writing | Bertram's Blog

Writing Your First Book Second

October 11, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I mentioned before that I’m reading the novels of a bestselling author, trying to figure out why she is so popular. Yikes, what a chore! If she’s anything to go by, being a bestselling author has nothing to do with being a good writer. I’ve seen much better writing posted on the Internet by unpublished authors. Apparently, however, once an author has established herself on the bestseller list, she no longer needs to concern herself with the tenets of good writing.

The story I am currently struggling to read is about identical twins. I am on page 250, but if I were to edit the book and take out every single explanation of how the twins looked alike, how no one could tell them apart, how no one could tell which twin was which, how it was like looking at the same person, how it was like looking in the mirror, how they were the same age, how there was no difference between them, those 250 pages would be whittled down to about 100.

So, this is what I’ve learned: you, me, and everyone else who have written a book and tried to get it published have written our second book, the one that will be accepted for publishing after the first one sells. I’ve written three novels (to see the first chapters, click on “My First Chapters” under “links”) but they are all second books. Which isn’t a bad thing. Only by writing can a person learn how to write. I hope to get good enough so that one day I can write my first book, a novel with such a flash of brilliance that it will capture the minds and money of publishers and agents.

Like Andrew Vasch and his series character Burke. In the first novel, Burke was a total loner who lived off the grid. I’m not sure if the book was brilliant, but that character certainly captured my imagination. So I looked forward to the second book, and ho-hum. B-o-o-oring. Burke became like every other series character, only we were supposed to pretend that he was different. Suddenly he had friends galore, everyone knew him, and almost everyone knew where to find him.

See what I mean? Once you’ve established yourself, you can make your own rules. You don’t even have to write well. Your name becomes a brand, and that’s all that counts.

So how do you become a brand? How do you write that first, brilliant novel? Don’t ask me. If I knew, I’d be writing bestselling novels. I certainly wouldn’t be writing this blog.

Posted in blogging, books, writing. Leave a Comment »

Scarlett by any other name would have been sweet.

October 10, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Scarlett O’Hara was originally called Pansy. If Margaret Mitchell had kept that name, would her epic novel ever have become so popular? I doubt it. A Pansy would be sweet and biddable with rare moments of stubbornness, but she could never be as strong-willed as Scarlett, and she would never have caught and kept the attention of such a worldly man as Rhett.

Unlike women characters, men tend not to have exotic names. They usually have common, clipped names, which work well enough in most cases, but what if Rhett had been called Jack or Clint or even Brad? Millions of women would probably still have fallen in love with him, but they certainly would not have found him so intriguing.

Clothes may make the man and woman, but their names (in fiction, anyway) define them.

Though Scarlett fits the name of the character in Gone With the Wind, it could not be the name of a medieval heroine. In those days, almost all girls were named Mary, with Elizabeth coming in a distant second.

I suppose if Gone With the Wind were written in the 1980s, Scarlett’s name would have been Heather. Odd to think that in another forty years, youth will scorn that name as being old-fashioned, fit only for elderly women, much like Effie is today. (I shudder to think how many babies being born right now are being named Britney, Lindsay, or Paris.)

But I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that names matter and should be chosen wisely. A book may not be rejected because of a character’s name, but why take the chance?

Posted in books, fiction, writing. Tags: Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, Rhett Butler, Scarlett O'Hara. Leave a Comment »

Knocking on my blog’s door for lemonade and gingersnaps.

October 9, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Have you ever met one of those lonely old people who are willing to talk to anyone who happens to wander into their life? They don’t care if you had the wrong address and knocked on their door by mistake. They still ask you to come in, to have a glass of fresh-squeezed lemonade or a plate of homemade gingersnaps, to stay and chat awhile.

That’s how I feel when I check to see how people found my blog. I don’t care that they found their way by accident while looking for something completely different. (Usually they are searching for Omar Khayyam’s quatrain about the moving finger, but why are so many people interested in that, all of a sudden? And why come to me? I did finally post that quatrain for these visitors so they wouldn’t go away empty-handed or empty-headed, but still, there are other sites where they could have found it.) At any rate, I’m glad that someone, anyone came knocking on my blog’s door. I just wish I had some lemonade to offer them, or a plate of fresh-baked cookies. Probably would get more traffic if I did, but I have yet to figure out how to send gingersnaps through cyberspace.

In light of this, I’m sure you can imagine how I felt when I got a comment about one of my posts. Like I was a celebrity or something. A person I had never met read what I wrote, and liked it.

In the end isn’t that what we’re all looking for, whether we’re young or old, lonely or befriended? Aren’t we all looking for someone to acknowledge us? Someone to see us as apart from all the other billions of people in the world, even if only for a moment? We writers and bloggers spew out billions, trillions of sentences each day, and every single one of them says the same thing: “Notice ME.”

