On stage just in time for Halloween and its otherworldly preoccupations is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey. Directed by the theater’s artistic director Brian B. Crowe, this haunting production (sorry!) opened October 25 and runs through November 16.
We’re familiar with the story of hubristic doctor Victor Frankenstein and his determination to create life. For two centuries, his experiment-gone-awry has prompted consideration of the limits of science, the difference between a man and a monster, and, in our current AI-obsessed era, what it means to be human. Astonishingly, Mary Shelley began writing this consequential story when she was only 18!
Author David Catlin frames Shelley’s story using the circumstances under which it was written. Mary was engaged in an affair with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley, and had borne him a daughter who died in infancy. The couple struggled financially and decamped to Geneva in 1816. That year, a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia blackened skies worldwide. It was “the year without a summer.” Crops failed, livestock starved. In Switzerland, incessant rain. An uneasy time. They lived for a few months on Lake Geneva with poet Lord Byron, his physician, and Mary’s step-sister, Claire, Byron’s lover. To amuse themselves, they read and wrote ghost stories, and the result was not only Mary’s chilling tale but also John Polidori’s The Vampyre.
The STNJ cast takes on not only the roles of Shelley’s characters, but also the idle, somewhat bored, yet competitive authors. Actor Amber Friendly plays Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (and Elizabeth); Sean-Michael Wilkinson is Shelley (and Victor Frankenstein); Jay Wade is Lord Byron (and the creature); and Brooke Turner is Claire (and Victor’s mother). The actors switch convincingly between these roles, with Neil Redfield (as Dr. Polidori and Henry and others) especially adept at immediately conveying different personas.
You cannot watch Wade’s athletic performance without sympathy for the creature’s yearning, his anger and confusion. Nor how Victor, preoccupied with his experiments, is heedless of their potential consequences, including how his monomania affects those he loves and denies him his own full humanity. Meanwhile, Elizabeth is a model of constancy in an uncertain world, hoping for but not expecting love. The story proceeds toward its tragic ending with the occasional intrusions by the poets and “real-life” characters, often foreshadowing their own fates. Women were not so simple, Mary believed, that they were free of dark impulses, and she proves it with her famous story.
STNJ has resisted the trend of providing patrons with a QR code instead of a printed program, and its nice biography of Mary Shelley is a thoughtful addition. The theater’s productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.
In the last of these brief essays on how to choose the most effective words for your writing, we turn to dialog. We hear people talking all the time. Dialog should be easy to write, right? Then why is it so often tedious to read? Anthony Lane called his recent essay on the writing of Elmore Leonard “Easy Music” (The New Yorker, July 7 and 14), and that’s a perfect title.
Lane’s essay was prompted by C.M. Kushins’ new book Cooler than Cool: The Life and Work of Elmore Leonard. Reading Leonard, I learned a lot about writing dialog, mainly, don’t write too much. Most conversations are surprisingly truncated. Reading dialog in which a characters spell out their full thoughts are boring, but it takes a deft hand to make sure the meaning is encapsulated in as few words as possible.
Lane (no word-choice slouch himself) marvels at Leonard’s skill, given what he calls the infinite bandwidths of spoken English. “So sharp are his ears, when pricked up, that somebody, way back in the Leonard genealogy, must have made out with a lynx.” As Leonard himself has said, and this applies well to dialog, “It doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to sound like it does.” Strictly grammatical? Less important than impactful and believable.
In general, dialog offers great opportunities to express your own and your characters’ style In fact, you want characters to have quirks in their speech; they help readers distinguish one character and one point of view from another. Yes, your characters can use slang, foreign words—big words too—if they are appropriate to them. It’s how you handle them that matters.
Foreign speech and dialect
Cormac McCarthy’s book, The Crossing, takes place mostly in Mexico. His text is like a course in how to handle foreign words—in this case, Spanish. He doesn’t do ham-handed things like include the translation in parentheses. Or repeat a Spanish phrase verbatim in English. He lets the reader figure it out, but hekeeps it simple. Also, he picks words close to their English counterparts, with only a few that may be hard-to-guess. Most readers can carry on without interruption. They get the drift.
Another example from a recent best-seller: An Englishwoman is trying to get information out of a bathroom attendant in Brittany. She asks, “Avez-vous travaillé longtemps à la gare?” The answer: “‘Non, Madame, j’ai commencé ce poste le mois dernier seulement.ʼ She explains that she only took the job last month.”
