Real Life and Fiction Meet

This week a suspected Anti-immigrant group sent Representative Raul Grijalva of Arizona a suspicious toxic white powder closing his office and reminding us of the Amerithrax attack on September 18, 2001 which is sent by letters to several news media offices and two Democratic U. S. Senators, killing five people and infecting 17 others.

It is always amazing to me as a writer how real life truly does mimic fiction – not always in the best of all possible ways. Years ago when I was President of the National Emergency Care Advisory Council – I worked very hard to get television to correctly represent first aid in programming. The reason I did that was because people were emulating television (which claimed to be emulating people) and doing real harm to injured people. Of course if television was having their professional first aid squads emulate the mistakes of the general population that didn’t make sense but it did keep them from being responsible in their programming. Not much has changed by the way.

In my new novel “Tranquillity Initiative” I wrote about what would happen if the second bomb that the terrorists were planning to deploy was successfully dropped from a sky scraper. Among the things that would happen would be that there would be a collapse of the police, fire, emergency medical services, public health, and garbage collection services with horrendous results. Another result would be that New Yorkers would flee to the countryside which would arm itself against the refugees. We saw that happen in the Algiers Parish of New Orleans as people tried to get to dry land and safety.

In the early 1800s, New York City essentially burned to the ground. There were a number of reasons why that happened. One of them was that the previous summer there had been a terrible outbreak of cholera and the fire department had been decimated to the point where it didn’t have the staff to put out the fire. If an anthrax weapon were to be deployed over New York, the various departments would see their staffs massively cut by debilitating disease and if, for example, there were riots major parts of the city might simply burn. Today we can pull from neighboring states and counties, however, a lot of damage could take place before New Jersey, Connecticut and Westchester could get across the bridges and through the tunnels (providing they aren’t jammed by traffic trying to escape) – parts of Long Island would be taken out by the germ warfare so Queens would probably be decimated as well.

It is fascinating to sit and read history and to apply the lessons of past disasters to the possibilities of present time. The major lessons are that not much changes when a writer applies human nature to catastrophe.

How To Write A Book That Positions You As An Expert In Your Field

This is the opening discussion in my new ebook - now available on Kindle - "How To Write A Book That Positions You As An Expert In Your Field"

To Get A Publisher Or To Self-Publish.

Most writers are not candidates for big publishers. They may be candidates for small niche publishers; they may not be candidates for any publishers. This book, for example, is a candidate for e-books but not for print publishers. In the day of self-publishing, and e-book publishing, getting published by other people isn’t all that necessary. That is particularly important to realize since you, as author, are going to have to do the bulk of self-promotion anyway.

Big name publishers, like Doubleday or Harcourt Brace, are becoming fewer and fewer. Yes, they sometimes give advances, which you pay back out of the sale of your book, but you have to pay back in full if it turns out they don’t like your final product. Yes, they sometimes put money into a national tour, and they take care of all the little problems like lay out and copy writing. But, there’s just one major problem – if your book isn’t a hit in a few weeks, it goes off the shelves, out of the book stores, gets remaindered or languishes forever in Amazon warehouses or you get to buy whatever copies are left. With the advent of the big discounts at the super stores which are in competition to see who can sell the most by lowering the price of your book, you get less profit from your books. The policies in big publishing, and big chains end up being costly for the little guy and it pays to know what business is like in the book world before you enter it.

Finally, there’s the issue of who gets the profits. If you get 1 - 5% of the sale of your book with a big publisher you’re lucky – and that’s not entirely unfair. They take the risk, make the advance, eat the returns if the book doesn’t sell, have the book edited, copy edited, printed, distributed and, if they do happen to publicize it, keep the staff to do that on their payroll. They have big buildings, big staffs, international representation and a lot of overhead. So you take your couple of bucks profit and keep your day job.

Since you’re going to have to store a bunch of your books anyway – for back of the room sales – you might as well publish it yourself and keep the profit. Unless you are already really famous, and have a great publicist on your payroll, books that have been published by big publishers usually don’t usually have a long life – although that’s somewhat less true with the advent of Amazon.com where 49% of all books are sold. If you are using your book in your seminars and workshops for back of the room sales, you need to have copies for the duration of your career (which you buy at half price from the publishers as long as they’re in print and then you self- publish). Unless you have a big name and a large following, it’s probably best to consider self-publishing early in your decision-making process.

NOTE: Even if you are going to submit your project to a publisher, it’s a good idea to have a copy editor look it over before you send it in. Editors don’t like misspellings, awkward English and typos.

Review: Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole

My grandson who is eight liked this movie. I thought it slooooooooow, thin and dependent on the 3-D as a substitute for true content.

