You Book Snob, You

Sometimes we forget how isolated we are, as readers and/or writers, I think. We’ve surrounded ourselves with like-minded folks, folks who we feel a bond with because we share many of the same loves, literary and otherwise.

In my case, most of the people I talk to (on line and in so-called “real life”) are speculative fiction fans, crime fiction geeks, pulp afficiandos, western readers, horror-hounds, etc.

Basically, people who enjoy GOOD WRITING.

So I’ve gotten used to seeing posts on the old FB about stuff I like and am interested in. I’ve grown accustomed to hearing the latest snarky but spot-on slam against whatever the latest literary fad/atrocity is rocking the world’s boat. Because of that, I’ve become a little removed from the tastes of the average casual reader.

Case in point: yesterday alone, on the social medias (and forgive me for referring to them so often; they really make up a good ninety percent of my interaction with the rest of the world) I saw four different things poking fun at or dissecting that 50 SHADES OF GREY book. I’m fine with that—it is, after all, just the latest in a long line of hugely popular books that most people with taste like to make fun of, including me.

But…

Also yesterday, a friend of mine who is NOT a writer or even a constant reader posted about how much she was digging 50 SHADES OF GREY and couldn’t wait to read the next one. A whole shitload of folks liked her post and commented in absolute agreement. They were amazingly enthusiastic. It sort of reminded me about how insulated we are as so-called serious readers. We are the minority, big-time.

And maybe we’re even snobs? It’s totally possible.

But is being a snob about reading necessarily a bad thing?

We’ve all had this conversation:

“Hey, have you read NAME OF LATEST BLOCKBUSTER NOVEL DESIGNED FOR NON-READERS BEFORE THE INEVITABLE MOVIE TIE-IN?”

“No, I haven’t read that.”

“What? But I thought you were some big reader. You should check it out, I’ll lend you my copy.”

“No, that’s okay. It’s not really my thing.”

“Oooh, I see. Not cool enough for you? Man, you’re such a literary snob. You haven’t even read it but you’ve already judged it, right?”

There’s nowhere to go with that argument. They’ve got you dead to rights. You ARE a literary snob.

Or, in other words, you are someone who has read enough that you know what’s going to work for you and what won’t. You have developed enough sense to spot crap from twenty miles away. You have a fully-functional bullshit detector.

You don’t need to be gored in the testicles by a bull to know that it’s something you won’t enjoy, not one bit.

Addendum: A couple weeks ago, my friend Jason Stuart wrote a great blog post about this same subject. Read it here: Yeah, but have you read it?

So to the fans of disposable flavor-of-the-season fiction, you’re a snob. So be it. There are worse things than being a snob.

The irony of that is that readers of what we refer to for lack of a better label as serious literary fiction turn their noses up at us genre fiction fans.

Here’s another conversation you’ve probably had:

“Hey, Mr. Lit, have you read GENRE CLASSIC THAT WAS CALLED TRASH WHEN IT FIRST CAME OUT 60 YEARS AGO BUT IS NOW TREASURED BY PULP GEEKS EVERYWHERE?”

“Uh, no. I don’t think so.”

“I’ll lend it to you.”

“Save it. I don’t read lurid, plot-driven stuff, only character-based, non-linear narrative with no punctuation and pages and pages of interior monologue.”

Seems we’re only the second tier of snobbery, us genre fans (although I should point out that I don’t dismiss so-called literary stuff the same way I dismiss flavor-of-the-season stuff—maybe I don’t know my literary place or something.)

My point is this: we are right. The lit types and the pop-trash types on either side of us are wrong. It’s okay to say it out loud, even if it does isolate you. I for one would rather be isolated with readers with good taste than roaming amongst the herds who don’t get it.

Cutting to the chase and other things

Who the hell does this Lowrance guy think he is, giving writing advice? He's not exactly burning up the best-seller charts, is he? You know who SHOULD be giving writing advice? That James Patterson guy, that's who, or maybe that chick who wrote that 50 Shades of Masturbation book. Those are writers who know how to deliver what the people want, right there.

So okay, if your goal as a writer is to sell lots and lots of books and become famous and make movie deals and appearances on Oprah, I'm not your man. Can't help, because I don't know the first damn thing about how to get to that point in a career.

But if you want to write solid short stories, well, I've picked up a few things, mostly from writers who are better than me. But they've worked for me. Here are some of them.

