Life (and everything else) is a movie…

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante

From my first book, The Eighth Day, to my current release, Forgive Us Our Trespasses, many readers emailed me or commented that “they could see it as a movie.” Or that “it should be a movie,” or “it would make a great movie.” My favorite is, “Why didn’t you make it as a movie?“

At some level, these well-intentioned comments bristle my literary soul. After all, a published book is the same achievement, relative to process, as a produced movie. They are both the end-product of creative inspiration. And each is the pinnacle of its art. (My card-playing Uncle Guido would say, “It’s da Pinochle a de art.” Uncle G always put his cards on the table.)

Last week I attended a very fancy dinner in a chic Manhattan restaurant. The check was more than my monthly rent when I was 35. Luckily, this time I was the guest. I’m no kid, but I was the youngest guy at the table. The purpose of the dinner meeting was to discuss a “big investment deal.” More money than the entire block I lived on back then costs. This was serious stuff. Four hours of exquisite apps, salmon, Delmonico steaks, wines, martinis, and “to the moon” desserts. All for three people!

But the amazing thing was we all had movie stories. It seems the movies were a common drug we were all addicted to. By mid-dinner, we were suddenly all teenagers, speaking of our hits and near misses in the movie biz, fueled by celluloid enthusiasm and cinematic verve, it was the most energetic part of the evening.

Orson Welles, in describing what it was like to be making his, (soon to be classic film), Citizen Kane, is quoted as saying, “It’s the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.” Well, the ‘little boys’ sitting around the table agreed.

The big, eight-figure deal may or may not happen, but that night, we all got to dabble in “the dream.”

P.S. Every time, and there are many, that some reader says my books should be a movie, I always ask, “You know anybody?“

May the Force be with you…

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash

Okay, so by now we have all chuckled over the unofficial holiday name of May 4th. So here’s my, MAY THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU writing tip.

Unless you were living on Alderon… (Sorry, too soon?) You know that THE FORCE is a tappable energy source that puts the physical in metaphysical. Well, for we who chose to wield a pen over a lightsaber, there is a force many of us have had with us all along. I am speaking of what can also be defined as being in the zone. Now, I can’t scientifically prove this, but I believe when we are really comfortable with our CRAFT, our ART is free to wander through the universe. To drop in on past lives, current lives, or future lives. Suddenly, if we are deep in creation, an out of the box thought comes to us. It may be a small detail or major plot point. Other authors have used terms like, out of nowhere, all of a sudden, then it came to me, and a few other synonyms for that ‘Aha’ moment when a missing piece or needed next piece comes to us. Another term maybe the MAGIC of writing. I love it. I have tons of moments of synchronicity when what was in my head, and on the page was suddenly standing before me.

Like when I was writing (on the subway) and offered a woman my seat. She liked the chivalry involved and we spoke for a bit. Eventually we got to, “What do you do?” She says, I used to be a trainer for Koko the Gorilla. I stopped dead in my tracks (while the train kept rolling on its tracks), opened my laptop and showed her the last thing I wrote before I looked up to offer her my seat.

“You know like that monkey on TV, you know, Koko the Gorilla.” Kronos, the kid from the Bronx said.

“Oh yes, many cognitive issues and studies have been done with her. She’s amazing, and talks to humans through sign language.” Janice, the trained psychologist said.

At which point the woman made a peace sign, tapped it below her left shoulder, and then made like she was beating her chest, she was signing “Koko the Gorilla.”

Q.E.D.

Many of us have had this experience when we are totally engaged and actually living in our writing. I once described it on radio some time back as, “tapping into universal intellect.”

So may your writing jump into hyperspace and may the force… well, you know.

Writing Tip Wednesday: The Gun in the Drawer…

The audience settles. House lights dim. The curtain opens. The stage lights come up. On the stage, an opulent den. Big cushy leather chairs opposite an ornate desk. Well-stocked bookshelves along the wall. A globe on a stand. A character enters stage left. He reaches into his waistband and pulls out a revolver. He slides open the drawer and places the gun in, and slides it closed.

I guarantee you, from that moment on, everyone in the theater is focused on that drawer. The specter of it being within his reach charges every line of dialog with a subtext of impending confrontation. A normally innocent inquiry becomes a possible trigger to pull the trigger. “What did you do yesterday?” suddenly has a dark shade as the aura of the gun raises it to an interrogation tone.

