Blank Screen Syndrome – Again

Posted on April 18, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

I realize now that these writing process notes are upside down. A blog is a stack of articles – last in, first out (LIFO, we used to say in another life; as opposed to FIFO, which is a queue).

So the earliest notes on my current writing project are somewhere down in the list of posts, which readers of this one probably haven’t seen. That means I can’t depend on context to illuminate what I’m talking about.

Chapters in a book may be like that. I tacitly assume that a reader will understand the current chapter in the context of the ones before it, but I wonder if that’s true. I usually read two or three books at once, alternating among them, and it takes me a couple of weeks, at least, to finish one. Short-term memory being what it is, I need strong writing to remind me who’s what. I doubt if most readers read a book straight through in one or two sittings (unless it’s one of those mythical “un-put-downable” ones that the New York Times Book Review advertises).

I’ve been reading Dickens’ Bleak House for weeks. The thing’s a monster – must be 600 pages in print (I’m reading it on Kindle). I only read a couple of chapters a day, and that’s not every day. By now, I’m “82%” into it (no page numbers in Kindle), and I remember hardly anything of the first few chapters. But Dickens’ wrote Bleak House like a blog. It was serialized in a newspaper, weekly, I think, over 18 months, so each chapter does have a certain integrity. Since the plotline started to pick up after the 50% mark, I’ve had better contextual memory for characters and events. Maybe that’s the true value of plot – short term memory aid.

My current project, working title “Chocotle,” has four chapters now (hold your applause). I’m trying to focus on characters, not on plot, which is a big change for me, with the result that, at the end of each chapter, there is no springboard of causality to launch me into the next. No hook, no cliffhanger. Chapters just end when the characters are done saying and doing what they meant to say and do. God, I worry about that.

I have a screen that says, “Chapter 5,” and that’s all. It’s daunting. I look at it and I wait for something to come to me. Anything! Please! Okay, a clown jumps out from behind a floor lamp and puts Mozart on the stereo. There’s an opening line. I can’t use that. Anything is the same as nothing if there are no constraints on anything. I need constraints.

So I created a startup template:

Outline for Chapter N

Title TBD
Begun: date
SAVE AS !!!

Goal

Characters

Location(s)

Scenes

Notes

I write my goal for the chapter as if I were writing specifications for some other writer who will do the actual work. I don’t give a thought as to how I could accomplish the goal. That will be somebody else’s problem (namely, me, later on).

Goal for Chapter 5:

In this chapter, I need to show Scott’s decline in performance at work, and in happiness at home, as his worldview morphs from committed consumerism (him on the supply side) to something more genuine and interpersonal. The change is becoming problematic for his career and even his home life. People don’t like other people to change. They won’t allow it. Snap out of it, Scott! He doesn’t flame out yet. These are the early rumblings. The reader may or may not associate his changes with his continued obsession with chocotle.

Once I have an approximation of the goal, I sometimes start to visualize scenes or snippets of dialog in that context, and if so, I keep on writing, no matter how chaotic the result is. Anything is always better than nothing. Something can be edited. Nothing cannot be. If I ramble on, I can cut and paste those thoughts later, moving them down to the “Notes” section, but I never interrupt the rambling if it starts rolling. Rambling is gold. Ramblin’ Gold. Wasn’t that a Nat King Cole song?

Then I list the characters I expect to be in the chapter. In this case, Scott, obviously. And probably his boss, Mason Lenox, because I see some kind of a scene at his office, where Mason talks to Scott about his erratic performance lately. Scott is surprised. I’m not erratic, what are you talking about. Mason says, Stanton said you argued with him. You know we never argue with a client. I didn’t argue! I was suggesting xyz. You can’t believe how lame their ideas were. He was upset. He called you and whined?

Quite often, when I list a character who will appear with Scott, some shapes of a scene coalesce, and, as above, maybe some lines of dialog appear out of nowhere, which are, of course, horrible, but that doesn’t matter. I write them anyway, then snip them all and move them down to the “Scenes” heading, and voila, I have a germ of a scene, and all is not lost.

At home, Scott will talk to his wife, Allie about his troubles at work, so I list her as a character. But what if he wasn’t home? I’ve been spending too much time there. He could call home and he talks to his son, Dylan. Where’s your mother? Out. Some kind of meeting. With Nora? I don’t know. At this time of night? That’s what she said. Yadda, yadda.

I’m starting to visualize a situation where Allie is cheating on Scott, and this is the first clue, and if I wrote it well, the reader might suspect something was going on even if Scott doesn’t.

List Dylan as a character.

The same sort of process goes on when I list the locations where things are going to happen. One location is at Scott’s work. One is at home. But wait, if he calls home, he’s not at home, so where is he? Maybe he went to the beach house. It’s October, it would be all shut down, cold and dark and stormy. Good mood. He calls from there. Why would he go there? What’s up with him? Hmm. I’m visualizing a situation and another scene. And I could free-associate on that and snip it later to its proper place.

