David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "dave-schwinghammer"

Combing the Daily Newspaper for ideas: March 17, 2010



I’ve come up with some of my best ideas clipping the daily newspaper. I’ve written a novel, using the Jodi Huisentruit kidnapping as an inspiration. She was a TV anchorperson who was kidnapped in front of her apartment building at four-thirty in the morning. They never found her. I also found one about a guy who rides the freight trains every summer. He’s a perfectly normal guy otherwise. He just likes to hop the freights and go for a ride. I’m still working on that one. I’ve got the hobo vernacular down. There are books about that. Anyway here are some possibilities I found in today’s paper:



1. March Madness: On my football board, the guys are all talking about bracketology as if it were the stock market. Can you imagine a person who lives, breaths and eats sports? I know it’s been done in several movies, most notably “The Diner,” but it’s definitely not a cliché.



2. There’s some hypocrisy going on in the Republican party regarding Nancy Pelosi’s “Deemed passed” idea. Gingrich used it a lot more than the Democrats are. Maybe do this from a Congressional page’s point of view.



3. Lots of flood threats going on in Minnesota. Considering the earth quake in Haiti and the one in Chili, what would that be like? Fargo, North Dakota, seems to go through this every year. High school kids are excused from school to help sandbag. Knowing them, it must be like party time. Maybe not. Maybe they’re more serious than we think. Explore the issue.



4. Health care issue. I’m going through some stuff myself right now with arthritis in my neck. When did you first notice you were getting old? 22? 40? When you celebrated your silver wedding anniversary? When the kids flew the nest?



5. Doctor certified in new specialty. Sleep medicine specialty. This is in St. Cloud, Minnesota, population approx, 70,000. Narcolepsy is interesting for me. I once had a student who had it. Not being able to sleep must be hell.



6. Suicides in the Ivy league. “Cornell Takes Steps After Gorge Deaths.” Do you realize how hard it is to get into an Ivy League school? These are privileged kids with the world by the tail. What could provoke them, other than flunking out?



7. Dentist accused of assault and battery. He used paper clips instead of stainless steel posts inside the teeth of root canal patients. Isn’t root canal bad enough? Protagonist would be the patient with the paper clips.



8. Comics page. Danae in “Non Sequitor” gets detention for insisting that all boys are booger brains, including historical figures.



9. “Tiger Will Return for Masters.” Is there really such a thing as sexual addiction? Aren’t just about all guys addicted to sex?



10. “Brazen Conn. Warehouse Heist Nets 75 Million in Pills.” Thieves cut a hole in the roof of a warehouse, rappelled inside and scored one of the biggest hauls of its kind---antidepressants and other prescription drugs, most likely headed for overseas black market. Enough to fill a tractor trailer. What kind of mind would think this up? Definitely unique.

The two girls in Jeannette Walls' novel, "Bean" and Liz Holladay, are extremely likable characters, and we cheer for them throughout. They've been stuck with a bad lot in life.

Their mother, Charlotte, who may be a manic-depressive, considers herself a singer songwriter and is prone to take off on a whim, a little "me time" as she would put it. At the beginning of the book they live in a small town in California and Charlotte leaves the girls with enough money to subsist on chicken pot pies, but when she doesn't show up in a reasonable amount of time, the girls decide to take a bus to Virginia and live with their uncle Tinsley, the former owner of a textile mill in another small town. He lives in a big house that's going to seed rapidly, and he's somewhat of a hoarder. He cares more about rocks and geneology than people, though he soon grows attached to the girls.

THE SILVER STAR can be funny at times, especially when Liz teases "Bean," whose real name is Jean, which Liz couldn't pronounce as a little girl. When Beaner is sick; Liz refers to her as "green Bean," when she's really sick she calls her "greener Beaner." Liz also takes after her mother in that she writes poetry and eventually learns how to play guitar. She also writes "emu" poetry, which gets a little old. A farmer near her uncle's place owns a pair of emus, and Liz grows attached.

