He’s Got Your Back

 

In the mid-seventies, backgammon swept the USA. Some of the dust settled north of the border, and inspired an entrepreneur there to launch a backgammon magazine. Its trajectory must have been shallow, as there seems to have been only one issue, but its short flight was impressive. One of its intrepid reporters was dispatched to the Mayfair Club in New York City. If the scientists at Los Alamos ushered in the Nuclear Age, the scientific players at the Mayfair Club helped usher in the Backgammon Age. The man from the Great White North cornered a few Tellers, Oppenheimers, and Feynmen, to see what they might tell, or opine, as they were fine men and women. To each there was one question he could not resist asking, almost before they had given their names and their achievements: “What about the backgame?” To which most replied: “What about the backgame?” It was clear that he expected the equivalent of the lore Hermione found in the restricted section of Hogwarts Library, and soon would know how to brew the backgammon equivalent of Polyjuice Potion. The experts all tried to let him down gently, essentially saying that the most special thing about backgames is that you should avoid them.

Still, I understand how he felt. A few years later, when I took up the game, backgames held the same fascination for me. The books of the era couldn’t resist describing them in terms that would naturally lead beginners to think backgames were a secret weapon of the experts, and that mastering backgames would show that, you, too, had joined the expert ranks.

If only someone would write a book? Around the time Mr. Canada was in the Mayfair, a Mayfair player, Paul Magriel, wrote his magnum opus, and said he would be writing many more books, with one on backgames being among the first he planned to tackle. It was never forthcoming. Over the years others would promise they would tackle it. I was among them, but backgames slipped all tackles.

Finally, someone wrote the book! Partial credit goes to Mochy, who wrote a quarter of a book, Backgammon Masterclass, on backgames. But full marks go to Encino dermatologist, Dr. Alex Eshaghian, who got the itch and scratched out Backgammon Backgame Strategies. Heft the book, peek inside, and you will see and feel why it took so long: doing the job properly took an immense amount of work. It’s 8.5 x 11, three hundred pages, nearly a kilogram in weight, and that hardly hints at the contents. There are hundreds of diagrams. I haven’t counted, and guess it is hundreds, but there could be over one thousand. Where there aren’t diagrams, there are tables, dozens at least, probably at least one hundred. The positions had to be conceived, rolled out, transcribed: that’s a tremendous amount of labor, even if it is a labor of love.

My one complaint is that I wish there were less of the first three-quarters of the book, and more of the last third. When I started playing, the books of the era decreed that the best three backgames, in order, were the 2-3, the 1-3, and the 1-2. That the higher the anchors, the less like a backgame it was. That if the gap between anchors was more than one pip, e.g. a 1-4, it weakened the backgame, etc. As I progressed a bit, and discussed backgame theory with my friend, Tim Wisecarver, he confirmed the received wisdom, and offered insight into the whys and wherefores. One of Alex’s achievements is to confirm what everyone took for granted. The received wisdom is correct, but he has the numbers to prove it, and the explanations was to why.

 

I am not sure if the terms Hintrose and Suhise are Alex’s coinages, or if he borrowed them from elsewhere, but they are crucial in understanding many of the explanations in the book. Hintrose is: Hits In the Next Two Roll Sequence. Suhise is: Subsequent Hitting Sequences. For example:

 

 

 

The defender (Black) has 35 Hintrose. That is derived this way: 65 (two numbers) times any 6 (eleven numbers) equals 22; plus 44 (one number) times 6 or 51 (thirteen numbers) totals 35 numbers out of 1296 where Black gets and hits a shot. Alex notes that calculating Suhise is more complicated, and seldom does so, but notes that the lower the blot left, and missed, the harder it will be to clean up, so the more Suhise will occur.

 

 

 

The checker play problem above is the first of a set of three, shown in diagrams 4.15 through 4.17 in his chapter on bearing in against backgames. The next two diagrams move Black’s man on his 8pt back to the 23pt and 22pt respectively. How should White play her 31 in each case? (The diagram wrongly shows 33 as the roll, instead of 31. Updating the images is such an enormous pain in the ass on Blogger that I hope this note of explanation suffices.)

In the position about White should not make her 8pt. Black’s timing is such that playing 11/7, leaving no Hintrose, is best. Move the checker back to the 23pt, and now making the 8pt is best. It blocks sixes, forcing Black to dump to his acepoint should he roll one. If the spare is on the 22pt, safety is once again preferred, since fives play to Black’s deuce, the next point he wants to make, and sixes are a problem for Black, whether or not the 8pt is made.

Here is another example of the thoroughness of his comparisons.

