On Writing -- Editing

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series

Years ago -- at least eight -- I tried reading Connelly's police procedurals featuring a main character named Hieronymus Bosch. (Rhymes with anonymous.) Named after the Dutch painter who depicted earth and hell as equally dark and dreadful, Connelly's Hieronymus Bosch pretty much sees Los Angeles like that, a fantastical nightmare.

At that time, I was enthralled with the TV series Castle. Maybe you watched it, too. Rick Castle was a crime novelist who, along with an attractive, New York City police detective solved crimes. Actually, it was probably the very attractive (and funny) actor Nathan Fillion who kept me watching each week. I liked his uncensored mother and independent daughter, too.

Anyway Rick Castle occasionally played poker with real life crime novelists -- James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Stephen J. Cannell and others. I decided to check out those real life writers. James Patterson first. He seemed to be the most popular at my local library. His books went out like hot cakes. I didn't like his books. I read two to be sure. Then Michael Connelly. I read two of his too. Didn't like them either. I never got to Cannell.

I could just never connect with Harry Bosch.

And then. And then. More like now. I've connected with the Harry Bosch character by way of Amazon's series Bosch. Somehow Titus Welliver, the actor who plays Bosch, makes him more likable, more sympathetic. And the series is well enough written that I don't find myself editing the teleplays.

Connelly's books I edit, sans red pen.

This passage is from Connelly's The Overlook. Our little-bit-unlikable hero and his bloodied former lover who happens to be an FBI agent are chasing a bad guy who in the past few minutes has killed two people, tried to kill Bosch, and engaged in a gun battle with Bosch's partner leaving him wounded.

     Bosch turned and saw Rachel come through the door, a smear of blood on her face.
          "This way," he said. "He's been hit."
          They started down Third in a spread formation. After a few steps Bosch picked up
     the trail. Maxwell was obviously hurt badly and was losing a lot of blood. It would
     make him easy to track.
          But when they got to the corner of Third and Hill they lost the trail. There was no
     blood on the pavement. Bosch looked into the long Third Street tunnel and saw no one
     moving in the traffic on foot. He looked up and down Hill street and saw nothing until
     his attention was drawn to a commotion of people running out of the Grand Central
     Market.
          "This way," he said.
          They moved quickly toward the huge market. Bosch picked up the blood trail again
     just outside and started in. The market was a two-story-high conglomeration of food
     booths and retail and produce concessions. There was a strong smell of grease and coffee
     in the air that had to infect every floor of the building above the market. The place was
     crowded and noisy and that made it difficult for Bosch to follow the blood and track
     Maxwell.
          Then suddenly there were shouts from directly ahead and two quick shots were fired
     into the air. It caused an immediate human stampede. Dozens of screaming shoppers and
     workers flooded into the aisle where Bosch and Walling stood and started running toward
     them.  Bosch realized they were going to be run over and trampled. In one motion he
     moved to his right, grabbed Walling around the waist and pulled her behind one of the
     wide concrete support pillars.

Just copying this from the book makes me want to tear my hair out. All these words! But they don't give the reader the feeling of an adrenaline charged, life and death race. William Bernhardt, the best writing teacher I ever had, said, "Show, don't tell." And Hemingway touted the mot juste which means the exact, appropriate word. These rules keep the story so close to the reader, that the reader sees it. Hears it. Feels it.

This passage should be built on short, sharp sentences. And don't insult the reader. "Maxwell was obviously hurt badly and was losing a lot of blood. It would make him easy to track." Really? No shit, Sherlock.

At least Connelly uses adverbs properly. Unnecessarily, but properly. How would I write it?

          "He's been hit," he said.
          Bosch picked up the blood trail on Third Street. They lost it at Third and Hill.
     No one moved on foot through the traffic in the Third Street tunnel. Or on Hill
     Street. Maxwell was gone. They'd lost him.
          Then to the left, a knot of people ran out of the Grand Central Market.
          Bosch and Walling ran toward the hulking two-story building. They picked
     up the blood trail again. They followed the wet, red stains inside. The stench
     of old grease and strong coffee hit them like a wall. Noise filled the cavernous
     hall. Guns held at their sides, they followed the blood. Through the maze of food
     booths and produce stands and retail stalls, the trail flickered in and out. It
     threatened to disappear beneath the crowd's milling feet.
          Ahead, shouts and two shots stopped time. Then shoppers and workers
     stampeded, screaming, toward Harry and Rachel. He grabbed her and pulled her
     to safety behind a concrete pillar.

And you can probably figure out an even better way to write it. It needs to read fast, raise the reader's heart rate, leave them breathless.

