Don't press

 In my WIP I have at least two major issues I need to deal with before I can move forward. The temptation is to dig and dig at the problem in order to make the solution come out of where it’s hiding in the subconscious. If that’s what it’s doing.

I’ve worked on both issues, jotting notes down about them, thinking about them while walking and so on. No solution has yet appeared. Not a workable one anyway. I have to be willing to say to myself: ‘This isn’t the answer – yet.’

I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Shadow of a Doubt again last night. This will be the third time I’ve seen it. Quieter in its menace than some of Hitchcock’s movies, it nevertheless has a very menacing character at its centrem played by Joseph Cotton. One of the other actors in the film is Hume Cronyn. This was his first movie, and he went on to make a second with Hitchcock, Lifeboat. He also contributed to the scripts of two others, Rope and Under Capricorn.

In the superb Hitchcock biography by Patrick McGilligan, Cronyn talks about working on the script of Rope with the director. What Hitchcock had to say to him is relevant to the subject I began this post with. 

Early on in the working relationship I discovered a curious trick of his,’ said Cronyn. ‘We would be discussing some story point with great intensity, trembling on the edge of a solution to the problem at hand, when Hitch would suddenly lean back in his chair and say, ‘Hume, have you heard the story of the travelling salesman and the farmer’s daughter?’ I would look at him blankly and he would proceed to tell it with great relish, frequently commenting on the story’s characters, the nature of the humour involved, and the philosophical demonstration implied. That makes it sound as though the stories might be profound or at least witty. They were neither. They were generally seventh-grade jokes of the sniggery school, and frequently infantile.’

One day, Cronyn asked the director challengingly: ‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’ asked Hitchcock.

‘Stop to tell jokes at a crucial juncture.’

‘It’s not so critical – it’s only a film.’

‘But we were just about to find a solution to the problem…I can’t even remember what it was now.’

‘Good. We were pressing…You never get it when you press.’

Cronyn said later that he never forgot ‘that little piece of philosophy’ Hitchcock offered, ‘either as an actor or as a sometime writer.’

 What Hitchcock is saying is that making a big fuss about trying to find the solution, hammering away at it in frustration, doesn’t work. ‘Don’t press,’ he says.

It’s like trying to remember someone’s name – and at my time of life I can forget the names of my grandchildren, or very good friends, or relations I’ve known since childhood. Pressing on the matter and trying to grind yourself into remembering doesn’t work. Forget the name and talk about other things, read a book, or write on some other topic. The name will suddenly appear.

I was going over some of the Psalms of Ascent this morning. I memorised these a long time ago and they remain with me to this day. Occasionally, however, a word or phrase will go AWOL, or drop out of sight. The immediate reaction is to think ‘I’m forgetting this Psalm.’ No I’m not. It's only the fact that the brain hasn’t done any work on this Psalm for some time, and so it has to collect all the information together again, which may take a moment, or a minute, or five minutes.

That word that’s gone missing will suddenly appear, even if I’m already in the middle of the next Psalm.

Which is to say, that the solution to a writing problem will suddenly appear. However with something like writing, something that requires creativity, it may take not minutes, but days.

Be patient. Don’t press.

 The quotation from the book, Alfred Hitchcock – a lifein darkness and light – by Patrick McGilligan, comes from pages 402-3 of the 2003 Paperback edition by John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The photograph of Hume Cronyn is courtesy of The Movie Database. 

Having a cold but still getting some work done

 Last four days I’ve had a cold. Started Sunday and then shifted between suddenly feeling better and just as suddenly feeling quite unwell. Monday, for instance, after expecting to have a runny nose and cough, I had next to nothing, and I thought maybe what started on Sunday evening wasn’t going to amount to much.

And then Tuesday arrived and I wasn’t well at all – yup, just a cold. I know.

And Wednesday (yesterday) came and I started cancelling things I had to do yesterday as well as today.

And of course, just to keep me on the hop, I’ve felt really well today. Could have done all the things I’d cancelled.

So I did some pruning of a rose that had gone crazy and thinks reaching for the sky is a good look for roses. Helped my wife clean up the remaining tomato plants – which have done their dash – and deposited the used soil and dying plants in the compost. (Yes, you can compost tomato plants, as I discovered at the age of 78. Also potato plants. My mother, who did the garden in our previous house, mostly, had always said this was a no-no.

