Writing

When Did You Know?

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When did you know you wanted to be a writer? Joe Konrath poses that question on his blog today. I’ve known almost all my life what I wanted to be.  Not too long ago, my Mom found a paper I wrote in fourth grade where I said I loved writing stories and that I wanted to be a writer.  I posted one of those early stories here on my blog…along with one of my daughter’s  written at the same age.

When I was ten or eleven, I was already pecking novels out on my Mom’s old typewriters. The first one was a futuristic tale about a cop born in an underwater sperm bank. I don’t know why the bank was underwater, or how deposits were made, but I thought it was very cool. I followed that up with a series of books about  gentleman thief Brian Lockwood,  aka "The Perfect Sinner,’ a thinly disguised rip-off of Simon Templar, aka "The Saint." I sold these stories for a dime to my friends and even managed to make a dollar or two. In fact, I think my royalties per book were better then than they are now.

I continued writing novels all through my teenage years.  Some of my other unpublished masterpieces featured hapless detective named Kevin Dangler. I remember my Uncle Burl being quite amused by that one. He even wrote a story about Kevin Dangler one summer when we were fishing at Loon Lake. Only Dangler wasn’t a detective in his tale. He was the lead singer of a rock group called Kevin Dangler & The Scrotums. Being a packrat, I still have most of those novels today in boxes in my garage (some were destroyed in flooding a few years back).

By the time I was 17, I was writing articles for The Contra Costa Times and other Bay Area newspapers and applying to colleges.  I didn’t get a book published, but my detective stories got me into UCLA’s School of Communications. My grades weren’t wonderful, so I knew I had to kick ass on my application essay. I wrote it first person as a hard-boiled detective story in Kevin Dangler’s voice. The committee, at first, had doubts that I actually wrote it myself — until they reviewed articles I’d written for the Times, including one that used the same device as my essay.

I sold my first non-fiction book, UNSOLD TELEVISION PILOTS, while I was a freshman in college and my first novel, .357 VIGILANTE, shortly thereafter (thanks to Lew Perdue).  And so here I am, at 43, doing exactly what I was doing when I was seven or eight. I haven’t really changed. It’s cool…and kind of weird, too.

Shell Scott

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Ed Gorman posted a nice piece about my friend Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott books on his blog today.

I loved Prather because he was always fun. I was naive about his right-wing
politics so they never got in my way, I just liked the hilarious situations
chicks always led the willing Shell into. One of my all-time favorite scenes is
Shell in a hot air balloon flying above the nudist camp he’s just escaped from.
His attire consists of his holster and gun.

The Shell Scott books are dated but still as laugh-out-loud funny as they were forty years ago. In his heyday, Richard was one of the best selling authors in the world, with tens of millions of copies of his book in print.

I spoke to Richard a couple of days ago — he’d just signed a contract with Hard Case Crime to reprint one of his early, not-Scott books.  So pretty soon a whole new generation will discover just how good a writer Richard Prather is.

New Years Resolutions for Writers

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Novelist Joe Konrath posts his Professi0nal Writer Resolutions for the new year. They work for me, too.

  • I will keep my website updated
  • I will start a blog
  • I will schedule bookstore signings, and while at the bookstore I’ll meet and
    greet the customers rather than sit dejected in the corner
  • I will send out a newsletter, emphasizing what I have to offer rather than
    what I have for sale, and I won’t send out more than four a year
  • I will learn to speak in public, even if I think I already know how
  • I will make selling my books my responsibility, not my publisher’s
  • I will stay in touch with my fans
  • I will contact local libraries, and tell them I’m available for speaking
    engagements
  • I will attend as many writing conferences as I can afford
  • I will spend a large portion of my advance on self-promotion
  • I will help out other writers
  • I will not get jealous, will never compare myself to my peers, and will
    cleanse my soul of envy
  • I will be accessible, amiable, and enthusiastic
  • I will do one thing every day to self-promote
  • I will always remember where I came from

Of course, not all of these resolutions really apply to Joe. He keeps his site and blog update, can speak well in public, and attends every writing conference held from here to Tehran. He forgot the big resolution though…

Write.

