Human Ecology and Meaning-Making

Last fall, I visited my granddaughter at Cornell University, where she’s an undergrad in the College of Engineering, currently a junior majoring in something called Operations Research and Information Engineering. It says something about the state of language in the twenty-first century that this writer and old English major tells her friends, "It's really data analysis," hoping this will make it more comprehensible to those of us who remember when language was meant for us to speak clearly to each other.

Numbers shine brightly in my granddaughter's mind. Her numeracy fills me with awe. But she's articulate as well and has many other gifts and skills. She plays guitar, indeed, had asked her dad to bring her guitar with him when we came to see her that weekend. She started doing competitive hiphop at age three and is on a dance team at Cornell. She even choreographed a piece for a dozen dancers last spring. And she thinks. We had wonderful conversations during the visit. I also had time to see how the university—-not only Cornell, because this is a sign of the zeitgeist—-is using language these days.

One sign that made me tear my hair even as I laughed was blazoned on the building that presumably houses what at Harvard is called the Divinity School and at Fordham, the Theology Department. It said OFFICE OF SPIRITUALITY AND MEANING-MAKING. I assume the intention was to label belief in the ineffable and exploration of the unseen, including everything and offending no one. The term spirituality is a fine one. As a crackerjack editor, I say it does the job. I'd delete meaning-making. Were they afraid atheists would picket them? They should have worried more about sticklers for felicitous prose.

My granddaughter has an eclectic group of friends. She'd told me one of her roommates had a double major in pre-med and English, so I led with that when I met her.

"Oh, I'm not majoring in English any more," she said. "Now I'm doing pre-med and fashion."

"I can't fault you for dropping English," I said. "But fashion is a major?"

"It's in the College of Human Ecology," she said.

"What on earth," I said, "is human ecology?"

"Oh, it's where they put everything that doesn't fit anywhere else."

I'd call inventing a term with that definition meaning-unmaking, though I admit human ecology has a fine ring to it, seducing us into believing that it means something. I don't know if academics or marketing professionals wrote the university catalog, but they produced some grand word salad by way of artistic verisimilitude. (I know, I know, human ecology really is a thing. I googled it after I wrote this post. Nonetheless...)

Sez the college website:

High-quality education, research and public engagement are the cornerstones of the College of Human Ecology and its academic departments, which include: Psychology, Nutritional Sciences, and Human Centered Design.

We prioritize innovative collaboration and are fueled by a powerful, interdisciplinary and applied approach to improving lives.

Our undergraduate academic majors are firmly grounded in the social, natural and physical sciences, and design to create dynamic, interdisciplinary fields of study. This allows our students to explore their interests in a broader context and to understand and analyze issues from multiple perspectives. . . there is no prescribed way to prepare for careers in business, health/medicine, or law, or just one way to be creative in the college. . .

Majors include design and environmental analysis, fashion design and management, fiber science, global and public health, human biology, health, and society, human development, and nutritional sciences.

Whatever.

I suspect it's of a piece with the headlong rush toward AI's takeover of language. In the twenty-first century, the idea is not to make meaning, certainly not clearer meaning or new meaning, but to take the meaning language already offers us and complicate, distort, obfuscate, and ultimately lose it.

AI-de-camp

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AI is everywhere, everywhere. Even where it isn’t.

You may remember my friend Thrush. Months ago, he urged me to write a non-fiction book, a layman’s guide to AI, artificial intelligence. I concluded I’d need a lot of research to bring my knowledge up to date for a full-fledged book, but an article might be more achievable at this point.

Thrush himself has a fair amount of experience. He was an engineer and I a consultant who worked for Westinghouse’s robotics division. (W) spun off as Automation Intelligence and a much smaller team led by Richard Fox specialized in neural networks, the foundation for modern artificial intelligence, also called machine intelligence.

To Understand the Future, Look to the Past

In the 1990s, AI approached the intelligence of a catatonic Labradoodle, but contrariwise, low IQ made it valuable for handling backbreaking and mind-deadening tasks.

An anecdote out of Australia told of a small parts inspection that was not only brain-numbingly dull, but subject to errors as workers’ attentions wandered. According to the story, workers trained a goose to detect bad assemblies, and an anserine solution proved somewhat more accurate without grousing. Supposedly the government stepped in and shut down the goose’s career, claiming forced labor was cruel to animals… not humans, but animals. (I would be interested if anyone can verify if this tale is true.)

Meanwhile, Fox and his colleagues, eventually acquired by Gould, had viable contracts, many from the automotive industry. These included banal tasks like Ford counting palleted sheets of window glass for export, GM identifying machine tooling heads too fine for the human eye to see, and determining if a transmission tab had been welded or not.

A particularly mundane task allowed Fox’s team to exercise its neural network: grading lumber. As plywood finishing a final trim and sanding, end-of-line workers noted knots and imperfections and categorized each sheet as Grade A, B, C, etc. This is where AI training kicked in.

For one last time, the grading workers sat with a training dongle, a keypad to rate the plywood. AI peered over their shoulders as workmen clicked through plywood sheets, teaching the neural network that a crack in the wood meant a rejection. Three small knots or one very large knot might drop a score to a grade C. After training with several sample sheets, the program was ready to tirelessly grade lumber all day long. Not brilliant, but it helped reduce industrial drudgery.

Pattern Recognition

Like all development, AI built on the shoulders of people and programs and techniques that came before, especially the Holy Grail of pattern recognition.

Humans can easily recognize faces, voices, songs, the distinctive beat of hawk wings, the scent of a lover’s neck, a fractional glimpse of an artifact our minds instantly extrapolate from a part to the whole in toto. Historically, digital computers have suffered at such simple human tasks. Before our current LLMs (large language models) and picture recognition could become useful, we needed pattern recognition, and pattern recognition required huge amounts of very fast storage and processors. These prerequisites have finally fallen into place and pattern solving has become a reality. Google and Alexa can not merely parse verbal questions, they can identify the voice of their inquisitor. Technology has finally arrived at the doorstep of machine intelligence.

