David C. Smith's Blog, page 3

Building a Story: Walt Disney’s Cinderella

If I were ever to teach a class in basic storytelling, especially one in which the class and I discussed popular imaginative fiction, I might very well start off with this book as a perfect example of how to structure a story.

The edition of the Walt Disney Cinderella story I mean is one that I found in the children’s section of Top Shelf Books, our wonderful used-book store on Northwest Highway here in Palatine, Illinois. The book is copyrighted 1995 and on the title page is identified as a Grolier Book Club Edition: “Originally published in Denmark by Egmont Gruppen, Copenhagen, in 1995.” Probably I bought it when Lily, our daughter, was around three years old. I’ve read it to her countless times. She’s read it to herself numerous times, as well. (She’s now seven.) It is a slender hardcover volume of about 44 pages, although it doesn’t even have folios. It does have four-color illustrations taken directly from the Walt Disney cartoon version of Cinderella, the one all of us are familiar with.

Here’s the thing that I noticed the very first time I read it to Lily. Getting into the story, I’d read the large-type text on facing pages, and the events described would be good news for Cinderella. Turn the page, and the next you know, we have dialogue or action that pushes things backward. Trouble for Cinderella. Classic reversal. Next page or two, we’re on the upswing. Next two pages, reversal. This goes on regularly until we get to the happy ending. It isn’t mechanical, although I may make it sound that way here. But the succinctness of telling the story this way builds into it a real sense of dramatic tension and personal investment. It’s the x-y graph we all learned when we were introduced to the classic structure of Freytag’s pyramid or the up-and-down sine wave of how to structure a movie script or a mystery story. Peak, trough, peak, trough, gradually climbing in intensity, until we get to the final act and then everything comes together except for those last few curve balls that leave you breathless until, ta da, climax, happy ending, resolution, denouement, redemption, happily ever after.

On the very first page of this edition we get an illustration of Cinderella awake in bed, fooling with her hair, with bright sunshine coming through the window and her little bird friends chirping her awake. No surprises here. We know that the use of animals in fables and tales pretty much goes back to the very beginning of storytelling. The Jatakas of early Buddhist literature and Aesop’s fables for all practical purposes reach back to the beginning of the human oral tradition. Generally, animals are regarded as being better than human beings in almost all ways; they are clever, wise, powerful, sexy, vital. (We may debate whether anything’s being superior to human beings is really much of a challenge, given how woefully we have disported on this earth in our time, but that would be a topic for another blog.) Animals represent the gods or the supernatural, introduce change in the protagonist’s life or bring wisdom to the afflicted or afflict those who think themselves very wise or clever in order to teach them a lesson. So here is Cinderella, very much an Ur-protagonist, one with Nature, beloved of Nature –

– and very clearly in trouble, as we notice immediately on the facing page, in a deep trough, because here we see Cinderella on hands and knees, scrubbing the floor, with the evil stepmother hovering over her, and the text makes clear that the stepmother is cruel and that she and the two stepsisters treat her like a servant and make her do all of the work. That’s all we get. Not much in the way of nuance. We are in a world of wholes, not of halves or fractions, of gray areas or ambivalence. We go from the natural world of Nature and happy birds to this false, indoor world of cruel people who aren’t even actually part of Cinderella’s life because they’re not related by blood. They’re artificial. We’ve already been notified that Cinderella has more in common with the innocent creatures of the natural world than she does with these creeps who command the household.

And so it goes. The royal messenger arrives saying that the king is going to have a ball that night for the prince. Peak! Turn the page. Cinderella is permitted to go…if she gets all of her work done in time. Trough! Cinderella excitedly pulls out her mother’s old gown from the trunk in the attic in anticipation of a wonderful evening. Forward! Then the stepmother comes in: “Cinderella, wash the floors!” “But I washed them yesterday!” “Well, wash them again!” Reversal! The animal friends help Cinderella, but even that assistance fails against the will power of the evil stepmother and the machinations of the wicked stepsisters.

Until! Halfway through the story, we get the fairy godmother. For me, this brings to mind Robert Bly’s famous leaps of association, which he describes in “Looking for Dragon Smoke,” the first part of Leaping Poetry (1975): “In ancient times…the poet flew from one world to another, ‘riding on dragons,’ as the Chinese said…. [Poets] dragged behind them long tails of dragon smoke…. The dragon smoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of the work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.” Bly cites examples of such leaps in Gilgamesh and The Odyssey. “In all art derived from Great Mother mysteries, the leap to the unknown part of the mind lies in the very center of the work. The strength of ‘classical art’ has much more to do with this leap than with the order that the poets developed to contain, and, partially, to disguise it.”

So we are dealing with deeply resonant human material in Cinderella, a story that Marina Warner, in From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers, reminds us goes back at least a thousand years. Warner discusses at length an ancient Chinese version of the story, details the sexual symbolism of the slipper, and makes clear that the fairy godmother in modern variations was an animal helper in more ancient versions but that, fairy or animal, this figure is indeed the dead mother returned: “The animal helper, who embodies the dead mother in providing for her orphaned child, constitutes a structural node in the Cinderella story, but the creature changes in later European versions until she takes the form of the fairy godmother familiar today.” Structural node, indeed: that’s Bly’s long floating leap, isn’t it? It’s the dragon smoke. Cinderella, Warner reminds us, is a “much-loved story of female wish fulfillment.” “Cinderella is a child in mourning for her mother, as her name tells us; her penitential garb is ash, dirty and low as a donkey skin or a coat of grasses, but more particularly the sign of loss, the symbol of mortality….”

Right here we have the beginnings of the Harry Potter epic or an Ender’s Game in the making, or another of any number of such characters and plot set-ups. This is rich, deep stuff, and when we use the story in its stripped-down form in this Grolier Book Club Edition that I would provide for my class, we have very clear architecture that we can use to build any sort of story we like.

So the fairy godmother appears and the impossible occurs: Cinderella, or her dead mother, or the girl’s subconscious, or animal spirits assist her in achieving her original goal, of attending the ball so that she might, of course, meet the prince and thereby achieve the happy ending, the fulfillment, the enlightenment, the resolution that all true suffering protagonists must attain. The last half of the story is pretty much the first half in reverse: the prince searches for the beautiful girl whom he wishes to wed, and no matter what the evil stepmother and the wicked stepsisters do to interfere with this fated reunion, things backfire on them. The animal friends actively help Cinderella in the first half of the story; in the second half, they assist by actively interfering with the stepmother and the sisters. The stepsisters, proactive but arrogant and remote in the first half, now react with selfish tears and moans when they are unable to fit the glass slipper onto their own toes. The stepmother was able to control all circumstances when it was just she and the girls inside their old castle in the first half of the story; now that outsiders, life, fresh air, and freedom have intruded in the persons of the duke and the footman, the envoys of the prince (that is, envoys of the world that Cinderella’s fairy godmother has opened for her and introduced her to.) the stepmother’s actions take the form of bungling slapstick. Whereas previously she could do nothing wrong, now she can do nothing right. The story reversals now work in Cinderella’s favor.

This Disney version undoes a lot of what, over the centuries, were critical elements in the Cinderella story, but in terms of sheer basic storytelling power, this really works. So I’d introduce my class to all of this material and draw the graph and the sine wave on the chalkboard or whiteboard or easel, and then suggest that we all collaborate on building the outline of a story based precisely on this architecture.

You can see where this could go. A teenage vampire story? A space opera adventure? A Western? The opening has to provide an introduction for our protagonist that gives us fundamentally everything we need to know. Look at the opening of, for example, John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, right? And the dragon smoke or structural node in that movie? Conan dies on the Tree of Woe and is brought back to life from the land of spirits. Wouldn’t have worked to have it be Conan’s fairy godmother, but we get the idea, be it strength deep within ourselves or the symbolism of dragon smoke (or demonic spirits), a trip through a time portal, a perilous sea voyage or space voyage –  we could use whatever we like, but that’s what makes the protagonist the protagonist. For Gilgamesh, it was battling Enkidu, his spiritual brother, his animal-like wilder self, before journeying to the end of the world, losing what he had come for, but returning all the wiser for that and becoming, finally, a decent man and a decent king.

That would be the first day of my class, and this concise little hardcover of Disney’s 1950 cartoon would be my introductory text. It makes use of very resonant, and gratifying, subconscious elements while using a story framework  patterned on the Greek tragic model we’re all familiar with, that of incident piled on incident until we have a final denouement, like Greek warriors rushing into battle to settle things once and for all — the shootout on the streets of Dodge City, or the attack on Darth Vader’s battle star, or John Walton’s finally making it back down the mountain in time for Christmas morning, despite all odds that his life is in very real danger. (Or maybe it was coming back up the mountain. I forget which.) I’ll bet my class and I could spend the rest of the semester crafting story after story built on this architecture, creating good popular fiction with compelling plots, and – - if we were to do it right — with characters that halfway through look into a mirror, die and are reborn, defeat a shadow, or take a long journey that brings her or him back to where she or he started in order to complete a very powerful story journey. That journey would feel as satisfactory for whoever were to read it as it would to those of us who wrote it. Whether we did it as an outer space Western or a Victorian mystery story or a sword-and-sorcery adventure, I’ll bet that few people would recognize it literally. Subconsciously, though, they might very well understand that they are experiencing a good strong tale…one that, in its essence, has been around for a thousand years or more.

 

The Years That Pass That Are Not Past

When I was a kid—10, 12 years old and later—I used to stay up late at night on Fridays and Saturdays and watch old movies. Monster movies hosted by Ghoulardi on channel 8 in Cleveland, for a while there, in the early sixties, but later, just about anything—film noir from the 1940s and 1950s, Shane and other Westerns, old adventure movies, and particularly pictures from the very early talkie era, which for some reason fascinated me. Carole Lombard and George Raft dancing in some movie whose name I forget. Bruce Cabot in a Western whose name escapes me. A film noir from the 1950s which haunts me still; I have to track this one down. A guy crosses the mob, runs off to Mexico, and then for some reason is able to come back to the city of darkness. He makes amends or the guy who double-crossed him gets fingered and pays his dues, and the protagonist—I keep thinking it is Richard Conte—at the end is able to start a new life. He goes outside. His girl, a woman he met in Mexico or something, is waiting for him across the street. They smile at each other. She starts to cross the street to greet him when, bam, a car comes out of nowhere, skids into her and kills her, and any chance Richard Conte or whoever it was had for building a new life and actually being able to make something of himself, that is now gone, too.

I have to find out which movie that was. It kind of haunts me. Everything that film noir was about, for me, is in that scene. Guys who’ve never had a break, who have always been kept down no matter how much they fought back, guys who understood completely that life is unfair and basically meaningless, finally get a chance at something, and then it gets taken from them, or they get smashed down one last time, in some impersonal way that would be cruel if the universe or anybody gave a shit about these poor slobs, if anything meant anything. It’s Greek tragedy. These were Greek tragedies, these film noir pictures. Hubris doesn’t mean that your character was your fate or that you had to be noble to suffer; hubris means that stuff happens randomly, there is no way to prevent it, and you get knocked down just because. In fact, there is no because. You get knocked down, The End. Character is, Yeah, shit happens, but I just keep going. These grandparents and parents of ours who made it through the Great Depression and World War II—that’s character. They developed character. That’s tragedy, and that’s the character that comes from tragedy.

