Influences

Twenty Writers: Peter Bagge, HATE

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See the Introduction for more information on “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books.” The current list of writers and books is located at the Continuing Series page.

Hate 5

Hate 5

Peter Bagge is my venerated saint. It took me far too long to figure that out.

Back in the 1990s, I stumbled across Bagge’s brilliant HATE comics more than a few times—on a comic book store rack, in a cool barber shop’s magazine pile (not that I spent much time at barber shops back then), stuck in the middle of a friend’s stack of High Times back issues, that kind of thing.

Intrigued by Bagge’s manic, skittish covers, I thumbed through these random issues and chuckled over his taffy-stretched characters, all of whom seemed filled with the same gunk they inject into Stretch Armstrong dolls. They flapped their arms in perfect circles as they spewed venom at each other. Their teeth splayed out geometrically toward the reader when they vented or raged about whatever was sticking in their craw at that moment. Then, after achieving a measure of calm, some new perceived outrage would arise on the next page (“perceived” is the key word here) and their tomato would flame up all over again.

In those early encounters with Bagge’s work, I never read an issue of HATE all the way through. I didn’t have to. All the fun was in watching Buddy and his cohorts lose their minds over things most everyone else would find perfectly innocuous or trivial.

And yet…I understood why they would lose it. Yes, I screen my calls, and so do you, so don’t give me that. Yes, I don’t want you drinking from my private beer stash. Yes, don’t tell me you aren’t dating guys and then start dating my roommate. Buddy’s short fuse made perfect sense to me.

Bagge's rendition of Daffy Duck, Bob Clampett-style

Bagge’s rendition of Daffy Duck, Bob Clampett-style

At age 32, after a few encounters with Bagge’s work, both in the real world and online, I slowly gathered I’d missed out on something pretty damn important. I began seeking out every HATE issue and collection I could lay my hands on. (By that time, Bagge had quit producing monthly editions of HATE and only released annuals for fans starved to keep up with his incredible pantheon of characters.) Over a two-week reading spree—30 issues, published from 1990 to 2000—I dug into his epic storyline of Buddy Bradley’s clench-fisted life and the miscreants, losers, and delusionals surrounding him. With this closer sequential reading of his work, my heart sank. There was so much more to Bagge’s brilliant decade-long narrative than ranting and arm-flapping. I should have been following HATE as it was published, not lapping it up after the fact.

HATE centers on Buddy Bradley, a New Jersey hipster transplanted to Seattle smack in the middle of the grunge era. The early issues circle around the concerns of most any twenty year-old: parties, temp jobs, roommates, looking for sex, looking for authenticity, scrounging for free meals, consuming cheap beer. Buddy’s roommates include paranoiac George Hamilton III and carefree Stinky Brown, one of those guys who manages to get by entirely in the moment and never lacks a girl on his arm. The elliptical orbit of Buddy’s love life has two foci: unstable, abortion-prone Lisa and uptown girl Valerie.

Hate 13

Hate 13

Buddy manages to eke his way through Seattle’s grunge scene (and later, suburban New Jersey) through a combination of entrepreneurship, conning favors from friends and strangers, shoplifting, and mostly-idle threats. Although HATE‘s early issues delve deep into college life sans actual college enrollment, something less remarked upon is the tension in later issues when Buddy swears it’s time to shape-up and grow-up, moving back to New Jersey to settle down with Lisa in his parents’ basement.

Doonesbury‘s Yale hippies and commune malcontents progressed into adulthood in the 1980s, but their outlook (i.e. their politics) shifted not one iota—thankfully, otherwise they might have had to live up to the judgy pronouncements they’d decreed a decade earlier. In the final monthly issues of HATE, the New Jersey Buddy Bradley is but an echo of his Seattle predecessor. He’s like that college pal who swears off pot, buys a tie, and obtains a business loan to start selling water bongs mail-order. What a square.

Hate 15

Hate 15

I do not see myself as a live-in-the-flesh Buddy Bradley, but there is much of him I recognize in myself. His firebrand rant about hating rock ‘n’ roll is one I’d preached as well (almost down to the word) to a San Luis Obispo house full of Generation X hippies. (They never invited me back.) And while I never had a roommate like George Hamilton III, I kinda-sorta resembled him due to my Robert Anton Wilson-inspired pet theories about secret power structures and hidden knowledge. And Buddy drinks Johnnie Walker Red Label. Eerie! (I could go on.) When I reached age 32, I thought I’d been through something unique—as unique as a crushed Coke can, HATE informed me.

Bagge’s genius as a storyteller reflects one of my personal peeves about contemporary fiction—”the cult of poignancy” as editor David Holler dubbed it. That is, the urgent desire of literary fiction to land in a moment of soft, still self-reflection. This desire is simply a rejiggering of Hollywood’s desperate need to reach a concluding morality that assures us there is Good in this world, and genre fiction’s love of pat, satisfying endings.

HATE eschews closing any story with revelation or insight into Buddy’s life, or even a resolution you would call “a resolution.” There’s rarely any forward momentum at all. In almost every issue, Buddy winds up pretty much where he started, albeit bruised or unconscious or a bit richer or poorer for the journey. HATE isn’t anti-poignant, as that suggests Bagge was consciously working against easy pathos. HATE is merely absent of poignancy, or any moral compass for that matter. Buddy Bradley is a vector of force propelled by the rocket fuel of disgust, outrage, and self-interest—and yet Bagge maintains our sympathy for him. Our sympathy for Buddy Bradley parallels our sympathy for Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost. We recognize too much of ourselves in them both to toss them overboard.

But that sympathy is never comfortable. There’s an unsettling randomness to the consequences of Buddy’s antisocial decisions. There is no divine thumb on the cosmic scales in HATE. There aren’t even scales. When Buddy screws over a roommate or a girlfriend and comes out ahead free-and-clear, his brash grin for the reader is disturbingly celebratory. Buddy is bragging to us, “I got away with it.” And Bagge, the author, never steps in with a value judgment.

Many writers claim they write amoral or morality-free stories, but few writers have truly shorn our Western value system. Even Seinfeld had a karmic ethos of deserved and undeserved comeuppance. Whether Buddy’s unscrupulous world-view and self-centered priorities are the symptom or the disease—or the cure—I leave that question to others. But I’ll take Buddy’s value system over Holden Caulfield’s cap-wringing and Tyler Durden’s under-microwaved existentialism every time.

Hate 28

Hate 28

For all the praise Bagge’s received for documenting the grunge era in Seattle, I say Bagge actually recorded something more important. HATE performs an X-ray on an oft-overlooked segment of the American population, the suburban-bred young adults who didn’t power through college and upward into the American workforce. Nor did they coast into the coastal creative classes thanks to a grandmother’s trust fund or their partner’s cushy income stream. They’re educated and savvy enough to hold down service work and low-paying professional jobs without falling backwards into poverty, the supposed only possible outcome in the traditional left-wing scripts handed down to us. They discovered early on that getting ahead in America is a far more vicious enterprise than it should be. They quit pretending upward mobility is even a worthy goal. Instead, they relented to a daily grind of work, alcohol, sex, and hate.

I’m not playing a violin for these folks. Neither is Peter Bagge. That’s kind of my whole point.

Now an admission: When I was 20 I resembled this guy more than any single figure in Bagge’s epic:

A good (and free) introduction to Bagge’s narrative and artistic style is “The Hasty Smear of My Smile”, an alternate history of postwar America and one of my favorite standalone strips he’s put together. Koo-koo-ka-choo.

