Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 34

Ken Atchity Quotes...

“Write to make a difference. Write because you have something to say to us all. In dramatic writing, fiction, and nonfiction, this means knowing exactly what your work is about and being able to tell the publisher in ten words or less..."

― Kenneth Atchity, Write Time: Guide to the Creative Process, from Vision through Revision-and Beyond





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The Daily Routines of Famous Creative People

The daily life of great authors, artists and philosophers has long been the subject of fascination among those who look upon their work in awe. After all, life can often feel like, to quote Elbert Hubbard, “one damned thing after another” -- a constant muddle of obligations and responsibilities interspersed with moments of fleeting pleasure, wrapped in gnawing low-level existential panic. (Or, at least, it does to me.) Yet some people manage to transcend this perpetual barrage of office meetings, commuter traffic and the unholy allure of reality TV to create brilliant work. It’s easy to think that the key to their success is how they structure their day.

Mason Currey’s blog-turned-book Daily Rituals describes the workaday life of great minds from W.H. Auden to Immanuel Kant, from Flannery O’Connor to Franz Kafka. The one thing that Currey’s project underlines is that there is no magic bullet. The daily routines are as varied as the people who follow them– though long walks, a ridiculously early wake up time and a stiff drink are common to many.

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With Coaching Client Ken Orman and his actor wife Morgana Shaw at the Academy Museum

Morgana just appeared in Camilla Carr’s one-woman show on Bette Davis

 

“Your Shrinks Might Need to be Shrunk” (by Dennis Palumbo) For ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE!

It’s been more than twenty years since Dennis Palumbo’s fiction has appeared in EQMM. In the meantime, he’s been busy with a series of novel-length thrillers featuring Daniel Rinaldi, a psychologist who consults with the Pittsburgh Police (the latest is Head Wounds, from Poisoned Pen Press), and his short stories have been collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). A former Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Dennis is himself a licensed psychotherapist, and in this post he talks about some misconceptions many mystery writers and readers have about the usefulness of psychological diagnoses in solving crimes. —Janet Hutchings

As a former Hollywood screenwriter, now a licensed psychotherapist and mystery author, I have more than a passing interest in how therapy is portrayed on screen and on the page. That said, I’ve noticed that in recent years, whether in some best-selling crime thriller or on your average procedural TV drama, the therapists depicted are usually pretty quick-on-the-draw when it comes to diagnosing characters in the story.

For example: To explain a suspect’s behavior to the investigating detectives, shrinks in these novels and TV series toss out easily-digestible diagnoses like “psychopathic,” “schizophrenic,” or “borderline personality disorder.” As if these terms explained everything the cops (and readers or viewers) needed to know about the person being discussed. In my view, not only is this lazy storytelling (psychological symptoms taking the place of character development) but it’s clinically debatable.

The problem starts with the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Used as the premiere diagnostic bible by mental-health professionals worldwide, the DSM has been predominately responsible for the labeling of an individual’s behavior, in terms of whether or not it falls within the range of agreed-upon norms. As such, it’s been both praised and reviled over the years. Praised because of its concise descriptions and categorizations of behavioral symptoms; reviled because of its reinforcement of stigmatizing attitudes towards those whose behavior is deemed “abnormal.”

In fact, there’s an old joke about how clinicians use diagnostic labels to interpret their patients’ behavior. If the patient arrives early for his therapy appointment, he’s anxious. If he’s late, he’s resistant. And if he’s on time, he’s compulsive.

Nowadays, however, it’s becoming clear that the joke may be on us. Diagnostic labels are thrown around quite casually by people who ought to know better (therapists on TV news programs) as well as by people who usually don’t (writers of mystery novels and procedural crime shows).

For the latter, it’s perfectly understandable. With rare exceptions, most writers depend on research—and such tools as the DSM—to provide their psychologist and psychiatrist characters with the right lingo. This not only makes these characters sound like the mental-health professionals they’re supposed to be, but it also allows the writer to describe the bad guy’s psychological problem in a way that the reader understands. Plus it makes the shrink character seem wicked smart.

