Location Location Location

Robert B. Parker sent Jesse Stone to work in Paradise, MA, but Spenser worked out of Boston. Nevada Barr set Anna Pigeon wandering through every National Park from Isle Royale to the Dry Tortugas. Loren Estleman frequently sent Amos Walker from Detroit to Iroquois Heights.

Google Maps won’t get you there or to Paradise, MA. According to real estate agents, location is everything. It probably is to writers, too.

The difference is, if writers don’t like their location, they change it.

The main problem with a location is the people who live there. As a writer, if you involve their hometowns in unsavory things, they may complain. They may even complain that you’re writing unsavory things about them.

People do unsavory things. That’s one place where we get our ideas. Carl Hiaasen once complained that whenever he dreamed up a completely wacky plot, he’d pick up a Florida newspaper and see something even wackier.

If we set a story in a big place with lots of people, more sensitive readers can dismiss the possibility that you’re writing about them. That’s one reason why New York is such a popular setting. If there are millions of people there, how could anyone be writing specifically about them? Unless your name is Donald Trump, and the character’s name happens to be Donald Trump, too.

Detroit is a small city getting smaller. In the latest census, it lost about a quarter of its population. But “Detroit” is shorthand for something much bigger. It is a euphemism for the car business which touches almost everyone. Everyone in America either owns a car or occasionally rides in one. Many people wrap their identity in their vehicle.

From the inside, the car business is an incestuous family. You can’t go anywhere in southeast Michigan without bumping into someone you recognize. I couldn’t set a story anywhere inside the real auto industry without literally stepping on someone’s toes. That’s what I know, so some invention was required to prevent trodden toes.

My fictional city is Paris, MI. There is a real Paris. It’s a country crossroads north of Big Rapids. It has a little Eiffel Tower, and at one time someone made replica iceboxes there. There is no risk anyone from that Paris will find themselves on my pages.

My Paris is a city built on pretention and lost dreams. It has a half scale Eiffel Tower that looks like a power pylon. The city’s builders hoped to cash in on their exotic namesake, but they come off as misguided pretenders. Everything faintly echoes all things French, and particularly Cadillac because my fictional benefactors, the dela Mothes, descend from the founder of Detroit. They lost their birthright along with the famous brand in a lawsuit before 1910. Every dela Mothe is obsessed with recovering that identity. My Paris is a monument to that obsession.

A city constructed as a replica of something else is uniquely American and quintessentially Detroit. The façade of the Henry Ford museum is identical to Independence Hall, America’s birthplace. Greenfield Village recreates a lost era when invention seemed commonplace. The Wright brothers’ memories live cheek by jowl with those of Thomas Edison and Stephen Foster. Main Street, USA in Disney World presents a movie back lot image of the Age of Innocence. Except the street is paved and the buildings are always freshly painted. Oh, and no one lives there.

Two landmarks in my Paris are the palatial estates of the dela Mothes. One of them, Blackstone, alleges to be the second largest private home in America, after the Biltmore mansion. Detroit is dotted with places like that. Meadowbrook Hall, Fairlane and Rose Terrace (demolished decades ago) were each monuments to the oversized egos that founded the industry. Whole communities like Palmer Woods, Grosse Pointe and Birmingham were built to display the lesser luminaries spawned by the auto companies in their heyday.

Paris includes the Univers Industries Tech Campus, fictionally designed by Mies van der Rohe. It reflects both the Warren’s GM Tech Center by Eero Saarinen and Ford’s Research Center in Dearborn. Each mimics a college campus in form, but not in the structured thinking inside.

Finally, Paris is flanked by a vast, gritty and ultimately abandoned industrial complex. Anyone who has driven along I-75 in Detroit, Joslyn Road in Pontiac, Van Dyke Avenue or seen the old Rouge Complex can appreciate the way the specter of industrial might still clings to our consciousness. We wish for those lost wages without recalling the rusty acid residue that ate away at our neighborhoods and souls.

