I cannot believe I am even putting these two activities together in a title. Individually, each carry enough anxiety to my heart and in some cases a huge amount of disappointment. At any given point in time, there is a huge possibility that goals set for either task are slipping further and further away.

Last week as I closed the velcro on my work out gloves for the 20th strength training session, I began thinking about my commitment to both exercise and writing and reached an epiphany. The ability to miss commitments in both are deeply rooted in reasons that are identical twins.

Try it for yourself. Make a quick list , your Top 3 reasons,  that are at the root of you blowing writing goals or skipping exercise commitments. Common reasons that often surface to the top are not enough time, too many distractions; fear of failure and not seeing positive results fast enough or not having a strong enough belief that your work will yield winning results. We are looking for the major win, the loss of weight quickly or the best seller right out of the shoot. Yet we know that most successful people take incremental steps with extreme discipline towards their goals. They master majoring in the minors. Start writing consistently, schedule writing time and shoot to hit it consistently for 10 straight times.

What would be your idea of something you could do this week to get back on track  or stay on track with your writing goals?  It’s likely to be found in the small minor things.  Take small steps and I’d love to hear what you are doing.

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One of our blog readers made an excellent point in response to Part I of this series of blog posts (Thank you Katie!). She stated that most mysteries are more plot-driven than character-driven. This explains why in some mystery novels, the characters seem a little flat.

Luckily, I believe I have found a mystery writer whose stories are both plot and character driven: Dennis Lehane. So far I have read two of his novels (and am almost done with a third): Shutter Island and Gone Baby Gone. Both of these novels are compelling stories with fascinating and well-developed characters.

Shutter Island revolves around a U.S. Marshal traveling to an insane asylum on a remote island to investigate the disappearance of one of the inmates. The characters and the plot of this story are quite complex. For instance, along the way we learn that U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels is on the island for personal as well as professional reasons. I don’t want to give anything away (although many have probably seen the film), but suffice it to say that this is one “missing persons” mystery with a whole lot going on. If you pay close attention while reading the book, you may well figure out a significant part of the mystery, but the strength of this book is that even if you have figured it out before the end, the storytelling abilities of Mr. Lehane inspire you to read on.

In this novel the characters and the plot were very well-developed and as a writer I was fascinated to see how the author wove the complicated threads of the story together. For those of you that saw the movie without reading the book, I encourage you to pick up a copy. You will find the writing interesting and even knowing the end can’t take away from the power of the characters and the potency of a truly great mystery.

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Archetypes in the movies is certainly nothing new.  It’s almost impossible to discuss Star Wars (OT obviously) without talking about heroic archetypes and heroes’ journeys.  Many of those archetypes are so ancient that they are as old as storytelling itself.  Movies aren’t ancient but they seem to have had quite an effect on storytelling in barely over a century.  That effect is big enough that some characters seem to be becoming archetypes peculiar to the modern age.  Since this is the sort of stuff that fascinates me I guess you’re stuck reading it.  I have five in mind off the top of my head but I think I might find more as I ponder a bit.  Hopefully the comment sections will yield some I haven’t thought of.  Let’s start with…

The Rogue Cop.  This one is modern in part because the idea of a police force as we think of it is modern.  Not that much older than movies really.  Cops make good Hero archetypes naturally.  They’re good guys who stop bad guys.  They take oaths and carry shields.  Knight of the Round Table type stuff.

Then came Dirty Harry.  We love that guy.  Why?  There aren’t many reasonable people, including real life cops, who think a man like Harry Callahan should be walking free, let alone armed and carrying a badge.  Yet there aren’t many people, including real life cops, who don’t root for Harry.  He shoots people down rather than arrest them and apparently gets every partner he has killed as well.  Still, most people think of him as the good guy.  There has to be something there that we like or identify with.

