Dave's Anatomy: My History as a Writer, #8: The Ghost of Christmas Present, or Taking Ideas from Famous Stories

After I published five stories in a row about my ongoing character, musician Sossity Chandler, I decided I needed to do something else. Ongoing characters are common. W. Somerset Maugham wrote several stories about Ashendon, a British spy. Not many people know that Mark Twain wrote two novels about Tom Sawyer after the publication of the initial book on him. Other authors have done the same, but I thought maybe I ought to branch out a little bit lest I get caught in a rut.

The Christmas holidays were approaching. Christmas is many things, but to those who read a lot it is also Dickens' famous novella, A Christmas Carol. Soon I had an idea for a new story.

Doing a spin-off story was nothing new for me. I said in an earlier blog that the first story I published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake," was modeled on a Henry James story, "The Aspern Papers." But this would be a little different. It would reference a well-known piece of literature. It would continue the creative "conversation" on the piece. I had seen some spins on the story. The made-for-TV movie An American Christmas Carol set the story in the USA during the Great Depression. Everyone from Mickey Mouse to Mr. Magoo to the Muppets had been included in versions of the story. This story, however, would employ elements from the Dickens ghost tale and go off in a different direction from the original.

Doing this sort of thing is an old tradition. I often 

hear people talking about how Shakespeare "stole" all his plot lines from other authors. I once heard a poet tell about how William Wordsworth "stole" the idea for the poem "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" from his sister, Dorothy.  But the idea that every story must be original is a relatively new development. In the past, authors took elements from other stories, used plots, tropes, characters, and ideas freely. And even modern writers do. My favorite story, W. Somerset Maugham's "Mr. Know-All," borrows plot from "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant. Examples could be multiplied. But if you're going to communicate with an existing 

work of literature (I like this term better than "steal"), 

you'd better do it with a little bit of skill.

The story, "The Ghost of Christmas Present," appeared in a British magazine called Neonbeam (no longer published). It is about a lonely, down-and-out guy, Jerry, who receives a visitor on Christmas night. The young lady says she has no place to go. He assumes she is homeless. She is dressed retro (1960s) and doesn't know what a computer or bottled water is. Finally, she confesses that she is a ghost.

He looks up her story and finds out she was murdered after a rock concert some time back. Once it is established she is a ghosts, she quips, "I guess I could be the Ghost of Christmas Present."  He remembers how as a child he had thought this meant "present" as in "gift" and that the ghost brought people Christmas presents. Jerry goes to bed that night thinking he can't even score with a ghost girl and this Christmas will be like the others in his adult life:  lonely and disappointing. In the middle of the night, however, the girl materializes in his bed. She informs him that from midnight to about 3 a.m., ghosts have bodies and the two of them make love. She also tells him why she is a ghost. Pretty and sought-after in life, she led many young men on. One ended up committing suicide after she dumped him and, when she is later murdered, she can't go to her rest. Being with Jerry makes her realize that to "go on" she will have to do good. The good is showing him love, giving of herself, and then being willing to face the consequences (whatever they are) when she goes on to her reward.

Shakespeare also informs the story. She haunted the theater where the concert after which she was murdered was held. But when a church rented the place for a Christmas celebration, she was driven out and had to flee. At the beginning of Hamlet, when Horatio and his friends are speculating on whether or not they've really seen a ghost, one comments,

                                       Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
                                    Wherein our Savior's birth is celebrated,
                                    The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
                                    And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
                                    The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
                                    No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
                                    So hallowed and so gracious is the time.

Something about Christmas and ghosts doesn't jive. So the girl, whose name is Bari, is driven away and has to seek refuge in Jerry's house. Here is another instance of "stealing." But for writers, using other texts is par for the course.

Bari is able to go on—though she's not sure 

what awaits her later in the afterlife—because 

she has done good and shown love to someone. In the morning, Jerry gets a call from the only girl he ever dated inviting him to spend Christmas day with her. The Ghost of Christmas Present has indeed brought him a gift—the gift he wanted most of all.

Stories that reference familiar works of literature are risky. The author has to walk a fine line, not borrowing too much from the story, not crassly appropriating another author's content, but making, in a sense, a commentary on the possibilities an existing story opens up. "All books speaks of other books, and every author tells a story that has already been told," novelist and critic Umberto Eco once wrote. Stories have already been told, but they lead to innumerable tales that can proceed from the original. "The Ghost of Christmas Present" was like this. There have been other "takes" in my writing career. Appropriating ideas from well-known literary works, revising them, and recasting them is a great exercise for any writer to do.

