Lynn Hesse's Blog: Book Signing, page 3

Anti-Heroes Must Be Interesting

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Last weekend in South Carolina one of the more thought-provoking questions for the panel members at the Mystery in The Midlands surrounded the topic of whether the protagonist must be likeable. Underlying this question there was a presumption of the mainstream moral code of right and wrong being part of a good guy’s persona.

Most authors at the conference agreed the ‘good guy’ wins in fiction because he follows the rules, or bends the rules only for the common good in extreme circumstances. Even Detective Inspector Fred Thursday in the BBC series Endeavor, allowed a murderer to go free when she killed her abusive husband.

War would be another example of a reality where the lines of right and wrong become blurred, or temporarily suspended because survival depends on actions aimed at bad guys, but many times during the execution of the mission innocent people are killed. Using military terminology these people are considered collateral damage.

Wow, that is heavy stuff. Back to fiction.

Should fiction give us a break from the harsh realities of life, or does it reflect real life in complex characters and plot lines? Make us think, see another point of view, or disturb our illusions?

The philosophical questions I considered before I wrote about my anti-hero character, Clara Shannasey McDougal, in my upcoming novella Stranded in Atlanta:

If your subculture developed because your Roma people were isolated and starved in a ghetto in Russia, would you think stealing from your oppressors was wrong? If millions of your people were killed in concentration camps, wouldn’t the persecution of your great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers influence your worldview and inform your modern choices in America?

Of course, I think literary and excellent genre fiction can incorporate whatever the author’s imagination can conjure.

This is my answer to the original question. Yes and no. An anti-hero must be interesting and have a particular moral compass for the reader to overlook their deviation from societal norms long enough to empathize with the character. For example the Taken movies sequels with Liam Neeson work because planning revenge would be a natural reaction if someone took, or killed a member of your family. For most people the fantasy wouldn’t be acted upon. In fiction the protagonist can stalk and extract the just punishment. Eventually, we like some parts of the anti-hero because we see the underdog win. We have lost, and it didn’t feel good.

However, we can suspend reality, read an anti-hero story, and let the character get even for us. In the end we may feel a guilty pleasure, and ask ourselves why we like the almost irredeemable character, but we do. Why? We want to believe in justice, despite the odds, for everyone including ourselves.

 

Cabbagetown Wall Murals – Twelve Original Family Members Left

[image error][image error]One of my characters, the forger, in my soon-to-be-sent-out manuscript about an Atlanta art heist lives in Cabbagetown. During a research babbling session with my husband, he shares a photo of The Fiddler by Steve Seaberg and Esther Lefever created around 1986 on the CSX Railroad Wall on Wylie Street at the Krog Street viaduct. The tile mural is made from Georgia clay tiles.

Gentrification has replaced much of the original culture, but a few monuments still stand to remind us of the cotton mill village founded after the Civil War and the hardworking men and women who strove to make a better life for themselves and their children.

It’s estimated twelve original mill family members still live in Cabbagetown. The reason you don’t see condos in Cabbagetown is because it has been on the National Register of Historical Places since 1976.

Photos by Dean Hesse

When Nothing Works

[image error]Photo of Ofir Nahari- famous clown performer

My cell phone won’t send the photos I took yesterday for my weekly blog.

The page won’t open in the lynnhesse.word.press.com for me to add the blog or the photo.

Patience to understand the digital world escapes me. It is hard enough to understand people.

My social media rep. can’t be reached.

The news of Trump and Putin play in the background.

The sign for the subdivision cleanup needs to be made…even if nobody shows up.

My husband doesn’t want to pickup the Keep DeKalb Beautiful equipment for the cleanup.

It’s raining.

Be grateful. You have a computer. You have coffee, food, and shelter.

It’s raining.

Is it Monday or Tuesday?

The deadline for the novella is July 31st.

The short story you rewrote and edited for ten years, the domestic violence submission nobody wanted, has been accepted for an anthology.

You should smile.

Your new tribe of sister writers didn’t dislike your anti-hero protagonist.

