tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79163324852236716152024-03-03T16:26:14.603-08:00Shelly Lowenkopf's BlogA writer’s notes to himselveslowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.comBlogger3689125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-19492852672187068802022-05-22T12:59:00.003-07:002022-05-22T12:59:19.172-07:00The Mischief That Nurtures Us<p><span style="font-size: large;">You are well into your twelfth year of teaching a course called Writing Personal History FOA. The FOA abbreviates "For Older Adults." One of your qualifications for teaching this class has its origin in the fact of your own status as an older adult, a fact that brings you countless occasions of amusement. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In recent weeks your own "OA" status was born out when you had occasion to check the status of one of your many writing pseudonyms. In this case, you sought the name Craig Barstow on the Amazon books pages. Sure enough, Craig appeared in the role of author for two titles, <i>The Lady of the Line </i>and <i>The Virgin of Spare Rib Hill, </i>the former bearing the copyright date of 1960, the latter copyrighted in 1961.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Sure enough, Craig appears as well for <i>The Reluctant Lawman, </i>published in March of this year. He is also credited with authorship on <i>The Robber Barons,</i> scheduled for August of 2022. The publisher of the 1960s titles has long gone defunct. The two more recent titles are published by Berkeley Books, an imprint of the Random/Penguin family.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Were you to Wikipedia the publisher of the earlier Barstow titles, you'd see it listed among the offerings of Kozy Books, Roslyn, Long Island, New York. In a few Facebook groups related to mass-market paperback publishing, Kozy Books "Cozy up with a Kozy Book" is listed as a sleaze publisher. Indeed, many of your earlier novels, short stories, and essays appeared in publications with dodgy or condescending titles, in many cases solicited with the notion that your work added a more tiered, dare you say respectable appearance to the publication.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">One early novel, <i>Deadly Dolly, </i>was commissioned by a publisher of magazines that fell in the category of so-called "girlie magazines," for which you also wrote essays (rather than articles) or humorous short stories in which sexual relations, indeed, even romantic relations, were not mentioned.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In short, but to your intended point, your publishing history has as many gray hairs as your whiskers. When you think of this history, you're as likely to linger on a remembered incident or individual from your personal life.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">A sixty-odd year gap between appearances of Craig Barstow writings forms a large enough receptacle for your own lengthy history, which crosses paths with current incidents and moments where, even as you composed fiction, you reminisced reality, then incorporated it in the text. Example: <i>The Robber Barons </i>has a character who was born in Chicago as Gunnard Hjerstedt. You have no trouble finding names for your various characters. All you have to do is listen to them. They'll tell you their names. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Not likely you'd invent a Gunnard Hjerstedt, who complains in the pages of your novel of the dangers he experienced as a lad in Chicago's fraught, working-class neighborhoods. This character changed his name to Laird King, a close approximation of the name of a longtime writer friend who, among other things wrote the book from which Sally Fields's first screen appearance as an actor came. Gunnard Hjerstedt, at one time an actor, changed his name to Day Keene, under which he wrote well over fifty novels.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Much of this makes you an older adult. Your actual date of birth ratifies your older adult status. That does little to tamp down the parts of you who still have the thoughts and feelings you had at seventeen or twenty, when you could expect, from time to time to fall hopelessly and helplessly in love.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">As an older adult you have indeed been attracted to admirable young ladies, one of whom you confessed how, were you back to being seventy-five again, you'd be more expressive.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Among the many things you've learned from being attracted to intriguing ladies is the same thing you learned from watching actors you admire. Restraint. Timing. You have caused a barista at the estimable Handlebar Coffeehouse to appear in three short stories so far. You have also listened to the character you have created of her.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In these years of your history, you've spent many times and incidents with actual and imaginary individuals, including those roistering, argumentative, cranky, and sentimental aspects living rent free within you.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Neither a romantic nor a cynic, you've come far enough along to know how each of them believes in the absolute rightness of their vision, the incredible irony of the human condition, and its constant, nurturing mischief.</span></p><p><br /></p><p> </p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-57776257992648068152022-05-19T12:46:00.005-07:002022-05-19T12:46:43.125-07:00When You Got Serious and When You Didn't Part I<p> <span style="font-size: large;">In the earlier stages of your writing life, you'd experienced a few minor satisfactions that came from being published. That the venues for these publications were well below your hoped-for targets only served to remind you of the hurdles you sought to overcome, the growth you hoped to achieve.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">You have a vivid memory of a college-level writing class you'd been at some pains to be admitted to. The professor had reading assistant who, he told us, had earned the position because she had some publications for her own work. One of your submissions for class credit came back with her handwritten marginalia: This story is ready for publication.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">You were at most twenty at that time, awash with omnivorous reading and aflame with the desire to see your work appear in publications reflecting your interests and aspirations. Even then you understood that the story you'd submitted for class credit was not remotely ready for publication. So far as you were concerned, publication was a serious business.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">For some considerable time, the things you wrote struggled under the weight of your seriousness. The scant few things of yours to find their way into publication had one thing in common. You were more concerned with the pleasure of writing them than their ultimate publication.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Flash forward to your last year of the twenties and the publication of your first novel. This was by no means the first longer work you'd completed in the belief it was a novel, rather it was the first sustained narrative you wrote built on the foundation of your experiences working with a traveling carnival and the awareness of supportive emotional support from the topic, its characters, and the relationship between the reality you experienced and the fictional reality you attempted to evoke.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Flash forward two years, at which point you stood before a display of paperback novels in San Francisco, a city of great importance and affection for you. In that rack, you saw three novels you'd written pseudononymously and one with your own by-line.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">At about this time, many of your friends and associates began to ask you the same question: "When are you going to get serious?"</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Alas, you listened, triggering a long stretch of your attempts to write seriously. What pleasure can there be for you in seriousness? Yours is not a serious nature, it is a fun nature.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">More to come on this important stepping stone. For instance, how can you be serious about something that consistently supplies you pleasures? Don't you take writing seriously? Why would you persist in trying to achieve ability that has to be coaxed and nourished at every turn.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Leave it for the moment at this: To undertake writing is the equivalent of taking on a puppy. One of your first puppies was a notional and preternaturally bright blue tick hound. Indeed, her son, whom you named Edward Bear, graced you with a life that shone with writing-related metaphor from which you to this present moment draw insight.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Your most recent puppy, a feisty mix of Australian Cattle dog and Australian shepherd, still appears to you in dream and memory, bestowing gift and insight.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Another parallel go go along with your writing experiences resides in the formal education you got in institutions and the education you got in used bookstores, carousing with writers, and working your way through untold thousands of pages wrenched from your typewriter, balled into wads, tossed toward some waste receptical.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">All the while, you were moving away from seriousness.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-86716482738629322522022-02-07T17:13:00.001-08:002022-02-07T17:13:09.251-08:00Hauntings from a beloved old ghost<p><span style="font-size: large;">At an early point in your writing career, you were yanked out of a rent-paying, non-writing job by the actor, John Carroll, one of your early screen heroes, thanks to his role in the black-and-white film, <i>The Flying Tigers.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Working with and for John meant working for a man of many moods and facets. Most days of the week, you reported to his farmlike estate in the northwestern aspects of Los Angeles known as Chatsworth, where you were expected for breakfast, presided over by Carroll's towering, graceful mother, best described as a New Orleans version of the stately actress Maria Ouspenskaya.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Breakfasts often had grits and Creole sausages, but there were also platters of steaks, piles of beignets, and fluffy omelets, interrupted by two of the least disciplined French poodles you'd yet experienced in your mid twenties.