Jeff Mariotte

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

By Jeff Mariotte

You don’t have to have read many of my posts here at Storytellers Unplugged to know that I don’t believe writers should wait around for inspiration to strike. Regular keyboard time, daily if possible, exercises the writing muscles, and employing those muscles, through hard work, replaces inspiration. The daily “inspirations”—how should the plot proceed from this point? What will the characters say to each other? What am I really writing about?—reveal themselves through this effort.

I practice what I preach. My daily work schedule finds me at the keyboard from about 8:00-5:00, unless something (usually ranch chores) interferes. There’s always something to be written, even when, as right now, I don’t have any immediate novel deadlines looming. I’m committed to a short story, an original graphic novel, a long-deadline tie-in novel (the rarest kind), and I have a couple of original novel proposals in the works.

But that phrase at the top of the page, “Time to Write,” has a different meaning, and it’s more akin to inspiration than I usually accept. Anyone who’s written fiction knows that sitting down at the keyboard and typing is only part of the process. Before you get to that (even if you’re writing other things more or less simultaneously), you churn the story over and over in your head. You see scenes play out like movies in your brain. You hear snatches of dialogue, visualize the characters, learn about their lives. You feel the theme of the work, the deeper meaning, reach out toward you with tendrils of mist that dissipate when you grasp at them.

At some point—at least for me—all these images and smells and sounds coalesce into words, and it doesn’t matter if it isn’t working hours, or if I’ve been at the keyboard all day and want nothing less than to be away from it for a few hours, those words want to come out.

That’s when I know it’s time to begin a book…when I know that the time spent thinking about it in the car or the shower or the back pasture is paying off, and the thing is ready for me to be writing it instead of just dwelling on it.

After a couple of weeks working on an outline, that happened for me on Friday night, around 7:00. I was reading upstairs, and the words flowed into my brain, blocking out the ones on the page, and forced me down to the computer. When I’m really going on a project, I sometimes have to leave the computer on all night because I never know when I’ll be drawn to it, if only to delete a phrase and insert a better one, to add a few words, or to write an entire page or two. I’ve learned that it’s better to give in to these impulses than to try to remember the phrasing that inserted itself into my head the next morning. If it stinks, it can always be changed or erased, but if it slips away before it’s written down, it might not return.

Here’s what I wrote Friday night, edited a little on Saturday. It may or may not end up in the final book—if I even sell the book and write it. But it wanted to come out, and that means I’m ready to begin the process.

The alarm gave off a faint, high-pitched beeping noise, spaced a second or two apart, like something you might hear in a hospital. It was accompanied by a blinking red light, its flashes in counterpoint to the beeps. I had been dreaming of the war—Chancellorsville, to be precise, smoke and flames obliterating the sky and the woods and the enemy except for the dull crack of their rifles and ours and the whining of minie balls bursting through the haze and the wretched screams of those who got hit—and although the digital clock blazed 1:32, for a few moments I didn’t know what year it was, or even what decade. Oscar Peterson played softly in the background, his fingers racing across the keyboard like he had six hands, which could have put it anywhere in the 1950s or early 60s. But the tune came from my TV—I slept with classic jazz on, mature music, music that speaks to adults even if they’ve died and come back and then done it again—and satellite radio on television is a modern invention. Twenty-first century, then. That narrowed it down.

Sometimes giving into this process, this compulsion to put something down, tells me things I didn’t know about the book I was about to write. When I wrote Missing White Girl (on sale now, but look for it under the name Jeffrey J. Mariotte), this first page became the first chapter.

The back of a van or truck, she guesses, but hard, anyway, and ridged. She rolls on the turns, slams into solid steel when the vehicle brakes suddenly. A hump that keeps ramming into her spine might be a wheel well. Head pounding, blindfolded. Duct tape holds an awful rag stuffed in her mouth and straps down her hair, bites her flesh.
No idea how long she’s been riding, or who took her.
Or why.
No idea….

Most of the rest of the book is in past tense, not present. Only the scenes about Lulu Lavender (who has been abducted, but who is not the missing white girl of the title [either of them, in fact]) are in the present tense, which serves, I hope, to heighten the tension and terror of her situation.

That was not a conscious decision, though—it came in one of those early bursts of write-this-down-now that I couldn’t ignore. Then I had to look at it later and make the decision whether or not to keep that tense and tone in the book. If it works, it’s because I was ready to write it.

Speaking of being ready to write, and of being overcommitted, this will be my final post on Storytellers Unplugged. I’ve enjoyed my time here—I’ve been part of it from the beginning—and appreciate the sense of community we’ve developed here. But my own blog has suffered (some might say benefited) from my lack of time to devote to everything I need to do, and I have to cut back in some areas. Anyway, it’s good to give new voices room to sound off, too, and I’m as anxious as anyone to find out who’ll be taking the 21st of the month in my stead.

If you’re interested in continuing to see what I’m up to and joining in conversation about my life and work, drop on by Dispatches From the Flying M. I hope to see you there, and I’ll certainly still be around here, as a reader if not an essayist. Thanks for your attention and participation here.

Jeff

by Jeff Mariotte

It should go without saying—but these days, it seems even the most obvious sentiments need to be expressed or people will assume they’re not felt—that last week’s shootings at Virginia Tech were an abominable act performed by a seriously disturbed person.

What was worrying from a long-range perspective was the amount of attention paid to the shooter’s writings, apparently violent and full of rage. That attention seems to have been eclipsed for the moment by consideration of his multimedia “manifesto,” but I still fear that we’ll return to it in the months to come.

Americans are already living in an environment where a student’s writings about a fictional presidential assassination can trigger a visit form the Secret Service, and where students can be suspended for “violent” writings. We should all remember—and where necessary, remind “the authorities”—that the world of the imagination and the world we live in are two different places. Very seldom does anyone confuse the two, as the VT killer seems to have done. Young people in particular struggle with all kinds of powerful emotions, as their bodies change and their minds are exposed to new information and they try to follow their individual paths toward adulthood. Through writing, they can express some of those emotions, study them, understand them, and to take those writings as literal statements of intent is foolish in the extreme.

Fiction is about conflict. Since the beginnings of literature, that conflict has often been expressed in violent action. I believe that writing about violence has a therapeutic effect in most cases, and is rarely, if ever, a genuine spur toward violence on the part of the writer. Has Thomas Harris, after all, really enjoyed brain sherbet? Has Stephen King mangled victims with laundry equipment? Has Lee Child shot dozens of people?

And on the flip side, this past week also brought the tragic anniversaries of Waco and Oklahoma City and Columbine and the birth of Adolph Hitler. Had the people responsible for those deaths written stories of rage and murder? Not that I’ve heard about. Now, though, the shooter responsible for more deaths than any other was an English major and an amateur writer, so it’s assumed by the media and the so-called experts that his writings, properly examined, could have predicted his future actions.

