Essays

My son is working on a high school English essay.

I've written several hundred essays at this point -- if you told me this would be the case when I was in high school, I'd probably have taken my own life.  But the essay is an important form.  Blog posts are a kind of essay, as are editorials, news analysis, and reviews.  They really do have those famous parts we're taught in school: the premise, supporting arguments, conclusion, and whatnot.

My favorite essays are the funny ones: David Sedaris is an essayist; Woody Allen wrote three books of essays, Steve Martin has done quite a few, and columnists such as Dave Barry certainly have their moments.  The humorous essays of SJ Perelman and Robert Benchley got me into the business in the first place; I'd hazard a guess that Thurber and Samuel Clemens got them into it.  Nor is it just men: Dorothy Parker, Veronica Geng, Virginia Woolfe, Molly Ivins... many laffs to be had, and much to learn about the essay form.  There are hundreds more to discover, of course.

The French have a great term for the short, light form: petites feuilles, 'little leaves.'  But essays, of course, can be serious.  Any time there's a single point to be made, requiring more examination than an epigram but less explanation than a monograph, there's your essay.

Here's why I recommend writing them: no other form sharpens up 'getting to the point' quite as well as the essay.  The fictional equivalent of the essay is the short story, but short stories have some peculiar constraints because they are (despite their brevity) still required to establish a world, its characters, and their travails, just as a long novel, a screenplay, a stage play, or any other longer form must do.  So short stories are these elusive, flickering things -- a glimpse of something more.  So a short story may often not get to the point at all: it's indicating that there is a point, and directing us toward it, but often by design leaving the actual point itself unspoken.  Essays live or die by whether you 'get' them or not.

My son would probably like to avoid writing another essay, ever.  I'd like to be a great essayist, but I'm not.  My funny ones have occasionally outlived their evanescent subject matter, but only for a little while.  Mostly, writing them has been an opportunity to catch the diaphanous mayflies of my dim little thoughts and pin them to a bit of cardboard.  Then again, that's also a fair description of life itself.

Pitching The Idea

I've got several pitches coming up for some reason -- various things all at once have turned into "go ahead, dazzle us" opportunities.  Including screenplay ideas, which I haven't had to pitch in several years.

"The pitch" is something people associate with Hollywood, mostly, but you'll have to do it for books, magazines, blogs -- anywhere you're trying to sell a project.  A pitch is pretty simple: you get a meeting (phone or meatspace), key personnel show up, and you tell them you have an idea.

Note I didn't say "you tell them your idea."  This is a part of it, but not the important part.

People pitch things all the time -- they don't realize it, however.  When you tell somebody about a movie you enjoyed, you're pitching the movie.  When you have a plan for the weekend and you suggest it to friends, you're pitching the plan.  Pitching writing projects isn't much different.

How do you tell people about a movie?  You don't walk through the story beat-for-beat.  They'll tune out within seconds.  Instead, your impromptu pitch goes something like this:

"Dude, it's like all these alien worlds are in the grip of an evil empire, and this kid from nowhere has to become a space fighter pilot for the resistance and blow up an enemy battle planet.  He's got robot sidekicks, a laser sword, and he can move shit with his mind.  But the bad guy is this giant cyborg, and he has even more powers."

And off you go to see Star Wars, of course.

This is extremely hard to do in actual pitch meetings.  The confidence isn't there, and you don't want to sound like an incoherent fanboy for your own work.  But you have to generate that enthusiasm.  What really matters, as my chum Rich Procter once pointed out, is to propose the central proposition and then shut the hell up.

"What if you woke up one day and discovered everybody you knew was being replaced by perfect, alien replicas?

"Can you imagine if your archaeology teacher was secretly a Nazi-fighting adventurer?"

"What if they figured out how to clone dinosaurs?"

After that, most of the pitch is simply your "take," a jargon term for "version."
 As in, "My take on this is we establish our hero lives in these two worlds, on the one hand he's a scientist, on the other he's an arrogant, globe-trotting artifact thief.  Then he gets the call: his unscrupulous rival is working with Adolph Hitler to find the Ark of the Covenant, this ancient box with the original Ten Commandments in it that can destroy whole armies.  So the rest of it, he's neck-and neck with this rival, and he kicks a huge amount of Nazi ass in the most spectacular manner possible -- he even gets laid -- but the Nazis get the box first.  However, by this time they've pissed God off, so when they open the box, the Germans get destroyed.  But not the archaeologist, because he finally learned some humility.  He's spared, and in the end he gets the box."

That's not the story.  It's merely an indication that there is an idea in place.  It indicates there are first, second, and third acts.  Very faint description of character are indicated.  Hardly any incident is described -- only that there are exciting things happening.

