Set Them Free! But keep the Kaiser's copy ...

We invite you to stand a while, and think.

Stand on the embankment of the Thames on a sunny weekday afternoon, Big Ben at your back, the Thames to your right, and watch the crowds scurrying past the twin Sphinxes standing guard over Cleopatra's Needle.

Observe how people stop and stare at the two giant statues, and then let their gazes drift upwards, to the small pyramidion on top of the obelisk.

Or stand on the plaque marking the spot where the guillotine first tasted blood during the French Revolution, and watch the cluster of people beneath the beautiful obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, and then let your gaze wander from them to the huge fountains with their leaping waters, and on past them along the most attractive street in the world, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, up to the proud Arc de Triomphe.

Or stand before the uncarved beauty of the obelisk in St. Peter's Square in Rome, and see how the colonnades sweep outwards to embrace the granite spear.

And think of these monuments, torn from their desert homeland and moved to these foreign spots.

By what moral right are they kept there?

The sight of these lonely giants, standing lost in the peace of millenia amidst the hustle and bustle of the huge cities they now find themselves in cannot but move you.

They moved us.

And so as part of our novel Obelisk Seven, we are hoping that we can add to a movement to Set Them Free. To return them – along with the bust of Nefertiti now in her new Berlin prison – to Egypt.

We are proud to join the company of H. Rider Haggard (1856 – 1925), the famous author of She, and King Soloman's Mines, in calling for their return.

Haggard, whose book She sold an incredible 83 million copies, wrote his first novel while struggling as a newly admitted lawyer, and established a genre of lost worlds. Haggard wrote She in a "white heat", he said, in February and March 1886.

In The Days of My Life, Haggard describes his meeting with Budge Snippets:

Only ought not the thing to stop somewhere? For my part I should like to see the bodies of the Pharaohs, after they had been reproduced in wax, reverently laid in the chambers and passages of the Great Pyramids and there sealed up for ever, in such a fashion that no future thief could break in and steal.

Haggard writes poignantly about the scene which E.A. Wallis Budge (1857 – 1934) found in one ancient tomb he had opened:

Dr. Budge told me of a certain tomb which he and his guide were the first to enter since it had been closed, I think about 4,000 years before. He said that it was absolutely perfect. There lay the coffin of the lady, there stood the funeral jars of offering, there on the breast was a fan of which the ostrich plumes were turned to feathers of dust. There, too, in the sand of the floor were the footprints of those who had borne the corpse to burial. Those footprints always impressed me very much.

 

H. Rider Haggard

In Obelisk Seven our hero,  Kate, argues for the return of the obelisks to Egypt.

She suggests that one way to do this is for the current host countries to provide the funding for Egyptian carvers to cut out of the granite quarries on the banks of the Nile new blocks of stone, and – using the old techniques – to carve exact copies of the obelisks.

These copies the host countries could move to London, and Paris,  and Rome, and New York, and then return the originals to their rightful places in Egypt.

We have a suggestion for the bust of Nefertiti.

It, too, should be returned to Egypt.

However, there is a copy already in existence – the one made in 1913 for James Simon when the bust was taken to Berlin in 1912 and gifted to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Why not let Berlin keep the Kaiser's copy, and return the original Nefertiti bust to her homeland?

The Vatican Obelisk - Michelangelo's Question

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was a man of genius, intelligent, knowledgeable in many things, but one question in his mind made him say No to a pope. Decades before the obelisk in front of St. Peter's in the Vatican was moved to its present site, Michelangelo asked one simple question:

What if it should break?

And he refused to even attempt to move it, leaving it to a later time under a new pope.

In 1586 the energetic Pope Sixtus V wanted to move the 330 ton obelisk at the side of St. Peter's basilica a distance of 275 feet to the front of the basilica.

In our novel we describe the wonderful story of how Fontana the engineer managed to plan and carry out the move of this huge obelisk.

When the Roman Empire fell, not a single obelisk was moved from Egypt for over a thousand years, with one reason being the lack of knowledge of exactly how the Romans had managed the logistical feat of lifting these huge stone monsters, binding them for their safety, moving them, and then lowering them on to their new homes.

