Once again we highlight our criminally favorite cartoonist, Future Thought channel of YouTube. We love the sausage-shaped Shifty, a Minion gone bad.
Yikes! In this Crime Time episode, only one outcome is possible.
| © www.FutureThought.tv |
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That’s today’s crime cinema. Hope you enjoyed the show. Be sure to visit Future Thought YouTube channel.
I changed my regular morning take-out order the other day, after many, many mornings of exactly the same, and it reminded me, out of the blue, of the opening of Heinrich Böll’s postwar novel, Billiards at Half-Past Nine. The new guy in town, an architect, goes to the local café for breakfast, and since it’s his first time, orders something a little eccentric, trying to make an impression. But this act of daring comes back to haunt him, because now he’s expected to get the same damn thing for breakfast for the next sixty years. Böll also goes into a very funny sidebar about how Germans will never ask the price, when it’s not listed on the menu, for fear of embarrassing themselves. And a common daily routine offhandedly becomes a reflection on the national character.
Billiards at Half-Past Nine is in some ways an analog of Irwin Shaw’s novel Voices of a Summer Day. Böll published his book in 1959, Shaw published his in 1965. Böll was born in 1917, Shaw in 1913. Both served in the war, Böll with the Wehrmacht, Shaw with the U.S. Army. Both of them wrote about their experiences in the war, Böll with The Train Was on Time, Shaw with The Young Lions, and both had critical and commercial success. (Shaw, of course, had enormous commercial success later on, with an extra helping of critical schadenfreude.) Billiards at Half-Past Nine and Voices of a Summer Day are mid-career novels, the two writers stretching their legs but not showing strain, using a comfortable voice but not falling into lazy habits of mind. Structurally, very similar, both books generational, but the narrative arc a single day, told in flashback and multiple POV. In other words, very fluid and fluent, with a lot of grace notes - Dickensian, even, meant very much as a compliment, and not to imply cluttered. The books are actually terrifically clean, tight and exact and effective, like a good pitcher in the sixth inning.
Böll is also that generation of German
writers who lived through Nazism and the war, and wrote what might be called
stories of atonement, although the Germans call it die Trümmerliteratur,
literature of the rubble. Günter Grass is another – born in 1927,
Grass was 17 when he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, an admission he made long
afterwards – and German historical guilt is his subject. Hans Hellmut Kirst, author of Night of the Generals, was born in
I’ve
talked about German “atonement” before.
We’d do well to remember that an entire generation of younger Germans
wanted nothing whatsoever to do with regret, or war guilt, or the whole concept
of collective responsibility. They
thought the Nazis were their parents’ problem, not theirs. In the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s, when
Baader-Meinhof was active, the young German Left accused the government of
being riddled with Nazis – the
chancellor, Kurt Kiesinger, had in fact been a party member, so the Left wasn’t
all that far wrong. My point here, is
that those kids indulged their own unexamined moral superiority. We have a similar blind spot in white
Only
the weak accommodate history. The bold
march on.
Author Sherry Harris is a good friend (and editing client) of mine. Recently, she mentioned how my prior edits continue to influence her to this day, and we realized it might be helpful for Sherry to share some of my past comments/concerns in case any of you have the same writing issues. So I invited her to be our guest blogger today. Take it away, Sherry!
— Barb Goffman
The Extra Voice
by Sherry Harris
All writers have voices in their head, but I have an extra one. It's Barb Goffman's. She edited twelve of my thirteen published books, one that isn't published, and all the short stories I've written. So, trust me, when I'm writing, Barb is right there with me. Below are some of the things she's saying:
Not enough sleuthing – What, Barb? I write mysteries; of course there's sleuthing. But apparently, in every third book or so, there isn't! I get distracted by a relationship or a subplot and forget the main point of the book--that my protagonist has a mystery to solve. Here's a comment Barb made when she edited Rum and Choke: "I've already mentioned this, but to flesh it out, a large majority of the book (at least it felt like a large majority) involved Chloe helping Ann search for the treasure. The rest of the book had a lot of subplots, and sleuthing into Enrique's murder felt like one of them. Obviously, that's a problem."
Are you writing a travelogue? – Apparently, I was. In an early book, I sent Sarah from her little town of Ellington, which is about fifteen miles northwest of Boston, to the North End of Boston. I love Boston. I love the North End. It took Sarah two pages to make it from the T by the Government Center in Boston to the North End, which is about a ten-minute walk. In the original version I waxed on about the history of Faneuil Hall and its famous golden grasshopper weather vane. Sarah stopped at the Holocaust Memorial and at Union Oyster House. She padded across the cobblestone street and went by Mike's Pastries before she arrived at her destination. In the final version of the book, her walk was one paragraph, as much as it pained me to delete so much detail about my beloved Boston. Sigh, Barb was right. Now when I'm waxing on about something in a first draft, it gets axed by the second one.
She needs to react – I'm reacting to this voice. Both of my series have female protagonists, and this bit of advice has made a huge difference in my writing. Find a dead body? You need a reaction. Someone say something startling? Your protagonist has to think something or say something or make an expression that gives away their thoughts to the reader. This seemingly simple statement is key to writing a book with more emotional depth. Now, it drives me nuts when I read a book where the characters don't react.
Slow down – but the pace... It's one of those rules of writing to slow down the fast-paced (action) scenes and speed up the slow ones. While my logical brain knows that, apparently my writing brain forgets it. BTW, reactions work in the fast scenes too.
