Showing The Rifle

Like anyone who has spewed forth a book, I’m occasionally asked what the toughest thing is about writing. I’ll mumble something about the difficulty of making time to write when you have a full-time job and family, or trying to write when you’re not inspired, or something equally cliché.

But I’m lying. I don’t want to talk about it, but one thing that is BY FAR the hardest thing to do, even now that I'm closing in on the end of my third book.

Knowing how to show the rifle.

You probably recognize the phrase. Playwright Anton Chekhov famously wrote that if you show a rifle hanging over the mantle in Act I it had better go off in Act III or you shouldn’t mention it.

Chekhov was referring to the importance of keeping extraneous detail out of your writing. If something doesn’t serve a distinct purpose to plot or characterization, chop it out. Great advice.

But for me, “showing the rifle” is more about burying the clues that the protagonist uses to solve the mystery the book is about. Because what you want to do is show the rifle in Act I, sure, but do it in such a way that when the gun goes off in Act III, it’s a complete and utter surprise to the reader.

For my money, the hardest trick in literature.

I’m a pretty easy audience. I’ll put up with wooden characters, familiar scenes, trite dialogue. As long as the story is moving at a good clip, I’m happy. But the second the detective suddenly produces a clue that was conveniently not mentioned when she first “noticed” it, or pulls some piece of arcane knowledge out of thin air, I’m out.

Of course, the opposite is true as well. There are few things more irritating than reading a setup that is so obvious it might as well be highlighted, then spending the rest of the book waiting for the “big reveal” on page 277 that you saw in Chapter 3.

So I obsess over the rifle.

It’s nerve-wracking. You painstakingly plant clue after clue, then scuff just enough metaphorical dirt over each one, hoping they go unnoticed. Because to you there’s a big, red arrow pointing at each one that screams “LOOK, LOOK! SETUP FOR THE END OF THE BOOK HERE! RIGHT HERE! HE’S GOING TO REFER TO THIS LATER DURING HIS *SHOCKING* PLOT TWIST! BE WARNED!”

Move along, nothing to see here. Not an important plot point, I promise.

Fortunately, to this point, no reader of mine has ever said anything about the big red arrow. In fact, I have even occasionally received what I consider the absolute highest praise a plot-driven author can receive:

“I totally did not suspect the twist at the end!” 

There is no rifle in the Traveler books. At least, not yet. But if I put one in, it will definitely go off. And if it’s still a surprise after I telegraphed it for you just now, I’ll take that as a compliment.

Parts of the preceding originally appeared on the blog of one my literary heroes, Ed Gorman. Ed passed away in October 2016. But you can still read some of his final musings, as well as those of guests and friends at newimprovedgorman.blogspot.com.

I keep 'em a long time

Lennox Randon

I said goodbye to my friend and writing partner Lennox Randon recently. He lost his battle with cancer in November 2018. Few people have taught me more about writing and no one more about life than my friend Randon.

Folks who have attended my book readings or visited my web site may be familiar with the story of how I came to write my first book. In short, a friend of mine named Rob Cline, who also had a book project languishing on the shelf, began meeting with his friend Randon (he went by his last name) for the purpose of mutual support in finishing their books. Rob invited me to meet Randon and join them.
What’s missing in my part of this story is how Randon got Rob, a dad with a demanding job and three young kids, to set part of his precious free time aside for this effort. At the end of his pitch, Randon smiled slyly and said:

“You know... I have cancer.”

I wasn’t present for this conversation, but I can imagine the exact expression on Randon’s face as he played what he called “the cancer card.” I would see this devastating phrase delivered with a half-smile and ever-so-slight eye twinkle again and again over the nearly eight years of our friendship.

At the time, Randon was in remission, and able to joke about his illness. But later, when the cancer came back, he still kept the same light, almost bemused tone.

So Rob started hanging out with Randon, and they each brought a few new pages to a weekly meeting. I joined up a few months later. Like Rob, I demurred at first, complaining I was too busy. 

But when a guy who pretty much knows his expiration date is willing to spend some of those numbered days helping you complete something off your bucket list, the daily pressures of job and family start to look pretty mundane. I was in.

The Writing Lads at a Cedar Rapids Rotary Club

Before heading to our weekly Sunday sessions in Randon’s basement, I would tell my wife I was off to see The Lads. The name stuck, becoming The Writing Lads when we went public.

Rob and I are accomplished public speakers, doing probably 50 gigs a year between us. Randon always insisted he wasn’t much of a public speaker, let alone an entertainer. 

