Center Code: A Rebuttal from Les Edgerton

Pain is weakness leaving the body. 

A little while back, I posted up an idea I have about writing in the present tense. I asked Les Edgerton, a man with far more experience than I, for his opinion about it. He graciously took the time and trouble to give it. When I received his rebuttal, it took me about an hour to realize that this is the criticism I have been looking for, and for quite a while now.

See, my perspective on failures and shortcomings is that they can be far more instructive than whatever pleases the ego or makes us comfortable. Therefore I have asked Les if I can publish his rebuttal to my blog unfiltered and in its entirety. He gave me the go-ahead. Next Wednesday I'll post up my own thoughts in an effort to try to explain myself a little more clearly on Center Code. But for now, enjoy an inside look at how real editing and real critique is done. And once again, thanks Les. The rebuttal follows; Les's comments in bold.

First, I’d like to commend Chris on his motivation for promoting present tense. Most of the writers I encounter who try present tense are younger or newer writers, who choose to employ it in an effort to look “original.” Which never, ever works. Because… it’s not original. It mostly comes across as a stylistic attempt to appear different. Same motivation as the young coed who writes poetry sans capitals (ala e.e. cummings), or writing fiction with space breaks between each paragraph (ala Lonnie Moore), or any number of other stylistic aberrations which they believe marks them as original but only serve to make them stand out as derivative.

Chris’ motives are much purer—he sees past tense (and past perfect tense) as being impediments to the fictive dream. Very commendable. Alas, I see a number of problems with his thesis.

Which I’ll address in Chris’ article itself…

Center Code: A New(ish) System of Writing

By Chris White

First of all, I know I'm not the first guy who's tried this. But I’m trying to develop a new(ish) style of writing I’m calling Center Code. Really, it's just a new way of looking at writing in the present tense. Center means—well that bit is obvious, but code in this sense has to do with writing; an orderly system of rules; a book. With the concept of Center Code, I’m looking at the events of a story on a timeline that moves from left to right. The fictional past (left), fictional future (right), and fictional present (center) in Center Code are more distinct than in traditional writing and therefore easier both to read and to write, without the author having to use so many words in the story to explain everything.

So allow me to go ahead and use lots of words to explain how it works. Past perfect is clunky. Yes it is. Which is why, about forty years ago, writers learned that when going into a flashback, the first sentence began in past perfect… and then immediately segued into past tense. That offended old-time English teachers, but it worked to deliver the reader to simple past tense, which is ingested by readers as the “present tense” of a story. The only ones who write flashbacks entirely in past perfect tense are writers who haven’t kept up with conventions, or, old-time English teachers… That’s kinda what started all this, in my head. I’ve done some editing lately, some collaborating, some writing of my own, and I noticed that lots of us are using this tool called the flashback when we tell our stories. Except, in the vast majority of quality stories, flashbacks aren’t used much at all these days. For my own students, I suggest that one flashback per novel is allowed in the first draft… to be removed from the final draft. When encountering many flashbacks in a novel these days, it suggests a newer writer, and one who hasn’t learned that backstory isn’t important most of the time, and if it is, it can be delivered in a much better way than stopping the narrative to go there. Flashbacks are mostly (mostly, which doesn’t mean always, but means mostly…) archaic components of contemporary novels, written primarily by tyros and writers who eventually end up self-published. If you haven’t seen LOST, you might have to wrack your brain to get what I’m talking about, but suffice it to say that there are certain signals a storyteller needs to give the audience when a flashback is happening, otherwise chaos overtakes all of us and we drown in a sea of useless words. The “signals” that we used to use were the space break and the first sentence of the flashback written in past perfect tense, going immediately thereafter to simple past tense. I say “used to use” because that’s changed in the past few years, although it’s still accepted, more among brand name authors than newer ones.  I want to be able to write in flashback, or even to be able to show the past on the storyline much more clearly. Center Code allows this, and makes the solution elegant and sensible.

However, there is a contemporary technique that provides the writer a seamless way to segue into the past that doesn’t even create a blink. It avoids all the problems Chris refers to. A great example is in Gerald Donovan’s novel, Sunless. It begins with the protagonist at the age of five and creates (in past tense) the inciting incident that creates the story problem, up until page 27 when, with on simple sentence the reader is effortlessly transported into the “present” of the story when he’s in his twenties. The sentence is brilliant. It reads: A year and then twelve years passed like a bandage.And, voila! we are immediately transported thirteen years from the past into the present of the story. No space break, no past perfect tense sentence to signal a departure from the time previously on the page. Repeat: Not a past perfect sentence in sight. An absolutely seamless transition into the present of the story and both the narrative preceding this and then after this sentence, is all couched in the present of the story.

What Donovan does in his novel is precisely what I think Chris is attempting to do with his Center Code theory. The good news is, it’s already been done and much easier than inventing an entirely new structure.

