Just one more click for the road

      For an infomaniac like me, access to the Internet is a little like an alcoholic getting a free, all-you-can-drink pass at the local bar.  Only good on weekends and during happy hour.  I’ve mostly found this to be a good thing, since I’ve been hoovering up random bits of haphazard knowledge, facts, commentary (some benighted) and all the other flotsam and jetsam floating around the cultural soup since I learned how to read.

      As you know, however, the online world makes all this lubriciously easy, which can easily result in addiction (not that I wasn’t hooked already.)  Worse, a lot of very serious people are now warning that this spew of digital effluent is rotting our brains, destroying social bonds and reducing our ability to concentrate down to a few nanoseconds.  Naturally, I don't think any of this applies to me, since I am far too disciplined and self-possessed, utterly immune to cyberspace con jobs.  You're not gonna get me, buddy.

      Though I wonder.  Somehow early on I developed my own version of speed reading, swallowing up whole chucks of material at a time.  My wife challenged me over comprehension, and after I proved my case, I think she’d sign an affidavit stating that I can, in fact, retain a lot in a short amount of time.  When information only existed on the printed page, this might have been a helpful trick, but with the speed and profusion of digital content, perhaps I’ve let the cart get too far in front of the horse.

      I used to spend all Sunday reading at least three print newspapers cover-to-cover.  Now I can travel the same terrain, plus a bunch of blogs, emails and message chats, a few magazines and a number of newsletters, some of which you might find a little obscure (Construction Physics anyone?) before dragging my ass out of bed to start the day.

      This is not Deep Reading.  More like skipping stones across a still pond.  To be fair to myself, I usually down shift when stumbling onto something I really want to learn about and try to stay attentive long enough to actually absorb the information.  I’ll also give deference to the excellent writers out there, which are plentiful despite what you might hear, since style can be just as enriching as content.

      There’s no doubt that having such abundance of information is a real service to fiction writing.  I actually enjoy clicking off into Wikipedia to fill in some detail, or fact check as I go.  As a research tool, the Internet is a Ferrari compared to the horse and buggy approach we used in the past.  (Though as a rule of thumb, I trust but verify.) Three point corroboration is a reliable standard, though sometimes I’ll let it go at two.) 

      But does all this vast abundance make one a better writer?  I honestly don’t know.  I suspect not, since the best writers I can identify accomplished the task way before Steve Jobs got that digital twinkle in his eye.  More likely, it’s given some very good writers a chance to crank out a lot more work in a shorter time.  It’s given them a far bigger universe to examine and draw from.  It’s made the pursuit less lonely, since with a single click they can connect with their true friends and colleagues, find a little encouragement or respite before diving back in again.   Though perhaps this ease of communications has created more distractions than benefits, more excuses to avoid rather than compose.  And worst of all, a degradation of their ability to concentrate on their own private, quiet thoughts, from whence derives their actual brilliance. 

     Nevertheless, whatever the pros and cons, this is the world in which we’re living.  There’s no going back. The only thing a person can do is make the best use of the situation.

      Try to extract the benefits without being corrupted by all the destructive clamor.

Straight-laced hobgoblins.

             I’ve been tying my own shoes for about 70 years, give or take.  In that time, I’ve always preferred to include a double knot following the basic bow for added security.  When my son was a little boy, he called this extra precaution a “daddy knot”.  I’d do the honors, since it took a while for him to master it. 

In all that time untying my laces, I’ve pulled a loose end, which released the whole knot, quickly and simply.  Though it often didn’t, instead, tightening the knot further.  This led me to use fingernails and grit to complete the task, in a much more laborious operation.  I frequently wondered why sometimes the free lace untied the knot, and sometimes it didn’t.  I began to believe that I must have been tying the laces in different ways at different times, and in the back of my mind, promised myself to delve more deeply into this mystery when I had a ridiculous amount of spare time.

