Conflicted, or just Complicated

Linnea Sinclair had a good post about Conflict versus Complication up on Kristen Nelson's blog.

Because I write by the seat of my pants, letting the characters do the exploring and staying the heck out of their way, my first drafts are poster children for this. Very complicated poster children.

For instance, right now the neighbor's dog barks at the hero every time he walks past. The dog's had two paragraphs so far, on the two different times the hero's returned home. Since I try to write with the throttle open and the pedal down, I just stayed out of the way and let that dog bark.

I have an idea that maybe one day, the hero will come home and no dog will bark. The silence will alert him to danger. Or maybe a villain will kick the barking dog and betray his or her true nature.

Or I'll get to the end of the book without the dog ever coming in handy again. That'll get edited out.

In the end, I'm aiming for lean, hard stories. I can't afford an ounce of 'fat', by which I mean anything that doesn't tell the story better.

Linnea also said something awesome right at the start of her post. She mentioned how you can't seperate one element of a story from the others. I get the feeling that'll be my next post...

Utterly Spoiled

For a while there, I'd had a bad run of books. Godawful things I didn't get through fifty pages of, and godawful things I followed right to the end, turning pages in mute shock.

But lately, my run of luck has changed. It all started in Australia, with Gil Brewer's The Vengeful Virgin. Then, the rest of John Ramsey Miller's Winter Massey series. There was some Lee Child in there, and Andrew Vachss's newest, Mask Market.

Oh, and Theresa Schweigel's Officer Down. And of course, I've just finished re-reading the Harry Potter books so as to be fresh for July 21.

And the good times didn't stop there. In the last couple weeks I've also enjoyed Joe Hill's fantastic debut, Heart-Shaped Box and Barry Eisler's Choke Point and taken some time to visit with old friends: Walt Whitman's poetry and F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories.

I'm also reading the final installment in Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy. Daunting sizes on those bad boys, but man, can Stephenson ever deliver the goods!

It's a run of luck so fine I'm afraid it can't last.

But no. Here on the table (up on deck, as it were), I've got a James M. Cain omnibus, John Connolly's The Unquiet, Sarah Gran's Come Closer and Swords of Talera, a pretty cool fantasy tale by some guy named Gramlich.

Charles, I hope your mum's okay!

This year, I also want to re-read Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca and maybe pick up one fo the biographies about her that're due out.

Utterly spoiled...

PS Just started Charles's book. It's like being a kid again, discovering Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E Howard and Fritz leiber for the first time. Loving it!

I am so truly and utterly spoiled!

So There I Was...

So this one time, I'm working a day job at the State Zoo. Just flunky work, but it kept the bills paid.

It was Easter Weekend, the single biggest family day of the year. Problem was, the dolphins were, well, feeling a bit of spring fever themselves. They were shagging all over the place, and management were freaking out.

In just a couple of hours, the zoo was going to be filled with impressionable young children. They'd see copulating sea mammals. There'd be moral outrage. Funding would be pulled, people would have to apologize on Oprah or something.

"There is one chance," said the Head of Marine Research. "Baby seagull meat has the proven effect of reducing, possibly even eliminating, a dolphin's libido."

Much smiling and hand-clasping all around. Except for me, of course.

I got a stick and a sack and directions to the seashore.

So I set off. It was a fair walk through the forest, but spring was in the air and I had my earphones and the radio to keep me company. It wasn't so bad.

The zoo was having an awful day. There was a big announcement on the news that one of the lions had broken loose. Fortunately, the keepers had put a few tranquilizer darts in it before it jumped the fence. I walked carefully, but saw nothing.

It was a great morning at the seashore. The sun was warm, the air crisp and salty. I went up and down the sand with my stick until the sack was stuffed full and dripping with baby seagulls. Time to head back to the State Zoo and a day of mucking out cages.

But on the way back, what did I see? The lion!

This great, tawny beast lay right across my path. The empty cylinder of a trnaquilizer dart still hung in its flank. I stood a moment, listening to its great, rumbling snores and looking from side to side. There was no way around through the thick trees.

I was as quiet as I could be. Gently, I crept up to the sleeping lion. I raised one foot, moved it slowly over the dangerous cat's body. I didn't dare breathe.

Just as my toes set down on the lion's other side, a cop jumped out from behind a tree and cuffed me.

"But, officer, what's the charge?"

And he said....

"Transporting young gulls across the state lion for immoral porpoises!"

ANd for suffering through that joke, you may have a mock cover...

Eight Simple Things

CS tagged me, so into the breach I go...

1. I have double-jointed thumbs.

2. I can waltz.

3. My father was a priest when he met my mother. ALmost twenty years of age seperate them, and they're still happily married. These things certainly affected the person I became.

4. I have seen ghosts. If they saw me, they didn't let on. I don't think the dead really care about doings on this side of the fence.

5. My first tattoo was a Batman symbol.

6. When I feel down, I read Ralph Waldo Emerson or Marcus Aurelius.

7. For a short spell in the early nineties, I was a mortgage banker. I lasted about six months before I finally called in well.

8. New Zealand's not the only place I've lived. There were also brief-ish stints in Barcelona and Jerusalem. Both were awesome...

You were right, CS. That *was* fun!

Smooth-talking Irishman

A Poet To His Beloved

I BRING you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams,
White woman that passion has worn
As the tide wears the dove-grey sands,
And with heart more old than the horn
That is brimmed from the pale fire of time:
White woman with numberless dreams,
I bring you my passionate rhyme.

