Stephen Dunn, my undergrad writing teacher, told me, “Suspense is cheap.” I knew what he meant — that providing insight into human lives and poking at the fabric of existence is a higher literary calling, and is what separates Tolstoy from Louis L’Amour. But I also thought it was an easy thing for a poet to say. Suspense isn’t a weapon that is kept in the poetical armory.

Dramatists have a greater eye for suspense — and for where storylines are going. For most of my life, I’ve known where most stories are going, so for me suspense has been cheap and insight more highly valued. I had little doubt where “Anna Karenina” was headed, the novel or the eponymous heroine, especially because I’d heard in advance about the final meeting with a train. That never mattered because every page signaled the miracle of creation. I was enrapt by Levin’s struggle to understand himself and his place on his land and in the cosmos, and sick over Anna’s dreadful mistake in following her heart and losing everything else. The suspense, such as it was, didn’t matter.

Last year after he gave a talk, Brad Meltzer handed out copies of some of his books, provided gratis by his publisher in what I thought was a nice gesture. I decided to read “The Millionaires.” Was it entertaining? Plenty; it was the reading equivalent of a cocaine rush. Was it suspenseful? To a degree — although again, I could see where all of it was going (and that, in true Agatha Christie fashion, the secret villain was someone who had already falsified his own death). Has it left any footprints on my thinking? Let’s just say that although I gobbled down all 547 pages of the book, a week later I couldn’t remember one iota of it. Whereas I still can’t drum out of my head Chaucer’s cook with the ulcerating knee who happens to stir up a wonderful blancmange, and I read that once 25 years ago.

Last week when we were watching “The Wire,” I said to my son, “Omar isn’t going to make it out of this season.” Omar is the character we like the best, and I could see his demise coming. On tonight’s episode, Omar was hobbling around the streets of inner-city Baltimore taking out Marlo’s muscle. Once I noticed that there were two such scenes, I knew tonight was Omar’s night. (Because the third such scene would complete the movement.) “Tonight’s when he gets it,” I said. Lex said, “NO!” Then Omar stepped into a liquor store to buy a pack of smokes and I said, “This is the scene,” and then he got it in the head from behind. Another smoking-related death.

“WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS RIGHT?!?!?!!?” Lex screamed.

Because suspense is cheap: It’s easily unpacked and solved. Forecasting Omar’s death didn’t ruin the drama because the best drama isn’t about suspense. Suspense is just the vehicle.

Nice piece on Slate.com on the late, great comic-book writer Steve Gerber. But writer Grady Hendrix gets one thing wrong when writing, “[Gerber] delighted in sneaky juvenile wordplay—for part of his run on Man-Thing the book was called Giant Size Man-Thing.”

Yes, great line, and no, Hendrix is not the first to point this out. But Marvel had an entire line of “Giant-Size” something-or-others, including Giant-Size Avengers and Giant-Size Defenders — indeed, there were no fewer than 29 in all (each, you’ll note, with a hyphen between “Giant” and “Size,” which pleases me greatly). So this wasn’t any wordplay on Gerber’s part; this was the result of the regular title selling well enough to merit a quarterly edition as well. But I doubt that would explain the existence of “Giant-Size Kid Colt,” and my algebra skills aren’t up to the task of solving “Giant-Size Marvel Triple Action.”

By the way, the issue above was the one most prized in my collection. I have a letter published inside. I was 14. Ironically I now relate to it even more, but in a completely different way — most nights, I am The Winky Man, wandering around my bedroom creating chaos in my sleep.

I just got in from the memorial service for my writing teacher, Bill Idelson, whom I talked about here. The service was held at the Writer’s Guild Theatre, and let me say that even in death Bill continues to be a great teacher. Here’s advice we all should heed in thinking about the service we would want:

1. Get Carl Reiner to emcee. (You may recall that Bill wrote for “The Dick van Dyke Show” and played a recurring role. Hence the connection to Carl Reiner.) Mr. Reiner is warm, humane, slyly funny and wonderfully off-the-cuff. He didn’t miss one opportunity. Perhaps my favorite bit was the suggestion of specific edits after viewing the tribute film.
2. In every photo of you, make it look like you were having the time of your life. Apparently, every day was the time of Bill’s life.
3. Pose an attractive spouse with you in those photos, and enjoy her company in every shot.
4. Surround yourself with interesting and amusing people like Norman Corwin and Ray Bradbury and various successful former students and performers like Ann Guilbert who will show up and tell funny stories about you.
5. Turn out to have been a World War II flying ace, someone determined to fight even though the Navy has given you a p.r. job so you can keep working as an actor. Pay for private flying lessons yourself so they can’t deny you. Then fly night fighter missions over Japan and get awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and four Air Medals. Then don’t tell people, so that even longtime friends learn this only from reading your obit.
6. If you’re going to have children, do a good job with them so that they say things like “I won the Dad lottery,” a claim that will be supported by all the photos and the video.