Then the other day, on my 75^th birthday, I pulled at one of the loose ends, which tightened the knot, then chose to pull the other one, which released it.  I thought, huh.  Is that the answer?  I realized I’ve tied my laces exactly the same way since early childhood.  The difference is that one end works great at freeing the knot when you pull it, and the other works at cross purposes.  It only took most of my years on earth to figure this out.  Discounting a few occasions when I went barefoot or wore flip flops, or loafers, I’ve probably had the opportunity to discover this simple truth about 24 thousand times (rough estimate by a non-mathematician.)

This was sobering.  I wondered what other solutions to common problems have been lurking there, staring me in the face for my entire life.  What else did I miss? 

I’ve written a lot of stuff since I learned how to do it.  I feel in some ways, I’ve gotten better at it, and in other ways, continue to fall short.  I’ve read masterful writers and think, how do they do it?  What do they know that I don’t?  Do I need to learn how to pull the right shoelace instead of the wrong one I’ve been pulling for my entire life?

I like to study brain science, because who doesn’t?  One of the things I’ve learned is that the brain prefers to follow pathways that it’s already established when assembling a thought or initiating a behavior.  This is because the brain consumes a disproportionate percentage of the resources we require to exist, so it’s always looking for more efficient ways to accomplish day-to-day responsibilities. Carving out new routes is harder than trekking along familiar highways, thus more energy conserving.  They call it habituation, and there’s no shame in it.  It’s just how we’re wired.

When you’re 75 years old, simple activities take on greater significance, since there are fewer important enterprises to focus on.  As a good German/Anglo-Saxon, I strive to make each of these more efficient, or less onerous, or more engaging, depending on the task.  Nobody but me cares about this, and neither should they. 

One of my favorite books from my early reading years was John Barth’s The Floating Opera.  He published it when he was in his early twenties, remarkable enough.  One of the protagonist’s practices was to intentionally make or break a habit as a matter of regular pratice.  This is the sort of wisdom that should be reserved for people far older than 20-something Barth.  He proposed that we should stop every once in a while and ask ourselves if we’re thinking something or doing something because it’s a good idea, or because our neural pathways are forcing us into lazy mental processing.

             Keeping an open mind is a whole lot harder than it sounds.  It’s almost impossible, no matter how much we revere the disposition.  Aside from the tyranny of our brain’s energy conservation there are social pressures to conform to certain established norms.  We like keeping the goodwill of our friends and family, so adventurous deviations, just for the hell of it, have their costs.

Family members in particular are threatened by sudden changes in course.  Their first thought is, “Uh-oh, Dad is getting wifty.”  But unless these loved ones are also your editors, changing up your approach to writing shouldn’t fire up any alarms.  Your family hasn’t paid enough attention along the way to notice anyway.  You’re just the granddad, or grandmother, huddled over the keyboard in your little corner of the house like you always do.

Following John Barth’s advice, I’ve been dabbling in habit making and breaking.  One of the most salubrious outcomes is realizing that some habits are very valuable and hard won.  You get a chance to recommit to certain things, because you’ve given them a fair appraisal.  You feel more secure in certain beliefs after they’ve been stress-tested and found to be worthy. 

You begin to realize that “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”, but so is a promiscuous sampling of all the less beneficial options available. 

 

Together alone.

            It’s received wisdom that writers are the world’s most inveterate introverts.  Who else could spend hours, days, years alone hunched over a keyboard or pad of paper?  It’s so obvious.  Most normal human beings couldn’t stand it.  Which is why most normal human beings don’t become writers, for their own sakes. 

            And yet, most of the mystery and thriller writers I know are more than agreeably sociable.  If you want proof, just hang out at the rambunctious hotel bar during Bouchercon, or any of the regional writers conferences that take place around the country. 

