Moments In Crime

Make Anger Fun

Things that make you angry can inspire you. But if you're a writer you must be so careful. If you see injustice, you want to correct it! You want to tell them! I bet if I show them how wrong they are, they'll change! And if they don't change, at least my ego will feel better having told them, via the symbolism of my work, what horrible immoral idiots they are! I'll have done my part, by jings!

When a fiction writer uses her fiction to preach, she's stopped being an author. One thing this world does not need is more scolds.

An English teacher once told me that a good writer of fiction writes because he has something to say. For years, I believed that.

But I don't believe it anymore, because I found out by experience—and by searching the depths of my amazing soul—that only poor writers of fiction write because they have something to say.

Good writers write because they want to discover something.

If they're really good, they'll bring us, the readers, along with them. When we finish reading a book that explores and develops great human themes, we feel a bone-deep satisfaction. Maybe we see something in an entirely new way. Maybe we know ourselves better, maybe we see ourselves in a new light (for better or worse!). That's what good fiction does.

I remember sitting in front of the TV watching jurors say that they found a woman guilty of killing her own child because she just wasn't believable in the courtroom. "She didn't express remorse." Nothing about the evidence, but everything about the affect of the accused.

I was appalled.

I wanted to explore that phenomenon, and I realized that a fictional framework using a woman accused of murdering her child could work well. I wanted to get inside that woman—and those jurors, and the lawyers who sought to influence them—and see what I could find. And I wanted to do it without pomposity, because, frankly, I didn't feel I knew any answers. On top of that, I wanted to have fun doing it, because I just can't write a book that isn't fun.

That's how I started to write THE ACTRESS.

You can read Chapter 1 on my web site, www.elizabethsims.com.

Thanks for looking in.

Songs in the Key of Bang

We've all seen diagrams of the brain, the familiar frontal lobes, the cerebral cortex, the medulla oblongata, and so on. There's right brain for blowing bubbles in a meadow, there's left brain for doing your tax return, there's the place that's supposed to control your urge to kill, the place that makes you know when to double down on a pair of fours in blackjack, and the place that comes to life when you hear a champagne cork pop.

I just love that popping sound, not necessarily because it means something good to drink; I just like the sound. I like the rhythm of train wheels, too, and the buzz of the beans in the coffee grinder. Once, I was treated to a courtside seat at a Pistons-vs.-Pacers game, where my feet were actually on the court surface, and I could feel the pounding of the players running up and down. That was something! I play the drums in my local symphony orchestra, and I guess that means the percussion zone of my brain has crowded out other, more useful zones, like the one about doubling down.

I started out playing the clarinet, because that's what was in the closet at home when I was ten, but I soon yearned to play the drums. Expressing a desire to change instruments, however, would have shown weakness of mind. Also, Girls Didn't Play Drums, and the ones who did had to endure constant questions as to whether they really were a girl or not. If you were a true girl, you played the flute.

In college marching band I played saxophone but made friends with burnout drummers and, when the season was over, became one of them. Under their pot-smoke-drenched wings, I learned that halfhearted drum playing earns you a spot in the toilet of public opinion, while playing drums with concern and heart earns you nothing. But while you're doing it, you feel like you're on the summit of Everest.

And that's the thing: to go into any arena and look for the thing that inspires you most.

Playing percussion, I learned you don't just hit it. You play with taste, you listen to the ensemble, and you acknowledge your place in the back row as coolest of the cool.

A trumpet player once said to me, "You must have nerves of steel to play those cymbals." And it's true. You know the old saying, "If you're going to make a mistake, make a big one"? Well, you get your chance if you're on cymbals. Unlike the violin, where you can look at eight other people playing the same thing and go, "Oh, yeah, I'm lost right now, but I'll come in when they do," there's nobody else poised to strike those two heavy spun brass plates, whether fortissimo or quad-piano. You've got to be ready, and do it.

Over time, I've felt more and more driven to simply show up and serve the music.

What music inspires you?

Stimulating Objects

As I'm sure it's been observed in blogs of yore, when you become a published author, more and more demands on your time come along. You go from being someone who simply writes, to being an author, and that means you've got to balance your time between doing original work (as in get the next book done) and promoting your current work, responding to readers, etc. When I'm feeling cornered by a new request or promotional opportunity that will take hours out of my life, even days—I ask myself: Will doing this make me a better writer? Will it deepen me? Almost invariably, the answer is no. Sometimes I acquiesce anyway, but if I refuse, I feel better about it.

So when I agreed to do this blog for Minotaur, I gave myself carte blanche to follow whatever paths my brain wanted to run on, knowing that that's what helps me get better: let the mind go, write, explore, no fetters. My childhood has unexpectedly popped up.

