At Loss for Words

Mom and Dad spoke in a secret language.

So does my house phone (VoIP for those interested). Mere words into this article, it rudely interrupted to snarl. “Lobotomy. Lobotomy.”

I’ve previously mentioned an older resident of my childhood hamlet, one of those men crushed when the wife left, and emotionally unrecovered. He had a speech impediment when combined with abbreviations made his sentences difficult to decipher. Kids, however, learned to understand him and leveraged their translation skills into a private language.

Pity their poor teachers, a common target of childish insults. These days adults can check suspect words and phrases online. AFAIK, many are acronyms but IDK some slang terms. Nut? Seriously? 304 or 403? Make up your minds.

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Back to my parents’ private language when secret codes favored grownups. When adults didn’t want children to understand, parents of a certain era could rattle off conversations, helping to maintain a united front against the young and obstreperous. For example:

“Ettybay usway eanmay (o)otay erhay istersay. Iyay oundedgray erhay.”

Recognize that? It translates as:

“Betty was mean to her sister. I grounded her.”

In early grade school I read everything and stumbled upon Pig Latin. At last, I knew what my parents were up to. It’s dead easy to learn and for me at least, I could speak Pig Latin much faster than I could comprehend it.

And so I waited. (heh heh, maniacal laughter ensued) Next time Mom and Dad spoke Pig Latin at the dinner table, I casually interjected with a comment in Pig Latin. My parents stopped using their secret language. Had I been smarter, I should have pretended I couldn’t understand the conversation.

Igpay AtinLay

Here are Pig Latin rules (although algorithm might be a better word).

1. Detach leading consonants from each word.
2. Append them to the end of the word followed by ‘ay’.
• Thus “perfect children” becomes “erfectpay ildrenchay”.
3. For words with leading vowels, say the word followed by ‘yay’ or ‘way’.
• Thus “I am useful,” becomes “Iyay amway oosefulyay.”
4. Go by sound rather than English spelling, especially in rare instances of writing.
• Thus “To be or not to be,” is written “Ootay eebay orway otnay ootay eebay.”

[Grownups, don’t reveal to Generation Alpha! Eizesay eethay advantageway.]

Final Word

About my outrageous phone. It took a while before I realized it was trying to say, “Low battery. Low battery,” instead of “Lobotomy.”

By the way, the full English version of the above statement, “Betty was mean to her sister,” would more likely be spoken with asperity as, “Your daughter Betty was mean to her sister,” thereby disavowing parental knowledge of begatting DNA, placing responsibility on the other parent.

Uh-oh. Lobotomy. Lobotomy.

---

But Dad, It's Smokey

If you've had a few laps around the sun, maybe gone to your share of go-gos, you know the commercial. It's the 1970s one where a voice-of-god announcer stops people on the street to ask how much they love Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. The capper is a guy mugging for the camera and telling how his father would shout to turn down the radio. "But Dad," the guy says through a cheese-drenched grin, "It's Smokey!"

By luck or fate, my boyhood coincided with the golden age of the compilation record commercial. The K-Tel Era, those 90-second spots with the signature scroll of whatever songs were stitched together for moving product fast. The Smokey commercial was from Imperial House Records, that serial flogger of the "as seen on TV" reissue album. And I'll be honest: "But Dad" was surely how Young Me first heard of Smokey Robinson. 

With age and means of payment I came around to Smokey and the Motown Sound, that feel-good rhythm, those fun horns and catchy packaging. When Smokey came to town this summer, I had the ticket money. Neither of us are getting any younger. 

Smokey was performing in the Nashville Symphony Pops Series, and the billing listed a la Imperial House the hits he was to sing. And he sang 'em: "More Love," "I Second That Emotion," "Being With You," "Just to See Her." But how he sang 'em, though. The stories he wrapped around 'em. I was listening to a writer's writer.

