Writing Tip #3 Make the Protagonist Save a Cat by page 5

This has been on my mind the last few days because I’m reviewing a novel that has kept me at a distance from the protagonist. The result is, that after reading sixty pages, I’m bored to tears because I don’t care about the lead character and I don’t understand exactly what her problem is. And although the writing is beautiful, I will likely not finish it and I will certainly not review it due to lack of interest.

Here is an interesting description of plot, from Writing to Sell by Scott Meredit:
“A sympathetic lead character finds himself in trouble of some kind and makes active efforts to get himself out of it. Each effort, however, merely gets him deeper into his trouble, and each new obstacle in his path is larger than the last. Finally, when things look blackest and it seems certain the lead character is finished, he manages to get out of his trouble through his own efforts, intelligence, or ingenuity.”

I love this description, but the key element I want to focus on is “A sympathetic lead character…”

A reader doesn’t have to like or even find the protagonist sympathetic, but a read MUST be interested in the main character and understand what his/her problem is, and it is important that the reader somehow empathize with him/her.

Readers are desperate to attach to somebody from the moment the story begins, and you want them to attach to the protag, since it’s the protag’s story. It’s that attachment, that emotional connection, that deepens the reader’s interest in the story and keeps them turning pages.

But how does a writer establish that connection early on? By writing what Blake Snyder calls the “Save the Cat” moment. In the first few pages, make the protag do something nice (like saving a cat from a tree), or interesting, or funny – something that will push the emotional buttons of the reader so s/he can connect on a deep level with this character. You want to hook the reader on this character, and the bigger the emotional content, the deeper the hook is set. Saving a cat from a tree sets a smaller hook than rushing into a burning building to save a baby. The general rule of thumb is: this save the cat moment should happen the first time we meet the character, that is our first impression should be a positive and deeply emotional charge for the protag.

Once the reader has established this emotional investment in this character, then you can start lowering the boom on the protag. And when s/he get knocked in the head, the reader feels it, the reader cares, because you established that connection up front. The reader wants the protag to win, needs for him/her to win, and will stay hooked until s/he does win.

Interview: Patricia Nell Warren, author of The Front Runner, The Wild Man and The Lavender Locker Room.

Late last year, while doing a book signing at the Palm Springs Pride celebration, a woman ambled up to me and asked how my signing was going. She was utterly charming, and during our conversation about signings, glbt-themed fiction, and the pride celebration, I realized I was talking to Patricia Nell Warren, author of The Front Runner and several other fantastic gay-themed books.

Like most gay men of my generation, I have been a fan of her writing since the early eighties when I first read The Front Runner. In fact, that book changed the way I viewed myself as a gay man, and it inspired me to want to write gay-themed fiction. I’ve come across several life-changing books in my travels, but TFR was the first, and perhaps the most inspirational.

During her visit, I somehow found the nerve to ask if she would do an interview with me for my GLBT Literature column at Examiner.com. She graciously agreed and asked me to contact her after the New Year. Well I did, and the following interview is the result. And yes, she’s as captivating in person as her answers to my questions suggests.

Q: When did you start writing and how many novels have you published?
I started writing when I was 10 years old, and first published professionally when I was 18 (meaning I got paid). This was when I won the Atlantic Monthly’s 1954 College Fiction Contest and they published the story in a special supplement. Since then, I’ve done seven novels and one nonfiction book.

Q: Was there someone in your family, a teacher, or perhaps a favorite book, that inspired you to begin writing?
My whole family loved books, and collected an impressive library at the Montana ranch where I grew up – from weighty tomes in German that my greatgrandmother brought from the old country, to all the English-language classics and bestsellers of the World War II era. I grew up reading stuff like Winston Churchill’s Blood, Sweat and Tears, and anything that Eleanor Roosevelt wrote (I adored her). When I read Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, I didn’t miss the fact that they adored men.

Q: What was the first story you ever wrote about?
The short story at age 10 was about a wild horse who jumped off a cliff rather than be roped and corralled by horse-hunters. Definitely my first statement about freedom.

