Throwback Thursday: Why I'm not worried about the Generation of the Book

This post was first published 24 April 2012 in a slightly different version.

The other day, I was wandering aimlessly through the campus of Pacific Lutheran University (these things happen) so of course, I stopped and wandered into their bookstore.

As I walked in, I noticed that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.

It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has taken over.

(Cue instant graying of hair.)

My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.

We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a Thing with us. And I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes. In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary tastes and were ordered to climb it.

This seems better to me somehow.

And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic. Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.

For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, the Millenials (as we're calling them at the moment, apparently) are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.

Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.

Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.

But this is not -- as is often alleged -- just a culture of the cribnote. It is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.

They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content. A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.

But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.

I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?

Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.

At least I have reason to hope so.

Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.

Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.

And this is not just shelf after shelf of trifling teenage Drama, Harry Potter ripoffs, and vampires. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there: David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, Dave Eggers, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books. Don't believe me? Let me Google that for you. Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.

Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.

If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them. Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.

Drinking from the font of ideas (Also Laser Sharks!)

This morning, I found out that some brilliant and/or daft people mounted a laser on a shark just to prove that they could. I rushed over here with every intention of telling you all about how I was right and we really are living in the future. I mean, flying cars are all well and good, but after laser sharks, everything else is just gravy, right?

And then my inner geek became my outer geek and I said: "Heh. Dude... Laser Shark!"

Talk about a gift that just keeps on giving; you could do almost anything with a premise like that. Almost any story can be grafted on. Science fiction? Of course; c'mon, that writes itself. How about something hard...
Military Fiction: The brave men and women in uniform who labor shoulder-to-should to bring together the ultimate weapon, lasers and sharks!
Techno-thriller: Terrorists (there are always terrorists) hijack the laser sharks and threaten to loose them upon an unsuspecting world.
Mystery: A body washes up on a desolate stretch of the Australian coast, burned and bitten beyond recognition. Was it murder? What could possibly have committed such a heinous act?
Spy Thriller: A foreign power is developing a secret weapon at their base beneath a volcanic island.
Romance: A handsome marine biologist meets a winsome laser engineer with a dreadful secret.
Steampunk: Aetheric amplification of Sol's brilliant light reaps unexpected rewards in the submarine base of the nefarious Doctor Villainous Deeds!

The list goes on and on and on. Ideas tumbling over ideas in a rush to get their hands on a real-live laser shark. And it occurred to me that this week, of all weeks, was the perfect opportunity to talk about where ideas come from.

Are they delivered to me by Laser Sharks?

Sadly, no.

I started thinking about this when thriller writer Joseph Finder said this:

Then, he said this:

And got me thinking about just how fertile is the daily news crawl that crosses my screen. Not just for things like digital organ thieves and shark-mounted lasers. Take that same Facebook-borne logic leap that Joe was talking about and graft on a story about an MI-6 codebreaker found locked in a bag in his locked apartment and you have the material for quite a thrill ride.

How about a conservator in the rare book room at Brown University that found an engraving signed by Paul Revere stuck in a medical book? How did it get there? Who put it there? Were they hiding it from someone? Historical fiction, thriller, romance, the world's your oyster with a core story like that. And how about a 400 year old map that was found to have a fortress marked in invisible ink that could lead to a lost city in West Virginia? Really! Where can't you go with a lead like that?

Historical fiction and thrillers aren't your thing? Want something that's sweet, but just a little creepy? How about this story from NPR about how a baby's cells lurk in mom's tummy long after the baby is born.  If you're not interested in sweet and want to focus on the creept, there are cannibal shrimp are invading the gulf coast, Iceland is sending tourists into the heart of dormant volcanoes,  and scientists are getting blood samples and DNA from 5,300 year old Alpine mummy.  

That reminds me, there's a GIANT statue of Anubis, the Egyptian god of tombs, being carted around Seattle like a parade float.  That's either a horror story, the next Indiana Jones movie, or a lawsuit waiting to happen. Maybe all three.

Speaking of lawsuits, I found out this week that space lawyers are apparently a real thing. My high school career councilor really dropped the ball on that one. But you want a comedic legal thriller? Fine. A bear fell out of a tree and led to a lawsuit that could literally change the face of copyright law in America. yes, really.

Mysteries? A guy carrying a big bag of money had a heart attack on a train platform at Penn Station and no one knows where the money came from. And how about those thieves that staged an elaborate movie-worthy heist in Connecticut to steal a few truckloads of pharmaceuticals? Heck, just today I found out about a robot petting zoo and a hexapodal walking car that will, oh yes, it will be my next ride.

But I write Children's books you say? This week provided me with a harmonica-playing pachyderm, a kidnapped penguin, and an escaped Tokyo parakeet made it home because it could tell the cops its address. No excuses.

So where do I get my ideas? I pay attention. Because in the end, it's not coffee, or my favorite pen, or a special table at the coffee shop, or mystical muse that brings me my stories. It's not even the friends and news sites that dropped those leads into my inbox. I bring me my stories. I get them by paying attention, by collecting all the various bits of the history that came before me and the world around me right now. And I find the bits that fit together but don't fit with anything else.  And the glory of this weird enterprise of writing is that anyone else can take in the same elements from the same news items and they will create entirely different stories from the same ingredients.

So that's it. And the next person who asks me where I get my ideas gets poked in the eye. Seriously. Safety glasses are advised.  Don't worry, you can get a new bionic eye to replace it. Because this is the future we're living in. 

Oh, and I'd stay out of the water until the batteries on that laser run dry. 

Just a thought.

The Generation of the Book: A culture of creativity comes of age...

I was wandering aimlessly through Tacoma, Washington recently and accidentally ended up near the campus of Pacific Lutheran University. So of course, I stopped and wandered through their bookstore.