My hair is dirty.

I haven’t heard from my son.

The world doesn’t make sense today.

Enough. I’m going to show up and finish the next scene on the novella.

Delving Into Deep Waters

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I write seven days a week with an undetermined day off to celebrate, mourn a rejection email, or regroup after I learn the critique group doesn’t like my anti-hero protagonist. I grab a cup of coffee and begin. I prefer this creating of the characters, plot, and scenes, to refining them at the end of the process with a paid professional editor. During this part of the process I must use the left side of my brain and analyze the work—break it down—and ultimately myself.

Recently, I pulled out a dusty short story, added 500 words to make the guidelines for an anthology submission, re-edited it, and sent my baby to a professional editor in North Carolina, who I’d never met, and waited. When she emailed my hard-felt words back she wanted more details/content about the weird family dynamics that lead to the abuse cycle in my story.

No problem. My job as a short story writer is to cover the drama of complex human relationships in three to five thousand words.

After two weeks and swapping the manuscript back and forth to be tweaked further, I let the writing sit for 24 hours, reread it out loud, found more technical errors, and submitted to the anthology by the deadline July 1, 2018.

A few days later, I got an email from the anthology mistress. She wanted to use my story, but asked me to consider a major change in the mother’s character, in the main abuser’s physical characteristics. She even suggested an exciting occupation for this character. I flinched. I felt the layered quality of the work was built brick by brick, and couldn’t be changed. I let the submission sit. I agonized. I emailed the editor and explained I would minimize the qualities she found stereotypical, but the characters were based on my street work in law enforcement.

When I reworked the material, I realized I hadn’t outright addressed the motivation for antagonist’s abusive action. Of course, she was abused as a child. I thought I’d implied it. I slept on it. I verbalized my distress to my poor husband. In the end I added five lines of dialogue, background info through a secret revealed about the mother from her oldest daughter’s point of view, and discarded the adjectives defining the mother as obese, not just overweight. My bias was showing.

My main objective in all my writing about abuse has been to show the cycle perpetuates itself. Over the years of doing and editing and redoing, I had lost sight of my original theme or purpose for the writing: to reveal only blaming the abuser leaves us as a culture without a viable solution to help break the cycle of abuse.

Note: We are bias toward obese people. Check out Dietland, an AMC funny, poignant drama series on Monday nights.

The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall

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The Music Teacher by Barbara Hall

“Inspiration is divine.

For everything else there are teachers.”

–St. Cecelia, Patron Saint of Musicians

Author Barbara Hall created Judging Amy, a successful television series from 1999-2005. Tyne Daly played Amy’s mother in a Hartford, Connecticut setting. I was a fan of the stories involving independent women dealing with the complicated challenges of dispensing equal justice from the bench, or in Tyne character’s case caring for children as a social worker.

Now, Ms. Hall has added an adult book with depth and candor to her list of YA novels and many other accomplishments.

Ms. Hall’s protagonist in The Music Teacher is a mean music teacher by her own admission. During the day the divorcee works in a music store and teaches music to unenthusiastic students, and at night she returns to her trailer. However, a new pre-teen student, Hallie Bolaris, walks into Pearl Swain’s music room, into her life, and her boring, predictable world tilts. This student not only has perfect pitch, she has the gift. She is intuitive. She understands how to hear the notes on the page, feel the notes leave the strings of the violin, and collect the nuances of those notes as they return to the instrument.

Pearl can’t help being obsessed with her student’s welfare and talent. Nothing matters except the exquisite physics of sound produced by the defensive Hallie. The consequences of Pearl’s total dedication foreshadow the inevitable confrontation between the teacher and student.

The journey of this middle-aged, ordinary teacher traces the magic, the unexplainable making of music through the release of energy, and its return as the raw beauty of inspired sound. Ms. Hall writes many lines in this novel readers will want to savor and sit in silence to let the rhythms of the words resonate, but beware, “You can’t kill music… Once you find it, you are a slave to it forever. You serve it; it doesn’t serve you. You no longer pretend to be a master of your universe.”

