Acts of Malice

I was chatting with my father about my novel-in-progress tonight, and he made an interesting observation. My dad, you see, has been an advertising and marketing guy for most of his professional career. “We used to have a saying back in the days when I was making radio commercials,” he told me. ‘We called it ‘The Theater of the Mind’.”

With radio, you don’t have any visuals for the listener to see. You can’t literally show them a picture, and you have to paint the scene for them — through description, through sound effects, through dialogue. The visual image, for good or for ill, unfolds inside the viewer’s mind. If you did a good job painting the scene, that mental picture will be every bit as vivid as what you’d see on the television. If you didn’t do a good job, your listeners change the channel.

That’s how it is with books, too, only we don’t even get the luxury of a sound effect track. Description, dialogue, pacing and suspense have to carry the day. Because really, that’s all you have.

One writer I can think of who does this stuff very well is Jodi Picoult. In fact, I have to say I think she’s a preternaturally good storyteller. Her dialogue crackles, her description is as vivid as anything you’d see on a TV or movie screen, and her stories are so absolutely, gut-wrenchingly plausible that you can’t help get sucked in. She understands that a novel is an exercise of what my dad called “the theater of the mind”, and she writes accordingly.

So, how about it? Who are your favorite writers who get this concept? Which books or authors do you think don’t get it? Sound off in the comments!

Since I got my iBook (about which more at www.onemacwriting.com), I’ve been evolving a set of tools that works well for my writing. One of the indispensables on the Mac has been Notational Velocity, a sort of minimally structured free-form information capture tool. Alas, Notational Velocity is a Mac-only tool, so I hacked together a Windows program that works sort of like Notational Velocity. Basically, operation is like this:

• Type a note title in the small box at the top of the Window. The list of existing notes will filter as you type. Once you have the title for your note entered, press Enter to create or edit that note.
• Click out of the edit box or press the escape key to save your note when you’re done.
• You can also select a note to edit by double-clicking a note title in the note list, or by single-clicking on a note title and pressing Enter.

At this point, the note title is case-sensitive. In other words, “TEST”, “test”, and “TesT” refer to three different notes. This may change in a future version. Also, NVWindows does not synchronize with Notational Velocity, though I’m open to input on how to make synching work. The data is stored in a SQLite3 file called nvdata.db in the application directory. On the theory that a picture is worth 1,000 words (and yes, that IS Windows XP; I just have a visual theme that looks Mac-esque):

Download is available from: http://tsunix.taylored-software.com/~tlcravit/NVWindows_0.01.zip

Comments, feedback, bug reports, etc. to tammy@tammycravit.us are welcome, and will be responded to as time permits. This app is something I’ve been developing for my own use, so it’s not my highest priority at the moment.

As writers, and as human beings, we are all like rocks, worn into interesting shapes by the action of a thousand, or million, waves washing over us over and over. The individual impact of one wave might be insignificant at the time, but the cumulative effect of all of them later makes us who and what we are.

Over on Murderati yesterday, Alexandra Sokoloff asked the following question:

Authors, what would be your ideal list of three other authors to be compared with? Or who would be your three authors who influenced you the most as a writer? And/or – have you ever had a review that reminded you exactly what your mission was?

It’s funny - as I got to thinking about Alex’s question, I realized that the people who influenced me the most as writers often did so in other ways than the words they put on the page. And, in fact, some of my greatest influences aren’t writers at all. But they surely shaped who I am as a writer, who I am as a human being, and the truths I have to tell.

Here, then, in no particular order are some of my greatest influences:

Laura Lippman, who gave me a copy of Marjorie Williams’ unparalleled anthology “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”, which showed me a style of narrative I never got to experience writing for my local newspaper ten column inches at a time.

My first newspaper editor, a grizzled old newsman named Russ Stockton (who is now deceased, a fact which grieves me greatly). One of my first stories for him involved talking about my experience as a rape survivor, page one above the fold. Russ taught me in word and deed that writers need to be fearless in their pursuit to tell the truth, and not to pull punches.

Sue Grafton, who made time for an interview from a small-town newspaper reporter and was beyond gracious with me even though I caught her four days before she was leaving on a trip.

Elaine Charney, the first teacher I ever had who taught me to love learning for its own sake.

Two dear friends of mine who shall remain nameless here to protect their privacy. One is an attorney who fights tirelessly for the rights of the most young and vulnerable of our society’s members; the other, did battle on the front lines in the war for the children and now teaches others how to fight the good fight. From them, I’ve learned courage under fire and never giving up no matter what.

How about it? If you wrote down the people who’ve most shaped you, who would be on your list?
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