Several years ago I had the opportunity to write for publication a non-fiction piece about the experience of watching my mother suffer and die from complications arising from Parkinson’s disease. Going into the project I was more than a little hesitant. It had been merely three years since her passing, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep the proper distance between myself as the narrator and the deep emotion I was sure to conjure up. Fortunately I was able to maintain that distance, and although recounting the experience was at times painful, I was also able to come to some closure. In short, I found the experience therapeutic.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on a similar piece about my dad’s death, which occurred a little more than seven years ago, and I’ve found this project — the search for closure and the reasons for the disconnection we endured most of our lives — to be equally therapeutic.
Memoirs have become popular today, and writing about the death of a loved one can often facilitate the healing process, but many new writers make the mistake of focusing the piece on themselves, which gets in the way of the reader’s enjoyment. Remember that the reader must be given the freedom to relate to your memoir in their own way.
When I read Saving Milly, Morton Kondracke’s account of his wife’s battle with Parkinson’s, I immediately related because his story mirrored my own experience. Yet my girlfriend, who also read Milly, related to Kondracke’s story not because she knew my mother, or knew anyone who’d suffered from Parkinson’s, but because Kondracke had allowed her to experience his plight in her own way. My girlfriend has experienced the loss of loved ones and so Kondracke’s story, while not identical to hers, mirrored the pain she felt while watching her deeply beloved grandfather and mentor prepare for death.
The key, therefore, to writing any memoir is to avoid the pratfall of becoming too Hallmarky, too syrupy. Don’t inject huge amounts of your own feelings into the piece; instead you must become the outside observer. You can still elicit the emotion from your reader, but the reader must experience their own emotions, not yours.
On Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, many of us no longer have the joy of spending each holiday with Mom and Dad, brunch or a ballgame. Yet there is no greater honor one can pay their parents than to write about them, how they influenced, what they meant to you. And you don’t necessarily have to have had a wonderful relationship with them when they were alive to write about them. If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Maya Angelou: “I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.”
Friday, December 01, 2006
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
I Have Met the Enemy and He Is Me
I recall the vast number of people I’ve met at my author’s readings that claim to want to write a novel. A little Internet research revealed to me that an estimated 230,000,000 Americans think they have a novel in them. Of that number, only about 5% — or little more than 11,000 — ever feel the satisfaction of typing “The End” on the last page; fewer still ever feel the pride of seeing their work in print. Those who persevere not only through the agony of the writing process but also through the search for an agent or a publisher, dealing with rejection, to overcome tremendous odds to see their work published feel part of a very elite club, and rightfully so. So why don’t more aspiring writers see their dream through to The End?
I read somewhere, and I agree with the assessment, that writing the first and last third of a novel is easy, but writing the middle third is very difficult. In other words, the beginning and the ending are easy. It’s the long haul in between that’s hard. But this assessment speaks only of the writing part; what of the preparation that precipitates the actual writing? This is often where many new writers get derailed. I know I was when I was contemplating my first novel, January’s Paradigm.
I had my idea — a good idea. I had a rough outline about the plot, had developed all my main characters and some of the secondary and tertiary characters. I even had an idea who my audience was. Yet with all that in hand I still successfully procrastinated commencing writing for months. What kept me from writing that novel for so long? I did.
Writing a novel is like committing to a football season. It demands dedication and it requires hard work. Many aspiring writers can envision the glamour of seeing their book on the best seller table in their favorite bookstore, but they can’t see the work it will take to get it there. Football fans celebrate along with their favorite team when it wins the Super Bowl; but few recall the brutal 16-game schedule, plus the tough playoff games that had to be won in order to play that final big game on the first Sunday in February. Furthermore, the casual fan doesn’t see the grueling workouts that begin in August, before the season begins, and the practice sessions during the week, running countless plays (some which may not ever be called under game conditions), and the hours sitting watching game films, with no guarantee that the team will win their game on Sunday, let alone make the playoffs and go on to play in the Super Bowl. This is dedication and hard work. Writing a novel requires the same dedication and hard work, but against an opponent you can’t see because that opponent is you. And like the football team that starts the season 0-0 but with no guarantee of making it to the Super Bowl, you also have no guarantee that your book will make it off a potential agent’s slush pile let alone onto the Best Seller List.
