Monday Musing: The Lockout is Over

And so it's officially over.

The members of NHL Players' Association have ratified the new collective bargaining agreement, officially bringing to a close the second lockout in eight years, and the third overall in the tenure of NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman. The deal followed some intense negotiation, which followed weeks of negotiation, non-negotiation, and gamesmanship aimed at painting the other guys as the bad guys in the fight. I'm happy it's over. While hockey never went away, the truth is the alternatives to the NHL--the American Hockey League, college hockey, Russia's KHL--just can't compete. The NHL is indeed where the best players of the world go to play. I'm happy it's over, I'll watch the games, but I honestly haven't missed it quite as much as I thought.

Anyway, it's amazing how so little can get done for so long, and then it all rushes together. With the cancellation of an entire season looming (for the second time), owners and players finally felt the economic pinch. And in the case of the players, I'm sure they were also well-aware of the ticking clock, the one that accompanies professional athletes in any sport. A year lost to a labor dispute is not just a lost year's salary, it's a lost opportunity to play the sport you love, to live out your dream. Unlike those of us who are school teachers, CPAs, or car wash attendants, professional athletes have a small window for achieving fame and fortune. Niclas Lidstrom, Chris Chelios, Gordie Howe and Johnny Bucyk—players who all played for 20+ years—are rare in the sport. According to Quanthockey.com, the average NHLcareer lasts 5 seasons, roughly 20% of retired players played in only one season, and for many former players, their first NHL game was also their last. While money was clearly an issue, the fact is, it's not the only issue. 

Think about that for a second. A five-year career. If you knew you only had five years to write a great book, or as many great books as possible, would it change your approach to writing? I bet we'd all spend a lot less time blogging and surfing forums and so on and so forth.

Yikes. Sorry to come off sounding like such a downer. I actually started off feeling pretty good today. So, let's just toss this in there to make me feel better, one of the great ads the NHL did a few years ago (and, oh the irony of having Youtube stick an ad in front of an ad). Have a great week, all.

Making the Case for Flat Villains

I've been thinking all week about Monday's post and your responses to it. Normally, I try to respond to all comments individually; with this one, however, I've decided to just do a follow up post.

After reading so much agreement with what I said (and much love for Les Mis), I started reconsidering. Yes, in general I like well-rounded villains, and remembering that the villain is the hero of his own story is a good place to start. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that literature is full of bad guys who are bad, period, and we don't always get the sense of 'self-heroism' from them. There are times when it's appropriate to give your villain the flat treatment. Making the case: Sauron, from The Lord of the Rings, and James LaValle, from my own Parallel Lives.

Sauron is one of the baddest bad guys ever. His whole purpose is to find his ring so that he can conquer all of Middle Earth and enslave its peoples. What we don't know is Sauron's motivation. Is he trying to live up to the impossibly high standards his parents set? Is he trying to woo Galadriel? Does he just want ocean-front property? We don't know, but we really don't need to know. Sauron is believable. History is littered with men who lived to conquer, and the book was written during the time of Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini and Stalin, men who tried to impose their will on the world. We've seen this villain in the real world, and we don't understand him any better here than in the pages of a book.

The other thing that makes Sauron work is narrative distance. We're never in his head, we never visit him in his tower in Mordor, we never even see him. That distance allows Tolkien the luxury of not having to give him a personality or fears or dreams beyond what we already know. In other words, he gets to leave out all the stuff we're told to put in if we want to have well-rounded characters. It's not supposed to work, but it does. If you have an overarching bad guy like Sauron, you may not need to give us more than the broadest view of what he wants.

And then there's the point of view of the story. When I sent out Parallel Lives to my first set of readers, I was rather worried that the story's antagonist, James LaValle, was too flat. Was he believable? I wondered. Did I need to give him more dimension, more depth?

The LaValle we see in the story is what we used to call a 'derelict' back in high school. He smokes pot by the bushel. He's disrespectful to teachers and disruptive in class (and not in a good way). He's a bully. And for some reason, he decides he doesn't like my protagonist, Chris Burke, and begins a systematic campaign of harassment that lasts throughout high school.

Now, it was tempting to go and give James some redeeming features, and to wonder why he's like this, but I resisted, based in part on the story's point of view. Parallel Lives is a first person narrative, told exclusively from Chris Burke's perspective. He can only know and react and respond to what he sees, to what James shows him. And James never shows him anything but his bad side. The closest we get to seeing another side of James is in this quote from a friend:

'"He used to be so nice," Madison told me once. James had just knocked the books from a seventh-grader's hands and scattered them halfway up the hall with a kick. "He taught half the kids on our block how to ride bikes."'

