The Wearing of Hats

I wanted to take a moment to point you over to a great local memoirist and blogger, Ev Maroon.  http://transplantportation.com/

And now that I have confessed my admiration for his verbal skills, I shall parry and riposte his latest blog post in which I, gentle reader, was categorized as... (deep breath) a hat guy.  Yes.  I was astonished too.  Well, not really, but let us pretend that it was me in that cafe he was describing and go with it because it's funnier that way.

That's me in the corner with the fedora, or on the sofa by the fireplace in the wool driving cap.  Scribbling madly in a notebook or frowning at the screen of my laptop, hat alternately perched atop my noggin or twirling in my hands as I contemplate the next scene of my novel.

Man do I hate the fact that those blasted Kennedy boys with their oh-so-perfect coifs made it de rigueur for American men to stop wearing hats.  It's not an affectation, damn it!  I want something on my head!  I want to cover my hair rather than spend all my time fussing with it, trying to meet the expectations of a society drunk on the fumes of Bryllcreme and blinded by the Brilliantine!

I don't do it to stand out, not really.  It's just that the time I spend glancing in the mirror before going out to get the fedora tilted just so, or the driving cap at just the right angle is less than the time I would spend trying to get the mop on my head to do anything other than whatever the hell it wants to do that day.  I know the hat makes me look like a dandy, but in sooth, it's the least vain option afforded me by this confounded society of ours.

And there's the safety aspect as well.  Yes, wearing a hat is safer, not only for me, gentle reader, but for you as well.  Some mornings that thickness of felt is all that keeps the mop in check, imprisons it against the day when it seizes control and rampages through the city. 

It's for your protection really.  A public service that I wear this hat in defiance of Kennedy and cafe archetype.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

A Dreadful Monstrosity Is Born

Genre Jungle redux

The conventional wisdom states that you should read widely in your genre or you won't know the conventions and won't be able to hit the mark for the market.  But Genre is a tricky thing and 'Thriller' is less well defined than most.  I like to read thrillers -- or at least what I consider to be thrillers -- and yet I spend precious little time reading the clock-tickers and time-racers that get 'Thriller" stamped on the spine by New York.  Rarely does my "heart race like a meat hammer pounding against a blood anvil*." 

Someone once told me that the difference between suspense and thriller is that in the suspense novel, consequences are personal and in the thriller, the consequences are global.  I disagree.  For a political or military thriller ala Tom Clancy, perhaps that's true, but I think that puts too much emphasis on plot and for my money, it's about engaging in thrilling storytelling.  For heaven's sake, tell me a story.  Give it an air of menace, convince me that there are consequences for the protagonists should they fail, consequences that make me own their peril and take it into myself.  The world doesn't have to be jeopardy; making me worry about the characters is quite enough.  Impending nuclear Armageddon is just icing on the cake if I care about the characters making it through the next scene.

I mentioned Joseph Finder yesterday.  In his address to the PNWA last year, he defined dramatic tension in a thriller as "Characters in peril".  Not necessarily "The World in Peril", the characters.  I have to give a crap about the characters and their arc or I won't care that the world is going to hell behind them.


The recent NPR poll of audience favorites from the thriller genre showed me very few books that New York would plop into that genre. When was the last time you heard Stephen King referred to as a thriller writer? He was the most nominated writerof the bunch, above Lee Child, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton.  How surprised are you to find Truman Capote? Conan Doyle? Bram Stoker?

For the most part, the takeaway from this is that no one knows what a thriller is except the person reading it.  But I can tell you that it has everything to do with writing and style and little to do with the stamp on the cover.  And I stand relieved to see how little the audience seems to care what section of the store their 'thrillers' are sold in -- they're looking for a good story that thrills them.  And quite frankly, everything else is marketing.

---

* Yes, that's an actual line from a "Thriller" handed to me by an excited publisher's rep long ago with the assurance that it would be "The Next Big Thing".  It was less than thrilling and sold less than well.

