Wokeness Killed My Favorite Movie

On the off chance you don't know what "wokeness" is, it's viewing the world through the lens of whatever is currently deemed politically correct. And being "woke" killed my appreciation for one of my favorite movies, The Quiet Man starring John Wayne. It's a saccharine homage to Ireland in which Wayne plays an Irish-American boxer who killed a man in the ring and out of guilt, decides to return to his ancestral homeland and start over. The screenplay lards on the clichés so thick that it's a wonder that a real Irishman didn't lob a firebomb onto the set in protest. I realized those shortcomings the first time I saw the movie but gave it a pass because why let reality interfere with a good tale? If nothing else, what I most admire about the Irish is the way they let everyone mangle their heritage and customs, but buy them a pint and they shrug it off. The rest of us should live by their example. In The Quiet Man, Maureen O'Hara and John Wayne play their roles in a typical romance-movie template of cold-warm-cold-warmer-colder-hot-coldest-hotter-happily ever after. For me, the wokeness part comes in when after a spat, O'Hara locks the door of her bedroom. Wayne kicks it open, demonstrating that he will not allow anything to come between them. When he did that, I immediately thought of "Domestic violence. He's off to jail." The movie had plenty of other period tropes that are now painfully uncomfortable to watch.

A couple of TV shows that trigger wokeness are Cheers and Frasier. Both sit-coms depend on double entendres, sexual innuendo, and outright come-ons that would get you hustled to HR and then right onto the street. What blunts the offense are the sharp put-downs and physical reprisals, though I would not suggest acting this way in any professional setting. At least, not without legal representation.

The one author who most activates my personal "wokeness" meter is John D MacDonald. As a teenager I loved his Travis McGee series but on a recent revisit, his women characters are decidedly milquetoast. On the other hand, Mickey Spillane would today be pilloried for his lack of political correctness, though at the time, he was his own brand of woke. Plus his women characters tend to be as dangerous as the men and that trumps any level of wokeness. Sometimes, you just gotta go with the flow.

Christmas Lights and Second Drafts

Christmas is upon us –– the season of good cheer, good food and drink, and time spent with close friends and family. For me, it’s also a time to regroup: I’m between semesters and chipping away on the second draft of a novel.

No two writers work the same way, and finding one’s process is like discovering how to tie a tie: You can hear about how to do it, even see it done, but until you actually finish a novel, you might as well stand before the mirror and try to do it backwards. Some writers outline. (Jeffery Deaver gave a keynote address I heard saying he spends eight months writing the outline, three writing the book.) Others say writing is like driving at night –– you can see only as far as your headlights, writing and plotting as you go. Other writers fall somewhere in between.

Part of developing a writing process is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I do well to focus on character and dialogue, aspects that have always come easily. I’m never going to plot like Dan Brown. It’s simply not in my DNA. Moreover, I believe all writers, to some degree, write what we read. I grew up on series novels –– Parker, MacDonald, Chandler, Grafton, Paretsky, Burke (both Jan and James Lee) –– and I have no real interest in writing one-and-dones, stand-alones. Character interests me. I want to learn more about their lives in the vein Michael Connelly describes in his essay “The Mystery of Mystery Writing”: “The mystery has evolved in recent decades to be as much an investigation of the investigator as an inquiry of the crime at hand. Investigators now look inward for the solutions and means of restoring order. In the content of their own character, they find the clues” (Walden Book Report, September, 1998). I like to have a large canvas when I’m creating the arc of a character, a canvas that might span several books. I enjoy following a character, see her grow and develop and take on new challenges, and I enjoy books whose ill deeds expose moral ambiguity. All of this means the human condition is front and center in my plots: people do things, then, for relatively simple reasons.

So as I near the halfway point in draft No. 2, I’m taking inventory. The characters have come to life and are, fingers crossed, consistent and believable. Ditto the setting. The plot, though, has to be reeled in, simplified. I’m always looking for a way to find a twist at the end while honoring Poe’s and Chandler’s mandates that a mystery not only play fair with readers but also conclude with all necessary clues being front and center, unlike real-world crimes where aspects of the case always go unexplained. But much like the box marked “Christmas Lights” in my garage, this storyline needs someone to untangle it, and like that box in the garage, no amount of money will get my kids to do it for me. That means cutting and adding –– eliminating some red herrings, punching up other characters’ roles.