Q: Who are the authors who most influence you today?
I do a lot of history writing these days, so I really admire writers who dig into an already-chewed-over subject to find fresh material. For instance, I loved Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, by James D. McLaird, which I read while researching Calamity for my “women in rodeo” piece for Outsports. McLaird did a masterful job of showing us the real human face of a woman who has had a lot of myth-making makeup jobs done on her.

Q: Do you need to be in a specific place or atmosphere before the words flow?
Naturally it’s nice to get up at 6 a.m. (my brain is still on ranch time), brew coffee, make the rounds in my garden, then go to my laptop and put in 3 solid hours before the phone starts ringing. But I can work pretty much anywhere if I have to – a skill that I learned by working in a busy New York media office for 20 years.

Q: What’s the strangest source of inspiration you’ve found for a story?
Sometimes the strangest thing is that you didn’t know it was an inspiration till many years later. For instance, when I was writing the original “Lavender Locker Room” series for Outsports.com, I was wishing I knew a boxer. Suddenly I realized that I had known a boxer – German contender Wilhelm von Homburg, whom I had met in L.A. after he retired from the ring -- and hadn’t heard from him for many years. On googling him, I learned that Wilhelm had died a few months previously. But it was possible to dig out the story through German online sources, interviews of a film producer who worked with him, and my personal memories of things he shared about himself. I think it’s one of the best pieces in the book.

Q: Was The Front Runner your first novel with gay characters, and what was the inspiration behind Billy and Harlan’s story?
Actually my first such novel was the original version of The Wild Man, which I started writing in the late 1960s, when I was still in and out of Spain. I gave it my best shot, but wasn’t writer enough or out enough to pull it off. So the project got put aside for what turned out to be 30 years.

The Front Runner story started to gell for me after I spent several years in long-distance running, then the first “extreme sport” to become popular with Americans. This was in the late 60s and early 70s. I was one of the women activists who got the AAU to change the women’s rules, so we could run any distance over 2 ½ miles. I wasn’t out then, but I did start bump into other closeted people in the sport. The moment came when I realized it could make a novel. My original idea was a lesbian coach and her lesbian runner trying to get to the Olympics – but after a few chapters I realized this would not seem very real to readers, since there were NO women track coaches at the time. So I changed the main characters to men.

Q: Were the sequels, Harlan’s Race and Billy’s Boy, as popular with gay and lesbian readers as The Front Runner?
Both were on the LGBT bestseller list for a long time in the 1990s, and they still sell well today. But neither have racked up the record that TFR has. Harlan’s Race was a hard story for some people to choke – they thought it was too dark, and they didn’t get it about gay Vietnam veterans. It’s amazing how biased some of our own people are, against LGBT people who serve our country.

Q: Many critics have proclaimed your novel, The Wild Man, as your finest literary effort to date. Would you agree with that?
Yes. Writing the historical novel One Is the Sun in the 1980s was a big creative watershed for me – it radically changed the way I approach material, and taught me how to texture more deeply. Without OITS, I couldn’t have written Wild Man. But TWM is a better piece of writing.

Q: You’re latest book, The Lavender Locker Room, has garnered several excellent reviews. Can you tell us about it?
I started by writing the articles as a series for Outsports.com, where they were posted on an ongoing basis. By the time I had 17 or 18 pieces, I realized they could be an anthology. I do have my favorite sports (equestrian, soccer, track & field, endurance events). But I also challenge myself to cover sports that never appealed to me personally – like football. After I wrote about Dave Kopay and Bayard Rustin’s history-making stint in high-school football (he did his first civil-rights activism there), I found I could really get into football.

Volume 2 of TLL is in progress – some of the pieces are posted at Outsports.com under “gay sports history.”

Q: Do you prefer writing non-fiction over fiction, or does it make any difference at all?
Great question. Having spent my whole life in the media, I’ve learned that the idea of a line between fiction and nonfiction is – well, fiction. Trying to separate them is a little like trying to separate two twins who are conjoined at the brain. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Every novel has its genesis in the writer’s real-life experience in some way. Likewise, there is very little nonfiction that hasn’t been fictionalized to at least a small degree – if only to shape and organize the material. In One Is the Sun, I fictionalized a complex real-life oral-tradition story that I was told by Indian relatives of mine – and was confronted with the need to fill in some blanks. So fiction was the best way to tell the story and get the point across.