Then I move up and down the outline, which really isn’t an outline, just a container for ideas, some of which may never happen. I add ideas to the categories, if any occur to me, until something looks like something. Above all, I want to get out of the chapter having achieved its stated goal. I keep going back to that. What must I do to make that goal happen?

Still, even with infrastructure built, a sentence must be written on that blank page. What is that first sentence? Where does it come from? I don’t know, and I don’t know. Where does blood come from when you prick your finger with a pin?

Toole – A Confederacy of Dunces

Posted on April 14, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 14, 2014

Wacky People Doing Wacky Things

Toole, John Kennedy (1980) A Confederacy of Dunces. New York: Grove Press.

The main character, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a modern-day Don Quixote, a manic, tragi-comic, delusional soul who believes, or at least pretends, that only he understands what is right, good, and true.

Beyond that, the similarity ends, for Reilly is an obese, slothful, arrogant, self-righteous, unemployed baboon of a person who lives with, and off of, his mother in a rundown house in New Orleans. He lies, brags, complains, eats, drinks, pronounces, belches, farts, masturbates, vomits, and waddles his way through the book. He’s a very disagreeable character, and that’s a challenge for some readers, but you have to admit, it’s a triumph of good writing when you dislike a character that much.

There is no plot, not even a theme. The book is structured as a picaresque series of scenes and mini-adventures involving ostensibly wacky characters, loosely connected. It ends (unsatisfactorily) simply when the steam is exhausted.

The book’s main virtue is that it’s supposed to be very funny. I’m always wary of books advertised as funny, ribald, hilarious, or “destined to become a classic.” That’s especially true when I see superlatives such as, “It will make you laugh out loud till your belly aches and your eyes water.” – The New Republic. Well, that didn’t happen when I read it. I smiled a few times, mainly in the first hundred pages before I got bored. How funny are fat jokes, really?

The book has become a classic, more of a cult classic I would say, although, there’s no denying that it inexplicably won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

Besides the low humor of body function jokes, which I haven’t enjoyed since I was twelve, there are some ironic and sarcastic lines that raise the mean. You have to accept the not-believable premise that Ignatius has earned a Master’s degree in medieval studies. That allows him to pontificate and criticize in wonderfully pedantic ways. When his (temporary) employer asks him about the filing he hasn’t done, Ignatius explains,

“Oh, that. Yes. Well, when I opened the first drawer this morning, I was greeted by a rather large rat which seemed to be devouring the Abelman’s Dry Goods folder. I thought it politic to wait until he was sated. I would hate to contract the bubonic plague and lay the blame upon Levy Pants” (p.95).

That’s deliciously dry, intellectual humor that also reveals the character well, and there’s plenty of it to make a reader smile, until it becomes repetitive and tedious, which for me, happened quickly.

The same adaptation occurred for the many “colorful” characters who popped up in the book. Many are memorable, and all are genuinely original, I admit that, but all are flat, stereotypical characters, not round. Even Ignatius is flat, despite his manifest rotundity. I especially enjoyed Jones, the janitor. Here he is talking to the bartender at work:

“You want another beer?”

Jones looked at the old man through his sunglasses and said, “You tryina sell me another beer, a poor color boy bustin his ass for twenny dollar a week? I think i’ about time you gimme a free beer with all the money you make sellin pickle meat and sof drink to po color peoples. You sen you boy to college with the money you been makin in here.”

…”Well, if conditions really bad…”

“’Really bad’? Hey! I’m workin in modern slavery. If I quit, I get report for bein vagran. If I stay, I’m gainfully employ on a salary ain even startin to be a minimal wage.” (p. 143)

Jones is a funny character, but only as caricature. He has no interior.

So, the book has virtues, is well written, will make you at least smile if you tend not to LOL. But it’s flat and its humor wears thin, and it doesn’t go anywhere or add up to anything.

Saramago – Blindness

Posted on April 11, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 13, 2014

Eye of the Beholder

Saramago, José (1995). Blindness. New York: Harvest.

A man sits in his car at a traffic light, staring at the red, waiting for the green. The light turns green and the cars around him roar ahead. But not his. Angry drivers behind honk their horns. Some come forward to abuse him in person. But he waves his arms and cries, “I am blind!”

He’s only the first. One by one, characters suddenly go blind, without warning, without cause. Their visual field is filled with impenetrable, uniform white, so the epidemic is called the white blindness. It spreads across an unnamed city and an unnamed European country.

The main characters are, ironically, an ophthalmologist and his wife. The doctor examines newly blind patients, consults medical books, but can find no explanation. Then he goes blind. Inexplicably, his wife does not.

The government sets up quarantines, hoping to stop the contagion, and the doctor, along with his wife, who pretends to be blind, are shipped off to an empty insane asylum, along with a few others. Soon the place is full beyond capacity and they are surrounded by soldiers with orders to shoot anyone who approaches the exit.

