Tom Glenn's Blog, page 66

Fiction Craftsmanship (2)

Yesterday afternoon I did my workshop on fiction craftsmanship in Elkton, Maryland—as I indicated I was planning to do in yesterday’s blog. I had only two participants. That’s not unusual. Not many people are willing to devote themselves to an art that pays poorly and is famously difficult. Both participants were dedicated writers who wanted to sharpen their skills. Both, as far as I could tell, benefitted from the workshop.

I was surprised, as I often am, that so much of the workshop’s content was new to the participants. As I say in the introduction to the presentation, fiction craftsmanship (sometimes called technique) is a neglected subject. We apparently assume that there is nothing to know about formatting, word usage, and sentence structure peculiar to fiction writing. That’s why I call fiction craftsmanship “the forgotten discipline.”

This offering of the workshop was especially difficult for me. It required an hour-and-half drive both ways, and on the way home I was caught in the aftermath of hurricane Ida. And yet, it was well worth it. Watching enlightenment dawn on the faces of the two students as I explained how they could write better made it all worthwhile.

Fiction Craftsmanship

Later today, I will be offering my workshop on fiction craftsmanship at the Palette and the Page in Elkton, Maryland. The workshop is intended for fiction writers who want to improve their skills.

Each time I do the workshop, I am struck again by the contrast between the techniques that make for good fiction and those best for nonfiction. Fiction, a form of literary writing, is an art and depends for its success on the creativity of the writer. Nonfiction is more like a profession, with brevity and clarity its most important virtues. Even the editing rules for fiction are different from those for nonfiction. The differences are small—e.g., whether to put a space before and after an em dash (you don’t in literary writing), when and how to use commas—but important enough to get one’s work rejected.

The final editing authorities for literary writing and journalism are different. The Chicago Manual of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2003) is the rulebook for literary writing including fiction; The Associated Press Stylebook (The Associated Press, 2010) lays down the law for journalism. Both are thick volumes (957 and 465 pages, respectively) and spectacularly detailed.

But editing rules are a small part of the difference between the two kinds of writing. Journalistic writing demands simple, straightforward, focused prose, whose purpose is to convey information. The goal of literary writing, on the other hand, is to entertain and create beauty. That means its creators are given much wider boundaries on what is proper.

My own fiction in the six books and seventeen short stories now published depends more than most on telling of events that actually happened. I fictionalize the story by attributing the actions described to fictional characters rather than to myself or people I knew. For example, every event related in my novel Last of the Annamese, the story of the fall of Saigon, actually happened.

Because fiction is an art, my writing borrows from poetry many techniques and devices. I search for the right word to create the emotional flavor needed in a moment of the story. I vary the size and structure of sentences more according to the logic of music than that of grammar. I create images with words to move readers.

As a result, when I offer my workshop on fiction craftsmanship, I emphasize that the rules I’m stressing will not result in successful fiction—only creativity will do that. All the application of fiction craftsmanship will do is avoid immediate rejection for failure to follow the rules.

The class is scheduled for 2:00 p.m. at the Palette and the Page, 120 East Main Street, Elkton, MD 21921; (410) 398-3636. If you’d like to attend, call and let the proprietors know.

Planes Flying into the Sunset

I live in Columbia, Maryland, a few miles east of Baltimore-Washington Thurgood Marshall Airport, which everyone calls BWI. From my deck on the northern side of my house, I regularly see airliners flying west out of BWI and others flying south then heading east to land there. Because the view from my deck, looking across a pond surrounded by mature trees, is so beautiful, I eat all my meals on the deck, weather permitting, and spend as much time as I can enjoying its splendor.

That means I see many planes coming and going. Before the pandemic, flights were constant, every few minutes. Covid-19 didn’t stop them altogether, but they become much fewer. Now they’re increasing regularly.

The outgoing flights are much higher and much louder than the incoming ones. My guess is that planes heading out and climbing require much more power than those descending and preparing to land. At times, planes flying eastward are so far up that I can barely see them, but they are still thunderous.

My favorite time to watch the outgoing planes is as the sun is setting. The planes heading out appear to be flying directly toward the sinking sun. Best of all are those moments just before twilight when the sun is so low that it shines only on the very tops of the trees. At those times, the airliners glow and shimmer as the sunlight floods them from below.

I am among the most fortunate of men, living in a beautiful place and surrounded by the magnificence of nature at its most resplendent. But nothing is more beautiful than planes at twilight flying into the dying sun.

Why Capitalize Marine?

