Mmmem'ries

I saw Cats this week. Believe it or don't, I had never seen it before. Long ago, in a previous life, I had tickets to see it, then something happened - I honestly can't remember but it was some kind of emergency and I had to go out of town. My ex-sister and brother-in-law used the tickets. They were good seats, too.

Here's the thing: I get it. I really do. Cats was completely original at the time. The costumes, the makeup, the operatic quality of the play, it was all so shiny and new. For a long time, musicals had consisted of dialogue, dialogue, song-and-dance, dialogue. Now it was singing, dancing, singing.

I also get that this play is based on a book of poems about cats. That darned T.S. Eliot. His wonderful and creative presentation of different kitty characters was possibly a harbinger of all those cute cat videos.

The problem as I watched it was that it almost has a storyline except that it doesn't. There's a big group of cats waiting for Old Deuteronomy to choose a cat to be reborn. That has the making of a plot. Who will he choose? Is there a danger of choosing the wrong cat? What if something prevents him from choosing? THAT'S a story.

Instead, we are introduced to all the cats in the poems. They give a little song and dance explanation of who they are, then they split, mostly. There's no indication that there's any cat other than Grizabella eligible to be reborn. And none of the cats seem to like her. What about Asparagus? He's old and got palsy (or perhaps "pawlsy"). Doesn't he deserve to climb the ladder?

It gets kind of exciting when Macavity shows up and kidnaps Old Deuteronomy, but I don't know why he kidnapped him, and he's found (or conjured up) pretty quickly by Mr. Mistoffelees, so the thrill dies before it even gets going.

By the end of the play, Grizabella has climbed the Stairway to Heaven, the cats are all doing their happy-crazy dance, and all is right in the cat world. It was okay, but I kept wondering, where were all the cats we'd been introduced to earlier? I liked the fat black cat with white spats, but he didn't even make the curtain call. What the hell, Andrew?

For those of you who love Cats, let me say that I loved the entertainment aspect of it all. The dancing was wonderful, the costumes and makeup well-done, the singing fine and good. At one point, I did voice my suspicions that Sir Webber wrote this musical while under the influence of something. I'm fairly sure I would think less about the plot and enjoy the antics more had I been under some influence. Alas, a single glass of cheap red wine did not do the trick.

The almost-but-not-quite plot did give me something to consider as a writer. When populating my stories, do not put the spotlight on characters that do not move the plot along. They might be fun or quirky or elicit some kind of response from the reader, but they are no less important than props. And props must all follow the law of Chekhov's gun.

Don't put them in the story if you're not going to use them.

They're not who you think they are

Yesterday, my buddy Drew wrote a post about his meeting with a hooker, back when he was working as a broadcast journalist. Yes, it was for a story, you crazy kids. You can read it here: http://crimefictioncollective.blogspot.com/2013/10/that-evening-i-spent-with-hooker.html. As it turns out, the prostitute he met was not the prostitute he thought he was going to meet. The cliché of the hardened woman, abused as a child and strung out on drugs, was replaced with a young girl who worried about being seen on camera because her mom watches the news.

This started me thinking about real people vs. writers' characters. I was at a read and critique at a writer's conference, listening to an excerpt. The writing was clearly strong, and the story had a certain level of intrigue. A young, naïve woman is taken captive and gang-raped by a group of men. They leave the house and she frees herself, finds some clothes, a little cash and...

Stops to heat up a can of soup and eat because she's hungry.

What? Maybe she is hungry, but why not grab a piece of something - bread, fruit, crackers - to go? Maybe she's so traumatized that she's not thinking clearly about getting out of the house before her attackers return. It's possible. But nothing communicated her motivation, and the action didn't seem related to the plot. The soup wasn't Chekhov's gun.

We argued with the writer for quite a while. I don't know if we ever changed his mind. It sure taught me a lesson, though.

A character can be anyone doing anything, but they have to make sense.

Perhaps a member of the family abused the young prostitute and is making money off her. Perhaps her family is struggling financially and she is trying to keep them off the street. There might be several ways to tell her story and make her believable. Since she really exists, there's got to be a way. (I'm sure Drew could find it.)

