's dog thinks he's pretty cool. That is, somewhere in this guy's life, he gives and receives love and and acceptance.

So I've been grappling with Jack, jumping from hold to hold, trying to find one that locks on. I've written a bit about Jack's few genuine relationships, and a bit more about his efforts to revive his recording career.

But I still don't like him. Jack is isolated, deluded and monstrously selfish. He's....

BAM!

Jack Terrabonne is the unbridled artistic ego. He's the natural result of Picasso's quote to the effect that 'an artist would rather see his kids on the street and his wife in a whorehouse than go without paints and brushes.' Jack is a big spoiled baby. A talented spoiled baby.

And just like that, I see Jack's great conflict in his life. It's with his own past: all anyone wants to hear are the classic hits from his past (the Branson/Vegas fate), but Jack's ego won't accept that his best days are behind him. He keeps trying to record new material, and it's godawful.

This, I can understand. I could be making a very comfortable living tattooing full-time. I could make better than that if I opened my own studio again. The world is happy to reward the art of my youth. But creatively, I've moved on, and that's an uphill battle.

I've got my grip. I still don't like the guy, but he's mine now...

Where DO You Get Your Ideas

Don't you just love that question?


Right now, my Main Bastard has really found his groove. He's fiercely loyal to the Minor Bastard. He's charismatic in his way, a good friend.


He's also sadistic, murderous and terrifying. He moves through a world of pleasure, victims and opportunity. Pity anyone or anything the Main Bastard catches weak and alone.


Killing isn't enough for the Main Bastard. For some reason, he loves to play with his victims. He reenacts his triumphs with the dead bodies until the game bores him.


It's only a matter of time before he begins his search again.


Why?


It's his nature. Taking prey, he feels alive.


The Tiny Dynamo finds my work violent and dark. She often wonders where those terrible ideas come from.


Somehow, I don't think she'd believe me if I told her:

His fluffy, pretend victims aren't enough. He brought another bird in the house last night.... Gotta love him, though!

Those Little Nippers

Turns out that gentle stoner whose original role was mostly the laying of pipe is a real passive-aggressive, backstabbing bastard.

And a Supporting Actress whose role I didn't (and still don't) quite understand has a lot more sand to her than I'd first thought. I'm starting to see how a gal like that might figure in the villains' denouement.

Oh, and my sweet-natured Innocent Victim? She might be a bit of a liar, and a thief.

At least, at long last, my Hero is finally alone among the villains, isolated and without solace on an estate that makes Thornfield or Manderlay seem like beachside holiday homes. The two Villains have different reasons for wanting him there, and Kane has his own reasons for going.

Yesterday was a day of surprises!

Official Semi-Daily Wordcount-o-Meter:

27,073 words

Will I make my unoffical Dec. 2nd deadline?

Let us hope....

Writing Lessons from... Helena Bonham Carter?!

The Tiny Dynamo and I saw the new Harry Potter movie last week. I wasn't completely happy with the adaptation, and I wasn't completely disappointed, either.

But I was definitely struck by Helena Bonham's turn as Bellatrix. In her own words, she 'had five lines, and they cut three out.' Yet she was still one of the movie's most memorable players.

Her performance was no surprise. Every part she takes, no matter how small, she brings it to life. How does she do it?

No big secret. Actors talk about it. Writers talk about it. The big difference is, she actually does it: Miss Carter looks at ever part as though that character were the star of the show.

For that matter, Jk Rowling writes that same way. Her characters are so vivid, so memorable, because each one is an individual in his or her own right. From Cho Chang and Neville to Snape and Filtch, everyone in her books is the star of their own private lives.

After all, it's not like any of us go through our own lives thinking, "I'm the girlfriend/the sidekick/the gruff bartender with words of wisdom/the whore with a heart of gold/etc." Neither should our characters.

Sometimes, Miss Carter's method puts her in conflict with other members of the production. Sometimes, getting in your characters' heads will put them in conflict with the plot outline, with how you saw their function, with how you saw the story going in the first place. A well-realized 'minor' character can turn a story on its ear, and I think that's a good thing.

