You're A Part of the Scene

by R.S. Mellette

I've been binge-watching the Foo Fighter's series, Sonic Highways, on HBO. It chronicles Dave Grohl's journey with the rest of the band to record a song, inspired by and recorded in a different city around the country. While in that city, they delve into the evolution of the music scene that is unique to that part of the world.  Jazz in New Orleans. Blues in Chicago. Go-Go & Funk in D.C. etc. Not only is the history fascinating, I found the series inspirational for artists of all kinds, including myself as a writer.

But nostalgia is useless if it doesn't teach us something about today, or guide us toward a better tomorrow.

I got to thinking about those music scenes. For a brief moment, I wished I had been involved in something as cool as grunge in Seattle, or Willie Nelson in Austin. Then I said to myself, "You idiot! You are. Right now. Right here at From The Write Angle."

Sure, our Moveable Feast may not be in Paris, but this isn't the 1920s. None of us may be as famous as Hemingway, Fitzgerald or Joyce, but neither were they at the time. If they were, or if we were, then it wouldn't be a scene would it? All great "you should have been there back when" scenes start before the artists become household names. For those involved, it's not necessary for their peers to make it big. They are mythic not for what they will do as famous artists, but what they did last Tuesday when they couldn't afford breakfast.

So whether this little band of writers is destined for greatness or not, I thought I would provide my portion of the yet-to-be-made (or never-to-be-made) documentary on our little scene. Those who are a part of it, as participants or audience, feel free to chime in with your own angle of the story in the comments.

For most of us, From The Write Angle started with AgentQuery Connect, which is a scene unto itself. The head of that little movement is the mysterious AQCrew. No one knows who AQCrew really is, but his or her guiding hand has been a big influence to writers, published or not. The mystery of AQCrew's real identity adds to the mythic aspect of AQC's tale.

For me, From The Write Angle started when Robert K. Lewis, aka Thrownbones, got an agent. This was around 2008 or '09 on the first incarnation of Agent Query Connect. Not only was I completely jealous, which is my highest compliment, but he wasn't around the boards as much and I missed his posts. Shortly after that, I got an agent and I missed his posts even more.

There are a whole new set of problems a writer encounters once they make it to the next level, but to complain about them to writers on the level below is kind of rude. I had never been the type to think I needed a support group, but Agent Query Connect had become that as sure as if it were held in the rec room of a local community center. Once I'd found an agent I felt like I'd lost my support, so I asked AQCrew if I could form a password protected group for writers who have agents.

When ACQ moved to the new site, this group became The Class of 2009. Most of us moderated (or still moderate) forums on that site. At some point, AQCrew mentioned that writers were forming blog groups and that we should consider doing something like that. From The Write Angle was born.

My biggest contribution after that was writing the statement of purpose:

We learn best, not from our bigger than life heroes, but our big brothers and sisters. We run fastest to catch the person just in front of us, not who has already finished the race. We seek The Write Angle to help you, not because we have reached the summit, but because we are in arm's length, and when you are arm's length ahead of us, we hope you'll remember how you got there.

In 2012, Matt Sinclair started publishing short stories via his Elephant's Bookshelf Press. As I say in the acknowledgements of Billy Bobble Makes A Magic Wand, he is our Sun Records. Thronebones went on to have his Mark Mallen noir series published. Mindy, R.C., Sophie, Cat, etc. have all done well and still blog here along with the rest of the team. Others, have moved on to emeritus status, but like any members of a scene, they are with us in our thoughts.

What scenes are you all currently a part of?  What are you doing now that will be a fond memory in a decade or so?

R.S. Mellette's new book is Billy Bobble Makes A Magic Wand. He is an experienced screenwriter, actor, director, and novelist. You can find him at the Dances With Films festival blog, and on Twitter, or read him in the anthologies Spring Fevers, The Fall: Tales of the Apocalypse, and Summer's Edge.

Happy Halloween!

Halloween. No day can evoke more tingles and shivers than October 31st. For a change, a few of us at FTWA thought we would share a story that scared the crap out of us. Most are movies, but movies are stories, right? So here we go…

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Robert Lewis

There always seems to be that ONE movie that scared the crap out you as a kid. Maybe it was The Legend of Boggy Creek, maybe The Omen, or maybe The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. For me, however, it will always be Herk Harvey's 1962 "Carnival of Souls" starring Candace Hilligoss. Not only is it eerie and scary as hell, it also has one of the creepiest-looking dudes ever seen on film:

See what I mean?

