Month: December 2013

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Like it or Not, You ARE the Main Character

The audio version of this post appears below. To listen, just click on “Play”.

 

 

When I think back over the years at what kept me from actually doing what I wanted to do in my life – write, I realize that a big factor was not wanting to always be the main character in my stories – or, any character for that matter. It just seemed so trite and quite frankly, really scary. And, let’s face it; everyone who reads your work is going to immediately assume it’s you you’re writing about. Watch any interview with any author and almost always the first question from the interviewer is; “So, are you so and so?” After much self-deprecating bullshit, the author always admits there is a little piece of him/her in the main character.

 

There’s nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’m glad that’s the way it works because I want to know something about the author I’m reading. But, for me I always thought – hell to the fucking no. Presumably, my mom is going to read my stuff and I just can’t bear the idea that she would have insight into the darkest crinkly corners of my poisoned mind.

 

I lived a pretty cool life and I’ve had successful authors advise me to build my stories around the experiences I’ve had. I was a private detective in Connecticut for years; something I hid from friends and family (I took “private” very seriously) under the guise of just being a guy who owned a limousine company and was involved in local and state politics both in the front line and behind the scenes. So, I was out there in the public pretty prominently, but the real story was I working cases for some pretty serious folk in some amazing and dangerous situations. I had an incredible team of people behind me all of whom had their own very distinctive characteristics and skill sets. They blew me away everyday.

 

So, while I agree with my author friends that my files could generate a plethora of best sellers, I owe it to my old clients and the people I met along the way to keep their secrets secret. I don’t even want to fictionalize the cases because they are so specific, the people involved would instantly recognize the story as their own.

 

Thus, I made a deal with myself, which really is like making a deal with the devil. I decided to keep me out as much as possible but to employ a certain alchemy in putting together the personalities and characteristics of my clients, employees and subjects from my case files in creating my own characters. One of my favorites is Charlie from Station Vermont, which appears in my book 5 Tales. Check out the excerpt here on the blog. The guy who inspired that dude is a real piece of work.

 

Then I realized omitting my experiences, personality and character traits from my characters is nigh to impossible and after many years torturing myself by de-constructing and re-constructing my characters to lose anything I saw as me-ness, I realized its ok to put yourself in the story either in a big way or maybe just a wisp. I prefer the wisp, but I would encourage anyone getting into this world to let themselves go. Everyone has a story and what may seem banal to one person could be someone else’s Great Expectations. Be yourself, people want to read about it.

 

 

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I Don’t Want to Kill My Darlings – Screw You, Sir Couch!

I'm not listening to this old fossil any longer!

I’m not listening to this old fossil any longer!

The audio version of this post appears below. Just click ‘Play”.

 

 

I don’t want to kill my darlings. Quite frankly, I’m kind of tired of modern authors taking advice from Edwardian literary martyrs who apparently sacrificed their own time by doling out bits of wisdom to the less talented plebes and neophytes of the writing community of these past three centuries. The Edwardian martyr to whom I refer herein is Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch the progenitor of the phrase “Kill Your Darlings”, which was originally “Murder your Darlings”, something he was adamant about.

Now, I have a theory on why Sir Couch was such a vehement proponent of deleting one’s best work before publication. I think it was competition. Those Edwardian authors were notorious for hating each other’s guts and I believe he was trying to stack the deck in his favor. Every writer has a certain signature in their work even if they cross genres. The reason we read a specific writer’s work and become fans is because of their style and I relish that. I like that I can pick up any piece of work under the Samuel Clemens name and know it’s really Twain. I’ll bet a donut that if we were afforded the opportunity to read Salinger’s previously unpublished work without even knowing it existed – that we would know it was his unequivocally.

There are lots of habits I would love to lose – like my horrific habit of using the word “just” all over the place. (Fortunately, I edit the shit out of those after the fact – but still.) Or, my dreadful grammar, which at times, embarrasses me beyond belief. But, as for some of my inherent style sheets – hell no. I write because I love to write, firstly for me and secondly for the reader. And, I don’t want my favorite writers to stop being themselves either. It’s disingenuous and fucking boring as well. Who wants to read the same style, form, cadence, etc? And, who wants to write that way? Not me, my friends.

