WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

By Stephen Jay Schwartz

“We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” —Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Defense Department briefing, Fe. 12, 2002

As absurd as this statement sounds, I wish I had written it.  It’s brilliant, in it’s own, Gertrude Stein sort of way.

It gets me thinking about my responsibility as an author.  When I read a book, I trust the author to guide me through an unfamiliar world.  I expect the author to be the authority on his subject.  And doesn’t that seem appropriate:  author = authority? 

So when I catch a mistake in a book or when I see inconsistencies in a film, I begin to feel uneasy.  I lose that comfortable feeling one gets when one is thoroughly immersed in a story.  At that point I usually move on to something else. 

I remember when I wrote a documentary about the International Space Station for the Discovery Channel.  I had written a line about a meteor crater on Earth and the video editor found a crater image and dropped it in.  We didn’t know the image was wrong until the Discovery Channel contacted us, having received e:mails from a dozen angry viewers.  The network made our producer re-cut the piece, drop in the correct crater image, and re-deliver it at his own expense.  It kinda came back to me—as the writer/researcher I was expected to have caught the discrepancy before it went in. 

Beat has a few inaccuracies that got past my research readers, making it through to publication.  The errors amount to a few freeway directions and a geographical mix-up or two, things you wouldn’t notice unless you were a San Francisco local.  But, damn it, I’m writing my books for the locals.  I’m writing them for the specialists.  I’m writing them for the cops that walk the beat.  I want people to read the work and say, “Yes, this is authentic.  I trust this author, I trust this guide.”

The inaccuracies aren’t so terrible, and I can correct them in the second printing.  But it drives me nuts, and it fuels the manic attitude I have about research.

Most everyone here knows the pleasure I get from doing what I like to call “boots on the ground research.”   Sometimes I call it “method research,” or “wallowing-in-research” or “embedded research.”  Others have simply referred to my process as “going native.”

And yes, it is true that I was five months late delivering BEAT because I was lost in the Land of Research, and Brett Battles had to pull me back from the brink and point me in the direction of my manuscript.  So I understand that I can go a little overboard.  At the same time, I can’t write what I don’t know, so if I’m gonna write it, I better know it.

I recently spoke at a Road Scholar event called “The Scene of the Crime” and I chose to discuss how research authenticates an author’s work. 

In preparing for the event I identified seven steps in my researching process:

Internet Research

Book Research

Interviewing Specialists

Boots on the Ground

Novels and Memoirs

Personal Knowledge

Specialist Readers

 

1.  Internet Research

The Internet is a great place to start.  Basic research used to be much more difficult in college, when I’d spend eight-hours digging through dusty periodicals in the university library.  In some ways it was fun, like a treasure hunt.  But it was a godawful waste of time.  Now one fucking keyword delivers a million links and a million points of view.  In BEAT, many critical story ideas began as a basic Internet search.  I was introduced to the organizations Children of the Night and S.A.G.E. (Standing Against Global Exploitation, which I fictionalized as R.A.G.E., or Rallying Against Global Exploitation).  This discovery emerged as a crucial subplot in the novel.  I also learned about the network of underground rivers running through San Francisco, and I learned that some of them actually rise up into the basements of existing buildings.  This gave me the entry point to my climactic action sequence.  I love the Internet.  The Internet is my friend.

2.  Book Research

Books provide a vital bridge from ignorance to elocution.  I don’t really feel comfortable in a subject until I’ve read a book or two.  I’ll give a couple examples:  When I was researching this little known subject called…SPACE…you know, for that Discovery Channel project…I needed to interview astronauts and cosmonauts and program managers and a host of other really bright folks.  NASA had sent me this giant binder of PR material which served only to confuse me.  Too many bits of information.  I remember struggling through an interview with some brilliant scientist when he paused and said, “You really need to get up to speed on this.”  “Yes,” I said, pleading, “Tell me how!”  He suggested I read a book called “Dragonfly,” about the Mir Space Station, which detailed the development of Mir and the relationship between NASA and the Russians.  I read the book and, sure enough, the next time I talked to the man I was up to speed.  The book TOLD ME A STORY, and I remember stories.  It put all those little bits of information into context.  And I love context.

Similarly, when I wrote Boulevard I did not get “boots on the ground” access to the LAPD.  Fortunately, an L.A. Times journalist named Miles Corwin had spent a year with the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division and he documented the experience in his book, “Homicide Special.”  The book became my bible and it let me observe the nuances of life in this elite homicide unit.  It gave an authenticity to my novel that cops recognized as true.

3.  Interviews

I believe we’re about three degrees of separation from everyone we need to interview for our projects.  Case in point—recently I needed a good contact in a European police department.  It seems like an obscure request.  How would I meet someone, and how would I find someone willing to give me the straight scoop and not some sanitized, Media Relations version of the truth?  While doing research for Beat I met an FBI agent who provided great information for the book.  I asked if he knew any policemen in Europe and he referred me to a friend of his who works as a diplomat in the Dutch Consulate in Washington, D.C.  That gentleman, in turn, referred me to a friend of his who not only works in a European police department, but is also a homicide detective and—get this—a published crime novelist and TV writer.  The perfect catch.  Three degrees of separation.  I met with him recently and he agreed to act as my consultant and to read drafts of my next book when I’m ready.

4.     Boots on the Ground

This is my favorite.  I just jump right in.  Steps one, two and three usually lead me to an opportunity.  If I’m researching the coroner’s office, I’ll get an opportunity to witness an autopsy.  If I’m researching the San Francisco Police Department I’ll get the opportunity to walk the North Beach beat, to ride shotgun in a radio car, to visit a crime scene.  Once I was researching the background for a protagonist in a short story and suddenly I found myself in the back woods of Alabama, dressed in camo, on a turkey hunt.  And I’m a vegetarian.  Thank God we didn’t find any turkey.  Another research opportunity placed me in the Navajo Indian Reservation eating peyote with the local medicine man.  Boots on the Ground is where I live, it’s where it all comes together.  It’s where all the really good anecdotes are born.