Watered the plants in the garden. So far the Council hasn’t imposed any water restrictions, which is a bit of a surprise because we’re having a kind of drought - in the sense that we haven’t had any substantial rain for some weeks. Our plants have been okay, but the grass has turned a strange shade of yellowy-brown.

In the Botanic Gardens, the duck pond has been reduced to half its size. The little stream that seems to run out of nowhere has stopped. I’m told it’s been turned off in the meantime because it’s actually a man-made tributary running off the Oamaru Creek, as I discovered today. I’d been wondering what its origin was in the three years we’ve lived here.

The gardeners in the Gardens are watering the grass, because it’s going the same colour as ours, and everyone else’s.

And I’m not doing much on furthering the book. Yet, during the course of the week, I did come up with an interesting name for my main villain. I won’t share it with you at this point, because I’m not convinced it’s the right name. A bit too fancy, perhaps.

I did some more thinking about why the calamity that happens at the beginning of the book comes about. Still haven’t decided on this, though I did have fun reading up on some possible things that could have happened. Actual scientific or practical things; not just magical ones.

And I looked further into whether my current narrator has any reason to be the main character. At this point he’s not giving it much get up and go – apart from rescuing another character  in spite of his lack of bravery. But he’s a bit too much of an observer. This is obviously going to have to change, or he may find himself in a minor role.

And I made a kind of timeline of events that mostly happen before the book begins. These needed to be in my head, even if they don’t make it into the book itself.

All this stuff is important. The book can’t move forward without a good deal of thinking at this stage. Having given myself a number of problems to solve I have to solve them. Keeping on writing in a pantser sort of way may bring solutions to light. Or it may just leave me with a flabby draft.

In my last book, after three false starts involving a number of chapters that either got dumped or transmogrified in some way into the book that eventually got published, I found that there were always points where the creative writing had to stop, or else a lot more digital paper would be wasted.

And even though writing on its own is enjoyable, it’s equally possible to get enjoyment out of thinking about how to get your characters out of tricky spots, or to find out why they’ve done what they’ve done, or what the history of certain events is, and much more.

It’s not as ‘easy’ as writing scintillating dialogue and dramatic description, but it gives an underpinning to the work that will stand it in good stead.

I had a cold for the last couple of days. Now my nose is running and I have a bit of a cough. I've been going to work spreading my germs and now I'm going to get the blame when every one else gets the cold. The cough medicine is not mine - I just found it on top of the fridge and thought I'd throw it in the picture. 

Photo: Jason Rogers

Foreign Correspondent re-viewed & Mr and Mrs Smith noted

 Back in 2012 I wrote a post on my favourite Hitchcockmovies. I came across it again this morning after checking to see if I’d ever mentioned Foreign Correspondent, which stars Joel McCrea and Laraine Day, and was released early in 1940, in this blog. I had, with fondness.

I watched the movie on You Tube last night (Spanish subtitles included) and it remains an absorbing movie - with some absurdities. Not unusual for Hitchcock. Though it was shot in the States, it has a large cast of Brits; many of them had been in Hollywood for some years. The movie shifts from the US to Holland to London and back. It’s full of studio ‘exteriors’ - most of them wonderfully done, like the full-scale windmill set against a painted backdrop of the Dutch countryside, and of course, the ocean in the climax of the movie.

I mentioned in my previous post that there was a great scene shot from above of dozens of umbrellas, with the hero hiding amongst them. In fact, it’s an assassin who escapes through them, causing first one umbrella then another to shift in what is otherwise a settled sea of covers. The assassination scene is brilliant: first there’s the odd meeting of McCrea with ‘Van Meer’ who for some reason doesn’t recognise him; it’s only later we understand that it’s a stand-in lookalike for the old peacemaker, a stand-in who gets shot for his pains. 'Van Meer' tumbles down the steps while the assassin, supposedly a photographer, smashes his camera to the ground and begins his escape. This involves other people getting shot in a busy street, cars and trams everywhere, mothers, children, and George Sanders (playing the absurdly-named ffolliott – his name is given an equally absurd explanation) who happens to have Laraine Day in his car, and who then gives chase with McCrea on board.

The subsequent car chase is both full of Hitchcock humour and real suspense. In one completely irrelevant scene, an old Dutchman is trying to cross the road. A car comes whizzing round the corner. He steps back, tries again. Same result. Beautifully-timed, as an increasing number of vehicles appear, and the man narrowly avoids being hit time and again before giving up.

