Making lemonade out of lemons, Part 497

By Rick Blechta

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it must be like to be sentenced to prison. It doesn’t have to be maximum security, just a place where one can’t leave and has to live by someone else’s rules 24/7.

I’m certain everyone knows from where these thoughts are originating. Here in Toronto, we’ve been under lockdown more or less since Boxing Day, which is an appropriate start to something like this. Even though we can go out to shop for groceries and other things, we are spending most of our time in our homes, a box more or less.

Now I don’t have any experience with being incarcerated, but for 14 years I did work in a summer music camp which ran for 3-4 weeks. Since we only have one car, my wife would drive me up, give me a kiss and take off for home. I was pretty well stuck there since with only two hours off in the afternoon when the campers had recreation and our workday finishing at 9:00 pm, where could we go even if we had transportation? The nearest town was about 30 minutes away.

Even though I enjoyed many aspects of this camp, it did feel pretty claustrophobic. The best I could manage was a walk through some nearby woods. To me, it did feel a bit like prison.

So now I’m feeling that way again, my wife too. Two or three days can go by where I don’t even leave our property. The sidewalks are icy and right now it’s cold, cold, COLD, so even walking in our neighbourhood isn’t too inviting.

Michael Connelly’s most recent book, Law of Innocence (excellent novel, by the way), finds one of his series characters, Mickey Haller, in jail awaiting trial since he hasn’t been granted bail. Connelly paints a pretty good picture of the way being locked up must feel. This supplied additional fuel to my recent thoughts.

Where does my post’s title fit in, though?

Well, the other day I decided I might as well use the way I’m feeling to write some scenes of incarceration as a sort of test bed for future use, get down my thoughts while I’m in the moment.

It’s been very elucidating. In looking at stuff from a few days ago, I feel I’ve captured something worthwhile. Since there’s no immediate need for this material in my WIP, I felt free to just “let ‘er rip” and that freedom has been liberating and shows in what I’ve set down.

Will I use it? Who knows? If I do have the need for prison scenes at some future time, I’ve at least got some useable templates.

So I think this has been worthwhile to do. But it also led to an unexpected reaction: I feel a lot less worse about being cooped up indoors than I did.

And that’s a very good thing.

Stay well everyone!

A grand idea?

by Rick Blechta

Sitting out in our backyard yesterday evening with my wife, discussing our weekend with our grandkids who were over for the first time since the last week of February, there was a lull in conversation when an idea popped into my head. I must have been thinking about what I need to do today and of course Type M was near the top of the list — and I needed a topic for this week’s post. With the harsh reality of our daily lives, I wanted a topic that would provide some fun for everyone.

I have a vague memory of this sort of thing being tried before, but not enough to give out names or authors, so sorry for that. (Perhaps someone can help.) My brain storm was this: what if you could put two favourite characters from some of the great crime fiction series.

So let’s have some fun. Here’s my choice for a mash-up.

How about Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch with Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks? Both detectives are exceptionally experienced and good at what they do, both have a tendency to do their own thing, but more importantly, both are quintessential products of their respective cultures. Bosch just breaks rules, damn the torpedoes, while Banks operates more discretely while being equally subversive in his own way. Bosch and Banks also are not afraid to rely on hunches.

I also think this combination would work best if the characters were operating in a “neutral” third country where they’re both out of their element — although I have to admit it would be interesting to see Bosch navigate the British policing system. Since Peter and Michael are good friends, it might even happen some day (are you two listening?).

So that’s my choice. How about you? And don’t forget the why part because that’s what makes this idea interesting!

Opening Lines, Opening Questions

Thomas Kies’s terrific post about opening lines this week got me thinking. As I commented on his post, first lines mean a lot to me –– as a writer and reader.

What makes a good opening line? Students, journalists, fiction writers, poets –– everyone –– wants to engage the reader immediately. People speak often about the “hook.” But I’ve never thought of opening lines that way. To me, the goal of a first line is to have the reader face a question that requires an answer –– at some point. And as a reader, I certainly want an opening that poses one or more questions.

Consider these gems:

“The marvelous thing is that it’s painless," he said. "That's how you know when it starts." (“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” by Ernest Hemingway)

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. (The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley)

It had seemed like a good idea at the time. (“Nine Lives to Live” by Sharon McCrumb)

The old lady had changed her mind about dying but by then it was too late. (City of Bones by Michael Connelly)

Two short stories and two novels. All four opening lines ask questions of me (the reader). Hemingway’s opening is legendary. All make me continue reading. And no matter your method of writing –– whether you plan everything in advance or fly by the seat of your pants –– the opening can (and, in my humble opinion, should) pose a question.

It has become a classroom writing activity for my students: Write down five opening lines that require readers to ask one (or more) question. Then take the most compelling opening line (presumably the one that forces you –– the writer –– to answer an interesting question). And write for twenty minutes, seeing where that line leads you.

All of this got me thinking about the novel I’m writing now. I went back to check the first line, making sure I’m praying what I preach. Here it is: Ellie Whitney saw the hesitation and waited for Pam Rush to make her choice.

What do you think?

Challenges facing the contemporary crime-fiction writer, cont….

Rick’s excellent Sept. 18 post “Is it getting harder to write contemporary crime fiction?” has me thinking. He astutely examines the works of Rex Stout and Michael Connelly and wonders if one’s need to keep up with technological advancements dooms writers entering the genre.

Good question.

