Posts by David Corbett
The actor Louise Fletcher passed away a few weeks ago (September 23rd), and though she had a career spanning over half a century, much of it in television, her signature role, the one for which she is most remembered, is that of Nurse Ratched in Milos Forman’s adaptation of the Ken Kesey novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Why is it that in a wide open field of other notable villains—Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, Francis Dolarhyde (the “Red Dragon”), Tom Ripley, Noah Cross—this gentile, soft-spoken nurse continues to represent a particularly insidious form of evil?
In a Vanity Fair profile written by Michael Shulman in 2018, Ms. Fletcher explained her unique approach to the role and shared some other insights into the making of the film. The article was at least in part prompted by news of an upcoming Netflix series, Ratched, based on the same character (Sarah Paulson serves in the series role),
The TV series purports to tell the story of how the title character came to become such an iconic embodiment of evil—i.e., it focuses entirely on events that took place before those depicted in the novel. That backstory, created entirely by the show’s writers, bears little resemblance to the character in Kesey’s novel.
To be fair, Louise Fletcher’s portrayal also differed significantly from how the character was presented in the novel, but the difference between her approach and that provided by the TV series is striking.
The TV series portrays Nurse Ratched as diabolically evil by nature—malformed by childhood trauma, hardened during service as a nurse in the Pacific theater during WW2, and progressively more unhinged as the series progresses—with the ultimate effect that of a meticulously crafted mask concealing the soul of a self-aware monster. (The TV series makes little attempt to restrain its over-the-top inclinations, to the point it often approaches grand guignol. Its showrunner, Ryan Murphy, lists American Horror Story and The Jeffrey Dahmer Story among his credits.)
The film, on the other hand, sought to temper the more exaggerated elements of the novel. Forman, a veteran of the Prague Spring and an important figure in the Czech New Wave, escaped Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion in 1968, saw in the novel an analogy to his own experience under totalitarianism. (Kesey wrote the novel as a critique of U.S. conformity in the aftermath of WW2.) With respect to the character in question, Forman said, “The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched.”
Ms. Fletcher took a slightly different approach. Consumed by the Watergate hearings, she saw in Nurse Ratched a reflection of Nixon’s abuse of power, but both she and Forman knew playing the character as an idea wouldn’t work, just as they agreed the portrayal in the novel was cartoonish—in Ms. Fletcher’s words, “she’s got smoke coming out of her ears.” Instead, she focused on a simple human observation: Nurse Ratched is convinced she’s right.
She thought back to her childhood in Alabama and “the paternalistic way that people treat other people there … White people actually felt that the life they were creating was good for black people.” She saw how that dynamic translated to Nurse Ratched and the patients under her care. “They’re in this ward, she’s looking out for them, and they have […]
Read More
In a recent email from author Emily Kimelman, she laid out a whole new model for self-publishing that I found especially intriguing, and I thought the Writer Unboxed community would as well.
Emily is the best-selling author of two series—the Sydney Rye mysteries and the Starstruck thrillers—as well as the Kiss Chronicles urban fantasy series under the name Emily Reed. Spending her early years in the Soviet Union (her father was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Enquirer), she caught the wanderlust bug at a young age and has traveled the world from Mongolia to Costa Rica to Spain and beyond, and she often bases her books on her experiences abroad.
(Personal note: Emily is also my wife’s best friend, and they’ve been “sisters from different misters” since they met at age twelve while attending The Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.)
I recently invited Emily to share her publishing experiences and her unique new venture with our readers.
Why did you originally decide to self-publish?
In 2005, I was in my twenties and coming up with my life plan.
I wanted to write mystery novels because I enjoyed reading them, and writing them seemed like the most fun way to make a living.
I researched how to support myself as an author and decided I’d write a stunningly good book, get an agent, then a publisher. Then they’d take it from there while I wrote in cafes around the world with my dog sleeping peacefully at my feet and my fingers clacking away on my keyboard.
