Update On The Novel

It occurs to me I should stop pontificating on writing like I have any idea what I'm talking about, and instead update the status of my first novel, Rise Again.

I sent in the official second draft at the end of January.  The second draft is the first draft with the editor's comments reflected.  Here and there I wrote new material or deleted earlier passages.  Some things had to be changed for continuity purposes, or just for clarity.  There were bits and pieces of spelling and punctuation to be repaired.

A few days ago, I received a massive stack of paper from the publisher in New York, representing the first 500 pages of the revision with hand-written notes by my able editor.  I'm incorporating these notes, with the next 300 pages due to arrive sometime next week.  Once these revisions are done, that's draft three.  That will probably be the end of textual changes.

That's not the end of the process, of course.  Much to do.  Here are some of the big steps:

There's a final polish, which is not quite a draft* -- the copy editors take over at that point, looking for any punctuation, grammar, or formatting that needs fixing.  They'll make sure there are no anglicisms or archaic spellings.  Any legal issues will be addressed at this point, such as those involving the use of trade names, living people, or real events.

After that, the thing is typeset, or rather the digital equivalent to typesetting is done.  The layout of the book, the overall page design, is handled at this point.  I'm talking over the jacket design with my editor now; this effort will move to the publisher's art department along with the manuscript.

Then -- dig this, cats -- they're printing bound galleys.  This doesn't always happen with novels in the blood-stained genre ghetto.  I'm tremendously honored that they're doing so for my book.  Bound galleys are for publicity purposes, to hand out before the publication of the novel to generate interest.  The folks that get a copy are likely reviewers, tastemakers, maybe some key booksellers, and of course good old Hollywood production companies.  Those last remaining mistakes that eluded all editing can be spotted by alert readers, too.

I'll be getting a stack of the galleys, which I will distribute among the peeps that still talk to me in the movie business, as well as a variety of Los Angeles-based people that are active in the horror creation and fan worlds.  And best of all, I can send fanboy copies to people like George Romero, Tom Savini, Rick Baker, and the rest of the guys that got me interested in horror in the first place.

Meanwhile, Simon & Schuster's publicity department will send galleys around for cover blurbs, pull quotes, and endorsements generally.  Additional publicity is developed -- whether this is ad campaigns, posters, or the poetically named 'book dumps,' those origami cardboard things with books in them that you see standing around in bookstores.  They'll set up any interviews or press junkets at this time, as well.  I should be so lucky!  I'll take whatever they have the budget for, of course.

After that, the whole thing is locked.  It goes to press, is bound and distributed, and the public buys thousands of copies per week, rocketing the book into the bestseller lists, where it hangs for a year.

That's it in a nutshell.

*In screenwriting, a "polish" is generally a completely new draft for which the writer is paid far less, with multiple polishes tucked into the contractual polish; Warner Bros. once had me polish a script until I was making about a nickel on the dollar.

Transformatory Childhood Experiences

We are all shaped by our childhoods.  Furthermore, most of us are shaped by only a small number of events in that period of our lives.  In writing fiction, it can be useful to know what those events are in the lives of our characters.

First, before I continue, this isn't professional psychological study here.  This is my working paradigm.  So apologies if I defy the science on this subject.  Second, it is vital to distinguish received memories from firsthand recall.  A friend of mine had a slew of treasured childhood memories as vivid as snapshots.  Imagine his horror when he discovered a box of snapshots precisely conforming to his memories: he didn't remember the events, he remembered the pictures!

Caveats done:

I made a bold assertion at the top, but it's true.  Think back: childhood organizes itself into two general categories of memories.  There's the "general circumstances" category (what school was like, our impressions of holidays, relatives, and summertime, for example), and there's the "specific recall" category (crapping your pants during fifth grade Social Studies class, getting the GI Joe space capsule for Christmas, etc.).  How many childhood events live vividly in your memory?  Damn few, I suspect.  How many of those were traumatic?  Most to all of them, typically.

