The Butchertown Chronicles: Annals of Research

Despite the shroud of illness that has weighed me down in recent months, I haven’t been entirely mummified in blankets upon my bed.

For example, the day before Elizabeth and I took a recuperative holiday in September, I limped to the end of the first draft of my next novel, Butchertown.

More I won’t say—give me a week or two—but I‘ll tell you about some of the background reading. I’ve been fairly lucky here, in that the last three books I’ve read have also been good ones, worth finishing, worth both my times and yours.

COMING HERE TO GO HOME

First and best was The Long Way Home: An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War, by David Laskin (Harper Perennial), a beautifully written story, both intimate and epic, of twelve European immigrants who, after arriving on U. S. shores around the turn of the 20^th century, found themselves signing up and shipping back to Europe to fight in World War I, with one of them fighting his own countrymen.

Like the thousands of immigrant soldiers who served—many of whom knew not a jot of English--the dozen Laskin focuses on came from all over Europe: an Irishman and Norwegian; Jews from the ghettoized world of Russia’s Pale of Settlement, poverty-stricken Italians, and an Austro-Hungarian.

Many immigrants came to escape conscription in their countries’ armies. All came to America in search of a better life as people have for half a millennium. Whatever their reasons, the last thing these men expected was to soldier up and ship back home to fight a war.

None of them resisted the draft call-up in 1917. In fact, draft resistance was rare, an alien notion to our resistant age (though Laskin does relate a couple of grim cases involving the fatal persecution of pacifist German immigrants). This becomes especially poignant in the light of how especially vile and pointless World War I was.

All these men served bravely, under the most ghastly circumstances imaginable and, except for a couple of Medals of Honor, little thanks. Even so, many of those who made it back alive felt a pride in their service to their country they carried with them for the rest of their lives.

This a beautifully written book, richly and movingly detailed. If your curiosity ever leads you back to those days, this is one to read.

LIFE OF CRIME

You Can’t Win by Jack Black (not the comedian) is the best true crime book I’ve read in years and certainly the most thrilling true crime autobiography.

Jack Black was born in 1871 in British Columbia and grew up in Missouri. As a teenager he took easily to a 30-year career as a professional criminal, burgling and stealing his across the fading Old West. Fifteen of these years he spent behind bars in the U.S. and Canada. It wasn’t until he hit bottom as an opium fiend (and kingpin) facing another 25 years that he met wealthy San Francisco newspaper publisher and editor Fremont Older in the 1910s and broke his downward spiral.

You Can’t Win is an amazing read, a mostly candid, compelling, and hair-raising story of life on the lam and underground, packed with vibrant sympathetic characters, roller-coaster adventures, and hair-raising exploits.

Woven all through it, though, is a grimy despondency and fatalism, tarred with many episodes of brutality, by both crooks and cops. Black illustrates with exacting detail how it takes as much brains and skill to be a “successful” criminal as required in most other professions (including burglaries that take all night, as the thief sits waiting for his victim to turn over in his sleep.)

As livings go, it’s not much of one; by Black’s account, only one in five burglaries could be counted as “successful”; the rest of the time is spent in fear—of getting caught or starving—or a relentless boredom and aimlessness that ends in alcoholism and drug addiction).

Surprising too is the camaraderie among underworld denizens in those days, with comparatively little of the self-destructive ultra-Darwinian mentality that seemed to arise with the enormous wealth and power spurred by Prohibition and the War Against Drugs. As Brian Burroughs also demonstrated in his classic Public Enemies, Black experienced a tentative “honor among thieves” that, while not ironclad, and contingent on circumstances, was essential to the survival of both body and soul. Crooks were never honest to us law-abiders, of course, but they had to be square with each other if they hoped to see another day. Their lives were short and brutish enough as it was.

While it may be seen as an “anti-crime” book, You Can’t Win is also an “anti-punishment” book. Once out of prison and cleaned up, Black, with Older’s help, became a noted public figure, speaking out not only on crime prevention but also as a full-throated advocate of prison reform. As has been noted time and again, prison never made an honest man out of anyone. It wasn’t prison that reformed Black, but the realization achieved with the help of others, that there were choices beyond the bad ones he made.

Even if you’re not interested in the social issues Black discusses here, you’ll have a ripping time following along on his exploits, more edge-of-your-chair thrills than you’ll find with most crime thrillers. While Black obviously glosses over his later career (when he turned toward violence and drug-dealing), his portrayal of life underground is exact, vivid, unsentimental, and memorable.

GOLDEN AGE OF HECHT

Real movie and theatre buffs know all about Ben Hecht. When I was trying to be screenwriter, he was one of my heroes—maybe my only hero. Hecht was—and remains—the greatest screenwriter from the Hollywood dream factory. He wrote and co-wrote, (credited and uncredited) over seventy movies during Hollywood’s Golden Years, from the 1920s and the 1960s.

