Getting by with a little help from my friends & my murder book

The summer has come and (nearly) gone, as of this writing, and it was a whirlwind. In July, I founded and directed a summer writing institute for teenage writers. Actually, July was the easy part, the culmination of 13 months spent planning, designing, and recruiting both faculty and students, and I have Type M’s Frankie, Tom, and Barbara to thank for serving as three of my seven visiting artists.

So now, as the fall launches a new school year, and I prepare to do it all over again, I’ve also hit the second half of the novel I’m writing. This is where things get hard. I’m 45,000 words in, the story line has taken a rough shape, and it’s time to get serious about plotting and tying up loose ends. It was interesting to hear all three of my Type M friends speak about writing, about plotting in particular. Most are “pantsers,” writing, as they say, “by the seat of their pants,” not knowing where their book will go.

Elmore Leonard said he spent the first hundred papes getting to know the characters. I love writing the first hundred pages. Now, as I approach page two hundred, I recently returned to my personal “murder book,” the notebook where I write character sketches, plot ideas, and questions I have about the manuscript on which I’m working. It’s literally my murder book.

I read again this week (in a Mystery Writers of America publication honoring him) about Jeffrey Deaver’s hundred (or more)-page outlines. I wish –– I REALLY wish –– my brain worked that way. My murder book is as close as I get, and, believe me, I’ve tried to outline. The story, it seems, always has other ideas (or my subconscious does and those only appear when I really turn everything off and sit down at the desk).

The other day, I sat for six hours at a picnic bench in a loud water park as my 12-year-old daughter Keeley and her friend went up and down crazy slides, ball-point pen out, murder book open, and filled seven pages, creating would-be plot points and coming up with what (hopefully) is a surprise ending (one I didn’t see coming when I began the book).

So as I head into the fall, the murder book will remain open, allowing me to finish the work in progress while another year begins, and I get to do it all over again.

What Makes It Worthwhile

 Today I received the first half of my advance for WHISPER ROOM to be published in 2022.  My wife watched as I opened the envelope from my agent and she asked, “Do you think that pays for your time spent working on the manuscript?”

I could see her smile and the mischievous nature of the question in her eyes as she asked it.  After all, I spend the better part of a year producing a novel.

I smiled and replied, “If you use money as the only yardstick to measure by, then no.  There are other forms of compensation, you know.”

She does knows that.  Like today, we’re moving our chamber of commerce office to another location.  The building owner completely renovated to our specifications.  Financially, she made us a deal we couldn’t pass up.  And it has a lovely koi pond, complete lily pads, frogs, and a family of turtles. 

While we were discussing the move, the landlord took me aside and told me she was two chapters into my first book, RANDOM ROAD.  She said, “I love your lead character, Geneva Chase.  She’s such a hot mess.”

Bingo!  That’s what makes it worthwhile. 

When I walk into a bookstore and see it on the shelf, or lately, in Barnes & Noble and see it on a table in the front of the store--my book parked right next to Stephen King’s latest. Yeah, baby!

Or when I see a favorable review online.  Or when I’m out and someone walks up to tell my how much they enjoy my books.  That’s how I measure success.

So, back to WHISPER ROOM.  This past Monday I sent the manuscript to my editor.  This is the scariest part of the process.  I’m freaking terrified that she’ll email me and say, “Nothing personal, but this is crap!”

Oh, let me digress for a moment.  The book’s title is out for testing.  I didn’t even know they did that.  

I’m sorry, back to the WHISPER ROOM.  Waiting for my editor to pass judgement on the manuscript is pure torture.  So, rather than dwell on it, allow me to offer what some other authors have said about the editing process:

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.” — Raymond Chandler.

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” — Saul Bellow.

“Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.” — Samuel Johnson.

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” — Mark Twain.

“Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts. This suggests cutting to speed the pace, and that’s what most of us end up having to do (kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings)…I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: ‘Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.’ — Stephen King.

So, yes, I’ll be patient to see what my editor says, but I think I’ll deposit that advance when the bank opens tomorrow. 

Thou Shalt Dwell

I enjoyed reading Thomas Kies’s post Thou Shalt Hoard Notebooks, partly because I love Stephen King (I’m a Mainer, after all), and partly because Tom got me thinking.