Okay, here's the plot. Liz and Bean's uncle was forced out of the mill by an efficiency expert-type foreman, Jerry Maddox, with absolutely no people skills. He rides the workers hard. Uncle Tinsley really doesn't have much money left from his share of the sale of the mill, and the girls need school clothes; they take a job working for the psychotic Maddox. He hires Liz as a right-hand girl, but he has ulterior motives. Bean is hired to help his wife Doris take care of the kids. Maddox isn't a very believable character. Even in rural Virginia he wouldn't get away with what he does, not matter how many people work for the mill.

Liz and Bean also have different fathers. Bean's father died in Vietnam and she has cousins in the area that she rapidly connects with. The mother eventually shows up, but when things get tough she usually runs for the hills.

The ending also seems a bit far-fetched. We want Jerry Maddox to get his comeuppance, but the way it happens is suspect, and the ramifications of the event are about as believable as Jerry Maddox's previous bullet-proof behavior.

Were you thinking "THIS sounds like SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS" when you first read about HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET?

Well I'm sure Jamie Ford might have read that book, but HOTCOBAS has it's differences. For one thing, Henry Lee, who falls in love with a Japanese girl at the ripe old age of twelve, is a Chinese American. This is a love story but it's also about Japanese internment camps and the generation gap. Henry's parents send him to an American school where he and Keiko Okabe are the only Orientals. Henry, especially is mercilessly bullied.

Henry is not allowed to speak Cantonese in his home, despite the fact that his parents don't understand English, and his father makes him wear an "I am Chinese" button. He and Keiko work in the kitchen during lunch hour where he "befriends" the gruff lunch lady, Mrs. Beatty. She will play a major role in the story later.

Henry's father is from northern China where the Japanese persecuted his people and when he learns about Henry's relationship with Keiko he won't speak to him anymore.

Henry knows he won't be able to eat his lunch at school; he gives it to a street musician, Spencer, who is just beginning to make inroads in the Seattle jazz scene. They establish a lifelong friendship. A black man and a Chinese boy share the same heart, Ford seems to be saying.

Ford hops between WWII and the 1980's where Henry and his son Marty have a similar generation gap in some respects, although nothing like Henry and his father.

The Panama Hotel figures strongly in the story, hence the title. It's on the border between the Chinese and Japanese settlements in Seattle. We're expecting Keiko to be sent to an Internment camp eventually, and she leaves something important at the hotel.

So the big question throughout the novel is if Henry and Keiko will ever get together. The odds seem stacked against them, but Marty has a surprise in store for his father.

Q. What's your work schedule like?



A. I do about three hours a day. I used to think I should be able to do at least eight hours as I did as a teacher, but it's just so draining. After you hit, three hours you're basically just typing. There are exceptions. John Gardner was a working fool. Everybody should read ON BECOMING A NOVELIST.



Q. What's your process?



A. I make a scene outline for just about everything I write, including short stories. Sometimes I barely glance at it, but if I get stuck it's always there. I change it a lot as I write.



Q. Do you write on the computer?



A. Yeah, I don't have a problem with that. I know some writers work in longhand or on the typewriter, but I just see that as redundancy. I was a teletype operator in the Navy and being able to edit the tape as I drafted messages was such a gift. I also started writing before computers and

being a lousy typist makes me appreciate workprocessors even more. Then there's rewriting. You can move things around so easily on a wordprocessor and you can save your chapters as stand-alone projects. I like to think my chapters sound like short stories.



Q. What's the best movie you've seen based on a novel?



A. I have a special place in my heart for TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I taught that book every year for sixteen years and never got tired of it, and the movie was almost as good. I used to do an exercise in class where the kids watched the movie, then picked out the elements from the novel that were missing in the movie. No Aunt Alexandra was the biggest complaint. No Uncle Jack.



Q. Do you have Kindle?



A. Nope, but I might have to get one if the Minneapolis Star Tribune stops delivery. Hopefully they'd still provide computer access. I must have a morning newspaper!