After finishing the 13th Harry Bosch novel -- four of them in the past two weeks -- I'm taking a break. Patricia Cornwell's The Last Precinct, also a crime novel, but it's safe to say, I'll be checking more Connelly/Bosch books out of the library soon. And I'm looking forward to the 5th season of Bosch.

I Sing the Body Electric -- A Review

But first please click on and read I Sing the Body Electric. No, you don't have to read the whole book. It's a collection of short fiction. And this link takes you to just the first part of the first short story "The Kilimanjaro Device," but you'll get-it. This reminds me all over again why I am such a Ray Bradbury fan.

If you read this review first, you will miss the joy of discovery, the ah has, and the satisfaction of getting-it.

Much of Bradbury's fiction has been adapted for the screen -- both great and small. "The Kilimanjaro Device" was an episode on the old Twilight Zone television series. You can find it on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but beware. Twilight Zone is one of those series you can lose a whole evening binge watching. Though I think that watching this story as opposed to reading it, could deprive you of one of its most important facets.

If you've read it before, read it again just for the enjoyment. And then, if you're a writer, read it again analytically.

If I'd read Body Electric before, it was a long time ago and I'd forgotten it. And if it was a long time ago, it was before I had classes with William Bernhardt, so it's safe to say that I did not read it analytically. I may not even have "got-it."

My husband is a voracious reader and watches Barnes and Nobles' Nook sales religiously. He likes free and cheap. Yesterday B&N had I Sing the Body Electric on sale for 99 cents and he told me I should buy it. He knows that I read short fiction as resource material for improving my own writing, and who better to teach me how to write short fiction than Ray Bradbury?

Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite writers. I love stories with a twist, a surprise, and an inside joke that I get.

I was just finishing Career of Evil, the third in J. K. Rowling's crime novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith so I put Body Electric on the back burner. I'll soon have a review on Ms. Rowling's Cormoran Strike series. 

And finish it I did. Then I had no book to take to bed with me. A good book helps me to go to sleep. (Or keep me awake, as the case may be.) So I turned to Bradbury's I Sing the Body Electric. 

**  SPOILER  ALERT!  **

He opens the book with a quote from Walt Whitman. Be still my heart. That is a sure method of hooking me. And the first short story is "The Kilimanjaro Device." 

Now, I do not usually read reviews before I read a book, so I was not aware this was a time-machine story. Not that that would have kept me away, it's just that having read The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, I am automatically prejudiced against anyone's attempt to write time travel. They couldn't possibly come up to her high standards. 

(Yes, I know I have lots of irrational prejudices. But isn't that the definition of 'prejudice?' And I know it, so that's why I don't read reviews before I read the story. Think how many good stories I'd miss.)

What was immediately apparent, however, is that "The Kilimanjaro Device" is written in the first person. Another of my prejudices.

Using simplistic, unadorned language, the narrator recounts arriving in the area of Ketchum and Sun Valley, Idaho, after a long road trip. At this point, I was disappointed. This was not the Ray Bradbury I loved.

And then, and then!

 The narrator talks about being a 'reader' not a reporter. He's looking for an 'old man.' The old man who wrote 'Michigan stories' and the 'Spanish stories.' The stories about fishing and bull fighting. But he is adamantly not looking for the grave.

Okay, here's the twist. He's looking for Hemingway, who is dead and buried.

And there's another twist as he talks about 'right deaths' and 'wrong deaths.' 'Right graves' and 'wrong graves.'

What he does not say in the story but I know is that in the summer of 1961, Hemingway shot himself to death at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, and was buried there. I was a young teen and I did not yet know that famous writers committed suicide. I'd never heard of Ketchum, Idaho. A 'wrong death' and a 'wrong grave.'

And then Bradbury gives us the surprise.

     "At your service," I said.

     "And when you get where you're going," said the old man, putting his hand on the door and leaning and then, seeing what he had done, taking his hand away and standing taller to speak to me, "where will you be?"
      "January 10, 1954."

      "That's quite a date," he said.

The old truck that our narrator is driving is a time machine.

      There is a mountain in Africa named Kilimanjaro, I thought. And on the western slope
      of that mountain was once found the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one
      has ever explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.

      We will put you up on that same slope, I thought, on Kilimanjaro, near the leopard, and
      write your name and under it say nobody knew what he was doing here so high, but
      here he is. And write the date born and died, and go away down toward the hot summer
      grass and let mainly dark warriors and white hunters and swift okapis know the grave.

