The Movie in Your Mind

By David Corbett

I spent last weekend attending the 2012 Noircon, the biannual lovefest to all things noir devised and convened by Lou Boxer and Deen Kogan in Philadelphia. 

I love this festival, which is far more intimate and writer-centric than most others I’ve attended. The participants largely form a congress of equals, and there is never a great divide between the contributions of the various panelists and the comments from the floor. It’s a smart group, widely read and not shy, and I always come away learning more that I could have imagined.

This year was particularly exceptional, with what at times seemed to be a continuous string of highlights. That said, one presentation stood out for me—the keynote talk by Robert Olen Butler.

Butler’s a gracious, witty, generous man with a knife-like body and a steel-trap mind. An astonishing talent, he’s written thirteen novels, six story collections, nine screenplays, an essential guide to writing (From Where You Dream—trust me, read it), and has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship in addition to an almost unseemly bundle of other awards and distinctions.

Why, I hear you ask, is such a literary hotshot slumming at Noircon?

Well that’s an interesting question, one ironically answered by Otto Penzler the day before Butler spoke. Otto explained how, after studying English and American Literature at the University of Michigan, he discovered crime fiction and promptly realized that its best practitioners owe apologies to no one.

Butler agrees, not just in theory. His most recent novel, The Hot Country, is a historical thriller set in Mexico in 1914, combining intrigue from both that country’s revolution and the worldwide cataclysm routinely known as World War I. The plan is for nine more novels in the series, all to be published by Otto Penzler’s Mysterious Press.

But what Butler chose to discuss at Noircon was craft—specifically, the way in which fiction mimics the cinematic portrayal of events in the mind. (His remarks, I now know, were a distillation of his chapter, "Cinema of the Mind," within From Where You Dream.)

The American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Butler informed us, once remarked that he owed everything he knew about cinematic technique to Charles Dickens—who died years before the advent of film.

By way of example, Butler turned to the following passage from Great Expectations, which appears shortly after the narrator, Pip, sets the stage, identifying himself and his family, then continues:

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things, seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain, that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"O! Don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."

Butler called our attention to several techniques here, all of which have cinematic elements, and there are two particular points that stuck with me, involving the first and the third paragraphs.

Butler noted that the first paragraph serves as what in film is routinely called the establishment shot—setting the story in its initial setting. We start at a distance in a long shot then move in to the nettles of the churchyard and the headstones in arresting close-up, then look out across the landscape again, as though to put those deaths in perspective.

That perspective is not local. Dickens moves beyond the "low leaden line" of the river to : “the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing ... the sea.” A great many writers might leave that phrase out. Such an omission, he argued, would be a mistake, for the establishment shot doesn’t just lay out the scenery. This crucial phrase broadens not just the physical landscape but the thematic one, extending our view not just to the immediate environs but to the world at large, setting the stage for so much of the story to come, and hinting at its universality.

And then, with incredible boldness, Dickens snaps us back again to "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry," the narrator himself, Pip. This movement in and out creates a marvelous sense of the larger savage world and the small scared soul that form the essential focus of the tale, and do it subtly with this implicit, cinematic movement in and out of the action.

Similarly, the third paragraph might readily find itself in many a writer’s Dead Darling file—another error. It’s not just the unnerving description of Magwitch we’d lose. Note the suspense that builds by separating “I’ll cut your throat” from “‘O! Don’t cut my throat, sir,’ I pleaded in terror.” Note also how that tension is created and how it builds. There are no independent verbs in the main clauses of any of the sentences, for the desired effect is one of attenuation—Pip staring in terror at the man emerging before him—and verbs in grammatical structure are the device for conveying movement in time. Omit them, and you're standing stock still.

The next example was one with which more of the crowd was familiar, the first few paragraphs from the second chapter Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon:

A telephone-bell rang in darkness. When it had rung three times bed-springs creaked, fingers fumbled on wood, something small and hard thudded on a carpeted floor, the springs creaked again, and a man’s voice said:

“Hello?...Yes, speaking…Dead?...Yes…Fifteen minutes. Thanks.”

A switch clicked and a white bowl hung on three gilded chains from the ceiling’s center filled the room with light. Spade, barefooted in green and white checked pajamas, sat on the side of his bed. He scowled at the phone on the table while his hands took from beside it a packet of brown papers and a sack of Bull Durham tobacco.

Cold steamy air blew in through two open windows, bringing with it half a dozen times a minute the Alcatraz foghorn’s dull moaning. A tinny alarm-clock, insecurely mounted on a corner of Duke’s Celebrated Criminal Cases of America—face down on the table—held its hands at five minutes past two.

Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sitting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into the curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.

He picked up the pigskin and nickel lighter that had fallen to the floor, manipulated it, and with the cigarette burning in the corner of his mouth stood up. He took off his pajamas. The smooth thickness of his arms, legs, and body, the sag of his big rounded shoulders, made his body like a bear’s. It was like a shaved bear’s: his chest was hairless. His skin was childishly soft and pink.

He scratched the back of his neck and began to dress. He put on a white union-suit, grey socks, black garters, and dark brown shoes. When he had fastened his shoes he picked up the telephone, called Graystone 4500, and ordered a taxicab. He put on a green-striped white shirt, a soft white collar, a green necktie, the grey suit he had worn that day, a loose tweed overcoat, and a dark grey hat. The street-door-bell rang as he stuffed tobacco, keys, and money in his pockets.

As with the Dickens example, the main focus again resided on the creation of a series of mental images that form a vivid film-like sequence, visually clear in our minds, even including camera angles—the ceiling light shot from below, followed by the close up of the rolling of the cigarette, both mimicking Spade’s own focus.

But there’s more than that, too. Once again, suspense gets created through the use of detail an impatient writer might discard—or never visualize to begin with. Spade rolls himself a smoke right after learning his partner, Miles Archer, has been killed. We don’t know as yet for sure that the two o’clock phone call concerned Archer, and it’s not until later we’ll learn Spade was sleeping with Archer’s wife. Instead we get this enigmatic, slow-motion rolling of a cigarette. Its intrusion into the scene piques our interest, precisely because it doesn’t quite fit. It suggests without stating outright that Spade has something serious on his mind, and yet in the casualness of the activity we also sense no great alarm. There’s even a hint of relief.

Note: Interestingly, the day before, Lawrence Block had remarked that Hammett, sensing that his literary success might well depend on his novels being made into films, deliberately limited his descriptions to only what could be seen and heard. This wasn’t, as many have believed, a nod to Hemingwayesque technique. It was a professional calculation.

In the Q&A that followed his talk, Butler noted that as a teacher in the Ph.D. program at Florida State, he encounters some of the best aspirants to literary fame to emerge from the various MFA programs across the country. And all too often, “They know the second through tenth most important things about writing, but they don’t know the first.” The first, he explained, was that stories are about yearning.

He suggested that genre writers often understand this point well—if they sometimes have an insufficient grasp of the next nine most important things about their craft—because genre often has the yearning built into the premise of the form. Crime fiction is driven by the search for justice, romance novels by the craving for love, science fiction by the need to humanize technology, etc.

His talk burned a nasty little hole in my brain, and as soon as I could I got my hands on a copy of From Where You Dream and I’ve been devouring it ever since.

So, Murderateros -- how does the cinema of the mind guide you in your writing? Do you take time to envision camera angles? Do you consider tempo in your descriptions? Do you play with quick alteration betweeen and long shots and close ups to create a dramatic effect between thematic or narrative extremes?

* * * * *

There were a great many other excellent presentations at Noircon, including but not limited to:

            —Well-deserved awards bestowed on Lawrence Block and Otto Penzler, with interviews of both men, giving Block a chance to, among other things, recount his days as a writer of lesbian romance novels, and Otto an opportunity to discuss how obscenely cheap real estate was when he bought his first store in Manhattan.

            —A panel on music with SJ Rozan and John Wesley Harding (who writes crime fiction under the pen name Wesley Stace), complete with songs.

            —A wickedly lurid, funny, and confessional true crime panel with Megan Abbott, Allison Gaylin, Wallace Stroby, and Dennis Tafoya.

            —A blackly comic panel of cautionary tales from Hollywood featuring Lawrence Block, Duane Swierczynski, Anthony Bruno, and Ed Pettit.

            —And last but not least, a panel on burlesque and noir, with Lulu Lollipop, Frank De Blasé, Timaree Schmit, and Susana Mayer.

As I said, I had a gas, and I fully intend to return in two years. Even without Lulu Lollipop.

* * * * *

Blatant Self-Promotion Segment: For all the month of November, Open Road Media/Mysterious Press is featuring 100 titles for less than $3.99, including The Devil’s Redhead at a nifty $2.99.

If you haven’t yet read it, pick it up. If you have, share it with a friend. (Or an enemy. I can live with that.)

