The Franklin-Edgerton Outlining Method Revealed!

I went to journalism school. It’s one of the tracks high school guidance counselors recommend to kids who want to write. If you’re like me, you get two years into your coursework before it dawns on you that the profession expects to you do things that terrify you. Namely, ask questions of complete strangers and become an absolute noodge in service to The Story.

My college years were solidly in the 1980s, which meant that some of my writing professors were products of the era of New Journalism, which was born in the 1960s and epitomized by the nonfiction work of such writers as Truman Capote, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin, and countless others.

The first rule of New Journalism is that great nonfiction can and should borrow its techniques from great works of fiction. Because newspaper and magazine stories are short, the ideal model for a nonfiction article is the fictional short story.

Why? A great short story has a beginning, middle, and an end. A great short story gives us characters that we care about. It’s dramatic, romantic, exciting, suspenseful—depending on dictates of its genre. And regardless of genre, great stories suck you in and keep you reading. If journalists could do all that in the pages of a daily newspaper or a magazine, well, wow, they would really be onto something.

In my day, one of the oft-anthologized stories first-year journalism students encountered in their textbooks was one called “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” by Jon Franklin, a onetime science writer for The Baltimore Sun.

The story was simple. I’ll sketch it out in broad strokes, and beg your forgiveness for the eventual spoilers. A patient named Mrs. Kelly was born with a tangle of malformed blood vessels in her brain. The defect worsened as she got older, generating life-threatening aneurysms and a host of medical issues. Blindness in one eye, hemorrhages, loss of taste and smell, seizures—not fun stuff. When her brain started causing leg paralysis, Mrs. Kelly decided it was time to address the problem once and for all. She was sick of living with the monster—her words—in her brain. The trouble was, for most of her life this Gordian knot was regarded by most doctors as largely inoperable. But medical science and technology were changing. A doctor named Ducker thought it was now possible to repair the tangle. But as he and his team warned Mrs. Kelly numerous times, the surgery might well kill her. The patient agreed to take the chance. She didn’t want to live another minute with this thing in her brain.

Again, remember, this is a true story. If there is tension in this story—and believe me there is—it’s there as the result of good reporting. I can’t tell you how many times as a student I’d read a piece of creative nonfiction, and ask the professor something along the lines of, “But how the hell could Talese have known what that dude was thinking?”

The answer was always the same: “He asked.”

(See earlier reference to being a damned noodge.)

Franklin’s genius was to structure his nonfiction article from the POV of the doctor, not the patient, from the moment the doc started his day at 6:30 AM until the conclusion of the surgery at 1:43 PM. The writing is vivid, tight, and painfully suspenseful.

The article ran for the first time in The Baltimore Evening Sun in December 1978, and has the distinction of being the first newspaper feature story to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Franklin later went on to teach journalism. His book, Writing for Story, became a classic, the book nonfiction writers recommend to anyone who wants to make “real” stories come to life on the page. In the intro, Franklin talks about his struggles as a young newspaperman. He kept bashing his brains against his typewriter, hoping to find the secret to organizing his copious notes into cogent reads. Reporters amass a ton of real-life facts in their notebooks, and they can easily make the assumption that the recitation of those facts will necessarily lead to a decent piece. Wrong, says Franklin, without a plan you will more often descend into “spaghetti-ing”—the endless unfurling of facts that lead nowhere.

If he wanted his stories to have an impact, he realized that he could model his pieces on the work of great short story practitioners. The outlining method he preached was innovative at the time. When my wife and I discovered it in the early 2000s, we often started our nonfiction books by crafting out a beat sheet in the Franklin style. Denise used Franklin’s method help her structure not only her first big nonfiction book but each of its chapters. When she saw our Post-It-festooned copy on my desk when I was writing this post, her first response was, “Oh—I should use that for the one I’m writing now!”

Before I get to the method, let me switch genres—and jump back in time. It’s August 2014. The crime writer Les Edgerton describes on his blog an outlining method that he has used forever. He talks about learning how to outline in school as a kid, and how horrible that Roman numeral-A, B, C method was. Most writers are intuitive. They don’t need anything that detailed, confusing, and worthless.

To write his short story “I Should Seen a Credit Arranger,” for example, Edgerton tells us that he hammered out the following outline:

• Debt endangers Pete
• Tommy cons Pete into a kidnapping
• Pete and Tommy botch the kidnapping
• Pete escapes
• Pete pays for mistake

That’s it—five bullet points that quickly summarize the flow of the action. No line is longer than six words. With this outline, Edgerton tells us, he was able to write an 18-page short story, and later expand that story into a 92,000-word novel (The Genuine, Imitation, Plastic Kidnapping, Down & Out Books, 2014). The same outline worked perfectly for both. His discussion of the method is short and sweet; I urge you to read it at the link above because I am intentionally leaving out the good stuff.

Les taught this outlining technique to all his fiction-writing students, and at least 20 of them had gone on to land book deals, so he felt he was onto something. When someone thanked him in the comments of this blog post, he wrote: “I wish I could take credit for it, but I came across it years ago in a craft book and I wish I could remember the author so I could give him credit!”

As soon as I read the post, the cadence of those five punchy beats were immediately familiar to me. I shot him a note, telling him that he was using Franklin’s method. Considering his interest in long-form journalism, Franklin never applied the method to fiction. And that, I told Edgerton, was something I had struggled with ever since. It seemed to me that I ought to be able to apply Franklin’s method to my fiction, but doing so successfully kept eluding me. Prior to this, my story outlines were quick, dirty, and sloppy. (I’ll share some in a future post.) But Edgerton’s post is geared specifically for fiction, and shows us how to use it to craft not only stories but entire novels.

Man, was he pleased when I wrote him. “I hated not being able to give him his proper credit,” Edgerton wrote me back. “I have or had all of Jon’s books at one time but can’t locate it now so may have lost it.”

