David Litwack's Blog, page 4

Ideas are everywhere

What do the following have in common? A rustic stone chruch in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, Mt. Etna, the Temple of Zeus in Agrigento, the old merry-go-round in Oak Bluffs, the Chihuly Glass Museaum in Seattle, and the Palantine Chapel in Palermo. All of these are sources of inspiration for my next novel, the sequel to There Comes a Prophet. I’ve always Continue Reading

A Story from Long Ago

This week, a story came out a in my alma mater’s alumni site. It started by highlighting the wisdom of my first writing mentor: “‘Drama,’ Brandeis Professor John Matthews was fond of telling the students in his playwriting class, ‘is conflict with something at stake – the higher the stakes, the higher the drama.’ David Litwack ’68 was listening closely.” The article Continue Reading

On genres and literary awards

Yesterday, I received word that two of my novels won bronze medals in the 2013 Readers’ Favorite awards. There Comes a Prophet won in the Young Adult – Coming of Age category, while Along the Watchtower won for Fiction – Drama. Of course, I was pleased. But what to make of it? I’d applied to several contests before. All are Continue Reading

A cause for celebration and sadness

I’m nearing completion of the final draft of my new novel, The Daughter of the Sea and the Sky. A few more days and it will be time to send my latest offering to the editor. Finishing final edits for a new novel is always a cause for celebration and sadness: celebration for finishing a project after all that hard Continue Reading

Win a Kindle Fire, $100, or Autographed Books in the True Hero Contest!

WHAT IS A HERO? Too often we confuse heroes with celebrities. Rock stars, actors and athletes are routinely admired. Kids love to emulate them and wear their paraphernalia. Not to demean what they’ve accomplished—talent and success are something to be admired—but is what they’ve done heroic? In Along the Watchtower, Lt. Freddie Williams is decorated with the silver and bronze Continue Reading

World of Warcraft and Prince Frederick’s Azeroth

Where did some of the ideas come from for Prince Frederick’s fantasy world? From World of Warcraft, of course. As research for Along the Watchtower, I played a lot of World of Warcraft. I started when my son, an avid player, invited me to meet him in Azeroth and go on quests together as a way of visiting. With him Continue Reading

Role-playing games and the trauma of war

I’ve always been fascinated by how we perceive reality, each of us bringing our own experiences and biases into play. But it’s when we’re ripped from our normal lives and placed in extreme circumstances that our reality becomes totally fragmented. Such is the case with hospitals and war.

A couple of years ago, I became engrossed in the online game, World of Warcraft, thanks to my son. I’m on the east coast and he’s on the west, so we’d meet every Wednesday evening in the virtual world of Azeroth, where our avatars would go on quests together. I was struck by how immersed I became in the mood of the game as we wandered through castles and crypts, solving riddles and vanquishing demons.

The fantasy gaming experience has a dream-like quality to it. And I began to wonder: how would this experience affect the dreams of someone whose reality has been fragmented by war? These concepts—war, hospitals, and the fantasy world of online gaming—came together in my new novel, Along the Watchtower.

I began to research the effects of war on returning veterans. I learned that 30% are diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress. That means after six months they’re still dealing with flashbacks, disturbing dreams, depression and difficulty re-assimilating into their former lives. And that doesn’t account for the many others who are seemingly able to adjust but continue to deal with inner turmoil. The war experience changes them all forever. Many have suicidal thoughts (the suicide rate among veterans is triple that of the general population. More soldiers have died by their own hand than in the war itself). Many struggle with dark thoughts and have difficulty forming relationships, unable to “turn off” the normal flight or fight syndrome, leaving them suspicious in crowds and always on alert.

And then, there are the physical injuries. One of the ironic successes of these recent wars is the advance in battlefield medical treatment. The result is that far fewer die of wounds than in prior wars. The ratio of wounded to dead in WWII was 1.1/1, in Vietnam 1.7/1. In Iraq, it’s 7/1. More are saved, but more come home with debilitating, lifelong injuries. And 68% of the wounded have some form or brain trauma, penetrating injuries from shrapnel or non-penetrating concussions from the blasts of IEDs.

To learn more about brain injuries, I read In an Instant, the story of Bob Woodward. The brilliant Woodward had just been named co-anchor of ABC’s World News Tonight. Then, while embedded with the military in Iraq, an improvised explosive device went off near the tank he was riding in. Bob suffered a traumatic brain injury that nearly killed him. The book describes his recovery and recounts how fragile the human brain can be. At one point, the erudite Woodward could rattle off the names of all prior U.S. presidents but couldn’t remember the names of his own children.

And I read about post traumatic stress. One of the best books is Achilles in Vietnam. Written by Jonathan Shay, a Vietnam War era PTSD counselor, it compares his clinical notes from patients with the text from Homer’s Odyssey, showing how we as human beings have dealt with war trauma across the millennia. He shows how war fragments our sense of reality and disrupts our moral compass, leaving re-entry into normal life as a brutal and agonizing experience.

Playing a make believe fantasy game and going to war both have a surreal quality that takes us out of our normal reality. But for war veterans, the sense of normality doesn’t return without a struggle.

The Wounded Warrior Project is a wonderful organization, dedicated to helping veterans adjust. Their stated mission is: “To foster the most successful, well-adjusted generation of wounded service members in our nation’s history.” How successful we’ll be at achieving that goal will tell a lot about who we are. It’s one of the most important stories of our time.

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The box has arrived

My smart phone beeps and the tracking text from UPS appears: Your delivery is at the front door.