Growing up in rural New Hampshire, I got into a lot of fights.  There wasn't much else to do.  That's a general memory.  I don't remember any specific combats, even though they got quite rough.  I'm told a schoolmate set my hair on fire.  I don't remember that.  I do, however, remember what the fights were like.  I can precisely recall the sensation of a face colliding with my fist, and vice-versa.  The adrenaline and anger and humiliation of such idiot violence are all vivid in my mind.

Specific memories are different: I clearly remember being locked in a supply closet in second grade, because I was hopeless at mathematics -- and the teacher thought I should be parked in a confined space until I damn well finished the work.  I can remember the ratty old felt erasers stacked on a shelf, the smell of mimeograph paper and chalk, the sunlight (autumn or spring) coming through the seeded Victorian glass of the closet window.  I can even remember the view: the town bandstand was visible from where I sat, but only if I turned around.  The table faced a wall of shelves.

So those are examples of what I'm talking about.  I chose a couple of negative examples, but there are positive ones as well.  It's the negative experiences, however, that most effectively shape character.

Let's say you have to write a villain.  Villains are terrible.  What a protagonist wants is an antagonist -- an opponent.  A villain is necessarily a kind of caricature, because any positive characteristics have been withheld or erased in order to create a more unsympathetic person to come up against the hero of the piece.  But this is a spy thriller, and the antagonist has to be a ruthless, cold-hearted killer.  How do you get into such a character? 

Typically they're from some inherently bizarre background: a Stalinist orphanage dedicated to training psychopaths, or an abusive family of knife-throwing acrobats, or something like that.  Many writers leave it at that.  But you don't get proper characters from that.  So think of some specific moments -- one or two will suffice -- that epitomize the formative years of the character. 

Like this: when he was seven years old, the villain was kicked in the eye during a game of football (soccer, that is) at the orphanage.  The older boy that delivered the blow threatened to kill him if he sought medical attention, because it would cause trouble for the perpetrator.  So our young villain tried to conceal his injury, until the swelling got so bad his eye began to bleed.  He was rushed to hospital for surgery and spent the next six months getting beaten up by the older boy for "telling" on him.

From this we can derive some habits, attitudes, and idiosyncrasies of the villain.  He has a deep-seated fear of showing weakness.  He ignores injuries, or hides them.  He has a grudge against certain types of person.  He hates doctors.  The list can take us anywhere -- maybe he punctures the eyeballs of his victims.

If a character seems perfunctory or flat, consider thinking about their childhood experiences.  After all, an adult is just a child that knows better.  Who the adult is will depend largely on how the child came to know the world.

The Difference Between Art And Craft

Art is what you want to end up with.  Craft is what gets you there.

This is true of all art forms.  Writing is no exception.  Craftsmanship -- the ability to do a good job consistently -- is available to anyone willing to practice their skills relentlessly.  Art can only be created after craftsmanship has been fully mastered.  Some people go straight to creating art -- they're called "geniuses," and if you're a genius you don't need anybody's advice.

For the rest of us: when art fails, fall back on craft.

Insights On Writing From A Lawsuit

I stumbled on an interesting blog post by Teresa Nielsen Hayden that discusses a plagiarism lawsuit against JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series.

The suit isn't what is interesting -- it's the blogger's brief remarks on how stories get created that caught my eye.  From the post:

1. The plaintiffs haven’t paid much attention to other works in the genre.
2. Non-writers think it’s the ideas, rather than the execution, that make a book. They’ve got that backward.
3. People who aren’t accustomed to having a lot of ideas of their own have a very poor grasp of the odds that others might independently come up with the same ideas.

 Very true.  The bulk of the post has to do with how multiple people can have the same idea, and how that idea takes on very different lives depending on who is telling the story.

While there are certainly many instances of plagiarism in the world (especially among writers at the New York Times, for some reason), we should be extremely careful before accusing anybody of it.  It's almost always coincidence, unless a text has been lifted word-for-word.

