LAMB SLAYS DRAGON

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

So I’ve been rummaging through the undersides of things in my effort to consolidate the clutter of my life before moving from house to apartment, occasionally jumping when the call of “Spider!” comes from one of the other rooms, from one of the other family members, and my life-saving skills are required to take the thick or thin or hairy or spindly eight-legged offender out to the outside of the domicile where we, ourselves, will soon be outside looking in.

It’s a bitch of a time to get any writing done, and a few weeks after I started my third novel I find myself just ten pages in, ten solid pages, re-written ten times, but ten pages nonetheless.  My focus has been on the move and the day job and on finishing my tour for BEAT, which took me back to my hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, last weekend.  Writing will again commence Thanksgiving morn, when I’ll be looking at four ten-hour writing days in a row.

But I have during this time made time to read.  I tackled the works of Thomas Harris, picking up SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and RED DRAGON.  I was getting tired of being the only writer on the planet who couldn’t say that RED DRAGON was the best thriller ever written.  I’ve seen the title pop up in just about everyone’s Top Ten List, and I was at this year’s Men of Mystery when Greg Hurwitz was asked to name the best thriller ever written, and he said it would have to be RED DRAGON.

I read the books back-to-back, but backwards, diving into LAMBS first only because I was able to acquire it before DRAGON.

I was just a few pages into LAMBS when I got the cozy feeling that I was in the hands of a master.  It was revving up to be the perfect reading experience and I felt myself trying to slow things down, afraid I’d run into a bump along the way, something that might derail this wonder-train and break the illusion I was getting that LAMBS might in fact be the golden elixir of thrillers.  I zipped through the novel and was not disappointed.  It was brilliant, and in my opinion, a perfect novel.

I eagerly leapt into RED DRAGON, expecting the same.  And it was great, it was wonderful, but it wasn’t SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. 

Both novels are compelling studies of characters in duress.  Perhaps what makes DRAGON stand out so much is its depiction of semi-retired FBI profiler/forensic analyst Will Graham, the physically and psychologically wounded man responsible for capturing the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter.  Asked to return to the FBI to pursue another brutal killer, Graham first visits Lecter in jail, hoping to obtain a little insight.  Lecter asks him the question, “Do you know how you caught me, Will?”  He answers his own question thereafter, saying, “The reason you caught me is that we’re just alike.”  This statement haunts Graham through the rest of the book, and Harris does a bang-up job convincing us that Graham fears he has what it takes to be another Hannibal Lecter.

All of DRAGON’S characters are complex and believable and the science and procedural aspects of the book are spot on.  It’s a really great book, but it’s not SILENCE OF THE LAMBS.

What is it about LAMBS that captures me so?

First of all, it’s tight.  I’m a big fan of tight.  I’m a student of Jim Thompson, and his writing is honed down to the bone, and it moves.  We talk here at Murderati about “cutting out the stuff no one reads,” and Thompson’s work stands out as a shining example of that.  I read Thompson continuously as I was writing my last few drafts of BOULEVARD, and his writing taught me to constantly tighten and trim my prose.  His work proves that less is often more.  I’ve noticed that BEAT is a tighter, faster ride than BOULEVARD, and my new book is tighter still.  Soon I’ll be writing mystery-thriller haikus.

LAMBS is rich with detail.  It’s obvious that Harris has done his homework.  But the volume of research is presented with amazing restraint.  There’s no need to take the reader on long tangents into the history of profiling or forensic science.  No need to give us more than the very basics about Clarice’s boss, Jack Crawford.  Just enough to bring out character, without drowning the reader in backstory.  One beautiful little character touch comes in a narrative line about Crawford that reads, “Back at his chair he cannot remember what he was reading.  He feels the books beside him to find the one that is warm.”  There are little brushstrokes like this everywhere in the novel.

And don’t even get me started on the rich character descriptions of Clarice, Hannibal Lecter, Chilton and Buffalo Bill.  Every character, even the walk-ons, is unique and bursting with dimension. 