I enjoy doing both genres because I can use all my life experience for both of them.

Q: So, if you don’t mind sharing, would you tell us about your latest work in progress?
I’m doing another anthology called My West – a collection of short pieces about the American West that I’ve written over the course of 50 years. It covers quite a number of subjects, from rural to urban to religion to politics to ethnicity, and of course sexual orientation. In fact, I was inspired to leap into this project by The Autry National Center of the American West when they accepted the two Brokeback Mountain cowboy shirts into their collection of clothes worn in great Western films. Our stubborn survival in a “red state” region is a subject whose time has come. The book will be out from Wildcat Press later this year.

Q: Out of all the stories you’ve written, which is your favorite and why?
That’s hard to say – each of my writings is important to me in some way. I do have a special thing for The Wild Man because it was such a battle to write.

Q: Name a book or movie written by someone else that you wish you had written, and why that one?
I don’t look at writing that way. There’s no way I could own somebody else’s experience, which is the wellspring out of which we all write. For example, I admire Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” but I don’t wish I had written it – because I write about gay cowboys my own way.

Q: If you could offer one tidbit of advice for new writers, what would it be?
This is a tough time to be a writer. The book business is in major trouble, because it is based on retail sales, and retail sales are being slammed by the recession. Also, the world is crossing a technological horizon in publishing, with e-books. Because of television and movies and the Web, people reading habits are changing. It isn’t just that they’re reading less – their attention span and the way they mentally process stuff that they read – is also changing.

So the new writers are going to run into all kinds of obstacles and discouragements – not only to find a publisher, but find their readership, and keep it. I would tell them to never give up.

Q: What do you like to do when you’re not writing?
I love to read and study what I’m working on. I also love to garden, cook, and hang out with my friends and my cat. My entertainment tastes run to documentary films, though I do admit that I cried all the way through Avatar.

Q: Had you not become an accomplished writer, what other occupation would you have most liked to tackle?
Probably ranching or farming, though these are daunting and heartbreaking occupations today. It’s tough to make a living there. Or I might have been involved in horse sports on a full-time basis.

Q: Do you enjoy writing, I mean, do you find it fun?
To me, writing is the greatest fun.

Q: What, more than anything else, fills you with rage?
As a non-Christian, I am outraged that the religious right would like to wipe out everybody on the planet who doesn’t believe as they do. I am very concerned at what the New Apostolic Reformation is doing in Africa, because this part of the world is where they’re perfecting their MO, which is the creation of governments that are “purpose-driven” (Rick Warren’s phrase). Wait till they introduce something like the Uganda anti-gay bill in our own Congress. And they will if they take back control of Congress and the White House.

Q: Can you tell us something about the place you call home?
At home here, I like to keep things simple. After years of moving many times, I don’t own a lot of “stuff.” My enjoyment of the place is more in the trees and flowers I planted around it, the people that come and go – and of course the daily dance with words.

Q: Anything else you’d like to share?
Your support of other LGBT writers and writing is much appreciated. The more we all stick together, the better chance we have of coming out of the recession with “LGBT culture” intact.

Thank you, Patricia, both for taking the time to answer my questions and for contributing so much of yourself to the LGBT community.

For more information about Patricia Nell Warren and her books, press here.

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Gay Writing Today, a new website

Hi everyone,

I've been a member of an online gay writer/readers group for about two years. The group has actually been around for six years and its five hundred members communicate with each other via a Yahoo list. Recently, the group decided to expand their reach beyond its members and into the literary community.

Thus they have created a website, Gay Writing Today, where readers and writers can lean about new glbt-themed books and the authors who write them, read the latest book reviews, and pose questions to a group of talented readers and writers.

Gay Writing Today is the brainchild of author Dorien Grey and was built with the help of talented authors and techies Leiland Dale andLex Valentine. There are a number of talented writers listed there, and I'm proud to be included among them.

