Chris Orcutt, Writer

The first time I read John Irving's The World According to Garp, I choked on a Big Mac.

It was a cold March day 15 years ago, and I was in a McDonald's in Norwich, New York, eating lunch, when a passage took me by such complete surprise that I started choking.

Reluctant to suffer an ignominious death in a Mickey D’s, I dropped the book and looked around clutching my throat. Thankfully, an old-timer saw what was happening, jumped up from his seat and gave me the Heimlich (he was remarkably spry as I recall). The food dislodged. (Never mind where it went. Gross.)

What I was eating when Irving's book surprised me.

"What the hell happened?" he asked.

"Something surprised me," I said, nodding at the book. "Something I read."

"Well, you probably shouldn't eat while you're reading then."

"Probably not, sir. Thank you."

As I sat down, I glanced at the book that had nearly caused my death. I realized that, while I didn't want to cause readers of my own writing to choke in fast-food restaurants, I did want to emulate Irving's ability to surprise them—the smile-inducing sentence; the word choice that evokes a gentle shake of the head; and best of all, the memorable, unexpected scene.

The hardcover version. I wore out my paperback.

From the first, what grabbed me most about the novel was its delicious unpredictability. Take the first line, for example. I can quote it from memory:

Garp's mother, Jenny Fields, was arrested in Boston in 1942 for wounding a man in a movie theater.

This was, and still is as far as I'm concerned, one of the best opening lines of a novel ever. The key word, of course, is "wounding." From time to time, I consider the dozen other words he could have used there, and I realize what a surprising and brilliant choice "wounding" was.  Stabbing? No, too specific, too violent. Injuring? No, too vague. What about "lacerating" or "contusing"? Afraid not. "Wounding" was, and still is, perfect. The questions that "wounding" raises, and doesn't answer, are what entice the reader to continue.

The famous Russian short story writer and playwright, Anton Chekhov, once said the following (I paraphrase): "If a gun hangs above the door in the first act, it must go off in the last act." As a student of Irving who has read Garp and one of his other excellent novels, A Prayer for Owen Meany, at least a dozen times, I'm convinced that Irving must have held Chekhov's view—at least subconsciously—because nothing gets wasted in the story. Every character trait, setting detail and conflict is important, they all build to the climax, and along the way there are hundreds of surprises.

Today, looking out my window and watching the shaking trees, I remember that fateful day in McDonald's when I not only learned to be careful trying to eat and read at the same time, but also the value of surprise in writing. Shortly after that episode, I wrote something on an index card that I've kept on a bulletin board ever since. It's a piece of advice to myself that I've tried to heed in everything I write. Many times I've fallen short, but once in a while I nail it, and here it is:

Put a surprise on every page.

It’s the surprises that keep me reading.

It's the surprises that keep me writing.

It’s the surprises that make life worth living.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A recent survey of teens in Great Britain by the newspaper The Telegraph came out with some interesting results. Of the respondents, only 25 percent believed that Sir Winston Churchill really existed.

On the other hand, many more respondents believed certain fictional characters had actually lived. For example, "Sherlock Holmes, the detective, was so convincingly brought to life in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, their [sic] film versions and television series, that 58 percent of respondents believe that the sleuth really lived at 221B Baker Street."

The Troublemaker: the homepage for Dakota Stevens Investigations.

This fact caught my eye because yesterday I received an email from a private investigator in Houston, Texas asking Svetlana Krüsh, my fictional detective's fictional Gal Friday, if she would be open to a link exchange. Here's his email. Here's "Svetlana's" reply. And here's a PDF of the PI's links page so you can see his description of Dakota's site.

Over the past couple of years, since I first launched Dakota & Svetlana into the cyber-ether, I've had several people in emails or on websites thinking they were real people. Take this chess blog entry, for example. I felt bad, so I finally had to intercede and tell them the truth.

A chess club thought this was Svetlana Krüsh.

I've also received 10-12 requests from people for advice on their cases. (I wish I'd saved those emails. I lost them when I changed accounts.) The most memorable of these came from a desperate husband who believed that his wife was not only stepping out on him, but also prostituting their daughter. Ouch! He wanted to know if this was a case that "Dakota" would be interested in. "Dakota" considered it and said to himself, "Fuck that." My fictional PI replied that the man should probably go to the police.

Aside from the people in pain part, this is exactly what I was hoping for when I created these two characters. They're real to me, so if others think so, that's great. With this in mind, I'd love for two people to have a conversation someday similar to one I once had with my step-grandfather Cecil.

Back when I was 13, I read the Sherlock Holmes stories in their entirety. At the time, I was visiting Cecil in Vinalhaven, Maine, and the conversation somehow drifted to Sherlock Holmes. I went on and on about the stories and how much they meant to me and how I wanted to create a detective like him someday. Yada, yada, yada. The maunderings of an eager 13-year-old.

Anyway, Cecil interrupted and said the following (in a thick Downeast accent):

"Yessir, I remember my teacher tellin' us bout all those cases that there Sherlock Holmes was solving. Boy, he was one smart fella, wasn't he, Chris?"

