On September 15th, 2012, a man named Darrel Damer died.
Darrel has been my maternal randmother's 'gentleman companion' for the last decade. My grandfather died in 1996; Darrel's wife passed on around the same time. When Grandmother and Darrel met, each found in the other the joy and comfort that they had prepared themselves to live without for the rest of their lives.
Darrel was a great man. He was the proud patriarch of a large family, a kind and compassionate person who treated me like a grown grandson. The story of his life is amazing in full, a saga fortunately recorded in a private autobiography.
In WWII he was a naval gunner who rode aboard the Liberty Ships of the Atlantic convoys; he had three of them torpedoed out from under him. During one attack, he stayed at his cannon and continued to defend the ship even as it sank, giving the crew and the other gunners time to evacuate. As the water came up around his ankles, he scored a crippling blow on the U-boat that had attacked his ship. The submarine turned and fled for home while Darrel took off his shoes and calmly swam toward the lifeboats.
After the war, Darrel returned home to Virginia and began work as a steamfitter, a trade that he plied for several decades. He had little formal education, but he was a highly intelligent man and he sought knowledge wherever it could be found. During the time that I knew him, he borrowed many books from me, devouring subjects ranging from pre-Christian theology to theoretical physics with a zeal that eclipsed even my own. I always looked forward to the intellectual discussions that filled our visits.
On September 21st, 2012, Roy Jack, my wife's maternal grandfather, died very unexpectedly, probably from a heart attack.
He too was a great man, a model of wisdom and humility, the anchor of his family. Roy and his wife Rachel raised three children while running their own business, which is no mean feat. They started with a carpet and upholstery cleaning service, later branching out into interior decorating and opening a very successful home decor outlet.
I met Roy in 2001, and we got along right from the start. He had the best handshake of any man I've ever known. Like me, Roy was a man who loved to build and fix things, and he was possessed of a keen insight into the way the world worked, from something as small as an electric motor in a child's toy to things as large and abstract as international politics. He and I often sat in his living room at family gatherings, quietly discussing whatever took our fancy while watching his brood of grandchildren at play. The things I learned from him will stay with me for the rest of my days.
Both of these men made this world a better place, and it is poorer for their passing. They will be missed.
Sunday, September 23, 2012
Monday, September 3, 2012
Doing My Homework
Part of learning to be a successful writer is studying the art of storytelling. One must learn to understand the fundamental elements of a story--the gross components--but also the tiny details, down to every weld and rivet.
There are myriad sources of education from which a dedicated writer may draw. I have gotten into the habit of reverse-engineering books and movies (I call it 'deconstructing' stories) to identify the various tools and techniques the storytellers have used and the clever, innovative methods of their employment. Establishment, for instance, is a vital part of any story; in order to understand events that transpire over the course of the story, the audience must be given key pieces of information. The trick is to hide your establishment the way a stage magician hides the rabbit. You can't just tell somebody "pay attention to this, it will be important later." Sometimes all it takes is a word or two, the literary equivalent of a seemingly insignificant detail appearing in the corner of the screen for a couple of seconds near the beginning of a movie. Sometimes it's a line of dialog; in essence, one character telling another what the writer wants to tell the reader. There exist countless other tricks, some of which I know and use, some I'm still mastering, and others that I may never discover.
One of the hard lessons for me personally has been the art of brevity. Stories have to move fast. Since I have a visual imagination, my tendency is to throw in every single detail I see in my mind; if I'm writing a chase scene, I want to describe every bump in the road, every shift of the gears, every swerve and dodge, when what is important is to give the reader the thrill of speed, the urgency of the situation, and the frenetic, chaotic pace. Instead of describing a character getting whiplash in a terrifying collision, it's much, much better to give the reader whiplash.
A surprising source of education, probably ranked third in my book behind reading great fiction and reading _about_ great fiction, is the supplementary material included on DVDs. A filmmaker is limited by the same constraints as a writer, in that only so much information can be crammed onto the screen before a movie becomes too long or too complicated. In watching the deleted scenes, I can gain insight by discerning why they were deleted and how the story was changed by their exclusion. Listening to the commentary tracks often yields little nuggets of priceless education--for instance, hearing a director describe the decision-making process that led the flawless execution of a scene can inform my examination of a scene in my own story, or listening to an actor explain the steps they took to create a character in their mind may give me a new way to create my own characters.
