Writing About People, Places & Things

So after writing some 500 blogs on varying subjects—some with a modicum of wisdom and others not—I recently culled what I thought were the best hundred or so entries and created a collection titled Writings About People, Places & Things. I edited the thing, formatted it to the demanding specifications required by Amazon’s Kindle, bought a photo and created a cover, and on Thursday lofted the thing into the ebook universe. It’s available at http:/tinyurl.com/alg3nyy.

I did this partially because I believe some of the writing is worth keeping, and largely because in a couple of days I will go in for the fourth surgical procedure to arrest a cancer that apparently does not wish to be arrested. Though I am trying to enter this latest foray with a positive attitude, I have to admit the whole thing is getting old. I was initially diagnosed more than 18 months ago, declared cancer-free and then not-so-much cancer-free two times following a battery of follow-up tests. This, I know, is often the way cancer works, and it has left me, scared, depressed, and resigned.

The one positive aspect of this situation is that I have been writing more than ever.  I have three uncompleted projects that need attention and I am determined to finish them within the year. I plan to demand St. Martin’s Press shower me with dollars and an international book tour, but if the editors there do not consider the works worthy (inconceivable, I know, but the world is a strange and unfair place) I will self-publish.

If you are reading this blog, do me a favor: please download or sample Writings About People, Places & Things on your Kindle, Nook, PC, or pad. Write a review and help me foster some interest among readers. I’d really appreciate it.  Thanks!

Writing, Part Whatever

For the past several years, I've been working on a novel set in Paris in 1919. I'am now on the fourth rewrite and I've trimmed more than 100 pages. I've tried very hard to heed the advice of Jane Feather,  a friend whose works regularly appear on the New York Times' best-seller list, and that of her husband, Jim, a noted editor. "Do not," they told me, "assume that what interests you, interests others."

This is the sort of advice most writers don't hear enough, or, if they do hear it, fail to heed; it is counter-intuitive and runs against the grain. After all didn't we get into this wretched and thankless trade precisely because we were captivated by the oddities of history,  emotions, or a combination thereof? Me, I am and have always been an avid fan collector of facts no one knows. I'm trying to become a member of the UK's highly reclusive Useless Information Society and I have every volume put out by Don Voorhees, master of the esoteric. (Example: The Rhode Island School of Design hockey team is called the Nads. Their team cheer is "Go Nads!") I am the quintessential garbage head, and I say this with a measure of pride.

The book with which  I've been struggling encompasses the lives of several artists whom I assumed are household names--Picasso, Modigliani, Satie, Renoir, Cocteau among them--and whose lives and works changed the course of art in the Western world.  Who wouldn't be fascinated by the fact that Cocteau was an opium addict? That Modigliani regularly smoked hashish and lived for weeks on sardines and bread? That his pregnant fiancée Jeanne Hébuterne committed suicide shortly after his death? Hmmm. Pretty much no one, it turns out. What I imagined would pique the readers' interests brought an oh hum reaction from agents who read the book, and I'm pretty certain some of them were so young they might not even have heard of Modigliani or Cocteau.

Well then, what about my fascinating serial killer character, Henri Désiré Landru, who between 1915 and 1919 murdered 10 women and a boy? He was one of the last people whose execution was with the guillotine, and he never owned up to his crimes.  In popular literature, Landru was know as the French Bluebeard and to this day there are some who believe he confessed all in a written declaration just recently discovered . Remarkable, right?

Not so much. "I don't do serial killers," wrote one agent whose specialty includes novels set in Europe between the wars.  ("Well, you should" was my imagined and unspoken response.)

Bearing the Feathers' advice in mind, I took to my book with a vengeance, wielding a pen sharpened not to edit but to slice.

The staggering statistics of World War I (the deadliest conflict in history. Total number of  deaths: 16 million.  Of casualties: 30 million. Cost? $186 billion.)?  Gone. I took them out. The secret life of Pablo Picasso? Trashed and on the cutting room floor.  The internal dialogue of most of my characters?  Deemed unnecessary and made to vanish. The number of ancillary cast I wrote about simply because they interested me? Reduced by half.

The more I edited, the more it struck me that I'd been writing by the pound, adding pages simply because it made the book heavier and more self-important. Also, I wanted readers to know how smart I was, how deeply I'd researched my subject. This book was no longer entertainment, it was a cry of,  "By-God-I'm-going-to-educate-you-Philistines. By the time you finish reading this opus, you'll realize you wasted your college years on a liberal arts education!"

In other words, I lost track of what I was writing--a story meant to entertain readers, if I'm lucky engross them, and, perhaps, provide an ah ha moment or two.

The agreement between writer and reader is a simple one. I'll give you the years it took me to research, write, edit and market the book. You give me a brief span of your attention, perhaps a bunch of minutes strung together while riding the subway. Allow me an afternoon or two at the beach, an hour at bedtime.

I know you're not asking for an education;  you're giving me the opportunity to entertain you. If I fail to do that, well, that's my fault, not yours. 

The Rewrite

For the past three weeks I have defeated the Butfirst Disease (see 8/28/12 blog) and actually done some serious work editing a book I wrote a few years ago. I know my skills and my limitations, and I can honestly say it's a good read with a strong story line, characters you can love or not, a great location--Paris in 1919--and a couple of interesting subplots. I'm about two-thirds through and I've chopped more than a hundred pages. The original came in at 437, and I hope to end up with about 325.

