Miss Demeanors

Yesterday my computer ‘glitched’. I’ve had a computer crash before. Twice actually. Both times the machine simply stopped working. It wouldn’t turn on. Game over. One time a technician replaced the mother board, the other time I bought a new one. Both times I accessed my documents from a backup drive and quick as a wink I was back in business. Yesterday was worse. Worse than a complete shutdown. It was heart palpitation bad. Every time I opened a document the content was that of the file opened immediately preceding it. Think about this. Pick a recent file and open it, and while the file name remains correct, the content is from the preceding one. I tried changing the file names, copying the document…. At this point I felt a cold dark panic. I pulled a document from my backup drive…. Same thing happened. I restarted the computer a few times, nothing changed. Imagine: You cannot keep content in a document. It felt like a ghost was in the machine. Watch The Shining, it was that frightening. End result, I turned my computer off and left it. Much, much later I restarted it a final time (okay, I waited until the next morning, today) and miraculously everything is fine. If I didn’t have a witness I wouldn’t believe it myself. (Their response to the problem was maybe you’ll have to retype the document from your hard copy….. ah, but that was the problem. Once the newly typed text is a new document, the next time you open it the content will be from an older document. ARGH!) All we can figure out is that something happened when the power went off yesterday. I think that the files were in the middle of backing up to Dropbox and something got ‘off’ (that’s a technical term). Anyway, back to normal today. What’s your worst computer failure?  

I took a well-deserved break the other evening and went to a movie. I picked Jack Reacher, Never Go Back as my two hours of entertainment. The problem, and one I should have anticipated, was that once I’d seen the movie I needed to read the book. How did it compare, what changes were made (other than the obvious ones…. how tall is Reacher?). Fortunately (deep irony here), when I went to my book shelf there it was – Lee Child’s Never Go Back in hardcover splendor. I have a lot of books that I’ve bought and not had a chance to read, so there is no shame in an unbroken spine. I thought I’d take a peek at the first chapter or so and get a sense of the difference between movie and manuscript, then get back to work on my own manuscript. It takes me around a minute to read one page of a novel. That’s over four hours to read Never Go Back. In one big chunk of time. I’ll skip the obvious, clearly I enjoyed it. What struck me is how much of Reacher is internal. Jack Reacher the quintessential action hero is actually the quintessential cerebral action hero. How does that translate on screen? How do you show Reacher weighing all of his options and trying to get the bad guy to back down unharmed? Reacher is a loner and loners aren’t the most loquacious people. How do you translate that into film without it becoming a silent picture? Anytime I read I feel like I’m taking a personal master class in writing. With Lee Child it is a master class in picking the exact level of detail to incorporate. In an interview he once said that he skips research. He wants to write what will feel familiar to the reader. If the reader expects the gun to be heavy why interrupt their immersion in the story to explain that ‘technically the xyz revolver is lighter than most in the same category.’ Who cares! At that point in the story, with the gun pointed, all the reader should care about it What Happens Next. Child knows this. Maybe a little of his talent and skill will rub off on me as I re-read my own draft, trying to gauge the details needed for my reader to feel the place. Really feel it. I undergo serial reading more often that I’d like to admit. (A real confession here…. a bit embarrassing… I was on a long flight last week and read three Jack Reacher novels in a row. Yep. In a row. It was like eating a whole bag of candy at Halloween. I blame this on e-books which allow instant gratification. I also blame this on the airline. There was not one single good movie to watch.) Back to the point. Reading a clump of books by one author is instructive. If they have a continuing character you see very clearly how they capture that introduction each time. How much description and backstory is enough? How much does it vary? You judge what the author keeps as part of their style and what is unique to the story being told in that particular book. How do these authors keep us coming back? We want familiarity, but not imitation. In Lee Child’s Never Go Back the story was comfortingly expected, yet fresh. Of course, in the end, I have to remember that I read that last Reacher novel when I should have been writing. Maybe Lee Child will offer a few hours of his time to make up for my writing jag? Writing for me, of course. Or maybe I should count the debt paid, since I certainly learned enough from my read to justify those few hours immersed in someone else’s world. Thank you, Mr. Child. 

Description does not come easily to me. I can write pages and pages of dialogue, but ask me to describe a room and I start to twitch. I recognized some time ago that this might be a barrier to a career as an author and so I settled upon a way to force myself to observe. Every day I take a walk in the woods. With my dogs. Every day I observe the same thing, except it’s not the same thing, because it changes from day to day. There are the seasonal changes, of course, which are very evident now. Acorns are falling, leaves are drifting, chipmunks are chirping. That was a surprise to me. A chipmunk sounds like a bird.   There are also changes after storms. I love to walk in the woods after a bad storm and look at all the drama. Some of the trees are uprooted, and they fall sideways, and their skirts make me think of ladies in crinolines. Sometimes one tree crashes on top of another, and then they look like monsters fighting. Sometimes a storm will force all the leaves off a tree, so what was bright and gold yesterday will be bare today. But then there are all sorts of quiet changes. Mushrooms erupt. Shifting light makes an innocuous looking stump look ominous. Streams dry up, or they overflow. There is one particular rock that is driving me crazy. It is way too big to move, and yet it does. Sometimes it’s in the middle of the path, and sometimes to the side. I can’t figure it out. I feel like someone is following me and moving it around, though that seems unlikely. However, when my oldest son was young I did one day go in the woods, did my circuit, and when I got done I discovered that a troop of Boy Scouts had following me. Evidently I am so focused on observing that I’m not paying attention to anything else. (Not surprisingly, there’s a scene in Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency when she’s being followed in the woods, though not by Boy Scouts.) One of my favorite trees in the woods is an ash. The leaves stay green, then turn a beautiful pale silvery color and curl up and they’re there all through the winter. They always make me think of sea shells. Then spring comes and they all fall to the ground and new green ones grow. I’m always excited to see that tree because I’m never quite sure what it’s going to do next. 

When writing about a character, I like to ask her 10 questions. (Actually, I’m more likely to ask her 1,000 questions, but that would be a very long blog post.) 1. What is your happiest memory? 2. What do you worry about before you go to sleep? 3. What’s your favorite tree? (That was an easy one for Maggie Dove. An oak.) 4. What do you regret? 5. Do you like chocolate candy or Skittles, and why? 6. If your best friend’s husband flirted with you, would you flirt back? 7. Do you believe in evil? (This became an issue in Maggie Dove’s Detective Agency.) 8. What scares you? 9. If you won a million dollars, what would you do with it? 10. What’s your favorite book? The more questions I ask, the more real the character becomes to me, and what I love is when a character surprises me. When I asked Maggie Dove about her happiest memory, she told me about an afternoon she wore a red dress and surprised her husband. I didn’t see that coming, but I loved it and went with it and it’s one of my favorite moments in the book. What questions would you add to the list?