More in the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” series.


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Twenty Writers: Unstuck in Dresden

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See the Introduction for more information on “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books.” The current list of reviews and essays is located at Continuing Series.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Early one August morning in 2011, I set off for Dresden. I was lodging at a surprisingly spacious budget hotel located in what was once known as East Berlin. I showered, snagged a Brötchen from the breakfast table downstairs, and rode public transit to Berlin’s central train station, the Hauptbahnhof.

The Hauptbahnhof was a modest-sized transportation hub with a grand planar green-glass facade and crystal strands of staircases and escalators within. A number of national and international rail lines passed through the station on all levels.

In contrast to its modernity, the area surrounding the Hauptbahnhof appeared bombed-out. Weedy lots and half-built (or half-demolished) concrete structures of uncertain purpose surrounded the station, even though it was located in the dead center of town, and not the outskirts where this sort of thing might be excused.

In 2011, dereliction was not unusual in the eastern reaches of Berlin. The area that was once West Berlin was clean, modern, bustling—as sleek and efficient as the capitalism it had boasted of to its neighbors during the Cold War. What was once East Berlin was largely a patchwork of low-lying buildings, many redolent of America’s 1970s aesthetics bereft of its most garish extremes. Anything not man-made was lush and overgrown from the humid summer. (Berlin, my travel guide explained, was built on a swamp.) Buildings with blasted-out holes in the plaster stood here and there in East Berlin, the rubble having been hauled off but the damage not repaired. As I learned from the natives, Berlin was still recovering from forty years of Communist rule, where counterrevolutionary ideals like aesthetics and grounds-keeping were not prioritized.

Having visited Munich a few times, I would bet a stein of beer that the meticulous, efficient Bavarians would never have allowed for this situation to sustain. For any undeveloped lot, the Bavarians would have installed a beer garden or a park or some nice shopping. Munich is the neighbor who keeps their lawn trim and packs away the Christmas decorations on Boxing Day; Berlin is the family with the half-built additions and a porch painted a color intended for the whole house, but Dad never got around to finishing the job. It’s for those reasons I found what was once East Berlin relaxed and livable.

Having visited my favorite beer garden in all of Europe the night before, I didn’t wake quite early enough. I missed my train to Dresden by precious minutes, in part due to being lost in the Hauptbahnhof‘s Escher maze of escalators. Running up to the platform for Dresden, the train chugging eastward, I wondered if this was a bit of Vonnegutian fate, the kind of nondescript event that leads to major ramifications for the character later in the book.

Literary tourism

My visit to Dresden bore some emotional weight. It would probably be my only chance to see the city Kurt Vonnegut wrote about so prominently in Slaughterhouse-Five.

Literary tourism is a recurring compulsion in my life. I’ve sought out Hemingway’s Key West house and the six-toed cats who drink from an old bar urinal in the garden; Henry Miller’s ramshackle Big Sur cabin, surprisingly spartan for a hedonist; Beowulf under glass at the British Museum in London, a city practically designed for literary tourism, right down to the pub reproducing Sherlock Holmes’ parlor; even Mark Twain’s cabin in California’s Gold Country where he reportedly penned “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Literary tourism has even made its way into some of my stories, in particular “A Concordance of One’s Life”, and to a lesser extent Everywhere Man.

With only one more free day in Germany, I woke the next morning even earlier and made it to the Hauptbahnhof with time to spare. As my train left the platform, I was treated to the very European experience of an Italian family arguing with the unflappable German conductor over seats, some business about assigned seating and Second Class. As English was the common language between the two parties, I was able to follow the argument. The conductor eventually conceded and moved on, leaving the Italian family to overtake the compartment. The mother pointed out to me that there wasn’t enough room for all of them, and so I moved to the next compartment.

The train ride from Berlin to Dresden took two and a half hours. If I’d traveled the day before, I had planned to find a cheap room to crash in for the night. Now I had to make the same return trip in the late afternoon via the last train out of Dresden to Berlin.

The Slaughterhouse-Five Tour

In a different book, Kurt Vonnegut wrote

Ah, God, what an ugly city Illium is!

“Ah, God,” says Bokonon, “what an ugly city every city is!”

I was curious to see what had sprung up in Dresden’s place after the end of the war, after the firebombing. I was also curious how Vonnegut’s book was now received by the city. I had it in my mind that Slaughterhouse-Five was a literary gift to the City of Dresden, a rather lengthy handbill proclaiming to a cold and unaware world the war crime they’d suffered. Much like my trip to Hiroshima, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Everything I’d read about both cities focused on one subject: utter destruction.

I wondered if there were Slaughterhouse-Five tours of Dresden. If I ran a Slaughterhouse-Five tour of Dresden, I would dress up like Billy Pilgrim and pretend to be unstuck in time. I would start the tour with this:

“And now our tour concludes. So it goes.”

And end the tour with this:

“Welcome! My name is Billy Pilgrim. Today I’m your guide for the Slaughterhouse-Five tour. On your left is our first sight…”

For all my planning back at home, it never occurred to me to attempt to locate the actual slaughterhouse Vonnegut and the other American POWs huddled in during the Allies’ firebombing of the city, safe while Dresden burned to nubs and ash. I assumed (wrongly, it turns out) that the slaughterhouse had been demolished after the war. I focused on the city center itself rather than striking out to the industrial areas in search of the structure that saved Vonnegut’s life and changed American postwar literature.

On the last leg of my train ride, two young women joined me in the compartment, college-aged summer hitchhikers making their way across Europe. They hauled mountaineering backpacks with sleeping rolls, enough gear to scale K2. Minutes before the Dresden station, we struck up a conversation. They were from Switzerland.

“I’m American,” I introduced myself.

“We know,” they told me. Whenever foreigners know my nationality it’s a little discomfiting, like meeting someone who can read my thoughts.

They told me they headed to Amsterdam. When they said “Amsterdam” they giggled between themselves.

“I’m going to Dresden,” I told them.

“Why?” they asked me, honestly perplexed.

Anatomy of a church

Dresden workers' muralOn my walk from Dresden’s station to its Old Town I passed a reminder of the city’s time under the German Democratic Republic. A broad mural spanned the second story of an otherwise unremarkable building. In the town I grew up, such a building would have been the advertising offices of the local newspaper or something equally mundane. This is what I expected to find in Dresden: postwar Socialist-drab architecture erected in a hurry and on the cheap.

The building was forgettable but the mural was not. Like so much social realism to come out of the Communist bloc, it features idealized caricatures of workers—women in head scarves, men in Trotsky hats—raising their sickles and rifles in a show of unity. The mural stood over a wide walkway, where it could be admired as easily as it could be ignored.

DresdenOnce past the mural and its uninspiring canvas, I discovered Dresden was not ugly. In fact, the city was charming. Although seventy years had passed since the firebombing, plenty of time to rebuild, I did not expect to walk into such a minute jewel. With East Berlin as my primer to post-Communist Germany, I presumed Dresden would be a place of unkempt parks, weedy lots, and an opera house or civic chamber destroyed by the Allies and left as rubble with a statue before it memorializing the carnage.

Strange then to see Dresden work so hard to appear as the city it was five hundred years ago, more medieval than mid-century. Its stout Old Town proudly exhibited a collection of limestone spires and copper-green cupolas. In the Middle Ages, labor was cheap, free when pressed into service by the Church. In the 20th century it wasn’t so cost-effective to refurnish a city to its fifteenth-century original without making do with mass-produced raw material—the financial temptation to erect a Disney reproduction of the original must have been great. There was nothing fake or inauthentic about Dresden’s Old Town as far as I could see.