William Butler Yeats

Steve here: Yeats is another of my all-time favorite poets. He had that distinctly Irish gift for the flow of language, and wrote on every subject from love and death to the politics of his day.

I don't write poetry myself. I just love the use of the language, and the occasional metaphor that strikes a deep note on the dark bells of the soul.

Seems to me, one of the best things we can do as writers is to read plenty of poems, then ignore them. There's a lot of poetic influence in writers like James Lee Burke, Walter Mosely, Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly. None of them ever let the language get in the way of the story, though...

Snape Hunt

In anticipation of the release of Book 7, I've gone back and reread the previous six Harry Potter Books. (By the way, I'm spoiling as I see fit here. I figure if you care at all, you've read the material. If you don't, you won't mind the spoilage)



I'm going with Salman Rushdie on this one:



"Snape, unlikeable as he is, is essentially one of the good guys. Is Snape good or bad? In our opinion, everything follows from it," Rushdie said.



I write a lot about character on this blog. My own work is character-driven, and it's great characters that excite me about other people's fiction. And few characters anywhere are as enigmatic, complex, tormented or driven as one Severus Snape.

There are a lot of reasons to believe Snape is evil, and a few (very good) ones to believe he's on the side of the angels.

Me, I need Snape to be good.

His physical appearance is one reason. In a more conventional kid's book, you'd expect the dark, greasy-haired guy with the bad attitude to be evil. But Rowling has refused to make Snape a villain over and over. Harry's own prejudices have been frustrated, and he's had the chance to learn not to judge by appearances.

He hasn't, and that in itself is interesting to me. Rowling has taken the hard road, showing her readers a world of moral complexity and subtle motivation.

Some of the good guys are, frankly, assholes. Sirius, Snape, even Harry's father all have pretty serious flaws. They still stand up for what's right.

The villains are capable of love and loyalty, tenderness and fear. No cardboard saints, no plaster demons.

Except.

Except that, if Snape *is* evil, the structure falls apart. The dark, greasy, bitter guy turns out to be a heart of evil after all. Dumbledore was wrong to ever trust him. Harry's prejudices were justified.

JK Rowling might even be able to hear the gnashing of my teeth over the rustling of that big pile of money she sleeps on.*

I'm looking for Snape to have killed Dumbledore by prior agreement. The souls of a wizard's victims are stored in the wand and can be realeased under the right circumstances. Snape will be beyond reproach and ideally positioned to aid in Voldemort's defeat. Harry will finally realize that Snape was his ally after all...

This is nerve-wracking. I've got three thousand pages invested in this story (from the cheap seats in the audience, but still...), and I'll be gutted if she lets me down.

*Who am I kidding? Rowling can't hear herself scream over the rustle of all those bills, let alone the vast, thundering fall of fresh revenue. And she deserves every bit of it.

Unless Snape is evil.

Constant Conflict

So I'm writing along, a variation on stranger-comes-to-town. I've got these six characters, each with his or her own agenda and all on a collision course. There's been one terrible crime 'out front' where we all see it, and others happening in the background, where even I'm not entirely sure. Before long, there'll be blood on the walls...

One reason I write 'full throttle' is that I really, really want to find out what's going to happen. What sorta sucks about writing is that I HAVE TO write my way, one word at a freakin time, up to the end.

Yesterday I wrote a phone call. Yup, a phone call.

My hero on this one's a bit of a drifter, so there's not a lot of point in him carrying a cell phone. He needed to reach out to another character, and it seemed worthwhile to show that he needs a landline. I know, I'm yawning already.

But I followed my golden rule:

Nothing, nothing without conflict.

My hero went in to the bar where he's working. I put the relief tender (ten words in a previous chapter) behind the bar, still on from the night before because the morning guy never showed. The low-key stoner stuck on a double shift wanted the hero to clock in. The hero wanted to use the phone and get the hell out.

The character he was calling saw the work number on her cell. She's pretending to be sick to keep from covering that shift too. I got a nice bit of three-way conflict out of that one phone call.

Somehow, I doubt that call will end up in the final draft. But I did learn a couple things about my characters by watching them handle this situation, and writing it got me through to the next scene. I also got to add in the extra layer of tension when the relief tender mentions that the cops are asking about what happened behind the bar last night...

Now, the hero and his coworker are having lunch. They've got conflict on several levels:

Overt: She has information he wants. She doesn't want to give it to him.

Covert: She's making like she has his best interests at heart. He's not sure he trusts her.

And deeper: She wants something bigger from him, and it makes him wary. I'm not even sure that she's being honest about what she wants.

And further: There's a three way love triangle going on as well. That way, just the fact of these two being alone together is a move against the woman who isn't there. And the two women hate, hate, HATE each other, for reasons I can only suspect.

One thing about this story: my characters aren't telling me much. My heroes usually don't. Male or female, I gravitate to quiet, tough characters who don't see a lot of point talking about their pasts. They're action-oriented for a reason, and that's as it should be.

This time though, everyone around the hero is dodgy. They tell me their motivations, and I don't believe them. Where the hero just isn't talking, these people are actively hiding and lying.

Just like the eventual readers, I have to look at what they're doing to see them with any honesty at all. It's maddening, intriguing, and kind of fun!

In other news, Butler Dynamo continues to help. Here he can be seen turning his hand to literary criticism...

I thought the book was more interesting than that!