Chris Orcutt, Writer

(This isn't a meditation on the writing life, but I woke up this morning and found myself needing to write about the events of 5 years ago. Hopefully this will prove cathartic enough that I won't have to think about it anymore. Somehow, though, I doubt it.)


Sometimes it doesn't seem possible that it happened, that I once worked for Merrill Lynch and had an office on the 5th floor of the World Financial Center, across the street from the Trade Center Complex. It seems so long ago, like another person did all that, not me.


As often happens here in the Greater New York area, I woke up this morning to sirens. When I looked out the window, the sky was deep blue and cloudless—just like it had been on that fateful Tuesday morning five years ago...

Just the day before, Monday, 9/10/01, I ate lunch in my office—chicken lo mein—while sitting on the credenza and staring out at the Twin Towers. I said to myself (and may God strike me down right now if I'm not telling you the truth), "You know, everybody worries about somebody driving a bomb underneath the towers. What if somebody just flew a plane into one of them?" (After the fact, it was well established that a lot of people had similar premonitions, as though we had all tapped into the Collective Unconscious beforehand.)


That evening, as I left my office, I took the "people bridge" across West Street and crossed through the Trade Center Plaza. Even though I had done this a thousand times, I never got over my sense of awe of those buildings, and something told me to look up. I did, and I must have stared up at them for five minutes before other people slowed down and began to look up to see what I was looking at. The sun was beginning to set, and I remember the way it glowed orange on the radio towers above. I thought it was just a pretty sight; I didn't know it was foreshadowing.


Cut to the following morning, Tuesday, 9/11. I had recently finished a new book, and full of optimism for it, mailed a stack of query letters before going to the train. The sky was absolutely cloudless and a unique shade of deep blue—one I'd never seen before and haven't seen since. It was cool that morning as I recall, jacket weather, and as I waited on the platform, I breathed with a sense of satisfaction that good things were on the horizon.


Only a week earlier, I had changed my hours from 9-5 to 10-6 so I could use my mornings to focus on my writing. I was confident that my time was coming soon, that my work as a technology manager in the financial services industry was drawing to a close. Visions of agents, bestsellers and royalty checks danced in my head. The events of that day were the furthest thing from my mind.


We board the train. I get the aisle seat of a two-seater, and we go two stops before my pager vibrates. It's a message from one of the office assistants, Theresa, and it goes something like this:


"DON'T COME DOWN HERE. THERE HAS BEEN SOME KIND OF ACCIDENT IN ONE OF THE TOWERS. SECURITY IS EVACUATING THE BUILDING RIGHT NOW. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT IS HAPPENING. STAY AWAY."


A second later, the entire train erupts with cell phones. The woman next to me says, "God, they did it." A bald man in a trenchcoat across the aisle from me hangs up and says, "All of my people are down there. I have to get down there." The conductor makes an announcement that a plane has flown into the North Tower. The way it's phrased, she makes it sound like it was an accident. Before the train reaches Grand Central, she gets on the PA again to announce the South Tower hit—this time it's clearly not an accident.


As the train pulls into the station, I remember the bald man whose people were all down in the North Tower rushing out of the train and running up the ramp. I never saw him again.


Outside on 42nd Street, traffic has come to a standstill because thousands of people are standing in the street trying to use their cell phones. I try to call my wife, but the circuits are jammed. In a daze, I wander up to 5th Avenue and stand in the road with hundreds of others, staring at the smoking towers miles away down Manhattan. I'm torn as to whether I should go see Alexas over on 7th Avenue, or if I should take the subway downtown and try to help people.


Fortunately, when I reach the subway on 7th, they have stopped all downtown trains. Today, five years later, I realize that it's a good thing I wasn't down there at the time, because chances are, Boy Scout that I am (once a Scout, always a Scout), I would have tried to help people (I am very much HelperMan), and I would have ended up getting killed by a falling chunk of concrete. (I also believe that seeing people jumping to their deaths would have scarred me for life, and I wasn't supposed to see it.)


Every cab in sight is taken. Convinced that I'm not going to get down there, I go to my wife's office instead.


We go up to the roof, where dozens of people are gathered watching the horror. From this distance, the Towers look like two giant factory smokestacks spewing coal smoke. I feel incredibly impotent, like I should be down there doing something but I can't. We take the elevator back downstairs.


There, we find out that the South Tower has just collapsed. There is screaming all over the office. My wife's boss's brother-in-law works for a bond company in the South Tower. At this point, I realize that my parents and family must be sick with worry. I try the phones, but they're all still jammed. But email works. Despite the gravity of the situation, I feel a need to lighten things for them on their end. I send my parents an email that mimics Mark Twain's famous telegram: "RUMORS OF MY DEMISE HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED. I am at Alexas's office, and we're both fine. The phones aren't working here, so this is the only way I can send this. Love, Chris."


