The Importance of Writing “Ernesto,” Part 3

My short story “Ernesto,” which originally appeared in the March 2012 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, has just been reprinted by Lightspeed. To celebrate its reappearance, I’ll be publishing revised versions of a few posts in which I described the origins of this story, which you can read for free here, along with a nice interview.

In an excellent interview from a few years ago with The A.V. Club, the director Steven Soderbergh spoke about the disproportionately large impact that small changes can have on a film: “Two frames can be the difference between something that works and something that doesn’t. It’s fascinating.” The playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth once made a similar point, noting that the gap between “nearly” and “really” in a photograph—or a script—can come down to a single frame. The same principle holds just as true, if not more so, for fiction. A cut, a new sentence, or a tiny clarification can turn a decent but unpublishable story into one that sells. These changes are often so invisible that the author himself would have trouble finding them after the fact, but their overall effect can’t be denied. And I’ve learned this lesson more than once in my life, perhaps most vividly with “Ernesto,” a story that I thought was finished, but which turned out to have a few more surprises in store.

When I was done with “Ernesto,” I sent it to Stanley Schmidt at Analog, who had just purchased my novelette “The Last Resort.” Stan’s response, which I still have somewhere in my files, was that the story didn’t quite grab him enough to find room for it in a rather crowded schedule, but that he’d hold onto it, just in case, while I sent it around to other publications. It wasn’t a rejection, exactly, but it was hardly an acceptance. (Having just gone through three decades of John W. Campbell’s correspondence, I now know that this kind of response is fairly common when a magazine is overstocked.) I dutifully sent it around to most of the usual suspects at the time: Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the online magazines Clarkesworld and Intergalatic Medicine Show. Some had a few kind words for the story, but they all ultimately passed. At that point, I concluded that “Ernesto” just wasn’t publishable. This was hardly the end of the world—it had only taken two weeks to write—but it was an unfortunate outcome for a story that I thought was still pretty clever.

A few months later, I saw a call for submissions for a independent paperback anthology, the kind that pays its contributors in author’s copies, and its theme—science fiction stories about monks—seemed to fit “Ernesto” fairly well. The one catch was that the maximum length for submissions was 6,000 words, while “Ernesto” weighed in at over 7,500. Cutting twenty percent of a story that was already highly compressed, at least to my eyes, was no joke, but I figured that I’d give it a try. Over the course of a couple of days, then, I cut it to the bone, removing scenes and extra material wherever I could. Since almost a year had passed since I’d first written it, it was easy to see what was and wasn’t necessary. More significantly, I added an epigraph, from Ernest Hemingway’s interview with The Paris Review, that made it clear from the start that the main character was Hemingway, which wasn’t the case with the earlier draft. And the result read a lot more smoothly than the version I’d sent out before.

It might have ended there, with “Ernesto” appearing without fanfare in an unpaid anthology, but as luck would have it, Analog had just accepted a revised version of my novelette “The Boneless One,” which had also been rejected by a bunch of magazines in its earlier form. Encouraged by this, I thought I’d try the same thing with “Ernesto.” So I sent it to Analog again, and it was accepted, almost twelve months after my first submission. Now it’s being reprinted more than four years later by Lightspeed, a magazine that didn’t even exist when I first wrote it. The moral, I guess, is that if a story has been turned down by five of the top magazines in your field, it probably isn’t good enough to be published—but that doesn’t mean it can’t get better. In this case, my rule of spending two weeks on a short story ended up being not quite correct: I wrote the story in two weeks, shopped it around for a year, and then spent two more days on it. And those last two days, like Soderbergh’s two frames, were what made all the difference.

“I need you to get me some information…”

Note: This post is the fifty-fifth installment in my author’s commentary for Eternal Empire, covering Chapter 54. You can read the previous installments here.