5.     Novels and Memoirs

I separate this category from “book research” because it serves a slightly different purpose.  In book research I’m looking for specific details.  In novels and memoirs I’m looking for the essence of a thing.  I’m looking for the mindset.  If I were writing a piece set in Germany in World War II I’d probably read Rebecca Cantrell’s “A Trace of Smoke,” “The Diary of Ann Frank,” and memoirs of people who lived through that time.  For Boulevard I read “What Cops Know” to get inside the heads of police officers.  I read memoirs of cops who had careers in the Chicago Police Department, the LAPD and the NYPD.  I let the rhythm of their voices influence me.  I let the parameters of their world define the parameters of mine.  For Beat I read a book called “Sex Work,” a series of memoirs by working prostitutes.  I also watched TV documentaries about addiction and addictive behavior.  The documentaries were like visual memoirs.  All these tools served to fix my thoughts in the realism of the world I would write.

6.     Personal Knowledge

This is what the writer brings to the table without having to do extensive research.  By now many of us already have a working knowledge of police procedure, so we only have to delve into our memories to write the scenes.  If you’ve studied karate all your life then your action-hero protagonist reaps the benefits.  If I had a green thumb I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time researching Abbey Reed’s gardening techniques.  In Boulevard and Beat I captured the world of sexual addiction and the Twelve Step process with such accuracy because I’ve been there.  I wrote what I knew and the accuracy showed.  A person who had a career as a medical examiner feels very comfortable writing a series around a medical examiner.  But writing from personal knowledge alone restricts our ability to grow or to represent characters or points of view very different from our own. 

7.     Specialist Readers

And, finally, when all the research is done and the story has been written and rewritten, I turn back to a few of the specialists I’ve interviewed and I ask them to read the book for accuracy.  This is where the rubber meets the road.  I remember when I gave an early draft of Boulevard to a police officer and asked him to correct anything and everything that seemed inaccurate or seemed stupidly out-of-place.  When he was done he said, “The knife on page nine should be 9 inches instead of 6.”  And that was it.  So, all the book-reading and interviewing and embedding seemed to have paid off.  However, another officer who read the book as an ARC caught a number of jurisdictional inconsistencies that, fortunately, I had time to correct before the book went to print.  That’s why it’s important to go to more than one specialist for that final read-through.

I can do all these steps simultaneously, and I can keep it up, at a slower pace, even as I delve into writing the book.  And, as Barbossa said in the Pirates of the Caribbean, “Argh, they’re really more guidelines than rules.” 

But they lead to great places.  They take the unknowns we don’t know we don’t know and turn them into knowns we know we should know.

I’m sorry if I’ve been absent from the comments this past couple weeks – I’m in full launch mode.  And today I’m traveling, so I’ll check in on the comments as the opportunities allow.  Thanks!

Reining in The Beast

By Brett Battles

Each book I write has it’s own personality. I’m not talking about the theme or the plot or the way it is told. I’m talking about the physical process of writing it.

Some are like your friend that you like spending a lot of time with. You get along. You have fun. Sometimes you make a wrong turn when you’re on a road trip, but you always get to where you’re going.

Some are like that friend who you are always making plans with but more times than not they cancel before you get together. Your relationship takes a long time to solidify. Occasionally it never does.

And some are just beasts.

In fact, I would venture to guess that most authors would say the majority of books they work on fall into this last category. These are the books that you are fighting with constantly, that you’re trying to tame, or at the very least rein in enough to get down on paper.

For me, I’ve experienced all of them, and sometimes all three in the same manuscript.

My first published book, THE CLEANER, was the good friend you like to spend time with. Of course, being my first novel, I didn’t have a contract yet so had the luxury of time, so I could afford to meander wherever I felt like going.

Then came my second novel, THE DECEIVED. Of every book I have ever written, published or unpublished, this was the one that was my biggest beast. Largely this was due to the well known phenomenon of the “second book” syndrome. By second book, I don’t necessary mean the second book an author writes. I’m talking about the second book he or she creates once they have been published. This usually is the first book you write where you’ve got a contract. And a contract means your publisher has expectations…like it you’ll finish within a certain time frame. And we’re not talking about a date in the distant future affording you that luxury you had with your previous book(s). This is a deadline that’s barreling down on you. In additon you have the added pressure of not wanting to screw up. For me, this, this meant I must have rewritten the last 100 pages of that book three times. When I was finally done, I was SO relieved.

My third, SHADOW OF BETRAYAL, was a little bit of both the good friend and the beast. But because it went a lot smoother than book 2 went, I was basically happy.

The fourth book I wrote (again this is post publishing, I have three unpublished manuscripts on my computer somewhere) was a breeze for the most part. That book, THE SILENCED, will be out next March. The hardest part of that one was that I broke up with my girlfriend of the time in the middle of it. Not fun for either of us, I’m sure. Of course, in a way, that just made me focus more. But, even then, I don’t think I would ever call THE SILENCED a bear. In truth, it came really easy to me, and I’m very pleased with the final version.

Number five is a standalone called NO RETURN that’s actually all down, too. (It will be coming out in the future, publisher hasn’t set the date yet.) That was the quickest book I had written to that date (from zero words to a draft polished enough to submit to my publisher). It also seemed to flow right through my fingertips. A good friend again. Not a beast.

Number six I wrote at the beginning of this past summer. It’s a YA book that my agent is showing around right now. That was probably the most fun book I have ever had writing. I loved the experience, the characters, the story. A good friend, indeed.

So based on this, when I started my latest adult novel in September – the first in what I hope might be a new series – it was natural to think that with my recent track record this one would be a breeze. After all, the last three I had written had gone extremely smoothly. Why shouldn’t this one, too?

Why, indeed?

I wish I knew the answer, because it hasn’t.

It. Has. Been. A. Beast.

As of Monday, I have restarted this novel for the fifth time. The first time I probably got about 20 pages in before turning back. No biggie, that happens. Take 2, another 20, maybe 30, and I think I was able to salvage much of the first take. Take 3: 81 pages, mostly new material. Take 4: 103 pages, mostly new material. Take 5 (current version): as of this writing on Tuesday night, 41 pages, almost entirely new material.

That is one, big, fat, UGH! If I could have strung all that new material together I’d be well over 200 pages by this point!

Now, I am using a lot of the same setting. And the characters are all pretty much still there, though they have changed greatly (especially in my latest version). I’ve also used scenes that are similar in each. Unfortunately they are not similar enough to recycle what I had. I think I’m getting closer now, hoping, in fact, that Version 5 will be the base for a full draft. (Dear God, please let it be so.)

