I’ve been to a string of bad author readings recently, which is a drag. I’ve attended dozens and dozens of readings, and the really bad ones always seem to fall into two categories:

Bad Reading Scenario #1: You show up on time, but nobody’s there. You wait. Three or four people straggle in. Finally the author shows up, half an hour late and looking like he’s been sleeping in the stock room for the past three days. He wanders up to the podium. He has to ask the bookstore staff person how to operate the microphone. Finally the author says, “Hey. Um … I wrote a book. I don’t know. I’ve never been to one of these things before. What do you want me to do? I guess I could read a passage or something.” He turns to the bookstore staff person. “Hey! Hey, do you have a copy of my book I could read from?” He turns back to the audience. “Or, I don’t know, I could answer questions, I guess. Any questions?” The audience is dead silent.

Bad Reading Scenario #2: Tons of people show up, but they’re all old friends of the author. The author shows up on time, but spends half an hour catching up with people and downing cocktails, so the event still starts late. Finally, completely hammered, she stumbles up to the podium and says, “Hey, everybody! I don’t know about you, but I find these things soooo boring, so I’m just going to read like a paragraph.” She reads a paragraph, then says, “I guess I’m supposed to take questions?” Someone in the audience asks, “What inspired you to write this book?” The author squints into the crowd and says, “Who’s that? Is that Chrissy? Oh my God, I haven’t seen you in forever! Hey everybody, this is Chrissy! We went to summer camp together! Wow! Wait, what was the question? What inspired me to write this book? You did, Chrissy! I wrote it for you! I love you, Chrissy! Woo!” A few more questions follow, with similar answers. Finally the author declares, “Okay, enough of this, let’s get back to the booze! Woo!”

Authors of the world, don’t let this be you.

It looks like I’ll be getting into T. C. Boyle’s graduate fiction workshop for the fall semester. Yay! To celebrate I’ll be buying this.

Steve Eley, editor of Escape Pod, has posted a list of authors who’ll be appearing soon on Escape Pod. Authors who’ll be making their first appearance on the podcast include Peter S. Beagle, David Brin, Neil Asher, Jay Lake, and Carrie Vaughn.

Ever since coming to USC, I’ve had this problem that there’s no place quiet and secluded where I can read. No matter where I go, from my apartment to the deepest recesses of the library, I’m distracted by the noise of chatter (particularly cell phone chatter), street traffic, or, in the case of my apartment, loud music and people continuously shouting, “Woooooo!” (In my bedroom, I have a loud fan facing the wall that I leave running 24 hours a day. That helps a lot.) I’ve tried music or earplugs to block out the noise, but I don’t find either strategy particularly relaxing or effective. Well, I finally hit on a solution I like better. From now on I’m reading everything out loud. That way, the sound of my own voice drowns out all the other ambient noise. This is obviously a lot slower than reading silently, but it’s better than not reading at all, and I think it helps me pay closer attention. It will also hopefully make me more practiced at reading aloud, which is a handy skill for an author to have. In fact, when I get a chance I’ve been popping over to one of the empty lecture halls to practice reading in front of an imaginary crowd.

I’ve also been hitting a lot of author events recently. I used to go to a few every week when I lived in New York, but when I moved out to L.A. I didn’t know where any of them were and I sort of fell out of the habit. I finally found a website that lists them all, and in the past few weeks I’ve been to see readings by Daniel Alarcon, Chad Kultgen, Lisa Lutz, Dana Sachs, and MFA students from CalArts and UC Riverside. Tonight I’ll be going to see Etgar Keret, whom I mentioned in my last entry.

Last week in my fiction class I learned a new x-point plot outline.

The one I already knew was this 7-pointer: A character (#1) in a place (#2) has a problem (#3). The character tries (#4) to solve the problem, complications (#5) ensue, and the character succeeds or fails (#6), which leads to a resolution (#7).

This new one is a 5-pointer, and is quite similar, but different enough to be worth mentioning: A character has a problem (#1). This problem evokes a need (#2). This need causes the character to take action (#3). In the course of this action, the character comes to a realization (#4). This realization leads to a resolution (#5).

I kinda like them both, so I just decided to combine them into my 10-pointer (plus I added #7): A character (#1) in a place (#2) has a problem (#3). This problem evokes a need (#4). This need causes the character to take action (#5). Complications (#6) ensue. The character makes a choice. (#7) The character succeeds or fails (#8) and comes to a realization (#9), which leads to a resolution (#10).

