More on Plotters versus Pantsers

I thoroughly enjoyed Warren Easley’s guest blog about outliners versus pantsers.

Full disclosure, my wife and I had dinner with Warren and his wife, Marge, in Arizona while we were at the Poisoned Pen Press/SoHo Press Mystery conference last September.  They’re delightful people and Warren is an outstanding writer.

His blog made me evaluate what kind of writer I am…a planner or someone who flies by the seat of his pants.  I think I’m a little of both.

When I start a book, I try to write a slam-bang, grab em’ by the throat first chapter.  I don’t have a clue what the book will be about or who the bad guy is.  I will work on that first chapter over and over and over.  In my newest book, Graveyard Bay, I wrote the first chapter easily fifty times until I found what I was looking for.

Graveyard Bay was my biggest challenge so far.  My second Geneva Chase mystery, Darkness Lane, ended on a bit of a cliffhanger.  Geneva’s been entrusted with a notebook that incriminates nefarious Russian mobsters.  The third book had to be a complicated chess game on how that notebook both helps her and puts her in terrifying danger.

Another disclosure, the ARCs for Graveyard Bay are out.  This is the part that makes me really nervous.  That means the book is out for review. Fingers crossed. Oh, and the book launches September 10.

Once the first chapter is done, I move on to the second chapter, and then the one after that.

At some point, however, I have to write down the characters and what I think they’re up to.  There are blind alleys, twists, turns, plot threads that will have to be accounted for.

But even at that, the book is a journey for me.  As such, some of the plot twists and character dialogue is unexpected. I like that writing a novel is as much an adventure for me as I hope it will be when someone reads it.

In his book On Writing, Stephen King argues that he can tell whether or not a book was written using an outline. He thinks such books feel somehow "staler" than books that are written the "true way," which is by the seat of your pants, never knowing what will happen next.

William Blundell in his book The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, he said, “I’m a strong opponent of outlining.  It’s deciding in advance what the story will be, and then just bolting the whole thing together like something out of a hardware store.”

Ray Bradbury said, “First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.”

So, as I await the September launch of Graveyard Bay and I prepare for Thrillerfest in just a couple of weeks, I’ve gotten the green light by my editor to continue working on Shadow Hill after she’s looked over the first hundred pages.

I’m twelve chapters along and, yes, I’m already taking notes of the untied threads I’ve left and blind alleys that Geneva is going to have to explore before I figure out who the heck the bad guy or gal might be.  www.thomaskiesauthor.com

How Much Violence?

We live in a violent world.  In books, movies, television shows, video games…the news.

Recently, there was a mass shooting at UNC Chapel Hill.  Two people were killed.

The mass shootings over the last few years have been horrific.  58 killed in Las Vegas in 2017.  49 killed in the Pulse nightclub in Florida.  32 killed at Virginia Tech in 2007.  That doesn't even count the terrible shootings in our high schools and and elementary schools.  I was ashamed that when I heard the body count at Chapel Hill, I almost felt a sense of relief that it wasn't higher.  That's just wrong.

The world is awash in violence, either man-made or from natural causes.  Wars, fires, famine, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes.

So, why do we enjoy reading mysteries?  They're inherently violent.  In almost all mysteries, someone dies. But the beautiful thing about a novel, generally speaking, justice is exacted by the conclusion.  The bad guys (or ladies) are uncovered and arrested or otherwise dispatched.

How much violence is too much?  It depends on the writer and it depends on the audience.

Late last year, I read Hank Phillippi Ryan’s mystery, Trust Me.  Death definitely has a seat on this bus, but her book is far from being violent.  It’s a excellent psychological thriller. It quietly pulls you along with enough twists and turns to keep you guessing and on the edge of your seat.  The gore level is very low and the storytelling is topnotch.

At about the same time, I read Stephen Mack Jones’ first book, August Snow. Full disclosure, I liked it so much, I’m currently reading his second novel, Lives Laid Away.  The violence level is stepped up, but you’d expect as much when your protagonist is a retired Marine and an ex-cop. There are going to be fist fights and gun play and Jones makes it work without making it cringe-worthy. You genuinely like the characters and hope they live through their violent travails.