However, as I said, it can also lead to lazy storytelling. In too many mysteries and thrillers nowadays, the shrink character need only say that someone’s a psychopath and—in an instant—a whole series of inexplicable or horrendous behaviors are explained away. To the question of why the bad guy did what he did, the answer is simple: he’s crazy.

In other words, so much for developing a vivid, relatable backstory for this character. Or creating a motive that makes sense. Or for acknowledging, as the author should, that most people are too complicated to be reduced to a set of easily determined symptoms.

Which is why I feel that crime writers—especially those who make use of therapists in their stories, either as protagonists or “experts” brought in to help the hero or heroine—need to take care not to use a one-size-fits-all model of diagnosis when it comes to describing a character in the story.

(There’s another problem with this, one which I think writers need to be aware of. Diagnostic labels, like practically everything else nowadays, follow the dictates of trends. Remember how, not too long ago, every other child was diagnosed with ADHD [Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder]? Or Asperger’s? Well, forget about those. Now the “hot” new label, regardless of age, is bipolar disorder [what used to be called manic-depression]. Lately, whether you’re a movie star, teen heartthrob, politician, or athlete, you’re not cool if you’re not bipolar.)

Not that there’s anything wrong, per se, with labels. Nor with the idea of a common vocabulary so that all us clinical geniuses can communicate with each other. It’s just that, if we’re speaking honestly, diagnostic labels exist primarily for the convenience of the labelers. Which is fine, as far as it goes. But how far is too far? Especially for crime writers?

In my opinion, “too far” is when authors give their therapist characters an almost clairvoyant ability to declare (with God-like conviction) what’s going on in the mind of some suspected bad guy. Because, as any working mental health professional will tell you, facile, off-the-cuff interpretations of a patient’s psychological state rarely end up being accurate. And can even do great harm.

Once, when asked how he worked, Albert Einstein replied, “I grope.” Frankly, that’s what most good therapists do, too. They grope. That is, if they truly respect the therapeutic process—and their patients.

In my own series of mystery thrillers, my lead character, psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, does a lot of groping. Trying to make sense not only of his patients, or some suspect for which the Pittsburgh Police are seeking his expertise, but of himself, too. His own motives, prejudices, needs.

As a therapist in private practice for over 28 years, I’ve grown to appreciate the vast differences in temperament, relationship choices, communication styles and beliefs of my patients—and how these translate into behaviors, both healthy and harmful. Which means I’ve been forced many times to challenge the orthodoxy of my own profession, and to pay attention to the potential danger of reducing people to a simple diagnostic category.

I think all of us who write mysteries owe our various suspects and bad guys the same consideration. As well as try to keep our shrink characters’ smug, self-congratulatory opinions in check.

After all, despite being fictional, they’re still only human.

G.K. Chesterton: 'The Inside of Life.'

 

"We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer.  Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys--instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere.  

Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost."

 

~ G.K. Chesterton: 'The Inside of Life.'

 

Author David Angsten

davidangsten.blogspot.com

Author Anthony Avina Reviews Kevin Spark's novel id! #FREE on Amazon this Week!

" This was a mind-blowing and thought-provoking psychological horror thriller. The imagery played well into the deep-set tone that psychological horror novels often take..." Anthony Avina

The Synopsis

A psychologist and daughter of a murderer develops a revolutionary test to explore the id unencumbered by morality and sets a killer and the cop driven to violence by that same killer on a path of destruction in author Kevin Spark’s “id: A Novel”.

Dr. Shelly, a brilliant psychologist, forever haunted by her father and his murderous past, is driven by the need to find out why we do the things we do? Is the concept of free will just a concept and nothing more, a construct that blinds us to a less palatable truth, that who we are is predetermined and encoded at birth? Does anyone really choose to do the bad things we do or are we just doing what comes naturally?