 So there's a hint that James wasn't always like this, but that's as far as I took it. In the story's present/past narrative, older, wiser Chris Burke has some theories on why James was such a jerk, and examines his own behavior to see how he may have unwittingly escalated the conflict between them. But he never knows for sure, because he can't truly get into James's head, and James isn't around anymore to give him an answer. His high school self never asked James, "Why do you have a problem with me?" though if he had, he almost certainly would have been told, "I don't like your face." Or maybe, "Because you were born." You know, those classic high school comebacks.

I was gratified when my readers told me I didn't need to do anything with LaValle. I think if you've attended high school, you've likely encountered someone like him. Beyond that, what we're allowed to see of James is limited by what Chris sees. In this case, James as continual jerkwad works; I can get away with leaving him as 'the sneering, jeering King of the Burnouts.'

So there you go. I think remembering that the villain is the hero of his own story is something to keep in mind, but before you break out the bicycle pumps and try to put more air into your bad guy, ask yourself whether you really need to or not. Consider the page time your villain gets; consider the point of view of the story. Only pump if it makes sense to pump.

Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

Musical Monday: Stars, Inspector Javert

Friday night I became one among millions of Americans who have seen the latest version of Les Miserables (yeah, I know there's supposed to be an accent over the 'e', but I just can't work that hard at this hour).

The movie did not disappoint me. I thought most of the performances were very strong, and even Russell Crowe, whose singing voice is not the best, did a great job as Javert, the policeman obsessed with finding the dastardly parole violator, Jean Valjean. And it's Javert I want to focus on here, because I had one of those 'Ah, hah!' moments while watching the film, the same sort of moment I wrote about while watching Breaking Bad over the summer.

If you're not familiar with the story, the quickest summation I can  give you is this: After spending almost 20 years in prison for stealing and making multiple escape attempts, Jean Valjean is released on parole, which he promptly breaks. He is hounded across the years by Javert, a former prison guard now turned policeman, who doesn't care that Valjean has reinvented himself as a wealthy industrialist and philanthropist: the man is a thief and a parole violator, and must be brought to justice. Of course, the story is much, much more than that, but for the purpose of this post, that's all you need to know.

At any rate, there was a scene in the first third of the movie. Following a close encounter with Valjean, Javert sings the song, Stars (this is from the 10th anniversary concert, not the current theatrical release):

A particular line caught my eye and gave me that "Ah, hah!" moment:

"He knows his way in the dark

Mine is the way of the Lord"

What was it about this line? To me, it was a perfect illustration of that writing aphorism that gets batted about whenever someone asks about villains:

"The antagonist is the hero of his own story."

Here we have two men on opposite sides of the story. Valjean, living under a false identity, trying to be a good man. Javert trying to prove the subterfuge and uphold the law to its letter. We sympathize with Valjean because we've seen how good he is, and we probably feel that his original sentence was not just to begin with. But in this moment we see Javert as a man absolutely convinced that he is not only right in the eyes of the law, but in the eyes of the Lord as well. He is the hero of his own story.

Victor Hugo's book covers Javert's backstory in great detail (Oh, does it go into great detail), so we have time to understand who he is and why he behaves the way he does. The musical does not have that luxury of time, and, given the attention span of many modern readers, we probably don't, either. But two lines in one three-and-one-half minute song out of nearly three hours gave us all we needed to know about Javert; it made him understandable, if not exactly sympathetic. We can see him as the hero of his own story, even if he's not the hero of ours.

 

A Little Off and Out of Whack

Heading into Christmas, I thought, "Now's the perfect time to take a week, maybe two, off from the blog. Go ahead, just say it straight out and be done with it." Of course I didn't, and here I am on a Friday morning with three, four, maybe five pieces partly completed, and no sense of how to finish any of them before morning madness takes hold.

The holidays have definitely messed me up a little bit. I'm sorry to say I haven't been writing much of anything over the last few weeks. It's not writer's block or anything like that, it's just been a matter of time. It's funny how this writing thing gets in you, and how out of whack you can feel when you don't have the time to do it as much as you'd like.

So there is no real post today. Instead, you get this video from Of Monsters and Men. It's funny how these things work. One of you posted this on your blog, I want to say in the spring. I remember seeing it, and I loved it. A few weeks ago, something put me in mind of this song, but I had no idea who the band was, the name of the song, or who posted it. I scoured a couple of likely places but could not find it. Then, yesterday, while checking out a non-writing message board I frequent: There it was.

I'm not huge on video music, to be honest. I was around when MTV was born, when people went gaga over crummy music because it had really cool videos. But I love this video, I can't explain why, it's really fun, and I like the song a lot. Enjoy your weekend. I'm putting myself into the shop for a realignment.