No wonder people love to blog: It's I, I, I! Me, me, me!

When I decided today to write about things that inspire us, I realized that practically the first things we interact with, other than our own bodies and that of our mothers, are toys.

Toys are the original stimulators, aren't they? The original inspirers.

The first toy I remember really loving was a fist-sized red rubber ball that came free in a Tide detergent box. (The original Tide graphic featured a red ball in the center.) My mom fished out the ball and tossed it to me, age probably three or four. I loved that ball. Other than its being bouncy, the main thing about it was its aroma. It smelled like Tide, and it stayed smelling like clean laundry for years, until I lost it on somebody's roof. The associations we make.

The sight or sound of a toy inspires us to act on it. A button on a string, a tricycle, an Etch-A-Sketch, a stick and an empty can, blocks. As adults, we don't stop needing toys, and we don’t stop needing play, no matter what we try to tell ourselves.

Lots of times we call the stuff we play a game with 'equipment,' but it amounts to the same thing. (A golf club by any other name, you know?)

My most grown-up toys are my writing instruments, my pens and pencils. When I was I guess a pre-teen, I read an article in a magazine my mom had brought home from school—was it Harper's or the Atlantic? It was an essay about writing instruments, and I read it over and over, and I thought it was wonderful. The writer talked about the fat, expressive Mont Blanc fountain pen, and the slim, smooth Eberhard Faber Ebony 6325 pencil, among others. Goldenrod brand lined tablets, I think, as well. These things were described so lovingly. At the head of the article was a photograph of the various implements in a row like a police lineup. I've tried in vain to find this article. Does anybody know about it? Can you tell me the issue and number of whichever magazine? Who wrote it? I'd love to have a copy. It would have been around 1972, I think. Margin of error several years one way or another.

As it happens, in my desk drawer now I have a Mont Blanc fountain pen, which I made a point of acquiring when I began to write poetry in college. Glad I tossed the poems and saved the pen. And—yes, there's a Faber 6325, there in the cut-off cigar box, ready for sharpening and some serious blank paper. And on my bookshelf is Henry Petroski's The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance, a wonderful book about the humblest of writing utensils. I reread it every couple of years.

Writing technology has really come along: the new gel pens and ballpoints are so much better than the early versions, way back in the cave-painting decades after WWII. And the mechanical pencil is a boon, especially the mustard-colored .9mm Pentel.

Once, when lost in the fog of writing chapter 10 or 14 or 32, I made the nearly fatal mistake of leaving my Mont Blanc on my table at the Starbucks when I went to the bathroom. When I came back, it was still there, but the guy at the next table was staring at it steadily. From then on, I've only brought gels and ballpoints with me to the public arena. I really like the Uni Jetstreams. They're so smooth!

Writing is both work and play.

What toys inspire you?

Art, Film, Art

There's this guy who gets up every morning and goes outside, his favorite place. He feels a strong compulsion to make patterns out of natural things: twigs, stones, flower petals, busted-up ice. His name is Andy Goldsworthy, and he's a famous artist, and he's made art all over the world. Some of it is totally ephemeral—it'll be resorbed by nature in a day or a week—and some of it would be considered 'permanent': carefully built stone walls, for instance.

But of course, the whole point is that nothing's permanent, everything changes, everything that comes will someday go. So why make anything? Why do anything? Ah, because eternity is to be found in any honest activity, be it lining up fern stems in a spiral pattern that makes you cry to behold it, or running a dry-cleaners in a strip plaza. (I'm not asserting that the fern stems would make you, personally, cry (but I suspect they might).)

Yesterday, Goldsworthy was quoted in Time: "Right in front of your face is the stuff you choose to ignore."

I worship this guy.

A contrast to Andy Goldsworthy, yet totally heroically similar, is Mark Borchardt, working-class auteur best known as the subject of the 1999 documentary "American Movie: The Making of Northwestern." He's a guy who comes across as a burnout who wanted to make a movie, not just any movie, but his firm vision of a movie. He didn't go to Hollywood and work his way up, he just did what he had to do right where he was, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with whatever the hell sparse money and resources he could scrape up. Instead of finishing "Northwestern," he wound up making a horror short called "Coven," which he pronounced "Coe-ven."

"American Movie," which won a big prize at Sundance, called lots of attention to Mark, and since then he's been a minor celebrity, even having, now, his own cable TV show (which I just learned exists).

"Coven" essentially sucks, but that's beside the point. Deep at Mark's core lies a bluntly heroic artist.

Things Mark said in a 2002 interview in The Onion:

On inspiration:

"I don't care about making a movie, but I care about making a movie that's spiritually satisfying."

On artistic integrity:

"It's like a poem, dude: 'My girlfriend punched me in my right eye, broke the glass coffee table.' That can't be altered. No one co-writes that with you."

