The Toe Update

I went to the orthopedist yesterday. He looks over the toe, the stitches, the alignment, whatever. Everything is as perfect as can be reasonably expected: no infection, joint’s tight, tendons seem to work.

Then he says. “Um . . . what else do you do for fun?”

“Else?”

“Other than jiu jitsu.”

“I run.”

“Other than running.”

“I trail-walk my dog.”

He says, “Hmm. Hm. Well, I suppose you can ride a stationary bike . . .”

The upshot: three months. I can start running again in mid-fucking-November. Maybe.

So as I wrote the other day: It could have been worse. Could have been a lot worse.

Still kinda sucks.

Middle-Aged Fat Guy Update

So . . .

Finally wore a hole in the bottom of my Vibram 5Fingers Sprints, so I have replaced them with 5Fingers KSO’s, which not only Keep Shit Out, but have 3mm soles as compared to 1.3mm for the Sprints. Something like that.

Anyway, they’re fully as awesome. They give a little more stone-defense than the Sprints, which make them comfortable to run even on some of the semi-groomed gravel trails at our local college’s cross-country course.

I’ve been having a bit less success with the Gracie BJJ. Being the oldest student there by almost a decade doesn’t help, nor does having done no serious training of any kind in the past five years. I was just getting into good enough shape to get serious there when I ripped my big toe in half.

Working a lapel-knee takedown, I found myself with a student who (though much more advanced in BJJ than I) didn’t actually know how to take a fall. Now, back in the day, Kimura-sensei wouldn’t let you wear a gi in class until you could demonstrate proficiency in back falls, side falls to both sides, front falls, forward rolls and back rolls . . . but that was trad judo, which is a different endeavor.

At any rate, while I was busily trying not to drop this guy on the back of his neck, I caught the big toe of my left foot on the mat. This happens from time to time, and isn’t a big deal . . . unless you have the additional momentum of an extra person to deal with, in which case you might end up stepping down on that caught toe rather than pulling it back.

I heard it pop–like your third-grade teacher snapping his fingers–and thought, Oh, goddammit. I just broke my fucking toe.

So I rolled up to a sitting position and looked at it. The big toe was folded all the way under–flat against the ball of my foot–and the skin on top of the toe had ripped all the way across, probably having something to do with the knob of bone that was sticking out out through it.

Well, me being, y’know, me, the first thing I did was grab my toe and pull it straight, to get the bone back in under the skin where it belongs. Then I went to the emergency room, where I discover that I was mistaken–the X-rays were inconclusive for fracture. It seems instead of breaking, it was massively dislocated, and the bone I saw sticking out was one end of a tarsal joint that had popped open.

I’m thinking, Cool! So instead of a month or six weeks, I’ll be back in two, right up until the PA explains that this is still what you call an “open joint injury,” which means an assload (literally) of intramuscular antibiotics and a tetanus shot and a follow up with an orthopedist, because even though the bones seem to be intact, I had managed to drag the interior of the joint across a mat that sweaty guys were rolling around on.

So like everything else in my adult life, it could have been worse–a lot worse–but it still kind of sucks. I’m in a surgical boot at least until Thursday, when the orthopedist will evaluate me, and he’ll tell me how long it’ll be before I can go back to running and jiujitsu and suchlike activities.

On the other hand, two doctors and about five nurses are all impressed at how well I can set a bone. And everybody was impressed with my cheerful demeanor and exceptional pain tolerance. Hell, I was impressed myself . . . right up until the ass-jab shot the gallon of Vaseline-weight antibiotic into my right butt cheek, during which we all discovered simultaneously that my (seeming) exceptional pain tolerance was in fact only an artifact of my toe not actually hurting much, and that my pain tolerance is actually comparable to that of a eight-week-old golden retriever. And that I am capable of producing a remarkably similar squeal.

Meanwhile, I can barely even walk the dog, and I’m getting no use of my standing desk; I spend my days sitting on my expanding ass, typing furiously to get His Father’s Fist off my desk before the world ends in 2012, and have already found the last five pounds I lost. Turns out they were in those pizzas I’ve been scarfing.

