Writing Clueless vs. Oblivious

Zestful Blog Post #153

Looking forward to doing a reading, then chatting and doing Q&A with students at Simpson College near Des Moines, Iowa next Tuesday evening. If you’re local, drop in! Thanks to Professor Nan St. Clair for setting it up.

One of my early jobs was in the HR department of a large bank in Detroit. It was so long ago that I wrote and starred in a video to educate our customers on how to use them there brand-fangled ATM machines. Customers were issued ATM cards and everybody created their PIN. It was quite a thing, having this important four-digit passcode to remember! Don't ask me about my curly perm.

The bank’s president brought his nephew over from England one summer to work in various departments of the bank; he hung around HR for a week or so. The young man thought ATMs were the coolest. He showed us his ATM card, upon which he’d written his PIN.

“You’re not supposed to do that!” we told him, aghast. “That defeats the whole purpose!”

“My uncle told me to,” he said. “That’s what he does.”

When Lady Diana was getting to know Prince Charles, she was stunned to learn that he had no idea how to make a cup of tea.

U.S. troops working with the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) taught them how to shoot down Vietcong helicopters. You have to lead them, they explained, meaning train your rifle sights just ahead of the copters’ noses, then shoot. ARVN troops shot down numerous Cong choppers. But when they had a chance to ambush and shoot Cong choppers on the ground, they also carefully aimed ahead of the copter’s noses, then pulled their triggers.

[Note of correction here, dateline 3.25.16: My military expert advises that this scenario is unlikely to have happened, due to the very few North Vietnamese aircraft used in the war. More likely, he suggests, I remembered reading about the reverse situation, where NVA soldiers were trained to take down American aircraft by the same method, and making the same mistake on stationary aircraft. Thank you, SD!]

The common thread here is cluelessness. And the reason for cluelessness is lack of information, and sometimes a lack of skill in objective analysis. You can have a lot of fun with clueless characters. I mean, who for God’s sake would believe the president of the bank would write his PIN on his ATM card? Yet it was so. Therefore in your writing, you need to sprinkle cluelessness sparingly. One way to do it is bracket something a character is clueless about with things they’re savvy about. The bank president, for instance, sure as heck knew what to make of balance sheets, and how to delegate. Vietnamese troops knew a lot about jungle survival, and could fight like tigers hand to hand.

Obliviousness is a little different. My brother remembers being dropped off for his weekend job in a grocery store by our dad after a rainstorm. As he brought the car to a stop, Daddy splashed through a huge mud puddle, drenching a guy who was walking by. “And I had to get out,” said my brother grimly. “Daddy was oblivious.”

People in the throes of infatuation are often oblivious to any flaws in their beloved. This has fueled countless dramas and rom-coms, both in print and on the screen. But obliviousness has to be believable, and never used to hotfoot it over a plot hole. The crime-scene techs simply missed the bloody fingerprints on the refrigerator door? They just, like, forgot to look at them? No. But each guy could have thought the other guy was going to process those marks. By the time they realized their mistake weeks later, the crime scene had been released and cleaned. A self-centered person could be oblivious to the pain of a loved one. Show us the self-centeredness, then show us the obliviousness.

Even if you don’t know what you need until you need it, you can go back and create traits and circumstances that will bring everything to convincing life. Readers want to stick with you.

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The Snapshot Trick

Zestful Blog Post #152

Today’s post follows these two announcements:

1)

After a two-year hiatus, I’ll be back at the Florida Writer’s Association annual conference (October 20-23, 2016 in Altamonte Springs). Gonna teach “Fearless Writing” and “How to Write Dialogue Like a Pro,” and will be available for individual consults as well. They’re still putting together the lineup, but here’s the link. Will talk writing for martinis come bar time. Tank regular, dry, up, olives. Think of it as an investment.

2)

My Marcia has designed, built, and launched an extraordinary math game for kids and adults. Number Round-Up uses the world’s smartest tiny horses to help players master sorting, set theory, commonalities, and more. Get links to the free demo and paid versions at Logical Game Studio. This really is a cool game, currently in the Chrome store. No ads, no upselling, just a well built, charming, thoroughly kid-and-adult-tested game that helps foster a love of math and logic. If you take a look, I’d love to hear what you think of it!

On to today’s post.