Clarice herself is exceptional.  There is such complexity to her, in that she is a young, female, FBI trainee with a troubled past and a chip on her shoulder.  She’s refreshingly original and her sense of pride and justice are things to admire.  Match that with Lecter’s eerie, uncanny ability to peer into the recesses of everyone’s psychology, and you’ve got two of the best characters ever written. 

In LAMBS, Lecter is a slippery guide and mentor, and, while he’s always out for himself, he finds joy in helping Clarice along on her path.  He plays a slightly different role in DRAGON, by actively helping the antagonist in Lecter’s own quest to destroy Will Graham.  This doesn’t feel like the Lecter I know from LAMBS.  It’s cleverly done in DRAGON, but it reduces Lecter’s role to something less than his potential, which is further developed, with greater satisfaction, in LAMBS.

The pacing of LAMBS was also more satisfying than in DRAGON.  LAMBS grabbed me by the throat and shook me almost to unconsciousness, then slapped me in the face repeatedly to wake me up.  It was a non-stop ride on a jackhammer.  And yet I still felt firmly planted in the story—the speed of the narrative didn’t come at the cost of losing the story’s foundation.  I still got the opportunity to peek into the world of the FBI, to spend time in Quantico, to learn about Clarice’s early life on the farm, her run from the glue factory, her desperate wish to live in a world of silence, where the lambs never cry. 

And I had the opportunity to observe the smartest serial killer on the planet.  I don’t know if I’ll ever have Harris’ chops—Hannibal Lecter is the most interesting antagonist I’ve met.  There is more of Lecter in LAMBS, too.  He plays a more vital role in the narrative, and yet he doesn’t steal the story from its principal characters, Clarice, Crawford and Buffalo Bill.

Listen, I could go on forever, analyzing the structures of each novel, deconstructing every chapter and paragraph, explaining what works for me and why.  They are both great novels, but I clearly see SILENCE OF THE LAMBS in the top spot. 

Let’s hear some comments.  What do you think is the best thriller of all time?  Why?

                                                              *    *    *

Also, my short story prequel to BOULEVARD is now available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from my website.  It will also be available on Kindle and other e-book devices beginning December 7.

 

In CROSSING THE LINE, young LAPD officer Hayden Glass is driven to move quickly up the ranks at the department. Only one year in, he decides to pad his experience with a stint in Vice. But, with a marriage on the rocks and carrying the weight of a dark and troubled past, Hayden cannot resist the temptations he encounters on the street. CROSSING THE LINE marks the moment Hayden’s sex-addiction first rears its ugly head.

THE WORLD OF THE WORD

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

What fascinates me is the never-ending sentence running wild in my mind, bursting through my thoughts like the long, paper dragon in the streets of San Francisco during Chinese New Year.  There’s always a sentence running, always an editor running at its side, clipping, grooming, evaluating. 

It’s been this way all my life.  Always the third-person observer, the narrator in my head describing everything I see, “…he stood high on his toes to throw the paper bag over the fence…the car passed and she turned to wave, forgetting the cup of coffee in her hand…the man impatiently pulled the little dog on the leash, dragging it through the muddy park…”

My God, will this inner voice ever shut the fuck up?  I mean, really, it’s maddening.  It gets worse when I’m tired, when my defenses are down.  And if I’m sick, running a fever, touched by a hallucination or two…forget about it – “The Nyquil settled into the acids of his stomach, reacting like dry ice in water, the green liquid turning into gas in his belly, settling into his bowels under a river of…”

Enough.  Stop it.

This has got to be a writer thing, right?

I used to feel very much alone living with my inner narrator and then I went to my first Bouchercon and met a hundred other authors.  I recognized the same look in their eyes when they talked, or when they sat in rooms watching others talk, and I sensed the narration behind their eyes.  I’d follow their glances around the room and imagined how their sentences described the things they saw, and wondered if they described them as I did.  And I wondered if their narrators drove them crazy as well.

I wonder what occupies the minds of surgeons?  Do they constantly run the scalpel through the tissue of their mind’s eye?  Is the path of the blade ever-changing as their internal surgeon writes and rewrites each operation?