It’s easy in film or visual media like television. Usually, in the early days, the camera would zoom in on a character and then the focus would go all fuzzy and dreamlike (as in Casablanca), and then the flashback sequence would start and we would understand that what is happening on the screen actually happened before the first part of the narrative that we saw. The way the LOST folks did it was to use a signature sound, very similar to the sound we heard at the beginning of each show, when the letters did their little fly-in thing. (The Lost technique was film’s method of providing a space break for a signal.)

In the early days of film, directors borrowed most of their techniques from books. The original way to signal a flashback or that we’re going to a new pov or time, was to simply state it, ala the “Meanwhile, back at the ranch…” scrolling across the scene in Caligula script. These days, fiction writers borrow film techniques. Instead of that later technique with the wipe or dissolve (taken from the space break of books) in the Cassablanca example, beginning with Truffaut, film suddenly began using what was called the “jump cut,” which is today considered an archaic term (even though still appearing in some screenplay software) which no selling screenwriter would ever provide in a spec script. Today, almost all scenes are jump cuts and there no longer exists transitions like wipes, dissolves, script scrolling, etc. While film aped prose at first, nowadays prose acquires film techniques which is why Donovan’s technique works—we’ve been “trained” to accept seamless transitions and no longer need signals such space breaks or that horrid first past perfect tense sentence. They’re still used, of course, but they’ll become rarer and rarer as writers begin to learn how contemporary writing works and quit listening to English teachers on things like this. The point is, past perfect sentences used to signal flashbacks or other departures are passé, even if some writers haven’t yet learned so. And, although we’ll continue to see space breaks for perhaps the next ten years, the up-to-date writer won’t be using them. We’ll follow examples like Donovan instead.

It's not so easy in print, especially when so few of us have done very much to move it along. We're still writing basically the same way our forebears did about 150 years ago, about when Charles Dickens was just making it big. I would disagree heartily with this. Nobody writes like Dickens these days. At least, those who get published legitimately don’t. We're still, in other words, like a filmmaker who's using the extreme closeup and soft focus trick to show breaks in the narrative of our stories, and we're behind the times. No filmmaker other than those making direct-to-video or home movies uses those techniques any longer. Even the term “jump cut” is extremely archaic and that ended those dissolves, etc., many decades ago. Now I know this will get me into trouble with the sage and wise among us, but I think—if the written version of media is to stand up to the pressures exerted on it by technology and culture these days—that we writers need to come up with some kind of system of rules for our writing that makes it more interesting, makes it stand out, engages the reader, moves the story along clearly and briskly. We need to develop a system that, by design, translates well into other media too...like the audioBook, for one.

Much like Hemingway found a way to call forth a new style that brought immediacy and purity to his art, I think it’s logical that we today can do more of the same—if we are unbound by the constraint of believing that we have to do things the way they’ve always been done.

One thing that’s always bugged me is how, no matter how awkward, novels are written in two tenses, even three, all at one time—and the way these tenses mix and interact makes little to no sense. I already mentioned the past perfect bit about flashbacks. Past perfect masquerades as the past, making a distinction between it and the past tense, which masquerades as the present in the novel. Still with me? Let’s use some examples. Here’s how lots of novels are written in two tenses at once: The problem with this argument is that no one uses past perfect tense in flashbacks in contemporary fiction. We still see it as the first sentence of a flashback, but that’s over already, even though some haven’t found that out. Therefore, this makes the point moot.

She reflected on how things went down with Sam, last time they saw each other. She had tried to leave, but he hadn’t allowed that. This is simply an example of poorwriting. For starters, the author began the whole thing in the first sentence by “telling” instead of showing, and then repeats the error in the second. This isn’t the level of writing to begin with that Random House is apt to publish. The first sentence blatantly tells the reader she’s going into a flashback and the second isn’t needed. Just… write…. the… scene.

For example, the writer would have been better served by writing (for starters, I’d get rid of passive, “telling” verbs like “reflected.”) Reflected is a particularly odious verb, indicating a person in repose, idly musing over the sermonette of the week. Just not an active verb at all.

            The same thing had happened last time she’d seen Sam.

            “Get your ass back here,” he said. (And then just go on with the flashback. The “had happened” is the only signal needed to let the reader know it’s a flashback.)

