Setting as Character

 I have been working through a final draft on my latest long-form piece, and it's had me thinking a lot about setting. As a result I've begun drafting a post for Sleuthsayers on the importance of scene-setting and the need to get it right. I'll be running that one out next time around. As a table-setter on this topic I've pulled a previous post about "Setting as Character."

This particular post is from 2013, and I think it's aged well if I do say some myself, so I'm reposting it here, in hopes it proves helpful to authors out there wrestling with setting. In two weeks, I'll be back in two weeks to expand further on this topic. - Brian

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Setting. Everyone knows about it. Few people actively think about it.

And that's a shame, because for writers, your setting is like a pair of shoes: if it's good, it's a sound foundation for your journey. If it's not, it'll give you and your readers pains that no orthotics will remedy.

Nowhere is this more true than with crime fiction. In fact strong descriptions of settings is such a deeply embedded trope of the genre that it's frequently overdone, used in parodies both intentional and unintentional as often as fedoras and trench coats.

Used correctly a proper setting can transcend even this role–can become a character in its own right, and can help drive your story, making your fiction evocative, engaging, and (most importantly for your readers) compelling.

Think for a moment about your favorite crime fiction writers. No matter who they are, odds are good that one of the reasons, perhaps one you've not considered before, is their compelling settings.

Just a few contemporary ones that come to mind for me: the Los Angeles of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. The Chicago of  Sara Paretsky, Sean Chercover and Marcus Sakey. Boston seen through the eyes of Robert B. Parker. Ken Bruen's Ireland. Al Guthrie's Scotland. Carl Hiassen's Miami. Bill Cameron's Portland.

And of course there are the long gone settings highlighted in the gems of the old masters. These and others read like lexical snapshots from the past.Who can forget passages like:

The city wasn't pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly city of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters' stacks.

—Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest

Then there was Hammett's most ardent admirer (and in many ways, his successor) Raymond Chandler, a writer of considerable scope and power, was never better than when describing the sun-blasted neighborhoods of 1940s Southern California, the desperation of the region's denizens, and and black tarmac byways both connecting and dividing them in Farewell, My Lovely:

1644 West 54th Place was a dried-out brown house with a dried-out brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree. On the porch stood one lonely wooden rocker, and the afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the cracked stucco wall. A line of stiff yellowish half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

And no one did it better than Ross Macdonald:

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life was a house wren which contested my approach to the veranda.

— Ross Macdonald, Black Money

In each of the passages excerpted above the author has used a description of the setting as a tip-off to the reader as to what manner of characters would inhabit such places. Even hints at what lies ahead for both protagonist and reader.

With Hammett it's the stink of the corruption that always follows on the heels of a rich mineral strike. With Chandler, it's a life worn-out by too much living. And with Macdonald, it's a world and its inhabitants as out of sorts as those hedges that need clipping.

Brilliant thumbnail sketches each. If you haven't read them, you owe it to yourself to do so. And each of them was giving the reader a glimpse of a world they had experienced first-hand, if not a contemporary view, then at least one they could dredge up and flesh out from memory.

With the stuff I write it's not that simple.

In his kind note introducing me to the readers of this blog, our man Lopresti mentioned that when it comes to fiction, my particular bailiwick is historical mystery. In my time mining this particular vein of fiction I've experienced first-hand the challenge of delivering to readers strong settings for stories set in a past well before my time.

How to accomplish this?

It's tricky. Here's what I do.

I try to combine exhaustive research with my own experiences and leaven it all with a hefty dose of the writer's greatest tool: imagination.

"Counting Coup," the first historical mystery story I ever wrote, is about a group of people trapped in a remote southwest Montana railway station by hostile Cheyenne warriors during the Cheyenne Uprising of 1873. I used the three-part formula laid out above.

While pursuing my Master's in history, I'd done a ton of research on the western railroads, their expansion, and its impact on Native American tribes in the region, including the Cheyenne.

I've visited southwestern Montana many times, and the country is largely unchanged, so I had a good visual image to work from.

Imagination!

An example of the end result:

Wash and Chance made it over the rise and and into the valley of the Gallatin just ahead of that storm. It had taken three days of hard riding to get to the railhead, and the horses were all but played out.

The entire last day finished setting their nerves on edge. What with the smoke signals and the tracks of all the unshod ponies they'd seen, there was enough sign to make a body think he was riding right through the heart of the Cheyenne Nation.

