Author Archives: Murderati Members

Into The Special World

I was watching Collateral a few days ago, one of the best mainstream thrillers to come of Hollywood in ten years, I think (and anyone who says Tom Cruise can’t act is just plain wrong). Besides being maybe the most accurate and weirdly beautiful depiction of LA I’ve seen on film (actually digital video) since Chinatown, with wonderful characterizations from a stellar cast, it just hits so many things perfectly, seemingly without trying.

But a lot of “not trying” comes from having learned your craft so well that you make the right instinctive choices.

I’m thinking of a moment early in the film that on the DVD commentary director Michael Mann says he can’t explain, but he knew he had to have the shot because it summed up the whole story for him.

I was thrilled to hear it because it had been a goosebump moment for me when I rewatched the film. But I know why, for me at least.

The shot I’m talking about is when cab driver Jamie Foxx heads out onto the downtown freeways to start his night shift (it’s late afternoon), and he drives seemingly head on into a huge, wall-sized Mexican mural that actually is sort of iconic, if you know downtown L.A: a painting of a desert canyon with a vaquero (cowboy) on a white horse, and a black bull. The mural is unfinished, and the vaquero has no head. And for a moment it really does look like Jaime Foxx is driving right into that landscape. It’s surreal, and mythic, and it totally sets up the action that is to come.

Well, that moment hits one of the most important beats in storytelling: the Into The Special World or Crossing The Threshold moment.

A story will usually begin by showing in some way the Ordinary World of the main character, which externalizes a lot of essential information about that character – especially why they are somehow stuck in the life they are presently living. Then it’s time to take her/him out of that old, familiar comfort zone and plunge them into the adventure – no matter what the genre is. And this is one of the most magical moments of storytelling; perhaps the most important one to get right.

Because it’s so big, this scene very often comes as the Act I Climax, although it can be as early as the Sequence 1 Climax. Once in a while it comes early in Act II, right after the Act I Climax. And once in a great while it doesn’t happen until the Midpoint, as in Jaws, when Brody and his team of Hooper and Quint finally head out (in that too-small boat) to open water to hunt down the shark.

It’s not uncommon to have several crossings of thresholds, as the hero/ine goes deeper and deeper into the Special World. This is always an effective technique to make us feel we’re really going on an adventure.

In Groundhog Day: the obvious Into The Special World scene is very early in the story, under the opening credits, in fact, when after the opening scene in the newsroom, TV weatherman Phil Connors, his producer Rita, and cameraman Larry drive out of Pittsburgh, over a bridge (an archetypal symbol of crossing a threshold), and into the snowy mountains of Pennsylvania. Out of the city, into a small mountain town. This kind of contrast underscores the feeling of newness and adventure we want to experience in an Into The Special World transition.

But there’s a second, more subtle Crossing The Threshold, when Phil wakes up in the morning to a replaying of the day he just spent. The filmmakers cue this moment with the shot of the clock alarm clicking over to 6 a.m., while “I Got You, Babe” plays on the radio. It’s a big visual that will repeat and repeat and repeat. The numbers on the clock are like a door, and they usher Phil into the real Special World: a time loop where every day is Groundhog Day and there’s no escaping Punxsutawney, PA.

The first Harry Potter is a great example of the many-threshold technique. There is often a special PASSAGEWAY into the special world, and in Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone you first see Harry enter the new world of London, then Hagrid magically rearranges the bricks in a stone wall so Harry can step through into the very new world of Diagon Ally, then Harry has to figure out the trick of Platform 9 ¾, then the train takes Harry and the other first years into the wilderness, then finally the kids cross the dark lake (looking very much like the River Styx) in small torch-lit boats to get to Hogwarts. The Into The Special World moment is very often turned into a whole scene or sequence to give it the weight it deserves.

Other famous passageways are the cyclone in The Wizard of Oz (and Dorothy stepping over the threshold into Technicolor Oz is certainly the most famous depiction of that moment in film history!), the red pill in The Matrix, the chalk sidewalk paintings in Mary Poppins, the wardrobe in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the tesseract in A Wrinkle In Time.

But certainly the entering the Special World moment doesn’t have to be a supernatural experience. In While You Were Sleeping – the warm, bright Callaghan house is a special world to lonely Lucy, who wishes for a family of her own. When she gets out of the taxi and sees the big house covered in Christmas lights, you can see her longing to belong there on her face. There she is confronted by a Threshold Guardian on the porch: the family friend who suspects she is lying about who she is.

Joseph Campbell talked about the idea of the Threshold Guardian: a character (or sometimes an animal or creature!) who tries to turn the hero/ine back at the gate. It’s a great way of giving the Crossing The Threshold moment extra resonance.

Another trick is to use symbols we all have in our heads. Bridges, doors, gates, freeway on-ramps or off-ramps: these are all symbols that are used constantly by filmmakers and authors to create the sense of Crossing The Threshold. And it’s very effective to have this sequence be a descent: Clarice descends multiple staircases and passes through seven gates to get to Lecter down there in that dungeon – a great, ominous Crossing The Threshold scene, that takes us down into the subterranean realms of the unconscious along with her.

So I’m wondering, Rati: are you aware of that Into The Special World moment when you’re reading or watching a film? Writers, do you design that moment, consciously or unconsciously?

Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers; hope everyone’s doing something special for their own!

– Alex

FIVE-STORY FALL

by Stephen Jay Schwartz

It was Wednesday of this week, in Santa Monica, at a new cafe across the street from my usual cafe.

I went outside for a little break and to make a phone call. I called my wife, talked story points for the new novel.

It had been an exceptional day. Filled with serendipitous moments. A great meeting at Sony Studios with the director of the film project I’m writing. A great meeting also with the guy who will be revamping my alto saxophone, enabling me to play music again, after a fifteen year hiatus. And then a new cafe, filled with the promise of new cafes, where I know no one and can focus on focused writing. It was a good day.

I turned off the phone and seconds later saw the decorative Christmas lights, which hang year-round between street signs, suddenly swing and shake wildly. I thought we were having an earthquake.

Which brought a strange memory, of telephone wires swinging wildly a few years ago. I thought that was an earthquake as well.

I asked a guy beside me what it was and he said there had been a naked woman dancing on the rooftop of the building next to us. It dawned on me that something might have hit those Christmas lights to make them shake so wildly.

I looked up the street a ways and saw a small crowd gathering. I walked up and saw the woman’s body on the ground. People hovered over her, passersby compelled to stop. They touched her shoulder tentatively. Someone found a sheet and draped it over her.

She was breathing. An occasional, deep breath. But no movement. Her head was completely shaved. People were saying she was a transient, that she was doing drugs, that she was crazy.

The police cars came. A woman said she was a nurse and a cop gave her a pair of blue, rubber gloves. She checked the woman’s pulse. A fire truck appeared and eight paramedics leapt into action. They did a quick visual examination. I heard one of them say, “agonal breathing.”