By creating a doppelganger that invokes the physical and emotional qualities of real places, an author can resonate with readers who have lived the reality without challenging their memories.

You can keep your memories. I’ll always have Paris.

Ambition

My friend Ann Rant says, “I have to get to work. I want to finish this book before I die.”

I say, “I have to get to work. I’ve got ten books to finish before I start the next series.”

We’re about the same age. Without disclosing any secrets, I can safely say that neither of us will be shopping for caskets any time soon.

I mean no disrespect to Ann. Some great writers like Harper Lee wrote only one book. To Kill a Mockingbird came out fifty years ago and instantly became part of the canon of great literature.

My ambition is both more humble and greater.

I want to publish a series that spans the last fifty years in the car business. That would be an epic accomplishment, except that the books are crime fiction, a humble genre.

I’m like J.K. Rowling. She’s a retired billionaire. I’m retired, too. She planned out the entire Harry Potter series before she started typing. I planned out my series, too. She kept the plan a secret. I can’t keep a secret. Maybe that’s why she’s a billionaire and I’m not.

All is revealed:

Frank Healy starts as a student and later as an engineer for Univers Industries in Paris, Michigan. If he’d kept his head down and his mouth shut, he’d’ve risen to the executive ranks before retiring. Instead, his uncompromising sense of justice drives him to right the wrongs he sees around him at work. Evil-doers die at his hands. His ambition is to mete justice and keep his job. No mean trick while you’re killing evil executives.

Red Crush (Agora International) Frank returns to school through the aftermath of the 1967 Detroit riots. The smoldering rage awakens him to the plight of black people, a group he’d previously ignored. When he begins a work assignment at a stamping plant, he falls into an imminent race war between black laborers and white skilled trades. People are dying in industrial “accidents.” When Frank realizes there is an invisible hand behind the discord, he sets out to stop the battle by causing his own accidents.

Safety Margin (Agora International) Frank has achieved his life ambition. He’s an engineer at the Univers Styling Center. When he is assigned to the nascent air bag program, he soon realizes that not all the test dummies are dummies. When the trail of his missing Vietnam veteran brother leads into the seamy underbelly of Detroit’s Cass corridor, he finds that the trail of missing veterans leads back to the air bag test program. No man should die for technological progress, and Frank is ready to stop the massacre. Meanwhile, Frank’s wife becomes sexually entangled with a Catholic priest, and the local archbishop is unwilling to stop it. Frank again feels compelled to intervene.

Grand Designs (any takers?) When the Arab Oil embargo shakes the foundations of the auto industry, the Univers CEO asks Frank and some cohorts to re-invent the company. When the time comes to show off their results, the stakes are raised. Frank must mediate between Charles dela Mothe, the styling chief bent on his legacy, and Newt Isakssen, the technical genius who knows how to keep the company afloat in a sea of regulations. Charles has another problem. He believes he has the right to sex with anyone in his employ. When his series of rapes leads to Frank’s door, he must act to save the company and his female coworkers. Charles must die.

Paris Pariahs (draft) After Frank kills Charles dela Mothe; he becomes an outcast at work. His ex-wife, Priscilla, arrives on his doorstep, drug addicted and riddled with AIDS. It is 1984. AIDS is a death sentence. Doctors and hospitals are terrified of the plague. Priscilla is turned away at the emergency room door. Frank nurses her through her final days while plotting revenge on those who infected her. At work, he uncovers a plot to use Methadol, the drug that addicted his wife, in a scheme to addict customers to new cars. The drug leads people to their deaths by heat stroke when they fail to leave overheated cars. Frank vows to stop the plot.

Filled with remorse after brutally murdering one of his victims, Frank attempts suicide, failing not once, but twice. As penance, he must bring justice without resorting to murder. On the way, he learns about mercy and forgiveness, but still rights the wrongs.