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">More often than not, these breakfasts consisted of Carroll questioning you about things you'd learned at UCLA and instructing you in such matters as how to write a screenplay, how to direct a scene in a film, and how to write with conviction about things--such as exploration for oil in Texas and Oklahoma, or how to put out fires in oil wells--in which you had no interest.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">It was a rare breakfast when Carroll and you were the only two participants. You breakfasted numeroustimes with one of Carroll's closest friends, who happened tobe one of your mother's favorite actors, Grant Withers. On at least two occasions, you were asked to loan the shirt you were wearing to the actor Clark Gable because Gable had gotten blod spatters on his from a dynamic you were aware of repeating at least three times: When Carroll and Gable, frequent brothers of the carouse, reached a certain point, they often became combatants, twice in your sight in the driveway of the Carroll estate.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Never mind. When John's mother called us in for breakfast, the brotherly rivalry was ended. Either Carroll's mother or his ex-wife, Lucille, served a platter with warmed, moist washcloths.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Other frequent guests included a Major Baumgarten, who insisted on loaning you his Jaguar saloon, and the producer, Jed Harris, who often congratulated you on your choice of an employer and who told you on several occasions that John Carroll would have had a better career if he hadn's been so handsome.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Nothing you wrote while in Carroll's employ was ever produced, but as in so many previous and subsequent situations, production, publication, or their absence, didn't mean you were not learning things of immediate and eventual value.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">At one point where you began to suspect your time with Carroll was cominng to some sort of closure, he took you into his bedroom suite, gave you five or six suits he no longer wore, stuffed five hundred-dollar bills into your pocket and said, "Lad, I wish there were more." At this point, he made you swear you would never change your name, threatened to return from the dead if you did.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Years, but not too many, later, you were writing under the pseudonyms of Craig Barstow, Walter Feldspar, Adam Snavely, and Gail Spencer, an indication of your prolific output.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Earlier today, while waiting for responses to the edits by your editor at Penguin/Random on a title by Craig Barstow, you put some of the things you'd learned from John Carroll into play--you added a rascally character to the outline of yet another Craig Barstow western. The character is named Julian Lafaye, born in New Orleans, wishing to make a name for himself in the mineral rich northwestern portion of theNewMexico territory. The Lafaye character comes on stage first with the name Jake Carroll. The protagonist will discover the duplicity.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">For complete disclosure, John Carroll was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, as Julian Lafaye. For greater disclosure still, were a person to consult the book pages at the Amazon store, he'd find two Craig Barstow titles from 1960, one announced for March of this year (2022) and yet another for August of this very year.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">John has indeed returned to haunt you. Your payback? Bringing him on stage once again, recalling Jed Harris's observations and thus determined to rough him up a bit.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-25901976753901025432021-12-25T12:38:00.001-08:002021-12-25T12:38:19.763-08:00Some Notges on Inevitability<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"> Not too many writers or composers of whom you can admire for their ability to use the right word at the right time, the appropriate note in the immediate moment. Mark Twain and Willa Cather stand as your standards for that type of composition. Surely the late, lamented Joan Didion, the yet productive Deborah Eisenberg and Francine Prose define that category for you.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, and, more recently, Maurice Ravel, fill those musical needs. You can read the mentioned writers or listen to the musicians for the immaculate power of choking the next, inevitable moment in a composition, a fact that denders them beyond inventive or melodic. You read and listen for inevitability.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">When you have written something, you scurry back over it, looking for what Flaubert called "the right word," <i>le mot juste. </i></span></p><p><i><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">You owe your morning routine now to Francine Prose, who, via an interview, revealed to you her pleasure at the daily "Spelling Bee" feature in<i> The New York Times. </i>You are given seven letters, two of which are vowels, inclusive of a letter in the center, which may be either vowel of consonant. Your job is to pick as many words out of that seven-letter panoply as you can. Words must be at least tour letters long. No proper nouns. You earn points, one for a four-letter word, as many as fourteen for longer words.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">The "Spelling Bee" has for the moment eclipsed your interest in the crossword puzzle. There are hundreds, thousands of words sifting about in the unused spaces of your brain folds. When you attempt this fresh puzzle each day, you're reminded of the words you know and do not use unless they appeal to your non-rational sense of fit. Yes, of course you use some logic,some memory when you select a specific word, You rely on your individual sense rather than the dictionary's assigned priority of the meaning and use of a word.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">You're fondness for the music of Maurice Ravel comes from the beyond rational understanding of tonality, into the inevitability of how his phrases take you toward a celebration of emotions. You read and reread Twain and Cather, Eisenberg, Prose, Mansfield, beyond the story. You already know how the story ends. You reread for the feeling. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you listen to the first four segments of <i>Noble and Sentimental Waltzes </i>or <i>At the Tomb of Couperin</i> you have been taken on a journey that leaves you at the desired destination, charged, enthusedtransformed from your everyday self to your composing self, eager to chose words that will provide a pathway to inevitability.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-83559017043710910192021-11-26T18:37:00.004-08:002021-11-26T18:37:43.334-08:00A Promotion to the Bigger Sandbox<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">When you attended your favorite elementary school, you looked forward to the time when you would be shifted from the smaller play area and its smaller sandboxes to the play area on the east side of the main building. There awaited not slides not swings but large wooden packing crates in which the mere setting of a foot caused an immediate transformation and a major supplement to the imagination.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">You are of an age from whose heights you can see traces of evolution in the social and cultural forces that forged you or, better still, caused you to forge behaviors, attitudes, techniques.One such cultural force was the era of printed materials into which you were born, an era where the so-called "Pulp" magazines flourished.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Although you fancied comic books as a younger reader, this pulps lit up news stands and magazine racks with a dazzle of color and adventures opening the outskirts of such terrains as the Western, the mystery, the "other' worlds of science fiction, and those shrewd, beguiling outskirts of fantasy in which things were as they seemed until they became portals to other universes and rules of behavior.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Your early hopes for publication offered you realistic rates of payment, both financial and artistic terms. If you wrote well, you might be paid as much as a penny a word. Someone who read such a story might remember it with fondness for a few days after reading.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">A recent trip to the Amazon books page caused you to see one of the many effects of your previous age and your present one. There, along a book you'd written under the pseudonym of Craig Barstow back in those speculative, adventureous days of 1961, offered itself as an item for sale in the same panel as a book you wrote under the same pseudonym, which will be published in February of 2022. No typos there. A sixty-one year gap.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">The publisher for the first book has long since vanished from the list of active producers of novels in a publishing era that might well be called "the massmarket paperback era."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">This is not to say that your forthcoming novel will be in any form other than a massmarket paperback, but the former had a fifty-cent price while the latter lists for seven ninety-nine.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">The years have been good to the earlier work; it now lists for fourteen dollars (none of which you will see as a royalty or merest acknowledgment of your efforts).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Your takeaway from nostalgia after viewing the two titles in such proximity--at the time of writing the first, you were aware of the desire for a sufficient speediness to allow you to write enough words per month to pay for rent and groceries. Your rate of production has vastly declined because of your immediate goal now. Every word must earn its keep. Every scene must interest you, keep you alert, wondering what those individuals of your creation are up to. What will they do next, and how well will you be rewarded for the outcome of their interactions. No amount of money can pay for anything less.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">Thus have you moved from the small sandbox for writers to the larger one.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;">When you removed your shoes after a day in the small sandbox, your toes were covered with granules of sand. When you remove your shoes from a day of working at this stage of your life, your toes are covered with the granules of unfinished narrative.