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  Oh, man, sometimes I am just amazed by my own cleverness, and by my modesty, too, of course. You see that headline up above? It would take a regular Leonardo DaVinci to... oh, wait, you figured it out? Yeah, it's kind of a dumb gimmick, and I guess that proves that I'm not above dumb gimmicks.

  But I do write backwards. For the very literal-minded, I don't mean that I... no... no one thinks that I mean it yllaretil. Here's what I mean: let's say I have a scene, or a character trait I particularly want to have in my book. In Secret Spy (still the working title), for example, I wanted the main character, Terrence Tillberry, to be munching a Hostess fruit pie.

I will digress and explain why I wanted this: First, the character on whom Tillberry is based was a real FBI agent. However, all I really know about him is that he had a girlfriend who was a KGB operative, and that he--and this is true--ate donuts and other junk food every day. His boss described him as "lunchie." I don't know if he ate Hostess products or not. I, however, DID eat Hostess fruit pies every day for lunch when I was a freshman in high school. They're repulsive to me now, but I thought I could bring credible sensory detail to the myriad pleasures of consuming them.

Okay, so I have Tillberry eating a cherry-flavored Hostess fruit pie. Great! But then I started to ask, "Why?" This ultimately developed into an entire back story about Terrence as a young boy: When he was about to start seventh grade, he felt very insecure. He confided in his beloved Uncle Martin, who counseled him to start lifting weights. Martin was also a Special Agent for the FBI, and because of Uncle Martin's example, Terrence is inspired to become and FBI agent himself.

But why, I asked, did he start eating Hostess products? Well, how about if he had an aversion to going to lunch? Why would that happen? Well, what if there was a particularly traumatic event that happened in the FBI dining room? What would have happened? Well, how about if he is embarrassed for some reason? Who would embarrass him? His boss might embarrass him. What would his boss do or say to embarrass him? His boss might ridicule him. What would his boss ridicule him for? How about if his boss accuses him of being the beneficiary of favoritism? Remember, Terrence's Uncle Martin was in the FBI.

As you can see--and if you can't, I'll just tell you--the entire process of developing Terrence's story was one of asking questions, and then answering them, and it all started with "Why would an FBI agent eat a Hostess fruit pie?" Each question prompted multiple answers, and more questions, and as each question was asked and answered, Terrence got more real, and more interesting.

The novelist John Rechy, under whom I studied at USC's Master of Professional Writing program, said that "writers ask questions, and get answers." It's really as simple as that, and (drumroll for the approaching irony) as complex. That is, the bigger the question, the deeper the answer in terms of how it will influence your characters, their motivations, and the plot of the book itself. My first novel, Echo Valley, really started because I wanted to have a scene in which Tom Huttle, the protagonist, emerges, dressed in tin foil, from the back of a burning garbage truck that has just flown through the air. Now, this was a somewhat more difficult question to answer than, "Why would an FBI agent eat a Hostess fruit pie?" However, it led to the same type of question-and-answer sequence, and in ways far too complex to explain right now, became the spine of the entire plot of Echo Valley, which is about Tom Huttle's misadventures as he writes a book called Garbage.

So, as for the advice portion of our program: if you have a scene that springs to mind, by all means, write it! You may not know precisely where it might ultimately fit in your book, and perhaps you don't know what it means. That's okay. Ask yourself, and then answer the question.

Oh, by the way, in a craven effort to draw readers to this blog, I'll always put nude in the labels field. I have nothing against nudity, by the way, though typically don't practice it in a public setting. Now I can put public nudity in the labels field, too. I am that diabolical.

Ferpectionism

The rewrite stretches on. Just when I think I have, at last, trimmed, sharpened, modified, deepened, and adjusted every character, scene, conflict, and theme, I find... something that's out of place: a clunky description, an awkward transition, a bit of stilted or unrealistic dialog, a scene that just doesn't play. I fix them, and move on to the next part, which I thought was perfect, only to find that it, too, needs changes.

At this point, it feels as though the rewrite will take forever. Every time I read the manuscript, I find something else that displeases me. Lines that in earlier drafts made me laugh now fall flat. This is one of the hazards, of course, of writing comedy. Comedy is, by definition, surprise. In fact, the best description of humor I ever read is this: Surprise without promise or threat.

