Downer Endings

As most of you know, we at this blog usually write about (1) mysteries or (2) writing or (3) mystery writing. And when the subject is writing, I've noticed that it's usually about either our own creations or about what it is that makes fiction (stories/novels/movies) effective and interesting and entertaining. (As if we know.)

Today I want to talk about stories that don't have happy endings. Movies, specifically. There are of course many of those, and some have endings that aren't just sad, they're downright depressing. Yes, I know, that might not be a good topic to focus on right now, during these uncertain times, but hey, I needed something to post today. Velma, our secretary and first-sergeant here at SleuthSayers, gets grumpy if I don't turn in my column.

For the record, I've always felt that the end of a story doesn't have to be either happy or sad (or even totally believable--look at The Black Stallion, or The African Queen)--but it does have to be satisfying. Every good story needs a problem for the hero/heroine to solve, and if by the end of the tale he doesn't get what he's been seeking, whether it's love or treasure or freedom or redemption or the world championship or whatever, the audience needs to understand why. Some of my favorite movies have clear, positive, cowboy-in-the-white-hat-wins endings. Everybody likes those. Other favorites of mine--Witness, Casablanca, Rocky, Vertigo, Hombre, Chinatown, Rain Man, and many others--end with the hero not getting what he wanted, or what he thought he wanted. But with those stories there was always a reason for that failure, and usually the outcome was for the greater good, or to teach him (and/or the audience) a life lesson. In Dead Poets Society, to mention just one example, the hero is fired from his job, but because of the way it was done the viewer leaves the theater feeling uplifted.

I once heard there are two words that come to mind when the subject is depressing endings: foreign films. That of course isn't always true, but I had to throw it in.

With regard to downer endings in general, I think they come in several flavors:



1. The death of the hero

Cool Hand Luke
Thelma and Louise
Braveheart
Saving Private Ryan
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Love Story
Bonnie and Clyde
Shane
Easy Rider
The Room
The Wild Bunch
Gran Torino

2. A continuation of the disaster/crisis

On the Beach
Night of the Living Dead
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Melancholia
Cloverfield
Fail-Safe
I Am Legend
The Happening
The Birds
Miracle Mile
The Road

3. An unresolved ending

No Country for Old Men
The French Connection
Blade Runner
2001: A Space Odyssey
Inception
The Blair Witch Project
The Wrestler
Doubt
Taxi Driver
The Florida Project

Barton Fink


4. A surprise ending

Shutter Island
The Mist
Planet of the Apes
Primal Fear
Fight Club
10 Cloverfield Lane
The Departed
Atonement
Seven
Soylent Green


NOTE: In my opinion, some of the above (Shane, No Country for Old Men, Seven, The Wild Bunch, Fail-Safe, etc.) were extremely good movies and some (The Happening, The Room, Love Story) were not. This isn't about good or bad or my idea of good or bad; we're just talking about endings.



Not that it matters, but I think the movie that had the most depressing ending ever was The Mist--probably because it was both tragic and needless. I enjoyed the story, but boy that ending was a punch in the gut. If you've seen it, you know what I mean. The odd thing is, the Stephen King novella from which it was adapted wasn't as bleak at the end. (On the flip side, the movie Cujo ended happy and King's novel Cujo ended sad.) The second most depressing ending I can remember was to one of the most depressing movies I've ever seen: They Shoot Horses, Don't They? But it was also satisfying in that it explained with crystal clarity, in its final thirty seconds, its mysterious title.

One more observation: Some movies with depressing subjects have upbeat endings (The Shawshank Redemption, Deep Impact, Ghost, Oklahoma Crude, Stand By Me); some fairly upbeat movies have depressing endings (Somewhere in Time, Titanic, King Kong, Million Dollar Baby); and let's face it, some depressing movies have depressing endings (Leaving Las Vegas, The Road, They Shoot Horses, The Elephant Man, The Wrestler, Requiem for a Dream). Something for all tastes.

How do you feel about all this? What are some of your favorite downer endings? Which are the worst? Have you ever seen an otherwise good movie whose ending ruined it? Ever seen an otherwise bad movie whose ending saved it? How about those that started bad and went steadily downhill? Have any of your own stories and novels ended with a letdown?

I suppose, since I have nothing positive to add, that's the way I'm ending this column.

Stay safe!

Hack This

Manipulating time, space, characters, and settings are several of the logistical elements fiction writers juggle while revealing their story.

A story's minutia may not be as challenging to manage when an author writes chronologically. However, when the structure is more complicated, such as bouncing back and forth in time or by telling the story through multiple point of view characters, keeping track of details such as who did what, when and where can be tricky. How did the crime unfold? At what point did which character know which clue?

If you're lucky, any mix-up made will be passed off as a red herring. If not, you risk unwanted confusion, killing suspense, drawing the reader out of the story, or potentially spoiling a twist.  Savvy readers will call you out on your goofs every time.  Ouch.

What's a detail-challenged mystery writer to do?

Whether you are embarking on a new project or already revising, here are a few hacks that have helped me keep my writerly ducks in a row.

Write chronologically. I'm a chronic Plotter (except for the one novel I attempted to Pantster my way through, but I'll save that fiasco for another post). No matter how I envision the structure unfolding, I always write my first draft of any story chronologically. By doing so, each character--by default-- will never know more than what I've already revealed in the story/backstory. It also helps to keep my insider plotting information from seeping out too soon.

Color-coded sticky notes. I've written two (not yet published) novels and several short stories, which all utilized a time-hopping before/after narrative. Before and after what, you may ask? Usually some traumatic event.  In on particular novel, I braided three point-of-view characters on this before/after sequence and quickly learned I was juggling more than just a story-line. As you can imagine, each character's emotions, voice, and perspective, changed substantially before and after said event. Only a few chapters in, I soon realized that keeping track of six different voices was chaotic ambitious.

