What I Learned from Dead People (Mostly)

No. This isn't a post about me whipping out a Ouija board and contacting the dead, no matter how much I love ghost and horror stories. 

It's just that the bulk of my favorite writers tend to be of the "late" variety. I'm one of the oddball readers who doesn't just call a writer a favorite only because I like their work, but instead they become a favorite more because I learn something from them. I become a better writer because I read them. They influence, nay, infect me with their work. 

That said, I'm really working hard at discovering more living writers who have something to say to me about the craft -- something that isn't just a rehash of the lessons from the already dead folks. (Sure, call me a snob. I've earned it.)

Ernest Hemingway

Papa re-taught me how to write. I totally ignored Hemingway in high school when we read "Indian Camp" and "Hills Like White Elephants," but when I discovered him again in college and tackled books like The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, I actually paid attention. 

What I had thought was boring in high school, I later appreciated as direct, succinct, non-flowery. And I loved it. Then, when I took a class on short stories and revisited the Nick Adams stories (and Hills Like White Elephants), I realized I was seated at the foot of a master craftsman in the art of dialogue. He was the first writer I found who let people talk around the things they wanted to say instead of talk about them. 

And that is a lightbulb moment that has followed me in my writing ever since.

Zora Neale Hurston

Woman have the most important keys of all, according to Zora Neal Hurston, in her collected folk tales Men and Mules. Those are the keys to everything that drives a man to want for himself, the kitchen and the bedroom, food and sex, his belly and his, well, you know. 

Hurston never shied away from the truth of her world. Women didn't have the power they deserved. They were treated like second-class citizens, and if one was a black woman, it was closer to third-class, right behind black men. Still, she knew the power and pride and ability she owned as an African-American woman, and those things permeated her works. Their Eyes Were Watching God, even if divorced from her full body of work, shows the life of a woman who was willing to every tool at her disposal to live life on her own terms and to achieve personal freedom, even if she had to move from man to man to man to no man in order to do it. 

In short, Zora taught me about how who I am and where I am as a writer influence me. Those things make me the way I am. They contribute to my beliefs and my character and my ideals. And there's no reason to shy away from them just because I'm telling a story. Let them flow. Chase the things I believe in and trust the story to find others who believe in them too. 

Ray Bradbury

I can write whatever the hell I want. That's the lesson I learned from Ray Bradbury. 

Do I want to write a collection of science fiction stories? Then do it. Do I want to write a mosaic novel about growing up in a small town? Then do it. Or maybe a sci-fi pseudo-novel told in short stories? Go ahead. Time's a wastin'. How 'bout a horror novel? Sure. Go right ahead. 

Don't let the machine pigeonhole you. Pay no attention to the genre markers that tell you "Thou shalt not pass." The whole of the world of storytelling is your plaything. 

There are no areas of the map you can't travel to. And there's nothing the machine or the marketing department can do to stop you. 

Raymond Chandler

I'm going to be honest. I had never read a Raymond Chandler story until I started to write pulp. I figured at that point I needed to go back to the masters since most of what I saw in the magazines from the 1930s and 1940s was the equivalent of literary cotton candy (all fluff, no substance). Granted, a few stories and writers did stand out (such as Bradbury). But Chandler is the one I had heard put on the highest pedestal of quality. So I read The Big Sleep and The Little Sister. 

Let me tell you, Chandler was a natural step for me from Hemingway. He was just as direct, just as amazing with dialogue, but he was able to somehow turn a phrase without sounding flowery. He was able to work that stuff into character-building and not narrative fluff. 

To put it bluntly, I fell in love. Now, numerous books and movie adaptations later, I still am. 

But he didn't just teach me to tell an action story. He also taught me how to be a hopeful pessimist. He taught me that I didn't need to listen to folks telling me to write a "Hollywood happy ending" and that I could be true to my characters and the world in which they lived and still have a sort of hopefulness bolster the story from below (often from way, way down below). 

Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton taught me tone and setting. I couldn't read Ethan Frome without feeling the cold and experiencing the isolation of winter in Starkfield. Each word conveyed mood and contributed to a sense of vague hope-destroying atmosphere -- in spite of the budding happiness Ethan and Mattie feel toward each other. 

This bittersweet way of telling a story stuck with me, and it underlies a lot of my own work. People often tell me "How do you write such depressing endings when you're so optimistic?" I tell them that people don't learn things during good times. We're too happy experiencing them. It takes something tragic or life-altering to make us stop and pay attention. And the same is true from my characters. 

And that's a lesson I learn from Edith Wharton.

Flannery O'Connor

I don't advertise it a lot, but I am a person of faith. And that faith has been traditionally called Christianity. Granted, I'm also a deconstructionist and I've spent years deconstructing and rediscovering my faith outside of what common passes as such. But that's neither here nor there. 

The main point is that I am a believer with a personal faith. And I'm also a writer. And both of those things are okay even if I choose not to write stories about that faith -- and especially not stories that are attempting to convince others to believe the same thing I do. For the longest time, stories from Christians were only allowed to be evangelistic in some way or written in such a way that shows how right and true it is (and thus correct and better). 

Flannery O'Connor showed us a better way to tell stories as a believer. She was able to take the things she believed and weaved them into characters to show both positive and negative aspects of those who claim to believe. She was able to write about faith in a way that didn't alienate or belittle those who choose not to believe. 

I'd like to thing I've been able to follow in her footsteps, using my faith as a way of seeing the world when I right, rather than having to engage in evangelism or apologetics. 

Raymond Carver

Subtlety. 

The reality is that people often (to quote Thoreau) lead lives of quiet desperation. Yet, in our fiction we often prefer to write of grand gestures and big actions, where people perform life on stage so they can be seen from the nosebleed seats rather than merely living life. 

"But that's just more exciting," you say. "Stories have to be big. Characters have to be big." 

Raymond Carver took the directness of Hemingway and took it away from Spain and the War, and brought it into the quiet, homeland of a living room, a front porch, a car parked in a driveway. 

Carver believed that the small story was as important as the big story. The small inspiration was just as crucial to life and living as the big inspiration. The small change in character was just as critical as the big changes (the kind of world-changing stuff of the pulps and the movies). 

Carver taught me that in my stories, I should never neglect the small things. 

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Most people begin their Marquez journey with "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" or in college with 100 Years of Solitude. My journey, however, was different. I began in college with The General in His Labyrinth, and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what people saw in his work. Sure, the language was masterful and the story epic, but I'd seen that in lots of other writing. 

Still, I stuck with it, moving instead to his short stories. 

There I discovered two that remain favorites to this day, "The Incredibly Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Grandmother" and "Eva Is Inside Her Cat." Only after those did I read "Enormous Wings." 

What did I learn from Marquez? I learned about magic. I learned about wonder. I learned that stories can work best when the amazing sits down next to the commonplace on the same bench. I took that with me into my superhero stories for iHero Entertainment/Cyber Age Adventures, and it has also served me well in my pulp and horror stories. 

Ed McBain

The first time I read one of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels (at the suggestion of a friend -- thanks, Tracy!), I almost put the book down when I came across the first jump from limited third person (a standard in thrillers) to a sudden first-person account that hit without any warning. 

What the hell was this guy doing? He's breaking every rule or writing I've ever been told. 

Only... it worked. By damn, it somehow worked. It was as if I was the cop interviewing and interrogating the subject. 

And he did it inside a commercial thriller/police procedural story, not some artsy-fartsy literary work. 

So, yeah, McBain (Evan Hunter) taught me to break the rules. 

