Craig Russell's Blog: Black Bottle Man, page 2

With Forgiveness

Many of the characters in Black Bottle Man make the gravest mistakes of their lives because of a mistaken belief in the righteousness of their own actions and motives.

In my life, I’ve learned how wrong I can be – and that with forgiveness, there’s always hope.

Building an Alliance with the Reader

Many writers use the unreliable first-person narrator.
Their story is told from a single viewpoint and you can’t be sure if the narrator’s interpretation of events is accurate.
That was an important development in modern literature, but with Black Bottle Man I wanted my readers to be my allies in this story.
The only way for that to happen is for them to implicitly trust that they are being told the truth.
When a story is told by a variety of characters and all their versions match, the level of trust between reader and writer grows and the reader can lower his guard, connecting on a more emotional level.

Hurtin' - A song in the country idiom

I love trying new forms of writing.
Here's my attempt at a song in the country idiom.

Are there any singers out there willing to take it out for a test drive?

Hurtin’

We’re just actors on a stage
Avoiding all our lines
Life’s turned another page
And you’ve said you can’t be mine

(Chorus)
Fools love as well as wise
Though it’s often hard to see
The causes in our lives
Now the lies have set you free

So, you found another’s soul
And you’ve turned your back on mine
You’ve accepted heartbreak’s role
I’ve got nothing left but time

(Repeat chorus above)

Aches a word I’ve come to know
Hope’s a feeling now denied
But I won’t let love’s pain show
When I see you by his side

(Repeat chorus above.)

(© Craig Russell)

Nuclear Arms - a TV Ad Script

My script for a 30-second television ad about the delays in signing the START Treaty. The video is inter-cut by silent, black screens with white text.

Video 1 - smiling teens at an air force recruitment office.
Sound - modern, exciting music.

Cut to black screen w/text - "Stockpile - 10,600 weapons."

Video 2 - Close up of earnest and kind recruiting officer.
Sound - modern, exciting music.

Cut to black screen w/text - "Plutonium - 43 metric tons."

Video 3 - Cameras follows the sexy, phallic curves of a nuclear missile, like a high-end sports car ad.
Sound - revving engine.

Cut to black w/text - "Radioactive waste - 100,000,000 cubic meters."

Video 4 - Montage of Nuclear Fireballs
Sound - total silence.

Cut to black w/text - "When we've done our job, there's no life."
Keeping the above text, add another line. - "Like it?"

Sound - Very fast voice-over reading tiny text at the bottom of the screen -"* Please note: Membership in the Strategic Missile Force does NOT entitle you to use the more than 75 secret Presidential Emergency Facilities built across America for use during and after a nuclear war."

Change screen text to - "Nuclear Weapons - Talk with your government."
Sound - very quiet air raid siren, rising in volume.

The Vagabond Boy and Tarzan

A vagabond boy, summer and winter I was allowed to ramble across wheat fields and saw-grass slough, over snow-drifts and frozen dug-outs, searching for gopher-sized adventures.
At age ten, a mysterious door on the third floor of the Carman Memorial Hall opened.
Beyond lived Tarzan and Tom Swift, Slan and the Hardy Boys; and the expression “get your nose out of that book!” was invented.
Now years later the mysterious door has opened again, and I'm sending stories the other way.
Blame it all on Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Hobos and the Slaughter House

The difference between the people forced to take to the road during the Great Depression and those who were able to hang on to hearth and home was slim as a dime.
But the men who were hobos before the 1930s - during the good times of the Roaring Twenties - would have been an entirely different kettle of fish. They chose to wander. Makes you wonder why.
In contrast, my parents were born in 1918 and faced the Great Depression as teenagers.
My father’s parents had been quite well off, with plenty of farmland and a nice house in town. But the collapse ruined them, and Dad had to leave school to work after grade eight.
Through the 1930s and after, my folks saw their share of grasshoppers, drought and hard times.
But through unending work, and despite having to feed and clothe ten children, they managed to hang on the farm and keep us all together.
Mum sewed our clothes and did all her own baking. We had a few dairy cows for milk, grew a huge garden that supplied us with summer vegetables and winter canning, and raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle.
In addition to cropping our own land, in the fall my dad (plus the boys and girls alike) hired out to do custom combining for other farmers. He also ran a beef ring - a slaughter house for the local farm families. Without freezers and refrigerators to keep meat fresh, on a rotating basis each family would supply a heifer and the meat would be divided amongst the ring members.
I ask you, how could people give up all that fun, to bum along the railroad?

Advice from David Bergen

In 2009 I had the great privilege of spending a week as a student with Governor General’s Award and Giller Prize author, David Bergen at the Canadian Mennonite University School of Writing.

The best general rule David gave us was to think like Earnest Hemmingway and cut adverbs.
Take a sentence like this: "Sam was equally furious and privately believed that the clerk was slightly jealous of the magistrate."
Kill the adverbs (in this case cut the “ly” words - equally, privately, slightly - and you've improved your writing.
Now do the same with your whole book!

David also picked a sentence fragment from my Black Bottle Man manuscript
- “when the moon was not at her post to see the things that Aunt Annie (and Aunt Emma) had done” -
and asked me to write a chapter exploring what happened to Rembrandt that night.

The result was Chapter Four and I learned that authors sometimes hide important scenes from themselves. (Thanks David!)

The Radio-Play experience

Black Bottle Man has had two lives.
First, it was a novel. During a vacation at Clear Lake, Manitoba it struck me that by attributing specific lines to the various characters it could make an interesting a radio play.
Lisa Vasconcelos, producer of Mecca Productions gave me the green light. After a few weeks of rehearsal, the eighteen actors who participated in the staged reading of ‘Rembrandt’ (as it was then called) gave us three excellent performances.
The opportunity to hear the interplay between actors and to watch and listen to the audience response was invaluable. Hearing it performed as a radio-play it helped me cut anything superfluous.
My excellent editor at Great Plains Publications, Anita Daher has remarked on how clean the manuscript was, and I would credit the radio-play process with paring away any narrative fat.
After the Brandon performances, ‘Rembrandt’ was briefly considered by the Manitoba Theatre Center. But (and I think quite rightly) they felt it was too long for a stage production, and was still very much grounded in the novel format.
One should really try to listen to that kind of advice, so I said, “Right, it is a novel.”, applied the same cuts to the book and sent it out to publishers, tighter and stronger from the experience.

Using the Theatre Ear

A dozen years ago I had the time to study acting. That led to directing community theatre.
Live theatre is a great training ground for a writer’s ear, teaching you to recognize effective dialogue.
Good acting demands that you live utterly in the moment. That sense of being in the now is one of the attractions, but also one of the most poignant aspects of the performance arts. Theatre is ephemeral. When a play is over, it’s gone forever.
So, to find a balance to that recurring loss, about five years ago I turned my hand to writing.
While working on Black Bottle Man I tried to apply all that I’ve learned from theatre – trusting the intelligence of my audience, getting into scenes late and out early, and understanding that all characters are motivated by love.
I believe that theatre has made me a better writer.