SPECTATOR TIME TRAVEL: POSTSCRIPT

Three months back, in a post called “SPECTATOR TIME TRAVEL,” I posed the hypothetical, “If you could be whisked backward in time, by some Dickensian spirit or H. G. Wellsian device, where and when would you go?”

I offered a grab bag of suggestions off the top of my head—attending one of Charles Dickens’ legendary readings; sneaking into Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Beverly Hills home back in the '30s and '40s to listen to the composer and his dear friend, Vladimir Horowitz, play through the “Rach 3” on dovetailed concert grands; or,  maybe even more exciting, one of the legendary “cutting contests” matching stride piano players such as Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Count Basie, and Earl "Fatha" Hines.

It’s not that I wouldn’t want to be among the select few for the Sermon on the Mount or at the foot of Sinai when Moses came on down with the Ten Commandments; but Hollywood has already been there and done those, and the Gettysburg Address, tool.

Another notion recently popped into my brain. How about being a fly on the wall in the Writers’ Room at Sid Caesar’s old “Your Show of Shows,” which, as Wikipedia states, was “a live 90-minute variety show that was broadcast weekly in the United States on NBC (Saturdays, 9:00-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time/6:00-7:30 p.m. Pacific Time), from February 25, 1950, until June 5, 1954...”

The main comedy quartet--Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris--was brilliant in skit ensembles. But behind them was marshaled perhaps an even more awesomely talented team of comedy writers.

At various times (and, actually, on various Caesar shows), the all-star lineup of jokemeisters included Mel Tolkin, Sir Caesar, Carl Reiner, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, Mel Tolkin, Gary Belkin and Aaron Ruben.

To our great good fortune all these decades later, some Spectator Time Travel is possible  in this case. You can purchase a (somewhat pricey) DVD of “Caesar’s Writers” on Amazon.

The photo of “A Reunion of the Greatest Comedy Writers" is at the top of this post.

 

Here’s the caption:

"On January 24, 1996 at the Writers Guild Theater in Los Angeles, CA, legendary comic Sid Caesar was reunited with nine of his writers from Your Show of Shows and Caesar’s Hour. The event was taped, and later broadcast on PBS in the United States, and the BBC in the UK as a 1 hour special, with only select portions of the full two-hour event. The full event was previously available only as a VHS, offered as a pledge premium by local PBS stations. Now, the full two-hour special CAESAR’S WRITERS is available on DVD for the first time! Be prepared to laugh non-stop as the panel, made up of head writer Mel Tolkin, Caesar, Carl Reiner, Aaron Ruben, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Sheldon Keller, and Gary Belkin share stories about their time working on Caesar’s shows and offer their insights about writing comedy..."

HIGHER EDITING

The title of this post is drawn from the autobiography of Rudyard Kipling, Nobel laureate, the second most quoted name in English literature (according to Bartlett’s) after Shakespeare.

“Do you like Kipling?” goes the old joke.

Answer: “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”

But I’ll get back to Rudyard in a moment. First a plug from our sponsor, namely me.

My chase thriller, The Running Boy,  can be downloaded in Kindle format free for the next three days – Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I’m hoping to drum up some interest, obviously, for what I consider an exciting read. So spread the word, if you will.

You can read an online interview with the author about the writing of The Running Boy here.  

By the way, on Monday and Tuesday Amazon will be giving away my most popular thriller, Lair of the Fox. After that, both return to their regular Kindle price of $2.99.

And now back to our regularly scheduled post and Rudyard Kipling’s “Higher Editing”…

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Kipling flashed across the London literary firmament like a comet at age 23 with the delicious short story collection, Plain Tales From the Hills, followed a year later by Barrack-Room Ballads, which showed him a master versifier.

His sensational debut at such a young age was comparable to that of Charles Dickens. "The star of the hour," said Henry James when Rudyard was only 25. "Too clever to live," said Robert Louis Stevenson.

But the shooting star did not flame out. While he continued to produce stories and poems at a prodigious rate, he never joined his own rabid fan club. He was certainly aware of his genius, but his approach to the craft of writing remained ever that of a conscientious workman. He edited himself ruthlessly.

“Higher Editing” he called it, and I’ll get to the specifics of his technique in a few moments.

But please note: It is possible to expand a story or novel through good editing. To diagnose what is lacking and suggest the addition of needed material.

That is emphatically not the kind of self-editing I’m talking about here. I’m talking “less is more,” a strictly reductive process.

The most famous editor I recall hearing about was the legendary Maxwell Perkins, editor and hand-holder of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Not our Tom Wolfe, but the great undisciplined contemporary of Hemingway and Fitzgerald “whosetalent was matched only by his lack of artistic self-discipline.”

Wolfe's great big doorstop novels—Look Homeward, Angel, You Can’t Go Home Again, Of Time and the River—all landed on Perkins’ desk as cartonloads of verbal tonnage, all requiring major surgery. For instance, from the brilliant but bloated manuscript of Angel, Perkins managed to remove 90,000 words.

I have a similar tale, with far punier statistics. My first thriller, Lair of the Fox, was sold on the basis of an outline and the first 100 pages to a small publisher. The completed manuscript weighed in at 120,000 words – every one them perfect, I'll have you know.

