PAPA KNOWS BEST {GHOST OF A CHANCE Interlude}

{"I like to listen.

I have learned a great deal from listening carefully.

Most people never listen."

- Ernest Hemingway.}

If you pay careful attention to this next post of mine, you will never write the same. Better. But not the same.

The name of this post :
FLAT AS A PHOTOGRAPH
OR
MORE THAN HUMAN?

The trouble with most fiction churned out these days is that it is as flat as a photograph. Your novel has to be rounded and resonate with depth.

You do that by filling your prose with truth.

Truth rings inside the mind of the reader. He believes not your story but the truth of the characters in that story.

Cliche is not truth.

We all know that war is bad. Yet, sometimes it is necessary to fight. Even then, it is bad, destroying something precious inside those who survive.

Writing is a form of war. And you will not emerge from your novel the same as you were before starting it.

But before you can finish a novel in truth, you must start.

And sometimes starting is the hardest thing about your novel. Other times, the hardest thing is to continue.

At the start, it is all juice and kick to the writer. But you use up all the juice and the kick goes. That is where your heart either saves you or gives up on you.

Sometimes when I was starting a new story, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges I love into the edge of the flame.

I'd watch the sputter of blue they made and look out over the roofs of Paris.

I would whisper, "You have always written before, and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know."

I would do just that. Because there is always one true sentence you know or have seen or have heard someone say that rang in your mind.

Still struggling?

Watch what happens around you.

Say you catch a fish.

If his jumping about gave you a kick, brand the actions before and after into your brain.

The rising of the line from the water.
The way it tightened like a fiddle string as the drops splashed from it.

Remember the noises and what is said.

Remember how they made you feel. Remember your actions prior to those feelings. Put them into words. Those words will touch your reader.

Still struggling?

Get into somebody else's head for a change.

If someone yells at you, try to figure what that person is thinking about as well as how you feel.

Study people.

Especially arguing people. Don't think who is right. As humans we naturally think of things as they should or shouldn't be.

As a human, you know who is right, and who is wrong. You have decisions to make and actions to take.

Be more than human.

Be a writer. Do not judge. A writer understands.

Or if he doesn't understand, he struggles to understand or to understand his lack of comprehension. That is the difference between a hack and a writer.

A hack memorizes what people say around him. A writer listens. Hardly anybody listens any more.

Worse. Hardly anybody observes.

When you come out of a room, you should be able to describe everything you saw there and what feelings that room gave you.

And you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling.

Practice it. You're standing in a line at the movies or at the grocery store -- observe and understand what it is that you saw.

See how people get out of taxi's or cars. How do women look at strange men, at their husbands, at their children.

There are thousands of ways to practice. Start doing it today. And always think of other people : their actions, their expressions as they do them.

Do that for a month and you will become a better writer.

Oh, in the Shadowlands, they say Roland has met his doppelganger. Perhaps two of him will make one whole man. One can only hope.

{Note by the ghost of Raymond Chandler : Throughout the Shadowlands it is believed that Roland has killed the ghost of Hemingway -- something that has never before been done. The ghosts want Roland dead before he can pass on the secret.

Others in the darkness want to know how to kill the formerly unkillable through torture then death. Unknown to most, Hemingway had only been poisoned.

But long before then, he had been poisoned by the jealousy he feels towards the love the ghost of Marlene Dietrich feels for Roland.

He has been hiding in the kid's apartment, hoping the ghosts or the Others will kill Roland, and he will have Marlene and the kid's blog all to himself.}
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