It seems to me much more artful ways could have conveyed what was a fairly obvious answer to what was a fairly obvious question than providing the response verbatim. In fact, after “Non, Madame,” the particulars aren’t that important. That was the answer.
When you want to create characters who grew up in a particular country or US region, you may want their speech to retain some of that local flavor. Likewise the slang or speech patterns of teenagers or members of a particular ethnic group help establish their age or indicate their origins. The thing to remember about representing these speech patterns is: a little goes a long way.
Here’s dialog I wrote for a story set in New Orleans amongst the fictional Perdido biker gang; yes, it’s quite different from what would be spoken in a Tulane English class: “Didja heah bout the fie-yuh?” a man shouted, bursting through the door. At their blank looks, he said, “Out at Aucoin’s old fahm down near Delacroix.” He said DEL-uh-cwa. “That’s all unduh watuh out theh, ain’t it?” a Perdido asked.
Once I established this thick Louisiana accent for the Perdidos, I mostly left it behind, with just occasional reminders.
It used to be the case that mis-spellings were used to show a character’s speech was nonstandard or uneducated. That was called “eye-dialect,” and it’s almost always pejorative. (Examples are “wimmin” for “women,” “lissen” for listen; “enuff” for “enough”; the pronunciation is standard, the spelling is not.) Readers used to find eye-dialect humorous, but it went out of fashion decades ago. Even creative spelling meant to reflect the actual pronunciation, should be used sparingly.
Instead, try to achieve the impression of your characters’ speech by the vocabulary, idioms, and word order they use and the rhythm of their speech. Remember the book Angela’s Ashes? It well conveyed how poor Irish in the countryside spoke almost through rhythm and word choice alone.
Get Creative!
English is a living language. It evolves as needs and habits change. Andwith the creativity of its users. That is, you! We’ve added to it, for a time at least, with widely understood abbreviations like IMHO, ROFL, and BOGO.
Here’s another type of example from a book I read recently: Joe “gently made his way across the lobby.” Hmmmm. “Gingerly” would be more idiomatic, but “gently” expresses the thought quite well. Readers know Joe is impaired by a vicious hangover, and likely can visualize him moving tentatively, “gently.” Sometimes a word, deployed in an unusual way, can really work.
Here’s another one: “The argument sprayed out.” Works, yes? No? If you’ve created a new word or a new use of an existing word and you think it really works, stick to your guns! Use it!!
Character Names
How do you pick the names for your characters? Nick and Jack are great names—short, “manly.” And sadly overused. Jason appears so often in thrillers, you can wonder which book you’re reading. You may have to “live with” your character a while to find a name that truly fits.
Of course your characters’ names should be memorable and not too similar to each other. People may not read your book straight through. You have to help the skimmers, the sporadic readers. In one of her books, popular crime writer Patricia Cornwell named three characters Berger, Bonnell, and Benton. The book was nearly 500 pages long, and I never got them straight.
A name can have intrinsic value. Some cultures believe a name can influence a person’s destiny or character. In the 1800s, thousands of babies were named George Washington Whatever; one of them is my great-great-great grandfather, George Washington Wright. My great grandfather (other side) was Henry Clay Smith. Alas, a distant Tennessee cousin was Jefferson Davis Edwards. Do the names you give your characters influence their sense of themselves? Or what society expects of them? Are they influenced by stereotypes the name evokes? Psychologists believe this can be the case.
The name you pick can have some kind of explicit meaning: Rusty or Robin for a character with red hair is a straightforward example. Pope Leo XIV did not just pluck his papal name out of the air. He chose it, he says, because he wants to evoke his predecessor, Pope Leo XIII, who espoused a doctrine of social justice.
When read a book in which a character has an unusual name, I consider why the author may have chosen it. David McCloskey’s excellent spy thrillers feature a CIA operative who trains and oversees field agents. Her name is Artemis Aphrodite Procter. A name that calls attention to itself like that cannot have been an accident! It’s actually brilliant.
You’ll recall that, in Greek mythology, Artemis is the huntress and Aphrodite the goddess of love. The name Procter is pronounced like the word for a person who oversees students, just as this character oversees new field agents, to whom she is fiercely loyal.
