Why I do lyrics

For National Poetry Month. 

Some people quilt. Some crochet. Some play cards. Some play music. Some build things. Some solve puzzles. Some take up gardening. My stepfather rebuilt grandfather clocks. Or if you’re my former neighbor, you wash your car and spiff it up. Me, I write lyrics.

I’m talking hobbies, of course. We don’t do it for the cash although occasionally someone is able to turn their hobby into a profit-making venture. No, we do it for the pleasure of it. We know it will never pay for itself but we do it just the same.

Now where I came by this desire to write lyrics I will never know. There is no songwriter in my family that I know of. Yet I’ve been writing lyrics and poetry all my life. At least as far back as to the time I was nine when I wrote my first poem, “Chewing Green Corn”. Even now I look back on that three-stanzaed sucker and wonder what made me do it.

It was a long time gone before I could create anything that I would call a decent lyric. One that was worth showing anybody and calling it mine. Mostly it was about love or the longing for love, the rhyming of moon and June. Liking Rod McKuen in those days did not make me better at the craft of creating a good lyric. In fact, I found myself picking up many of his bad habits.

Then, sometime in the seventies, I began to write lyrics about things other than love. My God, hearing “Feelings” for the five millionth time would cure anybody of that habit. Somewhere along the way I learned I could write humorous lyrics as well as the other stuff.

Once I get that opening line it’s just a matter of gardening. I start planting roses and pretty soon I have tulips. Then I’m in there doing some weeding and out goes the inessentials. Along the way occasionally I get lucky and come up with a line I really like. Like the one from “Shoes Done Me In”, “Separate closets and shoes get lost.”

Now you know why I am partial to certain musicians like Mark Knopfler, Ellis Paul, Gene Clark, Bob Dylan, Dan Fogleberg, Ian Tyson, Gordon Lightfoot, Cole Porter and Bernie Taupin. There’s nothing like a good lyric to get my attention. When I hear one, I am surprised and in awe of the talent that created it. I always feel like I’ve learned something new. It may be a phrase or a way of saying something that I had never heard before or a feeling that was imparted through those words.

As I say, it’s just a hobby. No reward but the sheer magic and pleasure of birthing something that never existed before. Guess I’ll keep doing it. Who knows. I might win the lottery and hire Ellis Paul to write some music for one of my little ditties. You never know.

Do you have some kind of hobby?

To Gatsby or not to Gatsby, that is the question

Most writers want to be somebody else. Joseph Heller wanted to be Groucho Marx. Norman Mailer wanted to be Ernest Hemingway. Ernest Hemingway wanted to be God. But that job was taken. So he became Ernest Hemingway instead. Mark Twain did not want to be Edgar Allan Poe, though Sam Clemens did imbibe from time to time. He had way too much Mississippi River in him to be anybody other than Tom Sawyer. After all, Tom could tell a whopper with the best of ’em. That’s a fact.

Thing is that Shirley Jackson wanted to be Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. Flannery O’Connor wanted to be a saint. They both just about made it. Jonathan Franzen wants to be John Updike. John Updike wanted to be Henry Green and Proust while J. D. Salinger wanted to be Scott Fitzgerald.

Scott Fitzgerald wanted to be Zelda’s husband. Jay Gatsby had a lot of Fitzgerald in him, especially his desire for Daisy Buchanan. She’s a stand-in for Zelda. Thing is Fitz was as much Nick Carroway as he was Jay Gatsby. Seems to me that Nick went east to become Herman Melville and go after the great American novel, the “Moby Dick” of the twentieth century. As John Lovitz used to say, “Could happen.” Nick managed to gather the material when he arrived East. Jay Gatsby was Captain Ahab and Daisy Buchanan was the whale. (What is with writers and fish?) Daisy always wore white and her palace in East Egg was white.

Thing is Thomas Wolfe was writing both the “Moby Dick” and “War and Peace” put together. So Nick never had a chance to do that. There’s only room for one great American epic novelist at a time.

The point of all this is that few things are as they seem on the surface. As my granny used to say, “It just ain’t so. You got to dig deeper, Boy, to get to the marrow of the thing.” And, as far as I am concerned, “The Great Gatsby” is not Jay Gatsby’s story. The character arc points elsewhere and that elsewhere is straight at Nick Carroway. Nick is the one who changes in the novel. From beginning to end, Gatsby is after Daisy. As he floats facedown and dead in the pool, he still believes he can have Daisy.