That’s nonsense, and they should know it, and they should not jump to that conclusion the next time a writer expresses boiling anger on paper, or even tells a story of extreme violence just because it’s what speaks to him at the moment. We’d be better off, I think, to let people work through those issues on paper, and maybe cancel the third week of April altogether, because all those anniversaries piled upon one another bring a terrible psychic weight to bear on us all, and that, more than any story or play, seems destined to lead to more violence.

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I wrote, several months ago, about the pleasures of writing about what you want to learn about. Knowing there might be a check at the end of the research makes the time spent on study more enjoyable and worthwhile, and the more a writer knows about his or her topic, the more informed and convincing the final book can be.

These past few months, I’ve experienced both sides of the coin. I wrote two novels based on TV shows, one on the CW series Supernatural and one on the CBS program CSI: Miami. For Supernatural: Witch’s Canyon, my editor suggested that it might be cool for the Winchester brothers to visit someplace they haven’t on the show, like the Grand Canyon. I hadn’t been to the Canyon since moving to Arizona anyway, and love seeing it, so I made the trip, did some research on the region (since the story itself doesn’t take place in the National Park or right at the canyon) and enjoyed every minute of it. The words flowed when I got to the keyboard. I think the book is good, although that’s not something I’m in a position to judge for myself yet.

For CSI: Miami: Right to Die, however, I didn’t get to go to Miami. I’ve been there several times before, and I had books and maps and the internet to help me. Location wasn’t the tricky part in that one, though. As on TV, the science in the book has to be right, even when the application of that science (CSIs investigating murders beginning to end, for instance) is not accurate. And science is not something I have ever been (or will ever be) entirely comfortable with.

The language of science, like the German language, seems to believe that there’s no word that can’t be made better by the introduction of several additional words that may or may not seem related at first blush.

Writing the novel, I not only had to try to understand scientific language, but to translate it into something I could describe in real words. It’s not enough to grasp how cyanoacrylate fuming or tetramethylbenzidine testing works, but in a novel that has to be expressed in sight and sound and smell. Which, if you’re scientifically challenged like me, makes the work much harder. I think it all works, but again, someone else will have to determine that—I’m still too close to it.

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Recently I’ve taken on various tasks that pull me away from writing. I’m a judge for this year’s World Fantasy Awards, and behind me in my office are—no, I don’t have time to count them; let’s just say about a hundred books that have arrived in the past couple of months, with more showing up all the time. I’m chairing a subcommittee for the International Thriller Writers, and after having spent yesterday in the mountains there are more than forty emails in my in-box about that work. And I’ve been doing whatever I can to promote my supernatural thriller Missing White Girl, which goes on sale next month. Any of these could easily become full-time work, at least temporarily. None of them come with a check attached, and only the third of those works to my semi-immediate financial benefit. But only after spending plenty of time and money on the process.

Which leads back to time management, and the necessity of saying “no” once in a while. You can bet that’ll be my answer the next few times I’m asked to take part in something above and beyond. It’s too easy for a full-time writer to think, sure, I’ve got an hour I can spare here and there. When those hours grow into days and weeks, they can become a problem. It’s one I’ve managed to avoid, but now, suddenly, I’m in the middle of it. Anybody got a shovel?

by Jeff Mariotte

Spring came to the Flying M Ranch before I was quite ready for it. One minute, nighttime temperatures were in the 20s, and the next daytime highs were in the 80s. It’s a heat wave; it’ll break, they tell us, in the next few days, and then there’ll be some more spring before it’s really summer. But the other, surer signs of spring are all there. The cottonwoods are suddenly bursting with leaves. The grass is greening, wildflowers blooming, as is algae in the pond. Crickets have begun to mysteriously appear on the family room floor, and since my office is at the far end of the family room, I have to run their gauntlet to get from here to the rest of the house. Moths, likewise, find ways to slip inside at night, strafing the light fixtures. We had a wetter summer than any in the last decade or more, and a fairly wet winter, and it’s going to be a banner year for bug life.

I’ve lived most of my life aware of the weather, but not connected to it in the way that I am now. In cities, it’s either convenient or it’s not. Rain snarls traffic. Sunny days invite walks outside, maybe yard work. Longer evenings suggest barbecues. “Put weather in,” advises brilliant mystery writer Joseph Hansen. It’s easier to do that when you know what real weather is.

Now that I’m living in the country, ten miles from the nearest town, weather is more apparent, more immediate, and more necessary. It helps, too, that the Flying M is located someplace where weather is more extreme. After more than two decades in San Diego, almost anyplace would have more extreme weather, but here in Southeastern Arizona we have tumultuous summer monsoon thunderstorms, withering heat, biting cold, snow, hail, and in every season, wind.

At the beginning of this year I accepted two tie-in novel jobs, with relatively short deadlines at the end of March and April. To do them, I set aside an original horror novel I was working on, because they promised immediate paychecks and the novel didn’t. By the time this essay sees (digital) print I’ll have turned in a novel based on the CW TB series Supernatural. I’m now immersed in one based on CSI: Miami. It’s currently the most-watched TV show in the world, but no pressure….

To get them done on time, I marked up a calendar, creating a schedule to which I would have to adhere. Three thousand words a day, five days a week. If I missed a day, or didn’t make my word count, I’d have to make up for it on weekends. Otherwise, my weekends were free to do other projects, like the original graphic novel script I turned in last week, or essays like this one, or promotional efforts for my forthcoming original novel. Or simply to relax, to enjoy the family, maybe catch the occasional movie.

Three thousand words a day isn’t punishing, most of the time. It’s ambitious, but I’ve done more words in a day before. There was a time, when I had a day job, that I could only write on weekends, and shot for five or six thousand words a day on those days.

The plan has worked so far. Even with a scheduled-in trip to the Grand Canyon, I finished the first draft of the Supernatural novel on the allotted day. CSI: Miami is proceeding according to plan as well.

At three thousand, I have time left in the day for other things. Sometimes that’s reading—as one of this year’s World Fantasy Award judges, I have plenty of reading to do. Sometimes it’s more promotional efforts for the book. Sometimes it’s the thing I’d rather be doing—working outside on the ranch,

It’s not a real working ranch; we’re not raising cattle or goats or chickens or anything like that. And it’s not a farm, growing vegetables or fruits. Mostly what grows here is what grew here before we came. With the exception of invasive plants like Russian thistle, also known as tumbleweed, most of what grows here is what grew here, as far as we know, before anyone came. Mesquite, creosote bush, various native grasses, and weeds. And the aforementioned wildflowers, which are just weeds with attractive reproductive bits.

But there’s much to do. Spring, between the wet winter season and monsoon season, is a dry time, with hot winds that sap the moisture from the land. It’s fire season (as is fall) and the growth that came up during the wet season has to be cut back, a fire break built around the house to make sure in the event of disaster, we’ll have a defensible perimeter. We keep a few patches of lawn, mostly for the enjoyment of the dogs, and those patches have to be kept relatively weed free. We have a lily bed that has to be tended. The pond needs to be maintained. Mesquite needs to be cut down so that it’ll be dried out and ready for next winter’s woodstove season.