On achievement:

"I've always been my own worst enemy, and that's a hell of a fight."

When I was a freshman in college, my roommate opened her sketchbook from drawing class to show me what she'd been working on. She had drawn her own hand, a typical first-week kind of assignment.

The hand looked OK, except the wrist looked wrong.

"Yeah," she said, "I worked on it and worked on it, but couldn't get my wrist to look right." She leaned over with a pencil and said, "That line's supposed to be like this." And with a swift, uncalculated movement, she drew a perfect line inside the bad one, and the picture was suddenly correct, beautiful.

We stared at each other in silent shock.

That was as big a lesson as anything I ever learned in four years of undergraduate school.

Whose art inspires you?

Sorcerers and Apprentices

Mother Goose was probably the first author who really moved me. Her themes of adventure, naughtiness, suffering, and redemption ring through much of contemporary literature, and I believe her influence is all too unsung. Feels good to be able to give her a plug here.

I remember sitting on my father's knee listening to Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' and my dad's own made-up stories of Sinbad the Sailor, which invariably starred a little girl who lost her dolly and cried in a bitter baby voice, then found her dolly in the end with the help of Sinbad. That doll showed up in the little girl's own back alley so often I can't tell you.

When I was in the first grade, my mother, age 40, decided to get a college degree and become a teacher. She enrolled in Eastern Michigan University and studied English literature and composition, and that was one of the signal events in my life. Suddenly, at the very time I was learning to read, new and amazing books came into the house. One was a gigantic anthology of children's literature that securely pinned my thighs to the couch as it took me into marvelous territories. I shuddered at the Norse myth of the brave Balder and the horrible Loki, who fashioned his arrow of the Kryptonitic holly, the only plant that failed to take the oath of benignity at Balder's birth. My heart was stirred by the cheerful inventiveness of the Borrowers, and by the delicious vengefulness of Hansel and Gretel.

Man, I thought, if only I had the guts to shove Mrs. [neighbor's name deleted] into her own red-hot oven! I read of the selflessness of the kids who wanted the Wheel on the School so the lucky stork could nest there, and realized with an unpleasant feeling that if I were one of those kids, I probably wouldn't care all that much about the damn wheel, frankly.

The act of reading, much moreso than going to catechism or enduring a scolding, was the thing that first got me to consciously examine my own moral code. I looked within myself and what did I find? Quite a selfish little girl! In the hard years since, I've achieved spotty success at rationalizing and camouflaging that self-interest. I keep reading in order to gain greater expertise.

As a child I was an early riser. I'd get up at dawn and roam silently around the house. One morning I picked up a sheet of paper my mom had left on a table, and on it were typed the strangest words I'd ever seen. They formed a poem, and I read the paper over and over, fascinated by the screwy vocabulary. One night at dinner, I began saying the poem from memory, for the hell of it, and everybody put down their forks and looked at me. I finished the poem with the repeated first stanza, " 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe..." Nobody commented, but I later learned I'd made some kind of impression. To this day I can recite "Jabberwocky", though I can't say it's ever come in handy.

I've always liked to read slowly, and reread.

My mother did in fact graduate from college, and taught high school English for ten years. Books flowed through our house. I remember the books I read way too early (Deliverance stands out), and the books I should have read at a youngish age but didn't bother to (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, one). From that, I guess I learned that a sensational story beats a sensitive one almost every time. Think back to Loki.

Which stories inspire you?

A Powerful Place

For me, inspiration is the juice that you get from an experience that leads you from where you were a minute ago to someplace bigger, deeper, more intense. It doesn't necessarily have to be a pleasant-feeling or positive experience.

Inspiration, for sure, can be a cliche: the beach at sunset, reading a poem about roses, listening to 'Light My Fire' on your headphones.

I find tremendous inspiration in the city of Los Angeles, and that's why I set my current novel, THE ACTRESS, there. Oh, God, the pace, the energy, the history of it all---glamor, crime, disaster, sex, rags to riches to rags.

I've lived on the West Coast since 1994, and have spent lots of time in L.A. It's an infuriating place---all those people trying to drive on the same road you are, the asbestos-like smog, the on-the-makeness, the crime (which is just a particularly lousy way to be on the make), the poison oak in Griffith Park.

But! How sublime to be at the epicenter of American culture! (That's arguable, I'll admit, but I'll argue it simply by saying: the movies, custom cars, surfing, gang wars, and the weather.)

When I was in college, I got into reading Joan Didion, whose writing about L.A. I admire very much: so incisive, so caustic, so elegiac. Yes, somehow L.A. died for Joan, and she moved to New York, the next best thing.

