notes on finishing Aristotle

I've just finished keying notes from Aristotle's Poetics. This short work is still probably the best overall guide to writing dramatic works, whether as prose or as script. Aristotle focuses on storytelling, which he sees as the core of the poetic art. Art, to him, means "imitation": when we see art we must be reminded of life in some way. In Shakespeare's terms, it is the mirror held up to nature.

For Aristotle, the highest form of poetry was tragedy: serious poetry intended to be acted out on stage. In order to gain the fullest audience involvement, the characters need to be "better" than we are, at least in certain respects. Why? Because the key emotions of tragedy, according to Aristotle, are pity and terror. It is to experience these vicariously that an audience watches tragedy, and they are evoked by seeing superior people undergoing misfortune. When a good person suffers, we feel pity; whereas when a bad person suffers, we feel satisfaction.

It felt a bit strange to read these things, put so bluntly by the great philosopher, and yet he hit the nail on the head. We see it all the time in movies: the bad guy does mean things, and gets his just deserts in the end. The good guy, or girl, braver and more noble than we are, suffers, and we feel pained about that. It's politically incorrect to rate people on a quality scale, and yet that is what popular art does all the time as a matter of course. (For the record: I'm no friend of political correctness--quite the reverse.)

According to Aristotle, comedies are stories about people who are worse than we are. And this is true also: think of the TV sitcom, the staple story of which is about the flaw of one of its characters. Out of jealousy, social climbing, greed, lust, or other motives, a character does ridiculous things, and we laugh. "Ha ha, what a schmuck." The typical sitcom episode ends with the character being chastened, and apologizing for his behavior: all is restored to equilibrium until the next episode.

It gets me wondering though about more modern dramas, that depict gangsters and low-lifes (say) in heroic dramatic roles. Usually gangster heroes (such as those played by, say, James Cagney) were seen as popular heroes by many--admirable rebels against corrupt or unjust government forces. Or some, such as Vito Corleone in The Godfather, are relatively good: he may be a greedy, violent, vengeful, ignorant criminal, but he has principles or a code of honor that his foes lack. He's better than they are.

But then we get to the "grunge" phenomenon of the 1990s: movies like Pulp Fiction and Trainspotting, populated almost exclusively by the dregs of society: criminal lumpenproletarians who lack redeeming qualities. Both movies were more or less comedic in tone, at least in many places, and so were perhaps conforming to Aristotle's scheme in that way. But I found most of the characters in both those movies revolting, and I cared less about what happened to them than about whether I was about to be subjected to yet more disgusting scenes. I wouldn't want to see either movie again, although I thought there was much cleverness and ingenuity in Pulp Fiction.

But in general I regard shows like that as a measure of the aberrant times we're in. I think about George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, how people in that future dystopia attend movies to watch the women and children of their "enemies" being killed, and laugh at them. In many ways, we're there now.

Still, I'll rely on Aristotle. All spiritual training involves the cultivation of virtue--and not just the relative "virtue" of being less cowardly or brutal than one's enemies. The challenge of being human remains the same. And as Gandhi recommended that one should be the change one wants to see in the world, so I think I should create the stories I want to read.

So that's what I'm doing.

creating by association

Yesterday was what I would call a good writing day. I focused and kept at it for, well, a certain length of time. I worked in my Notes document, following the heuristic approach of asking myself questions and then attempting to answer them.

One thought leads to another. The interesting thing about this is that, remarkably quickly, you move from the self-evident to the unexpected--or anyway to the not-so-obvious. One fact leads to another, in a chain of connection. And those other facts can be charged with new significance.

Harold Bloom makes the point that a large part of Shakespeare's genius was that he used soliloquies to show how a character comes to new realizations by hearing himself put something into words. While this isn't exactly what Bloom meant, I think about Hamlet's famous line, "To sleep, perchance to dream...", in which, in using the metaphor of sleep to describe death (his own contemplated suicide), he is led on to the connected idea of dream--that consciousness lives on even when the body is "dead".

Every idea, every concept has associations. I think that creativity lies exactly in following promising trains of association. The associations available to you for any given concept depend on your education. Not just your formal education, but your total experience of and learning in life. If you're not very educated, and if your mind tends toward the routine and prosaic, you won't be capable of coming up with creative ideas.

For example, take the idea of a banker. If you don't know much about bankers, don't know any of them personally, for example, and haven't learned anything about banking beyond your own consumer experiences, you won't be able to come up with many interesting associations. If you're trying to create a banker character, you will be limited to cliche notions, such as that bankers like money, enjoy power and prestige, and so on. Your banker won't be much more than the pinstriped mascot of the Monopoly board-game.

Linda Seger, in her excellent book Creating Unforgettable Characters, talks about using this process to sketch in the traits of a potential character. As an illustration, she suggests that you're creating a character for the next Indiana Jones movie--say a professor of religion. She then steps through a process of association to discover more about this character:

If this religion professor has a Ph.D., we would expect that he has done a great deal of research and can easily ferret out all types of obscure information in libraries or bookstores. It would be consistent for him to be interested in related areas, such as philosophy, church history, sociology, anthropology.

Many religion professors...have had liberal-arts backgrounds.... It wouldn't be inconsistent for a professor to love literature or music or art or architecture--or to be knowledgeable about these areas. This interest in archaeology and early church history could lead to a love of travel. Perhaps he might have done some archaeological research in Turkey, or Israel, or Egypt. It wouldn't be unusual for him to know several languages, perhaps Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.

Notice how one set of characteristics implies other character qualities. A person who is sophisticated enough to know the music of Mendelssohn may also know the painting of Vermeer and Rembrandt. A person who grew up on a farm probably knows something about repairing tractors and cars, and about how to read weather patterns.

Linda Seger's professor of religion already starts to sound like a person, just by going through likely associations. (There's more to do, of course, to create an actual character.) If you were writing a story, any one of those connected traits might be a doorway to somewhere useful. If the character speaks Hebrew, maybe he's Jewish, and you have another field of associations. Or if he loves travel, maybe he flies his own plane--and voila, another set of possibilities. You move steadily in the direction of a more definite, unique individual--a character.

The connections are logical and probable, but not necessary: you choose the ones you want. The choices are guided by your intuition and the needs of your story.

It's work. It requires actual thinking: actively imagining things and working through the connections. It's rather like cooking: the creator works hard so that the consumer can have a relatively fast, pleasant experience.

Creating story events is similar. You imagine something happening, and then imagine how characters respond. If you're not sure, then you need to work more on the characters. Work, work, work.

That's what I did yesterday, and I inched forward once again.

the gestating virgin

Yesterday I finally had time to take up cudgels again for writing my book. It was one of my least-favorite kinds of writing sessions: one in which I struggle to recollect the threads of what I'm working on. Eventually I realized that, after my break of several days, I just could not remember what my thoughts and intentions were with respect to my current chapter (30). Nothing for it but to go back and read the (highlighted portions of) my Word notes.

The notes document for chapter 30 now runs to 35 pages. When chapter notes get long like this, I become anxious. Admittedly, the first 13 pages of notes are mostly extracts from research texts. That still means over 20 pages of actual cogitation-and-creation notes.

Mind you, the overall quality of these notes is high (take my word for it). In my effort to understand what drives my characters, I must dig. And dig, and dig.

"Oh, pshaw!" you might say. "A character's motivation is just whatever you make it. Decide on one, and go! Don't talk in that quaint way about 'discovering' the motives of a character, as though he were a real person. You've said yourself that characters aren't real people."

Yes, true. I've been skeptical of this kind of talk from writers, which is finally a form of pathetic fallacy, I think. I remember reading a nonfiction work by the novelist John Fowles, in which he described working on The French Lieutenant's Woman. He said that when he was writing a scene for his character Charles, he had the strong feeling that Charles wanted to diverge from his path and go down to knock on the cottage door of the heroine. Fowles declared that it was a real, definite feeling of intent coming from the character--that was how he experienced it.

