Short Stories to Novels

This is my first full summer as a Michigan resident. The weather, excluding some air-quality concerns, has been excellent –– unlike everywhere else, it seems. The sun doesn’t set until 9:30 each day, at the tail end of the Eastern Time Zone. We are having a great time exploring downtown Detroit and all that the region has to offer. And work is slower without students in the building, so I've been bringing the dog to work. 

On the writing front, I finished a novel that I hope kicks off a new series. My agent is currently shopping it. While I wait to hear, like Sybil, I’ve been working on short stories. One is under review, the other is based on my outline and notes for what would be the second novel in the new series (yes, I’m a serial optimist). 

I like writing short stories based (pretty loosely) on an idea I have for a novel. It’s a nice way to try out the plot, work with the characters, and see what sidelines I want to expand in the book version. I got the idea when I read “Sadie When She Died,” by Ed McBain, (a short story I love) and found that McBain must have loved it, too, because he later turned it into a novel. I did this first with “Autumn’s Crossing,” which appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and later led to Bitter Crossing. The endings aren’t the same –– something I find that happens often; short stories can be open-ended, even in our genre, and I’m a sucker for a good open-ended finish. But the characters are the same, and I learn a lot about them as I work with them, which saves me (some) revision later when I write the book version.

It’s all about process, and in this fickle business, you need to enjoy the process, as Tom wrote about recently. 

I’d love to hear from our readers who likewise bridge short fiction with novels.

So much to digest

There has been so much to digest this week. The news cycle nearly forgot COVID-19, as the death toll topped 100,000 Americans, and swung to nationwide protests in the wake of the horrific killing of George Floyd.

On Monday evening, I, along with the rest of the nation, watched the president use military force to clear a path through protesters so he could have his picture taken in front of a church. He was holding a Bible as the armed military members stood at the ready.

As a privileged white man, I don’t pretend to understand the emotions my Black friends and colleagues feel this week. I am not teaching right now, so I’m not working to help students process images seen on TV or the words they hear coming from home. My work at present is primarily as a father: in conversations about systemic racism, about the anger spilling into the streets in nonviolent and violent protests borne in the deep and dark waters of slavery, about the ways we, as a white family in this particular nation, have benefitted from a financial system built on oppression and designed to allow us, above others, to own property, and about how owning property alone creates opportunities for things like college loans. Admittedly, this effort on the homefront is not much, certainly not enough.

If you are looking for a compelling read about race and its relationship to the American police forces, check out Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me.

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When scenes like the one I saw on CNN Monday evening elevate my blood pressure and these next five months loom large, I, like probably many who turn to this blog do, turn to the blank screen –– and write.

I have a manuscript with my agent, so I’m playing the waiting game. Meanwhile, I’m writing a short story with the idea of using it as the frame for the sequel to the novel my agent has. I got the idea by reading Ed McBain’s story “Sadie When She Died” and then the novel by the same title. The story is wonderful. McBain liked it so much he turned it into a novel. I did this with the first Peyton Cote novel, Bitter Crossing.

Using the short story form allows one to take a plot and try it out. To see where it falls flat, see where, if you had another 90,000 words, you could expand it with additional storylines, characters, suspects, and complications.

Writing a story is good practice. I’m keeping a careful eye on my word count. There are no extraneous scenes. No fluff. Hemingway said fiction writing was architecture, not interior design. Nowhere in fiction writing is that more true.

It hasn’t been a good week, but I am hopeful that change is coming.

Be well, be safe.

In Medias Res

Some recent excellent posts, including “Plotting, Plotting,” by Vicki, have me thinking about that timeless phrase in medias res.

I’ve been considering launch points –– of scenes, of novels –– simply where to begin. I like dialogue –– like to read it, love to write it. In many ways, I think we often know people best by what they say. In terms of plotting and moving a narrative forward, I buy into Elmore Leonard’s great line, Skip the stuff no one reads, entirely, and so dialogue is my bread and butter.

I’ve been reading TV scripts of late and have been observing where the scenes begin, the launch points. The audience enters most scenes mid-stride, mid-conversation, which, for me, is both fun and useful because I’m consistently launching in the middle, starting a scene with someone speaking. No preamble necessary. The stage (setting) has literally been set visually.

How does this translate to fiction? And therein lies the rub. After all, how much in media res is too much in medias res? Tom Wolff begins The Bonfire of the Vanities with straight dialogue. We have no idea where the scene is set until half a page into the scene, but the tension is captivating and Wolff, like Ed McBain, accomplishes so much with how people speak that we almost know the setting by the way people talk. But consider this opening by James Lee Burke of Last Car to Elysian Fields:

The first week after Labor Day, after a summer of hot winds and drought that left the cane fields dust blown and spiderwebbed with cracks, rain showers once again danced across the wetlands, the temperature dropped twenty degrees, and the sky turned a hard flawless blue of an inverted ceramic bowl. In the evenings I sat on the back steps of a rented shotgun house on Bayou Teche and watched boats passing in the twilight and listened to the Sunset Limited blowing down the line. Just as the light went out of the sky, the moon would rise like an orange planet above the oaks that covered my rented backyard, then I would go inside and fix supper for myself and eat alone at the kitchen table.

Stunning imagery. Burke’s lyrical voice shines through. And more importantly, Robicheaux’s latest internal crisis is hinted at. He is, after all, eating alone. The tone is ominous. We sense that we are starting after the fact. I want to keep reading to see what I’ve missed.

Where and how to begin? In medias res can have many different looks and take many different forms. And the beginning of a story is different than the beginning of a scene. Billy Collins says stepping from a poem’s title to the first line is like stepping from the dock into the canoe, which lets us know how tenuous launch points can be.

In Medias Res. So many choices.

CWA Daggers Dinner

I'm just back from the Daggers Dinner, the big event of the Crime Writers Association year when the celebrated Daggers are awarded for the best crime in a range of categories – historical, thriller, non-fiction, international, debut, short story – and then the Gold Dagger for the best crime book overall.
This year the winner was  Jane Harper for The Dry, published by Little Brown.

But the highest honour of all is the famous Diamond Dagger, presented for a career of ‘sustained excellence’ in writing crime and it is, of course, the most coveted. The first winner, in 1986, was Elmore Leonard and he has been followed by writers such as PD James, Eric Ambler, Ruth Rendell, Ed MacBain and more recently Lee Child and Peter James. It's a beautiful trophy, designed originally by Cartier.

This year's worthy winner was Ann Cleeves. Her two series, one set in Shetland and featuring Jimmy Perez, and the other set in the north of England and featuring Vera Stanhope, are hugely popular on TV as well as on the printed page.

The occasion itself was very stylish. Two hundred and fifty guests gathered in one of London's hotels – authors, publishers, agents, journalists, publicists – for fizz, a dinner and an excellent, entertaining and very self-deprecating speech by the man who wrote Death in Paradise. I don't know if you get it in America and Canada but it's a delightful, tongue-in-cheek TV series where an old-fashioned British detective, who still believes in gathering all the suspects together at the end for the denouement, finds himself in a tropical island where the police service isn't run in quite the same way as it is here in Britain. I'm addicted to it for Sunday evening viewing.

I've never been in the happy position of being on a Dagger shortlist – or is it unhappy? Getting the award is obviously wonderful, but oh dear, the nerves before the envelope is opened and the horrible necessity of appearing a good sport afterwards when it's not your name that comes out must make it a miserable evening.

So much for fame and glory! The rest of us could just raise our glasses to the winners and enjoy the evening.