Perhaps the writer's young naïve woman really is so delirious she stops to heat soup. Perhaps she's not that naïve, she's a badass who sticks around to get revenge. Again, there might be several ways to make her actions understandable.

It's easy to create a character that everyone is familiar with. The geeky computer specialist. The Hispanic maid. The hooker with the heart of gold.

I'd like to suggest that it's just as easy to create a character than no one is expecting. The Hispanic computer specialist who is a body builder in her spare time. The college-educated white man who cleans hotel rooms. The housewife who moonlights as a call girl to feed her sex addiction and get paid for it. These people can exist in stories. The author only has to make us believe.

What are some of the characters you've read about (or seen on the screen) that turned a stereotype on its head?

Give me some great examples and I'll give you a free ebook.

The (not so) cool jerk

Some characters pop into my head as full-bodied people; I know them well and can write them without much fuss. Some people need me to get to know them better, so I find out their background, their preferences, and even their astrological signs.

Today I've spent the entire day with Bobby Fermino, one of the horse trainers in my new mystery. I don't like Bobby and I didn't want to spend time with him, but if he's going to be in the story, I have to know who he is.

I began by knowing that he is a manipulative, narcissistic jerk. He plays fast and loose with the rules. He steps on peoples' feelings without any empathy. He gets away with it because he wins.

But how did he get that way?

It was the hardest journaling I've ever done. I know some of you dabble in the Dark Art of Human Behavior. What do you think? Is this how Bobby got to be who he is?

I want to win. Doesn’t matter what at – I want to win at everything. It’s my parents’ fault. If they hadn’t spent so much time fawning over my big brother, I wouldn’t have had to try so hard. Tony could do no wrong. He was so shiny and perfect. I don’t get it.

I mean, for Pete’s sake, he always had his head stuck in a goddamned book. Yeah, he got the grades, but what fun is that? They gave him everything, just for a few goddamned A’s. A free ride to college, hell, a car to get there. Not just a car, a brand new car.

They were all impressed because Tony wanted to be like them. They're both doctors, but when I was six, Dad bought a little farm next to a big cattle spread. He and Mom thought we could 'stay close to the land' or some kind of weird shit like that.

School was boring. I couldn’t wait to get outa there. When Mom and Dad talked to me at all, it was to tell me I needed to apply myself. To what? Didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I spent most of my time out with the guys next door at the ranch. Watched them ride fast, rope cattle, then drink a few beers. That looked like fun.

As soon as I was old enough, I started riding and roping and drinking with them. They were good guys. Not book smart. Not worried about anything. That’s the way to be. When you’re not worried, you can figure out how to get ahead.

Tony graduated from high school and got a BMW to drive to college. I graduated from high school and got the boot. No car, no college, just an invitation out the door to the “real world” and a promise to take me back when I “straightened up”.

Don’t do me no favors.

Good thing I’d been playing the angles. I met a gal, Kelsey, whose parents owned a big spread in Arizona, near Phoenix. I managed to bullshit my way into starting their young horses which gave me some income while I was banging their daughter. She was a nice kid. So nice I married her when she said she was knocked up.

Turns out, she was a sly one. There was no baby, but at least now I was in the family so I could slide my chair up to big table.

Soon I had a real trainer shingle, Bobby Fermino, All Around and Performance Horses. I could take a mediocre horse and turn them into a champion. Okay, so sometimes I needed a little more than just ‘training.’ Better living through chemistry, as they say. And of course there are procedures.

The clients didn’t mind. Their horses were winning at shows. I was winning. Winning money at reining. Winning prestige and a name at pleasure events. I didn’t even have to advertise. My clients took out ads in the Journal featuring me and their expensive horses.

The key was to get clients who didn’t want to ride their own horses. None of these amateur riders for me. I worked with horses, not people. That way I didn’t have a lot of eyes scrutinizing what I do. I got results. Who cares how I did it?

