Sir Carlson Writes A (My? Your?) Story: All Righty Then

By: Michael James Greenwald

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Captain’s Log, Stardate 23.9, rounded off to the…nearest decimal point. We’ve…traveled back in time to save an ancient species from…total annihilation. So far…no…signs of aquatic life, but I’m going to find it. If I have to tear this universe another black hole, I’m going to find it. I’ve…got to, mister.

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Okay, I’ll admit it, caught Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on USA at 3AM, and I forgot how hilarious Jim Carrey is (Lois, your gun is digging into my hip!).

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Anyway, this week, which is an open week, (Why do you care about Snowflake? Do you know him? Does he call you at home? Do you have a dorsal fin?), I’m going to highlight an exceptional writer and his helpful writing “How-To” book.

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Most of us (especially those Arizonians in our blog-dience) know-of Sir Ron Carlson. Some of us may have even had the privilege of being a student of his when he taught at Arizona State University. Now, he directs the graduate program in fiction at the University of California, Irvine. His latest book, The Signal, is a typically Carlson, pared-down, rustic adventure, set in the stunning mountains of Wyoming, involving a reunion of Mack and his soon-to-be-ex-wife Vonnie, forced by the author to accomplish a task, a very Carlsonian literary construct (“When you have stilted lovers, give them a task they need to accomplish”).

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In Ron Carlson Writes a Story, Sir Carlson takes us through an in-depth examination of how he created one of his most revered short stories “The Governor’s Ball.” He reveals the germ for the story began when a mattress fell off the back of his pickup truck, goes through paragraph-by-paragraph of the story, talks about his thought processes at each moment and how he accomplished his primary tenet, “the writer is the person who stays in the room.”

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Yes, Sir Carlson provides the usual writing technique book suspects. Chapters titled:

• writing character: an inventory
• writing dialogue
• the purpose of a scene
• the idea of the story idea
• do you have an outline?

Not to take away from these chapters–where Sir Carlson does breath several original thoughts on topics hashed over in “How-To” books since Ug showed Ig how to carve an active rather than passive buffalo onto a cave wall–there are other chapters that enlighten wanna-be writers in fresh ways:

• the big boat
• these guys were hammering on my house
• going over to her window
• coffee
• potshots

One of the most helpful aspects of the book is Sir Carlson’s admission that in a lot (if not most) places of his writing process he had absolutely no idea what he was doing or where his story was traveling (And people, if Ron “F-ing” Carlson is human, then heck, I’ll subscribe to the humanity of us all).

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To highlight what I’m talking about, I hope Sir Carlson wouldn’t be too offended if I include an excerpt from page 65 of his book. When he began the story, he had two pieces of information: a water-soaked mattress will fall off the back of a pick up truck, and the narrator needs to be going to the Governor’s Ball with his wife. At this point, the Governor Ball pressure has been established and in the last paragraph the mattress on the back of the truck “rose like a playing card and jumped up, into the wind.”

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Carlson talks about where he was as the writer at that point:

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“By now in ‘The Governor’s Ball’, I’m terrified. I’ve done all the easy stuff, written my little event following the outer story as best I could, the way you follow a marked trail through the forest, and I’ve come to the end of that trail and I feel a lot like standing up and heading out to the kitchen, which is to say like lying down there in the woods until grim death lays its cold hands on me. But I have one more little crumb in my knapsack, that is, I know I continued to the landfill, so I can write that tiny episode and then lie down an wait for gruesome failure to grace my with his icy touch.

“The traffic all around me slowed, cautioned by this vision. I tried to wave at them as if I knew what was going on and everything was going to be all right. At the Twenty-first South exit, I headed west, letting the rope snap freely, as if whipping the truck for more speed.”

“That’s all I can do. Is it great? No. But it is that other blessed thing: serviceable. It is writing that takes me in its way from one place to another. Quite simply, it is the next thing. It serves–I’m still alive. I have had the opportunity to quit, and I have declined. For now. I was still in the room.”