When Soren, a young owlet, falls from his nest one evening, he’s plucked up and taken to the sinister St. Aegolius Academy. Once there, he must use his wits and bravery to escape his captors. Soren and his new band of orphans fight their way through many dangers, hoping to find refuge with a group of brave owls thought only to be a legend—the Guardians of Ga’Hoole! They find the Guardians, and return with them to the Academy in order to defeat the masked and evil owl and save all the other owls from evil domination. That sounds a lot more interesting than this movie turned out to be.

The first rule of good script writing is to keep the plot turning as it advances and each turn must be different and interesting of its own accord as the plot is revealed. This movie fails to do this. It flipped back and forth but the flips were rarely very different. A major plot point – the time line of hypnotizing Soren’s sister and handing her over to the traitor among the Guardians, was developed backward what we say being the reverse of what was reported – sloppy and lazy in a movie with so few plot points. I don’t believe there was enough to the book to keep the movie interesting. Watching owls fly over different scenes does not fill that need for change and development the plot of a full length movie requires. It might have done better as a television series where the dearth of material wouldn’t have been so obvious. It was occasionally beautiful, marginally interesting, not once exciting and at times utterly boring.

Why I love making villains sympathetic

I'm about to embark on the National Novel Writing Month competition with a subject that has been languishing in my computer for years. I'm very excited about it. What's interesting about the subject of Typhoid Mary is that it echoes today with decisions that have been made about public health, with prejudice and bias about disease and misunderstandings about the cause of disease.

I'm going to write about Typhoid Mary - one of the world's great medical villains. Mary was the first person identified as a healthy disease carrier. This is such a twisty story it's going to be interesting to see if I can bring it off.

Just as the early handling of HIV-Aids was colored by prejudice against the gay population, so Mary's case was mishandled by the prejudice against Irish Immigrants. A bias against Immigrants that resonates today.

Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) always claimed that she was persecuted. And she was. Other typhoid carriers killed and infected more people and they were not locked in quarantine for life. The supposition is that she became famous because she was Irish at a time when Irish immigrants were not widely popular. She was a woman without children and not regarded as a "bread winner." She was powerful, violent and profane. She used salty language that the people who dealt with her found offensive. Most of all she denied her condition (and had the medical findings to back her up) and fought for her freedom. My theory is that George Soper the man who discovered her and isolated the cause of a disease that killed 23,000 people in America (when only 10% of those infected died) used her to make his fame and secure his place in medical history well beyond the simple fact that he discovered her. The interesting thing is that her fame persists while you only learn his name by reading about her.

My job as a writer is to make her sympathetic. George Soper, because we wrote and spoke about her extensively, controlled her story. Much like the losers in a war, Mary Mallon became a villain in the perception of the general public of her time. But Mary as villain is too easy a story and not nearly as interesting as Mary Mallon whose life would be destroyed if she ever admitted even to herself that she was a carrier. Mary Mallon the proud woman, valiant victim, who had learned to support herself at the top of her profession. I plan to get her up a tree and throw stones at her. I plan to strip her bare and pour salt in every wound. I plan to make you love Mary even as you understand that she made very bad choices.

I have never liked two dimensional villains or 100% sympathetic heroes. Pure evil might be frightening but it is not nearly as much fun as villains with foibles and contradictions. Childish behavior. Passionate if unlikely love interests. Behavior that everyone in the play, film or book interprets as a good child or good person that masks the evil below. In my book George Soper will be Mary Mallon's nemesis. A physically short, Jesuit-like person with OCD who is very interested in being really famous. Although he has already achieved a certain status as a Typhoid Expert, Mary is his ticket to true and lasting fame. During his life he enjoyed that fame but it has not outlasted her.

The joy of this story is that it skates along the time line of history and my job is not to make up the whole story but to bring these characters to life - to fill in the blanks and make the characters alive and interesting. It is also my job to put things like the science of the day into perspective. It was just the beginning of microbiology. The chemist who regularly tested Mary for Typhoid at her own expense found her to be consistently negative - quite possibly because his science was not as cutting edge as the Department of Health. Lots of mysteries to explore. It will be a marvelous month.

Book Structure and "Are Your My Mother?"

Probably the best structured of any children’s picture book that I have read and the book that best illustrates structure for any piece of fictional writing is, “Are You My Mother?” by P.D. Eastman.

Structure of fiction books and movies is not the three act play that most of us are brought up to think of. They have three acts but the acts are not equal.

In a movie the first twenty minutes (Act 1) is the introduction to the character and the situation in which the character finds himself…. at twenty minutes (1-3 pages in a children’s picture book or 1-2 chapters into the novel) there is an “inciting incident” which causes the main character to make a decision that sets him on the track of the rest of the movie, novel or children’s picture book. Generally, he thinks it is the thing that is going to solve his problem. In a well structured novel, the first chapter or two is the equivalent of that first twenty minutes of a movie or the first few pages of a children’s picture book.

