Across the Great Divide

Tracking Down My Cowboy Legacy Takes a Strange Turn.

My grandfather died more or less as expected. He had been half gone already and the liver disease put a period to a long story with the bottle.

My father made the trip alone from Colorado down to the ranch, a remote, hardscrabble cattle operation on the Arizona-Mexican border near Douglas. He came home with a few artifacts, including a lever action Winchester and a mare named Cherry. Since I was away at college in Minnesota and everyone out west had pity on me, I inherited a mail order ranch coat that was fine for the desert but wasn’t much good to me until April.

If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve asked for him to bring back a book.

Lately I've been reflecting on some of the sources and inspirations for my novel. Monument Road is a contemporary story featuring a rancher who's isolated and out of time—both in his life and his place in the century.

The book didn't start out at all as a "western," and it had little to do with the traditions of western novels—whether the old time fantasies of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, the horse-crazy books by Anna Sewell and Marguerite Henry or the modern westerns by Thomas McGuane, Kent Haruf, Cormac McCarthy, James Galvin and Richard Ford.

But damn, once a rancher shows up, pretty soon there are horses, maybe cows, and land that is either failing or outgrowing its usefulness. Next thing you know, you're penned in.

Leonard Self started out as just one of the cast, invented to be part of an ensemble playing variations on the tune of suicide. A diversity hire, you might say.

But as I began making him a real character, with credible reasons for ending his life, the old cuss started to grow on me—and before I knew it, he'd taken over the narrative and I was stuck writing western fiction, a regional novel or some such.

I blame it on the horses.

There's no surer way to be branded a genre writer—okay, plus spaceships and vampires—than to put a ranch in your story. I mean, your protagonist could be a writer, an architect or even, god help us, a horny college professor, and you would be considered right in the mainstream. But give a character a corral as his workplace?

I tried to subvert the stereotype. Leonard wants to free himself from the land rather than cling to it. I put several guns in his hand that were never fired. His experiences around horses revealed character but were largely tangential to the story.

I wonder if reviewers will notice.

Once I started getting a complex about this, I remembered a book at my grandfather's ranch I'd seen as a boy. A relative pointed to a character named Russ (my grandfather's middle name which he preferred to Homer) and said, that's grandpa.

I was too young and too interested in the ranch itself to read more than a few paragraphs. I got the impression it was a cowboy novel with rough cowpokes riding the range.

Many years later, after my own father's death, family history became more important, and I wondered about that book. I thought I remembered the title as Red Embers, and occasionally I searched for that title, but all I came across was a novel about a California girl and her polo pony by another juvenille fiction writer, Dorothy Lyons.

Polo? I figured the book with my grandfather's name in it was some pulp fiction that had turned to dust by now.

But today, I took one more stab and tracked down an Arizona cousin. If the book had survived in the family it was likely to be down there.

She wrote back saying she didn't remember the book, but she had heard that Grandpa Quimby had trained polo ponies back in the early 1920's in California.

The book I remember didn't have a dust jacket. The cover art for the Lyons book would've made clear the novel wasn't about fading cowboy campfires. I'm doing more research before I declare myself—including finding a copy to read—but it looks like I might be more connected to the horsey tradition than I thought.

Distraction or Inspiration?

Yes, I've been working on a novel and yesterday was asked, do you have trouble getting distracted and staying disciplined?

For readers of the shrunken blog, the answer may seem like no. After all, I've severely curtailed posting and reading material that would send me wandering off in some new, brain-sapping direction.

But there are other perils.

Like this morning, for instance.

I'm writing about a youth pastor in 1979 who gets a new washing machine and illustrates his homily using the minor miracle that brought it to him.

Since I'm writing on a computer, it's a simple matter to pause and check out what the control panel of a 1979 model would look like.

What I didn't anticipate was this — an entire subculture of people who videotape their washers. There's even a site dedicated to automatic washers and the collectors who love them.

Look out, it's a rabbit hole!

Gotta go.

Local Color Finds its Way.

I'm in low-blogging mode, but it's hard not to pass on one connection I feel with my old home place as I work on a novel based in this valley.

Wait... a bobcat just walked past my door.

No, that wasn't it.

It's the names. Writers like to stretch names to the limits they can, nudging them toward the realm of improbability. But here in western Colorado, I grew up with great names all around me — fiction-worthy names like Janet Toogood, Verna Tibbetts, Mira Doss and Floyd Smallwood.

I thought of this especially today as I read the newspaper.

Summer Chastity Honesty Hazel, 31, 2956 Parkway Drive, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of second-degree burglary, first-degree criminal trespass and theft of less than $500.

Puck Stair of Salt Lake City practices kiting with her paraglider just off North Avenue this morning while she waited for a trailer hitch to be installed on her vehicle. 