 

 

The above is position 8.40, in a section called “Comparison of Single Gap Backgames During the Attacker’s Bear In.” He notates the position as 1-3 (3), which means it is a 1-3 backgame, and the defender’s prime is from the 3pt out. The spare on the defender’s 6pt will always sit there, no matter whether the five-prime is from the 7pt through 3pt, the 8pt through 4pt (1-3 (4)), etc. Suppose the attacker is on roll in each case, what are the equities?

	CL E	SW	GW	BGW	SL	GL	BGL	GAW	E ND	E D/T
1-3 (3)	0.491	62%	26%	2%	38%	3%	0%	75%	0.701	0.676
1-3 (4)	0.388	56%	27%	3%	44%	3%	0%	70%	0.518	0.380
1-3 (5)	0.321	51%	29%	4%	49%	3%	0%	66%	0.390	0.201
1-3 (6)	0.293	49%	29%	5%	51%	3%	0%	65%	0.306	0.105

 

That is his table 8.13. I trust you can decipher everything, except possibly “GAW,” which stands for “Gammon Adjusted Wins.” He also has tables 8.14 and 8.15, which give similar information for an additional eight positions, for the 2-4 and 3-5 backgames. For those White’s formation is shifted back one or two places as appropriate.

 

The two most important columns are the SW and E D/T. The defender’s gammon and backgammon losses increase as his prime is moved further back, but his overall losses drop dramatically thanks to his improved timing. Even the position pictured above is not a double. I won’t reproduce table 8.14, but only 2-4 (3) is a double, the E ND being 0.869 and the E D/T 0.905. Nor will I reproduce table 8.15, but there 3-5 (3) and 3-5 (4) are passes (the first with a no double equity of 0.984 is nearly too good), and the others are borderline D or ND. Oddly, 3-5 (5) is barely no double, while 3-5 (6) is barely a double, 0.870 versus 0.874.

 

On the next page, tables 816 through 8.19 compare apples to apples, i.e., the first compares 1-3 (3), 2/4 (3), and 3-5 (3), the others the (4)’s, (5)’s, and (6)’s. This is all excellent, and useful information, but it reads more like a reference book than a textbook.

 

Which is why I was happy to reach page 233, and Chapter 13: Unorthodox Backgame Tactics. Chapters 13 through 15 are devoted to checker plays. This is the section I wish was much longer, because there is a tremendous amount of material covered in fewer than seventy pages. As the author admits, it would take several volumes to do these concepts justice, and I hope he is the one to expand on what he has done so far. Here are some examples.

 

 

A few years ago I think most people would have played 17/9 without hitting. Now I expect many open players would get this right: 17/11*, 4/2*.

 

 

 

This is position 14.8. In positions 14.9 and 14.10 White’s blot on the 21pt is shifted to the 22pt and 23pt. In each case, how should Black play 44?

 

In the position shown, Black should play 22/18(2), 8/4(2)*. Black does not have ideal timing for a backgame. With the recommended play he trails by only 13 pips, 166 – 153. He equalizes the board strength, and has the flexibility to continue priming, or otherwise shift game plans as things develop.

Move White’s man back a pip to the 22pt, and making a five-prime from the 4pt out is best. He has 4s, 5s, and 6s to run of one of his anchors, while keeping his prime intact.

Move the man back to the 23pt, and now Black should make both barpoints. White’s 66 and 65 are blocked, and 64 slots her 3pt, but leaves a direct shot.

 

 

 

 

I imagine that seeing these two side-by-side you know how to play them both? When White has the blot on her ace, Black should hit; when the ace is made, Black should make his 4pt.

 

Alex Eshaghian has written a book that belongs on every serious player’s shelf. No one will ever write the definitive book on backgames. The topic is too broad and complex for anyone to do that. But for now, Backgammon Backgame Strategies is as close as we have come, and will probably remain so far into the future.

 

Imitation of Life

 