(I wondered, as a kid, why my parents would spend their early adulthood in the late fifties and early sixties, sitting on the couch or relaxing in an easy chair at the end of the day, watching boring Andy Griffith Christmas specials or predictable variety shows or mediocre sitcoms until I realized, much later, that they had earned that right to do that by living through so much crap, the Great Depression and World War II and every deprivation, material and spiritual, that went with those events.)

I ramble in this way because, as my seven-year-old daughter tells me, “Dad, you have too many words.” Also, I ramble in this way because watching those old movies late at night, sometimes every night during summer vacation when I was 14, 15, 16, ties in with how I appreciate time. This is odd, but here it is: the old TV Guide, the digest size that anyone over 30 or 40 grew up with, always listed the movie title, I think, with Movie in bold caps (Futura? Helvetica?) and then, if I recall correctly, a dash, followed by the movie’s genre: Western. Melodrama. Comedy. Adventure. Romance. Maybe they used Romance; I’m not sure. Monster movies, I remember, were always labeled Melodrama, a term I recall looking up when I was I don’t know how young. Then you’d get the release date in parentheses, and then the famous TV Guide capsule summary which was nothing more or less than the logline for the movie. These descriptions were gems of precision.

The release dates in parentheses put these things in perspective for me. I was born in 1952. Here was a Western that was released in 1952, so I have something in common with that movie in terms of time. A war picture—I wasn’t really drawn to those the way many of my peers were—but a war picture would be from the 40s. My old man had been in the war, and that was (I would count) so many years before I was born. I’d heard about the Depression from people in the neighborhood and my grandparents—that put movies from the Depression in perspective. (My dad’s mom loved the old Universal monster pictures from the early 30s and also had a special fondness, I recall, for White Zombie, which, as ancient and slow as it no doubt seems to viewers today, still for me has a creepiness lacking even in the Universal movies. It may be the very lack of artfulness that makes White Zombie seem airless, vacant, hollow, allows it to fulfill its sense of stasis, slow-moving death, emptiness, doom.)

From those parenthetical release dates for movies, I pulled together a sense of America in the twentieth century, so that, when I learned some historical fact or other, I fit it into the period familiar to me from the movies. The Progressive era and the Jazz Age were silent movies, and the more of those I saw, the more I understood how electrifying these movies must have been to their audiences, sound or no sound. Movies (originally the term was used to slander the newcomers in Los Angeles who made pictures—the people, not the product) moved. They were about speed, energy, youth; they were about what was becoming the American Century.

Oddly, then, I carry around this weird sense of feeling in many ways very familiar with stretches of history I did not live through. The Great Depression is not remote; it was when George Raft danced with Carole Lombard and Paul Muni was on a chain gang and Humphrey Bogart met his Dead End at the hands of Joel McCrae, at the same time that my dad’s father worked for the railroad and kept his family together that way. It was when Mr. Jones across the street worked for the Girard Coal Company, I think its name was, and did okay, and it was when Mr. Grinnalds next door hit the road as a young man and looked for work, traveling from Virginia to Pittsburgh to Youngstown, and that was “back when I was smoking Luckies,” as he said to me once, as though a way to tell time is by which brand of cigarettes you smoked or which car you drove or which girl you were dating.

So this history is relevant and recent for me, and my appreciation of it did indeed start with watching Shane and The Bride of Frankenstein and Prince of Players on Friday and Saturday nights when I was a kid. How, then, does anyone else for whom bygone history is recent history measure that span that keeps things alive, recent, almost within living memory? Do scientists carry around a time map such as this with dates or places in which Nils Bohr and Michael Faraday are plugged in, so that time for a scientist who is alive now is squashed into stepping stones of relevant years, so that the years that have passed are not past? Artists must feel that way. Musicians must. The past is never past for musicians because they seem always to be building on what has gone before them, in the same way that scientists do. Painters. Some writers, some novelists. For many people it is, no doubt, the history of their families or their neighborhood that provides the path of stepping stones, their church, the local business or businesses. How empty those of us must be who try to live new and fresh at every moment as though there were no moments before, only this one, so that they must constantly catch up, compete, be rewarded, be recognized, be paid attention to. For what? For a moment? These restless people are beads from a broken necklace rolling all over the place, no longer connected, no longer sensible or part of something recognizable, less than alone. Sadness. Madness, a kind of madness, such a life.

I have too many words, as Lily says, but when I start putting them down, the past is not past, as Faulkner said, and I begin to feel a connection with anyone else who runs a race with his or her own moving mind, trying to get the words down as precisely and as soon as possible so that whatever is inside becomes outside, becomes expressed—words, music, even science, maybe.

For the life of me, though, I still cannot recall the name of that Richard Conte movie, and when I checked his filmography on IMDB, I didn’t find it. I don’t think it is a Richard Conte movie. I have misremembered a stepping stone.

The Years That Pass That Are Not Past

When I was a kid—10, 12 years old and later—I used to stay up late at night on Fridays and Saturdays and watch old movies. Monster movies hosted by Ghoulardi on channel 8 in Cleveland, for a while there, in the early sixties, but later, just about anything—film noir from the 1940s and 1950s, Shane and other Westerns, old adventure movies, and particularly pictures from the very early talkie era, which for some reason fascinated me. Carole Lombard and George Raft dancing in some movie whose name I forget. Bruce Cabot in a Western whose name escapes me. A film noir from the 1950s which haunts me still; I have to track this one down. A guy crosses the mob, runs off to Mexico, and then for some reason is able to come back to the city of darkness. He makes amends or the guy who double-crossed him gets fingered and pays his dues, and the protagonist—I keep thinking it is Richard Conte—at the end is able to start a new life. He goes outside. His girl, a woman he met in Mexico or something, is waiting for him across the street. They smile at each other. She starts to cross the street to greet him when, bam, a car comes out of nowhere, skids into her and kills her, and any chance Richard Conte or whoever it was had for building a new life and actually being able to make something of himself, that is now gone, too.

I have to find out which movie that was. It kind of haunts me. Everything that film noir was about, for me, is in that scene. Guys who’ve never had a break, who have always been kept down no matter how much they fought back, guys who understood completely that life is unfair and basically meaningless, finally get a chance at something, and then it gets taken from them, or they get smashed down one last time, in some impersonal way that would be cruel if the universe or anybody gave a shit about these poor slobs, if anything meant anything. It’s Greek tragedy. These were Greek tragedies, these film noir pictures. Hubris doesn’t mean that your character was your fate or that you had to be noble to suffer; hubris means that stuff happens randomly, there is no way to prevent it, and you get knocked down just because. In fact, there is no because. You get knocked down, The End. Character is, Yeah, shit happens, but I just keep going. These grandparents and parents of ours who made it through the Great Depression and World War II—that’s character. They developed character. That’s tragedy, and that’s the character that comes from tragedy.

(I wondered, as a kid, why my parents would spend their early adulthood in the late fifties and early sixties, sitting on the couch or relaxing in an easy chair at the end of the day, watching boring Andy Griffith Christmas specials or predictable variety shows or mediocre sitcoms until I realized, much later, that they had earned that right to do that by living through so much crap, the Great Depression and World War II and every deprivation, material and spiritual, that went with those events.)

I ramble in this way because, as my seven-year-old daughter tells me, “Dad, you have too many words.” Also, I ramble in this way because watching those old movies late at night, sometimes every night during summer vacation when I was 14, 15, 16, ties in with how I appreciate time. This is odd, but here it is: the old TV Guide, the digest size that anyone over 30 or 40 grew up with, always listed the movie title, I think, with Movie in bold caps (Futura? Helvetica?) and then, if I recall correctly, a dash, followed by the movie’s genre: Western. Melodrama. Comedy. Adventure. Romance. Maybe they used Romance; I’m not sure. Monster movies, I remember, were always labeled Melodrama, a term I recall looking up when I was I don’t know how young. Then you’d get the release date in parentheses, and then the famous TV Guide capsule summary which was nothing more or less than the logline for the movie. These descriptions were gems of precision.

The release dates in parentheses put these things in perspective for me. I was born in 1952. Here was a Western that was released in 1952, so I have something in common with that movie in terms of time. A war picture—I wasn’t really drawn to those the way many of my peers were—but a war picture would be from the 40s. My old man had been in the war, and that was (I would count) so many years before I was born. I’d heard about the Depression from people in the neighborhood and my grandparents—that put movies from the Depression in perspective. (My dad’s mom loved the old Universal monster pictures from the early 30s and also had a special fondness, I recall, for White Zombie, which, as ancient and slow as it no doubt seems to viewers today, still for me has a creepiness lacking even in the Universal movies. It may be the very lack of artfulness that makes White Zombie seem airless, vacant, hollow, allows it to fulfill its sense of stasis, slow-moving death, emptiness, doom.)

From those parenthetical release dates for movies, I pulled together a sense of America in the twentieth century, so that, when I learned some historical fact or other, I fit it into the period familiar to me from the movies. The Progressive era and the Jazz Age were silent movies, and the more of those I saw, the more I understood how electrifying these movies must have been to their audiences, sound or no sound. Movies (originally the term was used to slander the newcomers in Los Angeles who made pictures—the people, not the product) moved. They were about speed, energy, youth; they were about what was becoming the American Century.

Oddly, then, I carry around this weird sense of feeling in many ways very familiar with stretches of history I did not live through. The Great Depression is not remote; it was when George Raft danced with Carole Lombard and Paul Muni was on a chain gang and Humphrey Bogart met his Dead End at the hands of Joel McCrae, at the same time that my dad’s father worked for the railroad and kept his family together that way. It was when Mr. Jones across the street worked for the Girard Coal Company, I think its name was, and did okay, and it was when Mr. Grinnalds next door hit the road as a young man and looked for work, traveling from Virginia to Pittsburgh to Youngstown, and that was “back when I was smoking Luckies,” as he said to me once, as though a way to tell time is by which brand of cigarettes you smoked or which car you drove or which girl you were dating.

So this history is relevant and recent for me, and my appreciation of it did indeed start with watching Shane and The Bride of Frankenstein and Prince of Players on Friday and Saturday nights when I was a kid. How, then, does anyone else for whom bygone history is recent history measure that span that keeps things alive, recent, almost within living memory? Do scientists carry around a time map such as this with dates or places in which Nils Bohr and Michael Faraday are plugged in, so that time for a scientist who is alive now is squashed into stepping stones of relevant years, so that the years that have passed are not past? Artists must feel that way. Musicians must. The past is never past for musicians because they seem always to be building on what has gone before them, in the same way that scientists do. Painters. Some writers, some novelists. For many people it is, no doubt, the history of their families or their neighborhood that provides the path of stepping stones, their church, the local business or businesses. How empty those of us must be who try to live new and fresh at every moment as though there were no moments before, only this one, so that they must constantly catch up, compete, be rewarded, be recognized, be paid attention to. For what? For a moment? These restless people are beads from a broken necklace rolling all over the place, no longer connected, no longer sensible or part of something recognizable, less than alone. Sadness. Madness, a kind of madness, such a life.

I have too many words, as Lily says, but when I start putting them down, the past is not past, as Faulkner said, and I begin to feel a connection with anyone else who runs a race with his or her own moving mind, trying to get the words down as precisely and as soon as possible so that whatever is inside becomes outside, becomes expressed—words, music, even science, maybe.

For the life of me, though, I still cannot recall the name of that Richard Conte movie, and when I checked his filmography on IMDB, I didn’t find it. I don’t think it is a Richard Conte movie. I have misremembered a stepping stone.