I did write a stunningly good book (it took 5 years), and I did get an agent …but the rest didn’t fall into place until I became my own publisher.
I’m entrepreneurial by nature and watched the self-publishing market emerge from a shameful little corner of the internet into a powerful force traditional publishers were ignoring. So in 2011, when my agent still hadn’t sold my book, I figured I had nothing to lose by going indie.
How have you monetized your books – in particular, share with our readers “how it works” with Amazon.
Retailers like Amazon pay between 30-70% royalties depending on the cover price.
While self-publishing gives authors more control and higher royalties than traditional publishing, retailers don’t share any data—like who bought your books. You’re basically a wholesaler who is allowed to set the retail price.
Also, Amazon runs ads for other products—and books—on your titles’ pages which makes sending your readers there kind of a gamble—they can easily be distracted before clicking the buy button.
How did this part of your career go?
It went great! And I still sell my books on all major retailers.
The better I became at advertising and promoting myself, the more money I made. But I also started to understand how disadvantaged I was compared to others’ selling digital products online.
When you’re spending multi-five figures on ads, and not getting any data from your traffic, you’re paying to give Amazon a lot of customers.
The first month I grossed six figures and retailers kept 35%, I knew it was time to move toward direct sales.
BookFunnel, a delivery service for ebooks that indie authors use to send out ARC copies and reader magnets, integrated with Shopify and other sales platforms a few years ago. But until […]
Read More
In Kate Atkinson’s When Will There Be Good News? Joanna Hunter, whose mother, sister, and baby brother were murdered by a lunatic when she was six years old, explains to a police officer why she tells no one about this: “People look at you differently when they know you’ve been through something terrible. It’s the thing about you that they find most interesting.”
Most people, however—and characters—do not harbors secrets out of fear of being “interesting.” On the contrary, what we choose to keep hidden, and why we do so, says a great deal about what we fear, if exposed, will undermine or even destroy our standing among our friends and family, community and peers. That fear may be unreasonable, out of all proportion, but that’s far less important than that it exists—especially for writers.
Secrets provide writers with an intrinsically valuable way of conjuring depth in a character—there is automatically an inside and an outside, what is concealed and what is revealed. And the tension created by the character’s decision to conceal something about themselves provides an immediate dramatic payoff—we can’t help wondering what they’re hiding, why they’re hiding it, and what will happen if the secret is revealed.
Secrets also provide an economical way to depict vulnerability—the very fact a secret is being kept means the character fears being exposed.
That threat—of being exposed or “found out,” and therefore ostracized or abandoned—is one of the key dreads of existence. In a sense, our secrets hint at the isolation we associate with death, and our keeping them hidden is part of the magical thinking we perpetuate as part of the ritual of life.
The mask we call our ego or persona is crafted on the premise of concealing our fears, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities—our secrets. Instead we display to the world our confident, competent selves—with some allowances for self-effacing humor and sociable humility.
A great deal of modern drama is premised upon the peeling away of the mask concealing our secret selves, and the struggle to summon the courage and honesty to deal with the consequences of being known more authentically, more completely.
It may be that there is no such thing as living without a mask, and that the stripping away of one simply predicates the donning of another. It may be that what I think of as my honest self is really just a different one: slightly less dishonest, defensive, deluded. But it remains true that whatever mask I wear, its purpose isn’t mere concealment; it’s also protection.
Secrecy vs. Repression
Although there is a diagnostic distinction between secrets, which are consciously concealed, and repressed traits or behaviors, from a dramatic perspective they reflect more a difference in degree than kind.
Repression, from a writer’s point of view, is simply what happens when the concealment of a secret has been rendered habitual by years of effort. It’s fear of exposure that makes what’s hidden dramatically interesting, and for both secrets and repressed desires or traits, that fear is fundamentally the same. What’s at stake is our public identity, the person others believe us to be, and all we have built by assuming that role.