Well, for a single blip of time, I was noticed.

Posted in blogging, life, writing. Tags: lonely, Omar Khayyam. The moving finger writes. 2 Comments »

Our Most Cherished Beliefs are Bunk

October 8, 2007 — Pat Bertram

An agent once said that to sell, a novel has to validate our most cherished beliefs. If this is true, then what’s the point of writing? Our cherished beliefs are bunk.

The universe does not make sense. Not every effect has a cause. And things don’t always work out for the best.

The government does not have our interests at heart. A government consists of government employees, and the only interests they have at heart are their own.

Marriage is an outdated institution, perpetuating outdated roles. There is no happily ever after. Love does not come to all of us, and it doesn’t last forever.

Family is not the most important thing in our lives. How can it be? We spend our adulthoods trying to overcome what was done to us in our childhoods, and we put our children in daycare centers and schools to be raised by strangers.

Motherhood does not confer special status. Mothers are common – about half of all creatures on this earth are mothers.

And apple pie makes you fat.

So what’s the point of writing? Because for one brief moment we control the universe, and our cherished beliefs become real.

But what the hell do I know.

Posted in life, writing. Leave a Comment »

A secret agent so secret even he does not know he is a secret agent.

October 7, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Speechifying is not the way to tell a story, but somehow I always end up with one know-it-all character who cannot keep his mouth shut. I do, however, manage to get rid of some speeches during the rewrites. This is an outtake from my novel More Deaths Than One.

“In a book I wrote,” Harrison said, “one of my characters was hypnotized by the CIA, then sent to wait tables at a very important, highly secret and secure dinner for several heads of state and other key figures. In his hypnotic state, the waiter was able to remember everything that was said and done, and parrot it back later. Afterward, his memory was erased, he was brought out of his hypnotic trance, and he resumed his normal life, none the wiser. I thought the idea of a secret agent who was so secret he himself didn’t know he was an agent was very clever. I just recently found out that the military had used that very same technique in Vietnam, Korea, and perhaps even during World War II.

“I also discovered that they had once developed a program to desensitize service men to the act of killing. One problem soldiers have, even those with no moral objection to taking lives, is that they reach a saturation point. After a while, the killing seeps into their heads and into their dreams, and they begin to hesitate when it comes time to pull the trigger. Because of this, a tour of duty in a combat zone is limited to twelve or thirteen months; experienced fighting men are constantly being replaced by neophytes. Not a very efficient way to run a war. Ultimately, the program was abandoned. Desensitizing soldiers beyond the point of saturation was very expensive and time-consuming, to say nothing of inhumanly brutal, and after all that, those soldiers often died in battle before they ever reached that point anyway.”

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Bucketeers, scams, conmen

October 6, 2007 — Pat Bertram

Researching a novel can become addictive. Like with money, you feel as if you never have enough background information. You tell yourself you need one more piece before you can sit down and begin creating your opus, but as the days, weeks, months go by, the pieces pile up. Eventually, however, even the most exhaustive research ends, and you begin writing. Now what do you do with all that background information? You use, it of course. You earned it, right?

If you’re smart, or lucky, or have a good writing coach, you discover that all those facts sink the story, and you jettison most of them during the rewrites. You hoard those facts, though, and later add them to your blog.

Among my jetsam is this piece about Jacob Simon Herzig, (AKA George Graham Rice) one of the most successful bucket shop operators in history.

A bucket shop was an ostensibly legal brokerage firm. Some of the firms operated within the law, but most did not. They cheated their customers, stole from them, misused their money. In New York State, in one five-year period early in the twentieth century, bucket shops went into bankruptcy owing their customers more that two hundred twelve million dollars, the equivalent of several billion in today’s dollars.

Originally, bucket shops were markets where flour and grain were sold by the bucket to poor people. The wealthy, of course, did not patronize those places since they could afford to buy in larger amounts. The modern equivalent of a bucket shop began soon after the Civil War when railroad stocks were placed on the market and sold in small lots to investors who didn’t normally buy stocks. Financiers like Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim Fisk were all early bucketeers; in fact, they set the standard. They created artificial markets, issued false proclamations concerning the value of the stock, kept printing fresh stock as long as there was a demand. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the early bucket shops had grown into rich, powerful brokerage houses, they attacked the bucketeers. It took three decades, but these so-called legitimate brokerage houses, the New York Stock Exchange, and the big bankers managed to put the bucketeers out of business, though there was a reincarnation of them in the penny-stocks of the l980s.