The center of the book concerns the blind inmates’ experiences in this prison, their deprivations, the filth and degradation, the starvation, inhumanity, and violence. The story morphs from a Camus-like Plague story to a description of a concentration camp. This part of the story continues far too long. It takes about ten pages to understand the Holocaust analogy, but the sordid action goes on and on.

Finally, in the last quarter of the book, the internees escape into a devastated, post-apocalyptic world in which groups of ragged, filthy blind people stagger among corpses lying in the streets, like zombies searching through destroyed and looted stores for any remaining food and water. The ending is completely manufactured and quite disappointing.

The writing is thoughtful and well-observed, but reportorial, rather than poetic. The narrator does the reflecting, describing scenarios, and character’s thoughts and feelings, because the characters themselves are generally too busy just trying to stay alive. Having the doctor’s wife as the only sighted person is a brilliant device that allows Saramago to contrast blind and sighted experience throughout.

The book’s typographic style seriously detracts from the reading. Punctuation, other than the comma and the occasional period, is non-existent. One is confronted with long, often page-long, strings of run-on clauses, perhaps suggesting that for a blind person, experience is not well-organized. Quotation marks and dialog tags are not used, so it’s usually difficult to tell who’s speaking, presumably as it would be for blind people in a crowd. It’s a clever but unnecessary gimmick, adding little more than an obstacle to reading enjoyment. On top of that, the narrator promiscuously shifts point of view among characters and himself, and often spontaneously migrates through all the grammatical tenses, for no apparent reason. So this book is not an easy read.

Thematically, we are repeatedly thumped over the head with descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man. People are mean, thoughtless, selfish, greedy, cruel, brutish. Take away the thin veneer of civilization and vicious, hairless monkeys are revealed. Once in a while a word, or an act, of compassion or courage shows up like a beacon at sea (that nobody can see). This obvious theme has been worked many times. Lord of the Flies comes immediately to mind, but there are plenty of others. This book contributes no new insight on the topic, and renders the whole middle section of the book tedious.

What I enjoyed was the observant phenomenology of blindness, although there wasn’t nearly enough of that for my liking. For example, in one scene a man has cut himself and is bleeding badly, but because he is blind, he doesn’t notice at first, and when he realizes he is bleeding he is annoyed, but not horrified or panicked. The reader takes pause to realize how significant the sight of blood is in reacting to injury. In other insightful scenes, a blind person touches fingertips to a mirror, trying to feel his reflection; a bad man threatens a crowd with a handgun, but he’s blind, and so are the others, so what, exactly, is the nature of the threat; blind people have trouble washing and using the toilet; they form relationships based on talk and gesture, but not on looks; they despair at the now-useless art museums in the world. A writer describes how he uses a ball-point pen to slightly emboss his paper so he can tell where he’s written and where the page is still blank, but he can’t answer the question of why he does it, there being no readers left in the world, and you think about how useless the world’s libraries and televisions and computers, and movie theaters and smartphones would be if everyone were blind. These, and similar observations about the central place of vision in life, are consistently fascinating.

Less fascinating, and really, not even believable, are characters’ (and the narrator’s) squeamish shyness about nudity. What does nudity even mean if everyone is blind? That question was apparently too difficult to address properly so its awkward handling stands out. Another issue too difficult to even question, is what it means to “own” a house if all of civilization has broken down, including law enforcement, monetary economics, and contract law. Characters mindlessly seek to “return home,” and squabble over who owns what. Other problems arise if you take the story too literally. Anyone with an ounce of problem-solving skill could have solved many of the difficulties the characters faced. So the story does not mean to create a literal dystopic world, because it fails in that. Rather, the white blindness is a contrivance to focus our attention on what kind of human nature underlies the surface of polite society, and on how fragile human relationships are, yet without the delicate spider-web of convention, how we would all become selfish brutes. In that sociological, psychological aspect, the book is more successful, but not particularly insightful.

Saramago, who died in 2010, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998.

Peccaries on Parade

Posted on April 9, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

My back yard is open to the desert – no fence. I like it that way. Reminds me that I live in a certain terrain. My house is not an insular platform or barricaded station, but part of an ecology. A family of Javelinas paraded through today. There were about twenty of them, all ages, sizes, and both genders. They weren’t foraging, but marching, definitely going somewhere definite, heading higher into the hills.

Javelinas are like a wild pig, but they’re not a pig. They look like pigs, with the standard piggy snout that looks like an electrical socket. they have cloven hooves, and they say, “Grunt, grunt.” They’re not pink though. They’re covered in spikey brown hair with a lighter-colored stripe draped around their shoulders. The young piglets are smooth, but reddish brown, called “reds,” not “piglets.” Extremely cute.

Javelinas are a type of collared peccary, a beast originally from Bolivia and Paraguay, more related to the horse than the pig. You can’t help think of Javelinas as pigs, but you have to remember they’re wild animals. The adults I saw weighed 40 to 60 pounds, maybe more. You wouldn’t want to get between a mom and her red. They have very sharp teeth that stick out of their jaws four inches or more. And they move faster than you can. They can rip all the flesh off your leg before you know what’s happened. Stories of that happening to people around here are common, usually stupid people who try to feed them, but sometimes it’s just someone walking along a Tucson street. Nobody expects to be attacked by a herd of wild pigs on the way to the store.