“We came out ready to go from the get-go and it’s something we’ve emphasized with the kids, being ready to go first pitch to last pitch,” Montrose coach Landon Wareham said. “They did that today.”

I don't need to make things up when it comes to names.

And the bobcat is real, too.

If the Shoof Hits, Whereat.

Former Strib editor Tim McGuire comments on the move afoot to reduce copy editing as a cost-saving measure. Although many people think copy editing is a form of proofreading that would prevent the increasing bone-headed errors we see cropping up in daily newspapers, McGuire sets it straight:

Copy editing corrects context errors, provides expertise on local points of history and location and supplies subject matter expertise that often saves a piece of copy. Copy editors also supply a little thing called judgment. Every writer pushes a point too far, uses language that is ill-advised or makes assertions that can’t be supported. A copy editors [sic, was that a test?] job is to catch those.

In addition, he points out that copy editors are in the flow of production in a very particular way. They have an appreciation not just of the story being written but where it fits the paper being made and how it's being read.

I've had the varied experiences of being edited at a newspaper, editing the work of experts and not-so experts, editing other writers, and editing myself — as a blogger and the head of writing company where, if we didn't get the nuances as well as the basics right, we lost clients, which is far more painful and concentration-inducing than losing a subscriber.

[Copy editors are invited to have a go at that paragraph.]

I should add that I've had the experience of editing former newspaper reporters, and I would agree with McGuire: "Reporters and others are simply not prepared for the sophisticated enterprise called copy editing." [h/t to Hal Davis, who must be a hell of an editor]

Weekend Read: A Different Look at Diversity.

As a writer, I once made my living from the reality that many highly functional people can't write as well as their as their jobs require. Jack Miller teaches "developmental" English at Normandale Community College, where he sees students who arrive equipped with "life experience" but not the rudiments of written language. For some of them, it's a new language; for most, it's a language they have used for decades but not learned.

Some of his essay for Center of the American Experiment makes the liberal in me cringe, the college scholarship reviewer in me nod, and the citizen in me glad for teachers like Miller.

Don't judge the essay just by these excerpts. The whole thing is worth a read. [h/t Hal Davis]

Other causes, less tangible, contribute to students’ poor record and performance in college (especially that 20 percent or so who demand extra time and energy from the professor), and here I venture on more speculative ground.  Some are not sure what is done in the classroom—how to behave.  They don’t know when or how to take notes.  They perennially miss due dates, drift in late, drift out during the break not to return.  They sabotage themselves and then seem to expect forgiveness and accommodation from their professors.  Someone showing up one day after having been missing for five or six weeks, only vaguely recognized by the professor, will assume that a way can and will be found to bring him up to speed and on track with the rest of the class.  Is all this the result of repeatedly being forgiven in the past?  I think so. 

[...]

A system is in place to cushion failure, and students who have always been praised for just showing up need it.  They have been told time and again, “You can be anything you want.”  All that is needed is “passion.”  So when the academic path contains a detour, explanations to yourself and to others can come easily.  Scholastic problems don’t emanate from within but from without. So determined is the college to offer “support” and so long is the list of reasons to receive that support that almost anything can be explained by or blamed on an external cause—poor time management, attention deficit disorder, you name it.  

Back When I was a Word Man.

This is a test of Typepad's audio player, which in my browser doesn't display as a player in my preview mode. It appears to require a right-click on the box to open the link in a new tab/window. But now that it's posted, a play arrow does seem to appear if you hover over the bar with your mouse.

Word Man

A Paragraph from Behind the Curtain.

This is the stuff I'm supposed to be working on.

Leonard was willing to give the Reverend Quentin Peasley the benefit of the doubt. Peasley was Inetta's pastor, and no matter how he rubbed Leonard, she was not one to be taken. Still, he did not know how else to put it: Peasley had that self-satisfied manner of preachers that seemed as if he had put on an entire special outfit, skin and all, before he showed up at the house. His eyes,  artificially bright and welling with empathy. His voice, a touch too reverberant. His words, selected like steaks at the butcher counter. And he seemed overjoyed to see a man who was not glad to see him.

Why This Just Might Take Awhile.

Three times, I've started novels, and twice before, they never got finished. These efforts have been sufficiently spaced in time that the writing was done using different technologies.

The first was composed using a typewriter and sheets of newsprint. That meant any page requiring significant revision had to be retyped from the start, which encouraged even more revision. This laborious process was not responsible for the novel's incompletion. I was freelancing and had a lot of spare time. It was a coming of age novel, and in the writing, I discovered I had not yet come of age.