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For a writer, the usefulness of this book is tied to the fact that Sir Carlson has a perspective on his process and is able to dictate blow-by-blow how he survived the story. I’d compare this to the extras a lot of DVD’s provide now, where viewers can go through episodes of TV shows or scenes of movies with a director voice over in the background, revealing information about process and technique in real time.

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Sir Carlson produces this resource for writers.

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At the end of the book, “The Governor’s Ball” is included in its polished-from, which is fascinating in itself, as you can examine what an author produces in a first draft and the kind of tweaking an author must do to have a publishable piece.

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In Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor said, “If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.”

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Sir Ron Carlson in Ron Carlson Writes a Story proves O’Connor’s theorem.

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Thanks for reading. See y’all next Sunday.

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I have exorcised the demons…this, house, is clear.

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Go to de writing room, go to it…

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😉

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MJG

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If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

What I Learned From Olympic Figure Skating: Stuffing 40 Million South Koreans in My Motivational Back-Pack

My Sista From Another Mista and I

By: Michael James Greenwald

Good morning, friends, readers…country-people?

This morning, Friday morning (though this T.G.I.F.F. paradigm appears to have little meaning in my life–I work harder on the weekend), I awoke with thoughts of figure skating on my mind.

(I heard my father’s scream, all the way from Arizona: “I KNEW IT!!!!“)

If it helps at all, dad, it was woman’s figure skating.

(Dad: “Sexy girls?  Short skirts?  That’s my boy!!!!)

Sigh.

To be fair, I’m not a big fan of figure skating.  But my mother is.  And, though I would have much rather been mowing through Ron Carlson’s latest fare–The Signal–what can I say?  I love my mum.

Everyone: AWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!

But there are things to be learned, even from the personally most uninteresting of sports.

Kim Yu-na of South Korea

On the left I’ve posted a picture of Kim Yu-na, the willowy figure skater from South Korea.  19 years old.  Sweet.  Pretty.  Loves wind surfing and shopping, and of course…boys.

Yu-na skated last night in the long program as the perennial favorite to take home the 2010 Winter Olympics gold medal.  But as I listened to commentators build-up of the spectacle and comment before, during and after her performance, I became aware of deeper, much more sinister (and compelling), stakes than whether or not this teenager could put together a performance to win a gold medal.

Evidently, she was skating for the hopes and dreams of her entire country.

Athletes, in our time are elevated to statuses of near-Gods.  Above politicians (granted, that is high mark to eclipse), writers (slight bias there), saints and religious deities…

Society catapults athletes and other celebrities (movie stars, musicians, TMZ darlings) above deserved role models, such as parents, teachers, fire fighters, community service veterans…

Now, I realize this is old hat.  Less deserving people have been idolized more than more deserving people probably from the start of humanity, when Ug and Fud and Ik stood up on two legs and the rest of the human clan followed, Ik captivating the entire tribe’s attention with the cool way he can shake his two feet, while Ug and Fud go unnoticed as they pile rocks to create a shanty, as a hurricane approaches.

I want to focus in on the pressure aspect.  According to multiple sources, including the evenings skating commentators hammering this point home, Kim Yu-na had much more than her coach’s, parent’s, her own expectations piled on her back as she set to execute her first quad (like that figure skating lingo, everyone?), she had the morale of more than 40 million people stuffed in a backpack, slung over her shoulders.

“Her loss or her winning will be perceived as a national loss or a national winning,” said Kyung-ae Park, a political scientist who holds the Korea Foundation Chair at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

A national loss or a national winning?

Wowzer.

For me, clocking in at work, has the potential to affect, at the most, ten people.  Can you even imagine that level of pressure?