In 1920 F. Scott Fitzgerald described Fannie Hurst as an author who wouldn’t be read “ten years from now.” Had he said: “Ten years from when she stops” he’d have been nearer the mark, because in 1933 she produced her best-remembered novel Imitation of Life. The book was a bestseller, snapped up by Universal Studios. Carl Laemmle, Jr. had taken over from his father. While concentrating on the pictures the studio was known for, low-budget Westerns and horror, he wanted to show his studio could compete with the Big Four in making prestige projects. He assigned veteran director John M. Stahl, and the movie was released late in 1934. It starred Claudette Colbert and Warren Williams. Though if you see the trailer they are hardly mentioned; instead, the performances of two unknowns, Louise Beavers and Fredi Washington are singled out. Twenty-five years later something similar happened. The remake starred Lana Turner and John Gavin, with two more male romantic figures, Robert Alda and Dan O’Herlihy in supporting roles. Yet again, a pair of comparative unknowns, Juanita Moore and Susan Kohner, essaying the roles played earlier by Beavers and Washington, were nominated for Best Supporting Actress Oscars. While the primary plots differ from each other, and from the book, in significant ways, the essential story is as follows. A pair of single mothers meet, and live together, each raising a daughter. One becomes very successful, the other is her maid, though treated like a member of the family. The primary plot in each tracks the star’s path to success. There is a subplot involving the daughter of the success, one which I found contrived. But the movies are remembered, indeed, both are in the National Registry of Films, for the other subplot, involving the maid and her daughter. They are black, the mother obviously so, but the daughter is able to pass for white, and tries to do so, breaking her mother’s heart.

 

Both movies are very much of their period, and require some effort by the viewer, who must place them in context to appreciate them.

 

In the earlier version Colbert plays Bea Pullman, mother of Jessie, who takes in Delilah Johnson (Beavers), mother of Peola. The girls are played by three actresses, when the characters are 3 and 4, Peola the elder by a year, 8 and 9, and finally 18 and 19. The oldest pair are Rochelle Hudson as Jessie, and Fredi Washington as Peola. Bea tries to support the menage by selling pancake syrup door-to-door. Her breakthrough comes when Delilah makes the best pancakes she has ever tasted. She opens a restaurant on the boardwalk. Five years pass, and a hungry man, Elmer Smith (the deadpan Ned Sparks), grateful for some free cakes, tells her to “box it.” She begins selling “Aunt Delilah’s Pancakes,” with a smiling Delilah on every box. Bea becomes hugely successful. Ten years pass, and Elmer, now her right-hand man, invites a friend, Steve Archer (Warren William) to one of her soirees. He is an ichthyologist. That ichthyologists attend glitzy black-tie parties seems fishy to me, but maybe he was paid scale. Meanwhile, Peola from the time she is small wants to be thought of as white, and hates it when her friends discover who her mother is, realizing the truth about her. When grown, instead of attending a Negro college, she secretly takes a job as a cashier at a segregated restaurant in Virginia, but is outed when her mother turns up. She tells her mother she will go away, and “if you see me on the street, don’t acknowledge me.” While Delilah and Bea searched for Peola, Steve looked after Jessie, who fell in love with him. While he never encouraged this, Bea tells Steve that until Jessie is older, and over her infatuation, she cannot see him, but will wait for the day to come when they can finally be together. Meanwhile, her heart broken by her daughter’s rejection, Delilah takes to her bed, and soon dies. Her one wish was for a lavish funeral. Peola turns up at the funeral, realizing at last what she has done to her mother.

Seeing it today, a likely reaction is to cringe at the character Delilah. The nadir of post-Civil War African-American life was in the 1930’s. It was the decade when the tide began its slow turn. Imitation of Life was a major turning point, but it is hard to recognize that. Delilah is a woman who just wants to be housed and fed. She is the happy black servant, as unthreatening as Aunt Jemima, the figure who inspired Aunt Delilah. When the business becomes successful, and Bea wants her to sign papers showing that she, Delilah, is a twenty-percent owner of the million-dollar business, she refuses. Just to keep living in Bea’s house is enough for her. That, and a good funeral when the time comes. That actual Black attitudes even then were at odds with what whites of the period wished to believe is clear when learning of the backlash by Blacks, who hated Beavers playing a maid. To which Beavers replied that she’d rather play one, than be one. The character she plays is in many respects similar to the one Hattie McDaniel played five years later, in Gone With The Wind. (McDaniel plays an extra in the funeral scene, but I was unable to spot her.) Beavers’ portrayal of Delilah was perhaps the first significant Black role in a major Hollywood film.

 

Then there is Peola! Fredi Washington, born in 1903, was only three years younger than Beavers. But she could pass for younger. Moreover, she could pass for white. Indeed, it was suggested that she do so, in furtherance of her career. Though having outed herself by playing this part, I am not sure how that would have worked. She refused to deny her race, turned her back on Hollywood to return to the New York stage, and was a civil rights activist.

