A Writer’s Focus

Normally, good writers are not eclectic. Each focuses his/her oeuvre on a single idea, a subject that ignites his/her passion, a theme he/she chases with beautiful variation through a lifetime of work.

For example, Hemingway was captivated with the idea of how to face death. After he witnessed his father’s suicide, it became his central premise, in writing and in life. He examined death in war, in sport, on safari, until he finally took his own life.

Charles Dickens, whose father was imprisoned for debt, wrote of the lonely child searching for the lost father in almost all his great works: David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Great Expectations.

Not that I’m in the same league as Hemingway and Dickens, but I also have a central theme that keeps popping up over and over—a gay protagonist who gets crushed by an unkind world, who picks himself up, and crawls through hell in order to pursue his dream, and ends up finding something even more treasured than he first imagined. 

Looking back on my history, I can pinpoint where this theme came from. When I was just coming into manhood, my father had a cancer operation that left him bedridden and weak as a newborn. His doctors told him he had only months to live. He fought back, day by day, recovering his strength an iota at a time. He beat the cancer, and eventually returned to work. He lived for another sixteen years. Because of his illness, he was forced to give up drinking. He attended AA, and became a supporter of the Twelve Step Method. His last several years he spent mentoring recovering alcoholics, which brought him enormous gratification. He lost everything, fought back, which led to a new calling, and that eventually led to a meaningful life. His battle has been my inspiration all these years.

Like so many other writers, I have found a subject and it sustains me over the long journey of the writer.

Genre should be a constant source of reinspiration. Every time I reread my manuscript, I get excited about it, because it is my kind of story, drawn from the thing in my past that most inspires me.

The Essence of Zen Practice

The old adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” is often true. I’ve been studying and practicing Zen for going on forty years, and I resently came a cross a picture on FB that encapsulated my impression of what Zen Practice is all about. Buddhist call it being mindful. New Age folks often call it staying in the moment. Whatever you call it, I believe the picture below clearly shows the essence of Zen practice, and the secret to a happy life.

Writing Tip: The Protagonist’s Gap

Your protagonist, indeed all your characters, at any moment in the story should take the easiest route, from his/her point of view, in the pursuit of their desires. It is human nature. But of course, what is the easiest route is relative to each character. 

What generally happens in life is that we take an action to achieve our desire or goal, while thinking: If I do this conservative action, the world will react in such a way that I will move a step closer to achieving my goal. And in life, if we’ve thought it out, we are usually right. This is how we want life to work, we think the problem through, we take action, and we get the desired results. But we NEVER want that to happen in our stories. 

In your story, you need to concentrate on the moments where the character takes an action, expecting a helpful reaction from his/her environment, but instead the action provokes an unexpected, more powerful response. That produces conflict, and conflict is what makes the story interesting. 

For example: I see a younger man in a bar. He looks my way, smiles. I think to myself, Cool, he likes older men. My desire is to take him to bed. I know my first action should be to strike up a conversation, so I walk over, smile and say, “Haven’t we met before?” – and he shouts, “Don’t you wish, grandpa.” Then turns his back to me. Suddenly, the scene is more interesting, because in order to get what I want, I have to do something more forceful than my first minimum action. 

When that happens, when the protagonist takes actions that s/he thinks will move him/her closer to an object of desire beyond their reach, and gets an unexpected reaction that pushes him/her further away from said desire, it creates a gap between the character’s subjective thought and their objective reality. This gap is where the story should focus. In fact, this gap IS the story. 

So what happens when a character finds him/herself caught in this gap? Simple, s/he has to regroup. The world is now different from before the character took the first action. The character must assimilate the change, then decide on a bigger, bolder plan of action to achieve the goal. Then they must take action again. But, of course, the same thing must happen. The world must react in an unexpected way to this new action, pushing the character even further away from the prize. Thus, the gap widens further, creating the need for even more dramatic action.

In our example: assuming I still want to bed the young man who insulted me at the bar, I might lay a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and say, “Let me buy you a drink.” And after the bartender brings a round of drinks, I tell him, “Keep the change.” So the young man knocks back the drink, then turns to me as says, “I’m no whore, old man. I can’t be bought.” Now the stakes are raised, I’ve gambled $100 without getting what I want, and what will I do next? At this point the reader should assume I’m wasting my time and money.

Two key things happen when the character takes this second action. 1) the stakes are raised and the tension level goes way up. He is doing much more than he originally wanted to do, but he is now committing himself. And 2) by committing himself, he opens him self up to risk. This is not only key, it is a pillar of good fiction. The second action MUST put the character in a position where it forces him to dig much more deeply into his human capacity, or stand to lose something valuable in order to gain what he covets. In short, the protagonist, now in a state of jeopardy, must risk something he already has, in order to gain the thing he desires. 

The measure of the value of a character’s desire is in direct proportion to the risk s/he is willing to take to achieve it. The greater the value, the greater the risk. 

So again, the protagonist must take a much more dramatic, risky action. And, of course, YOU NEVER GIVE THE PROTAGONIST WHAT HE THINKS HE WILL GET. You always want to keep that gap getting even wider with each action. Every time s/he takes action, the gap should widen, pushing them further from the goal, until the end when subjective and object collide head on. That is what keeps the tension in a story escalating. At some point, it should seem like the protagonist will surely lose what s/he has risked. But of course, they may or may not, depending on the story.

And now you're asking yourself, did I get that young guy at the bar into bed, and if so, what did it take? 

Finished Manuscript #10

Yesterday I finished the last round of edits to my current manuscript. I would like to thank the people who beta read this manuscript while it was still in development—David O Sullivan, Sidney Miraz, Mark Kindrick, and Rob McCann. Your feedback was wonderfully helpful and most appreciated.

