Write It Down

Thriller Guy works with writers at all levels, from beginners to professionals in their pursuit of a commercially viable novel. My, doesn’t TG sound officious? (TG just looked the word officious up and found that he has always used this word inappropriately. He always thought it meant something close to efficient, in an official, formal kind of way. Imagine his surprise when he found that it actually means “objectionably aggressive in offering one's unrequested and unwanted services, help, or advice; meddlesome.” My goodness, TG didn’t mean that. Anyway…

One of the first things TG does when taking on a new writer, is to send him or her a Field

Notes, 48-page blank notebook. This small notebook fits easily into a shirt, pants pocket or purse and is always available for writing down those stray or not so stray thoughts that float through our brains when we are involved in the creative process. TG has written elsewhere in this blog about the amazing business of getting answers to pesky plot problems, structural conundrums and character difficulties simply by asking your brain to solve these problems and then turning your attention to other matters, letting your unconscious do the work. (Or going to sleep, which is the best method.) It’s really astounding how many times your brain will come up with an answer on its own, so you sure as hell better be ready to record it when it comes floating up into conscious levels.

TG was having lunch with one of the writers he works with, a successful thriller novelist, who said that rather than writing these thoughts down he simply picks up his cell phone, presses a couple of buttons and says, “Note to self,” and dictates the idea where it will be recorded on the device. And TG is sure you other whippersnappers do the same thing with your high tech gadgetry, smugly assuming that we doddering oldsters with our archaic methods are only a few years and a few steps away from obsolesce, and, lets be honest, death, anyway, so you look on with mild amusement as we take out our little notebooks, lick the lead of our pencil stubs and creakily scribble down the fleeting dregs of the dustbins that are our minds. Admit it! You know it’s true!

Except that cutting edge brain science says that we’re right and you’re wrong. There are many advantages to hand writing things down rather than dictating them or even typing them into your computer. Writing turns the process into a “whole brain” activity, involving both the logical and creative parts of the brain. “It heightens recall, focuses attention, facilitates learning, helps prioritization, increases awareness and activates more of the physical part of the brain than any other method.” So take that, whippersnappers.

TG was struck by an interesting fact while doing research on Thomas Edison for Allen Appel’s novel-in-process, number six in the fabulous Pastmaster Series (available here for Kindle). After Edison’s death in 1931, 3,500 small notebooks were found in his home. He kept these “idea books” always with him and would often read through them looking for ideas to work on. A quick search on the Interweb shows that many famous men throughout history have kept these same sorts of small books and usefully employed them. A blog on the site, The Art of Manliness, (excellent site) lists twenty notebook writers, with pictures of the small books they always carried and how they used them. Among them are Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Frank Capra, Larry David and others. Sure, none of these fellows, except Larry David, could have used his cell phone or tablet computer instead, but the obvious point is that it worked for these guys, and if it worked for them, maybe you should give it a try.

As noted above, TG uses the Field Brand of notebooks. (TG is in no way connected to this brand, though if they would like to take him on as a spokesperson, this could be arranged to mutual benefit.) They’re a lot cheaper than those moleskin things, cooler and really portable. TG carries his in the back pocket of his jeans, and by the time the pages are filled it’s pretty beat up, but it never loses structural integrity.

TG thinks that after working by hand with one of these for awhile, your writing ideas will come to you in greater numbers and in particular with more focus. And besides, it looks a lot cooler to see someone writing something down in a little notebook than yammering into a cell phone like one of those idiots who walk around in the grocery store talking to their phone friends while they shop.

Here's an actual page shot from one of Allen Appel's notebooks.

 So here’s the deal. The first couple of readers to send TG their land addresses at Appelworks@gmail.com will receive one of these nifty Field Notes notebooks.

  

Thriller Guy has just finished a short crime novel and is in the throes of writing the sixth entry in Allen Appel’s epic, historical time travel Pastmaster series, so he is acutely aware of the perils of taking any opportunity to not write. Going upstairs to check out the refrigerator, stepping outside to get a little vitamin D, checking Facebook, checking e-mail, there are hundreds of ways a writer can fill the time when he should be writing. (TG has blogged about the pain of writing on many occasions, so he won’t go into that here.)