Not that I don’t like people. The horse show world is a great place to meet folks… especially the female kind. Could I help it if these girls flirted with me? My wife was hounding me for kids now. I wasn’t in the mood to raise any brats, so there’d be no sex there. Besides, she was starting to look her age. I still needed an outlet for my urges, though.

Kelsey walked into the tack room one night to find me with one of my outlets, Brittany. Funny, I never saw her until Brittany had put on her panties and left. That Kelsey was a sharp one. She had pictures. Lots of pictures, and not just the action shots of me and Brittany. Pictures of my training methods.

So my methods are harsh, so what? They’re just horses, for Pete’s sake. The clients can’t care, they’re winning. But the AQHA would care. I’d be lucky to be suspended.

I was given choices. Get out of town or else. She didn’t even care if my crimes tainted her family’s name. “Daddy’s got enough money to shield us.” She tossed me the keys to the ranch foreman’s 15-year old truck.

“Daddy can buy him a new one. Send me an address and I’ll ship your clothes.”

Luck is a funny thing. My bad luck had put my ass on the road at two in the morning. Good luck had put me on the road at the exact time to snap a picture that would change my life.

 

BTW, no offense, but this is who I see when I picture Bobby Fermino:

 

 

Sorry, Guy.

 

What's my motivation?

I'm weepy today.

It could be that my hormone meds are no match for my mood swings. Or the post-vacation blues. Or a general letdown from the rigors of life. Here's what I do know:

1. The vacation was accompanied by a splash of stress. It was the first year without our friend, Jim, who passed away from pancreatic cancer last September. We all felt the loss in little things. A favorite food not eaten, or drink not taken, an empty chair at the dinner table. No one played the guitar.

In addition, the "kids" are barely that anymore. They are all in high school or college. Some of them couldn't come because they have jobs and obligations. Their independence is wonderful and exciting and frightening, because some of them are trying to spread their wings into dangerous winds. For those of us who've been there, done that, and have the scars, it's worrisome.

There were other forces at play as well, problems that run deep within other families and are not mine to discuss, but I feel the pain of them anyway.

2. Marcus is leaving this Saturday to return to college. Yes, it's his second year, and I was very excited to see him go the first time. This is different, mostly because he now has a car. When he was a freshman and needed to come home or go somewhere beyond Long Beach, I drove over and picked him up. It's 20 minutes from our house. Now, he no longer has to wait for me to drive into the dorm parking lot and pick him up.

I'm no longer needed.

Add to that his current plan, of finding work in Long Beach and getting an apartment over the summer (with a friend). At that point, it will feel like he's really gone.

So this afternoon, as I cruised through Facebook, I found myself looking up Jim Barnes' page and crying, in a quiet, tears-down-the-neck, way. No sobbing or heaving. But weeping. Weeping about everything.

Why am I sharing this?

Because, if I'd put that scene in a story, I think most readers would stop and say, "WTF?" Why is she crying? This makes no sense. If I layered in a bunch of reasons for an extended crying jag, I run the risk of boring the reader with backstory. Maybe, instead of sympathy, my character comes off as having a pity party. The readers would say, "Geez what an annoying character."

Then they'd stop reading.

The secret life of characters is a difficult sell, especially in genre fiction. Genre readers (I'm speaking in generalities here) want to move through a book quickly. They don't want simplistic characters but they want their motivations to be clear-cut. Anything that makes them stop and absorb a complex moment has to work. Or else.

Literary fiction is, of course, different. You can let your characters wallow, as long as it's well-written wallowing. To show a master at work, I've selected the last paragraph of W. Somerset Maugham's Christmas Holiday. It's a rather long paragraph and I'm kind of laughing at all the long sentences with semi-colons (secretly I'm loving them because I adore a good semi-colon), and don't worry that it will spoil it for you if you've always wanted to read Christmas Holiday and never got around to it. Trust me, you can still enjoy the book.

