Writing is my Ibuprofen

Writers. They have notably different outlooks on pursuit of the craft. Some find it experiential, some experimental, some a spiritual calling, some an organic event like a hard round avocado pit splitting to root.

I see it as none of these …  or anything close. Writing is my ibuprofen, my hashish brownie, my dream within a blueberry patch. It turns lead into gold. Day into night. It is alchemy. It is ecstasy. Moreover, it is logical. It sets the world straight like the heady effect of a Cuban cigar.

It has me really well placed.

Before I took up writing, I never knew what sense to make of the world. Such a chaotic miasma of hopes and dreams, car wrecks and body odor.

It gave not a single clue as to why it had to exist as it does, and so for me it fell agonizingly short of any damn usefulness.

Ah, but I was so wrong.

This spinning, orbiting vomituous mess has a thousand and one uses if you are a writer. What used to provoke me to anger and frustration now fuel the reversals in my 3-act sequence. What used to lift me to dizzying heights of disconcerting joy now prop up the delusions of my protagonist, antagonist, hero and heroine. It sticks to the children’s shoes with humiliating bathos, comes out of their eyes like the white light of genius and castigates evil like rants of the righteous.

I finally took what I saw and experienced and made it my own. This one move changed everything.

Now at last I have the patience of a saint.

~ ~ ~ ~

Yes, my love, you were terrible in bed, but don’t worry yourself; it will all get worked out by the middle  of chapter twelve.

On Casting Villains 2

The Complicity with Evil

He is malfeasant — but he is adored.

It is a workable formula for a villain of evil — deepening evil, who, hidden behind a scrim of appearances, leaps out to seize the unsuspecting reader. His attributes  — shudder! — resemble our own.

He loves dogs. He has a passion for finery. In public a gentleman, in private an ogre, the mastermind of criminal suffering on a very large scale.

This could be one of any number of men we see standing around us. A monster that’s human, a man that’s a monster.

Did you ever notice the majority of villains are men? In fiction? In life?

“Nosferatu the Vampyre” played by Klaus Kinski, 1979

Dracula loves beautiful women, even though the blood of any old human would do. His passions and ours resemble each other. This invites our complicity.

Silvio Berlusconi

Politicians always do pretty in public and ugly in private. What’s more, we know it; but again and again we are taken in by the fellow. He will poison the water and doom all our children — he will leave the country in a disastrous state — but we are not better; we are complicit. We trust him. We want him. We let him inside.

__________

Ilse Koch with her charming husband.

So much for the men. A woman too is capable of grand villainy, yet an author must have a reason to explain it away. She must have a reason.

The so-called “Beast of Buchenwald” or “Witch of Buchenwald,” Ilse Koch, was legendary for her sadism and murderous designs on the Jewish inmates at Buchenwald and Majdanek concentration camps.  Hers would not be a matter of the reader’s complicity … but of a whole nation.

That she made lampshades out of the tattoos of her victims is perhaps only a media fabrication … but the image does suit her completely. She had several other unsavory traits, one of which was proven by the Nazis themselves: that she was a crook.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

With a man, however, you don’t need a reason. Interesting, no?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So complicity can be very effective. A character that makes us complicit in his or her evil, at least through the first act, will make an odious villain indeed.

Then there’s the question of who’s the more evil.

In the Godfather saga, Don Corleone is known to be a dangerous man. He’s a mobster. Why, a guy could get killed. His antagonists, though, are more evil still.

Sollozzo. “Blood is a big expense.”

The Tattaglias. “He sleeps with the fishes.”

Barzini. “He must let us draw water from the well.”

• – –

Don Corleone: “I never knew it ’til now … but it was Barzinni all along.”

________________________

~ ~ ~

Be sure to check out the cadre of villains I feature in my historical intrigue, Of Heat, of Blood, of Gold, available on Kindle Publishing

(for all devices!)

On Casting Villains

I will readily say it. Contemptible people make great antagonists.

And the monsters in life, (the boss from hell, the misanthropic landlord, the demagogue, evil schemer or tyrant, born-too-cruel people who bring misery into the picture of life) make excellent villains.

