Dale E. Lehman's Blog: Lehman's Terms, page 7

Mayhem in the Garden

In the summer of 1992, I wrote a short story titled “The Planter of Flowers.” Memory of its origin has long since faded from my mind, but the date hints at a possible connection.

Also in the summer of 1992, my wife, children, and I traveled from our home–then in the Chicago suburb of Streamwood, Illinois–to Wounded Knee, South Dakota for the annual Lakota Baha’i Conference. A do-it-yourself conference organized by adherents of the Baha’i Faith living on the Pine Ridge Reservation–one of the poorest areas in the nation–it offered locals a chance to meet and learn with a diverse group of Baha’is without expense.

“The Planter of Flowers” has no obvious Lakota connection. There is one mention of a character who looks like he could be native American, but that’s coincidental. The real connection is Baha’i. I’ve often wanted to work Baha’i elements into my stories, but seldom succeed.  I can think of only three short stories where I’ve done so. If you knew what to look for, you’d find them hiding in my first two Howard County mysteries as well, and the next novel, Ice on the Bay, will include Baha’i characters. But given the number of stories I’ve written over the years, these are a paltry few, and this story is one of them.

I did try to sell the story, but by and large editors didn’t seem to get it. I later modified it, but still found some readers didn’t quite get it. I wonder if you will?

Let’s find out. Without further ado, here is “The Planter of Flowers.” Enjoy!

 

The Making of “True Death”

While The Fibonacci Murders began with a vague idea (see The Making of the Fibonacci Murders), True Death‘s origin was even more nebulous. I started with the title. Don’t ask where that came from. I have no clue. But it’s a neat title, no?

A title without a story, though, that’s rather a problem. Most titles reflect some key aspect of a story, such as the characters (MacBeth), the locale (The Martian Chronicles), primary events (The Fibonacci Murders), or key themes (Sense and Sensibility). Without a story, how can one devise a suitable title?

No matter. I had a neat title, obviously one that bespoke a theme. But what is true death? An author might choose from several interpretations, but at the time I had in mind a particular sense: death of the soul. As a Baha’i, I view a person’s physical death not as their destruction but merely as passage from one form of existence to another. Spiritual death, while not obliteration, distances us from our Creator. It harms us in a way physical death cannot.

But a theme isn’t a story. Most often, I discover themes as I write, so here I approached it exactly backwards. The opening scene, with a  broken man in a rocker on the porch of a run-down cabin, was in essence a statement of the theme, made while searching for the story:

The run cut into the base of the mountain, twisting and turning with the land, bubbling past old farms, past pine and spruce and deciduous trees waking from winter slumber, gurgling beneath small bridges on gravel roads, down past a mansion built by some retired executive looking to get away from it all, down through the gap between the mountain and its neighbor, down to join with the river just south of Centerville. A paved road kept the water company, winding through the mountains alongside it. Where the run entered the gap, splashing over a series of rock steps, an unpaved track slipped southward into the trees, climbed the slope, and ended at a small, run-down shack.

On the porch, a man in a scarred old bentwood rocker creaked back and forth, back and forth, his blue eyes directed at the treetops yet not focused on them. Few ever saw those eyes, but those who did frequently remarked how old they seemed compared to the body that hosted them. Vietnam veterans said he must have seen serious action in Afghanistan or Iraq; his eyes were that kind. Others speculated he had lost a wife or a child, or both. Not that anyone knew. He rarely came to Centerville, and then only to buy food. He arrived like a shadow, conducted his business, spoke to no one, and left like a faint breeze falling still. Whatever tragedy had befallen him, it seemed to have drained most of the life from him.

Had he talked to anyone, had anyone uttered such speculation, he would have shook his head. He was, in fact, already dead.

Now I had a character with no story, only a slight improvement. Fortunately, at about the same time a story presented itself. With True Death, I wanted to delve into the backgrounds of detectives Rick Peller, Corina Montufar, and Eric Dumas. In The Fibonacci Murders, I’d mentioned that Peller’s wife had died in an automobile accident four years previously. I realized I could build upon that by turning it into an unsolved hit-and-run. With that and the broken man from the first scene, I had sufficient material to spin a tale.

That’s how True Death began. Where all the twists and turns came from, well, that’s another story.

It Runs in the Family

My father passed away last night after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was 86 years old. I will miss him, but I’m glad that he could slip away peacefully and without the severe pain that so often accompanies cancer.

I’ve noticed as I’ve grown older that some of my father’s mannerisms lurk within me, popping out at unexpected moments. We have a similar sense of humor. Sometimes I’ll realize that what I’ve just said or done was what he would have said or done. And every so often I’ll get a look on my face that prompts my wife to say, “That’s your father’s look. Stop it!”

