Guest Post: What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

This month, I'm turning my column over to a guest, Eric Beckstrom. I've been friends with Eric, a talented writer and photographer, for some thirty years, and I'm pleased to have the chance to let him address the SleuthSayers audience on a topic I'm sure many of us can identify with. As Eric mentions here, his first published story appeared in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology--an enviable place to make your debut, given the competition for those spots! What's even more remarkable is that he's since placed stories in three more Bouchercon anthologies (how many other writers have been selected for four? Certainly none I know of). His latest, "Six Cylinder Totem," will be in the 2025 edition, Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed (available for preorder here). Without further ado, here's Eric!

— Joe

What Kind of Relationship Do You Have With Your Writing?

Eric Beckstrom

We all have a relationship of craft to our writing, or however you choose to put it--relationship, interaction, approach--but I find myself wondering whether other writers also think about their relationship with their writing as a truly personal one--a nearly or even literal interpersonal one, as distinguished from simply craft-centered and intrapersonal. Maybe every writer reading this column experiences their writing in that way, I don't know. That is my own experience– closer to, or, in practice, even literally interpersonal. It is intrapersonal, too, but I also relate to my writing as this other thing outside of myself, like it's a separate entity. The relationship has been fraught. Sometimes– much more so now– it is functional and healthy, sometimes less so, and, for an interminably long time, it was dysfunctional right down to its atomic spin. It includes compromise, generosity, forgiveness, impatience, resignation, joy, trust, fear, just like any other important relationship in my life. The current complexity of the relationship is a gift compared to when it was an actively negative, hostile one, defined by avoidance, fear, and resentment, with only the briefest moments of pleasure and appreciation.

That was years ago. Then, one night, I made a decision that changed my relationship with my writing forever in an instant: I let myself off the hook. More on that later. I understand, of course, there are many very accomplished writers among the SleuthSayers readership, and that perhaps everyone moving their eyes across this screen has also moved well beyond anything I have to say here; but if you ever trudge or outright struggle with your writing--not the craft connection, but the relational one--then maybe there's something here for you.

One of the most common pieces of advice or edicts offered by established writers to budding or struggling writers is, "Write every day," "Write for at least an hour each day," or some variation thereof. This advice is always well-intended, but in my view it seems awfully essentialist. Sometimes it even seems to stem from writers with--I'm being a little cheeky here--personality privilege, such as those who have never or rarely had difficulty with motivation; or from other forms of privilege, like growing up in an environment that encouraged and nurtured creativity or was at least free from significant obstacles to creativity.

© Eric Beckstrom,
LowPho Impressionism

Or maybe those edicts about the right way to approach writing aren't nearly as pervasive as I have thought, and it's more that my (more or less) past hypersensitivity turned my hearing that advice four or five times into a hall of mirrors back then, fifty-five times five in how I felt it reflected negatively on me. Back when I was struggling for my life as a writer, I heard it as judgment. "Eric, you don't writer every day, let alone each day for an hour or two. Therefore, you are not a real writer because you obviously don't have the passion everyone says you'd feel if you were. You are a piker: you make only small bets on yourself, and to the extent that you make writing commitments to yourself, you withdraw from them."

While advice around commitment, writing schedules, regularity, and habit, is, on the face of it, sound, it has a hook on which I used to hang like someone in a Stephen Graham Jones novel or the first victim in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. That hook has barbs of guilt, fear, imposter syndrome (not to mention nature-nurture baggage). It also has barbs forged from practical challenges like having to work full-time and having other commitments, and being too mentally exhausted to sit down and write at the end of a day of all that. Until the night I let myself off the hook, I used to absorb those writing edicts as barbs into flesh. As profoundly, debilitatingly discouraging.

For sure, that's also on me. Also, on my upbringing. Also, on the third-grade teacher who called my very first story silly and unrealistic. But, at the end of the day, it was on me to change how I relate to writing. From the age of ten and decades into my adult life, yearning to write, but blocked by inhibitions and other stumbling blocks I'd never learned to turn into steppingstones, I absorbed the standards set by established writers as slammed doors, guilty verdicts, and commandments I had broken.

Here's what happened the night I let myself off the hook– off other people's hook.

I was sitting in front of the TV feeling conflicted, as I felt every night. I knew I ought to go into the other room, turn on the computer, and write. I longed to do so– it was a physical sensation– but couldn't bring myself to. I hadn't been writing, so I wasn't a real writer, right? And since I'd finished very few writing projects, I had limited evidence of talent anyway. All my Psych 101 childhood baggage was there, too, present, like that longing, as something I felt as you'd feel someone slouching behind you in the town psycho house, reaching for your shoulder.

Then, for some reason– and I don't know where this came from– I said out loud to myself "You know what? Screw all that. Screw the edicts and other people's standards. Screw the judgment you feel from others and screw the self-judgment. If you write tonight, great. If you don't write tonight, then don't castigate yourself. Maybe you'll write tomorrow."

In that moment, a strange kind of functional (as differentiated from dysfunctional) indifference triggered a profound letting go which permanently changed my relationship with my writing. And, finally off the hook, having made a deliberate, defiant choice to stop judging my writer self by others' standards and even by my own standards at the time, that very same night, I turned off the TV, turned on the computer, and started writing. Years later (not all my hangups disappeared in one night), after I began making the effort to submit stories for publication, one of the first ones I ever completed, over a single weekend just weeks after I finally began writing in earnest, landed in the 2017 Bouchercon anthology as the first story I had published.

Since then, I've encountered, or perhaps just become more capable of seeing and absorbing, more down to earth, approachable advice and insight offered by others. William Faulkner said, "I write when the spirit moves me." Now, he also said, "The spirit moves me every day," but his words contain no edict or implied universal standard, no judgment. Jordan Peele added an entirely new dimension to my relationship with writing, and, I will share, to my approach to life, with his suggestions to, "Embrace the risk that only you can take." One of the most practical, wise, simple, and compassionate insights I've gotten from another writer– and because of that component of compassion, this insight most clearly describes my current, far more healthy interpersonal relationship with my writing– came from a good writer friend, who, when I described my ongoing struggle with tackling large writing projects, said, "You know, I think it's just about forward progress, whatever that means to you." I also recall the wisdom of another friend who, when I told him about some life issues I was struggling with at the time, said, "That's good. If you're struggling it means you haven't given up. Don't stop moving, don't stop struggling." It's not advice specific to writing, but it sure works.

Nowadays, for me, forward progress could be a single sentence I drop into a story right before my head hits the pillow. It could be a cool ending to an as-yet nonexistent story. Or an interesting first sentence. An evocative title without even the vaguest notion of what plot it might lead to. A single word texted to myself at 2:00AM because it strikes me as belonging to whatever I'm working on. I often do research on the fly, so forward progress is sometimes a link to some article I drop into a given story doc, which I keep in the cloud so I can do that from wherever, whenever. And yes, sometimes forward progress is pages of fast, effortless, final-draft quality writing.

