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.   

 

Wham bam, thank you ma’am.

            The other day I spell checked the word “pfft”.  It passed with flying colors.  This made me very happy.  As with exclamation points, semi-colons and references to intimate body parts, onomatopoeia can be very effective, if used sparingly.  Tom Wolfe never thought to resist any onomatopoeic impulse, but he’s the only author I know who got away with it.  (Batman comics notwithstanding.)

            It’s not only effective, it’s loads of fun.  It’s like splashing around in the mud.  Whacking a barn with a baseball bat.  Popping bubble gum.  Swooshing down the side of a mountain on a pair of skis.

            A lot of words don’t precisely mimic their subject, but sound pretty close to what they describe.  Bullet.  Grotesque.  Punch.  Slime.  Squeeze.  Jet.  Fart.  Kiss.  Others sound like they’re off by about 180 degrees.  My favorite is Pulchritude.  How did sublime beauty take up residence on the same block as Poultice or Putrid?  How could a lovely word like Sanguine, meaning optimistic, have such bloody roots?   Other words sound worse than they are.  Phlegmatic.  Dyspeptic.  Zaftig also doesn’t sound all that great, though Yiddish speakers likely meant it to reassure the rotund.  On the other hand, I would have thought Jejune was a rather pleasant state of affairs if I hadn’t looked it up.  It’s why I’m sticking with Vapid, for its unmistakably vaporous disposition. 

        Yiddish may seem the invention of a clever stand up, but English can often feel like a practical joke.  If there’s a specific thing you should be doing that’s good for you, it’s Prescribed.  If you shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole, the thing gets Proscribed.  If you’re bathed in admiration, you’re experiencing Approbation.  If the pitch forks are out for you, it’s Opprobrium.  It’s good to know if you’re researching something’s Etymological roots, and not its Entomological, unless you want bugs floating around in your word soup.  The same crew can raze a barn or raise it, though you need to know their intentions before deciding on the spelling.  Since we have Flammable, it seems profligate to have Inflammable as well, since it means the same thing, and sounds like you mean the opposite. 

Worse is Cleave.  It means to split apart, but also to tightly adhere.  Contranyms are not only confusing, they’re simply unfair. 

A Gimlet eye is reputed to be sharp and penetrating, though I once knew a chap who had an affectionate relationship with the vodka variety, and I’d say glazed was a more apt description. 

 Pleasing notions produce soothing words to the ear.  One can easily imagine people of various origins serenely flowing together, as tributaries join a river, when they Assimilate.  Words with well-placed esses are often like this.  I never had to look up Verisimilitude.  And no other word than Sibilance could accurately express the lispy phenomenon (though disliked by recording engineers).  Only a word with a soft touch could adequately conjure a Caress, usually an act requiring some Finesse. 

            On the other hand, a few hard consonants were smartly recruited to identify a Block.  (No one stubbed their toe on a word overflowing with vowels, unless they happen to be French.)  There are probably a hundred slang terms for penis, but nothing is so instructional, or adaptable to describing a thoughtless, sadistic jerk, as a Prick.  Here, the concluding consonant is essential to the effect.  If you find yourself in a Funk, you can blame the same consonant, appropriately placed, for ruining the word Fun.   When others try to foist off obvious falsehoods as truth, it’s no wonder we call it Bunk, proving consonants’ suitability for delivering ridicule.

Some words are so perfectly contrived, that looking for synonyms feels ungrateful.  Blasphemy is custom crafted to be spoken by a crusading inquisitioner, a word you can bellow from the pulpit or whisper in dim candlelight.  The first person to pull a sticky mass off the bottom of their schoolhouse desk surely called it a Wad.  In that same schoolhouse, the anonymous word coiner likely came up with Zit, a far more evocative identification than any of its peers.

  This all may seem the preoccupation of a Logophile, and I’ll gladly cop to it, though there’s a drawback to this.  Logo also means a symbol or design used to express the brand identity of a product or service.  I’m fine with this as an ordinary practice, but when marketers think it’s wise to wallpaper the entire world with their self-serving promotion, it’s just obnoxious. 

How about, logophile declares himself an antilogoist? 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I'll have what they're having.

I lived in London in the mid-70s, and found much to love about the place.  The members of my family whose genealogical roots were planted in the British Isles had inculcated me with an enduring Anglophilia long before I set foot in the place.  So I was predisposed to enjoy the accents, Georgian architecture, desiccated wit and lousy food, but it took months of jumping on the rear of red buses and fighting off chilblains to really appreciate Britain’s deeper charms.

The most pleasing contrast with America was the absence of celebrity culture. It seemed as if the Royal Family sucked up all the voyeuristic oxygen, leaving little for movie stars and football players.