Both repressed traits and secrets can be uncovered straightforwardly by exploring the character’s backstory—whether they’ve been buried for a moment or a […]
Read More
The spirit of creation is the spirit of contradiction— the breakthrough of appearances toward an unknown reality. —Jean Cocteau
The Nature and Dramatic Purpose of Contradiction
A contradiction in character is something about a person that piques our interest because it betrays what we expect, given what else we know or observe about him. Like characters who harbor a secret, those exhibiting contradictions instinctively arouse our curiosity, which is why contradiction provides such a useful tool above and beyond considerations of verisimilitude or inventiveness.
In truth, once one trains an eye to seek out contradictions, they can be seen virtually everywhere. They express a seeming paradox of human nature: that people do one thing and exactly the opposite; they’re this but they’re also that. That doesn’t mean everyone lacks integrity or is inauthentic; it means people are intrinsically complex.
Some contradictions are physical, like the bully’s squeaky voice, the ballerina’s chubby knees—or the mother’s “hideous smile of malice” in Paula Fox’s The Widow’s Children, or the old woman’s “intimate menacing voice” in Eudora Welty’s “A Visit of Charity.” Ever notice how much more chilling a threat becomes when spoken in a calm, soft voice? (Think Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, when she tells Billy Babbit she will inform his mother of his sexual dalliance with one of the girls McMurphy snuck into the ward.)
Some seemingly go no deeper than nicknames—the killer in Richard Price’s Clockers named Buddha Hat—or an otherwise unassuming housewife’s suggestive tattoo, as in John Hawkes’s Travesty. And yet even these seemingly inconsequential incongruities raise a suspicion of unexpected complexity, enigma, or depth.
Some contradictions are dispositional: A man is both garrulous but shy, outgoing but suspicious, brutal but childlike. Omar Little from the TV show The Wire isn’t just a shotgun-toting vigilante who lives by robbing drug dealers—asked how he earns his money, he replies, “I rip and run”—he’s also an open homosexual who treats his lovers with startling affection and tenderness.
The ultimate effect of amny such contradictions is that we never know exactly which aspect of the whole personality will assert itself in any given situation. This in turn creates tension almost every time that character appears in a scene. (Caveat: When Omar is carrying his shotgun, we’re pretty sure he’s not out looking for love.)
Some contradictions are behavioral: We feel divided— optimistic and yet wary, accepting and yet guarded. We’re both generous with family and friends but fearful of strangers, apologetic to our superiors, and resentful of our inferiors (or vice versa). Such contradictions routinely speak of a tension between whom we trust and whom we fear—and why. Whatever their cause, they remind an observer that what she sees in any given situation is not the whole story.
Beyond purposes of verisimilitude, contradictions serve two key dramatic purposes:
Contradictions can be used as foreshadowing. In the opening pages of Raymond Chandler’s The Long […]
Read More
One of the most useful insights I took away from Steven James’s excellent Story Trumps Structure is his strategy of breaking down the main character’s overall arc into three distinct struggle threads:
Interpersonal relationships also provide an excellent means for:
At some point as you’re planning or reworking your story, you should take a moment to analyze which level of dramatic action you intend to emphasize: External, Internal, or Interpersonal. This is because the various levels of dramatic action reveal different aspects of character, and elicit different responses from readers and audiences:
However, none of these levels of dramatic action act independently of the others in truly compelling fiction.
This point was driven home repeatedly by Steven in his book. I took the baton from there in The Compass of Character and developed a specific methodology for creating and developing that interdependence.
Interweaving Struggle Levels
Whenever more than one struggle level exists, you should try to weave them together so that solving a problem on one level has material repercussions on the other. A satisfying conclusion to the story usually requires the integrated resolution of all the levels of dramatic action in the story—unless the point is to show how success on one level makes success on the other(s) elusive or impossible. Even then, however, the interconnection among the struggle levels will make this ambivalent ending more poignant.
If the struggle threads merely run parallel—going along at the same time but not affecting or influencing one another—they will likely feel disconnected, and possibly undermine one another. Worse, they may come to feel gratuitous, and test the reader’s or audience’s patience.
