“Weeping Underwater Looks A Lot Like Laughter”: Strange Title, Promising Debut

By: Sleep Sunshine

Michael J. White’s first novel begins, “On our debut night in Des Moines, Nicholas Parsons murdered a high school senior in the hotel room directly beneath us.  The following morning we received a call from the front desk receptionist announcing a cancellation of the complimentary breakfast buffet, due to the conversion of the hotel restaurant into a provisional police headquarters.”

Since I’m a writer I like to think about what made me pluck a book from the seemingly endless stacks at B&N or Borders, and fork over my dwindling cash-flow to bring it home.  Many times I don’t remember.  This time, I recall reading those first two sentences and being interested enough to continue down the page, from their George Flynn, White’s narrator did the rest.

George Flynn and his family (undeveloped, minus his older brother Zach, who is, but not far beyond the lines of jock-stereotype) move from Davenport to Des Moines, Iowa just in time to begin his junior year, in a brand new high school.  George quickly finds himself alienated from his new high school peers, who he describes as “disproportional, with oddly shaped craniums packed with perversions,” and put-off by their hazing in passing notes about him around class, one of which reads: “Please put the fire out in your crotch.”

By page twenty, though, the primary focus of the novel is revealed.  Emily Schell.  Beautiful, intelligent, unbridled…all the qualities of an excellent literary muse.  George is smitten on sight.

Mr. White, though, isn’t done.  Coupled with the “dream-girl” is her younger sister, Katie Schell, whose precocious, witty, sardonic humor really pops off the page.  Katie is also in love with George, and this element–a love triangle, but not really–is fascinating to witness developing.  George can’t help his physical attraction to Emily, while he can’t ignore his intellectual and spiritual infatuation with Katie.  And lurking under the surface is an even more compelling element, which isn’t ever raised: George’s obsession with the Schell family, as a whole.

Katie Schell suffers from MS, which flares and ebbs as the book progresses; when not sick, Katie is only mobile through the use of a crutches or a wheelchair.  While physically limited, Katie’s mental capacity is limitless.  In every scene Katie is in, she steals the spotlight, especially from her older sister, who’s not all to happy about this yet struggles with the emotions of being jealous of her handicapped younger sister when she received a genetic Power-ball relative to Katie’s losing ticket.

The narration is told from present-day George’s POV.  His life is in ruin and he looks back at these several years with the Schell sisters as the point where his life climaxed and began it’s descent.  One of the weaknesses of the book is George.  He serves as the narrator, yet his characterization is not given as much weight as the Schell sisters, or even the Schell family altogether.

The story is so focused on this dynamic it leaves out what could otherwise be a very interesting and revealing character study of George and his relationships with his parents (not even touched on after page 2) and his older brother Zach (a couple scenes with Zach near the end had great potential).  Mr. White imagined George as a red-head, which, for me, made him inherently interesting, due to the stigma red-haired men in our society deal with; yet Mr. White stopped there, as if this were enough to establish George.  Other than the passing-notes near the beginning, we do not witness George dealing with much adversity.  This can be explained with the fact that George is portrayed as kind of an easy-going fella (who wouldn’t like him), but that retards his character depth, especially in contrast to the fascinating, complicated Schells.

The book doesn’t strive too far.  All you believe is going to happen, does in fact happen, with little surprises along the way.  The hook which captured my attention on the retail floor of B&N–the Nicolas Parson’s murder–turns out to have no greater significance than a repetitive fascination for George and other Des Moines characters.  But, for some reason, neither deficiency left me wanton at the end.  Through reflection, I’ve come to commend Mr. White’s instinct to not muddy the water.  The central plot arc involves George and the Schell sisters and all the emotional highs and lows having met them bring, and that, for this reader, was enough of a meal to chew.

All in all I found this novel to be an excellent read, recommend it for those Confession-ers who enjoy coming-of-age, contemporary type literature, and look forward to Mr. White’s next effort.

Wishing, as always, great words to y’all.