 One of the chief methods of putting off writing -- particularly dangerous when writing novels with a strong historical element -- is the peril of Internet research. Being always aware of this danger, TG was struck when he recently read this quotation from Michael Chabon in The

Wall Street Journal.

"Research is incredibly pleasurable and seductive and you have to be on your guard against it. It's very easy to use it as an excuse not to write. There's always one more fact that could help you and you probably shouldn't start writing until you find out the boots worn by German troops in World War II, and if I just knew who made those boots then I could write my chapter. So you have to be on your guard against that.

"The Internet is there to say 'just one more link, just one more link.' The Internet wants you not to get your work done and the thing that is most insidious about it is the way it does that is by being the greatest research and productivity tool in the history of the human race."

And today, whilst perusing Facebook -- instead of writing -- TG found an entry by thriller writer Joe Finder about the same subject. TG will now lift whole portions on the article from his newsletter. Readers can go here to read the entire piece. Finder is a nice guy, TG has interviewed him, and he writes good thrillers.

Finder: “But every hour you spend doing the fun stuff of research is time you're not writing. And I'm here to tell you that research, while fun and often necessary, is addictive and dangerous.

“It's also a great crutch. All novelists feel like impostors at times; it's only natural to feel unqualified and insecure in what you're writing about. You don't really know it — what do we

know, we're writers, right? So you want to find out as much as you can. But in the age of the Internet, you're always one hyperlink away from the next website or article, and it can go on ad infinitum. The easiest thing in the world is to put off writing while you find out exactly how many gallons the New York City reservoirs hold, or how long it takes to fly from Washington to Timbuktu, or whether Brazilians drive on the right or the left-hand side of the road.

“So stop. Put the story first. Write your story first, and fact-check later. It doesn't have to be 100% accurate; it just has to be plausible.

“John Grisham was 100 pages into his latest book, The Associate, which was set at the Princeton Law School — when he found out that Princeton doesn't have a law school. It didn't derail him; he just moved the story to Yale, which does have a law school. The key is that the setting wasn't the important part, the story was — and he'd already written 100 pages, so he was able to go back and make the necessary changes.

“In Hollywood they call this “fixing it in post.” Dozens, if not hundreds, of pieces need to come together just so in order to get a scene right on film. If 99 things are right and one thing is wrong, it's not worth shooting an entire scene again; they can fix it in post-production, by overdubbing sound or correcting color or editing something out. The key is to keep going, so the production can “make its day,” and stay on schedule.

“That's what John Grisham knows: the key is to keep going. “When I write fiction, it takes a lot to get me out of the seat to check anything,” he said in a recent interview. “I hate to stop writing to go check a fact, to go find a city, to go to a hotel — I'll just make stuff up.”

“And you know what? Readers hate it, too. Nothing is worse than stopping a story to give your readers all the great research you did about how and when some government agency happened to be based in West Virginia instead of in Washington, DC, or why that particular vintage of Burgundy is considered the best, or who manufactures a particular kind of pistol in the United States.”

(TG here. Finder goes on to discuss what happens when you make a firearms mistake. You get tons of irate emails from gun people. This has also been TG’s experience as well.)

Finder: “But then I defer to that king of all research, James Michener, whose Herculean efforts filled whole bookshelves (Hawaii, Caravans, The Source, Centennial, etc., etc...).

Even he admitted that research can only get you so far: “The greatest novels are written without any recourse to research other than that writer's solitary inspection of the human experience. Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Jane Austen, Turgenev, and Henry James exemplify this truth ... To praise a writer for having done research is like praising a bus driver for knowing how to shift gears; if he can't perform that function, he has no right to climb into the bus.” Because the story, like the bus, has to go somewhere.

“I wrestle with this constantly. I've had to set time limits on my research. If questions come up while I'm writing, I might make a call or fire off an email, but I don't stop writing while I wait for an answer; I keep writing, and fill in details later.”

TG agrees. And adds… Many times you don’t need to be absolutely accurate, or even pretty much accurate. Not as long as your story is dragging the reader along by his collar. TG has had this proven to him many times. After a first, second or third draft, TG has readers who will go over the manuscript to check for typos, plot flubs, anything that’s wrong that can be fixed. Time and again, TG has found that in the action sequences the amount of editing is drastically reduced. The errors are still there, but the readers, even those who are tasked with finding mistakes, get caught up in the story just like everyone else and miss many more errors than they usually do. The takeaway?