Cut to the chase. You know those scenes in TV shows where, when a scene ends, they transition to a shot of , say, a hospital, before catching up with the characters INSIDE the hospital? Just to give you a heads-up on where the next scene is going to take place? Have you ever really required that shot of the hospital? Transitional scenes are just clutter, usually. The reader doesn't care about Jack's scenic drive from one key scene to the next, while he contemplates all the stuff he just learned in the previous 4 pages. To keep a short story really moving, end a scene with a break, and then dive directly into the next relevant moment.

Keep descriptions of people and places brief. I mean, really brief, as brief as you possibly can. Unless Lulu's appearance is really, truly unusual, a single sentence should do the trick. If your character finds herself in a doctor's waiting room, you don't need to describe the color of the chairs, the paintings on the wall, the magazines on the table-- unless, of course, by describing those things you're revealing something relevant about your character (maybe she's weirdly compulsive and counts how many copies of Entertainment Weekly are in front of her, I dunno). One nice trick to describing a room effectively, I've found, is using smell. That's a sense that we often forget about when writing, but it's amazingly evocative. "The waiting room was small and close and smelled like a stable." Ta-da, done.

Ease off on the internal monologue. One sure way to slow a story down and bore the reader is to indulge in a character's introspection and soul-searching. Especially in a short story, nothing kills the momentum more thoroughly. Consider this: when Hammett had to have the Continental Op ponder his current situation, he handled it by writing something like, "I stood by the window, gazed down at the street, and thought my thoughts." That was it. And it totally did the job. We don't need to know everything the character is thinking. All we need to know is that he's thinking. The rest should become apparent by what he does.


Kill all adverbs. You've heard this a million times, I know. And some of you STILL fight this one. "But sometimes adverbs can be useful, not all of us want to be Ernest Hemingway and besides adverbs are colorful and friendly and they MAKE ME FEEL LIKE A WRITER!!" No. Stop it now. While the occasional adverb might be useful, your best bet is to not second-guess where their usefulness will reveal itself and instead kill, kill, kill them. I promise, it will make your story tighter and more emotionally resonant. And while you're at it, try to stick with "said" for dialogue attribution. "Grumbled", "replied", "countered", "argued"... these are all weak compared to "said", and if you're doing it right, the reader will get the tone.

By that same token, mortally wound all similes and metaphors. You aren't Raymond Chandler. Nothing pulls me out of a story more than the writer exerting his writer voice, some clever little metaphor comparing the dame's hair to the after-effects of a nuclear holocaust or the fella's eyes to a pair of black licorice jelly beans left on the sidewalk. These are the sort of things that remind the reader that they're reading a story. And it's especially bad if you're trying to describe something rather complex-- like, say, a fist fight. The more complex the scene is, the more careful you need to be to use clear, brief language and short, declarative sentences.

Watch your tense. I actually see this a lot. Beginning writers have a strange tendency to lose track of whether a scene is past tense or present tense (and sometimes even future tense!). Jack either "went" or "goes". Pick one and stick with it.

Finally...

Don't moralize. If your story is in third person-- hell, even if it's in first person-- don't tell me that Jack is a bad, bad man. He's a rapist and a killer and a puppy molester, I get it. I don't need the author to point out that he's an immoral, one-dimensional bastard. In fact, why don't you show me another side of him? Why don't you show me Jack taking care of his invalid mama before heading off to drown some kittens? That would actually make him interesting. But whatever you do, don't judge your own character. That instantly makes him a cartoon.

So there you go. Using these tips, I've managed to clear over a hundred dollars this year in my illustrious writing career. Fame and fortune, baby. It all comes down to keeping the story moving and giving us fully-fleshed out characters.

Or you could just go the James Patterson route, I guess, and hire someone else to do it for you. Or write some cheesy, derivative porn, that works too.

The Long Black Train

Hawthorne: The Long Black Train is now available on Amazon.

"It's Hell on Wheels. A simpering madman, possessed by dark magic, transforms the night train into a rolling charnel house. And Hawthorne is about to come face-to-face with an evil beyond imagining.