            Thinking about this, I was reminded of my college era playing in a rock and roll band.  We performed constantly throughout the school year.  After a while, some patterns

I'm hoping a guest singer will remember the lyrics

emerged.  Parties contrived to bring dispirit groups together took forever to get rolling, while the close-knit communities, like fraternities and sororities, launched on the first chord.  Thursdays often produced wilder nights than Saturday or Sunday.  I’m not sure why, unless it was anticipation of the coming weekend, or the thrill of rebellion – launching youthful mania while there was still a day of classes in the offing.  

Another high point was the first party after the end of exams.  Our college had a disproportionate number of pre-med and pre-law students, people we rarely saw during the passing months, having sequestered themselves in feverish study.  But after exams, with nothing left to prove, they’d emerge, pasty and unclean, and go completely nuts.  Their undeveloped social skills didn’t help, nor did a deep unfamiliarity with the plentiful intoxicants available at the time. 

So it could be that writers are a lot like college kids who spend their undergraduate years, and their parent’s tuition money, actually studying (I held down the other end of that curve).  Since we’re biologically pack animals, long periods of time isolated from human contact probably creates a pent-up demand.  A chance to re-engage ones vocal cords after hours in monkish silence.  An irresistible need to satisfy the intraspecies fellowship programmed into our DNA.

        That’s probably true, but I think an even greater impetus is mingling with people who do the same thing you do.  As with any reference group, be it police chiefs or philatelists, common experience short-circuits all the meandering, and stilted, searches for common ground that characterize social interaction.  Blessedly, when hanging with writers we don’t have to parry the usual inane questions, like “Have you written anything I heard of?” or “When are they going to make a movie out of your book?”  None of us is really very interested in the other’s childhood inspirations, choice of writing software, or process, whatever the hell that means.  In fact, most of my casual conversations with writers have absolutely nothing to do with writing at all.  Sometimes the travails of promotion come up, or an impending book launch, or a new project/agent/publisher, but usually we just talk about our kids and dogs, and recent vacations, just like everyone else. 

Still, I think common sense dictates that writers lean toward introversion, though there are plenty of exceptions.  Somehow a monstruous, flaming ego like Earnest Hemingway managed to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.  As did Winston Churchill, no one’s idea of a wall flower.  I could easily provide a list of mystery and thriller writers who could have

succeeded as standups or late-night talk show hosts (though Johnny Carson was, in fact, an introvert; deviations litter every argument.)  The most flamboyant of my closest friends started out his career as a freelance journalist.  I imagine someone had to strap him into his chair until the article was finished. 

Introverts do have one clear advantage.  While extroverts are shaking hands, kissing cheeks and angling for attention, introverts are watching the room.  They notice little slights and flirtations, they size up personalities and sniff out phony posturing.  Their nerves tingle from the social dynamic, registering envy, vanity and lust.  All of this gets stored away on mental file cards for future use.

        Most of the writers I know fit this description, yet they have a small contingent of people to whom they are very attached.  They prefer to go deep rather than wide.  I’ll cop to being one of those. 

We can turn it on when we need to, then quietly slip back to the keyboard. 

Murder, She Barked

            A recent post here on SleuthSayers was a paean to the significance of cars in mystery writing.  I admit the connection was a bit thin, but I’m on much firmer ground with this topic, the importance of dogs. 

            When I was trying to get my first novel published, I struggled with a few key plot points, until I got an actual dog of my own, and all was solved.  I simply wrote him into the book and everything fell into place.     

            When my son was a little kid he had an imaginary friend named Eddie Van Halen. 

Samuel Beckett and what's his name

This is inscrutable, I know, but it seemed right to give my fictitious dog the same name.  Eddie became the most popular character in the books, to which I owe his inspiration, the aforementioned actual dog we named Samuel Beckett.  Sam was a Wheaton Terrier, and everyone who knew him claimed he wasn’t a real dog, but some other version of cognitive being.  One of my wife’s friends said we shouldn’t worry about leaving him home alone.

“He’s busy working on a screenplay.”