Am I frustrated? A bit, but not as much as you might think. I take the view that I can’t afford to ever get too frustrated. That would only cripple me from doing the task I need to perform. If a story’s not working, it just means I need to take a closer look at it, or it could even mean it’s not the story I should write. Either way, I gotta keep moving forward. To be overwhelmed by frustration (or anything for that matter) is not an option. (This goes for the editing phase, too.)

So I’ll get up tomorrow morning (I’m writing this on Tuesday night), and I’ll put my fingers on my keyboard and tap away until I’ve hopefully reached my goal for the day (went way above on Monday, went way under Tuesday.) And I hope when I reach that 80 to 100 page mark I don’t get the same “crap, this isn’t working” feeling I got on takes 1, 2, 3 and 4. I don’t think I will this time, but I didn’t think that on the previous versions, either.

It’ll all depend on whether I can rein in the beast or not.

 

So do your stories have personalities? How would you describe them?

 

Fun Is Good, Part I: The Badass Factor

by J.D. Rhoades

Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?

If you never did, you should.
These things are fun, and fun is good.

           -Dr. Seuss

There are a lot of things that go into making a great book: plot, pacing, characterization, dialogue, etc. Today, I’d like to talk about another, often-overlooked factor: fun.

Not a lot of people talk about what makes a book fun to read. That’s probably because it’s such a hard thing to quantify. But if a book is fun to read, people will keep coming back to it, and they’ll anxiously await the next one.

For purposes of these posts, I’m not just talking about books being funny. Certainly a book that makes you laugh is fun. But there are some “serious” works that are just a sheer hoot to read and/or watch. In my next few posts, I’ll be talking about some of the things that make a book or movie fun (to me at least).

First,  we’ll talk about one of my favorites:  the badass factor.

From Beowulf to Jack Reacher, we do love our badasses, those unstoppable, unkillable guys and gals who take a licking and keep on kicking,  right up till the end when l they either triumph, or in the case of badass villains, go down with their guns (and sometimes themselves) blazing.

One of the things,  for example, that makes Jonathan Maberry’s zombie-driven thriller  PATIENT ZERO so much fun is that its main character, Joe Ledger,  is a serious badass, and he knows it. It’s right there in the book’s dynamite first line: “When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week, there’s either something wrong with your skills or something wrong with your world. And there’s nothing wrong with my skills.”

That passage illustrates one of the things that makes a bad-ass a bad-ass (and thus adds to the fun):  an  extraordinary self-assurance, born of an uber-competence in the fields of  crushing enemies, seeing them driven before them, and hearing the lamentation of their women. Robert Crais’ Joe Pike, for example, adds a huge fun factor to the Elvis Cole books by simply being the absolute best at disposing of bad guys without hardly breaking a sweat or even taking off his shades. And the books featuring Pike (there’s a new one out-YAY!) are, yes, serious fun.

The writer should be warned, though. There’s a very fine line between the type of confidence that tickles the reader’s fun center and the kind that stimulates the eye-rolling nerve.

Another form  of bad-assery is the Sheer Stubborn Endurance kind, exemplfied by Bruce Willis’ John McClain in the frst DIE HARD movie. Blown up, burned, feet cut to ribbons, he just keeps coming after the bad guys. Another example: Inigo Montoya in THE PRINCESS BRIDE, who, though badly wounded, gets up, raises his sword,  and delivers his signature  line, over and over, until he finally does in the man who killed his father, after this classic exchange:

Inigo Montoya: Offer me anything I ask for.

Count Rugen: Anything you want…

Inigo Montoya (runs Rugen through): I want my father back, you son of a bitch.

Which brings us to the  Badass Moments, in which a character’s true awesomeness is exhibited, often through a single line or gesture. Example: the moment in the first episode of the TV series FIREFLY when Captain Mal Reynolds comes striding up the ship’s cargo ramp into the middle of a tense standoff,  sees one of his people being held hostage, draws,  shoots the hostage taker dead without breaking stride, and moves on to getting the ship flying.

Another type of Badass Moment comes when  someone who’d previously been the hunted  turns into the lion and starts whomping the  snot out of bad guys  right and left. Example: the moment in ALIENS when the hangar door opens to reveal Ripley, driving that giant exoskeleton and snarling “GET away from her, you BITCH!”

Rule of thumb: Any  moment that makes you want to leap up, pump your fist in the air and holler ‘Hell YEAH!” increases the fun factor exponentially.

LORD OF THE RINGS, (the book version) is  fun, in large part, because it’s  chock full o’badasses and badass moments, like:  Aragorn standing on the walls of the surrounded Helm’s Deep and telling the million or so nasties teeming about below him that no one’s ever taken that fortress and  that the ridiculously outnumbered defenders will let them live if they run away now; Theodens’ pre-charge speech and the  Ride of the Rohirrim, and my favorite, when Eowyn, after being warned by the Nazgul that no man can kill him, whips off her helmet and gives her “No man am I” speech (a Badass Moment if there ever was one). And let’s face it, when it comes to  Sheer Stubborn Endurance badassery, the name’s Gamgee. Sam Gamgee.

So tell me: who are your favorite badasses? And for future posts: what makes a book not just good, but FUN?

Next time: The Audacity Factor, or Oh, No, He Did NOT Just Do That!

Should I pull the plug?

by Tess Gerritsen

Last week, I flew out of town for a speaking engagement.  For four days, while I was away, I didn’t check my email.  The morning after I came home, still groggy from fatigue, I booted up my computer and stared at a hundred new emails in my in-box.  Only a few were from friends or family, a few were from my agent and editor, but the vast majority were from people I’d never met.  Some of them were very nice emails telling me they liked my books.  Others asked for signed books for their charity auctions, or for signed photographs (I seem to get a lot of these requests from Russia), or for advice on how to get published or get an agent, or whether I’d come to speak at their library/school/luncheon/etc.  There were emails asking for online interviews or to set up lunch dates so they could tell me the needs of their favorite charity.  There were emails asking for money.  And there were a few from people who were angry that I had insulted old people or obese people or their favorite dog breed in my latest novel, and they would never read another one of my books.  Facing that long list of emails, I felt a sense of overwhelming exhaustion because each one of these emails needed to be read.  Each one needed a response (and I do try to respond to every single one.)  And if I put it off for a day or two, I’d just end up with fifty new messages waiting for me.  Meanwhile, there’s a book I still have to write, a husband who’s irritated that I’m not downstairs for breakfast, and a stack of snail-mail that needs to be attended to.