"Uh, Cecil...you realize he's a fictional character, right?" I said. "He was made up. All of it."

Cecil gave a start in his chair like he'd just seen a ghost.

"You don't say!"

"They were all stories, Cecil," I said. "Every word was make-believe."

Now, even though Cecil had limited education, he's no dummy. He believed that Holmes and Watson existed because his teacher probably gave him that impression. Anyway, he's no worse off than the 58 percent of those Britons I mentioned above.

It's nice to know that Dakota and Svetlana are in good company.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm in the middle of polishing my latest novel, and because I find the process so onerous, I've decided to take a break from it and write about it instead.

Polishing should in no way be confused with editing. When you edit, in addition to moving passages around and trying different ways of saying the same line, what you're really looking for are opportunities to cut words. Once you're able to do what William Faulkner said ("kill your darlings"—those precious pet phrases that don't add to your story), you begin to look forward to hacking out large chunks of material. Adjectives, sentences, paragraphs, scenes, and sometimes whole chapters can be yanked and you don't notice. In fact, the work gets better through omission. You're chipping away everything that doesn't resemble an elephant. That's editing.

But polishing is different, and in many ways more difficult. A pain in the ass, actually. It reminds me of something the inimitable Oscar Wilde once said:

"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again."

I'm not a Jedi writer yet, but back when I was still a Padouin Learner, I thought the above quote was ridiculous. Someone couldn't possibly have spent that much time debating the merits of inserting or omitting a piece of punctuation. Come on. The fact is, I didn't know enough about writing yet to understand how true it was.

Polishing anything has a way of aging you.

In the early stages of writing a book, like a burgeoning romance everything is beautiful and full of potential. You're enraptured by the Idea. The characters pulsate with energy. The possibilities are endless. Then you write a draft. And another draft. And another draft. And each time you create a modified version of the Idea, you deface the Idea a little bit, until you reach a point where you realize your creation will never match up with the Idea, and that the best you can hope to do is present your sullied thing in the best light possible.

By the time you reach the polishing stage, you're sick of the book. But you have to read it one more time—at least. You literally get nauseous. The process is made even more poignant because you know you're going to have to face all of the imperfections and failures that, at your current state of writerly development, you are unable to fix. The feeling you get is, I imagine, a lot like the feeling a divorced person gets when forced to see his/her ex-spouse at child visitations.

"Hey, I'm sorry. I did the best I could. Why are you bringing that up again? We've gone over this. What do you want from me? I said I was sorry. Goodbye."

If your story is tight and fairly well-told, by the time you get to polishing, you know you can't radically improve it. You know that no matter how nicely you buff the sucker, it's only going to gleam so much. And if it's a turd, well, forget it. A turd polished is still a turd.

Here are some of the things I focus on during polishing. I call this my Hunting List:

• Removing every unnecessary adverb, which means virtually all of them.
• Removing unnecessary commas to increase reading speed, or putting some in (see above) for clarity.
• Removing extraneous dashes and semicolons.
• Changing verbs from past progressives (e.g., "was running") to simple past tense (e.g., "ran").
• Eliminating small, extraneous "word packages," which often start with prepositions.
• Eliminating as many attributions (i.e., he said.) as possible, but not to the point where it's ever unclear who is speaking.
• Substituting more picturesque verbs and specific nouns for the lamer ones on the page.
• Clarifying anything confusing and "planting" information that becomes important later in the story.

I read somewhere that every book teaches the writer what he needs to learn to tell that story, but one thing I've found is that polishing never gets any easier.

Some of you may be reading this and saying, "Quit your whining. At least you're working on a finished book." And you'd be right.

But this still doesn't change the fact that what I'd rather be doing is staring at a New Idea. A New Idea, standing on a hill in the spring sunshine, the sweet nectary breeze blowing her ginger hair around. She waves to me. The breeze flaps her sundress. She laughs, beckons me with a finger and departs over the hill. I'm about to run after her when I hear Old Idea, my battle axe of a book, screeching at me to come back down and clean the gutters.

I'm feeling ill again. Must be polishing time.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some of you will disagree, but I believe we don't have as much choice about what we write as we might think.

For years, my father, Al, encouraged me to write about sex because he was convinced that sex sells. He was right, of course—sex does sell—but he was wrong, as all non-writers are when they suggest ideas or subjects for writers to use, in thinking that I could instantly adopt his idea with the enthusiasm necessary to create a book-length work.

Now, I realize that all writers have to be able to get into ideas that aren't wholly their own, but we can usually only do this when there's an outside motivator—like money. Getting paid, whether as a newspaper reporter (which I've been) or as a speechwriter (which I've also been), has a way of making you excited about whatever topics interest the client.

But more than the kind of writing we writers do, I'm really talking about the ideas we find ourselves attracted to, and where this is concerned, I believe we don't have much choice. The writing heart wants what it wants.

