David Schwinghammer's Blog - Posts Tagged "david-a-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. 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.

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.

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.

1. It’s mystical. Lots of stuff in there about the Mescalero Indians (who believe in ghosts), although it’s set in Minnesota.

2. Theme: There are lots of them, unusual for a mystery novel, but I guess the main one is that good kids fall through the cracks and often seek advice from people they consider cool rather than their parents or their teachers.

3. Characterization: Some editors recommend keeping the number down to around a dozen or so, but I’d say I must have over a hundred in SOLDIER’S GAP, if you want to count the dogs and other animals.

4. The reviewers say it's really funny. A murder mystery shouldn’t be funny? Who says? Donald Westlake is funny. Ed McBain is funny. Even Stephen King is funny. Anyway, that’s the compliment I get most often in Amazon reviews. The relationship between protagonist Dave Jenkins and Mingo Jones, the Mescalero night deputy is especially droll.

5. There are some strong women characters for you ladies. The mayor of the town is a woman, and when she says jump, the men say, “How high?” Dave Jenkins’s girlfriend plays shortstop for his softball team, and she’s the best player on the team. She's also a member of the volunteer fire department.

6. There’s a boy genius for you Harry Potter fans; he helps Dave Jenkins solve the murder of the local high school principal. He's also in love with one of the murder suspects.

7. Unless you’re really quick, you won’t be able to figure out who done it until the murderer is actually apprehended, and there are at least a dozen suspects, including the school superintendent who was having an affair with the principal’s wife.

8. Lots of sub plots. The sheriff, Harry Kline, can’t do his job anymore and he tells terrible jokes and smokes too much. His main competition is Dave Jenkins, who, as I said, dates his daughter. Dave is also still in love with his high school sweetheart.

9. The story is set in the Red River Valley, sugar beet country for those of you who know Minnesota. The river also runs north which is even stranger. The town also has an odd name, SOLDIER, named after the civil war soldiers, including Colonel Colvill, hero of the Battle of Gettysburg (poetic license) who settled the town. There’s a weird statue of him in the town square whose eyes seems to follow you around.

10. Lots of Minnesota curiosities. We have 10,000 lakes, an Indian heritage (Ojibwas and Sioux), lots of Germans and Scandinavians and weird accents. The stuff in “Fargo” isn’t too far wrong.

Anyway, thanks for tolerating my self promotion, and if you’ve got the time, please read the reviews at Amazon.com.

BILL MAULDIN: A LIFE UP FRONT begins with thousands of WWII veterans coming to see Bill at a nursing home in California where he is suffering from Alzheimer's. He stares off into space until one of them pins a medal on him; then his eyes light up.

Author DePastino then shows us how Bill moved from a hell-raising kid living on a mountain in New Mexico to STARS AND STRIPES cartoonist and premier morale booster of World War II. DePastino shows us Mauldin's undaunted will to succeed. Prior to WWII, he labored at his craft, sending out thousands of cartoons with little chance he would ever get anything published. He borrowed money from his grandmother to go to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. We also see his mischievous side. He never did graduate from high school, thanks to a prank he pulled in a science class. He lit a cigarette and put it in the mouth of the class skeleton, too much for the teacher to overlook when he relit it and took a few drags.

Prior to WWII, Bill joined the Arizona National Guard. Four days later the guard was mobilized into the United States Army. He began his cartoonist career working part-time for the 45th Division News, going full-time when it was sent overseas. It was the hell-raiser kid who appealed to the soldiers. Bill was a sergeant in the Infantry before he was a cartoonist. There's a cartoon of Bill's characters Willie and Joe throwing tomatoes at the head of an officer as their unit enters a liberated city. This was one of the cartoons that would arouse the wrath of General George S. Patton, who wanted Bill fired. Thankfully other generals, Mark Clark among them, liked Bill's work enough to ask for signed originals.

When he returned from the war, Bill eventually went to work for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, then the Chicago Sun-Times
as a political cartoonist where he took on such issues as segregation in the South and the House Un-American Activities Committee. His cartoon of Lincoln holding his head in his hands after the Kennedy assassination would become one of the most famous of the 20th Century. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice.

The book also examines Bill's personal life in elaborate detail. He was married three times, his second wife dying in a car accident after a massive stroke. There's an especially touching anecdote about how he reconciled with his first wife after fifty years apart.