So I’m watching, from the presumed safety of my patio doorway, a line of javelinas walking past, only 10 yards away. They’re coming from around the side of the house, across my yard, and heading up into the wash. They keep coming as if in an endless line, and it seems like a joke, or a cartoon. Huge boars are in the lead, then some fat mothers, with one or two reds trotting under and around them. Whenever the mother pauses, the reds immediately race under and jump up to grab a teat, but they can’t hang on and she moves ahead. There’s a five yard space then a few more big males. Are they called bulls or what? Not boars, because they’re technically not a pig. What do you call a huge, male, wild peccary? “Sir,” I would think.

They don’t see me; don’t even look in my direction. They have poor eyesight, but I’m surprised they don’t smell my presence. They may be accustomed to human smells, since obviously they don’t mind living in the dry streambeds between the houses. They must have been breeding and giving birth in the lowlands, where it is even more populated with humans, but maybe where there is more food. They have a thick, leathery mouth, so they can eat prickly pear cactus with no problem, and it’s easy to see evidence of their munching. They’ll also eat carrion, and are quite adept at knocking over 30 gallon trash barrels. I keep mine locked behind a cinder block wall.

More females appear with their frolicking reds. Families are usually about ten individuals, according to the Sonoran Desert Museum, but this is a group of about twenty. “Family” has a loose definition for javalinas. It isn’t a male and his harem. There are six or eight males and maybe four females, each with one or two reds. I’m surprised the males get along. On nature shows, males fight fiercely for females. Nobody wants to share. Javelinas must be very progressive in their social attitudes.

It’s 4:30 in the afternoon, surprising, because most game travels at dusk or dawn. Maybe they were moving by daylight to avoid the coyotes and mountain lions, which tend to be nocturnal. Why was today the particular day for the big hike? “Come on, reds! April 8^th, time to move up the mountain. Grunt, grunt! Don’t dally, or the coyotes will get you!” “Oh boy! Let’s go! What’s a coyote?”

After the line of javelinas had trotted out of sight, I could hear neighborhood dogs farther up the hill barking their heads off, presumably from within the safety of their fenced yards, because if it came down to javelina vs. pet dog, I know which I’d place my money on. Then, when I thought they were all gone, one more javelina appeared in my yard, a huge old grandfather, more gray than the others. I think he was blind, because he couldn’t stay on the path the others had worn in the sand. He zigged and he zagged, but he kept his snout down and always sniffed his way back to the correct direction. If I were a mountain lion, he’d be the one I’d pick off. Or try to.

I like having wild animals around. The motion-sensing lights around my house come on at night once or twice a week, so I know critters are out there, doing their mysterious things. During the day, I keep my eyes open when I hike in the parks and even when I walk in the neighborhood, and I always carry pepper spray. The most fun is watching animals be themselves, like parading through my yard, on a mission, to who knows where, for who knows what. It’s too bad we can’t communicate with them better.

The Chocolate McGuffin

Posted on April 9, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

Chapter 3, just completed, ended abruptly, surprisingly so. After 3400 words, it wanted to be finished. At least I had the sense to listen to that signal. I had another scene lined up, a big one, but I sensed it wouldn’t have been organic to bolt it on after a natural end. Maybe I can use it later.

This is what I mean when I recommend writing from an outline. It doesn’t mean you’re going to follow the outline, but at least you have a vague sense of direction. If you don’t have an outline, the writing tends to meander. That can work for naturally gifted writers, but it doesn’t for me.

My first goal in Chapter 3 was to introduce Scott’s brother, Greg, and his wife, Ronnie, and I did that. They will figure large, later on. I gave each one of them a tiny bit of texture, just enough for them to take form.

The second goal was to introduce chocotle, the magical chocolate that is the story’s McGuffin. I’m going to create a utopian mini-society, but I don’t believe those really work, because people are, after all, nothing but hairless monkeys, and we’ll scratch each other’s eyes out with the first available excuse. I needed a device that would cause a few people to back away from greed and selfishness, at least for a little while, to make the story go. Chocotle now exists, so ‘Mission Accomplished’ for this chapter.

Having just summarized the broad arc of the story line, it seems pretty lame. I am seized with self-doubt. Utopian society forms and dies, wah-hoo. That isn’t much of a plot. What am I doing? I’m aching for a tricky safecracking caper or a money-laundering pyramid. This approach of writing from characters is torture. How do I know my characters are interesting? Even if they are interesting, who cares, if they don’t do anything?

Most people don’t do anything. We want to read about people who do things. Mrs. Dalloway didn’t do anything, and I loved her. Why is that?

I’m reading Saramago’s Blindness, and his characters are doing a lot of incredible things: starving, wallowing in excrement and blood, fighting with thugs in an insane asylum, hand-to-hand grappling, knives, guns. And did I mention everyone is totally blind? All but one, actually. It’s a roundabout phenomenology of vision and blindness, along with an allegorical examination of human nature, and allusions to the Holocaust.