“You know, like [James] Bond doesn’t have scenes with other men,” the screenwriter Jez Butterworth once told The New Yorker. “Bond shoots other men—he doesn’t sit around chatting to them. So you put a line through that.” To be fair, this isn’t entirely true: Casino Royale, which is probably the finest installment in the whole canon, has an entire second act that consists of little except for Bond chatting in a room with other men. But I understand his point. Few of the Bond films have what we might describe as conventionally good scripts, but they remain useful as a kind of laboratory for a certain sort of film writing, produced under conditions of high pressure. The history of the series, its basic formula, and the need to please a star and a handful of production executives who are answerable to nobody else all create an incentive to cut everything that doesn’t enhance the brand. If it doesn’t fit, you put a line through it. Butterworth’s track record here isn’t perfect—he worked on both Skyfall and Spectre, with notably mixed results in the latter case—but it’s still worth listening to what he has to say. And when you look at the Bond films through the lens of removing whatever isn’t central to what the franchise represents, it goes a long way toward explaining some of their more inexplicable moments.

Take the uranium bullets in Skyfall. If you’ve seen the movie, you probably remember that after Bond’s return from the dead, he removes a fragment of a slug from the wound in his shoulder and hands it over to the lab for testing. The results reveal that it’s made of depleted uranium, which only three assassins in the whole world are known to use, and a glance at their photographs allows Bond to narrow it down to one. Setting aside the fact that being struck by such a bullet should have cut Bond in half, or that MI6 evidently failed to perform any such analysis on the hundreds of spent rounds at the scene, it seems rather careless for a hired killer to leave such a distinctive calling card. You could invent a rationale for this—perhaps the assassin deliberately wants to put his signature on every hit—but it still takes us out of the movie for a few seconds. When you apply Butterworth’s rule, though, you can start to see the reasoning behind it. The plot point with the bullet feels a lot like an attempt to compress what used to be two beats into one. If the lab had managed to narrow down the universe of possible killers using, say, passport tracking, and then had layered the ballistic analysis on top to drill down even further, we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But it would have meant a longer scene of Bond chatting with a man, so it had to go.

The trouble, obviously, is that when you push this kind of compression too far—or at the wrong moment in the story—the audience is likely to object. As a rule of thumb, viewers or readers tend to be more willing to follow the hero through a few intermediate steps of reasoning in the first act than in the third, so the kind of shortcut that Skyfall presents here might well have gone unnoticed in the last twenty minutes of the movie, when we’ve been conditioned to expect the narrative to take a logical leap or two for the sake of momentum. (In this connection, I always think, for some reason, of the penultimate scene of Die Hard With a Vengeance, in which John McClane figures out the villain’s whereabouts using the words on the bottom of an aspirin bottle. We buy it, sort of, because we’re so close to the climax, but it wouldn’t have worked at all earlier on.) A thriller is engaged in a constant balancing act between plausibility and forward movement, and the terms of the equation shift based on where you are in the plot. It isn’t just a matter of what you do, but of when you do it. In general, you can get away with greater gaps in the logic when the surrounding action is furious enough to drown out any implausibilities that would seem glaring if the characters were conversing in a quiet room. Which, in fact, goes a long way toward explaining why Bond can’t be shown chatting with other men: with every such scene, the plausibility of the narrative, which is already so tenuous, comes closer to collapsing entirely.

You can clearly see this principle at work in Chapter 54 of Eternal Empire. Wolfe has just arrived in Sochi in the aftermath of the drone attack, and in order for the plot to proceed, she needs to figure out the location of the launch site with nothing but the information she has at her disposal. The steps in her deductive process are, I think, fairly plausible. The attackers would have wanted to stay off the satellite networks; the drone would have been controlled through line of sight; given its size and the number of rockets it fired, it would have needed enough room for takeoff, or maybe even a pneumatic launcher; and it would have required privacy and a high level of security. Glancing at a map, she concludes that the assault must have been launched from a dacha to the north of the port. Powell, on the phone, says that he’ll pass along whatever he finds, and we later learn that she identified the correct location on her third try. Looking back at the scene from the distance of a few years, I think that I compressed her chain of reasoning just enough, especially because there are so many competing forces at this stage that are propelling the narrative forward. It’s particularly instructive to compare it to the similar series of deductions that Wolfe makes in Chapter 9, which end with her finding a body in East Acton. In that case, instead of unfolding in a couple of paragraphs, it occupies a few unhurried pages—which was just right for that point in the story. The closer you are to the end, the faster it has to be. And you always have to keep your target in sight…

Quote of the Day

The next play doesn’t know anything about the last one. It can’t help you one bit.