The list is fabulous—Scarface (1932; the good one); The Front Page, written with Charles MacArthur, play and screenplay); Nothing Sacred, Wuthering Heights, Gone with the Wind (uncredited); Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Notorious; Gunga Din.

So many scripts for so many good and great pictures, it’s hard to see how there’s any room nowadays for a writer like him anywhere but in the far realms of pay cable (Hecht would have been a natural for series like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. But shows like those don’t come along often.)

As told in William MacAdams’s readable if uninspired biography, Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend, Hecht was also one of the most celebrated, and most antic, writers and wits of his time. Born in New York City in 1894, he moved first to Wisconsin, then as a young man, to Chicago where he became a successful newspaperman, columnist and leader of what was known as Chicago Literary Renaissance, a noted novelist and poet, whose books were sometimes banned for obscenity.

Noted is all he came to be in this context, because little of Hecht’s work from that era is remembered, except for a collection of his columns, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago. Some years ago, I read his debut novel Erik Dorn, a novel in the Modernist style that was just birthing at that time—inward turning, psychological, philosophical, sometimes witty, but dramatically static and barely memorable.

It wasn’t until 1926, when Hecht, his romance with being a starving artist tarnishing and wondering if he would become any more than a “notorious, noted writer,” received a telegram from fellow scribe Herman Mankiewicz (Citizen Kane) urging him to come to Hollywood and write for the movies:

“Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

Well, sadly, it eventually did get around. Nevertheless, for the next forty years, Hecht outcompeted the idiots, not only winning an Oscar (for the story for Underworld) and nominations for others, but making a large and steady living as script doctor for David Selznick and many others producers and directors.

Hecht denigrated his screenwriting career, but significantly, he was able to write, produce, and direct some movies of his own, ambitious expressions of what he thought an artistic movie should be. (I’ve not seen any of these, but Crime Without Passion, Actors and Sin and Angels Over Broadway are said to be the best of them).

In the end though, even heaped with praise from critics and serious moviegoers, none of Hecht’s films turned a dime, illustrating that eternal tension between art and commerce. The mystery of how to get their butts in the seat (or their eyes in a book) with becoming a “hack and sellout” remains forever an insoluble matter of alchemy.

As biographies go, MacAdams’s book often feels perfunctory, hurried, and undistinguished, but Ben Hecht was such a colorful and fabulous personality (even when he’s dislikable, which is often), that his story almost tells itself.

If you want more color and dash, I’d recommend Hecht’s autobiography, Child of the Century (especially his account of his newspapering days). Fantastically entertaining as that one is, though, you’ll need to down a dozen grains of salt while reading it. The fabulous Ben Hecht was also a first-rate fabulist, not only in the movies, but in telling his own life story.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.

Shop Talk#6: The Passion of the Bureaucracy

Novels are big clerical morasses.
--Richard Ford, author of Independence Day

Once upon a time, before becoming an editor, I was a legal clerk, then a government bureaucrat. Most of you probably know what that entails, unless I have readers in some remote Himalayan valley who have managed to achieve Internet access (good God, are you that bored? And do you have a spare room for a weary urban refugee and his wife?)

Whatever your ice-creamy ideas about the writer’s life and the sweeping glories of novel-writing, know this: I’m reliving my days as a bureaucrat now.

The reason can be distilled down to one simple word: detail. And lots of it.

Maybe more than most other art forms—and I’d like to hear from those who can cite where I might be wrong—writing novels is about capturing details. And listing them and keeping track of them. And staying painfully aware of them as I go through the last draft of my book, Dragon’s Ark, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, and chapter by chapter.

Any of you who write novels may know about this. But except for Richard Ford’s quote above (from The 2006 Novel and Short Story Writer’s Market; Writer’s Digest Books), I’ve never read any accounts of this in interviews conducted by writers, nor in any of their autobiographical accounts. Even the late Norman Mailer, in one of my favorite books on the subject, The Spooky Art, seems never to have suffered from paper cuts or jabbed himself with a paper clip. (It was Mailer who kindly pointed out that it was perfectly OK to bungle three or four novels before writing one suitable for publishing. Too bad it took me thirty years to find that out.)

Office work . . . now I get it! That’s why I avoided writing a novel for so many years!

When I was professional paper-pusher, I never discussed the details of my labors to anyone. It was more than those promises of confidentiality, more than a pseudo-Bohemian’s shame that he wasn’t romantically starving to death in some nihilistic garret. Even in those circumstances where I played an essential role—say in medicine or law enforcement—the hundreds of dry little steps I took each day to make sure that the details were available in a comprehensive and comprehensible fashion for immediate access for my superiors, I spoke not a word about them. In fact, I could hardly conceive of a language to talk about it. “This bit of paper with that subset of that information over there, goes in this folder with this color tab, not that color tab”--

--no no don’t go to the Brittany Spears site just yet, stay with me, please.