Attracting an Agent Is Like Going for a Job Interview

For the past 10 years, going back to 2003, at least, I’ve pitched ideas to agents, hoping to interest one of them in the commercial potential of one or another of my ideas, and the effort has come to nothing. I had literary representation decades ago, and what I wrote seemed to be accepted well enough in the commercial fiction market of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But that was then. Today, what I’m interested in writing, and how I’m interested in writing it, is of no use to literary reps or to publishers. I’ve debated why, and most of my answers are the same ones you’ve no doubt confronted many times. If I read one more blog or article that echoes how (1) the competition has never been fiercer, (2) the agent really has to fall in love with your pitch or your manuscript, or (3) you as the writer must never give up because the writers who get published are those who persist the longest, I’ll  – Well, I don’t know what I’ll do. Nothing, is what I’ll do.

No, I honestly think that where we are now in terms of writers and their agents is a reflection of the corporate ideology that has been taking over all aspects of American life for the past 30 or 40 years. It is this corporate emphasis that killed the midlist, for example. It is this corporate mentality –  driven by the bottom line, needful of regularity in the marketplace by which to base growth projections, and suspicious of novelty and creativity — that will give you the best clue to attracting an agent.

Attracting a literary agent is now exactly the same as applying for a job interview.

This doesn’t negate anything mentioned in the first couple of paragraphs. For instance, when I’ve gone on job interviews, I’ve made it a point to say to the person interviewing me, “Here’s my skill set and work history. How can I use these to help you? What can I do to help you with your business?” What I’m saying to whoever is interviewing me is that that person, as a potential employer, has a need to be filled, and if I’m the person with precisely the right skill set and experience to fill that need, then we shake hands and I show up next Monday to begin filling out the paperwork.

So along with all of the talk about writers needing passion and never giving up and believing in themselves and writing what they love and learning how to write crackerjack two-sentence pitches and how luck and whom you know play as big a part as having a mechanically perfect and grammatically correct manuscript, what’s really going on is that you, in your pitch to an agent, are applying for a job. You’re the potential employee. The agent is your potential employer.

Think this way and you’ll cut through a lot of folderol about writers and agents needing to work together for a vision, or agents needing to fall in love with characters or become enthusiastic about a manuscript and its passion or whatever.

These things are true, but exactly the same thing occurs during a job interview. Everyone in the room is working toward a profit-centered or growth-centered horizon. Everyone needs to feel that she or he is, if not falling in love, at least talking the same language and becoming enthusiastic about the possibilities each offers the other. These are the words and terms we use when we describe opportunities to express ourselves, to move forward, to make something of ourselves, to gain fulfillment — and those things are as true for a trucking company, a pancake restaurant, or an insurance agency as they are for someone promoting any other kind of product, such as commercial fiction.

I don’t think it used to be this way, not entirely. Publishing used to be much, much smaller, although even back in the early 70s, when I was trying to interest people in my adventure-fantasy novels, it was obvious that, even though you can’t make a living as a writer in America, you can make a fortune. All that’s changed is that the odds have increased and the fortunes have gotten larger.

But especially with agents such as Donald Maass, who may have been the first to promote this career-novelist approach to the talent he’s attracted, the idea of books as products and writers as product-producing profit-centers has become the norm in the commercial popular fiction arena.

It never used to be that formulaic, is perhaps what I’m getting at. It was not a formal algorithm, as far as I know, and the metrics involved were more generous for those writers-turned-authors who needed to get several paperbacks under their belts before settling into a profitable groove.

Publishing is now moviemaking is now the music industry is now finance is now social media-ing. Just as certain writers flourished in the past because their talents were perfect for their times, be it writing for pulps or paperbacks, radio or television, so certain writers today are perfect for our times. We can discuss matters of taste or talent or vision or any of those things for the rest of the week, but what really matters — consistently producing a product that meets the demands of the marketplace in a predictable, growth-oriented manner — is why you, as a potentially successful author, should approach agents as though you are applying for a job.

How to engineer two-sentence pitches to reflect that I’m not sure of yet. And a few other things, as well. I’ll try to come up with some ideas if this is useful to anyone out there. Maybe it’s simply a matter of working with the agent once you’ve gotten past the I-love-your-pitch stage. Then again, I am the guy who hasn’t successfully engaged any agent for more than 10 years, so do keep that in mind. I wouldn’t trust me too far on this.

When I talked with Don Maas over supper a long time ago, the day after Columbus Day 1989, I told him that I saw myself as a novelist fulfilling a role similar to that of a movie director. Movie directors are free to undertake a variety of pictures. The best of them, at least, historically have done comedies as well as dramas, flat-out genre pictures such as Westerns or thrillers as well as anything else that intrigued their intelligence or creativity. That’s what I wanted to do: a couple of thrillers, then some horror, then maybe try my hand at a mystery, as well as writing some historical fiction. (I’d still love to dramatize the attempt to create the state of Franklin out of territory that eventually became part of Tennessee.) Maas told me that I had it wrong: novelists aren’t movie directors; they’re actors. They become typecast. Audiences want to see the actor do more or less the same thing in successive pictures throughout their careers. Same with writers of certain kinds of stories.

Maas was right, of course. True movie stars with undeniable talent — a Tom Hanks, for example — eventually can earn enough clout to be allowed to stretch as far as his or her talents will go. But given how the entertainment industry is structured, this situation is the rare exception. And given how the popular commercial fiction industry is structured, it’s unusual for authors, as well. Stephen King writes a lot of horror and then says that he wants to be a more or less serious fictioneer and write more substantial fiction; that’s fine, but he’s still basically a very successful hairdresser moving to a new salon and taking his clientele with him. Same with James Patterson, whose success has been incredible. He started out in advertising, which may be the best possible start for someone to develop the mindset of anticipating and then feeding audience expectations. And when Patterson got caught behind the curve — say, with the boom in YA fantasy fiction or the Diary-of-a-Young-Doofus clones, he moved smoothly into line to take his place in racking up sales. That’s how it’s done.

These agents who represent your manuscripts also now guide your career, so they are basically managers. It’s job security for them and assists you, as well, in staying on top of things in an environment that has changed so dramatically. We’ve gone through so many corporate buyouts, and so many editors and other industry specialists lost out when publishing hemorrhaged talent after the 2008 crash, that it makes sense for agents to reinvent themselves as literary reps-cum-managers and whatever else they can do to keep things moving forward.

I believe these agents, in that regard, when they say that what would have sold 5 or 10 years ago has no chance in the publishing environment today. Those ideas that I pitched over the past several years? Seasons of the Moon was one of them; I still think that the concept of a rural, pagan, matriarchal community embodying in its own fashion the most ancient of social constructs, that of justice, makes for a great novel. But the commercial appeal? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Crickets chirping. Call of Shadows? Too adult, maybe. It’s my old David Trevisan novels reinterpreted as more mature material. I’m still annoyed that Maas dropped the ball and never talked to Doubleday, in the fall of 1988, after I’d pitched Doubleday with the concept of the first Trevisan novel, eventually published (and mismanaged) by Avon in 1989, titled as The Fair Rules of Evil. But the idea worked once; why not use that concept of an ageless sorcerer, make him a grown-up, give him a lot of baggage, and set him in situations that would really resonate with contemporary events as well as historical themes? Many pitch letters later — nada. Zilch. Crickets. I really thought it would make a great series.

Maybe it’s as simple as my not knowing how to write temptation-filled pitch letters. That’s entirely possible. But it’s also entirely possible that, whatever else I’m doing, I’m approaching this in the wrong way. I’m looking for someone to represent my novel about the psychopathic writer and the young book editor caught under his spell, someone to champion my reincarnation story or my novel about the mysterious disappearance of a movie star. Wrong approach. What I need to do (despite all of the advice about writing what you love and bringing your passion to what you write) is to think in terms of fulfilling a need in the marketplace by approaching a potential agent as a possible employer. Do the research, identify a potential money-making idea, and go for it. Hire me! After all, that agent would not only rep my story but sell me as a product and manage my career, and we would build this as we would a trucking company or a chain of pancake restaurants.

As I said, I think that this is the proper mindset to have in pitching agents, and if it is of assistance to any of you out there swimming upriver or fighting the good fight in the trenches against impossible odds — well, you’re welcome to it. I’m not sure how exactly to go about it — I don’t have an algorithm or game plan — but there you go.

Although, again, I’m the guy who couldn’t interest any of dozens of agents with the adult-sorcerer or pagan-women ideas.

As for me, I’m at 41,000 words with my literary sword-and-sorcery novel, which really is something new and different, as far as I know, but I doubt that there are many editors or agents out there who’d be interested in an oddball experiment such as Sometime Lofty Towers.

Anyone? Any takers? Anyone?

Ah, as I thought. Crickets.

No problem. I’m coming up on 43,000 words any day now, though, and I’ll keep it going because I do feel passionate about this story!   : )

 

 

“There began to be wisps of mist along the ground”: The Excellence of Leigh Brackett’s Prose

Whenever I hit a rut in my writing and need to be reminded why I am at the keyboard, I pull out one or another story or novel by Leigh Brackett to get me back on track, to remind me why I wanted to learn how to tell stories in the first place:

Jim Beckworth, on Old Raven’s buffalo horse, fired and reloaded until his arm was tired from pushing the ramrod home. The frenzy cooled. The survivors of the herd streamed away across the plain. Rich came up beside Jim. He was grinning, his long hair flying, his eyes wild and bright. “We made ’em come,” he said. “Wagh! We made ’em come!” He and Jim rode with the braves, yelping their triumph.

That’s from early in Follow the Free Wind, her 1963 Western novel. We are there. We are there, when we read this scene or any scene in one of Miss Brackett’s stories, and in a fashion that I, at least, find unique to her kind of word work. We get the most concise information we need for a character. Descriptions pull us in as though we are a camera eye. This is because Brackett nailed down how to manage her craft by writing screenplays.

I can’t think of a more exacting or demanding method of getting a story across with the absolute minimal amount of verbiage than a screenplay, but Miss Brackett had it mastered. She is, after all, the scripter that Howard Hawks kept on set so that she could rework dialogue with him while he was directing.

So look at what Brackett does with that paragraph. The short sentences are shots. Paragraphs and pages are scenes. She is guiding us with a camera eye over the plains, cutting to a character, pulling back to pan across the moving herd, coming in for a close-up of an excited mountain man.

Even in giving us exposition, Miss Brackett provides backstory with that precisely detailed camera eye that drops us right in the middle of where she is taking us:

They were about to cross the Platte and head south to the Arkansas where they wintered, and they had nothing in the line of food or horses to spare. But their cousins the Skidi, the Pawnee Loups, they said, had a permanent town at the Forks of the Plains where they wintered, and it might be that Tirawa had smiled more brightly upon them. So the General marched on westward, praying. And then, incredible as a vision of paradise, there were the big earth lodges, warm and dry, and steaming pots of food, and nothing to do but eat and sleep, hunt, and bargain for buffalo robes and new moccasins.

As efficient and succinct as this writing is, Brackett always allows herself just enough space to bring in the poetry, as in that paragraph, also from Follow the Free Wind, as well as with the title of this blog, which is taken from a line in her short story “The Shadows,” first published in the February 1952 issue of Startling Stories:

     Barrier walked ahead, going with a lanky noiseless stride like an Indian. His eyes were anxious, and his nerves on edge.

It was very lovely in the forest, with the blooms of many colors nodding overhead. Barrier thought of a garden at the bottom of the sea. The glades were full of blueness like still water. There began to be wisps of mist along the ground.

