Updike – Rabbit, Run

Posted on by June 27, 2014
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Rabbit Run - Updike

All The Insight of a Rabbit

Updike, John  (1960). Rabbit, Run. New York: Random House, 264 pp.

This is the first of the “Rabbit” tetralogy, and the book that established Updike as one of the greatest American novelists (and won a Pulitzer Prize). Harry Angstrom, nicknamed “Rabbit” for his twitchy nose, was a high school basketball star but at 26, an adult with an alcoholic wife and an infant son, he has a hard time coming to grips with the reality that he’s no longer a star, not a hero, not the center of attention,  just an ordinary guy who demonstrates vegetable peelers in a department store.  The novel is about Harry’s inability to deal with this existential panic, and to a lesser extent, about the angst and ennui of suburban life in 1950’s, post-war America.

The writing is luminous, with the kind of sentences you read over and over to absorb their beauty.  Updike’s observations of the everyday are detailed, insightful, and thought-provoking. The way the scenes unfold is masterful. There is much to learn about the craft of writing here, for any writer. That’s why you read the book.

Another source of enjoyment is the time machine to a bygone America. Almost every scene is unintentionally nostalgic, including complaints about the new “supermarkets” putting  corner groceries out of business, old TV shows, old cars, attitudes toward marriage, anxiety about sex, pregnant women drinking.  It’s hard for me to accept that that’s now a distant historical period, but it is.

There isn’t much of a plot. The story is about ordinary domestic issues, strained marriages, sexual infidelity, social scandal,  drinking, morality, parents, babies, in-laws. There are a couple of genuinely dramatic moments, but over all, this is a somewhat rambling character study, not a thriller, so don’t expect a driving plot.

Harry (“Rabbit”) is not a satisfying character. It becomes apparent early on that he is socially immature, hugely egocentric, impulsive, and not well-educated. He leaves such eddies of emotional and relationship wreckage in his wake, you would judge him to be psychopathic, except he is oblivious, and blind to himself. He does have moments of self-reflection, though these  seem incongruent with the rest of his character.  Overall, he is sometimes charming, but never a likeable character. Other characters are similarly shallow – not badly rendered by the author, but merely characterized as mind-numbingly dull and unimaginative, perhaps the way most ordinary people are, or at least were in the world Updike has constructed.

Updike has used the time-tested formula of presenting stupid people doing stupid things, because it’s easier for readers to understand unsubtle characters.  Faulkner’s characters, by contrast, though dim-witted, are so nearly subhuman, a reader struggles to understand their actions.  I do not engage well with dim-witted characters, so I always hope they will at least be amusingly funny or shockingly outrageous, or will be used to satirize some aspect of society. In this novel,  I found it difficult to make a connection to any of the characters, except maybe Ruth, the prostitute. She seemed more genuine than the others.

To be clear, though, this cast is made of  good, solid characters, coherent in themselves and distinct from each other. It’s just that they’re so ordinary, dull, and thick that there’s not much to be learned from observing them. The novel does nothing to add insight  to  the nature of life, love, or loss.  The pleasure in reading this novel is to watch a master writer execute his craft. It’s a novel about John Updike.

I haven’t read the other three novels in the Rabbit series. People say this first one is the least polished, and that in subsequent novels, Rabbit becomes more developed and well-rounded. Unless he has an inexplicable infusion of intelligence, insight, and emotional maturity, it’s difficult to imagine that he will change much.  If I read the subsequent novels, it will be to enjoy more of Updike, not Rabbit.

 

Talking Heads Syndrome

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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People TalkingThis is the latest post in a series of maybe a dozen, concerning the process of writing my current project, working title Chocotle. As a progress report, I’m finishing up chapter 18 now, which will put me at about 57,000 words, getting near the end of the Middle section. I am drifting a little, unsure about the forthcoming critical crisis and climax, but I have a rough idea of what needs to happen, if not how to make it so.

In the meantime though, I’m becoming worried that my characters talk too much. This is my first entirely non-genre project, so I do not have an external circumstance driving the action with its inexorable causality. My people are ordinary human beings being human. So they talk.

Talking is how the characters reveal themselves and convey important story information. The narrator, in this case third-person-close, usually has a strong part to play for story exposition. So I tend to rotate among narrative description, dialog, and thought balloons.

What I don’t have is much embodied action in the world. My characters don’t play basketball or climb mountains or run marathons. They don’t even go shopping or take the dog to the vet.  All they seem to do is eat in restaurants and talk in cars and hotels. Is it a problem? I think it is. They don’t seem very grounded.

Much of human life is about conversation. It’s what we do. Most jobs are about communicating all day. We go to meetings. We send emails.  At home we talk. At school we talk. Maybe once in a while, on vacation, we go skiing or marlin fishing, but that’s an exceptional event, not an everyday activity. I think my characters are realistic by talking all the time, but for a novel, it may seem too abstract.

I look at how other authors manage physical embodiment. Not genre authors, but more mainstream, or literary ones. In As I Lay Dying, for example, Faulkner has his family go on a road trip. That’s the main driver of events. They use temperamental mules to pull a cart, and they have horses, and they confront obstacles, like weather, fire, and hostile neighbors, but they’re on a mission to reach the next county to bury a casket. That’s the action driver that puts them in the world, in nature, riding horses, falling off carts, peeing in the bushes, and doing other embodied things.

My characters don’t do that. I could make them pee or run around the block, or ride a horse, but it wouldn’t be organic to my story, which is contemporary, mostly urban, with educated characters acting and talking rationally, for the most part. The road trip is a particular structure that forces embodied scenes. I think of the last half of Lolita, where Nabokov has Humbert tour the U.S. by car. That gives him unlimited scope for mental reverie and conceptualization.