As I was walking up and down the aisles, I began to notice that a longstanding prediction of mine was coming true: All of the displays were YA books. Every last one of them. Down the aisles, they were selling required reading and textbooks, but the endcaps and the tables were piled with books that are generally considered "Young Adult" titles.

It hit me: The Harry Potter Generation has hit college.

(Cue instant graying of hair.)

My generation, "Generation X" has many names. We're GenX, the MTV Generation,the 13th Generation, and my favorite from France: "Génération Bof". (Bof means "Whatever".) Whatever you call us, we are the children who cut our teeth on Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Our childhoods brought us Star Wars, ET, Indiana Jones, and MTV. We sent MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice up the pop charts and turned around a few years later and supplanted them with Pearl Jam and Nirvana. And we have been told that we're the last generation to learn cursive script and the last to learn to type on a typewriter.

We are a disparate lot. We read, sure, but it wasn't a thing. I certainly don't recall us riding into college on a wave of our own literary tastes.

In fact, we arrived and smacked into a wall of our parents' literary taste and were ordered to climb it.

This seems better to me somehow.

And although the generational naming thing is more a product of news headlines than science, after us came what is often called "Generation Y" who are most noted for growing up never having known a world without an internet. These are the so-called "digital natives" the culture of the electronic.  Yet I am inclined to think they might more properly be known as the generation that put their foot down and demanded their own literary canon.

For all the pissing and moaning about a generation that doesn't recognize originality, or is addicted to plagiarism, they are carving original niches out of every genre. It is a generation that breathed life into Tumblr and Youtube, and gave backbone to Steampunk.

Is it a mashup culture? Certainly, but culture has always been about the mashup. The Lord of the Rings is a mashup of Arthurian Legend, Norse Sagas and the Bible. I mentioned this in my post about SOPA: Our society's conversations have always been awash with quotes from Rhett Butler not giving a damn to Indiana Jones making it up as he went along. Heck, Harold Bloom reckons (and not entirely without merit) that most of what we consider to be modern and cosmopolitan ideas including most of what we know of humor and humanity were cribbed directly from William Shakespeare.

Do that sort of thing these days, and you would be hearing from Master Shakespeare's solicitor.

But this is not just a culture of the cribnote -- it is also a creative culture, and dare I say, a literary culture all its own. The digital natives are restless and they are reinventing the world around them, and no matter how many fingers the RIAA and the MPAA summon to shore up the dam, they are pulling it down and revealing the rusted scaffolding beneath.

They have taken up the means of production, bypassed the gatekeepers, and flooded the world in an ocean of content.  A vast, raging sea of unorganized, unedited, undisciplined content. It's raw, and unfettered, and as like to shock you as it is to enlighten you. And much of it that is good will be lost by the sheer size of the pile that you have to shift through in hopes of finding anything.

But it has always been that way, hasn't it? The chaff falls away under the millstones of the market and we find the wheat... eventually.

I hope that is still so. I really do. Because most of what we know of literature grew up within those protective walls that we've been so steadily tearing down. And wouldn't it be the cruelest trick of all if a generation of books manages to accidentally kill them as a medium by making it impossible for their creators to survive on their proceeds?

Too cynical? Yes. Yes indeed, Scott, too cynical by far.

At least I have reason to hope so.

Books will survive. Of course they will. As an object, as a symbol, as a medium for storytelling, as a bundle of bytes and bits, they have a devoted following among even the youngest readers. The average book blogger on Tumblr is in their mid twenties and more are arriving all the time. There is a whole world of young people moving up through the ranks, struggling to find their voice, to tell their tales. The formats change and evolve and storytelling trundles ever onward, reinvented, rehashed, retold by each succeeding generation.

Want proof that literature and books in general will survive? Walk into any bookstore (assuming you can find one) and ask the booksellers how large the Young Adult section was ten years ago. Then go look at how big it is now.

And it's not trifling teenage drama. Some of the most exciting and innovative writers currently operating are shelved there from David Levithan, M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, Maureen Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Laurie Halse Anderson, and John Green to name just a few. And their fans are motivated, engaged, fired-up... about books.  Truly, an amazing and literate generation came of age waiting in the lines outside the bookstore at 1:00 am, parents and children huddled together in the cold, counting down the minutes to the next Harry Potter book's release.

Welcome. You've made it. And you've made it your own.

If Rowling taught us nothing else, she taught us that storytelling will out. Where stories need telling, there will be a place for people who know how to tell them.  Will we be able to support ourselves on the proceeds? Only time will tell, but for my money, the Generation of the Book will not lightly relinquish their stories, nor those who tell them.

RE: "Greed is Good"

Open Letter from the desk of Mr. G. Gekko, Chairman

TO: All Employees 

RE: Setting the record straight on "Greed is Good" 

It has come to the attention of this office that a speech given some time ago has become problematic for the business practices of this firm and this nation. The Chairman has expressed regret (having nothing to do with the current slate of litigation against him) and wishes to set the record straight.

On that day in 1987, when addressing the ethos of his firm and his vision for western culture, he misspoke on rather an epic scale. 

What he meant to say was this:

Read is good. Read works. Read is right.  

Reading clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Reading, in all of its forms; reading for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and reading, you mark my words, will not only save us, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A. 

The chairman expresses his sincerest apologies for any misunderstandings.  If nothing else, unchecked READING is less likely to crash the world economy. 

Semi-sincerely,

G. Gekko, Chairman

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore (Oscar-Winning short) UPDATED

The best movie I've seen so far this year is only fifteen minutes long.

From the "Things That Are Inspiring Me This Morning" files, this animated short by Moonbot studios of Shreveport, Louisiana has been nominated for the Oscar in a category that is usually dominated by Pixar.   In fact, one of the founders of Moonbot was a conceptual artist on Toy Story, sprung from that fertile breeding ground for artists that is Pixar studios.