Dresden churchThe rebuild was so complete, so meticulous, at first blush I wondered if anything remained to mark the firebombing that melted this city down to hot rubble in 1945. I found one, a block of permanently charred masonry standing in a cobblestone platz before a stunning Baroque church, Dresden’s Frauenkirche. A wordless plaque indicated where the block had fallen from the cupola above during the firebombing. In the human anatomy of the Frauenkirche, the masonry block fell from its heart.

(I know now that many memorials for the Dresden firebombing exist, some in the city and others elsewhere in Germany. Some only exist on the Internet as frameworks for remembering. I didn’t visit Dresden to search out statues and plaques and modern art commissioned by governmental panels, but I did expect to more of these markers than I encountered.)

Hundreds of miles from the Berlin swamp, Dresden offered a cloudless temperate day, the air off the river smelling fresh. The church platz was ringed by bistros lively with business. Vendor carts served cold beer as fast as mugs could be filled. Standing aside the masonry block and surveying the scene, I developed a theory: Dresden understood that remembering is different than never forgetting.

Of course

My own failings hampered my time in Dresden. I don’t speak a lick of German. Unlike Berlin, where an English-speaker can manage thanks to a mostly-multilingual population, few people in Dresden spoke my native tongue.

Rendered all but mute, I pointed to the beer tap when I wanted a beer, pointed to the menu when I wanted a brat, and did my best to pronounce Bitte? and Danke schoen for everyone I had dealings with.

At one of the beer carts off the church platz I met an English-speaking couple. Not only did they speak English, they were American. I did not ask the obvious questions. With a beer in hand and the sun on my back, I was incurious to know where they were from or who employed them.

She was talkative. He seemed totally uninterested in conversation. She asked why I came to Dresden.

“Slaughterhouse-Five, of course,” I said. That “of course” made me out as a snoot.

She searched the air above her. “Is that a book?” She asked her husband if he’d read it. He murmured “Never heard of it” and drank more beer.

I told her she probably read it in high school. She couldn’t remember.

Fox tossing

When I asked why they’d visited Dresden, she explained it was a layover on their bus trip to Amsterdam. She giggled when she said “Amsterdam.” His attention never left his beer.

“Have you visited the castle?” she asked me. Their package tour included a ticket to Dresden Castle, now a museum. “Their king was the King of Poland. Twice.”

“Augustus the Strong,” her husband said, still not looking at me.

“Why was he called ‘the Strong?'” I asked.

“Because he was strong,” the husband said. “He could dead lift hundreds of pounds.” A bit excited, he finally turned on his stool to face me. “And he was a master at this game called fox tossing.”

“What’s fox tossing?”

“You throw foxes as high into the air as you can.” So animated, his beer was sloshing.

“Dresden?“

I trudged back to the train station passing the workers’ mural once more. Now I saw how out of place it was in Dresden, this relic of propaganda today apropos of nothing. Like Communism, it was not erased and it was not forgotten, nor was it intrusive or even damned, but simply left to be, a curiosity.

On the train ride back, I experienced a conversation I would have twice more in Berlin, all with Germans. When I mentioned visiting Dresden, the Germans’ response was always “Why?” They expressed in their best English that Dresden was a boring town with nothing to draw a tourist, especially one who’d traveled so far.

I asked each if they’d heard of Kurt Vonnegut or Slaughterhouse-Five. None of them knew of him, which wasn’t terribly surprising. I don’t read German novelists, after all. The name confused them, though, since Vonnegut is distinctly Germanic. I assured them he was American.

I told the Germans Vonnegut had written one of the greatest English-language novels of the past hundred years. “It’s about Dresden. He was there during the firebombing.”

Only one of the three knew of Dresden’s destruction. (They were younger than me, I should add.) All were bewildered at the idea of a novel about Dresden—”Dresden?“—especially a novel important enough to be taught in American schools and universities.

It floored them. “You’ve read a book about Dresden?”

Imagine the situation reversed. Imagine learning that every student in Germany read a novel about one of Bokonon’s ugly cities: Illium, or Bakersfield, or Walla Walla, or Duluth. Imagine if Germans eagerly traveled to Duluth because it was featured in a popular novel. Duluth?

The second bewildered German I encountered—”Dresden?“—sat across from me. We were at a picnic table in my favorite beer garden in all of Europe. It was muggy in Berlin and nine o’clock at night, strings of light bulbs threaded through the tree branches. When I arrived at the Hauptbahnhof, I went straight to the beer garden.

We were joined by an American who’d emigrated to Germany to marry. He had a wife and a child, and had carved out a rather enviable life in what was once East Berlin. The first time we met he told me he never wanted to return to America.

“What are you two talking about?” He had brought us fresh mugs of beer.

“He went to Dresden today,” the German told him.

“Sure,” the newly-minted Berliner said as he distributed the beer. “Slaughterhouse-Five.”

Other books in the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” series.


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Writing better fiction with Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure: The treatment

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Syd Field

Syd Field

(See my “Continuing Series” page for a listing of all posts about using Syd Field’s paradigm to write fiction.)

Last post I explained Syd Field’s “paradigm” and how it applied to writing a three-act screenplay. I also explained that I’ve modified his paradigm for writing fiction (short stories and novels). What I’m about to explain is the first step in that process. It’s to write a treatment for your next story or book.

I’m not talking about a Hollywood treatment. In Hollywood, a treatment is a specific document produced near the beginning of the creative process. Different sources give different definitions, even wildly different page counts, for a treatment. For Syd Field’s purposes, a treatment is a brief description of the screenplay—part sales pitch, part outline, part proof-of-concept—three to five pages long, narrated in present tense with little or no dialogue. It lays out the beginning, middle, and end of the film, not shot-for-shot or in terms of scenes, but in broad summary form. Think of it as an overview of the movie script, whether the script is completed or not. Often a strong treatment is the basis for a movie studio to order the full script’s development. (Sometimes one wishes they were, on average, a bit stronger.)

I am not proposing you write a Hollywood-style treatment for your next novel or short story. I gave it that name because that’s my inspiration for this stage in the process. So, when you see that term here, don’t think of a Hollywood pitch. Think of your treatment as the first step in writing your story.

Writing a treatment for fiction is to prepare for writing a full three-act outline. A treatment challenges you with a series of questions that ask you, in sum, to honestly evaluate where your inspiration stands. It only takes a few minutes, but it makes the next steps even easier.

The fiction writer’s treatment

Let’s start by assuming you have an idea for a story. It might be an inkling, it might be an itch that needs to be scratched. It might be a big, bold idea, one you’ve mapped out in your head from a quiet, unpresupposing opening to a monumental, explosive finish. Maybe you’ve already written some notes. Maybe you’ve written a first page or a first chapter. Maybe you’ve written nothing at all. It could be a novel, it could be a short story, or it could be a dud.

Ask yourself the following questions in order. Use a clean sheet of paper or a fresh word processing document to record your answers; don’t do this in your head. Try to limit yourself to one to two sentences to answer each question. The next steps of this process will give you a chance to expound more. Right now the idea is to shake out that story idea and find its core.

Protagonist: Who is the main character of this story?
In one or two sentences, sum up your idea for the main character. If you don’t have a name for your character, just refer to him or her as “main character” or “protagonist” or “he” or “she”—don’t get hung up on names and ages right now. Don’t write about peripheral characterizing details, use this limited space to really drill down into his or her pertinent information.