Take a look at my newest book, Mother Hulda, a science fiction story based on a tale by the Brothers Grimm. 

Check out my Writer's Page for more titles. 

Comments are always welcome!

Dave's Anatomy #7: My History as a Writer: Seeing My Character from Another Character's Point of View

Sossity

As my writing developed, I set down several more stories about my ongoing character, singer Sossity Chandler. She seemed a good bet. Several stories about her went to press, and I had begun to get a sense of her as a character.  But a good idea is to get as many perspectives as possible to know the character better. I wondered how she would look through the eyes of another figure in a story.

I follow strict rules with Sossity. The stories that feature her are always third person, never first. They are from her point of view, but you never get inside her head. She is a mysterious figure. In my favorite novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman, the omniscient narrator gets inside the head of every character except Sarah, the French Lieutenant's Woman. She remains a mystery and, to an extent, so does Sossity Chandler.

In her character biography, she marries a guy named David Urbanic. But before David there a couple of long-term relationships. She dates Diggory Marks, who will return to her later life as a love interest; and she dates Jerry Watanabe for eighteen months. Their love affair and their split-up is part—though not the entirety—of my story, "Being Caught up with My Ego, I Leave Behind a Beautiful Girl Who Eventually Becomes Rich and Famous."

Quite a title! I did this because Jerry is Japanese-American. There is a

Jerry

tradition in Japanese haiku poetry of long titles. They are sometimes longer than the poet itself. Hence, the title, which nods at Jerry's ethnic heritage but also suggests his lack of connection with it in the slightly parodic use of such a title to tell the story of his lost love.

Jerry dates Sossity Chandler when they are students at Purdue. When she drops out, they start to lose contact, though they do see each other from time to time. Jerry is with her when she get her "big break." They are in his plane (he has a pilot's license) flying above Beaver Island, Michigan, when Sossity gets the call that one of her recording is getting lots of airplay, is selling well, and has the makings of a hit. The two of them spend a weekend together and go their way, Sossity to fame and fortune, Jerry to a job in a computer company in Chicago.

While there, Jerry gets caught up in the pursuit of success. He also begins to have an affair with Anna, the woman who runs his company. He and Sossity drift further away from each other.

Anna

The affair with Anna, though, has a dark side. She is into S&M and slowly drags Jerry into the practice. Like a frog in a kettle, her preferences take him over. She uses her position as CEO of the company to coerce Jerry into servicing her. He has started to like Cynthia Ku, a Chinese-American girl who works in the firm. Anna threatens to fire her if Jerry does not cooperate.

Cynthia

Jerry and Sossity finally break it off. The trauma of this makes him see things clearly. He realizes what he has got himself into and refuses to come to Anna's house. She sends a local thug to beat him up. 

Mistake. Jerry is a martial arts expert. He knocks the thug out and calls Anna, telling her he has recorded incriminating pictures of her from her cell phone and will make them public if she doesn't desist. Knowing she is beaten, she give him a severance package. Jerry eventually marries Cynthia and starts his own software company, which is successful.

He never forgets Sossity, though he knows it is over for them. He sees her at a concert later. She sings a cover song, Neil Young's "Birds," dedicating it to him by name, and gets tears in her eyes when she sings the refrain, "When you see me fly away without you. / Shadows on the things you know. / Feathers fall around you and show you the way to go. / It's over. It's over." The last lines of the story are poignant. They show something of Jerry's personality (and I find them poignant because he is a lot like me).

She cried too. I could not see it when she sang the song, but the next day I came across an item on the internet news:   a close-up shot of her with big, glistening tears on her cheeks. When I read the caption, Sossity Chandler sheds tears during Neil Young song, I wanted to put my fist through the computer screen and wanted to find the correspondent who had written that banal tag-line and pull his arm out of joint like I had for Anna’s hired thug. Of course I did neither. I had a family now and responsibilities. Sossity had gone her way, I mine. But she had given voice to what would have otherwise been inexpressible. That is her talent. That is the direction her life should take. The realization of this enabled me to let go of her.

Like me, Jerry is talented, formidable, and tough. But he is also indecisive and allows himself to be bullied by other peoples' expectations. He is too restrained. Worst of all, he allows his ego to get him into trouble. But he is also able to accept loss and to see the good even in a loss, though this is a sad consolation.