Spec-tacular

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Comedy writer Ken Levine gives some wonderful advice on his must-read blog about writing that perfect sitcom spec:

Don’t view the show from the perspective of a fly. I once read a WINGS spec as
seen by a buzzing fly. I offer this as the first example because I know so many
young writers fall into this same trap.

Don’t put yourself into the show
and make yourself the lead character. I once read a CHEERS where Alan had more
lines than Sam & Diane combined. Alan? Who’s Alan? Alan was one of the
extras. And so he remained.

And just because people tell you you look
like Debra Messing doesn’t mean you should write a WILL & GRACE entitled
“Grace’s Sister”. If I get a script with a photo attached I know I’m in trouble.

Don’t hand write your script, no matter how good your penmanship. Send
your spec in a UCLA blue book and you’ll get an F.

Don’t invent a
format.

Know the characters. I read a spec MARY TYLER MOORE SHOW where
Mary wondered what to get her husband for his birthday. Her “husband”???!

Some other things to avoid, at least in drama specs:  the hero’s evil double, the reappearance of long-lost relatives, or the hero getting amensia, going blind, or getting critically injured. It’s also not a good idea to write a spin-off pilot for one of the secondary characters.

What to Spec?

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With so few comedies on the air, what sitcom should an aspiring writer spec as a sample of his or her talent? Veteran comedy writer/producer Ken Levine tackles that question this weekend on his blog.

Select a
current show you like and think you know the best. “Current” is the key word
here. Once a show is cancelled the shelf life for your spec is about six months.
So don’t start that ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT you’ve been developing. And I hope you
didn’t pour a lot of time and effort into a spec KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL. When
RAYMOND went off the air everyone was sad but show runners. No more reading
fifty RAYMONDS a day when trying to staff! And for that same reason, please let
this be WILL & GRACE’S last year! The good news is if you’ve got a spec
FRASIER you can just change the names and send it out as an OUT OF PRACTICE. And
of course you never have to worry with a SIMPSONS because they will go on making
new episodes forever…

…Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great shows out there at the moment. What
I think we’ll see this year is everybody writing a MY NAME IS EARL. It’s clearly
the best of the new crop. The only caution I give you is that EVERYBODY will be
writing one. If that doesn’t concern you (or you’ve written it already) I say go
for it. If it does then some suitable alternates might be SCRUBS, TWO AND A HALF
MEN, EVERYBODY HATES CHRIS, or HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER (a far cry from the CHEERS,
TAXI, MASH, COSBY days).

Unfinished Greene

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Graham Greene’s treatment for NO MAN’S LAND, a film script he never wrote, and his unfinished short story THE STRANGERS HAND, are being published together in one volume early next year by the University of Texas. The Wall Street Journal reports that NO MAN’S LAND was written in the period between Greene’s novels THE HEART OF THE MATTER and END OF THE AFFAIR and that the pages have lanquished for over thirty years in the University’s archives. I can see the academic interest in Greene’s movie treatment and unfinished story…but is there any real entertainment value in it for readers?

Screenwriters Getting Press

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The media relations committee at the WGA must be giddy — the LA Times is giving screenwriters a lot of attention lately. For example, today they did a short profile of Robin Swicord, discussing how she went about adapting MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA. It sounds like it was an unusual process:

"I had to go absolutely unprepared to the first meeting," she said. "I
hadn’t read the book since it came out. When I came into the meeting,
it was clear he had a movie in his head."

After she left, she
reread the book and began to take notes. "I wrote an outline of what
the movie might look like," she said. "Mostly, I wrote 18 pages of
musing on aspects of the book — the thematic lines that drove the
narrative of the story. I e-mailed him that. He contacted me and asked
me to come to another meeting."

Hired the next day, Swicord
spent six weeks working on a 70-page outline that resembled a
screenplay without dialogue. "It was the film completely envisioned
with casting and location breakdowns. The idea was that they would be
able to take that and start going to work. Rob had to cast without a
screenplay. It was intense."

On top of that, while she was writing, another writer was simultaneously doing the rewrites:

Because Swicord was still off working on the script as rehearsals
began, Marshall brought in scribe Doug Wright to make changes when
needed.

