Linus and Lucy

My favorite Christmas album is Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas. And my favorite song is Linus and Lucy.

Simple enough. But why?

Well, there is, I suppose, the yearly joy of waiting for the broadcast each year when I was a kid. But when I was an adult, I had a yearly ritual of going to see George Winston play Lincoln Center each Christmas. My girlfriend and I would dress up and go out to eat and then go see the show, and it was our Christmas present to ourselves. At the playing of Linus and Lucy, George Winston would invite the audience up on the stage. He would usually say something like, "This is probably the ONLY time in your life you can come up and dance on the stage at Lincoln Center. Take off your heels and your tux jackets and come on up here." And usually about fifty or so people out of the audience of a thousand or so would. Now, I firmly feel the audience was divided into those who recognized this was the ONE moment in their WHOLE lives when they could have that unique experience and dance to Linus and Lucy in Lincoln Center. And those who sat in their chairs and watched.

BUT, there is more.

My kids have grown up with Linus and Lucy on this album, and I have these visions in my head, dozens of memories, of them dancing together as little ones, to my favorite Christmas album.

So here you have one single song, and one woman, and multiple layered reasons for LOVING this song and this soundtrack and playing it nonstop during the holidays. And this is one song.

As Genius and I have been having our Writing 201 discussion, you'll see we banter around the phrase "organic" a lot. I think it's one of those phrases that is easy to use but not every writer understands it on a cellular level. When you reach the place where your characters are organic, I think there is that much back story to nearly every like and dislike, every quirk. They are less imposed by the writer and instead grow out of the back stories of your characters' lives.

I'll take it a step further. When chick lit was at its height, writers routinely gave their female characters gay best friends. It was the thing to do. But I could almost always tell (I think) when it was a "device" and not organic. When the authors did it to be trendy and not because they knew what that kind of friendship was about. How? When there was nowhere in the novel any REASON for that friendship. It was like--give her a gay. If you read Diary of a Blues Goddess, you may recall that Georgia Ray tells the story of Dominique (nee Damon). How Dominique had been a boy in high school and her best friend. And they were the two outcasts in their school and had this tight bond because of it. And when Damon came out to his military father, he was punched in the jaw and thrown out of the house. He went to New York to figure out his life and to figure out what his sexuality meant to him. And when "he" came back . . . he was no longer Damon but Dominique. But the friendship wasn't predicated on trend. It was predicated on being there for each other through the death of Georgia's mother, through their being outcasts. His being a drag queen was just an incidental.

What ORGANIC detail can you tell us from your wip? And what is your favorite Christmas song?

Whispers

Yesterday in the comments, Jude brought up Child-44. I loved the book, though it was exceedingly bleak. I thought the details of Stalinist Russia were incredibly accurate and well-told. I can still remember my grandmother showing me a picture of a cousin and his wife who were sent to Siberia. "What happened to them?" I asked. Her reaction told me all I needed to know, as did this book.

But really, Child-44, to me, is a textbook example of organic plotting. In chapter one, a fascinating and gruesome scene unfolds of starvation. And then chapter 1 opens many years later. It is not until the reader arrives at the last third of the book that the full and total ramifications of the prologue come to bear. To say more would be a huge spoiler. But suffice it to say, the whispers on the prologue ARE the book. The seeds of everything you might need to know about the book are there.

Organic plotting involves a lot of whispering. Whispering is that thing you can't quite . . . hear. Some rustling underneath the plot. Something not quite right. I have the privilege of reading Lurker Monkey's new fantasy and from the first breaths of this book, whispers are everywhere. Perhaps it's not unlike "chatter" in signals intelligence.

I feel like I have blogged a hundred times on organic writing. But it's one of those more esoteric writing subjects. Without organic writing/plotting, the results are forced. They are the work of a puppeteer and not a writer. Things happen TO characters instead of arising obviously and gracefully from the plot.

Here's another point. We are FICTION writers. In real life, bad things happen to good people for not earthly reason at all. And that can still be a fine point to open up a book. J.A. Konrath was here on his AFRAID blog tour. That chapter one he posted at his sight is indeed a seemingly random horrific event. But then the whole book, in essence, shows why it wasn't so terribly random at all. This is fiction. In the end, you choose, as the writer, what characteristics your characters have, what details to reveal, you create the foreshadowing, you hone the theme. So, no, I don't believe you can have random events in a book. The whispers have to follow from page one to the end.

Finally, I suppose some genres demand whispers more than others. Thrillers and mysteries . . . fantasy. They, to me, definitely demand you start the underlying chatter early on and let it build to a cacophony.

Thoughts? Do you have whispers in your book?

Bad Clowns

On the way to the circus yesterday, Baby Girl suddenly confessed a mortal fear of clowns. She might have told me this BEFORE I spent $150 on third-row seats. I spun a tale of the difference between "evil clowns working for the Dark Side" and the "good clowns who only spread cheer." She didn't buy it. Nonetheless, she ended up meeting some very nice clowns--not the evil ones--and had a wonderful time. There is even photographic evidence she laughed at the clowns, and she got to do a tug 'o war with four of them in one of the rings.

Which got me thinking . . .

We've had discussions on the blog before about 1) fears, and 2) quirks. When I ask what do you fear most on this blog, I get a lot of very serious answers: death, a child dying, Alzheimer's, fire . . . . illness.