And if you try to avoid the possible imputation of plagiarism, you can drive yourself crazy.  I wrote a zombie screenplay a few years back, in which there was an amputation scene.  A year later, the creators of the Walking Dead comics had an amputation scene that was similar in certain respects.  I don't think for a moment they saw my screenplay and decided to steal the idea.  Zombies = high probability of amputations.  That's all there is to it.

But, when I later wrote the novel based on my screenplay, I changed the amputation scene considerably.  Because by that time I was myself aware of what the Walking Dead guys had done, and I didn't want there to be any chance someone might think I stole the idea from them.

Then again, the movie My Super Ex Girlfriend may well have been inspired by a screenplay I wrote -- I can say this with some certainty because I had a meeting about my superhero screenplay with certain personnel responsible for My Super Ex Girlfriend, not long before the project was announced.  They read it, we talked about it, they were interested.

Did I sue them?  No, because they did something similar but different.  Inspired by, but not the same as.  And it was a shitty movie, by the way.

I don't get to put a moratorium on romantic comedies about superheroes just because I came up with one first.  I could try, just like the plaintiff in the JK Rowling case is doing.  There may be similarities in tone and detail.  But in the end, if somebody is inspired by something you wrote, and their version goes farther than your version, tough titty.  It doesn't count unless the similarity points directly to copying, as when an entire passage is copied without attribution. 

Write better, be the one out in front -- I think that's the real remedy.

Strong Opinion, Strong Character

I have some strong opinions.  Strong enough so I'm sure I'm right about many of them.  They're opinion only insofar as I acknowledge other people may have compelling reasons to disagree.  This is a vital aspect of writing characters: it's not so much what the character believes, as how they believe it, that is important.  That's just my opinion, of course.

What follows is more opinion.

Over the years I have observed that people who hold strong opinions and regard them as settled fact are among the strongest characters, in the literary sense.  They're usually also cranks.  The stronger the opinion, and the less settled the subject matter, the weirder the individual.

Global warming, for example, is not a matter of opinion.  Certainly not in the most literal sense -- an opinion is "a belief or judgment that rests on grounds insufficient to produce complete certainty," according to Dictionary.com*.  The vast majority of climate science indicates that the planet is heating up, with its consequences already observed.  Any person that thinks a warmer globe means warmer seasons, conflating climate and weather, is a poltroon.

But there I go!  I was talking about matters that are not subject to opinion, and I went and had an opinion on the subject.  But not quite.  My opinion was regarding global warming deniers, not global warming, which is settled science, regardless of what the popular media makes of it.  That's the tricky thing about opinions.  They have a way of appearing around any subject at all.  Even if the facts are firmly known, we can still decide what we think about those facts.  And up springs an opinion, yet again.  About fact, in other words, we can still have opinion -- and the opinion can be stronger than the most irrefutable fact.

Opinion is what we use to fill in the gaps in the story of our existence.  It's the drywall compound of life.  In the truest Buddhist practice, one of the great struggles is to let go of opinion and accept what is, as it is, without superfluous commentary.  After all, once we start living by our opinions, we are on the path to unfounded beliefs, and we make a break with authentic being (the state of pure existence that is also non-existence) and start living inside our own stories.

My first prolonged encounter with people living inside their stories occurred when I spent a year at Catholic school.  The nuns there were a bizarre group.  They fretted over the righteousness of every possible activity.  For example, only one of them was permitted to drive a car, because automobiles were sinful.

I don't remember how I learned the nuns believed this, or how I knew the reasons behind it; it was probably a speech extemporized by one of them during a class on some unrelated subject.  They were prone to these outbursts.  For them, every subject attracted an opinion.  But armed with Jehovah's righteous certainty, they didn't regard their opinions as anything less than absolute fact.  Their entire lives were founded in opinion: faith is the ultimate opinion, after all, and religious belief is little more than opinion dressed up in fancy clothes.

