Summer of the Disco Tent

I let this blog slide for a few months while my pinkie stopped being numb. It's still numb, but the malady has spread to areas above the neckline.

Summer has slithered past, promising one thing, delivering it without comment and preparing to step aside for autumn.

Autumn is an especially nice time to be a writer, or even a person who sees the world through what might be a writer's eyes. The days are shorter, the shadows longer, and the breeze threatens to become a howling wind right about the time we decide to carve triangles into the front of an orange squash.

Turning it and its habitat into an eerie corral of creatures.

That's the problem with the whole story. It's always the same creatures. People only know the creatures they've experienced and most of them are dreadfully uninteresting.

The ones that matter are inside the mind. Scary stuff, that.

For the moment, the scratching, growling, snarling thing on the other side of the tree is content. In another couple of months, it will emerge, turning autumn into a graveyard of fear and anxiety.

That should be fun. And the mums will be in full bloom.

I had the opportunity to take part in an essay contest that described life for a solitary person on a deserted island, filled with horror. I didn't win. I wanted to win. Honestly, I don't know how a deserted island could contain any horror that didn't contribute to it being deserted in the first place. But anyway, I decided to show up there and get the scoop.

There is a germ of a story emerging. Let me think it over and get back to you.

A winning idea

I spent the last few weeks not writing, not because I had no interest in it but because the world got more interesting.

As we used to say in market research, "IN WHAT WAY?"

The groundhog emerged from hibernation, which is always a treat. I really don't think it needs to get more interesting than that. It's not that he emerged, it's that nobody seems to know where he emerged from.

But my typewriter fingers are itchy lately and the inevitable 'gee, it's too nice to stay inside and write' is probably gonna do me in. Maybe not.

I wrote a raunchy 240-page novel a dozen years ago about a guy who wins the lottery and runs into a whole series of miscreants, thieves, buggers and deviants on his way to nowhere sensible. I liked the book, some of the characters and the plot.

I think I might try that plot idea again with a different motive in mind. I always wondered what would become of me if I ever won the lottery. Most of us wonder that. I think it's odd that we all say we wouldn't change. In real life, you would. In my book, I don't have to. The fun part of creating characters based on yourself is that you can make it anything you like.

See, what doubles as writing or story-telling is a matter of taking the mundane, adding two somewhat interesting people, have them do something and off you go. The guy winning the lottery has many more options in such a story.

I like options. You meet the strangest people on the way to the park.

Winning the lottery is not mundane but you still need to deal with groundhogs, who do not need the money.

I have no idea, yet

I just finished a novel that started out as a paranormal suspense yarn and became something of a murder mystery. It's about writing what I know as opposed to what I think I know.

The main character wasn't clear to me until the second chapter and I created her out of a notion that she needed to be somewhat different. So I made her young, black and naive.

Of the three, the part that I resemble is naive, though not so much these days. In any case, it was fun taking this character through a maze of peculiar events, eclectic notions and a brutal winter in a place that probably exists in this form.

I have no idea what it will resemble when it's undergone its first back-read. I think the characters are somewhat one dimensional. The story is a bit of a stretch but -- as murder mysteries go -- it's feasible.

I am happy I did this thing and I hope I can rescue it.

The problems that remain are whether I see this story as it should be or whether I see it as I think it should be.

Writing is fun; self-criticism is less enjoyable.

I am excited about sharing it with a couple of beta readers who I trust will be harsh, kind, honest and abundantly generous with their praise of my writing skill.

One likes to hear that, doesn't one?

Weather as a plot device

Climate, whether it is changing too fast to suit you or is too slow showing off its really cool stuff, is an important part of a story.

The nastier the better if you want to churn up some deviant behavior. Nothing like a blizzard or flood to turn a tough time into a really bad day.

The best part of winter is that it happens partly around the Christmas holidays, which can create issues with people who are, say ... in need of government help.

"The director is out of town until the fifth of January. Is there someone else who can help you?"

"The damned dam is about to collapse and I NEED the director's permission to do ... um ... who else can help me?"

Conversely, summer heat and humidity are nice tools for driving rural stories. (Hot town, summer in the city.)

So you get that sort of option when creating dramatic tension with weather as a primary component of the yarn you want to spin.

Volcanoes, earthquakes, tidal waves are all interesting and powerful devices, but frequently they are major events that create settings. It's less likely you can write effectively about a volcano since I'd wager you have never experienced one. The last tidal wave to visit Indiana was ... yeah, you got no idea about that either, do you?

A gloomy winter helps develop characters. Unless you live in San Diego, you should be able to communicate that.

Pay some attention to the weather when starting a novel, remembering that today's blizzard is tomorrow's lost dog in the snow. Weather might not be the primary driver of the story but it adds sidebars and makes the routine somewhat unpredictable.

And the real weather you experience has affected your emotional outlook on life. Prepare to understand yourself.

Six of one ...