Story, story, story. Readers will forgive mistakes. They will not forgive boredom and frustration. Stories will never get written by writers seeking perfection.

First draft = story. The rest is simply details.

Messy Desk, Messy Mind?

Thriller Guy works in a basement. There are no widows to speak of; the only indication of daylight is a small window in a door at the far end of the room.  That’s the way TG likes it. TG once had a very rich wife who bought a many-roomed house and TG had a fabulous workroom that looked out at the Bitterroot Mountains and the beautiful big sky of Montana. That lasted about three weeks before TG moved his “office” down into the basement next to a giant furnace. No windows.

Ahhh, nothing to do but work.

Not really TG's desk.

So down in the present basement… TG’s office (that’s what we call it in case the IRS is listening) is a couple of tables nailed together with his iMac, a printer and all manner of junk atop. Books, pens and pencils, various sticky notes, books to be reviewed, books recently reviewed, electrical fuses, wires, many wires, old CDs that may or may not contain anything useful, piles of recipes downloaded off the Interweb, research stuff and a ton of other crap. It’s a real mess. Every time TG starts a new book, he begins by cleaning up the desk. That means it gets cleaned up every couple of years. Sometimes TG begins to feel a little bad about this.

But hark! TG hears the voice of science, saying…

Working at a messy desk may actually help you think more creatively!

Much of the rest of this blog is stolen verbatim from the journal Psychological Science.

Scientists found that being surrounded by clutter can promote creative thinking and stimulate new ideas. In contrast, working at a clean and prim desk may promote healthy eating, generosity and conventionality. The new study was conducted by psychological scientist Professor Kathleen Vohs and fellow researchers at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. They mapped the behavior of people working in a messy room and clean room with a series of experiments.

Participants in the study were given a choice between a new product and an established one. Those in the messy room were more likely to prefer the novel one - a signal that being in a disorderly environment prompts a release from conventionality. Professor Vohs said: "Being in a messy room led to something that firms, industries, and societies want more of - creativity. Previous research has found that a clean setting leads people to do good things, such as not engaging in crime, litter and showing more generosity. We found, however, that you can get really valuable outcomes from being in a messy setting."

In the first of several experiments, participants were asked to fill out questionnaires in an office. Some completed the task in a clean and orderly office, while others did so in an unkempt one where papers were strewn about and office supplies were cluttered. Afterwards, the participants had the opportunity to donate to charity and were allowed to take a snack of chocolate or an apple on their way out.

Being in a clean room encouraged people to do what was expected of them as they donated more of their own money to charity. They were also more likely to choose the apple over the candy bar. However, messiness had its virtues as well. In an alternative experiment, participants were asked to come up with new uses for Ping-Pong balls. Overall, participants in the messy room generated the same number of ideas for new uses as their clean-room counterparts, but their ideas were rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by impartial judges. (TG has to admit that he can’t think of any clever uses for Ping-Pong balls other than playing Ping-Pong and choosing winning lottery numbers.)

Professor Vohs said: "Just making that environment tidy or unkempt made a massive difference in people's behavior."

The researchers are continuing to investigate whether these effects might even transfer to the Internet. Preliminary findings suggest that the tidiness of a webpage predicts the same kind of behavior. Coupled with the findings published, this is especially intriguing because of their broad relevance. Professor Vohs said: "We are all exposed to various kinds of settings, such as in our office space, our homes, our cars, even on the Internet. Whether you have control over the tidiness of the environment or not, you are exposed to it and our research shows it can affect you."

So there you go. Just try to write a novel at a clean desk.

Bor-ing.

How Much is Too Much? Rape, Murder and Torture in the Modern Thriller.