Perhaps you have more than one main character in mind. Ask yourself if one of them is, in your mind, the true central character. If not, limit your answer to the bare number of characters central to your story.

Setup: What is the minimum of backstory, history, setting, or exposition that must be presented before the main story begins?
In one or two sentences summarize your main character’s situation when the story opens. It might be where she lives, or place of employment, or why she suffers from some limitation. Brevity is important. Limiting yourself to one or two sentences makes you really think what’s truly important about this character, why this character is important to you, and therefore to the reader.

If you think the answer is “None”—that no backstory must be presented to the reader—great, write that down. However, unless you’re Samuel Beckett reincarnated, most stories require some background or scene-setting before the events of the story begin. Even if it’s the name of the main character and where she lives, that’s backstory.

Inciting Incident: What event disrupts the rhythms and rituals of the main character’s daily life?
The Inciting Incident catalyzes the narration and launches the story. The disruption is usually external or physical, such as the family in Raisin in the Sun receiving a sizable inheritance, but it can be an internal realization or discovery.

Keep your answer to the disruption itself, not your main character’s reaction to it; that’s the next question.

Plot Point #1: What reverses the main character’s daily life such that there is no easy return to normalcy?
Another way to phrase this question is: What happens to prevent the character from simply ignoring the disruption that has occurred? For Raisin in the Sun, the grandmother uses the money as the down on a home in an all-white neighborhood, committing her 1959 African-American family to a precarious future.

Note that it’s possible for the Inciting Incident to be the first plot point. The nature of the disruption could be something impossible for the main character to ignore. (For example, he’s hit by a bus while crossing the street.) But often the inciting incident is not so monumental, even if it seems that way in your mind. Be honest: is there any way for your character to ignore or avoid the inciting incident? If so, you probably need to find a way to ensure there’s no way for her to turn away from it.

There should be no going back. That’s why I emphasize the word “reverses” in the question—there should be some event or decision, internal or external, that alters the trajectory of the main character’s daily life. If they can ignore the disruption and return to life as it was, most characters will. And there your story ends, most likely unsatisfactorily.

No going back

In my experience, the first three questions (Protagonist, Setup, Inciting Incident) answer themselves. When I’m inspired to write a story, I tend to have some idea of the character, their situation, and the event that launches the story proper. Answering those first three questions is largely an exercise in putting my inspiration onto the page, which is valuable in any case.

The fourth question (Plot Point #1) is usually the first challenging one. This is why I emphasize starting with the treatment. It forces you to honestly evaluate your story’s opening and ensure you’re not shortchanging the main character—or the reader.

Too often, underdeveloped fiction assumes that the main character will eagerly jump in to resolve the inciting incident head-on. It also assumes that the reader is along for the ride, that they won’t question why the character has taken on the challenge so willingly. Superheroes leap into action. More human characters look for ways to avoid leaping into action.

Consider Lolita. Confronted by the law and bouncing in and out of sanatoriums, Humbert Humbert resigns himself to moving in with Mrs. Haze, although he abhors her traditional domesticity. All evidence indicates he will simply abandon her and return to his lascivious ways. It’s when he sets his eyes on Haze’s 12 year-old daughter—the Inciting Incident—that Humbert’s “normal” life is turned over. Although he doesn’t want to return to the rhythm and rituals of his previous life, he has little recourse due to Mrs. Haze’s constant presence. Humbert engineers a chance to tussle with the girl—Plot Point #1—igniting his desires that form the remainder of the novel. Plot Point #1 is why there’s no going back for him.

(“Plot Point #1” is Field’s terminology. So far I’ve been unable to find a word or phrase I’m more comfortable with, so I’ve left it in.)

Here’s another example:

After work, a man goes to his girlfriend’s apartment. She announces that she’s pregnant. The man puts his jacket back on, walks downstairs, and hails a taxi. He goes to the airport, where he flies to Europe to put this unexpected event behind him.

This sounds forced to my ear, but the writer developing the story absolutely believed in it. It took the writer some time to realize he was railroading his main character to Rome in order to get to the juicy, intriguing part of the story that he wanted to tell.

My suggestion? Plot Point #1:

After work, a man goes to his girlfriend’s apartment. She announces that she’s pregnant. The man asks his girlfriend to consider terminating the pregnancy, but she’s committed for religious reasons. He walks downstairs and hails a taxi.

I’m not saying this solves every problem with the story, but it firms up the man’s motivation for his abrupt decision to flee. The girlfriend’s announcement is the Inciting Incident and her unwavering commitment is Plot Point #1. It ensures there’s no easy turning back. Otherwise, if your character can simply return to his or her hum-drum life, why wouldn’t they?

Part four: Completing the treatment


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Writing better fiction with Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure: The paradigm

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Syd Field

Syd Field

(See my “Continuing Series” page for a listing of all posts about using Syd Field’s paradigm to write fiction.)

As mentioned in my first post of this series, Syd Field calls his structure “the paradigm”:

The paradigm is a dramatic structure. It is a tool, a guide, a map through the screenwriting process. As defined in Screenplay, a paradigm is a “model, an example, a conceptual scheme.” … A screenplay is an open system.

That last bit is important. A screenplay—and a novel, and a short story—is an open system. Compare this to an observation made by Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of the C++ programming language:

…software development is an iterative and incremental process. Each stage of the process is revisited repeatedly during the development, and each visit refines the end product of that stage. In general, the process has no beginning and no end.

(Emphasis mine.) Although Stroustrup is describing how software is written, I believe his observation applies to writing fiction too, and most creative endeavors.

Think of a story you’re working on right now. Do you really know where your inspiration for it started? Can you enumerate every influence leading up to it? Now think of your last completed story. Are you really finished with it? I’ve discovered recurring themes in my own work that make me wonder if I’m still “writing” older work.

Writing is an iterative and incremental process of inspiration, evaluation, and revision. Each iteration shapes and smooths and revises. Nothing in a story is sacred. Everything in it deserves questioning and challenging.

Proportions

Field’s paradigm asks you to think of a story as three interconnected acts. Each act is unit of drama. It may be a scene or a series of scenes, but in fiction, those scenes are not necessarily “in the moment” of the narration. (For example, Heart of Darkness is entirely narrated by Marlow in England, but the acts of the story are the events along the river in Africa.)

The three acts are not vacuum-sealed. Events in Act One have ramifications that carry into Act Two and even Act Three. Questions posed on the first page may not be answered until the last.

At its simplest, the three-act structure goes back to Aristotle’s Poetics:

Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is a whole and complete in itself…a thing is a whole if it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

In some ways, that’s all the three acts are: the beginning, middle, and end of your story.

Each act is not the same length. Remember, in movies and theater, time is everything. (In both genres, one manuscript page is considered to be approximately one minute of stage or projection time.) Most films are 90 to 120 minutes long. Theater tends to run closer to three hours, but there’s been a recent trend for ten-minute plays.

As far as page count, fiction is all over the map. What’s more, fiction writers don’t tend to obsess over how long it takes for a reader to read the story. For my interpretation of Field’s paradigm and applying it to fiction, I don’t worry about the length of each act in terms of page count. What’s important is their proportions:

  • Act 1: 25%
  • Act 2: 50%
  • Act 2: 25%

So the middle section of the story is roughly twice as long as the opening and concluding acts—roughly.