Well, nothing in this manuscript surprises me anymore, which... isn't any surprise, as I have read the manuscript dozens of times. So, I have to trust that the positive responses of my few readers--all of them intelligent, perceptive, and helpful--were genuine at the time, and know that I shouldn't mess with what amused, intrigued, or excited them. For the rest, I have to trust myself.

On the subject of rewriting, my wonderful writing teacher, the late, great, and much beloved Paul Gillette, said, "At some point, you've got to say, 'This is the quiche of the day.'" I guess that point has been reached when change would make the story different, but not necessarily better. Naturally, every significant change resonates throughout the manuscript. You give a character a different goal, and every thought, every line of dialog, is affected. In other words, there is a point, and I believe I am close to it, when the manuscript is good enough.

There is no such thing as ferpection, in other words. Mortals, and writers, can aspire to it, but only God and F. Scott Fitzgerald can attain it.

The Best Things

As they say, the best things in life are free, like butterflies or dandelions, or... I know, Echo Valley and Deadlines!

Kindle Select is a Kindle program that lets the author give away books as a promotion. I listed Echo Valley and Deadlines. I haven't yet figured out what the actual benefit of it is for the writers to give away their work, though I can see the appeal for readers. Free books? Okay.

I suppose the point for writers is to generate interest and, one hopes, reviews, which, the the benevolent circle of commerce, lead to sales, more reviews, ad infinitum.

I am so far at Step One: Give Away Books. I was delighted to see that both books posted some pretty healthy numbers, meaning that they now reside collectively on some 650 - 700 Kindles from the U.S. to Germany.  That's cool. I hope the people enjoy them.

But what does does it mean that people have downloaded my books for free? That's hard to say. For one, it says that the covers were eye-catching. So, for that, I thank Barbara Morgenroth for Deadlines, and my son, Drew, for Echo Valley.

That people downloaded the titles must also mean that the descriptions made them sound interesting. I'll take almost all the credit for that, except Barbara again gave me good advice as to the blurb for Deadlines.

So, we have answered a couple of crucial questions in the marketplace of ideas: namely, that based on the cover and the descriptions, people are willing to take a few seconds to download the books. But the question remains as to how they value them, or whether they value them. That's a trickier calculus.

I suppose that a Free Food day at the supermarket would draw enormous response. The shelves would be cleaned out in an hour. Does that mean people are hungrier? Maybe they just like free stuff. If that's so, are they more appreciative of the box of mac & cheese they paid $1.69 for, or the one that cost them nothing? Probably the one they paid for. However, maybe they'd never even try mac & cheese if it weren't free, and I guess that's what I'm hoping for. I'm hoping that people who downloaded my books, a) read them  and, b) review them and/ or tell their friends about them.

I mean, really, is that too much to ask? If you got a box of mac & cheese at the Free Food Giveaway, wouldn't it be a nice demonstration of gratitude to tell your friends, "Hey, I got some free mac & cheese, and it was really tasty. Go get some!"

Not to get moralistic about it, but I think it would be wasteful, to just just stash that mac & cheese in the cupboard and not appreciate that, any other time of the day, it had measurable value.

If I've lost you in this dense metaphor, let me return to the concrete and say that I hope that all of the people who downloaded Echo Valley and Deadlines read it and enjoy it, and that if they do they will take just a few minutes to write a review and tell their friends.

Now, for some reason I'm hungry. I wonder if there's anyplace giving away food for free?

Coincidence, and planning

In the final chapters of Secret Spy, many loose ends must be tied up. The best way to take care of one of them was for one of the character's cars to catch fire.

Others who read the chapter said that this felt like a handy coincidence. Cars do catch fire, it's true. But when that fire drives some of the narrative in a particular direction that is desirable for the writer, and doesn't seem rooted in the story, then the reader feels manipulated.

But this problem was easy to solve: all I needed to do was weave into earlier portions of the story some hint that the car has a problem: a funny smell, a small mechanical flaw. Then, when the fire occurs, the reader will look back on the previous "hints" that something was amiss, and think, "Oh, that makes perfect sense! I should have seen that coming."

That sense that they "should have seen it coming" is a very good one to instill in the reader because it makes them feel as though they are in able hands: you as the writer have been able to insert just enough information to assure that everything feels logical, but you haven't put in so much that the plot is predictable. "Oh! I knew that car was going to blow up 60 pages ago. Finally!"