Writing always seemed like all I would be good for, but it turns out that I have to spend more time than I ever expected working with power tools, or working with shovels and rakes and pitchforks, or cutting wire, or mending fences, or hauling rocks.

As physically demanding as that work can be, it recharges the part of me that can be wearied by a schedule of three thousand words a day, every day. The characters about whom I’m writing go outside with me sometimes, their problems kicking around in my head as the wind kicks up dirt and grass into my face. Other times, the process of changing into my work boots, old jeans, and cowboy hat chases them away and I leave the project completely behind, all my focus and energy going into the task at hand.

Every writer finds his or her own way to recharge, to set the reset button in order to go back to keyboard or page with a fresh perspective and a wakeful mind. Others have been discussed in this forum in the past. It can be a day at the beach, a night at the movies, a mani-pedi or a nap. To me, it’s not just a recharge, it’s as important to the work as the schedule and the discipline to stick with it. For me, working outdoors in every kind of weather connects me to the seasons, to the spinning of the Earth. Walking with the tracks of coyotes and jackrabbits, snakes and birds, occasional visitors like deer and javelina, brings me closer to the creatures we share our planet with (although I’d prefer that they, like the moths and crickets, remained outside the house). I write about the planet and the land and all its inhabitants, and I need to be in contact with them from time to time.

If I didn’t have that—didn’t have dirt under my nails and mud on my boots and sun on my neck and wind in my face—well, I’m sure I could still do the three thousand words a day. After all, that’s the job, that’s what you sign on for when you take money to write a novel.

But if I couldn’t get away from it and go outside once in a while, it might start to feel like work.

by Jeff Mariotte

Like many writers—most, probably—I’m often asked for writing advice. Because virtually everyone who speaks the language can put a pen to paper or jab at some keys and write a reasonable English sentence (although often not two in a row), many, many people think they could be writers of one kind or another, if only they knew the secret tricks. I try to dissuade some, while encouraging the more promising.

The advice I give most often, because it seems most true to me, is basically this: write, write, write. When you’re not writing, read. Then write some more.

This has felt, anecdotally, like the best advice I could come up with. Writing, I believed, is an activity that uses a particular set of “muscles,” and as with pole vaulting or hammer throwing, exercising those muscles often improves one’s performance. Writing a lot and consistently has made me a better writer, and I can’t help but think it would work for others as well. I don’t think any amount of exercise can make a bad writer good or a good writer great, but most of us fall somewhere in between those extremes, and strive diligently to improve our skills, to “master” our craft (only to find that, having gotten better at one aspect of it, other faults become glaringly obvious).

But it was all a gut feeling, without anything other than my own perception of my own experience—close-up and no doubt far from unbiased—to back it up.

Until now.

Now a writer named Sharon Begley has written a book called Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain. I haven’t read the book yet, although I hope to soon. But I read an excerpt from it in TIME, and from its descriptions of studies in neuroplasticity, it convinced me that my gut instinct was on the money.

In the excerpt, Begley talks about a Harvard study in which volunteers practiced a five-finger piano exercise, then took a test while a coil of wire sent magnetic impulses into their brains. This transcranial-magnetic-simulation test showed how much of their motor cortexes were used to control the finger movements they needed for the exercise. After just a week of practice, the bit of motor cortex used had literally spread, in Begley’s words, “over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.”

More significantly, the researcher running the experiment had another group of volunteers merely think about doing the piano exercise, without actually doing it, holding their hands still. Like the first test group, these people experienced expansion of the region of motor cortex that controls the fingers—even without using their fingers.

As Begley writes, “the discovery showed that mental training had the power to change the physical structure of the brain.”

There is, of course, much more to the article (and doubtless, to the book) than this. But just reading this much, combined with what I already believed about how writing begets better writing, caused an almost literal spark to ignite in my mind. The brain, Begley tells us, can be literally rewired simply through thought.

Tying this back into writing, the theory goes, by sitting and writing, one is exercising whatever region of the brain controls writing. Not just the movement of the fingers across the keyboard (although that is also something that gets better with practice, and is likely the result of motor cortex expansion of a particular sort). But mentally as well. What separates writing from typing is, after all, the mental activity underlying it. The use of the imagination, combining with what we know of stylistic standards, with inspiration about characters and plot points and turns of phrase, remembering seeds planted early in a story and bringing them to fruition later on (or remembering the flowers we “saw” in our mind’s eye and making sure to plant the seeds in the right place)…these are some of the things that our minds are up to, almost without our conscious participation, while we sit at that keyboard or with that notebook and write.

Doing all of these activities at once is not easy, and it’s a testament to the power and intricacy of the human mind that we can do them at all and not fall out of our chairs or choke on our own spit. (And I am not, lest you wonder, denying having either of those experiences while writing. But I’ve survived them.)

My experiential judgment that my writing improves by the doing of it leads me to believe that writing frequently and consistently—and just as important, thinking about writing, pondering plot twists and character arcs, visualizing scenes, the daydreaming in the shower or the car or tilted back in my desk chair with my hands locked behind my head—is physically rewiring my brain. I don’t know what parts of it are giving up ground—the part that does math, I’d guess, and maybe the part that remembers who gave me what for my birthday last year. But I don’t miss those parts as much as I’m appreciative that my skills continue to grow, that I haven’t hit a plateau as a writer, that maybe it’s not possible to do so unless some other, less helpful brain wiring mechanism kicks in and overrules the rewiring.

We’ve all read writers who start out good but then get better and better as they age. We’ve probably read others who get worse—but not as many, and there are very likely reasons for that deterioration—overuse of alcohol or drugs, laziness, creeping dementia, or others. For most of us, age brings experience, practice, maybe something resembling wisdom. And our brains have been fixing themselves to operate more efficiently at whatever it is we do most.

Does practice make perfect? Of course not—there’s no such thing as a perfect work of creativity. If there were, we might stop striving toward that goal. But does practice make better? Of course. Now we know at least part of the reason why.

By Jeff Mariotte

The Morton Syndrome

“When it rains it pours.” That’s what it says on the side of the Morton Salt can in my pantry, but it could as easily describe the summer monsoon rains or the way work can show up unexpectedly, all at once—or the alternative, which is worse.

I’m a full-time writer, which is another way of saying that my work schedule—and my income—can fluctuate wildly. Unless you’re a regular on the bestseller lists or have a spouse with a steady income, you’re probably the same way. I work all the time, either on original novels or work-for-hire novels, and occasionally on short stories or comics. But the WFH stuff usually comes with short deadlines attached—and up-front money—so there are times that original work has to be pushed aside to take on a tie-in project.