The nuns, around half a dozen of them, lived in a massive granite house next to the school, and contracted cancer at a startling rate.  This was later traced to the release of radon gas from the stone of the structure, which permeated the air inside the convent.  Because the nuns were almost shut-ins, they were irradiated continuously.

A couple of them had driving licenses: the youngest, who was in her twenties (not allowed to drive lest she be exposed to sin), and a middle-aged nun of unimpeachable credentials, as worldly and imaginative as a boiled spud, certain to be welcomed into the bosom of Christ upon her demise, which was certain to be early, because she hardly ever left the convent except to cross the street to the church (also made of the radioactive granite).  It may have been her that informed us of the worldly wickedness of automobiles.  Assumptions are opinions without the conviction, but let's assume it was her.

Cars invited pride, she pointed out.  Perhaps this is why the convent possessed only a drab olive-colored Chevette of uncertain vintage, received second-hand from the local priest.  Cars encouraged willful behavior and outright lawbreaking -- among other things, speeding, drunk driving, and heavy petting in the back seat (in ascending order of wickedness).  In addition, an automobile encouraged sloth, worldly desires (presumably for a better automobile, even a convertible), and idolatry.  I can only assume the final point had to do with logo-branded Ford products.  Back then, people really believed in American iron.

So those nuns had some serious, deeply entrenched opinions.  They thought of them as facts.  They believed in them as fervently as they believed in Mr. Jeebers and his old man Yaweh.  And yet there is no mention of automobiles in the Bible.  The subject of prideful modes of transportation hardly comes up at all, except maybe in Esther 6:9 when Mordecai gets a ride on the king's horse.  And he earned it.  The whole thing was invented by the nuns, or somebody higher up in the Church, based on an opinion that wasn't supported by any species of factual authority -- not even in the source of all truth according to their worldview.

That's why it's so satisfying to write (and read) about people with heavy-hitting opinions.  They can be utterly wrong, they can be absolutely right; they can believe their opinions fervently or adopt them on a whim.  The important thing is that their opinions should have tremendous force behind them at the time they're espoused.  Certainly the opposite can be true, as well -- a character that holds no opinions at all is still staunchly holding to an opinion: "I have no opinion."  Look at so-called independent voters.  They refuse to take a position on any subject, yet their behavior is highly predictable -- which means they do, in fact, have strong opinions.

Usually the protagonist hasn't got the strongest opinions in a story.  Dickens' finest protagonists were often almost devoid of convictions, initially: look at Nicholas Nickleby or Oliver Twist.  They're subject to endless opinions from others, and themselves are merely reactive until they begin to construct a moral and intellectual apparatus for themselves.

In the book The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux, the protagonist is a teen boy; the story is driven by his father, a man of such tremendous opinions that he goes mad in the end.  He is the definitive crank, in fact.  His opinions overwhelm reality, driving him further and further from the forces of conventional thought and into a literal jungle of self-indoctrination, which is more or less what opinions amount to.

A gentleman associated with my day job (he says, obliquely, so as not to identify the party in question) has a habit of inventing opinions on the spot, regardless of facts in evidence or whether he knows anything of the subject.  He will then hold fast to that opinion for the rest of his life, reality be damned.  This can be entertaining or irritating, depending on circumstances.  It has certainly resulted in a fascinating character.  Another person with whom I have had extensive dealings has ironclad opinions on every subject, unassailable by argument or evidence -- and these opinions change every couple of days.  Then the new opinions are unshakable.

So when I'm writing characters, I try to develop an idea of their opinions.  Then I discover how those opinions apply to the various situations the characters will encounter.  The strongest characters consistently have the strongest opinions.  This is probably because all of us have certain beliefs that override reality at certain points: the vegetarian will starve rather than eat meat, the nun will live like a rabbit in a cancerous hutch rather than risk spiritual pollution from the world outside the convent.  Opinions are one of the most powerful characteristics that distinguish the individual from the rest of the world.

Incidentally, one day the second nun that knew how to drive -- the young one -- left the convent, jumped on the back of a big black motorcycle, and rode away forever.  I would be interested to hear her opinion on any number of subjects.