George Graham Rice sold a great deal of stock, milking each scheme as long as he could then moving on to a new venture. He began to print a financial newspaper called The Iconoclast. The Iconoclast lambasted the financial powers of the country, blaming Wall Street for all the ills that affected the people. It claimed that the multi-millionaires and insiders were using the Stock Exchange to cheat hundreds of thousands of innocent people out of millions of dollars, which they were. He promised his subscribers that he’d help even the score by disclosing his own private information. His daily circulation grew to over 300,000 subscribers nationwide, giving him the biggest sucker list in America. He sold parts of his list to other bucket shops, but only after he’d squeezed some money out of the people on that partial list. One of his scams was the Columbia Emerald Company. According to The Iconoclast, the mine was operating and producing emeralds valued in the millions, and he bilked people out of half a million dollars before anyone discovered there were no emeralds. As long as there was actually a mine in South America, however (which Rice had purchased for eight hundred dollars) Rice was not liable to prosecution.

Rice also owned almost a million and a half shares of Idaho Copper Mine, for which he paid ten thousand dollars total, almost eight cents a share. Though the mine had not been worked in twenty years, was in fact completely flooded, it had two big assets: it actually existed and it was listed on the Boston Curb Exchange. The Iconoclast touted the stock, and it went up to $6.25 a share as thousands of suckers rushed to get in on the ground floor. The whole thing eventually fell through, but Rice walked away with millions.

Posted in blogging, writing. Tags: bucket shop, Columbia Emerald Company, conmen, scams, The Iconoclast. 1 Comment »

The Fickle Gods of Fashion

October 5, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I’ve written before about darlings, those bits of our own rhetoric we love but that serve no purpose in our novels. This speech, orated by the verbose character Harrison, is another of my darlings from More Deaths Than One. By the time I got rid of all his unnecessary speeches, he went from being a major character to a minor one.

“All through history, people made clothes to fit their bodies, but with the advent of ready-to-wear in the twentieth century, people now make their bodies to fit their clothes. This aberrant behavior has become so ingrained that everyone takes it for granted, as if it has always been so. In fact, women take great pride in being a perfect size zero or four or whatever.

“I was strolling down a street in mid-town Manhattan not too long ago, watching the power-suited, whippet-thin young men and women hurry by, and it occurred to me that the sign of a prosperous and pampered nation is this fashionable gauntness rather than corpulence, as is commonly believed. Only in a country assured of an ample and continuous food supply can its citizens starve themselves to the point of emaciation simply to serve the fickle gods of fashion.

“But perhaps it’s not their fault. Advertising is a powerful behavior modification tool. Take the story of the match king.

“In the early part of the twentieth century, Ivar Kreuger, a match manufacturer, managed to corner the match market. Through various deals, he ended up with the exclusive rights to sell matches in many countries, including most of Europe, but this monopoly was not enough for him. Back then, it was a common practice for two or three people to light their cigarettes from the same match. Ivar realized that if he could somehow keep that third person from using the match, he could greatly increase his sales, so he had his advertising department start the rumor that it was unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match. Tales were told of dreadful things happening to the third person who used a match, like the bride who had been left at the altar and the soldier who was killed after each had lit a cigarette from a match which two others had already used. Even today, though most people use lighters, the superstition that it’s unlucky to light three cigarettes from the same match still persists. That’s the power of advertising: the ability to control the behavior of vast numbers of people.”

Posted in life, writing. Tags: The Match King. Leave a Comment »

You can be a bestselling novelist, but do you really want to be one?

October 3, 2007 — Pat Bertram

I’ve been reading the works of a bestselling novelist, trying to pinpoint why she’s been so popular for the past two decades. It’s hard work. Her writing style is surprisingly amateurish, her characters are not well drawn, she tells and explains instead of showing, and she repeats herself as if she can’t remember from page to page what she’s already said.

So, why do people keep reading her books?

Passion. Her characters never like or dislike anything. They love and hate, but mostly love. “She ate a piece of cherry pie, and she loved it.” “They had sex, and they loved it.”

Identifiable characters. She gives her characters tags that readers can identify with (mother, prosecuting attorney, abused child, wronged wife) and lets the reader fill in the blanks.

Issues. She picks an issue people are passionate about, and wraps her story around that.

And most of all, she gives readers someone to love and someone to hate, and makes her character choose between them. And, brilliantly, the character chooses the one the reader doesn’t want.

Example: a prosecuting attorney, who adores her husband and their young daughter, gets breast cancer, has a mastectomy and chemotherapy. The husband can’t handle it, is mad at her for “pretending” that she’s sicker than she is, is totally unsupportive, and even worse has an affair. A coworker supplies the support the husband refuses to give her, and she and the coworker fall in love and plan to get married when her divorce goes through. A year after being diagnosed, she is doing well, and the husband comes nosing around again. In the end, they get back together.

See? Passion. Identifiable characters. Issues. Someone to love and someone to hate. And the wrong ending.

Why is the wrong ending the right one? If the author went with the new love, who would remember? By having the character go back to her husband, the author is manipulating us into thinking about the story. Would we go back to a husband (or wife) who treated us like garbage just so we can uphold the sanctity of marriage?