Which, of course, Smokey is. One of the Twentieth Century's greats of pop R&B, recipient of the Johnny Mercer Award and a founding cornerstone for Motown's hit engine. His hits for other Motown artists include:

• "Ain't That Peculiar," Marvin Gaye
• "Don't Mess With Bill," The Marvelettes
• "Get Ready," The Temptations
• "My Guy," Mary Wells
• "The Way You Do the Things You Do," The Temptations

And the pan-generational "My Girl," written especially for David Ruffin. Smokey's music has been covered by the Beatles ("You Really Got a Hold on Me"), the Rolling Stones ("Going to a Go-Go"), The Jackson Five ("Who's Loving You"), Elvis Costello ("From Head to Toe"), and many others. "Tracks of My Tears" was a hit for Smokey, Johnny Rivers, Aretha Franklin, and Linda Ronstadt. 

A lot more has changed since the K-Tel Era besides my age. My thoughtfulness, for one. My own attempts at writing, for another. I started thinking about William Robinson the writer and what his style teaches about storytelling. 

A Smokey Robinson song feels so simple and immediate. He throws in some wordplay now and then--I try to keep my sadness hid, just like Pagliacci did--a bit like Mercer or Cole Porter set to soul, but mostly his music sticks to basics. His rhymes tend to be quiet, relying on the performer to sell the meaning. It's no accident. In interviews, Smokey talks about writing for timelessness, music that could be played years from now. You don't see a Smokey name-check or here's-a-new-dance song. He makes no period references and takes up no fad causes. 

Smokey is right, and his channel-hosting deal with SirusXM is proof. Years from now people will hear his music, just as artists are still recording Mercer's and Porter's music. Because Smokey writes about the theme that has driven popular music forever: Love. Finding love, holding love, losing love, chasing love. Add in that groove, and it's a memorable formula. In fiction terms, we'd say he'd honed his voice and knew his broad readership. 

Simple.

Simple ain't easy. Even Smokey didn't get the formula at first. Barry Gordy had to hit him with critique, saying Smokey's songs were disconnected verses. The words needed to tell stories. Smokey took heed and honed his storytelling chops. In interviews now, Smokey talks about getting the words right, tinkering until the lyrics read like a standalone tale. He even jokes about the writer's eternal struggle. "Cruisin'" is a dead simple song about two lovebirds on a car ride, with clear overtones of sex and a running metaphor about relationships as a journey. "Cruisin'" took him five years to write. 

His simplicity extends to his lyrical vocabulary. Every word in a Smokey song is as clear as blue sky. It's the same reason we fiction writers should pitch the thesaurus. Plain words speak louder, hit harder. We're in the emotions business, the words with meaning business. We're definitely not in the fancypants business. 

Motown's goal was to write songs for everyone. Whenever I do a workshop on story writing, I hit on the critical difference between writing for yourself versus writing for an audience. Writing for ourselves is a release. We can write whatever the hell we want, however the hell we want it. Readers shouldn't have to endure that. 

Writing for publication means writing to be understood, which means dropping any conceit that the work is about us. It's from our experience, but in the end, it's about the reader and giving them that emotional connection. You know, like Smokey singing love stuff right for you. About you. 

So when, in the 70s, Imperial House stopped people on the street to rave about a compilation record, they hammed it up for the camera. To get on TV, sure. But also because it was for Smokey. 

BONUS READING:

• https://americansongwriter.com/smokey-robinson-still-churning-out-hits/
• https://www.aarp.org/entertainment/music/info-2021/smokey-robinson-wrote-that.html
• https://www.vulture.com/article/smokey-robinson-interview-life-legacy.html

 

The Perils of Pauline

Nickolodeon

A while back, I was casting about for story ideas. One of them was that old trope of the woman tied to a railroad track by a dastardly villain. (Dressed in greatcoat and top hat, twirling his mustache as required by the Congress of Vienna in 1848.) A passenger train is bearing down on her. Our hero, who sounds suspiciously like Dudley Do-Right (even in silent film) swoops in to save her at the last minute. Our damsel in distress clutches her hands to her chest, bats her eyelashes, and coos, "My hero!"