Yeah, right, I thought.

I was already a writer myself by then, and not had any such experience--at least, nothing so definite. Of course, I never had a very clear idea of what the hell I was doing in any case. But my suspicions about this Frankensteinian moment of the composite character suddenly rising from the laboratory bench are backed up by Robert McKee in his Story:

Research from memory, imagination, and fact is often followed by a phenomenon that authors love to describe in mystical terms: Characters suddenly spring to life and of their own free will make choices and take actions that create Turning Points that twist, build, and turn again until the writer can hardly type fast enough to keep up with the outpourings.

This "virgin birth" is a charming self-deception writers love to indulge in, but the sudden impression that the story is writing itself simply marks the moment when a writer's knowledge of the subject has reached the saturation point. The writer becomes the god of his little universe and is amazed by what seems to be spontaneous creation, but is in fact the reward for hard work.

To discover what drives a character, you need to know his world, for that is what he is responding to. It's an ecological task: to understand how the animal functions within its environment, for the two go together. The cheetah is an animal of the African savanna; it can't function in the Arctic or in the Arabian desert. It is what it is, and behaves as it behaves, because of the environment in which it exists.

Finding this level of authority for a remote historical period is, of course, difficult. But I find, as I keep at it, that insights do come. Gradually, gradually, my main characters start emerging from the fog of potentiality into the clear outline of specificness. As I learn--or decide--something definite about my world, my characters acquire something toward which they can have an attitude, and thus define themselves.

In fairness to myself, I've made a lot of progress in the last month in understanding more about my world. While the historian and the archaeologist have to refrain from making positive statements beyond what the evidence permits, and so leave their picture of the world frustratingly vague, the storyteller must commit. Nothing can be a maybe; the finished picture will be the result of countless definite choices.

My finished world will be in high-definition, and so will my characters. And look how long it took us to get high-definition TV.

character, cont.

Back to regular life: rain plops from the gray sky outside; and upstairs Kimmie prepares to return to Mother Corporation, as a late colleague of our old training class used to call it.

I was talking yesterday about working on character. I didn't feel that I got to the heart of what I wanted to say--maybe because I don't know what I want to say.
Here is an extract of my highlighted notes from Malcolm Heath's introduction to Aristotle's Poetics (compressed):

Tragedy is an imitation of a certain kind of action. So one constituent part of tragedy is plot, the ordered sequence of events which make up the action being imitated. An action is performed by agents, and agents necessarily have moral and intellectual characteristics, expressed in what they do and say. From this we can deduce that character and reasoning will also be constituent parts of tragedy. Imagine that you have left me alone with your silver spoons. Broadly, there are two factors that will determine whether or not I steal them. One is whether I am honest; this is the kind of thing which Aristotle means by character--an agent’s settled moral disposition. The other relevant factor is how I interpret the situation: do I think that I am likely to avoid suspicion if I take the spoons? This is what Aristotle means by reasoning. Thus character sets my agenda (what would I like to do?), and reasoning relates that agenda to a given situation (what is it feasible to do in these circumstances?).

What he says about tragedy applies to other dramatic forms as well. The actions taken by characters, which constitute the sequence of events we call the plot, arise because of two things: the agent's "settled moral disposition" (character) and the agent's "reasoning".

The question of character (settled moral disposition) is interesting because, as we know, this may not be quite so settled. I'm inclined to use the word values to name this aspect. Each of us holds a number of values, and these can change with circumstance, and also over time. At work I might generally value efficiency, and behave accordingly, but on one project I might have political reasons for dragging my feet--a different value has supervened, at least apparently.

Closely related to our values are our beliefs--what we think is true. These seem to underlie, or perhaps simply provide the rational justification for, our values. If I value efficiency, why do I value it, at least in this one context? Why do I care? There must be some reason, whether I'm conscious of it or not. If you really examine this, it can be quite elusive.

In a work context, efficiency might seem an obvious value. The work exists to achieve some result; accomplishing that result in the shortest time, with a minimum of wasted resources, is clearly a higher-quality approach. And maybe in the case of a task that I have chosen all on my own, freely and willingly, and which I am performing myself, no further explanation need be sought. Efficiency then just means that I achieve my freely chosen aims as quickly and easily as possible.

But suppose I'm an employee. The work is not really chosen by me, but is something I've been hired to do by someone else. Now if I hold (or exhibit) the value of efficiency it has a slightly different meaning. Is it because I value the task as much as my employer does, and therefore completely identify with his values in this respect? Or is it maybe that I wish to get ahead, and therefore want to make a good impression? Or do I have a more abstract and philosophical belief that "whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do with thy might"--that any job worth doing is worth doing well? Or do I feel a sense of competitiveness with my coworkers, and want to beat them in a race to get things done? Or maybe I've made a promise to achieve something by a certain time, and feel that my word is my bond.

Now the beliefs underpinning my value of efficiency are less clear--maybe even to myself. To become conscious of them would be an act of self-knowledge.

I find that coming to this type of knowledge is as difficult with created characters as it is with oneself. There's an arbitrary aspect, in that a character's values and beliefs are just whatever I decide them to be. But that's not the whole story, because not all values and beliefs are equally interesting to me, or equally relevant to the story.

This seems to be a crux. For the story as a whole--any story--has a meaning, and many subordinate meanings. Only certain values and beliefs will show those meanings in the strongest light. But not even the writer can know what a story's meaning finally is until the work is done, and therefore it's not clear what values and beliefs the characters truly hold until the work is done. Until then it's all a kind of chess game: any given move may be simple, but its underlying rationale may be deep, subtle, and even mysterious.

digging for character

Well. I've been away from the blog for about a week now, mainly because Kimmie has taken the week off, so it's vacation-time and we're not using the alarm clock. That means later sleeping and a more free-flowing lifestyle. We both really like it.

Also, I have been working on my book, and the time not spent drafting blog-posts I have actually poured into real writing (or, in my case, preparation for writing). So that's all to the good.

But I don't want to drift too far away. I feel a slight twinge when I check StatCounter and see that regulars have visited the blog, only to find the same old post staring at them. So I thought I'd get on the case first thing today. It's the last day of Kimmie's vacation in any case; tomorrow she'll be back at the corporate rockpile.

Where am I. I'm on chapter 30, still doing preparatory notes. The toughest job I face is trying to understand my own characters. I started the whole project thinking I had a rough idea of who they were and what they were up to, but that sense kind of disappeared somewhere along the line. Now, finally, I have come to see that the discovery of what my characters really want, and why, is the major quest before me. I'm astonished at how difficult it is.

In this chapter, the point-of-view character is Menahem, the Babylonian-Jewish magician. Some time ago I decided what it is that Menahem wants to achieve, but now I need to know more--I need to know why he wants to achieve it. In quest of this knowledge I pore through my research notes, highlighting more, typing more. Why? I suppose because there is no direct way of accessing him as a person. Indeed, he is a historical character, but very little material exists that talks about him. He is essentially a fictional creation. As such, he's a blank. There's no way to learn more about him except by knowing his world better.

That might sound strange. As a fictional character, surely he is just simply whatever I want him to be. I don't need to "discover" him; I just need to "make him up". Make a couple of decisions, and get on with it. Why make things so complicated?

All I can say is, I've tried that. That's how I started out. I sketched a character, gave him an objective--something he wanted to achieve--and started writing. But a fuller character needs more. For one thing, a main character needs conflicts--not just conflicts with other characters, but internal conflicts. That means opposing tendencies within his own soul. What are these? And where did they come from?

In history, Menahem shows up in Josephus as the Essene who prophesies to the young Herod that he will be king of Judea one day. I've created Menahem as a character to whom the monarchy of Israel--the monarchy lost 500 years earlier in the confusion of events surrounding the return of the exiled Jews from Babylonia--is important: a personal mission. It's easy to believe that there can be such a character: they're all around us. Political junkies of one kind or another, ardently seeking to see their political vision realized, spending much or all of their time on the project.

