Joe Clifford Faust's Blog, page 13

To Thine Own Writing Be True

It's been an interesting experience getting The Mushroom Shift ready for publication.

I mean, here is a novel I wrote almost 25 years ago, and as I'm reading it, and as I'm having my Kindle read it to me as part of the proofreading process, I'm discovering something about it that I hadn't expected.

It's a really good book.

Yeah, authors are supposed to say that sort of thing. But I don't say that about many of my others – not A Death of Honor or The Company Man, or the three books of the Angel's Luck trilogy. While I can chat them up to interested readers, I don't think they're particularly good, largely because I hadn't yet hit that mystical One Million Words mark.1 Of my published novels, Ferman's Devils/Boddekker's Demons is the first one I can page through without cringing, largely because (I believe) by that point I'd actually Gotten Good.

Yet here is a novel that was my third (written after Desperate Measures and Honor2), before I had Gotten Good – but I can mostly read/listen to it without wincing. Plus there are moments in the book that make me marvel at how good it really is.

Granted, there's one scene in The Mushroom Shift that I have long considered one of my best pieces of writing ever – but one scene does not a great book make. Mushroom I think is a great book, in spite of the fact that my writing style hadn't completely evolved. Why?

Well, I've been thinking it over, and I believe I might have the answer.

The Mushroom Shift was written for love. It was written for the sheer joy if sitting down and telling a story. It was written because the story was coming out of me, and not for any sort of commercial consideration.

The others from that period were, well, written to try and make money.

Ditto the story about Ferman and Boddekker, which was something I wanted to write for a long time, and had a great time doing so when I finally did it.

Ditto again for Drawing Down the Moon, in which I defied my then-agent's advice and sat down and wrote it because it was a story I wanted to tell. Well, DDtM is also a great book because I think I have officially Gotten Good now, but you see the pattern forming.

There's something to be said for tossing commercial considerations out the window and writing for the love of the process.

Need more proof?

Open up your web browser, point it at Amazon dot com, and look up the Stephanie Plum series of novels by Janet Evanovich. Check out the reviews of the early series; One for the Money, Two for the Dough, Three to Get Deadly…

People love 'em.

Now check out the reviews of books Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen. Evanovich's readers are turning on her, accusing the writer of making her books dull, boring and repetitive – basically phoning it in for the score.3 One reviewer even accuses her of milking the series after allegedly reading an interview in which Evanovich advocated doing exactly that.

I'm guessing that the one thing on the minds of all of Evanovich's disgruntled readers right now is, "Where is the love?"

Don't get me wrong – there's nothing bad about writing for money. But there seems to be a strange phenomenon that occurs when you do that. You start keeping commercial considerations in mind, and perhaps you start getting a little shy about letting loose for fear of offputting your readers. And pretty soon you're doing that thing of stamping the novels out using a cookie cutter formula.

I suppose it's nice work if you can get it.

But so much more satisfying… and a much richer legacy you will leave… if you be truthful with yourself as a writer, if you push yourself out of the box, and simply write for the sheer joy of creating, of telling a story you want to tell rather than shooting for the lowest common denominator.

Who knows? Your fans might even like it, too.

—

Or that new iteration of skill honing, the Ten Thousand Hour mark.
That's right – those early novels weren't published in the order in which they were written.
And actually, in the interest of full self-disclosure, I found her books dull, boring and repetitive after just two. Along with highly irritating. But she makes more money writing than I do, so you can't argue with success.

Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion

Inside Scientology: The Story of America's Most Secretive Religion by Janet Reitman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Objective, fascinating and frightening look at the history of L.Ron Hubbard's alternative religion cult.

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Thinking About Thinking

I've had a chance to do a lot of thinking lately. Okay, technically we think all of the time. I mean creative thinking. After being a bad master for a number of years, I've started to walk the dog for a half an hour or so on most days, and having nothing to clutter my thoughts, I've been mentally making, um, mental notes on a future novel project.

The thing is, these notes haven't been for 8000 Days, which is the next book I plan to finish writing. But I haven't been thinking about that one. And I haven't been thinking about the UFO Novel, which is the big project that will follow.

No, I've been thinking about a whim I've had for a number of years, and it has been taking shape rather nicely on these walks.

