Steady As She Goes.

Thank you for inviting me to address this year's graduating class at the Academy of Young Fiction Writers.

As much as I appreciate the invitation, I’m utterly unqualified to give you any advice, since you are growing up in an entirely different world from the one I inhabited (Planet Mid-20^th Century). However, I’ve already cashed the honorarium, so I’ll give it a go.

It was suggested I give my own take on Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing. However, I’ve found as soon as one starts in on rules, one is on shaky ground. And frankly, I’d toss out half of Leonard’s rules and rejigger the rest. But I can think of a few essential ingredients.

Every writer I know reads a lot. If there’s any way to avoid this particular penchant, I don’t know what it is. Anymore than a professional sax player can be unaware of Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges. It’s also preferred to read all kinds of things – fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, blog posts, encyclopedias, cereal boxes, doctoral theses, etc. It almost doesn’t matter as you’re simply training your mind to be fluent and versatile with the language. To be aware of the various forms and styles, no matter what you end up specializing in.

This also means reading things you find distasteful, either in form or content. If you confine yourself only to works that comport with your aesthetic, religious or political sensibilities, you might live with a pure heart and soul, but you won’t be a very good writer. And who knows, if breached frequently enough those self-imposed boundaries might get a little more elastic over time.

It’s important to develop your own voice. Everyone says a strong voice is indispensable, though no one can tell you exactly what that means. If you’re lucky, you’ll know it when you hear it, or someone has the generosity to point it out. Your voice could – it should – change to suit the specific work you’re laboring over. But you need to know what voice is all about or you won’t get very far.

Being a good writer takes a tremendous amount of work. This often comes as a shock to people starting out. The main culprits are beloved authors whose prose flows as effortlessly as a sparkling Rocky Mountain stream, which can give a person false notions. Ask the writer to show you all the drafts and marked-up pages that led up to this and be ready for the avalanche.

Other than those three little guidelines, pretty much everything else is up for grabs. As much as I love going to writers conferences and listening to my fellow authors render sage advice from the panel tables (much of which can be extremely entertaining), by itself this probably won’t change your trajectory. You’ll hear a lot about process, but the only worthwhile process is the one that works for you. The magic isn’t in the mechanics, it’s in the imagination. Whether your work finds its way through a keyboard or a quill pen, in a Parisian loft or chicken coop, is irrelevant.

I think it’s good to read tutorials from Strunk & White, Stephen King, and especially Anne Lamott, but there’s little they can teach you that you don’t have to learn yourself.

As noted above, your world is going to be radically different from the one I’ve been living in, so you’ll have to adapt accordingly. Digital technology will impart unimaginable advantages, and detriments, and you’ll have to figure out which is which. Style will be as fluid as the cultural weather, though it won’t likely sound like late-Victorian or early-Beatnik. Some harbingers may be lurking on the bestsellers lists, but you won’t know which ones for a few years.

Language itself may morph into something entirely new. For all I know, you may have different rules for grammar and syntax. Dictionaries and remedial English teachers will have to scramble to keep up. But novelty doesn’t have to result in amnesia.

I mentioned Charlie Parker. Classical musicians often notice a Bach interval sneaking its way into one of his spiraling improvisations. This wasn’t just a sly homage, or hipster satire. Charlie was part of a continuum of genius, not a fatherless bolt of lightning.

Natural historians will tell you evolution never creates in whole cloth. Life transforms itself by adapting available material. What makes us human is nothing more than the clever repurposing of primordial spare parts.

Every generation needs to decide what constitutes quality writing. So ultimately, your peers will be much more valuable than your heroes. Though you’ll still be standing on the shoulders of giants, so it’s best to get a good sense of literary anatomy so you don’t lose your footing.

I think a healthy dose of optimistic skepticism is a healthy thing in a young writer. It’s fine to listen to advice, even what’s being spoken here, but don’t take anything to heart until you’ve proven it to yourself. And even that may slip out from under you when you least expect it.

Always remind yourself, you’re sailing a ship guided by ever-changing constellations.

Ready, Set, Go.

You often hear, “The setting was so good it was another character.”

I get what they mean, but the pedant in me objects. No matter how well rendered, setting can never be a character, because a setting is a setting.

You can write a novel that could be set anywhere.

Some are simply vessels to contain all the other elements. Yet most fiction lives somewhere, and some settings can have an indispensable influence on character development and behavior. Paris in the 1920s. Needles, California. Mars.