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-10717228443425485842021-10-16T10:12:00.000-07:002021-10-16T10:12:01.801-07:00Eine Kleine Nacht Music<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> In your long history of attempts to put words on the page with meaningful outcome, you've had numerous encounters with the necessary element in the publishing equation, the editor. One of the earliest editorial comments on your work you remember--after all these years--came after you'd turned in copy on schedule for a regular column in the now defunct <i>Citizen-News, </i>a newspaper circulated through the western segment of the Los Angeles of your upbringing.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The editorial comment: a diagonal line running through each of the four pages you submitted. No other words were necessary. You understood their meaning. The editor who drew these diagonals took added moments of his time to write these words "Too long. Too wordy. Cut."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between that editorial experience and the present moment in which you compose this, you have experienced more encounters with the editorial process than you can remember. Indeed, you cannot say except to make wild guesses about the numbers of essays, reviews, short stories, and novels you have published.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In the space between that early memory, you have another, at least five years later. Another kind editor at a now defunct publication in the so-called confessions magazine category wrote you a note accepting a "confessional" you wrote, telling you a check was enclosed in keeping with the five-cents-a-word pay rate. She went on to remind you that she'd rejected nearly four-fifths of the submissions you sent her because, among other things, they were too funny. She reminded you that most of her regular authors had a much higher rate of acceptance. "You don't write to confess," she wrote, "you write to laugh. Think how much happier you'd be if you wrote for publications where laughter had greater value than confession."</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Between that note and the most recent note from a personediting you, circumstances have changed. You've been editor in chief of five different book publishers, an executive editor of at least three literary journals, and even now are the poetry editor of a literary journal.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In more recent years, a collection of your short stories found its way into publication. In an exchange with the publisher, you gave reluctant agreement to the translation of the title used for this blog post into its English translation, "A Little Night Music." That story concerns a troubled musician in the midst of his discovery of love, appreciation, and acceptance. The location is quite specific, the bed of the person with whom he encounters these valuable conditions. In the background, he hears what at first sounds like a large, wounded animal. He later discovers the sound is his host's ex-husband, whom she had to rid herself because of, among other things, his tendency to violence. Hence the title, made even more ironic, to your sensitivity, with the Mozartian title and subsequent publication in German. You have a cultural DNA that renders you uncomfortable even at this remove when you hear German being spoken. All the more reason to use the Mozart title rather than the English title.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At the moment you write this, a novel is due in a matter of weeks, an editor has just sent you a setof page proofs for one last chance at changes or finding typos. Indeed, you found a typo in the spelling of the publisher's name. Your goal is to make the novel under way the best thing you've written. You have the equivalent of the most recent novel in page proofs as an example of something you hope to improve upon.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">All these years, your nature has never been one project at a time. Thus this project you work on in odd moments while reading final proof on a recent novel and working on what you hope to make the best outcome yet. This "other" project is a short story, "La Fie aux Cheval du Lin," clearly French, its title the exact title of the French composer, Claude Debussy. French is by no means whatsoever your native language or any language over which you have some control. To the extent that you might be able to play "Chopsticks" on a piano, you have some awareness of French words. So why not call the story "The Maid with the Flaxen Hair"? There is a maid with flaxen hair in the story. Her effect on the protagonist and hison her are heavy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You first became aware of the song when you were wildly in love with a maid with flaxen hair, hoped to marry her, hoped to exchange effects for the remainder of your lives. The song was introduced to you by a piano player who used the French title. You'd never heard of the title or the melody. Nevertheless, it evoked a vision of the maid with flaxen hair of whom you write here.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You wish this story to become the most insightful, evocative, and memorable of your long career. You are already at work, arguing with an unseen editor, determined to keep this title in French.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">All you have as a consequence of the seventy-odd years you've spent trying to get things down on the page in some meaningful way is the notion that each thing you attempt must be approached with the goal of making it your best yet.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You are fortunate in your literary agent; she is a gifted editor. You've only moments ago looked at her "suggestions" on the first five chapters of your work in progress. The editor who sent you page proofs of the last completed novel has had reasons to show exasperation with you--as well, you have reasons to show exasperation with some of her suggestions.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You still have, working on your behalf, over a span approximating seventy years, that generous man who drew diagonal lines--delete lines--through your copy.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">And you have yourself, with a greater sense of what to do and what not to do when you begin to compose.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-73724868090206210362021-09-23T12:17:00.001-07:002021-09-23T12:17:19.874-07:00Ave Atque Vale, Angela. Hardly Knew You<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Under ordinary circumstances, when you bring a newcharacter on stage for appearance in a novel or short story, you putter with your equivalent of a casting call, build an individual with traits and talents in some relationship to the story. Your first chore is to make sure there is some form of chemistry between that character and the protagonist.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Next step--you do a quick survey of individuals you've known in real life, whisk away some of that character's traits, shake the way a seasoned bartender shakes a cocktail, then you begin to write. As specific examples of this process at work, a former publisher for whom you worked and a former department head at a university you taught have turned into an aggregate of a quirky, self-involved sort of antagonist, someone the protagonist must suffer to some degree with each encounter.</span></p><p><br /></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Enter Angela Ayers, who came to life only two days ago as a means of bringing historical and attitudinal information on stage relative to a fictional town in New Mexico for your current project, <i>The Robber Barons. </i>When you began sketching a few notes for her, you realized she is entirelyfrom whole cloth. You don't know anyone from real life who in any way approximates her. You wish, in fact, that there were someone like her because you would immediately have a crush on her. That said, you put her to work. You were not surprised to discover, after you reviewed yesterday's pages, that your protagonist has a crush on her. He's not quite aware of the fact, but he surely will come to realize the chemistry of his attraction when he catches himself wondering if he can lure her from Albuquerque, where she runs a ladies' clothing emporium, to San Francisco, where her education, attitude, and intelligence could lead her to even greater levels of achievement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The thing he doesn't know about her yet--but will soon discover--is that her father was not adverse to robbing the occasional train in Texas or the Arizona Territory. You only discovered this a few days ago. Given her polar-but-largely-admiring regard for her father, Angela also tried her hand at holding up a train, found herself enjoying the experience to the point where she did it again, and yet again. Thus she has become an invention of such singular importance that an outcome for her you'd not considered will have to be put into play. She has to go, which is to say she needs to be killed off. You have no idea how this will come about, but you have forty or fifty thousand words of text in which to make your discovery.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">This represents the uncomfortable parallel between creating stories, with which you have some experience, and playing God, with which you have neither experience nor art. The closest you can approximate the former experience with the experiences of real life resides on the loves and losses you've experienced all these many years. You've lost grandparents, parents, friends, lovers, animals; you've lost a beloved sister and a beloved wife. One of the many reasons you're embarked on this book at all is to get a sense of a contemporary character, the 2020's, as it were, and his grandfather. You already know how your grandfather character is going to take the loss of Angela Ayers. You've been there, done that. Now, you get to write about it.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-78706096790510733562021-09-16T12:52:00.001-07:002021-09-16T12:52:42.758-07:00The Days of Wine, Roses, and Shot Sheriff's<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Your first formal step taken toward becoming a writer of fiction came when you signed up for the course in creative writing offered by one of the most popular teachers in the Fairfax High School (7850 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, CA) of your day. Herman Quick left you with a rousing number of memories. He'd just come off a successful diet to lose weight. Your experiences of him involve a thin, natty dresser. Indeed his trademark was the double-breasted suit.