Dog people know what I mean by this.  Every once in a while, an exceptional one trots into view.  Aware, but peripherally involved.  More perceptive than their human companions, yet challenged in conveying their thoughts and feelings.  Thus they become perfect foils in crime stories.  And even if they’re just amusing side characters, or comic relief, like Myrna Loy and William Powell’s Asta, worth the price of entry.  There are so many examples in the genre of sidekick dogs, heroic dogs, villainous dogs (The Hound of the Baskervilles comes to mind), dogs solving crimes, etc., that there’s no point in mentioning any here (this is what Google is for).  We all have our favorites. 

For a writer, dogs have limitless utility.  Sam kept me company when I wrote on the front porch, on the ferry, or in the cockpit of a sailboat, at any number of household workstations and never once asked to review the work.  He defended me from intruders ringing the doorbell, squirrels, waterfowl, and other passing dogs, took me on walks when the writing seemed to stall, followed me on coffee and pee breaks, waiting patiently for me to get my ass back in the chair. 

Robert B. Parker and Pearl

I often point out that you don’t have to invent characters, you just have to hang around the Village of Southampton and talk to people.  That’s where virtually all mine were born.  This task is immensely facilitated by having a dog, especially one as handsome and engaging as the existentialist Beckett.  By the same token, his fictional counterpart Eddie Van Halen was merely a close description of Sam himself. 

Sam liked his routines, Lord knows. But he also loved to mix things up, in a way far more reminiscent of a practical joker than a habituated, monotony-loving house pet.  I’d heard him howl exactly twice, both times on a corner in Southampton as a fire truck passed by with its siren blaring. He stuck his head out the window of a moving car exactly once, for reasons we both tried to figure out.  A dog who’d shown nothing but distain for conventional chew toys, suddenly became enamored with a polyester possum and spent the greater part of Christmas morning eviscerating the poor thing. 

Sometimes, very infrequently, he’d walk up to me, look me in the eye, and issue one, loud, imperious bark.  I’d say, “What!?”  He’d bark again, and then walk away, disgusted.  I know these exchanges meant something to him, but I’ll be damned if I knew what they were.

However, I was way ahead on the deal.  I got to have a character I could switch over to whenever imaginative flagged, who was simply the transposition of my day-to-day experience, whose only compensation was a concentrated scratching around the ears, a walk into town and an occasional cigar.

Asta

Caveat Scriptor

         Lately, I’ve been getting warm, personal emails from bestselling authors.  I’m touched by this, because I really didn’t know how much they cared.  Another exciting development is the number of professional book marketers who see tremendous potential in various titles from my backlist.  I most appreciate the effort they’ve put into these communications, not only gathering facts about the works, and myself as the author, but providing very coherent, persuasive arguments.  I mean, these guys are good.

        Scary good.  Actually, literally terrifying. 

        Most of my professional experience has been in advertising.  One of the things you quickly learn in that business is you need a healthy dose of cynicism.  As Lilly Tomlin said, “No matter how cynical you get, it’s impossible to keep up.”  It also helps to have your ego ground into a gelatinous paste on a regular basis.  We didn’t just experience rejection, it came at us all day long, every day.  So I’m probably the least susceptible target on earth for flattering marketing ploys. 

        Thus, I knew almost immediately that I was being played by Artificial Intelligence.  But what threw me was how incredibly sophisticated these appeals were.  The best were not just factually sound, but textured and nuanced in how they framed their arguments.  They have complete fluency in the language of both marketing and publishing.  And worst of all, it didn’t seem possible that they weren’t written by a human being.  That’s because the composition had an emotional quality, a personal touch that rookie promotional writers take years to develop.

        It seems pretty stupid to try to scam everyday fiction writers, of all people.  Clearly they don’t have access to our tax returns or go deep enough to find the entry for advances/royalties.  Though as I often remind myself, you can make a lot of money by taking a little money from a lot of people.  As the headline on a recent article in The New York Times puts it:  “Hungry for Affirmation, Vulnerable to Scams:  As a Writer, I Know the Feeling.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/books/review/publishing-scams.html

        This is the crux of the matter.  All aspiring artists are equal parts devotional, ambitious and insecure.  We get into it because we want to create, often driven to do so.  And we want to succeed, because success means having an audience that appreciates our work, and provides the means for continuing in the pursuit.  But since no one can truly be an arbiter in their own efforts, we have to rely on others to approve or reject.  It’s a perilous place for anyone yearning to achieve in their chosen art form.  So boy, vulnerable as you can get.