I keep the dozens of details that make up the narrative of Dragon’s Ark in lists and the lists are kept in files—oh-oh your eyelids are fluttering. WAKE UP! You’re learning something, dammit!—on my computer. I have a large folder, called “Ancillary Files.” This folder contains exactly 30 documents listed by type of information. There are notes transcribed from four beat-up inked-up notebooks; a file of deleted passages that may find their way back to the final draft (but not likely—in fact, I haven’t dumped much in there since the second draft). There are drafts of verbal pitches to agents and query letters; lists of readers and people I want to mention in the acknowledgments (yeah yeah, Hilary, don’t worry, you’re in there . . . sheesh, politicians . . . .); lists of contacts, and research questions.

Then there are the two most important files of all—what, you want more sweet dopey cat pictures? No, please, don’t go! It really gets exciting!

The two most important docs are “Character List” and “Event Calendar.” The first list also contains a list and description of important locations. The main purpose of these are to help me maintain consistency of characters and settings and make sure all the events in the book time out and dovetail correctly. I refer mostly to the events calendar (I used a 2006 calendar as my base, though the actual year of the novel’s events are left vague). As time goes on, I update each file with deletions and additions of details.

They’re sloppy lists now, but after I type “The End” I’m going to have to go back and finalize both of them so they match up with what’s in the finished novel. Why? Because somewhere down the line, either I or (hopefully) the publisher will have to hire a copy editor—a bean counter of words like me—to make a final pass to catch whatever I or my editor will have missed. And believe me, details will be missed, hopefully minor ones. Even the masters miss details. The Lighthouse an excellent mystery by P.D. James that I’m now reading, muffs a geographical detail. It’s small and perfectly forgivable, but still, we always strive for perfection, even as we know we can never reach it. Care must be taken.

In order to draw near to that perfection, the copy editor will need those two lists and they will have to cross reference the details of character, plot and setting; for example, to make sure that all the changes I made from draft one—say of a place name—have been completely worked into the final draft.

Oh my! Have I really completely murdered your desire to ever tackle writing a novel?

Swell! That’s less competition for me!

Now for that link to a video of hair falling out.


EXTRA FUN NOTE:

“All Things Considered” on NPR broadcast an amusing piece on Friday on what kind of Hollywood movie could be produced based on the 2008 Presidential election and who would play whom (Meryl Streep as Hilary Clinton; Richard Dreyfuss as John McCain and Denzel Washington as Barack Obama, etc.).

Your correspondent’s evil nimble mind immediately leapt to one of his (and, allegedly, Nobel Prize-winner Jimmy Carter’s) favorite movies: The Good, the Bad & the Ugly with the following cast:

Clint Eastwood as Barack Obama . . . Lee Van Cleef as John McCain . . . and (drum roll) Eli Wallach in the role of Hilary!

Now, if we can just CG the candidates into clips from the movie . . . if you know anyone with those skills, send ‘em to me! We may have a YouTube hit on our hands! Let's get this meme rolling!

(The object on the left of the photo above is a walking stick I bought in the Lake Tahoe area; the one on the right is a Basque carving I picked up in Monterey; the photo in the middle was taken in Bill Arney's apartment in San Francisco; it was there that Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon.)

Shop Talk #5: Slow, Shaky Surgeon

I finished draft #3 of the formerly-titled The Vampire of Alpine Canyon (now called Dragon’s Ark )on February 28, 2001 and have finally grown the stones to—just kidding, it was 2008, like you remember. I didn’t shamefully hide it away like I did Mazola Party Platter that mega-hardcore porn video I produced in the 1990s—Oh! I never told that story!? Never mind!

I last discussed this book in “The Back Trails of Research” (9/16/07). This time, I have the following facts to report:

1) Draft #3 came in at 582 pages, down a pitiful 36 pages from draft #2 to around 161,000 words. Not even within cannonball distance of my goal. Am I a failure? Only if I quit.

2) My writing skills are now at the level of Harold Robbins’ Late Period (say, The Betsy). Don’t break out those ABAs yet. I keep clearing away webs of plot, story and awful writing. For example, the “vampire hunter,” still lacks forward momentum and takes too long wandering in and out of too many box canyons and dead-end trails. Until recently, I mushed around about the name of a significant geographical feature, but I think it’s settled now.

As with draft #2, once finished, I immediately set #3 aside to simmer and to fantasize about my guaranteed great success: I saw numbers so high that, to steal one from David Mamet, “dogs can’t hear it.”