Cadillac Dreams (next) General Motors is on the ropes. They are on the verge of missing their payroll. Tony dela Mothe, the Univers CEO wants to regain the Cadillac name his family lost to GM eighty years earlier. When a slick Mergers and Acquisitions trader proposes a scheme to recover the brand through “green-mail” in a stock purchase deal, Tony is taken in. Two hundred million dollars later, the trader disappears with all the money, and Univers has nothing. Frank sets out on the trail of the grafter, intending to turn the tables with the help of Lucy Firenze, his wealthy girlfriend.

Electroshock Therapy – A hotshot aerospace entrepreneur comes to Univers with a plan to transform the car business with a revolutionary electric car. Clearly, they know everything about technology and nothing about the car business. Frank is thrust into the middle of the fray when his team is assigned to sort out the conflicting claims and make a business case. Everything comes together smoothly until a crash test reveals the fatal flaw. Sodium sulfur batteries burst into an unstoppable conflagration when torn open in an accident. Newt Isakssen wants to press on convinced that the problems can be masked until they are solved, but when the crash facility burns to the ground killing all the test engineers, a final confrontation is inevitable.

Broken China – When a new CEO takes the helm at Univers Industries, change is overdue. The Japanese have been gnawing away at the American car market and demand is stagnant. The company’s heir, Louis dela Mothe sees China as the company’s salvation, a vast untapped market, ripe for plucking. Frank Healy and Kit Karsten are assigned the lead. Kit gets the job because he has long experience with the Chinese, dating back to his days with the CIA on a secret mission in Cambodia. Frank is there because of his product savvy. Unfortunately, Kit’s history confronts some long memories on the other side of the bargaining table. Their opposite number, the chairman of the People’ Liberation Car Company, is a general who fought against Kit forty years earlier. As the two Americans scout the country looking at market conditions, they quickly realize they are being followed, and a simple business deal morphs into a harrowing struggle to stay alive and out of a Chinese jail. All the while, their negotiations continue as if nothing more was at stake than a few billion dollars.

The List – The stock market meltdown of 2008 is about to claim another casualty. Univers is nearly bankrupt. No one will buy a car from a company that might not be in business tomorrow. Drastic measures have become necessary. Louis dela Mothe gives Frank a list of highly paid executives with simple instructions: get them off the payroll, and ideally off the retirement rolls as well. He has sixty days until the government intervenes. What Louis wants is for Frank to intimidate the executives into quitting, and failing that to murder them. Frank wants nothing to do with the scheme, but Louis threatens to expose all Frank’s past misdeeds if he fails. Frank’s reputation precedes him, and most of the targets leave on their own, but a few holdouts bode ill for a showdown.

The battle over dirty laundry abruptly ends when the government seizes the company, installing a former general at the helm. His personal scheme for revival involves a giant locomotive like vehicle that is supposed to transform long distance transportation. What it does is drive other cars off the road and into the ditches, often on their roofs. When Frank fails to stop the juggernaut program, he becomes the target of a vendetta by the general that can only lead to greater tragedy.

Fuels Gold – Deep in the bowels of Univers Industries, a chemist invents a new ceramic catalyst that will revolutionize fuel cell technology. The zeolite breaks natural gas directly into carbon dioxide and hydrogen which produces electricity with remarkable efficiency. While the patents are being prepared, a strike team of ex-special forces soldiers breaks in and steals the prototypes. They offer the technology on Craig’s List to the highest bidder. Frank and his brother must find the culprits and recover the samples before a competitor decodes the technology and steals a march. The trail leads into the murky, quasi-legal world of mercenaries an corporate espionage.

Power Suit – When Univers funding of an unconventional scientist at Cadillac University leads to the discovery of a new piezo plastic fiber, the implications quickly become obvious. Clothing equipped with the right sensors and a small power supply, can multiple the strength of a person wearing the suit. At first the scientist sees it as a boon to paraplegics, restoring their mobility. But soon Univers military subsidiary seizes on the technology as a path to super-soldiers, men with infinite endurance and the strength of ten. When Frank reluctantly dons the prototype for a confrontation with the mad soldier he opposes, the battle becomes a clash of titans.

