Category Archives: Storytelling

Nebraska

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Bad work karma has kept me away from this website, and I miss reaching out to my invisible friends.Just had to write to tell you, urge you, implore you to see Alexander Payne’s movie Nebraska (trailer here), with Bruce Dern and Will Forte. Dern is the aging dad who thinks he’s won a million dollars in a bogus sweepstakes and won’t be talked out of it.

The script spot-on captures the relations between parents and children and old married couples. Heartwarming, without being sappy. Moments of hilarity when we recognize ourselves. Reviewers who say Payne doesn’t like Nebraskans (he is one, after all) miss the whole point. People like the characters in the movie can be found everywhere, which is what gives the film its appeal.

Excellent performances from the large cast of the old man’s relatives and long-ago friends whose “congratulations!” come with a predatory gleam in the eye. (Rated 91 on the Tomatometer.)

Christopher Wallenberg interviewed Dern for the Boston Globe, and the actor—a top contender for an Academy Award Best Actor nomination and Best Actor winner at Cannes—says what he tried to do was find “real moments.” And find them he did. You can never be sure how much his character really hears or knows. More than he lets on, you may suspect. His son has the insight to look past the apocryphal sweepstakes win to see that what his father really wants is “something to live for.”

Forte plays a supporting role in both the film and the story, attuned to the possibilities of an impossible quest. Familiar to Saturday Night Live audiences, Forte nails this difficult role, making not only his character feel real, but also, by the self-effacing negative space he creates, enabling his cranky dad to become a fully realized, sympathetic person, too.  

Interesting that the film is shot in black and white, in Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and Nebraska. The scenes of that lovely country—plus one long shot of Mt. Rushmore—“OK, we’ve seen it, let’s go,” says the cantankerous old coot—lose nothing in the cinematographer’s soft greys and charcoals. I once worked with a brilliant photographer who only shot in black and white. When I asked why, she said, “My black and white looks like color.” So does Nebraska’s! See these inspired photos.

Experiments

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The fall 2013 issue of Glimmer Train includes an interview with short story writer and novelist Peter LaSalle, based at the U of Texas, Austin.   LaSalle talks about his new book, Mariposa’s Song—the story of a 20-year-old Honduran immigrant girl working in a rough Austin nightclub. The story itself unwinds like a song, one very long song, in one very very long sentence.

Experimental fiction has always had its devotees and its detractors. One reader’s bold innovation is another’s annoying gimmick. The ultimate test, of course, is, does it work? Ten, twenty years on, when the glare of newness no longer blinds us, do people still read it? You’ll think of examples of successful experiments immediately (and will have forgotten the others, perhaps):

  • Benjy’s stream-of-consciousness story in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
  • The discovery of magical realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude
  • David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which starts six stories across time in forward chronology, one through six, then finishes them, six through one, ending up where they began
  • A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan, creative in so many ways,  including a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation.

The staying-power of the last two is as yet unproved Cloud Atlas was much-praised upon publication, won several awards, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a difficult movie; A Visit from the Goon Squad won a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is being turned into a tv series. [!]

Succesfu experiments–and even some of the marginally successful ones present readers with new tools for discovery, new ways to understand the author’s fictional world and the characters in it.

A 17-year-old boy recommended Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) to me. You could see in his eyes the delight of the new and, he hoped, iconoclastic. The book is presented variously in typewriter script across the page, in regular type in columns up, down, around and diagonally across the page, as poems, photos, letters, straight text, and it contains a 42-page index containing a great many entries for “more” and not so many for “less.” When Danielewski wants the reader to speed up the pace, there is a single word on the page. A lot of impenetrable analysis has been done on this book; I’m inclined to think the author was having fun. He just has a complicated brain. And he succeeded in something Faulkner was unable to do. He convinced his publisher to publish some words and sections in color.

Similarly, Night Film by Marisha Pessl is currently receiving much publicity. It’s a suspense novel that includes scraps of movie script, newspaper clippings, photos, website screenshots, police reports. Most intriguing, it’s available as an audio book, for which, though I love audio, this book seems particularly ill-suited.