Yu-na even admitted to feeling the pressure in a book of short essays published last month.  “If my performance falters, not only people around me but the whole nation might turn their back on me,” she wrote.  She talked about the disappointment her countrymen expressed after her second-place finish in a 2008 event: “I got a flurry of text messages, but I felt sad and disappointed after checking them,” she writes. “Not a single message congratulated me.”

Well, last night Yu-na nailed it.  Not only did she win over South Korea’s nemesis Japan (South Korea harbors deep resentment toward Japanese for Japan’s colonization of their country), but she set the competitive figure skating scoring record with a eye-popping (not my eyes, but evidently everyone else’s) 228.56, finishing 23 points ahead of the silver medalist, Japan’s Mao Asada.

Her commanding win, and just as importantly, the ridiculous amount of pressure placed on her, caused me to examine my own life.  I live pretty comfortably.  I have a job.  I have a home.  My parent’s are proud of me.  My siblings and friends believe I’m a success story.

But I don’t feel that.

I have aspirations that exceed all those expectations.  I desire to win the gold medal in writing, to build a writing career that will sustain my family and myself for the rest of our lives, and just as important, to me, is to become a successful author amongst my peers.

But do I have the drive to do so?

I’m willing to bet wons to banchan that whenever Yu-na felt to tired to practice on a particular day she could focus on the expectations 40 million people had on her back, and strap on those skates and fine-tune her sit-spin.

So, how do we, as wanna-be writers, actors, musicians, carpenters, athletes, politicians, teachers…whatever your dream station in life consists of.

How do we create the pressure of 40 million South Koreans’ expectations stuffed into a backpack slung over our shoulders?

How do we motivate ourselves every single day to forgo watching “Is It a Dude or Lady” on Maury Povich to get-down to the daily training necessary to achieve our dream?

How do you do it?

Thanks for reading.

–MJG

If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

Kicking You When You’re Down: PLC Interviews Michael James Greenwald

NOT Michael James Greenwald

By: The Parking Lot Confessional

Hello, and welcome to the Sunday edition of the Parking Lot Confessional Interview Series. Today, Amy K. Nichols, S.C. Green, and Amy McLane (PLC) will be tossing questions at the sometimes-cagey, chronically-complicated Michael James Greenwald.

We met him on a sunny Sunday morning at the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf on Indian School in Scottsdale, Arizona. Michael showed up twenty minutes late wearing a blue “I’m Like a Superhero Without Powers or Motivation” t-shirt, ripped jeans, and dark bug-eyed sunglasses. We were sitting at an outside table and he walked right by us into the coffee shop, emerging at least ten minutes later, with a medium chai, one pump vanilla, latte and an odd grin on his face.

“I knew that girl in there.” He took a seat, sipped from his hot drink. “We took a writing class together at ASU with Ron Carlson. She wrote these amazing sci-fi stories. Stuff that would just blow your mind, man.”

He took out a pack of Parliaments, lit one with a skull&crossbones Zippo. “You don’t mind if I smoke, do you,” he asked, exhaling a cloud away the opposite direction from where we sat, watching the grey cloud shifting and shaping in air. “She said she applied to like nine MFA programs, got universally rejected. Send out over three hundred short stories and got back three hundred rejections. Ran up ten grand on her credit cards and ended up crashing at her sister’s apartment until her sis married some real estate tard and they ditched the apartment for a house with a pool in PV.”

Michael shook his head. “Now, she works here on the weekends, temps at an office during the week. Taking classes at Scottsdale community for criminal studies. Hasn’t written word one in two years.” He shook his head. “Man, if you let it, the writing life’ll kick you when you’re down.”

“Any suggestion for writers in our audience?” we asked.

“Yeah. Don’t fall down.”

Michael James Greenwald’s novel-in-progress, Haply, first in his Worthington Series, is one-part family-saga, one-part ghost story, spotlighting a young family dealing with inevitable loss. His short story collection, Stories from a Bowling Alley, catalogs lives of working-class people from and around his hometown in the south suburbs of Chicago.