See how it starts out in past tense, then switches to past perfect when the flashback is introduced? That bugs me, because, as I’ve said, it’s kinda clunky, awkward, and thick with words that really clog up the narrative. All of that is present because the writer had few skills. Now, to see how novels can be written in three tenses at once, let’s add dialogue:

Bryson was highly neurotic; he hadn’t been the same since his sister had died suddenly all those years ago. “But that’s over,” he told himself. This is a terrible example in several ways. First, colons and semicolons have for a couple of decades been considered archaic punctuation in fiction and are no longer used. They’re too formal for fiction (still used in nonfiction and English classes), but today the em dash is used instead of these. The only people who use colons and semicolons are brand names, and some foreign cultures. Contemporary writers who’ve kept up with today’s usages know better. Then, there’s an adverb used (suddenly) that is the poster child for why most adverbs shouldn’t be used. But, the worst flaw in this is the writer has the character talking out loud to himself! Actually, it kind of proves he’s neurotic, as only lunes talk out loud to themselves. I suspect the writer may have intended this to be a thought, but thoughts are never delivered with quotation marks—only spoken out loud dialog justifies quote marks. Again, this is mostly telling once again (Brian was highly neurotic) Also, another adverb totally unnecessary—“highly.” That’s like saying someone is “highly pregnant.” You either are… or you aren’t. Neuroticism isn’t a condition assigned degrees, as a rule. Also, and more egregious, it’s again the writer telling instead of showing. To be honest, this example just plain sucks and it’s not the past/past-perfect tense that makes it so.

I may as neurotic as Bryson, but it bugs the heck out of me that all the dialogue in any given story is present tense, and everything else is either past or past perfect. I know, I know, I know, it’s always been done that way and who the heck am I to go changing things. I guess I never noticed it either—until I started writing—and needed to generate internal monologue, usually denoted by italics, like this (which brings up yet another flaw with tradition):

I think here Chris defeats his own argument when he says, “I guess I never noticed it either.” Exactly. The whole reason we use past simple tense. The reader never notices it. It’s the entire reason we use simple past tense. THE READER NEVER NOTICES. We all accept it as the “present” tense of the story.

“You’re a fool!” he said, a little too unkindly. And I hate you, he added to himself, which was even more unkind.

Again, an example of poor writing here. This writer seems to love adverbs (too unkindly). While adverbs used with originality can elevate writing, this kind of usage signals a lazy writer who hasn’t yet learned that the dialog should be written to show the reader the intent of the speaker. And, when someone says, “You’re a fool!” (especially with an exclamation point, of which about one should be allowed per novel—in the first draft, and then taken out in the final draft) to tag that with “a little too unkindly” comes across more as humorous than anything. Is this a writer trying to be ironic? And then, the tag to the thought is wordy to a fault. Why not just write, And I hate you, he thought? I’m afraid this writer hasn’t mastered the craft of showing and not telling. He or she is informing every single word spoken. This is a writer who clearly hasn’t learned to trust his audience’s ability to “get it” without his help. As for italics, I always tell my students not to use them for thoughts. While technically okay, they usually don’t work. For one thing, if this is narrative that has a lot of characters’ thoughts, there’s an aesthetic being violated. It just looks like crap on the page when the reader encounters many of them. So long as it’s clear it was a thought, there’s just no need to italicize them at all.

I may be picking at nits here, but that monologue bit is not inside quotations, but it is in present tense—because it’s something the character is saying (unspoken or not). Anyway, all this is to say, if there’s so much inconsistency in our fiction, it sure seems like anything goes, because I can’t really tell what the rules are anymore. How is it sensible at all to write in three tenses at once? Center Code makes a case for writing in one tense at a time, at least most of the time. I think, given how far things have wandered from reason, that we’re overdue for someone to make a stab at generating some new rules.

So here goes. Center Code allows the story to be told from the center, tense-wise. Therefore the entire narrative (depending on where it appears on the timeline) is in the present tense, along with the dialogue. That's handy. It brings everything into sync. Everything that appears in past tense, therefore, can be taken literally as past tense; there’s no need to use past perfect except on rare occasion. Likewise with anything that has yet to happen, a la foreshadowing. But future tense, i.e. He will soon find out, is theoretically rare. Sure, Center Code takes some getting used to, but if you try it, you just may find you like it. All I'm trying to do here is put a name to something that's probably been tried before, but hasn't been well received because of poor packaging or lack of planning. I figure if we at least name it something that is sensible, something that represents clearly the thinking behind the system, we can better understand it, both as writers and as readers.

Center Code allows for a cleaner storyline and makes more sense overall. Plus, if and when the tense changes, the reader is alerted to it quite effectively and naturally, and without any extra explanatory language—i.e., the fuzzy dissolve made infamous by Spaceballs. Flashbacks can be written in simple past tense But, they are, even with writers who aren’t yet aware of Donovan’s example. Nobody writes flashbacks in past perfect tense. Nobody who’s published, except perhaps a hack like Stephanie Myer, writes a flashback in past perfect tense. Hasn’t been done—at least by well-published writers with intelligent editors in about 40 years.  rather than clunky past perfect, and if the story moves back to center, it’s just as obvious that it’s happening without all this heavy-handedness from the writer. Plus there's no weirdness from the coexistence of past tense narrative and present tense dialogue in the same freaking sentence. I know you're chomping at the bit for an example of Center Code in action, so here's an excerpt of something I'm working on:

“What’s it like to die.” It’s not stated as a question.

She looks at K, both intrigued and annoyed. “Nobody really knows, do they?”

