When an author rears his or her ugly head...

I was recently reading a novel where a very well-known author’s political leanings suddenly intruded into the story. It was all handled very smoothly and might have even gotten by me were I not in “writing mode”, working on something myself, a time when my antennae are more attuned to what I’m reading than is normally the case.

It got me thinking: is it ever all right for an author to intrude on his/her story line?

I’ve certainly tried hard not to do that, but this particular case seemed egregious, ultimately. It had nothing to do with the plot. However, the passage was quite entertaining and relieved the pressure that had been building up in the story. (That’s something else for a later discussion: when the author ratchets up the tension too early on and then doesn’t relieve it somehow.)

I can understand why the passage was allowed to remain and I’m sure that it was questioned by the editor (or should have been). Yes, it was a bit indulgent, but like I said, it did serve some purpose in the story. By the way, in this case, it clearly showed the political leanings of the author.

We all do intrude into our stories, though. It’s unavoidable. Little bits of us inhabit nearly every character, inform the actions and reactions to things and situations. How many times have you been told, “I can so clearly hear your voice in your stories”? Or how many times have you told an author that? I admit I have.

But how much should you intrude?

Guest blogger Lise McClendon

Lise McClendon's eighth book (wow), Blackbird Fly, has just hit the bookshelves, and I can't wait to read it. She's also an active member of MWA, having served on the board, Sisters In Crime, and the International Association of Crime Writers. Lise has a wealth of knowledge about the publishing industry and the book biz. Thanks, Lise, for contributing today!

Guest blogger Lise McClendon

Summer is for getting your (oh-so-tanned) arms around the story.

I envy people who can work all year round, whatever the weather. For me, winter is the time to write, to sit inside and tell myself stories. But the story I tell depends on how I spend my summer brainstorming. As writers the imagination, or that damn voice inside your head -- whatever you call it -- works all the time, while we're weeding the garden, driving the car, or taking a walk in the sunshine. Can we call this work? Some would scoff but it seems necessary, this thinking time. And doing it outside in the summer is fine with me. I live in the Rocky Mountains where summer is a scarce commodity. (This year it just arrived!)

But it can't all stay in my head. I have to write stuff down like everybody else. This year I'm trying some new tricks gleaned from writers more organized than I am. At the beginning of the year I started my annual writing journal in a file on my computer. I pumped myself up, wrote down ideas for characters and plots, zoomed around the internet cutting and pasting research and background stuff. I bought lovely but basic spiral notebooks from Clairefontaine with thick, smooth paper. I downloaded a couple outlining programs, Inspiration and Tinderbox, as trials. I have yet to get organized enough to actually make an outlining program work for me but I like the idea. (Maybe in the fall...) The computer writing journal has gone a bit fallow after I started writing in the spiral notebooks. I have been filling them up with ideas, notes for things to research, bits of scenes, and character sketches. I have no idea why the spiral notebooks from the Dollar Store aren't as inspiring. Maybe it's the French thing? I am a serious Francophile, as you can figure from my new book, set in the Dordogne. All I know is the paper quality is on a level rarely found in Staples.

Another author, Jeff Abbott, wrote about these notebooks and how writing longhand makes him slow down and think more. It seems to be true. I am such a fast typist after all these years that I can almost type as fast as I think and often run out of things to say. Writing longhand lets my brain whirl a bit. (Hey -- Pun alert -- put in some peas and I'll have whirled peas.) My brain is a whirler. It is not methodical and logical, at least in this stage of writing. It leaps from thought to thought, ADD-like, from what-if to how-about. It knows no mistress.

In other words, it's a mess. But writing ideas down straightens the mess out, makes it logical, makes me see the patterns in the chaos. Writing a novel is basically an organizational chore, getting the first-second-third parts, weaving in patterns to richen the texture, finding the pace that works, cutting out the dull stuff, and seizing the right bit of background that makes a character come alive.

For my new novel of suspense, Blackbird Fly, I rewrote the book so many times I've forgotten all the organizational struggles. But starting a new novel, fresh and summery as a bouquet, is exciting. All these new what-ifs! At least it's exciting while I'm still whirling about it. Ask me again in January.

Oh, the Suspense!

Donis writing today. I am in the process of finishing the first 100 pages of a new book for my editor’s approval.  When I’m really in the zone, in the midst of a scene, I’ve been known to leap up from the computer and begin pacing the floor, unaware of my surroundings, muttering dialog to myself.  I imagine that to an observer I look like a hands-free cell-phone user.  Except there’s not a person on the other end - there’s another world.