In the Rabbit series of novels, Updike has his characters do things, often, it seems, just as an excuse to be embodied. In Rabbit, Run, Harry stops to join a pickup basketball game as he walks home from work. Later, he goes out for a pack of cigarettes and ends up driving all afternoon and all night, as far as West Virginia, then turns around and drives back. It’s a mini-road trip for no reason except to move the scenery. At other times, he walks, he climbs a great hill with his shoes off; he plays golf with the preacher. None of these actions have any intrinsic meaning. The story is about Harry’s character and conscience. But Updike keeps Harry jumping about so we always have a sense of him being located in time and space.

I’m not crazy about how Updike does it, either. Why does Harry drive all night to West Virginia, then home? No reason. He doesn’t even know. Some nonsense explanation is proposed that he has a desire to see dawn on the Gulf of Mexico, but that’s totally arbitrary and not convincing. He could just as well have had a desire to go to the moon. It was simply a mini-road trip to give Updike an opportunity to do extensive thought balloons, introducing us to Harry’s interior life. And that’s how I read it, as a writer’s device, not at all organic to Harry’s character.

Harry, and Faulkner’s characters, are relative dimwits, not particularly self- aware, so they can take spontaneous actions they don’t even understand themselves. No explanation is needed, or possible. My characters, by contrast, are well-educated and relatively self-aware, and wouldn’t drive to West Virginia for no reason at all. If you look at a self-aware character, like Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, he doesn’t do much but drive a car, but his interiority is almost rich enough to sustain the pace. Almost, but not quite – Humbert still has the advantage of a road trip. But anyway, I don’t think it’s necessary to have un-self-aware characters to introduce non-genre action into a story.

On the one hand, it probably helps to choose a story structure that facilitates embodied action in the world, such as the road trip, or Find The McGuffin. I don’t want to show characters brushing their teeth and sweating and farting, just to reassure the reader that they are embodied. That seems contrived and I haven’t enjoyed it (e.g., Confederacy of Dunces). And I don’t want to have characters arbitrarily get up and climb a tree or go to work on a shrimp boat, just for something to do. Their behavior has to grow out of their genuine attitudes and concerns.

I’m stumped on this. My story is about relationships and meaning, and world-view. It’s not about finding the treasure or burying the casket. So my characters talk a lot. I put them in gardens, in restaurants, in bedrooms, in cars, and around dinner tables. But it always boils down to talking heads. Mrs. Dalloway got away with that somehow. You don’t see her going skiing and playing golf just to be in the world. She buys flowers and convenes a dinner party, and talks, and talks, and thinks.

But that was a long time ago. Times have changed. I think I need to get my characters into swimming pools, to funerals, into baseball games, performing music, playing squash.  All that seems wasteful to me right now. What they want to do is talk. But maybe on the next pass through I’ll give them more physical therapy.

Pushing on a Rope

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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RopeMy last post on the process of writing my current novel was over a month ago. Then, I considered why sometimes chapters came to an end before I was ready, when I still had more to say. My answer was that a chapter is an organic object, a set of scenes that accomplish certain story or character goals. The problem was not really the chapter length, but the scope of the chapter goals.

Well, I survived that crisis, and now I am six more chapters along, working  on lucky 13, and I have a different kind of chapter problem. It won’t move forward fast enough, no matter how hard I push on it.

I’m near the middle of the Middle section of the novel, at 41 thousand words, about where the complications should be developing fast and furious, building to the climax near the end of the Middle. But I need to turn a corner.

Scott, my main character, hit bottom in the Beginning, lost everything, but experienced a bounce in the opening of the Middle, which became his hope of re-establishing his life. Alas, he has been defeated at every turn. Not only that, his romantic interest is drifting away from him, although he doesn’t quite see that yet.

What I need is for the romantic interest (RI) to exit stage left, pronto, so I can usher in a new character to propel the story forward. Scott met Selma, the RI, when he was down and out, and maybe he misjudged her, and himself. The way she developed, it became clear to me that she wasn’t going to be right for him in the new future I have planned for him. So she needs to be replaced.

Sometimes writers complain, or marvel, that their characters do unexpected things and behave in ways the writer did not intend. But I say, if your characters are out of control, then you don’t know what your story is about. That’s a writing failure, not something to brag about.

I admit, I had not fully envisioned Selma’s future. She was perfect for Scott when he desperately needed companionship, but that was way back at the start of the Middle section. She was the beginning of his recovery, and I had not yet envisioned in detail what would happen in the Middle. Now that I’m writing the Middle, I can see that Selma is not going to work out.

I like Selma. I could delete her retroactively and put in the right character, but I don’t want to do that. She’s a strong character. She can reappear later with great effect. But for now, she needs to be fired. She did not run off and behave badly on her own. She behaved exactly as I wanted her to, but now that  I’ve clarified in my mind what needs to happen, she’s not the right person for the job.

So now I’m five pages, 1500 words into  Chapter 13 and all I’ve been able to do is create some doubt in Scott’s mind about Selma. A knock-down, plate-throwing fight  would be too abrupt at this point. Tensions need to mount. Selma will introduce the new RI, and then I can have a huffy-puffy fight and get Selma off the stage. Even with plenty of high-handed narrative exposition, that’s going to take several pages. And I can’t introduce a new character without at least one dramatic scene, so there’s a long way to go.

Replacing Selma is not even the main goal for the chapter. What I want to get done is have Scott and his new RI begin a different kind of life. That’s the critical direction I need to set sail for. It’s a big turn. It’s Scott’s crisis point. How many pages will it take me to turn his ship around?

