MAKE THE AUDIENCE CARE

I tried to watch two movies today. Couldn't stand either one. They had the same problem: Failed to make the audience give a damn.

I think movies and stories are all about caring. The reader or audience has to give two hoots and a holler about the story and the characters, who in turn have to care about something that is hugely important to them.

They have to give enough of a damn about something or someone to take a great, huge, scary emotional or physical risk. Otherwise we don't have a story.

Today's movies took two different approaches. "The Stratosphere Girl," is about a 15-year-old budding cartoonist who has a boring life. She needs to get away, and when I watched it, so did I.

It is very hard to show a character who is bored without boring the audience to tears. I lasted about 10 minutes. I probably didn't get to the good part, if there was one.

The other movie, "Sleepless Night," is a French thriller that plunges us into action right away. Two guys are pulling an armed robbery. Guns. Speed. Chase. Shoot-out. Bang-bang. A knife. Slice, cut, blood. Foot chase. Bag of cocaine.

You get the idea. But who cares? Not me. These two guys don't seem to care about anything except the bag of cocaine, which has no emotional resonance for me. For one thing, it is a big fat cliche. (The filmmakers needed a MacGuffin, and that was easy, I guess.)

Later, they show one of these thugs dealing with his teenage son, whom he loves very much. That is supposed to make us care. But it does not. We have already seen him shooting at people. So I am not going to care about him. It's too late.

I look back at my list of favorite movies and realize they all start with the main characters caring about something very much.

"The Godfather" starts with the wedding scene. The old man grants favors on the day his daughter gets married. He has to. He cares about the Sicilian tradition, and about his daughter, and his god-son, and so on. We see his power, and we also see his sense of honor, and his caring.

"Silence of the Lambs" starts with Clarice Starling working out on the FBI obstacle course. She wants to become an agent in the worst possible way. She cares about her work, and about stopping the killer, "Buffalo Bill." She will take any chance, any risk, to get the job done. Her caring makes us care about her.

When you write a story, show that your characters give a damn about something that is so important to them that they will take a huge risk for it. It can be an emotional or physical risk, or both.

You have to care about it, and so do your characters. Otherwise, we won't give two hoots and a pile of horse dung. If they don't care, we won't care. And there goes your story, and quite possibly your career.

-- Roger

Copyright © 2012, Roger R. Angle  

SEEKING THRILLS

Lately, I've been working on several writing projects at once: a novel, a short story, a screenplay, a stage play, a memoir, and a humorous self-help book for men.

Does that seem like too much? Or not enough?

I have found, in my lifelong pursuit of the writing muse, that I have to find the energy in whatever I am doing.

For me, I like to go back and forth between two writing projects on any given day. Or among three. Usually two is enough. One gets too boring. I find more energy, more excitement with two.

I don't know why that is. Maybe it's my early reporter training, when you'd often have six or seven stories working at once and as many as 17 on your active list. You'd have one source on the phone, and another would call you back.

I found that fast pace exciting.

Anyway, it doesn't matter why. What matters is the energy. The drive, the oomph, the quickening of the heart, that marvelous intensity you get where you're on the edge of something new. When you are about to get the big story.

It must be like chasing a jaguar through the jungle with a spear. Metaphorically, of course.

I think it's the same impulse that drives climbers to go after the highest peak or the most difficult rock face. We are attracted to the toughest competition, not the easiest.

As I read somewhere, the human mind is hard-wired to seek novelty and challenge. Something new and something difficult.

If it was easy, anyone could do it, right?

Where's the fun in that?

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

POLITICAL STORY

Today I am working on my first political story, started when I was more active with MoveOn.org.

It is about one of those self-appointed, supposedly patriotic Minuteman who is "guarding" the U.S. border, when he finds a lovely Latina who is lost and being stalked by a mountain lion.

He follows her, and soon the mountain lion is stalking him.

You can probably guess what happens next. Or maybe not.

When I finish it, I plan to send it to a magazine.

Wish me luck.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

WRESTLING THE GORILLA

I've been having a lot of trouble getting my yah-yahs up to wrestle with my novel, a big hairy gorilla that runs through the jungle and turns and fights me with all its strength.