But why? At bottom, why are people political junkies? What are they hoping to achieve, really? What's really driving them?

It would help to know what's driving oneself. If I want something, why do I want it? Why, really? In a certain sense, the more you want something, the bigger the mystery becomes. You think something is going to be satisfied, but what, exactly?

I'm working on this large and difficult book. Why? It represents a challenge of a certain kind. It calls on my abilities and powers, as well as on my curiosity and my impulse toward self-expression. Ego and pride are involved, as well as a readerlike curiosity to see how this story is going to work out. Will I actually be able to create a book that I would want to read?

In the end I might not have any better explanation than "it's in my nature". And maybe the same applies to my characters. I choose actions for them, and that is their character, full stop. But I still need to know their thoughts on the matter--what they think they're trying to do, and why they think they're trying to do it. Whatever they think, they're probably wrong in any case.

Warren told me that he was inspired by the work of an Amercian artist named Robert Henri, who painted in the early years of the 20th century. When I looked him up on the Web, I found this quote by Henri:

Most folks don't think what they think they think.

Yes. Now: how to write that?

humanizing the character

After yesterday's post examining my quickie rewrite of scene 1 of The Da Vinci Code, I was talking with my mother, who'd read the post, and she was expressing how the character of Robert Langdon needs to be developed more, made to seem more real. To her he doesn't feel like an academic who is passionate about his subject--as presumably he must be in order to have written several books on it, and to have become famously associated with it.

When he is awakened by the ringing phone, she thought, he might even be thinking or have been dreaming about some problem or subject related to his work. Sure, I thought--why not? As a student of symbolism, he might very well get an idea or inspiration from a dream (I thought about the famous story of how the 19th-century German chemist Kekule solved the problem of the structure of benzene by dreaming of a ring of dancing elves, or some such). If Langdon were to awake excited by an idea arising from a dream, he might be eagerly groping for his bedside notepad to scribble it down before he forgets it.

Notice what this would do for his characterization. First, it would show him to be passionate about his field--he's doing it even in his sleep. Second, the problem or image itself could eventually plug in to the mystery of the main plot. A nagging puzzle that he brings into the story could relate to the story puzzle, and get its kickoff here, right at the top. Third, the fact that he might jot down a dream-image before answering a ringing phone at night tells us something powerful about his values: it's a choice he makes, and the choices that characters make are exactly what tell us about their nature--what is interesting about them. This guy is a symbology nerd who puts symbolism ahead of ringing phones.

So that's a good idea. Mom went on to imagine some other possible details, such as whether Langdon might not have his own bathrobe from home instead of using the hotel's silk one. That might be her own preference if she were in the hotel, and giving the character similar preferences helps to humanize him and make him more self-assertive on his environment: he's not just a passive user of stuff provided by others, he brings his own choices along with him. A comfy old bathrobe would be a piece of home you could take with you, and the prof might lounge in it while working at his laptop in the hotel room. Such a Langdon is starting to feel more real to me.

These ideas are things to help with the characterization of Robert Langdon--crucial if he is to be an interesting and believable character. But characterization, defined as the details by which a character manifests him- or herself, is not the highest or first job of character design. What the main character should really have are contradictions in his nature that create conflicts for him. I haven't read the actual novel, but the level of writing suggests to me that Brown does not design his characters at that level of depth. A paradoxical Robert Langdon might be, for instance, an expert student of religious symbolism who was also a passionate atheist. Such a person makes us wonder what makes him tick; it suggests complexity and personal history. He might find himself getting, almost against his will, into heated arguments with clerics and believers, attacking their naive faith even as he knows more about it than they do.

That's just an off-the-cuff example. A well-designed story brings out the contradictions in a character, and leads him to tough choices that put his values to the test. A writer can't even begin the task without a lot of self-knowledge. You need to know what your own contradictions are to be able to get inside someone else and feel theirs.

So my own rewrite was more of a technical exercise; I did not set out to rewrite the book or recreate the character, only to render scene 1 in a way that did not violate my sense of the characters' personhood, if I can put it that way. At the very least I need to be able to sense that I'm reading about people, and not just looking at words printed on a page. The task of deep character means going up the levels of story, getting into it at the level of theme, and that means taking on more and more "story responsibility"--assuming the burden of knowing what the story is ultimately about, why it is worth telling, and how these particular characters are the best for telling it. It's a heavy burden.

Still, it might be tempting to try a rewrite based on that more fully characterized Langdon. On the other hand, aren't I supposed to be doing some writing of my own at some point?

scene 1, continued

A light drizzle falls outside; Kimmie's short Easter-time vacation is over, and she's soon to head back out the door to Mother Corporation. Time also for writers to pick up their tools dropped nine or ten days ago and resume work tunneling through the granite mountain of their project.

But I wanted to finish my thoughts on chapter 1, scene 1 of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. In my last post I looked at how I (not having read the whole novel) might approach the backstory to the scene. That job can be done only provisionally in one's first draft. You won't really know--or be able to know--what your story is truly about until you've finished a draft. Only then can you go into a scene with a knowledge of its real function in your story. Only then can you make sure it has the right things in it, and that the characters are loaded with the right motivations.

So with this work I'm strictly at a first-draft level; I don't yet know anything more about these characters than what I read in the first scene. My ideas and suggestions therefore rest only on that limited basis.

I'd like to look at the writing in a bit more detail. Here's the opening again:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

I've already commented on the opening sentence. Because of its softness, its low impact, and the fact that we don't yet know who Robert Langdon is, I might cut it. I have found that the quickest way to a stronger opening sentence is simply to delete it, and open with your second sentence. This is true not just of fiction, but of almost all works of writing. Often the first sentence is a kind of warmup; the second sentence starts getting to the point. Opening your work that way is much more vigorous. Try it.

Sentence 2: A telephone etc. It's a bit wordy, and also contains an awkward repetition of the word ring.

Sentence 3: He fumbled etc. It's okay: prosaic, purely expositional. One thought I have is that it's not self-evident that one would switch on a lamp in order to answer the phone in bed. Would I, especially if very tired and groggy, hoping to get back to sleep? I might, if I felt some disorientation and anxiety about being in an unfamiliar bed--or plain old fear of the dark.

Sentence 4: Squinting at etc. Hm. I suspect we don't need the word plush, since any "Renaissance" bedroom with a telephone in it is not likely to be a flophouse. We already know it's a bedroom, so that word is not strictly required either. I don't know what Louis XVI furniture looks like--but that's okay. To me it suggests "old, French, and expensive", which fits the bill. Again, "hand-frescoed walls" is redundant, since fresco is the art of painting on wet plaster, and as far as I know there is no machine process for this. As for the colossal mahogany bed, that's certainly expensive-sounding, but I feel a vague doubt that mahogany is Louis XVI, since mahogany is a tropical wood. It might be genuine (colonial forests), or possibly someone made a Louis XVI-style bed out of mahogany, although that seems unlikely: why make expensive period furniture out of nonperiod materials? What would they say on The Antiques Road Show? If the author has seen a Louis XVI mahogany bed, then no problem. Or if the hotel were in Las Vegas instead of Paris, then I would not expect them to care about the authenticity of the furniture. But if I were writing it, I'd play it safe with a European hardwood.

Sentence 5: Where the hell etc. This feels a bit out of sequence for a guy who has already turned on the bedside lamp and looked around. He found the lamp, which must be of different type and location from the one at home. If it were me, I would have thought this before I groped for the lamp. To have such a sustained experience of not knowing where you are is uncanny-feeling and anxiety-provoking. We should see this in the character.