The working title is:

Everything You Ever Wanted

Or

Surviving Immortality

It is my longest work yet, coming in at 169,000 words, 430 pages. It’s a Sci-Fi story of a man who discovers the fountain of youth, a formula that will make old people decades younger, and keep people youthful for several thousand years. But he tells the world he will not divulge his formula until every gun, tank, battleship and bomb has been destroyed. When the world is free of all weapons, then everyone will live forever. And then he goes into hiding.

Before he disappears, his gay son is exposed to the formula, and becomes immortal. The father takes his son into hiding with him, but then the son discovers his father has unleashed a sinister plot on the human population.

It’s a story that pits man’s greed against his lust for violence. It’s a tale of a world gone crazy, driven to the brink of total destruction, and the account of one young man who realizes the courage, the will, and the compassion to combat the insanity, both within himself and outwardly.

This is a story I’ve been contemplating for over six years, and been actively writing for the last two years. And thankfully, starting tomorrow, I can move on to the next adventure in the queue.

Today I will write a query letter, and send this manuscript off to my publisher, Bold Strokes Books. Assuming they agree to publish this novel, this will be my forth book published by BSB, and my tenth published novel.

Paul Anka in Concert

We went out to see Paul Anka in concert last night and it really was quite a show. At 75, and performing for 60 years, the energy and voice are still there. Admittedly, we probably wouldn't have chosen to go but a close relative is Paul's personal manager so we got great seats and even a meeting with Paul after the show.

When he sang "You're Having My Baby", all through the song I kept thinking, "How sexist! Shouldn't that be: You're Having Our Baby."??? But then I remembered that song was written before the women's movment. I was surprised to learn he's written over 800 songs, including My Way which he wrote for Frank Sinatra.

It's great to see icons of the 50s still going strong.

The Characters I Write

My career as a writer had been occupied in writing about characters who don’t fit into the social patterns. Most of my protagonists are gay men, but not all. These characters are very varied; some don’t fit in because of sheer defiance, some because they are terrified of society, some are simply scandalous. There are some, however, who have such a high degree of integrity that they don’t fit in anywhere in a world tainted by corruption.

The one thing they all have in common is that they are outsiders. They have many voices, and all sing, some loudly and some whisper, against the social norms. They are people who have few friends, yet value absolute loyalty to the personal relationships they find, they cling to those relationships as the plot darkens and they must fight to save themselves and the people that matter to them.

E.M. Forster once said: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” This, I believe goes to the heart of my outsider characters that I try to create. I’ve always regarded loyalty to friends and loved ones as going beyond admirable to heroic. It represents the best qualities of the outsider.

I write about outsiders because I believe the outsider is, should be, really, one of the most socially valuable people in the whole community. Because he/she often, more often than not, challenges the social norms, doing what he/she thinks is right, rather than what’s accepted or easy.

Admittedly, I’ve always felt myself to be an outsider, and not by choice. So that by creating these characters, I’m questioning my own experience, what I am and what I am becoming. I create these characters and plots to find out if there’s meaning in the external world for me, and then, I suppose, if I decide that there isn’t, to impose a meaning of my own.

There are as many reasons to write and create characters as there are writers, but I’m explaining what I feel motivates me as a writer, and that is my own experience. I take those different experiences and mold them into a real constructed, contrived novel or short story which has a plot played out in action and also a philosophical plot which either proves or disproves a question, which it the story’s main theme. It has motifs as in a symphonic work, and it comes to a conclusion. But at the heart of that plot are the main characters, and I tend to paint a detailed portrait of these characters. And within the heart of these characters lies the soul of the outsider struggling against society for ideas they believe are truth and just.

Writing Tip: Idea versus Counter-Idea

Idea versus counter-idea comes from the Greeks. It is the dialectical approach to telling a story. Socrates and Plato defined a story as a three-step conversation: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The thesis is a statement of the proposition. The antithesis is the discovery of a contradiction to this proposition – the opposite. Finally, the resolution of this contradiction that necessitates a correction of the thesis is called the synthesis – the combination of the two. Lajos Egri elaborately explains this in The Art of Dramatic Writing on pages 49-50.  

In a dramatized dialectial debate, thesis events echo the contradictory voices of one theme. Sequence by sequence, often scene by scene, the positive idea and its negative counter-idea argue, so to speak, back and forth. At climax one of these two voices wins and becomes the story’s controlling idea.”

The positive and negative assertions of the same idea contest back and forth through the story, building in intensity, until at the crisis they collide head-on in a last impasse. Out of this rises the story’s climax, in which one or the other idea succeeds. By following this controlling idea, every dramatic sequence and scene should argue the theme. Each subsequent sequence should escalate the argument, and both sides of the debate should be argued with equal intensity. The bottom line is that there must be continuous escalating conflict through positive and negative charges. Each character must win some and lose some. 

Karl Iglesias suggests that the theme should be turned into a question rather than a premise. For instance, rather than state the premise for Romeo and Juliet as “Great love defies even death,” you should ask, “What does great love defy?” or “Can love survive even death?” and let the story reach a natural conclusion. 

So if I understand this correctly, a story should swing back and forth. If for example, your story’s theme is that living a life of integrity wins in the end, you first show that integrity wins by having your protag succeed using his integrity, then show that deceit wins by having the protag lose to someone through deceit, then switching again, building in intensity each time it switches. The reader should not know which is the true central theme until the climax. It is this pulsing back and forth that gives the story its rhythm, and keeps the reader wondering how it will end. 

Dramatic writing is about conflict; therefore, the point vs counterpoint approach seems to make sense. I somewhat agree that at the climax the “Idea or the Counter-Idea” must win. Yet I am not sure how that would work with an ironic ending where the protagonist wins by loosing or looses by winning, then it is more difficult to define the controlling idea.