But make no mistake, when the Writing Lads gave a reading, Randon was the star. People may have come to see us because they knew Rob or me, but it was Randon they remembered. 

He held the audience spellbound as he talked about how his real experiences as a cop informed the events of his books. But then he would pull the Robert Stack double sunglasses stunt from “Airplane!” or fire a Nerf gun into the audience to illustrate a gun battle.

Randon and I interviewed each other on his website in 2015.  He was a guest on a YouTube interview show I did in 2016.

Even then, Randon was defying the odds. His doctors didn’t think he would see 2014, let alone almost make until the end of the decade. In the intervening years, it was easy to forget how sick he was, even though he was open about the chemo and radiation he was undergoing.

But you don’t have to be an author to write the ending of his story. Randon’s social circle, never really large, had ceased to grow when he got sick. 

So I was pretty much the last new friend he made. But Randon mated for life. Once you were in, you were in for good. The fact that I got there late didn’t make any difference. In fact, he put his attitude toward friends into words in his first book, “Friends Dogs Bullets Lovers”:

I tend to keep things for a long time.

For example, in 1968 I purchased a Swingline Tot stapler for elementary school. 

Still have it. Still use it. 

Only stapler I've every owned.

I'm the same way with friends.

I keep 'em a long time.

To say that I am honored to be in that group is a vast understatement. Randon taught me a lot. He showed me how to live with physical and emotional pain. He showed me how to face death with grace and strength. But mainly, he reminds me and all of us that it doesn’t matter at what time in your life someone shows up. Sometimes the new friends are the most meaningful ones of all.

If learning about Lennox Randon the man has made you at all curious about Lennox Randon the writer, I hope you will check out some of his work. If a few people read him based on this post, it will be at least a meager payback for everything he brought to me.

Lennox Randon’s books include:

“Friends Dogs Bullets Lovers,” a fast-paced, action-adventure story about two friends who start an off-the-books detective agency after being put into the Witness Protection Program.




  “Memoirs of Dead White Chick,” a time-travel history novel about a 20th-Century woman who wakes up in the body of a black teenager in pre-Civil War Philadelphia, whose contacts with Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass change history.




  “Christiana.” Randon completed this book that was begun by his late daughter, Alou (Lark) Randon. It follows a group of addicts on a paranoia-fueled trip through Danish ghost towns, in the tradition of “Trainspotting” and “The Naked Lunch.”




Randon also wrote eloquently and honestly about the ups and downs of his life at www.lennoxrandon.com.

On dentists named Dennis

An article is making the Twitter rounds which discusses "implicit egotism." The authors suggest that implicit egotism leads us to prefer things that are connected to ourselves, that might have the same letters as those in our names, for example. The writers' research turned up the fact that the city of St. Louis has a slightly disproportionate number of residents named Louis.

And, that people named Dennis or Denise are slightly more likely to become dentists.

Read a summary of the article here.

Since I did not become a dentist, and settled in Cedar Rapids as opposed to say, Denison, Iowa; it would be easy to say the article is bunk.

Until I realized that D.G. became a DJ.

Dylan or Dali?

We are playing a particularly cool version of "Subterranean Homesick Blues" on KCCK these days, which reminded me of something that has been disturbing me for awhile.

Has anyone else noticed that the older Bob Dylan gets, the more he looks like Salvador Dali?

Just sayin'.

Richard Gere, The L.A. Times and Me

I had a semi-brush with greatness this week when I learned that two Hollywood stars apparently chill out listening to our Iowa Channel webcast. Full story on the Iowa Channel blog, and here is the story that appeared in the L.A. Times.

Believe it or not, this is not the first time my work has been featured in the L.A. Times.

Our tale begins in those halcyon days of 1987. The Iowa Hawkeyes were flying high under

Hayden Fry. In Cedar Rapids, people worked for Teleconnect, Iowa Electric and Rockwell International. They shopped downtown at Armstrongs or at Westdale, which believe it or not, was then the "good" mall. And a young DJ named Dennis Green held down the PM Drive shift at WMT-FM, and was given entirely too much creative freedom.

This particular year, we were electrified to learn that a MAJOR MOTION PICTURE was going to be filmed on our community. Now bear in mind, this was before The Final Season, yes even before Field of Dreams. Up to this point in time, the only fairly recent movie to be made in Iowa was a 1970's Sylvester Stallone vehicle entitled "F.I.S.T." filmed partly in Dubuque (Don't bother).

