The story and the book.

My little girl asked me the other day: "Are a story and a book the same thing?"

Good question, kid.

We talked about Snow White and the many versions we've seen and read, from Mirror Mirror and The Fairest of Them All to the Brothers Grimm version and the older folktales. I told her, "you hold a book in your hands but you hold a story inside you, and if it's a really good one it will stay there forever."

Stop rolling your eyes. It's the truth.

Every couple of days I do the rounds of flash fiction websites -->. There are some wickedly talented editors and curators out there (oh yeah, writers too) and you never know when you will find something compelling and original and crazy, crazy good.

A handful of short stories have lingered within me over the past nine or so months, tossing and turning long after page and browser and Kindle screen were history. I'm still pretty nervous about formally 'reviewing' (I don't feel possessed of any authority to criticise others' fiction writing, especially not when I'm jammed up like a twenty dollar printer) but I would really like to mention three exceptionally sticky tales.

The first is William Dylan Powell's 'Road Kill'. I read this on The Flash Fiction Offensive last year and then over summer I lost track of it, couldn't recall where I had found it or what it was called or who wrote it... but I tell ya, I didn't forget one character, one mood shift, one feeling. I searched everywhere for it, Googled it, read back through bloggers' flash fiction reviews, no luck. Finally a couple of weeks ago I leapt upon the Spinetingler Award nominee list and there it was, it was called 'Road Kill', of course it was.

I read it again, it got me again. Please go read this story if you haven't already, it's a knockout.

Another story that snagged on my heart like a fish-hook is the first story in Heath Lowrance's eBook collection, Dig Ten Graves. It's a sad little stunner called 'It Will All Be Carried Away'. I think of it as 'The Charon Whitfield story' and this is a good sign for me; my test for a well written, well performed screen character has always been whether I can remember the character's name (as opposed to the actor's) for a long time after the film or TV show finishes. Well, Charon Whitfield is as real as my best friend and the protagonist's voice is still ringing. I can't forget his shameful, spiteful, remorseful reminiscences, and that's not a bad thing at all.

The third story I want to mention is a Joe R. Lansdale tale I found in Stories: All New Tales, an anthology edited by Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio. Mr. Lansdale's piece is called 'The Stars are Falling' and it's a beauty. It's the story of Deel Arrowsmith, a World War One soldier who returns home to East Texas so shell-shocked he's not sure if he's really dead or alive. He arrives back at his cabin to find his young wife and son, counting him dead, living it up with a handsome young neighbour. All the good stuff follows: jealousy, revenge, love, longing, secrets, war, brutality and death. I felt for Deel and I really wanted him to triumph, I think I still do.

Every time I cruise the websites and publications, anthologies and blogs, I'm looking for that connection. I want to be moved and torn up and tormented. I have to wonder, though, what it is that makes a particular story to stick to us as individuals:

Is it a narrative voice that strikes a harmonic chord?

Perfectly timed ideas that help us make sense of where we're at?

Themes that connect to our own?

Characters who remind us of our loved--and hated--ones, of ourselves?

Back in the saddle again.

Well, that was a longer-than-intended writing hiatus (which leads me to question: can it really be the thing you were born to do, if you can stand being on this planet three whole months without doing it?)

My family break is officially over. The wheels are firmly on the wagon and it's rolling along. This week I felt the unfamiliar rumble of boredom and that's how I know it's time.

My screenwriter friend and I were talking last night about 'putting down the pen' on a writing project and how it's a lot like taking a break from an intense love relationship: when you get back together down the track, the hope is that you'll both reintegrate seamlessly, like the final act of a well-written romcom (in the days when there was such a thing). You'll rediscover each other with all your new parts and experiences and hopefully you'll hold a newfound appreciation--or at least an acceptance--of the other's more irritating ways, as well as your own.

In the best case, the new-yet-oldness of it will feel sublime and predestined and just plain great... but the reality is, unless you commit to some pretty tiresome reconstruction, it's more likely to feel awkward, forced and frankly a bit of a letdown.

So for me, three months out of action, it's time to 'do the work' with this creative reunion. Less love and inspiration, more effort and discipline. Just until we're back on good terms, although mere speaking terms will do for starters.