The Stimulation of Simulation

Writers and researchers have speculated for a century about AI, and even as far back as a couple of millennia if one extrapolates early myths. AI was a topic at my university. I found myself assigned to a team working on economic simulations. Other universities pursued weather models, the effects of tides, and even earthquake simulations, so economics seemed relatively manageable. 

In an idle moment, I submitted a paper about simulating human intelligence, arguing that as simulations became more refined, they would eventually become indistinguishable from the real thing. I didn’t immediately realize I was backing into postulates and theorems by well-known theorists in the field, but I visualized simulation as an unexplored path to artificial intelligence.

Eliza

We’ve discussed prerequisites and pattern recognition, but in the mid-1960s, a fun experiment surfaced at MIT. Joseph Weizenbaum created a program, Eliza, that could communicate in a primitive way with humans. Although MIT disclaimed artificial intelligence, it nevertheless contained seeds of AI, the recognition of certain words resulting in a reaction. Beyond its small vocabulary, note the lack of specifics:

ELIZA: How do you do. Please tell me your problem.
Leigh: I'm concerned about the dark side of artificial intelligence.
ELIZA: Please go on.
Leigh: AI may not only be used, but also abused.
ELIZA: That is interesting. Please continue.

An anecdote told of an associate professor outside the computer room who sat down at an untended terminal, not knowing it was connected to Eliza. He attempted in vain to access his apps, and met with an implacable Eliza whispering soft platitudes in this teletype. Eventually the screaming professor drew the attention of staff, who soothed him with hot tea and an explanation.

Eliza lives on. You can try her out for yourself.

It all comes together.

Not long ago, our friend ABA had a government contracted business where she and her staff sorted through historical photographs to identify content, i.e, this is Nelson Mandela visiting Table Mountain on a mid-July afternoon.

AI has made her job obsolete. Computers can now recognize Madiba and distinctive geography with little to no human interaction other than feeding the machine.

Robots

As we speak, commercial robots are mating software with hardware, matching AI with mechanical precision. Applications are numerous. Think of elder care. Instead of slings and motorized hoists, a robot that may or may not look human softly scoops arms under a patient and gently lowers her on a toilet or into a bath, adjusting water temperature as desired. Another robot tenderly feeds a paralyzed patient and reads her an email from home.

I predict– yes, I’m willing to take such risk generally fraught with failure– I predict within a Christmas or two, we will see toys with built-in AI. Children can talk with them, ask questions, tell them their concerns, and let them know when they’re hungry or tired or need soothing. In the middle of the night, a toy might sing a child back to sleep. Advanced toys might resemble futuristic robots, whereas toys for young toddlers could look like Tribbles or teddy bears.

Jesus at the Wheel

We see one robot almost every day, a highly-intelligent ’bot on wheels. I’m referring to an electric vehicle (EV) with full self-driving (FSD)– the Tesla.

The average person may take FSD for granted, but those of us in the computer field are amazed at advances, especially in recent months. It is possible to enter the car, tell it where to go, arrive at its destination, and park itself without a person once turning the wheel or tapping the brake.

My friend Thrush, having traded in his Model 3 for a Model Y, cogently commented he doesn’t so much drive his Tesla, he supervises it. Close your eyes and you’ll never imagine a real person isn’t steering the car or– no disrespect– Jesus, as bumper stickers read.

Thrush no longer feels comfortable driving a traditional car. He has a point. Tesla accidents make the news simply because they are rare. Their accident and fatality rate is considerably lower than human-driven vehicles.

The console screen in a Tesla identifies traffic lights, stop signs, trucks, cars, and bicycles. It used to show traffic cones, but they’re no longer displayed. If a child darts into traffic, the car will brake and swerve to avoid him.

I’ll dare make another prediction, that the day will soon come when self-driving vehicles talk to one another. What? Why? Say you’re following a truck. An EV cannot see through a semi tractor-trailer any better than a person. But a smart vehicle in front of the semi sees a pending traffic accident and shouts out an alert to like-minded vehicles, giving them a chance to react without seeing what they’re reacting to. In a step beyond, intelligent vehicles could deliberately coordinate with one another to mitigate collisions.

The Dark Side

Those of us in the industry are well aware of abuses of computer intrusions and malware. At least one downtown bank here in Orlando won’t let you enter if you wear dark glasses or a hat. They want their cameras to pick you up and soon enough, identify you with AI.

London is one of the most monitored cities in the world. With AI, their computers could scan sidewalks and plazas snapping photos. Cameras sweep Trafalgar Square, its AI circuits identifying each person, innocent or not. AI can analyze faces at political rallies and protests, the wetdream of a police state. That is one creepy intrusion.

AI is already used to identify target marketing weaknesses and desires. In fact, AI was forced to cut back because it was targeting pregnant women before husbands and the women themselves were aware of their condition.

Finally, among other joys, AI can be used for warfare, electronic and traditional.

A Starting Point

We need AI legislation not only to protect us from corporations, but protect us from government. Decades ago, Isaac Asimov proposed three Laws of Robotics, later refined with an overriding fourth law. I can think of little better to form a foundation (there’s a joke here) for statutes to protect us against government and corporate excesses.

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Superseding other laws, a robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

What now?

Experiment with ChatGPT and other AIs. You’ll encounter flaws, many, many flaws, but what they get right can be impressive. But I suggest three works of fiction from the past to give an idea of the future, what’s possible and what terrifies. They are novels after all, not inevitable.

The Shockwave Rider (1975)

John Brunner may have been the greatest Sci-Fi writer of the latter 20^th century. He didn’t depend upon evil aliens or hungry monsters (except for an embarrassing awful early novel). Each of his books deals with a topic of concern such as pollution and over-population. His novels read like tomorrow’s newspaper and he had an astonishing prescient record of predicting the future. In Shockwave Rider, he foresaw computer viruses and hackers. Like Stand on Zanzibar, the story is an entertaining peek into the future– now our present.

