When in doubt, just write. Write your way out of a corner, out of your fears, out of your setbacks. It's a good default setting. But right up alongside it put another track: the study of the craft. Make constant and never-ending improvement a goal just as important as your daily pages. Just write and keep learning––these are the two steel rails that will carry you to a productive career.
Sometime back, I started reading an old pulp novel with no great expectation. But I got pulled into the fictive dream and did not want to put the book down. I set everything else aside so I could finish the book.
I can’t remember the last time that happened. Usually when I read fiction, part of my mind is analyzing it: Why is the author doing that? Does this metaphor work? Why am I thinking of putting the book down? Ooh, that was a neat technique, I need to remember it ...
This time, though, I was fully into the story. It was only when I finished the book I asked myself, What just happened? Why was I so caught up? What did this author do right?
The novel is Big Red’s Daughter. It’s a 1953 Gold Medal paperback original. I found it when I was poking around the Internet for 1940s and 1950s noir. I love that period because the plotting is often superb, the writing workmanlike to excellent, and the effect every bit as suspenseful as anything written today—without the need for gratuitous language or description of body parts. The sexual tension was suggested, even on the book covers. Oh, those covers! Love ’em.
And then I looked at the author’s name. I didn’t know him. So I did a little research and found out there’s ... very little information available on John McPartland. I love discovering little-known authors, and McPartland certainly qualifies. So how pleased was I when I got the book and had this can’t-put-it-down experience?
I’m not claiming that this is a novel that should have won the Pulitzer. But it is a prime example of what pulp and paperback writers of that era had to do to eat: write entertaining, fast-moving, popular fiction.
They knew the craft of storytelling. Since I teach it and analyze it myself, I was anxious to try to discover what McPartland brought to Big Red’s Daughter. Here’s what I found:
Jim Work is a Korea veteran, back home now and about to go to college on the G. I. Bill. The returning vet trying to find his place is a vintage postwar noir theme, one the reading audience couldn’t get enough of. He wants a job. Wants to get along. Wants to find a girl and get married.
For a page-turner, you have to have a lead character that readers are not just going to care about, but also root for. Even if you’re writing about a negative lead (e.g., Scrooge), the audience has to see something possibly redeeming in the character.
Jim Work is not perfect. Readers don’t respond to perfect. But we are on his side, because he yearns to do the right things.
Here’s the first page:
He was driving an MG—a low, English-built sports car—and he was a tire-squeaker, the way a wrong kind of guy is apt to be in a sports car. I heard the squeal of his tires as he gunned it, and then I saw him cutting in front of me like a red bug. My car piled into his and the bug turned over, spilling him and the girl with him out onto the street.
By the time our iron touched I'd swung my car to the right, so it wasn't much of a crash. I climbed out in a hurry, angry and ready to go.
The MG pilot was up and ready to go, too. The girl was beside him, brushing the skirt over her long legs. Nobody drew even a scratch out of the bump.
This was a tall, lean lad with a pale face and hot, dark eyes. I saw that much before his left fist smashed into my face. Not a Sunday punch—a real fighter's hard, straight left.
I was looking up at the cloud-rimmed blue sky. My face was numb; this boy had a solid, exploding punch. I tried to roll over fast—stomping on the down man's face is popular these days. I was right but I was slow. I saw the heel coming down and I brought my hands up. But the heel swung back from me and I pushed up into a low crouch.
The girl had him from behind, pulling his jacket down over his wide shoulders, her right knee high in the small of his back. This was a girl who must have seen action. She knew just the trick to keep her boy friend from grinding my nose into my teeth with his heel.
The MG driver is Buddy Brown. The girl is Wild Kearney (her real name—love it!). And immediately Jim is drawn to her—a love interest. She is a “bronze-blonde” but “looked like the kind of girl that would be with winners, not losers, top winners in the top tournaments and never the second-flight or the almost-good-enough. Not the kind of girl that I’d ever known.”
So here we have both violence and potential romance from the start. And the lead is vulnerable in both toughness and love.
The rule here is simple: Don’t warm up your engines. Get the reader turning the page not because he’s patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next.
Buddy Brown calms down and invites Jim out to a house where some other people are having a party. Suddenly this Brown fellow seems like he might be okay. Jim goes along because he has a desire to work Brown over for the sucker punch and possibly to start the process of getting the girl away from him.
Brown’s behavior throughout the book is unpredictable, and not only that, we sense an undercurrent of danger. He’s like a snake that seems friendly but could bite at any moment. You’re just not sure what he’s going to do next, because he is ...
Buddy Brown is ruthless and sadistic, yet able to charm the ladies and the gents. At the house party Jim calls him a “punk,” and Brown says he is going to kill Jim for that remark. Jim tries to fight him again, and Brown beats him up but good. We get the sense Buddy could kill Jim without a second thought, but then he relents and is charming again.
In Hitchcock thrillers the most charming character is often the bad guy (e.g., Joseph Cotten in Shadow of a Doubt and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). Such a character is much more interesting than a one-note evil villain. Which leads to ...
Dean Koontz is big on this. The way it works is that you put in just enough backstory to understand why a guy would turn out this bad way. A reader’s crosscurrent of emotion is experienced rather than analyzed, and that’s a good thing. Great fiction is, above all, an emotional ride.
In one scene, Jim finds Buddy drunk and stumbling around because he knows Big Red Kearney (Wild’s tough-guy father) wants to hunt him down and kill or ruin him. Jim, in a display of 1950s loyalty to his species (sober men take care of drunken men), takes Buddy into a place for coffee. Buddy then reveals a little of his backstory. When he was fifteen, growing up in New York, he and two friends got on the bad side of a local gang leader:
[Buddy] looked across the booth at me, his bruised, pale face a little twisted.
“Mick and me, we run off from home. The boys came to my house and worked over my old man to tell where I was. He didn’t know, so they gave him the big schlammin. He’s never going to get over it. They caught Mick downtown somewhere and they took him out on Long Island, tied him up with wire, and burned him. You know, with gasoline. He was a very sharp kid, good dancer, lot of laughs when he was high on sticks. He got burned up.”
The slender, drunken boy was talking in his soft whisper, his eyes far away from mine, talking with a clear earnestness as if he were living it all again.
