Norman Green

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?

12/24/08

 

I think I’ve been asked that question a thousand times.  The answer?  I just go to www dot…

 

Just kidding.

 

At first I had no idea how to answer that, and then later on little inclination, but now that I’ve been doing this a while I think I’ve gotten some perspective.

 

For one thing, it ain’t one great big idea, not with me.  That has happened a time or two, I have gotten that one big flash where I’ve seen a big chunk of story with the characters and the plot and all the rest of it and I’ve had to race to get it all down before I lost it, but that has definitely been the exception, not the rule.  Most of the time I get a lot of small ideas.  When I wrote my first book I based the story on what I saw every day, ordinary life on one short stretch of one particular street in Brooklyn, NY.  The characters were inspired by the people I ran into, and the story line and the plot and the themes of the book were layers of smaller ideas built on that foundation. 

 

I have a novel coming out in January of ’09, I am working on a sequel to it now, and this is the first time I ever sat down and invented a character completely within my imagination.  Alessandra Martillo is a street kid from the Brooklyn projects and she is not based upon anyone I know.

 

I don’t think.

 

At any rate, I wanted to write a series character.  I have never started a story with that in mind before, and I have regretted, once or twice, the way I dealt with characters in previous books because I think I made it difficult for myself to revisit those characters again.  Plus, the arc of a character needs to be longer in a series, if this mythical person changes too much in the space of one book, if he (or in this case, she) learns too much or grows too quickly or is too successful at becoming, she will be more and more boring in successive novels.  That is something which has happened to some of my favorite characters in fiction, and probably some of yours, too.  The writer creates the character and then sets for her a particular set of problems within herself that she needs to solve, and if she does that too quickly, then what?  Do you then invent new flaws for her or dig up a few of the old ones and give them more teeth?  That is what happens in real life, but fiction labors under constraints in which reality has no interest.  In any event, I think this is why series characters eventually lose their steam.

 

There are exceptions.  One that comes to mind is Lawrence Block’s Bernie Rhodenbarr, a burglar who is about as introspective as a bag of rocks.  He just continues to get himself into trouble and then weasel back out of it.  I like reading Bernie but I don’t think I could write a character like him, I like my people to get themselves a little more twisted up over who and what they are.

 

Okay, so Alessandra is no Bernie R.  She’s a private investigator….  Oh, man, I can hear the groans.  There are a million gumshoes in fiction, they have taken every conceivable form, they’ve been ex-cops, housewives, retired military police, rabbis, cats, Jesus, do we really need another one?  And one of my beefs with PI stories is that it seems to me that the overwhelming majority of the fictional ones have gotten very far away from what the real ones do.

 

I went back and re-read some of the pioneers of the genre.  You probably know these guys better than I do.  The early PIs were tough guys, they knew how to take a punch, they were loners, they did not submit gracefully, they may have been somewhat predatory in their sexual habits…  In short, they were not the guys you wanted to bring home to mom, as a rule, but if you were in trouble it would be nice to have one of them watching your back.

 

What if I went back to those basics?

 

And what if my character was female?

 

Oh, come on, why not?  You think women can’t be tough?  You think a woman can’t be a loner, or have problems with authority, or, under the right circumstances, turn predator?   My brother, you should get out more.

 

Anyhow, that’s my big idea.  What comes after that is a succession of smaller ideas, layered like bricks in a wall.  What if she has to do at least some of the things a real investigator has to do?  What if she never finished high school?  What if she works for a guy that uses her like a paper towel?  And what if she really, really does know how to kick your ass?

 

What ifs, in a long string.  That’s where ideas come from.

WHAT’S GOOD?

12/9/08

 

That’s an impossible question, everyone you ask will have a different answer.  Who can you believe?  Ask a waiter, is he going to tell you what he really likes or will he tell you what the establishment he works for needs to unload?  No way to tell.

 

One of my biggest questions before I got published was ‘Is this stuff I’m doing any good?’  On some days my ego told me it was great and on other days my insecurities told me that it blew chunks.  Neither of those answers did much for me because I knew the driving force behind the answers had nothing to do with the work I was producing.  In my saner moments I suspected that I might be doing all right, but that was just a suspicion.  It’s all I’ve got, still, the suspicion that I might be doing okay.  To me this is one of the more difficult aspects of writing, particularly when you wondering how to get better.  Whose judgment do you trust?

 

You really can’t put much stock in reviews.  For one thing, you don’t see them in time for them to have much relevance to what you’re writing day to day.  If you sell your novel today (Congratulations!) it will take your publisher nine months to a year to get it through his system and out into the public.  Then, of course, you have to wait for some reviewer to (hopefully) read it.  By this time you have moved on, you are well into your next project.  Don’t get me wrong, good reviews are nice, it’s gratifying as hell when someone ‘gets’ you, but let’s face it, to you, that’s last year’s news because the next book is really gonna be the shit, man, you are really gonna knock them dead this time…  Besides, reviewers, as a group, have a terrible track record.  Herman Melville wasn’t much good until after he was dead, why was that?  For the first half of his life Tennessee Williams was God, but for the latter half he stunk.  While he was here Stevie Ray Vaughn was stale and derivative, but after he died he became the most gifted and influential guitarist of his generation.  This sort of thing goes on without end.  Remember when Madonna was more popular than free cheese?  Then overnight she makes it to the head of the ‘universally reviled’ list.  Did she lose it that quickly or did she just get run over by the machine?

 

I have a friend who has written a half-dozen novels, all of which, unfortunately, reside in a file drawer.  If he had written them fifty years ago there’s a good chance that he would have been successfully published, they are dense, intricate, layered, slow-moving and looong.  He can’t change who he is because his style is out of fashion, so he’s out of luck.  I have another friend  who writes for an audience of one.  He writes children’s books for his grandkids and he writes novels for himself.  Sometimes he’ll let me read one, or a part of one, but truthfully I don’t think he cares for my opinion one way or another.  I feel safe in predicting that he will never make it into print because I know he will never subject himself to the process.

 

His choice.

 

Will technology change publishing in the same way it has changed the music business?  Hard to say and opinions vary widely, but I know this much, it is very difficult to find a working musician who will tell you that it isn’t much harder to make it now than it was ten years ago.  In the world of books we have always had editors, newspaper reviewers and bookstore owners and together they functioned as a sort of filtering mechanism.  The work you held in your hand when you hit the bookstore had to make it past a number of critical eyes before you got the opportunity to buy it and ultimately pass judgment on it for yourself.  And the fact is that those critical eyes generally belonged to someone who could have made a lot more money doing something else but they did what they did, at least in part, because they loved it.  Now, though, editors are under increasing pressure to find the next blockbuster, which is very different than finding good stuff that’s worth printing, newspapers are going the way of the dinosaur, and most bookstores are owned by conglomerates and the buying decisions are made by a computer.

 

As a reader, and I spend more money in bookstores than any sane person ought to, I don’t think the direction we are going in is good.  I don’t want my choices limited to what is currently fashionable, but I don’t want to have to wade through a river of dreck to find one good book, either.  As a writer I think my friend, the one who writes for himself, might be on to something.  In the end, I have to be satisfied with my own opinion of whether or not I came close to hitting what I was aiming at, or not.

 

Herman Melville, rest in peace.  They hardly knew ye.