Just after the first of the year, I achieved a new record, for me. I’ve previously accepted a couple of three-book deals, but never before have I been approached on the same day by three different editors—two offering WFH book contracts and one soliciting a short story for a science fiction anthology. I accepted all three. It’ll mean a lot of work in a hurry, because the two novels are due on March 26 and May 1. And it means putting off the original that I started in November.

I took the jobs, because an extended period last year had been, for a variety of reasons beyond my control, short of contracted work. I wrote and sold original supernatural thriller Missing White Girl during that period, but even so, a dry stretch like that is hard to cope with financially. This, folks, is why they tell writers to keep their day jobs. It’s hard to put the food on the family, in our president’s terminology, when there’s no bread in the bank.

To make matters more complicated, as I launched into these two new projects, I also had a flash flood of page proofs that needed to be checked—for two novels and a short story. The long book I was reading (Lisey’s Story, by Stephen King—beautiful, so far) has been set aside while I work on the proofs and the research required for the new novels. Because both WFH projects are novels based on TV shows, I have a ton of DVDs to watch, in addition to the regular sorts of research that are required for any novel. In the middle of all this I also had to do the paperwork and proofreading associated with having a short story, “Walkaway,” accepted by the Amazon Shorts program, and study contracts for a couple of original graphic novels.

Then there are appearances, travel, conventions, promotion, networking…all of these will be happening between now and those two deadlines, and I’ll have to fit them in without jeopardizing the work itself. And my tenuous grasp on sanity.

What it comes down to is management. Writing is an art but it’s also a business, and you have to manage your time and your finances. If you can’t manage those things, then maybe you’re better off as a part-time writer, with your daily life controlled by a “legitimate” job. In some ways it’s harder because it means squeezing your writing into smaller chunks of time. But there’s a lot to be said for having a regular income.

Having known many hundreds of writers over the past couple of decades, I’m very aware that some have been phenomenally successful, while others have been completely unable to keep their careers going and have had to take other jobs. Becoming a full-time writer is, like any sort of entrepreneurial enterprise, a risky proposition, and not everyone makes it.

In the end, you—and the market forces that dictate your success as a writer—will have to make the decision for yourself. I don’t regret my decision (very often), even though it causes hardship from time to time. And I consider myself very fortunate indeed to remain in demand as a tie-in writer, as well as being able to sell my original work. It’s the best of both worlds.

I started by talking about salt—but if you manage your career well and you have the talent, you can also afford to treat yourself to dinner at Morton’s (the excellent steak house, not the salt mines) once in a while. That’s definitely a bonus in my book.

By Jeff Mariotte

No, not Breaking and Entering. Beginnings and Endings. Since it’s the season of giving, I thought I’d give Storytellers Unplugged’s dear readers a gift and let them read something other than my standard yawp about how and why I do whatever it is that I do.

I write from four to six novels a year, most years (he wrote, immediately breaking the promise above). So it sometimes feels like I’m always either writing a beginning or an ending.

Both are important, if not absolutely critical, to the success or failure of a book. The opening draws the reader in, or had better do so. The ending, the last words the reader reads, leaves the final taste in that person’s metaphorical mouth, the lingering trace on the retina, and color what the reader thinks when she closes the book. Whether she is going to re-read it, recommend it to friends, or throw it into the fireplace depends much more on those last words than on the first.

So (he wrote, returning to the first paragraph’s pledge after all), I thought that I would scan the bookshelves here at the Ranch and offer up some mostly random but well-crafted beginnings and endings, by a variety of writers. Some of these are well known, classics of the type. Others are not. Maybe they’ll inspire you to new heights in your own efforts. It never hurts us to be exposed to writers who do it well.

I’ll reveal at the bottom who wrote what—see how many you can guess. And have a happy Solstice and a wonderful holiday season, each and every one of you.

1. “A story has no beginning or end; arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him; he hasn’t seen you yet.’”

And

“I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.”

2. “It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.”

And

“On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.”

3. “Trust me for a while.
“I understand that’s really the line the spider hit the fly with, not ‘come into my parlor’ as popular legend has it, and I also realize I am not always your most Walter Cronkite type fella, sturdy, staunch, etc. But in this particular instance, there is just no doubt in my you-should-pardon-the-expression mind that I know whereof I speak.
“Corky thinks I’m crazy, natch.
“Somebody sure is.”

And

“Peggy lay on the bed for a long time and studied the lovely wooden heart. God he had wonderful hands. She stayed on the bed, turning the heart over and over. Then she got up and examined herself in the mirror. She looked fifty easy, what with the puffy eyes and the wrinkled clothes, but a change of wardrobe could fix the one, Max Factor could go a long way toward helping with the other. When she was pretty again, she put on a nice dress because even though she didn’t love him, Corky’s kind of talent you had to string along with, and with that thought firmly in mind, she went down to the cabin to tell him so…”

4. “It was a solecism of the very worst kind. He sneezed loudly, wetly, and quite unforgivably into the woman’s face. He’d been holding it back for three-quarters of an hour, fighting it off as if it were Henry Tudor’s vanguard in the Battle of Bosworth. But at last he’d surrendered. And after the act, to make matters worse, he immediately began to snuffle.”

And

“Gillian stirred in the back seat. ‘Whose house—‘ Her voice died as the door flew open and Tessa ran outside, hesitating on the front path, peering towards the car. ‘Mummy.’ Gillian said it on a breath. She said nothing else. She got out of the car slowly and stared at the woman as if she were an apparition, clinging to the door for support. ‘Mummy?’
“‘Gilly! Oh my God, Gilly!’ Tessa cried and began coming towards her.
“It was all Gillian needed. She ran up the slope into her mother’s arms, and they entered the house together.”

5. “The urban renewers had struck again. They’d evicted me, a fortune-teller, and a bookie from the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, moved in with sandblasters and bleached oak and plant hangers, and the last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse. I moved down Boylston Street to the corner of Berkeley, second floor. I was half a block from Brooks Brothers and right over a bank. I felt at home. In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.”

And

“‘Let’s go in and eat,’ I said.
“‘Okay,’ he said. His voice was a little shaky. When I opened the door to the cabin I could see in the light from the kitchen that there were tears on his face. He made no attempt to hide them. I put my arm around his shoulder.
“‘Winter’s coming,’ I said.”

6. “to wound the autumnal city.
“So howled out for the world to give him a name.
“The in-dark answered with wind.”

And

“It would be better than here. Just in the like that, if you can’t remember any more if. I want to know but I can’t see are you up there. I don’t have a lot of strength now. The sky is stripped. I am too weak to write much. But I still hear them walking in the trees; not speaking. Waiting here, away from the terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to”

7. “The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of Western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

And

“‘And nice to have seen you, Sue. Good luck,’ he called after her as she disappeared down the path, a pretty girl in a hurry, her smooth hair swinging, shining—just such a young woman as Nancy might have been. Then, starting home, he walked toward the trees, and unde
r them, leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat.”