Shelly constructs an experiment using a sensory deprivation tank and virtual reality, allowing the darkest part of ourselves, the id, to run free. Unencumbered by morality or remorse, Shelly finds the perfect subject in Adam. A borderline psychotic born into a world of neglect and crime. Delving into the deepest pits of his subconscious, Shelly surfaces with far more than she bargained for.

Detective Hopper, responsible for Adam’s capture, remains a broken man. After suffering a breakdown due to the escalation of his own violent behavior, he is placed under the care of Dr Shelly. Encouraging him to go looking for his own redemption, Hopper becomes a pawn in her web of deception until the lines of reality are redrawn as Hopper and Adam come full circle to an explosive end.

The Review

This was a mind-blowing and thought-provoking psychological horror thriller. The imagery played well into the deep-set tone that psychological horror novels often take, and the inclusion of VR gaming environments and sensory deprivation tanks helped elevate the tension that the reader felt as the story progressed. The way these psychological ids came to life in the story and the way they spoke to the psychological aspects of our own minds helped elevate the atmosphere of this book tenfold. 

Yet it was the rich character development that really helped highlight this psychological horror. The way each of the main characters really played off one another in this almost cat-and-mouse style thriller and the steady pace of the narrative itself allowed the tension to build more and more as time went on. The way the author explored the “animal” that rests within us all and the ways in which we all deal with that animal in our lives played well into the story, and the heart-pounding terror that the imagery of these character’s ids brought to life will haunt readers well beyond the final pages of this book.

The Verdict

Haunting, captivating, and engaging, author Kevin Spark’s “id: A Novel” is a must-read psychological horror thriller. The twists and turns the narrative takes and the shocking conclusions that each character finds themselves in only lend themselves to the dynamic atmosphere and chilling imagery the author’s impressive writing style conjures up, drawing me in similarly to the way the acclaimed film The Cell starring Jennifer Lopez and Vincent D’Onofrio did when I first watched it. If you haven’t yet, be sure to grab your copy today!

Rating: 10/10

Kevin Spark

 

3 Things Every Great Story Has To Have by Dr. Ken Atchity

Film Courage: What three things does a great story have to have?

Dr. Ken Atchity, Author, Publisher, Producer: What three things? Well, it has to have a hook that gets people instantly involved in the story and that’s a huge part of the story itself. And it’s got to have a very strong character in the story that you care about and other than that, it has to have twists and turns that lead to a surprise ending. If I had to just say three things, I guess that’s what I would say the three things are. Every story needs that because a story about nothing is not going to hold anyone’s interest.

And sometimes writers when they begin their careers think that if they just write, they can write about anything but the truth is they need to write from their heart about things that matter to everyone and if they do that, you can hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will resolve and when you do that you’ve got everyone’s attention.

And in ancient times there was a thing called The Oral Tradition which I used to teach as a professor of Homeric Greek. The Iliad and the Odyssey were sung at campfires and everyone in the culture knew the stories. We are publishing a book right now on Homeric song and how it worked and how it held culture together. And my first book those…I call those stories the shield of memory and it was because of those stories that a person knew how to deal with himself in battle or when facing an attacking boar or when facing an angry wife or when facing pillagers trying to burn down his village. He would instantly think of the story of Heracles who did this or that or the story of Aegean who did this and that and that’s all they had. They didn’t have books for learning. It was all passed along through the oral tradition. And I think stories have never failed to play that role in human life and when you think about it you know “What’s your story?” is probably the most human response to any encounter and it goes from the court of law where the jury is trying to decide which of the two stories do they believe, to a political campaign where the voters are making that decision, to a first date where you are going “Do I believe his story? I just don’t believe it? I can’t buy his story?”  That’s the ultimate human turn down, you can’t buy the story. And it goes through everything. Advertising is conveying stories that people will want to buy the product. This is how humans operate on a daily basis so to me it’s absolutely amazing that an industry has been created where people will pay millions of dollars for stories and where stories can basically conquer the world and I believe unite the world.

I mean look at all the work we are now doing with China in the movie business. I just saw Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (the new version of it) where the male lead is Chinese and she is Western and clearly as a producer I’m watching it going “This was a Chinese financed movie,” because I understand how it works for the market…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here ).