Crime scene tape went up around us quickly. The street filled with police cars. Cops rushed into the building where she had jumped—there was word that someone had been up there with her, maybe another jumper. I heard a cop say they were treating it like a crime scene. A forensics van pulled up.

The woman was put on a gurney and rushed away. Cops began taking statements. Blood remained on the asphalt where she had landed. It was a five-story fall.

I walked back to the cafe.

People were talking. It hit everyone differently. It hit everyone the same.

We were soothed by the fact that she was alive when they took her away. That she was breathing. I had seen her back rise and fall from the breaths.

Everyone who came into the cafe asked the barrista what happened. I sat at the counter, piping in when he fumbled for words. I said she was breathing.

A man came in and asked the question. We told him and he nodded. He’d seen a lot of these. He was a fireman. He said it might have been agonal breathing. I said, yes, that’s what the paramedics said. The fireman frowned. She won’t make it, he said. Agonal breathing is what the body does when there’s nothing left to do. It’s the body’s survival mechanism after intense trauma. It meant she was circling the drain. This is what the fireman said.

I worry that I’ve disassociated. It frightens me that I can talk about the details. I observed so closely the work of the police and paramedics. I took it in as if it was research to be used in my never-ending quest to get things right, to make things real in my writing. I wonder if I’m callous or if I’m simply in shock.

I remember that other day, a few short years ago. When I saw the telephone wires swaying. If I had left work thirty seconds earlier it might’ve happened to me. The wires were swaying because a telephone pole had been severed. This happened when the tow truck, traveling sixty miles an hour, tore into it. This was after the truck plowed through a dozen people waiting at the bus stop.

I drove into this scene, thirty seconds after it happened. A Hieronymus Bosch landscape. There were bodies in the street. And people rushing by. Children from the school next door staring through a chain-link fence, tiny hands gripping metal. A man running in his underwear, his arms waving.

It happened next to a police station, so the cops arrived quickly. I was told to stay in my car, drive on, clear the scene. I drove on, into the normalcy of the city streets beyond. I heard sirens, watched emergency vehicles pass, going the other direction.

And I thought to myself…did that happen?

I was in shock, although I didn’t know it. I would find out six months later in my doctor’s office when he told me I’d been suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This, after a five-month crusade to convince everyone I knew that the Bird Flu was the new Armageddon. That the Bird Flu would destroy us all. I had reams of research to back me up. I bought the face masks and emergency supplies and I was considering getting a shotgun to protect my family for when the System collapsed.

I was delivering my litany to a good friend when he asked the question, “Has anything strange happened to you recently? Have you experienced anything traumatic?”

Nothing, I said. I’ve been a bit stressed. This Bird Flu has really got me down. I haven’t been eating that well. There was this crazy accident I drove through a few months back where I saw three dead bodies and one of them could’ve been me if I’d been there a few seconds earlier and…

That’s it, he said.

The doctor gave me some anxiety pills and I took one and hated it and didn’t take anymore and gradually, during the course of the next few weeks, got better. That heavy feeling in the back of my head began to lighten. I think it was just the identification of the source of the trauma that set me straight.

As I sat at the counter of my new cafe, clinically replaying the images of the woman lying in the street, the cops arriving, the blue rubber gloves, the paramedics set into action, the police taping off the scene, I wondered if this was shock.

The barrista kept getting the question, with each arriving customer. Gradually his ability to explain what happened slipped. Soon he had trouble saying anything. I stepped in to fill the blanks. Something in me fed on their moment of reaction. I absorbed it, tried to process it, wondered why I didn’t react as they did. Was I desensitized?

The barrista was quick to explain that he had not intended to see the body, that he had only been walking to the grocery store for items for the cafe. That, when he saw the body on the ground, it had taken a moment for him to understand what it was. He was not the kind of person to go running to the scene, he insisted. It seemed very important that he communicate this.

I was one of the people who went running to the scene. I was there thirty seconds after she landed. I was there seven minutes before the police arrived. Thirteen minutes before the paramedics. I was aware that I could do nothing to help her. I observed, only. I was there, perhaps, to watch her die.

We write about these events, in our fiction. We visit the morgue and the coroner’s office and occasionally go to crime scenes. I’ve been to the morgue. I’ve seen autopsies. I’ve been in a room with three hundred bodies. They looked like empty gloves.

To be where a life was, just moments, seconds after that life has been extinguished…this is another story. This is sadness. I have been here a few times before. I’ve seen the bodies of two jumpers who leapt to their deaths from the clock tower of my college campus. I’ve stared at the body of a college student attached to his motorcycle on the ground in a pool of thick red blood as I hugged the shoulders of the friend who had driven the car that hit him. I passed the bodies of the men and women who were standing at that bus stop…

These are the tragic moments, the ones we remember. We linger on them. The inherent message is that life is fleeting, that at any moment the rug can be pulled out from under. In that instant, the bucket list comes out. What can I do with the time I have left? How long do I have? Have I said everything I need to say to my mother/father/wife/children? Have I left them enough to get by? (Money, guidance, wisdom, tools?)

I think this is why I run to the scene. It’s not to witness gratuitous violence. It’s not because I yearn excitement or that I find things morbidly entertaining. I run to the scene because I want to live. I want everyone to live. I want to understand life, and to understand life one must accept what is not-life and attempt to understand that as well.

I spoke with a friend of mine, later that night. She had seen this woman at the cafe the day before. She remembers staring at her for no apparent reason. She remembers thinking, “What is it with that girl?” There was an energy, a something-something about her that got my friend’s attention. Did my friend somehow know that this woman would be leaping to her death the very next day?

I remember the documentary I watched about the Russian theater attack in Moscow back in 2002. This was when the Chechen terrorists stormed a theater, planting women wearing suicide bombs in the seats, holding eight-hundred and fifty theater-goers captive for two and a half days. The Russian police pumped a chemical agent into the theater ventilation system to put everyone to sleep, but the gas was deadly and a hundred twenty-nine people were killed in the process. In the documentary, theater patrons were interviewed and many said they saw something strange in the eyes of the people who ultimately died. It was a distant look, something that suggested their lives were already over. As if they knew their time had come.

Perhaps this was what my friend saw. The day before. The woman leapt.

Sometimes I wonder, when we write in our fiction that a man has been shot dead, do we know what we have written? Have we considered what we’ve done for the sake of story? What does it mean when a woman jumps from the roof?

I run to the scene, to learn what to write.

The Edit Ninja

By Brett Battles

Photos by Mari Deno

Okay, so you’ve written a book and decided you’re not going to look for a publisher and will it publish yourself as an ebook…or…you’ve written a book, shopped it around but while you might have had a few nibbles, no bites, so you’re going to publish it yourself as an ebook. Easy, right? Just upload it and it’s done.

Wrong. I think many independent authors (not all) try to take short cuts, and think all they have to do is upload their book and that’s it. That’s not it. Not even close.

