Writers Are Readers, Right?

 by Thomas Kies

I got a phone call from a man who was referred to me by a friend.  Apparently, they were talking about life insurance.  I know, I know, not the most exciting subject in the world.  But it was during their conversation that the man confessed to my friend that he was interested in writing a book.  Being as I’m the only published novelist my friend knows personally, he naturally gave him my phone number. 

To my friend’s credit, he gave him my OFFICE number and not my personal cellphone.  So good on him.  

To keep anyone from being embarrassed, let’s call the man Charlie.  Charlie called me and politely told me what he would like to talk to me about.  Now, I love to talk about books, writing, and publishing. So, we scheduled a meeting the very next day.

I was happy to spend time with Charlie.  He asked good questions and took copious notes.  We discussed the positives and negatives of traditional publishing, self-publishing, and hybrid publishing. I told him how valuable it is to join a writers’ group and get a beta reader…no, not his wife or any of his children. We talked about how you need a good editor and how you need to sit down and write something every single day.  That’s what writers do. 

I asked him what genre he was interested in.  Charlie told me he wanted to write a thriller. Then I asked him who is your favorite author and what do you like to read?

His answer was, “Well, I’m not much of a reader.”

WHAT?

My question for the audience is, can you be a writer without being a reader?  In my opinion, NO!

Stephen King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all else: read a lot and write a lot.”

If Charlie wants to be a writer of thrillers, he’d be best served by reading thriller novels.  He’d be studying the writers who have made it happen. They’ve not only gotten published, but they managed to get onto best seller lists.  Writers like Lee Child, Brad Thor, Gillian Flynn, Don Winslow, David Baldacci, S.A. Cosby, Stephen Mack Jones, Stieg Larsson, Karin Slaughter, and Thomas Harris, just to name a few. 

It's how you can study plot structure, pacing, grammar, character development as well as a hundred other writing items you should know about if you’re going to try to write a book that someone will want to read. 

To Charlie’s credit, he’s not alone.  I’ve lost count of the people who have taken one of my Creative Writing classes at our local college that have answered that same question, “What do you read and who is your favorite author?”  And their answer has been, “I’m not much of a reader.”

But, on the flip side of that equation, I’ve found that the best writers who have taken my class are indeed dedicated readers.  They not only study the craft and work at it but enjoy reading.  

How can you not?    www.thomaskiesauthor.com

Thomas Turner, Guest Blogger

Please welcome our weekend guest author, Thomas Turner. A native New Englander, Tom ran a bar in Vermont after college, then moved to New York and spent time as an award-winning copywriter at several Manhattan advertising agencies. A few years later he ended up in Palm Beach, buying, renovating and selling houses. On the side, he wrote Palm Beach Nasty (one of my favorite titles of all time), its sequel, Palm Beach Poison, and a screenplay, Underwater. He currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and recently completed his third novel, Killing Time in Charleston. Take it away, Tom.

Sleuthfest is one of the great writers conferences. Held in Deerfield Beach, Florida, I have been to it four times, three as writer wannabe and this past Spring as published author, panelist and moderator. Back in 2008 Lee Child was the what I call the 'headliner,' but maybe that's a little too Vegas-y, so let's just call him, Special Guest of Honor. Lee is not only tremendously articulate and funny, but a very nice, down-to-earth guy. The last night of the conference, there was an auction for naming rights for a character in one of Lee's upcoming novels. The bidding was fast and furious and, in the end, I was the one left with my paddle raised. And now seven years later, Major Susan Turner is a cohort of Jack Reacher, living on in immortality in three of Lee's novels.

With that Sleuthfest history, I drove down to Deerfield Beach, filled with anticipation and eagerness, not to mention a little stage fright--having never been either a moderator or a panelist before. Well, turned out the Sleuthfest organizers had a special job picked out just for me, the rookie moderator. I was moderator of a panel called The Art of Embalming. With words like lividity, rigor mortis, cadaver and formaldehyde dancing in my head, I met the presenter, George Rafaidus, and a few minutes later introduced him. Turned out to be one of the most fascinating forty five minute presentations I've ever attended. The audience was totally into it and George was informative, well-prepared and, believe it or not, really funny. I walked away with a souvenir, too, a bottle of embalming fluid. I still haven't figured out what to do with it.

The next day, I went to my panel, which was entitled Laughing at Death. It was about humor in the face of death and destruction in the respective panelists' novels. I was the last to speak and I was awestruck at how smooth and silver-tongued my fellow panelists were. The moderator lobbed me what he thought, no doubt, to be a soft-ball question: "So, Tom, tell us about a funny scene in your novel, Palm Beach Nasty. I read it and thought it was jam-packed with good ones." I totally froze. If you asked me where my novel took place I wouldn't have known (clue: it's in the title.) I wanted to say, "Okay, Mr. Moderator, bail me out here…  give me a clue about one of those scenes you thought was so damn funny…" I guess I muddled through  it okay, 'cause at the end the moderator came up to me, shook my hand and said, "great job, Tom."

"You're kidding," I thought.