Dearest writer, do you sometimes struggle to describe your characters in a way that works smoothly with your action and plot? Do you have too much self respect to make them stand in front of a mirror and remark upon their baggy eyes / shining auburn hair / six-pack physique, etc? Is it especially challenging to describe a character’s changes over time, whether months or decades?

Help is here. In the last few months I’ve suggested this to a few clients, and today thought I’d share it with everybody. Very simple: Let somebody come upon an old snapshot, whether on coated paper from a Pleistocene-era camera, a Kodachrome slide that has to be held up to the light, or something digital.

[Musical and bossy even back then: Leading the neighborhood band.

Photo thanks to old pal BB.]

You are with me on this instantly, right? The picture can be of the character himself or herself (just can’t do ‘themself,’ never will), or of a beloved, or the enemy, or whoEVER.

Example:

While clearing out Jesse’s room, she came upon a snapshot of him with his 1978 prom date. She didn’t remember the girl at all. But there was Jesse standing tall, his gaze level and composed, in spite of the crazy maroon velvet tuxedo he was wearing. 

Nother Example:

No return address. I tore open the envelope. A black-and-white snapshot with crinkle-cut edges fell out, and I immediately recognized my stepfather standing beneath the wing of his plane with his flight crew. Full head of wind-tossed hair, wolfen grin, and that cold look in his eyes I remembered so well, too well.

Nother Example:

He surfed over to CNN and couldn’t believe it: There she was, smiling on the courthouse steps, looking pale but triumphant. Acquitted! Wearing her hair still in those stupid pigtails. Pink lipstick. Pink dress. Hell!

Last Example:

I went back to my first post on Facebook. Talk about depressing. The only picture I could think to post was of me in my judo outfit getting slammed onto the mat by a bigger kid. I was spindly and bucktoothed then, spindly and bucktoothed now.

You get the idea. Rock on.

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Arguing with a Publisher

Zestful Blog Post #151

Sometimes aspiring writers ask if I’ve ever been told by a publisher to change a manuscript in a way I thought was wrong. Yes, is the answer, and of course the next question is, well, what did you do? I was planning to write about this sometime soon, when coincidentally this exact subject came up in a message conversation with a friend on FB this week, as well as tangentially with a client. Thanks for the nudge, R and B.

In my series of posts (November 20, 2014 to March 12, 2015) on my publishing history, I recounted how I made significant changes in some of my manuscripts to satisfy my agent’s or an editor’s request. These happened because I felt their suggestions would improve the story. Good agents and editors are worth listening to.

But there’ve been a few times when I’ve said no. One particular instance was during the editing of On Location, the third in my Rita Farmer series. In that story, Rita searches the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest for her missing sister and the sister’s fiancé. After slogging all over the woods and getting closer and closer, Rita makes a breakthrough when she impersonates a Native American to find out some information.

A professional actress, Rita uses pigment to darken her complexion and hair, and puts on makeshift medicine-woman regalia to look convincing to the non-Indians she’ll be confronting. She carries a hatchet in her belt. The scene, both scary and funny, is about confidence, disguise, acting under life-and-death pressure, and the credulousness of an audience unprepared for a ruse. It is the crux move of the novel, and I crafted the story to lead smoothly up to that point.

One of my editors at Minotaur told me to cut the stuff about Rita putting on the disguise. I believe he felt it was grossly politically incorrect to put brownface on a white character. For sure, it was a risk. I deliberately take risks in my fiction. For instance, in The Extra, some of my characters are black, and they live in South L.A., and not all of them use proper English. That—a white writer portraying black characters talking ghetto or even slightly ungrammatical English—is considered offensive by some, and I heard from a couple of them after the book came out. But if you’ve ever hung out in South Los Angeles, you've heard a lot of nonstandard English. Is it honest to write all such characters as if they come from somewhere else? It’s safe, but it’s not honest and moreover, it doesn’t sound real.

In Rita’s situation in On Location, I took care to make Rita look somewhat silly, and to make the white people she deceives dull-witted. I did write a real Native American character into the book, who wouldn’t have been fooled by Rita’s getup. Prior to writing Rita’s transformation, I researched the customs, clothing, and regalia used by the real Indians in the area, where I was living at the time. I went to the reservation and looked around, and I went to the woods and figured out how to make the scene work.

If I were to cut that scene, I’d have to rewrite the majority of the book. I went to some lengths to defend the scene and those leading up to it. The editor backed off. I suspect he thought I’d made it all up on the fly, without thinking much about it. And he hadn't fully thought through the scene's relationship to the structure of the novel. My explanations convinced him we could stand behind the accuracy and spirit of the story.