But, before floating into my fantasy of how you’re all gonna buy this book or be struck blind, I made seven copies (with the assistance of my Wife’s Sister and Brother-in-Law) and gave each copy to seven selected readers (including Wife and Wife’s Sister). Some of them know each other, but others are mutual strangers. Some readers are also writers, while some are readers only: These minds are open to sheer pleasure, free from the technical worries that clutter the heads of all writers. The only thing the readers all have in common for sure is that they—I hope—read these postings.

I gave them three weeks to pound through it—no agonizing over every line and page—and asked them to focus on the book’s entertainment value: What bored them? What confused them? We like praise, yes—in fact, we need it--but learning what’s wrong is the path to keeping this one out of Border’s pulping pile.

Sometimes, “This part bored me to diarrhea, this part nearly gave me a heart attack and why don’t your characters stop changing clothes in the middle of every scene?” is all I need. Sometimes I’m only looking for confirmation of my sense that something isn’t working and maybe I’ll stumble on the reason why and—most important—how to fix it! For these issues, non-writing readers work best.

Best of all, non-writers don’t try to righteously rewrite your book the way they’d write it, a painful experience, especially when dealing with someone who’s prone to bellowing: “Fuck Shakespeare! I’m a Dean Koontz man!”

So, why aren’t I in a writer’s group?

For years, I was. In fact, I joined too many.

Once, I briefly joined a writer’s group who claimed that they read the fiction they produced solely from the point of view of “real everyday readers.”

“But that, of course, is bullshit,” as Charles Willeford so eloquently puts it.

Readers do not read like writers do, as noted above and no way can writers read like non-writers. For example, I study Elmore Leonard as closely as I read Cervantes, though I read each book in a very different manner, as I’ve lectured elsewhere. Whether it’s Ulysses or Butcher’s Moon, I’m always a writer reading. We writers process our reading in very different ways. We study the nails, the glue, the wood, and how it's cut, rather than pouring it into our heads, letting the words gush through ours souls. For us, even the most pleasurable reading is still work.

The writing group I speak of looked at my admittedly not-good-yet hit man yarn and then fell into bitter rage, as though I’d murdered their children before their eyes and then ate them in bite-sized uncooked pieces with an olive fork like Oscar Wilde, my pinkie waving arrogantly in the air.

Some of their critique may have been useful, but they yelled so loud, I couldn’t hear them . . . and I can’t hear you when you yell.

Look, Al Gore can scream at me about climate change. This here’s a fucking vampire novel fer chrissakes! Yeah, I’m striving to create the best darn one since Dracula, but trying to make me feel dumb as Dick Cheney’s gofer has never improved my work. Maybe the lazy and the deluded blossom under abuse, but my back pain and CRT-stung eyes put Yours Truly in a different class. Abuse only makes me want to quit and become a thought-starved bureaucrat again.

Another point: At best, I find writer’s groups are overrated; at worst they produce nothing but workshoppy writing that tastes like old gravy. Regarding the ones I’ve joined, I plead guilty to often trying to rewrite the other guy’s book. Most often, I got insecure and nervously wrote to avoid punishment. (“Put more of that literary stuff in. They love it! Cut that literary bullshit out. They hate it! I know! I’ll write the phone book! Nobody’ll get mad then!”) Then I’d stop writing period.

One more thing: I also found myself in trouble for liking—or not liking—another writer’s work. One group hinted that I wasn’t contributing enough to the discussion. When I started speaking up more, they hinted I should leave. Maybe I do lack guts and conviction. Maybe I was playing to the wrong crowd.

I’ve heard back from most of the readers by now. Comments are mostly positive, but, even better, some are pointed and incisive, while delivered in a thoughtful tone, as if I were a real grownup serious about making his humble piece something that readers will really enjoy. Most all agree that the early chapters are mostly a dreary info dump of too many characters, plot elements and story lines at once that eats up too many pages. One excellent point: I treated too many minor characters like major characters and that will trip up readers. An essential chapter was revealed as a major frustration that will take hours of frowning, pacing and rewriting to get right. One reader found entertaining a chapter I thought dull as C-Span. All of you said something helpful. I know you can't wait to read the acknowledgments.

Happily no one has screamed yet . . . exCEPT IN TERROR BWA-HA-HA . . . !

The comments continue to trickle in, but the three weeks are up. I’ve tossed the last gold coin into the treasure box of dreams and I’m back at it. I rework each chapter: hack, cut, carve, slice, trim, chop. A little razor work here, a roaring chainsaw there. I sit down with Patient Wife and read it out loud, search for errors and gauge her reaction. Then polish, trim cut. One reader recommended going through every page and cutting two sentences. Not as easy as it sounds, but it makes you look.

