Blues for Paris

I studied photography in Paris a couple decades past, and at one point decided to take long-exposure night-time shots along the Seine. After living in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, I already knew Paris was nowhere near as threatening an environment. And I’d been out at night there on my own, at concerts, plays, talks by photographers, always traveling on foot and by Metro. Still, I was wary about shooting after dark in a less populated spot.

The first time I set up my tripod on the Left Bank, near the Pont de Archêveché, my immediate surroundings were quiet and calm. Light rippled off the water. I sighted and framed potential shots and, with all my other senses, read the atmosphere for signs of trouble.

People strolled past, talking quietly, the flood lights of a bateau mouche spread their streak of daylight across both banks, music bounced down to the river from cars passing by.

There were no red flags, just peace and calm. And its epicenter, I finally realized, seemed to be Notre Dame, buttresses like wings spread out behind her, the spire with its watchful figures, her towers looking west.

My eyes to the viewfinder, vulnerable on all sides, that sense of a guarding presence calmed me down and let me work.

There are claims that buildings are simply enclosed air, objects built from inanimate materials, but I don’t believe it. Buildings are memory boxes, repositories of the voices, footfalls, and lives that have sounded within them.

During my time in Paris I passed Notre Dame on foot, on buses, ate my lunch in the square at her feet. Within her walls and in her deep quiet, I lit candles for my parents. She stands at the center of Paris like a guardian spirit keeping watch over her city and people. Her roots are centuries deep and she misses nothing, because the world comes to her with its news, sorrows, and triumphs.

And now the world is coming to her again, with aid and prayers for her restoration.

Writing a Synopsis

I recently applied for a fellowship that required a novel synopsis. For someone who’s completed their novel, this might not be difficult. In my case, the book is under construction and written only through the first half. I know where it’s headed and how it ends, but telling the story of that second half before having worked out all the specifics, beats, twists? Talk about a sobering experience.

The first step was going online to get information on the elements and requirements of a synopsis. Right away there were two issues to sort out. One was the intermingled use of the terms ‘outline’ and ‘synopsis,’ sometimes within the same entity’s requirements. The most frequent definitions I found were: an outline is something writers create for themselves; a synopsis is what you send to others as a depiction of your book’s contents.

Also, some sites advise that you write the synopsis in the same voice used in the book, while others tell you it should be in business-style prose. After quite a bit of hunting around, the former turned up much more often and I went with that option.

One of the articles I found most helpful was on Jane Friedman’s site. Examples that helped were on a no longer active Miss Snark page, where I searched for the word “fiction” because there were so many examples from several types of writing.

The basic elements are:

  • write it in present tense and third person

  • create a narrative using only the primary characters and conflict(s)

  • show how the plot’s layers carry the narrative through the end

  • reveal the major plot twists and the ending, counter-intuitive as that may be, so the judge, editor, or literary agent can evaluate whether the book delivers on it promise

  • check the guidelines you’re writing for, but often a synopsis is no more than two pages and can sometimes be single-spaced

And now for that second step, getting it done.

In the beginning, it felt a little like drawing a map before I’d traveled through the territory I was sketching out. Immediately, though, it became an interdependent process with writing the book itself, since working through all the demands of the synopsis showed me ways to improve the opening chapters of the story and build a better foundation for it.

All of this required a much deeper analysis of the entire book, the characters, their history, the story’s events and plot points—everything. In the abstract, pre-synopsis, it all made sense. In fact there were gaps, dropped threads, and an assortment of other issues. Summarizing the story forced me to weave together all of the elements in ways I’d planned to tighten up when I got to the end and could look back over the entire story.

Now that it’s done, I know what an important exercise and tool writing a synopsis is. If your story doesn’t make sense at elevator pitch length, it probably won’t hold together in the writing either. Better to know that up front. It was a challenge, but I’m glad for the experience.

So this is where I have to laugh at myself a little. A few years back, a writer I knew regularly told me to always write a synopsis, even for short stories, and to write the synopsis first. Back then I could not see how it would help any part of the process. Now I get it.