As you can see, even though I hated the book, she got me. After all, I am blogging about it.

Posted in blogging, books, life, writing. Tags: bestseller, novelist. 2 Comments »

Some darlings are hard to kill

October 2, 2007 — Pat Bertram

By definition, darlings–those parts of our manuscripts that we love even when they serve no purpose–are painful to kill, but some are more painful than others. This painfully dead darling is set it in Vietnam, but the incident it is based on took place during World War Two.

“I heard about this kid, a gentle kid, really. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, good-looking, with reddish-gold hair. But what really made him stand out was his smile. He always smiled.

“This kid was so thrilled to be doing something for his country that nothing bothered him, not even the climate. Since he was a swamp rat from Louisiana, he felt right at home.

“He came from a very large, very poor family who never had enough food; when he was drafted into the army, he felt as if he had won the lottery. He always had plenty to eat and, compared to the meals he had grown up with, it seemed like haute cuisine. He even loved the c-rations, including the ones that everyone else threw away, like ham and lima beans.

“He was delighted with his government issue clothes, too. In his entire life, he had never worn anything new or had boots that fit. He felt like a king. No matter what happened, it was better than his life back in the swamps of Louisiana, and he could not help smiling.

“His platoon was stationed near a Vietnamese village. Those people hated the Americans, but for some reason they took a liking to this smiling kid. They called him Wa-ky number one. Wa-ky was what they called the Americans, and number one meant the best. They also called him dinky-dao, which means retarded or mentally ill, because he was always smiling. They thought it was the funniest thing that the best American was dinky-dao.

“The one person who hated the kid was his sergeant, a really nasty piece of work, who felt he was being mocked by that constant smile.

“One day, in a fit of anger, the sergeant took an empty sandbag, and made a crude mask by cutting holes for the eyes and nose. He yanked it over the kid’s head, and snarled, ‘I never want to see your fucking smile again.’

“When the kid removed the hood, he was still smiling—he thought it had been a joke. This really infuriated the sergeant. He slammed the butt of his rifle into the kid’s face, grabbed the hood, and jammed it back on the kid’s head, screaming, ‘I’ll kill you, you motherfucker, if you ever take this fucking bag off again.’

“After a few days of wearing the hood, a change came over the kid. He would wade into the center of a battle and just let loose as if he thought he were invincible, or as if he no longer cared whether he lived or died. Afterwards, he would bayonet the dead bodies and mash their faces with the butt of his M-l6.

“All of this made the sergeant very nervous. He ordered the kid to take off the hood. The kid refused.

“As time went on, the man in the hood—you notice I say man, Sarge? That’s because there was nothing left of the kid he once was—got more and more out of control. He would go off by himself to hunt VC, and would return wearing a necklace of still-warm ears. Everyone was scared of the man in hood, particularly the sergeant, who was certain he would be fragged, but the man just ignored them and went about his job of methodically eliminating the VC.

“Finally the time came for the man in the hood to be rotated out. That morning he arose, casually took off the hood, folded it neatly, then packed it with the rest of his gear.

“Everyone gasped in shock when they saw him—his face was hideously deformed. When the sergeant had butt-stroked the kid, he had destroyed the kid’s left cheek and orbital bone, and they had never been repaired; no one even knew that he had been badly injured.

“He still had a smile on his face, however, but this time it was the rictus of pain, or of death.

“And his eyes . . . You’ve heard of the thousand yard stare, Sarge? This was a ten thousand-yard stare, as if the man in the hood had looked too long into hell, and now hell was all he knew.”

Posted in fiction, writing. Tags: Vietnam. Leave a Comment »

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, Moves on

October 1, 2007 — Pat Bertram

A couple of days ago I used a tongue-in-cheek version of the above title, and now people are coming to my blog in search of the quote. So here it is, along with several other well-known quatrains from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes, and having writ,

Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit

     Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a Word of it.



Here with a little bread beneath the Bough,

A Flask of Wine, A Book of Verse—and Thou

     Beside me singing in the Wilderness—

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!



Into this Universe and Why not knowing

Nor whence, like Water, willy-nilly flowing;

     And out of it, as wind along the Waste,

I know not whither, willy-nilly flowing.



Waste not your Hour, nor in the vain pursuit

Of This and That endeavor and dispute;

     Better be jocund with the fruitful Grape

Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.



Heaven but the Vision of fulfilled Desire,

And Hell the Shadow from a Soul on fire,

     Cast in the Darkness into which ourselves,

So late emerged from shall so soon expire.



Ah, Love! could you and I with Him conspire

To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things Entire,

     Would not we shatter it to bits—and then

Re-mold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!



Oh, Thou, who Men of baser Earth didst make,

And ev’n with Paradise devise the Snake:

     For all the Sin the Face of Wretched Man

Is black with—Man’s forgiveness give—and take!