Shirley Jackson

I'll admit it. My first exposure to Shirley Jackson wasn't her writing. It was the original movie version of The Haunting. In fact, that was so near perfect, I was afraid to read the novel out of fear that it wouldn't measure up (yes, a backwards way of looking at the movie adaptation, I know). Instead I discovered her written work in a short story class in college where we read and dissected "The Lottery." 

Only later, did I buy multiple volumes of her story collections and finally read The Haunting of Hill House. 

I was expecting to learn how to write fear from Ms. Jackson, but that didn't happen at all. I learned to write character, real character, the beneath the surface character that hides below politeness and manners and put-on gentility. 

I had grown up with it and experienced it ("we may be hurtful, but we're sure polite about it, bless her heart"), but I had never thought to weave that fakeness of character into the ones I wrote. Instead I always had them pure. Good characters did and thought good things. Bad characters did and thought bad things. Maybe not all the time, but at least in the part of their lives they lived in my stories. 

Then when I watched her bio-pic, Shirley, I saw why she wrote that way. And it clicked. 

Langston Hughes

Sometimes the best thing, no, it's always the best thing to do, is to try on another person's shoes. I learned more about life from a non-white perspective from reading the poetry and short fiction of Langston Hughes than I could have learned in a hundred thousand pages of history books. 

But he didn't only make me learn them. He made me feel them. I felt the tone, the rhythm, the raw emotion of the experiences he wrote about. His prose, his poetry, his way with words was that strong, that masterful. 

Stories like "Passing" showed me what it's like to try to stand apart from your past. "Home" took me from the welcoming streets of Europe back to the racially charged South, where a classical master of the violin could be lynched for talking to a white woman. 

The most effective tool in my writer's toolbox is this lesson learned from Langston Hughes: Learn to write from another person's perspective. Get to know people. That's the only way to write them without sounding inauthentic. This comes from experience and connection, not research. 

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut taught me two major lessons. The first was to write what I damn well please and to throw away the rules. He defied everything from structure to shape to the way characters are portrayed, and he made it his own. He all but refused to re-use characters, or at least no to re-use them except at foils for others in a later novel (if using them at all). He disregarded the laws of science while writing science fiction stories. But he never disregarded the truth of his characters and their consistency. So, in a way, he broke rules in order to sustain the most important rule. Be true to your characters. 

Also, he taught me this. The experience of art is the goal. Not the commoditizing of art. In a letter to students, he wrote:

“Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem about anything, but rhymed. No fair playing tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possible can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?”

“Then tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded foryour poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”

Annie Dillard

Nature is our biggest metaphor. But it got a really bum rap after the romantics turned it into always having to mean something like love, the sublime, a spiritual teacher, or the nobility of the soul. It's like the line from U2's cover of "Helter Skelter" from the album Rattle and Hum: "Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We're stealing it back."

While Wordsworth and Shelley may have rambled about how flowers were transcendent images of the sublime majesty (or some other nonsense), Annie Dillard stole it back. Annie Dillard returned the real and the natural to nature in a way similar to what the Realists did with human nature and the meatpacking industry (thank you, Upton Sinclair!). 

Sure, she observed nature and pondered the spiritual, but it didn't have to be majestic or triumphant. A moth burning on a candle wick could be little more than the symbol for death that it is. An old snakeskin could be a metaphor for the way our old lives and new lives are knotted together. Or it could simply be a shedded snakeskin. 

She taught me to use the physical world in my details, just not to let it become something it isn't. 

Walter Mosley

Lest you believe my entire writing education has come at the feet of so-called literary giants, I give you Walter Mosley (himself no slouch in literary technique) to go along with the commercial talent of Ed McBain and (to some degree) Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled acumen. 

I only discovered Mosley in the past few years — certainly no more than ten at the time of this writing. Yet, what he has taught me is immeasurable. Mosely taught me world-building. I know, I know. World-building is something an author learns from high fantasy like Lord of the Rings or from epic science fiction series with long, drawn-out political groups like in Dune. 