I’ve definitely been a victim of Sir Couch’s. I’ve killed, I’ll bet, thousands of darlings over the years and I’ll never get them back. A few years ago I wrote a paragraph so disturbingly raw that while I was writing the placement of the words didn’t register in my mind – it was just born from some passion for this particular story. When I read it, I got chills. Something told me I had to cut it – that it was just way, way too much and too over the top. I would never be able to look at my mom, hell – my whole family, again after they read it. I passed it to my trusty group of pre-screeners and all except one loved it. All it took was that one voice of dissent to justify my own thoughts. I killed the piece and have regretted it ever since. To date, that was probably my best paragraph.

I’m not doing that anymore and urge all fledgling writers such as myself to eschew this nasty phrase and write to your hearts content. To Sir Couch, wherever your bones may be rotting and restless with the worry of the genesis of better writers than yourself – I say this to you, Sir (in the voice of Sir John Gielgud from Arthur) go screw yourself!

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One of the Keys to Writing – Location, Location, Location

Most recent incarnation of my work space

Most recent incarnation of my work space

I should never, ever bitch about my writing space; it’s off the hook. I have a private office in our house overlooking a beautiful lake that affords a decent (but not perfect) barrier between my terrorist children and my pain in the ass dogs. It’s warm, comfortable and should be very inspiring given the scenery and the fact quite a few literary greats have passed through this hamlet over the last century and a half. Sometimes when I look out my window I can see their spirits passing through and shaking their fingers at me “write, you lazy ass, write!” castigating my sorry butt as they fade off over the mountains.

Waking up to this every morning would be inspiring to most people.

Waking up to this every morning would be inspiring to most people. San Diego.

But, that ain’t the case and it hasn’t been in the last few houses we’ve been in where I have had the luxury of carving out a nice lair for myself in which to create prose for the ages. There was the rooftop apartment in San Diego that commanded an incredible view over Balboa Park, downtown San Diego and the big bay. After that it was the first place in Vermont tucked into the woods on a hill nestled in between a grove of mature oak trees so far from the road the silence was deafening. Then it was the home of a published and well-known author Joseph Olshan. Besides the remnants of a successful author’s aura wafting about in the air, that place had two awesome spots in which to wax and record my twisted thoughts. And, then it came around to this place, by far the best in the lot.

While these seemingly perfect spots provide a great place for the business of my writing: planning, editing, social media marketing, the writing of this blog, etc. The meat of my work gets done where it has always gotten done – the saloon. I’ve written in these here electronic pages before about the lubrication that gets my mind chugging along, but I haven’t mentioned where it all happens. Possibly, I haven’t brought it up because I don’t want to give off the wrong impression that I hang out in bars for days at a time on a literary bender. That’s not the case at all, in fact, I only need a couple of hours to produce about four thousand words – maybe not good ones every single time, but usually something that with a little work can prove to be the better fruits of my labor.

Where the magic actually happens.

Where the magic actually happens.

I find the din of a bar to be comforting. It’s just the right amount of noise, especially right around Happy Hour. And, as aforementioned, the comfort and effect of a martini or two helps relax the mind into that place where the cerebral jackhammers find the terrain more pliable and loose. The atmosphere strips away the thoughts that muddy up the creative process as well as the empirical distractions of home. There are no children interrupting the creation of the best sentence you’ve ever written with a shrill screech, or the begging for yet another treat. No dogs are barking at phantom burglars or to go out and sully the neighbor’s lawn. You just have strangers who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the geeky guy furiously tapping away at the keys of the Mac Air and occasionally tipping back the perennially present up glass at its loyal perch far enough away from the laptop so as to avert disaster. Of course, if you’re like me and have a regular watering hole, the staff learns your pattern and knows well enough when to interrupt and when to leave you the fuck alone. Not like home where as hard as one may strive to set up rules – they’re always broken. “Dad, I want milk.” “Dad, Mom yelled at me!” “Dad, when are you coming down!” “Jason, these fucking kids are driving me crazy!” Ruff! Ruff! Ruff! Let me out or I’ll pee on your loafers!

The point of this sprawling diatribe is that where you write is important and if you can choose the location you are way ahead of the game and on your way to creating your best work. I knew a guy once who wrote on a seesaw with loose-leaf paper and a Bic pen. Nora Roberts wrote at an abysmally small desk in her kitchen as she watched her small children (couldn’t imagine that). Wherever it is, your space is important. If I had started this career earlier in life when I could be out and away from home with wild abandon, I know I would have legions of books out there already. Doesn’t mean they would be good – but, they would be out there.