If you think about it, that’s not terribly revolutionary news to a fiction writer. We’re taught to watch out for long openings. Exposition, introduction, summary, prologue, and/or excess scene-setting merely serve to delay the start of the narrative. Likewise, we’re told to watch out for ending exposition, long-winded conclusions, and so forth. We’re supposed to be eagle-eyed for when the story “really” starts (in medias res is the phrase usually mentioned here) and when the story “really” ends (think of Gordon Lish cutting the final pages of a Raymond Carver story).

In a nutshell, that’s what Syd Field encapsulates with his observation about act lengths. Trim the opening down, wrap up the ending as concisely as possible, and save the meat of the story for the middle. I would push harder on those numbers—20% / 60% / 20%—but there’s more to Act One and Act Three than the introduction and conclusion of a story. (More on that later.)

Three—no, four—acts

One problem with Field’s original three-act structure in Screenplay was the long haul from the end of Act One to the start of Act Three. Act Two is fifty percent of the story, 60 pages of screenplay manuscript. Since Field’s paradigm was intended to act as a guide or a map, how could he advise how to write a screenplay when half of his map was blank white nothing?

In his later Screenwriter’s Workbook, Field explains a discovery he made after Screenplay‘s publication. In many movies he found there’s a midpoint event that cleaves the second act into two smaller units of drama. This gives the screenwriter a target to shoot for when starting Act Two:

Knowing the midpoint is a tool; with it you have a way of focusing your story line into a specific line of action. You have a direction, a line of development.

(Playwriting defines “action” as a character’s desires and motivations, not shooting guns and car chases. Although Field doesn’t define the word, I believe he uses “action” to mean the results of a character attempting to fulfill those wants—in other words, we see the character trying to get what they want and experiencing the consequences. Aristotle said story “is not an imitation of men but of actions and life.” His use of the term could apply to both definitions.)

Between reading Field’s description of the midpoint, thinking of some examples in film and fiction, and my own experience, I see the midpoint as a Janus point in the story, a moment of looking backward and forward. Even if the storyline has wandered a bit (due to character development or a digression—any reason, really), the midpoint is a stitch connecting the beginning to the end.

With his discovery of the midpoint, Field’s three-act structure looks more like a four-act structure, but the basics are the same. I’ve labeled them with Field’s names, adding my own label for 2A:

  • Act 1: Setup (25%)
  • Act 2A: Complication (25%)
  • Act 2B: Confrontation (25%)
  • Act 3: Resolution (25%)

The labels are to offer the thrust of each act’s purpose. There’s no requirement that every sentence in Setup be setting up your story, or that every scene in Confrontation be confrontational. It’s just a general idea of the direction of that act.

The percentages may look daunting or restrictive, but understand that they’re to indicate rough proportions and not page counts. If your novel’s Act One is only ten percent of the pages, that may be just fine, or even great. But if your Act One is fifty percent of the pages, Field’s paradigm suggests you need to rethink your Setup. I suspect your readers would too.

Part three: the treatment


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Writing better fiction with Syd Field’s three-act screenplay structure

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Syd Field

Syd Field

If you’re a writer, consider if this sounds familiar:

An idea snaps into your head—a character, a situation, a setup, a name—and you dive in, pumping out a promising first chapter in no time at all. You clean it up and bring it in to a workshop or writing group. You get some input and take away some praise and criticism. Back at home you move on to the second chapter, and the third, and then…kaput. You’re out of gas. You make a couple of aborted attempts to keep at it, but it’s just not in you.

Months later you pick up the manuscript, tinker with it, and slide it back in the drawer. And that’s the end of your novel.

The frustration goes beyond hard work being “wasted.” (I don’t think any writing is a waste, it’s merely practice for the next round of writing.) No, the frustration is the hollow feeling that, with just a little more inspiration or skill, you could’ve pushed on and completed that novel. The frustration is the suspicion that, with just a little more planning, you would have a clear path forward.

I’ve not outlined or plotted every story I’ve written. I’ve completed a few stories without any serious planning at all that I would say I’m proud of. I might even say they’re “successful.” But I also know how many failed and false starts I’ve accumulated, a frustrating pile of corpses that simply didn’t pan out. I started thinking about how to outline a story and realized I didn’t have a definite idea of how to do it. I had a couple of notions, but nothing concrete.

Some time ago, when I was first coming to grips with how to write fiction—especially longer forms—I grew interested in the three-act structure screenwriters use. It’s a form Hollywood follows slavishly. Books on screenplay writing are almost entirely devoted to the structure, going deep into the mechanics and timing (that is, the page count) of each act. They detail what questions must be posed in each act and when those question should be answered, even breaking down each act into smaller subunits. It’s much more rigorous than anything I’ve seen in the world of fiction or poetry (which has an encyclopedia’s worth of its own forms).

My experience has been that fiction writers disdain the three-act screenplay structure. Actually, most disdain any manner of plotting or outlining, usually while murmuring something about “plot-driven fiction.” For them, the three-act structure isn’t a revelation, it’s the reason for all the pandering crap Hollywood churns out year after year. Others seem to have the attitude that outlining a novel is somehow “cheating.”

I’ve taken a fair number of playwriting classes and workshops. In them I was struck how theater, just like filmmaking, emphasizes structure over any other craft element. We found structure laced through plays as diverse as A Raisin in the Sun, Glengarry Glen Ross, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea, Noises Off, Cloud 9, and Fences—brilliant work, all of it, and nothing I would call “pandering crap.” But it’s right there on the page: structure, structure, and more structure.

The Headlight Method

Between all the fiction classes, workshops, writing groups, and how-to books I’ve read, it’s rare to find anything approaching screenwriting’s or theater’s level of emphasis on narrative structure. When I have, it’s usually a method for writing thrillers or “guaranteed” bestsellers, something to the effect of putting the character into deeper and deeper holes and forcing him or her to make harder and harder choices. Oh, and be sure to end each chapter with a cliffhanger. In the case of romance novels, structure is defined in terms of the types of motivations and the types of problems the characters will face. Others argue that most (or all) proper stories follow the Hero’s Journey, although I find that dubious, especially looking back on the literature of the last one hundred years. These are not the kinds of narrative structures I’m talking about.

Freytag's PyramidThe only vanilla structure I’ve seen consistently taught in fiction is the classic rising and falling action cliff ledge (also known as Freytag’s Pyramid). There’s tons of criticism of the pyramid out there. For my purposes, I ask if rising/falling action is an organizing principle or an observation. There’s a difference between a cake recipe and a photo of a finished cake sliced in half. In my mind, the cliff ledge is that photo.

Inevitably when discussing fiction and structure or outlining, E. L. Doctorow’s maxim makes an entrance:

Writing is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as the headlights, but you make the whole trip that way.

Like opening a story with weather, this quote has become another scrap of writing lore, that body of accepted thought on the shall’s and shall-not’s of writing fiction. But reread that quote. Doctorow isn’t advocating structureless fiction or railing against the idea of outlining a story. All he’s saying is, you’re not going to know every little detail about a book before you start writing it. Even if you can only see as far as the headlight beams, there’s nothing wrong with having a map handy before you set out on your trip.

Last year I got serious about understanding how screenwriters craft a three-act movie script. In the process of researching the topic I molded the three-act screenplay structure into a form geared for fiction (novels and short stories) rather than movies. This process produces a rough guide for your story, disposable, and nothing more. I’ve applied it on a number of projects and found myself surprised at the results. And, yes, my writing has improved for it.

