Brian Hodge

[What do you get when you cross a Storytellers Unplugged deadline with an exhausted writer who’s just finished a near-30,000-word novella that ran several thousand words more than expected? Today we get a redux: the very first column I did here, in June 2006, and which I recently tapped as supplemental material for a multipart series at my own blog.]

Several months ago, when the decade-old Hellnotes was still doing business as a weekly newsletter, before transmogrifying into a blog this May — transblogrifying, I suppose should be the new word — fellow contributor E.V.B. fired off a salvo in his monthly column that was aimed squarely between my eyes.

Well, no, it wasn’t. It would only feel that way if you were paranoid. E.V.B.’s “Writing 101” installments were full of excellent information and pointers for fledging writers, and often of value to experienced writers, too … and I just happen to run counter to one of them right down to the twisty double-helix of my being.

This particular installment dealt with writers going back to revise previously published work. E.V.B.’s position was unreservedly anti.* In a nutshell: If your work was good enough to have been published once already, leave well enough alone, get over yourself, and move along. There was a strong implication that any feeling a writer might harbor that he or she had grown in the interim and could do greater justice to the work the second time around is, well, kinda pretentious.

With apologies to none, I’ve always been one of those who refuse to leave things alone if time and greater objectivity conspire to make me see room for improvement.

Hang around long enough, and editors and publishers start to ask you for reprints. “Free money,” I’ve heard this called, because you’ve already done the work. All you have to do now is say, “Yes, thanks!”

If only it were that easy. As I’ve said elsewhere, “Whenever it’s time for a story to be collected, or reprinted in anything that comes much later than a year’s best roundup, I take another trip through it and almost invariably it sweats off a few more ounces. It serves the story well, I think, and keeps me from feeling as though it’s merely been dug out of mothballs.”

My tendency to tinker is much more prevalent when it comes to early work, and I would be surprised if that wasn’t the pattern with other chronic tweakers. Just as no one emerges from the womb fully formed, writers rarely start out with their voices fully manifested. After what must be a few million published words by now, I’m still working to refine mine.

One’s voice on the page is a product of evolution, honed through long use and critical self-appraisal. It often requires us to admit that while our works may have been good enough for somebody to publish, nevertheless, our ideas can be better and our ambitions bigger than our means of executing them.

Writers are not all of a single mind when it comes to post-pub revisions, nor should they be. If you feel that a story or a book should remain unchanged, forever reflecting the stage of development you were in at the time … well, to quote Yul Brynner, “So let it be written. So let it be done.” This is your Way, and it is faultless.

It just ain’t mine.

Around the time of E.V.B.’s column, I was spending a string of very late nights going through my 1996 novel Prototype and, I suppose, daring to imply that I really just might have grown as a writer.

Prototype was the last of four novels that came out of what I fondly remember as the Dell/Abyss years, and is slated for a hardcover edition this autumn. I’d salvaged the original computer files from a vintage floppy, which wasn’t entirely cooperative, and I needed to go through them to make sure nothing had gone horribly awry inside.

Offhand, I don’t recall if I started polishing the text on page 1 … but close enough. Reading this old work felt as though I were looking at a time capsule peppered with small but frequent sins that I’ve since tried harder not to commit. At least not as often. And a time or two, even I couldn’t figure out what the hell I’d been trying to say.

When the hardcover edition comes out, some readers will be reading it for the first time, and to them it will be entirely new. There’s no reason they shouldn’t have the best work I can deliver. I wrote the original text to the best of my ability at the time, but my best is better now.

Other readers will be returning to something they liked well enough to read again. They’ll find a novel that’s no different in content — their memories of it won’t be betrayed by characters doing things different this time around — but I hope they’re rewarded, even if subliminally, by a familiar novel that’s a bit more polished.

Here’s what it comes down to: The Dell/Abyss edition represented me in 1996. And the upcoming edition represents me now. One byline, but in a sense, two different writers.

There’s an old saying that you can’t step into the same river twice. As the water flows endlessly past, the familiar debris is swept away, fresh debris washes down from upstream, and all the while, the river has carved at its banks and resculpted the unseen silt and mud of its bed. It lives under constant renewal.

And so I have a hard time letting a work, especially an early one, wind back into print without wanting it to reflect something of what time and later work have done to whatever skills I may have. It’s no better a way than opting to not change what’s been set into type already, just a different one, coming from perhaps a different perspective on what one’s creative work represents: a static snapshot from the time and place it was written, or something drawn from a river.

It’s why Walt Whitman continued to update Leaves of Grass for nearly 40 years, why Stephen King redid the first book in his Dark Tower series, why chefs revise recipes until they’re perfect, why musicians remaster old recordings when new technology can make them sound truer to life, why George Lucas reworked the original Star Wars —

OK, bad example. But you get the idea.

