Dancing with Myself: Vincent O'Neil Interviewing Vincent O'Neil (guest blog on Nigel Bird's "Sea Minor" site)

You’ve done a lot of things over the years. You were a paratrooper, a risk manager, an advertiser, a consultant, and even an “apprentice librarian” (whatever that is). Can’t you keep a job?

Oddly enough, writing is the only thing that’s stayed a constant throughout my working life. I wrote my first novel when I was in high school, and kept plugging away at various books for the next twenty years, all the time holding down most of the jobs you mentioned. Although I’ve always referred to my writing as something I did in my spare time, it’s outlasted every full-time job I’ve ever had—which makes me wonder if writing was the full-time job all along.

Your Frank Cole mystery series is set in the Florida panhandle, but you’re a New Englander. How does a guy from Massachusetts write about Florida?

New England winters make writing about Florida an easy, almost mandatory, thing. Honestly, I was introduced to the Florida panhandle many years ago when I was in the army. I was a newly-minted lieutenant from West Point, and was fighting my way through a very tough commando course called Ranger School. In Ranger they don’t let you sleep very much or eat very much for roughly two months, and you carry an enormous rucksack all over the Fort Benning part of central Georgia, the mountainous part of north Georgia, the lunar landscape part of Utah, and then the swampy part of the Florida panhandle. Apparently I didn’t do the swampy part right, because they made me do it over. As a result I spent close to a month partially submerged in a river there, so I can honestly claim that I know the region in a way that few of the locals do.

You mentioned wintertime just now. Your most recent novel, Death Troupe, starts out in the middle of a brutal winter in the Adirondacks. Did you get tired of sunny Florida?

No one ever gets tired of sunny Florida. And I’m certainly not tired of the Frank Cole series, either. With that said, I caught a slight case of the acting bug two years ago and began plotting a new series, one built around a high-end murder mystery theater outfit nicknamed Death Troupe. The great advantage of Death Troupe is that they perform one play a year, each year in a different place, so I’ll have to move them around a lot. The first novel is set in the Adirondack town of Schuyler Mills, and I drew on my long association with winter to write it.

So does that mean Death Troupe is a wintertime read?

You know, that raises a question that occurred to me early in the brainstorming phase of this story: We have plenty of books that are considered beach reads, but is there such a thing as a wintertime book?

I thought I was the one asking the questions.

I am you and you are me and we are we, so I doubt it really matters. But no, Death Troupe isn’t focused on freezing to death in upstate New York (although there’s a much-praised sequence where one of the characters comes close to doing just that) and the last part of the book is set against the backdrop of a spectacular Adirondack spring.

Your main character in Death Troupe is the group’s playwright, Jack Glynn. This isn’t another one of those gloomy stories where the writer is alone most of the time and may or may not be going insane, is it?

Well . . . maybe. Actually, no. Not at all. Death Troupe’s playwright takes up residence in the host town roughly six months before the show, and writes a murder mystery play based on the locale. That requires him to be out and about, meeting the people of the town and learning its quirks. So Jack spends much of his time in the more popular gathering places, from a sports bar to a coffee joint to a frozen lake in the deep woods that’s been turned into a skating rink. And of course he meets just about every resident of Schuyler Mills, from the average everyday people to the . . . how to put this . . . more flamboyant citizens.

Hopefully some of those more flamboyant citizens are females.

Very much so. Jack has been both lucky and unlucky in love, in that he has an on-again, off-again romance with the troupe’s lead actress Allison Green. Their jobs don’t let them spend much time together, and when Jack heads to Schuyler Mills he quickly meets some highly intriguing ladies there. This is tough, as he’s already torn between his feelings for Allison and his fear that the two of them won’t end up together. He enjoys the company of the town’s unpredictable publicity manager very much, and attracts the attentions of a free-spirited ice sculptress as well. Oh, and one of his former girlfriends may just be stalking the troupe, so there’s that.

I didn’t see “Actor” listed among your many failed careers. What qualified you to write about the theater?

Research, research, and more research. When you know nothing about a complex topic like the stage, you have to start from scratch. I got The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Amateur Theatricals from the local library, and it really put me on the right path. The Idiot’s Guides are worth their weight in gold, and I highly recommend The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Private Investigations for anyone thinking about writing mystery novels. After reading many, many beginner-level books about acting and directing, I slowly graduated to more advanced works and finally ended with the memoirs of some noted Broadway directors.

Notice any similarities between directing plays and writing novels?