He has a family house in Scottsdale, that his grandfather bought thirty years before, where he escapes “the pressures of societal life”, as he put it, in Chicago. He took his sunglasses off to reveal eyes creased beyond his thirty years. Well into his third smoke, we began the interview.

PLC: Let’s start out with a softball. How long have you been pursuing a writing career?

MJG: My conscious self has been pursuing a writing career for four years now. I had moved to Arizona to go to law school and in the 11th hour realized if I took on 100,000 dollars in debt I’d never be a writer. My subconscious self has always wanted to be a writer. I guess I’ve been a closeted writer since I was really little, but I was always very athletic and my mother pushed me into sports. I found sports was a mainline route to coolness and girls, which at the time were the most important things for me. But now I’m perfectly happy with be uncool, alone, and poor. And if you believe that I have some land for sale in Utah.

PLC: Utah, huh. My cousin has a house there.

MJG: Then he can literally use that line.

PLC: He does. Trust me. Thinks it’s hilarious. Anyway, back to work, do you have any totemic writing subjects?

MJG: Fathers and sons is a subject that I am drawn to. And mental illness.

PLC: Why those?

MJG [shifts uncomfortably]: What happened to those softballs? Okay. Well, both subjects, I guess, derive from the tumultuous relationship I’ve had with my father, who suffers from bi-polar disorder, and my constant fear–and my siblings’, too, I think–is that someday our brains will short and we’ll end up just like him. I guess you didn’t ask about my biggest fear, but that would be one of them–I’m flush with fear– to end up suffering and struggling as much as my father has.

PLC: I’m sorry about your father.

MJG: It is what it is.

PLC: Any other subjects that grab you?

MJG: Well, I’m fascinated by the inner workings of family and children. I guess that biological clock is really ticking. [chuckles] My current novel and my next novel both center around young families, struggling with finances, balancing career and family dreams, and dealing with events which threaten the delicate connection between husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, and siblings.

PLC: What is the worst story you’ve ever written?

MJG: I just mentioned them.

PLC: All of them?

MJG: Yep. I have a big-time loathe-love relationship with all my work. I’m the kind of writer who requires an audience to justify my work. That could be because I’m still learning how to write for an audience, or what works and doesn’t work in my own writing, or because I have been using such an intuitive approach to my work, so I really don’t know what’s funny until a reader laughs, what’s sad until a reader cries, what’s dramatic and interesting until I see a reader’s engagement. I’m hoping I’ll get much better at knowing what works and what doesn’t as my career goes along, because I’ve found that there is a fine line between writing for an audience and pandering to an audience.

PLC: Can you explain that last point for our readers?

MJG: What I mean is, you can’t please everyone. No matter what you do, what you change, a good cross section of readers will not “get it”, will not be able to engage, will outright hate your work. And if you are reliant on external justification in your creative process, you could find yourself in a constant state of editing to try and address every readers’ concerns. As a writer, I warn you to not fall prey to the please all, please no one trap. You need to be like a stomach and become very adept at knowing what criticism to break down into proteins, what criticism to chemically alter for the body to use, and what criticism to just push into the small intestines for excretion–to use a crude analogy. You’re body–in this analogy, your manuscript–can’t use everything.

PLC: Okay, lets switch gears here, a bit, and move from focusing on you–

MJG: Thank you.

PLC: What? You aren’t comfortable with talking about yourself?

MJG [shrugs]: It comes with the territory, I guess. I’d rather my work speak for itself. This, of course, flies into the face of a lot of my goals beyond writing, though, so I don’t know.

PLC: What would those goals be?

MJG: Well…I don’t know if I should be revealing this here. Someone could steal it. I want each of my books to be linked to a cause. For instance, I have a novel which really directly probes a relationship between a son and his bi-polar father and I want a portion of the book sale proceeds to go to either research for mental illness or to organizations that in some way provide support for families debilitated by brain disease. I want to build a platform, both through speaking arrangements and book discussions, to both serve the needs of people in the world suffering in silence through this issue and hopefully raise awareness and make a difference in people’s lives.