The Adolescence of P-1 (1977)

Thomas Ryan also foresaw hackers and viruses and he provided the most realistic descriptions of computers and data centers in fiction, eschewing goofy tropes often seen on television and in bad movies. In its day, P-1 was little known, even in the computer community, but was adapted into a 1984 Canadian TV movie titled Hide and Seek. Like The Shockwave Rider, it ultimately foresees a promising, positive future.

Colossus: The Forbin Project (1966)

D.F. Jones turned this into a trilogy. It’s the best known of the novels here and was made into a 1970 film, The Forbin Project. A powerful supercomputer is turned over to the military, despite warnings to the contrary. Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, a similar computer goes on-line. They meet. Warning: Unlike other stories here, this is one depressing novel. I mean unrelentingly depressing. It makes Dr Strangelove read like Pollyanna. The only good note is it serves as a warning of what could happen.

Wanted: Data Entry Clerks with No Knowledge of English

Colossus is so damn depressing, I couldn’t end with it. In early days, data storage was expensive and computer memory even more so. Scanners were huge, slow, and inaccurate, so how might large bodies of information such as law library Lexus/Nexus be imported into computers?

They were typed in. Twice. At least.

Building a digital, searchable law library was the goal of one enterprise. Despite being surrounded by emerging automation, the group depended upon manual data entry. They hired pairs of keypunchers to retype law books in tandem. In other words, two women would be assigned the same text in a section, each duplicating the work of the other. A pair of women would attack another section, and two more yet another. The result was two streams of text hypothetically identical.

At the end of a daily run, each pair’s output was compared. Differences indicated a problem and a third person would locate the error and correct it. A lack of knowledge of English was a key requirement on the theory their output wouldn’t be influenced by their language.

Verily, let us cautiously give thanks for artificial intelligence.

Submission Accomplished

  

About two weeks ago, a good friend who's also an editor contacted me and said he needed a story for a crime anthology he was editing and needed it really fast, because one of the contributors had backed out of the lineup and he had to send everything to the publisher in just a few days. (Red alert red alert!) The theme of the anthology was specific but interesting, and after some arm-twisting I agreed to come up with a story. I did it in my usual way, beginning with a plot (a crime) and then putting in the characters and settings that were necessary to tell the tale, and--bottom line--I finished the story, sent it to him, and got a thumbs-up, so all is well in the world.

But that's not why I'm posting this column. I'm posting it because it occurred to me, as I sat down to begin typing that new story, that every single story I've written in the past several years has started by my doing the same thing. I pull up a previous story manuscript, change the title, delete everything below my byline, and start typing the new manuscript--which is then "saved as" a new file bearing the title of the new story. What I'm saying here is that all my stories use the same template.

What does that template look like? It's almost identical to the example shown at the Shunn's Modern Manuscript Format site. I said "almost the same" because there are a few things I choose to do differently. 

In case you're interested (and if you're an established writer I'm sure you already have your own version of all this), here are some observations about the way I format a short-stort manuscript for submission:

- I like Shunn's advice on placing the name/address/contact information at the top left of the first page and and the approximate word count, rounded off to the nearest hundred, at the top right. I don't usually include my membership in professional writing organizations in all this, as he suggests, but you can do that if you want.

- I type my story title and byline in proper case between a third of the way and halfway down the page. I sometimes change this after I finish the story, depending on where my story ends on the final page. (More about that later.)

- I always indent the first line of the story and the first line of every new scene, just as I indent the first lines of all the other paragraphs, as Shunn suggests. Some authors don't indent those first lines of scenes in order to make it look more like a printed version, but I do.

- I double-space everything in the text of the story with nothing extra between paragraphs. When I taught writing classes, some students turned in their stories with a slightly bigger vertical space between paragraphs. Editors I've talked with don't like that, and neither would I.

- I center a pound-sign (#) between scenes. Some writers and editors prefer using other separators (three asterisks, etc.) and some prefer to use nothing except one extra vertical space to separate scenes. I do whatever the guidelines tell me to, but I like putting at least something there, because when I used only spacing between scenes, I once had an editor butt two scenes together in the printed version of one of my stories. Scene breaks are there for a reason, and inserting a separator of some kind lessens the possibility of that happening. 

- I make sure Widow/Orphan Suppression is turned OFF before starting. In other words, widows and orphans are fine with me (even in real life) and if you suppress them, it can cause way too much open space left at the bottom of some pages. If all this sounds ridiculous to you, Google widow/orphan control.

- I also make sure Grammar Check is turned off. That program is maddening to me. When writing fiction, I happily splice commas, split infinitives, fragment sentences, etc., when needed, and I don't want the computer telling me I can't. (This is one of those times when it's good to be da king.)

- I use the Tab key to indent the first lines of all paragraphs unless the submission guidelines tell me to do otherwise. I know some editors prefer an automatic half-inch setting, etc., to indent paragraphs.

- I space only once after a period. I'm old and it was hard to make myself change, on this, but I did. It's my theory that the two-spaces-after-a-period rule was there to go along with the each-letter-takes-up-the-same-amount-of-space Courier font. The two spaces made everything look better, back then.

- I italicize. I don't underline. Underlining to emphasize text goes back to the days of typewriters, when italics weren't a possibility. I have, however, submitted stories to publications whose guidelines said to underline and not italicize, and I followed their rules. Just saying.

- I center the word END three double-spaces (sometimes two) below the final line of my story. Shunn prefers THE END, and that's fine too. I think it's good to put something there, because if my text happens to go all the way to the bottom of the final page, I don't want an editor to wonder if another page should be coming. Maybe, as with scene separators, that's just me and my paranoia.

- I don't use anything except black TNR 12-point format throughout. No colors, no boldface type. If I need to include something like a newspaper article excerpt, etc., I sometimes indent the whole thing to set it off from the rest of the text but I leave the font size the same.