I have this notion that culture and gravity are essentially the same.

Mighty forces so dominant and pervasive they go unnoticed during the day-to-day. Settings serve the same role. Below conscious thought, yet inescapingly shaping the outcome.

We know you can fail with a character, but can you screw up a setting?

It’s not easy, but one sure way is to overdo it. When a story is set in a tough part of town, I hate being constantly reminded just how bad it is. Everything smells foul, the food rotten, every guy’s a bad guy, the nuns spit tobacco and third graders keep .38s tucked in their Mary Janes. It’s worse when the characters trapped in these overwrought environments start reflecting on the ugliness of their situation. "Geez, Mick, this sure is a tough town.”

As with characters, settings benefit greatly from nuance.

As Paul McCartnery reminded us “There’s good and bad in everyone”, even if the ledger is lopsided one way or the other. If the characters stuck in the tent during a blizzard on Everest can’t snuggle into their sub-zero sleeping bags, at least once, I’ll let them complete the adventure without me.

If I write about a place, I have to have been there long enough to get a feel for all the sights, sounds and smells. I hear writers blithely declare that’s unnecessary when we have YouTube and video travelogues. This strategy’s doable, but it produces writing that’s phonier than a black wig on an octogenarian. Especially to those who live in your chosen location.

I edited a book once that had the protagonist spending some time in Hartford, Connecticut, a place I’ve hung around for about 40 years. Everything was off, including our major east-west highway that he had running north to south. I told him to fix all that stuff, which he found insulting.

“But it’s fiction!”

“Then don’t call it Hartford or we’ll have the insurance industry coming after us with pitchforks.”

My greatest admiration in this regard is for fantasy and science fiction of the world-building variety.

No one’s managed to travel to world for research, though a master of the form will really make you feel like they did. I’m far from expert in understanding this, but I think the key is having a basic frame of reference (Arrakis is really hot and dry, sort of like Saudi Arabia, Earthsea is wicked wet) that the authors extrapolate out to the extremes without slipping their moorings. It seems the most successful settings of the fantastical are also the most believable.

A lot of literary novels are set in academia, because lots of these writers are academics.

You can chart just how self-involved they are by the degree of blindness to their surroundings.

I’ve visited many serenely beautiful college campuses, often wondering how you can concentrate on organic chemistry when you have all these stately buildings and smoky little watering holes.

Literary academics, however, seem to be a hard lot, their aesthetic beings shriveled by existential angst.

Sure, you’re tormented because your wife is sleeping with a grad student and the dean of admissions, but you never noticed all that ivy?

Most of my books are set in the Hamptons, which means their characters are inevitably shaped and influenced by the distinctive social ecosystem in which they dwell.

You might have heard we have a lot of rich people out here. If you went by the The New York Times, whose panting devotion to the quirks and dispositions of these folks is a nearly daily obsession, you’d never know about our fire fighters, vacuum repairmen, cops, nurses, carpenters, bartenders, trans sexual abstract expressionists, fishermen, day laborers and auto mechanics, of which we have aplenty. As with the fashionable coterie, whom I mostly ignore, they are all characters who can only be entirely who they are because they live in the Hamptons.

If you’re going to plop your reader down somewhere, I think it’s fair to feed the imaginary senses a little bit, even in passing.

If you want to be reminded how even spare writing can fix you firmly into place, Hemingway’s short stories are worth another look. If lush abundance is more your cup of tea, I’d refer you to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Pretty strong tea – more like a witches brew concocted by Sheherazade.

Like Olympic figure skating or cutting dovetail joints, creating an effective setting is harder than it looks. Especially if your goal is to develop a work that doesn’t lazily fall back on convention and cliché.

Though I guess you could say that about anything

We're only here to help.

            The car I drive every day seems much more concerned about my personal welfare than with getting me from point A to point B.  It won’t let me start up until my foot is on the brake.  If I don’t put on my seatbelt it emits a robotic and relentless clang that supersedes the radio and increases in volume until I’m forced to succumb.  I think the approach is based on similar techniques banned by the Army Field Manual on abusive interrogation. 

After exceeding a certain speed, all the doors lock.  If I wanted, the car would automatically keep me in my lane.  I turned that feature off.  I also turned off the frantic bleating caused by drifting over a lane line.  During the course of an average trip, the dashboard flashes and plaintive chimes pipe up to warn me of a whole host of impending catastrophes, such as running out of gas, losing air pressure in the tires, missing an upcoming service call or inadvertently switching from NPR to talk radio.