PLC: That’s very admirable of you.

MJG: Yeah, well, don’t downplay the marketing potential of it, either.

PLC: Is there a book you find yourself re-reading again and again?

MJG: Cormac McCarthy’s All The Pretty Horses has some kind of hold over me. I can’t quite explain it. It’s just an amazing book. There are paragraphs of writing in that book that leave me breathless. There’s one page in that book, where Cormac describes this girl riding a horse and there are no sexual words on the page but for some reason the words he chose elicit a physiological sexual reaction I cannot quite explain. He captures a mood in that book, a masculinity, that is so powerful to me. Other people I’ve talked to say, “yeah, it’s a good book,” but for me, somehow that books taps into my soul. Brilliant piece of work.

PLC: We really enjoyed No Country for Old Men.

MJG: Don’t forget about his earlier work. Early on in my career, my best friend gave me Child of God to read, a book about a Lester Ballad, a murderer and necrophile–half your audience just decided they’d never read that book–which only McCarthy can reveal a depth of the humanity we all know is in there, but fear to bring it out, hold it in our hands, and try and figure it out. And only he can make a character like Lester sympathetic to the reader.

PLC: So, what are you saying, deep down, we’re all necrophiles?

MJG: Well, you three are [Laughs] for sure. No, I’m saying there are really dark, darker than most of us can even imagine, parts of ourselves, which most of us will spend a lifetime ignoring, denying its existence, and McCarthy forces his readers to see the evil in his character and at the same time maybe recognize the evil within ourselves.

I mean, for example, lets take Stalin, Idi Amin, John Wayne Gacy, or Osama Bin Laden. They’ve been branded mythic-like creatures of evil, but really they are all human beings, who need to digest food and water, breath air, just like we all do. We have that commonality, too. And to say we also don’t have, somewhere within us, similar depths of evil, is flat-out denial and fear. We recognize their evil, Lester Ballad’s evil, in whatever form it projects, in some way, because every human being–even Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Jesus Christ–possessed and possesses that same evil, projecting in specific forms for each of us, which we either have the ability to control or not.

Evil is evil, is my point. And McCarthy, through Child of God, forces us to look at the evil within ourselves.

If you can create your work to force your audience to examine something they may had been too fearful to see in themselves, force them to examine their life and their world, you are doing an amazing job as an artist.

PLC: What is the best opening of a novel you’ve ever read?

MJG: The greatest opening for me would be Charles Dickens’s magnum opus Tale of Two Cities:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”

PLC: Why do you like it so much?

MJG: It’s just a beautiful set-up for the novel. It really captures the period in a brilliant way. I recall being completely floored the first time I read that introduction.

I really love: “Suddenly it was June and there were strange towels in the house.” From Ron Carlson’s short story “Towel Season.” It’s a wonderful thing when a writer can spin your world on it’s side in the opening line. Something about the strangeness of this line, how the words collide in this sentence. Something about the immediacy of this opening line really sticks with me. Right away, you feel like you’ve missed a whole lot and instinctively you’re called to attention to try and catch up. Brilliant. If you want to go to school on opening lines, look no further than Ron Carlson U.

PLC: What about an ending?

MJG: “The End” always seems to do the trick.

PLC: Really? Seems bland.

MJG: Bland can be good. If you don’t have bland how can you appreciate flavorful? No, but I think the best endings, the ones writers strive for, are final lines that propel you to pop the book closed, take a deep breath, then open the book at page one and begin again.

“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

That might not cause you to begin to read “The Dead” over again, especially because if you’ve made it through Joyce’s story, you’re probably exhausted, but this line takes the story and raises it up to another level. This end sucks the air out of your lungs.

PLC: Speaking of the end, we’ve reached the end of this interview. So, thanks again, for sitting down with us.