But I never measure my "progress"--those quotation marks are important--by the number of words or pages, though if I make good progress in that way I consciously, usually out loud, give myself credit. And, submission deadlines notwithstanding, I rarely measure my progress according to some timeline. Some days, and I hate to say, sometimes for weeks, I don't write a word, though if that happens now it's almost always due to external constraints rather than resistance; and that is in itself forward progress with respect to my relationship with my writing, upon which the writing itself, and really everything, depends. But that doesn't mean I'm not making forward progress with respect to writing itself, because during those stretches of not writing paragraphs and pages I'm still doing everything I've noted, like simmering ideas, writing in my head and emailing it to myself later, reading like a writer. It's a delicate and, yes, sometimes fraught, balance between self-compassion and self-discipline--after all, what relationship is perfectly healthy?--but these days my relationship with my writing is more characterized by compassion, generosity of spirit, and confidence. Stories have greater trust that I will finish them, and I have greater trust that stories will lead me where they want to go. Even if I don't know where a story is leading me, or I think I do but it changes its mind, or if my confidence flags, or it just seems too difficult to finish, the two-way charitable nature of the relationship between my writing and I has transformed how I approach these situations: at long last, more often than not, that is in a healthy, functional way.

And it's a good thing, too, because for reasons I won't get into here the relationship between my writing and me has become a truly existential thing that sways the cut and core of my life. This thing has been described as a need, a compulsion, a yearning. In Ramsey Campbell's story, "The Voice of the Beach," the protagonist-writer says, "If I failed to write for more than a few days I became depressed. Writing was the way I overcame the depression over not writing." I am grateful to have reached the point where writing is something I want to do, not just something I must do to reduce bad feelings. Writing has become something that I do because, yes, if I don't then I feel sad and unfulfilled, but that's no longer the principle motive. For decades, I yearned to reach a point where I would write because it brings fulfillment and pleasure, even when it's hard or I don't feel like writing in a given moment or on a given day. I am relieved to have reached that point, even if I'm not very "productive" compared to most other writers I know of. That's no longer a hook I hang on. These days, for me a hook is a good story idea, a good opening line or a great title, and the only barbs are the ones my characters must contend with.

That is what I wish for every writer, whether well-established or yearning to begin: a satisfying and healthy relationship with your writing, and, in the words of my friend, forward progress, whatever that means to you.

© Eric Beckstrom, LowPho Impressionism

Finding A Glimmer of Hope, A Thousand Pieces at a Time

Anyone who's taught writing (or, I suspect, most other topics) in the last few years would have found little surprising in the recent news about an MIT study revealing that people who make regular use of AI tools like ChatGPT quickly show a serious reduction in cognitive activity.  After only a few months, such users "consistently underperformed neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels."

Lydia the Tattooed Lady
Magnolia Puzzles
Artist: Mark Fredrickson

I've certainly seen evidence of this in my own students. (For those unaware, I teach composition and literature courses for a number of online schools on an adjunct basis.) More and more of them are not just choosing to make use of AI, but fundamentally feel they have no other option, because they lack the reading and writing skills necessary to complete assignments on their own.

The situation isn't helped by the increasing number of schools that have essentially thrown in the towel, designing courses that actively encourage or even require the use of AI while giving lip service to the idea of training students to use it "ethically and responsibly."

This makes about as much sense as training someone to run a marathon by having them drive 26 miles a day and eat a meal from every fast food restaurant they pass on the trip.  And yes, in case you were wondering, it does make teaching depressing as hell.

An aside: I want to be clear here that I'm not blaming the students, certainly not on an individual level.  They can't help growing up in a world where literacy is consistently degraded and marginalized; they can't help having screens shoved in front of their faces all day long, starting before they can talk. What I can say is that, if I was under 25 years old, I would be in a constant state of white-hot rage over the world previous generations propose to leave me: a world that is less safe, less clean, less kind, less thoughtful, and far lonelier than it should be.  I would be furious to live in the richest, most technologically advanced society in human history, while millions have no access to healthcare or secure occupations.  It's no wonder so many of them are on antidepressants.

Aspic Hunt
Art & Fable
Artist: John Rego

But to get back to today's specific crisis…

AI has, in a very few years, become a source of existential terror for writers and other artists--not to mention those in a score of other occupations it threatens to wipe from existence (including, ironically, computer programmers, since it turns out AI is great at writing code).  It's a little quaint to look back at the many giants of science fiction who confidently predicted that robots would free humanity from dangerous or tiresome tasks like mining or washing dishes.  We've still got plenty of people dying of black lung or scraping by on scandalously low minimum wage gigs, but folks who want to write or create art have to compete with machines pretending they can do the same thing.

Believe it or not, I've painted this picture of doom and gloom because I want to share a tiny glimmer of hope I've found in an unexpected place: jigsaw puzzles.

Puzzling as a hobby exploded during the pandemic, when so many of us were looking for ways to pass the time, and my household is one of many that got caught up in the craze (see the pictures here of a few puzzles we've completed in recent weeks).  Even now that the pandemic is (sort of) over, it continues to be a thriving activity and means of connecting a huge number of people.  There are puzzling competitions around the globe, popular puzzling websites and content creators online, forums for discussion and news, and a lot of companies (many small, many new) turning out high-quality, beautiful puzzles in every corner of the globe.

Princess on the Pea
Enjoy Puzzles
Artist: Larissa Kulik

Not surprisingly, some of these companies use AI to create the artwork for the puzzles.  I can't report that these companies are immediately run out of business, and no doubt they're doing fine, for the most part.  But I can report this: there are a lot of puzzlers who actively refuse to buy those puzzles, and they tend to be fairly vocal about it.  They want to know that the puzzles they do were created by real artists, they want those artists to be clearly identified, and they (or at least some of them) are willing to pay a little more for puzzles that meet those demands.

As AI writing and art becomes more widespread, maybe it's people like these we can invest a little optimism in.  Maybe there will come to be people who demand this of their fiction and poetry and essays, and who aren't willing to just hop on Amazon and download one of the 5000 AI "books" that pop up every day.  Maybe they'll be willing to pay, just a little more, for the knowledge that a real person created the thing they're looking at, and will benefit from their patronage.

Maybe there will be just enough of these people that reading and writing– real reading and writing, not a simulation– will continue to be a worthwhile, and occasionally even rewarding, way for a lot of people to spend their time.

It wouldn't take much.  After all, the number of people willing to pay money to read, say, short mystery stories has been a small part of the population for a long time.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to hope that it won't die out completely.

The Happy Sheep Yarn Shop
Ravensburger Puzzles
Artist: Nathanael Mortensen

That's my hope, anyway. In the meantime, I'll be continuing to follow my personal policy of never using AI– not for brainstorming, not for drafting, not for editing.  What possible satisfaction could I get from asking a machine to write something and then putting my name on it?