I sometimes have to figure out how I’m going to pull off a particular scene I have in mind.  I know what I would like the reader to see in her head, what emotions or feelings I’d like to convey, but what is the most effective way to paint that picture, to evoke those feelings?  If I write the scene in two or three different ways, I’ll often be able to come up with the right combination of images, but occasionally, I’ll realize that I don’t quite have it.

That’s when I go hunting.  If I need more suspense, for example, I pick out several works - literature or movies - that made me tense, and try to pick apart how it was done.

I’m always looking for effective ways to building suspense.  In the course of writing several books, I’ve seen and read all the classic suspense-building techniques in action, and keep a list of examples, not only to remind myself, but to use as a teaching tool as well.

A refresher never goes amiss, Dear Reader.  And if you have other examples, I’m all eyes.

The Ticking Clock : Our hero must accomplish something before a horrible thing happens.  Diffuse the bomb!  Find out who really did it before the wrong man is hanged!  Great example, the movie D.O.A. (the 1950 original with Edmond O’Brien is better than the 1988 Dennis Quaid version.)

Drag Out the Action : Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? But if you just know the trap is going to spring, and it doesn’t ... doesn’t...doesn’t...  The anticipation is killing me! The trick here is timing.  Great example, Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble.

Add More Peril : Our heroine is running through the jungle and the Columbian drug suppliers are right behind her, brandishing their machetes.  She crashes through the brush, and finds herself on the edge of a cliff!  There is a river at the bottom of the gorge, so she takes a leap, just feeling the breeze as a blade slashes over her head.  She falls 75 feet into the river and realizes it’s infested with piranas! She swims like the dickens, piranas nipping at her heals, and as she nears the shore, 40 tribesmen with poisoned dart blowguns step out from the trees...   No matter how bad it is, it can always be worse.  Great example, any of the Die Hard movies. 

I Know Something You Don’t Know : We’ve seen the villain hide under the stairs, but the hero has no idea as he walks down into the dark basement.  The author gives us a piece of information that the characters don’t have.  Great example, Louise Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

The Cliffhanger : Remember the villain under the stairs?  He leaps out!  He grabs the hero around the neck!  He pulls a knife!  Meanwhile, back at the ranch...  Great example, Hour of the Hunter by J.A. Jance.

My Hands Are Tied : Our hero can see disaster about to happen, but is powerless to stop it.  Greatest example of all time, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. 

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back : The sleuth is investigating Laura’s murder.  He cannot discover a single clue to her death.  Everyone loved her! She was wonderful and squeaky clean.  He’s baffled, and sits in her apartment long into the night, pondering.  At midnight, the front door opens, and ... it’s Laura!  She’s alive!  Then who is the woman who was found lying on the floor of Laura’s apartment, wearing her clothes, shot in the face with a shotgun?  Ultimate example, the 1944 movie Laura.     

And one of my favorites, 

Foreshadowing : This takes some skill to pull off well.  Two guys are sitting around discussing the possibility of some nefarious occurrence.  “Oh, that’ll never happen,” says one.  Want to bet?  If the author has set it up well, we now spend two hundred pages waiting with baited breath for it to happen. Excellent example, Robert McCammon’s Queen of Bedlam.  What a set up!

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Take a trip over to www.fatalfoodies.blogspot.com today and check out Vicki Delany's guest entry.  How is it she can cook, but her characters can't?  I don't know.  I have the opposite problem.

Talking to myself

Charles here, posting a tad late today but that’s only because I wanted to build the suspense.

Interesting stuff being posted on dialog. I’ve always considered dialog to be one of my strengths, and if the critics are to be believed, dialog may be the best part of my books. Part of that comes from years of eavesdropping, but more comes from my near-constant need to create dialog in my head. I’m not kidding here – and I may need professional help – but I spend way too much time creating imaginary conversations, most of which I’m not even in.

