Pointless Points

At one point in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis stops his narrative to dwell on a dead bluebottle fly on a windowsill.

What’s the point of including an utterly meaningless detail like that in an otherwise compelling narrative? How could a dead fly possibly carry the plot forward?

In my house, flies, bluebottle or otherwise, never live long enough to die of old age. I hunt them down and kill them like a relentless assassin. But I know what he’s talking about. I’ve seen those wizened little husks in my shop and other neglected places. I associate them with dry, cracked wood trim and dust-covered window glass.

Lewis is evoking empty rooms and forgotten places with little reminders left in the narrative like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. He leaves us a faint trail to an undeniable conclusion. The children in the story have happened into a part of the big old house that adults have simply forgotten about. In places like that, adventure begins.

Our worlds are full of those compelling details that speak volumes to those perceptive enough to take note. Most of us pass by, oblivious to the subtle distinctions that separate one place from another. We are too busy talking on our cell phones to notice if the traffic light is red, much less if there is gum on the ground. But to a writer with an eye for nuance, those details tell all, and speak volumes about places and the people that inhabit them.

Sherlock Holmes is the kind of character that builds an entire narrative on those little anomalies, but he is not alone. Any character who is perceptive enough to see and note those little things has a head start on keeping our interest. He or she doesn’t need Sherlock’s ability to fabricate an entire crime scene from a single hair. Nevertheless, when that character sees and notes things that bring a place alive, we are interested, even if they don’t conclude anything about what they’ve observed. To observe is to know.

As readers, we have come to expect characters to be careful observers of body language. If an author feels compelled to tell us that someone is angry or embarrassed, we are a little disappointed. Where are the creased brows, the clutching hands? We need to test our own ability to read emotions. Are we correct? When a suspect confirms our suspicions in their subsequent actions, we can feel pleased about our insights. When I miss the cues and am taken by surprise, I sometimes go back to find what I missed. If the clues are not there, I feel disappointed.

Scenery speaks the same language. A room scattered with discarded laundry speaks of a disorderly mind, or haste. Who lives like that? Are they crazy, or is their mind on greater thoughts? We need to know. When a place reeks of neglect, is it because a neglectful person lives there, or has the place been abandoned? Does a spotlessly clean place speak of an obsessively compulsive owner or somewhere no one lives? We need to know.

Clothing can be redolent with cues. Someone with newly acquired wealth is likely to seek out expensive brands from the racks of prestigious designers like Armani or Versace, but someone from a family who’s lived with wealth for generations probably has a relationship with a tailor. Expensive fabric? Certainly. Expensive label? Probably not. Even then, the cut of the suit will tell many things about the wearer. Are they conservative (Savile Row) or a jetsetter (Milano)? The clothes will tell. The writer doesn’t need to spell it out to their perceptive readers.

Not a perceptive reader? Dirk Pitt will gladly jump off a two hundred foot cliff and swim through fifty miles of underground river, all the while grimacing in pain from his grievous wounds.

I’ll take my chances that you’re paying attention. If not, perhaps the other person who bought my books will notice.

Accentuate the Positive

Regional accents used to be a staple of great writing.

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath captures the unique speech rhythms of the displaced Okies as desperation drives them relentlessly toward California. Hemingway did a good job with his characters, too, writing through similar times. The great twentieth century writers had an advantage that is quickly disappearing. Regional speech was more distinct before the era of television. As global speech becomes homogenized, this is increasingly difficult to do, because everyone is starting to sound the same.

Tana French is able to distinguish not only her Irish characters, but also the differences between word and grammar usage among her characters. Her parents talk differently, even swear differently from the younger generations, and Frank, the cop talks with a distinct voice from his working class siblings. It is not just the vocabulary, but the grammar and pronunciation that sets them all apart. Amazingly, she gets this all in print.

I find those distinctions harder to capture and express among Americans.

Some regional dialects, or at least writable differences in pronunciation, are still apparent. I can hear and describe Southern, New England and New York patterns, but the nuance between say, Indiana and Chicago elude me. When I watch movies like Fargo and New in Town, I can hear the intonations of the upper Midwest. If I worked at it, I could probably write those down, too.

But is there a difference between Michigan and Ohio, or Michigan and California speech? Allegedly, the Midwest pattern is what newscasters use. But to my ear, the subtle distinctions between Arizona and Utah and Wyoming simply don’t translate into print.