A classic example is the attempt to “humanize” a detective by giving him family problems that have no impact whatsoever on the crime he’s trying to solve, or dragooning a wife or daughter into the role of hostage to raise the stakes in a way that feels contrived.
Using Intrinsic Longings to Interweave Struggle Levels
The natural interweave among levels of dramatic action can be seen more clearly by gaining a better understanding of the underlying motivations typical of each kind of struggle.
Each level of dramatic action speaks to a specific set of inner. The following […]
Read More
At some point in your career you may get asked to participate in a story anthology with other authors. If the collection is clearly linked to the themes, style, and subject matter of your own work, a “yes” response is often simple. But on other occasions the premise of the anthology may seem so far removed to your customary niche, and you may wonder if you can contribute meaningfully, or it’s worth your while to try.
I was recently asked to participate in a nonfiction anthology about voter suppression and intimidation. (It’s the third in a series titled Low Down Dirty Vote; the specific focus of this collection, which comes out this Sunday, is The Color of My Vote.) All of the solicited contributors were from the crime-mystery genre, for reasons the anthology’s editor, Mysti Berry, explains below. But the issue for the sake of this post concerns how each of the contributors adapted the themes and techniques of that chosen genre to something seemingly far removed from the world of murder, banks heists, and kidnappings.
Mysti Berry, the editor of all three volumes of Low Down Dirty Vote, explained her reasoning this way:
“Raising money for a good cause is a time-honored tradition, from bake sales for schools to begging text messages from our elected representatives. But I’ll admit, donating to the cause of fighting voter suppression via crime stories is not the most obvious of choices.
Indeed, when I approached the writers I knew best to ask for a story for Volume I of Low Down Dirty Vote, a common response was, “Oh, I love that cause—but I’ve got nothing. It’s kind of weird, you know?”
Indeed, in the early days of the 21st century crime writers were strongly encouraged to leave politics in the subtext. That changed dramatically, however, in the past few years.
Crime writers spend their working lives studying the difference between who we say (and believe) we are, and who we really are; what we really do when we think no one is looking. Crime writers know a con when we see one. And we know what happens when you let corruption fester.
But how can we talk about this when we’re supposed to “keep politics out of it?” I came to believe that there is a profound difference between policy disputes (what we used to call politics) and basic civil rights and human rights. Policy disputes are best left for a time and place when all parties agree that they want to “talk politics.” But defense of every citizen’s basic civil rights and human rights for everyone is a task we should embrace and insist upon—loudly.
Luckily for the anthologies, quite a few crime writers agree.
When I asked certain writers for a story for Volume I, it was because I knew them as good and decent human beings, and I assumed that they either already knew more than me about voter suppression or, like me, events of the day were catching them up fast.
I’m very shy and especially phobic about asking people for favors, so I asked people who would either say yes or be very nice about saying no. I shouldn’t have been worried, though—crime […]
Read More
When last we left our intrepid heroine (for those who forget and dare to refresh their recollection, go gently here and here), my current work in progress, aka the Mighty Manuscript (henceforth MM), was invigorated, refreshed and renewed by shedding over 22,000 needless, flabby words. She now stood tall—a lean, mean, once-upon-a-time machine—and was ready to …
…be read by a second editor, to determine whether MM’s sleek new frame was indeed as healthy as hoped or, on the contrary, suffering now from narrative enervation from having so suddenly lost so much heft.
As noted before, I’d hired Zoe Quinton as my editor for the first several rounds, and she was encouraging, though she also agreed that, having read MM in two previous incarnations she would likely read it this third time with those two previous versions unconsciously in mind. So I turned to editor extraordinaire Ellen Clair Lamb for “a fresh set of eyes” (ghastly metaphor).
To be brief (sensing a theme here?), though she made a number of excellent suggestions, it’s her remarks about the opening section—a prologue, though neither of us called it that (more on that to come)—that I’ll address here.
