One space or two?

          Here’s a wordy case for never using two spaces between sentences (you can skim it):

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html?

          Note that buried in all that hyperbole the author says two spaces are acceptable in draft manuscripts.  That's the way I learned to do it with all my writing way back in high school English composition class.

          But how many spaces between sentences will offer the clearest readability, which is the only important consideration?

          Today, every published book has justified type, which means the spaces between individual words are often wider (and sometimes a good bit wider) than the normal word spacing you have in ragged-right composition—this in order to fit a comfortable number of words on each line with minimal hyphenation.  Under those conditions,  I think using two spaces between sentences stands out a bit more, clearly indicating the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next.

          Therefore I’ll continue using the traditional two spaces between sentences.  Sue me.

Phil

Got 93,560 words on my new novel.  Can’t wait to see how it ends.

Mysterious thrillers

          A friend e-mailed me asking what the difference is between mystery and thriller tales.

          My answer:  Thrillers are sometimes mysteries.  But by no means always.  In every mystery, however, the reader doesn't know who done it, and only finds out in the final climactic scenes.  (Agatha Christie was the consummate mystery writer, whose books have outsold the Bible over the years, and for my money the best on-screen Miss Marple was portrayed by Margaret Rutherford back in the good old black-and-white-and-snowy TV days.)  In a thriller, on the other hand, the reader might start out knowing full well who the bad guys and the good guys are (though the characters may not realize this themselves) and the story interest is in seeing how the conflict between the two known factions gets resolved.  Cleverly-wrought suspense is essential to both genres if a writer wants to sell books.

          The "Sherlock" TV series with Ben Cumberbatch as the great sleuth is an excellent contemporary example of the mystery genre.  Fine plotting and great dialog, with moments of genuine intelligent humor.  “Justified” with Timothy Oliphant as a gritty federal marshal is an exemplary thriller series.   Both shows have excellent supporting casts.  Both are worthy of study by any aspiring writer.

           And although I create thrillers, I write in a constant state of suspenseful personal mystery because I have no idea what the devil’s going to happen next.

Phil

Side note:  Farewell, Robin Williams.  You brightened millions of lives over your years.  Thank you.

When to not stop

          “I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”  —Ernest Hemingway

         

          I learned that important lesson some time back, too.

          If I stopped my day’s writing on a problem, not knowing what was going to happen next in the plot, or fearing I’d gone off the rails somewhere a few hundred words back, or unsure about when to insert a chapter or scene break, I would discover the next day that I could conjure up any number of feeble excuses for not sitting back down and facing the problem.  Sometimes I lost days of writing.

          However, if I could possibly arrange to quit for the day while I was on a roll, when I could anticipate what was coming next with a measure of excitement, then the next day I’d be eager to get back to the job refreshed, with no time lost to doubts.

          Like other good lessons learned, this soon became habitual.  (The principle also works well when applied to everyday chores, like cleaning out the closets or rebuilding a porch.)

          This does not mean the writing has gotten any easier. 

           Here’s another Hemingway observation that applies to my current novel:

          “Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it’s like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.” —EH

          I’m having to do a great deal of laborious drilling and then blasting.  But each writing session, I try to stop just before I get to push that blasting plunger.

Phil

How I have to do it

        I type with my right index finger alone, assisted on the shift key by my  faithful left index finger.   I could not lay out a sketch of the keypad from memory, even if I was being tortured by some evil creature holding a fresh, warm Bavarian creme donut just out of my reach.  Yet my right index finger knows the layout intimately.  It can poke any key almost as fast as my calico cat, Havoc, can scratch me.  I ought to insure that digit.

          A type-A friend recently suggested I use the Dragon software and dictate my novels, so rather than each book consuming a year or more of tortoisorial labor, I could crank them out every other month like Patterson’s gang of ghost writers.

          But I can't work that way.  My process is complex.  I don't quite know what the characters are going to do or where the plot is going at any given time, so it's impossible to vocalize.  My work has only been marginally writeable over all these years, much less dictate-able.  Something about the plodding progress I make with my minimalist two fingers is part of the creativity.  Trying to vocalize a story without a keypad would be akin to a composer without access to an instrument trying to speak notes and chords: "A to begin, then a C followed by a G major chord, and next a minor . . ."  I suspect it would be about impossible for a composer to create exceptional music that way.  Another crude analogy would be Michelangelo trying to paint with both hands in order to speed up the process.  I doubt he would have then been capable of all his subtleties—the precise deft touches of light, the tiny wrinkle that can turn a smile wry.  Michelangelo was a fine artist, after all, not a barn painter concerned with optimizing square-foot coverage. 