---

A Year In, A Month Off

My first regular SleuthSayers post went up in late April of 2024, so I missed the opportunity to mark the occasion of my first anniversary as a member of this crew. In that first post, I somehow tried to make a connection between writing and a specific approach to baseball strategy. Since then I've talked about ShortCon, shelf shortages, musical anthologies, Walter Mitty, writing dialogue, the creation of a new Derringer Award, and a number of other topics. Hopefully, some of you out there have enjoyed reading it as much as I've enjoyed writing it, and I look forward to continuing to offer my rambles for a some time to come.

This particular month, I'm finding the shoebox of ideas a little empty. In fact, I haven't really written anything this month.

 That's after writing five stories in the first four months of the year, ranging from 2900 to 5800 words. I wouldn't call what I'm going through at the moment writer's block. It's not that I want to write but can't. It's more a matter of having other things to do and no pressing need to get back to the keyboard.

There was a time when this would have bothered--even frightened--me. I would have felt like if I didn't get back to writing ASAP, I might never get back to it at all. I'd be obsessed with the opportunities I might be missing. I'd be thinking about all the interviews I've ever seen with writers who say that ""real" writers write every day. I'd be thinking about Ray Bradbury's advice to write a story every single week, on the theory that nobody can write 52 bad stories in a row.

I've never come close to hitting that mark. The most stories I've ever written in one year is 26; over the last several years, I'm much closer to a one-story-a-month pace.

OK, so I don't write as much as this guy

The difference between the earlier me, who would have been panicked at a month without writing, and the current me, who's handling it fairly well, comes down, I think, to experience. I know that I've been through periods like this before, and invariably come out of them. I know that, sooner or later, I will sit down at the keyboard again and turn something out. A little time away from writing isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might even be a good one.

I'm confident that, somewhere in the back of my head, ideas are bubbling. Sooner or later, one will break the surface. And I understand that "real" writers come in all varieties. Yes, some write every single day. Others need breaks. And that's okay.

Even if it makes for what is almost surely my shortest column so far.

How about you? Do you take breaks from writing? Do you think doing so ultimately helps you?

Joe's Jukebox

Fans of contemporary short mystery fiction know that, over the last decade or so, there have been literally dozens of anthologies collecting crime fiction inspired by songs– usually those of a single artist or band, but sometimes a genre or specific era of music. In her column earlier this month, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman discussed her contribution to one of the most recent, IN TOO DEEP: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF GENESIS, edited by Adam Meyer (fair disclosure: I also have a story in this book). She shared a piece of valuable advice from another SleuthSayer, John Floyd, on how to write a story inspired by a song: not to get bogged down trying to work in every detail, but to find a piece of it to build on.

These musical anthologies started coming out at roughly the same time that I started publishing stories, and I've written for quite a few of them, so I thought I'd offer some of my own thoughts on the subject, in a scattered kind of way.

By way of credentials, I've written stories, for current or upcoming anthologies, based on songs by (deep breath) Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, The Ramones, Pink Floyd, The Allman Brothers, Waylon Jennings, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Aerosmith, Dexys Midnight Runners, Lyle Lovett, Genesis, Timbuk3, and Elton John– plus, just to round things out, numbers from the musicals Grease, Do I Hear a Waltz?, and Spring Awakening. There's also an orphan to mention here: a story I quite liked based on a Eurythmics song, for a project that ended up being cancelled. I hope that one eventually sees the light of day somewhere.

The first inspired-by-music story I wrote was in response to Sandra Murphy's call for stories for PEACE, LOVE, AND CRIME: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE SIXTIES. Figuring that Sandy would be swamped by stories inspired by the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Beach Boys, I used a favorite song by a different artist, one I hoped nobody else would light on: Roy Orbison's "Oh, Pretty Woman." I guess writers aren't supposed to say things like this, but the resulting story, "Mercy," remains one of my personal favorites. It's a little unusual in that the lyrics do inspire specific scenes, but the record itself is also an object within the story. The central character is a young woman, Lila, whose brother is killed in Vietnam, after which their abusive father destroys his treasured record collection. The 45 of Orbison's song is the only survivor, and the story concerns what Lila is willing to do to preserve it and find her own freedom.

Most of my musical yarns take an approach much closer to what John advised Barb to do: find a few details in the song to hang a story on. Over time I've combined this with another way of thinking about the task at hand; instead of writing a story inspired by the song, I ask myself what series of events might have inspired someone to write the song. I'm not entirely sure why this seems to work for me, but it does.

As Barb noted, there can be special challenges in using a song that already has a fairly coherent narrative plot. Michael Bracken was kind enough to invite me to write the title story for his anthology JANIE'S GOT A GUN: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE MUSIC OF AEROSMITH. That song already has an explicit story embedded within it (and fleshed out in the music video, which helped to make the song a monster hit) about a girl who shoots her abusive father. I didn't want to simply retell the story, but it seemed silly to pretend it wasn't there, so I decided to make my version a kind of sequel, in which we find out what happens afterwards.

On the other end of the spectrum, many of the songs of the Grateful Dead are little more than collections of trippy images and seeming free association, allowing plenty of room for play. When I wrote a story inspired by their "The Music Never Stopped," for Josh Pachter's collection FRIEND OF THE DEVIL: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF THE GRATEFUL DEAD, I chose five or six of the most vivid lines and tried to weave them (or rather references to them, as, for legal reasons, these stories generally cannot quote lyrics directly) into a story about a couple of drug dealers drawn into an act of violence at, appropriately enough, a concert.

I find writing these musical stories to be enormously fun and satisfying, and I hope I get to do a lot more of them. They offer inspiration, but also constraint: you have to evoke the original song clearly enough to amuse and engage its fans (but without making use of actual lyrics!) and at the same time craft a story strong enough to satisfy readers who might not know the song at all. Some of the best art, I think, resides precisely at this intersection of boundless freedom and rigid guidelines.

It will be interesting to see how long the current fad for these collections will last. It might seem like there have been so many of them that the trend must be nearer its end than its beginning, but on the other hand there is a long list of artists who haven't yet had inspired-by anthologies (note: it's entirely possible that some of the folks I'm about to name have inspired books I'm not aware of; if so, please let me know). Off the top of my head, I'd love to see (and contribute to!) collections based on Tom Petty, Willie Nelson, U2, Madonna, REM, The Rolling Stones, Kinky Friedman, Carole King, Fleetwood Mac, Melissa Etheridge, The Indigo Girls, Aimee Mann, Taylor Swift, or John Prine.