8. “ I flew home from Mazatlån on a Wednesday afternoon. As we approached Los Angeles, the Mexicana plane dropped low over the sea and I caught my first glimpse of the oil spill.
“It lay on the blue water of the Pacific in a free-form slick that seemed miles wide and many miles long. An off-shore oil platform stood up out of its windward end like the metal handle of a dagger that had stabbed the world and made it spill black blood.”

And

“She paid no attention to me. She stepped off into air and fell in silence until the black boulders stopped her. Smoke swirled over her body like the smoke from funeral pyres.
“I went back to Laurel. She stirred and half awakened, as if my concern for her had reached down palpably into her sleeping mind. She was alive.
“I picked up the phone and started to make the necessary calls.”

9. “The Axe Boy lived downstairs. We were friendly because he was forever walking an ugly little dog I patted when I bumped into them in the hall.”

And

“Do you know what I’ve been thinking about? Thinking about a lot? Whether Eliot is with Pepsi now. Even if he first had to go to Ophir Zik, I know Pepsi would get Eliot out of there in a flash. That would be great. They would have so much fun together.
“There’s no way to express how much I miss them.
“It’s hard convincing yourself that where you are at the moment is your home, and it’s not always where your heart is. Sometimes I win and sometimes not.”

10. “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow. When it healed, and Jem’s fears of never being able to play football were assuaged, he was seldom self-conscious about his injury. His left arm was somewhat shorter than his right; when he stood or walked, the back of his hand was at right angles to his body, his thumb parallel to his thigh. He couldn’t have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt.

And

“‘An’ they chased him ‘n’ never could catch him ‘cause they didn’t know what he looked like, an’ Atticus, when they finally saw him, why he hadn’t done any of those things…Atticus, he was real nice….’
“His hands were under my chin, pulling up the cover, tucking it around me.
“‘Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them.’
“He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”

1. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
2. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
3. William Goldman, Magic
4. Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance
5. Robert B. Parker, Early Autumn
6. Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren
7. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
8. Ross Macdonald, Sleeping Beauty
9. Jonathan Carroll, Bones of the Moon
10. Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird

By Jeff Mariotte

I tend to be drawn to fiction with a highly developed sense of place. I want to read authors who can write convincingly about a certain locale or locales, and probably as a result tend to favor those with strong regional associations. Stephen King on Maine (and more recently, John Connolly on coastal Maine). James Lee Burke on southern Louisiana and Montana. Joe Lansdale on east Texas. Robert B. Parker on Boston. Pat Conroy on the Carolina low country. Wallace Stegner on the intermountain West and the plains of Saskatchewan.

Some places have almost too many people writing about them. Los Angeles? Joseph Wambaugh, Michael Connelly, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, James Ellroy…that’s just crime writers, and it’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I’ve done my share of L.A. fiction too—hard to avoid when you write tie-in fiction for the Angel TV series—but it’s not a location I’d choose on my own.

Without my conscious participation, my region seems to have chosen me. My first original novel, small press classic The Slab, was set in California’s Imperial Valley and around the Salton Sea, a few miles north of the Mexican border. My second, Witch Season: Summer, first book in a teen horror quartet, took place mostly in San Diego. Also, you might note, a few miles north of the border. My occasional comic book series Desperadoes usually takes place in border states, sometimes right on the line. My forthcoming supernatural thriller Missing White Girl is the most explicitly border-centric one yet, set on both sides of the border and involving border issues. I seem to have become a borderlands writer, specializing in that separate nation that straddles the two recognized by law and convention and a line on the map. And that’s just fine with me.

Last month I went to the World Fantasy Convention in Austin, and I spent some extra time in Texas, mostly around the border city of El Paso, doing on-site research for the next one I plan to write. Part of writing convincingly about a place can be done by reading about it, but I think part of it has to be done by being there, walking around, looking and tasting and smelling it. I don’t know that part of the world as intimately as I do the Arizona setting of Missing White Girl or the California desert of The Slab, so it is even more important that I spend enough time out there to get it right.

Here are some of the things I did there:

I went to the Hueco Tanks State Historic Site and walked, crawled, and scrambled on rocks where people have lived, off and on, for twelve thousand years, leaving marks—pictographs, names and dates, graffiti—the entire time. Hueco Tanks is a sacred spot to many, and being there it’s easy to see why. Reading about it in books or online doesn’t prepare you for the reality.

I tried to make it through El Paso the first night, headed for Van Horn, but after hiking at Hueco Tanks during the day fatigue caught up with me sooner than I had hoped, so I stopped at the tiny town of Fort Hancock. This turned out to be a lucky break. The book I plan to write takes place in a small Texas town that has seen boom and bust, and from afar I had expected to model the fictional town, physically, on Van Horn. But I wanted it to be on the Rio Grande, too, which Van Horn isn’t. Fort Hancock, though, is, and this accidental stop became the high point of the trip, giving me the model I needed.

I drove to the port of entry at Fort Hancock—the crossing into Mexico—and through it, across a narrow bridge over the thin, flat brown ribbon of the Rio Grande. Then, before reaching the Mexican port of entry, I turned around and came back. This book doesn’t take place in Mexico, I knew. But I needed to see what the river looked like there. The ICE agents on the US side were surprised that I had spent such a brief time on the other side, but they were friendly and one was a horror fan and I told them about, and showed off the cover of, Missing White Girl, and may have sold a copy or two when it comes out. And maybe my future books, as well—if I get the border stuff right.

I buzzed through Van Horn in a hurry, looking at it only long enough to confirm to myself that I didn’t need it anymore. Too far from the river, physical surroundings all wrong, and Fort Hancock works better on every level. This was a crucial piece of information, and if I had tried to write the book from my ranch without going to the actual location, I’d never have known it.

Then it was across west Texas, a night in the charming Hill Country town of Fredericksburg, and on to Austin. Austin is a big city that felt, for the most part, like other big cities, its much-vaunted “funkiness” aside. I fought traffic to get to the funky part of town, then, disappointed, fought it again to get back to the WFC. Once again, I had to see it for myself.

On the return trip I didn’t stop in Fort Hancock (although I did spend a night in Fort Stockton, where there are dozens of restaurants, nearly all of which are closed at dinnertime on Sunday). But I stopped across the highway from Fort Hancock, where I took a dirt road as far as I could until the NO TRESPASSING signs stopped me, and discovered a wonderland of grassy sand dunes that I’d never have known about without experiencing them for myself.

Finally I was back in El Paso, where the action in the book that doesn’t take place in my fictionalized version of Fort Hancock occurs. El Paso, in the novel, will not be fictionalized, so I needed to drive and walk its streets and neighborhoods, making notes of particular locations that might enter into the story. I got to visit the Rio Grande again, this time securely inside the border and so not surrounded by fence. I saw Good Coffee Mexican Food and Bogart’s Lounge and the big, genuinely funky houses on the hills west of downtown and the pawn shop where the life-size Elvis statue is flanked by the Blues Brothers (but the music coming from the speakers was The King, baby, all the way). These sights may or may not make it into the novel—hell, the novel may or may not be written, that’s how this business goes. But they’ll inform it, and when I write about El Paso it’ll be with the knowledge of someone who has taken the city into his lungs, who had blisters on his feet from hiking around town, who went up Mt. Cristo Rey and bought an éclair at the Sunland Park Mall. I’ll probably need another trip back before the book is done, but at least I’m ready to start.