The last woman I saw do that was Arlene Sorkin, trading voices with Dave Coulier on America's Funniest People, or some knock-off thereof. For reference, Sorkin is not only the original voice of Batman villainess Harley Quinn, the 1990s writers of Batman based Harley on her. So... Parody?

But I thought about this. I've seen cartoons as a kid referencing this trope and the odd silent movie. But with independent stations airing westerns ad nauseum, I never actually saw a movie where the dastardly villain tied anyone to the railroad track. According to Atlas Obscura, there aren't any real-life cases.

What if there was? Thus came an as-yet untitled short story set in the Celloverse, my name for the fictitious setting for the Holland Bay novels. A train-obsessed suburban cop catches a break on his Saturday night (really, Sunday morning) shift and parks next to the tracks near the town square. He wants to watch the Lakeshore Limited blow by on its way from Cleveland to Chicago. As he settles in with a cup of cheap gas station coffee, he sees something on the tracks. We've all seen that. Limbs blown down by high winds. A dead animal, with deer a real derailment hazard. Trains do not stop suddenly. Even the really short ones way thousands of tons and have too much momentum. I've witnessed one panicked stop where the wheels on every car locked up and the train skidded to a stop. The train still moved several hundred yards, and it's a wonder it didn't derail.

But our intrepid hero, being an on-duty officer of the law and self-confessed train nerd, jumps out of his car, jogs around the fence, and goes to move what he thinks is a dead deer. It's a woman, zip-tied to the track. The explanation involves roofies and a man who can't take no for an answer.

That's a plausible scenario, but where did it actually come from?

Despite what our Saturday morning cartoons suggested, the woman tied to a railroad track did not appear all that often in silent films. In reality, the person who ended up on the tracks was almost always the dashing male hero. In comedies, the damsel in distress might end up tied to the tracks, but this was parody. The hero, a detective or a cowboy, would often be knocked out, landing on the tracks, only to be rescued by...

The heroine. So that's not a Marvel or scifi trope. That's an available character rescuing our disabled hero. It's not surprising the hero falling onto the tracks occurred so often to amp up tension. Trains during the silent and early talkie era were not just the primary means of public transportation, but cars were still not that common until the Depression. And planes? Why that sounds dangerous. Or did until World War II, when Clipper planes and huge bombers became commonplace. Helicopters did not even become common until 1945.

And the dastardly, mustache-twirling villain? The earliest example I saw came from a couple of episodes of The Little Rascals, where the gang put on a show with one of them (usually Spanky) playing the top-hatted villain. And that was a play-within-a-play, deliberately cheesy. 

So where did the trope come from? The earliest example came from an 1876 play called Under the Gaslight. In it, our hero is actually tied to the railroad tracks and saved by the heroine.

Credit for the modern woman-on-the-tracks trope stems from the serial The Perils of Pauline, wherein Pauline would get herself into all sorts of over-the-top peril (Hence the title. Clever!) with weekly precursors to the stock Bond villain. It should be noted none of these wannabe Blofelds ever tied Pauline to the tracks. However, comedies poking fun at poor Pauline, did put the woman on the tracks at the hands of a mustachioed, top-hatted villain cackling like Palpatine 50 years later in the Star Wars movies.

And since the 1970s, the trope hasn't played well outside of cartoons. And even then, it died off in Disney and Warner Brothers shorts by the 90s. Ellen Ripley, she of the Alien franchise, found herself not tied to a railroad track but stuck in a lifepod with the most frightening alien monster ever created. (Sorry, Galactus.) But instead of waiting for Tom Skerritt to save her (and anyway, the xenomorph already ate him), she grabs her cat, a pressure suit, and a proceeds to fight the monster in her underwear. As I teen, I naturally found this titillating. As a middle-aged man, I completely identify with this as if you wake me up in my boxers while doing mischief in my house at 3 AM, you will become very familiar with my Lousville Slugger. (Ripley weaponized the airlock, but there ain't a lot of baseball bats in space. Rifles, maybe, but not baseball bats.)

So I had fun writing this story and making it believable. It's still in revision, but it's coming along.

Besides, I'm a train nerd, among other things. I mean, how many more jazz buffs will crimefic readers tolerate?