Make it a full scene – all too often when I'm writing early drafts I jump to the next scene and start it with a line that summarizes something that happened since the last scene. It's fine to do it if what happened isn't anything important. However, in the book I just wrote, I found myself hearing Barb's voice telling me that the summary deserved its own scene. She was right. Again.
When was the last time she ate? – I don't know. If your protagonist has kids or a pet, you can add fed/took care of them to the above. Ah, yes, meals. My protagonists can apparently go days without eating. And it's not that each meal needs to be a scene (see paragraph on description above), but characters can grab something as they go out the door, or stop for something, or it can be a scene if something important happens.
I could probably write ten more pages of examples of things Barb's voice is saying. Like, why is your character doing something, or why is that scene in there–just because the writing is pretty doesn't mean it has a place in the story. Thanks, Barb. Sigh. But if you have to have an extra voice in your head, I hope it's Barb's!
Sherry Harris (https://sherryharrisauthor.com) is the Agatha Award-nominated author of the Sarah Winston Garage Sale mystery series and the Chloe Jackson Sea Glass Saloon mysteries. She's published short stories in Edgar Allan Cozy, The Beat of Black Wings: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Joni Mitchell, Black Cat Weekly, Three Strikes--You're Dead, and Scattered, Smothered, Covered & Chunked: Crime Fiction Inspired by Waffle House. Sherry is a past president of Sisters in Crime and a member of Mystery Writers of America.
You often hear, “The setting was so good it was another character.”
I get what they mean, but the pedant in me objects. No matter how well rendered, setting can never be a character, because a setting is a setting.
You can write a novel that could be set anywhere.
Some are simply vessels to contain all the other elements. Yet most fiction lives somewhere, and some settings can have an indispensable influence on character development and behavior. Paris in the 1920s. Needles, California. Mars.
I have this notion that culture and gravity are essentially the same.
Mighty forces so dominant and pervasive they go unnoticed during the day-to-day. Settings serve the same role. Below conscious thought, yet inescapingly shaping the outcome.
We know you can fail with a character, but can you screw up a setting?
It’s not easy, but one sure way is to overdo it. When a story is set in a tough part of town, I hate being constantly reminded just how bad it is. Everything smells foul, the food rotten, every guy’s a bad guy, the nuns spit tobacco and third graders keep .38s tucked in their Mary Janes. It’s worse when the characters trapped in these overwrought environments start reflecting on the ugliness of their situation. "Geez, Mick, this sure is a tough town.”
As with characters, settings benefit greatly from nuance.
As Paul McCartnery reminded us “There’s good and bad in everyone”, even if the ledger is lopsided one way or the other. If the characters stuck in the tent during a blizzard on Everest can’t snuggle into their sub-zero sleeping bags, at least once, I’ll let them complete the adventure without me.
If I write about a place, I have to have been there long enough to get a feel for all the sights, sounds and smells. I hear writers blithely declare that’s unnecessary when we have YouTube and video travelogues. This strategy’s doable, but it produces writing that’s phonier than a black wig on an octogenarian. Especially to those who live in your chosen location.
I edited a book once that had the protagonist spending some time in Hartford, Connecticut, a place I’ve hung around for about 40 years. Everything was off, including our major east-west highway that he had running north to south. I told him to fix all that stuff, which he found insulting.
“But it’s fiction!”
“Then don’t call it Hartford or we’ll have the insurance industry coming after us with pitchforks.”
My greatest admiration in this regard is for fantasy and science fiction of the world-building variety.
No one’s managed to travel to world for research, though a master of the form will really make you feel like they did. I’m far from expert in understanding this, but I think the key is having a basic frame of reference (Arrakis is really hot and dry, sort of like Saudi Arabia, Earthsea is wicked wet) that the authors extrapolate out to the extremes without slipping their moorings. It seems the most successful settings of the fantastical are also the most believable.
A lot of literary novels are set in academia, because lots of these writers are academics.
You can chart just how self-involved they are by the degree of blindness to their surroundings.
I’ve visited many serenely beautiful college campuses, often wondering how you can concentrate on organic chemistry when you have all these stately buildings and smoky little watering holes.
Literary academics, however, seem to be a hard lot, their aesthetic beings shriveled by existential angst.
Sure, you’re tormented because your wife is sleeping with a grad student and the dean of admissions, but you never noticed all that ivy?
Most of my books are set in the Hamptons, which means their characters are inevitably shaped and influenced by the distinctive social ecosystem in which they dwell.
You might have heard we have a lot of rich people out here. If you went by the The New York Times, whose panting devotion to the quirks and dispositions of these folks is a nearly daily obsession, you’d never know about our fire fighters, vacuum repairmen, cops, nurses, carpenters, bartenders, trans sexual abstract expressionists, fishermen, day laborers and auto mechanics, of which we have aplenty. As with the fashionable coterie, whom I mostly ignore, they are all characters who can only be entirely who they are because they live in the Hamptons.
If you’re going to plop your reader down somewhere, I think it’s fair to feed the imaginary senses a little bit, even in passing.
If you want to be reminded how even spare writing can fix you firmly into place, Hemingway’s short stories are worth another look. If lush abundance is more your cup of tea, I’d refer you to Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet. Pretty strong tea – more like a witches brew concocted by Sheherazade.