Actually, I noted a lot of similarity with many different roles, from acting to costuming to set design and directing. In a way, novelists cover all those tasks: We explore our characters’ motivations just like the actors do, dress our characters using techniques from the costume design team, and shape the story in much the same way that directors do. And if it weren’t for the annoying voice asking me questions here, I’d be able to say novelists do all this without having to consider outside opinions.

Pipe down. We’re almost done. It sounds like your theater research helped your writing. Did it?

Unquestionably. I really did a disservice to actors, designers, and directors in my last answer, as one individual can’t even come close to doing all those jobs. But by reading about them and taking copious notes, I was able to pull bits and pieces of the things they do into Death Troupe. For example, I learned that some actors will create a biography of their character to help them understand the role better, even though none of that bio ever gets into the play. That helped me form the backgrounds of some of my own characters, and it reminded me that we writers don’t have to include every detail that we might have worked out in our heads. Sometimes it’s better to leave a few loose ends untied.

Always leave them laughing, right?

Absolutely. It’s very much a piece of stage wisdom to always leave the audience wanting more. So having said that, shut up and stop asking me questions.

No, you shut up.

To read Vinny’s blog on life, writing, and everything else, please go to

http://blogsfromexile.blogspot.com/

For his website, which is jam-packed with sample chapters and a review from The Sunday New York Times that he had tattooed on his back, please go to

http://www.vincenthoneil.com

The Midwest Book Review’s excellent review of DEATH TROUPE

It's quite annoying when fiction becomes reality. More so when your fiction is murder. "Death Troupe" follows the theatre group known as the Jerome Barron players who have earned the nickname Death Troupe, surrounding their practice of doing murder mystery plays. But when their writer turns up dead, it gets all the more complicated as they have a murder mystery in reality for themselves to play out. With plenty of intrigue and betrayal, "Death Troupe" is a fun and highly recommended read, not to be missed.

                                                                   --MBR Bookwatch, April 2011

DEATH TROUPE is available from Amazon.com as a 396-page paperback ($11.00) or a Kindle eBook ($2.99)

http://www.vincenthoneil.com/

Guest-blogging on how to write a theater-based murder mystery at Janice Hardy's marvelous site

Hi,

I would post the content of my guest-blog here, but Janice's site is so nice, and she did such a great job with my post, that I'll just share the link:

http://blog.janicehardy.com/2011/03/guest-author-vincent-oneil-on-improving.html

Vincent H. O'Neil Releases New Theatre Mystery, DEATH TROUPE 2011/03/10

Vincent H. O'Neil Releases New Theatre Mystery, DEATH TROUPE 2011/03/10

Hearing the Music: How composing a song and composing a story can be almost the exact same thing

In my latest novel Death Troupe, the play’s gruff director Jerome Barron gives some advice to his playwright, main character Jack Glynn:

“Do me a favor, Jack. Get yourself a nice set of headphones and listen to a few classical tunes. Pick something that really hits you, that gets your blood going or the tears flowing, anything you like as long as it’s got a lot of different instruments.

“Here’s why I say that: While you’re listening, shut your eyes and try to pick out some of the moments when the song’s building, like where an oboe hops in or a fife flutters a few notes and then disappears. Be honest with yourself, and ask if you ever noticed those things before. Then go back and listen for the big moments, those soaring, sweeping passages where you feel like your heart’s going to explode in expectation.

“And after that, start writing. Write this play like a composer. I’ve always said that the best members of this troupe came from musicals, and I stand by that. To do what we do, you gotta be able to hear the music—even when it isn’t there.” (Death Troupe, 2011)

I have a modest background in music, having played saxophone in two championship-winning bands (one marching, one jazz) back in high school. And as a writer, I’ve been impressed many times with the similarities between the things we did in those bands and the things I currently do.

The high points of a story, like the high notes of a song, don’t just suddenly appear. Both compositions build toward those moments, and in most cases they’re easily distinguishable from the rest of the work. Just as the high points in music can be signified by increased tempo and louder volume, the big moments in writing are sometimes identified by faster pacing and intensified action.

That doesn’t mean the passages between these peaks (the valleys, so to speak) are merely filler. They serve more than one purpose, in that they convey the readers or listeners from one peak to the next while holding their attention and advancing the overall work. In novels, subplots and backstories frequently populate these valleys in much the same way as the supporting instruments of an orchestral piece.