You are cordially invited to check out the site, which is constantly updated. Your comments, questions, and suggestions are welcome, and of course if you read or write gay-themed fiction, you are welcome to join the group.

Writing Tip #2

Start as deep into the story as possible.

There is a golden rule in screenwriting. Start a scene as late as possible and get out as early as possible. That is, don’t start a scene with a man strolling to work, walking into a building, riding up in an elevator, getting called into the boss’s office and then getting fired. Start the scene with the man already in the boss’s office saying “YOU CAN’T FIRE ME!”

This great advice goes for novels as well, both for each chapter and for the overall story.

This topic is heavily on my mind this week because I was reviewing a novel about a woman who, in 1891, leaves her husband in Boston, travels to San Francisco, boards a ship and sails to Hawaii. There she meets a lesbian and has an affair.

The real story is about the heroine’s love affair with this Hawaiian lesbian. The problem was that the novel slogged through 70 pointless pages before the heroine landed in Hawaii, and another 75 pages before she meet the love interest. After a 100 boring pages of what should have been back-story, I emailed the author to tell her I couldn’t give this novel a glowing review. She was adamant that my interest level would soon pick up and that the ending would be very satisfying. Hoping she was right, I read another 100 equally boring pages, which brought me to the book’s halfway mark. I emailed her again to inform her I would not invest any more time in her novel because I couldn’t recommend it.

She wrote back, again adamant that if I kept reading I would love the story. What she doesn’t get, is you can’t bore the reader with 200 pages of tripe before getting to the interesting part. You have to start with the interesting part. You have between ten and twenty pages to hook the reader. If you don’t grab their interest and hold it, you’re done for. And the way you do that is by getting to the point, quickly.

Start as late into the story as possible. In the example above, the story should have started with her seeing Hawaii for the first time from the ship. In chapter two, she could have given 10 pages of back-story telling why she left her husband and sailed to the islands. By chapter three she should have meet the love interest. There, 200 pages cut down to 30. And my point is, that 30 pages would have been much stronger with all the dull crap cut away.

In order to start the story as late as possible, the writer needs a clear understanding of exactly what the story is about. In the example above, the author clearly thought the story was about the heroine’s journey – NOT! The story was, or at least should have been, about the love affair.

So my tip for this week: Understand what your story is about, and get to the heart of it as quickly as possible. There are not many hard and fast rules in writing, but the cardinal sin is: BORING THE READER! Not for a chapter, not for a page.

Book Review: Big Diehl by George Seaton

Reviewed by Alan Chin
Published by MLR Press

Big Diehl (pronounced Big Deal) escapes his going-nowhere ranch life in Laramie, Wyoming the day after he graduated high school. But leaving does not erase the emotional pain inflicted by eighteen years of life with his trailer-trash father.

Diehl’s search for his place in the world leads him to an army recruiting office in Casper. While waiting for the army to process his paperwork, he is temporarily adopted by a pair of hospitable lesbians who own a local bar. They put him up at their ranch where he meets Tony, another “waif” that the ladies have taken in. As it turns out, Tony had been an exemplary Marine until he ran face first into a brick wall called “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” Diehl and Tony begin to forge a relationship, but the Army intervenes and ships Diehl to boot camp.

Diehl finds Army life satisfying except for the need to hide his sexuality. Opportunities come and go with other desperately lonely souls like himself. He takes advantage of some, not others. The need for stealth limits all relationships to a one-time thing. Or is that Diehl’s emotional pain won’t let him get close to anyone?

After 9/11, Diehl finds himself a squad leader in Iraq, trying to keep his boys alive. The horrors of war and Army life shape Diehl into a man, a troubled man to be sure, but none the less a man of grit. When Diehl’s Iraq tour is suddenly cut short, he finds that he now has the strength to face his pain and confront his past. But does he have the will to fashion a more satisfying life, one where he can settle down with one man? You can ask but I won’t tell.

