David Linzee's Blog

What's in a Title?

I'm being asked where the title of my new book "One Fell Swoop" comes from. It's not just a familiar phrase. It's a quote from Shakespeare's "Macbeth." When Macduff is told that Macbeth has murdered his wife and children he cries,

"What, all my pretty chickens, and their dam,
At one fell swoop?"

The image is of a bird of prey flying down upon helpless domestic birds. We now call a hawk's dive a "stoop," but "swoop" seems better.

Part 3: Where do you get your ideas?

A rational person would say, if this is a love story and the main romance plot is stalled, I have to solve that problem or give up. But for me, developing ideas is not a completely rational process. I leave the central romance plot and go looking for another problem, in a different area of the story, and hope that the second problem contains the solution to the first.
In Passengers, only one subplot is going on. The ship's operating system is malfunctioning. The problems are minor at first but grow more serious. For a long time, my guy ignores them. This is good because it builds suspense, but bad because it violates character consistency.
I've decided already that my guy is an engineer or mechanic. This is a man who likes to fix machines. But glitches are happening on the ship, the big machine on which his life depends, and he's ignoring them? Implausible. I no longer believe in this character.
This happens to me all the time when I'm writing outlines. The characters just won't do what the plot calls on them to do. When that happens, I have to change either the plot or the character, and I'd prefer to change the plot.
So, I ask myself, can I get rid of the ship malfunctions entirely? No, because this is the reason why my guy wakes up. Okay. Only one other possibility: the malfunctions are happening, and being an engineer, he notices. What follows from that? He realizes the ship is in deteriorating shape. He goes looking for the problem. To me, this is more interesting than his mooning over sleeping beauty. His life is on the line, which gives me the potential for strong, suspenseful scenes. When he does find the problem, he realizes he can't fix it. He needs someone with specialized knowledge. He reads the files and finds out that the person with the expertise to fix it is sleeping beauty, whom he hasn't noticed before. He has to wake her. If he doesn't, she and everybody on the ship will die.
This is an example of how one problem can solve another. Making the character consistent, I've found a way to avoid having him make a decision that goes against the genre. You'll notice it's a very simple solution. The original, problematic way the story went was 1/he wakes sleeping beauty 2/they fall in love 3/the ship malfunctions get steadily worse until 4/they have to fix them. All I've done is change the order: 1/the ship malfunctions get steadily worse 2/he wakes sleeping beauty 3/they have to fix them 4/they fall in love.
Here's another tip: if you solve a problem and feel clever, your solution probably isn't going to work out. If you solve it and feel dumb for not seeing how obvious the solution was, you've probably found the right answer.
I have now turned my initial idea into a bare-bones outline that I would like to write. I'm not saying it's a better story than the movie Passengers, or that I'm smarter than the scriptwriters. I don't doubt that all the possible variances I've set out above occurred to them. They made different choices than I would. Or the producers or stars or studio executives did. (Or the associate producers' girlfriend's hairdresser, who Elmore Leonard tells us is the most influential person in movie production.) That's why I'm glad I'm a novelist and not a screenwriter. Even if the pay isn't as good.