Of course, we could’ve just scrapped every bit of the foregoing and defaulted to another old saying you may have heard, attributed variously to Jean Cocteau, Paul Valery, and Oscar Wilde, and whose subject alternates between art, poems, and books. But let’s take the broadest one possible:

“Art is never finished, it is merely abandoned.”

Or this one from Robert Cormier, which has its own appeal:

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.”

* While I wish I could print excerpts rather than summarize, the request to do so went unanswered.

***** That multipart series at my own blog that I mentioned? An epic reader-request fulfillment, it’s a comprehensive look at taking a work from its first draft through to the last, with all the revision stages in between I could think of. It wrapped up last week after four parts and a followup postscript, “A Fine Line Between Polish And Overkill.”

[Photo by Gonzo fan2007]

“Begin with the end in mind…”

Sound advice, that. Sound strategy. The rationale being that if you don’t know where you’re going, how in the name of Zeus can you be sure you’ll actually get there? Where, exactly? The end of an as-yet-unfinished novel comes to mind, for starters, but that’s just one entry on a really, really long list.

Then again, I can think of at least two pitfalls in clinging a tad too tenaciously to this approach:

(1) The grinding day-to-day reality of the distance in between. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge of covering all those points between A and Z. Or consumed by every grungy little details you think you need to get locked down before embarking, even though details keep expanding fractally.

Eventually, overwhelm = paralysis. While obsessive planning becomes an insidious form of procrastination. I confess to being a repeat offender on both counts.

(2) If your vision is continually locked on that spot 1000 yards ahead, you run the risk of falling on your face because you’ve tripped over what’s right in front of you.

The antidote? Begin with the end in mind, most definitely.

Then refocus.

The Power Of Three

It came a couple of days ago, like validation, in an e-mail newsletter from financial writer Ramit Sethi:

“Read what’s necessary to complete the next three steps in front of you, then take action.”

This was in the context of entrepreneurship … but then, most writers would do well to see themselves as creative entrepreneurs who inhabit a variety of roles, many of which would’ve been nonexistent for the authors they came of age reading.

And I say validation because this newsletter arrived within 24 hours after I’d completed the biggest and most involved — and most daunting — phase of giving my website a total overhaul and from-the-ground-up reconstruction.

Now, web designer is most assuredly not among my specialities or natural inclinations, but I had to take it up anyway. This meant doing a lot of things I’d never done before, which in turn meant finding out how all these things I’d never done before actually get done.

And the three-step limit was pretty much how I’d proceeded through the entire project.

The World’s Population Of Triplets Can’t Be Wrong

It might take a neuroscientist to explain why, but there’s just something about three that keeps things optimized.

Phone numbers come in three segments.

Traffic lights have three statuses.

Primitive peoples often don’t even see the point of higher sums. The Yanomamo, of the Amazon rain forest, conceptualize just three numbers: one, two, and more than two.

The most common form of the multivolume storyline is the trilogy.

The pinnacle of athletic endurance is the triathlon.

In August of last year, I even did a piece here called “The Three-Step Process To Surprising Your Readers.”

For whatever reason, three simply works to our advantage. Three is easy to grasp, yet still feels substantial. It’s more than a paltry one or two, less than an unwieldy four or five.

So your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to push this from theory into practice, like the creative entrepreneur you are.

What are the next three steps of, say, being your own webmaster?

The next three steps in implementing new ways of connecting with your readers?

Or starting your own blog?

Or finding out what you need to keep that research-intensive novel in motion?

Or, instead of exhaustingly outlining your novel to the very end, what’s going to happen in just the first three chapters? Then the next three after that?

Three steps: Name them. Define them. Own them.

Ready. Set. Go.

***** If you leave now, I’ll hurt myself. Your presence is cordially requested over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, where some of the stuff above gets a more thorough hashing-out in “A Better Way Of Managing Your Author Website.”

[Photo by Marina Montoya]

It happens to all of us: A work is rejected or critically thrashed on the grounds that the main character isn’t sympathetic enough. Maybe the entire disagreeable herd of them aren’t sympathetic enough.

Of course it’s a highly subjective complaint, and maybe even misses the mark for what makes a work compulsively readable. I’ll forever remember the way David J. Schow once broke it down: Never mind whether or not characters are sympathetic … the greater question is are they interesting?

The fact remains, though, that the sympathy factor remains important to a lot of people on both sides of the printing press.

And so remains this paradox: Often, the most interesting characters are the ones with the most flaws, the most disagreeable qualities. Sand down those rough edges and you’re likely to lose what makes them compelling.

You can get away with a lot, though, if you know how to package it.

We can overlook, forgive, or even empathize with just about any character flaw, no matter how bad it is or how deep it runs, as long as it’s clear that the character is genuinely resolute about getting better.

We’re Funny That Way

The reasons are obvious: We’re suckers for stories of redemption. We’re suckers for even the appearance of redemption.