I didn't even read over summer, although I bought plenty of eBooks and squirrelled them away (or pouched them away, this being the land of marsupials and all). Hoping to post reviews very soon for the books at the top of the pile.

What I did during my hiatus, alongside caring for personal responsibilities, was inhale Westerns. Movies, TV and short stories.

I started off by revisiting all three seasons of Deadwood (Ah, Joanie Stubbs, the danger of a living heart in all that death!) then I jumped all over the genre and its hybrid forms, from Shane to Calamity Jane, from Deadman's Road to The Proposition, from doco series Cowboys and Outlaws to Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience. Peckinpah, Ford, Hawks, Leone and all the artists who love them.

Westerns are so, so, so... good. Every word, every frame soaked in story. Heroes, antiheroes, archetypes and myths. Period costume, edible design and exquisite language. Sex, morality, dirty violins and revenge. Colonial brutality, original title and the hot blood-call of the land issue. The western is, I've come to realise, a complete artform, it needs nothing else.

This thought has sparked a direction and I'm going to follow it, like a new cologne on an old boyfriend.

Letting the sunshine in.

This month I put down the crime novels, turned off the DVD boxsets and took a breather from all the dark and troubled matter that usually calls me to witness.

So this is what it feels like to be one of those "positive people" (shudder). It feels odd, like trying to walk in a mermaid suit. I've been here before, it never lasts, the world always slaps that hippie grin right off your face.

But see, there's a new young person in my life who needs some sunlight and I've gotta be the provider.

I've decided to put down my work in progress 'til early next year, which completely sucks, but again, I can't be sifting through psychic riverbottom sludge while also meeting a small person's need for lightness and hope and level-heartedness. Maybe I'm framing it too dualistically, maybe it really is all one experience as I've always thought, but for now this feels like the right thing to do.

I will be back. Til then, keep kickin', friends.

Unfollowing the hero.

This week I read S.J. Watson’s mystery thriller Before I Go To Sleep, the story of a woman with amnesia who gradually pieces together an awareness that her constant, loving husband may not be so loving after all.

After a couple of pages I wasn’t sure I would continue with the book. I once experienced amnesia after a head injury and it was damn scary, and recalling the sensation of being lost inside my own mind made me uncomfortable, sometimes even nauseous. (Besides this, I have to admit, the book’s milieu was not to my taste, my Irish convict genes encoded with little sympathy for middle class Brits and their problems.)

However. Somewhere early on, I can’t tell you where, I attached to the main character in this novel and I couldn’t let go.

My intellect--and the blood of Bartholomew Jordan running through my veins--told me I should shut the book and move on to the Andrew Vachss on the bedside table or Daniel Woodrell’s beautiful Outlaw Album on my Kindle.

I could not do it.

S.J. Watson has done that elusive thing: she’s written a page turner, the book you read in one sitting, the book you read until your eyes are red and blurred and it’s four in the morning and you have to get up at six but you can’t stop until it’s finished.

Now, it seems to me that in dramatic screenwriting it’s a lot easier to craft this rolling flow of attention and interest. It’s in the way you structure and sequence the things that happen, the flow of questions and answers. But in fiction? It seems mysterious to me, magical. The page-turner effect is like alchemy, worthy of the highest praise.

All this awe led me to wondering about character identification and how on earth it really works.

You know when somebody on a social media site says some jackass thing and your brain says, UNFOLLOW? Sometimes you even 'Unfollow it up' and hit that little green button, or the blue link that says Unfriend. Where is the line they’ve crossed, it’s inside you, right? Unique to you?

So, regarding the main character in my own novel in progress, as the story has unfolded I’ve been surprised to discover that she tells lies. A lot of them. Unfortunately, when it comes to my own tastes as a reader, I would probably shut my own book and return to Woodrell. I desire honest heroes. Flaws and moral complexity are great but the heroes and antiheroes I like best tend to be truth tellers, often to a fault. This woman, though? Habitual liar. I’ve been wondering if this will be a turnoff or even a dealbreaker for readers and if so, how to deal with this, since characters are who they are and that’s that.