Q. What about women characters? How do you deal with them?



A. Well, they're just human beings, but I won't say I'm not influenced by stereotypes, mainly the women's intuition thing and that permission to change their minds thing they've got going on. My old girlfriends are always sneaking in there, too. One of them threatened to sue me if I ever wrote about her, but she's an old lady now so I doubt that she'd even care anymore.



Q. What male author do you think handles women the best?



A. There's a joke there someplace, but I'll play it straight. That would have to be Wally Lamb in SHE'S COME UNDONE. One would think that was written by a woman. Oprah put it on her list so she must not disagree.



Q. I see quite a few references to quirkiness in your Amazon reviews. Where does that come from?



A. I was a class clown so there's somewhat of a smartass component in my work. Then there's the Joseph Heller influence. If you haven't read him, just about everybody in CATCH-22 is quirky. And to think, I didn't like it at first. I was assigned the book in an English Humanities class; I guess I just wasn't used to something that original. Hello, Mr. Schell! I hope you're still kicking.



Q. You were a journalism teacher. Any influence there?



A. Not like Hemingway. Just a check your sources thing and double and triple checking your spelling. I still have trouble with research. I never know how much I can use or how much to paraphrase.



Continued.



Dave Schwinghammer's published novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available at Amazon.com.

Q. You seem to have a problem with best sellers. Are you jealous?



A. I don't have a problem with all best sellers. I've recently read THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and loved it. However, I do have a problem with those authors who seem to be writing the same book over and over. Some of them don't even write their own books. If there's a co-author, think ghost writer.



Q. You said you got ideas from the newspapers. Can you give us an example from one of your novels?



A. MENGELE'S DOUBLE is based on the Jodie Huisentruit kidnapping. She was a television news anchor who was kidnapped in front of her apartment building at four-thirty in the morning. She's still missing. She grew up in Long Prairie, Minnesota, about twenty miles from where I live. She's still missing. I basicially fictionalized the whole thing, giving her a different name. The protagonist of the book is Charlie Zelnick, the Jodie character's high school journalism teacher. He's going through a mid-life crisis and he decides to go look for her. I was a journalism teacher myself so I guess you can see the personal tie-in.



Q. How about agents. How do you find one?



A. You don't in my case. But there are sources. THE NOVEL AND SHORT STORY WRITER'S MARKET has a section on agents, but I would recommend a professional organization that thoroughly vets these people. There are so many crooks in the business. Some agents have ties with freelance editors and they get kickbacks for sending people their way. Freelance editors can charge up to a hundred dollars an hour. I found one, William Greenleaf, who helped me a great deal, but I was lucky.



Q. What about workshops and writers' conventions?



A. I went to Splitrock in Duluth. I was the only male in a class with sixteen women. I'm a male chauvinist pig so that was a frightening experience. The moderator, mystery writer and poet Kate Green, was very helpful. A guy from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension even came to talk to us. I also went to Iowa City. I had about a hundred pages of SOLDIER'S GAP at the time and the twelve other people in the group and the moderator were encouraging as well as tough when they needed to be. Workshops tend to be a mix of the serious writers and the dreamers. There was a lady in our group at Iowa City who would not read her work, and it was supposed to be an advanced novelists group. I recently went to Taos, New Mexico, to get a chance to talk to a publisher. All I can say is, never pay to talk to anybody. You have to remember that these people are there on vacation, too, as well as raking in the bucks. I did meet a very friendly agent in one of the classes I took and I plan to submit STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS to her as soon as I feel it's finished if I ever do feel it's finished.

Certain elements of Goolrick's HEADING OUT TO WONDERFUL reminded me of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN. He catches you completely by surprise. His main character does something so out of character you can't stop thinking about what happened.

Readers can also trace the plot to old time Appalachian music, some of which Goolrich includes in the book. Oldtimers will be reminded of the Kingston Trio's "Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley."

