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.

Children in Crime.

The other night I watched the pilot episode of a new TV drama series about an ex-cop with a photographic memory. It wasn’t a great show, I won't go into it except to mention that the idea of ‘memory’ was explored through flashbacks to the murder of the heroine’s sister when they were children. The image of the little girl lying dead in a puddle, her mouth open and water seeping in, was repeated throughout the episode as the heroine flashed back to the unsolved crime.

Although the show vanished from my consciousness as soon as the credits rolled, the image of that dead kid sat in my stomach for days like a batch of bad prawns. I was angry about it, I wanted to scrub the image from my mind. I felt manipulated.

Why? It sounds on paper like the show could have worked, right? A unique memory problem helping a character deal with her traumatic past, a la Memento? Okay, yes, but due to the show's lackluster writing and bare-bones story development the haunting of my brain felt cynical and cheap. It was as though everything hung on that one device, that one dead child.

Is this ‘memorable’ television? The viewer is disturbed by the image of the child, the camera wandering over the little body again and again and again. It creates an effect that lingers, he or she may even mention it to others (the way I tell others about the Stephen King story that’s been stuck in my mind since I read Full Dark, No Stars). Maybe the next person turns on the show next week, also sees the kid, also feels ill, says something to some friends and now, how 'bout that, we have an audience.

I guess I’m assuming, because this is network television, that it was not a writer telling a story from his or her heart (although 'The Rememberer', the short story upon which the series was based, may well have been), rather that the primary consideration was ratings. Hence the anger. There was no point to beating me around the head with that image; they were just after my eyes on the advertisements.

My churning gut got me thinking about the role of children in crime stories. What is it that hits us so hard? Is it their inherent defenselessness in real life? (I think this is the case with depictions of animal cruelty, which is why I so loved Dennis Lehane’s short story 'Animal Rescue' in Boston Noir. I was prepared to be horrified and instead I found an odd, gentle love story with a cracker of a twist. Go read it.)

What about stories where the kids are the perpetrators? Where I grew up--and in a thousand places just like it--kids did petty crime: smashing up empty housing estates, lighting fires, breaking and entering, shoplifting and pocket picking, selling pot and pills, gang bashing and rumbles, sexual assaults, torturing animals (and other kids) with firecrackers and air rifles, and those are just off the top of my head. I’m not celebrating this, just telling you how it was, and is.

There are some great stories with child characters who walk--and cross--the line between victim and perpetrator. I’m thinking of the kids in The Wire. The little boy in Fresh. Looking forward to Toomelah, from writer/director Ivan Sen. But where is this line between helpless victimhood and psychopathic criminality, and how do we know where on the scale to place our youngest characters without doing them (or the reader) an injustice?

Many fiction writers deal with this moral dilemma by leaving children out altogether, by depicting a wholly adult world and letting the gruesomeness and violence flow between ‘consenting adults’. At most, the characters may be parents protecting their families. There's nothing wrong with this choice but story worlds can easily become rarefied, homogenous. Without children, something important is missing. The best stories take place within communities, they give us special access to them, and the word 'community' implies a spread of ages, from babies to elders. (The word is used these days to mean pretty much any group with something in common, but as the great swordfighter Inigo Montoya once said, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”) The adults-only approach works for short fiction, but sooner or later a kid is going to wander into a longer work and ask for attention, maybe some chocolate, a bedtime story.

What I want to know is:

a) If we want to write lifelike communities, how do we integrate the young in a non-exploitative way?

b) As a writer, how do you gauge whether the image or character you’re using is exploitative?

c) As a reader, how much is too much?

d) When it comes to children in crime stories, who does it well, and how?