Reboot

*sigh*

The inimitable Mighty Proctor, She of the Many Names (CS Harris, Candice Proctor, CS Graham, and many, many other aliases) was right: The godawful slowdown I've been suffering was in fact my subconscious trying to clue me in to certain, um, *problems* in my story.

Of course, the subconscious mind being the Creepy Wee Beastie that it is, the poor thing has trouble communicating with this thin skim of gray matter that walks in the light and believes it is all that exists. In short, I got bad sleep and bad dreams, bad writing and no writing, all of it getting worse and worse until finally I was at my wits' end and the Creepy Wee Beastie was able to speak clearly.

My problems were three. And they were important.

One. My protagonist was not outsider enough. Not by half.

Two. One of my subplots stank. Really, really stank. That is to say, it contributed nothing to the central thrust of the book, and if anything muddied the waters of the themes as I see them.

and Three. My Act I climax *needed* to hit A LOT sooner. Which meant collapsing some of the early 'action' (which, frankly, could afford to be collapsed), which led to old characters saying and doing different things, and to new characters coming in to make things happen.

Of course, fixing Problem #1 meant amplifying and creating problems, and fixing #2 meant writing out a character I was rather fond of anyway.

Needless to say, the result is a complete, from-page-one reboot of my manuscript.

I think I may be able to save a few paragraphs here and there.

So it goes.

Letting the Monster Out

Recently, Charles expressed his disappointment in a story he read. The lead character (name of Edge), a cold-eyed killer (and borderline psychopath) now retired, spends most of the book trying to stay out of trouble. Until, of course, it's time to strap on his guns again.

The formula is tried and true. Shane. Pale Rider. Unforgiven. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. The Big Boss. Hell, the true story of Cincinnatus. One of drama's favorite 'guns on the mantelpiece' is the bad-ass who's trying to hold back.

The book Charles read didn't work, and I thought I knew why. The hero's arc failed in two places: the start and the end.

Drama is about contrast. No matter what genre, the hero or heroine ends the story in a very different place from where they started. Bridget Jones starts her story miserable, alone and embarrassed at the turkey curry buffet, and she ends the next Christmas happy, in love and immune to anything her mother might say. We meet Harry Potter unloved, disregarded and the absolute bottom of the heap, positively hated by his adoptive parents and living in a cupboard under the stairs. By the end of that first story, he is the hero of his school, loved by all. Othello, on the other hand, starts his story a celebrated hero, saviour of the city with the most beautiful woman he's ever seen for his bride. By the end, both he and Desdemona are dead by his own hand.

Rule of thumb: the lower the hero starts, the higher he'll end up. Or vice versa. Sometimes, it can be both. The detective may end the story with all the answers and his life in ruins. All I'm saying, there's a reason you see a lot more rags-to-riches stories than rags-to-lower middle class.

Back to the Retired Gunslinger. This character always starts as a bad-ass held in check. Always.

Shane and the Preacher (the Mysterious Stranger in Pale Rider) are both introduced fronting off groups of thugs with little more than an icy glare and a palpable sense of menace. How do we know they're bad-asses? Groups of asshole bullies take one look at them and run away.

Chen (Bruce Lee's character in The Big Boss) and Dwight from A Dame to Kill For show the natures they're hiding in action. When Chen's cousins end up in a fight, Bruce Lee uses grace, skill and a deft comic touch to show us that he really could've whupped those bullies butts the whole time, only he promised his momma he wouldn't fight. Dwight stops an attempted murder with a single knockout blow, and his voiceover tells us directly how much he enjoys it, how tempting it is to 'let the monster out'. We soon learn he no longer drinks, smokes, won't even let himself exceed the speed limit for fear he'll turn that monster inside him loose.

Remember: the Retired Gunfighter is *not* a changed man. He may think he is. He may argue that he is, act like he is, do everything he believes a changed man would do. But *we* need to see that old Monster still lurking under his skin, sniffing the air and waiting for a chance to slip its chain.

We need to see that no matter how much the Retired Gunfighter might lie to himself, whatever it might cost him, part of him wants that monster loose.