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">At Quick's suggestion, you bought--and to this day treasure--a book with the inspirational title, <i>How to Write Magazine Fiction. </i> Written by a man who worked both sides of the street. By one of his names, he was editor for a prestigious scholarly press. By another of his names, he indeed wrote for magazines.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">The advice from Herman Quick, "Shoot the sheriff in the first paragraph," had a broad acceptance in <i>How to Write Magazine Fiction</i> . You set forth at a blistering pace to shoot various sheriffs in numerous first paragraphs. Indeed,over seventy years later, here you are, in the midst of a two-book contract to deliver stories where there are sheriffs, lawmen, and private investigators such as operatives for the PinkertonAgency.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">You in fact are fresh from having attempted to purchase from Amazon's book division a book you acquired in your role as editor in 1965 and was published early the next year. The book, <i>The Pulp Jungle,</i>was a memoir of Frank Gruber's early years writing for magazines that got their generic name from the fact of their printing on a low-grade, acidy paper commonly referred to as pulp. The idea for this book came about when Gruber delivered to you a manuscript, <i>Brass Knuckles,</i> which was a collection of his crime stories featuring a character named Oliver Quade, also known as "The Human Encyclopedia." Somewhere in the editing process, you'd observed to Gruber that these reprinted stories, gathered here for the first time, merited an introduction.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">After you'd read the manuscript of the introduction for <i>Brass Knuckles, </i> you phoned Gruber, who, as you recall, was at a television studio, serving in his own editorial capacity as story editor of the ongoing TV series, <i>Tales of Wells Fargo. </i>"Just wanted to say," you said, "that this introduction could very well be expanded to, let's say fifty or sixty thousand words and, thus, your first book length work of nonfiction."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Gruber, being the man he was, said, "Not entirely true, kid." He called you kid. You were in fact thirty-four. At the perspective from which you now write, he was correct to call you kid. He reminded you that he'd published a biography of the iconic Western writer, Zane Gray, and had self-published a biography of Horatio Alger. "Bring you a copy of the Alger next time I see you," he said. "Autographed, of course." "Of course, you said." Then you went on to ask when your next visit would be.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">"Couple of weeks," he said. "Let's make it three." By which he meant that he'd bring in the manuscript for the source of these mamories, <i>The Pulp Jungle."</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">In actuality, he needed a month. He seemed to have forgotten one of the two mysteries a year he write for the then publishing house of Dodd, Mead.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Last time you looked, the going price for a copy of <i>The Pulp Jungle </i>was $435. Abe Books, this morning, offered a signed copy for $1, 250. They'd also get you connected with an unsigned copy of <i>Brass Knuckles </i>for $45.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Gruber was not your only connection with this kind of hardboiled writing. You also had dealings with his good chum, Steve Fisher, with a noted contemporary, Bill S. Ballinger, and such glorious others as Robert Turner and Day Keene, even to the point of publishing another memoir from Keene's and, for a time, your literary agent, Donald McCampbell, <i>Don't Step on it, It May Be a Writer.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Those were glorious days, times when you found yourself sitting across desks and tables with the daughter and son--in-law of another grand writer from those days, Frederic Schiller Faust, also known as Max Brand; with William F. Nolan, whom you single-handedly convinced to lower Logan's age from 30 to 21. </span> </p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-87702647712398499422021-08-14T13:27:00.000-07:002021-08-14T13:27:44.605-07:00Details, Devils, and Sundry<p> One of your favored concepts for your own composition, your teaching others to compose their own work, and your priorities for focus in your role of editor insists that the devil resides in details. You've evolved your consideration of this notion to include the absolute equivalency between details and characters in your own composition.</p><p>Thus not only do the characters themselves plan, flail about, scheme, lie, and indulge denial, there is a host of nouns and adjectives in orbit about them,offering distractions, life-saving vests, and solutions. More to the point, when you begin to edit your own work, the first things you look for are laggards, characters who serve no purpose and </p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-56346911017546479972021-07-26T11:26:00.004-07:002021-07-26T11:26:59.352-07:00Drama<p><span style="font-size: large;">Dramas begin as daydreams, morph into night dreams before they are written on some medium, written, revised, then edited and published, where they are read, reread, interpreted.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Story is the cognac of our emotions, distilled for us to sip on, one beat at a time in the snifter of our inner experience. Story has become a life we savor inwardly in place of the life we lead.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-89500783014107386082021-02-21T14:26:00.000-08:002021-02-21T14:26:00.696-08:00My Problems with Occam's Razor<p><i><span style="font-family: georgia;">Universes need not be unnecessarily expanded.</span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i>--William of Occam</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">When you find yourself in the middle of the many things you've already begun, outcomes and resolutions appear to have lit out for parts unknown, their baggage assembled in haste, tails tucked low on their haunches. This leaves you abandoned in the wake of why you begin projects in the first place.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">You've had a near lifetime to consider the mechanics of this condition. From time to time, answers appeared within your grasp. All projects and dreams have beginnings. Stories set off with some purpose, dreams begin for you with the awareness of a need. Over the years, many of your stories began with a character confronted with a choice or task. Your dreams often have you in a locale without shoes and thus your attempts to negotiate terrains not suited for bare feet. A variation of this theme has events of your dream dependent on your ability to find your car.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Sometimes days passed with no firm grasp on the moment of engagement, but when it came, some inner celebration within you spilled out into the atmosphere, where you could breathe it, see it, taste it. If the project showed signs of still greater intensity, you heard music in the same way you hear a soundtrack in a film. Wonder of wonder, the music you heard left you with the impression it, too, originated within your imagination, although in the past you've heard symphonies, ballet music, and chamber music compositions you were pleased to remember from your appreciation of music.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">One of tools you rely upon in your roles as writer, teacher, and editor takes its name from its Latin origin, in the middle of things, thus <i>In medias res. </i>The quickest way to apply the brakes to a story already set in motion may be found by providing physical and emotional descriptions before the dramatic action. Look for the place where the lead character arrives at a similar condition you noted to begin this essay. Forget about chronology. Look for the place where the protagonist may be seen in action, her attempts to cope in direct proportion for the need to produce a significant, appropriate outcome.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">In later years, you've warned students, editorial clients, and the aspect of you best seen as the writer: No stage directions. No description. No footnotes.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Your warning shifts to assurance with your observation that information and description are best served after the reader has enough information to read the situation ahead of the character, then begin to worry about it. So, okay, this Ishmael guy, he felt a bout of depression coming on, so he does the dramatic equivalent of slamming an Advil or two; he signs on a whaler, understands how a few months at sea will calm him. But wow, how's he gonna stay calm with a dude like that Ahab in charge?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">How, indeed?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">A possible plan: consider story as a party. Arrive late, leave early, with the explicit takeaway that those who longer overlong at parties often get caught up in the cleanup activities.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;">Perhaps you'll learn the proper rhythm that will produce the outcome you seek. Perhaps not. Perhaps your clutter can best move you along in the state of delight with each new beginning. Perhaps remember to look for later places to begin your narrative at revision time.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-3917359336001874622021-02-18T10:42:00.002-08:002021-02-18T10:42:55.802-08:00You, as the Most Pestiferous of All Your Creations<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> Three books survive the various moves during your life to date, a barmitzva gift from a forgotten donor, a Christmas gift from your sister, and yet another gift from her in response to her asking your wish for a birthday present.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The earliest of these, a Rand-McNally Atlas of the world, bears an inscription from 1941. Although uninscribed, the second book, an enormous doorstopper collection of novels, sketches, and observations from Mark Twain, dates from your thirteenth year, and the last, a collections of poems and translations by Ezra Pound, dates from the early 1950s.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Since you came into possession of these books, you moved from locations in Los Angeles, New Jersey, Masachussets, Rhode Island, and Florida. The circumstances of your last move, from 652 Hot Springs Road in that portion of Santa Barbara known as Montecito, to your present location, caused you to select one hundred titles from the five- to six-thousand accumulated by you and your late wife.