Now, Alexas and I decide it's time to leave. Out on the street, panic has set in—cell phones aren't working, subways aren't working, ATMs aren't working. Miraculously, Alexas and I get a cab. We only have $20 or so (since 9/11, we always have at least $100 in cash on us), so we can only take the cab as far as Upper Harlem. There, on Broadway, the cab drops us off, and we join the thousands of others trekking out of Manhattan. At one point on one of the rolling hills above Harlem, I look back and see a river of people behind us. It's an Exodus of Biblical proportions. Our only plan is to get off Manhattan, and from there either walk or hitchhike the remaining 10 miles. All Alexas and I can talk about is how our lives are going to change. We realize already that New York City, and the country, will never be the same again.


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Epilogue: Shortly after 9/11, when Merrill Lynch offered voluntary severance packages, Alexas encouraged me to take one so I could focus on my writing. I did, and now, five years later, despite the fact that material success continues to elude me, I know it was the right decision. If nothing else, I can say that when the 9/11 wake-up-call came, I listened by not continuing to do something I hated. The event made me better appreciate how good I had it: a great spouse, family, my health, and work that I loved. And given that the Earth will one day be swallowed up by the Sun, what else is there?

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 09:11 AM | Permalink

(Note: The following was meant to be posted back in July, but due to technical difficulties, it’s appearing now for the first time.)


On July 17, Mickey Spillane, creator of the infamous Mike Hammer PI series, died. He was 88, and by all accounts he lived a pretty cool life.


In addition to writing several bestselling novels that readers adored, Spillane played a mystery writer on the 70s TV show Columbo, appeared in several commercials for Miller Lite beer, and married a hot second wife, Sherri Manilou, who posed for the cover of his novel The Erection Set.

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There are far better obituaries about Mickey out there, so this entry won’t detail his accomplishments. Rather, I’d like to talk about certain ideas on writing that he espoused (or suggested through his work) and what I learned from him. For lack of a better name, I shall call these the “Mickey Principles.” I believe that all of us aspiring mystery writers can learn a lot from old Mickey.

Ultimately these ideas all come down to the number one ingredient necessary for commercial fiction: narrative drive. The best definition of narrative drive I have found is on the second page of Larry Beinhart’s book How to Write a Mystery (it’s excellent by the way): “Narrative drive is the promise—or threat or tease or suggestion—that something is going to happen.”


Mickey Principle #1: Don’t take the reader where he wants to go.

Time and again in the Mike Hammer novels, when Spillane ends a scene, the scene that follows has nothing to do with what has just transpired. For example, if he closes a scene with Hammer in a lusty embrace with a nude dame, you want him to open the next scene with hot details about the act, or at least some internal monologue by Hammer about what happened. Instead, Spillane puts you in a room with a new corpse and three fat, sweaty detectives.


Another way that Spillane doesn’t take the reader where he wants to go has to do with clues. Hammer finds a bullet, a piece of evidence the cops miss. We want Hammer to start following this new line of inquiry immediately. But no, Spillane purposely strings you along, making you wonder why he doesn’t pursue this new clue, almost to the point that you get frustrated with Hammer, and then he goes there. The art is in knowing how long you can tease the reader before he throws your book in the trash.

Mickey Principle #2: Keep sequels short and to the point.

By sequels, I’m not referring to movies like Jaws 2 or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (I loathe that movie). In storytelling parlance, a sequel is a brief period of reflection and/or planning by the protagonist following a scene with conflict. The idea is that a story is a series of scenes and sequels strung together: conflict-reflection-conflict-planning-and so on.


In the Mike Hammer novels, after a scene of conflict Hammer doesn’t spend a lot of time mulling over his troubles or what to do next. In fact, if anything, the criticism of Hammer has been that he acts too impulsively, with virtually no visible motivation. Clearly this approach doesn’t work for literary fiction, but in the realm of genre, or commercial fiction, it’s nearly a commandment.


Related to this, and perhaps obvious to modern readers, is the idea that your characters shouldn’t take a lot of time getting from place to place. Mickey Spillane, Donald Westlake, and most of the noir writers from the pulp era were among the first to recognize the importance of this. Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell the TV writers during the 1970s, because if you watch closely at least ¼ of every episode of Hawaii Five-O showed people driving. (I’m convinced the producers were being paid off by auto manufacturers.)