It’s why whoremongering televangelist Jimmy Swaggart still had followers after he blubbered his way into legend, and why politicians and celebrities keep coming back from scandal after scandal after scandal.

There’s a reliable damage-control playbook that PR pros employ when their clients slip their leashes to reveal their true natures, and more often than not, the public buys it. Buys it eagerly. Because we like the story so much, with its stations of the cross — confession, contrition, resolution, redemption — that we’re willing to overlook the improbability of it being altogether true.

We like to see people fighting the good fight, and if the battleground lies within themselves, so much the better.

You can use that to make a lot of character flaws palatable. You can use that to hang onto a lot of character actions that, by any objective standard, spectacularly fail the sympathy test.

Doing It Right By Accident

The first time I really became consciously aware of the leeway this gives you was a few years ago, while taking a trip through my novel Prototype, to give it a bit of polish for a new edition. The central character, Clay Palmer, among other faults, can be cruelly blunt, doesn’t like to be touched, likes to play head games, is prone to violent outbursts, and has an unrelentingly cynical view of life.

This shouldn’t have worked, I thought at one point, seeing everything again through more objective eyes. Clay is not a likable character you’d choose to hang out with in the real world, although I daresay he’s an interesting character.

To his benefit, however, he also has a painful self-awareness that something is terribly wrong with him, and when he learns that he has an extremely rare chromosomal mutation, he wants help so desperately that his drive to get to the heart of what it all means forms the skeleton of the bulk of the novel.

Of all the considerable feedback I’ve gotten on Prototype, not one person has complained that the central character — who sometimes behaves abominably — isn’t sympathetic. To the contrary … I think he is, but it can only be his awareness that he’s broken and his resolve to triumph over it that make him so.

Otherwise, I’d’ve only created another sociopath.

Extreme Case Study: The Woodsman

Again: We can overlook, forgive, or even empathize with any character flaw, no matter how bad it is or how deep it runs, as long as it’s clear that the character is genuinely resolute about getting better…

Just about.

Are there flaws so deep, deeds so vile, there’s no salvation from them? It’s a good question. Effective storytelling can bring you over to nearly anyone’s side, but if you want to see this pushed about as far as it possibly can be, I can think of no better example than the 2004 film The Woodsman.

In it, Kevin Bacon plays Walter, a convicted pedophile paroled after a 12-year prison term. There’s no ambiguity here — he did it, and it’s not at all certain that he won’t do it again. The only landlord Walter could find who would rent to him puts him in an apartment that faces an elementary school. He’s wary, closed-off, harassed by a police detective, ostracized by most of his family, and lives in continual fear of being found out by his co-workers at a lumber yard.

Serves him right? There’s no excusing what he did, and no attempt to, but it’s hard not to feel something for him. Admittedly, though, it’s difficult to peg how much of this is in the story and how much lies in the goodwill that comes with the actor. Few actors of the last 30 years seem as inherently likable as Kevin Bacon.

This much is clear: Walter doesn’t want to lapse again, an internalized struggle that has two key externalizations (SPOILER ALERT!). The first is ongoing: his instant recognition of another predator hanging around the school, and his desire to stop him. The second is a pivotal encounter: a devastating conversation with a young girl he’s approached in a park, and his realization that, if he goes through with his intentions, he won’t be the first. He sees the damage done already, which short-circuits his plans, and the moral revulsion he feels allows the protective side of his nature to finally take over.

The Woodsman isn’t for everyone, but it does make for a superb study in how to find the humanity in a very difficult source.

By comparison, whatever potentially alienating traits your characters have will probably seem all the easier to deal with.

*****Got a few more minutes to kill? You’re invited over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where you can learn how to hack your productivity with the latest installment, “The 5-Second Trick To Writing More Each Week.”

Predictability seems to be about the worst charge that can be leveled at a storyteller. After plagiarism, that is. Plagiarism and predictability, the big two mortal sins.

It doesn’t matter what you’re writing. It can be the total antithesis of the kinds of tales that, by default, have ample unpredictability etched into their DNA: mystery, thriller, suspense, crime. You could instead be writing literary fiction, whatever that is. Humorous memoir. Fantasy. Doesn’t matter.

No matter what the label, its readers want you to be ahead of their guesses and suspicions as to where the path leads. They want to be surprised … and with some regularity, too.

Forget this and, predictably, scorn shall be heaped upon your head.

The Unwritten Contract

You won’t find it in any roster of civil statutes, but whenever someone picks up a book or a story, there’s an implicit contract between reader and writer. The bare-bones version goes something like this:

• You won’t bore me.
• You’ll either take me to places I’ve never been before, or to places that feel as familiar as where I grew up.
• Love ‘em or hate ‘em, your characters should make an impression on me.
• And whatever’s coming, I don’t want to see it coming. Not all the time, anyway, and not from a long way off.

There’s something in us that delights in being surprised. In the storytelling context, we looove having the rug yanked from beneath us, being blindsided and sucker-punched. It’s like a little pleasurable hit of a drug. The brain quivers, ecstatic, with a teeny squirt of dopamine and we’re ready for more.