Do engineers see schematics?  The blueprints of a bridge designing and re-designing itself in their dreams?

Do painters see colors and shapes and diminishing perspective when they shop for their vegetables at Ralphs? 

How do people get through their days?

In my life I’ve been a writer, filmmaker and musician.  As a filmmaker I’d watch a man walk across the street and I’d see the coverage in my head; long shot, medium shot from the front using a long lens, medium shot from the back, close up of his foot touching the sidewalk on the other side, close up of the bumper of the car that just missed him, long shot to see the car pass and the man turn to watch it go, medium frontal shot as he reacts to almost having been hit. 

Now, imagine how difficult it would be if I went to a Lakers game.

But, even as I lived in the language of film, I still had to hear that pesky narrator describing each scene as if it were written in a screenplay.  When I watch movies, I imagine how each scene looks in the script—CUT TO: Football player on the field, on his back, the paramedics surrounding him.  CUT TO:  Tom Cruise reacts.  CUT TO:  The family at home, watching the TV, the player’s wife standing, her body shaking.  INSERT:  TV screen, wide shot of the field, pandemonium. 

Again, it drives me nuts because I just want to sit back and enjoy “Jerry Maguire.”  Instead, I’m typing the damn screenplay in my head.

I met an author at Bouchercon who had damaged his fingers and had to resort to using some voice-activated software to help him finish his book on deadline.  Once the software recognized his voice he could speak his novel into the computer and the words would magically appear.  However, he would have to speak it like this, “Percy stepped into the street comma his long comma black hair trailing in the wind period space…”  He said that, after a while, it produced a clarity of thought he never knew existed.  Alan Jacobson was with us and he said he used the software, too, and one day when he was talking to his wife he said, “Do you mind stopping by the store comma when you’ve got some extra time question mark.”  He stared blankly ahead, then said, “Did I just say comma question mark?”

I don’t think I’ll ever use that software.  There’s no way I want my inner narrator inserting punctuation into my daily observations.

It’s strange, too, because I started in music early on, beginning with clarinet in the fourth grade.  And yet I never saw the world as musical notes.  I don’t remember my mind blaring symphonies the way my inner narrator drones on with the prose.  And yet, even as a kid playing that clarinet, I found myself describing and re-describing my environment with silent words. 

I think I’ve been wired as a writer from the start.  And it’s taken forty years for me to realize that this is how I function best.  Not as a public speaker or an actor or musician or surgeon.  I see the world in words, in three acts.  I see mundane daily events and the words that run through my head create drama.  I want everything to have meaning, though few things in life have meaning on their own.  The narrator infuses meaning, demands a good story.  I see spectacular, open-ended climaxes, because even in the end there are questions that remain. 

I daydream of dreamless sleep, sometimes, just for the silence that exists when the narrator takes his leave.

HUNKERING DOWN

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

It happens too easily, doesn’t it?  This loss of time. 

Where did it go?  I look back, month to month, and identify the actions that kept me from writing.

It must have been a year ago that I turned in my final draft of BEAT.  The first thing I did next was work on the proposal for my next book.  I spent about two months on an idea set in the Los Angeles Harbor.  Did a ton of research, digging into the lives and cultures of the people living in San Pedro.  I took a four-hour tour of a container ship, led by the ship’s captain.  I did tours of the harbor on a fireboat.  I studied and prepared and learned what I could about my characters’ lives.

I wrote the proposal and I sent it to my agent and he nixed it.  Didn’t feel it would sell.  I began again.

I put my head into a cool idea about grifters.  Ensemble crime piece with twisted characters and a fresh story.  I wrote the proposal and sent it to my agent and…he nixed it.  He suggested that I write an international thriller—possibly for Hayden Glass.  I came up with another idea and wrote two proposals using the same storyline:  one was a standalone and one was a Glass book.  I wrote two twenty-page proposals and sent the Hayden one to my editor.

While I was waiting on his answer, my editor suggested I write a “Hayden” short story – something we could give away for free on Kindle and other e-book venues.  Something to introduce new readers to the world of Hayden Glass.