(btw, I make my own pizza, being as I’m gluten-intolerant and allergic to yeast. For the crust, I use a home-made flat-bread-style pao de queijo–Brazilian tapioca cheese-bread–and homemade red-pepper sausage and it’s really amazingly good, which leads me to suspect that those other ten pounds are gonna turn up pretty shortly . . .)

That’s your Middle-Aged Fat Guy Update. I’m out.

SRW #5: Exposition

By request, from Guy.

Stover’s Rule of Writing #5: Exposition

First, a reminder of something that should be obvious but sometimes isn’t:

Exposition is the delivery of information to the reader. Period.

So is every other element of writing.

Deliver information is the only thing your language on the page does. The only thing it can do. Are you with me? The most in-your-face action-packed-thrillaminnit scene is, at its core, exposition . . . it’s just a bit more vivid than the narrative elements we usually apply that word to.

Exposition is fundamentally exactly the same as narrative and scene, and is subject to all the same general principles. Remember what we were talking about before, in the section on Scene? I use the term “Reveal,” and we had four general categories: Plot (or Action)  Reveal, Character Reveal, Context (or Setting) Reveal and Insight Reveal.

The only difference is the intent of the author. With the Scene Reveals, the author wants to draw you into the action. With Exposition Reveals, the author only wants to efficiently deliver the information you’ll need to understand a current or subsequent (usually, though sometimes previous) Scene.

So the basic Rule of Exposition is: Don’t. (Subject to Rule #1, of course.)

That is, don’t write paragraphs or (gods have mercy) pages of simple information you want your readers to absorb. Because they won’t. Most people skip over those parts and go to the next scene anyway.

That’s not to say you can’t get away with it. Plenty of people have. There are enormous (and enormously awkward) essays on the 19th Century whale trade in Moby Dick. Those who undertake an unabridged version of War and Peace will discover whole chapters devoted to explications of Tolstoy’s “Common Man” theory of history. However, unless you are a talent on the order of Melville and Tolstoy, leave that shit out.

There will always be, however, an irreducible minimum, so the trick is finding ways to bury the necessary exposition within dramatic scenes. In trying to do this, there are two guiding principles.

The first one comes courtesy of the redoubtable Perry Glasser, my one-time novel-writing coach:

Never tell your readers anything until they absolutely need to know it.

Think of your story — your world, your characters, everything — as being Top Secret, Need-to-Know only. If your readers don’t need to know, don’t tell them at all. If they do need to know, save it until they can’t go on without it.

Take Heroes Die, as an example most of you will be familiar with. The entire Prologue is a chain of exposition (mostly *ahem* cleverly disguised *ahem* as Setting Reveals). Hari’s relationship with Shanna gets profiled in the context of explaining his reaction to viewing the Servant of the Empire cube . . . in which we also find out an assolad of information about the Studio, the caste system, Caine and Pallas and all kinds of shit. What we don’t find out about is Hari’s childhood, and his relationship with his father. That stuff becomes a feature of the first scene with Duncan in the Buke.

In fact, most of the scenes in the early parts of the book contain at least a sentence or two of Now That We’re Here, You Need to Know This. Sometimes whole paragraphs. Shit, the whole Underwood-Clearlake Adventure Update business is there to be Caine’s version of Basil Exposition. Even later, in scenes like Lamorak in the Theatre of Truth, you finally get some of Karl’s backstory . . . but most of his backstory is withheld until it’s directly pertinent: when he betrays the woman who loves him.

From my point of view, a decade and a half on, the exposition in HD looks pretty clunky and overdone — I was only gradually learning how much I don’t actually need to say.

Hell, I’m still learning how much I don’t need to say.

Again: Never tell your readers anything until they absolutely need to know it. And be sure they really need to know it; if you’re not dead-bang certain the information is essential to understanding the story, leave it out. Your editor will tell you  “something needs expanding here — I’m not sure why XX is YYYing . . .” Then you’ll find one nifty change in a line of dialogue on the next page, and everything’s golden.

The second principle is my own:

Never give your readers facts when you can give them stories.

People don’t pay you for nifty ideas, or for realistic settings or deep world-building. Things like that are features of story, not story itself. Present your exposition as a story within the story, and readers will rarely even notice they’re being fed exposition . . . because it still tastes like story.