This all leads to a long sequence in which McCrea investigates people doing skulduggery inside the windmill. He continually managing to stay just out of sight – even though at one point his overcoat gets caught in the machinery. He manages to get himself out of it just before it’s chewed up.

There’s a great deal else that’s excellent – the plane crash into the sea that occurs at the end is terrific, and the way various unnamed actors have their moment in the limelight both in this scene and in others. Or the attempted murder up on a very high church tower. This one has a troupe of schoolboys involved for a minute or two, adding to the edginess of what’s about to happen – especially as there’s a broken bit of tower off to one side waiting to be repaired.

In a much earlier scene Hitchcock has a couple of children jokingly stealing the hero’s hat. It occurred to me that in his early films in the US he still had children involved as he had in his British movies. Often they were quite forward children, like the strong-minded Dutch girl in this movie, who translates McCrea’s English to the police. They were often relaxed about doing things adults would have a fit seeing them do these days. But in his later US movies, it’s rare to see a child. Apart from The Trouble With Harry, which features a young boy who finds the body, there isn’t any of the same ilk as the earlier kids.

Anyway, thank you, You Tube, and the people who upload older movies. Especially when the copies are as clean and bright as when they were first shown.

Poster for the film courtesy of The Criterion Collection 

Update 12.3.24: I found that Hitchcock's Mr and Mrs Smith is also available (sans subtitles) on You Tube, and watched it last night. By all accounts it was done more as a courtesy to the female star, Carole Lombard, than because Hitchcock was desperate to do it. And why would he be? It was so far out his normal range that it's not surprising it comes across as competently-directed but little else. 

The script is funny-ish, but not outstanding; Lombard and her co-star, Robert Montgomery expend a great deal of energy, but the thing rarely lights up. One of the few scenes that made me laugh involved Gene Raymond, who, on discovering that the other two are technically not married because of a legal glitch, makes his play for Lombard. He gets a cold, Lombard plies him with whiskey, and the result is a man who, being teetotal normally, suddenly walks and talks like an automaton, sits by bending the wrong bits first, stands likewise, and on going to step up from one level to another notes that his foot decides this isn't a good idea. Raymond plays it for all its worth. 

It's not that Hitchcock couldn't do comedy - most of him films have comic scenes or characters - but the 'screwball comedy' type of movie just wasn't up his alley. 

 

Ways to keep the brain exercising

 My wife and I are going to the USA from late March to mid-April, to see our son and his wife and their four children. We haven’t seen the two youngest children face to face before, so we’re looking forward to that. The youngest will be about three months old when we arrive, so it’ll be nice to handle a baby again – haven’t done that with any of our family babies for some years now.

I haven’t travelled such a long distance since 2012, so I’m having to get my brain into gear to deal with a couple of long flights. My wife, on the other hand, has been to the UK several times in the last couple of decades. She seems to cope with travelling in a matter of fact way, which is great.

And there’s a great deal more fiddling around with phones and devices this time – far more than I did on previous trips. Thankfully my wife is now experienced in the quirks of dealing with these things. On my own I would have had no idea what I was doing.

Thus, just over two weeks out from leaving, things feel a bit like they’re in limbo round here. People keep saying ‘you’ll be looking forward to it’ and I keep having this kind of blank in front of me. I think it’s partly a way of coping with the travelling. I’m happy to get to a place. Getting there, particularly by plane, isn’t my favourite part.

So it’s not easy to get on and work on the book at present. But writing these blog posts helps – they’re a way of getting the fingers into gear before tackling the vagaries of the book itself.

And another help has been writing Daily Quordle Poems. I started doing this in mid-2022. DQPs are four-line poems that take the four words from the Daily Quordle puzzle and use them as the starting words of each line. The poems may be serious, they may rhyme or not rhyme, they may be witty or funny or odd. The writer has the choice.

I’ve done DQPs that have the key word at the end of the line. Or two at the beginning of the first two lines and two at the end. Since the rules aren’t so strict that you have to stick to them in a Pharisaic way, I’ve played around quite a bit.

And at one point, because the person who was letting us know what the words were got a bit behind, I’ve written poems of twelve or sixteen or twenty lines, all with the Quordle words (usually in alphabetical order, just to add to the mix) as the first words or each line.

There are some 1800 posts on the official site – dailyquordlepoem.com – from a variety of writers.

Check a few of them out. Or try your hand at one for own entertainment.  

