“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. 

You can’t get there from here.

“Ambiguous” is another way of saying, just not sure. After puzzle solving, it’s the most abiding element of crime writing. Our protagonists spend about three quarters of the book or short story feeling very unsure. This isn’t only because the author herself is usually caught between the multiple poles of her story, and is undecided about how it should all turn out. It’s also, more importantly, in the nature of any pursuit of the truth, because truth itself is a very slippery thing.

Most assume there is only one truth, and I’m partial to that idea myself. But people tend to disagree about what constitutes That One Truth, and since there is no objective arbiter to pick among the favorites, the question gets hurled into philosophical tracts, legal briefs, rabbinical debates and mystery stories.

It appears there is an inverse correlation between a person’s general awareness of the world and confidence in their beliefs. That is, the more you know, the less sure you are. And vice versa. When you dive into any subject, you soon learn it’s filled with subtlety, nuance and conflicting conclusions. And ambiguity. It’s a lot easier not to bother with all that stuff, make up your mind and stick with it no matter what. But I think the opposite approach is worth the effort.

According to Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, reaching any destination is impossible if with every step you halve the distance. Numbers being what they are, the halves are infinite, and thus your goal unreachable. Mathematicians over the years have found ways to disprove Zeno's Paradox, but they shouldn't have bothered. Few were aware of how things work at the quantum level. When your halves start to interact with subatomic particles, they can end up being in a couple places at the same time, which Werner Heisenberg instructed means their location is ambiguous. Nothing in your common experience can fix this, nor can a clever mathematician, not even Albert Einstein. So if you follow Zeno’s methodology, he essentially had it right.

Heisenberg

The upshot is that at the most basic levels of reality, nature’s governing property is uncertainty. So why should a murder mystery be any different?

I spent a lot of my career working in and around public relations. As with most vilified professions, most of what PR people do is pretty mundane and entirely benign. They spend much of their day examining how a person or institution is being described in the media, and where possible, correct misrepresentations. Most people in the press like this, since they are tasked with delivering information to the public that is as close to the truth as they can manage. Assuming the PR person is able to prove their corrections, responsible journalists will be sure to get it right the next time, and will reward reliable sources with greater access and goodwill.

There’s plenty of room for abuse on both sides of this interaction, of course, but overall it works pretty well. Though one thing it taught me is that anything you learn from the media, no matter how honest and sincere everyone’s trying to be, is at best an approximation of the truth.

This frame of mind can engender a fair amount of cynicism, which is likely why hardened journalists, PR flacks and homicide detectives are often portrayed as a pretty jaded bunch. But more often, in my experience, they develop a healthy skepticism about nearly everything. Which I do think is healthy, since there is nothing more suspicious than assertions of absolute truth. Without skepticism, no crimes would be solved, no mysteries ever written.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Close enough for jazz.” It’s a tired old saw that suggests imprecise tuning is okay if your goal is to perform a lot of improvisation. It’s a bit of a slander, since every self-respecting jazz musician cares deeply about their intonation. I think it works better as a broader lesson for truth seekers. Knowing that you’ll never get all the way there doesn’t mean you don’t try. But once you’ve exhausted yourself and every possibility, and arrived at some working hypothesis, it’s okay to say close enough.

Elementary.

             I’m always vaguely annoyed at the expression, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  It raises a lot of questions.  I want to know if those thousand words adequately conveyed the same information as the picture.  Would a million words have done a better job?  How about a hundred?  And whose words anyway?  What if James Joyce described a painting by Claude Monet.  Would the result be an exact facsimile, of either the picture or the text?

             The problem is a picture is a picture and words are words.  Composers are always telling you their symphonies are renditions of literature, or historical events.  The 1812 Overture has lots of percussion and heavy brass, symbolizing canon fire and the like, but I bet the Russian soldiers defending Moscow would pick the timpani and cymbals any day over the real thing.  I’ve heard The Rite of Spring, and though I think the concertgoers who rioted over the symphony’s debut might have taken things a bit too far, it’s a pretty poor substitute for daffodils, butterflies and frolicking fawns. 

            I probably lack adequate imagination, but I prefer works of art to be judged by the distinctive, and irreplaceable, qualities of their form. The best film adaptations of books render both the story and emotional feel of the original, a real accomplishment.  I’d count the film versions of The English Patient and Mystic River among those that pulled it off.  But they’re not the books.  Doesn’t make one type of work any better than the other.  I’ve preferred some movies over their inspiration. Blade Runner, for example.  Philip K Dick was a genius, but his novella that spawned the movie is so so.  The movie’s a masterpiece. 

            The greater point is that these are separate works of art with the same title, each using a distinct form of media.  How lucky we are that such things exist.

            This is a long-winded introduction to the actual thought behind this post.  I’m thoroughly enjoying TV cop shows of late, in particular nearly anything on Brit Box, which exquisitely elevates the police procedural to it’s most riveting and involving expression.  And the British actors, with their precise speech, understated delivery and stiff upper lips, are ideally suited to the task.

            I’ve never read Anne Cleeves, whose books make for first-rate TV shows, and I’m sure she’s an excellent novelist.  But there are other Brit Box shows orchestrated by creator/writer/director/showrunners that are just as compelling and addictive.  Since I’m a partisan of the mystery writing gig, I’d make a case that mysteries are ideally suited to the TV series format.  They’re taut, contained and bursting with human drama.  The stakes are usually life and death, and the potential for moral hazard is endemic to the genre.  Police procedurals also trade in conflict between established power structures, intractable bureaucracies and tangled legal conundrums opposing the valor and hardheadedness of individual players.  Lone wolves, iconoclasts, denizens of the borderland between defending the law and vigilantism are its bread and butter.

            I don’t have to convince this audience that solving puzzles is the most satisfying of intellectual pursuits.  Brit Box serves up theirs as a dish both precisely calibrated and piquant.  While never shying from a gruesome murder scene, or burst of violence when called for, the point isn’t the action, but rather the shrewd doggedness of its protagonists.  Modern technology is ever present, though in the service of the quest, never an end in itself.  The heroes are physically brave, though their courage is more manifestly moral.  I’m not immune to the charms of a good shoot-em-up, but having the fastest gun or most effective right hook is the shallowest of heroic accomplishments.  In all this, the British have the proper sensibility.

And if in the midst of the highest drama and ugliest of dilemmas someone has the good sense to put the kettle on, I’m fine with that.

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.