Skoob Press Moved to New Site! Skoobpress.com

Skoob Press is excited to announce that the recent lack of activity is due to putting our time and effort into creating a more sophisticated blog. We are now on Word Press at SkoobPress.com.

One thing you'll notice at our new site is that we have two new bloggers: Eddie dePeterse and Wayne Crotts. Eddie will write on a variety of topics, while Wayne will write primarily on film and historical novels.

As Skoob Press is a work-in-progress, we know you'll notice things that could be improved. Don't worry--we'll get to all of those things in the next few weeks. Meanwhile, we will be writing on a regular basis again and invite you to join us!

Thank you for the comments. All are welcome.

The Question Is Always Why

I can't remember whether I've written about motivation before, but it's a topic I keep coming back to because I think any work of fiction or even nonfiction depends on whether the character is sufficiently motivated to do the things the author has the character do. In other words, why does the character do what he or she does? When I think of character motivation, I actually think of a series of movies rather than novels. To me The Godfather, both I and II, are great movies despite their having a level of violence that I normally wouldn't watch. What makes the movies great is Coppola’s exploration of evil and how one decision can move someone from being basically good to being fundamentally evil.

The problem with both of the first two movies is that Coppola wants to make a movie about evil and the struggle of people as they deal with its impact while using the movie as a vehicle for his economic views: he wants to overlay that movie and have as its driving force a condemnation of capitalism, which is politics (not sure how he feels about that issue now that he’s gotten so very rich off these films).

In the first movie and the pulp novel, Michael is determined not to be involved in his family's business, which is, of course, the Mafia. The most important moment in the movie is when Michael makes the decision to murder a man for the first time to protect his father, who has been shot by a rival don protected by a corrupt police captain. Although many of us might say we would kill for our families, Michael’s movement from nice college boy/war hero to being a “made man” is a weak moment because Michael shows an insufficient internal struggle, present in the novel as well. It’s true that as the son of a Don, he has grown up surrounded by violence. Nevertheless and despite his father’s being shot, it seems to me that we should see a greater internal struggle, a longer struggle, a darker struggle, as Michael takes a step from which he cannot return. The brilliance of the movie—the fact that once he has stepped over a particular line, he cannot go back and be who he was because stepping over the line separating good from evil has changed him irrevocably—is somewhat marred by a missed opportunity to play out that internal struggle more fully.

So in the first movie, you have a moment in the film that should have been profound but wasn't necessarily. In the second movie, you see Coppola trying to impose what he wants the movie to be about onto Michael.

Michael has two beliefs on which he basis all of his decisions: protect the family and base decisions on pure logic. All of his decisions in the book and the movie stem from those two driving forces. In the second movie, Freddie, Michael's brother, betrays Michael and almost gets Michael's wife and children murdered in their bedroom in an appalling act of violence that terrifies both Michael and the audience. As the movie goes on, Michael becomes wealthier and more successful, more powerful until at last he becomes untouchable. The process of murdering others in retaliation and self-defense, his need to protect his family, the fortress they’re forced to live in—the life he builds as a result of that one fateful decision to kill a man—forces him to become his father times ten: ruthless and emotionally remote from his family.

Nevertheless, Michael lives according to his two rules; he defends his family and is always logical. When Coppola has Michael kill his brother Freddie and all of his living enemies despite the danger it brings to the organization, Coppola has him act outside of the parameters of his character. One thing that really bothered me during the movie is Coppola’s insistence, conveyed through characters such as Michael’s sister, on Freddie’s innocence, yet we see that he's not innocent. He betrayed his family. The tension between what the characters are saying about Freddie and what the audience thinks of Freddie based on his own actions mars the movie. Given the context, Michael was justified in having Freddie killed. To eliminate the tension, Coppola needed to stop having other characters defend Freddie and concede that justice was served by his death or have Michael forgive him with the clear intention of showing that Michael’s forgiveness was an act of mercy and not what Freddie deserved.