Submissions :: The Genre Jungle

New York Times bestselling author Joe Finder tells the story of his first attempt at selling a thriller.  He sent it to an agent (back in the hardcopy days of yore) and received it back with a paperclip on page forty.  Joe is the ornery sort and did what you're not supposed to do: he called the agent and said "What's with the paperclip?"  After berating him for being cheeky, the agent finally told him that the paperclip marked where he stopped reading.  He then told him not to bother ever submitting a story to that agency again and hung up.

Joe didn't get any less ornery, but he did learn a lot about where to begin his story.  He cut the first forty pages and sold the book to a different agent, going on to a mostly successful career on best seller lists and so forth.

One of the reasons I began this blog was to chart my path from the slush pile to the bookshelf. This includes some rejections (and more than a little Chinese food) but more often it means listening to crickets chirruping in the form rejections that most of us receive back.  A sterile rejection letter tells you nothing at all.  Agents and publishers fire them off for a whole host of reasons including the fact that they just don't have room on their docket for another (insert genre here) novel or the market isn't right to try to sell (insert genre here) just at this moment.  In all my submissions, I've received only three personal notes and only the last one included anything I could use to really examine whay the book kept coming back to me.
 
Like every other writer (or so I hope), I have a cheering section rooting me on -- family and friends who believe in my ability to fight my way free of the slush pile.  I've been gratified by their response to the aforementioned agent's brutally honest assessment and I thank my dear friends for rising to my defense.  But their love for me doesn't make them right any more than his ambivalence makes him wrong.  The trouble with brutal honesty is that while it is brutal, it is also honest.  And honesty should never be ignored.

The crux of that agent's comment was the same as the feedback Joe Finder got (except that I didn't have to alienate an entire literary agency to get it): I started in the wrong place and he felt no desire to keep reading or ask for more pages.  He likes the way I write but he didn't care for the way I handled the story.  In essence, I failed to meet his expectation for a "Thriller".

So now I can do one of three things...

1. Ignore him and carry on.
2. Re-cut the manuscript to meet genre expectations.
3. Pitch the book for a different genre.

Honestly, my takeaway from all this is that I failed to impart to him what I was attempting to do in The Palimpsest.  Either that or I should have pitched it as a mystery or suspense novel (which it isn't really either). 

For the record, I think that genre conventions are complete and utter horse-puckey (thank you Colonel Potter).  I sold books for a decade and understand as well as anyone can why they exist (to help readers find books similar to ones they already like).  I still think they're artificial constructs and that they do more harm than good.  In a physical bookstore, it was about where to shelve a book and where a customer will go to find it.  Online bookselling has thankfully begun to erode these distinctions and I think that we will eventually be largely free of them even if the publishing industry isn't quite ready to let go yet.

My feelings about genre distinctions aren't the reality.  So I have to decide how to move forward and how to categorize my work within the framework that exists.

I always knew that The Palimpsest was going to be hard to sell.  While I'm a fan of writers like Finder, the writers who set the bar are the likes of Ken Follett, Iain Pears, Amitav Ghosh, Arturo Pérez-Reverte and Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  All of these guys write books that could be described as 'thrillers' but manage to bridge the genre distinctions, creating smart, literate and exciting tales that meet or exceed their categorization.

All of which means that there's a market for a book like mine.  Smart, literate thrillers and mysteries, "Nerd Adventures" if you will.  To pretend that's not what I'm trying to sell would be a lie.  And no one is served by me re-crafting a sales pitch that lies about what the book is (or isn't).  If I cut it and cut it and cut it until it fit inside the cookie cutter, it would no longer be something excite me or my readers and that's a problem for me.

This may sound arrogant, but I don't really care: I did not come here to meet expectations, by God I came here to exceed them.

What I am currently reading...

"If you tell yourself you are going to be at your desk tomorrow, you are by that declaration asking your unconscious to prepare the material. You are, in effect, contracting to pick up such valuables at a given time. Count on me, you are saying to a few forces below: I will be there to write."

-Norman Mailer
The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing

Wisdom no matter where it came from.

Submissions :: Wisdom Where You Can Find It

Yesterday I received a personalized rejection letter from a major agent who took the time to explain why he was rejecting my novel.  It was short and brutally honest and it hurt like hell to read it... brutal honesty is funny that way.