This week, after tossing all this around, something great happened. Through my teaching job I got free tickets to attend a seminar at a Brisbane university by a visiting Hollywood screenwriting guru. The man’s written a couple of books linking mythic storytelling with cinema, and he works as a story analyst on studio pictures. In this seminar the guru was likening the identification process to infantile attachment, using the metaphor of the umbilical cord; he described how it is broken at birth and how we cast around throughout our lives for something or someone to which we can re-attach; he claims it’s a primal human need. (This isn’t new by the way, Aristotle and Joseph Campbell and all that.)

The guru claimed that when we 'link in' with a hero in a story, our phantom umbilicus grabs onto that character and we become one, like mother and infant, then the primal connection pulls us along for the ride.

The man was kind of an egomaniac--the telling of his ‘personal background’ tale ran for almost two hours--but the hundred or so people in the lecture theatre were indeed along for the ride. We were on his side, we were following.

Then something strange happened. A sick kid in his late teens started coughing in the audience. Not loud (we didn’t hear it and we were right in front of him) but I guess it happened more than once. The guru stopped speaking mid-sentence and said to the lad, “you should get a cough drop for that.”

The kid blushed and said, “I know, I’m already on them, I’m really sorry.” Humble, his head bowed.

The guru stepped forward. Hard, angry face.

He berated the kid for distracting him.

He told him to leave.

The auditorium fell silent and I'll be damned if I didn’t hear every one of those umbilical cords snap in unison.

I felt it too, a kind of chill, at the precise moment the 'hero' lost the empathy of his audience. There was a brilliant, loaded silence, packed with meaning.

The guru had crossed the line from hardass to asshole. A Hollywood asshole at that, probably not even his own trait, just a side-effect of working for too many years in movie studios among other Hollywood assholes with their farmer-kicks-wife-kicks-kid-kicks-dog mentality. But regardless of the reason, there was nothing he could have done or said to get those listeners back, to regain their trust, their allegiance.

The rest of the session was tense, quiet. The book was closed.

I believe the writing God answers our questions if we ask them in the right spirit, and this was my message of assurance.

Your heroes can lie, they can walk out on their loved ones. They can kill people like Dexter, they can ruin people like Tony Soprano. Let them go where they need to go. If they go too far you will hear the snap, you will feel the chill.

You will know.

Desperate women.

Recently I submitted a couple of short stories to the Sisters In Crime Australia Scarlet Stiletto Awards, a short fiction competition for Australian women writers. The terms of entry for the contest specified "active woman protagonist". Now of course I know what this means, the character's desire drives the story, she has a plan, meets obstacles etc. etc. You won't find me arguing with this, it's Storytelling 101. I guess the judges didn't want to read a whole heap of stories where the female characters were all, you know... dead. Corpses in car boots.

And the truth is, across contemporary mainstream crime fiction, TV drama and films, this is still largely the case. (I'll never forget a review I once read for a new TV series in which the (male) reviewer wrote angrily, "from Twin Peaks on down, it's just more dead women!")

Interrogating my stories to see if they fit the brief--and pondering the relative 'activity' or 'passivity' of my characters--started me thinking about the role of women in our stories.

In 2011 the dominant culture promotes ass-kicking, strong, independent, sassy female characters and that's all good, I'm one of those girls and even if I weren't, them's the times we live in. BUT. I think we're missing something. Not every female character in books and TV and movies has to represent the Warrior archetype, there are others that are just as valuable (and some pretty great hybrids, like the Mother/Warrior in Terminator 2: Judgement Day)

'Strong' women are so often drawn as 2D cartoons, no facets, no inner life or secrets or contradictions. In trying to 'liberate' us from depictions of weakness or victimhood or frivolity, the culture offers us yet another cardboard fantasy. 'Role models' rather than actual characters. Bleugh. As for the femme fatales, (femmes fatale?), when they're written well they are a blast but it's rarer than it should be to find one who rings true, where there is honesty and nuance in the telling.

I've lived in this world as a female for a few years now, I've travelled the globe and met all kinds of folks and there's one thing I know for sure: sometimes the most dangerous, desperate thing a woman can do is to allow.

