#The man who knew too little disc series#
#The man who knew too little disc free#

It was the music characters listened to while out cruising the neighborhood. In Word is Bone the third column was music. Column 3: When you set out to infuse your fiction with culture, what’s this abstract thing that makes a third column? What is the culture’s intangible column made of the play of dust in light?.

#The man who knew too little disc series#

Column 2: the dramatic series (the scenes containing major plot points) is a second column rooting drama in your culture based on what’s at stake, not on what’s familiar or film cliche.

Column 1: the natural series of events (the rituals and work) is one column of writing culture.

This structural analogy of a roof and columns remains helpful when I ask myself how I’m infusing my fiction with culture. For example, if you firmly establish plot and character to gain your readers’ trust, then you can rely more on their trust when you experiment with style. Whether or not that meeting goes well, that’s what my book was investigating.ĭiscover the Writing’s Third Column of Dust in LightĮvery fictional roof needs two foundational columns of writing to rely on, and the third column can be the one for experimentation and play, the column of dust in light. What the previous generations think and say about the neighborhood’s workings must, and will, eventually meet with what the younger generations need from the wider world (and what they do to get it). It’s young men that cause most of the trouble, you know. That’s when I took my walks, carrying that nailstick case there were any young men about. The Spanish music and the rap music and the train rattling all made a racket that never quit. But without Walter and his thoughts on the neighborhood, we don’t have the context for those young men and their conflicts. When Walter assesses local tensions, he faults the neighborhood’s young men. neighborhood was quite diverse and had a history of related tensions. Like many former dairy and hay towns turned into hybrid-industrial/suburban-sprawl, my L.A. One of my characters, Walter, is an elderly apartment manager local to the neighborhood. The power dynamics I was exploring required that I represent several generations despite the plot’s centrality in the neighborhood’s youth.

#The man who knew too little disc free#

What options are they afforded within their community and without? How cramped or how free do they feel as a community, and as separate individuals? How at home or at odds do they feel in the only space they have to share? Whether the conflict be internal or external to the characters, it often comes from the power dynamics in the characters’ culture. In your natural series AND your dramatic series, we all know you need conflict. In Both Your Natural and Dramatic Series: Understand Power in PlaceĪs Bill Withers says in his suspiciously strutting groove: “Who is he (and what is he to you?)” Whisper to us from the brick wall when you weren’t allowed a ticket. This first date, and June’s warning to Kiddy, foreshadow a later crime at the drive-in theater-it's not going to be a crime that would usually make it on the silver screen, let alone the news. June called back, “Speed it up past this one.” They passed with their arms out like tightrope walkers. June and Kiddy ran along the top of the brick wall that divided the neighborhood backyards from the drive-in parking lot. There may be a lot that’s already been said. How have other authors within the culture represented their characters and their locales? Whose influence are you writing toward, and whose influence are you writing away from? Especially if you are writing while taking popular genre conventions into account, as I was when I was writing this crime novel, ask: Who are the heavy-hitters of Lit that have explored this culture in this genre before? There may be a lot of work you’ll have to do, and to undo. And, being from where I’m from-novel and film characters who look like our brothers and sisters growing up are often melodramatic stereotypical villains-I’m very aware of the major flaws in other writers’ attempts to realize my culture.īefore you even sit down to write “culture,” you might read around the place where that culture flourishes. I didn’t just want to establish “setting,” I wanted readers to think about how they’ve encountered my setting in novels and films before. Dedicating my novel to my neighborhood is not what I’d call a technique, but it reveals something. Setting is important to culture, but I’m not addressing “setting,” or not “setting” alone, so much as I’m addressing the larger landscape of your culture’s representation in fiction.