How does the novel’s character embody these elements? Quite literally. She has a row of nine stars tattooed between her shoulder blades. Each star represents one of her agents whose murder she has avenged. At the end of the most recent book, she’s in a tattoo parlor, having a tenth star added to the array. Artemis Aphrodite Procter. Love and the hunt. Absolutely.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this ten-part series on the importance of choosing the right words. You can find previous segments on my website, www.vweisfeld.com under the Writers’ First Draft tab. Go now, and create your magic!
A murder mystery in which the detective-work is done by a flock of sheep? YMBK. And, if you’ve noticed my preference for realistic crime stories and political thrillers, you’ll probably be surprised that Big Bad Wool and its predecessor Three Bags Full were two of my favorite books of the last year—sheepy detectives notwithstanding. As testaments to the books’ appeal, Three Bags Full has been translated into more than thirty languages and is currently being made into a movie starring Hugh Jackman, Emma Thompson, Bryan Cranston, and others. Big Bad Wool was translated from the original German by Amy Bojang.
Dark doings occur in these books, including murder. The sheep don’t perfectly understand the human world, of course, but they are observant, patient, and one of them—Miss Maple—is quite clever at putting two and two together. Part of their understanding of humankind has developed through their shepherds’ habit of reading to them each night: mysteries, romances, and, in one disturbing interlude, a text on sheep diseases.
In this story, Rebecca, their shepherdess, has taken the sheep on a long-promised trip to Europe. She lives in her caravan along with her Mum, a devotee of the Tarot, though sheep keep eating a card here or there, diminishing the deck and people’s possible fortunes. Shepherdess, Mum, and sheep are overwintering alongside a French chateau. Snow is on the meadow and ominous tracks are everywhere. Animals are being found in the forest, brutally murdered. Is a werewolf on the prowl? Rebecca worries about the safety of her sheep, and they worry about hers. The plot becomes complicated, making the story perhaps somewhat overlong, but it’s refreshing seeing the world through the eyes of the animals, and I didn’t mind.
The sheep bring distinct personalities and skills to this adventure. Aside from Miss Maple’s acknowledged cleverness, Mopple has the best memory, Othello is a born leader and learned a lot in his early days living in a zoo, Lane is the fastest runner, and the fearless winter lamb, born out of sync with the sheep calendar, hasn’t acquired a name yet and longs for one.
The sheep meadow is next to a fenced-in herd of goats. The temperamental and attitudinal differences between the species—as well as what you could call their different “skill sets”—prove most entertaining and useful. Swann (a pen name) must be exceptionally observant to render animal behavior so vividly and convincingly. Some things the sheep get wrong, and others they understand quite differently than the humans do—the value of veterinarians, for example—though they have an enviable ability to tell when a human is lying. They go about their sheepy business (mainly focused on eating) in a charming, sheepy way. I hated for this oddly comforting book to end!
P.S. When the Public Safety Writers Association decided to have a detective-themed costume event at its annual meeting last summer, you can guess mine!
An Old-Fashioned Family Murder, which premiered last Friday night at George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick, N.J., is first-rate old-fashioned fun! This new comedy-mystery, written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Larry Raben, will be delighting audiences through November 2. It’s Tony Award-winner DiPietro’s eighth production at the Playhouse, and he and the theater clearly work beautifully together.
The play nicely echoes the whodunnit tropes and characters of the Golden Age of detective stories, starting with the secluded ritzy Claythorne mansion, isolated by a dramatic storm (lots of stage lightning and thunder). Set in 1943, the opening scenes give Arthur Whittington (played by Tony Carlin)—an insufferably pedantic and self-satisfied author of second-rate mysteries—the chance to rattle on. One of his pet themes is why a mere woman could never be a stellar detective. (Yes, you know from this point on that a woman will put him in his place).
Over the course of the evening, the two twenty-something Claythorne sisters, Dotty (Caitlin Kinnunen), who dresses like her own grandmother, and Clarice (Allison Scagliotti), the epitome of glamour, plus Clarice’s fiancé, Jasper Jamison (Michael Evan Williams), a pool boy at the country club, come to loathe the author. He plays a game of what if? that reveals all three have a motive to kill the ancient Claythorne patriarch, soundly sleeping upstairs: Dotty, because she’s treated like a servant, Clarice because Daddy objects to Jasper, and Jasper himself. When Whittington reveals he’s been invited there in order to witness a new will the old man has created—one that cuts one of the daughters out entirely—that really puts the cat among the pigeons.