I think it’s just the fact that he will always do what he thinks is right.  We all wish we were so confident about what to do that we can just go ahead and do it.  It doesn’t seem to matter that Callahan’s code isn’t legal and under the cold light of reason not particularly moral.  What matters is that it’s not relative.  Dirty Harry knows what has to be done and he’s the one to do it.  If you go against the code you go down.  Zero ambiguity.  Zero guilt.

I can’t really think of an ancient story Archetype that really fits the Rogue Cop.  Arthur’s knights were expected to follow the chivalric code at all times.  A knight that followed some made up code of his own just wasn’t a good guy.  Much of this is modern because of modern social structures of course.  Not just the idea of law enforcement but the idea of civil rights.  We tend to believe in civil rights but we can’t help but be pissed off when those rights protect those we know are bad guys.

So is Inspector Callahan and the Rogue Cop a true Archetype?  Well, what was the last movie you saw where a cop interviewed witnesses, filled out paperwork, got a warrant, gathered evidence, made an arrest (not by himself but with a squad of patrolmen), booked his man, filled out more paperwork, testified in a court of law, and then clocked out and went home?  How many people did Martin Riggs arrest compared to how many people he shot or just broke their necks with his bare hands?  I haven’t seen the last Die Hard movie but in the first three the only thing John Mclane does that even remotely resembles police work is flash his badge and say ‘I’m a cop’.  

The funny thing is real police makes pretty good story.  My wife is a True Crime addict and she got me hooked on The First 48, a show on A&E that follows real homicide detectives on real cases.  Fascinating stuff and real human drama but it takes the fantasy of movies to achieve the archetypal status and Dirty Harry is the gold standard.  

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Palimpsest is Gore Vidal’s first memoir. Early on in the book, he makes the point that this is not an autobiography, but a memoir. Too many autobiographies read like an excuse for the author’s failings and a platform for their supposed triumphs, as though they are getting their two cents in before someone else gives the final accounting. Vidal offers no excuses, even admitting in the beginning that he chose the title, and later realized he had been mispronouncing the word for years, and didn’t fully understand the origin of its meaning.

In Palimpsest he plays with time like a magician, deftly moving from one place to another, never losing the reader, an uncommon fluidity where most memoirs follow a strictly age based progression. There was no prose for prose sake, or lyrics over substance, yet his writing draws the reader in as though you were spending an evening listening to incisively funny repartee. He had me chuckling in the first few pages. Essentially, he’s the guy at a cocktail party you’d most like to spend the evening with.

He has an almost clinical insight into people and it doesn’t hurt that he’s known some of the icons of his age. His slant on Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Jackie Onassis (they shared a stepfather) and countless other characters of his time are priceless. There is no lack of dysfunctional family dynamics, either. Though he doesn’t use his upbringing as anything more than a travelogue of how he got where he is. He continues to be the most erudite voice of the anti-establishment. You can catch vintage Vidal on YouTube sparring with William F. Buckley on a sixties talking head show in a game of wordsmanship.

For all his wittiness and fascinating stories, the real value is that his memoirs chronicle how his life as a writer evolved. At a critical juncture early in his career, he decided to go ahead with the publication of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, over the objections of his agent. It contained overt homosexual overtones and true to form, the publishing industry blackballed him for the content. That he chose truth over conformity, and the commercial success that comes with it, was a defining moment. It seems the writers who only give their audience exactly what’s expected end up being trapped by their success.

His decision led to Hollywood and Broadway, experiences that ultimately made up for the early rejection. It is what allowed him the freedom to produce a wide range of work, from Myra Breckenridge (a one finger salute to the entertainment industry), to Visit to a Small Planet, and historical fiction, Lincoln, being his most famous.

Palimpsest is a gift from Vidal.  He shared the essence of who he is with clarity, style and honesty. Isn’t that what art is all about?

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Starting out as a young writer I never wrote stories. Poetry was more my speed. And as a young poet I wrote my share of really, really bad poetry complete with awkward rhymes and sappy subject matter. But somewhere in my junior year of high school I was introduced to a poet that changed my writing forever. That poet was Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the poem that changed my life was called “Sometime During Eternity”.