The movie folks don’t seem to get it. They continue to make movies, doing a Somerset Maugham where the Narrator Nick is barely a character and making Gatsby the protagonist. All through the novel, it’s Nick the reader sees change. It is Nick, the country bumpkin, who comes to the big bad city to make his fortune. It is Nick who gets the Daisy treatment. It is Nick who is impressed with Gatsby and all his parties. It is Nick whom Tom Buchanan confides in about his trysts with Myrtle Wilson. It is Nick who is sadder but wiser at the end of the novel.

If the focus is going to be on Gatsby, then what we get is a character study with a plot thrown in at Act 3. Character studies do not good movies make. By the end of the novel, it’s obvious that Gatsby has been knocking at the wrong door all along. And Gatsby never gets it.

Why would Daisy give up everything for Gatsby? Things like a husband who got his wealth the legitimate way. He inherited it. Jay Gatsby got his the nouveau riche way. He gambled for it. Plus Tom Buchanan treats Daisy like a princess. Daisy is no Jordan Baker. She has enough self-understanding to know that she is fragile. It won’t take much to break her. Plus she and Tom have a child together. Old Gatz forgot that. For a mother, a child trumps a dream any day.

And she’s pretty happy in the cocoon her husband has made for her. He may be an s.o.b. but he’s the kind of s.o.b. who will give her the security Gatsby will never give her. The Gatz has beaucoup cash now. But her family warned her about the Panic of 1907. “Here today, gone tomorrow,” her daddy wisely pointed out to the darling of his eye.

So where does this leave the film maker? With an older, but wiser, Nick Carroway. Mature enough to know that maybe, just maybe, he can make a life with Jordan Baker while he writes that “Moby Dick” of a novel he’s been meaning to write. And maybe they can take off to Paris. After all, Jordan Baker had Hadley’s money.

I know. That’s not in the novel. But who knows? It could be in the movie.

I am at my best …

When things get really bad, I go to the writing place. Neil Gaiman.

When I sit in a chair and face a blank canvas and make up words on that blank slate before me. I am at my best when I rewrite those words and create a better draft than the one before. I am at my best when I add and subtract words from that scribbling I recently put on the page. I am at my best when I squeeze everything I can out of those words and get juice. Writing, I love every part of it.

The beach appears empty. It is high tide and the waves rush toward the shore. The sun is about to set. A fiery orange colors the sky the way Van Gogh must have colored his canvas. With strokes of genius. Suddenly a head bobs up from the water, then two arms reach toward the white sand that is the beach.

Questions arise in my mind. Who is this person and why alone in the water? Why is the beach empty of people? This is where the questions start begging me for a narrative to answer them. Story is born.

Could it be that the one I see is an alien criminal, escaped from some distant waterworld of a prison and the galactic cops are trailing her? There I can almost see one of the police behind her. No, that’s a mermaid, or maybe a merman. I am relieved but, at this distance, I can’t really tell who it is behind her.

Could be that man in the water some five minutes ago dove for pearls. The water grabbed him up and tossed him miles toward this African beach. Soon the night overcomes the world with its darkness and the surfer drags himself up onto the shore. He lays naked on the warm sand, his swimming trunks pulled off him by the tide going back out to sea.

There are dozens, hundreds of possibilities. These are only two. Maybe I can combine them and see what story appears on the horizon. But looking out onto that man on the beach, I know his name is Charley and he fell off a cruise ship. Knowing this, I now know what he wants, what he desires more than anything in the world. To get back to his wife and home. So what is stopping him? Nothing but the jungle and the ocean. And maybe Tarzan of the Apes who doesn’t like other human beings treading into his territory. You see, Tarzan is a very territorial guy and this part of the jungle is off limits for everybody except Jane, Boy, Cheetah, and himself. Seems like Tarzan may very well be my antagonist.

Now where do I go from here? Not sure. It’s going to take some brooding and figuring out the kind of guy this Charlie fellow is. As I study old Charlie and write several scenes, each taking him in a new direction, I realize that Charlie doesn’t really want to get back to his wife and civilization. You see, I start getting some back story. Charlie and wife Allie were having a fight on the cruise ship. “I want a divorce,” he screamed at her. “The hell you do,” she screams back at him. She hits him. She hits him hard across the face. He falls backward and over the side of the cruise ship, the Norwegian Viking. The last words she hears from him as he hits the water is, “Oh, shit.”