          And I’m a writer, after all, not a fiction-speaker.  I don’t read to myself aloud, nor can I write aloud.

          We recently lost the great Elmore Leonard.  In the following clip he tells us how and why he worked the way he did.  I suspect it would have been impossible for him to have dictated a novel.  My process is similar.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub_09NgFjrA

          Elmore wrote a first draft longhand, then ensuing drafts on an electric typewriter, the way all of us had to do it back in the dim, dark pre-computer age.  It tended to be tedious, but we managed somehow.  In order to re-arrange a sentence, we had to re-type that whole manuscript page.  In an age before that, my mother was a newspaper reporter, banging out copy under tight deadlines on a hulking dinosaurian upright mechanical typewriter.  Most kids today have never even seen one.   Before that, it was rock tablets and chisels.  Before that it was big toes in the dirt.

          And nobody remembers carbon paper.

Phil

Jump-starting a story

          People have wanted to know where I get my fiction ideas, especially for short stories.

          The answer’s complex. 

          Sometimes I write from frustration or anger when an egregious injustice or bureaucratic absurdity is featured in the news.  Or a dangerous societal trend will set me off, like the increasing widespread dependence on a whole spectrum of prescription drugs with their myriad detrimental side effects.  The subtle inadvertent or deliberate damage we do to one another, such as our propensity to talk behind each other’s backs, has resulted in stories—one titled “The Garden Club,” for example, wherein gossip turns lethal.  Sometimes it’s fun trying to emulate, on my modest level, the style and tone of some famous author, like the late hard-boiled Mickey Spillane.  I’ve read and re-read many thousands of novels and short stories over the decades, so snippets and tendrils from the finest of those have become so deeply embedded they’re part of me now. 

          Sometimes a yarn will slew sideways quite on its own, it seems.  This occurs most often when I try to tackle an unfamiliar genre for the hell of it.  One attempt at writing romance mysteriously morphed into a faked-crime yarn.  A few forays into science fiction, just to test those waters, also took on criminal aspects entirely by themselves.

          On rare occasions, I have no idea whatsoever where a story comes from.  No conscious idea, that is.  I’m probably one of those afflicted with a not-quite-grownup overactive subconscious mind, wherein all sorts of creatures crawl and devious demons cavort and delightful fantasies play out.  Sometimes those mysterious scenarios steal through a fragile membrane into my conscious mind and result in a new short story that appears to have been born of purest magic.

          Or, as an occasional challenge, I’ll put up a blank page on my computer screen, type some random strong word in boldface, crank up my excellent Bose speakers with appropriate selections chosen from my Amazon Cloud Player, and attempt to build an entire short tale from that single word.  One titled “Rage” came out pretty well.  There’s a list of potential title words and phrases I hope to hang stories on some day.  Titles that intrigue me include “Too Late” and “Depthless” and “Why?”

          Broader ideas for novels are more difficult.  Some years ago a friend who had covert experience in naval intelligence in remote parts of the world enlightened me about the brisk global trade in light weaponry, which continues to help fuel never-ending violence in numerous hot spots.  That led me into some further research, which in turn laid a foundation for Guns, the first novel in a trilogy.  A fourth novel in that series is in progress, with 84,000 words in the bank and closing in on the climactic scenes.

          It can be helpful to learn how the top writers come up with their story ideas; they all have their secrets and they’ll sometimes share.  Stephen Hunter (Pulitzer Prize winner, former film critic for The Washington Post, and acclaimed author of the Earl Swagger series) confessed in the foreword for one of his novels that he’d blatantly borrowed several of his plots from other successful novelists, with only the settings and characters changed, and with the imposition of his own writing style, as disguises.

          That’s not a bad idea for any of us.

Phil

A Short-cut to Fame and Fortune

          Back in my personal stone age—before there was almost everything that’s considered essential today, like plastics, TV , air bags and seat belts and AC in cars, computers,  high-IQ pocket phones, bikinis, ten thousand different wonder drugs, soy bacon, Google Earth, and Walmart—a good selection of major magazines featured short fiction.  Authors like O. Henry and Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever had become popular masters of the art.   One of my favorite short story series characters was Tugboat Annie in The Saturday Evening Post.

          Today a few modest magazines like The Strand, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine stubbornly retain the form, and anthologies and collections manage to hold onto a small market niche, thank goodness.  All those series TV shows can be considered just another form of the old-fashioned short story, really.  The excellent series Justified is, in fact, based on a coal-country short yarn by Elmore Leonard titled “Fire in the Hole.”  Many movies have also been based on shorts:  2001, A Space Odyssey, The Absent-Minded Professor, Bad Day at Black Rock, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, High Noon, Hondo, The Killers, Rip Van Winkle, A River Runs Through It, and South Pacific, for just a few.  Google will guide you to lists of them.