Stretching away to north and south below them lay the broad flood plain of the Gallatin. The river itself meandered along the valley floor, with the more slender, silver ribbon of rail line mirroring it, running off forever in either direction. The reds of the tamarack and the golds of the aspen and the greens of the fir created a burst of color on the hills that flanked the river on either side, their hues all the more vivid when set against the white of the previous evening's uncharacteristically early snowfall. 

"Suicide Blonde," another of my historical mystery stories, is set in 1962 Las Vegas. Again, the formula.

I did plenty of research on Vegas up to and including this time when Sinatra and his buddies strutted around like they owned the place.

I lived and worked in Vegas for a couple of years and have been back a few times since. I am here to tell you, Vegas is one of those places that, as much as it changes, doesn't really change.

Imagination!

Which gets you:

Because the Hoover boys had started tapping phones left and right since the big fuss at Apalachin a few years back, Howard and I had a system we used when we needed to see each other outside of the normal routine. If one of us suggested we meet at the Four Queens, we met at Caesar's. If the California, then we'd go to the Aladdin, and so on. We also agreed to double our elapsed time till we met, so when I said twenty minutes, that meant I'd be there in ten. We figured he had a permanent tail anyway, but it was fun messing with the feds, regardless.

The Strip flashed and winked and beckoned to me off in the distance down Desert Inn as I drove to Caesar's. It never ceases to amaze me what a difference the combination of black desert night, millions of lights, and all that wattage from Hoover Dam made, because Las Vegas looked so small and ugly and shabby in the day time. She used the night and all those bright lights like an over-age working girl uses a dimply lit cocktail lounge and a heavy coat of makeup to ply her trade.

Howard liked Caesar's. We didn't do any of the regular business there, and Howard liked that, too. Most of all, Howard liked the way the place was always hopping in the months since Sinatra took that angry walk across the street from the Sands and offered to move his act to Caesar's. Howard didn't really care to run elbows with the Chairman and his pack, he just liked talking in places where the type of noise generated by their mere presence could cover our conversations.

You may have noticed that in both examples used above I've interspersed description of the setting with action, historical references and plot points. That's partly stylistic and partly a necessity. I rarely find straight description engaging when I'm reading fiction (in the hands of a master such as Hemingway, Chandler or Macdonald that's another story, but they tend to be the exception), so I try to seamlessly integrate it into the narrative. Also, since I'm attempting to evoke a setting that is lost to the modern reader in anything but received images, I try to get into a few well-placed historical references that help establish the setting as, say, not just Las Vegas, but early 1960s Las Vegas. Doing so in this manner can save a writer of historical mysteries a whole lot of trying to tease out these sorts of details in dialogue (and boy, can that sort of exposition come across as clunky if not handled exactly right!).

So there you have it: an extended rumination on the importance of one of the most overlooked and powerful tools in your writer's toolbox: setting. The stronger you build it, the more your readers will thank you for it, regardless of genre, regardless of time period.

Because setting is both ubiquitous and timeless. Easy to overdo and certainly easy to get wrong. But when you get it right, your story is all the stronger for it.

And that's it for me. Tune in next time for more on making setting work for you.

See You in Two Weeks!

Fourth Wall Down

I have been reading Montalbano's First Case And Other Stories, (2016) Andrea Camilleri's collection of tales about a Sicilian police officer.  I've enjoyed it a lot but there is one that I want to discuss.  I suppose I should issue a spoiler alert but since the surprise is mentioned on the back cover I won't feel too guilty.

One of the stories stands out from the others because it is much bleaker in subject than the rest.  It shocked me and I was not the only one because Salvo Montalbano stops everything and makes a phone call to a "seventyish man striking the keys of a typewriter in the Roman night."

The author informs his character "I'm just trying to bring myself up to date, Salvo. A little blood on the page never hurt anyone." 

That's called breaking the fourth wall: characters acknowledging that they are indeed characters.

Since then I have been trying to think of other examples in mystery fiction.  I think the most famous occasion comes in John Dickson Carr's novel The Hollow Man (1935) when his detective Dr. Gideon Fell provides "The Locked Room Lecture."  While listing every possible variation on the impossible crime the good doctor explains "we are in a detective story and we don't fool the reader by pretending we're not. Let's not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let's candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to a character in a book."

I did a web search looking for more examples and most of what I found were something different than I was thinking, namely examples of authors writing themselves into their books as characters. Examples include S.S, Van Dine, Kinky Friedman, and Anthony Horowitz.

But getting back to the self-aware characters, Edmund Crispin's detective is Gervase Fen.  In The Moving Toyshop (1946) when he seems to be announcing random phrases he explains that he "was making up titles for Crispin."