The story is about Mary Henry (Hilligoss) who is out one day driving with friends. They're challenged to a drag race and during the race her car careens off a bridge and into a river. She's the only survivor. A church organist, she moves to a new town, new job, so she can start over.

But then she starts to ... see things, including the man above. Strange events begin to happen to her, like one moment she's in a busy department store and then it's suddenly empty. The only people she sees in these strange, surreal moments are zombie-like, staring at her as she passes by. I can't tell you more, as I don't want to spoil the film, but needless to say, it's a VERY effective horror flick. I can still remember watching it one Sunday afternoon on Channel 5 KTLA in Los Angeles, and how I had nightmares all that night and rest of the week. There were nights where I would wake up, the San Fernando Valley winds howling, the trees outside my window scratching and clacking on the glass, seeing that man's face in the corner of my room, watching me.

Carnival of Souls. If you've never seen it, get ye to The Netflix!

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Darke Conteur

I have always been drawn to stories that frighten me. It's like an addiction; I can't get enough even though I know I'll get very little sleep afterward. Most movies I watched as a child were the old, campy B movies; Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolfman, the Mummy, something I watched on television to kill a Saturday afternoon. It wasn't until I saw the movie CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1973) that I was truly scared.

Actors led by Alan Ormsby go to graveyard on remote island to act out necromantic ritual. The ritual works, and soon the dead are walking about and chowing down on human flesh.

Part of the flesh-eating zombie trope that exploded in the early '70s, by today's standards it's campy and stupid, but for a ten year old, it gave me nightmares for three months. I learned to jump from the doorway to my bed in one leap and I am proud to say that I can sleep with the covers over my head and not suffocate! It should be a part of any ghoul's zombie collection!

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Cat Woods

Movies don't scare me. Not in the Friday the Thirteenth and Nightmare on Elm Street-murderer-on-the-rampage-for-no-reason sense. These are child's play. Fiction at its finest, yet fiction none-the-less. Actors can shake their hockey sticks all they want and I remain unfazed.

The movies that strike terror into my heart are psychological thrillers.

When a movie could be reality? That's when the goosebumps pop and I literally shiver from the inside out. Only one honest-to-God-teeth-chattering movie stands out in my mind. Cape Fear.

Childhood fears: One Halloween when I was about six, my sister and I had to visit our biological father. After dinner, he watched a double header of B-rated horror flicks.

Terrifying shadow creatures lived in the basement and drug people down the stairs to brutally torture and kill them in the first movie. With no place else to go, my sis and I cowered behind the couch and listened to the screams of the dying victims. That night we had to sleep in the glass-walled library with the door closed off to the rest of the house. My sister never recovered, and to this day she cannot go down into a basement without every single light on.

The second movie was about scientists injecting liquid into people's brains, turning them into mindless killing machines. Something about the glazed expression in their eyes and the personality flips caused by the drug scared me far more than the basement creatures ever did.

I guess that night killed all hope of Freddie Krueger terrorizing me. However, it left the door wide open to the darkness residing in the depths of the human mind.

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Matt Sinclair

Like many people, when I think of scary stories, my first thoughts tend toward movies, where the images are so evident. There was a movie whose name I quickly forgot, but its opening scenes have remained with me ever since. Picture this: I’m a small boy, age 7 or 8, getting his last few minutes of television in before summer vacation. My family owned a home toward the eastern end of Long Island, where the TV reception was awful (or my parents knew that television and summer vacations were a bad mix.

It didn’t matter what I watched, as long as it was TV. I turned it on and found the beginning of a movie. A young woman receives an unexpected package. She opens it and finds a set of binoculars. For reasons lost to the young boy I was, the woman was excited and immediately went to look through the binoculars. The she let out a blood-curdling scream as her eyes were impaled.

Just then, my father rallied the troops and I turned off the TV, but that confusing moment of horror remains.

In a sense, I hope some reader here knows the name of the film so I can view it as an adult and possibly understand that it wasn’t what I thought it was. Perhaps it was acid around the rims of the eyepieces. That would be much easier for me to handle.

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How about you? Any super-scary stories to share?

I, Editor

by Robert K. Lewis

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”

As I finished up the latest draft of my current novel, I got to thinking about my editing process and how it’s changed and morphed over the years. I first have a confession to make: I’m fascinated by editing. Love it, really. There is this one moment that I’ll always remember as a writer. I was sitting at a table in Caffe Trieste in North Beach, pouring over a printed-out copy of my book, and as I worked, I suddenly realized that I’d turned a corner in my writing process because I now hated first drafts and had fallen in love with the editing of the draft. After all, first drafts are only there to be edited.