Perhaps the most brutal part of writing a novel is that it is such a solitary endeavor. A football team that wins on Sunday can feel good about itself, at least for another week; if they lose and get booed, well, in another week they can play better and turn those boos into cheers. A football team can win with one or two key players hurt or having a bad game because the other players can step up their game. But a writer must do it on his or her own. He’s often his own worst enemy, and he must overcome obstacles that he sets before himself. A dedicated writer who works hard day in and day out receives little in the way of cheers or external inspiration. In short they must rely on their belief in themselves. Day by day, page by page, week by week, chapter by chapter, month by month they must dedicate themselves to their solitary endeavor, perhaps sharing an occasional excerpt with a family member or in a writer’s group. Is it any wonder that most aspiring writers give up before ever writing the first word of their novel?
Once I sat down and wrote the first sentence of January’s Paradigm, which I’d written in my mind’s eye weeks before I ever sat down and typed it, the rest came, well, maybe not easily, but certainly naturally, and more easily than I had imagined. Sure there were bumps along the way, some roadblocks, diversions and digressions; but I always kept my eye on the horizon, on the final sentence, which, coincidentally, I’d also written long before I typed the first sentence.
Now whenever someone approaches me at a reading to tell me they have a book in them to write and I ask them why they haven’t written it, and they reply, “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I always respond, “How about in front of a keyboard?”
I read somewhere, and I agree with the assessment, that writing the first and last third of a novel is easy, but writing the middle third is very difficult. In other words, the beginning and the ending are easy. It’s the long haul in between that’s hard. But this assessment speaks only of the writing part; what of the preparation that precipitates the actual writing? This is often where many new writers get derailed. I know I was when I was contemplating my first novel, January’s Paradigm.
I had my idea — a good idea. I had a rough outline about the plot, had developed all my main characters and some of the secondary and tertiary characters. I even had an idea who my audience was. Yet with all that in hand I still successfully procrastinated commencing writing for months. What kept me from writing that novel for so long? I did.
Writing a novel is like committing to a football season. It demands dedication and it requires hard work. Many aspiring writers can envision the glamour of seeing their book on the best seller table in their favorite bookstore, but they can’t see the work it will take to get it there. Football fans celebrate along with their favorite team when it wins the Super Bowl; but few recall the brutal 16-game schedule, plus the tough playoff games that had to be won in order to play that final big game on the first Sunday in February. Furthermore, the casual fan doesn’t see the grueling workouts that begin in August, before the season begins, and the practice sessions during the week, running countless plays (some which may not ever be called under game conditions), and the hours sitting watching game films, with no guarantee that the team will win their game on Sunday, let alone make the playoffs and go on to play in the Super Bowl. This is dedication and hard work. Writing a novel requires the same dedication and hard work, but against an opponent you can’t see because that opponent is you. And like the football team that starts the season 0-0 but with no guarantee of making it to the Super Bowl, you also have no guarantee that your book will make it off a potential agent’s slush pile let alone onto the Best Seller List.
Perhaps the most brutal part of writing a novel is that it is such a solitary endeavor. A football team that wins on Sunday can feel good about itself, at least for another week; if they lose and get booed, well, in another week they can play better and turn those boos into cheers. A football team can win with one or two key players hurt or having a bad game because the other players can step up their game. But a writer must do it on his or her own. He’s often his own worst enemy, and he must overcome obstacles that he sets before himself. A dedicated writer who works hard day in and day out receives little in the way of cheers or external inspiration. In short they must rely on their belief in themselves. Day by day, page by page, week by week, chapter by chapter, month by month they must dedicate themselves to their solitary endeavor, perhaps sharing an occasional excerpt with a family member or in a writer’s group. Is it any wonder that most aspiring writers give up before ever writing the first word of their novel?
Once I sat down and wrote the first sentence of January’s Paradigm, which I’d written in my mind’s eye weeks before I ever sat down and typed it, the rest came, well, maybe not easily, but certainly naturally, and more easily than I had imagined. Sure there were bumps along the way, some roadblocks, diversions and digressions; but I always kept my eye on the horizon, on the final sentence, which, coincidentally, I’d also written long before I typed the first sentence.
Now whenever someone approaches me at a reading to tell me they have a book in them to write and I ask them why they haven’t written it, and they reply, “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” I always respond, “How about in front of a keyboard?”
Monday, February 07, 2005
Now That's Cliche
You’ve heard the expression: “That’s cliché.” Certainly you’ve been advised as writers, by your mentors, through correspondence courses or creative writing classes, to avoid clichés. Sometimes that can be difficult, especially when you are writing in a genre that is in itself somewhat cliché, like romance or mystery.
