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Avoiding Kent State

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We all have a short list of lucky things that happened to us over our lifetime. One of mine is the year I served as editor of the University of Iowa’s daily student newspaper. It was 1969 and 1970—the ultimate year of student anti-war protest. I feel a little bit guilty about linking the word lucky to the horrific events of that time, but it was the year of news, big news—especially for students—and my cohorts and I had ringside seats to much of it.

Kent StateA few of us from “The Daily Iowan” went to D.C. to cover the events of first anti-Vietnam War moratorium protests in 1969. I remember my experiences there as mostly chaos, but I got close enough to the action to have a canister of tear gas blow up at my feet. I ran faster than it could form its engulfing cloud and thus quickly recovered from its effects. Our little group did some pretty good reporting.

Memories of those days came rushing back to me recently when I opened the spring edition of the Columbia Journalism Review to a page of John Filo’s photograph of young Mary Ann Vecchio crying out over the prostrate body of the unarmed student. He had just been shot dead by a member of the Ohio National Guard, which had been called onto campus to quell student protests. We ran the picture on page one of the DI.

Not long after, Iowa had its own brush with disaster when our own governor mustered the National Guard to settle the campus disturbances on the U of I campus. The weekend warriors were encamped at the local fair grounds outside Iowa City and I sent a couple of student reporters out to see what they were up to. The pair came back with quotes that chilled my blood and could be best described as expressing a trigger-finger itchiness anticipation to create their own version of Kent State on the Iowa campus.

protestThe university’s top brass had essentially gone into hiding but had set up a system where I could call a certain phone number and tell the person who answered the information or person(s) we were seeking. Soon enough interviews with appropriate sources would be arranged. There was no attempt to control the content of our stories or access to the people we wanted to interview. The system actually facilitated the production of timely and accurate news content. I think the administration knew by then that our DI staff was dedicated to producing professional quality journalism, including the accuracy attained by talking with those in highest authority. The paper would later be specially recognized by the Associated Press’s Managing Editors Association for “quality reporting above and beyond the call of duty and of exemplary import.”

Our standard was simple—to report the news rather than rumor and innuendo, which the campus was awash in. We received a bomb threat for one of the main buildings on campus and after a thorough search proved it to be false, I decided not to run with the story. A bomb threat with no bomb was not news, and the DI did not need to serve as bulletin board for posting falsities intended to scare and intimidate. Censorship? Arguably to some, but we didn’t receive any more bomb threats during that tense spring. The DI itself was threatened, however, and steel plates were welded across the windows of our second story newsroom and the press building across the street. Campus security assigned a detail to keep a close eye on our offices and staff.

I had made enemies with the radical left when I wrote an editorial condemning efforts to inflict serious and permanent physical damage to property and buildings and local Iowa City businesses in the name of being against the Vietnam War. It asked the simple question: “Who are the real pigs?”

Still I was not denied my experience with a bomb. We consistently ran beyond the page one deadline, so I would drive staff members home well past midnight. Sitting at a stoplight a block down from our central campus, called the Pentacrest, waiting for a traffic light to change, I gazed down a deserted street into the heart of the city’s business district when a bomb in a trashcan exploded. It turned the trashcan into shrapnel that took out the windows of businesses on both sides of the street. No one was hurt, but I got a nifty conversation piece of shrapnel that landed inches from my car.

Those of us immersed in the horrors of Kent State were in a state of shock that our own government agents would open fire on unarmed protestors. It was about as un-American as you could get. But many thought it was the students who were being un-American. The political dichotomy ran along the same boundary as the anti-war dispute—the government wanted to tell young men they had to go and fight in an undeclared war, and young men didn’t think the concept of national duty should be stretched that far.

U of I Pentacrest sceneLater, as a young lawyer looking back on the events, I recall wishing I had had the opportunity to put some of those politicians under cross-examination. They were aloof and arrogant, and needed to have some of their hot air released into the world of truth. Yet our country is better today for having been taught such painful lessons in honesty and transparency. Though still frequently lacking in transparency, most politicians know they can’t hide the truth for very long. Journalists have sharpened their skills. Citizens tend to be disinclined to allow such factual tomfoolery. You can’t just tell them. You need to present evidence to support your claims.

The picture in the CJR brought memories crashing back to that time when emotions ran so high you could literally taste it. When the DI reporters came back from our own fair grounds back then, they and shared quotes from their notebooks from interviews with our own guard members and went off to write their stories. I called a special phone number that I had been given and shortly thereafter received a call from a top member of the University’s administration. Our conversation was brief. I told him that I was going to read to him some quotes from guardsmen encamped at the fairgrounds. If anything happened on our campus, I advised, the gist of our conversation would become the headline news: Administration Forewarned Before Guardsmen Open Fire was the headline I reserved in the back of my mind.

We didn’t need the headline because then university President Willard Boyd and the governor exercised wisdom and left the guard at the fairgrounds. Soon they were sent home. Instead the governor called in the Iowa Highway Patrol from around the state and deputy sheriffs from surrounding counties. Though spiffily uniformed, the patrolmen lacked the demeanor of soldiers in warfare itching to open fire. One of our student photographers best captured the interaction with a picture of two highway patrolmen, highly polished boots resting upon the low, single-rail perimeter “fence” around the Pentacrest, engaged in conversation with a small gathering of anti-war students.

Our story quickly shifted from one of confrontation and protest to communication and discussion. No one person could take credit for this result, but a lot of people could be proud of their contribution to it and being one of the cooler heads to prevail. The fundamental educational concept of discussion and debate won out over confrontation and loss of control. Someone once called the Iowa campus the Athens of the Midwest. During those critical days, it was.

Daily Iowan headlineTaking no chances, the administration did decide to end the school year early—an action that quickly diffused the potential for disaster and interjected the most fundamentally curative reaction to tension—time. But the picture remains far from a benign scene of history. The students in that horrific front-page photo are now elderly and have been cast to the four winds. The family of the dead student has likely, too, passed on. We are left with but a picture that freezes in time the student anti-war protests at their lowest ebb and at one of lower points in our history.

Many years later, the daughter of a friend who ran a bookstore in Iowa City back then, interviewed me for a piece she was working on about “those” days. Even over the phone I could sense that she had teared up and I asked her why.

“I wish I could have been there,” she said.

To me, the ones to tear up over were the 57,000 young American men deprived of so many days of life by the folly of war and politicians who lacked the basic fundamentals of wisdom and compassion.

In the intervening years, it’s become apparent that these young men did not die in vain, like I thought for so many years. They taught us a hard lesson and though sabre-rattlers and tongue flappers reside among us still, a majority with improved common sense has prevailed. The troublemakers have hopefully lost the credibility required to send our youth needlessly into harm’s way. If not, an old tradition should apply—that they show their courage by leading the first charge.

Formidably Formidable Sounds

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In the 1956 sci-fi movie “Forbidden Planet,” there was a trash device—toss in whatever and it would be instantly vaporized.  Being at the age where cleaning house and doing dishes were two of my more dreaded sci-fi moviehousehold chores, I was pretty enamored with how I could use such an appliance. Of course, that approach to efficiency wouldn’t work today. Environmentalists would be up in arms: “What the hell’s wrong with recycling! We need to preserve our resources!”

But think about it—how Hollywood might have handled the concepts of recycling and the preservation of resources then might have produced some forward-thinking products of today. The hottest one on the market might be the ZapIt cleaning machine. After all, lasers have been zapping everything from trash to cancerous tumors in our modern world. The focus has not been on lasers as household cleaning utensils but as weapons of war and medical treatment. And why zap dust when there are enemies out there that need zapping? I have no way of knowing how advanced laser-based weapon systems have really become—my security clearance does not extend much beyond the level of newspaper headlines—but likely we’ve exceeded the science fiction of Hollywood.

Were my childhood friend and neighbor Tom Risa still around, I think he would join me in voting “Forbidden Planet” as one of the best sci-fi flicks of all time because of the quality of its special effects, especially those in the labor-saving, household utilities category. The plot has pretty much become a faded memory, but it had superb special effects that remain impressive today. One of these was the first robot movie star, which later continued to star in a TV series as Robbie the Robot.

Besides suggesting the need to develop humanized androids, the “Forbidden Planet” trash laser was the ultimate in cool. As I recall, it was a sort of column into which you could toss virtually anything after lunch and Captain MidnightZAPP! It’s instantly vaporized. No dishes to wash, no trash to take out—very appealing to a 10-year-old in those days before mechanical dishwashers.

In later movies this early sci-fi household convenience became weaponized into “ray guns” and “blasters.” Wow! To think I was at the dawn of sci-fi noise making sound effects necessary to give these devices resonance respectability. I mean, if you had a space-age ray gun, i.e., laser, it needed to sound space age. That wasn’t an easy transition from the “pow” of a cowboy’s revolver to the gggggrrrrrzzzzzaaaaaapppp of Captain Midnight’s ray gun. It was easy to get tongue-tied trying to maintain and get to roll off the tip of your tongue the appropriate introductory “gggrrrrrrr . . .” of whatever advanced weaponry with which you were armed.

