YOU CAN'T GO HOME - Why I Write

If you ever listen to radio, I'm sure you've heard at least one song called "You Can't Go Home Again" from performers like Lari White, The Judds, Bon Jovi, Sugarland, The Statler Brothers, Miranda Lambert, and many others.

Chuck Cannon

One of those songs was written by Chuck Cannon, performer and writer with hits recorded by many of my country favorites including Toby Keith, Willie Nelson, and Ricky Van Shelton.  To me personally, Chuck bears the distinction of being the person who made me aware that I'm short. 

Let me explain that I come from a family in which the women tend to be 4'11", so when I grew up to be 5'3", I looked tall when with my female family members.  I felt tall. 

At a songwriters' meeting where Chuck Cannon was the featured speaker, he performed his original "You Can't Go Home Again."  The host wanted a picture of the guests and said, "Taller people in the back."

I stepped to the back row beside Chuck.  He gently took my shoulders and moved me to the front row, saying, "You belong up here."  Sure enough, when I received a copy of the photo, not only was the front row the place for me, I was the SHORTEST person there!

Bet you're wondering, "Now where is she going with this?  It should be related to writing and/or mystery, but then, perhaps that's the mystery...what's she writing about today?"

Could it be about short people, even short writers?  William Faulkner was only five feet, five inches tall--taller than I am, but not especially tall for a man. 

Could it be about Chuck Cannon?  He wrote many of my favorite songs, including "How Do You Like Me Now?"

Could it be about literary techniques?  We've recently had blogs about constrained writing and frame stories.  (Actually the stream of consciousness technique is related to the writer today's blog is about.  He's classified as writing his Bildungsroman novels in stream of consciousness technique.)

"Dixieland"

None of those are right.  Some of you liked reading about my awesome moments in music.  Today I'm writing about an awesome moment in my teenaged years involving the person who made me want to be a writer.

The photo to the right shows one of American literature's most famous landmarks.  In an epic, autobiographical novel, this rambling Victorian building was called "Dixieland," but in reality the author grew up there when it was called "Old Kentucky Home."  I read the book when I was about thirteen.  When I got a car and license at sixteen, I took myself to Asheville, North Carolina, to see the house. 

There was a small card on one of the bedroom door frames.  On it was printed, "This is the room where Ben died."  Now, I was a pretty flip teenager, and Ben was a character in the book, but standing at that door brought tears to my eyes.  I thought, "If just the memory of a fiction scene can make me cry, then words are powerful stuff!  I want to do that."

While in Asheville that trip and many times since then, I visited the graves of O. Henry and, within walking distance, the writer who impressed me so --- Thomas Wolfe.

Cover of the first
edition, published
in 1929

I'm not talking about Tom Wolfe, who wrote Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and feuded with John Updike, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal.  I'm speaking of North Carolina's Thomas Wolfe who wrote Look Homeward Angel, which has not been out of print since it was first published in 1929.

Classified as possibly the most autobiographical Bildungsroman (a specific type of coming of age novel) by an American novelist, Look Homeward Angel follows the life of protagonist Eugene Gant from birth to age nineteen.  While I loved visiting the Asheville places Wolfe had used and renamed in the book, the people of Asheville weren't happy with his frank and realistic reminiscences. In fact,  Look Homeward Angel was banned from Asheville's public libraries for seven years. Today, Wolfe has become one of Asheville's most famous citizens, and his boyhood home is a National Historic Landmark museum in his honor.

Thomas Wolfe, 1930-1938

As an early teenager, I simply assumed that the title Look Homeward Angel referred to a stone statue of an angel that both Eugene and Wolfe's fathers used as porch advertisements at family graveyard monument shops each owned. (I saw the angel in a cemetery in Hendersonville, NC.) Wolfe's first title was The Building of a Wall, which he changed to O Lost before renaming it Look Homeward Angel: A Story of a Buried Life.  The title comes from the John Milton poem Lycidas. 

"Look homeward angel now, and melt with ruth; 
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."
                                                            ---   John Milton


Asheville's reaction to Look Homeward Angel played a large part in Wolfe's next book--You Can't Go Home Again, that line so frequently used by songwriters.  (Chuck Cannon also has a song entitled "Look Homeward, Angel.")  I don't believe the inspiration for songs and other prose using Wolfe's titles came directly from Milton. Their influence is Thomas Wolfe.  Wouldn't each of us be filled with pride to have one or more of the titles of our writings inspire the work of so many other writers?

When young Thomas Wolfe gave his manuscript to Scribner's Maxwell Perkins, the editor insisted it be condensed to a more manageable publication size.  They cut sixty thousand words from Wolfe's manuscript before it was published at five hundred, forty-four pages. 