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You've not made a true inventory, but your current book population exceeds fifteen hundred, a suggestion of how books come and go in your life but also the near miracle that you'd have the three survivors of your early years.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Let's get the Rand-McNally Atlas out of the way. Over the early years of your possession, you read it as you would a novel, using places, settings, and things you promised yourself to visit as focal points. The main value of the book now is sentimental. A gift from your beloved sister. Her handwritten inscription. If and when a time comes when you once again divest yourself of your books, you'll offer it to either of your nieces, convinced they'll accept it more to humor you than any wish to have this wannabe relic. Same kind of situation where your youngest niece and her husband took Rocky, your sister's dog, after your sister's death.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The other two books define your interests, your goals, large chunks of your eduction and attitudes; they made and continue to make contributions to your education, your perceptions of the worlds inside you and those in which you are a visitor. They represent what you wish to be, attempt to be, and use as a scale of equivalency against which you measure your progress as a person and a writer. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Against your memories of times where your behavior seems now to have lacked such qualities as restraint, humility, consideration, and empathy, your awareness of the immense talents and visions of Twain and Pound humbld you, led you toward paths of self-improvement and understanding. At no time have you considered yourself their equals.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Into this acquisition of books, role models, and influences, you added the work and careers of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John O'Hara, and Willa Cather, from which point you went on to find and become influenced by two flesh-and-blood mentors, the writer Rachel Maddux, and the actor Virginia Gilmore.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You were then officially a work in progress.</span></p><p><br /></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-18526383178367962082021-02-14T15:36:00.000-08:002021-02-14T15:36:14.389-08:00Role Model<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> When you take on a literary role model, whether you realize it or not, you are attempting to add tools to your toolkit. The tools belong to your role model. In all likelihood you had no real awareness of such tools until you saw your role model using them in some easy way that made you think you could use them.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Because of your reeading habits as a boy, you were all over the place with writers you sought out. The fact of Albert Payson Terhune's long list of publications lead you to follow him. You were not looking for tools to borrow. True, he wrote about collies, a breed somewhere toward the middle of your okay list. The best you could offer of your interest at the time had to do with his clear understanding of how to deploy event and intent. These many years later, you remember his dog characters but cannot bring to memory any human. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">James Fenimore Cooper wrote about scouts and adventures, often impacted by Indians. Thus you worked your way through him and his shadowy people, all of whom, in mitigation, had names you could recall.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Helpful librarians suggested other authors such as Joseph Altschuller and Howard Pease. You still have a visual memory of the librarian who told you, yes, He'd be good for you. He wrote boys adventure books.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">And there it was, your plight. You were a boy who read because he craved adventure, found non in the world about him, relied instead on that situation you now recognize as passive in its intrusiveness, not passive in its aggressiveness. You wanted story to fill the void. You wanted--ah, you could not describe what you wanted then. Your attempt to define it now may still want vital details. You wanted to eavesdrop on adventures others engaged.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Before long, you found on your own a writer who turned all that around, caused you to become aware of his incredible set of tools, caused you at one time in your life to apply as a correspondent to a newspaper he worked for, instilled in you the practice of copying out his sentences, looking for the products of the tools. Once, when you were in the midst of a class called wood shop, you became aware of the fact of wood having grain, of the rip and cross-cut saw to negotiate the grains of any given piece of wood. You began to pay attention to the merest scrap of wood that came your way, the better to detect its grain. You learned how to identify the blades of the hand saw in order to detect whether it ripped, or cut with the grain, or crossed against the grain.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You believe you've read most of the enormous output of this writer, knowing your opinion of his least effective work. You arrived at grudging agreement with another writer who wrote of how must American fiction begins with another of this writer's work. You had some moments of wishing to borrow tools from this second author, but your admiration and fandom had distinct boundaries.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Last year, you took the unthinkable step. You borrowed a number of this author's characters, mixing them freely with your own characters, your own narrative voice, your own vision, after all these years, of where you believe the writer should be in relation to story and character. Each time you read through work already set down, your first thought relative to the correctness of narrative tone and, in fact, each word, has to do with how much the text sounds like you rather than the resonant, anchored, purposeful sound of The Role Model.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The early years of your discovery of Mark Twain were magical. He had no choice in the matter. You wished to see as he saw, feel as he felt, write as he wrote. You wished to write like him. These later years, since your work began to find minor places of publication, you understood why he has been such a beacon for you. Perhaps if he were able to see some of your prose, read one of your more recent short stories, have a look at the opening pages of this latest venture in which a character of your own creation is hired by a principal character of his, Tom Sawyer, to find another and yet more enduring of Twain's characters, Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Twain might allow you were no slouch of a storyteller. With a twitch of his mustache, he could suggest with some sly innuendo that you might have put your time to better use, learned some trade where you had a chance at making a go of a career.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You can live with both possibilities. You would rather be no slouch than a wastrel of your apprentice time. As you race through the decades of your life, you think sometimes of the things you have produced, the things you have not produced, and the fact that you have kept faith with teacher by taking care of the tools you have borrowed from him, admired them, used them to attempt projects well beyond your ability to produce.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-64031656088864717882021-02-07T13:37:00.002-08:002021-02-07T13:37:14.530-08:00Crossfire<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> Each time you present yourself to compose fiction or personal narrative, you place yourself in the uneasy terrain between opposing forces. You may indeed be taken down, either by an enemy or the more likely prospect of friendly fire.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You mean no harm, or so you say. You set forth to demonstrate or learn--or both. You have learned little at this point in you life, enough to keep you afloat and working. Your mot precious asset beyond life itself the curiosity that brings you to this unsettling, dangerous terrain. You are curious to see how products of your imagination will fare on stages designed in the trance-like states of your awareness.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Among the scant library of your knowledge, this slim volume, <i>Nature Abhors a Vacuum, Drama Detests Neutrality, </i>awaits your consultation, right next to <i>The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged. </i>Whomever your characters may represent, they should emerge as opponents in some contest of strategy: chess pieces, solid and striped billiard balls, Dorothy Gale and the Wicked Witch. There can be no outcome without conflict. You cannot hope to compose fiction from a safe remove. You must take the role of a trespasser, sooner or later.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When you compose fiction, your fulcrum is the truth each of your characters see. If you project characters whose moral compasses bear close relationship to yours, you will not have story. Perhaps you'll get some idiom of encouragement or acceptance, but your characters will not be able to withstand the inner and outer storms so necessary in memorable fiction. Your characters will see acceptance and rejection as conditions they dare not confront.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">When you compose your own history, you are trimming and cutting Reality as you saw it; you are casting yourself as a protagonist or antagonist in a combat where you have the power to alter meaning and outcome. If your dramatic self requires deeper, more significant events, why of course, you produce them. If your dramatic self despairs of outcome, you shift your narrative and your tone to living for the moment rather than for achievement.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Fiction and life translate best through action verbs. The basic pulse of each is the stimulus and its response, often referred to as the beat. The best days of writing come when you set forth enough stimulus to cause an avalanche, from which you run to protect yourself from being buried.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Then you dust yourself off, get such sleep and coffee as you can, then return to investigate the mess you have caused.