As an independent author, what you need to do is think of yourself as a publishing house. And by that, I mean just because you’ve finished writing the book doesn’t mean it’s ready.

First step…story editing. This could mean hiring a professional editor (especially advised for those who have never been published before, but when looking for one shop around and get recommendations), or finding some other means of getting the feedback you need. For me, I have a group of trusted, savvy, and insightful readers who read my book and give me detailed feedback. The group contains several respected published writers, and others whose opinions I trust.

Okay, that’s done. Next: a cover. The rule of thumb here is: You get what you pay for. So if you want a cover that looks professional and will draw the attention of potential reader instead of turning them off, be prepared to pay for it. And trust me, it’s worth it.

But wait, your book’s still not ready. There is a vital step that cannot be skipped. You need (need, need, need, need, need) to have someone copyedit/proofread your manuscript. And I’m not just talking about finding someone who isn’t doing anything at the moment, and having them look for errors.

Good copyediting and proofreading are skills that only a small percentage of people have. I don’t have it. Never have, never will. So I’m lucky to have someone who excels at this who I can go to when I have a manuscript that is ready for this step.

I’d like to introduce you to her today. Meet my professional copyeditor and renowned Edit Ninja, Elyse Dinh-McCrillis.

BRETT: Okay, Elyse, first question: Why torture yourself copyediting other people’s material? I know that would drive me MAD! (Of course, as you well know having worked on a couple of my books now, I would suck at it.)

ELYSE: It’s much more torturous for me to read books full of errors! When I was younger, whenever I saw a mistake in a book/magazine/newspaper, I’d let out a full-throated ARGHHH! a la Charlie Brown when the football is yanked away. People in the room with me would say, “Why don’t you do something about it?” So I did. I like to think I’m helping put better books out into the world and preventing readers like me from the same kind of aggravation.

B: When did you first realize this was a skill you had?

E: I wrote for my high school paper and my journalism teacher said I was the only student who always turned in perfectly clean copy. I was compulsive about proofing my own work because I never wanted to look like a moron due to some stupid typo. My teacher named me features editor and I found I had a knack for telling others what to do editing other people’s work, too.

I also read a lot and retain much of it (do not flash your credit card numbers around me). I think it’s important to not only know the guidelines of grammar and style, but also be aware of pop culture and current events. A sharp editor would know there’s no such thing as a Mazda CRX, that sixty-six Americans were originally taken hostage in Iran but only fifty-two were held for 444 days, that the non-lightsaber weapons in Star Wars are called blasters, not guns. These may not be earth-shattering mistakes but you never now who might find them important.

B: Doesn’t everyone know they’re blasters? Oh…God…I’m a nerd, aren’t I? Anyway, you obviously enjoy doing it enough that you do it professionally. So, have you seen a psychiatrist lately? And if not perhaps one of our Murderati readers can recommend one to you. (Is my bias for how much I would personally hate being a copyeditor showing?)

E: Ha! Funny that you mention therapy because I think part of my job is being a therapist to my clients. I’ve spent hours on the phone with writers who are certain they can’t finish their book or they’ve written the worst book in the history of man. I talk to them and ask questions to help them figure out how to fix their problem areas. It’s quite satisfying for me when they achieve that breakthrough. That’s not to say I’m touchy-feely. If you’re just whining, I don’t have patience for that.

B: Joking aside, I cannot express how grateful I am for the work done by a good copyeditor, and in my case, that’s you. You have saved me from embarrassing myself multiple times in SICK and HERE COMES MR. TROUBLE. So I want to publicly thank you for that! Thank you.

E: Thank you for trusting me with your manuscript babies. You make my job a lot easier by writing thrilling stories. Plus you pay me and that’s cool, too.

B: Wait…are you implying you’d do it for free? Probably not, right? Okay, so why don’t you tell us a little bit about the process, how you work with authors, and what authors should expect from you?

E: The process is tedious so I should probably say something interesting like, “Well, Brett, it involves Samoan masseuses and corn” but that might confuse your readers. The real answer is, my fee includes fixes in grammar and style, rephrasing of awkward sentences, comments to help you fix weak spots, and fact-checking. Turnaround is about two weeks for a full-length ms, but I can do it faster if you have a specific deadline. If I’m doing developmental editing, I’m available for phone consultations and minor therapy as mentioned above. I’m not a licensed doctor, though, so you might have to sign a waiver releasing me from liability if you suddenly develop a drinking problem.

B: I know I have things I screw up all the time. In fact I have a list on my wall to remind me to check for some specific types of errors when I finish a manuscript. (It’s true, taped to the wall next to the kitchen.) What are some of the common mistakes you see authors repeating all the time?

E: Lie vs. lay, dangling modifiers, the misplacement of “only” in a sentence (“I only have one dollar” and “I have only one dollar” do not mean the same thing), i.e. vs. e.g., possessive pronouns vs. contractions, less vs. fewer, and redundancy (“I thought to myself,” “I rushed quickly through the door,” etc.). I guess that last one isn’t a mistake, it just annoys me.

B: Any pet peeves?

E: When potential clients want to pay me only $8-10 an hour and say that’s the going rate on Craigslist. I say go back to Craigslist and good luck.

E: HA! Good one. I refer readers back to the “get what you pay for” statement I made above about covers. Applies here, too. If an author is interested in hiring you, is there someplace they can go to find out more information about your services?

E: The Edit Ninja website.

B: Ooooh. Spiffy! Anything else you’d like to add?

E: I think there’s a misconception that editors are sticklers for rules. I’m not. As long as your language serves your story, I don’t care if you coin new words or end your sentences in prepositions. But if your style starts distracting from your story then it needs adjustment. I think astute readers can tell the difference between someone who flouts grammatical conventions intentionally and someone who doesn’t know what they are.

B: Thanks for spending a little time with us today, Elyse. I love hearing your insights.

Let me just say to everyone, if you’re a writer in need of a copyeditor, I couldn’t recommend Elyse more. The only thing I worry about is that too many people will start using her services and she won’t have time for me when I need her. Seriously though, if you have a book in need of copyediting contact Elyse. You’ll be very happy with the results.

Now, if you have some questions you’d like to ask Elyse—specific or vague or completely off topic—fire away. Elyse will be checking in all day.

Sooner or Later It All Gets Real

by J.D. Rhoades

I have to confess, I’ve been riveted by and keep coming back to the photograph above. In case you’re not familiar with the photo, this is the Presdent of the US and his advisers watching, in real time, the operation that took down Osama bin Ladin. A larger, hi-res version is here.

I don’t intend to get into the politics of this, but rather into the human element. Look at that photo for a moment. Look at the tension in those faces as they watch the whole thing go down, as it happens, knowing that the dice have been rolled and knowing that if the whole thing goes to pieces, there’s not going to be a whole hell of a lot they can do about it.

Now imagine trying to put that scene down as words on a page.

