Showing posts with label crime writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crime writing. Show all posts

Friday, July 30, 2021

Dancing to Architecture by Josh Stallings

 Q: Do you have hobbies outside of your writing life? Tell about them. Do they feed your writing life? Do they get your mind off your current projects and their attendant frustrations? Do they satisfy a different part of you than is satisfied by your writing?


I used to have hobbies, I tell myself. But I’m not sure that’s true. There are things I do that seem hobby-like but they are almost always extensions of my writing life. For example, learning to shoot various firearms, led me into target shooting, which led me into skeet shooting. As odd as this sounds, target practice brings me a meditative peace.





Motorcycle riding had a similar calming effect. Both activities required me to split my mind. The logical part is fully engaged in safety concerns, but if I “think about” all the formulas involved in hitting a three inch flying clay disc, I am unable to do it. Instead, I intuit when to fire the shotgun. Riding on a race track is the same, to gain even slight mastery you need to both never forget the safety rules and not think about them at all.  


 



Sadly politics and the people I started to run into at shooting ranges left me more agitated than tranquil. Several horrific accidents convinced me motorcycles were not a real option if I also wanted to be able to walk. 


Exploring locations is another way to calm my brain, ease my worry and solve writing problems. “I’m going out looking for a place to torture McGuire,” I remember telling Erika. “Have fun,” she said, not looking up from her work. I walk my novels. Traveling, alone on a new road, the logical side of my mind is busy with maps and road rules while the creative side is allowed to wander. 





These things have in common learning or discovering something new. This also tracks with how I write. One very personal thing I need to find when writing a new novel is, what am I learning as a writer on this one, what new technique am I gaining for the tool box? It can be as simple as first person vs third person point of view. Or combining the two. I need to both be discovering the story as I write it, and give my craft side something to work on.




Julia Cameron’s “The Artist's Way,” suggested an artist date, a time you take yourself places to fill up the well. I worked as a film editor at a shop a few blocks from the LA County Museum of Art. When I would get stuck on a cut, I’d go look at art. A lunch break spent looking at a huge canvas covered in lily pads really freed my mind. 

    

A misremembered quote has stuck with me for years, “talking about art is like dancing to (about) architecture.” Dancing to architecture makes as much sense to me, as solving a film editing problem by staring at an oil painting. It is illogical yet it works. What we do in creating anything, takes logical and illogical thinking. It is the intellectual equivalent of rubbing our tummies while scratching our heads. 


In the last few years my drive to produce more writing has collided with my responsibilities of being squished like the tuna and mayo in the generational sandwich. My work ethic drives me worse than any boss I ever had, demanding that I justify my time, my word count, my time management… 


I clearly needed this question asked at this moment. So far I have described what hobbies do for me, and how I convince the taskmaster upstairs that they are work. While cleverly avoiding the question. 


At this moment I don’t have any hobbies. I don’t have any time to let my mind wander/wonder. I have become the worst kind of boss/manager.


My well isn’t dry, but I am starting to pull up as much sand as water.


I’m struggling to find an upbeat end to this essay/post… 


Failing that, here's picture of me painting when creation was a simple act of joy.







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I’m talking about neurodiversity, writing Tricky, being a dyslexic film editor and more with Theo Smith at Neurodiversity - Eliminating Kryptonite & Enabling Superheroes Podcast.


https://anchor.fm/neurodiversity



Friday, January 12, 2018

Why Crime Fiction?

Why did you decide to become a writer and in particular a writer of crime fiction?

by Paul D. Marks

To make lots and lots of money and be famous and see my name and picture plastered on billboards and the sides of busses and go visiting on Fallon and Kimmel. That’s why.

But, I’m not getting rich and the only place my picture is plastered is in the post office. So time to
delve into the whys and wherefores and open up that whole Pandora’s Box of psychopathology that makes me, uh, me. And that made me want to become a writer of crime fiction. But we won’t delve too deep. You never know what you might find down in the depths.

So, besides the riches and fame, what prompted me to write crime fiction: I write it so I can kill people...on the page that I can't kill in real life...........


Related to that is the desire to see justice served as it so often isn’t in real life. That said, in much of what I write there are no neat bow-tied endings. And even when parts of the stories are tied up other parts are left open-ended. Kind of like life. So, justice is often served on some level, but maybe not neatly and maybe not legal justice, but some kind of street justice. Unless it’s a totally noir tale where there truly might not be justice, at least not in terms of how we normally think of it.

Writing crime fiction also gives me a way to comment on things that I want to comment on. Also to explore different points of view about those things, via various characters, including those that might not necessarily jibe with my own thoughts. Kind of like when you did debates in school and you had to take the other side of the issue, whether you agreed with it or not.

And, as RM said in a post from a while back, “With crime fiction I get to write about people in trouble, not just criminals and victims, but the people who happen to be police officers as well.” It's so true, and crime fiction is about so much more than whodunit. It's about all the people affected by the crime. As such, it gives us a vehicle to explore the human condition (now that sounds pretty hifalutin) but in a structured story with a plot that keeps us interested (hopefully) and moving forward.