At first glance, Franklin’s outline method doesn’t look like much. It doesn’t seem like such a big deal to jot down five bullet points on a scrap of paper, and start writing. But the essence of your story boils down to choosing the right verbs in your outline.

Watch how Franklin’s outline evolved before he wrote “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster.” (And here, folks, we get to the spoilers—forgive me.)

His first outline read:

Complication: Woman gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster thwarts Ducker
Resolution: Woman loses gamble

Notice: the 1^st and 5^th points on the five-point outline are connected to each other. Complication must lead inevitably to Resolution. In the parlance of fiction, we have an inciting incident, following by three action points on the try-fail cycle, and a conclusion.

Franklin was writing a newspaper feature article. And yes, the piece was sad, but he didn’t want to bring down his readers. So he tried another outline, this time from the doctor’s POV:

Complication: Ducker challenges monster
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Monster wins

This story was better, but still depressing. Franklin tried one more time, hoping to inject a ray of hope.

Complication: Ducker gambles life
Development:
1. Ducker enters brain
2. Ducker clips aneurysm
3. Monster ambushes Ducker
Resolution: Ducker accepts defeat

At the end of the operation, an exhausted Ducker staggers out of the operating room. He eats his brown-bag lunch in the hospital cafeteria, where he manages to respond to a few of Franklin’s questions. As he bites into his sandwich, you can just tell how crushed he is, but he must go on. There are tons of other patients out there, and he can’t let this outcome bring him down. He is a neurosurgeon, and this is the life. He will live to defeat more monsters, again and again.

Franklin, a reporter writing about real people, understood, captured, and reflected for his readers the greatest truth any story can ever share. Defeating monsters is one of the greatest themes in fiction. Possibly the greatest metaphor of them all.

After our exchange, I never connected with Edgerton again. In January 2024, when I saw that Franklin had died at the age of 82, I made a note to contact Les Edgerton. I thought he might find the news of interest. But it also occurred to me that Edgerton’s blog posts had for some reason stopped appearing in my RSS feed.

Investigating, I learned that Les himself passed away at age 80 in 2023 of complications from a bout with Covid. His work and his classes shaped many writers in the crime fiction community, and I know he is missed.

Both of these gentlemen—who never met—are forever linked in my mind by this single outlining method. One who unabashedly borrowed it from the world of short fiction, and the other who sensibly returned it.

---

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Mr. Swartwood’s Marvelous Box of BOGO Swag

My wife runs a monthly authors-in-conversation series at a local watering hole. She started it just before Covid hit, went virtual during the pandemic, and returned to the live event format when that sad business was over and done with. Now she’s got a steady stream of regulars who show up each month to hear her chat about the writing process with authors who probably would not have considered visiting our town if she had not sought them out (and we did not live in a place that calls itself Beer City, USA).

One of the recent authors was my longtime pal Robert Swartwood, a successful hybrid author who had recently branched into the traditional pub world with the launch of an unusual thriller, The Killing Room (Blackstone, 2023).

Last October Mr. S. trekked to North Carolina from his home in Pennsylvania for the weekend. When we arrived at the venue, he popped the trunk of his vehicle and pulled out some boxes, which contained stacks of large-format bookmarks, chunky attractive magnets, and tons of books.

Magnets, as they appear on my file cabinet.

Yes, he was well aware that our local indie bookstore was handling sales. But Robert had another idea in mind. The books he had flagrantly transported across five state lines represented a chance to do some marketing—and house cleaning—at the same time.

Most authors have a ridiculous number of their own books on their shelves. If you’re traditionally published, your contract stipulates that your publisher will send X copies of your hardcover, and another X of your paperback when that format drops. You may have bought additional copies direct from the publisher using your author discount, and you may have gotten a freebie box from your editor or agent when they tidied their office. If you’re self-pubbed, you certainly have a stash too.

At the end of his talk with Denise, Swartwood announced to the crowd that anyone who bought the new traditionally published book from our local bookstore’s on-site table could take their pick any of his previous titles for free. (While supplies lasted, of course.)

He had no idea how this Buy-One-Get-One-Free gambit would play out, but he was curious to try it. As a Big 5 publishing exec once told the New York Times, when asked to comment on the proliferation of free ebooks on the ’Zon, “Free is not a business model.” True, but sometimes it makes strategic sense.

Yes, paperbacks of Swartwood’s indie print-on-demand titles represented money out of his pocket, but those copies were a sunk cost. Copies of books he had written under a pseudonym for an Amazon imprint had cost him nothing, as they were provided under the terms of his contract. Regardless of the source, he was tired of all these books taking up space at home. And he really wanted to show his new publishers that he could move sales of the new title under the Swartwood name. So why not offer free books as giveaways?

Well, it worked! Many people that day bought more than one copy of The Killing Room, enticed by the freebies. I saw people leaving with a mix of four to six books, which confirmed my long-held theory that at any given time people at book events would probably buy multiple copies to gift to friends or family, but are holding back due to cost. (They certainly do during the Christmas season.) But in the other 10-11 months, if you gave them an excuse to spend, they go nuts.

The freebie hit of the afternoon was the short-but-sweet Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (Norton, 2010), which Swartwood conceived and edited. The 188-page volume contains 125 short stories—no, I did not type that figure incorrectly—by modern writers such as Ha Jin, Peter Straub, James Frey, and Joyce Carol Oates that take their inspiration from the tragic Hemingway short “story” about baby shoes.

At a book event this past weekend, I too pulled a Swartwood. Ages ago, when I first taught myself how to format POD print editions of my indie fiction titles, I ordered a stack of paperbacks I had designed of four of my short stories. Back then, I mostly wanted to see what they looked like, and to judge if doing short stories in print was feasible. I had given most of them away, but I found a few stragglers on my office shelf a while ago.

Turns out, people last Saturday loved the freebies. When I asked which one of the four titles they would like, many people told me to choose for them. One guy humorously quipped, “After all, you must know my tastes pretty well based on meeting me five minutes ago!” Everyone expected me to sign those copies as well. Might well be the first time I ever signed a 23-page “book”!