Speaking of Pixar, in order to take the trophy home, this little short is up against the Disney-owned juggernaut's "La Luna" and that's a pretty tall order.  Still... I'm predisposed to root for the little guy.

The LA Times turned out some great coverage of the unlikely film from Shreveport, including the formation of Moonbot in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and the death of Michael Jackson. But I think that Moonbot says it best in their artist's statement on Vimeo:

"Inspired, in equal measures, by Hurricane Katrina, Buster Keaton, The Wizard of Oz, and a love for books, “Morris Lessmore” is a story of people who devote their lives to books and books who return the favor. Morris Lessmore is a poignant, humorous allegory about the curative powers of story."  

http://vimeo.com/35404908)

Whatever its pedigree, it's one of the most delightful bits of animation I've seen in quite some time. But I'm such a booklover that I'm probably too biased to be objective.  So I'll let you decide for yourselves.

For your consideration...


The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore, Trailer


The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore Trailer from Moonbot Studios on Vimeo.

UPDATE: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore won the academy award for best animated short. Unfortunately, this means that they have taken down the full video. I've replaced it with the trailer, which at least gives you a feel for the thing. I'm sure that if you hunt around, the internet being what it is, someone has if available somewhere. I personally join you in hoping they make the full thing available soon for legal download or purchase.       -Scott
.

Lighting the other end of the candle :: The Perils of Helium Hand

There comes a time when you have to make hard choices and for me, that time has arrived.

The candle is already lit at both ends and now I either have to figure out how to light the middle too, or something has got to give.

This is the main reason I haven't been blogging as much lately: I have a bad case of Helium Hand. When it comes time to volunteer for things, my hand just seems to rise of its own accord and before I know it, I'm letting things go that might further my career just trying to keep up with all of the things I volunteered to do.

I am a huge advocate of volunteering in your community. Help out anywhere and in any way that you can.

Education isn't something that should be delegated to teachers and then ignored, hoping they'll wave a magic wand and make our kids ready to take their places as a citizen. Hell, Washington State has a constitutional mandate to fully fund education and even they can't keep up with it. There are a number of reasons for this, among them that there's too little money, too many tests, and not enough hours in the day.

Never one to say "Go and do" without having gone and done, I kept putting my hand up until I needed a hand myself.

Awhile back, I was tapped to help create a new community Writing Center for the Tacoma area. We call it write@253. Out of that grew a wider effort to align all of the mentoring programd operating in Tacoma in a group effort to raise awareness and drive volunteerism in the south Puget Sound region.

They're both excellent causes that I am aching to lend them every kind of support I have at my disposal. The writing center is a specific cause, a cause near and dear to my heart where I get to directly help students find their words and assemble them into stories. Find an hour has a broader impact across the whole of the community. Every hour I spend with them, I'm theoretically helping an untold number of kids.

I am not saying that my presence or absence is the lynch pin for the whole effort. Far from it. Neither will fall apart without me. I cannot imagine walking away from either, but I'm coming to realize that I only have time for one of them.


Setting aside the fact that I see my family and friends less than I would like (because who can't say the same?) at this moment, I have two very personal novels ready to move center stage. Also, there's also a large-scale write-for-hire gig standing in the wings, clearing its throat and ready to push everything else aside with a real deadline. Oh, and I have a day job that I love.

Even when you only sleep four hours a night, you only have so many productive hours in a day.

My first impulse is to pick the very personal project that allows me to help students one-on-one. It came first anyway, the other just sort of happened. But I want to do both.

I believe that every writer carries a debt to the person, the place, and the culture that  put the pen in their hand. It is a debt that is repaid by encouraging more writers and spreading a love of reading and writing, an appreciation of our history and culture.

How do I keep the candle burning when I can't seem to keep my head above water?

Kinetic Text: Ira Glass on the Creative Process

I meant to post this video when I first found it and then I forgot about it a few times. This is excellent advice from Ira Glass of This American Life fame. It's aimed at the beginner, but just as important for the middler, or or even those of us who've made a living at this and are still assailed by the occasional (or more than occasional) doubt.

Shyness Unmasked :: Finding My Inner Extrovert

This morning, a writer and storyteller I greatly admire not only correctly identified me by my work, but also told me that he loved the story. My tongue cleaved to the top of my mouth, my palms got clammy and it took me several minutes to figure out how to respond.

If this interaction didn't take place via Twitter, I'd have been in real trouble.

Like everyone on the internet, my various bios conceal as much as they reveal. When someone asks about me, I'm prone to default to being funny rather than honest. I have no excuse for that, it's just the way I am. If you asked me the same question at a restaurant, I'd probably do the same thing.

Well, at least I'm consistent.

My sense of humor comes from a place of extreme discomfort. I am notoriously awkward in social situations, excitable, shy, prone to blushing, and generally nervous around new people. Strangely, I've been told by many that I'm a compelling public speaker. I'm not sure how that works, but when I hear it, I smile, sort of jerk my head in a nervous half-nod and carry on carrying on.

My favorite aunt was a source of particular terror for me as a child. I was so painfully shy that I ran away and hid from her. I locked myself in a bathroom or two and she once pursued me over and around furniture, determined to give her great nephew a hug. This perfectly turned-out woman, always proper and dignified and accustomed to moving in the circles of power and propriety, determined to get me over my fear of her.

Because she was just that awesome.

If you meet me, you might not realize I'm the adult that used to be that kid. I've been developing ways to conceal these kneejerk responses for over thirty years. When I was single it was ten times worse. It's a wonder and a miracle that my wife and I ever met, much less married.

Even conversations with people I've known for years are often filled with odd stretches of complete silence while I try to come up with something say.