When I'm done typing the story, I go back and check several things:

- I make sure all curly apostrophes and quotation marks are "aimed" the right way. Example: to properly type 'em (instead of them), I type a character just before em, hit the apostrophe key after that character, and delete the character I inserted. I realize that's a bassackwards way of getting there, but it works. I do the same kind of thing with single quotation marks in funny places. There are of course other ways to do this, but I like that one.

- I do a spell-check of the whole finished manuscript to catch misspellings, duplicated words, etc. It also flags certain odd words that I want to leave as is. (I like made-up words, and my characters sometimes THUNK their heads on the sidewalk or WHACK their palms on desktops, so when those get flagged I just override the program and allow them.

- I check to make sure my headers look right. Since I use previous stories as templates, it's all too easy to accidentally leave the title to the previous story in my header.

- If my story ends too close to the bottom of the page for me to write END two or three double-spaces after the final line, I don't want to put END by itself at the top of the next page. Instead, I go back to the first page and adjust that one-third-to-halfway-down title and byline such that END can now fit at the bottom of the last page or such that I can put the final couple of lines of text at the top of the next page and type END below that. This adjustment isn't usually required, but it sometimes is.

NOTE: Some editors prefer different fonts, different separators between scenes, and other unusual things. Whatever they want, I do it. (One editor, I recall, wanted everything to be in Verdana font.) If I don't like it, I do it anyway, and then change it back later, when I submit the story someplace else as a reprint. 

Again, these are just things I do in preparing my own stories. I'm NOT saying you should do it that way. I would like to hear, though, about your preferences on this submission/style/formatting issue. Are you a Shunn follower or a Shunn shunner? What's the strangest requirement that you've seen in submission guidelines? Do you have some formatting tips that I or others might consider, to make manuscripts look or read better? In my view, all of us are still learning, on this and on everything.

Meanwhile, I wish you joy in your writing and luck with your submissions!

Back in two weeks.

Mr. Grisham Has Thoughts About Your "Book"

One of the classic tenets of the screenwriting trade is that writers make poor film protagonists. Yes, the writer character has been done well in movies such as Barton Fink, The Ghost Writer, Adaptation, and Stranger Than Fiction. But in general, it’s painful to watch a scene in a movie of someone writing a book. This applies as well to reading a novel in which a character is struggling to write…anything. This too has been done—The Shining, Wonder Boys—but it’s probably not the best premise for anyone contemplating their next book. I mean, where’s the action?

But what about a real-life story about a neophyte author who dreams of writing a thriller? The man in question is a former ad exec named Tony Vanderwarker. When we first meet him in his nonfiction memoir, he’s written a slew of unpublished books, mostly comic novels. His latest has recently landed with a splat on the desks of agents and editors in the Big Apple.

He longs to try yet again. Maybe a thriller, thinks he. His got an idea about a missing nuke he’s been itching to try. One night over dinner, he shares his pain with a fellow scribe. Mr. Vanderwarker tells us that while he himself grew up in an affluent Connecticut suburb, his friend is a son of a Mississippi cotton farmer. As the meal wraps, his buddy makes him an offer. What if I coach you through the novel-writing process? You do all the work, of course. It’s your book. But I’ll be on the sidelines, reading your outlines and manuscripts, giving you notes and pep talks along the way. What do you say?

It’s an offer Mr. Vanderwarker simply cannot refuse. The two men are dining in the tony historic city of Charlottesville, Virginia. And his neighbor and friend is none other than John Freaking Grisham.

And so the scene is set for a hilarious, rollicking Bildungsroman as these two nutty guys crisscross the nation in a nifty convertible in search—

Uh, no. Actually, it’s exactly what I told you it would be: a book called about a guy trying to write a book. It’s called Writing With the Master (Skyhorse, 2014).

Speaking as a writer who struggles to juggle my own writing with the demands of ghostwriting clients, admin tasks, my wife’s work, the house and garden, and all the other things life throws one’s way, including friends who want advice on their writing, I was frankly astonished that someone of Grisham’s caliber would surrender so much of his time to help a friend. In promo interviews, Mr. Vanderwarker said Grisham was inspired by his recent reading of an account of Chef Daniel Boulud’s mentoring of a younger chef.

In the course of 196 pages, the two writers embark on a process that is both fascinating and brutal to watch. Fascinating because it’s probably the best look anyone is ever going to get of Grisham’s creative process. (That’s the reason I bought the book. Grisham granted permission to excerpt his critiques.) Brutal because, let’s face it, unless you are a very special individual, the first few books you write will be unpublishable. They’re critical to your development, but they are usually not something you can sell. And thrillers are among the toughest genres to nail.

Mr. Vanderwarker can write. He proves it page after page, with a breezy, conversational, self-deprecating description of their process that will leave writers nodding, “Yep—been there, done that.” I must have found the book suspenseful as well, because I kept reading to find out what happens.

At that first dinner, Grisham tells Mr. V the plain truth: beginnings and endings are easy. It’s the middle that kills you. Grisham’s mantra is SIMPLICITY. The premise has to grab readers fast, hook them, and keep them reading for 360 pages without losing their attention to extraneous subplots. He instructs his pupil to first write a three-sentence synopsis, then a three-act outline.

Personally, I hate creating outlines for books. Never been able to make in-depth ones work. But many people swear by them. (If you have access to Master Class, you can actually download a PDF of one of James Patterson’s outlines.) Grisham shreds Mr. V’s first attempt, telling him to SLOW DOWN. There’s just too much going on in his proposed book. “Most plots fail because they’re too complicated,” Grisham explains. “A strong central plot that stays on track can afford the luxury of spinning off subplots, but not too many.”

Mr. Vanderwarker spends three months writing outlines before Grisham gives him the go-ahead to write—wait for it—a chapter-by-chapter outline. Mr. Vanderwarker splutters but acquiesces. When finally permitted to write the book, his first draft elicits a “Gee—that’s nice, honey,” response from his wife, and is later eviscerated by Grisham, who can only stand to read the first half.