Maybe I’m just feeling impatient. That’s how you feel when you push on a rope.

 

UPDATE: 2 days later.

I finished Chapter 13 in 13 pages. Once I got Scott introduced to Rosie, the new RI, they hit it off immediately, and the writing just flowed.

Selma got jealous, pouted, and went home. She is still not out of the picture, but now I’m in a place where I can cut the cord between her and Scott.

I dread writing the scene that has to happen. I feel like Scott does: Can’t she just go away? I don’t really owe her anything just because we’ve been together nonstop for six months. Why does that suddenly make her feelings my responsibility? But he knows it does, and he has to confront the reality. Aargh. I don’t want to do the break-up scene any more than he does.

He’ll be reasonable but he’ll feel terrible. She’ll be petulant, all the while denying her obvious resentment. That will have to be next chapter; can’t let it fester any longer.

Meanwhile, Scott and Rosie have instant attraction that needs to be developed. I plan for this relationship to stick, so I need them to exchange some backstory, which I never did with Scott and Selma. Backstory is a show-stopper, I know, so I’m going to have to use a very light touch. The context will have to be very much “getting to know you,” and not info-dump. That will be tough.

Also, I’ve made Rosie highly intelligent, but with a zany sense of humor. That’s going to be hard to sustain. Humor is impossible to write well.

What I still did not get done is Scott’s big turnaround, his epiphany and life-change. I couldn’t just tack it onto the end of 13. It needs to be centerpieced. I did set up a moment of doubt in his mind, so the change will not seem out of the blue when it comes in 14.

I don’t know how it will go. I don’t want a clichéd aha! moment, even though that’s exactly what it is. Maybe something bounces off of Rosie. He sees something in her that makes him reconsider himself.  I don’t know how that would work. That’s why starting every new chapter is hell.

Update: 2 days later

I stayed out of the way, and Chapter 14 wrote itself.  Scott and Selma broke up.  Scott and Rosie, and her 10 year old son, Danny, bonded. Out with the old, in with the new. Mission accomplished.

The breakup with Selma was difficult to get started. I couldn’t find an entry point at first. I finally got it rolling by having the 3P narrator go in real close, right into Free Indirect Discourse, where the narrator’s and the character’s voices become barely distinguishable. It becomes almost, but not quite, a first-person narrator. Once I was inside Scott’s head, I knew how it should go.

I set the showdown out at the experimental horticultural gardens, because that’s where Scott and Selma had first met the previous spring. Now it’s fall, the weather is cold, the sky is darkening. My idea was to have Selma fiercely and violently yank weeds from between plants, betraying her feelings to her words, but it turned out, she didn’t act that way. She generally kept shut up pretty tight, because a big part of Scott’s frustration with her has been her lack of openness. And although he shows real compassion for her, Scott’s also a little cold-hearted in the scene. He wants out, and he gets out, fairly skillfully. I had imagined a lot of screaming, crying and wild accusations, but it turned out, these are not that kind of people. Besides, the scene, in a garden, seemed to work better with the tension staying quietly subterranean.

Then I put Scott back with Rosie, ostensibly to discuss her report on chocotle, but actually to introduce her son, Danny, give a little more backstory on her, and create some emotional bonding I can use later. The scene was at a restaurant again. Where would writers be without restaurants, bars, and dining room tables?

Maybe that’s just me. In “The Woman Who Lost Her Soul,” a novel I’m reading by Bob Shacochis, I notice he’s not as foodbound as I am. He has plenty of talking scenes, as I do, but he sets them in interesting places, like in the middle of a gun battle in Croatia or in a Byzantine cistern in Istanbul. I need to get out more.

Anyway, Chapter 14 is short and sweet, only 11 pages and 2500 words, and it nicely accomplishes two important goals: Scott – Selma; Scott + Rosie.

What it does not do, however, is reach Scott’s epiphany, the point where he sees the light and turns his life around. It just didn’t want to happen yet. Characters live at their own pace. Yes, I’m the author, and I can make them do jumping jacks any time I want, but authenticity, or at least, believability, puts constraints on what I can do. I felt I needed to get Scott better connected to Rosie before he would make his turn. Rosie is the start of that turnaround. Without getting her looped in first, Scott would sit up in the middle of the night, bolting from a dead sleep to declare, “Hey, I need to make a turnaround!” That wouldn’t be convincing. Now he’s got motivation to visualize his future. I  think he’s ready.  Chapter 15 for sure.

Rushdie – Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Posted on by June 30, 2014
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Haroun Sea of StoriesRushdie, Salman (1990). Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta Books. 212 pp.

A Fantastic Essay on Writing

This is perhaps Rushdie’s most accessible book, ostensibly a children’s fairy tale, set in a fantasy world far away. An Indian man and local celebrity, Rashid, is ruined when he suddenly loses his ability to entertain people by spinning fabulous stories. The loss occurred when his ambitious wife left him, despairing, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” This question recurs several times in the book and is its thematic core. Rashid’s young son, Haroun, vows to save his father and embarks on a heroic journey to another land, where the sea of stories lies, the source of all stories, past, present, and future. A tribe of anti-nonsense, bureaucratic-type beings has been poisoning the sea of stories, so that people will focus on important things. Haroun’s adventures in this fantastic land are vivid and unforgettable, involving mechanical birds, shadow warriors, a great ark, floating gardeners, and much more. The tale, and the wonderful imagery, recalls Dorothy’s experience in the land of Oz, but with the bonus of fantastic, poetic, and playful language from Rushdie.