Here are a couple of mine from the past:

LIPID ain’t limpid, like your limpid eyes, my dear.
TULIP ain’t two lips, though you have two, it’s clear.
MUCUS ain’t music, though your words are music to my ears. But…

SPADEs is trumps, so it’s clear, hear this in your ears, I win again, my dear.

and this is a catch-up one with two days' worth of words:

DINER, perusing the racing guide, at LUNCH, in a
TRICE, changes his mind re the HORSE, whose
STYLE is in a state of SULLY after
COYLY losing not just the bettor’s shirt but his INGOT.     

Intuitive ideas

General Carrera Lake, inside Marmol Caverns, Aysen region-Chile
Photo: Nico14uc

 

I made a note to myself today: Don’t get rid of intuitive ideas just because you can’t initially see how they fit.

When writing as a ‘kind of pantser’ – the best way I can describe myself – odd things creep into the writing that I know have a part to play but don’t immediatley see how they fit into the overall plan.

Two such things come to mind about my latest book. First, there’s a traumatic event in the opening chapter. This came out of nowhere even before this book started. Some months ago I was walking the dog, looked at a particular house and wondered what it would be like for that house to slide down the hill? I went home and wrote a chapter that included this idea. But there didn’t seem to be anything else forthcoming, and I put the chapter and thoughts about that particular book away. 

The idea itself persisted, and is now in the heart of the opening chapter of my current writing.

Another idea was that a character who was supposed to be dead wasn’t in fact dead. This idea had presented itself in that same discarded chapter, and now has a place in the present work.

However, I’ve just spent a good deal of time this afternoon trying to figure out why this person should be known to be dead when he isn’t, and how this fits into the story. I’ve made some progress, though it sometimes felt like going round in circles as arguments and counterarguments fought for survival.

On the other hand I still don’t know how the traumatic event I spoke about connects to the whole story. I only know it does. Time and hard work will give me a way forward on it.

One other example. In one early chapter of the WIP a cavern with an underground lake and a rowboat presented itself. I noted at the time, make sure the cavern has something to do with the story, or it will have to go. It’s a mystery I yet have to solve.

These three, along with a number of other odd ideas, or words that came out of characters’ mouths, or phrases that I threw in out of nowhere, are all intuitive thoughts. There's something about them that makes me say, This belongs. It’s my job to figure out how it belongs and what it will do to the story.

I anticipate more hours spent trying to work these things out. And I need to do it sooner than later since I can’t move forward confidently without knowing what these things think they’re doing in my book.

It's all part of the writing.

Hence the note I made to myself today. The process of writing relies not just on our skills, but on our subconscious throwing what might be called spanners into the works. To mix the metaphors, these things are then worth pursuing down their own particular rabbit holes.

The Great Escaper

 You know when a movie starts off slow – three shots of waves crashing in, a long shot of a man standing on a beach looking at the sea, more crashing waves, the man in close up, and so on – that generally the pacing is going to be off. There are ways to start slow and there are ways not to. If a movie doesn’t engage in the midst of its slowness, then it’s likely not going to engage full stop.

Which is what happened with The Great Escaper, starring Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson as an elderly husband and wife in a care home. Not only did it start slow, it managed to maintain this slowness for a good deal of its running time. Everything stretched out as though old age is all about slowness.

Jackson brings some life to the piece, but very few of her scenes are with Caine, so she’s left playing to actors whose storylines are barely filled out. Caine, on the other hand, pro that he is, manages still to make a very believable character even in shots where the camera just sits looking at him while he’s looking at something else – the sea, often; John Standing at times; a bus that he’s not waiting for. Caine must have wondered if anything was ever going to move in the film.

I find myself with very few supporters in regard to the slowness of the movie. An amazing number of reviews, both from members on imdb.com and from media reviewers, say that the thing could have been maudlin but isn’t. They ignore its chronically slow pace.

Well it could have been maudlin and it is. Even worse when poor old John Standing comes into the story and spends almost the entire time being maudlin, like some puppy without a home. He’s an alcoholic, so he drinks a lot; he’s an atheist, so he has nothing better than his present life to look forward to; he can’t forgive himself for something that he only had an innocent hand in.

Then there’s the chirpy black guy who’s lost his legs. He starts off being one of the most chipper characters in the movie. By the end he’s fallen into the maudlin trap as well. Good grief. You long to get back to Jackson, who in spite of her pains and illness and not having much longer to live, still gets on with life. (In real life she outlived her husband by seven days.)

Caine actually does a terrific job with a part that’s well and truly underwritten. Jackson, in her last film, does the same, and she has a bit more material to work with.

