Being Entitled

I shall start bravely, with a cliche: You can’t judge a book by its cover.

            But maybe you can judge it by its title. At least that's kind of what happens as a writer. 

Previously, I’ve started novels with a title, which provided a sort of guiding principle. But this latest novel began as a short story, which was itself based on an experience I had when I’d first arrived in L.A..

Bear with me as I digress: The year was 1981, and Anwar Sadat had recently been assassinated. Shortly after his death, the CIA—which hadn’t seen the assassination coming (what’s new?) took out full-page ads in major magazines—remember magazines?—seeking recruits to help fill what they had determined was an enormous intelligence gap.

I was in L.A., hanging out at The Improv, writing spec sitcom scripts, hoping to break into the industry, and getting nowhere. But I was also very interested in foreign affairs. I saw one of the CIA ads and thought, “You know, I might be a pretty good spy.” I’d been a reporter before the TV-writing bug bit me, and figured that a spy was really just a reporter who didn’t reveal that he was reporting. You had to be able to listen, which I’d always been told I was good at. You had to be able to write, which I could do well also. Besides, I liked to travel, and the job sounded exciting.

I wrote a letter to the CIA in which I spelled out my qualifications—not mentioning my forays into sitcom writing--and noted my alarm over the state of world affairs. It must have been a good letter because a few days later I received in the mail a letter from the CIA, inviting me in for an interview. If memory serves, the letter arrived in an unmarked envelope, but my imagination may be embellishing this particular detail.

I went for the interview, which was an utter failure. (Or was it? I could be lying. I may actually be a spy, you know…)

Anyway, I didn’t write this story for thirty years, but when I finally did write it I thought that it had the seeds of a longer tale, with this premise: “What if a struggling sitcom writer got a job at the CIA?”

The concept went through many iterations before crystallizing as this: What if a struggling sitcom writer gets a job for the CIA, but doesn’t even know he’s working for the CIA? I knew I had something interesting there, but it seemed a little far-fetched. How could you work for the CIA and not know it? A passing remark by my brother, Bruce, answered the question. Bruce had a friend who was in the CIA and wanted to join the civilian workforce. Unfortunately, his entire career had been basically classified, so he had no resume.

I thought, what if my character worked for a CIA cover company that was created to give legitimacy to CIA agents who are leaving the agency? This dovetailed with another experience of mine, which was writing for the employee magazines of a big insurance company. The CIA cover company, I decided, would be an insurance company. Retired and compromised CIA agents worked there, built up their resume, and then had the credentials to join the working world. My character would write for the company’s employee magazine, yet have no idea that his real employer was the CIA.

I really love this idea, and I won’t spoil the story any more other than to say that it turned out to be something more of a subplot than the actual plot of the book. But that is neither here nor there.

Remember, the previous several paragraphs were a digression. I started out talking about titles, so let me get back to that. As I wrote the book, which spooled out in many funny and unexpected ways, my working title, Secret Spy, became less and less accurate. My character, Tom Huttle (who is the central character in two other novels, Echo Valley and Huttle the Hero, both set many years later) was not a spy at all, secret or otherwise. He wasn’t the main character, either, much to my surprise.

Ultimately, the story does have a lot to do with spies, however. It’s just that Tom isn’t one of them. I needed a title that reflected what the story is really about. So, here is the description of the book: “Hollywood, 1982. For FBI Special Agent Terrence Tillberry, being in love with Petra Tarasova is wonderful, except for two things: First, she’s in the KGB. Second, she can’t stand him. It’s not like Terrence is much of a prize, either. He’s barely holding onto his job, and since his divorce, he’s ballooned in weight, thanks to a diet of Hostess fruit pies and Twinkies. And the financial strain of caring for his increasingly demented mother hasn’t helped him feel any less desperate. Luck seems to turn Terrence’s way when he discovers a secret list of CIA operatives. Treason might just be the way to win Petra’s heart, and maybe solve the rest of his problems, too.

But when the bodies start piling up, Terrence realizes that his problems are only just beginning.”

See what I mean about the Tom Huttle story being a subplot? He doesn’t even bear a mention in this description. Poor Tom. Not to worry, though. He has plenty to do. In any event, it was clear that Secret Spy would simply be an inappropriate title for this story. Trying to come up with a better title, I brainstormed, I asked my writing group, and generally worked myself into a later. In darker moments I thought, “What if I never come up with a title? What if I’ve written an entire book and it will languish forever because I can’t figure out what to call it?”

The thing is, titles have an enormous amount of work to do. They have to convey the tone of the story: in this case, funny. They have to give an idea of the central conflict. I dabbled with Spies in Love, but that’s the actual title of a recent nonfiction book about terrorists. Not funny. Ideally, the title also provides a sense of the setting, too. (Flashback: I wrote my first screenplay in 1981. It was a drama about a girl molested by her father, which at the time was a very taboo subject. I titled it—pretentiousness alert—A Bird and a Memory. How embarrassing. Needless to say, it went nowhere.)

I shared my perplexity with my pal, J.B. White, and told him the central conflicts of the story. “How about The Spy Who Loathed Me?”

That was it! The story is essentially about Terrence Tillberry’s increasingly desperate and self-destructive efforts to gain the affection of KGB agent Petra Tarasova. She doesn’t like him. Plus, being a play on the James Bond title “The Spy Who Loved me,” the title had a nice retro-homage feel to it.

Then came the cover. I wanted to use a Hostess fruit pie with a bite out of it, against the Soviet hammer and sickle. But my friend Barbara Morgenroth felt that, given the constraints of ebook thumbnails, such an image would be too busy. She made the a great cover using a battered hammer and sickle against a red background. The title, in an homage to the Saul Bass movie posters for the Hitchcock and Bond pictures of the 60s and 70s, is a nice retro typeface, which stands out against the red background.

You can see it at the left. Yes, it’s only a couple of square inches, which is no reflection on the acres of work and thought that went into it.

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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.