On another level, though, the story can be read as an essay describing the process of creative writing. The sea of stories is the source of creativity, and it does seem like it is in another land, or even, on the moon, as it is in Rushdie’s story. A writer only hopes to sample its waters, and when, suddenly, inexplicably, the creative waters are not flowing, it feels like the sea has become poisoned. On his way to rescue the creative process, Haroun’s understanding is repeatedly frustrated when he is told, by several magical characters that the process is too complicated to explain, or P2C2E, as it is called in the story. He discovers a warrior who fights with his own shadow, often becoming confused over who is the warrior and who is the shadow, and writers of creative fiction will recognize that feeling of confusion as an author struggles within himself to develop a fictional character.

Throughout the novel, these sly allusions delight the tuned-in reader, so even as a child enjoys the story as a fantastic adventure, the savvy writer will enjoy the humorous essay on the vicissitudes of the process of writing fiction, a process that is, in the end, a P2C2E.

At a third level of analysis, the story has another message, the answer to the question, “What’s the use of stories that aren’t even true?” Rushdie’s answer is the story itself: We want, we need, stories that aren’t even true for the sake of the pure joy of creativity, which is a part of the human spirit. He wrote this book while he was in hiding from a death threat, or “fatwa” issued by the ayatollah in Iran because of his earlier book, “The Satanic Verses.” When humorless people are trying to kill you, perhaps silliness and satire are the best response.

Wright – Going Native

Posted on by June 17, 2014
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Going Native WrightWright, Stephen (994). Going Native. New York: Dell Publishing.

Writing For the Sake of Writing

This widely praised novel is more like a collection of very loosely connected short stories. The writing is interesting, some of the sentences hallucinatory. That’s the joy of reading the book. However, there is no traditional plot, no significant character development, and no particular insights are revealed. It is just a series of almost unrelated scenes and characters.

Should it be read then as an anthology of stories? That doesn’t work well, either, because the chapters/stories themselves lack dramatic tension and insight into characters, so as stories, they don’t work well. A recurring theme in the book is allusion to horror movies. Characters describe horror movies they have seen, or scenes are staged like scenes from horror movies, and maybe that’s why the stories and scenes seem pointless, as horror movies themselves are. So maybe the book is supposed to be a high-concept parody of the horror genre. But if that’s the game, it loses for being repetitive, unfunny, uninsightful and, above all, not horrifying.

The writing itself is interesting, original, and well-observed. Here are some random samples:

At their backs there’s a flash and a sudden whoosh, a beat of gigantic wings; they swivel in their seats to the unnerving spectacle of a column of flame rearing up angrily into the dim air. ‘Oh look,’ remarks Rho, ‘Wylie’s got the fire going.’ The daiquiri pitcher is emptied and refilled and emptied again. The citronella candles are lit. Mr. Freleng, the retired electrician next door, totters out to adjust his hose, faithful attendant to the abiding needs of the lawn god. He behaves as if he were alone, blind and deaf to the balcony audience spellbound by each fussy exertion. Upstairs the children sleep at last. Daphne gets paid and goes home. A small dark bat appears, flutters anxiously through the soft twilight, a flimsy prop on ineptly managed wires.” (pp 24-25)

 

““’Listen, Woodstock, the picture, ever see it?’

‘I don’t know. I guess. Sure.’

’Well, remember the scene where everybody’s romping bare-assed in the mud? I’m the guy on the left with the beard and the big dick. God, the times we had…’ He waggled his big head in disbelief. ‘A planet of wonders. Like to visit it again someday before I die.’ He looked over at his listener. And now I’m immortalized in celluloid, how about that?’” (p. 73).

The enduring topics are stifling everydayness, punctuated by sex, violence, and drugs, told in interesting and complex sentences. In the end, there is a hint that a certain 1960’s Ford is a clue that allows you to reconstruct a chronology of one or more characters, but why would you?

Is this a novel? Call me old-fashioned, but I say it is merely writing for the sake of writing, not for the sake of traditional storytelling or for Aristotelian exposition of human relationships to God/fate/destiny. Many readers might find reading the book an enjoyable experience, as long as they have their expectations set appropriately.

Shacochis – Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing

Posted on by July 14, 2014
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DrinkingSmokingScrewingLife’s Three Great Pleasures Considered

Nickles, Sara, & Shacochis, Bob (Eds.) (1994) Drinking, Smoking, & Screwing: Great Writers on Good Times. San Francisco: Chronicle Books. 200 pp.

This anthology of stories, essays, and poems (many of them excerpts from larger works) recalls a time when writers celebrated excess rather than worried about it. So says the excellent introduction by Shacochis. The selections themselves, however, are not all celebratory. Many concern attempts to quit and avoid problems arising from life’s three great pleasures: a martini before and a cigarette after.

Selections range widely, from Mark Twain on what it means to enjoy a cigar, to an acerbic feminist essay by Erica Jong excerpted from Fear of Flying. Most essays are humorous, by authors such as Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and Art Buchwald. Some are from classic literature, by the likes of Henry James, Anais Nin, and Vladimir Nabokov.

I found that the humor has not worn well over the decades. Times and values have changed so radically in recent years, there is little humor left in jokes about getting drunk, trying not to, or trying to quit smoking. Maybe that’s a worthwhile message from the book: as a culture, we’ve become so health-aware that coy or snide jokes about secret drinking, smoking and screwing are no longer interesting.

As for the screwing part, there are some good essays, but again, because modern culture has become so open, there is nothing that can be written about sex any more that is shocking or even titillating. Everything possible has been written, repeatedly. What’s compelling about the selections concerning sex is not the sex, but the fine writing, such as by Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov. Articles that dwell on body parts and juices for shock value, are flaccid.