“I’ve never forgotten that year. I hid down near the produce market, sleeping in the daytime, going out at night to scrounge rotten fruit and stuff. The big rats would be out at night and I’d carry a stick and a sack of rocks. For two months I hid like that. Then it cleared up. The wheel got sent up for armed robbery and the other guys forgot about it. But I remember that year.”
Suddenly Buddy is humanized. Not that he’s any less dangerous. Our emotional involvement in the story thus deepens.
In the first two chapters this guy Jim has a car accident, gets punched in the face, is drawn to another man’s girl, goes to a party where he gets in another fight with Buddy, and ends up badly beaten and bloody.
And this is the good part of his next couple of days. Meeting Buddy in a bar, the conversation doesn’t go so well. Buddy says, “You’re a punk.”
“You keep calling me that, boy, but you don't stand up to it very good. I'll tell you something. I'm going to make you crawl across the dirt to me begging me not to hurt you any more. Crawling and begging. Can you see it? Is it a picture to you?”
“Let's go back to the alley.”
He laughed. His left hand snaked across the table and he had the second finger of my right hand in his fist, bending it back, holding my palm hard against the table. His right hand thrust his cigarette toward my eyes and I ducked my head back. Still torturing my finger with his left hand hard on my right, he moved up like a cat and his fingers laced into my short hair. He pulled my head way back and I tried to reach him with my left hand. He let go and clipped me across the throat with the side of his right hand. A hard clip on the Adam's apple.
It was all pain. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I was in the chair, my head hanging forward, loose, holding myself up on my elbows. I could see the puddles of beer on the tabletop, I could feel the frantic pounding of my heart.
Maybe nobody noticed. It happened inside of ten seconds. I was sick and weak, knowing only the ultimate desperation of trying to get air through my paralyzed throat to my lungs.
He didn't say anything until he thought I could hear him again. Then he said, “You're probably a good man, a real good man, fighting boys like yourself. Don't feel bad. You don't have it, that's all. In about five minutes you'll be able to talk again. Then we'll talk about Broadway Red, where you met him, how well you know him. Then we'll talk about Wild, about how she's crazy about me. Then we'll go to some quiet place and I'll work you over until you crawl to me. Then we'll say good-by and that will be the end of our friendship. You can write to me if you want to.”
I was there in the chair, my head hanging forward, the pain easing a little.
Somebody had walked up to the table. “Is your friend all right?” It sounded like Henry's voice.
“He choked on something. Swallowed his beer wrong.”
Notice the writing in this scene. It’s violent but not overwritten. McPartland allows the action to do its work and the character to tell us how it feels.
Between Wild, Buddy, and Jim. And while we’re on the subject, want to see how the best writers wrote about sex back then? Here is the only sex scene in the book, in its entirety:
I swung the car to the right on the rutted road over the dune, toward the surge of the waters of the bay.
It was a finding without a knowing. There had been a typhoon in Tokyo once when the wood-and-paper buildings ripped before the fury. This was a typhoon between two people––a man and a woman who thought she belonged to another man.
Then it was a knowing as enemies who were once friends might know each other.
After that it was a silence between two people who should not have been silent. We both knew now, we understood each other. We should not have been silent in that way. At last I held her in my arms again, and there was no storm, but there were no words.
The author didn’t need to describe body parts.
McPartland’s style never gets in the way of the narrative. He doesn’t strain for effect, and the resulting emotions are rendered naturally, sharply. After the sex scene described above, Jim takes Wild home.
She opened the door and was outside the car.
I was out and we stood there together. I brought her to me, but she was not with me. A tall girl in my arms, a lovely girl, a girl behind a frozen wall, a girl who did not speak.
Wild stood there after I put my arms down, and then there was a kiss, and we were close and warm there in the darkness, kissing as lovers do when the good-bye could be forever. Perhaps Wild thought it would be.
It was over, still without words, and she went down the steps and pushed open the door. There was a rectangle of soft light just before the door closed behind her.
I was halfway in the car when I heard the scream.
Do you want to read on? I think you do.
The action of the story is compressed into a couple of days, so it really moves. Any time you can put time pressure on your characters (the “ticking clock”) it’s a good thing. And the stakes, as previously mentioned, have to be death. In Big Red’s Daughter, it’s physical. A noose (Jim is accused of murder) is tightening around the lead’s neck.
In the midst of the action there are emotional beats, too. But these never bog down the story, they only deepen it. At one point Jim is put in a jail cell. Here is the longest emotional beat in the book:
The night loneliness engulfed me. I thought of Buddy Brown.
They’d find him somewhere tonight. Walking on a dark street between the hills. In his bed. Sitting alone in his room with a bottle. Sitting alone and laughing, with the brown cigarette cupped in his hand, the weed-sweet smell thick in the room. Maybe now an officer, hand on his holstered gun, was walking toward Buddy Brown in the lonely Greyhound waiting room at Salinas while the heavy-eyed soldiers and huddled Mexicans watched. Maybe a state highway patrol car was flagging down the MG on 101. Night thoughts. Night thoughts on a bunk, scratching flea bites.
They wouldn’t find him. It was a night truth, one of those things that you know as you lie awake toward dawn. Maybe they’d look for him, but they wouldn’t find him.
I moved restlessly on the sagging bunk.
In Revision & Self-Editing for Publication, I wrote a section called “The Secret Ingredient: Honor.” I think we are hardwired to look for honor in others and to want to act honorably ourselves when the chips are down. When Big Red Kearney shows up in the story, there is a bond of honor that he strikes with Jim, recognizing that Jim is not a punk like Buddy Brown. When this bond comes to light, it makes you root for Jim all the more.
I won’t describe what it is, lest you want to read the book. The last chapter is short, doing its job and no more. There is no anticlimax. And for my money, it ends just right, with what I call resonance. It’s that feeling of satisfaction that the last note is perfect and extends in the air after you close the book.
I work on my endings more than any part of my stories. I want to leave the reader feeling like the whole trip has been worth it, right up to and including the very last line. I will sometimes rewrite my last pages ten, twenty, even thirty times.
I’m not saying these eleven items are the only way to write a page-turner, but if you can get all of them in a book, a page-turning result would be practically guaranteed.
I was sitting contentedly at one of my branch offices (with the round green sign and coffee service) when I overheard a curly-headed young man say, “The only way to learn how to write is to write!”