What did I do? I resurrected a favorite time-honored analog technique--sticky notes and a long piece of yarn. In this image of my dining room table, the horizontal blue yarn represented the novel's traumatic event (in this case, the death of one of the POV characters), all the notes above the yarn represent chapters occurring after said event, and all the notes beneath the yarn occurred before.  No surprise, each POV character has their own color (blue, orange, or yellow), and on the face of each note, I list the chapter's primary plot developments.  Here's my hack: I numbered each sticky note in their alternating before/after chapter sequence that I expected for the final draft, but then reordered them chronologically (all the *before* sticky notes followed by all the *after* ones) to finish writing my first draft.  Voila!

Graph Paper Timeline. In my work in progress thriller novel, the historical narrative spanned four generations of Slovak women surviving world wars, German occupation, and communist oppression. Even though I wrote the scenes chronologically, setting a fictional family among the first world atrocities of the twentieth century, I needed to be extra careful remembering which character had a living memory of current and past events. This time, my dining room table wasn't long enough for all the sticky notes I'd need for a one hundred year guide.

Instead, I taped together several pieces of graph paper. Each square represented one year, segmented off in five-year intervals.

Below my horizontal black timeline are all the European historical events I felt relevant enough to impact my characters' (fictional) lives. Above the line are the lifespans of my novel's primary characters (each is assigned a different color), which identified their major milestones (birth, marriage, children, death).

Finally, I drew vertical black lines intersecting my fictional and non-fiction events, one per historical chapter. This way, I was able to keep track of what current and historical details my characters would have known at any give chapter. Anything to the right hadn't happened yet. I found my timeline hack to be especially helpful during my not-so-linear revision process.

While nothing beats a good editor, fact-checker, or critique partner, creating scaffolding for your story can help you manage the unwieldy business of building a fictional world.

What writer hacks do you lean on to keep track of details?


PS – Let's be social:

• Twitter- @KKMHOO
• Facebook-  Kristin Kisska
• Instagram - @KristinKisskaAuthor
• Website- KristinKisska.com

The Pros and Cons of Tinnitus

I've written on this blog a number of times about the scourge of tinnitus, and how I've had to maneuver around it since I was four years old. I had German measles, and the resultant high fever did the nerve damage which has given me the constant companion of a ringing sound in my left ear for the fifty-one years since. If you'd like more general background on my battle to concentrate and actually write with this constant distraction in my head, you can find it at the other end of this link. If you're interested in hearing about the toll tinnitus takes on me, how exhausting it can be battling through it to really listen to others (a big part of my day gig) and yet how important it is to do precisely that, you can find that discussion here.

Today's post, while tinnitus-related, is a bit different. And in these trying times, when we need good things to talk about, let me just say this: this post is all about the positives.

Like George Benson. More on him in a bit. And my life-long love of music. More on that in a bit, too.

Yep. This guy.

"Positives and tinnitus," you say. And I hear your skepticism. But bear with me.

As I mentioned before in one of my previous posts on the subject: "I'm not saying there is anything good about having tinnitus. There isn't. It's a plague. I don't actually know what silence sounds like. And in addition to the ringing, I have significant hearing loss in my left ear."

The post I'm quoting from (which, again, can be found in its entirety here) was all about how tinnitus forced me to learn to be a better listener, to be more attentive, in all the forms that word itself takes. And while I still believe all of the above, that's not the positive I'm laying out here.

I reconciled myself to never being without tinnitus for even one second of my life many years ago. In my twenties, thirties and forties, I even began to be able to tune it out.

Until I became a father.

My son (who is turning eight in a couple of months) had a piercing shriek as a toddler which brought my tinnitus roaring back into the forefront of my hearing range. In the years since he learned to walk and stopped shrieking at that particularly maddening frequency, I've struggled to relegate tinnitus once more to the background. The ringing monster, it seems, is strong, and it's also pretty relentless.

This is not to say I can't do that. And it has gotten easier to do over time. Then again, it's always with me.

Or it was, until a week ago. (And at last we come, after a couple of false starts, to the true positive in this post!)

No, my tinnitus isn't cured. It's just been mitigated.

I now know what it's like to not hear tinnitus. And I have audio technology to thank.

I still don't hear silence. But thanks to a combination of the best streaming service out there and a birthday gift I recently gave myself, I can now hear a whole lot of what I've been missing (hearing loss, too, remember?), and tinnitus-free.

TIDAL

I subscribe to TIDAL, which is the brainchild of rapper and music mogul Jay-Z. As streaming services go, it's pretty impressive on a number of levels. Its profit-sharing model is far more generous to the musicians who generate the content it peddles to listeners like me, and I like that. The same cannot be said of Spotify (which is why Taylor Swift famously and unceremoniously pulled her content from that service several years back), Apple and Amazon Music, or any of the others out there. TIDAL also has a HiFi lossless audio option (for an in-depth discussion of digital music compression, and what lossless audio actually is, and how it's far superior to standard compression, click here for a link to an old CNET article which is worth your time and trouble.). For our purposes, and in the interest of brevity, suffice it to say that most of the processes of digitizing the sounds made by instruments, including the human voice, flattens out the sound at levels human beings aren't supposed to notice.

However, many of us do. Digital audio often feels flat to me. Like alot of medieval art, there isn't much depth of field to it. All of the elements come across at the same size and the same level, with no perspective, per se. I also often picture the experience of listening to digital music sliding across the surface of a glass table.

On the other hand you have lossless audio. Like vinyl before it, lossless audio preserves the topography of recorded sound, giving it the fullness, depth and richness that digital music can't match.

And nobody wants to see this

And yes, I know, we as a society make fun of "vinyl snobs," dismissing people who prefer its sound, and rhapsodize at tiresome length about it, applying awkwardly fitting adjectives such as "warmth," etc., as somehow pretentious. They're frequently grouped in with lovers of hipster beards or man buns.

Well, I'm none of those. I'm a mid-fifties music lover with low-end hearing loss and a constant ringing in my left ear. So if there's a music delivery system out there which is technologically advanced enough to help me reshuffle the aural deck which has been stacked against me since before I started kindergarten, guess what? I'm all in.

Which is why I pay $19.99 per month for TIDAL's "HiFi Lossless Audio" option. Paired with my Sonos speaker system, it's helped me hear things I might otherwise miss. In fact the Sonos soundbar my wife recently helped me sync up with the television in our living room has helped make it so I don't need the subtitles. Not even for the British stuff!