It makes me tired just thinking about it. 

Today, I was reading a bit of memoir by Robert Towne about writing his famous movie "Chinatown."

He said it drove him nuts. He retreated to Catalina Island to write most of it. The isolation helped him focus on it and wrestle with it every day.

I was glad to hear it was a beast to write. Made me feel better.

I realized that part of my problem is that I want it to be easy. I don't want to wrestle the 800-lb gorilla.

I want it to be easy like a short story, like "Casualty of War," which won the Random House short fiction award in 1999. That story took me about 20 minutes to write and I was smart enough not to change hardly any of it.

(Here is a link:)
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/contest/0999/sstory1.html

But novel writing is different. Takes me nine or ten months working all day every day to get a first draft and eight or ten years to do the rewrites. Of course I do much line-by-line revising. I should probably follow Borges's advice:

“Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.” – Jorge Luis Borges 

Of course being a compulsive rewriter and endless futzer, that is hard for me to do.

Anyway, the important thing for me now is to realize that I cannot expect it to be easy. It is going to be hard. As someone once said, "If it was easy, anybody could do it." And as someone else once said, "Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm."

And courage. You have to have courage to tackle something as big and hairy as this.

Wish me luck. And energy. And perseverance. And guts. And willingness. You have to be willing.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BAD STORYTELLING: 'DIRT'

Today, I was lazing around, trying to recover from a bout of hypoglycemic fatigue, as I often am in the afternoon, and I tried to read a mystery novel called "Dirt" by Sean Doolittle, published by Uglytown, a small press in Los Angeles devoted to pulp fiction.

Uglytown books are fairly attractive, quality paperback originals well produced and hip looking. Unfortunately, this author didn't understand something vital to the writing process: the mind of the reader, the canvas upon which the writer paints.

There are three stories in any fiction: on the page, the most obvious; in the writer's mind, which changes as it takes shape on the page; and in the reader's mind, most important of the three.

In "Dirt," an inauspicious title if there ever was one, the writer did the set-up poorly, in my opinion, and failed to create an interesting story in the reader's mind, at least for this reader.

"Dirt" starts out with the funeral of a man the narrator claims was his "good buddy." The traditional funeral is interrupted by some environmental activists cum maniacs who arrive with road flares and jump on the coffin and give a speech about the misuse of mahogany.

I thought the action was stupid and pointless , out of left field. All surprise, no suspense. But it didn't have to be that way.

The disruption of the funeral could have been integral to the plot, if the tree-hugging activists had been set up properly. The dead man could have been (a) a member of the activist group, which would have made the disruption ironic, or (b) a sworn enemy of the group, which would have made the disruption seem like revenge.

Either way, the story would have made sense and not made this reader throw it down with a pronounced, "Ugh."

There is a lesson here for new writers: Do your set-up carefully, and avoid he dreaded deus ex machina -- god from the machine.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

VOLUNTEER SLAVERY

Years ago, when I lived in NYC, I used to go hear Rahsaan Roland Kirk at the Village Vanguard.

It was a wonderful time, with great music. Rahsaan had amazing chops, musical taste, and energy. He was one of the best jazz musicians I've ever heard. He was a musical genius and a musical freak. He could play two or three wind instruments at once, and he could hold one note forever. He could breathe in through his nose and out through his mouth at the same time. And when he was in "cutting" sessions with other jazz greats, he could cut them down, man.

Anyway, the great Rahsaan, who was blind, BTW, would sometimes march through the audience and play a song called "Volunteer Slavery," which had a line, "something that we all know."

The idea was that each of us chooses to enslave ourselves to something or someone. For a jazz musician, I'm sure it was the music.

For me, it's the writing. The idea of writing a real novel, a work of fiction that swings for the fences while it also swings, in the jazz sense.

Anyway, today it's back to work for me. I'm over a horrible stupid computer virus my system had for the last few days, so it's time to hit it again. As my son would say, it's not going to write itself.

Back to volunteer slavery, something that we all know.

Wish me luck. I'm humming Rahsaan's song as I open the file and start to write.