It took two months to write “Crossing the Line,” a short story prequel to Boulevard.  It documents the moment a younger Hayden Glass, just one year into the LAPD (two weeks into the Vice unit), picks up a prostitute, fully intending to arrest her, and instead “crosses the line.”  It’s the first time his addiction appears on the scene.  The story should show up any day now, and I intend to post a pdf file of it for download from my website.

After finishing the short story I waited for word on my book proposal, busying myself by marketing Boulevard, prepping and attending conferences like Thrillerfest, doing library gigs, working the day job, spending time with my family, dealing with the impending short sale of my house.  There were plenty of things to keep me from writing a novel. 

Ultimately, my editor suggested that I write a standalone, and my agent agreed.  But a book deal didn’t emerge and I was instructed to write the standalone without a contract.

Once I determined what I was going to write, once I had my agent on board (after all, he’s the one charged with selling the thing, it’s a whole lot easier if he’s passionate about the story from the start) I settled in to do the research.

I spent a couple months interviewing professionals and reading books about the FBI.  I somehow managed to finagle a trip to Europe for a little “boots on the ground” action.  I set a hard-and-fast deadline to begin writing the novel, a date that should have given me plenty of time to prepare. 

That date is November 1.

I haven’t finished my research.  I haven’t even finished typing my handwritten notes from Europe into my computer.

Meanwhile, the launch of BEAT has required that I spend weeks doing interviews and writing blogs.  I’ve thrown myself into the marketing, doing everything possible to give BEAT a chance.  And then came Bouchercon and my SF launch and all the signings and touring leading up to the conference.  And there are signings and touring still to come.

That elusive “start” date feels like it’s slipping away.  My wife and I have to move the crap that has accumulated in our house over the past five years and move it to a small apartment in less than three weeks.  We have yet to define what is garbage, Goodwill, recycle, storage or apartment-stuff.  This could take all of my time, further derailing my plans to have a book out quickly.  As it is it’ll take eight months to write the book, using weeknights after work and full weekend days, and then I’ve got to sell it, execute an editor’s notes, then wait ten months to see it released.

Tonight my wife told me not to let anything get in the way of my writing.  She said that she would somehow deal with everything else.  I’m responsible for keeping my day job and writing the next book and that is all.

I think I’ve done enough marketing.  I’m not sure how much it helps anyway.  And I think I’ve done enough waiting for others to tell me what to do next.

You know, Brett Battles told me this would happen.  He said it would sneak up on me, that I should write the next book without waiting for permission. 

And Bob Crais told me not to get lost in the machine, but to “write the next book, always write the next book.”

I know how I get when I write.  Everything else falls to the wayside.  Writing is all-consuming.  That means I’ll have no time for anything else.  I’ve been afraid to jump in, afraid that the house will fall apart, that I won’t spend time with my family, that the world around me will crash and burn.  I’m going to have to trust that my wife can do what needs to be done.  Homeschool the kids, manage the bills, pack up the house and move a family of four and a dog and a fish.

November 1^st.  Chapter One.  First sentence.  Time to write.

DYSFUNCTIONAL SEX

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

I did a signing event at a Borders last week and my good friend Tim Hallinan (The Queen of Patpong) asked a really great question:  What kind of scenes are difficult for you to write?

An interesting inquiry coming from Tim, whose brilliant Poke Rafferty series depicts some shockingly difficult scenes, some involving sex abuse and torture.  And he’s read Boulevard, which presents its own cadre of distorted sexual encounters and includes a variety of horrific murder scenes.  So I think the crowd was expecting me to pick out a gruesome massacre and go to town.

But what came to mind, the most natural response I had to Tim’s question, was something quite different.

“The most difficult scenes for me to write are the normal, healthy, romantic love scenes.”

First of all, the person who can even find a normal, healthy, romantic love scene in Boulevard deserves a prize.  My love scenes come right out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

The one that was really hard to write appears in Beat.  You’ll know it when you see it.  It’s as close to romance writing as you’ll ever get from me.  And, still, even as sexy and romantic and, can I say—fucking hot—it gets, there is still an awkwardness, a sense of unexpected discovery, a fear of the unknown.  For a protagonist who is a sex addict, anything that looks like healthy sex is going to be awkward and unsettling, even as he recognizes that this is how the rest of the world experiences it.