And when our hero does finally let that monster out, WATCH OUT! We've watched our hero suffer through three-quarters of the story resisting his natural urges. His half-measure compromises have failed: the monster inside gloated and the villains still won. In the end, there's nothing left for it but to cut loose.

And here's the thing about cutting loose: you've gotta go big. BIG!

Shane guns down the hired killer, the ranch boss and everyone else in the saloon that night. Preacher blows up a strip-mine and wipes out the villain's whole gang. Dwight comes back with a brand new face, a duffel bag full of explosives, a ninja accomplice and a .25 automatic tucked up his sleeve. And in The Big Boss, Bruce Lee stabs the local drug lord to death with his own fingers.

Big.

I'm thinking this is why the book Charles read failed. The killer, Edge, starts out pretty whimpy (okay, cool), but he goes wrong in one important way. Maybe more: I don't know if we get to see what total bad-assery he's holding back, or if we get a sense for how very badly he wants to let that beast free. But I do know this: he carries his gun with him in a carpet bag.

To me, that's a fatal flaw.

And when the rough stuff does start again, he emerges quite a bit less violent than he used to be, with a greater regard for law and order. Wtf?

I call it 'muted arc', or rags-to-lower middle class: the character's changes simply aren't big enough. By keeping his pistol nearby (though not on his hip), Edge is making a definite statement. Contrast it with Preacher in the Pale Rider, who needs days of hard riding to reach the steel box where he's locked away his guns.

And Shane, Preacher, Chen, Dwight, any Retired Gunslinger you can think of, all give us a sense that their violence at the end is worse than they ever were back in their bad old days. They may suffer for unleashing their violence (Shane is badly wounded, maybe fatally. Chen goes to prison.), or they may simply have to live with this poisonous knowledge about themselves.

No way should it actually be better. Shane can't strap on his guns, give the hired killer a flesh wound and have the ranch owner surrender without further bloodshed. And then go off with the lesson that the answer is moderate amounts of violence...

Fan Factor

This is one of those best/worst days: four, five drafts down the road, sitting down with a printed copy of the new manuscript and actually reading the damn thing.

Sure, I make notes here and there. I'm still trying to iron out the weather and make sure nobody's name changes too much, but that's all little stuff. The literary equivalent of 'mom-cleaning', the saliva-drenched thumb scrubbing vigorously across the child's face in the moments before they're turned loose.

The big stuff is Suction. Does the story draw me in? Can I forget that I wrote this story and just enjoy it? Would I feel good about buying this book? Does this story make me a fan?

You see, I'm my hardest reader. I always see something I might have done differently, maybe a little better. Same with paintings, drawing, everything. Sooner or later you have to let go and move on, but the urge remains. And the urge is to fix those 'horrible' mistakes.

So far, this one is pretty promising. I keep finding myself worried less about my own techniques and more about what's going on with these people, all of them on the cusp of the worst day of their lives.

But rest assured, there's still plenty of technique to worry about...

Little more on that next time!

PS. As always, I have that odd sense of amused wonder: I *know* there were days I HATED writing and was sure I sucked. And days where I LOVED writing and was sure I ROCKED. But reading through the manuscript. I can't find those spots!

Feelings about work are impostors. The work itself is true.

From Strength to Strength

Second draft of my latest 'head shot'. The final polish is over there in the right-hand column.

It's actually germaine to My Five Strengths as a Writer!

1. One Thousand Things: Two decades in the visual arts have taught me about faith, fortitude and the art of the telling detail. About creativity, discipline and the vagaries of that area where money meets art.

As the Zen proverb goes, "From one thing, learn one thousand things." My work in comics, tattoos, painting, etc. have all made me a better writer.

2. Sympathy for the Devil: I'm good at getting into my villains' heads, and those of the supporting characters too. This means they act and react intelligently.

Not only would my Mad Scientist *not* put a self-destruct button(!) on his giant laser, he'd just shoot that pesky, interfering hero.

3. Full Throttle: Life is precious. I'm not going to waste a minute of it on half-measures. Anything I want, anything that seems worthwhile, I go for it with everything I've got. Writing is worthwhile; it gets what it deserves: my best.