We could have gone and watched Dune II but having seen the first part some time ago I didn’t think it was going to be my wife’s cup of tea.

Ah, well, we got to see the The Great Escaper for free, courtesy of my wife’s employer, so in some senses it wasn’t entirely a wasted night.

Backstories and bios

 I remember reading a novel some years ago in which the author plainly thought that his background notes about each main character should be included at some point in the book. This led to an absurd climax where everything stopped while the author gave us the backstory for one of his characters right in the middle of the action. Not just a paragraph or two, but pages.

 Writers often create long, detailed backstories for their characters, and it’s a great temptation to put most of this into the book – though hopefully in a more subtle way than the author I’ve mentioned above did.

 But for the most part, backstories should remain where they belong, in the files, not the book.

I wrote something similar during The Counterfeit Queen’s long evolution. Needing a bit of forward movement while struggling to find more of the story, I wrote at least two chapters, maybe three, in which the villain gave her side of events.

 What I found interesting was that in the course of writing those chapters I discovered some new ideas and some connections in the plot that I hadn’t seen before. These chapters, which were never intended to be part of the book, were far more fruitful than I realised.

Re-reading them sometime later, I thought, I should use these in the book. They’re great! I could make them the opening chapters, and…

 Thankfully the wiser part of my brain prevailed and I left them out. They would have stopped the story getting up and running by putting its main character on the back burner for several pages.

 But I still recommend this approach as a way of seeing the story from a different viewpoint. Or as a way of using the brain’s creative energy in a different way.

 I’ve sometimes tried to write two of these in a row. That doesn’t work for me. The creative energy pours into the first character’s discussion of themselves, and there’s nothing left over for another character. And that just makes you feel like a blah kind of writer again...

Don't rush, let it simmer

 So I continued to write chapter 8 last night. And kept feeling…’this isn’t very good…’

 What choice do I have at this point, as a kind of pantser? I can scrap the words and start afresh, and hope things take off differently the second time. Or I can analyse why I’m feeling disgruntled with this piece of writing.

 If I choose the latter course, I can ask: why does what’s happening in the this particular chapter seem all too familiar? Haven’t I pursued a similar path in one of my others books? Characters heading off somewhere in some sort of special machine. Without knowing where they’re going.

 Yes, this does seem too familiar. If I was a reader of this series (in the proper order) I’d be thinking, He’s doing the same old thing again, and possibly I might toss the book back on the shelf, or drop it in the returns section at the library.

 There's also a sense of the twee about chapter 8. That is, the magic is all a bit too cute, especially for a book that started out on a drastic and life-threatening note.

 It feels too cosy. The characters are settling into doing what they would normally do. And not only doing it, but being given the chance to do it by the author in the guise of one of the other characters.

 The end result is, if I’m bored, the reader’s going to be bored. And they won’t be asking why.

What about the other approach I mentioned: scrapping the main idea behind the chapter? This means writing something new, of course. I’ve done it before – in The Disenchanted Wizard I often went off in the wrong direction, and had to drop sections that were twee or cute or cosy or whatever. The Archives folder for The Counterfeit Queen is full of rejected chapters, chapters that were just filling up the gaps. You have a sense for it after a while as a writer. You usually feel something’s off, but you’ve forged ahead in spite of that and now you realise you took a wrong turn.

So, back to Jail and don’t pass Go. 

Counterfeit Queen not only went back to Jail without passing Go, she found a whole new way to start the book, a way that tied everything together in a much more satisfactory fashion. That occurred somewhere about year three, I think.

In Andy Martin’s book Reacher Said Nothing, he details how Lee Child goes about (or used to go about) writing a new book. He would start on the same day each year (a bit of the superstitious) and write an opening. It might consist of only a few paragraphs. These would include an idea he had in mind, but hadn’t developed in any way. When I say ‘idea’ it might be barely an idea.

Then he’d go off and do other things. He probably wouldn’t write anything else for a few days. He’d let his subconscious go to work finding points in what he’d written that had potential to create mystery and thrills.

 Which says to me, Don’t be afraid to leave the book alone for a few days. Even this morning as I lay in bed thinking that I wasn’t much impressed with chapter 8’s progress, I already had a thought about a different approach. As this point, mid-afternoon, I’m not much impressed with that either. Time to let things simmer for a day or three.

 In my next post, I’ll look at a couple of other options for when you reach this point, options which may help to lead you forward.