So I was shocked to learn from my editor that this small publishing house (Walker & Co.), in order to reduce their printing and binding costs, never published trade books over 80,000 words. Therefore--would I please cut 40,000 words from my manuscript.

I did it. And I relied on Kipling’s “Higher Editing” method to do it. And the book is much the better for it.

It wasn’t easy. As a legendary teacher of fiction writing once explained, “This is why surgeons never operate on members of their own family and dislike to work even on close friends.” (William Foster-Harris, The Basic Patterns of Plot, p. 112)

A famous American editor has his own take: “Play ‘digester’ to your manuscript; imagine that you are an editorial assistant on a digest magazine performing a first squeeze on the article to be digested. Can you squeeze out an unnecessary hundreds words from each thousand in your draft?” (Gorham Munson, The Written Word, p. 170)

John D. MacDonald used the reductive process as an intrinsic part of his creative plan. A magazine profile of the mystery master described him “tapping out the 1,000-page drafts that he whittles down to 300-page manuscripts in four months.” (Newsweek, March 22, 1971, p. 103)

For this reductive process to work, however, you have to put your heart and soul into that first draft, like Tom Wolfe or John MacDonald. Don’t edit or second guess yourself the first time through; let yourself be driven forward by the compelling emotion of your story; to switch metaphors, trowel on the raw pigment, which you can shape later at leisure.

To quote Gorham Munson again, “Write as a writer, rewrite as a reader.”

 (The Written Word, p. 167)

Another master of mystery, Elmore Leonard, went from a journeyman paperback writer (westerns and detectives) to best-sellerdom and Hollywood fame by taking an opposite tack. He began to edit himself in advance — on his first draft. As he famously put it (his rule No. 10 of good writing): “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

If you can do that, bravo! Others, some very great writers among them, have had to go back over their work and painfully cut out the deadwood.

Here is the method used by Georges Simneon, whom I profiled in an earlier post..

“In response to the imperious instruction given him by Colette, "Suppress all literature," he embarked on developing the pared-down style which he made so notably his own." (“About Simenon,” The European, Nov. 2, 1990)

INTERVIEWER: "What do you mean by 'too literary'? What do you cut out, certain kinds of words?"

SIMENON: "Adjectives, adverbs, and every word which is there just to make an effect. Every sentence which is there just for the sentence. You know, you have a beautiful sentence—cut it. Every time I find such a thing in one of my novels it is to be cut." (Simenon quoted in Writers At Work, The Paris Review Interviews, p. 146)

To quote Leonard again, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Granted, that rule does not apply to the beloved storytellers of an earlier era—to Jane Austen or Dickens, to Tolstoy or Conrad. Nor even to my favorite of current thriller writer, Frederick Forsyth. Narrative charm is a special skill of selected yarn-spinners, an honor to be conferred by adoring readers.

So, at last, we come to Kipling’s “Higher Editng.” Here he describes how he used it on his debut story collection, Plain Tales From the Hills:

“They [Anglo-Indian tales] were originally much longer than when they appeared, but the shortening of them, first to my own fancy, after rapturous re-readings, and the next to the space available, taught me that a tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know that the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect...

This leads me to the Higher Editing. Take of well-ground Indian Ink as much as suffices and a camel-hair brush proportionate to the interspaces of your lines. In an auspicious hour, read your final draft and consider faithfully every paragraph, sentence and word, blacking out where requisite. Let it lie by to drain as long as possible. At the end of that time, re-read and you should find that it will bear a second shortening. Finally, read it aloud alone and at leisure. Maybe a shade more brushwork will then indicate or impose itself. If not, praise Allah and let it go, and "when thou hast done, repent not."... The magic lies in the Brush and the Ink.” (Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 224-225)

THE ULTIMATE BUCKET LIST

“Bucket List” seems to have entered the popular consciousness with the 2007 Rob Reiner movie. It starred Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men on a road trip, pursuing a wish list of things they wanted to do before kicking the bucket.

But the Ultimate Bucket List, in my view, was created on a rainy afternoon back in 1939 by a 15-year-old boy daydreaming of great deeds and faraway lands. Young John Goddard worked on his “Life List” (you can peruse it here) until he’d drawn up “127 goals he wished to experience or achieve in his lifetime.”

He wanted to explore the waters of the Amazon, the Congo, the Colorado and the Nile rivers. He hoped to climb an impressive list of mountains, including Mt. Ararat in Turkey, Mt. Cook in New Zealand, Mt. Popocatepetl in Mexico and Tanzania’s Mt. Kilimanjaro. He wanted to visit the Great Wall of China, the Panama Canal and Suez Canals, Easter Island, the Galapagos Islands and the Taj Mahal.

That’s from his obituary in the May 22 Los Angeles Times. John died May 17 at the age of 88 of

a rare form of cancer. But he exited having completed more than 100 of those 127 life goals.