I've always suspected that I'm not alone in this. Not to paint with too broad of a brush, writers are by definition, people who are inclined to spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts. Let's face it: when your imaginary friends are so good you want to share their antics with other people, it leads to a lot of living inside of your own head.

My imaginary friends are so at home they built a lovely little village named Westmoore and made themselves at home. If there's room for a whole village in there, surely the rest of you will fit?

One of the ways I get past my anxiety is by wearing a mask. And not a metaphorical one either, a real one. The one in the snapshot to the right.

I realize that sounds a little weird, but bear with me for a moment.

Consider for a moment a man who is terrified of walking up and standing in front of a room full of people and talking. Then consider what it would take to make that happen. What kind of shield would it take for that person to walk up in front of a crowd and not only command their attention, but hold it?

It was almost exactly ten years ago that I met my Dumbo's feather.

Unfortunately, you can't just wander around in a mask without paying a higher social price than you are already paying for merely being shy. It is possible for the pendulum to swing too far in the other direction and what I really needed was a controlled environment for the experiment where this sort of behavior isn't that strange.

I needed a place that would allow a largely inexperienced, completely unknown and shy actor on their stage.  There really is only one place where that sort of thing is possible. Luckily I'm an historical reenactor and was therefore already on the cast of my local renaissance faire.

Meet Calabash. (I'm the one that isn't made out of bronze.)

I've mentioned before that I'm a clown. Calabash began as a strange experiment and it became something more than that. He became the outlet valve for a part of my personality that I didn't know existed.

With that mask on, I could walk up to complete strangers and not only engage them in conversations, but I could stand on a stage, shouting at the top of my lungs and attracting the sort of attention that without the mask would have me scrambling for cover. I became a lead character. I got paid to show up places. I was on the cover of the program.

A terrified flying elephant holding onto a feather for all he's worth.

And like that feather, the mask was a trick. And just as with Dumbo, it worked.

About eight years after I first put on the mask, I attended my first writer's conference and I was one of the few people there actively meeting the eyes of those around me. Who was starting conversations with strangers, walking up to tables at the dinners and introducing myself, leading conversations, holding up my hand in classrooms...

Outside the agents and editors room instead of staring intently at my shoes, I pictured myself putting on the Calabash mask before I went in.  I was still shaking when I walked out, but my voice was as steady as my handshake and my eye contact was good.

As dumb as it sounds, I couldn't have done it without Calabash the clown.

Writers are mainly introverts, people who would rather sit and chat with their imaginary friends than stand in front of a room full of people who are looking for them to be as interesting in person as they are on the page.

Given my druthers, I would still hide in my corner and write my stories without ever doing anything else. Instead, I'm presenting ideas to the boards of local charities and nonprofits. I'm heading up comittees designated with the task of broadcasting the missions of those organizations to a larger audience. I've walked up to editors and agents and journalists and felt less like I was ice skating on thin ice over the dark waters of panic.  I've found myself on a stage both literally and figuratively, and I've found my a way to make myself at home there.

Because if I want to introduce all of you to those imaginary friends of mine, it's what I have to do. And to be successful at this, you do too.

i

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.

1,2,3, Who Are You Writing For? :: One Story, Many Audiences

“A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.”
PL Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins 

Until you start writing about the lives of kids and their families, you don't fully grasp the genius manner in which JK Rowling moved her characters from scene to scene with minimum chit-chat and precious little mono-syllabic grunting in response to questions posed by authority figures.

I don't mean that last part in a snide way.  I uttered my share of monosyllables in my day, and I raised eye rolling to such a level of athleticism that it was seriously considered for inclusion in the 1988 Olympic games.

The Soviets threatened a boycott and I lost my shot at a gold  medal.

To be honest, I spend as little time as possible thinking about my audience.  I think that if most writers were honest with themselves and you, they do too.  Partly because art is always created for the artist because that's when our imaginations are most free of boundaries, and partly because it's easy to freeze up from the imaginary rotten tomatoes you can just see coming your way.  Nevertheless, there's a point in any story when the writer must decide on the intended audience for the story.  As Travers said above, the writer is only half of their book.

Because thinking about who your words are aimed at intrinsically changes your storytelling. It's the old saw about a tree falling in the forest not making a sound without an ear to hear it.

Without your audience, you're just killing trees.

This is complicated when each genre carries with it a whole passel of responsibilities and expectations.  Not only a responsibility to be respectful of the history of the genre itself, but also familiar with the peculiar ecology of the place, knowing what pitfalls to avoid, and the expectations of... (wait for it) ...the audience.

I don't want this to get sidelined and wrapped up in the whole "Perils of Genre" debate.  I covered that already here and discussed my own peculiar sub-genre of "Nerd Adventure" as well.

I've written widely across the spectrum, but never encountered a dance quite like the one in which I am currently engaged.  I've said that Howard Carter is a book for kids, but really it's a book about kids.  And I think it's a book kids would like.

When you are trying to breathe life into a younger character, you have to decide which kids you want to write for.  Are you creating stories for the actual young people you wish to enjoy your work or the young stalwarts their parents wish they were (or think they are, which amounts to the same thing).

We all remember being twelve or thirteen and I'd wage that not one of us was exactly what our parents thought we were and the world in which we lived was hidden from them.  All an adult has to do is walk into a room of chattering children and watch the ripple effect their presence has as they cross the floor.  The world of children is not the world of adults and that bears exploration and consideration because the books written for kids are almost entirely written by adults.  Adults who remember at least enough to sound genuine.

I've often thought that one of the main reasons that books and movies like Stand by Me and American Grafitti and even Goonies hold such sway is that they remind us of a time when our worlds didn't extend beyond what we could see, and that peculiar parallel culture of which we were all too briefly citizens.  And you will notice that not one of these feature young people acting like little angels.