4. Caaauuuse It's a Thrilllller, a Thrill-ler Night: I'm good with suspense. Nature or nurture, I'm good at ratcheting up the tension.

5. The Tiny Dynamo: I've been blessed with a *very* supportive partner -- something not to be underestimated. This thing of ours is not for the faint of heart. The Dynamo puts up with my moodiness, solitary habits and financial instability, all for the dubious advantage of being the first to read a couple of novels a year! It doesn't hurt, either, that my particular partner has an eagle-eye for plot holes and bad writing. Knowing she'll read my work forces me to go beyond my own limitations...

Set Em Up Joe, part deux

Last time, I talked about stories where the setting was part of the conflict. Where any attempt made to move the story somewhere else would make the whole thing fall apart.

Today, I'm going to talk about a different, but also *very* important kind of setting. And confess one of the sins of my past.

The setting I'm talking about today is the kind that that lives in the writer's heart. For many of us, there are places that simply sink their roots deep and never let go.

I love John D MacDonald's work, and especially his evocative sense of place and time. The stories themselves are the sort of elemental struggle that could happen anywhere, and sometimes did. His two-guys-killing-each-other took place in the Rust Belt and the South Pacific, in Chicago and Mexico. But what we most remember is Florida.

JDM wrote about Florida the way I've heard old people talk about their first loves. He had the talent to tap into the beauty and poetry (and sadness) of his love for a vanishing world.

People often talk about Dickens using London as a character. For me, characters engage in conflict, and environments seldom do. What's wanted is a term to describe that powerful sense of place, so different from the run-of-the-mill. It's like the difference between seeing Shakespeare done on a bare stage, and Shakespeare where somebody's taken the trouble to build the castle staircases for the big swordfight in Act II.

I think the main thing with Dickens was his deep intimacy and hatred-tinged love of London. He wrote other places and even other times, but those works lacked something of the power that he wielded in his own lair.

And it doesn't always have to be the world outside our windows, either. Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard set their adventures in places they'd never been. John Connolly still lives in Ireland, but he creates a Maine in which Joseph Conrad would feel at home, on the dark frontiers of the immortal soul.

My own lost love is Minnesota. It was the place I landed when I left home at 17, and it's the place where I learned to be kind and decent and in many ways different from what I might have become. I love its summer heat and winter ice, spring snows clinging to pools of shadow and the snap and rustle of autumn leaves. All of it was so different from the South of my childhood, and that wide prairie cast a spell that still lingers.

I shall now confess my sin.

The first thing I ever completed was a novel-length comic called Leather Tales. The story grew out of my fascination with people trying to change. The way some recognize the paths of their own destruction and do nothing. How those same forces return again and again even for the ones who are trying to do better. How violent legacies are never really let go.

Sadly, I chose the story trope of lesbian hitmen taking on the mob. My fan mail was, ah, interesting. But that's, as they say, another story.

I was working 40-60 hours a week as a tattooist at the time, so work went slow. It took me three years to write and draw the first hundred-odd pages. Three. Years.

A lot changes in three years. I wasn't the same person I'd been when I started. Hell, I didn't have the same job or even live in the same country! One day, I noticed something.

And once I'd noticed, I couldn't look away. Like a train wreck.

I'd stayed pretty limber with the figure-drawing, but years of tattooing had atrophied my ability to work in prespective. Backgrounds were *hard*. And when I finally did get it right, they were boring. Boring, boring, booooring, Sidney. Boring.

Mister Clever that I was, I'd found the perfect solution: I set the whole story in a hotel room. A dark hotel room. Ha! Atmosphere! Ha, shadows! Ho ho ho, no one will know!

By then I was a hundred sixty pages in, three and a half years of work by that point, and it was awful. Really, truly, world-class awful. Not I'll-get-better awful, not I-hate-my-hair-this-morning-and-all-my-work-too awful. But just, honestly, flat and dull and (shudder) boring.

I'd taken the lazy approach to setting, and been given the lazy man's payment. In the end, I sucked it up and spent a couple months retraining in perspective drawing. I threw out all but five pages of that work and reframed the story so that those first 150+ took place in six pages. Six. Took me less than a week.