It’s fun to give away free stuff. Swartwood’s lovely magnets were a hit too. Author Ben Wolf says in his book, Power Author: A Quick Guide to Mastering Live Events, that magnets are a pricy but smart giveaway at live events. Unlike bookmarks and other easily discarded paper items, magnets end up stuck to someone’s fridge or office file cabinet. They’re the gift that keeps giving—to authors. Month after month, year after year, they’re advertising your name and book—if done right.

Yes, I’m aware that all of this stuff costs. But for most of us, they are a reasonable tax deduction. The question then becomes how little do you have to spend to make people deliriously happy, and have them walk away thinking that they have gotten a bit of a steal? I was delighted to see that free short stories in print were greeted with the same enthusiasm as full-size novels. Depending on page count, the wholesale price of a POD novel costs me about $4-$7. A 60-page paperback “Bloody Signorina”—an AHMM short that was a Derringer finalist—costs me $2.30. That’s not free, but it’s a nice giveaway for friends, buyers, editors and other high-value contacts you encounter at conferences.

A 60-page paperback still has enough
 of a spine to stand up. Who knew?

In a certain sense, this little book of mine serves as a nice “business card.” In one volume, people get a sense of my crime writing style, a list of all my books, my website URL, my newsletter sign-up info, contact info, and sample chapters to another book. A nice package overall.

Some other stuff I bring to book events in my handy tote bag:

QR Sign-up: Passersby “shoot” the code, and are directed to the newsletter sign-up at your website. (It also alerts them to the fact that you have a website.) Buy a plastic “Stand-up Sign Holder” at your stationery store. (This one is the 5-x-7 inch model.) Design a 5x7-inch image on Canva with your details. Use a QR code generator that isn’t spammy; the free one by Kindlepreneur is perfect. Make sure that people can easily find the newsletter sign-up form on your web page. You don’t want them scrolling and getting lost. Optimize your website for mobile devices. If they are going to sign up, they will do so on their phones within a minute of seeing your sign, not on their desktops at home.

Clipboard & Sign-up Sheet: Besides the QR code sign-up, I still offer a hard copy sign-up sheet, because typing on phones is still too fiddly for many people. I design the sign-up sheet with book cover art, and ask for two details only: name and email address. It gives folks something to do while you sign their book. Bear in mind that hard-copy signups mean you must now transcribe everyone’s chicken-scratch accurately and upload the deets to your mailing list. Check details before they depart the table to make sure you can read their writing.

A "chunky" bookmark, with full-bleed cover image.

 

My wife's stash of bookmarks and postcards.

Swag: You already know that I am not a fan of bookmarks. I feel the same way about stickers, postcards, and the like. They’re often money thrown down the drain. That said, if you or your publisher have invested money in this stuff, by all means set it all out neatly on your table. Readers who are not ready to buy, or who prefer to buy ebooks or print books online, will grab ’em because they’re free and an easy way to remember your book or byline. Place swag on your table where it will not interfere with the business of signing books or your sign-up sheet. Set out a few pieces of swag at a time, and replenish them as you go. (This will reduce the chance of some whack job swiping your entire inventory.) Swartwood told me that he doesn’t love standard bookmarks because book covers have to be the size of a thumbnail to fit on them. Far too small, in his opinion, to make an impact. If you’re going to print your book cover, he says, go big. His bookmarks (and Denise’s postcards) offer large images of their book covers. As for the magnets, he ordered in such quantity from PureButtons that his price-per-piece was $1 each. Personally, I would keep nice swag like that hidden and offer them to buyers only.

Writing Tools: You will need a fistful of ballpoint pens for sign-up sheets, and Sharpies for signing books. Always bring more than you think you’ll need. They are sucked into black holes.

Mr. Swartwood takes the dais at ThrillerFest to accept his award.

Congrats! (The ebook hit online retailers
 before the print edition hit stores.)

Lest you think I have dropped the thread on Mr. Swartwood’s writing, fear not! At ThrillerFest 2024, he accepted the ITW Thriller Award for Best E-Book Original for The Killing Room. The second book in the series is up for pre-order, and wouldn’t you know it, if you order the new book, you can get one of his old titles for free, while supplies last. (Order via the indie bookstore in his area for a signed copy, or discover your online options in his recent post.) Everyone loves BOGO, baby!

Book 2

* * * 

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

Writers of the World: Bifurcate Now!

I am not a lawyer, accountant, or literary agent, but I do think that seven years working in the trenches of a children’s math magazine at Scholastic taught me a skill that is apparently lost on the accounts payable clerks who toil for two different literary agents that I will not identify: I know how to multiply a gross figure by a decimal and calculate exactly how much to send me, the freaking author.

Maybe you don’t have such problems. You are blessed with an earnest, hardworking, bookish agent who throws her heart and soul into repping you. Her only fault is that she’s a one-woman agency, somewhat scattered, and your royalty checks and statements routinely reach you about 90 days after the publisher sent them to her. Earning interest in Cat Lady’s account, in other words, and not yours.

Or maybe your agent is a crook or employs a felonious bookkeeper.

The remedy for all this is a beautiful word with Latin roots: bifurcation. That means the publisher pays each of you your share of the royalties directly, without mingling your cashola with the agent’s.

Two minutes of research reveals that in the Devonian epoch, publishers directly paid writers, who were then responsible for paying their agents. That arrangement was altered in the Pleistocene, when it was decreed that writers could not be trusted with Other People’s Money and that agents were infinitely more trustworthy.

Moreover, when checks, royalty statements, annual tax statements, and currency itself had to be hand-chiseled on stone tablets, it was so much easier for the publisher to send a giant wad of money to, say, sixteen agents, and let them dole out minuscule amounts to the respective writers. Relieved that of that onerous paperwork (and the associated labor costs), publishers could get on with the rarefied work of curation.