Well, when you tend to write more grounded fiction like I do, you need a more grounded teacher, and that, hands down, is Walter Mosley. He showed me the real world, but not just that. He showed me how to incorporate the elements of it, positive and negative, helpful and harmful, commendable and condemnable, into the woven fabric of my fiction. I'd like to think it's a lesson I've taken to heart, particularly in my most recent novel, and in my Rick Ruby stories. 

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein has never shied away from using his work to express what he believes about the world and what it could perhaps be. He challenges almost every social, economic, and political norm alone in the pages of a single book, For Us, the Living. Then, if you add to that his magnum opus, Stranger in a Strange Land, and the gender-switching I Will Fear No Evil, you can't help but notice his social viewpoints. He addressed the politics or war in the military satire, Starship Troopers. 

Throughout his body of work, Heinlein taught me that my opinions on the world need never be put on hold or boxed away because I'm a writer. I don't have to hide them and keep my fiction innocuous or free from politics/social issues. No, if anything, he demonstrated just how much a good writer can change minds and influence a generation's way of thinking by including such ideas in entertaining stories -- even when they may not be the dominant point of view, perhaps especially when they may not be. 

Edgar Rice Burroughs/H. Rider Haggard

I'm lumping these two together because they're particularly similar writers with similar worldviews, and more importantly, they both taught me the same lesson. Regardless of their views that haven't aged well regarding racial issues, sexism, and the white savior trope, both told rip-roaring yarns. 

And that is something I must never forget. First and foremost, a story must entertain. It must tell some adventure, whether internal or external, and it must put a character or group of characters through trials designed to help them either change into a better self or fail to change.

They taught me the heart of pulp fiction, and despite my attraction to and inspiration from literary giants, I do believe that at its heart, any good, effective story shares shape and structure with the best of pulp fiction. Take a memorable character. Put him/her/them in a interesting predicament, and throw problems at them until they eek out success by the skin or their teeth or fail miserably. 

Dalton Trumbo

Dalton Trumbo may be the most unknown name on this list. Well, that is, unless you follow the history of Hollywood during McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Trumbo was a well-respected screenwriter of such classics as Exodus, Spartacus, and Roman Holiday. In addition to those he also wrote a powerful anti-war novel called Johnny Got His Gun (also made into a film in 1971). You've seen bits of it if you ever watched the Metallica music video for the song "One." 

What did I learn from Trumbo?

To stand firm. When called before the House Un-American Activities Committee while under suspicion for Communism, Trumbo remained stalwart. While many others among the Hollywood elite turned in the names of others to avoid being blacklisted, Trumbo did not.  In fact, he refused to testify. 

As a result, he was blacklisted and could only get work if he wrote under a "front writer" who got the credit instead of him (that happened with each of the above listed films). Only in 1960 did he get credit for writing Spartacus and Exodus, and it wasn't until 2011 that he got full credit for Roman Holiday. 

However, he never betrayed his integrity, nor did he ever stop telling stories. And in the end, he won. 

Donald Westlake

A three-time Edgar Award-winner and a Grandmaster of the Mystery Writers of America, it's difficult to find a way that Donald Westlake hasn't impacted and influenced crime fiction. He certainly has influenced mine. 

A caveat though: When I talk about his influence, I'm specifically referencing his stand-alone works, not his series work with Parker and Dortmunder. 

Westlake's characters are dream stuff. They don't just have feet of clay; they wallow in hearts of clay and brains of clay. These are people with faults, but often people trying to do the right thing -- at least as they understand the right thing to be defined. 

Westlake is a refresher course in the hero with an individualistic moral code that he/she/they define and set the rules for and boundaries of. Good or bad, giving or greedy, they play by their own rules, and ALWAYS play by them, come what may. 

So, yeah, Westlake taught me that the best, the most intriguing, the most compelling characters are colored with so many shades of gray that it's almost impossible to dump them into simple boxes like "good" or "bad."