But I realize too, that a lot of us have completely nonsensical fears. I mean, they make sense to US, but . . . to the rest of the world, we perhaps look a little nuts. Which then is more like a quirk. And we've talked before how sometimes writers can go on quirk overload. I've been asked to critique things that get so cluttered with oddity, and my only reaction as editor is WHY? So I think as writers, when we ponder quirks, they should feel less tacked on, more organic. They can still be completely nonsensical. Can still enhance the story. But . . . somehow they are rooted in that sort of nonsensical neurosis, which makes sense in the character's universe. That they are not quirks of the writer's cleverness but of . . . the character's reality.

For example . . . Baby Girl wants a hamster. But she cannot abide gerbils because they have tails. The logic on this one escapes me. But there you go. It HAS a logic. It might not be YOUR logic. But there's an order to it. A rule of quirkiness.

Me? In a strange hotel room when I am on the road, I cannot even contemplate sleeping until I look under the bed, in the closet, and in the shower. Now . . . I am not sure what I would do, should I discover the boogeyman in any of these places, but there you go. I was a chronic "check-under-the-bed" kid. Still am.

Another fear-quirk? Jumping spiders. You see . . . spiders are fine. I actually usually capture them and put them outside. But once, after I got divorced, I went to kill (pre-Buddhism) a spider. And it jumped. High. I was utterly freaked out. And for the first time, I didn't have a man in the house to kill it for me. Frankly, that was about the only good thing about marriage. Having a handy spider-killer. So I did what any self-respecting fraidy-cat would do. I called my best guy friend on the phone and he TALKED ME THROUGH killing the jumping spider. And the entire time, I kept shrieking, "It's trying to kill me. It's jumping because it wants to get up to my neck and kill me." Jumping spiders? Still kind of freak me out. Daddy Longlegs? Not so much.

I always make sure, in my humorous novels, to include these oddities. But I would never just have a character sketch that said, "Afraid of jumping spiders." I might put, "Afraid of jumping spiders. Long story." Or "Afraid of evil clowns. Don't get her started on the topic."

Maybe it's just a difference in my mind. But I really think when you talk about organic writing, it helps to not just "tack on" oddities, but root them in real lives.

So here are mine:

1) WHATEVER is under that bed

2) JUMPING spiders (only . . . regular creepy crawl ones . . . fine)

3) Evil clowns (not the good ones)

4) Rats (but not mice)

5) The serial killer up the street (he may not REALLY be a serial killer, but the guy seriously freaks me out)

6) Close talkers. PLEASE respect my space when you talk to me. Hence number 5.

7) Confined spaces. Even after death. When really . . . will I care? But I think I will. Hence I will be cremated and PLEASE no pine boxes, family. (It's all spelled out in my will, along with my song selections for the party I want you all to have.)

I could go on. And on. I am a neurotic mess. But in my life . . . it's organic.

Thoughts? Anyone afraid of evil clowns? Does anyone else think about the difference between neuroses and tacked-on quirks?

Mayhem and Dinner and Organic Writing

When one particular editor of mine believes I've forced a plot point, she says, "I just don't buy . . . . "

And nine times out of ten, what she's stumbled on is puppetry, not organic writing.

What do I mean?

No one has yet to be able to give me a surprise party where I am actually surprised. Oh, I ACT surprised, and I am always pleased at the gathering of friends and family, but no, I'm not surprised. (Sorry, guys.) And most of the time it's because there's something just a tad "suspect" about the way I am lured to a certain locale at a certain and precise time. Like, "Let's go to dinner at precisely 6:00." In my life, the way I roll, it's more like, "Let's go to dinner AROUND 6:00 and hope it happens by 7:00." Preciseness isn't my thing. So that's one giveaway.

Same thing with writing. If you as author stop and think, "I need to get Character A into the scene with Character B so that Character B can reveal Plot Point A, a red herring for the mystery," or if you say, "I want Character A to keep bumping into Character B for a cute set-up to their romance," then to me, it's forced. It's visible.

Instead, if the characters and story drive it, there's a flow to it; it all unfolds organically in a way that's very real. And then you often find organic things spilling unexpectedly into your storytelling. Maybe it's chicken and egg theory I'm discussing here, maybe it's too subtle to even fully explain. But I look at it like this . . . . in one of my favorite scenes in The Roofer, Ava (main character/narrator), Uncle Two (two-time murderer and beloved uncle), Dad (multiple murderer and daddy dearest), Tom (brother, cop, cokehead), and Uncle Charley (loanshark/bookie)have dinner one night. I didn't set out to have a scene in which a fight would evolve. Instead, they're a volatile bunch--no matter what they do, what they eat, if they are gathered together, anything can happen. Tom was sniffing in the scene, hyper, junked up . . . Dad got pissed and punched him with no warning (which is how someone like that would handle it) and broke his nose, blood flew into the sausage (ruining dinner . . . somehow, it just wasn't appetizing after that), the dinner turned into a melee with everyone staking out a corner, someone pulled a knife, Uncle Two's arm got cut to the bone, Ava and Tom left to avoid it disintegrating further into more bloodshed, Dad had to be held back from going after them. It was an organic, for this family, unfolding from sitting down to a meal to bloodshed. I think if I had SET OUT to write a scene of family bloodshed, a piece would have been missing. Tom wouldn't have done cocaine before dinner, Dad would have grabbed the knife first and cut to the chase. Somehow, I would have forced it to its logical end, but some piece would have been left out or rushed. Same result. Different path. Had it not been organic, an editor might have said, "I just don't buy that a father would pull a knife on his own son," but instead, so much happens, so realistically, it might make you wonder why you don't bring a switchblade to your own family gathering.

I don't know if this is something I intuit as a writer, this let it unfold process, or if anyone else goes through this process--if anyone else SEES the difference. Maybe I'm the only one who figures out every surprise party.

So . . . I bet you all want to come to family dinners at my house. As for the writing? Thoughts?