Tote up all the "I saids" and "he saids" and the thoughts that we can see and feel and we have Bradbury's best inside joke. He's writing Hemingway!

Writing Emotion

Comedy/Tragedy from etsy.com

The question is how best to represent emotion in literature. I have been charged with insufficiently communicating my characters’ emotions. My writing teacher and, even more so, my fellow writing students read bits and pieces of my work and invariably ask “but how does he feel?”

Here is a bit from Murder on Ceres. Rafe and Joe have just returned from witnessing a crash that killed all on board.

Joe stopped pacing. “Man, you lose power and you got nothin’. No floating, no sailing, no gliding. Without atmosphere, there’s no nothin’.”

Rafe closed his eyes, but that was no good. He could still see those flashes of light. He stood and went to the door. “We couldn’t see anything. But they’re gone. I have no doubt. They’re all gone.”

At the end of the scene each reacts to the horrifying incident in his own way. 

Joe calls his ex-wife.

“Brenda? Hi, baby. You sleepin’? Yeah, yeah I know it’s late. I just thought, you know, maybe I could come by…” He bowed his head. “Yeah, of course. You’re right. No. No. I understand. Is Joey okay?” He stood and stretched, arching his back. “That’s good. Yeah, that’s good. No. I haven’t forgotten. I’ll pick him up Wednesday morning.” Joe let his hands drop to his sides.

A quick ten-count later, Joe keyed his mobile again. “Hi, Linnie. Yeah, I’m good. How are you?” Joe leaned back in his chair. “So, you free after work? Yeah. I’d like that. Meet you at your place in about an hour.”

Rafe deals with it differently.

“There is always light in the darkness. Manny Turrentine.” Rafe quoted to no one in particular A little longer and he’d be finished here. He’d go home and the whole place would be lit up like full sun, canaries singing, and his wife pregnant. He would wrap himself in her and this day would be far away.

Minutes passed as Rafe made his account of what he’d witnessed. More minutes than words should take. More minutes than the crash took that killed all on board.

To me, both men are displaying emotion. Not by ranting and raving and chewing the scenery, but by rigid self-control. They distance themselves from the death, each seeking reassurance by reconnecting with their own real, familiar lives. 

            I would like to write emotion. My characters are not shallow people, at least not in my head. They do have emotions. I admire what I consider 'restrained emotion.' That's what I want to write.  Perhaps not quite so restrained as Cormack McCarthy. 
My daughter, who knows me and my work, says I should take care not to be too subtle. She says I should read Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants." That I'm more like him than I care to admit. And maybe that's not such a bad thing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald -- A Review of The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night

Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald

 



     On the word of Ernest Hemingway I read The Great Gatsby and started to read Tender Is the Night. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway's memoir of his time in Paris during the early 1920's, he describes Fitzgerald as having written a great novel referring to Gatsby.

     So I read it.

     Hemingway touts the "mot juste -- the one and only correct word to use." He says he learned "to distrust adjectives" as he would later "learn to distrust certain people in certain situations."

     As frustrated as I get with Hemingway's lusterless and often unnecessary dialog attributions, I do like his clean, strong prose. He did use adjectives. Adjectives that infused his prose with life and passion. He wrote of what he called "false spring." After the trees had leafed out and he would feel joy at Spring's arrival then would sometimes come a return of winter. "When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person had died for no reason." Simple, strong adjectives.

     Then came Gatsby. 
     Her front lawn seems the most active thing about Daisy. "The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens -- finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of it run."
     And there's Daisy and Jordan Baker. "We ought to plan something," yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
     "All right," said Daisy. "What'll we plan?" She turned to me helplessly: "What do people plan?"

     If it is ennui which I miss, I can stream an emo music performance on You Tube. My attitude about both emo music and bored rich folk is the same. If they're bored with themselves, why would I be interested?

     But surely I must be missing something in Gatsby so I read on.
     Then came this gem from Daisy's husband.
     "Have you read 'The Rise of the Colored Empres' by this man Goddard?"
     "Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone. (This from our narrator.)
     "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be -- will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
     "Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them."

     Throw in a little anti-Semitism and disparage the lower classes with whom it is all right to screw around. Bring in Gatsby, whose wealth is on a par with (or greater than) Daisy's crowd, but its source is unknown and his antecedents are even murkier. And you have a thoroughly disagreeable book.

     The plot is slow to develop. When it did, I immediately thought of Thomas Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, which describes an equally amoral money-centric life-style. But does it better.

    I went back to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and reread what he said about Fitzgerald. He said Fitzgerald produced better work after his wife's first mental break down. So I was back on the hunt.