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-11668160049382717382021-02-06T14:49:00.002-08:002021-02-06T14:49:36.050-08:00Triangulation<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> Your memory of personal events and of facts has served you as a basic tool kit. Without intending pun, you can't remember when you first became aware of this relationship, nor, until you were well along to senior citizen status did you identify the process you used to make the association. You remember events in your own life. You remember facts you gathered from reading or direct association with living sources. You remember times when you invented sources more often than not for the purpose of establishing your reliability and correctness. This includes inventing facts you hoped to be true in mitigation of the feelings caused by the inner burrow of uncertainty. So yes, you invented facts to help you maintain and contain certainty. When you were much younger than you were now, certainty mattered in different ways than it does now.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You quite liked the authority of having facts and confident assertions. You relished opportunities where you could demonstrate your facts and assertions. Some years--but not too many--later, you realized this preoccupation could make you appear a smartass. In near synchronicity to your awareness of yourself as a smartass, you began to question the accuracy of the facts and opinions of others. Part of the stimulus for this growth came from the childhood experiences related to being born into moderate affluence in Los Angeles, moving through financial necessity to the east, then New England, then southeast Florida. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Your then awareness of an outer condition presented to you as The Civil War served as a trigger to your broader overview. Smarting from a scathing reminder from a teacher in Florida that Civil War didn't count as a correct answer and, rather, that The War of Northern Aggression did, you were quick to discover that the authors of the text book in which such distinctions appeared listed their associations with universities located in the South.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Not many years later, you understood how you'd graduated from Smartass to Pedant.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Later still, you were enrolled in a state university where male students had reserve officer training corps classes mandated as a requirement for graduation. Your active dislike for ROTC caused you to perform poorly enough that you had to repeat the agony. Nevertheless, the pain and humiliation--"You're kidding, right? Nobody flunks ROTC."--brought you in contact with one class in which you excelled because you learned not only how to value and read maps but, through a process called triangulation, use locations known to you in order to locate unknown places. Triangulation gave you an opportunity to use what you knew to help approximate what you did not know.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Some years later, when you worked as an editor, you acquired the work of a Canadian author who'd spent time in England, looking, you later learned, for English quirks and traits he could use in characters as a way of conveying his own vision of the English. When you spoke of the matter, he'd hum several bars of a song, "Winchester Cathedral," before he lapsed into his set piece about how the song served to illustrate the inevitability of English quirky behavior.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">With that paragraph, you supplied a portion of the triangulation process by which you found yourself in Winchester Cathedral, about to give a lecture on a novel, <i>The Tower, </i>that dealt with the construction of a cathedral such as the one in Winchester. In addition, you were cautioned, "Mind, you're standing on Jane Austen." You use techniques of triangulation to describe how you came to be in that place on that particular day, standing on the burial site of a favored author. Yet another aspect of those events would return to haunt you, much as the lyrics of the sone, "Winchester Cathedral," Perhaps a year later, you were in a Santa Barbara Starbucks. When the barista handed you your venti latte, she said, "I so enjoyed your lecture on <i>The Tower."</i></span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Not finished yet. You've worked with the individual who cautioned you about stepping on Ms. Austen. He's a prolific author, a major archaeologist. From him and his observations, you were triangulated back to the historical if not prehistorical past, realizing how those worthies used their powers of observation, memory, and prodding questions to navigate the uncertain waters of survival and sustainability. From this same author, you learned via triangulation how the ancients function and, now that you're into it, to look back at a past where you can't asked Siri to do your research for you.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-58735612497852831942021-02-05T10:48:00.000-08:002021-02-05T10:48:52.854-08:00An Infinity of Pages<p><span style="font-size: large;"> You have spent much of your life as an intern, student, or apprentice to the condition of writer, content with the simple truth of the maxim wherein brevity is the soul of wit. At your present age, you have even less reason to doubt the truth of that equation, although you do recall times in your apprenticeship where your goal was length, a condition that has more to do with humor than wit.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">During those tumultuous years, length signified seriousness of intent. The longer the work, the more serious it would become, thanks to your belief that length meant more themes. What great mischief lay behind the logic of that assumption. </span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Much of your apprenticeship had to do with removing length. Those extra clauses and phrases disguised the thematic material you'd hoped to introduce but, found lacking, substituted the occasional adjective, adverb, or even more tortuous diversion.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">All about you, voices clamored for you to get serious. In desperation, you moved to length, vocabulary, and literary allusion, thus began your true apprenticeship. You needed to organize search-and-destroy missions to detect and deal with length, vocabulary, and literary allusion.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Old habits die hard. Length, vocabulary, and literary allusion have ways of convincing you they belong in your lines and paragraphs. Years spent editing the work of others taught you how devious a thing seriousness can become.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Yesterday, you used the Adobe Sign application to put your signature on an agreement form that bore the logo of Penguin/Random House. You might call this an accomplishment, You might even regard it as a result of the seriousness of your intent to advance in your lifelong apprenticeship. This would not have happened had you not, over the years since you began, produced an infinity of pages which you then probed for length, vocabulary, and literary allusion.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">The takeaway truth for today: Better to sign such agreements for work you have already completed rather than those you have barely begun.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-48655327785800480452020-12-17T12:44:00.000-08:002020-12-17T12:44:18.658-08:00The Writer as Bouncer<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> Showing up for work as a writer, you face a range of possibilities, which include being stopped at the door by a burly, unfriendly presence who questions your credentials, the bouncer. Of course the bouncer is you, with all your previous memories of the hours of practice, study, and thought involved in causing you to think you could work as a writer.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Never mind that you have found other aspects of work, things you never saw yourself doing under any circumstances, most of all because you had no wish to do anything but write. Forget entirely the fact that both these other things of work came your way because you were at various times in your life able to finish written pieces, send them out for publication or production/performance.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">The thing standing in your way at such moments is that lovely combination of self-status, enthusiasm, and having been sold the literary equivalent of the Brooklyn Bridge by that shameless con artist aspect of yourself, your imagination.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Some mornings, you duck under the restraining rope, arrive early, scarcely a sip of coffee down your parched throat, all eager to pick up where you left off. Other mornings, although less sanguine, you are curious to see how well the things you were up to yesterday have held out.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Yet other mornings, you've resolved through degrees of sleep and sleeplessness to bounce the totality of work done on the project to date, certain you had not got its intent in ways that you could live with.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">In ideal worlds, worlds you do not write about, you would simply enjoy the last sip of coffee, brush croissant crumbs from your chest, then stride either to your computer or that place where you store your fountain pens, chose a tool, then begin to compose. You do not write about such worlds in full awareness that neither they nor the worlds you write about exist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">At one point in your early years, you could not wait to get to work, the better to describe every notion and idea that ran through your body like a leg cramp. Time has provided you with ways of stopping most of these cramps in their tracks. Time has also provided you with the avuncular advice whispered into your ear that the sort of writing to which you aspire has nothing whatsoever to do with description, everything to do with the evocation of cramps, pangs, temblors,and other mischiefs running through the atmosphere whenever two or more persons gather in the presumptive agenda of purpose.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">One individual, whomever she or height be, may well be subject to all these mercurial passions and sea change tides, but one person alone is not enough. There must be more at hand to compound the mischief.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Thus your awareness that you write about mischief, in which you must immerse yourself before you can stride past the Bouncer who sits at your seat before the computer, or who occupies the chair next to the writing surface where your fountain pens await.