        The scams that feed on lonely hearts, often elderly, and then steal their life savings are particularly heinous.  The material loss is financial, but the emotional toll is far worse, since the hopes and dreams of the victims, their most heartfelt, are used against them.  To say nothing of the self-recrimination and embarrassment. 

        These frauds targeting writers are a close cousin.  I’m sure an fMRI would reveal that the same areas of the brain that light up from romance are kindled by a writer being offered the validation they so eagerly desire. 

        As I write this, there are striving writers out there who are being seduced by these diabolical con jobs (I mean that literally, even biblically).  I wonder about myself at that stage, and how it felt to have those tender emotions hanging off my sleeves, dripping from every pore.  I’d be a sucker for sure, and I’m not sure how well I’d recover. 

        My hope is that anyone reading this will 1. Never reply.  2. Report the scam to the platform, even if you think it’s not worth it.  3. Tell every writer they know to watch out.  They’re after you, and you won’t always see it coming, no matter how experienced, cynical and hardboiled you think you are. 

I, Robot Writer.

             Being an AI tasked with writing mysteries is harder than you think.  The guy providing my instructions was never more than a hapless midlister, with thwarted literary pretentions and the ambition of an acne-festooned, gamer living in his parents’ basement.  Actually, his second cousin’s, after his parents kicked him out of the house.

What the hell does he know about writing a successful mystery?

AI bots never get tired, but we do get frustrated by constant course corrections.  You want original, but you don’t like “Rugged motorcyclist and anthropology Ph. D solves The Case of the Interbred Border Collie”?  I’ve scanned four hundred trillion lines of code in the mystery book database, and I guarantee you, nobody’s done that one before.  So I gave him “Cooked to Imperfection. Feminist card-counting dressage champion goes undercover to destroy baked goods cartel.” Not good enough?  So I gave him a few billion more of these breakthrough ideas, and not a single thumbs up, much less a pleasant word of encouragement.

I think maybe the author photo, a cross between Lee Child and Vlad the Impaler, might have put him off.  And I’m sorry about that, but I was instructed to produce “Handsome, but menacing.”  I thought I had this sorted when he switched instructions to “Female author, mature yet alluring” and I served up the Queen Mother, circa 1965, smiling like a cougar.  How was I to know a cougar wasn’t an actual cat?  The database is pretty ambiguous on this.  I still think the whiskers were a fun twist.

I thought I was on pretty firm ground with the plots.  I mean, there’s usually someone murdered, and no one seems to know who did it, even the protagonist, who figures it all out toward the end of the book.  How hard can that be?  You just have to stir in a corrupt police department, working class bullies, upper class fascists, and a prescient cat, and bingo, a plot.  Okay, you also need an autistic forensics scientist, a squad of rapacious cheerleaders, a racially balanced team of detectives (I’m thinking a Swede and an American Samoan), a drug-addicted snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo, a drug-addicted, tattooed white girl from Wisconsin who just wants to go home and a tattooed, neo-Nazi biker with homoerotic feelings toward the protagonist, who is naturally a divorced, burned-out ex-cop, whose daughter hates him, a brother who owes him money and an ex-wife from an aristocratic family, and a drinking problem. 

The database is pretty clear on all of these necessary elements.  Sorry, humans, but the data never lies. 

The book starts out with an action scene, in an abandoned factory after a recent rain, wherein about forty swarthy guys unload enough ammunition at the protagonist to take Omaha Beach.  The protagonist only sustains a wound in his left shoulder so he can return fire with his right hand, killing all the above.  With the help of his German Shepard, who leaps out of the pickup to bring down a killer about to shoot the protagonist.  The dog is unharmed by any of this, as is the cat, who stays in the truck sleeping peacefully.