Pitch meetings last about fifty minutes, excluding handshakes.  Your entire pitch should take less than a minute and a half.  The rest of the time is spent answering questions about all the stuff you left out.

That's pretty much it.  It's far, far harder to do than writing.  Most pitches go on for ten minutes or more, and it's a disaster.  I do it myself.  You get into specific details and the next thing you know you're explaining your hero is afraid of snakes, which is set up in the beginning and pays off around the middle of act two, and... And your audience has lost interest.

So think about your pitch.  You might never have to make one, but it's a great way to focus your thoughts.

Confessional Character Details

I read a blog comment today that contained an exquisite character moment.  Someone confessed she was in the habit of turning on the dehumidifier to mask the sound of her vibrator from the neighbors.  Either that, or she'd wait for the heat to come on.

Once you get past the prurient aspect of this little slice-of-life confession, it contains an enormous amount of character information: here's someone liberated enough to admit -- in a public forum -- using a sex toy, yet she is worried her physical neighbors will identify the sound of it. 

We have a dim outline of her surroundings: it's a building, not a luxury situation, a compressed life.  The neighbors immediately become characters, yet all we know of them is that they exist.  The dehumidifier, the heat: it's winter.  But the dehumidifier is also a self-treatment device, which returns you to the vibrator, and you get this very clear sense of someone who has a practical, everyday approach to life.

It's interesting that it doesn't matter what words you use to describe this story.  I'm paraphrasing someone else, and yet the sense is the same.  It's the very idea of the thing that works, which is why such confessional character details are always memorable.  They're like shaggy dog stories -- jokes that can be told in a million voices and still work.

Speaking of erotic practices, there's a great movie, the 1967 Branded to Kill, starring Jo Shishido.  In it, he plays a hit man who is aroused by the smell of cooking rice.  There are these very funny scenes in which he interrupts lovemaking to immerse his face in the steam from a rice cooker.  Why he possesses this odd kink, nobody explains.  But it's so absurd, and yet so intimate, you buy it completely.  When he pants "boil rice!" you know his desire better than a conventional cinematic 'smoldering stare' contest could convey.

When I'm writing characters, some of them will volunteer stuff like this.  If it's too deliberate -- that is, if I try to force it, by making up quirky details -- it won't work.  The characters come off as disingenuous eccentrics.  At best they're like Amy Adams when she's imitating Meg Ryan: carefully observed, but unmistakably second-hand.*

What you want is for these details to emerge on their own, not from your invention, but rather from the character herself.   Say you get an intuition that she likes the color yellow very much, and her precise favorite yellow is that of a raincoat, and then the detail appears: she loves the rain, because she associates it with the yellow of raincoats.  You know that color?  It always looks best on an overcast day, doesn't it?

The writer John Irving is probably the leading novelist to use quirks as character.  He gets it right about half the time, in my humble opinion.  Sometimes it's like he recruited a bunch of homeless psychotics and gave them a script to follow, with mixed results; at other times, you believe he's limning genuine individuals: people authentically, fiercely themselves.  It's hard enough to write ordinary people.  It's even harder to write oddballs.  Success or failure lies in the richness of these confessional details.

When they work, these little revelations are what make writing worthwhile.  When they don't work, it just sounds like you're trying too hard.  So it's probably better to try for rich characters if you can.  The downside isn't all that bad.

*With apologies to Amy Adams, who is sometimes excellent, and sometimes second-hand Meg Ryan.

Advice! Always With The Advice.

Don't be afraid to read your own writing. 

And even more important: don't be afraid to like it.  But don't love it.  That's for your readers to do. 

Are You Writing Yet?

Don't be afraid of the empty page and whatnot.  Go ahead and sit down for an hour or two today and write something.  It will help if you figure out what to write ahead of time, so take a walk or do laundry and think it over.

Or try one of the following suggestions:

1. Detail the events surrounding that time you got arrested.
2. Make a story out of the first time you attended a wedding.
3.  Write a description of your favorite dish, and try to evoke it in such a way that the flavor appears in the reader's  mouth.
4.  Write a dozen good insults.
5.  Write a novel about duelists in 18th Century France.

On Influences

I'm working up notes for a young adult (YA) series idea.  My agent likes it, and suggested I read The Dark is Rising series as a point of interest, to which my idea has some passing similarities. 

These books, by Susan Cooper, were written in the mid-60s through the late 1970s -- eight years elapsed between composition of the first and second novels.  I'd thought they were new to me, but in fact I read the first couple of books as a child; I was often in the English and Welsh countryside where the stories take place, so they're particularly vivid to me now.