Before too long, I will type THE END. Then Dragon’s Ark will sail alone into the stormy seas of the marketplace. I'll shed a tear . . . and then start the next one.


Re-edited 6/8/11


Copyright 2008 by Thomas Burchfield

Shop Talk#4: The Back Trails of Research (Part of a Series)

No "fun" for Writer Tom, This Time

I have just returned from four days in Alpine County, California. “Gee,” you might well ask, “doesn’t this call for another episode of ‘Them Thar Hills’? Another hapless Laurel-and-Hardyesque escapade about being pursued by bears and burning down campsites—no, entire national forests ala Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire?” No, not this time. My primary goal had little to do with basking in Nature’s Glory and divining Her Secrets (though a little divination did go on). This time it was all about research. The collection and absorption of information about the people of Alpine County. All in preparation for the approaching conclusion of my work on that fabulous, sure-to-be bestselling novel all of my readers are Morally Obligated to purchase or face the Onslaught of Various Rashes and Bizarre Deformities: The Vampire of Alpine Canyon. People live in the country, often close to, and within, wilderness itself. I know this is strange to many of my readers who are probably mostly urban dwellers. Maybe one or two of you feel the same way about the country as H.L. Mencken: Nature “is a place to throw empty beer cans on a Sunday.” It’s a funny thing about the supernatural tale. The more realistic, the more grounded in quotidian detail it is, the stronger the sense of surprise, awe and terror at the appearance of the fantastic. Nathaniel Hawthorne seems to be the first to notice this, and, no one’s proven him wrong yet. (Fantasy horror efforts, like the awful awful The Mummy and Van Helsing don’t even deserve the term ‘horror.’ They’re action comedies, and bad ones at that.) I need enough of those everyday details to make my story, its characters and the world it takes place in, believable, to you, my loyal readers, who will make yourself twenty-to-thirty bucks poorer to fulfill your solemn duty to me, your hard-working author (unless you wait for the paperback). And to get those details, and get ‘em right, I had to return to the scene of my original inspiration. Now, as you might imagine, the Alpine County of quotidian reality has, in the rich soil of my mind, morphed into another place that resembles the magical place I love, but is still very different. Firstly, it was missing a couple of significant geographic features I want for my book—one of them the titular canyon. But I knew that things would have to really change when, on a trip I took a couple of years ago, I learned from a curator at the County Museum, that Alpine County completely lacked a certain kind of Rural Professional, who had become central to my tale. (Apologies for my coyness here, but I really don’t want to spoil it for you.) At that point, I realized I could no longer use real-world Alpine County as my backdrop. I would have to “make a place up,” a normal practice among novelists of all genres (read Joyce Carol Oates’ Bellefleur, another great Gothic, which is set in an imaginary Upstate New York.) First off, I changed the name of the county. Next, I doubled its land area and its smallest-in-the-state population of around 1,200. Increasing the population meant creating another whole new town and actually demoting the remote, charming, bucolic county seat of Markleeville (population 150) to a remote, charming, bucolic village, also bearing a new name. Still, I need a realistic baseline to build my new fictional world from and there is still plenty that Alpine County can teach me. (Another note: The next biggest California county in population, Sierra County, is around 3500, which is way too much. In fact, Alpine County is so small, California's state government considers it “unclassifiable” in terms of state funding.).

My Front Yard (See last week's posting for back yard.)

I arrived on Sunday afternoon and camped in Grover Hot Springs State Park, a place I’d hiked around on a couple of occasions, but this trip, as a camper, I found myself falling stoned in love with: I decided to make it my base for my entire stay. (With a four-square mile golden meadow surrounded by the towering looming Sierras as my front yard, what fool am I to sneer?) In my previous posting on this subject, I shared a profound dread of the hostile resistance I might face in response to my questions. I couldn’t have been more wrong, I’m grateful to say. From the County Health Services, through the Washo (Southern Band) tribal headquarters, on to the Sheriff’s Department and the County Library, all my questions were answered with patience, utter politeness and everyone’s best effort (though the Sheriff’s spokesperson did worry about whether if they would be reading about yet another crooked, spineless, inept small-town sheriff; I assured her not). Not all questions, of course, could be answered and correspondence with a couple of the people I spoke to will continue. One insight I did gain that I can share: not all the facts I learned about how things are done in Alpine County, will become facts in my book. By now, my fictional location has taken on a shape of its own. Practices regarding say, law enforcement, vary, from county to county. In Alpine County, the California Highway Patrol handles all traffic matters on all roads . . . but that will not be the case in my story. Still, just that scrap of info helped to clarify a few things. Still, I have to be careful. Critics complain, often rightly, how genre writers blithely ignore reality just to keep our fanciful plots moving. Fair point, but too much attention to too much detail can create a doorstop book: a kind of Á la Recherché du Temps Perdue Meets Edgar Rice Burroughs that doesn’t get moving until page 300, because I’ve spent too much time describing how the deputy cleans what kind of pistol while reflecting on his latent transexualism and problems with his pregnant wife: I’m not doing either Tom Clancy-ville or Marcel Proust, here. I returned home on Thursday with over a dozen pages of chicken scratching and a tremendous case of exhaustion—I hardly slept the whole time I was there—part of the reason I did very little hiking around. I’m still catching up. Sleep? Oh yes, more please . . . . Nevertheless, this time, I crossed one of the biggest mountains. I’m well into the Valley of the Third Draft (the Reader’s Draft.) of The Vampire of Alpine Canyon. Despite all the work that remains, I do believe I see a little light up there, just over those peaks, yonder.