Through this story, readers and an author get a viewpoint on Sossity Chandler through the eyes of someone else. In a later story, "Jergen Kohaut's Blues," and in the two stories "Qualities of Light" and "Mood Indigo," Sossity is seen from the POV of other characters. If you are writing an ongoing character, it's a good thing to do.

I have a new book out! It is titled Mother Hulda, a science fiction story based on a tale of the Brothers Grimm--but with an intergalactic twist. Kindle only. You will be surprised.

                               

Dave's Anatomy #6: My History As a Writer--Exploring Academic Themes

I have a Ph.D. in Literature from Purdue University. My area of study was English Renaissance—the period of time in which such authors as Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert, and many of the great poets and playwrights lived. I did my Ph.D. dissertation on the poetry of Robert Herrick, best known for his poem that begins "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." This is a classic carpe diem poem more famous in recent times due to the fact that the late Robin Williams mentions it in the popular film, Dead Poet's Society.

Robert Herrick

You would think people would recognize such achievement, but those in my writer's group were always telling me, "Dave, you're sounding academic!" By which they mean boring and elaborate. To an extent they are right. For years I wrote academic studies of literature. The by-word in fiction writing is "Show, don't tell." In scholarly writing, however, you tell and don't show! So I've had some bad habits to break. You also tend to write more passive sentences in scholarly writing, so that's another thing I've had to overcome. The admonitions of my writer's group were good in many ways. But not in every way.

As I began to look for new ideas to write about and new inspirations for stories, my mind reverted to my education. I had studied a lot of modern literature and a lot of classic fiction such as Dickens, the Brontë sisters, William Makepeace Thackeray, and it was good stuff. I borrowed a plot from Henry James for the first story I ever published, "The Girl Who Knew Nick Drake." But what about my dissertation topic? Would it be possible to construct a contemporary story using something from the English Renaissance? Lots of people draw on Shakespeare for plot material. The sci-fi classic film Forbidden Planet is based on Shakespeare's The Tempest; a lot of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement borrows from Hamlet. But what about Robert Herrick? Could his poetry ever provide ideas for a story?

Teaching some of his writing in a class at the university where I'm employed gave me an idea.

When Herrick was not writing carpe diem poems or poems about the nipples of his girlfriend's breasts, he wrote theological poems (he was an Anglican priest and often crossed the line in his writing).  His theological works are considered inferior to his other poems, but they made good material to write a dissertation on because not many people had written on them. The couplet that gave me the idea of the story was this one:  "Evil no nature hath. The loss of good / Is that which gives to sin its livelihood."

Augustine

Obscure? Sure it is. Herrick is drawing on a theological point that goes back to Saint Augustine of Hippo in 400 A.D. It is the notion that sin has no ontology—that is, it has no real existence and not a part of God's creation; it is a twisting and a perverting of something good. It has no existence in and of itself.

This is an idea Christian theologians have held to since Augustine wrote about it 1600 years ago. C. S. Lewis noted, in his preface to The Screwtape Letters, that the Devil is not the counterpart of God, not a creature of perfect evil that exists in opposition to the perfect goodness of God, because if you took everything that was good away from the Devil—will, mind, emotion, and existence itself—there would be nothing left. Evil is simply a twisting and a perverting of something good.

This is what Robert Herrick meant when he wrote, "Evil no nature hath. The loss of good / Is that which gives to sin its livelihood." "Livelihood" here means existence. A story began to occur to me after I left the class where we talked about Herrick's poem.

My ongoing character, Sossity Chander, is doing a tour with an English musician, Collin. Usually cheerful and funny, he seems depressed. She asked him if anything is wrong, and he confides to her. Years ago, when the craze was on with groups like Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, he sold his soul to the Devil. Sossity says such a concept is ridiculous and he needs to forget it, but he tells her the Devil has come for his due and he will have to kill himself soon. And he plans to do it. He then withdraws from her and will not see or speak to her.

Abadonna 

Sossity gets a call from a girl named Abadonna, who identifies herself as her friend's "watcher." She is there to make certain he goes through with the expected suicide and warns Sossity that if she tries to interfere there might be trouble. This angers Sossity but she doesn’t know what to do.  In desperation she calls an old friend, Heather Alabaster, who is an Anglican nun and who, Sossity remembers, once smashed a Satanic altar someone had erected at their apartment because Heather was counseling girls caught up in a demon-worshiping cult. She asks Heather's advice. Heather advises her to try to separate her friend from the "watcher." She later remembers reading the line from Herrick in Heather's house long ago. She gets an idea.