Many, by the way, were far more audacious or difficult than those cited by the Times obit. A few examples:

• climb the Matterhorn
• land and take off from an aircraft carrier
• free dive to 40 feet and hold breath two and a half minutes underwater
• teach a college course
• publish an article in National Geographic
• run a mile in five minutes
• learn French, Spanish and Arabic
• milk a poisonous snake
• play Debussy’s Claire de Lune on the piano.

I had the privilege of knowing John Goddard. He was an elegant gentleman, personifying for me the Victorian adventurer, as at home in drawing room as the jungle. In this he was in a direct line of romantic and intrepid adventurer scholars—Sir Richard Burton, Sven Hedin, Richard Halliburton, Charles Doughty, Fridtjof Nansen, Thor Heyerdahl, Wilfred Thesiger.

Predictably, Goddard has been called a “modern Indiana Jones,” a title he shared with contemporary explorer-adventurer, Dr. Jack Wheeler, another grownup Eagle Scout (like Goddard) who has climbed the Matterhorn, among many other exploits.

I confess to having made my own life lists, usually after a flute or two of New Year’s champagne. Looking them over in later years, I find very, very few checkmarks in my ballot boxes. On John’s list, on the other hand, unchecked boxes are rare. True, he never appeared in a Tarzan movie (No. 93) or visited the moon (No. 125), but let’s give him a pass on those, shall we?

To quote the L.A. Times obit again:

“When he was growing up, he heard older people say with regret that they hadn’t done the things they wanted to do,” his son said this week. “He decided he was going to live a life of adventure so he wouldn’t have any regrets.” 

The only real consolation for growing up (someone once told me) was the opportunity to fulfill one’s childhood dreams. To me, John Goddard embodied that quest, and I suspect he had very few regrets when he finally closed his eyes on his lifelong dream.

And I know, if I'll only be true

To this glorious Quest,

That my heart will lie peaceful and calm

When I'm laid to my rest.

(Joe Darion’s lyrics from "The Impossible Dream" from Man of La Mancha)

PS. For the interested, I see there has sprung up a social network website where you can keep track of your personal bucket list, add videos and images, and read about others’ adventures.

SERMONETTE: FANATICISM VS. DILETTANTISM

One of the most powerful motivational speeches blasted out of my car speakers the other day. I was driving my teenage son to school, and, as usual, he’d plugged his iPhone into the dashboard.

I thought he’d selected the wrong track from his wall-to-wall hip-hop playlist. A deeply resonant black voice launched into a story about a young man seeking out a “guru” to learn how to make a lot of money.

I glanced sideways. My son was actually listening, so I listened also. Oh, well. Whatever this guy was getting worked up about, it couldn’t be as distasteful as the nasty hip-hop lyrics I’m forced to endure. (My son swears he hears only to the background music.)

The secular sermon was a bit belabored, with a lot of repetitive phrasing and cadences, slow to reach its predictable crescendo. But when the guy finally got there, I found myself unexpectedly galvanized by the simplicity and force of his message.

Spoiler Alert: Before I write any more, you might prefer to give it a listen. The motivational speaker is Eric Thomas (about whom I know nothing), and you can find his “rant” with a web search of “How Bad Do You Want It?” Or use this link.

Now that you’re warned, I’ll cut to the chase. The young man meets the guru at the beach and is walked out into the water till their heads are barely above the waves. Suddenly the guru pushes the young man’s head under water and holds it there for… well, for  a heckuva long time in the story:

“He had him held down, just before my man was about to pass out, he raised him up. He said: ‘I got a question for you.’ He told the guy, he said: ‘When you want to succeed as bad as you wanna breathe, then you will be successful.’”

That’s it, the moral of the story. It’s not enough, according to Eric Thomas, to just “kind of want to succeed.” You have to want it as much as a drowning man wants to breathe. Anything less won’t cut it.

And, you know, that really resonates with me—and with many thousands of others, including my usually blasé  son. I suspect because it’s true.

A wise man—a guru of sorts—told me once a deceptively simple thing--that life is a crisis. A continuing crisis, in which, by our choices, we define ourselves moment by moment, day by day.

Sounds kinda like “Introduction to Existentialism”? Could be.

The trouble is, we seldom perceive this ongoing crisis. Except when we get the big, obvious theatrical clues. Then it's inescapable.

Like at the final hand at the poker table, when all the chips get pushed to the center and it’s showdown time.

Or in the opera’s last act, when the trumpets sound and the timpani rumble and the Fat Lady gets ready to sing.

 

Or when we are plunged beneath the weaves and have to fight upward for oxygen.

The trick is to see the crisis when no one else around you does—and to respond with extraordinary effort under seemingly ordinary circumstances.

But Eric Thomas says it better:

“You gotta go days without – LISTEN TO ME! You gotta want to be successful so bad that you forget to eat... I never forget, I went, 50 Cent was doing his movie, I did a little research on 50, and 50 said that when he wasn’t doing the movie, he was doing the soundtrack. And they said: ‘When do you sleep, 50?’ and 50 said: ‘Sleep? Sleep is for those people who are broke. I don’t sleep.’ See I got an opportunity to make my dream become a reality. Don’t cry to quit. You already in pain, you already hurt. Get a reward from it. Don’t go to sleep until you succeed.”