Like Olympic figure skating or cutting dovetail joints, creating an effective setting is harder than it looks. Especially if your goal is to develop a work that doesn’t lazily fall back on convention and cliché.
Though I guess you could say that about anything
Last episode saw our hero (cough, cough) under threat. We continue with…
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| Fury © Piper Aircraft |
Escape from Loch Haven
Piper’s corporate director was psycho. The rat bastard was enjoying himself.
I turned on my heel and left his office. The programming staff took one look at my face.
“Oh, my God. What did he do?”
I told them. “I think he physically threatened me or at least wanted me to believe it.”
The staff stared at one another. “He’s ƒ-ing mental. Regular people don’t talk to one another like that. That stuff about the forests, probably just wants to scare you. He doesn’t have enough friends to pull off a mur– a threat.”
Jennifer said, “He wouldn’t dare, but why take a chance? God, this is so embarrassing. Welcome to the Chamber of Commerce.”
He wasn’t merely uncivil, he was uncivilized. “Your boss is a psychopath.”
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| Lock Haven, Pennsylvania |
“How do we get you out of here?” one of the guys said.
Jennifer dialed the airport and spoke only a minute. “Manny wasn’t kidding. He’s informed the airport to turn you away on sight. He put the word out for company pilots not to help you.”
“Okay,” I said as implications began to sink in. “Surely some sensible VP will stop this.”
The staff said, “On a holiday weekend? All the executives are in Vero and spend less and less time here. You might not see one for a week or two. At the moment, he’s the on-site top dog. He’s got you.”
I couldn’t conceive a way to involve law enforcement or the court, a kid up against the largest employer in the area, especially on a holiday weekend. “Judge, O Judge, willfor thou issue an emergency order to force Piper to return me to my doorstep?” In my head sounded Bill Cosby’s voice: “Right.”
Phoning Rich, my old boss, proved fruitless, never mind my investigation absolved his product. “You’re on your own,” he said coldly. “You’ll figure it out.”
I fantasized about a special place in The Ninth Circle for the principals in this case.
My door at Piper’s rooming house stood open. Inside, a woman was stuffing my suitcase.
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| © Piper Aircraft |
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know, sir. Someone told management you’re not staying.”
“Is there a motel within walking distance?”
“Not even close.”
“I’m going to place a call.”
“Not long distance, okay?”
The reality of spending a homeless night on unfamiliar streets set in. I phoned Jennifer and told her the residence considered me persona non grata. Bumped from the bunkhouse, as Jennifer put it.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “Nobody has heard of anything like this, but no one dares oppose an executive director. Yet if we’re careful, I think I’ve found a way to get you home.”
Bless her. Out of sight hadn’t meant out of mind. She’d been working overtime on my behalf.
“My heroine, thank you. Will you get in trouble?”
“Maybe. Screw ’em. I feel kind of responsible getting you here. No one guessed how insane he is.” I could picture her thin-lipped smirk. “If they fire me, I’ll file an ADA case naming Manny personally. They won’t want that. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
She directed me to leave my suitcase behind with a promise Piper would ship it after the holiday. I didn’t want to abandon my flight case with my discs, tapes, and listings.
“Take it, that’s a bonus. It enhances the plan. Let’s have an early dinner; you are going to need it.”
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| © Artisan DeLand Skydive University |
As we sampled Dutch sausage, she slipped me a ball cap with a logo that read ’SkyDive DeLand’.
“It’s in Florida a few hours from Vero,” she said. “Here’s the deal. Jerry, my jump master, has agreed to sneak you out of Dodge. We’ll wait until evening shift change, hoping Manny hasn’t spread the word to them. As we sail in, your ball cap and flight case should suggest you’re one of the brethren. Jerry will file a flight plan heading west rather than east in case someone is looking at eastbound flights. He will fly you only to the next light aviation airport, no farther. No need to expose him to additional risk.”
“Whew. I’m grateful as long as he doesn’t airdrop me from ten thousand feet.”
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| © Piper Aircraft |
She chuckled. “You’ll take a hill hopper to the next town and after that a commuter link. Eventually you’ll come to an airport with real jets, which will get you to Philly, Newark, or LaGuardia. From there, you can book to Boston Logan, and find transportation to Plymouth. It’s grueling, but will that do?”
“Wow, thank you, clever one. You are brilliant.”
“I hate what Manny’s done to you and done to the company. Unfortunately, he stands a good chance of getting away with it.”
“But so many people know.”
“The executives are out of town and when they finally return, they’ll have bigger tasks than look into the unlikely abandonment of a consultant. But maybe, who knows? He’s certainly abused his authority and burned through karma.”
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| rescuing damsels |
Return on Investment
Jennifer waved at the airport attendants and smiled at the security guard. Staff paid no attention to me, another jump junkie lugging a flight case.
We trudged onto the tarmac. I didn’t relax until we were in the air beyond recall. What would I have done if their impromptu human smuggling operation hadn’t worked out?
The trip worked exactly as Jennifer planned. I arrived exhausted in Boston well after midnight where my girlfriend picked me up. My car in Plymouth could wait. As we drove to our apartment in beauteous Brockton, she pumped me for details.
She laughed way too riotously when I told her about Jennifer.
“Leave it to you to arrange rescue by a fair damsel.”