For many women in this world, attaching to a man and surrendering control is the best--sometimes the only--way of achieving a goal (shelter, money, babies, immigration) and the truth is, it's as fraught with danger as picking up a sword and going to battle.

For a real life perspective, let's look at my former next door neighbour. When she first moved in, she rocked up with her children and the house was peaceful and they smiled. They did, I saw them. Then, over time, desperate allowing: she let her new boyfriend move in to her house and bring his brothers and friends with him. She let him sell drugs from her doorstep. She started selling them herself. He set up methamphetamine production and distribution from the house, her house (italics because she yelled "this is my f*ckin house" two or three times a day; they were probably baby's first words). She gave him her car keys, she had a baby with him. She left him alone with her kids from previous relationships. Then domestic violence, lots of it, possibly molestation, she lied to the cops and the child protection workers for him, every time they came to the door, every single time. She kicked him out, she let him come back, she kicked him out, she let him come back. I don't know how the story will end but it doesn't look good.

It's a real life crime story, not original or compelling in itself but maybe a starting point. It's a real woman's role in a crime story. I'm not denying my former neighbour responsibility when i talk about allowing, I'm just saying she dropped a long way down for the love of another and she wasn't chasing that man down the street, she was just opening the door every time he knocked. (I hope it doesn't end with a corpse in a car boot but it's not inconceivable, the stakes are high and people aren't exactly in their right minds.) This happens all over the world, every day, but the question it raises--why does she keep going back to him?--is a great one, an important one. I wish I could find more well-written stories that grapple with it, cos you know, I've been guilty of over-allowing myself in the past and I'd love to know what the f*ck that was about. For some readers, why do I keep letting him/her back in? might be THE question in their life, the only question.

I found that very question wrapped up in Megan Abbott's delicious Bury Me Deep, the heroine at a turning point where she was racking her brains, saying to herself, "he is nothing, and yet still...?" Go find that bit, it'll knock you out.

As a somewhat related aside, one of the reasons for Ms. Abbott's breakaway success is that she is able to render women from earlier times (ie. USA in the 1940s) in an authentic way. She acknowledges her characters' 'passive' roles in society while giving them agency and curiosity and desire.

On to another example, seventies cinema is IMHO unbeatable and one of the best movies from that era, brutal and poignant and devastating, is Looking for Mr. Goodbar, which I'm sorry to say has not been released on DVD. (*Cough torr.ent cough*.)

I'm calling this story noir, not because it's dark--it is--but because the main character falls down a hole and then just keeps digging herself deeper and deeper until tragedy is the only possible outcome. It's based on the true story of a lonely New York schoolteacher with a habit of cruising bars for one night stands. It was fictionalised by Judith Rossner in 1975 as the novel Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In 1977 a true crime account was published by journalist Lacey Fosburgh (Closing Time: The True Story of the Goodbar Murder), the same year the novel became a feature film.

It might seem a dated idea now, everyone does whatever they want with anyone now, right? Umm. Just watch the movie. It's not a morality tale about the dangers of casual sex. It's drama, in the truest sense of the definition: people doing stuff to people.

Theresa Dunn gets in real trouble and the way she handles it gives us insight into how women feel and behave, but also how the character as a specific individual feels and behaves. She walks out into the night, she takes a lucky dip of random men from the streets of the city and she lets each one of them in. Literally, figuratively, metaphorically. I guess prostitutes do this every night but we know their goal, it's usually survival, money for living and the feeding of families and/or addictions. Theresa doesn't have to do this, she has other options for finding love and lust and companionship, but she's chasing something, she's getting a payoff. What is it? She doesn't know who they are, bad guys good guys, she doesn't think about that, she gives herself up completely to her inner pain and seems at times to be playing out some kind of death wish.

Brave. Risky. A challenge to sexual liberation and feminism, yes, a challenge to pretty much every value system I can think of. The fictionalisation of this true story shows what's best about storytellers, whose role it is to be truthful and revealing, the light bringers, not just flashing cool images and stereotypes at the reader or viewer, on the other hand not just repeating what is 'worthy' or what makes us look appealing or acceptable. I don't know that you could make this movie today.

So, back to passivity and I do apologise for the looong post but it's a big idea.

