Why do my characters boss me around?

No Peace starts at del Monte Hotel in Monterey (photo circa 1880s)

In a previous post I wrote that I had started the next Steve Dancy Tale and the title of the seventh book in the series would be Coronado. I had a plot outline, a nifty cast of characters, and enough research on San Diego history to fill a nonfiction tome. Steve had other ideas. I started the story in Monterey, California, intending to travel down to San Diego by way of Redondo Beach and Pasadena. Don’t ask. I won’t tell you the storyline because I’ll probably use this material in the next book. Suffice it to say that Steve got himself into so much trouble in Monterey that he can’t go anywhere until he cleans up his mess.

Wait a minute, isn’t Steve Dancy a fictional character? Yeah, that’s what irks me. Who gave him the right to change my story? When I start a new work, I know the beginning and how it ends, but allow the characters to show me the way to get from one end to the other. Many times, I put the characters into a scene, give them a couple lines, and then transcribe the rest of their conversation. I know them so well that I trust them. But never has a character taken me off the rails and done his own thing. This is outrageous. Perhaps he’s miffed that I abandoned him for a spell to write Deluge. Hell, I thought Steve and Virginia wanted to be left alone on their honeymoon. Which brings to mind the first time I knew something was going haywire. The new book starts about two years after our newlyweds rode off into the sunset. I’m writing the first chapter and Steve and Virginia suddenly announce they have a one-year old son. I’m typing away, and suddenly Jeffery Joseph Dancy enters the story uninvited. Cute kid, though.

The bottom line is that I’ve changed the title for the book. It is now called No Peace, A Steve Dancy Tale, but who knows, it could change again. Now I have a true appreciation for what it means to have a character driven story.

One last thing; because of my recent focus on westerns, I was concerned that Deluge might not be accepted by my readers. It was contemporary, and although there were horrific gunfights, the main antagonist was a nasty storm. I’m pleased that the initial reception has been great. The ratings on Goodreads score it 4.4 and the initial Amazon reviews rank it 4.6. Thanks to all of my readers.

Gotta go. Steve's telling me to get back to work.

Steve Dancy in New Jersey? What's that about?

Still from The Great Train Robbery

The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale partly takes place in New Jersey. Oh yeah, and Thomas Edison is a character in the latest story. Dancy fans need not worry; Steve has been firmly converted to an unabashed Westerner. He has good reason to visit New Jersey and it will take someone toughened by the Wild West to sort out the mess in Menlo Park.

Serratelli Hat Company

New Jersey may not be the Wild West of the mid nineteenth century, but the Colt revolver was invented in New Jersey, Annie Oakley called New Jersey home, the Serratelli Hat Company is based in Newark, John B. Stetson came from New Jersey, and the first Western movie was filmed in New Jersey. Six shooters, western hats, and the birth of Western movies: that ought to be enough to give New Jersey a Western pedigree. Besides, Edison needs Steve and his friends to sort out a few problems or he may never complete his electrification of Wall Street.

Edison, has the curriculum vitae to play a role in a traditional Western, especially one where the protagonists are miners, not cowboys. Thomas Edison’s contributions to mining included new techniques in blasting, conveying, crushing, and magnetic separation. His greatest mining invention was the electric cap lamp. 

As for his cowboy credentials, he has none, but his company produced the very first Western feature film. In 1903, the Edison Manufacturing Company distributed The Great Train Robbery.

Edison clowning with Henry Ford

You might notice his name in the upper left hand corner of the title frame. I believe this makes Mr. Edison a cowboy at heart, which in my mind gives him the right to cavort in a Steve Dancy Tale.

The Return, A Steve Dancy Tale by James D. Best

Full of Surprises—Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming

In high school, I read every Ian Fleming James Bond book. I liked them, but wasn't motivated to read them a second time until recently. I started with Live and Let Die, the second book in the series. The novel was full of surprises. I remembered that Bond was a different character than in the movies and the plots were less extravagant.  All true. James Bond is vulnerable and feels fear in the books. He is not as much of a loner and makes friends easily. The plot doesn't make sense in either the book or movie, but the action/escape scenes tend to the more realistic side in the novel. There is a fetish about equipment, but in the book, Bond is given somewhat specialized scuba gear, while in the movie, Roger Moore wears an electro-magnetic watch that can pull a wooden row boat by it metal rowlock. Fleming does not give Bond futuristic gadgetry. A steel-toe shoe is about as exotic as it gets.