Sentence 6: The jacquard bathrobe etc. It's the bathrobe that answers Langdon's question about where he is. This also feels late. The French Renaissance bedroom is a tipoff he's not in Kansas anymore. Possibly he travels so much, and stays in so many hotels, that he can't bring the name of this one to mind without help. But I suspect that the writer has used this detail as a mere expositional device, to tell the reader where Langdon is. This is bad: the writer has sacrificed character authenticity for a minor bit of exposition. In reality I think Langdon would recall exactly where he is when he switches on the lamp. If he doesn't know at that point, he's in a dissociative state. Sure, he might be a sleepyhead, a non-"morning person" who can't get it together so quickly upon being wakened, but then I think the writing should lead us to that conclusion more definitely. The narrator implies that Langdon is lucid enough to note the Renaissance style of the room, the mahogany of the bed, the jacquard of the bathrobe, while still not knowing where the hell he is. For me it just doesn't add up. I see "expositional device", and that would be enough, probably, to put me as a reader off the whole book. This writer does not see his character as a person--so why should I?

Well then, there's some more detailed criticism of scene 1. Next time, perhaps, Vitols the writer will turn his own hand to rewriting the opening of one of the best-selling novels of all time...

Da Vinci, scene 1

Let's dig deeper into chapter 1, scene 1, of Dan Brown's mighty bestseller, The Da Vinci Code (I picked up Mom's discarded copy at her house yesterday).

In my last post I looked at the first sentence:

Robert Langdon awoke slowly.

Now let's read on from there:

A telephone was ringing in the darkness--a tinny, unfamiliar ring. He fumbled for the bedside lamp and turned it on. Squinting at his surroundings he saw a plush Renaissance bedroom with Louis XVI furniture, hand-frescoed walls, and a colossal mahogany four-poster bed.

Where the hell am I?

The jacquard bathrobe hanging on his bedpost bore the monogram: HOTEL RITZ PARIS.

Slowly, the fog began to lift.

Langdon picked up the receiver. "Hello?"

"Monsieur Langdon?" a man's voice said. "I hope I have not awoken you?"

Dazed, Langdon looked at the bedside clock. It was 12:32 A.M. He had been asleep only an hour, but he felt like the dead.

"This is the concierge, monsieur. I apologize for this intrusion, but you have a visitor. He insists it is urgent."

Langdon still felt fuzzy. A visitor? His eyes focused now on a crumpled flyer on his bedside table.

THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY OF PARIS
proudly presents
an evening with Robert Langdon
Professor of Religious Symbology,
Harvard University

Langdon groaned. Tonight's lecture--a slide show about pagan symbolism hidden in the stones of Chartres Cathedral--had probably ruffled some conservative feathers in the audience. Most likely, some religious scholar had trailed him home to pick a fight.

"I'm sorry," Langdon said, "but I'm very tired and--"

"Mais, monsieur," the concierge pressed, lowering his voice to an urgent whisper. "Your guest is an important man."

Langdon had little doubt. His books on religious paintings and cult symbology had made him a reluctant celebrity in the art world, and last year Langdon's visibility had increased a hundredfold after his involvement in a widely publicized incident at the Vatican. Since then, the stream of self-important historians and art buffs arriving at his door had seemed never-ending.

"If you would be so kind," Langdon said, doing his best to remain polite, "could you take the man's name and number, and tell him I'll try to call him before I leave Paris on Tuesday? Thank you." He hung up before the concierge could protest.

That takes us to the end of the first scene, just before Langdon starts reminiscing about the past year and the past day. After the flashback scene, we return to Langdon's hotel room, and a pounding on his door by what turns out to be a police officer, Lieutenant Jerome Collet of the Direction Centrale Police Judiciaire.

Not having read the book, I can only assess the scene on its own content. The story function of the scene is to rouse the protagonist from his everyday life by having a new problem impinge on him. In that sense, it's exactly the right place to start: right as the story launches. The scene conflict is between the concierge, who is trying to prepare Langdon for the arrival of the cop, and Langdon, who doesn't want to be disturbed.

That conflict idea, while okay, feels a bit underpowered, considering who the players are in the scene. Since the police are here as part of what appears to be an investigation (a man linked to Langdon has apparently committed suicide), I expect they have the legal power to question Langdon if they want to--that is, they don't need his permission. In any case, scene 3 starts with the cop pounding on Langdon's door, so his effort to put off the concierge looks and is ineffectual.

The concierge's behavior and dialogue are, to me, not very plausible. His opening remark that he hopes he has not awoken Langdon seems weak and insincere. He's waking Langdon because the cops are making him wake Langdon--it's not his fault, it's theirs, and if I were the concierge I would make sure Langdon understood that up front. Instead we have a concierge who is strangely mysterious about who is visiting. He seems overawed by the policeman and refers to him cryptically, in an urgent whisper, as "an important man." Huh?

In my opinion, it appears that the backstory to this scene was not worked out. The writer did not think through the motivations, backgrounds, and actions of the characters involved. If I were writing the scene, I might start by imagining my concierge. He is probably on the same floor as Langdon, attending to the guests on that floor, he works at a posh hotel, and is very probably a snob, used to seeing famous people come and go, and helping them with various personal matters. He's probably territorial about protecting the privacy of his guests, and would resent a cop coming up and using the law to override his authority here. To him the cop is not an "important man"--his guests are important men: Bill Gates, Vladimir Putin, Justin Timberlake. This is just some cop throwing his weight around. The people tipping him--and tipping big--don't want to be bugged, least of all at 12:32 a.m. His job is to get rid of pesky, officious plebs like the cop.

Therefore, in my backstory, I imagine that the concierge has already fought the first battle with the cop--and lost. He would certainly make it plain to Langdon that any inconvenience and annoyance are 100% the fault of the cop, that he did his best to prevent this rude intrusion. He might not do this in a crude, obvious way, but that would be his attitude, and it would color his dialogue. If the concierge has no further role in the story, that will probably be enough for him: he will have enough color and attitude for a good minor character.

Langdon himself, as the protagonist, needs lots of attitude as well. He shouldn't merely be a generic professor who's peevish about some of the effects of becoming famous. He should have passions, issues, problems--things on his mind while his career carries on. If he's being woken up, why not use the opportunity to learn more about him? What if he were waking from a dream about his wife, who has recently divorced him? How about waking to the memory that he's just been diagnosed with heart disease? Something to start suggesting a person and not just a name and a job.

For the purposes of this scene, I would want to figure out how Langdon feels about being in France--does he come here a lot? Can he speak French? Does he travel well, or is it a chore--does he miss his home? If he doesn't speak French, does he notice the attitude of the local French people toward him regarding this fact? (I recall being in Paris and watching an American traveler approach an information table staffed by a young woman. The traveler simply started talking in English. The woman responded in excellent English, but she was coolly polite. When I approached I first asked, in French, permission to speak English, and got a much warmer reception.) The concierge may be subtly patronizing toward those who do not speak French. How observant is Langdon? Is he used to staying in posh hotels? How does he feel about it? I would want to know these things--and show them--if I were writing the scene.

All these questions and issues form part of the backstory of the scene--the story before the story. The writer needs to know what attitude each character has toward each of the other characters in a scene. The concierge, to the cop, might be arrogant, resentful, and minimally compliant. To Langdon he might be ingratiating, self-justifying, and subtly patronizing. The cop might be self-assured and ironic with the concierge, and to Langdon be polite, apologetic, and slightly intimidating.

You get the idea. I'll have more to say on this scene--but that's enough for today.

Shantaram: finished

Yesterday afternoon I finished reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. That in itself is a significant compliment, since I do not finish most books, especially novels, that I start reading, and Shantaram is 933 pages long. I see on Amazon.com that it has attracted 79 reviews to date, and every reviewer apparently gives it a full five stars--the top rating. I too would give it five stars. Mr. Roberts must feel very gratified at such a response; any writer would.

Although I would issue a five-star rating, the novel has its problems, as does any book. I have talked about some of my reasons for enjoying this book in previous posts, such as here and here. There is much to admire. First, and most of all, Roberts's view of life as important: an arena where important things happen. He confronts issues such as love, evil, death, torture, and redemption head-on, and presents a world where these things plausibly arise: India (especially Bombay) of the 1970s and 80s, and in particular its underworld of poverty and crime--a world that Roberts knows at first hand from the time he spent there on the lam from the Australian authorities after escaping from prison there.