So, since it’s a topic near and dear to my heart, I thought I would talk about how I edit, and how I’ve heard other people do their editing.

The first time I go back to edit, I’m looking at the big picture (which is very Sol Stein, btw). What are the big changes that need to happen? Where does the story sag? Where is it strong? What plot choices work? Which do not? I will at this point make a cover sheet for each chapter, listing what characters appear, along with a brief overview of what’s going on. I then lay the ENTIRE book out on the floor of my office. Here’s what it looks like.

Yes. It’s a mess at this point, and it’s ALL on the table as far as I’m concerned. I’m married to NONE of it. I’ll rearrange chapters, take a part from one chapter and move it to where I think it would work better. I’ll toss entire chapters or storylines. By color-coding the characters (Hey, I’m a visual guy, what can I say?), I get a very good idea of when and where they pop up. This is the big work. The heavy lifting.

After I’ve done the next draft, I then add looking at the language and sentences into the mix. Here is where I will probably start at page one and work through to the end. I’m trying at this time to get a sense of the rhythm of the book. I’m still, at this point, staying loose and fluid with it all, ready to go back to the heavy lifting if necessary, or maybe follow up with a weak thread that needs reweaving, or even starting to look at word repetitions that piss me off, etc.

I may do a couple drafts this way, working from the beginning to the end, honing as I go. It’s laborious, yeah, but… this is the way I work. And really, since I love to write, it doesn’t feel nearly as laborious as it sounds. I love the journey, you know? Your mileage will vary, natch.

From here, I then become a miner of sorts, delving further and further down, really focusing in at the sentence level. Here I’m trying to make EVERY sentence sing. Seriously, if you think you can get away with a few bad ones, well… have you ever NOT noticed the turd in the swimming pool? Exactly. That’s how those sentences will stand out, trust me. Every.Sentence.MUST.Sing.

When am I done? Ah, well that’s the question that every writer asks, and none really know the answer to. Me? I just feel it, inside. I just know that it’s time for me to let the book go.

And so, here some tips that I’ve come across over the years that I want share with you. I’m sure that some of them, or maybe all of them, are known to you, but that’s okay. Maybe it’ll just reinforce your own way of doing things. I’d love to hear about how you do your editing!

1. Be flexible. When you’re just starting out at writing, you have a tendency to treat every word as sacred, every plot choice as carved in stone. This is natural. It takes some guts to admit that you were wrong. I have to tell you though, that in that first draft you just completed? It’s a 100% certainty you were wrong, probably in many, many places.

2. As I mentioned earlier, in the early stages, make a cover sheet for each chapter listing the characters and plot movement. Find a color-coding system that works for you. If it’s at all possible, lay the book out on the floor to get “the big picture”. Doing this helped me to see that one character in my latest had entirely dropped out of the book early in the second act, only to reappear late in the third. That led me to re-evaluate the need for that character, and also got me pondering other possibilities for that character.

3. Work from the macro, to the micro. This is Sol Stein’s advice, and it’s certainly good enough for me (see my rec of his book below). Be brave in the early stages. Toss what you love, fix what you hate.

4. When you’ve moved to the sentence level edits, read your book in reverse order, from the last page to the first. The problem with editing is that we KNOW the story, and get carried away with it. This leads to missing key issues and errors. However, reading it in reverse page order will help with fixing bad sentences and grammar. It takes the ego out of the equation.

5. I’ve also found that ping-ponging around the book from chapter to chapter (chapter 3, then go and do chapter 37, etc.) helps you stay out of the book and enables you to better see how a chapter is flowing, how it begins, how it ends, etc. Doing this led me to discover that most of my lead-off sentences were almost identical, and I always ended a chapter with a single line of dialog. This technique is just another way to keep you OUT of the story and focused on plot, characters, and sentences.

6. Finally, and I can’t stress this enough: read your story aloud to yourself. It all sounds great, in our head. This is natural, as these are OUR words. WE created them. However, when you read your book out loud, THEN you get the sentences that are laborious, the ones that will trip you up, cause you to go back and read them again. And hey, if they trip YOU up, and you created them? Then they’ll most definitely trip up someone who bought your book.