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| Charon, ferryman of the River Styx “Find your own way back.” |
Aftermath
Rich, my old boss, damn his dark soul, had bebuffed requested help of any kind, even a brief drive to Chelsea to pick me up at the airport. He refused to pay his portion of the bill despite my investigation getting him off the hook.
Of course Manny saw to it Piper didn’t pay either, avoiding a dent in his precious budget. Outgo exceeding income is not a way to run a consulting business, and the chain of flight fees left me well in the hole.
UPS dropped off my suitcase. I gathered Willy found a job on the West Coast. Jennifer left Pennsylvania after which we lost touch. Piper shifted most operations to Vero Beach.
Manny, the crooked salesman turned crooked manager continued some months until I lost track. Somewhere Karma awaits. I like to picture him ferried across the River Styx where Charon boots him off and says,
“Find your own way back.”
I'll start this off with two statements for those who want to write fiction for publication. It's sort of a good news/bad news observation:
- The bad news is, you're going to have to deal with editors.
- The good news is, that's not really bad news. Most of those dealings are PPP: pleasant, painless, and productive.
As I've gotten older and more stubborn, I guess I probably argue with editors more than I used to, but it's still not often. The main reason I don't argue is that almost all the editors of short-fiction publications I've dealt with are competent and kind and open-minded, and certainly know more than I do about their job and their readers and what they want.
A second reason is, I'd like to try to please them as much as possible. All editors strive to publish the best stories and writers they can find, and they're especially happy when those writers are easy to work with. If an editor and I disagree on something in one of my stories, I always ask myself whether it's something worth arguing about. If it is, we discuss it, but if it's not (and it's usually not), I salute and do it the way the editor wants it done. Why not? After all, he (or she, in most cases) is the boss, and--to quote someone wiser than I am--"Those who play too hard to get, don't get got."
Besides, losing an editorial argument about something in the content of your story isn't always a complete reversal of what you wanted. It can be a compromise. Just rewrite that part until both of you can agree.
I realize that what I'm saying here isn't anything new; it's mostly common sense. But I'll try to illustrate some of it with ten examples from my own so-called writing career. And I'd love to hear about some of your experiences as well.
1. I once wrote, in a submission to a mystery magazine, that a character "cut his eyes at" another character. The editor of that story pointed it out, and asked what I meant by that expression. I explained it, because Southern folks have been cutting their eyes at each other for as long as I can remember, but the editor was still in doubt, so I happily surrendered and changed the wording to "glanced at" or something equally anemic. That satisfied her. (But I did cut my eyes at that email several times before sending it.)
2. In a submitted story to a time-travel anthology in 2019, I wrote something about the current value of a treasure-trove of money that had been stolen many years earlier. I've forgotten the specifics, but I was dead wrong in the calculations, and the editor of the anthology caught my error, and I corrected it. In fact I very thankfully corrected it. It's bad enough to show one's ignorance and carelessness to an editor--Barb Goffman, in this case--but at least Barb was a longtime friend. It would've felt a lot worse to have made a fool of myself in front of the readers, which I would've done if Barb hadn't caught my mistake.
3. In the Weird Things That'll Never Happen Again department, the editor of a weekly magazine phoned me one morning and said she needed a July Fourth holiday-mystery story, and needed it fast. When I asked how fast, she said, "The deadline for the new issue is tomorrow." I didn't know if I could do it, but I also knew that if I could, I'd have an "in" at that magazine for the foreseeable future. I wrote the story, submitted it that night, and it was published three days later. I'm not sure how many brownie points I earned, or if I earned any at all, but it never hurts to go the extra mile if you can. I try to do the same for anthology editors who find they need a story at the last minute to cover an author who dropped out of the project.
4. I long ago submitted a mystery story about a robbery and kidnapping, caught on camera, of a character I had named Ron McGraw, and I titled the story "Take the Money and Ron," which I modestly thought was brilliant. As it turned out, the editor didn't like my title--but she didn't tell me so. She just changed it, to "Candid Camera." I still think my title was a lot better, but hey, sometimes that's just how the mop flops. I kept my silence and cashed my check.
5. I think I've told the following story before, but it shows how flexible and cooperative editors can be. The first mystery I ever submitted to Strand Magazine featured a revenge-murder caused by a poison which I said was "a fluid from the oscolio blossoms of eastern Africa." Shortly after submission, I was surprised to receive a phone call from editor Andrew Gulli. He said they were considering my story, but no one on their staff was familiar with that poison, and were wondering where I had found out about it. I told him, very honestly, "I made it up." He said, "You what?" I said, again, "I made it up." There was a long, long silence on the phone, and finally he said, "Okay." And they published the story a month later.
6. Editor Linda Landrigan at AHMM once suggested that I change the ending of one of my submitted stories because it was "too abrupt." She was exactly right. I agreed with her and added a final plot twist, essentially creating a second ending on top of the first, and both of us were happy. That story, "The Blue Wolf," appeared in their February 2000 issue, and since then I've sold a lot of stories--some of them to AHMM--that featured a second or even a third ending after what appeared to be the first ending. That helpful technique is only one of the many things I've learned from Linda over the years.