When the book came out, I heard from many readers—and reviewers—who thought the Rita-as-Indian scenes were a hoot. One reader, however, wrote me a stern email telling me what a horrible racist I was. “I hope no Indian reads this book,” she wrote. She particularly objected to Rita’s narrative sentence, “I worked to project intelligent savagery.” The word ‘savage’ is considered an insensitive label by Indians, this correspondent told me. She happened to be local, she said, and she worked at the library near the reservation. I gathered she was white.

Usually I write back to such readers with a simple, “I’m sorry the book disappointed you.” No defense, no trying to convince somebody of something they don’t want to hear.

But I wrote back to this woman asking who was offended by the book—she, a politically correct white person? Has she met or heard of any Indian who has read the book and found it offensive? Well, no, she wrote back, and had to admit that her principles were the ones involved, and she was speaking for herself. We had a fairly cordial exchange, and that was that.

During the editing of one of my earlier books, I called up my editor to complain about numerous discretionary changes the copy editor had made. That is, not things like corrected grammar, spelling, punctuation, or usage, but things like extra commas, deleted words, and changes that dumbed the work down. She defended the copy editor, and I said, “Well, then, take my name off the front and put yours and his. You can be co-authors. Publish it that way.” She backed off.

My point is this: Your name, in the end, is the one that’s gonna be on the book jacket. You have to be pretty sure of what you write. If you’ve done your homework and been honest with yourself and your material, you’re justified in standing up for your work when the occasion arises.

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Actress Promo Report

Zestful Blog Post #150

Thought you might be interested in some facts and figures today. Over last weekend and into this week I put The Actress up for free on Amazon Kindle, for the full 5-day period allowed, from Friday through Tuesday. Initially I thought I’d just make it free through Sunday (Oscar) night, but decided to leave it up the whole time, because it was doing so well.

First, context. My fiction is all in the Amazon ‘Select’ program, meaning the books are only available in e-book form on Amazon Kindle. The benefits, so far, are worth it to me. The vast majority of e-books are sold on Amazon, and if your books are in the Select program, you get more exposure and more money. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a ringing endorsement of the program, it’s just to explain why I, an author who values simplicity, am sticking with it for now. Your ‘Select’ books can be read for ‘free’ by readers who have signed up for Kindle Unlimited or KU (they pay $9.95 per month for unlimited access), and for actual free by readers who own a Kindle device (via the Kindle Owners Lending Library, or KOLL).

Free is good. You reach readers this way who wouldn’t necessarily find and buy your books on their own. The immediate benefit is that you, the author, get paid per page of free material read. It’s a fraction of a cent per page, but it adds up (example below). The extended benefit, of course, is that some readers who like your work will read and buy more and become fans.

Last week’s promo was the first time The Actress was free to anyone who wanted it. On Friday when my newschat and blog about it went out, readers downloaded it 2,629 times. Saturday: 1,408. Sunday: 731. Kind of a geometric progression. To my surprise, the book quickly reached #1 in the Amazon free store in the legal thriller category, and it ranged between 8^th and 11^th in the female sleuth category. It also broke into the top 100 free books overall, reaching #63 at its best.

Meanwhile, not much happened with my other titles, which, I’ve found, is typical when a free promo is running. My sales and free pages read were suffering from the winter blues, and I hoped this promo would help. The bump, if you’re going to get one, generally comes after the free promo is over.

As of Sunday night the book was still the #1 free legal thriller, so I decided to let the promo go the maximum time, through Tuesday, just to see if the ranking would hold, even though free downloads were slowing way down.

On Monday 400 more readers downloaded the book, and on Tuesday 427 did. A few spilled into Wednesday given international time zones: 17. So total: 5,612. That’s a lot of potential readers. Now, authors have learned that not everybody who downloads your freebie reads it, but a bunch will get to it, sooner or later. The book’s rank dropped to #2 and then #4 in free legal thrillers as of Tuesday afternoon, then I stopped keeping track.

Sales of my other books have bumped up a little in the last couple of days, but it’s too early to tell how well that will go or how long it will last. Mainly it’s the KU and KOLL pages read that have soared. As soon as the promo started, they jumped from dismally below 1,000 per day to way over that. Yesterday KU and KOLL readers made it through 3,776 of my pages. As I’m writing this midday today, about a thousand pages have been read.