I also can't help but notice that the vast majority of these anthologies (again, at least the ones I'm aware of) focus on white musicians. Maybe the single most glaring omission from the list of honored artists, given the sheer volume of his output and the incredible depth and richness of his lyrics, is Prince. Or how about a collection inspired by the hits of Motown? The blues giants of Chess Records? There are great stories just waiting to be written for "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" or "Mannish Boy."

I also can't be the only one who'd love to see crime writers taking on a comic musician. Bring on DARE TO BE STUPID: CRIME FICTION INSPIRED BY THE SONGS OF WEIRD AL! Bring on Spike Jonze and Spinal Tap! Bring on Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem! And save me a slot on the table of contents!

Can you picture that?

What acts do you hope to see honored with one of these volumes? And if you've written for some of them, how do you approach the songs?

The Future Ain't What It Used To Be

I've obviously dedicated most of my writing career to crime and mystery fiction, and as you might expect I read a great deal of work in that field growing up.  I also had a deep love for science fiction, though, and while I've read relatively little new work in the genre in the last few decades, as a kid I delighted in the classics by the giants of the field--Asimov, LeGuin, Silverberg, and so on.  Recently, going through a box of books from my childhood home, I came across an interesting artifact by another of those giants, Arthur C. Clarke, probably best remembered today as the author of 2001.  I thought it worth looking at, both as an example of the perils of writers imagining the future and as a lens on the world writers are working in today.

In 1986, Clarke published a book titled July 20, 2019.  The date, of course, is the 50^th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and the book is a series of essays in which Clarke predicts what the world would look like in that then far-off year.  I bought and read the book when it came out.  I don't remember what I thought of it then, but reading it now, almost six years beyond the date Clarke chose for his prophecy, was certainly eye-opening.

So how did Clarke do with his predictions?

Well, there are a few hits.  He thought that the field I work in, distance education, would be huge, though he assumed it would operate via teleconferencing rather than being online (more on this later) and largely text-based.  He said that cars would still be much the same and still mostly gas-powered, though he thought they'd get 100 miles per gallon.  He thought entertainment would reflect an increasingly fragmented culture with more books, movies, music and so on aimed at specialized audiences, and he predicted the boom in self-publishing as part of that.  He was right about shortened hospital stays and the fact that medicine would still be largely controlled by corporations, though he didn't seem to give much thought to the social implications of the rich having care most people can't afford.

There are, however, far more misses, some amusing, some depressing.  Examples:

SPACE.  Clarke believed that by 2019 there would be a permanent manned outpost on the moon with perhaps as many as 1000 inhabitants.  There would be several manned orbiting space stations as well, and we would be routinely mining asteroids and preparing the first manned mission to Mars, with an eye to exploring the outer solar system.  He discussed in detail several conceptual engine ideas then being theorized which could cut the voyage to the red planet from months to a few weeks.  It's interesting to contemplate how much of this might have happened if NASA had gotten, say, a third of what the US has spent on the military since 1986.  Incidentally, earthbound transportation in Clarke's 2019 is similarly advanced, with magnetic trains and advanced hovercraft linking cities and jets that go from Shanghai to Los Angeles in two hours.

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies

SPORTS.  Clarke predicted that steroids, hormones and other chemical enhancements would be made so safe that there would no longer be any reason to ban them from competition.  In addition, many athletes would have cybernetic parts, or even nerves cloned from legendary competitors to improve reaction time.  Elite athletes would be identified through genetic testing by the age of five and spend much of the rest of their lives being rigorously trained, using computers designed to enforce the most efficient way to perform any motion.  In baseball, for example, batters using boron bats would routinely hit home runs, though the fences had been moved to 500 feet from home plate.  They would do this facing pitchers who could throw 125 mph and pitch every other day.  The NBA would have to raise its hoops to 12 feet and make them smaller, since the average player would be over eight feet tall.

Offered without comment

THE MIND.  Clarke had little patience for the idea of therapy.  He thought that, by 2019, genetic mapping and brain imaging would make it possible to produce a vaccine preventing schizophrenia, drugs to prevent highly specific phobias and complexes, and compounds that would induce any desired mood.  For example, there would be a drug whose only effect is to enhance music appreciation, which would be routinely taken before attending any concert.

OK, maybe there's something to that one

ROBOTS.  Clarke would have been stunned to know there are still people making their living as coal miners today.  One of his most confident predictions was that virtually every job involving elements of danger or drudgery would have been taken over by robots well before 2019.  He honestly didn't think there would any longer be people working in factories, aside from very occasional repairs and inspections.  He also thought that most homes would have robots to handle routine domestic chores, and he dedicates considerable thought to how home design would emphasize simplicity and reduce clutter to make it easier for the robots to get around.  Clarke is very clearly NOT thinking of computers, but of humanoid robots.  He honestly thought they would be everywhere.  On the other hand . . . 

Rest easy, humans

COMPUTERS.  Clarke vastly overestimated the importance of the individual computer, and vastly underestimated the importance of computer networks.  He correctly assumed computers would be everywhere, in every home and every workplace, by 2019.  But while he occasionally mentions computers communicating with each other to share information for specific purposes, he still thought of every computer as an essentially distinct unit that learns to master the skills and demands of its particular job and function.  The idea that the computer would be connected to others essentially all the time, and that it would be useful only to the extent this is true, simply never occurs to him.  Thus he could not predict anything resembling Facebook, or Google, or Twitter, or Wikipedia, or Amazon, or the internet itself as it has come to exist.  Nor does he ever imagine anything resembling a smartphone--which might seem odd, from the man who, shortly after WWII, correctly predicted the creation of communication satellites.  This one oversight is so fundamental that it touches nearly everything else in the book, making it much less accurate than it might have been.  There's simply no way to understand almost anything actually happening in 2019 (or 2025) without taking account of the web.

Clearly, he did know there were dangers

GEOPOLITICS.  Again, Clarke was oddly short-sighted here.  He assumed the fundamental structure of world politics in 2019 would still be based on a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact contending with a US/UK-led NATO, with the front lines in a still-divided Germany.  There is virtually no mention in the book of Asia, Africa, or South America, let alone any notion that nations like China and India would be emerging superpowers that would shape much of the 21st century.  Weirdly, despite his ambitious claims for robots elsewhere, he envisions war still being conducted by human operators in planes and tanks; drones are another invention he did not foresee.  Something else he didn't mention, though it will dominate our lives for the foreseeable future: climate change.  Scientists by 1986 were well aware of this coming crisis, but Clarke never mentions it.  Perhaps he assumed the problem would have been solved, given his surprising degree of faith in  …

Not pictured: ice

 HUMAN NATURE.  It's hard to fault Clarke for this: he assumed that humanity, as a whole, would make decisions which might be self-interested, but which would be basically rational and fact-based.  He'd be dismayed to know that, more than fifty years after the first moonwalk, there are a substantial number of people who simply refuse to believe it ever happened because our teaching of science, math and critical thinking has become woefully inadequate.  He didn't foresee the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, the rise in racism and xenophobia, the spread of terrorism, or the willful embrace of ignorance that defines so much of our politics.  I truly wish that as a species we had lived up to the potential he saw in us.