Sometime During Eternity

Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hep
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
ninteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter

You’re hot
they tell him

And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool
And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is THE king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree

Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This poem blew my young Catholic mind. What genius to take the story of Jesus and translate it into Beatnik terms. I was hooked. From then on I immersed myself in the Beats: Corso, Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Cassady, among others. I began to experiment with my own style. I embraced free verse, finally breaking free of the constraints of traditional poetry. The subject matter I explored became more sophisticated and more dark. Reading the poem by Ferlinghetti opened up a whole new world of writing to me. I felt I had finally found my voice. To this day my poetry still carries the mark of the Beats.

If you haven’t read it and even if poetry isn’t really your thing, I highly recommend Ferlinghetti’s poetry book A Coney Island of the Mind. It is a truly inspired piece of writing. And I am a firm believer that everyone needs to read Ginsberg’s “Howl” at least once before they die. This is poetry at its most raw and powerful. How can you go wrong with an opening line that reads:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked…”

I often wonder if I would have continued writing poetry had I not found “Sometime During Eternity”. Quite honestly I wonder if I might still be Catholic. That poem caused me to look at a whole lot more than just poetry with new eyes. It affected me deeply and isn’t that the point of poetry?

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The first lines of a novel are so important and so many of the great ones have been taken. So how do we draw the reader in? How do we make him/her take interest in what we have to say and want to read more? Here is my two cents worth:

1. Start in the middle.
Many people struggle with writing the first paragraph of an essay, let alone a novel. One technique that has helped many is to start a story somewhere in the middle, then craft a beginning that logically and interestingly brings the reader to that point. There is no rule that says you must begin at the beginning and if you are staring at line after scratched out line of false beginnings, perhaps moving along to a different part of the story will help you figure out a way to draw in the reader.

2. Start in the middle.
This time I mean start your story in the middle of the actual story. Draw the reader in by indicating that this has been going on awhile. It may just make them wonder what has been happening up to this point. Of course, you will need to give them that information somewhere down the line or else you will upset your reader and they will curse your name.

3. Start with dialogue.
Most human beings are voyeuristic by nature and starting a story with a conversation between two characters might just be the ticket to causing the reader to read on.

4. Pose a question.
But it will need to be a good one; one that makes the reader think. You will also need to eventually answer the question. Be sure you know the answer the question you pose in the first couple of lines or you could disappoint the reader later on. This technique will probably work best if you are using a first person narrator in your story.

5. Give us a character to connect with.
If in the first couple of sentences we meet someone that we can identify with on some level, we are more likely to want to continue reading to see what happens to them. How does one do this in a mere three or four lines? That is a fantastic question and one that I am not sure I can answer in this space.

The first lines of a novel or story are the worm on the hook so to speak. Have fun with them. Seek out those books and stories you love most and read over and over again and take a look at the first couple of lines. What drew you in? What caused you to want to continue to read this story? Many of the best beginnings have already been written, but that doesn’t mean there cannot be many more added to that list.

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Opening lines are a slap in the face with a strange hand. When done right they bring you into this new world you’re about to explore with powerful force, yet leave you needing to know more.

It has to hook your reader quickly and effectively, especially if you’re interested in selling it. In screenplays you only get a few pages, in a novel you may get a chapter. So how do you make a line that gets things running in style? Going off some of the first lines that stuck with me, and ones in the American Book Review’s list of 100 Best First Lines of Novels, here are my thoughts:

Keep it tight – Editing should remove superfluous words from your entire piece, but squeeze things extra tight in your first line. Leave no word there without a specific meaning and intent. For example, consider “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins” – except for one deliberately omitted plot point, you learn something from the sheer simplicity of this sentence and specific words and phrases he used.

Make it strong – Active voice and strong verbs only. You’re in control, and your story has something to say. Does “Some thought it was a pretty good time, but others not so much” really pack the same punch?