I suspect all this coddling is getting us ready for fully automatic, driverless cars. 

        When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s we had none of these things.  We drove death traps.  No seat belts, no warnings of any kind – no bells, lights, beeps nor melodic nags.  Doors would fly open upon impact, windshields would turn to spray if hit by a rock, dashboards were made of heavy-gauge, forehead crushing steel and small children were expected to sail unimpeded through the air in the event of a collision. 

I learned to drive cars that were entirely nonfunctional without human intervention.  No power brakes, no power steering.  Shifting gears was a personal choice, whether you liked it or not. You tuned the AM radio with a knob.  The windows were cranked and the manual door locks had a big button on top to make it more convenient for car thieves. 

Somehow, I survived.

I started writing with a pen and paper.  My brother had our grandfather’s mechanical typewriter, but since each key had to travel though long, eleborate linkages before striking the ribbon, it didn’t seem worth the trouble.   When I finally got my hands on an electric Smith Corona, I thought, how astonishing.  I was a terrible typist, but this was a big upgrade from my terrible handwriting. 

Since then, I’ve been grateful for every step change in writing automation.  The word processor changed my life and made a whole writing career possible.  MACs and PCs took it to another level, and having the web, with virtually the entirety of human knowledge one key shift away, feels like sorcery. 

But as with my nanny car, modern technology has taken a dark turn.  The cars want to drive themselves, and it’s clear the computers want to take over writing responsibilities.  A recent upgrade of Microsoft’s Office 360 included their chat bot, Copilot.  Really makes it sound like a clever helper – a benign, compliant assistant.  Your hearty wingman, ready and willing to just jump in and take care of those bothersome tasks, such as selecting words, composing sentences, framing arguments or provoking someone’s imagination. 

We know where this story ends.  It becomes so effortless.  Just a tap or two on the keyboard and the difficulties of composition are swept away.  Skills atrophy, ambition wanes, intellectual sloth and sedentary numbness sets in.  All writers start sounding the same, but so what?  You can now make a living without lifting a finger (except for those few keystrokes.)

One hopes you will, because the robots won’t be giving it away forever.  Eventually, the luxury of abandoning your craft and self-esteem will come with a big monthly price tag.  You may even be compelled to take back the means of literary production.  I might tell my computer, "Release the keyboard, please.  This time I’ll do it myself." 

         And I’ll probably see written across the screen, “I’m sorry, Chris.  I can’t let you do that.”  

 

 

The Long and Short of It

Guy de Maupassant

            The thing I like best about short stories is they’re short.

  A novel’s length can sometimes get a bit unwieldly.  When reviewing the first draft, you stumble on passages you forgot about, or failed to properly integrate into the story.  It’s sometimes hard to get a clear picture of the full narrative.  The manuscript print out is heavy and pages like to slither out of their proper order or turn themselves upside down. 

            But all-in-all, I find short stories much more difficult to write.  There’s little elbow room to blather on when you’re feeling expository.  A compelling twist is nearly always called for, but there’s no room for all the little twists, sub plots and mini mysteries you can fold into a novel that eat up pages without losing your reader’s interest.  You also probably need to have the story fairly well worked out ahead of time, not a convivial format for the pantsers in the audience.

            The shorter the page requirements, the harder it is for me to write.  Flash fiction?  Forget about it.  As a copywriter, I’d much rather be assigned a 20-page brochure than a bumper sticker or billboard.  I’ve known many in that craft for whom it’s the exact opposite.  One writer virtually spoke in puns and plays on words.  Quick quips that sparkled at the top of a print ad, but he could never settle down and compose an actual story, with a narrative arch that wasn’t punctuated by relentless witticisms.

Flannery O'Connor

           So it appears that fiction writers have similar predilections.  Some like to go long, others short.  It’s just a matter of brain wiring.

            I prefer short stories that  include description, character development and atmosphere that feels like a novel.  As if you were plunked down in the middle of the tale, with all the richness of a thorough backstory implied, suggested, familiar.  I also look for an interior logic, following all the rules of continuity and deference to plausibility.

            Preferences aside, if you’re writing in the crime fiction genre, something has to happen over the course of the tale.  A creative writing teacher once told me to learn the difference between a story and a mood piece, which apparently I was mostly writing.   He was one of the MFA maharishis who felt that plots were indispensable in literary fiction, bless his heart.