After I was grown and married, I learned that like me my father was a writer. He’d never had anything published, but he’d written poetry, fiction, and essays. Poetry and I don’t usually get along, but eventually I did have a chance to read some of his fiction. A devoted Christian, religion inspired most of his works. With the rise in digital publishing, he used a print-on-demand outfit to publish one of his novels. A second and probably better novel waited in the wings, but never made it to publication. I haven’t read it in its entirety yet, but I’m considering editing it and arranging for its publication.

One might, therefore, suspect that I got my love of storytelling from my father. But it runs even deeper. A “family story” written by one Wilshire Lehman, one of my distant uncles, details the great westward migration of the Lehman family. Yes, early in the 1800’s, my great-great-great grandfather Adam Lehman (I love to tell people I can trace my family back to Adam!) moved his family from the civilized environs of southeastern Ohio to the “wild west” of Mercer County, practically in Indiana, built a homestead, and in so doing laid the foundations for a story that over a century later would be recorded. Wilshire titled it, “And They Got There.” Decades ago, my father helped arrange the typing and distribution of the manuscript to interested family members, and later had it put into electronic form.

As part of the package, dad wrote a brief introduction to the work, in which he stated, “The Lehmans have always been storytellers.” He noted that Wilshire had, by his own admission, inserted some fictional material into the account in order to make it more interesting. This fascinates me, since my first efforts at storytelling predated any knowledge of such matters. I don’t know exactly how old I was, but I remember composing a very silly little tale when I was young, probably no older than seven. At that time, I didn’t even know how to spell the word “hawk.” (I inserted an “l” before the “w”.) As I grew, I continued to write fictional tales not out of a desire to become rich and famous but simply because I enjoy writing. Why should that be?

Whether nature or nuture I don’t know, but maybe a penchant for storytelling does, somehow, pass from one generation to the next. Other traits do. For example, “And They Got There” portrays Adam as an honest, hard-working man who a weakness: he worries about the unknown. When making plans, he hesitates if he can’t be sure of the outcome and must sometimes force himself to press on. On the surface, this sounds like one of Wilshire’s fictionalizations. The specifics may be. But the trait itself? I have to wonder, because I recognize that as one of my own characteristics: I, too, am prone to hesitation when outcomes are unclear.

So yes, many things may run in families, and storytelling just might be one of them.

The Making of “The Fibonacci Murders”

It began at a traffic light, a red light that stopped me on my way home from work one day. Minds often wander at such moments–at least mine does–and at that particular red light a thought came to me: it would be fun to write a mystery in which a mathematician plays a key role. Deservedly or not, mathematicians have a reputation for quirkiness. I could play that up to good effect.

Not a bad start! But it took two more years before I connected that character with a story. What took so long? Well . . .

Something like a decade earlier, I’d written a science fiction novel and started shopping it around. In those days I was an “aspiring writer,” a polite and encouraging term for a writer who hasn’t made a sale yet. I’d written oodles of short stories, mostly science fiction, but sold none of them. I had also written one longer work, a mystery just barely of novel length.  And then there was my magnum opus, the SF novel Jurek’s Legacy. My first full-length novel, it was arguably the best thing I’d written. I had high hopes of selling it, and set out to find an agent.

Although it may be hard to remember now, at that time there were just two kinds of book publishers. One, real publishers, carefully picked the works they would produce and paid advances and royalties to authors. The other, vanity presses, would produce anything somebody would pay them to produce. Real publishers pay the costs of book production. That’s why they’re so picky about what they produce and reject the vast majority of what they receive. Vanity presses produce just about anything, because they make their money off of writers, not books. As there are always a healthy number of desperate aspiring writers, vanity presses can always find customers.

But I was looking for an agent. I’d collected a few “thanks but no thanks” notes and one agonizingly near miss from an agent who said she loved my work but was closing her business to focus on other things. (Drat!) At just that moment, a fellow writer contacted me to say he’d signed on with an agent and encouraged me to submit my novel to her.  I did. End result? She turned out to be less an agent than a scam artist. She charged a modest up-front fee, then did nothing in return. When I began to press for my money back, she informed me she’d sold my novel, but when the contract arrived, it was from a vanity press.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that knife went in so deep the wound took nearly a decade to heal. I largely stopped writing fiction after that. Possibly I judged myself too harshly, but the words refused to come out right. I did write, but my efforts turned to nonfiction. I sold a couple of technical articles on software development, and later a pair of essays to Sky & Telescope. I contracted with About.com to write content on the Baha’i Faith, and after that venture folded I created a new site, Planet Baha’i, to continue that work. (PB had a good ten-year run before I retired it. It’s been resurrected as an occasional blog.) I was no longer an aspiring writer; I was a published author.