There, I’ve done it: two in eBooks, four written, six to go. Now all I need is a publisher.

Is that the phone ringing?

I Rot a Buk

Shortly after I was inducted in the Order of the Golden Boot (early retirement), I earned a Ph.D. in sociology. I hoped for a second career teaching college. 

I got the degree in short order, but things didn’t work out quite as planned. I did teach for about six years, primarily as an adjunct, which meant I did the same things as a real professor for a tenth the pay.

Most of that time, I taught social theory and research methods to upper division students. Since those courses were both required for admission to the master’s program, I frequently got graduate students trying to backfill their prerequisites.

Writing is an important part of graduate study. I felt an obligation to include critical evaluations of student writing as part of my syllabus, even though it wasn’t strictly part of the curriculum. I was regularly astonished by the material that crossed my desk. I wasn’t laboring at some backwater online diploma mill. My employer was a Carnegie research university. 

Some of my students’ writing would have received failing grades from my seventh grade English teacher. Admittedly, standards have declined since the golden age before pot reigned. Even so, a sentence fragment will never be acceptable in academic writing. Some of my students didn’t seem to know the difference between a noun and a verb.

The situation was so bad that whenever I encountered fluency, I became suspicious, especially when the fluency emerged halfway through a paper. Plagiarism is a perpetual problem in academia. It is so easy to cut and paste from the internet that students think there can’t possibly be anything wrong with it. 

I once had a student cut an entire essay from Karl Marx and present it as her own work. I suppose she didn’t think I’d notice. 

Any time I came across something that appeared too good or out of character, I would search the internet for the source. Generally, I found the original within a few minutes. Once in a while, I was wrong. I received a brilliant piece from one student, but when I searched, I could find nothing similar from any public or academic sources. When I talked to the student, he turned out to be a sophomore member of the university debate team. 

All I could do was bask in the glory of his work.

While I was teaching introductory sociology, I used different standards. I wanted them to express their ideas freely, without any grammatical constraints. Your second grader writes to the same standard. My minimal requirement was that I had to be able to parse their meaning, even through the fog of improperly selected words and bad constructs.

Even setting the bar that low, I occasionally got a piece that was completely incomprehensible. I received strings of letters that had never been combined into a word. I saw strings of words that couldn’t possibly be interpreted as a sentence. I saw sentences that made absolutely no sense. I got text message constructs presented as serious academic contributions.

From college students. All I could do was shake my head.

All this has little significance for serious writers. A writer must order her thoughts into a structure that extends past the first period.

When a friend introduced me to post-modern art, she told me something that Wassily Kandinsky (Der blaue Reiter. I had to slip that in!) said. There can be no universal communication between the artist and the viewer. The artist expresses him/herself in the work, and the viewer sees her/himself.

I’m more of a fan of Juergen Habermas. He argues that communication between people (writer and reader in this case) depends on a common frame of reference, a shared world view. We have to know some of the same things to see the same things. 

I write to share some of what I feel in my imagination, so that you may feel some of those things, too. To me, that implies a recognizable sentence structure, meaningful paragraphs, a plot and human-seeming characters.

If no one understands what I’m trying to say, I’m no different than an infant clattering randomly at the keyboard.

Praise for Purple Pros

Almost twenty years ago, I was invited to join a writers’ group that met in Beverly Hills (Michigan). Most of the other attendees where published, although I only knew the woman who invited me, Annick Hivert-Carthew.

When one of the others started reading, I was floored. I felt I was in the presence of greatness, like Papa Hemingway had sat down next to me at a bar.

His name is Loren Estleman. At last count, he has published over forty books, some westerns like Billy Gashade, the one he was reading from, but mostly noir. His writing is crisp and poetic. It never fails to delight me.