*I'm using the word 'opinion' in this sense throughout, but it should also be understood that within the realm of opinion I include belief, faith, conviction, and so forth.  After all, until Shiva shows up with a flaming trident and turns us all into vibrating electric hamsters, thus proving the Hindus right, religion is a matter of opinion -- whether you call it faith or truth.  I'm obviously not enchanted with strong religious beliefs, but naturally you will forgive me my opinion on that topic.

Starting with Story

Stories are always better when the characters appear to be the source of the events. 

But the process of writing often works in such a way that events precipitate the characters.

When I'm writing a story initiated by situation rather than character (the case more often than not), there's an important step to be taken: figure out who's best for the story, what their motivations could be, and how they will eventually become responsible for the story events, not the author.

Some kinds of stories, the genre ones, make this easy.  There are certain people that always turn up in murder mysteries, for example, and romance novels.  If you're reading a political thriller, you know you're going to run into the henchman, the Machiavelli, the yes-man, the long-suffering trophy wife, and so forth.  Each of them can drive part of the narrative, or the whole thing.

If it's a 'school days' type story, whether with kids that can do magic, vampires, or football rivals, there will be the usual sympathetic and unsympathetic faculty, bullies, hawt girls and hunky guys, nerds, lummoxes, a couple of geniuses, and one overweight Goth girl.  Each of them has certain predictable motivations and story arcs that can drive the narrative.

That said, my wife and I have an exercise we do almost unconsciously when we find an interesting news item with unanswered character elements.  These are ideal story setups, and because news reporting is so oblique, sensational, and vague these days, we have a clean slate to work with.


Today, there was an item in the news about a doctor kicked off a plane with his wife, who is 7 months pregnant, because the doctor kept asking the flight crew to give his wife water while they were delayed for a couple of hours on the tarmac.

We discussed different approaches to filling in the blanks.  Was the doctor combative, one of those braying guys that has to show everybody who's boss?  Was he in fact a heroic guy resisting the oppressive corporate cruelty of the airline?  Was the wife a shrew?  Was she ill?  Did some jealousy-stricken flight attendant who wants a baby decide she didn't like the fecund wife?  Were the other passengers generally fractious, or were they meek?  Whose side were they on?  There are thousands of possible configurations.

Another story today: a jury became so unruly and vocal about how crappy the Los Angeles court system is they actually rebelled in the box -- and both prosecution and defense decided to go with a trial without jury, dismissing the unruly dozen.  This is a subject I recently got to experience during my own stint on jury duty.  It was a grotesque, largely pointless exercise in futility, and people -- under economic duress, and with little time to spare even if the could afford the lost wages -- were angry and resistant. 

So I think of the character possibilities in that story.  So many different roads to such a rebellion in court.  So many motives.  And of course, imagine what the judge must have been dealing with -- unable to keep the jury from rejecting the system, let alone the more traditional hostile witnesses.  What kind of man is he?  What does this do to him?  The story is received, but the characters remain to be written.

Both of those news stories could be explored further.  I'm sure I could learn in detail what happened in each instance.  But I don't much care.  What's important to me is the opportunity to explore how certain results can lead to certain characters -- rather than the other way around, as it appears on the finished page. 

Day Jobs, Part II

There's a crisis at work again.  The worst time to be interrupted when writing a long story is towards the beginning.  Anywhere after 80 or more pages, it's relatively easy to pick up where you left off.  Read the pages you've got, which will get you back into the voice and rhythm, then glance over your notes and start writing.

I'm not quite 40 pages into my latest story, and for three days I haven't had the time to write anything -- or the energy, in today's case.  The trouble is a big deadline at work.  Management overpromised and underscheduled rather significantly, so we have five days to do a month's work.  This consumed the later half of last week and it will absolutely rubbish the coming week.

The following week we have three houseguests.

What to do?  Normally I force myself to write every day, even if the muse isn't around.  Just a paragraph, a sentence.  To write nothing is far worse than to write only a couple of words, if that's all you can manage.

