Tag Archives: literature

Spillane’s Assault and Insult On Why We Read

Posted on by under books, dailies, fiction, Uncategorized, writing

Mickey Spillane, famous for creating Mike Hammer, wrote hard boiled, tough, sexy  crime novels. The stories were short, packed a violent punch, and were big sellers, popular with men, but not with the critics or the literary world. Spillane didn’t care. Like Hammer, Spillane was a tough guy too.

What he wrote on the first page of his novel My Gun is Quick caught my attention. It is something we readers and movie goers know, but ignore, pushing it to the back of our minds. But Spillane confronts us with the following:

“You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You’re doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else’s experiences. Fun isn’t it? You read about life on the outside thinking of how maybe you’d like it to happen to you, or at least how you’d like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the night of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it’s great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it’s all in books and not in reality at all and that’s that. Still good reading though. Tomorrow night you’ll find another book, forgetting what was in the last one and live some more in your imagination.”

Spillane is right of course, but what struck me, and it may not have been his intent, is that it seems an answer to his critics, a defiant explanation of why people read and that he is writing for what his readers want, that being action, plenty of it, and a dame of course, nothing serious, just another vicarious experience. Mike Hammer will get involved with some tough guys, get in brawling fights, but we never will. Hammer will help out some blonde, the type we will never meet. But we will live through it in our imagination.

But there is something else going on in the quoted passage. “Life through a keyhole,” is  a punch in our face, like a blow from Hammer, telling us we have a dull life. Therefore we get ready to “fill in a normal life. . .someone else’s experiences. . .you’d like it to happen to you. . . nothing like that happens to you. . .”

Spillane manages to tell us why we read and insult us at the same time. I like that in a tough guy. We need not take it personally. Howard Cosell said, “I tell it like it is.” So does Spillane. I read a book or two of his years ago, so long ago I remember nothing of what I read. But I picked up a used book that contained three of his memorable novels, I the Jury, My Gun is Quick, and Vengeance is mine. So the stories are there for when I need a vicarious thrill. And I will read someone else’s adventure and be happy.

reader

 

 

 

What should a writer pretend to be when writing dialogue?

Posted on by under dailies, e-books, fiction writers, language, Uncategorized, writing

Before I answer the question posed I want to set the scene before two characters talk.

In a short story I am working on, a man is walking down a hallway, stops in front of a door with a security window, punches a code into a keypad, and enters into another hallway.

I do not tell what the facility is, but through describing what the man sees in the hallway, like the color of the walls and what type of pictures or posters are hanging on the wall and using phrases like ‘institutional carpet’ and what he observes by watching people, some of whom are looking at a TV, though few seem to be comprehending, the reader should get the idea that the man is in a nursing home.

The man walks into a room where a woman is sitting and looking out the window. He pulls up a chair and begins to talk. So now we have  a setting. And now they must talk.

When faced with a conversation, especially an emotional one and one with a twist, and a conversation that must reveal character , a lot of thought must go into the dialogue.

You must know your character, know how he talks, and know his personality. What you need not know is how the conversation will end. If you chose to think of how it will end and write towards that end that works too. For me, I like to make it up as I go along. Like an improve actor.

If I know my character, then I can imagine the conversation. As I write I know the man is going to reminisce about two things. One will is about how happy he was when he got married and the other is the worst day of his life when his two children, home from college, are killed in an auto accident.

So, like an actor, I go with the scene. A writer must get into the character’s head and pretend to be the character. Writing fiction requires you, not to think, but to feel. A good actor feels the words, understands the emotion. Once you feel the emotion of the words, the dialogue flows. It did for me, usually does. And in this moment where the man says more than the woman he is conversing with I come up with something that makes it all work, including the twist.

You see, the man thought he was talking to his wife. The woman said that she was not his wife, that her children were not dead. She made short interjections, then asked him to call a nurse, three of four times she would break in and ask for the nurse.

When the nurse does come she sees the man and an empty chair.

The man was not in the right room, his wife is dead, the woman who lives in the room was watching TV in the activity area, and the man had dementia.

But you never say what the facility is. You never give the background like a reporter giving news. You reveal through descriptive imagery and through dialogue, imagining you are an actor, not on the stage, but on the page.

Finished imaginings of mine are found at the top of my web page and the e-books are available on Amazon.

Thanks for reading.

How Literature is defined 40 Years later. . . and Today

Posted on by under books, e-books, fiction, Uncategorized, writing

Do you know the meaning of literature?

Some may think the term literature is reserved for the works of great writers like Dickens, Twin, Dostoyevsky, Austen, Lawrence, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Melville, and on and on. Literature, I am sure these folks think, should be set apart from popular fiction, especially genres like westerns, mysteries, science fiction, and those romance books, that women love so much.

I have a college textbook I used while completing my Bachelor degree. It is called A Handbook to Literature and is essentially a dictionary of sorts, in that it defines words, phrases, anything you need to know about literature including distributed stress, four senses of interpretation, Gaelic movement, sublime, plot, and sometimes things that sneak in like five points of Calvinism. It covers everything you need to know about literature, poetry, and in between. But it is missing one thing.

How is it a handbook about literature does not itself have a definition of literature? The closest it gets is litterateur defined as a ‘literary man, one who occupies himself with the writing or criticism, or appreciation of literature,’ but there is no definition of literature.

In college I did not bother looking up the word as I believed it was a broad term for everything written, whether fiction, poetry, or plays. And I assumed the word literature was reserved for creatively written books of depth and substance with great incite into the human condition, not those from Louis Lamour, Mickey Spillane, Jules Verne, or one of those Harlequin romance things. 

Indeed, when I typed in the word in Google Search asking for definition I find ‘written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.’ But I wanted to know the etymology of the word, so I Googled further. The online etymology dictionary says this. ‘ early 15c., “book-learning,” from Latin literatura/litteratura “learning, a writing, grammar,” originally “writing formed with letters,” from litera/littera “alphabetic letter” also “an epistle, writing, document; literature, great books; science, learning” (see letter (n.1)). In English originally “book learning” (in which sense it replaced Old English boccræft); the meaning “activity of a writer, the profession of a literary writer” is first attested 1779 in Johnson’s “Lives of the English Poets;” that of “literary productions as a whole, body of writings from a period or people” is first recorded 1812.  

And there it is. Forty years after college. Did you see it? “Originally” (as in the beginning) “writing formed with letters.” Not epistolary letters, not the Scarlet Letter, but simply using letters to create words, that create sentences and thus writing. That seems to encompass everything, including those Harlequin things.

Of course literature is also used to describe the works of a period in the cultural period of a country. And we can further go into more usages, but I think, in the end I will let Ezra Pound have the last word.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. [Ezra Pound, “ABC of Reading”]

The following are my e-book contributions to literature of the 21st century, writing formed with digital platforms.

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