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So coming soon I will be a book festival in Baton Rouge. To prepare for this event I am committing to returning to this website on a daily basis to provide updates on things going on.

I fear I am screaming into the void and not speaking to anyone at all. But I have to try. I will never be said, I didn’t try.

Here’s day one. Check back tomorrow to see what’s happening. Task number cleaning up this website and deleting a bunch of spam.

I’ve been hesitant to post this entry because it raises some uncomfortable questions. But here goes anyway.

I am very concerned about representation in literature. I think more people need to see more characters that look like them, sound like them, and value what they value in our popular stories.
I am a white, Jewish, cis male who was raised in a upper middle class home. I understand privilege.

I want the hero sitting opposite Flint to be a person of color, a woman of color in fact.

I do not want to appropriate someone’s culture for entertainment value.

The short answer here is two fold, at least in my opinion: Research and Sincerity.

As a quick aside, the answer cannot be I can only write about white Jewish guys because that’s the only way I’ve ever experienced the world. I do have empathy and imagination. So I think the people who are more concerned with appropriation as opposed to representation must begin the conversation acknowledging this is all a matter of degree. 12 Angry Men has already been written. Are there any other stories that exclusively involve white dudes worth telling? Even Rambo has a girl and a bunch of Vietnamese “bad guys”.

Having acknowledged that it is all a matter of degree, I do think about Ernest Tidyman and Walter Ellis Mosley a lot. If you are unfamiliar, Ernest Tidyman was a (white, Jewish) novelist and screenwriter. Among other characters he created Shaft. Yes, the man who would risk his neck for a brother man, was conceived and conceptualized by a white jew. Walter Ellis Mosley is also a novelist. His most popular character is Exeikel ‘Easy’ Rawlins.

Shaft holds a higher place in the American Pop Culture universe, I think. But Mosley was the first black man to receive the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The point today is ‘blackness’ and the African American experience as it was conceived and depicted by Tidyman is a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of ‘blackness’ and the African American experience as conceived and depicted by Mosley.

The most dramatic example of this difference can be seen in two scenes that mirror each other at the start of each novel. In Shaft, the white cops are looking for our titular detective because “the word on the street is something heavy is going down” and they want his help. Shaft has no interest in helping white cops so he tells them to fuck off. Then one cop says, “What are you doing that’s more important than this?” Shaft laughs in his face and says, “Getting laid.” And then he walks off, without giving the cops another thought.

In Devil in Blue Dress, the first novel featuring Easy Rawlins, there is a scene at the start of the story, where the white cops come looking for out titular hero. They want to speak to him because a woman he knows has been murdered. They knock on Rawlins’ door. He is nothing but polite to point of subservience; however, when he asks why the cops want to bring him downtown, when he asserts his rights as an American by simply asking “What’s the charge, here?” rather than answer him, the cops beat the shit out of him.

Shaft is great.

It showed an American audience a black man who gets to win, be the most powerful guy in the room, and be a sex machine to all the chicks. And this is something that had rarely, if ever, been seen before. Especially in popular fiction. Compared to Willie Best (one of my personal heroes, you should look him up) Shaft is a much needed breath of fresh air.

However it is also fair to say that Shaft is a “Black-skinned replica of the white action hero commonly found in the detective genre.” In fact that is exactly what Matthew Henry said in his 2004 exploration of Shaft in the African American Review.

As a matter of film history, MGM intended to cast a white man as John Shaft until African American director Gordon Parks was added to the project. While the recasting of Shaft changed the racial context of the story, the script changed not at all.

Easy Rawlins’ whole story is about race. And justice, or lack there of. And the world being very, very unfair when you are the bottom of the social pecking order. In no universe could Easy Rawlins be a white guy. The story wouldn’t make any sense. His story. The mystery he’s solving. The bread crumbs he can follow through parts of LA no white cop could traverse.

People take advantage of Easy. They lie to him. They hurt him. He is rarely allowed to be the most powerful man in the room. And he doesn’t win as much as he survives and lives to see the worst of the worst bad guys get punished in a outside the law kind of way. But the last lines of the book are optimistic, even hopeful. “We [Easy and his neighbor] sat on my porch drinking whiskey and laughing. We laughed for a long time.”

Hashi, my heroine, is Native American. Her name means ‘sunshine’ because it’s thematically important to have Flint be drawn into the light. Race is not overtly discussed by our heroes. But race touches every part of their story. It bubbles under the surface, always present but never directly acknowledged.

I hope these choices put me on the spectrum squarely between Tidyman and Mosley. I did a lot of research into Hashi and her people. And I sincerely tried to make her a real person as opposed to a generic mannequin in Native American garb.

More Choices

Characters have always been easy for me to create. I find the process a bit like shopping with a giant catalog of demographic facts, stories, and traumas and then playing mix and match with these things until you have interesting people.

Character creation has always been my favorite part of role playing games. I even have my own truncated version a character sheet, I sometime use when creating book characters. Link. Again the act of writing is often really fun.