Once I got past the brief and surreal moment of nostalgia for the days when I just got impersonal form letters, I went through the six stages of rejection.  Yes six stages. (In the extremely unlikely chance that the agent in question ever reads this... well, I'm human and it is what it is.)

1. Denial: This never lasts long when you have documentation. "Dear Mr Perkins..." is pretty darned hard to deny.
   
2. Anger: What does he know? He's only got umpteen years of publishing experience with a major agency and various publishing houses...
   
3. Bargaining: If I send him affidavits signed by my mom and friends (all of whom loved the manuscript just the way it is) surely he'd have to reconsider...
   
4. Depression: I suck.
   
5. Acceptance: He took the time out of a very busy day to write me a personalized rejection outlining what he didn't like about it. This is expertise at a level that isn't generally dispensed if you are beyond hope.  So either I accept the expert advice or I ignore it, but all this wallowing is making me hungry.
   
6. Chinese Food: Sometimes it's good old fashioned chocolate cake, but by stage six it was dinner time and so this time it was Chinese Food.  Nothing polishes off a good wallow like Chinese food.  I don't know why that is.

I've had a strange relationship through the years with fortune cookies. (Yes, I know, strangest segue in the history of this blog, just go with me on this one...)  I don't want to come off as superstitious, I've twice I've received the fortune "ALL OF YOUR CURRENT PLANS WILL SUCCEED" the evening before I met a girl that I would fall for.  The second time I was smart enough to marry her. 

Once, the president of a major bookstore chain handed a roomful of employees fortune cookies and insisted that we read our fortunes aloud and append "In Bed" to the end of them.  I don't remember the fortune from that cookie, but I remember the uncomfortable silences that followed each recitation...

There's something magical about those darned things and even though I know it's all in my head and my human propensity for finding patterns where they don't exist, I still get that frisson of anticipation and dread every time I pick one up.

Last night, my wallowing ended with the following fortune:

"DO NOT BOTHER WITH AN UNCHALLENGING CAREER, IT WOULD BE A WASTE OF YOUR TALENTS."

I may have to frame that one.  If ever there was a snippet of advice I needed to remember on a daily basis, it's that one.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go see if I can re-read that letter yet without wanting to whimper and eat fried rice.

Teaser Tuesday :: The Palimpsest

In response to the #TeaserTuesday meme on Twitter, I offer a glimpse into the world of The Palimpsest (currently in submission)

---

The Palimpsest

a novel

by Scott Walker Perkins

Jordan pulled her jacket tight against the cold mist and tried to think back to the last thing she’d put in her stomach besides coffee. There had been a Powerbar in the lab and then scotch with Morrie that afternoon. Coffee, energy bar, coffee, Scotch, more coffee and yet more coffee or “Saturday dinner” as it was known in the imaging lab.

It was a wonder anything came up when they pumped her stomach.

Her gaze danced across the doughy rounds stacked under the bell jar next to the espresso machine. An intrepid spider had scaled the stack and left its ropes in place trailing down the north face. She’d been coming to the tiny coffee stand for years and the stack of bagels hadn’t changed in content, shape or size in all that time. A firm reminder if she needed one that she was in Seattle -- coffee was for drinking, bagels were decoration.

The barista looked up as she passed coffee cups to the three students in front of her.

“Hi, Jordan,” she chirped. “The usual?”

“No…” She glanced sidelong at the bagels and forgot any notion of trying to eat one. “Do you have any juice?”

“I can make you a smoothie.” The girl blinked and seemed to see Jordan for the first time, eyes tracking from her drawn face down to the hand resting on the counter. Jordan pulled her hand back and let her sleeve fall down to cover the white hospital wristband. For the first time in her life she wished she could be the sort of woman who carried sewing scissors. Or a hunting knife. Why didn’t they cut the thing off when they discharged her?

“The usual is fine.”

The girl didn't ask more questions and Jordan didn't offer. Espresso and money changed hands and Jordan walked away. By the time the next customer ordered, Jordan had faded into memory, just another customer seeking warmth on a foggy morning.