Second, his characters. Shantaram is densely populated with characters (I had a hard time keeping track of them all), and they are all vividly presented. Indeed, there is a superabundance: characters would be introduced with powerful descriptive strokes, and then would hardly appear in the story again. It's as though Roberts can't resist giving each character his or her poetic due, even if they are but walk-ons in his story. His main characters are impressively realized, multidimensional, and capable of unexpected words and actions. He sees them all through a certain romantic haze, especially the women, who are mostly beautiful, although always in very individual ways: they are people first, unlike the routine eye-candy of the typical bestseller. It's as though the main character and narrator Lin is enchanted with women and unable to describe them in any other way but as one enchanted. An example:

Ulla was dressed for work in a small, tight, black, halter-neck dress, fishnet stockings, and stiletto-heel shoes. She wore eye-dazzling fake diamonds at her throat and ears. The contrast between her clothing and Lettie's was stark. Lettie wore a fine, bone-coloured brocade jacket over loose, dark-brown satin culottes, and boots. Yet the faces of the two women produced the strongest and most unexpected contrast. Lettie's gaze was seductive, direct, self-assured, and sparkling with ironies and secrets, while Ulla's wide blue eyes, for all the make-up and clothing of her professional sexuality, showed nothing but innocence--honest, vacuous innocence.

That's all fine with me: I positively like the romanticism of Lin's character, and pretty much share it myself. I found myself wishing he'd do more with some of the characters--but that's another issue.

Third, Roberts fills his book with authentic incident and detail: his world rings true. And it is a phantasmagoric, exotic world, gorgeous, grim, and fascinating. Roberts exudes authority, which is always riveting. It's a novel, but these are things he has witnessed.

(Shantaram, by the way, is a name bestowed on Lin by the women in the village where he stays for a few months. It means "man of peace".)

My main hesitation with the novel is, as always, at the level of story. It is actually a mystery plot: Lin eventually wants to learn the truth about two of the most important characters in his life: the Swiss-American beauty Karla, with whom he is in love, and the Muslim mobster Khader, who takes Lin under his wing and introduces him to the criminal world of Bombay. The story is actually quite simple, and it develops only very slowly. Lin has his hands full with many urgent things in the meantime. Lin himself, wrapped up in his own world, is slow to realize that he lacks important information about those around him, so he is not really a sleuth. It's more that information is delivered to him when he is ready for it, the final pieces not till the end. I found this structure a bit contrived, a bit far-fetched, and also a bit underpowered. It does move slowly--I suppose like the Ganges.

There is much more that could be said about this book--and maybe I will. Despite my quibbles, it puts in the shade just about everything else being written now, as far as I can tell. My survey of the bookstore, in which I wound up buying Shantaram, certainly suggested as much. How many of us writers have been addicted to heroin, robbed banks, been imprisoned, escaped, lived in a Bombay slum, worked for the Bombay mafia, fought in Afghanistan, or been tortured in an Indian prison? I sure haven't--but Gregory David Roberts has. Such a man has something to say, and in Shantaram he's said it.

author convenience

Had a theoretical chance to sleep in, since Kimmie had a bone-density scan appointment first thing, but in fact I lay awake after 3:45, not dozing off again till 6:00. A crowd of dreams, then up at 6:30.

This week I have not keyed notes first thing, but instead just opened up my chapter notes document and started work. When working on relationships or characters, I find myself taken into the social background, the politics and history of the area. Sometimes I feel angry with myself for not knowing my world better already, for not remembering all the things I've learned about it and decided about it. It's not enough to have vague knowledge: it must be precise, just as knowledge of events in your own life is precise. It's not: "I went to school somewhere"; it's "I attended Balmoral Junior Secondary School and Carson Graham Senior Secondary School, from which I graduated in 1977". It makes a huge difference whether you attend a junior high school on the wooded mountainside of North Vancouver, B.C., or a public secondary school in the Bronx. Even though I've had only one of those experiences, I know they are very different from each other, and will form the backgrounds of different kinds of people, different kinds of characters.

So I fuss with the history behind my characters and their situation. Of course, my novel is a historical one, and more than that: a story about the history, about its impact on the world for the following 2,000 years and beyond. The questions the scholars can't answer definitely ("exactly why and when did the five district councils in Judea, established by Gabinius, the Roman governor of Syria, dissolve, and what kind of government took their place?") I have to solve for myself. So I feel anyway: I must come up with something, choose among the alternatives. Because the world of my characters is a particular world. Knowing it in every detail, or as many details as possible, is my job.

Another thing is: I can't stand author convenience--the plotting flaw of events' being designed by the author to facilitate his story contrivances. Implausible events are designed in order to make the story go the way the writer wants. Kimmie and I are watching season 3 of 24 on DVD (borrowing it from the library). The series 24, in the thriller genre, packed a punch in season 1, but is now a shadow of itself in season 3. Creator fatigue has long since set in, and the writing has drifted downhill, with author convenience and cliches rearing their heads often. An example: the Counter Terrorist Unit, having abducted the archvillain's daughter to use as a hostage, transports her back to base in a compact four-door sedan with a lone driver and no other escort. I believe that having secured this lever against the villain, their single most important asset in saving the lives of millions of Americans from gruesome viral death, they would look after her more carefully and transport her much, much more securely. When she is abducted back away from them again it will be no surprise, and all the heroes' ensuing difficulties will really be their own fault.

That is but one example of many I could give. The fact is, good writing takes not just ability but also time. Even a brilliant writer needs time to become acquainted with the world of his or her story. This is true even if you are writing about your own life, for such writing is much improved by becoming more knowledgeable about the facts surrounding your own existence. What were the leading news stories on that day? What was the stock market doing? What do sociologists have to say about the dynamics of society at that time? All these things can help even the autobiographical writer. The writer of things other than autobiography needs that much more time to gain knowledge of the world of his story.

I wrote on into the morning, petering out by about 11:15. I decided to try some keying of notes: a bit more from Identity: Youth and Crisis by Erik Erikson. I also looked over the notes I made on identity just after Christmas.

What on earth am I doing?

the pleasure of notes

It was back to work for Kimmie, and so also the end of my vacation of researching the question of identity: back to the project. I opened my notes document for chapter 20, read through the last couple of entries, and resumed keying.

Even if I do sometimes (often; usually) lie awake at night fretting about my project and my life, when I get into my notes I always remember that there is no rushing it. As I muse about the world of my story, I learn. Characters emerge from the fog of grayness, sameness, to become individuals with unique life histories. If you want to write something that's any good, you must go through this.

Part of my reluctance to work on notes, or even writing the draft, is that I don't like to face how slow the process is. I feel that someone is going to catch me--going to find out how slowly the ideas come to me, how few of them there are among all the rejects and dross. As though the value of the finished product--the collection of "keeper" ideas--would be diminished if people knew how difficult it was to find them and gather them together.

This must be faced: the seeming wheel-spinning of much of the notes process. It feels like wasting time, pursuing an idea, seeing where it goes, or elaborating it, only to find that it's not what I want and rejecting it. Today I was working on the character Doris--the young commoner whom Herod becomes attracted to early(ish) on. She is what I'm calling a New Jew: someone who has been baptized by Hillel into a community of Jews committed to observing their faith in a simple and wholehearted way. I've already decided that she's done this; today's question was why.

That question took me far and wide. I had to open research books to remind myself of recent history. What motives would help my story? What motives might complicate her potential relationship with Herod? I found things I thought I could use--even things that I liked. This is the reward of the preparation phase. You have the pleasure of finding an idea that's interesting, unexpected, relevant, and that should make your story richer and more engaging.

But won't people realize how difficult it was to find that idea? Better not even to open the notes document. Better to ignore the whole thing. Say: this identity topic sure is interesting...

philosophy and fiction

Still in the late stage of my cold, but my head is relatively clear. Kimmie, on the other hand, is in full-blown acute nasopharyngitis, and home from work today. She putters upstairs, wrapping Christmas presents.