          I’ve always enjoyed reading and writing shorts.  They’re a challenge to a storyteller’s skills.  A short must have most of the elements of a good novel.  It must be carefully woven to create a perfect tapestry, with no room to spare, so characterization and scene setting must be brief and vivid.  Because this is difficult for a writer to accomplish, shorts make excellent training for neophytes and fine practice for old pros.  For me, they’re a good way to explore different genres without having to invest the time necessary to peck out an entire novel, for page-testing new characters who might one day populate longer fiction, for airing pet peeves, or to fictionally scrutinize some life experience I’ve enjoyed or endured.

          Recently I put together a collection of my stories, many of which had been previously published over the years.  It’s titled Dagger and Other Tales.  Stephen King wrote the first 500 words of the last yarn in that collection.  The King beginning appeared years ago in Cavalier Magazine with an invitation to readers from the editor, Nye Willden, to  try their skills at finishing the story in a contest for a $500 first prize.  The idea intrigued me, so I stayed up all one night, writing and revising, and by dawn I had a story.  I mailed it in and it took first place and was published in the magazine.  Stephen’s version was revealed in a subsequent issue, and it has since been reprinted several times, most recently in his excellent fifth short story collection, Just After Sunset.  It was also dramatized as part of Tales From the Darkside, the Movie.  The story was titled “The Cat From Hell.”

           Any writer trying to learn the craft would do well to attempt selling a short tale or two.  (Google has  lists of magazines that accept short submissions.  Check out their guidelines.)  Shorts can be fun learning experiences, and maybe even a short-cut to fame and fortune.

Phil

(Dagger and Other Tales can be had at a fair price on Amazon.com.)

Apostrophes

          In the entertaining movie Hook (Robin Williams as Peter Pan and Julia Roberts as Tinker Bell) Dustin Hoffman (as the evil pirate Hook) tells Smee, one of his scruffy underlings, “I’ve had an epiphany.”  Later in the story, Smee, emulating his idol, declares, “Oi’ve just ‘ad an apostrophe.”  It’s one of my favorite movie lines.

          I’m happy to say I’ve just had an apostrophe.  For three weeks, my current novel-in-progress was stuck at 77,800 words.  Like some other authors have done—John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, and Lee Child for examples—I don’t write to an outline, preferring to make up the story as I go along, letting my characters do as they will.  I wish I could work to an outline like Jeffery Deaver so cleverly and successfully does, but I cannot.  (I met Deaver at a writing conference and had dinner with him and his wife.  They collaborate to create an elaborate outline for every book, refining it repeatedly until it’s all laid out in detail; I know it’s one of the reasons his stories are filled with so many exquisitely devious twists.)  It means I sometimes have to go back and revise my story line to fit new happenings, but I’ve always lived with that shortcoming.  One of the questions I’ve been most frequently asked in workshops and talks I’ve given on the craft of writing has been, “Do you outline?”  I’ve never been able to come up with a satisfactory answer why I do not.  Sometimes I’ve said, “Well, if even I don’t know what’s gonna happen next in a story, the reader surely won’t, either, and that ought to keep the story interesting.”  But it seems a lame answer.  And it’s not the most comfortable or confident way to write.  Working on my second novel in a trilogy some time ago, I was 65,000 words along and facing a looming deadline before I even realized who the killer was going to be.

          The other day I woke up and sat there on the edge of the bed as the sleep cobwebs cleared to reveal a glimmering of how the rest of my current novel could perhaps unfold.  I went to a local restaurant owned by a friend for my usual cup of cinnamon coffee and a low-fat peach muffin, and took a booth.  I opened the novel I’m reading (one of many thousands I’ve read over the years) but my eyes were only scanning the words, my brain unable to retain anything because my own novel plot seemed to be growing ever clearer by the minute as if by some wonderful magic, my relief and enthusiasm growing as well.  All of a sudden I could see nearly to the end of the story, with most of the loose ends weaving themselves together nicely like an exotic tapestry.

          It was an excellent feeling.  A major apostrophe.

          I’ve always suspected writers like the great John D. MacDonald really have outlined their work, albeit subconsciously.  Their stories seem too refined and cohesive to think otherwise.  I believe my own subconscious mind has been churning away at my novel the whole time I’ve been working on it, and finally that aspect of my mind came through for me with clear visions for the rest of the story.  Now all I have to do is write it.

          Wishing you happy apostrophes in your writing and in your life.

Phil