An internal, intuitive experience in a rough and tumble world makes for a fascinating story (I'm thinking of The Sound and the Fury and also Jane Campion's gorgeous In The Cut, adapted from the novel by Susannah Moore). Speaking of corpses in car boots, Detective Sarah Linden in
The Killing is a good example of a beautifully rendered heroine with a tangible inner life. She uses her gentle, compassionate nature in the service of her goal, ie. finding Rosie Larsen's murderer. She maintains an introspective manner without ever becoming a 'passive protoganist' (whose only function onscreen to be acted upon by others). I'm not saying she's sensitive because she's a woman or a mother, it's not like that, it's just who Linden is. She knows things nobody else can know, she goes places nobody else can go, because she listens and receives. A great quality for a detective.

British TV drama Thorne: Sleepyhead is another good example (adapted for television from Mark Billingham's Sleepyhead). We go inside the mind of a young woman whose attacker has deliberately afflicted her with 'locked in syndrome'. Her passivity is terrifying, she literally does not move, and yet she quests, she wants, she tries. It says something to me about being female, something I haven't seen or heard before.

The fact is, and this is getting all confessional here, it can feel good to yield (okay, unless you're the last character I mentioned). Maybe that's the answer to the why question, maybe it's that simple. Nobody sets out in life to be a hardass, not at first anyway. It feels good to be kind and accepting and to let go of the reins, it feels fantastic to truly, deeply forgive. It can feel like the reason you were put on this planet, like your spirit's work is done. BUT. When you're talking about real life, real human beings, you gotta pick the person on the other side of that dance, that lunge and parry. It can't be just anyone. There are opportunists and there are thieves and there are humans with great contempt for humanity. That makes for great books and movies, we love those books and movies. But in real life? It's called Russian Roulette, and it's a lonely game.

Just ask Theresa Dunn.

Start your engines.

The Buddhists say suffering is caused by four basic anxieties:

Guilt.

Doubt.

Meaninglessness.

Death.

It's been said that if you look at any successful, well functioning story through this lens you will see one of these anxieties working as a kind of 'engine' pushing it all forward.

Assuming you buy this idea, let's say we each have one anxiety that resonates most strongly within us. My core anxiety, my engine as a writer is Meaningless. How do I know? Because I'm drawn to absurdist, fatalistic narratives. Idealistic characters up against a cruel and random world. I want to know what God is thinking (or not), I crave the lessons right now that will only come at the moment of death (I don't know about your death but I'll confidently say it of mine). I'm driven to ask why of everything, everyone. I see a base bewilderment about fate, justice, karma, suffering and consequences in everything I write.

It's why I like noir stories and why I take umbrage at 'noir' tales that are really just violent images with bummer endings. The hero doesn't have to be a good person but I crave the downfall, the flow of choice and consequences.

It's my question, my quest.

My dear screenwriter friend sees Death at the core of everything she writes and most of what she enjoys to read or watch, and I see it there too, clear as can be. Her films are full of ghosts and crossings and grief.

Many of the young men with whom I went to film school--a rarefied hothouse, so maybe not the best test of true values and intentions--seemed to cluster pretty tightly around Guilt in their writing and filmmaking. To show you what I mean, here's Ian Irvine's neat little short script Splintered (film directed by Peter Templeman, produced by Stuart Parkyn.)

I enjoy these stories but the core anxiety, Guilt, doesn't shake me up. To me feeling guilty is kind of a pointless pursuit (like Farmville or the Tour de France or collecting porcelain dolls). You did it, you didn't do it, just deal with it is my pragmatic response. Regret interests me more--what you didn't do, missed opportunities, lost lives and loves a la Grey Gardens--but Guilt is like the stockmarket, somebody else's business. I couldn't get a good script or story or novel out of it if I tried. It'd be kind of like writing in a genre you don't read, and the good guys warn against that.

Having said this, I loved reading Cornell Woolrich's Fright this week and will run up another post on it soon. Paranoia and fear and lies, all the tragic results of covering up a crime (or an accident functioning as a crime), now that I can get behind.

Goes for Detour, too, in spades.