Yesterday, after my post about my interest in learning more about evil and buying a book online about it (that order got canceled; had to order another copy from a different seller in Carlsbad, California), I picked up the novel Shantaram at teatime and read chapter 23. I was surprised to discover that the chapter was centered on a long discussion of evil between the protagonist Lin and the Bombay crime-boss Khader. I had a strong feeling of meaningful coincidence--of things being brought together for me at exactly this time, because I need them now.

As I make my way through Shantaram I am developing ever more respect for its author, Gregory David Roberts. I continue to enjoy the book and even, recently, felt a slight temptation to keep reading after I had finished a chapter--something I probably haven't felt (for a novel) for 20 years! (I didn't give in; I would have been reading only for information--to find out what happens--and it would no longer be an aesthetic experience. Occasionally I will indulge this urge with nonfiction, since I am usually reading that only for information, but even then I find that my enjoyment of a book quickly tails off. Usually I prefer simply to switch books in order to keep the reading experience fresh-feeling.)

As I read chapter 23 I recognized that Roberts takes his philosophy seriously: that one of his self-descriptors in the novel's second paragraph ("a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime") was not a mere throwaway but an earnest statement of a major interest of his. In this chapter Khader, the fatherly, intellectual, Muslim mafia boss, who bestows teachings and blessings on his many clients and underlings in the manner of an Asian holy man, expounds his own philosophy of evil as relating to the modern science of complexity and the scientific concept of the tendency toward complexity: good is that which works with the universe toward greater complexity; evil is that which works against it. It was an interesting, serious take on evil, and Roberts spent a good number of pages on it as Lin tried to understand what he was being told. At the same time it was part of the character dynamic unfolding between Lin, the fugitive convict who has severed his past life from himself, and Khader, an adoptive father-figure. How can a crime-boss be dispensing spiritual teachings? I don't know--but he can, and he does.

It is just one of countless paradoxes of the Indian world that Roberts portrays. And Lin is his own kind of paradox: a dried-out drug addict, violent criminal, and street-fighter who is also ingenuous, romantic, and poetic. If he were written in the third person he might be impossible to accept: for he is almost impossibly heroic in many ways (defying oppressors, saving people's lives, doing acts of great selflessness and generosity). But as a first-person character Lin conveys a believable sense of no-big-dealness to his actions. Aware of his dark side, he feels no special pride in his light.

So: at 497 pages in I am enjoying Shantaram just as much as I did on page 1--a rare occurrence. Doubly so, considering that the novel, for its size, is structurally rather simple and slight. There are a couple of simple story-questions on the go--the things we want to find out--but they proceed slowly, slowly. Roberts, like India, is in no rush, and has countless wonders to unfold to the visitor en route. It's as though the real story is about Lin's salvation, but Lin himself has no awareness of this, so the narration is all about the phantasmagoria of his existence--the heavens and hells visited by the soul on its way to its destiny.

The day slips away. Think I'll do some more reading right now.

what do we fall in love with?

Like an invalid recovering from his illness, I am getting back to the writing habits that I'm familiar with. Like keying notes in the morning. This morning from Beyond the Essene Hypothesis and Peoples, Nations and Cultures. My self-made encyclopedia of knowledge relevant to my work grows larger.

Gaining knowledge as I go means that I continuously outgrow the knowledge I had at earlier stages of writing my draft. My knowledge of my fictional world is much greater now than it was when I started writing chapter 1 in 2002. I know much more about not only the functioning of the ancient world at the date of my story, but about the characters I am populating it with. For this reason alone a second draft of any extended work is essential--and there are many more reasons than that.

I research to learn the details of how my fictional world works, but even more than that I research to learn about what the ideas were that drove the people of that time and place. How did they think, and why?

Does this seem academic? Dry?

My mother has in the past summed up her attitude toward a focus on ideas in storytelling thus: "You can't fall in love with an idea!" Meaning that it is character the drives fiction, and character that involves the reader in a story. It sounds right. I didn't want to be the champion of dry, academic fiction-writing; I don't like that myself.

And yet I wasn't satisfied to leave it at that. I do love ideas. Is it the same type of love I have for a character, or a person? Do I love one more than the other? Differently?

My thinking now is that there is no real difference between loving a character and loving an idea. A character is not a person, after all; a character is an idea evoked by words on paper. The thing you "fall in love with" is a construct in your mind, evoked by symbols on a page. There's no human being in sight. Robert McKee also emphasizes that a character is not a person, and cannot be. He expressed it thus: "a character is an idea wrapped in an emotion." A character is a simplification of a person, a certain collection of qualities relating to an idea.

This does not make our experience of characters weak. After all, what are we doing when we fall in love with a real live person, anyway? What is it we're actually falling in love with? If you fall in love with someone at first sight, you fall in love with something that you know nothing of as yet--or very little. I submit that in a real sense you have fallen in love with an idea--an idea of the possibility of a pleasurable or even ecstatic intimate relationship. You have fallen in love with a figure in your own soul. As you get to know that person better, you fall out of love--or certainly the relationship changes from what it was.

A story is about something. A character in a story is also therefore about something, an idea wrapped in traits and behaviors. A character stands for something: Dirty Harry stands for justice, Ebenezer Scrooge stands for the hardening caused by wounds in the past. I suspect that when we discover who we are--our identity--we too come to stand for something. We can become the main character in the story of our life.

Again: story is software for living.

Shantaram: midcourse reader's report

Outside, a thin layer of snow, growing ever so gradually thicker as tiny flakes flutter thinly down.

Last night I finished Part One (of five) of Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts, the Australian convict-turned-Bombay-slum-dweller-turned-novelist. I'm on page 169 of 936 of the St. Martin's Griffin trade paperback, and I'm happy to report that I'm enjoying the read.

It's not because of the storytelling, because I think that Roberts is not a particularly experienced or trained storyteller. In 169 pages we have had only a handful of events that could be called plot-points. In many ways the real story seems to have begun only on page 142, when the narrator-protagonist, the escaped New Zealand convict Lin (who has been given the name Shantaram, "man of peace", by newly made Indian friends) gets mugged, leaving him both penniless and unable to approach the authorities for help, due to his criminal status. With this, the character acquired what could be called a true story problem, with the arising in this reader's mind of the question, Uh-oh, how's he going to deal with this?

What keeps me reading is that other aspects of the book are so strong and so unusual. For one thing, there's the knowledge that the story is mainly autobiographical, so there is the sense of realism and unexpectedness in the world he portrays. Roberts writes with apparent authority about India--a place I know little about, and have mainly stereotypical ideas about. I find my stereotypical ideas about India being bulldozed again and again as I read: a truly pleasurable experience, since we don't read things just to find what we expect. We want authentic novelty, and Roberts serves this up nonstop. Roving from downtown Bombay to an Indian village to a city slum, Roberts gives a vivid, closely observed, firsthand account of his impressions. They register as authentic, and lend his book that quality I so admire that I call richness: the sense that the details available to the writer are vastly more numerous than what he is able to show, and so the ones presented suggest the many others not expressed.

Next: his characters and characterization. These are very good: the characterizations are vivid and unexpected. He is able to portray Indian characters as genuine and yet very non-Western people, a continual thrill to read. I am reminded more than anything of reading A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry back in 2001--another large novel about India, by a native Indian. Roberts's work compares favorably so far.

One of the most appealing aspects of the book is its tone. Roberts is writing about a tough, streetwise, fugitive criminal who finds himself among the Indian underworld. What I expect is tough, gritty writing with a menacing, violent edge. What I get is a tough world seen through sensitive, poetic, and even romantic eyes. Lin (and Roberts I suppose) is intensely romantic, romanticizing people and places (as for instance his description of the Swiss-American woman Karla that I extracted in an earlier post). Again and again he seems to have the experience of what James Joyce called "aesthetic arrest"--the sense of being stopped in one's tracks by an experience of beauty, and moved to a higher plane of seeing such that one is able to create genuine art. Roberts's descriptive art is not at Joyce's level, of course, but he gives it all he's got again and again. He goes for it. I like it: his tone is not "sophisticated", but it's perceptive and intelligent and passionate. He's a sincere man who's had strong experiences and is reporting them to us.