Now I can hear it. Uncle Bardie, where’s the planning in that? What structure do you have? None at this point. But this is my first draft and a very rough one at that. In my second one, there will be decisions to be made. Do I begin on the beach or on the cruise ship will have to be answered.

Next comes the digging. I don’t know what this Charlie really wants. I make a list of important events in his past. I pick one that I think is the most important, I count to ten and start writing. I am writing for insight not to include the scene in the story. If I don’t know this stuff about my character, my reader won’t know it. In this and other scenes I write I am coming to know my character well enough to tell his story, He is like a stranger I just met. By the time the story ends I will know him better than my closest friend or partner. Once I know him well, I know what he wants and I can then tell whether he will turn left or right on that beach or go straight into the jungle. I know whether he has the resources to survive the jungle. I have some clue at what resolution the story will have. That resolution may change along the way and probably will, but at least I have a direction. And I can see the first turning point in my plot. It is a goal to head for.

One of six. These key scenes include: plot point one that turns the plot on its head and twists it in a new direction, a midpoint where the story changes again and sends the character flat on his ass, a second plot point that throws my story into a completely new direction, a catharsis where Charlie has a knock-down-drag-out with Tarzan. I find out that Charlie beats the crap out of the Ape Man himself and ends up in a tree house with Jane, Cheetah, and the Boy. Course I always knew Tarzan was an extraterrestrial cop. I just didn’t have proof. That’s my first draft.

Didn’t know I would end up in a tree house at the beginning but so it goes. Now comes the elbow grease and the spick and span. It’s time to do the polishing, get out the structure chart and make sure all the holes are filled in. Begin to discover which scenes need more work, which scenes need cutting, which scenes need creating.

In my process, I haven’t completely abandoned structure at the beginning. But I leave a lot of room open for discovery. As I work through the second and third drafts, I know where I should be in the story. But, for me, it’s like knowing that I am in Chicago on my way to Seattle. I just need to decide how long I will be in Chi-town and what sights I will see there. As I visit those places, I get a sense of whether I am headed in the right direction to get to the sight I want to see. In each scene, I decide what the characters want in that scene, what is opposing them and whether they will get it. If they do, it becomes a “yes” but. if not, it is a “no however”.

Soon I am into my fourth draft and I am polishing up all those verbs, kicking the adverbs out on their asses and deciding if that noun needs a buddy adjective. When it is all nice and neat in its Sunday best, out it goes into the world. Hopefully some publisher will like. But …

And now it is on to my next tale. For I am at my best when I sit my butt down in the chair and face the blank sheet and put words on paper.

When are you at your best?

Editing a Novel

You’ve written a novel. What to do next? After all, we’ve heard that all first drafts are crap. I know mine is. Should you hire an editor? Maybe two? What if you haven’t the cash for an editor or editors? Possibly Uncle Bardie can help. After all, he has dug in and halfway through editing his novel, Adam at the Window.

My editing process may not be for you. But one can learn from others’ mistakes and triumphs. And who knows? It might work for you. I learned it trial-and-error style. Unfortunately there’s no Max Perkins to help us spiff and span our novels into their Sunday bests. What would Thomas Wolfe do?

There’s hundreds of books on novel writing. Some great. Some good. Some not so good.  Often they repeat what we’ve already heard. And not many on editing. Here’s three that have been helpful to me: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King, The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself by Susan Bell, and Intuitive Editing: A Creative and Practical Guide to Revising Your Writing by Tiffany Yates Martin.

Let’s get started. First we take a break from the novel. About a month will do. Then we read the thing straight through, taking no notes as we go. That we come to later. Once we’ve done that we have a decision to make. Do we love the characters and the story? If we don’t love the characters and the story, our readers will not love the novel enough to purchase it and read it.

Do we love our story enough to make a commitment and marry it? Are we willing to stick with it through good times and bad? Will we put in the time and effort to make this relationship work? If another story comes along, are we going to commit adultery and abandon our novel for another, more exciting spouse?

If we say no, it’s okay. There are other stories out there. If we say yes, we’re in it whole hog for better or worse. Through writer’s block. Through the times we may find ourselves going down a dead alley and have to start over. Are we’re going to wake up day after day and show our love for it by sitting down at the desk and getting to work until we can send it out into the world dressed up for a meeting with an agent or an editor?

Once we have decided yes, we can go to work. Reread the novel, making notes. We’ve already made certain decisions concerning the story. We’ve decided the genre. We know the structure of the novel. We’ve answered the following questions about the Protagonist. Who they are? What is their Flaw? What do they want? Will they get it? What obstacles are in the way of them getting what they want? Who is the Antagonist? If the Antagonist is a person, we’ll need to make sure we know the answers to the questions we asked for the Protagonist.

