WRITE THE SIZZLE NOT THE STEAK

Eric, a friend and co-worker,

dropped by my apartment today to lend me his DVD of SHERLOCK HOLMES: GAME OF SHADOWS.

He spotted my collection of movie memorabilia on the walls.

He hushed in a breath. With trembling fingers, he touched a small card by the door.

It was a card containing an authentic piece of fabric from the black body suit worn by Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow in IRON MAN 2.

He looked at me as if I had the Shroud of Turin on my wall.

"She wore this, man. Her bare flesh touched this. Her DNA is on this cloth. Her DNA."

"Ah, Eric it could have been worn by her stunt double, or it could have been cut from the trimmed pieces of fabric on the floor when they made the outfit."

"No, man. This card certifies with a hologram and shit that this piece of cloth is from Scarlett's suit. Oh, man, it touched her body."

"You need to get out more, Eric."

"Hey, I go out plenty. Just not with Scarlett."

"Well, neither do I."

"Yeah, but you got her DNA."

And as he hung the card back up sadly on my wall, I realized what I would get him for Christmas :

an autographed photo of Scarlett.

After all, in touching the picture to sign, she would have left some of her DNA on it, too. It would repay him for giving me the autographed photo of Angelina Jolie.

Guys. We are a strange breed.

And what does this have to with the art of writing?

Well, it gives you a little insight into the bizarre psyches of two friends. And it also teaches us an important lesson in how to write.

Eric read into the card more than the words on it.

It said the cloth was from the body suit worn in the movie. But in his mind, Eric could see Scarlett putting on the skin-tight suit.

The words said little, Eric's imagination suggested much more. The readers who turn the pages of our books are like Eric in that our words will suggest to them a whole canvas of images if we choose the words with craft and lyrical style.

Write the sizzle not the steak.

Listen to the words of Stephen King:

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

Just another way of saying, "Sell the sizzle not the steak.

Let the reader smell the aroma of the cooking plot, hear the sizzling of approaching danger, and taste the ashy flavor of death in the air like smoke from a gutted home.

You see, the most important things, the crucial things are hard to wrap words around. Haven't you felt it?

You ached to say the right thing to a grieving neighbor, a dying friend -- and the words that came to you were so meager --

like having a foot long square of wrapping paper to somehow put around a two foot wide gift.

Stephen King put it this way :

"The most important things are the hardest to say.

They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them --

words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

But it's more than that, isn't it?

The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all,

or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

And because Stephen King writes in wisdom like that, we buy his books.

And that's what's so important about our blog friends.

You understand what it means to want to express the haunting images inside your head by crude things like the written word.

I understand. I'm one of you. And I am reaching out to you as you are reaching back to me --

from the confines of the solitary confinement of our minds, held prisoner by the limitations of the written word.

Neither one of us totally understands. But that's all right. Sometimes it's good just to be silent with a friend in the night.
****
The darkness is gathering, growing stronger in this world, and only the light of brave, caring hearts stands in its way.

GOOD GUYS ARE BAD NEWS ... for your novel

{ I had to start my post with a photo of a bad girl to counterbalance the good guy subject matter.

Ah, not buying that? Didn't think so. It was worth a try.}


"Good guys are boring?," I said earlier tonight.

Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."

We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels.

Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.

"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."

"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in a cellar. And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."

Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."

"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"

"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."

"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"

"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to read the latest Sookie Stackhouse novel.


Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine.

But being good boring? Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : "Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for."

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.


So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.

As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?

To live vicariously through them.

And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal. Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.


What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?


To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :

Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?

Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin : "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."

Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."
Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."
— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)

Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)


{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :


“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”


"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”


“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates, for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”

"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer. At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it, and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur? I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."

"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...

What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?

To do the extraordinary.

Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :

A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.

He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."

He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.

Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.

What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, I couldn't resist.)

There is a hero inside all of us ...

if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look.

And where is that?

In your heart, my friend. In your heart.
*******************************************

***

THE MUD OR THE STARS?

“Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.”
- Frederick Langbridge

There are epic events in each person's life. What we make of them determines what we make of our lives.