In summation: great service, impressive life.

It was a pleasure watching clips from “The Andy Griffith Show,” which Bill also wrote for, with a large audience. It’s easy to forget just how wonderful Don Knotts was — as well as the material he had to work with. Much was made of Bill’s writing advice to students over the years. Last night in class I was talking about “verisimilitude” — a word that puzzled my students and that Bill would have winced at — but really I was echoing Bill said: “Keep it real.” (Or, more literally, “make a simulation of the truth.”) One of his other bits of advice repeated tonight was this: Never mortgage your story for a joke. The story is more important, and the joke won’t be that funny. That’s exactly right. If you want more of this, you might click here and order Bill’s book — the core of his workshop, captured on paper.

There’s great wisdom in this piece by Marsha Norman (writer of “‘night, Mother,” which, coincidentally, I’m teaching from tonight). I especially like Ms. Norman’s insight that smart playwrights are smarter than critics about where fault lies. I still read the critics — sometimes — but no, I don’t heed them, not really. Playwrights can often hear the play that poor direction has muffled, but critics, who often have limited working knowledge of the theatre, can’t knowledgeably separate these creative roles.

Thanks to EM Lewis for bringing this piece to my attention.

My friends Doug and Stephanie Hackney are on a permanent tour of the world. Lucky for them and us, the world is a large place. That way they get to upload awe-inspiring photos like these. Click here to see their photos from the furthest tip of the world and to read Doug’s simple, striking, declarative narrative. Favorite line: “But as the mountains shook off their cloak of nighttime clouds, the day looked more promising.” That approaches Hemingway.

A professor of rhetoric digs at the meaning beneath Obamalingua.

The last week of May at the Great Plains Theatre Conference in Omaha, Nebraska I’m doing two things I like to do: teaching and judging. I like to teach, and I like to judge. (The latter, at least when it comes to the comportment of elected officials, the relative merits of something artistic, and the personal habits of people who are breezily late and/or ill-mannered.) The conference begins May 24th, and if you’d like to join us, you should click here. If you’d just like to see what I’m teaching, click here. (I’ll be teaching two days, and serving as a panelist throughout the week. And also, if past writing or theatre conferences are any indication, hanging out at pool halls and clubs ’til closing.)

When, late last year, they sent me a very nice email asking me if I would do this, once I ascertained that this in no way conflicted with the San Diego Comic Con (which is in July), I agreed, then set about rearranging my schedule so I could do so. (Among other things, I’m teaching a new class this summer at USC. More about that in a future post.) I also thought: Hey, maybe I’ll drive. As we all know, I love driving that Mustang convertible. I could see wide open stretches of America with the top down. I did that in 2004 stumping in Arizona for John Kerry (he lost). And also, I would have my car. So I looked again at my schedule, both personal and professional, then went to Google maps where I always go now because Mapquest has made it a habit of giving me the longest, slowest, most aggravating, and most often wrong route, and then I discovered something I did not know: Omaha, Nebraska is 1554 miles away. In my mind, it was two states over. No, it’s four states over — in the middle of the country. Who knew? I won’t have enough time to drive there and back, and the nice people at the conference are providing a plane ticket. And so, the plains conference became the plane conference.

I take all this time to relate this story because for me every day is an adventure in discovering what I don’t know, including, to paraphrase Socrates, what I don’t know that I don’t know. I’m eager to visit Nebraska because it’s one of the few states I haven’t been to, but until that fateful day when I looked at the map online, I never had a fixed idea where it is. Now I know it’s next to Iowa. That state I can fix on because it’s next to Illinois, and I’ve been there plenty of times. But Nebraska? I know Springsteen did an album I never wanted to listen to about it. I know that 20 years ago a guy I grew up with who was then a sometimes-dangerous drop-dead drunk once took off for there on some strange odyssey he never allowed himself to discuss again. And… that’s it. I know nothing else about Nebraska. But I’m looking forward to finding out more.