Arthur C. Clarke

The Horror! The Horror?

For the past few years, I've been maintaining a list of markets for short crime/mystery fiction for the members of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (obligatory plug: membership is free, and the group is open to writers, readers, editors, and anyone else interested in the form). Several times a month I go hunting for new market opportunities: magazines, websites and anthologies that might be of interest to the writers in our group. This means checking sites like Duotrope and the Submission Grinder, scrolling through social media, doing general Google searches, and so on. New magazines are relatively rare these days, but new anthologies pop up fairly often.

I'm Stephen King, and you're not.

And I've noticed something odd– or at least, something I don't quite understand.

Mystery readers can be a fairly rabid bunch, and there are a lot of them. Walk into any bookstore, and the mystery section is likely to be among the largest. So why is it that there seem to be a lot more markets for short fiction in other genres than there are in mystery?

This isn't new; it's something I was aware of even before I started keeping the markets list. I should also say that it's possible I'm just wrong about this. Maybe my perceptions are skewed somehow, or maybe I'm just not good at this kind of searching.

But, man, it certainly seems as though, for every new anthology seeking mystery stories, there are ten seeking fantasy or science fiction and fifteen or so seeking horror. It's the preponderance of horror that I always find especially confusing. Go back to that generic bookstore, and compare the size of the mystery section to the size of the horror section (you can find it by looking for Stephen King and Joe Hill). In pretty much every bookstore I've ever frequented, the mystery section is larger.

So what explains the seemingly much larger number of markets for horror? Logically, it would seems to suggest a similarly larger number of readers, but I don't see much other evidence that this is the case. Maybe it's just the case that there are a lot of horror readers who don't read anything else? Maybe horror readers are more open to short stories, while most mystery readers prefer novels?

One of the places I dabbled in horror

I should make it clear that I have nothing against horror fiction. I've dabbled in it myself, and I certainly recognize there's a lot of wonderful writing being produced in the field. My first love will always be crime, though, and I guess the bottom line is that I wish mystery writers had more opportunities to strut our stuff.

So: short column this month. It's February, after all. The main reason it's short is because I don't have an answer to this question, and I'm hoping someone will. What do you think? Are my perceptions of the current market just wrong? If they're not, what explains this?

Or maybe everyone just wants to be Stephen King?

The irony, of course, is that horror fiction has its roots in texts like Dracula and Frankenstein. Mystery fiction, by contrast, looks back to the short stories of writers like Poe and Doyle (yes, this is reductive, and yes, Doyle wrote novels about Holmes, but I think there's pretty general agreement that the stories are better).

Police Reported Ahead

I was driving on the Interstate in an unfamiliar city over the holidays.  I had the GPS on my phone patched through the car stereo, giving me directions to my destination, but I wasn't expecting to hear one thing it suddenly announced: "Police Reported Ahead."

Sure enough, a few minutes later I passed an obvious speed trap.  My first thought: well, that technology would have made things a hell of a lot easier for the Bandit.

My second thought: who exactly did the reporting?  Are there drivers actually logging in to Google Maps, or whatever app I was using (I lose track sometimes) to report police activity?  Or does the thing somehow detect when people using it are pulled over?

I don't know why I found it so surprising.  It prompted thoughts I've had before, about how the very concept of privacy is falling by the wayside.  In this particular case, the omnipresent phone and all it represents may be working to foil police action, but far more often, we find that we've created a world where we take it for granted that our every action is monitored, our every utterance heard, our every message and transaction recorded somewhere.

The vast majority of people in society today willingly carry around a device that makes it possible to know where we go, how long we stay there, who else was present, and a great deal of what happened.  We're not just willing to carry these devices around--a lot of us would get violently upset if they were taken away.

Cash is disappearing from society, displaced by digital transactions that make anonymity essentially impossible.  Want to buy a beer at your local sporting event?  It's increasingly likely that your bank will know about it immediately.  It's not hard to imagine a world where the bank lets your car know how much you've had to drink, so it can decide whether to let you drive.

Security cameras, facial recognition technology, drones--good luck escaping them.  Leave some DNA at a crime scene a few decades ago?  You'd better hope none of your close relatives send a sample in for DNA testing.

We can applaud a lot of this--the Golden State Killer was arrested because a relative sent some DNA to a genetic testing service--while still finding the disappearance of privacy troubling.  From what I can tell, it's already something the younger generations of today don't even think about.  Having grown up in a digital world that's been harvesting data about them since they were toddlers, they regard the notion of a private life as akin to the notion of a horse and buggy.  It's cute, but it's simply not part of the reality they live in.

For we crime writers, this presents some special challenges.  I love the Parker novels by Richard Stark (which is to say, by Donald Westlake), but almost none of the heists that master thief Parker and his cronies pull off would be possible in today's world.  Entirely aside from the inescapable surveillance, there just aren't that many places any longer with giant piles of cash waiting to be stolen.  Today's master thieves use laptops, not handguns.  Not nearly as much fun to read about, and no fun at all to write.

Think about some of your favorite noir and crime films made prior to, say, 1990.  How many of them have plots that would still work if everybody had a cell phone?

So what's a poor crime writer to do?  One solution is to set stories in the past, which is something I've done a lot.  Frankly, it's something of a relief to write about a world where people still read newspapers, go to the library to do research, and sometimes get a busy signal when they try to use the phone.

Of course, the other option is to use our imaginations, recognizing that, however much the world has changed, people still commit murders, still take things that don't belong to them, and are still haunted by the mistakes they've made in the past.  I'm honored to have had stories in all five volumes to date of the superb anthology series MICKEY FINN: 21ST CENTURY NOIR, created and edited by fellow SleuthSayer Michael Bracken, who takes that subtitle seriously.  He wants stories set in the present day, with killers and crooks and PIs who have cell phones, and reading any edition of the series will demonstrate that it's still possible to tell compelling stories set in that world--which is to say, our world.

None of which prevents me from regarding this new age of surveillance with suspicion, or feeling nostalgic for the time before.  When I was twelve years old, I'd often get on my bicycle and be gone from home all day.  I didn't have a phone.  I didn't even have much cash.  Nobody knew where I was or what I was doing.  Today, for most families, that would be unthinkable.

But doesn't it also sound a little bit wonderful?

Taking Stock, Moving On

Sports franchises going through poor seasons say they're having a "rebuilding year" because it sounds better than "terrible year."  There is something to be said, though, for the basic concept of a rebuilding year--taking stock of where you are and trying to put the fundamental pieces in place for moving forward.

The end of the year is a natural time for writers, like everyone else, to take a step back, see what they've done, and think about building that foundation for the next twelve months.  As a writer, I wouldn't go so far as to say I had a terrible year.

