by Brian Thornton
We've all been there–going great guns on a project, and then, suddenly REAL LIFE strikes, and drags you (frequently kicking and screaming) out of your narrative, and by the time you've got REAL LIFE tamed and wrestled to the ground, hog-tied and branded, your head's been out of the story for so long you're having trouble picking up where you left off.
After all, it's not a pensieve and we're not all Harry Potter, able to dip our face in it and drop right into the middle of the story.
So what to do in such an instance.
I've recently found myself on the horns of just such a dilemma, so I did what any evolved, 21st century writer does: I crowdsourced it by putting the question out to my Facebook writer friends earlier today.
And I have to say, I was both pleased and heartened by the response, not just from writer friends, but from non-writers as well. So I thought I'd share the responses here.
See below, and if you feel like weighing in with some free advice or just how this reminds you of this or that funny story, please feel free to drop a response into our comments section.
And how, without further ado, here they are:
"Not
a writer, but i have an idea. when i read i put myself in the story, i
become one of the characters. at the very least, in my mind i am in the
room with them. try reading your story from the view point of one of the
characters. it might put you back into where the story was headed. or,
it might just show you a different direction to take it."
"This happens to me a lot. I just begin to rewrite it from word one. I don't even consider moving forward for a day or two."
"Not
a (fiction) writer, but I would think the process might be similar to
reading the story. If there's a long break between reads in the middle
of the book, I sometimes have to go back and reread all or a major part,
just to get the thread of the book
back in my brain. Perhaps going back and re-reading what you wrote will
pull you completely through the story you've written, and re-remind you
of where you were going with it...."
"I review my notes and outline then I edit the last few things I wrote. I have to do that all the time!"
"Once
when I was stuck I wrote a "behind the scenes" scene of my characters
talking about me, bitching about the long wait, complaining about plot
holes and where they wanted their character arcs to go. It was fun and
was, uh, scary what obnoxious opinions they had of me. Good luck!"
"Hire
Bob Towne or Johnny Milius for the rewrite, while I grab a gimlet or
six at the Brown Derby with Diane Keaton and Jackie Nicholson, then hit
the links for a quick eight with Ronnie Reagan. At least that's what I'd
do if I were Bob Evans."
"Read and re-read it until I finally get back in the groove."
"Plant ass in chair. Type."
"May have to go in seclusion for inspiration."
"Tough
spot. Was recently there myself. But yeah, as has been stated, ass in
chair, start typing. It also helped me to review my plot notes, do a
re-read and reattach myself to the feelings that got me started in the
first place. Ask yourself: Why did I start this mad scheme way back
when?"
"I
agree---re-read, that's what I did after I brought my old, old word
processor online and looked to see if there were any stories I could
salvage!"
"Re-read from the beginning. Then plant your ass in the chair and type. You can have some coffee."
"Write
a tangent with the characters doing something that is not plot related.
Kind of like letting school kids get a recess. It might get you back
into the groove and you might get a short story out of it."
"As someone said, reread from the beginning or some other interesting spot. How about mood music?"
"I
have to read it from the beginning, typically in one sitting with a
notebook handy to make notes. Sometimes I forget what my characters have
been up to! ... I just read the posts above mine: Glad to know that retracing the plot from the beginning is something you all do as well!"
"Hemingway
said never leave off at the end (of a scene or chapter). Always start
up more action then go right to it. Works for me. So does re-reading
previously written section."
"I spend a few days being really cranky and kinda sneaking back up on it..."
"Whenever
you leave your thread, jot a note of how to reframe and focus in.
Survival tactic for to-do lists, dissertations, homework, vacation
planning, blah, blah."
"I
go back and re-read. If it's been a few days, I go back a few chapters.
If it's been a while, I start from the top and read through."
There you have it, folks. The fruit of my crowdsourcing on this issue. Again, if you feel like being heard on the subject, please do leave a comment of your own.
Tune in two weeks from now to see which approaches worked for me, and which didn't. And a sincere thank you to all of my Facebook homies who chimed in with helpful l suggestions!
28 May 2015
27 May 2015
The Verdict
A while back, I wrote a story and submitted it to HITCHCOCK. Not long after, a bomb went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. It was one of those WTF moments, because it didn't make any sense. (Of course, you could say that terrorist acts, by definition, don't make any sense, and you wouldn't get an argument from me.) The weird thing was that inside of 48 hours, the suspects in the bombing were ID'd as Chechens. My story began with a hit on a guy in a car. The shooters were hired guns, contract killers. They were Chechen gangsters, brought in soft, for the one job.