Better writers than I have written novels set on Mars, in ancient Greece, in Amber and Newhon and Dune. I’m not saying it can’t be done. I’ve written books that take place in the outer spaces of both the Star Trek and Andromeda universes, in Joss Whedon’s Sunnydale and in Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age and in Barrow, Alaska in midwinter, in addition to those set in Las Vegas and San Francisco and L.A. and other places I know well. I’m only saying that I prefer to write about the places I know, and of those places my preference narrows still more. It’s the border country that I know the best and love the most, and about which I just might have something to say that’s worth saying.

I didn’t choose it. It chose me, and now I’m tramping all over it, marking my territory. Has your region chosen you?

If not, maybe it’s time to get in the car and drive until you’re tired, just to see where you’ve been brought.

Since many of my fellow Storytellers are posting fiction this month, in celebration of Halloween, I wanted to play along. But I mostly write novels, with very little short fiction. I set myself a goal one weekend, a couple of weeks ago, and wrote two shorts–not quite short-shorts, but close, I think.

They’re very different in tone and intent, but both conceived and written, in first draft, in the same 36-hour period. I posted Staking a Claim yesterday at my regular blog, and saved the darker of the two for here:

The Cloud
by Jeff Mariotte

A vortex of vultures. Hundreds of them, maybe with a few ravens mixed in. Black, winged carrion-eaters, scavengers, spiraling in loose formation against the blue, blue sky, as if the valley was a tub and someone had pulled the plug and all the water, full of jagged black specks, whirlpooled down the drain.

#

Bradley hadn’t intentionally killed anything larger than a cricket since his twelfth summer. That summer, he had felt plunged into horrifying darkness, and he had inhabited that darkness fully. He had tried to limit his killing to wild creatures, but a couple of neighborhood cats had found themselves buried in vacant lots and under the roots of trees, along with assorted raccoons, squirrels, rabbits and the like.

He had lived in suburbia in those days, his parents the very definition of white middle class life. He had thought he’d follow in his dad’s footprints, wearing a tie, working in an office. Then, that summer, he had figured he’d be in prison by the time he was eighteen. Maybe get life, maybe the chair. That was what they used in those days, at least in the stories Brad (never Bradley, not at that age) had heard. They strapped you into a chair and sent electricity through it and smoke came out your ears as your brain cooked.

It hadn’t happened that way. Whatever he had been going through that summer, he had moved past it. Instead of taking him over, killing had lost its appeal. He had still fired guns from time to time, on ranges and in the service, but not at living things. Nor had he stabbed anything or twisted a furry little neck between his hands.

These days he lived in a small rural town. Unlike most of his neighbors, he didn’t own a firearm. He had come a long, long way from that twelfth summer.

He had farther yet to go.

#

The night before the cloud came through, Bradley had been reading his son’s math book (Benjamin was—coincidence?—twelve this year), trying to stay far enough ahead to help with his homework. He had been sitting at the dining room table, head nestled in his hands, the book open in front of him, numbers swimming before his eyes, when Benjamin came out of his bedroom. He stood, blinking sleepily, barefoot in plaid pajamas. The pillow had sculpted his light blond hair into abstract forms. “I forgot to tell you,” he said. He stifled a yawn while Bradley waited for the rest. “Mom called this afternoon. She wants to have me on Sunday for a picnic with Jerry’s family.”

Bradley had hemmed for a moment but then agreed, unable to come up with a legitimate reason why he shouldn’t. It was because of Suzanne that he lived here, out in the boondocks, in a small mobile home because that was all he could afford. When he had announced that he would be telecommuting instead of working in the office—he had followed his father’s path, that way—he hadn’t been fired, but his salary had been slashed considerably. But Suzanne’s family had always lived in the high desert. After their divorce had been finalized, she hadn’t wasted much time moving out here. To keep seeing Benjamin, Bradley had followed. It was Suzanne’s place, not his, and he had never truly felt comfortable there. For Benjamin’s sake, he tried. He could think of nothing he wouldn’t do for the boy.

The next day, he dropped Benjamin off at school, where Suzanne picked him up in the afternoon. That night, the cloud passed through.

#

They weren’t hard to find. The tornado of birds gave away their location. He hiked toward them carrying two rifles, a shotgun, and a revolver he had found in neighbors’ abandoned homes. He had emptied boxes of ammunition into his pockets to avoid the hard corners; the bullets clanking like change when he walked, the shells poking almost as much as boxes would have. And he’d have to sort it on the spot, he realized. Boxes would have been awkward, but he could have used a bag of some kind.

He wasn’t thinking clearly, that was all. Who could blame him?

#

Bradley watched the news on TV. No one knew what it was or how it did what it did, and experts debated even what the effects really were. Nor did the experts agree on how best to deal with it—whatever it was. Tactical nuclear weapons, some said. Inside America’s borders? others countered. Boots on the ground, that was the way to go. Search and destroy. Our armies had plenty of experience with house-to-house combat, after all.

Bradley’s response was to stay indoors for several days after the cloud passed—trying to reach Suzanne by phone every twenty minutes, then every hour—with the doors and windows closed, sealed off with plastic kitchen wrap and Scotch tape. He didn’t know if it would work. When the next morning came and he hadn’t died and developed an intense desire to eat human flesh, he guessed that maybe it had.

But not knowing what had happened to Benjamin drove him mad. He tried to watch TV or listen to the radio but they just kept running the same meaningless drivel, possibly of interest to those outside the cloud’s area of impact but not to him. He cleaned his kitchen, his bathroom, scrubbing until his arms hurt, his fingers became red and chapped. With the radio and TV off he heard strange noises, his mobile home groaning in the buffeting wind that had accompanied the cloud and that hadn’t ended, even though the cloud had dissipated (or moved on, press reports differed on this point too), and it sounded like someone trying to speak to him from the other side of the grave.

That Saturday, he decided it was safe to go outside. He drove to the home where Suzanne lived with her new husband Jerry, on the town’s wealthier west side. Suzanne’s family had been upper middle class, and Jerry’s was downright rich by local standards. Between the two families there must have been a couple dozen relatives in town. Their family picnics were legendary, thirty people, forty, sometimes more, with buckets of food and organized sports and games. No wonder Benjamin hadn’t wanted to miss this one, even though Sunday should have been his day with Bradley.

No one answered his knock. Hardly anyone showed on the streets at all, and when Bradley saw anyone he veered away. They were soldiers or they were the dead, he figured. He had no interest in meeting either one. Traffic lights cycled through their colors at empty intersections. On every block, Bradley saw carrion birds, perched on power poles or street lamps or roofs.