And those pages were heavy on atmosphere. They were invested with a sense of place. They could have been set anywhere, but I chose a place and a time of year that spoke to me of second chances and new beginnings, of a fresh clean world and the possiblity of redemption.

I closed my eyes and drew Minnesota.

What's Talent Got to Do With It

97,000 words (back on track)

One ending has been chosen, the other locked in its cupboard. The scratching behind that door grows feebler, the weeping softer. Soon they may stop entirely.

Meanwhile, CS Harris got me thinking. She's got a great series of posts up right now comparing bestsellers with similar, though much less successful, books. The differences seem to jump right out.

Which made me wonder, what's talent got to do with it?

The creative fields are a funny business. Art, literature, music-- hell, interpretive dance and mime are crowded with yahoos whose self-esteem eclipses their ability (think American Idol open auditions), and then there are the few superstars who make it to being household names. And those two ends of the scale are all people know.

Mention you're a writer at a party. You'll hear about Uncle Elmer's manuscript, unfinished after twenty years. You'll hear about how JK Rowling's richer than the Queen. You might even get my favorite suggestion, "You gotta get you an idea like that one." Gee, thanks.

It takes an enormous amount of work, training, drive and maybe talent just to rise onto the lowest rungs. And from there? Fuggeddaboudit....

I worked hard, trained hard and drove over, under or through every obstacle to carve out a lovely career for myself in art. Then, selfish prick that I am, I 'decided' (reason for air quotes: see That Twisting Urge) to reinvent myself as a writer.

So what's talent got to do with it?

I had no idea if I had any, for one thing. I also didn't care, for another. Now, I don't mean that in the sense so many Idol hopefuls obviously do. It's just that there are several factors important to success.

Talent's the only one we have no control over, so why worry about it. Most people don't fail through lack of talent, and quite a few succeed despite any discernible scrap of it. They fail due to fear, laziness, priorities and bad influences.

Fear: kills heaps of dreams before they start. Understandable, I guess. The creative life offers no steady paychecks, no built-in understanding from family and friends and the sorts of embarrassment that make standing naked in a roomful of strangers seem easy by comparison. It's not for the faint of heart.

Laziness: A many-headed beast I rail on about a lot on this blog. It takes a lot of hours to write a novel, even a bad one. It takes a lot of hours to do the reading to stay up on the field. And it takes something extra to not settle for any less than your best.

That means not accepting stereotyped characters, flat prose, hackneyed situations and anything less than total honesty in our observations of human nature. I think the horror genre unravelled in the eighties under a flood of 'good enough' work.

Good enough never is.

Priorities: I had to include this to be honest. I have no children and a 'job' that only requires me to work two or three days a week. I keep my needs modest so that I have the time to write thirty, forty, even fifty hours a week if I feel like it. Most people don't have that, and some will just be too plain tired at the end of a day to sit down with pad and pen or keyboard or goose quill and parchment and give it their best.

Fair enough, too.

Bad Influences: Another form of laziness, really. Before I got serious about writing, I read what I felt like, and my tastes are quite frankly a little on the trashy side. I come back again and again to 50's and 60s pulp crime, 80s horror and sci-fi/fantasy. Like a lot of casual readers, I was reluctant to take a chance on any first-time novelist and anybody who wasn't on the bestseller lists.

My first novel sure reflected it, too. I put myself on a strict program of every award-winning debut novel I could find, as well as the top winners in my favorite genres. There was no use looking at where the bar had been set thirty years ago. There was no use looking to certain established authors who'd been writing essentially the same book over and over for years, either.

Where does talent fit in?

It's a tiny, tiny leg up. It's a little rush of pleasure and promise that gets us started. It's an extra inch or two forward on the long, long, LONG road to becoming as good as we can be.

And maybe, in fact probably, it's also the hidden end of our personal ruler. I'm tone-deaf, and I seriously doubt that any amount of hard work, training and perserverance will make me a concert violinist.

Too many musicians out there putting in the hard work who actually have talent, too.