Which is why I’m thinking about shutting down my public email access, unplugging my internet, and hiding in a cave.

Other authors have told me they’re astonished that I’m still accessible to the public by email.  They shut down their public email addresses ages ago because they didn’t want to deal with the nasty messages.  One author has her husband read all her emails first, and he deletes anything that might be upsetting.  If you’re a public person, you will certainly get those messages.  Sometimes they’re upsetting enough to screw up your writing brain for the day, as you obsess over how lousy a writer you really are.  

Then there’s the dilemma of how to graciously respond to all the requests for your time and attention.  You want to be polite.  You want to be understanding.  But sometimes I’m really bad at saying no, and I’ll fret over just how to word my response without sounding like a jerk.

The truth is, staying in contact with lots and lots of people is not just distracting — it’s work.  While I do have a Twitter account, I tweet only once or twice a week, and usually only about the TV show, “Rizzoli & Isles.”  I have a Facebook account, but I’ll post only occasionally, usually about publishing news or events. And that’s about it for my online social life.  In fact, it’s a lot like my real social life.  I like hiding out in my office. I like eating popcorn by myself on the couch, in front of the TV.  With the phone unplugged.

I just watched “The Social Network,” a terrific film about the founders of Facebook. I came home thinking that there’s something wrong with me, because I don’t understand the overwhelming popularity of Facebook.  Yes, I do use it.  I appreciate its ingenious design.  But I never imagined that people would want to stay so obsessively connected with each other.  

Because most of the time, I just want to be left alone.  

In the recent Time Magazine article about Jonathan Franzen, I came across a description of his workspace:

Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts and solitaire, down to the level of the operating system. Because Franzen believes you can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he not only removed the Dell’s wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port. “What you have to do,” he explains, “is you plug in an Ethernet cable with superglue, and then you saw off the little head of it.”

Most people who read this probably think: “Wow, Franzen is a total weirdo.”  I read it and think: “How do I keep the superglue from getting into the rest of my computer?”

I think Franzen has a point.  All this social networking is getting in the way of our writing.  It’s distracting us.  It’s sucking up our time.  Yet we’re made to feel obligated to do it, for marketing, for success.  Every author’s been told she must have a website.  Every author must blog.  If you drop out of the chatter you’ll be forgotten, and no one will buy your books.  If you neglect to blog, tweet, and continually post on Facebook, you are doomed to die penniless and unread.  

Yet I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.  I’m mulling over the consequences of getting unplugged so I can devote more time to what got me here in the first place: writing books.  Not answering emails.  Or taking on more speaking gigs.  Or tweeting and Facebooking.  

So here are some questions I’d like to address to other authors:

Do you still have a public email address?  

Do you answer your own emails?  

If you went private, why?  

Are you getting more writing done as a result?

Those people

by Pari

I’ve been thinking about stereotypes and generalizations. We’re taught that they’re evil, to be avoided. But let’s be honest. We use them every day to categorize our world. They provide a necessary shorthand, without which we’d be mentally paralyzed.

But how do we know when we’re using stereotypes and generalizations in the negative? I’m not talking about the obvious, easy examples. We know they’re bad. It’s the subtle everyday ones that interest me. The thing about them is that they’re frequently only negative in the eyes of the beholder. 

Here’s an example: In one of my books (it’d give too much away to name it) two kids, who’d been abandoned by their birth mother, end up being the bad guys. A few months after the book was published I received an angry email from a reader.

“Adoption has such stigma and challenges already,” she wrote me. “Why did you perpetuate the myth that these kids are problem children in their new homes?”

Short answer? I didn’t.

Longer answer? I wasn’t saying what the reader chose to read into that particular plot point. I know good parents can have rotten children. I knew it at the time I wrote the book too. But the woman my protag cared about didn’t deserve these kids and I didn’t want them to be of her blood.

And now there’s my WIP. It’s a YA novel. The protag is a freshman in high school. She’s a tall girl who has already earned her black belt in Tae Kwon Do. She knows how to take care of herself and is self-confident until kicked in the gut with problems no one should have to face. During her first week at a new girls’ school, the only student who offers her a glimmer of friendship is a “little person.”

Why did I choose to have the tallest kid in the class befriend the smallest? Because that’s how it came out. Both these girls experience being different in a real, physical – visual — way. And that informs who they are and their immediate gravitation toward each other.

And yet . . . I can already see the nasty-grams because the little person in this book isn’t a charmer. The  comments won’t come necessarily from “little people” either. With my Sasha books, especially the last one where I reveal some of Sasha’s own nasty prejudices, I’ve received comments from non-Jews who didn’t like her attitude.

Why is it that people take offense at certain stereotypes and generalizations and not at others? I can guarantee that no one will refuse to buy my future book because the blonde is a bitch. Tall people won’t be pissed that my protag doesn’t always act admirably. Martial artists won’t put me in a choke hold when they see me.

So what gives?

Questions for today:

  1. Can you give an example in your own work where something you wrote with one intention became a hot button for someone else?
  2. Should writers care about those potential hot-buttons? Does it compromise art to consider them?
  3. What are some of the stereotypes and generalizations we use daily?
  4. What are some less common examples that drive you batty? 

Enjoy the video below. It’s a happy stereotype buster:

 

 

 



Never give up, never surrender…

by Toni McGee Causey

 

I sat here gobsmacked while watching the LSU win over Tennessee and for those of you who don’t know me, I’ll give you the short version: I bleed purple and gold. And even so, even as rabid a fan as I am (I, the one in the family who wanted the big screen TV in time for football season), am here to tell you, LSU should have never won that game. We played horribly. We made so many mental errors, it was nearly textbook in how to shoot yourself in the foot. We actually lost the game at one point, when the final buzzer sounded, and it was one of the most embarrassing Keystone Cops endings I’ve ever seen: 32 seconds left on the clock, men on the field, calling a dumb play, then failing to cross the line by a foot… and without any more time outs and without a plan, a bunch of the team ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, the ball was snapped and the quarterback missed it. He missed it. It went bouncing down the field behind him as the clock ran out and Tennessee, who’d been the underdogs going into the game, won. They erupted with joy, ran out onto the field while the entire LSU stadium looked on in stunned grief. Not unexpected, seeing how badly we’d played the entire game, but still. 

The only thing that made it palpable was that Tennessee had freaking played their hearts out. They excelled, several times. They deserved the win.