Another author who read that night was Sarah Wolf. At the time, she had two mysteries in print, and was working on a family saga about the Turkish massacre of Armenians in the early 1900s. Her writing was equally beautiful, on the order of Maeve Binchy’s work, but she couldn’t find a publisher.

I was mesmerized by both of them.

On the other hand, much of what I read, especially among thrillers, is very badly written. I often wonder how an author ever made it out of the slush pile, but there he (or she) is in hardcover.

I am not enamored with most literary fiction. I recently picked up a book that was being praised to the heavens. Against my instincts, I persevered for two hundred pages, then skipped ahead a hundred pages at a time. I never finished it. It was boring. The characters were boring. The story lacked a plot. Okay, maybe it was character driven, but I wouldn’t drive those characters to the end of my driveway.

This from someone who stays up past bedtime reading about complexity theory.

Let me be perfectly clear. While I have a Ph.D. my education hasn’t been the slightest bit liberal. The closest I got to the humanities was philosophy. I am, however, a voracious reader. I read everything: hard science, social science, history and fiction. I read the Iliad and Odyssey for pleasure before I could drive.

I think I know good writing when I see it, and I think I can tell if my own writing is okay. I adore writers like Nevada Barr, who effortlessly capture place, personality and plot. But this is a point of departure with some of my current writing friends. One of them, I’ll call her Ann Rant, scrupulously avoids reading fiction. She is deathly afraid she’ll unintentionally plagiarize some famous author, thereby missing her one chance at stardom.

Maybe I have an advantage because I remember much of what I read. I can usually place a phrase or situation with a particular author, and often to a particular book. I can usually tell by the first paragraph if I’ve read a book before, even if it was twenty years earlier.

I believe all that reading enriches my writing. If an exquisite remembered phrase comes to mind, I can turn it into something new without treading on the original. The greatest writing I’ve read scans like poetry, and on the rare occasions when I achieve that effect, I can see it.

My friend Ann Rant is a beautiful writer. Her characters are full of vivid integrity to the point that I can tell when she writes something her character would never say or do. Despite this, Ann remains tentative and uncertain. She has toiled over her manuscript for years. It remains unfinished, in a constant state of flux. She should be on a book tour by now.

Back to purple prose.

I like alliteration. Some of the best phrases I’ve enjoyed are built from similar syllables tied together like matched pearls in a necklace. Beauty calls from nature, from music. Beauty speaks its own name in literature, too. Even in murder mysteries, if they are ever allowed into the hallowed halls of literature.

I can murder my characters without murdering the language, too.

Naming Names

“Write what you know!”

That sentence is practically the opening imperative in every book ever written about writing.

Two members of my writers’ group have recently published hardcover books. I’m insanely jealous, but that’s not what this is about.

One of them, a minor celebrity who stirred controversy in the local papers fifteen or twenty years ago, wrote a memoir extolling the great events and loves in his life. I’ve not read it, but he says he spared no detail. So much so that six months later (he claims) his wife was still chasing him around the kitchen table with a carving knife. If it’s true, that much rancor might’ve qualified both of them for a marathon, and he’s in his seventies.

The other, a former advertising executive who claims to have known everyone from Madonna to Mother Teresa, published a novel about presidential politics in the late 1960s. Many of the characters in the story were the real people on the national scene at that time. Since most of them are dead, I suppose he doesn’t have much to fear from libel, but even so…

Neither of these writers shows the slightest compunction about revealing the intimate details of other people’s lives.

I can’t bring myself to do that.

My novels are written from life in the same way my fellow authors have used their experiences for inspiration. The difference is that I can’t include those explicit details in any way that might embarrass the people who were there with me at the time.