First I did the obvious: I got rid of as many words ending in ly as I could. Depending on adverbs is like hiring cheap labor. The job will get done, but badly.  I followed this with a 'search and destroy' for the word that, possibly the most useless of all four-letter words. Then I looked for passive sentences and made them active whenever possible. Finally, I counted the number of times I used the word 'seemed.' I took all of them out save three or four out, because things either are or are not. If they seem to be, it means they're actually something else.

Like many writers, I've had to create my characters from an amalgam of both the real and the imagined. In doing so, I gave them particular appearances, demeanors and quirks, thought patterns, personalities, issues and secrets.  And, like many writers, I thought I had to share all this information with the readers: How else would the legions who will make this an enduring best-seller know what and who I'm writing about? This need to over-describe was a mistake.  It slowed the book down tremendously without adding an iota of interest. It pains me to say this, but it was boring. In writing, for the most part, you don't need the warts and goiters.

I also thought: Do readers, for example, have to know in excruciating details about the great influenza pandemic of 1918, and the deaths of a lead character's parents? In my mind, they did. Who wouldn't be fascinated by such a wave of death? Twenty to 40 millions killed in the greatest and most devastating epidemic in world history, with 28 percent of all Americans infected! Personally, I love having such information at hand; I  thrive on dropping significant factoids during a lull in dinner conversation, which may or may not explain the rolling eyes of my exasperated friends.  Me, I like this stuff. Others, maybe not so much.

I did this repeatedly throughout the book, using the lives of my protagonists and heroes to illustrate historical details I found interesting but which had no play whatsoever in the book's plot. 

Call it the James Michener syndrome. It worked back when JM was putting out his 900-page epics, possibly because (1) there were fewer distractions to readers--phones, emails, television, tweets, texts, etc., and (2)  many people now want some sort of instant gratification, even when reading (it's my sense that the need for instant gratification has hit the reading public. That's why we read writers like Lee Childs whose characters don't evince much thought or philosophizing and are constantly engaged in some form of action--hitting, killing and maiming, for the most part.)

The other stuff I'm getting rid of involves what I call characterial introspection. How often do we need to know what the character is thinking, and to what depth?

I believed it was necessary to the plot's development to have in black and white all the concepts, notions, and rationalizations needed for my people to act. What I didn't realize is that this sort of exposition is mortally dull to the reader, and a facile way for the writer to avoid doing the work that must be done.

What all this means, in the end, is that the reader has to be allowed a place in the book. I'll lose him if I crowd him by over-writing. In fact, ideally, the reader is lured into the work and becomes a character. A Joyce, Harris, Balzac, Hugo knows that when creating a universe, there has to be a door to let the reader in.  That's great writing.

I still have a lot of work to do...

The Butfirst Disease

Rudyard Kipling is said to have written "How the Whale Got His Throat" in three sleepless and famished days. It is my favorite of his ten Just So Stories, a children's tale, a political satire, and a cry against powers-that-be. And it's short, not even 1,000 words.

My friend Jane Feather, the best-selling author of some 40 books, routinely writes 2000 words a day, which may explain why more than 10 million copies of her works are in print.

Me, I doubt I've ever written more than 1,500 at one sitting because I suffer from butfirst disease. I am full of good intentions from the moment I wake up, and my promise to write write write until my finger tips are bloody from hitting the keys is a heartfelt one, but first...

Well, but first I have to feed the cat, make my bed, water the plants, take a shower, drink two large espressos,  sweep the kitchen free of the detritus aforementioned cat brought in and see if the pumpernickel bread is still edible. I have to look at the paper because perhaps something has occurred that may influence my life. This hasn't happened in a decade or more, but you never know. There is email correspondence,  text messages sent to me while I was asleep, and voices to reckon with on the answering machine. Then there is a laundry to do, a lawn to mow or a driveway to shovel free of snow, things to take to the post office, a 12-step meeting. At noon, I have lunch with friends, and at two there are bills to pay. So I am always eager and willing to write, but first...

Kipling, of course, had servant to do his butfirsts, and I do not, but I'm almost certain that even with a retinue of butlers, maids, chauffeurs and cooks, my habits would not change. I would find things to do and gather enough impediments to delay sitting down and writing for the better part of a morning or afternoon.

The strange thing is that I love writing. It's what I do best, and possibly the only talent I know for sure I possess. There are few things I find more pleasurable than spending two or three hours at a clip establishing a character, creating a dialog or defining a scene. It's really a shame I don't do it more often. Too many butfirsts.

Even as I write this, I'm thinking I should really take down the hummingbird vine that is overpowering my gutters. Also, I should hardboil some eggs for later, because if I wait too long to boil them, they'll be too hot to eat by the time I'm ready to eat. It all makes perfect sense.

Lately, at the suggestion of editors and friends, I've been redoing a novel I wrote several years ago and have not managed to sell. The book follows the adventures of a newly married couple in Paris in 1920, when the center of the artistic universe was in one neighborhood, Montparnasse. The problem with the book, I think, is that I put too much into it. I always want readers to have ahha moments when they read my stuff; I want them to be amused and amazed, and so with Montparnasse  I think I have created a literary turducken. I have famous writers, painters, composers and playwrights elbowing each other for space in the pages. The result is that the ahha moments get in the way of the plot, which is moderately complex as is.

Once again, though, the butfirst disease strikes. I will do anything to avoid this rewrite. Part of it, of course, is that I do not want to take a hatchet to my deathless prose and in fact, I am suddenly realizing that even writing this blog is simply another avoidance technique.

Crap.

All right. Montparnasse, page 116. Gotta edit Ernest Hemingway out.  I only put him in to show people how smart I am. Bye, Ernie. James Joyce to follow.