Wordcraft -- Who’s writing here? And why?

Surrounded by tens of thousands of publications at the Dallas Public Library’s central branch, in the middle of last Saturday’s Dallas International Bookfair, it seemed appropriate for a group of Dallas writers to gather to talk about why they write. Robert Wilonsky, managing editor for the digital version of The Dallas Morning News, guided the conversation with panel members Harry Hunsicker, Karen Blumenthal and Laura (L.A.) Starks.

Of the three, only Blumenthal originally had a career in writing, as a financial journalist. In a twist stranger than fiction, and egged on by her history-reading daughter, she parlayed her financial expertise into a children’s nonfiction book about the stock market crash of 1929. Hunsicker was (and still is) a commercial real estate appraiser, a job that leads him to many of the settings he uses in his alternate life as writer of mysteries and thrillers, including his latest novel, The Contractors, out this year. And Starks said that her original career as a chemical engineer involved “the same looking at risk” as in her thriller fiction, except that “in fiction, it’s not what can go wrong, but what will go wrong.”

Given all this, Wilonsky wondered, where did they get the chutzpah to begin a book? How did they force themselves to face the daunting blank screen of a computer?

“I had this kid who became fascinated with the New Deal,” Blumenthal said. “She was nine.” While searching for reading material for her daughter, she discovered a dearth of high-quality nonfiction for children, a need that prompted her to write her own book. “All my colleagues said, why would you do that? Who would read it? I won an award which,” she said wryly, “doesn’t make you any money, but you get to write another book.”

She had since written children’s nonfiction about computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs, Prohibition, and is currently at work on a children’s book about the evolution of machine guns. And the difference between writing nonfiction for adults versus for children? While nonfiction for adults “goes off in all sorts of tangents, when you write for children, you strip that down to the essence.”

“I tried to write the great American novel as my first book,” Hunsicker said. “I wrote about seventy pages. And they were really bad. Once I clued in the genre that I read, the blank screen was not that intimidating.”

“I would have this scene and then another and another,” Starks said. “I had about 50,000 words and I thought, this must be a book. I was so wrong.” She credited Suzanne Frank, program director for SMU’s continuing education creative writing classes for teaching her what a book really was. “She said, you need to make it larger in scope, and she was so right. The book would go on to become the thriller 13 Days.

Hunsicker, too, credited SMU’s creative writing classes for helping him develop his story-writing skills.

“Two of you talk about taking classes at SMU,” Wilonsky said. “Is it possible to teach someone to write?”

“That’s a can of worms,” Hunsicker said. “You can teach people to write a paragraph or a scene but you can’t teach them to write a story.”

Blumenthal disagreed--at least to a point. Writing, she said “is hard. It’s painful. It’s ugly. People who are willing to do that can learn to be better writers.”

(For more about the writers involved in this discussion, see their websites, www.karenblumenthal.com/, http://harryhunsicker.com/, and http://lastarks.com/. For more about SMU’s continuing education creative writing program, see www.smu.edu/Simmons/CommunityEnrichment/CreativeWriting/. And next Monday, I’ll discuss local resources, from free to pricey, for writers.)

Wordcraft -- Dallas and a little noir music

When you live in a city with a “black scar on its history that will never be erased,” as literary agent turned editor David Hale Smith writes in his introduction to Dallas Noir, what can you do but write stories that match the city’s dangerous paradoxes?

At least, so Smith thought after rock musician turned publisher Johnny Temple told him he wanted to add a volume of Dallas noir to the city by city series of dark tales his “reverse gentrification” independent press, Akashic Books, has published over the past decade.

Beginning with stories set in Akashic’s home neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, the line has expanded to mud flinging romps across all five New York City boroughs, the United States and abroad. (Addis Ababa noir, anyone? Helsinki or Trinidad or Zagreb, Croatia? No place on Earth, it seems, is without its dark and deadly underside.)

And what, exactly, is noir? Not exactly crime fiction, not exactly mysteries, noir consists basically of “existential, pessimistic tales of deeply flawed characters on a downward spiral,” Smith told the overflow audience at last week’s launch of Dallas Noir, in Dallas, of course, at HalfPrice Books on Northwest Highway. “A happy ending is the antithesis of noir, because these characters are inherently corrupt.”

Despite the ban on happy endings, seventeen Dallas writers gleefully exhibited the dark sides of Dallas neighborhoods and suburbs for the book. Matt Bondurant (The Wettest County in the World) drew on his experience with the city’s latest plague--West Nile virus. A cop in a story by historical writer Kathleen Kent (The Outcasts) finds her drug investigation complicated by the only hours-dead body of a Civil War general--or at least of his reenacting counterpart. Harry Hunsicker (The Contractors, coming 2014) traces the descent of a family business--armed robbery--from Depression-era outlaw and ancestress Bonnie Parker. And if you’re tempted to impersonate a stripper, don’t--unless you have a skillet handy and you’re being written by J. Suzanne Frank (Laws of Migration).
Even home buying, estate planning and dog walking prove become unnerving activities in the hands of Dallas writers with murder and mayhem on their minds.

And although the characters in this collection don’t get do-overs, readers can. Those who missed Dallas Noir’s launch can meet the cast of writers at Barnes & Noble bookstores in Lincoln Park (November 5) and SMU ( November 9), where students can interrogate their favorite teachers, Frank and David Haynes (A Star in the Face of the Sky.) Next week, Dallas Noir and company hit the road, with signings in Fort Worth, metroplex suburbs, and Austin and Houston.  For more details, see 
www.akashicbooks.com/.

And for the rest of you out there with trigger fingers itching to hit the keyboard, check out Akashic’s list of short story interests. But don’t look back, Jack. This is no place to linger over long goodbyes. The limit’s 750 words.