We writers are such kidders. We spend hours and hours online every day, and devote much lip service to justifying it. We're doing research, building our fan base, learning new promotional techniques, keeping abreast of the latest developments in publishing, blah-blah-blah. And sure, some of that is true --- but only about sixty percent of the time. The other forty?
We're goofing off!
Case in point: I blow forty minutes every morning reading The Huffington Post, and while I do it in part to catch up on the news, I'm only religious about it because I get such a kick out of some of the site's headlines. They practically beg for a punchline, which I'm only too happy to supply.
Let me show you what I mean:
But says she has no intention of returning the Royal Lampshade.
(If the guy who wrote this story thinks this is news, he must have a major drug problem.)
She wants to receive an obscene phone call before every performance --- on her hat.
Because 174,261 times in 59 years is hardly enough for any man.
Because if they made it available in any other part of the world, they'd be laughed out of existence.
Number 1: "Was that as pathetic for you as it was for me?"
I can't give you 43 million reasons why, but the guy in the picture could.
Okay, maybe it's just me, but if I'd gone to see a doctor named "Nikita Levy" for the first time and found this guy waiting in his office, I would have smelled a rat right there.
Perhaps. But what do you say we drive a stake through his heart and chop off his head, just to be on the safe side?
. . . made E.L. Grey cry. But only for 50 seconds.
Proving that when you say, "Nyet new taxes," in Russia, you had better mean it.
And then she'll go into rehab with Steven Tyler.
Man, I knew my new desk lamp smelled funky!
"Of course I'd like to go home with you tonight. But would you mind autographing this bar napkin first?"
I don't know, Mr. Gere, and I don't care.
No, but let's hope a group of neo-Nazis pay $212,000 for it on eBay, anyway.
. . . and 1 thing I simply don't understand: Why in the hell does somebody with his money find it necessary to paint hair on his head every morning?
And here I always thought it was the other "Joe Walsh" who wrote "Walk Away."
Shouldn't this headline read "MUST-SEE YAHOOS ON VIDEO!"?
Help me out with this one: If she's maximum-frowning in the "Before" photo . . .
By the time you read this (I hope), someone will have won the U.S. Presidential election and someone will have lost it.
To most Americans, the election was a battle between two men with fundamentally different ideas about the role government should play in our everyday lives. For others, it was something much greater, a virtual war between the Powers of Darkness and the Agents of Light over the very soul of this nation. If you think I'm exaggerating, you haven't been reading some of the Facebook "discussions" I have been over the last several months.
Because it's easier to get people to the polls by convincing them their vote could make the difference between putting the Son of Satan in the White House and a decent, God-fearing human being, the political arena is an ideal setting for this kind of silly, provocative oversimplification. But politicians are not the only ones who like to describe every human conflict as one pitting Good against Evil.
We crime writers have a tendency to reduce things to those very same extremes.
Of course, we do it for the sake of high drama, not election results. In the interests of maximizing the stakes in a thriller, for instance, we often go in for villains who are simply heartless monsters, rather than complex people with conflicting motives. Conversely, our protagonists are soldiers of righteousness, angels with dirty faces who have no doubts, whatsoever, about the virtue of their cause. God is on one side and the Devil is on the other, and there's no way to mistake which is which.
Gray areas are okay for literary fiction, the reasoning goes, but readers of mysteries and thrillers only have eyes for black and white, the better to root for the latter as they hungrily turn pages.
I can't view the world that way, no matter how popular such fiction is. Just as I know Barack Obama is not a freedom-hating Muslim and Mitt Romney is not a Scrooge-like robot with contempt for all poor people, I also know that real "good guys" and "bad guys" come in all stripes and colors, and that their needs and motivations cannot always be described in a single line. I keep this thought in mind whenever I enter my polling booth and whenever I sit down to write. Nobody in this world wears horns and a barbed tail, nor walks with a halo consistently overhead.
The shorthand of Good versus Evil might win (and lose) elections, and it might sell a boatload of crime novels, but it's just not for me.