As a writer I found Bill's work regimen especially impressive. For one thing he used a Polaroid camera to take pictures of himself in various poses. "Capturing precisely the curl of an arm, the twist of a face, or the wrinkles in an overcoat was an ongoing obsession." The man never stopped trying to get better, and should be remembered as an authentic American hero. Like Snoopy, let's all quaff a root beer with Bill Mauldin on Veteran's Day.

Certainly each person’s sense of humor is different. Some prefer slapstick, some prefer raunch while others cringe, some prefer something a little bit more cerebral like satire. Despite individual preference, I think there are a few guidelines the budding writer might consider before beginning a comic novel.

1. Characterization. It helps to have a likable main character. Hawkeye Pierce in M.A.S.H. is somewhat sarcastic and disrespectful of authority, and he’s a drunk and a skirt chaser, but we like him anyway because he’s high on the “cool” thermometer. Two such dissimilar actors as Donald Sutherland and Alan Alda played the man and we like them both. In my novel, SOLDIER’S GAP, I set out to find a character similar to Hawkeye, and I think I found him in Deputy Sheriff Dave Jenkins.

2. Dialogue. Snappy dialogue goes a long way as you can see in the Janet Evanovich numbers. Dialogue also reveals personality if you can get your characters to sound different.

3. Straight men and sidekicks. It always helps to have somebody to play off of. In SOLDIER’S GAP, it’s Mingo Jones. Mingo Jones is a Mescalero Apache and night deputy who is investigating his native American heritage, which includes belief in ghosts and the Land of Ever Summer.

4. Don’t try to be funny on every page. Maybe that’s why I don’t like Jerry Lewis. In everyday life, the funniest people aren’t trying to be funny half the time. They also have to live their lives and if they fool around too much they’re out of work. Also, as you can see from your Leno jokes, not everything is funny. Besides, you need to keep your story moving and that’s pretty hard to do if you’re always going for the yucks. Read the Dortmunder novels. Donald Westlake is one of the funniest humor writers working today, but most of the time he’s more interested in the caper.

5. Weird is not necessarily funny. If you’re reading a vampire novel, you need to overcome suspension of disbelief before you can appreciate the humor. That’s not to say it doesn’t work. Everybody loves Abby on NCIS and she’s certainly weird. In SOLDIER’S GAP there’s Mo Pleasiac, a teenage genius, who has latched onto Dave Jenkins as a father substitute.

6. It’s okay to be serious and humorous, especially when writing satire, but you need to know the tricks of the trade, primarily hyperbole. Jonathan Swift exaggerated the problems with English politics, using outsized (and undersized) characters. Try to be topical. Christopher Buckley, the premier American satirist writes about smoking and government assisted suicide. Lately he’s been writing about his father, who thought urinating in public was only wrong if other people did it.

7. Minor characters. People are people watchers. Funny little characters can liven up your novel. Grandma Mazur isn’t in the Evanovich books very much, but we recognize her from our own experience, if only from TV sitcoms. The woman who discovers Principal Egge’s body in SOLDIER’S GAP is a special education teacher who also does palm reading. A cast of characters is almost as important as the main character. Part of the reason Stuart Kaminsky’s Porfiry Rostnikov novels are so popular is because readers like to hang out with these people.

8. Setting. Brooklyn is funny for some reason, maybe because of the accent.
Brainerd, Minnesota, was funny in “Fargo,” once again because of the way the characters talked. Texas is funny because of Texans’ outsized egos.

9. Your main character can’t be too competent. Dave Jenkins of SOLDIER’S GAP can’t see the forest for the trees in respect to his romantic relationships. He’s also a lone eagle, unwilling to take advantage of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s expertise. He just assumes they’re incompetent because they’re bureaucrats. It helps to have a minor character who’s smarter than your lead. “MO” Pleasiac, in SOLDIER’S GAP is Sherlock Holmes’ smarter brother Mycroft to Dave Jenkins’ Sherlock.

10. The Battle of the sexes. This can be a great opportunity for some funny dialogue. Men and women are always trying to one-up each other. Perhaps you can create a situation where two characters have a brother/sister relationship, but one of them is romantically interested in the other or maybe they both are and they don’t know it. See “Bones.” Annie Kline is one of the love interests in SOLDIER’S GAP, but Dave Jenkins doesn’t realize how much he cares for her because she does guy things like work for the volunteer fire department and play shortstop on his softball team.

SOLDIER'S GAP can be purchased at goodreads or Amazon.com, new and used.