MJG: Sure. Not like I had anything better going on. Except drinking, and there’s always time in a day for that.

PLC: We look forward to reading your finished novel.

MJG: So do I. So does my agent, for that matter. I’ll just keep plugging away and see what happens.

PLC: Famous last words?

MJG [grins]: Sure. Any questions?

If y’all want to get to know Michael a bit better, check him out on FACEBOOK, follow him on Twitter, or a his personal blog.

Characters on A Wire: A Study of HBO’s “The Wire”

My boy: Omar Little

By: Michael James Greenwald

Well, Happy Sunday Funday everyone!! And Happy Valentine’s Day to those who celebrate and Happy Anti-Valentine’s Day to those that don’t. For my topic on this glorious Sunday in Chicago, I was going to select love…love, love, love. But love is theme, love is emotion, and this week, my pets, we are discussing characters, and I had a revelation on Thursday night while watching my favorite show of all time, “The Wire”, which really folded nicely into this week’s topic, CREATING SOLID CHARACTERS.

Today we will be studying the enemy: television writing.

I will present a short sequence in two episodes from season 4 of The Wire (Episodes 46 and 47) then we’ll talk about some of brilliance in the writing and how we can steal from it.

THE SHOW:

Basically, the show is about the law and the street in the inner city of Baltimore. Cops on one side and highly organized drug organizations on the other side. Characters are either on the side of the law or the side of the street, though lines are blurred throughout.

THE CHARACTERS:

Chris

Chris Partlow: Mid 30’s, enforcer for drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, cold, calculated killer

Michael Lee: 14 year old “street kid”, who takes care of his little brother Bug, has a drug addicted mother, and is wary of adults

Michael

Cutty

Cutty: Former enforcer for drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, did prison time and came out to build a boxing gym for disenfranchised inner city youth

Bug: Michael’s little brother

Michael’s Step-Father: Bug’s dad, not Michael’s, has been in prison for a long time

Snoop

Snoop: Chris’s partner, a female enforcer for the gang

THE SITUATION:

We follow MICHAEL as he deal with pressures at home (his mother, who sells their groceries for drugs) and pressure from the street (the drug dealing game). He’s a quiet and shy kid, but has taken over a parental role for his little brother BUG and begins boxing at CUTTY’S gym and shows an aptitude for the sport, yet for no good reason, he balks at all attempts by CUTTY to assert himself as a father figure role in his life. For instance, he bolts CUTTY’S van when he drives him and another boy home from a boxing fight rather than be alone with his boxing coach and whenever CUTTY puts his arm around MICHAEL, MICHAEL shrugs away and appears very uncomfortable. No explanation is given, yet we wonder. In addition, as his peers fall into roles as drug dealers, MICHAEL refuses to do so, even going as far as to decline a sizable cash present from CHRIS and the drug kingpin Marlo, even though every other kid takes the money and standing his ground could very well lead to violence upon him. Seeing his boldness, CHRIS tries on multiple occasions to recruit MICHAEL into the role of his protege, yet MICHAEL spurns all his advances.

We follow CUTTY as he struggles to teach hardened street kids boxing skills and keep them away from the violence that surrounds them. He reaches out to MICHAEL, in what appears to be a parental way, but when MICHAEL spurns him for no good reason, we begin to doubt CUTTY’S motivations.

We follow CHRIS as he basically kills anyone who stands in the way of his boss building a drug empire in Baltimore. He’s cold and calculated (watching him, you shiver, trust me), yet when it comes to killing his victims, he takes care to execute them in a way where they feel the least amount of pain, shooting them in the head. He has spotted MICHAEL and seeks to recruit him as his protege.