Part 2 Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

This is a good time to bring up the issue of whether a novelist should outline at all. (Screenwriters just about have to.) Many highly successful writers, including John LeCarré and Lee Child, have said that they don't. The just start writing and figure it out as they go. This keeps it fresh for both the reader and the writer. The latter sits down at the word processor every morning not knowing where the story will go next.
If you want to take this route, you have my blessing. But one of many obvious dangers is that you're going to have the problem I'm having with Passengers. You'll give your character a problem you can't resolve, which will mean a lot of rewriting, or even abandoning the project, at a great waste of time and effort.
Back to Passengers. The way the movie's writers tell it, he wakes her up and tells her it was an equipment malfunction, not something he did. Events go just the way he hoped they would. They fall in love and are blissfully happy.
For me, the predictability red flag rises again. The viewer will just be waiting for her to find out that he woke her on purpose and lied about it. Again, there is only one way for the story to go. They can't just keep on being happy.
Another predictability problem of a more subtle sort also arises. What the hero expects to happen--happens. He thinks this sleeping beauty will return his love, and she does. Here's a tip: whenever things are going the way your main character expects them to, your story is in trouble.
A credibility red flag also goes up. I don't believe that a beautiful relationship can arise from a completely selfish decision. Perhaps others do, but again, I'm the one who has to write this story.
So, unlike the writers of the movie, I've reached an impasse. For me, the developing idea has gone off the rails. At this point in the process, I try to cheer myself up with the thought that what appear to be blocks are messages from the idea about how it wants to be written. Guidance. I'm hoping I can use one problem to solve another.
I backtrack to my thought that maybe I should switch genres. This idea does not want to be a romance. It wants to be a black comedy. My guy is not a hero, but a selfish monster. So I'll give him his comeuppance. He wakes up his sleeping beauty, and she's not at all the way he imagined. They fight and get on each other's nerves so much that eventually he figures out how to put her back to sleep, and tries again with another woman. Who doesn't work out either. Woody Allen could do great things with such an idea. I'm almost surprised he hasn't already.
Unlike Allen, I am not a comic genius. I drop the black comedy notion. I'm going to stick with the romance, which means I'm stuck at the point where my guy wakes up sleeping beauty. I just don't see him doing it.
In my next post, I'll explain how one problem stops me but two problems are a breeze.

Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Part One
Many of the people who ask me this question seem to imagine that an idea comes in a lightning bolt of inspiration. In a flash, the whole novel is in my head, and writing it is easy from then on.
The truth is a lot grubbier. The initial idea isn't much; what matters is what you do with it. A long process follows before the idea becomes an outline: fiddling, making mistakes and correcting them, spotting pitfalls (or failing to!), and trying to avoid what has been done before by other writers. Many ideas don't make it through.
To illustrate my process--and mine is only one possible way of doing it, and probably not the best way--I'm going to take a recent movie and show how I would have worked it out, if it had been my idea. Why? Because if you've seen the movie, you'll find it easier to follow the discussion. If you haven't, don't despair, I hope to make my comments understandable regardless. SPOILER ALERT! If you want to see the movie PASSENGERS and be surprised, read no further.
The idea is: people in suspended animation aboard a space ship wake up in mid-voyage. This is a good example of how the idea matters less than what you do with it. This idea, for instance, is the beginning not just of Passengers but of the first Alien --two very different movies. In future, other writers will probably take the same idea in other directions.
Let's say that in developing the idea, I make the same decisions as the writers of Passengers. It'll be one guy (hereinafter "our guy" because it takes me a long time to name characters) who wakes up, and he gradually makes the horrifying discovery that he's far from the destination and will spend his whole life alone on the ship. Despair threatens. But he falls in love with a sleeping passenger, reads her file, and is tempted to wake her, giving himself a companion, but making sure that her own plans for her life go up in smoke.
At this point, a predictability red flag would go up for me. The audience is going to get ahead of me, because only one thing can happen next: he wakes her. If he decides not to, that's the end of the story.
So our guy is going to wake her. My next problem is, that's not permissible in the genre I'm working in. His decision is human and understandable. We're social animals. But it's a monstrously selfish decision, and I can think of no way that a romantic hero can recover from it. That doesn't mean I'd give up on the idea, just that I'd think I may have to change genre. More on that later.
Of course, the writers of Passengers disagreed with me, and had their guy wake her. Some people liked the movie. Others hated it, mostly because of that decision. It's all a matter of opinion. If I'm the one writing the story, mine is the opinion that counts.
(To find out what genre I decided to switch to, check back for my next post. Hint: imagine if Woody Allen had directed Passengers.)

POV Peeve

[spoiler alert]
E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel after a thorough survey of point of view in fiction, decided that the only rule was that a writer could do anything he could get away with.

I don't presume to argue with Forster, but I do have a POV pet peeve: first-person narrators who don't level with me. The big advantage of first-person is that a character can talk directly to the reader. When the author exploits this advantage, then has the narrator-character keep back important information just for the sake of preserving plot twists, that strikes me as cheating.

So Lisa Lutz set me to grumbling in The Passenger when the narrator was on the run and wouldn't tell me why until near the end. Especially when she explained it all to another character, but kept me in the dark!

