Norman Green

HEAVY LIFTING

Sometimes writing is fun and sometimes it’s work, and like the lazy no-good slug that I am, I would much rather skip over the hard parts and get right to the stuff I like. I have done that in the past, and I’ve paid the price for it, too. I am at a critical juncture in my new project, which, for the time being, I’m calling ‘Benbow Street Hustle.’ I’ve written the opening and I’m pretty happy with what I’ve got so far. I have the next scene dancing in my head but instead of simply running with it, which would be the fun part, I am concentrating a little bit harder on plot.

Okay, a lot harder.

There are some writing teachers, Brenda Ueland for one, who advocate for the ‘let her rip’ approach. I like Ueland a lot, when I was writing my first book she dug me out of a deep funk and if you’re in need of a boost to get you going again Ueland would be a great place to start. She got me working again when what I needed, I guess, was to quit worrying and doubting myself and just pile up some pages. The thing is, I’m not sure that’s the correct approach for me at this point in time. Plus, when I’ve used this approach in the past I have been stuck with a lot of heavy lifting when it came to cleaning up the mess that is the first draft and trying to impose some order. And basically what that tells me is that you’ve got to do the work sooner or later, if I bail on it now I’m just gonna get stuck with it later on.

On the ‘Benbow Street’ project I’m trying to change my usual pattern. I think I have a decent idea of the destination, plot-wise, but I don’t want to simply settle for that, I would really like to do more of the heavy lifting beforehand. The problem is that I have never really worked this way, I’ve taken a stab at it once or twice but I don’t think I’ve ever really given it an honest shot. So, long story short, if I get stuck with a case of writer’s block for the next month, you’ll know why.

READING: I just finished ‘The Breach’ by Patrick Lee, which was terrific. I’m no reviewer but I know what I like, and Lee cost me a couple of late nights. If you like thrillers, check him out.

HOLY SHAMUS! I’VE BEEN NOMINATED!!!

I feel like a kid who just got his first bicycle…

Sometimes it’s hard to say, when you’re a writer, whether you are really an artist or just in the grip of some mono-mania for which there is not, as yet, any effective treatment. The criteria for success or failure are much more clear-cut in my day job: the thing either works or it doesn’t. No ambiguity, and a nice paycheck at the end of the week. As a writer, though, it’s much tougher to tell how you’re doing. Shelby Foote once said that no writer ever truly succeeds, he only achieves an acceptable level of failure. From that I infer that when undertake a writing project I imagine something like King Arthur’s castle complete with battlements, towers and a moat. When my finished manuscript finally goes off to the copy editor, how close did I come to my initial vision? Did I get my castle built or did I settle for a tin box on flat tires sitting in the back corner of a trailer park somewhere? Much of the time, unfortunately, I am in no position to give you a clear answer, by that point in the process I can see trees but no forest.

I have some friends who read drafts for me but I think it’s hard for your friends to be at all objective about your work. And sometimes, like a lot of things in life, you just ain’t gonna know. I have a poster of Van Gogh’s ‘Avenue of Poplars’ hanging on my wall. If I take the time to look it never fails to get to me. It is a stunning portrayal, in simple pencil on paper, of the loneliness and isolation of one human soul. Stark, brutally direct, it is truly a work of genius and if it says nothing to you, you are dead.

The man sold one painting.

In his life!!

I don’t know if I have written my Avenue of Poplars yet. I think I have written a page or two, here and there, that reach about as high as it is possible for me to go. If they happen to jump out at you when you read them you will probably know something about me and I will probably know something about you. But still, it is hard to know from those infrequent peaks how I am doing. Sam Johnson said I would ultimately have to answer for how well I have used my gifts. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it is a disquieting thought.

This is, I suppose, an over-long way of saying that I have been nominated for a Shamus award. These awards are handled by people who love good writing as much as I do and I feel honored by this nomination. Whether I win or not, I am in distinguished company.

COMMITTMENT

I am, all of a sudden, ten thousand words into my new writing project.  I guess that means I have to admit that we are past the fooling around stage.  I’m in.  And isn’t it funny how many of life’s decisions are made in that fashion, you wake up one day to the realization that you’re in deeper than you thought you were.  You missed your exit….  Okay, maybe it’s not that funny.  But I’m starting to like this story.  It has a couple of interesting characters in it, with a few more lurking in the shadows.

