Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Junot Díaz & Difficult Characters

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Junot DiazJunot Díaz, fellow New Jerseyan and one of America’s top young writers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2007) and a certified MacArthur Foundation “genius,” is interviewed in the fall 2014 issue of Glimmer Train. Last year, he published a book of short stories, This is How You Lose Her. (This is the book a friend of mine starts reading whenever she and her husband have a disagreement.)

“She’s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.”(TIHYLH)

About his recurring character Yunior, who narrates much of sci-fi addict Oscar’s story, and who also features in the short story collection, Díaz says “He is the classic dumb-ass character who makes all the right mistakes to produce, for me, in my mind, great stories.” Yunior shares some biographical details with Díaz, a parallelism that he believes makes writing—or reading—a little easier. “You get free heavy lifting from readers . . . by blurring that line between fiction and biography, a confusion that adds an extra serving of real to the tale.” Getting readers to do some of the work for him, some of the world-creation that keeps them on the page, is especially important in fiction, he believes, when writers “are asking them to confuse our work for the world and often to connect to characters who are difficult.”

“Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to.”(BWL)

“Her rage filled the house, flat stale smoke. It got into everything, into our hair and our food, like the fallout they talked to us about in school that would one day drift down soft as snow.”(BWL)

Junot DiazOne of the ways Yunior is difficult is in his relations with women, his infidelities, and his objectification of women, and Díaz explains that he includes that aspect of his character because it’s “one of the standard ways our culture operates.” Díaz gets some blowback on this, and says the shock of recognition when readers see this aggressively masculine point-of-view on the page “in what I think is so honest a way, it often repels us in ways that the very presence of it in our real lives doesn’t. . . . It’s as if it’s only in this book where these guys exist.”

“You can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in.”(BWL)

While the writer of the Door Stop Novels blog called Brief Wondrous Life “incredibly offensive,” she added, “it is also absolutely one of the funniest books I have ever read in my life.” Her bottom line: “I think that is what I like most about Díaz —the man goes for broke.” He isn’t writing allegory, with a lot of message overlaid about his real political views; he isn’t writing religious. He is describing the worldviews of very particular people, and it’s in the detailed rendering of those views that make people love or hate his work, but, either way, to believe it’s real.

“The half-life of love is forever.”(TIHYLH)

 

Ed Snowden: Hero or Traitor?

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This post is not going to settle that question for you, and it’s not one I thought I’d be writing about, a recent resurgence in coverage of Snowden has made me think more deeply about him, now that the original panic and dismay have subsided. Most of the coverage is prompted by reporter James Bamford’s recent article, published in Wired. Bamford conducted the longest set of in-person interviews with Snowden since he went to ground in Russia a year ago. I’ve also been studying Stuart Taylor, Jr.’s, essay, published by Brookings, “The Big Snoop: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Terrorists.”

Who Is Ed Snowden?

Ed Snowden, NSA, privacy, security, TED talk

Ed Snowden’s TED talk (photo: wikimedia.org)

Snowden’s position from the beginning has been that he is a patriot and a whistleblower, “bent on saving his country from becoming an Orwellian security state,” as Taylor puts it. Others have recorded his ambition, his highly visible, well-polished initial announcements and PowerPoints, and his more recent TED talk, which may suggest more complex and troubling motivations. Washington Post reporter and author David Ignatius (whose novel about a rogue CIA cyber-expert is reviewed on my home page) has said, “Snowden looks these days more like an intelligence defector, seeking haven in a country hostile to the United States, than a whistleblower.”

Ironically, given the current fractured state of U.S.-Russia relations, Snowden was offered asylum there only if he stopped his work aimed “at harming our American partners,” Russian President Putin stipulated. Snowden first withdrew his asylum application, but ultimately agreed not to release more intelligence secrets. The stolen National Security Agency (NSA) documents are no longer in his hands.

Security vs. Privacy

You will recall that in Snowden’s jobs, he accumulated evidence that the NSA was collecting and storing phone records, emails, and other private Internet activity of a great many American citizens, not just those suspected of terrorism, associating with terrorists, or even remotely connected to any—we “ordinary Americans.” This revelation led to retired NSA director Keith Alexander’s famous haystack analogy: If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you need the whole haystack.

In polls, the majority of Americans oppose this wholesale domestic spying, and the government has damaged its credibility as a result. Yet, Snowden worries the public will become inured to disclosures of mass surveillance, as the PBS News Hour reported. Our acceptance may be in part because Ordinary Americans feel privacy is already hopelessly lost, in part because we believe we are helpless to stop the spying, and in part because people tend to become numb to successive outrages and risks

By spying on foreign citizens and leaders, NSA also has damaged relationships abroad. What the public has heard most about, however, is the spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone calls, while “the violation of 80 million Germans is a nonstory,” Snowden says.