Sixtus V wanted the obelisk to represent the triumph of the church over paganism, and when Fontana finally lowered it into its new position before the basilica, a bishop climbed a ladder to baptize it with holy water, and all those watching the baptism received from the pope an indulgence against future sins, good for fifteen years.

And fortunately for Fontana the obelisk did not break.

Obelisk before St. Peter's, the Vatican, Rome

Your Adams & Eves: Of Villains & Villas

James Bond

Do you have a worthy villain? Is your Bad Guy bad enough? How do you measure his 'badness'? It's no good just to people your novel with good heroes; you also need villains of substance.

Blake Snyder puts it well in Save the Cat! – he has a title Make the Bad Guy Badder. He writes that we don't want to see nobodies onscreen, we want to see heroes. And he argues persuasively that there is a win-win correlation between your Hero and your Bad Guy:

And making the bad guy badder automatically makes the hero bigger. It's one of the Immutable Laws of Screenwwriting. Think about James Bond. What makes him James Bond is Goldfinger, Blofeld, and Dr. No... He needs someone bigger to play with to make his own heroism bigger. He needs an antagonist whose powers match his own ... The point is that the hero and the bad guy are a matched set and should be of  equal skill and strength, with the bad guy being just slightly more powerful than the hero because he is willing to go to any lengths to win... So if your hero and your bad guy are not of equal strength, make them so, but give the edge to the bad guy.

We ended up with three themes (global warming, the obelisk quest, and the Tough Bug); we also ended up with two sets of Bad Guys, one for the Tough Bug theme, and one for the other two themes.

One of the Bad Guys we located in a palace on the Grand Canal of Venice. The Bad Guy family we modelled on a real family that had been a powerful force in Venice for many generations:  the Cornaro family. For centuries this wealthy family dominated the city state of Venice, commissioning palaces, theaters and other buildings, and contributing members to the political elite.

We saw many palaces as our gondolier sculled us past them, and one in particular popped up when we needed a place for some climactic skullduggery – a five storey building with a curving exterior staircase.

The 'Gitti' Palace in Venice

This gave us our setting: a dark night during the famous Carnival of Venice, a gondola moving soundlessly through the waters of a canal, and the voices of late-night revellers drifting over the lapping water ...

Care to dance The Obelisk Waltz?

Quick: what word comes to mind when I say 'obelisk'? I'll bet it wasn't 'dance'. But in 1881 Cleopatra's Needle was moved from Egypt to the USA by Captain Gorringe, and hundreds of thousands of Americans fell in love with this huge stone pillar. 

The Obelisk Waltz

The stories of the struggles to move it from the desert sands, over the oceans, and into Central Park, enraptured many.

And some found themselves composing songs in honor of the obelisk.

The Obelisk Polka

As a recent book on obelisks describes it:

In an age when domestic music making was one of the most widespread of bourgeois pastimes, the obelisk served as an inspiration for countless bits of sheet music: Mrs. Lou Fitts composed an Obelisk Waltz. There was a Grand Obelisk March and an Obelisk Polka; Florence Hooper Baker dedicated her Obelisk March to Commander Gorringe.

(From: OBELISK – A History by Brian A. Curran, Anthony Grafton, Pamela O. Long and Benjamin Weiss – 2009)

Suddenly obelisks were used to market all kinds of things – hotels, needles and thread, you name it. 

And Captain Gorringe became famous for his steadfastness in overcoming objections to the move and for successfully loading this huge stone object into a ship, unloading it, and erecting it in Central Park.

Where she now stands, a solitary giant far from home, and an unknown stranger to many New Yorkers.

Cleopatra's Needle, Central Park, New York

Cleopatra's Needle in Egypt before its move to New York

The reality kick: A Bride, 28 carloads of Bones & the Pantheon Obelisk

Sometimes reality sneaks up behind you and gives you a kick in the pants when you are writing. You sit waiting for your Muse to gift you a scene, or a character, and nothing happens. Then suddenly a thought swirls in the back of your mind – perhaps a dredged up memory of a vacation or a cup of coffee with someone – and keeps coming back until you just have to deal with it.