Yep, clear as a bell, and with a Yorkshire accent, that is saying something!

This experience got me thinking: if Sonos could help, what might the right pair of headphones do to help me experience sound more like people with normal hearing levels did?

As it turns out, a whole lot.

So I stared doing research. I have some great 1MORE bluetooth earbuds and a pair of Beats headphones which are wonderful for shutting out extraneous noise when I'm in a loud room. But what about headphones intended solely to enhance the sound piping through them, as opposed to those intended (like my Beats and my wife's awesome Bose headphones) to cancel outside noise?

Enter Massdrop and Sennheiser. These two companies joined forces on the Massdrop X Sennheiser HD 6XX headphones. They're open-backed, so, as the dozens of reviews I pored over noted, they wouldn't be all that effective in a noisy room. But then, the noise I was looking for them to cancel out isn't external.

They're priced on the low end for "high end" headphones, and stack up well against other models which retail for five times their price. So I decided to take a risk and get them as a birthday present to myself.

The result? Well, let me sum up with an excerpt from the conversation I had with myself after giving these beauties a try:

"How did I know...this was just what I always wanted? I am so thoughtful! Thank me....very much...."

All kidding aside, I have to say, when I got these headphones out of the box, plugged in and gave them a test, I honestly got emotional. My wife was sitting right next to me, and saw me tear up. The experience was that powerful.

And that's where George Benson comes in. I chose his song "Give Me The Night" as my first listen with these new headphones.

Now, this song came out in 1980. Over the intervening forty years I have listened to it at least hundreds, perhaps thousands of times. And yet, with  the combination of these headphones and the lossless audio, I was hearing this song for the first time.

Suddenly I could hear instruments which had always been buried too deeply in the mix for me with my hearing impairment, to ever pick out before. I was experiencing Benson's guitar riffs played alongside and beneath his vocal for the first time. AND, even more remarkable: I was not hearing any tinnitus in this "new" mix.

For the FIRST TIME since I was four years old!

So. Yeah. I got emotional.

Every now and again you hear about someone who has been deprived of one of their senses (usually sight) suddenly regaining all or part of that lost sense, and it's nearly always portrayed as an overwhelming experience. Well, I get that now. Because I've had that experience.

And while it's true that this enhancement to my hearing is only conditional and only part-time, and I'm still legally deaf in one of my ears most of the time, man, I will take it. I mean, imagine, if you will, getting back something which has been taken from you a piece at a time over decades, and getting it back all in one moment.

Because now I know what I've been missing all these years.

So, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna wrap up for now. After all, I've got a lot of old favorites to hear all over again for the very first time.

See you in two weeks!

My Misadventure on West Thirty-Fifth Street

Yesterday the mysterious Press published The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe,  which Publishers Weekly described as, ahem, "superb."  And who am I to argue?

I have a story in the book and I am racking my brains to say anything about Rex Stout and his wonderful creation that I didn't say here or here or even here. 

So let's take a different approach.  Last year Josh Pachter told me he was going to be editing a book of  different authors' takes on the world's fattest master detective and asked if I had anything to contribute.

I had to regretfully decline.  I don't really write parodies and I am not such a fan of pastiches (which I define as writing another story in the style of an already existing body of work.)

But then I realized that there was a third possibility: a homage.  To me this means you muck around in another writer's universe but don't create another work of the type that writer has already produced.

It can be a subtle difference, I admit.   If I write another Sherlock Holmes story, attempting to keep as closely to Conan Doyle's style as possible, that's a pastiche.  But when Nicholas Meyer wrote The Seven Percent Solution, rewriting the history of Holmes and adding Sigmund Freud to the story, that was a homage.  Got it?

And it occurred to me that I could look at Wolfe and friends from a different viewpoint than Stout had done.  So I told Josh to give me a little time before he started the presses, so to speak.

An important fact about great literary characters: seen objectively a lot of them are annoying as hell.  Seriously, how long could you have tolerated the smug genius of Holmes before you strangled him?  How about Rumpole, Columbo, or House, M.D.?  Even Huckleberry Finn might have been pretty exasperating.  All of them are great to visit, but you sure  wouldn't want to live there.  As Ogden Nash wrote: "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance."

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote a number of books about the Howard Families. To oversimplify, these are people who are much longer-lifed than most folks.  The one member of the group who never seems to age at all uses the name Lazarus Long and he is virtually worshipped by his fellows.

But, boy, he seems truly irritating to me.

In Heinlein's book The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, we finally see Long through the eyes of a non-Howard character and guess what? He loathes the guy.  I felt vindicated.   

So I wrote a story that looked at the residents of that famous brownstone on West 35th Street from the viewpoint of their neighbors who had to put up with late night meetings, the occasional shooting or bombing... And Josh made "The Damned Doorbell Rang" the last story in the book.

I call that superb.

Byte Me

Back up your files!

So many stories are no longer accessible.

I’ve been hearing this since the advent of personal computers, and I’ve always tried to adhere to what is, on the surface, good advice.

I no longer have the cassette tapes from my first computer—a Radio Shack TRS-80—but I have a collection of 5.25” floppy disks, 3.5” diskettes, Zip drives, and CDs containing word-processing files created with WordStar and various iterations of Microsoft Word on a variety of PCs and Macintoshes. Except for the CDs, I no longer have any working computers that can read the disks, and the self-extracting archives I created to store large documents and then copied over each time I’ve upgraded to a new computer no longer self-extract. So, even though I have backed up much of what I’ve written, I can’t access the work from the first few, post-personal computer, decades of my writing career.

More than four decades of writing.

On the other hand, almost everything I’ve archived on paper in my six files cabinets is still readable. The few exceptions are contracts I copied using my fax machine before I had regular access to a photocopier or my own copiers and scanners. (Faxes and copies created using thermal fax machines slowly darken over time.)

BLAST FROM THE PAST

How we submitted electronic ms.

Back in the day—sometime after the advent of personal computers with word processing programs and before the use of email for manuscript submission—several of the publications for which I wrote liked to receive electronic files on diskettes. So, I prepared a label with my (no longer valid) contact information as well as information about the disk and what was on it. I’m unsure why the disk pictured was returned to me, but apparently I submitted a story titled “I Hired a Private Eye,” which I saved in Rich Text Format as a file named PrivateEye.rtf on an IBM-formatted diskette.