I think there are more examples of writers playing this game outside of their fiction.  For example, Marjorie Allingham wrote an essay of sorts called "What to do With an Aging Detective" in which she chats with Lugg, the assistant to her protagonist Albert Campion about the difficulty of the great man getting too old to star in action novels.

The newsletter of the Private Eye Writers of America, Reflections in a Private Eye, often features authors interviewing their own characters.

And I have had a few out-of-story chats with my character Shanks.

But how do you feel about characters, especially series characters, admitting they know what's going on?  Does it damage the suspension of disbelief?

And They Lived Happily Never After

When I was little, before I learned how to read, my dad used to read fables and fairy tales to me before I went to sleep. We had a big book, and each night I would pick a story. Some of them scared the crap out of me (I'm looking at you, "Jack and the Beanstalk"--grinding bones into bread; no wonder I grew up to write crime stories). I wasn't scared just because of the stories themselves but because my dad was good at voices. I loved them.

These days, I think when people think of fairy tales, they picture the Disney version. A poor child with a wicked stepmother wakes up to find that mice cleaned the house for her, then birds tie ribbons in her hair before a fairy godmother turns a pumpkin into a carriage and she's whisked off to a ball and, eventually, the good guys live happily ever after. It's wonderfully fantastic--unless you have musophobia, ornithophobia, or curcurbitophobia. What's curcurbitophobia? Fear of pumpkins. You've now learned your new word of the day. You're welcome.

But the earlier tales by the brothers Grimm and others were far darker. And not animated! Cinderella's stepsisters chopped off their heels and toes to shove their bloody feet into the glass slipper, then birds plucked out their eyes at the royal wedding. Hansel and Gretel escaped cannibalism by fooling the witch with poor eyesight and then pushing her into the hot oven. Rapunzel's prince fell from the tower into a thorn bush, ending up blind. (Too bad there were no eye surgeons in these tales. Those docs would have made a mint.)

It's these darker versions that I expect inspired many of the stories in a new anthology releasing today, Wish Upon A Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales. The book was edited by fellow SleuthSayers Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson. Its description says in part that the authors "reimagine familiar classics where the line between good and evil isn't always clear, dreams don't come true, and there are no happily-ever-afters." 

That is true (sort of) for my story in this book, "Little Red Riding Hood." My tale involves a blind date, a hopeful woman, and one very charming man. Lest you think this suave guy should be in a Cinderella-inspired story (and we have one of them, written by Donna Andrews), don't forget that even wolves can clean up well. My story has some fun Easter eggs I worked in that I hope readers will find and enjoy.

Wish Upon A Crime is available in trade paperback and ebook from the usual online sources, including Bookshop.org. Author Tara Laskowski (who doesn't have a story in the anthology), has called it "Gritty and tense [...] The crime authors here blend a modern, stark reality with the magic lore of old, and as a result bring a new meaning to the word 'grim.'"

The end. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

A Bias Against Biases

            Given the crazy political environment we’re in, I’ve been giving a lot of thought lately to the evil bias twins: negativity bias and confirmation bias.  As with most of our psychological afflictions, these tendencies are rooted in biological evolution.  We tend to overemphasize the bad in life because it made survival more likely.  Worrying about the saber tooth tiger that almost ate us was more beneficial than spending a lot of energy admiring our cave art. 

            Confirmation bias is trickier, but it did help us stick with smart choices, like keeping our hands out of the fire, while ignoring the advice of the shaman who thought a little fire cleansing was good for general health.  On the other hand, the shaman who agreed you shouldn’t move your settlement to the valley next door as you depleted the available resources confirmed the wrong thing. 

            Of the two, I think negativity bias has hobbled more of my family members and social reference groups.  This penchant is significantly reinforced by the media, for whom negativity is mother’s milk.  A bottomless well of attention and renewed subscriptions, of clicks and likes.  I think being aware of imminent or emerging threats is wise, but wallowing in all the bad news distorts reality and undermines the ability to have a little joi amidst all the ennui.

            Historians will tell you that everyone has nearly always thought that life has degenerated, if not gone to hell in a hand basket, and that we’re all doomed.  That each successive generation has also been wealthier, healthier, less subject to horrific wars and chronic deprivation never enters into it.  That doesn’t mean every little thing has improved, or that some things in the past weren’t arguably better, or that progress doesn’t come with a fair amount of regression.  You just have to look at the declining number of free-range children, or the obesity epidemic, or the decrease in pop tunes that feature key changes, to support that view. 