One more writing lesson learned.

a fiction writer studies screenplay structure

A gifted writer I know once gave me this advice: the best way to master plot and story structure is to study screenplays. They’re action and dialogue segmented into the building blocks of scenes, and each scene is there for a reason. Studying them had forced him to look at, and cut out, the slack and excess in his fiction work.

I finally decided to follow his advice. Up until now I’ve only written short stories. Then one of them morphed into something the size of Texas. But realizing it had the potential for a novel-length work was like standing at a very wide river looking at the other side. I could see that other side, sort of, but wasn’t sure how to get there. So I devised a screenwriting study plan focused on plot and structure.

Worksheets

The first step was reading beat sheets (film) and plot worksheets (fiction). Beat sheet templates can feel queasily like a paint-by-numbers approach to story telling (on page 10 do this, on page 28 do that), but reading one for a film you’re familiar with reveals the steps in that story’s propulsion. The templates can also provide scaffolding for creating your own plot.

29 beat sheets & worksheet links (bottom of page, from Writers in the Grove)

Plot worksheets for writers (KM Editorial)

The most useful exercise was creating my own beat sheet for the film Michael Clayton. I watched it with a blank template and a copy of the film script open on my computer (lots of hitting pause involved here), and wrote out the beats into the template. It was like seeing a 3D X-ray of the film’s architecture, and gave me a concrete sense of how to structure a layered story with complex characters.

Reading

The second phase involved books about screenwriting that fiction writers considered useful. This left out all the paint-by-number equivalents. I read five books but will highlight the two I found most helpful.

The first is Dan O’Bannon’s Guide To Screenplay Structure. He addresses the logic and rhythm of story structure in a way that translates easily to writing fiction. In addition, he examines theories of storytelling and structure from Aristotle’s Poetics through Robert McKee. That section alone saves you reading about six other books, which is no small gift. There are exercise sheets to prompt your own scrutiny of films (that could also be used for fiction) as well as a 6-8 page analysis for each of 12 films that include an exercise at the end. You can create a blank template based on his analyses and use that to analyze other films or fiction.

The second book is by Karl Iglesias and is made up primarily of verbatim advice, broken down by topic, from about 20 career screenwriters. Its focus is firmly on writing and story structure. A little time is given to dealing with studios and the film business. The advice is realistic and helpful, including references to books and teachers that had most inspired the screenwriters who were interviewed. The book’s title, 101 Habits of Successful Screenwriters (2d edition) is catchy but doesn’t really signal how thorough the contents are.

Favorite writing tip:

“doing the 20s”
One screenwriter in 101 Habits lists or sketches out 20 ways that a scene or plot point could be done, then picks the best. “If you make yourself write twenty ideas, not worrying about whether they’re any good or not, often the ninth or tenth one will be golden because you didn’t settle for the first thing that popped into your mind.”

The lesson for me: the first thing that pops into my head is likely to also be the first thing that pops into a lot of people’s heads. Coming up with 19 alternatives will take each of us in a different direction, along our own neural pathways, and is a much more likely way to arrive at an interesting, as opposed to predictable, story.

Most helpful structure tip:

Decide on the theme and make sure every scene is related to it.

My take: at the heart of the story you want to write and the spark that ignited it, is an essential point you want to make or explore. That’s your theme. Don’t include an event or character that doesn’t relate, reveal, or lead to this core concept.

And that brings us back to the taut economy of screenplays, which is a good reason to study them!

Reboot

In which the resident author goes back to speaking up.

“To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passion of an age that forgives nothing.”

“The greatest renown today consists in being admired or hated without having been read.”

“The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies…the strange liberty of creation is possible.”

These are as clear-eyed a description of our time as anything I’ve read in a while.

Although I’d add one thing. It’s the trickiness of finding unfrazzled stretches of time when we’re not redlining through our task lists, when there’s enough brain-oxygen available to imagine and produce creative work. Personally, I have to switch out of hyper-mode and move from micro-focus to wide angle―what I call long-thought mode.

And then, after all the time, revisions, weighing of words and sentences, double-checking rhythm and beats, someone may read three lines (or three words) of what you’ve written, snap to an opinion, and dismiss it, all in a matter of a few seconds.

