Elmore Leonard and Peter on Raylan, Justified and Voices of the Dead

   I had the privilege of hearing a talk recently given by Peter and Elmore Leonard at our local library. Elmore is the best selling author of a gazillion western and thriller novels...many on the New York Times bestseller list. He is also a screenwriter and many of his works are box office hits with starring roles by actors like Paul Newman, George Clooney, Charles Bronson and Burt Reynolds to name just a few. Elmore's latest endeavor is as executive producer of the FX Network's latest hit series, JUSTIFIED.

       Peter Leonard, Elmore's son, has now broken from a successful advertising career (like father, like son) to try his hand at writing. His fourth work, VOICES OF THE DEAD, is coming out this month and he says it is, finally, his own voice speaking as opposed to a "knock-off" of his father's. I am certain Elmore is a difficult act to follow but Peter seems quite capable of holding his own. 

What I enjoyed about the evening was watching Elmore (even his son calls him Elmore). He is as interesting and demonstrative as many of his memorable characters. When Elmore speaks, he uses his hands to make his points...not unlike the cock of a dog's ears. I also liked the casual, conversational tone of the evening...as if we in the audience were all sitting around a large  table in the Leonards' home. They had no script, no index cards and no platform. Peter had some questions jotted on a piece of paper and  he referred to them when conversation slowed but , for the most part father and son discussed their craft.  

What I enjoyed about the evening was watching Elmore (even his son calls him Elmore). He is as interesting and demonstrative as many of his memorable characters. When Elmore speaks, he uses his hands to make his points...not unlike the cock of a dog's ears. I also liked the casual, conversational tone of the evening...as if we in the audience were all sitting around a large  table in the Leonards' home. They had no script, no index cards and no platform. Peter had some questions jotted on a piece of paper and  he referred to them when conversation slowed but , for the most part father and son discussed their craft. 

Elmore was born in New Orleans but  his father, who was a site locator for General motors, moved his family to Detroit in 1934. Elmore has been here ever since.  Peter, of course, was born and raised in our fair city. Both men have been good to our beleaguered town. Not only casting Detroit as the setting for most of his stories but also giving their time to our little community just north of Detroit. This talk was one of just three Elmore is giving to promote his latest and 46th work, RAYLAN. He really does not need to promote his books--they are now grabbed up by his hungry fans as soon as they hit the shelves. And Peter is well on his way to being just as loved and admired.

So, they talked about writing. About how disciplined a writer must be. Both writers honed their crafts while working day jobs with advertising agencies. This meant they adopted a routine of waking at dawn and writing for two or three hours before leaving for work. Then they would come home and be the family men they both were. (Interesting side note: in my other life as a professional florist, I designed the bridal flowers for Elmore's daughter. So my first encounter with the famous author was at the front door to his home when I dropped off the bouquets. I doubt he remembers! )  

Peter pointed out that Elmore said he was not a fan of recurring characters but, with Raylan, that has changed. This is Elmore's third title starring the lawman.
"It's kind of nice," Peter said. "You know the guy now."
"And," Elmore said. "I can get him to talk without much trouble. That's so important."
He said he even likes his bad guys because he can get them to talk. One of Elmore's outstanding successes is the dialogue he interjects into his stories. With little else in the way of describing a character, Elmore's readers have a crystal clear image of every person in his stories...all because of the dialogue.

They also talked about the names they give their characters and how important that is to the success of the story. That they find their names in any number of unexpected places. Raylan, for instance, was the same name as a man introduced to Elmore at a luncheon in Arizona. Peter talked about what it was like to be an author whose father was a famous writer. The good part, he said, was that he could always get the best advice on writing issues at the dinner table. The hardest part was developing his own voice.

The pair touched briefly on Elmore's treatise, THE 10 RULES OF WRITING. I've read it. It's skinny and as sparsely written as Elmore's fiction but packs more heat than many larger texts on the topic.

Out of curiosity I watched Justified last night. I am actually recording the series. I'm not much of a TV viewer. Never seem to find shows that hold my attention for their duration but Justified is good.
When it was over I went to bed and pulled out the book I'm currently reading. Reading, I have found, is a much better way to go to sleep.

