John Luther, Writer

The actor is first person to get blamed for a scene that falls flat. This is unfair.

Few things can ruin a scene like a poorly timed line. I was reminded of this a few nights ago while watching a performance of my own play. More than a few of my lines were real turkeys. My apologies to the cast.

This is why I think short dialog is better. Or at least harder to screw up. If you really listen to the way Americans talk in conversation, our sentences rarely break ten words or so.

The human ear is an amazingly sensitive instrument. If you’re of the realist school, as I am, 95% of the play is rhythm. It’s the playwright’s job to create dialog that sings. If so much as one syllable is out of place, he or she is setting the actor up for a stumble. If the actor manages to keep his or her composure, the audience will still hear it and be distracted.

Thanks again to the cast and everybody at Confetti Stage for the hard work they put into the 4th Annual Short Play Festival, and into my little play in particular. The script is now online (PDF, 48K) for those who asked to read it.

The writer’s worst but constant companion. I got another one yesterday for a short story.

The summer after I graduated college I worked for one day selling frozen fish door-to-door. The company assigned me to spend my first week training with their star salesman. I can’t remember his name so I’ll call him Don.

I met him early Monday morning at the warehouse and helped him load the chest freezer in the back of his pickup with boxes of frozen cod, salmon, shrimp, and an exotic new creature from Australia called “orange roughy.”

We spent the day cruising the upscale suburbs around Albany, stopping every few blocks to get out and knock on doors. Don pushed the orange roughy, hard. “Ma’am, have you had Orange Roughy? No? Not many people in this country have. It’s the most popular fish in Europe. Well, what an amazing fish, ma’am. It has a light, flaky texture but–I swear to God–tastes exactly like lobster.”

The housewives were not impressed. We sold nothing.

At lunchtime Don had to pick something up at his apartment. When we got there he invited me inside and disappeared into the kitchen. The only furniture in the place was a twin mattress on the floor in the living room. There were no curtains, no dishes, no pictures, no stereo, no television. The wall-to-wall carpet was threadbare and dirty. “Got it,” he said, waving an envelope in the air. “I need to mail this. It’s to my wife’s lawyer. Getting divorced.”

The afternoon went just like the morning. We must have knocked on a hundred doors and were turned away at every one. Most people were polite but a few were downright nasty.

At the end of the day Don asked me what I thought. “I don’t think it’s for me,” I said.

“Give it another couple days,” he said. “Always remember–every No is one step closer to a Yes.”

At the time, this struck me as the most pathetic thing I’d ever heard, especially considering the guy’s circumstances.

But now that I’m older I recognize the hard truth in this cliché, and I admire Don for getting up and packing his freezer every morning. When you’re a writer, rejection is a core part of your life. You have to believe that the no’s will someday result in a yes, or why bother writing it at all?

From a Harvard Magazine interview with Ian Frazier:

“I like to revise and retype,” he says. “A lot of bad writing is because people don’t have to retype. I like retyping.”

This raises a question I have often pondered: Has anyone written a novel that’s worth a damn on a computer?

The evidence is scarce.

I spent some time on my vacation rereading Fitzgerald short stories. It was fun but a mixed bag, overall.

“Babylon Revisited” was better than I remembered. Heartbreaking. An absolute masterpiece. Every fictioneer should aspire to write a story even half as good.

“Head and Shoulders,” “The Strange Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Offshore Pirate,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and many of the other well-known pieces, while replete with beautiful language and some compelling characters, seemed dated and ultimately kind of frivolous.

The stories that–barring “Babylon”–have held up best are the Pat Hobby stories. They’re poignant, funny, tragic, quintessentially American, and–to me, anyway–deeply moving.

These stories, when they’re written about at all, are dismissed as hack work that Fitzgerald cranked out for much-needed personal capital, or as pathetic . For example, consider these lines from a 1962 review in Time magazine: “The Hobby stories are no more than good copy, and occasionally, when the author’s wonderful facility wears thin, they are not even that. But their publication in hard cover rounds out the body of Fitzgerald’s work in print, and the bitter humor of the Hobby characterization is a fascinating study in self-satire.”