The good Captain was also the perfect canned hero, as one description makes clear:

Captain Midnight was a daring, jut-jawed war hero who led a mysterious government group known as the Secret Squadron. Midnight, his comic sidekick Icky, and the rest of the Squadron traveled around the globe stomping out evil.

They probably should have said, “zapping out evil.”

The nice thing about playing in a futuristic world back then was that anything could become a prop and we all were experts in sound effects. If you were a cowboy in need of a six-shooter sound, you could mimicked the sound of a six-shooter, hardly a challenging task. We had such cowboy models as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy giving us lessons at the Saturday matinees. They taught us about guns and how to handle them, and, more importantly, what they sounded like were you to achieve as adequate level of authenticity. And you couldn’t be a cowboy unless you could spin your weapon on your trigger finger . . . without getting a blister. These were the early years, the time before the time when good guys wore white hats and the bad guys black ones. Hoppy’s hat was black.

cowboyIt was era of radio. Sound was king. The sound effects brought scenes alive in our imaginations. I remember sitting on the couch in semi-darkness as the Lone Ranger, emanating from the radio, steadied his horse Silver with a soothing, “Steady, Big Fella,” as the stead’s hoofs clattered against the hard-surfaced ground. Silver would dutifully whinny and settle down. I don’t recall Scout ever giving his master, Tonto, much of an attitude. There I sat in rapt attention caressing my own six-shooter, and whinnying like Silver, ever ready in case some outlaw were to burst through the front door. Usually it was just Dad getting home from work, but I “plugged” him anyway.

I mean to tell ya. I was there at the beginning, as we transitioned from the sound effects of a spinning cylinder of a forty-five to capturing the sounds of a space-aged conflict with Martians. We didn’t have any good models for the latter, but then no one could prove we didn’t sound accurate.

In part because there had not yet been any actual space travel, it was left to my generation to invent the sounds of intergalactic travel and conflict. These new sounds were considerably more complex than the simple “pow-pow-pow” of a Colt 45. As I think back, “pow” might have been the sound made when you socked a bad guy in the jaw and “kapow” or “capow” was the sound of your trusty 45. Maybe some future Ph.D. candidate in linguistics will study the evolution of the syllabic characteristics as cowboys transitioned into space explorers and give my generation credit for how space travel came to sound as it does today.

Tom and I got pretty good as sound effects men. We’d sit at the picnic table on the rear patio of my house and practice them. Frequently that involved mimicking the sounds we had just heard in the sci-fi movie we had just seen. Tom went on into space exploration, working on the early Voyager projects, but he was never asked to develop the sounds of intergalactic travel.

Had they asked, he and I would have gladly recorded a track for the golden LP that was sent off into space glued to the side of the first Voyager. I can just see it being intercepted by some intergalactic explorers from out beyond Pluto somewhere, and who decided to forgo an attack on the third planet from our sun for fear of encountering such ferocious weaponry as heard on the “golden disk.” Think of it—the sound effects that saved our world!

ray gunIt’s not that sound is no longer important these days. It’s been somewhat modified and supplanted by visual effects and tones considerably more eerie and broader in range of sound and modulation. Pull the trigger on a ray gun today and you’ll hear some pretty awesome stuff.

This might sound like a “When I was boy” kind of story, but when I was a boy you had to use your imagination to fill the gaps between what you heard on the radio or saw in a movie and what you came up with to serve as your reality against the Venusians marauders climbing over the backyard fence. Turn a kid lose in his father’s workshop and thirty minutes later he’d emerged equipped with some awesomely destructive something or other made real by some gutturally-produced sound effects. Today, to find such sounds you have to turn a kid loose in a toy store where they probably story old imaginations high up and at the rear of a back shelf.

Watch out!

“Ggggggeeeeerrrrrrzzzzzaaaappppp!”

That was close! Best keep a weary eye out for those creatures. They like to hide in your imagination. When you bring them out to play, they’ll likely turn on you. Just like that!

“Ggggggeeeerrrrzzzzaaaappp!”

By the way, that’s Martian for “Want to play a game?”

Watermelon & Basketball

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Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter has returned to the road. In a short New Yorker piece, Hunter admits his decision to return to the stage “kind of knocks me off my writer’s game.” Hunter pointed out a very important distinction between writing and performing, which he describes as “probably like the difference between eating watermelon and playing basketball.”

ProcrastinationI wondered if Hunter’s choice of similes might have been different were he a novelist instead of a songwriter (poet?). I realized that virtually every non-writing activity has an analogical writing twin. Some examples: driving a locomotive—exactly how forging through a challenging paragraph/page/chapter can feel; painting a house—writing so often involves putting a new coat of paint on an old plot, sometimes a bristle full at a time; doing the dishes—writers are always cleaning something up or organizing things or thoughts; changing the cat’s litter box—well, I’ll leave that connection up to you.

The reason writing is so ubiquitously connected to most everything we humans do is because our activities are the raw material of story.

The cover of the just-arrived edition of The Writer magazine touts “Secret writing habits from Ayelet Waldman” (Bad Mother, Red Hook Road, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, Love and Treasure). I couldn’t locate the article in Contents so had to search for it and finally found it on page 34. Turns out that it wasn’t an article by Ayelet but about her and merely invests in its opening paragraphs a few words on where to write. The issue included other articles on where to write, all of which involve spending thousands of dollars to go traipsing off to various idyllic settings to do something that is a lonely effort no matter where you are when you do it, which makes the where you are less important than where your characters are.

Writing is not about your comfort—or discomfort—but the comforts and discomforts of your characters.

If you’re going to travel, do it for research that you can use to enhance the accuracy and realism of your story. Setting is just that. It’s the stage upon which the play takes place. It rarely is the play. Most of the time, the someplace where your story takes place is more an invention or heavily modified reality located inside your head. It’s cheaper to travel there. That means the physical act of writing can be done just about anywhere you happen to be. It simply is not about where you are when you write that counts but where your story takes place and where your characters reside. Writing does not require that you scout locations to do it at. You can do that on the Web or in the library or at your travel agent’s office. Once the lights go off, it can be difficult to tell the difference between a Marriott and a Motel 6 from you own bedroom.

What writers do is create a world and inhabit it with their characters. Really, do you have to be surrounded by chirping birds or gentle ocean breezes to do that? In reality, breezes and birds more likely offer the potential for distraction than inspiration. You haven’t time for that; you’re supposed to be working on your story. Running around finding the perfect location or workshop will, about 99 percent of the time, add to the list of reasons why you didn’t get around to any serious writing, and increases your credit card debt. Get real. Instead of spending your time making travel plans, spend it writing about the travels—physical and psychological—of your characters.

The result is that many of the ads for workshops and escapes feed your procrastination rather than your inspiration. But then, procrastination is not the real cause for not writing. It’s my position that procrastination has little to do with not writing. The term is typically applied to putting off something distasteful or some chore you don’t like to do. If writing falls into that category, look for a new hobby. You’re not meant to be a writer and you’re wasting your time and money searching for the magic formula that someone hints might be hiding in some exotic venue.

Why is procrastinating bad?Like Ponce de Leon and his search for the fountain of youth, you’ll likely end up getting nicked with the poison arrow of useless effort and die a slow death from never getting started, let alone ever getting finished. You are finished.

Fact is the problem isn’t one of procrastination but the lack of organization and discipline. We all have the ability to sit down and generate prose; it’s finding the time and wherewithal to do it and do it to the point you get pretty good at it. Like any investment, writing demands its quid quo pro—commitment, time, and effort. Unfortunately, all three have the same mortal enemy—the lack of willingness—that deep down need to tell story. If it’s not there, you won’t find it in a converted barn or by a gurgling brook in Wisconsin.

The reason discipline is so important to an army is not that it drives the troops forward. It keeps them from quitting and falling back. There is a big distinction between those two concepts. In writing, we spend a great deal of time talking about the drive forward. Have you ever sat down and thought about why you quit, or don’t get to it? The reason many would-be writers do not peer into that cave of the unknown is the fear they might discover their desire to write has no legs in reality.

Lets look at what is involved with procrastination. Marc Chernoff has a website called “Mark and Angel Hack Life – Practical Tips for Productive Living.” The site is not specifically for writers, which enhances its credibility. Mr. Chernoff presents seven causes and “proven cures” for procrastination. Let look at them and see how they might relate to the writing life:

1) Fear of the outcome. This is another way of saying fear of success. Yeah, right! Writers probably don’t suffer so much from that as from fear of failure. That’s the monster that lurks just beyond the entrance of that dark cave. If you do not finish, you can’t be assessed. Instead of discussing a literary challenge, you dwell on the excuses that keep you from the keyboard. Excuses are endless. To put this fear into perspective, walk into a bookstore and look around. You’ll be surrounded by hundreds of success stories. They finished. They got beyond “Chapter One.”

book storeChernoff is not alone when he suggests to the fearful that they face their fears. “The best way I’ve found to defeat fear is to stare it down,” he writes. “Connect to your fear, feel it in your body, realize it and steadily address it. Greet it by name if you have to: ‘Welcome, fear.’”