I don’t feel a thing for his characters, despite their incredibly unusual lives. Incredible is literally the problem: cannot be believed. And yet, if I write characters who kill a half-dozen victims, or steal millions worth of jewels, that seems believable, even though it’s not. Maybe Saramago’s imagination is more original than mine. My characters trope across familiar fields. His struggle in a world too difficult to imagine. At least he’s got an unusual world. I’ve got ordinary everydayness.

It’s too early to give up. Maybe Chocotle will turn out all right, even if it is mundane. You could hardly get more mundane than Mrs. Dalloway or Jay Gatsby. Mundane is not an automatic death warrant.

Onward, then, through the fog. What I have to do next is reveal the magical qualities of chocotle, by showing changes in Scott’s attitude and behavior, subtle at first, then ballooning to crisis proportions. I have no idea how to do that. I need an outline.

Lamb – Rise of the Machines

Posted on April 4, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 8, 2014

Cute Kittens Sell Books!

Lamb, Kristen (2013). Rise of the Machines: Human Authors in a Digital World. Ebook: WANA International ISBN: 1938848322.

Lamb is a well-known social media guru for writers and this book offers advice on how to establish and run your internet “author’s platform.” Everyone knows you need a “platform” if you’re going to sell e-books. But what should it look like, and more urgently, what should its content be? Lamb answers these questions with a light and frothy style, with the kind of corny personal anecdotes and humor you expect to hear in a stuffy hotel meeting room from a self-promotional speaker. Style notwithstanding, the book does contain actual ideas.

The problem with e-books is marketing. The internet is an ocean and your book is a tiny raft that few people will ever see, even if it is lucky enough to stay on the surface. You might as well drop your book manuscript down a well as post it on Amazon and wait for results, because you’ll get about the same sales result.

On the other hand, getting published by a traditional (paper) publisher is virtually impossible, and even if you are so lucky as to land a contract, and if you do not actually get cheated, you’re still virtually on your own for marketing – publishers won’t do much for you, because they don’t have the money to spend on you, and because their marketing efforts are impotent anyway. If the publisher does manage to sell a few copies, you’ll earn only a few pennies per book. Sure you could have an unexpected, runaway best-seller. You could also win the lottery. What are the odds?

This is the dilemma that Lamb sets up starkly in the first section of her book, “Brave New World.” The future of publishing, she says, is not with traditional publishing and marketing, but with e-books and social media marketing. She makes a convincing case that is consistent with my own experience.

Writers trying to use the internet to sell their books usually make two fatal errors. First, they direct most of their efforts to other writers. They are not your target market. Why fill your blog up with book reviews, process notes, and publishing advice. Nobody cares. Other writers might be right for Lamb’s target audience, with this particular book, but that is definitely not the case for fiction. With fiction, a couple of your writing colleagues might grace you with a mercy buy, but that’s about it. You need to reach the general book-buying public, a completely different crowd, if you hope to seriously sell books.

The second fatal error authors make using social media is to inundate potential readers with advertising, self-promotion, and overt requests to buy your book. People hate that. It’s annoying and it should be embarrassing to you, and in any case, it is not effective. If you’re blogging and tweeting and posting self-promotional advertising, you are “this close” to being a common spammer. You’re driving away buyers, not attracting them. Stop it.

What should you be doing instead of making these awful errors? First, address your social media content to “ordinary people,” not other writers. Focus your content on topics that ordinary people care about. And what is that? (Gulp hard.) Ordinary people care about pets, weight loss, food, health, holidays, religion, children, sex, the latest television shows, movie stars, popular music, and pop culture in general. Why do you think it’s called pop culture? Because it’s popular! My stomach churned when I read this. I am connected and engaged with many aspects of my culture, but pop culture is not one of them. I have zero interest and almost zero knowledge of it! I did not even recognize most of the examples Lamb gave. Nevertheless, she makes a convincing argument, and I concluded she was correct. So that leaves me in a pickle, but for other writers, her suggestion might open floodgates of opportunity.

What about the second fatal error, using social media to ask people to buy your book? It’s wrong and it doesn’t work anyway. Instead, you should be using social media to sell yourself. Not your impressive resume, but your actual, down-to-earth self. You should be blogging and tweeting and posting interesting, informative, and humorous content about your family and the pizza, skin care products, cars, and guns that you, personally are so passionate about. You never ask people to buy your book or “like” your page. No, you invite them to correspond with you about your love of cute kittens and Thai food. In that way, you build up a “following” and that’s what it means to have an author platform. Then, when your book is ready, you can say, just incidentally, offhandedly, insouciantly, “By the way, my friends, my new book just came out: Title.” And your 20,000 online “friends” will at least know where to find it. That’s the ticket to success, Lamb says.