From the writer’s perspective, this doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design. Lots of painstaking design.

It’s hardly an exhaustive list — in fact, I hope you’ll add to it — but here are 5 key places in most any storyline where unpredictability can be used to greatest effect:

• Most obviously, the ending
• Mobilizing events and their outcomes, or character reactions to them
• Hidden sides or buried traits of characters that suddenly break through
• Secrets that are deliberately withheld
• Novel uses of language

The Best Way To Keep Them Guessing? Keep Yourself Guessing

In wrangling these component parts to keep the reader off balance, first ideas nearly always deserve to be wadded up and slam-dunked into the trash. Second ideas too, a lot of the time, and maybe even third. Here’s why:

There’s a good chance the same thing has already occurred to your reader.

A good chance the same thing has already occurred to some lazy writer who’s already been this way before you.

A good chance the reader has, somewhere, already seen the same thing play out as you’ve initially imagined it.

Thus, there’s a good chance that if you’re in the habit of settling on the first thing that comes to mind, your reader will feel like she’s seen it all before.

Earliest ideas are usually the quickest and easiest, the ones within the shortest reach that anybody could grab. They’re the plain old rocks lying on the surface, rather than the valuable gemstones that take some digging to get to.

So get your fingernails dirty and dig deeper.

One Fundamental Way I Put This To Work

Later this month my fourth collection, Picking The Bones — fourteenth book overall — will be coming out. For the sales copy, I dipped back into the time capsule to crib from a review of my first collection, The Convulsion Factory, in which critic Stanley Wiater said: “Hodge is deadly serious about presenting a world where the worst punishment is the mere fact that you are aware you will probably live to see another day.”

Even now, I’ve yet to meet Stan Wiater, but when I first read that, I wanted to jump in my car and track him down and give him a great big hug. I still might do it. Here’s what I’d yell before getting a faceful of pepper spray: “Thank you for noticing!”

Because a lot of work and thought went into striving for that reaction.

Last year, on public radio, I heard a writer/teacher named Brenda Peterson discuss the classes she taught. Her students were frequently prone to the habit of killing off their main characters, so she would have to slap a moratorium on this for the rest of the semester:

Killing them off is too easy. Think of another ending.

The same thing had occurred to me years before, after encountering in others’ work that same default cop-out that so bedeviled Peterson. So, for me, this became, if not an unbendable rule, at least a governing policy:

If you’re in the center of my world, you’re safe, in a way. Hardly anybody dies here. But that comes with a catch: You may wish you had. You’re going to be confronted with some transformation or some revelation or some understanding of yourself that maybe you can handle, and maybe you can’t. Still, I’m giving you a fighting chance here.

It’s harder, yes. It takes adding more hamsters to the wheel in my head. But the result is work that’s more personalized, that’s unique in its own way, because I don’t have the exact same sensibilities as anyone else.

And neither do you.

4 Steps To Walking The Tightrope Of Unpredictability

Like anything, keeping your work unpredictable is a skill that can be honed, and it has component factors.

(1) Know yourself, be yourself. It bears repeating: Your sensibilities are as unique as your fingerprints. We all see the world a little differently. So stake your claim. Learn from the craft of others, by all means, but don’t try to be their clone. As Bruce Lee said, “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own.”

(2) Know what you’re really writing, and why. You shouldn’t be writing for no reason. You should be writing to communicate something. Understand what that is, and you’re that much closer to finding the sharpest, most surprising ways of expressing it.

(3) Hold nothing back. No half-measures, no timidity … that’s how you reach the turf that is uniquely yours. By its very nature, honesty is surprising. For a much greater focus on this, see “Leave It All On The Page.”

(4) Know your characters. I’ve always maintained that when you really know your characters, they end up doing half the work, just by being themselves and shaking off your efforts to treat them like paper dolls. And if they start surprising you, they’ll surprise your readers. Whenever I get to this state, it’s almost like taking dictation: “What’s everybody up to today? Really!?! OK, then, let’s roll.”

Now go and sin no more.

***** Done? So it ain’t so. You’re always welcome over at my own blog, Warrior Poet, which I’m finally getting synchronized with my entries here.

[Photo by Hector Sevillano]

Sometimes the most intimidating aspect of tackling a long project, like a novel, isn’t any one thing. It’s the whole thing. The entire monolithic beast. It’s a mountain, you’re at the bottom, and to plant your flag at the top means more climbing than you can possibly imagine.

The sight of it, the thought of it, is overwhelming.

But what about, say, that narrow little plateau just 10 feet up? Forget about looking any higher. Just the plateau. Can you imagine getting that far, at least?

If you can, then there’s hope.

Forgetting The Big Picture

Breaking down a ginormous task into smaller, more easily managed chunks is a basic tenet in the vast flood of project-management and self-development literature. It’s sometimes likened to eating a whale. In one bite? No can do. Filets? Now you’re getting somewhere.