As she walked, Jordan ignored the other pedestrians crowding her path back to the archive. Students bundled up in purple University of Washington jackets and hooded sweatshirts shouldered past her. The males gave her the requisite second glance but continued on when it became obvious she wasn’t going to look up and return their admiration.

She kept her head down and her offhand in her pocket, the crisp edges of the hospital band scraping the inside of her wrist with each pivot of her hip, reminding her that her world had changed.

Jordan couldn’t bring herself to drink the coffee, but the steam rising from the cup invaded her head, ripping away the last veils that shielded her. She wasn’t ready yet, but the forces of espresso are irresistible and memories washed over her.

Her footsteps faltered and she drew to a halt as she entered the parking lot.

The lamps overhead were beginning to flicker and darken as their sensors detected a sun rising somewhere behind the clouds. Her little white Volkswagen waited faithfully among the few cars already in the lot. Pale wrappers littered the asphalt around the tires bringing vague memories of sharp pains in her arms and the earnest voices of paramedics demanding her name. Fading in and out of a world painted alternately red and blue by ambulance strobes.

The little convertible had been purchased as an expression of freedom but now it felt dangerous. The canvas roof was too dark, the flexy windows throwing back her distorted reflection in the halflight. A fragment of yellow police tape fluttered from the seam of her door. Jordan shifted her satchel strap and scanned the empty lot, the frisson of dread running up her spine.

“Do you work at the university?” he asked.

“I’m a doctoral candidate in paleography, but I’ve been working with Doctor Stapleton at the Fuchs-Mostowy Archive on a privately-funded project.”

“Paleography?”

“We study handwritten documents -- I’m working on new ways to read erased writing in old manuscripts by viewing them under special lighting conditions...”

She didn’t remember it, but obviously told him about the book -- her precious, tattered, ugly little medieval prayer book that no one would look twice at if they didn’t know better. It certainly didn’t look like a book worth stealing.

Jordan caught herself as she stumbled against the trunk of a BMW. The car’s alarm chirruped a friendly warning to back away before it called for help. She pushed away from the silver sedan and looked around, scanning the faces of pedestrians cutting through the parking lot between the archives and the university, looking for yellow eyes. Everyone was bundled up against the autumnal cold snap, hoods up and heads down in the mists.

Yellow eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair and fought the tremors.

The flashes of memory were all but useless if she couldn’t give a better description than ‘male, Caucasian, brown hair with average height and build’. And those damned yellow eyes. Not contact lenses, no matter what the detectives said. As the darkness descended, the eyes had been all she could see, those horrid amber spheres leaning over her…

She poured out the espresso on the ground and wished she had braved the bagel. Even stale cobwebs were better than gnawing emptiness. It was going to take more than bread. For every moment she remembered, another had been erased, her memories scrambled and out of sequence like a sheaf of note cards fallen from a lectern.

Jordan turned away from the car and crossed the lot toward the archives. Her keycard was still missing but the guard at the side door recognized her and let her in. Jordan made polite excuses and moved past, hoping word had not yet spread.

The Fuchs-Mostowy archive was housed in a sprawling mansion near the University of Washington. Barnabas Mostowy had designed the building to echo the rambling half-timbered structures of his wife’s homeland and during his lifetime collected the third largest collection of pre-modern literature in the United States. His widow had further endowed the institution on her death, allowing high-tech research projects like Jordan’s to exist.

She walked alone through the silent corridors and down into the depths of the building, finding her lab sealed by police tape but her office unguarded and the lights on. When she’d departed the previous evening, it had been with every intention of returning. Her computer was still turned on and it woke up with the stroke of a key.

A page of her dissertation filled the screen, black letters floating on a white field.

Jordan selected everything on the screen and deleted it. The cursor now flashed at the top of a blank screen, mocking her with the idea that if she wanted the deleted chapter back, there was still an ‘undo’ button.

Oh, if wishes were keyboards...

Learn more about The Palimpsest and Jordan's world
of rare books and international intrigue at my website.

Scott W.Perkins, Adventure Nerd?

At the recent PNWA conference, I was pinned down by an enthusiastic cohort questioning me about the nature of genre and writing in general.  He was an affable sort and I really wanted to answer his questions and react to what he was saying about his work, but the caffiene needle was hovering around E and he had strategically placed himself between me and the coffee cart.