Now, given that this section was the first the reader would encounter, I suffered over it. Clair was unequivocal: cut it. Not out of any prejudice against the dreaded prologue. But before I relate her concerns, allow me to share the now slaughtered darling in its brief (that word again) entirety so you may share the sense of coming upon it without preconception:
Réamhrá
I do not consider death a tragedy, any more than I regard life a triumph. Life gets lived, then it doesn’t—there’s the miracle, if you find yourself in need of one.
Then again, if it’s the miraculous you’re wanting, allow me to introduce Georgina Laoise O’Halloran.
The surname means “stranger,” and her people come from the Monserrat Irish, banished to the Caribbean as indentured servants when Cromwell drove them off the land.
The middle name, pronounced lee-sha, means radiant. And make no mistake, for all her darkness, there’s a burning flame within that girl only the blind could miss.
Yes, I know, how slight and sentimental—a story of love, while the wolf devours the world. And not some grand triumphal romance, neither. Just poor, mad Georgie. And me. The faithless ingrate. What pair could mean less in the grand, rapacious scheme?
And yet, if not love, what? Power, vengeance, wealth, fame—pursue them if you wish. Feed the illusion. I find them lacking overall, gaudy recompense for the job of survival, a ploy to stand out at the funeral.
A wise old dodger once told me that the true test of greatness lies in thinking and feeling deeply about simple things. Well, for as many lifetimes as it requires, it will be my grateful fate, my mission, to think and feel deeply about Georgie O’Halloran’s simple, fragile, incandescent soul. To defend her, sing for her, stand by her side.
Yes, of course, all well and good—I hear you say—but can you save her?
From her enemies. From herself. From you.
[Note: Réamhrá is Irish for “the […]
Read More
Last month (“Explanation vs. Fascination—And a Woman in the Corner Opposite“) we explored how to use moments of helplessness to “look behind the curtain” of your characters. The context of that exploration was the need to make our characters fascinating by resisting the temptation to explain them.
But simply exploring moments in the past won’t by itself overcome the temptation to narrate those events in some form of flashback or backstory reveal. We need to take our exploration a step further by showing how those moments generate behavior.
Before we begin, though, take a moment to reflect on how you yourself deal with stress or conflict.
The psychologist Anna Freud referred to such patterns of behavior with the technical terms adaptations or defense mechanisms.
The novelist Elizabeth George (in her fiction guide Write Away) refers to this type of pattern of behavior the Pathological Maneuver. Personally, I love that term, not just because it’s more colorful. It reveals the fundamentally maladaptive nature of the behavior in question.
The maneuver is pathological because it demonstrates how the person is not dealing with the underlying emotion prompted by their experience of stress, conflict, judgment, and so on. And the episodes of helplessness we explored last week, especially those linked to fear, shame, guilt, betrayal, or loss are precisely moments characterized by stress, conflict, and judgment.
To see how such episodes generate habitual behavior—specifically, here, Pathological Maneuvers—consider these examples:
Read More
Where do our desires come from? Put differently, how much control do we exert over what we want?
This question has been haunting me lately, not just in my own life but in the lives of my characters.
We’re so often told that the principle question to pose in the depiction of a character, is: What does she want? All well and good. But it’s in answering the follow-up question—Why that and not something else?—that a great many characters flatten out, reduced to a small, simplistic, reductionist set of circumstances, often grounded in the past, that “explain” them.
The more I’ve thought about this, the less satisfying that approach has seemed to me. Our hope is to create characters who are fascinating. But fascination and explanation don’t mix well. Even if the explanation is surprising, paradoxical, shocking, unless it suggests there is “more to explain,” it likely will soon lose that ineffable quality that intrigues us.
Take a moment to observe your own thoughts—the Stream of Consciousness as it is typically and somewhat flatteringly referred to. (I prefer to call if the Firehouse of WTF?) Although I recognize these thoughts as my own—if not, hoo boy—why do they arise in the manner and at the time they do? Whose hand stirs the cauldron where they simmer and bubble up?