If you don’t listen to anything I’ve said here, please at least listen to #6. It’s really a great help. And it’s not like you have to be all Shakespeare and stuff, either. You can say it softly to yourself, at your desk. Sure, your spouse or partner or whatever might think you’re crazy, but you’re a writer, yeah? You’re already crazy!

To end, I want to give you a list of what I feel are some of the best books out there on editing your own work. This is not the end-all of lists, by no means. If you know of a book on editing that rocked your world, let us know in the comments!

Self Editing for Fiction Writers, by Renni Browne and Dave King This has to be at the top of the list. Simply put, the best one out there on the topic.

Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing, by Claire Kehrwald Cook A much more academic feel than Browne and King’s book. This one is more like taking a class in editing your work, and that just ain’t a bad thing.

The Artful Edit, by Susan Bell Chock full of examples and strategic tips. Short, and too the point.

Stein On Writing, by Sol Stein I always find a way to recommend this book, whenever and wherever I can. It deals with the entire writing process, however part VI of this wonderful book deals with revision, and Stein gives you an awesome way to edit your novel, rather than just starting at page one every time you start a new draft. For myself, there’s a part of me that likes starting at page one sometimes, knowing there’s a lot of hard work ahead. But, I’m a masochist that way.

Heck, I’m a writer, right?

Guns, Dames, and Dark Streets. We're Talkin' Noir, Folks.

by Robert K. Lewis

I decided yesterday, as I was sitting at the stick of my favorite watering hole, that I should just start my journey here on From the Write Angle by giving you some basics about the writing that’s as near and dear to my heart as a new fifth of Johnny Walker Black: The hard-boiled detective story, otherwise known as noir.

I love this description I found in Merriam Webster: Crime fiction featuring hard-boiled cynical characters and bleak sleazy settings.

Hard-boiled, cynical characters. Bleak, sleazy settings.

How can you go wrong with that?

Let me begin with the writers and/or books you need to know about. I’ve already written, to a fair degree, about some great, yet pretty unknown hard-boiled writers, so I won’t beat that dead horse here.

So, belly up to the bar, people...

Black Mask. If there’s a bible for this stuff, then the magazine Black Mask is it. Was in publication from 1920-1951. Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler polished their chops writing for that mag. Erle Stanley Gardner, John D. MacDonald, and Lester Dent also got their start there. Every one of these guys went on to become a part of the canon of detective fiction.

The Maltese Falcon. Any list has to start with this book, and with Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade is the iconic, tough private eye. The guy you think about when someone asks about tough guy private detectives. This book has it all: tough cops, a dame that’s not to be trusted, and a psycho killer. The way Hammett draws San Francisco, you can smell the fog rolling in off the bay, the fish being unloaded at the wharf. This novel is considered by many to be the great “opening salvo” of the genre.

The Big Sleep. And if Sam Spade is the granddaddy of all noir gumshoes, then Philip Marlowe is the grand uncle. In fact, Chandler did more to change the face of crime fiction than any other writer. So much of what Chandler wrote is now the granite-like foundation of the canon, that his contribution is often taken for granted. Let me just give you a small example, from this novel:

“You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that, oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was."

THAT, my friends, is tough, gritty writing, at its best.

Mickey Spillane. What I linked to here is one large volume that contains his first three, tough-as-nails novels: I, the Jury, My Gun is Quick, and Vengeance is Mine! What? You’ve never heard of Spillane? Well, have you heard of his legendary private detective, Mike Hammer? No, not the coked-out, 80’s TV show, but the gumshoe in these novels. Spillane learned from the guys that came before him, like Chandler and Hammett, and took hard-boiled/noir to a whole new level violence and grit.

There are a few other guys that I think you should hop on down to your local used bookstore and check out: Ross MacDonald, Don Westlake (and his pen name Richard Stark), Frank Kane, and Brett Halliday. If you’re looking for more modern variants of this hard style of writing, then check out Dennis Tafoya or Michael Connelly. Hell, there’s even surf noir! If you haven’t read Kem Nunn’s The Dogs of Winter, then you are really missing out. Not really a detective novel with a private eye or anything, but there is a mystery, and how Nunn creates this dark sense of dread and impending doom (a staple of the noir style) is truly the work of a master writer.

I want to end this by hipping you to some quotes from Raymond Chandler’s treatise on detective fiction, The Simple Art of Murder. These snippets will give you a great idea of what exactly noir is about, and how the detective fits into the dark world he finds himself in:

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor­–by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.

He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge.

The story is this man’s adventure in search of hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.