That last line is perfect, and here’s why. Brackett doesn’t say “Mist crawled along the ground” or “A mist began to rise” or “There was a mist on the ground.” She says, “There began to be,” with that expletive “There” initially holding us back, and the alliteration and the cadence of the stressed and unstressed syllables, and then “wisps of mist,” with the repetition of the short vowel sound but with the consonants slowing us down so that we are reading at the same speed that the wisps are moving, then ending with “along the ground,” guh-guh-duh, like an incantation coming to a rock hard conclusion: “There began to be…wisps…of mist…along the ground.” And the wisps are just beginning, in the same way that the claustrophobic adventure the characters find themselves in is just beginning. They are a team of earth or Terran explorers on some new planet; they have found the ruins of a lost civilization, and in a moment, they will become uncomfortably aware that shadows, moving shadows, independently alive shadows, are following them and closing in around them. And there began to be wisps of mist….

Then there is the dialogue. Brackett is renowned for the hard-boiled edge of her writing. True, that aspect of her prose is what gives her lines their electric crackle and snap. But she understands drama. The peppy back and forth of hardcore streetspeak is just the beginning for Brackett because she brings out character through her dialogue the way professional screenwriters do. This is from The Coming of the Terrans (1967):

     Dying star, and dying world, alone on the edge of nothing. Trehearne looked at it. “What do they do there?”

“Nothing. They just wait.”

“For what?”

He knew the answer before she told him. No more ships, no more voyaging, nothing to look forward to but the only release there was. Trehearne drew back from the viewer. Shairn smiled.

“Afraid?”

“Yes.”

“I’m on your side.”

“Are you? Or are you just using me to punish Kerrel, because he bores you?”

“Don’t you trust me?”

“No!”

“But there isn’t much you can do about it, is there?”

“I guess not.”

“Then you might as well as make the best of it.”

Crackle. Snap. And “nothing to look forward to but the only release there was.” Ouch. Grim.

It is the judicious minimalism of her writing that really gets to me. Brackett pulls us in; she requires us to collaborate with her in her storytelling, just as she expected everyone involved with filming one of her screenplays to become involved in making the picture. There’s a great interview with Brackett in Films in Review for August-September 1976 in which she talks about the workmanlike aspect of crafting stories. This would been published during the time that I knew her and Edmond Hamilton—he died the following February—and I recall mentioning the Films in Review article to her, but if she said much about it, I don’t remember her comment, damn it.

In any event, I paraphrase because I don’t have my copy at hand, but one of the points she made was that, prior to crafting screenplays, she would start a story and get up a head of steam and go for it, and the story either worked or it didn’t. Once she began writing scripts, though, she had a clearer sense of fashioning a story, of fitting all of the pieces together.

I like that revelation about her professionalism because the more I’ve relied on what I know about filmmaking and the modern, cinematic form of storytelling, the surer I feel I have gotten with my own writing.

So I turn to Miss Brackett’s stories to remind myself just how much sheer fun and enjoyment we can have in crafting our yarns. She’s not a polemicist or a writer living indoors, looking into a mirror and talking back to herself, as so many of our contemporary literary writers are. I understand that that is their shtick, but she comes from a different school entirely. Writing for Leigh Brackett is not therapy or exhibitionism or oversharing; it is storytelling. She trusts us to understand that. And her enthusiasm comes through in her writing. It is professionalism of a very high order, and she’s having a ball telling these stories, using all of the tools in her tool chest, and we can tell that as we read her prose. We’re in very good hands from sentence one on.

Which brings to mind something else. I tend to think of writers — or their work, at least — as being warm or cool. Miss Brackett’s contemporaries Ray Bradbury and Charles Beaumont I think of as warm; another contemporary, Richard Matheson, is cool. (I can go back to Tolstoy, who I feel is warm, compared with Chekhov, who is very cool.) Brackett is cool; her stories are strong and solidly planted, waste no words, and pull us in like a movie does, showing us, not telling us, welcoming us to come by the fire (if I may mix my metaphors) and sit and be included and listen.

So her stories are cool. Still, regarding the woman herself…I don’t think I have ever seen a photograph of Leigh Brackett in which she isn’t smiling, or at least grinning, or at least has one little corner of her mouth turned up. She seems to me always to have been enjoying the trip. Smiling while she had fun the whole time she gave us these stories, this poetry, these shots, these scenes — all of this exemplary prose.

Website Reboot

Friends, the website has a great new look courtesy of my friend Mike Johnson, and I’m taking the new look seriously by promising to blog frequently and faithfully. Used to be that I’d blog maybe two or three times a year because I got it in my head that I needed to write reasonably thoughtful essays.

I like those essays, and I may yet have a few of them left in me, but the gist of this blog from now on is going to be putting down my thoughts of the moment—primarily about writing, the art and practice of, or jabber about what I have in the works.

Publishing? Such as it is these days, we can talk about it.

I want to talk about friends of mine who write and their projects.

Leigh Brackett–her writing style was singular and remarkable. I’m going to discuss that.

Sometime Lofty Towers, that art-epic sword-and-sorcery literary novel of mine that I’ve been at work on, off and on, since this time in 1997? You’re going to hear about that. I’m up to more than 40,000 words and we’re about to get into the big battle scene that will go on for who knows how long and, if I know what I’m doing, will be as spooky as hell.

I might even talk about the legendary and god-awful silent-movie version of The Whisperer in Darkness I made in 1975 with some friends in northeast Ohio. Long vilified and treated as a joke. Maybe I’ll share some thoughts on that.

Books I’ve read or am reading. How do I reconcile the philosopher John Gray’s excellent, reductionist Straw Dogs with Ptolemy Tompkins’s The Modern Book of the Dead-—the former a brilliant, pithy takedown of the modern West’s fetish with progress (among other topics), the latter a fascinating study by a former materialist-minded thinker as he pieces together, in a book that is superbly written-—a map of the afterlife based on evidence and insights from a plethora of sources, most of them dismissed by modern science.

Psychics. They’re real, and their gifts are bona fide.

Words. Grammar, English grammar.

Movies. Lots about movies, I’m sure.

We’ll see where this goes.

In the meantime, enjoy this newly designed website, which, coincidentally, strikes exactly the right tone of the Halloween season.

Old Dogs and New Paradigms, Part 4

While having breakfast with my daughter, Lily, the other morning, I made note of a commercial that came on as we were watching Nickelodeon. (Nickelodeon is pretty much the only channel we do watch these days, and that’s not a bad thing. The writing on I Carly—now canceled, alas—and Victorious, on See Dad Run and Marvin Marvin, is much better than what passes for scripting on most of the legacy broadcast network offerings. And if Supah Ninjas is new to you, be aware: this show has become appointment television in our house on Saturday evenings whenever a new episode premieres.)

The book advertised—I didn’t notice the title—is the latest of many series indebted to the wild success of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. This one was engineered or concocted to reach an audience of Middle Schoolers and has to do with a brother and sister. That the product being advertised is a book or a series of books is subordinate to the fact that the product advertised is a product. This is nothing new in America; we are, after all, the country that developed mass advertising and product promotion and we are the country that created consumerism as a contact sport. The television commercial served to remind me that the commercial success of any writer or author depends on two things: (1) the beginning of a trend that comes from out of nowhere, and then (2) promoting and profiting from that trend by finding the sweet spot that will tickle the Pavlovian response in potential customers.

Events aligned just once in my life to allow me to hit that sweet spot, matching what I was writing with what a sufficient number of people wanted to read. This was during the late 1970s and early 1980s when sword-and-sorcery fiction was popular. The more profitable commercial possibilities of Tolkeinesque world-building fantasies, however, quickly took precedence in the marketplace.

The very successful product engineering and promotion of adult world-building fantasy occurred during the enormous shift of publishing books as books to publishing books as product. One of the results of this shift has been the death of the midlist. The midlist is where you used to find sword-and-sorcery and lots of other offbeat or interesting books. The midlist represented the manuscripts chosen and fought for by editors who took chances. Catherine Czerkawska put it very well in her blog of last summer (which can be found here in its entirety: http://selfpublishingadvice.org/blog/self-publishing-midlist/ ):

The midlist used to be the seed bed from which the occasional (almost always unpredictable) blockbuster would spring. Screenwriter William Goldman’s much quoted dictum that ‘nobody knows anything’ applies just as much to fiction as to film. If the publisher got lucky, it might be an author’s first or second book that made the breakthrough. More frequently it would be their fifth, sixth or seventh book. And if a book did become a bestseller or spawn a number of sequels, some of those profits would be ploughed back into nurturing other seedlings. Broadly speaking, that’s how it used to be, before the big corporations ate the smaller companies and changed the whole ethos of publishing in the process.

The past decade or so has seen traditional publishing presiding over the slow decline of the midlist. The slump occurred because many publishers (now part of huge corporations with shareholders to consider) began to be reluctant to buy books which weren’t certain to make shed loads of money from the offset. And this at a time when eBooks were in prospect, POD [print on demand] was becoming a reality and profits from the ‘long tail’ of niche markets were already being exploited by a handful of far-sighted companies in collaboration with creative practitioners in other fields.

The experience of many older writers, even those with agents, is that publishers are now looking for instant gratification in the shape of a ‘stunning debut bestseller’. If the books don’t sell in industrial quantities within a surprisingly short space of time, the author will be quietly dropped after a handful of titles and will find it almost impossible to publish elsewhere. More likely these days, he or she will not be taken on at all. Writers – and agents – tell of deeply frustrating rejection letters from editors all essentially saying the same thing: ‘I love this, I think it’s wonderful, but in the current climate, our marketing department doesn’t know how to sell it.’ It is rather as though a company allowed sales – however competent – to consistently override all product development decisions….

These developments also help to explain why so many older writers like myself are embracing the indie revolution with such enthusiasm. We have either been dropped by publishers who were focused on instant gratification, or by agents because we weren’t making them enough money. We have no chance at all of producing a ‘stunning debut’ because in most cases, our debuts were rather a long time ago. But most of us have a number of novels on file, sometimes reverted backlists, sometimes well edited and highly praised new work which was not deemed to be bestseller material and so remained unpublished. Yet we know that readers enjoy our work because they have taken the time and trouble to tell us so and to ask for more.

When Czerkawska mentions “industrial quantities,” my heart sinks because the situation faced by those of us “older writers” who once used to see our books faced on bookstore shelves is defined precisely by those cold words. I think of a comment I read recently in an AP piece filed by Dan Sewell announcing the death of Leroy “Sugarfoot” Bonner, frontman for the Ohio Players, a funk band of the 1970s ( http://music.yahoo.com/news/ohio-players-frontman-sugarfoot-bonner-dies-171706799.html ). In the AP article, bass player and Ohio Players founding member Marshall Jones is quoted as saying, “I sit back now, and it was all a brilliant blaze. I think, ‘Damn, did I do that? It was just “Zoom!” That was a starburst. And like all things like that, it fizzles.” Which is precisely what it feels like to have been a midlist author whose books showed up on drugstore and bookstore shelves, sold a few copies, and then disappeared, likely forever. Bonner himself is quoted as saying that, these days, “There is nothing but the old school and the new fools.”

I love that.

What has occurred in publishing—the bottom-line dictate that the opening weekend must be huge and the returns instantaneous and enormous—is precisely what has happened with the music industry, with movie production, and on Wall Street among investment bankers. Agents, editors, and publishers want customers. I want readers. Superficially the same, these two entities may occasionally meet in the middle somewhere and agree that certain books are worthy of their time, even though one of the entities sees the story primarily as entertaining product and the other, as sincere, unique expression built on accepted literary protocol. Customers consume and then discard or excrete. Readers, if I may make the distinction, often invest as much of themselves into reading a story as the writer puts into writing it. Readers are not simply page turners; they are thought turners, as well—true imaginative partners, not passive audience members.