And you find that you have the scene or character you were looking for. Thanks, Muse!

Wedding buggy at Pantheon, Rome

A photograph we took of a buggy with a horse in front, waiting patiently while a bride and groom were being married inside the massive Pantheon in Rome, gave us our opening scene for Obelisk Seven. Plus, we felt a little kindred spirit with the bride and groom, because we were married on a beach ... another unusual setting.

This huge temple was built in 27 BC by Agrippa, the son-in-law of Emperor Augustus, whose name is on the facade of the building, and dedicated by him to all the gods (hence the name Pantheon). It was rebuilt in 123 AD by Emperor Hadrian, and much later was converted into a church, because its vault and round shape lent itself to this purpose, by Pope Boniface IV. To consecrate the church, the Pope brought twenty eight carloads of bones of martyrs from the catacombs and placed them beneath the altar.

With a history like that, and an obelisk before it, plus a bride and buggy, we just had to use it to open our book. And so our lead character, Nick, sits in the rain along with the patient  horse, and meets our heroine, Kate.

Audrey Hepburn

Throw in Audrey Hepburn (she starred in Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck in 1953, and ordered champagne at a trattoria close to the one we were sitting at in the Pantheon square during our vacation), and we had the unsual setting we wanted for our first meeting of our heroes.

Why obelisks?

Why on earth do we have obelisks in our thriller? We blame Dan Brown for this. When we finally bought a copy of The Da Vinci Code in the Da Vinci airport in Rome, we took turns reading it. As we wrote in our website, Obelisk Seven:

When we finished it, we talked about how Brown wove interesting facts – the where, the who, the what - into his thriller, and suddenly we both had the same thought: why not use some of our wonderful memories of the cities we had just visited in a thriller of our own?

And so Obelisk Seven was conceived. Two and half years after the conception of that idea, after a lot of research and hard work and tons of sheer fun, our novel was finally born.

Then we had further discussions about what kind of a novel we would write, and how we could do what Dan Brown had done:

We liked the way he slipped little bits of information into the novel, and loved thinking back on the places we had seen which he included in it.

Then it struck us: we had noticed something very interesting in London, Paris and especially in Rome. It seemed that everywhere you walked in Rome you came across huge granite blocks of stone erected in ancient Egypt many
centuries ago. Later we learned that the obelisk pope, Sixtus V, had deliberately restored many of the obelisks in Rome in places where they could be beacons to the many pilgrims coming to the city. As in: Go down this street, turn left at such-and-such an obelisk, then right at the next one, until you come to ...

Could we use these ancient obelisks in a thriller?

So we dived into the history of the obelisks, and found out some fascinating things about who made them, who moved them, and where they now were. Of the 33 remaining obelisks (hundreds were carved out of rock in Egypt since the first one some 4,600 years ago), most are still in Rome.

And there might still be more obelisks buried in that city!

We discovered that the Egyptian name for obelisk is tekhen, which means mystery, and that it was a symbol of life and light. Used as a type of triumphal column, to record the glories of a pharaoh, another thing struck us forcibly about the obelisks when we visited them in London, Paris, Rome and in Egypt: the ones taken from their homeland seemed lonely to us.

Egyptian obelisks were never designed to stand on their own, but were harmoniously integrated into the monuments they graced, and often erected in pairs. These solitary obelisks in the heart of the busiest cities of Europe and America had been wrenched out of their rightful environments, and banished to lonely existences.

We read a description of the obelisk in the heart of London, England, which really caught our fancy. The writer called it a 'solitary heathen stranger' in the city of London. A pretty accurate description, we think.

'Solitary'. Can't argue with that; just take a long, hard look at it on the Thames Embankment. It was designed to be twinned in front of an ancient Egyptian temple, yet there it stands, all alone.

'Heathen'. It belongs to the dim twilight of the human race, as one writer put it. It predates most religions, never mind just Christianity.

'Stranger'. You cannot disagree with that description. Look at it carefully. It does not fit into that wet, grey country. It belongs in a desert, where the sun is worshipped for all the seasons it brings and life it gives.