I wonder if aversion to coincidence  has a certain resonance to real life, as indicated by sayings such as  "everything works out for the best," and "there is no such thing as a coincidence." Perhaps this sense that stories all cohere is an iteration of the human drive to look at the events in one's life--or, indeed, of history or civilization itself--and be able to say, "Yes, I can see the pattern now, and it all makes sense. It couldn't have happened any other way." Of course, "it" definitely could have happened in a multitude of "other ways." There are no guarantees in life at all. Maybe the ending of a book is like the ending of a life, except you get a do-over. How nice.

I suppose this might branch into discussion of multiple dimensions, or multiple universes, or an analysis of reality, but I'll leave that to much smarter people. My goal is to avoid writing plot points that just serve my purposes, and are not sufficiently rooted in the reality of the story.

Method & Madness

When you're writing, you want to feel free and creative; let loose to discover without restriction.
And it's good to have some systems in place to make it easier. I'm not talking about writing rules--that's a whole different subject--but organizational systems.

As the saying goes, "what gets measured, gets done." And while you can't measure creative content, or quality, or originality, you can certainly measure words, and that's what I do.

Here's my organization and tracking system for the novel.

1) I create a folder for the novel, of course, and sub-folders within it labeled Research, Correspondence, and Chapters, and Misc.

2) For each chapter, I create a separate a separate file, named thus: novel name - chapter 1. I don't keep every draft of every chapter, by the way. I just find it too cumbersome. However, if I excise a part that I think will fit elsewhere, or develop into another story, or which I simply like for one reason or another, I copy/paste that to a new file. I name it something, and save it in the Misc folder.

3) If I get input from other readers on that chapter, or if I do rewrites, I make the modifications in the individual chapter file.

4) At the end of the day, I save a copy of the chapter or chapters I've been working on, IN SEQUENCE, in a separate file that contains the entire manuscript of the book.  Its name is: novel name-complete.

5) Here's where the "what gets measured, gets done" notion comes into play. The last thing I do after a writing session is do a word count of the novel name-complete file.

6) I keep an Excel spreadsheet of my word count, which automatically calculates how many words I've written on a given day when I enter the starting point (where I ended the previous day, obviously) and the ending point.

When I started this with Secret Spy, I had written 34,000 words, and it was really great every day to watch my progress. I suppose if I were really clever I could turn the spread sheet into some groovy bar graphs or what have you, but of course that's not really the point. The point is to be able to watch your progress. My daily goal was 1,000 words, and except for one or two days I hit it, and perhaps 30 percent of the time I exceeded it. My top word count for a day was 3,677.

This system also plays into my rewriting strategy. Once your manuscript is complete, you have it in a single file. You know the beginning, the middle, and the end, and you also know your characters, themes, settings, and conflicts. I comb through the manuscript from the beginning to end, strengthening each component as I go along.

Brain sorting

Try this: remove the top of your skull. Using a scooping instrument--an ice cream scoop, large wooden spoon, or garden spade works well--remove a portion of your brain, and splat it on a piece of paper. It will be messy, but do your best to examine it objectively. If it isn't what you want, rearrange, remove, or otherwise modify the parts until it takes the shape you desire.

Yes, you got me: it's a metaphor for writing! Tricky, tricky me. I tell my students that writing the first draft is a process of seeing what you think; putting your brains on the page, and then looking at them to see what you think. This may not be true for everyone, but even if I have a pretty good idea what I'm going to write, it amounts to nothing until I've actually stared down the blank page and started.

As I am fond of saying, "Anything worth doing is worth doing badly," and it is never more true than with writing. If I have what I think is a good idea, I can think about it to an extent, but until I've written it, I don't really know the dimensions of it. I think it's generally a bad idea to talk about what you PLAN to write, because it removes the element of discovery. The story has been told, and nothing has been written.

People can attach all sorts of mystery and misery to writing, of course, and I have done my share of both. Back in the day, I had the now embarrassing and very romantic belief that I just had to write with a fountain pen. That lovely flow of ink onto paper felt like, well, it probably felt like blood; metaphorically, I was pouring my essence onto the page.

Being a newspaper reporter disabused me of this notion. The real trick was not connecting to the paper. It was connecting my butt to the chair, my fingers to the keyboard, and my thoughts to the page. Only then did I REALLY know what those thoughts were.