But OMG, guys! Have you heard? Funds can now be electronically electroned to the money store of your choice, so why not bifurcate? It’s the smart thing to do.

I have ghostwritten a number of books for business people, many of whom instructed their literary agent to enact bifurcation on Day 1. It’s what you do in the “real” world of business. To people who think seriously about money, publishing’s financial traditions appear quite dumb.

In one email that I probably should not have received, the literary agent chided her client—the fellow whose book I was writing—saying bifurcation was fine to do with domestic (ie, US) contracts, but would be somewhat more complicated with foreign rights. She was only half right. It can be tricky. If I were doing a foreign deal today, I’d try to bifurcate, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to focus on bifurcating payments on domestic royalties.

I took the fork most traveled by...

Why would you want to bifurcate? First, because the money owed to writers goes missing all the time. The most egregious case is the one involving the literary agency that represented Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk, not to mention the estates of Edward Gorey, Mario Puzo, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Heller, Studs Terkel, and many more. The firm’s bookkeeper embezzled $3.4 million over seven years. Apologizing profusely to their clients, the principals of the firm watched as their weeping former employee was sentenced to two years in prison, then filed for bankruptcy. By all accounts, a respectable firm ground into the dust by greed.

Second, I’d bifurcate because one writer’s personal stash of dead-wood agents can quickly pile up like cordwood. I’m a mid-lister at best, yet in my career, my money has flowed to the offices of a total of six literary agents. Back in the day, I befriended a scrappy young agent who landed me a few book deals. He departed for a new firm, still agreeing to rep me but leaving his former employer responsible for paying me royalties on my “old” projects. When another agent of mine left her longtime agency, she and her longtime employer decided to split my rights between them. (No one bothered to ask what I wanted to do.) The dead-wood agency would send me royalties on my US rights, and “my” agent would rep my foreign and all other subsidiary rights.

It was nuts. At one point, I was getting checks from four different agencies, but only firm one repped me for reals. The others were, as I say, dead wood.

Talk about scary: At one firm, the longtime principals had retired, entrusting the distribution of royalty checks to—who else?—their progeny and grandchildren. At another firm, when the two principals began suing each other, they at least had the decency to teach their clients the B-word.

It was a tedious process, bifurcating payments with every print and audiobook publisher with whom my wife and I had ever signed a deal with. We set up bifurcations with Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Audible, and Brilliance Audio. We got good at it, and once we were done bifurcating with our LIVE agents, I moved on to prune the dead wood.

Here’s what you do:

Get out copies of all the contracts you have with a single publisher. To make this easy on yourself, just deal with the publishers in your nation of residence to start. In other words, money that is coming from a US publisher to you, a US writer. If you’re a Canadian writer, you have my permission to bifurcate from your US agent and your US publisher. That transaction should go smoothly. But I’m neither a lawyer or accountant (as noted above).

At the top of your most recent royalty statement you will find the contact info of your publisher’s royalties department. On your royalty statements, you will see that your publisher has reduced you to a number. Write down your official author number, and fire off an email to this effect:

I’d like to bifurcate the following contracts—noted here by date, name of book, etc. My agent of record, noted in Paragraph Whatever, is Eustace Simoleons, of the Rackhamup Simoleons Literary Agency. The split-share on each of the birfucations should be 85 percent to me, the author, and 15 percent to the aged yet highly esteemed Mr. Simoleons. Mr. S and his numbskull assistant are cc’d on this email.

Note: If you have contracts at the same publisher that involve another agent, you’ll have to go down that route too.

Since they are no longer having to chisel money out of stone, I have found that royalty department drones have free time on their hands, and will most likely respond quickly: “Wow, a human wants to talk to us! Thank you for writing, Scribulous J. Scrivener! We’d love to help you set up that bifurcation, but Mr. Simoleons must assent before we proceed.”

Numbskull assistant will prod Mr. Simoleons to respond. If he’s still quite sagacious, Mr. S. will instantly comprehend that you have handed him a reason to reduce the annual hours paid to said nitwit. (“Sh*t—if I can get all my authors to do this, I might be able to fire my idiot assistants and drop payroll,” he will think, albeit privately to himself.)

If, on the other hand, Mr. Simoleons is shady or neurotic, he will phone to convince you that it’s in your favor to let him (man)handle your money. Hold firm. Say it’s a business thing, and you’re happy to get your attorney involved if it would make him feel more comfortable. (Only say this if you are not bluffing.) When you surmount that hurdle, the royalty department will send you a contract addendum like this:

We refer to the agreement (the “Contract”) dated TK, between Scribulous J. Scrivener (the “Author”), and Edified Press, at 123 Highly Overpriced Office Towers, NYC, (“the Publisher”), concerning BOOK TITLE (the “Work”).

It is hereby agreed as follows:

1. Paragraph TK of the Agreement—(ie, the so-called Literary Agency clause) is hereby deleted in its entirety and replaced with the following:
2. “Fifteen percent (15%) sums due Author under this Agreement shall be paid to the Author’s agent: Eustace Simoleons, Agency name and address (the “Agent”), whose receipt of funds shall be a full and valid discharge of Publisher’s obligations.
3. “Eighty-five percent (85%) of all sums due the Author under this Agreement will be paid directly to the Author at: Scrivener’s address. Receipt of those funds shall be a full and valid discharge of Publisher’s obligations.”

Nothing in these two paragraphs will be deemed to have changed the amounts otherwise payable by the Publisher under this Agreement. In all other respects the Agreement remains in full force and effect in accordance with its terms.

ACCEPTED AND AGREED:

Signed by Publisher

Signed by Author

Yes, you can get a lawyer to look at this, but I would recommend having the publisher draw up the doc first, so you don't incur excessive legal expenses on consultations with your attorney and their subsequent drafting of the doc. The agent is not required to sign, because the original contract was always between you, the author, and the publisher, with only one graf inserted to redirect your money to the agent.