 

1934 was the year the Code came back into force, and the studio was worried that the movie might be banned. Not for any of the expected problems, crime, violence, sexual content, etc. The issue was one other thing banned by the Code: miscegenation. Neither Delilah nor Peola is given a love interest, but Peola’s skin color makes it clear that miscegenation must have occurred. Though Peola has a change of heart at the end, she is not shown as being in the wrong by passing for white. Her sin is to have rejected her mother, but that is seen as tragic, the result of forces beyond their control. The strength of the film is that it forces the audience to sympathize with Peola’s plight, and to ask tough questions as to just why Peola cannot live as white. That’s because Fredi Washington, with her light skin and finishing school diction (like her “sister” Jessie’s) is hard to see as Black. All of the very real restrictions placed upon her at that time, because of her race, seem absurd. Indeed, the concept of race seems absurd. Which it is, but here that absurdity is as apparent as black and white.

 

Twenty-five years later, the story goes like this. Lora Meredith (Turner) and her daughter Susie, meet Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore) and her daughter Sarah Jane on the beach at Coney Island. The year is 1947, and they also meet Steve Archer (John Gavin), a photographer, who develops an interest in Lora. Lora is an aspiring actress, and when Steve, after proposing, tries to order her not to pursue a career, she breaks it off. Agent Allen Loomis (Robert Alda) has her audition for successful playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy). She becomes a star, O’Herlihy’s muse, and his girlfriend. A decade later she is considering giving it all up, and is reunited with Steve, but then a prominent Italian director offers her a part in a movie. Her now sixteen-year-old daughter (Sandra Dee) develops a crush on Steve, while mom is away in Italy. Meanwhile, Sarah Jane hates being black, and once again breaks mom’s heart, but turns up at the funeral. (Where the great Mahalia Jackson sings a solo.)

 

The 1959 remake was helmed by producer Ross Hunter, and director Douglas Sirk, a partnership synonymous with 1950’s melodrama. Sirk is considered a great director, but a difficult one to “get.” The reason is that he made subtle points hidden beneath a glossy, melodramatic surface. What you see seems corny and overwrought: and that’s the point. The tension between life and his slightly funhouse version of it was deeply ironic, a commentary on the manners of its period. Lana Turner is central to his expression here. A bit of context which might escape modern audiences, but which would have been in the minds of those seeing it in 1959, was that Turner and her daughter had recently been at the center of a major Hollywood scandal.

 

Lana Turner was married eight time, twice to Stephen Crane, father of her only child Cheryl Crane. Besides all those husbands, she had many boyfriends. In the late 1950’s, after divorcing husband number four (or five, counting Crane twice) Tarzan actor Lex Barker, she began living with a low-level gangster named Johnny Stompanato. One night in 1958, allegedly to protect her mother from a beating, her fourteen-year-old daughter stabbed Stompanato to death. Inevitably, there were rumors that it was the actress who stabbed him, and the daughter took the fall because as a minor (and non-movie star) the repercussions would be less. Crane would lead a troubled life for some years, but later became a real estate broker and author. She is still alive, having turned eighty in July.

Audiences would have had the scandal in mind, and read things into the relationship in the movie between Lora and Susie. The relationship between the daughter and Steve Archer felt contrived in 1934. The age gap then between Hudson (18) and William (40) was greater than that between Dee (16) and Gavin (27), and William seemed an old forty. Nonetheless, it felt less inappropriate. Hudson was a mature eighteen. Dee, who may actually have been two years younger than her official biography has it, making her fourteen, not sixteen, plays a very perky kid. She is supposed to be graduating from finishing school, but when she and Steve go to a nightclub, he pointedly orders her a Coke. She seems much younger than she would in A Summer Place, made a year later and released later the same year. Dee was too interesting an actress to be dismissed so quickly. When she and her mother have a confrontation over her feelings about Steve, and her mother says she will “give him up,” Susie tells her mother to “stop acting.” Dee real depths of emotion, and neatly skewers Turner’s acting.

Turner’s performance was part of Sirk’s triumph. I can’t think of a role in which she has impressed me. She seems stagy and over the top in most of her scenes in Imitation of Life, but the critics attribute it to Sirk, something he coaxed from her. It makes her slightly silly, but it works for the character, who in contrast to Colbert’s version, is artificial, and narcissistic. There’s a great moment when Annie, late in the movie, mentions all of the friends she wants at her funeral. There are the members of her church, and of the various lodges she belongs to. Lora says she never knew Annie had all those friends. “You never asked.” She doesn’t say it as a rebuke. Annie is as saintly in her way as Delilah was in hers. But it brings Lora up short, because it’s true.

 

The title in this version might fit Lora’s life even better than it does Sarah Jane’s. But it was meant for Sarah Jane’s part of the story. The idea that a Black woman would try to pass as white was, sadly, still plausible despite the passage of twenty-five years. What had changed was how much stronger that point might be made. The very first night the Johnsons move into the small apartment the Meredith’s occupy, on being gifted with a black doll, eight-year-old Sarah Jane cries that she wants Susie’s white doll; she doesn’t want a black doll. She also does not understand why she and her mother have to sleep in a tiny room off the kitchen.