Ask the same questions of our desires. Consider, for example, who steals our heart—and who doesn’t. My life changed when a therapist suggested I seek relationships with women more resembling my dad in temperament than my mom. (Long story, I won’t bore you, but the point is that before this revelation I was, to put it mildly, choosing unwisely.) So is my idea of who is capable of loving and worthy of being loved grounded solely in the impression my father had on me? unlikely. But if not, who or what created the complex combination of factors that melded into The One?
I’m reminded of something Jim Harrison wrote in The Man Who Gave Up His Name to the effect that any reasonably intelligent person has reflected on the role of chance in meeting the person we fall in love with. But it’s not purely accident, or we’d be capable of loving anyone who happens by.
At every step of this process, taking a step back to ask the next question or round of questions, we encounter a curtain, and pulling back that curtain sooner or later leads us to another. Is there a final curtain, behind which lies the bedrock of our character? If you believe in an individual essence or a genuine self, your answer is likely yes. But the seemingly bottomless reservoir of personal accounts and fictional stories premised on the difficulty of finding oneself suggest that even if I possess an essence it’s not within easy reacy.
But if I lack such an essence, if the Real Me doesn’t lie buried somewhere deep within, how is it possible to answer the question: Who am I? Is the answer always provisional? (“Based on the latest data …”) Is it perhaps instead the case that we create our personas bit by bit as experience offers opportunities and shuts down others? But if that’s true, why do some choices feel wrong—”out of character?” Perhaps we’re constantly working both […]
Read More
Not one person in a hundred knows how to be silent and listen, no, nor even to conceive what such a thing means. Yet, only then can you detect, beyond the fatuous clamour, the silence of which the universe is made. —Samuel Beckett
In her December post (“The Hidden—But Crucial—Mad Skill”) Kathryn Craft discussed holding fast to the creative spirit despite the overwhelming difficulties and constant, even essential disappointment one endures in its pursuit.
In particular, she provided a quote from Martha Graham that has continued to slosh around inside my head ever since:
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.
In my own November post (“Why I Am Not Writing”), I noted some of the difficulties I was having getting back into the daily habits required of a novelist. I won’t revisit those here, but in the interim I’ve managed to get back to my desk, only to discover an entirely different difficulty, one I can’t help but imagine I share with a great many of you.
I’m speaking of distraction. After five years of daily dread and doomscrolling, scratching the FOMO itch (Fear Of Missing Out) by constantly checking the news, I’ve found that I’ve developed the very bad habit of letting my attention swing like a weather vane with every stray thought.
This has only become more evident as I’ve tried to focus on writing. Joyce Carol Oates considers interruption a writer’s greatest nemesis. How unsettling, in my case, to realize the enemy lies within.
Following the advice of the Israeli historian-philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, I’ve returned to meditation, hoping to get a grip on this. But as anyone who meditates knows, it ain’t as easy as it looks.
There is quite possibly nothing more difficult for a flibbertigibbet like me than to sit still. Even when I do, it’s not as though tranquility magically descends. The Buddhists have a saying: the mind is a monkey. My mind is a whole forest full of them, chattering away in the trees.
Once, when we were in the car together, my late wife remarked that she could literally hear me thinking. “You have a very noisy brain.”
The constant flux of mental floaters we think of as consciousness—our thoughts, our worries, our plans, our fears—distracts from the deeper awareness Samuel Beckett talks about in the quote that opens this post, an awareness that requires silence. To be creative, ironically, being […]
Read More
I realize this blog typically concerns itself with the “craft and business” of fiction, but I want to address instead something we seem to discuss too little.
I wrote this post before reading Wednesday’s superb piece by Kathleen McCleary, “Stories Will Save You,” in which she discussed how fiction can offer meaning and insight. Here I too discuss the value of fiction, but from a slightly different perspective: the pleasure of reading.