You will need to execute this document for every book you have at this publisher, and at every other publisher that brings your work to market. You’ll do it for all the the other businesses that have signed subsidiary deals with you.

Not gonna lie to you. It will take time. While you’re at it, instruct the publisher to set up direct deposit as well, and agree to receive your royalty statements via email or their online royalty portal. The documents you sign today probably will not impact your royalty statements or payments for a year. Because publishing.

Once the new agreements start kicking in, however, you’ll forever get your 85 percent and the agent will get their 15 percent. At the end of the year, the publisher (not the agent) will send you your tax docs. Yay you!

From this moment forward, I predict that you will never hear from your dead-wood agents again, just the ones continuing to rep you. Although, because these idiots really cannot do math with decimals, you may occasionally get a check in the mail remitting you 85 percent of an agent’s 15 percent payment. (Yes, this has happened to me with two agents’ offices, several freaking times in a row.)

Once, I got an anxious call from the scion of a once-great literary agency who said, “Um, we just got a call from someone in Bulgaria who wants to do a deal with your book? Can you handle it?” (Translation: “Please don’t make us have to work after all these years of cashing grandpa’s checks.”)

JFC, publishing is stupid, but you don’t have to be. Bifurcate.

---

See you in three weeks.

— Joe

josephdagnese.com

The Pressfield Synchronicities

 

The Man in the Velcro Mask.

Every morning since January 1 of this year, I have observed the same ritual to start my morning. I get to the office early and slip into an inflatable jacket and helmet. The radiation treatment I underwent in 2022 damaged the lymph nodes in my face. If I don’t pump my face free of the excess liquid, over time I’ll wake up mornings looking like a bullfrog. When the motor kicks on, the suit squeezes my chest and face, filling my ears with the breath of an unseen giant. In the 32 minutes it takes to run my cycle, I read a page from three books in quick succession.

And yes, I’m well aware that I’m about to sound pretentious, but work with me here. The first book is the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. The second is The Daily Stoic, by Ryan Holiday, a collection of daily readings culled from the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius, with Holiday’s modern commentary. The third book is a 2023 collection of daily meditations on the writing life by the author Steven Pressfield. It’s the book I devour like potato chips, often peeking ahead and blowing my daily allotment. Pressfield’s words go down smoothly, and leave me thinking and nodding for the rest of the day.

If this author’s name sounds familiar, it’s because you fit into one of three demographics. You’re one of those folks who hang out in sports bars, tossing back cocktails while glued to the Golf Channel, thus absorbing a bajillion viewings of the 2000 movie, The Legend of Bagger Vance, based on Pressfield’s first novel of the same name (pubbed 1995; 450,000 copies sold*).

Or maybe you attended a military academy, and in order to graduate your instructors had you read Pressfield’s historical novels Gates of Fire, about the Battle of Thermopylae (pubbed 1998; 1 million copies sold), or Tides of War, about the Peloponnesian War, (pubbed 2000; 125,000 copies sold).

Or you are simply a person who has dreamed of better things. You want to commit to a daily mediation practice, lift weights, lose weight, do yoga, paint, dance, or sculpt. You want to chuck your stupid day job and open an Etsy shop to sell your handmade jewelry, leatherwork, or pottery.

Or, God help you, you want to write.

In that case, you have probably read—or probably should read—Pressfield’s 2002 book, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles (pubbed 2002; 500,000 copies sold).

With more than 27,000 reviews on Amazon and 103,000 on Goodreads, the latter is one of those books I had heard about forever but never bothered to pick up. One summer, when I was bouncing around the east coast with my wife on one of her research trips, I tucked War and few other slim sequels to this title in my bag and read them as we traversed nine states.

That one experience with his books sparked a series of Pressfield Synchronicities that I am still experiencing. I’ll read a nonfiction book by Writer A, who announces he is a Pressfield fan. I’ll read a book that that writer recommends, only to find that Writers B, C, and D in turn are all Pressfield fans. Everywhere you look, in other words, everything is coming up Pressfield.

The O.G. paperback is about 165 pages, with chapters that are a page or two long. Each reads like a mini-sermon, wherein Pressfield addresses the central question facing any creative person: Why the hell don’t we do the things we say we want to do? Why don’t we write that novel? Why don’t we start that business? Why don’t we tell our bosses to shove it and go off on our own? Why don’t we pursue in this life what our souls are meant to achieve?

The villain, he says, is something called Resistance:

“Most of us live two lives,” he begins. “The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two lies Resistance.”

He could have called it Procrastination or Avoidance. But Resistance nails it. It is a pernicious evil that threatens to crush us, that wants to keep us in our lower, unrealized state. To keep us ordinary, perhaps, or boring, so we don’t threaten our comfort level or the comfort level of others.

Listen:

“Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. The more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and the growth of our soul.

“That’s why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there’d be no Resistance.”

Amen, brother, I thought, remembering the years I longed to do more with my writing but never did. I worked editorial jobs to support myself, and I convinced myself that I was too tired by the end of the day to do my own writing. By Pressfield’s definition, I was living a shadow life—close to the dream but no cigar.

Pressfield knows what he’s talking about. For years he lied to himself, too. Said he was a writer but instead of sticking his butt in the chair, he wrote ad copy, picked fruit, drove trucks and New York City cabs. He wrote only when “inspired.”

One day, he chose to become a professional and write regardless of how he felt. He packed a bag lunch and showed up for work, so to speak, the way any gainfully employed person does.

That said, his craft books are probably not for everyone. Many will take offense at his language and his gruff, tough-love message. Don’t get me wrong; he is supremely erudite. (His golf novel is based on the Bhagavad Gita, for Pete’s sake.) For all his scholarship, his command of classical philosophy, Eastern thought, and ancient military battles—he’s the plainest of plain speakers. Like the titles of his other books suggest—Do the Work; Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be; and Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t,—when he speaks, you hear the ex-cabbie, the ex-trucker, and the ex-Marine.