My current work is a thriller of the stranger-comes-to-town variety. The hero is clear. The two groups of bad guys (each with their own seperate agendas) seem clear at the moment. The femme fatale, she's right there. Or is she? I have to admit, she keeps surprising me, and may even end up being the protaganist at the rate she's going.

My hero is a drifter, tending bar when 'trouble strikes'. he's got a couple of co-workers. Why? Because dialogue reads better than exposition. Because it gives him an opportunity to have local contacts. Because he's, well, a drifter. Sometimes, the guy needs a ride to wherever he's going.

Except that one of the workers has a crush on him. Fair enough. She's motivated to give him local info and rides, anyway. And it creates an instant conflict with the femme fatale. She was meant to be a minor character, but she's gradually becoming more important to the story.

Fair enough.

Thing is, I needed a third bartender. After all, somebody has to keep the place open when the hero and the other tender are out running around. Enter Kevin.

Kevin may not survive to the final draft. There's every chance he'll end up a brief mention along the lines of, 'Ten minutes later, the relief bartender showed up so the hero could leave.' Just another of those lives that brush ours only slightly.

Except Kevin wrote himself a bigger part when the hero needed to use the phone. The more scenes where he shows up (or needs to be considered, even though he's off stage), the more I realize he doesn't like my hero much. Personally, I think at the bottom of it is that Kevin had his eye on their coworker. I may be wrong.

Nothing much may come of it. Or Kevin may get the hero into hot water at some point. Or he may deliver a timely bit of information about the true nature of the coworker (I'm not sure I trust her...). Thing is, at least I know why he's doing what he's doing, even when all he's got is a couple of lines.

Kevin thinks he's the star. He thinks he'll get the girl.

I think Helen Bonham would be proud...

Bloody Sudoku Moments

Yup, it's that time again, and early this time. The old Sudoku moment.

I'm a recent convert to Sudoku, but thoroughly hooked nonetheless. Like anyone with a gambling/drinking/reading problem, I'm in it for those moments of triumph, those dizzying heights to which my soul soars when the numbers all come together and I let loose my mighty cry, "SUDOKU!"

And yeah, that can be embarrassing on public transport.

But for every dizzying high, there are the lows. You look at the field of numbers and realize that three can't possibly go there. But that means the five over here wrong too. It's not as bad as losing the rent on a horse, selling your wedding ring in a bar for more drinks, or reading the next Dan Brown novel, but it sucks.

My characters are little jabbermouths right now. My hero's turned out to be smarter than I would've thought, and the villains and schemers around him are prety crafty themselves. They're driving things along just fine without my help.

So of course, I forced a situation, and wrote myself into a corner.

I'm out of that corner now, but it did involve unraveling three chapters and going back to the last time I was on track.

We're once again up and humming...

Tell It, Pablo

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair


DON'T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY
Don't go far off, not even for a day, because --
because -- I don't know how to say it: a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in an empty station
when the trains are parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because
then the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve on the beach;
may your eyelids never flutter into the empty distance.
Don't leave me for a second, my dearest,

because in that moment you'll have gone so far
I'll wander mazily over all the earth, asking,
Will you come back? Will you leave me here, dying?

Pablo Neruda

(Steve here)

Man, could this guy write! My own current work is shaping up okay. No word counters this time, but I've got the players on the board and they're each starting to give me a sense of what they want. Two or three of them are just an absolute blast to write, constantly surprising me.

Of course, there are two characters who act like they want one thing, but I'm pretty sure they're lying...

Butler continues to help.

The Look of the Thing

88,000 words

Those pesky damn descriptions. You know what your character looks like, but how is the reader supposed to?

It's been almost a hundred years since Dashiell Hammett could get away with stopping the action for most of a page every time he wanted to describe Sam Spade or anyone else. And if you ask me, it didn't really work then. Less than ten years later, Raymond Chandler was using leaner, more poetic descriptions.

I'm too lazy to get up and get Chandler off the bookshelves, so here's one from the table beside me, Earnest Hemingway describing Brett from The Sun Also Rises:

Brett was damned good-looking. She wore a slipover hersey sweater and a tweed skirt, and her hair was brushed back like a boy's. She started all that. She was built with curves like the hull of a racing yacht, and you missed none of it with that wool jersey.