Well, I just finished copying out every single word of James Joyce’s Ulysses by hand into a series of spiral notebooks. I forget exactly when I started, but it was within the last two years. For some of you, this may require some explanation.

Basically, when I attended the Odyssey writing workshop in 2001, the instructor, Jeanne Cavelos, suggested that a worthwhile exercise might be to retype a short story by an author we admired and pay particular attention to how it was written. One problem for writers is that if a piece of writing is any good it sweeps you away into your imagination, leaving you with little or no awareness of mundane technical details such as verb choice, sentence length, or comma placement. Retyping a story forces you to actually pay attention to all that stuff. And I thought, hey, if retyping a short story is good, then retyping an entire novel must be even better. And if retyping an entire novel is even better, doing it by hand must be better still.

I discovered that not only was this very educational, it was also very fun, nay addictive. I found it very relaxing and also found that it put me into a mental state that was conducive to thinking over many things besides just the text in front of me. I did one entire novel, and then another, and then another, and then another. I started off with writers who wrote like me only better, then moved on to writers who wrote less like me but still great, then on to writers I didn’t actually even like but who were undeniably skilled. Which brings us to Ulysses.

I’d never read Ulysses. I’d never actually read anything by Joyce except Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I mostly disliked. (I’ve since read Dubliners, which I liked better.) My reasons for deciding to copy it out are now growing hazy after two years, but I near as I can recollect: 1) There’s a reference to it in Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber, 2) When I lived in Ireland, I was really struck by the fact that the Irish put a writer — James Joyce — on their currency, something that would never happen in America, 3) It was listed as the greatest novel of all time by the Modern Library, 4) Mike Canfield said he liked it, 5) Some famous writer I can’t remember was quoted as saying “We are all struggling to be contemporaries of Joyce,” 6) Some other famous writer I can’t remember said that Ulysses deploys every literary technique ever invented, which seemed like something good to know, 7) I once embarrassed myself in front of another writer when I got “Molly Bloom” confused with “Judy Blume,” and I wanted to make sure that never happened again.

Anyway, it’s now 3:17 a.m. and I’m off to bed. I may post more on this later. But for now … I’m DONE.

One of the assignments for my screenwriting class was to take a film we liked and break it down in a specific format, noting scene lengths, and seeing if/how the film conforms to a three act, eight sequence formula. Here’s one I did for Donnie Darko. (Warning: Obviously it contains a lot of spoilers.) I thought Donnie Darko would be an interesting challenge, since it’s such a quirky, idiosyncratic movie, but it actually fits the formula fairly well, with the inciting incident coming as expected around the ten minute mark and the emotional low point coming at the end of Act II. The eight sequence fit is a little uneasy, but it still kind of works. I did pick up a lot of things going through the movie like this that I never noticed before just watching it. One thing I noticed was how tightly plotted it actually is. I always thought of it as being a somewhat rambling, digressive story, but if you really look at it just about everything that happens is necessary to set up something that happens later.

Here’s the best writing aid I’ve come across in a while: a program that reads your story aloud to you in a sort-of human-sounding voice. You can even export the reading as an mp3 file and put it on your iPod. Then you can pace around the kitchen listening to your story, and if something strikes a wrong note, you can fix it and quickly export another audio file. This has a few advantages over working at the monitor: You get more exercise. You don’t wear out your eyes as quickly. You’re more likely to catch typos, since your eyes play a lot more tricks on you than your ears (at least, mine do). You also get a better sense of what the story sounds like when read aloud. This is important to me, because I’ve been trying to focus more attention on writing stories that work well when read aloud. After some very cursory poking around on the net, I bought NaturalReader, which works pretty well. (Someone else may know of some better and/or cheaper alternative.) You have to choose from a whole list of voices. I finally settled on “Audrey,” a female voice with a British accent. Audrey sounded slightly less grating than any of the American accents, which is important if you’re going to spend hours and hours listening to her. She actually sounds (to me) a lot like Victoria Tennant’s character in L.A. Story, one of my favorite movies. That is to say, her voice is kinda sexy. I admit that on a few occasions I’ve succumbed to the temptation to use her voice for non-writing-related purposes — that is, having her say stuff like, “David, I can’t stand it anymore! I have to see you! Fly to London tomorrow. We’ll have tea and crumpets in bed,” just to see what it sounds like. Anyway, having the computer read your story to you works really well. Give it a shot. So far the only real drawback is that I think maybe I’m starting to fall in love with Audrey.