Carefully considered and constructed or not, whatever we put out there has to survive a click-bait culture where algorithms that serve advertising and the politification of everything rule. No pressure.

But that knobby little seed at the pit of all our souls still wants to reach out and make contact. We still want to share our latest story or song, that captured handful of our own aurora borealis of color and light, spits and howls.

Sometimes the response we receive feels thoroughly unrelated to what we’ve produced. Some people need to decontruct and apply labels so they can give the work a good drop-kick and move on. Some―and god willing our work finds them―say yes, I’ve felt that too, or hey, I’ve never looked at it that way, or just, thanks, that was cool.

It’s the reason we make that scary reach beyond the borders of ourselves, just to catch a glimpse of that slow dawn of recognition, of yes, of aha. So we keep on chasing the “strange liberty of creation.”

Which leads back to those quotes at the top that so accurately describe this specific moment on the planet: Albert Camus, December 1957, in a lecture delivered at the University of Uppsala. L’Artiste et son temps.*

Plus ça change, non?

————————————–

*Translated by Justin O’Brien, published in English as Create Dangerously in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Publiée dans les Discours de Suède sous le titre L’artiste et son temps

Silenced

Fall 2017 brought long weeks of bearing witness to destruction.

It felt like a literal fall, and a steep drop.

White supremacist rallies and violence. Communities leveled by hurricanes, floods, and wildfire, ripped open by inexplicable blood shed at an outdoor concert, in a church, across a rural county. Twitter invective from a president who governs like it’s 1959 and never sees a white face when he’s looking for the cause of the country’s problems.

And that’s just in the U.S.

The intensity of nature’s power is one thing, the white elitist hatred was more than I could bear. I went to rallies for inclusion, relieved to see they dwarfed the population of white supremacists intent on turning the local tide to their maniacally limited views. Views euphemistically marketed as free speech.

Sure, you’re free to speak your mind, just be honest about what’s on it. The Charlottesville rally was named with a little less sleight of hand: Unite the Right. But don’t call it a rally for speech rights when the segment of the population that’s protesting is white and predominantly male, coinciding with the segment of the population that runs just about everything in the country.

And, of course, the presidential tweets kept launching, like spitballs through the national discourse.

By the middle of October, I’d been silenced by it all. I didn’t have the words to turn these events or anyone’s responses to them into a perspective that would clarify anything, a picture that would make the fine points and interconnections visible or tangible.

We found out local governments had allowed development in unwise―to put it mildly―places without ensuring developers complied with laws and building codes. Floodplain maps weren’t revised to reflect changes in the environment and the effects of building on that environment. Hurricanes increased in breadth and power. Western forests showed us what can happen when they are depleted, dried out, and vulnerable. People scrambled to survive storms, fires, and bullets. And now mudslides, from rains following the fires.

All this after decades of a slower building but equally destructive storm: rising living costs and sinking or stagnant income levels for most of us.

On celluloid, George Bailey won his checkmate stand-off with Mr. Potter. On the ground here in the U.S., Mr. Potter has taken the highest office of the land, and like many in the nose-bleed elevations of upper income, he is only interested in more. To give anything, as Bailey did to keep his community properly housed and thriving, was soft-headed foolishness to Potter’s wealth-addicted eyes.

If that’s not a familiar tale, we can look to All The Money In The World for a modern film version of the same addiction.

Spread across all of that is a sizzling layer of American entertainment and news (whether it’s actually news or just more entertainment) that seems focused on getting people agitated, angry, and eager to vent, or to open that pressure valve onto someone else. Like a church full of worshipers, or a plaza loaded with country music fans.

So where’s the ballast, or the balance, if you believe people and community are more important than walls and wealth, if you’ve felt silenced, as I have, by this nine-alarm hot mess delivered to us daily via our news sources of choice?

I’ve come to realize it starts with showing up, standing up, and speaking up. So that’s my assignment to myself for 2018: no more being shocked into silence, it’s time to get shocked into words.

Fires, landscape and loss

Our sense of landscape goes deeper than familiar hikes and favorite cafés. The streets we know, personal landmarks we pass, buildings we spend our days in and the views from their windows, they all give our lives contour and context.