–SS
Michael James Greenwald (Sleep Sunshine)
Born a Jew, though through his fellow confession-ees, now firmly committed to this cathartic concept of confessional (at least in the agnostic literary sense), Michael James Greenwald is a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and waffling daily (sometimes hourly) on To-MFA or To-Not-To-MFA, that is the question. He’s focused on his Summer of Michael, ’10, where healing mentally and spiritually is the order of each day, and moving forward, onto The Next Step. His debut novel The Rainbow Child and short story collection Celebratory Gunfire are due to be published in the next several years. His personal blog site is sleepsunshine. Feel free to venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

On Therapy and Artistic Immortality…On a Tuesday, At That

As posted Tuesday on the Parking Lot Confession.  Make-up work for missing my regular Sunday post.  Thanks for reading…

SS, in full Blackhawk "Playoff Beard" Regalia

Good morning, Confession-ees! I’m confessing today from strange places and times. Tuesday morning. Not my usual day.

You might be thinking: WTF, him again, we know to avoid PLC on Sundays as to not subject our eyes to his ridiculous blabber, and now he’s tricked us; posting on a Tuesday! Look away, Eyes! Look away! WTF! WTF!

As am I. As am I.

(Or…you might not be thinking that at all. Who knows what we think, right?)

Yesterday, I attended my very first therapy session, with a therapist who one of my best friend’s recommended. To be truthful, the decision to try therapy (again) wasn’t a shot from the hip, I’ve gone back and forth for a while now on it’s necessity. I settled down many a night on my mother’s verandah, sucking on a bottle of Knob (“Knob Creek, the only bourbon Sleep Sunshine will pass-out from“…still waiting for that check, Knob Creek; remember Cheyenne Drive is spelled with 2 N‘s), staring out into a Chicago rainstorm, going back and forth:

To Therapy, or Not-To Therapy; the question.

During this debate, I recall an instance, another of my best friend’s likes to retell, about a time when I was in college, and one buddy, lets call him Goro, and another of my best friend’s, let’s call her Silvanopolis…yeah, that’s what I said: Silvanopolis. She’s part Russian, part lost city at the bottom of the ocean. A Russo-opolis mix. Very sexy.

Here’s the interplay:

INT. Living Room–College Apartment–Day

Beer bottles and fast-food containers and passed-out individuals lying around on a beer-stained carpet, top-less girl sprawled on an adjacent couch. GORO and SILVANOPOLIS sitting next to one another engaged in a heated DOOM battle, smoking four-foot glass bong between them.

Goro: Yo, Sil, what shall we get Mike for his birthday?

Silvanopolis: I don’t know. A psychiatrist.

GORO nods his head.

Fade to black.

My College Yearbook Photo: Gosh, I looked so much younger then!

Harkening back, I question if I’ve always been sorta crazy, and come to the conclusion I guess I have.

But now I’m doing something about it. Kudos to me.

Really, what I seek out of therapy, what I expressed to my therapist, lets call her Fredreicka Goldenfarb (what is with me and Russian names this morning), was my desire to have the ability to de-clutter my brain to a point where I can make some Big Choices in my life. At the moment I feel so buried, mentally, so over-extended, that it’s hard for me even to decide on what to have for lunch, much less figure out what career I want to do for the next ten years, what state I need to live (as in geographical area; not mental, IE–catatonic), who I will marry and have children with, etc.

The only part of my life which has remained relatively constant is my work, my writing, and I wonder if the roller-coaster of productivity I’ve experienced–weeks of 70,000-word-production coupled with weeks of struggling-to-write-a-decent-page-of-prose–can be aided by this de-cluttering of brain.

For her part, Fredreicka stated her confidence that we’d get there, that she’d do all the heavy-lifting (then proceeded to ask me how much I’d pay for her services; to which I wrote down the secret password to my trust fund on a slip of paper and handed it to her. Then she mentioned how it would get worse before it got better and I snagged back the slip of paper and emptied the change out my pockets onto her nice therapy table, instead).