An HD still of me from Get Lamp, my friend Jason's upcoming
film about text adventures and interactive fiction. I used it
because my didacticism in the still matches this piece.

In my own case, part of me wishes I were more attracted to non-fiction. As a writer seeking publication, just from an odds standpoint life would be easier; there are far more nonfiction books than fiction published every year.

But again, we don't get much say in what captivates us. I have no idea why I find redheads so damn alluring, but I do. Similarly, I don't get to choose the ideas or characters or voices that grab me by the lapel and either shout or breathe hotly in my ear. Nope, they choose me.

What we write is also determined by something much more prosaic: how our brains work. I have friends who think in data, in facts. Jason, mentioned above, is one of these guys. He and people like him amaze me in their ability to consume vast quantities of information, categorize it, assimilate it, report on it, etc. This may explain why Jason leans toward documentary filmmaking and internet history/archiving. Suffice it to say, I'm not one of these fellows. I like to do what Sherlock Holmes did, which is to keep all but the most essential tools out of my "brain-attic." I have to, in fact.

I am a heavily right-brained, lateral thinker. With the exception of a few subjects that I know a lot about, I don't have a lot of information on file. The best way I can describe my thinking process (and other fiction writers I know have described a similar process) is continuously asking myself, "What if?" A person's quirky mannerism makes me wonder, "What if he did that in a bank and they misunderstood him? What would happen?" Frequently these "what-if's" lead to imagining a character, who routinely manifests as a voice. Each voice has a particular rhythm and diction, and she might be be cunning, shy, unstable, or selfish.

Why this photo? Simple: I love redheads.

The thing is, I don't get to choose the idea. The idea floating around in the ether, the one that insists on being written, chooses me, and that's that.

And as much as I'd like to write a chapter for a nonfiction book and bang out a proposal and have my agent sell the book—often just on the basis of a proposal—I can't because the writing heart wants what the writing heart wants.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 04:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yesterday I alluded to John Gardner's book on writing, The Art of Fiction, and casually mentioned syntactic slots. Since then, I've received a few emails asking me what these are. I'll do my best to explain.

Mind you, although I taught college English for several years, I am not a grammarian. That being said, let me refer to the book where I first learned of this concept, Gardner's The Art of Fiction.

Although heady, Gardner's book is remarkably thorough.

For those of you unfamiliar with Gardner and his work, he was an English professor at SUNY Binghamton who had achieved literary fame from his novel Grendel, which was the story of Beowulf told from the monster's point of view. Earlier in his career, he had taught at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1982.

On page 104 of his fiction writing classic, Gardner wrote, "Sentences in English tend to fall into meaning units or syntactic slots—for instance, such patterns as..." (Below, the numbers in superscript indicate the start of a new syntactic slot.)

Gardner's main idea is this: "A writer may load one or two of the slots with modifiers, but if the sentence is to have focus—that is, if the reader is to be able to make out some clear image, not just a jumble—the writer cannot cram all three syntactic slots with details."

So I'm not borrowing exclusively from his book, I'll give you my own made-up example:

Okay, there's our sentence with the slots empty of modifiers. Now, let's load up slot 1:

See how only modifiers were added to the first slot? Those details only modify the subject. Now let's load up slot 2:

As you probably noticed, loading up slot 2 (the verb) makes for awkward constructions. My example is not the best, but of the three slots, I've found the verb slot to be the most resistant to modifiers. Here's the sentence with slot 3, the object, loaded up:

There it is with the object heavy with modifiers. Finally, to prove Gardner's point, let's see what the sentence would look like if all three slots were loaded up:

I rest Gardner's case. The same is true, by the way, if you invert sentences to form "Yoda Talk"—¹Object, ²subject, ³verb. ("To the moon he goes!")

So there you go—syntactic slots. I hope this has cleared matters up. Enjoy them in your own writing, and remember, you can load up one or two, but three, unless you're William Faulkner, probably won't work.

Just for fun, here's an example of a long sentence from Faulkner's The Hamlet:

Hill-cradled and remote, definite yet without boundaries, straddling into two counties yet owing allegiance to neither, it had been the original grant and site of a…plantation, the ruins of which—the gutted shell of an enormous house with its fallen stables and slave quarters and overgrown gardens and brick terraces and promenades—were still known as the Old Frenchman place…and even some of the once-fertile fields had long since reverted to the cane-and-cypress jungle from which their first master had hewed them.

Good luck beating Willie. You'll have to get juiced up and write on your wallpaper first.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dean Koontz wrote somewhere that "the first half-million words are just practice." I agree with that. I have a garage full of boxes of my writing, and a filing cabinet drawer jammed with notebooks, all of which prove his point.

Most of what I wrote there was crap because I was trying too hard. I hadn't learned the importance of restraint and proportion in a piece of writing. I hadn't read John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and learned that sentences are comprised of syntactic slots, and that when creating a sentence you shouldn't overload more than one slot with information. There were a lot of things I hadn't learned, and still haven't.

