Rob Writes

The Big Lebowski

I was watching a documentary called “The Achievers” which is about fans of the movie “The Big Lebowski.”

There are events out together that are called Lebowski Fests where fans get together have costume contests, recite lines from the movie and generally just bond with each other, all around a movie which did really poorly at the box office, but then went on to become a ‘cult classic.’

So why am I talking about The Big Lebowski and Lebowski Fest? Well, number one, the Coen brothers are masters at what they do. They write character based movies that people either love or hate. Either one is okay with me, as eliciting emotions is what writing is all about. Love and hate are strong emotions. No one wants someone to be indifferent about their work. There is enough ennui in the word.

But the real reason (number two, if you are keeping track) is a tidbit; a throw-away line in the documentary. This is paraphrased, but basically someone said that Coen brothers movies are all about “someone having a problem and solving it in a horribly bad wrong way.” And off you go.

So think about that for a second. The character relationships are hugely important. When I do improv, I was taught that the best scenes are about two or more characters who are somewhere (doesn’t matter where) and they have a real connection, a relationship, and the background ends up being just that. The characters aren’t talking about their cutlery if they are in a kitchen (unless the cutlery is just a metaphor for how they feel about each other – maybe one is sharp and one is dull?)

The scene, the background, is just a setting. The relationship is what makes you care, but the plot is about a problem.

A problem can be something simple. Your mother hates me and it impacts our relationship.

How do you solve this problem?

a) You sit with your mother-in-law and have a discussion and try to hash out your differences. Boring (but likely in the real world).

b) You divorce your wife, so you lose the MIL problem.

c) You buy your MIL an around the world vacation and arrange a rendezvous with a foreign lover, so she moves to Paris and becomes a seldom dealt with fly in your marriage ointment. While in Paris she gets kidnapped by the lover’s incensed ex-mistress, and you have to go rescue her and realize she is an interesting person. You fell in love with her and divorce your wife and now you have a DIL who hates you.

I don’t know that that plot really works, but the point is, you have a problem that is solved in a way that is abnormal and then the solution drives the movie (or the book.)

What drives your writing? What is the plot point or points that sets your book apart? What makes your voice something that people want to revisit?

I don’t know how the Coen brothers do it, but this little piece certainly got me to thinking. Hope it does the same to you.

Happy bowling, my little Lebowski urban achievers!

Behind the scenes look at the Coen brothers and the Big Lebowski here. (affiliate link. thanks for clicking)

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Write What You Know

It may sound like a cliche, but write what you know, or research until you truly know a subject inside and out. Live it, if possible.

When I wrote my first novel, Someone Else’s Tomorrow, I set most of the book inside a quirky little restaurant, El Pollo Loco. (Years later a restaurant opened with this exact name. )

One reason I did so was because I worked in a restaurant in college for about a year. I knew the backside of the restaurant business. (Yes, backside. It fits, believe me.) I don’t know how to run a restaurant, but I know employee habits and how things get set up and turned over. One of the comments I got from numerous people was how they recognized the little details that I included.

When I included things like breakfast prep work I had no idea that people would recognize the truth in the actions I was typing about. It just was part of the scene.

So this isn’t to say you can’t write sci-fi, or about a foreign country, but do research and keep the details true to things you do know. Most writing really is about relationships, not the background, so good fiction or good science fiction is about people and how they inter-react.

Keep writing and honing your craft and keep it real.

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Lot 23 Zombie Romantic Comedy

What do you do to promote book sales?

This is a part of the process that presents challenges. We are creative people; we think, we write, we publish. We wait for sales to start pouring in. But really for unknown authors the sales aren’t going to just pour in. They trickle in, at best, and you hope people will write book reviews on Amazon and gradually word of mouth has people clamoring for, not just this book, but more work from you.

The general thought (from the experts) is to write series of books. People fall in love with your characters and want more. Many of your favorite authors recognize success (think Harry Potter or 50 Shades of Gray, or Hunger Games) and follow up.

I’ve even gotten the advice to write a series of three books and release them all at once. I don’t have the patience, but it certainly is worth thinking about.

So what do you do to promote book sales? Social media, friends and family, Fiverr for bought reviews?

I am looking at doing the podcast circuit and just talking, but I also got these fantastic cards designed to drop off at libraries, book clubs and even book stores…

What do you use? comments welcome and encouraged. Let’s succeed together.

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The Big Other

There is only one thing that makes a read (or a movie) interesting and that is the challenges to the hero. Usually these are in the form of problems he or she needs to solve and there is one problem which stands out as the ‘mother’ of all. That is the “Big Other.”