Midlist authors reaching their readers in this age of instant gratification brings me to another observation, this one regarding my former agent, Don Maass, who has been spectacularly successful in developing precisely these sorts of instant-gratification, industrial-quantity products that regularly appear on the bestseller lists, where sales “consistently override all product development decisions.”

Maass and I once talked about the possibility of my writing my breakthrough novel. When I knew him, early in his career and, as it turned out, near the end of mine, he championed my fantasy trilogy The Fall of the First World, then recently out of print, and tried to get it picked up for republication. No one wanted it, but I credit him for his hard work and his appreciation for a book series that had nothing in common with the Tolkienesque clones that were as popular then as they are now. On the other hand, Maass failed me in a number of ways. He refused to show Magicians (later retitled The Fair Rules of Evil) to Doubleday, even after an editor there asked to see it; he preferred to pitch it to paperback houses. It was published under its new title by Avon, who dropped the ball miserably on distributing it. I also recall Don’s dismissing one my pitches (for a manuscript titled Sinister) because it mixed genres. “Is it a horror novel?” he asked me in 1987. “Or is it a police procedural? It has to be one or the other.” Perhaps I was ahead of my time, given the enormous success we’ve seen over the past fifteen or so years with precisely those kind of cross-genre novels.

Don would have no interest in representing me now because I myself am no longer interested in trying to develop the kind of book-as-product that he has so successfully managed to promote in this modern era of readers-as-consumers. (I know this because I recently pitched him with a new idea and never received a response.) But I think it’s important to keep in mind what Don has helped to accomplish for his brand of writer. His methodology has been undeniably profitable and has helped shape the current system of fiction publishing in New York. However, we are moving at the speed of light into fascinating new regions of author-reader exchange as a benefit of digital publishing, web publishing, independent publishing. In a year-end blog dated this past December, Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, reports an encounter he had with Maass in which they came down on two different sides of writers publishing independently. Mark Coker thinks that the future for many writers is in self-publishing; Maass, contrarily, says, “If you don’t care to reach readers, then by all means self-publish.” ( http://blog.smashwords.com/2012/12/mark-cokers-2013-book-publishing.html) As a woman who responded in the Comment sections of Coker’s blog says, Maass turned her down when she pitched him, and if she’d listened to him, she’d still have no readers. Instead, she now has thousands as a result of self-publishing her novels. It’s simply the difference between writing to reach readers, even if the cost-benefit ratio does not look good in a purely business sense, and writing to produce a product that will appeal to customers and succeed in a purely business sense. (Again, there used to be room for both types of story, back when we still had the midlist.)

Much of the discussion in the Comments section of Coker’s blog has to do with the concept of black swans—the outliers in any field that seem to come out of nowhere, exactly in the way that the latest writers or hit novels used to appear from the midlist. Where are these black swans now? They’re coming from the self-published authors and independent publishers.

This democratization of writers, as messy as it is, of course, is a genuinely good thing for those of us who want as many worthy writers as possible to have as good a chance of success as possible—and by success, I do mean reaching one’s readers, not necessarily monetizing some concept into the next get-rich-quick scheme concocted by producers of books as products.

It’s worth remembering, then, that more than a few of the current successfully commercial series started out precisely as black swans that literary agents overlooked, missing the forest for the trees. Diary of a Wimpy Kid originated as a blog on an educational website. 50 Shades of Grey, as kitschy a marvel as anything concocted by Judith Krantz or Danielle Steele in their gloriously imbecilic heydays, began as fan fiction. These are wonderful products to grab a youngster’s attention and introduce him or her to reading, or to enliven a gray, ahem, afternoon. There will be more such successes, many more, as the slapdash nature of democratized self-publishing and independent publishing shows the tired old Midtown dinosaurs, the still-remaining legacy publishers, a thing or three about reaching audiences. Hugh C. Howey sold his self-published dystopian sf novel Wool last year to Ridley Scott and Steve Zaillian, in collaboration with 20th Century Fox. Howey also landed a book deal with Random House UK. So the big cheeses—Random House, Fox—still have all the money to throw around, but you can see where this is going.

The legacy houses and the literary agents are no longer the innovators, if they ever were. They certainly are no longer acting decisively as intelligent discriminators in weeding the possible sure hits from the likely misfires. Pretty soon they will be simply brand-name packagers, maybe offering a little panache or fading glow to the real talent. But that will come to an end, too, sometime. What good are these publishers and agents? They don’t offer copyediting any longer; they won’t promote your book. Maybe they’ll distribute it, but for a big cut. More and more, as independent writers have complained about since the democratization of storytelling got going in earnest, the question is: What good are these traditional publishers? The money spent by readers continues to gravitate more and more to the new independent writers and publishers. As this occurs, more and more editors and artists and PR copywriters will be let go by the old houses. The hustlers who survive will find new ways to make a buck; they always have and always will. But it will no longer be in situations in which they stand between writers and readers, separating them according to corporate whim. They will have to find ways to make a buck by accommodating the new writer-reader dynamic.

As of now, I believe I’ve finally made peace with the fact that I will never have long-term conventional success with my writing—securing a literary agent, receiving substantial advances, having stories optioned for movie or television adaptations, and consequently making enough money to feel that I can pay for my daughter’s college education and earning my livelihood solely from what I write and see published. I’m fine with that.

I also think that I’m now past the endless circle of what-if’s that kept my desire to write in suspended animation for the better part of two decades. What if Dino DeLaurentiis’s people had read my Red Sonja script in 1983 before completing their plans for the movie? What if the Red Sonja they did make had turned out to be a good B movie worthy of a sequel rather than a Golden Turkey nominee? What if Don Maass in 1987 had shown the manuscript of Magicians to Doubleday instead of refusing to do so? (Hell, what if I had gone on for my Master’s in Medieval History and spent the eighties and nineties teaching classes on the Pirenne Thesis or the rule of Baybars, the thirteenth-century Mameluke Sultan of Egypt?)

Where I am now is good. I’ve been a medical editor for more than twenty years, and for the past twelve years I’ve worked with orthopaedic surgeons, copyediting and preparing for publication review articles and other educational material. They do the surgery on children born with spina bifida or on athletes with injured anterior cruciate ligaments; my staff and I may sure the grammar and syntax in the surgeons’s papers help them say what they mean to say.

Recently I was at our annual meeting and, one morning on the shuttle bus that takes attendees to the convention center where the technical exhibits and educational meetings are held, I found myself seated next to one of our doctors. We talked about his line of work, and he used the phrase “good hands.” It is a commonplace among surgeons, that an excellent surgeon has good hands. What, I asked, does that mean precisely? That the surgeon’s hands are steady? I certainly hope that his or her hands would be steady!

It’s more than that, he explained. Orthopaedic surgery is a combination of both carpentry and gardening. The carpentry is repairing the bones and joints and understanding the mechanics and engineering involved in those bones and joints. The gardening is appreciating the tissue you’re working with, disturbing only as necessary everything in the field or area of the surgical repair. The tissue, the human body, is like the soil in a garden, and you work with it carefully to help things be where they need to be or want to be and to help them grow.

Remarkable analogy. I am borrowing it to explain what I mean by the sort of books and stories that allow writers to connect with readers in such a way that there is a partnership. I’ve said many times that, if you’re a sports fan, sometimes you want to watch a baseball game and any baseball game will do. It helps to pass the time with something you’re interested in. The same with books. If you like to read, sometimes you want a book that just helps you pass the time, and any book of the type you like will do. It’s largely the mechanical aspects we appreciate in those baseball games and those books. They do the job well, and we’re in the hands of a good carpenter. It’s sufficient.

But then there are the writers whose books not only rely on the good carpentry and mechanics of storytelling but that also make use of the gardening aspect of good writing. Characters have depth; the characters are people as real as people we know, perhaps even more real, presented with the clarity that comes of precise observation and reporting. The language touches us in ways that we hadn’t anticipated; the words open doors and windows of thought, or expand what we assumed we know. Often, the ordinary is revealed to be full of wonder. This benefit of good writing needn’t be profound, but often it feels just right, the author not using the same words over and over but instead choosing the right words and putting them down so that we are held for a moment in suspension. At its best, good writing is a thing of wonder, as well.

With my writing these days, I am trying to be both a carpenter and a gardener. This puts me out of step with the cleverer authors who are attuned to the zeitgeist or who help create the zeitgeist, who are in the rhythm of the cultural moment. Sometimes these writers are both carpenters and gardeners; certainly they are good carpenters.

I want to try to be more than just a good carpenter, and so I take care with what I write. This is a not a recipe or a formula for turning out copy quickly for publishers! But it does satisfy the writer part of me that hopes to reach readers, even just a few of them.

So I am back at work on Sometime Lofty Towers, my literary sword-and-sorcery novel (if there is such a thing) that is, of course, an adventure story, but an adventure that takes place inside as well as outside the characters. The violence takes place inside as well as outside the characters. The resolutions are incomplete because that is how life is: incomplete. We do our best to draw conclusions, as someone famous once said, from insufficient facts.

I started Sometime Lofty Towers a month after my father died, in the fall of 1997, and I have occasionally taken out the manuscript to work on in the years since. The basis of the novel is my notion that sword-and-sorcery stories essentially are Westerns in the sense that American Westerns provide us with the same elemental material that has been used since human beings first started telling stories. So my book is set on a frontier; it is about the clash of cultures, one from the East, which has money and power and is determined to take what it wants, and one in the West, represented by the indigenous peoples, who have remained as they are for as long as they have told their history to themselves. They are the People. Sometime Lofty Towers is, all at once, an adventure story, a meditation, and an exercise in which I try to use the language in the best way that I can. I may be trying to do too much. My reach is exceeding my grasp. But here is a passage I have worked and reworked numerous times. Maybe I just about have it where I want it to be.

The ache of aliveness, the hurt of living, life takenfor what it is: be there gods, be there devils here or hereafter, it comes to nothing, life comes to nothing. Years pass, and the years are nothing. We are complete before we are begun. In all that we do, we charge life with more than it is meant to hold, but to what purpose? We suffer and are gone, and otherwise all is silence, the silence from which we come, the silence to which we go. Did we dream it? Is life so? All is silence. Beyond any dream, beyond any or ever— Nothing that was, was, and we who are, never were meant to be.

I will not find a conventional publisher for this book; I know that already. It has nothing to recommend it in the commercial sense. But I do hope for readers.

The same is true of a sequel to Seasons of the Moon that I intend to write. I want to explore when and how this gynocentric community came to settle in that small Ohio town and perhaps balance that story with events following those in Seasons, showing what happens to some of these characters during the social upheavals of the 1970s. I want to tell that story. It’s as simple as that. I want to tell a story.

In this frame of mind, I’m reminded of something Igor Stravinsky once said. It speaks to me as an artist and creator as well as to the part of me that tries very hard to appreciate the best that others do, whether they are writers or surgeons or…baseball players: “Everything genuine is rare.”

Everything genuine is rare.

Including writers.

Including readers.

For Glenn, with Thanks

I completed the following appreciation in January 2011 for a book of testimonials to be published in connection with honoring Glenn at the annual Robert E. Howard Days celebration in Cross Plains, Texas, in June 2011. That particular volume of tributes to Glenn did not materialize; therefore, this is the first publication or appearance of this essay.

I’ve left it in the present tense although Glenn passed away on December 31, 2011.