And Another New Year

Happy New Year to all of you, whether you've already celebrated because you're on the other side of the world or not. I hope 2013 is good to you and brings you all you hope for in life.

This is, of course, the time when we reflect on what we've done, set our goals for the coming year, and, quite often, make a series of predictions about what's going to happen in the world. I'm not much for the latter; I have no crystal ball, and I honestly don't understand enough about how the world works to have even a hope of a shred of accuracy over where we're going to end up as a society. And if I try to narrow down and focus on something like, say, publishing, I'm equally in the dark. About all I do know is that paper books aren't going away any time soon. Beyond that? Call me clueless.

But Bonnee Crawford fired the first shot across the bow of writerly resolutions (appropriate enough, given that she's one of those people who is already in the wild, wild world of 2013) when she asked in her blog last week: What is everyone else aiming for? And I thought about it and realize that my goals for this year (as a writer) are pretty much the same. So I took a look back to my first post of 2012, and here is what I found:

• Get an Agent.
• Write a New Book. 
• Improve, Improve, Improve.

Well, the sad thing is I still don't have an agent. But I've also backed off the query process a bit lately. The overwhelming silence from agents since the first round went out in April is significant. I believe in Parallel Lives, but I think I'm still pretty bad at the querying thing. So I spent most of NaNoReviMo pounding away at my query. Sent out a newer version at the beginning of December, got some rejects, got some more silence, and I'm back in the query workshop. I'd have asked Santa for a new query for Christmas, but let's face it, this has got to come from me. I realize that an inability to create an articulate query could point up to troubles in the manuscript, but I don't believe that's the case with PL. I would not, however, be surprised to find myself querying some of the same agents who rejected PL with Barton's Women.

And speaking of which, that was one goal I definitively met. At the time I wrote my goals for 2012, Barton's Women was still just a glimmer of an idea born of a hurricane. Six days later, in my writer's group, I wrote the first paragraphs. I finished an first draft in August, read and revised, and have it out with some excellent critters. My wife has read it and given me invaluable feedback. So my list for 2013 includes doing another revise round on that one and getting it out in front of agents, too.

As for the new, new book, I mentioned a while back that I had an idea that was floating in my head. Though I've not had that crystallizing "Ah ha!" moment with it, I've decided to try to write my way into it and have made some headway. It's definitely proceeding slowly so far, but it is proceeding. I certainly hope to be able to finish a draft of it in 2013.

Finally, we should always strive to keep improving. This is a tough one, since I am the Doubting Writer, after all, and I'm always going to find my work...not as good as I want it to be. On the other hand, I"m pretty sure that Barton's Women was in better shape when I sent it out for critting than Parallel Lives at the same stage of its life. But I've kept reading, I think when I read, and I'm trying to crit where I can. I haven't read many books on the craft this year, but I'll be honest, a couple of the ones that everyone cites as being Godly have left me kind of flat. I'll have to look into some others and see how they strike me.

And now I've rambled on too long. I wish you all a very happy new year, with good things for you and your family.

And just for fun, here's the Grateful Dead New Year from 1980/81. I cut out about two minutes of the late Bill Graham riding on top of a giant skull to the stage. Happy New Year, all!

Snow Day

And who gets to shovel all that?

Blog closed.

Sorry, guess I should have made that announcement before you made the drive over, huh?

Reminds me of the time I took the Magpie and Catbird down to the bus stop. We crunched our way over the ice-covered lawn, and slid down the ice-slicked street, and waited dutifully in the cold, watching cars crawl past on the treacherous road. After ten minutes, someone slowed, rolled down their window, and said, "You know, school is closed today, right?" Oops.

Enjoy the weekend, all. Here's a few pics of yesterday's scenery.

Musical Monday: The Christmas Song

What a voice that man had.

I think, when I was a kid, I actually liked Christmas Eve better than Christmas itself. It was just so full of excitement and anticipation, but there was more to it than just that. For whatever reason, my family didn't decorate our Christmas tree until Christmas eve. I don't know if it was just a tradition handed down from one side of the family or the other, or something that came about by design or by accident. With three kids to take care of, maybe it was a way of giving us something to do.

But we'd decorate the tree, then eat, then we'd go to church. Odds were good that we'd have a visit after church from my Uncle Joe, who'd stop in for a bit. At some point, we'd end up in the living room with all the lights off except for the tree, Christmas music playing. And as excited as we three kids always were, I also remember those hours of Christmas eve being among the most perfect, and, oddly, the most peaceful of the year.

May your Christmas be perfect and peaceful. Merry Christmas, everybody.