When I’m immersed in his texts, I imagine him slowing his cab down to give me a piece of his mind. “How many years are you going to waste not doing what your soul knows it must to do, huh, Joe?” he says, lecturing me from the front seat while the meter runs. “What do you think this is, a joke? Stop the bullshit—sit and write already. That’ll be twenty bucks. Don’t slam the door on the way out.”

(By the way: considering our audience, I should says that one of his books, a hilarious crime novel called The Knowledge, is a semi-autobiographical take on his taxi-driving days.)

On that research trip with my wife, I peeked at the copyright page of one of his books. We were traveling in Massachusetts that week, and I thought, “Huh, that’s funny. We’re in the exact same town in New England where his editor and publisher is based.”

That was the first coincidence. I get home, and I run into a young bartender friend who’s announced that he wants to move back home to Long Island. He’s got a good side hustle selling his artwork—abstract paintings—but he craves the financial security that only his parents’ basement can provide. He knows it’s a slippery slope. If he goes back to the old homestead, there’s a good chance that he will get sucked back into the drama of his hometown family and friends, and maybe, just maybe, he won’t devote himself to his artwork and the burgeoning Instagram clientele he is slowly building.

“People tell me I should read this book,” he says. He struggles to remember the name…

I got you, kid, I thought. We bought and presented him with a copy of The War of Art on his last day in town.

Another young man, the brother of a friend, returns home after a long deployment in Afghanistan. Obviously bright, he served in a crypto-linguistics unit in the U.S. Army. Now he wants to become a journalist. An obvious underachiever, he quickly lands himself a journo fellowship at Harvard. Christmas week, as we all gather around his mom’s table, he confides that he loves historical fiction. While in the military, he devoured the books of—

I stop him right there, and tell him he should go out right now and spend his money on his favorite author’s books about writing. “Pressfield writes books about writing?” he says.

Months before this, Pressfield released an ambitious, 534-page book called The Daily Pressfield. (I sprung for the signed copy via his website.) It offers 366 inspirational readings drawn from his work, meting out one passage a day for a year. This is the book I am supposed to be reading page by page each morning. Except, I keep skipping ahead and devouring giant chunks.

How’d did I hear about it? I was listening to a self-publishing podcast some weeks earlier that had the now 80-year-old Pressfield on as a guest. He explained that he’d gotten the idea from the author Ryan Holiday, a young Pressfield fan who is best known for resurrecting Stoic thought for the Instagram masses. Derek Sivers, another entrepreneur and thinker who founded CD Baby and later sold that company for a $22 million, holds Pressfield’s work in such regard that he has summarized most of the former’s books on his website. Another writer, the marketing guru Jeff Walker, urges his readers and clients to read Pressfield as well. Don’t even get me started on Oprah…

So yeah, I don’t know how this happened to me, but for a while there one conversation or piece of media after another sparked a chain of Pressfieldian references.

Then the synchronicities petered out. After the holidays, I was too busy to get out much, and winter was too cold for socializing. On a warm day in February or March, I went to the fancy resort in town with views of the mountains. Over a couple of tangy beef lettuce wraps, I got to talking with one of the resort’s F&B managers. He’s worked in the food and beverage biz his whole life, starting as a server, mixing drinks as a bartender, slinging tacos and margaritas in a food truck that his brother owned in Costa Rica, before eventually landing here and becoming everybody’s boss.

But wouldn’t you know it? Deep down inside, he longs to write songs and play music the way he did in his teens, before marriage, the kids, the mortgage, and all these exhausting responsibilities. He’s built a studio in his home so he can rock out in his free time. But he worries. He’s in his forties, you see, and it all feels too little too late.

He sighs and shakes his head. I can feel his frustration. Out of the freaking blue, because he knows I’m a writer, he goes, “Hey—you ever hear of that book, The War of Art?”

* * *

* Sales figures courtesy of the author’s website.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com

How to Turn Your Book Cover into Matchbox Art

I live in a town that sports a stupid amount of gift shops. Such abundance delights the tourists, and keeps the economic engine of this little mountain town purring. Some years ago, my wife picked up two handmade items in one of those shops that we keep on a side table in the living room. They are matchboxes decorated with the covers of vintage mystery novels. They’re so adorable that we never use them, preferring to light candles with an electric gooseneck lighter made by Zippo. The matchboxes just sit there, looking pretty.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve handled them over the years, wondering how hard it would be to turn one of my book covers into an equally cute piece of decor. Turns out, it’s really easy.

WHY MAKE MATCHBOX BOOK ART?

• To decorate your living spaces
• To give as gifts (they make nice Christmas tree ornaments, as I’ll shortly reveal)
• To offer as swag to book clubs or fans
• To appease the insatiable gods of book promotion

Now, yes, it is much simpler to print bookmarks, bookplates, and the like than it is to create handmade matchbox art. But the process is so straightforward (and cheap) that you could assembly-line the whole process, pressing the kids and grandkids into service, and whip up a sizable batch that will delight family members and others who have supported your books over the years. You could also surprise author friends with matchboxes featuring their books. These days people are over-wowed by handmade items.

WHAT YOU NEED

Matchboxes (a typical 10-pack of 32-count wooden matches costs about $5 at a supermarket.)
A few sheets of white card stock
Chisel-tip markers or paint
Glue (Elmer’s, contact cement, glue gun, glue stick, etc.)
Scissors or X-Acto knife
5-inch piece of ribbon or twine (optional)
A high-res .jpg or .tiff file of book cover
Computer and printer

An accountant to write off these business expenses

WHAT TO DO

1. How lucky we are that the dimensions of the wooden-match matchbox conforms so well to those of the standard book cover! Before you start, measure the width of your matchbox. I’m betting it’s 1.25 inches. (Regardless of the size of yours, round down to the nearest quarter inch to simplify your life.)

Look, ma! I'm a hand model!