When that landscape is incinerated, as it has been in Santa Rosa, in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, our inner compass points burn too.

The horizon of losses from these ongoing fires feels endless and is not fully known. Families, friends, animals, and community are what matter most. Losing your home and belongings is its own depth charge of a nightmare. And it’s no small thing to lose the places where you’ve left footsteps and gathered memories.

Map of Evacuation Centers in Sonoma, Napa County and Beyond. From The Press Democrat

Tipping Point Emergency Relief Fund

Extensive listings of organizations helping fire evacuees, places for evacuees and their pets and large animals, organizations accepting donations. From SFGate

POV & Unreliable Narrators—in fiction & in life

In fiction, stories are often told in the voice of a reliable narrator. It’s a voice that guides us through a story without skewing the nature of the events taking place, the characters experiencing them, or the underlying truths and meanings depicted.

Point of view, or POV, is basically where that narrator’s―and the reader’s―sight is aimed.

And POV is what jumped out at me about the “echo chamber” memo (full text) written by a junior engineer at Google that went viral early in August. It covered what he saw as Google management’s misconceptions about women’s capabilities, and what he called the Google echo chamber. To back his argument, he presented supporting evidence that appeared carefully cherry-picked.

His memo illustrates what the default setting is for a lot of us:

when we look out at the world, we think of our own first person point of view as a reliable narrator.

But here’s the catch. We forget to examine our assumptions. We forget we’ve even made assumptions. And we forget the ways in which we tend to gloss over or ignore whatever doesn’t fit our constructs.

In the realm of fiction, this is something a good beta reader will cure you of pretty quickly by pointing out gaps and inconsistencies. Most writers are familiar with these wake-up calls from the world outside our own heads.

In the day-to-day of non-writing life, we each tend to create our own POV-reinforcing echo chambers, and there aren’t necessarily any beta readers to snap us out of it.

The second thing that struck me about the echo chamber memo, and has deepened through events surrounding and since the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, is how tired I am of a particular strain of white narrative voice, especially as it’s become increasingly histrionic and exhausting.

It’s a voice that’s been with us always, but its vituperative levels have been rising here in the states since the 2016 US presidential campaign. And it was during coverage of Charlottesville that the weariness finally hit me full force. It’s a tiredness with deep roots, from decades of being raised, schooled, cajoled, ridiculed, and judged―usually unfavorably―by this particular POV.

I think of it as the voice of the Old White Guard, although it obviously has new constituents. And, full disclosure, I’m half white or anglo myself.

So let’s call this POV first person self-reflexive. It’s from a specific subset of white culture. It’s often male. It’s entirely self-referential. It doesn’t question its own accuracy and is certain those who disagree are wrong. It isn’t convinced that all white males are qualified and capable, never mind women and people of other skin colors.

It also has a need to diminish everyone else in the room that’s reached the white-knuckle stage lately. And that’s what has stood out most: in an era of global challenges that demand stepping up with creative, collaborative, and inventive responses, this is a voice that sounds unsurpassably needy and self-focused.

If there’s an upside to this continuum of events, from the echo chamber memo to the violence and invective surrounding and since the Unite the Right rally, it’s that we’ve had the chance to see how limited and how skewed this POV is—a classic example of an unreliable narrator.

They can have their say just like the rest of us, but they can’t eclipse the multiplicity of voices across the breadth of the United States, or any other country.

We need to keep moving forward to a multi-racial, ethnic, culture, religion, gender democracy.

Let’s call that point of view collective-omniscient. It may be noisy and demanding work, but if we keep our eyes, conversations, and POVs open, we’ll get there.

A walk through the Redwoods

Any time you need to get out, get calm, and breathe, I recommend a visit with the Redwoods. They’re some of the earth’s oldest breathing citizens, who count time in decades and centuries instead of seconds.

This is a small tribute to the trees and caretakers of the Armstrong Redwoods near Guerneville, California.

