Cowboy Confessional

I hacked out a slightly different version of Cajun Queen over the weekend. It is still a work in progress and I sorely need to find a better drummer than me. For a song that was whelped as a solo slide guitar piece, this tune is evolving in unexpected ways.

There are parallels for writers. I chatting with Dear Old Dad over the weekend. He started writing his first book and got stuck constructing the outline, having no idea where he was going with his memoir (the old man is leading a damn interesting life). He has lots of good stories to tell but he didn’t know what the theme and point of his book would be.

Sometimes the written word is like a song that you are monkeying with in studio. In Cajun Queen I knew something was missing — it did not sound complete. I started grabbing the odd and assorted percussion instruments laying about. Not liking tambourines much at all I grabbed that last.

Much to my dismay it was exactly what I needed.

My advice to Pop was to write nothing but different high-level outlines no deeper than two levels. I suggested organizing each outline around different centers of topic. After hacking through three or four, he would start to see patterns emerge — common themes that would tie the book together. I also suggested starting at the end — finding the one story that made the biggest impression on him personally — and opening the book with it. That would automagically set the tone and theme tight away.

Cajun Queen is a case study of setting the tone. As originally performed, it was a slash-and-burn blues bit focusing on slide guitar riffs, which themselves were much different than what has now been recorded. But for some unexplained reason I wanted conga drums in the song and laid that track first. That changed the center — the focus — of the song leading to the dueling guitars you hear now.

Sometimes you gotta go where the universe tells you to go.

I hope Dad starts his memoir with a meeting he had. It was with a colonel who serving in Vietnam during that troubled little war. Dad and his band of engineers worked some typical magic, rigging up motion detectors and shoving them into bamboo stalks (bamboo in Nam is about the size of a man’s thigh and grows tall enough to obscure the sun). At night, huey choppers would fly down the Ho Chi Minh trail tossing sharp-ended bamboo stalks loaded with Dad’s invention along the trail. These electronic stalks could discern the difference between an ox cart or an infantry division rolling down the road. They could tell the difference between marching boots and tank treads. The bamboo would radio this intelligence to U.S. commanders.

After a very business-like briefing, the colonel came over to my old man and said “We see them coming now. You saved a lot of my men’s lives. Thanks.”

Now that’s a theme we all can live with.

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News headline writers should be considered criminal suspects until proven otherwise.

Because of my expertise in gun control policy, I receive daily feeds of news stories concerning the subject. I was rather surprised today to see two “identical” news stories with very different headlines. One headline amplified the core political story and the other amplified the bias of the reporting newsroom. That for former was a newspaper in good repute and the latter was a TV station is not a surprise.
When I say the stories were “identical”, I’ll note that the report from a television web site was a reduced version of the newspaper report, but copied their content word-for-word.

The newspaper in question is the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a truly great paper which I had the please of reading for seven years while residing in the magnificent city of Richmond, VA. They report that a state agency will review private sales of firearms at gun shows. This is a sensitive issue nationally, but especially in Virginia where we have held suspicion of the intentions of government ever since Patrick Henry said “Give me liberty of give me death.”

The Times-Dispatch rightly headlined the piece “Gingerly, panel to examine gun show sales.” Though incomplete, the headline cornered the issue of how the government will delicately investigate if private sales of firearms at gun shows contribute to guns entering the underground market (this is a useless review given the standing criminological research that concludes such leakage is minimal).

Keep in mind that the city of Richmond is in the center of the state, cradled by urban, suburban, and rural regions. It truly reflects the state’s varied populations and thus is quite attuned to neutral phraseology.

The TV station is in Washington D.C. where guns are, for practical purposes, banned. The TV station headline reads “Va. Crime Commission To Study Gun Show Loophole.”

For those unfamiliar with the debate, the phrase “gun show loophole” is a fanciful and borderline insane description of the issue. It was invented by organizations with stated goals of eliminating private firearm ownership. Aside from being a inaccurate issue statement, the term “gun show loophole” is designed to invoke fear by falsely insinuating that there is an unintended oversight in the law.

It is instructive then to see that the television station borrowed a lobbyist phrasing in order to invoke fear in their viewership, and not the more reasoned original headline provided by the newspaper.

