I'd like to talk to you. I am supposed to be related to Donna Lee Hickey. My 80 year old aunt told me she was a cousin. I've seen it mentioned in biographies that her father was in vaudville. So was my great uncle Patrick McCaffrey who was born in 1890. Her mother's maiden name would be the clue. If it is either McCaffrey or Kelly (not her ex-husband, but my father). I would be glad to exchange information with you privately.

Thanks so much for the great thumbnail review! I really appreciate it. I am going to cut and paste it all over the place.

Ned

One of the best Hollywood memoirs ever written is Ned Wynn's "We Will Always Live in Beverly Hills". For those who want a fascinating inside story about Hollywood, stars, and what it means to be on the way up and on the way down and to be a child growing up under that spotlight with famous people part of your every day life, I highly recommend it.

You're probably right, Ned. This is fascinating to us. But we should respect the purpose of the message boards. Your input, and everybody else's has been delightful!

jdb1 (is your name Dolores?),

That's a great example, really good. Allowing the reader/viewer do some of the work is a way of making that reader/viewer your partner in the telling of the story. It creates a special kind of intimacy between writer and reader. This intimacy makes us conspirators of a sort. Almost like we have a dialogue with the narrator, a quiet, almost secretive conversation. If a writer can maintain this intimate bond with his reader (or a director with his audience), he has captured the reader's imagination completely. I think that I remember having this occur a lot more when I was very young. It was easier to become engulfed in a story at that age. But as I became older and more sophisticated, I also became more critical about what I was reading. I required more from a writer. And the more I required of a writer, the more was required of me. Eventually, I tired of most light fiction and began to immerse myself in books which could get my attention and hold it. One of the problems with books and movies today, and this was pointed out by someone just a few posts ago, the endings feel like cheats. We are buoyed along by sparkling prose and swift action only to find ourselves slapped in the face with some contrived, too pat, or completely illogical ending. It make you want to wring the writer's neck. It's a sloppy kind of writing and it's a shocking betrayal of that intimacy which was created earlier, at the beginning. Feeling cheated, I become disenchanted with that writer and stop reading him or her. Which is a pity. I think it all is a part of the kind of facile gloss we have begun to accept in our popular culture as a whole today.

Btw, I'm feeling a little guilty here because I feel as though I've hijacked this thread and turned it into a writing seminar, but I guess Miss Wynn's whereabouts have been decided a long time back. How many of us are left here, anyway? Three or four? This is OK to do, right? Or should we create a new thread? I know that this is exactly how threads morph over time until they don't even pretend to match the thread's subject line, but is there a protocol here that we're violating?

Red,

The trick is integration of character and action. In order to flesh out characters while continuing to advance the plot requires that the characters and the plot are well-integrated so that the actions in the story come out of the characters in an organic way. And that doesn't mean pesticide-free. If your characters are well-integrated with the story, then it won't seem as if you have "strayed" at all. The reader will continue to be interested so long as they believe that the character "reveals" that you are writing will mesh with the storyline and help to advance your plot.

So, instead of having things taking place - action - then stopping that and having several paragraphs explaining a character, you are continuing the action but explaining - as the character is engaged in an action - something about that character that sheds more and more light upon him and tells us a something about him that helps us to understand his place in the story. A good way to practice this is to take one simple action, say a character is loading a gun, driving a car, or milking a cow, whatever, and then try slipping in something about the character while he or she is still loading or finishing loading, driving or parking, or milking or finishing milking the gun/car/cow. If you go on too long at any one point you risk removing the reader's attention from the action.

You might be saying now, well, I read so and so's book and he or she gave over one whole page to a character examination and it didn't hurt the action at all. But that is probably because the writer is very skillful at doing this. Examine how the writer did it. Why didn't it detract from the plot? You will usually find something in the character description that allows him/her to go seamlessly back to the action without losing a beat. When you are a novice or amateur, (and even sometimes when you're advance or a professional), it's good to start with a simple thing, write just a few lines, then read your own stuff back and see what if feels like. Do you detect a "bump" in the prose? Is there a kind of hiccup between action and character description? Try and make these transitions so smooth that no one even notices what you have done.

What I'm describing is anything but easy. Writers work for years to learn it. The best example of bad writing is in The DaVinci Code. The author is incapable of doing what I've been describing. But good writers can do it. Just try to find one or two writers you like and study their prose. Don't worry that you will become too imitative; you will. But over time you will find your own voice. Learning to write is a life-long practice. Good luck.

