Note

Starting today I will be inserting a 'break' into longer posts. To read the complete post, you have to click "Read More >>" when it appears at the bottom.

Please note that I don't track 'clicks' or generate ad revenue from this blog and don't currently have any plans to do so in the near future. I'm just trying to do some housekeeping and keep the main page from being so long that you have to scroll to reach the next post.

FYI
Scott

The Research Phase :: The limits of memory and the joys of learning something anew.

I'm fond of quoting Werner von Braun: "When I don't know what I'm doing, it's research."  It's a great quote and often gets me out of a jam when someone is pressing me to tell them what I'm up to ("Staring out the window" is a bad answer, especially when the inquisitor is ones spouse. Just trust me on that.)  

To be brutally honest, though, research is generally a process of reminding myself how many things I used to know and re-teaching myself how to do things I once knew. When I decided that I wanted to write a character who was a mathematician, for instance, I found myself at wits end when I dug below the surface of my math skills to discover some of the more basic portions of my education had escaped under dark of night.

Silly Stories for Serious Times :: Letters to my Nephews

Gentlemen,

I'm afraid that the news is not good.  My generation is set to pass to yours a world fraught with serious problems and fractured by divisions that are deeper than ever before.  At some point, we will toss you the keys to this world and our problems will be your problems.

I lived through the end of the cold war and I can give you a bit of advice for going on with. There is really only one time-honored and proven way to get through these tough times. In serious times, silliness gets us through.  Revel in it. Never turn your back on it.
 
Most of the best silly still comes from Great Britain. You're too young for Monty Python or Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I look forward to you coming to an age when you're able to appreciate them. I don't even care that they were already a bit dated when I first encountered them. True silliness is timeless. It transcends piddling things like time, space and culture.

We really should figure out how to harness the stuff. We'd be flitting about it jetpacks and time machines in no time.

Where was I?

Oh, right.  American silliness had its heyday in the time of your great grandfathers and it's high time we woke it back up. Sadly, our strategic reserves of silly seem almost tapped out and I don't know where we will find more. So much of current comedy has become political, acerbic, droll, deeply ironic, and/or some combination of all three. I can appreciate that trend on some levels. There are far too many things going on that beg us to laugh at them to keep from crying about them.  But with humor of that stripe, you're never quite certain if people are laughing because the joke was funny or because they're uncomfortable.

The only prescription for times when even the humor becomes tinged with sadness is hefty innoculations of silly.

Sadly, our country has been importing our silliness for so long that we've all but forgotten how to make our own, which makes it more important that we find and nurture all the silliness that we can find.

This is one reason why I spent the last few months writing a silly story about a young lad standing with his family and friends in the face of serious events (it really doesn't get much more serious than an alien invasion, in my opinion) and breaking it down with unrelenting silliness.

There are people who will sniff at you when you tell them you write humor, or - worse yet - science fiction. There are many who think I've lost my mind, devoting so much time to delving into the absurd when there are so many deeply troubling issues to explore.

They're wrong.

Being silly is never a waste of time. And people who are serious all the time are missing the real joy of being alive. And I refuse to give in to that mode of thinking. All the terrible things happening in the world is no excuse not to have a laugh or take time to dream. When you can do both at once, that's a real gift.


Our sense of humor is perhaps our greatest gift as human beings. Our willingness to embrace the absurd is part and parcel to our ability to cope when the going gets tough. Sometimes you just have to throw your hands up and laugh.

Love,
Your silly uncle Scott

Don't "Breathe" a Word :: The Perils of Lazy Dialogue

There are a half-hundred words that you can use when you're writing dialogue to describe how words were said.  Lines of dialogue can be shouted, screamed, whispered, thundered, blurted, whined, exulted, cried, clarified, called, uttered, ejaculated, exclaimed, declared, denied, crowed, and breathed.

Don't ever use any of them.  They're lazy and, more importantly,  they sound like writing.