A fundamental and inevitable tension Taylor explores is between national security and individual privacy and the irony that a security apparatus is needed in order to protect privacy. He covers, in a readable way, the basic tenets of relevant U.S. law going back to the Bill of Rights, in which the Fourth Amendment obligates the U.S. government to ensure that citizens “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” Before the telegraph, before the telephone, before the Internet, securing one’s “papers and effects” was relatively simple.

Snowden Fallout

Today, we must entrust the transmission and disposition of our communications to third parties that may or may not have an interest in protecting them or be able to do so when the NSA comes calling. However, the bad publicity Snowden’s revelations generated for the telephone companies and Internet giants has prompted a rethinking of corporate policies and strengthening of encryption practices.

Those steps haven’t come cheap. Tech companies have been hit by both substantial additional expenses and loss of income, as foreign clients become wary of their products—a potential $180 billion revenue loss, according to Forrester Research analysts.

In addition, the State Department says Snowden has not only damaged U.S. intelligence-gathering, but also potentially endangered U.S. agents abroad, without citing specifics.

Evolution of Law

After Watergate, Fourth Amendment protections were purportedly strengthened by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which put a layer of judicial review between U.S. citizens (or permanent resident aliens) and the intelligence agencies that want to spy on them. But post-9/11, the Senate outflanked the FISA mechanism, in the hurriedly adopted Patriot Act. That new law widened the government’s authority to conduct surveillance and investigations.

Although critics predictably labeled the sweeping reforms President Obama proposed last spring as “going too far” and “not going far enough,” the changes may have begun to move the needle. And, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to halt the NSA’s practice of conducting warrantless searches of its database containing millions of Americans’ emails and phone calls—“one of many proposed reforms that never would have happened had it not been for Snowden,” Bamford claims.

Evolution of Technology

The “exponential leap” in authority under the Patriot Act coincided with greatly increased technical ability to collect, store, and monitor electronic communications data, a combination that, in Taylor’s words, has “run roughshod over laws, standards of conduct, and international norms,” jeopardizing the desired balance between national security and individual privacy contained in the Fourth Amendment.

NSA’s new million-square-foot data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah, potentially can hold “upwards of a yottabyte of data, some 500 quintillion pages of text,” Bamford says. Every hour, billions of phone calls, faxes, emails, computer-to-computer data transfers, and text messages from around the world flow through this facility. “Some flow right through, some are kept briefly, and some are held forever.”

Then, there are the leaks. And, as Bamford points out, evidence suggests that Snowden is not the only leaker, because some media reports cite documents that apparently did not come from him. This put NSA in a real bind: “accused of rogue behavior in its snooping,” Taylor says, “and of incompetence in protecting the information it had collected.” Snowden says NSA cannot seem to tell which documents he just electronically “touched” and those he actually stole, though he says he left digital clues to enable them to be differentiated. “I figured they would have a hard time,” he told Bamford. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

Solutions?

A second major tension, is “the severe limit on the degree to which transparency can be reconciled with functions of government that must be opaque — that is, secret — in order to be effective,” Taylor says. Certainly, the solutions Snowden himself suggests do nothing to reconcile that tension. In Bamford’s article, he suggests, for example, “making encryption a universal standard—where all communications are encrypted by default.” Regarding future leaks, he says, “The question for us is not what new story will come out next. The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Further Information

Check out the upper left corner of the Brookings article to see what its computers are tracking about you, as you read.

NSA surveillance capabilities allow it to map your movements by monitoring the unique identifiers emitted by your cell phone, computer, and other electronic devices. You can get the flavor of this by checking out what Google can do, unless your device has this feature turned off (how to turn it off).

Read about the MonsterMind, a real? program designed to counter international electronic threats. It poses two dangers: the ability to wage autonomous retaliatory attacks that have unanticipated consequences; and, to the privacy point, the system’s need to monitor virtually all communication between people in the United States and those overseas, as Snowden says, “without a warrant, without probable cause or even a suspicion of wrongdoing. For everyone, all the time.”

Experts’ views on the future of the Internet, in light of a range of security concerns, reported in July 2014 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

What’s Your Green?

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Rorschach

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Having a political discussion with my friend Don is almost impossible. In conversation, I avoid the hot-button issues I know will set him off. Unfortunately more of those topics crowd the landscape of his mind than I anticipate, and stumbling on one is like setting off a land-mine. Why is it we can’t just have a conversation? It’s because our points of view are so different, there’s little room for mutual understanding, and we might as well be speaking different languages. Point-of-view determines not only which facts each of us takes in, but also what we see when we look at something as quotidian as three people standing on the street corner.

