Losing Leg Is a Reminder of Wilson Follett's view on Writer's Experience

Circumstances over the past two months allowed very little opportunity to read, but there was time to think during physical therapy sessions about past reads and their applicability to the current situation of learning to live with one leg. One book that came to mind was The Modern Novel: A Study of the Purpose and the Meaning of Fiction, written by Wilson Follett.

Now, unless you are of an age that takes your interest in writing back to the time when Marion Crane and Norman Bates were only characters in a novel, you may know Wilson Follett only as the author of Modern American Usage.

Follett wrote in the academic style of his day, one that might be considered overwritten in today’s world. But what he has to say is worth wading through. His thoughts on fiction are divided into some twenty-seven areas. Applicable to my situation are his description of two types of experiences, extensive and intensive.

Extensive experiences, he wrote, may be gained “through the obvious expedients of travel and voluntary association with many and various types of people.”

However, intensive experiences, which he maintains are “immeasurably more valuable to a writer,” can never be gained “through any amount of deliberate and conscious seeking.” They must come unsought if they are to come at all; and no man can gain a genuine experience of any joy or sorrow by experimenting purposely with life.”

Living with one leg is definitely an intensive experience, mentally as well as physically. And you don’t have to lose a leg to understand it. You want extensive? Go to the zoo and photograph all the lions. You want intensive? Go to Africa and meet one lion, face to face, on his turf, with no bars in between.

The Minnesota Crime Wave Presents 15 Stories of Murder, Mayhem, Malice

Okay. I’ve never been the world’s biggest fan of short stories. It all goes back to college days and two professors who believed William Sidney Porter was the world’s greatest writer. After two years of “in-depth analysis” of what seemed like every short story he wrote under the pen name, O Henry, it felt like a life’s quota had been used up. But a reader’s mind can be changed, even in his advanced years.

What brought about this change in attitude was an anthology of stories written by Minnesota authors: Fifteen Tales of Murder, Mayhem, and Malice. As if the title is not enough, readers are given an additional warning in the introduction, written by Pete Hautman, another Minnesota author.

“There is a sort of North Dakota-meets-Iowa smiling bleakness available here in Minnesota that manifests itself as suppressed rage. Cut somebody off in traffic and you won’t get road rage, you will get the Minnesota Look. For those unversed in the silent language of the Look, allow me to translate: I will kill you with my thoughts. The fifteen Minnesota writers featured in this volume are looking at you and smiling. They would like you to: Have a Nice Day.”

Included in the book are the thoughts of Marilyn Victor, Richard A. Thompson, Michael Allan Mallory, Jess Lourey, Mary Logue, Lori L. Lake, William Kent Krueger, David Housewright, Ellen Hart, Elizabeth Gunn, Lois Greiman, Pat Dennis, Carl Brookins, Judith Yates Borger, and Joel Arnold.

After chuckling, grimacing, muttering, and shaking my head through one hundred and sixty-four enjoyable pages, this reader will never again hear someone say, “Have a Nice Day,” without looking over my shoulder. Looking for a smile.  And wondering.

This anthology was published under the auspices of the Minnesota Crime Wave.

Kent, Carl, and Ellen; In Armed and Dangerous Mode

 Carl Brookins, Ellen Hart, and William Kent Krueger are the culprits who comprise The MCW. These three not only give new meaning to the concept of promoting and marketing, with a “bad guys” impersonation, their website offers Minnesota Crime Wave On TV!, an enjoyable collection of videos—discussions and interviews that readers and writers will enjoyable.

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Answers to Questions Asked By Readers of The Providence of Death

It’s been two years since THE PROVIDENCE OF DEATH was published, and folks who’ve read it are getting antsy. Questions are being asked, both in face-to-face meetings about town and in emails. They go beyond, “When’s your next book going to be ready?” Many of the questions have been about specific characters.