It isn't that authors have only recently become manipulative. Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree is a novel in which the narrator is an impostor. Late in the book, she blithely confides that she is the person she's pretending to be.

A more famous example is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyda whodunnit in which the narrator reveals at the end that the murderer is--himself. Edmund Wilson found this stunt so tedious that he wrote an essay demanding, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?

I exempt from this criticism The Girl on the Train in which the heroine was practically on the scene of the murder and wonders if perhaps she commited it herself. But she has a perfectly sound reason for not providing the reader with the answers. She was blind drunk at the time and can't remember. What reader wouldn't sympathize with that plight?

A Book to Read Even if You've Seen the TV series

"Orange is the New Black" has been praised as a groundbreaking cable TV miniseries. And it is. Reading the memoir Orange Is the New Blackit's based on, you may feel a bit let down--at first.

The cable TV series is one of the great inventions of our time. This supercharged version of the three-decker Victorian novel, in which vital, flawed characters energetically pursue their ends at cross purposes with each other, hatching schemes, making true friends and deadly enemies, is fast-paced, sexy, and exciting when done well. And it is done well in "Orange."

But if you want to find out what going to prison is like, read the book.

The TV series takes incidents and characters from the book and dramatizes the heck out of them. In an early episode, Piper, our heroine, disparages the food, not realizing the inmate in charge of the kitchen is present. The furious inmate sets out to starve her to death. Only by enlisting allies and concocting a scheme to placate her can Piper get enough to eat.

In the book, Piper disparages the food, and the inmate makes an angry retort. That's it.

In the TV show, an inmate named Crazy Eyes conceives a mad passion for Piper and courts her. Then stalks her. The one-sided love affair escalates almost to violence.

In the book, Piper meets Crazy Eyes and notes that she's pretty whacky. That's it.

What does go on in the book? Piper is lonely and bored. She does a lot of thinking, about her past life, and about the people she has left behind on the outside, and has to deal with on the inside. The memoir is well-written, sharply observed, and free of self-pity. Not to mention informative. You find out all you'll ever want to know about being a middle-class person going to prison, and you're eternally grateful you're not finding out first-hand.

The book also devotes a lot of space to Piper's friendships. She meets a few women from backgrounds completely different from hers who are not damaged human beings but strong, compassionate people. She learns from them and they look after her. But these friendships lack conflict, so they mostly didn't make it into the show.

The cable TV series can deal with only a narrow wedge of human experience. It can't get bogged down in loneliness and boredom. It has to be funny and fast-paced. Imprisonment is neither. The writer of a book has a range of material and flexibility of technique TV dramatists can't match.

Seen the movie? Read the book anyway.

Because the movie audience is so much larger than the book audience, some folks feel that once a novel has been made into a movie, the book has served its purpose and can be forgotten. This is especially so when the movie is a good one, and the book is an entertainment, not a literary classic.

But in some cases, it's worth reading the book, even if you've seen the movie. (And if this your situation, my post will give nothing away.) One example is Ian Fleming's From Russia With Love

Both movie and book are high points of the Bond series. A lot of people, including Sean Connery, have said the movie (the second one made, in 1963) is the best of the lot. Before any movies were made, the 1957 novel brought Bond to a new level of fame when President John F. Kennedy named it one of his favorite books, along with several more prestigious historical and biographical works.

The biggest difference between book and movie is that Bond comes in much later in the novel. The first70-odd pages take place in the Soviet Union. We encounter one frightening and grotesque Commie after another as the plot against Bond is conceived and set in motion. Fleming was a reporter in Moscow during the darkest days of Stalin's reign, and if his nightmare vision of the USSR is not accurate for the Khrushchev era in which the novel is set, it certainly is scary.

Another difference is that the plot is against Bond personally. There is a decoding machine involved, but it's not important. The object of this far-reaching conspiracy is to kill Bond. And not just kill him, but disgrace him.

The straightforwardness of the novel is another difference from the movie, which has a more convoluted, more conventional plot involving everyone's favorite criminal gang, S.P.E.C.T.R.E., playing British and Russians against each other to get hold of the decoding machine and sell it to the highest bidder. (Fleming called it the Spektor in the book, and it had to be renamed the Lektor in the movie, to avoid confusion.)