            As to confirmation bias, I’m more attracted to commentators who agree with me than those who don’t.  I read the educated opposers anyway, because I think that’s good mental hygiene, and sometimes I stumble on an argument that shifts my point of view. But I have a diminishing number of years left on this planet, and I’d rather spend this precious time with convivial associations than a bunch of chuds who just make me want to assert my second amendment rights and reach for the nearest cudgel.   

           

            To confess my biases, I feel the mystery/thriller genre is as good, or better, than ever.  I think the form has been dramatically improved by all the women and people of various ethnicities who have come on the scene.  It reminds me of the fifties and sixties when the publishing industry (and academia, and advertising, not coincidentally) started admitting Jewish writers, who revolutionized American fiction.  

            The rising tide of diversity in mystery/thriller writing has risen all boats. 

Yet now, when it comes to what we’d generally call literary fiction, I’m just not feeling it.  I’ve tackled some of the leading fiction writers of recent times, and with the exception of Amor Towles, I’m generally disappointed.  To be more specific, it’s as if they’ve forgotten that plots matter more than obsessive introspection.  That beautiful language can transcend the mundane activities of daily living (maybe go back and review James Joyce), that there’s greater meaning to be perceived from simple human interaction than thwarted expectations. 

I’m not alone in this.  David Brooks did a whole column on the matter.  https://tinyurl.com/eypvzzx5   I don’t necessarily agree with his political thesis, but the numbers underlying the argument are availble from Neilsen. 

At the same time, maybe I’m not giving literary fiction enough of a chance; like Brooks, I’ve only been peaking into the current literary world.  Maybe I should just push through and be pleasantly surprised.  Stop letting bias creep into my prehistoric brain.  (Anyone eager to set me straight with recommendations are urged to comment.)

It could be that literary fiction has gone the way of poetry, ballet, symphonic music and opera.  Settling in as a marginal art form, yet enduring with a hard core of devotees who will keep it alive into the foreseeable future.  I hope that's true, because I want all art forms to survive and thrive, even those I'm not very partial to.  Art tends to evolve toward and away from you, in big, barely noticeable cycles.  The important thing is to keep it all alive.  
            

            Unlike Timothy Chalamet, I adore ballet. Since my mother was a ballet dancer, as is a niece I’m particularly close to, perhaps that formed a positivity bias.  I love a handful of operas, though like hip-hop, some of which I really enjoy, I don’t seek it out as a general rule.  Call it ambivalence bias.  

             As I wrote in a prior post, keeping an open mind is really difficult.  You’re constantly warring against biological determinism – not succumbing to negativity or huddling in comfort with your collection of favorites.  I remember as a younger man telling myself that I wouldn’t be like the old curmudgeons I knew at the time.  That I’d fight, fight against the dying of a flexible mind, the elasticity of a healthy consciousness.

Twenty-Two and Counting

More than a few people have asked me why the cover image of CRIME SCENES, my recently published collection of stories from Level Best Books, is a picture of baseballs, with a bloody thumbprint on one. I can't take credit for the image; that goes to Shawn Reilly Simmons, Level Best's cover design guru. I do quite like it, though. I've written before--in my very first SleuthSayers column, in fact--about the connections I see between baseball, my favorite sport, and my approach to writing. So the picture is appropriate in that way. Beyond that, I like the griminess of it, the black-and-white broken up by the shocking red fingerprint, the dirty, used baseballs. It speaks, I think, to the generally noirish nature of my stories. These are not fresh-from-the-factory baseballs. These baseballs have been places. These baseballs have seen things.

Two of the stories in the book do directly concern baseball. In "Give or Take a Quarter Inch," a retired pitcher must deal with a bizarre ransom demand when his wife is kidnapped. In "Chasing Diamonds," an aging pickpocket and his young apprentice have to pull off a job in the crowd during a Houston Astros home game (at Minute Maid Stadium when I wrote the story, though it's now called Daikin Park).

The pickpocket is on a quest: he wants to attend a game in every major league stadium. As it happens, this is a quest he and I share, though he's a bit ahead of me. He only needs Seattle and Miami to complete his set of thirty. Last week, I was in Kansas City, where I watched the Royals defeat the Mariners five-zip behind a complete-game shutout thrown by Stephen Kolek. Scratching Kauffman Field off my list brought me to twenty-two current MLB parks where I've seen games. Eight to go: Seattle, Miami, Philadelphia, Yankee Stadium, Texas, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Oakland (though I guess, now, that's actually Las Vegas, or will be).