If his name is new to you, please see the Wikipedia page devoted to him at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Lord

Glenn Lord is an important man.

I first heard his name in the late 1960s. I was in high school and, as things turned out, a witness, one of many, to a turning point in this country’s popular culture. By that time, I was reading and collecting the Lancer editions of the Conan stories, I had subscribed to Amra, and I had been buying Creepy and Eerie for years, primarily for the Frank Frazetta covers, as well as Castle of Frankenstein magazine—isn’t that a name from the past for a lot of us?—to read Lin Carter’s book reviews of paperback fantasy novels. There was very little fantasy available then in print for those of us just discovering it. Otherwise, there was the Burroughs boom, of course. And a lot of science fiction paperbacks. And pulp reprints, mainly of the Shadow and Doc Savage. But for stories way beyond any of those, for stories that were as raw and visceral and real as a punch in the face or a cut on the arm, for stories that felt as actual as the things your dad told you had happened during the war and stories dealing with the arrant madness and arbitrariness and casual cruelty that the world can inflict on us—for these kinds of stories, there was Conan. There was nothing else remotely like them. They didn’t feel made up, not entirely. They felt raw and real.

Which, of course, they are.

This was the beginning of the Howard boom, or of the first Howard boom, and the boom occurred because of Glenn Lord.

Because even though the Conan paperback reprints with the legendary Frank Frazetta covers were raw and real and interesting in and of themselves, few of us had any idea — certainly I didn’t, not at the age of 15 or 16 — of what else had been left to us by Robert E. Howard, that astonishing wealth of posthumous material. Guarding this material, preparing it for publication, publicizing Robert E. Howard, and promoting his artistic vision — this is what Glenn has done for us.

How, precisely, would we now regard Howard if not for Glenn? I don’t care to imagine the portrait of Howard that we would have today if it were not for his preeminent literary champion.

Literary executor is the term most associated with Glenn’s name. How many times have we seen that phrase in print — “courtesy of Glenn Lord, literary executor of the Robert E. Howard estate”? As a literary executor, he is in estimable company. One thinks of Max Brod choosing not to burn Kafka’s manuscripts, of Robert Barlow championing Lovecraft, of Irving Shepard fulfilling this fiduciary responsibility for Jack London’s estate following the death of Charmian London, and of Dan Fante today doing the same for the legacy of his father, John. And of course, we now automatically think of Glenn and of the trunk — Robert E. Howard’s manuscripts and letters, all that remained. Graciously and imperturbably and patiently, Glenn fulfilled the promise of what had been hinted at in the late 1960s. He brought the promise to fruition, and fruition is not a bad word to use for it. Glenn has toiled long and hard and with love, like a planter or grower, preparing the soil for the blossoming, really, of serious interest in Robert E. Howard — first with enthusiastic fans, then with increasing commercial assertiveness, and now with verifiably academic, scholarly results. Have you seen, in Glenn’s Wikipedia entry, the list of publications to which he’s contributed? It’s incredible. The man is tireless. And every article, every apazine, every book is one more seedling he has planted and nurtured that has come to fruition for those of us involved in the serious appreciation of Howard’s life, work, and legacy.

Glenn and I first made each other’s acquaintance, as it were, by correspondence, in late 1975, when both of us were in the Esoteric Order of Dagon, the amateur press association devoted to H. P. Lovecraft. I still have the carbon copy of my first letter to him, and I have his response to me. The topic, predictably enough for me, at least, was the movies, in particular Howard’s comments on some of the cinema actresses of the early Depression. Then there is a jump to 1980, and most of our correspondence for the next half decade or so has to do with business, or at least starts out as business-related correspondence, because at that time I was involved, with Dick Tierney, in writing a number of pastiche novels based on Robert E. Howard literary characters.

November 1980: Ace is considering reprinting The Witch of the Indies. April 1981: Ace is finally paying what they owe for the Red Sonja novels, slowly but surely, so here’s a check, and by the way, filming on the John Milius Conan movie is going to wrap in about three weeks. (And if it is a success, Glenn warns me, look out for a whole lot of bad s&s movies!) January 1982: A Red Sonja movie is going to be made. May 1982: Ace has been bought by Berkeley. September 1983: Wilhelm Heyne are interested in publishing the entire Red Sonja series in West Germany. October 1984: Glenn sends along a check for my share of the money from the German edition of For the Witch of the Mists — money I really need because I am out of work, have dropped out of writing, and have just spent the money I do have to move to another city to make a fresh start. December 1986: the Red Sonja books are still earning a little bit, so, Dave, here’s your share of the most recent check: $12.81.

But it’s not all business. How could it be? Glenn’s natural generosity and friendliness come through all the time, answering questions of mine, providing tantalizing hints of projects under way to advance appreciation of Howard and his work, and commiserating with me about the vicissitudes of life. October 1984: he thanks me for helping him get in touch with a collector who can help index the Spicy line of pulps. April 1985: a tornado has come through close to Pasadena and flooded some streets, but fortunately, Glenn is otherwise unaffected. February 1986: Pinnacle has bit the dust. Have I been able to get back the rights to my books from them? The letters start to drop off after that—my fault, not Glenn’s. But we stay in touch. June 1998: he is sorry to hear of the death of my father and apologizes for not writing in a while because he has been assisting with his mother, whose own health has been suffering. April 1999: Glenn sends me copies of my novel Oron, which has been translated and published in the Czech Republic.

And, of course, all through the 1990s, there were his ongoing, unconscionable legal issues. Truly, if no good deeds go unpunished in this world, then what other reason could there be for dragging this man over hot coals time and again, frustrating and humiliating him and all of us who are concerned most of all with the integrity of Howard’s life and work?

It was reprehensible.

I finally met Glenn in person in 1994 at PulpCon, and the circumstances were as you’d expect: this unaffected, honest man, so elementally important to assaying and cataloguing our popular literary heritage, was happy because he’d managed to snag a rare periodical containing a story by Tevis Clyde Smith. And I met him again in June 1998 during Howard Days in Cross Plains. The same man, maybe with a little more weight on him (true of me, too!), but the same truly good human being, sharing anecdotes, making plans, giving us the latest news.

This is Glenn Lord:

When I needed money, Glenn got me a check, no questions asked.

When my morale was low because writing for publication is so arduous and risky, Glenn put things in perspective. And he was happy to hear when things looked up on my end — the usual ups and downs in life — and who would know those better than Glenn himself?

When my novel Oron was translated and published in the Czech Republic, Glenn is the person who graciously went out of his way to retrieve some copies for me. Not easy to do — and he was the only person who offered to assist.

I am now a long way from high school and a long way from the wonderful thrill I first had from reading Robert E. Howard’s fiction. The passing of time does not matter. The excellent legacy that Glenn continues to create is what matters, his importance to literary scholarship and his championing of his fellow Texan.

Aside from that, my own personal gratitude to him is great. I am honored to know him.

Thank you, Glenn, for everything you have worked for and achieved, for everything you have given us.

Old Dogs and New Paradigms, Part 3

Last summer, I got back the rights to 10 of the 18 paperback novels I saw published in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These 10 are copyrighted in my name and are about my original characters, so . . . they’re mine. (The other eight novels—seven of them coauthored with Dick Tierney—feature characters originated by Robert E. Howard, the famous author of the Conan the Barbarian stories. Neither Dick nor I own those characters.) Once I had the rights back to these books, however, I was a little unsure what to do with them.

For years I had neglected these novels because, perversely, I had tried to ignore or forget the fact that I had even written them. This state of mind was as odd as it sounds. But the fact is that, after having published 18 paperback novels and pretty much having reached a dead end in trying to become a successful popular writer, I dropped out of writing in 1984. In retrospect, I can see that this was a foolish decision and an immature overreaction to the pressure I was under, but there it is. I had been working very hard at my craft for about 12 years, had seen a small measure of success in the fanzines of the time and then with the sales of those paperback novels, but otherwise had not one blessed clue about what I was doing or how the business worked. I saw no foreign sales of my own work and no nibbles from TV or film production companies. I relied on agents to promote my work and regarded them as business partners when, in fact, as I have learned over the years, literary agents are in business for themselves, and writers are useful to agents only insofar as they help increase the bottom line. Which makes sense. But in my desire to become a writer, my appreciation of such a practical fact was on par with my desire to become, when I was 10 years old, a Mercury space program astronaut. That is, I had about the same level of unsophisticated understanding of both professional milieus. In determining to succeed at writing, I thought it best to put my head down and go as fast as I could so that somehow something would happen.

My mind is turning in this direction right now because I have been working again in earnest at the writing craft. Starting a few years ago, I have been trying to get the fires going again, and I am beginning to see some success on the page—that is, the work I’m doing now reads well to my friends and to me. So the coals that were going dead and turning cold have been stoked and are blooming again with heat. What a good feeling it is. I spent the winter and spring revising my old fantasy trilogy, The Fall of the First World, and recently turned it in to John Betancourt at Wildside Press. I was able, in revising it, to make some changes or corrections I’ve wanted to make since Pinnacle Books first published the trilogy in 1983—improve some word choices, tighten sentences, round out some ideas—things of that nature. I’m enormously pleased that this trilogy and the other 7 of my 10 books will be reprinted by Wildside. (I’m sending John the two David Trevisan books next, as soon as I have scanned them in. Then Oron and the other Attluman novels.)

Also, I’ve placed my novel Call of Shadows with Ron Fortier’s Airship 27 Production. I’m very happy about this, as well.

And sooner or later, I suspect that Magicians will be produced, once we can get the modest $5 million needed to do the movie the way it should be done.

So I’m getting back into print after a long hiatus and, in surveying the radical changes in publishing that have occurred since the rise of the Internet, the collapse of the midlist, and the total corporatization of New York fiction publishing, I came across an article that appeared recently online in Prospect, the British periodical.

The article, by Edward Docx, is “Postmodernism is dead” (http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/201...) and reviews a comprehensive retrospective, currently on display in a London gallery, of the postmodernist movement. Docx provides a very nice definition of this social, philosophical, and artistic movement: “In the beginning, postmodernism was not merely ironical, merely gesture, some kind of clever sham, a hotchpotch for the sake of it. . . . Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilize the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.”

Postmodernism quickly descended into the confusing, foolish parody of itself that we know today, although Docx makes it clear that postmodernism made critically important contributions to society. It has cleared away the paranoid concept of one dominant “narrative” (such a postmodern word, that) and provided alternatives to the conceit that that dominant narrative was western. It has provided parallel avenues of expression and acceptance of “difference” perspectives, thereby offering a horizontal appreciation of history, experience, and identity rather than a vertical, hierarchical one. And it has exposed the fiction of identity as a solid entity rather than as an aggregate of shifting coordinates of gender, religion, class, and so on; as Docx says, “We are entirely constructed. There is nothing else.” Postmodernism changed “the great banquet of human ideas” from “one of self-determination (Kant et al) to other-determination. I am constructed, therefore I am.”

The fly in the ointment, however, is clearly this: the unease that most of us feel in regard to this radical awareness or sensibility. Do you really think that you are “constructed”? Do you really sense that you are a kind of postmodern, fluid force field of almost arbitrary labels—this religion, that gender—and not a real person or a real human being? My answer to this is that we are what we think we are. If we are able to make choices, then we will do so, but we won’t make them because we surmise that we are “an aggregate of shifting coordinates.” We know this intuitively, and most of us recoil from the idea of being an aggregated force field (my term, not Docx’s!). It is very similar to the ancient notion—surely there is nothing new under the sun—that life is an illusion and that we, too, are no more than an illusion. And this creates a paradox that may very well lie at the heart of human experience.