In a recent Glimmer Train essay on point-of-view, Bret Anthony Johnston, director of creative writing at Harvard, wrote that his students get this concept when he trots out the old saying, “To a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail.” He says writers need to understand their characters’ obsessions—their hammerness—and those ten-penny features that loom so large in their minds. Sometimes their preoccupations are so consuming they don’t see the pile of screws right nearby or, more likely, interpret it as another pile of nails. “To the brokenhearted, every couple looks happy,” he says.

I’ve read Johnston’s award-winning book of short stories Corpus Christi: Stories, and this year he published the novel, Remember Me Like This (NPR review and interview). The novel deals with a family whose son disappeared, then is returned to them four years later. While he understood going in that this lost, this hiatus in relationships, would color every aspect of his characters’ lives, “what I didn’t know was how different and revelatory their perspectives would be.” Each family member reacted in a unique and shaping way, and required of Johnston—and the reader—different levels of empathy. “In fiction,” he says, “every detail is a Rorschach test” to be interpreted through the lens of the character. We ask about a character’s experience not “what does it mean?” but “what does it mean to her?” If we didn’t, we could never read with understanding the story of anyone not exactly like ourselves, should there be such a person.

Despite the popularity of multitasking and our self-deception about our skill at it, in truth our brains are pretty much wired to handle one thing at a time. This inattentional blindness, Johnston says, is “point-of-view in its purest form.” What captures our characters’ attention demonstrates what they are most interested in and care about the most. This is perhaps why the unimportant details that new writers include in their scenes—in a misguided effort to make them concrete—are so distracting. “Find out what your characters notice, find out where their gazes linger and why, and you’ll find out who your characters are.”

Johnston has published a nifty set of writing exercises, too, and he included one with this essay. You might try it. He suggests grabbing pen and paper and moving through your surroundings making a list of everything you see that’s green. (This will be a long list in my case, as I always say, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green.”)

see, eye, green

(photo: c2.staticflickr.com)

Done? Did you notice particulars you’d forgotten about? Will you see items in your surroundings in a new way for a while? Were memories stimulated? Briefly, “green” was your mind’s obsession. I’ll bet dyed-in-the-wool environmentalists would create a somewhat different list than would a graphic designer.

“Now do the same thing for your characters,” Johnston says. “Find out what their ‘green’ is.” What readers need to know isn’t just what your characters look at, but, more important, what they see.

 

Creativity is UP!

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Up, Navy Pilot

(photo: wikimedia.org)

Metaphors We Live By (George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) is a classic study of the way metaphor shapes our understanding of the world. Published in 1980, it dismisses the idea that metaphors are strictly a matter of language, the frosting on the cake of meaning, as argued by various competing philosophical and linguistic traditions. In what I usually read, the search for truth is conducted not by academics, but by a fictional detective, so some of this was heavy going. Where the authors dig into the language, their examples are fascinating.

Lakoff and Johnson are not generally talking about literary metaphors, but rather about the ones so thoroughly absorbed into the language that we no longer notice them as metaphors. One fundamental set of such metaphors reflects “orientation”: up-down, in-out, back-front, and so on. Although some metaphors in this set appear to be more or less universal across languages, others are more culturally determined. In Western culture, many common phrases reflect the metaphor “happy is up” and its opposite, “sad is down.” Examples are:

  • That boosted my spirits.
  • I’m depressed.
  • It gave him a lift.
  • My heart sank.
  • Being up-beat.

Extending this pattern, health and life are up:

  • It’s time to get up.
  • He’s at the pinnacle of health.
  • Lazarus rose from the dead.
  • She sank into a coma.

More is up (this one, we even represent graphically):

  • My income rose last year.
  • The Dow reached a new high.

Having control is up:

  • He’s at the height of his powers.
  • She has control over the situation.

And so on. This metaphor is so pervasive, we don’t notice it. The other orientation pairs are embedded in the language in much the same way, and from the various concepts they signify, they form a coherent way of understanding our world.

Lakoff and Johnson also discuss how we depend on metaphor to help us structure inherently vague concepts, like emotions, in terms of more concrete things we may have directly experienced. Complex emotions, like love or anger, have inspired many overlapping (and sometimes conflicting) metaphors. For example:

  • Love (vague) is a journey (concrete).
  • Anger (vague) is hot (concrete).