Because of the way my brain works, I'm compelled to add that I've also seen games in five stadiums no longer in use: the original Yankee Stadium, Turner Field in Atlanta, Olympic Stadium in Montreal back when the Expos were a team, the old Busch Stadium in St. Louis, and Milwaukee County Stadium.

What's interesting (at least to me) is that I still feel compelled to complete this checklist, despite the fact that my actual interest in professional baseball, as it's played today, has waned. I still love the basic game itself, but the many rule changes over recent years, mostly aimed at speeding the game up, leave me cold. They also seem a bit pointless. I have yet to meet the person who won't watch a game that lasts three hours, but will watch one that lasts two hours and fifty minutes.

I hate that instant replay is now part of the game (and I say this as a lifelong Cardinals fan who watched my team lose the 1985 World Series due to an indisputably blown call in game 6, not that I hold a grudge). The fact that, as of this year, even ball and strike calls can be challenged is, in my opinion, inane, yet another intrusion of AI into a field where it isn't needed. I was recently at a White Sox game that went into extra innings, using the new rule that extra innings begin with a runner on second, an innovation that only disrupts the structure of the game and dissipates any tension that's been created. In Bull Durham (the best film about baseball ever made), Kevin Costner's Crash Davis says there should be a constitutional amendment banning AstroTurf and the designated hitter. AstroTurf has, thankfully, become a thing of the past, but the designated hitter is now used throughout MLB, rendering much of the strategy and subtlety of previous generations moot.

Kauffman Stadium

I miss the days when pretty much every team had franchise players who spent their careers in one town, their abilities and personality shaping the entire team and the way they played: Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken, Ozzie Smith, Willie Stargell. No doubt the players are better off now, but it's hard to generate much affection for a team when the players get reshuffled every year. My heart broke a little when Albert Pujols left St. Louis, and has never fully healed.

All that said, actually being at a game is still exciting, and many of today's parks are beautiful. You still get the big, soulless concrete donuts--Toronto, Tampa--but there are a lot of parks that have been thoughtfully integrated into their neighborhoods and built with character and history in mind, as in San Diego or Baltimore. And of course there's always a special thrill in seeing someplace like Fenway or Wrigley, where decades of ghosts are almost visible on the basepaths. Plus, there are still players and moments that can thrill. I was at the Nationals game in 2018 when Max Scherzer notched his 300th strikeout of the year, and I'll never forget the game in Anaheim with a crowd--many of whom had come from Japan--absolutely rabid to see the unbelievable pitcher/slugger Shohei Ohtani. My favorite memory may be from a 2001 game in Atlanta when Cal Ripken, playing in his final year, hit two homers, earning a standing ovation from the Braves fans.

To bring this all back to writing, my wife suggested a while ago that I commemorate my quest by writing stories set at every ballpark I actually see. It's a good idea, but one I've been slow to act on. There's Houston in "Chasing Diamonds," of course, but the only other park I've worked into a story so far is San Diego's Petco Park, where an obsessed cop trails a suspect in my "Taking the Hit," published a few years back in Guilty Crime Magazine. I'm working on a story set in Dodger Stadium now, though, and who knows? Maybe in a few years I'll come out with Rounding the Bases, a collection of thirty stories set in thirty parks.

Rate Field, home of the White Sox

Anybody got a better idea for a title?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Speaking of publications . . . 

Aside from Crime Scenes, I've gone the first five months of 2026 with no stories published, which is a long dry spell for me. It's about to end, though, as I have two very different stories scheduled to come out on June 2, just a couple of days after this column goes up. I try to limit the self-promotion here, but I'm so happy to finally be putting something on the "2026 Fiction" section of my website that I can't help but call them to your attention.

First up, Level Best Books brings us WISH UPON A CRIME:CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY FAIRY TALES, edited by my fellow SleuthSayers Michael Bracken and Stacy Woodson and featuring a host of today's best short crime fiction writers. Is that a terrific idea for an anthology, or what? My story is "Hansel and Gretel," and has a former cop trying to track down the titular missing siblings after his arrest of their father results in them being turned out into the streets. I don't like playing favorites, and I've never published anything I'm not proud to have my name on, but if forced to name a story from recent years that I'm most pleased with, this might well be it. The anthology as a whole is dynamite, and I urge you not to miss it.