Tom offers Stephen King’s rules of writing, one of which is to take a long break after you’ve finished the draft of a novel and return to it with fresh eyes. This got me thinking about a conversation I had recently with a writer-friend who talked about hitting roadblocks mid-novel and pressing pausing.

She said she gives herself two weeks away from the novel and writes something entirely new, a short story. Once the story is finished, after a couple weeks, she goes back to the book, reads it from the start to the problem area, and usually comes up with a fix. When she leaves the novel, the new project becomes her focus. She doesn’t dwell.

I like to dwell. I’m a good dweller. (Did I just write that sentence?) I think dwelling is productive. My daughter, when she was about 10, came into the office one day and said, “Mom says you’re in here writing. Everytime I come in here, you’re just staring at the wall.”

That’s me writing. I’m a dweller.

Elmore Leonard said somewhere that he wrote the first hundred pages and then figured out where the book was going. I agree, which is probable why I love writing the first hundred pages so much. The path into the forest is never scary. It’s only after you’ve been in there a while and realize you’re lost that fear kicks in.

I’m about 27,000 words into my latest project. I’ve taken breaks to write two academic pieces (both sold, which is nice) and make an hour-long conference presentation for a pedagogy in a virtual setting, which took three weeks to prepare. And I’ve dwelled about the book and where it’s headed. A lot.

Dwelling amounts to note-taking and outlining. Nothing too formal. Asking lots of questions about motivations and why characters are doing what they’re doing and acting the way they’re acting. Plotting out the next five or six scenes.

Dwelling isn’t easy. But it can be useful.

Then She Said...

Since mid-September, I, Donis, have been facilitating a creative writing workshop for emeritus professors at Arizona State University. This is the second time I’ve done this workshop, and it’s been an eye-opener for me. Professors know all about the rules of grammar and spelling and the like, but people who have spent their lives writing scientific treatises and keeping a professional, unbiased distance from the reader have a hard time letting go and putting action and emotion into their writing. Not to say that they don’t have some clever story ideas! Wrangling students for thirty years will give you plenty of material.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been discussing effective ways to write dialog. Hemingway said that dialog is not real speech, it’s the illusion of real speech. I’m sure, Dear Reader, that you’ve read Elmore Leonard’s admonitions that one should try to never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue, or that one should never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”.

On his website, Tim Hallinan suggests that instead, the writer “use body language: Dialogue broken up by description of what characters are doing provides context and also projects an image. When someone other than our protagonist is speaking in a scene, what is our protagonist doing? Are her hands at rest? Does she listen intently? Does she squirm in the chair. Drum her fingers? Twist her hair? We convey a lot without saying a word.”

I like that idea.

For instance:
"Nonsense," Martha interjected, is a perfectly acceptable sentence, but if I were a fly on the wall, I might see what Martha is doing when she says this. One might try something like, Martha straightened, indignant. “Nonsense."

Rather than "Question?" Beth offered, try, Beth held up a finger (or leaned forward, or tapped the table). “Question?"

And rather than "Okay, Beth. Ask it," Joel replied, consider having Joe sigh, roll his eyes, flop back in his chair, then, "Okay, Beth. Ask it."

You can come up with better examples, but you get the picture.

Of course the "rules" are really only suggestions.

As far as the current popular idea in publishing of only using "said"...I use "noted" and "agreed" and "asked" and the like plenty of times myself. But I do think that the take-away points are: 1) don't use descriptors that draw attention to themselves, like, "he asservated", because that puts the author in the picture, and 2) if you can describe the situation, body language, etc., in lieu of a dialog tag, that's the best way to let the reader see what's going on and draw her own conclusions rather than having the author tell her.

Dialog is Tricky

I'm delighted to welcome Doug Lyle to Type M for Murder. D. P. Lyle is the Macavity and Benjamin Franklin Silver Award winning and Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Scribe, Silver Falchion, and USA Best Book Award nominated author of 16 books, both fiction and non-fiction. Along with Jan Burke, he is the co-host of Crime and Science Radio. He has worked with many novelists and with the writers of the TV shows Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women’s Murder Club, The Glades, and Pretty Little Liars.