7. In one of my stories in the print edition of The Saturday Evening Post, I mentioned that a character's horse was a mare and, about three pages later, I said something like "he unhitched him and rode away." Him? Rode him away? Unfortunately, the Post editors didn't catch that inconsistency any more than I did, and the first I heard of it was when one of my writer friends read it in the magazine and emailed me to point out my error. It was too late to fix it, and I still remember my reaction, which was something like Good God what was I thinking? I hope confession really is good for the soul, because it hurts to admit I made such a stupid mistake. It's one of those cases where I wish the SEP editors had been harder on me.
8. Back in the early 2000s, Woman's World published a story of mine under the wrong byline. I found out about it when a guy on the East Coast contacted me via my website to say he had read a lot of my mystery stories, and the one in the latest WW issue sounded like my writing, but the published byline said it was written by someone else. "Do you also write under the name Elizabeth Hawn?" he asked me. I assured him that I had never used a pseudonym of any kind, and when I contacted the editor about it--the late Johnene Granger, she said the person who put together the issue screwed up and inserted a previous author's name. She was clearly upset about the mixup, but I told her it didn't bother me--I had already been paid and it wasn't that big a deal. The funny thing was, it happened again about a year later (can you spell "Rodney Dangerfield"?), and again the story was credited to Elizabeth Hawn and the editor apologized profusely. (I've always intended to search the mysterious Ms. Hawn out and tell her about the switcheroo, but I never got around to it.) The point of all this is, publishing mistakes happen, and sometimes it's just pilot error. What good would it have done to complain about it?
9. About ten years ago, not long after I had preached to the students in my fiction-writing class about the dangers of overusing substitutes for "said" and explanatory "ly" adverbs during dialogue, a certain magazine published a story I had submitted to them that included the sentence "Of course not," he said. Except that in the final, printed version they had changed that sentence, without telling me, to "Of course not," he protested sharply. Again, I didn't bother to complain to the editor about it--the horse was already out of the barn--but I was tempted to. What they'd done was take a perfectly good sentence and turn it into a piece of truly bad writing. (Picture Tony Soprano sighing, shrugging, and saying "Whattayagonnado?")
10. I once wrote a long Western story that featured a group of masked bandits robbing a stagecoach. In one part of the story, a deaf passenger who could read lips "heard" something important that was said by one of the bandits. A sharp-eyed editor pointed out that the passenger couldn't possibly have read the guy's lips because of the bandanna covering his nose and mouth--which was of course correct. I was embarrassed enough to crawl under my writing desk, but when I came out, I corrected the story as needed and it was published--in fact it was serialized in three consecutive issues. All because of a good editor.
FYI, I listed these experiences because most of them are unusual enough to stand out in my memory, but in truth, almost all my contacts with editors have been short and uneventful and pleasant. Because most editors are themselves pleasant. They work in different ways: Some are extremely "hands-on," getting down into the trenches with (usually) helpful opinions on everything from structure to grammar to punctuation, etc.--and others are not. Both AHMM and EQMM have always surprised me in that almost all my stories there have been published with no edits at all, at least none that I was aware of, and with little or no discussions between writer and editor. The Strand, to a certain degree, is that way also. My takeaway from that, which might or might not be correct, is that if these three magazines receive a story that does require a great deal of editing, it's likely to be rejected on the spot. Which is even more incentive to us writers, to try to send them only our very best work.
I'll close with one more observation. As mentioned, I've had many conversations about content with the editors of publications, sometimes resulting in changes and sometimes not. But in every case, whether I won or lost the argument, I appreciated the editor's attention to and questioning of those kinds of things. Once again, these editors want the same thing I do, and that is to make a particular story as good and believable as it can be.
What about the experiences, good and bad, that you've had with the editors of anthologies, collections, magazines, and such? Or, for that matter, novels? Were you always satisfied with the result of your discussions with the editor? Are you usually in agreement? Did they usually help your story? Can you recall any really wild situations? Were differences ever extreme enough to lead to your withdrawing a story or other project from consideration, or to your not submitting work again to that publication?
Here's to a successful, profitable, and edit-free fall and winter!
September 1 is the new January 1. If you lose track of time, Labor Day is the holiday that shakes you out of your reverie and reminds you that all those lovely resolutions you made last December now have only four months to come to fruition.
I’ve had a pretty decent writing year but I am forced to admit that client work and the garden took precedence from May to August. I have far more jars of pickles and tomatoes, far more frozen blueberries, figs, and spinach than short stories.
Would that my story crop matched the garden crop!
To inspire myself, this week I reviewed some quotes I’ve collected over the years from other writers and creative types. Some of these quotes have lived on my hard drive for more than thirty years. I’ve done little with them, and now—as a wiser and (ahem) older writer, I understand why. Most of them are full of it.
Let’s take the topic of process, for example. Here’s the late David Lynch offering advice on how to write a movie script. I saw him discuss this ages ago in a written interview. Decades later, he discussed it again in a video that went viral.
Here’s his advice:
“You get yourself a pack of 3x5 cards and you write a scene on each card and when you have 70 scenes you have a feature film. So on each card, you write the heading of the scene and then the next card, the second scene, the third scene, so you have 70 cards each with the name of the scene. Then you flesh out each of the cards and walk away you’ve got a script.”
I ask you: Is this useful advice? Do screenwriters, producers, and show runners today use index cards while blocking a script? Sure! Their work is collaborative and a cork-board of cards helps them communicate their vision to others, just as storyboards do.
Do fiction and nonfiction writers use the same technique? Yes! Not all, but I know people who do. One friend texted me a photo of his bulletin board when, disbelieving, I asked for proof.