Sweet-natured, life-affirming stuff

Some stuff I want to mention:

The anthology PULP INK 2 is out as of today, and I highly recommend it. From the awesome Snubnose Press, it's edited by two of my favorite writer/editors, Nigel Bird and Chris Rhatigan. The contributors list is pretty much a who's who of the best voices in genre fiction these days-- it's got stories from:
Julia Madeleine,
Eric Beetner,
Mathew C. Funk,
Richard Godwin,
Patti Abbott,
Katherine Thomlinson,
Andrez Bergen,
Christopher Black,
R. Thomas Brown,
Court Merrigan,
Kevin Brown,
Mike Miner,
Cindy Rosmus,
James Everington,
W.D. County,
Kieran Shea,
Joe Clifford,
BV Lawson
...and finally me, your loyal and steadfast hack.


My story is called "My Life with the Butcher Girl", and it's a sweet tender love story that will tug at your heart-strings. Fact.

Also, today is the last day "That Damned Coyote Hill" is free. I thought yesterday would be the last free day, but I was wrong, a condition that happens with alarming frequency.

Tonight, Beat to a Pulp will publish on Amazon the second Hawthorne weird western, "The Long Black Train", and I promise you that it is weirder, bloodier and crazier than the first one. Hope you pick it up.

Hawthorne: That Damned Coyote Hill out now

David Cranmer and Beat to a Pulp have re-released the first Hawthorne tale, "That Damned Coyote Hill", on Kindle, as of now. It's .99 cents, but I believe it'll be free for a few days, starting tomorrow, if you want to save yourself a buck.

"The Long Black Train", the second Hawthorne tale, should be out in a week or so.

Thanks, friends, for your enthusiasm about the character of Hawthorne and his dark, Weird Western adventures. There's lots more to come.

Technical Difficulties?

For the five or six of you waiting patiently for the re-release of "That Damned Coyote Hill", apologies. It was supposed to roll out on Friday, but technical issues at Amazon have delayed it. The big power outage and all that. I've been checking it pretty compulsively all weekend and this morning, and still nada. I had a big push for it ready to go over the weekend, but so much for that.

I'll let you know as soon as it's up.

Fictional Rebels

The most heroic characteristic a human being can have, I believe, is the complete unwillingness to submit his/her will to anyone or anything. My heroes in fiction and film tend to be the ones who don't do what they're told, who kick constantly against the pricks and refuse to bow. Is this slightly infantile of me? Yeah, probably. But I don't care. It's what I respond to.


In real life, all of us submit in one way or another. We sorta have to, sorry to say. Whether it’s to an employer, a relationship, a personal god, the government, whatever. Partial submission is part of that social contract we have with the world. And that’s probably why some of us balk and fidget when we feel constrained by other things, things that we feel we can actually control.

Even in the movies and in literature, the heroes who don’t back down usually meet tragic ends. They die, or even worse, become part of the machine. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, but I choose to think that the lesson is this: death is the trade-off. The hero lived life free.

It’s why I like that Tom Petty song “I Won’t Back Down”, or even John Mellancamp’s “Authority Song”. It’s why I was drawn to punk when I was a kid.

Here are some of my heroes who refused to submit:

Cool Hand Luke. 

What drove our boy Luke to struggle against his restraints when everyone else gave up? What made him attempt escape over and over again, when he knew it would eventually end in tragedy? He was the very embodiment of the slogan, “Give me liberty or give me death.”

Huck Finn. 

Huck wasn’t even aware that he was kicking against authority. He wasn’t a conscious rebel. And his mind was still enslaved, in some ways, by the bigotry of his time. But in his gut, Huck knew that THEY were wrong and HE was right.

Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”. 

Another prisoner, like Cool Hand Luke, who valued his freedom above all else, even life. He attempted escape from the concentration camp so many times, and was re-captured and sent to solitary confinement that he became known as The Cooler King.

Tom Horn.

McQueen again, playing the real life role of a man who valued personal freedom and integrity so much that he was willing to go to his death for it.


Marlon Brando in “The Wild One”. 

What are you rebelling against? What do you got?

Zorro. 

Don Diego de la Vega dons a disguise to fight the oppression of the peasants by cruel Spanish rulers in colonial era California.

And then, of course, there’s the “real people fictionalized” category—historical rebels like Pancho Villa, Spartacus, William Wallace.

I’m sure there are tons more I’m not thinking of, iconoclasts and fighters who value independence and free will more than life itself. Who are some of your favorite rebels?