Website: http://www.dplylemd.com
Blog: http://writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com
Crime & Science Radio: http://www.dplylemd.com/crime--science-radio.html

Dialog Is Tricky by DP Lyle

Dialogue can indeed be tricky. But, it can also do so much for your story. It can bring the reader more deeply into your fictional world, reveal character, move the story forward, expose thematic elements, and create a realism that allows the reader that “willing suspension of disbelief” so essential to effective story telling. That’s a lot of work. And it means getting dialogue right is essential.

One major problem is that it’s far too easy for authors to use their own voice and not that of the character when writing dialog. This is particularly true in first person narrations because the writer often identifies deeply with first person characters. This is fine IF the character is you, or very similar to you. If not, that’s a different story.

This leads to creating characters that “all sound the same.” In reality, good dialog should need no tags as the words and rhythm of the speech should allow the reader to immediately know who is talking. That’s the ideal, the goal. But that’s not as easy to do as it might seem.

So how do you make each important character distinct? It requires living inside that character. Really getting to know them. Understanding how they think, act, and speak. Like making good chili, this takes time. It can’t be rushed.

Think about when you meet a new friend. You know that person on a fairly superficial level, at first, but maybe you later go to lunch together, and then spend more time doing various activities, vacation together, and gradually you become deeper friends. The person you thought you knew back during that first encounter is now someone else altogether. You know how they think, act, and speak. Can even anticipate what they’re going to say and how they’re going to say it. You now know them.

Same is true with fiction.

I, and many others, consider Elmore Leonard the master of dialog. If you haven’t read him and you want to write true dialog, you are shortchanging yourself. Each is a textbook on dialog. Many years ago at the now defunct Maui Writers Conference, I met Elmore and had the great pleasure of sitting and chatting with him for an hour or so on two different occasions. Hours I relish to this day. We talked about writing and story telling. I told him that I loved his characters and asked if he did character sketches or anything like that. He said no but that he would spend weeks, sometimes months, coming up with a name and once he had a name he knew the character. That struck me as pure genius. It was so simple, and so true. What he meant was that he lived with these characters in his head—getting to know them—and once he did, he had a name—and he knew them intimately. He knew who they were, how they would act and think, and how they speak.

This taught me two valuable lessons.

First was the importance of names. A name should reflect the character. Who he or she is. I mean, if you look at some of Leonard’s characters, Chili Palmer is not a neurosurgeon, he’s a loan shark. Linda Moon doesn’t sit on the Supreme Court, she’s a lounge singer.

The second lesson was the need for time to truly know any fictional character. A process that doesn’t happen overnight, in either real life or in the world of fiction.

I have always recommended writing first drafts fast and not sweating the small stuff. Don’t edit heavily until you finish. The reason is that your characters will evolve. The character you knew in Chapter 1 is very different from the one you know by Chapter 50. When you go back and edit, you have a better grasp of how that character acts, thinks, and talks. You will say to yourself, “No, she wouldn’t say that.” Happens all the time. More proof of the writing adage: Writing is rewriting. And this rewriting is often where the characters will distinguish themselves.

So relax, take some time, get to know your little imaginary friends and soon you will instinctively know how they speak.

WHO NEEDS RULES?

“There are three rules for writing a novel," W. Somerset Maugham once quipped. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” Anyone who's set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) knows this to be true. However, that's never stopped members of the literati from offering advice in the form of "rules" to writers of crime fiction.

In 1841, with the publication of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe launched the detective fiction genre and established what is known as "Poe's Five Rules of Detective Fiction":

1. There must be a crime, preferably murder, because it fascinates readers more than any other crime and there appears to be an unlimited number of ways in which people can die.

2. There must be a detective, someone with superior inductive and deductive reasoning, who is capable of solving the crime that baffles the official police system.

3. The police must be seen as either incompetent or as incapable of solving a certain type of complex crime.

4. The reader must be given all the information or "clues" to be able to solve the crime if the "clues" are properly interpreted.