Lucky for me, most of what I read is bereft of cliches. I try to avoid sports reporting, political writing in conjunction with the stock market and almost anything dealing with arguments between birth control users and people who think Viagra is birth control.

That leaves me with real writing. Back in my years, I fought gamely against lazy headline writers and reporters who thought the clever turn of a phrase was unique. Borrowing from last year's issue doesn't make it anything but tedious.

In my attempts to create solid narrative, I find myself noticing what I write, wondering if the cliche (or overdone phrase) is useful or if it's a roadblock to a better verb,

I like verbs.

Naturally, a quippy turn of a phrase when least expected can create some interesting literary abrasion. It can help ease the tedium.

So long as it isn't a crutch. Depending on the cliche to tell a story suggests something is missing, that mainly being depth in the development of the character.

I think characters speak in cliches, but they're not likely advancing the story if they do much of it and it suggests strongly they aren't very interesting.

By and large, I avoid cliches like the plague.

Ben Hur: more than a movie

How do you describe setting?

I think the secret lies in some of the older writing, meaning ... from the 19th century. It's important to understand that writers from the days before television or even cinema had few visual images of the worlds they described. Unless they'd been there -- and some of the more prominent writers of the day did travel a lot -- they had only other books, maps and acquaintances as reference. Diaries and journals helped. Photographs were less useful. 

One can see a mountain and visualize life on it. To visualize it and describe it, two topics. The reader almost certainly had not seen this mountain. It's also important to remember that extensive travel was, depending on the area, not easily achieved by the masses.

In fact, most people of the time could scarcely afford the book, let alone the dream of experiencing what it described.

Some of that deals with verbs. They make birds fly, people sing and jump and dance. They make bears roar and trains rumble. I still don't know how many ways there are (were) to describe what people do when they are standing around, talking to each other.

Still, the classics of the 19th century can give us some direction. Here is a snippet from the 1884 novel "Ben Hur, A Tale of the Christ," by Gen. Lew Wallace. The general has taken us to a land of fantasy, nothing like the landscape he knew as a child in Indiana or later, as a military man in faraway places like New or Old Mexico.

But you are there with this paragraph.

When the dromedary lifted itself out of the last break of the wady, the traveler had passed the boundary of El Belka, the ancient Ammon. It was morning-time. Before him was the sun, half curtained in fleecy mist; before him also spread the desert; not the realm of drifting sands, which was farther on, but the region where the herbage began to dwarf; where the surface is strewn with boulders of granite, and gray and brown stones, interspersed with languishing acacias and tufts of camel-grass. The oak, bramble, and arbutus lay behind, as if they had come to a line, looked over into the well-less waste and crouched with fear.

Modern writers might describe this scene in much the same way, but the cadence of the writing will have changed. That's natural. It's what makes the craft so appealing.  

Wallace was a master at painting a scene. Again, the language and cadence of the day:

At this age the apartment alluded to would be termed a saloon. It was quite spacious, floored with polished marble slabs, and lighted in the day by skylights in which colored mica served as glass. The walls were broken by Atlantes, no two of which were alike, but all supporting a cornice wrought with arabesques exceedingly intricate in form, and more elegant on account of superadditions of color -- blue, green, Tyrian purple, and gold. Around the room ran a continuous divan of Indian silks and wool of Cashmere. The furniture consisted of tables and stools of Egyptian patterns grotesquely carved. 

Setting, and what makes it important. Wallace nails it here:

His shoes were brought him, and in a few minutes Ben-Hur sallied out to find the fair Egyptian. The shadow of the mountains was creeping over the Orchard of Palms in advance of night. Afar through the trees came the tinkling of sheep bells, the lowing of cattle, and the voices of the herdsmen bringing their charges home. Life at the Orchard, it should be remembered, was in all respects as pastoral as life on the scantier meadows of the desert.

If you only saw the movie, you missed the best part of this story.

Verbs that aren't

A billion years ago, a writing coach told me that if I wanted to succeed at the craft on any level, that I should avoid the following:

IS
ARE
WAS
WERE

The four weakest verbs in the English language.
The first thought was (is) that there are (is) not much way to avoid that.
Well, yes there is (was).

The trick, you see, is (was) to use verbs that sing, that drive the story. The better the verb, the better the description. In a sense, the way to make better sentences is (was) to use verbs that do something.

There is a tree in the yard.
The tree in the yard stood like a gigantic monument to time.
It is (was) still a tree, but we have some idea of its dimensions, once we realize that the tree stands in the yard, which I suppose is (was) different from it lying on its side.

Powerful verbs help a writer because powerful verbs create a need to produce better descriptions. Verbs move our lives.

Try it sometime. Take your average sentence, even one so benign as "I am talking on the phone" and turn it into something far more dramatic.

The best authors seldom rely on is-are-was-were for description.

There are (were) times when those verbs are (were) helpful.

Try to think of something better.