Yes, I’m on deadline with a large writing project. But now the script is finalized and we tape on Friday and Monday, so the smoke is lifting. And so look for more posts here.

You would think that it’s relatively easy to keep count of things that exist in whole units, especially when those whole units add up to only double digits. But today I took a break from working on my new play, tentatively entitled “Second Ice Age,” because I suddenly had the burning desire to figure out how many plays I’ve written. This was partially occasioned by my having to send out an updated bio to a conference I’m teaching at early this summer.

The last time I updated it, the bio that gets put into play programs and speaking notices and such says that I have written “more than two dozen” produced plays. That’s true. It’s also true that I’ve written many other plays that I’ve never sent out because I don’t think they’re ready, which means I’ve written more than 40 plays. I suppose in my mind, I will one day “fix” these other plays. (Or maybe I think that, like some wines, they’ll improve with age. Or just go really bad.) But… how many more than 40?

“The Bar Plays” was intended as a cycle of short plays — a cycle I may finish some day. I’ve written two of them so far. So I guess I should count that as two. Or, is it one unfinished play? Do I count the play I wrote in high school? (Hey, it was even produced.) It isn’t on my hard drive but I’ve got it on file somewhere. If I count that one, I’m now writing my 42nd play. (I think.) But I started writing it before play 41, so which one is actually play 41?

Of the 42 plays, about two-thirds are one-acts, some of them brief. But, I should note, some one-acts are “full-length” plays. Is a 60ish-page play (I’ve got at least two) a one-act or a “full-length” play? When it was done in L.A., “Uncle Hem” was full-length. In New York, it seemed short (because they played it too fast, I think. Which is precisely what one friend called to tell me.). When students ask me, “How long is a full-length play” or, more often, “How long is a one-act play?” I give them a variation of Edward Albee’s response. When asked by an interviewer how many of his plays are full-length, Albee, whose first success was with a one-act, said, “All of them.”

When I was an undergrad studying literature, it puzzled me how writers and then critics and academics couldn’t land on an exact number of how many stories or novels or plays or songs or whatever had been created by a particular artist. In cases concerning the passage of time and the lack of good storage, it made sense: Maybe Aristophanes and Chaucer and Shakespeare couldn’t keep track either. But why not Raymond Carver? Since then I’ve come to know that Carver’s stories exist in different versions, often substantially rewritten, sometimes retitled and sometimes not. As does the Bible. As does, it now seems to me, most things.
For years I kept a record of what I had written and in what order. Now I couldn’t tell you even where that is. I have two file cabinets stuffed with various printed-out or published versions of various things — the product also of short stories, and essays, and reviews, and correspondence, and failed novels — and boxes more in storage in the attic. A few years ago I found a computer disk that at some point I had marked “Lee’s Writing” (I like to think that I’ve come up with cleverer labeling systems since then) and found several completed short stories and plays that I had utterly forgotten about.

I am lucky in one regard: I’m not obsessive enough to be paralyzed by this. I have at least one friend who wouldn’t be able to leave his room until figuring this out. I won’t go too far down that rabbit hole, or I’ll never get to play 43. And I remember the beautiful last story I heard about the late Louis L’Amour. When he knew he was dying, L’Amour went into his writing study resolved to clear up all the debris. On every square inch of floorspace he had stacked manuscripts in progress, miscellaneous writing, correspondence, ephemera, drafts — the detritus of creativity, not all of it yet given shape. His wife came in and saw him standing there deciding how to make order of this before he died, and she said, “You leave that. I’ll take care of it.” And L’Amour left all that and went to his desk and back to his writing.

The deadline for a 10-minute play festival that I wanted to enter passed just one minute ago. The topic: “The sense of smell must be an important element of the play.” In about 23 minutes, I wrote a new play called “Crotch Rot” and uploaded it. Will it be selected? Maybe not. But I wrote a new play and uploaded it at 11:59 and however many seconds. I say this to share with my students, whom I constantly advise when they say they don’t have a play that fits whatever imminent submission requirement: “Go home and write one. It’s not due until tomorrow.” (And it’s worked at least once:  I wrote a 10-minute play in 46 minutes to meet that particular deadline — and the play got accepted and produced.)