As the father of four children (two sets --- one now in their twenties and the other in their pre-teens), I've seen a lot of so-called "family-friendly" movies. Some of them good and some of them bad. A few have been terrific and quite a number have been just dreadful.
Now usually, when an adult says something this harsh about a kids' movie, it's because the critic in question is just a curmudgeon. A grown-up who's lost touch with his inner-child and can no longer be moved emotionally by films filled with pathos and/or whimsy. I know people like this myself and I've always felt sorry for them. What does it say about one's adult existence if you lack the capacity to feel something --- really feel something --- when E.T. boards that spaceship and leaves poor Elliott behind?
But in this case, I promise you, my unequivocal statement that THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN is one of the worst kids' movies ever made, is not coming from a heartless grinch with no appreciation for flights of fancy. In fact, it is coming from someone who had hoped it would be a fine entertainment. My family and I saw the film three weeks ago at the behest of my son Jackson, whose birthday we were celebrating, so I truly wanted to enjoy it.
But I just couldn't.
By now, you have to be wondering just what THE ODD LIFE could have possibly done so poorly as to earn such enmity from a big, old softie like me --- someone who cries like a baby every time the credits roll at the end of BIG FISH?
The answer's quite simple: There is not a single credible moment in the film. Not one. No character ever --- ever --- behaves the way a real person would.
I swear to you, this is no exaggeration.
"But, wait a minute, Gar," I can hear you saying. "This is a movie about a little boy who sprouts from a garden in answer to a childless couple's prayers. It's a fantasy, and fantasies aren't supposed to be credible!"
To which I reply, "Nonsense."
The best fantasies are those that are well grounded in reality. The magic in them works because, in the world in which they operate, characters abide by the very same rules of logic we do. Fantastic things may happen to them, things that are realistically impossible, but their reactions to these things ring true. Credibility is the lifeline a filmgoer --- or reader --- can cling to when everything else in a story is threatening to throw them overboard. (Or worse, insisting that they jump.)
THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN literally defies you at every turn to believe what its characters are doing. When all common sense suggests they turn right, they turn left instead.
You want examples? I could give you several dozen. But dismantling, piece by piece, a film like this --- one that so clearly has its heart in the right place --- would be a very mean spirited thing to do. So I'll just let one key example suffice for all the rest.
(SPOILERS AHEAD)
The film's story is told in flashback by Cindy and Jim Green, two wild and crazy kids madly in love but unable to conceive, as they are interviewed by a pair of sober and skeptical adoption agency officials. To illustrate how fit and well-prepared they are to become adoptive parents, the Greens tell the officials the incredible tale of their "son" Timothy: a ten year old boy they raised as their own after he unexpectedly sprang from their front garden one night like an overgrown, ambulatory carrot.
Only hours before, Cindy and Jim had buried their extensive wish list for the child they can never have in a box out in the garden, and they understood immediately that Timothy --- sweet and innocent and brimming with heartwarming bromides --- was meant to be that wish list personified. With living green leaves sprouting from his shins to authenticate his agricultural origins, Timothy had to be a gift from . . . Somebody. Right? So they kept him, and passed him off to everyone in Stanleyville as their own (adopted? inherited? borrowed?) child.
(The folks of Stanleyville are a simple and uncurious lot, apparently.)
Anyway, from there, the Greens' story gets much more preposterous --- and far more sappy. In the end, after having changed the lives of everyone he's come in contact with for the better, Timothy loses his leaves and eventually returns to the garden, never to be seen again. The interview comes to a close and the adoption agency officials bid the Greens farewell, having just heard them relate a story only slightly more fantastic than that of James and the Giant Peach as if they'd been under oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them God.
Naturally, Cindy and Jim's application for adoption is approved and a beautiful little girl is promptly delivered at their doorstep, just in time for Fade Out.
That THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN had to end on this cheerful note, or one remarkably similar to it, is inarguable. This is a Disney movie, after all, and happy endings go with the territory. I love happy endings. But a happy ending slapped onto the backside of a film with zero effort made to support it with so much as a wisp of realism is an insult to one's intelligence. In this case, THE ODD LIFE ends the way it does for one reason, and one reason only: because that ending suited the man who wrote and directed it.
That's what's wrong with the movie throughout: Everything that happens in it only seems to happen because the movie's screenwriter/director Peter Hedges wanted it that way. Logic, realism, common sense --- none of these things plays any part in the choices the film's characters make. Not in the things they say, not in the things they do.
(I suspect I'll be encouraged to offer further examples of this in the comments that follow, should you be interested in hearing them. But I won't go into them here.)
I don't know whether THE ODD LIFE is as horrible as it is because Hedges is lazy ("I don't feel like explaining how this could happen.") or just plain clueless ("I can't explain how this could happen."). But I do know his film comes off as the work of a man who cares far more about the emotional responses he wants to elicit from people than how those reponses can be earned honestly. When a writer, simply to achieve a desired result, puts his own best interests before those of his characters, he is doomed to fail. In successful fiction, the Cardinal Rule is not "For every action there must be an equal and opposite reaction" --- it's "For every action, there must be a viable and perceptible reason for the reader (or viewer) to believe it."
Defenders of THE ODD LIFE OF TIMOTHY GREEN --- and there are many, like these two little guys . . .
. . . would probably say the problems I cite are all in my head, that I just didn't approach the film with the proper commitment to suspending my disbelief. But demanding that your audience suspend its disbelief indefinitely, simply because the story you are telling is a fairy tale, is not a substitute for telling it in such a way that it requires as little suspension of disbelief as possible. I saw no evidence that the makers of THE ODD LIFE gave a rat's ass how credible its people and situations were, and that's a shame.
Because I like a good, child-friendly fantasy as much as the next heartless bastard.
Questions for the Class: How important is credibility in fiction to you? What was the last critically-acclaimed film or book that failed to meet your standards in that department, and why?
As I write this blog post, I'm wondering how in the hell I'm going to find a way to post it in time for Wednesday. Because, you see, I'm on vacation this week, and nothing ever comes easy for me when I go on vacation.
Vacations are supposed to be fun. An opportunity to put work behind you and do nothing but relax and enjoy yourself for a while. Travel, eat well, and take afternoon naps by the pool. Catch up on your reading, maybe even try a few absurdly dangerous things you'd never try otherwise (hang-gliding, cliff diving, etc.). Laugh and play, and love with renewed vigor, and forget what it was about your chosen profession that had you longing for a vacation in the first place.
The idea is to find your professional "off" switch and activate it, then fill the void only with things that make you smile. For most people, shutting down their work lives can be as simple as turning off their cell phone and leaving it off. Disconnect him from his Macbook and smart phone and an accountant becomes just another joe, his head no longer swimming with numbers to crunch. Drop an attending ER physician on a beach in Maui for a week and see how much time he spends worrying about gunshot wounds and head trauma. Because the work these people do is only as portable as they choose to make it, they can get on a plane and leave it behind them, whenever the need arises.
Not so the professional writer.
The writer's lot is reminiscent of that old saying: "Wherever I go, there I am." Your work --- and all the things about it that make you crazy --- is in your head, twenty-four-seven, and you can no more leave it at home with the family dog when you go on vacation than your left foot (assuming you have a left foot). The writer has no "off" switch, other than sleep, and sometimes even that doesn't work. So a writer's vacation is, at best, a series of momentary diversions from the stresses that are always with him. There is no complete escape. You can run, but you can't hide.
This summer, the family and I are doing a week in Aspen, Colorado, and as you can see, a person looking for heaven on earth could do worse. This place is gorgeous. The weather's lovely, the air fresh and clean (if a little thin) and the scenery is right out of a nature lover's dream.
So why am I having to work so hard to be happy?