Simplicity and brevity give the book the advantage over the movie in other ways. In the novel, Bond takes the bait, the trap closes, and that's that. The movie's middle is fattened up with scenes that show off the sights of Istanbul, but are otherwise dispensable. After the famous fight scene in the train compartment (a highlight of book and movie), the movie adds on a couple of more action scenes that are rather anti-climatic. The novel quickly wraps up.

The Bond-girl is splendid this time out. In the book she is said to look like Greta Garbo. One assumes Fleming was thinking of her in "Ninotchka," in which she played an icy Soviet thawed on a trip to Paris. He named her Tatiana (for the heroine of Pushkin's poem "Eugene Onegin") Romanova (for the martyred Russian royal family).

Another big difference is the ending...but I get into "spoiler" territory if I discuss that, and I want you to read and enjoy the book!

Snarky Sherlock, Part 2

SPOILER ALERT! Read no further if you haven't read "The Adventure of the Second Stain" in The Return of Sherlock Holmes

A couple of people have questioned (FTF, not online) an assertion I made in an earlier post about Sherlock Holmes. It's that while Watson is a bluff, four-square patriot, his creator Arthur Conan Doyle is a slyly humorous social critic, who expresses his snarky views through Holmes.

Here's some more evidence. In "The Second Stain," Watson is like, I now go down upon my knees to relate Holmes's greatest case, when he was privileged to be of service to the most exalted personages in the realm.

Holmes, meanwhile, quickly perceives that these exalted personages have behaved childishly, and they're at his mercy. While solving the case, he enjoys humiliating them. He blows off the Prime Minister, literally forces Lady Hilda to her knees, and makes the Foreign Secretary look like he couldn't find his nose using both hands.

I make these points mostly as a way of calling attention to a highly enjoyable story, well worth revisiting.

Chalk One Up for Ovid

The American Automobile Association reports the results of its latest poll: Drivers admit to doing things that they themselves condemn as unsafe.
93% says it's dangerous to text while driving. 32% do it.
89% " " to speed 45% "
97% " " to drive sleepy. 32% "
94% " " to run red lights. 39% "


As Ovid said, "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor."
"I see and approve better things, but follow the worse which I condemn."

British vs American dialogue

These are tense days for me. I've written a novel that has two British characters. And I made them speak British. Now I'm waiting for a reaction from my friend in Britain.
He may tell me I made a big mistake. W. Somerset Maugham, early in The Razor's Edge, announces that though he's writing about Americans, he won't even try to render their speech accurately, because that's impossible. American or British novelists who imitate each other's language only embarrass themselves.
But Herman Wouk, a novelist who rivals Maugham in popularity (and longevity), did not accept that dictate. In War and Remembrance he has his British characters talking British throughout. One of them, Pamela, says to her American husband, "'Lady Halifax says you're rather a lamb."
"'Is that good?"
"'The accolade.'"
This rings true to me. Throw Americans and Brits together, and they''ll notice the differences in the way they talk and be amused and annoyed. As Gorge Bernard Shaw said, England and America are two countries separated by the same language. Since my two Brits are in America, they make a lot of witty remarks about the language divide.
At least, I hope they're witty.
But it's possible I embarrassed myself as thoroughly as poor Alistair MacLean.
A Scot who became famous writing World War II thrillers set in Europe (The Guns of Navarone), he decided to try his hand at a Western Breakheart Pass. Big mistake. His sheriff says, "I'm the lawman, not you and your lot." His U.S. Cavalryman says, "The men are taking them for a bit of a canter." His gunfighter says, "I dare say we'll find something to talk about."
In addition to the danger of lapsing into your own tongue without realizing it, there's the danger of using a foreign expression incorrectly. I was worried enough about this to consult an expert, a scholar with a doctorate in modern languages from Cambridge. "'Naff' mean unfashionably dressed, right?" I asked. "Yes, he said. "But not exactly." He gave me a five-minute lecture on the connotations and denotations of 'naff.' There was a class angle too, of course.
And this is the guy whose opinion of my novel I am awaiting.