Example: My first novel, Red Crush, begins in 1967, in the aftermath of the Detroit riots. I was attending General Motors Institute in Flint, MI at the time. As in the story, that was when my fraternity made a panicked move from a racially mixed neighborhood to their new, but unfinished house nearer the campus. But none of the details of that actual move may be found in the novel. For one thing, I wasn’t there. For another, I feel that setting the stories in fictional Paris, Michigan and equally fictional Univers Industries provides a degree of protective camouflage for the other people touched by the events I’ve used.

Let’s face it. My real life was pretty boring. Sure, I knew about and saw things that served as a good pretext for crimes, but auto workers and executives are as exciting as melted butter. I met John Delorean, when he was a mythic rising executive, but he was long gone by the time the cocaine sting happened. I breathed his air for about thirty seconds, then he was gone.

I do this because I don’t want to leave a hint that anyone I knew, or anything I saw was either embarrassing or criminal. Only in my imagination.

A while ago, I started writing a memoir about my pilgrimage through organized religion. I have not finished it, because I wanted it to have some semblance of a plot, and it didn’t. I felt I was better off sticking to fiction.

However, in the memoir, I was confronted by the same dilemma that bounds my novels. I don’t want to embarrass anyone. The people I’ve known and worshiped with are all sincere in their beliefs, and are mostly still alive. If I published my personal observations and conclusions in the context of the facts, places and dates of their lives, my revelations might subject them to undeserved ridicule because they’ve been tarred with the brush of my cynicism.

I don’t want that.

Some of you, including my published friends, might say, “Who cares? That’s what happened. I’m simply recalling the events as I saw them.”

I believe that people have a right to retain their dignity. If I have to hide behind a pseudonym, using disguised names and locations to protect everyone else’s dignity, I guess it’s my duty to do so. If my old friends recognize themselves in my stories, it’s up to them whether they tell anyone else. I’m not going to splash their lives all over my pages.

If no one ever buys my books and reads about them, it doesn’t matter. I’ve done my duty.

Freedom of the Press

It is no secret that the tone of public discourse has declined of late. Rancor echoes through the halls of Congress, over the airwaves and across the internet. The Supreme Court recently ruled that even hate speech is protected by the Constitution.

The right to contribute to public discourse has been a central principle of our society from almost the nation’s founding, and generally has been exercised with a vengeance. With the rise of the internet, a new question has emerged: What ought to be published?

From my viewpoint, this is not a question of censorship in the sense that the powerful have the ability to suppress those with whom they disagree. It is more a question of what deserves to be disseminated.

With Twitter and Facebook, any person with a thought can promptly publish it to a world of breathless readers, or so we would believe. In fact, the new media gives voice to many, buy hearing to few. We broadcast into a void. The body of content on the internet is described as a cloud. Perhaps a better metaphor comes from astronomy: Dark Matter. Dark matter composes the vast majority of the universe. It probably consists of subatomic particles that never coalesced into anything meaningful, like a hydrogen atom. Mostly what dark matter does is obscure our view of what lies beyond, other suns, other planets.

All those Tweets, Facebook posts and blogs are dark matter that obscures whatever substantive, meaningful and pleasurable content may exist on the net.

We have been led to believe that we can find almost anything on the net. Certainly, it seems almost everything IS on the internet. The problem can be finding it. Search engines do too good of a job matching content to queries. A typical search on Google may yield a million hits or more.

But are they relevant? Are any of them exactly what you’re looking for?

The much-touted cloud is another matter. There are two aspects of cloud computing. One is that vast quantities of data, for example financial transactions, can be stored on remote servers, along with applications to search those transactions. If you want to return a sweater to Target that you bought six months ago, but don’t have the receipt, great. A clerk can find the charge using only your credit card number. Data miners can reduce billions of transactions to meaningful and obscure trends using statistics.

But suppose you’re a writer. You’ve posted your Great American Novel on Amazon. How is anyone other than you’re tech savvy mother going to find it when they’re looking for a Great American Novel to read?