The photo below shows a big tree and a little me at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Santa Monica Blvd., with a particular parking lot in the distant background. That's one hell of a tree, I thought. What's with the parking lot? Well, hey, when you're writing a novel set in L.A., how can you honestly avoid having a parking lot in it? That lot has a silent yet significant role in THE ACTRESS.

One of the most emotionally intense experiences I've had in L.A. was in the summer of 1995, when the O.J. Simpson murder trial was saturating the city like creosote on a wharf piling. I flew into LAX and boarded the rental car shuttle bus, en route to a business meeting. The driver, a broad-shouldered black guy, greeted each of us with a cold stare. Once seated, I realized that the bus radio was tuned to the live broadcast of the Simpson trial. Every single passenger on that bus was white. We were all these little white businesspeople with our briefcases, and he was this stone-silent black guy with his hands on the wheel, and we all listened to the trial together, without anyone uttering a word, for the ten-minute ride to the car lot.

I can't explain what a peak experience that was.

More recently, I was invited to dinner to a house in the Hollywood hills. My friend Phil, an actor, and his wife were house- and dog-sitting for a couple they knew, and they wanted some company, and I was in town. So my companion and I drove up those narrow twisting streets, and found our friends in an aerie above the city with purple evening coming on. The house had this tremendous aura of swank, with warm maple wood floors and ten-foot-high chiffon drapes screening the narrow deck. I remarked on a framed photograph of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra on a wall.

"Oh, yeah, Ava Gardner used to own this place. The current owners keep that picture."

Immediately my glamor glands started to pump, and I smelled the lipstick and the cigarette smoke and the spilled Scotch, and the split-level house came almost alive. We drank wine in the billowing sensuous privacy of the deck, and the wind picked up and night came down, and we talked and laughed about a thousand things.

What place inspires you?

Random Encounters

Random Encounters

The other day I was chatting with the cashier at the grocery store. It was one of those congenial moments, and I lingered, putting away my change. The next customer was setting her stuff on the counter, and she got right into the friendly vibe.

"Oh, gotta get some extra chocolate," she said, piling on candy bars from the rack.

"Hey, I'm a woman," said the clerk, "you don't have to explain chocolate to me."

The customer put a large bag of oranges next to the chocolate.

"My house burned to the ground two nights ago," she said calmly.

The clerk and I turned to really look at her.

"Gosh, I'm sorry to hear that," I said, feeling that extra intensity that comes over you.

"Yeah," said the clerk.

The woman looked at us and smoothed her red coat.

"Well, I got out with my family---and my accordion. We're in a motel, but at least we can polka!"

"That's a good thing," I said. "Will you all be OK, then?"

"Oh, yes. In a way, it was a blessing in disguise."

I thought for a moment, then said, "You'll never have to clean out that attic."

She looked at me with something close to delight dawning in her eyes. She hadn't thought about the attic yet. "Yeah!" she said. "Yeah!"

Random intersections with strangers give extra depth to life, I feel. Right now, I can still see the woman in her red coat, and I can see her family in the motel, with their oranges and chocolate and their polka music. I'll probably never bump into that woman again, but I'll remember that conversation for a long time.

Readers often ask me where my inspiration comes from. This week on Moments in Crime, I've chosen inspiration as my theme.

What inspires you?

Blogging This Week: Elizabeth Sims

Elizabeth Sims is the author of the Lambda Award--winning Lillian Byrd mysteries. A former bookseller, she lives on the west coast. Visit her online at www.ElizabethSims.com.  And get ready for her latest, THE ACTRESS, which goes on-sale next Tuesday, May 27.

Photo Credit: Ernst Fine Art Photography

Aspiring actress and single mother Rita Farmer has gone from struggling to find work to downright desperate. If she doesn’t land a paying job soon---horror movie, soap commercial, anything---she’s afraid her ex-husband will use her dire financial straits to take away Petey, her cherished four-year-old son.

While she’s charming the crowd at storytime at the L.A. public library, a celebrity defense
attorney approaches her with an unusual job offer: So long as she’s discreet, Rita can
rake in a thousand dollars a day preparing his client for her appearance in court. Easy money? Hardly. His client, Eileen Tenaway, is not only a wealthy heiress and a queen of the tabloids but she’s been charged with the murder of her own child. The attorney needs Rita to coach Eileen secretly to help her seem more sympathetic, more human. He needs the jury to believe not only her words but the subtle cues of body language, facial expressions, even vocal style. Rita knows she can do it, but what she doesn’t know is how determined she’ll become to find out what really happened to Eileen’s family---once her own life and Petey’s life depend on it.

The Actress, Elizabeth Sims’s engrossing new series debuting a spirited sleuth, delivers a fresh, behind-the-scenes look at Hollywood’s high society at its lowest.