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.

The Marketing Plan

Prepare to be dazzled and intimidated by my technical prowess; aided and abetted by decades of hard-won experience in the trenches of the business community, where I applied the Sun Tzu principles of zheng and qi to vanquish my white-collar foes with extreme prejudice, trampling upon the headstones of any competitive enterprise in cold fury.

Or not.

I don’t know much, but I know I love you. And that’s why I’m writing this. And also just to try to get that fetchingly irritating pop ditty in your head for the next hour or so. I am, contrary to Google’s company ethos, sometimes evil.

Look, it’s simple. A marketing plan is just a statement, a road map, if you will, of how you plan to bring your competitive product or service to market in a way that will benefit you, the evil mastermind, the most. After all, that’s what capitalism is. And it’s one of the most important documents you can have in your portfolio, along with your business plan. You do have one of those, too, right?

A good marketing plan is going to state a few things: descriptions of your target market, competitors, and the product or service you offer; an outline of your marketing budget and pricing strategy; and analyses of your sales, market share, expenses, and company financials. It will also document what history your enterprise has racked up, i.e., what’s already been tried and what worked and what failed. Most importantly, it should articulate what strategy you may have going forward.

Last week I wrote a wee bit on the publishing industry and gave you my take on where I think it’s headed by emphasizing certain areas of opportunity for the indie writer. A good indie writer ideally is able to be a one-man operation when necessary, but he is always surrounded by top-notch people who advise him, and whom he advises in turn. You can’t do this alone, in other words.

I can’t overemphasize the importance of technology, folks. eBooks are pushing writers and the industry that surrounds our activities like nothing since the printing press. Seriously. Be sure, when you write up your plan, that you account for eBooks. I’m not going to be too specific here, but when it comes to sound business, a good businessman looks for ways to lower his costs—called overhead—however he can. Well, if an indie author goes to print, more than likely he’s going to go POD or print on demand because he’s only printing what he’s already sold. And while that may sound like a great idea, for most authors out there it’s simply too expensive, and most of you are doing it backwards. Unless you’re in a niche market like cookbooks or glossy coffee table full color photography hardbacks, you might want to consider eschewing print altogether. I’ll say it like this: I believe, in the next couple of years, eBooks will become the new standard for mass market fiction. eReaders will be even cheaper and better, the free market will sort out the chaff, and Borders will be out of business. Oops. Looks like they’re already having trouble.

I’m over my limit here. Writers, Google is your friend (even though they're evil most of the time): search the terms of this blog and you’ll find more than you need to write up a solid marketing plan. Have an advisor look it over; even your local banker. Why not? Anyway, if a writer can write “tightly wound plots” and “compelling twists,” and is having trouble coming up with a marketing plan, I don’t offer him much hope for success. Just sayin’.

The Boise Music Fest

Before we get started, for full disclosure: I love Rock n’ Roll. (And I also love Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, who were the best part of the day Saturday). I even used to be a drummer, and on more than one occasion, and in more than one local band. I have played on the stage at what used to be the Big Easy here in Boise. So I know a little about the local music scene. That’s what I believe lends credibility to what follows.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that people, who are sometimes stupid, get even worse when one adds alcohol. And the crowd dynamic. When the Idaho Statesman reported that the Boise Music Festival would be, ahem, “improved” this year by the addition of more opportunities for people to buy and consume beer, I resolved to avoid it. More on why I in fact did not avoid it later.

Listen: I’m not against people having a right to drink (however absurd that may sound in a nation where our unwanted children don’t even have a right to live), however, rights are endowed by our Creator and come with equal and opposing duties. If, for instance, one has a right to drink beer, however ridiculous the idea may be, then that person also has a duty toward restraint. So, on the subject of alcohol: when a society and culture has cast off almost all restraint, it has therefore surrendered its duties toward responsible action, and also whatever rights it may have had as part of the bargain.

Pythagoras said it best: “As soon as laws are necessary for men, they are no longer fit for freedom.” But we no longer show the slightest interest in policing ourselves.

So here’s why I went to the Boise Music Fest: because that’s what my lovely wife wanted to do on her birthday. I love her, so even though large crowds are not my thing, and the music culture of late is growing more and more abhorrent to me as the days go by, I went, making a decision to make the best of it. And I succeeded, but I couldn’t help noticing a few things.

Never mind that the local acts weren’t even local, okay? I don’t know what geniuses decided to cut the local acts out of the action this year, and in favor of really bad regional “talent” besides, but that was a decision almost as ill-advised as having more beer on hand. But you know what, we don’t have much in the way of leadership anymore, at least insofar as it can be considered intelligent or responsible. So I’m not really surprised.