Syd Field

There’s countless guides, how-to’s, manuals, videos, and seminars on successful screenwriting. Syd Field’s Screenplay is, as I understand it, the Bible on the subject. First published in 1979, Field articulated his three-act structure (he calls it “the paradigm”) as a framework for telling a visual story via a series of scenes. Like literary theorists from Aristotle onward, Field recognized that most stories are built from roughly similar narrative architectures, no matter their subject or setting. In Screenplay he set out to diagram that architecture and explain how it applied to film.

Although Screenplay is the Genesis document, I recommend his Screenwriter’s Workbook (1984). It picks up where Screenplay left off, detailing discoveries and new thinking on his three-act structure. Syd Field made a lifetime career out of teaching people how to write movies; these two books are where he started.

Not everything Field discusses directly corresponds to fiction. Film is a different medium, after all. What I’ve tried to do is pare down and re-shape his three-act structure into something more appropriate for writing novels and, to a lesser degree, short stories. I’ve used this modified paradigm to write a four-page story (“The Last Man in San Francisco”), to revise a long novel that I thought was dead and lost (Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People), and now a new novel (tentatively titled Bridge Daughter).

Let me be clear: this is not a robotic recipe for writing fiction. Syd Field did not lay out a formula for writing blockbuster movies, nor am I laying out a formula for fiction, bestselling or otherwise. This isn’t telling you how to write, it’s suggesting a creative process to engage with before you write. Basketball players take practice shots before a game; artists rough out ideas in their sketchpad before approaching the canvas; musicians practice their set before going into the recording studio. What I’m suggesting is for you to get some basic ideas about your story out of your head and on paper before you start writing.

Part two: “The paradigm”


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Twenty Writers: Yoshihiro Tatsumi in retrospect

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See my Introduction for more information about the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” project. The current list of reviews and essays may be found at the “Twenty Writers” home page.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Tokyo, 2010. (Yasu. CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons)

Yoshihiro Tatsumi, Tokyo, 2010. (Yasu. CC BY-SA 3.0 Wikimedia Commons)

Last night I learned Japanese manga artist Yoshihiro Tatsumi had passed away at the age of 79. Revered as the grandfather of gekiga (a darker form of manga, akin to graphic novels or alternative comics here in the United States), Tatsumi was known in Japan for his urban, noirish comics featuring a gamut of characters, from gangsters and back alley hoods to college students and office workers. Only in the last ten years did he became well-known in the North America (and perhaps elsewhere) due to new translations of his work published yearly by Drawn & Quarterly and edited under the guiding hand of Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve, Shortcomings).

I don’t think I can express how much I enjoyed Tatsumi’s work or how his comics encouraged and shaped my own writing. I did not come to his work via manga (a form I honestly don’t know much about) but rather by accident while browsing the shelves at a local bookstore. The cover—a lone man in a raincoat receding down a seedy nighttime alleyway, his back to the viewer—led me to pick up The Push Man and Other Stories and read the first story, then the next, then the next. I promptly purchased the copy, returned home, and read the entire collection in one sitting. My only disappointment was that none of his other work was readily available in the U.S. at the time. (My novella Everywhere Man gets its name from Tatsumi’s Push Man, and takes a few other cues as well.)

It was remarkable, this voice from Japan whose stories respected their source culture while also digging up explosive emotional power directed at that same culture. Tatsumi’s minimalist style and quiet stories of “average” people are often compared to Raymond Carver, but they’re also deeply infused with American noir and crime fiction. Themes of sexual frustration and violence and emasculation are rampant in Push Man and elsewhere. His characters often seem like Japanese counterparts to Jim Thompson’s West Texas oilcatters and door-to-door salesmen: disposable men on the edge of breakdown or abandonment, with few choices other than to jump on the accelerator and push through their troubles rather than backpedal out of them. They rarely succeed. Tatsumi’s characters live in cramped rooms, cramped even by Japanese standards, usually only large enough for a futon and a hot plate. They sludge through dead-end jobs while watching from afar Japan’s miraculous economic boom of the 1960s and 70s. They aren’t preoccupied with death, they fear being erased. I have the idea these stories were intended for the same kind of audience Jim Thompson wrote for, young lonely men who felt shut-out from the American—or Japanese—Dream.

The Push Man and other stories (2005)

The Push Man and other stories (2005)

When recommending Tatsumi to friends, my trouble has always been what not to recommend. Of Drawn & Quarterly’s offerings, perhaps only the autobiographical A Drifting Life and Black Blizzard (penned when Tatsumi was 21 and the source of some embarrassment for him when reprinted) are reserved for Tatsumi completists. Otherwise the English editions we have available represent an impressive body of work which, as I understand it, remains an incomplete record of his full output.

In Push Man‘s stories, each limited to eight pages, Tatsumi deftly compresses grim situations down to their bare minimum and yet manages to leave himself the occasional panel for bleak panoramas of late-1960s Tokyo, its late-night bars and red light districts and walk-up ramen stands. The artwork is sometimes cartoony—even clunky—but the emotional force of his characters’ desolation carries through page after page. In later collections (Abandon the Old in Tokyo, Good-Bye, and Midnight Fishermen) the young men’s magazines Tatsumi was writing for opened up more pages for his work. His pen improves in these collections, trending toward photorealism and employing heavier use of shadow and contrast. These tightly-wound tales sometimes suffer from the breathing room four or eight additional pages allowed, but each collection stores more than a few gems.

A Drifting Life (2009)

A Drifting Life (2009)

Tatsumi’s autobiographical A Drifting Life is his most ambitious work translated to English, and perhaps his most ambitious work of all. Intense but careful to withhold the most personal details of his life from the reader, Tatsumi lays out his formative years and how he entered the manga field while in elementary school. Each stage of his life is a new round of jousting with manga as an art form, tackling a narrative outlet he found liberating and yet restrictive and overly commercial all the same. I wish more time was spent on the side story of the manga rental industry in postwar Japan and its power to create and demolish artistic reputations. Some of the editors and publishers Tatsumi fought with sound straight out of Hollywood’s star system, right down to the shoddy treatment writers on both sides of the Pacific endured to produce consumable work week after week.

Still jousting with the strictures of manga at the age of 74, Tatsumi published Fallen Words, eight “moral comedies” inspired by rakugo, a venerable form of Japanese performance where a seated speaker narrates a story with a fan and a cloth as props. Rakugo performers will often tell stories that have been repeated for over a hundred years; the art is in the retelling and voices and mannerisms and novel uses of the props themselves. Tatsumi took this verbal art form and produced visual versions that depicted them in their original Meiji- and Edo-era settings: “I attempted to take rakugo, where laughter is supreme, and to tell the stories in the visual language of gekiga,” an art form not known for its comedy. Some stories rely on twist endings that don’t quite work, some on puns that only makes sense to Japanese speakers, but the book as a whole demonstrates the kind of experimentation Tatsumi was willing to engage in right to the end of his career.

Fallen Words (2009)

Fallen Words (2009)

When I was a graduate student teaching undergraduates creative writing, I included one story from Push Man as required reading. “Make-Up” remains my personal favorite of his work. It involves a young office worker living with an older woman, a bar hostess. When she’s gone at night, the young man dons a kimono, applies her cosmetic, and takes to downtown Tokyo passing as a woman. Not only is it remarkable the ease with which Tatsumi tells this nuanced story (another woman falls in love with him as a woman), it’s also surprising the sensitivity and compassion he offers his main character without falling into bathos. Some of the students tripped up on the simple lines of Tatsumi’s pen, some had trouble with the quietness (entire pages lacking a line of dialogue), but many gripped that something interesting and surprising was going on, right up to the ambiguous ending that opens up rather than shuts down the story.