MUSEUM PIECES

I’ve written before about my typewriters—“Three Typewriters and a Desk”—but I’ve never written about my computers. Alas, they have mostly just been tools to which I have no inherent emotional attachment.

My "computer museum."

My first personal computer was a TRS-80 connected to a small black-and-white television I used as a monitor and to a cassette tape player I used to back up files. I was never able to use it to write, and my most significant accomplishment was learning enough BASIC to create a short, text-based choose-your-own-adventure type game.

My next computer was an IBM PC, provided by a client who subcontracted consulting work to me, and since then I’ve worked my way through several brands of PCs before transitioning to Macintoshes and working my way through several generations of Macs.

I still use both PCs and Macintoshes on a regular basis, but the Mac has become my computer of choice, and I no longer own a functioning PC. Temple calls the collection of dead PCs in the garage my “computer museum.”

PLAN AHEAD

So, backing up your files is still valid advice—especially backing up unsold work and unfinished works-in-progress—but think ahead. How will you access those files next year or next decade when the software used to create the files no long exists and the media they are stored on is no longer accessible?

I certainly wish I’d planned ahead.

“Sleepy River” appears in the May/June 2020 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, due out later this month.

Spare Time and Spare Parts

We all need to fill much too much spare time right now, but social distancing is easier for a writer because it's part of our life anyway. Unfortunately, I may have domesticated Zach Barnes and Woody Guthrie too much and fear that I'll turn them into family sitcoms, so, for the first time since 2003, I have no novels in progress. I have a few ideas for short stories and a novella, but a few weeks ago I turned to the Nostalgia Plan, AKA Recycling 101.

I store pretty much everything I cut on flash drives or external hard drives: a line of dialogue or description, scenes I cut from novels or short stories, an interesting character, projects I abandoned, and even stories rejected so often I ran out of places to send them. I cannibalize enough to make it worthwhile.

I published Blood on the Tracks, the first Woody Guthrie novel, in 2013, but I wrote the first version of that story late in 2003. In various forms, revisions, and under at least four titles, the book(s) received over 110 rejections.

Sifting through the wreckage, I found a complete MS called The Cheater, an earlier version of what eventually saw print. Between 2006 and 2008, I pitched it to 58 agents. Interestingly, three of them asked for a full MS, another asked for 100 pages, and two others asked for 50 pages or the first three chapters. They all turned it down, usually without comment, but one with the kind of rejection that makes writers crazy: "You're a good writer and there's a lot to like here, but I can't sell this."

No further explanation.

Eleven years later, I still don't know why that MS was rejected, but I suspect that it was because I changed genre in mid-story. The premise was that the PI who would later become Woody Guthrie met Megan Traine at their high school reunion and they teamed up to solve a murder that involved one of the their classmates. Alcoholism and domestic abuse were important themes, and I suspect agents freaked when the cozy went south.

A few weeks ago, I went through the book again. I even found two pages of revision notes from 2010, when I considered revising that 78K-word story for my then-publisher, who had a 70K-word limit.

The cozy high school reunion idea is autobiographical. I met the inspiration for Megan Traine at my own reunion. Although we graduated together (Our class graduated 691 students), we never met in school, and she became a session musician in Detroit. The reunion idea was the crux of several versions of the book, but I finally decided that was the problem and abandoned it for Blood on the Tracks. 

The Cheater, which I also sent out twice as Alma Murder, presented another problem. The PI was from Connecticut and his name was Erik Morley, but Megan Traine was constant through all  versions of the book. Her character deepened, but changed very little between 2003 and her real debut ten years later. I figured if I put her in Detroit with a different lover, she'd look a little slutty, so I decided to change her name and background. The plot would still work, and I liked the POV of the classmate, a woman accused of killing her abusive husband. She was a lawyer and a functioning alcoholic. So much for the cozy, right?

I studied my revision notes, revised them some more, added new ideas, and rewrote about 40 pages of the book. I changed Megan Traine's name and background and cut all the music scenes from earlier versions (Erik Morley still played guitar, another constant with Woody and one of the few things he had in in common with me).

It was like sticking my hand into a garbage disposal.

The more I read, the more I realized that Meg and music generated some of the best scenes in that book. Changing her would force me to re-write or cut parts that gave all the characters more depth.

Fourteen years ago, I loved the book and the characters and we were a team. The rewriting. . . not so much. It became a chore instead of a passion. I stuck it out for about three weeks, then remembered the advice all doctors have at the top of the list.

First, do no harm.

I was mutilating something I loved and the changes would make it different, but not better. I decided to leave the book alone.

Maybe I'll publish it someday as an eBook, and UR-version of Blood on the Tracks. If I do, Alma Murder still works as a title. Or, maybe, I'll just leave it sleeping on the hard drive where it's happy.

I was surprised that a 14-year-old MS still felt like I actually knew what I was doing. Now, the biggest change would be a global edit to replace the double-space after end punctuation. And maybe to eliminate a few semi-colons.  I have several short stories on that same disc that don't merit reworking. I guess this particular story was more important to me.

Samuel Johnson said that only a blockhead writes for any reason other than money. But sometimes money's not enough, either. Sometimes we do it for love.

What do you have in your closet?

Surviving COVID19

COVID19 is a dangerous adversary and everyone is discussing how stressful they are finding living in the age of COVID19.

There have been many excellent recommendations on how to reduce stress. Many of these recommendations have focused on stress reduction strategies like exercise.

Given my area is mental health, I would like to add to the conversations on stress by presenting a different lens.

First, let’s talk about what stress is and is not, because to tackle something one must always know what one is getting into the ring with. 

In 1936, biologist Hans Selye described a common physiological response in rats subjected to harmful factors and he named this the stress response. “The main features of the syndrome were suppression of the immune system, ulceration of the lining of the stomach and small intestine, and activation of the two … stress-response systems.”

Over the last 80 years, there has been extensive documentation of the widespread damage of stress on our body and brain.