The strength of Writing With the Master is reading the astonishingly thoughtful memos Grisham shoots back to each of Mr. V’s outlines and drafts. Some of them are so punchy and no-BS that they brought a smile to my face. You see, I read every one of my wife’s books, offering copious comments along the way. Her favorite comment of mine is the minuscule drawing I once sketched in a margin. It depicted a tiny Yoda, garbed in Jedi robes and brandishing a lightsaber. Rising from his mouth was a dialogue balloon that read: “A sentence this is not.”

Grisham’s pencil edits pull no punches. He underlines redundancies, questions plot points, tiny details, and calls his pupil out on his occasional authorial pontifications:

• Isn’t Sigma Nu a fraternity?
• not believable
• Isn’t it a Sunday?
• no one would ever trust the goons
• abrupt ending
• way too much plot
• sermon
• bad sermon

It’s tough going for our hero, who speaks often of steeling himself with a manly beverage to re-read Grisham’s notes, even weeks after he has received them.

As I read, I thought of the times I have read the work of newer writers. I wanted to value and honor what had been attempted, but often I found myself thinking, “Wow. The premise is cool. This could be really good…if they were a better writer.”

But I found that it’s really hard to put into words how something can be made better. This should be more vivid. Stronger. Tighten this. You can offer such advice, but unless you’re sitting at the keyboard, literally editing someone’s MS in front of them, they will interpret those words differently, and execute to their current level of skill.

I think that’s what Grisham is up against in this book. He knows when something isn’t working, but not always how to coach a better performance from his mentee. Like many experts, he’s running on instinct. He himself would never waste 100 words on a scene that goes nowhere because his gut just knows that it is a non-starter. But despite his caveats, the neophyte plods on, devoting thousands of words to a subplot that smacks into a wall, and must later be cut.

Years go by. Years. Mr. Vanderwarker’s third draft is far better. Grisham, perhaps up to eyeballs in missing nukes after all this time, announces that he can’t give much more help. The book is about as good as it’s ever going to be. He suggests sending it out to some agents and editors to elicit their verdict. Big shock—the book’s DOA as soon as it makes the rounds.

Mr. Vanderwarker has told interviewers that only after he wrote the nonfiction account of their mentorship did most of Grisham’s notes sink in. With fresh eyes, Mr. V revised his thriller. I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice to say the entire experience results in two published books.

And Mr. Vanderwarker surprises us all in the end with a satisfying career shift that was cleverly foreshadowed all along. Not thriller-worthy perhaps, but masterful nonetheless.

---

See you in three weeks!
— Joe
josephdagnese.com

When Writing Historical Fiction: It's Better to Travel

(A repost from a while back. Still useful. Hope you enjoy! - B.T.)

[Elmore] Leonard was originally no more a man of the West than was the Ohio-born dentist Zane Grey. While a kid in Detroit, Westerns enthralled him as they did most people in the 1930s and 40s. When he grew interested in writing during college Western fiction seemed a promising genre he could work in part-time. Unlike many writers then selling Western tales to pulps, though, Leonard insisted on accuracy, and kept a ledger of his research over the years, later crediting his longtime subscription to Arizona Highways magazine for many of his authentic descriptions. All had to be genuine: the guns, Apache terms and clothing; the frontier knives, card games, liquor, and especially the horses.

 — Nathan Ward, from "Elmore Leonard's Gritty Westerns," in Crime Reads

It's certainly never a bad idea to follow the writing advice of the great Elmore Leonard. His Ten Rules For Writing are rightly famous as terrific advice for any writer of fiction.

 

The Great Elmore Leonard

In those instances where Leonard's advice isn't readily available, it never hurts to follow his example, if at all possible. Take the one in the quote above from Nathan Ward's Crime Reads article on Leonard. For years Leonard apparently leaned heavily on the content of Arizona Highways magazine.

It's a fine notion. Now, don't get me wrong: it's always better to travel. There is no substitute for actually going to and spending time in the place you're writing about. But, if you're writing about someplace and you can't afford to go, read travel writers. For that matter, even if you can afford the investment in both time and treasure to visit the region where your work is set, read travel writers. No one can help you get a feel for a certain place like people who make their livings helping their readers get a feel for a certain place.

 

Take William Dalrymple. The British-born-and-raised son of a Scottish baronet, Dalrymple these days is best known for his recent run of riveting books on the history of the subcontinent: India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Dalrymple is a terrific writer and a first-rate historian who splits his time between a farm just outside Delhi, in India and a summer home in London.

William Dalrymple

But before he began to make a name for himself with books such as White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India, The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, The Return of a King: the Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-1842, and The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence and the Pillage of An Empire, Dalrymple began his writing career as a travel writer, taking readers on a tour through the Eastern Mediterranean and the Holy Land (From the Holy Mountain: a Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East), and of course, chronicling the early days of his life-long love affair with India. With his first book In Xanadu: a Quest, published in 1989, Dalrymple chronicles his modern retracing of the journey of Marco Polo from Jerusalem in the summer palace of Kublai Khan in China. But it was with his second book, 1994's City of Djinns: a Year in Delhi, a memoir of his first visit to the city which has had such a tremendous impact on his adult life, that Dalrymple really began to make his mark.

And there is so much to this memoir which can be of use to the writer reading about the city. Here's an early excerpt laying out his introduction to Delhi and to India:

I was only seventeen. After ten years at school in a remote valley in the moors of North Yorkshire, I had quite suddenly found myself in India, in Delhi. From the very beginning I was mesmerized by the great capital, so totally unlike anything I had ever seen before. Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, a landscape of domes, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices. Moreover the city—so I soon discovered—possessed a bottomless seam of stories: tales receding far beyond history, deep into the cavernous chambers of myth and legend. Friends would moan about the touts on Janpath and head off to the beaches in Goa, but for me Delhi always exerted a stronger spell. I lingered on, and soon found a job in a home for destitutes in the far north of the city. The nuns gave me a room overlooking a municipal rubbish dump. In the morning I would look out to see the sad regiment of rag-pickers trawling the stinking berms of refuse; overhead, under a copper sky, vultures circled the thermals forming patterns like fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope. In the afternoons, after I had swept the compound and the inmates were safely asleep, I used to slip out and explore. I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul de sacs, feeling the houses close in around me.