The grown-up Sarah Jane is played by Susan Kohner. Kohner was the daughter of a film producer born in Bohemia, and an actress born in Mexico. Unlike Fredi Washington, she was not black, but with darker coloration than Sandra Dee (almost everyone had darker coloration than Sandra Dee) she could pass as an African-American passing as white.

 

By 1959, the Code having already been challenged a number of times, the filmmakers were slightly less concerned about the repercussions stemming from miscegenation. Not so blithe as to include explicit sex, but that was generally true in the fifties. Sexual allusion was the order of the day, and they made the most of it. Annie tells Sarah Jane she wishes she would go to church socials, and meet a boy. “You mean, bus boys, janitors …?” African-American men were undesirable, not only because dating them would make her own race obvious, but because in a racist society their socio-economic status was limited. She secretly has a boyfriend. When she returns from sneaking out to see him, she tells Susie about it, while stripping down to a slip for bed, confiding that “he’s white.”

We meet him. Later that year Sandra Dee would pair with Troy Donahue, in a role that would make him a star. In this film he has just one scene, but it got him noticed. It’s not the Troy Donahue we think of. Sarah Jane meets Frankie, and can see something is upsetting him. “Are you a nigger?” The line was even more shocking then than it is now. Despite its banishment from common usage, and its replacement with “the N-word,” the original has been used so often in popular music and R-rated crime dramas that we are immured. She denies it, but Frankie says he has heard it from “the other kids,” who know who her mother is. He beats her, and leaves her sobbing in a puddle in the alley.

She takes a job, telling her mother she works nights filing books at the library. Annie discovers she is working at Harry’s Bar, as a dancer in a skimpy costume, flirting with the white patrons. After her mother’s arrival outs her, she runs off to Hollywood, to dance at a club called Moulon Rouge, where she and another dancer date customers.

 

Kohner was terrific, but five years later she married, and quit acting. That was around the time acting quit Dee. It’s a shame that neither had the careers they deserved, though unlike Dee, Kohner, who is still alive, age eighty-six, probably got the life she wanted.

 

On Writing

 

1978 was the year I discovered the funniest book I’d ever read, and also the scariest. The father of my friend Chris Rosburg really enjoyed smoking and reading, so he decided to open a store called Books & Briars. It was a bookstore with a tobacco counter, or a tobacconist with a whole lot of books. I dropped in regularly to chat with Chris. I’d help him by pointing out that A Child’s Garden of Grass did not belong in the gardening section, and he’d share the latest sick jokes. (“What has fifty-eight legs and flies? John Gacy’s crawl space.”) From the stacks I discovered the extremely funny book, and the extremely scary one. I am not claiming either one is its category’s superlative, only that at the time I read them, I laughed harder, or shuddered more, than I have with any books before or since. Things change, and I doubt either book would impress me as much today. When I was twelve, I read The Catcher In the Rye, and Atlas Shrugged. I thought they were two of the best novels ever written. I reread both when I was sixteen, and boy, had my opinion changed!

 

The funniest book was The Water-Method Man. I don’t remember much more about it than the title being a reference to an old treatment for venereal disease. It’s author, John Irving, had written three more books by that point, his newest, The World According to Garp, would make him famous. Because I enjoyed The Water-Method Man I bought and read the others, and a few years later The Hotel New Hampshire, then quit him for years. I had decided that he was writing the same book over and over, and I no longer needed to see how he’d rework it.

 

The scariest book was The Shining. I am not an avid reader of horror. I’ve certainly read the odd Lovecraft or Bloch, but I don’t itch for the newest Dean Koontz. The Shining was an impulse buy – it looked like it might be good – and I didn’t expect it to really scare me. There was something about it that really did. It’s a haunted house story, nothing new about that. But the idea that we were seeing the ghosts through the eyes of a five-year-old, and that he had paranormal abilities, so when he encountered them what seemed dim and whispery to normal folk were for him blazing images, the volume turned up to eleven, made it very intense. When the kid starts blasting out an extrasensory cry for help, and it’s so powerful that Hallorann, two thousand miles away in Florida, drives off the road, I was riveted.