I'd been listening to others at the conference coin new subgenres for themselves and most of them were incredibly clever.  ("Historical Balderdash" was my hands-down favorite.)  So in a moment when I was desperate for a cup of Joe, I found myself babbling semi-coherently about how what I really write is 'Nerd Adventure'.

Nerd adventure?  Really, Scott?

While in general I have no wish to be held to the sort of things I say on the cusp of caffeine withdrawal, I find that this isn't far from the truth.  Most of my characters have an above-average intellect and below-average social skills. There isn't a Navy SEAL or Green Beret in the bunch, none of them would feel comfortable dancing in front of people and most of them are only gregarious in situations where everyone around this is just as goofy as they are.  Even the one character I have with military experience is a misfit failed revolutionary (ex IRA, actually).

The drama and conflict comes largely from seeing these people yanked out of their comfortable, academic existance and tossed into the fire.  Scene: A bunch of people who don't know one end of a handgun from the other find themselves in a firefight.  Action!

And why not?

Nerds are big business.  In fact, it's beginning to look to me as if the mad scientist will be the meme that supplants vampires.  Old school, retro scifi mad scientists.  It just doesn't get any nerdier than that.

So in a world where a logline is necessary to get an agent or publisher to look at your manuscript, is it such a bad thing that I can walk up to them and say I'm selling "The Big Bang Theory meets DaVinci Code"?  Nope!  And that's the story of how a subgenre was born.

Language Unleashed :: Words in the Radiolab

Words, words, words.  What are they?  We know that they are slippery things, as Shakespeare reminds us.  Their power to confound is as great as their power to shape beauty and feeling.  With words we can encapsulate the quintessence of man and capture the conscience of a king... or we can fritter them away and let meaning slip our fingers. 

But is society possible without them?

Nowhere (outside of Shakespeare) is this discussion more artfully encompassed (at least in my opinion) than on a recent show called Radiolab.  And in fact, no discussion of language - least of all the English language - can be undertaken without delving into Shakespeare, so much of our modern language and idiom owes much of its existence to his prolific pen.  Ranging from the deaf learning their way in a world of noises they cannot hear to the scribblings of the Bard of Avon, the Radiolab guys trace what words are, what they mean and how the connect with meaning in our brains.

How much human society is possible without words?  How much has language formed us rather than the other way around?

I should point out that when I first encountered this story, I came in toward the end.  And I didn't like what I heard.  I got in the car, turned on the engine and got only the end of the story.  Lacking any of the necessary context to understand the discussion already underway, I found it difficult to catch up.  From what I was able to glean, I couldn't really grok what they were on about. 


The show regularly paints word pictures and challenges the bounds of radio, stretching the possibilities of the spoken word.  Their give & take format and conversational progression intercut with interviews and soundbytes is an artful way to present stories, but this is both blessing and curse because as I discovered, it makes it difficult to come in late.

I couldn't catch up.  So I did what I always do -- I went looking for the answers and found the podcast and listened to the end, astounded that what had seemed unsupported assumptions about the nature of language were - of course - much more than that.  In fact, many of my own assumptions about words and the structure of language and thought were at fault.  Whether or not any of that is true, the story is just as amazing and beautiful as I knew it had to be.  It is a journey and to jump in in the middle is to do a disservice to your storyteller and your fellow travelers.

At this point you would be well-served to take an hour and listen to the original and moving episode "Words" HERE.

When I took the time to listen to the full show, my mind was blown.  Thoughts were provoked, gobs were smacked, and the relationship between words and symbolism and the physical objects they refer to took on new depth and meaning.

I'm still assimilating it all.  I'm not entirely sure I agree with every conclusion, but it is nonetheless a fascinating story, artfully told and it's a darn fine way to spend an hour of your life.  Take it from me, I'm parsimonious with my hours and this is one I don't want back.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
trippingly on the tongue...

Hamlet

As a bonus, below is a followup video to the show, further exploring the topic.  Two Radiolab contributors bring us out of the radio and into a visual style of wordplay in "an exploration of how language connects our inner thoughts to the outside world." 