The anthology is a light read that lets you sample some fine authors, and if you’re going to sample them, it might as well be on topics that are fun to read.

What Is a Chapter?

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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ChapterI’ve written a half-dozen posts reflecting on the process of writing Chocotle, a seedling novel. Previous posts are somewhere lower in the stack. I’m writing this one sooner than I expected, because Chapter 7 slammed shut after only 10 pages. It often happens that chapters end before I’m ready. I’m not sure why, and it made me consider, what is a chapter, anyway?

A chapter is a set of scenes separated by passages of description.  For me, a chapter is a movement of character and story bigger than one scene. A single scene shows one or several characters acting or reacting, in virtual real-time. The reader sees it while it’s happening.

It can take a paragraph to describe how a character leaps out of the way and tumbles to the floor, something that in real life might take a couple of seconds. If the paragraph is understood properly (and written properly), the reader has a feeling that the action took only a few seconds, so that counts as virtual real-time. A sequence of real-time actions, such as conversational ping-pong, can take minutes.

By contrast, a description can say something like, “By the end of the week, Bob was exhausted.” That compresses a whole week’s worth of actions into one sentence. A chapter is a set of real-time scenes, with narrative description as the fast-forward button between them. By combining those two, the chapter covers a larger block of time, minutes, days or weeks, perhaps a few months, or even years or centuries. All that compressed time is punctuated by scenes in real-time, to make the story slow down so the reader can feel the characters.

How do I know how much time a chapter should cover? The question is really about what the chapter goals are. However long it takes to accomplish those – that’s how big the chapter should be. Okay then, how do I decide what the chapter goal(s) is or are? I’m not sure about that. I have a larger vision of where I want the story to go in general, and I need to identify the points of action that need explanation. I call them “break points.”

If I want a character to go from rags to riches, I can’t just say, “And by the end of the week he was wealthy.” The reader would think, “Wait a minute! How did that happen?” Something like that is unusual and the reader wants details. There are too many ways it might have unfolded to just gloss over it.  So I need to identify the critical circumstances, the break points, that caused the result, and I have to show those, with scenes, so the reader can see how it happened.

If I have too many break points to illustrate, the chapter will be too long, and probably confusing, too; it’s hard to remember it all. If I gloss over important break points, the reader will feel frustrated, left out, and disconnected from the character. I have to figure out which story developments are unusual, interesting, or important enough, that they need explanation. I don’t need to explain how the character ate a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast. But I would need to explain why he suddenly quit his job.

In Chapter 7, my goal was get Scott out of his job – he had to quit, and then suffer the consequences of that decision, because I need him to hit bottom so he will be forced to rebuild his life in a different way. That’s the general arc of his story – he crashes down from a high place then rebuilds a new world. Quitting his job is crucial to that development. I could have accomplished it in one sentence: “So he quits his job, and the family’s finances go to hell and he has to sell the house and his wife hates him.” But it’s an unusual, dramatic event. People don’t just up and quit every day. There are too many ways it could have happened. The reader needs to see some break points.

So how did it happen? In the beginning of Chapter 7, Scott is torn by the irrationality of what he’s about to do. His gut tells him to quit, but he knows it doesn’t make sense. That’s a scene, where he argues with himself, and the reader can see what he’s thinking. Finally, he calls his boss and they have a conversation. The reader listens to that conversation and sees how Scott quit and how the boss took it. That’s another scene.

Then he has to tell his wife what he’s done. She’s horrified and disbelieving. She screams and shouts. That’s a scene. Then there’s a section of narration that compresses the next three months, all the way to the end of the year. By the end of three months, things are bad. Scott tells his kids they have to go to public school because the private school fees are killing him. That’s a compressed scene, narrated, slow, with indirect quotations, but not shown in full real-time detail. I wanted to include the kids in the unfolding crisis, but I didn’t think it was important for them to be fully dramatized. Scott’s my main character, not them.

By this time, when things are really bad, Scott’s wife, who has been devastated since the credit cards stopped working, is humiliated by the idea of having to sell the house (What will Mom and Dad think?). She and Scott talk. That’s the closing scene.

At that point, I thought, “Mission Accomplished.” He quit his job, he told his boss, his kids and his wife. His financial ship is sinking fast, which is a strong motivation for him to make further changes in his life. The End.

But the chapter was only 10 pages long, 2500 words. First I thought I could add another goal, because he hasn’t really hit bottom yet. His wife has to leave him and take the kids. I could add that. But that would open a can of worms that would wriggle on for many pages, probably end up being too long, and it would also dilute the effectiveness of the single message I had for this chapter: Guy quits his job; his life falls apart.

Then I thought maybe I had over-compressed Chapter 7 and that’s why it was short. I could have unpacked that three-month compression into a few slower, more detailed scenes. There was a reason I compressed. The chapter is transitional, showing Scott falling, having jumped off a cliff. It’s a simple idea – you jump and you fall. If I detailed it out in more scenes, I’m afraid the chapter would become overwritten and boring. I don’t know. How can I know?

What kind of scenes could I add? I could dramatize phone calls from creditors, showing Scott’s struggle to stay afloat. I could show awkward meetings with friends at the supermarket where he and his family are embarrassed to reveal they are no longer affluent. I could show Scott and his wife trying to hide their financial distress from parents. I could show Scott in tense interviews with job recruiters. Right now all that feels like it would be overkill. It’s not hard to understand what it means to be on the financial ropes because we’ve all been there. It’s like eating oatmeal – it needs little explanation.

Or am I wrong about that? Maybe I rushed it. This is a first draft, and I won’t pause to second-guess myself at this point. So I’ll revisit Chapter 7 later and maybe I’ll decide to expand it.