Now appears the leader of Dotty’s mystery book club, Shirley Peck (Sally Struthers—yes, that one!) who has distinctly different views about lady detectives. When everyone goes to bed, a murder does occur. Again you’ll recognize the tropes of classic detective fiction, but DiPietro’s script is full of laugh-out-loud lines that make them fresh again. Police detective Paul Peck (James Taylor Odom), Mrs. Peck’s son, arrives to investigate.
Under the not-so-steely gaze of the law, the players circle each other warily. The sisters’ claws come out; the laughs do too. The doting Mrs. Peck and her somewhat bumbling son play off each other perfectly, chemistry that may in part reflect Struthers and Odom’s past stage appearances together. Struthers’s performance of a woman struggling (and mostly failing) to keep a low profile, to let her son shine, is fascinating to watch. Her gestures and expressions, no matter how small, are exactly right.
Tickets for An Old-Fashioned Family Murder are available here or by calling 732-246-7717.
To have a lasting impact on readers, your writing has to have some style. Style comes from your characters and their actions, the descriptions and dialog, that make them uniquely “yours.” It comes from your vocabulary, tone, point of view, rhythm, syntax. Some writers call this “voice.” One of the main reasons readers develop favorites among the thousands of authors out there is because they like the author’s voice. And creating a voice begins with the words you choose.
Once an author develops a truly distinctive voice, you recognize it. I’ll bet you might recognize these distinctive literary voices, even with just a line or two.
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.” “From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.” “Folks like to talk about revenge like it’s a righteous thing but it’s just hate in a nicer suit.” “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
You may have recognized the authors who chose those words: Arthur Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler, SA Cosby, and Mark Twain.
Irony
For a great many stories set in our skeptical times, one aspect of voice that authors can make good use of is irony. Authors are using irony when they set up statements or situations that reveal a reality different from what appears to be true. Irony works when the reader already has expectations and understands the disparity between what “should” be the case and what “actually” is.
It’s why we joke about the labor-saving devices that are more trouble than they’re worth, the customer service departments that give anything but.Or appreciate the humor in the accompanying cartoon. Or why we despair at politicians who espouse high-minded goals, then take actions that make them impossible to achieve.
You might assume irony comes up only well into a story, when those expectations and realities are established, but here’s a possible opening line for a romantic story that’s dripping with irony: I’d been told my wedding day would be the happiest day of my life. Uh-oh. Disaster on the horizon. It works because readers too have powerful expectations about wedding days.
Emotion
Writer try to engage readers by evoking emotions. But how do we do that effectively? The song we used at the beginning of this series of posts is “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” If you remember it or read it again, you’ll recognize that it is absolutely full of emotion. But how is that handled? Does the narrator ever say, “I was angry with my short-sighted officers? I was sad my legs were gone?” No, he says the heart-breaking “Never knew there were worse things than dying.” And the equally poignant: “I thanked Christ there was nobody waiting for me.”
Good advice for writers is: “never name an emotion.” When he was starting out, a friend who’s a writer of stories with terrific plots had to learn how to write about emotion, ironically [!], by not writing about it. He would always over-explain. He would show an action, then tell his readers what it meant. He’d name the emotion in sentences like:“She threw the plate of spaghetti against the wall because she was so angry.” There’s no need to say she was angry. It’s obvious.
If you do a good job showing, the telling is unnecessary. If you’ve used the strongest, most descriptive words to get to that point, your readers will understand the underlying emotion and only be annoyed if you also tell them.
This brings up another important rule of thumb: “Trust Your Reader.” Savvy readers stay engaged if you leave them hanging a little, having to figure things out, rather than having events and reactions over-explained to them. Let them have the thrill of discovering the meaning behind your story.
Next week: Last in this “Every Word’s a Choice” series: Dialog Previous blogs in the series are under the Writers’ First Draft” tab of my main webpage (vweisfeld dot com).
Domenic Stansberry’s new noir mystery takes it slow, unraveling in beautiful prose the confounding situation its protagonist, political ghostwriter SE Reynolds. Stansberry—who hasn’t published a novel in almost a decade—has won numerous prizes, including an Edgar Award (Mystery Writers of America) and a Hammett Prize for his past books.
The Lizard isn’t a typical thriller that keeps the action pulsing and the pages flying. Instead, Reynolds is caught in a net that ever-so-slowly tightens around him. When the book begins, he’s already on the run in a desolate sector of Southern California. It’s La Bahia, a town worn out and on its last legs. Just like the old Hotel La Bahia, destined for the wrecking ball. Just like Reynolds himself? Why anyone would go to this godforsaken place, willingly, is another mystery, yet someone may have followed him there. Or is his paranoia acting up?