Shelley F. Blatt

Laila Knight asked for a little personal information. I try to focus on writing and what can help all of us become better writers. But I said I would make a stab.

Hopefully, I will not sound like that starlet who said to an ear-weary Groucho Marx : "Enough about me. What do you think of me?"

Hurricane Katrina and Rita swept through New Orleans and Lake Charles. Neither city has fully recovered. And those of us who survived are changed forever by it.

Five years ago, Hurricane Rita was a category 5 hurricane. I spent the morning running rare blood to scrambling hospitals.

I drove back home to wolf down a hurried lunch. A mandatory evacuation was issued. I went downstairs.

Someone had siphoned the gas from my car. All the gas stations were shut down. I was stranded in the path of a killer hurricane.

Alone.

Or not so alone.

Freddie, my supervisor, called checking in on me. He offered me a ride in his car as he drove beside his wife's car containing his two children.

So with the clothes on my back, my laptop on my lap, and Gypsy in a carrier, I rode with my friend into the darkness.

The highways were shut down. We drove the back roads, the cypress trees bending down over us in the blackness as if listening to our whispered voices. Freddie's eyes were hollow.

As we passed his wife's car, I saw she was frantic, on the verge of panic.

I winked at the pale faces of Freddie's two children, Allison and Abigail, pulled Gypsy, my cat, out of the carrier, and picked up her front paw as if she were waving at the two girls.

They giggled. And the grip of panic on their mother seemed to break.

She waved back and gave a valiant smile with a thumb's up salute.

Freddie studied me for a moment and said, "Dude, you're like Job."

"How so?"

"I mean you got your gas siphoned out of your car just when you needed it most."

"I bet a lot of people did."

"Yeah, but if Rita hits Lake Charles, this will be the second time you'll have lost everything.

You lost it all when your home burned. And before that you closed your business. Your mother died before that. And before that your fiancee died. And your childhood best friend died before Kathy. Damn, it's like you're Job."

I nodded, smiling sadly, "As I recall Job ended up pretty well."

"You've got a strange way at looking at life, dude."

"You're not the first to say that."

We made it to Baton Rouge where I worked delivering rare blood to all the hospitals reeling under the impact of Katrina.

I drove to the hospital of Metairie, the first suburb of New Orleans. (It is a French term for a tenant farm.)

I saw people who had only thought they knew what having nothing meant. I smelled the stench of decaying human flesh on the breath of a too silent city.

I saw young boys in uniform trying to be men under impossible conditions.

Late at night I typed the first draft of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, alone in the spacious suite afforded me by the blood center for which I worked.

It had been leased for the board of directors to oversee the new center in Baton Rouge.

So for two months I slept in a prince's suite. Gypsy was, for once, satisfied with her accommodations, she being a princess and all.

I barely saw the suite. I was always driving it seemed --

down long, unfamiliar roads to strange hospitals protected by hollow-eyed young boys with automatic weapons and dry mouths.

On my days off, I would volunteer to drive vans for the Salvation Army, Red Cross, church groups, or out-of-state relatives frantic to find lost loved ones. There are stories in that time that haunt me still, but they belong to shattered, valiant hearts.

Finally, the blood couriers were allowed back to our devastated city.

It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. But these ruined streets and gutted homes I knew. Our city has never truly recovered. But my friends are a hardy bunch.

Me? I just fake it.

I've only mentioned one snippet of my life, and look how much I have written. Sigh. Like Freddie says, I tend to talk a lot.

But he smiles good-naturedly when he says it.
***

***

THE MUD OR THE STARS?

“Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.”
- Frederick Langbridge

There are epic events in each person's life. What we make of them determines what we make of our lives.

Shelley F. Blatt

http://voicesofawriter.blogspot.com/

has awarded me THE STYLISH BLOGGER award where I have to reveal 7 things about myself.

Sigh. Considering how long-winded I get, this may not be easy. Let me do it like Jeopardy, couching my response in the form of questions.

