My serialized Twitter fiction story is now available on my web site in summary form. It is the story of Bob, whose short name is required of all Twitter fiction characters, a mild-mannered insurance company employee who reaches for the stars and is cast into the mud. Check in every day, or if your lazy like me, every week.
If you like it, tell your friends, if you don't, tell your enemies.
I don't know everything there is to know about writing. In the universe of my imagination I do in fact know almost nothing about writing. With this in mind I search out the knowledge of others, attempting to stand on the shoulders of giants. Though I have quickly learned there are many false giants out there.
One of the stock tools of the writing adviser is the writing exercise, where you, the aspiring writer, are given a set of prompts, conditions, restrictions, etc. and are asked to produce a hunk of written material. This is all well and good and some of these exercises have given me insight to the creative process, but then what?
Then nothing. The exercise is over and it is time to move on, abandoning this child of my literary creation. I can't do it! I wrote this thing. It's important to me. I can't just turn the page and move on. I need to file this away for future use. Nothing gets thrown away.
Unfortunately, because of the premise under which the writing exercise was created, it is rarely of any use outside the context of its genesis. So I have notebooks full of useless material, that anal-retentive me plows through on a regular basis looking for some missed pearl. I know it's a waste of time, but I can't let go.
Am I the only person with this problem?
Change. It seems so simple, but if you read lots of series detective books, change is not a common theme. Travis McGee is always Travis McGee. Nero Wolfe and Archie are always Nero and Archie, no matter how many decades separate their first and last adventures. Hillerman’s characters change from book-to-book. They grow, they succeed, they fail, they get weary of the evil they confront on a daily basis. Finally, they grow old and retire. They find love, or give up trying to find love.
The other thing I like is that with ever book there was rarely a predefined focus. Some were Leaphorn books, some were Chee books, many a mix of the two. The evolving relationships between the main characters, and the requirements and circumstances of the crimes, created a fresh dynamic for each book, which went a long way to keeping the stories from getting stale.
Looking back though, what hooked me first and probably with Hillerman was his first chapters. The last line of the first chapter of most of his novels should required reading for how to get a reader excited about the rest of the book. Gigantic juicy literary worms that we little reader fish just can’t resist.
It’s rare that a book in a mystery series can be so different from the rest of the series and yet still fit. THE SHAPE SHIFTER fits that description. Even its opening chapter is a departure from the get-the-action-going formula at which Hillerman excels. This book opens on our hero, the legendary Lieutenant Leaphorn in an awkward social position, paying a call the newlyweds Jim and Bernadette, apologizing for missing their wedding and bringing them a gift basket. Hardly the grisly imagery we’ve come to expect.
Most of the rest of the book is told as a flashback, another oddity for the series, but it works. Hillerman died two years after this book was published. I don’t know if he meant it to be the last book in the series, but if fulfills that roles very well. The book ends with Leaphorn seeming to make peace with his retirement. His use of Navajo legends and supernatural imagery as way of avoiding implicating himself on the crimes of which he might yet be accused was a wonderful counterpoint to his previous need to bring all crimes into real human terms. It shows him letting go of his defined role as a policeman and returning to his role as a Navajo man, who being forced to attend a white boarding school, missed out on his cultural childhood.
As with many character-driven mysteries, the actual mystery isn’t much of one, though the anticipation of the gathering of proof is engaging. While the gathering of proof is never actually completed, the end takes on a very satisfying Nero Wolfe like justice being done shortcut. Satisfying for the reader perhaps, but not for Leaphorn’s sense of right and wrong. He pays some dues, literally, but at the end of the book you sense that he’s pulling himself out of the game.
I’ve now read all of Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries, of course not in order. Some lazy time soon, perhaps after my next novel is written, I’m going to reread them in order. I can hardly wait.
I always thought that was a ridiculous phrase. To be honest though, success isn’t something I’ve had to worry about. That is, until recently, when I started promoting myself as a writer. The usage of my website, http://tomflanders.com, has tripled over the last few months. People are finding me on Facebook and Myspace. My Twitter fiction short story is slowly gaining readers. This is all great but now what?
One of the symptoms of fear of success is the worry of maintaining a flow of new work. That became very real this morning when I realized that I didn’t have a blog post ready for today. My first reaction was, oh well, I’ll skip a day. Then the raised-a-Catholic guilt kicked in and I realized that I had an obligation to my faithful readers. Of course that sort of hubris is equally unacceptable. I settled on posting so that I can maintain my search engine indexing rank, which is a technically valid point.
So here I find myself, following my ambition of laziness, working towards tossing off the shackles of work for a life of literary leisure, laying about the house throwing together the occasional creative masterpiece, now faced with the prospect of having to write 250 words each and every day with the sole purpose of keeping my name on people’s radar. Is this what I signed up for?