       One cold winter’s day back in the fourth grade, Howard stayed home sick from school and he and his dad had their first “Don’t Tell Mom I Let You Watch This” movie marathon.  That day they watched some of his dad’s favorite movies from when he was a kid. Stand By Me, Goonies and The Christmas Story flickered on the screen one after the other as Howard's fever soared, his hallucinations joining the adventurous bands of misfits gathered to outsmart murderers and teachers and pirates and parents.
      In some ways, that day set the tone for their relationship as his dad began thrusting movies and books into his hands that inevitably featured clever kids besting spies and pirates and evil wizards mostly by breaking every rule they came across.  Howard learned pretty quickly that adults loved those stories right up to the point where their kids began acting anything like the characters.
      Howard thought of it as The Goonies Paradox: "This is awesome, but don't ever do or be anything like this."

Howard Carter Saves the World, Chapter 7: The Goonies Paradox

Most all of my favorite authors wrote for both children and adults: JRR Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, Roald Dahl, Michael Chabon... the list goes on.  And some of my most favorite authors wrote books that were shelved only in the kids section but draw adults like moths.  Norm Juster and JK Rowling spring to mind.

To turn what Travers was talking about in the quote at the top of this post on its ear, I'll say that when writing for or about kids, you're really only a third of the whole.  The other two parts are kids and their parents and that's a balancing act indeed.  Will your young characters talk, act and think like real kids, or are they going to speak, act and think in a way that will not draw any ire from their parents?

JK Rowling knows this.  I think every successful writer does, especially those who manage to stand astride the two worlds by speaking to the youthful reader while awakening the last lingering echoes of childhood in the adult half.

I have no idea whether or not I can pull this off, which is why I'm doing it.  Keeping my young characters alive and funny was my primary concern going into this and now my primary concern as I find myself in the middle is keeping them alive in the minds of my readers.

Because no matter who you're writing for, that is the real magic trick.

Your humble patience pray :: Guidance from Master Shakespeare

All the world's a stage...

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

In the prologue to Henry V is found the advice every writer or actor should hear in their heads as they embark upon any effort to present events larger than their stage or page can hold.  Not familiar with it?  You should be, and not only because it's the beginning of one of the Great Works, but because it holds an enormous amount of advice for writers from one of the greatest (if not the greatest) writer ever to lift a pen.


In these words, Shakespeare admits to and then dispenses with the doubts his audience might hold in their hearts that he can pull off the sprawling battle of Agincourt and unfurl the landmark event of English history in the space and time constraints of the stage.  He admits right away the limitations of the stage and actors to truly capture the events about to unfold without the willing assistance of the audience's imagination.

And as he said in a later play 'Aye, there's the rub'.  Nothing you write is going to work if you forget this simple fact: You are putting images in someone else's head and it's your job to give them enough to suspend their disbelief and let their imaginations do the rest.

But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?

A novel is not a stage... or is it?  Certainly, you can populate the vasty fields of your imaginary worlds with  all the armies of man and monsters you care to name... but really, how much can you describe them before the reality breaks down and it becomes a treatise on the arms & equippage of imaginary armies?  Too much is worse than too little.   You can't show it all, some part of the action and world will always fall off the stage.  And take it from a sometimes actor, the lap of the front row is a bad place to end up.

So your problem is somewhat the opposite of Shakespeare's stage, but the solution is the same...

O, pardon! since a crooked figure may 
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder...

I've read many an early draft of fantasy epics and space operas that dwelled so intricately on the arms and equipment of each armsman and space ship (or whatever) that you forget you're reading a novel and begin to wonder whether this is a doctoral dissertation.

Let one or two speak for many.  How do you cram an army onto a stage or page?  The same way Shakespeare did.  The same way, incidentally, as Tolkien did.  And John Toland and Joss Whedon in Firefly for that matter.  By giving us a handful of representative characters who stand in for the millions.  One crooked figure from which your audience is to extrapolate the millions unseen.

I'm about to unleash an army of aliens and giant robots upon the fields of the earth but don't look to me to create them in intimate detail.  Tell us they exist.  Set the scene and pan the camera across the field as the armies of monsters and mechanized monstrosities clash and then shift your focus to the heroes because the next line might be the single-greatest line in any prologue in English history, the prayer every writer utters in the dark watches of the night...

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts

Get your audience rooting for your characters (and you by extension) and they will suspend their disbelief, willingly participate in your ruse.  They will populate an imaginary field with aliens and robots and clothe your naked scaffold.  They will fill in the gaps where you eliminated all those adverbs.  When you get them on your side, you don't need to tell them that your character said something 'tiredly', they'll be so wrapped up in the action that they'll read it tiredly.

Because that's the secret:  The reader wants you to succeed.  They want you to tell them a story and as long as you never betray them, they will follow you through the gates of hell and allow you to take one character and let them stand in for thousands and compress the events of years into a few pages.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts 
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o'er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour glass...

Time and character compression are your friends, but only if the audience is.  And it's easier to get them on your side if the stage is not so awash in characters and needless detail that they can't find the story.


At the end of the day, writing is writing, whether it's a play or a sci fi lark about a boy genius who turns farm equipment into robots.  End the end, even Shakespeare knew that no matter what you are trying to say about the human condition, it all boils down you connecting with your listener and getting them on your side long enough to hear you out.

And as I prepare to send my muse into the field on a mission to which she is unaccustomed, that's a great comfort to me.  Bring on the robots! Cue the aliens!

Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play.

Exit, stage left.

Editing for Length & Pacing :: Lessons from YouTube

I get YouTube videos sent to me all the time.  Most of them are cats or gerbils practicing to ride their Roomba tanks to prepare for world domination, but every once in awhile it's something artsy and/or funny and sometimes they're just plain cool.  This morning, I found a lesson in editing that is very much applicable to writing.