So stress doesn’t just feel bad - it is really bad for you. Reducing stress can save your life and a sense of control is the one way cortisol and other factors provoked by stress can be reduced and the health impacts minimized.


What is crucial is that stress is not just bad things happening to you – it is bad things happening with a sense of having no control over these things.


You might be thinking: if control is crucial to managing stress, how on earth can you control a global outbreak of a virus? How can we control not only the illnesses and deaths but also the economic consequences on such a large scale. Control? It seems like a rather ludicrous word in the face of all this.

All true points. Thank you for making them.

My answer is to introduce some people whom I have known that belong to “The Greatest Generation”- those who lived through World War II. They earned their name because of their tenacity and 'can do' attitude. They did not enter the war with these attitudes but, rather, they were forged by the hardships they faced.

My father-in-law, Bill, and his twin brother were pilots in World War II. Bill’s brother died when his plane went down in Europe and he was never able to speak of him again – it was as if the grief of his loss had torn out his heart. Bill went on to get an engineering degree, marry, have children and live a life of laughter and love.

My mother-in-law, Verna, stayed home and helped in many ways the war effort. She told me stories of how they would try to get butter to make her beloved pastries, how they would save things so they could send packages to those who were fighting along with letters. The volume of letters diminished over time because many of the young men she grew up with died.


Neither of them had any ability to stop the war or save those they loved. Both were irreparably broken by the losses they sustained. Both walked into life after the war with a strong stride. They survived the war by small acts and large ones that were all acts of resistance. Bill was a man who embraced competence – taking care of his family and being the one who got things done – and Verna was loving, taking everyone under her wing. Perhaps those characteristics were their tribute to those they lost and a way to ensure that they would keep those around them safe.

Let me introduce you to Lili. She was Jewish and was sent away from her parents as a small child into hiding. She lost her parents and everyone in her family. I learned later that she had anxiety and many difficulties all her life in response to this, but what I remember about her was that she was one of the kindest people I have ever known. If the world robs you of so much through cruelty, kindness is the ultimate act of defiance.

None of them had control over global events that ended up at their door. What they did was to take control during and after in small and large ways. Ultimately, their characters are a testament to how they became known as the greatest generation, because it was not what they endured but how they endured it that defined them.

Back to COVID19. We have no control over when we will have a vaccine and this nightmare will end. However, the reality is that we have never had control over large global events and this is no different. What we do have control over is our small corner of this planet and that is where we fight. 

Much has been discussed about the courage and tenacity of my colleagues during COVID19. When I speak with them, they talk about doing what they have always done; medicine with the patient in front of them. They read voraciously about this virus, they consult others for more information, they organize their homes to have decontamination zones to keep their family safe and do many other things to manage their corner of the planet.

Many of my non-medical friends are reading and watching the news to educate themselves, they are designing new ways to get groceries safely and clean them down. They are reaching out to friends and family to inform them, check up on them and laugh with them.

When we talk about the new normal – it is the ability of each of us to have small and large acts of defiance and resistance to keep those we love safe.


We will not recover without scars. We can only hope to minimize the number we lose and comfort those who have lost people. There will be anguish: times when we wake up in the middle of the night drenched in fear. When we emerge from this - we can do so with a character forged by how we responded to COVID and how we controlled our corner of the world.

First Thoughts about Writing a Story

Last Saturday, John Floyd talked about how he starts writing a new story. A very interesting post. Check it out if you missed it.

John said he usually starts with a plot.

I’m different. I usually start with a character, then fix on a setting, and finally decide on the inciting incident which often includes a crime. I never outline but simply start a story and keep writing most every day to finish it. If I do get stuck, I make a list of what could happen next, pick what I think is the best situation, and continue writing.

I think there are two reasons it’s so much easier for me than other writers to not plot. First is to read. A lot. Stephen King says we should read the same amount of time every day as we spend writing. Sounds about right to me. But I started reading early (with Nancy Drew—I’m a cliché!), and average two books a week, and have for years and years and years. I know there have to be terrific authors out there who do not read much. But if you are struggling, I suggest you read more in your genre to get a feel for how good writers do it. And maybe get some insight into why you consider some writers amateurish and not be that way yourself.

For some reason I am highly focused. You can even interrupt me when I’m writing, and I will get right back to where I was and continue on when you leave me alone. How do I do that? I SEE in my mind’s eye the setting and what’s happening. I HEAR what the characters say and how they say it. And I FEEL their emotions as I write about them. I even find myself making faces, which I can use for dialogue tags. But the seeing and hearing are the most important things. Because I’m THERE, when I get back to writing, I can continue with little trouble. If you “see” everything, you will prevent mistakes such as having someone sitting and a while later, standing without showing it happening. You can imagine the gestures the characters are making and use them to make tags. You can describe the setting the same way every time you need to mention a table or a chair.

So, it’s all a snap for me, right? Of course not. I have other problems. The first and worst is character names. I wish I had all the time back spent messing with them. For a novel, I average about five or six name changes. Thank goodness for Find and Replace in Word although that can be both amusing and frustrating. For my current work, I decided to change a character’s name from Slack to Novak. I forgot how many characters wore slacks. This is about a 75,000 word novel. My fear is that I haven’t corrected all of them because you can’t totally depend on Replace to work correctly. I can only hope my beta readers find any of my characters wearing Novaks. Then I changed Mark to Aaron, and there was Maker’s Aaron instead of Mark. <sigh>

I learned early to make a list of characters in a chart that can alphabetize rows. First and last names each receive their own rows, and I also have ones for age, car, and description and other details I need to remember. So, as soon as I have several names, I alphabetize them by first name, try to have others with a different first letter, then do the same with the surnames. When writing series, these are really handy to look back at when I forget a minor character’s name or description, age, or make of car.

Because I am more interested in characters than the actual plot and setting, I have a lot of dialogue and people’s reactions to what’s going on. I find myself repeating certain reactions. Each novel seems to generate it’s own particular reaction. The last one was “shrugged.” This one has too many folks gasping. Fortunately, I own a terrific book called THE EMOTION THESAURAS—A writer’s Guide to Character Expression by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi. They have a whole series of books like this one, but for me, this is the most useful. Pick any emotion, go to the index, and choose things like anxiety, denial, happiness, surprise (gasp), and so forth.