On the other hand, like Tana French, I can hear and capture the gross differences between Michigan rednecks and middle class characters. Lower class blacks have their own patterns that were once referred to as “Ebonics.” That term is probably no longer PC, but I could still hear it among my students. Occasionally, I would get one who was completely incomprehensible when she made a statement or asked a question. As I recall, she dropped out before too long in the semester. Maybe she couldn’t understand me.

People often change voices depending on who they’re talking to. Listen to anyone cooing to a baby. Their voice goes up an octave, and they tend to babble nonsense. But we also adapt our vocabulary and sometimes our accents, depending on our audience. One of my characters, Beverly Sue Gannett is supposed to be the daughter of a big Coca Cola executive. She turns on her southern charm when she wants to manipulate someone, but otherwise conforms to Midwestern English. I can almost hear her eyes batting as she says, “Y’all know, ma daddy works for Co-Cola.”

People also attempt to gain superiority by strutting their vocabulary. If they want to impress or intimidate someone, they may wheel out their full repertory of fifty-cent words. I like it the best when people misuse words, trying to prove how smart they are. It works.

Another dimension that works well in fiction is age differences in vocabulary. To me, Barbara Park’s character, Junie B. Jones epitomizes this. She talks and acts like a precocious second grader. Very believable. I sometimes read books where children talk like mature adults. If the story is written from the retrospective viewpoint of remembered childhood, fine, but a child should have a child’s voice and vocabulary.

Perhaps the extreme case for this is found in The Art of Racing in the Rain, which is told from a dog’s point of view. At first, I was put off by the premise, but as the story progressed, the author’s intention became clear. The dog, Enzo, had a human’s grasp of his world, but lacked the voice to express himself in the story. He knew, but couldn’t say, except on the page. The language was plain and unaffected. Enzo wasn’t trying to impress anyone. It worked. At the end, I cried.

Travel’s Travails

We just got back from Galway, in the west of Ireland. 

In the words of that apocryphal New England farmer, “You can’t get there from here.” Here being Detroit.

The thirteen hour ordeal started at our daughter’s house in rural county Galway. My son-in-law Jan drove us to the bus station. We left the house at seven local time. That took about forty minutes. From there, we rode an express bus across the width of Ireland to Dublin, where we got on a plane to Atlanta, and thence to Flint, MI. By the time we walked in the door, we had been on the road for eighteen hours. We showed our passports to about a hundred people, and were scolded for not arriving two hours before the flight time. Somehow, we avoided the full body scan we got in Calgary last year.

So much for the convenience of air travel.

While I arrived home utterly exhausted, fearing I’d drive off the road before hitting my own driveway; that was not the low point of the trip.

Ireland is a wrong-hand-drive country. Everyone drives on the left side instead of the right, like most of the world does. I suppose I could get used to that, but for the narrow roads. Most roads there are wide enough for a good-sized lorry (truck, to us Yanks) — one, not two. These are not one way streets, but country lanes, and in some cases what passes for highways.

Daughter’s cars are both right hand drive, so they have the good fortune to sit next to the edge of the road, leaving me to face the terrors of oncoming traffic. Even that would have been okay, if people drove at speeds appropriate to narrow lanes. Instead, they take the speed limits (typically 80kph/ 50mph) as a right. Heart failure feels like a legitimate alternative to passing a lorry at 100kph, threading between it and a parked car on the opposite margin. I screamed out loud, but no one else noticed.

Ireland is an interesting country to navigate. For the most part, street signs and names are as unnecessary as house numbers. Signposts offer suggestions of distant destinations, but believing them may not actually get you there. 

If you’ve lived there for generations, locations are imbedded in your DNA. Navigation is essential if you go. There I so much to see, you’ll want to find it, even if you have no idea where “it” is. Within a few miles of the house where we stayed, there had to be a dozen ruins dating as far back as the seventh century, and some so complete that a roof and window glass would’ve made them livable.

Even away from the dime-a-dozen ruins, the scenery is painfully picturesque. Rolling hills are crisscrossed with stone walls, and every pasture is dotted with sheep, lambs or cows. Thatched cottages abound, some of them hundreds of years old, and still occupied. The villages bear no resemblance to American strip-malls, or even the space efficiency of their German counterparts.