The character Lin himself is an asset. He is, like all good protagonists, a contradictory character. He embodies the qualities of criminal toughness and poetic romanticism, and this makes him ever interesting. He narrates as though he is a simple, uncomplicated guy, an observer, rather self-deprecating, and yet again and again I have been surprised by him. My own view is that, possibly because Lin is based on Roberts himself, Roberts has underestimated Lin's uniqueness and paradoxical qualities, with all the power these suggest for storytelling.

Lastly, and most importantly for me, Roberts narrates with the conviction that life is a place where important things happen: that what we do and feel and believe matter. Life is where our values are discovered and tested, often at great cost. He is an antidote to the frivolity of the great mass of contemporary fiction-writing. Though light in tone and often funny, he takes life seriously. I appreciate that, because I'm dying before too long--and so are you.

A perfect book? No, far from it. But page for page, Shantaram compares favorably with what else is out there. Roberts suffered to write this book (written over 13 years, largely in prison, with Roberts's blood literally on the paper), and the result is accordingly worth our attention. No regrets.

the writer shops for a novel

The dark days of the year are here. The fog has lifted, leaving everything dark and wet and still. I turned my errand of cash-fetching at an ATM into a short jog, and ran around Victoria Park. The dark clouds were trying to rain as I walked off my run, but they are still only pregnant with rain.

Kimmie's colonoscopy went well yesterday: the doctor gave her the all-clear, and so whatever was paining her in her abdomen is of still unknown cause. The doctor feels that it's within the bounds of normal experience and is not concerned. Meanwhile, Kimmie is assured for now that there is no sign of cancer, which struck down her brother Freddie.

While Kimmie was in the tender hands of the St. Paul's GI Clinic staff, I walked along Burrard and Robson, winding up again at Indigo Books. This time I determined to search for a novel. Fiction is on the third floor, so I rode the escalators up there and started looking. My first impulse was to look in the science-fiction section. Why? Probably because what I'm looking for is to leave this world: to see how other writers handle the depiction of an imagined other place. Partly this is defeatism, though, because I expect all novels to be disappointing, and so want to have some imaginative verve as compensation for putting up with a basically unenjoyable reading experience. Isn't that a negative stance?

Pushing aside my defeatism, I strode to the "fiction/literature" shelves: the large section of general fiction. Starting at the As, I worked my way along the book-spines and covers. I held my gloved hands behind my back, only looking. No touching unless something looked at least a little bit interesting. Margaret Atwood--nope. Peter Aykroyd--nope. Jilly Cooper--nope! On...

I wanted to find historical fiction, if possible, to compare with my own work. At some point I'm going to have to compare my work to others', and I'll need to know what's out there. I find this thought tiresome. "What will your work remind me of?" "Picture the Shopaholic books, but written by Thomas Pynchon."

Shelf after shelf. Shelf after shelf. Here I am, people--I'm here to spend. Make me. C'mon...

Hmm...what's this? My first pickup: a big Penguin paperback called The Game of Kings by Dorothy Dunnett. Say, this looks not bad. Nice cover. Hm, part of a series, I see--dangerous, but also potential (series to me suggest cranked-out, repetitive work--but I'm planning one myself so I'd better not carp!). Penguin: I still associate this imprint with quality, and indeed British writers I regard as over all better than American or Canadian. Slight problem: it's set in the 16th century, a period I don't have any particular fondness for. Flip it open, read the first paragraph, the first page.

I don't exactly remember the first paragraph (I didn't get the book), but I was a little leery of its suggestion that the main character (or the character being introduced) was a kind of swashbuckling rake, back in the country after unspecified adventures. It feels kind of standard. The writing itself, though, was good, far from the schlock that is usually dished up as historical fiction. Should I? It's a big book--but I like that (if it's good). Hmm. I flipped to a couple of passages in the middle. I settled on one: a rapid narrative of some kind of forest campaign, in which large actions were summarized in brief sentences. This put me off. Combined with the opener, which again was an overview rather than a specific action of one character (it was along the lines of, "When news of So-and-So's return started circulating through the country, people could hardly believe it..."), I felt I was getting too much summary and not enough drama. Nah, I thought--it's too risky. I put it back.

(Now that I've checked the Amazon.com listing for this series of books, I see that every one of them gets 5 stars or 4.5: the reviews are stellar. I'd better go back and read this after all!)

Listlessly I trailed among the shelves. Back, forth. Nope. Nope. Nope.

I went past another biggie: a novel called Shantaram by someone called Gregory David Roberts. It had an Asian-looking design on its gold cover. I picked this up too. The back cover contained reviews of praise, but no plot summary. Odd. The striking thing was Roberts's own story, which occupied the largest paragraph on the back, next to his photo:

Gregory David Roberts was born in Melbourne, Australia. Sentenced to nineteen years in prison for a series of armed robberies, he escaped and spent ten of his fugitive years in Bombay--where he established a free medical clinic for slum-dwellers, and worked as a counterfeiter, smuggler, gunrunner, and street soldier for a branch of the Bombay mafia. Recaptured, he served out his sentence, and established a successful multimedia company upon his release. Roberts is now a full-time writer and lives in Bombay.

Well. One thing's clear: I sure have a tame bio. I assessed the physical book. Hm, big trade paperback, 936 pages including two pages of acknowledgments at the back. The book appeared to be based closely on his life--that could be good. How does a junkie/robber/Bombay street soldier write? Let's find out. First-sentence test, chapter 1:

It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured.

Hm--is it good? Or a "hey notice me!" grabber? I'll read on:

I realised, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn't sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it's all you've got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

Good. For one thing, this writer is not among the great majority who share the same dismal characteristic: they write as though life were a pointless waste of time. He sees life and experience as the arena of important things: values. That makes him my kind of guy up front. I was willing to read more:

In my case, it's a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum-security prison.

Good. I could see why such emphasis was put on Roberts's bio; without it, these lines would raise huge credibility issues. With it, though, they command attention. I get the feeling that although I would never want to live Roberts's life, here in this book I have the opportunity to learn from it, because he has himself. I was mostly sold at this point.

But it was so big, and relatively expensive (trade paperback: $19.95), that I wanted more security. I flipped ahead to other passages. Here's the second paragraph of chapter 2, in which he's describing a Swiss girl named Karla whom he meets in Bombay:

And I did--I liked everything about her. I liked the Helvetian music of her Swiss-American English, and the way she pushed her hair back slowly with a thumb and forefinger when she was irritated by something. I liked the hard-edged cleverness of her conversation, and the easy, gentle way she touched people she liked when she walked past them or sat beside them. I liked the way she held my eyes until the precise moment when it stopped being comfortable, and then smiled, softening the assail, but never looked away.

That clinched it. Here I was reading someone who's probably better than I am at characterization; I can learn from this guy. He deserves to have his book bought, and I'm happy to do it. I chose a pristine copy and headed for the till downstairs.

When I got home I read chapter 1 and very much enjoyed it. Now: chapter 2.

still thinking, still learning

Felt heavy and groggy in bed this morning when the alarm went off, distantly perceived through my earplugs, at 5:30. Heavy eyelids. I lay there awhile as Kimmie launched herself up, switched on the radio, and bustled through her morning routine. I vaguely tried to identify the song I heard playing, muffled by the earplugs. What the heck was that? (Had to unplug them to find out: "Devil Inside" by INXS.)

Eventually it occurred to me that my greater than usual morning fatigue might be the first sign of an impending cold: that is usually my first sign, if I'm alert. I started taking echinacea.