The answer's complicated, but it all boils down to money. Paradise is paradise no matter how you slice it, but when you're doing it on the cheap, it's a little less so. The wife and I aren't here with the kids counting pennies, exactly, but we are keeping an eye on where every precious dollar goes, so corners are definitely being cut. Most of the time, this is a painless process, since this is the story of our lives back home, after all. We're used to making compromises. But when you're on vacation, surrounded by people who would appear to have vast fortunes to spend fulfilling their every desire (and that of their children), it's hard doing without.
Especially when you hold yourself personally responsible.
That writer's brain you can't turn off during vacation is constantly thinking about all kinds of things, but one of its most maddening preoccupations is career assessment. The dreams we hold for ourselves professionally do not feature us questioning our every purchasing decision during the two weeks out of every year we set aside to forget our troubles and live a little. Rather, these dreams have us playing on vacation with reckless abandon, unfettered by the budgetary constraints we are ordinarily bound by.
A compact for the rental car? To hell with that, give me the SUV!
The Westin or the Holiday Inn? The Westin!
Sirloin steak or tacos? Puh-lease, we'll have the steak!
Still, limited discretionary funds or no, I'm having a wonderful, blessed time here in Colorado with a woman and two children I love very deeply. I can't give them the vacation they deserve, but I can give them a husband and father who will never stop trying to do so. To writers without a six-figure book deal or Hollywood option money rolling in by the truckload, the cup can always appear to be half-empty, especially when they're trying to take a break from the grind of writing to relax for a while.
But my cup is most definitely better than half-full, and I know it.
(Oh, by the way: I managed to find a connection to the Internet in time to post this Wednesday morning, so things are definitely looking up!)
Questions for the Class: How well do you fare on vacation? Are you able to shut everything out and enjoy yourself, or . . . ?
One of my favorite films of all time is Steven Zaillian's Searching for Bobby Fischer:
I think this movie is a small masterpiece and nothing less than a miracle, the latter because it's virtually without flaw. Zaillian's direction of his own screenplay, the cast, James Horner's beautiful score --- you just can't make a family-oriented "sports" film of this kind any better, IMO --- and when you consider all the things that could have gone wrong during the movie's development that somehow didn't, well, it's nothing short of amazing.
A few years back, the Arclight theater in Hollywood did a screening of the film that included a Q & A with Zaillian afterwards, and naturally, I jumped at the chance to attend. Zaillian's an incredible screenwriter (Schindler's List, Gangs of New York, Moneyball [w/ Aaron Sorkin]), and I was anxious to hear him describe both his process in adapting the non-fiction book by Fred Waitzkin upon which his script was based, and his experiences in getting the movie made.
I learned a lot that night, but one thing Zaillian said in particular has always stayed with me. He said the script didn't really take off for him until he realized that the story within the source material he really wanted to tell was that of a father and son. At its heart, that's what Searching for Bobby Fischer is all about: a son's need to win his father's approval. Everything else --- the chess tournament milieu, the Good Coach With a Past, the evil rival --- is just window dressing.
That Zaillian had something to say about the father/son dynamic is evident in the final product. His film is as moving as it is --- at least, for me --- because it seems so genuinely felt. This one clearly came from the heart, and I think that's the reason Zaillian's screenplay is such a gem.
Writing "from the heart" is what every author should be trying to do each time he puts pen to paper, regardless of what he's writing, because that's where the good stuff is, the stuff that makes a writer's work uniquely his own. Your one-of-a-kind perspective on the world in which we live --- and the passions that color that perspective --- are the one-two punch that no other writer on earth can offer a reader. Your voice is an important calling card, but your soul is an even greater one.
Whenever I sit down to think about my next long-form work, I inevitably come to this question: In what ways can my personal belief systems enrich this material? What do I have to say about it that speaks to who I am as an individual, and how I view life?
If I can't answer that question --- if I just can't seem to find an emotional entry point to the story at hand --- then I move on to something else.
For me, then, the ideal premise for a novel is one that not only excites me on a storytelling level, but also offers me the opportunity to explore a theme that, for one reason or another, stirs me emotionally. The object is not catharsis, necessarily, but combustion; just another log to throw on the creative fire.