I grew up in Ohio, and December days were overcast, the nights were long, and snow often covered the ground. Going outside was fun for a while but so was coming back inside where it was cozy and warm—hygge, as they say in Norway—the perfect environment for reading.
“Curling up with a good book” was something that, for me, defined the winter months (and made them a bit more bearable). I remember immersing myself in Great Expectations and Pride and Prejudice and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The House of the Seven Gables and Jane Eyre and Moby Dick, all those thick 19th-century marvels few of us return too—sadly, in my opinion—except in their cinematic versions. Though they didn’t form the groundwork of my love of reading, they expanded it, deepened it.
Those were days when my obligations were largely limited to schoolwork and chores, so I had the necessary time on my hands to disappear for hours on end into a fictive world. I know few of us have that luxury anymore, so I’ll keep this brief: Let’s all share the title of a book (or two) we’ve read recently that brought us pleasure, that reminded us of what a delight a truly great book can be.
For me, I’m absolutely loving China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, set in the most imaginatively realized and stunningly original fantasy world I’ve ever encountered—think Dickens meets Steampunk with an ample serving of “thaumaturgy” (magic) and creatures both monstrous and touchingly human—written by a novelist who also wrote Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (among other things).
What about you? What have you read recently or are reading now that has once again reacquainted you with the sheer joy of reading?
Read More
I’m reading instead.
I’ll take your questions now. (Joke.)
Actually, that opening answer is very much true, for reasons I’ll discuss below, but it’s not the whole picture.
It’s also not the case that I’ve stopped writing entirely. I just turned in a story I was asked to provide for an anthology benefitting Democracy Docket, the organization run by Marc Elias fighting against the multiple voter restriction and suppression laws springing up all over the country. The anthology is the third in a series, Low Down Dirty Vote Vol. III, and my story is titled “An Incident at the Cultural Frontier,” based on my own experiences and concerns serving as a poll worker in my hometown, a liberal mixed-ethnic enclave in an otherwise overwhelmingly monocultural conservative county. Given the editor’s response to my submission—“You wrote the HELL out of that story”—I don’t believe my writing skills have atrophied in any significant way.
But I had hit a wall in the novel I’m working on. I’d managed approximately 150 pages and just felt adrift, not solely because of the work itse
The novel is the second in a series, and my attempts to find an agent for the first book have so far been unsuccessful. My editor, Zoe Quinton, is taking but another look at the manuscript to see if anything jumps out at her as being a red flag, but I’m increasingly inclined to believe it’s not the book that’s the problem. It’s me.
At a recent Craftfest luncheon (Craftfest is the teaching adjunct to Thrillerfest), an editor for a major publishing house remarked, “We don’t invest in books. We invest in writers.” He meant that publishers typically do not consider a book as a one-shot deal, but expect its author to deliver at least five books with increasing sales numbers book to book. If sales don’t rise, the writer is let go, and the process repeats with another pigeon—ahem, writer—for there is never a dearth of aspiring authors desperate to be published.
At the beginning of my career, I was one such writer. I had some notable success early and was even considered a rising star by my publisher, with the caveat, “David’s not for everyone.” (If they’d slathered that across the cover of my books, they would have sold better. But I digress.)
Be that as it may, after my sales failed to increase through the fourth book, I was let go. I’ve been wandering the publishing wilderness ever since, and the poor showing of my last novel, despite a prize nomination, most likely nailed the proverbial coffin shut.
I felt bad about this for some time but have finally come around to regard it instead as liberating. I continue to write if only to ensure that, as a teacher, I do not lose touch with the process, because I believe I owe that to my students. I need to be able to identify with their struggles and the best way to do that is to share them.
But it may be that I am one of those “pre-published” authors who goes the route of self-publishing, not to become rich or famous but to provide readers who have enjoyed my work a chance to read more of it. The numbers may not be impressive to a publishing house, […]
Read More
I thought that if I were broken enough
I would see the light
—Robert Creeley, “The Revelation”
In the vast majority of stories, characters pursue what they legitimately believe is in their own best interest. They misunderstand what that is, pursuing the right thing for the wrong reasons, the wrong thing for the right reasons, etc., but they don’t start off believing their goals are misdirected.