I suppose you could do such thing, if you want to go to the expense. The Scrivener software I use even has a “cork-board” mode that allows writers to create digital index cards and move them around to build their story. But it is far from the only way to write a story, script, or whatever. I still rely on a scrap of paper, especially when outlining shorts. When a decent idea hits, I use whatever’s handy to capture it.
I am sure that a million film students watched this clip and bought index cards. A moment’s thought tells you that there is nothing intrinsically valuable about an index card. It’s a freaking blank slate. What matters is what you put on it.
I laugh every time I think of Lynch and his cards. He was possibly the most whacked-out moviemaker of his age. Some of his movies track as if they were indeed filmed not from a finished script but a stack of index cards, albeit dropped on the way to the set, hastily picked up, and sloppily reshuffled. What Lynch might have written on his cards would be vastly different from what you would scrawl on your cards.
Also, Lynch forgot to mention in that clip that his index cards—since they originated in his imagination—were made of equal parts straitjacket fabric, demon’s breath, chocolate shakes, and tuna melt sandwiches. Oh—and you could only buy them at a stationery store that has now, with his death, sadly closed up shop.
Back in the 1980s, I was a fan of the BBC series, The Singing Detective, written by Dennis Potter. He also wrote the BBC series Pennies From Heaven. You don’t need to have watched those productions or to have read any Dennis Potter to know how much he influenced British and American TV. To put it mildly, TV shows critics fawned over and called “groundbreaking”—such as The Sopranos, in which the real world blends seamlessly with the dark fantasy lives of its characters—would not have been possible if Potter had not unleashed his singular vision on the world. People say the same thing of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks—a series I loved—but to be fair Peaks aired three years after The Singing Detective, and 12 after Pennies.
In 1988, Potter did an interview in which he said in a roundabout way that he routinely explores the same themes—and that that was a good thing:
“I’m not afraid to keep going down that same road, you know. The more a writer writes and the more self-confident he becomes, the more he digs in the same little patch. To me, one of the definitions of an amateur writer is that he can appear to be versatile. He will write A and then he will write B before he’s finished A. Well, forgive me, but I think a real writer will be going A, A, A, and will never actually get to B, never wants to get to B.”
Intriguing quote. We know it’s true for him because he said it. But is it empirically true? (Is anything in this profession?) Do his words feel true to you? Do you think that if you are versatile that you are still an amateur?
The other night, at a book event, I heard a young writer quote Bob Dylan saying that he basically has written the same five songs over and over.
I cannot confirm that Dylan ever said this, but I think artists of all types do embrace core themes and explore them in their work repeatedly. It’s the nature of the artistic mind. You work to exorcise or relive experiences, feelings, memories. According to Rabbi Googlevitch, Picasso had no fewer than six art periods in his lifetime. Dali, says the good rebbe, had four.
Lawrence Block says in one of his nonfiction books for writers that outlines are hand-holding devices to give writers the confidence to write just this little piece. As more words hit the page, you deviate from the original plan or you revise the outline. I’m paraphrasing him, but that advice jibes with a famous line by E.L. Doctorow that gets quoted by other writers constantly:
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”Heaven help me, I cannot find the source for this quote. Let me observe that this is just enough advice to get a young writer in trouble, especially if they are attempting to write a book for the first time. The quote sounds reasonable. I hear those words, and the subtext assures me that novel-writing is a straightforward, linear process. The truth is, on some projects it doesn’t freaking matter if my headlights are on. I am likely to drive myself into a ravine. Or, somewhere between Chapter 13, Chapter X-P, and Chapter 67 Sirius-Blue, the car has turned into Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, flown into a tree or submerged itself to take in a coral reef in the Dead Sea. Or the road has turned into molasses, and I am about to be baked into a loaf of Anadama bread, car and all.
When writers or artists say these things, they know that the spotlight or camera is on them. What they are about to say is being recorded for posterity. They want to look wise, even if that wisdom differs greatly from the messy truth of their process. So you should probably stop searching for truth in other people’s quotes—Are you listening, D’Agnese?—and enjoy them for what they tell you about the speaker.
When I was in college, I must have read this New York Times interview with E.L. Doctorow in which he argues that some of us are just innately blessed with the ability to glean truth from real life, regardless of our own backgrounds. (I was on a Doctorow kick at the time.)
“Henry James has a parable about what writing is. He posits a situation where a young woman who has led a sheltered life walks past an army barracks, and she hears a fragment of soldiers’ conversation coming through a window. And she can, if she’s a novelist, then go home and write a true novel about life in the army. You see the idea? The immense, penetrative power of the imagination and the intuition.”
Oh yes, young Joe thought. How profound. How deep! I don’t really have to research something before I write it. I can just glean inspiration from open windows!
At the time, I mentioned this line to a journalism professor of mine who had served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. In a heartbeat, he quipped, “Well, she might be able to, Joe, but I don’t want to read it.” (Once again, I have no idea where this Henry James parable originated. Anyone know?)
That professor loved mystery fiction. Reread parts of the Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe canons each year the way other people rewatch favorite Christmas movies. When Robert B. Parker made an appearance at the campus bookstore, he insisted a group of us students stop by and buy a few paperbacks. It’s the only time I had ever met Parker.