While there, we resorted to our favorite solution: let someone else drive. Our native guides included Maeve Healy, one of Sarah’s co-workers and a history nut. She took us to Kylemore Abbey, which until last year was a girls’ boarding school. Most of the facility is off limits to visitors. It’s packed with nuns.

We took a bus day trip to the Burren (pronounced “burn” if you roll your r’s) and the Cliffs of Moher. The bus traversed those same narrow lanes. It was so big, opposing traffic had to stop to cross paths. I closed my eyes when two busses met. All I know is that nothing vital scraped off.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, now I suppose that my fictional Frank Healy will have to return to the Auld Sod to tip a few pints with his real relatives like Maeve on some future wild goose chase. A terrifying car chase along those narrow lanes is not out of the question.

I’ve already got the terror part down pat.

Famous or Flameless

In my opinion, great writers are few and far between in the published world.

While I’m sure the 95%+ that get filtered out by agents and editors mostly deserve obscurity (myself included for the moment), I don’t think great writing is among their top criteria. I’ve read several famous and bestselling authors like Clive Cussler and some other equally popular thriller writers who should have remained with me in the bottom of the slush pile.

Tom Clancy’s most recent book, Dead or Alive, is a good example. Admittedly, it was ghostwritten by Grant Blackwood, but that doesn’t excuse the bad writing. Clancy has always been known for his technical detail, but in this one, many of the details are plainly wrong. He makes reference to a tritium laser sight. Tritium is a radioactive isotope used for low light applications like radium was once used on watch dials. Tritium I used for sight applications, but not with lasers. Laser sights typically use LEDs, which have nothing to do with radioactivity. Maybe he meant Trijicon, the company that produces those military sights, but no one corrected the error.

Another error he repeats frequently (I see this elsewhere, too) is substituting “site” for “sight” when referring to firearm aiming. Wrong! At least they don’t call semi-automatic handguns “revolvers” like so many authors do.

Many of the things they do in the book appear to be shameless attempts to fill up pages. Of course, no one else ever did that. I find mindless repetition of acronym definitions particularly irritating. After you’ve told me once, you can assume I’ll remember for at least a few pages.

Another problem I have is that the book churns up what seems like a hundred pages reminiscing about Clancy’s previous books and the characters’ stale adventures. I can understand a certain amount of this for scene-setting, but after a while, it gets old.

For those of us still at the bottom, the question is, “What does it take to get noticed?”

The last time I submitted material to an editor (lost in the mists of time), he told me I needed to be more edgy.

What does “edgy” mean? Does that mean more gross language? Does that mean more gruesome murder victims? Does that mean short, clipped anti-Faulknerian sentence fragments? Does it mean more dark atmospherics? I thought noir was moribund (I also thought there was a t in that word).

My wife, Linda, says my writing has improved. For one thing, I’ve lost that gawking earnestness that inhabits the pages of most cozies, but is that enough? I don’t know.

I thought it was a breakthrough when I was accepted by my eBook publisher, but it appears all I got from the bargain was somebody else taking a cut from my pitiful Amazon earnings. What is fifty percent of nothing, anyway?

While I savor the work of those good writers that populate my reading list, I have yet to discern exactly what separates those who make it to the big time from those who don’t. With some writers, it’s obvious. Janet Evanovich leaves me rolling on the floor. Nevada Barr’s books are beautifully set and written. Patricia Cornwell has always been the master of her characters’ emotions. All of them write good stories. But among the rest, what was it that got them to the top of the pile? Did they go to New York and pester people until someone agreed to get them off their back? Some authors claim it was sheer persistence.

That I can believe.

One must be obsessive-compulsive just to write a book. It is not unreasonable to see that an OCD person would keep gnawing at the book world until someone noticed. But is that a good test to separate the wheat from the chaff? I don’t think so.

There has to be something more.

Tana French

I pride myself on high standards for other people’s writing. If only I could do the same for my own. Admittedly, my range doesn’t extend into contemporary literature, but that may be a value judgment all by itself.

Right now, I’m reading Faithful Place by Tana French. She’s an Irish writer with two other books under her belt, neither of which I’ve sampled. The books are mysteries, so they slipped under my upturned nose before I rejected them out of hand for being “literature.”