THE CONFLICT:

MICHAEL’S step-father returns home from prison, and though MICHAEL’S mother promised her two sons she’d never let the man come back to them, he moves back in. He acts very friendly to the boys, picking BUG up from school and helping the young boy with his homework, yet MICHAEL acts very coldly toward him and begins to have trouble in school. MICHAEL’S step-father tells MICHAEL that he has returned home to take everything over and he wants MICHAEL to pay him money that MICHAEL earns from the street for living in “his” house.

MICHAEL is provided several options to deal with his situation. He can talk to his teacher in school, ask CUTTY or CHRIS to help him. The first two choices are obviously the correct ones, but ultimately MICHAEL goes to CHRIS and asks him to help him.

In this scene, CHRIS and his partner-killer SNOOP stand in the shadows as MICHAEL points out his step-father, who’s buying drugs on the corner. In three short lines of dialogue, MICHAEL and CHRIS’S characters are developed more than they have ever before.

MICHAEL: I just want him gone, away from me and Bug.

SNOOP [Incredulous]: Why? What the hell he do to you?

MICHAEL opens his mouth to say, but can’t. CHRIS and MICHAEL look at one another. MICHAEL lowers his head, obviously ashamed. CHRIS’S facial features tighten.

CHRIS: We take care of it, boss.

In the next scene, CHRIS and SNOOP lead MICHAEL’S step-father down a dark alley, guns drawn. CHRIS is drilling MICHAEL’S step-father about whether or not “he likes boys.” MICHAEL’S step-father denies having ever touched the kids. At the end of the scene, CHRIS pistol-whips MICHAEL’S step-father in such a vicious, horrifying way, even SNOOP, a hardened killer herself, stares on in shock, as CHRIS beats the man unrecognizable.

ANALYSIS

What can we, as writers, gain about how to build characters from these two short scenes (and, I realize, the episodes before these which laid the framework)?

1) Situations must always, always place incredible pressure on your characters.

As people, we learn the most about ourselves when placed in pressure-filled situations. Do we run away? Do we drink malt liquor? Do we stand tall and face the pressure directly? Do we create to-do lists?

Putting a character in a situation where they must choose a direction will illuminate depths of characterizations that can never be reached by saying: MICHAEL was molested as a kid so adult male attention makes him leery. Showing MICHAEL shrugging CUTTY’S arm off of him and bolting from the van to not be alone in the van with the man reveals this character depth in an impacting way.

The more pressure from the most angles will create a tension the reader will feel. I mean, MICHAEL has pressure at home from his horrible mother, pressure from having to raise his brother BUG, and a constant lure from the street.

2) Good ambiguity is your friend.

Question: Do we know MICHAEL was molested as a child? Do we know CHRIS was?

I don’t think so.

But we think there’s a pretty good chance one of them or both of them were, and we salivate with the idea of not knowing, don’t we? We want to know! We need to know! But the writer is not giving us the satisfaction of knowing, and this drives us crazy…in a great way. I watched this episode three days ago and find myself wandering off in the shower, while munching on a bologna sandwich, or before going to sleep, wondering: was CHRIS molested? was MICHAEL?

This is good ambiguity. Don’t feel like your readers need to “get” everything. Present credible situations which give your characters opportunities to react and see what happens. Life is not cut and dry, black and white; life is blurry and gray. Your goal is to present your scenes in this fashion.

3) Be so very specific

This is actually a Jim Sallis mantra, which I listened to, when in his class, and believed I understood it, but now realize it takes a lot of practice to be as specific as you need to be.

This is what I mean. If we hadn’t been presented the way CHRIS usually executes his victims–promises of pain-free death followed by a professional double-tap to the head–then we wouldn’t have been able understand the impact and reasoning when he pistol-whips MICHAEL’S step-father. The depth of character only opened up once we understood context.

Same with MICHAEL. Writers took care to present MICHAEL as an amazingly responsible older brother, great friend, skilled boxer, intelligent student, tough kid, so when his step-father was introduced into the mix and he lost his brother, withdrew from his friends and boxing and school, we understood, without the writer saying, MICHAEL is having difficulty dealing with his step-father being home because the man’s a big jerk and quite possibly might be a molester.