His female companion nodded with the reverential gaze of the weary pilgrim imbibing the grand secret of the universe from a wizened guru on a Himalayan summit. I dared not break the soporific spell. Even so, I was tempted to slide over and say, “And the only way to learn how to do brain surgery is to do brain surgery.”
Friends, it is too simplistic to say, “Writing makes you a better writer.” That’s only partially right. It might make you a better typist. But most writers want to produce prose that other people will actually buy. For that you need more than a clacking keyboard, as essential as that may be to the career-minded writer.
Bobby Knight, the legendary basketball coach and tormenter of referees, had a wise saying: “Practice doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.”
That's so true. If what you ingrain in your muscle memory are bad habits, you are not moving toward competence in your sport. In point of fact, you're hurting your chances of becoming the best you can be. You have to learn, and then keep writing. But you always have to be learning and studying along the way.
When I was learning basketball, I made sure my shot was fundamentally sound: elbow in, hands properly placed, perfect spin on the ball. I became one of the great shooters of my generation, or at least in the history of Taft High School.
By way of contrast, I'd play against kids who had goofy, elbow-out, sidespin shots that had never been analyzed or tweaked. These players were never a long-term threat.
So, let's get a few things straight about getting better at this craft:
As a kid I'd check out basketball books from the library and study them. Then I'd practice what I studied on my driveway. I'd watch players like Jerry West and Rick Barry, and observe their technique. Later on, I received coaching, and I once went to John Wooden's basketball camp. I played in endless pickup games, and afterward I'd think about how I played and what I could do to improve.
Writers learn their craft by reading novels and picking up techniques. They also learn by reading books on writing. Then they practice what they have learned. They get coaching from editors and go to writers conferences. They write every day and, after they write, they think about how they wrote and what they can do to improve.
Every now and then some self-designated teacher somewhere will act the contrarian, and say a writer should forget about “rules” and the study of craft. Rules only choke off your creativity. Burn all those Writer's Digest books!
It's a silly straw man argument.
First, they use the word rules as if writing craft teachers (such as your humble correspondent) lay them out as law. But no one ever does that. We talk about the techniques that work because they have been proven to do so over and over again in books that sell. And even if a technique is so rock solid someone calls it a rule, we always allow that rules can be broken if—and only if—you know why you're breaking them and why doing so works better for your story.
What creativity mavens should endorse is this: Creativity and the “wild mind” (Natalie Goldberg's phrase) are the beginning, but not the end, of the whole creative enterprise. One of the skills the selling writer needs to develop is how to unleash the muse at the right time and then whip her material into shape for the greater needs of the story and the marketplace for that story.
That's why structure is so important. Structure enables story to get through to readers—you know, the ones who dish out the lettuce? That's why I call structure “translation software for your imagination.” The no-structure mob may, every now and then (and almost always by accident) produce an “experimental” novel that gains some traction with critics (but rarely with readers). But the other 99 percent of such work fails to sell. I know many writers would love to be able to simply wear a beret, sit at Starbucks all day, and have whatever they write go out to the world and bring in abundant bank and critical accolades.
Not going to happen.
Meanwhile, more and more writers who have taken the time to study the craft are happily selling their books in this new, open marketplace we have.
To gain traction in this game, you would do well to consider the three Ps: passion, precision, and productivity.
Passion. You find the kind of stories you are burning to tell. For me, it's usually contemporary suspense. I love reading it, so that's mostly what I write. But I also believe a writer can pick a genre and learn to love it the same way people in an arranged marriage sometimes love each other. The key is to find some emotional investment in what you write. But that's only the first step.
Precision. Eventually successful writers know precisely where the niche is for the books they write. They spend some time studying the market. That's how all the pulp writers and freelancers of the past made a living. Dean Koontz at one time wanted to be a comic novelist like Joseph Heller. But when his war farce didn't sell, he switched markets. He went all-in with thrillers. He's done pretty well at this.
Productivity. Finally, selling writers produce the words. These words won't be wasted. They will be making them better writers, because they have studied the craft and keep on studying.
The fun part of writing is being totally wild and writing in the zone. The work part of writing is shaping up the material so it has the best chance to connect with the market.
Therefore, writing friends, don't be lulled into thinking all you have to do each day is traipse through the tulips of your fertile imaginings, fingers following along on the keyboard, recording every jot and tittle of your genius. If you are writing for income as well as joy, write smart.
Write for the ages. Edit for the grocery store.
Once I made the decision to become a writer, I went after it with everything I had. There would be no going back, no surrender. In this I found myself feeling like one of my writing heroes, Jack London.
London was a self-taught writer who achieved success through an iron will and disciplined production. He also wrote one of the best novels about a writer, the largely autobiographical Martin Eden. There are long passages that get inside the writer’s mind and heart, and also chronicle London’s own efforts as a young man struggling to teach himself to write fiction. Let’s take a look at a few of those.
[Martin] went farther in the matter. Reading the works of men who had arrived, he noted every result achieved by them, and worked out the tricks by which they had been achieved—the tricks of narrative, of exposition, of style, the points of view, the contrasts, the epigrams; and of all these he made lists for study. He did not ape. He sought principles. He drew up lists of effective and fetching mannerisms, till out of many such, culled from many writers, he was able to induce the general principle of mannerism, and, thus equipped, to cast about for new and original ones of his own, and to weigh and measure and appraise them properly.
When I started my writing journey I went to a local used bookstore and picked up an armload of thrillers by King, Koontz, Grisham, and others. As I read these books. I marked them up, wrote in the margins, talked to myself about what I was discovering, made notes about the techniques—sometimes on napkins or other scraps of paper. I still hang on to all of these notes.
In similar manner he collected lists of strong phrases, the phrases of living language, phrases that bit like acid and scorched like flame, or that glowed and were mellow and luscious in the midst of the arid desert of common speech. He sought always for the principle that lay behind and beneath. He wanted to know how the thing was done; after that he could do it for himself. He was not content with the fair face of beauty. He dissected beauty in his crowded little bedroom laboratory, where cooking smells alternated with the outer bedlam of the Silva tribe; and, having dissected and learned the anatomy of beauty, he was nearer being able to create beauty itself.
I have a notebook full of examples of great flights of style. I’ve copied, by hand, passages I’ve admired. The object was to get the sound of sentences in my head and expand my stylistic range.