There are a few gems in the old notebook drawer.

Much to the annoyance of their spouses, most writers never throw anything away. We hoard everything graced by our words—pocket notebooks, hotel stationery, cocktail napkins and business cards. I suppose the thinking here is that one day we'll remember such-and-such a line and want to use it in a new piece.

I've had this experience a couple of times, but the problem was, when I when to my "archives" and read the piece of description, dialogue or journal entry, the moment the piece was removed from its current context, it didn't have the same meaning. Like the famous iceman found in the Alps, my notebook entires are moments frozen in time that require some forensic reconstruction to understand their larger meaning. The Zeitgeist is lost, and as time goes on, the fire that compelled me to jot them down fades away.

But as the title of this entry suggests, buried within those million words are a few diamonds. I plan on dipping into my notebook drawer once in a while to share some of these snippets with you. Think of it this way: if a writer's creations are his children, these are my lovable and kind-hearted, but clueless, kids whom I want to have every opportunity. They may never go anywhere in life, but I still want them to have their 15 minutes. So, here goes:

Writing Advice
I open a tiny CVS pocket notebook and discover some story principles I paraphrased from somewhere. I have no idea what book these came from, but they're good and here they are:

• Start with a change, a lack of harmony with the environment—a threat to the central character's self-concept.
• As a result of the change, the character will create a goal—a story goal.
• Get the change shown as swiftly as possible and show the character beginning to react with predictable unease—or worse.
• Most "setup" stuff are author concerns. The reader just wants the story to start.
• You have 25 words to engage a jaded editor's interest.
• Arouse curiosity.
• Grab the reader and give a hint of what to expect.
• Some editors claim they can be sure if a book is going to be well-written and exciting enough to publish by reading just the first sentence or paragraph.

Quotes
In an interview once, David Mamet, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and one of my idols, was asked if he ever used the conversations of regular people as the basis for dialogue. He replied, "Have you ever listened to subway talk? Subway talk is boring. I'd like to think I can come up with better dialogue than the crap people say on the subway."

I agree with Mamet that most overheard conversations aren't good enough to be used as dialogue in a story or play. (At least not without a lot of work.) However, sometimes people can surprise you, saying things that are incredibly apt or funny. Here's my favorite eavesdropped line from the Overheard in NYC website.

Dipping into my own collection of snatched things that people have said, here are a few of the best:

[Guy in his 30s talking to a male friend about women]

"They're gonna see what they want to see. You can come home with fucking flowers every day and it won't make a bit of difference."

[Elderly man on train asking other passengers the same question at every stop]

"Is this Scarsdale?"

[On line at Boston Market; one fat man interrupts another]

"Wait, is there meatloaf in this story?"

[No idea where I heard this]

"You know...you two are standing just far enough apart to form an ellipse."

[In a toy store; one man in his 50s to another]

"Toys these days? I've never seen such wimpy shit. Political correctness, I'm telling you. Now, back when I was Lou's age, know what I had? I had a Big Bang Cannon. And you know what the slogan said? You know, that italicized type? Yeah, it said, 'Big noise for boys!'. Toymakers back then, they didn't give a shit if you lost an arm."

[Some young lady—maybe one of my gal-pals in college— wrote the following in my notebook]

"I cleaned my room! I found my checkbook! I fucked my professor!"

Continue reading "Gems from the Notebook Drawer — Vol. 1" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Like a lot of writers I get my best ideas in the shower, but for years I refused to acknowledge this fact. When I sniffed my mint shampoo and got an idea for an Irish woman assassin that specializes in poisoning through the epidermis, I told myself, "You can wait to write it down. You'll remember."

Guess what? Didn't remember.

And that's where my shower notebook comes in.

Now, I'll admit that many of my shower ideas suck, but as Creativity Guru Michael Michalko teaches in one of his books on the subject, when it comes to ideas, quantity begets quality. So, in the case of my shower notebook, when an idea comes to me, I don't judge it; I simply stick my arm out and write it in my little yellow vinyl notebook. It's called a WetLog™, and it's a lot more pleasant than it sounds.

The WetLog™ notebook—perfect for outside the shower.

Into my shower notebook I have put dozens of ideas, most of which will probably never come to fruition because I lack the skills, experience or both. (So, if you like an idea and can do something with it, by all means steal it.)