The gap between the London of today and the temple at Heliopolis which it came from is not just a geographic or time gap - it is a gap between civilizations so far apart that we struggle to bridge the differences in our own minds.

No wonder they intrigue so many people. They are just that - mysterious.

Your Novel & Your Elevator Speech

As soon as you put pen to paper to write your book – perhaps even sooner – you will run slap into a major problem. How do you describe what your novel  is about when someone asks you?

You will suddenly realize that you desperately need what some of us call your "elevator speech", and others your "logline".

Let's talk about you in an elevator, then move on to Star Trek and how you can use the availability bias to make your elevator speech memorable.

Now imagine that you are in an elevator on the tenth floor when a heavy hitter of a publisher steps into the elevator. The door closes. She notices your manuscript tucked under your arm.

"Your book?" she asks, and you nod, tongue-tied. Beads of sweat spring out on your forehead, and you swallow, trying to lubricate your dry mouth so that you can say something interesting, something arresting, something memorable.

This is your big chance ...

"What is it?" she asks.

You are now one floor further down, and your brain freezes. Your mind goes blank. Bits of static dance where once your neurons danced and made intelligent patterns resulting in interesting things to say.

This is when you really, really need your elevator speech.

The one that pitches your novel to the big-time publisher in the time it takes for the elevator to drop from the tenth floor to the ground level, and she rushes out to her next meeting.

The one that makes her stop, give you her card, and ask you to call her.

On her private number.

And soon. Like that night.

What must your elevator speech contain for you to get  her card when the doors open?
Saved by the Cat?

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat!, comes to our rescue (we met him in this blog post):

"What is it?" is the name of the game. "What is it?" is the movie. A good "What is it?" is the coin of the realm.

So let's start with two of Blake's definitions and then explore the two concepts. His definition of the hook is short and sweet:

Save the Cat!

"It is a simple mental picture that promises fun and gives you enough of a peek into the storyline that you can see the potential."

And he defines the logline this way:

"A logline is a one- or two-sentence description of your movie that tells us what it is."

Another advantage of a good logline is the discipline it exerts on the author, as Blake observes:

"And concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because if you can learn how to tell me "What is it?" better, faster, and with more creativity, you'll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you'll make the story better, too.

Click here to see some other descriptions in our website of the elements of a good elevator speech.

The Da Vinci Hook?

And what hook did Dan Brown use for The Da Vinci Code? The plot of the 450-page novel can be neatly summarised in 44 words, which Brown himself helpfully does on his website:

"A renowned Harvard symbologist is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci's artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the key to one of the greatest mysteries of all time ... and he becomes a hunted man."

The Obelisk Seven Hook ...
And our elevator speech for Obelisk Seven?

What is the link between seven obelisks which are sending out signals, an international television show on global warming, and a new oil-eating microbe which threatens the world’s energy supplies? And who is willing to kill to prevent others finding this link?  

When Nick Kangles, the host of a global warming international television show, microbiologist Kate Stanton and Egyptologist Gliffy discover that an ancient Egyptian obelisk in Rome is sending out mysterious signals, they set out on an increasingly dangerous hunt across Europe, Egypt and America to find the secret of the signals.

Back to Blake, who says that in Hollywood parlance that one sentence, that one line, is called a logline or a one-line. Along with answering "What is it?" each contains certain building blocks that make it a sale.

The first building block of Blake is irony. Why the need for irony? Because that is the hook that often gets your attention.  He gives this example of the logline for Die Hard: A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists.

Another Blake description:

A logline is like the cover of a book; a good one makes you want to open it,  right now, to find out what's inside.

What is the next building block? Blake claims that the logline must provide a compelling mental picture:

"... you must be able to see a whole movie in it... a good logline, once said,  blossoms in your brain."

Blake writes that a good logline, in addition to pulling you in, has to offer the promise of more. Blake advises any writer who is winding up to make his pitch to make sure his audience can hear somewhere in the pitch some version of: "It's about a guy who ..."

"The "who" is our way in. We, the audience, zero in on and project onto the "who" whether its an epic motion picture or a commercial for Tide detergent.  The "who" gives us someone to identify with..."

A good logline "hooks us with someone to identify with as much as something."