One of the most difficult challenges in the world of fiction, in any medium, is the accurate dramatization of a true story. Done well, a novel or movie based on real events is a historical document in its own right, despite the odd bit of license taken to craft an engaging story. Once again, because the subject is something that really happened, the temptation to include every tiny detail is hard to resist, but sorting out what actually needs to be there is the real trick. As an example, I'll use the movie _Apollo 13_, since that is what I have playing in the background as I write this post. (For those who plan to put this lesson into practice, it's hard to go wrong with any historical drama spearheaded by Tom Hanks and/or Steven Spielberg, but there are many other great examples)
In the supplementary material included with the film, there is a short documentary in which it is mentioned that actors Tom Hanks and Kathleen Quinlan spent three days in the home of the people they subsequently portrayed, Apollo 13 Spacecraft Commander Jim Lovell and his wife Marilyn. With all of the historical detais recreated for the film, from the sets, props, and vehicles, down to the actors' hairstyles and the cut of their costumes, it would be easy to believe that the actors and their real-life counterparts could have spent three days discussing this myriad of visual elements. I can picture Hanks watching the way Lovell moves, the way he carries himself, his gestures and his unconscious mannerisms--which I'm sure he did, to some extent--but that's not actually what's important to the story. What is important, and what the actors spent those three days studying, is the emotional qualities of their subjects. The emotions felt by Jim and Marilyn Lovell, and all of the other people portrayed in the film, during the seven days of the Apollo 13 crisis over forty years ago, are the same emotions they feel reminiscing about it today. Director Ron Howard was likewise faced with capturing and evoking the emotional state of the astronauts, their families, and the entire country in that time. Everything else in the story--the color of the computers in the flight center, the position of every switch and dial in the spacecraft, the length of the men's sideburns and the volume of the women's hairstyles--revolves around those emotions.
What does this tell us as writers? It tells us that what our characters look like is not as important as what they feel. I've actually stopped giving all but the barest physical description of my characters, because I've discovered that conveying their thoughts and emotions accurately will give my reader everything they need to create their own picture of the character. Unless hair color is somehow intrinsic to the plot, I don't mention it. In my mind, the protagonist may be blonde, but the reader could just as well imagine them as brunette. What matters is that the reader has a solid visualization of the character, not what the character actually looks like. There are characters in my stories whom I picture as black or asian, but I didn't include that detail because it didn't matter. For all I know, a black person might read that story and imagine the character as white. It doesn't really matter if the reader imagines exactly what I envision (in fact, it may be better that they don't). Just get the feel of things right, and all those little details will create themselves.
So the message of this post is this: do your homework. Read books. Watch movies. Read books about books and watch movies about movies. When you find something you like, watch or read it again. If a writer or filmmaker pulls off a neat trick, pick it apart and figure out how they did it.
And, once you think you're pretty good at that, read _The Manual of Detection_ by Jedediah Berry. It's a great story, but it's also a magic trick in novel form. I've read it at least six times, and I still can't find the rabbit.
There are myriad sources of education from which a dedicated writer may draw. I have gotten into the habit of reverse-engineering books and movies (I call it 'deconstructing' stories) to identify the various tools and techniques the storytellers have used and the clever, innovative methods of their employment. Establishment, for instance, is a vital part of any story; in order to understand events that transpire over the course of the story, the audience must be given key pieces of information. The trick is to hide your establishment the way a stage magician hides the rabbit. You can't just tell somebody "pay attention to this, it will be important later." Sometimes all it takes is a word or two, the literary equivalent of a seemingly insignificant detail appearing in the corner of the screen for a couple of seconds near the beginning of a movie. Sometimes it's a line of dialog; in essence, one character telling another what the writer wants to tell the reader. There exist countless other tricks, some of which I know and use, some I'm still mastering, and others that I may never discover.
