G is for Goal

I just read an article about one of my favorite authors, Harlan Coben. Hope I got this name right. A and E are hard to keep straight. An immensely successful author that keeps it simple in spite of his success. I would suggest the opposite - his simplicity in writing is what keeps him successful. His character, Myron Bolitar, is the only character I know, besides my group of Shoshone high school girls in the Lemhi Valley, that plays basketball as part of the setting in a book.

Goals are simple things, part of what I think every writer should use. Maybe Mr. Coben does too. An entry a day in the case of this 26 consecutive day challenge. The large size of writing a book is intimidating when viewed as a whole. The simple tool of setting a goal helps reduce that size and intimidation. One page today. One chapter this week. One thing at a time done over and over. Soon the habit starts and soon that big immense thing always murky and vague in the future is halfway done, because of the many small goals you set and achieved on the way to getting that novel of yours done. Try one. Set one. Complete one. And then do it all over again.

F is for female characters

Agency was the first entry in this category of writing about character-based issues. Bechdel test was an easy and related follow-on. Now the entry that, of all 26 letters, probably fascinates me most.

My adventures in writing revolve around a series of books that in turn revolve around the lives of a river guide on the Salmon River and a rancher who grew up on a ranch in the nearby Lemhi Valley. River and Ranch is the first book I've written but is the 7th +/- in the series. New Grass Growing is next in that line.

Back in the day when this idea of writing started to take hold, my kids were little. Those kids are three daughters. My wife and I were aware of them being every bit as active as the boys they knew and that lived in the neighborhood. The conscious realization of this was letting the girl "stuff" happen as they each discovered it, but also stressing "girl power" when we saw them in circumstances where we wanted them to be aggressive and "not back down", for lack of a better way to explain it.

That parent-based setting was the dawn of my awareness of strong female characters. The first thing I realized is that no matter how much we put "blue" stuff in front of our daughters, they all gravitated to "pink" stuff, without any dis- or en- couragement from either of us. My take away from this is that girls are different from boys. From day one. AND They are strong in their own way, unlike male connotations of strong, but strong nonetheless.

As a writer I find that significant, because the easy tendency when writing strong female characters is to put the woman in man's clothes and have them fight alot with swords or guns, etc. In other words make them like male characters, since strong is an adjective associated with men. For some characters in some stories that just might work. But for other characters and stories that "change of clothing" and a girl name likely will not.

As I have gradually drawn out the plot and the world in which my MCs live, the big thing I've come to realize is that too often female characters are in a book to fit the plot of another, often male, character. They are dependent on events written for that male character, such that the female MC is reacting to something happening to the male MC. This is, in part, what led to the Bechdel test I think. I want my fiction to be populated with women on their own plot line. Both plot lines intersect, boy and girl do meet and fall in love, but that ranch woman has her own story with her own set of subjects.

This could go on and on. I find this subject fascinating in many ways both good and bad. If it interests you, the three articles below go a long way towards maturing my thought process on this subject. I still read and reread them. They might change your outlook on female characters as well. cheers.

characters that are women/girls/female
characters that are women/girls/female, #2
characters that are women/girls/female, #3

E is for editing

First draft, second draft. Write, rewrite. History records many many introspective thoughts made by writers as they look back on the time spent at the editing desk that was once their writing desk. Myself now included.

There really is no other way to learn writing other than by doing it. The consequence of writing then is that you now have something to edit. I admire writing for the near miracle that it is. The brain's ability to consume sugars, connect synapses, and adjust neurons all in the name of original thought, to me, is the most impressive display of biology there is. In the case of writing fiction, even in the presence of research material, that ability to take nothing, or perhaps a few tidbits of data and make that into something, is beyond description. How your brain does that is simply amazing.

Along comes editing after the fact of writing. Maybe editing is the coach to the raw talent that is on display in writing. Taking the raw bits and applying some polish, starting with the roughest grit and gradually working your way up through finer and finer grits as you get close to that final polished mirror-like surface in which the writer's true intent is finally displayed staring back at the reader.