It’s buried, just like it would have been at the bottom of a slush pile while your frustration with the uncaring publisher mounted. We writers grasp at the delusion that because someone can download it to their Kindle, they actually will. First, they have to discover it, which they won’t unless they know exactly what they’re looking for. Then, somehow, they have to realize after reading a page that it’s worth buying for a measly four dollars.

Good luck with that.

Garrison Keillor allegedly said, “The average eBook will sell ten copies, seven of which go to blood relatives.”

I come from a big family, and I haven’t even done that well, judging from my last royalty check, and I’ve got TWO novels on Amazon.

This is not to say that things have gotten worse. Access to publication has always been restrictive. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack because he owned the printing press. Martin Luther’s 99 Theses got published because some stringer tore them off the cathedral door and set them to type. After that, the news agencies picked them off the wire. Generally, things that got published conformed to social norms and the values of the elites who own the presses.

Publishers have always been selective because there’s an awful lot of badly written stuff out there. The invention of personal computers and word processor software has only made it easier for someone to assemble 300 pages into something they fervently believe is a novel.

Now that drivel can go directly to Amazon, with no one standing in the way to say, “That’s awful!” And the sum total of all those titles is a cloud of dark matter obscuring whatever delight someone else has created that actually deserves to be read. Widely.

A technological solution is unlikely. True, several startups are working on software that analyze songs to predict future hits. Amazon uses similar technology to suggest future selections based on your previous purchases, but don’t count on something like that to drag you from the mucky backlists to the New York Times bestseller list. It’s not going to happen, no matter how beautiful your writing is.

Beat your own drum. Jump up and down and scream. Make a YouTube video. Hold an eBook signing event. Those are the things that will get you noticed, if only by the men with the white coats and butterfly nets.

Write Right, Wright

Few words in language are more tangled in a Gordian knot of confused meanings, and homonyms. But when we tug on the right end, the connections are not as tangled as they first appear.

The simplest meaning of RIGHT is the cardinal direction, as in handedness. Roughly five out of six people are right handed in the US. Elsewhere in the world, the ratio is more biased, as left-handedness is considered worse than gauche in some cultures. I am among the minority. Left to our own devices, there would probably be more of us.

After handedness, the second meaning of RIGHT is power. You ask, “Are you kidding?” No. Was it Stalin who said, “Power comes from the barrel of a gun?” Robert Schlain, author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, argues that fists, tools and weapons are wielded primarily with the right hand. Men (I’m not being sexist) exercise dominance using the power of a strong right hand.

When we talk about the “Divine Right of Kings” or the “Bill of Rights,” it is power that grasps and sustains those rights. Political scientists say the government has a monopoly on violence. “Might makes Right.” Who can argue against that?

RIGHT also means correct. This is actually a tautology. Correct means “right together.” When we do something right, it is right because it conforms to some norm which has been imposed by those in power. When I took geometry in high school, I was regularly marked down for creating proofs that didn’t conform to the classical ones. I wasn’t wrong.  All my steps were correct, and the result was the same, but the path didn’t match.

Right also means true both in the sense of truth and straight, as in a right angle.

This notion of correctness creeps into insidious corners of language. Adroit – French for right – means skilled in English. Gauche – French for left – means awkward. Sinister is “left” in Latin. Well, you see my point. If you’re right, you’re right.

Expecting conformity to norms can go to extremes. Being “right in the head” is a euphemism for sanity. If you don’t do what’s right, you may be locked up as criminal, insane or both.

Perhaps the most obscurely linked meaning for RIGHT is the political one. We identify conservatives with the label Right, and identify liberals, socialists, Communists and free thinkers with the label Left. Mostly, this comes back to the power question. Conservatives want to preserve their established power structure, which they believe is Right (as in correct). It is also the source of their privilege. Everyone else wants to change something.

While the right hand is associated with power, the left is associated with nurture. Give almost anyone a baby, and they will cradle it in their left arm with the baby’s head next to their heart. When the baby is happy and calm, all is right with the world.