Of course it is. When I extract myself from my expectations I see that this is what I wanted without knowing what I wanted. My brain often hides such insights from me. The form of my ambition is to be a writer. The essence of that ambition is to have people read what I write. So this fear of success isn’t so much about that fear of the mechanics of producing work. It’s a deeper fear that I may not be as good a writer as I’d like to believe. The fear that the readers whose attention I’ve caught will tire of me and wander away.
Is anyone actually reading this?
Mr. B is one of my dirty little secrets. I’ve actually only, long ago, read a few poems and one short story of his. I’ve also seen two semi-biographical movies about him. None of these made me much of a fan. To me he seemed like nothing but an obnoxious drunk with a gift for putting words together.
Fast forward fifteen or twenty years. I’m now an aspiring writer in the mid-to-late stages of middle-age. I happen across Mr. B’s bio on wikipedia and I fall in love with him. Though he wrote for much of his life, he didn’t quit the world to write full time till he was 49 years old. I’m currently 48, so I have twenty months left to match his example. And Mr. B worked as a sorter for the post office. That makes my job at the insurance company look like a carnival ride.
So I guess I’m more of a fan of Mr. B than I am of his work. Though my mental wish list of what to read next now has his works near the top. It’s kind of like how I like Lady Gaga, but don’t like her music, so I watch her videos with the sound turned down. No, I guess that’s different.
The other day I noticed that many of my favorite writers were victims of the dreaded writer’s disease. People old before their times emerging periodically to pound out some prose before slipping back into the comfort of the bottle. Or punching out drunken babble submitted to, and cleaned up by, sympathetic editors. Now that I dare to consider myself a writer, and see on the horizon a time when writing will be my sole occupation, I worry and wonder what my relationship with intoxicants will be.
This is not idle chatter. I have had my experience with an overactive taste for tequila. During college, and for a short period afterwards, I disappeared into drink on a daily basis. However, at that time I had no direction in life. I was not yet a writer. I was completely alone and self-loathed. My relationship with the woman who later became my wife broke that cycle, but it wasn’t the last.
During my years of doing standup comedy I was always reliant on my liquid courage, beer being my drink of choice. Then I stopped doing comedy, so I stopped drinking beer. I’m such a creature of habit. I’ve always been better at avoiding temptation than resisting it. I’ve stopped drinking simply because I’m not going to places where beer is readily available, and was often free.
So we’ve established that I drink when I’m lonely or in bars. Such a cliché. Therefore all I have to do to not become a drunk is to stay out of bars and stick close to my wife. But what if? I’m a writer, my world revolves around what if. The fact is that I’m not really afraid of drinking. I’m afraid of loneliness, of which, drinking is a side-effect. The mere notion of having to deal with life without my wife terrifies me. I am such a coward.
I’ve been told this many times about my writing. I have not followed it. I don’t think I ever intent to delete files, but the get put in obscure folders and as I move from old computer to new some of the folders just don’t make the transition.
From now on I’m going to be more careful. Working on a character study for my new novel, I realized that the woman I was writing about was actually the main character of a short story that I wrote four years ago, but didn’t like very much. So I went looking for the file of that story. Nope. Not there. Gone. I could have sworn I saved it to the “needs work” folder but it isn’t there. Extensive searching has produced nothing. So now I’m recreating it from memory. I will be much more anal about these things from now on
I wrote a scene for my new novel that takes place in the den of a man who collects paper cars. Without effort I was able to visualize every aspect of this room. The rows and rows of shelves of mostly-white little cars. The dim room lighting contrasting the sharp work bench lighting. The smell of glue and color printer ink drying. These images came alive in my head and flowed down on to the page.
But what do you do if this doesn’t happen? What if you are writing a location that doesn’t just spring to mind? How do you explore this unknown place of your own imagination?
I had this experience writing the very first chapter of my new novel. It takes place in a bar that required a specific layout to facilitate the interaction of the characters. As I wrote I kept running into conflicts of space and would have to rearrange the furniture and sometimes even the walls to make the action work.
I finally gave up and started from scratch, but before I wrote a word a created a diagram of the bar. I used a free flowcharting program I download which had a floorplan module. And it worked. As I started putting things in place I saw immediately what was wrong. I changed the rooms from being square to being long rectangles, the depth of the rooms, front and back, being much longer than they were wide. Then everything fell into place. The cramped width created the tension that was previously missing from the room, and the exaggerated length gave the trip to the back room much more the feel of a journey.
I should note that I have little artistic ability. The point isn’t the quality of the drawing I created, it is that using this tool helped me visual a space that I need to be just perfect, and it worked.
Fortunately, the first book of Hesse’s that I read is still my favorite. DEMIAN was the first book I read where I had an emotional attachment. The title character’s attitudes towards, well just about everything, were frighteningly similar to my own. Tough my responses to those attitudes were quite unlike Demian’s. Only one other book has been even been close to this and that was Saul Bellow’s HERZOG, but that mirrored my life in my early middle ages, which was a much less conflicted time. Of all the books I’ve read those are the only two to reach me at the deepest levels of my brains secret rooms.