Books in their digitized forms open up new possibilities for integrating bits of film, photos, audio, alternative paths, puzzles. They have the potential to burst open like a piñata. Authors already are creating vines and mini-movies as promotion for their books; integrating them is the obvious next step that some already are taking. I’m reading the New York Times’s non-fiction The Jockey on line. Audio, video, straight text. I would say “can’t put it down,” but I’m not holding it, I’m watching it unfold before me.

I don’t know about Mariposa’s Song, though. One long sentence. Other new forms, jangled and multimedia as they may be, are perhaps a better fit with our modern attention span.

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What We Know

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@ Death Valley, July 2012

My writers’ group—eight to twelve of us who get together every month to provide critiques, commiseration, celebration, and snacks—tried a storytelling exercise this week. (This was after a brief mental warm-up: describing an eighth dwarf for Snow White. “Sleazy” cheated at poker and was always trying to get Snow White alone.) Our main challenge for the evening was to briefly describe “the strangest thing that has ever happened to us or the oddest thing we have ever seen.”

Two hours in, we were still going strong. One hitchhiking escapade with a dodgy driver that ended in Death Valley could have been recorded almost verbatim as a complete short story. Others were pieces of narrative that might launch a whole symphony or be used in some work as incidental music: People and things that disappeared mysteriously. Ghost stories. Clairvoyants. A whole subcategory of jaw-dropping pet shenanigans.

The point of all this was to show ourselves that we have amazing, interesting stuff inside. We’ve had experiences. We’ve had emotional peaks and troughs. And we can draw on these in our own writing, much like the most uxorious actor, if he were cast as Othello, might seek out and magnify into mountainous proportions one minor wifely flaw. One member of our group could reconstruct her terror when locked in a room with a noisy ghost; another might recreate the merriment of family misadventures in Olde England; one has given the fear she felt when being stalked to her fictional character in a related situation.

This, I think, is how the often misunderstood dictum, “write what you know” should be interpreted. When it is taken too literally, it is patently absurd. Not to mention boring. “Another fascinating day in front of the computer, interrupted by a run to the grocery store. A literal milk run! Received 72 emails. Decided not to order FiOS.”

Writers can and should ground their writing in the emotions they know, distilling and intensifying them to the right pitch. We don’t have to write dully about emotions, we can write with them. Ready-to-tap, in full array, they are buried in the experiences that have amazed, amused, shocked, warmed, and frightened each of us. Two hours of round-robin storytelling proved the point. While none of the anecdotes we told each other this week will ever appear as a complete story—except perhaps the one about the wayward hitchhiker—we can filter the feelings these events inspired through new fictional situations and watch them emerge in emotionally compelling new guises.

Want to try it yourself?

Advice from the Masters

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Some of our America’s best writers, “masters of the craft,” have set down their fiction-writing pens to ruminate about writing itself—what makes it good, even great, and what to avoid like the dread passive tense. I just discovered a treasure chest of these literary gems assembled by Maria Popova in her brainpickings blog—“a free weekly interestingness digest.” The collection includes advice from authors as diverse as Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Bradbury, and Orwell.

Some of these authors dispense pithy observations, such as Stephen King’s “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Some authors’ advice is more ecumenical. Elmore Leonard’s famous 10 Rules for Writing is not in this collection, though widely extracted and republished (without permission, I understand, as they are in a copyrighted book he’d prefer to sell). His book includes this revelation: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard and Hemingway are masters of the spare style, but not everyone can write that way, not everyone wants to, and not every subject fits that style. Trish, in her comment on last week’s blog, reminded me about Leonard’s admonition to “never open a book with weather,” perhaps the dullest subject imaginable for hooking a reader. But if that rule were followed to the letter, by every author, we’d miss these opening paragraphs:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. . . .

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. . . .

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

This is, of course, the opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which chronicles the impact of the dawdling obfuscations of the befogged panjandrums of Chancery Court (trusts, estates, land law, guardianships), who delay the proceedings of the cases that come before them until the parties are dead and the fortunes involved have disappeared into the hands of the lawyers. The beginning, in both its plodding tone and fog-bound, muck-mired description, freighted with symbolism, sets the reader up perfectly for the entire 1000-page novel. Much different than the writer who observes his fictional world no more acutely than to note the sun was shining.