To explain, I'll refer you back to this post about Elmore Leonard's iconic list of 10 rules for effective fiction writing.  I'd summarize the Leonard's list (and my own feelings on the subject) by saying "Don't be a lazy writer or assume you have a lazy reader."  

Leonard sums them up by saying "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Which amounts to the same thing, really.

Rule number three on Leonard's list is "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue".  Personally, I double the lexicon of acceptability by including "asked".  Just don't "breathe" a word. Say it.  Just say it... and then don't use an adverb to modify it (which is rule #4).

Why all the hate?

Because the word "said" is descriptive.  All the rest are prescriptive.

A descriptive word "said" or "asked" tells us what happened.  A prescriptive word like "breathed" or "exulted" or any of the rest tells us how to read the sentence that we just finished.  That's important: prescriptive words come at the end of sentences.  So if your reader obeys you, they have to go back and reread.  Talk about breaking the flow of the story.

Put another way, they're stage directions, and if you want to write stage directions, write a play.

The laziest thing a writer can do is tell the reader everything. The real work of writing is to decide what to leave out, and the real work of writing dialogue is crafting sentences that carry themselves, free of the need for phrases like "he responded snarkily" or "she shouted angrily". If you want a snarky, or shouty tone, use snarky, shouty sentences.
 
First of all, unless you overuse them., the exclamation point should tell your reader the character is shouting and the word choice and simple, short declarative sentence carries across the anger.  "Shouted angrily" is made redundant by writing the sentence correctly in the first place.

Does this mean you should never use "shouted" or anything else?  No. Like any rule, this is one that is meant to be broken carefully, wisely, and with malice aforethought.  But know that you're doing it and why.  In certain situations "whispered" might be necessary.  At times, I suppose "shouted" might even be necessary.  But I'll go out on a limb and say that the rest of that list isn't.  Not ever.

If you've read Howard Carter, you know that on some level I'm a stone thrower living in a glass house. Keep in mind that it was a first draft, but at least in that book, I seemed to be particularly fond of "whispered".

One of the first things I will do when going from that first draft you read to the second is remove those instances when I got lazy and gave too much stage direction.

The later it is at night and the more tired I am as I write, the more likely it is that these things are going to happen.  Which is why we have rough drafts that we don't show to anyone.  Because at some point we have to come back in the cold, clear light of day and find all the parts that sound like writing and rewrite them. 

A Horse of a Different Color

I was met with a round of blank looks.  It's okay, I'm used to it by now, but it didn't make it any less frustrating.

"This is a book?" One person ventured.

"It's a kid's book," I said.  "It came out when I was in high school."

A round of knowing looks went through the group. Someone patted my forearm, I forget who it was, and leaned in to whisper "Scott, by high school, most of us stop reading children's books."

Actually, I was twenty six or so when I finally read it. A fact that I keep to myself, preferring to pretend to be horrified that they hadn't been reading stories about boys and their horses when they were sixteen.


I thought about asking about those Harry Potter books I knew they had on their shelves, but gave up.  Those were different, or at least those were the worm that turned.  And even though JK Rowling was largely responsible for drawing adults into the young adult sections of their bookstores and libraries, most of the venturing seemingly went forward from Harry's pub date, not backwards.

Which is too bad, really. There are some great overlooked books on those shelves, languishing in the boy wizard's shadow.  It's possible that I'm one of the few Americans who had even heard of War Horse before it became a play.

I cheated, I suppose, by being a children's bookseller. 

Today, it was featured in the New York Times, but only because it's about to open in New York.  In short, it's a story about a boy and a horse. Big deal, right?  Then the British army takes the horse to Europe and the boy follows his equine friend into the blood and chaos of the First World War.

Written from the viewpoint of the horse.

