writing

song sketches

~ Anthony Lee Collins

My friend Don has a blog, and he posted there recently that he hasn't written songs in a while, but now he has a bunch of new songs starting to come together. This was interesting to read, since I'm in a similar position in some ways (not counting the part about being a dad, and not counting the part about Don's singing voice feeling good, and... okay, not that similar).

But similar in that I was steaming along for a while, writing a lot of mysteries in a pretty short amount of time, but now I have stopped for the moment, mostly because I'm working on putting together a book (a collection of the first round of mystery stories, in fact).

There are more mysteries coming (I have beginnings for at least three new ones, one of which even has an ending, too), but there is only so much time and attention in a day, so the new stories are percolating around in the background while I work on the book. One of them will be pretty challenging, since it will be the first really hypertext-y mystery story, maybe even more three-dimensional than Carly.

So, we'll see how they go. Maybe I'll start one pretty soon (if I can figure out which one should go first).

I'm not a dad, as I said, but there are times I've felt like one since Ron entered the lives of the intrepid detective and her loyal assistant. Marshall is having to figure out how to be a dad (and with less advance warning than most dads get), complicated by the fact that his daughter arrived having had a long and complex history in her twelve years, most of which Marshall knows very little about.

But he's going to start to learn more in one of the new stories.

structure and plot on the subway

~ Anthony Lee Collins

I was sitting on the subway next to a man who was reading a book called Structure and Plot (or possibly Plot and Structure), so I peeked over his should to see if I could learn anything.

I learned:

  • writers should use plot and structure
  • some "literati"-type writers disdain plot, they think that plotting is something like slumming
  • those "literati"-type writers are wrong
  • there are two types of plots:
    • literary plots, and
    • commercial plots
  • literary plots involve somebody's internal journey, and they meander around to various points (the book included a helpful chart) until they come to:
    • a hopeful ending, or
    • a downbeat ending
  • commercial plots, on the other hand—

And that's when he closed the book and got off the train.

I suspect that, if there are only two kinds of plots, I must already be doing the "commercial plot" kind, since the diagram and description of the "literary plot" didn't seem to resemble anything that I do.

agatha and janice and joey

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 1 Comment

I found this article interesting. My favorite part was the writer's astonishment at the fact that Agatha Christie sometimes started her mysteries with no idea who the murderer would be. The writer is so startled by this idea that she mentions it twice, both times with italics:

"Most astonishing, Curran discovers that for all her assured skewering of human character in a finished novel, sometimes when Christie started her books, even she didn't know who the murderer was. Ah! It makes sense—a brilliant mystery writer must first experience the mystery! Or does it?"

And:

"The most astonishing thing about the wide net Christie threw out each day is that she also cast it over her murderers. I always assumed she just knew who did it, in the same way that, well, a murderer knows exactly who they want to kill. Certainly, at the end of her books, she always made you feel that the story couldn't have happened any other way. It had only ever seemed otherwise because you couldn't see it. But it turns out that for many of her books, Christie often ran through multiple scenarios for the victim, the method of death, and the identity of the murderer."

It doesn't surprise me at all, of course. And, as I've pointed out before, it wouldn't have surprised Rex Stout either. I know that in writing classes they tell you to plot everything out in advance, to make charts and diagrams, and I'm sure some people actually do that, but many do not.

Some people write like Alfred Hitchcock made movies: every scene and gesture planned out before the first word is written. Other do it more like Robert Altman: putting a bunch of interesting characters together in an interesting situation and watching what happens.

I also liked this comment in the article (about Christie's habit of writing in different notebooks all the time, because most days she had difficulty locating the one she had been using the day before):

Christie's half-dozen active notebooks evoke the modern computer desktop. What would she have made of a Mac, apart from killing someone with it?

That reminded me of Steven King's recent comment that he loves all sorts of gadgets, especially if he can think of ways that they could go weird on their owners.

Joey and Janice

When I write about Jan Sleet, especially when she talks about her youth (as she does here), I sometimes think about Joey Ramone, the late lead singer of The Ramones.

I read an article once where the writer happened to see Joey on line at a bank one day, and he (the writer) reflected that, no matter what, Joey would have been a freak. Could anybody imagine him in a suit, or in tennis clothes? But in a leather jacket, a T-shirt, ripped jeans, and sneakers, he looked completely appropriate. He was fortunate to find rock and roll, where freaks of various sorts can be appreciated and even celebrated.

Jan Sleet is a bit like that. In the scene I link to above, she talks about her experiences in high school, where she was clearly a freak. Weird looking, tall and skeletally thin, bookish (and perhaps a bit arrogant about her brains), there was no way she was going to be popular. Any attempt to be popular would have been doomed to failure, which would have galled her, so she didn't try. With the support of her father, who had grown up a different kind of freak in a different small town, she started to develop a plan and a persona which would make it obvious that she should be judged by a different set of standards.

the magpie deserves your respect

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ Leave a comment

I saw an interesting article in Newsweek.

The piece is not clear about the book being reviewed (Reality Hunger: A Manifesto), since in one place it's "a spirited polemic on behalf of non-fiction," but in another we hear that "literature should be appropriated, adapted, and remixed to create new meaning, like art and music." Is it a work of art? Is it non-fiction? I'm curious, but probably not enough to buy the thing.

Because what really interests me is the method. The author (David Shields) has taken 618 quotes from other people and arranged them into a book. He wanted to have them uncredited, but his publisher insisted there be 618 footnotes. Shields says, "I'm trying to recover the freedom that writers from Montaigne to Burroughs have enjoyed, but which we, as victims of a very litigious society, have sacrificed over the past 30 years."

I have a mental image that, in five years or so, Quentin Tarantino will have to footnote each frame of his movies, and Lady Gaga will have to footnote her videos (not only the Tarantino movie that each frame came from, but the movies Tarantino got his images from, and so forth).