And then… the absolutely unbelievable happened. As everyone was on the field, and the coaches were already shaking hands, the ref got word from the booth that there was a mistake. The kind that happen only in the movies: there were too many defensive linemen on the field. Tennessee had put too many men out there, and because of that, they earned a penalty. And because of that penalty, LSU would have another shot at a final play.

They did. And they made a touchdown. And won the game.

I cannot tell you who was more shocked — the coaches, the players, or the audience. 

Look, right now, there are a lot of people in this business feeling pretty beaten up. I know Tennessee had to have been pretty bitter about that loss when they went back into their locker room, but I will tell you one thing: they proved they had the heart and the talent to win. They had nothing to be ashamed of, and I’m not going to be surprised if they don’t use that close call to spur themselves on to do even better the next game and start handing other teams their asses. They may have lost one game, but they haven’t lost the season.

It’s the same in this business. Losses don’t define you. It’s what you do with them that defines you. Everyone needs to lose something, every now and then, because you learn, when you lose. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the mistakes of others. One of the things you learn is that one loss does not a career define. Unless you let it. You pick yourself up, you keep moving on. You lose again? You pick yourself up again, you keep moving on. [The corollary is, if you’ve won everything you’ve aimed for, then you haven’t challenged yourself enough.]

My husband and I’ve been in the construction business for 28 years, and I’ve fought more battles than I care to remember. Sometimes, and there were many, when it looked like we were going to lose a battle, we’d get this image in our heads:

 

And we’d dig in and fight to survive another day. You can’t let the punches keep you on the ground, when you’re in business for yourself, and make no mistake about it, when you’re a writer, you’re in business for yourself. You have to have an almost impossible mix of ego (people want to read what I wrote) with humility (I have so much to learn, I’m never going to learn everything), but perhaps, most important, is tenacity: never give up, never surrender.

If you can quit? Then you’re in the wrong industry. If you’re not driven to keep going, driven to keep writing, driven to keep telling your stories, then there’s absolutely no shame in finding that thing that you are driven to do. Really, and truly, as honorable as I think it is to be the person who entertains others, I think it’s just as honorable to be a thousand other professions, because we all need each other. So if you can walk away, then run. Flee. Save yourself the grief.

Because there will be grief. There will be days when you do everything right, just about everything, and the other team wins the game because of one singular mistake. Or sometimes, you might finally be on the side where the dumb luck falls your direction. Tennessee did just about everything right and LSU didn’t, and still won on dumb luck. But there’s one truth about both of those teams: they’ve done their homework, they’ve practiced hard, over and over, even in the face of other defeats. They didn’t stop, either of them, and give up. 

But they’ve both learned. It’ll be interesting to watch what happens next. 

People will give you another chance, when you show them you’re tenacious enough to keep showing up for the game, that you’ve improved, that you’ve done the work, that you’ve learned from your losses.

I don’t know about you, but that’s all I need, is that shot. I’m not going to stop – trying, or learning — so no matter how luck falls with this try, or the next, or the next, I’ll be in it for the long haul.

So tell me, ‘Rati, who are some heroes in your life or in fiction that have exemplified the “never give up, never surrender” attitude that you admire?

Precision in the Wunderkammer

By Cornelia Read

I don’t often review books any more. I know too many people who write them, I don’t want to damn anyone with inadvertant faint praise, nor forget to write about anyone. I know how often my own feelings get dinged if I read a friend’s list of random “great reads” when I’m not on it, which is petulant and lame on my part but hey, I just don’t want to bruise anyone else’s tender feelings.

So when I comment on books directly, these days, I try to talk about the ones that are really, really good, and I try to talk about books by people I haven’t actually met. There are VERY few people I will buy in hardcover who aren’t actual friends (I want to buy friends’ books in hard cover because I like to think I’m adding a couple of bucks to their coffers–and I like to do that sometimes even if they’re already richer than god. Just saying.)

Charlaine Harris, Denise Mina, Mary Karr, Alan Furst, and William Gibson are on this list right now. I will go without food and electricity in order to wallow in these people’s words.

The book I’m on the verge of finishing, just at the moment, happens to be William Gibson’s zero history. I have loved his work since I first scored a ratty paperback of Neuromancer back in Syracuse, which is, like, when Pteradactyls were still gliding up the Mohawk Valley, practically. Uphill both ways, in the snow. He was a godsend, and it still just thrills me to the bottom of my tiny black heart that someone so goddamn sublimely and lapidarily SMART can be a bestseller.

If you have worries about civilzation or anything, pick up this book. Mr. Gibson, as always, affirms my belief that the tribe of those who care about what matters, about subtlety, about elegance and grace and precision on the page, is alive and goddamn well. Hosanna.

I think that on a paragraph level (though he succeeds mightily in both more macro and micro ways than that), his work is also illustration of what precision can do for a writer. Sometimes I think a list of three things can define space, in a fictional world. Especially if there’s a frisson of not-same-ness among them.

I’m trying to figure out how to word this properly, since I’m writing about wording things properly, so my fuzziness is kind of annoying the hell out of me, but it’s a little like apposition, only deeper.

Here’s a definition of apposition:

 

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to define or modify the other. When this device is used, the two elements are said to be in apposition. For example, in the phrase “my friend Alice,” the name “Alice” is in apposition to “my friend.”

More traditionally, appositions were called by their Latin name appositio, although the English form is now more commonly used. It is derived from Latin: ad (“near”) and positio (“placement”).
Apposition is a figure of speech of the scheme type, and often results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being) in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorter descriptive phrases. This makes them often function as hyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence. For example, in the phrase: “My wife, a nurse by training,…,” it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification “a nurse by training.”


Okay, not exactly apposition, since I’m talking about actual objects, here, and their difference when suspended Calderesque-ly near one another is what makes this work–maybe it’s more like opposition? Fuck it, I’m just going to quote the man so you see what I mean. This is a description of one of the character’s rooms at a gorgeously byzantine private-club hotel in London (also, hyperbatons? What an immensely fabulous word…):

“Which room is Heidi in?” Hollis asked him.

“Next to yours.”

“Good,” said Hollis, with more enthusiasm than she felt. That would be the one with the yellow chaise longue. She’d never understood the theme. Not that she understood the theme of her own, but she sensed it had one. The room with the yellow chaise longue seemed to be about spies, sad ones, in some very British sense, and seedy political scandal. And reflexology.