There are excellent reasons why we most likely will never see the faces of the Navy SEALS who carried out the operation. We’d basically be putting a target on their backs and the backs of their families if we did that. But damn, I sure would like to. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you like to know? Would they be calm? Determined? Grim? Furious? Nervous? Scared shitless? I’d love to be able to get into their heads, then write it all down.

It’s rather ironic that I became so transfixed by these thoughts on the same day I made my flippant comment on Tess’ post that “Reality’s boring, that’s why I read.” Because right there, in that picture, is some reality that could come right out one of the very thrillers we read and write.

Problem is, far too many thrillers–some of them extremely popular–feature heroes I can never quite accept as human. Instead of realistic people who feel fear, doubt, tension, you get Bolt Studly, the mavericky, two-fisted, fearless ex-Navy Seal/CIA Agent whose only flaw is that he rushes headlong into the action. I much prefer my action heroes with some vulnerabilties: Charlie Fox, Jonathan Quinn, John Rain, to name just a few. Even Jack Reacher got a lot more interesting when he began to face the possibility he could lose.

Living where I do (right next to Fort Bragg, headquarters of JSOC) and doing what I do as a day job, I’ve met quite a few Special Ops soldiers. No SEALS, but plenty of Rangers and Green Berets, and a few guys I’m pretty sure were Deltas (the haircuts are the giveaway. You meet a guy around here who says he’s in the Army and he’s got hair down over his ears, you’re most likely talking to someone from Delta). They pretty much run the gamut you’d expect of any group of young men: some are great guys, some are blustering assholes. Some are quiet, unassuming family men, some have, shall we say, messy personal lives. A very few, quite frankly, I’m concerned to have walking around loose. And, I imagine, you get the same spectrum in SEAL Team Six, the people who took down OBL.

Which, to me, makes the real life story even more amazing. Because these guys aren’t perfect Bolt Studly (even though some of them may swear to you that they are, especially if you’re female). They’re not Superman. They’re real. They’re three dimensional. They’re human. Admittedly, humans who can shoot the pips off a playing card at 100 yards, but still, they worry, they fear, they get the shakes. Then they do the job anyway.

For that, we thank them.

Writers who lie

by Tess Gerritsen

Sadly, it’s happened again. Another memoir, another embarrassed publisher. Greg Mortenson, author of the mega-bestselling Three Cups of Tea, about his humanitarian efforts to build schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been accused of fabricating key elements in his book. He’s also accused of misusing the donations to his charity, the Central Asia Institute, but it’s the book that I want to focus on. Because the writer who dreams up a dodgy memoir is such an old tale, I’m surprised that anyone’s surprised that another one has popped up.

Mortenson in particular has been on my radar for a while because all my close friends have raved about him. “He’s a saint, you must read his book!” they insisted, shoving the book at me. By the time the tenth person said that, I was irritated about the whole thing and never did read the book. Then, while I was in Dubai, I saw that Mortenson was one of the featured authors on the program. I tried to get into the session — held in a huge auditorium — but the place was packed so tight you could scarcely breathe. My brief impression of him, before I fled the overheated room, was that he was an immensely polished speaker who knew exactly how to work an audience. He had legions of adoring fans. I remember saying to my husband: “He reminds me of a fake TV evangelist.”

Maybe it was just the cynic in me. Maybe I was a wee bit jealous of the piles and piles of books he was selling at the festival. But now, a few months later, it turns out I may not have been so far off the mark.

It’s not the first time I got a whiff of uneasiness about a memoir writer. Some years ago, while waiting to go on the air at BBC in London, I was introduced to a writer named Norma Khouri who was scheduled to go on the air right after me. “Norma grew up in Jordan,” her publicist told me. Norma was getting a huge amount of press for her memoir Forbidden Love, about the horrendous honor killing of her best friend in Jordan. Norma was gorgeous, poised, and well-spoken. She also struck me as completely American. “Wow,” I told her. “Your English sounds like you grew up in the US!”

“In my school in Jordan, the teacher who taught us English was from the US,” Norma explained without an instant’s hesitation. “That’s why I sound American.”

It sounded plausible. Sort of. But I couldn’t get over the fact she just seemed so American. I think I even said that to my publicist. “She’s just like a gal from Brooklyn,” I said.

Fast-forward a few months, to the breaking news about memoir writer, Norma Khouri. Who, it turns out, had not grown up in Jordan, but in Chicago. (If you get a chance, watch the superb documentary Forbidden Lie$, about Norma and her astonishing fabrications.) As I’d guessed earlier, she was American, and I had detected that fact within a few sentences of talking to her. Yet for several years she’d managed to fool publishers, critics, journalists, and a gullible reading public. Part of the reason the fraud went on so long is that Norma was passionate about defending herself and skillful at covering up her inconsistencies. For every question, she had a ready answer. I think back to how quickly she responded to my observation that she sounded American, and how willing I was to believe her.

It didn’t occur to me that anyone would lie about such a thing. Or that anyone would be brazen enough to fake a story that any journalist, with just a few phone calls, could easily blast to smithereens. Yet it happens again and again. James Frey. Margaret Selzer. Forrest Carter. Every few years, there’s another fake memoir. And every time the truth is finally revealed, readers are outraged, publishers duck their heads in embarrassment, and everyone asks, “How could this happen?”

It happens because we want to believe uplifting stories of people who rise above their traumatic pasts. It happens because publishers don’t have the resources to check the facts. It happens because the writers are talented enough to create a reality that seems like truth. These writers are such darn good liars that we can’t help but believe them.

And it happens because there’s loads of money involved, money handed over by gullible readers who think they’re buying a thrilling true story of a man’s saintly deeds or a young girl’s survival on the streets. Many of these readers would turn up their literary noses at a mere novel. No made-up stuff for them; they want to be inspired by the truth. They want to enrich their minds with history. They’re above reading something as trivial as fiction.

How ironic that they were reading fiction after all.

Is Creativity Dying?

by Pari

I love a good conversation, the kind that’s broad and blends seemingly unrelated subjects with ease. That’s one reason Murderati is so satisfying!

Last Saturday, our LCC 2011 core committee met for the last time. We ate lunch together at the Range in Bernalillo. The business portion ended quickly. That’s when the fun began.

The discussion veered from literacy to No Child Left Behind:

“It’s no less than a conspiracy to dumb down America through a systematic homogenization of thought.”

“It’s encouraging a situation where creativity, in the form of instruction and content, is being sacrificed in the name of ‘basic skills.’”

“It’s discouraging intellectual curiosity, the joy in learning for learning’s sake.”

From there the conversation wandered to what’s happening to our children in a society where we’re scared to let them roam free.

“They’re losing the opportunity to cultivate essential skills in independence.”

“If they wander in groups, merchants and policemen likely assume they’re up to no good.”

“But if you can’t spend hours finding ways to amuse yourself – outside and away from electronic gadgets – how can your imagination soar?”