In the end, all I really want for Christmas is to not face draft No. 3.

Happy holidays!

It never gets easier

Writing never gets easier. Not for me, anyway. Not if I’m continuing to challenge myself.

I’ve written the first 30 pages of a novel-in-progress three times now, using two different points of view and even trying present tense.

Point of view is my largest concern anytime I start a novel. I think it’s the most important decision a fiction writer makes.

I’m several months –– but only three chapters –– into a new novel, one which I hope launches a new series. I want the book to feature a husband and wife team. The wife is a career-oriented power player in her profession; the husband is a cynical type who wants no part of his wife’s relative celebrity. I wrote the first three chapters from the husband’s third-person perspective –– he’s the outsider, viewing his wife, the most powerful person in their workplace. I didn’t love those pages. And, after writing three novels recently using the third-person perspective of a female, I was hankering to write from a male’s first-person point of view. (I grew up on Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald, after all.) So I scrapped the third-person opening, committed to the first-person voice of the husband, which moved him much closer to the action, while making sure the wife remains a large part of the plot from the start. I’m off to the races now.

No discussion of point of view is complete without also mentioning John Gardner’s “psychic distance” chart. In his book The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner offers this wide-to-narrow camera lens view of the distance from which a reader views an author’s scene:

1. It was winter of the year 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3. Henry hated snowstorms.
4. God how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging up your miserable soul

When you reach No. 5, you are inside the character’s head –– and not far from first-person. The benefits of using third person, especially in a crime novel, are clear: You can zoom in (as Gardner’s No. 5 illustrates) with nearly the precision of first-person; however, in third-person, the writer can also withhold information that might be hard to conceal in a first-person story. Michael Connelly, in a2003 BookPage interview, speaks of the challenge of withholding information from the reader when writing in first person: "When you go into first person, all bets are off. You find yourself feeling like you're cheating the reader if you hold anything back. I think that's one of the things that was good about the old [third-person] Harry; I was able to hold things back and kind of spring them on the reader when I wanted to."

While third person has many benefits, I’m a sucker for the intimacy of the first-person speaker. I like to be closer to to the character. Writing in first-person, to me, is like acting: I step into character and voice and record (and convey) the information in a manner true to the speaker’s worldview.

What it always comes down to is making the appropriate choices for the work at hand. After writing 100 pages to get 30, I’m hoping I’ve done that.

Three Starts

I'm writing something new, something I hope will launch a series. I've spent a lot of time pre-writing. I have an outline I like (you know me and outlines: it's a starting point and a safety net). I have characters I would enjoy growing over years, a husband-wife team.

What I'm toying with is the point of view, usually something I never second-guess. I've written a present-tense, first-person opening, and I've written a third-person, multiple-POV opening — each running close to 40 pages — and now I want to try a first-person, past-tense voice.

I grew up reading Robert B. Parker, Ross Macdonald, John D. MacDonald, Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and others writing in that vein. As a reader, I enjoy the walk-behind-the-character-and-view-the-world-through-the-speaker's-eyes vantagepoint. It offers an intimate relationship with the speaker and just maybe with the writer. I'm reading Philip Roth's Exit Ghost right now and pause every few pages to reread a passage. The plot isn't pulling me along; however, the narrator's voice and Roth's turn-of-phrase is providing any and all narrative tension.

Also, it's difficult to separate plot from character when we're dealing with first-person protagonists. The plot is limited by the knowledge and capabilities of your speaker, and when you feature the first-person voice, you must allow readers an in-depth knowledge of your character's limitations; you must play fair with readers, far more so than when writing in the third-person voice.

You've got to show your hand often. I enjoy this type of writing — exploring the depths (and shallows) of my characters. I like that it's akin to acting — stepping into voice and playing the part for a few hours a day. Third-person doesn't provide me the same type of experience.

So I have two partials sitting on my desk and will write the same book from a third vantage point now, the first-person past-tense. It's all a unique and fresh writing experience.