Kim started to step away, but it was too late. The next person in line had overheard the exchange and shouted, “No fair!” He shouted, “If Mr. King bleeds in his books then he has to bleed in mine!”
This, everyone in the building heard. Shrieks of indignation filled the cavernous hall as five thousand horror fans each demanded their own ration of celebrity blood. Echoes of rage boomed off the vaulted ceiling. Kim could scarcely hear as King asked, “Can you help me out?”
Still pressing the ice pack against him, she said, “They’re your readers…I’ll do what you decide.”
King went back to signing. Signing and bleeding. Kim stayed beside him, and as the crowd saw that no bandages were forthcoming, the protest gradually subsided. Five thousand people. Each with three items. Kim told me that it took eight hours, but King managed to sign his name and smear a trace of his blood in every book. By the end of the event he was so weak the bodyguards had to carry him under the armpits to his Lincoln Town Car.
Even then, as the car pulled out to deliver him to his hotel, the disaster wasn’t over.
A group of people who’d been shut out of the event because of overcrowding jumped into their own car and chased King’s. These book lovers rammed and totaled the Lincoln—all for the opportunity to meet their favorite author.
In that tavern, Kim and I sat looking out the window at the empty street. Pondering the night.
Her dream had been to open a bookstore in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, a store that sold only cookbooks. She’d die of amyloidosis in 2011. Kim Ricketts’s dream bookstore, Book Larder, is still open.
But that night it was just Kim and me in an otherwise deserted bar. A little drunk, but not much. Shaking my head over her Stephen King story, I asked, “So that’s the big fame we’re all striving for?”
Kim sighed. “Them’s be the big leagues.”
Bless you, Kim Ricketts. May one of your many, many graves always be inside my head.
Establishing Your Authority
Establish your authority,” Tom Spanbauer used to tell us, “and you can do anything.” As his students we made lapel buttons printed with this dictum and wore them the way members of a religion would wear crucifixes and the like. It was our creed. A part of the Ten Commandments of Minimalism: Don’t use Latinate words. Don’t use abstracts. Don’t use received text…And once you establish your authority, you can do anything.
To that I’d add the Thom Jones advice: Action carries its own authority. If you move through each scene with clear, physical verbs—taking steps, touching objects—your reader’s mind will follow as closely as a dog’s eyes track a squirrel.
If you were my student I’d ask you to consider the following methods for building authority within a story. Make the reader believe you. Make the incredible seem inevitable. Authority: The Authority Speech
You’ve seen the typical authority speech given in many movies. In My Cousin Vinny it’s near the end of the courtroom trial when Marisa Tomei seizes the moment and gives her passionate lecture about the 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air with a 327-cubic-inch engine and a four-barrel carburetor.
In The Devil Wears Prada it’s the recent history of the color cerulean blue used in fashion, a speech delivered in minute detail by Meryl Streep as she assembles clothing for a model.
The film Legally Blonde contains two such speeches. The first occurs in a Rodeo Drive clothing store, where Reese Witherspoon upbraids a salesclerk by delivering a boatload of facts that expose the clerk as a liar. The second speech occurs late in the trial sequence when Witherspoon lectures on the chemistry of permanent waves, using facts that decimate the testimony of a prosecution witness.
For quick, powerful proof of a character’s authority, few tactics work as well as allowing her to reel off facts that demonstrate she boasts a depth of technical knowledge no one would’ve expected. Recent politics make this a device useful for female characters, but not so useful for males. First because there has to be an expectation that the character is vapid. The surprise comes when a seemingly dim-witted character demonstrates a deep understanding of something crucial. Consider the dream sequence in Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion where Lisa Kudrow recites the process for making glue. And alas, the airhead character is more likely to be a female.
These days such a speech delivered by a male character would come across as tedious mansplaining, at best. At worst, as Asperger’s syndrome. Still, there are male examples. Just watch Good Will Hunting for the scenes where Matt Damon spouts erudition to dominate would-be geniuses in university taverns.
Another aside: Wes, the editor in the background—always there, never noticed—suggests that an authority speech makes a character more likable. I find the whole concept of “likability” to be problematic. We’ll revisit this, but I’d rather respect a character. Frankly I don’t even like likable people.
So if you were my student, and you needed to give a character authority—and build your own as the author—introduce the character as simple-minded, then have her or him let rip with a string of esoteric, complicated facts that shock the audience. Authority: The Dead Parent
Scratch the surface of any comedy and you’ll find a dead mother or father. It’s the unresolved, irresolvable hurt that generates all the wisecracking and antics.
Even in dramas, it’s the background tragedy that makes the foreground dramas bearable.
The dead relative is everywhere.
In the Earl Hamner television series The Waltons, it’s John Walton’s dead brother, killed in World War I, the never-mentioned ghost that the young Ben Walton is named for. In The Big Valley the patriarch, Tom Barkley, has died, leaving Barbara Stanwyck to run the ranch. In Bonanza the matriarch is dead.