I worked on notes first thing over coffee. Today I focused on keying notes I highlighted last night in Peoples, Nations and Cultures about ancient Italian tribes. I was wanting to zero in more on the character Marcus, whom I have decided to make Italian rather than Roman. I keyed notes about the Aequi, the Bruttians, the Lucanians, the Sabelli. I knew that these were among the first peoples conquered by Rome (the first being the Etruscans to the north) in its steady expansion from being an ordinary market town in central Italy. I also knew that they provided recurrent problems and rebellion. The relationship was complex.

The struggle culminated in the so-called Social War of 91-87 BC, when some tribes tried to cast off the Roman yoke through armed struggle. The conflict was finally resolved by Rome's decision to grant the Italians full Roman citizenship, instead of maintaining a relationship of unequal "allies". With this decision, the unprecedented process of the extending citizenship from the landowners of a single city to all freeborn men of a large territory, embracing many cities, was begun. Previously people had been subjects of monarchs in empires; now they would be (theoretically) voting members of a republic. Admittedly the republic would not last much longer, but this idea, of equal, participating citizenship in a geographically extended polity, was one of the bases of the modern nation-state.

It's important for me that Marcus have a complex relationship with his Romanness. The Social War occurred while he was a boy; his father would have been made a Roman citizen as a result, and Marcus's own Roman citizenship would have followed even if he had not joined the army (where citizenship was one of the rewards of service). The relationship between Rome and the tribes was always at least partly antagonistic--probably is to this day.

Still thinking, still learning.

I have felt tired today, even though there has been sunshine in a brilliant clear sky. I walked among the dark shadows and fallen leaves, stopped to note the progress of the apartment-demolition at 6th and Chesterfield. I'm being gentle with myself.

how Frankenstein does it

A thick fluffy overcast eventually yielded rain. Rain falls steadily now in the dark of afternoon.

Still on vacation hours, I moseyed back into chapter 19 with my morning coffee, again made by Kimmie ("How many scoops?" "Five and a half"). Today I was back at the leading edge of the chapter, working mainly with description of my location. With description I need first of all to put myself in the right mood of sensing the world of my story. I know I have too much descriptive material; I prefer it that way. I prefer to trim away the excess later rather than come up with material to flesh out a skimpy section.

This is imaginative work. I draw on descriptions of the place in my research texts; I've made a few prose sketches based on digital pictures in my Pictorial Library of Bible Lands; and I have open digital images from that same Pictorial Library of a model of ancient Rome in the 2nd century BC. This is a bird's-eye view of the city, contour-modeled, at a date about 100 years before the time of my story. I find it evocative: bluffs, red-roofed temples, dense green copses of trees. I also draw on my own memories of being in Rome. My job is to package these strands into a semblance of living time and place.

All this, of course, in pursuit of my goal of verisimilitude. In a recent e-mail my friend Warren paid me the compliment of singling out my treatment of minor characters for praise. He felt that these are generally lifelike and contribute strongly to the effect of verisimilitude. To paraphrase him, in going about their business in 48 BC, they don't seem to realize that they're not alive anymore. He said that they appear to spring to life with ease (thanks Warren!).

If they spring to life, that's great; but it's not with ease. I put effort into the creation of all my characters, including the minor ones. Generally, anyone who's got a speaking role in my story gets cast as though for a movie. How?

First: I maintain file-folders of pictures of people, clipped from magazines. I have a folder each for men, women, and children. When I finish reading a magazine, I go through it in search of people I might want to cast. Some are celebrities, but most not. I clip the pictures and file them.

Next: when I need a character, I usually make use of a book by Roy Feinson called Animal Attraction, which I bought on a whim in 1999. This quirky, humorous, party-game kind of book is actually very perceptive and clearly the product of much work by its zoologist author. In it you complete a simple 9-question multiple-choice quiz to discover what species of "animal" you are (Feinson has categorized people into 45 different animal types, mostly mammalian with a few birds and a snake thrown in). For each animal he gives a two-page character profile, focusing specifically on the animal as a romantic partner and how it combines with each of the other animal types. Feinson is witty and fun, but his real achievement, to me as a creator, is that he has successfully conveyed a sense of the great differences between people--that two people can be as different as two species of animal. If I think of one person as being like a bat, and another as being like a bison, that gives me a vivid sense of how distinct they are from each other.

Usually I complete Feinson's quiz for a new character (questions like physical size, aggression, gregariousness, and so on). If I know some of these attributes I might use them, but sometimes I use a special random-number generator I created in Excel for the purpose. It gives me nine random numbers in the right ranges, and I get a random animal (actually usually a selection of two or three animals, the way Feinson has arranged his material). If I don't like the animal profile, I spin again. It's fun!

Once I know a character is, say, a mole (Feinson's quick list of mole traits: "observant, dogged, determined, quiet, introspective, unresponsive, indecisive, pessimistic, lonely"), I might start looking through my clipping file for a face to match the personality. I "cast" the character. It has to feel right. But it needs to be a face that I have on file, which limits my options. Sometimes this is good, in that it gives me a look for my character that is somewhat different from what I would expect for the character-type I have in mind.

Finally, a name. I usually know whether my character is Jewish, Greek, Roman, or something else. There are websites with lists of ancient names. I use one of these. Usually, by default, I'll look first under names starting with the same letter as the animal, but I don't necessarily choose one of those.

When I have all the elements, I write the name on the picture, and file it in the folder called "cast characters". I also write the character's name, animal type, list of traits, and anything else I know about him or her in the document called Characters, an alphabetical list of all the characters in my story.

Thus my methodology to create lifelike characters: people who feel real, like someone actually observed. Based on Warren's appreciation, I feel that it's working.

Oh: and what kind of animal am I? Glad you asked. I'm an owl: "contemplative, eloquent, sober, principled, sincere, verbose, preachy, sanctimonious, overly conservative". Sexy, no?

Paul's Rom-Com Festival

Rose at 6:38 in the dark of morning. Rain pattered invisibly outside. I tried opening my Notes document for chapter 19, but did not get far. Other things supervened.

Tonight: program 11 of Paul's Rom-Com Festival. It's the 1990 movie Pretty Woman with Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. It's another in the top drawer of the genre. There are many things to like about the movie, but next time you see it, pay attention to how the character of the hotel manager is portrayed. He is the only character, apart from the two lead roles, who undergoes a character-change in the course of the story. This makes his subplot--the change from disdain for hooker Vivian Ward to acceptance and even respect and love--an important one for the meaning of the movie.

For the record, here are the films of Paul's Rom-Com Festival so far, in chronological order of release (and viewing):

• It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. Story by Samuel Hopkins Adams; screenplay by Robert Riskin. Directed by Frank Capra.
  
• Born Yesterday (1950) starring William Holden and Judy Holliday. Screenplay by Albert Mannheimer based on the play by Garson Kanin. Directed by George Cukor.
• The Apartment (1960) starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. Screenplay by I.A.L. Diamond and Billy Wilder. Directed by Billy Wilder.
• Annie Hall (1977) starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman. Directed by Woody Allen.
• Tootsie (1982) starring Dustin Hoffman and Jessica Lange. Story by Larry Gelbart and Don McGuire; screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal (and other uncredited writers, including Barry Levinson and Elaine May). Directed by Sydney Pollack.
• Splash (1984) starring Tom Hanks and Darryl Hannah. Screenplay by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandell. Directed by Ron Howard.
• Baby Boom (1987) starring Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard. Screenplay by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer. Directed by Charles Shyer.
• Moonstruck (1987) starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. Screenplay by John Patrick Shanley. Directed by Norman Jewison.
• Working Girl (1988) starring Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford. Screenplay by Kevin Wade. Directed by Mike Nichols.
• When Harry Met Sally (1989) starring Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Screenplay by Nora Ephron. Directed by Rob Reiner.
• Pretty Woman (1990) starring Richard Gere and Julia Roberts. Screenplay by J.F. Lawton. Directed by Garry Marshall.

I'll update the list as we move forward with the festival.