Christa Faust (Money Shot) made an interesting comment about the sex in Boulevard, saying that it was “ugly sex,” and that she loved it.  Not because the sex was ugly, but because the sex was revealing.  It revealed character.  She said she can’t stand the “obligatory sex scene,” which often feels like authors throw them in to satisfy readers who expect to see characters having sex at specific, predictable intervals throughout the story. 

The awkwardness of a sexual encounter, even between long-time lovers, even between a husband and wife, reveals volumes about the characters’ state of mind, their back-stories, religious beliefs, morality, societal influences.  The sex scene is an opportunity to take the character arcs up a notch, or to reveal things that were previously unknown.

I don’t have much trouble writing the dysfunctional sex scene.  But the “ooohs” and “ahhhs” of romantic sex embarrass me.  I don’t want to go there.  I force myself, though, pretending it’s the easiest stuff in the world to write, all the time cringing and blushing.

You’d think I’d find it tougher to write the gory details of a murder scene, right?  Wrong.  I really enjoy writing the gore, because I know that it’s fiction.  I see it in my mind as fiction, as a movie, as a special effect.  I look at the challenge of writing the crime scene in a way that amps up its potential for poetic imagery.

Here’s a scene of gore in Boulevard that I had a great deal of fun composing:

The walls were dripping mostly with the bits and pieces of what #4 shot took when blasted through flesh and bone.  Brain matter, bone splinters, chunks of muscle tissue, bits of fingernail, a mosaic of nerve patterns like macabre snowflakes, strands of hair.  Blood dripped and trailed over lamp shades and wooden chairs.

Doesn’t freak me out at all.  It’s so over-the-top that it feels like opera—in fact, I can imagine classical music playing over the images. 

Like the scene in the Peter Weir film Fearless (from the novel by Rafael Yglesias), where the airplane crashes in slow motion, and we’re inside the plane where all the terror is seen and felt, and the only sound we hear is classical music.

It’s probably the most intense cinematic scene I’ve ever encountered.  It could have easily been over-done with sound effects—the screams of passengers, the tearing of metal, the wind, the flames.  Instead, it’s poetry.

Imagine being able to capture that experience in words alone.

I don’t think I could ever write a truly graphic scene about a child in pain.  I just don’t want to even think of that.  Kids are magical and innocent and adorable in every way and, even though I know kids are suffering in this world, and I want to bring this to the attention of people who can relieve their suffering, I just don’t want to write the details.  Same thing with animals.  I’ve been a vegetarian almost all my life, but I can’t watch those PETA films. 

So a love scene should be easy, right?  But when I try, I get all queasy inside.  Maybe it just doesn’t ring true to me.  I mean, most of our characters have just met during the course of our stories, right?  Boy meets girl.  At some point, boy and girl consummate the relationship.  Now, in real life, ninety-nine times out of a hundred that situation is going to be real awkward.  It ain’t gonna be the way it’s portrayed in the movies.  Or the romance novels.  Or the porn films of Jenna Jameson.  New lovers don’t always know where to put their hands, or how hard is too hard, or when it’s appropriate to scream out, or when to assume their partner is done. 

One of the best sex scenes I’ve seen on film comes from Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, from the Elmore Leonard novel.

Again, the right music fills in the spaces.  And the editing is extraordinary.  It sure makes sex look easy.  Can I accomplish the same in words alone?

On the other hand, I think I do a pretty decent job with awkward, ugly sex.

Like this excerpt from Boulevard:

He was having trouble getting hard.  She noticed.  She tried to force it.

“Not so hard,” he said.

He didn’t want to think of her this way.

He pulled away, closed his eyes, pressed the palm of his hand to his forehead.  There was that hard, dull pressure that circled his head like a lead cowboy hat.  She reached out and drew him back.  He tried not to think of her as a colleague.  He tried to think of her as a whore.