Screw all that! Why invest time in self-overcoming? Let Nietzsche worry about that activity. How about ignoring or circumventing fear? It’s pretty much the same as the monster under your bed. Step out ahead of it. My example: I have a life-long fear of heights. A long time ago I found myself climbing toward the top of one of Colorado’s Fourteeners—mountains higher than 14,000 feet. (How I found myself there is another story.) There’s a place on the mountain I climbed—Long’s Peak—called The Cables, because you have to hang onto a cable and pull yourself up a particularly smooth and steep area. The shear granite face was covered with a skim of ice, water trickling under it. I remember the water because I was looking at the little bubbles flowing past when my feet came out from under me. I didn’t spend much time overcoming or naming my fear. I had no desire to hang around and get to know it better. I wanted to get the hell away from it. The person on the small ledge maybe 10 feet above me said to take it easy and come up slowly. After I kicked my fear’s ass off the mountain, I told my friend to “move over.”

That experience was epiphanic. No I didn’t overcome my fear of heights. It slapped me across the face again when I looked down at the tiny ledge off the backside of the mountaintop. I could really see where I would die were I to slip on my way back down from the mountaintop. There were no options. If you climb up, you have to climb down. I focused on getting that job done. So screw the fears; kick them off the mountain. Your job is to soldier on, as it were, not fall back, and certainly not to lament about it.

2) Helplessness in the face of complexity. We’ve all been there. It’s that feeling of being overwhelmed. Mr. Chernoff’s advice is perfect. Break down whatever it is into smaller parts. Focus on the bits and pieces. What’s the saying, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Actually, that’s a bit of a misstatement from the Chinese proverb: “The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath one’s feet.”  The version I like states, “Even the longest journey must begin where you stand.” It removes the mental obstacle of a journey being 1,000 miles long and lets you focus instead on forward movements—the bits and pieces. So what if your steps are tiny. They’re steps. They accumulate. Words add up to sentences, and sentences to paragraphs, and paragraphs to pages.

3) Rebellion and laziness. Mr. Chernoff’s example is of the boy who is told he would be doing the same stuff in homeschool as in public school. He responded rebelliously. No success. Then his mother created a new paradigm: “Finish early, we do something fun.” Run with that idea; offer yourself little rewards for achieving some reasonable level of output. Instead of reading about fear and procrastination, read about self-motivation. Focus on the positive, not the negative.

Here I clash a bit with those who preach that you should hammer it out and fix it later. Don’t get me wrong, I rewrite a lot. But I also revise, edit, and tweak constantly as I go. Rewriting means you’re doing the same thing over again. It’s not that I never start over, I do, a lot. But the goal is to get better at putting the better version down on paper the first time. That’s how you grow as a writer. It’s how you know that you are growing as a writer. You sense it. You see it. It’s not a matter of speed, but increased efficiency and verbal creativity that will make this little trick work. Hemmingway’s goal was 500 words a day. That’s two pages! My goal is to get it closer to right, each time I write. But I try not to angst over it when the magic doesn’t always work. When you come back to it, you’ll likely see the path to improvement.

4) Lack of motivation. Mr. Chernoff’s advice here is inapplicable to writers. As an example he uses doing one’s taxes, which is a good candidate for something distasteful (unless you’re a tax accountant). Writing cannot be distasteful. It might be hard and demanding and frustrating at times, but when it becomes distasteful, it’s time to burn the paper, grind up the pencils, and throw your computer into the dumpster. You will never be a writer.

5) Lack of focus and fatigue. Mr. Chernoff suggests that we disconnect from outside distractions, or schedule them (e.g., checking e-mails) at fixed periods. “And only take breaks as a reward for accomplishing smaller sub-tasks.”

Writing doesn’t work quite the same way. It’s the product of an amalgam of invention, interpretation, translation, organization, and production. It’s easy to get out of focus or hung up on a fragment of non-importance. Hard physical labor can leave you exhausted. Hard mental labor will leave you with a strange combination of exhaustion and exhilaration. Take a break, stretch your legs, walk a few circles around the living room—or block—and then come back. There are a thousand little ways to take a mental break. Explore what works for you, but keep in mind, a break is not the project, the project is the project and that must be the center of your attention and focus.

6) Not knowing where or how to start. Bingo! Mr. Chernoff hit the bull’s eye with this one as it relates to writing. I suspect that a lot of writer’s fear is related to this. Keep in mind that every story has a beginning, middle, and end. Put those at the top of the page or whiteboard and under each list what might be involved in making it happen. Those are your tasks. Complete them in pieces, work backwards, sideways, linearly—whatever works for you. I’m a linear person, mostly, although sometimes I jump ahead to write a scene that is tickling my brain or kicking the door to get out—or in. When I jump ahead and write, however, I frequently don’t use or end of totally rewriting it by the time I reach that point, but the exercise keeps me moving. I would tell my middle school students that their words are neither made of gold nor cast in concrete. They are totally frangible. They have to earn their keep.

Writing is organic, which means it grows and alters itself, and its direction, as it grows and expands. To me an outline is little more than road signs. They don’t mean you have to follow that particular path. You find your direction as you travel. There rarely is a map to a story because it takes on a life of its own, once it has legs. When that happens, you have reached critical mass and most of what precedes this point in this essay becomes irrelevant. It’s wheels up and you’re flying solo.

7) Perfectionism. Mr. Chernoff says, “It just doesn’t matter.” Well, in writing it does matter; it’s just that it has be defined and managed. You can’t shove the stuff that comes out of the ground into your crankcase and call it oil. It has to be refined. So does your writing. It’s a process. Mr. Chernoff refers to it as putting off “implementing ideas by using the excuse that [you’re] not yet prepared to do the idea justice.” Writing is both the assignment and the practice for the assignment. That’s why it can be frustrating. You write in order to learn to write and to write better. You write story in order to discover ways to make the story better. There’s no Wizard of Oz who can give you a certificate of Writeology. That comes from effort and practice, and on some days the magic works better than on others. You are the man behind the curtain.

This all brings me to the rules of success. If you haven’t noticed, articles about the rules are always written by the successful. I’m not being coy. The rules are frequently presented as magical formulas—follow the steps and success awaits you. Life doesn’t work that way. Life and reality present too many unconsidered and/or uncontrollable variables. What worked for Joe might we spell failure for Jim.

The simple fact is you can follow and apply all the “rules” and still not succeed because it’s not the rules that generate success but your own best efforts. And there’s an element of luck and being at the right place at the right time that comes into play in all activities human. The rules on how to become a great writer need the same disclaimer as the ads by investment companies. “Results will vary.” But remember, without effort there is no results.

procrast4So when you are taking a break from your writing to read that article about what makes a successful writer, the rules listed never mention that most successful writers got that way by keeping their eyes on the ball. They haven’t time for interruptions that don’t fuel their progress.

Here’s what happens: you have an idea about a story and some characters who might bring it to life. You think about it. Make notes, maybe, even do some research. But absolutely NOTHING will happen if you don’t start writing it. And rarely is that journey one you can take in the comfort of a limo. The road is rough. You need a Jeep and some fortitude. But each little effort adds to the mass. And when that mass shifts from being a concept to something with substance, then words on paper, the story and its characters reach critical mass—that’s the point where they come to life, inhabit your brain, and become your collaborators and motivators.

Discipline means trying to write on a schedule that keeps the story from losing its momentum. When you can’t write—and life will always throw obstacles in your path—keep the story alive in your mind. Consciously think about it. That will keep you subconscious primed and trigger it to keep working on your project while you’re busy having to do other things. Don’t let the story or the characters sneak away from you. They’re like plants. They need water. Just try not to slip on the water when it occasionally turns to ice. Keep the fire lit.

Fire! Fire on the mountain.
Long distance runner, what you holdin’ out for?
Caught in slow motion in a dash for the door
The flame from your stage has now spread to the floor
You have all you had. Why you wanna give more?
The more that you give, the more it will take
To the thin line beyond which you really can’t fake.

Modification Clarification

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Take away the subject and verb of a sentence and you’re left mostly with modifiers of one sort or another. I’m not referring to the single-word adjectives and adverbs—they should, like pepper, be used sparingly—but to adverbial and adjectival phrases and clauses used to plug in additional construction workersdescription and clarification and/or alter the structure of your sentences so they read less like a Dick and Jane reader.

Like anything, these phrases and clauses can be overused, but the real problem is that they are easily misplaced within a sentence. The result is that what we intended to say isn’t said.

The primary violations come from unintentionally modifying the wrong nouns (adjectives) or verbs (adverbs). One example I like: “I read there was a big fire in yesterday’s paper.” If that was the intended sentence, the rest of the story might be about the house that burned down after the reader dropped his burning newspaper onto the carpet. Obviously, the speaker intended to say, “I read in yesterday’s newspaper there was a big fire.”

We don’t catch these misplaced modifiers because we have abused them for so long in our informal conversational communications that we fail to hear or see the misuse in print. Usually when something doesn’t sound or read right, it’s likely not right. But, for some reason, our eyes don’t catch what our ears have grown accustomed to not hearing, which makes misplaced modifiers a problem for self-editing writers who already face the challenges associated with trying to read and edit their own work with fresh eyes. Our observations of what has been written are obscured by our intentions behind what we think we wrote.