All this seems reasonable to me, although Lamb’s “formula” does have that whiff of all those get-rich-quick schemes that say, “You can be rich! Just buy my book!” Certainly Lamb practices what she preaches. Her own platform includes the sprawling WANA website http://wanaintl.com/, where WANA stands for “We Are Not Alone,” and her own related blog, facebook page, and twitter accounts (to list just a fraction of her social media links). Not coincidentally, this e-book, Rise of the Machines, ranks under 300,000 on Amazon in sales after only one year. Something is working for her.

The book is not a “how-to” for setting up your Twitter and Pinterest accounts. It gives high-level, practical, yet strategic advice for marketing self-published e-books. It’s an easy read because of its low information content and high redundancy, but despite its lightweight feel, there are valuable marketing lessons for any author who intends to self-publish online. It is almost surely not the last word. Traditional publishers will eventually get the memo and change the way they acquire, produce, and market fiction. Until that happens however, cute kittens and Thai food are your best bets.

No Pirates, Please!

Posted on March 28, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

Here’s an update, and I know you care, on the continuing struggle of my latest project: I’ve established the Garrison family, their upscale house, their affluent status. I’ve introduced the two teenaged kids, who may figure importantly later. I’ve introduced Allie’s parents and revealed that all the money is on her side of the family. That will matter later. I’ve reinforced the idea, introduced in the first chapter, that Scott is existentially unhappy – with his career, with advertising specifically, and with modern life in general. That’s the start of his arc of development.

The dog needs more development. He appeared only momentarily then I forgot about him. He should be cut or developed. I like him.

A lot of work got done in one chapter. Maybe it’s two chapters. It ended up longer than I expected, 25 pages, 5000 words. I can cut it up later. My instinct says chapters should be short, but maybe that’s a holdover from genre writing. It’s nothing to worry about now.

I have a kernel. Salute the kernel! Pop the kernel! I have characters and setting. I should be happy. I am and I amn’t. Nothing points the way forward. No dead bodies, no missing money, no kidnapping. Just people living their lives. Only the writing will make anyone turn the page. Does it do that? I don’t know, but I have to turn the page – start a new chapter. Spin the wheel.

I could continue baseline character development. Allie should have her own chapter, showing her at work, to demonstrate how she doesn’t realize that others see her as needy and manipulative. She doesn’t see herself that way. I need to get her ready for her future breakup with Scott. Yes, this lovely family must be destroyed. Why else would it be there? However, I worry that a reader, at this point, has had enough stage-setting and wants to get on with it, so Allie will have to wait.

The central driver is going to be Scott’s emotional-existential change. It won’t be some big mountaintop realization, but a muddling, foggy, groping that will put him in uncharted territory. I don’t know how it will happen. In small steps, I guess. Which way? I’m staring into a tangle of vines, brambles, a wilderness. It’s so much easier when there’s a corpse and a detective.

I need an event, an excuse, a catalyst – something to lurch the story forward. I have to get out of that house, too. It’s already getting claustrophobic.

I could take the family on a vacation – to a fancy resort hotel, maybe. Maybe Miami, for the Basel Art Fair – that gives Allie a chance to do some artsy scheming, Scott can play golf, the kids do whatever. Alligators could appear! I’ve never been to Miami. Could I fake it? All those luxury resorts are the same.

I’m at sea, here. Wait — how about a cruise? Do rich people like cruises? Seems like they wouldn’t – imprisoned in a tacky floating hotel for a week of gluttony and tawdry entertainment. It would have to be a purposeful cruise, like a TED cruise or an educational thing that prepares you for an archeological dig in Belize.

Maybe they’d go to the French Riviera – rich people love the Mediterranean. Scott would be worrying the money the whole time. Nothing happens on the Riviera, or on most vacations, for that matter, that’s the problem. People lay in the sun and read magazines. You could do that in Cleveland. I need something to happen.

At least a cruise ship could be attacked by pirates. In fact I’m surprised that hasn’t happened. Those ships are soft targets and have lots of money on board. Can passengers take guns on a cruise? There could be gun battles. No, no, no. That’s not the story. Back, back, back.

I’ll ask Scott what he wants to do.

Overcoming The Blank Screen

Posted on March 19, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

I’m writing this post instead of doing my real work, because my real work is stuck.

I wrote a scintillating (ha!) Chapter 1, which got the new project off the ground. Hurrah for that. Now I’m staring at the proverbial blank screen and Chapter 2 is not forming in my mind. It’s been several days.

This is what’s wrong with writing from character. There’s no roadmap. I deliberately chose to do it this way for this project because I need to flagellate myself if I’m ever going to break free of genre. In genre writing, you write an outline that follows a fairly well-defined dramatic form, sketch a few character types, and start writing. The plotline pulls you along. And the result is not so bad. I’m reasonably happy with what I’ve done that way.

But I always knew my characterization was weak, a particularly galling acknowledgment for a former psychologist. So on the current project, I vowed to start with characters, and I did. But without the strong plotline to guide me, look what happens – I’m dead in the water.