Reynolds’s trouble started when a New York literary agent called to persuade him to help out an old friend—Max Seeghurs, another former investigative reporter—who’s supposed to be writing a book about a defunct New Mexico retreat called Sundial. Sundial was a popular destination for people on the make financially, politically, or in Hollywood. Sex and drugs. Alas, Sundial’s owner and his twenty-something son both died under dubious circumstances, the retreat closed down, and Seeghurs wants to pull the band-aid off. Expose the rot. But Seeghurs is having trouble pulling the book together; maybe Reynolds can be his manuscript doctor.
Reynolds isn’t keen on this potential assignment because Seeghurs is notoriously difficult to work with. And, because the last time they met up a couple of years back in Miscoulga, Nebraska, Reynolds had an affair with Seeghurs’s wife, now his ex-wife. But Reynolds’s latest candidate is not committing to hiring him, the money is attractive, and he finally agrees.
It takes some effort to track Seeghurs down out somewhere near the ocean on Coney Island. It’s not an easy thing finding him, the landlord hasn’t been paid and isn’t happy about it. But Reynolds persists and finds Seeghurs, all right. Dead. Trying to find out what happened takes him back to Miscoulga and eventually to the crumbling Hotel La Bahia—a sad place to make a last stand.
For a person who ends up so alone, he has some good relationships. Some of the spirited conversations with his ailing parents are among the funniest in the book. Not the typical mile-a-minute thriller, but one where you’ll want to savor the prose. And, you may find yourself pondering the possibilities, even after you turn the last page.
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Even if this movie weren’t considered darn good, and it is, it’s almost worth it to see a filmmaker—in this case Paul Thomas Anderson—try to shoehorn a Thomas Pynchon novel into a couple of hours. He’s tried before. You need only recall Anderson’s 2014 messy and occasionally hilarious film, Inherent Vice, to award Anderson extra points for tackling the writer again.
This time it works. Partly by stripping out a lot, but there’s enough left to keep viewers’ minds buzzing. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob, a one-time anarchist/revolutionary and Sean Penn as a far-right army colonel determined to bring him down. Not because Col. Lockjaw is a law-and-order man. Oh, no. His reasons are much more personal. (One very-Pynchon touch is the outlandish names.)
In his revolutionary days, Bob was partnered with Perfidia Beverly Hills (played by Teyana Taylor), who ends up in witness protection, and they had a daughter, Willa (Chase Infiniti) who is now seventeen. She lives with Bob in a remote community where he spends his days getting high. He’s been chased so relentlessly by the authorities that he and his friends have developed a sharp sense of paranoia, and when the warning signs come, Bob heeds them. At least as well as he can in his addled state. The plot has been updated from the book (feds chasing drug dealers) to today (feds chasing immigrants), and doesn’t suffer for it.
What so impresses me about DiCaprio’s work is that he’s able to set aside vanity and just be the character, rough edges and all. So many actors (male and female) persist in preening for the camera. They may be delivering the lines, but you can almost see them thinking, “How do I look? How do I look?” DiCaprio lets all that go. And Sean Penn? Creepy, creepy. Plus Benicio del Toro as a guy who knows how to get things done.
Surprisingly (it is Pynchon, after all), the story is pretty easy to follow, and while there’s some violence, Anderson doesn’t follow the Hollywood rule of maximum-to-the-ridiculous fire-power. Some of the strongest scenes are the quietist. It’s a story about people on the fringes, and many kinds of unraveling (security) blankets are out there. I won’t give away any of the plot. See it, and decide for yourself.
Nice music choices too, though I’ll never hear the Shirelles’ “Soldier Boy” the same way again. Rotten Tomatoes critics’ rating: 95%; audiences 85%.
“Adverbs are the tool of the lazy writer.” Mark Twain
“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Stephen King
The liberal use of adverbs, the telltale “-ly” words, especially has drifted out of fashion, in favor of more direct prose. It’s obvious what King and Twain thought of them. The death knell may have come some decades ago with the Tom Swifty. You may remember these awful puns: “I’ll have a martini,” Tom said drily. Or “I know who turned off the lights,” Tom said darkly. Or “I always eat at McDonald’s,” Tom said archly. At the height of their popularity, it was hard to hear an -ly adverb without thinking of the line that could introduce it, she wrote promptly. An occasional adverb, like an occasional pun is fine, it’s overuse that you want to avoid.