I’m now planning on going to Readercon, so if you see me there say hi.

The prospect of seeing so many writers together in one place has gotten me thinking about some of my favorite movies about writers. Books on writing always tell you to “write what you know,” but then they also tell you not to write about writers, because writers writing about writers is bad. Personally, I don’t know what they’re talking about. I’m fascinated by everything having to do with writers and writing, and personally I love writers writing about writers. In fact, possibly the only thing that I would love more than writers writing about writers would be writers writing about writers writing about writers. Actually, my biggest complaint with stories about writers is that the stories always try to include romance and conflict and tragedy and boring stuff like that rather than focusing on much more interesting things such as writers dreaming up ideas, writers constructing plots, and writers rewriting sentences.

Anyway, without further ado, here are my Top 10 Movies That I Thought Up Off the Top of My Head Just Now About Writers:

1. Wonder Boys – A college professor struggling to finish his novel gets caught up in a madcap series of events involving his brilliant but troubled student.
2. Shakespeare in Love – Shakespeare is inspired to write Romeo and Juliet when he falls in love with a noblewoman masquerading as a boy actor.
3. Throw Momma From the Train – A writing teacher tries to teach one of his students how to write a mystery, then finds himself caught up in a situation right out of Hitchcock.
4. Adaptation – A writer struggles to adapt a bestselling book into a unique screenplay, while also humoring his brother, who wants to write a thriller.
5. Shadowlands – C.S. Lewis, author of Narnia, has his worldview challenged when he falls in love with an American poet and divorcee.
6. Finding Neverland – Playwright J.M. Barrie meets the family that will inspire him to create Peter Pan.
7. The Whole Wide World – A young woman befriends the awkward and troubled young writer Robert E. Howard, author of Conan the Barbarian.
8. Quills – The Marquis de Sade clashes with the church and society over his scandalously perverse writings.
9. Swimming Pool – A mystery writer staying at a French villa tries to get an idea for her next novel while dealing with the increasingly outrageous behavior of the owner’s daughter.
10. Finding Forrester – A young basketball star and writer befriends a recluse who turns out to be a famous novelist.

Well, that’s my list. Any terrific movies about writers that I’m missing out on?

It still amazes me how many people I talk to who don’t realize that you can use an iPod to listen to audiobooks. I don’t even know how I ever survived before my iPod + audiobooks. It allows me to combine two of my favorite activities — going out for a walk & reading a book — into one Voltron-like uber-activity. It allows you to exercise and get smarter at the same time. Back at USC I worked out a system that worked pretty well. I like to listen to a complete short story without interruption, so what I’d do is go out for a one hour walk and listen first to a short story, then fill up the remaining time with whatever novel I was working on. (Recently Stephen King’s The Cell and Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.) I get my audiobooks off Audible.com. Their selection of short stories is mostly classics, so I’ve been listening to a lot of those (Joyce, Chekhov, Saki, classic detective and horror stories). Here in the Netherlands, I’m living right next to a wooded park, and I’ve really been getting a kick out of heading out in the early evening and listening to a classic horror tale while wandering the woods. The setting sun and cool breeze rustling the leaves really adds to the atmosphere. A story I just listened to that I really enjoyed was William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night.”

Update: braintraumered correctly notes (in the comments) that MechMuse also offers audio content, and that they feature work by talented new writers. That reminds me, I configured my Myspace profile to play an audio clip of my fiction when you visit it, which I think is kind of cool.

I got into the classes I wanted, so this fall I’ll be taking a fiction workshop with Janet Fitch, who wrote the novel White Oleander, and a screenwriting workshop with Stephen Mazur, who wrote the Jim Carrey movie Liar, Liar. So I’m happy about that.

USC has a graduate writing contest going on right now. I entered my newest story, “Blood of Virgins.” The judges are two of my favorite contemporary short story writers, T.C. Boyle and Aimee Bender, who are on the faculty here. I hope I win something, but even if I don’t it’s a thrill just to think of those two actually reading something I wrote.

Last night Bobby Moresco, co-writer of Crash, came to speak to the program. He said a lot of great stuff. The thing that really struck me was his quote, “Being a writer is about being able to ask questions and then answer them.” I’ve heard this same idea before, but when he put it that way it just clicked for me in a new way. That’s what the creative process is: you start out with some interesting premise, character, or image and keep asking yourself why, why, why until an entire narrative emerges.

Speaking of questions, I received another piece of good writing advice recently. Erich Van Lowe, former head writer for The Cosby Show, taught my survey class for a few weeks. He said that the opening of a story should raise questions in the minds of the audience, so that they’ll stick with the story because they want to find out the answers to those questions. I asked if he could give an example, so he talked about the opening of the Lost pilot. You see a guy wearing a nice suit lying in the jungle. Instantly you’re intrigued. Who is this guy? Where is he? Why is he just lying there? Why is he wearing a suit in the jungle? Then he gets up and starts running furiously. Where’s he going? What’s the rush? Then he busts out of the trees and onto a tropical beach. He’s on an island. What’s he doing on an island? How’d he get here? Slowly the camera pans and you see crowds of people escaping the flaming fuselage of an airliner. The guy rushes to help, and you wonder, will he be able to save them? What caused the plane crash? What island are they on? By this point you’re totally hooked.

The other day in the bookstore I saw something I’ve never seen before. Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain,” basis for the hit film, has been published as a book. Just that one story. It’s really more of a pamphlet, but it’s got a spine and it’s shelved with all the other books. I’m glad for anything that increases the profile of short fiction. $10 is a lot for one short story, though the publisher must be figuring that the massive popularity of the title will overcome that hurdle, and they’re probably right.

Last semester, my film professor gave a piece of advice about writing that stuck with me. Like most good advice about writing, it’s straightforward and obvious and I’ve probably heard it a dozen times before, but for some reason this time it just clicked. He said, “All art must evoke an emotional reaction in the audience.” He paused. “I’ll say again, all art must evoke an emotional reaction in the audience. You can write a story with clever ideas and nice language and believable characters and a solid plot, but if it doesn’t make the audience feel anything, you’ve got nothing.”

And this semester, my nonfiction writing prof expressed the same idea in a slightly different way, “People react to what they feel, not what they think.”

And here it is again. For my novel writing class I’m reading All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. Willie Stark is an aspiring politician who gives speeches full of high principle and abstract ideas. The audience tunes out. Here’s an exchange he has with Jack, his assistant, who’s the narrator:

    “What we need is a balanced tax program. Right now the ratio between income tax and total income for the state gives an index that — ”
    “Yeah,” I said, “I heard the speech. But they don’t give a damn about that. Hell, make ’em cry, make ’em laugh, make ’em think you’re their weak erring pal, or make ’em think you’re God-Almighty. Or make ’em mad. Even mad at you. Just stir ’em up, it doesn’t matter how or why, and they’ll love you and come back for more. Pinch ’em in the soft place. They aren’t alive, most of ’em haven’t been alive in twenty years. Hell, their wives have lost their teeth and their shape, and likker won’t set on their stomachs, and they don’t believe in God, so it’s up to you to give ’em something to stir ’em up and make ’em feel alive again. Just for half an hour. That’s what they come for.”

One of my favorite novels growing up was Steve Gould’s Jumper, about an abused teen who suddenly develops the ability to teleport. I always liked that his power just happened, and no one ever knows why. This always struck me as elegant, and immensely preferable to trying to justify it with some preposterous and convoluted explanation. (You can see some influence from Jumper on my story “The Second Rat,” about a man who suddenly develops the ability to rewind time.) I signed up for the Viable Paradise writing workshop in 2004 in part because I wanted to meet and work with Gould.

So I was thrilled to see this announcement that he just sent around to the Viable Paradise mailing list:

I’ve been publishing for twenty-five years, a handful of short stories in the eighties and then 5.5 novels from 92 to the present. Early on I definitely had to have the day job and later on I definitely cycled through having a day job and not. (Health care is a bitch.)

But I just quit the day job again.

JUMPER, my first novel (1992) is being made into a big (and I mean BIG) motion picture from New Regency Films. Directing is Doug Liman, who made SWINGERS, THE BOURNE IDENTITY, and MR. AND MRS. SMITH. First screen play draft was written by Dave Goyer of BLADE and BATMAN BEGINS fame, second draft by Jim Uhls who did the screenplay for FIGHT CLUB. Budget is greater than the annual income of some countries. Filming begins this March and it’s projected to be a ‘big’ movie in the summer of 2007.