Hollis’s own room features what her friend and former bandmate Inchmale has named the “Piblokto Madness bed.”

[I]ts massive frame covered entirely in slabs of scrimshawed walrus ivory, with the enormous, staunchly ecclesiastical-looking lower jawbone of a right whale, fastened to the wall at its head….


Piblokto Madness itself?

“Intense hysteria,” she recited now, from memory, “depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to cold, echolalia.” She kicked her shoes in the direction of the wardrobe’s open door. “Hold the coprophagia,” she added. Cabin fever, this culture-bound, arctic condition. Possibly dietary in origin. Linked to Vitamin A toxicity. Inchmale was full of this sort of information, never more so than when he was in the studio.

The whole thing is like a Viking barrow of word-riches: “gutta-percha” and wunderkammer,

boiler suits and “specialized apprehender gloves.”

One gets the sense that for Gibson, as for one of the characters, “Reading, [Milgrim’s] therapist had suggested, had likely been his first drug.” God knows it was mine, and reading this is like falling face first into a lovely glowing pile of what I believe Jay McInerney once called “pink Peruvian flake.” If such a drug held traces of frankincense and psilocybin.

And the apposition of the archaic and the po-mo makes it all fresher and wittier:

Heidi shrugged out of her leather jacket, tossed it aside, and pulled her black t-shirt off, revealing an olive-drab bra that looked as combat-ready as any bra Hollis had ever seen.

“Nice bra.”

“Israeli,” said Heidi. She looked around, taking in the contents of the room. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “The wallpaper’s like Hendrix’s pants.”

 

And you totally know what the stripes on those pants look like, even though God help me if I could Google up a rendition that matched what I see in my head.

Meanwhile, I totally want Milgrim’s therapist, in Basel:

Addictions, he thought, turning right, toward Seven Dials’ namesake obelisk, started out like magical pets. Pocket monsters. They did extraordinary tricks, showed you things you hadn’t seen, were fun. But came, through some gradual dire alchemy, to make decisions for you. Eventually, they were making your most crucial life-decisions. And they were, his therapist in Basel said, less intelligent than goldfish.

 

What makes this stuff go deep, makes it be so eminently satisfying and right-on, is the precision. Every image is carved and faceted out of something translucent, hard, exact. Briolettes of rock crystal:

…Something was unfolding within him. Like a brochure, he thought, rather than the butterfly he imagined to be the more common image. An unpleasant brochure, the sort that lays out symptoms all too clearly….

…A cross between Grand Central and the atrium of the Brown Palace, Denver, structures aimed heroically into futures that had never really happened….


…She’d favored artboys, of any stripe, and unfortunately the dodgy hybrids as well, artboy-businessmen, with personalities as demanding as ambitiously crossbred dogs….

It’s like Saki without the veneer of archness. And when a writer does this well, you get both a clear movie of the textured world in which the choreography is unfolding, and tremendous depth of perception into character, as in this description of a pickup truck with “cartel-grade” armor:

Aldous had proudly pointed out the narrowness, the extreme evenness, of the gaps between the doors and the bodywork. They were too narrow for the insertion of any kind of pry bar, he’d said, too narrow even for “the jaws of life,” an expression Milgrim was infamiliar with, but which he took to be Jamaican, some potent icon of existential dread.

Or Hollis’s brief flash on previous conversations with her lover:

[S]omething in his tone now reminded her of his explanations of asymmetric warfare, a topic in which he had a keen and abiding interest. She remembered him telling her how terrorism was almost exclusively about branding, but only slightly less so about the psychology of lotteries.

I love that. I love this book. Buy it.

Give me a paragraph that rocked your world recently, O dearest ‘Ratis…

The Value of Good Research

by JT

Hi ‘Rati bretheren,

Bunny Rabbits! (It’s the first of the month, quick, say it aloud! There, I just gave you luck.)

I hope you’ll bear with me today – I’m touring for THE IMMORTALS, which released on Tuesday. Yay! I’ll do my best to get to comments once I land in a single spot for more than 5 minutes. In the meantime, I’m posting an article I did for the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers on research. It fit so well as a follow up to Zoë’s great post yesterday…

I’m curious to know two things from you today – what’s the craziest thing you ever did to research a scene? And what authors do you think do the best job with their research? I’m partial to Daniel Silva, myself…

xoxo, JT

Growing up west of Larkspur, Colorado, nestled deep into the Pike National Forest, I developed a fascination with all things moss. Moss, and lichen, and striations in the red rocks, and smoky quartz. I’d come home from my daily forays into the woods with multitudes of samples tucked into my pockets, and invariably the first thing out of my mouth when I happened upon my mom or dad was, “What’s this?”

My parents, being smart sorts themselves, always answered the same way: “Look it up.”

Daily discoveries of new moss, lichen, rocks, bark and dinosaur tracks led to evenings in front of the fire with the Encyclopedia Britannica (the green and gold on white version) learning all that I could about paleontology, and meteorology, and biology. I adored learning. My parents speculated that I might be a scientist when I grew up, bought me a microscope and a rock tumbler, all the accoutrements upstanding young girls need.

What I was preparing myself for, of course, was not a life in a laboratory, but a life playing with words. I was readying myself to be a writer.

Insatiable curiosity is what drives most of us to the page. I’ve always preached one thing about writing: don’t write what you know, write what you want to know about. Write what turns your crank, what excites you. That way, research won’t feel like work.

That’s how I ended up writing thrillers. I’m fascinated by psychology and love the idea that it can be applied to determine the motivations behind a crime. But when I set out, the only thing I knew about being a cop, or a profiler, was what I saw on TV. And that’s so far from accurate most times it’s laughable. I learned quickly that writing thrillers can be many things: fun, challenging, an education. But there’s one thing you must, must do – get your facts right.

We all make mistakes. That’s the nature of being human. I know that sometimes when I’m doing research, I suffer a bit of forest for the trees syndrome, and thank goodness I have great copyeditors to ferret out those little problems. And sometimes, mistakes make it all the way into the printed books, and then I have to bit my lip and turn red when the emails come in.

But you as a writer are fully in control of your research destiny. You make the choices. Do you write a police procedural? The choice there is simple – you either do the research or you don’t. Do you write a historical? Again, an easy choice, do you rely on primary source material or do you make it up, hoping the history books had it right?

There are many choices when you’re writing a novel – genre, setting, characters, plot. And each of these choices helps you decide the level and relative accuracy you need.