He couldn’t find Suzanne. He couldn’t find Jerry. Benjamin was with them, no doubt. Dead, alive, or somewhere in between, he didn’t know.

#

He loaded all the guns. It had been years since he’d fired one, but the Army had drummed the basics into him even though he never saw combat. He knew how to load one, how to aim, how to adjust for wind and distance, how to squeeze the trigger.

He had staked out a position on a rocky slope overlooking the meadow. He had guessed this was their general vicinity, although there were plenty of wide-open spaces around where a large family and assorted friends could congregate. The vultures ha
d confirmed his hunch, pinpointing them precisely. Vultures could smell death.

From his vantage point, he was able to pick them off, one by one. They didn’t run away when the bullets hit. He blew out one’s brains that one dropped right into the lap of the woman next to him. She pushed him away and went on with her meal. No fried chicken at this picnic, no potato salad or carrot sticks or freshly baked peanut butter cookies.

Bradley steadied the barrel on a rock, aimed and fired. Another one fell. The birds flew around and around, in a virtual panic, smelling death and yet seeing too much movement to risk dropping down. Bradley thought he could smell the birds now, even as they sniffed the death down below. He felt like one of the vultures, watching from on high, swirling around, keeping his swooping eye on a few fixed points.

Fewer with every shot.

The troops would be on the way soon enough, he suspected. He had already heard a couple of helicopters, maybe checking out the bird-tornado. They hadn’t flown close enough to see into the clearing, though. Yet. They would, soon enough. Maybe they were coming in trucks.

He wanted to be done before they got here. He didn’t want anyone interfering with what he had to do.

#

He hadn’t intentionally killed since his twelfth summer. Until today. And was it really killing, if they were already dead?

They didn’t even know enough to hide. They just kept picnicking as he hit one after another in the brain—whether it took one shot, two, or six. One of them, he thought maybe Jerry himself, had kept gnawing on an arm after Bradley’s narrow miss had blown off most of his lower jaw.

Which made it feel less like murder, somehow.

That was good. Bradley had left murder behind long ago.

One by one, he put them down. Giving them peace, he told himself. Once he even shouted it to them, not that they understood. “I’m doing this for you, Suzanne! I’m letting you rest.”

She might have looked up the hill toward him when he called to her. Or she might have been watching the birds, or just tilting her head for no reason. He put the next bullet between her eyes and she collapsed in the grass.

Finally, only one remained.

#

The vultures grew bolder. Below, most of the movement had stopped. Only one still sat upright, and he was small and fair and his motions were slow and close, reaching out for another handful, bringing it to his mouth, then sitting and chewing for minutes at a time. Almost still.

The vortex started to descend, drawn by the carrion on the ground.

Bradley tried to convince himself that he wasn’t too late, that the cloud had spared his son.

But Benjamin had always been a finicky eater. Bradley watched the boy lift his mother’s hand, bringing it up to his mouth. Not to kiss it.

One last time, Bradley took careful aim, although tears made aiming harder.

One last time.

By Jeff Mariotte

A moment, please, to remember our comrade Charlie Grant, on the sad day of his funeral.

Writers typically spend a lot of time in no one’s company but their own. I know I do. The Flying M Word Ranch is 10 miles away from the nearest town, which only has about 17,000 inhabitants anyway. There’s one other house on our dirt road, but I see their horses more than I see the people who live there, and more of our neighbors are cows, coyotes, buzzards and crickets than human beings. I’m surrounded by 37 acres of my own property and thousands, or tens of thousands, of acres of undeveloped high desert and mountain, with a few scattered houses here and there. I see my family every day (as long as no one’s on a trip somewhere) but most days I don’t see anyone else.

And yet…

…and yet, we live in a world where anyone with a phone line (High-speed access? Out here? Don’t make me laugh.) can be in contact with tens of millions of people from all over the world. We can go online in minutes and spend hours, chatting or reading blogs (or writing them) or trading e-mails.

We can also surround ourselves with TVs and music and iPods and every other form of electronic gizmo created in the last half-century to ease our loneliness, and many of us do. These gizmos give us every opportunity for interpersonal communication, albeit of the faceless kind.

Storytellers Unplugged, for instance, has a Yahoo group for swapping messages, one of eight or nine such to which I’m subscribed. I don’t drop in on any of them nearly as often as some, and no doubt more often than others. I need to limit my online time somehow, and reading every group’s messages, plus blogs, plus other sites I like to visit, can just take too long. That dial-up thing again, partially. Point is, they’re out there if we want them. Forget about MySpace—on dial-up it’s very slow-loading, and while I understand it can be great for promotion, I just haven’t been able to force myself into that environment. I do, however, have a personal blog, an Amazon Connect blog, and my monthly contribution to this one.

We can also belong to writers’ organizations, and I do. This year I let my SFWA membership lapse, and a few years ago I gave up on the HWA. Currently I belong to the International Thriller Writers, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers, and the Western Writers of America. Three seems to be about my limit—when something else comes along I have to drop one. But there are plenty of others out there, each with its own benefits and drawbacks. The biggest benefit, I believe, is a sense of community. It’s good to know that there are others out there struggling with the same things we are, facing the same issues, dealing with them in our own ways. These associations can help us guide our careers and tackle personal challenges. They can also spawn friendships that go beyond the electronic and into the real world.

Mostly who I spend time with when I’m working on a project (which is pretty much always) is the characters in it. No, they’re not real. They’re fictional, imaginary. But that doesn’t mean they don’t fascinate me. If I’m doing my job right, they’re intriguing people with hopes and dreams, disappointments and heartaches, jobs and hobbies and personal interests that aren’t the same as mine.

Sometimes, through them, I learn things I never knew before. A character with an interest in Big Band music, for instance, might steer me toward websites or blogs full of information I never would have thought to look for. The interests of characters have led me into new worlds, which in some cases result in acquaintanceships or friendships with real people in the real world who share those interests.

Also through my characters, I’ve been exposed to ideas I never thought about. It sounds unlikely, to say the least, since I’m the one writing them. But how many of us haven’t worked out our ideas and feelings about some topic by writing about it? The act of writing spurs intellectual energy. Thinking about what this or that person would say or do makes us examine our own convictions. Putting thoughts down on paper (or pixel) generates new, different thoughts. Nothing spurs creativity like creativity, and if creativity isn’t defined by coming up with original ideas, then I don’t know what it is.

So writing may, at times, be the loneliest of professions. It can be one in which you can easily feel isolated from the world. But it’s also one in which you can surround yourself with whoever you want to get to know, at any given moment. It’s important to talk to real people, face to face, once in a while. But when you can’t, when you’re shackled to the desk, you still don’t have to be alone.

And there’s something to be said for choosing wisely the company you keep…

By Jeff Mariotte

Back when I was a much younger and (probably not coincidentally) unpublished writer, I believed that a successful piece of fiction could have the entertainment of its readers as its highest goal.