[There was a bit of a bump for the quickie free promo of Easy Street I ran earlier in February, but the big spike is the result of The Actress promo.]

Let’s say you average 3,000 free pages a day. At .0058 cents per page, which is the last I figured it, that equals $522 in a 30-day month. Not a king’s ransom, but nothing to sneeze at.

I’m ramping up my promo work for my books, primarily by writing and planning more releases. I’ve been talking a little bit about Crimes in a Second Language; stay tuned for more on that this month.

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Audible Deal and More

Zestful Blog Post #149

Dearest Zestful A-lister,

As promised yesterday, here’s my newschat that went out this morning. Forgive and delete if you’re already on that list.

Newschat for Brighter Skies

Dearest Correspondent,

We know there are only four seasons, but scientists have recently determined that winter actually has five subseasons: 1) holiday buildup, 2) holidays, 3) holiday downslope, 4) gray skies, and 5) despair. Even in Florida people complain about winter. The locals get out their coats and fur boots when temperatures plummet into the low seventies, while seasonal people get upset if it’s too windy to golf. Be that as it may. Here now the news, with bright-sky wishes for you and yours.

1) The audio book company Audible made an offer on all five of my Lillian Byrd crime novels, and we signed the contract last week. This was in the works for quite a while. Am thrilled that Lillian will have a voice! Was able to approve the narrator; more about her next time. Mega thanks to the team at the Donald Maass Literary Agency for making it happen: Rights Director Katie Shea Boutillier and Agent Cameron McClure.

Not sure when the audio books will be available, though the rumor is several months out from contract signing. Funny thing: I realized I need to reread those books closely and make pronunciation notes for the narrator, so I’m doing that in betwixt and between other stuff. Detroiters have developed idiosyncratic pronunciations for countless streets and places. Ask a Detroiter how to get to Gratiot or Livernois or Ecorse.

2) In honor of this weekend’s Oscars (which I don’t usually watch, but hey, it’s a good excuse to do a promo), The Actress – Rita Farmer mystery #1 is free on Amazon Kindle.

If you haven’t snagged it yet, please do. I hope you enjoy it! Maybe it will whet your appetite for the next two in the series, The Extra and On Location. (I might note that you don’t need a Kindle device to download the book; you can get the free app for just about any device you can use to get connectivity.) And yes, I know I’ve been promising the fourth in the series forever, but bear with me. I swear I’ll get it out there.

3) Meanwhile, I’m nearly finished with final edits on a mainstream standalone that I’ll be self-pubbing through my imprint Spruce Park Press. Crimes in a Second Language was inspired by my Aunt Tracy, who befriended her cleaning woman after discovering that she was not only illiterate, but had barely attended school at all in her native Mexico. My story takes two similar women on a twisty road through education, insight, deception, and (naturally enough) dangerous malfeasance. More soon.

4) It’s a little late to report this, but Lillian Byrd #5, Left Field, did in fact win a Goldie award at last year’s GCLS conference. Very happy about that. And no, I can’t make it to the GCLS con this year—too much other travel going on. Hope to have news of other appearances soon.

5) With enormous help from Marcia, my website got a makeover last fall, and I couldn’t be happier with it.

6) My blog keeps going, as well as articles for Writer’s Digest magazine. Most recent is “Power Tools” in the January issue. Currently I’m writing one for them on “The Little Things” that are easy for writers to overlook but can make a huge difference in the quality of your work.

7) My work will also appear in the forthcoming Crafting Dynamic Dialogue: The Complete Guide to Speaking, Conversing, Arguing, and Thinking in Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, June 2016). I was honored to be asked to write an original chapter on internal dialogue for it. Also, they’ll be using some material from my book You’ve Got a Book in You.

Thanks for your company! Wishing you happy (ice-free) trails and blue skies. Love,

Elizabeth

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Pulitzers and Oscars and Harper Lee's Lawyer

Zestful Blog Post #148

When writing or speaking about the craft of writing, I often give examples from famous books. As it happens, a great many famous books have been made into movies. This is not by accident, I tell my audiences. Stories that resonate deeply in the human heart find their way around.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was one of the first novels I ever read. I remember being so young I didn’t know what rape was, and I didn’t understand that Mr. Ewell did NOT fall on his knife. Growing up, I read the story dozens of times, and still reread it every few years, in spite of having been told by a college professor that it was a contemptible book. This professor, in the middle of teaching Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet, somehow found a way to bring up To Kill a Mockingbird and sneer at it, because in the end, the little white children are safe “and everything’s all nicey-nice.” I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t recap the plot of Mr. Sammler’s Planet if my life depended on it.