Tatsumi’s work is often criticized as heavy-handed, cliched, and moralizing, which is arguable for his earlier output (such as Push Man) but is not so easily asserted with Drifting Life or Fallen Words. My response is to look at the boldness of the subject matter, the narrative distillation of complicated situations converted to deceptively simple panels on the page, and his early mastery of story structure. Each page of “Make-Up” is a self-contained scene, as perfect as a zen koan. It’s harder than it looks. That’s what I think Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s detractors are missing. This was not a natural talent who slipped into the form with ease, but one who struggled with it and attacked its firmaments, sometimes with mediocrity, sometimes brilliantly, but always thinking of his next push forward.

More on Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s passing: Adrian Tomine, Paul Gravett, Bleeding Cool.


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Twenty Writers: Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon)

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See my Introduction for more information about the “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books” project. The current list of reviews and essays may be found at the “Twenty Writers” home page.

Update:
Another interpretation of “The Flitcraft Parable”

The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell HammettDashiell Hammett was a prodigious writer, but in the most lopsided kind of way. He wrote north of a hundred short stories in less than five years, grinding out stories every month for an insatiable readership thanks to a plow horse work ethic the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s demanded of their writers. In 2011, a researcher going through Hammett’s papers discovered fifteen short stories that had been overlooked, all but lost. There are big-name published authors who’ve not written fifteen short stories in their career. For Dashiell Hammett and his peers in the world of pulps, fifteen short stories was getting your foot in the door.

It’s striking, then, that after all this output, Hammett was later unable to produce more than five novels, and after those did not produce anything publishable for twenty-five more years, until his death in 1961.

Like his short stories, Hammett’s five novels are of mixed quality and yet all impressive in their staying power. In Red Harvest Hammett created the “man in the middle” genre that directors Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Walter Hill, and many others would borrow for their own uses. The man-in-the-middle story is a structure Hammett seemingly cut from whole cloth, as no one seems able to point to a true antecedent. Hammett’s genteel, Fitzgeraldean The Thin Man spawned a slew of successful Hollywood pictures. Its form—a fashionable society couple solving murders between martinis and canapés—may sound dated, but judging from the success of Downton Abbey, I bet it could stage a comeback at a moment’s notice. The Glass Key‘s story of a political boss’ right-hand man smashing down rivals rings familiar to any fan of the Coen Brothers’ Miller’s Crossing (although Coen Brothers’ fans should also read James Cain’s mostly-overlooked Love’s Lovely Counterfeit for another important influence). Hammett’s books echo in all manner of 20th century entertainment, here and abroad.

Then there’s The Maltese Falcon, the most widely-known novel in the bunch. Like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, its title alone is a signifier: fog-soaked San Francisco, the statuette of a solemn stiff-winged black bird, back-alley shootings and mysterious packages arriving by ship from Hong Kong—John Huston knew a great novel when he read it, and he knew better than to monkey with a winning story. If you view the movie immediately after reading the novel, you’ll wonder if there was even a shooting script. Huston’s adaptation hews that closely to the book.

One omission in Huston’s adaptation of The Maltese Falcon is a brief story Sam Spade tells to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the femme fatale. Spade’s story has nothing to do with finding the Falcon, nothing to do with the motley assortment of characters searching for it up and down the streets of San Francisco, nothing really to do with anything in the novel. The story is a mystery all right, but not in its elements of detection, which it has none of, but what the story means and why Spade is telling it to O’Shaughnessy.

The Maltese Falcon is a model of brisk pacing and efficient writing, a novel of sensation and suspense, and so the digression stands out all the more for it. Spade’s brief tale, two and a half pages long, is one of the most mysterious and puzzling aspects of The Maltese Falcon. Although never referred to as such in the book, it has become known as The Flitcraft Parable.

The parable

Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy of a well-to-do family man in Tacoma, Washington named Flitcraft. In 1922 Flitcraft left his office for lunch and never returned, missing the four o’clock tee-off he’d reserved a mere half-hour before. He also abandoned a good family and $200,000 in the bank, leaving behind no indication of another woman in his life, or any kind of double-life at all. As Spade says about Flitcraft’s disappearance, in what may be the absolute best of Hammett’s prose:

“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”

Five years after Flitcraft had vanished, Spade was working for one of the larger detective agencies in Seattle when

Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles—that was his first name—Pierce. He had an automobile business…a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season.

Although not told in-scene, it’s easy to envision Spade’s visit to Flitcraft not so much as a confrontation but a tense social visit. For a tough-guy book, there are no threats or intimidation in The Flitcraft Parable, no car chase or running down dark streets with revolvers unholstered. The parable reads like Flitcraft and Spade were drinking coffee while discussing the situation. But it is tense, as Flitcraft must attempt to explain the logic behind his actions, if any.

After all, what has really changed for Flitcraft? Once again he holds an office job, has a wife and child, a house, even that four o’clock tee-off, all in Spokane, a mere three hundred miles away from a near-identical life in Tacoma.

What precipitated his flight? While going to lunch that day in 1922, Flitcraft passed a high-rise construction site:

“A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. … He felt like somebody has taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Realizing that his life had been randomly spared, Flitcraft decides to randomly upend his life. Like the prince Buddha shedding his family and power and worldly possessions, Flitcraft abandoned his comforts to wander the world. He drifted until he wound up in Spokane, a four-hour drive from his family, and settled into a situation indiscernible from his original:

“He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

The story ends there. Unimpressed, Brigid O’Shaughnessy shrugs off the parable and changes the subject. To the casual reader it appears as a digression from the thrilling search for the Falcon, and not a particularly relevant digression at that. What’s more, Flitcraft’s explanation does not satisfy. There must be more to his story, but Flitcraft is not mentioned again in the novel.

One cannot imagine The Flitcraft Parable finding a place in pulps like Black Mask, magazines that instructed their writers “When in doubt, throw a dead body at ’em.” No gun is leveled, no whiskey is poured, no dame is saved. In The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett crafted the most iconic private detective novel ever, the singular representation of an entire form, and yet in it he wrote the most unorthodox story of detection ever.

Charles Flitcraft

Dashiell Hammett

Dashiell Hammett

It can be overemphasized that Hammett was, prior to taking up the pen, a private detective. Too often his experience as a Pinkerton agent is treated as a trump card by his proponents, proof that Hammett’s work is authentic compared to the detective fiction of “amateur” hardboiled writers.

It’s important to state: The Maltese Falcon is not a work of hard realism. Hammett understood how to give people what they wanted to read, hence his success in the pages of Black Mask. He also had a preternatural gift of vivid and bold writing. Raymond Chandler asserted Hammett did “over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” That’s why, unlike most of his peers at Black Mask, Hammett is still studied and marveled over today.

But Hammett was a private eye and he knew the ins and outs of that profession. He knew that such work did not always involve reaching for one’s revolver to get answers. He knew sitting down and talking frankly will sometimes get all the information one requires. No hot lights, no pounding on the desk, no good-cop/bad-cop.

Look again at the subdued language when Spade is hired by Flitcraft’s wife:

Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right.

No leggy femme fatale arriving at the detective’s office wearing a mourning veil with a slit up her dress. Mrs. Flitcraft’s entrance has all the dramatic effect of going to the phone company to request a change in service. The weary acknowledgement—”It was Flitcraft, all right”—indicates Spade knew all along it would be the same man, although his reaction later tells us he’d never seen a man skip town for quite the same reasons as Flitcraft’s. The subdued language is echoed in Flitcraft’s tepid attempt to explain those reasons to Spade: “He had never told anybody his story before…He tried now.” This is not a parable of a man making a considered choice. Flitcraft up and left with little self-examination at all, compelled, it seems, by cosmic forces beyond our ken.