But why haven't I been thinking about the book – one that I've got about 1/3 written – that I'm about to start work on? I suppose because it's such a slight thing. I know where it's going, I have one-sentence descriptions of what is to happen in each of the remaining chapters, and each of those chapters is pretty much set in my head. There's not much left in the way of mental gymnastics to perform.

So why haven't these mental gymnastics covered the UFO novel, which may be my biggest novel yet, and certainly has a lot of blanks to be filled in? It could be that I'm not ready to write it yet. But I doubt it. I've got tons of notes, handwritten, typed, odd .doc files here and there, most of which have been incorporated into the book's Scrivener file. Maybe because the idea has reached critical mass and I'm at the stage where I need to begin actually writing in order for the blanks to be property filled in.

But this notion of working in a genre that I'd never had much interest in, never wanted to work in, and that would involve far more up-front research than I usually perform?1 I don't know. I thought I was over that whole crazy writer thing.

Maybe it's because it's been a while since I've had the opportunity to engage in unbridled, uninterrupted thought.2 See, if I were to list out the times/places where I tend to engage in the most independent creative thought outside of sitting at the keyboard, it would probably look something like this:

Driving/Commuting

Shower

Repetitive/mundane physical tasks (e.g. mowing the lawn)

Unfortunately, most of these have become compromised over the years. The price of gas has seen me carpooling with my wife, so conversation fills the car there. Even so, my car thought was waning because of my heavy use of the iPod. When I listen to music, I do it rather intensely, and it occupies my mind rather completely.3 Having a spouse and two children long ago put an end to the extended creative sessions in the shower, and allergies put a premature end to the lawn mowing.

To make up for this I developed a method of enforced creative thought where I consciously pick a topic and send my imagination down the resulting alleyway. It's serviceable enough – so much so that I sometimes teach this method to groups – but it lacks the joy one gets from just letting loose with imaginative thought.

And perhaps that's why my mind has wandered in the direction it has gone… simply because it can.

Whatever the case, it has taught me this: that it is good for creatives to be able to make such flights of fancy. They're an important part of the process, and I've missed them.

But why… oh, why… that idea?

—

I prefer to do what I call "on-going research", wherein I simply read about things that interest me, and, well, if the shoe fits…

Except for that close call with the skunk.

While I can listen to music while I write, I cannot listen to complete albums by the likes of XTC and Elvis Costello. Their superb use of wordplay is just too good – and too distracting.

Handwriting is on the Wall

I have just heard the news that cursive writing will no longer be taught in Ohio schools, making it the third state to abandon the skill (behind Indiana and Hawaii). The keyboard is king now, the thinking goes, making unnecessary a discipline that teaches manual dexterity at the fine motor level. In these modern times we live in, cursive is slowly being traded as a youth-learned skill in favor of manipulation of a joystick.

That's pretty sad. We're slowly losing something useful, something that was a rite of passage in our schooling, and something that serves as a unique identifier and perhaps even a mirror of our personality.

I say this in spite of my never having really gotten the hang of cursive. My penmanship was wobbly and inconsistent, and I always had to labor at it. Printing worked better for me, probably since I did an unusual amount of writing as a kid before the cursive lessons started. I was actually faster at printing, and over the years, my printing evolved into it's own kind of cursive, though it doesn't look anything like when I try to write in cursive. It's neither writing nor printing, but it is distinctive.

Quality cursive is a subjective thing anyway. Two of my oldest friends vary widely in the quality of their penmanship. One has a tight, elegant, kind of writing that resembles a city skyline. It's amazing looking and could be a font. The other writes in broad, palsied, wavy lines that look like Charles Schulz's lettering in the last few years of his life. Even his printing is sad looking. But both are enormously successful in their respective fields.

What always amazed me was how cursive seemed to cookie cutter the handwriting of girls. Our cursive system turned out millions of girls who wrote with broad, loopy writing, the kind that seemed to encourage the dotting of "i's" with tiny hearts or flowers. Being a callow youth, I immediately judged girls on this kind of penmanship, and I never dated anyone whose writing looked like that.

In fact, my wife has the most amazing handwriting I've ever seen. It took me a couple of years to be able to read it on the first pass. Her letters are long and thin and slant off to the right like a field of wheat bending in a breeze. The loops she pens are gracefully thin and tight, with just enough space inside to distinguish one letter from another. It's graceful and compact and is as unique as she is.