“No,” he says. He looks at her, considering things. She’s munching her ice cubes, a habit both attractive and repellent. “I mean,” he continues, “what happens at the moment, say, when a man takes a bullet to the heart? Does he just die instantly, or does he feel the pain?”

“I guess there’s probably some shock.”

“Yeah, but nobody knows that,” he says.

“Sure they do. Lots of people have been shot before.”

“Not in the heart. Not that, and lived to tell about it.”

“There’s a lot of people in the world, K.” She addresses him by his name—the abbreviation a necessity because of its awkwardness. They’ve both agreed to this.

He thinks about it for a moment. “There are a lot of people in the world.” His thoughts churn, touching on the unknowns of death and what it’s like…the actual experience.

Chris, I’m afraid this example is extremely poor. The “author” is all over this. Just highly visible. There are just many, many things wrong about this. For one, who’s pov is this? AT first, it looks like it’s the woman (She looks at K, both intrigued and annoyed.) Giving the internal emotions of a character pretty well tells us this is from her pov. She can possibly deliver her speech showing her annoyance, but there’s nothing here that can show she’s intrigued without telling the reader (from her pov). But then, immediately following that, we read: “No,” he says. He looks at her, considering things.) And now, we’re inside K’s pov. Perhaps the author intended an omniscient pov, but that’s been an unpublishable pov for over half a century. Then we get into unnecessary backstory that completely stalls the read—that lengthy stuff about how they got to just use K for his name, which is completely and unabashedly and unnecessary backstory. This completely takes the reader out of the fictive dream. This example is exactly what Harry Crews speaks of when he talks about his writing theory, to “leave out the parts people skip.” Most readers would skip about all of this, I’m afraid. Almost all of this indicates a writer who hasn’t yet learned to trust the reader’s intelligence.

There was an age when all our stories were epic, and deserving of the term. They were myth and legend, and had happened long ago and in exotic places. It made sense that they were told and retold in the past tense. Ahem, but it makes sense that all stories are told in past tense. Unless the listener or reader is a complete moron, he knows the story already happened. To pretend otherwise is to attempt to manipulate the reader. We know it’s already happened… because it’s been written. To somehow “pretend” it hasn’t already happened doesn’t make any sense. It’s asking the reader to go even further to suspend their disbelief than simple past tense does. Those who feel that present tense makes the read more “immediate” are simply wrong.  I argue that past perfect and its use in modern fiction is a cobbled-together reaction, a field-expedient result of the past tense tradition of epic storytelling having collided with modern literary devices like the flashback, and not some intentional elegant solution conjured up by professors of English somewhere. But, what’s wrong with your thesis here, is that no one uses past perfect tense in publishable novels. It’s only used in those novels that are “only available in their rooms” or are self-published. Not in anything of quality. If a writer is using past perfect in flashbacks or anywhere else, it’s highly unlikely a decent agent or an editor is ever going to take it on. It's not elegant. It's awkward, and doesn't really stand up to the sense test, as I've demonstrated. Increasingly, especially in mainstream fiction, it just doesn’t make sense to stick to the stodgy past tense for the bulk of our narrative. But, the argument is spurious. Nobody uses past perfect tense. Haven’t for eons. Today our stories are hard-hitting, dynamic, happening in the moment, and moving at the speed, quite often, of technology itself. It makes sense to develop a system of writing like Center Code for this reason.

In the present media age, it’s difficult to write in the past tense and still retain a sense of relevance to the now. After all, we don’t live our lives in the past tense—we live in the now. Why shouldn’t our best and brightest stories be told in the same way? Why can’t we read our stories that way? And why not call our happening-now-stories Center Code?

Here’s a post on flashbacks that may be of interest.

http://lesedgertononwriting.blogspot.com/2010/09/writing-flashback-as-scene.html

Chris, I have no idea if the examples given in your article were written by you or taken from somewhere and it’s obvious I’m not a diplomat in any sense of the word, but in case they were yours, I didn’t want others seeing my crits. [These examples are all mine, and again, I obtained Les's permission to publish this critique--CW.] While I understand your frustration with what you view as the “rules” or “norms” of writing, I suspect perhaps you’re not really current with contemporary usages. I get that because many of your examples and criticisms are over things that are no longer existent in contemporary writing, and more reflect writing of an earlier age perhaps. The truth is, almost all that is taught in high schools as far as writers go, is dead wrong, and most of what is taught in college is as well. In fact, when I encounter a young person who wants to be a writer and they ask me what they should major in, I always advise them NOT to major in English or creative writing and to avoid as many literature classes as possible. If they attend those classes and buy into lit professor’s stuff, it’ll ruin ‘em as writers!

The people I’d recommend as models of quality contemporary writing are folks like Ray Carver, Harry Crews, Gerard Donovan, Paul D. Brazill and the like (Chris Ewan gives great examples of how to utilize backstory in his novels) and the only good writer’s how-to books out there (besides mine…) are Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction and Jack Bickham’s Scene & Structure. Most of the others suck or just regurgitate the same stuff, many times giving archaic information.