That's all the physical description one of the three major characters gets. Robert Cohn has glasses and a broken nose and not a lot more. And our narrator, Jake? Your guess is as good as mine.

And to my way of thinking, that's a pretty good way to go. Thomas Harris uses it with Clarice Starling. Everyone admits she's good looking (including herself), but that's it. Hair color? Eyes? Height? WHo cares?

She doesn't stop in front of mirrors, pause to admire photos of herself, or take time out for ridiculous conversations about her appearance. You know the ones:

"Hi Bob."

"Hi Clarice. How is a girl like you, five-six with shoulder-length blond hair and eyes like a winter sky, trim and athletic without losing your curves, not have a boyfriend?"

"Probably all the serial killers I work with, Bob."

Ack. Ick.

We've all read that kind of crap, and worse. And notice those verbs I used: stop, pause, take time out.

Description kills action. Be careful with it.

I ran down the center aisle, my leather boots making rapid hollow sounds on the wet stone flags.

Two acoloytes, their robes marking them as servants of the Dark King of Alkalbharkarkkkanakk, were up at the nave of the ruined church, working the final stages of the Ritual of LLewyylnffnororr. In mere moments, the final spell would be spoken and their blades would plunge into the creamy bosom of the maiden on the altar. Her blond hair and fair skin were pale against the dark rock and the iron chains that dug so cruelly into her wrists and ankles, and the gauzy veils about her body did nothing to hide its lush curves.

Her death would summon the Legion of Shadow Demons of Hrrkkkrrrkk and doom us all.

I drew my trusted blade, Bright Star of Morning, from it jewelled scabbard at my back.

As opposed to...

I hit the center aisle at a run. Two mutts in robes were working the ritual, the girl on the altar between them.

I pulled my sword.

See what I mean? The time to've done that kind of descriptive brickwork is before ActionBoy gets near that altar.

For me, it's a hard and fast rule that no character describes themselves. I can probably count on one hand (and have five fingers left over) the number of times I've had my mind on a problem but took time out to think about my looks in a mirror, or to admire convenient photos of myself. Or discussed my looks with others.

Actually, that's not quite true. Way I look, it's a subject for discussion. But that's "How'd you get your dreads like that?" and "Those tattoos hurt?" or "Hey cool! I've got a tattoo too, want to see it? It's waaay down here..."

And that's a legitimate way to paint a picture in the reader's head. Another is, if you're not writing in first person, to let the viewpoint character in that chapter describe the others. Elmore Leonard uses it brilliantly.

Otherwise, leave it alone. One of the best suspence novels EVER, Rebecca, not only doesn't tell us what the heroine looks like, it doesn't even tell us her damn name!

In comics, this isn't an issue. Ink, paper, character set in stone. Every reader sees the same lines and shapes, the same character. Tin Tin is Tin Tin, Archie is Archie, and it takes zero time to look at them on the page and see em there.

Movies are the same. They freeze stuff, close it off to interpretation. Clarice is Jodie Foster, end of story. Too bad Julianne Moore, she's still Jodie Foster. Nice writing Thomas Harris, but we'll be seeing Jodie Foster when we read.

In prose, we have more flexibility. Shame not to use it.

Tell the Truth and Shame the Devil

73,000 words

Stephen King says building memorable and believable characters is nothing more or less than our own observation of human beings and our ability to tell the truth.

He also says, tell the truth and you won't be popular in polite society for long.

I remember being fourteen or fifteen years old. Being afraid all the time, and turning hard to hide that fear. Looking at the violence and addiction around me, the teenaged parents, the kids who came out of prison dead eyed and flat faced and the ones who never got more than a memorial page in the yearbook, I was scared.

I remember sitting with Interview With a Vampire and getting my first clear vision of a life beyond what I knew. The thought that I might one day sit at a sidewalk cafe on a sunny street in Paris was impossible, but too tantalizing to resist.

I got tastes of what I wanted, but I also plumbed a lot of my own personal darkness. One day, I finally did get free. My dreams came true because I paid what they cost.

When my work goes wrong, this is usually where it gets lost: it loses its honesty. It's tempting to write these sort of nifty-clean thrillers where you can imagine Roger Moore in the lead. Or genteel murder mysteries where old ladies have to figure out who killed the vicar. Hell, I love to read that stuff.