(Neither of these two stories are driven by Guilt, by the way, not deep down. For Prescott Marshall it's Doubt: is he busted or isn't he? For hitchhiker Al Roberts it's getting caught, ie. Death.)

There are noticeable class differences between us, even in a first world country like Australia. Maybe our individual anxieties are influenced not just by our temperaments and our karmic missions but by where we're situated within the hierarchy of needs at birth (are we born scrabbling for food and shelter or do we grow up reaching for 'self-actualisation' through psychotherapy and violin lessons?)

Maybe Guilt is more of a middle-class concern, is what I'm gettin' at.

When I think of Guilt and social status I'm remembering a Cherrie Moraga essay* in which she said: "guilt isn't a feeling, guilt is an intellectual mask to a feeling. The real feeling is fear: fear of losing power over another, losing one's position of privilege..."

It's undeniable that some writers, regardless of class or upbringing, are kicked into motion by the Guilt engine and they write powerful, original stories when they let it lead them. (Look at working class Bostonian Dennis Lehane's stunning standalone novel, Mystic River. You know those boys who didn't get into the police car? Guilt. You know Dave, who did? Death.)

As for Doubt, I really don't get it. Again, I enjoy the stories--many mystery stories and almost all legal dramas are fuelled by the Doubt engine--but it doesn't keep me awake at night. In this lifetime I fall on the side of Faith and blind belief and I'm okay there. Doubt definitely seems to be a driving concern for people I've known and loved who grew up in wealthy, atheist and particularly academic families. All that Descartes and the constant demands for proof, I couldn't bear it but it really puts a fire under them.

To each their own anxiety, huh?


* Badly paraphrased via This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color.

Namer.

Yesterday's trip to the Gold Coast Library brought treasure.

If I read good things about a book on the internet I track it down on the library's web catalogue and order it in to the nearest branch. Because this library is awesome and has pretty much everything, it's usually sitting in the hold bay within two or three days... however nothing beats walking into a library with twenty blank spaces on your borrowing account and no plan or agenda. You wander along like a beagle sniffing out The Book, the one you are meant to read right now. Maybe it relates to what you're writing and can help you work out a story problem, maybe it's nothing to do with writing and there's something on your mind about which an author can offer illumination.

I remember picking up Laura Lippman's I'd Know You Anywhere and feeling dazzled and nauseous when I read the synopsis on the back cover. Not only was it story territory that interested me as a writer--which scared me a bit, as though reading the book might lead to unwitting trespass--but the concept also spoke directly to me as a reader. I clutched that thing to me and hustled it out of there; man, I probably would have stolen it if it wasn't free.

Besides the thrill of finding a book of Patricia Highsmith short stories (The Black House) and Hard Case Crime's reissue of Cornell Woolrich's Fright (I love that guy, he handles pain like no other) I brought home a trio of series novels yesterday that hit on a question I've been circling around regarding my work in progress.

My novel in progress is in the third person and my girl, my heroine, is identified by her first name... however lately whenever I name her I'm impelled to type her last name instead. As in, every time. Is it a mistake to change this, I've wondered, is this the thing that will make her look tough and independent but in the process annoy the reader and make him or her put the book down? I seriously don't know. I know I would never change it just to make a political point (I'm under no illusions that it would change anything for anyone) but I also know that for a week now I've been dithering every time I type that first name, fingers repelled by the keys.

I wonder why heroines in books and movies are almost always identified by their first names while the most compelling of heroes--or anti-heroes--are immediately identifiable by The Word, The Name. The three heroes that came home with me yesterday are Scudder, Reacher and Parker. You know them, right? As soon as you hear those solitary surnames, you know them.

The only female protagonist I can think of who is consistently called by her last name is Ellen Ripley in the Alien movies. I'm sure feminists have come up with damning reasons for this, to do with social inequality and females being seen as smaller, domestic, not taken seriously, blah blah blah. That's not my business as a writer, though, all that comes later. I just have to tell the story that wants to be told.

So anyhow my thanks go out to the Gold Coast Library and to the writers of the single-name heroes and anti-heroes of crime fiction. I picked up some amazing reads and I came home with an answer that has finally freed the fingers to run.