Question One : WHERE WAS I FIVE YEARS AGO?

Five years ago, Hurricane Rita was a category 5 hurricane. I spent the morning running rare blood to scrambling hospitals.

I drove back home to wolf down a hurried lunch. A mandatory evacuation was issued. I went downstairs.

Someone had siphoned the gas from my car. All the gas stations were shut down. I was stranded in the path of a killer hurricane.

Alone.

Or not so alone.

Freddie, my supervisor, called checking in on me. He offered me a ride in his car as he drove beside his wife's car containing his two children.

So with the clothes on my back, my laptop on my lap, and Gypsy in a carrier, I rode with my friend into the darkness.

The highways were shut down. We drove the back roads, the cypress trees bending down over us in the blackness as if listening to our whispered voices. Freddie's eyes were hollow.

As we passed his wife's car, I saw she was frantic, on the verge of panic.

I winked at the pale faces of Freddie's two children, Allison and Abigail, pulled Gypsy out of the carrier, and picked up her front paw as if she were waving at the two girls.

They giggled. And the grip of panic on their mother seemed to break.

She waved back and gave a valiant smile with a thumb's up salute.

Freddie studied me for a moment and said, "Dude, you're like Job."

"How so?"

"I mean you got your gas siphoned out of your car just when you needed it most."

"I bet a lot of people did."

"Yeah, but if Rita hits Lake Charles, this will be the second time you'll have lost everything.

You lost it all when your home burned. And before that you closed your business. Your mother died before that. And before that your fiancee died. And your childhood best friend died before Kathy. Damn, it's like you're Job."

I nodded, smiling sadly, "As I recall Job ended up pretty well."

"You've got a strange way at looking at life, dude."

"You're not the first to say that."

We made it to Baton Rouge where I worked delivering rare blood to all the hospitals reeling under the impact of Katrina.

I drove to the hospital of Metairie, the first suburb of New Orleans. (It is a French term for a tenant farm.)

I saw people who had only thought they knew what having nothing meant. I smelled the stench of decaying human flesh on the breath of a too silent city.

I saw young boys in uniform trying to be men under impossible conditions.

Late at night I typed the first draft of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, alone in the spacious suite afforded me by the blood center for which I worked.

It had been leased for the board of directors to oversee the new center in Baton Rouge.

So for two months I slept in a prince's suite. Gypsy was, for once, satisfied with her accommodations, she being a princess and all.

I barely saw the suite. I was always driving it seemed --

down long, unfamiliar roads to strange hospitals protected by hollow-eyed young boys with automatic weapons and dry mouths.

Finally, the blood couriers were allowed back to our devastated city.

It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. But these ruined streets and gutted homes I knew. Our city has never truly recovered. But my friends are a hardy bunch.

Me? I just fake it.

And there you have at least 7 things you didn't know about me. And I've answered only one question. Like Freddie says, I tend to talk a lot.

But he smiles good-naturedly when he says it.


Oh, and that time in Baton Rouge was the first time I saw my soon-to-be Viking friend, Eric.

There is a tune by Muse that fits with Fallen in Tara's HOT KISS BLOGFEST :

THE MUD OR THE STARS?

“Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.”
- Frederick Langbridge

There are epic events in each person's life. What we make of them determines what we make of our lives.

Jodi Henry

http://jodilhenry.blogspot.com/2010/12/award-and-great-list.html

has awarded me the "Versatile Blogger" where I have to reveal 7 things about myself.

Amanda Sablan and VR Barkowski awarded me and tagged me with similar awards. Ouch.

For one, I had to tell 10 things you don't know about me, and for the other, I had to answer 5 questions with 5 answers about myself.

I thought I would combine the three. Probably won't work. But hey, it could be fun. I think Custer said that same thing about that infamous stroll through some valley.

Question One : WHERE WAS I FIVE YEARS AGO?

Five years ago, Hurricane Rita was a category 5 hurricane. I spent the morning running rare blood to scrambling hospitals.

I drove back home to wolf down a hurried lunch. A mandatory evacuation was issued. I went downstairs.