I use the word fortunately in my first sentence because, while I have read and enjoyed many of Hesse’s books, none have hit me like DEMIAN. That book gave Hesse a special place in my heart. For instance, if my introduction to Hesse had been ROSSHALDE, I may not have read another.
It was Hesse also that helped shape my own writing’s quests of spirituality. Though my journeys take place within the modern mechanized world, I may not have started these journeys without Hesse’s examples.
Most people when discussing Hesse tend to jump first into STEPPENWOLF. I have no dislike for the book, but it did not reach me like DEMIAN. Actually, what I consider my second favorite Hesse book is his last, THE GLASS BEAD GAME, a giant inside joke of a send up of education, biographies, epic stories and just about everything else that kept me from becoming a serious reader till I was in my forties.
For me Hesse’s greatest strength was seeing the truth behind the veneer and exposing it without judgment. A skill I have yet to master.
My inner critic has multiple personality disorder. I’ve slowly been learning to deal with the louder, more obnoxious manifestations. The one that screams, “You Suck!” now gets the deflating, “It’s OK if I suck.” My belief in that statement is real and shuts him right up. The career-related taunts no longer get to me either. I’ve successfully transitioned from trying to be a success to trying to define my own place and writing persona.
So with the load-mouths silenced, what’s the problem? The problem is the sneaky little passive-aggressive voices that have taken me a long time to even associate with my inner critic. The lazy voices that don’t show themselves, sitting in the dark, staying under the radar and whispering dead-end detours to my subconscious.
The problem, I have finally realized, is the perceived failure of my two previous writing projects. What brought me to this realization was the decision to submit my first novel to agents. This action broke the spell. Of course, by failure I don’t mean the finished products themselves or their lack of sales. Both my novel and my book of short stories are as good as they could have been. My failure was a lack of confidence which prevented me from marketing them as aggressively as I could have. The relative success of this marketing is irrelevant, but if I don’t give it my all I’ll never get the closure which will allow me to move on to the next novel.
So the new novel gets put on hold again while I clean up some old business. I wonder what manifestation the inner critic will be forced to try next.
THE CURIOUS EAT THEMSELVES by John Straley
I'm not sure if I would have liked or disliked this book more if it wasn't so close in tone and execution to my own first, but unpublished, novel. In both this book and my own, BROKE DOWN ON THE ROAD TO GLORY, the hero and narrator just wanders through the story from lie to lie and manipulator to manipulator. Though Straley's hero, Cecil Younger, is supposed to be an experienced investigator he seems to have no more skill than my own hero, Alex Rebar, a mentally unstable used car buyer. That is the only valid criticism of the book. To complain about anything else would be hypocritical because my own book commits the same sins, if sins they be.
Here is the problem. I like my book. I have no delusions of its grandeur, but I like it. I thought it was unique. Now I know it isn't. It is very similar to at least one other book out there. Now I can't decide if my negative reaction to THE CURIOUS EAT THEMSELVES is jealousy of its success or seeing my own book's perceived faults in another.
Which ever it is it doesn't matter. I must recuse myself from a critical analysis of this book because of my obvious bias for and against it. Though I must thank Mr. Straley for one thing. I have been on the fence about trying to get my own novel published, but after reading his story the pendulum has swung me into action. I started working on a query letter for a literary agent last night.
Ah the rain pain industrial jazz.
Japanese women and German men shouting American angst.
Lovely patterns spewing from drum kits.
Dancing with a girl in a gas mask.
Moving slow to fool the strobe lights.
Paranoid rituals, swarms of police cars.
Meaningless secrets told in sweaty release.
Discreet mistakes made at irregular intervals.
Sins and lies left on a mattress somewhere.
I started listening to these teleconferences found at the SF Writers Conference Site. The first one I listened to was an interview with Brenda Novak, a writer of romance novels. Don't get an attitude. I learned a pile of good stuff. Check them out.
This is a great example of how you need to be open to new things. Often when I'm doing research I am limited by my preconceived ideas. But here I opened up and took a chance and listened to what the romance writer had to say, mostly because her teleconference was the first one on the list, and I heard some great advice that I would have missed. It makes me wonder what else I might be missing out on.
Of course, there are limits. I spend some time every day trolling writer's forums and often come across very bad advice. I'm not saying that you need to take everyone's advice. Just don't dismiss out-of-hand people just because they are outside their comfort zone.
After all, who am I to be giving you all advice?
Published: 1971
Found At: Bookman's on Grant Rd. in Tucson
Paid: $3.00 (More than I like to pay for a used paperback, but I HAD to have it.)
Favorite Inside Joke: Reference to the movie THE FRONT PAGE