If you don’t have a big other in your writing there won’t be peaks and valleys, which need to exist to hold someone’s interest.

In “Blaze Motors” the big other was the oppressive government agents, first in the form of the Nazis and then the Polish Secret Service. There were many other challenges, such as the flight from Poland to the USA by the families and the enigmatic statements of a secret diary, bu the “Big Other” was the government interference in freedom.

In more familiar territory (for people who haven’t read Blaze Motors) in Casablanca Rick has to deal with the bureaucracy of a divided city in North Africa, but the real Big Other in the story is the love triangle between Rick, Ilse and Victor. How will Rick overcome the circumstances and allow Ilse to escape and have love in her life?

Look at your story and make sure there is a defined Big Other (along with a series of connected or unconnected ‘little others’) to make sure the story has victories and challenges built in for the heroes. If not you may need to add them.

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On Set – Bite Nite

I wrote this a few years ago when I was on the set of an independent movie. I played the priest. I capture small vignettes of circumstances. You never know when the thoughts of that moment might come back and be useful. Maybe they will come into play down the road or maybe they might just be a writing exercise. Either way it’s a good thing. Keep writing. That’s the lesson today…

So. We travel back in time to 2010.

The average person hasn’t been on a movie set, or at a remote shot. But there are pictures in your head, if you are curious enough to watch the ‘extras’ on many DVDs. But that still doesn’t give you the feeling of being there.

The cemetery was quiet and cold. Faintly trains could be heard in the background. They contributed a slow rumble, which was accented by the occasional buzz of a car speeding past. Two cameras were capturing the magic that was happening near the weathered statue of Jesus.

A eulogy scene was being shot, and the total screen time would probably be around two or possibly three minutes. Cameras are rolling, but these days are totally silent, so you wouldn’t know if they were on or not. A boom microphone hovered overhead capturing even the slightest sound.

Lines were delivered. There were a half dozen in total, and then a shift in the camera angles. We have little to say in between the takes, which number in the teens. We stand, hopefully in the exact same poses as the lines are again delivered. This time it’s close up shots of the mourners, next time it’s a tight shot on the priest’s face. A cold breeze blows and we are aware of the below zero wind chill factor as our fingers slowly become numb.

Finally, after two numbing hours, it’s a wrap on the scene. We trundle away, trying to push blood to our feet and failing. A half hour later in my car I finally feel warm again. It’s an independent film, which means, most times, that there is no pay, but the experience is worth the time. Actors are an odd breed. They are an eccentric collection of people from all levels of society and of all ages. Some have always had confidence, some have gained it from many appearances on stage or screen, and some have to fake it, every time.

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Rewriting and Reviewing

I was talking with a friend of mine, name of Isabella, who is in the process of writing her first book. Her mother had asked me to take a look and give her some advice; words of wisdom or something along those lines.

Isabella has written about, oh, I don’t know, maybe thirty pages and that is a lot. Maybe I should have mentioned that Isabella is 12 years old or somewhere in that neighborhood, so to stick to something over time and put down words that are somewhat coherent is quite a task.

Kids hardly write any more and with the ‘instant gratification nation’ that we’ve become it is refreshing to see this sort of thing. But Isabella is just twelve, so her work is rough.

She knew it … I knew it … her mom knew it. But what to do?

She needed to review and rewrite, but didn’t know where to start.

My advice? Read it out loud. Seriously. Take any written work and read it out loud. You will hear the clumsy language or the poor sentence structure. Don’t get me wrong. We all speak in broken English.

“That boy did good.” Might sound alright out loud, but looking at it written down, you know the boy did well. (Or you should.)

But between the two mediums you should be able to sort things out. You are your own first editor.

A note on this. You may want to record your verbalization and then go back and listen to it. It might give you a little distance and allow you to be a bit more critical.

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Developing Character Profiles

I belong to several writer’s groups; some online and some that ‘meet-up’ at coffee shops and bookstores. Although I don’t participate in person very often I feel that online forums and emails sometimes help in the writing process and lately my one meetup group has been having a discussion on character development.

Each character a unique voice

A problem many writers have is using their own voice when they write dialogue. Early on I would think, what would I say if I was a detective and this was the situation, or if I was the criminal? But my break-though was writing character sheets. I don’t spend a lot of time of front on this, but I try to write down, in a separate document, a character’s age, race, weight, weight and a little background. (I do this same thing with locations – what does it look like, what is the floor layout, etc.)

As the story and the character develops I add more details. This might include education, place of birth, college and other more telling facts. My personal ‘cheat’ is to assign someone I know to the character. I have a friend from Boston. If I have a character from that area I will write down his name and then that character’s voice becomes Steve’s voice. Maybe their physical characteristics might morph into Steve’s, but not normally. But in my head I am saying ‘how would Steve say this line? Does he have verbal crutches?” Someone from Canada might say ‘eh’ while someone from Australia might use the term ‘mate’ etc.