Someone had siphoned the gas from my car. All the gas stations were shut down. I was stranded in the path of a killer hurricane. Alone.

Or not so alone.

Freddie, my supervisor, called checking in on me. He offered me a ride in his car as he drove beside his wife's car containing his two children.

So with the clothes on my back, my laptop on my lap, and Gypsy in a carrier, I rode with my friend into the darkness.

The highways were shut down. We drove the back roads, the cypress trees bending down over us in the blackness as if listening to our whispered voices. Freddie's eyes were hollow.

As we passed his wife's car, I saw she was frantic, on the verge of panic.

I winked at the pale faces of Freddie's two children, Allison and Abigail, pulled Gypsy out of the carrier, and picked up her front paw as if she were waving at the two girls. They giggled. And the grip of panic on their mother seemed to break.

She waved back and gave a valiant smile with a thumb's up salute.

Freddie studied me for a moment and said, "Dude, you're like Job."

"How so?"

"I mean you got your gas siphoned out of your car just when you needed it most."

"I bet a lot of people did."

"Yeah, but if Rita hits Lake Charles, this will be the second time you'll have lost everything.

You lost it all when your home burned. And before that you closed your business. Your mother died before that. And before that your fiancee died. And your childhood best friend died before Kathy. Damn, it's like you're Job."

I nodded, smiling sadly, "As I recall Job ended up pretty well."

"You've got a strange way at looking at life, dude."

"You're not the first to say that."

We made it to Baton Rouge where I worked delivering rare blood to all the hospitals reeling under the impact of Katrina. I drove to the hospital of Metairie, the first suburb of New Orleans. (It is a French term for a tenant farm.)

I saw people who had only thought they knew what having nothing meant. I smelled the stench of decaying human flesh on the breath of a too silent city. I saw young boys in uniform trying to be men under impossible conditions.

Late at night I typed the first draft of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, alone in the spacious suite afforded me by the blood center for which I worked. It had been leased for the board of directors to oversee the new center in Baton Rouge.

So for two months I slept in a prince's suite. Gypsy was, for once, satisfied with her accommodations, she being a princess and all.

I barely saw the suite. I was always driving it seemed -- down long, unfamiliar roads to strange hospitals protected by hollow-eyed young boys with automatic weapons and dry mouths.

Finally, the blood couriers were allowed back to our devastated city. It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. But these ruined streets and gutted homes I knew. Our city has never truly recovered. But my friends are a hardy bunch.

Me? I just fake it.

And there you have at least 7 things you didn't know about me. And I've answered only one of the five questions. Like Freddie says, I tend to talk a lot.

But he smiles good-naturedly when he says it.


Oh, and that time in Baton Rouge was the first time I saw my soon-to-be Viking friend, Eric.

And another thing about me : Each time I enter my apartment, Gypsy pads to me in greeting, and I say, "The Force is with you, young Gypsy, but you are not a jedi yet."

She seems unperturbed. And here are some scenes you will not believe from George Lucas' new creation, THE OLD REPUBLIC :

THE BAD NEWS ABOUT GOOD GUYS

{VICTOR STANDISH ALERT! :

Victor has been spotted with his ghoul friend, Alice, at MUSINGS OF A PALIINDROME :

http://musingsofapalindrome.blogspot.com/ }

Good guys are boring?," I asked some days back.

Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."

We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels.

Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.

"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."

"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in his cellar.

And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."

Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."

"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"

"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."

"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"

"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to try saving LEGEND OF THE SEEKER.


Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine. But being good boring?

Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.

So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.

As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?


To live vicariously through them.

And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal.

Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.

What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?

To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :

Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?


Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin :

"Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."


Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."

Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."

— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)

Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)

{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :


“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write;

he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”


"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits.

If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”


“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates,

for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction

because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--

lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”


"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer.

At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it,

and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur in THE BIG SLEEP?

I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."

"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...


What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?

To do the extraordinary.

Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :

A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.

He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."

He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.

Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.

What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, the title even fits in with my own title of this post.)