One of the touchstones for me has always been, can I be “normal” and still hold onto my artistic edge?

Fredreicka again seemed confident. She said, not only would my artistic edge not be affected, but I’d be a happier person, which would allow my creatively to flow more freely, and I’d have more control over it, eliminating, or at least tempering, the frustration of never knowing which Sleep Sunshine will settle down to the keys–the Manic-uberProductive-SS, where the sentences flow like I’ve possessed Jonathan Lethem’s fingers; or the Depressive-NearIlliterate-Nicholas-Sparks-clone.

We hang onto this creativity like it’s something that will hold us to the earth when the tornado of our lives rages around us. It’s what we have. It’s what keeps us sane. It’s who we are, isn’t it? Non-artists don’t get that, do they?

Yet, our creative endeavors won’t feed us (literally and figuratively), won’t cloth us, won’t hold us when tragedy strikes, won’t love us back (not in the way our human-ness needs), won’t grab a beer with us, won’t provide us children (real children), won’t allow us to feel the great stimulations living, real living, has to offer: eternal love, friendship, family, orgasm…

Often I think of some of the greatest artists of Time, and note how many of them, outside their art, lived miserable existences–failed marriages, estranged children, friend-less, penniless, drug and alcohol addictions, shotgun chokings–and I wonder, I do, if that is the price we must pay for greatness.

And if it is, will I make this sacrifice? Can I? Should I?

Fredreicka seems to think not.

Me? I hope not. I want the love, the marriage, the baby-carriage. I want all the gifts I bestow on my characters and with them all the pain they bring. I want to feel, in real-life, viscerally, not just on the page, through my creations. But mostly, I want artistic immortality. And if I can’t have both–if we all really must choose Red Pill or Blue–I remain unsure of what choice to make.

My hope is Fredreicka will help me de-clutter my brain enough to make the best decision I can.

Thank you for reading.

As always, I wish you great words!

-SS

For those of you in the Chicago-land area, Sleep Sunshine (Michael James Greenwald) will be reading his poem “I Am Lane” at 42 Degrees North Latitude on Thursday, May 20th, at 7PM. (I’ll have two, no three, therapy sessions under my belt by that point, so the chance you’ll witness some on-stage weeping is really good!)

Click here for more details.

Thanks for supporting your local Chicago artists!

Ray Bradbury. You’re a Weird Guy, Man.

And he looks so normal too...

Good morning, World-People!

Unearthed an interesting quote that I wanted to convey to you all.

Lo!  The Great Ray Bradbury speaks:

“You must write every single day of your life…you must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads…may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days.  And out of that love, remake the world.”

Wear books like hats upon your crazy heads…

Amen, Ray.  Amen.

(Author Note: I, in fact did this, wearing my book like a hat upon my crazy head, and wish to point out the most important word–well, the second most important word besides crazy–would be my, as in, my book.  In my experience plucking a library book off of the shelf and prancing around the public library with it splayed on your head will effectively get one (me) banned from Palos Heights Public Library.  And to think, I hadn’t even began to climb the stacks, smelling books like perfumes!).

Good words, Peeps.  Good words.

–MJG

When not joining a National Terrorist Watch List, Michael James Greenwald deals with a daily dose of depression by being a Border’s Book Sniffer. He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance (Corporate-sponsored education institutions here I come!!!), by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

Something Blue, Something New…At PLC: Round Robin Fiction Story “Parlour Games”

FIRE...GOOD! FIRE...BAD! FIRE...GOOD!

Hello All!

I’m just writing you this evening to make EVERYONE and their MOTHERS aware of a new idea we had over at my group site, parkinglotconfessional.com.

This week, we performed a Round Robin Fiction Story, with all four of us taking a section, and trying to write a complete short story, in 3,000 words or less.

What we came up with? Well, lets say it kind of looks like what would happen if a giraffe mated with a tadpole.

Ouch? Yeah, probably.

But…interesting.

Here’s the link for PART ONE of “Parlour Games” by the Parking Lot Confessional.

Enjoy!