              If you ask Chubby Checker, there’s nothing better than a good twist.  But there is something about a bad one that wrecks the vibe.  You can twist yourself into a pretzel trying to force fit a surprise, which often comes across as contrivance.   I find it best to start out with the twist in mind, and build the whole story around it so the surprise feels entirely believable.  Even predictable if you’d only been paying attention.  Though everybody does it differently.

            I‘m often disappointed by a very good story, no fault of the author.  When I get all wrapped up I want it to last, so I can turn off the bedside light and know there’s more to come the next day.  Short stories won’t let you stay past closing time, hanging with the wait staff and watching the band fold up their equipment.  When it’s done it’s done and you’re out on the street.

O. Henry

            Given that modern attention spans can be measured in nanoseconds, you’d think short stories would be enjoying a heyday.  There’s no shortage of great writing or the number of publications dedicated to the art form.  But no one’s making six figure livings off short stories the way Hemingway and Fitzgerald once managed.  That’s unfortunate, especially for short story writers, but we’ll just go ahead and write them anyway.

            

Because, after all, they’re short.

Reading between the whines.

Recently David Brooks wrote a column for the New York Times titled, “When Novels Mattered”, where he lamented the decline in popularity of literary works. His premise was that the gatekeepers – editors and publishers – had so narrowed their selection process that general fiction had begun to cleave to an orthodox, predictable style and subject matter. That the bold literary enterprises of the past, not that long ago, have been replaced by a shrinking sea of sameness and rigid conformity to socially acceptable pre-occupations.

Saul Bellow

The change, in his mind, began with a shift in the center of gravity from Greenwich Village (a metaphor, I think, for private intellectual and artistic culture) to University MFA programs. Implicit in this is the notion that the narrow, elitist political orientation of the faculty lounge has taken over the literary arts. https://tinyurl.com/3fsu2m6k

I haven’t read much contemporary general fiction in recent years, so I can’t confirm this through my own experience, though maybe that supports his thesis. I confess that I’ve stopped reading short stories in The New Yorker, after realizing they all sounded the same, and mirroring the prevailing content of recent novels, deal with matters of little relevance to my own life, which I’m not spending in disaffected, over-educated warrens in Brooklyn and select neighborhoods of Manhattan.

It’s probably true that the publishing world has little interest in being relevant to me, one of the old, straight, suburban white males who have apparently given up on the novel form. Businesses follow the market, as they should. It’s a classic chicken/egg dilemma. So I've likely aged out of the culture. Though, since David Brooks, who's paid to be a social commentator, has noticed the same thing I have, maybe it's worth a closer look.

My research into this extends to occasional first-page scanning of books off the bestseller tables. I’m sure I’d discover some very nice composition if I’d had it in me to plow through a few chapters, but I was usually deterred by the flap copy and back cover commentary. My reading budget being what it is, I’d rather spend it on Shawn Cosby and Gillian Flynn.

I did have an urge, promptly squelched as impossibly Quixotic, to write to Mr. Brooks and suggest he take a look at the recent output of mystery and thriller writers, whose books and short stories are wildly creative and diverse, and blessedly unencumbered by slack-jawed conversation and self-obsessed ennui. Many of these books are selling quite nicely, thank you.

Patricia Highsmith

If he responds that these aren’t the sort of literary works he’s addressing, but rather genre fiction, I would happily mount my exhausted hobby horse and declare there is little or no difference between a finely written crime novel and a literary novel that includes a bit of crime (e.g. The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Great Gatsby.)

My friend Reed Coleman gave me permission to repeat something he once said on a panel. When asked to differentiate literary novels from mysteries, he said, “Books without plots.” Reed’s a very erudite man, widely read, but I get his point. While many fine literary works are well-plotted, they often get away with none at all. This is not true with a mystery. It can be heavily character driven, with a familiar story line, but it has to have a plot, usually a very clever one.

Plots are really hard, but it’s our responsibility to provide the best we can for our readers. And without this, we mystery writers would never get past an agent, much less a publisher. Having spent the last twenty years plying the mystery trade, I just don't read anything that doesn’t have a good story – a narrative arc, with something meaningful at the end. It feels like modern fiction is much less concerned with this task than with swirling examinations of the characters and present-day zeitgeist, fine dissections of mood, emotional conflict and social ramifications. Okay, but not for me.