There is a hero inside all of us ... if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look. And where is that?

In your heart, friend. In your heart.
***
And in the spirit of this post and the holidays :

THE MUD OR THE STARS?

“Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.”
- Frederick Langbridge

There are epic events in each person's life. What we make of them determines what we make of our lives. Amanda Sablan and VR Barkowski have awarded me and tagged me. Ouch.

For one, I have to tell 10 things you don't know about me, and for the other, I have to answer 5 questions with 5 answers about myself.

I thought I would combine the two. Probably won't work. But hey, it could be fun. I think Custer said that same thing about that infamous stroll through some valley.

Question One : WHERE WAS I FIVE YEARS AGO?

Five years ago, Hurricane Rita was a category 5 hurricane. I spent the morning running rare blood to scrambling hospitals. I drove back home to wolf down a hurried lunch. A mandatory evacuation was issued. I went downstairs.

Someone had siphoned the gas from my car. All the gas stations were shut down. I was stranded in the path of a killer hurricane. Alone.

Or not so alone.

Freddie, my supervisor, called checking in on me. He offered me a ride in his car as he drove beside his wife's car containing his two children. So with the clothes on my back, my laptop on my lap, and Gypsy in a carrier, I rode with my friend into the darkness.

The highways were shut down. We drove the back roads, the cypress trees bending down over us in the blackness as if listening to our whispered voices. Freddie's eyes were hollow.

As we passed his wife's car, I saw she was frantic, on the verge of panic. I winked at the pale faces of Freddie's two children, Allison and Abigail, pulled Gypsy out of the carrier, and picked up her front paw as if she were waving at the two girls. They giggled. And the grip of panic on their mother seemed to break. She waved back and gave a valiant smile with a thumb's up salute.

Freddie said, "Dude, you're like Job."

"How so?"

"I mean you got your gas siphoned out of your car just when you needed it most."

"I bet a lot of people did."

"Yeah, but if Rita hits Lake Charles, this will be the second time you'll have lost everything. You lost it all when your home burned. And before that you closed your business. Your mother died before that. And before that your fiancee died. And your childhood best friend died before Kathy. Damn, it's like you're Job."

I nodded, smiling sadly, "As I recall Job ended up pretty well."

"You've got a strange way at looking at life, dude."

"You're not the first to say that."

We made it to Baton Rouge where I worked delivering rare blood to all the hospitals reeling under the impact of Katrina. I drove to the hospital of Metairie, the first suburb of New Orleans. (It is a French term for a tenant farm.) I saw people who had only thought they knew what having nothing meant. I smelled the stench of decaying human flesh on the breath of a too silent city. I saw young boys in uniform trying to be men under impossible conditions.

Late at night I typed the first draft of FRENCH QUARTER NOCTURNE, alone in the spacious suite afforded me by the blood center for which I worked. It had been leased for the board of directors to oversee the new center in Baton Rouge. So for two months I slept in a prince's suite. Gypsy was, for once, satisfied with her accommodations, she being a princess and all.

I barely saw the suite. I was always driving it seemed -- down long, unfamiliar roads to strange hospitals protected by hollow-eyed young boys with automatic weapons and dry mouths. Finally, the blood couriers were allowed back to our devastated city. It was like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. But these ruined streets and gutted homes I knew. Our city has never truly recovered. But my friends are a hardy bunch.

Me? I just fake it.

And there you have at least 10 things you didn't know about me. And I've answered only one of the five questions. Like Freddie says, I tend to talk a lot. But he smiles good-naturedly when he says it.


Oh, and that time in Baton Rouge was the first time I saw my soon-to-be Viking friend, Eric.

And another thing about me : Each time I enter my apartment, Gypsy pads to me in greeting, and I say, "The Force is with you, young Gypsy, but you are not a jedi yet." She seems unperturbed. And here are some scenes you will not believe from George Lucas' new creation, THE OLD REPUBLIC :

WRITE THE SIZZLE NOT THE STEAK

Eric, a friend and co-worker, dropped by my apartment today to lend me his DVD of THE WOLFMAN. He spotted my collection of movie memorabilia on the walls. He hushed in a breath. With trembling fingers, he touched a small card by the door.