He grabbed her thighs hard.  He saw her skin turn white where his fingers dug in.  He felt his cock stiffening.  His eyes remained closed as he bent over her, biting her nipples with his teeth.  Her breathing grew deep and husky.  She pulled him into her, enveloped him, sank her fingernails into his shoulders and back.  He pushed hard and she pushed back, thrusting quickly, tightening around him.

His cell phone rang.  He didn’t hear it, he was already coming.  He collapsed on top of her.  She lay there on the desk, her legs spread in the air, half wrapped around his waist.  She was still in the moment.  Waiting for something.

He lifted himself off, pulled up his pants.  The office was quiet.  His cum drained from between her legs.  Her hand found a box of Kleenex tissues.  She wiped, pulled her shirt over her breasts, found her panties and skirt discarded on the floor.

“God, it’s all about you,” she said at last.

He heard the shame in her voice.  The shame of acting out.  It must’ve been a new feeling for her.

“What did you expect?” he said.

“I don’t know, I thought I’d be different.”

In the meetings he was told that an addict could spot an addict.  That an addict sent out a certain kind of signal and other addicts responded.  It was true like that in crime, too.  A pickpocket saw every other pickpocket in a crowd.  The junkie knew another junkie with a look.  Sex addicts sought each other out.  Kennedy was drawn to him because she recognized herself in him.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“It’s shameful.”

“Yes, it is,” she agreed.

“Fuck you, it didn’t have to be that way.”

“So why was it?”

                                                          *    *    *

It’s probably more uncomfortable for people to read than it is for me to write.  Hmmm…I wonder if I should be worried about that…

What about the rest of you?  Is it difficult writing sex?  What scenes are most difficult to write?  What scenes are uncomfortable to read?



DOCUMENTING THE JOURNEY

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

So, I’m about a week away from delivering my second novel to the copyeditor and it feels…I think it feels great, despite the fact that my whole being feels bludgeoned from the process.  Is it really almost done?  I can’t believe it.  They say the second book is the hardest and I’m here to say that, yes, they’re goddamn right.

Coming to the end of this journey made me think about the beginning of this journey.  What I went through to get the first book done.  It brought memories of the days when I was writing BOULEVARD on my own, without a book deal.  Before I had an agent.  When the idea of becoming a published author existed solely in my head.

I went back and found my journal, the journal I started when I was in the middle of the process, and pulled the first couple entries.  I thought it might be an interesting thing to share, now that I’m on the other side of it.  One thing that’s interesting is my relationship with San Francisco and how the city ultimately evolved into the setting for my second novel.  I can see the seeds of that decision in the journal entries themselves.

I hope this isn’t boring.  I hope it’s not the literary equivalent of showing pictures of my family vacations.  I’m sure many of you have gone through a lot of this stuff yourselves….

December 13, 2006

I’m starting this late in the game.  I’m 225 pages into the writing of Boulevard.  I’ve written and re-written the first forty pages many times. 

I wrote most of it straight from the heart without outline or thought of plot.  Which was liberating.  I’m used to making outline after outline after treatment after draft.  It felt good to just put pen to paper (fingertip to keyboard) and write.  The momentum and poetry came from that process – that “spontaneous prose”. 

And finally, when I’m closing in on the final fifth of the book, I’ve outlined it to the end.  I’m just a month or two away from completing the first draft.  And then there will be everything left to do.  A huge rewrite is in order.  I’ve left subplots dangling.  I’ve left characters hanging on ledges.  I’ve introduced motifs only to split and scatter them over a long bumpy pot-holed road.  All of the detail work has yet to be done. 

I’ve been at this story for about two years now.  I don’t have the time to put into it, not the way I did on all the screenplays I wrote before I had a wife and kids and a mortgage and a real job I cannot quit.

Today I’m mired in a scene of recollection as Darren (whose name I will change) drives back from The Slough of Despond after viewing the killer’s artwork and meeting a prostitute who cuts herself.  The Slough scene reads pretty well now, after spending numerous evenings reworking it.  But a simple scene where Darren considers the value of his partnership with ex-partner Rich is taking me all of two nights to formulate.  And I won’t finish it tonight.

