Snoopy was right.

This was actually the book that was supposed to 'write itself.' This is an expression I have heard about writing that has been expressed by people writing about writing but I have yet to hear another author describe having experienced the phenomenon.

To be sure, some stories seem to flow much more easily than others. Deadly Lessons more or less went that way (seriously, as I promised last week, the origin story of Deadly Lessons is coming in a subsequent column). Sure there was work involved but I don't recall having had so much angst and struggle with the direction of the story. I could be looking back at that initial novel through rose coloured glasses but I know that while there were elements of the story with which I struggled, by and large I had not only a very clear direction from the outset but also a pretty good foreknowledge of the paths I'd take from beginning to end.

The latest book or W3.doc as it's lovingly known, as cheesy as it sounds, originated overnight in a dream. And it really was one of those stories that arrived with such clarity that for the final two years in which I was working on Last Dance I was literally chomping at the bit to get to this third book that would, I assumed, write itself.

Of course it hasn't worked out that way. Like Last Dance before it, W3 has proven to be a challenge, not helped by the significant gaps of time between sessions of sitting down to write. I have blamed all kinds of factors (see post from November 28, 2011), not the least of which has been increasing doubts about the efficacy of the story: the longer it is taking me to write this book, the more doubt I have in the narrative itself.

But there is reason for hope. As I have taken to spending some quality time with the story so far, I have renewed faith in it - at its heart it's a missing person's story. Why I have struggled with it is that I'm realizing the story isn't completely flawed, it's actually just much more complicated than I had thought.

My first two books were fairly standard mysteries in that the premise of the book is trying to establish who is responsible for the central crimes. There are elements of that in W3 as well. But W3 really will focus more on the why of the crime rather than on the 'who dunnit' aspect. In fact, it will likely be pretty clear who dunnit fairly on; the question to be solved is more along the lines of what exactly did the doer do and why.

I'm hardly breaking new ground in the genre - far from it. It's just different territory for me and I'm discovering that the further I go into the story, the complexities involved require me to pay much closer attention to detail and discovery than perhaps I had in the past.

And as far as hope go, I went through significant doubt on Last Dance as well and nearly everyone who has read it and shared their opinions have told me they liked it better than Deadly Lessons.

If quality is determined by self-doubt, W3 ought to be outstanding.

Next week: a little about the thing I like least of the writing life - marketing.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Wednesday, 2 January 2013 4:03 PM PST

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When riding the Tube in London passengers are audibly reminded while exiting the trains to "Mind the Gap." For daily or regular London Transport users, the warning is largely irrelevant and likely is no longer even heard by weary commuters on their daily trudges into the city and back out to the burbs where all but the most-wealthy of London's workers must live. They simply step over the gap between train and platform and continue on their way, no twisted ankles or high heels stuck between terra firma and terra traina.

There's a parallel to writing.

In my case, the gap is the seemingly continually expanding span of time between sessions of writing the next novel in the Winston Patrick series, currently titled “W3.doc” on my computer, though the publisher already asked me some time ago for the title to begin advance marketing. I take that as a positive sign but also an increase in the pressure to, you know, write the damned book.

I experienced the gap in writing Last Dance too, wherein weeks and occasionally months would go by during which no real meaningful writing on the book went on.

This differs significantly from my experience writing Deadly Lessons; I wrote the first draft of that first book, start to finish, in about ten months. To be sure, those were the halcyon days of being on a six month sabbatical from work, pre-child, with really nothing but long stretches of day in front of me to in which to write my literary debut. That and golf, which became quickly evident was not something to which I should devote serious time. Having been granted a leave from work to write a master’s thesis I found that by the time my leave had come I had more or less completed it and turning to fiction seemed something worthwhile to do. It helped that it was a partially paid leave, which meant that for that one and only time in my life I was a paid writer. More on the Deadly Lessons origin story in a later post.

The real danger of the gap is maintaining, hell even remembering, the consistency of the story. On more than one occasion I’ve returned to the story after a significant gap only to find myself wondering what the hell was going on in the story. This happens to readers when they’ve been away from the text awhile but it’s deadly for the writer. We know eventually that our ability to get the details correct and the story flowing is critical to keep the reader from wandering away from the story in the first place.

In Last Dance, I actually found myself trying to pick up a scene following a pretty significant gap in writing productivity. I had to go back multiple pages in search of the identity of a character about who I was reading, only to figure out I had inadvertently changed a character’s name, which was why, of course, I couldn’t figure out who the hell I was reading about. No small thing either: the character whose name I had altered was one of the central protagonists and the homicide victim who is, in fact, the premise of the story.