But a rebuilding year?  Yeah, I'll cop to that.

By my count, I wrote thirteen new stories in 2024.  That's not bad, but I've had years when I wrote more than twenty (26 being my high).  My 2024 stories totaled roughly 52,000 words, for an average of 4,000 per story.  Of the thirteen, three were submitted to open-call anthologies, seven were written for anthologies I was invited to contribute to, and the remaining three were submitted to magazines.

I had fourteen stories published in 2024, which, again, is down considerably from my 2022 high mark of 21.  Ten were in anthologies, four in periodicals.  Two were reprints (details and links can be found on my website).

Other writing-related 2024 moments worth noting: I attended two conferences (Bouchercon and ShortCon), joined the Sleuthsayers, was nominated for a Shamus award, signed a contract for a collection of some of my stories, and was elected the President of the Short Mystery Fiction Society (since I ran unopposed, it was a landslide).

My work with the SMFS probably accounts for some of my decline in production.  Before I was the President, I was the Derringer coordinator, as I discussed at (probably excessive) length in my very first Sleuthsayer column.  Both positions took up a lot of time I might have spent writing, but I don't regret  holding them.  The SMFS has been enormously important in my development as a writer, and if I can give something back that helps other writers in similar ways, I'm happy to do so.

What I ultimately think was more damaging was something that offers far less fulfillment or meaning: social media.  I allowed myself, at various times this year, to get sucked into the vortex of Facebook and (shudder) Twitter/X, as well as, to a lesser degree, other platforms.  It's astonishing, and distressing, to realize how much time and mental energy this can take up, if you let it.

The conventional wisdom is that social media is vital to the life of a writer these days.  We need the connections.  We need the leads. We need to actively promote ourselves.  This is unfortunate, because I'm increasingly of the opinion that social media is also toxic to the writing life.

That's only in part because of the time it sucks up.  It also promotes a mindset that is actively destructive to the kind of quiet contemplation and reflective thought vital to productive writing.  It shreds the attention span.  It offers a constant stream of distraction.  It promotes a continual buzz of anxiety, because in the world of social media everything is a crisis, everything is dramatic, everything is conflict, and the ways in which the world is on fire just multiply the longer you look.  At least, that's what it was doing to me.  How can I write a nice little murder story when hundreds of people are screaming at me that the collapse of civilization is just around the corner?

Since a certain event in early November that I will not discuss directly, I've been off social media almost entirely.  I haven't been on Twitter once, and I deleted the app from my phone, keeping my account only to prevent anyone else from taking the name.  I've made a few Facebook posts to promote new publications, but avoided looking at anything else on the site.

I'm finding this is very good for me.  I'm less anxious and depressed.  I'm writing more, and enjoying the process more.  I'm also reading more, with more sustained attention.

The problem, of course, is that to a certain degree social media is important to writers today.  It's not just a matter of promoting our work, though that is important.  It's also the place where we establish and maintain our relationships with other writers, with publishers, with readers.  Lord knows not many people are writing emails these days, let alone letters (I have no idea what the literary biographers of the future are going to have to work with).  Since the social aspect of being a writer is important to me, it feels impossible, and unwise, to sever my ties with social media entirely.

So this is the dilemma I face going into 2025: how do I reap the benefits of social media without paying the costs?  I'd honestly be interested in hearing how other writers deal with this problem.  Do you use social media?  Which platforms, and how much?  How do you keep it in check enough to not interfere with your writing?  Is social media, for you, ultimately a boon or a curse?

Whatever your answer, I hope everyone reading this had a productive 2024, and I wish us all a better 2025 than we might be expecting.  See you in January!

Don't Speak

For a brief period in my life, I got somewhat serious about playing chess.  I bought and studied books on the game, joined a local club, and even played in a few tournaments.  I never got great--it could be argued, with some justification, that I never even got good.  But I got better than I was when I started, and I enjoyed the process tremendously.  Eventually, I came to a point where I felt like I had to focus my time and energy on either chess or writing, and for me the choice was an easy one.  

While I don't study chess rigorously any longer, I still play the game recreationally, and it influences the way I see and think about the world in some respects.  For example: every move in a game of chess has a gain and a cost.  Move your knight to a new square, and you've gained an attack on enemy pieces that were previously safe.  On the other hand, you've endangered pieces or squares your knight was defending.  This may seem like a rather obvious observation, but it's a useful way of thinking about choices.  What am I going to gain, and what do I have the potential to lose?

A friend who coached me in the game--and who happens to be one of the top-ranked players in the state--told me something when I was starting out that has stuck with me as a particularly valuable lesson: "You're going to lose a thousand games before you win one that means anything."  Anybody can luck into a win if your opponent makes a blunder or simply isn't paying attention, but a win like that isn't significant.  It's a fluke.  The only way to truly get better at the game, and to win games that feel significant, is to play people better than you are and get your brains kicked in, time after time after time.  Failure is built into the process.

This has fairly obvious parallels with writing.  We tell beginning writers that they can expect to get drawers full of rejections (or rather, these days, email folders full of rejections) before they get an acceptance.  Every successful writer I've ever talked with recalls the months and years of toiling away without ever seeing their name in print.  As in chess, it's learning from failure that makes this experience essential.  If you're serious about the craft, you use rejections to figure out what works and what doesn't.  You build on your strengths, and find ways to minimize your weaknesses.  (If you're not serious about the craft, like one member of a long-ago writing group convinced she was the next Toni Morrison, you threaten to sue the editors who had the temerity to reject your divinely inspired prose, never mind that it jumps between first and third person twenty-seven times for no reason.)

If you're determined, and lucky, you'll eventually reach the stage where you're getting acceptances on a regular basis.  Once you reach that stage, how do you keep growing?  What's the writing equivalent of continuing to challenge players better than you?

You find ways to challenge yourself.

I love writing dialogue.  It's one of the most fun parts of writing crime fiction, maybe in part because most of the writers I came up idolizing (Robert B. Parker, Donald Westlake, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, Rex Stout, etc.) were themselves masters of the craft.  I don't pretend to be on their level, but I like to think I have a certain ability to turn a memorable line or convey information through dialogue in a painless way.

(On reflection, it's interesting that there's such a strong connection between crime writing and dialogue, going all the way back to "You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive."  Are there science fiction or horror writers who are especially admired for the ways their characters speak?)

So last month I set myself a challenge to do something I'd never done before: write a story without dialogue.  In the attempt, I drifted into using a collective narrative voice, something else I hadn't done before.  The story is structured as a shared flashback, using description and narration, but no dialogue, to revisit a tragedy that happened to a group of people decades earlier.

The thing is, I failed.  Near the end of the story, the villain has two lines of spoken dialogue.  I wrestled with this for a couple of days, but in the end I just felt like I needed to "hear" that voice, almost as a counterpoint to the way the rest of the story is structured.  A better writer probably could have found a way to stick to the original mission, but then a better writer probably wouldn't need to set themselves such hoops to jump through.