—Jez Butterworth, to The Telegraph

You Only Write Twice

In a recent profile in The New Yorker, the playwright and screenwriter Jez Butterworth shares one of his personal rules for his work on the upcoming James Bond movie: “You know, like Bond doesn’t have scenes with other men. Bond shoots other men—he doesn’t sit around chatting to them. So you put a line through that.” Butterworth makes it all sound rather easy—as the rest of the article indicates, he’s a reliable source of pithy observations on craft—but in fact, the process of writing Spectre seems to have been anything but straightforward. As the leaked emails from the Sony hack make clear, work on the script is still ongoing, and a dream team of Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan, and Butterworth himself has been struggling for months to crack the movie’s third act. (A typical line from the leaked correspondence, written in all caps in the original: “We need to cut twenty pages and this whole set piece could go.”) In the meantime, shooting has already started, and it’s never a good sign when writers are still straining to figure out the ending for a $300 million production.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have mixed feelings about discussing the documents from the Sony hack, and as a writer, I’d hate to see notes about one of my works in progress leaked to the public. Yet the handwringing over Spectre is useful in the reminder it provides of how even the most handsomely compensated—and talented—writers in the world remain at the mercy of notes, and how they’re no more capable of solving problems at will than the rest of us, even when the stakes are so high. And if the studio consensus on the draft is accurate, the notes aren’t wrong: the screenwriters seem to be having trouble even with creating a compelling bad guy, which is the one thing that a Bond movie can be expected to do well. (It also gives me pause about the casting of Christoph Waltz, which would otherwise seem like an exciting development. Waltz has been a fantastic presence in exactly two movies, both scripted by Quentin Tarantino, but without a strong character and great dialogue, he tends to fade into the background—he doesn’t bring the same charisma to an underwritten part in the way that, say, Mads Mikkelsen or Javier Bardem have done.)

Of course, plot problems aren’t new to the Bond franchise, even when the series has had ample time to develop a script. There was a gap of four years between Quantum of Solace and Skyfall, due mostly to financial problems at MGM, which should have been plenty of time to work out any kinks in the story. When I watched Skyfall again the other day, though, I found myself newly annoyed by the way the plot falls apart halfway through. Bardem’s grand scheme, which involves getting caught on purpose, degenerates into a shootout that has nothing to do with the rest of his plan—he could have saved a lot of time and trouble by simply flying to London and taking a cab to the building where M’s hearing is taking place, which is essentially what he does anyway. And this isn’t a question of plausibility, which doesn’t have much to do with the Bond movies, but rather of simple dramatic payoff: if you’re going to make a big deal about the bad guy’s insanely complicated gambit, he’d better have something good up his sleeve.

What’s worse, it all could have been fixed with a simple change—by having the hearing take place within MI-6 itself, prompting Bardem to get himself caught in order to attack it—but apparently the temptation to indulge in an elaborate subway chase, which is admittedly cool, was too great to resist. More to the point, though, is the fact that we just don’t know. Maybe objections were raised and dismissed; maybe production on certain sets had already begun, forcing the writers to work with what they had; or maybe altering the scene would have caused problems elsewhere in the movie that I haven’t anticipated. (It doesn’t help that Skyfall was the second of three movies released over the course of twelve months, along with The Avengers and Star Trek Into Darkness, that imprison the villain inside a glass cube and include some variation on the line: “He meant to get caught!”) A movie, much more than a novel or play, is a machine with many moving parts, and all a writer can really do is keep from getting caught in the gears. Spectre may yet turn out to be a great movie, and it wouldn’t be the first to survive late problems at the screenplay stage. And if it ends with Bond escaping from certain doom at the last minute, it’ll be based on firsthand experience.