–MJG

One More Day

Good Morning

By: Michael James Greenwald

It’s a melancholy day, here in Chicago, inside and out.  Drizzle and wet, white-gray clouds linger over my damp drive-way.  Water beads my sister’s windshield, blades of sprung grass.  I feel it in my head; maybe like an old man feels the cold weather in his arthritic knee, I feel a somber day in my depressive head.  Winter has found its way back, there’s a hard chill in the air; birds that had returned, perennials that had poked heads above the dirt–this morning, believe they’d somehow erred.

NOT me (thank God no one had camera phones in my day)

But I’m not nineteen anymore.

The option of smoking a bowl and/or cracking open a bottle of suds, sitting on my couch and thumb-wrestling my MLB “The Show” all day has been over for a while.  Dad no longer pays my freight.  I can no longer pick up co-eds.  I’ve graduated to the world, unprepared, possibly, but thrust out of a collegiate womb filled with pot smoke, beer bongs, video games, Oscar feeding, laying college girls with no performance or procreation expectations and hopefully no STD’s.

The world is a cruel place.

Probably.  Yes.  I think at least three million people today agree with me.  But infinitely more interesting?  Probably that, too.  Because there’s something utterly interesting about a winter haze hanging over a winterized forest, and nature, caught unawares, unsure of whether to spring forward, unterred by this sudden regression into the heart of winter, as though the seventy-degree, sunny days of the past two weeks had been a terrible tease, an elongated April Fools joke, an unfunny frat prank on us all.

Yet, I can’t help wondering how many people died yesterday (I tried to look it up on our wonderful Internet, but evidently unless you are notable or a celebrity, no one seems to record your passing).  How many people would give whatever they own for One More Day, even a lousy, overcast cold day like today.

And if that doesn’t clear my head of winter, then possibly nothing will.

Come on chemicals!  Adjust!

Hello, Dopamine?  Time to rouse and face the day!

I’m going to force my tired body and aching head out from slumber, fold my sheet crisply over my comforter, brew a strong pot of brew, and plant myself at my desk.  There, I will click open my The Rainbow Child file and allow my fingers to wiggle this depression away.

The best part of being who I am is using what I have, for the greater good of the world, and more importantly, the greater good of me.

Write, You Fingers!

Write!

–MJG

HORNS!!

Michael James Greenwald fights off his daily dose of depression with his fingers.  He’s a student at Story Studio Chicago, applying for a Ragdale Residency in the fall, and considering allowing UT, Austin a second chance at deliverance, by accepting him into their MFA program for 2011 (HOOK ‘EM HORNS!!).

For now, he works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago.   He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

Sunday Confession at PLC: “To Be Blunt”

Gearing up to write. (There's a pen in my other hand, I swear)

By: Michael James Greenwald

“You can’t put a value on sweat equity.”

–Jonathan Sehring, President of IFC Entertainment

Hello, peeps. I’m back after my vacation/business trip and to be truthful, I’m feeling more ornery that usual. I don’t know if this has to do with the sabbatical or the fact that Sarah Palin’s high-pitched (I mean, really, someone please kick her in the nads), dumb-ass, Tea Party voice is coming through my radio, but, regardless, brace yourself…

This week we are talking about goal setting. I believe my three counterparts said about as much as can be said about goal setting. I find it my goal (see, it’s everywhere) to hammer it home.

Screw goal setting.

Uhhhhhh????????????

Yeah, I said it. I’ll say it again.

SCREW GOAL SETTING.