Another of the writers that prof urged me to read was James Lee Burke, whose books I later inhaled. Last year, Burke, then 87 years old, was interviewed on a podcast by North Carolina reporter Tommy Tomlinson. In that episode, Burke said that he had no plans to retire and no plans to wrap the Dave Robicheaux franchise anytime soon.
I know Tomlinson slightly, and follow his Substack. He and his wife devour mystery novels and TV mystery series. In a column written a few weeks after that podcast, Tomlinson said he’d been haunted by something Burke said. On the strength of this graf, I looked up the podcast and listened to the whole thing. These are Burke’s words:
“This is what I believe, and it’s metaphysical … the only activity that we do in the same way that God does is creation. That’s it. It’s like a baptismal font. Once you do that, you step into infinity.”
It’s the kind of quote that makes me want to start believing in writer quotes again. To that end, I wish you all a lustrous, productive fall, wherever you are and wherever the waters take you.
Thanks to Patricia Furnish for Rabbi Googlevitch.
See you in three weeks!
Headline this weekend after Charlie Kirk's assassination:
"America Enters a New Age of Political Violence!"
No. You can call it sad, tragic, traumatic, etc., but not new. I'm writing this on September 15, 2025, and 62 years ago on September 15, 1963, at 10:22 on Sunday, a bomb ripped through the all black 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing 4 young girls and wounding anywhere from 14-22 people as they were getting ready for Sunday Service. According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
Four white men, Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry, from the Cahaba River Group, which had splintered off from another Ku Klux Klan group because they thought the KKK was too restrained, not violent enough, in the fight against integration, were the bombers. It being Alabama in the 1960s, the original FBI investigation ended without indictments, and it wasn't until 2001, after President Clinton appointed Doug Jones as the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, that ALL the bombers (except Cash who had died of old age) were finally indicted, tried, and convicted.
And then came November 22, 1964 – the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and in 1965 they started televising the Vietnam War… and we all sat, eating our dinners and watching the war every single freaking night - including the little girl running naked and screaming because she'd been covered in napalm, the MyLai massacre, the Vietcong man being shot in the head, his brains blowing out, and then dropping dead on his side - until it ended in the early 1970s when we got to watch everyone in South Vietnam trying to get on the helicopters as they left. And August 1, 1966, when Marine veteran Charles Whitman went up the Main Building Tower at the University of Texas, onto the observation deck, and started shooting people down below. In the next hour and a half he killed 15 people (one a pregnant woman), and injured 31 others before he was finally shot and killed by 2 Austin police officers. And in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were both assassinated, followed by the bloody 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.
And it's never stopped. I am sick to death of endless violence, pundits, politicians, splinter groups, condolences, sorrows, and horrors.
I have decided that the real problem is that we humans don't like humans very much.
But enough of that.
Let's talk instead about the little mysteries of life.
I've been having some work done on our yard, including ripping out five large - 2' x 4' - uneven flagstones in the back that were simply a health hazard to me and my husband as we potter around living our Beatrix Potter lives with the bunnies, the ever chattering squirrels, the sparrows, and the cawing crows. Especially in winter when the flagstones were slick with ice and/or snow.
Anyway, my guy (everyone needs a "my guy") came and was working away. One flagstone, two flagstone, three flagstone, four flagstone - and he was at the door saying, "You've got to come see this!"
So I came out, and this is what I saw:
That's a well, with carefully built brick walls, and some kind of concrete thingy in the middle. Now, our house was built in 1919, and there was no sign of a well on the survey map that came with the house when we bought it. We never dreamed there was a well under that flagstone, and I will say to its credit that we, and probably a lot of folks, have walked across that flagstone many a time and it never shifted an inch.
But my curiosity was aroused (most odd things arouse my curiosity, and since life has a tendency to be full of them, I spend most of my life curious and investigating), so this week I've been calling around, trying to find out:
I've talked to a lot of people at the City this morning, and basically, everyone had a well throughout the 1800s, and into much of the 1900s. And by much of the 1900s, I mean that as late as the 1970s, when with a population of 72,000, the city decided to put in another reservoir up in North Sioux Falls somewhere. That would cost money, so there was a referendum, and a number of people in the neighborhood voted against it. The reason? Because if they got a reservoir, then the neighborhood would have to get indoor plumbing. Strangest hill to die on I've ever heard of.
I was also assured that probably the outhouse area has long disappeared, being filled in, and then... decades passing. Which is a shame in some ways, because it might have been interesting to excavate that. People used to throw all kinds of trash in the outhouse because where better?
And I'm still debating whether to get the well cleaned up and pumping again... But then we'd have to lift off that damn flagstone again. Decisions, decisions.
Meanwhile, who here has heard of Frances Glesner Lee (1878-1962)? She was a Chicago heiress to the International Harvester fortune, who wanted to go into medicine, but was told ladies didn't do that. So she hand crafted (including knitting and sewing the various fabrics, making miniature cigarette butts, etc.) "the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a one-inch-to-one-foot scale. These macabre dioramas were purpose-built to be used as police training tools to help crime scene investigators learn the art and science of detailed forensics-based detection." Miss Marple would have LOVED her.
"Red Bedroom"Go here (LINK) and (HERE) to learn more about her and see more of the dioramas. Or watch the video below:
I wonder if any of them show a murder in or near a well? BTW, our well had no bad smells coming up, just cool earthy air.