It’s my nature to be blunt so please forgive me if I offended—it’s never meant as personal.

BTW, as a general rule, I’d avoid flashbacks like the plague! In almost every instance they have a negative effect on a novel and most good editors will turn down most novels who use ‘em. If used, I’d advocate delivering backstory like Callie Khourie does in Thelma & Louise. That is, not until at least 1/3 into the story and not as flashback but brief hints at a backstory. It’s a good exercise to watch this flick and pay attention to Louise’s backstory and how she delivers it. (Her former rape in Texas). Very instructive.

Blue skies,

Les

The Great Heroic Writer

I recently vacationed at the Oregon coast. One of the adult evening discussions briefly centered on the act of writing. I have a dear friend who fancies herself a writer but hates the act of writing. Believe it or not, I understand that completely. Sometimes creativity is hampered by the act of creating.

I had another brief discussion last week, this one online and with someone else; someone who believes they have a great idea for a novel—though it would be their first—and they wanted to run the idea by me. Mainly, though, they were asking me a direct question about how to get started. I told this person, “the great mysterious secret of how a writer starts a book is simply this: Just start.”

It’s the same basic problem in both cases, I think. Both of these writers have everything they need in order to begin to produce their art. They have the desire. Talent. Concept. Even a modicum of skill. All they’re lacking is the action of taking the first step in a direction. Quite frankly any direction will do. It takes many years to know that this is true from experience, but the journey is about the journey, not the destination.

If I have any hope for my fellow writers out there, it’s that they eventually, if they’re not now, become dauntless. It’s a difficult thing, to be sure, writing down in words what eventually becomes some kind of story. It doesn’t matter what kind of story it is, fiction or not. That’s not even the hard part. The hard part is opening up the heart, the place of origin for these stories, to the world at large. Every artist faces down the demon of Criticism at some point. It’s mostly an internal battle, that one. But it’s one worth winning.

How to Properly Submit for Publication

Hello, infidel...Allah is calling...

My best answer to the question? Don’t. It’s just that simple, and I’ve said it before: You don’t need a publisher. Not these days. And not, certainly, for what you’ll get out of making a deal with the Devil, which amounts to about 15% on the high end, and that’s if Beelzebub likes you. Or if you drive a harder bargain than Faust. The purpose of a publisher today, ideally, is to influence submitted works so as to hold the industry to a higher standard. If you’re enough of a self-starter, you’ll hold yourself to a high standard all by your lonesome. You have a greater need for a U.S. Marine Drill Instructor editor than you have for any kind of publisher.

But I suppose I ought to answer the question I posed. What’s the best way to submit your work to a publisher? You don’t want to waste your own time, and if you’re counting on being published by the publisher to whom you’re submitting your work, you sure as hell don’t want to waste his time. So: As the acquisitions guy for a small and innovative publisher, I can tell you I don’t want to have to sit down and attempt to chew my way through a submission (elementary grammar and spelling completely aside) that has been written by someone who hasn’t yet made profound discoveries about himself personally and applied it to his writing. But on with the Obvious Rules.

Obvious Rule #1: Submit according to guidelines. If you can’t be bothered to read half a Web page on how the publisher wants to receive your work for consideration, then why should a publisher be bothered to do anything with your submission but pitch it into the circular file? Usually, publishers ask for Times New Roman 12pt font, double line spacing, and that the work be sent as .doc or .docx files—you know, impossible draconian stuff—but not always. Look at it like a job interview: if you’re incapable of meeting the minimum stated requirements, why even try? Move on to something for which you are qualified.

Obvious Rule #2: Submit edited work, not a rough draft. Okay. Submissions can also be like a first date. You want to show up finely groomed, with a high polish and a pleasant aroma. It boggles the mind that so many authors submit work that lives in a cardboard box and smells like pee. Crude, but the comparison is apt. If you have a good story idea and you know it, but you’re having trouble with spelling and sentence structure because of public school, don’t submit your work until it’s showered and properly dressed.

On a personal note, anything with unicorns or wizards is a non-starter. I’m just sayin’.

Obvious Rule #3: If you find Obvious Rules #’s 1 and 2 too difficult, you’re not a writer and you should make yourself useful in some other industry. If, however, you’re a little hurt but mostly challenged to prove me wrong by fulfilling to the best of your ability Obvious Rules #’s 1 and 2, then congrats. You’re most likely both called and gifted.

Oh, yes. Gifts come from God, just like rights. But just because you might be gifted to be a writer doesn’t also mean it’s your right to be published. And that brings us round to the point: It’s all about perspective. Gifts have a purpose, and that purpose must be fought for in order to come to full bright; in order to fully become what it is. But don’t fight the publisher. This is an internal battle.