  This became clear when I was told several of the blokes I’d been

hanging around for months at our local pub were cast members of Monty Python, who were early in their ascent, but already internationally famous. I didn’t realize this because no one fawned over them, badgered them for autographs or snapped flash bulbs in their faces (pre-selfie, thank the good Lord).  In fact, Graham Chapman always looked a little lonely sitting there by himself at the bar.

I cleave to a similar tradition, where I admire certain people whose accomplishments have made them famous, though never for the fame itself.

  I’ve met a few celebrities along the way, most of whom were exceedingly gracious and well mannered, along with a handful of jerks who likely achieved that designation through certain native gifts.

            Since America does have a robust celebrity culture, I’m used to long, passionate public eulogies for anyone dying with a Q rating above .1, some of whom I genuinely grieve having lost.  There’s nothing wrong with this, since every passing is a sad event for their loved ones, and knowing a little more about their lives, however belatedly, is meaningful.  That written, it’s easy to become inured to this type of commentary when it’s so plentiful and predictably anodyne. 

            Thus I found myself unusually stirred by a recent crop of celebrity deaths, mostly because I felt some personal affinity for the belated.  Since this is a literary centric platform, I’ll lead with Tom Stoppard, my favorite contemporary playwright by heads, shoulders and torsos.  In the hierarchy of unfair distribution of talent, Stoppard was unrivaled.  It was as if his very thoughts were conceived in perfect, lyrically brilliant prose, and all he had to do was jot them down.  He not only understood how to render human speech as the finest writers would have wished, he improved on the product.  And he was born in Czechoslovakia. 

            When I wasn’t clinging to the cliffs far below Stoppard’s literary heights, I spent years designing and building houses, and all the stuff that goes inside.  I’ve written about the parallels between pleasing, yet functional, architecture, and a well wrought book, and I would say that Robert A.M. Stern and F. Scott Fitzgerlad had a lot in common, aside from mysteriously lettered names.

Stern managed to be both revolutionary and traditional, to impress and startle the senses, while creating sturdy structures sure to endure for all time.  I studied and tried to emulate both those guys, mostly unconsciously, since their guiding lights appeared to me self-evident.

            Among my other abiding pursuits has been playing bass and guitar in rock bands, as well as folk and bluegrass ensembles.  I knew early on I’d never be the lead guy, never a Hendrix or Doc Watson, but I was a serviceable rhythm guitarist honored to be a reliable backup for the virtuosos at the front of the stage.  In this occupation, Steve Cropper was the A.M. Stern, the Tom Stoppard of tasteful chops and steadfast rhythmic structure.  There’s a long list of huge pop hits that were composed around his guitar licks, which were woven around seemingly simple, elegant

phrasing, that every aspiring guitarist has to learn if they hope to be accepted into a jam session.  These contributions are so significant, so fully integral to the musical language we all use, that you hardly notice they’re there. 

            I was very aware of these important influences as I went along, but it wasn’t until Rob Reiner died that I realized he took up a similar space in my heart.  I was frankly astonished that he’d directed all those movies that I relish, his work being so protean and quietly influential.  To come back to the realm of literary expression, Reiner understood and valued fine writing.  It clearly mattered to him, and he knew how to make exceptional creativity accessible, but also bring well-deserved attention to its brilliance.  As such, he was the Maxwell Perkins, the Lorenzo de’ Medici of cinema.

                          Triteness is the offspring of sentimentality, and since there’s nothing like death for

inspiring sentiment, it’s hard to express genuine loss with the dignity it deserves.  So the best I can do is be grateful for what these men gave me over the years, nurturing my better parts and making the daily effort of life more worthwhile.

---

Awk. Strike. Huh? Underline. Check.

When I was a kid, there was a daily aphorism published alongside the  funny papers in The Philadelphia Inquirer.  I involuntarily read hundreds of them, but only one stuck in my mind:  “A good father is priceless. Nobody needs a bad father.”

            One could debate the absolute validity of the second half of that, but not if you substitute “editor” for “father”.  I might even substitute “A bad editor is worse than no editor at all.”  This is particularly true when a writer is just starting out, filled with confusion and uncertainty.  The editor in this case is usually someone older, more confident and experienced, at least on paper (so to speak).  It’s the classic power imbalance, where the junior party is highly vulnerable, and the consequences of poor advice can be devastating, even fatal to the nascent creative spirit.

            A good editor, on the other hand, can change your life.  Learning to write is a lot like searching for your contacts in the dark, sailing with a broken compass, fixing a watch wearing oven mitts, or any combination thereof.  Poignantly, the novice writer is aching to improve herself, while her heart is laid bare by the dueling forces of ambition and raging insecurity.  What she needs more than anything is encouragement, any excuse to plow ahead despite the constant threat of embarrassment, or worse, loss of nerve.  A good editor knows this, and guides gently, carefully, instilling knowledge and craft without shattering her fragile emotional state.