An editor recently pulled a sentence out of my latest manuscript One Hot January and suggested that it was somewhat cliché. I have to admit, out of context, he was right. But my character is a cross between Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer and an indignant Humphrey Bogart, so within the context of the entire text, it works. In short, it can be an effective technique, if used sparingly.
Keeping in line with this month’s Valentine’s theme I’d like to discuss writing a love scene. Love is a universal theme, but because it’s been done countless times writing a cliché free love scene is difficult if not impossible. Often we must settle for an original variation of a cliché.
Let’s start with physical descriptions of our lovers. Whether a woman is beautiful or a man handsome is highly subjective. Get specific and stay away from superlatives related to perfection. No one is perfect in reality so why should they be in literature? Don’t cop out by allowing the reader to see only their own concept of beauty — show us what your character sees, and make it real! Look at your spouse or lover. Certainly there are flaws in their features that endear them to you: the tiny scar in the right eyebrow, the mole on the left cheek, the dimpled chin, the gray hair at the temples. Complexion can be porcelain or Mediterranean bronze, but give it some flaw to make it real — freckles or a birth mark
One of the early chapters in One Hot January takes place in a New York nightclub. My protagonist is taken by the buxom blonde across the table from him. Her low-cut sweater reveals a tiny mole on the inside of one of her breasts, and throughout the chapter he keeps coming back to that tiny mole — he watches it kiss the other breast as she leans forward, elbows on the table, to listen to him. Eventually that tiny mole beckons to him, he begins to fantasize, and he tries to imagine if she might have any other similar moles in more secluded places.
Within the context of the chapter as a whole that mole plays a very small part, but it goes a long way toward building the character of my protagonist and it does so in a way that isn’t cliché, although the sexual tension between the two is something we’ve all experienced at one time or another, and while that tension itself can be described as cliché, how the scene plays out is an original variation.
As for love scenes, unless you’re writing erotica, I always advise that less is more. Stay away from sappy narrative and describing body parts and positions that leave the reader wondering, “Huh? Is that even possible?”
Here is a fine example of a good love scene, from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series:
Eventually I came to resent Jolenta’s sleep. I abandoned the oar and knelt beside her on the cushions. There was a purity in her sleeping face, however artificial, that I had never observed when she was awake. I kissed her, and her large eyes, hardly open, seemed almost Agia’s long eyes, as her red-gold hair appeared almost brown. I loosened her clothing. She seemed half drugged, whether by some soporific in the heaped cushions or merely by the fatigue induced by our walk in the open and the burden of so great a quantity of voluptuous flesh. I freed her breasts, each nearly as large as her own head, and those wide thighs, which seemed to hold a new-hatched chick between them.
That’s the end of the scene. Notice its simplicity — how much is said with so few words, and how much what is left unsaid contributes to the scene. Again: an original variation on an old cliché.
One final bit of advice to keep in mind: the more descriptive the scene, the more erotic, the more difficult it becomes to remain cliché free. As I wrote earlier, sometimes less is more, as evidenced by Wolfe’s short excerpt above.
J. Conrad Guest’s writing credentials include January’s Paradigm, first published in 1998 by Minerva Press, London, England. As a contributing writer to Encore magazine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he writes about the people and businesses in the Kalamazoo area; two of his articles have been featured on the cover. He has written theatrical reviews for a Detroit area newspaper, two murder mysteries that have been successfully produced, and several short stories that have appeared on Internet e-zines. J. Conrad Guest also provides manuscript evaluation and editorial services at j.c.guest@att.net.
An editor recently pulled a sentence out of my latest manuscript One Hot January and suggested that it was somewhat cliché. I have to admit, out of context, he was right. But my character is a cross between Mickey Spillane, Mike Hammer and an indignant Humphrey Bogart, so within the context of the entire text, it works. In short, it can be an effective technique, if used sparingly.
Keeping in line with this month’s Valentine’s theme I’d like to discuss writing a love scene. Love is a universal theme, but because it’s been done countless times writing a cliché free love scene is difficult if not impossible. Often we must settle for an original variation of a cliché.