Now, my story didn't have anything to do with terrorism. It was about money, and closing a loop. Eliminating loose ends. But the coincidence bothered me, and I dropped a note to Linda Landrigan at AHMM, and suggested it was kinda too close to home, as if I were exploiting a real-life event - that killed people - and better we revisited it, if and when she bought the story.
Next up, I touched base with my pal Michael Parnell, who at the time was living in Tbilisi, Georgia. Michael's pretty much my go-to guy for crazy feudal stuff in the Caucasus, and I wanted his input. Michael came back at me and agreed it was an odd juxtaposition. He said, Chechens make great heavies, for sure, but you got a lot to choose from, this neck of the woods. For openers, there's your Armenian rug guy who gets his thumb cut off - why not make the baddies Azeris, for example? Armenians and Azeris hate each other. And he threw some other stones in the pool, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the heroin traffic out of Afghanistan, the Moscow mafia moving in on the Georgian gangs. In the end, writers being jackdaws, attracted to shiny objects, I wound up writing a book called EXIT WOUNDS, and I'd happily credit Michael with giving me the background.
This is taking the long way around to the Tsarnaev verdict. Everybody's familiar with the essential narrative. An impressionable kid, led astray by his older brother, who'd been lured to the dark side of Islam. I have to comment that I have no patience at all with Fundamentalism, whether it's Born Again bible-thumpers, or extremist Orthodox Jews (like the guy who murdered Yitzhak Rabin), or ISIS thugs. My personal sympathy is that I'd like them out of the gene pool. Tsarnaev himself is sort of a poster boy, or at least that's the tack his defense took. There's something to this. The wars in Chechnya, for instance, drew in plenty of recruits from the disenchanted Soviet republics, border states along the southern perimeter, what the Russians like to call the Near Abroad, many of them with majority Moslem populations. Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks. All of them disaffected with native dictatorships, set up by Moscow. These are genuine grievances, and historic. Don't think people don't nurse old wounds.
This is, however, no alibi. You don't spray a crowd with shrapnel from pressure-cooker bombs. An eight-year-old kid died. What does he have to do with the Palestinians, or the invasion of Iraq? There's something truly screwy with making these things morally equivalent, or using them as an excuse. I don't get it. Terror tactics, the bombing of the King David hotel by the Irgun, say, or the IRA campaign in central London, in the 1990's, don't really work. They come back to haunt you. Prince Charles can shake hands with Gerry Adams, but it was the Irish, after all, who blew up Mountbatten.
I know inviting a conversation about the death penalty is asking for trouble. Abortion, capital punishment, and gun control seem like hot-button issues. (How gay marriage got sucked into this is beyond me.) But certain things seem obvious. The death penalty isn't a deterrent. It's unequally applied. Guys on Death Row turn out not to be guilty. DNA evidence, twenty years later. That's enough reason to get rid of it. Me, personally, I kind of like beheading, and hanging, and electrocution. They're all inhumane - you hang somebody, you have to stand on their shoulders, it doesn't break their neck, put some weight into it. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, society's revenge. You murder the social compact, you pay the price. And in this particular case, there's certain guilt. I'm sorry, but this isn't good enough. I might personally think Tsarnaev should be publicly disembowelled. That's not the issue.
Tsarnaev has no excuse, legally or morally. Like the old lawyer joke. Guy murders his parents, and then throws himself on the mercy of the court, because he's an orphan. I don't think so. You take responsibility. Diminished capacity doesn't work, not in this instance. There was a plan that required malice aforethought. They knew innocent people would die. They went ahead. Good lawyering can't explain this away. In fact, nobody even tried. We're left with the raw thing itself. The dead.
I think we deserve satisfaction. Socially. I think we deserve an endgame. I think we want payback. I think we're entitled to it. The death penalty speaks to this. You fry 'em, or they roll on the gurney. Retribution. But. I can't answer my own question. Are there people who deserve to die? Yeah, there are. Who makes the decision? I guess we all do, collectively. Which means the burden is ours. We choose this. Have we repaired the damage to the social compact? There's certainly something final about it, that a blood price is paid, and we're complicit. I don't know. If you take innocence off the table - if we can say, beyond doubt, that Tsarnaev is guilty - is justice served? I'm not convinced.