2. Dash to your computer. Find the .jpg or .tiff file of your book cover. (You must use a high-resolution version.) Duplicate the file so that the original remains pristine. Double-click on the file copy, and it will most likely open in Acrobat or Preview, depending on your system. Choose “Adjust Size” from the dropdown menu.

3. You’ll be presented with the dimensions of the current image. Ensure that the width and height are “locked” and that you are working in inches.

4. Change the width of the image to the width of the matchbox. (I typed 1.25 inches in the Width box.) When you do this, the Height will change to the appropriate proportional dimension. Ensure that the resolution is somewhere between 200 and 300 pixels/inch. If the software tells you that cannot perform this operation until you convert to a .tiff file, agree to the conversion and name the resulting file. We’ll wait while you open the new file, adjust the size of the image, and change the pixels.

5. Either way, once you’ve adjusted the size, hit OK.

6. Open the new file. It will look smaller, but not necessarily matchbox sized.

7. From your File menu, choose print. You’ll get a dialog box that shows how your cover will print—a tiny matchbox cover embedded in the center of a giant sheet of white paper. If you’re just making one match box, you’re probably going to have to sacrifice this one sheet of paper to the tree gods.

Yes, folks, Murder, Neat is a little masterpiece.

8. If you’re moving beyond a single prototype, let me assure you that you can use software such as Canva (free), Pages (for Mac; paid), or some other design program to “tile” your new file on a single sheet of paper, so you can print, say, 16 mini-covers on a single sheet in one fell swoop. This will work as long as the image you tile conforms to the new matchbox dimensions. Go ahead and print your file on card stock.

9. Away to the workbench! With paintbrush or markers, prettify your matchbox to hide the manufacturer’s logo and other details. I used acrylic paint markers, but Sharpie glitter or metallic markers are fine too. (A fat “chisel-tip” marker covers a lot of terrain at one stroke.) Regardless of what you do, you’re probably not going to be able to disguise all of the print on the box. That’s okay. The ones sold in gift shops look just like yours.

10. Paint carefully around the strike zone so the wooden matches can still be used.

11. Allow each painted side of the box to dry before moving to the next.

12. Feel like painting the internal drawer that holds the matches? Go to town.

13. Cut out your book cover with scissors or an Xacto knife.

14. Apply glue to the blank side of the book cover. Gently affix the cover to the box. Let dry. 

That’s it! You’re done. Unless, of course, you want to upscale the heck out of this project…

15. Fold your optional ribbon in half and glue the ends. 

When dry, glue the ends to the inside bottom of the matchbox drawer.

When dry, you now have a loop from which you can hang the box. A wire hook is all you need to display the “book” on your Christmas tree, for example.

PARTING ADVICE

Paint the matchbox a color that will contrast nicely with the predominant color of the book cover. If you need help picking a color, squint and see which colors pop out at you.

Here’s what I mean:

Since the cover of our recent (and most excellent SleuthSayers anthology) Murder, Neat is largely black, I painted the box red, which makes the black pop, and echoes the color of the title font.

I used red again to echo the cherry on the cover of my book.

I’ve always loved the cover of editor Josh Pachter’s Jimmy Buffett anthology, but the cover would disappear against the backdrop of an equally orange box. So I contrasted the cover against the blue of the parrot’s wing. (Call me crazy, but I think a margarita-green color would have also worked.)

The cover of Art Taylor’s On the Road With Del & Louise presents a challenge. The biggest fields of color are teal, orange, and red. If I had chosen one of those colors for the box, sections of the cover would have faded into the background. I went with basic black, which echoes the asphalt of the road depicted on the cover. He said hopefully.

I’m sure that a professional crafter would be able to crank out far more competent work, which is why they’re selling them in gift shops! My scissor skills are not the greatest, and my cover placement could be straighter. But I’m happy with how these turned out. If nothing else, they have enlarged my understanding of what is meant by the craft of writing.

If you need more inspiration, you will find countless videos on YouTube by searching under Matchbox Art.

Join me in three weeks when I will show you how to assemble an FBI-grade forensics kit using only a cereal box, a can of motor oil, and a banana!

* * *

I’m out of here. You know where to find me.
Joe

josephdagnese.com

They don't let you smoke in bars anymore.
Yet they still give away matchboxes. Go figure.

Drink On, Drinkers!

 

Available wherever fine anthologies are sold. (Booze not included.)

Some years ago, I had this brilliant idea for a novel that never came to fruition for reasons that will become painfully obvious. I was absolutely convinced that before I could write a word of this hot new project, I needed to read a 400-page biography on the life of the political cartoonist Thomas Nast. We’ve all been there, am I right?

In that book was a reference to Nast’s favorite New York watering hole, Pfaff’s, a coffeehouse/cafe/bar that was popular with a burgeoning class of colorful artists, writers, and theater folks in Greenwich Village in the mid-19th century. Its heyday would have been the 1850s and 1860s.

In its lifetime, Pfaff’s had at least three different incarnations. Two locations—on Broadway near Bleecker Street—were situated in the neighborhood where I had worked for Scholastic back in the day. In my mind’s eye I could picture those old buildings with little effort. But I probably wouldn’t have done much with my newfound knowledge if it weren’t for synchronicity.

You know how you read about some obscure thing and it begins popping up everywhere you look? As months turned to years, whenever a piece about Pfaff’s appeared, I’d tuck that fresh article away on my hard drive.

Pfaff’s worked its magic on me. For a time, it was a rathskeller with vaulted-brick ceilings located under a busy hotel. (See images here and here.) Giant hogshead beer barrels. A gas lamp chandelier. Foreign-language newspapers on every table. It was an epicenter for America’s blooming literary and artistic culture. The round table before there was ever an Algonquin.

It was also New York’s first gay-friendly establishment, where male and female same-sex couples could hang out in a darkened vault in the back without fear of judgment. Patrons declaimed poetry, argued politics, drank heavily, and pleaded with Mr. Pfaff to let them ride the tab till their next payday. He often acquiesced, because thanks to these beautiful loons, Pfaff’s had become famous coast to coast.