 You can hear this entire program on our library's website: http://vimeo.com/35425452

         

Donald Maass -- The Dean of Powerful Writing

I am a member of Backspace (BKSP.org) It is a forum for writers who want to not only create meaningful fiction and non-fiction but who want to sell it. Backspace  holds bi-annual conferences in May and November. I attended my third last week and will, for the next several weeks, be trying to deal with the overwhelming amount of information dished out there.

Donald Maass presented a day-long workshop on the third day of the conference. Based on his incredibly successful textbook, "Writing the Breakout Novel," the workshop covered such important topics as adding dimensions to your protagonist, exceeding their personal boundaries to create larger than life moments and going through the same process with your antagonist. To say this workshop was huge is like saying the Brooklyn Bridge is a way to cross the East River.

Of course it is possible to read Maass's textbook or the workbook based on it or his latest work, THE FIRE IN FICTION. But hearing him speak on these topics, enjoying his wit and asking him pertinent questions while an issue is fresh in your mind adds so much more to the learning arc. And that doesn't even touch on the breaks where I was able to share my awe with fellow writers--not feel like I am the only one in the world who has miles to go.

 I certainly would never pretend to be qualified to advise writers on ways to improve their craft. However, I would hope some of the insights I took away from this conference might prove interesting to other fledgling writers. So, from time to time, I will post some of these insights here in no particular order.

Today I will finish with what I learned from Donald Maass about creating sympathetic characters. As we all have been told, readers do not spend much time with characters they do not like. In fact, more often than not, readers flat out abandon stories with despicable protagonists. This isn't to say all characters have to be like Mary Poppins. In fact, the most memorable protagonist of all--Scarlet O'Hara, was far from perfect. But she was both admirable and human. That, Maass says, is critical. Like all of us she had a bad side but she also had a good side. She was determined, strong and one of the first feminists. She was shrewd. She was everything we often admire in a man...but she was a beautiful, raven-haired female. In fact it is the tension created between the good and the bad in a character that makes her most appealing. That makes for a page-turner. Long after a novel is finished and returned to its shelf, the reader will remember the conflicts of a well-crafted character and that is what every writer wants. Right?

Harding's Tinkers and My Mortality

I cannot imagine anything more unsettling than contemplating that day when I will no longer be a physical part of this world. Worse than that, though, has to be George Washington Crosby’s plight in Paul Harding’s novel, Tinkers. It opens with him in his living room on a rented hospital bed, eight days away from death. And yet both George, and his poet father Howard, has given me reason and strength to open and re-read the pages of my own mortality.

George is desperate to “look at his life, to take the stock he always imagined a man would at his end”. He has always been a responsible, analytical and organized man. Sadly, not only is he helpless to control the order of his memories but all of them have shifted in so many different ways that what he sees is a “different self every time he tried to make an assessment.”  And since control and precision were huge priorities for George the novel opens with him hallucinating about a “torrent of (window) panes (that) would drive everyone from the room…(leaving him) marooned on his bed in a moat of shattered glass.”              

Safe, yes, but also alone.

I would guess that those last hours of life are unsettling for as many reasons as there are persons experiencing them. I think of the differences between a priest, a burglar, a mother and a child. Their thoughts on their deathbeds, if they recognize them as such, have to be vastly different. But certainly our need to comprehend what happens next is a universal concern. Does death mean we have forever lost our connections to the only life we’ve ever known? The people we love? Do we merely become “a ghost, almost made of nothing”? Or, is there a way …a promise, a hope…that we will still remain connected but perhaps not in a way we recognize?

For Kathleen, George’s mother, the “nearly martial ordering of her household is, in fact, the love she is so terrified that she does not have.” Likewise for George, a builder of solid homes and a repairer of fine clocks, abandoning his family in death--exposing them to the whims of nature and “intrepid squirrels”  just as his father and grandfather had abandoned their families--is tantamount to forsaking their love. It is a loss that both George and his quixotic father, Howard, dread.  And it is their coping with that dread, trying to make sense of its pain that not only permeates this beautiful story but also draws me to want to read it over and over.