Probably the clearest example of this in my work comes at the beginning of HD Day Two; I had already introduced the villain–Kollberg–but I needed to establish him as a legitimate threat,  in terms of his intentions and of his capabilities. I also needed to establish just how far out of Hari’s reach he is; I wanted to make it clear that Hari can’t fight back on any level.

Anyway, the point is that an assload of expository bullshit is encapsulated in a brief biographical sketch of Kollberg’s upbringing and career. This is a trick I nicked from Homer himself; in the Iliad, the minor named heroes are introduced with a capsule biography (and often a line or two about their home and lands) just as they are getting killed by the main characters. The first time I used it was when we get the POV of Meremptah-Sifti in Iron Dawn. It’s also echoed in the “This is” sequences in Revenge of the Sith.

You have to be careful with this kind of shit; it can become an end in itself. But used well, it’s not limited to capsule bios.

For example, the “Now” storyline in Caine Black Knife is about 80% straight exposition. Maybe more. “Gift” is purely expository. “Below Hell” is exposition until the entrance of Tyrklld, and even after that, most of what’s going on is Context and Character Reveals, a style that the rest of the “Now” sequence follows. “Eyes of God” is nothing but exposition . . . but being presented as a story — Caine and Tourann exchanging information — most people barely noticed, if they registered it at all.

Part of the reason I got away with this is structural: by framing the “Now” sequence as an investigation, getting people to tell him shit he doesn’t already know is the spine of the story . . . and then in the “Prince of Lies” chapter, he starts telling other people shit they don’t already know, which again works (for me, anyway) because investigation narratives are always built around facts: collecting facts and fitting them into a narrative to explain their interrelationships.

The other reason I got away with it was the “Then” sequence, which obliquely depends on the information revealed in “Now,” and thus is only maybe 10% exposition shuffled into the non-stop asskicking.

Which brings us back to –

Stover’s Rule of Exposition: Don’t.

When you get really good at this shit, your exposition becomes story . . . which means it’s not  “efficient delivery of information” any more. When your narrative requires point-of-view characters to discover the necessary info, it’s not exposition, it’s a plot point.

Club Caine Announcement

Matt,
I wanted to let you know that the next meeting of Club Caine is this Friday at 6:45, again at the Panera Bread in Schaumburg. If you wanted to let your blog followers know that’d be great. We’ll be finishing up Heroes Die. Thanks!

Joshua

You’re welcome.

Hard-Boiled Essentials

To understand where hard-boiled crime fiction came from, you need to start with Dashiell Hammett. If you don’t know Hammett, you won”t understand the guys who followed his trail.

Hammett was an actual hardguy who was, before he started selling books, a real-life Pinkerton operative. His experiences as a Pinkerton man are the basis of his flat-out best work, which are the Continental Op stories. There are shorts and novelettes, and all of them are worth reading.  What you must read are these novels:

Red Harvest

and

The Dain Curse

Once you get through them, you can go to Hammett’s personal favorite novel:

The Glass Key, the plot of which might seem a bit familiar to fans of the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing.

And then on to his most famous books:

The Thin Man

and

The Maltese Falcon

Once you’re through Hammett, you can move on to Jim Thompson:

The Grifters

The Getaway

The Killer Inside Me

From there, James M. Cain:

The Postman Always Rings Twice

Double Indemnity

And only then are you really ready for the man I consider to be the only true inheritor of Hammett’s mastery, Raymond Chandler:

The Big Sleep

The Long Goodbye

The High Window

The Lady in the Lake

And his collection of four Black Mask novelettes,

Trouble is My Business

Those are the essentials. For further reading, there’s Ross Macdonald, who admired Chandler’s hero (Philip Marlowe) quite a bit, and cut one from the same cloth by the name of Lew Archer. I’ve only read a couple of these, but they’re worth looking at:

The Drowning Pool

The Underground Man

Some people consider him to be superior to Chandler. I consider those people to be talking out their asses, but YMMV. Archer is very much like Marlowe drop-kicked from the Thirties into the Seventies.

Then there’s the other McDonald, which is John D. Anything with his name on it will be worth reading. The ones most on topic are the Travis Magee novels, of which there are 20(!). They’re easy to spot because they all have colors in the title:

Pale Orange For the Shroud, The Empty Copper Sea, that kind of thing.