Write What You (Don't) Know (Yet)

Write what you know.

Sam Clemens, busy NOT being a French peasant girl.

                                    – Mark Twain

Famous advice from one of the most talented and accomplished writers in American history. And if I'm being honest, it's bunk.

I say this as a big, big fan of Mark Twain's (real name Samuel Clemens) work, especially stuff like Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and of course, Huckleberry Finn. And oddly enough, I'm not sure how seriously Twain took his own advice. After all, his favorite, among all of his works, was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte. And need I point out that Twain, while clearly a citizen of the world and a man of some extensive life experience, was not a medieval French peasant girl, never claimed to have a single religious vision or hear a single disembodied voice, never successfully (or unsuccessfully, for that matter) led French knights in battle, and didn't know what it was like to be burned at the stake.

No matter who you are, no matter what you write, you're going to eventually find yourself in a situation where you run out of experience/knowledge. And then what? Research?

Research can help, but again, it's likely to take you only so far. What then?

Well, you can always try to extrapolate. Case in point:

I was walking in from the parking lot to the building at my day gig the other day with a co-worker I know slightly. Great guy, and he's at least 6'10" tall.

And it occurred to me: I don't know how it felt to be 5'4" as an adult (because I haven't been 5'4" since 6th grade, and that was a looooooong time ago), but as I was walking in to my building with my co-worker, it occurred to me that our height differential was something I definitely noticed. And that's not something I usually take note of: people are as tall as they are or as short as they are. I rarely notice, mostly because other people's height usually has no impact either positive or negative, on my daily life.

Who among us hasn't felt like Kevin Hart standing next to Dwayne Johnson at one time or another?

And again, my co-worker is great. He's not a threatening guy. At all. But with height he can't help but be....well....imposing, I guess would be the word.

And that was my in.

From there it was simple (notice that I said, "simple," and not "easy") to get into the head of a 5'4" character dealing with someone much taller than him. It really helped to shift my perspective and allow me to inhabit a character whose stature (literally) is far different from my own.

And that's just one example. 

Another quick one, and then I'd love for those of you taking the time and trouble to read our little blog to share some of yours?

Another scene in my current work-in-progress is from the perspective of an accountant who has uncovered what he thinks is embezzlement by one of his clients. This client's fees are literally putting the accountant's kid through college. So what does he do?

Now, I'm not an accountant, and I've never been on the horns of a dilemma where my client has placed me as a result of my uncovering their bad actions. And said situation has never had the potential to ruin my life.

But everyone has had that sinking feeling when faced with personal or professional disappointment. And everyone on the planet has gotten that nauseating feeling in the pit of their stomach as a result of shocking news. So....... extrapolate!

How about you? Have any sure fire ways to  help you lend authenticity to writing a situation with which you have no personal experience? If so, please share in the comments!

See you in two weeks!

A Man on Fire

I’m reading David Milch’s memoir, Life’s Work.  If the only thing we remember him for is Deadwood, I’d be okay with that, on my resume.  But he wrote 81 scripts for Hill Street Blues (there were a total of 144 episodes, over the run of the series); he wrote and exec produced, with Steven Bochco, NYPD Blue – which it’s fair to say changed the nature of broadcast television in the 90’s; and he was the eminence grise behind John from Cincinnati, a brilliant misfire that sank beneath the waves after airing ten episodes on HBO.  He was responsible for Beverly Hills Buntz, Brooklyn South, and Luck, as well, but I doubt if they’ll prove to have the shelf life on streaming media the other shows do.

He was Yale, summa, master’s from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and mentored by Robert Penn Warren.  He’s been diagnosed as bipolar, he was a heroin addict, and he’s got a gambling Jones.  Milch is up front about all this, the good and the bad, but the gambling - and in particular the mystique of the track – has a very specific hold on him.  He walks it back to his relationship with his dad, which is unresolved.  The senior Milch was, ah, difficult. 