As a neophyte to the world of creative writing, this has become one more item on a growing list of unexpected, but very pleasant surprises. Never was it thought that fictional characters would come to be viewed in the same light as the new neighbor who moves into the neighborhood. Readers want to know more about them.

  

Writing the second Joe McKibben novel is proving to be as slow a process as the first one. Joe, an ex-cop has an insatiable curiosity. Even when I’m not sitting at the keyboard, he’s still thinking about what should be done next. That is very frustrating. He gets a bright idea about doing something that will help solve the mystery. I start yelling, “No. Don’t do that. I’ll have to rewrite. He doesn’t listen. I’m doing a lot of rewriting.

As an interim measure, an effort is going to be made on a hopefully regular basis (monthly) to answer some of the questions that have been asked to date. And should others arise, they will be added to the list. That is, assuming the answer has been determined. Maybe some day I’ll learn how to control a fictional character I created.

The process will start with a character that most folks didn’t like. Hampton’s new Chief of Police who took office near the end of the book.

CARROLTON DAVENPORT

Since city council made it clear his appointment was for only one year, he started looking for another job after six months.  Four months later, he resigned to take a job as chief in a small town in southern Georgia near the Florida state line.

Clyde Kimmel, Hampton’s long-time councilman and mayor, invited Joe to lunch where he said if Joe wanted the chief’s job, it would be his. He told Joe he’d talked privately to other members of council. The vote would be unanimous.

Joe told the mayor he felt honored, asked that the members of council be thanked for their consideration. But he declined the offer with the comment that he would never again carry a weapon, which he would be required to do as police chief.

The mayor asked, “Is that because of the man you shot while in uniform?

“Yes. That, and I promised Cam when I retired that I would never again carry a weapon.”

“I’ve heard stories about the shooting. Do you mind telling me how it happened?”

Joe’s gut reaction was to refuse. It was a day he didn't want to talk about. But the mayor had been a staunch ally during his days on the force. He owed the mayor an answer. He took a deep breath and told his story.

“I was the field training officer for a rookie who had finished his downtown foot beat and assigned to motor patrol. We were working expired city stickers on Mercury at ten o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Supposedly the safest time to make a traffic stop. We pulled a car with an expired sticker down by the aerospace park. I told the kid it was his turn to write the ticket. He committed a rookie mistake. Walked up to the driver’s window without stopping short and asking the driver to show both hands and keep them in sight. The driver had a handgun. He shot the rookie twice in the face. I’d stepped out of the patrol car to stand at the rear of the stopped car. When the driver fired, I emptied my weapon through the back glass of the car. Two shots hit the driver in the head.”

“Is what I’ve heard about the shooter correct? Booze and pills?

“Yes. Well over the legal limit on blood alcohol content and full of pills. He was drunk and wired.

“Some things can’t be helped. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“Bullshit. I was the rookie’s training officer. I should’ve done my job. Kept an eye on the kid. Yelled for him to stop short of the driver’s window when it was obvious was not going to.”

“I can see why you didn’t yell at the rookie. That would have been a big embarrassment to him.”

“Clyde, living with the idea of embarrassing a rookie would have been easier than living with the fact I had to attend the rookie’s funeral."

After hiring a firm from Boston to conduct a “national” search, city council selected the new chief from internal ranks. A major with seventeen years experience in Hampton got the job.

 

Cozy: Not a Book Genre by Definition, But a Possible Feeling After Reading

There is no memory of having heard the word cozy used as the genre of a book before signing up some years ago to be a part of DorothyL, an on-line discussion group about mysteries. Curiosity at the time led me to read several books described as such by both the authors and readers.

That reading did nothing to satisfy my curiosity. Comparatively speaking, the books read were more cheese and chalk than peas in a pod. The subject had been dropped from personal thought until another round of on-line discussion arose about what makes a book cozy. The latest comments struck me saying what a cozy book isn’t rather than what it is.