Exorcising the ghosts

Over the weekend, The New York Times Style Magazine ran a fascinating series of short pieces by writers confronting their own early work. (The occasion for the feature is an auction being held at Christie’s next month by PEN American Center, in which seventy-five first editions with annotations by their authors will go up for sale. If I could get just one, it would be David Simon’s copy of Homicide.) The reflections here are full of intriguing insights, one of which I quoted here on Sunday. There’s Philip Roth’s description of the analytic session in Portnoy’s Complaint as “an appropriate vessel” for the kind of uncensored, frequently repellent story he wanted to write—a nice reminder of how a novel’s most distinctive qualities often represent a solution to particular narrative problems. I also liked George Saunders’s account of revisiting his first collection of short stories, which is full of “ghost-phrases” that he was positive were there, but must have been cut along the way. The version of a story that a writer carries in his or her head is an amalgam of variations, with each draft superimposed over the one before, and it sometimes bears little resemblance to what finally ended up in print.

But the comment that stuck with me the most was from Lydia Davis, who writes tightly compressed, elliptical short stories, some of them only a paragraph long. (I’ve only read a few of them, but they’re extraordinary—worthy contributions to a tradition of parables that goes back through Borges and Kafka. Of all contemporary writers whose work I feel I need to study more closely, Davis is near the top, largely because her virtues are so different from mine.) Appropriately enough, her contribution isn’t much longer than most of the stories that inspired it, but it’s been rattling around in my head ever since:

I read a story through again and again, whether it’s a long story or a short one (or a very very short one). If anything bothers me, even very subtly, I reread it many times, consider alternatives, put the story away for a while, read it again. I don’t consider a story finished until nothing bothers me anymore—though there are a few stories that never completely satisfied me but that I felt were good enough to go out in the world as they were. I simply couldn’t think what more I could do to them.

And the line that really gets me is “until nothing bothers me anymore.” On some level, that’s the only standard to which writers ought to hold themselves, as John Gardner notes in The Art of Fiction: “When the amateur writer lets a bad sentence stand in his final draft, though he knows it’s bad, the sin is frigidity.” The trouble, of course, is that revising a story is like trying to catch a trout with your bare hands. Whenever you think you’ve got a grip on it, it slips through, and one change can set off a series of little crises elsewhere in the draft. To switch to another metaphor, it’s like the horseshoe nail that lost the kingdom: revising a word in a sentence can change the rhythm, which throws off the paragraph, and suddenly the entire chapter—or the whole novel—needs to be rethought. And I’m only slightly exaggerating. At the moment, I’m nearing the end of a significant rewrite of my current novel, with a long list of changes big and small, and although most live on the level of the sentence or paragraph, I won’t know how they really play until I sit down tonight and read the whole thing straight through. That read, in turn, will suggest additional changes, meaning that the novel has to be read yet again, and so on and so forth until I collide with my deadline on Friday.

Ideally, each round of changes will be less extensive than the one before, gradually converging, like a function approaching its limit, at the story’s ideal form, or at least something close enough. This seems to be what Davis is describing, and it’s clear that her stories demand nothing less: they’re so condensed and intense, like poetry, that a single wrong word would tear them apart. The problem is that even as the story nears its perfect shape, if it even exists, the author is changing in the meantime: the standards you had when you started may not be the ones you have now, after you’ve been shaped by the work itself. Much of writing consists of managing that threefold relationship between the story, your original intentions, and whatever you’re feeling today. When the process doesn’t go perfectly, which is to say most of the time, you end up with the ghost-phrases that Saunders describes, a mismatch between the story in your head and its published form. Davis seems determined to exorcise those ghosts, and by her own account, she usually succeeds. She wouldn’t be here if she didn’t. And if the rest of us are still haunted by our ghost-phrases, well, we can take heart in the words of Jez Butterworth, who notes that a matter of milliseconds can make the difference between nearly and really—even if the process can start to feel a little like Butterworth’s own script for Edge of Tomorrow. You try, fail, and repeat.

The difference between nearly and really

A few years ago, Butterworth went to an exhibition of Robert Capa photos in New York. Capa’s contact sheets were on display, and you could see the pictures leading up to each famous shot. The differences between photos came down to a matter of milliseconds, yet, Butterworth said, “the one before, that is so nearly the shot that rings like a bell forever,” had no resonance at all. “And it taught me something about the difference between nearly and really. Those days where you’re looking at a page and thinking this is an imitation of itself—it could be as close as the frame before the actual one, and it’s nothing. It’s nothing.”

—From a profile of Jez Butterworth by Emma Brockes in The New Yorker