My children, on the other hand, were educated during the ascendancy of the keyboard, and interestingly enough, they both lean more toward printing than any brand of cursive. Further, what training they did get in cursive managed to generify their penmanship, and their styles of printwriting are remarkably similar. Both have a practiced signature, but it consists mostly of straight lines occasionally interrupted by a loop. But as their father, I can tell them apart.

Perhaps it's time for cursive to go, given how keyboards now dominate our lives. But that's not a good thing. It was a good discipline to learn. It gave you a unique marker beyond the fingerprint. From personal experience, I can say that writing by hand gives you a more intimate connection with the words in your head. For most of the novels I'm working on or have planned, I already have opening scenes written by hand (including the soon-to-be-released The Mushroom Shift, which was the first time I wrote a first chapter by hand).

Time and progress leave things behind, and for better or worse cursive is looking more and more like a dinosaur. However, being modern has its price. I can't imagine Sullivan Ballou's letter or the train station scene in Casablanca being improved by a laser printed missive in perfect 12-point Times New Roman.

Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany

Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany by Rudolph Herzog

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fascinating account of humor, dark and otherwise, and its part in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler.

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Oh, Fudge!

Where to come down on the idea of cussin' in one's books? I've gotten away from it for the most part, mostly because I'm a Christian and try hard not to use it myself. But I've also sat through enough TV versions of films where the language is softened, and for the most part the writing works without it (except for the moment in Heartbreak Ridge where Clint Eastwood refers to a compromised operation as a "cluster flop").

If the profanity is taken out and not given a ridiculous substitute, most writing functions surprisingly well. I've gotten along without it nicely for a couple of novels now, although in Drawing Down the Moon I resorted to some comparatively minor epithets during a couple of moments when the emotional tension was ratcheted up so high that it seemed the scene couldn't exist without the kind of expression that exists when you call someone a son-of-a-bitch.

One thing I don't think most writers consider when using profanity is how it is perceived by the reader. Folks, most readers ain't looking at it the way that a lot of us do. For example, John Grisham has been praised for years for "not using profanity" – but he does. The thing is, he uses it ever-so-sparingly.

This tells me that in minuscule amounts profanity becomes overlooked as part of the story and doesn't even enter the reader's consciousness. There's not enough to alert the reader's radar, so it flies under it naturally.

Unlike when I went to see Dog Day Afternoon once upon a time a long time ago. A bunch of us from college went, and one girl who was unenlightened about "cinema" (as opposed to "movies") became bored with the plot early on and began to count out loud the number of F Bombs dropped by Al Pacino. And you know what? Thinking back on it, it was distracting. Not the girl's count, but the fact that there were so many that it demanded counting. How else do you account for people tallying the number of F words in films like The Big Lebowski, or pretty much any movie in which Joe Pesci or Robert DeNiro are allowed to do some ad-libbing? It's like there's a saturation point for this particular epithet, and once you pass a certain number of uses, it pushes the meter from "Useful" to "Tolerable" to "Offensive" and into "Self Parody."

Oddly enough, this didn't seem to happen in The Commitments, but then the word wasn't flowing exclusively from the mouth of one particular character – it same from everyone, as if it was a part of the street argot. And it worked that way.

My take is to use profanity infrequently and only when emphasis is needed somewhere. I'm not so sure I buy into the whole "it's part of the character" thing anymore because it has become so over-used (see below for an exception).

While there was profanity in A Death of Honor, there were only two F-bombs – one in a confrontation with a jackbooted version of that universe's police, and an expression of disgust and dismay near the book's end. My editor called me up to talk about this since Del Rey wasn't known for that kind of language, but what's interesting is that she was concerned with the second instance of the word – almost as if the first hadn't existed. I guessed that was a sign that it felt natural in the first application, and seemed gratuitous in the second – although I would have traded the first to keep the second, which is where I really felt it belonged.

Interestingly enough, there was almost no profanity in Honor – at least not in the traditional sense. When I initially wrote the first chapter, one of the things I postulated was that language would change in the future, so I used a different, odd word as a profane expression. However, since Honor was only the second novel I'd written, I lost my courage to see that part of the book through and used common contemporary cussin' instead. But I kept the idea in the back of my mind… and when the time came to write Ferman's Devils I had a lot more confidence… and that's why the characters there say "ranking" all the ranking time. It's up to readers to figure out why it's a cussword (and no, I don't give any clues – but it was accepted).