Genre is paramount – are you writing science fiction? Chances are you’re going to create a world that’s alien to what we experience on a daily basis, so you’re in the clear. Romance? You’re going to strain credulity and coincidence a tad in order to have a happily ever after, so you’re probably pretty good there. Spy thrillers give you quite a bit of leeway, actually, because so much of agency work is Classified that chances are the reader isn’t going to be familiar with the internal machinations, and you have the freedom to push the envelope. Historicals and procedurals, though, that’s where you must get your facts right.

Setting is a biggie too – are you going to pick a real place or create a fictional town? I chose Nashville, Tennessee as my setting for a number of reasons, and I spend a lot of time making sure that roads are open, the views are correct, the timing is right on. I go out and drive the scenes to see exactly what my characters see. Then again, my setting is a character in the novels, which means I need to be pretty close to exact with my depictions. I’ve only fudged once, with a bar name, just because I didn’t want to get sued when they found out it was a base of operations for a couple of serial killers.

Your characters will drive your research as well. Is your heroine a librarian? She’s not going to know the difference between a revolver and a pistol, (unless she’s from the South, and then she’d probably be carrying a Remington shotgun anyway…) Is your hero a cop? Right away you know that your duty as a writer is to research police procedure, lingo, everything that will come into play in his daily world.

Plot is the fourth consideration when it comes to research. What’s important to think about is how the story will change your hero or heroine, and if your villain uses something tangible to create that alteration.

Stephen King, in his brilliant book ON WRITING, says you have to know all the rules so you know when to break them. This is applicable to research as well. Learn all you can about the subject, so you know what you can leave out. None of us want to read a story that’s been obviously researched, with minutiae irrelevant to the pace thrown in to show the author’s done their homework.

So how do you do research? Since I’m a thriller writer with a focus on police procedurals, I’ll lay out my general course of action. I write two books a year, and the pattern usually follows this formula – 1 month of research, 4 months of writing, 1 month of editing. That doesn’t leave me a lot of leeway time wise, so I have to make the most of that month of research. When I first started, I knew nothing at all about the police, so I called my local homicide office, told them what I was about, and they invited me down for a ride-along. Granted, I lucked out that the person who answered the phone was interested in writing himself, but if I hadn’t made that initial call…

Now, several books in, that relationship is so solid that I can call or email with a detail and he’ll be able to help. Cultivating relationships is vital to good research.

Being hands on helps too. In my 2nd book, there’s a large section set in Long Island City and Manhattan in New York. I sent out questions online to all my listserves, but I wasn’t getting what I needed – how it smelled, and what my character would hear, and the exact shade of the gray skies at dusk…  so I booked a research trip. Fully tax deductible, and it made those sections of the book come alive.  I’ve done that with Italy and Scotland too – see, we’re writers, no reason why we can’t make it fun, right?

Online research is vital as well – no matter what I do in person, I always back things up, double-source them online, to make sure everything is spot on. The beautiful thing about Google is its variety – the Google Earth function lets you go anywhere and see anything, and they’re adding in audio now, so the only thing missing is smell. Pretty cool.

There are ways not to do research, too. Asking a friend, and not double-checking their answer. Seeing something on TV, or reading it in a book, and not questioning the source. That’s mighty dangerous.  I know there was a spate of “cordite” smells after a gun fired in books and television – but that’s not what happens in real life. In the movies, when someone is shot, they go careening backwards into walls – in real life, they drop. Hearts don’t stop immediately; it takes a few minutes for people to die. Medical examiners can’t tell cause of death by looking at a body. You can’t cock a hammer on a Glock. These are the little details that people get wrong all the time, and it drives readers mad.

So take your time, be patient, and ask around until you’ve confirmed the answer from two or three places at least. And then check again. Create a world that invites your readers to settle in and be amazed, and do it well enough that they will suspend disbelief and follow you anywhere. If you get it right, they’ll do just that.

Does It Matter?

Zoë Sharp

fiction fik’shen, n an invented or false story; a falsehood; romance; the novel or story-telling as a branch of literature; a supposition, for the sake of argument, that a possibility, however unlikely, is a fact (law).

We lie for a living. We make up stuff out of our heads and write it down in such a way that we hope whoever reads our words comes halfway to believing it’s true. Or at least that it could be true.

Maybe.

OK, on Weird World perhaps.

Playing fast and loose with the truth is all part of what we do. I’m as guilty as the rest. I take fake things and dump them in real places, and take real things and dump them in fake places. Sometimes I take real things and dump them somewhere else that’s real, but just not where they belong. Sometimes, I don’t even realise I’m doing it until a long time afterwards.

When I wrote my first novel, KILLER INSTINCT, I invented a tumble-down hotel, The Adelphi, which was revamped to become a nightclub where much of the action takes place. I describe it on the opening page:

‘The New Adelphi  was a nightclub that had risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the old Adelphi, a crumbling Victorian seaside hotel on the promenade in Morecambe. It had a slightly faded air of decayed gentility about it, like an ageing bit-part film actress, hiding her propensity for the gin bottle under paste jewellery and heavy make-up.’

Entirely fictitious. And yet, I was doing a photoshoot in an entirely different northern town some years later – and I’m talking probably a decade here – when I came across this boarded-up old building. And it was just so right for the book, that it was a spooky experience. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for the Adelphi on Morecambe’s seafront, but it was so close it might as well have been.

 

And then, in HARD KNOCKS, I wanted a big spooky manor house in the middle of a forest in Germany. I invented the place – the little village of Einsbaden, where my equally invented Einsbaden Manor would be located – but I wanted to anchor the place in some kind of reality. I still have a cutting in the HK file of Wannsee, the house where senior Nazi officials gathered to discuss Hitler’s Final Solution. It was the right imposing shape, with a dark past, and it had a flat roof, which lent itself to all kinds of plot points. I had no qualms about removing it from its real location and transplanting it to mine.

I know writers who have no difficulties with using real things in real places, even for the most grisly scenes, but I’m always reluctant to do that. I remember the story about a TV writer who used the registration number of his own car for the murderer’s vehicle in one of his own screenplays. Obviously, he had no objections to this. But then he sold the car…

I remember another author who needed to have her main protag’s vehicle registration in the story, and she deliberately invented a combination of numbers and letters that could not exist, so could never have been given to anybody and cause problems further down the line.