     I found Tender Is the Night. I got to page 8. "The woman who had recognized her was not a Jewess, despite her name."

     It didn't seem to matter how many more pages I read. Same song, second verse. Could get better... but I gave up trying to find where exactly the 'better' began.

     So, if you're tempted to read Fitzgerald, I would humbly recommend that you read Thomas Wolfe instead.

     And disregarding what I can only describe as his overly generous praise for Fitzgerald's work, I can recommend Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Now I shall have to check out some of the other writers he talks about in that little book. Surely I cannot be so disappointed in them.

X and Y are for X-act-lY a review

     Today is the first day I've written since one week ago yesterday. After a surprise appendectomy late Good Friday, it seemed all was well. And I suppose it was, but Tuesday, a week ago today, things took a turn for the worse and I was back in the hospital with cholitis. Not a good choice. Not a choice at all, really.

     That Tuesday, Wednesday, and most of Thursday, I did nothing but sleep. Then Thursday I opened my reader to Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I've never been a big fan of his writing style, however this autobiography of his time in Paris in the early 1920s is wonderful. There are still the passages of dialogue full of he-saids and she-saids, but this particular work is filled with the sights and sounds and lives of people in Paris during the post-WWI era.

 

 

Ernest Hemingway and his son Bumby

Paris 1924

 

    In this book I got to see Hemingway as a struggling writer with a young family. During this period he had given up journalism in favor of creative writing. He turned out short stories that were rejected for publication in the United States. In fact, German publications seemed to be his only markets.

     His approach to writing was as intense and focused as a runner training for a marathon. He talks about writing in cafes, describing them as a warm place to work for the cost of a drink. About interacting with the then and now famous literati of the time -- Gertrude Stein, Evan Shipman, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, etc. About their petty jealousies and unfounded admirations. About their demands and generosities. About their advice, sometimes accepted. And about their writing, adding to my own list of intended reading.

     And, at the end of the day, he went home to his family.

   

Sylvia Beach in the doorway of her bookshop

Shakespeare and Company

 

     He also wrote of his discoveries, solutions to life problems, the greatest of which was poverty. His accidental discovery of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop made his life and work there possible. Sylvia Beach served as a lending library to those who could not afford to buy books. He paid his minimal membership fee right away but not before she sent him home with volume after volume to read. And he could take the books with him when he and his family traveled. He had to read.

      She also loaned him money when he needed it. Freely. And she reassured him during those times that, like all authors, like all people who set themselves lofty goals, he was good and the world would eventually appreciate his work. After all, didn't the Germans already?

     His descriptions of life in Paris at that time are physical. The light playing across damp faces of  buildings. The goatherd piping his arrival on their street. Milk was delivered on-the-hoof in that pre-refrigeration time. How to travel on foot from where you were to where you wanted to go without passing restaurants and bakeries emitting scents of things a hungry man could not afford to buy.

     And always his main interest was to perfect his writing.  Disdaining unnecessary adjectives and adverbs in favor of the mot juste -- "the one and only correct word to use." 

     To show his characters in their world X-act-lY.

    

H is for Hemingway

 

I like this picture because he's smiling, a rather mischievous smile, at that

My cousin and I recently discussed Hemingway. There are few famous writers whom I appreciate less than him. Faulkner and James Joyce, being two. I must admit that I think the failing is mine in their cases. I simply can’t follow their stories. John le Carré fits in that group, now that I think about it.

          Ernest Hemingway and Henry James, however, I do not like because I do not like their writing styles. They both tell good stories, but it’s the way they tell them.

Henry James’ run-on sentences bring out the editor in me. I heard someone once describe him as “chewing more than he bit off.”

Hemingway, on the other hand, never met a complex sentence he liked. And very few compound ones. In The Old Man and the Sea he makes me crazy with his uninspired attributions: “and the old man said,” “and the boy said,” “and the old man said.” But it is a good story and it’s a skinny little book so I wasn’t frustrated with it as long as I was with James’ The Golden Bowl.

Generally speaking, I am not interested in authors’ biographies. If I like their work then I don’t want to know much about them, because I might not like them and that would color my enjoyment of their work. If I don’t like their work, then who cares about their lives?

 Call it inspiration or curiosity or maybe just a way to avoid working on my own book – I found myself reading Wikipedia’s entry on Hemingway. His story would make an epic novel, filled with sex, violence, exotic locations, famous people (some wealthy and powerful), and a tragic ending.

 After all this complaining, I can recommend For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms. Plus, I think his short fiction is excellent. Now I think I’ll read A Moveable Feast, his autobiography, and see what he thought of his life.