Call it what you will. Such thinking led to the floor’s being pulled away beneath our feet as tedious, pompous, circular arguments took all of the air out of the room. Docx refers to it as the postmodern paradox: “because postmodernism attacks everything, a mood of confusion and uncertainty began to grow and flourish until, in recent years, it became ubiquitous. A lack of confidence in the tenets, skills and aesthetics of literature permeated the culture and few felt secure or able or skilled enough or politically permitted to distinguish or recognize the schlock from the not.” The professors, in other words (in an irony that Mencken, for one, would have relished) had created a Frankenstein monster and could not control it. The result? “In the absence of any aesthetic criteria, it became more and more useful to assess the value of works according to the profits they yielded. Capital, as has been said many times, accommodates all needs.”

Capital accommodates all needs. This puts into perspective what has occurred over the past several decades regarding publishing, writers, fiction, storytellers, New York corporate entities, print-on-demand, the young writer just getting started, the old dogs left on the sidelines, and the constructed auteurs promoted by New York that are our rock stars of the moment. The paradox is that “by removing all criteria, we are left with nothing but the market. The opposite of what postmodernism originally intended…. In other words,” as Doxc says, “increasingly, artistic success has become about nothing except money; and, increasingly, artists have come to judge their own success that way, too. This is the reason that we feel the genre writer’s cry ‘I sold millions’ so powerfully, even though in truth it can say little about the art form other than that ‘it sold millions.’”

And so here we are. I have not made millions as a writer and the odds are that neither have you. I’d sure like to. I like money. Everyone likes money. Who doesn’t like money? I’d like to have lots of money. But my desire for all of that money, as a reward for the stories I write, must confront the modern (or postmodern!) reality that market success right now is bestowed upon writers who, more than ever before, fit into the postmodern zeitgeist, which is one of surface and not depth, acceptance and not challenges, sensation and not thought. It is immaterial whether James Patterson writes well (he doesn’t), just as it is immaterial whether Madonna has any talent (she doesn’t) or whether Fox News really provides news (it doesn’t); they are what they are—exclusive postmodern constructions that weirdly feed upon themselves and do not include us but allow us to observe them—and that is sufficient. Same for Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian and other manufactured entities that I tend to regard as foolish but which others reward simply because they are the flavor of the moment.

Where does leave those of us who don’t feel that we are constructions or illusions, those of us who are not of the moment, those of us who feel there is more to artistic creativity than simply defining it in terms of money? Well, we are starting to get past the notion that the only yardstick by which to measure worth is the yardstick of earnings. Artistically, as Docx says, what is happening now, as postmodernism recedes into the past and becomes just one more –ism, is that we are free to use whatever we like of postmodern conceits without pretending that it is the last word in human expression or social relevance. It provides options for us, nothing more and nothing less. I recall discussing with Donald Sidney-Fryer years ago, What will come after postmodernism? There had been an article in the Chicago Tribune that I had shared with him, and we kicked this back and forth for a while. My sense was that we will gravitate back toward some sense of the classic or the formal because we inherently need that, we human beings. I could discern no other options. It is deeply part of us to require such a foundation in our storytelling, our arts, our societies, our lives. My notion of a new classicism or formalism Docx calls the need for, and a resurgence of, authenticity: “Values are important once more: the values that the artist puts into the making of an object as well as the values that the consumer takes out of the object. And these striven-for values are separate to the naked commercial value.”

These values are separate to the naked commercial value! A commercially successful author may actually be good, but not necessarily so. And writers who have not gained commercial success may indeed be worth your time and attention despite the fact that the marketplace hasn’t lauded them. These facts are truer now than ever before. (As though an absolute term such as true could be truer, in any event!)

So there is hope for me. A former agent once suggested that I am a “cult author.” I may wear that declamation as a badge of pride, but what he meant was that my commercial appeal is limited. No doubt! I still hope to earn all of the money I mentioned a few paragraphs earlier. Give me millions! But if my hope is to be fulfilled, then it must come about as we go through a transition of social awareness: if Docx is right (and Donald Sidney-Fryer and I, as well), then we are moving toward a new appreciation of formal construction, authentic intent, and artistic sincerity. If such be the case (and doesn’t that sound formal, using the conditional subjunctive mood there!), then perhaps my semi-commercial but authentic, cult-figure fiction may yet earn me some more dollars. In a postmodern world, I can earn money and still be authentic; it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

As for what is coming in our post-pomo world of popular fiction—which is where I make my home—I can give you some recent examples that most of my readers will be familiar with. Take Howard Andrew Jones’s The Desert of Souls—a wonderful new novel that many are comparing to Robert E. Howard’s stories first published in Flying Carpet and Oriental Tales magazines during the Great Depression. The comparison holds up, but there is more than that going on here: Jones has gone back to the modern period of adventure storytelling and, fully aware of what he is doing (as are we), has made excellent use of the storytelling methods of that period. But he is doing it in our postmodern or post-postmodern world, and by doing so allows us to experience the world of Haroun al-Raschid, not as an exotic other place that requires taming by the West, but as a land unto itself that requires no one else’s permission to exist and needs to offer no explanations for itself. Jones can create women characters that are not one-dimensional but many dimensional. Yet he writes in a style that is not shallow and clever and self-referential but is clearly modeled on the strong, objective style of popular writing of nearly a century ago, the popular fiction of the early pulps. And if Jones’s doing such things seems acceptable to us and not extraordinary, that is precisely the point: he is doing these things on this side of postmodernism, making use of postmodern tools while providing an authentic story that continues the trajectory of the mid-twentieth fiction that itself was so authentic and modern that readers return to it still for that voice of the authentic it provides us. What a joy. (As the literary executor for Harold Lamb’s estate, Jones has had the rare opportunity to steep himself in the work of one of the best writers of the first half of the twentieth century, and clearly he has learned from that master, for the tone and pace of The Desert of Souls echoes the best work of Lamb, who, in his own time, the modern era, approached writing historical fiction with an authenticity that we can now see was ahead of its time, was indeed an early marker of our time.)

Another example: Ron Fortier’s Airship 27 Productions, which I mentioned earlier—“pulp fiction for a new generation.” Having now made our way through the swamp of arbitrariness, of the foolish contrivances of imperialism, and of force-fed narratives of exceptionalism, we now have Charles Saunders revisiting the racist 1930s with a pulp hero, Damballa, who (brilliantly!) is the product of a biracial union and serves as a hero-of-the-night to right wrongs in late-Depression Harlem. Don’t we wish we had had a story like this in 1938? Well, now we do. Is there a more authentic voice in our community of writers than Charles Saunders? I don’t know of one. And we are here with him, in post-pomo America, living in 1938, just as we always knew we could.

Ron will also be bringing out my new novel, Call of Shadows, early next year—formally structured, based on the classic form of mid-twentieth-century popular storytelling, but infused also with sufficient post-po-mo self-awareness that it takes is itself—not nonseriously—but very seriously indeed. We used to have to suspend our disbelief. Then we went through a period where we knew everything; the artist had no secrets, or the filmmaker, or the writer; we’re all in on the gag as Michael Bay pummels us with another Transformers movie. Now we are moving past that, and we really actually seriously choose to go back to suspending our disbelief, because by doing that, we are coming home and trusting the artist to do something for us, not party with us. Invite us, but be an artist first of all, not a gag master.

I like it.

It means that the old dogs have another tool in the tool kit to do what we do best: tell a good yarn.

And be appreciated for it.

And perhaps make a few bob for it, too, whether or not any us make some of the millions currently going to the far more commercially successful writers.

Hey, we’re the authentic ones. Give us a try after you finish that James Patterson novel. The flavor is a bit different—and maybe a little new and improved, as well.

Additional Note: A quick epilogue regarding the time in my life when I tried to squash the part of myself that hungered to succeed—on my own terms—as a writer. How weird was it, trying to negate or subordinate part of myself that I had spent years cultivating and strengthening? Weird enough that I offer it as a cautionary tale and suggest you not do it. Take life as it comes, is my new motto.

Once I had decided, once and for all, I thought, at the age of 31, that my ambitious hard work had been done under a bad sign and that I had been chasing a star and had now better grow up and determine how to make my way in the world, I felt alternately depressed and ecstatic. Depressed because I had put all of my eggs into one basket and nothing had come of it. Ecstatic because, after having worked so long and hard at that one thing and having failed at it, as I thought, I truly felt as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. All clichés have their element of truth, and I truly did feel that I had been unburdened. I clearly recall, in the summer of 1985, looking back at that poor naïve dope who had worked so hard at writing and feeling sorry for him while also being excited for myself because, perhaps, opportunities were still available, and doors still could open where other doors had been closed to me. It was an absolutely wonderful feeling. I am not kidding.

Nevertheless, as I tried to subordinate the part of me that had been predominant for so long, I came to realize that I had developed my own version of muscle memory, as it were. Imagine a musician practicing for hours every day, or an athlete, and then stopping abruptly. The muscle memory, the neural patterns that have become part of one are still there. Perhaps they recede slightly, or the muscles weaken, but the body remembers everything. I quickly became aware that I was missing part of myself, and this was particularly true in quiet moments. My mind, for example, had become used to working on a couple of different levels at once. Typically there was always a deeper layer of imagination or thought, a place where I was working out story ideas or staying alert to story possibilities even while I was doing other things and attending to what I considered my mundane life. Without this background noise of alertness, listening for story clues, working out ideas, I was always in the present. I became unsure what to do next with my time, and I had nothing to look forward to. I wondered if this were how other people spend their time, floating from one moment to the next, simply moving through the hours waiting for things to occur or to happen to them, rather than planning on what to do next. I found myself looking for things to do. My interest in reading fiction disappeared nearly completely. I recall picking up a James Ellory novel that Fred Adams had lent me, sitting down to thumb through it one rainy afternoon, and becoming completely absorbed in it for the next thirty pages. Then, when I realized what I was doing, I set the book aside with the sense that I had betrayed myself. What business was it of mine any longer to be interested in reading and writing and novels? Joe Bonadonna lent me a collection of short stories; I perused one of them and wondered at how the author could achieve such fine effects. I told myself that once I had tried to do such things, but that had been another Dave Smith. Was I depressed? Was I simply putting up a defensive wall to protect myself from very deep feelings of failure?

After a while, hating the silence at the back of my head and very much disliking the floating feeling of waiting for something to happen, of each day going by with me peripheral to it, I began to try putting stories together once more. These attempts typically went in circles, whereby I would rework the same thousand words over and over again for months at a time until the scene became utterly dull and pointless. I revised Engor’s Sword Arm, a novelette from 1978, for Morgan Holmes; it was an interesting exercise, but the storytelling spark did not catch fire. I wrote “The Man Who Would Be King,” a very odd story with no structure to it at all, as a kind of lament or eulogy. When my father died in the fall of 1997, I felt moved to try to write again as a way of handling the emotions of that event, focusing on something that would steer my feelings in some positive direction. I wrote about 16,000 words of a literary adventure-fantasy novel called Sometime Lofty Towers. I still intend to finish it. But it has sat there for nearly a decade and a half, waiting for me to come back to it.

I had come to doubt every word I put down. The storytelling instinct I had developed and mastered over many years was still present, apparently, but the practical, mechanical aspects of getting the job done seemed to be gone. I know that this happened because, after a few years of trying to write novels again, and completing pages of manuscript, I petitioned agents to read what I had done and take me on as a client. These efforts came to nothing. I blame myself. The storytelling instincts were there, yes, but the means whereby one writes plausible, potentially saleable fiction—gone.