Coppola’s having Michael irrationally killing all of his enemies, who were already incapacitated, is also a flaw as once again Coppola has to have Michael step outside the parameters of his character as one governed by logic. Apparently, Coppola wanted the audience to see Michael as the ultimate capitalist, twisted and murderous. Instead he showed that even in a great movie, you can have serious problems with motivation, often but not always as result of the author, or in this case, director, trying to impose his or her will on a character. Even Mario Puzo, the author of the novel, didn’t want Michael to kill Freddie and said he would only put it in the script if Michael waited until his mother died.

Once an author creates a character, the character takes on a life of its own, and the author must live within the parameters by which the character operates and in which the character lives.

   

Review of The Spies of Warsaw

I've just discovered Alan Furst, though I can't remember how. I think I ran across his name and one of his novels skimming through a list on Audible.com, thanks to a friend who gave me a 3-mth subscription. I listened to the audio version, read by Daniel Gerroll, whose claim to acting fame seems to rely on a recurring role in Knot's Landing and Cashmere Mafia. Hearing him read The Spies of Warsaw reminds me of Mr. Holland's Opus, a movie about a man who took a teaching gig only until he could write great music and then discovered that though he was a mediocre composer, he was a great teacher. Mr. Gerroll makes this novel for me, in part because it's not the sort of book I would normally pick up. His ability to infuse characters with personality and to read a variety of  accents well, important since 1930s Poland was peopled with Poles, Germans, Swiss, French and Russians, enables the reader to suspend disbelief and capture the wonderful atmosphere so important to Furst's work.

The novel itself is about a military attache, Colonel Jean-Francois Mercier, who finds that what he thought would be a boring desk job is, in the years leading up to another World War, the epicenter of a city in which espionage and betrayal are like silent rivers flowing under seemingly peaceful streets. Working quietly among the military and social salons of Warsaw, he pieces together tiny bits of information that take him to Germany and Paris, to speak with spies and to persuade men and women to betray their countries in an effort to save Europe from another German invasion.

But the real story is the impact WWI and its aftermath had on Eastern Europe and the world. Though Poland is once again a country, the Poles have to monitor their German neighbors, fearing another march across the borders--and not unreasonably, as we know. The Russian Revolution is twenty years old and Stalin's Gulag is full, the Great Purge beginning; Franco is waging civil war in Spain; Hitler and the Nazi Party rule Germany. This fascinating novel is about the forces of these ancient nations moving inexhorably towards war--and the egocentric men who refuse to see what others have put right before their eyes.

If I have any qualms with The Spies of Warsaw, it would be my feeling bogged down by details at times. The pace is slow in the beginning, and you have to listen carefully or you'll miss important information. Also, one weakness of audio with a novel of this kind is that I sometimes struggled to remember who was whom. Still, I recommend this for anyone who likes historical novels or who enjoys seeing the grand sweep of history. Furst captures both in his tightly plotted, atmospheric work.

Writing Advice to Me in Response to My Post

 

For your novel- create a mythical street just off a historical one.  That is done all the time and not disruptive to the reader at all. At some point, have an expert or two fine-tune the historical accuracy in your novel.  Many times the historical accuracy editing can be completed with a single adjustment here or there to explain what would be otherwise an interruption.  I think that what you are after is to propel the reader into the historical era and then engage him/her in the story being told with the history as background.  I can’t help but think of the plot in ‘Somewhere in Time’ when Christopher Reeves has transported himself into the past to meet his true love (Jane Seymour). He did this via concentration/meditation in surroundings of the past he wanted to visit, including wearing a Victorian era suit he had purchased in a pawn shop.  And it worked! He jumped back in time, met Seymour, fell in love, but alas there was that impervious 1979 dated penny that was in one of the pockets of the Victorian jacket.  He pulled it out by chance, realized what it was, the spell broke and that was that.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSfcpJb_J38&feature=related .

So the trick is to get the reader back in time- and keep them there without some misplaced or ill-timed 1979 penny breaking the spell.  Leaning on a historical expert or two will help guard against this.  I would also encourage you to see movies of the era and about the era that you are writing about—not because they are typically accurate but your reading audience will expect them to be.  Therefore,  it will help you know what historical points will need to be emphasized and what historical myths may need to be countered via a paragraph here or there.

What's the #1 Problem with Writing a Historical Novel?