But a fiction writer? Not so much.

And so back to The Fibonacci Murders. Once I had both a character and a story–a series of murders based on the Fibonacci sequence–I got busy writing, and amazingly the result wasn’t half bad. Mathematician Tomio (Tom) Kaneko didn’t turn out as quirky as I’d originally envisioned, but you’ll find his genesis embedded in the first paragraph of the novel:

First I must state two things: I am a mathematician, and I am not crazy. I mention the first because it alone explains my involvement in the events that recently took place in Howard County, Maryland. Otherwise, I would have had no connection to them whatsoever and would have been spared injury. I mention the second for two reasons. First: strangeness is associated in the public mind with my profession, notwithstanding that relatively few mathematicians are odder than the average person. Second: it seems to me the tale I’m about to tell could only have been imagined by a lunatic. Indeed, there was a lunatic. But he was not I.

So there you have it. Where the story itself came from, how the detectives wandered in, and how they caught the culprit, well ,those are tales for another day.

Success and the Author

Success is a vague term. If you look it up in the dictionary, you’ll find something about favorable or desired outcomes, a measure of succeeding, or attaining certain things such as wealth or favor. Basically, success is a target one aims for, and it may be a fuzzy target.

Take my book signing this past weekend, for example. I sold six books and gave away a number of bookmarks, both to people who made purchases and to those who did not. It sounds rather meager. But was it a success?

To me, it was. I’m far from well-known. At previous events, I sold between two and four books. Six is a record! Moreover, one fellow I talked to lives on the west coast, so as I quipped to the store employees, I’m now a nationally-known author. (Truth be told, I already was because of previous sales, but it’s fun to say it.) I gained some additional experience with this kind of event and in talking to people about my work, including works in progress. And finally, I have a standing invitation to come back to the store for future events. Overall, that’s not too bad.

Here’s another sense in which I consider myself successful: most people who have read my novels seem to have enjoyed them, and some, by their own account, were blown away by them. Now, I don’t think of myself as being a great writer. At my best, I think I’ve done a fair job, and at my worse I think I’ll never get it right. But I like to think I can at least tell a pretty good story, and the majority of responses to my work so far seem to support that contention. To me that’s success, even on meager sales.

Not that I would mind greater sales. That would be commercial success. Maybe someday that will happen, although it will take a lot of work. Writing is the easy part of being a writer. Selling one’s writing, that’s the hard part, especially in today’s world where anyone can publish a book and so the market is flooded with works competing for attention. You might be surprised at how few copies a first novel released by a major publishing house has to sell to be considered a success, or indeed at how complicated it is to define success in that scenario.

But really, to me success in writing is less about sales than it is about sharing something with readers that they will enjoy. Sales are a mechanism for that sharing and possibly a metric for gauging that enjoyment, but they are in a sense secondary. Another way to put it is that success in writing is more about the giving than the getting.

Which may be a good statement about success in life generally.

A Hernia and a New Date

Soooooo . . . I’m going to have an operation to repair a hernia tomorrow morning. As a result, I’ve had to reschedule my book signing at Greetings & Readings in Hunt Valley, MD. The new date is Saturday, June 18, 2016 from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM. Just wanted to mention that. More later . . .

June 4th Book Signing

I’ll be at Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley, Maryland on June 4, 2016 from 1:00 PM to 2:30 PM signing copies of my new novel, True Death. I’ll also have copies of The Fibonacci Murders in case you missed it and want to pick up a copy. If you’re in the area, please stop by and say hello!

  

Typogorphical Errors

Over the years, I’ve joked that I need a t-shirt that reads, “I hate typogorphical errors!” The typo, as it is usually called, is the bane of writers. editors, and publishers everywhere, a stealthy creature that slinks into even the most carefully-checked works, causing pain, frustration, and mild terror. Consider the following egregious example I recently tripped over:

This excellent agreement convinced many scientists that the meteoroid dinosaur extinction theory first put forward by Alvarez and collaborators was correct. The ejecta fell exactly on the paleontological boundary, confirming that the impact occurred at the

However, the initial dating of both the crater and the iridium layer . . .

(Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, by Lisa Randall, p216)

And this in a work published by HarperCollins! I’m sure there were a few slapped foreheads when it was discovered. I had to show it to my wife, just so she wouldn’t feel so bad about the typos that have showed up in the books she’s edited.