I’ve spent weeks understanding my main characters, not down to the last biographical detail, but in profiles. I do have a story outline at a high level of abstraction, not detailed enough to tell me what to say in chapter 2.

I finally decided on having an Easter dinner because I wanted it to be spring, and I have a distant image of a future Thanksgiving dinner when everybody’s situations will be radically changed. Bookends then.

The MC and his wife, and two kids, will have her parents over for an Easter dinner. That would be a fraught situation that I could make crackle with subterranean agendas. It’s stereotypical, I realize, but I thought it might be within my skills. Jonathan Franzen did it in Corrections, a book I did not enjoy for being trivially banal, but facing the blank screen now, I appreciate it better in retrospect.

I have sketched characters’ positions, agendas, and voices; and spent more time than I’d like to admit researching the locations I wanted (affluent living room, dining room, and kitchen), and way more time than is conscionable researching the menu. (As a vegetarian and non-foodie, I had to suppress my gag reflex more than once.) I thought I had it ready to go, when I realized: it was going to be boring.

Scenery, however pastel, was not going to be enough. I needed something to happen. Somebody needed to have a heart attack, or the gas stove had to explode, or, at the very least, somebody had to scream, knock back their chair, and stomp away from the table and out of the room. It didn’t really matter.

I thought of what Faulkner did in As I Lay Dying. He just invented things to throw at his characters: fire, flood, river, mules, distance, and a totally contrived “road trip” story. His obstacles were almost arbitrary, but he needed to give his characters something to react against, to reveal who they were, which they did. Needless to say, I’m no Faulkner. I’m not even a Franzen. But the principle seems correct: throw the characters a crisis.

So I made up a list of crises, similar to the ones already mentioned, and decided on one that would involve the power going out, leaving the family in the dark, trapped in the house, the food uncooked. They are thrown together, forced to huddle and look directly at each other’s faces. I’m not sure what they’ll do, but I think I can find out now.

There will be three scenes. First the giddy anticipation and preparation of the feast, with subtexts of anxiety. Second, the power goes out just as dinner is to start, and how does everybody react to that? Finally, there will be the “after-party” scene when most of the immediate crisis is handled, but plans have to be made for what to do next. Lots of potential for good in-fighting there.

I hope I can start writing something tomorrow. There’s still some significant detail to sort, but I’m starting to get the sense of what it will be like.

Ridgway – Animals

Posted on March 17, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comMarch 17, 2014

Wittgenstein’s Mistress on the Mezzanine

Ridgway, Keith (2007). Animals. New York: Harper Perrenial.

An unnamed, first-person narrator is a free-lance illustrator of animals, in or around London. He describes his ordinary, nerdy life in excruciating detail, reminiscent of Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine. This narrator seems to have the same mild Asperger’s syndrome that Baker’s narrator did, dwelling on the tiniest details, but without Baker’s wit and erudition.

On his way to work, the narrator finds a dead mouse in a gutter. Morbidly fascinated, he pokes it with his pen. Later, at home, his partner, “K,” happens to pick up that pen and put the end of it in his mouth. Narrator is near apoplexy when he sees this, is unable to speak, and runs out of the house.

Narrator then bumps around, looking for a place to stay. He visits a friend, his son, and even his son’s mother (presumably his ex-wife, though there’s no flicker of recognition), and that’s when we start to see clearly that Narrator is more than just unreliable, his mind is rapidly disintegrating.

As in David Markson’s remarkable book, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, this narrator demonstrates through his narration, his descent into madness, re-telling stories with variations, retracting and correcting his statements, undercutting himself, misjudging things. Unlike the narrator in Wittgenstein’s Mistress however, Ridgway’s narrator lacks complexity, experience, cultural depth and interest. He’s just an ordinary nerdy guy with mundane, albeit crazy thoughts.

On the plus side, Ridgway’s narrator has some wonderfully bizarre delusions and hallucinations that qualify for the descriptor, “Kafkaesque.” Near the end of the tale is a surreal vision of a very strange office building.

There is also a good phenomenology of a “famous person,” Catherine, the wife of his son and possibly his own ex-wife. Whether she is really famous or not is doubtful by that time. It could be another delusion, but the description is great nonetheless.

There are other examples of excellent writing throughout.

“I stopped suddenly as I turned into Michael’s road, disturbed by two thoughts, and a third, which was horrible, but which came slowly crawling after the others like the mangled survivor of a car crash that I had not noticed occurring.” (p. 166).

The good writing keeps you reading, but it’s just barely enough forward motion to keep those pages turning. Still, the setup and context seem derivative from other recent novels, which is disturbingly unoriginal, and like most derivatives, is much less good than the source, leading to a somewhat disappointing experience overall.

Choosing a PN

Posted on March 13, 2014 by bill.adams111@gmail.comApril 30, 2015

I’m looking down into the water, seeing my own hesitant reflection, trying to convince myself that I’m ready to dive. I know I’m not going to turn around and climb down off the board. I’m going to soar, gracefully, smoothly, slicing the water without a splash.