Scott has fallen. In the next chapter, for sure, he will splat on the sidewalk.

The Name Game

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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namegameThis is the latest post in the series on my writing process during the long struggle to create Chocotle, which wants to be a novel. It now has 23,000 words, which is 25% to 33% of a modest novel.  I like to finish around 300 pages, which is about 75,000 words. I assume at least 10% of it will be cut in editing, so I should be aiming at 85,000 words.

Actually, I don’t aim at any word count. I just write. I monitor word count so I can see progress, which is rewarding in itself, but mainly to get a sense of the pace. I conceptualize the story in terms of Beginning, Middle, and End, so if I’m at 50,000 words and still trying to establish the status quo, I know I am way off course. I like the beginning and end to be 25,000, and the middle about 50,000. In the Beginning, I set the status quo then smash it. I feel that I am getting near the end of the Beginning, so my current word count feels about right.

What I’ve got so far, at least in my self-deluded mind, is that Scott’s status quo as a happy husband and father, and successful and affluent advertising man, has already started to seriously deteriorate. By the end of Chapter 6, he had “turned like a sunflower facing a different sun,” and he couldn’t make himself go back to work after his forced 2 weeks of vacation.  I’m sure we all know the feeling, but Scott really didn’t go back and he’s in serious doo-doo.

Chapter 7 will send him over the edge, irretrievably into the abyss. That’s the short goal statement for that chapter. Chapter 8, the end of the Beginning, will have him utterly hit bottom, everything gone, nothing left. That’s as far as I can see right now.

As I started to set up Chapter 7, using the template I described in an earlier post, I realized I need a name and an identity for someone I’ve been calling “Mr X,” the fellow who Allie has an affair with. That is a much more difficult sub-project than it seems.

The names of characters help the reader connect to them. People’s names are merely identifiers, not even unique ones, virtually arbitrary, not self-chosen, and they mean nothing. Whether your name is Smith or Pendergast has no bearing on what kind of a person you are. Yet in readers’ minds, it does.

Names have sounds, and they have connotations. To use characters’ names to advantage, they should be chosen carefully. Actor John Wayne’s real name was Marion Morrison. That would never do for a western tough-guy hero. But why not? What’s wrong with Marion Morrison? It’s a real name for a real person, the very actor we came to love on screen. I can’t say exactly what’s wrong with the name, but few people would disagree that “John Wayne” worked better than “Marion Morrison” ever could have.

Charles Dickens had a great time with character names. He was quite aware of their connotative associations, and he liked to play with that. In Bleak House, for example, the venal lawyers who bill clients so mercilessly that there is finally nothing left of their claim, are called Jarndyce and Jarndyce. The similarity to the word “jaundice” is not accidental. The white, old and pinched, aristocratic, and desiccated lord and lady of the manor are the Dedlocks. The woman who talks incessantly about her former husbands is Mrs. Badger. The small, misshapen fellow who annoys the main character is Mr. Guppy. A frivolous and obnoxious woman is Mrs. Pardiggle.

I use more traditional names, but still with an ear to connotation. Scott Garrison is so named because a garrison is a military fort or barracks and in this story, Scott will spend quite a bit of time hunkered down.  He’s named Scott because despite his profligate ways in the beginning, he’s fundamentally frugal, and people associate frugality with the Scots. So it’s not a bad name for him.

I keep several files of names in the computer. I collect them from actual lists of names I find, such as contributors to the local theater, from the newspapers, and of course from the internet. There are millions of names on the internet. Just enter “baby names” into a search engine and see what you get. The problem is not finding names; it’s choosing. How is that done? Intuition, mainly. Here are some examples of how I chose character names from my lists.

When I was looking for Scott Garrison, I wanted a male, Caucasian, American, just under 40, an ad man. I selected a few first names (left two columns) and some last names (right two columns) and put them in a grid. These names were selected intuitively, for their sound and not-quite-conscious connotations.

Martin Craig Mayfield Moss
Grant Winston Tate Cross
Mason Truman Baxter Garrison
Carter Alec Holder Hatcher
Kevin Paul Wilder Washburn
Travis Edward Goodrich Hemphill
Winslow Mark Brothers Parsons
Scott Curtis Biggs Fellows

 

Then I tried combining first and last names to see if any were memorable, unique, believable, and had a strong, positive, likeable main character sort of feel, whatever that is. I also looked for slightly lower frequency, when appropriate – not so many Tom, Dick and Harrys. Then I went through and highlighted the most promising ones.

Martin Mayfield; Craig Garrison; Grant Baxter; Grant Whittaker; Truman Cross; Carter Mayfield; Alec Goodrich; Alec Fellows; Kevin Cross; Kevin Fellows; Paul Biggs, Paul Baxter; Paul Holder; Paul Tate; Travis Biggs; Travis Moss; Edward Mayfield; Edward Parsons; Edward Fellows; Mason Brothers; Winslow Hatcher; Winston Fellows; Alec Winston; Winslow Carter; Kevin Carter; Paul Finder; Paul Hatcher. Chris Cross; Walter Washburn; Martin Parsons; Mark Biggs; Grant Wilder; Mark Wilder; Scott Mayfield; Scott Baxter; Scott Parsons; scott Fellows; Mason Webb; Martin Webb; Steve Ralston, Karl Block, Gordon Gallup, Ken “King” Cole, Jeremy Barksdale, Matt Hightower, Alexander Cook, Sean Masterson,

John Curry, John Packard, John Truax, John Click, John Coffee,

Ted Packard, Ted Truax, Ted Click, Ted Cross, Chris Cross

Scott Baxter, Scott Lovett, Scott Hightower, Scott Garrison

 

As I picked through the list of combinations, I seriously considered “John” and “Ted,” but finally focused on “Scott” as my preferred first name, fairly soon, and arrived at “Garrison.” I also used Ken “King” Cole, in a different project because I just liked that one. I like the possibilities for good nicknames, as in, “His name was Johnny Webb but everybody called him Spider.” I collect those, but rarely use them. Maybe they’re too silly.