It was a card containing an authentic piece of fabric from the black body suit worn by Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow in IRON MAN 2. He looked at me as if I had the Shroud of Turin on my wall.

"She wore this, man. Her bare flesh touched this. Her DNA is on this cloth. Her DNA."

"Ah, Eric it could have been worn by her stunt double, or it could have been cut from the trimmed pieces of fabric on the floor when they made the outfit."

"No, man. This card certifies with a hologram and shit that this piece of cloth is from Scarlett's suit. Oh, man, it touched her body."

"You need to get out more, Eric."

"Hey, I go out plenty. Just not with Scarlett."

"Well, neither do I."

"Yeah, but you got her DNA."

And as he hung the card back up sadly on my wall, I realized what I would get him for Christmas : an autographed photo of Scarlett. After all, in touching the picture to sign, she would have left some of her DNA on it, too. It would repay him for giving me the autographed photo of Angelina Jolie. Guys. We are a strange breed.

And what does this have to with the art of writing?

Well, it gives you a little insight into the bizarre psyches of two friends. And it also teaches us an important lesson in how to write.

Eric read into the card more than the words on it. It said the cloth was from the body suit worn in the movie. But in his mind, Eric could see Scarlett putting on the skin-tight suit. The words said little, Eric's imagination suggested much more. The readers who turn the pages of our books are like Eric in that our words will suggest to them a whole canvas of images if we choose the words with craft and lyrical style.

Write the sizzle not the steak.

Remember Stephen King from two posts ago?

"Good books don't give up all their secrets at once. Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

Just another way of saying, "Sell the sizzle not the steak. Let the reader smell the aroma of the cooking plot, hear the sizzling of approaching danger, and taste the ashy flavor of death in the air like smoke from a gutted home.

You see, the most important things, the crucial things are hard to wrap words around. Haven't you felt it? You ached to say the right thing to a grieving neighbor, a dying friend -- and the words that came to you were so meager -- like having a foot long square of wrapping paper to somehow put around a two foot wide gift.

Stephen King put it this way :

"The most important things are the hardest to say.

They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them --

words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out.

But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away.

And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it.

That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."

And because Stephen King writes in wisdom like that, we buy his books.

And that's what's so important about our blog friends. You understand what it means to want to express the haunting images inside your head by crude things like the written word.

I understand. I'm one of you. And I am reaching out to you as you are reaching back to me -- from the confines of the solitary confinement of our minds, held prisoner by the limitations of the written word.

Neither one of us totally understands. But that's all right. Sometimes it's good just to be silent with a friend in the night.

****
The darkness is gathering, growing stronger in this world, and only the light of brave, caring hearts stands in its way.



Never say that I don't offer a public service here. So if you want the legs and tummy of Gwyneth Paltrow, go to this link (I tried these blasted exercises, and now I'm walking like the Penguin in BATMAN) :

http://shine.yahoo.com/event/the-thread/leg-exercises-from-hollywoods-hottest-trainer-1684894

GOOD GUYS ARE BORING?

{ I had to start my post with a photo of a bad girl to counterbalance the good guy subject matter. Ah, not buying that? Didn't think so. It was worth a try.}



"Good guys are boring?," I said earlier tonight.


Nickie, my co-worker, nodded sagely. "Yep. Boooooring."


We'd been talking my disenchantment with Sookie in the TRUE BLOOD novels. Bill, her first lover, had suffered near death twice for her, but she is attracked to sociopath vampire, Eric.


"Vampire Bill is boring while Eric is just bad and sexy."


"Uh, he tore apart a guy who was just trying to escape being chained in a cellar. And then, he got upset when the man's blood ruined his hair's highlighting."


Nickie giggled, "That was so cute."


"What if the guy had been your kid brother? Still cute?"


"Oh that guy was a jerk. He had it coming."


"And the two little children Eric looked down as munchies toward the end of season two? Did they have it coming?"