Finally, and perhaps an observation that can apply to any fiction—from spare Hemingway to florid Dickens comes from Kurt Vonnegut. Hemingway might condense it to “Be interesting!” What Vonnegut proposes is that the style a book is written in says everything about the author:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

Now, there’s a challenge worthy of the most ambitious writer. Maria Popova, with her interestingness blog would seem to be on the right track. Or, as Mr. Leonard says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

On Form and Format

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Image courtesy of www.freeimages.co.uk

For this week’s blog post, I’m referring you to an April 20 guest post—Follow that Thread!—I provided to Debra Goldstein’s lively blog, It’s Not Always a Mystery. That post builds on an intriguing essay by John McPhee about the complexity of organizing all the disparate pieces of the long, non-fiction narratives he writes so superbly. Many of his considerations apply equally well to fiction writers, who may not choose the most obvious way—strict chronology—to organize their work.

Two of the recent entries in the “Reading . . .” section of this website are cases in point. The book The Lullaby of Polish Girls (being published next month) moves back and forth in time with every chapter, but is set up to be easy-to-follow. In The Expats, a thriller I listened to, rather than read, the shifts in time and place were somewhat harder to follow, because I (mowing the lawn) couldn’t scan for a chapter title or detail to reorient myself. Still, it worked, though it’s the kind of book that could have been written chronologically and the chapters shuffled afterwards, so that the hero has only the information she should have had at any given point. In fact, I’m not sure how the author, Chris Pavone, kept it all straight otherwise!

To talk about structure in a purely mechanical sense, have you noticed that not only books, but individual chapters are becoming shorter? In the book I’m currently reading, some chapters are less than a page long, which works because most chapters switch voices from one character to another. But even in books with a single narrator, chapters may be little more than individual scenes.

This format is coming into vogue as a response to mobile devices. Authors and publishers envision people reading in short bursts, on iPads, smartphones, etc. I find all those breaks a little jarring (and they create lots of wasted space—less “book”), but it isn’t awful. What do you think?

Big Data & the Small Screen

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TV watching is getting better! It’s not just because TiVo lets you skip the ads, it’s not just the high-quality original programming from the premium cable channels, it’s big data doing something actually useful.

The lead feature in the April issue of Wired covers what it calls “the Platinum Age of Television,” and it says “networks and advertisers are using all-new metrics to design hit shows.” The Nielsen rating system’s hegemony has developed some pretty serious cracks in today’s multimedia environment. It was best at projecting how many people were sitting in front of their television sets watching a given show at a given time. Once the DVR arrived, Nielsen adjusted its system to count viewers who watched an episode up to a week later. And, this fall it says it will start counting views streamed over the Internet.

But it still isn’t counting Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, or tablet viewings, says Wired.

Since the key younger demographic is disappearing from the ratings system and the networks and advertisers are left with grandpa in his La-Z-Boy, they’re looking to new information sources: Twitter followers, show-related trending topics, and the like. In February, Twitter bought Bluefin Labs to help it start providing some of these data. Bluefin and its competitors mine social media messages relevant to 120 different TV networks and link them to data on the people who post and the devices they use. Watching while tweeting and posting to Facebook are a new norm.

“Some day in the near future, a show’s tweetability may be just as crucial as the sheer size of its audience,” says Wired. This means that shows people actually care about will rise in the network firmament based on much more than timeslot viewers.

Networks know some shows attract a small audience that really, really cares about them. Think of the firestorm of letters they receive when they cancel one, or how NBC had to get creative with Direct TV to save Friday Night Lights. Comparing “most watched” to “most loved” shows, a lot people are watching stuff they don’t care about all that much. Viewers rate a number of shows—Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, Sherlock (OMG, PBS!), for example—higher than the much more popular NCIS, Vegas and others. Which only proves what we’ve always known, just because a show is watched doesn’t mean it’s very good.

With better metrics, the shows people feel passionate about may stand a better chance of survival.

Exploring Further

Wired – How Data Powers the Platinum Age of Television

The Nielsen Company – “New Study Confirms Correlation between Twitter and TV Ratings” -3/20/13

TV.Com’s annotated list of most popular TV shows.

Zombies and Enneatypes

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An interesting cast of characters assembled yesterday for the Liberty State Fiction Writers’ fourth annual conference. Two hundred writers, editors, and agents in a Woodbridge, N.J., hotel talked about stuff I know zero about (zombies) and never heard of (enneatypes).

Quite a learning experience. Many of the attendees write in genres and sub-genres I’ve also never heard of. Romance publisher Harlequin alone has some 30 lines, including Harlequin Medical, Harlequin Historical, and Harlequin Historical Undone, as in bodice laces, I suppose. Since Harry Potter, there’s an upsurge in writing for the Young Adult and Middle Grade markets. None of this is what I do, but what was nevertheless inspiring about the meeting is that these women—and most of the attendees were women—are getting it done. They have kids, they have jobs, but they are writing books. Not only that, their books are published, sometimes self-published and self-promoted, but they are getting it done, and a remarkable number are making a living at it. At the book-signing session, a ballroom was filled with long tables where authors sat behind piles of their books, beaming like proud mamas.

Yes, I heard the common gripe, “I just want to write, I don’t want to do all this social media,” and the firm answer, “Today, being a good business person is half your responsibility as a writer.” Even an agented book that goes to a traditional publisher needs promotion at the author’s end. With only one major bookstore chain left, the competition for attention is keener. Meanwhile, the biggest physical store selling books is Wal-Mart. Marketing expert Jen Talty reflected on the myriad forms available to authors now, from self-publishing to e-books to audio to video game scripts to film, to you-name-it and said, “The product is not the book, it is the story.”

About the zombies. “New York Times best-selling author” Jonathan Maberry—an entertaining speaker—said, “a zombie book isn’t about the zombies. It’s about how people behave when faced with an immediate life-threatening crisis.” He recommended World War Z by Max Brooks, son of Mel. This summer, a movie version will be released, starring Brad Pitt. Maberry borrowed a great image for keeping the action in a thriller moving: “Imagine your character is walking a tightrope and behind him, it’s on fire.”

All the people in one workshop seemed to know about enneagrams except me. They are typologies of people’s personalities—nine types, precisely—and the traits associated with them, reduced to a dense chart. Authors can use these typologies to assess how their character might react in a particular situation. For example, a character of the “perfectionist” type tends to react with gut instinct and under stress becomes moody and irrational. I suspect such charts are helpful to the writers who use them, but that many characters are combinations of types, and one or another comes to the fore depending on circumstances. It seemed to simplistic to me, and Wikipedia notes that the system isn’t science-based or easily tested.

My reason for attending the conference was to talk face-to-face with literary agents. It’s bad form to collar an agent in the hallway and pitch your book, but the conference arranges brief (5-minute!) appointments, and I signed up to meet all three agents there who represent mystery/thriller authors. But first, I attended a workshop on pitching, which was filled with good advice and timely reminders, which I immediately adopted. And, all of the agents I talked to want to see all or part of my manuscript. A possible first step on a long road ahead, while I get cracking on the video game adaptation.

Have a Story Busting to Get Out?

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“I’ve always wanted to write a book,” people tell me when they find out I write. “I have a great story in mind.” Clearing desk and mind-space to do it is the problem. They need help getting started.

In November, I wrote about National Novel Writing Month, when several hundred thousand participants worldwide commit to writing a novel of at least 50,000 words in thirty days. Last year they penned almost 3.3 billion words! And some of them actually go on to get published. But for academic schedules and other reasons, November isn’t always a convenient month to participate.

So NaNoWriMo has branched out. In April and July, The Office of Letters and Light, the nonprofit organizer of these events, is holding Camp NaNoWriMo, “an idyllic writer’s retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life.” The goals are up to participants, but it’s meant to be “a challenge to dash off the first draft of your ambitious writing project in just one month.” The days are longer, after all!

This year’s Camp has several new features:

  • The Word-Count Archery Range: A flexible word-count target that suits your project—anything from 10,000 to 999,999 words.
  • Your Camp Cabin: A small group of fellow-writers to cheer you on, bounce ideas off of, or be a quiet resource. You can choose cabin mates based on their age, shared genre (mystery, historical fiction, fantasy, memoir, or whatever), similar word-count goal, activity level, or even by name.
  • Scripts included: a new category has been established for scriptwriters.