* * * * *

The clock struck twelve and they bade one another good-night. Charley went to his warm and comfortable room and began to undress, but suddenly he felt very tired and sank into an armchair. He thought he would have one more pipe before he went to bed. The evening that had just gone by was like innumerable others that he had passed, and none had ever seemed to him more cosy and more intimate; it was all charmingly familiar, in every particular it was exactly as he would have wished it to be; nothing could be, as it were, more stable and substantial; and yet, he could not for the life of him tell why, he had all the time been fretted by an insinuating notion that it was nothing but make-believe. It was like a pleasant parlour-game that grown-ups played to amuse children. And that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened - at this hour Lydia, her eyelids stained and her nipples painted, in her blue Turkish trousers and her blue turban, would be dancing at the Serial or, naked, lying mortified and cruelly exulting in her mortification, in the arms of a man she abhorred; at this hour Simon, his work at the office finished, would be walking about the emptying streets of the Left Bank, turning over in his morbid and tortured mind his monstrous schemes; at this hour Alexey and Eugenia, whom Charley had never seen but whom through Lydia he seemed to know so well that he was sure he would have recognized them if he met them in the street; Alexey, drunk, would be inveighing with maudlin tears against the depravity of his son, and Eugenia, sewing, sewing for dear life, would cry softly because life was so bitter; at this hour the two released convicts, with those staring eyes of theirs that seemed to be set in a gaze of horror at what they had seen, would be sitting, each with his glass of beer, in the smoky, dim cellar and there hidden amid the crowd feel themselves for a moment safe from the ever-present fear that someone watched them; and at this hour Robert Berger, over there, far away on the coast of South America, in the pink-and-white stripes of the prison garb, with the ugly straw hat on his shaven head, walking from the hospital on some errand, would cast his eyes across the wide expanse of sea and, weighing the chances of escape, think for a moment of Lydia with tolerant affection - and that nightmare from which he thought he had happily awakened had a fearful reality which rendered all else illusory. It was absurd, it was irrational, but that, all that, seemed to have a force, a dark significance, which made the life he shared with those three, his father, his mother, his sister, who were so near his heart, and the larger, decent yet humdrum life of the environment in which some blind chance had comfortably ensconced him, of no more moment than a shadow play. Patsy had asked him if he had had adventures in Paris and he had truthfully answered no. It was a fact that he had done nothing; his father thought he had had a devil of a time and was afraid he had contracted a venereal disease, and he hadn't even had a woman; only one thing had happened to him, it was rather curious when you came to think of it, and he didn't just then quite know what to do about it: the bottom had fallen out of his world.

* * * * *

Now then, if Mr. Maugham had told us Charley began to weep, we'd completely understand.

How about you - do you want to see this much depth in your characters, or should they just cry when they've stubbed their toe?

She can be taught

To use engineering terminology, when I wrote Freezer Burn, I spent about three months in design, then about four months writing. Most of my design time went into the plot. I was so worried about leaving clues hanging in the breeze and having the wrong person in the room when a bombshell was dropped. If you've read or watched any bad mysteries, you know what I'm talking about.

But the people... the people I knew. Apart from a few notes on their physical characteristics, I knew who they were, what they liked, where they lived. I did end up changing the killer halfway through writing, but basically, all I had to do was take these folks and plop them into the story.

I approached Hit or Missus in the same way, but it turned out completely different, for a number of reasons. One is that I was trying to make the crime uncomplicatedly complex, if that makes sense. Dale's comment, when he read Freezer Burn, was, "Peri needs a harder case to solve." So I wanted it to be clever without needing a Powerpoint presentation to explain it all. After months of thinking and writing and talking to people, my story outline still seemed shaky, but I went ahead, hoping the plot would be pulled out of the writing.

Somewhere in the middle of the book, I was writing a scene and realized it was boring. Peri is investigating, blah-blah-blah. Or maybe I was bored. It doesn't matter why I did it, but I hit Peri in the head with a golf club. At that point, I threw the outline away and went rogue.

The good/bad news was, my seat-o-the-pants writing exposed a fatal flaw: I hadn't really "met" my guest characters. Sure, I knew Peri, Skip, and Blanche. I even brought back Benny, due to popular demand. But the new men and women Peri was meeting were like paper dolls. It took me months to go back and figure these people out.