Frank Center Lobby dedication to Scott Beard - April 1st!

 

ROBERT SCOTT BEARD
1964-2021

 

 

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Whether showcasing his students or performing at the piano himself, Dr. Scott Beard practically lived in the Frank Center for over a decade before transitioning to Administration, Many of you know he was a consummate neat freak. As such, he strove to ensure that the lobby and the hallways looked their best, because he understood that the Frank Center was often the first impression for visitors to the campus. But what many of you didn't know was that maintaining that image often meant cleaning, scrubbing and vacuuming it himself.

So, I felt it was a fitting tribute to him that we refurbish the lobby in his name. President Mary JC Hendrix agreed, and I thank her for her support, as well as the contributions of everyone on the Shepherd University staff who had a hand in the remake of this integral part of the University's soul. I also thank especially, our good friends, Kenneth and Vicki Wilson for their additional financial support,

Featured at the Dedication will be pianist Dr. Jason Solounias, a Shepherd alumnus and one of Scott's most accomplished and successful students, who will perform a few of Scott's favorite pieces.

 

Following the Dedication ceremony at 6 pm, Shepherd University will present the annual Musical Showcase, which Scott, Marcia Brand, and I started to raise money for music scholarships.

There is an admission for that concert, but you may attend the Dedication without an obligation to attend the Musical Showcase.

 

Write Your Novel to Be a Film by Kenneth Atchity

Novelists seeking representation complain that none of their books have been made into films. At any given moment, we have literally stacks of novels from New York publishers on our desks in Los Angeles. Going through them to find the ones that might make motion pictures or television movies, we — and other producers, managers, and agents — are constantly running into the same problems:

    “There’s no third act... It just trickles out.”

    “There are way too many characters and it’s not clear till page 200 who the protagonist is.”

    “I can’t relate to anyone in the book.”

    “At the end, the antagonist lays out the entire plot to the protagonist.”

    “There’s not enough action.”

    “There’s nothing new here. This concept has been used to death.”

    “We don’t know who to root for.”

    “The whole thing is overly contrived.”

    “There’s no dialogue, so we don’t know what the character sounds like.”

    “There’s no high concept here. How do we pitch this?”

    “There’s no real pacing.”

    “The protagonist is reactive instead of proactive.”

    “At the end of the day, I have no idea what this story is about.”

    “The main character is 80, and speaks only Latvian.”

    “It’s set in Papago...in the 1960s, and is filled with long passages in Uto-Aztecan.”

    “There are no set pieces.”

Of course anyone with the mind of a researcher can list a film or two that got made despite one of these objections. But for novelists who are frustrated at not getting their books made into films, that should be small consolation and is, practically speaking, a useless observation. Yes, you might get lucky and find a famous Bulgarian director, who’s fascinated with the angst of octogenarians, studied pacing with John Sales or Jim Jarmusch, and loves ambiguous endings.

But if you regard your career as a business instead of a quixotic crusade, you should be planning your novel from the outset to make it appealing to filmmakers.

Give us a strong (preferably male) lead who, good or bad, is eminently relatable — and who’s in the “star age range” of 35-50 (where at any given moment 20 male stars reside; a star being a name that can set up the film by his attachment to it).

Make sure a dramatist looking at your book will clearly see three well-defined acts: act one (the setup), act two (rhythmic development, rising and falling action), and act three (climax leading to conclusive ending).

Express your character’s personality in dialogue that distinguishes him, and makes him a role a star would die to play.

Have someone in the film industry read your synopsis before you commit to writing the novel.

Though I’ve observed the phenomena for several decades now, it still surprises me that even bestselling novelists, even the ones who complain that no one has made a film from their books yet, don’t write novels dramatic enough to lend themselves easily to mainstream film. It’s a well-known phenomenon in publishing that, with very few exceptions, the more books a novelist sells the less critical his publisher’s editors are of his work. So time and again we read novels that start out well, roar along to the halfway point, then peter off into the bogs of formless character development or action resolution.