"Oh, you're as boring as vampire Bill." And Nickie hurried off to try saving LEGEND OF THE SEEKER.



Our conversation got me thinking on how difficult it is to write a non-boring hero or heroine. But being good boring? Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, once wrote : Everything I did in my life that was worthwhile, I caught hell for.

I don't know about you, but that's pretty much how it's been for me.


So Niki and actors who moan that good guys are boring don't really mean boring in the obvious sense.


As writers we have to look at heroes through the reader's eyes. And what do they want of their heroes?


To live vicariously through them.


And who wants to suffer through routine living second-hand? We get enough of that up close and personal. Our failure with heroes is that we make them routine.


What do the readers want from the hero of the novel they're reading?


To live dangerously and to have fun through them by :



Dialogue :

How often have you been stung in a situation, only to come up with the perfect comeback HOURS after the fact?



Think CON-AIR when

Cameron Poe says to agent Larkin : "Sorry boss, but there's only two men I trust. One of them's me. The other's not you."



Or with Robert B. Parker when Spenser says :

"...You have any suggestions, make them. I'm in charge but humble. No need to salute when you see me."
Fraser said, "Mind if we snicker every once in a while behind your back?"
"Hell, no," I said. "Everyone else does."
— Robert B. Parker (The Widening Gyre)


Or when Spenser walks into a TV station's boardroom to see three lawyers sitting on a couch beside one another.

"Which one of you speaks no evil?," I asked. (A Savage Place)



{Side-bar} :

University professor turned writer, Robert B. Parker, had thought-provoking things to say about writers, literature, and life :



“It was not just that Ross Macdonald taught us how to write; he did something much more, he taught us how to read, and how to think about life, and maybe, in some small, but mattering way, how to live.”



"Being a professor and working are not the same thing. The academic community is composed largely of nitwits. If I may generalize. People who don't know very much about what matters very much, who view life through literature rather than the other way around.”



“The advantage of writing a series is that it probably replicates, for lack of a better word, real life more than most fiction because most people have a history and know people and come and go and you have a chance to play with the characters and not just the protagonist.

It gives you the opportunity to develop--lapsing back into academe for a moment--a whole fictive world. Gee, I love saying that now, just keeping my hand in. Fictive world!.”



"I sit down every day and write five pages on my computer. At some point I found that not outlining worked better than outlining. The outline had become something of a limitation more than it was a support.

When I did the Raymond Chandler book, Poodle Springs, which was in the late eighties, I was trying to do it as Chandler did it, and since Chandler didn't outline then I thought I won't outline.

If you read Chandler closely you can see that he didn't outline. What the hell happened to that chauffeur? I would recommend to the beginning writer that they should outline because they probably don't have enough self-confidence yet.

But I've been writing now since 1971 and I know that I can think it up. I know it will come."




"It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way."



But I digress ...


What, besides saying snappy dialogue, do readers want to do through their heroes?


To do the extraordinary.


Even if it is in ordinary circumstances. Spit in the eye of the bully. Tweak the nose of a snobbish boss.

Take this scenario :


A tired stone mason sits at a bar run by one of his few friends. Another man sits down beside him. He never looks at our hero, but he pushes a thick manila envelope over to him.


He whispers, "Ten thousand now. Ten thousand after she's dead."


He gets up and slowly walks away. Our hero hurriedly opens the envelope. Sure enough there is the money. And a blown-up photo of a woman from her driver's license.


Our hero gets up to follow the man to see if he can get the license plate number of his car to give to the police. The man is already outside -- getting into a police car.


What does our hero do? What would you do? And so starts the Dean Koontz novel, THE GOOD GUY. (Hey, I couldn't resist.)


There is a hero inside all of us ... if we only know where to look. There is a magentism to your hero of your novel ... if you know where to look. And where is that?


In your heart, friend. In your heart.

*******************************************

And if you have the time, here are some interesting scenes of an ancient TV series derived from the Spenser detective series. I fell in love with Susan Silverman from that series -- an intelligent, brave, caring woman.