Harper Lee’s smash hit book was made into a terrific movie, which is as beloved as the book. I’m writing about this because it’s Oscar time. The film version of Mockingbird won a few Oscars. I’m getting to my point.

Which has to do with Harper Lee’s other book, Go Set a Watchman, which got published last year. Just to get this straight, Mockingbird brought tons of attention to Lee, who hated the attention, who retreated from public life, who said she’d never publish another book, but oh, my gosh! Her lawyer “finds” this ol’ manuscript—just now!—and gets an idea! And at the age of 88, after having a stroke and being in an assisted-living facility, Harper’s like, cool, I’d thought that stack of paper was lost for good! Let’s dust this puppy off and publish it! Heck, yes. I can’t wait! And what’s more, I really don’t need to do any edits, or even talk to the publisher myself; my lawyer will handle everything. She has my best interests at heart.

Right.

So the book, which I haven’t read because I’m boycotting it, reportedly portrays Atticus Finch as a racist, and puts an ugly coda onto the one brilliant gift Harper Lee gave the world. Do we think Watchman is going to win the Pulitzer? They’re talking about making a movie of it. No doubt they will. Suppose that’ll win some Oscars? A Pulitzer and some Oscars?

Right.

And that’s my point.

Here’s a tiny gift for you, dear reader who has stuck with me all the way to the bottom: Advance notice of our latest giveaway: Starting at midnight Pacific time tomorrow, Friday, The Actress (Rita Farmer mystery #1) will be free on Kindle through the weekend. In honor of the Oscars, naturally! This is the first time it's been free. Also, stay tuned for a newschat coming tomorrow with more announcements. I’ll post it here on the blog as well as send it to my newschat list.

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No More Bad Self Label

Zestful Blog Post #147

When my mother turned 50, she decided to learn to play the piano. I, age about 16 and a serious musician, was surprised, because Mom had never evinced any musical talent or ability, ever. But I was happy that she wanted to learn. She bought a piano (only a spinet, but at least it was new) and hired a teacher, who set her to work on the rudiments of reading music and playing simple tunes.

I was able to help her a little between lessons, and I enjoyed plinking around on the instrument myself. God, isn’t the sound of a piano lovely? Mom’s progress was slow, but so what? One day, however, she dropped her hands into her lap and said, “Oh, I’m so bad!”

I said, “No, no, you’re just starting to learn.”

She  shook her head. “I don’t expect to be the next Van Cliburn. All I want is to be able to come home from seeing a musical, and just sit down at the piano and play all the songs from it!” She pantomimed playing lush chords with her left hand and fast melodies with her right. My blood ran cold as I understood how clueless she was as to how much experience and skill such a seemingly casual feat would require.

 Mom constantly felt discouraged, and I saw that it was because of her unrealistic expectations. “I’m so bad,” she would say all the time. I couldn’t get her to understand the difference between being a novice at something and being bad at something. We knew a bad piano player. “Look at the Jordans’ daughter,” I’d say. “She’s a bad piano player. Why? Because she’s been taking lessons and playing for twelve years and she still sounds like crap. No feeling, no heart.”

That didn’t cut any ice with Mom. Eventually she quit and gave the piano away. “I was just so bad.”

This story relates, of course, to any art. A novice must learn the craft, gain the skills, study up, and practice. Progress, generally, is uneven: often slow, but occasionally you make a breakthrough and something that was hard is now easy. Patience, laddies and lassies, patience and persistence. Novices must not think in terms of bad or good. Learning and gaining facility is all that matters.

A bad writer is a person who has developed a mediocre level of facility (at most) and who is satisfied by that, and who does not seek to improve beyond it. A good writer is a person who has achieved a respectable level of facility (at least) and who continues to strive to get better, and whose work indeed shows development and improvement over the course of his or her career. The striving to get better part makes a good writer exactly like a novice. It’s a Zen thing, really: If we bring beginner’s mind—that is, open, eager, receptive, committed—to everything we do—

Well, let’s just try it and see what happens.

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