Now, I ask you. Can this guy set a scene, or what? Really helpful for drinking in the flavors, colors, scents and sounds of what on the face of it comes across as a truly unforgettable place. Really not a bad guide if you're interested in writing about modern-day India.

But what if, like me, you're a writer of historical fiction?

In Leonard's case, as stated above, he exploited a modern magazine to help give him local flavor not just for another region of the country, but for that region in another era. No mean feat. It's a testament to Leonard's talent, coupled with his singular vision that he was able to "world build" (to borrow a phrase from our friends who write speculative fiction) using these building blocks for his foundation.

So sure, you can (and should) definitely use your imagination to fill in the cracks. There is certainly no substitute for imagination in the fiction writer's tool kit. That said, you need more than one tool in order to get the job of writing fiction done. I've often felt like our "tool kit" as fiction writers should be more aptly called a "tool warehouse." And of course, another way to use travel writing as one of those tools, to help get the feel for a city or street, or region or state or county or what-have-you during a bygone time is to go and find travel writing from the time in which your work-in-progress is set.

I have a writer friend whose current work-in-progress is set during World War II. One of his major characters has a back-story in which he lived in Germany during the 1930s, in the run-up to the war. I referred him to A Time of Gifts: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Hook of Holland to the Middle Danube, the first volume in a superb three-volume memoir of a trip on foot across Europe, from Holland all the way to Turkey by travel writer, war-time British commando (the account of his part in a successful kidnapping of a German general in Crete is not to be missed), bon vivant, and (some say) one of Ian Fleming's models for his literary creation James Bond, Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Leigh Fermor set out for Constantinople (Istanbul) in December of 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had come to power. His narrative is replete with rich details about German life during that period, laying out how the Nazis had both a heavy and in some ways, a negligible impact on the country they would eventually drive to absolute ruin. Here is Leigh Fermor's initial impression of Cologne, the first major German city he visited:

After a first faraway glimpse, the two famous steeples grew taller and taller as the miles that separated us fell away. At last they commanded the cloudy plain as the spires of a cathedral should, vanishing when the outskirts of the city interposed themselves, and then, as I gazed at the crowding saints of the three Gothic doorways, sailing up into the evening again at close range. Beyond them indoors, although it was already too dark to see the colours of the glass, I knew I was inside the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe. Except for the little constellation of tapers in the shadows of a side-chapel, everything was dim. Women knelt interspersed with nuns and the murmured second half of the Gegrüsset seist Du, Maria rose in answering chorus to the priest’s initial solo; a discreet clatter of beads kept tally of the accumulating prayers. In churches with open spires like Cologne, one could understand how congregations thought their orisons had a better start than prayers under a dome where the syllables might flutter round for hours. With steeples they follow the uprush of lancets and make an immediate break for it. Tinsel and stars flashed in all the shops and banners saying Fröhliche Weihnacht! were suspended across the streets. Clogged villagers and women in fleece-lined rubber boots slipped about the icy pavements with exclamatory greetings and small screams, spilling their armfuls of parcels. The snow heaped up wherever it could and the sharp air and the lights gave the town an authentic Christmas card feeling. It was the real thing at last! Christmas was only five days away. Renaissance doors pierced walls of ancient brick, upper storeys jutted in salients of carved timber and glass, triangles of crow-steps outlined the steep gables, and eagles and lions and swans swung from convoluted iron brackets along a maze of lanes. As each quarter struck, the saint-encrusted towers challenged each other through the snow and the rivalry of those heavy bells left the air shaking. Beyond the Cathedral and directly beneath the flying-buttresses of the apse, a street dropped sharply to the quays. Tramp steamers and tugs and barges and fair-sized ships lay at anchor under the spans of the bridges, and cafés and bars were raucous with music. I had been toying with the idea, if I could make the right friends, of cadging a lift on a barge and sailing upstream in style for a bit.

Again, this is quite a scene the writer is setting! So much good material, such a solid feel for the place. Leigh Fermor wrote the memoir some forty years after the trip, based on large part on the deep and thorough entries he made in his journal as an eighteen year-old looking for adventure in a rapidly changing world. And then he goes on to talk about his attempt to "make friends" in that timeless way young people have from time immemorial: he went to a bar:

I made friends all right. It was impossible not to. The first place was a haunt of seamen and bargees shod in tall sea-boots rolled down to the knee, with felt linings and thick wooden soles. They were throwing schnapps down their throats at a brisk rate. Each swig was followed by a chaser of beer, and I started doing the same. The girls who drifted in and out were pretty but a rough lot and there was one bulky terror, bursting out of a sailor’s jersey and wearing a bargeman’s cap askew on a nest of candy-floss hair, called Maggi—which was short for Magda—who greeted every newcomer with a cry of “Hallo, Bubi!” and a sharp, cunningly twisted and very painful pinch on the cheek. I liked the place, especially after several schnapps, and I was soon firm friends with two beaming bargemen whose Low German speech, even sober, would have been blurred beyond the most expert linguist’s grasp. They were called Uli and Peter. “Don’t keep on saying Sie,” Uli insisted, with a troubled brow and an unsteadily admonishing forefinger: “Say Du.” This advance from the plural to the greater intimacy of the singular was then celebrated by drinking Brüderschaft. Glasses in hand, with our right arms crooked through the other two with the complexity of the three Graces on a Parisian public fountain, we drank in unison. Then we reversed the process with our left arms, preparatory to ending with a triune embrace on both cheeks, a manoeuvre as elaborate as being knighted or invested with the Golden Fleece. The first half of the ceremony went without a hitch, but a loss of balance in the second, while our forearms were still interlocked, landed the three of us in the sawdust in a sottish heap. Later, in the fickle fashion of the very drunk, they lurched away into the night, leaving their newly-created brother dancing with a girl who had joined our unsteady group: my hobnail boots could do no more damage to her shiny dancing shoes, I thought, than the seaboots that were clumping all round us. She was very pretty except for two missing front teeth. They had been knocked out in a brawl the week before, she told me.

