Notes from Maine - 2020/06/03
The news in every direction is terrible. I wish I had something insightful to say about it, but I know that there are others who will deliver those messages in a much more meaningful way. And I need a break from all that, so I suspect that you might too.
I have a number of rules that I try to stick to when I’m writing a book. I suspect that those rules are the reason I started writing in the first place. My first rule is, “No Cheating.” I don’t remember if it was the book Misery or the movie, but in one of those Annie gets very upset at cheating. You can’t show the main character drive off a cliff at the end of one chapter and then magically have them jump from the vehicle at the last second in the next. That’s cheating, and it’s unfair.
That said, I’ve definitely cheated.
I wrote a series of books that were about a character named Madelyn. In general, I don’t write towards specific endings or events, but there was one thing I knew about Madelyn when I started the first book. I knew that Madelyn was going to be hanged for her crimes. From page one, she was at the end of her life, but she kept deciding to live, one day at a time, because she had to fight for what she believed in. I knew that those beliefs were going to be turned upside down, and I knew that eventually she was going to have to fight to live, completing her reentry into humanity.
The problem was that I also knew that I wasn’t done with Madelyn. It wasn’t easy to merge those two ideas—she had to hang, but she had to keep going. That conflict is the reason that the Madelyn series remains one of my favorites.
My second rule is that Bobby is dead. This rule is similar to #1, but different. Do you remember “Who shot J.R.?” from the show Dallas. That cliffhanger was like rule #1 above, but a few seasons after J.R. was shot, Bobby Ewing died and Pam remarried. (I could be getting all this wrong, it was a million years ago). It turned out that Bobby wasn’t dead and they said that the whole previous season was a dream that Pam had. Nonsense.
Specifically, this rule is you can’t have a dream sequence that erases what we already know. I’ve broken this rule (kinda) in Fiero’s Pizza. The family gets a do-over. It’s somewhat of a circular story, which bothers me sometimes but it felt right in that circumstance.
The third rule is that there is no omniscience.
This is a tough one for a lot of people, and it’s something that I have steered towards, so my older books might not comply 100%. In a lot of books, we’re hovering over the action and we know more than the characters involved. Sometimes we know what they’re thinking even when we shouldn’t. It’s like a voice over in a movie, explaining everything as it happens. I watched a biographical movie once where the main character is killed by firing squad. Supposedly, the whole movie was scripted from the character’s writings, but we close with a voice over of what was going through his head just before he was executed. How would we know that?
I prefer to write from one set of eyes at a time. Maybe the whole book is from one perspective, and maybe I’ll jump back and forth from chapter to chapter, but I prefer when we don’t know what’s on the other side of the door until the character opens it. The reason why I say that this is “a tough one for a lot of people,” is because of the endings. In some of my books, we’re not going to find out where the monster came from, or whether or not everyone gets to live happily ever after. If I don’t have a way to show it without omniscience, then I’m probably not going to show it.
Number four is the anti-Scooby-Doo rule. At the end of every episode, Scoob and the gang would find out that there was no ghost, wraith, demon, or werewolf. It was just Old Man Jenkins in a mask, trying to commit insurance fraud or whatever. And he would have gotten away with it… etc.
That drives me nuts.
I want a real ghost, or demon, or whatever. I don’t want psychological unwinding or hallucinations or Old Man Jenkins. Did you ever see Project U.F.O. from the seventies? It was a TV show about Project Blue Book, which was a government program designed to convince everyone that every alien encounter was actually swamp gas. That’s the way I remember it, at least. With Scooby Doo and Project Blue Book, and everyone always trying to explain everything away, I want a book where people don’t constantly deny what they’re seeing and where real monsters exist.
“My mommy always said their were no monsters, no real ones, but there are, aren’t there?” Newt asks in the movie Aliens.
“Yes, there are,” Ripley says.
To deny otherwise would leave us incapable of dealing with them when we encounter them. They might be people cosplaying (like John Wayne Gacy dressed up as a clown), or in human skin, (like Annie from Misery), but there are monsters. Paranormal monsters are just a subset. Those are the kind that I prefer to write about.
Anyway, those are things that I keep in mind whenever I write a book.
Today I’m sending you Blood Ghost, which is technically a sequel to The Hunting Tree. The story starts fresh with different characters. You don’t need knowledge of The Hunting Tree to follow along with what’s happening. Hope you enjoy it, and I hope you’ll share this offer with friends and family. I’ve really enjoyed connecting with everyone who has written me these past couple of months, but sadly I think these emails have pushed away as many people as they have attracted. I would like to reach more people, and the best way to do that is through you.
I hope you’re safe and finding happiness.