Mickey Principle #3: When your detective discovers an identity—particularly the killer’s—don’t have him reveal it immediately.

In the climactic scene of I, the Jury, when Hammer figures out who killed his best friend, Spillane strings the reader along for a couple of pages. This might seem obvious, but I think that modern TV detective shows have made writers forget the importance of delaying gratification. Even if your story is in 1st person, if your narrator has been forthcoming with thoughts, theories and events throughout the rest of the book, he deserves a few moments of privacy. And it’s at this critical juncture that I believe the detective has earned that privacy.


Doing this allows you to entice the reader to the solution, and it gives the reader an opportunity to solve the case herself. The idea is that if you’ve played fair with the reader, presenting all of the information and clues your detective uses to solve the case, your reader should be able to solve it as well. Creating this brief delay between the detective figuring out whodunit and the summation allows the reader to participate, investing her more deeply in your characters and the story. And if you do it right, and the reader guesses incorrectly, she will paradoxically love and respect you all the more.

Mickey Principle #4: Sex and violence, in their varying degrees, are really the only two colors on the writer’s palette.

This is the Spillane idea I’ve gotten the most out of. When you think about it, all scenes have (or should have) a conflict with tinges of sex or violence in them. Now, by sex Spillane didn’t necessarily mean hardcore, on the rug, chicka-wa-wa screwing; sex can be a kiss, the promise of an embrace, or as little as a flirty exchange. And by violence he didn’t necessarily mean that one character had to pummel another one with a pipe (although this happens, and aren’t we readers glad for the cathartic joy these events bring?); violence can be extremely subtle, like one character nudging another while on a line, a woman’s catty remark about another woman’s shoes, or simply one character’s refusal to do something another character wants.


Thinking of scenes and interactions between characters in this way has, for me, simplified the writing process. I’m not saying it’s easy or that I’ve mastered it (or even think I will). What I’m saying is that approaching the writing of fiction with this metaphor in mind has given me something concrete to gauge my writing against. I think of the sex-violence writing palette metaphor as those slide bars in Photoshop that control color, brightness and contrast. For every scene, at least subliminally, I think about what degree of sex I want to convey, and what degree of violence the scene should have. This idea of Spillane’s, besides the novels themselves of course, is his greatest gift to writers—especially those of us endeavoring to write commercial fiction.

Mickey Principle #5: Be clear about why you write.

I’m not sure if this is apocryphal or not, but allegedly Spillane only wrote when he needed money and spent the rest of his time deep-sea fishing. In a 2001 interview, he told the Associated Press that writing “...is an income-generating job.” Thinking of writing this way, I believe, keeps it clear in the writer’s mind exactly who they’re writing for. It shouldn’t be for yourself. It should be for the reader, the guy or gal who’s going to plunk down $24.95 for your hardcover book.


And even if you don’t care about selling your work, remember that writing is only blank ink on paper or dots on a screen until somebody reads it. As my first writing mentor, Thomas Gallagher, once told me (two weeks before his death), “Chris, writing is communication.” Sounds like something the village idiot would say, but it’s actually a profound point. Until someone takes in your message, processes it and is affected by your words, you haven’t done anything.


I’m saddened by the death of Mickey Spillane because I always thought his fiction was richer and better written than the critics ever gave him credit for, and while he won some awards during his lifetime and was recognized by his peers, the “literati” wrote him off as a hack. This is unfortunate because I believe that in 20 years or so, academics will do serious “studies” of 20th century pop fiction and discover that he was one of a handful of writers who gave birth to modern commercial fiction.


However, I have to admit my feelings of loss aren’t entirely altruistic. I’m also saddened by Mickey Spillane’s death because as soon as my mystery novel, A REAL PIECE OF WORK, was accepted by a publisher, I planned on flying down to Florida and begging him (or fighting him—he was 88, so I probably could have taken him) for an endorsement of my book. That isn’t going to happen now.

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Goodbye, Mickey, and thanks for your wisdom—even if you didn’t know you were teaching us. And say hello to Doyle, Hammett and Chandler for me, would you?

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 08:00 AM | Permalink

Dear Readers,


Some of you might already know me from NotWriting.com. This weblog, however, will be different.


Rather than detailing all of the foolish things I do or think about when I'm not writing, here I plan on chronicling the trials and travails of trying to make it as a fiction writer.


Some of these entries may be reflections on craft, or they may be more philosophical, like, "How did I end up doing this? What the hell was I thinking?" But no matter what, I plan on being as honest with you as I can about the highs and the lows of this journey. I hope you enjoy it.


Sincerely,


Chris Orcutt

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:00 PM | Permalink