And that's just a taste. Leigh Fermor's three volumes here truly form a treasure trove: a window into a long-vanished world, and a feel for both the time itself and the timeless humanity of its cast of thousands. Well worth a read whether you're writing something set in Middle Europe during the 1930s, are a student of human nature, history, great writing, or (most likely) some combination of all of the above. 

Patrick Leigh Fermor (Right) in Crete, 1943

And that's all for now. Tune in next time when I break out the work of a Flemish diplomat and show how his long letters home from his posting in the court of the Turkish sultan helped inform the writing of a couple of my published works.

See you in two weeks!

Lawrence at 60 Years and Counting

Lawrence of Arabia changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. I’d seen pictures before that affected me deeply, and quite a few I’d gone back to see more than once. I knew vaguely about the auteur theory. I realized movies were made, they didn’t somehow spring from the brow of Zeus. But on the most basic level, I didn’t actually understand that a movie was intentional, that it was calculated and specific.

Lawrence changed that, and I can tell you exactly how: the moment when Peter O’Toole holds up the burning match, and blows it out, and they cut to the sunrise on the desert, the music swelling.

I’ve mentioned this before, and it’s subliminal, not literal, the light suddenly dawning, but I remember how jaw-dropping it was – the shot itself, for openers, and at the same time, that I’d been let in on this world-changing secret. I was struck with awe.

Lawrence is back, and not for the first time. It was released originally at three hours and forty-two minutes, a roadshow feature, in December, 1962. Then cut by twenty minutes for general release. Then re-cut in 1970, to 187 minutes. And then restored, in 1988, to 228 minutes – this is the Director’s Cut available on DVD. I just got to see it again, theatrically, in a 4K restoration. Granted, it’s digital, not film, but it’s spectacular.

A word about the cinematography. (Freddie Young won the Oscar for it, Anne Coates won for the editing.) The movie was shot in Super Panavision 70, which is a 65mm negative printed to 35mm, projected in anamorphic – meaning the compressed image on film is widened on the screen. One of the cool things about the newest release is the amount of visual detail. You can argue that there will always be more detail captured on film negative, but the image will degrade, as prints are reproduced from the master negative.

This new digital transfer is probably the best available capture of the original, even if the purist in me kicks against it. You can see the blowing sand, the texture of a man’s skin, in close-up, or the depth of distance. Lean and Freddie Young used a 500mm Panavision zoom lens to shoot Omar Sharif’s entrance, through the dust and the heat coming off the hardpan, the figure seeming to resolve out of a mirage, or a trick of the mind’s eye. Is there really a better entrance in all of the movies?

I went back to see Lawrence twice, the initial 222-minute roadshow release, and then I saw it another three times, in its 202-minute general theatrical release. I couldn’t get enough. My pal John Davis and I could retail entire scenes of dialogue to each other – “The best of them won’t come for money, they’ll come for me” – and ape Peter O’Toole’s mannerisms. I didn’t, at that point, even know David Lean was a big deal, that he and Olivier and the Kordas had brought British cinema back from the dead, after the war, or at least brought American audiences into theaters, which is what mattered to the box office. Later on, when I was living at the Y on Huntington Avenue, I discovered a revival house up the street, and saw Great Expectations for the first time. It was Lean’s two Dickens adaptions that put him on the postwar map, Great Expectations in 1946, and Oliver Twist in 1948, but this wasn’t on my radar. I was just knocked out by the picture itself, and it was icing on the cake to realize it was guy who’d made Lawrence.

Oh, and that Maurice Jarre score!

I think it was his big break. It was sweeping, and eerie, and thunderous, and sometimes all at the same time. Lots of tympani. I tried to recreate it the following summer, at a pump organ. Four of us, teenage boys. Driving a van filled with mattresses up to a summer cabin in Canada, and a shaving kit full of bathtub benzedrine, courtesy of a chemistry-adjacent friend of a friend. The four of us stoned out of our minds and flying, me pumping the foot pedals on that organ with physical fury, and picking out Maurice’s main theme on the keyboard, DOO-doo, doo-doo-doo-doo-DOO-doo. It must have driven the other guys crazy, except that they were doing much the same, banging on a typewriter instead of an instrument. I think this is a story for another time. Too much left in already, when I should leave most of it out.

In any case, I think I’ve hit the highlights. Lawrence is the most important movie of my life, both as a movie that made me think organically about the movies, and as a totem, in terms of personal history. I’m enormously grateful it pointed the way.

August 13th, A Thrilling Day

My phone, a reliably clever device, routinely tells me about newsworthy events that I should probably know happened that day.

            August 13^th has been monumental in shaping world affairs. If you're a fan of political thrillers, it should be a red circle day.

            Barbed Wire Sunday occurred on this date in 1961. Beginning at midnight, soldiers from the East German military arrived at critical points along the line separating East and West Berlin. They quickly unloaded barbed wire and concrete and began erecting the barrier that became the Berlin Wall. The government deemed the move necessary to stem the brain drain and hemorrhage of the workforce from communist East Berlin to the West. The East German secret police, the Stasi, blocked intersections between the sectors of the divided city. 

            Where would the Cold War political thriller be without referencing Checkpoint Charlie, the best-known crossing point between the city's two halves? Here, Soviet and American tanks squared off 100 yards apart in a showdown that brought the two sides perilously close to war. Prisoner exchanges occurred, and daring escapes were attempted at the thin space separating the two superpowers.

GZen, Creative Commons

Roger Moore, as James Bond, crossed through Checkpoint Charlie in Octopussy. Tom Hanks surveyed the wall in Bridge of Spies. Illya Kuryakin was frustrated in his attempts to rundown Napoleon Solo as he extracted Gaby to the West in The Man from UNCLE (the movie). Countless books have used the wall as a physical challenge or metaphor. And it all started on this date.