After a nice lunch that day, I eagerly approached the next event: signing books for my adoring readers. The drill was there were long tables which eight or ten authors sat behind looking out. Readers then came up with books they'd just purchased at the adjacent book store which authors signed. I was seated next to the son in a well-known mother-son writing team. He never deigned to turn to me and acknowledge my presence, maybe because he was so busy signing books.  I got exhausted watching him inscribe book after book. Ka-ching, ka-ching, I remember thinking as I sat there twiddling my thumbs. After about twenty five minutes and no adoring fans, I was about to flee. Find a bridge and jump. But then, finally, a timid woman approached. "Hi, I really liked Palm Beach Nasty, would you--"

Would I? Are you kidding? I almost kissed her.
_____________
Check out Tom's website at tomturnerwrites.com

Freeing The Cells

In her post of December 3, Donis Casey makes it clear that finding a suitable title for a novel can be a challenge. The same holds true for finding a title for a blog post. So, how does one go about it? Or, for that matter, how does one go about writing anything. In long-ago days before I made a really serious attempt at a novel, I liked to swap clever opinions with a colleague at the Library of Parliament here in Ottawa. Someone, I forget who, once opined that writing is easy: “You sit at the keyboard and concentrate until blood starts to seep from your forehead.” And sometimes it does seem like that. Writing can be very difficult; for me at least. For others not so hard. My friend and fellow Ottawa writer, Mary Jane Maffini, once said something along the lines that her output was only limited by the number of hours in the day that she could spend at the keyboard. Or sentiments to that effect. Much to be admired, even envied.

But to hearken back to the title of this post, I discovered an easier – if less productive – way to assuage the demands of the creative beast. FreeCell! How many games of FreeCell does it require to get from the opening sentence of one’s hoped-for novel to that much-desired Finis moment? In the case of my first book, Undertow, it was somewhere north of 10,000 games. It took me almost four years to write that book. Perhaps if I had halved the number of FreeCell games to a mere 5,000, I could have done it much more quickly. But I doubt that. The moderately challenging – if inherently silly – game did calm the fevered mind. And the book did get written.

The message being, I suppose, that writers will do odd things to get the job done.

Later on, I adopted a more complicated stratagem. Spider Solitaire. But that one really was, in the end, counter-productive. Spider Solitaire is much more complicated than FreeCell, and really does challenge; to the point that it’s often hard to think of anything other than getting the game done, and then going on to yet another game, and another, and another. And there being three levels of difficulty, that game is even more deadly in terms of time demands.

And where am I now in my effort to finish my fourth Inspector Stride novel? Back to FreeCell as it happens; 4,631 games played to date. Which could mean that I have only about 5,400 games to go before the novel’s done. Clearly I should play more, and play more often. Seriously, though, games like FreeCell are sometimes a hindrance, but at other times they are relaxing and they reduce stress.

Computers, as we all know, are a mixed blessing. We have instant access to a world of information via the internet – which in itself is another mixed blessing – but too often there is too much temptation to wander off into non-productive pursuits. Writing is like life generally. I have a self-imposed end-of-January deadline for the new Stride, and it’s a tossup whether I will actually make it. An old story; but hopefully not with a surprise ending.

To finish up this post, I will essay a piece that I will presumptuously call A Tale of Two Novels.

A month ago I dipped into my first Jack Reacher novel. It was only about five years ago, at the Left Coast Crime gathering in Bristol, UK, that I discovered there was such a creation as Jack Reacher. Lee Child was one of the keynote authors at the gathering, and he made a short speech, in which he talked about his protagonist. Like Reacher, himself, Lee Child is very tall, if not nearly as bulky. (I think Reacher tops out at about 250 pounds.) Child explained to the audience that he came up with the character’s name because, being very tall, he was often asked during visits to supermarkets, usually by older, tiny persons of the female persuasion, if he could please reach them down an item from one of the upper shelves. He then began to think of himself as a “reacher”, and thus the character’s name came to him.

I liked his story a lot, and I still do. And I wish I could say that I liked the Reacher novel that I am reading – The Affair – as much. Sadly, I do not. I am fairly certain that the book is another bestseller for Mr. Child, and good for him. But for me, despite some interesting writing and a lot of information about the United States Army, particularly the Military Police part, I am finding that my attention wanders often. It’s not a long book, and a month after starting it, it’s still not finished. Worse, I don’t really have much interest in finding out “whodunit”, who did slash the throats of all those radiantly beautiful women near an American Army base in the deep south. My main quibble with the book is the “soldier-as-superman” gambit. At one point in the narrative, Reacher goes one on four – or is it one on six? – with a collection of large and ugly local redneck inbreds, and quickly demolishes the lot of them, sending them limping back to their caves, or holes in the ground, or wherever. In another scene he casually shoots another brute in the forehead and sends his two equally odious companions scampering back to their hovels in mortal fear and dread. None of it – for me – rings true. It’s seems to me a superficial construct.

So, when I drove from Ottawa to Kingston this past weekend to visit with my daughter, I left Reacher at home on the floor beside my bed, and took with me instead a wonderful short novel by the late British author J.L. Carr – A Month In The Country. The book was released in 1980 and was shortlisted for the Booker. It was a considerable success, reprinted many times, although not likely a money-maker along the lines of Lee Child’s Reacher series. In 1987, though, it was made into a film of the same title, and starred Colin Firth, Kenneth Branagh, and a young Natasha Richardson – who would, in March 2009, tragically die from injuries sustained in a ski accident in Mont Tremblant, Quebec. The film is as brilliant as the book.

Then, in one of those bizarre incidents that drive serious film lovers mad with frustration, all prints of the 35 mm master were somehow lost, and this brilliant film appeared to have vanished from the world forever. Happily, another print was eventually found in a warehouse. But then there was another long delay while ownership of the print was sorted out. Happily it was sorted out.

The film is now available on DVD in the original 96-minute version. I commend it to anyone who enjoys films of intelligence and substance. The same recommendation, of course, is made for the book.