First Edition Cover

Fleming was a much better writer than I remembered. His pacing was pitch-perfect and descriptions excellent. Although the dialogue often seemed pedestrian, Fleming was a great storyteller. Live and Let Die was an easy read, and there were more than a few times when I reread a section that showed skillful writing.

The big surprise was the racism reflected in this 1954 book. Fleming occasionally writes favorably about his black characters, but for the most part he relies on offensive words and stereotypes that were more generally accepted than we would like to remember. Fleming’s attempt to reflect black ghetto dialects seems crude and wrong. This novel demonstrates that racial attitudes have improved in the last sixty years. Perhaps everyone, especially the young, should read Live and Let Die to gain a fuller understanding of the 1950s.

The Inferno by Dan Brown—A Crummy Book

At the time of this writing, Inferno by Dan Brown has nearly 5,000 Amazon reviews for 3.9 stars. Since I thought this was a poor novel, I’m going against the grain. I would give it 3 stars if it was written by a developing author, but it only gets 2 stars in my book because it’s obviously been thrown together by an apparently waning writer.

There is an adage in writing that the author should never let his or her research show. When the action is stopped to pontificate about some factoid, it jerks the reader out of the story. This is forgivable once in a while when the story is good. Inferno does not have a strong story and Brown commits this offense countless times. The reader can imagine him getting a VIP tour around a historic site and Brown peppering his escort with questions about passageways and trivia. He let the locations define the story instead of making the locations a backdrop. This makes for a mediocre travel guide and a lousy novel. All plot, no story.

If Robert Ludlum didn’t invent the chase novel, he perfected it. The basic formula is that a man and a woman meet, there are murders, the bewildered couple become suspects and run, they are chased by good guys and bad guys from one exotic place to another, and a puzzle must be solved or bad stuff will happen to the world and our protagonists. Ludlum made you feel for the characters’ plight, but Brown uses characters like historic sites to merely carry the plot. The reader doesn’t know Brown’s characters. They are as enigmatic as the puzzle. I don’t criticize Brown for adopting this formula. (I used it in The Shut Mouth Society.) I criticize him for mimicking Ludlum’s voice with single declarative sentences meant to hammer a point, and even copying Ludlum’s amnesia device from the Bourne series.

In short, The Inferno was lazy writing.

Fiction: art or craft?

You can buy innumerable books about how to write fiction. I have bookshelves full of them. Some help, but most are regurgitations of the same old stuff. The majority of these how-to books present a formulistic approach: If you get each of these elements right, you’ll have a bestseller. I beg to differ.

Neither too hard or too soft

I once bought three writing books simultaneously. The first was the bestselling text for college creative writing courses, the second was How to Write a Novel for Dummies, and the third was a middle-of-the -road advice book by a relatively successful novelist. The worst of the bunch was the college textbook which was all about mechanics and literary devices. Plot was reduced to paint-by-numbers. The Dummies book was a poor second. The actionable advice could have been adequately summarized on two typewritten pages. The middle-of-the-road book was by far the best of the breed and it has guided my book buying on writing from that point forward.

I’m biased. I believe storytelling is the most important aspect of fiction. Characterization is a close second, with plot a distant third. Literary devices are inconsequential until you have a compelling story.

There are great storytellers, great writers, and great storytelling writers. The first can be commercially successful, but eventually fade away. The second never gain a large audience. The third become immortal.

(Twain, Shakespeare, and Homer are but three examples.)

Raymond Chandler wrote, “all art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and that if it does not it dies and is forgotten.” The secret to mass appeal is engaging stories. 

Fiction may be art or craft, but it is certainly not engineering.

11/22/63 by Stephen King

I haven't read a Stephen King book in a couple decades. 11/22/63 reminded me why I used to read King’s books as soon as they were published ... and why I quit reading them. King is a good writer, has a great imagination, knows how to pen an engrossing story, but is exhaustingly verbose. I wanted to make a little circling motion with my finger to tell him to hurry up, but of course he wasn't in the room to see it.

Fiction writers have the unique ability to bend time. We can do what we want because it’s our world. We make it up. The premise of 11/22/63 is that our intrepid hero discovers a time portal that takes him back to 1958. After a quick touristic holiday, he decides to go back to 1958 and wait until November 22, 1963 in order to save John F. Kennedy. King proceeds to tell us everything that happens in the intervening five years. Why? It was King’s decision to have the portal go to 1958. He could have chosen 1961 or 1962. I think he just loves to write.

