Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

One way or another, it’s all about the writing here. Sometimes it’s heavy on theory. Sometimes it’s heavy on practice. And sometimes I don’t know how you’d classify it.

This one, to be sure, falls squarely on the practice end of our warped continuum.

When it comes to getting things done and earning the right to tap out our three most cherished letters — END — at the close of a manuscript, nothing, absolutely nothing, replaces good old-fashioned work. There’s simply no other way to get there.

Still, I think most writers are as wide open as a Montana sky for ways to jump-start the process. We look for angles with the shrewdness of street hustlers. However you describe what you’re after — motivation, enthusiasm, a roll-in-the-hay with the Muse — most of us build up a repertoire of tried-and-true methods to juice the means of production.

Maybe it’s an exercise in personal superstition — you can’t write without your lucky cigarettes. Maybe it’s a simple tactic. Hemingway, it’s said, liked to leave things off in the middle of a sentence, or even a word, because when he came back to it, it would still feel warm. Or maybe it’s an exercise in borderline insanity. No lie: I was once interviewed by someone who told me about a friend of hers who would drink a pitcher of water, then tie himself into his desk chair with intricate knots, where he and his screaming bladder would stay put until he’d finished his daily quota.

Hey, whatever works — who’s to judge?

I developed a new trick of my own recently. Maybe it will help you too. Or maybe it will strike you as an exercise in pointless frivolity. I can only promise you that it will not rupture your bladder.

It arose this summer, as these things so often do, out of a timely convergence of two unrelated activities:

(A) Reading Rebel Without A Crew, filmmaker Robert Rodriguez’s account of how he made his debut feature, El Mariachi, for $7000, and how it catapulted him on the trajectory his career has taken ever since.

(B) Writing, on request from Cemetery Dance Publications, the sales/dust jacket copy for my upcoming crime novel, Mad Dogs.

First the sales copy:

*

From Brian Hodge, the author of the highly acclaimed Wild Horses, comes his long-awaited second crime novel, which once again finds him careening at whiplash speeds between black humor and the pounding heart of darkness.

Actor Jamey Sheppard may not be starving, but he’s definitely struggling. His career has been one piddling role after another with names like Radical Dude #3. Still, as he’s road-tripping from Los Angeles to Arizona to reunite with his fiancée for their wedding, the future looks brighter than gold.

Until a liquid lunch deputy turns the best day in his life into the worst.

But Jamey’s no criminal. He’s only played one on TV.

From the moment he’s mistaken for Duncan MacGregor, the real-life renegade he’s just portrayed in a re-enactment segment on American Fugitives, Jamey’s life can never be the same. And so begins his sun-scorched odyssey through overnight media saturation celebrity and the national fascination with outlaws.

In his hideaway, Duncan — a thief who fancies himself an Old World highwayman — is watching, too. And he just has to meet the guy who relived his own worst moment in front of a nationwide audience.

Within days, in a twist that even American Fugitives couldn’t have seen coming, their fates are intertwined, as they ricochet down a road filled with the world’s dumbest bounty hunters, Hollywood deal-makers and wannabes, cops on both sides of the law, a metal-plated ex-con with a prehistoric outlook on life, an impromptu right-wing death squad, a merciless Jay Leno, and the most dangerous people of all when it comes to grudges and vengeance:

Family.

Staying on the run could be the best career move Jamey’s ever made … if he can just live long enough to sign on the dotted line.

*

If you’ve never given it much thought before, you can see by this that there are a few things sales copy is, and a few things it isn’t. Hyperbolic? A bit. Concise? Sure; this is just 294 words. Informative? To a point. Its job is to dangle enough of the novel’s storyline before you to, I hope, interest you in reading the thing, but without spoiling any of the surprises.

Which leads us to what sales copy isn’t: an outline. It’s not a tool for writing the novel. It’s a tool for marketing the finished results.

Now back to Rebel Without A Crew.

I’ve always liked Robert Rodriguez as a filmmaker, and the extra features he does for his movies’ DVD releases are some of the most interesting around. I think what I admire, above all, is his amazing DIY ethos, which should be inspiring even to someone who isn’t particularly interested in making his or her own movies.

After he shot El Mariachi with a single borrowed camera, Rodriguez had four hours of footage, total. Four hours of raw material that needed to be shaped into a coherent, flowing whole. Interestingly, Rodriguez didn’t begin the editing process with the opening scene. Instead, he started after the end, as though the completed movie already existed.

“I need to get excited about the long journey ahead, so I cut a trailer,” he writes. “Like the kind you see in the movies before the main feature. The Coming Attractions. The process of cutting a trailer allows me to see what images from my film are the strongest, it gives me an idea of what the A material is, and how to exploit it.”

And later, after he’s cut more than one, “Thank God I have these trailers to remind me of what the movie can be if I ever finish it.”

Thus came the Reese’s chocolate + peanut butter moment: As long as I’m writing sales copy for a finished novel, why not write the sales copy for the new novel of mine that’s barely underway?

So I gave it a whirl. And damned if it wasn’t an experience that felt simultaneously liberating and highly focused. Because it didn’t have to shoulder the burdens of an outline — which I’ve always hated doing — providing a detailed map of the novel to come, and usually proving incomplete once I get far enough into it.

Instead, what I had was an overview that I could, figuratively speaking, hold in my hands and take in all at once, and connect with emotionally in a way that I have never connected with an outline.

It is, as Rodriguez’s trailers were for him, a reminder of what the novel can be. And a motivational kick in the pants to make sure I write something that lives up to what the sales copy tells me it is.

So. There you have it: one more tool for the toolbox, if it happens to fit your way of working.

Even if you don’t use it in quite the same way, I would still encourage you to try your hand at writing sales copy for your own work, if only because it forces you to look at your work from a completely different perspective: that of readers, who may be approaching it with little or no knowledge of what they’ve just picked up, or looked up online. In those few moments you have to make your case, how are you going to persuade them to invest their own hours in what you’ve done?

And, just as important, are you going to deliver once you’ve hooked them?