Now, my story didn't have anything to do with terrorism. It was about money, and closing a loop. Eliminating loose ends. But the coincidence bothered me, and I dropped a note to Linda Landrigan at AHMM, and suggested it was kinda too close to home, as if I were exploiting a real-life event - that killed people - and better we revisited it, if and when she bought the story.
Next up, I touched base with my pal Michael Parnell, who at the time was living in Tbilisi, Georgia. Michael's pretty much my go-to guy for crazy feudal stuff in the Caucasus, and I wanted his input. Michael came back at me and agreed it was an odd juxtaposition. He said, Chechens make great heavies, for sure, but you got a lot to choose from, this neck of the woods. For openers, there's your Armenian rug guy who gets his thumb cut off - why not make the baddies Azeris, for example? Armenians and Azeris hate each other. And he threw some other stones in the pool, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the heroin traffic out of Afghanistan, the Moscow mafia moving in on the Georgian gangs. In the end, writers being jackdaws, attracted to shiny objects, I wound up writing a book called EXIT WOUNDS, and I'd happily credit Michael with giving me the background.
This is taking the long way around to the Tsarnaev verdict. Everybody's familiar with the essential narrative. An impressionable kid, led astray by his older brother, who'd been lured to the dark side of Islam. I have to comment that I have no patience at all with Fundamentalism, whether it's Born Again bible-thumpers, or extremist Orthodox Jews (like the guy who murdered Yitzhak Rabin), or ISIS thugs. My personal sympathy is that I'd like them out of the gene pool. Tsarnaev himself is sort of a poster boy, or at least that's the tack his defense took. There's something to this. The wars in Chechnya, for instance, drew in plenty of recruits from the disenchanted Soviet republics, border states along the southern perimeter, what the Russians like to call the Near Abroad, many of them with majority Moslem populations. Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Tajiks. All of them disaffected with native dictatorships, set up by Moscow. These are genuine grievances, and historic. Don't think people don't nurse old wounds.
This is, however, no alibi. You don't spray a crowd with shrapnel from pressure-cooker bombs. An eight-year-old kid died. What does he have to do with the Palestinians, or the invasion of Iraq? There's something truly screwy with making these things morally equivalent, or using them as an excuse. I don't get it. Terror tactics, the bombing of the King David hotel by the Irgun, say, or the IRA campaign in central London, in the 1990's, don't really work. They come back to haunt you. Prince Charles can shake hands with Gerry Adams, but it was the Irish, after all, who blew up Mountbatten.
I know inviting a conversation about the death penalty is asking for trouble. Abortion, capital punishment, and gun control seem like hot-button issues. (How gay marriage got sucked into this is beyond me.) But certain things seem obvious. The death penalty isn't a deterrent. It's unequally applied. Guys on Death Row turn out not to be guilty. DNA evidence, twenty years later. That's enough reason to get rid of it. Me, personally, I kind of like beheading, and hanging, and electrocution. They're all inhumane - you hang somebody, you have to stand on their shoulders, it doesn't break their neck, put some weight into it. This is, not to put too fine a point on it, society's revenge. You murder the social compact, you pay the price. And in this particular case, there's certain guilt. I'm sorry, but this isn't good enough. I might personally think Tsarnaev should be publicly disembowelled. That's not the issue.
Tsarnaev has no excuse, legally or morally. Like the old lawyer joke. Guy murders his parents, and then throws himself on the mercy of the court, because he's an orphan. I don't think so. You take responsibility. Diminished capacity doesn't work, not in this instance. There was a plan that required malice aforethought. They knew innocent people would die. They went ahead. Good lawyering can't explain this away. In fact, nobody even tried. We're left with the raw thing itself. The dead.
I think we deserve satisfaction. Socially. I think we deserve an endgame. I think we want payback. I think we're entitled to it. The death penalty speaks to this. You fry 'em, or they roll on the gurney. Retribution. But. I can't answer my own question. Are there people who deserve to die? Yeah, there are. Who makes the decision? I guess we all do, collectively. Which means the burden is ours. We choose this. Have we repaired the damage to the social compact? There's certainly something final about it, that a blood price is paid, and we're complicit. I don't know. If you take innocence off the table - if we can say, beyond doubt, that Tsarnaev is guilty - is justice served? I'm not convinced.
www.DavidEdgerleyGates.com
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