5. The detective must explain who the criminal is and the motive, means, and opportunity by the conclusion of the story.

It's interesting to consider works of crime-fiction, past and present -- both literary and cinematic presentations -- and discover most honor Poe's list, give or take a rule or two. When we think of literary adages that have withstood the test of time, the final lines of Raymond Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder" stands out: "...down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man." You know the passage. You've read it before. You've probably even recited it to someone. I would argue, though, that, given the state of the contemporary crime-fiction novel where sleuths are more diverse and complex than ever, Poe's rules are more relevant than Chandler's musings.

Following Poe, in 1928, S.S. Van Dine offered his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" in the American Magazine. His advice includes, "There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better" (rule 7) and compared the genre to "a sporting event." I can't imagine what Poe would have thought of Van Dine's flippant portrayal of the genre. Several decades later, as part of the New York Times "Writers on Writing" series in 2001, Elmore Leonard wrote "Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle," his own list of ten rules that any writer is smart to follow. Where Van Dine is didactic and antiquated, Leonard is helpful and offers gems for contemplation.

However, for the contemporary writer of crime fiction (and our modern-day readers), Raymond Chandler's "Ten Commandments For the Detective Novel" remain helpful, interesting, and like all of Chandler's work, sparse enough to offer writers room to maneuver within his list and readers leeway to argue for or against the merits of any contemporary favorite.

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law....If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

Like everything Chandler wrote, this list is direct, thoughtful, and provides excellent fodder, most of it pertaining to plot and authorial credibility. Which rules still hold up? Take the last novel you read and see. I'd argue most rules will apply. It's an interesting list to view as an author. Admittedly, I have sinned against some of Chandler's commandments in my own works, but I like to think of Robert B. Parker's Spenser series, which, novel after novel, seems to uphold these "commandments" with the dedication of Mother Teresa.

In the end, what are we to make of lists and rules? Some argue rules only hold a genre back, imposing unnecessary (and/or antiquated) limitations to what the genre can achieve. Parker, after all, insisted he didn't write genre fiction and listed The Great Gatsby as the greatest crime novel. I say that where excellent literary criticism has the power to make a text more accessible for a larger reader base, our genre's lists and rules challenge us (as readers and writers) to examine works more closely while asking our best authors to at once write within these boundaries -- and to also stretch them to new limits.

*Originally appeared in The Strand, May 5, 2016

Point-of-View

I’m knee-deep in my 2016 Peyton Cote novel, tentatively titled Destiny’s Pawn, and the process has me thinking a lot about point-of-view

I started the novel, wrote maybe thirty pages, and immediately decided I needed to use alternating close, third-person points of view. Of course, our single mother / U.S. Border Patrol agent, Peyton, is still front and center, but the spotlight has to hit several other players for the plot to hold up. Tony Hillerman was a master of this, as was Elmore Leonard (see link for an interview with him about point-of-view).

The third person limited point-of-view fits well in crime fiction for a variety of reasons. Among them: it makes it easy for the writer to withhold information. If I’m writing in first person, I have to show my cards all the time – anything Jack Austin, for instance in my other series, knows, the reader also must be told because the book is told in Jack’s first-person voice. In third person, though, I can know things – and other characters can know things – that Peyton doesn’t. Where I ran into problems in Destiny’s Pawn, forcing me to use alternating limited third-person points of view was that things were happening in the Ukraine that were impacting events Peyton deals with in northern Maine. There would, therefore, be no logical way to end the book that offered readers enough information or details to provide a satisfying conclusion.

No one understood point-of-view and its defining elements better than legendary author and teacher John Gardner. Within third person, Gardner defined layers of “psychic distance.” Here is his now-famous chart explaining the range within which an author can maneuver in a close third-person point-of-view.

1. It was the winter of 1853. A large man stepped out of a doorway.
2. Henry J. Warburton had never much cared for snowstorms.
3. Henry J. Warburton hated snowstorms.
4. God, how he hated these damn snowstorms.
5. Snow. Under your collar, down inside your shoes, freezing and plugging your miserable soul.1

Here, you see the camera zoom in until the reader is squarely inside Henry J. Warburton’s head, the pronoun “your,” in the fifth sentence, forcing the issue.

Many writers feel choosing a point-of-view is the most important decision they make when starting a work of fiction. I, for one, am in that camp.

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1Bernays, Anne and Pamela Painter. What If? New York: HarperCollins, 1995: 87.