I don’t want this to read like some dedicated grammarian’s nit picking, but careless use of modifiers detracts from a writer’s clarity and can damage his or her credibility. An example of the impact that a misplaced modifier can have on a sentence is made clear by the following two sentences: “Only I love you.” – or – “I love only you.”

The problem is with the misplaced adverb only. There are a few other adverbs that can create similar confusion—almost, just, nearly. These are what I call double-agent adverbs because they can modify nouns as well as verbs. Take this sentence: “Thomas nearly ate the whole chicken.” The intent was to let us know that Thomas ate almost all the chicken, but what the sentence actually says is he ate none of it. He merely nearly ate.

Two more examples:

The committee meets only on Wednesdays.

The committee only meets on Wednesdays.

The first sentence tells us that the committee has but one weekly meeting, on Wednesdays. The second sentence tells us that the committee, when it gets together on Wednesdays, only meets and apparently takes no actions and makes no decisions. Both sentences are grammatically correct, but their meanings are considerably different. Once again, misplacement of the adverb is the culprit. The same thing can happen when you misplace an adverbial prepositional phrase. Which of the following two sentences states the likely intention of the writer and the reality of the scene?

The runners stood ignoring the crowd in their lanes.

The runners stood in their lanes ignoring the crowd.

There is a distinct difference between the crowd that apparently is blocking the runners by standing in their lanes and the runners who are focused on the race and thus not paying attention to the crowd.

The cure for this easily committable error is rather simple—attach your prepositional phrase directly to the word it modifies. The runners stood where? In their lanes. When you put a phrase at the end of your sentence, the crowd gets in the way of the runners and the intended clarity of the sentence. Note: This sort of injected “dis-clarity” frequently occurs when the offending phrase is plugged into the end of the sentence. That should be a red flag that tells you to conduct a clarity check.

Another danger for confusion arises from what I call “cross-eyed” modifiers—when the adverb is located between two clauses or phrases without clearly identifying which clause or phrase is intended to be modified. The modifier can look, and thus spray its modification in either direction. The example I like here is “The governor promised after her reelection she would not raise taxes.” So which is it? She promised that she would not raise taxes after she was elected or that after she was elected she promised not to raise taxes. The distinction might be important.

“Students who practice writing often will benefit.” Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. But, “Students who often practice writing will benefit” makes the intent of the writer easily understood. These students always reap the benefits of practice. But notice that the second—correct—sentence doesn’t quite sound correct? The reason is that in conversation we have said things wrong for so long that wrong sounds right and right can sound wrong. We have glossed over our errors so often that we fail to catch them when we write or read them.

We’re not drawing lines here between absolutes of right and wrong. A cross-eyed modifier is merely unclear and creates unwanted confusion. When you write, you want to be both clear and correct.

Be aware, too, of the “man who wasn’t there” trap. It’s taken from the William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) poem “Antigonish” (1899):

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d stay away.

construction workers sitting on a girderThe principal of the man who wasn’t there trap shows up in sentences like “Turning the key in the lock, Holmes quietly slipped into the room.” The subject of the verb “turning” has been dropped but we pick it up in the main sentence—Holmes. We could have written the sentence this way: “Holmes, turning the key in the lock, slipped into the room.” Either way is correct and the alternative structure allows us to interject variety. Keep in mind, however, that when you play with structure you need to keep an eye on clarity.

The corner we can paint ourselves into happens when a modifier, typically a participle or infinitive phrase, is left dangling because we’ve moved the word it actually modifies to another part of the sentence and end up in a puddle of muddle. A few examples:
Regretfully declining the dessert menu, the waiter brought us our bill.

After getting a new job, my commuting costs have doubled.

To recover from surgery, the doctor recommended bed rest.

When in doubt, make the actual subject—“waiter”, “commuting costs”, and “doctor”—into the subject of the modifier and see if it makes sense. (Modify the subject to assure agreement!) If the new sentence doesn’t make sense, fix it.

(The waiter), Regretfully declining the dessert menu, brought us our bill.

(My commuting costs), After getting a new job, have doubled.

(The doctor), To recover from surgery, recommended bed rest.

These fixes are usually fairly easy. It’s called rewriting! Don’t just move things around, but think about what you want to emphasize in your sentence and construct it accordingly.

After we regretfully declined the dessert menu, our waiter brought us our bill.

My commuting costs doubled after I got my new job. (Or flip it!)

The doctor recommend bed rest in order to recover from surgery. OR: After my surgery, the doctor recommended that I get plenty of bed rest.

There are two things at play that cause the confusion. The first is the consequence of an effort to be concise. Conciseness is good, clarity is better. Note also that the offending sentences often employ the under constructionparticiple form of the verb: declining, getting. Right behind my general rule to avoid use of the passive voice comes the directive to avoid the use of the participle verb phrase form.

Variety is the spice of life as well and writing and reading, so don’t avoid a potential problem by avoiding it. Write, edit and rewrite for clarity. Every writer needs to be dedicated to remove careless confusion from his or her diction. The neat thing about writing is that once you start to pay attention to a potential issue, it becomes an automatic response and you catch yourself spotting errors as you write rather than when you edit.

[Special Note: The challenge in writing about grammar is coming up with examples. I think authors likely “borrow” examples from others and tweak them to make them look like their own. That’s a sort of borderline plagiarism. I didn’t tweak my examples, instead, to borrow a phrase from the late U.S. Senator, linguist, and semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, I “stole them fair and square” from Mark Lester and Larry Beason. (The McGraw-Hill Handbook of English Grammar and Usage, 2005) Thanks guys.]

Jalapenos in the Oatmeal

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Bob Markoff, The New Yorker magazine’s cartoon editor, in his book, How About Never—Is Never Good for You?, wrote, “Acting outrageously makes it that much easier to think unconventionally. If you don’t have a silly bone in your body, you’re not going to have a funny bone either. And if you can’t combine mature intelligence with some immature thinking, you’re never going to be funny enough to make a living at it.”

Markoff’s comment is so loaded with insight that it jumps off the page and slaps you across the face. It demands would-be cartoonists to highlight it and commit it to memory. For writers, it demands that we highlight it and commit it to memory.

People performing the Lindy HopThinking unconventionally and immaturely are the character traits that make a fictional character bigger than life and allows him or her to break free from the gravitational pull of paper, jump off the page, and dance across your mind’s visual stage. Too many of us, me included, suffer from bouts of a form of self-consciousness, a subset of the fear of embarrassment, that keeps us from going out on the dance floor and doing the Lindy Hop. Somebody might see us! Though we admire watching others perform, we lack the courage or are too self-conscious to join in. For a writer to join in, his or her fingers first must dance unconventionally, immaturely, and unselfconsciously across the keyboard.

You can’t write a symphony using but one octave. Nor can you cripple the potential range of the thought and behavior of your characters, or their story.

By not interjecting your characters with outrageous actions and a certain level of immaturity, you risk imbuing them, and your story, with the excitement level of Pabulum. Your prose might be accurate, insightful, and reasonably active, but it will lack electricity—the fearlessness and adventurousness that snaps and zaps. That is where your characters’ cunning, wit, and creativity reside, and thus is critical not only to their own survival in the story but the survival of the story in the reader’s mind.

jalepeno peppersIf you think about your favorite characters that have populated your reading history, most likely they are the ones who displayed outrageous actions and immaturity at variously elevated levels. These traits are what differentiate round and full characters from flat, cardboard ones. They empower a character to escape from the page rather become trapped on it and meander around the lines of ink. They are the knotted sheets that the imprisoned character climbs down to escape from the page after setting it afire. Your prose should make them like caged animals squeezing between your subjects and predicates to leap at the reader. It’s like putting jalapeño peppers in the oatmeal!

Without outlandish and immature behavior, characters come across stunted, undeveloped, underdeveloped, and moribund. If your writing a hot pepperdoes not push the boundaries, your characters won’t. Too many of us hang back and don’t let our characters—or our plot for that matter—reach, push against, and cross the boundaries into the kind of behavior Markoff writes about.

Most of us were not raised by international spies or having toured with the Barnum & Bailey Circus, so our collected experiences are a bit more ordinary, i.e., boring, common, and, yes, dull. As a result we sometimes unknowingly confine ourselves to a real world rather than explore a more outrageous one. As a writer, you do not need to actually act outrageously, but your characters do. To help them do that, you need to at least think outrageously, and visualize that for your characters. Take to the dance floor of your mind, and dance with them like no one is watching.

You’ve just written an action scene and have sat back and wondered why it comes across with the brightness of a nightlight rather than an intense, night-piercing searchlight. It’s probably because the scene, and the characters who populate it, lack outrageous behavior. Fantasy writers have it easy in this regard. They live in the world of outrageousness. Their stories maybe associated with or arise from some aspect of reality, but they quickly jump into a world beyond reality where their characters are not limited by it.

For the novelist or short story writer whose characters live in a world just a few blocks down and over from the one we live on, there’s a boundary where outrageous can become too unbelievable and actually destroy the effectiveness of a story or scene, thus killing its credibility. But that boundary is farther out there than you think. Words on paper have us rooting for humans trying to bring down Godzilla. As long as Godzilla appear reasonably logical in the world where it resides, we’re along for the scaly ride.