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Jukebox Hero of the Week: In tribute to John Wesley Harding, who so graciously regaled us with song, here's "Ordinary Weekend," which he wrote after reading Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me. (In his performance for us, he remarked somewhat sheepishly he should have practiced, and ended up forgetting several verses, only to offer some of the best advice I've ever heard: He said years of performance had made him utterly un-selfconscious about fucking up. Not that anyone cared. We were enthralled):

Voice Lessons

By David Corbett

First, a couple workshop notices:

Starting January 23rd, I’m teaching an eight-week course on crime-writing both in-person at San Francisco’s The Grotto and online for Chuck Pahalniuk’s LitReactor. If you or someone you know is interested, act fast, because classroom slots are disappearing pretty quickly.

Also, I’m teaching one of my favorite classes at Book Passage the weekend of February 4^th-5^th. This one’s titled Integrating Arcs & Acts, and I do scene-by-scene breakdowns of five iconic films—Vertigo, The Godfather, Chinatown, Silence of the Lambs and Michael Clayton—and analyze them in terms of character arc, proof of premise, theme, subplot development and suspense, then use what we learn to discuss student work. Seriously, it’s the most fun you’ll have in a classroom ever, promise.

* * * * *

Most of you know by now I often play the contrarian—call me Captain Cranky—hoping to ignite a fire or at least stir things up a bit, keep the discussion lively.

It’s something I tell my students about their stories: When in doubt, pick a fight. Terrible advice for a marriage, I realize, but that's a discussion for another day.

An example of my all-too-typical cranky contrarian method was my most recent post, where I staked out a somewhat extreme perimeter on the future of narrative, hoping to flag the flames of debate concerning where storytelling is headed.

I suggested that the eBook revolution may well introduce not just the possibility but a necessity to embed audio and video perks, making narrative a more fully multimedia mindmeld—perhaps, in the case of sophisticated role-playing games, even an interactive dance or duel—all of which most likely means a more communal, demanding and costly enterprise for writers.

A lot of the response this verbal shot across the bow engendered was to the effect that storytelling will never die—the delivery system may evolve, but the fundamental human craving for story will remain.

I don’t dispute this. (I may be cranky, but I’m not an idiot.) But I don’t think that’s why the book cum book will survive.

What is it about the book specifically that makes it both unique and indispensable? Here’s my potentially contentious, contrarian, cranky stand of the day, except it isn’t an extreme position; it’s what I truly believe.

We don’t read books for story. We read books for voice.

Or, put less contentiously: What books and especially novels provide that no other form can is voice, not story.

The book is a deeply personal meeting of minds, writer and reader, and its access to inner life offers a particular type of intimacy unlike any other. It provides access to a whispering or wisecracking confidant in a world of bellowing shills, feverish opinionators, thundering dullards. And the way the singular intimacy between writer and reader takes form is in the unique way the writer’s fictive universe takes form in words.

Voice is more than style, i.e., diction and rhythm, structural boldness, innovative conceit. It incorporates worldview and attitude, the embers of passion, the cool surfaces of reason. It’s the embodiment of the writer’s creative spirit in language. It’s the writer’s presence in words as we engage with her story in our own imaginations—and the written word does require engagement.

There is always an element of passivity to hearing a story, but the degree of that passivity is less in reading than in more visual media. Writers who understand this tend to rein in the special effects, but that doesn’t mean squelching every speck of individuality whatsoever—assuming such a thing is even possible.

The basic power of less-is-more resides in its respect for the reader, its understanding of not just the willingness but the need of the reader to share in the shaping of the story, not just sit there and get pampered with prose. This often leads to a belief that the best writing is always that in which the author disappears, and lets his characters and story command the stage.

And yet I wonder—is this really true? Does that describe the books we really admire and crave and return to? Or is there something subtler going on—enough individual distinctness to remind us we’re not alone with the words, not so much we wish the writer would just buzz off.

Even the sparest prose—Hemingway, Hammett, Simenon—conveys far more than just what the eye and ear take in. A uniquely rendered world takes form, but not just that. We feel what matters in that world, feel the ghosts in the shadows and hear the murmuring beyond the door. Strangely, so much is revealed in what’s missing, because somehow we sense what was chosen and why, and wonder at the omissions. That too is voice, for we know someone did the choosing, the leaving out, and can feel it in both the cut of the words and the gaping silences.