Beautifully done!

Similes are like...

Dialogue Coach :: Speaking of Revisions

Spotting your own bad writing is an important skill; spotting your own bad dialogue habits is crucial.  I have been told that I write dialogue well, especially scenes with large numbers of people talking.  I love doing it because it allows me to put ideas on the table that would not occur to my main characters and deal with some expository business without writing any monologues or extended omniscient narration (Both of which I hate).

I can think of five things that will absolutely kill a dialogue scene.

1. Point of View problems. (Head-hopping)
   Be clear about your POV character(s) and stay out of the heads of the other speakers. This is called "head-hopping")  If your POV character doesn't know it, don't show it.
2. Who said that? (Unclear pronoun antecedents.)
   If you have more than one character of a gender, you must be very careful with or not use gender pronouns to tag dialogue.
3. Author ventriloquism.
   Your characters must talk like themselves, not like you.  Each character must have a unique voice, mannerisms, and linguistic fingerprint.  A longshoreman won't speak the same way an author speaks or a professor.  Trust me, I know some professors and longshoremen.
4. Adverbs. (Adverbs present dialogue badly.)
   Adverbs are vampires, sucking the life out of dialogue.  Type "ly" into the search function of your word processor and delete almost every word it finds with that suffix.  Your writing will be better for it. 
   
5. Bad dialogue tags.
   Said, asked or typed (because we live in a text-rich world, sometimes dialogue takes place on a keypad)

The most prevalent problem I see is the last one.  So, let's talk a bit about dialogue tags

When was the last time you simpered?  Really?  How about the last time you exulted?  Personally, I can't remember the last time I hissed, sighed or grumbled a conversation.  (Okay, I'll admit to the occasional grumbling, but it's worth noting that when I grumble something, my wife usually asks me to repeat it because when someone grumbles, it's usually hard to hear them.)

These things are called "dialogue tags" and for the most part, they're a sign of lazy writing.  Rule number three in Elmore Leonard's fabled "10 Rules" is "Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue."  The ladies at Editorrent included "Bad Dialogue Tagging" on their list of things that mark an amateur.  Blogging agent Nathan Bransford has led many a spirited debate over why, when and if dialogue tags like "Exulted" should be stricken from the written record.  . .  If I listed all the debates raging across the internet on this topic, we'd be here all day.

I'm a big fan of saying that the only concrete rules of writing are "Butt goes in chair and words go on page", but that's a definition of writer that falls short on the subject of craft.  It's not enough to vomit words onto a page if no one will reads them.  And if they're not enjoying it, they'll stop. Your job is to keep them from stopping.

I attended a workshop at the PNWA conference when someone (I'm sorry, there were so many, I think it might've been Bob Mayer) said that any word other than "said" might make a reader pause.  Again, your job is to keep the reader reading.  If they stop, you're dead.

There are exceptions to any rule and one reason why the debate still rages is that there are a goodly number of best-selling examples of bad dialogue.  One of the few complaints I have about JK Rowling, in fact is that she tends to play fast and loose with words like "exulted" and "ejaculated" to describe dialogue.

My default position on this is that anything sparking this much debate should be used advisedly if at all.  And by 'advisedly' I mean that you need to know that there will be people burning you in effigy if you think you can get away with it.  I'm not here to satisfy grammarians, but I am in the business of keeping readers reading.

I honestly believe that the most common reason we use these things isn't because we don't trust our readers to infer emotion or delivery.  I've heard that said a thousand times and I just don't believe that it's true.  I think it's because writers love words and said and asked get boring after awhile. The method I use to get around this is the action lead-in or breakout.  That's to say that I preface or end dialogue describing a bit of action which stages the dialogue.  This is discussed quite ably in this article so I won't bother to reinvent the wheel.   

When I am revising a story, I type the following words into the "Search" box and eradicate almost every one that I find:  hissed, sighed, grumbled, yelled, screamed, complained, whined, temporized, exclaimed, worried, blurted, confessed, intoned, simpered.