 

Like Irving, I hunted up King’s other books. He’d published two by then, Carrie and Salem’s Lot. More were coming, and I kept buying. He held me as a reader a lot longer than John Irving did. Still, there came a point where I grew tired of King. It happens, even with the best of them. King was never the best, but parts of him are very good. In his book On Writing he lumps himself with three other writers who were at the time he wrote among the biggest sellers in the market. Two of them are now dead: Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy. John Grisham is still around, and still busy, as is King. Of the four King is far and away the best writer. He says in On Writing that what makes writers successful is their ability to tell the truth. I agree only to a limited extent. What makes all of those four extraordinarily successful is that at some level they all channel their inner twelve-year-old boy.

It's a thing I first observed with King, and the insight came while reading The Body, a novella famously adapted as the movie Stand By Me. The characters in the story are twelve-year-old boys. (If they are eleven, or fourteen, or anything other than twelve, you may let me know care of the I Don’t Give a Shit Foundation.) During their quest to go see a dead body, they take a break while one of them tells the others a story. The story is about a fat kid who is picked upon. There are a lot of those in King’s stories; enough that I wonder if Little Stevie was once a kid with a weight problem. This particular victim turns the tables at a fair. He enters a pie-eating contest, gorges on blueberry pies while the crowd taunts him for being a fat pig, and then gets his revenge by vomiting. Projectile vomiting! Blueberry vomiting! Which causes chain-reaction vomiting so copious it threatens to flood the fairgrounds and drown the town. The other kids love that story! It is the sort of story a twelve-year-old boy would love. Me, I don’t love it. But readers did. The same sort of audience that saw a campfire surrounded by bean-eating cowboys and made Blazing Saddles a hit made books with scenes like those bestsellers.

 

Stephen King is the Steven Spielberg of writers! Spielberg has tried with mixed results to make “grown up” movies, but his greatest successes have come with movies that a young boy would love. (One of his biggest hits, Jurassic Park, is a movie about dinosaurs written by Stephen King’s peer, Michael Crichton.) Spielberg’s most recent movie, Meet the Fabelmans, is a semi-autographical story about a young boy who shows technical brilliance while making movies whose heart and soul are childish: about crashing trains; kids with their own friend from outer space; or cliched war stories. Steven Spielberg combines that juvenile sensibility with impressive technical accomplishment. Stephen King also combines a juvenile sensibility with amazing technique.

 

It's one thing to understand where he is coming from, and recognize that while he will never write The Great Gatsby or Grapes of Wrath, he has written, and will write, very satisfying books which sell many more copies than either of those sold when they were first published. It is another to figure out how to channel it. I doubt anyone can tell us, even the man himself. What he can tell us is about his technique. That’s what he does in On Writing.

 

I just wish he offered more. Most of King’s advice is bog standard. Turn to any book about writing by a writer and they will tell you to: Plant your ass in a chair every day; Eliminate excess words; Consult a good style manual; Read a lot. King tells it as well as anyone, but there is much he might have said. Perhaps like a good magician, he did not want to reveal the actual mechanics of his tricks. What sorts of things do I wish he revealed? Here follow a few.

 

The short and the long of it.  My brother had a friend, Harris from Paris, who lived in Tokyo. Like many itinerants, Harris discovered the gig economy before it was called that. One of the ways he made money was writing copy for product inserts. “Suppose you are writing copy for a leather case made to hold a Nikon camera, what is your headline?” My brother suggested: “The Nikon Camera Case.”

“Try again,” said Harris. “Not enough words.”

“The … Nikon Camera Case, Made of Rich Brown Leather?”

“No good! The text itself should be two or three thousand words, and the headline at least two or three hundred.”

“That’s absurd!”

“They pay fifty cents a word for the copy, and a buck a word for the headline.”

 

The reason nineteenth century novels were so massive was often because they began as serials, the authors being paid by the word. The Japanese manufacturers felt their customers expected more than a blurb, and paid for excess. Nineteenth century readers, too, wanted their money’s worth. Tastes change. They changed rapidly in the 20^th century. But even before Ernest Hemingway revolutionized writing, others pointed the way. Mark Twain was a pathfinder when he picked up his tomahawk and scalped James Fenimore Cooper. “Cooper’s art has some defects. In one place in ‘Deerslayer,’ and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.” Twain then tells us that there are “Nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In ‘Deerslayer’ Cooper violated eighteen of them.” He lists them; here is number fourteen: “Eschew surplusage.” I.e.: Keep it short.

 

Beginnings writers seldom have a problem with writing too short. Telling them to eschew surplusage is safe advice, as most don’t eschew, they chew, gobbling surplusage like a herd of starving cows. What hardly anyone goes on to talk about is when something needs to be long.