-- Roger


(Links:)
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_0UE7wjFYA&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiI2ZHmxPPo&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Liy6TQ8FLR4&feature=related

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BESTSELLERS OR JUST CRAP?

Today, I went to the library to study bestselling novels, hoping I could learn something to use in my own work.

I browsed the shelves and got out six or eight books and sat down to read a page or two. You can tell a lot right off the bat.

The first one was by John Grisham. I think it was called "The Associate" or something like that. It started out about a law student coaching an inner-city boy's basketball team.

God, it was boring. I could hardly wade through six or eight pages of the first scene. It about wore me out.

The guy sees a cop or federal agent watching him. OK, big deal. Then later he gets outside and two FBI guys hassle him about an old rape charge.

Why should I care about this guy? I don't. This is a bestseller? You can't prove that by me.

Then I tried books by John Sandford, James Patterson, Richard North Patterson, Ridley Pearson, and three or four other big-time bestseller writers.

To me, they were all pretty much the same. These books are supposed to be thrillers, but I was not thrilled. I wasn't hooked. I wasn't even interested. They were unbearably dull.

This isn't the first time I've done this. In the past, I've tried Lee Child and Dean Koontz and Lisa Gardner and John Locke (whose stuff BTW is notable for its extreme use of cliches).

Years ago, I picked up a used copy of a John Sandford novel, and the first chapter was surprisingly good. It was about a group of high-powered biz execs who went on their annual deer hunt.

At the end of the first scene, somebody shoots and kills the chairman of the board. OK, so far, so good. Then the author says, "It was a real bad day for the chairman of the board." Or something like that. 

Yargh! I threw the book against the wall. That authorial intrusion ruined it for me. I couldn't read any further.

I even read a whole John Grisham novel once, "The Firm." It was so repititious and badly written that I vowed I'd never read another one.

This was typical. These bestsellers are almost uniformly horrible. Poorly written and boring. I can't even read that crap, let alone write it. Trying to read it is a form of torture. Yargh!

So I made a decision: I will pass on the bestsellers. Who cares? If I was doing this to make money, I'd become a pimp, or sell life insurance, or go to law school, or become a hit-man. (Joking now. Har-har.)  

From now on, I'm just going to write the best novels I can, by my own criteria. Travel my own road, and see that road by my own lights.

That decision feels right. It puts me in charge, the captain of my ship, the master of my fate.

For one thing, I can study the novels I love, the great books. You know, Tolstoi, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, Hemingway, Melville, Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

No more crap.
Whew, what a relief.

I don't know if I'll ever be a bestseller, or even publish a novel, but at least I'll be doing what I love and doing it my own way.

Wish me luck.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

LITERARY THRILLER?

I've been a starving writer most of my adult life and have made a living in journalism, teaching and PR. That hasn't been a bad life. I'm not complaining.

I enjoy those things and think they can be valuable, especially journalism and teaching. After all, journalism and school are where most people get their understanding of the larger world, outside their family and friends. (Or should.)

But my passion has always been fiction. I've tried before to write big literary thrillers, and my goal has been to make enough money so I could quit my day job.

In 1996, I had a novel that almost went big. A publisher was talking $500,000 and a two-book deal. BTW, that makes it cheaper for them; they get two for one. Half a million is enough for a break-out book, and I was hoping to be able to write full-time.

But the deal fell through, and I'm back at it again. Am studying bestsellers, first to see if I can find any that don't make me puke, and second to see if I can adapt any of their methods to my own work.

I've read "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo," part of the greatest publishing phenomenon that I know of--the three books in the series have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide--and I'm planning to study John Grisham, John Sandford and other big bestsellers.

I don't know if this is even possible. Obviously, lots of other writers are trying to do the same thing. Even some non-writers. It's not easy.

But some people have succeeded. There are new writers on the bestseller lists all the time. Of course, most of their work is ridden with cliches and full of outrageous plot devices.

But my theory is that you don't have to write crap for money. I don't know if my theory is correct. After all, most of the big-money books are pretty crappy. But then, so are most so-called literary novels.

Anyway, I'm on a quest to make money writing fiction, and I don't want to write crap.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Wish me luck.
I'll need it.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle