First, the News. I’ve started uploading my published magazine articles to help answer the question: What do you do all day? They’re up on the website – just click on the banner at the top of this page and follow the “Magazine Articles” link. I’m putting them up there in the order I wrote them and golly-bob-howdy is that an eye-opening experience from my unbiased perspective. However, I’ve resisted the urge to edit and they are up there as published.

What to talk about – Writing or Starting Over. I know, Heads it’s Writing, Tails it’s Starting Over. Flip. Heads it is. Flip again. Heads. And again. Eight more times. Damn. I know, I’ll change the rules: Tails it’s Writing. Flip. Tails. The Universe has spoken and now I’ve got to come up with a thousand words or so about my new job.

Let’s start out by pegging the Nerd Meter. I love words. Always have and, despite them now being work, I probably always will. I have read dictionaries. Sad, but true. I also like the right words, not only for accuracy’s sake but for descriptive resonance. Putting the best word right where it belongs can put a shimmer to the blush of a rose or hone its thorns to pin prick precision. The converse is also true. The wrong word can drop your prosaic balloon onto the sticks with inevitable results. 

I recently struggled through one of the most poorly crafted novels I have ever read. I teetered on the willing suspension of disbelief until I got to the point where one of the characters drove off in a “Carmangia”. My first reaction was that the author – the “#1 New York Times Bestselling Author” – had just made up some fictional Italian sports car because she couldn’t get Ferrari to give her any product placement money. Two paragraphs later it hit me. She meant “Karmann Ghia” the old Volkswagen sport coupe. Pop went the balloon. Don’t these people read the stuff they write? By the time you become the “#1 New York Times Bestselling Author” with “over 75” books to your credit you should probably have an Editor and a Proofreader? Jeez, by the time I get to 75 books I better have a freaking entourage.

Eventually words have to be put into sentences and this is where I begin to fall short. I have written earlier about one of my favorite authors, Lee Child, and how he is sentence challenged. His books are a fun read so you can easily suspend disbelief and get into the spirit of the story regardless of the lack of what most people in the English speaking world would consider “grammar”. I swing for the other side of the park when it comes to sentences. I really like building complex and convoluted structures that logically make sense but would give Mr. Spock a headache to decode. The shining example of this style of sentence composition was written in 1830 by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton opening his novel Paul Clifford. This is the famous “It was a dark and stormy night…..” line. When I find something I’ve written that confuses even me I try to simplify it. My effort usually makes it worse so I succumb to my darker urges and leave it stand. Happily, I am not alone in my fondness for obfuscatory and abstruse prose and Edward George – who also coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” – has legions of fans still and you can read emulatory paeans to the man, as well as the original sentence in its entirety along with his novel, at www.bulwer-lytton.com.

With words and sentences I am lacking just one thing. Paragraphs? Think the smart-alecks among you. Talent? Think the rest. No, to both. What I am missing are Stories.

I’ve spent some time pondering this and have come up with some observations as to what makes a good story. The literary conventions of theme, characters, and plot often fall short when applied to Popular Fiction. I mean, all-in-all, when a writer tries to direct the story – a la Ms. Carmangia – the result is often that a better product would have resulted had the page remained ink-free. Even here, when the analysis also includes what you might call “good” Popular Fiction, a lesson becomes apparent. The job of a Popular Fiction writer – my job – is to write believable – yet good looking – characters who think things you as reader wouldn’t typically think, say things you probably wouldn’t say, and do things you probably wouldn’t do. 

Murder, for example. 

Murder Mysteries are the #1 top Popular Fiction genre. Murder is so pervasive in fiction that people die in kids’ books. All of us have had bad days and a lot of us have thought “Gee, I’d like to kill that so-and-so.” A much smaller percentage of us would actually come out and say that – unless it had been a very bad day indeed. A, fortunately, even more miniscule proportion of us ever act on those thoughts. Fortunate in that if we were all murderous cretins there would be few of us left to actually read all the Murder Mysteries that are written. Nonetheless, we gobble up fictional murder and, regardless of our actual feelings on the subject, grab more as soon as it hits the shelf.

Another observation I made is that these fictional thoughts, conversations, and actions are usually found in scenarios balanced at the very far edge of believability threatening to topple into the abyss. The real-life norm that murder is something that happens between friends is rarely seen in fiction. Fictional murderers are cast in the Jeffrey Dahmer mold taken up a notch or two to become Hannibal Lecter or Ted Bundy writ large into Patrick Bateman. This over-the-top-ness filters into all aspects of a story because by-and-large typical people, like you and me, think, say, and do typical stuff which doesn’t make us particularly story-worthy – just typical. 

Once you have a barely credible concept and some words and sentences and stuff you have to take that and turn it into a story. You sit down, plot it out, analyze your characters and their motivations and outline it chapter-by-chapter. You take your outline and refine it into a tight, fast-paced concept document. You do this over and over until your best-selling novel just spills from its pages. 

You do but I don’t.

For me the fun is in the writing process rather than in conceptualization and design. Writing itself really doesn’t feel like work. I’ll start, because you have to start someplace, with an idea that I find intriguing. It could be a scene or it could be an idea that was in my head when I woke up. Then I start typing. Usually it’s just a descriptive sentence – something to get my fingers moving. It may not even have much to do with the original idea. If the Story wants, which is the weird part, it takes over and the white space on the page just starts going away by itself. If the Story can give me ten-thousand words or so I figure there’s some legs there so I’ll box it up, put it in the to-do file, and hope that the next time I sit down those ten-thousand words have multiplied like rabbits and tumble forth in more-or-less the right order. It’s really a borderline mystical experience because the Story tells me about its characters and what they are doing. I, as the “writer”, feel more like a bystander during the creative process. Which is good because, given the chance, I’d much rather sit around and watch somebody else do the hard part.

The Story, on the other hand, knows squat about entertainment and cares nothing about making this job as a Writer pay for itself. This part of the drill is where I’ll see if I’ve got the chops to edit the drivel that flowed from my fingers and turn it into something that you, my reader(s?), find entertaining. Editing requires that I go in search of flaws in what I thought was pure mind candy when I wrote it. I must read my own work with the same critical gaze that I apply to Ms. Carmangia and her ilk. I have to look at the Story as the drainage from some necrotic, bone-deep literary abscess and start cutting and burning and, hopefully, healing. If the Story is as good as I thought it will survive the treatment and go on – better for it – to thrive. That part of the process, for me, is not going to be easy and I was really hoping for easy. As much as I want to write for a job I really don’t want it to turn into work.