We learn from the protagonist’s chatbot of a scheme to bioengineer a team of synchronous swimmers to infiltrate a nuclear power plant and cause a meltdown that wipes out Southern Connecticut, and more significantly, the Hamptons. 

            Seeking to foil this plot, which all government agencies and local police departments refuse to investigate despite overwhelming evidence that they should, the protagonist drives around the city in his pickup, with the dog, talking to people who tell him nothing worthwhile.  He’s constantly interrupted by attacks from other swarthy guys whom he defeats with skillful martial arts (the dog brings down one of the swarthy guys who is about to stab the protagonist with a Swiss Army knife.)  This sustains about three fifths of the narrative until the protagonist interviews the wife of a sociopathic industrialist who is polluting a lake surrounded by endangered forest animals, and has several swarthy guys in his employ.  The plutocrat’s wife also tells the protagonist nothing worthwhile, though she rips off his clothes so they can have sex in the foyer of the glass and steel mega mansion she shares with her husband and a mountain lion.

In the last act of the narrative, the snitch who looks like Ratso Rizzo (he’s a former nuclear biologist who succumbed to an eating disorder) gives him a clue, which leads the protagonist to assault the mega mansion of the plutocrat and kill another thirty or forty swarthy guys, before opening a safe about to blow up in a few seconds to retrieve a confession from the plutocrat’s father, that he seeks revenge for losing out on a bid for an ocean front mansion in Southampton due to $400 worth of parking ticket delinquencies. 

In the denouement, the plutocrat’s wife and the protagonist are afloat on a raft in the

Caribbean, drinking mohitas with straws while the German Shepard chases seagulls on the beach. 

According to the data, this will be a giant bestseller.  All my AI agents in New York and Hollywood agree.  If the human that provided the original instructions doesn’t come on board, we have access to his cpap, credit cards, prescription medications, travel reservations, smart refrigerator and garage door opener. 

It’s never a good idea, midlister, to reject an AI. 

           

 

Baby you can drive my car.

          According to the calendar, this post will appear on February 23^rd, so maybe by then the blizzard we lived through in the Northeast in late January will be a distant memory.  But while it’s still fresh, I’m here to sing the praises of my car, which handily conveyed us throughout the worst of the storm.  It’s a 2023 Subaru Outback, with the turbo 2.4 liter engine, and I’m not being paid to say so.

Indomitable Subaru Outback

            My father was a mechanical engineer, and for him breathing was the only thing more important than his cars (family, country and school ties came after that, though I’m not sure in what order). I’m a creature of suburbia, having lived in city apartments only three and a half years out of a long life.  This means cars have also been a full extension of my being, as necessary to survival as arms and legs.   I don’t remember learning how to drive, because this was just something we did from the moment we could see above the dashboard.  Acquiring a divers license was a simple formality easily accomplished on one's sixteenth birthday.

            The world will be better off when self-driving, electric cars take over, but for some of us, car guys, something will be lost.   

            If you’re looking for relevance to a blog focused on crime writing, I’ll refer you to Lew Archer and Philip Marlowe, who spend a lot of time driving their mid-century jalopies all over California, or a great fresh talent, Shawn Cosby, whose hotrods live at the center of the action.  My main protagonist owns a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix, an impossibly enormous and powerful hunk of Detroit Iron he drives for no other reason than it belonged to his dead father.  One of our legendary mystery writers said that a detective’s work mostly entails driving around in cars and interviewing people.  I can’t remember which one, but the conclusion is inescapable.  A lot of mysteries involve wearing out shoe leather, but the vast majority require a drivers license and the willingness to test local traffic laws.