It is the literary equivalent of winning the lottery, but just keep this in mind. You can’t win if you don’t buy a ticket. Ya gotta write somethin’ and get it out there.

I’ve always thought that one of the most flattering comments for a male author to hear is, “You write such good female characters. You really understand women.” At least, I imagine that would be pretty flattering. No one’s ever actually said that to me, so it’s hard to say for sure.

Anyway, back in the fall of 2004 I was looking for some big, crazy, writing-related side project to embark on, and I decided that attempting to deepen my understanding of women’s perspectives would be a worthy endeavor. I decided to read tons of memoirs written by women. (Memoirs, not biographies, because the key thing was not necessarily what the person had done, but what she thought and felt about it.) My original crazy goal was to read a hundred. I just finished number eighty, and I think I’m going to declare victory. Eighty is a nice round number. This doesn’t mean I’m going to stop reading women’s memoirs altogether, but I’ll probably be reading them much less frequently. (I really need to start reading other stuff — like catching up on what’s been going on in the fantasy & science fiction field in the last year.) If, down the line, I do actually make it to a hundred, I can always declare victory again. (Though I promise not to declare victory again at like eighty-two.)

People always ask me, in regard to my big, crazy, writing-related side projects, “Did that actually improve your writing?” and I always say, “Man, I sure hope so. Because otherwise it was a huge waste of time.” I do feel that absorbing all those thoughts and feelings has improved my ability to portray female characters, and actually all characters, but I guess only time will tell. If you’re curious to see what I actually read, check out the complete list.

Two years ago I put together a page of “Notes on Prose” to use as lecture notes. Since then I’ve expanded it a bit, whenever I learn something new or get particularly irritated by some writer’s stylistic tic. I’m contemplating linking to it from my official site, though the page is still a little rough around the edges and could probably use more by way of explanation/introduction. Anyway, if anyone’s curious to see what I’ve got at the moment, it’s here.

Had my first Academy Series class tonight. We watched Gladiator, then had a Q&A with the guy who wrote it. Gladiator actually seemed a lot better than I remembered. My impressions watching it the first time were that it started out great, but that the final act dragged, and the final battle was anti-climactic. When I watched it on DVD, I found myself fast-forwarding through the dialogue to the action scenes. But watching it tonight, the pacing and balance really seemed fine. Maybe I’m just more accepting now, faced with the prospect of actually writing my own play and screenplay.

The Q&A was awesome. The writer was brutally candid about his experiences, and listening to him talk sure made working in Hollywood sound like hell. He freqently referred to studio execs as “fucking idiots,” and talked about one meeting where an exec asked him, “Could you rewrite it so that Russell Crowe’s character isn’t a gladiator?” He said that in his original script, Maximus returns to his family at the end, but the studio insisted that they be dead and out of the way right from the start, so the director introduced the afterlife concept as a way to preserve that part of the story. The writer was proud that the film portrayed a pagan hero and a pagan afterlife, something that would’ve never been permitted during the Roman epic films of 1950s. He talked about how the idea of Maximus rubbing sand on his palms before each battle came simply from a need to show externally Maximus’s decision to fight and live on after he’s first captured and made a slave. He said that everyone thought Gladiator would flop and ruin Russell Crowe’s career, and that Russell Crowe was furious with them the whole shoot for involving him in this harebrained project, but that that anger came across well on screen.

He also talked about some of his other films, namely Amistad and King Arthur. He said that his Amistad script had survived pretty much unscathed, except that the black slave was supposed to be the hero, and they’d made the white lawyer the hero instead, which he thought was a terrible mistake. He said that King Arthur was the worst experience of his life, because the original script had been brilliant, and they’d turned it into a ridiculous medieval Top Gun.

The funniest moment was when the professor who teaches a class on writing treatments asked him if he’d written a treatment for Gladiator, and he said, “Nah, I never do any of that shit.” He said that if a treatment is really required, he’ll write a first draft and then compress that into a treatment. When asked how he got his foot in the door in Hollywood, his answer started out like, “Well, I was banging this girl at Fox, and she put my script in the filing cabinet where a big-name actor saw it.” I guess that’s good to know.