One of the hard lessons for me personally has been the art of brevity. Stories have to move fast. Since I have a visual imagination, my tendency is to throw in every single detail I see in my mind; if I'm writing a chase scene, I want to describe every bump in the road, every shift of the gears, every swerve and dodge, when what is important is to give the reader the thrill of speed, the urgency of the situation, and the frenetic, chaotic pace. Instead of describing a character getting whiplash in a terrifying collision, it's much, much better to give the reader whiplash.
A surprising source of education, probably ranked third in my book behind reading great fiction and reading _about_ great fiction, is the supplementary material included on DVDs. A filmmaker is limited by the same constraints as a writer, in that only so much information can be crammed onto the screen before a movie becomes too long or too complicated. In watching the deleted scenes, I can gain insight by discerning why they were deleted and how the story was changed by their exclusion. Listening to the commentary tracks often yields little nuggets of priceless education--for instance, hearing a director describe the decision-making process that led the flawless execution of a scene can inform my examination of a scene in my own story, or listening to an actor explain the steps they took to create a character in their mind may give me a new way to create my own characters.
One of the most difficult challenges in the world of fiction, in any medium, is the accurate dramatization of a true story. Done well, a novel or movie based on real events is a historical document in its own right, despite the odd bit of license taken to craft an engaging story. Once again, because the subject is something that really happened, the temptation to include every tiny detail is hard to resist, but sorting out what actually needs to be there is the real trick. As an example, I'll use the movie _Apollo 13_, since that is what I have playing in the background as I write this post. (For those who plan to put this lesson into practice, it's hard to go wrong with any historical drama spearheaded by Tom Hanks and/or Steven Spielberg, but there are many other great examples)
In the supplementary material included with the film, there is a short documentary in which it is mentioned that actors Tom Hanks and Kathleen Quinlan spent three days in the home of the people they subsequently portrayed, Apollo 13 Spacecraft Commander Jim Lovell and his wife Marilyn. With all of the historical detais recreated for the film, from the sets, props, and vehicles, down to the actors' hairstyles and the cut of their costumes, it would be easy to believe that the actors and their real-life counterparts could have spent three days discussing this myriad of visual elements. I can picture Hanks watching the way Lovell moves, the way he carries himself, his gestures and his unconscious mannerisms--which I'm sure he did, to some extent--but that's not actually what's important to the story. What is important, and what the actors spent those three days studying, is the emotional qualities of their subjects. The emotions felt by Jim and Marilyn Lovell, and all of the other people portrayed in the film, during the seven days of the Apollo 13 crisis over forty years ago, are the same emotions they feel reminiscing about it today. Director Ron Howard was likewise faced with capturing and evoking the emotional state of the astronauts, their families, and the entire country in that time. Everything else in the story--the color of the computers in the flight center, the position of every switch and dial in the spacecraft, the length of the men's sideburns and the volume of the women's hairstyles--revolves around those emotions.
What does this tell us as writers? It tells us that what our characters look like is not as important as what they feel. I've actually stopped giving all but the barest physical description of my characters, because I've discovered that conveying their thoughts and emotions accurately will give my reader everything they need to create their own picture of the character. Unless hair color is somehow intrinsic to the plot, I don't mention it. In my mind, the protagonist may be blonde, but the reader could just as well imagine them as brunette. What matters is that the reader has a solid visualization of the character, not what the character actually looks like. There are characters in my stories whom I picture as black or asian, but I didn't include that detail because it didn't matter. For all I know, a black person might read that story and imagine the character as white. It doesn't really matter if the reader imagines exactly what I envision (in fact, it may be better that they don't). Just get the feel of things right, and all those little details will create themselves.
So the message of this post is this: do your homework. Read books. Watch movies. Read books about books and watch movies about movies. When you find something you like, watch or read it again. If a writer or filmmaker pulls off a neat trick, pick it apart and figure out how they did it.
And, once you think you're pretty good at that, read _The Manual of Detection_ by Jedediah Berry. It's a great story, but it's also a magic trick in novel form. I've read it at least six times, and I still can't find the rabbit.
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