            If you think that’s all a bit too precious, you haven’t worked with professional writers, some with years of hard-won experience, yeomanlike work ethic, awards on the shelf, etc.  If you want to get the best work out of them, you first tell them what you like, before telling them what’s missing, what needs to be improved.  A capable writer will know how to listen, how to take direction seriously, but not if you’ve undermined their confidence in what they’re doing.      

            Ultimately, you can’t teach a person to be a good writer.  The same goes for editors, though I think it’s easier for the less capable to hide behind their implicit authority, academic credentials, or the pretense of fashionable standards, and standard practices. 

     

        Editing is not engineering, it’s an art form.  It is not to impose your own preferences on matters of style or subject matter.  It is not to write the book for the writer.  You need a baseline of technical expertise, but the real work is understanding what the author is intending, and helping her achieve that goal. 

            I’ve found that cutting out words, sentences, even paragraphs, is almost always a good idea, but I once had an editor who cut so much I thought she was beguiled by that slashing motion with the red pen.  Lucky for me, I was able to put a lot of it back in again.  Often less is more, but occasionally less is just less.

            I’ve known a few copywriters who failed miserably as creative directors (essentially editors in the advertising business.)  The problem was they wanted to be a player-coach, but always hogged the ball.  The better creative leaders made you do it yourself, as many times as you could stand, until they were satisfied.

            A word about writers groups.  They can be quite useful, and even enriching, if composed of the right people.  I’m in one myself and get a lot out of it.  The members have widely varying levels of experience, but they’re all naturally capable practitioners.  I take everything they say seriously, jumping on the good stuff and letting the rest just drift on by.  But I think these arrangements can be treacherous for inexperienced people –  writers and commentators.  Amateur editors are often either too harsh or too lenient, since they have some notion of the role of editor without the requisite skills to actually ply the craft.  Rookie writers are like survivors of a shipwreck, lurching for any passing debris, without knowing if they’ve glommed onto a sinking mattress or inflatable raft. 

            I have no solution for this, except to advise caution and broaden the field of people examining your work.  Over time, you might learn who to listen to.

            I’ve come to understand that editing, or any form of comment on another person’s work, is an awesome responsibility, for all the reasons touched on above.  It’s not to be taken lightly, but rather humbly, with advice and caution in equal measure.

“Writing is thinking.”

             My wife made this observation many years ago, and it has not only lingered in my mind, but grown in significance as I’ve experienced the effects. 

Here’s the premise:  When you’re just thinking something, it’s an undifferentiated ball of feelings, memories, randomly firing synapses, unstructured language, side tangents and fleeting images.  A swirl of disorganized, unmediated mush.  When you have to express all that via the written word, you have to “think it through”.  In other words, your mind imposes order and continuity to the original jumble, recording feelings and vague impressions in a way they can be conveyed to another person, essentially “completing the thought.”  Writing it down makes it real and tangible, and adds a fair amount of useful cognition along the way.

Fiction writers often mention those strange, and unfortunately fleeting, moments when something seems to be writing itself.  It’s suddenly effortless, the words flowing on the page as if directed by divine inspiration.  What could be happening, miraculous though not quite as romantic, is your brain, as your write, quickly sorts out all the inchoate reasoning that’s been going on in the background, and letting you reveal what you’d been thinking all along. 

It's also possible that the language you’re putting on the page is triggering other thoughts, which then express themselves as words, sentences and paragraphs, which then fuels further thinking, and concomitant writing, and so forth in a virtuous circle.

Brain scientists describe a process whereby raw emotions express themselves, spontaneously and involuntarily, as words in the heat of a stress-filled moment.  This is when your amygdala (once referred to as your “lizard brain”) gets so riled up that it sends a message right to your mouth, or in extreme cases your fists, bypassing all that other refining and moderating circuitry.   We usually apologize after one of these episodes by saying, “Sorry, I lost my temper.”  Or “Really sorry.  I guess I lost my mind.”   The latter is technically more accurate.  You have, in fact, lost portions of your mind when they’ve been sidelined, or hijacked (an actual clinical description) by the primitive bits from our evolutionary past.

I bring all this up to illustrate that it’s not unreasonable to assert that thoughts originating in one part of the brain can find themselves transformed for the better as they pass through the other parts.  Why the purely emotional sensations you might feel witnessing the dawn of a beautiful spring day can splash across a piece of paper in the form of a sonnet, and you have no idea how it got there.