That’s not all. I sometimes put in characters that in the end do not add much or anything to the plot, so I have to kill them off. And sometimes I leave stuff out that needs to be there and it can be difficult to find a place to impart the information needed during edits. I might even have to add a character or two.

Each story is different, so of course, each one has its own idiosyncrasies and needed fixes. For some reason, I don’t hate editing like a lot of authors do. Which is a good thing. My average is about five passes for novels and sometimes even more for short stories because every detail in those needs to work extra hard.

All that said, I do pay a lot of attention to plot. I try to have interesting starts and finishes to each chapter and to the story as a whole. I enjoy making up twists and unusual situations. But for me, the characters drive the plot. They act and react. I need to put some hard or uncomfortable situations in front of them and see how they handle them.

Who else usually comes up with a character? I suspect it’s probably a tie between character and plot coming first, with setting coming in last. But if you choose setting first, I’d love to hear how that works for you. 

I hope everyone is doing okay staying inside most of the time and maybe getting lots of writing and reading done. I certainly am. Take care!

The Hands of Erik Larson

Back in February, before things went horribly, horribly wrong, I was sitting in the auditorium of a North Carolina university, amid a crowd of about 400 people. Remember those days? Wait—it gets worse. It was an audience filled with book lovers.

They had come that night to hear the author Erik Larson speak about his latest book, The Splendid and the Vile, about the leadership of Winston Churchill during the Blitz of 1940-1941. Larson, as you probably know, is the acclaimed, bestselling author of numerous works of narrative nonfiction, probably most famously The Devil in the White City, but also Isaac’s Storm, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, and so on.

Erik Larson in conversation with Denise Kiernan.

Narrative nonfiction is modern book publishing code for “nonfiction that doesn’t bore you.” Larson is arguably the form’s most famous current practitioner. I once listened to an editor at a Big Five house assert that Larson invented the technique, and that everyone else who did it today was merely copying him. We were in a publishing office at the time, and I half-expected author David McCullough to leap out from behind a potted palm and gut this person with a Revolutionary War-era bayonet, if the ghost of Evan S. Connell didn’t get there first, wielding General Custer’s firearm.

When I studied journalism in college, my professors sang the praises of such New Journalism writers such as Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Jimmy Breslin—writers who were reporters first, yet used the techniques of fiction to make their true stories read as engagingly as made-up ones. I admired all those writers when I was in my late teens, and even today I never tire of hearing how they organize their information.

That’s why I was there to hear Larson. Well, that’s not precisely true. My wife, Denise Kiernan, an acclaimed, bestselling narrative nonfictioneer herself, was interviewing Larson that night, and she insisted that a) I attend, b) sit in the front row, and c) take lots of pictures. In our small city, Denise does a lot of “in conversations with” various authors, and as a result I’ve become the world’s worst photographer of book events. In my defense, authors hardly move when speaking about books, so how can we expect the resulting photos to be dramatic? I happily found that Larson does love to gesture. Look at those hands!

Some takeaways from that night, and from his book, which I’m currently reading.

• Unlike novels, nonfiction books are sold on the basis of a book proposal, which can run anywhere from 25 to 100 pages. This is primarily a sales document, meant to convince editors to act now! and buy the book already! With 9 million books sold worldwide, Larson can now probably get a book deal on the basis of a 30-second phone call to his editor. But he insists on writing a full proposal, to be absolutely certain the book he’s proposing has a beginning, middle, and end.
• Just before Larson's The Devil in the White City was published in 2003, Larson was absolutely convinced that his career was over. Why? He didn't think people would like/understand/appreciate the new book because there was no true link between the two different components of the story. That is, on one hand you had the diabolical machinations of Herman Webster Mudgett (aka H.H. Holmes), a serial killer. On the other hand you had the grandeur, innocence, and raw American promise of the 1893 World's Fair. Both true-life stories happened at the same time in Chicago. Larson thought they would make a good combo, but he was worried that readers (and perhaps critics) wouldn't accept the premise of a story that leaped between the two. He needn't have worried. So far as I'm able to determine, that book remained on the New York Times bestseller list for at least 366 weeks.
• Over the years, Larson has developed a sixth sense about the telling details that he and lay readers love. Just as we learned in The Devil in the White City that the Ferris Wheel, which first debuted at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago had “consumed 28,416 pounds of bolts in its assembly,” we learn that Churchill—at heart a government employee whose personal income did not permit him to spend extravagantly on alcohol for his guests—nevertheless ensured that Chequers, the government-funded estate he used for his weekend retreats, was in turn amply stocked at government expense. One liquor order, Larson tells us, consisted of 36 bottles of Amontillado, 36 bottles of white wine, 36 bottles of Fonseca port, 36 bottles of claret, 24 bottles of whiskey, 12 bottles of brandy, and 36 bottles of champagne. The rules imposed by the British government were that Churchill could only serve this booze to foreign dignitaries, and his staff had to keep strict details on who had consumed what. Records would be audited every six months. 
• Speaking of big numbers: In the history of WWII literature, there have been approximately 18 quintillion books written about Churchill. To ensure that he was coming up with something fresh about the man, Larson initially limited himself to reading only a few biographies about Churchill. Then he carefully set aside those volumes, and dug into the archives firsthand to find “his”—that is, Larson’s—Churchill.

• When he’s researching in archives, Larson will photograph records, if permitted, with his smartphone. Images of primary sources, especially letters written in a spidery hand in fountain pen ink, are often hard on the eyes. But digital images can be later adjusted on a computer, shifting, say, the color contrast, and thus making them easier to read.
• Before he writes, Larson spends countless hours slotting all the dates of each piece of data—official reports, personal letters, etc.—he’s found into a timeline of sorts that allows him to craft more dramatic scenes. Thus: When Churchill was here doing this, his daughter was here doing that. Those timelines might run 80 pages in length. 
• The writer in me especially loved reading how Churchill insisted his underlings learn to write better reports. Quoting from the book: 

    “Let us have an end to phrases such as these,” [Churchill] wrote, and quoted two offenders:
    “It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations…”
    “Consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect…”
    He wrote: “Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.”
    The resulting prose, he wrote, “may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officialese jargon. But the saving of time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clear thinking.”

