Monday, May 30, 2005

People Watching and Richard Thompson

It’s Thursday, the 26th and I’m standing on a sidewalk in Nashville, waiting for the doors to open at the Bellcourt Theater. Located, oddly enough, on Bellcourt Avenue. Behind me is guy who is probably in his late fifties, early sixties and he looks just like a guy I know named Stan whom I used to work with at some dismal copy shop years ago.

A few minutes ago I had walked away from the ticket counter thrilled to have been able to score two tickets to the show, shown as sold out for days. I don’t know why they had tickets at the window and I don’t care. It meant that I did not have to walk up and down the line asking if someone had tickets to sell. It would have been my own fault – procrastination is one of those failings that you can truly only blame on yourself. If you can find the time or the inclination.

This guy, the one now standing in line behind me, asked where I got the tickets and I told him and he hurried to the counter. By the time he was done I was back in line with my wife and I called to him as he walked by, asking if he was able to get one too. Fake Stan took this as an invitation to sidle into the line next to me and ask if I’d been a Richard Thompson fan for a long time. I told him that, yes, I’d liked RT for a while and he proceeded to ask if I had been at the show in New York where Fairport Convention opened up for Fleetwood Mac. It’s important to note here that the show Fake Stan was referring to took place sometime in 1970 and so, depending on when, exactly, the show was, I may or may not have been born yet. The guy behind me, probably the same age as Fake Stan, had been at that show and the two struck up a line friendship. Which was fine by me because for one, I’m not that sociable and two, my lovely wife was in line with me and she’s much more fun to talk to.

We waited in line for about forty-five minutes before the doors opened and it gave me a lot of time to people watch. Even though I’m not the social sort, I still enjoy watching other people. It’s probably the writer in me. And it was quite a group to watch. The militant lesbians in front of us, one with armpits hairier than mine, the other with a pretty but severely pock-marked face. The two extraordinarily festive young college gentlemen about ten people back in line – one dressed nightclub cowboy chic, the other in something pulled from Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean wardrobe. Middle-aged couples, families with teenage children, young adults, even a grandparent or two, hearing aids good to go. Ordinary people with a strong hippie flavor – the aged rebels grown comfortable sometime during the Reagan administrations but still connecting with their roots. Best of all though was the Marlon Brando look-a-like who slid into the seat in front of me, accompanied by a younger lady friend. From what I could gather, he was the father of the one in the Billie Jean suit.

It may sound like a strange assortment of people for a single show but, when you think about Richard Thompson, it makes perfect sense. He’s been playing since the late sixties and is one of the most gifted guitarists in the world. And he has a talent for songwriting that others in the industry marvel at. I could fill a book with quotes from music greats about how seminal he has been to their careers. Greatness that spans the better part of forty years collects fans through every decade. Grandpa remembers the stuff from the Fairport Convention years, or when RT was cutting albums with his now estranged wife Linda, while the young kids heard some of his stuff on the local alt station and bought a few CDs to find out about this aging troubadour.

I think that to be a good writer, you have to be a good people-watcher. You need to have some understanding of what makes them tick – not just the ones you like to write about, but the ones who may make you uncomfortable, too. Want to know how to remedy the accusation that your characters are paper, that they are one dimensional and lifeless? Go to a Richard Thompson show and just watch. And enjoy the living, breathing organic thing that is the crowd. And then write.

The doors finally opened and we streamed in to see a great show. We were in the third row: perfect seats. But this is a post about people watching and so a commentary on the show (as great as it was) will have to wait.

Tuesday, May 24, 2005

A Sense of Place

Yesterday evening I had the good fortune to spend a few hours with a friend of mine whom I don’t get to see as often as I’d like. We met at a favorite spot of mine called The Flying Saucer. We sat out on the “porch”, sunk deep into leather couches and sampled a few foreign brews. It was well-spent time, catching up with my friend, commiserating about things that are common to most men in their mid to late thirties. And just enjoying the place.

The Saucer is one of those strange spots that, for lack of any fitting descriptor, seems more vivid than just about anywhere else. There is an atmosphere, a concreteness, an intangible thing that makes it more than the sum of its parts. If it was the setting for a story, it would be as important a literary element as the plot and the characters.

That’s one of the reasons that I like the southern authors so much. In their books the place is a character; the towns, the natural surroundings, the culture – each is described with something just short of anthropomorphism. You can see the love that the writer has for the place, itself. If you don’t quite get what I’m saying, pick up anything by Larry Brown.

When a writer has the ability to evoke a sense of place it pulls the reader deeper into the story, helping them to get their bearings in a landscape that exists in the mind of the author. When the reader is connected, they can follow the characters with greater confidence.

Good characters should be shaped by their surroundings, if they have any depth at all. To understand the place is to understand elements of the characters. To describe a Kansas farm suggests a great deal about Dorothy; do we really need to have the author tell us that she is bored? Can we not understand Kino and Juana’s quiet hope and resigned acceptance from Steinbeck’s crafting of La Paz?