As Jim Sallis always said, “We don’t need that. We got it; we’re there.”

4) Make your characters walk-the-wire

Philipe Petit on a wire between the Twin Towers in NYC

You ever see that doc Man on Wire, about Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between the Twin Towers in NYC in 1974? Well, take a look at the picture on the left. See, Philippe? That’s where you want to place your characters. On a wire, nearly 1400 feet from the ground, teetering to the left and to the right, dealing with high winds, birds, rain, balance, on a quest to reach the other side.

What is at stake for the Philippe Petit?

His very survival.

The stakes couldn’t be any higher, could they. How about those stakes for MICHAEL and CHRIS. The same, aren’t they.

And that’s not to say every writer needs to write a gritty, inner-city crime drama. Because there are stakes just as frightening as death. And it is up to you to determine what those are for your characters. Loss of love is pretty horrifying to some. Debt. Marriage. A child. Abandonment. Loss of powers.

Whatever the stakes are for your characters, place them on a wire 1400 feet from the earth and toss every obstacle at them you can think and see what they do.

5) The past is the present and future

Everyone of our characters has lives before we discovered them. They were all babies, children, teenagers (AYYYYKKKKK!!!), maybe mothers, college students, acne-covered wizards…

We might begin a story when a character is 80 years old, but whatever happened before our readers join our characters on whatever journey will place them on a wire, is vitally important. As writers, we must know what our characters childhood, high school years, college dorm time, was like.

Now, do we need to provide a timeline? No. Do we need to have like forty flashbacks to when our 80 year old character was being spoon-fed plums by their now long-dead Aunt Carol? Probably not. But we, as the writer, must know how the past shaped our characters into the decision-making people they are now. So when we show the specific details of their lives, put them on the wire, put incredible amounts of pressure on them, we’ll have a much better grasp on what they’ll do, and we can then see their decisions better.

MICHAEL may or may not have been molested in his youth by his step-dad. But something sure happened to make him wary of adult male attention. Something happened to cause him to go as far as to succumbing to the gang life he’d spent all his energy avoiding when his step-dad comes back. We don’t know anything about CHRIS’S childhood, but something drove him to become the psychopath he becomes, and something even more terrifying must have happened to drive him to react out of character to even the suggestion MICHAEL’S step-dad touched him.

I hope this blog will drive you to think a bit more about your characters, because I don’t care whatever anybody says, characters, not plot, drive stories. The Wire writers created characters so riveting I stayed up late at night thinking about them, and as writers, there isn’t anything we could wish for more.
I wish you all good words!!!!!

Where all the magic happens...

MJG

If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

PLC Sunday Confessional: “Taking Stock of Maryland Crab Soup: Life And Work”

Here’s my second writing progress report.  Just letting y’all know where I’m at and going, and maybe providing everyone with a little insight into their own work.  Click here for the link.

Thanks for reading.

MJG
If y’all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.

Weekly Confession on PLC

By: Michael James Greenwald

Hi.  I made my regular confession on my group blog, The Parking Lot Confessional and would love if you checked it out.  It’s my own little spin on Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech.  Struggling writer style.

Check it out here.

You won’t be sorry.  Well…maybe a little bit sorry, but not jumped naked onto my horse’s black saddle after he’d been standing all day in the Arizona summer heat sorry.

That’s real damn sorry.

Thanks for visiting (don’t leave!!!! don’t leave!!!!  I don’t want to be alone!!!!  I’ll do a trick!!!!!  Any kind!!!!!! Oh, never done that before…okay, but first let me stretch…)

RANDOM VIDEO!!!!  RANDOM VIDEO!!!!!

My favorite movie scene.

I wish you all good words!!!!!

MJG

By the way, if you all want to get to know me a bit better, check me out on FACEBOOK, follow me on Twitter, or at my personal blog.