The story is set in 1948, and Charlie Beale, a war veteran, comes to Brownsburg, Virginia, sizing the place up. Seems like he's "looking for wonderful." He spends most his time outside town near a river just thinking, then he buys the land. He also takes a job as a butcher working for Will and Alma Haislett, and becomes attached to their five-year-old son Sam, who calls him "Beebo."

Sometime during the first several weeks the town's richest man, Boaty Glass, enters the store. He's also the area's biggest landowner. He and Will have known each other since they were kids, but Will tells Charlie Boaty is not a nice man. Later his wife, Sylvan, thirty years his junior, enters the store, looks around and leaves. Charlie looks at her like Frank Sinatra must've looked at Ava Gardner the first time he saw her in the flesh.

Charlie becomes a town hero when he saves Sam from drowning as does Sylvan who was the first to jump in and follow the current. Some back story is necessary. Boatie Glass was a 48-year-old virgin when he went out to Sylvan's little secluded valley and offered her family two thousand dollars for their daughter. They could stay on the land, but if she ever left him he would repossess the place. Her parents were so poor they agreed. We now have a moral dilemma. Is this a legal marriage? She doesn't seem to think so. Sylan, although beautiful, is also an odd duck. Her whole existence is built around fantasy, mainly the movies and her favorite radio program, Helen Trent.

Okay, so Charlie and Sylvan have an affair. But Goolrick throws in a little bit of a quandary. For some reason Charlie takes Sam along. Anybody with a grain of sense would know that eventually the kid would get curious, and sure enough, he does. Charlie Beale is a decent, loveable man. He treats just about everybody with respect. He even tries to join the black church, because they seem to be having fun, while the Baptists and the Methodists just talk about what sinners we all are.

Eventually Boatie finds out about the affair, but it seems he's more upset about Charlie's popularity than the fact that the man is cuckolding him. He doesn't even like her that much. He's got a mistress on the side. But property is property, and he forces Sylan to do something she doesn't want to do or he'll take back her parents' farm.

It appears Sylvan is more loyal to her family, who has pretty much disowned her, than she is to Charlie. That's one theory anyway for the terrible thing that happens. But I kind of think you'll have your own. Some people will be angry that Goolrick doesn't explain it, but it's a better story this way. Another minor quibble is that Boatie Glass, the most despicable character in the book, doesn't get his comeuppance. We want to see him boiled in oil, skinned alive and drawn and quartered, but for all we know he died in bed at age 95 in his sleep.

Q. You have five brothers and no sisters. Have you ever written about that?



A. Not that I can remember. People, especially women, usually say they're so sorry for my mother, so I guess there's a humorous story there. I recently read that your personality depends more on sibling and peer relationships than it does on genetics. I could definitely see that in our family. We were always jockeying for position and attention.



Q. You were raised on a farm. Ever write about that?



A. All the time. There's a chapter in SOLDIER'S GAP where Dave Jenkins and his little genius buddy, Moe Plesiac, visit a farm. Lots of memories went into that. I also did a short story entitled "Too Many Cooks" about a boy who was raised on a farm. There's quite a bit of me in that story.



Q. You write mysteries for the most part, but there's always more to them. Can you talk about that?



A. Religion seems to be important. I'm an agnostic, but I was raised Roman Catholic, so there's a process where you lose it. Dave Jenkins has a psychic experience in SOLDIER'S GAP, but at the beginning of the novel he's pretty much a non-believer and he goes through a process where he starts going to church again. He also has a partner who is a Mescalero Apache who attended Johns Hopkins on a LaCrosse scholarship. He majored in criminal justice but he needed a minor so he picked Native American religion. He is now heavily into native American culture including a belief in The Land of Ever Summer.