By way of analogy, I write this a couple days after Wisconsin beat Kentucky to advance to the championship round of the NCAA 2015 men's basketball tourney. Sam Dekker is a native son bringing tremendous raw athleticism to the UW Badger's program. Now in his junior year, Dekker is emerging as the big, fast, point-scoring horse that UW has needed to get over the hump. Dekker lore includes numerous anecdotes about the dour, old coach grinding him down, the coach seeking to expunge all of the extraneous bits of athleticism that Dekker brought to the program, leaving only the slow, methodical bits favored by the crusty old throwback coach. To some extent that is editing, although I hope to leave the excitement on the page instead of the cutting room floor.

I love basketball. It is a central theme in New Grass Growing, the follow-on book to River and Ranch. I've always appreciated basketball as a running and scoring game, which is a chunk of the talents that Dekker brings to UW. The girl's game, in particular, has devolved into this grinding, plodding, physical game based on defense, which also seems to be what an increasing number of men's games are featuring. Defense sucks. UW's plodding, slow, half court-based game barely qualifies as entertainment. A point that Gino Auriemma, the UConn women's coach, recently trotted out, by the way.

Anyway, editing is to writing as coaching is to raw talent. It's a process of refining, of paring away the extraneous fluff, leaving only the bare, but well-written necessities on display. Much like what Bo Ryan is doing with this year's edition of the University of Wisconsin men's basketball team. As much as I do not like Coach Ryan's style, he has taken the abundant raw talents of the young men on his current team and channeled them into a team playing for a championship. He has edited the first round of writing and turned it into a polished piece worth reading that tonight will be on display in the largest of release parties, the NCAA men's basketball tournament championship. Featuring the first year writing of Sam Dekker honed into polished manuscript that is now Sam Dekker playing for a championship.

adieu jusqu'à demain.

D is for Do Something

There are a few quotes I tend to keep top of mind. For me they serve not only in writing and thought but in life. My kids know it by heart as well. For me, the concept Roosevelt so concisely summed up is a simple one that provides the answer to many of life's issues. Teddy Roosevelt is responsible for my favorite quote of all time.

In any moment of decision,
the best thing you can do is the right thing,
the next best thing is the wrong thing,
and the worst thing you can do is nothing.

A wonderful antidote to the old "paralysis by analysis" that is so often seen by those in our society charged with the necessity to "do something".

C is for Core and Gap

Boscobel's famous native son gets full credit for today's phrase - Core and Gap. Where is Boscobel and who is the native son? Why am I writing about it?

Boscobel is an itty bitty little town on the Wisconsin River. Firmly in the heart of flyover country like most of the rest of the state. Pretty much due west of Madison, let's just call it southwest Wisconsin and leave it at that.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is the native son responsible for "Core and Gap". He offers up a pretty cool success story, maybe even the classic "country kid makes good" and goes to Washington, D.C., which is what he did.

Why am I writing about Core and Gap? For once I haven't digressed by this point in my harangue. Straight to it.

"the Functioning Core and the non-Functioning Gap" is a theory and a map (see the link to the left) developed by Mr. Barnett describing the state of the globe. It might be a view of the "have" and the "have nots", with some interesting exceptions. The civilized part of the planet that basically works, lives under the rule of law, and interestingly experiences more suicide than murder is the "functioning Core". The part of the planet filled with terrorists and sadness and moral decay (at least defined by western morals), not to mention anarchy, chaos, and evil (again from a western cultural reference) is known as the "non-functioning Gap".

River and Ranch and New Grass Growing are two books in a series revolving around the lives of Cale Thomas and Lane Nygard, two Special Operations Forces operatives, charged with unique special duties. In R&R they are on the cusp of retirement. In New Grass Growing, they are retired. In their careers though, they roamed the planet providing plenty of kinetics via their trigger pulling. In the course of researching these books I stumbled upon the Core and Gap. Fascinating. I'm incorporating this concept into the tactics, strategies and events in the lives of my two SOF MCs.

