Hell's Writing Room?

I don’t have a TV or any desire to make watching one a regular habit, so I don’t usually catch even the high buzz shows like Hell’s Kitchen. But a couple of local chefs are on it this season, which made me a bit curious about the show itself and how they’d cope, sending me off looking for the online stream to check it out. As the saying goes, it always helps to have a personal interest.

It was, as expected, colorful and dramatic and loud and profane and ugly (all the backstabbing and whining) and beautiful (the food!!! although in between screaming sessions, a soft voiced Ramsay doesn’t make bad eye candy either). But mostly, it was about excellence and how you get the brilliance of a perfect diamond through unbelievably intense pressure followed by refusal to settle for anything but the best out of the results. So many of the failures had to do with sloppiness and settling and inability to deal with pressure once it got past a certain point or if it came from too many directions at once. Ramsay's methods certainly aren't the only ones that can work, but the bottom line is that they do work, with spectacular results, and they're not boring.

Which got me thinking about some of the weaker books that are getting published and some of the better authors who have stopped being published, and the possibilities in a Hell’s Kitchen approach to creating some rational balance there. Think about it: to get a cozy manuscript even considered, rather than having a marketable hobby / shoppe hook, you have to have enough writing chops to win a competition that involves dashing out a short story using fixed ingredients and a time limit. Half baked characters? Boring presentation and bland story? Stale dialogue? An unbalanced seasoning of violence or romance? Thanks for trying, but this point goes to the blue team.

Think your hero is a tough guy and can take all sorts of punishment and come out of it with a smirk, a handkerchief staunching the bullet wound and a wiseass quip on his lips? Try getting him there with the editorial equivalent of Chef Ramsay kicking over your computer at every clichéd metaphor, taking a lighter to your thumb drive whenever the prose starts to drag, using a knife instead of a comma to break up run on sentences. Then try pulling your writing group together into a team that can work together to create the character and backstory that will take down someone else's tough guy. Man, Dash Hammett never had to get it done this way.

And of course there would be the special challenges, like the writing equivalent of Hell's Kitchen having a fine dining restaurant switch to serving up burgers and fries to the USC school band, such as forcing your gritty noir writer to satisfy picky and delicate Aunt Dimity-level cozy tastes if he wants to advance.

We haven’t even gotten into the punishments for losing. Having the team of gritty noir realism writers whose pages weren't dark enough to hide the reality about their writing spend a day writing Hello Kitty ad copy? Force the no onstage gore or violence cozy team, whose manuscript induced a response similar to the one A. A. Milne elicited from Dorothy Parker, to write a scenario with some fresh ideas about Freddie Kreuger showing people what cutting edge can mean? Set the Mickey Spillane wannabes who turned out to be all wannabe and too little Spillane to entertaining everyone else with Karaoke in drag, starting with strictly falsetto versions of “I Am Woman” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”?

I'm starting to like this idea the more I think about it, and that's before we even get to finding the best looking name writer available to fill the Ramsay role. Any volunteers?

Comments

[Kevin Tipple]

As far as the TV show goes, I quit watching after the first couple of seasons. When I could sit here and predict who he was going to go off on and why, before five minutes had passed, it was time to quit.

The same is true of books though I do have a little more patience. A certain author just released number sixteen of her comedic mystery series. I quit after book fourteen because it was the same old thing, book after book, and the heroine never learned anything. From what I read posted around the internet, the latest one is still the same old stuff.

Kevin

[Kim Malo]

Yeah, agreed on both the TV show (like I said, I'm watching it because he has a couple of local chefs on) and on predictability in general. Saddest cases to me aren't the ones that are predictable by book 14 (like you, I've probably given up long since and after all, enough people like that predictability to let the author reach book 14), it's the ones that are predictable by book 3.