My own father, an alcoholic, left my mother, my siblings and me when I was the same age as George. He did not leave us physically but like Howard, “The world fell away from my father the way he fell away from us. We became his dream.”  It is heart wrenching to read how George and Howard deal with their loss but, at the same time, it is comforting. It connects me to them.

Throughout his work, Harding juxtaposes dreams and reality and light and shadows in ways that create tension to the point of frustration. I found the tension not only within the story but also within myself as I read. Harding very effectively nurtures this with his narrative mode. I might say it is simply stream of consciousness except that that implies a narration of primarily the characters’ interior monologues. Harding goes several steps further by throwing in a dizzying combination of dream sequences, epileptic seizures and lyrical soliloquies like a Summer evening of fireworks that are both stunning and enlightening but, at the same time, awesome in their frightful power. This tension pitted my chances of understanding Harding at the same desperate level as the characters’ attempts to make sense of their lives. I felt their pain because Harding nearly drowns us with it-- like the silt and water of Tagg Pond that encompasses Howard as he sits in it for a day and a night while searching for his father and for himself. By the end of the novel I, like George and Howard, craved a resolution that gives us all a sense of being re-connected with those we lost and those we love.

There are other juxtapositions throughout the story. There is Howard who basks in the unpredictable but beautiful wonders of nature and its demand that we endure its hardships. “…winter already sealing the country people in behind him.”  In contrast there is George, who venerates the precise and predictable mechanical world of clocks despite their demands that we maintain them and live within the boundaries of their minutes. “Eighty four hours before he died.” 

Howard received his poetic leanings from his minister father whereas George’s tendencies reflect his mother’s “stern manner and humorless regime.”  I loved them both because Harding makes them real--vulnerable yet capable of tremendous love. As I read, more than anything, I cheered for them. I waited for them to connect once more with each other, probably because I never really connected with my own father.

In the end both George who is “lamenting the loss of this world of light and hope” (23) and Howard whose “despair came from the fact that his wife saw him as a fool, as a useless tinker” (125) do find each other and this gives comfort to their final hours. Howard sees his shadow separate from himself and “his shadow dreamed just as he did for the reason that he could imagine himself to be a shadow of something--someone--else.”  I believe that someone is George, the son for whom Howard longed.            

As George’s last breaths escape, his face becomes almost like a clock, a sundial, and the shadows of time passing across it… (his body) “merely maintaining a pantomime of human life.” The real George, the ‘it’ which I took to also be his ‘shadow’, his soul, is plumbing “depths far, far from that living room”  and far from his family’s “own, human terrors about their own wases to the it, which is so nearly was that it will not or simply cannot any longer accept their human grief.”  He connects with his family and his ancestors on a level wholly different than a tinker might.

What happens is that George senses “finally, the foolishness of attributing the unknown to secret cabals”  He accepts that “Everything was almost always obscure”…that understanding shines “for no discernable reason.” For him it was okay, upon death, to lie down and get picked over and be “used to fix broken clocks,” to become a part of the solution. “This is how, finally, we were joined.”

Because, in the end, Tinkers is not just about finding fathers or about trying to understand either their precise, organized natures or their poetic ones. It is not about trying to accommodate the natural world to the mechanical one. It is not about trying to justify the forces that bring progress or those that hinder it. In the end, what Harding’s Tinkers is about individuals finding their connections with all those other worlds and, finally, with the ones they love.

I am not alone, I am certain, in wanting my family, my peers and, yes, even my ancestors, to appreciate me. It is important--it is the nature of being human.  Like Howard and George, I’d like to die knowing that the reflection of my life, my shadow, lives on after me and attaches itself to my loved ones so that as this process of shadows coming and going, extends itself through generations and “this alternating, interdependent series of lives (forms) a sort of intaglio” that lives on well after me.

It is uncanny how much Howard is like my father. He liked to tinker in his workshop, he was a salesman, he was a father and he was a poet. I often thought he would have been happier without the burden of his family. Unlike Howard and like George, my father stuck it out--but only in a physical sense. His sense of responsibility won out but it also frustrated him. There has always been a part of me that would like him to come back to this world, to re-connect with me on a spiritual level. To assure me that, with his drinking, he left my family not because of it, but because of him. Having read Tinkers, I am comforted to know his shadow already has.