 

Invest in the millennium.  Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit.   Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
–    Wendell Berry,
from Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
published in The Country of Marriage

 

 

Trees are the earth’s endless efforts to speak to the listening heaven.
– Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies

The greatest gift of a garden is the restoration of the five senses.
– Hanna Rion, Let’s Make a Flower Garden

 

Visitors were enchanted by crooked, gnarled trees I would previously have dismissed because of their low commercial value. Walking with my visitors, I learned to pay attention to more than just the quality of the trees’ trunks.
– Peter Wohlleben, from the introduction
to
The Hidden Life of Trees

 

 

 

Restoration ecology is experimental science…. In its attempts to reverse the processes of ecosystem degradation it runs exactly counter…to the whole cultural attitude of regarding the Earth as commodity rather than community.
–   Stephanie Mills 

 

…most individual trees of the same species growing in the same stand are connected to each other through their root systems. It appears that nutrient exchange and helping neighbors in times of need is the rule, and this leads to the conclusion that forests are superorganisms with interconnections much like ant colonies.
–  Peter Wohlleben,
The Hidden Life of Trees

 

 

I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
–  Henry David Thoreau

 

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
– Mary Oliver, from When I Am Among the Trees from Thirst

 

In every walk with Nature one receives far more than he seeks. –  John Muir

 

What did the tree learn from the earth
to be able to talk with the sky?
–  Pablo Neruda

 

The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.
–  William Blake

 

 

Voyages, vacations, and road trips

To celebrate summer travel, some excerpts from Travels with Myself and Another by Martha Gellhorn, an American journalist and novelist who covered wars from WWII to Vietnam.

As anyone who travels much knows, things on the road―or water―don’t always go as planned, and that is often where the adventure begins. The focus of these essays are some of Gellhorn’s voyages that didn’t go so well, and include China, Africa, the Caribbean, and Suriname.

The pictures are my own, taken in Northern California.

 

“The airline, called China National Aviation Company (CNAC) consisted of two DC3s and three DC2s, elderly machines and no nonsense about comfort. Compared to passenger planes now, these were flying beetles.

… We climbed, as if climbing a spiral staircase, in tight jolting circles over Hong Kong until we reached fourteen thousand feet. All lights went off except the dim light in the pilot’s cabin and we crossed the Japanese lines, brightly lit far below. In half an hour, the storm hit us. I had been watching the flickering exhaust flame on a wing, but the wing vanished into cloud that looked grainy and hard as granite. Hail sounded like a threshing machine. Everything froze including the air speed indicator. Roy explained that if the speed dropped below sixty-three miles per hour the plane stalled and went into a spin, but there was no cause for anxiety; he opened his window a crack and judged air speed that way; he’d done it often.”

 

“The dinghy was not as long as I am. Carlton put the hatch cover in it, making a peculiar seating or lying arrangement, a convex curve for two thirds of the length then a drop to a concave curve. I spread the blankets on this surface, placed the pillow at one end, slid my legs under the seat and established myself with umbrella for sunshade. All I had to do was duck when the boom swung over.”

 

“With a picnic, water and heavy sandwiches, I set off to explore. St Martin was a magic island. Secret white sand coves indented the shore. I chose one far from town, walled in by thick bush that the rain had polished and framed by swaying royal palms. Under a china-blue sky, I sat naked in the shallows to watch schools of fish, recognizing only silver baby barracudas. And waded out to swim through glass-clear Nile-green water, where you could see below to the sand and more passing fish, into silky deep sapphire sea.”

 

[Paramaribo Grand Hotel, Suriname]

“I was swooning with happiness by five o’clock when I settled on a ruptured cane chair in the lobby to listen to the going gossip. At five o’clock promptly the mosquitoes arrived. ‘Union mosquitoes,’ a soldier observed. ‘They work from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m.’ They were the biggest mosquitoes I had met anywhere and fearless, they zoomed in to cover one’s arms and legs and died feeding while others replaced those you had beaten to death. When the blazing sun went down, the air refused to cool despite nightly rainy season cloudbursts. The rain was lukewarm, encouraged the mosquitoes, turned the streets into quagmires which dried to deep dust a half hour after sunrise. Between five and six in the morning, there was a very faint freshness to breathe.”

Find the book here

Read about Gellhorn, and the journalism prize awarded in her name, here