As a fun exercise, watch a scene from such a movie, then synopsize and describe it on paper. You’ll find yourself wondering why it worked so well on screen? It’s because the boundary of outrageousness exceeds the more limited boundary of our reality-based, word-grounded, conservative appropriateness. The scene on the screen taps into your imagination, and thus your emotions, from a purely visual angle. That’s the angle you want to try and inject into your writing. (I suggest writing that touches all five of the reader’s senses helps you achieve this same effect. See my blog, “Common Senses.”)

We all know that reading fiction is a form of escapism, except the writer must remember it’s not so much where you’re escaping from that counts as where you’re letting your readers escape to. That is what allows the writer to push the boundaries of normal behavior well beyond normalcy; your readers put their trust in your hands. Don’t disappoint them.

Readers simply want to believe, and as a result they allow the boundaries of normalcy to be stretched and expanded. John Grisham did it on smaller scale with his character Theodore Boone. (Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer). Really, a middle school legal whiz? It worked because Grisham took familiar behaviors and assigned them to unfamiliar territory. He’s written a sequel, Theodore Boone: The Abduction. The plots, the characters—they’re simply outrageous. Delightfully so.

The outrageousness of Grisham’s Theodore Boone pales in comparison to the characters in Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It opens with a brutal murder of a family and won a Newberry Medal. Gaiman artfully blurs the boundaries between the worlds of fantasy and reality, but because he writes in the tone of reality the reader doesn’t notice, or care. Gaiman simply cuts lose and pushes aside the limitations of normalcy and makes it all seem rational.

How can this be achieved? Therein lies the rub. There exits no formula and it’s easy to take the readers too far, miss the target, and lose them in the process. There are hidden and undefined mine fields, and if you step into or onto one, you’ll blow up your characters’ or your plot’s credibility.

Readers love heroes who have a human side, flawed by little weaknesses or beliefs . . . or big ones sometimes. They also love them to display traits we can only dream of. And that is what the writer needs to feed—not the realities of the readers’ minds but the unrealities—the stuff they dream of and willingly buy into. Everybody is his or her own Walter Mitty. As a writer, you have a duty to feed their Walter Mittys.

car race crashA novel is not unlike a car race. We go to races to watch the speed and daring of the participants, but we love the occasional smash-ups and spinouts and flying debris and flames and smoke, and the screeching of tires, and the crunch of metal on metal. Why do you suppose traffic slows to a crawl as it passes an accident scene? In part to see what might be there to be seen, even if it grosses people out.  Your writing needs smash ups, and it’s the outrageous behavior of your characters that causes them and slows the traffic down so the reader can strain to see the carnage.

Every character needs his or her strengths, but also their Kryptonite. In all the outrageousness, you don’t have a character lose all human traits, especially ones that are foundational to a character’s philosophy and ideals and to which their humanness is anchored. It’s what makes them fundamentally credible and provides the WOW when contrasted against their more outrageous elements. Finding (creating) and maintaining the balance between these two seemingly diametrically opposed states is the writer’s territory. Characters can’t be indestructible; otherwise there can be no credible conflict because there is no risk. But they can miraculously survive by not just luck, but cunning, incredible quickness, unbelievable bravery . . . The list of descriptors goes on.

Take away Kryptonite and Superman becomes just another indestructable super hero. Much of the potential for conflict and tension disappears. Where would the thrill be if you took away Jimmy Stewart’s crippling fear of heights in “Vertigo”? In Stewart’s case, his weakness is the heart of his character and the story. Don’t forget, characters can be called upon to overcome both external and internal conflicts. Real tension arises when they have to do both, at the same time. Otherwise, the temperature of the conflict (scene) would drop to something approaching zero in much the same way it would if Kryptonite had no deleterious effect on Superman.

You can see how the outrageousness of behavior is the key element in conflict.

In the original “Die Hard” movie, New York police detective Bruce Willis, in LA at Christmas to visit his estranged wife and two children, takes his shoes off and wiggles his toes in the plush carpet to relieve the tensions of his cross-country flight, only to find himself barefoot and running across broken glass in a hail of bullets to save himself and his wife and her colleagues from alleged terrorists. Similarly, Harrison Ford, in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” speaks of his phobia about snakes only to end up in a pit filled with them and armed with a dying torch, and, well, that whip.

Both situations are simply outrageous, if measured from the normal end of the continuum of human behavior, but they work, and work very well, because we want them to. Readers willingly suspend several levels of reality and dismiss normal skepticisms as the outrageous behavior logically moved toward the far end of the behavioral continuum.

Don’t be afraid to feed you readers a bowl of outrageous behavior. Just put some jalapenos in the oatmeal.

Common Senses

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“It was a dark and stormy night . . .” opens the story by that famous novelist, Snoopy. The opening often is used as the example of the type of hackneyed writing to avoid. But take a closer look. Combined, dark and stormy become powerful visual words that allude to senses other than just sight and sound. You can certainly visualize a darkened sky, perhaps the lightning, and hear the thunder off in the distance, rolling and coming toward you. “It was to be one of those nights when you could taste the electricity in the air and smell the rain’s arrival as it splashed on your sweat-drenched skin to bring relief from the August heat and humidity and a fresh aroma to your nose, like the washing you hung on the line for your mother when you were a kid.”

How about that for a finish, Snoopy?

Little Snoopy accomplished something that we all should think more about—appealing to all of our readers’ senses in order to heighten the impact of what we write. In seven words, Snoopy brushed Common Sensesup against sight, taste, smell, sound, and touch as the impending rain begins to fall.

Not bad for a little beagle.

Most languages, certainly English, are very visual in nature because they started as pictographs and hieroglyphics on cave walls to which our ancestors attached sounds that evolved into verbal and then into written language.

A long-ago communication professor asked members of our seminar to discuss the word purple. He simply wrote the word in white chalk on the slate blackboard. The discussion quickly focused on taste, color, similes, and metaphors to the obvious, grapes, for instance. But purple has no sound descriptors and you had to stretch a bit for smell. But for some reason we say that some people write “purple prose.”

Paul West in a New York Times article back in 1985, entitled “In Defense of Purple Prose,” wrote, “It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that’s rich, succulent and full of novelty.” He said purple “is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity.”

Yet purple, as a color, has always been associated with royalty. What’s it doing down there in the gutter? I was taught to associate the term “purple prose” with pornographic or certainly something sexually oriented or racy or raunchy.

Descriptive WordsWest went on: “So long as originality and lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a version as can be. A writer who can’t do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks.”

What does “doing purple” mean? I suggest it’s when a writer expands his or her efforts to incorporate more than the senses of sight and sound. It’s not easy. Just read a few descriptions of wine posted in your favorite store, or better yet, try to write a description of your own favorite wine and you will realize that trying to describe taste and smell and touch can get you into a muddle—where the image you had hoped to convey falls short of or off target.

“George, you look depressed.”

“I wouldn’t say my mood is depressed. I just feel purple today.”

Huh? To include the five senses in your narrative description, the challenge is to find clarity that puts your readers on the same page as you, the writer. Most of the time writers strive for clarity and understanding, or as we say in communications, to close the communication loop so the meaning of the message sent is received and accurately understood.

That perhaps explains why we tend to cluster our descriptors in groups of three. Poets, politicians and lawyers are famous for this. Take Emma Lazarus’ sonnet “New Colossus” on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free.” She could have said, “Give me your citizens who yearn for freedom.” What about the rich yearning to be free? Why do citizens have to be tired, poor, and huddled to be welcomed to America? And what does huddled mean exactly? Are the three descriptions synonyms or do they describe three distinctly different classes or categories of people? Later in her poem, she mentions, “wretched refuse of your teeming shores.” Not a pretty visual that, but notice the words Lazurus used are all visual. If they are not synonyms, neither are they discordant.

We collect our descriptors in threes, likely to assure we connect with our audience at some perceived important cognizant level. We feel uncomfortable in giving a single descriptor so much responsibility as to carry the entire weight of our intended description when we’re not going to be there to interact with the reader and assure she or he understands. Frequently, however, no single word is sufficiently specific, and thus we cluster. If you look at Lazarus’ words, you can see she tried to paint a visual image by using a broad brush, to provide sufficient imagery to assure that readers got her idea/message and see the people she described—the ones who need another chance, a new opportunity, to escape from bad circumstances.

The words she used—“tired, poor, huddled, wretched refuse” are each very visual. A reader would have to be totally ignorant not to come away with at least the gist of Lazarus’ intended description of these tattered masses. Given a minute, you could probably come up with a list of more synonyms Lazarus could have employed. But likely, your list would be very visually oriented, too.

Words, especially verbs and adjectives that have the greatest impact on readers, are the ones that touch the senses. Of the five senses, most descriptors we read and use target sight and sound. For the others—touch, taste, and smell—you will find that the lists of alternatives are noticeably shorter, which makes finding the right one potentially more difficult. By right, I mean descriptors that are fresh, in more attention-grabbing and unusual ways—that enhance the impact of your overall narrative description.