But that's not my voice. It's part of the human condition I can relate to vicariously, but not the part that I can speak from with any authority. I *can* be honest about fear, about predators and victims and souls in moral freefall, about violence, hope and love.

I once couch-surfed with a stripper/sometime hooker and her disgraced cop boyfriend/sometime pimp. I can be honest about the love and anger and sadness between them in a way that I can't about, say, a witty and debonair jewel thief, or a group of high school kids throwing a party with their parents out of town.

The Tiny Dynamo sometimes wishes I wrote Regency Romance. She's afraid to let her parents see my work. *My* parents never finished my first book. Ten pages, and they were out.

When the Dynamo read about the Christchurch I know, she was aghast. But she also admitted every word was true. So these last couple weeks, that's a lot of what I've been doing with this (almost finished) retrenchment.

Telling the truth.

Plotting and 'Plotting'

or,

Why I Can't stick to an Outline

with assorted notes on Character...

70,000 words (and likely to be 40-50,000 more...)

I really have no idea how long my word count is going to be. None. I can make guesses based on my past history, but that's about it. No real idea how this thing ends, either. I know how I'd like it to end, but that's no gaurantee.

Some writers make a plot outline before hand. Lots of them even stick to it. John Ramsey Miller started as a response to these weeks of untangling messes. Fair enough. James Ellroy's plots are famous for being nearly the length of the finished book. Me, not so much.

Today I'm thinking about character-driven versus situation-driven fiction. I don't mean plotted or not-plotted, but rather, is it the setup or the actors who drive the story?

Gerald's Game started with pure situation (what if a bondage game went wrong?). Barry Eisler's Rain books and Richard Stark's Porter series both started with the mental image of a guy walking. The writers had to find out who that guy was, and where the heck he was going.

For me, it's a little of both.

I've got an escaped killer, the cop hunting him and the people he's hunting while he's out. Situation? I guess. Character? That too. I started with a sense of who this killer was (and blog readers have seen that change as I write him), a better sense of who the cop is (from the last book) and almost no sense at all of who the hell these people are this guy keeps killing.

But now I'm at the point where I understand who they are, and why he's doing it. And the victims have turned out to be nastier and more resourceful than I would have thought as well. I can't stand cardboard characters or red shirts. Part of my 'psychosis' is that I'm always looking at each player and asking "why?" I also hate it when cannon-fodder acts stupid.

Even the smallest players have to have their reasons in my work. Sometimes those reasons make them larger, sometimes those reasons keep them small, and sometimes their reasons and reasonable actions march them right out of the story.

It's easier to think of stories as found objects. The metaphor's useful, and doesn't make my head hurt.

67,000 words (Not sure where I'm going, but I'm getting there quick!)

I started this novel a few days after Agent Anne said she'd start selling Poison Door. It was something to keep me from checking my email twenty-three times a day. Normal response time is around three months, and freelance drawing just leaves me too much time to go crazy.

Now I'm around the six week mark, both for sale and work-in-progress, and I'm not sure which makes me crazier.

But it's a happy sort of crazy. I'm chuddling along (yes, chuddling -- it's a perfectly cromulent word) with my various pursuits, and each one brings a tiny bit more joy into my life.

Still back in the early days. I'm adding, adding, adding stuff I missed before. I know one hell of a lot of it will come out (or more likely, over half of what I've written in the last month won't make it), but it's part of the process for me. I flail a lot, especially in the beginning. No worries.

I'm really in this first draft to see how the story turns out. But I'd gotten up to Chapter 40-something (my chapters are really short - about 1000 words on average) and had a 'Sudoku Moment'. That's the sinking feeling where you realize you went wrong somewhere, and you don't know where.

Instead of realizing to sixes couldn't fit on that one line, I realized Sarah was meeting up with a character didn't belong in the book nohow. But he was in something like three or four scenes. And he was doing important stuff. The guy had a bit of weight.

Dammit.

So back I went, knocking stuff around, looking for other characters to pull his weight if he left the story. And that's when I realized I had a couple of characters who *really* needed to be up to more (villains, of course -- lots n lots of villains in my work). I'd been thinking Maryanne would end up being deleted, but I realized she really had a LOT more to do. More writing....