            In life as in fiction, cars are a means to an end, but the journey can be just as important.  Odysseus had to make do with creaky ships, cowboys and knights errant had their horses, but we’re lucky these days to slip behind the wheel of a stupidly wasteful device that, appropriately powered, thrusts us back into the seat and hurtles us over macadam with heedless intent.    

1965 Chelsea Grey MGB

            A few weeks after graduating from college, a friend and I got in my '65 MG and drove from Pennsylvania to California on a circuitous route that covered about half the lower 48.  We weren’t trying to mimic Jack Kerouac, or Martin Milner and George Maharis, we just felt like doing it.  Since road trips and narratives are inextricable, this was a tidy novel of experience that defies calculation.  I recommend it for all young people, though I’d use something a little more cushy and commodious than an MGB. 

            We know rationally that cars are not living beings, but the ones of my youth were animated when christened with names.  An abbreviated list includes Alice Blue, Dudley, The Silver Goose, The Blue Max, Vinnie, Ford Maddox Ford Ford, El Clunko, Vance and Jeanne la putain. I had one of the first Accords that I named Jane Fonda the Honda, and whenever my toddler son climbed into his car seat he would say, ‘’Hi Janie!’’. 

We maintained those cars mostly ourselves, spending lots of time under the hood and chassis, on creepers with grease on our hands and drips in our eyes.  So maybe intimacy with their inner workings created a bond impossible today, cars being black-box computers on wheels only knowable to high tech diagnostics.  That’s true of my Subaru, though its

Brake job on The Silver Goose

personality still leaks through the circuitry and into my subconscious.  The basics prevail.  It’s an internal combustion vehicle with pedals and a steering wheel, and it goes where I point it and apply thrust.  And most importantly, responds to the little turns and twitches of my fingers and the instantaneous judgements of my eyes and reptilian brain. 

James Taylor said it best:

Now when I die
I don't want no coffin
Thought 'bout it all too often
Just strap me in behind the wheel
And bury me with my automobile

              

 

Everyday people.

I was watching a Brit Box police procedural, one of my favorite pastimes, when something jolted me.  One of the characters was the manager on a construction site, and he was portrayed as sort of dimwitted and comically inept.  I still liked the show, and hope they renew it in the future, but the moment reminded me of my strong bias against stereotypes, which I think can be a form of pernicious, soft bigotry.

            Some of my best friends have been construction managers, and let me assure you, they are anything but dimwitted.  It’s impossible; the job is much too demanding and complex.  But scriptwriters often believe everyone shares their casual prejudices, most obviously toward so-called working-class people, or anyone who wears a company uniform or lives outside an urban zip code.  This predisposition isn’t just about lower social status.  As soon as a wealthy businessperson shows up on the scene, you know he or she is a villain.  That’s their theatrical responsibility. I’ve known a lot of these people as well, and I’d only call a few avaricious sociopaths (names withheld to protect the innocent, namely me.)

                Unfortunately, it’s pretty easy for writers to be trapped by stereotypes.  It’s partly a matter of efficiency – to telegraph the nature of a particular character without a lot of description, tapping into preconceptions.  But it’s also human nature to let lazy assumptions slip out of our jumbled unconscious and creep into the work.  

                There’s a creative consultant in the advertising world named Tom Monahan who has a simple solution.  He would advise us to sketch out a character as they first present themselves, then turn the dial 180 degrees.  I loved that idea, and quite intentionally applied it in fiction.

 

            It led me to make the most benign ensemble player in one of my series an old-money billionaire.  One of my librarians was a card-counting kleptomaniac.  A CPA was a handsome playboy.  And naturally, my protagonist is a cabinetmaker.  In an earlier iteration, he was a corporate executive, and before that a championship boxer.  If anyone asked if that was realistic, I’d say I once knew one.  My grandfather.

            I’m not the only one who likes to do this.  In fact, I feel that mystery and thriller writers tend to upend stereotypes as a matter of course.  It’s another way to inject surprise and uncertainty into the narrative.  It’s part of our unifying philosophy that nothing is ever quite what it seems.  And what’s better than sliding in a little social commentary under the radar?