But right now I can't taste the story.  I've lost the momentum.  So a few paragraphs here and there are so much word salad.  I'll not be able to use any of it later on.  Too disjointed and rambling, among other predictable sins of the patchwork manuscript.  And I don't want to write twenty pages of useless muck when that would represent a third of the extant manuscript.

I've never found an entirely satisfactory cure for this problem.  My kind of work is feast or famine, and when the feast is on, it's flat out until the job is finished.  This day job cycle of crisis isn't a problem when I have a well-developed manuscript, or after the first draft is complete.  But at the beginning --

My current solution to these interruptions is to skip ahead in the story and write whatever stand-alone scenes I can think of.  If somebody has an isolated situation that lasts a few pages and which doesn't make an enormous impact on continuity, I'll write it out of order, and insert the thing once the rest of the manuscript reaches that point.  That way I have a shorter piece of story to tell, and it's much less daunting to sit down and write with the end of the fragment not far away.

This works as long as I have at least an hour of free time (and more importantly, free headspace) to knock out a page or two every day.

But in situations like the one before me, there isn't much time and certainly no concentration left over after the day job.  In these circumstances I stick to research. 

For example, there is a discussion of the Strindberg play Ghost Sonata in my latest novel.  So instead of writing, I can read the play again and take notes.  Develop the opposing ideas about it that my characters will give voice to.  In addition, I have some Coast Guard business for which I'll need authentic details.  I need to do some research into biology. And there are many boats in the story.

I know something about boats, a little about biology, nothing about the Coast Guard, and the play still doesn't make any sense to me.  So instead of writing, I'll do my research.  What that does for me is to shovel fuel into the brain-hopper.  If I can get the fire lit again after this deadline and family visit clear up, there will be plenty of material to stoke it back to roaring life.

The only flaw in this method is that little if.

Measuring Progress

Every writer has a unit of measure.  James Joyce measured his progress by the sentence.  I measure mine by the page.   James Patterson's unit of measure is an entire book.

Punctuation,

Here's why punctuation is so important:

When it's raining, children seek shelter. 

When it's raining children, seek shelter. 

What a difference a comma makes.

Page Counting

I admit it -- I'm a page counter.  At the end of every writing day, which is every day, pretty much, I scribble the manuscript page number I've reached on a 3x5 card.

Early in the story, I think of the percentages.  I'm around 30 pages into my latest novel, and that's a frail infancy.  I've given up on a project after 130 pages.  But if it's a 300-page novel, I'm 10% done.  That sounds pretty good.  Later on, I'm content to look at the day's number for its own staunch beauty: 246 pages, 389 pages, 410 pages.

Then things get hairy.  I'll see the number 500, and I start thinking maybe the damn thing is completely out of control.  I'll go back and look for entire chapters to cut.  It impedes progress, because with every additional page, I'm farther out in the air off the end of the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote.

But it's a book.  Stories take as long as they take.  Who's counting?

Burning The Building Down

As every genre writer does, I observe certain established norms in order to deliver what readers are looking for.  Horror has its own particular norms.

The opening of a story, regardless of genre, has to establish The Ordinary World, which should be familiar to, if not comfortable for, the reader.  This is akin to the world in which the much over-cited hero's journey begins.  There is a crack in this world.  It has a fatal flaw.  The hero's journey is a quest to heal the rift, renewing the world; in a horror story, the crack in the world is not intended to be healed, but rather is levered apart by terrible things that pull the hero in, intent upon destruction.*

It's like building a house against a cliff: the horror is the cavern-riddled stone of the cliff face, hidden behind a thin veneer of plaster; the other three sides, the floors and ceilings, are mine to furnish and populate as I will, understanding that something awful must come crawling out of the rock when everyone but the first victim is asleep.