He was so made that he could work only with understanding. He could not work blindly, in the dark, ignorant of what he was producing and trusting to chance and the star of his genius that the effect produced should be right and fine. He had no patience with chance effects.
This resonates with me, because I’ve often heard the advice that you should shun craft study and just write. Like you should shun medical school and just perform surgery. As I said in the previous section, good writing should be a marriage between writing and the study of the craft.
He wanted to know why and how. His was deliberate creative genius, and, before he began a story or poem, the thing itself was already alive in his brain, with the end in sight and the means of realizing that end in his conscious possession. Otherwise the effort was doomed to failure.
Jack London knew what he wanted before he started to write. He knew the plot before he began to write, and he developed the tools to pull it off. Now, I love all you pantsers out there. I want you to succeed. Just beware the perils and trust that your left brain is actually part of your head, too. Give it a listen every once in awhile.
On the other hand, he appreciated the chance effects in words and phrases that came lightly and easily into his brain, and that later stood all tests of beauty and power and developed tremendous and incommunicable connotations. Before such he bowed down and marveled, knowing that they were beyond the deliberate creation of any man. And no matter how much he dissected beauty in search of the principles that underlie beauty and make beauty possible, he was aware, always, of the innermost mystery of beauty to which he did not penetrate and to which no man had ever penetrated.
There are times that something may “work,” even if you don’t know why. So go with it, try it, let that character or section of prose fly off your fingertips. Just be ready to “kill the darling” if enough people tell you it ain’t working. I’ve reached for many a metaphor that my lovely wife has told me is more confusing than enlightening. She is almost always right about this.
He knew full well ... that the mystery of beauty was no less than that of life—nay, more that the fibres of beauty and life were intertwisted, and that he himself was but a bit of the same nonunderstandable fabric, twisted of sunshine and star-dust and wonder.
The story of Martin Eden proceeds from this point to a tragic ending. I think it’s because Martin failed to follow his sense of beauty to a source and instead succumbed to a meaningless Nietzschean void. That matter is best discussed in a classroom.
For our purposes, keep the magic alive in your writing. Don’t you love being a writer? Doesn’t it feel sometimes that you are made up of sunshine, stardust, and wonder? Yes, there are also times you feel like the tar on the bottom of a dockworker’s boot, but you accept that as the price for feeling the other, don’t you?
How are you teaching yourself to write?
I'm a fan of the Parker novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). I've seen all the film versions, like Point Blank with Lee Marvin, The Outfit with Robert Duvall, and Payback with Mel Gibson.
Payback, a 1999 release, is particularly good. But I recently became aware that the director, Brian Helgeland, had the film taken away from him. His version did not test well, so a new third act was written under the eye of Gibson, who was one of the producers.
A few years ago, Helgeland was given permission to release his director's cut. I recently watched it. It is darker and perhaps truer to the feel of the novels. I do think, however, Mel and Paramount were correct. The 1999 version is more satisfying.
But I digress. The reason I'm mentioning this is that the director's cut has an interview with the late, great Westlake on the genesis of Richard Stark and the Parker novels.
Westlake was putting out one hardcover book a year under his own name. Wanting to make a living as a writer, he decided he needed “another string in his bow.” He decided to try the paperback original market, which was geared mostly for a male audience in those days.
He wanted the books to be lean and dark. “Without adverbs,” he said. “Stark.”
That's how he came up with the last name for his pseudonym.
He chose Richard because he liked the iconic noir actor Richard Widmark.
That's how Richard Stark was born.
Then he needed a name for his character. He chose Parker. With a wry smile he said he wished he'd chosen another name, because he spent so much time trying to come up with other ways to say, “Parker parked the car.”
In any event, his agent showed the first book, The Hunter, to Gold Medal, the leading paperback-originals publisher of the day. Rejected. So they tried Pocket Books. An editor with the wonderful name of Bucklin Moon liked it.
The original manuscript ended with Parker in jail. He did not, in other words, get away with it (it being the killing of some bad guys in order to get money owed him from a heist). Moon asked Westlake if he would consider changing the ending so he could make it a series, and if could he turn out three books a year.
Westlake jumped at the chance.
What happened over the next several years is that Richard Stark started selling better than Donald Westlake, which irked Westlake the author ... but pleased Westlake the guy who wanted to make a living.
And so Parker became one of the great characters of hard noir.
When self-publishing took off in 2008, I said it felt like the mass-market boom of the 1950s, where many literary authors, like Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain or Gore Vidal writing as Edgar Box, made extra money.
So take a tip from the past: We can, like Westlake, have more strings in our bows, and self-publishing offers that opportunity. But unlike Westlake and writers of that era, we don't have to use a pseudonym. Independent publishing distinguishes brands by way of cover design, book description, and keyword categories. Writers can therefore gain fans in different categories, making some cross-pollination of fans not only possible, but probable. Readers have found me by way of my vigilante nun series and gone on to sample my historical novels. Imagine that!
Back when I started getting paid for writing, there was only one stream available for the professional scribe. Now there are three: traditional, independent, and a river made up of both.
And that’s good news for writers of every stripe who love to write and who want to stretch and grow—and make some actual money.
Put more strings in your bow.
There is a lot more pretty good fiction out there than there used to be. With all of the teaching and conferences and blogs that have sprung up over the last twenty years, writers who care about the craft are more equipped than ever to raise the level of their game. So when I go to a conference and see manuscripts, they are generally of a higher quality than I saw back when I started on the circuit. Sure, you’re always going to have manuscripts that are not ready for late night, let alone prime time, but I do think fiction writers in general are turning in more competent material.
That’s a good thing. It’s just not good enough. Because with so much content out there that is okay, a writer has to find ways to do better than okay in order to thrive. They have to find ways to go deeper.
When I say “deeper,” I mean deeper for the reader. We want to weave a fictive dream, make it vivid, and stop doing things that jolt them out of the trance. That’s one of the big reasons for studying the craft—learning to spot the “speed bumps” that jolt a reader, even a little bit, out of your dream.
Now, dreams are experienced emotionally and, only later, analyzed for meaning. It’s the same with fiction. We want the readers to be emotionally engaged and, when the book is over, thinking about what a great ride it was.
So emotion is a big key to going deeper.
Something I emphasize in my workshops is what I call crosscurrents of emotion, where readers experience multiple emotions through a scene or character, and sometimes those emotions are conflicting.
