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| Rather than writing, or writing about writing, or even reading about writing, I’ve been reading about writers. I shall now write about writers and their reading. Thus, as you read this entry, consider that you are reading a writing about writers’ reading.
All of the greats apparently read voraciously as children and young adults. Neil Gaiman, for example (yes, he’s a contemporary great), grew up reading C.S. Lewis, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Chesterton. You know, the great classics. And now he writes in the tradition of which he so immersed himself as a child.
A quick glance at my childhood reading would suggest I too have a bright writing future ahead of me… as the author of youth mystery novels about boy detectives who solve all their cases by getting captured by the bad guys.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. A few years after I started reading The Hardy Boys, my little sister started reading Nancy Drew. Time passed, and she moved on to reading George Eliot, Herman Melville, and Victor Hugo. Meanwhile, I had started reading Nancy Drew.
Someday my biographers will have a tough time making my formative years sound, well, formative. But there’s nothing to be done for it now but to start making up for lost time. And since I don’t have to go down to one meal a day in order to afford books, as Louis L’Amour did, I really have no excuse not to.
It’s time to start reading the classics! And I will… just as soon as I figure out how Frank and Joe Hardy solve this case.
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| I just read a very long short story by Robert E. Howard, a master storyteller from the heyday of pulp fiction in the 1930s and 40s. Known in today’s popular culture as simply the creator of Conan the Barbarian and one of the fathers of what would become known as “Sword and Sorcery” stories, Howard wrote in many genres. His tales of Puritan demon-hunter Solomon Kane are among my favorites, but Howard also wrote gangster stories, boxing stories and westerns.
One of these westerns, “The Vultures of Wahpeton,” has recently been optioned for a movie. After some digging around online I found the whole story and it kept me glued to my computer screen. Like all of Howard’s writing, the words fairly throw sparks off the page (as Stephen King described it), and the men are giants with the reflexes of the deadliest jungle cats. The hero is a man of questionable morals, thrown into a town where anyone could be the enemy. There are double and triple-crosses aplenty, and our hero lives by a code so bizarre we can’t tell just what he’s going to do next.
I know westerns; I’ve read dozens and watched hundreds of hours of western movies and TV shows. More than any other genre I have indulged in westerns. But this story that pre-dates most of my knowledge kept me unsure of my footing every step of the way.
What Howard did in this story, on a level bordering genius, is something I’m not sure of which I’ve ever even scratched the surface. My last two short story attempts have been fairly direct, Point A to Point B affairs. Though in any story we know the good guy is probably going to win, in my stories the characters are so flawless that any dramatic tension just goes slack. And “winning” is so obvious that it’s hard to care when the hero attains his goal. I think of Robert McKee’s maxim: “If the scene’s about what the scene’s about, you’ve got a problem.” I write entire stories like that.
I think this gets into yesterday’s topic of the character driven narrative. The external objective, what the character wants (which is obvious to everyone), should be secondary to what the character needs (which is a mystery to everyone, character and reader alike). This is especially important in the short story, where we become so intimate with the character that we view his world as he does. Only the author can see the big picture [insert sermon illustration here], yet has to maintain the mystery until the very end of the story.
“The Vultures of Wahpeton” has an ending some call bleak. After the climax, as the story was winding down and I was coming to the end, I was about to call it bleak and hopeless myself. Yet in the very last line Howard tips his hand and tells us what the story is really all about. Then it all makes sense, and it’s not bleak at all.
Here's a link to "Vultures"
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0608151.txt | | |
| As already stated, I like my stories with a lot of outward action. The mythic structure I like so well, for whatever reason, seems to play out more clearly in an outward journey. When the hero crosses the threshold of the desert ordinary world to the sub-aquatic special world there’s no missing the change. But when the hero lives with one mindset and is called to consider another perspective, it’s all too easy (for me) to miss the transition.
The popular trend in short stories over the past seventy years or so (though I cannot claim to have read a wide selection of short stories), seems to have been toward the more introspective, character driven narrative. The story should also be filled with rich, poetic descriptions, that themselves offer insight into the character’s inward journey.
I don’t like short stories.
However, if one wants to be published, it’s far easier to get a short story printed (though even that is growing more difficult with the decline of the magazine publishing industry), than to find a publisher interested in a 500 page novel from someone no one has ever heard of. Many a best-selling novelist has gotten his start in short stories, and while the whole world is changing, short stories are still the traditional way of getting into the business.
Until I find that perfect, full time job that will supply all of my financial (and maybe some emotional) needs, I feel that I must use this time of being mostly-unemployed to write. And I figure that means writing things that actually stand a chance of getting published. I’ll be stretched as a storyteller, but any artist should always be straining toward a better mastery of his craft.
So short story, here I come!
(PS: I don’t actually believe that perfect, full time job even exists!)
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| Well, I did not win NaNoWriMo this year. I tell myself that this is okay, that I don’t need to worry about a writing race when I should have a writing lifestyle. I also realized that writing a fantasy novel takes much more prep work than I expected (especially when you have such strong opinions on the rules of magic as I do). I bit off more than I could chew, but I can accept that because I learned so much. I probably learned more this year, when I didn’t win, than I did last year when I breezed through.
Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing more reading than normal, which has also added to my education. Most of you know, I like what some call “mythic structure” to influence (i.e.: dictate) my stories. If you don’t know what that means, just set the story beats of the life of Christ against any episode of The A-Team and you’ll have a pretty good idea. Mythic structure is dependable, familiar and connects with us on a deeply spiritual level (another thought for another time). That’s not to say that mythic structure is the only way to tell a compelling story (there, I just said it—never thought I would), but it’s what I resonate with, where anything else tends to feel like a wandering, unstructured mess.
The mythic structure is the one most commonly used in films, and what I was taught as a screenwriter. Many novels follow it as well, but I’m starting to think that novelists tend to do something vastly different. Mythic structure has many (most say somewhere around 12) little steps, each producing a specific turn in the story. We start in the Ordinary World, there’s a Call to Adventure that leads us into the Special World and so on, leading to a moment where all hope is lost about halfway through, and a great victory at the end.
Whatever the novelist uses, it does not seem to have little steps, but perhaps two big ones. These I would call the Climax and Everything-Leading-Up-To-The-Climax (which, I suppose could be called the Buildup). Just thinking over the last four novels I’ve read, I might catch glimpses of the familiar mythic story beats, but by and large I simply see the author gradually moving his characters into the place where the exciting part happens.
I’m not sure what this means, or if it’s even significant. Maybe some of you will have some thoughts. But I will say this: a novel can work with either structure, whereas a movie cannot. The difference likely lays with the fact that a film must be visual, where a novel lets us into a character’s thoughts. But even of that I’m not sure, or if that is the reason, of why that is.
Ultimately, I think that I find greater freedom in the novel (narrating feels so good after writing a screenplay), but love the timeless structure of the screenplay.
It’s all about the stories.
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| Today saw my highest single-day word count so far this year at over 2,800 words. Given that I need to write 3,334 every day for the next week to be caught up, that’s not terribly exciting. Much of today’s progress, however, is probably owed to having a fellow WriMo sitting across the table from me. Melissa and I are both so far behind in our respective word counts (and there’s nothing respectable about that) that some group momentum/panic/encouragement was definitely needed.
Even if I don’t recover my lost ground and win again this year, I’m still determined to finish my novel. Today I found myself writing “but even at a distance the Dwarfs were terrifying,” and I knew that I had something special.
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