One of my reference books combines sight and smell words into a single list: acrid, antiseptic, bitter, choking, clean, delicious, fragrant, fresh, juicy, medicinal, nutty, peppery, putrid, ripe, rotten, salty, savory, smoky, sour, spicy, stale, sticky, strong, stuffy, sweet, tangy, tart, tasteless, tasty. Notice that most lack specificity and rely on broad and common experiences to relay the message. That’s why we cluster our descriptions and rely on simile and metaphor to clarify their meanings. I’m not saying that is bad; it merely makes employment of words that touch on all these senses a bit more challenging to install. But it’s when you take the easy way out that your writing can sound hackneyed, or at least a bit too predictable.

You want to avoid prose where the inclusion of touch, taste, and smell descriptors reads like an accident report—”The popcorn was salty.” To have an effective impact, the use of descriptors referring to the “other” senses requires that you play with your sentence structure to make the description more prominent and thus more powerful. E.g.: “Her salty lips told me she had been drinking Margaritas for lunch.” Weave them into your narrative, don’t stick them on like a Post-It note.

Snoopy, the authorInstead of “The popcorn tasted salty” you might incorporate the sense of taste with another descriptor to add a little depth and breadth: “I sat down at the bar, grabbed the bowl of popcorn and shoved a fistful into my mouth. The salt stung my lacerated lip and I took a sip of beer to wash the pain away.” Of course the brute that gave you the lacerated lip might spin you around on the bar stool, but think of the five senses you could use to describe what happened when you came around with a heavy mug of beer that crashes into his cranium.

How about, “The roiling smoke quickly coated my nostrils and I gasped for the free clean air” rather than “The room was filled with smoke.” “I dove to the floor in search of air not yet saturated by the acrid smoke but it chased me to the ground and scratched at my eyes and tried to claw its way down my throat to reach my lungs.”

It’s easy to makeyour sentences sound over wrought, so care must be taken not to insert sense descriptions that jar the tone and flow of a paragraph or seems oddly out of place. Overuse of sense descriptors can easily come across as forced, and too many sprinkled over a small area will give your writing a hackneyed flavor. But playing around with your narrative descriptions to include, in appropriate locations, something that touches a reader’s senses other than sight and sound, will add dimension and depth to your narrative and enhance the image(s) you hope to create.

common4Just think about it. Snoopy obviously did.

To practice, check out the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility  (a.k.a. the Body Farm) and write the paragraph about a character (try it in first person) who has been abducted and finds him or herself waking up in the middle of the night on the wrong side of that fence.

Oh the places your readers will go . . . and touch, and taste, and smell.

Journalism and Fiction Writing

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I came to fiction writing late. Life happens while you’re busy doing other things. For me, writing started with journalism, and when I practiced that profession, I was pretty narrow in scope—the law and people associated with the law. My professional commitment to real facts, accuracy, and objectivity, I discovered, slowed my transition into fiction writing. But having survived the passage—mostly—I now find my journalism training helpful in writing fiction. Go figure! Although, journalism training can be both an asset and a curse to the fiction writer (it can be hard to shift from finding to inventing facts), I want to explore how the concepts of journalism might well be an asset to you and help you through those frustrating times of fiction writing.

Journalism applies the inverted pyramid structure. You start with an attention-grabbing lead that presents the gist of the story. No surprise endings allowed. You follow that by writing about the most important facts first, interweaving quotes from people who know about what you’re writing about, and work your way Journalistdown through a decreasing list of lesser important facts. It’s the organization that makes the journalistic style a good way to introduce young people to writing because it requires them think about it. To write a hard news story, the journalist must assemble, assess, and prioritize, and ultimately select that peck of facts from the bushel available, all while working against a deadline . . . tick, tick, tick.

The glowingly obvious distinction between the journalist and the novelist is that the former deals with real facts, the latter with manufactured ones, or ones adapted and modified from reality. In the end, the journalist and novelist tell story, just in different ways.

Consider journalistic writing as a form of outlining. It requires you to be organized and present the facts in a combination of descending importance and logical chronological order. That requires decisions about what goes first and why and what comes next and why and so on. Every novelist makes similar decisions. However, the journalist’s challenge is to make the story interesting without embellishment or fictionalization because of his or her professional fealty to objectivity and accuracy. The novelist invents it all and injects emotionality. For the most part, the journalist must exclude that, or assure that if emotion arises it comes from or is generated by the facts and not his or her spin on them.

As a journalist, you learn quickly to marshal the facts, assign them relative importance, and work to present them with descriptive clarity. You’re job is to inform, not preach, or pontificate. Truth is important as it relates to accuracy. And accuracy is important because it serves to build the reputation for reliability of the journalist. Side by side, journalism and fiction writing are not brother or sister, but kissing cousins.

In journalism school, we were sometimes assigned to watch the Sunday morning interview shows and write the news story. With several guests, guided by a moderator, an abundance of quotes and positions were covered from which to select those for a news story. Lots of judgment calls had to be made, and the challenge was to write a piece with continuity and that flowed, and have it polished and ready to hand in on Monday morning.

If you think writing in the journalistic form is easy, you might be surprised. It’s the organization that becomes the challenge and how to interweave the facts and authoritative quotes without the end result reading like a police report from Joe Friday of “Dragnet.”

Feature writing allows the journalist to interject a higher level of creativity and emotionality into the mix, and thus the stories have a better chance to come alive through their narration and dialogue (quotes). The writer gets to dig a little deeper into the human factors behind a story. (In the day, that style was covered by courses on magazine writing.)

More recently, a new label has been applied to these hybrid writers who interject the style of the novel into the journalist feature—literary journalist. In the right hands, the story can be as dynamic and intriguing as anything by a fiction writer. It’s not a matter of creating the tension and conflict, but finding it and effectively and creatively presenting it. As an assignment, go to www.jonfranklin.com and click on “Stories” then click on “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.” The feature, written in 1978, a bit before electronic technology flooded into the surgical suite, is about a surgeon and his patient with a brain tumor. It’s factual, riveting, and won Mr. Franklin a Pulitzer Prize.

Tony Hillerman and his wife

Tony Hillerman and his wife

One of my favorite novelists is Tony Hillerman, who unfortunately died in 2008. He started life as a journalist but had a desire to write fiction. Encouraged by his wife Anne, he did and soon found great success as a novelist. In the process he became the 22nd richest person in Arizona. One of his great successes was his series about Navajo police detectives Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. I read those novels before I learned of Mr. Hillerman’s journalism background, after which I realized that it was the tint of journalism that enlivened and added color to Hillerman’s factually edgy style. He wrote a dozen and half Leaphorn and Chee books. Did I mention he was also a prolific writer?

No, I am not suggesting you drop everything and enroll in journalism school, although a few courses or night classes on news and feature writing wouldn’t hurt. Why? Organization. The organizational demands that journalists face—especially when writing on deadline—can expose you to thinking faster and deeper. To a novelist, that can be very helpful, and just might have something to do with prolificacy, which is part of being self-disciplined, which you cannot acquire by reading about it. You learn it by doing it.

There is stopgap exercise, however, that requires considerably less time and financial investment than night school classes. Write news stories about what you are working on, stuck on, thinking about, or recently abandoned out of frustration. Play journalist. Interview yourself. Ask probing questions. Answer them—honestly. Then write the story. You will step away from yourself and see what you are doing with new eyes, i.e., a different perspective.

The very first question: What is your novel (or short story) about? You’ll be amazed by how much you have not sufficiently thought through that. I’m guilty of that! Explore the plot, the characters, their distinctions and motivations. Another probing question should be: What do you want the reader to take away from reading your work? Another: What challenges have you run into and what have done to resolve them? You can see where this line of questioning is going—into the world of more deeply thinking about who, what, when, where, why and how of your efforts.

There are no revolutionary interview questions, just the basic stuff, but the stuff we often do not address, or miss or avoid, perhaps out of fear, likely out of procrastination. We get so busy writing, or being frustrated with our efforts, that we don’t think enough about exactly what we’re up to or are trying to achieve. Having to write your own story changes that dynamic.

Consider it like enrolling in your own writing class. You can—for the fun of it—allow yourself only to write the hard news version of your self-interview or expand the inquiry into a feature piece. It’s not only the quality and depth of the questions and answers, but the process of writing your story that will help you to better organize your efforts, hone your focus, and, more likely, discover ways to make whatever you’re doing better.

I’d start with a hard news piece because you’ll find it the most challenging. You can’t wax eloquent but must make it interesting. The process of preparing for the interview (questions) and conducing it (answers) can be cathartic, but writing the story will be what gets you into thinking in a new way. It will force you to think about your writing on several levels, the two most important of which are (1) having to explain yourself to someone and (2) writing clearly about your answers and explanations. Of course, when we write we think about what we’re writing, but we don’t usually step behind the scenes and think about the why’s and how’s of it all. It’s important to look at the man behind the curtain. After all, he’s you.

Hearing Voices

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There probably is no technique as effective as using the active voice to immediately improve the quality of your narrative writing. The active voice mandates that the subject of a sentence performs the action. “Babe hit the ball.” In the passive voice, the subject shifts to receiving rather than performing the action: “The ball was hit by Babe.” Note that words are added and impact of the sentence weakened.
 