• A science-fiction story about H3 extraction on the moon, wherein nano-machines enter the moon rock and suck out the H3 we need for fusion on Earth, and then because the humans start treating the little mechanical miracle-workers like shit, the nano-creatures turn on them.
• An idea for an "editing engine" software program for writers.
• An idea for a nanotechnology shaver, whereby hundreds of microscopic "Roombas" shave a man's face while he sleeps, effectively gnawing down the hairs like micro beavers to tiny trees, chipping them up and storing them in their bellies until they return to "base"—a canister on a chain around the man's neck. Hopefully these nano-guys won't revolt.
• An idea for a new GEICO commercial. A while back, my wife and I were watching TV and remarked to each other about how tired the gecko-caveman thing is. So, why not a commercial that starts with a TV showing one of the old ones, then it pans back to show a couple on the couch. He says, "You know, that ad campaign's getting pretty tired." And she says, "Yeah, you'd think they'd realize how media-savvy people are these days and that they're saturated with this crap." Then CUT TO: "GEICO, fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent on car insurance..."
• Characters' names. I've come up with a lot of character names in the shower over the years, and NO, I've never stooped to calling any of them Ammonium Laureth Sulfate, although I have used Laurel in a story, and YES, I got it from the shampoo bottle.
• Dialogue. Most of the time I get the dialogue while writing or during my daily walk. However, now and then I find myself mulling over a line in the shower, refining it as I scrub, trying out different phrasings, comma placements and such.

Well, there you have it—the wonders of my shower notebook. Writer or not, I believe every creative person should have one. I don't know what it is about water that seems to stimulate most of us, but whenever I'm going to be around it, I make sure I have a notebook handy.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 02:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I never get sick. I mean never. The last time I was sick was three years ago with a cold, and just before that, a herniated disc. Which is why I don't know what to do with myself today because I'm sick.

But even though I was sick, I wrote today. You can count on it—on days that I don't write something for this or my other blog, NotWriting.com, I have written something, whether it be pages in a new novel, a scene in a screenplay, words for a business writing assignment, an entry in my private journal, you name it. The fact is, I write every day. Every day.

Yesterday, because I was confined to bed and didn't have the patience for writing in html on the blog, I worked in pencil on the synopsis of my new novel. That's the 1-page single-spaced document that will accompany my book to editors and film production companies. I dread writing the synopsis because a part of me feels that synopsis-writing has nothing to do with novel-writing, and that if a reader wants to know how it ends, I want to tell him, "Read the book."

But I did it. I wrote, just as I write every day, and I didn't do it out of a sense of duty or self-discipline. I did it because I truly love to write.

A Royal DeLuxe by a pool. That's it—no grand
metaphor, nothing. Just liked the picture.

My wife thinks I'm freakishly self-disciplined, and to the outside observer, I can see why she would think this. Every day, around 5am if I'm deep into a project, I shuffle across the hall to my office and get started. But I don't do it out of a sense of self-discipline. In fact, I think self-discipline is a lousy motivator over the long-term. Self-discipline may get you to sit up in bed, but only love will motivate you to leave the warmth of that bed, get dressed and embark on the loneliest enterprise there is—writing.

Many years ago, I had a revelation in which I finally understood the oft-quoted line by writers and other artists: "Process, not product." You have to enjoy the process of the craft you're engaged in and do it for its own sake, not for the final product or its perceived rewards.

Since then, if I'm ever feeling down or lacking motivation, instead of trying to discipline myself to write, I make a list of what I love about it, and always topping the list is my love of what I call "the line."

"The line" is that one sentence, that one piece of description, that one snatch of dialogue that comes out of nowhere and surprises you. You, the writer, have no idea where it came from; you know it's good, that's all. And ultimately, I think it's that love of the line that keeps writers writing. You simply have to love language, and if you don't, nothing short of self-flagellation would make you do this.

Hemingway's posthumous memoir of his early years in Paris.

Each year, I'll reread a few books where the gorgeous prose inspires me: Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, T.C. Boyle's East is East, Nabokov's Lolita, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary (or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina—depending on whether I want to read about the infidelities of a French or Russian woman). And more than the characters or plot, what you're reading for is the love. To witness great writers' love for the art and how they expressed it.

I didn't feel well today, but I wrote. And I wrote because I love writing.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

There are many drawbacks to being bipolar, but probably the most insidious is that when I'm on the cusp of, or in the midst of, a new manic cycle, I can become extremely irritable.

Petulant. Combustible.

When this happens, anything can set me off, and I have to exercise every fiber of self-restraint in me to keep from tearing people's throats out. I don't mean for this to happen, I honestly don't. I'll lash out at people and fifteen minutes later, like a summer thundershower, it passes and I don't know what I was so upset about. Like today with parking my car.

No Parking, biotch!

Since I moved back to my high school town of Millbrook, NY a year ago, I've been parking across the street in an empty spot behind my parents' building. It was convenient, and in exchange Alexas and I shoveled out the parking area that we shared with my parents and their elderly neighbors. A nice little arrangement.

Today when I returned home from the errands that a working writer/house husband does (speed grocery shopping, banking and office supply purchasing), I went to park my car and discovered another one in it. We've all had this experience. I hate fighting with people over knucklehead things like this, but I chose to confront the wrongdoers. I found out the vehicle belonged to a woman who works in a day salon across the street and went to their office and politely asked that the car be moved.

Continue reading "Squelching Editing Myself" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A cardinal rule among writers is that you NEVER let family members critique drafts of your work. Invariably they will either praise it beyond its worth or shred it (and you) to ribbons.