And now for something completely different: in a column a couple months back, I mentioned in passing a call for submissions from a publication called Antifa Lit Journal. Their third issue, subtitled Diversity of Tactics, will also be released on June 2, with a range of poetry, fiction, and essays addressing the current political situation. My contribution, "Blue," is a story I originally wrote in the summer of 2020, at a moment when protests against law enforcement abuses were becoming a regular occurrence, even as the pandemic and lockdown continued to make every part of life feel uncertain and dangerous. It's about a cop trying to decide where he stands at one such protest, and it was written out of anger and fear and anxiety, the result being something quite unlike anything else I've produced. I never found a home for it until now, and it's a little depressing to realize that it is, if anything, more relevant today than it was then. I can't exactly say I think you'll enjoy it--but if you seek it out, I hope you'll find it has something meaningful to say. What more can a writer hope for? 

Re-Tell Me a Story

It seems that I get a lot of my ideas for SleuthSayers posts from what I see on my TV--and that's what happened with today's column.

My inspiration: The other night I watched, for probably the 20th time, A Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood movie from the mid-'60s that launched the Spaghetti-Western subgenre. And I was reminded, for maybe the 10th time, of two other films, Yojimbo and Last Man Standing (neither of them Westerns), that had almost exactly the same plot: A mysterious stranger arrives in town and pits each of two rival groups against the other for personal gain. And these three similar movies even feature similar ways that the protagonist accomplishes his goal. They're so much alike that if you're familiar with any one of them, it'd be impossible to see either of the others without immediately thinking of the first.

Legally, how can that happen?

Well, that's a simple question with a long, complicated answer that I don't want to go into. (Because I would quickly get into matters over my head. I will say, though, that I believe the Yojimbo folks successfully sued the Italian director of A Fistful of Dollars and eventually received a settlement--but Fistful was so incredibly successful, financially and otherwise, it hardy mattered.) What I do want to go into are a few thoughts about how many stories, novels, and movies ARE retellings of other stories. And that we as writers can re-tell stories ourselves, if we're careful and follow the rules. (All of us know what plagiarism is, and nobody wants that. What I didn't know, until I looked it up, is that it's derived from the work plagiarius, which means kidnapper. Which makes sense.)

Here's the deal. Basically, we can copy ideas, concepts, titles, structural frameworks, and tropes but cannot copy specific character names and traits, quotes, exact sequences of events, etc. We would also need to be cautious about things like pacing, exact settings, character motivations, and the overall "feel" of a story. I'm no lawyer and I'm certainly oversimplifying, but a lot of this boils down to common sense. For example, I could write a story about a young girl on a farm who finds herself transported into a fantasy world with magical creatures and then comes back home with a headful of helpful life experiences, but I couldn't name her Dorothy and have her help a scarecrow and lion and tin man fulfill their wishes and fight with witches.

To my knowledge I have never in any of my stories "copied" the plot of another story (maybe because my plots, like me, are sometimes a little weird). A couple of years ago, though, I did write a story featuring a private eye who, in the course of investigating a wife suspected of infidelity, wound up in the middle of a conflict involving a wrong phone number. I'd once heard a joke about that kind of misunderstanding, and I had that plot detail on my mind throughout the writing of this story--but the story itself was far different in terms of characters, setting, mood, and the theme of the idea that inspired it. The joke didn't even feature a PI, and mine wasn't even the protagonist.

Having said all that, here are several examples of movies--again, I'm using movies because many of us have seen them--that are highly similar to each other:

High Noon (1952) and Outland (1980) -- High Noon is the classic Western with marshal Gary Cooper and new wife Grace Kelly counting down the minutes until the arrival of three killers on the noon train; Outland--an entertaining movie, I thought--stars Sean Connery as a marshal on one of the moons of Jupiter preparing to fight three hitmen who are on their way to his location via shuttle, to kill him.

Battle Royale (2000) and The Hunger Games (2006) -- Battle Royale is a Japanese film about teenaged students being chosen and forced by the government to fight to the death; the plot of The Hunger Games is pretty much the same, except that the story is set in a different location and a different time (the first movie takes place in the near future and the second in the distant future).

Yojimbo (1961), A Fistful of Dollars (1964), and Last Man Standing (1995) -- As mentioned, the basic plot is the same for all three, but Yojimbo is a Japanese adventure film starring Toshiro Mifune, A Fistful of Dollars is an Italian-made Eastwood Western directed by Sergio Leone, and Last Man Standing featured Bruce Willis and Christopher Walken in Prohibition-era Texas.

Shane (1953) and Pale Rider (1985) -- Shane is another American classic, with stranger Alan Ladd helping homesteaders Van Heflin and Jean Arthur fend off a cattle baron and his hired gun Jack Palance; Pale Rider features Clint Eastwood helping a group of independent prospectors defend themselves against an Old West mining company. Pale Rider is like Shane in an amazing number of ways, which I realized about halfway through the movie.