The funny part is that biased folks in the media still don’t understand why they are losing market- and mind-share. Folks, if you repeatedly mislead people — especially in the age of the Internet and instant fact crosschecking — they will soon ignore you as an unreliable source.

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Bartenders will surprise you.

That I make this observation indicates that I have, upon occasion, stumbled into a bar. Hell, I’ve stumbled into two today, which is an easy feat to accomplish while loathing Las Vegas.

(I find myself in Vegas this week on business, again confronted by the fact that the Big Sleazy lacks a thinking man’s entertainment. Anyone who has not figured this place out within 30 seconds of deplaning needs to drink more coffee).

Bored and bemused, I found myself bellying up to a bar in the New York, NY hotel, casino and Disneyesque asylum. I swear I saw a family of pale Bronx refugees who seemed authentically pleased with the fake version of their home town. Perhaps it is because this version lacks grime, crime, and a population of loud jabronis.

While waiting for the bartender to stroll by, I cracked open a collection of Fitzgerald short stories. He soon appeared, took my order, and said “Fitzgerald certainly captured the airs of his time, but I never found him as satisfying as Salinger.”

I wasn’t entirely surprised. I have found more intelligent men poring whiskey than I have in the pulpit, running for office, or commanding enterprises. Perhaps spending your days and nights in the company of drunks gives one perspective and a hunger for anything resembling uninbreated gray matter.

Brian, the barkeep de jure, and I exchanged our insights into authors for the better part of an hour, in between his bill paying duties and our mutual bemusement at life as absurdity that is Las Vegas. He had a fondness for Russian writers, sensing that their depressed and dower connection to life caused their characters to be more believable. I demurred, insisting that reading Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are a hastened path to suicide.

Not more than six month prior I had stumbled into the Fireside lounge (which, incidentally has no fireplace therein). I had with me a weighty tome titled “Constitutional Law and Politics, Volume One” (the fact there two volumes of this work exist is indication enough that the American legal system has devolved into an unworkable quagmire of legalistic instability).

The bartender, after poring me a fresh two fingers of whiskey said “I found it interesting that the Jehovah’s Witnesses have filed the largest number of Supreme Court appeals, that they needed to, and that they have an admirable win/loss record.”

I was stunned. Not only that a booze slinger knew such and arcane piece of legal trivia, but that I didn’t. The only respect I had for the Jehovah’s until then was for their persistence. Perhaps we should encourage all of them to confine their uninvited visitations to the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Barkeeps are as varied as the rest of us. It seems that the trick may be to carry a book with you and ignite their conversation on any topic aside from sports trivia and drunken debate.

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Writer’s groups serve a purpose … I am told.

I’ve been lucky in my lone-wolf mentality, having never been unsure about my ability to craft prose. Early on a kind but likely deranged editor paid me cold, hard cash for several hundred words, which assured me that I had enough skill to make a buck or two writing. Aside from occasional sanity checks, I have never leaned heavily on other writers (with the exception of a former lady friend whose PhD in lit gave me a source of quality editorial in between mad, fevered love making — kinda surprise I got any writing done during that period).

So at a recent literati conclave (the first I’ve ever bothered to attend), I visited a panel on the subject of writer’s groups. The moderator asked those in the audience — who barely outnumbered the panelists — why we came, as if we were being held in suspicion. I wanted to know the benefits and value of such groups, having heard wildly different conclusions.

In one extreme there are those who believe writer’s groups are useful sounding boards for serious word mechanics, who want professional outside perspectives to assure their final product is readable, entertaining, and marketable. At the other end of the literary rainbow, writer’s circles are poorly masked psychological support groups, whereby failed writers and writer wannabes abuse one another with their bruised verse.

One of the panelists was somewhat taken aback by my derogatory tone tied to the assertion of the latter type of group, indicating she knew me not for acerbic statements are entertaining to my ear. She and another gal then proceeded to waste the better part of the hour and my patience by waxing philosophic about the lonely nature of the writing craft, and how communing with kindred spirits (i.e., under-published wordsmiths) helped to bolster their resolve and give them the motivation to write.