Perspective is like a good hard punch in the face. I’ll tell it like this: I recently got a critique of my work that was totally and completely unexpected, like a bolt out of the blue, and it was deliciously blunt. I’ll share more on that in another post, but it’s enough to say that when I received it I realized I’ve been looking for this specific criticism for a couple of years now. I hope you too can experience this…when the time is right for you.

There’s a fine line between faith and presumption, and we cross it at our peril. If we’re gifted for a certain thing in life—and we know it—we must tread carefully away from the sense of entitlement. We’re not owed anything. 

Granny Doris, Joan Jett, and Moi

By the time I woke up on Sunday, granny Doris’ bright red lipstick had vanished from my cheeks. I’m not lying; why would I lie? But I’m getting certain elements of the story ahead of certain others.

I suppose it started with Joan Jett, whose hand I shook in the meet-n-greet, and who, I ended up confessing to my wife after the concert, is my latest crush. I don’t know what it is about petite brunettes, but I find them irresistible: Joan Jett, Audrey Hepburn, Mary Poppins, and of course, my April. Anyway the news of this crush didn’t faze her; inexplicably she doesn’t see Joan Jett, a probably-sixty-something-rocker-chick-who’s-perpetually-on-tour, as a threat. It’s the same for Audrey…who is now dead, and Mary…who is fictional.

But enough with the psychoanalysis.

This is about me meeting the Jett, who is awesome. As was the performance, which, from the front row of a 12,000 member audience, was inspirational. We stopped off to catch the show in Bend, Oregon on our way to the coast for a little time off. Everything was organized by a long lost relative on my wife’s side who has connections—enough connections to get us VIP seating and the like. Sure, there were the usual drunken fools pushing and shoving and sure, I had to employ my body mass to break up a fight at a concert again. I don’t know what it is about me and rock-n-roll concerts lately, but the fights seem to find me, which I find irritating. It was both thrilling and a little scary to literally stay the hand of a drunk/high fool who had cocked his fist in preparation to strike a young girl and tell him, “Get the hell out of here.” Or something like that. It’s not the kind of thrill I look for in my concert-going experiences, though.

The show was awesome, don’t get me wrong. Well, there was the 500 pound woman with a fifty gallon purse next to me who was jumping up and down and “thowin’ up da rock fist” and crashing into me with every pounding beat of the kick drum. Like an idiot I had worn sandals, and I feel like my toes have narrowly come through an Apollo 13 experience intact—there’s no rational reason that I should have ten toes on my feet, but miracles happen every day, do they not?

It was what happened after the show that was, well, a little difficult to explain. There was a BBQ. I remember that. It was good; kebabs. There was a beer, too. Then someone posed the question to me: “Have you ever had a Washington Apple?” Now, I know—I have enough life experience to know—that when someone asks a cocktail-related question like this it’s tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet and one’s choices are limited. Foolishly, I replied in the negative and soon a little Canadian whiskey was in my belly along with the beer. I suppose I became a more entertaining person after that, because then Granny Doris started giving me the eyes, telling me I was cute and that she was going to get the lipstick. There was also a bonfire, a hot tub, a garden hose and a dog, and more beer. Though I don’t remember, say, all the details, I’m pretty sure I wore lipstick for the remainder of the night—two bright red Betty Boop-esque lippy smackers on my cheeks; one set per side. Granny Doris, whoa. 

The Adjustment Bureau

If you want to know how to present the Christian faith in stealth mode, this is it. If you want to know about how to place hope in a package and deliver it to people in writing, study this movie. If you want a lesson in consummate skillful storytelling, look no further. I was blown away.

The Adjustment Bureau is a movie I would have boycotted, because I’ve grown frustrated with Matt Damon’s idiotic political sentiments and I’ve had quite enough of all of that. But it came highly recommended one night when some gents and I were gathered round for cigars and conversation.

Our conversation touched on many topics, but one of them was the paradoxical relationship between predestination and free will. Naturally, in hindsight, talk turned to this movie. I tend to think of movies like a visual story when they’re good, and this one was. And I think that one of the things that makes a story good, visual or not, is that it asks questions and provides some leads for some possible answers, leaving it to the audience to decide the answer—if indeed the question has an answer. Sometimes it doesn’t.

In the case of the questions this movie poses, it’s pretty clear that none of us have the answers. We can speculate, and better yet we can run through various illustrative scenarios, which is stimulating. The basic premise is this: Can a man change God’s mind? And if so…what would it take? Interesting ideas, yes? It’s the stuff of which good stories are made. Foundationally simple yet profound ideas. I love food for thought, and that’s what The Adjustment Bureau is. I recommend it.

Center Code: A New(ish) System of Writing

First of all, I know I'm not the first guy who's tried this. But I’m trying to develop a new(ish) style of writing I’m calling Center Code. Really, it's just a new way of looking at writing in the present tense. Center means—well that bit is obvious, but code in this sense has to do with writing; an orderly system of rules; a book. With the concept of Center Code, I’m looking at the events of a story on a timeline that moves from left to right. The fictional past (left), fictional future (right), and fictional present (center) in Center Code are more distinct than in traditional writing and therefore easier both to read and to write, without the author having to use so many words in the story to explain everything.