 

Consider this sentence: The panther ran through the jungle. Even a committee comprising William Strunk, Jr., Elwyn Brooks White, Ernest Miller Hemingway, and the panther herself, can find nothing wrong with that sentence. Now consider this one: The maharajah’s caravan moved through jungle, a caravan of a size not seen since the days of the maharajah’s great-grandfather: fifty elephants, each with a howdah made of teak carved by artisans in the distant past, with scenes of military triumphs, of timeless love affairs, or in honor of the gods; each elephant led by a mahout, and flanked by six soldiers, clad in silk uniforms with shining scimitars tucked in their cummerbunds, and peacock feathers jutting from their turbans; trailing the elephants a retinue afoot, three thousand five hundred strong; behind them the ox-drawn wagons, bearing provisions for the morrow’s festivities; all parading through the jungle, inexorably, inexorably, that is, until the caravan came to an abrupt halt. The maharani had dropped her iPhone.

 

Sure, the sentence is a shaggy dog story setting up its punchline, but even without the joke at the end, it needs to be long. Caravans do not “run through the jungle.”

Going back to short sentences, there is more to it than most let on. “The panther ran through the jungle.” Why? Perhaps she is hunting. Among a panther’s prey are warthogs, gazelles, and impalas. The writer chose to feature the panther, but the sentence could have featured its prey. I offered three choices, which might you favor? The warthog? Warthogs can run. They are quite fast, capable of running at thirty miles an hour. But “the warthog ran through the jungle” sounds absurd. You almost have to be writing humor, to choose the warthog. “The gazelle ran through the jungle” works. Gazelles run; it sounds fine. The impala, though, is exotic. There’s an animal worth chasing! Writing the right short sentence can be more difficult than writing a long one!

 

The Ins and Outs of Ins and Outs. Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code sold 80 million copies. Coincidentally, that’s how many chapters are in the book. The hero, Robert Langdon, can’t go two pages, tops, before a shot rings out, a car spins out of control, lightning strikes, he falls through a trap door, or a librarian tells him the library is closing, sometimes all of them at once. Not every chapter needs a cliffhanger, but if you are writing thrillers, as King does, you want readers turning pages to see what happens next. There are many ways to handle this, but a useful tip is to think of how transitions are done in movies.

As the climax approaches in Silence of the Lambs, Clarice is going to interview a witness, when she gets the good news from her boss, Jack Crawford: they have located Buffalo Bill. They are surrounding his house as Jack speaks to her on the phone. We see teams of armed agents moving into position. Meanwhile, in his basement, the serial killer is arguing with his victim, who has trapped his dog in the pit. His doorbell rings upstairs. The agents have the house surrounded by now, and the team on the porch is ringing the bell. The killer goes upstairs to see who is at the door. The agents burst through the door, and sweep through the rooms of the house. It’s empty! They are at the wrong house. Meanwhile, the killer opens his door, and there is unsuspecting Clarice, mentally disarmed because she “knows” Crawford’s team is hundreds of miles away, arresting the killer.

 

I was reminded of that scene recently while reading a thriller by Mick Herron. (If you haven’t discovered Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series, do yourself a favor and check them out.) Herron uses the “wrong doorbell” trick, albeit in reverse. We know the killers are at a door, and the doorbell rings at a house where our unsuspecting heroes are waiting for a pizza delivery. End of chapter. This time it’s the killers at the wrong house. For the moment. The doorbell will ring again!

 

Some rules on breaking the rules. If you have read Peanuts, you’ve seen Snoopy sitting on top of his dog house, pounding away at a typewriter, beginning a story, always with the same words: “It was a dark and stormy night.” Where’d he get them?

Sir Edward George Earl Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1^st Baron Lytton, was a British politician and writer. Hugely popular in the early and middle nineteenth century, at least one of his books, The Last Days of Pompeii, was still being read in the twentieth. In 1830 he published a novel, Clark Clifford, whose first seven words were; “It was a dark and stormy night …” Thanks to Snoopy as much as anyone, Bulwer-Lytton, and those words in particular, are synonymous with bad writing. There is an annual Bulwer-Lytton contest where people try to write the worst opening.

 

Let’s reinforce it. Elmore Leonard, one of the most prolific and successful authors of our times, offered ten rules for writing. The very first rule is: Never open a book with the weather. Never. No dark and stormy nights, not even bright and sunny afternoons. Sorry, Sherlock, I guess London fog can dry up and blow away, or at least creep off to the middle of the book on little cat feet.

 

What then to make of this?

The rain came, and should have washed down the streets.   Falling, it should have captured the particles of dust, the fog of auto exhaust, the reek from stray fires smoldering in piles of garbage, tackled them all, and dragged them to earth.   It should have washed the grime and peeling paint down the walls of the buildings.   It should have swept all the discarded newspapers and crushed cigarette butts and rotting banana peels from the sidewalks, swept everything into the gutter, so the city was clean and fresh, renewed.   Instead, the rain came too fast.   The streets filled with water faster than the antiquated sewers could cope.   They backed up like a plugged toilet, so that pedestrians could expect wet tissue paper and dog turds plastered to their calves.   In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right.