How do RIGHT and WRITE become entangled? Let me return to Robert Schlain. He also argues that alphabetic writing is a right handed task, using the parts of the brain skilled at order and structure. How else would we get grammar and spelling? That fact suggests that writing is a power tool. Things written become an instrument of those in power. If it’s written down, it must be right. Why? Because I say so. I have both the fist and the pen, you see.

There are also two ways to see WRITE.

One follows on from RIGHT as correct. Writing is a skill which ought to be done properly. There are rules of grammar and spelling to follow if we want other people to actually understand us. So we strive to write right, and hope that others do so, as well.

The other WRITE is something else altogether. For writers, writing is a creative act, the antithesis of rule following. We strive to conjure something out of nothing – the space between our ears. By rights, it cannot be a copy of anything which has gone before, it must be original.

The conflict between these two notions creates a dilemma for writers. On one hand, we must follow the rules so our readers can understand what we are trying to say. On the other, we constantly break the bounds of convention to tell stories in compelling new ways. Those tasks use different parts of our brains that may not like working together. That’s what editors are for.

This is true about both fiction and nonfiction. We are all in the business of telling stories. We hope to captivate our readers both with the rhythm of our words and the threads of the tale. When we leave our readers dazed and confused, we have failed.

Accomplishing this is a craft. A craftsman is a WRIGHT, like a shipwright. We sometimes refer to people as wordsmiths. Same idea. Writing is a skill learned and honed through practice.

Only then can a writer wright right.

What an Idiot

You: “What an idiot!  Anyone with a keyboard thinks he can blog.”

See?  You already understand my motivation.

According to Publishers Weekly (no citation), about 768,000 e-Books were published in 2009.  Discounting for Google digitizing everything written down since Adam and Eve went fruit shopping, that’s probably one book for every thousand people in America; two, discounting for all those small children who’ve mastered the keyboard but not the alphabet.

It seems that everyone I meet, when I tell them I’m a writer, says, “Oh, I’ve been thinking about writing a book, too.”

They probably have.

Today, everyone has something to say.  Facebook and Twitter consume the efforts of people with short attention spans and tiny keyboards.  Blogs can accommodate those of us who don’t run out of steam after the first paragraph.  E-Books are the new leviathans, capable of swallowing the efforts of the more verbose, like me.

What all these new media have in common is a lack of filters.  People can and will say almost anything on the web, coherent or not.  This outpouring constitutes a cloud of dark matter which is guaranteed to absorb all the illumination, the brilliant insight, the creative genius that yearns for an audience.
Philosophers once asserted that a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters could never produce the Declaration of Independence.  Now we have proof, or we might if anyone was actually reading all that stuff.

I feel compelled to blog about writing: about people who couldn’t put a coherent thought together, but think they have.  About people who have nothing to say, but are determined to keep saying it anyway.   About people who have a great deal to say, who express themselves beautifully, but struggle to reach closure.  About people who have all the right stuff except an audience.

Obviously, since you’ve never heard of me, I’m not writing from the top of the New York Times bestseller list.  More like the bottom of the slush pile.

I am published in the 21^st century sense.  I have two books with Agora International: Red Crush and Safety Margin, both crime novels set in the car business.  You can find them on Amazon if you look hard enough.  I’ve written two more books in the series, but have not yet transformed them to e-Books in the deluded belief that words on paper are infinitely more valuable than electronic ephemera.  I’ve also seen my dissertation published.

This makes me sound accomplished, but according to my most recent royalty statements; I’ve sold a total of two copies – one of the dissertation and one of the novels.

I blog both as a matter of blatant self-promotion, and also because the messages from the bottom of the slush pile are different from the ones we hear from the chosen few who’ve made it out of the mud.  The messages: Maybe, even if you think you have a book in you, you shouldn’t waste your time writing it.  Maybe you have something worth saying, but you need to square your shoulders and get to work.  Maybe there are voices that deserve to be heard, but that are lost in the cacophony of the web.  Maybe…