Let’s start with physical descriptions of our lovers. Whether a woman is beautiful or a man handsome is highly subjective. Get specific and stay away from superlatives related to perfection. No one is perfect in reality so why should they be in literature? Don’t cop out by allowing the reader to see only their own concept of beauty — show us what your character sees, and make it real! Look at your spouse or lover. Certainly there are flaws in their features that endear them to you: the tiny scar in the right eyebrow, the mole on the left cheek, the dimpled chin, the gray hair at the temples. Complexion can be porcelain or Mediterranean bronze, but give it some flaw to make it real — freckles or a birth mark
One of the early chapters in One Hot January takes place in a New York nightclub. My protagonist is taken by the buxom blonde across the table from him. Her low-cut sweater reveals a tiny mole on the inside of one of her breasts, and throughout the chapter he keeps coming back to that tiny mole — he watches it kiss the other breast as she leans forward, elbows on the table, to listen to him. Eventually that tiny mole beckons to him, he begins to fantasize, and he tries to imagine if she might have any other similar moles in more secluded places.
Within the context of the chapter as a whole that mole plays a very small part, but it goes a long way toward building the character of my protagonist and it does so in a way that isn’t cliché, although the sexual tension between the two is something we’ve all experienced at one time or another, and while that tension itself can be described as cliché, how the scene plays out is an original variation.
As for love scenes, unless you’re writing erotica, I always advise that less is more. Stay away from sappy narrative and describing body parts and positions that leave the reader wondering, “Huh? Is that even possible?”
Here is a fine example of a good love scene, from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series:
Eventually I came to resent Jolenta’s sleep. I abandoned the oar and knelt beside her on the cushions. There was a purity in her sleeping face, however artificial, that I had never observed when she was awake. I kissed her, and her large eyes, hardly open, seemed almost Agia’s long eyes, as her red-gold hair appeared almost brown. I loosened her clothing. She seemed half drugged, whether by some soporific in the heaped cushions or merely by the fatigue induced by our walk in the open and the burden of so great a quantity of voluptuous flesh. I freed her breasts, each nearly as large as her own head, and those wide thighs, which seemed to hold a new-hatched chick between them.
That’s the end of the scene. Notice its simplicity — how much is said with so few words, and how much what is left unsaid contributes to the scene. Again: an original variation on an old cliché.
One final bit of advice to keep in mind: the more descriptive the scene, the more erotic, the more difficult it becomes to remain cliché free. As I wrote earlier, sometimes less is more, as evidenced by Wolfe’s short excerpt above.
J. Conrad Guest’s writing credentials include January’s Paradigm, first published in 1998 by Minerva Press, London, England. As a contributing writer to Encore magazine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, he writes about the people and businesses in the Kalamazoo area; two of his articles have been featured on the cover. He has written theatrical reviews for a Detroit area newspaper, two murder mysteries that have been successfully produced, and several short stories that have appeared on Internet e-zines. J. Conrad Guest also provides manuscript evaluation and editorial services at j.c.guest@att.net.
Friday, December 31, 2004
Routine and Ritual Keys to Writing
I’m often asked if I suffer writer’s block. I wish I could answer that I don’t, but the truth is I suffer writer’s block after nearly every session comes to an end. Like a stage actor who has forgotten his next line, I fear that my muses will go mute, and I’ll have nothing to write. Since my block is rooted in sitting, staring at an empty screen, I’ve discovered a few tricks to help me to overcome those blocks, both in routine and ritual.
Since I do my best creative writing in the morning, before my heads gets too cluttered with work related issues, I do most of my creative work on weekends. I try to limit each weekend session to four to six hours at most; if I go beyond that limit I tend to burn out.
Since five days between sessions is too long, which necessitates having to get reacquainted with plot and characters, I try to schedule sessions two or three evenings during the week after work. This can be problematic since I also write on my day job, and often the last thing I want to do when I get home after eight hours on my work PC is get behind the keyboard at home and be creative. However, if I’ve done my weekend work well and have gotten into a groove, I’ll purposely end my Sunday session in the middle of a piece of dialogue or action sequence so that I’m anxious for my next session to begin. When I sit down for that Monday or Tuesday evening session, I pick up right where I left off without missing a beat because I already know what my next word will be.
If I can stretch my creativity into my next weeknight session, great, but if I’m tired or have come to the end of a chapter or just can’t get the creative juices flowing, I’ll go back to edit and polish what I’ve written during my previous three or four sessions. Even a session dedicated to polishing helps to keep me involved in plot and close to characters — the key for me is to keep my sessions fairly short but scheduled closely together. If too much time elapses before my next session, I lose touch with what’s happening on the printed page as well as inside my characters’ heads.