 It would be fair to say that speaking serves the same purpose.  It also organizes the cacophony of impulses and feelings that constitute thought into discernible meaning you can communicate to other people.  That’s true, though written language operates at a different level.  It is more structured, intricate and reliant on basic logic.  You are more likely to be working your way to a conclusion, a summation that faces greater rigor than merely thinking out loud. 

            My wife would maintain that the act of writing itself not only harnesses thought, it is a type of thought itself that arrives at a destination unreachable by any other means.  It’s possible that some fiction writers compose their work fully in their heads before delivering it to the page.  But most are like me.  I have some idea of what’s going to happen in the next chapter, but I really won’t know for certain until I get there.  Often, my assumptions are misplaced, and the narrative goes merrily off in another direction entirely. 

You could argue that writing is merely a tool that facilitates thought, and by extension, creativity.  Feel free, but in my experience, no good ever comes from arguing with my wife.  

Truth be told.

           The subject of my most recent SleuthSayer post was uncertainty.  I’m certain of that.  In that piece, I asserted that crime fiction was the natural home of ambiguity, an abiding state of nature, and a hallmark of every great mystery.  This may or may not not be precisely true, but on the other hand, likely true enough to be contended here. 

            Another fact of nature that plays an important role in crime fiction is that people often don’t tell the truth.  Almost never.  They lie, hedge, dissemble, prevaricate, and weasel their way through their lives, flooding the environment with oceans of uncertainty. 

            Not everyone lies all the time, but everyone is in the habit of telling only part of the truth.  This is usually meant to maintain civility and pleasant relations, though there’s a lot of daylight between complimenting your mother-in-law’s lousy meatloaf and telling the cops that you were home all night and have no idea how that BMW ended up in your garage.  We do these sorts of things naturally and fluently, having evaded responsibility for cleaning out the cookie jar or socking little brothers as soon as we can form sentences.  It’s innate.

Raymod Chandler described detective fiction as “riding around in cars and interviewing people.”  Maybe he didn’t actually say that, but it fits with his general view of the genre.  And while driving skills are fairly widespread, a good interviewer is an artist. 

There was an awful lot I liked about the advertising business, but aside from creating ads, the thing I liked most was qualitative market research.  That is the academic term for what mostly involves interviewing people, one-on-one, or in groups.  You might believe, like most people, that marketing is a soulless endeavor, but not if you’ve had a bunch of guys in a room talking about their cars.  Or intercepted a pack of teenagers in a mall to learn why they’re buying brand new jeans with the knees ripped out.  Or shadowed kitchen-table insurance agents as they chatted with ordinary people about death, disability and destruction. 

           

            After hundreds of these encounters discussing thousands of individual judgement calls, I’ve learned a few things. 

            Everyone likes to talk about themselves and what they do for a living, or how they spend their free time.  In other words, their lives.  That’s why salesmen, journalists, homicide detectives and hostage negotiators want to get the conversation on a personal level as quickly and smoothly as possible.  You cynics out there claim the interviewer’s true feelings can be faked, but they can’t.  You won’t succeed without some natural empathy and a genuine interest in what people have to say. 

            Although a research interview isn’t a test, everyone thinks there’s a right answer.  There’s an urge to please that’s very powerful, but also a desire to look good in the eyes of the interviewer.  That’s why focus groups (a session where one questioner tries to extract information on a specific subject from five, or eight, or ten people sitting around a conference room) can be a harder nut to crack, since few enjoy standing out from the consensus.  You have to convince each individual that the only right answer is what they actually believe if you want any meaningful outcome. 

            You’ve probably noticed that the accuracy of political polling has been falling dramatically.  One reason is it’s hard to get people on the phone, and even harder to catch them face-to-face.  In my experience, phone interviews themselves are far less effective than in person, for reasons explicated above.  I think written questionnaires are close to worthless, and online surveys worse than that.  Social research is a bit of a science, but it’s mostly an art.  Which is why detectives and savvy researchers always prefer to handle their assignments in the flesh.  You can hide those lying eyes, but it’s harder with the questioner staring you right in the face. 

            Body language is often the most articulate.  This is because gestures and facial expressions are less voluntary.  Things just sort of leak out that you aren’t intending.  Consequently, the first reaction is usually the most reliable, because it springs from an emotional response.  Over the following few seconds, the conscious mind takes the reigns, and people begin to say what they think they ought to say, or what their conditioning says is the proper point of view.

            People often don’t know why they want what they want.  Or why they did what they did.  Humans aren’t robots, but we do tend to delegate a lot of our behavior to unconscious impulses.  But when gently pressed to apply logic and reason to emotional decisions, we’re not that bad at figuring it out.  It may not be the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but it’s often good enough for storytellers in any line of business.