My father, Al Orcutt (a.k.a. "Big Al" and "Broken-Down Old Dad"), is a retired school principal and avid reader. Although most of his reading is in American history and contemporary politics, he does enjoy the occasional novel and is a rabid fan of one of my favorite writers, John Irving. Until recently, Al had a retiree dream job—"working" in the Millbrook paint store. Since foot traffic has never been overwhelming in the village, Al got a lot of reading done.

Dad posing at the paint store. I was going for the look of those
antique photographs, in which the proprietor is expressionless.

But Al got bored with it, and the woman he was working for, although a savvy businesswoman, has a reputation for annoying her employees over time. So, for the first time in his life, Al actually QUIT a job.

The trouble is, now Al doesn't have a lot to do during the day. If I drop by (we live in the same town, across the street from each other—purely coincidental), Al is usually ranting at CNN or MSNBC about some new "damn bullshiit thing that idiot Bush is doing." I'll sit with Al for half an hour or so, during which time each of us will test our blood pressure twice, then go home shaking my head. What's becoming of my poor old broken-down old dad?

So...I've decided to break the Prime Directive and give Al a copy of my latest novel to read and critique. He needs a project, and although I've had several readers, I need a reader of his type, somebody who will read it purely for the story and who will tell me if it bores him at any point.

Al's verdict on the book will likely be one of two exclamations (spoken with a thick Downeast Maine accent):

"Jeezus Christ, Chris—how do you do it? Jeezus, if I tried to come up with a story longer than a page, my goddamn eyeballs would explode."

"Jeezus Christ, Chris—it was good, but so many characters. I mean, Jeezus, how many of the fuckers do you need?"

I printed out a copy last night and will hand-deliver it to him this morning. While I'm over there, I'll test my blood pressure. I'll probably need it.

I'll report back to you in a couple of weeks, when I'm making this little project due.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Because I spend 75% of my time on the computer writing, for years I've allowed myself to get suckered into purchasing (yes, actually buying—I refuse to pirate software) the latest version of Microsoft Office. Now that Office 2008 for the Mac is out, I briefly considered picking it up. Very briefly.

In a previous entry I described the three writing programs I use most often: WriteRoom, Pages (part of Apple's iWork suite), and Final Draft. Conspicuously absent from that list is MS Word.

Office 2008 for the Mac. I'm
running out to get it now—NOT!

Unless the fellows in Redmond, Washington get their heads out of their asses and figure out what people who actually write want in a program, Office 2004 for the Mac will be my last Microsoft purchase.

I'm tired of their shipping faulty software and letting "early adopters" (never me—I know better) find the glitches and essentially fix it for them. I'm tired of "productivity software" that is anything but productive and in fact ends up wasting your time as you jerk around with it, trying to get it to behave the way you need it to. And I'm tired of programs like Word that are written for the lowest common denominator—for people who don't know the difference between a gerund and an ampersand.

So, listen up, Microsoft. In case no one's told you before (like they haven't), here are the features writers of book-length work want in a program. In some cases, Word has these features, or similar ones, but they're so deeply buried in the program, or presented via a clunky, obtuse interface, that they're useless. Here's my list:

Continue reading "Goodbye MS Word, You Lousy Whore" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once upon a time, there was a writer. He lived in a small house in the country, and each day when he finished his work, he would walk his little town, saying hello to all of the wonderful people—the postman, the fireman, the doctor, the grocer. Life was very good for the writer.

Each day, when the writer edited that morning's work, he printed out the pages, put them on a clipboard and went through the material with a red pen. The red pen was a nasty throwback to his teaching days, but he liked it because he could always see marks made in red. The writer, you see, was slightly colorblind.

Merrily would the writer enter his edits into the computer. With each line he entered, the writer pressed CMD-S to save his work. Not that it mattered because the fancy computer also auto-saved his work every 2 minutes. And each day's work was saved with a suffix, thusly: MY_WRITING_MMDDYY.

At the end of each day, the writer would upload his finished work to his best friend's server. The best friend was profoundly generous and gave freely of his bounty of bandwidth and mass storage capability. And all the friend ever asked for in exchange was some cash when the writer had it and the occasional case of non-alcoholic Pinot Noir grape juice.

Nothing could impinge on the writer's world.

So the writer grew smug, smug in the belief that he had shielded himself from any possible disaster.

"Fires and floods and tornadoes and blizzards—blow, wrack and rage!" the writer yelled. "Fuck you all! I'm covered!"

Meanwhile, Zeus and his daughters, the Muses, did not take kindly to the writer's arrogance. For years they had immersed him in a delightful fog of never-ending inspiration. One of Zeus's daughters, a comely redhead, was especially hurt by the writer's haughtiness because she was the one who had been charged with ensuring the safety of the writer's work. And now for the writer to suggest that it was technology—mere flecks of silicon—that was protecting him....

The redheaded goddess seethed.

Continue reading "Little Boy Dumbass" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Even though success with my own writing—my fiction—continues to elude me, I'm very fortunate in so many ways, and I know it.