We need to make sure we are happy with our answers to these. If we are not, we’re going to need to make changes to the novel to satisfy us. These changes will come in the editing process. In some cases, rewriting from scratch.

Once we are happy with the story, make a chronology of the events of the novel and its background. This might include the births, marriages, etc. of the characters. This way you’ll have a sense where the characters were at such and such a time. Though my novel starts on my protagonist’s eighteenth birthday in 1960, I included the dates his parents were married and the date when his father left to go fight in World War II.

Next do a profile of each character. Include an interview with each of them. Ask the question, “What do you think of the Protagonist?”

Next break the novel down into scenes and list them row by row on a spreadsheet. Each scene has the following criteria:
Date Completed Revision
Name of the Scene
# of Words
Image for the Scene
Day and Time of the Scene
Setting of the Scene
Number of Characters and who they are.
What is the purpose of the Scene? Is it Revealing Character, Supporting the Theme, or Advancing the Story?
Is the Scene anchored in such a way that the reader will not be confused? In other words, will the reader know the setting and the characters?
Will the Scene open with Action, Dialogue, Thought, or Description?
Will the Scene close with Action, Dialogue, Thought, or Description?
If you have scene after scene with Dialogue, Keep the reader from being bored. Change the opening to Action, Thought or Description. The same instructions work for the Closing as well.
Which of the five Senses are used in the Scene? Make sure you have at least two Senses used in the Scene.
What is the Word Count? If there are several short scenes, have the next scene be a long scene. And vice versa for long scenes. Again this provides variety for the reader.
Once you have edit a scene, you’ll want to revise this list of questions?

Are there missing scenes or scenes you don’t need? Do not make changes. Make a note to deal with this issue when you get to it in your editing process. I’ve been surprised at how my insight changes once I make it to that scene.

Notice I haven’t mentioned chapters. That will come later.

Now we are ready to edit the novel. I edit the novel scene by scene. I open two text boxes side by side in Microsoft’s One Note. Scrivener can also be used for this purpose. I copy the scene into one of the text boxes. In the text box beside it, I rewrite the scene, making changes as move along.

For instance, the first sentence may say: Charles went to the inn on Tuesday.
My revision might go like this: Charles headed to the inn in the rain Tuesday afternoon.
A second revision might go: Charles’ wig fell off his head as he rushed through the rain for the inn that Tuesday afternoon.

There are times when I will eliminate a sentence or change the subject of the sentence. I work to make sure I have created a scene that is going to follow my guidelines for that scene. Sometimes I flush out a character or a setting or an event.

I may do this exercised on a scene multiple times. In one scene, it took me twenty or thirty times to get the scene right. This is a good way of getting into the nitty gritty of a novel.

Instead of pasting your edited copy back into the original manuscript, paste it into a second document and label it version 2. Any time you make a major change in your story, create a new version just in case you need to go back to the older version.

Once you are ready to paste the scene into the novel’s manuscript, I would suggest you paste it into a program like Grammarly or ProWritingAid. I use ProWritingAid. Here you can check the grammar, the style, the spelling, the reading level among other things. Just because the program tells you to change something doesn’t mean you have to change it. Sometimes I find sentences that aren’t what I wanted to say. This exercise forces me to think about the way I am using language.

When I have updated the scene based on ProWritingAid’s suggestions, I paste the scene into the new version of the novel manuscript.

But I am not finished yet. I change the font of the scene. I write in Times Roman. Here I make the change to Arial. Then I read the scene out loud, checking for rhythm and errors I may have missed. Then I change the font back to Times Roman.

Now I come to Chapters. Some Chapters will have only one scene, some two or more. I am asking myself the question, “Do these scenes have a theme? Was there a question in the first scene of the Chapter that got answered in the third scene?” I also look at the length of the Chapter. If it is too long–over 3000 words–do I need to start a new chapter?

At this point, I add information to a Chapter list I have created with this criteria:
Date completed revision
Chapter Number
Chapter Title based on Theme of the Chapter
# of Words
# of Scenes
What Decision was Made in the Chapter?
What Question was answered in the Chapter?
What was the Objective in the Chapter?
What was the Obstacle to achieving that Objective?
What was the Outcome of the Chapter?
Did the Chapter close with a cliffhanger?