So allow me to go ahead and use lots of words to explain how it works. Past perfect is clunky. That’s kinda what started all this, in my head. I’ve done some editing lately, some collaborating, some writing of my own, and I noticed that lots of us are using this tool called the flashback when we tell our stories. If you haven’t seen LOST, you might have to wrack your brain to get what I’m talking about, but suffice it to say that there are certain signals a storyteller needs to give the audience when a flashback is happening, otherwise chaos overtakes all of us and we drown in a sea of useless words. I want to be able to write in flashback, or even to be able to show the past on the storyline much more clearly. Center Code allows this, and makes the solution elegant and sensible.

It’s easy in film or visual media like television. Usually, in the early days, the camera would zoom in on a character and then the focus would go all fuzzy and dreamlike (as in Casablanca), and then the flashback sequence would start and we would understand that what is happening on the screen actually happened before the first part of the narrative that we saw. The way the LOST folks did it was to use a signature sound, very similar to the sound we heard at the beginning of each show, when the letters did their little fly-in thing.

It's not so easy in print, especially when so few of us have done very much to move it along. We're still writing basically the same way our forebears did about 150 years ago, about when Charles Dickens was just making it big. We're still, in other words, like a filmmaker who's using the extreme closeup and soft focus trick to show breaks in the narrative of our stories, and we're behind the times. Now I know this will get me into trouble with the sage and wise among us, but I think—if the written version of media is to stand up to the pressures exerted on it by technology and culture these days—that we writers need to come up with some kind of system of rules for our writing that makes it more interesting, makes it stand out, engages the reader, moves the story along clearly and briskly. We need to develop a system that, by design, translates well into other media too...like the audioBook, for one.

Much like Hemingway found a way to call forth a new style that brought immediacy and purity to his art, I think it’s logical that we today can do more of the same—if we are unbound by the constraint of believing that we have to do things the way they’ve always been done.

One thing that’s always bugged me is how, no matter how awkward, novels are written in two tenses, even three, all at one time—and the way these tenses mix and interact makes little to no sense. I already mentioned the past perfect bit about flashbacks. Past perfect masquerades as the past, making a distinction between it and the past tense, which masquerades as the present in the novel. Still with me? Let’s use some examples. Here’s how lots of novels are written in two tenses at once:

She reflected on how things went down with Sam, last time they saw each other. She had tried to leave, but he hadn’t allowed that.

See how it starts out in past tense, then switches to past perfect when the flashback is introduced? That bugs me, because, as I’ve said, it’s kinda clunky, awkward, and thick with words that really clog up the narrative. Now, to see how novels can be written in three tenses at once, let’s add dialogue:

Bryson was highly neurotic; he hadn’t been the same since his sister had died suddenly all those years ago. “But that’s over,” he told himself.

I may as neurotic as Bryson, but it bugs the heck out of me that all the dialogue in any given story is present tense, and everything else is either past or past perfect. I know, I know, I know, it’s always been done that way and who the heck am I to go changing things. I guess I never noticed it either—until I started writing—and needed to generate internal monologue, usually denoted by italics, like this (which brings up yet another flaw with tradition):

“You’re a fool!” he said, a little too unkindly. And I hate you, he added to himself, which was even more unkind.

I may be picking at nits here, but that monologue bit is not inside quotations, but it is in present tense—because it’s something the character is saying (unspoken or not). Anyway, all this is to say, if there’s so much inconsistency in our fiction, it sure seems like anything goes, because I can’t really tell what the rules are anymore. How is it sensible at all to write in three tenses at once? Center Code makes a case for writing in one tense at a time, at least most of the time. I think, given how far things have wandered from reason, that we’re overdue for someone to make a stab at generating some new rules.

So here goes. Center Code allows the story to be told from the center, tense-wise. Therefore the entire narrative (depending on where it appears on the timeline) is in the present tense, along with the dialogue. That's handy. It brings everything into sync. Everything that appears in past tense, therefore, can be taken literally as past tense; there’s no need to use past perfect except on rare occasion. Likewise with anything that has yet to happen, a la foreshadowing. But future tense, i.e. He will soon find out, is theoretically rare. Sure, Center Code takes some getting used to, but if you try it, you just may find you like it. All I'm trying to do here is put a name to something that's probably been tried before, but hasn't been well received because of poor packaging or lack of planning. I figure if we at least name it something that is sensible, something that represents clearly the thinking behind the system, we can better understand it, both as writers and as readers.