Many times, you can avoid the adverb problem by selecting a more robust verb, as in these pairs of examples. The first uses an adverb, the second a more colorful verb.
“Get off your duff and bring me that report,” the captain said angrily. “Get off your duff and bring me that report,” the captain growled.
“Come over here and sit by me,” she said flirtatiously. “Come over here and sit by me,” she flirted.
Which approach you use depends on your writing style and voice, but if you find yourself falling back on them to make your meaning clear, give your verbs a hard look.
Order, Please!
The previous post in this series talked about the little known yet widely followed English-language rule about the order in which adjectives are presented. Where to put adverbs in a sentence is a little trickier. Their position is less fixed. Adverbs are usually but not always put near the verb (or before the adjective) they modify.
For example, in these sentences, the adverbs barely, terribly, and wildly modify—that is, they change and in this case make more precise or intensify—the adjectives “plausible, hot, and inappropriate.”
Barely plausible alibi Terribly hot day Wildly inappropriate behavior
Careful placement of adverbs avoids vagueness in your writing. Some modifiers—“only” and “just” are prime examples—can function as either adverbs or adjectives and, as adverbs, they are often rather haphazardly placed. Keep in mind that they are modifiers, and need to be near whatever they are modifying. When you change their position, the literal meaning of your sentences actually slightly shifts. To avoid ambiguity, these words must be in the position that most accurately conveys your intention. You know what you mean, so you have to be extra-conscious of what you’re actually saying. It’s a habit worth developing.
A careful writer pays attention to these tiny differences in meaning. Here’s another example where moving the adverb affects the meaning
“Heck, I don’t even know the backstory.” (It’s a mystery to me) “Heck, even I don’t know the backstory.” (And I’m usually in-the-know) “Heck, I don’t know even the backstory.” (And there’s so much more to it)
The emphasis in the first version is on know. In the second example, the emphasis is on I, and in the third example, it’s on backstory.
“Just” And “Only” Trip Everyone Up
Sometimes placement is critical. Here’s an example from a literary magazine request for submissions (and tut-tut to them):
“We are only open in March for underrepresented voices; the window for general submissions (from all writers) is closed.”
What the editors probably mean is that they want submissions from authors who are members of underrepresented groups and no one else in March, but what they are saying is that those groups are welcome to submit in March and not at other times. The sentence probably should have read:
“We are open in March only for underrepresented voices; the window for general submissions (from all writers) is closed.”
More examples. Note the differences. What the sentence is implying is in italics.
She watched to make sure he only delivered the salad (and didn’t spill it in the customer’s lap or make disparaging comments about it. He only delivered it.). He just wanted her to pay the check (not lecture him about his love life)
In conversation, this last kind of construction is used when the speaker is sort of apologetic about the ask. Kind of a “Gee I didn’t think this would be such a big deal. All I wanted was for her to pick up the check.” But it is ambiguous when we are reading and not hearing the speaker’s tone of voice.
What is the proper place for “only” in this sentence? “I believed he was innocent of the burglary.”
Ahhh. Trick question. You cannot answer it unless you know what the sentence is intended to mean. Think about the differences:
Only I believed Jake was innocent of the burglary (everyone else believed he was guilty) I only believed Jake was innocent of the burglary (I couldn’t prove it) I believed only Jake was innocent of the burglary (and the rest were guilty) I believed Jake was only innocent of the burglary (but not the b&e)
While a few of the differences in meaning might appear a bit subtle, and while you may think they don’t much matter, rest assured, they matter a great deal to Jake.
Part 9: Have some style!
For previous posts in this series, check the “Writers’ First Draft” tab on my website home page: www.vweisfeld.com.
Author Matt Goldman is part of that tribe of television writers who have made a successful jump into print. These authors have in common their ability to establish steadily rising action with no lulls and visual imaginations that let them describe scenes so that readers can easily picture them. And they aren’t reluctant to deploy a little authentic humor. Goldman’s first book was nominated for a number of awards, and the new one, The Murder Show, will likely garner equal attention.