The aforementioned deals with routine, but what about ritual? Ritual is what I go through before each session to help me get inside my character’s head. Like an actor who slips into character through the process of applying makeup, getting into costume or running through lines in his head, I put on a pot of coffee for a morning session and work a crossword puzzle while I sip my first cup. The crossword not only gets my creativity going, but it’s something Joe January, the protagonist in my current series of novels (January’s Paradigm, One Hot January and January’s Thaw) also enjoys. Since he enjoys smoking cigars, I’ll often light one up as well — it’s a sort of bonding ritual we go through. A morning cigar goes well with coffee, but in the evening it goes equally well with a glass of scotch or a shot of bourbon with a beer. Since January is a private investigator circa 1946, donning my own fedora immediately sets my mood for that period, and when I sit down to my PC, I envision myself in January’s office in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, and I begin to hear his narrative, his dialogue, in his Bronx dialect.
Of course there are those blocks that leave one completed paralyzed. That’s happened to me once, and to overcome it I went to New York City to frequent some of the same places January does in an effort to reconnect with him. The result of that experience not only got me back on track, but resulted in a piece of flash fiction — A Case of Writer’s Block:
I once had a life outside this park. Years ago, and it was a pretty good one, too. I’d been a private investigator and some of the cases I worked on would’ve made for good reading had they been fictional. As a matter of fact, the last case I’d been working on had started out to be a simple missing person—an attractive young woman from Gramercy Park had hired me to find her missing father. The case had turned out to be anything but simple.
It seems her father had, for six years, been on the lam from a very elite overseas group. When I finally caught up with him, he spun a wild yarn about a genetically engineered man from an alternate reality future in which the Nazis had won World War II. This six-fingered manufactured being believed that by allowing the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would join the Allies in time to defeat the Axis before it became too strong, and so he convinced the woman’s father to take part in a wild conspiracy to persuade Churchill to withhold from the U.S. the vital decrypt specifying the date and time of the Japanese attack on Pearl, thereby hoping to amend his present—my future.
Of course the story sounded crazy to me, and I hadn’t believed any of it, but I couldn’t disbelieve the two Germans after this woman’s father—I’d met them both—and so I had had to be careful.
That was 50 years ago and about all I remember until…
I first noticed the tall man passing through the gate at 86th Street. Obviously he was a tourist, with a Yankees cap pulled down over his eyes, wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt, and holding hands with a pretty and petite woman who had eyes only for him. He looked familiar—slender with broad shoulders and gray hair showing from beneath the edges of his cap. Because I have a good mind for names and faces, I knew I’d never seen him before. Still, I couldn’t help but feel we had unfinished business between us.
Our eyes briefly met as we passed, going in opposite directions, and I saw brief recognition in his eyes followed by a look of shame mingled with guilt. The woman holding his hand, oblivious to the look we exchanged, laughed—a rich, sultry sound, sexy—and whispered, “So do you love me just a little, J. Conrad Guest?” and the name registered, although I couldn’t say from where or when. That feeling of unfinished business grew stronger.
I followed the two of them across Central Park, not intending to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear bits and pieces of their conversation—two lovers on vacation from someplace in Michigan, and something about an unfinished novel and the writer’s block that seemed to have crippled the man’s creativity.
Just before they exited the park from its west side, the tall man glanced back at me. I considered pretending I hadn’t noticed, but somehow I knew I couldn’t pretend anything in front of him: he had known I was here from the moment he entered the park. Even from a distance I could see his nearly imperceptible nod. A smirk came to his mouth; a moment later he winked at me and turned to leave the park with the woman.
The exchange puzzled me, yet it seemed to comfort me as well. Somehow I knew this tall man who seemed familiar but whom I had never met, knew me intimately. I also knew that he wouldn’t forget me in this park, and that one day soon my life outside its walls—my future—would resume…
Since I do my best creative writing in the morning, before my heads gets too cluttered with work related issues, I do most of my creative work on weekends. I try to limit each weekend session to four to six hours at most; if I go beyond that limit I tend to burn out.
Since five days between sessions is too long, which necessitates having to get reacquainted with plot and characters, I try to schedule sessions two or three evenings during the week after work. This can be problematic since I also write on my day job, and often the last thing I want to do when I get home after eight hours on my work PC is get behind the keyboard at home and be creative. However, if I’ve done my weekend work well and have gotten into a groove, I’ll purposely end my Sunday session in the middle of a piece of dialogue or action sequence so that I’m anxious for my next session to begin. When I sit down for that Monday or Tuesday evening session, I pick up right where I left off without missing a beat because I already know what my next word will be.