Time To Get Back

It has been raining for about seven hours--pouring really. Good day for writing except that this kind of weather definitely puts a different light on what ends up on the page--more like layers of shadow. Last night when I was unable to sleep I told myself I have to look for the positives. Not just the ones in the rain but in everything that is contributing to my unsettled mood.

So here goes:

**Rain is challenging when you have seven puppies to potty outdoors but it is good for the earth, the gardens and the rivers.

**Take pleasure in a clean floor instead of dreading how dirty it is and hard it will be to clean it.

**Focus on how far I've come in my writing instead of how far I have to go to come up with something decent.

**Remember that your true friends will take you for face value, not for an increase in their investment. If I return the favor to them what more is needed?

**It hurts to consider that my mother likely didn't care for me. I was in good company, she didn't like herself much either.

I'm reading a good book, Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout. 

Olive is not very likeable. She is not handsome, is large, is 

opinionated and is domineering. A seventh grade math teacher, 

she moves about a small Maine town with authority and aplomb.

I had a nun in high school like that. Sister Veronita. She taught 'Current Events' and warned us all that the Middle East would be the end of us all. Almost every student in the school disliked her (my mother said never to use the word 'hate.' I liked her ...she was not afraid of anyone or what they thought. Sr. Veronita was, in 1967, one of the original feminists. Difficult for a nun, especially.

I like Olive and what she tells Julie towards the end of the book. "Go for what you hunger." (I'm paraphrasing, but it is close.) Julie does and it changes her life--or so we are led to believe.
I have a friend critiquing my current novel as I write it. I am doing the same for hers. One of the thinks she keeps saying is that she doesn't like my main character.

I think that might be a problem, unless I can make her more like Olive.

Monday Musings--Designer Gowns and Journalists

Two good things in the NYT today. Both are upstarts that have thumbed their noses at this economy. The first that caught my eye is a company that is Netflixing (is that a word?) designer gowns. Called 'Rent the Runway', it intrigued me because, first of all, I am inherently frugal (some would call it cheap) and, second of all, because I've always been a tad envious of women who can carry off wearing one--both the expense and the savvy of it. The rental prices range from $50 to $200 plus $5 for insurance. With the holidays coming into view, I just might try this. Maybe once I wore a designer gown to a party that would be enough--I would be disappointed enough in the results that I would shift my envy (seems like the grass is always greener somewhere). I guess my only concern is whether the thing ( you have 4 days to keep it) fits.

So the second upstart is in Texas--called the Texas Tribune. It is an online news organization that has set its sights on monitoring news and policy coming from Austin. The non-profit (what news organization makes one anymore?) has already won financial support to the tune of 3.7 million dollars and is well on its way to making a fresh sustainable mark in the decimated world of journalism.

“I began to see journalism as a public good, like national defense or clean air,” said John Thornton, an Austin venture capitalist who has invested $1 million of the $3.7 already put up for the project. The theory is to pay good journalists well for serving their readers with healthy, clean portions of news.

Not too shabby.

Inspiration or Discipline?

Is inspiration or discipline more important in creating art?

This is an ongoing discussion in two of the online writing/reading groups I've joined--Backspace and Goodreads.

In my first life, as mother to three daughters and florist for 34 years, I followed the discipline road and reached some level of success despite frequently being singed by both ends of the candle. I hadn't placed much emphasis on inspiration mainly because I didn't have the confidence that it would take me anywhere. Don't get me wrong, I placed an extremely high value on inspiration and the art it nourishes. I just didn't believe I had any seeds to begin with. And I was extremely frustrated.

Then about six years before I retired I gathered the courage to create inspired floral creations rather than pump out cookie cutter FTD designs. I had admired for over a quarter century designs by florists all over the world but never thought myself capable of attaining that level.

I guess I liken this to the difference between works by Stephanie Meyer or Nora Roberts and those by Jayne Anne Phillips or Andre Dubus III. All certainly very worthwhile reads but I have to think the two former authors are more focused on discipline and are probably more commercially successful whereas the two latter focus on inspiration (no doubt combined with discipline) and are more artistically successful.

I will grant that floral designs are in a different world than fiction. But I learned something during those last six years--I learned that if I had the courage to allow inspiration a seat on my wagon I could, indeed, create more artistically successful designs. I had the seeds all along! What a surprise when that art was validated by my clients who then inspired me to reach even higher.