"I think genre is basically an outmoded method of organizing record stores." -Mollylele
"Since movement is the best medicine I recommend street fights." - M.T. Zimny
"The disabled don't have traditions in the traditional sense." -Annie Carl
"In my experience Facebook ads are a great way to spend money." - Claire E. Jones
"Nobody owns culture but it is a sacred spiritual thing that people are assigned responsibility for." - Gregg Castro
"That's how we define what a species is: how they sound when you step on them." - H.E. Milla
"I think alternative history is an amazing tool that should be used in schools to teach history." - Yasser Bahjatt
"We're all descended from the original Adam and Eve who were sperm whales. Count the ribs. It's true!" - M.T. Zimny
"Disabled archaeologists and anthropologists are looking for things that able ones aren't." - K. Tempest Bradford
"You can't judge a book by its cover but you can sure as hell sell a lot of copies." - Tod McCoy
"Would you like to have a dystopia? If so, you want to have a corporation that owns the seeds." - Jennifer Rhorer
"I am an apocoptimistic writer." -Robert L. Slater
"It's almost like there are microclimates of politics in the Northwest." - Peter Crozier
"I am always telling authors 'Your story starts in Chapter Four.'" - Atlin Merrick
"I don't always recommend gatekeeping, unless you're a woman and you want to gatekeep." - Sadie Hartmann
"We could add a new letter to LGBTQ. V for villainsexual." - Evan J. Peterson
"I'm not a scientist. It doesn't have to make sense for me." - Jennifer Rhorer
"Make sure you understand that the book you wrote is not the book you planned to write." - Andy Peloquin
"Hand-waving is the best solution we have to this problem." - Sue Burke
"In Indian country we call fry bread Indian crap." - Gregg Castro
"Be professional before you're professional." -Atlin Merrick
"I think of a song as a thesis and every part of it proves something." - Alison Belle Bews
"I am the dumbest person up here, but I have the strongest mic." - M.T. Zimny
"Reach out to someone and say 'I don't know shit' and they'll say 'No shit you don't know shit.'" - Bryce O'Connor
As I mention regularly in this blog, I've returned to meeting jail inmates on a part-time basis. The court staff calls me in to plug holes that sometimes occur in any small office--illnesses, vacations, that sort of thing. I'm happy to help. I enjoy the work, and the occasional magistrate session keeps my bar card from getting dusty.
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The sessions also allow me to uncover that collection of typos and misunderstoods that crop up occasionally in police reports. Often, these mistakes happen when a patrol officer in the field calls in his or her report using the department's voice-to-text system. Others occur, I think, when personnel use a word and aren't entirely clear on the definition. In either case the results can be entertaining.
What follows are a few of the recent examples of reporting errors. Besides a bit of fun, I hope they remind writers and citizens that police officers are human. They make mistakes just like the rest of us. Rarely are the errors cataclysmic breaches or deliberate violations of constitutional norms. More commonly, they are the mistakes we all make. A failure to proofread carefully or the assumption that what we actually said was what we meant to say. Anyone who has ever dictated a text message should understand. We want our police officers to be flesh and blood people so that they might empathize with the individuals they encounter. That doesn't mean we can't enjoy it when that humanity is displayed.
He did not feel the form.
I'm easing into the typo topic. This isn't the most egregious mistake. But a great deal of my jail business involves unwanted touchings of one form or another. More accurately, a lot of my business consists of an excess of alcohol or drugs, followed by unwanted touching, sometimes with fists. So maybe someone did sneak a feel on the paperwork rather than fail to complete all the numbered boxes. Hopefully, the defendant obtained consent.
Upon returning to the station, I tasted the ecstasy.
When I read this, I momentarily stopped my work. I've had a movie moment, I thought. An officer in the field, touched the drugs to her tongue, looked dramatically at her partner, tossed her mane of perfectly coiffed hair, and announced that, "this stuff is pure."
Or more likely, when she got to the station, an officer exhausted from working deep-nights did a chemical test on the drugs that came back positive for a controlled substance. Then in her sleep-deprived state, she wrote 'tasted' rather than 'tested'.
I like my version better.
We stooped because a man was lying in the road.
Either the police stopped to perform a welfare check on a man who might present a danger to himself or others, or they had a sympathetic response. You be the judge.
I contacted a female who loved in apartment 137.
If children are reading this blog with you, tell them the police meant to type 'lived'. If they're not, create your own story to the prompt, "The Woman Who Loved in Apartment 137".
I had the subject perform a simple metal test.
As every driver knows, when a subject is stopped for driving while intoxicated, they are asked to perform a battery of field sobriety tests. The goal is to determine whether the driver is too intoxicated to operate a motor vehicle safely.
The goal is to have the subject perform a simple mental test. I always find it funny when I see a typo written by someone commenting on another's loss of cognitive faculties. I'm sure the defense attorney will too.
But I could be wrong. Arc welding may be a new National Highway Safety Administration-approved sobriety test. I don't attend as many legal seminars as I used to so I might have missed that update.
There are a handful of recent offerings. They should remind us all that we're subject to typos. Read those stories one more time before submission. And if you find yourself lying in the street, don't fear the bent-over police officer. She's likely stooping to help you.
I'll be traveling on the day this blog posts. Apologies in advance if I don't reply to your comments.
Until next time.
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| Illustration by Helen John from All of A Kind Family |