Declare! – Make a bold statement about your world, your characters, or your ideas. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” – Holy cow. Take it further and give your readers a command. “Call me Ishmael” gives you more than just the character’s name, throwing in personality, attitude, and several implied questions.

Keep it vague – Wait, what? I thought you just said strong and delcarative!  Yes, and vague. The opening line is a sharp hook, but you have a whole story over which to reel them in. After one sentence you don’t know who Lolita or Ishmael are, or who will be the hero of David Copperfield (“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show”) but you will keep on reading to find out.

There are no absolutes here, but if you look at American Book Review’s list you’ll see that, in general, the lines are still very compelling but get longer and more meandering as you move down the list.

Your opening line is a first, bold, glimpse into this new world you created, and like a curious child peeking through a keyhole you want the tiny sliver they can see to keep them glued.

He stared straight ahead as lawyers for both sides tossed evidence and insults at one another. Every once in awhile a small smile appeared on his lips. Usually it was during times when the prosecution showed gruesome images of the murders he had committed. And sometimes during witness testimony, his eyes glazed over as though he had left the courtroom mentally and returned to the scene of his bloody crimes.

And bloody they were.

Twelve men, all members of rival crime families, showed up butchered in twelve successive days. All were missing their eyeballs, tongues, and penises. According to the medical examiner, these body parts had been taken while their owners were still breathing. The tool used to remove these items was a rusty straight razor which now lie dormant in a small plastic baggie labeled “Evidence.”

A quick death would have shown too much mercy and Frankie “The Gasket” Colletti was not a merciful man. Only he knew the running total of how many men and women he had killed over the years…how many “leaks” he had stopped. Ending up in court was inevitable, but it had taken years to bring down the man in the dark suit at the front of the room. The man who oozed indifference as photo after photo of mutilated bodies clicked by on the screen at the front of the courtroom. The man who smirked a little when a victim’s family member cried out in court. The man who only glanced at the jury once, but had conveyed such a message as to insure a mistrial. This was a man whose sole purpose was to kill and he was more than confident he would be doing it again soon.

Years ago, because I found many of my ideas were springing forth on my drive to and from work, I purchased a small tape recorder to capture any inspired phrases or plot lines that zoomed into my head. This worked pretty well. I confess to a couple of impromptu renditions of old 80’s tunes working their way onto the tapes, but overall the device helped me during those times when ideas where popping up in the car. Most of these ideas came to me as a single sentence…almost like a log line for a story. I find that a single sentence can often lead to an entire story idea. Many a time, prior to using the recorder, I would drive eight or nine miles saying the same line over and over in my head until I got to where I could write it down without wrecking the car.

As far as where these ideas come from, it varies. Sometimes I will see something while I am driving that conjures up an idea. Often items that fall out of the backs of trucks will get my mind working or even a garbage bag left in the middle of the road. I wonder what is in the bag and then my mind will start on a story. Wondering about things will usually always lead me to some kind of story idea. Unfortunately, over the years, I have abandoned many of those ideas and left them unexplored.

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Personally, I think all writers should put a little of themselves into their stories. In fact, I’m not sure there is any way around having some of ourselves enter into our writing. Writers have often heard the old advice: “Write what you know.” Cathartic writing, such as journaling or blogging, can often lead to some great ideas, but sometimes those ideas can get lost in the shuffle. Maybe they don’t come across as well as we would like because we are too close to the subject matter to be truly objective. Can exorcising our personal demons morph into a great story, or will it just come off sounding like an overly-exposed therapy session? Who can we turn to for advice on this subject?

My answer: Stephen King. Stephen King is one of those writers who explores his dark side resulting in some fantastic storytelling. I highly recommend his book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. This book contains a lot of stories about his life and how those life experiences have shaped his writing. He is a man who successfully uses writing to overcome some of the personal demons with which he struggles. This book is a great guide for those writers considering using their cathartic writing to generate their own stories.

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