There have been a number of great stories written from the viewpoint of animals and some not-so-great attempts to mimic them.  Traveller, by Richard Adams, is the book it reminds me of most.  And though War Horse predates Traveller by a few years, comparisons are inevitable because of their animal's-eye-view of war, the comparisons stop there.  Both narratives attempt to draw attention to how strange the enterprise of war is by showing it from the viewpoint of an uncomprehending animal forced to participate. Much though I liked Traveller, I think War Horse wins the bout, capturing the full scope and horror of the putative War to End All Wars.

War Horse is one of those books that hollows you out and shakes you and then puts everything back just a bit wrong and with extra parts left out.  In a good way.

I haven't seen the play, but I will if I get the chance. In fact, I was reminded of the book (prompting the discussion above) by the play, or rather by the puppets used to bring horses onto the stage.  The puppets are so beautiful and amazing that the designers were invited to talk at this year's TED Conference.  It's no secret that I love puppets and puppetry. I wanted to be Jim Henson when I grew up and I still quietly dream of working with his people someday, somehow.

The horse puppet will show you how powerful a puppet can be.  Seriously, the could not have been more powerful if they had brought actual horses onstage.  I cannot fathom how the upcoming movie adaptation by Stephen Spielberg can hope to measure up.



Before you see the play or watch the movie (Christmas of this year, I believe) I hope you take a moment to read Mr. Morpurgo's amazing book.  And if you're a writer as I am, read the story behind that book.  It's the perfect story of a tale that made it to print only to be written off more times than you can count, finding its audience decades later and an author who never gave up on it.

The Legacy of Jim Henson

 

Howard Carter Saved the World :: Writing As Performance Art Redux

I have often described writing as the fine art of talking to yourself.  And many times, that's what it feels like: a writer goes into a corner with his or her computer and a few months later, comes out bearing a ream of paper and a couple of new nervous tics.

I prefer the idea that writing is a conversation between writer and reader.  A conversation that starts with the writer and then is gifted to readers to carry on with on their own.  Writing Howard Carter Saves the World has cemented that idea in my mind forever.  For me, this is the first time that this conversation has happened in real time.  Getting more or less constant feedback from people who were reading along as I wrote was mind-blowing at times.  At times, it resembled improv or stand-up more than writing.  I was able to "read the crowd" and react when something wasn't working or if a joke fell flat.

That's a gift.

It's also a bit nerve-wracking.  Sometimes we need that insulating blanket of time between the day the words hit the page and the day the reader reacts to them.  I gave myself some of that by pointedly not looking at the Google pageviews.

Sometimes, it's better not to know.  The idea of an audience was sufficient.  That much of the insular relationship between writer and words I felt it necessary to protect.

If you were reading along, I thank you.  If you haven't read it, there's still time.  If you want to wait for it to pass under the editor's pen, I certainly understand that too.

This has been a strange, sometimes harrowing, and always rewarding experience.  Writing the whole thing in public and posting it online as a serial gave me an entirely different relationship to the text -- even though it's still a first draft and a bit rough in places, it's a lot more polished than most first drafts have any right to be.

At times, it was like writing and publishing a new short story every couple of days.  And at other times I ran dry or ran aground and didn't know if I could keep going.  Knowing the audience was out there reading -- no matter how small or large it might be --  kept that next chapter coming.

And in the end, we saved the world.

Together.

It panned out to be about 95,000 words spread over 42 chapters, a prologue and an epilogue.  I predict that in revisions it will lose between 5,000 and 10,000 words, so some of what you've read will never make it to the final edition.  That's the way of things.


For now, rest well, citizens of the Earth!  The story is complete and your world is safe once more.  Howard Carter is getting a well-deserved rest before I hop in my time machine and revisit his tale for the next phase of its journey from daydream to finished book.  The poor kid's been through a lot!

If you were waiting until I was finished to read it, now's your chance!  I will very likely take it down sometime in May, which is when I will begin revising the manuscript to begin submitting to agents and editors.  Click the image below to be taken to the front page.