Q. What's next?



A. I was sort of dumbfounded by the popularity of Tim LaHaye's Rapture novels. It seemed like such a regression, so I thought I'd do something with Greek mythology, which is what my novel STRANGERS ARE FROM ZEUS is about. The Greeks knew very well that they invented their gods, not the other way around. Their gods are very humanistic. You have this idea that man is born with original sin in Christianity that I think is incredibly destructive. People should read BEFORE THE DAWN about this journalist who traced our DNA from Africa across the Red Sea and on to Europe and Australia. There was no Garden of Eden and no snake who tempted Eve. It's interesting that Eve got the blame there; that's a Mazdian influence. The Jews spent something like seventy years in captivity in Babylon and the Essenes, who notoriously hated women and blamed them for the evil in the world, brought that idea back to Israel. Ironically they were worried that Judaism was being Hellenized.






Dave Schwinghammer's published novel, SOLDIER'S GAP is available at Amazon.com.

Harry Hole has got to be the most extreme homicide detective in suspense fiction. In the last episode he has his jaw broken; in this one he comes close to being killed twice, and a gun is not employed.

Harry is also an alcoholic and a drug abuser. At the beginning of THE LEOPARD he has resigned from his job and gone to Hong Kong where he acquires an opium addiction and is heavily in debt to gangsters over gambling losses. This is where his new partner, Kaja Solness, finds him. She tells him the department is willing to pay off his gambling debt if he will return to Norway and work on what looks like a new serial killer investigation. Harry is the only detective with experience working on that sort of crime as he solved the Snowman case and a previous string of murders in Australia.

The murder weapon in this case is extremely original. It's a torture device acquired in the Congo. It looks like a Christmas ornament with circular ridges; it is forced into the victim's mouth where it irritates the sides of his/her cheeks. A string protrudes from the victim's mouth. Eventually the first two victims pulled the string, causing needles to puncture the sides of their mouths and palettes, and bled out. The genius is that the murderer could be elsewhere when the victim actually died.

Subplots involve Harry's dad who is dying and Mikael Bellman the head of Kripos, an FBI-like homicide unit, who persuades the higher ups that the national investigative unit should handle all murder cases. Bellman is good-looking and charming but lacks Harry's imagination. Nesbo throws another hurdle in Harry's path when he includes a Bellman spy among Harry's confidants.

In THE SNOWMAN it was easy to pick out the killer. Nesbo must've listened to his critics because this time he manages to hide him/her pretty well, although conforming to the mystery convention where you show the murderer briefly so the reader can play along. But then he pulls a Jeffery Deaver twist (not a compliment) that made me want to hurl the book against the wall. But I soldiered on and Harry's relentless pursuit of the killer was still enough of a selling point to make me want to know what happens to this poor soul in the next episode.

Nesbo's main appeal is his ability to put Harry in such terrible circumstances that as a reader you think surely he's going to get the green Wienie this time, but he always manages to think his way out of it. Usually, with a series like this you know the author isn't going to kill off his bread and butter character, but with Nesbo you're not quite sure.

1. Diagram your novel on a horizontal line on a large sheet of paper (art paper, or butcher paper), entering plot point one, midpoint, plot point three, and climax. Draw vertical lines between Acts One, Two, and Three. When you come up with a definite scene, tag it and put it beneath the line in a sort of outline.



2. Generate scene cards (who’s in the scene?, situation and conflict, action, sensory detail, props etc. Hook, segue to the next scene). You make these so you can move them around when necessary and you can see the flow of your novel. Strive for forty cards, ten for Act one, twenty for Act II, and ten for Act III. Act one, from beginning to plot point one is exposition. You want to introduce your overall conflict and your main characters. When you get to plot point one, around p. 75, your main character starts working on his goal (ex. finding his kidnapped daughter). Act II is development; aim at midpoint where something significant will happen to send your character in another direction; your character is then propelled toward plot point two, where Act III, the resolution to your goal begins. Shortly thereafter your climax occurs, where your character either achieves his goal or is denied (Girl he loves chooses another man). Wrap it up in a hurry, not much more than a few pages. I like epilogues, but maybe that’s just me. You’ve been with these people for at least a week, and you want to know what happens to them in the future.