One of them is a thirteen year old Hispanic kid who lives with his mother in the Bronx.  In most respects he is an ordinary kid.  He is not a genius, he isn’t anyone’s prodigy, he’s small for his age, he isn’t a budding master thief or lion tamer.  He is, however, emblematic of the place where he lives.  They have a t-shirt in the Bronx which proclaims that borough to be the place where only the strong survive.  It isn’t true.  If you look around you will see all sorts of people who are not strong but who have clung to life regardless, but only just.  And from their example even a thirteen year old can infer that survival is not enough.

So this is an ordinary kid, but shaped by the neighborhood he lives in.  He is wary of strangers and new things, he is not easily scared, he keeps his own council and knows how to keep his mouth shut.  He is, perhaps, what you might be if you were thirteen and lived where he does: he is toughest where it counts the most, which is between the ears.  And oh, yeah, he lives to play baseball.  He is fiercely loyal to his Little League team and to the New York Yankees.

The other major character is a street kid from an earlier time and a different borough.  His is in his mid-thirties, freshly released from a long stretch in an upstate New York prison, where he has spent something more than half his life.  Like our baseball player, he has been fiercely loyal, but perhaps to the wrong people, and he has paid a heavy price.  He might be on the short track back to prison, or he could be in danger of becoming another lost soul who survives, barely, in the Bronx shadows.

Yeah, okay, I know I haven’t told you anything about the plot, and I resent the implication, sir.  I do too know where I’m going with this.

IN THE BEGINNING…

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s criticism of James Fenimore Cooper.  If you want to have the feeling of having your prose hacked apart, stomped and spat upon by a very smart, very funny and very unforgiving critic, you can have it vicariously by checking out Twain.  The thing is, he wasn’t wrong.  Strunk and White essentially said the same things but with less humor and certainly less sting.  Twain chooses one of Cooper’s paragraphs and then proceeds to leave about 95% of it on the cutting room floor, explaining why as he goes.  It made me laugh when I read it, but it also made me cringe, just a little, knowing that I am fully capable of committing Cooper’s excesses myself (as was Twain, by the way).  But if you are trying to make your prose tighter and tougher, you could do worse than conforming to Twain’s rules of writing, and you won’t be the only one.  I will be reading that piece, along with the rest of Twain’s rules, again, and soon.

Next topic, I finally made a beginning on my next writing project.  When I’m in between manuscripts I tend to fool around with stray ideas and odd characters and sometimes one of them just feels right.  I try to be more logical, not to say mercenary, about the whole thing but more often, as in this case, something I thought was just a throwaway riff begins to rattle around in my skull, I begin to see the characters moving, I hear them talking, and when they start keeping me up at night I have a pretty good idea that I’m onto something.

Of course, I still suffer the same old doubts.

In one of his letters somewhere, I read Norman Mailer bitching about one of his seven figure contracts.  ”It only comes out to about two bucks a word,” he said, or some such.  You could argue that Mailer would have made more per word if he’d perhaps have edited more of them out, but I suppose that’s a matter of taste.  If, however, Mailer’s problem was too many words, mine tends to be too few.  I love a minimalist style but sometimes I think I am in too great a hurry to get to the ending, and I am always plagued with worries that I am going to come up short.  ’The old man and the sea’ was short, maybe could have been shorter.  ’Drive’ was short too, but I think it could have used a little more meat on the bone…  I wish I could table the whole question and just write my damned book, but I haven’t been able to do it yet.

Okay, so here’s my next big idea:  kid lives on Benbow Street, in the Bronx (that name ring any bells?), he’s thirteen, and baseball is his life.  Upstate, a man is released from prison after completing his term.  He was in for manslaughter.  (Funny, how much more impact that word has when you split it into two.)  He’s spent over half of his life institutionalized.  He is ill-prepared for freedom, hunted by the loved ones of the man he went to jail for slaughtering.

Their paths cross…

SLOW PROGRESS

When I finished writing my first book I immediately started working on the second one, and therefore, by the time my agent pronounced the first manuscript ‘finished’ and therefore marketable, I had a pretty good handle on what I wanted to do next. Just keep writing, I told myself, don’t stop whatever you do, just keep working.