Sorry, fellow cetacean lovers. It’s just a metaphor.

At some point, though, we need to cross over from the simple mechanics of re-organization into mindset. How we mentally frame and approach and see the big, snorting beast in front of us. Overwhelm, after all, is not a set of conditions. It’s an emotional reaction to them: fear and paralysis and a cry of “Where do I begin?”

Recalibrate your view of what lies ahead, and you can strategically forget about the big picture for as long as being myopic is in your best interests.

This shift in perspective is at the heart of what ultra-endurance athlete Stu Mittleman, in his book Slow Burn, says about marathons:

Our objective isn’t to run 26 miles. It’s to run one mile 26 times.

So what might this look like when applied to the page?

So glad you asked…

The Novel As Short Story Collection

When I was writing my first crime novel, Wild Horses, I soon fell into the habit of regarding each chapter as if it were a short story unto itself. Finish one, and the next chapter was just another short story that happened to be about the same characters. Finish them all, and it added up to a collection of stories that was more than the sum of its parts.

It was nothing of the kind, of course. None of the chapters could’ve been printed in standalone form and made much sense.

Ah, but for a time, in my head, short stories is exactly what they were … and in the making stage, the discovery stage, my head was the only theater that mattered.

Chunk by chunk, the usual loose, made-to-be-broken-whenever-convenient rules for stories applied:

• Each chapter had an arc — a definite beginning, middle, and end.
• I went into it with a clear idea of the ideal entry point, where it was going, and what it needed to accomplish in between.

And that’s about all, really.

It’s an approach I’ve used since then, and neglected as well, and overall I find that it keeps the work punchier, more focused, more directed.

That Goes For Nonfiction, Too

I’m under no illusions that I’ve made some arcane discovery. Still, the only other person I’ve encountered detailing a similar approach is Tim Ferriss, in, as of this writing, the most recent post at his blog.

He cops to a sense of overwhelm while writing his first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, and the saving grace inherent in downshifting his vision to the component level:

It changed only when I started viewing each chapter as a magazine article: strong enough to be a stand-alone piece, including a clear opening or “lede,” a clear middle with case studies, and a punctuated end with lessons learned.

From that mindset, a few trial runs, I developed a chapter template … I needed a repeatable process. To sit down to “write a book” was just too overwhelming, even with a table of contents as a blueprint.

Returning To The Big Picture

Will it work for every novel, every nonfiction book? Maybe. Maybe not. That’s up to you. Because it’s just a strategy — a means to an end, not the end itself. The beauty of it, though, is that it leaves no visible traces. The reader, seeing you on top of the mountain, doesn’t have to know how you got there, and probably won’t care.

All the reader really needs to know is this:

That you wrote the stories — the articles — the chapters — and eventually the book took care of itself.

***** Your next stop? Why not make it my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “To Produce & Protect: 5 Things That Creators Can Learn From IT Geeks” is gamely trying to hide its pocket protector.

[Photo by Casey Serin]

You’ve heard it all your life: You only get one chance to make a first impression. True enough in the flesh, but then again, there’s whatever people might have heard about you before they have a chance to shake your hand. What’s true in real life is also true on the page.

Learn to exploit that, and your characters can come alive before they ever set foot onstage.

The Weight Rankings Of Characters

Like boxers, characters come in different weight classes. There are flyweights who enter and exit in a single paragraph, and rarely even need a name. There are lightweights who may occupy just a scene or two. Middleweights who recur throughout the story, as secondary characters, and the main character heavyweights the story revolves around.

Then there are the super-heavyweights.

These are the characters who make the page tremble when they pass by. Who suck up the air in the room and exert their own force of gravity. The characters who make the most lasting impressions.

And, very often, they’re not the main character. Instead, whether friend, foe, or something in between, they’re there to impact the main character, for better or for worse; maybe change that person’s life and world forever.

Super-heavyweights nearly always arrive with more oomph when their arrival is anticipated.

It’s only logical that in whatever world you’re creating, such a person has long since earned a substantial reputation. Maybe multiple reputations, even conflicting and contradictory reputations.

So use them to pave the way.

Tell, Don’t Show

There’s a basic obstinacy in us as readers that resists being instructed, through flat narrative declaration, how to feel about someone.

A more or less omniscient view that informs us of a person’s sublime beauty, staggering intellect, legendary cruelty…? This is just hype. Shallow, lazy hype, and most of us are inured to it. Hype is for five-year-olds.

Instead of issuing the directives yourself, it will be infinitely more effective if you scoot your auctorial self out of the way and give the job to other characters. Let them do the talking, gossiping, and editorializing. Odds are, then we’ll happily buy whatever you’re selling.