Personally, as a college educated, white collar US citizen I find this view of the planet to be fascinating and quite compelling. He pulled it together in the years shortly after 9/11 and I'm sure it's been revised in the years since. For me, it remains the first thing I trot out when in the company of those wanting to discuss global politics as they intersect with culture and lifestyle. From my civilian perspective I've found the "Core and Gap" to be the best method of explaining global politics, and maybe even civilization.

Buy his first book or go to the library and check it out. It is a dense read requiring thought and concentration, but the outcome it 100% worth it. At least for me it is.

The fact this dude is from Wisconsin is icing on the cake :)

B is for Bechdel Test

With the passage of a mere 85,560 seconds since the premier post in this, the thrilling 26 days of the A-Z blogging challenge, we now find ourselves at the post for the second day. I may have mentioned it explicitly yesterday, if not, for sure I hinted at it. Yes, the Bechdel Test is today's entry, brought to you by the letter "B".

Following on just a bit from yesterday's rambling discourse on "agency", today's word (phrase) comes from the fertile mind of a cartoonist, possibly someone who read the work of that cartoonist and was inspired to credit the cartoonist for something her cartoon characters said in one of her episodes. Check out the ever helpful Wikipedia entry on the Bechdel Test and all will become clear(er). The cartoonist is Alison Bechdel and the friend who may have noticed is Liz Wallace. The founding incident took place sometime in 1985, back in the halcyon pre-internet days when ink stained paper in a far larger volume than it does today.

In my media consumption world, the introduction of the Bechdel Test was quite revealing, and it continues to be. First of all, it has further dimmed my respect for mainstream media content creators. To be fair, they are under pressure to create revenue from their media creation efforts, so they are certainly biased in their efforts and hesitant to change anything that would lessen their success. Such is life in our capitalist frame of reference. Regardless of that though, the Bechdel Test reveals in a very interesting way, just how lopsided media tends to be STILL in 2015 when it comes to portraying women.

Inquiring minds want to know, assuming they didn't click away to the Wikipedia entry, just what is the Bechdel Test? It is a simple protocol consisting of three parts. The media in question:

1. has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

That's it.

Almost half of all films made in the last 20 years FAIL this test. Going further back in time this ratio is worse, way worse, as you might expect. I won't repeat the Wikipedia article, I hope you will click on that link though and read up on this notion. For me it is eye opening. In a moment of self-congratulatory back patting, I am also EXTREMELY proud of myself for writing Dana, a main character in my books in such a way as to pass the Bechdel Test, before I even knew this test existed. You can bet that all my MCs with the xx chromosome are going to continue very much in this fashion.

One recent example of successfully passing this test, to me anyway, is a Sunday night prime time TV show we stumbled across, Madam Secretary, starring Téa Leoni and Tim Daly (of Wings fame). To my eyes, when it comes to passing the Bechdel Test and agency for its female MCs, this show PASSES with flying colors. That this is a Sunday night prime time show on an old letter network, CBS, makes it even more impressive. Once again, a well done Wikipedia entry on Madam Secretary informs the discerning media consumer that this show was created by a woman and is produced by a woman. There is one other producer surprise. Go read the entry....

As an aside, tiresome though they may be, I am shocked at how much I am using Wikipedia. I am going to have to make a contribution. The body of knowledge stored in Wikipedia gets more impressive by the day.

Back in the day when our college freshman was a mere lass of five or six, she began playing soccer, which remains a foundational part of her young life. In those early days, I remember watching her outrun the boys on the team. She was the team's leading goal scorer and quite the little athlete, small in stature and age though she was. Somehow, around that time in our family life, my wife and I began using the phrase "girl power" around all three of our daughters, even the littlest diaper filler, who was already hard at work keeping up with her older sisters. Dora the Explorer comes to mind as one possible inspiration. I cannot clearly remember how we came around to using that phrase, but it clearly had to do with our parental awareness of our daughters NOT playing second fiddle to boys. We really pushed this notion of standing side by side, not one in front of the other. Looking back, this is one of the things I am most proud of as a parent, even more so, when things like the Bechdel Test serve to remind us just how far in the wrong direction Hollywood continues to go in terms of portraying women.