That was roughly ten years ago.  A lot has changed in ten years, the world is a different place, the publishing industry is circling the drain, but I published six novels, and I am, I think, maybe one more draft away from being finished with number seven. I think I’m pretty happy with them all, even though I must admit that when I look at them now I see mostly what I would change.

I’ve changed as a writer, too.

While writing my first book I didn’t have a clue where I was going but brother, I was determined to get there. I tend to be much more deliberate these days, I spend a lot of time in between writing projects thinking about what I want to work on, and why. That is, in fact, what I’m doing now, and I gotta tell you, brother, I do not enjoy the process. In general I find the act of sitting down and writing something to be empowering (sorry, I know how overused that word is), particularly in first draft. To me, it feels like running does when you’re in a groove and you think you’ve got it all going. I used to be a runner but these days my knees doth protest too much, and loudly. But what I’m going through now feels like a trip to the grocery store when all your ideas lie there stinking like a row of dead fish and you think, man, I don’t wanna buy any of these things, get me outa here.

However.

I still choose to believe that the struggles I am currently not enjoying are worthwhile, that no matter how much I would love to skip this entire step and just jump into something new, I really need to sit here until until it feels right, until I have a vision of something that I think is going to be worth the year of my working life it will take to pull it down out of the air.  So, if the ‘what’ is still in question, at least the ‘why’ is becoming clearer.  I was not wrong, ten years ago, when I told myself to just keep working.  I might have told myself that out of fear, back then, but I know better now. I need to do this because it feels as good, when I get it right, as anything else I have done.

Call it a runner’s high.

BASICS

First person or third?

I’ve done both.  There’s plenty of reasons to choose a point of view.  If I write in first person it limits my story somewhat, because the bulk of the story needs to be seen through one set of eyes. There are ways around that but they can make the flow kind of lumpy and I hate that, I don’t like to have to stop and think, ‘oh yeah, we’re doing this now.  I like smooth, like your grandmother’s gravy.

The Phillies have a pitcher named Bastardo.  You gotta be kidding me.

Third person, I’m omnipotent, I see all, know all, I can choose every character’s inner dialogue…  I always need to be careful when I’m writing third person.  Too many points of view, you lose immediacy, you run the risk of confusing your audience.  Easier to write, maybe, at least for me, but I think I am too easily tempted to wander when I write third person. There is something to be said for a meandering story line but I think I probably write better stuff when I have a stronger focus.

Okay, next, who’s the protagonist?  A crook?  I like crooks, I sure have met plenty of them and I bet you have too.  I think I do crooks pretty well, and my fascination with bad guys goes way back.  I remember reading ‘Robin Hood’ when I was a little kid. ‘A rush light, which costeth nothing but a groat…’ Funny, the useless things my brain hangs onto.  I do recall being curious enough to go to the dictionary to find out what a ‘groat’ was.

In olde England, a coin of little value.  Like a nickel, say.

Okay, next, what’s the story?

Yeah, well, that is the question.  I already know the theme, which is not the same thing at all, the theme is more general and ethereal and having a nice grasp on it is not as helpful as having the bones of the story fixed in your head.  I usually start in working before I have much of an idea where I’m going and I always wonder, at this stage, if I wouldn’t be better served if I could have a bit more patience and try to map out in some detail where I would like to go. I have never been successful at it, but I am going to try, again.

ARGUMENTS WITH MYSELF

I am still on the fence.  I have not been able to decide what, or even if, I want to write next.

I know, nice problem to have.

However, if insanity, as the saying goes, can be defined as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, I might be nuts.  What good will it do to write the next chapter in the life of Alessandra Martillo if the resulting novel meets the same fate as the last one?  I must have blinked because I did not see a single copy of Sick Like That for sale in a bookstore anywhere.

Of late, I have been thinking about my goals as a writer, my reasons for doing what I do.  When I started out I wrote because it felt good, and if you had asked my my goal then I suppose the answer would have been ‘publication.’  Things have changed since then but I still write because it feels good.  If, however, I had to sum up my hopes for what I write next I really think my answer would have to be ‘readers,’ and if that is the case, in all honesty I have to admit that I haven’t been getting it done.  It is not news that the publishing industry is in a state of flux.  The old business model is on life support and we should probably start digging the hole.  Editors and agents have a harder time keeping the doors open, former bookstore owners are polishing their resumes, librarians are getting laid off in appalling numbers.  It is difficult to believe that we will read even less in the future than we do currently, but it seems certain that the process of getting stories from inside the author’s skull out to the public will look much different than it does now.