• Lastly, Larson observes that Churchill’s wartime speeches to the British public adhered strictly to a kind of formula. First, he transparently laid out the dilemma all Britons were facing in clear, unvarnished terms. Then he enumerated reasons for hope, reasons for citizens to keep fighting the good fight, and why their efforts might actually turn the tide. And he always closed with a memorable, rhetorical flourish that stirred the hearts of all listeners and moved them to action.

Hearing Larson speak of this, and later reading his descriptions of Churchill’s speeches in the book, moved me deeply and left me longing for such a leader, should such dark times ever leap to the fore again.

---

Postscript:

A few nights after we last saw Larson, he texted my wife to say that the remainder of his book tour had been canceled, as had the tours of so many authors. Larson's book still shot to No. 1 on the NY Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction, as many of his previous books had, but the independent bookstores that were planning to host him no doubt lost out on many of those sales. This is the current crisis facing countless authors and bookstores.

To that end, my wife is on the lookout for ways to conduct her previously scheduled "in conversation" book events virtually. What software are people using to do this effectively? We've heard people sing the praises of everything from FB Live to Zoom to Crowdcast, and so on. Kindly let me know your experiences in the comments. Be well, and take care of yourselves.

Passing the Time

I've seen a lot of memes about how Isaac Newton discovered calculus while he (and everyone else) was under quarantine for plague, and how William Shakespeare wrote the poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.  In other words, get off your butt and do something with all this free time!

To which I answer, what free time?  I'm still writing blogs, writing stories, keeping up with friends, paperwork for Alternatives to Violence Project Sioux Falls, writing (with the permission of prison authorities) to the inmates, keeping up with the latest COVID-19 statistics, a daily walk, and then there's laundry, constant reading, making face masks and other survival kit, and the weekly foray to find food and other necessities.  I suppose I could also clean the house a little bit, but let's not go too far.  It might break into my reading.  And at night - a girl's gotta have some fun - there's Netflix!

Meanwhile, let's talk about our reading habits in time of worldwide pandemic.

Some people are reading Albert Camus' The Plague, and I tried, I really tried, to re-read it, but it was just too damned depressing.  On the other hand, Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, is a real nail-biter, but also has a lot of mordant humor to it.  (Which is only what you would expect from the author of Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe.)  The descriptions of "doctors" and treatment alone is enough to make every Monty Python movie look underdone and insipid.

BTW, every day for the last two months I've included the daily COVID-19 statistics in my journal, because (1) I'm an historian and (2) I read Defoe's Journal years ago, and one of the things that always stood out to me were the "daily bills of mortality".  I believe in maintaining the tradition.  In the immortal words of Mr. Defoe, "The bills were simply frightful." 

Meanwhile, if you really want good literature about epidemics, you can't go wrong with the Victorians.  They knew how to write a cracking good yarn, and wallowed in sickbed and deathbed scenes, and all the accompanying pathos and tears, as well as tender moments of love-making on the precipice.  Plus they're long novels.  Like a mini-series, you can binge for quite a while.

Charles Dickens, Bleak House.  - Smallpox.  Besides being the most bitter satire of the legal system, bureaucracy, and greed that's ever been written, some of the major plot twists depend on a smallpox epidemic.  While I - like many others - find our heroine Esther Summerson almost nauseatingly sweet and self-deprecating (it doesn't help that she narrates much of it), there are enough other characters to make this a great novel.  One of them, Harold Skimpole (supposedly based on the real life poet Leigh Hunt), who is a masterpiece:  free of all the duties and accountabilities of life.

"I covet nothing," said Mr. Skimpole in the same light way. "Possession is nothing to me. Here is my friend Jarndyce's excellent house. I feel obliged to him for possessing it. I can sketch it and alter it. I can set it to music. When I am here, I have sufficient possession of it and have neither trouble, cost, nor responsibility... It's only you, the generous creatures, whom I envy. I envy you your power of doing what you do. It is what I should revel in myself. I don't feel any vulgar gratitude to you. I almost feel as if YOU ought to be grateful to ME for giving you the opportunity of enjoying the luxury of generosity. I know you like it. For anything I can tell, I may have come into the world expressly for the purpose of increasing your stock of happiness. I may have been born to be a benefactor to you by sometimes giving you an opportunity of assisting me in my little perplexities. Why should I regret my incapacity for details and worldly affairs when it leads to such pleasant consequences? I don't regret it therefore."  

Who among us has not met a Mr. Skimpole?  And what a hard lesson it is when the Mr. Skimpole does to us or someone we love what he does to Richard Carstairs - bleeding him dry of every penny - and to the poor boy Jo, dying of smallpox:  "You had better turn him out." And when Mr. Jarndyce will not turn him out, but nurse him, Skimpole - we find out later - takes a bribe and turns Jo over to the man sent to find and kill the boy.  And no one kills Skimpole!  Bleak House is worth the reading just for the portrait of Skimpole, the ultimate conman.

Charlotte Yonge, The Trial.  - Scarlet fever (an outgrowth of strep throat) combined with typhus (lice) spreads through the village in the opening chapters, killing tons of people.  In the aftermath, one of the local doctors' families has lost the parents, leaving the oldest son (also a physician) in charge of his 4 siblings.  Unfortunately, Henry Ward is of the pompous ass school of Victorian pater familias, and the conflict between him and his younger brother explodes into violence.  Leonard takes off and goes to work for an old reprobate who's a distant relative.  Old reprobate is killed.  Leonard's arrested and tried, and Henry takes his sisters and leaves for America, where they move to a swampy, disease-filled settlement (that should be named Eden after Martin Chuzzlewit).  What could possibly go wrong?  Especially after Henry leaves his sisters in the settlement to go be a doctor in the Civil War?  Who will rescue them?  What will happen to Leonard?  What does Sir Walter Scott's Marmion have to do with anything?  (BTW - this novel is a sequence to her The Daisy Chain, both of them favorites of C. S. Lewis.)