On the other end of the spectrum is Don Winslow’s new book, The Border.  At slightly more than 700 pages, it’s on a scale with Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. This book is raw, gritty, and very, very violent. But it’s about drug cartels, addicts, DEA agents, Mexican Federales, and dirty politicians. Is it for everyone?  Of course not.  Personally, I loved it.  Couldn't put it down.

My own Geneva Chase series has been described as dark and sinister.  But most of the violence in my novels takes place off the set.  You don’t actually see the violence, but you witness the aftermath and the ramifications.  And make no mistake, there will be at least one life or death struggle.

These are my personal rules on violence:

It can’t be gratuitous.  There must be a point to it.  That act of violence has to move the narrative forward or bring the story to its conclusion.

Limited gore. There should be enough to make it real, but don’t make it gore porn.

Don’t glorify violence.  Show it for what it is—ugly and scary.

Show the ramifications.  In Darkness Lane, Geneva Chase has discovered the body of a murdered man.  He’d been tortured and beaten to death.  The scene so rattled her that it keeps popping up in her head.  She keeps thinking, "His head was bashed in."  Over and over. Something akin to PTSD.

I’m fussy about the body count.  If I want to see a massive loss of life, I’ll watch Game of Thrones.

Speaking about violence, I’m glued to the television as the last episodes of Game of Thrones play out.  I love the series because of the character development and byzantine plot lines and no one is safe.

But it’s not for everyone, Cindy, my wife, won’t watch it because, in the very first episode, someone kills a dire wolf. Cindy saw that and she was out of the room.

Oh yes, one last Thomas Kies rule on violence.  It was the subject of an earlier blog.  Never hurt a dog.

Stress

Henry James said that plot is characters under stress.

When I began working on my second Geneva Chase novel, Darkness Lane, I sent the first hundred pages to my editor at Poisoned Pen Press. In it, Geneva is sober, cooking meals for her and Caroline (Geneva’s ward) in their warm, cozy kitchen, and she’s sworn off married men.

In the first chapter, I wrote about an abused woman who waits until her drunken husband has fallen asleep and then covers him with gasoline and lights a match. By the time the police arrive, the fire department is vainly trying to put out the blaze and the husband is long past screaming.

The cops find the woman standing on the curb with a plastic cup filled with Merlot. She looks at the officers and says, “I’m just toasting my husband.”

A page later, we find that a fifteen-year-old high school girl has gone missing. She happens to be Caroline’s best friend.

A good start? I thought so.

My editor, in her diplomatic but honest way, sent back a critique essentially saying that she could see how I was putting the puzzle pieces in place, but Geneva, my protagonist, was too suburban.

Oh my, God, I’d made her boring!

My editor went on to say, she hoped that the part of the abused woman torching her husband wasn’t being used as a ‘billboard’, a ruse to bring the reader into the story but once you’ve past it, no longer is part of the narrative.

Oh my, God. It was!

Finally, my editor said that in the first hundred pages…NOTHING HAPPENS!

Oh, my God. She’s right!

Two weeks later, I’d rewritten that first hundred pages. After review, my editor came back and told me that the first hundred pages are dark and it feels like everything is right on the edge of disaster. Keep writing.

Whew!

I put the characters under stress. I made the abused woman a secondary plot line, something that would merge with the disappearance of the high school girl. I brought in two characters from an earlier book I’d written but was never published, bad guys—really bad guys.

Geneva had to have it coming from all sides. Teenage Caroline became a pain in the ass. The publisher of the failing newspaper where Geneva is working is threatening to sell the publication to a media conglomerate, screwing his employees into the ground. A teacher at Caroline’s school disappears at the same time the high school student has gone missing. Geneva discovers the body of the student’s father, brutally murdered.

Geneva starts drinking again.

Characters under stress.

Australian writer, Ian Irvine said, “Conflict forces characters to act in ways that reveal who they are – and nothing tells us more about characters than how they deal with their troubles.”