The “love is a journey” metaphor underlies statements like: “We’re on the road to romance” (think Sinatra’s: “Nice ‘n’ Easy”); “It’s a rocky road to love.”; “We went in different directions.”; or “This relationship isn’t going anywhere.” The “anger is hot” metaphor leads to: “I was boiling mad”; “Cool it!”; and “in the heat of the moment.” (Icy cold anger is scary perhaps because it’s so counterintuitive.)

I’m trying to understand all this (which is the tip of the tip of the iceberg, you understand) in terms of writing. “We draw inferences, set goals, make commitments, and execute plans, all on the basis of how we in part structure our experience, consciously and unconsciously, by means of metaphor,” say Lakoff and Johnson. The orientation metaphors and their many variants perhaps explain why, a writer’s attempts to create a literary metaphor sometimes miss the mark. Perhaps they have violated this coherent, and implicit language system.

A linguistic exploration of the metaphors underlying emotion seems to me like an endorsement of the frequent dictum: “show, don’t tell.” Simply saying that a fictional character feels love or anger or happiness conveys little to the reader, because readers will have different ways—and many competing ways—of interpreting that emotion, depending on the metaphors through which they see the world. The metaphors underlying those feelings must be expressed—and in some fresh way that is consistent with the existing substrate (safer) or totally new, stretching both writer and reader.

Read more at: The Literary Link and, for some juicy literary metaphors, Welcome to the World of Metaphor.

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History, Mystery, or Miss-story?

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4th of July, early America, John Lewis Krimmel, Philadelphia

John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, Philadelphia, 1819 (photo: wikimedia.org)

A panel of six mystery writers explored the elasticity of history at the Deadly Ink 2014 conference this weekend. They were, in chronological order by their topics:

One of the most interesting questions these panelists were asked is how comfortable they are changing facts to suit the fictional purposes of their story, and the division of opinion was striking. Belsky’s point of view seemed to be “It’s fiction—do what you want,” whereas others, including Alfieri and Inglee, especially, believed that if you incorporate real historical individuals, you have to be true to their attitudes and actions.

Belsky pointed out that we may never know the whole story or maybe even the true story of past events—and Irving pointed out that applies to current events as well—freeing the author to fill in the blanks. (My own opinion on this is there’s a big difference between not knowing a fact and making one up.)

When an author must change a fact, a date, or other detail, they can use author’s notes to describe what and why. With that manes, Scott Turow acknowledges some of the liberties he took in several pivotal event in the WWII novel Ordinary Heroes: “There was no ammunition dump at LaSaline Royale, which is actually situated a few miles from the site I describe . . . Heisenberg (Werner Heisenberg, physicist) did run from Hechingen, but not because anyone had attempted to blow up the secret location of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute on Haigerlocherstrasse. FDR’s death was announced near midnight overseas, not in the afternoon of April 12, 1945.” This last detail seems to be one that could have been fictionally accommodated. It was an event, like the Kennedy assassination, that every American alive at the time remembers vividly.

Alfieri created a character drawn from life down to his toenails and gave him his own name, much as real people appear in the novels of E.L. Doctorow, but when her mystery plot required this character to commit a violent act for which there is no evidence, she renamed him. She was able to build the character in the first place because of the strength of her research, and several panelists endorsed immersive research for fiction, which must appeal to many writers’ innate inwardness.

When an author knows enough about a period—how people thought, what they thought about, what they ate, how they made a living, what they feared—new story elements arise organically from that substrate. They fit the story, the story isn’t made to fit them. Such an approach makes for an infinitely richer reader experience, even if most of that research never appears explicitly in the book. The writer moves forward with confidence.

Another reason to get the details right is that readers will be sure to ding them if they don’t. Errors can destroy a book’s credibility and readers’—and reviewers’—interest in it. To avoid mistakes, Kelly and Rubin said they work with historians. Rubin, especially, because he is published by LSU Press, has to meet scholarship standards.

A final difficulty for historical writers is language. The conversations among characters have to read as if they are of the period, yet a precise rendition of old-fashioned language—by writing “forsoothly”—may be unreadable. David Mitchell, discussing the language he used in The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (I loved this book!), described writing dialog for characters who were native speakers of Japanese, who were Dutch and speaking Japanese, Dutch and speaking Dutch, English upper-class sea captains, English lower-class seamen, and so on. Plus, the book begins in 1799, with two hundred-plus years of language evolution in between. Mitchell developed a language he called “bygone-ish,” which had the ring of the old and the clarity of the current, with variants for each nationality and class.

Mitchell’s approach points out an important issue that applies not just for words and phrases. Even if an event actually did happen or a word actually was in use at the time a story is set, writers of historical mysteries may avoid it anyway, because it will sound too modern, out of place. In this way, truth is more powerful than fact. And if this seems like another way of saying, “it’s fiction—do what you want,” it isn’t.