Now, if what you want to convey is coming through a first-person point-of-view, that’s a little different. First-person POV implies a specific person’s outlook, knowledge, or opinion. That might work fine. Even so, the impact will still be magnified if the narrator has help.

In preparing the way for a super-heavyweight, here’s some of the ground they can cover:

• Larger-than-life deeds the SHW has done.
• Things the SHW has done to, for, or with the speaker or others.
• Dire warnings or positive expectations about the SHW.
• Anecdotes of how the SHW has reacted to adversity.
• Reactions to the mere mention of the SHW’s name.
• Rumors about the SHW.
• Things about the SHW that can’t possibly be true but people believe anyway.
• Things other people have done to, or because of, the SHW.
• Advice on how to interact with the SHW.

And so on. These can be positive or negative. If they clash, so much the better — the reader feels invited to make up his or her own mind.

Avoid generalities, for the most part. It’s the details that bring the lightning.

Case Study: The Silence of the Lambs

When I first saw the movie version of The Silence of the Lambs, I thought the introduction of Hannibal Lecter was one of the most effective character rollouts I’d ever seen. Film has sensory advantages the page doesn’t, but still, this is one movie that hews extremely close to its source material, and the tactics are essentially the same. It employs several of the above list.

True, for readers of Red Dragon, Thomas Harris’ first outing with Lecter, and for those who saw its film version, Manhunter, he’s already a singularly unforgettable monstrosity. But this matters less than you might think. Wisely, Lambs takes nothing for granted, and starts from a zero point.

The setup: FBI trainee Clarice Starling is being sent on a seemingly bureaucratic errand to deliver a questionnaire to Lecter in his asylum cell.

Lecter is talked about almost continuously for five-and-a-half minutes before he’s seen. Before we ever set eyes on him, we first see the apprehension, revulsion, and terrible awe with which everyone else regards him. We see his profound impact on people who are anything but lightweights themselves, and the way this sequence unfolds is deftly orchestrated:

1. First, a question dangled like a hook: “Do you spook easily, Starling?”
2. Then his nickname: Hannibal the Cannibal.
3. Orders to obtain even the most trivial minutiae about him, showing the intense curiosity the FBI’s behavioral unit has about him.
4. Warnings: “Be very careful … You’re to tell him nothing personal. Believe me, you don’t want Hannibal Lecter inside your head.”
5. Labeling, from a second source: “He’s a monster. A pure psychopath.”
6. Rigorous, almost paranoid procedures for dealing with him.
7. An excruciatingly detailed warning, the consequences of deviating from procedure: “When the nurse leaned over him, he did this to her.” Starling is shown a photo we never see. We only see her face as she looks at it. “The doctors managed to reset her jaw, more or less. Save one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.”
8. Warnings further reinforced by a third source.

By the time Starling reaches his cell, the sense is one of utter dread.

And in context, mission accomplished.

Latter Day Infantilism

From the time we’re babies awakening to the world around us, we watch other people for cues on how to react to things. The expression on the nearest adult’s face can tell us whether that tumble we just took is cause for laughing or crying.

We never really change.

So when you have characters who need to evoke a particularly strong reaction, first give them a reputation to live up to.

Then have them surpass it.

***** One more dance? You are invited over to my own blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Lessons In And Out Of The Arena: Spartacus: Blood And Sand (Season 1)” waits with arm extended.

If you were to start combing through the sound bites of current productivity wisdom, it probably wouldn’t take you long to come across a couple of the more oft-repeated nuggets. Without quoting anyone or any version in particular, they go more or less like this:

Specialize. Specialize specialize specialize. Narrow your focus and your activities with laser-like precision. Because success and achievement come not from the many, varied things you do, but because of all the things you’ve had the steel to peel away from yourself and leave behind.

And this:

If everybody else is caught up in doing something, that should be your cue to do the opposite.

You see how a case could be made that the one cancels the other out?

Now, I’m probably misconstruing the whole spirit of this hyperspecialization advocacy, and yes, it’s no doubt the proper road to take for some people.

For a writer, though, it sounds like death. Slow, suffocating death.

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Just to clarify: I’m all for relentlessly focused effort. I’m all for a laser-sighted, heat-seeking mission to accomplish a goal. All for sacrifice in the name of getting better.

But if all this is so unilaterally directed that one thing is all you know, all you’re passionate about, all you can talk about, then sorry … but sooner or later you’re going to inspire most everybody who doesn’t share your particular fervor to feign an excuse to disengage from the tedium of your company.

The call to hyperspecialization has its own version in the writing sphere:

Live at the desk. Learn to live at your desk.

As a battle cry, though, it just seems to land with a big, wet thud. While it may pay off short term, for the intermediate and long terms, it doesn’t actually sound much like being alive after all.

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I suspect that most of us who love language have certain words, certain phrases, the mere sight and sound of which ignite us to our core. It’s the way they look on the page, the way they feel on the tongue, the way they hang in the air like magic incantations … which, for those of us so affected, is exactly what they are. Because they light up the skies and make low-hanging fruit of distant stars.