(as a university screenwriting instructor I usually get paid for this, but for TCM movie buffs, the first one's free)

jdb1 and redriver,

Your comments are spot on. The dumbing down of America is now a fait accompli. There are some very good writers still being published, however, but they don't write light fiction. Their books are more literary. The aforementioned Ian McEwan writes some pretty good fiction some of it scary others of it gut-wrenching and terribly tragic. His most desperately touching book is called Atonement, and I wish you well if you intend to read it. It is very moving and very sad. John Banville's The Book Of Evidence is another very good book.

You might notice that I am only citing English writers. I am sure that there are plenty of good American writers working today, but since I don't know who they are I would have to say that my ignorance of them won't allow me to make any remarks about them. I have all but given up on what once was light fiction, the kind of sweeping stories of Wouk don't seem to be coming out these days. Or I simply don't know about them. But the literary paucity of good, light fiction is really sad.

The point about TV and films driving the book world is true and only points out the further degradation of the art of writing. Everything does, indeed, sound like a pitch. Having lived in the world of the pitch - or should I say, Pitch? - I know what you have to do to sell a movie idea. The very idea that that is driving American fiction is just depressing. The DaVinci Code is a great example. It is plot driven which doesn't mean, necessarily, that there can't be good characters in it; but the fact is that Dan Brown is a flat-out horrible writer. He has no skill beyond the obvious. Even his "page-turner" abilities are not that good because he doesn't leave us anything to figure out. Instead he tells us exactly what is happening by having his mouthpiece characters constantly spilling the plot to us page by page. I really hated that book. Imagine a book whose first page tells us that everything in the book is fact, and then proceeds to tell us a total fantasy backed by no facts whatever! Where are the editors? You can't fix Brown's gaping inadequacies as a writer, but you can at least say that this is a work of fiction and leave out that pompous and ridiculous declaration regarding what the book contains, can't you?

Maybe we should have a thread which deals with how books have become too like films in that they are driven by the same devices, the Pitch, the Bottom Line, the ultimate question: "Is there a movie in it?" I was once, a long time ago, a script reader at 20th Century Fox. All the books that came through the department - run then by Dick Zanuck's partner, David Brown (a very intelligent, well-read, gentlemanly guy) went to people like me. I reported directly to David. I wrote reports on the books, a sort of mini-review. The overarching question always was, "Is there a movie in this book?" Now that is a perfectly legitimate question for a movie studio to ask, after all they are in the business of making movies not books. But now it seems that almost every work of entertainment fiction is pointed directly at the movie business. This changes the way the books are written and presented. No longer do we have much in the way of the all-important Inner Life of the characters, especially the main character. Narration is there to help the film producer to see what a great movie the book could make. Most of these books, of course, would not make good movies, but at the same time, they are lousy books as well. They are neither here nor there, fish nor fowl. Everybody loses.

Ned, you've raised one of my most persistent bugaboos about today's fiction. I think it stinks. It's so rare these days to find a well-written, satisfying novel. I generally stick to mysteries, which at least have a semblance of a plot which must be resolved in a sensible way.

I find that much current fiction (and I don't read much new stuff) reads like movie pitches. The books aren't "books." Books like The DaVinci code are so plot-driven - there's no character development, backstories seem superfluous. It's all action and special effects. Even romances are written that way -- you can practically see where the author has pencilled in and erased "(to be played by Brad Pitt)."

Another thing I truly hate about current fiction is the writing in the present tense. I want a fully thought-out, finished product. Present tense writing gives me the impression of an unfinished draft. "The hero goes up the stairs." No, no, wait -- "the hero goes into the kitchen." No, no - hold on -- "the hero eats a salami sandwich, and is very sad" And so on. It's in keeping with the pitch-the-idea theme -- three or four chapters shopped around to every studio, and if they don't bite, publish it as a novel. Shouldn't it be the other way 'round?

Your other point, about editors, is very well taken. What exactly to book editors do these days besides go to lunch and attend publishers' conferences? Just about every new book I read is full of factual errors, even the fiction, and characters who appear and then disappear with no resolution. To me, the worst flaw in modern fiction is the unsatisfactory ending. A plot idea is presented, but the writer doesn't know how to sew it all up at the end, and there doesn't seem to be any editorial help at all. Frankly, I rarely read new fiction to the end. The whole thing just peters out about 2/3 of the way through, and I lose interest.

And it's the same with movies, unfortunately. Plot points go nowhere, characters behave in ways they didn't behave two scenes ago, etc. And it's bound to get worse now, since schools are turning out generations of semi-literates.