The Masters

 Wendall—every other Thursday

As I am a bit stuck at the moment, I'm revisiting this post and these writers to get me back on track to write during my break from UCLA. Happy Holidays, everyone!

As an author, this is a difficult thing to admit: I’m hard on books. 

 

This is the state of my original university copy of The Portrait of a Lady.

 

If I love them, I reread them. A lot. I carry them in my backpack, I read them on buses while trying to balance a coffee, they fall on the floor when I fall sleep in the middle of a page, and if I think the line or the paragraph is something I want to remember, yes, I will star or underline. I was a huge underliner in college.

 

The shocking inside of the book, above.

 

For old hardback books, I do use Levenger’s gold page markers, at least. 

 

These Levenger page tabs are a lifesaver when you just can't bear to desecrate a book.

 

When a beloved paperback starts falling apart, though, I have been known to hold it together with a rubber band, a trick I learned from my advisor, Bob Bain, as I don’t want a new copy—I would lose all my notes!

 

Two that I just can't abandon, despite the state they're in.

 

I hope that I read widely (I may be deluded, see below), even though there are hundreds of thousands of works I still need to get to. There are certain books that had a huge influence on me as a child that I revisit once a year, including Harriet the Spy, Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass, and David Copperfield.

 

But there are three American authors I find most helpful when I am stuck, who offer inspiration and a way to understand the writing life, and who remind me of why I do this at all. Their books are especially beloved. And battered. Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, and Sam Shepherd.

 

John Singer Sargent's portrait of James. I visit it in the National Portrait Gallery every time I'm in London.

One of my favorite photos of O'Connor.

Vintage Shephard, in a photo by Herb Ritts.

They may seem a strange combination. They are certainly different in style. But to me, they all write about the same thing: the ways we delude ourselves. All of their works examine the fine line between having an imagination and flat-out lying, and the disconnect between the way people are perceived by others and the way they perceive themselves. 

 

 

James’s Isabel Archer is one of the great “lying to herself” characters of all time, O’Connor reveals layers of tragic delusion through the grandmother in “A Good Man in Hard to Find” or Mrs. Shortley in “The Displaced Person,” and every character in Shepherd’s Buried Child is lying to themselves and everyone else, until they’re forced to face the truth in their backyard.

 

This is a topic that fascinates me, partly because, as a writer, our job is to make things up. So we have to be good at it, but can that spill into our own, personal narratives? Trying to understand this has certainly helped me as a writer, particularly in learning to hint at the subtext in every situation, and to show the way characters try to cover things up in dialogue, while unwittingly revealing everything. Their dialogue has especially influenced me as a screenwriter.

 

I also think all three of them are, in their own ways, hilarious. I am in the preliminary stages of a new mystery series that features Henry James and he completely cracks me up. If I were casting him, I’d choose Bill Murray. The layers of irony and sarcasm in his work always take me by surprise, but they’re everywhere. Here’s an exchange from one of my favorite, more obscure stories, “The Beldonald Holbein.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Well, to begin with, she’s American.”

“But I thought that was the way of ways to get on.”

“It’s one of them.  But it’s one of the ways of being awfully out of it too.  There are so many!”

“So many Americans?” I asked.

“Yes, plenty of them,” Mrs. Munden sighed.  “So many ways, I mean, of being one.”

Bill Murray. From Dr. Venkman to HJ?

 

O’Connor, of course, is famous for her zingy one-liners. “Everywhere I go people ask me if I think universities stifle writers. I think it doesn’t stifle enough of them.” When told that author Caroline Gordon did most of her writing while she did the dishes, O’Connor’s response was “I think there should be a complete separation between literature and dishwashing.” And this sentence from “Good Country People” delights me: “Besides the neutral expression she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings.”

 

Shephard’s characters are so often defined by absurdist, darkly comic lines like True West’s “There's gonna be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning.”  Or Buried Child’s “You should take a pill for that! I don’t see why you just don’t take a pill! Be done with it once and for all. Put a stop to it. It’s not Christian but it works.”

 

Of course, for all three, the humor is one gateway to the serious topics they’re taking on. This is probably why all three of them are also famously cranky. As someone who was taught it was impolite to be cranky at all, but especially in public, I adore that they snap at people and never suffer fools gladly. This always gives me a vicarious thrill.

 

I love this photo of HJ. What writer hasn't had this kind of day?

 

But maybe I love them most for their other writings—letters, notebooks, interviews, introductions—because they offer a window into the way they work. They certainly all suffered from doubts and missteps, but from what I can tell, all of them learned to trust that they were a conduit for art, that if they showed up, the words would come through them. As a “pantser” I find this comforting.

 

 

O’Connor: “I sit there by the typewriter for three hours every morning and if something comes, I am there to receive it.”

 

Shepherd: “I felt kind of like a weird stenographer. I don’t mean to make it sound like hallucination, but there were definitely things there, and I was just putting them down.” 

 

James: “Well, that is my start—and the rest ought to go. I can trust myself.”

 

My particular favorite places to find these writers’ thoughts include The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, O’Connor’s collection of letters, The Habit of Being, and Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, and a new work which astounds me, Two Prospectors: The Letters of Sam Shephard and Johnny Dark.  

 

All underlined like mad, of course.

 

I just hope I live long enough to rubber band these three.