When I'm writing the Ordinary World from which my story will erupt, I'm fascinated by what is happening there.  This, after all, is where most non-genre stories spend their entire length: ordinary people doing the things people do, without malevolent agents, strange disasters, or supernatural occurrences.  I can imagine a time when I'll write an entire book in that world, without the intrusion of the uncanny.  As it is, I'm trying to develop such convincing Ordinary Worlds that the reader is fully engrossed in it when strange things begin to occur.

To beat the house-building analogy to death, put it this way: I want to get past building against cliffs, because it's obvious there's something peculiar about such a house.  I want to build out in the open, on suburban lots with lawns and ornamental trees.  Lure regular folks into those houses, where they commence to lead ordinary lives.
And then -- because the horror writer's job is to inflict -- wait until everyone's at home, and burn the house down.

It's a rotten but jolly occupation.


*Stephen King is the acknowledged master of establishing the Ordinary World -- observe his pioneering use of consumer brand names, for example, and his scrupulously middle-class settings.  He's able to compress a great deal of exposition into a few pages -- because he begins with a world so familiar he need only gesture to it, for the reader to know where they are.

They Threw Me Off The Jury

...Because my wife writes for a crime show on television.

I came home with flowers and champagne.

Do Things

Useful rule to follow: if you have an opportunity to do something, do it.  It will improve your writing.

I'm in the midst of jury duty now.  So far the jurists haven't been selected; yesterday the questioning began, and there will be more today, to see if I'm to be one of the dozen jurors out of 50 or 60 people called up.

Jury duty is a boring, unpleasant business, especially if it's a criminal case.  The system in California is incredibly inefficient and slow.  If I wasn't a writer, I'd feign insanity rather than face the juror's box.  But I am a writer, so I've been making notes of what happens, the characters and moods and incidents.  If I get selected to be on the jury, I'll be alert to the points of interest as they occur.  One should never miss a new experience (I've never been called up before) simply because it's unpleasant. 

This doesn't mean I won't be taking the trial itself seriously.  The first order of business is being a good juror.  But everything that happens is material, somehow.  I rely on my own experiences to inform my writing.  I might never write about a trial, but there will be analogous story situations that use the same kind of characters, emotions, and so on.  I think this is true for most artists.  Even as they are going through something, they are recording it in some way for use in their art.  Claude Monet, speaking of the death of his young wife:

Finding myself at the bedside of a dead woman who had been very dear to me and who was always very dear, to my surprise I kept staring at the tragic temple while mechanically looking for the sequence, the appropriation of the color degradation which death had just left on the motionless face. Blue, yellow, gray tones, and goodness knows what else. That is what I had come to.
The organic automatism trembled at first from the shock of the color, and in spite of myself the reflexes committed me into an operation of unconsciousness in which the daily course of my life resumed its flow, like an animal turning round his millstone."

In other words, he's looking at her corpse, shattered by loss, and at the same time, he's building a palette in his mind to paint her, because that's what he does.  He paints.  I suppose a cabinet maker would be thinking about building an appropriate coffin.

So as a writer, I embrace even the most wretched experiences, as long as they give me something to work with later on.

That said, I am fervently praying to get thrown off this trial.

Sex In Novels

Sex almost never works on the page.

By which I do not mean the paper gets all rumpled; rather I mean that sex scenes in books are usually terrible.

That's probably why every "dirty" romance novel has the same identical four or five sex scenes, starting with "he tore open her bodice/ peplum/ kirtle/ blouse with powerful hands, revealing her heaving breasts."
The hunky rapist is always hung like an elephant, and the heroine experiences at least seventeen climaxes, even if it's her first time.

It's terrible stuff, but the sex in all such novels adheres to a tried-and-true formula.  Why?  Because little else works.  There are many lists of books with favorite "dirty parts," and the books in question are almost always specifically written to make the sex scenes work. 

Even the finest writers seem to lose their ability to project emotion or sensation once the characters get busy.  A lot of novels written by "literature" writers -- the Bad Sex In Fiction Award  by the Literary Review is an opportunity to sample the classics every year --contain the worst sex scenes you can possibly imagine.  It becomes clear that being a serious author doesn't mean you get laid.  I'll quote the 2009 winner here (cover your ears if you don't want to read any naughty words):

Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon's head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked).