These generalities aren’t in place in our society for no reason. People sort of expect a Canadian character to say ‘sorry’ a lot.. It carries a bit of comic effect sometimes, but at least it makes them unique inside your story.

Do they have an education? That increases vocabulary. Are they a baker? Maybe they use terms unique to their trade. A mechanic has oil under his nails. Does he nervously clean them when he is uncomfortable? Does that cause awkward pauses in his speech pattern?

Character development and differentiation is important to make your story and your characters believable.

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This one weird trick to write a book fast

As the author of five books and a former ghostwriter I know a lot of ways to get quality writing done quickly, but most people don’t ever consider this one weird trick on how to write a book fast. It’s an old trick which pre-dates computers and even word processors and it has been used by everyone from Isaak Asimov to Fyodor Dostoevsky.

What is this one weird trick? It is (hold on to your hat) persistence. That’s right, persistence. One thing that all prolific writers have in common is a dogged perseverance to get the job done. Asimov did not go to Fiverr or E-Lance and farm out his work, and neither did Arthur C. Clark. They wrote on a regular schedule. And Einstein? Who knows what E would be equal to if he would have gone off-shore for cheap labor? It wouldn’t have been mc² that’s almost for sure.

If you do some research on any writer in any genre you will find that this holds true; they wrote on a schedule and likely did not take extended breaks away from their writing. In fact many writers start to get cranky when they can’t get the words out of their system. It’s sort of like blowing up a balloon. It can only take so much before it bursts and prolific writers are the same way. Putting the words on paper (or into some word processing program) is the pressure release valve.

Okay, maybe it’s not a weird trick, but it’s amazing how people think that writing is about tricks and gimmicks. It’s not about tricks at all, but about crafting words to make them do what you want.

Questions, comments? please let me know.

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Blaze Motors – Some Secrets Don’t Stay Buried

Blaze Motors is my second novel and is available on Amazon.
There is a pretty interesting back story to this and that is the reason that I am sharing. All good stories have some basis in truth. I think that humans can tell when a story is fake and it ruins things for us. Even the most far fetched tales are based on truth.
For example, JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was based on WW2. Sauron was Hitler; Saruman Mussolini, etc, etc. Some people may argue that, but there is enough evidence, even from the man himself.

So the skeleton of the story is true, which helps us to believe that the rest of it could be, or at least that it feels real to us.

So how can you get story ideas? talk to your friends and family. I would advise this in any case – talking is good. But you never know what story you might uncover or what story you might miss. Years after my Father died I had a short conversation with my Mom. (Somehow I believe it was connected to a documentary we were watching on the telly.) We got on to the subject of the Hindenburg disaster. Casual conversation and she just drops this tidbit in. “Your father was there when that happened.”

Holy shit! One of the most talked about disasters in the history of the United States and my father happened to be on the airfield and witnessed it. What a story that must have been. But I missed it. I didn’t know to ask the question, and honestly he died suddenly. I thought I had plenty of time. You never know.

I was talking with friends of mine, Barry and Elke Fisher and she knew I was a writer, so she often told stories of her family and of her early years bumming around Europe back packing. And she told me the tale of an ancestor who had an auto factory. To keep the Nazi’s from taking the factory and turning it into a war machine they buried the car parts in fields outside the city they lived in.

I took that story and placed the factory in Bialystok and turned it into a truck factory. A fire made the story more interesting and a strong male lead with a love interest was paramount. The skeleton is true. An outline was provided and then I researched Bialystok and emigrants fleeing Nazi persecution and threw in a few more points of interest.

In my head this was all scenes and it was very visual, so I wrote a screenplay. I then converted that into the novel. One idea, multiple projects and potential streams of income.

It’s an idea, and I think one that is worth exploring for anyone considering writing a novel, whether it is their first or tenth..

I hope this inspires you to pursue your passion for writing. Questions and comments are welcome.

Until then,

Rob

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Kindling and How to do Kindle Right

I don’t do much promotional stuff here, you may have noticed. This site is more about writing and techniques for organization and thought processes. There is a reason for that. Down and dirty how to use Amazon’s Kindle for publication is covered in my book Write Here, Write Now, No Excuses. So no need to get into that.

And the detailed explanation and much more is covered in Geoff Shaw’s Kindling program. Those are the best sources I can recommend and I recommend them both whole-heartedly. Start with my book and if you want more, move to Geoff’s program. It is well worth the investment…