Months of re-writing. Months of doing what I should have done before I even started plotting. Gah.

I've started the third book (as yet untitled). It has a basic premise: what would happen if I burned down Benny's house? I began the book during NaNoWriMo and learned something very important: I can't write a book during NaNoWriMo. I got about 7500 words written and hit a wall. I needed more research, more confidence, a better idea of who done it and why. After finally writing several rambling essays on the original crime, I began putting the outline together. And yet...

What was I missing? Come on, class, let's say it all together:

Gayle hasn't met her guest stars yet.

So although I'm antsy to start writing the book, I need to go back and put the time into my people. I'm using Michele Scott's worksheet, "Interview With Your Character" to define the folks who'll be helping/sabotaging Peri in this story. Yes, even the dead people. BTW, I highly recommend these worksheets. Michele's a good storyteller who loves to help other writers. She loves horses, too, so naturally we've become friends.

The good news is, once I get all these ducks in a row, the writing will be a snap.

Writers, out there, does this sound familiar to anyone? Or am I doing it all wrong?

What a character

Before I tried writing an entire novel, I used to listen to authors talk about their characters as if they were real people, and I admit, I wanted to smile and nod while I slowly backed out of the room. I mean, at the very least they sounded a little too precious to hold a serious conversation. And some of them sounded plain old-fashioned nuts.

And then I wrote a novel. I began with good intentions and a basic plotline: a young, shy girl hits the road, grows up, and finds her spunkiness. It could be fun, or literary, or even literary fun.

I created a girl, Beth, who has a domineering mother, a libertine for a boyfriend, and an unsatisfying job. I thought these elements would naturally force her to leave town and allow her to blossom on the road. Except that Beth proved to be too passive. I had to practically burn down her house to get her out of town. I tried to get her anger up, to give her some righteous indignation over being micro-managed by her mother, ignored by her father, and casually cheated on by her boyfriend, but every time I tried to put words in her mouth, they sounded false. The only way her voice was true was when it was passive, denying that things were as bad as all that.

Once she hit the road, her car broke down in Amarillo (she was traveling from Illinois). My plan was for her to stop in a town I knew. I don't know Amarillo. I've visited there exactly once - my family drove into town at 10 p.m., got up the next day and visited the American Quarter Horse Museum, ate breakfast at Cracker Barrel and hit the road. I thought perhaps she could wrangle a different car and continue on the road. But Beth is no wrangler. She accepts whatever is offered, and what is offered is a waitressing job. So now I'm stuck in a strange city.

I kept trying to force Beth to grow a backbone, and leave Amarillo. But the words were forced, false, wasted. Instead of leaving for Taos at the end of the book, she falls in love with a cowboy, a character I hadn't even created when the book began.

It took me 90,000 words, but I finally learned my lesson. Your characters are real people, in that, once you set up their personality and their history and their basic parameters, there are physical laws you must obey in their actions and dialogue. Beth could not change as completely as I wanted her to, because she was shy and passive and damaged by her upbringing. A couple of weeks in Amarillo would not bring out her spunk.

This was a good lesson to learn when I started writing Freezer Burn. Benny Needles began life as a seedy, slimy, little man with no redemptive qualities. He hires Peri (my protagonist) to find his Dean Martin-autographed ice cube tray. I even toyed with making him a serial killer. But once he started interacting with Peri and the police, he took on a more human form. He became an OCD personality who is a rabid Dino fan. He was suddenly misunderstood, a social outcast who was basically a sweet guy. He may or may not have killed someone (not to spoil the plot), but he's not the sleazebag I envisioned. Seeing him evolve that way meant I had to re-visit the first part of the book to soften my description of him, and Peri's early responses to his requests.

But it was okay now. I was able to accept these characters as real people and adjust the story to their true natures.

For any of you who are writers - is this a common occurrence, or have you already slowly backed out of the room, nodding and smiling at me?