The nice thing about this is readers do not pause to analyze the emotions. They feel them, and the more going on, the better. This makes for a novel they will call awesome or memorable, rather than merely enjoyable.
Crosscurrents of emotion are created in three ways.
Show the characters experiencing conflicting emotions. Let’s say a boy and girl meet, and they are attracted to one another. The boy is a vampire. He wants to kiss the girl but also to suck her blood. You could write that scene emphasizing only the emotion of love. Or only the horror of it. But if you have equally strong currents of bloodsucking lust and incipient romance, you get an almost exponential emotional deepening.
So how do you get at some of these deeper emotions in your fiction? Here are a few exercises I teach in workshops:
Imagine that your lead character is in a nice living room with a big bay window. The window looks out on a lovely garden. There is a chair sitting by the piano. Your lead picks up the chair and throws it through the window. Now ask yourself why. What would make your character do that? It all depends on what kind of character you’ve been writing. But this surprising, shocking action is motivated by something. Brainstorm what that is until you find the motivation that strikes you in the gut.
The police come to where your character lives. They have a search warrant. In your character’s closet is one thing that she never wants anyone to see, ever. What is that thing? What does that tell you about her inner life? Brainstorm that item until you find something fresh and, more important, disturbing.
Now your character is sitting under the hot lights in an old 1940s film noir. There is a tough, cigar-smoking police detective who is haranguing your character, trying to force her to admit something, confess something. What is she trying to hide? When you find out what it is, the thing that she does not want to reveal to anyone, have her fight back. She won’t talk to the bad cop. But she is sweating under those lights. Then the good cop steps in and tells the bad cop to leave the room. He is warm and understanding and your character trusts him. Now she makes her confession. What does she tell this man?
I love this one. Go forward in time twenty years from the end of your novel. If you’ve done a Civil War novel, go to 1885. If you’ve done a sci-fi novel set in 3156, go to 3176. You are now going to play reporter and interview your lead character. If your lead has died in the novel, talk to the ghost. This is called “The Dickens,” because you are going to the future, like Scrooge did.
Sit down with your reporter’s notepad and ask the lead these questions, similar to "How Should Characters Change?" in chapter three:
The Dickens may be done at any time, but it’s especially effective when done after you’ve read your first draft for the first time.
You can do things to create crosscurrents of emotion in the readers themselves. One of the most powerful ways to do this is to give a villain a sympathy factor. As I've already mentioned, this is much more effective than the stereotypical, all-evil-all-the-time bad guy. Readers don’t want to empathize with evil, and that’s a good thing. But they also don’t want to be manipulated. By giving them a fully rounded villain, you create conflicting emotions inside the reader.
The amazing thing is the readers won’t dislike you for that. Instead, they will sense that the whole reading experience has done something to them on the inside. And you know what they’ll do after that? Recommend your book to their friends! That’s the secret to a career, ladies and gentlemen.
Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” The meaning is obvious. Unless you, dear writer, are experiencing something emotionally as you write, your scene will have that much less “vibration” in it. Just as joy is evident when you are telling your tale well, so too is emotional vibrancy.
Remember the opening of Romancing the Stone? Romance writer Joan Wilder (Kathleen Turner) has headphones on, pumping music, as she types the last scene of her work in progress. And by the end of it, she’s crying up a storm.
You need to experience some waterworks, too, as a writer. But you also need to experience any strong emotion as you write a scene.
How do you get there? You place your characters in real conflict. You get inside the viewpoint character’s head. You call upon your own life to experience what that character is experiencing (this is a little exercise method actors call “sense memory”).
Once you’re there, write that scene for all it’s worth. Overwrite it, in fact. You can always “pull back” on the intensity level when you revise.
In short, don’t settle for good enough fiction. Push past the familiar and the easy and the okay. Get emotional!
There are pansters. And then there are pure pantsers.
Pantsers (derived from the idiom “seat of the pants,” as in performing an act solely by instinct) are those writers who do not plan (or plan very little) before they write. These folks love to frolic in the tulips of the imagination. “We get to fall in love with our words every day,” they say. “We are intuitive. Don't rain your outlines on our parade!”
Okay, well, that's one approach to writing a book, and there is nothing sinful about it. I am not saying that this is in any way an invalid method of finishing a manuscript—so long as you recognize the hard work that must follow to shape a readable novel out of this mass of pantsed material. But to any writer or teacher who says writing this way is not only best, but easy, feed them this phrase: Pants on fire!
The “pure pantsers” are a more radical ilk. These are the ones who want to throw away all thought of structure, whether at the beginning or the end. They find structure formulaic and offensive to their artistic sensibilities. They stand on their tables and shout, Off with the shackles of what's been taught all these years! Throw away the tools of the craft! We are the true writers around here! We laugh at you structurally imprisoned slaves! Join us!
So let's have some plain talk about pantsing.
In The Liar’s Bible, Lawrence Block recalls writing one of his Bernie Rhodenbarr mysteries. Larry wrote, and did so without an outline or even the thought of one, then looked up from his manuscript one day and observed:
I had incidents. I had plot elements. I had characters in search of a story. But all manner of things were happening in my book and I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on. Why had a man named Onderdonk inveigled Bernie into appraising his library? What were hairs from a golden retriever doing in the cuffs of a corpse’s pants? Who was the young woman Bernie ran into in the Kroll apartment, and how did she fit into what was going on? Who had stolen Carolyn’s cat, and how, and why? What connected the Mondrian in Onderdonk’s apartment, which someone else had stolen, with the one in the Hewlett Museum, which Bernie was supposed to steal in order to ransom the cat? If I couldn’t answer any of these questions, who could? And if nobody could, how could I keep on writing the book? ...
… For a time I persisted, telling myself to Trust The Process, and feeling all the while like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis. Then, with 175 pages written and a maximum of 75 left in which to Wrap Things Up, I stopped writing and threw up my hands. And my lunch.
All pantsers face this at some point. They have to wade into that mass of verbiage and excreta and figure out what's good, what's dreck, what fits, what doesn't, and where the story is going and how to help it get there. But if they have been told to “forget about structure,” they are lost at sea with no navigation tools in a leaky boat.
Sometimes I have to fire up my rescue dinghy and motor out there with a life jacket.