“Who’s to say your imagination can’t take flight in designing a really beautiful stand of code?”

From there we jumped to U.S. cultural values:

“Creativity is dying even though we have more products and means of self expression than ever before.”

“Our culture doesn’t value innovation unless it’s tied to making money.”

“If money were the only factor, literary fiction wouldn’t win so many prizes.”

“Artists need to be paid for their efforts, not just the results.”

On and on we went:

“People in the U.S. are so passive now they just want the same pabulum repackaged again and again.”

“There are too many choices – in books, music, stories, art – with the internet. We’re hitting information overload.”

“We need gatekeepers otherwise we’ll all be overwhelmed with the incredible amount of crap out there.”

“Are you telling me you want agents and marketers – the very people who only want sure things –to be the arbiters of creativity in our society?”

At the end of three and a half hours, we didn’t have any answers. But then answers are overrated. Once you have them it’s easy to stop thinking and assume you know.

I certainly don’t.

And yet, it was a fascinating conversation and I wanted more.

So today’s questions are
1. Is creativity dying or one breath away from life support?

2. Are gatekeepers essential to keep us from drowning in a sea of sub-par products?

3. Are we benefiting from more choices than ever before or is everything starting to look the same – even when it isn’t?

I can’t wait to read what you’ve got to say.

Cinderella made me do it

By PD Martin

Here’s the thing…this week I found myself getting into the hype surrounding the wedding, the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton (unlike Cordelia’s post yesterday, I am going there!). There…I’ve said it. I have publicly confessed! But why was I suddenly so intrigued in the few days before the wedding? What is it about this ‘story’ that captures our attention?

At this stage, I’d like to point out that although I’m an Aussie and therefore officially part of the Commonwealth, I would prefer it if Australia was a republic. In other words, I’m definitely NOT a monarchist. I also do NOT have a fascination with the royals. In fact, I really don’t care what they do and don’t do in their daily lives. I certainly never read the tabloids, nor am I into royal fashion. And while I’m not a tom-boy, I’m certainly no girly-girl either. So I was only vaguely interested in what the dress might look like. Despite all this, somehow the story of the ‘commoner’ Kate Middleton marrying a prince…well, it was making my heart flutter! Yup, there’s the second confession of this blog. I was totally into the hype and my heart was fluttering before the wedding even started.

Despite these confessions, in NO way do I take responsibility for what I was feeling. Instead, I blame my daughter. It’s because of her that I was swept up in the romanticism of an average girl marrying a prince. My daughter may only be four, but she’s got a lot to answer for!

About six months ago, I first read her the tale of Cinderella. As a woman today, this fairytale (and many others) does unsettle me a little. Will my daughter be waiting for a man to sweep her off her feet or rescue her like the fairytales? I know chivalry isn’t dead, but it is on the decline. And the idea of a man falling in love with a woman he dances with for a couple of hours and then marrying her as soon as he finds her? Mmm…I guess that’s why they call it a fairytale. Don’t get me wrong, I am an optimist and my husband and I met, fell in love, and got married very quickly, so I know it’s possible to feel like it was meant to be, like it was out of a fairy tale. But still…Cinderella? One night?

Anyway, just about every night for the past six months Grace has pleaded for Cinderella as her bedtime story. See…it’s not my fault I was intrigued by the wedding! The Cinderella story has been rammed into my brain just about every night for the past six months. Who wouldn’t succumb? And that’s what I told myself when I switched on the TV at 7.30pm Aussie time and watched the wedding.

Cinderella is a powerful story – and I think that’s the other reason I got caught up in the wedding mania this week. It’s weathered the storm of time (don’t you just love that expression) and it’s had many new twists.

According to Wikipedia (all hail Wikipedia!) the roots of Cinderella may be in 1BC, and in the story of a girl called Rhodopis who lived in Ancient Egypt. In that story, an eagle snatched one of Rhodopis’s sandals and carried it to Memphis, dropping it on the King. The King was so taken by the sandal and the fact that it had been delivered by an eagle, that he ordered the girl to be found and brought to Memphis to become his wife. Yup, that sounds like Cinderella, doesn’t it? We have the shoe.

There’s also a version that’s been found from 860(AD) China. It’s called Ye Xien, and in that story a young woman befriends a magical fish that is the reincarnation of her mother, who was murdered by her stepmother. She loses a slipper after leaving a festival and guess who finds it? The king, of course! He falls in love and I think you know the rest. So now we have the wicked stepmother. And is the fish effectively the girl’s fairy godmother?

There are also aspects of the Cinderella story in Arabian Nights, and in the story of Cordelia from pre-Roman Britain (around 55BC). Both of these tales feature jealous siblings. A more recent similarity can be found in the 1634 tale of Cenerentola. This story had a wicked stepmother and stepsisters (plus the slipper and the King searching for its owner). So now we have the stepsisters.

And it was in 1697 that the Frenchman Charles Perrault added in the pumpkin, fairy godmother and the glass slippers.

If this Cinderella history has you intrigued, check it out on Wikipedia (even if it’s purely to justify why you watched the royal wedding).

There have also been many modern day twists on the Cinderella fairy tale. There are far too many to list here, but a few come to mind. Pretty Woman was deconstructed by many as a modern Cinderella story (even though many elements were missing). And then there was Ever After (starring Drew Barrymore) and Happily N’Ever After (a retelling of the story from the point of view of one of the royal servants who’s in love with Cinderella).

And in terms of the power of the Cinderella story, we also have the theory that the Cinderella tale is one of the ‘base’ plot lines, a story arc that many modern books and movies follow in some way.

So what does all this mean? Simply this: If you watched the royal wedding, rest assured it wasn’t your fault – you were wooed by the historic power of the Cinderella fairytale. We’re all excused.

And yes, the kiss was short but at least there were two of them. I clapped excitedly both times (confession number three), just like my four year old. Did you?

Sickety sick sick…

By Cornelia Read

So my daughter calls me EARLY yesterday morning and asks me to call her health center at school to tell them that she needs to stay home for the day, because she is sickety sick sick. I think to myself, “yeah, right… must be late with an English paper or something,” but I dutifully call in and say I’m keeping her home for the day. I am in New York at this point, and she is in New Hampshire.

And then I get on a train to come home to New Hampshire, and am suddenly sooooo tiiiiiiiiired that I curl up on my little Amtrak seat on my side, with my feet up on top of my bag, and pretty much sleep from Penn Station to New Haven.

Get off at Back Bay, take the Orange Line to North Station, get on the train for New Hampshire, and am soooo tiiiiiiiired again that I lie down across my seat with my feet up on my bag, and sleep until the lady sitting behind me starts talking on her cellphone about how she’s been getting all these weird calls all day that are actually intended for a phone number that’s one digit off from hers. She is telling this to whomever lives at the phone number that is one digit off. And she is really, really boring, and they kind of don’t believe her. And then she has to call someone else and tell THEM all about this problem with the phone, and by this point I want to grab the cellphone from out of her hands and just whack her upside the head with it until she stops talking. But I am too tired, so instead I jam my headphones into MY phone and listen to opera and Patsy Cline for a while.