I’m having trouble writing tonight.  Which is pathetic because I’m in my favorite writing spot in the world – San Francisco!  Actually the best spot is The Novel Café in Santa Monica.  But nothing beats San Francisco for ambiance, energy and inspiration.  I got here yesterday, working for the day job.  When I’m not out selling lights, I’m spending my time in the book stores, cafes, restaurants.  I discovered the Beat Generation Museum here and I’m considering taking another trip up here in a couple weeks to see Carolyn Cassady speak.  I purchased “Windblown World”, Jack Kerouac’s journals from when he wrote “Town and the City” and “On the Road”.   It is this journal, as well as the journals of John Steinbeck (written as he wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” and “East of Eden”) that has inspired me to finally keep a journal.  I must write a little something every time I sit to work on my novel. 

It’s been a struggle tonight.  I don’t feel like a very good writer at the moment.  The story is beginning to feel formulaic.  I’m not trying to write a stock crime novel.  I don’t know what genre this will fall into.  I expect a lot of trouble when I try to publish it, because no one will know how to market it. 

Sometimes I wonder if I have anything to say in the piece.   Or have I already said everything in the first hundred pages.  I feel like I’m just connecting the dots from here to the end.  The unique spark of creativity is eluding me. 

It’s such a process.  I torture myself with it.  I chew six pieces of gum at once.  I tap my foot incessantly.  I drink cappuccino and espresso and hot tea (caffeinated).  I spend my days nibbling at sunflower seeds like a rodent.  I’m anxious at writing, I’m anxious in stasis. 

This is maddening.

December 14, 2006

I’m surprised how little writing I managed to do while in San Francisco.  I was only in for two days and I wallowed in the sights sounds smells tastes of the City.  I love San Francisco more than any other place I’ve been.  I remember one set of days long ago when I was nineteen I sat in a café in the City reading Dante’s Inferno from beginning to end.  It’s such a literary city. 

I spent my two days walking in the mist and fog and rain in North Beach and eating and drinking and journeying to the Haight District and eating and drinking and bookstore hopping where I found old Doc Savage paperbacks the likes of which I read when I was thirteen and in camp in the Ojai mountains.  And I’ve been looking for them ever since, in used bookstores, and of course I should find them in San Francisco.  And I picked up Kerouac’s journals.  And the DVD “What Happened To Kerouac?”, the documentary that introduced me to the Beat Generation.  And a CD of Kerouac reading “On the Road”.  I spent time at City Lights Bookstore where I again saw Lawrence Ferlinghetti pass beside me.  Last visit I asked him to sign one of his books for me, which he did and I will treasure.

December 20, 2006

Thought I’d try a little warm-up writing on the journal before burying myself in doubt and struggle.  I’m at the Novel Café, early enough in the evening to get a little decent writing done.  I worked in the field with our L.A. rep today and ended early enough to land at the Novel by 4:30 pm.  I bought my two hours of parking and I begin the nervous clock-watching from now until 8:00 pm when I will put my last quarters into the meter. 

I sat down and read ten pages of Kerouac’s journal to get me into the mood, to slow me down a bit, to settle me and prepare me for a night of writing.  I spent a few minutes with Ralph, who told me that his screenplay, “Stronger than Steel”, will be represented by CAA.  I haven’t seen the other cast of characters yet – Paul, who was a reader for me when I worked for Wolfgang Petersen; Diana, Paul’s mother, a union reader who, along with Paul, spends her days and nights at the Novel reading scripts and writing coverage; Joe, long-time writer-buddy who is finishing his heist script, who lives on a boat in the Marina; Rob, a successful writer/director who has two films coming out simultaneously in January.  There are other regulars, like the “log guy”, a homeless wanderer who carries a lacquered, well-loved log wherever he goes.  The “veggie guy” who carries a sign on Venice Beach denouncing MacDonald’s and the full-scale slaughter of animals.  All the little gems that make the Novel such a wonderful place to write.  Such a creative pond of collective karma.