It is the same as if a wife character learns she is pregnant but hides it from her loser husband. A husband who has lost his job and the family doesn’t know. The kid who flunked out but can’t tell his parents. The fiancée, who lost the engagement ring money at the racetrack. These too are guns in the drawer. They shape the trajectory of the dialogue and the character’s actions and responses to things.

Got it? Secrets. Below the text, subtext, charge the text. Now as a book coach I have found a very common error in most manuscripts is when the writer places the gun in the drawer, but it does not affect anything. Like it was never there. Secrets are prime character motivators. Secrets yield lies. Lies yield mistrust and mistrust yields suspense. All that takes a simple scene, sequence, or book and charges it with subtext.

For more writing tips to help you author your next novel, check out my online course, From Writer to Author. It will open up the drawer to your next manuscript!

The Write Place…

A booth at a diner in Jersey, the knee knocker seat on the LIRR, or on my lap sitting in a chaise on the beach in Puerto Rico, even in a hotel room at a writer’s conference. All these admittedly non-romantic settings in which I have penned much of my 6 published novels, 4 number ones, and three pending manuscripts, have one thing in common. A space that, beyond everything else, allowed me to write, compose, imagine, edit, polish, and author a manuscript. That space can best be visualized as a box with its four corners drawn from my left ear to the left edge of the screen and from the right side of the screen back to my right ear. Everything outside that “thought rectangle” dissolves away, goes out of focus, and becomes the comforting background lullaby that has underscored my “performance” whenever I wrote.

For me, when the idea is breaching in the birth canal, there’s an immediacy to getting it out, regardless of the purity or quiescence of wherever I happen to be. I have even knocked out a few paragraphs on my iPhone in the back of a funeral parlor during a wake. Even in my home, I may be out on the balcony, on the kitchen table, or with my laptop on a snack tray, usually with a TV, radio, or some other background noise that has accompanied my workspace all the way back to homework in elementary school.

I am lucky enough to have met and conversed with some of the most well-known and prolific authors on the planet or listened to them interviewed at writer’s conferences. Question 5 or 6 is always, “Do you have a place, or time or routine when you write?” and some have elaborate ceremonies and rituals and others the simple; “my desk every day from 10-2.” Some need a fresh pot of coffee or progressive jazz on the stereo, or in one very famous case, toke up on prodigious amounts of weed. (And he is at the very pinnacle of a successful author!)

Again, just last night, a vintage episode of the Dick Van Dyke show aired in black and white. The one where Rob, a head writer for a TV show, is driven to become a novelist. The setup is that he can’t get to writing because of all the domestic distractions of his suburban New Rochelle home, which are frustrating his efforts. The solution to the marital friction that this occurs results in a suggestion from his wife Laura that he go to a cabin in the woods for a few weeks and concentrate on his book. Well, of course, he winds up doing all kinds of foolish things which delay and get in the way of his writing. Finally admitting that it was him, not the setting, that is the problem, he puts the idea of being an author on the shelf having learned that his novel just wasn’t ready to come out yet.

I find that notion to be paramount amid all the reasons a writer can’t author. In my class, From Writer to Author, at the online Academy of Creative Skills.com, I address the ‘internal space’ that we need to create in order to satisfy that need to create.

Rob does write one thing in all those days, the only line he could manage, the dedication, to his wife expressing his love and admiration of her. His line after she reads it and does her trademark, “Oh, Rob…” he adds, “Now all I have to do is write a novel to hang on the end of it.”

Aw, 60’s TV, where everything works out in 28 minutes and 30 seconds, including commercials.

By the way, I wrote this at 6:30 in the morning, on a snack table, with the sun coming up over the skyline of New York splashing over the Hudson River to my right, – the iHeart radio from my iPhone on in the background.

Ready to embark on your journey From Writer to Author? Check out my online course for 15 steps to elevate your writing craft!

Character Building ala Citizen Kane

In a previous blog post, I spoke of empathetic love connectors to the reader and used the classic film Citizen Kane as a reference. Well, here’s another little gem for authors coming from the genius writing duo of H.J Mankowitz and Orson Welles. I believe they are teaching all writers by channeling this lesson through the words of their character, Rawlston.

I like the simple thing notion. Because simple means common, and usually common is not complicated because it is innate to us, simple. So, when building a Character follow what Rawlston (Mankowitz and Welles) instructs us. After all, they made a movie that many call the greatest movie of all time, all around a simple thing. Rosebud!