So take a page out of Death Troupe and listen to a little music before you start writing or when you’re on a break. Movie soundtracks are particularly good for this exercise, and many of them are available on YouTube.

As Jerome Barron observes later in the book, the similarities between orchestral groups and theater troupes shouldn’t be all that surprising: After all, they’re both led by a Director. The same thing goes for writing, except that the composer, the playwright, the novelist, and the overall Director are one individual: You.

www.vincenthoneil.com

Getting It Write: When your main character is a writer

In my new novel Death Troupe, the main character is a playwright. Creating such a role was a new experience for me, and I was surprised by how much work it turned out to be. I’ve read many novels in which the protagonist was some kind of writer (Stephen King’s The Shining, Misery, and ‘salem’s Lot, just to name three from a single author) and had always found the writer-as-character to be highly engaging. Making my playwright interesting wasn’t the hard part, of course; what was difficult was describing a fictitious writer’s creative process without simply restating my own.

When it comes to writing, I believe that whatever works for you works for you. It might work for someone else, but then again it might not. These platitudes are easy to say (and even to follow) in real life because we so seldom control how someone else crafts a story. It’s a very different thing, however, when we do have that control.

Death Troupe’s main character, Jack Glynn, doesn’t follow a standard routine in writing his plays. He’s the in-house playwright for a theater troupe that comes together once a year, each year in a different town, to perform a mystery play written specifically for that locale. As a result, Jack has to travel to that vicinity (in this case a place in the Adirondacks called Schuyler Mills) and develop the story as he gets to know the area and its people. He draws heavily on local history and tradition for this, but the troupe’s director provides his own overbearing input as the play is being developed.

Jack’s meetings with the director provide great opportunities for showcasing the brainstorming process, and they also convert what might have been his deadly-dull ruminations into a freewheeling dialogue. This is helpful, as a main character who is a writer could be expected to spend long periods of time alone with the work-in-progress. As mentioned above, Stephen King did this quite successfully with his imprisoned (and terrorized) novelist in Misery, but even so there is always a danger of boring the audience with long passages where the writer is mentally building the story.

Which is not to suggest that the writer-as-protagonist is necessarily boring—far from it. Because they don’t normally hold down a nine-to-five job, writer-characters are freed to spend the day (or night) as they see fit. The search for inspiration can take them to some highly interesting settings, and those settings can be the home of some very unusual personalities and events. Writers see the world through very different sets of eyes, and the writer-protagonist’s interpretation of those sights, personalities, and events can be both entertaining and revealing.

Even the act of writing need not necessarily take place in a quiet room with a single desk and chair anymore. The laptop and Wi-Fi have freed the artist to roam about at will, almost like Hemingway composing essays in his notebook as he sat in busy cafés. Putting the writer in the middle of things, even while creating, provides the opportunity for other characters to break up those long passages where the reader is inside the writer’s head. And that was where I discovered how to describe a fictitious character’s creative process so that it wasn’t just a repeat of my own: The shifting settings, and the information provided by various characters, drove the playwright’s imagination in such a multitude of directions that it assumed a life of its own. The involvement of the demanding director likewise sent the brainstorming down unexpected paths, as his personality and Jack Glynn’s are almost polar opposites.

Having stumbled across this technique for building someone else’s creative process, I was actually pulled along by it at various times. Jack Glynn’s emerging play itself became quite exciting, particularly when a period of seemingly useless effort bordering on writer’s block suddenly lurched into a full-blown creative spree:

. . . he now found himself in one of those exhilarating periods when he’d rather be writing than doing anything else. Things that made for a normal life—like a daily routine that followed the sun—took a back seat to times like these, and he exulted in that change because it served as proof that his writing was indeed the most important thing in his life. It wasn’t a conscious choice on his part, like deciding to repaint the bathroom or go buy the groceries, but an overarching reallocation of his existence that was as undeniable as breathing. Day turned into night, breakfast turned into dinner, and the laptop or the writing tablet beckoned even when he was asleep. He would often awake with a new idea—as if he’d merely been on a break and not unconscious—and he would see the empty seat before the desk not as his station in some pointless assembly line, but as the pilot’s seat in a ship that could go anywhere. (Death Troupe, 2011)

Perhaps that’s the best part of having a writer as the protagonist: Having followed that individual’s avocation ourselves, we identify with the character’s struggles as the story develops. We sympathize when the tale dead-ends, or a major rewrite becomes mandatory. And we beam with a shared pride when the final product comes together.

www.vincenthoneil.com

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