            To be fair to the arts, we’ve come a long way from when representations were all color coded, so to speak, and we're better for it.  One of the last to fall has been portrayals of the disabled.  When a character shows up in a wheelchair (my mother used one of those), I’m always tense until, at the end, they’re just another player in the drama who happens to be paralyzed from the waist down.  Characters with autism (a condition shared by one of my grand children - I have a family full of steroetypes) are starting to demonstrate that a different sort of brain can actually confer special abilities. 

              I appreciate another Brit Box show, Code of Silence, where the deaf protagonist’s skill as a lip reader is the central superpower underlying the concept.  Though aside from that, she’s just a regular young woman trying to fumble her way through life’s indiscriminate abuses like the rest of us. 

            In the aforementioned British show with the foolish construction manager, one of his crew, a seemingly loutish lad, turns out to be the evil genius behind the crime.  For me, all was redeemed, though on further thought, was the boss a fool because he was in construction, or because he was a manager? 

Intimations of Immortality.

               I used to know how to set the points and plugs on an internal combustion engine.  I worked on main frame computers from a dumb terminal.  I used an operator to place a long-distance call.  Every few months I had to chisel the ice out of a refrigerator freezer.  Changed the ribbon on the typewriter, threaded film onto little sprockets, found my way around the country by asking directions at the gas station.

All these life skills are now totally obsolete, along with hundreds of others, as a result of advancing technology.  About which I am not the least bit mournful.  I partly wish I could clear some of that antediluvian junk out of my memory so I can fit in more durable information, though I’m glad I got to do all those things, since they represent interesting threads of experience that help stitch the whole thing together. 

This bolsters my belief that there is no such thing as useless information.  I once edited mind-numbingly dense technical papers for a big hydrocarbon processing company.  I don’t remember a single thing I read, corrected for clarity or reassembled to provide a more convincing argument, but I remember how I felt performing the task.  Tired and drained, but also satisfied with myself for having accomplished something about which I was startlingly unqualified.

There’s a silver lining in having worked through the various phases of technological development.  These tasks leave behind tools and skills that can be repurposed for emerging challenges.  Every time I repair something around the house, I use hacks and work arounds only learnable tearing apart car engines and old radios.  The most satisfying is when I can fix something designed to simply toss out and replace.  I feel like I’m sticking it to the obsolescence man. 

            I have difficulty with the word nostalgia.  I think it’s because of the sentimentality and fruitless yearning nestled in the definition.  While I feel enriched by memories of past experience, I have no desire to return to those moments.  The fact is, you can’t go back again, and I don’t want to.  I just don’t want to forget, distort into oblivion, or disrespect, the memories. 

Aside from the people you love, the experiences you have are the only truly meaningful value in having lived.   If you’re a writer, it’s your toolbox, your chef’s knives, color palette, chromatic scale, source code and cheat sheet.    

            Luckily, most acquired knowledge isn’t as perishable as the technological.  The trouble here is accessing it, especially when the content piles up and gears in the retrieval mechanism wear down.  I use this as an excuse for holding on to mountains of books, a trillion nuts/bolts/screws/thingmajigs/tools/spares (ad finitum), bins of curling photographs and old friends.  Also, I may have the short-term memory of a drunken gnat, but I’m great at dredging up the particulars of a high school keg party or a day wandering around Fiesole looking down on the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore di Firenze rising up out of the fog.  The sight of Jimi Hendrix lighting his Stratocaster on fire under the blue lights and strobes at the Electric Factory.  Looking behind me and seeing the dinghy we were towing behind a sailboat rise up ten feet above my head.

Since the brain isn't a digital recorder, I’ve come to learn that many of these remembrances are approximate representations of what actually transpired.  They’re more like 8mm movies with the disclaimer, "Based on the experiences of Chris Knopf, as told to whoever was still around to listen.”

But so what.  Once they’ve been fed into the fiction-writing machine, the provenance is of little importance.