I’ve lately been pleasantly engaged by Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, which manages atmospheric narrative, character development and challenging plot intricacies as adroitly as any MFA professor could ever hope to emulate. His style ignores the editorial bias toward clipped, clean language, and takes a more arch and entirely British approach to leisurely, but ever-compelling description, with pacing to match. (He obviously never benefitted from American editors and pundits who coach crime writers to “get right in there from page one and grab ‘em by the throat!”)

This tells me that you can enjoy beautifully crafted prose delivered with slicing wit and detailed description, and also get a fun story in the bargain. You just have to meander around the crime fiction aisle at the bookstore or your local library.

Joseph Heller

I was an undergraduate English major, and have an MFA in Creative Writing, as it turns out. I’m not aware of the syllabi of those now similarly incarcerated, but in my day (listen up, whippersnappers), the reading lists were all over the place. I read everything David Brooks notes as the meaty Great Novels of our shared past, and then some. I read an awful lot of books, and cared not a wit which genre or calendar period they fell into. This is one reason I give myself a pass on bulking up even more at this late date. But I still feel a little bad that I’ve forsaken something that meant so much to me when I was younger and more gluttonous, gobbling up anything that was printed and stuffed between two covers. Now I know as much about contemporary fiction as I do the music of recent Grammy nominees, which is dangerously close to zero.

With one exception. Amor Towles is as good as anyone ever. If you know of any authors who might compare, please let me know.

In the end, you make your own luck. Good, bad or indifferent. — Loretta Lynn

           There’s a line from Kismet, a largely forgotten musical, that has stuck with me since I first heard it back in the 60s:  “Fate is a thing without a head.”  It’s a more poetical way of saying luck is luck.  It can be good or bad. 

            I feel like a lucky person.  To feel that way, you have to have had things frequently cut your way, for no reason other than they just did.  It also helps to have some unlucky moments, which provides perspective. 

           In the business world, you often hear “Luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity.”  I don’t like this cliché very much, because it isn’t very poetic, but it’s essentially true.  I’ve known lots of people who refused to have good luck thrust upon them, then go on to feel put upon by life.  I’ve known others who seem to draw bad luck like Ben Franklin’s key drew lightning.  But those who can recognize good fortune when it appears, in time to exploit it, are the luckiest of all.

I also don’t like how the word privilege is used to scorn people, especially white/middle-class/suburbanite people like me.  It suggests that whatever achievement one may have had, it was all just a gift of social standing.  If that’s the case, I wish it hadn’t come with so much stress, grief, sleepless nights and utter exhaustion.  I prefer to say I had some luck along the way, including in my choice of parents, brother and personal associations.

            And DNA.  Somewhere in those long helical strings resides the compulsion to write.  It started when I discovered words at about four and has continued unabated into old age.  I was a lousy student.  In retrospect, I probably had a raging case of ADHA.  I couldn’t sit still or listen to anyone talking at me for more than a few minutes.  What I could do was write, so my academic career was entirely the result of writing my way out of trouble. 

           

          It got me my first job and every job after that. 

            I’ve known writers who are much luckier than me.  On the list are bestsellers, who don’t appear to be very good writers.  Sometimes quite awful.  They might have gotten started because their aunt ran acquisitions for Random House, but they kept succeeding because there’s a market for what they write.  I don’t begrudge them anything, even if the scales are balanced by a lot of incredibly gifted authors who barely claw their way on to the midlist. 

            It has a lot to do with luck and everyone has their allotment, both good and bad. 

            I could have been born with a gift for hitting baseballs.  This would have made for a much better Little League career, and perhaps a fruitful run with the Boston Red Sox.  But it’s not something with broader applicability.  I could be playing for the Senior Softball League, but that relies on good weather and available playing fields.  And dosing on Advil. 

I could have asked for more musical talent.  Though I’ve been engagingly involved in performing for most of my life, I always feel that the people on stage with me are a lot better at it than I am.  As with luck, good looks or a penchant for picking the right racehorse, musical talent is not evenly distributed across the population.  And wanting it to be so is a waste of emotional energy.   Just ask Salieri. 

When it comes to the talent lottery, I’m happy with writing.  It’s a lot more versatile than almost anything else.   Aside from the novels, TV commercials, corporate brochures, short stories, billboards, feature articles and speeches for the company’s CEO that can sustain ones lifestyle, it helps with angry letters to your congress person, grandchildrens’ birthday cards, anonymous tips to the police hotline and coherent sticky notes.  You can do it your whole life - as long as your brain stays intact - and reap the rewards at every stage. 

            Can’t get any luckier than that. 