Now we are ready to move on to the next Scene. Working this routine, I have made hundreds of changes. Including re-directing my story and major plot revisions. I have added characters and subtracted them. Each change made the novel a better book.

Even if you are planning on hiring an editor, I believe this process can make the novel the story it was meant to be.

Before sending the novel out to literary agents and publishers, you’ll want some beta readers to review. These should be folks who read a lot. The readers should not be writers. Here are some questions you might want them to answer after they’ve read your novel.

1.What did you think of the title?
2.What do you think the book is about?
3.Did the opening scene pull you into the novel?
4.What did you think of the Main Character?
5.Did you find any part confusing or boring?
6.Who is your favorite character? Why?
7.Who is your least favorite character? Why?
8.What is your favorite scene?
9.Was the ending satisfying?
10.Would you recommend this novel to others?
10.Is there anything else you would like to add?

Remember only you can tell your story. Good luck with your storytelling.

 

 

The Bard

There aren’t many things I know. In fact, there is only one thing I know. I am a Bard, a curious calling, but one which I came to early. I tell stories, I rhyme rhymes, I wish stories into existence, I remember tales that so many have forgotten, or would like to forget.

I reach into the air and they are there, just waiting to be told. I am not a Shaman, only a Bard. I sit by the fire, my voice rising and falling with the story others want to hear, a story that falls from my lips with words, precious words, my words, words of power and despair, hope and adventure and laughter, of times when men have laughed so hard they split a gut.

What shall I tell these kings, these warriors who sit by the fire and wait upon the Bard? Perhaps I shall tell of Queen Maeve in the West. She went to war over a cow and it wasn’t much of a cow either. Cuchulain—the Cuke we called him, great warrior that he was—the Cuke had the cow and pride would not let him surrender it….so he and Maeve went at it and had themselves a war.

Shall I tell of Krishna, the little blue boy of the Hindi who had all the women eating out of his hands? Now that sounds like a job I would enjoy.

Maybe the story of how pissed off Hera was because Zeus went out chasing the girls again. Or the tale of the dragon who farted so much he forced all the people to evacuate the land. If they’d only had a virgin. Virgins made good snacks for dragons. It became the custom for the king to devirginalize all the virgins in the land. Shall I tell the story of the man who was obsessed to the point of madness with the Great White Whale enough to chase that leviathan to the ends of the earth?

There’s the story of Dick Whittington. That one I like a lot but nobody else seems to know. It’s not even on Billboard’s Top Forty Fairy Tales Chart. So what story shall I tell to those fellows, sitting around the campfire?

How about this one.

Ships. The Trojans looked out to sea and they saw ships. Ten thousand ships. The great kings of the Greeks and the minor kings, the great warriors, sons of gods and the goddesses and sons of mortal men. They were coming. They were coming for the city, for the beloved Ilium, Troy to the Greeks.

All because Paris had to go and ‘nap a Greek queen from the king of Sparta. Like Priam’s youngest couldn’t have any lady he wanted. All the Trojan women were doing moon pies over him. No, he had to go messin’ where he shouldn’t be messin’. Now those Greek boots were going to be walkin’ all over Troy.

Hector, the great Hector, called for his father Priam, the king. He came to the battlements and joined Hector and saw the great ships of the Greeks. He almost despaired. But he did not, for he stood by his greatly skilled son, Hector, and said, “Let the Greeks bring it on.” He knew his city was safe. None could penetrate the great walls of his city, Ilium.

“Prepare the city,” Priam said to Hector, then went to the Temple of Poseidon, the Sea God, the Horse God, the Patron of Priam’s City and the Patron of its citizens. To despair would offend Poseidon.

The gates opened. The peasant-farmers from the countryside rushed through the thick gates and into the city. On the horizon and behind the city a legion of Amazons, those female warriors who could give a warrior a run for his money, came looking to fight for Troy. They were led by Penthesilea. She wanted to make amends for killing her sister.

Soon there was a council, Priam’s Council, in the city with the kings of all Ilium’s allies. They debated the fate of the city, whether they would surrender the well-stacked Helen, Menalaus’ beautiful blonde-haired wife. Paris refused to surrender his mistress. Instead he offered himself for exile. Banished from his father’s kingdom forever for the sake of a city, always a pilgrim, always longing to return to his father but he would never return. If the Council decided so, as the city prepared.

In the distance there were sounds, sounds of war. The Greeks were coming! The Greeks were coming! The Greeks were coming!