Fruit of the Family Tree

Photo by Johnny Cohen on Unsplash

As we authors fill out a Character it’s always good to investigate the family. We are all shaped both positively and negatively by our familial connections, experiences, and memories. As we grow up with impressionable open minds, the right thing said by a relative can lead us down a righteous and successful path, or to prison. The beauty of enhancing Character profiles with family-borne aspects is that you can thank or get even with the people in your family.  Just joking, but I have used a Character’s family member many times to explain, rationalize or put a finer point on a Character’s predilection without needless expository verbiage. Often, it’s not a whole in-depth bio but sometimes it’s just a line, “My Uncle Joe was like that.” Or a longer description of a brother who died in Iraq as a prime motivator to enlist. These baked-in memories and trajectories are indelible and can be stated in the story or kept to yourself as a personality subtext that is never revealed to the reader but guides you where to place the character on their arc.

In my own life, I have a formula that describes my emotional, practical, and psychological makeup. I find it’s true in everything I do; from being a director on a set, a senior Vice President, an entrepreneur, or an uncle. When I am at my best, all cylinders running at 100%, and I am in touch with the universe and tapping into a white-light energy source that almost guarantees that I can handle anything and usually make it better for all concerned. When I am in that state, I feel that I am 60% my mom, 30% my dad, and 10% ESP.  When I am producing, my mom can charm a Teamster out of charging me meal penalties. When I am running a business, my dad can stand up to competition and people who wish you no good. When I am authoring, directing, or helping someone through a rough patch in their lives, then ESP (or it could be my great grandparents, or some guardian angel,) sends me a notion, a spark, or sometimes a smack on the head to ask about, or bring into the situation something random, out of the box, that opens a new door to a character, or it may point me to a course of action for a person to ponder, or for me whether to cut the blue or the red wire.

Now, I can’t prove that to anyone, but I know when I am in that ‘zone.’ When I am operating at just that right balance from the positive results I get. The whole point of this is that we are the cake our families put in the oven, what happens later is either the icing on top or the grit from falling on the kitchen floor. This should also be true of your Characters; they didn’t just pop out of the turnip patch. They can be shaped by their family for better or worse. For further proof simply look at the wholesale employment of therapists and psychiatrists who, in most cases, deal with replanting, pruning, or dealing with the fruit of a person’s family tree.

Obviously, we all have our own family stories, joys, and tragedies from our lives. This little treatise is by no means exhaustive but just a little nudge to suggest that sometimes the fruit of the family tree, whether it is juicy or rotted, could be just the thing you need to motivate your story, plot, character, conflict, or resolution.

If you liked this tip, check out my course From Writer to Author for a deeper look into character building: https://courses.academyofcreativeskills.com/p/from-writer-to-author

Happy Belated and Joyous Birthday James!

Yesterday was James Patterson’s birthday. He is a monster author. And why not? I know where he came from. Same place I did. Advertising. We both were creatives in the New York ad biz. I understand the approach to story that comes from the discipline to get a message out in only 75 words or less. Thirty seconds of broadcast time that educates, motivates, and ends with a call to action, while wrapped around a USP device.

We shook hands once, at a Borders conference when my first book and his 14,345th title was coming out. I exaggerate, but like I said he’s a monster. But in point of fact, he’s a brand! Good for him!

I spend a lot of time helping good writers to become authors. Ultimately the next stop after author is BRAND. And if your brand gets big enough, your style can take a back seat. You may continue it or freely move around the literary Ouija board, without fear of rejection because your brand sells the book. He has been successful in many genres: romance novels, historical fiction, nonfiction, children’s books, and science fiction. 

But for the rest of us mere mortals, hammering out 85,000 words or so, into a compelling, satisfying manuscript is the immediate task before us, on the way to potentially becoming a brand. To that end it helps to find the common ground with those whose names are above the title, we all face the blank page. We all have no idea if what we are composing will be a great symphony or a one hit wonder. Branding aside, every book stands alone, even those in a series. So how to succeed in authoring a novel? I believe the answer is…

“I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It’s very disciplined, yes, but it’s joy for me.” – James Patterson

That’s one more thing that I share with Mr. Patterson, and I am sure with nearly every successful author, we both consider writing a joy. Finding joy, is the key to facing that page, working out the plot, defining and building character and tying out the resolution of a brilliant conflict. Sheer Joy!

I can’t teach Joy. But when I see it in a student, I know we are more than halfway along to a better, manuscript. In a word, the whole process becomes a… joy!

Oh, one more thing, the New York Ad shop where I was a creative director/senior VP for 40 years, was Sid Paterson Advertising. No relation, and only one ‘T.’