Just ask Rose. She’ll tell you that one of my favorite things to do on long rides is to hold Kiwanis Club meetings as I drive. Out loud. Now I’m not a member of the Kiwanis or any other similar organization, and other than a few speaking engagements over the years, I’ve never been at that kind of meeting, but that doesn’t stop me from holding a meeting anyway. If you were to be sitting in the back seat, you’d hear something like this:

“Gentlemen, if you’ll take a seat…guys?...Jerry, if you’d help get folks movin’ in. Thanks. Good to see you Bill. How’s your son doing? Glad to hear it. Tell him I said hi….Okay, almost set here? Good. Howard, if you’d call the meeting to order…”
“The July tenth meeting of Kiwanis Club number 467 will come to order. All rise for the pledge…”
[Here I’d recite the US Pledge of Allegiance. If we’re driving in Canada, I’d sing O Canada]
“Thank you, Howard. Alright then, lets start with a reading of the minutes. Steve, you ready.”
“Ready and willing. The last meeting we had was on June twenty-third. Now, we were supposed to meet last week, but as Dave will be telling us later tonight there was a bit of a, uh, water situation in the building.”
“A bit? Try a flood.”
“Okay, Noah…by the way, thanks for loaning us that generator.”

Now is this good stuff? Hell, no. Is it painfully annoying to sit and listen to? You bet! But just doing it – making it all up as I go for no reason or purpose, keeping it going until Rose finally cracks (usually about the eight minute mark, although once she waited out a whole meeting, just to show off her superhuman powers) – has helped me hone my dialog skills and ‘voices’ I need to tell a story.

I know this sounds/is crazy, but it’s a technique I honestly use. And this weekend, as we drive down to a B&B in the Finger Lakes, I’ll be hosting another meeting. Unless there is a motion from the floor to bring a quick end on account of the fact that Rose will kill me in my sleep if I don’t.

Thoughts? (Not on my sanity, on the technique.)

“Dialogue attribution,” he said, nervously and eagerly and in a manner that ruined the author’s scene, “is very important.”

A few weeks back, Vicki wrote a terrific blog that still has me thinking titled “Stop That! She Said Angrily.” In this column, she pointed out some pitfalls of dialogue. I’d like to revisit the topic and to begin with a disclaimer of sorts: You may think you are the only one writing your books, but here I will argue that your readers write your stories along with you—and that you need to consider that when scripting dialogue.

First, let’s define dialogue in a way that helps fiction writers: It’s the verbal and non-verbal language used by the author to convey a scene in which a conversation takes place. A line in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” speaks to this. You all know the story. A man and women are discussing abortion. The dialogue establishes the story’s tension and continuously amps it up:

“It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said. “It's not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on.
“I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.”

The non-verbal line is very simple: The girl looked at the ground the table legs rested on. That’s it, but the sentence conveys a great deal of information. Of course, we know what she is doing physically. But we also know what she is like. She is in deep contemplation here, considering her plight, their future, and possibly even feeling guilty, which would open up all kinds of characterization possibilities (does she hold religious belief? etc). And we know what the man is doing—based on Jig’s non-verbal communication, on her reaction to his statement. The man has to be staring straight at her, waiting intently for her answer, which comes much later in the text. Thus, Jig’s physical action becomes non-verbal dialogue here. It is non-spoken communication that actually propels the scene forward.

Surely there is no need for the dreaded ly adverb here. Imagine how the scene would read if Hemingway had written:
“It's really an awfully simple operation, Jig,” the man said urgently. “It's not really an operation at all.”
The girl looked down.
“I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in.”

Only two changes, but the scene is very different, not nearly as unique. It is also not nearly as effective for one simple reason: The author doesn’t allow the reader to play an active role in the scene. Every reader wants to get lost in the scene. Stephen King calls this “the magic” of fiction, that space between the first page of a book and the last when a reader is so lost in the story that the work is not fiction, it is not text on a page, it is simply a place in the reader’s imagination where she has gone unaware that a book is in her hands, that an author has taken her there.

In my Hemingway revision (imagine being able to say that!) the reader has lost that. The writer is now telling the reader what to think. With “urgently,” I might as well have written THIS IS YOUR AUTHOR SPEAKING FROM THE FLIGHT DECK. THIS LINE IS OF GREAT IMPORTANCE! No way anyone is missing the author here. And anyone who was lost in my story has been awoken from their enjoyable trance with the subtlety of a tree crashing through their bedroom window. To continue, my insertion of “The girl looked down” drains the characterization from the scene. Readers learn nothing of Jig. Now her actions are not unique. They are entirely expected. In short, readers are given no hint that will lead them to a realization about Jig. She is just looking down. Is she thoughtful? I don’t know. Maybe there’s an ant on the floor. The bottom line is that “the magic” is gone. No one is lost in my story.