So yeah, the gap is a challenge.

Which is at least in part why I’m not getting as much writing done on this holiday break as I had hoped and planned (and for those of you keeping score from the last two weeks’ postings, no, I haven’t written the discovery scene mentioned in both those posts).

Instead, I have gone back to the beginning, printing out the entire work in progress to date, which I plan to read from start to finish to make sure the story hasn’t gotten swallowed in the gaps between writing. I need to get a renewed handle on how I’ve developed the story so far, hopefully paving the way for renewed flow and output going into the New Year.

Makes for a pretty decent resolution too.

Next week: this story may be more complicated than I thought.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 12:01 AM PST

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“It’s not that I think dialogue is a bad thing,” he said, staring at the blinking cursor.

“It isn’t?”

“No, it isn’t,” he continued, though his voice had taken on a higher-pitched, self-justifying tone. If he had been an adolescent girl his hand would have been on his hip, his hip jutting out in that awkward position only an adolescent girl could find comfortable. “It’s not just filler. Dialogue can be used to actually advance the story. In fact, it should be.”

As I noted last week, I have a tendency to be dialogue-heavy. Worse, as a former high school classroom teacher, I not only overuse dialogue but often feel a need for more dialogue to explain the dialogue I’ve just used. I think it drove my first publisher – herself a former English teacher – a little crazy. “It’s the curse of our day jobs,” she told me.

See how it advances the narrative?

For some writers, even within the crime genre, dialogue is the principal tool for advancing story. One of my earliest crime writing influences is surely Robert B. Parker, author of the famed Spenser series of some forty novels. Spenser was a hero of sorts to me, limited in his dialogue generally to short, snappy sentences but somehow managing to solve crime nonetheless.

Parker, who famously wrote four pages a day, every day until literally dying at his computer nearly three years ago almost reversed what is often the standard mantra of writers: sparse dialogue with lots of action. Parker’s stories are so dialogue driven that the short bursts of action actually do come as a surprise. In the middle of a conversation someone is suddenly punched in the throat or a bullet flies.

And of course, Parker’s dialogue was witty (and always included the line “we’d be fools not to”), replete with literary references, and intelligent in a way we’d all like to speak on a regular basis, like the West Wing of crime novels (Sorkin-esque dialogue would require a whole other post simply to contain my fawning). I’ve heard critics decry Spenser’s literary and culinary prowess, as though it’s not possible for a hard-boiled detective to read classic literature and know how to cook. I find it charming.

But I get it – there’s more than one way to skin a cat and readers may well prefer a variety of narrative tools and structures to advance the story.

Which leads me back to the quagmire in which I found myself last week: how does Winston Patrick determine this newest piece of information I need him to have without relying on dialogue, and yet remain plausible?

In this particular scene, it may not be possible. And given the slowing impact it has had on my writing (though the novel has been progressing rather slowly of late anyway) it may be an indicator that perseverating on one reviewer’s point of view is, in fact, as unproductive as everyone tells me it is.

Next week: I hope to have the scene written. I’ll let you know how it works out.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Wednesday, 19 December 2012 8:36 PM PST

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Among the litany of reasons my current novel writing seems to have stalled is a problem I’m having with dialogue.

I like dialogue.

To be sure, when I first started seriously writing, my ambition wasn’t novels but situation comedies. Loved ‘em. Still do, really, though the selection of quality sitcoms from which to choose has greatly diminished from when I watched with more regularity. Or I’ve become much pickier about sitcom writing, certainly a possibility: Growing Pains, after all, really wasn’t all that good. In fact, the only blog that I read daily is Ken Levine’s, formerly a writer on such little programs as M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier. I live vicariously through his adventures and misadventures in the sitcom writing trade.

Way back when, I viewed sitcom writing as my one-day work. When we’d watch the Emmy awards (doesn’t everyone?) my wife would look at the collection of, well, nerdy-looking mostly men in ill-fitting tuxedoes up on the stage as the head writer accepted Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series awards and wonder aloud, “Are  you sure that’s to what you aspire?”

And I did. I wrote spec scripts and pilots of my own creation. I sent out queries. I was rejected by some of the biggest names in television. Once, I’m convinced, a series even stole my idea they assured me they hadn’t read.

I was a big fan of Mad About You. When the show debuted, my wife and I were about to be newlyweds and we sort of grew up in marriage alongside Paul and Jamie Buchman.