But ultimately I want to entertain. I’ve talked about this before, and I don’t want to beat on a dead Sturges, but the Preston Sturges movie Sullivan’s Travels makes the point very well about entertaining. It’s the story of a film director who makes movies like Ants in Your Plants of 1939. But he thinks it’s light and silly junk. He wants to make the ponderous message movie Oh Brother Where Art Thou. But through his adventures he learns that what people really want is to laugh – and to be entertained.

Now, there’s not generally a lot of yucks in crime fiction, though there are some exceptions. But the best crime fiction is entertaining first. Sam Goldwyn famously might have said, if I want to send a message I’ll call Western Union. Which is not to say that crime writing can’t have a message, just to say that it shouldn’t hit you over the head. The best writing makes you think, but it doesn’t tell you what to think. A crime writer can illuminate aspects of society, good and bad, without being preachy or moralistic. My novel White Heat deals with race and racism in the form of a fast-paced, intense mystery thriller. And while I hope I make some points about those subjects, my first goal is to entertain. The sequel to White Heat, which may actually see the light of day one of these days, does the same thing about another pressing issue of life today – immigration.


And, of course, I enjoy reading crime fiction and watching crime-related movies. As I’ve stated here before, I’m a “movie guy,” and I came to a lot of crime fiction via the movies. Anyone who knows me knows I love film noir and in that genre there are few heroes, at least of the conventional variety. I’ve done a lot of different types of writing, mainstream, humorous/satire, screenplays of various genres. But crime writing/fiction and noir allow me to explore what good and evil are and where the boundaries between them are sometimes blurred.

So there you have it, now I can stuff the bats back into the belfry and close the lid to Pandora’s Box.

Why do you write crime fiction?

***

And now for the usual BSP:

Check out my website: www.PaulDMarks.com


Friday, December 1, 2017

A Thousand Monkeys Walk Into A Room – And Start Typing Away


Scientists have invented a robot that can do your writing for you. You give it the basic plot and characters and it does the rest. Would you use it? Why or why not?

by Paul D. Marks

Aren’t some authors doing that already? Kind of doing factory farming writing – farming out their books to other authors. That seems kind of robotic to me.

And while it would be nice to have a robot take some of the burden off, I don’t think I’d do it. But like Sean Connery learned, “never say never.”

Part of what makes good writing is the author’s personal experience and how they interpret that experience and distill it into their writing. How s/he infuses their writing with their take on life. A robot or artificial intelligence would be missing that. Until they can truly experience life, not just have it programmed into them, their writing will lack a certain heart to it. And didn’t they try that with typing monkeys, thinking that eventually they’d come up with a Shakespeare play just by random chance. According to Wikipedia, “The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” The same might be said for a robot. But, even if they could do it, having it programmed into them to whatever extent, it takes the fun and spontaneity out of writing.



Slate has an article about Shelley A.I., a bot that writes horror stories. ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/27/an_ai_bot_is_very_good_at_writing_horror.html ). I think the examples provided in the article show that the writing is, indeed, a bit “mechanical”. And, as they say in the piece, “The algorithms, like Shelley, still require human-made works to teach themselves how to create phrases and sentences from words, how to generate drama and rising action and climax, how to access a lexicon that delivers the right sort of tone and purpose, and more.” So it seems like robots or Artificial Intelligence bots have it one up over the monkeys, but I’m thinking that the A.I. writer still lacks something humans do, most especially life experience that puts what they’re writing in context and gives it a deeper texture. (I noticed that one of the commenters to RM’s blog earlier this week also mentioned this piece, so the word on A.I. Writer Bots is getting out.)

Wired also did a piece both written by and about robots or A.I. And maybe it works for non-fiction, at least a little better than for fiction. But for fiction it doesn’t seem like it would work, even if you wanted to do it that way. You can find the Wired story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/ 

There’s something to be said for the human touch, whether in the market checkout line or at the bank…or in writing. Yes, the ATM or auto checkout line might be faster, but sometimes it’s nice just to have a face to say hello to and have it say hello back. Of course if they’re talking to their co-workers or on the phone, well screw ’em.

And while it’s nice to have “robots” or programs that can spell-check, offer up Thesaurus words or even check grammar (more on that in a minute) and analyze your story, you have to be the one to do the creative work. I don’t even like those programs that plot for you or do other similar things because they take the “me” out of the writing and without that the work could be written by pretty much anyone – or any bot –, so what then makes it unique? Plus, do we really want robots taking our writing jobs away?

Now to grammar: If you’ve tried using a grammar checker as a fiction writer you’ve probably found that it’s way too formal. It might work for non-fiction, but fiction is more free-form. And grammar checkers can drive you crazy. So though a robot or A.I. bot might be able to come up with a story it might be stiff and talk and walk awkwardly like Robby the Robot. You also have to be careful that your bot doesn’t mutiny on you:

VIDEO REMOVED



Someday there might be robots or AI with enough heart to create a good story. Or maybe, ultimately the human element just can’t be replaced.

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And now for the usual BSP:

Please check out the interview Laura Brennan, writer, producer and consultant, did with me for her podcast, where we talk about everything from Raymond Chandler and John Fante to the time I pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it. Find it here: http://destinationmystery.com/episode-52-paul-d-marks/