What else does a good logline do? Once again, Blake puts his finger on it.

"The logline is your story's code, its DNA, the one constant that has to be true... It is,  in short, the touchstone, both for you the writer and the audience you're selling your movie to... The logline tells the hero's story: Who he is, who he's up against, and what's at stake."

Hooking with the Availability Bias ...
One last note: when making your elevator speech, you should use what psychologists call the availability bias. We can learn a bit about this bias from Leonard Mlodinow.

Just who is Leonard Mlodinow? For starters, he is a physicist and an author. Apart from being a screenwriter for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mlodinow, according to Wikipedia, while a doctoral student, developed a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in  quantum mechanics.

For our purposes we can forget Mlodinow's new perturbation theory and instead turn to his latest book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives in which he writes about how the availability bias distorts our view of the world by distorting our view of past events and our environment.

How can you use the availability bias in your elevator speech?

Pehaps this way. You make your pitch to one or perhaps two people (a potential agent or publisher). That person then has to go back to their firm and tell others about your pitch, and explain why it did or did not grab them.

Mlodinow gives an example of evidence presented to two groups in a mock jury trial, with each group then to pretend to be jurors and to give guilt/innocence ratings. The key finding was that the "side with the more vivid presentation of the evidence always prevailed" and the effect was enhanced when there was a forty-eight-hour delay before rendering the verdict.

The more vivid evidence lingered best in the minds of the "jurors", and was more persuasive.

So if you want the person you are making your elevator speech to to remember it positively, and pass on a positive recommendation to others in his or her firm, then make your pitch vivid.

Vivid lingers. Vivid sells. So use vivid in your elevator speech.

Now, go back to that building, and  ride that elevator up and down until the big-time publisher gets on it again. And this time, hit her with your elevator speech.

And then open your bank account so that you can deposit all your royalties in it ...

In the Beginning: A Da Vinci in Da Vinci

How does one suddenly get struck by the idea of writing a novel? What stars must line up just so, at just such and such a time, for just so long, for this crazy idea to take root in one's mind?

Loraine buying The Da Vinci Code at Da Vinci airport in Rome

For us, the stars lined up the day we settled into our chairs at the Da Vinci Airport in Rome, waiting for the final leg of our holiday tour through Europe.

We had gone on the Trafalgar Tours high speed rail tour from London through the Chunnel to Paris, then snaking through France to Nice, Monte Carlo and on to Venice and Florence.

It ended in Rome.

Our Eurostar steed

We had extended the tour by bookending a few extra days in two of our favourite cities – London and Rome.

Our tour guide was superb – a former lawyer who decided to switch to guiding tourists and indulging in his hobby of painting the magnificent views in the cities he toured, he had a wealth of knowledge about every city we visited and the history of the countries and places. If asked (which we did often) he would dive into all types of topics.

He had studied the tours and figured out exactly how to optimize the time available.

He had us running early in the morning to be the second tour group lined up to explore the Vatican, for example; when we came out, he showed us the huge queue which snaked all down a long, long block. We had avoided wasting hours of idle time because he had studied the logistics of each visit.

We also had local city guides in London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome.

Dan Brown

Now back to the airport.

Loraine glanced at the small bookstore and spotted a copy of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

We laughed, because it seemed that in every big city we went to our guides would end up quoting from this novel, using it as a kind of guide book. The bishop was killed on the second floor of the left building, one would say, and we would all crane our heads to see where Dan Brown had offed the  man.

We had not yet read The Da Vinci Code, but Loraine noticed in the newspaper she was reading that the Pope had once again condemned the book.

On the spur of the moment she bought a copy, and immersed herself in it on the plane going home, handing it to me when she finished it.

We sat down one morning on our terrace, nursing a cup of steaming coffee, and talked about the many photographs we had taken on our trip. Dan Brown's book came up. We both agreed that it was not the greatest writing we had ever read, but he had a hook – the wrapping of cities around his plot. Memories of the tour guides using it as part of their schtick came roaring back.

We can do what he did – wrap a thriller around a guide book - Loraine said off handedly, and the idea was born.

Diving Crow

Gayer-Anderson Cat