I have my health. I have a terrific, supportive spouse, a nice place to live, food on the table, and I'm well-paid for my words. Even if it's writing speeches, scripts, websites and technical docs for now.

Oh, and there's one other thing I have to be thankful for: a new computer.

Make that the new iMac. Pure aluminum-encased hotness.

With the 24" screen, I can have two complete pages of text visible at once, which makes it a lot easier to see what you're working on. You also get a better sense of the flow in a chapter, scene or stretch of dialogue.

The Delicious New iMac Keyboard

Truly, it's a pleasure to sit down to work every day knowing that you won't have to fight with your tools. For the record, the keyboard is the best I've ever worked on. I can't explain why; just go to an Apple store and try it yourself and you'll see what I mean. I won't go into detail about the computer and all its features, but I will mention what writing software I'm using because I've discovered that so far these programs work flawlessly with the computer:

The workspace, before

Continue reading "The Pleasure of Having the Right Tools" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Giving titles to your writing is a bit like knighting somebody. When you do it, the object of the knighting or the title-giving isn't intrinsically changed by the act; if the person's a jerk, he's still a jerk; if the writing stinks, it still stinks. However, what the title can do is make others take notice of something they might otherwise ignore, whether that something is an obscure person from Southern England or a boring book.

The best titles do several things simultaneously:

1. Arouse interest.
2. Encapsulate the story.
3. Include some kind of symbolism.
4. Become their own ideas.

I'm pretty good at coming up with titles for my own work. If nothing else, they're often intriguing. Usually they're based on a catchphrase or a line of dialogue, or they're "homages" to other creative works I admire. Here are a few of my favorite titles of short stories of mine, and the stories behind them:

TITLE: "I Hope You Boys Know What You're Doing"

STORY: My friend Carl and I were doing some "landscaping" for a 98-year-old woman, which basically meant we would cut down anything living. At one point, concerned that we weren't doing a very good job, the old woman shuffled out onto the porch and yelled, "I hope you boys know what you're doin'!" Here it is, from the collection of the same title, on Google Books: IHYBKWYD!

TITLE: "You'll Be Fucked for the Rest of Your Life"

STORY: This is an Al-ism. Al is my inimitable father, and I got this title from a time when he gave me the talk. I was in high school, going out with a senior from Vassar, and my father became concerned that I might get her pregnant. So, loaded up on vodka and tonic, and after having thrown the cat in the pool ("He can swim fine..."), Al said to me (in a thick Maine accent), "Chris...if you get her pregnant, you'll be fucked for the rest of your life!"

TITLE: "Whose Van is that on Fire Out There?"

STORY: My friend Tony and I were in a deli-slash-video store when a man in overalls (I swear), stood in the doorway, clutched his overalls straps and boomed out, "Whose van is that on fire out there?" I went to the window (we were on the 2nd floor), and sure enough, the flames were about 20 feet high. Here it is, if you want to read it (or don't believe me).

TITLE: "Sonata for Knife and Violin in F Major; 'Revenge'"

STORY: This one came to me two or three summers ago when I listened to Beethoven's "Sonata for piano and violin N 9 in A major, Op.47 'Kreutzer'" about 200 times. I wanted to write a story about a homicidal violinist who kills with a chef's knife for the creative power it gives him. I wrote it in four "movements", where each movement has notes to the "conductor" in Italian. Sounds pretentious, but it's not. Oh, and the F Major stands for "majorly f-cked".

As far as other writers are concerned, I'm interested in the stories behind their titles, as well as the titles that might have been. Here are a few examples:

TITLE: The Great Gatsby

ALTERNATES: Among the Ash Heaps and Millionaires, Trimalchio in West Egg, Gold-Hatted Gatsby, The High-bouncing Lover

TITLE: All the President's Men

ORIGINAL: At This Point in Time

TITLE: Jaws

ALTERNATES: Leviathan Rising, Great White, The Shark

My favorite "title story" though, has to be for James Cain's noir masterpiece:

TITLE: The Postman Always Rings Twice

STORY: While writing this book and others, Cain had worked out a system with his mailman where he would ring once when it was good news (checks or an acceptance letter) and twice when it was bad news (bills or a rejection). The postman, he said, always rang twice, so he decided to name the novel for this and the frustration it gave him. There have been a few geniuses in American literature, and Cain is one of them.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a fickle thing, Inspiration. One day it's all over you, like chocolate pudding on nude women wrestlers; the next day it's gone so quickly that, like a bad hangover, you can't remember if it was really there at all—or if you slept with it.

You can’t plan for Inspiration. You can’t lure it in with the smell of apple pie or the feel of 700-thread-count sheets. You can’t say, “Hmm, this month, I think I’ll be inspired. I think I shall do something creative.”

No, brothers and sisters, it doesn’t work that way.

Now, I realize that creativity is possible when you’re not inspired. In fact, one of the hallmarks of a pro is that s/he can produce creative work even when the urge is not overwhelming. But I’m not talking about simply typing or painting or running a movie camera; I’m talking about Inspiration. And that’s different.