The book being read when this latest round of discussion started was Anne Rivers Siddons’ BURNT MOUNTAIN. She writes scenes that could win a majority vote on being cozy, but no one would use the word to describe her complete books. “Why not?” That was the question lingering in the back of my mind as reading the book continued.

The exercise left me with the following thoughts—intended to be nothing more than what the word cozy means to one reader as it relates to books. That the word can used to describe a book has not so much to do with the subject matter, but how the subject is approached.

Cozy is the feeling created by reading the book, like a perfect trip to the beach. It was a sunny day. The temperature was neither too hot, nor too cold. The sea breeze, gentle and soothing, was never so strong as to make blowing sand a concern, or ruffle the pages of a book being read. The water, when going for a swim, felt perfect, like a second skin, with a gentle rolling surf, no need to keep a lookout for rogue waves.

The trip to the beach is remembered only with the feeling that it was a very enjoyable time. Nothing specific happened that burrowed into the brain and left its mark in such a way that in the days and weeks afterwards, it could be recalled separately from the overall enjoyment of the day.

The “cozies” read a few years ago are remembered in this manner. The feeling that they were enjoyable still exists. But, with the implied threat of a gun being held to my head, not a single character or scene from any of them can be recalled. And that is not a bad thing from my perspective.

The idea that every book read should be a story where events became emotional weevils borrowing into the psyche of the book’s characters, creating—for them and vicariously for me—moments that remain a haunting memory days or weeks later is not an appealing one. Every book need not give some great insight into human nature, or reveal some universal truth.

This is not to say that such books are never read. But sometimes, certain authors are bypassed for the moment when the goal is to simply pick up a book and, hopefully, have the experience of reading for its inherent enjoyment. And afterwards, like that perfect day at the beach, remember nothing more than it was worth the investment of time.

There is a fear, for me at least, that it would be a terrible situation should every novel read remained a conscious memory, competing later with the reality of the moment. Life, I think, might become so discombobulated that remembering what to do when Mother Nature called could be a problem.

Knowing that a book will be a cozy read beforehand is somewhat of a gamble, but knowing it was one after the last page is never a question. Which, to my way of thinking, is the problem. Cozy cannot be defined as an abstract truth, such as: sunrises and sunsets occur only once in each twenty-four hour period. Cozy is not a genre. It is a word that describes a writer’s desire/hope/goal while creating the story and/or a reader’s feelings after reading it.

John Dunning Five-Book Series Gives Unique View into Rare Book World

John Dunning is a name that may not be known to that many folks in today’s books-of-the-week world, but finding his five-book series buried deep in a corner of the local library was for me like finding five pieces of pure gold. Unfortunately, there is an element of sadness involved in this discovery.

Dunning, the owner of a bookstore in Denver, Colorado, was an award-winning author, but had not been published in ten years when he began the series featuring the character, Cliff Janeway, a Denver police detective turned bookstore owner specializing in rare and collectable books. People who know more about genres than do I use the word bibliomystery to describe the books in the series.

Each of the five books contains a whodunit story line that will satisfy the most devoted plot hounds. At the same time, they give readers a view of the world of rare and signed books that may surprise those who are as ignorant as I found myself about the trade.

The series was an instant success. The initial printing (6,500 copies) for BOOKED TO DIE (1992), sold out over night. Winner of the Nero Wolfe Award for the year, the book went through four more hardback and nineteen paperback printings over the next eight years.

The next four books, THE BOOKMAN’S WAKE (1995), THE BOOKMAN’S PROMISE (2004), THE SIGN OF THE BOOK (2005), and THE BOOKWOMAN’S LAST FLING (2006), continued the series’ success.

The sad part of the story is that the author has not been able to continue the series since undergoing surgery for the partial removal of a large benign brain tumor in 2006. He and his wife Helen have closed Old Algonquin Books in Denver as a storefront business, but continue to operate it as an as an Internet venture dealing in rare books.   http://www.oldalgonquin.com 

First printings of the hardbacks in the series have become collectable editions. The asking price on Internet sites for a signed, first edition of BOOKED TO DIE is in the neighborhood of $2,500, depending on condition. However, the good news for the average reader is that it appears all five books are still available in paperback and in audio format.