Over the years, I've figured out what most of my "hot button" themes are. The following is just a partial list:
Fatherhood
As a father of four children, I've learned how strong and fierce the paternal instinct can be. It's no surprise, then, that stories involving a father going to war to protect/defend/avenge his brood have always moved me. On the face of it, my most recent novel Assume Nothing may appear to be a crime thriller, but what it really is is my idea of a romance novel. What else would you call the story of a man willing to do anything --- anything --- to ensure the safety of his wife and child?
True Love
"Happily ever after" I'm not so sure about, but I'm a firm believer in true love. It's rare and it can be fleeting, but it's definitely real, and in my fiction, anyway, it's always worth fighting for.
Justice
This one goes without saying, right? It chaps my ass whenever Evil triumphs over Good, as it so often does in the real world, and I'll be damned if I'm not going to get some payback in my fiction.
Religious Faith
As you probably know by now (especially if you read this earlier post of mine), I'm a determined if incredibly nonconformist Catholic, someone who believes in the Higher Power most commonly referred to as "God," and who finds both peace and spiritual rejuvenation in the occasional twelve o'clock Mass. While I have no interest whatsoever in ever proselytizing, discretely or otherwise (primarily because the things I believe in may very well turn out to be poppycock), the underlying optimism of my faith pretty much colors my view of everything, and that view in turn informs my writing. As to the question of how much, I'll just answer this way: No one will ever mistake me for C.S. Lewis, but neither will my fiction ever encourage non-believers to keep on keeping on.
Loyalty & Honor
The people I admire most in the world are those who live by an honor code and demonstrate an unshakable loyalty to family and country. No, I'm not just talking about the U.S. Marines. I think people from all walks of life exhibit these traits --- by standing by their spouses when infidelity beckons, or having a friend's back when the cost could be their livelihood --- and I love writing about them. Being loyal and honorable takes incredible courage, especially when the chips are down, and characters who meet this challenge, despite the personal sacrifices involved, are always at the center of my best fiction.
Forgive me if this all sounds pretty sappy. But these are the themes that play out again and again in my writing, sometimes because I want them there, but mostly because they insist on butting in. When I'm writing well, I'm emotionally connected to my material, and it is the things I believe in --- the things that most draw my ire or fill me with joy --- that provide that connection.
Author, know thyself. And write accordingly.
Questions for the Class: Writers, what are your hot topic themes? And readers, what themes do you most like to see explored in the fiction you read?
Tuesday, March 5, 2013 at 5:00AM in 
But says she has no intention of returning the Royal Lampshade.
She wants to receive an obscene phone call before every performance --- on her hat.
Because 174,261 times in 59 years is hardly enough for any man.
Because if they made it available in any other part of the world, they'd be laughed out of existence.
Number 1: "Was that as pathetic for you as it was for me?"
I can't give you 43 million reasons why, but the guy in the picture could.
Okay, maybe it's just me, but if I'd gone to see a doctor named "Nikita Levy" for the first time and found this guy waiting in his office, I would have smelled a rat right there.
Perhaps. But what do you say we drive a stake through his heart and chop off his head, just to be on the safe side?
. . . made E.L. Grey cry. But only for 50 seconds.
Proving that when you say, "Nyet new taxes," in Russia, you had better mean it.
And then she'll go into rehab with Steven Tyler.
Man, I knew my new desk lamp smelled funky!
"Of course I'd like to go home with you tonight. But would you mind autographing this bar napkin first?"
I don't know, Mr. Gere, and I don't care.
No, but let's hope a group of neo-Nazis pay $212,000 for it on eBay, anyway.
. . . and 1 thing I simply don't understand: Why in the hell does somebody with his money find it necessary to paint hair on his head every morning?
And here I always thought it was the other "Joe Walsh" who wrote "Walk Away."
Shouldn't this headline read "MUST-SEE YAHOOS ON VIDEO!"?
Help me out with this one: If she's maximum-frowning in the "Before" photo . . .
;)
;)