He goes on to say, “Stories are about adversity. Happiness can be the ending of the story, but it can’t be the story itself. Why not? Because happy characters don’t want to change. Happiness doesn’t force the characters to act and thus reveal themselves and, if the characters are having a good time, the reader is not.”

Plus, stress and conflict create plot twists. When I write, at some point, the characters take on their own lives. I’m along for the ride. They seem to create their own dialogue, move through a scene without my guidance. And just like real life, things happen that I didn’t see coming. Some of my best plot twists just seem to have happened on their own.

Crazy? You bet. But aren’t all writers a little nuts?

And because your characters are under stress, it can feel uncomfortable to write the scene. It’s painful, not because it’s bad prose, but because your characters are struggling with the obstacles that YOU’VE given them. They’re your characters. You created them. You’re making them suffer.

Overcoming dire obstacles under stress is what draws the reader into your story, advances your plot, and makes your characters more sympathetic.

Have a great week and I hope to see you at either/or the Poisoned Pen Press Mystery Conference in Phoenix over Labor Day weekend and/or at Bouchercon, September 6-9 in St. Petersburg, FL.

Please welcome Thomas Kies!

by Rick Blechta

Type M for Murder has a new member! We are most pleased to welcome Thomas Kies. Tom will begin work next Monday and alternate weeks with our delightful Aline Templeton. Please be sure to visit on Monday, July 30th to read Tom’s inaugural post!

In the meantime, here’s some biographical information he’s provided.

Thomas Kies

Tom Kies has wanted to be a mystery writer since he was a little boy, cutting his teeth on every John D. MacDonald novel he could get his hands on. But real life got in the way – working for newspapers and magazines for 30 years and raising three children. So his dream of being a novelist took a back seat.

Tom’s current day job is as the President of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce on the beautiful coast of North Carolina. At night and on weekends, he writes about murder. His Geneva Chase series starts with Random Road and six naked bodies found hacked to death on an island. Written from the first person point of view of a female alcoholic reporter, Tom says, “I didn’t start out writing as a woman and, frankly, it’s a challenge. But she’s such a snarky smart ass, she gets to say things I wouldn’t dare and that makes her a hell of a lot of fun.”

His second book in the series, Darkness Lane opens with an abused woman torching her sleeping husband. When the police arrive, she’s drinking wine and watching the firemen vainly attempt to douse the fire. “I’m just toasting my husband,” she says.

Concurrently, a fifteen year-old high school student vanishes. The two plots appear to have nothing to do with each other but as Geneva chases down leads, she finds that they are dangerously related.

Tom’s given workshops for various state writers groups as well as the NC Writers Network Fall Conference. Working on Graveyard Bay, he lives on Bogue Banks, a barrier island with his wife Cindy and Lilly, their shih-tzu.

Thomas Kies, Guest Author

Type M is very pleased to welcome guest author Thomas Kies, author of the Geneva Chase Mystery Series. The first novel in his new series, RANDOM ROAD, introduced Geneva Chase, “a reporter with a compelling voice, a damaged woman who recounts her own bittersweet story as she hunts down clues” to murders straight out of a nightmare—six bodies found naked and cut to ribbons in a posh Connecticut home. Thomas lives and writes on a barrier island on the coast of North Carolina with his wife, Cindy, and Lilly, their Shih-Tzu. He has a long career working for newspapers and magazines, primarily in New England and New York, and is currently working on his next novel, GRAVEYARD BAY.

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How Crazy is Your Research?

From nine until five, Monday through Friday, I’m the President of the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce. We’re right on coast of North Carolina and we’re blessed with beautiful beaches, world class cuisine, and some of the best fishing you’ll ever see. I’m the head cheerleader for one of the nicest places on earth.

Being the head of the Chamber of Commerce comes with a reputation that’s wholesome, upright, and good for the community. Heck, when the sun’s shining, it’s called Chamber of Commerce weather. Who else has their own damned weather?

But on weekends and after work, I think about and write things that are dark and, according to my wife, deeply disturbed. I write mysteries.