The answer to that question is easy; the solution to the problem is hard. Do I research Greenwich Village in the 1930s, or do I write? If a writer should write very day and I have only a brief window in the evenings, then I should write, right? (haha)

The problem with using my time to write is that I keep having to put blanks in where street or building names should go. My characters turn corners into nowhere and buy food at blank grocery store. After a while, I feel as if, despite the research I've already done, I can't write a coherent paragraph without getting the geography down.

So I draw a map with the streets in place and the begin to populate it with buildings that I want to mention and the streets where my characters live. Filling in maps takes a long time because you have to draw them and fill them in, and the only way to know what to put where is to  . . . research. So I read yet more books or look up more websites and then realize that I haven't written--actually put words on paper--for days, which means that I've lost my mojo and have to sit down to write at the same time every night to get it back.

Stumbling around in the story, writing sentences and scenes that are so bad I can hardly stand to write them and know they won't make it into even the 1st version of the novel, I push on until the writing is smoother and makes more sense and might make it into the first draft, a relief.

Next time I write a historical novel, I think I'll place the protagonist in the desert--a large one with no recorded history so that I can make up whatever I want, and it will be true because I say so. Greenwich Village is no desert and for some reason that now eludes me, I've chosen one of its most complex periods to write about it.

As a result, not only do I struggle to divide my writing time between actual writing and doing research, I also need to organize that research better so that I form a coherent picture of what life looked like in GV in 1932. As it is, I have tons of information gathered in Excel spreadsheets, notebooks, Word notes, slips of paper, books scattered all over the floor. You would never know to look at my desk that the rest of my life tends to be overly organized. Here, chaos wins. My fear is that if I take the time to organize all of this information and to gather more and organize it, I'll never write the novel.

So I know the question but not the answer. For now, I'll keep lunging between the three poles--writing, researching, organizing--until perhaps I develop that complete vision I need to write without pause, the names and places all falling beautifully into place, creating a world of their own. Then I'll know I've done enough to focus on the one thing that really matters: writing the story.

Reading War and Peace

I've downloaded War & Peace onto my Kindle with the determination to read it all the way through this time, right to the last page when everyone either gets married or dies or whatever happens. I'm not sure what happens because the first time I started it--about 12 years ago--I made it to page 400 and had to return to life.

My initial idea this time was that I would listen to it on my MP3 and read it. Like this: listen 20 minutes on my way to work and 20 minutes on the way home; read a few pages before bed; listen 20 minutes on my way to work and 20 minutes home, etc. Sure, I thought, getting through Tolstoy might take a while, but adding the 40 minutes audio a day would speed things up a bit and allow me to finish in no time.

As it turns out, the public library where I get my audio books doesn't have War & Peace, a fact that left me stunned. Stunned. What?! No War and Peace?!

I Googled War & Peace audio book and clicked on the FREE version. Take that public library. I listened to a sample and found that the free version reader is a young man who sounds Indian. His sincerity could not overcome my reluctance to listen to someone with an Indian accent read French phrases and Russian names in a book that had been translated from Russian into English.

I clicked on another Google link. I could buy the book for only 22.00, not a bad price for an audio book.

By reading customer reviews, which I always do, I found that the first audio version had an inadequate reader, but thanks to whiny customers, the company had come out with a second, much better, version. Getting the right reader is crucial in any audio book, but especially in one in which many languages and accents are employed: the Winter Queen, for example, whose reader is the best I've heard.

So I decided that my plan, once in danger of being foiled by a public library specializing in zombie stories, might work, especially if I could squeeze in a trip to two and read steadily every night. Then I checked out the hours on the audio book: 65. Sixty-five hours of audio book. I don't know if I have that much space on my off-brand MP3. I have no plans to drive to California. At 30-40 minutes a day, skipping weekends but taking the occasional weekend trip, I figure listening to the entire book would take me about 6 months.

I haven't downloaded it but still might since I've been told by a reliable friend that I can burn it into an MP3 and play it on my CD player. Meanwhile, I'm reading 4-5 pages a night. Or almost every night.

I love the book. Love it. Which is good since I'll probably be reading this novel for the rest of my life.