Here’s one of mine:

Renaissance man.

Or, if you prefer the non-gender-biased alternate, polymath, although that just doesn’t have the same cachet. But. A rose by any other name, no?

Renaissance man…

The phrase is usually defined as someone with many talents or interests; one whose expertise ranges over lots of different areas. So dry, though. I’d rather dwell on what it might’ve looked like in action. Say, someone who spent the morning exploring the flora close to home; who opened a notebook and made sketches of leaves that would do justice to any botany textbook today; who came home to the clavichord and composed a pastorale inspired by the outing; who finished the afternoon perfecting fencing techniques and rounded out the evening with poetry. The next day, tending to business and investments.

Such well-rounded days flowered from the Renaissance conviction that there were no caps to limit human growth, and thus people were obligated to learn as much as possible, in as many areas as possible, and develop their potentials to the fullest extent they could.

As a model, a template to follow, this is endlessly inspiring and evocative to me.

It also seems like an ideal approach for a lifetime of writing. Because if your work is to live and breathe, it does so only because of the breath of life you’ve huffed into it. And while the desk may be where you work, it isn’t where you truly live.

At its best, the desk is just a place you visit during your travels, where you bring back the intangible treasures you’ve picked up along the way.

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This past August, an article in The New York Times book section took a 40-year look back at James Dickey’s novel, Deliverance. Here’s an excerpt sketching out the basis of the novel’s DNA, and how much it shared with its author:

Off the page he cultivated swaggering hobbies: archery, fishing, guitar, the banjo. Dickey began writing Deliverance in the early 1960s, basing the novel on canoe trips he’d taken with friends … His hobbies paid off: the prose about rivers, music and archery is acute. The ‘Dueling Banjos’ scene, made famous by the film, is just as good on the page. The narrator notes how the rural boy’s ‘fingers moved only slightly, about like those of a good typist; the music was just there.’

No one can say what Deliverance would’ve been like, if it would’ve had the same resonances, if James Dickey had not lived so many of its elements. No one can say whether the novel would’ve existed at all if he hadn’t. It might’ve. Jack London, remember, never made it anywhere close to Alaska.

Just the same, I’m glad James Dickey charted the course he did.

A wonderful thing is imagination, and empathy an invaluable virtue.

But there’s nothing quite like writing from within the heart of experience.

So the more you seek to connect with readers, then the more you owe it to them to live. To live, to learn, to aspire to dwarf sequoias with all you grow to be. To live with as little headroom as you can get away with.

Because the world needs those who’ve loved and lost, who’ve lusted and won, who have sown and reaped in a hundred fields, who have followed their bliss and dared to fall on their faces, who have yielded to temptation and prevailed against it, who’ve shrugged off the arrows in their backs, who have risked looking ridiculous in cultivating whatever abilities and compulsions they find inside themselves whether or not the engines of commerce tell them there’s any good use for it.

The engines of commerce may not need all that. But the world does.

And so do your readers.

Because, if nothing else, the tapestry it weaves eventually becomes the basis of wisdom.

And there’s never too much of that to go around.

***** It doesn’t have to end this way. You are discreetly invited over to my blog, Warrior Poet, where the latest, “Agree To Disagree: The Key To Constant Conflict, Part 2” is ready ‘n’ waiting.

[Painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Photographed by dbking]

Nearly all storytelling relies, at some point, on hitting the reader with something she hasn’t seen coming. Or thinks she hasn’t seen coming, but actually has, because you, the author, have prepared the way for it, then sprung it only after she’s forgotten about the groundwork you’ve painstakingly laid. Or never realized it was there in the first place.

Granted, some surprises really do come totally out of the wild blue. Some just need to, and work better that way. Sometimes life is delightfully, cruelly, random.

The others, though, the prepared surprises, nearly always seem more satisfying. Because when one is delivered well, it’s like a stealth puzzle piece clicking into place — “Ahhh, riiight, I forgot about that!” And most of us are hardwired for puzzles. As readers, as viewers, we love seeing them solved, love solving them ourselves.

But when you’re the one in control, you have to plant the right seeds, and — this is important — you have to disguise what you’re really up to. Maybe give the reader time to forget all about it, too.

To The Power Of 3

I’ve often seen such surprises pulled off — and done it myself — in a 3-step process. Which may sound formulaic, but it isn’t, because it can manifest in an infinite number of guises.

Step 1: Introduction Of The Key Element

Get it out in the open. Show it, talk about it, but above all, tie it into something immediate that makes it look as if it has relevance right then and there. If you don’t, it runs the risk of being too obvious, another of Chekhov’s guns hanging on the wall in Act One: Everybody will be expecting it to be fired by Act Three.

Better still if the weaving-in comes with emotional significance to the characters. This sells the sense of immediacy, and often makes the scene more memorable for later.