Spent some time this weekend learning about Tourette’s Syndrome, in an effort to understand more of what my son is going through.  He has been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, Tourette’s and OCD.  A lot on his plate.  The Tourette’s and OCD have really taken over.  As I learn more about it I realize that I have or had Tourette’s myself, that all my strange, hyperactive tic behavior from my grade school days were the result of Tourette’s.  I still have a lot of tic behavior – biting my knuckle, clearing my throat constantly, always touching my face, obsessively eating sunflower seeds, etc.

Okay, I’m warmed up a bit, but not writing to my potential.  Still, I have so little time to write that I must get started.

I struggled through a few hundred words this evening.  I tightened and finessed the scene at the Slough of Despond.  And I deleted the three pages of transition scene after the Slough, with Darren driving home.  I’ve been trying to break through a wall for two weeks now.  This was most of the material I wrote in San Francisco, which read as dull, uninspired narrative.  I pushed through a bit on it, managed a few paragraphs to move the story forward.  But nowhere near the output I expect from myself.  My writing has been clunky lately, complicated further by the epileptic spasms of my computer as it coughs and putters in a complicated electronic death throe.  It’s been having meltdowns since yesterday when I downloaded updates to my software, and when I tried to set up my new wireless printer.  I re-booted the system tonight and when it re-upped it had cryptically reformatted my margins and font style so that the 223 pages I was so proud to have produced was reduced to 193.  I remember my excitement at having crossed the 200 page mark a few weeks back, and now I’m back under 200.  This is nuts.  I’m afraid of losing my work.  I need to get my laptop serviced before all is lost.

God, I’m tired.  I’m writing poorly.  I can’t think, can’t formulate words.  I’m writing in molasses.  I can’t focus.  Maybe it’s physical, maybe I’m sick.  Lots of people have been getting sick around me, so maybe I’m coming down with something.  My motor skills are off – I keep miss-typing; typing dyslexia, which is not me.  Usually typing is my forte.  I love typing and I rarely fumble.  But tonight I’m all over the place.  It’s a real struggle getting the words out.  Still, I managed to improve the beginning of the transition scene between the Slough and Darren returning home.  I’m going to have to pack up and leave the Novel soon.  It’s getting late and I have to be up at 5:00 am tomorrow to work the day job. 

I had a great conversation with Joe tonight about writer’s block.  He told me what I already know – if you can’t write, type.  Just keep it going.  You’ll work through the block.  Good old Joe.  He’s a real ally.  Uber comrade.  We discussed Frank Darabont, Paddy Chayefsky, Scorcese and Kerouac.  He gave me an interesting new perspective about the lionization of great writers.  He said he left that behind a while ago.  He does not hold any writer in awe.  He feels it gets in the way of developing his own sense of import as a writer – by putting some writers above him he is in effect lowering himself below them.  It allows him to focus on his writing without the constant comparison of him to other writers.  I argued that the great writers are my best mentors, my guides, the muses who help me monitor myself so that I can learn how to do the very best work I’m capable of.  I wouldn’t give up my Steinbeck, Kerouac, Hemmingway, Dickens, Updike, Augusten Burroughs, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Katherine Ann Porter, Flannery O’connor, James Baldwin, etc.  They ground me.  They center me. 

But God am I scattered tonight.  I don’t know what’s going on in my mind.  I must be getting sick.  I can’t keep a thought.  Time to pack it up and get my few hours of sleep before the long workday tomorrow.

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 ….and on and on the journal goes.  I think it ended up being around a hundred pages, covering the next year or so, with stops and starts along the way.  It continues through the search for an agent and the sale of the book.  I love reading the journals of authors and filmmakers—it gives me insight to their process and humanizes them.  It makes what they do seem attainable.  Observing their struggles on the page gave me the courage to keep at it, year after year, until the day I could ultimately say, "this book is done."

So, what about the Murderati gang?  Do you keep a journal when you write?  Anyone want to share an excerpt?

On my next blog I’ll be interviewing novelist Rebecca Cantrell as she looks forward to the paperback release of her fantastic, period thriller, “A Trace of Smoke.”