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Creativity and the Brain

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brain, creativity

fMRI brain images (photo: en.wikipedia)

Lots of articles about creativity in the current issue of The Atlantic, including a fascinating long report by neuroscientist and psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen who studies the origins of creativity in the brain and its association with mental illness. She started out in the 1960’s studying people involved with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among them was Kurt Vonnegut, who had a multigenerational family history of mental disorders and suffered from depression. (Moving interviews with Vonnegut’s son Mark were included in PBS News Hour’s coverage of Andreasen’s research.) Indeed, for many of the writers she studied, “mental illness and creativity went hand in hand.” Suicide was not uncommon. We think Hemingway, Plath, now Williams. Philip Seymour Hoffman was also far down that self-destructive path.

Andreasen began her academic career clutching a doctorate in literature, taught in the University of Iowa’s English Department, and published a book about the poet John Donne. But she chose to return to school in the sciences, hoping that study of the brain would lead her to understand why authors she admired had gone off the rails—and maybe even to help future writers.

She’s worked on two vital questions: “What differences in nature and nurture can explain why some people suffer from mental illness and some do not? And why are so many of the world’s most creative minds among the most afflicted?” As in many areas of neuroscience, the development of scanning technology, including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has enabled her to watch the brains of creative people “at work,” and these scans reveal tantalizing clues to her hitherto unanswerable questions.

Earlier work has shown that high IQ is not particularly linked to creativity—“above a certain level, intelligence doesn’t have much effect on creativity,” she says. If she couldn’t predict creativity from IQ measurement (with all its flaws), she had to find other ways to find subjects for research. She looked for external recognition, which led her to the distinguished faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Interviews rather quickly revealed that mood disorders (depression, mostly) were common among the writers and often ran in families. In fact, about 80 percent of the writers she interviewed had such a mental health history, compared with about 30 percent in her control group and in the population at large.

But how to measure creativity in the brain? After years of pondering this difficulty, Andreasen finally arrived at this insight: “Creative people are better at recognizing relationships, making associations and connections, and seeing things in an original way—seeing things that others cannot see.”

She has expanded her study to include creative individuals from the sciences as well as the arts. This inclusion has brought her George Lucas, mathematician William Thurston, and six Nobel laureates from the sciences, in addition to novelist Jane Smiley and a group of young creative achievers. Despite their diverse fields, all these individuals show similar brain processes, revealed in the scans, that differ from the workings of control group members’ brains.

Wearing her psychiatrist’s hat, Andreasen talks with her subjects (creatives and controls) about their growing up, family life, relationships, and creative activities. From these interviews, she’s learned that “Creative people work much harder than the average person—and usually that’s because they love their work.” She’s studied 26 people so far—13 creative geniuses and 13 controls—and validated the link between mental illness and creativity as well as the evidence that creativity tends to run in families, though it may not confine itself to a single field.

Other traits of the creatives include a personality style that leads them to take risks, confront rejection, and persist. Of course, she says, “Persisting in the face of doubt or rejection, for artists or for scientists, can be a lonely path,” and may in itself contribute to mental illness. Many creative people are autididacts—they love to teach themselves—and polymaths, with a wide variety of diverse interests. This holds true despite out education system’s persistent separation of the arts and the sciences. “If we wish to nurture creative students,” Andreasen says, “this may be a serious error.”

She closes by referring to the case of John Nash, the Nobel prize-winning mathematician who has schizophrenia (and who lives around the corner from me), profiled in the book and movie A Beautiful Mind. “Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both.”

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Put the Cat Out

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Siamese cat, Grant

Shut out again. (photo: author)

Steven King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft focuses on how he became a writer and the process of becoming and many of his observations about being a writer ring true to me. Like most people who dispense advice to the novice, he emphasizes the virtue of “ass-in-the-chair”—writing every day, which is a groove serious writers finally work their way into, despite the distractions of kids, jobs, and grocery-shopping. Right now, for example, my lawn is shaggy as a pony’s winter coat.

He says if he doesn’t write daily, “the characters begin to stale off in my mind—they begin to seem like characters instead of real people . . . the excitement of spinning something new begins to fade.” Like many other writers, I hit the keyboard early in the morning, and the excitement King talks about is what gets me out of bed at five to grab a cup of coffee and dive into the work.

He also insists that you shut the office door, “your way of telling the world and yourself that you mean business.” Certainly, I shut mine, mostly to keep out Grant, a Siamese cat who thinks sitting in my lap and watching the cursor move across the screen has limited entertainment value and is something to complain about. (I created a monster when I played YouTube cat videos for him.) Eliminate distractions—phones, beeping email alerts, insistent cats—anything that takes you away from the page.

