Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

You have to understand-- in-- in-- in most arts and most

things that people get taught, they don't know anything about

it before they do it.

If you go into an algebra class, well, you probably

don't know anything about algebra.

If you're being taught how to do a sculpture,

well, you probably don't know anything

about working with marble and a hammer and a chisel.

But when we start to talk about writing,

when we start to talk about storytelling, everybody--

or almost everybody--

knows writing, knows storytelling.

Not only that, they probably do writing and storytelling

every day.

So what I want to do is pull out some

of the elements of what you already do every day,

and make it into a more, kind of, structured,

and to some degree codified, system.

So I'm going to talk to you about plot versus story,

character versus character development,

the music of language, the importance of poetry.

All of these things I'll talk about.

They are elements of fiction, but you have to know how--

how they work in order to use them technically

in writing a novel.

For the purposes of showing you how I started writing novels,

and how I do write them, we're going

to use "Devil in a Blue Dress."

"Devil in a Blue Dress" is the first book I ever published.

And so therefore, it has a kinship to what you're doing.

Many of you, this is going to be your first book,

and so you'll see what I went through doing

what you're doing now.

The most important thing you're ever going to do in your novel

is that after every sentence, every paragraph, every page,

and every chapter, your reader's going

to wonder what happens next.

One of the easiest ways to get them to do that

is to hook them on the-- the problem or the situation

that the main character or characters are in.

Once you understand that these people are going to have

trouble, or these people might find treasure,

or these people may finally escape from a prison,

then you're-- you're deeply involved in who they are,

and what they are, and what they are trying to do.

Once you're-- or, they're there, you want to turn the page,

because the novel is not written if the reader doesn't want

to turn the page.

People read novels for two reasons.

They read it for entertainment on a light level,

and they read it to further understand human character,

human nature on another.

In order to answer the second, deeper issue,

the character has to learn something.

The character has to change.

Character doesn't have to become better.

The character doesn't have to become good.

It could be the opposite.

He could start off good and become bad.

He could start off hopeful and end up a pessimist.

But he has to be impacted by this world

that we're reading about, and therefore, we, the reader,

can more closely identify with that character,

and hopefully understand a little something

about ourselves.

"Devil in a Blue Dress" is a novel about a guy

named "Easy" Rawlins--

Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins.

Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle, and--

and Jennifer Beals decide to make a movie.

He was born in the deep South, lived

most of his life in Houston, Texas in the '20s and '30s.

When the '40s comes, he goes off to war in World War II.

He's a-- he's a combatant in that war.

He's a soldier who fights.

He has experiences that he never had

as a Black man in the United States.

And so when he comes back to the South,

it's just unacceptable to him the way people

expect him to live, the way people expect him to act,

so he ends up moving to Los Angeles.

He gets a job working in an air parts factory.

But again, he has these white bosses

who want him to act as they-- as he used

to have to act down in Texas.

He gets fired.

He has a house, but he can't pay his mortgage.

He's a little worried about what's

going to happen with his life, and his friend, a bartender,

Joppy, introduces him to kind of a dangerous white guy,

and the white guy says, I need you

to look for a white woman who hangs out

down in the Black community, because her fiance wants

her to come home.

Easy says, OK, I'll do this.

The bartender says, don't even find her.

Just look, and he's going to pay you.

You can pay your mortgage.

But Easy-- he likes to do the job he's asked to do.

He goes out.

He's looking for this woman.

And in doing that, he gets into all kinds of trouble--

all kinds of trouble.

Black man, white woman-- that starts off

all kinds of trouble.

And so he works his way through the novel and figures

out who he is and who he's going to become

by doing this job for this dangerous white man who's

named Dewitt Albright.

Easy's predicament is-- is multi-tiered.

1, he needs to pay his rent.

2, he can no longer live as a servant to the white man.

And third, he's gotten involved with a guy who's pretty shady,

and he's a Black man in 1948 looking for a white woman.

That's nothing but trouble.

The best way to develop a complex, engaging character

is to not worry about developing a complex, engaging character,

because that's a big question, right?

You want to write about somebody who you feel you understand,

or that you can understand, and you

want to learn about that person as you write about them.

And that layers and complicates the character,

but not from the beginning.

It's not like you sit down and say, OK, first I

have to figure out how I'm going to make a complex character.

Well, how tall is he?

How angry is he?

What was his mother's name?

You don't want to go through all that stuff-- at least,

I don't want to go through all that stuff.

All I need to know is that I have a character,

I know what the situation he's in

and how he starts to respond to it.

And how people respond to him begins to tell me who he is,

and how he might change.

It's not that you know everything about that character

to begin with--

and I know some people want to do that.

They say, I know everything about my character

before I start writing.

Well, to me, that's not fiction.

That's something kind of hybrid between fiction and nonfiction.

I honestly believe that just writing

in the voice of a character, or from the shoulder

of a character, is going to show us who he or she is,

and it's going to help us develop that character.

If you make a commitment to too many elements

of the person's character, there are usually characteristics,

or even "caricature-istics," where, you know, they chew gum.

They talk in a certain kind of way.

They use a certain kind of language.

They-- or even specific words.

You get stuck with that character.

That character can't move if they're exactly in place

in the mind of the reader.

One of the best ways, as I said, to develop a character

is to put that character in relationship to another person.

So as they talk, as-- as-- as they fight,

as they work together, we find out more about who they are

and what they are.

And if we find out something about,

let's say, our character who's getting shot

at early, which makes you think he will betray anybody

that he's dealing with--

if, by the end, he refuses to betray the friend

that he ran off with, then we understand

he's learned something.

He says, I should kill you, but I can't.

And that-- that-- you know, it's a simple--

that's a simple transition.

However, that's the way we think about it.

And it's, I think, best to think in simple terms

in the beginning of your writing.

In order to give you an idea about how

you can start to write about a character who you may not

know everything about in the beginning,

I'm going to read to you the first paragraph that I

wrote in my first published novel, "Devil in a Blue Dress."

"I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar.

It's not just that he was white, but he wore an off-white linen

suit, and shirt with a Panama straw hat, and bone shoes

over flashing white silk socks.

His skin was smooth and pale, with just a few freckles.

One lick of strawberry blonde hair

escaped the band of that hat.

He stopped in the doorway, filling it

with his large frame, and surveyed the room

with pale eyes--

not a color I had ever seen in a man's eyes.

When he looked at me, I felt a thrill of fear,

but that went away quickly, because I was

used to white people by 1948.

I had spent five years with white men and women

from Africa, to Italy, through Paris,

and into the fatherland itself.

I ate with them and supped with them,

and I killed enough blue-eyed young men

to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was."

When I wrote that paragraph, I knew

that I understood everything about Easy Rawlins,

from the fact that he was surprised to be--

to see a white man walk in that bar,

to how he could pay attention to every element of that guy's

existence, and how every element of that guy's existence

was white, and somewhat feral.

And then I learned that he wasn't afraid of this man,

because he'd been fighting and killing these men for years.

And because it's 1948, I know that it-- he

was in World War II.

So I'm finding a Black man who is realizing his liberation,

and that tells me I know who he is.

I know where he is right now.

And the only question is where he's going to get to.

And that's the novel.

I don't have to know where he's going to get to,

I just got to figure out where he's going to get to.

And when I started writing this book,

I had no idea, in the beginning, that it was a mystery.

So him becoming a private detective at the end of it--

I had no idea about that.