I wrote a spec script and sent the pitch to the production company. This was before I knew one wasn’t supposed to send spec scripts of a show to that show. Who knew? Everyone but me, apparently. They sent me a polite, standard rejection letter.

A friend “in the biz” suggested I wait six weeks and try again. What did I have to lose, aside from my dignity and sense of self worth? After the second attempt they rejected me by telephone. They’re warming to me, I thought. By the third attempt I figured they’d fly to Vancouver to reject me in person.

I decided to pre-empt them. After hopping a flight to L.A., we rented a car and drove out to Columbia Tri-Star Television in Culver City. As we rolled to a stop outside the gates, my wife asked what the next part of my plan was. “I didn’t think I’d find the studio,” I told her. “This is as far ahead as I’d thought.” Momentum flowing, I approached the gate, asked for the producer, gave them my name and…was allowed in.

No one was as surprised as I.

We had a lovely chat, following which I left behind my little package of scripts and went on my way. A few weeks later, I received a package in the mail containing photocopies of my scripts, with different bindings than those I had left, with a letter assuring me my scripts could not be considered or even read. Later, an episode bearing an uncanny resemblance to one of the scripts I had submitted, aired.

I thought my version was funnier.

Friends told me I should have been outraged but I wore it as a badge of honour. I couldn’t realistically have expected a hit series to buy the work of an unknown, unproduced wannabe script writer from Canada who had broken all the norms of breaking into the business. I took it as a sign that at least my writing was on the right track.

So I like dialogue.

The reviews for my last book, Last Dance, have been overwhelmingly positive. But Jack Batten in the Toronto Star says my protagonist, Winston Patrick, talks too much. I know we’re not supposed to fixate on our reviews but I also think we can learn something from everyone’s reactions to our work and it’s giving me pause.

Because right now I’m in the middle of a scene where some important information is going to be revealed and I’m hung up on trying to get Winston to discover it without relying on dialogue. We’ll see.

Next week: more on the influence of dialogue-heavy writing on my own work. 

Posted by davidrussellbc at 12:01 AM PST

Updated: Thursday, 13 December 2012 9:42 AM PST

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In an effort to increase my output, I’m returning to the blog (man, I hate that word). I’m planning to document some of the challenges and hopefully much more of the progress as I continue writing the third in the Winston Patrick series.

Below is a little tiny piece of mind fluff that came out at the beginning of a workshop I was leading. I hope to make this a regular (shall we say ‘weekly’) entry to move past whatever wall I’m up against as I’m writing. Stay tuned…please.

It’s difficult to write when my fingers are tingling, not because I can’t hold a pencil or type on the keys – I’m doing fine with that. It’s because it’s difficult to think of any other questions beyond ‘why are my fingers tingling?’ What the hell is happening here?

The ibuprofen helped in the short term but it seems like it’s wearing off. I can feel tingling again.

In comparison to feeling nothing, like I’ve had the big jammer or something, feeling tingling isn’t even a minor annoyance. It’s victory itself. But it’s a hollow one because it’s a victory achieved by using the malady that’s causing my anxiety as an indicator that I’m not, in fact, dead.

I may be writing a Neil Simon play or a Woody Allen movie here. I guess it worked out all right for them.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 10:43 AM PST

Updated: Thursday, 6 December 2012 10:46 AM PST

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I haven’t been writing a lot lately.

That’s sort of an understatement. I really haven’t been writing at all.  On the one hand, it could be I’m suffering from writer’s block.  For the most part, this is a fictitious condition, or so the psychologists would have us believe.  Of course, they haven’t had to write anything since their PhD theses and God knows no one wants to read those.

It’s probably difficult to get sympathy.  Kurt Vonnegut once famously said: “Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?”  I am neither bound nor gagged by policemen and while the freedom in which I live is less than perfect, I don’t yet feel I have nothing more to say.

The fact of the matter is that like anything else, I’m sure, the longer one stays away from a thing, the harder it is to get back to the thing.  Take school – with which I have a fairly significant amount of experience.  Skip one class and going back doesn’t seem so tough.  Skip five classes and the thought of going back and catching up on all that has been missed seems so daunting that continuing to skip further seems preferable, even though it’s clear the longer absences are going to make the eventual return that much more difficult to face.

Writing, I find, can be like that.

And to be sure, writer’s block is mostly just a fear of re-starting that which I walked away from some time ago.  The blank page, the blinking cursor, the time alone all become these ominous demons to be slain before productivity returns.  And it’s amazing the list of reasons one can concoct to legitimize absence from the writing.  Here are some of my current ones:

-          I haven’t purchased an iPad.