Step 2: The Reminder

Show it, talk about it, again. Preferably in a different context from the first time, but once more, it has to look free of ulterior motives. That the point is self-contained.

This is the bridge between Steps 1 and 3, a reinforcement of whatever you’ve put into play. Ideally, though, these first two appearances will be pulling double-duty, doing something in the moment that’s almost as important as what you have planned for later on … say, on the surface revealing something about your characters, while your delayed purpose lingers below, out of sight.

Step 3: The Payoff

Here’s where everything finally comes together. Either you’ve been subtle enough or buried the key element amid enough distractions to make the reader forget about it until its time comes … or everything you’ve laid it is now seen from a different perspective, a fresh context, a wider view.

And that’s it, the craft of surprise. Using something old in a brand new way.

It’s easy to describe, but easier still to point out in practice, so let’s take a peek at how this plays out in a couple of examples.

Case Study #1

In the movie version of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, the Power Of 3 is used to amp up and draw out suspense during the chaotic melee with orcs and their cave troll, in the Mines Of Moria. For several moments, we’re left thinking there’s no way Frodo could’ve survived being skewered by the cave troll’s giant spear.

But he did, of course, thanks to his shirt of mithril chainmail.

Step 1: Introduction

During their reunion at Rivendell, Frodo’s Uncle Bilbo gives him the mithril shirt, along with a sword (which slightly dilutes the impact a single gift would’ve had). “As light as a feather, and as hard as dragon’s scales,” he describes it. It’s an emotional scene, too. Bilbo is dealing with some heavy regrets over what his actions have led to, and in equipping Frodo for the journey, he’s not just investing in Frodo’s protection … he seems to be trying to make amends.

Step 2: Reminder

While the Fellowship hoofs it through the Mines Of Moria, we see the chasms glittering with mithril in its unmined state. Gandalf remarks that Bilbo once was given a shirt of mithril … a kingly gift, Gimli observes.

“I never told him,” Gandalf says, “but its worth was greater than the value of the Shire.”

That’s the really interesting part. We’re left wondering why, exactly, Gandalf withheld this information. For my money, it shows Gandalf’s protective nature, that he doesn’t want to introduce the corrupting influence of wealth into hobbit society … and maybe that he doesn’t entirely trust Bilbo to resist it. But we can only guess.

Step 3: Payoff

Frodo is skewered, but rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated. Open his shirt and … SURPRISE! The Reminder and the Payoff come surprisingly close together, but so much happens in those intervening minutes that most viewers completely forget about the shirt by the time it matters.

Case Study #2

In my crime novel Mad Dogs, I used the Power Of 3 to disguise the fact that I was bringing in a new character at a point when conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t: fairly close to the end. Her name is Petra Lanier, she’s a Hollywood makeup artist, and she plays a brief but vital role in preparing the main characters, actor Jamey Shepherd and career criminal Duncan MacGregor, for a climactic confrontation with someone who’s been busy stacking the odds against them.

The problem: Bringing in a pivotal new character this late would’ve come off too much like winging it … kind of like the cheeseball hero who, in a pinch, reveals that he just happens to have studied nuclear fusion during a semester at MIT. But there was absolutely no place to have brought Petra onstage any earlier.

There was still a way around this.

Step 1: Introduction

Petra was first brought up in conversation by Jamey’s fiancee, Samantha, in a heart-to-heart with a new friend, Dawn. It comes out that there was a never-acted-upon infatuation between Jamey and Petra in the past. The scene’s surface duty is to reveal Samantha’s insecurities about herself and her relationship with Jamey, and bond her with Dawn.

Step 2: Reminder

Petra comes up a second time in a conversation Jamey has with Duncan. This time you get the infatuation from Jamey’s perspective, and see that Samantha didn’t have nearly as much to worry about as she thought she did. It sheds light from another direction on the depth of Jamey’s love for and commitment to her.

And up to this point, it all just seems like a bit of she-said-he-said backstory, a potential fray in their emotional ties. Important, and valid, but hardly the only thing I’m up to.

Step 3: Payoff

When Petra finally gets her walk-on, she may not been seen before, but she’s certainly been a presence, the subject of a couple of heartfelt conversations. She has a unique enough name — this was no accident — that it’s likely to spark additional recognition. Her arrival isn’t a surprise the reader is likely to have seen coming, but under the circumstances it makes perfect, resourceful sense, and doesn’t come off like something I’ve whipped out in desperation to wiggle out of a corner I’ve painted myself into.

Ultimately, there are almost as many ways to surprise a reader as there are to tell a story. This is just one of them, but if you start looking for it, you probably won’t have to look very far.

The tripod, they say, is one of the most stable structures you can make.

***** Don’t stop now! If’n you please, swing over to my blog, Warrior Poet. The latest, the loud, true story of “The Chainsaw Massacre Of Focus: How To Creatively Cope When The World Won’t Stop Screaming In Your Ear.”