The following video is very violent in a video game sense, and a cool homage to the game Time Crisis and any number of ancillary action movies, Hong Kong flicks and pop culture tidbits tossed in for spice.  The guy that makes these vids is FreddieW and there aren't many indie filmmakers on the net doing it better.

Go ahead and watch it and I'll see you at the end.  (Sorry about the political ad at the beginning, YouTube ads are what they are.)



Why did I just ask you to watch all that?  Because one of the things I heard a lot at PNWA and elsewhere is writers griping about cutting a manuscript. 

A manuscript -- especially from an unproven author -- shouldn't be over 100,000 words unless you're writing fantasy.  The first pass at Palimsest clocked-in at 120,000.  I could get a long way just eliminating a word here and there, but 20k isn't going to go quietly.  I had to cut something I really liked.  And that means examining each scene and asking myself "Why is this scene here?"

Cutting a manuscript is a lot like cutting a movie.  You take what you have and you try to craft the best story you can.  If necessary you go in and write additional material (re-shoots in the film world) but that's an expensive use of time and resources, so it's best to use what you already got.  At the end of this post is a video with the young filmmakers talking about the process of making and cutting this action sequence together.  They spend a lot of time talking about procuring enough cardboard boxes for the shoot and a little about shooting and editing it together, so if you want, you can skip to the 4:00 mark because that's when they start talking about editing.

"Remember -- With editing, the only thing that matters is the the movie as a whole.  It doesn't matter how "cool" it is, or how hard it was to get (or write).  If it doesn't add anything, it doesn't belong."

That's an important lesson for anyone working on a long project like a movie or a novel.  At least with novels you can 'reshoot' without worrying about matching the lighting or whether your actor cut their hair in the interim.



Cultural Cross-Pollination is a series of posts on how writers can draw from other creative venues like stage, film, games, and even cartoons to apply their lessons to writing.  Click the tag below to see previous posts in this series.

Movie Adaptation

The other morning, the Engineer threw a magazine at me. It was the September edition of Writer's Digest, and it had apparently been languishing far too long on the dining room table for her taste.

We were on our way out the door, so I stuffed it in the backpack (which is very similar in many respects to "putting it away") and headed off to the cafe to do my morning writing. After I finished writing my five pages, edited a couple dozen and wrote a blog entry likening my character to Bugs Bunny, I opened the magazine. In the back of my mind, I was noodling with my ongoing series of posts on "Cultural Cross-Pollination". I've already done Commedia del Arte, Playwriting, Role Playing Games, Kinetic Text and Cartoons. I either needed a good hook for talking about movies or I needed to just let it lie fallow for a little while.

How movies can, should or should not affect our fiction writing is a bit of a poser, I don't mind saying. It's a big topic for one thing, and for another, I've already touched on it a little bit. Then it hit me... exactly like a rolled-up magazine left too long on the dining room table. In WD and just about everywhere else that writing is discussed, the ability to write "visually" is discussed, dissected and otherwise touted as one of the hallmarks of marketable writing. In the "MFA Insider" column, author Joshua Henkin posited that movies and television and the onslaught of "Write more visually" advice from writing books and magazines have cumulatively eroded our willingness to create introspection in our stories. To prove his point, he gave a writing exercise that entails going through your story or manuscript and highlighting everything that can be filmed in one color (action) and everything that cannot be filmed in a contrasting color (internal dialogue).  In "too many" stories, there would be an imbalance -- the external story would outweigh the internal struggle of the characters, the parts that cannot be adapted for film.

I'm not sure he's right. For one thing, recent and upcoming movies are challenging what's "Filmable". Where the Wild Things Are takes us into the lengthy interior monologue of a young boy at war with himself. Assuming they don't screw it up The Road will be a challenging movie of silences and bleakness where the characters never refer to one another by name.

Has visual media cracked the whip of visual writing? More to the point, have novels been overtaken by authors who would be better suited writing screenplays?

I undertook his experiment with my own manuscript and without compiling exact statistics (there's a limit to how much free time I have) I think my writing is about even. Between the "filmable" sequences and the internal dialogues, I was looking at a pretty decent balance of colors. While there are extended action sequences, I temper that with the fact that my characters are pretty brainy and have a tendency to live inward.

Speaking of "filmable" writing, Paul Levine is an entertainment attorney and agent who represents a lot of screenwriters as well as authors. At PNWA, he told a full room that aspiring screenwriters should write the book first. Movie rights were easier to sell with a publishing contract to back them up and getting a screenplay over the transom at the moment was almost impossible without that. The other editors and agents on the panels all agreed. Hollywood wants a sure thing now more than ever. This is why we're seeing sequels and adaptaions packed cheek by jowl on the marquee right now. Hollywood wants someone else to play taste-maker, to vet the stories for them, to see them succeed in another venue before they plunk millions of dollars into a film project.

To bring it back to novel writing, I used to wholeheartedly agree with Henkin on the impact that visual media has had on writing... for better and worse. And I still do to some extent. But talking to Levine, I got the feeling that there was a bit of the tail wagging the dog -- that movies are following print as much or more than it goes the other way around. Films are delving into territory that was long thought impossible to bring to the screen. Introspective movies are elbowing for room alongside the usual action and adventure. Rather like you will see in my screenpla... um... novel.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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The Rabbit Problem

I have a rabbit problem. Not in the garden, in my books. And if your characters are as capable as Jack Reacher or as smart as Sherlock Holmes or as beautiful as a fashion model... or in anyway presenting themselves to you as nearly super-human, then you have a rabbit problem too.

Legendary Warner Brothers animator Chuck Jones also had a rabbit problem. He was possessed of a set of characters with the ability to bend reality to their whim in order to triumph over what seemed to be overwhelming odds. And at the head of the pack was a rabbit named Bugs.