For this book, I started with my male lead. I flipped through the catalog of life and decided he was from California –the part of California that is as far away from the glitz of Hollywood as possible. I did some math to figure out he was born in 1954. That way he could serve in Vietnam or not depending on who he turned out to be. And then I made his birthday July 25, my father’s birthday. I doubted the date would come up in the book (it doesn’t), but it made me happy to know. It made me like this guy more.

The only other thing I knew about this man was he came into the Stillwater Café at a set time every week and he had a dead wife. That’s not much, but it’s not nothing either. What kind of man would keep a strict routine? What kind of man would be a slave to routine? A man like me. I love it when things stay the same, but I am not as good as Flint (the eventual name of my hero) at keeping the world from intruding on my routine.

In this way I decided Flint was a little OCD, a little troubled, and a little lonely. I also decided that he would be working on journal therapy. This was something I had heard about and after much research decided would be perfect for my story. So know my hero needed a problem. An interesting problem. A not whiney problem. And most importantly a problem I could pull off. Thus Flint became a man worried about good and evil in the world. His problem is he feels like the bad guys are winning.

I don’t have much faith. I wish I did, but there are too many dead parents in my back story for that. If I do have faith it is in Dr. King’s statement, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” I believe that to be true. I can offer you some evidence in support of that statement. But I can offer you far too many counterfactuals as well. This is my struggle.

My hero’s struggle would be very similar.

Not all writing is autobiographical, but a lot of it is.

So this unlocked a lot of questions for me. It unlocked time. I would set this story in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election –I wrote this book in 2018 before I knew the results of the 2020 election, or the 2024 election for that matter.

It unlocked more of my hero’s pathology. He would be suffering from intermittent panic attacks but not doing well in traditional therapy, hence the turn to journal therapy. His trauma wouldn’t be rooted in the war exactly, that story has been told by people with more experience than me. But it would be rooted in things he saw in the war.

So what did he see in the war?

Again my voracious appetite for news provided the answer. This time it came from the New York Times Book review. It was a book by Rachel Moran titled Paid For, which I immediately checked out from the library and read. The thesis of this book is that prostitution should be kept illegal, very, very illegal. This came as surprise to me. Having done zero research on the matter prior to starting this book and just being a guy living in the world, I was under the impression that the position of Carol Leigh was the correct, progressive position.

Ms. Leigh was an advocate for decriminalizing prostitution so society could regulate and protect sex workers. Ms. Moran’s point is legalizing prostitution codifies a man’s right to buy a woman’s body. I don’t know if that’s true, but it is a damn interesting point.

Now my hero was beginning to take real shape. He was a man who dedicated his life to stopping sex trafficking, and upon his retirement he found he hadn’t made a dent.

Next I returned to the catalog of life and made a picture of this guy. He’s modeled after a Highschool Principal I saw speak on an completely unrelated issue. I don’t remember that guys name, but he had a presence about him that was cool.

My guy would be tall and strong. Unbowed by sixty plus years of life. Military hair. Pale eyes. He wears the grey suits that Archer wears in season seven of that show. And he always has on a big watch. Military guys always seem to have big watches.

Then I needed a name. I like names to be indicative of character, which can be super cheesy. So you have to be careful. Names are often the hardest part for me. But…. I knew my guy was a hard man. I know a guy named Steele. He is not a hard man and that’s a tough burden for him to carry. I didn’t think my guy’s parents would so aspirational. Eventually I decided on Flint. Because Treasure Island was my favorite book as a kid.

Flint of course is a last name. So that’s means my Flint would have to have a first name so awful he wouldn’t let anyone know what it is. My college roommate was named Shannon. He hated having a name that was transitioning from a male name to a female name. Tampax sent him a free sample when he turned thirteen and I stole that story to give to Flint. Another childhood favorite of mine is Police Academy. And the chubby nerd in police academy is a dude named Leslie. Leslie Barbara.

So I had my male lead. In broad strokes anyway. Now I need to give him a foil. Someone who would be his equal but still need him.

For more on that process, tune in next week. Or if you’re not following along in real time, click the link at the bottom of the page.

As Garrison Keilor always says, “Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.”

Until next time,
cw

My first writing professor told me that the act of writing was really the act of making decisions. I not only believed him, I took this lesson to heart.

After I finished writing The Bread Will Rise, I decided I wanted to write a Chamber Piece –a Chamber Piece is an old term for a story set in a single location. Why did I decide to write a Chamber Piece? Don’t know…. There is a part of this process I don’t want to investigate too closely. When I was younger I was concerned, sometimes afraid, the well of creative ideas would dry up. There are lot of stories out there that focus on blocked writers and none of them are happy. So I decided to write a Chamber Piece and I didn’t question that decision.

Next, I spent a lot time researching Chamber Pieces. I watched a bunch of movies, read a bunch of stories, and studied several plays. Yes, the work of writing is often really fun.