-          my office is too messy/crowded/loud/quiet

-          I’m busy planning the release party of my new book

-          I haven’t finished writing my 3 x 5 index cards of the story

-          the cork bulletin board in the basement that I want to bring up to the office on which to organize the 3 x 5 cards has a spider behind it.  It’s a dead spider but it’s really large and it kind of freaks me out.  I thought of sending my 7 year old daughter to get the board and feign ignorance about the spider when she sees it and screams.

-          I’m a horrible father.

On their own, none of these items ought to prevent progress on the next book.  I even started watching the West Wing again for inspiration.  But focussing on Aaron Sorkin’s writing could only serve to make me feel incapable and thus joins the list above.

Julia Cameron claims to have a sure fire method for releasing me from writer’s block and to be sure, I have tried her program before and I have had some success.  On the other hand, it involves writing three pages a day of basically journaling, which seems to me to be taking up the precious little time available for writing and thus belongs on the list above.

Still, I’m not ready to give up and I’m pseudo-publicly committing to increasing the output so feel free to hold me accountable.  If you read this (and who would?) feel free to nag me. If you bump into me on the street or the Apple Store, remind me of my commitment. 

Progress reports to follow.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 7:12 PM PST

Updated: Monday, 28 November 2011 7:30 PM PST

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I'm not very good at relaxing.

In that total, unadulterated, undisturbed, complete and total sense of the concept, I confess to being somewhat of a failure.

I don't say that as a martyr or as one critical of others able to just completely let go and unwind.  I admire those people.  You don't need to be Bikram to know and appreciate the benefits of unplugging, recharging and re-energizing.  And not just the laptop batteries.  Whole publications are devoted not only to convincing people of the merits of downtime but also teaching them how to do it.  It's probably a said statement a publishing arm exists dedicated to and finding a sustainable market for teaching people how not to do anything.

But I'm a writer.

So what, one might be inclined to say.  Writers aren't necessarily such hard workers (with apologies to those fellow scribes who are).  I've heard writers described as actors who are too lazy to wait tables.

I'm the kind of writer, I suspect like many of my brethren and sistern, that makes the majority of my income from sources other than writing.  Thus (writers like to say things like 'thus', even when we're speaking), the bulk of the writing occurs during the down time from generating other sources of income, which conflicts with the relaxation time.

Take right now.

I am sitting around a swimming pool at a resort, being served drinks, watching other people relax, and about all I can think is the writing I'm not doing while I'm sitting here reading Stieg Larsson's admittedly very good book in a genre in which I'm supposed to be writing. 

There are others like me.

Looking around the pool deck I count three people pecking away at laptops.  They may not be fellow writers (they may be, though - look how many people James Patterson has writing for him) but they're working.  What's a guy to do?

Unable to take it any longer, the reminders all around me, (I think I even saw the guy next to me check his email on his Kindle when he was supposed to be relaxing) I started to write.  On my Blackberry, on which this entire posting was composed.

At poolside.  Drink beside me.  Relaxing.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 8:34 PM PDT

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I'm not one to complain but...

Recently. I was interested to hear Van Morrison was coming to town.  It's worth noting I was 'interested' he was coming to town, not 'excited' or in frothing at the concert-going mouth.

Still, it's summertime, and would continue to be so whence the aging rocker performed.  What a pleasant way to spend a summer evening: kicking back, maybe a cold one in hand (okay, I don't drink beer but it fits the imagery - I might even grasp a bottle to have something other than a lighter with which to sway to the classic tunes), tapping my sandals and dancing in that awkward public way a forty year-old white guy can pull off at a classic rock concert?

So I ventured to both Ticketmaster and Live Nation, entities both selling tickets to the show and thought, "Okay.  I work hard.  I'll treat us to a nice summer evening of nostalgic music and even celebrate that we'd likely be among the youngest concert-goers in the crowd.  And what the hell?  We could splurge.  We don't go to a lot of concerts.  Let's avoid the nose-bleeds and see the show up close.  How much could good seats to a nearly geriatric rocker be?

Two hundred and seventy-six dollars.  Each.  Five hundred and...hell, I can't even readily do the math for the pair.

This is not a diatribe against outrageous fees.  For the record, I paid $2.75 per ticket as a facility charge, which one would have thought would simply be based into the cost of hosting the concert, and $15.00 per ticket as a convenience charge, though for what convenience I'm paying other than providing a convenient means for Ticketmaster to conveniently move money from my wallet to its coffers, is not clear.  But plenty has been written about that near monopoly organization and the fees it is able to pay by virtue of a general lack of competition.