"Golden Rule. Bugs must always be provoked. In every film, someone must have designs on his person: gastronomic, as a trophy, as a good-luck piece (rabbit's foot, which makes as much sense as a rabbit carrying a human foot on a key chain), as an unwilling participant in a scientific experiment [...] Without such threats, bugs is far too capable a rabbit to evoke the necessary sympathy." -Chuck Jones "Chuck Amuck"

Take the above quote and insert "Sherlock Holmes" or "Jack Reacher" or "Calvin" from Calvin & Hobbes in the place of Bugs and you'll see the problem that Conan Doyle and Lee Child and Bill Watterson have faced every time they sat down to write.

If you can take your lead character(s) and insert their name and gender into the above quote, then you're in the Radio Flyer wagon with Arthur, Lee, Chuck and me, staring around at the sea of rabbits. Welcome aboard!   The blonde kid with the tiger is in charge, so don't smart off.

If a drama is derived from ordinary people in extraordinary situations, is it worthwhile to examine the extraordinary person in the extraordinary situation? Of course it is. It's just a matter of how you go about it.

The first thing to remember is Chuck's admonition that the supremely-capable character acting unprovoked will elicit very little sympathy from the audience. The corollary to this is that watching someone who is smarter than the subject matter waltz through the story is boring to boot. The Rabbit has to meet a challenge worthy of his efforts and attention or I'm not going to read your story and most of the editors I've met won't either.

Incidentally, if your character is so talented and capable in every realm and situation, I humbly submit that you need to rethink the decisions that led to your writing a novel about Superman. (Unless you really are writing a novel about Superman, in which case good luck and Godspeed because I'm as big a geek as as the next guy.)

There's a trap that catches just about every writer early in their writing career: It's insanely easy to create a fantasy alter ego that is everything we ever dreamt of being. And because as a breed, writers tend toward the bespectacled introvert more than the opposite (there's a fine line between being stereotypical and merely archetypal) when granted godlike powers, we can make manikins of words that are smarter, faster, and better than any human being could ever hope to be.

There are degrees of extraordinariness and I should take a moment to poke some holes in...

Contrary to what detective novelists and television have taught us, a genius IQ does not automatically come with a detective's badge, Oriental lineage doesn't come with a black belt in the local martial art and very few CIA employees ever get issued a Glock and a license to kill. Those things are all cliche's. That's not to say that there aren't any genius PI's, Japanese kids trained in Ninjitsu or CIA hitmen in the world, just that there's a fine line between stereotype and archetype and in a fictional setting the scales are too often tipped toward the wrong side of that equation. (mixed metaphor alert!)

The cliche has a place in writing and life and we should treat them in the manner that they so richly deserve: subversion. Playing against audience expectations is part of the fun of writing the extraordinary character.

Drag your Rabbits out of their element. Give them a reason to get involved and then challenge them by forcing them to act in a realm beyond their expertise. Play them against themselves and keep doing it or you're going to end up running afoul of Chuck's Golden Rule. At which point, you might as well lobotomize your rabbit and let the hunter catch him.

Kinetic Convergence?

Text has danced for quite awhile. Watching a Powerpoint presentation is sometimes a jarring experience as the data points samba across the screen, blink in and out and sometimes hide as much as they reveal about the speakers' point. Sometimes I think we're probably better off without it. But moving text doesn't have to be bedlam. Last week when I was looking at people who stepped outside the normal venues for delivering text, I remembered this video by video blogger Alan Lafustka aka "Fallofautumndistro". Alan put up an animated video of the Kenneth Koch poem 'Social Life with Friends'. This kinetic poem is done very well (I think) and I love the poem, which fits my current mood. I don't necessarily agree that it has to be an either/or proposition -- in this and in all things, finding a workable balance is the key. The reason I bring this up is the notion of delivering a story as animated words, so called 'kinetic typography'. There are a number of these poems and snippets of books on YouTube and as is the nature of the Tube, they are executed with a widely varying degree of skill. As ever, finding the workable balance is the key. Moving text can give you a migraine or it can inform and illustrate what it's trying to get across to you. In the middle of the dust-up awhile back about Kindle's 'read to me' app I started thinking about the future intersection between text and speech. Some books simply cannot be brought across as audio books. If you've ever read 'House of Leaves' you'll know what I mean, but Danielewski's acid trip of a novel isn't alone in breaking free of the stereotypical typeblock. A few weeks ago, I took my nephews to a bookstore and read over their shoulders as they browsed. I was astounded by how much even the middle grade books were straining against the format. Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney especially seems to be ripe for a method of delivery that would blend animation and text. Not a full-on cartoon, but a kinetic book. Of course, your e-Reader would need a video card, but with Barnes & Noble's entry into the e-book world, we're on the doorstep of true convergence. One of the many possible definitions of "convergence", is a blend of the abilities of many gadgets into one omni-gadget. An iPhone, for instance. The new B&N site, along with the controversial Google Books site is already delivering content that doesn't require a specific e-reader in order to view it. That means you can read your e-book on a PDA, Blackberry, laptop or netbook. I'm typing this blogpost on an netbook that honestly doesn't outweigh an e-reader by that much and has the added benefit of allowing me to watch video as well as choose between working on my book or reading someone else's. I predict that at some point this force of 'convergence' will either eliminate the e-reader or force their creators to allow them to do more than just read books. As books take on new dimensions and text slips the physical restraints of ink on a page, the possibilities for a convergence of our own are virtually limitless. Words can dance, appear and disappear, and illustrations will no longer be forced into a static realm. And as the technologies and artforms converge, it will either be beautiful or absolute and unadulterated bedlam. I've prepared a Powerpoint presentation that shows why it will probably be a bit of both. . .