 

 

NPR’s Morning Edition, Denis O’Hayer Retires

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https://www.wabe.org/press-releases/denis-ohayer-retire-host-wabes-morning-edition-june-29/

I need to make a positive comment about the news and give credit where it is due. I compliment, Denis O’Hayer, a white, middle-class man who is known for his fair coverage of the news and his mentorship of others. I hope his professional standards will be carried forward by his colleagues. He will be missed on Morning Edition on NPR.

Balanced reporting is one of the bricks in the foundation of Democracy. Writing the facts without interjecting your opinion is not easy. Ethics are involved. It is a honed skill held by too few reporters in our entertainment-driven media.

I thank Denis and wish him well.

Mother and Child

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As a Scottish descendent and mother I must stand with the immigrants. Are we afraid of criminals entering our borders, or those innocent children who will grow up, work hard, and prosper in our country? Are we fearful our American-born children can’t compete, or adapt in this fast-paced world where more and more education is required? If so, who is to blame? Where do we spend our tax dollars? It is not going to educate our children, or to our teachers and professors.

In times of moral crisis, I am reminded of the Bible story of King Solomon and of the two women who stood before him claiming to be the baby’s true mother. I can imagine both women presented good evidence they were the rightful mother. The king proposed to cut the baby in half to solve the problem. Of course, the compassionate woman who asked for the baby to live was the real mother.

What I know: gaining perspective is difficult, but driving home a point, or winning shouldn’t be important when destroying the life of a child is held in the balance.

1 Kings 3:24

The king continued, “Bring me a sword.” So they brought him a sword,

1 Kings 3:26

Then the woman whose son was alive spoke to the king because she yearned with compassion for her son. “My lord,” she said, “give her the living baby. Please do not kill him!” But the other woman said, “He will not be mine or yours. Cut him in two!”

Friendship

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A Time To Talk – Poem by Robert Frost

When a friend calls to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don’t stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven’t hoed,

And shout from where I am, What is it?

No, not as there is a time to talk.

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod: I go up to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.

Robert Frost https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-time-to-talk/

At age eight my son asked me what it was like in the covered-wagon days? I explained I wasn’t quite that old. Frost’s poem speaks to a different era, but I want my friends to know I will stop and listen.

I am grateful. In this moment I send out a blessing to you.

Pet Peeves

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[image error]  With all the crazy stuff going on in the world, I feel petty to bring up one of my pet peeves, but here goes. I hate to lie on my yoga mat preparing to namaste and see dirt and grit on the floor. Dean takes his shoes off and still tracks on the way back from his feral cat breaks in our backyard. They walk him, and he is content, but my floors!

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My robotic sweeper, Cufy or “Bob”, as we call him, came into my life on my birthday. The perfect helpmate. He is quiet, helpful, and efficient. I can let him roam at will, but he can get stuck in our small bathroom. He keeps hitting the door until I let him out. Not withstanding the bathroom mishap, he makes a soft whirling sound and returns to his portal without a fuss. Did I mention the remote? Heaven. My floors look fantastic, and I am at peace…most of the time.

By the way Bob May was the actor inside the robot costume on the ’60s television series Lost In Space; the reason Dean and I chose the name Bob for my little miracle worker.

Ah-hah moment: A plot is forming inside my writer’s brain about a mystery writer’s robotic assistant that solves crimes, while the writer sleeps, between midnight and six o’clock in the morning, and then cooks breakfast.

How Can Theater Training and Storytelling Improve Your Fiction?

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I wrote this last year  as a guest blogger for Killer Nashville.. It appeared on July 11, 2017. 

[image error]My job is writing, but I am a member of three community performance troupes involving storytelling, movement, and singing. My improvisation skills, stage experience, and playwriting enrich my fiction. Here is the Cliff Note version for non-actors or non-performers listing reasons why you might want to give my suggestions a try and develop theater and storytelling skills.