A publisher invests between $25,000 and $100,000 or more in publishing your novel. A low-budget feature film from a major Hollywood studio today costs at least $40 million. There is, from a business point of view, no comparison. Risking $40 million means the critical factor is raised as high as can be imagined when your book hits the “story department” — much higher than the critical factor of even the finest publishers. Hollywood studies what audiences want by logging, in box office dollars, cents, and surveys, what they respond best to.

If you want to add film to your profit centers as a novelist, it would behoove you to study what makes films work. Disdaining Hollywood may be a fashionable defense for writers who haven’t gotten either rich or famous from it, but it’s not productive in furthering your cinematic career.

Guest Post: HOOKED ON ROMANCE (WRITING) by Alan B. Gibson

Alan B. Gibson inks a four book deal with Robin Cutler and LMBPN World Wide Publishing!

I confess. I wrote Summer Thunder on a bet, and the stakes were high. My reputation was on the line.

It was cold and damp that March evening in Scotland when I joined a group of colleagues around the fireplace. We’d wrapped up a full day of workshops and classes at a writers’ conference, and we were doing what authors do best–sitting around talking about writing.

The conversation wandered to poking fun at genres other than our own. Most of them wrote crime. I’d been writing horror/thrillers, and apparently, I made a disparaging comment about how much easier it would be to write a romance or a fantasy.

“You wouldn’t know where to start,” said someone, (a friend?).

Encouraged by three fingers of whiskey I took her insult as a dare and doubled down, suggesting that not only was I capable of writing a romance novel, I could write a romance fantasy.

“Pfft!” I said. “I’ve even got the plot.”

I didn’t know the first thing about writing romance novels, and to the best of my recollection, I’d never read one.  Stunned that after all those years of teaching and practicing yoga I could still let my ego get the best of me, I shut up and blamed my impulsiveness on the whiskey.

“So, tell us!” The woman who goaded me was my good friend, or so I thought, and I made a mental note to get back at her one day.

I had just fallen into a gigantic hole that I’d dug myself. With only seconds to climb out, I reached not very far back in my brain to an area of expertise that hadn’t failed me––a lifetime career in advertising pitching to clients.

I stood up. “Okay. A beautiful woman with lots of personal baggage sells fairy figurines in her shop at a Renaissance Festival. A mysterious, hot surfer guy walks in looking to buy fairy dust. Turns out he is an actual fairy prince, and his kingdom recently ran out. Naturally, the encounter changes both of their lives.”

“That could work,” said a publisher friend with the credentials to know. “But set it in on a beach in California instead. You’ve always got to think about the movie.”

On the spot I created a fictional beach boardwalk. I kept the fairy prince, but now in this revised version he also happens to be a champion kite surfer. The story was writing itself, and on the plane home the following day I scribbled plot and character notes. For the next few months, I was obsessed with writing the story I entitled Summer Thunder.

Nobody was as surprised as I that putting that first book together got me hooked. I had so much fun, I couldn’t stop, and I wrote three more.

If you enjoyed reading about Lily and Theos’s magical romance in Summer Thunder, I believe you’ll want to find out what happens to her best friend Greta the Witch and her run-in with a rival witch, Zsa Zsa Hadju in Summer Storm.  Summer Lightning, and Summer Cyclone complete the four-book Romance/Fantasy series, Magic at Myers Beach.

Summer Thunder will always have a special place in my heart, too, because my life partner of 31 years, read the manuscript the day before he unexpectedly died, and one of the last things he said to me was how much he loved the story and how proud he was that I’d written it.

I appreciate feedback, so please visit me with your comments. I’m easy to find because I’m all over the place.

Summer Thunder is Book 1 (of 4) in my Magic at Myers Beach romance/fantasy series. It's being released very soon. If you're looking for a novel that just may change your life, (!) AND you feel you could pop for the 99¢ special series launch price, your support will help convince my publisher that they picked a winner!

YOU CAN PRE-ORDER THE eBOOK HERE.