King tries to write 10 pages a day—about 2000 words. That’s his goal, and he thinks every writer should have one, every day. I’m a fan of getting a draft on paper, powering through and getting the story down and fixing all the inevitable issues and lapses and problems in rewrite. After that, I revise, a chapter a day.

Room, door (and the determination to shut it), goal. Adhering to these basics, he believes, makes writing easier over time. The more you do it, the easier it gets. “Don’t wait for the muse to come,” he says, and it’s astonishing how many would-be writers talk to me about their lack of or need for “inspiration,” as if it sprinkles down from the clouds rather than up from the mind’s carefully plowed field. King says, “Your job is make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day.”

Everyone who aspires to write has likely read a lot, too. We’ve listened to lots of TV and movie scripts. Lots of other people’s words, many not very good, have passed into our brains, and our subconscious is filled with the stuff. It’s in there. It wants out. When a phrase or scene comes too easily, almost unconsciously, I’ve learned there’s a problem. It’s canned, it’s derivative, it’s not a genuine product.

So now King gets to the hard part. You have to tell the truth. Your story’s truth. The writer cannot just be a pass-through for others’ words, ideas, conversations. “The job of fiction,” he says, “is to find the truth inside the story’s web of lies.” Even when we love the characters in a book and we really, really don’t want it to end, if the book has told the truth, we can feel satisfied when we turn that last page. If not, a squeaky voice starts up somewhere in our brain, Madeline’s Miss Clavel saying, “Something is not right.” As stunning as most of Gone Girl was—a web of lies if ever there was one—I thought the ending fell unexpectedly flat, and King has put his finger on the reason. In working out her denouement, author Gillian Flynn somehow strayed from the truth of her characters.

By contrast, truth-telling pervades the Pinckney Benedict stories I reviewed this week (on the home page for now; eventually the review will end up in “Reading . . .”). One of the best quotes describing the struggle to find the truth nugget is a favorite of my writing coach, Lauren Davis, and it’s from sports columnist Red Smith, who once said, “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.”

While that’s true, King also says that even the worst three hours he ever spent writing “were still pretty damned good.”

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Research in Fiction

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Since I write both fiction and nonfiction (a woman has to earn a living), people often ask about the differences between the two. It’s happened that on nonfiction projects, when those of us involved are struggling over how to present some complex technical issue, my colleagues will say it must be so much easier to “just make it up.” Oh?

Tarifa, Spain

Tarifa, looking toward Jebel Musa, a setting in one of my novels (photo: Manfred Werner, Creative Commons)

Thoughtful fiction writers put an enormous amount of research into their work. Obviously science fiction and techno-thriller writers do. It’s the grounding in realistic possibility that lets the reader travel alongside them. Writers in other genres do, too, perhaps less obviously. Research is why I joke that the FBI may show up on my doorstep any time now, given the amount of Internet digging I’ve done into terrorism and weapons. General research on these topics provides an endless stream of ideas and themes for plot development.

In last week’s post, I wrote about the importance of “details.” Research is also how the writer develops and manages those details and avoids errors. If I need a tree in the yard of a house in Princeton, I know what grows here (weedy locusts, draped in poison ivy). But if the house is in Rome, I have to find out what kinds of trees I’d find there. Then I can write that the patio was “thickly shaded by a fragrant sweet bay tree,” rather than “there was a tree in the yard.” Such specific details make a story more vivid in the mind of the reader. While it takes a few seconds to read those eight words, it may have taken an hour to do the research and weigh the arboreal options.

I remember reading a thriller set in Washington, D.C., where a character took a cab and checked the meter for the fare. Alas, in that time period, D.C. cabs used a zone system for establishing fares. There were no meters (there are now). Neither the author—nor his editor—had Washington cred, and I don’t want my readers distracted by such slip-ups.

Research provides essential local color. One of my plots takes the protagonist to Tarifa, Spain. I’ve been to Tarifa, but I can’t say I remember it in detail and didn’t take many pictures. So I did photo research, creating a file of streetscape snapshots that helped me envision where the characters walked, the kinds of restaurants they ate in, the weather, and the local youth culture’s kite-surfing obsession. Research on Tarifa hotels gave ideas about room layouts, décor, city views, and the like. So when I write that Archer Landis could look over the rooftops of Tarifa’s low whitewashed buildings across the Mediterranean to the Rif mountains in northern Morocco, I know that is in fact possible.