What got under my skin the most is that, once again, our popular culture just keeps on continuing to demonstrate its penchant for excess, instant gratification, irresponsibility, and just straight up partytime central. I wasn’t at the Boise Music Fest for very long—maybe five or six hours—but in that time I saw several drunken brawls, one of which I helped to break up because the idiots were threatening to spill into the area where my group was standing. I watched a girl walk by me with a child that couldn’t have been more than a few months old, which was altogether a bad decision, but what did she care about the baby? She was going to see the free show, by God, babysitter or no. I watched a woman walk out of the crowd, obviously drunk or high, and begin to dance seductively for a man directly in front of me, who was there with his girlfriend. I walked straight past the booth that was advertising for signatures on the petition for the Idaho Medical Choice Act, which was decorated with renderings of cannabis leaves in green marker; that was hilarious. I can always tell when something is supported by liberals: its name is always the exact opposite of its effect. I walked by some ardent supporters of the measure later, who had mobbed over to a distant corner of the park to toke about it, he he he. There's no mistaking that particular aroma. It’s all fun and games, isn’t it? And can someone explain to me how M.C. Hammer singing about a woman’s ass somehow speaks to the dignity of the human spirit? How is that even art, never mind entertainment? I thought, surely, after singing a song like that, he won’t try to preach from the stage about his relationship with Jesus. But he did anyway, and it makes a mockery of the gospel of Christ. Too bad, and so very sad.

I’m all about allowing people to choose for themselves and reap either reward or consequence. Hell, I do that every day myself. But I’m dismayed at the decay of our youth culture, of which music culture has been and is still such a large part. It bums me out that so many of us still haven’t grown up, and refuse to do so, even at forty, fifty plus years of age. So many of us are still living for the next party, the next drunken binge, the next opportunity to worm our way into the VIP area, go to the afterparty and get laid or whatever, and for what? It’s so been done before. What, did that fulfill you last time you tried it? Yeah. I didn’t think so.

Perhaps the saddest part of the Boise Music Fest is that it brings out the worst in us. I know I saw plenty on Saturday, and I still wonder: why are so many of us content to exist in the slums of life? Why are so many of us so damn stupid?

Red Rabbit, by Tom Clancy

Clancy’s Red Rabbit is a spy-procedural, I guess you’d call it, that stars perennial hero Jack Ryan in a retrospective-prequel set in the early 1980’s. Being that I haven’t yet read all of Clancy’s stuff, I got the impression that I was missing some inside jokes as I went along. It was like watching old episodes of Benny Hill, where you get the impression that you’re supposed to laugh but you’re not sure why. So there were a few things I didn’t get; a few details that overflew me as I read.

That’s not to say it was a bad book at all.  It’s actually a good book. Personally, I’m lately enjoying Cold War era spy novels, and Clancy delivers the goods in this one. Actually, I’m pretty sure the guy can’t write anything badly or even subpar. I’m reminded why I love Clancy’s style: he has an attention to detail that isn’t often found in fiction these days. In fact it’s more often found in college level textbooks, probably. He has a knack for explaining the science, the why behind a particular plot element in the story that adds to rather than takes away. It’s brilliant.

And can I just say here, too, that holy crap there is a whole lot of consumption going on with his characters. At any given point, the characters are using any kind of tobacco and drinking any kind of alcoholic beverage, up to and including every kind of crap Soviet vodka they ever made. Clancy’s cast is lush, and in more than one sense.

The ending is at least slightly open-ended, but it still satisfies. Thankfully there’s a substantial Clancy backlist out there just waiting for me to peruse at my local library. If anyone knows offhand what Clancy novel is next in the timeline, drop me a comment, because I’d like to know.

The only niggles I can come up with on this book have already been mentioned (which can be chalked up to operator error, in lots of ways), but there’s one to add: I just wonder about this. It seems backward to me, especially from the perspective I’ve gained as an editor. But it seems to me that Clancy may have submitted his final MS to the editor, and then the editor came back with this comment: “Good, but add 20%.” There’s about that much padding in there, honestly, and I think it detracts from the momentum of the story. I don’t like it when authors (or their editors) make me feel like they think I’m too stupid to grasp something the first time it’s mentioned, let alone after the second or third time. It gets almost plot-line preachy. But again, that may be because I missed some things that the rabid Clancy fan would have latched onto. All in all, Red Rabbit is a good summer read.