I once consulted with a #1 New York Times best-selling author. She called on me because she's a fan of Plot & Structure and needed help getting a novel idea into shape. The book was fighting her, as she put it. The structure felt off and she had pages due to her publisher.
So we sat down for three hours and hashed it out. It was easy duty for me because she understands structure. She's studied it. She's used it. She knows it.
So I helped her push her protagonist through the first Doorway of No Return, into Act II, in a much stronger way. There was a subplot that wasn’t working, so we dug deeper into the characters and their motivations, and that solved it.
And since this was the first book in a series, we looked ahead to future books and planted important material in this one.
Her book has since been published and hit the New York Times Bestseller list.
After that meeting I had another consultation, this time with a new writer. He has a pantser's mind, and it shows. He writes pages and pages, and his imagination soars ... but he goes off on tangents. Ideas burst out of him, but he has no idea what to do with them, how to form them into a coherent story. When I sat down with him, he said, with obvious frustration, “I know I can write, but I don't know where this story is going!”
So I walked him through some key questions, based on what I call signpost scenes. These scenes are critical to your story, and you need to be writing (even pantsing!) toward them as you go. After I prodded him with a few “What ifs,” he started to get it. He began to see the structure of the whole plot laid out in his mind. He was excited. He could feel the strength that structure gave him, and the direction: He now knows what kind of scenes to write so that they are organic and related to the plot. He is not just spinning his scribal wheels.
So, I am not telling you to stop pantsing your way through a manuscript. I am telling you that at some point you have to face structure because if you don't, you're going to end up with a novel that doesn't sell, except by accident. (Yes, accidents happen, but that's no way to build a career.)
Sure, there are some writers who say they don't ever think about structure and they do just fine. I believe about 10 percent of them. These, I believe, are the lucky ones. They can intuit their way to a novel that works. Maybe even on the first draft (you can choose to hate Lee Child at this point). But the structure is always there, even if they don't plan for it. They've simply got it in their writing bones.
But the overwhelming majority of authors need to study and utilize structure and technique. I recall a sad story about a talented writer (his prose was superb) who inked a deal for a three-book thriller series. The first book came out and bombed, and as a consequence, the big publisher let the other two “die on the vine.”
I read that first book and my heart just sank for the guy, because his structure was off. He made some obvious craft mistakes up front which resulted in a dull first act (which you really want to avoid in the thriller genre). I wish I could have been his editor, because with a little help, so much of the trouble could have been avoided.
Here's the key to everything: You must put your original voice, vision, style, spice, characters, love, and passion into a story that, structurally, helps readers feel what you want them to feel.
That's what the craft of structure is about. It's not to limit you, the artist. It's to set free your story so an actual audience can enjoy it.
So go ahead and pants your way through a first draft if you like. But after that, put on bib overalls and get your tools out and start working on the structure.
You may wish to ignore this advice. You may seek to pitch a tent in Occupy Storytelling Park, grow a beard, and rail at the passing pedestrians. But understand this: Several of these pedestrians will be writers who know structure and are on their way to the bank to cash their checks.
I was a student at U.C. Santa Barbara, one of the best film studies programs in the country, during the golden age of American movies. The 1970s saw an explosion of great independent films and directors, many of whom were picked up by major studios. Our intimate band of film majors had the opportunity to talk with exciting new directors like Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, Lina Wertmuller, and Alan Rudolph.
But this was also the time when many of the great directors of the past were still alive, and they also came up for a visit. I got to chat with film giants like King Vidor, Rouben Mamoulian, and one of my all-time favorite directors, Frank Capra. Also, I met the legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe. Heady times indeed!
Film studies at that time were heavily into the “auteur theory,” which came to us from the French critics. This theory embraced directors with a marked style that was evident in their movies. You can always tell a film by Welles, Hitchcock, Josef von Sternberg, Chaplin, Keaton, and so on. Visual and thematic consistency are the marks of the auteur.
Over the years, though, I have come to appreciate a director who is usually left off the list of the greats. I believe he belongs near the top, and for reasons auteur theorists often reject. He belongs simply because he may be the best storyteller of them all.
William Wyler (1902–1981) was a studio director who refused to get tied down to one genre (usually an auteur requirement). All he did was tell one mesmerizing story after another. If you step back and look at his output, you have to shake your head in wonder. Here are just a few of his titles:
Dodsworth
Jezebel
Wuthering Heights
The Little Foxes
Mrs. Miniver
The Heiress
Classics, all. But look at what else is on his list:
A great Western, The Big Country. A great musical, Funny Girl. The greatest biblical epic of the all, Ben-Hur. Roman Holiday (a romance). The Desperate Hours (suspense). Friendly Persuasion (Americana).
And right in the middle, what I consider to be the greatest film ever produced in America, The Best Years of Our Lives. I rewatched it recently with my family and, once again, was knocked senseless by it. The mark of a classic is that it gets better every time you see it. Best Years is such a film.
So what was it about Wyler? He wasn't hyperactive with his camera work (a lesson many of today's filmmakers could benefit from). Why not? Because he didn't want to get in the way of the story. Instead, what you see in a Wyler film is a respect for the script, a superb direction of actors, and shots that are framed to tell the story, not to shout out what a great director he is—even though those very virtues made him great.
What's the lesson here for writers? Those who really make a dent, be it in the traditional world, independent, or “blended,” are all about story. When I have to choose between a novel that has beautiful style but a dull story and a novel that has a killer plot with serviceable writing, I'll choose the latter every time.
What really rocks for me is when a great plot meets with a style that has what John D. MacDonald called “unobtrusive poetry.” That's how I would describe William Wyler's films.
Above all, tell a great story. Give us characters we can't resist, even the bad ones. Give us “death stakes.” Give us twists, turns, and cliff-hangers. Give us heart.
Don't stress about style. Get excited about the tale. That's the key to the elusive concept of “voice.” If readers get just as excited about your story as you are, you've done it. You've clanged the bell, nabbed the brass ring, knocked a grand slam over the green monster at Fenway.
And if you've never seen The Best Years of Our Lives, get it on DVD or stream it, and schedule a good three-hour stretch to watch it without interruption. You’ll marvel at the genius of William Wyler, storyteller.
In his introduction to Stephen King’s Night Shift, John D. MacDonald explains what it takes to become a successful writer. Diligence, a love of words, and empathy for people are three big factors. But he sums up the primary element this way: “Story. Dammit, story!”