I am very lucky, I have a great day job which I love and it allows me the luxury of overlooking the financial aspects of publishing entirely, at least as they relate to me, so the question really boils down to, how do I reach more readers?  As technology changes, and changes us, maybe the process will become simpler, if not any easier.  Writers will always have to wrestle with empty pages whether real or virtual, they will always have to throttle their stories to coerce them into some legible and readable format.  I can’t see writing, at least for me, getting any easier.  And I’ve thought of simply posting my next novel somewhere so that anyone who cared to and owns a Kindle, I-Pad, smartphone or whatever can download it.  I’d leave payment to the honor system.  Send me two bucks after you download.

Or don’t.  See if I care.

Stephen King tried something like that once but he did it in chapters, with the proviso that if he didn’t get paid by a given percentage of downloaders he wouldn’t write the ending.  I don’t know how that worked out.  If I thought it would get me enough new readers I’d give it a try, but I see a few drawbacks.  First, I would hate to see the few remaining small bookstore owners cut out of the process.  They are people who, by and large, do what they do for the love of it and they’re already contending with Barnes and Noble, Borders, Amazon, et al, and I’d hate to add to their difficulties.  Second, editors, agents and publishers do perform necessary services both to writers and to the general public.  Perhaps their most important function is separating the wheat from the chaff.  When you pick up a book in a bookstore or library you can be reasonably optimistic that the writing therein will rise beyond a certain level of craftsmanship, although that is by no means guaranteed.  If you’re a fan of whatever form of celebri-doodling happens to be hot right not, a pox on you, you deserve what you get.  The point being, self-publishing, whether on the web or anywhere else, smacks of vanity press and I don’t want any part of that.  And third, if what I write now seems to be lost in the morass of the conventional publishing process, how could I avoid being lost in the on-line swamp?

Bottom line, I guess I will continue to write for that oldest of reasons, it feels good, and besides, it’s what I do.  Beyond that, if anybody has any ideas I’d be glad to hear them.

CrimeSpreeMag.com: Norman Green’s Sick Like That

SICK LIKE THAT (Minotaur) is a sequel to THE LAST GIG by Norm Green. We’ve been fans of Green since his first book and love this new series. PI Marty Stiles is out of action so Alessendra (Al0 and Sarah are in charge and end up working a case that involves Sarah’s ex husband. Great action and a wonderful story with great characters, if this was bowling, Green has just had a 300 game.

CrimeSpreeMag Book Reviews – Issue 35

Tags: crimespreemag.com

Library Journal: Sick Like That

Whether it is a sign of the times or just a plot device, mystery writers are showcasing how people can join forces to solve crimes and form relationships that go beyond the job. The individuals frequently differ from each other but find they can work well together in what becomes a familylike environment. Veronica Heley’s Bea Abbot (False Pretences) gathers a motley crew of various ages and backgrounds to solve whatever problems her clients want her to address, while two sets of odd couples—Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli’s Deputy Dolly and reporter Emily Kincaid (Dead Sleeping Shaman) and Norman Green’s PI Alessandra Martillo and receptionist Sarah Waters (Sick Like That)—team up to fight crime while building strong friendships.

Library Journal: Sick Like That Review

Tags: library journal, mystery, sick like that, teamwork

Norman Green mentioned on Publishers Weekly

In Green’s strong follow-up to 2009’s The Last Gig, Alessandra “Al” Martillo, who works for PI Marty Stiles, is only too glad to turn routine work over while Marty’s in rehab, recovering from a gunshot wound, to new gal and fellow Brooklynite, Sarah Waters. While Sarah tries to locate the estranged stepson of a wealthy client, Al attempts to track Sarah’s ex-husband, Frank, who disappears after telling Sarah that his luck has changed thanks to a sweet new job that sounds too good to be true. Both cases morph in unexpected directions. Sarah must learn quickly if she’s to survive, and Al finds herself trading quips and blows with a variety of thugs and law enforcement officials, from NYPD detectives to unnamed and unidentified Feds. Clever plotting and solutions that require both clear thinking and fast action augment Green’s double dose of tough, resilient female characters.

Fiction Book Reviews: Publishers Weekly

Tags: publishers weekly, sick like that