3. Non-scenes. Don’t worry if there isn’t much of a conflict for some of your scenes. Non-scenes are sometimes called incidents or happenings. An incident is a sort of abortive scene where a character attempts to reach a goal but meets no resistance or conflict. When a boy seeks to kiss a girl who wants to kiss him back, you have an incident. A happening just brings people together, no goal or conflict. Happenings and incidents add realism to your work, but don’t hold interest very long. If you structure your book according to scene and sequel, you can put your incidents and happenings in your sequels. Scenes sound like they’re happening in real time with lots of dialogue; sequels sound like narration, where the author is telling instead of showing. Something has happened at the end of a previous scene and your character is trying to solve the problem. He/she looks at the different possibilities and rejects all but one, then enters the next scene. He/she might be having a beer with a friend who helps him make his decision.



4. Setting. Should be like a character in your book. Tony Hillerman’s Navajo reservation; SHIPPING NEWS, set in Newfoundland; Huck Finn, the Mississippi River Valley; the Yukon in Jack London; the Red River Valley in SOLDIER’S GAP. Small town America is a good setting, although it’s been done to death.





Dave Schwinghammer's novel, SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on Amazon.com.

Without a doubt the greatest influence on Clarence Darrow's career as "Attorney for the Damned" was his father, Amiris, a furniture store owner in Kinsman, Illinois. He was the town radical who had a hard time making ends meet, but somehow always found money for books, which he passed on to his precocious son.

Darrow began his career in Chicago working for the city and spent six years dispensing legal advice for the railroads, as Abraham Lincoln had done before him. He quit when his mentor, William C. Gowdy died, but said he had felt guilty working for a giant corporation long before that.

Darrow's career as a radical lawyer began when he represented coal miners who were bargaining for an eight hour day. Author Farrell gives us a gruesome picture of children under ten years old working sorting coal. The coal owners purposefully paid their men and boys less than a living wage and the garment industry took full advantage of it in that families needed to send the mother and daughters out to work also. Textile mills popped up around the coal mines. Eventually Darrow would move up the ladder of radical causes, representing Wild Bill Haywood who was charged in the murder of Governor Steunenberg, who had been a union foil, and he would later represent the McNamara brothers charged with bombing the LOS ANGELES TIMES.

John A. Farrell reveals Darrow's warts as well as his talents. He divorced his first wife and was a lifelong advocate of free love, although he married a second time. He carried on a long affair with reporter Mary Field Parton, even after she was married, and he tried to seduce her sister every time he saw her. The famous poet, Edgar Lee Masters, who was Darrow's law partner, viewed Darrow as somewhat of a phony, claiming Darrow chiseled him out of some fees.

Darrow was also tried twice for trying to bribe the McNamara jury. Farrell shows how Pinkertons were hired to infiltrate Darrow's defense team, so Darrow may have felt he was justified in using extra legal tactics, that is if he was guilty. Some of his friends thought he was.

Darrow also represented some questionable clients, namely Chicago gangsters and the rich such as the Leopolds and the Loebs, which astonished his fellow radicals. Darrow's excuse was always that he was a lawyer and that's what lawyers did.

Sometimes Darrow couldn't get his clients off so he tried to get the sentence reduced. This happened with Leopold and Loeb; Darrow argued that the state of Illinois had never put to death a murderer under the age of 18. He also defended Patrick Prendergast, the murderer of Chicago mayor Carter Harrison, employing an insanity plea.

Farrell doesn't do justice to Darrow's most famous case, The Scopes Monkey Trial held in Dayton, Tennessee. We do learn that the case was a show trial conceived by drugstore lawyers in Dayton, as a sort of booster ploy for the town. Darrow and William Jennings Bryan brushed the other lawyers aside. When the noted agnostic and the evangelical politician became the focus of the trial, matters got serious. Unfortunately the judge disallowed expert witnesses and the case for evolution never got a fair hearing.

Darrow often spent days making a closing statement. He must've been really good because it seems he usually did it to a packed house. He may be the greatest lawyer in American history.