That requires certain tidbits of knowledge that others may not have, and certainly nothing that a president of a chamber of commerce should be harboring. For example, in my first mystery, RANDOM ROAD, a swingers’ club figures prominently in the plotline. I’ve lost track of the number of people who’ve read the book and asked me how I know what the inside of one of those clubs looks like. Because I worked in newspapers and magazines for over thirty years, I have the inside dope on a lot of stuff. It doesn’t mean I was a member.

In my second book, DARKNESS LANE, there’s a creepy scene that takes place in an exclusive diamond merchant’s shop. It’s expensive, well-secured, hard to find, and by-appointment only. Yes, that’s based on a real jeweler’s establishment. Full disclosure, in real life, the owner was murdered there.

The theater and haunted mansion scenes in DARKNESS LANE? Based on real locations in Fairfield County, Connecticut where the book takes place. I have pictures on my phone. I can share if you like.

 In the book I’m writing now, GRAVEYARD BAY, there’s a scene from a professional dominatrix’s BDSM dungeon. Have I actually seen one? Oh, yes. Was I a client? Hell, no.

But then there’s the stuff I don’t know or haven’t seen.

Let me digress for a moment. When I attended my first Mystery Writers Conference, there were multiple workshops given by authors, publishers, agents, cops, ex-FBI agents, forensic specialists, and physicians. We discussed everything from how to kill someone, to hiding the body, to what the body would look like after being in the water for a week. Questions were asked and answered. Will someone die after eating ground glass? What is a fatal dosage of Fentanyl? When someone is killed and thrown into the water, how do you keep them from floating to the surface?

If you were someone off the street just wandering into one of those workshops, you’d think you’d stumbled onto a coven of psychopaths. Weird? Certainly. Scary? Maybe. Fun? It is if you’re a mystery aficionado.

So, doing research at home is very similar. If someone were to look at my browsing history on my computer (my home laptop, not my work computer…oh, no—that would be wrong), they’d be tempted to call Homeland Security or the FBI. Let’s take a look at some of the topics I’ve Googled or YouTubed: The Russian Mafia, Los Zetas, M-13, explosives, pill mills, AK rifles, handcuffs, sex trafficking, ice pick murders, samurai sword, killer clowns, theater make-up techniques, Aryan Brotherhood, and hypothermia.

Some of the headlines of articles I’ve downloaded: Garage owner charged with selling drugs. Prominent developer killed by train. Real estate agent charged with home burglary. Florida nanny found dead in woods reportedly tortured before her murder. Body found in floating barrel identified, but name is withheld. Students mine data to find where unfaithful husbands live.

Those are actual headlines!

So, speaking of data mining, you can only imagine what Facebook has on me. And the ads that pop up unbidden on my computer screen? There’s an algorithm working overtime that’s dropping the weirdest advertising possible in my emails and on my newsfeed.

But then there’s the old fashion way of doing your research. This is where you get a feel for a scene or the flavor of the action. Talk to the experts. I have friends in law enforcement that help keep me on track (what happens when someone goes missing?). Some of them are avid readers so I want to get it right. There are doctors (so what does that broken arm look like?) and attorneys (walk me through a plea deal) in my Rotary Club who are fans as well. They don’t mind that I ask them questions, even if their answers never make it into a novel.

I’ve also spent time in police headquarters, hospitals, prison (not much time), and courtrooms. It gives you a chance to see, listen, feel, and smell the scene. I love researching my books.

And while knowing your subject matter is a good thing, Stephen King writes, “You may be entranced with what you’re learning about the flesh-eating bacteria, the sewer system of New York, or the I.Q. of potential collie puts, but your readers are probably going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.”

I try to tell the best story I can, but I also try to make it as realistic as possible. I research some pretty strange stuff…just don’t tell my Chamber of Commerce board of directors.

COMING JUNE 2018! The second book in the Geneva Chase series, DARKNESS LANE, is coming in June 2018! Pre-order now to be the first to read Geneva Chase's latest account.

Visit Tom's website at www.thomaskiesauthor.com