What's the Number of Words Needed When Writing a 65,000-word Novel?

This is not a trick question. But it’s one that would have once been answered differently. That is, if thought had even been given to the question some years ago before succumbing to the addiction of creative writing.

My ignorance was buried in what Robert Lewis Stevenson is quoted as calling, “The swiftly done work of the journalist, and the cheap finish and ready-made methods to which it leads.”

Many a night during a career as a reporter, my arrival back in the newsroom after covering an event was greeted with the announcement from the editor that he needed twenty column-inches to fill the allotted space. The lead was needed in five minutes so that the headline could be written. The deadline for the entire piece was thirty minutes away.

In the modern world of computers, column inches have been shoved aside by word count. There is no set formula that converts one to the other because of present-day variances among newspapers on column width and type-size. But per the rule of thumb back in the 1960s, a column inch equaled thirty-five to forty words.

So a seven to eight hundred-word story was written in those thirty minutes without a moment’s pause. It helped in those days that the norm for vocabulary was geared to a sixth-grade reading level. It was a time when effort was not spent thinking of big words, or descriptive adjectives, or adverbs.

Rewriting? The word did not exist in the newsroom during the course of daily events. There was a “rewrite” desk to handle wire service stories from the AP or UPI. But the process was ninety-nine percent cutting rather than rewriting existing text.

That was the mindset when the jump into creative writing was made. A quote on “rewriting,” one attributed to Dorothy Parker, was the only one with which there was any degree of familiarity. “I can't write five words but that I can change seven.” The quote reads “can” rather than “must.” It was once viewed as another attempt to demonstrate her wit. Its true meaning and importance were learned later.

 Over recent years, many quotes on rewriting have been read. All hold an inherent truth, but one struck me as the true goal of a creative writer and the effort it takes. The following comes from an interview with Ernest Hemingway in The Paris Review in 1956.

 Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?

Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.

Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?

Hemingway: Getting the words right.

So how many words does it take to write a 65,000-word novel? As many as needed if one’s goal is: “Getting the words right.”

Internet Represents True Democracy For People Who Write Book Reviews

Book reviews. The debate is ongoing among both authors and readers as to their value. The debate is far ranging. Who should write them: amateurs or “professionals?” What should be included: a short description or a full synopsis? What is the value of giving books a star rating like a hotel or restaurant?

The debate is a reminder of 1961, when my first full-time job in the newsroom of my hometown newspaper began. It was a daily publication, with an extra section on Sundays. This weekly addition included a lead article written by a member of the news or sports staff, plus pictures, travel articles, feature stories, and book reviews.

If a book was received, one written by a well-known, best-selling author of the time, a James Michener, Allen Drury, J. D. Salinger, Leon Uris, or Irving Stone, the chances were good that a review would be published. The exception to this rule would be a book written by an author with strong local ties.

That is the first part of the story from the old days; the very limited number of authors whose books were made available for review. The second part was the number of people who read the reviews. I don’t remember the paper’s Sunday circulation, but feel safe in saying it was less than 100,000. And it’s a safe assumption that not every person who had access to the Sunday paper read the book reviews.

Compare that to the current world with the Internet. Publishers, publicists, newspapers, and national magazines no longer make the decision as to which books will receive reviews. Individual readers now have the freedom to write reviews of any book of their choice. The review can be published in a virtual world where the potential exists for it to be read by people worldwide

This technology has opened a Pandora’s box. It’s a daunting specter for authors. No longer can traditional sources be looked to for an opinion that gives a thumb up or a thumb down. Book reviews have reached the ultimate level of democracy. Every reader has an equal opportunity to express his or her opinion. And like most issues debated in a democracy, a wide difference of opinion will always be heard.