The term “typographical error” originally referred to typesetting errors at the print shop, not errors that occurred in the writing or editing process. Most often, typos involved transposed letters or simply wrong letters. Later, with the advent of the typewriter, the term expanded to include miskeyed letters. (One that I’m constantly committing these days is the reversal of “i” and “o” in words ending in “ion.” Like statoin . . . err . . . station. I never used to do that. I don’t know why my fingers have picked up that particular quirk.)

In more recent times, with the computerization of just about everything in publishing, a typo can be letters miskeyed during writing or editing, errors that occur as a result of accepting changes entered by either the writer or the editor, or errors that occur during electronic typesetting and layout. The example shown above, in which the entire tail end of a sentence went AWOL, is most likely one of the latter.

Many people, myself included, have a sense that typos are becoming more common in published works. Indeed, it’s probably safe to say that those typos that mangle or eat entire sentences are a fairly modern invention. Although such things may have happened in the days of manual typesetting, they probably were rare. Today, not so much. So why does it happen now? The usual explanation is laziness. Writers and editors used to be a lot more careful and care a lot more about their product.

But I’m not so sure that’s true. The upswing in self-publishing certainly has resulted in a flood of unedited or under-edited works on the market, but that doesn’t explain missing sentences in works written by established authors and published by major publishing houses. Having sat in the publisher’s chair, having worked closely with my editor-wife both as a publisher and as a writer, I’ve gained some perspective on the matter.  It seems to me there are three issues:

Complexity. Publishing today involves computers from end to end. The author writes on a computer. The editor edits on a computer. Electronic document revisions are shuffled back and forth between author and editor. The edited manuscript is imported into publishing software, where typography and layout are handled not by the printer but by the publisher. The manuscript may be broken into a set of files by chapter, and those files collected into an ordered sequence. From this, proofs are generated (typically in PDF format) and sent to the printer. The printer may fiddle with the PDFs in some cases, but in a twist of historical and linguistic irony, printers don’t normally introduce typos today. The typos are already there by the time they get their hands on the production proofs. Ideally, at each step of the way the output is being inspected by the writer and the editor, but enter the next problem.
Overburdened human resources. Workers are under pressure to do more work faster than ever. Reviewing  an entire book in detail is time consuming and not a bit mind numbing, especially given that both author and editor have likely read the book several times each by the time production proofs are ready. Even authors get sick of their own books at that point! Moving quickly because they have to, numbed by repetition, and using processes prone to introducing new typos even as they fix old ones, maybe they spot all the errors and maybe they don’t. It’s not laziness, nor is it sloppiness per se. It’s just not easy, under these conditions, to eradicate every last error.
Typos are stealthy. I don’t know how else to put it. We’ve had the experience of training three sets of eyeballs on a proof, only to miss a few typos. You’d think that at least one out of three reviewers would spot any given error. But no. They sneak through anyway. How do they do that?

We all–writers, editors, publishers–hate typogorphical, er, typographical errors. Most of us, I’m sure, do our best to keep them at bay. Alas, it’s a constant battle, made no easier by the modern tools of the trade and the demands of the business.  And when they happen, we have little option but to sigh, cringe, wince, or maybe just laugh . . . and fix them in the next edition.

Without, we hope, introducing new ones!

 Header image courtesy http://ffffound.com.

Say What?

Dialogue is a central part of nearly every piece of fiction. Although it’s possible to write a story that has no dialogue–I can think of at least one that I wrote ages ago and another that had only one line of dialogue–that’s the exception rather than the rule. The ability to handle dialogue is therefore a key skill for every fiction writer.

You’d think it would be easy. After all, most of us spend a fair bit of time talking. Humans are a noisy species. How hard could it be to translate everyday talk into story dialogue? But it can be tricky. Dialogue is not conversation. Dialogue is conversation that has been cleaned up and sharpened to a particular purpose.

Read that again: dialogue is not conversation. You will find some writers who say that it is, but even they understand the difference, if you read what they have to say on the subject. If you recorded a conversation, you’d find something like this:

“Have you decided who you’re voting for yet?”

“Hey, these cookies are really good, did you make them?”

“No, I bought them at the store last week. They were, you know, on sale.”

(cough) “Yeah, well, Smith is an idiot and Jones can’t be trusted. I was , umm, talking last week . . .”

“I thought Smith made a lot of sense, I mean, about the budget. His budget. You know.”

“Um, but, I think he’s an idiot. His police ideas, plan, whatever. Did you hear that? God! I’m going to have another of these. These are great.”

“No, I didn’t, but I liked what he was saying about, oh, here, take the whole bag. You know?”