The story offers a learning experience: the character either learns the price of pursuing the right thing, suffers an awakening as to how they are mistaken, or steadfastly resists whatever lesson is at hand and blunders ahead.
In the overwhelming majority of such stories, regardless of how clearly they understand what they want or why, the characters hope to succeed.
But in a small but fascinating subset of stories, the character hopes in some way to fail—and suffer in the bargain.
In some cases, an explicit and an implicit longing are in conflict. Through most of the story, the character demonstrates an intense investment in his explicit goal, which is typically some form of immoral, antisocial, or asocial enterprise, while the implicit longing is to be caught, stopped, exposed.
This conflict represents a submerged battle for authenticity. The character suffers an internal struggle between what he believes he knows about himself and what he wishes he could believe.
But it also represents a buried longing to return to the human circle. Rejection of the phony, corrupt, self-serving, or deluded conditions of society may have prompted the immoral or antisocial behavior the character has pursued, but there remains a desire not just to be honest with oneself but with others—among others, if possible.
These are not easy stories to read—or write:
To stage such stories dramatically, one often needs to anchor the main character’s choices—the comfortable lie, the terrible truth—in other characters. Otherwise the narrative can bog down in tedious soul-searching that will have all the appeal of chewing razor blades.
A few examples hopefully will bring the point home.
Read More
A little less than a year ago I wrote a post here at Writer Unboxed on Black Comedy as a form, hoping to clarify the definitional ambiguities that often blur the lines between it and satire, farce, and anything else deemed “darkly comic.”
Today I want to move that conversation along a bit and ask a question that’s been nagging at me for some years: Will there ever be an iconic Black Comedy for the war on terror? Is such a thing desirable, let alone possible?
To consider the problem, let’s revisit one of the most improbably successful Black Comedies of all time:
The Soviet ambassador has just informed the American president and his advisors that their inadvertent attack on his country will trigger a worldwide nuclear holocaust due to the irrevocable effects of a Communist Doomsday Machine: a series of buried nuclear devices controlled by computer and scattered around the world, each jacketed with a deadly radioactive contaminant known as “Cobalt-Thorium G.”
One of the president’s advisors, a former Nazi—Peter Sellers reportedly based his portrayal partly on both Werner von Braun and the young Henry Kissinger—confronts the Russian ambassador on the obvious point that deterrence requires disclosure:
Strangelove
Yes, but the… whole point of the doomsday machine… is lost… if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?
De Sadeski
It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises.
This exchange from Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, in addition to several others in the film, reveals the script’s core comic premise: the chasm that exists in an era of nuclear holocaust between the mundane, petty, foolish nature of human motives set against the potentially cataclysmic consequences of our actions.
It’s hardly a new idea. The lampooning of human pretense and pomposity goes back at least as far as Aristophanes, and forms one of the central conceits of comedy. It dovetails with the observation that laughter provides a safe release for the constant if unconscious anxiety we feel due to existential dread and societal shame. Our pretensions are masks we wear to rise above, or at least deny, our fears. Comedy pulls away the mask so that, at least for a moment, the sources of that dread and shame can be revealed, addressed, confronted.
The trick, to the extent there is one, is to walk that fine line between addressing the sources of our fears and merely stripping them bare. The reason many horror films devolve into inadvertent self-parodies can be traced to a mishandling of this tipping point between sympathetic revelation and naked exposure.
It is, admittedly, a difficult line to walk, a fact made all the more apparent when one returns to the comic premise of Dr. Strangelove, the potentially disastrous gap between human desires and their consequences, and considers it in the context of the War on Terror. It’s a clearly relevant question—but does that justify any approach to an answer?
A few randomly selected incidents to drive the point home:
Read More