Frankly, I don’t understand either part of their belief system. Writers don’t write because they want to, they write because they have to. Take away a real writer’s word processor and their skulls will explored, spewing blood, gore, pithy quotes, and unfinished manuscripts across the room.

The other factor — motivation — is what separates real writers from sober society. The panel before this writer group grope was composed of working writers, who had regular columns and assigned pieces from national periodicals. A recurring theme among this caste was that deadlines are wonderful motivators. They maintained that real writers can summon prose on demand, and all it takes is desire or a little pressure, such as an editor who can utter that magic phrase “you’re fired.”

If you ever quit taking your meds and seek a writer’s group, the best two tactics you can adopt are to know what you want to achieve by being a member of a group, and then shop around (writer’s groups are like kudzu - there’s a new thatch sprouting up every few seconds). Even if you are greenhorn writer, find a group with people who have paychecks to prove their chops, because getting advice from fellow amateurs becomes a self reinforcing cycle of disappointment.

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I loath conflict, though not in my personal life. Just in my writing.

Get any group of fiction writers (as opposed to a random group of reprobates) together and the discussion will eventually get around to the subject of conflict or tension. Conflict drives every plot of every story. The story can be comedy, drama, or the internal dialog of a drug addled psychotic freak, be they a Congressman or Senator.

A lot of fiction lacks the construction of conflict. Sometimes the conflict is too mild and thus not a convincing driver for action of the characters. Sometimes there is not enough variety of conflict, and thus the work becomes monotonous. Other times the type of conflict is beyond the scope of the reader - something they never experienced, and to which they cannot relate. Any constrained conflict is deadly.

I believe this is what keeps many good writers from becoming great writers, and many bad writers from ever receiving a royalty check. They do not think-through a variety or conflicts and do not pick those that an average reader would respond. This is why basic conflicts — mainly love and violence — are the nauseatingly recurrent foundation of most Hollywood drivel. You can’t go wrong with passion, be it the passion to ravage a gorgeous woman (or to be ravaged by a hunky man) or to kill someone who damn well deserves it. Everyone member of the audience can connect with primal emotions and the conflict therein.

There are exceptions. Take Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The book is marvelously well written, with Fitgerlad’s humor carrying the burden of the story. For most of the book the conflicts are petty and would be forgettable aside from the Paris Hilton-like voyeuristic look into the lives of well heeled drunks. Fitzgerald takes a long time to get to the big conflict, though in this instance the payoff is worth it.

In a novella I’m starting to shop, I take conflict many steps further. The protagonist has one major conflict throughout the book — he died in a car crash, his wife survived, and his love for her keeps him from finishing his transition into death. But in each chapter I introduce another conflict with a series of antagonists. Some conflicts, like his undying love (pun intended) are internal. Some are external in his dealing with other ghosts and the living. And in a style I favor, I foreshadow the next conflict at the end of each chapter so the reader is compelled to keep reading.

Of internal and external conflicts, external are the easiest to craft. We all experience external conflicts and they all grown in the same garden. We have spats with lovers, unrequited love, fights with neighbors/bosses/police, etc. Such conflicts are relatively easy to create and fictionalize because they are well understood and need only interesting tweaks and appropriate tension to make them real.

Internal conflicts are tricky, and this is the downfall of introspective writers, who are a notoriously conflicted bunch. What tortures one man internally may be completely foreign to everyone else on the planet. The more obscure the conflict, the more it needs to be explained and illustrated, and the more weary the process becomes on the reader. So if you have an internal conflict from your childhood that you are aching to put to paper, think about your audience and ask if they give a damn. If they don’t, and you cannot in a couple of pages make them give a damn, then drop it as a viable conflict.

There is a way around even this problem, though you better be a skilled writer before attempting such. If the conflict is central to the character and is obscure, then unravel the conflict over the course of the entire plot. Make the conflict real by exposing the nuances through many chapters. This makes the conflict understandable to the reader, because they are experiencing the complexities through the “reality” of your character. The reader is in a sense becoming the character through a shared experience.

Needless to say this is not easy, and requires considerable thought in the plot outlining (and if you are writing fiction without outlining, you may well be doomed from the start). But don’t let that scare you. After all, Fitzgerald didn’t seem to have much of an outline and he did the same to Gatsby.

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