My second decision, which was based on my research, was to not be too rigid with my piece. The best Chamber Pieces, and I can take you through my data if you want, are the Pieces that leave the single location if the story would benefit from that shift. In the film Iron Door, the unnamed couple escape the vault the aliens put them in and the fact that we see that is good. In the film Buried, we stay with Paul even when I think the story would have benefitted from a cut to the CIA agent attempting to rescue him.

I won’t bore you with other examples, but I will say, even before I started outlining I decided that if the story needed to change location in order to maintain verisimilitude then that’s what I would do.

The next choice and decision had to then be location. What location would be interesting enough to set an entire novel in? It would have to interesting to both the characters and the audience. Or it would have to be interesting to the audience and the characters could be trapped their against their will.

While I was letting this problem marinade, I was listening to NPR (as is my general habit). That particular day a doctor was talking about how the best thing you could possibly drink after a long, hard run was chocolate milk. Chocolate milk, it turns out, has the perfect ratio of fats, sugars, and protein to feed a body that has just burned seven hundred or more calories in a relatively short amount of time.

I was uninterested in investigating this claim further, but I was very interested in the person who would drink milk after a run. I run (if you will allow a generous use of the word.) And I think milk would not go down well. Water for me please. Not too cold.

As I was listening to this NPR story I was driving to work and that drive takes me by an empty lot that is right in between a very real Wienerschnitzel and a less than clean Burger King on Highland Road in BR, La.

My first thought on this part of the drive is always how is that Wienerschnitzel still in business? I’ve been hanging around the LSU campus since I was child and I don’t know anyone who has eaten there, ever. My second thought that day, and probably other days, was a coffee shop on that vacant lot would make a killing.

I should say now that the lot in question has been vacant since the seventies despite a lot of construction on and around Highland Road. So it is probably vacant for a reason –gas line, Native American burial ground, spot of sandy soil that wouldn’t support a building. Something is very wrong with that plot of land. But I write fiction, so that didn’t matter.

I decided the setting of this piece would be a coffee shop near the LSU campus and one of the characters would drink Chocolate Milk on a regular basis.

Next, I imagined the perfect coffee shop. Or at least my perfect coffee shop. This is an exercise I use often. It comes from Plato’s Republic, a work I studied deeply in college. Plato was on the hunt for justice and he thought the best way to figure out what justice looked like was to imagine an ideal city state. Don’t worry, he said, about the practicality of forming this city state given various the political realities that existed at the time. Let’s imagine the ideal and then we’ll have a goal for which to aim. I really like that. And I imagine an ideal often.

So the Stillwater Café was born. It was named after one of my favorite children’s book heroes, who was in turn named after a Japanese Buddhist monk and teacher. The rest of the café is an amalgam of features from coffee shops around the country that I really like, plus a few features, like ‘the swamp’ that I always thought would be cool.

The café is an important, albeit silent, character in the story. As such it was generously detailed. Layouts. Finishes. Flaws that come with age. All noted before writing began.

Next I thought about my people. I decided very early on that the story would center around a couple who meets at the café for a regular ‘coffee’ date. This seemed like an easy, relatable way to keep the action situated in my one location. I quickly decided that my couple would not be a romantic couple, simply because in a good passionate romance our heroes would want to spend more time together than a weekly meeting could allow. They also might like to go on a date and stuff. So romance was out.

I decided to not make my couple the same gender for three reasons: 1) best friends lowered the general stakes unless one was dying or moving away. 2) Same gender relationships makes the entire book less relatable. I’m not saying women can’t read books about male friendship or that men would be uninterested in books about two girls chatting over coffee. I am saying, however, marketing is real. The search for an audience is real. I think selling a book written by a man that is about two women talking is a more difficult book sell than book written by a man that is about a boy and a girl talking.

To lower the romantic pressure on my couple. I decided a May, December relationship was the way to go. And to further reduce temptation I decided the December member would be the male figure and he would be deeply in love with his deceased wife.

In my experience and in my study of American fiction culture men are the more aggressive partners when it comes to introducing sex into a relationship. That is not to say women are passive and men are predatory, or that there are not a whole slew of interesting characters and stories about older women loving younger men. Again marketing is real and we in our role as writer, are allowed to use archetypes and cultural expectations to our advantage.

So older guy who is not interested in a romantic relationship. Finally to really close the door on my hero couple hooking up, I decided one of the main topics of discussion would be our heroine’s love life. If she is actively pursing a romantic relationship outside of our hero friendship, then neither character nor audience is going to expect or want our heros to hook up.

So at this point, after about six weeks of research and another week of hard thought and work I had a detailed location for my Chamber Piece and I had a very rough idea of who was going to populate it. The next step, of course, was to make some decisions about my hero couple.

For more on that process, tune in next week. Or if you’re not following along in real time, click the link at the bottom of the page.

As Garrison Keilor always says, “Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.”

Until next time,
cw