            The Manhattan Project got underway on this date in 1942. The research and development program that culminated in the atomic bomb was initially labeled the Development of Substitute Materials. The development project was run by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Engineering districts routinely took the name of the city where they were located. The Development of Substitute Materials had temporary offices on Broadway. Thus, they became the Manhattan District. The term “Manhattan” gradually substituted for the name of the atomic project. Always concerned about spies, Manhattan was believed to attract less attention and reveal less about the nature of the bomb's development.

            The Manhattan District was officially created on August 13^th under orders signed by Major General Eugene Reybold.

            The movie Oppenheimer most recently explored the Manhattan Project. Since the project's creation, the name has become synonymous with any apocalyptic device. Biological weapons and crippling computer viruses have all been labeled the Manhattan Project. The program established a model for government-sponsored, project-specific, big science. The world may be in more jeopardy, but the thriller writer has had an efficient tool for warning the reader about a developing doomsday mechanism since August 13^th, 1942.

            German-born Klaus Fuchs was a theoretical physicist. As part of the Manhattan Project team, he worked on developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, New Mexico. During his work, Fuchs spied on the project for the Soviet Union. After the war, he moved to the United Kingdom and continued his weapons research. In January 1950, he confessed to passing atomic information to the Soviets. Upon his release from a British prison in 1959, Fuchs migrated to East Germany. There, he became the deputy director of the Central Institute for Nuclear Physics. His work undoubtedly took him to numerous meetings in East Berlin, within easy walking distance of the wall.

            And thus, we're brought full circle.

            Fidel Castro and Alfred Hitchcock were both born on this date. Both impacted thrillers in differing ways. Finally, a shout out to William Caxton, who was also born on this date in 1422. He set up the first printing press in England. His first publication is believed to be an edition of The Canterbury Tales. 

Ilgar Jafarov, CC

            Where would writers be without publishers?

            Until next time.

            Postscript:

            In my last blog, I discussed the upcoming Olympics and made fun of rhythmic gymnastics. I've watched some of the individual and team competitions. While I'm still unclear on the ribbon, the routines performed with the ball and, later, the hoop grabbed my attention. I'd like to offer a sincere apology to all rhythmic gymnastics fans and athletes.

No obits necessary for the life of the mind.

These are times when optimism is about as easy to sustain as the suspension of disbelief during a superhero movie.  Especially in the face of all the media fury, of which I consume way too much.  So I won’t add to it here.  Rather, I’d like to address one small slice of the public debate, at least among those who are literate enough to ask:  Are we moving into a post-literate society?

Maybe, though it might depend on how you define literate. 

Just as there’s a natural distribution of bad hairdos, nice teeth and athletic grace across the population, there’s a percentage of people who like to read, absorb information and artistic expression, and formulate their own opinions from the swelter of competing views.  Let’s assume that the qualities described above are encouraged, for some, by achieving at least some education.  This means the percentage of the thoughtful and inquisitive is larger than ever:  In 1940, only about five percent of the country had graduated from college.  Now it’s over a third.

  You’ll hear it said, “People don’t read anymore.”  That’s not exactly true.  While overall book sales and reported reading habits have slid a bit, they’re certainly not gone.  After a long bloodletting of independent bookstores, their numbers have actually increased, if you discount some fatalities of the pandemic.  Barnes & Noble is still in operation, and doing pretty well, even if their big box competitors have mostly disappeared. 

          Social media and other forms of media engagement have eroded book reading, for sure, especially among the young.  But that’s an understandable outgrowth of the surging digital environment.  But as with all fresh trends, this too will stabilize and a new balance of wider choice will emerge.

Movies didn’t kill books.  Television didn’t kill movies (even streaming).  CDs didn’t kill records.  For that matter, the novel didn’t kill poetry, jazz has survived rock ‘n’ roll, synthesizers didn’t wipe out drums and guitars and song writers are still writing beautiful melodies and captivating lyrics.

There are temporary swells of artistic fashion, but the end result is additive, not wholesale extinction.   

Journalism is another institution that is supposedly dying on the vine, and print media is particularly under huge duress.  Though for every daily newspaper that goes under there are hundreds, if not thousands, of fresh news outlets appearing online.  You may rightly assert that many, or most, are poorly managed and edited, and filled with uncurated dreck.  That still leaves so much worthy and enriching information, and commentary, that you’ll never be able to absorb it all.

You can make a case that the once and possibly future cretin in the White House has caused an upsurge in media consumption, however polarized individual outlets have become.  Trust in the media favored by Democrats has actually improved in recent times.  I submit this is because people are paying more attention, that they’re reading more. I also believe that responsible journalism, in an era of propaganda and phony news, is trying harder to keep their facts straight and their commentary thoughtfully nuanced. 

A good friend of mine has a theory of the human mind:  “People have a tendency to extrapolate current circumstances indefinitely into the future.”  Even the scantest understanding of the past ought to unburden you of this fallacy.  We are, no doubt, going through some monumental changes, occurring at an unprecedented pace.  This is much of the problem, since rapid change makes it feel like everything is going to hell in a hand basket.  The originators of Chaos Theory, a scientific paradigm that explains the behavior of complex systems, say that nature moves from order to disorder, and back again, in irregular, but relentless, cycles.  They call the state between these cycles “phase transition”, when things become the most chaotic. 

            This is where we’re living today.  It’s not a post-literate society, it’s a society making a painful adjustment to the Information Age, finding its way through the torrent of books, articles and essays, along with posts, podcasts, online rants and blogs, just like this.

If you believe civilization is worth preserving, you have to believe that wisdom and critical thinking are essential ingredients in that preservation.  Thought in isolation from information is valuable, but closed-ended.  You can only go so far on your own.  I maintain that the richest source of revelation and enrichment are books.  Whatever form they take, physical or electronic, books will save us from annihilation, from the foolishness – economic, military, environmental, cultural – that is also an irredeemable aspect of the human experience. 

Don’t despair.  Publishers are publishing, readers are reading. Thus, thinkers keep thinking.