Reading these stories, I'm struck by how everything we do is influenced by something we experienced when we were young.  I don't know what JK Rowling read, but I am certain she read these books.  Children fighting the battles of adults; chosen ones finding their power; good and evil duking it out with magic across the British landscape.  Everything that's in Harry Potter's saga is in The Dark is Rising.  Does this mean Rowling stole her ideas?  Not at all.  Tolkien didn't steal The Lord of the Rings from Norse mythology, either.  Rowling was inspired to do something completely original, based on her influences.

That's not an oxymoron.

I think it comes down to this: when a writer reads something that truly inspires, that inspiration is going to become a driving force in the subsequent work.  For example, I would also guess that Rowling was inspired to a lesser degree by the Narnia books, The Gormenghast Trilogy, and Virginia Woolf's The Waves. 

My own Rise Again clearly owes a debt to Stephen King's The Stand, which I haven't read in 30 years or so -- but it knocked me out when I was a kid.

The thing is, I like to read classic material in whatever genre I'm tackling, but I am also very careful about influences. 

It's okay to pay homage to what delights you; I make no bones (so to speak) about writing a zombie novel based on zombie movies, nor do I deny I was inspired by George Romero, bless his mighty spectacles.  When an homage cuts a little too close to its source material, we call it 'derivative.'  But past that point, you're copying, or worse, stealing.

The more recent a work is, the less likely I am to read it.  Otherwise a significant portion of the writing energy ends up going to avoiding notional charges of plagiarism.  My father, who was a literate sort of fellow, defined the three premier evils mankind was capable of as follows: extinction, plagiarism, murder.  In that order.  So if there's something fresh and interesting out there, I won't look at it.  I'll read a synopsis to make sure the premise isn't identical, but that's it.  Older works are relatively safe.   

The Dark is Rising contains a lot of that jolly sort of fresh-air-and-mince-pies stuff that marks mid-century young people's literature; there's a similar feel to the Wrinkle in Time books, as well as From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, et al.  This somewhat old-fashioned, cozy quality renders these stories safe for my perusal.  But I'll avoid anything written in the last decade until I'm done with the project.


You need influences.  Nobody -- or damn few writers, anyway -- simply pulls a full-blown idea from thin air.  We're all telling the same few stories in our own ways.  The more original the variation, the better the work, of course.  Each writer will have a different approach to keeping the influences from warping the story they want to tell.  In my case, it's sticking with the older material.  The earlier style, voice, and conventions create sufficient distance so I don't find myself wanting to imitate anybody's effects.


Besides, I love re-reading these venerable things -- and discovering how much of who I am today is the result of what I read back then.

Literally Finding Your Voice

A friend of mine, who's writing a memoir, was talking about how he didn't like his literary voice.  I suggested an exercise, and coincidentally he had already used the same approach.  It worked well for him.  So consider it, if you're struggling with writing that sounds artificial, stilted, or just foreign to you.

You probably have access to cameras, computers, and phones that can record a lot of audio.  A cassette deck will work just as well.  Just make sure you can get a clear, easily audible recording. Set it up where you normally write, or if it's more comfortable for you, in another place where you feel relaxed. 

Outline in hand (you still need an outline), start narrating the story, almost as if you were telling it to a friend in the room.  Have a friend in the room, if it helps.  Don't worry about cadence or performance.  Just speak what you would otherwise write.  Narrate a chapter this way.

Then, listen to the recording.  Maybe wait an hour or two, so you get over the peculiar feeling of talking to a machine.  You'll get used to it eventually.  When I do radio interviews it's equally weird, because I'm talking on the telephone, but thousands are listening.  Or dozens.  You get my point.

Your voice will sound strange, your telling of the story will sound halting and weak.

But then, sit down and start transcribing it.  Listen to 30 seconds or a minute of the recording, then write down the sense of what you said.  Longhand is best -- you'll get one more editorial pass when you type it up, that way.  When you're done writing it down, read it.

It will not look like your usual prose.  But you may find you like it.  In any case, it will show you how you naturally communicate, your speaking rhythms.  You'll find you make less use of physical description, for example, and more action, because we tend to describe events when we speak much more fluently than we describe sights or sounds.  You'll use fewer two-bit words and fancy writer-looking phrases, in favor of more straightforward exposition. 

The only drawback is we tend to use a lot more adjectives and adverbs when we talk.  'Tis pity.

Now go through and edit that as you would a typical first draft.  Compare it to something else you've written in the conventional manner.  If you prefer the spoken version, or like things about it, consider using a voice-to-text program (this kind of software has advanced greatly in the last few years).  Otherwise, you can record yourself reading what you write conventionally.  When you play it back, many problems with the literary voice will jump out at you.

And what the heck, you can get warmed up for radio interviews.