"Some of the lines got tweaked," Swicord says, adding that Marshall promised her that 99% of her script would remain intact.

"He was as good as his word," she adds.

On Sunday, the LA Times, did a lengthy article about the rewrites that plagued FUN WITH DICK AND JANE before, during, and after production. Then, in another article the same day, the paper did a superficial examination of the credit arbitration process on both FUN and MEMOIRS, as well as a few other movies.

Moviemaking has been a collaborative business since Day 1, but rarely
have so many screenwriters converged on so few screenplays. While some
upcoming holiday films may be credited to just one writer, that hardly
means just one writer wrote the whole movie.

In some cases, producers and studios throw different writers at
different sections of a story, adding a joke here, some action there.
In other instances, a writer — or team of writers — does a
top-to-bottom rewrite.

The Writers Guild of America is then asked to sort out who did what and award the credits as it deems proper — a process that invariably leaves someone out in the cold. For example, while only
three writers were credited for the first "Charlie’s Angels" movie, no fewer than 17 scribes took a whack at its script.

Sticking to the Character

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I got this email query today:

I have a question about novels based on tv shows.   When you write a
novel based on the tv shows how do you keep the characters lives from developing
beyond what has happened on the tv show?  Or do their lives develop differently
from their lives on tv?   Does that make sense? 

The short answer is that I worked hand-in-hand with the producers of  MONK to make sure my books are running on a parallel course, development-wise. And if I do create some new backstory (as I have done to some degree), that it’s acceptable to the creator of the show and consistent with what that have done or intend to do.

For more detailed informati0n on how tie-ins are written, check out the many articles at the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers website.

Sex Sex Sex

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Sex_1Novelist Tess Gerritsen talks about the difficulties of writing sex. She offers a lot of great advice, but the bottom line is:

Ask yourself, as a writer, what your love scene is supposed to accomplish. If
it’s just to show that your hero is a normal guy having sex, that’s about as
interesting as watching him eat bologna sandwiches. No, the best sex scenes are
those that accomplish something far more profound. They offer us a deeper
understanding of character, or show us emotional awakening or healing.

I agree with her. She was brave enough to share an example from one of her books to prove her point, so I will, too. This one comes from MAN WITH THE IRON-ON BADGE:

I guess
something I learned from “Mannix” was true. Being a private eye really is an
aphrodisiac to women. Carol had never attacked me like that before.

I’m afraid the surprise and excitement were too much, because I came in about three minutes. But I
don’t think Carol minded; it calmed me down and allowed me to concentrate real
hard on getting her off. And believe me, it took my complete attention.
Pleasing a woman, especially Carol, isn’t easy and with me, at least, there’s a
lot of potential for embarrassment and humiliation.

She rewarded me for all
my hard work with a nice, squealing, writhing orgasm that nearly broke my nose
on her pubic bone, but I didn’t mind. I even jumped in, literally, to enjoy the
last few squeals of it with her.

It was so dark, and things happened so fast, she never saw my cuts and bruises, so she mistook my
occasional groans of pain for pleasure.

Carol fell right to sleep afterwards.

Between the sex, the pain, and the things on my mind, I didn’t get as much sleep as I would have
liked. But I get laid so rarely, I’m willing to sacrifice just about anything
for it, especially sleep, when I usually dream about having sex anyway.

While the scene is explicit, more by implication than actual description,  it’s not about the choreography or body parts. It’s about attitude and character — or, at least, I hope it is. To me, that’s how you get around the pitfalls of writing the sex scene, unless the point of the scene is to arouse the reader.

By the way, I’ve written my share of awful sex scenes. I honed my "craft" in college. My girlfriend was an editorial assistant at Playgirl and she got me a gig writing sexually-explicit  "Letters to the Editor" for the grand sum of $25-a-letter (Gasp! You didn’t know they were fake? You probably think Penthouse letters are real, too).  I actually had a lot of fun writing them (often in class, which got me some strange looks from the people around me)  and it helped me learn to write in different voices for different characters. Plus the letters got my girlfriend all excited, but that’s another story…