Amazing.

I can’t recall when I’ve read someone who captures such a sense of place, working class Dublin in this case, or who can give voice to such a range of characters. If I was writing this, if I had the ear to sound out Irish at all, everyone would come out sounding the same. She add enough nuance to tell between the working class stiffs and the more educated middle class. She manages to give voice to generational differences between parents and children, and even to express personality differences between siblings.

She puts more into their individual vulgarity than I suspected could exist.  I thought they all talked that way. Obviously not. Tana’s craft goes beyond voices. She has a whole unabridged dictionary of emotions written in shrugs, glances and postures.

I’m so starved for great writing, that alone would have left me drooling on the floor, but she doesn’t quit there. She uses atmosphere and scenery to bring everything into sharp focus. Not a detail is lost. The story has a deep, subtle plot and clever characters that keep me turning pages into the night. 

I only wish I could write with a tenth the skill she musters on a single page. If anyone can learn by example, this is a textbook for writers, disguised as a novel. Everyone who aspires to greatness as an author should turn these pages, studying until the binding falls apart. 

She’s that good.

Reading Writing and Lunatic

Oscar Levant wrote, “There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased that line.”

My own oft quoted version is, “The dividing line between genius and insanity is nonexistent.”

Same sentiment.

The evidence to support this claim is rife through history. The composer Schuman wrote most of his great works between increasingly frequent bouts of clinical depression. I’m sure he wasn’t alone. Vincent Van Gogh cut off his own ear.

In a sense, this is the essence of creativity. For really creative people, the normative boundaries that stop most people simply don’t exist, or have little power. When someone says, “That’s impossible,” the creative person asks. “Why?”

Novelists go beyond the bounds of social norms to find interesting people and situations. Most people are repulsed by the criminal minds invented by writers like Ruth Rendell, Patricia Cornwell and lately, Nevada Barr (read Burn if you dare). Repulsed, we read on, intrigued at the same time.

A creative person can get inside the mind of an insane one, because the only thing that separates them is impulse control.

Perhaps more frightening than the minds of fictional psychopaths are the actions of real sociopaths and serial killers. The BTK killer was a Lutheran deacon and city compliance officer in his hometown. He only murdered people in his spare time.

Erasing that line is especially important while writing about crime in industry. Corporations were declared “persons” before the law in the 1800s, but the Supreme Court could never grant a business a soul. They are by definition amoral. I find it interesting that sweatshops in Asia and Central America engage in exactly the same practices that American and European firms I before labor laws were enacted.

Sure, but what kinds of crimes would be unique to an industrial setting?

Can you see a company using human “volunteers” to develop air bags? Air Force Col. Stapp and Wayne State University professor Patrick tested themselves, but who would willingly crash a car at 30 mph? How about if survival wasn’t all that certain? The car companies used cadavers and animals— monkeys and pigs— but they were hardly volunteers.

Ethics laws changed drastically after news leaked about a longstanding program to observe untreated syphilis at the Tuskegee Institute. Today, the public frowns on human experimentation. Using Human crash test subjects is an intriguing subject that most writers would shy away from.

Another revulsive topic is causing fatal industrial accidents to foment racial unrest to weaken unions. Companies did all sorts of unethical things to break unions. During the thirties, Henry Ford hired thugs to beat union organizers, in an effort to keep his workers from organizing. If he was more sneaky, maybe he’d have caused a few accidents. Who knows?

Lastly, I offer manner of death as a revulsive topic.  One of the most intriguing legal cases over the last thirty years was the trial of Claus von Bülow for attempting to murder his heiress wife by insulin injection. She was found in a coma in 1980, and clung to life in a persistent vegetative state until 2008. Claus was acquitted.

Suppose someone like Claus locked his diabetic wife in a room with a two pound box of chocolates. The result would be the same, a diabetic coma and eventually death, but how much more dramatic (or insane, depending on your viewpoint)? Death by Chocolate.

Of course great crimes require great justice, at least in fiction. I am very much in favor of poetic justice in sentencing. If someone is guilty of ordering airbag crash deaths, shouldn’t he die the same way? Shouldn’t a violent rapist lose the tool of his trade as he goes down for his crime? I should think so.

Let the punishment fit the crime. Is that insane, or what?