Backstage Decisions Made by Actors and Directors:

Structure of scene: Performance of the same material teaches you what is essential in a scene. If you took the line of dialogue or a character out of the scene it wouldn’t work. Every character must come out of the scene changed, however mundane. Maybe it’s the character Aunt Mary’s job to introduce the red herring or the poisonous mushrooms she unpacked from a grocery bag. Every person in the scene has a reason for being there, and they must show the audience what is not stated outright in dialogue. If not, those pretty phrases or funny bits you love so much need to be cut. What is the scene doing for the entire structure?

What about the lines that hint at upcoming events or help the reader understand the desires or fears of the character? Yes. The Character’s Motivation: What does each character want, their little and big Ds, or desires, and what is blocking them from obtaining those needs? In my novel Well of Rage the overriding desires for my protagonist, Carly Redmund, are to survive and solve the cold-case murder of an African-American teenager, but the rookie’s underlining desires are to start again in a new city, Mobile, Alabama, and find forgiveness. Carly’s mannerism and speech patterns emphasize these wishes.

Research to Inform Backstory:

I visited Mobile, talked to the curators of the Mobile Mardi Gras Museum, went to the library, walked the streets, read books, and scoured the web data to make the city of Mobile come alive on the page. Could the story have been set in a different southern city? Yes, but from my perspective, Mobile has a unique history, culture, and is the right size to highlight the racism and sexism embedded in any governmental structure. Hemingway used the iceberg principle in the Paris Review, The Art of Fiction, No. 21 to illustrate most of what an author knows about a subject can be omitted because seven-eighths of its underwater in the story. The reader understands without being told, but if the writer omits because they don’t know something, a hole is left in the story.

The Character’s Physicality, Movements, and Gestures:

I am a dancer and expressing an intention without words is my first go-to, but play writing helped me hone the ear for dialogue and gestures particular to each character. I study people in restaurants and walking on the streets. You can tell a lot about a person by their posture, gait, how they eat food, their ticks, or their use of humor to misdirect, embarrass, or get noticed. A person’s physicality can be deceiving. A writer can use all these tools to inform or lead the reader to conclusions about characters and plot, but that brings up another question. Why does a reader invest or care about a character? I suggest examining point of view from backstage.

How far away do you want your reader to view your characters? I used multiple points of views in my finished manuscript, “Another Kind of Hero.” In the theater, as well as fiction, a narrator can be unreliable or reliable. Heroes can be reluctant or gung ho. All these factors came into play as I made my decision about POV. I used first person for the narrator scenes and third person for the others. Combining POVs can be tricky, but I realized early on I had two plots weaving together: I had a DEA agent trying to take down a drug pipeline, an opinionated narrator, and a casket full of money and drugs at the Pick’n Pay in Forsyth, Georgia leading dissimilar sisters into jeopardy. I wanted to convey small town life in Georgia in an intimate way to preserve the dignity of the southern culture while examining the hypocrisies that plague American life in our pursuit of the all-mighty dollar. By the way, using my storytelling skills helped to convey a fireside chat feeling between the narrator and the reader.

Don’t laugh. Wanda, the ghost, woke me up one morning and insisted she be put in the manuscript. I realized her voice had been developing through several shelved manuscripts and many improvisational performances. If I can say one true thing through Wanda’s voice, I will be happy.

Summary:

You don’t need to take acting lessons or manage backstage to gain the skills I’ve listed, but it is a fun, hands-on approach I recommend.

Lynn Hesse, the first place winner in the 2015 Oak Tree Press Writing Contest, Cop Tales launched her debut novel Well of Rage as an Atlanta Writers Club Author Panelist, 2016 Decatur Book Festival in Decatur, Georgia. Her 5-star rated novel on Amazon is based on her law enforcement experience and shows how the “isms” separate us. The themes of her fiction and short plays focus on re-framing traumatic events, taking a look at the facts, and then using humor and forgiveness to heal. A detailed interview about Lynn’s police career and the performance video Blue Steel can be seen in The Women’s Archives, Second Feminist Movement, Georgia State University. Lynn is a performance artist and lives in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Reach her at her website here.

(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)