The Seven Samurai (1954) and The Magnificent Seven (1960) -- The Seven Samurai, again starring Toshiro Mifune, is about a village of Japanese farmers who hire seven samurai to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops. The Magnificent Seven, with Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen, is about a village of Mexican farmers who hire seven gunfighters to help them keep a group of bandits from stealing their crops.

Rio Bravo (1959) and El Dorado (1966) -- Rio Bravo is a Western about a Texas marshal who arrests the brother of a local rancher for murder and then has to fight off the rancher's men until the judge arrives. El Dorado is an almost-remake about a gunfighter who helps a sheriff defend a rancher's family against another rancher. The plots are extremely similar, John Wayne stars in both, Howard Hawks directs both, drunk Dean Martin in the first movie becomes drunk Robert Mitchum in the second, third sidekick Ricky Nelson (nicknamed Colorado) becomes third sidekick James Caan (nicknamed Mississippi), etc., etc.

Dances with Wolves (1990), The Last Samurai (2003), and Avatar (2009) -- Dances with Wolves stars Kevin Costner as a soldier who meets, befriends, and lives with a group of Lakota Sioux in the post-Civil War West; The Last Samurai forces American cavalry officer Tom Cruise into the same kind of situation in the 19th-centry Japanese samurai culture; and Avatar has human Sam Worthington infiltrating and befriending a humanoid tribe on a moon of Pandora in the 22nd century.

Some other movies that are loosely based on previous films/novels/stories but that don't venture as close as those I've mentioned are Air Force One, Passenger 57, Under Siege, and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. These are all part of an unnamed sub-subgenre that began with Die Hard and feature an often reluctant hero who has to stand alone against a group of terrorists in an enclosed space like a building, ship, train, or airplane. These movies are just more proof that a certain amount of copying is allowed if you don't overstep the boundaries--or at least don't take giant steps. And there's also another way to do it: The surprisingly delightful movie Ever After, with Drew Barrymore, is an obvious ripoff of the Cinderella story, but it takes a direct and open approach by making its title Ever After: A Cinderella Story.

There are of course many more films out there that are copies or have been copied--The Lion King, Clueless, Bridget Jones's Diary, The Lord of the Rings, Cruel Intentions, Downsizing, Easy A, Freaky Friday, Yellow Sky, Romeo and Juliet, The Little Mermaid, Barb Wire, Trading Places, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Wolf Man, The Nutty Professor, The Most Dangerous Game, and so on.

So, how about you? Have you--those of you who are writers--based any of your stories or novels on stories, novels, or movies that you've read or watched? How closely do they resemble those previous stories/plots? Are you regularly inspired by previous works? Have you used them to create retellings, homages, or pastiches? If you've written a great many different stories, and if you--like me--try to keep learning from what you've seen or read in others' works, how do you keep from including/repeating some of those things in your own work?

If you do re-tell a story, be careful. I think I'll stick to new and original.

See you next week.

I Am Graduating Still

 

It’s the season of Dads and grads. My phone has blown up recently with pictures of young people in caps and gowns, sent by their proud parents. On a rainy weekday early this month I found myself in an auditorium watching a member of our family receive her hood for a PhD she’d been working on since the pandemic.

It had been a long time since I’d attended such a ceremony, so I was surprised to find myself become emotional. That’s something you’d expect to do at weddings and funerals. I forgot that education—the yearning to strive, learn, get better—is a powerful trigger for me.

In this case, I was struck with a memory from my past.

Freshman year of journalism school. I’m sitting in the seminar portion of my larger COM107 class—the first course every journalism student takes—when the professor makes a bold statement.

He says that journalism as we know it, as we’ve practiced it since the turn of the century, is on the ropes. Thought leaders now say that a person who enters the profession can expect to make seven significant career pivots in their lifetime.

We were kids. We knew nothing. His statement went right over our heads.

Then he broke it down.

I am not saying that you will have seven jobs in your lifetime. Doing the same thing seven times in a row. No.

Oh—I thought. That’s exactly what my baby brain thought you meant.

In the course of your lifetime, he went on, you will shift to radically different careers. Maybe you start out as a reporter for a newspaper, but eventually you will write press releases for an electric company, you will run marketing for a huge bookstore chain like Barnes & Noble, you will start your own public relations firm, and by the time you retire you’ll be running the fundraising arm for your local theatre company. That’s what I mean.