Sossity calls Abadonna and hints that she is willing to give herself in exchange for Collin's safety. She also has the security agency she works for gather as much information as they can on Abadonna, whose real name is Abagail. When they meet, Sossity confronts her with all she has left behind and with how she has been sexually exploited, served time in jail, and been forced into an abortion by her Satanic colleagues. She tells her, “Think of what you’ve lost, Abigail. Think of all the good things you’ve twisted and perverted to make yourself into what you are today . . . A girl like you should be loved by a man—and should not think she is obligated to let herself be gang raped and to facilitate a murder.” This affects Abagail, but not in the way Sossity expects. She runs off and commits suicide.

Collin is freed from her power over him and converts to evangelical Christianity. Sossity reflects on the tragedy of Abigail and the loss of good as Collin, his friends and family, rejoice over her death. Sossity remembers that in Dante's hell the worst part of it is cold, not hot.

The story was printed. My adult daughter, who is a good critic of my writing, thinks it's my best story ever. I feel all the better because at a certain stage in my writing journey, I began to see how even academic and scholarly texts—considered too esoteric and obscure by many—can inspire paranormal stories. I would similarly use such texts in future writings.

Check out my Facebook Page for more information on my writing;  or my Writer's Page

to see the books I have available.

The story, "The Loss of Good" appeared in Amarillo Bay magazine. A great read, check it out.

Dave's Antatomy #5: Exploring Creative Connections: "Into White"

One of the best openings I've written appeared in one of the most off-beat stories I've ever produced—a story called "Into White," named after a song by Cat Stevens, published in a journal called The Cynic Online (now defunct, sadly). This story became a way of exploring otherness. The different angles and directions it led me to explore a lot about creative paths and connections.

Here is the beginning I mentioned:

"I am an albino girl.  I have no pigment in my skin. My hair and flesh are white—and I don’t mean white in the sense we usually use the word, as in 'Caucasian.' I mean white like a piece of paper or a marshmallow. I have Type 1 Oculocutaneous Albinism. I do not have a drop of pigment in my body.  I am completely white."

Russian fashion model Nastya Zhidkova

I knew a young lady at the school where I taught who had this condition. I was fascinated to see the way she behaved and dealt with being different or "other" and the way the students at our school regarded her. No one treated her any differently, though on occasion she would talk about her genetic "condition." Still, I wondered, what would the dynamic be if one carried a distinctive appearance? I decided to explore it in a story. In this case, the distinction did not seem to lead to difficulties—but, still, what was the dynamic? What situations might it lead to? What are the dynamics of difference?

The story focuses on the young woman, Sarah, who plays piano in a local band. She meets Sossity Chandler, who is playing local gigs at that time and, through her, Tommy Sendek, a basketball player. Eventually, Sarah breaks off her less-than-ideal relationship with Drew Mason and begins to date Tommy and play as a back-up musician with Sossity.

Away from Drew, Sarah realizes how he always joked about her appearance. His jokes were never vicious or insulting, and she took them in stride, but she sees how this represented a controlling aspect of his nature. As time goes along, she sees that his joking about her albinism was only the tip of the iceberg and that Drew is violent and aggressive. Her relationship with Tommy, who is Jewish, a top scorer for a local team, but refuses to play ball on the Sabbath, deepens. He understands otherness.

The crisis continues to build. Tommy is a contender for the leading scorer in the State of Michigan. One night at a bar Drew begins to call her a "pink," "ghostie," and insult her in other ways. Sarah suddenly realizes he wants to pick a fight with Tommy and ruin his chances for becoming the top scorer in the state by making him ineligible to play because fighting would disqualify him from the team. She plays up to Drew, indicating she might return to him, and then sings (with Sossity playing guitar) the Cat Stevens song "Into White," which Drew had always wanted her to do and she had steadfastly refused. Drew relents and there is no fight.

Years later, married to Tommy, who plays basketball for an Italian league, she learns that Drew has ruined his marriage and his career as a musician by his violence and abusiveness. Sarah accepts Sossity's offer to play keyboards in her band now that she has become a major figure in the popular music scene. Her husband eventually lands a slot of a team in the NBA.

My acquaintance with a student brought about this exploration of otherness, personal negotiations, and relationships. These are the door than can open for writers when they are willing to explore. Exploration often brings in connections and opens the door to creativity. I have seen it happen many times.

 Check out my website for book titles you'll love to read.

More books and titles here.

Write a comment. I would love to hear from you.