Camp NaNoWriMo provides the support, encouragement, and resources you need to write a novel in a month, start to finish. Its resources will help you

  • plan your novel
  • track your progress
  • create a cabin full of like-minded writers
  • receive online encouragement from staff, fellow campers, friends, and family.

Sign-up for the April session is available now. What with other deadlines coming up, I’m planning to participate in July. I have a new novel one-fifth completed, and I want to buckle down and get the first draft done so I can really get to work! See you at camp?

Telling an Award-Winning Story

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Live-action shorts are to feature films as short stories are to novels. You have to get in fast, establish the scene and your characters, make a limited number of points—and out you go. I wrote about the short documentaries nominated for the Oscar last week. Now that we know Curfew won the live-action category—it got my vote!—here’s why.

The other four nominees (and all the documentaries) were pretty depressing. True, Curfew opens with a young man (filmmaker Shawn Christensen) sitting in a bathtub full of bloodied water, and he’s holding a razor blade. Damage has been done. Still somehow there’s a sense of incipient redemption, because when his sister phones in desperation (“you’re last on my list”) and asks him to babysit her nine-year-old daughter for a few hours, you know he’ll say “OK.” After he cleans himself up.

The unlikely relationship between the uncle and niece develops engagingly. A true story is unfolding there. Curfew benefited from the charming, cool, and always on-point performance by Fátima Ptacek (with Christensen at left).

 

Two other films were about children–young boys living in impoverished circumstances (Afghanistan and Somalia) whose big dreams are hard to hold onto. In Oscar handicapping, these two cancelled each other out. Today’s U.S. child actors are vastly better trained and directed than they used to be. These boys hadn’t had that support and retained some awkwardness.

The fourth movie was about an aging gentleman, a concert pianist, facing a confusing mélange of past and present, real and unreal, as he searches for his wife. Well done, if a little too predictable and a lot too like Amour, so a no-go for this year in such a strong field, the critics agree. And the last, Death of a Shadow (right), too slow-moving and surreal, short on action and long on atmosphere and outright weirdness. Steampunk clocks, silhouettes of corpses, endless corridors, creepy teeth.

While all the short documentaries were right around 40 minutes, making for a squirmy evening in only semi-comfortable chairs, all but one of the live action shorts were half that length. Curfew packed in so much feeling and character that it was a rich experience, deep if not long. And, BTW, it was edited on Christensen’s MacBook Pro!

  • Curfew (USA, 19 minutes) trailer
  • Asad (South Africa, 18 minutes) trailer
  • Buzkashi Boys (Afghanistan, 28 minutes) trailer
  • Death of a Shadow (Belgium/France, 20 minutes) trailer
  • Henry (Canada, 21 minutes) trailer

Oscar’s Documentary Faves

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A real treat this weekend, viewing all the Oscar-nominated short films in the documentary and live action categories! The treat part was seeing such remarkable filmmaking, though the subject matter of the documentaries, described here, was, well, let’s just say, “tears were shed.”

♦ King’s Point will be grimly familiar to those who know South Florida’s senior communities. The residents’ acerbic observations drew knowing laughs, but the jury remains out as to whether this type of congregate living is really a good thing or a concession to society’s lack of better choices for the elderly.

♦ Most moving for me was Mondays at Racine, about two sisters who once a month provide free services in their hair salon for women with cancer. Having their heads shaved exquisitely focuses and concentrates the women’s sense of loss and despair; the powerful emotional counterweight is the support of the sisters and their “been there” clients.

♦ Have you noticed the growing number of NYC homeless collecting bottles and cans by the hundreds (5¢ each)? Redemption exposes the way of life—and the diversity—of Americans whose survival now depends on others’ trash.

♦ Open Heart is the story of eight Rwandan children who must leave their families to travel 2,500 miles for surgery at Africa’s only hospital providing high-risk cardiac care for free. Meanwhile, the Italian medical organization running the hospital must fight the Sudanese president for promised financial support.

♦ Last, and probably the cinematically strongest of the lot, with a nice story arc, is Inocente, a talented San Diego teen (pictured above) who dreams of becoming an artist—a goal made even harder to achieve because she also is undocumented and homeless. All five films introduce viewers to some remarkable people, well worth knowing.

2-25 Update: And, yes, Inocente won, and it was great to see Inocente herself on stage with the winning team, as they called for more support for the arts and young artists.