When you’re inspired, you’re suddenly overcome by the desire to say something, to paint something, to sing something. Inspiration can also be a rescuer. If you’re a creative person who has been mired in stagnant thinking or predictable experiences, Inspiration throws you a line, pulls you out, dusts you off, gives you a pep talk and cab fare, and, depending on the severity of your condition, either makes sure you get home safely or accompanies you there and lives in the pool house for a while.

The forms Inspiration takes are limitless. A painting in a secluded corner of a museum. A song heard on an elevator. A sunrise, an open road, a freshly painted room. It can be anything really, but if you’re lucky, Inspiration takes the form of a person you never thought you’d meet, someone who arrives like the cool, ozone-rich breeze after a storm and blows away all of your discouragement. These people are rare, and when they come into our lives, we have to treasure every moment, every word we share with them.

Sometimes we’re another person’s Inspiration, and without realizing it, we give that person a few words of encouragement, a few moments of unadulterated appreciation, that will carry that person to the next level. It's one of the best feelings in life, and we should be thankful any time we get a chance to do this for somebody.

Once you're inspired, the trick is keeping Inspiration around. Luckily, the Ancient Greeks, Homer actually, already figured out how to do this. Ever since I read a great book about the creative process called The War of Art, wherein the author describes the following invocation of the Muse from The Odyssey, I've recited it myself every morning while in the middle of a new project. Here it is:

O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus,

sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who,

after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy,

was made to stray grievously about the coasts of men,

the sport of their customs, good and bad,

while his heart, through all the sea-faring,

ached with an agony to redeem himself

and bring his company safe home.

Vain hope—for them. The fools!

Their own witlessness cast them aside.

To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun,

wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return.

Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse. . . .

May Inspiration find you soon and keep you always.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 11:00 AM | Permalink

No, I'm not referring to the sick practice of using razor blades on myself—although there have been times when I've been tempted to. I'm talking about cutting words.


A month ago, I received the most helpful rejection I've ever gotten from an agent. The agent, who shall remain nameless, said that while my novel was good—well-written, great characters, entertaining story—it was overwritten in many places, meaning over-described, over-rendered.


Good advice is only helpful if the person to whom it's directed is ready to hear it. Turns out, after so many no's, I was ready. I looked at my manuscript with an absolutely ruthless eye. If the chapter, scene, sentence or word wasn't fulfilling a purpose, it got its ass cut.

Luckily I'm blessed with a brilliant wife who is a natural editor, and said wife just happens to be unemployed at the moment. Over the past month, Alexas and I would sit down each morning and read the book side-by-side. Each would make recommendations for cuts, and then we'd argue about it for the rest of the day. And then one of us would give in. Usually me.


I went into this edit with an ideal in mind that I've termed The Fred Astaire rule. I don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but I once read that when shooting wrapped on one his films, Astaire would tell the editor, "Make it as good as you can, then cut ten minutes." My plan was to cut the bit of excess verbiage lying around, then reduce the book further by 10 percent. I thought additional cuts would be impossible. I was wrong.


In the end, I took a 93,000-word manuscript down to 74,999. Do the math and you'll find that's over 18,000 words, or almost 20 percent. The book now reads almost twice as fast, leading me to come up with the following formula:

Where

RS=(((OWC-NWC)/OWC)*100)*4

The formula is BS, but the idea is simple. If you take the percent reduction and multiply it by 4, you'll get an idea of how much faster the book reads. For example, if you take a 100,000-word book and cut it to 80,000 words (a 20% reduction), the book will then read approximately 80 percent faster.


Along the way I kept an Excel file that tracked the cuts and gave me a running total. Geeky, yes, but it gave me empirical evidence of my daily progress. Besides, I like counting words. You can see a JPG of this file here.


Now you're probably asking yourself, why is he telling us this? Who cares? What's his point?


My point, which I had to learn the hard way, is this: Most of the time you can cut more. In the case of my book, I was able to cut so much that I'm now embarrassed I sent out the previous version.


But I'm profoundly grateful to the agent who gave me true, constructive criticism. I feel as though I've turned a corner and that representation for this book is just over the horizon. At least Sweetie, my faithful cat, thinks so.

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whenever I'm about to start a new novel, before I write a word of the story—in fact, often before I even know the story— I make lists.

Usually these are lists of scene locations. Every writer is inspired by different elements, but for me place is paramount. When I read, I like to be immersed in the writer's world, so when creating my own stories, it's really important to me to take the reader on a journey, to transport him to a different place, perhaps a place he's never been.

You see, I like to start with the place, and then I ask myself, "What if...?" about that place. In other words, I take the characters and put them in a situation in a certain place, and that's often how I get the plot.

That's my way, but as the freaky German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "This is my way. What is your way? The way doesn't exist."

Continue reading "How I Write, Vol. 1 - Making Lists" »

Posted by Chris Orcutt at 07:00 PM | 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