I no longer believe that. Instead, I’ve come to believe what the literature professors and writing teachers and books told us all along—that fiction should be about something.

This month’s essay, then, will be a kind of self-examination, an attempt to formulate (and maybe formalize) my own thoughts on the subject, in writing, which is how I do my best thinking. If it proves helpful to any readers out there, good. If any readers have counterarguments or additional points to make in comments, better. I’m not saying I’m right, I’m only saying I think as writers we need to think about this.

First I should say that there’s nothing wrong with entertaining. It’s still a primary goal of fiction, or should be. Fiction that isn’t entertaining on some level won’t be published or read. The greatest unpublished novel in history is a failed work of fiction, because sitting in a drawer or on a hard drive, it isn’t fulfilling its mission. Fiction is, foremost, a means of communication. By definition, communication involves two (or more) parties, one to send a message and one to receive it. Without both parts, communication has not taken place.

But entertainment alone is a low bar to set. Watching two beetles fight is entertaining for some people. American Idol is entertaining for others. Entertainment that does nothing more than pass the time for someone without requiring thought is forgotten as soon as it’s finished. Do I want to spend months on a novel only to have it on the shelves for a couple of weeks, read and forgotten? Or would I rather have it remembered, discussed, re-read, and stay in print (and generating royalties) for the rest of my life, and my children’s lives?

Given my druthers, I’d pick the latter.

Writing fiction involves these three aspects: art, craft, and business (and I’d take this a step further, to say that the same is true of any literary enterprise, from comic strips to movies, etc.). To make a few lines and squiggles into a character recognized as near-universally as Charlie Brown took craft on the part of Charles Schulz. To sell Peanuts into syndication, get it published in book form, and turn it into animated cartoons, merchandising, licensing, etc.—in other words, to make the strip earn money so that he could afford to spend his life making those little squiggles on art board—was business. Telling readers something about life—sometimes we need to trust even though experience suggests otherwise, because the alternatives (cynicism and suspicion) are worse, the world of adulthood doesn’t always make sense, happiness is a warm puppy—in four simple panels is art.

How much weight to give any one of the three aspects over the others remains a matter of much dispute, and one every writer needs to figure out for him or herself. Craft is probably the one most of us pay the most attention to. It can be learned, and improved with practice and experience. We can easily spot a bad example of it and recognize ways to improve upon it, in our own writing and that of others. This: “Put your hands up, you no-good, yellow-bellied dirty dog,” Ralph, the taller of the two bandits, dark haired and pig-eyed, with a week’s growth of whiskers on his cheeks, spat. is, by almost any standards one can apply, a poorly crafted sentence. If you can’t see about ten ways to improve it, then you, perhaps, need to focus more on craft than you have been.

Some writers bemoan the fact that writing also involves business, but it’s simply a fact (see “communication”, above). One can, of course, post one’s fiction online for free and still satisfy the basic definition of communication. But in our world, one needs to earn a living of some kind. And that internet connection isn’t free, nor is the “space” where the fiction is posted, generally. How long is anyone going to keep writing when every piece of fiction is costing money instead of earning it? How will that writer continue to improve, to hone his or her craft, to become the writer he or she might be, if he or she has to quit because that money might be better spent on food and shelter? Poverty is not all it’s cracked up to be, and it’s not a state to which I think any writer (excepting, of course, members of certain religious orders who have their fellow aesthetes to rely on) should aspire.

When a reader picks up a book, there’s a tacit agreement. The book will have been published by a professional publisher and edited by a professional editor. There are also copyeditors, sometimes fact-checkers, art directors, and so on involved, but the average reader doesn’t have any particular reason to think about their contributions. What the reader expects is a reasonable attempt by all involved to make the book the best it can be—free of obvious typographical errors, pages printed in order, a story that follows its own internal logic, exhibits some degree of craft and is entertaining to some extent.

All of this is part of writing being a business. Yes, you can self-publish, but take the internet example given above and multiply it by a few thousand. And yes, some people have successfully self-published and made money at it. Some people win the lottery, too, and some marry rich. You sure you want to count on those odds? Not me.

When I write a book, I want readers to read it. That means I want a publisher to publish it and to make an effort to get it into the hands of readers. That means, first, interesting an editor in it, then the rest of the people at the publishing company, then booksellers across the country. Finally, after those people have been addressed, it has a chance to be read. As with any business, I might have to make certain investments in its overall success—I might have to self-finance some promotional efforts, including bookstore signings and convention appearances, I might have to buy some ads, I might, at the very least, have to take time that might otherwise be devoted to writing the next thing to promote the last one online.

So, craft and business. But art? That’s the hard part. It’s also the part that makes any given book stand apart from the rest, It’s the part that makes it memorable, that makes readers close it and then give it to their friend or loved one and say “You have to read this.” Better yet, it makes them put it safely on their shelves and tell others they have to buy their own copies.

The art is not just in how you say what you say, but in what it is that you’re writing about. The theme, as the writing experts tell us. It doesn’t have to be complicated—in many cases, it’s probably better if it’s not, if we are able to distill complex ideas down into their simplest forms.

My next original novel, Missing White Girl, doesn’t have a simple theme that I can put into a single sentence. Maybe it would be a better book if it did. It is, in some ways, overtly political and overtly sociological, because it addresses two issues important in America society today (the phenomenon of massive media interest [and presumably public interest] in “missing white girls,” sometimes at the expense of equally deserving victims, and the question of immigration). An unstated but significant background aspect to the book is the idea that the human race migrated out of Africa, splitting into two directions, one headed east, into Asia, and the other north, into Europe (while some, of course, remained home in Africa). Very different cultures grew up in each of these places. Ultimately, they all met up ag
ain in the American southwest, where the eastern group had come from Asia, becoming what we know as Indians, met the Europeans who sailed west into what we know as Central America and then came overland into what would become the United States (accompanied by Africans). The southwest, where this book and most of my original fiction takes place, is the meeting point of all humanity. Which means, of course, that immigration is a constant, and trying to stop it with fences and trucks is kind of like trying to stop gravity by weighing blankets down with rocks.

Beyond the sociological and political aspects, however, it’s a novel about people and so it had better say something about us. What I think it says is that we live in an imperfect world, and since we can’t fix everything we need to try to fix those that are within our control and learn to live with the rest. Is that deep and profound? Maybe not, but it’s not as facile as it might be, either.

My next three originals, still in the planning stages because I’ve been working on a tie-in (see “business,” ‘above), will be increasingly complex, both in terms of the craft and the art required to complete them to my satisfaction, and in terms of what they’re really about (which isn’t fully formed yet, and sometimes doesn’t become clear until the writing is well under way).

Will they work? Will they succeed at the business part, much less the art and the craft? If I knew the answers to those questions, I could spend more time at the track than the keyboard and not have to worry about how the books sold. But I don’t, which means I’ll just have to write them and find out.