Early on, I had the barest ghost of a story idea. Nast hung out here. So did Edwin Booth. But by far the most famous Pfaff’s regular was Walt Whitman, who left behind one unfinished poem about the joint. (One line of that poem inspired the title of this post.)

Cool, I thought, there’s a murder at Pfaff’s, and Whitman and Nast team up to solve it. Easy-peasy.

But I couldn’t possibly start writing based on such a flimsy premise, could I?

I am on the record as a serial over-researcher, knowing that my process often teeters close to obsession. I usually research until everything I read starts to sound repetitive. Then I know it is time to stop. This ritual is propelled by a fear that I will get something wrong, and incur the wrath of those who know better. This grew out of my years in journalism, when there might have been serious repercussions for getting a fact or assertion wrong. An old journalism professor of mine offered this advice on research: “You’ll never become an expert on a new topic. But with enough reporting, you can become a semi-expert.”

Fiction often doesn’t demand that level of research, but old habits die hard. This time around, however, there were signs that I had grown weary of my own shtick. I had just investigated the heck out of Manhattan in the days of the Dutch (1625 to 1660) and New York during the protest era (1960s) for two other fiction projects. I’d written an 1890s New York crime short, and a 1970s Serpico-like crime fantasy short, both of which were pubbed in AHMM. Thanks to that Nast book, I knew a ton about the artist, but I didn’t know if I could spare the time to “become a semi-expert” on Whitman. Indeed, I doubted such a thing was even possible.

Then came a call for submissions. Our editors challenged us to write a short crime story involving…a bar. If this was not fate knocking, I didn’t know what was. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to procras—er, I mean embark on a sensible course of research. The pandemic was still raging, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

I cracked open my Pfaff’s file. To whet my appetite, I read two long scholarly papers, and browsed a Pfaff’s-dedicated website maintained by Lehigh University. (Yes, Pfaff’s is that well known and revered.) I perused articles about an NYU professor who guides people on Whitman tours. It appears that one Pfaff’s location still exists. The current renters of the space sometimes allow Whitman geeks to parade through the basement so long as visitors are careful not to disturb the boxes of merchandise destined for their Korean grocery upstairs.

I had not read Whitman since high school. I bought two modern volumes, The Portable Walt Whitman and The Collected Poems. Digging into those introductions and hearing his voice in my head again gave me one of my story’s conceits. I would presume to write bad poetry in Whitman’s style, only to have my fictional character reject them as they came to his mind. Among other things, I learned that he loved walking the city, as anyone who adores that island does. Like any good flatfoot, he would have known his nabe like the back of his hand.

I supplemented the literary research by reviewing some of his letters and photos at The Walt Whitman Archive, and a couple of decent articles about his relationships. It broke my heart to learn that at the end of his life, knowing that his papers would be scrutinized upon his death, he edited his journals, changing the pronouns of some of his lovers from him to her. I read one piece about the playful cross-dressing that most likely went on at Pfaff’s, which planted the seed for my plot. I found a long, shocking article that claimed that many of the encounters Whitman described in his encoded, private notebook involved males of an age that would greatly concern us today. (Before you judge Walt, consider the relative ages of Mr. and Mrs. Poe; he age 26, she age 13 when wed.)

I was not qualified to assess those claims. I needed just enough details to write a detective story. I shifted to assembling my prosaic details. What sort of food did Charles Ignatius Pfaff offer his patrons? (Slabs of roast beef, German pancakes, Frankfurter wurst, raw clams and oysters, salt herring with black bread, and so on.) What sorts of drinks? (Fancy European tipples, of course, along with the delightful new style of beverage immigrant German brewers had gifted their new American neighbors: lager.) I researched old Hoboken-New York-Brooklyn ferry lines, the old NYPD Tombs building, New York’s horse-drawn transit systems, the first Bellevue Hospital, and the protocols for visiting early city morgues, 

I talked to a doctor about how one might successfully stab an obese man in the back. I researched how early physicians diagnosed various forms of cancer. I re-read a book by the historian Harold Holzer on Abraham Lincoln’s famous February 1860 speech at Cooper Union, because that (nonfiction) book was set in the very same neighborhood at about the same time as my proposed story. Holzer’s descriptions of Lower Broadway were incredibly helpful.

At the end of all this, our modern pandemic was still raging, I had 45 pages of copious, pencil-written notes, and had not written a single word of my story.

Instead of freeing me up, my much-vaunted “process” failed me. I was now terrified to write this thing, for all the wrong reasons. I am not a poet. I am not a historian. I am not a literary scholar. I am not gay. I was just a guy who loved beer and old New York bars.

I should have embraced those credentials and run with them. But no. I had just come across a book specifically about Whitman’s place in the bohemian world. Essay after essay written by People In The Know. In other words, academics. Oh cool, I thought. Maybe these experts could teach a wannabe semi-expert what he needed to know.

Skimming even just a few pages of that text convinced me to stop this bullsh*t already and write the damn story. It dawned on me that I had absorbed so much Pfaffian history that I could write the story blind. And I would need to, because that tome made my eyes bleed.

All of which to say, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bled” is now out in Murder, Neat: A SleuthSayers Anthology. Go forth and read it lustily. It pairs well with a cool lager, pork schnitzel, and a robust German mustard. And yes, I probably left too much of my research on its pages, but you know what? Totally cool with it.

Let me assure you that I’ve long since recovered from my dubious labors, and am happily collecting material for two other historical “shorts.” One set during the American Revolutionary War, the other in Renaissance Italy.

Mark my words: I have resolved to never over-research again. In fact, I’m pretty confident that I’ll have both of these pieces wrapped in time for the 2068 SleuthSayers anthology. Go SLEUTHS!

See you next time!

Joe

josephdagnese.com