In New Hampshire the leaves are now unfurling, and the tulips are up outside my building, and even though it was snowing about three weeks ago it’s eighty fucking degrees out, and I know they won’t start the air conditioning in my building until Memorial Day, because they have to turn the heat off before the AC will work and once that happens they can’t turn it back on again or something and sometime they have a bad frost in, oh, JUNE, and they don’t want anyone to freeze to death so instead we just sweat miserably.

But luckily this happened last year too and I managed to snake the very last two fans at Walgreens, so I know I can just lie down under my fan when I get up to the third floor and recover a little.

And when I get into the apartment, my daughter says, “I’m so sick, but it’s really weird. I don’t want to barf or anything, I just feel kind of off and get really, really dizzy whenever I stand up. And I’m sooooo tiiiiiiiiired.”

And still I am such an idiot that I think she is utterly goldbricking, until I woke up this morning after about thirteen hours of sleep and felt totally exhausted and then tried to stand up and got really, really dizzy.

YEA. Not!

So here we both are, stupid and dizzy and really tired and weird, and I’m wondering if there are tsetse flies or some kind of shit in New Hampshire, because this sucks and apparently whatever is causing it is going around my kid’s school, as I discovered when I called in to the health center again this morning to say I was keeping her home again.

I had all these big plans to write a groovy blog post this morning, but my brain is more steel wool than steel trap, so, um, I slept most of the day. I am heartily sorry.

Instead, I offer you the best book trailer I have ever seen, made by Gary Shteyngart. I first watched it a while ago because my pal Jordan Foster said it was amazing, and that he had been the coolest teacher when she was getting her MFA in writing at Columbia, and she sent me a link.

I remembered it this morning because my kid asked if I knew anything about any of the people teaching English at Barnard, and I did not, but I said, “hey, wait a minute–there is this really cool guy at Columbia, and you should watch this video on Youtube, and also take a class with him.”

So here it is:

This man may have single-handedly restored my faith in literary fiction writers. And even Jay McInerney. Which is saying something.

Although I think they should have used me and JT in the deb sequence.

Okay, now I’m going to go drink more iced Theraflu. O joy, o rapture.

And also, Jordan has threatened to actually buy and send me this:

To which I responded “ewwwww… Gaggenau!”

I am soooo not a royal wedding person. Surprise, surprise.

My sister and niece got up at two a.m. in Berkeley so they could watch the whole thing, though.

So here’s my question for you ‘Ratis this week, because I’m utterly boycotting that whole topic (other than from the major-appliance angle), and I’m still sickety sick sick:

If you had to have someone else’s picture decoupaged to the front of your refrigerator, whose would it be? And why, of course.

I’m thinking I’d like these guys on mine, if I had to have an image of two strangers:

Telling the Difference

Zoë Sharp

We live in a Want it Now society. A No Waiting world, where delivery must be fast fast fast or we lose interest. Trash it and on to the next thing. Fifteen minutes of fame has become fifteen seconds.

If you’re lucky.

It may just be what I see of the UK, but kids’ ambition has turned from wanting some kind of career that might one day bring reward, to craving celebrity for its own sake – without apparently wanting to do anything to earn that status.

Patience and persistence, it seems, are dying qualities.

I have always said in the past that there were more persistent writers published than there are talented writers published, and I feel that was true.

It’s not just the actual business of writing an entire book. That’s tough enough. Having the self-belief and the knuckle-under mentality to keep going, a few hundred words at a time, until you’ve got a completed manuscript sitting there. Sustaining the idea, building the characters, developing the plot. It’s a feat that demands applause on the grounds of persistence alone.

There are hard drives all over the world cluttered with literary efforts that staggered to a halt less than halfway through, never to see the end of their journey.

By the law of averages, some of them might have been brilliant masterpieces.

Some would have been total dross.

Of course, some brilliant masterpieces do make it to the completion stage, are discovered and published to all-round acclaim.

Weirdly, quite a lot of the dross makes it that far, too.

In his last Murderati post, David Corbett talked, among other things, about the value of having a football coach who encouraged him in his endeavours. ‘Not because I was gifted. The reason I played football and not baseball or basketball was simple: I lacked any conceivable athletic talent. The only thing slower than me on the football field were the goal posts.’

Having someone to encourage your efforts at an impressionable age is vital for healthy development. What form that encouragement takes, and how you define the word ‘encouragement’ in the first place, is quite another matter.

Encouragement is important for writers, because self-doubt will always be part of the writer’s make-up. The devil on your shoulder, whispering in your ear nothings that are a long way from sweet. And the worst thing about that particular little demon is that whatever praise you receive only eggs him on. ‘Aw, come on – they don’t mean it. They’re just humouring you …’

Most fledgling writers don’t stray far from the nest for their first test readers. They ask family and close friends. In a lot of ways, it’s a logical choice. Who wants to turn their baby over to strangers who may send it out to play in heavy traffic?

Instead they turn to family. And family, being family, is most likely to deliver praise. ‘Well done,’ they say with a smile that doesn’t quite reach their eyes. ‘It’s great.’

Even if it isn’t.

After all, they love you. They want you to be happy, and most of all – unless things at home fall firmly into the dysfunctional category – they don’t want to see your fragile ego bruised. Possibly, also, they don’t want to have to live with the emotional fallout of telling you the hard, blunt truth.

That your baby sucks.

And then some.

Nobody wants to be told they’ve failed to achieve their dream, even if it is at the first attempt. Just as nobody wants to be told they haven’t got any talent ever to achieve their ambition. Or, worse and more cruel still I think, that they have some talent – just not enough.

Nearly.

Not quite.

Close, but no cigar.

Because, what if your bouncing baby bestseller is not actually destined forever for the slush pile, but what if it’s just … ordinary.

OK.

Not bad.

All right.

After all, some people’s terrible is other people’s brilliant. But there’s an awful lot of middle ground in between, so how do you distinguish between undiscovered genius and mid-list also-ran?

Somebody said recently that if you write for the approbation of others, then don’t do it. But if we don’t write to be read … then why do we do it? It’s just a voice in the wilderness, unheard.

That might be all right for the tortured artists among us, who work because they can’t do otherwise, driven by those whispering demons, urged on, flogging themselves until they’re bled dry by their ‘talent’.

Such artists are rarely appreciated – or acknowledged – in their own lifetimes.

But what about the rest of us?

Yes, we’re all driven to write in one form or another, but I see what we do as a craft rather than an art, and thus we’re all striving to better our craft in the hope that talent will out while we’re still in a condition to enjoy it.

If talent were enough.

If only talent were enough.

So, when do you decide that it’s not? And, if you make that decision, won’t the brockenspectre of regret follow you for the rest of your life?