That’s the opening paragraph of my novel The Battered Butterfly. Not only am I opening a novel with the weather, but while I don’t use the actual words “dark and stormy night,” it’s apparent the night is dark and stormy. I think it works, though you as reader are always free to disagree.

Why do I think so? Well, for one, it isn’t really about the weather, it’s about Manila. When I decided I wanted to write about the Philippines, in particular the Ermita neighborhood of Manila, writing a hard-boiled, picaresque crime novel felt right. The place had everything; sex, violence, corruption. It was the embodiment of noir. For his fifth labor, Hercules has to clean out the stables of King Augeus, stables housing three thousand head of cattle, stables which haven’t been washed for thirty years. Hercules reroutes a pair of rivers, which does the trick. Here I open up the heavens, and the deluge fails. No one is cleaning this place.

Beyond that, there is a bit of foreshadowing, the storm anticipating the storm of violence about to be unleashed. Also, we are about to meet the hero, Lefty Markowitz. Lefty is not the narrator of the novel, but the last sentence in the paragraph, “In Manila, even the rain didn’t work right,” echoes his voice. It establishes the tone of the book, cynical and ironic.

Did I think of all that when I wrote it? No, it just felt right at the time. Only later did I try to analyse it. You are your own reader, and should ask yourself when reading what you’ve written if it sounds like something you would enjoy reading if someone else had written it.

Those are some topics I wish King covered. He didn’t, but few of them do. Lots of writers have written about writing. It’s funny that books by writers about writing sell as well as they do. Writing is a craft. So are pottery and cabinetmaking, but no one reads books on those for fun and profit. Most people know that they will never become the next Patti Warashina, or George Heppelwhite, but they think there is a chance they could be the next Dan Brown, John Grisham, or Stephen King. When a Stephen King sets out to write about the craft, he knows that most readers are seeking a little bit of advice, and a lot of entertainment.

What sort of entertainment? Most books on writing by famous writers turn out to be memoirs. Lawrence Block has written at least five books on writing, his output helped by his having done a column for Writers Digest for many years. All of his books have plenty of biographical detail, despite Block never having done much of anything except write. King at least held a few day jobs, but Block dropped out of college to write full time, and never looked back. William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade, a “must read’ for aspiring screenwriters, is another memoir disguised as a How To. Having worked in film he has some impressive gossip. Even Charlie Kaufman’s movie Adaptation is sort of a “how to write a screenplay,” though that’s about like saying the Moby Dick is about “how to go fishing.”

King gives us an autobiography which takes us through the sale of the paperback rights to Carrie. Raised by a single mom, a kid who loved E.C. comics and movies like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, by the time he was grown he and his family were living in a trailer, while he taught school, and sent stories to men’s magazines. Then—Bang!—four hundred thousand dollars (of which he got half), and bye, bye trailer.

That’s the point when he began stockpiling impressive celebrity gossip. So many of his books have been filmed he could elbow Kevin Bacon aside with Five Degrees of Stephen King. Instead, it’s the point where he turns to the craft of writing, nominally “How I Do It.” Then to fill out the book he gives an account of his accident and its aftermath. It reads like a Stephen King story. He was creamed while walking along the shoulder of the road by a guy who wanted: “’Some of those Marzes bars they have up in the store’ … It occurs to me I have nearly been killed by a character right out of one of my own novels.”

To the above he adds a section showing his edits to a story, useful to writers, and a preview of a work then in progress. And a list of books he’d read in the past few years. Subsequent additions added more lists of books, and for the 20^th anniversary addition, a pair of articles by his sons. Even the book list is interesting. He is evidently not a fast reader. (He says as much.) He lists about one hundred books which he calls the best of the previous four years. Two subsequent lists each add around eighty more, each read over the course of a decade. Most are fiction, and what I found most interesting were the ones I’d expect him to have read when he was younger. Perhaps he did. Or, perhaps not. It’s almost impossible to imagine him not getting around to To Kill A Mockingbird until the late nineties. The Adventures of Augie March and War and Peace are heavier works usually read, if at all, by people closer to their college days. Then again, I first read both within the last ten years, so why not King?

Overall, it’s a good book. Reading it won’t turn you into a bestselling author. If that turns lies ahead, you are the one who must do the steering. But it will entertain you, and if you plan to do any writing, his advice will help.