Harriet Martineau, Deerbrook.  - Among the earliest Victorian novels (1839), the real plot is about Dr. Hope, who marries one sister while being in [unrequited] love with the other, and how that works out.  About mid-way through the novel, either cholera or typhoid ravage through a town, causing mass deaths and change.  This was the only novel Martineau ever wrote - she was famous for her political economic theories, which she put forward in a series of surprisingly well-written Illustrations on Political Economy.  Deerbrook doesn't have much on political economy:  but it does have a lot of authorial musings about hopeless love, what women should do with their lives, and poverty.  Plus a truly evil neighbor who will do anything - ANYTHING - to prevent her brother from marrying the object of Dr.  Hope's true love.

Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth.  - Ruth is a fallen woman, but pure of heart, who redeems herself  by nursing her seducer during a typhus epidemic.


But, if you're tired of morality and uplifting thoughts, or even thoughts about death at all, why not go further back and dig out a copy of Boccaccio's Decameron Tales?  Ten young people (7 women, 3 men) flee plague-stricken Florence and go out in the countryside (yes, they're young; yes, they have money; yes, they have servants; think all the New Yorkers who fled to the Hamptons), where every day they eat and drink and sit out in the garden, each one telling a tale.



They are almost all tales of love, trade (they're from Florence, and they're all merchants' children) many bawdy, most surprisingly (?) anti-clerical (in a time when there was no alternative to The Church), some tragic, most witty, and very, very, very entertaining.  Most are very old, retold by Boccaccio for his modern audience (everything was modern once upon a time).  And - if you're ever short of a plot, you could do worse than browse through The Decameron.  (Or Marguerite de Navarre's Heptameron, which often skewered her contemporaries...)

And let's not forget Chaucer, who lifted a number of his Canterbury Tales from The Decameron, so why not read that, too?  Read about Chanticleer and Pertelote (The Nun's Priest's Tale), The Wife of Bath's Tale ("Alas that ever love was sin!"), the Cook - too drunk to tell his tale; the Knight's Tale (a classic tale of chivalrous love), and the battling Reeve and Miller (whose tales show a miller and a reeve, respectively, being bamboozled and cuckolded).  And on and on and on:

Thus swyved was the carpenteres wyf,
For al his keping and his Ialousye;
And Absolon hath kist hir nether yë;
And Nicholas is scalded in the toute.
This tale is doon, and god save al the route!

- The Miller's Tale

All of these and more are available for free at Gutenberg! (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page).

And most are available for darn near free on Kindle and Nook.

Prodigal Son

Here's a binge candidate I wasn't sure about, but after watching the pilot season, a couple of which I missed the first time around, I'm down with it. Miami Vice.

The show went on the air in 1984, but it didn't crack the Nielsen top thirty until the second season, which was arguably its most influential. After that, NBC began to screw around with its scheduling, and audience numbers fell off. The fifth-season finale drew 22 million viewers.

Watching it thirty-five years later is somewhat of a mixed bag. Certain aspects date badly. Not so much the fashions, as in the clothes, but the fashion of narrative tropes. (There is the matter of Marty Castillo - Edward James Olmos - wearing ties that are less than an inch wide, but that's very much in character.) More problematic is the predictability, that morally compromised good guys are unlikely to survive an episode, for example, or that any fleeting romantic interest is clearly doomed. And why are Trudy and Gina always going undercover as hookers, not even once in a while as, say, lawyers?  

On the other hand, once you re-acclimate to the rhythm and conventions of the series, you find yourself moving to some familiar dance steps. You forget that the color palette was a real departure, back then, the sun-bleached stuccoes and desaturated pastels during daylight, and the heavy, deep, silken darkness of night, streetlights a hot, retinal glare. The look is a character. That, and of course the soundtrack. A little Phil Collins goes a long way, but the use of music bridges as structural was transformative.

Granted, you're shooting as many as two dozen episodes a season, they're gonna be uneven. Some of them are, to be generous, no better than pot-boilers. And then, just when your patience is running low, they serve up an episode like "The Maze" (S1, Ep18), which demonstrates how strong the show can be, without its aggravations. The other thing this particular episode points up is that Philip Michael Thomas, who I always thought was the weakest link, is a lot better than you remember, or gave him credit for. "Evan" (S1, Ep22), also from the first season, has a showcase of a scene - as written and acted - between Tubbs and Crockett, that allows Don Johnson to take all the air out of the room with unexpected discipline: the guy's got serious chops.

The idea that Miami Vice was a game-changer is part of its mystique, and it was used to promote it at the time. Was it all that different? If you compare it to Hawaii Five-O or Mannix, or even Hill Street Blues, you'd have to say yes, because Miami Vice used a less linear narrative. It also moved the goalposts for Standards and Practices, for content, and what followed. It's hard to imagine Wiseguy getting past the network censors, if Miami Vice hadn't come first.

I don't want to stake too broad a claim. American commercial broadcast television has never been known for daring, and cable has changed the environment entirely. Not necessarily for the better. The primary instinct for the lowest common denominator, for audience share, is still dominant. But in a landscape that was often vapid and inauthentic, not to mention technically primitive (stuck following the restrictions of a three-camera set-up, like the soaps, establishing shot, close-up, reverse), the surface tension, the urgency, the angles and the edits, the information overload, gave the show an invigorating edge.

In retrospect, it's probably fair to say that we get the TV we deserve. There was in fact a Golden Age, with scripts by Rod Serling and Paddy Chayevsky, directors like John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn, and a huge stable of actors. But let's be honest, plenty of that live drama was crap. There was at the time, though, a kind of free-for-all, an open market for programing. Locals were by and large network affiliates, and they had to provide a lot of their own content.  Then the marketing challenge changed, and the Big Three dominated, and predictability and stagnation set in. I'd guess it lasted from the late 1950's to the middle of the 1970's, but that's also when PBS got legs. As the market fragmented, with UHF and then cable, the audience became more directly engaged. When there was no selection, and only three choices, ratings depended on audience fatigue, or indifference. The yardstick for the broadcast was least offensive - you didn't have to like what you were watching, but you liked whatever else was on less. It made for homogenized material. As a sort of object lesson, a show like Miami Vice could be seen as emblematic. It came along when we needed it.