Great Goal: Specific Aim and Strategy to Reach It

Listen. Let me be real with you here. I know people who wake up every morning and write numbers 1 through 5 in a pocket notebook next to their bed and list Daily Goals (“Organize those taxes!”, “Take Fido Baggins to dog park!”, “30 Minutes on the Eliptical!”, “Buy Acne Cream!”), then check a bulletin board behind their desk where they’ve tacked Monthly Goals, color-coded by category (Work: “Create Your Monster Job Profile!”; Family: “Get Little Mikey to Poo-Poo in the Potty!”; School: “Finish Those MFA Apps!”; Religion: “Get to Church Every Sunday!”; Personal: “Book That Cruise for Louise’s Birthday!”…), and into their bathroom to wash their face and there, by God, are Yearly Goals taped to the mirror (“Find the Love of Your Life!”, “Get that 10% pay raise!”, “Pick out your dream house on a lake in Michigan!”), and into the kitchen where they open the fridge to get milk for their coffee and find a sticky note on the milk carton (“CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!” 🙂 ).

Is there anything wrong with this approach to life?

In my opinion? No.

Come out, Come out, Wherever You Are!!

But, as writers, you and me (unless you haven’t “come out” of the literary closet, and if you haven’t I urge you to add that to your Daily Goal List), we need to keep our eye on the damn ball. Making lists of goals takes time, time that some other writer in the world is using to write, and say what you want about writing being a congenial community of artists, reaching out hands to each other to lift each other up, help each other out, motivate one another, THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

That is worth repeating.

THE PROFESSION OF WRITING IS A COMPETITION.

While you are sleeping, while you are eating, while you are watching “Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars”, while you are stooped, (bio-degradable) poopie bag stretched over your hand, picking up Fido Baggins’s dog crap; another writer is writing.

And trust me when I tell you that this wielder of the pen will take your publishing deal.

Because, as much as you think your, romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect, convenience store Shakespearean allegory, homo-erotic detective noire/ghost story, dying coal town triopic, is a unique concept, there’s a twenty-three-year-old writer on a farm in what had been Prussia sneaking out to the donkey enclosure in his parent’s barn to scribble, on parchment in his own blood, his romantic comedy centered around a formerly-unknown troll sect. And he’s out there every damn morning, while you’re sitting at your desk writing “I’LL DO WII FIT AEROBICS FOR TWENTY MINUTES EVERYDAY” on a pink sticky note.

Where All Boris's Magic Happens (Oh, don't be an a@#).

Boris Stensky will take what had been your publishing deal at Harper Collins.

And on January 1, 2011, you’ll write on the bulletin board displaying your yearly goals: “FINISH MY NEXT MANUSCRIPT (a fable about a sequined-tutu wearing spider who only wants to qualify to be a dancer on ‘Dancing With the [MF-ing] Stars’!”

So, my point this morning (besides letting off some steam…thank you very much) is to remind you how many writers there are in the world, and writing down goals are all well and good, following all the steps to excellent goal creation laid out by my Confessional Compatriots is super-fab, but remember, the idea is to keep your damn butt in the chair (or in Boris’s case, his stomach on the donkey stall hay) and DO YOUR WORK.

Ready? Go!

You best believe I will. I’m sitting at my desk right now. And (“FINISH THE REWRITE ON ‘THE RAINBOW CHILD'”) is number 1 on the list of SUMMER GOALS tacked to my bulletin board.

Catch me if you can.

–MJG

Michael James Greenwald works in his family business of owning and operating bowling alleys in the South Suburbs of Chicago. He is also a fiction writer, with a short story collection Stories from a Bowling Alley and a novel The Rainbow Child due to be published in the next several years. You can read his blogs at sleepsunshine and his confessions every Sunday on his group blog at parkinglotconfessional.com. Venture to his Facebook page or feel free to email him with any comments or suggestions for further topics, or if you had any interest in being a guest blogger on either one of his sites.

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.

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.

Regular Sunday Confession in the Parking Lot Confessional

January 24, 2010

By: Michael James Greenwald

If you’re a writer, sleeping with a writer, want to sleep with a writer (hey!!!!!), check out my usual Sunday blog post at the Parking Lot Confessional.

“The Practice of Writing”

Oh, and find out what the heck this video:

has to do with anything (it might not, knowing me).

Hope y’all have a nice Sunday.  Send your questions, on writing, on dating, on life, to jonah14646@gmail.com.  I’ll post your question here and give it the best riff I can.

Thanks for reading.

MJG