Center Code allows for a cleaner storyline and makes more sense overall. Plus, if and when the tense changes, the reader is alerted to it quite effectively and naturally, and without any extra explanatory language—i.e., the fuzzy dissolve made infamous by Spaceballs. Flashbacks can be written in simple past tense rather than clunky past perfect, and if the story moves back to center, it’s just as obvious that it’s happening without all this heavy-handedness from the writer. Plus there's no weirdness from the coexistence of past tense narrative and present tense dialogue in the same freaking sentence. I know you're chomping at the bit for an example of Center Code in action, so here's an excerpt of something I'm working on:

“What’s it like to die.” It’s not stated as a question.

She looks at K, both intrigued and annoyed. “Nobody really knows, do they?”

“No,” he says. He looks at her, considering things. She’s munching her ice cubes, a habit both attractive and repellent. “I mean,” he continues, “what happens at the moment, say, when a man takes a bullet to the heart? Does he just die instantly, or does he feel the pain?”

“I guess there’s probably some shock.”

“Yeah, but nobody knows that,” he says.

“Sure they do. Lots of people have been shot before.”

“Not in the heart. Not that, and lived to tell about it.”

“There’s a lot of people in the world, K.” She addresses him by his name—the abbreviation a necessity because of its awkwardness. They’ve both agreed to this.

He thinks about it for a moment. “There are a lot of people in the world.” His thoughts churn, touching on the unknowns of death and what it’s like…the actual experience.

There was an age when all our stories were epic, and deserving of the term. They were myth and legend, and had happened long ago and in exotic places. It made sense that they were told and retold in the past tense. I argue that past perfect and its use in modern fiction is a cobbled-together reaction, a field-expedient result of the past tense tradition of epic storytelling having collided with modern literary devices like the flashback, and not some intentional elegant solution conjured up by professors of English somewhere. It's not elegant. It's awkward, and doesn't really stand up to the sense test, as I've demonstrated. Increasingly, especially in mainstream fiction, it just doesn’t make sense to stick to the stodgy past tense for the bulk of our narrative. Today our stories are hard-hitting, dynamic, happening in the moment, and moving at the speed, quite often, of technology itself. It makes sense to develop a system of writing like Center Code for this reason.

In the present media age, it’s difficult to write in the past tense and still retain a sense of relevance to the now. After all, we don’t live our lives in the past tense—we live in the now. Why shouldn’t our best and brightest stories be told in the same way? Why can’t we read our stories that way? And why not call our happening-now-stories Center Code? 

Excerpt from K: phantasmagoria, a novel by Chris White, coming soon.

How to Deal With Inspiration

And you thought Monica Lewinsky was scary...

Oh sure. The life of a writer is all fun and games, a creative laugh riot. Inspiration comes easy, wearing pajamas and carrying a silver platter stacked high with the topic du jour, and all the heroic scribe needs to do is hover above the plate, whereupon something witty and profound will fly to his hand, cheating certain death-by-a-thousand-keystrokes. Yeah, that’s how it works.

No, it doesn’t happen like that. Hence this post. This is why I’m writing about what a bitch it is to write. The muse isn’t just a harsh mistress. Sometimes she’s Hillary Clinton in jackboots and a patent leather negligee, brandishing a large cigar in one hand and a cat o’ nine tails in the other.

But the show must go on. That’s not just some fancy witticism from the halcyon days of Broadway. It’s the truth; and it’s also true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That goes for especially vivid metaphors as well. Me, for instance, writing about…all this…even though I don’t really know what I’m trying to say, is an example of a guy just pressing on. Listen: writers, you’ve got to find a way to push through.

Not every day is a Hello Kitty kind of day. Sometimes you’ll sit to write and you’ll have nothing. But you write anyway. Don’t you. That’s what makes you a professional. If you don’t write through the painful times, the hard times, the times when inspiration isn’t fancy or even wistful but mechanical, peach sherbet-colored and horrid, then you’re just a hobbyist. That, by the way, is how the IRS classifies writers. You’re either making enough money to be a professional, or you’re a hobbyist. But, I argue, such a mindset applies in ways other than the strictly monetary.

In other words, and to use a coaching term, have you got heart? When it gets difficult to go on, and you’re clearly on a plateau physically or even mentally or emotionally, what do you end up doing? Do you throw up your hands and collapse into whatever’s comfortable? Or do you crack your knuckles and grind out 500 words on the laptop just so you can tell it who the junk is running the show around here? It’s cliché, but games are won and lost in the second half—which is also usually the most difficult because your opponent has got you figured out by then.

This week’s random Monday post is for all the writers who’ve got something that’s keeping them from ratcheting up the pressure on that manuscript, telling it what happens next. People who are up against deadlines. Writers who have a lot going on in their personal lives. Creatives who are struggling with all kinds of other work they’d rather not be doing, but work that pays the bills nevertheless. You’d be surprised that it doesn’t take much, though, especially after that initial step.

Look at that. 500 words. Kinda. It may not be pretty, but it’s on the f&^%!@n’ page. And that means Hillary can get the hell out now. But she’d better leave my damn pantsuit; I paid twenty dollars for that, and I ain't just giving stuff away for nothing around here.