Vicki put this best when she wrote, “If you can’t tell by the dialogue that the speaker is angry or cross or suspicious or cool, or in a hurry, then there is something wrong with the dialogue.” I would add only that you also use the surrounding actions—the non-verbal dialogue, if you will—to let your readers develop your characters and to allow them to play an active role in the scene.

Writers Conferences

I’m sitting at my desktop computer in the office I finally have (mostly) to myself, after writing at least three novels on a computer desk in our bedroom. What a mess that was. I should have been in a closet. And what a luxury to now have a spot of my own, though other members of the family “borrow” it from time to time.

This week, I’ve been ruminating about the writers’ conference I just attended in Jackson Hole. As you know, there are all kinds of writers’ conferences. Jackson Hole is one of the smaller ones. Tim Sandlin, screenwriter, novelist, terrific human being, and director of the JHWC, keeps it on the smallish side (150 attendees plus faculty). That way, all visiting faculty are approachable to attendees. In fact, there are cocktail parties and barbecues where everyone mingles, yaks, and compares writerly experiences.

Tim does an excellent job of rounding up notable authors of fiction and nonfiction, young and hungry New York agents, and grounded and instructive editors from well-known publishing houses. This year, for example, Julia Glass was a keynote fiction speaker. As you may remember, she won a National Book Award for Three Junes. She is approachable, articulate, and kind. In fact, Tim insists he requires nice over notable when he invites authors as faculty.

There are also one-on-one manuscript reviews with a published author, which cost an additional $30 for a short review (20+ minutes; I never can finish critiquing in 20 min), and $90 for an hour critique. Contrast this with the Hawaii Writers Conference, which charges $1195 for their Writers Retreat. Granted, this is 6 days with a published author, but it’s a group session.

There’s something for everyone, and I believe a good conference can be inspirational. I came home from Jackson Hole with lots of ideas on how to write better, which is one of my big goals right now (faster, too).

Some conferences are fan-based. For fan-based mystery conferences, I think of Malice Domestic, Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime, and the upcoming Poisoned Pen Webcon (online, at http://www.ppwebcon.com/ ). Two good instructional mystery conferences are BookPassage, http://www.bookpassage.com/content.php?id=44 and the new Midwest Mystery Fest, (http://www.sincstl.org/).

Anyone have any other suggestions?

Where do you like to write?

When summer weather finally arrives (and it was really late this year up here in Ontario), most of us like to move outdoors as much as possible. After all, there really aren’t enough days to take advantage of enjoying life al fresco.

As writers, we’re often chained to our computers in a cold, dark garret, but why put up with that when the weather is glorious? Since I’m a “power computer user”, I don’t have the luxury of a laptop, much as I’d like to have one. My wife has one, though, and if I can pry it out of her grasping hands, there is nothing more luxurious than sitting outside by the water garden, listening to the sound of our little waterfall, birds — and all the emergency vehicles and buses careening up and down the nearby north/south street — those last sounds I try to filter out — as I type away merrily.

All this brings me to a question: where do TypeM readers like to do their writing? I’m sure some need the quiet and minimal distractiveness* of their cold, dark garret, but I’m equally certain that others often go walkabout when the writing bug bites and you find yourself with a few hours to indulge your passion — or do your work if one of those very fortunate full-timers.

Our family used to go out camping when the boys were younger, often to Flowerpot Island just off the tip of the Bruce Peninsula in Lake Huron. Not only is there no power, but once the tour boats stop running at night, you’re out there alone (along with anyone on one of the five other campsites).

It was there I discovered the joy of writing fiction in longhand. When breakfast was done and cleaned up, I’d go off someplace comfortable, quite often using a bench down near the boat dock, and work for several, exceptionally enjoyable hours while my wife read and the kids swam, caught crayfish and minnows or observed the snakes that sun themselves on larger rocks just off the cobble beach. Nobody would even miss me and I could escape to fictionland for a few blessed hours, writing about murder and mayhem in the music world. Ah! The pure indulgence of it was bliss.

So, where do you folks like to indulge your writing passion when summer (or any season) unlocks the shackles, binding you to your lonely, little desk?

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*This distinctive new word is Copyright 2009 by Rick Blechta. All rights reserved. Please contact the copyright owner for unique licensing opportunities that are now available.