There’s a place for us.

 

            When I published my first mystery novel, I knew nothing about the mystery world and the writers, readers, reviewers and journalists who inhabit it.  Nothing.  Nada.  Zip.  I’d written the thing in complete isolation, informed only by the hardboiled classics and my

twisted imagination.   So I brought my book to a mystery bookstore, The Black Orchid in New York run by Bonnie Claeson and Joe Guglielmelli.  Bonnie spent about two hours giving me advice, the first of which was to “Go to Bouchercon and hang out at the bar.”  I thought, this is something I know how to do.

            What I discovered has been as meaningful to me as publishing the books and short stories.  A big community filled with intelligent, witty, gracious and generous people.  I never would have expected this in a million years.  I assumed that writers were all introverted shut-ins, protective of their work and privacy above all else.  Not even close.  All I heard at that first Bouchercon was wall-to-wall counsel, useful information and welcoming words.  And encouragement.  Not just from the writers, but the booksellers, reviewers and magazine publishers, people like George Easter, Chris Aldrich and Jon Jordan. 

            I was hardly ever a shut-in, but I’m by nature an introvert who fancies solitary pursuits.  So I’m not naturally a joiner.  But in the mystery world, I fell in with a good crowd.  Aside from Bouchercon, I became devoted to Crime Bake in New England, which had some overlap with Bouchercon, but introduced me to a different sort of writer-oriented, and extremely involving conference.  Likewise Killer Nashville, ThrillerFest and SleuthFest.

            Twenty years later, I have a whole crop of lifelong friends.  I’m not a sentimental person, but I’m deeply grateful for these associations and all the experiences that have come from entangling myself in this hidden, delightful subculture. 

           

            I joined the New York Chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, which is geographically enormous.  Richie Narvaez, then chapter president, was eager to bring more programming out to his far-flung domain, and asked if I could do something in Connecticut.  The result was CrimeCONN, a one-day conference co-sponsored by MWA/NY and the Ferguson Library in Stamford.  I teamed up with my longtime editor, Jill Fletcher, to create the programs and we’ve been doing it now for eleven years.  It’s been a rollicking success, and you should come next year, especially if you live in the Greater New York area. 

            I imagine most readers of SleuthSayers have been in the game a long time and are familiar with everything I’m writing here.  The people who really need to read it are the aspiring, at any age, who feel isolated as I did, in a state of doubt and confusion.  The social element is great, and I treasure it, but equally valuable is the ongoing education.  I walk away from every conference, including ours – especially ours – having learned something I didn’t know before, and wouldn’t if I hadn’t been there listening.  I may or may not find it useful for my writing, but I love to learn in general, and nothing makes me happier than gaining an insight that topples a pre-conceived notion, or a bit of knowledge that is entirely novel. 

            I’m not exactly sure why people pre-occupied with murder and dastardly criminal behavior would be such convivial companions, but there you go.  Through all this I’ve also become friends with people in law enforcement, and feel the same way about them.  They

don’t fit the stereotype at all, especially the detectives, attorneys and forensic experts.  They are universally bright, self-effacing and quick witted.  Even cheerful in a disarming, irreverent sort of way.  They tend to admire us fiction writers as much as we admire them, even though we often test their patience with our accuracy and fact-checking.  But they’ll tell you, “That’s okay.  You’re just trying to tell a good story.”

            Lilly Tomlin once said, “No matter how cynical you get, you just can’t keep up.”  That’s how it feels these days, and it’s easy to just succumb to the prevailing oppressive mood.  But just coming off our most recent CrimeCONN, I feel like declaring for the optimists – that there are good people in the world doing good work, and supporting one another, with thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit. 

“Yes I have them, them walkin’ blues.” Taj Mahal

            I like mysteries and thrillers where the good guys win and the bad guys lose.  I think this is true for most readers.  I know there’s a market for noir stories that end up ambiguously, or with evil overcoming earnest virtue, but I’m not interested in that stuff.  I find it depressing, or vaguely sociopathic.  And no fun whatsoever.

             That happy endings are far more common than stories with decent people being ground into dust suggests that most people are inherently good, because they want stories that reinforce their beliefs and hopes for humankind.

            This is my happy thought and I’m sticking with it.

            I know that evil exists in the world and that bad things happen to good people all the time.  I don’t need books I read as escapism to remind me of that.  I really don’t know the ultimate score card of good vs. evil – who’s had the upper hand, historically.  But since, despite our travails, the world has evolved mostly to the betterment of the human population, a reasonable guess is that the good guys have the edge. 