Research does more than enable accurate and detailed description. It also can uncover details that fuel the plot. In my novel set in Rome, one of the bad guys hides out in Riano, a small town north of Rome. Riano has a public webcam that shows live pictures of its main square. After watching that camera a while, I created a scene in which the Rome police spot Nic and his girlfriend shopping in the open-air market and set the local police on their trail.

A totally different kinds of research I’ve done is to read works in Italian side-by-side with the English translation, to try to get a feel for the language. Whether this has been at all useful, I can’t say, but it was fun. More practical are the discussion forums of WordReference.com where I’ve asked Rome locals about current street slang.

Maps are essential: police precincts, neighborhood boundaries, building layouts, including floorplans I create. Google Maps street-level views and geo-coded photos, ditto.

I am in awe of those who write historical fiction, some of whom have developed encyclopedic period knowledge. Alan Furst (Europe in the run-up to World War II) and Patrick O’Brian (the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars) come to mind. Not only do they have to get the settings and clothing and historical details correct (no war before its time), changes in speech and language have been enormous. A teen character from a hundred years ago cannot convincingly say, “Whatever,” and the author cannot just write whatever, either.

In a recent interview, author Pinckney Benedict describes the research he did for the short story “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,” which is told from the point of view of a highly trained fighter pilot. Benedict not only read extensively about fighter pilots and how they think, he spent hours debriefing a friend who was a Marine Phantom pilot in Vietnam, and he also cobbled together “a convincing flight simulator” in his basement and spent many hours in it, following the flight path of the character in the story. Research, he told the interviewer, “makes me ecstatic.”

I collect all my research for a novel in a three-ring binder, which includes the photos and maps like those mentioned above. It has a divider for the basics: the calendar for the year the story takes place, the times of sunrise and sunset in the city, and the phases of the moon for the appropriate season. I can’t have a full moon on a Tuesday and another one the following Sunday. I make notes about time zone differences, so I only have to look them up once. It has newspaper or magazine articles generally related to the subject matter of the story and details about clues I’ve planted or weapons used. This notebook is my personal encyclopedia, and I refer to it often. It keeps me consistent. It keeps me from “just making it up.”

You Know Where the Devil Is

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In the details, right? Writing my brief review of the nonfiction book Spycraft this week started me thinking about details, because that book provided them in encyclopedic proportion (bad choice for an audio read; I should have bought a dead-tree copy instead). In my own writing and in reading the work of some twenty-five or thirty other newish writers, I’m well aware of the many ways details trip us up.

Writing description is a tightrope walker’s game. Authors have to include enough detail to put a picture (the right one) in the reader’s mind without being tedious. In the Victorian era, readers loved detail, and that’s part of what makes reading those novels hard for many people today, living life in the fast lane. Victorian detail came in long loopy sentences, but less ornate approaches can stimulate pictures in readers’ minds equally effectively. Read Cormac McCarthy to find starkly simple detail, yet surgically precise description: “The night was falling down from the east and the darkness that passed over them came in a sudden breath of cold and stillness and passed on. As if the darkness had a soul itself that was the sun’s assassin hurrying to the west, as once men did believe, as they may believe again” [The Crossing]. (McCarthy also teaches the subtle power of “and.”)

tightrope walker

(photo: wikimedia.org)

When the writer’s balance gets off—too much, too little—problems such as these occur: Pure decoration—a lot needs to be happening at different levels when moving a plot along, and it can be distracting when writers stop the action to explain that a particular weed was “no more than knee-high and had white, daisy-like flowers, each the size of a dime and centered with a bold dot of eggyolk yellow, and erupted in drifts along the dusty roadside,” if those weeds are never going to matter in the story. In Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (recent winner of the 2014 Edgar award), he describes in detail a young punk’s Deuce Coupe, black with red and orange flames painted along the sides. The punk and the car figure prominently in the story, and, in subsequent mentions, all Krueger needs to do is mention the flames and the whole image—in all its symbolism—is brought back.

The irrelevant detail (or “Chekhov’s gun”)—Anton Chekhov famously said, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” I hate finishing a book with that “Whatever happened to—” feeling about some vividly described character or thing. Yes, authors can include red herrings, but they ultimately have to be understood as such. At the same time, the groundwork for the resolution of the plot—and in mystery-writing, the clues—must be artfully laid so that the ending seems true, not a deus ex machina, nor totally predictable. Scott Turow’s first book, Presumed Innocent, gave such a neon-lit early clue that I knew the killer’s identity from that page on. Disappointed.