Is the story successful?  I like it, but in this game that doesn't count for much.  We'll see what the editor thinks.  Either way, I feel like I learned something, simply by forcing myself to frame a story in a way I never had before.  It's something I'll try again, though not immediately.

Have you written stories without dialogue, or set yourself similar challenges?  What did you learn by doing so?

Is That a New Derringer in Your Pocket?

The Short Mystery Fiction Society was formed in 1996, and presented the first Derringer Awards, recognizing excellence in short mystery fiction, in 1998.  Not surprisingly, the awards have changed in many ways over almost thirty years, and they're about to do so again.  

Taking a look at Derringer history is illuminating.  Over the last few months, the Society's current Assistant Derringer Coordinator, Mark Schuster, has put together something long overdue: a database of all the nominees and winners over the lifetime of the awards.  Thanks to his outstanding work, we've been reminded of some awards presented in the early years--Best First Short Story and Best Puzzle Story, for example--that have fallen by the wayside.

  

There have also been shifts in the categories which have stuck around.  The initial definition of flash stories was 200-400 words.  For several years the three main categories were flash (up to 1,200 words), short (1,201-10,000 words) and novella (10,001-25,000 words).  By 2004, there were categories with the awkward labels short short, mid-length short, and long short.  

It seems to have been about 2010 when the categories settled into the four competitive Derringer categories used today: flash (up to 1,000 words), short story (1,001-4,000), long story (4,001-8,000), and novelette (8,000-20,000 [the upper limit has changed a few times]).  In addition, the society presents an annual Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Short Mystery Fiction, and selects one deceased writer to enter the short mystery Hall of Fame.

Earlier this year, the Society voted to add a new Derringer award for the first time in many years: Best Anthology.  This idea originated with Josh Pachter, himself a Golden Derringer recipient, one of the best writers in the field today, and, not incidentally, the editor of many a fine anthology (including an upcoming anthology of Derringer-winning stories celebrating the 30th year of the Society).

Making changes to an institution like the Derringers shouldn't be done lightly, but the time is ripe for an award recognizing that anthologies have become more and more important in recent years.  I've heard more than a few writers suggesting that we're living in a golden age for the form, in fact.  

In part this may be, unfortunately, due to a decline in the number of magazine markets open to short crime fiction.  To be sure, there are still some fantastic traditional magazine markets out there, and there's an undeniable thrill to selling a story to Ellery Queen or Alfred Hitchcock.  There are also great online periodicals, like Tough.  The recent demise of Mystery Magazine (formerly Mystery Weekly), though, was only the most recent of many such losses.  Even if a magazine still exists, finding it can be a challenge.  I live in a fairly large town with a big university, but when I recently had a story published in The Saturday Evening Post, I couldn't locate a single store in my community that actually carries it.

For writers in our field looking to get their work in front of readers, then, anthologies have become increasingly important.  Many of them come from smaller publishers, run by people passionate about fiction: Down & Out Books, Misti Media, Level Best Books, others I'm sure I'm not thinking of right now.

About two thirds of my own stories have been published in anthologies.  For writers, these markets have a lot to offer.  They usually have entertaining, inventive themes, encouraging experimentation.  They offer the chance to work with highly skilled and engaged editors (I know my own work has benefitted tremendously from working with anthology editors like Josh, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken).  They have the potential to reach new readers who might otherwise never encounter our work.  They're likely to remain available for several years, long after a magazine publication has faded away.  

Most of all, they're just plain fun, as much for writers as for readers.  I sometimes feel I should be writing more for magazine markets, but at any given time there are anthologies open for submission on topics I just can't resist.  This year alone, I've published stories in anthologies themed around sports, one-hit wonders, fairy tales, the solar eclipse, sex and classical music, 21st century noir, and the songs of Aerosmith and the Grateful Dead.  Could one of those books take home the first Derringer for Best Anthology?  Stay tuned!

If you'd like to nominate an anthology, or stories for the other Derringer categories, you must be a member of the Society by the end of this calendar year.  Membership is free, and offers you the chance to rub virtual elbows with many of the leading writers in the field, along with readers, editors, publishers, and various others invested in short mystery stories.  In the interest of full disclosure, I am the current President of the Society--but I'd be telling you to join even if that wasn't the case.

So what are some of your favorite recent anthologies?  

As a writer, what draws you to certain anthology calls?  

As a reader, what are you looking for in an anthology?  Familiar authors?  The editor?  The topic?

     

Musing on Mitty

 At the just-completed Nashville Bouchercon, I was on the panel "Is It Over Now?: Bringing Characters to Life in Short Stories."  I always find these panels fun, a chance to meet some fellow writers and have engaging exchanges with the audience.  Our moderator, Meagan Lucas of Reckon Review, had some lively and insightful questions for us, including this: who is your favorite character from a short story?  For this particular question, I didn't have to think very hard.  My all-time favorite character from a short story is the protagonist of my all-time favorite short story: Walter Mitty, from James Thurber's masterful 1939 "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty."

If you haven't read "Mitty," you're missing something special, and you should go do so now.  It can be found in any number of anthologies and collections, and a little light Googling just might turn up a PDF version on the web, if you're not picky.

Am I going to spoil the story as I discuss it here?  In a way, although "Mitty" is a hard story to spoil, because, in some ways, it's barely a story at all.  It's very short, coming in at just over 2000 words, and strictly speaking almost nothing happens.  There's certainly not much that you could describe as a plot: Walter and his wife dive into the town of Waterbury to run a few errands.  That's it.

James Thurber

So what makes the story so memorable, and why is it worth talking about on a blog about crime fiction 85 years after it was published?

It's all about Walter.

Walter Mitty is fiction's ultimate daydreamer.  As he goes about the crushingly dull chores of a perfectly mundane day, he repeatedly slips into highly detailed reveries in which he is the world's foremost surgeon, or a crack pistol shot on trial for murder, or an RAF pilot stoically preparing for an impossible mission, and so on.  He's always jerked back to reality, but invariably returns to his inner world of fantasy, to the imaginary existences where his true life is lived.

As far as everyone else in the world is concerned, Walter is a shlub.  His wife nags and infantilizes him.  Cops yell at him to move it along.  Parking attendants and mechanics sneer at him, and store clerks condescend to him.  In his fantasies, however, he is powerful, accomplished, confident, feared, adored.  And here, perhaps, is the first reason for any reader or writer to love this story: it's a tribute to exactly the kind of enrichment and empowerment we have all felt in reading and writing; in slipping away into a story, of our own making or someone else's; in the world of fiction itself.  To be sure, Walter's specific fantasies owe more to the movies than to written fiction, but in a very real way Walter Mitty is a writer.  He may not be a great writer, or even a particularly good one; his fantasy life does lean heavily on familiar narrative tropes and genre archetypes.  Still, there are some inspired stylistic touches (I love the "pocketa-pocketa-pocketa" noise he imagines every machine as making), and you certainly can't fault him for lacking narrative energy.