My shock comes from the base ticket price itself.  Van Morrison was not the top grossing concert touring act in the past year  - he wasn't even in the top ten.  Yes, I know supply and demand is at play.  Obviously, Morrison believes a senior citizen rocker can attract the kind of client willing to part with that kind of cash to see him or he wouldn't charge that kind of money.

But it's just another highlight of how live music, at least of big name acts, is increasingly becoming a pastime for the wealthy.

See you in the nosebleeds.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 3:15 PM PDT

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I'm not one to complain, but...

Similarly, I'm not one to write political commentary, at least not for awhile, but every now and again, one must speak up.

No, I'm not going to rant about the G8 and G20 stupidity.  Enough venomous ink has spilled on both sides of that debate, if it can be called that, with neither side, if there really are sides, able to clearly articulate their issues, if they've defined even for themselves what those issues are.

But I can't help but comment on BC provincial finance minister Colin Hansen's press conference on Friday about the costs of hosting the Winter Olympics.  You remember the Olympics, right?  People were plenty angry heading into them, asserting, rightfully, that there might be about a million better ways to spend the millions of dollars it would cost to invite the world to participate in one big winter track meet.  The usual parties made the usual arguments, some in more sophisticated, convincing manners than others, but regardless, the show went on.

And once they did, there was more or less agreement that the games were successful in any large number of ways: number of medals won, opening and closing ceremonies - the temporarily non-erectile phallic symbol notwithstanding, the cultural and entertainment events, a new, if temporary, increase in national spirit and pride, the parties in the streets and venues.  Even many of the opponents confessed to being impressed and even enjoying the games themselves once they finally got underway. 

Why then, did Colin Hansen insist on such ludicrous, outrageous, political spin in his efforts to not rationalize the games being over budget, but to deny altogether the government had suggested the games would only cost the provincial taxpayers $600 million in direct costs.  Putting aside the arguments about what is and isn't an Olympics-related cost (the Skytrain extension to Richmond, the Sea-to-Sky Highway expansion, the new trade and convention centre - two out of three of which came in over budget), Hansen's attempts to deny the provincial government ever claimed to budget $600 million for the games takes political spin doctoring to a new high - or low, depending on your perspective.

For anyone who lived in British Columbia during the build-up to the games, I don't need to provide examples of government representatives using the $600 million figure.  We heard it time and again from the premier, from the finance minister, from the minister responsible for the games.  Veteran political commentator Vaughn Palmer provides but a small sample in his excellent column on the topic in the Vancouver Sun.  News outlets will provide plenty of others over the coming days.

Now that we are now well past the point of questioning the validity of the games, that the majority of Vancouver residents look back on the games with fondness, enjoying the memories of whatever small or large manner in which they participated in the events, is there really any need for Hansen to try to fake his way out what any competent chequebook balancer could only describe as cost overruns?  The games cost more than what we really anticipated, or at least more than what we told you they were going to cost.  Here's why.  Here's why we think it was still worth the investment.  Take it or leave it.  The games and the money's gone now.anyway.

I know, I know.  This kind of political 'truthiness' is nothing new.  And maybe I'm just sensitive as we head into summer time and our own incomes take their two month annual beating.  But to me, Hansen's performance yesterday, and by extension that of his government, sunk to new depths yesterday.  For the love of all that's good and holy, just once - once - I'd love to hear a politician speak with unwavering, unfiltered, unfabricated clarity, treat the public with the respect it so richly deserves and just speak the whole truth, the plain truth and nothing but.

Not the kind of truth that Hansen can tell himself he is speaking by rationalizing and twisting and tweaking.  Just the whole, unadulterated truth of the matter. 

It could have gone something like this: "The original $600 million we projected turned out to be not enough to really successfully do what we thought we should do with the games.  It turns out the state of the economy, the cost overruns, the revenue generated were worse than we anticipated and we had to spend more.  We still believe the games will be worth the cost and the province will be better off economically and in spirit in the long run." 

Sure they would have taken some heat for less than accurate forecasting.  Opponents, media and yes, bloggers, may well have taken them to task on their abilities to handle the public's purse.  But on the one issue that nowadays really does matter more than that, they would have been untouchable:

Integrity.

Posted by davidrussellbc at 5:28 PM PDT

Updated: Saturday, 10 July 2010 5:42 PM PDT

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