Magee is Marlowe and Archer with a few extra years and hard knocks, and who doesn’t care much about the law. He calls himself a salvage expert. People come to him because they’ve been robbed or cheated out of a bundle. Travis undertakes to get their money back, for which his cut is 50%. IF they protest, he just shrugs. “Half, or none. You pick.”

After you burn through those, take on the Trickster God of hard-boiled fiction, Rex Stout. This guy was a fucking changeling–probably the best pure writer of the lot, who produced prose so effortlessly lucid that you don’t even notice how fucking brilliant it is. His gag was to write classical detection (i.e. Holmes, Poirot, Dupin) using a hard-boiled narrator, who does legwork for the master detective.

The narrator is Archie Goodwin. The master detective is Nero Wolfe. I promise you will never forget either of them.

There are 33 novels, written from the early Thirties to the early Seventies, and it’s good to read them in something resembling order, due to a unique style of loose continuity.

And finally, one of very few modern masters of the genre, James R. Crumley. He doesn’t produce a lot, but what he does is awesome: hard-boiled mean drunks on crystal meth. My personal recommendations:

The Last Good Kiss

The Mexican Tree Duck

And then you’ll all know where Caine’s narrative voice came from.

Why I Worship Raymond Chandler

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

–Raymond Chandler

“Red Wind”

A knock-off. A twenty-thousand-worder for Black Mask. Written on cheap tequila and desperation.

Christ, I love that guy.

“An average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.”

That’s Raymond Chandler too.

Stover’s Rules of Writing

Hey. A lightning visit because I have recently made contact with one of the several writers who ruined my life by teaching me how to do this shit.

While I was in college, I did about twelve credit-hours of independent study in Writing the Novel (which was actually the earliest and most embarrassing attempt at what eventually became Heroes Die).

His name is Perry Glasser, and his website is

here.

I bring this up because he does sometimes take on Intertubes hopefuls and helps them (for money, you understand) figure out how this shit is done, and because he’s a damn fine writer.

Also because his work is often considered “too commercial to be literary,” and mine is often “too literary to be commercial,” and I’m a huge fan of bitter irony.

Sorry I haven’t been around . . . all better now. Mostly.

Now that I’m back, a question for the class:

If you were casting remakes of For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, who would you hire to play the Man With No Name?

Matt Might Be Going to School

So I’ve been feeling better, keeping up with my workouts, whatever, except for the weights ‘cuz, y’know, they bore the crap out of me. The only sports that have ever interested me are combat sports, and I’ve been sorely missing my old club from my days in Chicago.

So I’m driving into town last Sunday, and I see one of the strip malls along the highway, right next to Honada Sushi, is a brand new Gracie Barra studio. I thought, Huh. When did that get there?

Last night, I stop by to check the place out. I get there five minutes after it closes, so I can’t go in, but there’s a couple of guys with gym bags so I go over to talk to them about the club (studio, school, whatever). One of them is this big bald guy with a full beard who hasn’t bothered to put on a shirt, and he doesn’t have the physique of a gym rat, so I’m thinking, This might be a good place to try.

I know a little bit about BJJ, so I asked about the striking style there because, y’know, hitting people is what I like to do. Turns out the big guy is the new striking instructor, getting ready to start formal classes, and he says he’s a UFC contender, which is cool if true, and a massive FAIL if false. He says his name’s Ben, and he teaches a striking method that combines muay thai, IR kickboxing and regular boxing, and I’m thinking Score! because if you add a little kali and a little savate that’s exactly what I do. And when I get up next to him, I discover that he’s bigger than he looks. Bigger than I am, at 6’1″ and 240. Rough estimate: 6’5″ and 260. And he seems like a real open, upfront guy. Friendly instead of hardass.

Good so far.

So I go back there this morning and get the tour from Black Belt Dave, who runs the school, and somehow he starts talking about the verifiable historicity of Homer’s Iliad, and I’m thinking, Is somebody putting me on? because the historicity of Homer is exactly what inspired Iron Dawn and Jericho Moon.

He’s a great guy, outgoing and open and everything, and just in passing I mention I met the striking guy the night before, and BBDave says, “Oh, yeah, that’s Ben Rothwell. He’s here to improve his ground work.”