The mechanism translates the amorphous, non-linear thoughts in one's mind and the inchoate emotions in his heart to the linear and two-dimensional medium of the page or the computer screen remains a mystery to me, and a wonderful one at that. Maybe the physical process of typing, or of writing with a fountain pen, slows thought and feeling enough to grasp hold of them just a little. Once they're on the page, they're different, and I suppose that the process of rewriting is a matter of bringing those two-dimensional representations of thought and feeling into closer harmony, but I don't think it's entirely that.

The funny thing is, when I conceive of a project, and then go through the many revisions until it (hopefully) reaches a point that is satisfying to me and communicates what I want to communicate, it is often quite different from the way I imagined it at first. So, rewriting is in its own way thinking in its own right: an interplay between imagination and reality, in which both are stimulated, and both grow.

And the above is an example of exactly what I'm saying. I really had no idea I thought this until I wrote it down. Hmmmm. Well, for those of you who didn't read the whole thing and understand the metaphor, I suppose it's time to call 911 or fetch the sewing kit.

Getting back to rewriting

I left on some tangents back there, as is my wont, but don't despair, dear readers. I said I would write about rewriting, and intend to do just that.
First off, I am constantly rewriting. If I write a quick draft of a chapter or of a story, I comb through it many times before deeming it "finished." Of course, it's never finished, because, other than "The Great Gatsby," any piece of writing can be improved. But again, I digress. Before you can genuinely embark on a rewrite, you have to finish, because only then do you know the shape of your story, or your chapter, or your novel. When I'm nearing the end of a story, I invariably look to the beginning to figure out how to complete the story. Why? Because when you began the story, you implanted in the reader some questions. You made him or her curious. Throughout the story, you kept them curious. Otherwise, they wouldn't have bothered to read the book.
Finally, at the end, you have to answer the big question: what was this book about? What over-arching lesson did the character--and presumably the reader--learn? That, as I said in an earlier post, constitutes in my never-to-be-humble opinion, the theme. If you didn't implant a question pertaining to the theme in the beginning--because, for example, you devoted all your time to writing a clever opening sentence that got the plot going--then it's time to examine the beginning and see how you can implant that thematic question, too. Odds are, it's already there, and it's more a matter of refining it than inventing it. But you never know.
Once I have identified my over-arching question, and my theme, I go through the manuscript and strengthen it, perhaps moving components around, so that the revelation of the theme is as fresh to the reader as it is to the characters.
But rewriting, of course, is also about sharpening the characters.
In Secret Spy, Terrence Tillberry is an FBI agent who falls in love with a KGB agent in 1982 Los Angeles. He's based on a real guy, as I may have said, who was described by one detractor as "lunchy," because he--and this is true--always ate a lunch of pastries, etc., acquired from the local 7-11.
I expanded dramatically on this trait. Terrence Tillberry eats nothing but Hostess products: Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Ho-Hos and the like.
In that the FBI is a pretty selective organization, I had to justify why a guy with such little will power ever got hired. Nepotism seemed like a good idea, so I invented Terrence's Uncle Martin, who was an FBI agent, and put in a good word for Terrence.
In the rewrite, I took it deeper. Uncle Martin took Terrence under his wing when Terrence was a child. He was overweight, and afraid of being teased. Terrence confided in his uncle, who bought him a set of weights, and generously guided him in losing weight, and gaining confidence. The nepotism also brought a flavor to the book: Terrence was resented by his boss as a result of it.
I won't go into all the specifics of the story--I want you to buy the book when it's published--but the way this "character arc" (to employ a hackneyed term) evolved was fascinating to me. When I began the book, all I knew was that Terrence was fat, and slovenly. I used that as his identifier, and ultimately it expanded to really define and humanize him. He became a real and sympathetic character, who was neglected by his harsh father, and was teased. His kind Uncle Martin consoled and encouraged him, and inspired him to join the FBI. When he is "bullied" by his boss, due to the perceived nepotism, he reverts to his former self, seeking comfort in food.
First off, I never would have arrived at any of the revelations about Terrence's motivations and history had I not completed the story. Secondly, now that I know them, the understanding make every element of the story richer.
And it's still a comedy, folks, so don't think I've gone all mushy. Trust me, there are laughs aplenty. But I have to finish the rewrite before the public can really enjoy them.