So now here I am holding both ends of a new candle--the 'chronological one' that says I should retire, not rewire. The other--the one desperate to create. Does that mean I discipline my self to crank out fifty novels between now and the end of the rainbow (even assuming I find an audience!) or do I discipline myself to sit down every morning and listen to my muses and follow their inspiration?

Yep, you guessed it.

I'm an old friend to discipline--a newer one to inspiration. Who knows--maybe the three of us will be surprised with an audience. If not I have these two friends who've helped me enjoy the process of trying.

GRACE NOTES Moves Forward

I am excited to report that I have reached a milestone of sorts with my first novel which I am entitling GRACE NOTES. After twelve drafts, I think it is decent enough to push it under the doors of some of my friends for critique. Meanwhile, I will work on my query letter to entice agents near and far to fight over representing it. This is what I have plan to send to them:

Dear Ms. Smith,

In reading your blog I see that you represent authors of works similar to my literary novel, Grace Notes. In it Billy Mann, despite a moonstruck mother and alcoholic father, is an attentive big brother, popular athlete and talented musician. He is also the heartthrob of his pretty next-door neighbor, Evvie.

When driving home in a snowstorm Billy’s car strikes and kills her little sister. His life goes into a skid that doesn’t stop until he’s lost everything--his promising band, his nurturing mother, his friends and Evvie, who’d become his bride.

Billy replaces them with drugs, crime and an eight-year prison term. Evvie’s decision to leave breaks her heart as much as his; but she is pregnant and fears that life with him mirrors the same abusive path that destroyed her childhood.

After thirty years, Billy discovers his daughter, a classical violinist, who teaches him what his mother could never convey. It isn’t drugs or a stage that will give him the strength to win back everyone he’d catapulted from his life--it is the huge heart he’s always had.

Grace Notes is set in Detroit where a dying auto heritage is shadowed by endless turbulence but also great music. It tells of heart-wrenching trials like those endured by Jodi Piccoult’s childhood sweethearts in The Pact. My theme of music as healing force takes its inspiration from Andre Dubus III’s Bluesman. And themes of undying love and forgiveness echo Kristin Hannah’s True Colors.

I have been an independent bookstore owner, reported for my university newspaper and edited a Detroit weekly. I have been published in Women’s Day and other national magazines.

At 106,000 words, Grace Notes is complete. I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Jacqueline Carney

Monday Musings--David Morrell

More Than Rambo's Father




For those of you who read thrillers and suspense fiction David Morrell's name is a household word. If you do not read thrillers and suspense you will surely recognize what he calls himself --'Rambo's father.'

But he is so much more than that.

David received the prestigious Bob Kellogg Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Internet Writing Community at Backspace's annual conference in New York city a week ago. As a member of Backspace I attended for my second time and was one of the lucky ones in the audience both for David's acceptance speech and his keynote address the following afternoon.

Among his many titles are the aforementioned Rambo story, FIRST BLOOD, BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE and more recently SCAVENGER and soon to be released SHIMMER. The last two are biotech thrillers. Haven't read SCAVENGER yet but my girlfriend who has read all his novels said it is really creeeeepy.

What David Morrell should have said is that he is the 'father' of all contemporary writers.

I am an avid reader and an occassional reader of thrillers. I love Marcus Sakey's books...as much because he is an awesome writer as because he is a dear friend of my daughter, Jennifer. I also enjoy Sean Chercover and have hosted an authors' party for both these men. I enjoy Karen Dionne, who writes environmental thrillers and have hosted her at my local Rotary Club. I also enjoyed books by Elmore Leonard, who lives nearby, as well as his son, Peter's, book, QUIVER.
Peter has a new one, TRUST ME, that I can't wait to read.

I hate to admit I had never picked up any of David Morrell's books but I bought three at the conference, have read two and loved them both. His characters are complex, his pacing is awesome and his plots are both exciting and believable. And I love his voice...like it's Halloween and you're sitting on his lap and he's telling you this scary story. I love this guy!