One of the problems is that genitals and erogenous body parts in general have awful names.  "Penis" and "vagina" are wretched words, but nearly every colloquial term is absurd, if not outright funny.  And worst of all is to use similes, which is what makes the above passage so dreadful.  I've seen writing advice to use slightly more general descriptions, such as "their bodies joined and writhed" instead of "he thrust his rigid plonker into her woo-woo," but if the entire book isn't written at that remove, the scene will feel like it was parachuted in.

So what to do about that?  It comes down to writing the sex so it fits seamlessly with the rest of the book/ screenplay/ story.  If the whole book is coarse and vernacular, you can get away with coarse, vernacular sex.  If it's an otherwise tame romantic comedy, the sex should probably be low-key and funny.  If the scene is going to leap out and strangle you because the rest of the book is so unsexy, maybe cut the scene.  And please, please spare us all - if you decide to write one of those bitter, unsexy sex scenes with the action bluntly stated in medical terms to reveal how degrading and meaningless it is, go ahead.  Then cut it.

When I write about this, it seems stuffy.  Like I find sex in books offensive.  This isn't the case.  I like some good raunch, and it can be found in plenty of books.  However it's usually written by specialists (Anaïs Nin, Anne Rice, etc.) and even the experts often get it wrong.  It's not necessarily prudery, embarrassment, or awkwardness that makes writers compose bad sex in their stories.  There's a certain chemistry that has to exist, and most writers don't get the alchemy going beforehand.  It can sound stagey, forced, or stilted with just a single word misapplied.

Of course, the sexiest sex in books is the stuff we've been waiting 200 pages for.  Characters gagging for it, but they can't have it.  That's sexy.  There are passages in the Harry Potter novels as horny as anything in the Harlequin Blaze category.  There's some wonderfully erotic material in a couple of the Horatio Hornblower novels, improbably enough.

So write the sex, and write it with care.  Make the characters wait for it, yearn for it.  Most of all, the wait.  When they finally get together, we may read about it, we may learn it was awesome and kinky, but it will never be as good as the wait.

The Breakthrough Game

I have been working on a new book the last few days, having just submitted the penultimate draft of Rise Again to my editor.  Idle hands, and all that.

The story is fairly clear, at least the major situations in it.  Supporting cast volunteering for duty.  Coming along nicely -- a few pages of prose to try the thing out, and as many pages of notes discussing the various points that need to get sorted out. 

Then I realized there was a placeholder where the main character needed to be.  So far, the story isn't about anybody.  It just happens.  Without the right protagonist, you've got nothing.  So I need to determine who is best suited to this situation, meaning (it being a horror thriller) the person least suited to it.

So I took a break and played a writing game with myself.  You could call it an exercise, or just a process, but it seems like a game to me.  I asked, "why is this person here?"  Why are they in this situation?  I wrote down some answers, according to what I thought I knew, and they were silly answers.

In real life, people do things for little or no reason, all the time -- regardless of the consequences.  Youtube, QED.  In fiction, if you create characters that behave as aimlessly as living people, then the point of your story had better be that they're aimless, otherwise you got nothin.  Fictional characters have short, eventful lives.

So it's a very valid question to ask "why is this person here."  And when I asked it of my character, I found that her reasons were like real-life reasons.  "Just because," and "for lack of a better idea," and that kind of thing.  I asked a follow-up question: "okay, then who, instead of this character, would be there?  And why?"  Because this character of mine wasn't motivated.

And here's what happened.  It was a pleasant surprise.  This character stepped up to the plate, instead of allowing herself to be replaced.  She was there, I discovered, because she was looking for motivation.  And there were other people I hadn't known about -- they were the people she wanted to see.  So now I have a whole new aspect of the story to work with -- and a character that wants to get figured out.  She might yet drop out, but meanwhile --