Why do I want to praise Thomas Wolfe to mystery writers?  In addition to being the writer who convinced me I wanted to write, I  believe good writing shares common features, whether literary or specific genre.  My words don't have the power of those of Thomas Wolfe, but I always aim to do for my readers what he did for me.  I want them to react with some kind of emotion.  I want to make them happy or sad or scared, but I always want to create feelings for Callie's fans.  (I cleaned up that last line.  At book-talks, I've been known to say I want my readers to laugh, cry, or wet their undies, but, as I've told you before, I'm trying to become more lady-like in my old age.)

The other reason is to give me the chance to share with you a quote from Thomas Wolfe in the event you have an editor who wants to cut some little darlings from your work:

U S Postage Thomas Wolfe
Memorial Stamp

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn , was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one wishes to publish."

                                                        --- Thomas Wolfe
                                                                                                     
How about you?  Is there a particular author, book, or event that made you want to be a writer?

Until we meet again... take care of you!

Old Dogs and New Tricks

As usual, I've been reading almost as much as I've been writing, lately.  What's unusual is that in a few of the crime novels I've read, there are some new techniques--or at least seldom-used techniques--that caught my attention.

A reborn identity

The first "different" approach I'll mention was used by the late Salvatore Lombino--much better known by the pen names Evan Hunter and Ed McBain--in his novel Candyland.  Those who have read him know that the Evan Hunter name appears on his "literary" novels while Ed McBain writes police procedurals, notably those set in the fictional 87th Precinct of the fictional city of Isola.  In fact Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter many years ago, although I would imagine the pseudonym Ed McBain is more familiar to the reading public.  (Genre writers are almost always better known than literary writers.)

Anyhow, the reason Candyland is unusual is that it's two different books in one.  Billed as a collaboration between the two authors, the first half is written by the more sophisticated Hunter and the second half is written by the crime writer McBain.  (It's as if there really were two different authors rather than the same person; both names are even listed on the book cover.)  Also interesting is that the situation introduced by Hunter is then turned into a tale of murder investigation by McBain.  The viewpoint in the first half is that of the killer, and the viewpoint in the second half is that of one of the homicide detectives.  An intriguing approach, and an entertaining novel.

Don't I know you from someplace?

Another (fairly) rare technique is bringing characters from different series together in the same book.  I know it's been done a number of times, but I've encountered it most recently in two novels by two of my favorite writers.

The Panther, a new book by Nelson DeMille, pairs the characters John Corey and Paul Brenner, both of whom were already known to DeMille fans as protagonists in some of his previous novels.  John Corey was the head fred in DeMille's Plum Island, The Lion's Game, Night Fall, Wild Fire, The Lion, etc., and Paul Brenner was the hero of the novel Up Country.  Corey and his wife Kate Mayfield are the main players in The Panther, but Brenner is onscreen for most of the book as well.  As with all series characters, it was fun to meet them again, and also to see how they (when thrown together in the same cage) reacted to each other.

Robert B. Parker did the same kind of thing, occasionally teaming up folks from his three series starring Spenser, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall.  In the novel Blue Screen, two of the three series protags even become romantically involved (no, it's not Spenser and Stone), and Parker regularly interchanged minor characters like Rita Fiore, Martin Quirk, and Vinnie Morris.  Again, whenever that happens, and readers discover unexpected but familiar faces, it's fun.  It's like running into old friends while on a faraway vacation.

A Grisham switchum

I'd also like to mention a recent novel by John Grisham, an author I would describe as extremely talented but not extremely innovative. Grisham seems to know what works for him and sticks to it. Except for the occasional lighthearted project (Skipping Christmas) or sports theme (Bleachers, Playing for Pizza, Calico Joe), the only time I've seen him stray very far afield was with A Painted House, which is a literary, Southern, coming-of-age novel told from the viewpoint of a seven-year-old boy.

But in his latest, The Racketeer, he does some things I haven't seen him do before, stylewise, like mixing present and past tense, and writing some chapters in first person and others in third person.  He even writes the first-person sections in the POV of an imprisoned African-American lawyer.  I can't say it'll be a great story--I only just started it--but it looks pretty good so far.

Hey, Mom, watch this . . .

The kinds of things I've described above are merely different literary approaches, not so-called experimental writing.  Experimental, to me, means something like stream-of-conscienceness, or putting all dialogue in italics, or using second-person plural POV, or omitting all quotation marks, or writing the whole story or novel without using the letter "n."  That kind of writing I don't usually enjoy; I think that's just being different for the sake of being different.  (On the other hand, Cormac McCarthy has been known to employ some pretty wild techniques, and he's an author I like a lot.)