If I can stretch my creativity into my next weeknight session, great, but if I’m tired or have come to the end of a chapter or just can’t get the creative juices flowing, I’ll go back to edit and polish what I’ve written during my previous three or four sessions. Even a session dedicated to polishing helps to keep me involved in plot and close to characters — the key for me is to keep my sessions fairly short but scheduled closely together. If too much time elapses before my next session, I lose touch with what’s happening on the printed page as well as inside my characters’ heads.
The aforementioned deals with routine, but what about ritual? Ritual is what I go through before each session to help me get inside my character’s head. Like an actor who slips into character through the process of applying makeup, getting into costume or running through lines in his head, I put on a pot of coffee for a morning session and work a crossword puzzle while I sip my first cup. The crossword not only gets my creativity going, but it’s something Joe January, the protagonist in my current series of novels (January’s Paradigm, One Hot January and January’s Thaw) also enjoys. Since he enjoys smoking cigars, I’ll often light one up as well — it’s a sort of bonding ritual we go through. A morning cigar goes well with coffee, but in the evening it goes equally well with a glass of scotch or a shot of bourbon with a beer. Since January is a private investigator circa 1946, donning my own fedora immediately sets my mood for that period, and when I sit down to my PC, I envision myself in January’s office in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, and I begin to hear his narrative, his dialogue, in his Bronx dialect.
Of course there are those blocks that leave one completed paralyzed. That’s happened to me once, and to overcome it I went to New York City to frequent some of the same places January does in an effort to reconnect with him. The result of that experience not only got me back on track, but resulted in a piece of flash fiction — A Case of Writer’s Block:
I once had a life outside this park. Years ago, and it was a pretty good one, too. I’d been a private investigator and some of the cases I worked on would’ve made for good reading had they been fictional. As a matter of fact, the last case I’d been working on had started out to be a simple missing person—an attractive young woman from Gramercy Park had hired me to find her missing father. The case had turned out to be anything but simple.
It seems her father had, for six years, been on the lam from a very elite overseas group. When I finally caught up with him, he spun a wild yarn about a genetically engineered man from an alternate reality future in which the Nazis had won World War II. This six-fingered manufactured being believed that by allowing the Japs to attack Pearl Harbor, the U.S. would join the Allies in time to defeat the Axis before it became too strong, and so he convinced the woman’s father to take part in a wild conspiracy to persuade Churchill to withhold from the U.S. the vital decrypt specifying the date and time of the Japanese attack on Pearl, thereby hoping to amend his present—my future.
Of course the story sounded crazy to me, and I hadn’t believed any of it, but I couldn’t disbelieve the two Germans after this woman’s father—I’d met them both—and so I had had to be careful.
That was 50 years ago and about all I remember until…
I first noticed the tall man passing through the gate at 86th Street. Obviously he was a tourist, with a Yankees cap pulled down over his eyes, wearing a University of Michigan t-shirt, and holding hands with a pretty and petite woman who had eyes only for him. He looked familiar—slender with broad shoulders and gray hair showing from beneath the edges of his cap. Because I have a good mind for names and faces, I knew I’d never seen him before. Still, I couldn’t help but feel we had unfinished business between us.
Our eyes briefly met as we passed, going in opposite directions, and I saw brief recognition in his eyes followed by a look of shame mingled with guilt. The woman holding his hand, oblivious to the look we exchanged, laughed—a rich, sultry sound, sexy—and whispered, “So do you love me just a little, J. Conrad Guest?” and the name registered, although I couldn’t say from where or when. That feeling of unfinished business grew stronger.
I followed the two of them across Central Park, not intending to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help but hear bits and pieces of their conversation—two lovers on vacation from someplace in Michigan, and something about an unfinished novel and the writer’s block that seemed to have crippled the man’s creativity.
Just before they exited the park from its west side, the tall man glanced back at me. I considered pretending I hadn’t noticed, but somehow I knew I couldn’t pretend anything in front of him: he had known I was here from the moment he entered the park. Even from a distance I could see his nearly imperceptible nod. A smirk came to his mouth; a moment later he winked at me and turned to leave the park with the woman.