It’s interesting how Milch engages with this.  Art, he seems to feel, is in part a negotiation with the past.  He believes you can transform your personal history, through writing, but not transcend.  I happen to agree.  You can incorporate stuff (how do you not?), but you can’t shed your own skin, that’s soap opera psychology: confront your demons, and defeat them.  No.  What you can do is repurpose memory, and perhaps undo its darker energies.

Now, for instance, it probably comes as surprise to learn that the impelling inspiration for Deadwood is the story of St. Paul, struck blind on the road to Damascus.  Not me, either, but that’s what Milch says.  He actually pitched it to HBO.  They said, Naah, we’ve already greenlighted a series in ancient Rome, and he shifted gears.  He realized that the guiding principle was a myth, agreed-upon; if it wasn’t to be the dominant symbol of the emerging Christian gospel, there are other compelling mass delusions.  He settles on, wait for it, gold.  Gold is a lie agreed upon.  Which is how he winds up taking us out into the Black Hills of South Dakota.  A transliteration, he suggests. 

There’s a lot more in the book about Deadwood, the writing, the casting, the design, the zeitgeist, and I admit that’s mostly what I was reading it for.  War stories about Ian McShane, and Robin Weigert, and Timothy Olyphant, and how certain choices were made, about characters, and storyline.  You won’t be disappointed.

But here’s the thing.  Spoiler alert.  Milch’s brain is crowding up with deposits of amyloid plaque.  He’s got Alzheimer’s.  The past couple of years, he’s been in an Assisted Living/Memory Care facility.  He describes it as a growing solitude, coming unmoored.

In that sense, Life’s Work is enormously brave.  How much will he get to tell?  “Nothing comes easily,” he says, “in terms of being loyal both to the past and the present,” but he believes that’s the proper place of storytelling.  I’m both deeply impressed and terribly saddened, but I don’t think Milch is looking to curry favor, or find redemption, he’s simply setting the record straight.  We all want to enter our house justified, naturally enough, and Milch gets to tell the story his way.  I wish there were more of it. 

Bouchercon Briefing

Last week I returned home from Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, having walked a million miles while there—not hyperbole, I assure you. That hotel was designed for long-distance athletes. Anyway, I attended a bunch of panels—that involved sitting, after all—and while I didn't take a lot of notes, I did write some things down. Usually it was something I knew but the author or editor had made their point in an interesting way. At other times, it was information I didn't know (Kathleen Donnelly, this means you). Here are those notes. Everything that follows is a paraphrase. Any mistakes are my own.

Mysti Berry - A short story is about a character with a problem and the consequences of the choices made to solve that problem.

It's a Mystery! (Oops, I failed to note who said this) - Cozy mysteries are books with hope, community, and trust--things that make readers feel good.

Clair Lamb - For books or stories with texting, an older character is more likely to use full sentences and punctuation. A younger character is more likely to use abbreviations and emojis. In regard to abbreviations and emojis, the author should try to ensure the reader can at least mostly follow the conversation. If there are small non-vital bits of a text conversation that a reader might not understand but could quickly move past, having gotten the basic gist of the text, that is okay.

Kathleen Donnelly - Dogs can retain scent memories for years. (She writes mysteries involving a K-9 tracker.)

Otto Penzler - To make characters sound different, vary their cadence and word choice.  

I am sure I must have said brilliant things on my panel, but it was at 8 a.m., so my memory of that hour is a bit foggy. If you were at that panel and I said anything useful, please share it in the comments. Or if you heard words of wisdom at any of the other panels, I would love to hear them. After all, you might have attended a great panel I missed. At conventions, hard choices often must be made.There were times when I would have liked to attend two panels at the same time, but I haven't perfected that skill...yet.

Before I go, I want to give my thanks once again to the Short Mystery Fiction Society, which honored me at the convention with this year's Edward D. Hoch Memorial Golden Derringer Award, which is the society's lifetime achievement award. SMFS President and fellow SleuthSayer Joe Walker said really nice things about me as I walked onto the stage, but for the life of me, I can't remember what they were. Sigh. If only, like in the panels, I had been taking notes.

Next year in New Orleans!