David shared his life story with us and it isn't pretty. It is a story he often shares so I won't repeat it all except to say that the man he is today is proof of his tenacity, internal strength and compassion. Born in Ontario Canada his father died in World War I before David was born. When he was three his mother drove him in a borrowed car to an orphanage in the country, dropped him off at the playground to join the other children, turned around and left. She did return for him after marrying a man who hated children and was abusive to both David and his mother. He attended school in Canada up until his PhD which he received at Penn State University and has lived in the USA ever since.

David has an obvious love for writing and for writers, and more than that he cares about both--so much so that he spends a large portion of his time helping young sprouts like me stay focused and inspired.

I'd like to summarize some of the inspiration he imparted at his Backspace Keynote Address.

First you have to love writing because if you are in it for the fame or the money you will likely be disappointed. He told about the disparaging comments one of his early mentor made about David's early stories.

Second you have to read a lot and write a lot because that is the only way you will improve.

Third (and this was the one that struck me hardest) you have to find your voice. Where? It's hiding out with your demons in the unpleasant basement of your subconscious. David suggested we explore our deepest emotions and then listen to our daydreams. Listen to the good ones but, more importantly, listen to the ugly ones; and never, ever, stop them until they have played out to the end.

More than one author has suggested that an unahppy childhood makes for a writer's gold and this is what they meant. And if you say your childhood was perfect so you have no inspiration--most likely you are lying!

Finally David said to keep your integrity and write the book you are intended to write. Write for the moment you are in. Don't let the market, or what others say is the market, influence you. All of that is, after all, out of your control.

Thank you David Morrell for your inspiring words and support.

Buy Books this Holiday...From an Independant

Looking for a holiday gift idea that keeps on giving and has a reasonable price tag?

How about a book?

If you are looking for some great book suggestions link on to the blog, http://buymorebooks.blogspot.com/.
Many of the members of Backspace, an interactive website for writers, publishers and agents, are making their recommendations, including some of my own.

Then seriously consider supporting the independant book dealer. We are all hurting this season, but they are all running the risk of losing their businesses entirely and they are just folk like the rest of us.

Then, when you buy any books for the holidays, enter the titles you purchased under the comment section to help us reach our goal of 1 million books!

Green Hydrangea

I know when my Annabelle hydrangea turn from their cloud white to an uplifting shade of spring green that Fall is just around the corner. A cruel trick on their part. My heart sinks with dread as I realize daylight will be scant, sunshine rare and temperatures crisp. I don't mind the cooler temperature but I thrive on sun. Come mid-December my body will crave its warmth, my mind will seek inspiration in other places. Music, good books and my writing will provide sustinance for my soul.

It is a good thing, Fall. I keep telling myself that my schedules relaxes, gardens renew and thoughts turn inward. Fall is the perfect time to fire up those creative embers and get things cooking. What's not to welcome! Thank goodness for the season's songs of color that celebrate Summer's last chance to inspire.

The fourth draft of my novel is almost complete. By the end of October I hope to let it rest so that when I pick it up again in December I will have a fresh perspective with which to give it a polished finish. Exciting really!

I just finished a post that British author Eliza Graham wrote in 'Debutante Ball' where she says the turning point in a novel is "when the progatonists realize they can never, ever return to being the person they were at the start of their story." Something in that rang true with me.
Of course, every day we are a different person and therefore can't return to who we were the day before. And once Summer has passed it is fruitless to mourn for it.

So, Fall, I am here for you as I know you are here for me. I'll pick those spring green hydrangea before they brown, vase them on my writing desk and we'll both make the best of it.

Yin and Yang

I am beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel on my novel. I am working on the fourth draft and while I have said this several times in the past six months, this time I mean it. It needs a few more revisions but I can finally get my arms around its generous girth.

I think I will plough through the next thirteen chapters to the end then give it a rest. November is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth (NaNoWriMo) so I might use the time to attempt to write a short novel. An admirable goal and worthy experiment.

Maybe I'll write about the Yin and Yang of puppies.


Speaking of which, here is a photo of Yin and Yang puppies at six days old.
I wonder if this is how they were in Emily's womb. I watched these two for over ten minutes and while they both shuffled and squirmed they stayed together in a mutual hug apparently for warmth as well as comfort. Beautiful.