Passivity is the standard in The Flitcraft Parable. Even Mrs. Flitcraft shrugs and lets it go when told by Spade of Flitcraft’s bigamy:

“She didn’t want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her—the way she looked at it—she didn’t want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.”

The parable is built from the elements of scandal and recklessness and infidelity, but like tightening your grip on bread dough, Hammett lets the gooey salaciousness squeeze out and fall away. The three characters—Spade, Flitcraft, and his wife—simply give in to what has happened without complaint or fuss.

It’s not just an usual detective story, it’s an unusual story, no qualifier required. Hammett offers no hero or victim to identify with, no epiphanic moment, and no moral at the end, as most parables would conclude with. The tale has all the trappings of a Cheever story, but it never sneers down on the suburban way of life Flitcraft abandons and returns to. (Keep in mind that Hammett was an urban sophisticate in this period and sympathetic to the Communist Party and socialist movements; he would maintain strong leftist beliefs the rest of his life.) Flitcraft’s escape from domesticity to male freedom also sounds like the setup for an Updike novel, but again, the escape is not truly escape for Flitcraft, just as his return to Spokane is not a return to domestic imprisonment.

For a writer whose stock-and-trade is hot lead and wisecracking gangsters, Hammett tells The Flitcraft Parable with light, oblique touches. One is left with a sense that the falling construction beam shook up the cosmos and dislodged something vital, propelling Flitcraft out into the world. By the time Flitcraft’s orbit returned to domesticity in Spokane, that dislodged piece had slipped back into place and was wedged in tight. The dust settles and little has changed.

Charles Peirce

An important detail in the parable is Flitcraft’s assumed name when he settles in Spokane: Charles Pierce. This is most likely a reference to the American philosopher and polymath Charles Sanders Peirce (pronounced “purse”), the father of Pragmatism and one of the great thinkers of the 19th century. There is indirect evidence that Hammett knew well of Peirce’s work. In a letter to his publisher, Hammett describes The Maltese Falcon as the most “philosophical” work he’d produced to date. Peirce’s essays were published in popular magazines and his books were widely read and studied. The question then is why Hammett would namedrop one of the most important philosophers of the prior 100 years into a detective story about locating an old statuette.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce

A clue may lie in Peirce’s work in philosophy. Peirce’s Pragmatism was multifaceted, but one of its concerns was the relationship between doubt, belief, and truth. Peirce was also fascinated with randomness and how it shaped history.

Peirce argued that the universe is not entirely deterministic, that an element of chaos exists, and that this chaos is necessary for variations to form and evolve. He dubbed his theory Tychism. Peirce saw Darwinism as just one example of Tychism at work. Peirce didn’t say that the universe is pure randomness, just that by the injection of a small amount of uncertainty—call it a seed of chaos—variations and change sprung forth, and from there true growth.

Regarding doubt, belief, and truth, Peirce expressed the role of imagination on the search for truth in an 1878 essay he wrote for Popular Science, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear”:

…[Doubt] stimulates the mind to an activity which may be slight or energetic, calm or turbulent. Images pass rapidly through consciousness, one incessantly melting into another, until at last, when all is over—it may be in a fraction of a second, in an hour, or after long years—we find ourselves decided as to how we should act under such circumstances as those which occasioned our hesitation. In other words, we have attained belief.

According to Peirce, doubt is the key component to fruitful inquiry. Not just garden-variety doubt (as in “I doubt I can make it to the party in time”) but the kind of doubt that “stimulates the mind to an activity.” The stimulating doubt forces the mind to engage with the question and come up with an alternative that we believe is the truth. Our decision on how one would act is, in effect, how one did act—”in other words, we have attained belief.”

Putting it all together, the sound of the steel beam hitting the sidewalk, the fleck of concrete striking Flitcraft in the cheek and scarring him (“He rubbed it with his finger—well, affectionately—when he told me about it”), the sudden question of why he had not been killed: This random accident and chance survival introduced a seed of doubt to Flitcraft’s ordered, static life. It caused him to consider an alternate reality—a reality without his family or fortune. When he could imagine his life without them, it was just a few more steps to actualize that idea. Doubt stimulates belief.

Flitcraft’s snap decision seems monumental from our external viewpoint, but for him it was nothing more than a slight shift: “Life could be ended for him at random by a falling beam: he would change his life at random by simply going away.” Flitcraft goes out of his way to point out to Spade the “reasonableness” of his decision. Stepping back, maybe it does seem reasonable. It was also unsustainable—but no matter.

The reason for the telling

While Spade tells the parable, he and O’Shaughnessy are waiting for Joel Cairo to join them. Brigid O’Shaugnessy has had dealings with Cairo in the past and has come to Spade for protection. But O’Shaughnessy has lied to Spade already (in the novel, her first words to him are lies) and he expects her to lie again. This is the commonly offered reason for Spade telling her the parable: Spade is indirectly informing O’Shaughnessy that he does not expect her deceit to end. Like Flitcraft, the thinking goes, she too will not change.

It seems too straightforward a decode for me. Sam Spade is not one for long-winded oratories. It would be much more in character for him to say, “You’ve lied to me before and you’ll lie to me again.” Done and done. In fact, he does tell her that elsewhere in the book. There’s no reason for him to cloak it in a parable about a man in Spokane.

It’s worth noting that Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon in the third-person objective. Although Sam Spade is in every scene and the narrator stays close to him, we as readers are never privy to Spade’s internal thoughts. We can only guess what Spade is thinking at any moment. That’s the true mystery of The Maltese Falcon, not whodunnit, but What does Sam Spade know, and when does he know it? When it comes to Brigid O’Shaughnessy, I think Sam Spade has her pretty well figured out, much like he knew he would find Flitcraft when he traveled to Spokane. (“It was Flitcraft all right.”) Spade will work with O’Shaughnessy, but only to find the Falcon and to dig out the truth about her…even if that truth confirms what he already suspects.

I also refuse to believe that The Flitcraft Parable is about a man who does not change. Flitcraft’s beliefs are challenged by the chance accident of the falling beam. His travels—his search for some sort of truth—lead him back to his original beliefs. That does not mean his travels were wasted. Flitcraft has no regrets for what he did. His travels—his inquiry—made him a different man, even if he seems to be the same man as before, which he is not.

Spade uses The Flitcraft Parable to issue a statement, a personal credo. He’s saying there is a truth out there and it’s worth looking for it, even if you wind up confirming what you already knew. What’s more, randomness and chance stir the pot, make things happen, creates possibilities. Spade is not Sherlock Holmes. He does not see the world as orderly deductions, one fact leading unquestionably to another. Spade gambles, he take risks, he bluffs. (He’s named after a suit of cards, after all.) Later in the novel an adversary compliments Spade: “There’s never telling what you’ll do or say next, except that it’s bound to be something astonishing.” It’s as concise an observation as any written about Sam Spade.

Charles Sanders Peirce wrote “Do not block the way of inquiry.” Is there a more precise statement of the worldview of Sam Spade? Or, for that matter, the detective novel?

Or of Dashiell Hammett, a man whose left-wing beliefs led to his imprisonment at the age of 55, assigned the duty of cleaning toilets, all for believing that doubt and inquiry could lead to a better society?

November 13, 2015: Check out “Another interpretation of ‘The Flitcraft Parable'”


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