There. See it? Yonder . . . .

Shop Talk #3: A Long Long Trail A-Winding

The last we visited this subject, I’d just finished Draft #2 on that upcoming smash-through-the-roof bestseller you are—of course--all going to read, The Vampire of Alpine Canyon. By the time of posting, I was ending a mini-vacation from writing and was starting to comb through the manuscript to see what hell I had wrought upon the computer screen. Here’s what I learned:

1) Draft #2 came to a total length of 618 pages, or around 174,000 words. At least 130 pages,or around 35,000 words, must go.

2) As far as writing—execution, style, control of narrative, spelling—your correspondent is still attending the Danielle Steel School of Keyboarding Your Way to Bestsellerdom. Misspellings and bad sentences abounded like repeated stakes through my heart. I found no howlers—I really wasn’t looking for them—but there was plenty to roll my eyes to the ceiling in search of that lightning bolt that God fires down on all bad writers (or should anyway). Discontinuities remain: I’ve only settled recently on the name of a significant geographic feature—not the eponymous canyon—while a couple minor characters changed monikers throughout. Is there a cat in this book, or not?

3) However, I did detect significant improvements. The plot and story are much more clear, focused, and coherent now. The time and place are set as are my major characters and most minor ones. I have all the basic plot I need, and may even be able to snip away a few knots and strands and sew together a few others to spin a swifter, more graceful yarn. As I read Draft #2, I started grading each chapter, A through F. I gave myself mostly Cs, a couple of Fs, and more Bs and As than I expected to find. At least one chapter had leapt from a D-minus to a B-plus, simply by radically rethinking a character. The ending still pleases me though, of course, I might be wrong. Some of you may get to tell me.

4) Research: One of my major characters is a rural professional, but don’t expect a Tom Clancy novel with entire chapters of step-by-step instructions on doing whatever; nevertheless, in those scenes when my character practices his profession, I want it to ring true, not in only in terms of basic procedure, but also in terms of his role in the community. I’ve purchased several books on the life of rural professionals and have been in contact with at least one. Wikipedia has also turned out to be helpful

5) Other research: I have a supporting character who is a county official, so I must learn more about his business, too; another supporting character is a fanatical sports enthusiast,so at least some reading must be done to capture the experience and some—but not too much—of the lingo involved; still another is a character who lives on the dole, so how does the welfare system operate in such situations? And then, there’s all that wonderful flora and fauna.

About research: it’s not my tip-top, number-one strength. The reading part I’m one hundred percent on, but, like a lot of writers, I cringe when it comes to actually approaching strangers and asking questions. I feel like Ken Tobey opening that door in The Thing (the good version). What waits on the other side? “None of your goddamn business!” or “Ohhh, I get it! You’re gonna put me in your stupid book and make me look like a buffoon! Here’s my middle finger! How’s that for information, asshole?”

Interesting note: one of the greatest genre writers ever, Donald Westlake, has claimed he hates research and actually hires out for it! I have mixed feelings about that. I also tend to fudge a little regarding what my book is about when talking to people. As any of you who have written supernatural fiction might know, of all genres, outside of pornography, it can elicit the most hostile reactions, no matter how many allusions to Shakespeare, Poe, or Nathaniel Hawthorne you toss around (“A vampire novel!? Uh-uh! No way! Step back, or I’ll break your nose with this door!”)

I’m already up to Chapter 7 of Draft #3 and seem to be making good progress. The characters and their world now seem to be knit more tightly than ever. The people act more decisively with deeper, stronger emotion and clearer purpose: less like hapless stick puppets, more like flesh and blood characters. I can already see saying good-bye to several chapters that fail to do anything but cure insomnia. A couple things still seem too long and I feel like I’m sometimes packing too much information into too small a space.