But not exactly, not verbatim, not a carbon copy is the villain the skilled writer creates. Frankenstein monsters of nasty mean people are what people the better cut of stories, amalgams much more useful than perfect reflections from life.

It is the perquisite of our function as artists. Horrid people should really watch their behavior around artists. They who walk our nightmares and make each day difficult may well have their vituperation and denigration and repellent physicality chiseled into a slab of literary stone.

Or ought to.

• – – –

 

There is a legend, true to all accounts, that while painting his fantastic Sistine Chapel frescos, Michelangelo was forced to endure the acidic critiques of the Pope’s master of ceremonies, Biagio da Cesena. The venomous Cesena opined that the depiction of so many nude figures were more suitable for a public bath house or tavern than they were for a sacred chapel. Michelangelo responded by working Cesena’s face into the depiction of Minos featured in The Last Judgement. We can still see him today, complete with asses ears, his cellulite ridden nude body clothed only with an entwining viper.

Cesena brought a complaint about this treatment to the pope. The pope only joked that his own jurisdiction did not extend to hell, and so the portrait would have to remain.

Do not, however, make the mistake of admitting publicly who inspired your dastardly villain. We artists are too disempowered to afford the cost of a libel suit. Play it safe: change the names, never make an ID, and disavow, disavow, disavow.

By the way, I did not mean a single word of the preceding blog entry. — KN — 🙂

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Check out my own choice of villainous characters in my first novel in the series “The Byzantine Fables,” OF HEAT, OF BLOOD, OF GOLD … for Amazon’s Kindle and other devices.

 

On dynamic plotting in writing

Plotting is a less mysterious and treacherous endeavor when one keeps in mind what reasons there are for the ensuing action, speech, choices: those things that reveal to the reader aspects of the characters’ nature as they grapple with, scheme, or resist the actions taking place around them.

John Howard Lawson wrote excellently, if obliquely, on this subject. He called the initial reason for the story the Root Cause. The Root Cause might have been born out of a Root Action, or it might have instigated a Root Action. This chicken-and-egg argument matters little, because in a story Root Causes and Root Actions engender further causes and actions, like the branching out of a tree, just as they do in life.

Imagine these things in our lives. Someone who loves you all at once rejects you.

The rejection, a Root Cause, might lead to Root Action. You might choose to write that someone a letter, or go have a stiff drink, or jump in a car and drive all night long. The exhaustion of driving all night might engender a breakdown, evoking a monologue, a dialogue, or some action that the character might not otherwise make; thus the exhaustion becomes a lesser Root Cause, born of the Root Action of reacting to the initial Root Cause.

The love itself is a thing born previously of certain conditions, aspects of the people involved, previous actions. A story has to start somewhere, so we are free to choose what the original Root Cause for the story might be, regardless of the backfield info, (though we might very well utilize that too.)

I would not suggest this is all there is to plotting, not in the least. One must study conflict as it engages human nature, hone dialogue that reflects the characters we invent, and arrange these aspects of drama (or comedy, if you will) into an ever-developing sequence that the reader can grasp and become involved with.

Fiction, of course, differs from real life in many ways. Real life often has no “obligatory scene,” no satisfying conclusion to a mounting series of events. Lawson addresses the artifice of creating a dynamic plot. But let’s look at how life differs on the face of it.

President Kennedy, moments before his death

When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a nation was thrown into turmoil and remorse. The turmoil and remorse were Root Actions born of a Root Cause, which in turn was the action of the assassination.

(Jim Marshall Photography LLC)

But to this very day, we can only guess the reasons why he was murdered, let alone come to terms as to whether there was a far-reaching conspiracy, and the reasons why the events played out as they did.

Thus we lack a Root Cause of the assassination as Root Action. And what was the action preceded that hour to provoke the assassin (or assassins) to commit such a foul deed? Here one can see how life differs from fiction. An assassination in fiction should always has a root cause, or serve as one for the characters. Fiction, you see, supplies the answers that are lacking in life.