Readers have gently pointed out to me that “marine” doesn’t need to be capitalized any more than “soldier” does. But I always capitalize the word when it refers to a branch of the U.S. military or a member of that branch.

Why? To show the enormous respect I have for the U.S. Marine Corps and its members. As I have noted frequently in my blog posts over the years, much of my professional life before I retired was spent on the battlefield supporting friendly troops in combat. I have reported how army commanding officers sometimes refused to act on the intelligence I was able to provide. I even coined a term for that dilemma: the Cassandra Effect. But never, not once, did the Marines fail to exploit of the information I was able to give them.

One of the reasons for the Marines’ willingness to use signals intelligence was the influence of an officer named Al Gray. Al started out as an enlisted man, went on to become an officer, a general, and, finally, commandant of the Marine Corps. Early in his military career, he was a signals intelligence specialist, so he knew the discipline well. When I first me him in the early 1960s in Vietnam, he was already a captain commanding combat forces. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, I kept running into him as we both crisscrossed Vietnam. When Saigon fell in 1975, it was Al Gray, now a colonel, who rescued me. He was kind enough to stay in touch with me after he became a general and even after taking over command the Marine Corps.

The two top priorities of General Gray—I stopped calling him “Al” when he became commandant—were his unit’s mission and the welfare of the men serving under him. He was famous for never asking his men to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He was a beloved leader and one of the most effective commanders that Marine Corps ever had.

In all my years of working with the military, the Marines gained my greatest respect. Not only did they exploit signals intelligence to the hilt, they proved over and over their effectiveness on the battlefield. They remained humble and civil even in their victories and moments of greatest glory. So I capitalize their name as a sign of my deep respect for them.

Brutality of War

I am reading for review Ray McPadden’s We March at Midnight (Black Stone Publishing, 2021), and a few weeks ago I published my review of Conquering Jerusalem by Stephen Dando-Collins (Turner Publishing Company, 2021). Both of the organizations I review for know that I specialize in books about war and especially those about Vietnam where I spent the better part of thirteen years. Meanwhile, the newspapers are full of stories about twin bombings carried out by ISIS in Kabul that killed thirteen U.S. troops and at least 170 others with more than 155 injured.

In sum: no matter where I look, I can’t escape the echoes of war.

Much of my life before I retired from the U.S. government was spent on the battlefield. Although I was a civilian, I operated under cover as an enlisted member of the military unit I was supporting. My job was using the intercept of enemy radio communications to alert friendly forces to the presence, activities, and intent of enemy units. I was in combat regularly, especially during the Vietnam war. I witnessed countless times men killed on the battlefield. The grisliness of their deaths wounded my soul. I suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Injury (PTSI) and always will.

I’m not as good as I once was at shrugging off the gruesomeness of war. The more I age, the more my memories unsettle me. These days, I’m finding stories of the brutality of war deeply disturbing. They arouse my remembrances with fresh vigor and make me recall details I had forgotten.

So I have to ask: how can the human race tolerate war? Why can’t we find ways to end wars once and for all? I think the answer to my question is that as long as groups like the Taliban, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda thrive, wars will continue. Just this morning, the Washington Post is reporting that the U.S. military carried out a drone strike on ISIS in Afghanistan. We have no choice but to take up arms against people who would destroy us.

So people like me who suffer the psychic scars of war will have to man up and learn to live with both our own wounds and the stories of combat ruthlessness. But that doesn’t mean we can’t work for peace. That is our calling.

“I Want Them to Know We’re Coming” (2)

As we approached their location, the enemy ceased communicating, a sign that they were on the move. I alerted the commander that the enemy was leaving its position. When we arrived at the target, the North Vietnamese units had faded into the jungle. We found plenty of indications that they had been there recently, but not a single enemy soldier remained. Obviously, they had been intercepting our communications and had fled, avoiding confronting a superior force as the North Vietnamese always did.

The U.S. commander I was supporting blamed faulty intelligence for our failure to find and engage the enemy. He asserted that signals intelligence was not reliable enough for targeting and, in effect, banned me from his presence.

The Cassandra Effect dogged me throughout the thirteen years I spent more time in Vietnam than I did in the U.S. At the end, it almost cost me my life. In April 1975, I repeatedly warned the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, that signals intelligence provided overwhelming evidence that the North Vietnamese were preparing to attack Saigon. He refused to believe me and never called for an evacuation. By deception and outright lying, I was able to evacuate my 43 subordinates and their families, but I couldn’t leave. When the attack came, I escaped under fire.