And what is story? It is, says MacDonald, “something happening to somebody you have been led to care about.”
Something happening is the soil in which plot is planted, watered, and harvested for glorious consumption by the reader. Without it, the reading experience can quickly become a dry biscuit, with no butter or honey in sight.
Mind you, there are readers who like dry biscuits. Just not very many.
MacDonald reminds us that without the “something happening,” you do not have a story at all. What you have is a collection of words that may at times fly but ultimately ends up frustrating more than it entertains.
I thought of MacDonald’s essay when I came across an amusing (at least to me) letter that had been written to James Joyce about his novel Ulysses. I found it amusing because the letter was penned by no less a luminary than Carl Jung, one of the giants of twentieth century psychology.
Here, in part, is what Jung wrote to Joyce:
I had an uncle whose thinking was always to the point. One day he stopped me on the street and asked, “Do you know how the devil tortures the souls in hell?” When I said no, he declared, “He keeps them waiting.” And with that he walked away. This remark occurred to me when I was ploughing through Ulysses for the first time. Every sentence raises an expectation which is not fulfilled; finally, out of sheer resignation, you come to expect nothing any longer. Then, bit by bit, again to your horror, it dawns upon you that in all truth you have hit the nail on the head. It is actual fact that nothing happens and nothing comes of it, and yet a secret expectation at war with hopeless resignation drags the reader from page to page … You read and read and read and you pretend to understand what you read. Occasionally you drop through an air pocket into another sentence, but when once the proper degree of resignation has been reached you accustom yourself to anything. So I, too, read to page one hundred and thirty-five with despair in my heart, falling asleep twice on the way … Nothing comes to meet the reader, everything turns away from him, leaving him gaping after it. The book is always up and away, dissatisfied with itself, ironic, sardonic, virulent, contemptuous, sad, despairing, and bitter …
Now, I’m no Joyce scholar, and I’m sure there are champions of Ulysses who might want to argue with Jung and maybe kick him in the id, but I think he speaks for the majority of those who made an attempt at reading the novel and felt that “nothing came to meet them.”
I felt a bit of the same about the movie Cake, starring Jennifer Aniston. When the Oscar nominations came out that year, it was said that Aniston was “snubbed” by not getting a nod. I entirely agree. Aniston is brilliant in this dramatic turn.
The problem the voters had, I think, is that the film feels more like a series of disconnected scenes than a coherently designed, three-act story. The effect is that after about thirty minutes the film begins to drag, even though Aniston is acting up a storm. Good acting is not enough to make a story just as beautiful prose is not enough to make a novel.
Years ago a certain writing instructor taught popular workshops on freeing up the mind and letting the words flow. The workshops were good as far as they went, for this instructor taught nothing about plot or structure. Finally the day came when the instructor wrote a novel. It was highly anticipated, but ultimately tanked with critics and buyers. And me. As I suspected, there were passages of great beauty and lyricism, but there was no compelling plot. No “something happening to someone we have been led to care about.”
Of course, when beautiful prose meets a compelling character, and things do happen in a structured flow, you’ve got everything going for you. But prose should be the servant, not the master, of your tale.
Let me suggest an exercise. Watch Casablanca. Pause the film every ten minutes or so, and ask yourself:
You can analyze any book or film in this way, and it will be a highly instructive and worthwhile pursuit.
Also, consider putting this little sign by your computer:
Story. Dammit, story!
Her name was Susan and we were in the third grade. I saw her for the first time on the playground. She had blonde hair that was almost white, and eyes as blue as a slice of sky laid atop God's light table.
She looked at me and I felt actual heat in my chest.
Remember that scene in The Godfather where Michael Corleone, hiding out in Sicily, sees Appolonia for the first time? His two friends notice the look on his face and tell him, “I think you got hit by the thunder bolt!”
When it happens to us at eight years old, we don't exactly have a metaphor for it, but that's what it was––the thunder bolt. Love at first sight!
I remember the ache I felt the rest of the day. My life had changed, divided into two periods (admittedly of not too lengthy duration)—before Susan and after Susan.
Now what? Having no experience with love, I wondered what the next step was supposed to be. How did love work itself out when your mom was packing your lunches and your allowance was twenty-five cents a week?
I'd seen The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn. He climbed up the vines to Maid Marian's balcony. Was that a plan? Not in Woodland Hills, California, a suburb of mostly one-story ranch-style homes. Clearly the balcony strategy was out.
I had also seen the 1938 version of Tom Sawyer (I was getting most of my life lessons from movies and Classics Illustrated comic books) and was enamored with his love for Becky Thatcher. And what had Tom done to impress Becky? Why, he showed off, of course.
There was my answer. I would show off in front of Susan.
What was I good at? Kick ball. Athletic prowess would be my ticket into Susan's heart. So out on the playground I made my voice loud and clear when I came up for my kicks. Susan was usually nearby playing four square.
And every now and then we'd make eye contact. That's when I'd kick that stupid ball all the way to the fence.
Yet I was shy, afraid to talk to her directly. I mean, what was I going to say? Want to see my baseball cards, baby? How about joining me for a Jell-O at lunch? Hey, that nurse's office is really something, isn't it?
Flummoxed, I thought of Susan for weeks without ever exchanging a word with her. She had no problem with that, it seemed. But she knew I liked her. The rumor mill at school was a fast and efficient communication system. Which only made me more embarrassed.
I considered running away and joining the circus, but my parents were against it.
Then one day circumstances coalesced and the stars aligned.
School was out and kids were heading for the gate to walk home or get picked up. I usually went out the front gate. Susan went out the back, and this day I fell in with that company and quickened my pace to get next to her. Heart pounding, I said something suave like, “Hi.” I don't recall that she said anything, but at once I found we were side by side, walking down the street.
I started talking about our teacher, Mr. McMahon, who was tall and imposing and, to third graders, seemed somewhat mean (thus in hallways and safely out on the playground, we referred to him, in whispered tones, as “Mr. McMonster”).
Susan said nothing. I started to get more confident. Maybe, just maybe, she was interested in what I had to say. And maybe, just maybe, oh hope of all hopes, she actually liked me back.
All of that showing off was about to pay dividends!
And then came one of those moments you never forget, that burn into your memory banks with a searing, permanent heat. Susan turned to me and spoke for the first time. And this is what she said:
“Just because I'm walking with you doesn't mean you're my boyfriend.”