It’s always hard to jump into a new project, especially when previous ones are still being flogged. Being Ruby is “in the can,” as they say. It’s waiting to be shipped off to a summer workshop. It will remain inert until July.

Desert Dream is being serialized online and gathering critiques. It needs a major structural reorganization and more editing, but I don’t want to undertake that until I’ve collected all the feedback I can. So it’s time to start for real, the new project, tentatively titled Chocotle.

I’ve got an outline of the story, and a list of main characters, with biographies and psychological profiles. I’m a little hazy on the settings, but have some ideas. The last big planning task is to hire a narrator (PN, for “Persona Narrator”), to tell the story.

I knew I wanted a third-person PN this time. I am sick of first-person after the last two projects. I need a change. And it will implicitly be a male PN, closer to my own voice. Writing a female narrator in Being Ruby was extremely difficult, though an instructive exercise. The question is, how should my new PN tell the story?

The Retrospective Frame

At first I thought he would tell it retrospectively, from a future world, after all the events of the story were over. He would be a “survivor” of those past events, explaining to the reader how it was. He would be reminiscent, maybe a bit nostalgic, maybe a little despairing at how it all turned out so badly, but with an underlying hope of redemption.

He would be a frame for the story, coming to the fore periodically, once or twice per chapter, to set context. Between those goalposts, the story would play out and become third-person close and real-time, with PN retreating to the sidelines. There would be an ongoing irony between the youth and vigor of the story characters, and the nostalgic timelessness of the old narrator.

The trouble was, I would have to create that future world for the PN before I could even start the main story, so he could say things like, “You can hardly imagine how we felt back then. XYZ was the case, not like today.” That seemed like a lot of work, to write the ending first, and in a sense it would undercut the main storyline.

I like framed stories, but they do put distance between the reader and the main characters, which is the price you pay for being able to have the PN face forward. I don’t think I’m a strong enough writer to create a PN good enough to hold the reader for a whole novel like that. So ixnay on the ame-fray.

The Absent PN

The alternative would be a PN who just tells the story in the traditional way, in real-time, not as a strong character, more like an anonymous storyteller. That would certainly be easier to write. Let the characters carry the load and keep the PN in the background, only showing himself through vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone. That would be the safe choice, and something I could definitely do. The trouble is, that kind of “absent” PN is no fun. I like a PN with a voice, a personality. That’s the good part about first-person writing. Some people are really good storytellers and some are not. Both kinds can convey the basic facts of the story: what happened, who was there, how it turned out. But you’d rather hear the tale from a strong storyteller who adds color and point of view. It’s just more interesting that way. So the invisible, absent PN could be my default, but I thought I should be able to do better.

The Blogger

I considered a diarist as my PN. He would be reporting the events of the story into his diary, not directly to “you,” the reader. This would allow him to be self-expressive, more opinionated, more apparent to the reader, and more interesting as a storyteller. Writing directly to the reader, in third-person, forces the PN to become ghostlike. He’s telling you this story, in an interesting way, but who is he? Where does he come from? What’s his angle? None of that is revealed in a traditional PN. He’s just a godlike voice from nowhere.

A diary, on the other hand, puts him in a context, more like a person. There can be asides about having to feed the cat, and so on. But then I thought, who writes a diary anymore? It’s anachronistic. So why not have the PN be a blogger? (That’s is rapidly becoming anachronistic also, but we’re not there yet.) The blog device makes him an almost real-time narrator, reporting no more than a week after the events of the story. It’s a sort of limited past-tense. He reports what happened in the past week and reflects and opinionates. I can give him an explicit diction and tone. That felt attractive.

The Pirandellic PN

If I’m going to have a visible PN who is a blogger, what do I do about readers who leave comments for him? What would those say? What would that contribute? Then it occurred to me that perhaps those comments were coming from the characters in the story. Maybe one of them isn’t pleased with how the story is being told, for example, and would like to make certain “facts” known about certain other characters, who he feels are not being completely honest in the story. This could be a whole lot of fun. It would be vaguely like Pirandello’s famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

I still might consider going off the deep end like that, but right now I think it would be too much for me. It would turn the project into a work of meta-fiction, and would render the underlying story incidental and make its characters into puppets. I don’t think I want that. I want to tell a serious story with believable characters.

And the Winner Is…

Finally (I think – nothing is ever final in this racket), I decided on Bachelor Number Three: The Blogger. That choice gives me the opportunity to flex my PN without flipping over into meta-fiction. It might be a struggle to find the balance. I want my PN to add to the story, not detract from it. A too-strong PN will remind the reader that it’s all “just a story,” and pop the illusion that comes from willful suspension of disbelief. That would wreck the underlying story. My feeling is that many of today’s readers, at least those who venture beyond genre, are already aware of mediation by the storyteller, and are not disturbed by it, so will be able to handle a strong, but not too-strong PN without difficulty. The question is, can I execute that?

Splash.

Can't Stop Writing…

Bill Adams, Ph.D.