I’m assured by those still active in government that things have changed. Nowadays, they tell me, government officials and military commanders are trained in the use of signals intelligence and exploit it regularly. For the sake of all working in the defense of the U.S., I pray they are right.

“I Want Them to Know We’re Coming”

During my years of assisting on the battlefield, I sometimes ran into military commanders who didn’t believe my warnings and tip-offs derived from signals intelligence—the intercept and exploitation of the radio communications of the enemy. I never had that problem with the Marines, but it happened with army officers more often than I’d like to admit. As I have written before here, I coined a term for my dilemma, the Cassandra Effect. Cassandra was, according to Greek myth, a Trojan woman blessed by the gods with the ability to foretell the future but cursed by the gods that no one would believe her. Too often I found myself in that position: I knew from enemy communications where he was, what he was doing, which of his units were there, and what his plans were, but the army commanders I warned too often disregarded my admonition.

I believe that the reason army commanders so often ignored my intelligence was that they were not trained in the use of signals intelligence. Many of them had never heard of it and were suspicious of this civilian—me—operating under cover as an enlisted man in the unit they commanded. The National Security Agency (NSA), my employer, back in those days went to great lengths to keep its existence and work secret. We joked back then that NSA stood for “No Such Agency.”

And all too often army commanders gave little to no attention to communication security, that is, protecting their own communications from enemy intercept and exploitation. On one occasion I can never forget, I was working with a large U.S. army unit in the central part of Vietnam. I was able to use signals intelligence to inform the commander of the whereabouts of the enemy unit he sought to attack. As he set out for location of the enemy force, he insisted on using unenciphered voice communications to coordinate his subordinate units. I counseled him that the North Vietnamese were excellent at communications intelligence and were undoubtedly monitoring his transmissions. He waved me away. When I continued to protest, he finally said to me, “Fine. I want them to know we’re coming.”

More next time.

Upcoming

I’ll be presenting my workshop called “Forgotten Discipline: Fiction Craftsmanship” starting at 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, September 1, at the Palette and the Page in Elkton, Maryland. The address is 120 E Main St, Elkton, MD 21921, (410) 398-3636. The workshop is intended for fiction writers looking to hone their craft. Then, on Friday, September 3, from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m., I’ll be back at the Palette and the Page to serve wine and autograph my books. Hope to see you at one or both events.

End Words (3)

And here is the ending to my novel-in-short-stories, Friendly Casualties:

        “I haven’t had lunch with a beautiful woman in a very long time. The first time I saw you—”

        “Sam,” Maggie said, “are you flirting with me?”

        He blushed.

        “I’m too old for you,” she said.

        “No, you’re not. I mean . . . Miss Nilsson—”

        “Maggie.”

        “Maggie.” He hunched his shoulders. “I apologize. It’s just that . . . What I mean is, you’ve been hurt. So have I. We’re what they call ‘friendly casualties.’ Maybe you’d let me comfort you. Just a little bit.”

        “Sam, it wouldn’t be—”

        “And maybe you could comfort me. Only just a little.”

        Maggie started to shake her head.

        “Maggie.” He took her hand. “We have to start somewhere. Have lunch with me.”

        Maggie looked up into his lined face, so full of hope and pain. Her heart hurt for him.

            “Sure,” she said at last. “Sure.”

End Words (2)

Continuing my experiment of offering readers the last words instead of the first words of a book, here is the end of my novel, Secretocracy, published last year. Let me know if reading them makes you want to read the book:

            With his bag lunch in his briefcase, he drove the Mustang west to Hopewell Cemetery. He parked at the perimeter and passed over the rolling mounds of grass, by headstones and monuments and markers, to the rise where Clem’s body rested. He read the gravestone and walked around the plot, viewing it from every side. Finally, he stood at the foot of the grave and folded his hands in front of him. He had to talk to Clem.

            “We won, boss.”

            He raised his eyes as if he expected a response.

            “The rhinos made love. We were right in the middle of it, but we survived. Hacker’s gone. Shafter’s gone. So is Prowley. NPO is working within its charter.” He chuckled. “The Democrats even won the House in the election.”

            No answer. Why did he keep listening for one?

            “Your good name is intact. Julia saw to that. I came through it fine. So did Nettie. Oh, we’re together now. Thought you’d like to know that.”

            He imagined Clem smiling and nodding.

            “But mainly, I wanted you to know—”

He sank to his knees and folded his hands.

“I’m speaking now as the son you never had. You’re the father I always yearned for. And I wanted you to know . . .”

His vision went blurry.

“You didn’t die in shame, Clem. You didn’t fail. You won.”

More next time.