I coulda been a contender …

If you block your ears to the critics, then surely you must also disbelieve those who offer praise.

Always waiting for the but …

The nearly.

The not quite.

Just as we live in a Want It Now society, we also live in one that attempts to homogenise us. It rounds off the corners and in doing so crushes aspirations at the same time as attempting to eliminate disappointments. It creates that vast pool of middle ground.

Everyone’s a winner, babe.

Some schools in the UK have banned Sports’ Day because of the negative effects losing the egg-and-spoon race may have on the pupils whose speed and agility and hand-to-eye coordination isn’t quite up to the task. Other parents have been known to sue because their little darlings are not selected for the school choir, regardless of actual singing ability …

They must all be winners, and the playing field will be levelled and re-levelled until that is so. But isn’t it as cruel to encourage those without talent, as it is to discourage those with it?

Will the rise of ePublishing be the artificially levelled playing field of the literary world?

No longer do struggling writers have to go through the selection process of submitting to agents in the hopes of being taken on. Agent rejections can be blunt, and hard. They not only don’t pull their punches, they’re usually wearing a set of brass knuckles when they swing. And more often than not they follow it up with a swift knee to the groin for good measure.

And even if you make it that far, there’s the whole painful process to go through again, submitting to publishers. If you thought agents could be brutal, wait until commissioning editors get hold of your baby and start casually disembowelling it with a few slashes of a sharp red pen …

So, the temptation to circumvent this process and go straight to ePublishing is understandably strong, but there are dangers, as were pointed out in JT Ellison’s excellent interviewwith industry professional Neil Nyren on Murderati recently: ‘If you’re thinking of self-publishing an ebook, please—don’t make it a manuscript dump. Most ms never see the light of day for an excellent reason – they’re not very good.’

Sound advice.

Because, if you don’t go through the pain of rejections and rewrites, do you really know if what you’ve done is good, or even good enough? How do you tell if you haven’t quite got what it takes, or are simply misunderstood?

Having some talent is not the same as having enough talent.

But how do you tell the difference?

Finally, please spare a thought for all those Edgar Award nominees who will be put out of their misery this evening – April 28^th. I have the honour of being a contributor to a nominated title – THRILLERS: 100 MUST READSedited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner. Whatever the outcome, congratulations to the winners and commiserations to the losers.

This week’s Word of the Week is exenterate, meaning to disembowel, from the Greek ex from and enteron intestine.

Zombie in the Pudding (reflections on men, women, violence and football)

David Corbett

This one’s for Charlie Stella, crime-writer extraordinaire, who suffers in the purgatory of Buffalo Bills fandom. Here’s my shout out, on the eve of the NFL Draft. (Yeah, yeah, it’s a guy thing. So sue me.)

* * * * *

The reason so many women, smart women in particular, have such lousy taste in men is because they fundamentally don’t get football.

I don’t mean they should watch it more, pretend to like it more than they do, or tune in to NFL Playbook and bone up on the trapping game or the two-deep zone. (Though, on reflection: Could it hurt?)

I mean women don’t actually get why teenage boys want to play the game, and what lessons it can teach you if you’re open to them.

Admittedly, sometimes the lessons don’t sink in. Men are wildly imperfect. Sadly, that may be the most interesting thing about us.

This all came to me when a woman friend, who’s a huge New York Giants fan, told me she’d caught some serious grief from other women for being into football.

“It’s so violent,” they complained.

My friend replied, “Well, yeah, but it’s also really graceful at times—you know, like ballet.”

When she told me this, I stared at her like she’d sprouted a second head.

“No,” I told her, “football’s really violent. That’s what makes it fun.”

Then it was her turn to stare at me like I’d sprouted a second head.

Violence is one of the great riddles of the male sphinx. And football, for a lot of teenage guys, is how they learn to solve it. (In other parts of the world, it’s rugby. Or armed robbery.)

Blame testosterone—that strange ineluctable whatzit that rises up inside you (if you’re male) during puberty, insinuates itself into your psyche like a menacing twin, tries to take you over or at least wrestle you down into the blood and muck.

Call it: The zombie in the pudding. Out of the sweetness of youth it comes. And just keeps coming. And it wants to eat your brain.

The author (right) with his older brother John: the Pre-Zombie years.

About the time you begin having those urges, you also find you have a predatory instinct. And before too long you learn there’s a food chain, and every guy you know is trying to figure out where every other guy fits in. And you’re all hoping—secretly, if the guys are your friends—that they’re lower down than you are.

I was a pudgy kid who began dropping the baby fat around age twelve. For a couple years I pretty much had to fight my way home from school every day. I got my ass kicked good once—this guy named Chappy, flunked his way out of high school into the marines. And I kicked some other kid’s butt once, some greasy loudmouth whose name I no longer remember. The other dust-ups were basically a draw.

There is a profound lack of satisfaction to the average fight, a sense that the real point, which is almost mystically nebulous, remains unsettled—even with the aforementioned ass-kickings. Maybe especially then.

But with its rituals, its discipline, its strategy—they don’t call it violent chess for nothing—plus the fact it’s played before all the people who might feel inclined to mock you, football offers a way to scatter the ghosts from all those unsettled fights.

There’s one major caveat. It only works if you have a coach you respect and trust. I was lucky. I did.

His name was John Dorrian—sometimes known as “Bud” (he taught biology) or “Shag” (he also coached baseball). I count him among the three most influential men in my life.

Mr. Dorrian had all the visual appeal of Ichabod Crane (not the Johnny Depp version). He was tall and reedy, prune-faced, pucker-mouthed, weak-chinned—but he also possessed an undeniable dignity and strength.

An aging jock with an intellectual’s sense of the absurd, he read parodies of the Iliad at pep rallies, with the star players’ names inserted where the Greek heroes’ would have been: fleet-footed Mollica, fire-eyed Molloy. (He killed with Sister Canisia, who taught Latin and Greek.)

He’d been an All-American in baseball at Notre Dame for three seasons before being beaten out his senior year by a freshman phenom, some hump named Carl Yastrzemski:

This mysterious, quiet, intense, intelligent man, this man who knew what it meant to have his dream snatched away but who’d found a way to soldier on—this man took notice of me, and praised my effort.

Not because I was gifted. The reason I played football and not baseball or basketball was simple: I lacked any conceivable athletic talent. The only thing slower than me on the football field were the goal posts.

I played center because it limited the ways I could screw up—all I had to do was remember the snap count, hike the ball, and hit the fat guy. (A lot of fat guys are incredibly strong, by the way. And unpleasant.)

Oh, and I was secure enough in my manhood I could deal with the razzing I got for having the prima donna quarterback plant his hands up my ass every sixty seconds.

But I digress.

The beauty of football, at the high school level anyway, is that it’s the one sport where even a lead-footed no-talent like me could take his shot, because what it actually requires, at least for linemen, lies more in strength and attitude than speed or hand-eye coordination.