Other common problems are:

red plate, pie

(photo: christmasstockimages.com)

The misplaced detail—It’s jarring to read a long description of a plate, a car, a dress—its shape, material, use, whatever—and then, five pages or paragraphs later, after the reader has formed a firm picture of this plate/car/dress, provide the additional information that it’s red. All such basic descriptive details need to be in one place. And should include the shade of red: cherry, scarlet, maroon. You may ask, what difference does it make whether the damn plate is blue or red? Color matters. I will assume the author made a thoughtful choice.

The lack of sensory detail—to engage readers, details need to vary—not always to appear as if the writer was copying off the character’s driver’s license—and to appeal to more than the sense of sight (“I saw her cooking”). They need to describe characteristics that demand our other senses, too, those we can feel, hear, taste, and smell. Was Mom in the kitchen cooking, or did the clattering pans reveal Grandma had arrived and the rich aroma of sizzling chicken fat mixed with the burnt-sugar smell of caramel assure Sunday dinner would be a feast?

Details about characters—my writing coach, Lauren B. Davis, gave the perfect summary of what to aspire to in describing a character. What to aim for, she said, are details that don’t just tell how a character looks, but who he is. Two examples from Margaret Atwood: “(She wore) penitential colours—less like something she’d chosen to put on than like something she’d been locked up in.” Or “He’s a large man, Walter—square-edged, like a plinth, with a neck that is not so much a neck as an extra shoulder” (both from The Blind Assassin).

To sum up, while details brings a story to life—writers need not too many, not too few, and just the right ones, Goldilocks.

O, Canada! A Week in Ottawa

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O, Canada!

Ottawa, in 1857 picked by Queen Victoria to be the capital of the province of Canada, has grown into a beautiful, walkable city. In a week there, it wasn’t possible to see all it has to offer—at least not at the leisurely pace befitting a vacation. Early June was an idea time for a visit, too, perfect weather for long walks along the Ottawa River and Rideau Canal, and not yet overrun with tourists. (That can’t be said for mid-May, when the area hosts the world’s largest tulip festival—a gift in perpetuity to Canada for sheltering the Dutch Royal Family during the German occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.)

Parliament buildings, Ottawa

Parliament buildings, Ottawa (photo: author)

The main government buildings—Parliament and the Supreme Court—are spectacular gothic revival style, reportedly modeled on the picturesque nearby hotel, the Fairmont Chateau Laurier. The hotel’s opening was delayed some months because the developer, bringing furniture from England, died aboard the Titanic. Today, it’s the favored hotel for visiting dignitaries; the Prime Minister of Australia was a guest when we were there.

Ottawa was selected as the capital, in part because of its inland position, the War of 1812 having revealed how vulnerable to attack by Americans the country’s then-major cities—Toronto, Montreal, and Quebec City—were, all located on the St. Lawrence River. Nevertheless, Ottawa had strong transportation connections via the Ottawa River, which joins the St. Lawrence and the Rideau Canal. For a tourist today, these waterways are part of the city’s charm.

Like any national capital, Ottawa offers numerous museums and tours of government and official residences. Especially interesting was the Canadian War Museum, where the story begins with early skirmishes with and among Native Americans and ends with Canada’s role in international peacekeeping efforts, spearheaded by Nobel Prize-winning former Prime Minister Lester Pearson. Much attention is given to the country’s contributions in World War I, where the nation attained international recognition, most notably at the Battle of Vimy Ridge.

Separately, tourists can visit the Diefenbunker, a Cold War-era underground shelter for the government’s most important officials (but not their families) in case of nuclear attack. The names comes from former Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker (Dief the Chief), who had it built some miles outside the capital. Elaborate though the design of the multi-storied bunker is, it was soon outmoded by increasingly powerful atomic weapons and the short warning times enabled by intercontinental ballistic missiles. The accompanying helipad has been used once.

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (photo: author)

The National Gallery of Canada is huge, its architecture a modern take on the gothic revival theme, with an entire floor devoted to Canadian artists. That’s where I spent my time, as I’m a huge fan of Emily Carr and the Group of Seven.

In the middle of this floor is the Rideau Chapel, disassembled and reconstructed from the to-be-demolished Convent of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Ottawa. A special exhibit there is Janet Cardiff’s “Forty-Part Motet,” separately recorded singing of a 16th-century choir piece by 40 voices played back through 40 speakers. Visitors can experience the piece as a whole, or, walking around the chapel, listen to individual voices. An amazing experience (audio clip excerpt–don’t miss).

The great thing is, there’s no pressure to see it all. You can easily spend an afternoon cruising the river, biking the canal path, or in the bustling ByWard market area sipping lemonade and contemplating which of the city’s many delightful restaurants you’ll visit that evening. A very special evening at Beckta deserves mention. I did not take a picture of my food.

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