It’s good to be home, though I’m not sure why the return trip — from anywhere — is always more exhausting than going there was in the first place. Why is that? In my case I’ve been getting lazy on a beach in the Gulf, but I’m not sure that explains why the flight home seemed as if Kyoko and I were returning from New Zealand, not Mexico. Unlike some people, I don’t sleep well on a plane, so I used the time to give the planned revisions to my upcoming case another look while Kyoko nodded off on my shoulder. I’m lucky she didn’t drool on my suit.
To say I like what I see in those notes would be an understatement. I’ll give the guy at the wheel credit: he does come up with some off-the-wall shit for me to get out of; combining an odd assortment of elements one doesn’t expect to find. He says that’s to keep me on my toes, but I really think that’s just the way his mind works. The elements aren’t unique or earth-shattering in and of themselves, but his choice of which ones to combine and in what way can be — providing you drink your stories dark, offbeat and somewhat twisted; just like me. Blood Rituals promises to be no exception, but I just hope the landscape settles down enough for him to actually put proverbial pen to paper; in a purely digital way, of course. While catching up on all the changes, though, I couldn’t help but worry that I may be in for another roller coaster ride not so much of story, but of process. I still wake up in cold sweats about the circuitous way my last case evolved, and I’m not sure even a hard-boiled gumshoe like me would like to embark upon that kind of nightmarish journey again.
I’ve mentioned how difficult my last case, Portrait of Deadly Excess, was to record, but I may not have been entirely forthcoming as to its convoluted gestation. Yes, I spilled my guts about how Kane and I tussled over which one of us was going to be top dog, and may have also confided how my introduction to a pre-existing case required it be entirely rewritten with a different center and emphasis in mind. Draft after draft typed by in what seemed an endless dance of shadows, of entrances and exits, of ever-changing roles, some expanding while others shrank, of certain angles asserting themselves at the expense of others, of whole scenes and sequences moving forwards and backwards in the structure, and in deciding how much to say and where best to say it, before the final work fell into place.
These are universal issues every writer confronts, but the process of chronicling this particular case was further complicated by the fact that the guy at the controls decided to try his hand at adapting his own work for the screen in between his drafts of the novel and his attempts to find an agent or publisher. He’d work on the script while marketing the novel, and then polish off the novel while trying to sell the script. But fiction and screenplays are two very different forms, each with its own requirements, protocols and restraints. Each required he tell the story and convey information in a different way. He began to realize that specific passages, devices and angles that worked well in one medium did not work especially well in the other. The back-and-forth process also revealed problems and inconsistencies in the basic plot and structure, and that required that both novel and script be fixed.
The back-and-forth made me dizzy; like watching an endless exchange of volleys in a tennis match. Nor did all of these changes go down with me as easy as the glass of 12 year old Michel Couvreur I’m drinking. A lot of my introspective commentary and author omniscient narration that worked in the novel flew as far as Icarus before melting in the bright light of the silver screen. Author-dearest realized the basic structure of the story made the often-used first person narration of some classic noir stories untenable in this instance; there were a few specific scenes of the case I wasn’t privy to because I wasn’t, couldn’t be, there. Besides, film is a visual medium, and voiceover narration in mid-stream — even when said by the best characters/actors — can often come across as an intrusion of the visual narration one’s watching. In film, the camera itself is the point of view, and voiceover narration, even the best — MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Mitchum in Out of the Past, Neal in Detour, and Welles in Lady from Shanghai — can call attention to itself in ways the author might otherwise prefer to avoid if only he or she could solve the problem of imparting that need-to-know info or mood in some other, purely visual way.
Conversely, the BANG BANG action sequences which came to life so effortlessly on the screen do not work nearly as well on the written page. Action in any written format is hard to pull off largely because the author’s process of writing action gets in the way of our imagining it. Action voids time, collapses it into a sharp staccato of movement. You can see something in an instant, but it can take a writer many words to describe the same motion on the page, and it takes the reader many seconds to assimilate a sentence or more. Film eliminates that time lapse because it takes less time to show action on the screen than it does to read or write it. It’s tempting, of course, to sacrifice character and plot to loud and explosive action sequences, and to make the wizardry of ever-greater special effects the spine on which you build whole stories, but one becomes anesthetized to pure action after a while; it’s a lot like crack and other narcotics, the more you take the more you want and the more it consumes everything else. Hell, I’m a self-professed action-junkie, but even I know less is more sometimes. For me it’s the characters and story that need to be 3-D, not the picture.
It took the guy at the wheel a while to learn these lessons, just as he eventually learned that dialogue has greater stress on it in film than it does on the page. In film you actually have a real life actor mouthing the lines, so they better POP and not come across as forced or false or contrived. You can’t prop up weak dialogue on the screen the way you can on the page. Unfortunately, unless you’re terribly gifted in both word and ear making characters speak as people really do in life can be like having root canal done without Novocain. If you’re anything like most people, you don’t always say the perfect thing in any given situation. You often walk away wondering “why didn’t I say that, instead?” For that reason, it’s better to write dialogue as a character SHOULD speak if they had all their wits and emotions in the moment about them. Dialogue’s a lot like makeup for the stage or screen; the lights of the medium itself are so brutal and unforgiving that you’ve got to put makeup on to look natural.
And so on the process went for the better part of a decade. I’ll cut the guy some slack because he was working a day job all that time, but that didn’t change the fact that I was getting moldy waiting in the wings while all this tinkering was going on. More frustrating still was the fact that there was still no market for me in the end. Not as a novel, not as a script. I suspect it may have been my in-your-face attitude and mixed racial makeup that got in the way, but I’ll leave that particular rant for another time. Even a fictional character’s feelings can get hurt by repeated rejection, but I’ve also been known to occasionally delight in proving others wrong. My doubters made me better, stronger; they helped the guy who writes me figure out what he was doing wrong. I was there to help. Fictional characters do that, too, you know. Actors aren’t the only ones who nudge, nag, and throw fits and tantrums in their dressing rooms. Fictional characters do it, too. If we’re worth our salt we also change lines, refuse to say the really bad ones, and have the audacity to suggest we do this instead of that. We steal scenes, alter sequences, and point out missed dramatic opportunities.
Despite the ego-tripping all-too-common of our so-called ‘creators’, we fictional characters have some good ideas of our own now and again. The trick for authors is to pay attention to our kibitzing or risk having a stillborn child on their hands.