I believe I am now past that point. I have persisted in relearning how to write fiction, and I have become comfortable with myself again, identifying myself as a writer once more. The work habits have changed, however. Where previously I required long stretches of private time in which to develop material at the keyboard, now most of that development happens mentally. I can write a sentence or two and then walk away and come back to it in a week to see where I was; it doesn’t matter. The urgency to write is gone; the desire to rework my words until they feel polished and right to me remains, but it is slow going. And where previously I used to save and file every note or jotting that I scribbled as though they were precious, now I write things down and forget about them or throw them away. The act of creating and immersing myself in the process of writing is more vivid than ever, and I like doing it while I am in the moment; what to do with a piece afterwards is problematic.

I never really had a plan, after all, only a great hope and a strong work ethic, and the results of that effort are quite interesting indeed, a series of novels and short stories that, I now realize, have given hours of pleasure and entertainment to thousands of people. Previously, that element was something of an abstraction, but I’ve met many people who appreciate what I’ve written, and I am getting past this delusional or grandiose desire to do more than I was able to do.

My friend Mike James, the artist who lives in Warren, Ohio, has helped put this in perspective for me. Over the years, he has educated me in the baffling world of contemporary art. He has explained to me the importance of getting past the canvas as window frame; the necessary freedom of the action painting and of “the painted word,” as Thomas Wolfe titled it, of the 1940s; and the direction artists have taken since then in a corporate, comodified, commercial world in which what most of us in the mainstream consider to be art is a hopelessly bourgeois and antiquated perspective. When artists canning their own feces or erecting narcissistic monuments to themselves qualify as important art, we are at the end of the line and are in the same postmodern world of conceited intellectual shabbiness that has depleted the intellectual vigor of our postsecondary English and cultural studies departments. Either we get the bad joke, or we don’t. Either way, however, it is really of no consequence.

Anyhow, I read recently that some current artist or other in New York—it doesn’t matter who; they are all interchangeable now—had sold something or other for millions of dollars ($9 million, I think) to some rich man who fancies himself an art collector. What does it mean, I asked Mike James, when a self-proclaimed artist can indulge himself in this way, and then a millionaire can indulge himself by paying $9 million for that piece of art?

Mike said to me, It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a game rich people play.

It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a game rich people play.

I don’t have rich people paying me $9 million dollars for one of my stories. I have friends who write, and I write, and we have managed to skirt the swamp of postmodern chicanery to keep alive the old-fashioned, sensible style of storytelling that takes itself just seriously enough to entertain and inform, not posture and . . . play games.

I hope to continue contributing more stories written in this manner, too. And when I can make use of whatever tools are available to me in the tool box, I’ll do that, too.

But I’ll also take $9 million from the next person who decides that some story of mine is worth it.

Any of you rich guys out there want to share the wealth with me, I’m your man.

Doing that would be so . . . post-postmodern of me!

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Conan the Barbarian (2011)

Here’s the thing: Jason Momoa is great as Conan. And the movie captures the heart and drive of Howard more often than it does not. When it does not, it’s because it slacks off into unoriginal, derivative sword-and-sorcery material that undercuts the movie’s own strengths.

But it does get more things right than not. Jason Momoa, I say again, is excellent. And not just him. Ron Perlman, Leo Howard (already catching high fives for his work here), and Rachel Nichols are fine, as well. There is real chemistry between Momoa and Nichols that adds an undercurrent to their scenes together. And Stephen Lang and Rose McGowan do well with what they’re given, too. I ached to have more about all of these characters, to have dialogue that was not on the nose, and that hinted at more inside these people. These are characters wanting to do more in this story.

It’s certain that the young men who wrote this script tried their best to bring Robert E. Howard to the screen; I lost count, for example, of the allusions made in the dialogue to this or that bit of trivia in the Conan canon. The problem, I surmise, is that we have sincere young men who have grown up in an environment in which derivative, mundane, mainstreamed sword-and-sorcery is commonplace, and so what sets Howard and Conan apart has been buried under tons of baloney barbarianism. Conan by this time, as a character, as a concept, is nearly as generic as Sherlock Holmes or Tarzan. The problem, though, is that the character, as created by Robert E. Howard, isn’t sufficiently familiar to the public, which time and again has been presented with a one-dimensional cartoon version of Conan. Jason Momoa goes back to the source material; his Conan is a tough, shrewd, pantherish, intelligent young man born to fight. This is Conan. It is the young Conan of Robert E. Howard, and it works. What critics don’t get—and this is what I mean by Conan’s not being sufficiently familiar to the public—is evident in the complaint made by many that Conan in this movie is so tough and brutal that he can’t be distinguished from the bad guys. Think of it: Howard was making precisely that point in his stories, that Conan is not a conventionally good character, that he is a fighter and a survivor in a brutal world. Howard was writing in the Depression, when popular fiction was full of many such unconventional protagonists, characters that succeeded with audiences precisely because they were not conventionally good. Conventionally good people had been kicked to the curb by the stock market crash, and popular fiction characters who were tough, morally ambiguous, thought for themselves, and stayed barely inside the lines meant a lot to a certain audience of readers. These types are no longer a novelty; we have had so many Dirty Harry pictures and spaghetti Westerns and cable series such as The Sopranos and Deadwood that you would think that the bright critics, at least, would get it.

I think the reason they don’t, or one of the reasons they don’t, is because Conan the Barbarian is honest about its primitivism, its deep emotions and ambitions, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. This movie is about people who wear swords and armor, when they wear any clothes at all, in an ancient world, doing what needs to be done without the pretense of their being noble Romans or proud Spartans, let alone being complexly motivated sheriffs or morally ambiguous detectives. (The lack of clothes has something to do with it; nakedness equals naked emotions and honesty—that is, the character can’t hide beneath a suit and tie or under a ten-gallon hat. This nakedness, in all aspects, makes many audiences and critics uncomfortable, I think.) In any event, this honesty is apparently still too much for early 21st century Americans, who prefer to react to this movie the way Howard biographer and Conan completist L. Sprague de Camp did to the original stories: de Camp regarded Conan as a juvenile delinquent—comparable, in the 1950s, to, say, a gangsta or thug today. You could take some of de Camp’s “Oh, horrors! I get the vapors when I regard this barbarian juvenile delinquent!” sentiments and place them neatly into most of the current reviews of Marcus Nispel’s picture, and the insertions would be seamless. “Oh, horrors! There is blood and there are many grunts in this movie! I am getting the vapors!”

The baggage of generic sword-and-sorcery intrudes time and again in this picture, and it weighs the movie down. Many of the one-liners are lame. The thief character is a direct lift of the Tracey Walter Malak character in Conan the Destroyer: this was a weak character then, and it remains weak in this movie. A couple of times characters look up at the sky and, in despair or heartache, roar. This bit worked well the first time, when Christopher Reeve did it in Superman in 1978; it hasn’t worked since. Let’s everyone agree to drop it. Also, the conceit that the world is a battleground for good versus evil is trotted out without any necessity for it at all: why not just have two antagonists fighting each other? We don’t talk about good and evil when we make movies about the Spartans or about the Picts fighting the Romans. We do it with derivative sword-and-sorcery pictures, however, because we have been trained by the success of the Tolkein books, and its commercial inheritors, to regard fantasy melodramas as exercises in good versus evil. Howard was smarter than that; however, simultaneous interest in, and the subsequent popularity and success of, The Lord of the Rings and the Conan paperback book collections, beginning in the late 1960s, yoked these two entities together in the public mind under the banner Fantasy, and joined at the neck they remain. Look: Howard wrote men’s adventure stories with touches of true weirdness, which was sometimes very unsettling indeed, and thereby created a new type of fiction. Tolkein, a scholar and linguist, fabricated a fantasy milieu that drew upon Northern mythology. So his wizards and elves and munchkins are very much borrowed from the realm of fantasy and cultural mythology.

That element of weirdness is lacking in this movie, but it wasn’t in the Schwarzenegger pictures, either, although the Milius movie wanted to go there in a few places. Too bad. On the page, such a leap into the abyss, such a hint of cosmic unease or supernatural menace, distinguishes some of the best sword-and-sorcery fiction from unoriginal or less imaginative stories because this element has its roots in a philosophy and is not simply a stylistic exercise.

To be honest, this movie felt to me as though there were two drafts of the script in contention with each other, and someone mooshed them together. The hypothetical stronger script has the opening about the Cimmerian village; this stronger script also would explain why the Stephen Lang character has a giant octopus monster under his castle—clearly, there is some connection between it and the monstrous mask he brings back to life and puts on his face. The stronger script would also be the one that slows down occasionally and lets the actors do what they want to do, which is to spend a quarter of a page or half a page once in a while talking to each other. The weaker script has the leaden one-liners (including the embarrassing “No man should live in chains,” which could have come directly from that goofy syndicated TV show of ten years ago or whenever it was), and it rushes things along. Still—as much as I like the opening, that wonderful sequence set in Cimmeria, it does feel as though it is from a different movie. If it were cut out, we could spend more time on the story proper, which is where this movie wants to be, with Conan as a young man adventuring in the world.

The special effects are fine, although by the time we get to the ending, we are given another physically impossible, video game-derived set piece in which things fall and twist and crumble in blinding speed, reducing the characters to puppets acting out an adolescent fantasy. Conan deserves better than this. Remember the ending of Rob Roy? Nobody was jumping around trying to do fifteen things at once while dancing above a giant fiery cavern. Next time, resist the temptation to indulge the fanboys and instead give us a climax that adds to the characters and doesn’t reduce them to one-dimensional, reckless damned fools.

One final gripe: the actors all pronounce Cimmeria as “Simmeria.” Damn it, I’m sure that it should be “Kimmeria.” And they pronounce Acheron as “Asheron.” Surely (or Churely) that “ch” is a “k” sound.

So with all of these complaints and nits being picked, is there anything good about the movie at all? There is—and it is the performances of Jason Momoa and Rachel Nichols, as well as some of those scenes that must have been written in my hypothetical stronger draft of the script. The pirate ship scene is pure Howard and as enjoyable as anything he himself might have seen on the screen when he was a kid—in the silent movie version of The Sea Hawk, say, or Douglas Fairbanks’s The Black Pirate. Some of the background matte paintings, too, of glorious incandescent cities, have that misty throwback feel to earlier periods of filmmaking. The tug of war between Momoa and Nichols really transcends the barbarian bully versus spunky girl cliché: these two have chemistry together. Stephen Lang and even Rose McGowan, given the superficial material they have to work with, do well with it. We need to know more about Khalar Zym’s wife and why his feelings run so deep—these are not pleasant people, after all, and we need to understand them, particularly because he is a very powerful warlord of some sort, and how did he get that status?—but Lang does what he can with what he is given. It is another instance of my wanting the characters to have been able really to come to life, and the script held them back. And, of course, if the whole movie had been about Leo Howard and Ron Perlman and the Cimmerians, I would have been content with that. Their performances are wonderful. They do have stuff to work with, and they bring it home.

And I keep coming back to Jason Momoa, who now owns this character. He nails it, he gets it, he is Conan. I say, lose the derivative, LOTR-inspired high-fantasy trappings and the imitative Hercules superficialities and, next time, we will get a stronger movie. You know how a lot of people liked the original X-Men but some critics thought it weak in spots? The sequel topped it, and then some. Please let’s see that happen with the second Conan movie.