That aside, this is a well told story. I like time travel because they are basically fish-out-of-water tales. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur'sCourt by Mark Twain is the apex of the genre. 11/22/63 may have been overly long (880 pages in paperback), but it was still a fun read with some creative twists on time travel. I didn't agree with his speculations about altered history, but they didn't interfere with the story. If you like to be immersed in Stephen King’s world, you can have an extended stay with 11/22/63.

"Evil be to him who evil thinks" Edward III (1312-77)

The Western Writers of America reviewed The Shopkeeper in the August issue of the organization's Roundup Magazine.

Best, James D. The Shopkeeper, A Steve Dancy Tale. Wheatmark. Trade paperback, 233 pps., $18.95. ISBN 978-1-58736-922-3 

Steve Dancy is set on experiencing the West. At first glance, he is nothing more than a dilettante Easterner intent on writing a journal about his adventures on the frontier. He’s not running away from a hopeless life. To the contrary, he’s educated and seems to have enough money for his simple needs. Although anxious to avoid trouble, he can be pushed only so far, and when he chances upon some bad men doing unspeakable things to a woman, he feels he must take a hand. It isn’t long before he’s caught up in gunplay, which leads him into taking desperate measures, including buying a bank and a hotel, and influencing the upcoming gubernatorial elections. Dancy is a far different man than these Westerners think he is. Wealthy after selling off his Eastern businesses, maybe he should have told them what kind of goods he sold, because he’s sure not like any other shopkeepers they know. This is a fast paced tale with an interesting hero. In structure, with short chapters, crisp dialogue, and lots of movement, it’s reminiscent of a thriller. Sadly, neither of the women in this story were enduring, the older too evil and crass to believe, and the younger far from worthy of the infatuation the hero apparently feels toward her. The motivation seems weak for all the mayhem that ensues. Still, you’ll certainly find enough twists and turns to provide an entertaining and exciting story. 

I loved the review, but… "the older too evil and crass to believe?" This worries me because Mrs. Bolton was the only antagonist to survive in The Shopkeeper. Steve Dancy certainly finds her evil and crass ways unbelievable, but Mrs. Bolton has a villainous nature that might crush our gifted Mr. Dancy. I just hope that he wakes up and sees her for what she really is before the climax to Leadville.

Characters Matter

Characterization is a crucial aspect of fiction. We know this because it's drilled into us at school, in workshops, and in all the how-to books and journals we read. The protagonist must come across as real and interesting enough to pull the reader through to the end of the story. A common mistake, however, is to focus too much attention on the protagonist. When you read a great book or watch an outstanding film, it's usually the antagonist that lifts the story above the ordinary.

Chigurh From No Country for Old Men

Protagonists, especially those of the heroic breed, are bound by rules and common perceptions that somewhat inhibit creativity. Antagonists, on the other hand, are wide open for manipulation. They can be bad to the bone like Hannibal Lector or Chigurh. They can be nasty or evil, but mend their wayward ways like Ebenezer Scrooge or Darth Vader. The reader may be misdirected to believe the antagonist is bad and then everything is turned around like with Boo Radley and Mr. Darcy. Antagonists can make a story memorable, even when the antagonist isn't even human— like Moby Dick or Christine. The one thing these antagonists all have in common is great character development.

Your concentration on character development shouldn't even stop with the protagonist and antagonist. Nobody willingly hangs around boring people and nobody wants to read about characters with cornmeal personalities, not even bit players. Everybody inside the covers of your book has to be interesting. Give each of them a distinct personality. If you have a character like a postman or waitress that only appears for a couple pages, don't describe their personality, show it. You need to do it with dress, movement, or dialogue. Show, don't tell, is more difficult with the brevity of a minor player, but you only need to spice the character enough to make him or her three dimensional.

Here's an example from my novel, The Shopkeeper. 

I asked the hotel clerk for the best lawyer in town. He directed me to a man named Jansen who had an office across from the Capital building. I then asked to see the chambermaid in my room so I could give her some special instruction. After a brief wait, an exceptionally skinny girl arrived whose cheap dress fell straight down from her narrow shoulders.

“You sent for me?” she asked.

“I would like you to do me a favor. I’ll pay handsomely.”

“All right.”

“I haven’t told you what I want yet.”