What really makes the story work is that Thurber doesn't look down on Walter or condescend to him.  He shows us all the other people who feel disdain for Walter, but, right up through the story's perfect closing line (which I will not spoil here), he himself understands, sympathizes with, and even admires how Walter has made an interior life for himself that is so much richer and more fulfilling than his reality.

It hardly needs to be said that the story itself is masterfully written.  Thurber was a great prose stylist in the style of The New Yorker, where "Mitty" first appeared: sophisticated, witty, expressing tremendous emotion through restrained, carefully selected detail.  He creates one of literature's most enduring characters and his entire world in what amounts to about five pages, something anyone interested in short fiction can respect.  I particularly love the way small details are woven through through the story, linking Walter's inner and outer lives in clever ways.  

For example: remembering how he's been humiliated when his wife makes him take their car to a mechanic, Walter decides that next time he'll wear a sling on his right arm to show why he couldn't do the work himself.  In the meantime, he can't remember what it was his wife asked him to go buy, and while he's thinking about it, a passing newsboy shouts something about a trial.  In a flash, Walter is on the stand being interrogated by a district attorney about his ability to fire a fatal shot at a great distance with a pistol.  Walter's lawyer protests that his client had his right arm in a sling on the night of the murder, but Walter immediately and calmly asserts that he could have easily made the shot with his left hand.  A woman screams, the DA strikes out at her, and Walter punches him on the chin, calling him a "miserable cur"--and the physical Walter, standing on a sidewalk, says "puppy biscuit" out loud, having suddenly remembered what he's supposed to be shopping for.

A lot of what a writer needs to know about transitions and focus can be found in that passage.

Hollywood has taken two passes at adapting "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," and while both films have elements of interest, neither completely lives up to the source (surprising, I know).  The first version, released in 1947, starred Danny Kaye as Walter and was directed by Norman Z. McLeod, who made some truly great comedies with people like the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields. Thurber was consulted at various points by the filmmakers, and there are small moments lifted more or less directly from his story, but he ultimately didn't care for the result.  The film's narrative and style were so directly shaped around its star's persona that Thurber is said to have referred to it as "The Public Life of Danny Kaye."

Kaye's Mitty is a proofreader at a publisher specializing in pulp and adventure magazines (in the original story, we're given no hint of Walter's occupation, and he may well be retired).  He's had this job for eleven years, but still lives at home with his overbearing mother, who tucks him in at night and brings him warm milk.  His abusive boss steals his best ideas while mocking him for his daydreams, and his fiancé is an empty-headed young woman who cares a good deal more for her dog than for Walter.  

The film is not, of course, content to let Walter remain just a daydreamer.  A chance encounter with a mysterious woman on a train draws him into a real-life adventure revolving around the location of Dutch treasures, hidden prior to the Nazi invasion and now sought by government agents and a gang of crooks.  The plot makes virtually no sense, but there is some fun to be had, particularly in Boris Karloff's turn as a malevolent psychologist who tries to get information from Walter by convincing him that it's all just been another daydream.  In the end, Walter asserts himself, foiling the bad guys, marrying the girl (the one from the train, natch) and demanding a promotion.  He thus earns what Thurber's Mitty never earns, and does not need: the validation of the external world.

Danny Kaye was known for comic songs built around nonsense patter, and the movie obliges him by shoehorning two of them in for no very good reason.  The first is particularly jarring.  It comes at a moment when Walter is having his fantasy of being an ace RAF fighter pilot, much of which--including some of the specific dialogue--is lifted directly from Thurber's text.  Suddenly, however, one of the other pilots remembers that when he and Mitty were in college together, Mitty did a hilarious imitation of their music professor.  Everyone present immediately demands that he do the imitation, causing Walter to shuck his RAF uniform, don a waiter's coat as an academic gown, and launch into a German-accented musical "lecture" about the history of a symphony.  When I watched the film, I felt as though the song lasted just a bit longer than WWII itself (the YouTube link above is only a portion of the number).  Danny Kaye was a talented man who did a lot of great things in his career, but this scene is the reason fast-forwarding was invented.

The other song, "Anatole of Paris," is somewhat more bearable, if only because it is shorter and easier to understand.  It comes when Walter, for reasons I won't even try to explain, is trapped at a fashion show and daydreams about being a famous designer of women's hats--not, I think, something that would have much appealed to Thurber's character.

The next big-screen version of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty arrived in 2013 and starred Ben Stiller, who also directed, in the title role.  This version is even further removed from Thurber's story, but is, in my view, a considerably better film than Kaye's vehicle.  Stiller's Mitty works in the photo department of Life magazine, which is about to publish its final print edition before becoming Life Online (it's interesting that both movies have Walter working in publishing).  He has a crush on his coworker Cheryl (Kristen Wiig), but can barely bring himself to speak to her, let alone send her a wink on eHarmony.  He's good at his job, but his family and coworkers are accustomed to the moments when he "zones out," entering one of his daydreams and becoming completely oblivious to what they're saying.

The daydreams in the 2013 Mitty are largely confined to the first half of the film, and none have any connection to the specific fantasies in Thurber's original.  They're mostly brief action sequences, like an elaborate, physics-defying martial arts battle with his smug jerk of a boss.  Inevitably, this Walter is also drawn into a real-life adventure.  A legendary photojournalist (Sean Penn) has sent in a picture to be used as the final Life cover, but it's been lost.  Walter sets out to track the photographer down, pursuing him first through Greenland and Iceland, then across "ungoverned Afghanistan" into the Himalayas.  Along the way he jumps from a helicopter into the shark-infested North Sea, flees an erupting volcano, plays soccer with warlords, and so on.  Once again, by the end of the film, he has gained the courage to act, making a date with Cheryl and telling off his boss.

Like the earlier film, this adaptation of "Mitty" inverts Thurber's story by presenting Walter's daydreams as a childish habit that must be left behind, rather than a defiant act of resistance again drudgery.  Still, the Stiller version is much more worthy of your time.  The central plot is engaging and reaches a satisfying resolution, the cast is stacked with talented performers (Patton Oswalt, Shirley MacLaine, Adam Scott), and much of the movie, particularly the sequences in Iceland, is stunningly beautiful.  It's also interesting as a kind of time capsule of the cultural moment when the old, analog world vanished into a new, digital one.  The film is explicitly an elegy for the print version of Life, and thus an elegy for the world of newsstand magazines--like the one that gave birth to "Mitty" to begin with.

We really did lose a great deal when we let that world slip away.  Computers can do a lot, but they hardly ever go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.