What a shame. Reading stuff like that compels me to defend these stories.

First, Fitzgerald considered himself a novelist. He always wrote short stories for the money–to fund the novels, which he wrote with much greater care. This is well documented in his letters, journals & elsewhere. The difference with the Hobby stories is that he was no longer in a position to demand top dollar, as he’d been in the 20s with the Saturday Evening Post. Critics forget that he was shamefully underpaid for the “classic” work he published in such venues as H. L. Mencken’s Smart Set.

Furthermore, if the Hobby stories were written solely as trifles, why did Fitzgerald write so many of them? In other words, if the guy’s aim was purely to write some fluff to generate income, he could have chosen a much more lucrative subject than a cynical, washed-up Hollywood screewriter with the ethics of a carnival barker.

Lastly, I don’t believe that Fitzgerald considered Pat Hobby–consciously or otherwise–as an alter ego for himself. The man was obsessed with and deeply understood caste systems, and arguably fewer caste systems were as rigid as those within the studios of 1930s Hollywood. Pat Hobby understood but constanty mis-played these systems, and as such was the kind of guy that Fitzgerald would have pitied. And whatever Fitzgerald’s failings, self-pity was not one of them.

Anyway, I’ve been recommending the Pat Hobby stories to people ever since my friend Colin recommended them to me over ten years ago. Whatever the circumstances under which they were written, they’re among Fitzgerald’s best work.

I’m still working on stories that I started in college. I graduated in 1993.

Today I dug out one that I drafted in 2003. It’s “complete” in the sense that it has a beginning, a middle and an end, but it’s far from finished. My revision history shows that I’ve worked on it every year since then. The first draft was about 3,500 words. The version that I worked on today is 2,600.

I can draft a story in a matter of hours. Revising the damn things is what takes so long.

All good writing shares a common goal: make yourself understood while holding the reader’s attention. That’s about it.

[Update]: If my definition is too simplistic for you, Jonathan Morrow has 21 more ideas.

I hesitate to bother with this subject, but I think a lot of people are getting bad advice about submitting unsolicited manuscripts for publication.

Note the key word, unsolicited. If you already have a relationship with an editor, by all means use whatever format they ask for.

If your work is good, it will get published. No editor of sizable skill or reputation will reject a manuscript simply because the margins are too narrow or you used a pound sign to indicate the end of your story.

Short of decorating your manuscript with unicorn clipart or setting it in an unreadable font (say, nine-point Comic Sans, which I’ve witnessed), there is very little you can do to turn off an editor reading slushpile scripts. It’s the slushpile–they expect it contain a lot of wacky stuff, but they also know that somewhere in that pile might lay some very good work.

I’ve read slushpile scripts for some top-tier magazines. Nobody gave a damn how the script was formatted or rejected one out-of-hand simply because it was set in Times Roman 11 instead of Courier 10-pitch blah blah blah. We read at least the first two pages of everything, no matter what it looked like.

I’ve also published stories in some decent magazines and had several plays performed. I have friends whose books have been published by very prestigious houses, and another who’s in the enviable position today of having to decide which of two top New York talent agencies he wants to represent his first novel.

I share one thing in common with all these people: We worry more about our writing than manuscript formatting.

The bottom line? Make it readable, and put your name and contact information on it.

In my opinion:

This guy gets it right.

This guy is trying to be helpful but is probably causing a lot of people unnecessary grief.

The play is cast, rehearsals start this Friday, so I guess it’s time to announce that The Confetti Stage in Albany, New York will present my one-act play “A Terminal Case” as part of their Fourth Annual Short Play Festival. Very exciting. More details as things progress.

Yet another book about irrationality:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121426594353898543.html

I’ll skip it, thanks. I’ve read & enjoyed Dan Ariely’s book and the Thaler/Sunstein treatise on the topic, but that’s enough for me. Most people who spend time among human beings don’t need a book to challenge efficient market theory.