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-13493311214853843932020-12-16T11:39:00.000-08:002020-12-16T11:39:24.824-08:00Journeyman<p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;"> Whether awake or asleep, you appear as a dithering protagonist on a journey. The journey often has to do with arrival at a particular place to perform a particular task. In either state, wakened or asleep, you are often made aware that you are incapible of performing the designated task. (In one particular dream, your task was to perform the soloist guitar part of Rodrigo's <i>Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra.</i> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Nevertheless, there you stood, the orchestra behind you, the conductor before you, nodding your entry cue at you. And so you did. At least, you heard the opening guitar theme. But the entire concept so boggled you that you soon awoke, happy in the sense of "hearing" music you admire, relieved you did not have to perform it.)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Other aspects of the journey involve tracking down--tracing--information or understanding, bringing it from either the wakened or dream state to the contrary state. You bring parents, a sibling, a wife, or friends from the remove of death to the dream state, wherein you interact or watch them at some purposeful movement. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You visit a thrive of animal friends, thrilled once again to be in their presence, where you experience that remarkable sense of connection, the certainty of you knowing their quirks and moods, of theirs in the bonds of companionship. Every bit as splendid to have a dog napping nearby while you wrote as to be out on some seaside or mountain or even neighborhood jaunt. To have a cat with you in dream state triggers the sense of adventure to come.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">Wakened experiences often thrust you into that in-between state where you are writing, arranging words, details, consequences. No telling how and when that state will occur--sometimes in the midst of sleep, wherein situations and invented personages will push the dream visions off stage, insinuate themselves for as many "takes" or scenes as necessary in order to get the overall movementback into play.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: medium;">You are of an age now where there is scarcely any detail that goes off by itself, a lonely outcast on the playground where others play. And yet perhaps this was always the case, but it has taken you this long to recognize it.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-87176252198260365162020-10-30T14:40:00.000-07:002020-10-30T14:40:05.603-07:00Notes on Becoming a Penguin/Random Author<p><span style="font-size: large;"> Some years back, let's say as many years back as fifty, you embarked on an approach at making your living from writing for the expanding massmarket phenomenon known as the paperback novel. You had no thought whatsoever of becoming an editor, taking a paycheck from a publisher. Nor did you consider teaching as an income stream.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In consequence, you were often forced to some of the jobs associated with the starting years of the freelance writer. You variously worked at a parking lot, prepared moribund restaurants for auction, walked dogs, shelved books at a library, wrote screen tests for an aging actor, wrote scenes for LA-area tv shows including a daily equivalent of a concept that eventually became "Laugh-In."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Because of a pal who was able to support himself by writing a novel a month, you developed the discipline of producing pages, daily. Some of these pages were published as written by you, others via a number of pseudonyms, two of which have relevancy here: Craig Barstow and Walt Feldspar. Both these aspects of yourself wrote Westerns, novels taking place in the American West from about 1870 to 1900.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Your current literary agent knew that about you. She also knew an editor from her own days as editor who was looking for titles for a line of Western novels. She also had a client who expressed a wish to write Westerns but wasn't sure how to proceed. Thus the fateful phone call from your agent, asking you to adlib an acceptable outline sketch for a Western novel.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">In your earlier writing years, you recognized a significant gap in your ability to tell a story. Plot. You had pretty good characters, reasonable dialogue, narrative that took editors beyond your plotting ability. But a noticeable, even remarkable absence of plotting tools.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Thus you employed two examples of plot, found in short stories of writers not at all like one another, Dashiell Hammett and James Joyce. You reduced the plot beats of Hammett's story, "The Gutting of Cofingal," and Joyce's story, "The Dead," to role models you've more or less consulted each time you begin a new project.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">You consulted the Hammett when questioned by your agent, who interrupted you from time to time to record your turns of event, seemingly improvised. Her plan was to show your plot design to her client by way of inspiring him. Inspire, it did, but not to the desired effect. The client, whom you do not know, was not successful in impressing the editor at Penguin/Random.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">At three this morning, you were up to pee, awake enough to consider adding a few hundred steps to your daily requirement, sufficient reason to detach your cell phone from the charger and bring it along with you to record your progress.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Through this seeming ramble of paragraphs, you learned at three this morning that your agent, so impressed with your improvised scenario that she submitted it as well as the outline of her other client.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Thus you learned of the Penguin Random editor's approval of your outline.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: large;">Your waist and shoe size have not changed since those days you wrote as Craig Barstow. Thus Craig Barstow rides again, with a hitch up to the saddle from Dashiell Hammett.</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-72182642636300186232020-08-22T17:00:00.000-07:002020-08-22T17:00:18.688-07:00In, or How to Get in<p><span style="font-size: x-large;"> Still savoring the end of a short story from a book by an author you never knew existed before. Then the voice comes, whispers to you a revise of the first line of a scene you've been working on in a venture you've called "Double Standard."</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span></span></span></p><a name='more'></a><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span><!--more--></span>When you listen to the voice, two things happen: You realize that new line takes you to the place you want to be; you're right in. You don't need the edge of a debit card to work up the line of cocaine, You've already rolled up and snorted. Sometimes you need hours, days to get to that place, thus the metaphor about being in like the first blast. Long, long time since you did cocaine. You don't do it now. Don't have to as opposed to shouldn't.</span><p></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">Second thing that happens, you're slammed back nearly sixty years to the first time Rachel asked you, "Do you hear voices?" She asked you to find out if you heard voices or saw the characters in your story doing things. Huh, you said at the time, but later that night you began listening for voices when you wrote and soon enough, to your relief, you began to hear them.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">So here you are, well along in the years since Rachel asked you that, but with some regularrity, you hear her voice, rasped over by her cigarettes, asking you if you hear voices. Sometimes when you have trouble getting in, you think back on that moment to get the equivalent.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">In times between then and now, you did indeed try cocaine. Since that was not always easy for you to come by or you were not sophisticated enough to find ways to get it, much less determine how many times it had been diluted with more innocent white stuff, you chose booze and pot. Took maybe five years to see how each of those was a distraction rather than an enhancement.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">The important thing was to learn your way to "in," being an observer while the characters paraded about you with their agendas and difficulties. Like reading some of Rachel's stories. Like reading the diary she wrote while writing her first novella, "Turnip's Blood," and the early drafts of <i>The Green Kingdom.</i></span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">Of course you remember her. She was your first mentor, the first to ask you if you heard voices.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: x-large;">When you got around to telling her you heard then, she said "I thought so."</span></p><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-5650877356881087552020-01-16T12:49:00.000-08:002020-01-16T12:49:40.159-08:00AFTERTASTE AGENDA<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">AFTERTASTE</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A quality present in the ending of a scene, chapter, entire novel, entire short story. A dramatic itch awaiting a scratch.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The quality manifests itself in dramatic emotions like question, interest, sadness, reconciliation, grief, sorrow, surprise; sometimes aftertaste from a particular scene evokes a mashup of one or more of these feelings.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Consider aftertaste as the writer's reward to the characters and readers for staying the course of the narrative. If the reader comes away from reading a scene with no feelings about it, the entire scene falls into question. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b>NB: </b>There is no room for neutrality in fiction. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For the scene to earn its place, it must leave at least the aftertaste in the reader of wonderment at what will come next, to which character, and how.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">AGENDA</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The governing force that drives every character in every story.