How do you feel about "pushing the envelope" in terms of writing style or other literary devices? Have you done that, in past novels or stories?  Would you consider it, for future projects?  Do you enjoy reading fiction that uses new and different writing techniques and approaches?

Since I don't consider myself particularly innovative or adventurous, I was surprised to find myself enjoying most of these recently-read books I've mentioned.  Who knows, maybe I've learned from them.  Maybe one day I'll try something different myself.

And maybe not.

---

BREAKING NEWS: The winner of last week's drawing is C.S. Poulsen, who will choose either Death Will Get You Sober (hardcover), the first in Elizabeth Zelvin's mystery series, or her brand new e-novella, Death Will Save Your Life.  Congrats to C.S.!

Smart Writers and Stupid Writers

All Gaul may have been divided into three parts, as any beginning Latin student knows, but as far as I am concerned, all writers are divided into two groups - smart writers and stupid writers. Alas, I am firmly, and I might add unrepentantly, in the latter group at least when writing fiction. Even mystery fiction.

We all know the smart writers. They plan ahead. They have file cards of characters' personality features, elaborate back stories, and flow charts. Although it may be apocryphal, I rather like the story about Agatha Christie lying in her long British bathtub eating apples, until, the top of the tub lined with cores, she had worked out another of her fiendishly complex plots. That's my idea of a smart writer, one who leaves nothing to chance and has a clear map of where the story is going and who's going to do what to whom.

I find this sort of planning impossible, even though I happen to live with a smart writer. My sportswriter husband was capable, in the old days when dictation was necessary, of dictating a sports story, complete with all punctuation, from a few notes in his reporter's book. I found this astonishing, given my own troubles even with pen, paper, and typewriter. His was a hard act to follow, and perhaps you can understand why I didn't start writing until I was in my thirties.

And then, despite his good example, I turned out to be a thoroughly stupid writer. I get an idea, and because at least the beginnings of beginnings are easy, I plunge in. A character whispers in my ear, and I write down what he or she says. They tend to be obsessives with homicide in mind, although I get a few nice folk who are shocked at evil and want to set the world to rights.

The first few pages go swimmingly. There is really nothing better than starting a story (or a novel) with a flourish. How clever one feels, how creative. But then comes a difficulty, The Plot. While a smart writer would have looked into this little detail early on, the stupid writer trusts to the beneficence of the Muse, who, like all divas and goddesses, has her off days. Story comes to a halt. Writer goes for a walk in winter, a swim in summer, a sleep in the evening. And hopes.

But the Providence, as the Scots used to say, that looks after bairns and drunkards, has a soft spot for stupid writers. Gradually the story unfolds. And this is good, this is interesting. Every morning the stupid writer gets up with a little more material and she has to write if she is going to discover how the story comes out.

Forget all the writerly delays, the websites to check out, the email to answer - how modern technology has expanded the pencil sharpening and paper straightening of yesteryear. But if I want the end of the story, I have to get to work.

I find this salutary, though it may not be the case with every stupid writer. But I really aspired to be a reader, not a writer, and I must confess that if I knew the whole plot, the victim, the murderer, the exact placement of the crucial chase, the romantic moment, etc, etc, I would never sit down at the computer.

I find such smart certainty boring in the nth degree, while discovery is interesting and gets the juices going. I like to be surprised by everything from a character's sexual orientation to the identity of the killer, though I must admit that I left the latter very long in The Lost Diaries of Iris Weed. I reached 260 pages and was still dithering between two plausible candidates, but at least my work day wasn't boring.

Of course, there are disadvantages to being a stupid writer. Certain classic forms of the mystery are a closed book as far as I am concerned. Even thinking about a locked room puzzle gives me a headache and anything involving railroad or train schedules or precise timing is out of the question. Who can think that far ahead?

Plots can take a long time to resolve, too. I started a story called The Great Choreographer years ago and it only fell into shape earlier this spring. I have a suitcase full of money (strictly literary, of course) that offers all sorts of possibilities but has not yet found a good home. A story that I just finished considered two different victims and a couple of different murderous operandi before it reached its final form. This is not efficient.

Still, stupid writing has its advantages. Characters that develop as they go along are, I think, less liable to be easy stereotypes, and if plots take a while to develop, they sometimes provide nice surprises along the lines of 'I didn't think he'd ever do that!'

In any case, I suspect one writes as one must. And if one writes to know what one is thinking, then one always has a good strong motive to get back to the writing desk.