Charlie Charles (Chuck-chuck), Stan Stanley, John Johnson, Will Williams, Meya Meyapann, Robert Roberts, Richard Dick (Dickey Dick);

I also like names that have musical, alliterative, or just interesting sounds, but I also rarely use those, for some reason.

Becky Baker, Ellen Oatley, Dee Dee Zee, Ann McLang, Vito Valdivia, Brick Bracken.

And I collect real names that I like, but since these are real, living people whose names have been published for some reason, I’ve always been afraid to use them:

Jack Biggerstaff, Coral Reefe, Peter Elbow, Buganoni Spezzia, Quinton McKracken, Krystal Fogg, Jimmy Wallet, Leonard Lion (middle name should be Theodore), Mary Sheepshank, Timothy Salthouse, Michael Starbird, Brick Johnstone

Here’s another example of selecting a name. I needed a sneaky, somewhat dim bad guy; white, a real lowlife. I put potential first names on the left and last names on the right, then tried promising combinations, as before.

Willie Trader, Dealer, Monger
Andy Proctor, Proxmire
Roy Packer, Packman
Randy Yeoman
Bobby Lander, Swain, Tiller
Earl Feeney, Nunn, Lyman
Vern McGee, Merchant
Tony Gardner

 

Randy Swain, Earl Feeney, Roy Lyman, Bobby Lyman, Bobby Gardner, Willie Gardner, Roy Nunn, John Lyman, John Lander

Notice that, for me, lowlife first names tend to end in “y,” as if names for children or dogs, because these people lack dignity. I liked “Lyman” for the last name, because it connotes a liar. Other last names suggest common laborers, such as gardner, yeoman, monger, and merchant. (No offense to anyone who happens to have one of these fine names! I’m talking about irrational, barely conscious associations to the names themselves, before there is a person attached.) I ended up going with Randy Swain in this example. “Swain” is an archaic word for a young lover, which most readers wouldn’t know, but it adds an extra dimension.

One final example. I needed the name of a tough-guy, vigilante cop; a name that would be just a little too obvious, almost ironic because he was a pulp-fiction character.  Here’s how I selected:

Danny Vince Burns Striker
Sal Roman Walker Bigatti
Harry Ben Hammer Barefoot
Jimmy Tony Galambos Wells
Clint Clay Vandello Block

 

Danny Burns, Vince Hammer, Tony Bigatti, Ben Walker, Roman Striker, Clay Wells, Kurt Hammer, Jimmy Striker, Flint Striker, Sam Spear, Vince Armstrong, Clint Armstrong, Clay Armstrong, Sam Striker, Clay Savage.

I finally went with “Clint Savage” for my cartoony cop.

I’ve gone through the same kind of procedure for all my characters. And sometimes even after choosing, I decide I don’t like the name and I have to choose another then go through the manuscript with a global search and replace. The change is shocking after you get to know a character by a certain name.

I also try to avoid too-obvious racial and ethnic stereotypes, although if you want the name to suggest characteristics to the reader, you can’t be too shy. I’ve searched for, and found “the most black-sounding first names” and “the most white-sounding first names.” I have separate lists for black characters, Native Americans, Swedes, Greeks, Russians, and many other categories.

I usually Google the name I’ve selected, just to see if I need to avoid a real person’s name and a potential libel suit. Just about every name that can be synthesized is actually owned by someone in the world, but I don’t want the real person to have similar characteristics to my character, such as by being in the same line of work or even living in the same city.

Choosing a character’s name is a difficult process that I do not enjoy. It can take several hours to come up with one, and the result may end up being unsatisfactory after a few days.  But it has to be done. Right now, I need a name for “Mr. X,” Allie’s paramour. I’m thinking he’s going to be black, 40 to 45, an urban professional, possibly a professor, affluent, well-educated, and married, so a bit of a sleazeball (like her). He may not actually appear on stage, I’m not sure yet. It will take some time.

Some useful sources of names include:

http://www.behindthename.com/glossary/view/name_element What names mean.

http://names.mongabay.com/most_common_surnames.htm  Surnames by frequency, can be sorted by year to see historical trends.

Ethnic Name Generators

http://www.starmanseries.com/toolkit/names.html

http://www.atlantagamer.org/iGM/RandomNames/index.php

 

Myers-Briggs Character Generator

http://character.namegeneratorfun.com/

 

 

Rock n Roll Twofer

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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I like to sample pop music in very brief doses, just to have a sense of what the young people are thinking, and because, well, the Beatles are dead, man.

I catch bands appearing on late night shows like Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, SNL, and others. Naturally, these acts are DVR’d because I can’t stay up past 9:30 pm.  From time to time, I also watch Austin City Limits and similar pop music shows. In all of these excursions into popular music, I find little to like, and much that is laughably bad – in my humble opinion!

Granted, I am a fuddy-duddy who still loves mid-century jazz and Beethoven’s string quartets, so I do not expect to like current popular music, and that expectation is consistently met. With exceptions.

I was very surprised to watch  a recent edition of Austin City Limits that blew my socks off (old people are susceptible to that problem). Two acts were presented and both were so incredibly good, I hereby report them, knowing full well that I am probably the last person in the country to “discover” these talents.