The exchange puzzled me, yet it seemed to comfort me as well. Somehow I knew this tall man who seemed familiar but whom I had never met, knew me intimately. I also knew that he wouldn’t forget me in this park, and that one day soon my life outside its walls—my future—would resume…
Sunday, December 19, 2004
Birth of a Character
I've often been asked from where and how I developed the protagonist for my first novel January's Paradigm, and its two successors, One Hot January and January's Thaw. Here, for the first time anywhere, is the whole story...
My name is January. Joe January. I was a private dick from the South Bronx, circa 1940. Was once described as an indignant Humphrey Bogart. Who am I to argue? The difference between Bogie and me is that I was the real McCoy. Where he took the scripts that Hollywood wrote for him, I took on the tough cases nobody else would. Unlike Bogie’s, my bumps and bruises were the real deal, not makeup. Although in retrospect I can see that this could be construed as one of those Hollywood type scripts that Bogie might have been interested in bringing to the screen were he alive today.
In truth, I’m no Joseph Conrad, but I wrote every word on these pages. This is my story, but make no mistake, it’s anything but a story. I know. You’ll say it reads like science fiction, spanning two centuries and dealing with time travel and alternate realities. Some might find a less than satisfactory denouement, while still others will accuse me of arrogance in my self-depiction, creating a sort of comic book superhero; but in truth, in youth we often view ourselves as invincible. It isn’t until later in life that we come to realize how fragile life really is; furthermore, that we come to see the global repercussions of our actions. Yet given the chance to live life over again, avoiding the mistakes made during the first go-around, who among you would turn your back on the chance? Hence the real meat of my story is about missed opportunities, how, through my own foolishness, I lost the one woman who meant the most to me, not once but twice…
— Excerpt from One Hot January
And so was born Joe January, the protagonist from my forthcoming novel One Hot January (OHJ), its predecessor January’s Paradigm (JP), and the third book in the series, January’s Thaw, which I’ve just sat down to write.
The name Joe January comes from a John Wayne film, perhaps one of his least known films, Legend of the Lost, filmed in 1957 and costarring Sophia Loren. Wayne is hired as a guide for a French spiritualist in search of his father who disappeared in the Sahara while searching for a lost city in which he hopes to acquire a vast treasure. Loren, a thieving prostitute, tags along as the romantic interest, playing the two men against each other, in hopes of getting a share of the treasure.
I first saw Legend of the Lost as a boy in 1962 or 63. A Duke fan then (and yes, even now), the film did little to fuel my imagination (it was far too wordy, costarred a woman, and contained too little action to capture my attention), but the name Joe January stayed with me for nearly 25 years, at which time I sat down to write The Gig is Up, my first interactive comedy/mystery for a dinner theatre in the Detroit area. The action takes place in a nightclub in which a jazz trio — two female vocalists and a male pianist — are performing. During the first set, each member of the trio leaves the stage with a variety of props (opportunity) and exchanges of dialogue (motive), and Joe January appears in the second act as the police detective who, with the help of the audience, solves the offstage murder (during the intermission) of the trio’s manager, who is never seen. The show did well for me, being performed several times in a variety of venues.
But I wasn’t through with the character. In 1991 when I asked a friend of mine what she wanted for her birthday, she replied that she wanted me to write a short story for her. Perhaps she saw in me more talent than I realized I had. While I was writing this short story — I believe I titled it The Ultimate Paradox (TUP) — a Faustus type piece in which a man bargains with the devil for redemption of his soul, I began to envision a much longer piece, novel length and less much of the spiritual message of the short piece, in which one of the co-protagonists must face down his darker self in order to come to terms with his wife’s infidelity. The result was January’s Paradigm.
The protagonist from TUP (who wasn’t Joe January) didn’t make it into JP, but the antagonist from TUP evolved into JP’s third supporting character. Affectionately dubbed the beast, he’s described as a small gargoyle — standing at no more than five foot, three inches tall … it was obese, its girth greater than its height. Its personal appearance was obscenity personified: a bulbous nose, red, from too much drink, supported glasses so thick the magnifying principle worked both ways. The watery blue eyes, disproportionately huge, glared with cold, savage indifference ... its teeth, black from the rot of 10,000 Baby Ruth bars, jutted at a multitude of crazy angles, like those of some weirdly mutated rodent …
In JP, Joe January evolved from a comedic police detective in The Gig Is Up into a Bogie-esque tough guy, wise-cracking private investigator from the 1940s, a loves ’em and leaves ’em bad boy for whom many women toss away the warm and sensitive man they claim to want.