In this story, Ethan Harris is the fortyish showrunner for a television series called The Murder Show. He’s abandoned New York and arrived tonight in his home town of Minneapolis, in the hope that a different setting and atmosphere will give him a great idea for the show’s next season. It has to be good, because the show is one bad idea away from being cancelled altogether.
To his surprise, his high school best friend and almost-girlfriend Ro Greeman, still lives in the house behind his. She’s on the Minneapolis police force, as is her high school boyfriend Marty Mathis, which brings Ethan into much too much contact with his high school nemesis.
Ro has an idea for The Murder Show. Of course. Everyone does. Ethan’s heard so many of these he’s initially skeptical, but over time, her idea grows on him. She wants him to recreate the mysterious death of their friend Ricky O’Shea, killed in a hit-and-run on a rural road after his car broke down. Maybe the show would prompt someone who knows something to come forward, even after all this time. And, she eventually reveals, his isn’t the only such fatality in the area. If Ro hadn’t noticed a recent case so similar to Ricky’s, she wouldn’t have recognized the pattern.
Although Ro’s idea could reflect wanting to spend time with Ethan or be a way to get help outside official channels—whichever—Ethan proves himself a resourceful partner. And she needs one!
The quick-witted, teasing banter between Ethan and the women in the story deserves mention, because it rings true. That’s another thing television writers can do (the good ones, that is). They can write believable dialog.
Though much of the story takes place in urban Minneapolis, the trips to the rural areas, past and present, are well described. Fast-paced at both the plot and character development levels, this book is one a great many readers will enjoy. I certainly did.
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In September, we took one of our Midwest driving trips, visited many (23) friends and family along the way, and made several new tourist stops. These included two sites established to commemorate U.S. Presidents who fought for their country: The Eisenhower National Historic Site outside Gettysburg, Pa., and Indiana’s Tippecanoe Battlefield, where President William Henry Harrison made his mark on U.S. military history.
You may wonder why Ike, our 34th President, settled in the rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania. “Hey, wait, wasn’t he born in Texas?” “Didn’t he grow up in Kansas?” You’re right! But, after his presidency, he settled near Gettysburg. His ancestors had lived in Central Pennsylvania, and I believe the park ranger said that, as a child, Ike spent a lot of time there. Also, in retirement, he was still consulting with the government, and the farm was a (relatively) short commute to D.C.
So, that’s why. Now to the what. The farm is a beautiful piece of property and, when the Eisenhowers bought it in 1950, it included a smallish house that had to be rebuilt. More than most historic houses, this one is filled with the Eisenhowers’ own furnishings and decorations (a lot of “Mamie pink”). We saw the sunporch where the couple reportedly ate their dinners on tv trays, watching the evening news (!). The house had generous accommodations for guests, and an office for Ike that couldn’t have been larger than 8’ x 10’. Here, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, who directed the Normandy landings on D-Day, carried out his work, modestly and efficiently.
You can tour the house and grounds, garage (presidential limousine!), barns, and the farm he and his partners established that raised prize-winning Black Angus cattle.
And, if you also want to tour the battlefield while you’re there (which we have done numerous times, not this trip), the downtown Hotel Gettysburg is a lovely spot.
The Tippecanoe Battlefield and Museum is a national historic landmark a little over an hour northwest of Indianapolis. At 96 acres, it’s small (much smaller than Ike’s farm!). On 7 November 1811, a decisive battle occurred there between U.S. forces and the Native American Confederation and a bloody prelude to the War of 1812.
The Americans were led by William Henry Harrison, later elected the ninth U.S. President—the last one born as a British subject. He died of a fever after only one month in office. (We’ve seen his monument outside Cincinnati.)
The Native Americans were a large, multi-tribal community led by the famous Shawnee chief Tecumseh and his younger brother Tenskwatawa, called The Prophet. The brothers, who had seen Natives repeatedly displaced from their homelands to the east, vociferously advocated that they reject European ways and return to a traditional lifestyle.
Tecumseh traveled to the South in 1811 to recruit more allies for the confederation and warned his brother not to attack the encroaching U.S. military forces until he returned. On the fateful day, the Prophet nevertheless ordered a pre-dawn attack. The Natives were defeated, their community destroyed, and their hope of continued settlement in the Great Lakes Region went down with them. In retaliation, Tecumseh sided with the British against the Americans in the War of 1812.
Adjacent to the Battlefield, the Tippecanoe County Historical Association operates a small museum with thoughtful displays that put the battle in context.
Two very different historical sites. Both well worth a visit!