Having learned my lesson, years later I started what I called my potboiler. It had no literary pretensions but it did have a pretty good premise and explored a world of intrigue that most writers never attempt because holding a corporate job long enough to learn the real twists and turns of business is harder than making up stuff about international spies or serial killers.

Anyway, this time, I came into work several hours early each morning and wrote on an early "office automation system" my company had developed. It had a word processing system that at the time was competing with the centralized typing pool. My files were stored on a central server somewhere, and I could print them out on a tractor-feed printer.

My son was born before I got even halfway, and that changed everything in my days. Eventually, the company discontinued the system, and an alert department secretary asked me if I wanted her to print out a copy before all the tapes were scrubbed.

For a long time, the draft sat in a box. I started it up again much later, but world events had moved on to make the central plot device much less original. So had technology. OCR scanning the old paper version into my computer proved to be more than I was ready to take on. And an even bigger problem was I was no longer the same writer.

Novel number three is now under way, and there are even more miraculous tools for turning words into books. Research is also considerably easier. But using an internet-connected computer also poses hazards.

For example, today I wondered if a character would refer to a Quaker Oats container as a "box." Instead of just calling it a box, since it is not a significant point, I decided to search for terms people might use and came across this video.

Then another, by the same creator.

Then, of course, I had to write about this. Meeting the video creator was a gift. I'm just not sure it was any help.

The Presidential Race in Rhyme Has Finally Outlived its Time.

I'd rather not be this unkind,
But Trillin put me in this bind.
I heard him, just, on NPR —
His iambs stretched a smidge too far.

Though some reviews have praised the man,
They surely could do better than
Poor imitations so bereft
Of supple meter, rhyme and heft.

From Anchor Books to Zondervan
Book publishing's run out its span,
So why consign a single tree
To reproduce such minstrelsy
As this? It's hackneyed, drear and trite,
And Trillin barely can recite.
His verse rolls weakly off his tongue —
Not rapped, nor slammed nor even sung.

Jon Stewart tittered at this drivel.
Would Northrup Frye have been so civil?
New Yorker,  Nation, what are those?
Just places where they still spell prose
Complete with vowels and don't use thumbs
To type whatever nonsense comes.

So where's the market that demands
(In dollars, yen or Kruggerands)
Such arch flirtation with cliche
That no one's asked for anyway?

I can't pronounce myself a fan.
His deadpan humor lacks the pan.

When Ghostwriters Should Come Out.

Bruce Benidt writes about "When PR Ghostwriters Get Busted."

Are there ethical lines that we cross when we write an “authored article” for our clients? Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa thinks the Wyeth pharmaceutical company and its writing PR firm went too far in ghostwriting articles for doctors in medical journals supporting a Wyeth hormone replacement drug. The New York Times ran a story on Saturday in which Grassley said “any attempt to manipulate the scientific literature, that can in turn mislead doctors to prescribe drugs that may not work and/or cause harm to their patients, is very troubling.”

I started to leave a comment, but it began turning into this post...

I made a good living writing for other people — most of it was for those without the time or the skills to do it themselves. Sometimes they were intimately involved in developing the content and other times they barely read it as it whipped past. The larger and more layered the organization, the more it happened. I actually took a perverse pride out of channeling execs and producing something on target with little input.

For existing clients, I had no problem with originating a piece and bringing it to them for their approval. That's just doing the job of being an advocate for their business interests.

Without doing a direct interview, I've also drafted endorsement "quotes" that customers or stakeholders accepted as their own, without editing. I have even, at my initiative, written a letter in response to an issue, and gone looking for someone else who agreed enough to put their name to it. None of those instances have caused me to lose any sleep.

Most of us know that politicians rarely write their own speeches. That car company CEOs don't write their own Congressional testimoney. And that most executive directors don't write their own fundraising letters. But the Wyeth story strikes me as a special case for a couple reasons.

First, it concerns a commercial interest (Wyeth) working through an ostensibly independent second party (the physicians) to promote a product. If I see Kevin Garnett talking about a shoe, I know without being told he is being paid to promote it. If I see an energy executive writing about clean coal, I am prepared to detect bias, regardless of who wrote the words. But in a scientific article about a therapy, I only think I know if there is a connection (paid or otherwise) to a medical company, it will be disclosed.

Second, this case involves drugs, which require extensive disclosures in their advertising and promotion. This practice could indeed be an attempt to circumvent the regulations.

Third, the standards for scientific and medical journals are different from the trade publications and general news media most PR people work with. An article in a medical journal is more like an academic  paper, in which a reader expects the author is presenting their own intellectual work.

Bottom line, I'm not concerned whether Wyeth, the PR firm or the physicians originated the content or polished the prose. But the connection should be apparent in this case, so the reader can judge.