This happened in a classroom in the early 1980s, which meant that even Prof. Babcock—who was then and remained for decades after, a towering figure in communications research—could not foresee the impact the Internet would have on journalism. Newspapers began their death spirals when Craigslist arrived in 1995. Suddenly people had a free or free-ish place to take their classified ads, which newspapers had monopolized and charged through the nose for since the dawn of print. The loss of that revenue, and the revenue from display ads, cost newspapers dearly.

Back in 2026, as I waited for the graduation ceremony to start, I ticked off the jobs I’d had. I’d gone to school for magazine journalism. I knew I couldn’t hack daily journalism. I was a features writer at heart. I would write for the glossies, thought I.

If you squint at my resume, you would see a career that probably defied Professor Babcock’s thesis.

I wrote for children’s magazines for my first two jobs, then I jumped to a dot-com (undreamt-of in Babcock’s philosophy), then went freelance and wrote for a string of magazines before segueing to books and ghostwriting. Aside from the blip represented by that website, my career did not at all conform to a seven-career shift.

At heart I am still a writer and editor.

Babcock’s prediction came true only in the new skills I was forced to master. By the time I had books to promote and clients to woo, the practice of typing up a resume and dropping it off at the neighborhood printer to be—ha!—expensively typeset and run off on fancy paper was laughable.

The early 2000s I had to learn how to design a website. By 2009, when my wife and I published a book on the signers of the Declaration of Independence, we were designing t-shirts. (One for every signer! Collect all 56! Geez, was that a crazy idea).

Social media meant learning how to shoot photos, add text to them, and send them out into the world, often with appended music.

You know—to do the job most publishers had stopped doing.

When publishers ran a quick 'n' dirty ebook sale of one of our titles, we dropped everything and designed a promo ad to distribute on social media, the way an advertising director might do.

We learned how to pitch our books to bookstores and non-stores, landing new accounts the way sales reps would.

We learned to approach radio stations and book reviewers, the way publicists would.

Today, if you look at the website of the school I attended, they announce with some puffery that they are preparing students for careers in digital journalism. They have stopped the charade that they are teaching for a one-track career. Graduates, they say, must be ready to tell stories across multiple platforms.

Every year, when I do our taxes, I am amazed by the sheer number of software programs our household subscribes to. And I’m sure you, my fellow 21st Century scribes, are in a somewhat similar situation. Some more than others, no doubt.

It is only when I step back and recall that I entered my freshman dorm toting an electric typewriter…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school taught us to set type by hand, just to give us a feel for the origins of that quaintly ancient technology…

It is only when I recall that the journalism school later ditched that very same type lab—sold off all those wooden trays of backwards lead letters to the art school across the street, retired the elderly pressman who ran the hand-cranked press…and filled the lab space with gleaming IBM personal computers in my senior year…

It is only then that I can appreciate the shift in time.

This came to me in a flash, all at the start of that graduate school ceremony, and I could not shake the grateful thought that I am graduating still.

A while back, I decided to build an online store for our books and stories. Many writers have done this, and it felt like a good, long-term goal. If nothing else, it would be a place to refer all those people who ask, “What’s the best place to buy your books?” (They say this as if they haven’t wandered into a bookstore in ages, which—sigh—they probably haven’t.)

It took me two years, but the store is finally live. It took that long because I needed to learn or relearn a lot of new skills. Guess what? (The Declaration Signer t-shirts are back!) Next up: I am teaching myself to record my short stories. I have bolted the microphone to the dining room table.

Why would anyone want to stop learning?

A person my wife interviewed for her first narrative nonfiction book arrived in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in the 1940s to work as a lab chemist on the Manhattan Project. Few employees in the Secret City knew what they were working on, but Virginia, a trained scientist, surmised the truth. How could she not?

I miss Virginia. I enjoyed getting to know her during the writing of that book. She was kind enough to let us live at her home while Denise conducted her research so we didn’t have to keep shelling out for hotels.

By then Virginia was in her late eighties, walked with two canes, was partially blind, and wore two hearing aids. Each morning she headed to her office to wake her Mac. She had her screen zoomed to the highest setting so she could read the news in 120-point type. She prized her e-reader because the technology allowed her to do the same with books.

On one of those visits, she told us that she had enrolled in an exciting new class for the coming semester at the senior center. The instructor was a young physicist from the national lab.

“What’s the course?” we asked.

“The history of transuranic elements,” she replied.

God willing, I will be like her someday: Approaching my ninth decade and still learning. The only way to be, as far as I am concerned.

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com