Incidentally, "ranking" is almost the only cussword in Ferman. There are two others, used only once each – "bastard" and "ass". The only reason I used them is because I heard them used in actual TV commercials while I was writing the book, and put them into the advertising universe to make a point.

For the most part I think profanity is a spice where you err on the side of less is more. That said, there are exceptions. Right now I'm in the process of coding my unpublished police novel for the Kindle. It's based on what I observed when I worked as a Sheriff's Dispatcher, back during the Ice Age. It's thick with creative profanity because that's what I heard. Some time after I wrote it, in a moment of idealism I decided to rewrite it without the profanity. But when I started doing that it just wasn't the same book. Taking the profanity out ruined the whole tone of things. So I decided to leave it in.

Ultimately, it's the decision of each individual writer to make. Just keep in mind that your readers are more involved with the story than you think, and if you're gratuitous with the language, it may push the aforementioned Profane-O-Meter into Self Parody faster than you think.

And be cautious when I finally release The Mushroom Shift for the Kindle. The language really is terrible, and some folks don't ranking like that.

Beer is Proof God Loves Us

Beer Is Proof God Loves Us by Charles Bamforth

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

An interesting, if meandering book about beer and its creation, with one fatal flaw.1

—

1. Too darn many footnotes!

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Kung Foolery

Here's a little bit of fluff that I wrote from a prompt ("I know Kung Fu") for the writer's group I'm in.

"I know Kung Fu."

"What?"

"I said I know Kung Fu."

"Kung Foot?"

"Fu. Kung Fu."

"Yeah, so do I. He owns that takeout place down on 23rd."

"No, no, no! This isn't about food. It's about self-defense."

"So this Kung Fu character, he's like in the mafia, only Chinese, and if I cross you, he's going to send some guys over to my place with swords?"

"No. Any damage I do will be done with my hands and feet."

"So you're telling me that I should be afraid of you because, even though I'm the one with the gun, you're the one with the hands and feet?"

"That's exactly it. Stop laughing."

"Sorry. Can't help myself."

"You're going to be sorrier in just a minute, because–"

"Yeah, I know. You know Kung Foot."

"Fu. Kung Fu. It's a deadly martial art."

"Marshall art? Isn't that like a cop in the old west? Sheriff, that's the word."

"Scoff if you must. Kung Fu is a very serious discipline, one that has made my entire body into a weapon. A deadly weapon."

"So how come you ain't used it yet?"

"I'm only going to use it if I have to."

"I feel the same way about this here gun."

"It's no match for my Kung Fu."

"Do you have any idea what the muzzle velocity of this gun is? I think a bullet can move a lot faster than you can with your King Kong."

"It's Kung Fu. And I could have disabled you now and left you writhing on the ground in pain."

"But you didn't."

"You didn't shoot me, either."

"That's because if I shoot you, it's an even worse crime than robbing you. All I want is your wallet. I'm not wanting to shoot you over it."

"So why do you have the gun?"

"To make you give me your wallet. You're supposed to be scared of me."

"I'm not."

"Why?"

"Because I know Kung Fu."

"So why haven't you used it yet?"

"Why haven't you shot me yet? Maybe you don't have any bullets."

"Maybe you don't really know Kung Fu."

"It appears, then, that we are at an impasse."

"What's that?"

"Oh, forget it. Just take my damn wallet."

"Tell you what. Gimme what cash you have and you can have my gun."

5 Ways to Create Red Herrings in a Mystery Novel (via Global Mysteries)

If you're an aspiring mystery writer, or an aspiring writer in general, you should make Nancy Curteman's Global Mysteries blog a regular stop on your social media rounds. She has great topics, posts more regularly than I do, and doesn't dither like me.

Here's her latest, another ball knocked out of the park.

Red herrings play two important roles in a mystery novel. They heighten suspense and add greater challenge to a mystery puzzle by misleading the reader and/or the sleuth. A red herring is a false clue that a mystery writer uses to send readers and sleuths off in directions that do not lead to the apprehension of the real villain. Here are five strategies for creating red herrings: 1. Choose an innocent character and give him a motive that makes h … Read More

via Global Mysteries

Clan of the Cave Bear

The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A remarkable novel that takes risks, break rules, and succeeds as a great read and a great story. All the more amazing achievement for being a first novel.

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