This isn't my first Sudoku Moment in this book. Earlier, I noticed my Big Nasty Villain kept trying to be all noble. And it pissed me right off. I made my peace with the character by letting Baker know he might have his day in the sun sometime, but it wasn't this story. I rewrote Chapmann into the role, and man, is he a nasty little shithead. And he keeps getting worse!

I still don't know who's going to take Lerner's weight. Right now, it's not the important question. Right now, Helen and Maryanne have finally opened up to me, and I'm listening.

Where'm I at?

42,000 words (and happy as Larry)

I'm very much a character-driven writer. Or maybe a better word is situation-driven, since the charcters don't get much input until the defining situation gets rolling. Think North by Northwest: without the goddawful situation he finds himself in, Cary Grant would probably spend all his time being witty at parties.

Anyway, the characters know what they're doing at this point. Some of them hate each other, some love each other, and others are still trying to figure out what they think. Fair enough. At this point, knocking down a thousand or so words a day is cake. Where it gets a little wierd is now that most (And I do only mean most) of the flailing is over, these folks are doing some pretty unsuspected things.

For instance, I had two characters working on one problem in the background for two days (that's story time: probably a month out here on this side of the keyboard). Last night one of the characters found a solution that was simple, elegant, and in all truth she probably would've thought of almost immediately.

Crisis? Disaster? Stop everything and go back to figure out how the hell the story will hang together now that I know this?

Nope. I'm just getting on with it.

By the time I get to the second draft that solution may end up making me rewrite a big swathe of the book. Or it may end up collapsing a few other scenes. Or that problem may have to come out entirely to give some other part of the action more room to breathe. The truth is, at this point I don't really know what's important. By the end I'll know what was a keeper and what wasn't. This stage is about discovery, style and storytelling.

It's a lot of fun. The story's here, trying to tell itself to me. And that's not always the case. I've heaps of fragments that got right under my skin until I started work on them, then turned out not to have the legs to go the distance.

Oh, and for a close, here's the Ten Rules of Thriller Writing. It occurs to me that they can be used to make just about any fiction more gripping, whether literary, romance, or a cozy mystery.

As they say in 12 Step groups, take what you like and leave the rest.

Fresh'n ya Drink, Guv'nor?

38,000 words (in and around scratching the blackfly bites)

Ah, dialect...

"Nay, Miss, I'n got to keep count o' the flour an' corn-- I can't do wi' knowin' so many things besides my work..."
- George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

"...he had a monstrous civil tongue of his own, and a jolly, easy, coaxing way with him. I liked him a deal better than my mistress. She was a hard one, if ever there was a hard one yet."

- Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

Two great classics, both published around the same time, both still in print 160 years later. Which one's dialogue would you rather read?

The Tiny Dynamo assures me that TMotF is full of sex and betrayal and all sorts of ripe drama, but I doubt I'll ever find out. Any three pages of those damn apostrophes makes my eyes glaze over.

It's clear that both authors wanted to catch the flavor of their working-class speakers' dialects. Collins did it with a simple elegance that was way ahead of his time.

Trying to capture the sound of spoken dialogue on the page is an old, old problem, and one that hasn't gone away. Too few concessions to the sounds we make with our mouths, and our character appear to be delivering essays. Too many of those concessions, and the readers start skipping.

Dialogue is a real sore point for me. As an American writing Kiwispeak, I often feel like I'm negotiating a minefield. I want readers to see the characters as real people, and that won't happen if I run around writing every little bit of what I hear when people talk to me.

"Good on ya, mate," will do heaps better than "G'donya, mite," ever will. I try to pay particualr attention to writers whose dialogue hums with the sound of its characters' speech. Marian Keyes is brilliant, as are James Lee Burke, Neil Gaiman, Elmore Leonard and Frank McCourt. George Pelecanos is so good it's scary, but then, he also writes for The Wire.

I don't get it right much, but I'm trying. Getting the sound right seems to be about word choice and word order, and a sparing, sparing use of those intentional misspellings.

And then of course there's the lie at the heart of all dialogue: it's not about speech at all.