But whether the prose is spare or Proustian, we want not just Once upon a time, we want the smell of our grandfather’s cigarettes and after-shave and the freshly cut grass, we want the whispery hum of the dragonflies hovering near the rose blossoms just beyond the screen and the creak of the old man’s rocker on the porch as, after much shameless begging on our part, he tells us what happened to him all those years ago, when he was a wild young man back in Stillwater ... or Acapulco ... or Inchon.

From a writer, we want that presence in words on the page:

            You could not tell if you were a bird descending (and there was a bird descending, a vulture) if the naked man was dead or alive. The man didn’t know himself and the bird was tentative when he reached the ground and made a croaking sideward approach, askance and looking off down the chaparral in the arroyo as if expecting company from the coyotes. Carrion was shared not by the sharer’s design but by a pattern set before anyone knew there were patterns.

—Jim Harrison, “Revenge”

            From the beginning, we were sisters more than mother and daughter. Joanna Shaw rescued me in her way, and I tried to return the favor. I do not say this boastfully, but ironies are the way of the world, and now that I am an old woman I tell you with certainty that those who presume to lift another are most often in need of being raised themselves.

—Aimee Liu, Flash House

             The girls look like ghosts.

            Coming out of the early-morning mist, their silver forms emerge from a thin line of trees and the girls pad through the wet grass that edges the field. The dampness muffles their footsteps, so they approach silently, and the mist that wraps around their legs makes them look as if they’re floating.

            Like spirits who died as children.

—Don Winslow, The Dawn Patrol

            Three Indians were standing out in front of the post office that hot summer morning when the motorcycle blazed down Walnut Street and caused Mel Weatherwax to back his pickup truck over the cowboy who was loading sacks of lime. The man and woman on the motorcycle probably didn’t even see the accident they had caused, they went by so fast. Both of them were wearing heavy-rimmed goggles, and all Mel saw was the red motorcycle, the goggles, and two heads of hair, black for him and blond for her. But everybody forgot about them; the cowboy was badly hurt, lying there in the reddish dirt cursing, his face gone white from pain. The Indians stayed up on the board sidewalk and watched while Mel Weatherwax and one of his hands carried the cowboy into the shade of the alley beside the store.

—Don Carpenter, Hard Rain Falling

            She ached. As if her spine were a zipper and someone had come up behind her and unzipped it and pushed his hands into her organs and squeezed, as if they were butter or dough, or grapes to be smashed for wine. At other times it was something sharp like diamonds or shards of glass engraving her bones. Teresa explained these sensations to the doctor—the zipper, the grapes, the diamonds, and the glass—while he sat on his little stool and wrote in a notebook. He continued to write after she’d stopped speaking, his head cocked and still like a dog listening to a sound that was distinct, but far off. It was late afternoon, the end of a long day of tests, and he was the final doctor, the real doctor, the one who would tell her at last what was wrong.

—Cheryl Strayed, Torch

            Ree Dolly stood at break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. The carcasses hung pale of flesh with a fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

—Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone

In each of these excerpts, we get not just the beginning of the story but the entrance of the storyteller. This can be done badly, of course, and fan dancing won’t do. But neither will the timidity of those who use story like a crutch. It’s not flash we’re after but the sense of someone real speaking to us directly and honestly, and for that a certain confidence is not just called for but expected and deeply wanted. In some cases, even a fire-eyed bravado. Or just the intimate whisper of someone with a secret we feel almost certain we dare not believe, but will.

The writer who too obsessively vanishes leaves us at the altar alone. This is the ceremony of fiction on the page, the thing film and TV and games can’t do (or at least not so well), the thrill of it, the thing that makes the written word crackle and sing, that makes it sumptuous and sensual and gives us gooseflesh, the kind we get when someone important, someone we want to know better, perhaps even someone we want to love, is suddenly standing very near, and with a brief glance first one direction then the other leans close, very close, to tell us something.

So Murderateros—which writers do you read for voice? Which writers do you read for story alone, despite a lack of any distinctive individual voice? Are there any writers you admire whose voice is so subtle—Patricia Highsmith, is my example—it almost seems at first like no voice at all, until the tale gathers momentum and you hear it unmistakably in your mind?

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Jukebox Hero of the Week: Long ago in a universe far away, aka the 1970s in the Midwest, I did the solo coffeehouse bit, and I know how naked it can feel up there with just a guitar and a song. No one did it better than Townes Van Zandt, truly one of my heroes, and someone who can teach us all a bit about presence and voice and a slice of life rendered full in words.

(This particular song has a very special meaning for me, which I won’t get into, but should the one who knows what I’m talking about read these words and listen to this clip, know I’m grateful. For everything. Even when I’m cranky.):