Thanks for reading this far! Until tomorrow's thrilling diatribe on the letter "C", I bid you farewell.

Writing About Women? Consider the word "Agency"

Years ago as I started writing fiction, a question came up about adding more main characters into my series of books. It's true. I was asking it of myself. No one else was in the room.

Cale Thomas was rapidly filling out and developing as THE main character. The plot was coming along, aided by numerous research discoveries that left me shaking my head over how truth and fiction were colliding (more on that throughout this month). But Cale couldn't just talk to himself nor could the books rely on internal soliloquies as a tool to move things along. Enter more characters.

It's only natural that a lonely military guy camped out in the middle of nowhere needs to meet someone right? Sorry to be so predictable, but yes. Cale meets Dana, back in the beginning of River and Ranch, the book prior to New Grass Growing. So we have these two characters now. They are together BUT...they are also apart. And that is the segue leading up to today's letter.

Yes, the letter "A" is brought to you by the always fascinating word "Agency".

Just what is agency? Why is it the first entry in this 26 day A-Z blogging challenge?

It is the first entry, because the women that appear throughout this book series are complex strong, capable, and more than nuanced enough to carry their own plot lines. Does anyone beside me think of Prairie Home Companion, where "the women are strong"? Garrison Keillor's voice rolls through my head carrying that phrase, but I digress.

Thanks for hanging in there and tolerating my sudden left turns into trivia.

Back to "agency". Wikipedia's definition of agency is more than enough to start this ball rolling. Go ahead, click the link and read the definition. I'll wait, I need more coffee anyway.

Before I forget, I hope you will tune in for one of tomorrow's entries. Yes tomorrow is a double day. One of those entries is "the Bechdel Test", a neat way to consider agency, initially in female movie characters, but now used in fiction as well.

Turns out there's a ton of mostly relevant content you can find with Google's help on the word "agency". One that does not appear on the first page linked to above comes from Chuck Wendig's authorial wanderings. His version of the meaning of agency hits home for me. Agency implies strength, so initially you have strong female characters and this leads the reader's eye to somewhat expect men in women's clothing and character roles. I think The Athena Project from Brad Thor is a good example of this.

Chuck Wendig's blog entry (above) about strong female characters and agency does a superb job of working through this stereotypic treatment of women in lead roles in action type genres. I won't repeat what he writes and what the always worthy comments (and there are hundreds of them) further flesh out. Suffice it to say that "agency" as it applies to female characters, at least the female characters in my books, means more than just strong in a male definition of the term. I like "nuanced" and "complex" at least as much as "strong".

For me, the heart of this word agency is writing characters that are women leading their own lives, solving their own problems and happily enjoying the company of men all in such a way as to be human and independent, rather than falling back on the annoying tendency in fiction where most female characters fit in the narrative where the male characters need them to be. Think "Nell" tied to the railroad tracks in the old Dudley Do-Right characterfrom the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon back in the day.

Being the father of three daughters has helped me in understanding the balance that "agency" carries. My wife and I have raised and are still raising our three daughters to be strong and independent. One of the many meanings I take from this word comes from listening to my daughters talk about boys and their "hotness", "who is dating who" and "who said what". But in the next second, they are talking summer jobs, physics test, why a low cross is better or worse than a cross that comes off their foot and goes high, where the oldest one wants to live next year, and how can they find a room mate because one of them suddenly decamped to another school (sorry for the long string of dependent phrases there). In short, they are living their lives, much of which revolves around them and what they need to do to get by, and less of which puts them in an orbit around someone with a Y chromosome.