With at least one more book to come in the January series I feel Joe has a lot more to say; but after working with him for nearly 15 years, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to writing about someone else (no hard feelings, Joe).
My name is January. Joe January. I was a private dick from the South Bronx, circa 1940. Was once described as an indignant Humphrey Bogart. Who am I to argue? The difference between Bogie and me is that I was the real McCoy. Where he took the scripts that Hollywood wrote for him, I took on the tough cases nobody else would. Unlike Bogie’s, my bumps and bruises were the real deal, not makeup. Although in retrospect I can see that this could be construed as one of those Hollywood type scripts that Bogie might have been interested in bringing to the screen were he alive today.
In truth, I’m no Joseph Conrad, but I wrote every word on these pages. This is my story, but make no mistake, it’s anything but a story. I know. You’ll say it reads like science fiction, spanning two centuries and dealing with time travel and alternate realities. Some might find a less than satisfactory denouement, while still others will accuse me of arrogance in my self-depiction, creating a sort of comic book superhero; but in truth, in youth we often view ourselves as invincible. It isn’t until later in life that we come to realize how fragile life really is; furthermore, that we come to see the global repercussions of our actions. Yet given the chance to live life over again, avoiding the mistakes made during the first go-around, who among you would turn your back on the chance? Hence the real meat of my story is about missed opportunities, how, through my own foolishness, I lost the one woman who meant the most to me, not once but twice…
— Excerpt from One Hot January
And so was born Joe January, the protagonist from my forthcoming novel One Hot January (OHJ), its predecessor January’s Paradigm (JP), and the third book in the series, January’s Thaw, which I’ve just sat down to write.
The name Joe January comes from a John Wayne film, perhaps one of his least known films, Legend of the Lost, filmed in 1957 and costarring Sophia Loren. Wayne is hired as a guide for a French spiritualist in search of his father who disappeared in the Sahara while searching for a lost city in which he hopes to acquire a vast treasure. Loren, a thieving prostitute, tags along as the romantic interest, playing the two men against each other, in hopes of getting a share of the treasure.
I first saw Legend of the Lost as a boy in 1962 or 63. A Duke fan then (and yes, even now), the film did little to fuel my imagination (it was far too wordy, costarred a woman, and contained too little action to capture my attention), but the name Joe January stayed with me for nearly 25 years, at which time I sat down to write The Gig is Up, my first interactive comedy/mystery for a dinner theatre in the Detroit area. The action takes place in a nightclub in which a jazz trio — two female vocalists and a male pianist — are performing. During the first set, each member of the trio leaves the stage with a variety of props (opportunity) and exchanges of dialogue (motive), and Joe January appears in the second act as the police detective who, with the help of the audience, solves the offstage murder (during the intermission) of the trio’s manager, who is never seen. The show did well for me, being performed several times in a variety of venues.
But I wasn’t through with the character. In 1991 when I asked a friend of mine what she wanted for her birthday, she replied that she wanted me to write a short story for her. Perhaps she saw in me more talent than I realized I had. While I was writing this short story — I believe I titled it The Ultimate Paradox (TUP) — a Faustus type piece in which a man bargains with the devil for redemption of his soul, I began to envision a much longer piece, novel length and less much of the spiritual message of the short piece, in which one of the co-protagonists must face down his darker self in order to come to terms with his wife’s infidelity. The result was January’s Paradigm.
The protagonist from TUP (who wasn’t Joe January) didn’t make it into JP, but the antagonist from TUP evolved into JP’s third supporting character. Affectionately dubbed the beast, he’s described as a small gargoyle — standing at no more than five foot, three inches tall … it was obese, its girth greater than its height. Its personal appearance was obscenity personified: a bulbous nose, red, from too much drink, supported glasses so thick the magnifying principle worked both ways. The watery blue eyes, disproportionately huge, glared with cold, savage indifference ... its teeth, black from the rot of 10,000 Baby Ruth bars, jutted at a multitude of crazy angles, like those of some weirdly mutated rodent …
In JP, Joe January evolved from a comedic police detective in The Gig Is Up into a Bogie-esque tough guy, wise-cracking private investigator from the 1940s, a loves ’em and leaves ’em bad boy for whom many women toss away the warm and sensitive man they claim to want.
With at least one more book to come in the January series I feel Joe has a lot more to say; but after working with him for nearly 15 years, I can honestly say I’m looking forward to writing about someone else (no hard feelings, Joe).
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