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Agenda represents what the character wants, becomes the armature about which the other traits of the character winds. Think Scarlett O'Hara in Margaret Mitchell's <i>Gone with the Wind,</i> then consider her every action in that narrative.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Agenda tells the character how to behave, sometimes in ways not yet clear to the character. The behavior alerts other characters--and the reader--to expectations and suspicions about future activity.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">See agenda as the rabbit hole into which the lead characters tumble, as Alice did in her trip to Wonderland. Consider Macbeth in the opening scenes of the play named after him, ambitions covered by what he assumed to be his agenda of loyalty to King Duncan, then read on to see what happens after he got home to discuss his recent promotion with his wife.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Characters who don't want anything don't belong in a story. Even nameless characters have agendas. The crosswalk guard who delays the protagonist wants to get her charges, the school kids, across the street. The pizza delivery person wants a tip. No matter if they have no lines of dialogue; their behavior reveals their agenda, offers the writer the physical vocabulary and narrative tools to portray them.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Agendas in characters may be obvious or hidden, nevertheless they reside in what and how the character acts, thinks, and says.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-16094648410632549122020-01-15T15:51:00.003-08:002020-01-15T15:51:57.682-08:00ADVERSARY<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">ADVERSARY</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">All stories require adversaries in one form or another. The adversary is an individual or group whose interests conflict with those of the principal characters for whatever reason. These individuals often appear more likable than the principal character. No matter; the reader soon learns how these individuals will work tirelessly to prevent the principals from achieving their goals. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Adversaries often take the form of circumstance, conditions, and conventions, thus aged adults in a youth-oriented culture (or the reverse spin), women with the temerity to run for office in a male-dominated society, any system, whether social/cultural, political, religious, which the principal characters of a narrative believe cannot be beaten.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Adversaries bear close relationship to antagonists and obstacles. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">If you do not have one in your narrative, you do not yet have a story.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-63501641706665236872020-01-14T09:17:00.000-08:002020-01-14T09:17:58.727-08:00Accelerant<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">ACCELERANT</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A useful loan from firefighters, where an accelerant adds momentum and direction to a fire already in progress. Think of story as a considerable force, already in progress, then look for a potential fuel to enhance it. Characters such as Iago, in Shakespeare's <i>Othello, </i>Milo Minderbinder, in Joseph Heller's <i>Catch-22,</i> and Rebeca Sharp in William M. Thackeray's <i>Vanity Fair</i> accelerate the forces of impending mischief in their respective narratives. By its inherent, striated nature, social class offers the fiction writer opportunities to add momentum to narrative. Many of Thomas Hardy's novels use social class and its conventions to force characters to even more intense behavior. Hardy's <i>Tess of the Durbervilles</i> provides a significant example of accelerated dramatic force. <i>Jude the Obscure </i>emphasizes the potential for evoking forces that prevent a character from achieving a stated goal.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Settings and scenery offer yet additional chances for acceleration of narrative. Consider the details of Pip's life when he lives with his sister and brother-in-law in Charles Dickens's <i>Great Expectations.</i> Compare them with the surroundings Pip encounters on his visit to the estate of Miss Faversham. For an instructive treatise on how the details of setting and scenery provide accelerant, consult Zadie Smith's <i>White Teeth.</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">HINT: Let no character or character's agenda, no locale or object enter a narrative without a demonstrable potential for service as an accelerant.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-62156994431238621422020-01-13T12:57:00.003-08:002020-01-13T12:57:43.546-08:00ACTION, Revised EditionSo much in story depends on action, the movements between characters and, in many cases, the movements between the various aspects of a single character. Appropriate for the Revised Edition of <i>The Fiction Writer's Handbook </i>to begin with:<br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">ACTION</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Story begins with action. Someone in the present moment does something or is done to. The protagonist acts or is acted upon.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Shakespeare knew this for a certainty in the early 1590's. Romeo crashed a party for the daughter of the sworn enemies of his family. Primary action. Of course you have only to look at the first meeting between Romeo and Juliette. Proof of the pudding for how much this first action-reaction sequence mattered to Shakespeare; he shifted the narrative for their first exchange from his customary blank verse to a perfect (Shakespearean) sonnet.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In <i>The Dublin Murders, </i>a 2020 televised mash up of two early novels by the American-Irish writer, Tana French, a detective is sent to investigate the murder of a young girl in the same locale where he was a victim as a youngster.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Story begins when readers are then motivated to await the consequences of actions.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">To put a fine point on the matter, consider the process known as inertia. A body in motion tends to stay in motion while a body at rest continues its snooze. Each state is vulnerable to force, itself the personification of action.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">When motion stops, story comes to a halt, takes on dramatic qualities such as introspection, recollection of past actions, and description, all associated with inaction. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">These qualities must earn their keep if they enter the narrative.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">HINT: Remember inertia. Readers have greater motivation to continue reading when the characters stay active.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7916332485223671615.post-10950671742777075062020-01-11T11:41:00.001-08:002020-01-11T11:41:05.673-08:00The Itch in the Publisher's Voice<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The moment your body sends you an urgent itch message from some outpost of anatomy, a portion of your awareness goes to work forming a scratch response. Even if the offending itch flares up in the middle of your back under a layer of tee-shirt, sweater, and jacket, awareness begins to assess damage control, sends you an available source to defuse the itch.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">You may have to contort to reach the itch site, seek out a tree trunk, door frame, or other convenient remedy, whereupon you heave yourself against the trunk or door frame for some significant rubbing. Sometimes there may be a person to whom you can state your urgent plea. "Please. My back. Scratch."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The moment your body sends you an urgent story message from some outpost of your imagination, a response similar to itch awareness broadcasts itself through your sensitivities. In notable similarity to the itch message, the story instinct wants to be dealt with, scratched, as it were, rendered under some kind of control.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Unlike the itch, which may be scratched in a matter of moments, the story notion takes on the presence of a pestering insect or a hungry mosquito. You will need some time--always more time than you at first allot--to scratch enough to restore your previous comfort.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Itches and stories pester you away from your more benign self. You are in effect practicing mindfulness on one or two story itches from years in the past.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"Time," a publisher says in a text.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Ah, you think. Time for a royalty statement.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">"That, too," the publisher says. "Time also for a revised edition."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Publishers seldom, if ever, want revisions on published works of fiction. You have published a work of nonfiction and another of fiction with this publisher. There is no need for him to tell you he wants the revision on the work of nonfiction.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Thus early in the new year, not yet midway through January, while you have only a day ago scratched a short story itch to your satisfaction and have only the continuing buzz of a novel you are swatting at, another itch sends a scratch me message. You know for certain that this itch will require at least the better part of the coming year.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The first thing you will need to scratch this itch is the voice, the narrative tone in which this version will be told. This means you must do something you have not done for much of your writing life--you must listen to the material--let it dictate how you will speak of it.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Let's say it's eleven p.m. or midnight. Your neighbor continues to host a loud party or play <i>Sacre du Printemps </i>at considerable volume. Do you appear at his door, knock, then politely inform him of the noise? Do you yell across the courtyard? How will you proceed?</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">For some days to come, your subsequent entries here will reflect you, listening to the material, then responding to its behavior.</span><div class="blogger-post-footer">Copyright © 2007 Shelly Lowenkopf</div>lowenkopfhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05198658136254028258noreply@blogger.com0