In “Are You My Mother?” the set-up takes the first two or three pages. The mother bird is sitting on an egg. She sets off in search of food. The baby bird hatches, doesn’t find its mother. The inciting incident, that sets it on the track for the rest of the book, is the decision to set off to find its mother. From that moment on, it’s on a track that turns every one or two pages up to two or three pages of the end (every 15 minutes in a movie, 1-2 chapters in a novel).

In “Are You My Mother?” the baby bird meets a dog, a cow, a cat, a chicken, a boat, a plane, a car… and always his question is “Are You My Mother?” and always the answer is a variation on the theme of, “No.” Each time the question is asked or thought, the answer is slightly different. The plot is turned and each section of the plot is handled slightly differently. If you use the seven Harry Potter books as samples of that template each chapter leads to a different confrontation with a variation of Lord Voldemort, or someone else or some elucidating situation or circumstance. Each situation and each confrontation is different. Each chapter adds to our knowledge of the wizarding world, or Harry or Lord Voldemort until you have the entire tapestry before you.

Finally, in each modality there is a visit to the Valley of Death in which all is apparently lost for the lead character. It doesn’t matter if it’s a comedy, tragedy, Sci Fi, mystery, novel, movie, children’s story – in a well structured book there will be a moment at which the lead character finds himself in a hopeless situation. In “Are You My Mother?” the baby bird meets a “Snort.” The snort, which is a steam shovel, picks up the baby bird – at which point the bird thinks it’s a gonner and so does any child listening to the story for the first time.

Then follows the resolve. The Snort puts the bird back in his nest. His mother comes home. They recognize each other. They snuggle lovingly. All in 2-3 pages.

In a well constructed book – like the Harry Potter books – Harry is confronted by a variation on the theme of Lord Voldemort and survives. The end of Book Three is slightly different in that Harry saves Serius (his godfather) and does not actually confront Voldemort to do battle. It allows Serius into Harry’s life and it sends Wormtail (Peter Pettigrew) to the aid of Lord Voldemort. Number six is also a transition book. It takes out the powerful Dumbledore, it introduces the first Horcrux, and it sets Harry onto the path of ending the fight with Voldemort in which one of them must die.

The “Die Hards” bring up another problem. What happens when you have a strong character who has met many Valleys of Death and isn’t intimidated by them. In that case the Valley of Death is applied to someone he cares about (his wife, his daughter) and the character confronts it on their behalf. Whatever is going to elicit the emotion of all is lost is what the writer uses.

Structure is fascinating to study. After you’ve enjoyed a good move or book for the first time, read it for the way in which the author handles structure. Watch any studio-created action adventure (a high concept movie which plot you can encapsulate in a sentence or two) with a stop watch and at 20 minutes the action changes to the track the movie will ride on. Between 90 and 110 minutes the Valley of Death appears and you slide into the resolve. Legally Blond, Miss Congeniality, the Die Hards, the Lethal Weapons, Transformers, Avatar all structured in the same way. The interesting thing is how brilliantly and differently each of them does the exact same structure.

How J.K. Rowling uses magic to shift scenes

Children’s books as a rule are allowed to have only one point of view. Even if you are writing in the third person you only write from the main character’s point of view. If you are writing for adults, you have the luxury of shifting from one point of view to another, but not with children’s stories. For most children’s stories the only way you can get around something happening somewhere else is if someone tells you about it, or your main character dreams or imagines it…. Even dreams and imaginings are not common in children’s literature.

J.K. Rowling got around that difficult limitation by allowing Harry Potter to see into Lord Voldemort’s mind because of the lightening scar on his forehead – the result of Voldemort’s murderous attack on Harry when he was a child. The visions of other people and other places is generally accompanied by tremendous pain in the scar – which lets the reader know it’s not usual or not happening in Harry’s present time or place. The lightening scar is Harry’s attachment to Voldemort. It is also the writing tool that expands the writing platform that Rowling enjoys. It is an exceptionally clever way to incorporate information that could otherwise not be incorporated into a children’s book.

The limits of a single point of view are one of the things that make writing children’s books very challenging, more challenging than writing adult fiction.

Superstitions in Harry Potter

The Harry Potter series continues to fascinate me as does the growth and mastery of J.K. Rowling.

As she developed as a write, J.K. Rowling began including expletives that were specific to the wizarding world. Like “Merlin’s Beard!”

To my delight in her seventh book “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” Rowling got around to Wizard-specific superstitions. What she does that is so delightful is skate right beside something that is familiar in our regular world, touch it a tiny bit so that is becomes specific to the world that isn’t ours but it is so familiar we don’t need explanation.

In a conversation about The Deathly Hallows and their inclusion in a children’s book of cautionary fairy tales she discusses:

• May born witches will marry muggles
• Jinxed by twilight undone by midnight
• Wand of elder never prosper

It is the wand of elder that is important to the through line of the story, the other two superstitions give credibility to the third. It’s very clever writing. Truly J.K. Rowling can be used a textbook for exceptional writing.