That's not a complete list, but those are the ones I find myself using if I drop my guard.  You'll have your own list (and yes, you really should be keeping one) of words you overuse.  At the end of the revision, I'm not perfect, but I am better for having done it.

Good luck!

The Future Soon

Those of you who have been around awhile know that I am a noted jet pack aficionado and a huge fan of that pesky future that's always... just... out... of... reach... (dang it!).  I also live on a little island in Puget Sound.  Beaches and open water all over the place, a water sports paradise you might say.  So imagine how excited I was when I found out that some clever person decided to combine the two and make THE WATER SPORT OF THE FUTURE!

Keep you Jet Ski, I want a jet pack!


Amazing New Water-Powered Jet Pack - Watch more Funny Videos

What Time Is It? :: Revisions

Time will make fools of us all... or so I am told.  Over the weekend, I went to a 1940's theme party at a friend's and served as a suspect in a murder mystery*. In the course of the murder mystery (one of the ones that comes in a box) we noticed that our characters seemed almost preternaturally aware of the exact time that everything happened.

The dialogue provided was chock full of so many timestamps I was beginning to wonder if Tom Clancy** wrote it:  "At 5:40, I glanced down the corridor and watched the British Spy sneak into the club car. At 5:45, I heard a glass break and at 5:50 the Gendarme arrived..."

It's a trope that goes back to Agatha Christie and we had a lot of fun with it, inserting reasons into our dialogue as to why we happened to know the exact time.  "Well I happened to be glancing at my watch just as I noticed..."

Anyway, it brought to mind some things I'd been thinking about lately regarding telling time and telling stories.

Last week, a friend sent me an interesting link to a Physics Professor's blog trying to use applied mathematics to analyze a scene from Lord of the Rings.  He expended some very pretty math trying to decide how fast Middle Earth's DEW*** beacons could spread the word via mountaintop bonfires from Gondor to Rohan.  Because I'm a geek, I read it and had an opinion about it on several levels. The math is pretty, even if his ignorance of military discipline and Middle Earth geography are aggravating for anyone...  if... you happen... to... um... never mind.  Anyway, you can read his post here if you like that sort of thing.

What I really take away from Professor Allain's examination of the opening scenes of Return of the King isn't really my geeky fit of pique, but the importance of clarity in how much time is passing in a story.  Professor Allain's problem stems from the film's time-compression.  That is to say, it's unclear how long it took for the line of bonfires to carry a message from one kingdom to the next. 

For some reason, a visual medium like film can get away with this sort of thing.  The sun rises and sets in the course of the scene and I take it Peter Jackson wants you to understand that in the compressed "movie time" that it took all night to get the message from Pippin to Aragorn.  This is harder in a book.  I'll even go so far as to say that it's literary suicide for a writer to make a reader stop and wonder how long something took or what the sequence of events was.  This is what makes flashbacks, dream sequences and time travel such dicey story telling tools.

Even though I detest writing from an outline, I think that keeping track of what day it is, what time of day it is, and how much time has passed in the course of your narrative is the strongest argument I can think of for doing so.  I'm pretty good at keeping things linear as I write the first draft.  But when I start revising and events find new homes, it's annoyingly easy to get mixed up. 

As I read a printed manuscript, I use Post-it notes to flag everytime a day passes.  From this I create a timeline (which I wouldn't have to do if I wrote from an outline to begin with, but that's another post) and then go through and correct any time travel issues.

I firmly believe that a story well told doesn't need a Tom Clancy time stamp at the top of every chapter.  And it shouldn't inspire a physics professor to create mathematical formulae to figure out what just happened.  Somewhere between the two, there has to be a happy medium.  Just don't have characters glancing at their watches all the time.

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*Apropos of nothing, these parties are one of the reasons I have some of the strange photos you periodically see here.  The "Disco" era pictures are probably best left to the imagination, though...
** Tom and his peers really like to tell us the setting and hour at the top of every scene change: "Bob's Apartment, Washington DC, 0800 GMT" It works for him, but I think it's ultimately a bit of a cheat.
*** DEW "Distant Early Warning" - A string of radar installations and listening posts installed during the Cold War across Alaska and Canada to watch for early signs of attack from the Soviet Union.