The reason this has been on my mind lately is because I’ve just been off scouting locations for something I’m writing. How far do I go towards keeping it real? And does it matter if it’s not?

I wanted a particular type of mid-terrace house. They don’t exist in the location I wanted to use, but they are more common a few streets away. Moving my protag’s house by a couple of streets is no problem, especially as I only suggest the area, not an exact street name.

I wanted to be able to walk along the river between points A and B. Google Earth shows you can do it. Reality shows it’s gated and securitied up the wazoo, to the point where bending the rules would be counterproductive. Fortunately, an alternative route happens to fit in with the plot much better, as it allows my protag to see something there that will help them later. And there’s the odd burst of humour that I’m sure I’ll manage to slip in somewhere, if it’s appropriate:

Of course, to find this funny you have to look closely at the sign on the wall of the building:

I know these are small details, but ones I feel it’s important to get right. I know most people understand the definition of fiction, but nevertheless I like to blend fact and fantasy and hope that they can’t really see the join.

However, later in the story requires a big public location where lapses in security allow Bad Things to happen. I could use a genuine location, but I’d rather not, and I’m not quite sure why that is. Am I hoping that, by the time the reader reaches this point in the story, they’ll be invested enough in the characters to make the jump from reality to fantasy without a hitch? Or am I just squeamish?

After all, my characters are invented, but the tools they use are not. I’ve occasionally extrapolated something that’s available now and taken it to the next step, as I did with a computer program in FIRST DROP, but I don’t invent new types of aircraft or weaponry – I use what’s already available. Trust me, there’s more than enough out there!

I try not to make unnecessary mistakes with geography, too. I’m still grateful to an eagle-eyed copyeditor who spotted the fact I’d got Charlie Fox riding the wrong way up a one-way street in Manhattan. Not that she wouldn’t be prepared to do that, if the occasion demanded, but it didn’t. When I needed to have Charlie driving from Boston to Houston, I worked out the entire route – carefully avoiding taking her through the middle of NYC.

But still, I’m happy to make up an entire village, or housing estate, if I feel it fits in better with the story I want to tell.

So, my question this week is, how far are you prepared to go in inventing places and objects for your work, and does it matter to you as a reader if you’re mentally following a character through familiar territory, and they suddenly take a turning into a street that isn’t there? Do you notice? Do you care?

This week’s Word of the Week is tartan, which everybody associates with a checked material as worn by Highland clans of Scotland, where each distinctive pattern is the mark of an individual clan; something self-consciously Scottish – hence Tartan Noir for dark Scottish crime fiction. But Tartan® is also a type of all-weather track for athletic events, and a tartan is a small Mediterranean vessel with a lateen sail, while a tartana is a little Spanish covered wagon.

Embracing Mediocrity

by Rob the Slob

WARNING.  RANT AHEAD.

What is it about mediocrity that is so attractive to people?

I just finished watching the second (?) episode of Hawaii Five-0 and I have to say that while it’s not a terrible show, it’s no Dexter.  It’s no Justified.  It’s not even Law & Order.

There were enough holes in the episode I watched to have me raging out loud to my long-suffering wife.  “If they wanted to kidnap the guy, why smash into his limo and turn it on its head, then use the jaws of life to pry him out?  Wouldn’t it be better to maybe, you know, take him in a way that couldn’t potentially kill him?”

Just the presence of the jaws of life alone was proof that nearly killing him must have been part of their ridiculous plan. 

In fact, wouldn’t it be better all around to do the kidnapping as quietly as possible?  Why draw attention to yourselves and get the police involved? 

Ohhh.  But wait.  That was why it was staged that way.  Because otherwise Five-0 wouldn’t have gotten involved and you wouldn’t have a story.

And that was only one of the flaws. 

I work very hard to make the logic in my stories sound.  Now, granted, this may not always happen.  I may sometimes miss something or come up with a situation that makes people go, “give me a break,” but I try my very best not to.

This show, however, didn’t even seem to try.  All the plot points were used for effect and nothing else, and the story moved along in a way that was convenient, not plausible.

In other words, we’re talking mediocre.  At best.

Yet, according to the ads, it’s America’s #1 new show.

Go figure.

Or let’s talk music.  

I confess I don’t pay much attention to mainstream music anymore.  I know the names of maybe three current hot artists because, frankly, what I hear on the radio sounds like complete shit.  As the top 40 always has.  

On American Idol it seems that the “safest” or most mainstream artist wins every year.

Every decade we have a number of great artists writing/performing great songs, but for every great artist we have a hundred cookie-cutter overproduced banal autotuned idiots who render the radio impossible to listen to.

Check this out and I swear you will really wonder what’s wrong with people who love this particular singer (assuming anyone still does):

 

 

Even when she’s in tune, she’s tough to stomach.

Yet this same crap makes record companies millions of dollars.  Millions. So obviously somebody’s buying this stuff.

Then there are books.  

Obviously, because I work in the business I’m not going to name names, but we all know there are people writing out there who truly define mediocrity, yet they sell like hotcakes.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at a party or the dentist’s office or wherever and heard:  “Oooh, are your books like FILL IN THE BLANK?  (S)He’s my favorite author.”

Unfortunately, more often than not, FILL IN THE BLANK is a truly mediocre writer whose version of fiction makes me cringe in horror every time I try to read it.

Yet millions love it.

And don’t even get me started with movies.  

I went and saw EASY A this past weekend because it was set in and filmed entirely in my town, and the only thing the movie had going for it was an engaging lead actor.  The story was ridiculous—the kind of story that relies on the main character’s inability to simply say, “enough” before things get out of hand.  

If she were George Costanza, that might work.  But she’s an intelligent girl and the story set-up is so strained it’s ridiculous.  If she’d had a halfway decent justification for doing what she did, I might have bought it.  But no.

It was the perfect case of the plot dictating character rather than the other way around.  She had to react and do what she did because otherwise the plot would not have worked.

Now, I understand that we all have differing tastes.  One man’s garbage is another man’s treasure and all that. But I’m not really talking about garbage here.  I’m talking about middle-of-the-road boring bullshit.

Why does America love it so much?

I have yet to figure it out.

So my question to you this week is not why, but who?  

What popular singer, artist, television show, movie do you think is waaaaay overrated, and who do you think deserves to be more popular than the usual middle-of-the-road suspects?

And if you do have an answer to the embracing mediocrity question, feel free to chime in.