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Nessman's Box

"Outside the box" is one of my favorite cliches. (Yes, I allow myself to have favorite cliches, sue me.) It gets across in one succinct phrase all the dangers of these artificial boundaries we erect between what we are comfortable with and what is possible. It also illustrates the benefits of being one of those who is willing to step across the yellow tape surrounding our imaginary boxes. We all live like Les Nessman from the WKRP television show. Imaginary walls that provide us with imaginary comforts. Please use the imaginary door to enter and don't forget to wipe your feet on the imaginary mat. I feel like writers and publishers are more guilty of laying tape around our comfort zones than anyone else. We live and work in an industry that has - more than any other - remained virtually untouched by the last 500+ years of technological advancement. From the scribes at their desks in the monasteries to the guy at the cafe typing on his laptop, all that is different are the tools we use to put the ink on the paper. Yet in the past ten years, the idea of the book or newspaper has changed so drastically that we sometimes forget that the tapelines that form the boundary of our imaginary worlds exist largely as a matter of tradition. And the tape is peeling. My recent series of posts here at P2T have focused on how other forms of creative storytelling can add colors to an author's palette. In this ongoing meditation, I've talked about how Commedia del Arte informs my character choices, play writing helps me hear my dialogue and role playing helped me see the story from the inside. All of these are methods by which I break down those imaginary walls. For me, this blog is yet another step across the tape -- a place where I can think out loud about these things and maybe get some feedback from like-minded folk. Do you know a novelist that works outside the traditional boundaries? Someone I might not have heard of? Talk about it in comments! I'm curious to hear from you. ---

Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines.

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Role to hit...

I learned to tell stories from my dad, who was quite the raconteur when the mood struck him. I learned to love stories by reading a lot of them. I learned about characterization and what made a story drag you to the edge of your chair by participating in them. As if I haven't already made it clear that I'm a nerd, today I shall remove any lingering doubts. Today we're going to talk about... (deep breath) role-playing games.

I'm sure I have a pocket protector around here somewhere.

A table in a basement surrounded by young men, soda cans and empty pizza boxes. This raucous gathering was sterotypically the smarter kids from their school who found common cause in their esoterica. Mostly young men, they gather to breathe life back into a faded mythos governed by obscure rules and the chance roll of polyhedral dice... role playing games. About the only legal activity in the high schools of America circa 1980 that had any air of mystery about it. Movies and news reports tried to link role playing games to all sorts of satanic pseudo-mystical nonsense while most of the players viewed it in much the same way their fathers viewed Friday night poker games.

Most people know about Dungeons & Dragons, but there were far more than that: Top Secret, Vampire the Masquerade, Ninjas & Super Spies, Shadowrun, Battletech... the list seems virtually endless and at one time or another and I played them all.

What does this have to do with storytelling?

Everything and nothing.

It's axiomatic that the story looks different from the inside than it will look from the outside. I can tell you stories about things that really happened to me in the back-country during my mountaineering and backpacking days and make you laugh every time. Stories that were frightening, uncomfortable and dangerous when I was living them. I can tell you stories about bad guys thwarted, secret plans stolen and dragons slain in imaginary games and get much the same reaction. But in neither case - the real or the imagined - will it be the same for your reader if you re-tell my story to someone else. It's inherently different because I was there. I was standing in front of that bear or staring over that ledge or slaying that imaginary dragon.

The dramatic tension comes from the experience. The story would not be the same had I not subjected myself to the whims of chance, the roll of the die. And since you didn't experience it except through my narrative, you will tell it differently and with less immediacy than I.

That isn't to say that I want you to run out and throw yourself in front of a bear, or get buried in an avalanche. You don't need to do that in order to write about them. Nor do you need to put together a role-playing game based upon the novel you're writing.

Roleplaying games taught me to have an experience that didn't really happen, to watch it unfold through the eyes of a fictional character. Even if I didn't know what it felt like first-hand to stare down the snout of a black bear or free fall into nothing on the end of a bungee cord, I could create a semblence of that experiencve because I've learned the skill of putting myself into the head of a person that does not exist.

In Telling Lies for Fun & Profit, Lawrence Block talks about how finite even the most compelling life is in terms of storytelling potential. Even if you lived a life of danger as an international jewel thief, you are still - as Block puts it - sitting on a raft in cold waters, chopping bits off the back-end to feed the fire you've started at the front. At some point you will run out of boat. Being able to live through the eyes of an imaginary person allows me to build a bigger boat, feeding the fires with imaginary planks.

One last thing about lessons role-playing games can teach us and then I'll shut up about them...

In Across the Crowded Marketplace, I dwelt on the definitive archetypes, the roles your characters play in the stories they inhabit and how important it is that your readers be able to recognize them on a cultural level. At the core of that is a crucial understanding of your character and what role they fill in the story.

Part of this is the ability to play them consistently through the entire story. If one ear is lower than the other on page one, then on page 220, those ears had better still be assymetrical. I keep track of this using something else role-playing games taught me... the character sheet. Height, weight, eye color, hair color, ethnicity, skin tone, education, distinguishing features, idiosyncrocies... all on an easy-to-reference sheet of paper. This sounds fussy and even anal, and I suppose that it is. It also keeps my legendary absent-mindedness from sidelining my writing while i search the manuscript for some tiny detail from the first chapter.

Role-playing games take place in worlds that are fully-realized entities apart from ours, a shared landscape of the imagination replete with maps, politics and adventures in the offing. they are a place where we can step into other skins and other lives. A similarly-realized world should unfold each time I open my laptop and type "Chapter One" at the top of a page.

I owe it to my world and to my characters to know them well enough to be able to tell their stories as if I'd been there too.

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Scott Walker Perkins writes literary thrillers and novels of suspense woven from the threads of history. His current novel is The Palimpsest and he is working on another tentatively titled 42 Lines. Contact Me: swalkerperkins@gmail.com

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