Another field trip disguised as a camping excursion to lovely Alpine County, California, lies just ahead, next week. If I can avoid certain Vile and Dangerous Diversions, I may be typing “The End” before I know it!

And then the next step: taking this baby on the road for a spin. Presenting it to a select sliver of the reading human population—both writers and non-writers--and seeing what gives: seeing if I have successfully painted the world and its creatures that exist in my head into the minds and dreams of those whom I offer entrance.

There’ll be more about that, later.


A Vile and Dangerous Diversion! (Photo by Elizabeth; cat by Flo!)

[NOTE: I WILL BE POSTING ON SATURDAY OF NEXT WEEK, INSTEAD OF SUNDAY! SET YOUR WATCHES!

SHOP TALK#2: WRITE BADLY! (Second in an occasional series)

As I read the first draft of my novel The Vampire of Alpine Canyon for the very first time, I heard the critics thunder:

“Worst novel I’ve ever read! I’ve always been a First Amendment stalwart, but this vile excrement has changed my mind!”—San Francisco Chronicle.

“It wasn’t until I closed the book and threw it in the incinerator that the stench that permeated the room faded away”—The New Yorker.

“Makes Dean Koontz look like Michael Ondaatje. Clearly written by a chimp. City Council should pass resolution expunging author’s birth records from city files—“ Peekskill Evening Star.

“I can’t take it anymore! Hand me that revolver!” Publisher’s Weekly (deceased).

OK, it wasn’t that bad . . . but reading Draft #1 was rather like a high school memory: a sauce of
embarrassment and anguish. Sometimes, I glimpsed glittering life floating on a black mysterious
pool; sometimes, it was just algae rotting in oxygen-deprived water. I could see where I hadn’t a
clue I what was doing. (Toward the end, I realized I’d neglected an important character and spent fifty pages fleshing him out to uneven, but very helpful, effect.)

Draft #1 was the bad unpublishable book I expected: There were so many loose ends it looked like octopi in a front-loading washer. But when you get right down to it . . . Big Fucking Surprise. And without any guilt or paralysis. Why?

Because I hadn’t shown it to anybody! Not even darling Elizabeth. I figured out many years ago that the only lesson I ever learned from showing anybody a first draft was the most obvious one: “Your book sucks.” Usually, this comes in an angry tone of schadenfreude designed to crush the morale needed to get through the second draft, which, if ever finished, is written so as not to provoke further rage: And so it ends, with a nice, formulaic safe book, praised in workshops across the nation.

In other words, I had to figure out where, how and why my book sucked before letting any other human eyes near it.

Bad as the book was, I still felt I had something. Despite the flat characterizations, rushed
storytelling, dithering plot lines and paucity of convincing detail, my basic story still seemed a
good one. The ending seemed to work especially well—very unusual for a supernatural novel, which, even after the best, most exquisitely drawn and designed buildup, often collapses in bloody fiery confusion.

Bad as it was, it still recalled that night under Sierra stars. There were moments where it flew
like a dream, whispered from my shadow, snickered from the darkness.

Draft #1 came out around 500 pages. When I finished Draft #2 two weeks ago, it was longer by ten chapters and a hundred-plus pages. (Three of those chapters were ripped from that fifty-page monster I wrote in the first draft.) But that was not a bad thing. It was longer, I suspect, because I knew and understood more. I predict that when I read it (right now, that would be starting yesterday), that everything—character, motivation, plot, story, setting, drama, emotion—will be clearer and stronger.

By the time I’d started Draft #2, I’d drawn a crude map of the location. The real Alpine County,
sadly, turns out to be a little too under-populated and lacking certain geographical features for
the tale I’m spinning. So, I created an imaginary county, though I left some local landmarks with new names. I not only got my geographic features, I created a whole new town. Some work remains to be done in this area.

As I marched through Draft #2—only a handful of days off for illness and holidays—I used a calendar from a previous year to construct an “events calendar.” As I finished each chapter, I entered the following information:

CHAPTER NUMBER
TIME/DATE(S)
LOCATION(S)
CHARACTERS
PLOT/STORY

This was but one step in that “serious bureaucracy” mentioned in my last posting. Creating this
Flying Monster’s-Eye view helps establish a window of time within which the action would take
place. It assists with plot, continuity and pacing. It will undoubtedly help with analyzing and
cutting chapters and scenes and joining episodes.

A side note here: Over at literary agent Nathan Bransford’s blog, the subject of point of view (POV) came up, an essential decision in all fiction. Genre fiction is often told in the first person. Dracula did this through diaries, letters, and articles, allowing Bram Stoker to flit in and out of various POVs. Ghost Story by Peter Straub (my favorite of all) goes in and out of first and third without the media and with great success.