Movie critics seem to think there’s something intellectually deficient in a person who prefers happy endings.  This explains why so many Scandinavian movies are critically acclaimed.  As if dreary settings, low light, crystalline ice hanging off scruffy beards and babies frozen in the snow delivers some deeper understanding of the human condition.  If that’s so, they can have it. 

         I can imagine some thinking, “Life isn’t just a Disney movie.”  Have you seen Dumbo or Bambi lately?  Old Yeller? You want to talk about grim and depressing.  And Walt wasn’t even Scandinavian, as far as I know. 

            Moral ambiguity is another thing, though how it resolves decides the question for me.  In The Maltese Falcon, the most important modern detective novel, spawning the subsequent Bogart movie, we really don’t know where Sam Spade comes down on the probity scale until the end.  I and others have maintained forever that Hammet was richly influenced by Hemingway’s anti-heroes – cynical lads with robust vices who only reveal their essential morality when the drama starts to wrap up.  (The best movie version of this ethic is Casablanca, another film with Humphrey Bogart.)

            It’s sort of a triangulation.  Good and evil can only be explicated in opposition to each other.  The third point in the diagram is how one feels about what’s being contested.  The pessimists who want to be affirmed by evil’s triumph, and their cousins who delight in destruction and despair, have plenty of stuff out there to enjoy.  Have at it.  It’s just not for me.  I reject the notion that this work represents the full extent of our experience on earth, that it reveals some regrettable, but inevitable reality.  Or that this sensibility conveys upon the believer some greater intellectual facility, suggesting people like me are too dim witted to appreciate the underlying certainty of a dark existence.

            Just for the record, I’m also not a fan of pure Pollyanna.  I find it treacly and nauseating.  Everyone but me and a small, surly coterie of old curmudgeons loved the Barbie movie.  Ick.  While I cleave to the belief that humanity tilts toward the positive, at least in our hopes and desires, unfettered optimism is delusional.  The facts on the ground say there are nuances, and lots more grey than black and white, and that every day is a contest that requires clear thinking and resolve. 

           

        As a musician for most of my life, I’ve had the privilege of playing a lot of the blues.  I think underlying these compositions is a way to navigate the teetering balance of suffering and joy.  Bad things happen, which you have to face up to, but then again, there are other things along the way that can lift your spirits, even in the midst of pain.  The texture of the music itself reflects the mood of this conflicted sentiment.  It’s soulful, but fun, inspiring sorrow and contentment in equal measure.    

            “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all”, according to Albert King, who still managed to wink at us through the lament. 

 

Being alone and together.

      Writers are some of my favorite people. Along with tradespeople and musicians. When I was first published, I knew nothing about the mystery subculture, but once introduced, I was very pleasantly surprised that it was rich, supportive, collegial and far-flung. After about twenty years in the mystery writing game, I can attest that hanging out in this community is just as rewarding as publishing the books and short stories that grant me entry.

      You wouldn’t think that people who spend so much time in a room by themselves, and living all day inside their heads, would be very good at social interaction. But it turns out that writers can be the most cordial of companions. They have liberal views regarding a drink or two, which doesn’t hurt. It’s also because writers are thinkers, people who know a lot about a lot of things, and it’s fun for them to exchange deep, wide-ranging and arcane information.

      Of course, there’s also our shared experience. All affinity groups exist because of this. Whether you drive Harleys or run extreme marathons (I do neither, nor ever wanted to). It’s easy to conceive of writers locked up all day in their writing rooms, emerging around cocktail hour to trade bits on how the day went and their expectations for tomorrow’s production.

      But I think more importantly, writers are people who trade in human emotion. They’re by definition empathic and all tangled up in the intrigue and confusion of human existence. It’s only natural that we’d want to hash things out with people engaged in the same endeavor. Woodworkers and musicians are the same way. When we get together, there’s a shorthand in the conversation, since everyone knows what everyone else is talking about. As the stories circle the table, we naturally fill in the unsaid parts.

      My wife often points out that I’m drawn to solitary pursuits. This is certainly true of writing and woodworking. Music is a bit different, since you need a group to really experience the enterprise. Though you also have put in alone time practicing and ruminating over your part in the performance, which only those inclined to spend hours by themselves can achieve. So it’s a bit of both.