As you read this, you might feel a pang of hunger. You put aside this blog for a moment to find some lunch. You order some food. Hunger is the Root Cause of the action: ordering food.

But then, as you sit eating in the diner, in walks the love of your life, a great unrequited and painful affair. Here is the start of your story, but don’t be confused. The hunger was a lesser Root Cause. The real Root Cause is… well… you tell me.

More on this later… after lunch.

 

 

 

 

A thought I had

Memory distances us

from the present

for a moment which is stolen

to pay

for memory

 

The Deleted Medieval

A Self-censored Genre —

 

Joan of Arc

It had all worn thin on me. The search for the Grail, the legend of Excalibur, and the maddening exclusion of characters as true to life as they were to their hearts — such as St. Joan of Arc .

(Excaliber, anyway, was nothing but a boast: there were much better swords being made in Russia at the time.)

Russian sword — 11th century AD

 

King Richard the Lionheart, as he never looked

Because of the legends and their place in the mind, the factual Middle Ages have become eroded by fancy. The real characters who walked the old world have been written out to make way for the valorous knight, the Crusading hero, the ladies as pure and substantial as chalk.

The offending novelists chose as their model the puffery of the nobility at the time. Hyperbole set down as “legend.”

Take, for instance, the pope. It was indeed he who proclaimed the Crusades. Look closely at one in particular: the instigator of the Fourth Crusade. We see he was not the “Good Shepherd” that we find in the Pope Francis of today, but the cunning and heedless egomaniac that was Pope Innocent III:

Pope Innocent III

In the year 1200 AD, there was no more powerful man in the West. Oddly, in nearly all of the popular Medieval pulp, he never rates a mention.

The popular pulp also chronically omits the role that Byzantium played throughout the Middle Ages. The Byzantine Empire was an engine of culture, an arbiter of taste, and most importantly the middleman between the unrefined West and an empowered Middle East.

St. George — from the Vatopedi Monastery, Athos — 11th c AD

 

Hagia Sophia, Constantinople

All the riches of the earth flowed from East to the West, and Byzantium kept the balance between the two sides in check. Once the Fourth Crusade had decimated Constantinople (in 1204 AD), the world was left with the conundrum we still have today: two worlds at odds with no pivot in the center.

The Byzantine Empress Theodora

Byzantium, not the Grail, is the true lost treasure. That is why I chose it as the backdrop for my Fables.  I might have chosen a fictional fantasy-land, where  new intrigues, passions and sensuality reign, but why bother. Byzantium was mine for the taking.

More on this later, and more in Book Two of The Byzantine Fables.

 

 

 

My Book Covers

Illustrating The Byzantine Fables

I would like to take this opportunity to thank artist Tim Milk for the beautiful cover design on the first title of the Fables series, Of Heat, of Blood, of Gold.

He created this likeness of the character of Princess Zoe, and handled the design and typography as well.

The chapter insignias (below) are also his work. They do a great job of alerting the Kindle users as they flip between chapters of the novel.

 

Find Of Heat of Blood of Gold here!

Just Released: Of Heat, of Blood, of Gold

The Byzantine Fables — Book One

 

I am pleased to announce the publication of the first book of my series “The Byzantine Fables,”  Of Heat, of Blood, of Gold, exclusively on Kindle.

The Byzantine Fables are indeed fictional tales that offer the reader a maxim. But there’s no need to fear. The moral has been buried — comfortably deep.

Also, you will not find the speaking animals used by Aesop in his fables. They have all been replaced by their human counterparts.

Since the first book of the series, Of Heat, of Blood, of Gold is only loosely based on actual events, I offer a half-hearted apology to students and experts of medieval history. My excuse for appropriating history is a good one: actual history has no conclusion. The plot is disjointed, and the obligatory scenes are too heavy-handed.

When it comes to remote periods of history, most  accounts are piecemeal. None of it ever adds up; so I roll various people into one, stack events and their dramas to suit my story and thus fill the gaps.

History’s flaws have only one cure. Fiction.

— You can find the ebook on Amazon here:

• http://www.amazon.com/dp/B018PX4X8S