There are a couple of things that can be agreed on: Thriller Guy is one tough hombre and

that thrillers are, by their nature, going to concern death and destruction in all its possible varieties.  Over the course of, say, a years worth of reading thrillers for review, the body count involved reaches staggering numbers. But it isn’t the numbers that give TG pause, it’s how the deaths are depicted, and even more disturbing, with what ease and sometimes, eagerness writers show in the depictions. The joy they seem to take in writing about cutting off the fingers and more of helpless women, the rapes, the obscenities they create first in their heads and then on the page. TG finds these details disgusting. Wait, you say, you’re missing the point, TG, they’re supposed to be disgusting. That’s how the author seizes the reader, how he manipulates the reader’s emotions so that his villain ascends to that place in the reader’s imagination where his destruction becomes paramount. It is how justice is defined, in opposition to absolute evil.

Yeah, well, sure, but that’s not what I’m talking about. What I’m talking about is Wilbur Smith.

He’s the mega-selling author of various series, i.e. The Courtneys, The Courtneys of Africa, The Ballantine novels, The Egyptian Novels, and others. Fortunately, Thriller Guy has never been assigned any of these books to review. Unfortunately, he’s had to review Smith’s last two: Those in Peril, and his latest, Vicious Circle. In the review of Those In Peril, TG warned readers that the book was ultra violent, particularly in its treatment of women, though he also pointed out that was what Smith’s readers seem to like. In Vicious Circle, Smith really pours it on, degrading and torturing two girls, one of whom has been driven insane. Many of you will say, “it’s not Smith doing the torturing, it’s the character in the book.” Yeah, well, that’s just an excuse for what Smith seems to relish writing, and this is sick stuff.

Circle continues the story of series hero Hector Cross. Here’s the rundown on the book, taken from Smith’s website: “Hazel Bannock is the heir to the Bannock Oil Corp, one of the major oil producers with global reach. While cruising in the Indian Ocean, Hazel's private yacht is hijacked by African Muslim pirates. Hazel is not on board at the time, but her nineteen year old daughter, Cayla, is kidnapped and held to ransom. The pirates demand a crippling twenty billion dollar ransom for her release.

Complicated political and diplomatic considerations render the major powers incapable of intervening. When Hazel is given evidence of the horrific torture which Cayla is being subjected to, she calls on Hector Cross to help her rescue her daughter.

Hector is the owner and operator of Cross Bow Security, the company which is contracted to Bannock Oil to provide all their security. He is a formidable fighting man. Between them Hazel and Hector are determined to take the law into their own hands.

Cayla, is subjected to intense graphic, repeated, sexual torture by her captors until they chop off her head and send it to Hector and Hazel. The torture scenes are well over and beyond anything that was needed to make his point. Well into pornographic territory.

Circle is even worse. I have been debating if I should put some examples up on this site. I won’t put up any of his sickness with the little girls, but here’s a nice little para as the bad guy is debasing on of his minions, who we are told really loves this treatment.

“He slid his finger out of her and held it up in front of her face. “Now look what you’ve done, you dirty little whore. You have made my nice clean finger dirty with your filthy pussy.” (p172)

On the next page he cuts off both her ears and makes her eat one of them; on the next page he jams a knife into her gut and disembowels her.

He saves the worst for the children. On page 200 he depicts the bad guy having sex with little Sacha, “Three weeks before her ninth birthday party.”

Sacha is driven mad by this treatment and later on he writes a very long torture scene where Sacha finally dies and her sister is fed alive to a herd of pigs. Of course this scene is being filmed to be sold to perverts on the Internet.

TG has a very wide tolerance for the levels of mayhem. But what he has no tolerance for is when an author seems to be taking enjoyment in writing this stuff. Of course TG has no way of knowing if this is so, but the extreme torture of women and children occurs again and again in these two books.

Is Wilbur Smith to blame? Of course he is. But so are the people who buy his books, and they are legion. I have no idea if this sort of thing is on the pages of his many other series, and I’m not going to read them to find out. If for no other reason than he’s a terrible writer.  “Hazel,” he said with rising anger. “Fight, my darling. Fight the bastard.” He knew the black angel had come for her. “Don’t let him take you!” (p49)

Those in Peril was a bestseller, as are most of Smith’s books. I assume Vicious Circle will be if it isn’t already one. Thriller Guy will never review another one.

Anyone who reads this crap, and enjoys it, should be ashamed.

Anyone who writes this crap should be ashamed.

Shame, shame, shame.