It was the way she said boyfriend that did it. It dripped with derision and perhaps a bit of mockery. If I could have found a gopher hole, I would have dived in, hoping for a giant subterranean rodent to eat me up and end my shame.
This all happened fifty years ago, yet I can still see it, hear it, and feel it as if it were last week.
Is that not why some of us are writers? To create scenes that burn like that, with vividness and emotion, rendering life's moments in such a way as to let others experience them? To share some of our own past in a meaningful way? Like first love. We never forget it. And first rejection––it never goes away.
I want my fiction to create memorable moments for my readers and thus, even if it's only in some small way, help them through this cockeyed existence. Even if it's “only entertainment,” that's something I think we need. “In a world of so much pain and fear and cruelty,” writes Dean Koontz in How to Write Best Selling Fiction, “it is noble to provide a few hours of escape.” And the way into that escapism is to create emotional moments that seem real and vibrant and even life altering. We tap into that in our writing by going back to our own moments and translating them for fictional purposes.
Thus Susan was part of my becoming who I am and how I write.
So Susan, my first love, wherever you are, thank you. Maybe I wasn't your boyfriend, but you taught me what it's like to love and lose. I can use that. All of life is material!
I hope you're well. I hope you've found true and lasting love, like I have. I want you to know I hold you no ill will.
But always remember this: I'm still the best kick ball player you ever saw.
On a cool April night in 1950, a young actor got the chance to do a scene in the Actor’s Studio, in front of the legendary Lee Strasberg. This was the Valhalla of all up-and-coming actors in New York. It wasn’t easy to get a scene here, let alone be invited to join.
The scene called for this young actor to portray a soldier dying of gangrene. When the actor finished, Strasberg proceeded to tell him he had not sufficiently portrayed the pain of someone dying of this condition.
The actor interrupted him. He said that he, Strasberg, was the one who was misinformed. You see, this actor had been a Marine in combat during World War II and had seen soldiers dying of gangrene. He knew that in the final stages they felt no pain at all.
Furious at being contradicted in front of the class, Strasberg told the actor to leave and never return. The actor responded with a two-word exit line before storming off.
This young actor’s name was Lee Marvin. From that point on, he would infuse his acting jobs with whatever truth was inside him. And what was inside him was a volcano.
Growing up, Marvin had attention deficit disorder and dyslexia in a time when no one really knew how to deal with them. More discipline was the only prescription at the time. No wonder Marvin hated school and was constantly in trouble. He was always fighting. Once, as a teenager in a boarding school that his parents sent him to in desperation, his roommate threw some trash out the window. Marvin told him that was a stupid thing to do. The roommate called him a son of a bitch. Marvin later recalled, “I said, ‘Call me that again and I’ll throw you out the window.’ He called me it again and I threw him out the window. So, they kicked me out of school.”
With fighting such a constant in his life, it should be no surprise that, at age seventeen, Lee Marvin joined the Marines just after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was a right fit for him, and he toughed out his training and eventually shipped out for action in the South Pacific. But what he saw there was not the glamour of war often depicted in the movies. He saw life-altering horror. He was a sniper with many kills. He also engaged in hand-to-hand combat, wiped out machine gun nests, and was almost killed on several occasions. When a Japanese soldier came at his face with a bayonet, Marvin took it away and bayoneted the soldier “all the way to the gun barrel . . .”
A climactic battle in Saipan resulted in 80 percent casualties in Marvin’s unit. Marvin was wounded and ended up in a hospital. He was twenty-one years old.
After the war, Marvin dealt with post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, and a four-pack-a-day cigarette habit for the rest of his life.
But American men of that era were expected to “soldier on” in life, and that’s what Marvin did. Like so many returning vets, he had a hard time finding a viable career. He spent time digging ditches and hand-threading pipes. And drinking.
Then one morning in 1946, Marvin found himself sleeping off a drunken stupor in a public park in Woodstock, New York. A Red Cross nurse woke him up and started talking about community service. Next thing he knew he was involved in a local Red Cross benefit at the town hall, a production entitled (appropriately) “Ten Nights in a Barroom.”
He caught the acting bug. He did what most actors did in those days, pounding the pavement in New York. He got some work, told Lee Strasberg off, and later headed to Hollywood where he heard there was money. He started landing small roles and then turned up on an early Dragnet episode. Jack Webb, star and producer of the cop show, was so impressed with Marvin’s performance that he made sure influential people around town saw it.
Marvin’s breakout role was Larry Vance, a mob strong arm in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. In a chilling moment that made movie history, Larry gets mad at his girlfriend, played by Gloria Graham. She’s been yapping to a cop. He throws a pot of scalding coffee in her face. Marvin became a steady movie heavy after that, with an occasional touchdown in comedy.
He did a TV series, M Squad. He did it for the money and in order to increase his name recognition. But he didn’t like it. Later he said, “Creatively, an actor is limited in TV. The medium is great for pushing goods. Sell the product, that’s the goal ... But, I’m not interested in pushing the products; I’m interested in Lee Marvin, and where he’s going as an actor.”
We writers need to ask ourselves the same thing. Are we just trying to push a product, or do we have somewhere we want to go as a writer? Are we playing it safe? Or is there a truth we have that is burning to get out?
When Marvin was cast as the drunken gunfighter in Cat Ballou (1965), no one thought the movie or the role would do that much. But it became a surprise hit, and Marvin’s hilarious performance (given reality by his own struggle with the bottle) ended up winning him an Academy Award for Best Actor of the Year.
And that, in turn, rocketed Marvin into star status. After that he took on some iconic roles, including the tough major in The Dirty Dozen and the remorseless thief bent on revenge in Point Blank.
But I think my favorite Marvin performance is in the underappreciated Western, Monte Walsh (1970). It’s an elegiac tribute to a cowboy in the fading West who refuses to give in. In a way, it sums up what the actor was all about. There’s a point in the film when Walsh is offered a part in a Wild West show, but he’d have to dress up in gaudy duds and put on a false front. Despite the money, comfort, and security this would offer him, he refuses, saying, “I ain’t spittin’ on my whole life.”
Walsh lived his life with purpose and truth he was willing to stand up for.
When you can get that quality into your art—acting, fiction, painting, song—you are leaving behind something more than product pushing.
What kind of artist do you want to be?