This movie was to be titled "Farm of the Year," and would begin with the visit of Nikita Krushchev to an Iowa farm in the 50s (which actually happened). The movie would be the dramatic tale of the sons of the farmer who hosted Krushchev. They fall on hard times during the 80s farm crisis and become folk heroes when they take to robbing banks after the farm fails. What the dramatic connection between the Krushchev visit and mod

ern day Robin Hoods was supposed to be, was never adequately explained.

But the BIG NEWS was that the movie would star Richard Gere, then one of Hollywood's biggest leading men. And he would live & work in our town for several weeks during filming.

Well, the moviemaking took the town by storm that summer. A lo

t of people got work as extras and on the crew. A few even got in the movie, including a young Coulter Wood, now a geologist and occasional jazz singer (Coulter's cousin Elijah had already split Iowa for Hollywood and would get his first pre-Frodo break just a few years later).

The filming was also not without some controversy, as then-Linn County Sheriff Dennis Blome was criticized for giving the production company free or reduced cost security services in exchange for his own part in the film. An interesting precursor to the flap over Iowa's Film Tax Credit.

But, the one question that galvanized the entire community was "Where

is Richard?" It was a dail

y occurrence during my show... The phone would ring and the person on the other end would tell me that they had heard Richard Gere showed up at a bar with the cast and crew the other night. He was scene buying a 6 pack at the Handi-Mart. He's rented a house on Sherman Street.... It went on and on.

So, I did what any DJ at the time would do,

created a comedy bit out of it. It took the familiar form of an Emergency Broadcasting System announcment.

"This is a test. This station is conducting a test of the Emergency Richard Gere-Sighting System. This is only a test."

The familar EBS tone was replaced by a high-pitched voice, dumbfounded by a close encounter with the star. At the end, the announcer instructed people "where to swoon."

It was good for a few laughs during our shows, and then we kind of forgot about it.

Till

one day, several weeks later, my phone rings at the office and it's an L.A. Times reporter. She's doing a story on circus a "big-time" film crew creates in an Iowa town, and has heard about the ERGSS. I play it for her down the phone line. She chuckles politely.

A few days later an L.A. friend tells me I'm in the paper. Sure enough, there's an article, which

actually doesn't completely make us seem like ignorant hicks, and my comedy bit is the main topic. The AP picked up the story, and it also appeared in papers in Alaska and Ohio, among other places.

And, for the rest of my career, my official bio now truthfully can read ".... whose antics were covered by newspapers as far away as Los Angeles and Anchorage, Alaska."

As for the movie, it finally premiered under a new title, "Miles From Home," and was forgotten about as quickly as the more recent (and I think, better film), The Final Season.

An interesting footnote is that while we were all so obsessed with Richard Gere, we may have missed out several equally-interesting folks. Now, twenty-plus years on, it's hard to remember if these were all present in Cedar Rapids, but certainly some were. The movie may have been forgettable but a good half the cast have gone on to long and successful careers:

Brian Dennehy, Penelope Ann Miller, Helen Hunt, Judith Ivey, Laurie Metcalf, John Malkovich and Laura San Giacomo all may have spent some time in our fair city.

But, the biggest surprise has to be the director. "Miles From Home" was the feature film directorial debut of... Gary Sinise.

I wish we'd kept better track of Sinise Sightings.

Who?

Usually, my colleagues at NPR are spot on both in hard news and soft features, but yesterday.... not so much.

Robert Siegel introduced an interview with an upstart NCAA tourney team by explaining this group of young men was the "feel-good story of March Madness."... The first team from their conference to reach the Sweet Sixteen since 1979 ... done it without the benefit of any likely NBA top draft picks.

He then introduced the senior forward from..... Cornell University.

East Coast bias? Ivy League elitism? Or maybe the Sports Illustrated with Ali Farokhmanesh on the cover just hadn't arrived at the NPR offices yet.

Survey Says!

Survey Says!-Dennis

Thanks again to everyone who participated in KCCK's recent Listener Survey. We had over 200 responses, which ran the gamut from "We love everything you do" to "You suck pretty much all the time" and everything in between.

In years past, we would have shared the results and comments with our staff, and maybe put a summary in a newsletter article. But today, we can post the whole darn thing so anyone who is interested can take a look. So, we've done so, down this page. It's mostly all there, warts and all. The only editing we've down is to take out a couple of really uncalled-for personal attacks against a couple of our staff, and taken out one particularly profane entry.

Click here for the rest of the article