What it requires is a taste for violence.

One of the seminal moments in my life was my first tackling drill in full pads. Coach Dorrian taught us the proper technique: Get low, face mask between the numbers, lock him up, put him down.

Full go. Whole squad watching.

I was terrified, and fear makes you too stupid to do anything except what you’re told. (I’m sure there’s a history lesson in there somewhere.)

Two tackling dummies on the ground formed a lane, down which the ball carrier barreled toward me. I lowered myself, aimed my facemask at his chest and launched myself at him.

The thundercrack of that collision was absolutely one of the most gratifying experiences of my life. As I would learn to say later: I almost came.

Oh, and I locked him up. And I put him down. And Coach Dorrian blew his whistle and shouted, “Solid hit! Pay attention, gentlemen. Next!”

As I got back in line, one of my teammates muttered, “Man, I’d never hit anybody that hard.” It wasn’t a compliment. He meant that I was too dense to get that this was just practice.

Part of me thought, somewhat dimly: I didn’t realize I had a choice. But the other part of me was still glowing. I knew I’d crossed some threshold. I was a smart, lonely, scared kid who’d learned how to deliver a blow. And a man I respected had taken notice.

As for the guy who’d muttered his critique? He got stuck on hamburger squad.

Later that day, Coach Dorrian huddled us up to make sure we knew that hurting someone was never the point, and anyone who deliberately tried to injure another player would be off the team. No exceptions.

“But,” he added, “when you play with discipline and focus, at full speed and within the rules, this game can be a lot of fun.”

Which was exactly what I’d tried to tell my woman friend, the New York Giants fan, and what I wanted her friends to get. But to do that, you have to really unpack what Mister Dorrian was trying to say.

He was telling us: I know you’re violent, and I know you like asserting your will. I’m going to teach you skills to do that. But the other guy likes asserting his will too. And in this context, asserting your will involves inflicting pain. That’s where the rules comes in. That’s where the discipline comes in. They’re there to teach you the difference between being aggressive and being a punk.

Not that the lessons are unambiguous. Of the many things that get shouted at you—and you get shouted at a lot in sports, that way the lessons sink in deep, become a part of muscle memory—but one of the most insidious things that gets bellowed at you in football, the thing that plays on your deepest insecurities and haunts you, comes during blocking drills.

You line up in your stance, face the man across from you. You wait for the coach to blow his whistle, and when he does you fire out, lock up, drive, and as you do he’s caterwauling at you so loud the words echo through your brain, your blood stream, every fiber in your body.

What he says is: Punish that man!

Now, you may ask yourself: Punish him? For what? What did he do?

But I got it. On some level, I understood that that man bore the Mark of Cain. He was violent. Just like me. My job was to subdue him, control him, defeat him. My manhood depended on it. Because he was me.

I realize not all guys come away from football having imbibed that lesson. And it’s no doubt glib to blame their coaches.

Admittedly, it was nothing Coach Dorrian explicitly said that made me self-direct this notion of punishment. It was his example: his decency, his integrity, his commitment both to aggression and to playing by the rules. The phrase “tough but fair” gets thrown around so much it’s virtually meaningless. Unless you’ve had a Coach Dorrian in your life. Then, as I suggested, it becomes part of your muscle memory.

As for the guys who didn’t get the message, in my experience they fall into two distinct camps: Those who want to be pitied for their failures, and those who expect far more praise than they deserve for their success. The brooding Byronic losers, and the Apollonian golden boys.

The psychoanalyst Karen Horney defined masculinity as “an anxiety-tinged narcissism.” The anxiety comes from the guilt of violence — and the shame of being its target. The narcissism is a disguise, a way to pretend the shame and guilt are somebody else’s problem.

And all too often that’s what they become. They become a woman’s problem, in particular.

And sadly, all too often, women jump on board, perpetually nursing Mr. Pitiful out of his bottomless funk, or latching on to Golden Boy with his blowfish ego and riding him as far as he’ll take her, even if she knows it will never be all the way. (Sometimes, of course, they’re the same guy.)

And smart women are particularly prone to this mistake because they more than anyone are repulsed by violence. They get fooled by the mask in masculinity. Like the men they fall for, they want to pretend the zombie in the pudding is a myth. Or if he’s real, he’s out there somewhere, wandering around inside other men.

“My man is smart, he’s sensitive, he abhors violence.” To which I can only respond: Run!

Maybe it’s because I was an offensive lineman — the patrol cop of football — and never got pampered like a star.

But what football taught me was how to recognize within myself the things I hated in the other guy and use them to my advantage, while never losing track of the simple humbling fact that he was just like me. I learned to be proud but never to gloat, because as soon as the whistle blows my golden moment—or my moment of shame—is over, and I’ve got to get ready for the next play.

Football didn’t teach me squat about masculinity. It did, however, teach me at least a little about manhood.

Mister Dorrian retired after my sophomore year and was replaced by a man I’ll call Joe Bonaparte. The only thing big about him was the chip on his shoulder. He had the cocky swagger of a star jock whose heyday was long gone. And so he took out his frustrations on people he deemed lesser than him. Like his players.

I became a starter junior year but lost interest. I had nothing to prove to a man like Joe Bonaparte. And I was getting a little cocky myself, a little mouthy; coaches hate that, especially from a player they know is smarter than they are. I lost my starting job. Curiously, I cared a great deal less than I thought I would.

Then, in the last game of the year, the guy in front of me got hurt. Coach Bonaparte looked around the sideline, spotted me, pointed and said, “Corbett, you ready to go in?” I couldn’t help myself, the inner smart-ass just took over. I said, with mock wistfulness, “You remember my name . . .”

And that, as they say, was the end of that.

A few years after I graduated I ran into Mister Dorrian at a local mall. He looked rested and healthy (we’d heard rumors he’d been ill). He asked me how I was doing, and I wanted to tell him how much he’d meant to me, how much I’d learned from him. I wanted to say, in whatever mangled fashion I might manage to get it out, that he’d taught me a lot more than how to block down on trap plays, neutralize a nose tackle, or dig a linebacker out of the hole. He taught me what it meant to grow up. That I had to control my aggression, I had to deal with my guilt and overcome my shame. Women, in my future life, would thank him. Maybe even the smart ones.

But I said none of these things. It would have seemed gushy, and that was most definitely not Shag Dorrian’s style. We kept it simple, exchanged pleasantries, shook hands and said goodnight.

But as I walked away, I felt a small swell of pride.

He’d remembered my name.

The author, circa his playing days. (Note hair. Please.)

*****

I realize this post has little to do with crime or writing, but violence lies at the heart of what we do.

Do these reflections resonate with your understanding of men and women and violence, or do you find them wildly off the mark?

How have you had to come to grips with the real (as opposed to fictional) violence in your life?

Does your real-life experience with violence find its way into your writing — if so, how?

What say you, Murderateros?