I go to the entrance of the house, open the door and gaze too long at the shipment sitting on the stoop, then carefully bend at the knees and lift it up. I lug it into my office and rest it on the desk, the place where I’ve spent all those hours writing. Then I pull out my set of keys, pick the one with the sharpest teeth and drag it along the tape, letting the flaps flip open.

In the movie, Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox plays Marty McFly, a disgruntled teen who is unhappy with his parents. They’re frumpy, out-of-shape, and dragging themselves through mid-life. The magic has gone from their relationship. And they seem to have nothing to look forward to other than continually nagging him about one thing or another. When he returns from the past, after righting the wrongs of their youth, he’s surprised to find them changed. They’re now fit, well-dressed, and smiling at each other as they return from a game of tennis. As he marvels at the transformation, there’s a knock on the door. Their high school nemesis, Biff Tannen, now reduced to an obsequious helper, brings in a box and announces:

“Mr. McFly! Mr. McFly, this just arrived . . .  I think it’s your new book.”

“Oh, honey! Your first novel,” the mother says.

The father looks knowingly at Marty and spouts fatherly wisdom. “Like I’ve always told you, you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.”

Well, today’s my day. I yank out the filler paper but not too eagerly. After all, it’s my second book. I run the pad of my thumb over the glossy cover. I flip through, making sure all the pages are there. Then I walk over to the shelf with the plastic display case, the one I bought at Staples for $4.99. It’s a stacked display with four books in a row, each rising proudly above the other. It currently holds four copies of my first novel. I remove the back two, reach into the box and insert two new ones, then pause to admire them. Not quite right. I switch the books around so they alternate—new one, old one, new and old. Better. I replace the display on the shelf.

Then I shuffle over to my computer, sit down, and wiggle the mouse to clear the screensaver. A paragraph from my latest work in progress stares back at me. I read it once, twice. I sigh—not good enough. Time to get back to work.

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A Celebration of the Human Spirit

The Boston Marathon course ran past the front steps of the apartment building where I grew up in Brighton. We lived a bit after the twentieth mile, just over the crest of Heartbreak Hill. Since Patriot’s day was a holiday and we had no school, we’d go out every year and watch, a rite of spring, along with opening day at Fenway Park.

Back then, there were a paltry two or three hundred runners, not the twenty-five thousand plus of today. There were no prizes beyond a laurel wreath and the beef stew waiting at the finish. But thousands of onlookers would line the streets and offer complete strangers water and encouragement.

Another connection was when my dad was a kid, his scoutmaster was a man named Clarence Demar. Now, I suspect few of you have heard of him, but he won the Boston Marathon seven times around the 1920’s. He wasn’t a pro. He didn’t win prize money or endorsements. He just loved to run. He worked as a printer in Boston and used to train by running to and from work.

Of course, today the marathon is a bigger deal. Prize money was first awarded in 1986 and top finishers now compete for more than $800,000. The marathon is televised broadly and sponsored by large corporations. But most of that hullabaloo involves only the first few hundred runners, superhuman specimens who run faster per mile than most can conceive of and keep it up across hill and dale for twenty six miles.

They weren’t the ones targeted. The bombs were set to go off around four o’clock. That’s when the nine-minute-a-mile guys come in. These are people that will never win anything, if you don’t count the respect of friends and family and the pride in their accomplishment. Many of them are running for charity or in memory of a loved one. Lots of them have used the marathon as a goal, the pinnacle of a journey back from some hardship—stroke, cancer, addiction or personal loss. For them, the marathon is more than a road race. It’s a celebration of the human spirit.

Into this celebration came some deranged mind. It doesn’t matter whether their cause was political or religious, or they were just delusional. What they sought was not only to kill and maim innocent people, but to steal dreams.

Some people say that dystopian fiction is so popular today because we’ve become cynical. I think it’s because such stories show an individual’s ability to prevail over hardship and to shine even in the worst of circumstances. That’s the triumph of the human spirit—our ability to be at our best when things are at their worst..  And no one can steal our dreams.

 

 

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My Writing Style

Matthew Arnold wrote: “Have something to say, and say it as clearly as you can.” Hemingway said it a bit differently: “My aim is to put down on paper what I see and what I feel in the simplest possible way.”

I believe good writing is clear thinking, saying what you mean in the simplest possible way.

The problem for fiction writers is that we don’t always know what we mean when we stare at a blank screen. And we certainly haven’t rounded out those imaginary new friends we call characters. Much as when we move into a new community or take a new job, it takes a while to get to know people. That’s why a writer needs time to live in the story, to dwell inside the heads of his characters.

Over a series of rewrites, I try to understand my characters better. What is it is they want? What obstacles stand in their way? Then I lead them head on into those obstacles and let them battle their way through.

I try to say things in the most straightforward way. One of my favorite quotes is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of that gem of a book, The Little Prince. He said: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I aim to remove the unnecessary.

At the same time, I understand that a novel is a partnership between reader and writer. No reader will ever feel the same about the characters and the story as I do. My task is to give sufficient detail to stimulate their imagination, to provide enough brushstrokes to meld with their life experience and let them paint a picture of their own. Only in this way can the reader suspend their disbelief.

In previous blog posts, I give a couple of examples of this kind of use of detail:

From Gatsby: http://davidlitwack.com/wordpress1/?p=313
From Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus: http://davidlitwack.com/wordpress1/?p=1745

So what style do I strive for? Be clear on what I’m trying to say, then say it in the simplest way. Provide sufficient detail to stimulate the imagination of my partner, the reader, but leave room for them to add their own distinct influence on the image in their mind. Only then will the magic of fiction work. Only then will they believe what they’re reading is real.

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