I’ve often struggled with the literary charge of “show don’t tell” and I can’t think of a better tool that a strong sense of place to help me craft a good story while trusting the reader to follow along.

Readers: they’re smarter than you think.

Saturday, May 21, 2005

Lives of their own

Mike is sitting in the passenger seat of a ’79 Datsun, watching the empty Alaskan road open up before him. Driving the car is a woman named Helen who until twenty minutes ago had been a waitress in a fifties diner. Her young son has the backseat to himself.

And they are all running, even though Mike is the only one who knows what, exactly, from.

Welcome to a scene from my newest book – the scene that almost wasn’t.

As a general rule (broken on occasion with usually satisfactory results) I do no not outline a book before I write it. I start with a general idea, a bare bones story with a good character or two. Then I run with it. In this case Mike was supposed to have been a minor character – someone whose only purpose was to get the important characters to where they were supposed to be, doing what I needed them to do. In fact, Mike was supposed to die very early on.

But something happened as I wrote for Mike, as I fleshed out his character. I realized that it was Mike who was the main character, the person who would hold the book together, and who will probably change more than any other character as the events of the story play themselves out. Right now, I couldn’t imagine this book without Mike as the lead and I’m satisfied that I have not compromised my original vision for this book.

I’m not sure it would have worked out that way had I outlined the book. Mike would probably have been killed, we would never have met Helen and one of the best things I’ve ever written (a scene involving middle-aged mimes at the aforementioned fifties diner) would never have happened.

Am I advocating free-form writing in all cases for everyone? Nope. Like I said, I’ve written with a detailed outline and I’ve been pleased with the outcome. You simply have to trust that your creativity on the front end (the outline stage) leaves you with something that you can work with. But I think I like the open-ended, the possibilities, the undisciplined nature of my prose. I think it gives paper characters lives of their own – a depth I couldn’t have outlined.

Now I have a choice for Mike to make, one that has not been pre-recorded between staid Roman numerals.

  1. Do Mike and Helen make a run for Canada?

  2. Does Mike steal a more reliable car to aid in their getaway, dragging the innocent Helen into his seedy world?

  3. Does Mike freak out at his impulsive decision to take Helen and her son with him and drop her off somewhere safe?

  4. Do I kill Mike off, only later than I had first intended?

  5. Or…. Put anything you want here.

At this moment I don’t know the answer and I think I like the not knowing.


Wednesday, May 18, 2005

I Have Termites

Not me personally, of course. And, fortunately, not even in my home. Yet.

I have about 18 large and very heavy railroad ties that the provious owners of my home used to keep their dog from digging under the fence and getting into the neighbors' yards. I've been meaning to get rid of them since we moved in a few years ago and have recently discovered that termites (huge, well-organized colonies of them) have made them bases, ostensibly from which to launch coordinated assaults on my home. Like the Allies taking Okinawa, Midway, etc. to clear the way for an attack on Japan.

My friend Jerry came over and we loaded about half of them into his pickup and drove them down to a construction waste site a few miles away. During the process, I learned a few things:

  1. Jerry is much stronger than I am.

  2. Termites really do some impressive work - I mean, as much as I hate them as a homeowner, I can't help but admire their determination to eat through an entire railroad tie. That's like everyone in my subdivision trying to eat the surface area of Nashville.

  3. When walking backwards through the yard, try not to trip over the kiddie pool while holding something that weighs over two hundred pounds.

Much later in the evening I got to thinking about the last book I wrote, about how it had termites in it. I was having a hard time with the book, not really enjoying writing it (first time in the genre and learning that it's not my thing.) But I was deep into it, probably 50 pages or so from having it done. I was in the middle of a scene - an early climax, to resolve a mid-sized plot item. But as I was about to have my main character say something dramatic, or have someone take a shot at her (I write on the fly often so I hadn't quite figured out how the scene was going to end) I realized that the whole scene was a termite. It was sitting in the book, taking up space, weakening stronger sections before and after it.

OK, so take it out. The problem, though, was that I had devoted a number of scenes and characters to this plot point. Taking it (them) out would mean sending the story in a different direction, not to mention leaving me much farther away from finishing the book. And since I wasn't really enjoying writing this one anyway, I actually thought about leaving it alone.

But the book would have been weak, like the railroad ties, some of which were crumbling as we lugged them over and around yard hazards. In the end, I removed the termite, as well as a number of its cousins, and had to rework almost half the book.

I still didn't enjoy the process but I'm proud of the product. When someone reads it I can be pretty comfortable with the knowledge that there are no obvious insects weakening its structural integrity.

It's in the same neighborhood as something a writer friend of mine calls "killing your darlings". Maybe I'll write on that in a future post so check back with me.