Write About Now

Case Study in Characterization

As I mentioned earlier, I've been reading The Best Crime Reporting 2007. My rationale for dipping into the book was to absorb the "mood" of true crime, so that I could create a more convincing facsimile in the novel I'm writing. But I discovered something unexpected: a case study in characterization. The anthology collects essays that appeared in some of the nation's top puplications, including The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, and Esquire. Ironically, in spite of the fact that this is crime reporting and the crime genre is supposed to be 'plot-driven,' these narratives live or die on the strength of their characterizations. Often, the authors must create a vivid portrait in just a handful of sentences -- a skill I envy and would very much like to learn.

Tom Junod's piece "The Loved Ones," an account of the mass drowning of elderly nursing home patients during Hurricane Katrina, is a perfect example. It balances a profound theme and a complex narrative. Above all, Junod brings the players to life. His portrait of attorney Jim Cobb, who's defending the nursing home owners against charges of negligent homicide, jumps off the page. Here's a taste in which Junod captures through physical description the essence of Cobb's character and struggle:

Cobb is fifty-three now. He's lived in New Orleans all his life, and with his trimmed gray beard, his textured face, and his wrinkle-centered, red-rimmed hound-dog eyes, he looks like one of those dissolute Confederate generals of legend who kept a flask on his hip but still managed to lead those boys up the hill. He loves his causes, and now that he's convinced that the cause he really represents by representing Sal and Mabel Magnano -- the cause of his beloved New Orleans itself -- is a lost one, well, the man will say anything.

Write About Now ... And Not a Moment Too Soon

Welcome to Write About Now. I'm J. Mark Bertrand, and this is my new blog about writing and publishing. Since 2005, I've been writing about craft in fiction at a blog called, unimaginatively enough, Notes on Craft, but here I'm opening the topic up to include more than craft. What you need to know about me: I write non-fiction, but my real love is fiction ... and I'm an editor, too. Thanks to my MFA in Creative Writing, I have literary ambitions, but these days what I'm really interested in is crime fiction. Read as much as you like, push back and let me know what you think. With no further ado, here goes ...

The Killer Who Crowded My Personal Space

If there's one place in the bookstore I'm afraid to go, it's the True Crime section, a well-known haunt for crazies. So it took me a few minutes to build up my nerve. On the first pass, a greasy-haired kid in ripped jeans stood flipping through a book about the Mafia. I passed on by, pretending to head for the reference shelf. The local Barnes & Noble devotes three segments of shelving to books about serial killers, forensic science, and so forth -- half of them authored by Ann Rule -- and three narrow shelves just doesn't allow for enough personal space when you're browsing. In True Crime, you don't want anybody crowding you.

Go to the literature stacks and everything's pristinely shelved, a model of symmetry. That's because no one's digging through them. True Crime looked like it had been pawed, maybe even fondled. Gaps opened up in the shelves, books slumped sideways. I could imagine some suspicious loiterer lingering over each title, licking his finger before turning every page. Ripperology was well represented, and it seems half the pathologists in the United States have authored books about high tech crime-fighting. No Best Reporting, though.

The Mystical Cachet of Writing Manuals

When I was a boy, I discovered a leather duffle in my dad's closet, and inside was a cache of paperbacks by Dale Carnegie, including How to Win Friends and Influence People. I was fascinated. This secret power of influencing struck me as a good thing to possess, and any book that taught it must be worth reading. So I did. My expectations weren't exactly met, but that didn't stop me from believing that, whatever arcane skill one might like to acquire, its mysteries were revealed in a book. It was only natural, when my interests turned to writing, for my shelves to fill with how-to manuals.

Sponges and Conduits

Every author has his influences. Originality is a relative term. When we're asked where our ideas come from, an honest answer might be: "From other writers." Good authors borrow, great authors steal, and all that. Still, there's a right way and a wrong way to go about it. The author's mind is often compared to a sponge -- it's always soaking up ideas. I'm going to suggest that some authors behave as sponges, which is good, and others act like conduits, which is bad.

The sponge accumulates influences and gives them time to reconfigure in his mind. He takes what others have done but repurposes it in keeping with his own vision. When you read his work, you can probably identify some influences, but you aren't left thinking, "Hey, I've encountered this story before!"

The conduit is less artful, more derivative. He plunders whatever is popular and cranks out his thinly disguised version of it. In some cases, the process is so brazen that readers (or the author himself) can make one-to-one identifications. If you want to know the difference, it's that sponges are influenced while conduits merely imitate. There are some very successful conduits out there, writers who take every trend and crank out their own version of it, but I think there's something ultimately unsatisfying about such work. It's not just originality that's absent, but in some mysterious way personality seems missing, too.