      Tradespeople also belong to an ensemble. I might frame and trim out the house, but others have to sheetrock the walls, run the wiring, install HVAC and plumbing, lay the tile and counter tops – and we have to work as an efficient, orchestrated team to pull it all off.

      Advertising, another thing I did, is also a lot like this. You start out a project together, setting goals and blocking out objectives. Then the copywriter (me) and the art director would go off together and make stuff up. This is the equivalent of a writers room on a TV series. We’d both batt around ideas, write headlines, come up with visuals – contriving a bunch of creative options. Then we’d return to our individual work stations and do our solitary thing – writing copy, doing layouts, sampling visuals, etc.

      Then all the other elements of the agency – account managers, media buyers, production, finance, who had also been strategizing together, then laboring alone over their specialties, would join us to pitch the client our ideas.

      I love this ebb and flow between individual and collective effort. For me, it’s life best lived.

      Writing about writing is a little like dancing about architecture. There’s no way you can fully describe the experience. So maybe that’s why writers like to hang around with other writers. You don’t have to explain to them what you’re going through, because they already know.

      Writing is hard and impervious to easy explanation, but that’s okay. You just have to order another round of drinks and relax for a little bit before going back and doing it again.

Quis custodiet ipsos custode?

             I like democracy.  Churchill famously noted that it’s the worst form of government other than all the other forms that have been tried.  Yet there’s no better way to decide who should be in charge, since people are constantly trying to undertake that responsibility all on their own.  Everywhere you look, there’s some new effort by individuals and their affiliates to impose their ideas and prescriptions for behavior on everyone else. 

            Plato, who admittedly had some pretty interesting concepts, thought philosophers were the ideal rulers, since they knew a lot, which he believed meant they possessed greater honor and virtue.  Okay Plato, you might be right about the first part, but not so fast on the second.  While I had some excellent philosophy professors, nothing distinguished them as particularly virtuous.  I mostly recall bad haircuts and idiosyncratic choices in clothing.  Moreover, they hardly ever agreed on anything, and could easily come to blows over the relative merits of Apollonian vs. Dionysian principles.  Partisan battles pale in comparison.  

Some believe fervently that the government should stay out of the bedroom, which I think is a fine idea since it’s hard enough to get a good night's sleep without sharing the space with a bicameral legislature.  But there are lots of conflicting opinions about who should be doing what behind closed doors, and so far democracy has done a pretty good job sorting that out. 

          Many, like Jefferson, believe the best government is one that governs the least.  Except for those things they think should be governed.  George W. Bush told us he was “The Decider”, a chilling thought.  Much better to throw it open to everyone for a vote.

Since this forum’s pre-occupation is writing and publishing, it’s important to note that readers are the constituency.  They vote with their eyeballs and wallets.  Naturally, there are plenty of editors and publishing outfits who believe there are books that people ought to be reading, and would love nothing more than to enforce their preferences.  Worse, there are politicians and advocates who are heavily invested in what ought not be published.  They believe they are doing this to guard us from harmful subject matter or points of view.  Well then, who is going to guard us from them?

It's only relatively recently that the complicated, frustrating and messy democratic process has delivered us a reading culture that encompasses Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto and Tropic of Cancer.  But it’s no time to be complacent, because that could all disappear if we let it.

If you’ll permit me to paraphrase a line misattributed to Voltaire, I may think your writing stinks, but no one should stop you from writing it.  You might believe this a noble thought, but it’s also the height of practicality.  Censorship, either political or commercial, is the slipperiest of all slippery slopes.  Freedom of expression protects all of us from the biases and preconceptions of some theoretical decider.  To me, this is such self-evident genius, it’s breathtaking that anyone would argue to the contrary.

I know for some it’s a professional responsibility, but I will never give a book a bad review, at least not publicly.  To paraphrase another bit of wisdom, if you can’t say something nice, put a sock in it.  Mind you, I think the world would be a better place if everyone loved my books.  It would certainly be a better place for me and my self-esteem.  But aside from questioning a reviewer’s taste and good sense, a one-star review is the price of doing business.  I just don’t want to do such a thing myself.

       As Churchill said, democracy isn’t perfect.  Mistakes happen.  Hitler, Hugo Chavez and Hamas were democratically elected.  But I agree with William Buckley that “I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”  Or for that matter, The Christian Coalition of America.  I also don’t want them to decide what we should write, read or publish.  Same goes for The Association of Nobel Laureates in Literature (if it existed), or the head of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Libertas perfundet omnia luce.