Real people um and ah their way through conversations, repeat themselves, wander off in the middle of sentences, etc. Take a glance at a court transcript sometime and see.

Dialogue can't do that. It has to move the story forward. Characters on a page only open their mouths to advance conflict or to deliver information to the reader. If the author does it right, it's like watching a magic act: we zip through the pages watching two or three or however many characters have a conversation. The story moves forward without our realizing it.

Do it badly, and it's a Scooby Doo moment. "Gee, Fred, it sure was nice of your aunt to let us stay in this spooky old house."

Pipe must be laid. But that doesn't mean it can't be laid gracefully. Getting the sound right can help draw the reader in. Getting it wrong can make an irreperable mess.

28,000 words (very, very odd words.)

The big left turn is still waiting around a bend somewhere, but I've been doing the prep work for it. My villain's going through some changes, getting bad and worse.
Part of it was finding out that my initial setup was only possible in Auckland. Part of it was a growing sense that the bad guy I was sketching out belonged in a very different sort of thriller.

And part of it was a sense of connection between him and two other characters, connections that weren't possible as things stood.

Overall, I'm happy with the changes I'm seeing. My new villain's much more gritty and ferocious, and maybe slightly unhinged. Makes him fun to write, and it's been exciting waiting to see what he'll do next.

The last few days, I feel like I'm living Stephen King's archeological metaphor. That's the one where writing is like digging up odd-shaped bits and trying to figure out how they fit together. I feel as though in my initial enthusiasm, what I thought was a bit of arm bone or something actually belongs in the jaw. But then, if that's the case, I need more bits. And that means this thing I'm assembling must have really big teeth...

Or something like that.

Mostly I want to finish so I can see how the story turns out!

Where Do Stories Come From, part two

status: 19,ooo (every damn one of them like pulling teeth last night)

So I had this guy sitting in chains at the courthouse, awaiting transfer back to Parerua. Soon he'd be on the loose.

My fingers hit the keys. Would the annoying kid beside him end up a casualty or a reluctant sidekick? What would happen to the other prisoners who had court that day? How was he going to get out of the building?

What's this guy's name?

Sometimes the names are right there when I ask for them. Sometimes they're reluctant. I thought maybe he'd be 'So-and-so Lee', so that his nickname would be Stagger Lee ('cause as Nick Cave sang, 'he don't give a good God damn, not Stagger Lee').

Nope. turns out it's Baker. Okay. I can live with that.

I check back in with him every few scenes, see what he's up to. Turns out he's a LOT more resourceful than I would have thought. I have an inkling as to why, but I've been wrong before so I'll keep it to myself.

As I wrote those further scenes, it turned out that his goals were a bit more complex. And that he truly, madly, deeply loved the woman who double-crossed him and put him away. That he has a daughter, and she has her own agenda. That he's a LOT more resourceful than I would have thought. There's bound to be a reason for that.

A couple of the odd things I learned about him while writing, one was that his 'voice' was very much that of a crusty old man. He's been away a long time, and a lot of things are different now. It was so persistent, I went ahead and made him old. Like bald head and white beard, Father-Christmas-on-steroids old. It's weird. It works.

That meant going back through the earlier scenes and doing any necessary retouches. When you're clinging to ten or twelve thousand words, you hate to do any cutting at all, but cut I did. and put in more. It's one thing to take out extra story later, but the bits that just don't belong, they're wrong, and they can't be allowed.

Besides, it's an opportunity to write a little better, and know (or at least suspect - it may all yet change again) that these *new* bits surely fit in!

###

In a sidebar, yesterday was kind of writer's blocky, mostly because my sense of what-happens-next was horribly blunted. It was like, everyone would brush their teeth before bed, and I bet at least a few of them go home alone to watch TV. Uck.

I found the conflicts, focused on them and only them, and so the story flows. Just hits some debris once in a while.

###

Forgot to mention yesterday that another influence for the story came from an appearance in traffic court. (I mostly obey the road rules, but have, shall we say, a somewhat casual attitude to laws about displaying one sticker or another in my window. The car still starts without them, but the tickets are $200 a pop!) Anyway, I spent my morning in court, taking notes of course.