Gary_Clark,_Jr._2013Gary Clark, Jr. is a Texas bluesman and rocker who Rolling Stone declared “Best Young Gun” in April of 2011. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds like praise, and if so, I concur. Clark has played alongside plenty of musical luminaries, including ZZ Top, B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, and the Rolling Stones. According to Wikipedia, he has even performed at the White House, so there you go. The man has arrived. His first major album was released in 2012, called Blak and Blu which immediately hit #1 in blues albums.  You can hear free sample tracks by Clark at http://www.amazon.com/Gary-Clark-Jr/dp/B003TQJNDW . I don’t remember exactly what tune I heard on Austin City Limits, but it made my feet cold.

alabamashakes1I had barely recovered my breath and put my socks back on, when along comes another amazing group that everyone in the world already knew about except me, Alabama Shakes.  It’s a rock band formed by lead singer and guitarist Brittany Howard and bassist Zac Cockrell when they were just high school kids. The group also includes guitarist Heath Fogg, keyboardist Ben Tanner, and drummer Steve Johnson. They became active as a band in 2009, but by 2013 had been nominated for three Grammys.

According to Wikipedia, the band’s first full album, “Boys & Girls” came out in 2012 and went gold by 2013. Their first TV appearance was in 2012 on “Conan”, when they performed their first single, “Hold On,” which I think is what I heard on Austin City Limits, but I couldn’t swear to that. Someday we’ll be able to pop up a little internet browser within the main TV picture, but for now it’s an information-poor medium. Alabama Shakes has also appeared on SNL. The energy is phenomenal; the sound is riveting.

Sample their sound at  https://myspace.com/alabamashakes/music/songs , but caution: after I heard them, my feet were inexplicably cold.

 

The Granularity of Life

Posted on by April 30, 2015
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Granules 2 This is the fourth or fifth post about the process of writing “Chocotle,” a someday novel. I thought it would be interesting for me, and maybe also to others, to document the process of writing it, in parallel with the actual writing of it. That interest remains to be evaluated.

I’m documenting chapter-sized chunks of the project. I couldn’t do anything smaller scale, because writing a chapter is like writing a short story. It’s all-absorbing. It dominates my thinking for days at a time, and when the flow is flowing, that’s not the time to reflect. To reflect upon the flow is to stop the flow. Necessarily. There are philosophical reasons for that. Anyway, I’m mentally exhausted after writing a chapter. I need at least a day to regenerate.

Chapter 5 is the latest one to be born, titled “Descent.” Like others before, it ended suddenly, surprisingly, at 17 pages and 4,000 words.  I had a lot more to accomplish, but it was a natural ending, so, listen to the muse.

The goal of the chapter was to show main character Scott, slowly descending from ordinary, unquestioned everyday life, to turbulent waters where the most fundamental assumptions are questioned. I didn’t want a big fat epiphany, but rather, a series of little events that slowly hammer on his assumptions. So I got him acting strangely at work, so his boss tells him to take two weeks off.  At home, he pretends it was his decision to take some time off, and he gets into a stupid argument with Allie, his wife. Nearly all domestic arguments are stupid, but that doesn’t mean they don’t hurt.  Angry, Scott runs off to the beach house, where he can be alone with his chocotle experiments for a couple of weeks. So, we got ripples on the pond at work, ripples on the pond at home. That part’s solid.

Next, he’s at the beach house and he needs to buy groceries, and clothes because he left in a huff. I also needed to get him out of the house so it could be robbed. Now, all that could be accomplished in two sentences, as the previous two sentences illustrate. Instead, I used 700 words to say it. He wakes up, analyzes a recurring dream he’s been having, then goes to a diner for breakfast, then to a clothing store, then to a grocery store and finally comes home. That’s the 700 words, and I wonder, is that level of granularity too fine?

Do we need to know he was out of toothpaste, that he disdains shopping malls? Should I have shown him shifting the gears of his Mini-Cooper? Should I describe his breathing? What is the correct level of granularity for displaying a life?

Being out of toothpaste is not random. I wanted to show that the beach house is a vacation place, not fully stocked as a regular house would be, and that gives him more reason to go out to a Walgreens, and also helps make it believable that not much was stolen in the burglary because there wasn’t much to steal. The toothpaste comment could be brushed out, but I decided it pulled its weight.

Interpreting a dream as he shaves: Is that too much? I thought his analysis revealed something about his world-view, perhaps revealed more to the reader than he himself understood, namely that his life is no longer under his own control; that he is a victim of his social and economic status.  That will be important later, when he leaves it all behind. So I see the dream analysis section as laying groundwork that helps justifies a big change later. That isn’t one of the goals I set for this chapter, but once it started happening, I thought it was legitimate. It is, however, very fine-grained stuff, and hardly anybody likes to read about someone else’s dreams. I hate it when writers do that. I just skip over dream sequences when I read, because they’re generally pointless, as dreams are. But here, it was the analysis that was important, not the golly-gee-whiz, bizzaro, special effects of a dream itself. Maybe it won’t survive a future revision, but right now, it seems to reveal character.

So even though I used 700 words to say, “Guy has a dream, gets up, eats breakfast, buys some clothes and returns home,” I feel that everything is working; nothing is filler. Who knows? This whole book could be considered “filler.”

Another unusual feature of this chapter was that it did leave me a springboard for the next one. Because of where it ended, with Scott questioning some fundamental life choices, he needs more time at the beach house, because more things need to happen, things that were supposed to happen in this chapter but were cut off by the ending. Maybe I can get a running start at the next chapter without the startup being so painful – same scenery, same mood.