The definition/distinction in “grammarianese” states, “A verb is said to be in the active voice when it expresses an action performed by its subject. A verb is in the passive voice when the action it expresses is performed upon its subject.”

New to MeThe important distinction is that verb in a passive sentence is always a verb phrase that employs the verb be and the past participle of the main verb. Typically, the subject in the active voice sentence, becomes the object of an adverbial prepositional phrase in the passive voice sentence, and can sometimes be dropped altogether, with little harm to the clarity of the sentence. Keep this in mind. It will at least help you improve a passive voice sentence, should you insist on using the form. For example: The active voice sentence, “The lecturer provided helpful diagrams,” when converted into the passive voice, becomes, “Helpful diagrams were provided by the lecturer.” You could drop the “by the lecturer.”
 
I am not pounding my fist on the table and shouting, “You must endeavor to use the active voice at all times.” However, a conscious effort to increase its use has its benefits: (1) shorter, more concise sentences that get directly to the point, and, (2) stronger verbs, which tend to carry the action and are considerably more visual in nature. The passive voice paints in gray, the active voice paints in color.
 
Only transitive verbs—those that take an object—are used in the passive voice. Transitive verbs generally are wimpier than their intransitive (i.e., stand alone) brethren, and present one of the best arguments for using the active voice. Stated alternatively, the transitive verb in the passive voice needs assistance from an adverbial phrase. The intransitive verb used in the active voice has sufficient strength to stand alone and succinctly express the subject’s action, as the following examples show:

  • Active: Willa Cather wrote My Antonia.
    Passive: My Antonia was written by Willa Cather.
  • Active:  Someone has erased the videotape. /  Someone erased the videotape.
    Passive: The videotapes have been erased (by someone).

The examples show also that writing in the active voice is not always preferred. (In grammar, even suggestions have exceptions!) There are plenty of times when you want the subject in the active voice sentence to receive the action because passive voice form has greater effect. Consider the detective in a robbery-murder scene checking on whether the shooter’s actions were captured by the store’s hidden surveillance system. Rather than declare, “Someone erased these video tapes,” you might want him to say, disappointedly, “These videotapes have been erased by someone,” as he turns and accusingly looks at the four employees in the jewelry store with the owner’s dead body on the floor in the background, in a pool of blood.
 
Thinking about the voice of your sentence obliges you to consider alternative structures for all your sentences. A string of passive voice sentences come across as weak, and to the reader’s ear sounds redundantly bland. Unfortunately, for some mysterious reason, most of us tend to write in the passive voice initially. By thinking about the voice of each sentence, you begin to think about the effectiveness of each sentence. The process becomes more automatic and you’ll find yourself catching yourself when you write in the weaker passive form. Over time you’ll start to produce better sentences as your first alternative and enjoy seeing how the stronger verbs of the active voice improves the overall visual impact of your writing.
 
Additionally, using the active voice reduces use of the participle verb form, which is associated with the passive voice and sports considerable wimpy qualities. The –ing participle form simply sounds weak. (I’m ignoring the past participle form—ed.) Getting rid of the participle takes a little more effort than merely shifting from the passive to the active voice. You can’t just dump “I was singing” and use “I sang,” for the simple reason its tense may not fit the circumstances of the scene you’re writing. “I was singing when a shot rang out,” can’t become “I sang when a shot rang out.” But, “As I sang, a shot rang out,” works and the sentence has more impact. “A shot rang out as I sang,” works, too. “A shot rang out as I was singing,” has less power.

The Transitive VampireBy being sensitive to the distinction between the active and passive voice, you will become more sensitive to and inclined to write stronger sentences. After a while you’ll find yourself writing stronger sentences in your first draft rather than removing weak ones from it.
 
Too, you’ll discover that using the active voice reduces the need for too many adverbs. The stronger your verb the less it needs to be propped up with adverbs.
 
It’s not merely a question of applying a better sentence structure that drives the decision to use the active or passive voice. Sometimes the action is more important than the subject, which makes the passive voice the more effective of the two, a la the detective in the jewelry store. But, for the most part, the active voice works best. Consider these three sets of sentences borrowed from The Writer’s Digest’s Grammar Desk Reference by Gary Lutz and Diane Stevenson:

  • The youngsters ate all the pie before the party.
    The pie was eaten by the youngsters before the party.
  • My son wrecked the car last night.
    The car was wrecked by my son last night.
  • The storm damaged the crops and tore up the land.
    The crops were damaged and the land torn up by the storm.

So be aware and practice sensitivity to how you write what you’re saying. Writers should avoid over use of the passive voice, which is achieved by judicious use of the active voice. Or should that be, over use of the passive voice should be avoided by writers? Sometimes it just boils down to what sounds better under the given circumstances, but care adds to the quality of the circumstances!

False Consistency

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You can hardly pick up a writer’s magazine and not find an article on the importance of developing a consistent schedule for writing. It’s part of the discipline mantra, usually item number one on a list to to-dos or rules. Discipline to a writer represents the ability—or a learned habit to be more accurate—of being reliable to himself; to show up, on time, ready to sit down and write, day after day.

However, you must be careful not to fall into the trap of what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “foolish consistency,” which he described as “the hobgoblin of small minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency,” he said, “a great soul has simply nothing to do.”

Emerson’s quote comes from his essay “Self-Reliance,” in which he skewered society’s efforts at conformity and what he termed false consistency. Applied to writers, this happens when a suggestion becomes a rule and the rule evolves into being more important than what it originally stood for.

false consistencyFirst and foremost, keep in mind that writing can be work, hard work, damn hard work. The joys of writing so frequently written and spoken about come after a project is—finally—completed and arises from the warm and fuzzy feeling of just being finished. Like the pain of childbirth, the discomforts of writing quickly slip away, replaced by the pride of the newborn in swaddling clothes, and, ultimately, a willingness to start another project.

Emerson’s quote is usually a bit truncated. The full quote went on to say, essentially, that to seek consistency for consistency’s sake the great soul might as well “ . . . concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” Instead Emerson suggested, “Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. – ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ – Is it so bad, then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

This last part of the Emerson quote is more applicable to the thoughts of the transcendental philosopher that he was. A writer on the other hand seeks to avoid misunderstanding through clarity. Emerson was not against that, he just would argue that you not concede to the tried and true—the universally consistent, the hackneyed. To a philosopher, even a misunderstanding gives rise to new topics for discussion.

The first part of the paragraph makes sense to a writer, if you translate “hard words” as synonymous with substantive ones. The second part we will assign to that side of Emerson open to more transcendental exploration. He led the Transcendentalist movement of his time.

A writer should mostly avoid being misunderstood, which is done by striving for unique clarity and not conformity. Writers need to avoid merely watching their shadows on the wall, or more important, the shadows of others on the wall.

Applied, Emerson comments tell us not to be so wed to consistency that we miss the need to endeavor to write something substantively new and better each time. New frequently contradicts the old; in fact, it nearly always does. Perhaps Emerson presents the idea a bit densely, but he does a nice job of describing the process of writing as a day-to-day effort that strives for something substantively new despite being inconsistent with previous thoughts and efforts. It’s simply more important to keep your efforts fluid and active and not to worry so much about aligning them with the previous ones. Consistently attend to the substantive content of your efforts; work consistently (form) but keep your content (substance) fresh. Don’t get so wed to what you did (wrote) yesterday that you miss opportunities to create something new, and presumably better, today.

However, there is an exception to the rule. Sometimes you discover the train you’re on is not moving forward like it should, or it got switched to the wrong track along the way. You can sense this usually. When that happens, the remedy usually is to jump off the train and head back to the station and catch a different one that takes another, new or different, track. It’s during that sometimes-long walk back to the station that you discover why your first choice didn’t work and what needs to be done to get things moving forward again.

Emerson was not just a poet, but led the Transcendentalist movement and was dedicated to making people contemplate. He thought philosophically, which is always fraught with potential for inconsistencies, and in part involves itself with discussing, if not trying to resolve them. That sort of effort should be part of a writer’s resume. In other words, when not writing, take the time to think about writing.

In the spirit of coming up with new labels for old ideas, let’s call what we’re “talking” about here as “substantive consistency,” which incorporates more that just writing shadows on the wall. Substantive consistency demands a schedule for a simple reason—when you step off the train it’s not like stepping off a merry-go-round that you can just hop back onto after a few revolutions in your absence.

paintingLike a train, writing tends to more linear, ever moving forward, and if you linger, your train (of thought) can lose momentum and end up as dead tonnage blocking the tracks, or move on, leaving you mentally behind, trying to figure out where you were going precisely. You are forced to return to the station and start over in order to catch up with yourself, which can be a waste time and effort.

The consistency of sitting down to work is an important writer’s tool because it creates opportunities for meaningful production and synergistic thinking, when the pieces or facets come together to make something collectively more effective then they were sitting there separately.