“I just think he’s a, well, idiot. Moron. Whatever.”

This may be conversation but it’s not good dialogue. To turn it into good dialogue, we’d have to eliminate the repetition and the umms and the you knows and anything else that is polluting the stream of words. While the aim is to make the dialogue sound like real conversation, in fact the impression given to the reader is partly illusion. Art often works this way: one conveys the impression of reality, but in a more orderly and structured way than reality presents itself.

Dialogue plays several roles in a story. Principally, it helps define characters and it serves the plot. No dialogue that fails to do one or the other should survive the editing process. If it doesn’t serve the story, it doesn’t belong. In the above, the cookie content may be deadwood, although it could perhaps serve character development if incorporated carefully.

At the same time, dialogue is not usually the right place to deliver background to the reader. A common mistake of aspiring writers is to put exposition into their character’s mouths. This doesn’t work because usually characters end up explaining to each other things that all of them already know. And that’s generally unrealistic. If John already knows that Mary earned her Ph.D. last year, she probably wouldn’t tell him that she did.

The words spoken by the characters should convey their personalities and backgrounds, meaning that different characters should sound different. Dialect and different modes of speech help to define and distinguish characters. Some characters may be more prone to using sentence fragments, others may be very proper in their speech. Different slang terms can indicate the eras in which different characters grew up. Even what people say (as opposed to how they say it) can be important. For example, some characters may be very straightforward, while others may be evasive.

Far from being easy, dialogue is an art that takes some practice to develop. The good news is, it does get easier with practice.

 Speech bubble image courtesy of ClipArts.co.

Short and Snappy

Years ago, I ran across an interesting writing exercise.  It goes something like this:

1. Write a paragraph describing an object.

2. Rewrite the paragraph, but use only half as many words.

3. Rewrite the rewrite, again using only half as many words.

This could be repeated several times.  Let’s give it a try.  Here’s a short paragraph I wrote describing a tree in my yard:

In my front yard stands a tall Norway spruce, with branches that swoop gracefully down and then turn up again toward the sun.  The dark green foliage seems to drip off of the branches, hanging down in long tendrils.  Taller than the house, its scaly trunk is about three feet in diameter, and twenty feet up it splits into three trunks.  A few years ago, the upper part of one of those trunks snapped off under heavy snow.  The bark is coated with white trails where sap has run down form holes drilled into the wood by the yellow-bellied sapsuckers that stop to feed while passing through late each winter.

My word processor puts that paragraph at 110 words.  Half of that would be 55, so let’s see if we can get there:

Towering over the house, the Norway spruce in my front yard drips dark green foliage from branches that swoop down and then rise sunward again.  Three feet across at its base, the trunk forks into three great spires pointing heavenward, one broken off, silent testimony to a past snowstorm.  Yellow-bellied sapsuckers on their annual migration drill holes into the tree late each winter, leaving white trails of dried sap on the rough bark.

Nope, that’s 73 words.  Back to editing:

Towering over my house, the Norway spruce drips dark green foliage along swooping branches whose tips turn sunward.  High above, the yard-thick trunk forks three spires pointing heavenward, one shattered, testifying to a past snowstorm.  Migrating yellow-bellied sapsuckers pierce the tree late each winter, spilling sap that dries in white trails on the rough bark.

That’s better: 55 words exactly.  Let’s stop there for a moment.  Compare the last version with the first.  What changed aside from the word count?  Not the information content: the tree’s height and girth, its form and color, the broken trunk, and its interaction with the birds are all present in both cases.  Rather, I changed how I conveyed the information.  The shorter version is necessarily more active.  Instead of standing in the yard, taller than the house, the tree towers over the house.  The birds don’t leave trails of dried sap; they spill the sap which dries.  And so forth.  I’ve also had to find stronger words—shattered instead of merely broken off—to describe the scene.

The general rule, then, is this: Shortening a passage without losing content makes it more active.  Not coincidentally, which version would you rather read?

Is it possible to cut this down by half again, to 27 or 28 words?  In this case, not without losing information.  Even so, it may be worth the effort, if only as an exercise, because that requires choosing which details are the most important.  For example, if the birds were the important thing:

Late in winter, migrating yellow-bellied sap suckers pierce the Norway spruce towering over my house, spilling sap down the rough bark to dry in white trails.

Or if the broken trunk were more important:

Towering over my house, the Norway spruce drips dark green foliage while, high above, its thick trunk forks three great spires, one shattered in a past snowstorm.

Less is not always more, but editing often requires shortening and removing in order to strengthen a passage and present the right details.  Give it a try.  You may be surprised by the results!