If this is true, I'm in trouble. Looking back at the more recent cut-ups, I confess I have no idea where a lot of the raw material came from. Quite a bit of it from a major metropolitan newspaper that I guess I shouldn't identify by name.

But what about the older cut-ups, here and here and here?

And what about this? I have no idea where the first two paragraphs came from. The third paragraph is Vicki quoting a poem. What about that, when characters quote things? Will there have to be a footnote in Go saying where the "Isn't it ironic? Dontcha think?" exchange comes from?

Of course, we have SarahBeth's word later on that Vicki was never much of a reader, so is that Vicki quoting the poem, or the author? On the other hand, is SarahBeth actually a reliable source? (Okay, that one is easy: No.) What about the times that Jan Sleet quotes Sherlock Holmes or Gandalf?

Well, at least I don't have to footnote the Ode to Suzy. But will I have to give a credit to the programmer who wrote the Poetry Generator?

All of this seems a tiny bit constraining. I'm all for people not pretending that they wrote things they didn't, but we're all using materials that we didn't create ourselves, putting them in different orders to create new meanings. That's what writing is, after all.


Later: I did see an article in the New York Times which cleared up some questions. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto is a non-fiction book ("deeply nihilistic," apparently), written by a "onetime novelist."

I have skimmed the article, which I will probably read at some point, though I confess that some of the pop culture comments near the end led me to doubt the author's perceptiveness. Referring to Lady Gaga as "third-generation Madonna" is pretty obvious (though perhaps not to the NYT audience, many of whom may have no idea who she is), drawing general cultural lessons from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (an independent comic that spawned one unsuccessful movie) is unconvincing, and I question the judgment of anybody who considers the recent Star Trek movie an inspired reinvention of a classic (I would disagree with both "inspired" and "classic," actually, and even "reinvention" may be pushing it).

Also, of course, I enjoy the Resident Evil movies and can't wait for the new one.

writing the detectives

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 1 Comment

I saw an interesting article in the New York Times: "Sherlock Holmes, Amorphous Sleuth for Any Era."

I think the first premise is correct, that Sherlock Holmes' survival as a popular fictional character (which is unique in the last 100 years, as far as I can remember – I read an article once which compared him to Robin Hood and Tarzan, but that was written before they had pretty much vanished from popular entertainment) is at least partly based on how little we know about him, past the obvious catch phrases and accessories.

Contrast him with Nero Wolfe, for example. Nero Wolfe was (no pun intended) very well fleshed out as a character. If you read all of the novels and stories, you knew his history, his beliefs (quick, what were Holmes' politics?), his enthusiasms, and his phobias. You knew his quirks, and you could also infer the reasons behind them. So, Wolfe is not (so to speak) very flexible. You can't make him into an action character or a ladies man or an international man of mystery.

So, I think that's true, but I disagree with the second premise, which is that Holmes is so sketchily described because Arthur Conan Doyle was not a good writer. I am not, I should explain, leaping to Doyle's defense because I'm a Doyle fanatic (or a Holmes fanatic). As I talk about here and here, Jan Sleet is obviously a big Holmes fan, but I'm not. I've read the stories, I've enjoyed the Jeremy Brett series of television, but I'm far more enthusiastic about Nero Wolfe, for example.

But I disagree with the premise that good writers are the ones who describe more about their characters, and bad writers create sketchy characters with little depth. As Orson Welles pointed out, it is a sentimental 20th century idea, the legacy of psychoanalysis (which he hated), that the more you know about fictional characters the better the writing is.

He would use the example of Iago, and the fact that there is no explanation offered in Othello for what a shit Iago is. People in this era are not comfortable with this, and want a psychological explanation, but (as Welles pointed out) anybody who has been around at all in the world has met people who are just rotten (he said it better, but you get the idea).

Oh, okay, I looked it up. He said about Iago, "The great criticism through all the years has been that he's an unmotivated villain, but I think there are a lot of people who perpetuate villainy without any motive other than the exercise of mischief and the enjoyment of the power to destroy. I've known a lot of Iagos in my life. I think it's a great mistake to motivate it beyond what is inherent in the action."

There is more than one way to write well. Not all good writing is the same. Is David Lynch a bad movie director and writer because his characters have pretty much no psychological depth at all? Of course not, because he's doing something very different.

Also, it just occurred to me that my defense of Doyle is clearly not self-serving, since I am the opposite. You want to know about Jan Sleet's parents, her family, her upbringing, how she was in high school and college, where she was before U-town, and where she goes afterwards? It's all there. Why does she travel the world with Marshall as her platonic assistant, and then turn around to seduce and marry him? What is she like in bed? Does she ever cry? It's all there.

Was Doyle a great writer? No, I don't think so. Stout was better, for example. But Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, who has survived quite nicely into the 21st century, and he created a template that many thousands of writers have used since. For one example, why does Marshall narrate the mysteries, when he mostly doesn't narrate the novels? Well, mostly because Archie Goodwin narrated the Nero Wolfe stories, and that was because of Holmes and Watson. That's just one example of many.

I also read an article once where it pointed out that one of Doyle's greatest techniques was his ability to nest flashbacks within flashbacks, stories within stories, so that a lot of story can be told in comparatively few words. Watson tells you the story, then a client arrives and begins to tell a story within Watson's story, and sometimes there's a further flashback within that story. The story construction itself is very much like a puzzle box.

Detective story writers, whether they are aware of it or not, follow what Doyle did the same way movie directors are influenced by Ford, even if they've never seen a Ford picture. By which I don't mean to compare Doyle to Ford in terms of skill, but I think it's too facile to write him off because of his supposed weaknesses, without taking into account what he did create and the influence it had (and continues to have).