Let’s step away from the railroad metaphor and into a musical one. Synergy happens there when the musicians get into the groove, like in Ronnie Laws song “In the Groove”:

“When the band is in the groove
When you feel my body move
Wrap your arms around me, hold on tight
I don’t wanna play some game
I’m a moth and you’re the flame
Just wanna be with you tonight.”

Being in the groove is intense. It doesn’t mean you exclude everything everyone else one around you, but you do become focused, attuned, intimately connected to your project. You and your project become synergistic, feeding and feeding off of each other. Synergy occurs when the result is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s that point where two plus two equals six or even more. What happens is the collective facets of the mind play off each other, and develop a new momentum. To the writer it’s being so immersed in a project that when you’re not physically working on it you’re consciously thinking about it; and, when you’re not consciously thinking about it, your subconscious is.

Too often writers, when they hit the slow spot, disembark from the mental train, to wait for some inspiration to sweep then up and back aboard. Ayn Rand, from that side of her that was the novelist, dismissed the idea there was something called inspiration. Rather than some mystic gift generated by from a cosmic alignment of the planets, inspiration—that Oh my! flash of genius or insight that suddenly and unexpectedly surfaces when you’re in the shower—comes from within your subconscious, which has been working on some aspect of some thought or conundrum and finally reaches critical mass and spits it out. That “inspiration” is what substantive consistency feeds. It happens when you are fully and consistently engaged.

On Accuracy

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A recent cover of the “Datebook,” a Sunday tabloid insert in the San Francisco Chronicle that covers art, entertainment, and literary topics, reminded me of the phrase that journalism sometimes represents the art of merely filling space. What the space is filled with is frequently fluffed up a bit to give it an aura of substance that it probably doesn’t otherwise deserve, and sometimes, the headline for and the content of a piece are sufficiently divergent to be almost misleading. Such was the “Datebook” cover that screamed “When Hxllywxxd Gets It Wrong.” The article, by writer Mick LaSalle, pokes fun at, criticizes, and sometimes condemns a litany of movies that have gotten their facts incorrect. For example, he criticizes “Gravity” because Sandra Bullock’s hair is not floating in disarray as it would in the reality of weightlessness as she levitates through a spacecraft door dressed very similarly to Sigourney Weaver in the first “Alien” movie. The caption under a picture of Forest Whitaker from “The Butler” points out the movie “was based on a true story, but many of the ‘facts’ were false.”

The term false is pretty accusatorial. It intimates an intentional act of deception as opposed to a factual error or something the writer or director attaches considerably less significance to than the fine-tooth equipped critic looking for something to write about. It may, which happens in many sci-fi flicks, ignore reality in sake of story. When a true story is adapted into a movie, some of the reality is lost, or adjusted, or fictionalize to increase its impact as story. Rarely do real life stories track the same structure as that of the short story or novel or a movie. It’s not that mistakes were made; adjustments and adaptations were.

In a sidebar to the article, Peter Hartlaub adds to the list of movie mistakes, and establishes himself as a true movie flub buff. Together the articles provide plenty of fodder for cocktail chatter, but they miss the point about factual inaccuracies in fiction generally and movies specifically. Many of the “flubs” in movies are more likely driven by legitimate budget limitations—how many more takes and at what expense to not to have the hubcap fly off the Dodge charger multiple times as it chases Steve McQueen around streets of San Francisco in “Bullitt”?

Just as likely, a director is less concerned about the accuracy of the background and more concerned with what it does to enhance the scene. Usually the audience simply doesn’t care that Dustin Hoffman is driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge in “The Graduate,” partly because such minor, insubstantial, and non-substantive things have little or nothing to do with the plot.

I recall a wonderful presentation on the art of “Star Wars” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) several years back. Darth Vader, encased in a Plexiglas display sat in a dim corner, to be occasionally lit up at four-second intervals. The four seconds Darth Vaderrepresented the longest period of time the movie camera actually focused on him. The image created an aura of high-tech villainy, but the “real life” display allowed you to linger and take a closer look and see that in many ways this bad boy of space looked positively cheesy. All those gizmos on his belt were blocks of painted balsa wood. Sort of like the jellybean buttons on the flight deck on the Enterprise in the Star Trek television series.

Allusion is at the heart of movie making. Much about which LaSalle and Hartlaub complain likely was intended by some director to merely set the scene, locate the characters physically and/or geographically in relationship to the story, or to set a mood, much like the background in a painting. If you notice, when you’re having a conversation over lunch with someone across the table, the background loses its focus in your vision for the simple reason that you’re not focusing on it. In movies, frequently, you’re not meant to focus on the background details, but they hang there for a sufficient number of seconds and thus allow visual exploration by movie trivia buffs who pay less attention to the story and the acting and more to search of meaningless errors.

Finding such movie flubs can be fun, but they hardly rise to some substantive failure on the part of the director. Extend the logic of LaSalle and Hartlaub, and you would have to condemn the “back lots” of Hollywood for misrepresentations. After all, the behind-the-front-line Korean “MASH” unit was actually just a few miles from Los Angeles. And what about the streets of Vancouver becoming the streets of San Francisco, not to trick us but to save some money?

Although the Chronicle writers focus on the visual arts, they raise the legitimate question for the print writer as to what extent is his or her obligation to be factually accurate. I’m not talking about the fact that there doesn’t exist a group of forensic pathologists out picture of a levelthere who also solve crimes, and cops who constantly rely on written reports but never seem to write one, or that most police officers retire having fired their weapon only at a police range target. Put that kind of accuracy on the screen and viewers would go to sleep. Moviemakers aren’t expected to present the boring footage between when the detectives jump into their car to when they slide to a screeching stop at the crime scene. It’s the screeching stop you’re after. But when they climb out of their squad, you might want them to act more like real detectives—not to achieve dead on accuracy, that would be both boring and time-killing, but to acquire a level of credibility that makes their actions come across as authentic. Credibility and authenticity have more to do with supplying enough facts to get the reader to buy into the author’s version of reality.

Fiction takes liberties with facts and reality, that why it’s called fiction. It deals with imaginary events and people and places. At my house you would hear me sometimes vociferously criticize the inaccuracies of the typical TV courtroom scene, not because I feel they got in wrong but rather they didn’t get it right enough to achieve credibility. In my courtroom reality, I would employ a little bit of stage drama techniques, not to fool the jury but to keep their interest. Courtroom reality can be damn boring.

The novelist can paint a scene in great detail or chose to use a very light brush and leave the finer details to a reader’s imagination. Unlike in a movie, the writer is able to take the reader inside a character’s head for some background thoughts and perspective. The moviemaker has to visualize virtually everything but can play around with lighting and focus and use other techniques to enhance the mood of a scene or personality of a character. The screen requires that something to be there, which makes what is projected there ever so much more subject to inspection and thus criticism. It’s a risk of the business.

The same lesson, however, applies to both print and screen—that which is presented as authentic probably should be authentic. For the writer that usually means doing some research, the depth of which is driven by the depth of the writer’s reliance on it. You can’t bend the truth unless you know the truth.

Still, there is a difference between substantive details and insignificant set dressing. The writer who pays attention to both will attain greater popularity because readers trust an author who writes credible stuff. Readers respect authors who do their homework. And, if you know and understand the realities, you’re in a better position to know the extent to which your poetic license lets you tweak and modify them. John Grisham does this pretty well. Patricia Cornwall is a master at it. She knows her science and every book impresses the reader with how she uses her knowledge to empower the credibility of her plots and characters. She entertains and educates her fans at the same time. Sue Grafton is closing in on the last of her alphabet series about her private eye Kinsey Millhone. In her acknowledgements in each novel, she gives credit to the experts upon whom she relied to acquire some plot-specific expertise.

Ms. Grafton knows of credibility. The reason you have not seen Ms. Millhone in any electronic venues is that, according to Ms. Grafton, she would lose half her readers because the director’s version of Kinsey Millhone would not be their version. She knows that credibility comes in part from your fans and their perceptions and expectations.

Am I stating the obvious? To an extent. But in our world of self-publishing, it’s the author who seeks to adhere to the rigors of professional editors in the big publishing firms who likely will do better. There is a difference between a B movie and an A movie. Same for the work product of a writer. A movies and A books get their important facts right.

Choosing the right, i.e., accurate, facts can be as important as choosing the right word. As Mark Twain said, the difference between the right word and the nearly right word is the difference between lightening and a lightening bug. Incorrect facts reduce the voltage of an otherwise good story.

Factuality can be a little more challenging to the writer. Overdo the effort for accuracy and you run the risk of drowning the reader in a flood of trivia. Viewers might well have spotted the excess numbers of hubcaps flying about in “Bullitt,” but were likely more interested in the chase scene. The viewers of the Tom Cruise version of “War of the Worlds” were probably so caught up in the horror of the alien invasion not to question why an alien civilization so advanced as to have planted killing machines centuries earlier might not have already discovered the potential of bacteriological infection in the various galactic environments they encounter.

The trick is to find the right balance of accuracy to achieve credibility without coming across as a pedant. The formula for that does not exist. It’s a matter of knowing—like the baby bear in “The Three Bears”—when the porridge is just right, you generally know it, and your credibility might just depend upon it. It’s one of those things to which a writer needs to be sensitive.