I chose a more conservative path: Third person, singular POV; two major, four or five minor; one POV per chapter (with one or two exceptions). I briefly toyed with cutting down to two POVs only. While this might create a more intense experience, it might also make it a more claustrophobic, subjective story, maybe like those written by the English master Ramsey Campbell. But that’s not what I’m angling for with this tale.

This time, I’ve taken off only two weeks. My sense of urgency grows; my need to get on with it sharpens. The Muse that says “I think you’ve got something here” now sings another tune: “Wait no more! Go on! Suck all you want! But write!”

Shop Talk #1: There's a Draft In Here! (First of a Series)

“’Bob opened the door.’

“Dear Diary: Today, I wrote ‘Bob opened the door.’ Tomorrow I will write another exciting sentence as we discover what Bob sees through the now-open door—"

John Caldwell cartoon caption.

Ten days ago, I finished the second draft of my debut novel—and this blog’s real raison d’etat—The Vampire of Alpine Canyon.

Don’t fret. No spoilers lurk ahead. But I will try to answer the questions that have so many folks bouncing like frisky kittens: “Gee whiz, Mr. Burchfield! How’d’ja do it!? Gosh! It must be fun to write a novel! What’s it like?”

Well, it’s like this: Several years ago on a summer evening stroll along a High Sierra road in beautiful Alpine County, California, my wife Elizabeth, who misunderstood my anxiety over the eighteen-wheelers that thundered close by us like elephants looking for small animals to squash, made an off-hand tease that set my brain on fire.

That moment was one of those that every writer—especially fiction writers—pray for. As I looked at the saw-toothed, tree-lined wildscape around us, and the sky dimmed with the last crimson smear of sunset, turning to a sparkling moonless black, I saw what that title is meant to make you see.

At the time, I’d been swamping around up to my hips inside a different book. My day job was flattening my brain, rusting my soul. I was already putting down the floor on my editing business. Sometime after that night in Alpine County, I decided the first book—entitled Hill of the Dead—would be entombed for another day (maybe forever). This new idea kept flitting around in my skull—soft black wingtips whispering off towering cave walls. I kept seeing scenes from it, like a movie.

I even briefly considered writing it as a screenplay. But I’m too old to sell screenplays anymore, and my Muse insisted it would work better as a novel. I could take it places strictly forbidden by screenwriting’s rigid molds. I could try to evoke the beauty of this mountain place I love and the lives of its fictional inhabitants.

This would be my fourth attempt at novel writing. Until I read Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art, I didn’t think that you could fail at writing a novel, come back and try again, several times even, before finally publishing one. I thought everybody was like Pynchon and Salinger: bashing home runs at first bat. Or at least getting on base.

On Monday, November 7, 2005, I got up around 6:30 AM, pressed the coffee pot button and watched the Today Show with Elizabeth for half an hour. Then I dressed, entered the office, sat down at my desk, turned on the computer, put on some music, and thought and typed, thought and typed for maybe an hour or two. Then I went and tried to make money.

As I do with workshops, I avoid “how-to” books (one or two will do, in my mind.) but I read a lot about writers’ working lives: how they go through (and survive) their work days. Here’s a problem I shared with many:

One memory of my previous three cracks at writing a novel was that a lot of it was as boring as the job I slaved at. Trying to figure out the how and the why of a Vampire opening a door, for example, is very a much a technical matter, not much more inspiring than coding towers of legal documents. A stultifying amount of detail needs consideration: kind of like doing inventory a nail factory. There’s serious bureaucracy involved.

And I couldn’t think of those details all the time, either. Most of the time, I blundered on, from one chapter to another, like stumbling through a house, room to room. “Worry about it later,” became a frequent mantra. As Truman Capote once nailed Jack Kerouac for doing, I was only typing. Of course, this is not On the Road. It’s not even Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It’s a genre novel, a classic example of This Happened and Then That Happened. Details? I knew if tried to count all the nails, I might as well get a job at a real nail factory.

I thought and typed and thought and typed until August 21, 2006. I made no outline, though I made a character and location list. Many writers swear by outlines; others jump right in with only an idea of their destination. I took the second route. Like all the writers I read about, I had to find my own way of doing it. Sometimes I felt inspired. Many times, I was . . . typing . . . but even then, it seemed to go smoothly. I never lost the sense that I was writing a book that I eventually would want to read. I was haunted. To my bones. Enough to show up six days a week.

Typing THE END felt awfully good. Finally! I finished one whole draft of one whole book! After three tries! I spent a month sleeping late and thinking about other things (like how to make money). But I knew I’d only flown over this new territory once and hadn’t seen much more than moonlight and shadow. Before long, I would have to take to the sky and fly it again.

So what happened next? Surf by, next week . . . .