I found this to be a completely satisfying read. The characters and situations are completely believable. In fact, having spent four years in the Navy, during which time I hid deeply in the closet, Diehl’s experiences brought back many memories of living stealth – so many terribly lonely nights and the constant fear of being caught. This story makes a strong and clear statement about the emotional pain suffered by brave men and women honorably serving their county.

I found this read occasionally touching without becoming overly so. And although the ending is not happily ever after, it was a strong and sensible conclusion.

In addition to being emotionally stratifying, I found this story extremely well structured and well written. It has a clipped language that took me several pages to become accustomed to, but once I did I love the author’s voice.

The character of Diehl is well drawn and completely likable. If I have any minor complaint about this story is that some of the other characters could have had more depth. My only other complaint is that the story is a bit short, about 85 pages. I saw many opportunities to expand the story into something longer, but hey. I’m nit picking. I highly recommend Big Diehl.

For more information about this book, press here.

Fun With Words

The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition.
Here are the 2009 winners:

1. /Cashtration/ (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. /Ignoranus/: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. /Intaxication/: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. /Reintarnation/: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. /Bozone/ (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. /Foreploy/: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. /Giraffiti/: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. /Sarchasm/: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. /Inoculatte/: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. /Osteopornosis/: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. /Karmageddon/: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. /Decafalon/ (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. /Glibido/: All talk and no action.

14. /Dopeler Effect/: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. /Arachnoleptic Fit/ (n..): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. /Beelzebug/ (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. /Caterpallor/ (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

Book Review: The Judgment of Paris by Gore Vidal

Reviewed by Victor J. Banis
Published by De Capo Books, 2007


The Judgment of Paris is an early work from the writer who used to be Gore Vidal, which is to say, I like it lots better than his later writings, which tended to grow increasingly ponderous, and especially bitter, as the years and the words progressed. But in 1952, he was still a young man, or young enough anyway to write with a young man's verve. The wit was there—he never quite lost that—but it became more acidic and less purely funny as time went by. This is, in fact, a very funny book, a farce, but of the best kind, in which we see the world as it is, through the eyes of a keen observer of human nature.

Philip Warren is a bit shy of 30 years old and just out of law school after a stint in the U.S. Navy. Much like Charley Mason in Maugham's Christmas Holiday (which this books resembles rather more than coincidence would suppose) Philip gives himself a year to tour postwar Europe, in the course of which travels, like Paris with his golden apple (though it is not his apple with which Philip entices his co-characters) he meets and becomes involved with three women, who tempt him variously with power, wisdom and love.

No, it's not exactly a gay novel, but, puh-leeze, this is Gore Vidal. Poor heterosexual Philip can scarcely turn around without tripping over a queen or two. Here, a handsome young hustler explains the facts of Italian life to Philip: "He talked a great deal, stating, as far as Philip could tell, that all Americans, English and Germans liked Italian boys, and even Italian boys, though they didn't make too great a thing of it, liked Italian boys."

This meeting occurs at a gay bathhouse, where—here is Vidal's twisted sense of humor at its best—Philip goes not for the predictable sex, which he knows very well is what he will find there, but to meet with a trio of somewhat deranged political conspirators intent on returning Umberto to the throne of Italy and so ending the postwar Italian republic. Chief conspirator Lord Glenellen insists on buying Philip one of the Italian youths on display, who turns Philip down because he's too young and too good looking. Oh, Gore, what a tease you were.

And here an intriguing aside on the pleasures of reading about sex:

"Now, part of the pleasure one gets from reading novels is the inevitable moment when the hero beds the heroine or, in certain advanced and decadent works, the hero beds another hero in an infernal glow of impropriety. The mechanical side of the operation is of intense interest to everyone. Partly, of course, because so few of us get entirely what we want when it comes to this sort of thing and, too, there is something remarkably exciting about the sex lies of fictional characters…one feels far more clearly engaged than one does in life where the whole thing is often confused and clumsy. Also, there is a formidable amount of voyeurism in us all and literature, even better than pornographic pictures, provides us at its best with an excitation occasionally more poignant than the real thing."

Despite some earlier successes (The City and the Pillar among them) this might be said to be the first true Gore Vidal novel, when at last he found a voice worthy of his talent. A delightful read!