And I’m thinking, Wait a second . . . Ben ROTHWELL?

For those of you unfamiliar with Big Ben’s work, he’s

This guy.

I’m not kidding. Neither, obviously, is he. The video is worth watching for the song alone.

And I think I just might start learning BJJ.

And One More Thing: My Dog is an Awesome Dog

Though I really try to avoid Pet Posts, a word must be spoken here in honor of Aias, the Alaskan Malamute who’s pictured (four years old) at the right. He is now nine (geriatric for his breed, my vet informs me), a little overweight, cranky and willful and having some joint issues due to being a Giant Fucking Wolfdog entering old age.

He still doesn’t take orders well–especially in front of other dogs, because he’s got his share of pride and a bit extra–but he understands English well enough that he can figure out what I’m telling him to do. He also will argue if he thinks he has a better idea. (For those of you who’ve never been bitched out by a Malamute, think Chewbacca with bigger teeth.) He is also frighteningly intelligent.

A recent story (from this past winter): He’s out in the back yard, laying in the snow, and he decides he wants to come inside. When he’s ready to come in, he knocks on the back door. (Yes, he really does). That night I had a fire going in the fireplace and the Fabulous Robyn and yrs trly were watching a gunfire’n'bombs actioner, and we couldn’t hear him knock. So he goes back down the stairs, opens the backyard gate, and starts going house to house knocking on our neighbors’ doors. Finally, he gets the attention of some guy I’d never actually met (a renter, a few doors down the block). The guy opens his front door to find a 150# wolf-looking beast who is reading him the riot act in fluent Wookiee. He starts to close the door again (being a normally prudent kind of guy) . . . but Aias won’t let him close the door. Not in a scary way, just a “I’m Just a Dog, What the Fuck Do I Know?” way.

He finally convinces the guy to follow him, leads him up the steps of my back porch, and stares at the guy’s hand, then at the door, at the hand, at the door (Malamute for “You’ve got hands, dumbass. Fucking knock!”). So he pounds on the back door, and when I go open it, I find this guy backing away down the stairs because Aias is growling at him. (This dog never growls, excapt at other dogs who try to push him around) The guy’s got his hands up, and he’s pleading “This was your idea, dude! I only did what you told me!”

The guy tells me the story, and at the end of it, the guy says, “So I come over here and he herds me through the gate and up the stairs–and right after I knock on the door, the dog gives me a growl like I don’t know you, fucker. Get out of my yard!”

By the time the guy finished telling me the story, Aias was inside, asleep in front of the fire.

What brings all this stuff on is that my county here has just recently (two or three months ago) opened off-leash dog parks. Apparently in Aias’ opinion, the dogs at our park are a bit unsocialized–not surprising, given the recently-remedied lack of dog parks–and Aias has had to instruct so many of them on proper doggy etiquette that he got sick of it.

He has changed the game.

“It’s fucking Dodge City out here. I know a lot of you don’t know who I am. My friends call me Aias. You fuckers can call me Marshal Earp. Round these parts, I don’t just enforce the law. I am the law.”

Even the dogs who don’t know him quiet down when they see him coming to the gate. He doesn’t teach  manners any more. Now he just tells everybody to settle the fuck down or get your ass whipped.

That is to say: he will not allow dogs to fight when he’s in the park. Voices get raised, and as soon as they go from play-rough to real rough, he’s wading in, grabbing dogs by the scruff of their necks and hurling them away from the fight. Once he gets the combatants separated, he puts himself between them and makes it clear that if they want to fight each other, they’ll have to fight him first.

So far, no takers.

This has been going on for a month now, and other dog-owners know him by reputation, even when they haven’t met him yet; they call him the Sheriff, and they’re glad to see him come in, especially ones with younger dogs, because he always protects the puppies.

Last night, an intact male pit bull and an intact male boxer got into a fight over a couple of bitches who also mixed in the fight, and Aias stopped all four of them before any blood was drawn, and for the next hour, any time those males starting making any noise at all, near each other or not, they found Aias leaning on their shoulders, reminding them that he likes a quiet town.

And that’s why I had to tell you about my dog. Because he is fucking awesome.