A fair few felons were in traffic court too, mostly arguing for or against having their fines turned into additional time served. Interesting in itself, but there were other things as well. The felons were kept in a lounge out in the hall and trasported by two bailiffs when it was their turn. The bailiffs were always alert and on top of their game. The prisoners appeared in court in civilian clothes pulled out of a goodwill box back at the prison, and they wore wrist manacles with about a foot and a half of chain between the bracelets.

A body could do a hell of a lot of damage with those, if they knew what they were doing.

And then one guy showed up wearing the wrist and ankle hobbles. I never did find out what he'd done, but he did get me thinking...

Where Do Stories Come From, Grandpa

status: 18000 words (still on track)

In Lisey's Story, Stephen King talks about writing being like finding a piece of colored string on the ground and following it to see where it goes. I like all of his writing metaphors: an archeological dig, sitting in a basement with a guy in a Hawaiian shirt, trying to attract a shy smelly animal.

Today I thought I'd tlak about some of my colored strings, and where they seem to be leading me.

The first thread that set my gears turning was a tragedy. A seventeen year old juvenile delinquent was beaten to death when shackled to a max-security offender in the back of a van. The private security company (mall cops) who handle prison transport got the forms wrong.

The second was the New Year's crime spree of a mad dog killer. An ex-boxer turned convicted killer lifts weights in prison for twelve years and becomes really quite scary. No one thinks to ask why he hasn't been showing up to meet with his parole officer for weeks. When the cops finally do knock on his door, they find half an arsenal. A body count follows.

I didn't notice that I was paying more attention to those news items than others. Not until the first frayed ends of a scene started playing in my head and wouldn't quit. A man sat on a bench down in the courthouse basement, near the parking garage. It's lunchtime, and the alert, capable bailiffs have handed him over to a couple of lax, disinterested mall cops. The kid next to him keeps chattering away, nervous and annoying.

The man's eyes stay on the guards.

Of course, nothing stays the same. Tomorrow I'll post on how that soon-to-be-escaped felon is changing as I write.

Character Genesis - Tommy Knowles

Status: broke the 10,000 mark last night.

I thought my whole character/plot thing might be easier to understand if I gave an example.

Tommy is the primary bad guy in POISON DOOR. He's one nasty, warped, twisted piece of work, but he didn't start out that way.

Originally, PD was going to be a noir study of two bent cops trying to break loose from the drug lord who'd come to own their souls. Except that one of my cops just... (Shatner voice) simply... refused... to stay... BENT. Which, as they say, is another story.

Point being, Tommy was in there from the beginning.

He was always a drug lord involved in a turf war, always proud of having his hooks in two of New Zealand's finest, and always British.

And he had to be an asshole. A hero's only as big as the villain he faces (which is why Superman vs. a purse snatcher is dull as dishwater), and I needed Tommy to be really, really nasty. Not superhuman, just foul. My hero is Sarah Crane, a pretty dark piece of work herself and someone who could just as easily show up as a villain in a different story. Part of Tommy's job is making us glad she's on our side. Nuff said.

Tommy started out very slick and polished. A Mephistopholean puppet master.

Cardboard. Yawn.

But through conflict, his character deepened. Every scene I write puts the viewpoint character in conflict. Even (especially) if the point is to show a bit of that character's personality, it's going to come out by giving them an objective and putting something or someone in its way. I'll write more about that tomorrow or the next day.

I realized that what Tommy wanted was safety. Everything he did, from his Big Plan to his smallest action, was an attempt to feel untouchable, to feel safe. He was an orphan, a street kid (one of several in this book). Crime was a way to make himself part of the scary guys on the street, the ones no one wanted to fuck with.

Except of course that those guys are like sharks. They'll feed on each other the minute they smell blood in the water. A footsoldier's life was worthless. Tommy's only way out was up.

So he rose. Every move was savage and treacherous, and to keep the ones underneath him from doing the same to him, Tommy had to keep them terrified.

Tommy started to get interesting.

His expensive suits and toys were a sham. Like his savagery, they were a way of trying to fool the world, to draw attention from the frightened little kid nobody wanted.

And with no one he could fully trust, with his one big chance to maybe this time finally grow so big his enemies will never get him, Tommy did something wildly important to the book, something that threw my feeble outline out the window.

He decided he had to stay awake.