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Poetry Sucks – No, Wait, Does it?

Annabelle Lee

Annabelle Lee

The audio version of this post appears below. Just click on “play”.

 

I gave up reading poetry a quarter of a century ago, which is kind of ironic as the genesis of my writing passion grew from Edgar Allan Poe’s Annabelle Lee. When I was seven or eight, I made my mom read that damn thing to me over and over again. My mom was a real trooper as I spent hours asking her questions about what every single word meant and why Poe had chosen to arrange them the way he did. I realize that my love for a famous iconic poem doesn’t make me deep or intellectual, nor do I care. It would be far sexier if the writer’s spark had come from some obscure poet who killed him or herself by eating the only copy of their best opus and then aspirating on the vomit of their own words.

But, again, I don’t care. I just knew I wanted to learn how to string prose together like this guy did. Of course, that will never happen Poe was the master and I’m but a fan with a little imagination. As I went through school I suffered the same shit everyone does; Frost, Whitman, Yates…blah, blah, blah – searching for all the hidden meanings and trying to find some answers to life in general. I hated it. I’m not saying those guys don’t rock – I’m just saying it seemed a colossal waste of time trying to get into all these various heads.

At university I met tons of self-proclaimed poets none of which I became friends with. At that time, to me if writers were the gold standard of self-absorbed personalities then poets were the ones who set the standard. After awhile I coined the phrase “intellectual vapidity” and applied it to all the poets on campus. Then one night driving home from school, I heard some famous now dead poet on NPR saying how we all need poets to explain the universe to us. That everyone on the planet who was not a poet was somehow inferior and would struggle with our own existence until we take the big dirt nap. This guy probably thought we would struggle afterward as well.

Remember, I’m young at this point – twenty, or twenty-one at the most. So, I’m still impressionable and trying to feel my way up the slimy slope of life. I’ve never been one to judge too quickly or harshly and prefer investigating questions myself before rendering a decision on any given subject. Thus, I decided to write some poetry. I knew all the basic structures and understood everything from allegory to villanelle and since the white noise of ideas never shuts off in my head, I had plenty of material to forge into something hopefully readable.

After three weeks and exactly eighteen poems (I can still see the blinking MS/DOS prompt on my old Tandy computer), I re-read all of them and then called begging the NPR station to send me a tape of the interview with that nutty poet. I got it a week later, popped it into the player in my car on the home one night and listened to this guy’s pabulum once more. As soon as I got home, I looked at the printed out copies of my foray into poetry, neatly sorted them into a pile and placed the cassette from NPR next to them. I looked at the poems and said “you suck”, looked at the cassette and said “you suck even worse”, and then I ripped the pages into pieces and smashed the tape with a hammer, swearing to never attempt to write a piece of poetry, spend any time talking or arguing with a poet, and damning them all to hell. At twenty or twenty-one you feel like you have hell damning powers.

I’ve spent the last twenty-five or so years poetry free, being polite every once in a while when someone gifted me with a book of poems (usually Frost – easiest to find in the bargain bins, I guess) because the gift giver knows I love literature and trying hard not to grimace when someone told me they were a poet.

I’ve softened with age as one is wont to do and now have a still suspicious view on poetry albeit it a more embracing one. My good friend Ray Grant published a book of poetry a couple of years ago. You can find it here. Ray is someone I hold in the highest of regards, both as a thinker and all around Renaissance man. So, of course, I felt obligated to read his book (kidding Ray). I enjoyed reading Ray’s poems because I could relate the content to Ray as a person and my friend, and have gone back to his book on quite a few occasions. It’s also led me to be more receiving of other people’s works – although I do have to say, mainly of people who are not well known. I’m not sure what that phenomenon is, but I still find the classics boring and vapid. Maybe it’s just because I didn’t know those poets personally and thus couldn’t relate to what they were saying.

The point, if there were to be one is this: I’ve realized how personal poetry is and being the kind of person who loves nothing more than to entertain people with stories, I’m not ready to let the reading public into my most innermost thoughts and struggles. I’m giving poetry a stay of execution in my reading lexicon, but I still won’t be writing any poetry in the near future – or ever. Well, maybe as I’m about to take the dirt nap.