 

--Wendall

Stumbling Across the Tightrope of Disbelief

Wendall -- every other Thursday

As I was proofreading my latest book, I fell into the habit of listening to stand-up comedy specials in the background. It made me consider the boundaries of comedy in the modern  landscape. So, I decided to revisit some thoughts I wrote several years ago about pushing the limits of believability, and screwball comedy, in a mystery. 

 

Comedy - gliding or colliding in Charlie Chaplin's 1916 film, The Rink.

 

Suspending our disbelief has become a national pastime. While it can be alarming in real life, Coleridge’s concept is usually something fiction readers embrace. But where’s the line between delight and cognitive dissonance, between a gasp and a guffaw, or in my case, a loud, sarcastic “Pleeeease,” or “You’ve got to be kidding,” snorted across the living room?

On the surface, fantasy and sci-fi may be in more obvious need of our psychic largesse, but mystery novels require their share, particularly if they involve weekly corpses in a sleepy seaside town, sleuthing kittens, coffee roasters who put the FBI to shame, or for that matter, justice.

Is the justice served out in traditional mysteries something that belongs in a fantasy novel?

Despite its body count, I believe our genre is a hopeful one. Crime novels are a place where wrongs are occasionally righted and characters—however flawed—can win, or at least have a shot at redemption. So it’s more important than ever not to betray our readers by pulling them out of the story. Where is that line we can’t cross? How much leeway do we have?

My conclusion, which is certainly up for debate, is a lot.

Successful writers across the genre push the bounds of believability all the time. Take Lee Child’s Jack Reacher. Can he really keep a toothbrush in his pocket while obliterating eighteen bikers? Can he actually find clothes that fit perfectly in the middle of nowhere, every single time his are dirty/bloody, when I can barely do it with an entire mall and the internet at my disposal?

Of course he can, because Child made sure Reacher was larger than life from the start—in every novel he accomplishes things which would seem impossible for a normal person. And because his wardrobe, or lack thereof, brilliantly supports and illuminates his restlessness and the impermanence of his life, we don’t care that it’s unlikely every small town surplus store carries khakis for giants.

The immortal Rex.

Janet Evanovich offers us the world’s oldest hamster—Stephanie Plum’s Rex. What is he, thirty? Who cares? I hope he lives to be a hundred. Stephanie’s been through enough.

As a reader, I will put up with a certain amount of coincidence, a couple of “wait a minute, didn’t she’s?” and some leaps in logic, as long as I’m connected to the characters and the book feels emotionally truthful and consistent with the tone the writer established in the early pages.

As a writer, though, I’ve struggled to determine how much artistic license writing a “zany” mystery gives me, when it comes to the details of plot and character. I started out as a film writer, operating in a realm where nothing was expected to be realistic, but are the rules different for novelists? Do comedies get a pass hard-boiled books don’t? Or are the rules the same for any imaginary world?

In my particular case, my first novel, Lost Luggage, had an amateur sleuth in Cyd Redondo, but a zanier tone than most traditional or cozy mysteries. So I turned to my inspiration--screwball film comedies--for a working "logic threshold."

Is there a believable moment in this movie? Do we care?

 

How did the whole leopard thing really work in Bringing Up Baby? Did Katherine Hepburn’s Susan Vance have a leopard litter box the size of a bathtub, off screen? Would she really wear a floor-length chiffon peignoir with claws around? Did it matter? I embraced every silly moment of that film, because writers Hagar Wilde and Dudley Nichols set up Hepburn’s character to repel logic from her first line of dialogue. And because it’s the tension between what is happening on screen and what should reasonably be happening which makes the film a classic.

The Professors and the Showgirl. Ball of Fire (1941).

 

Would Garbo’s Russian bureaucrat in Ninotchka actually wear that ludicrous hat, or would eight bachelor scholars take in a gangster’s moll in Ball of Fire? If Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett were writing it, absolutely, because they gave us a beautifully crafted “suspension bridge” from the first moment of both films, making their characters believable in all their glorious unreality.

When Preston Sturges opens his script for Easy Living with a Fifth Avenue millionaire’s mink coat landing on broke heroine Jean Arthur’s head, we have no problem believing she will unwittingly meet and fall in love with the millionaire’s son. We know right away we’re in a world where no coincidence or happy accident is too great.

One of Preston Sturges's early scripts.

Still, as I’ve struggled throughout my series to maintain the tone one reviewer kindly called “enchantingly ridiculous,” I'm always wary of the line which might push it into the merely “ridiculous.”

In the end, it came down to listening to my character’s internal logic to make sure all my comic set pieces unfolded in a way that was believable for her and for the tone of the series. I found it also helped to try to keep up a relentless pace. That’s the true genius of the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s—their pace doesn’t leave the audience time to question or ponder. So that’s what I’ve tried to do in the series to date—write Cyd’s true, eccentric nature, as fast as I can.

Will readers believe Cyd, who can't swim, will survive this drop?

Whether readers buy her lowering herself on a rope—with her carry-ons—from a helicopter onto a cruise ship, preserving blood from a corpse in a travel nail polish bottle, rescuing endangered songbird eggs with her balconette bra, surviving a thirty foot drop from one infinity pool into another, or defeating the villain with her intimate knowledge of the way wheelchairs work, is always something I wonder, and worry, about.

How do you “cheat” logic or push believability in your novels and, as a reader, where do you draw the line? 

 

--Wendall