“Tell me … and then I'll tell you what handsomely means.”

That took me aback, but I plunged ahead. “I want you to write a letter and sign it with another woman’s name. Can you write?”

“You mean can I forge?”
________________________

Speed Demons vs. Slowpokes

Open Range

The movie Open Range started me thinking about plot pacing. Westerns films are supposed to be action/adventure, but Open Range is not Silverado—which opens with sudden gunplay and corpses thrown in every direction. In Open Range, the audience never sees nor hears any shots until the end of the movie—when all hell breaks loose. The intent is to shock the audience with a tardy eruption of violence that puts the main characters into mortal danger only after the viewer has learned to care about them.

Which technique works? Both. The correct pacing depends on what the storyteller is trying to achieve. The storyline in Open Range is a set-up for the finale. The scenery, characters, and the depiction of the fabled Old West lifestyle are just enough to keep the viewer’s interest until the big payoff. Open Range has a well-conceived plot and a strategy for developing that plot—something that can’t be said for every hyperventilating action flick.

Ever since the movie Speed, the audience at an action/adventure film expects to get their adrenaline pumping within the first 180 seconds. Hollywood does this with rapid-fire cuts, pulsing music, a banging soundtrack, and life-threatening scenarios that are frequently just a preamble to the real story. (Actually, the credit for heart-throbbing openings probably belongs to the James Bond series, but Speed found ways to twist the knob to the right.)

Dan Brown did the same to novels. He opened da Vinci Code with a gruesome murder and then slammed his foot on the accelerator until the reader felt breathless while lying in his La-Z-Boy recliner. Brown uses one hundred and five chapters for a relatively short novel—some chapters are as short as a single paragraph. This is the equivalent of a film editor making forty-five cuts in a one-minute action sequence.

Silverado

A downside of this trend is that critics assume that anything done with deliberation must be art—or worse, that art in film or literature must be painstaking slow. (Once Upon a Time in the West must be art because it moves slower than a septuagenarian fastening his seatbelt in a parking slot you want.)


The speed of the story should match the subject matter and the predilections of the target audience. Whatever pace you choose, it should be a choice, not an unwitting byproduct of the other story elements. The only hard and fast rule is that a plot must never come to full stop. Plots move or die. Even dialogue must always move plot or characterization. (People don’t want to watch or read the banal things we say to each other.)

When you read your next book or watch your next film, stay aware of the pacing. If you enjoy the experience, chances are that the story is told at the right speed to properly draw the characters and develop the plot for the genre’s audience.

Honest westerns filled with dishonest characters.

What happened to the Western?

Westerns were hugely popular for over a hundred years and then the genre suddenly fell into disfavor. Not only were Westerns popular in the United States, but the whole world devoured them. The Western was a staple of fiction, Hollywood, television, and daydreams. What happened?

The Western genre became a niche market because it abandoned traditional Western mythology. Westerns aspired to be art.

In recent decades, art has tended toward cynicism. The creative classes insist that true art illuminate our sins and our despair. The literati hooted, heckled, and hissed at the uplifting mythology of the Old West. Rather than a virtue, the talents required to tame a frontier became vices. Man killed—and man killed all the beautiful things. Bad stuff happened to good people, and for no apparent reason other than that life was unfair. The fashionable wanted art to reflect their world view, and the fashionable were in a funk.

And exceptional art did happen. Sergio Leone, an Italian enamored with the Old West, took the negative perspective and made it mainstream. His Dollar trilogy were his experimental etchings and Once upon a Time in the West, his masterpiece. A host of copycat films solidified the fashion and Westerns were henceforth required to portray the Old West with all of its faults and transgressions.

This fashion appealed to the elite, but a funny thing happened on the way to the movie theater—the public veered off in another direction. The general populous found it increasingly difficult to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys and the stories didn’t make them feel good about their ancestors or themselves. But they found a solution. They just quit coming.

What makes an appealing hero?

I asked myself this question as I tried to figure out why the Western genre had been relegated to a couple of obscure shelves in most bookstores. I tried to noodle this out for myself until I came upon Raymond Chandler’s 1950 definition of a hero. He was describing a detective hero, but it fits nonetheless. Here is my abridged version of Chandler's hero.

Raymond Chandler

“…down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. 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 will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him.

“The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”

When publishers and producers abandon their penchant for off-putting antiheroes and return to this model, the Western will leap back to prominence.

People want heroes they can admire and long to emulate.