Part of why I love Robert B. Parker novels so thoroughly is that –– viewed through the lens of which Rick writes –– they are simple. Spenser knows himself, and he knows human nature. And, thus, he solves the crime. “It’s a way to live,” Spenser tells us in Ceremony. “The rest is just confusion.” Sounds like Hamlet, when he utters those wonderful words: To thine own self be true . . .Know yourself well enough, and you can know the world around you. Wonderful. Poignant.

But outdated?

Say it ain’t so.

After all, it’s Connelly himself, in his essay titled “The Mystery of Mystery Writing” (the Walden Book Report, September, 1998) who states:

“The mystery has evolved in recent decades to be as much an investigation of the investigator as an inquiry of the crime at hand. Investigators now look inward for the solutions and means of restoring order. In the content of their own character they find the clues. I think this only bodes well for the mystery novel. It is what keeps me interested in writing them.”

Sounds like a Parker fan to me. I’m not questioning Rick’s assertion here. The passage above is dated 1998, after all. I agree that –– given the authenticity of TV’s cop shows and streaming networks’ crime thrillers –– the writer is better off cursed with writer’s block than to be inaccurate. There is no longer room to fudge details. But we aren’t doomed. The package might have changed. It’s a little shinier, a little spiffier, more precise, and procedurally more authentic.

But the heart of the story –– that heart that Wolfe Nero and Spenser and Kinsey Millhone and even Poe’s Dupin gave us –– remain at the core of why we write, readers read, and even our Netflix binge-watching next generation love this genre: at the heart of the story is the character.

The genre has changed and grown and now demands a level of authenticity of which Poe could never have dreamed. That’s a challenge, but it’s also a sign of evolution.

There’s another challenge we face that concerns me more: The way young readers now experience, learn, and consume narratives will pose the largest challenge to one who wishes to write crime fiction full time.

As many of you know, I work and teach at a New England boarding school. (I’m probably the genre’s only dorm parent to 60 teens.) So I know the habits of the teenage species well. And, frankly, I’m worried about our futures. Speaking to SJ Rozan this week, I mentioned that any writer I know who writes full time right now has their hand in some form of script work, as if TV/film work pays for them to write novels. Maybe that’s the new business model.

Or maybe Shakespeare was just further ahead of his time than I realize. Perhaps the Globe Theatre was supporting his poetry enterprise.

Impact

by Rick Blechta

My wife and I have been enjoying the Bosch series on Amazon. I’ve read pretty well all Michael Connelly’s Bosch novels over the years and enjoyed most of them immensely. Being a former LA Times crime reporter, his prose has real immediacy. Or would it be better to use the word “impact” to describe Michael’s prose style?

If you haven’t read any Connelly, his prose is rather sparse. With only bare bones description — just enough to set a scene — a lot is left to the reader’s “mind’s eye” to flesh things out but because he’s writing about Los Angeles and the surrounding area most of the time and we’re all familiar with that from a myriad of TV shows set in that city, this is no great handicap.

His dialogue is crisp and again pretty sparse. He’s certainly got the cop lingo down, even in his earlier books. I would guess this is a result from being a crime reporter. I also never get the feeling he’s showing off how much he knows. All those “cop details” come out in asides or they’re organically woven into the plot. I know for a fact how tough that is to do!

Anyway, getting back to the Amazon series, I’m finding it really quite superb. The cast is well-chosen — especially Titus Welliver as the title character — and more than get the job done. Production design is excellent and the writing uniformly terrific.

What’s interesting about that is numerous screenwriters have been employed — Connelly among them. You’d expect a dog’s breakfast of styles and colliding interpretations of characterization. None of that happens which is really quite surprising. If I hadn’t noticed the screenwriting credits, I never would have suspected that most of the episodes have different writers.

But the real takeaway from watching these episodes — we’re halfway through the second season — is the fact that I find myself constantly thinking about what I’ve seen. I’m not talking about mentally rehashing the most recently watched episode, either. Before sitting down to write this post, a couple of things that happened back in series one was going through my feeble brain.

To me, that’s the gold standard of impact. We’ve all read books or seen movies or plays that have stuck with us for a long time. What is it about those that causes them to stick with us? Why do these have such an impact?

The really interesting thing is that Bosch is having the same effect on my wife, so it’s not just me and my likes and dislikes that is causing a reaction. To be fair, she also enjoys reading Connelly, but I think something else is at work past that.

One last thing, Bosch is not retellings of the Bosch novels. Yes, they freely use characters and  situations but combine several books in each series to create something wholly new. I don’t believe I’ve seen that done to such an extent before.

But at the end of the day I’m left with this: How the heck can I accomplish this in my own writing?

Okay, Type M readers, if you’ve watched Bosch, what did you think of it? Am I correct about its impact?

Christmas Lights and Second Drafts

Christmas is upon us –– the season of good cheer, good food and drink, and time spent with close friends and family. For me, it’s also a time to regroup: I’m between semesters and chipping away on the second draft of a novel.

No two writers work the same way, and finding one’s process is like discovering how to tie a tie: You can hear about how to do it, even see it done, but until you actually finish a novel, you might as well stand before the mirror and try to do it backwards. Some writers outline. (Jeffery Deaver gave a keynote address I heard saying he spends eight months writing the outline, three writing the book.) Others say writing is like driving at night –– you can see only as far as your headlights, writing and plotting as you go. Other writers fall somewhere in between.

Part of developing a writing process is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. I do well to focus on character and dialogue, aspects that have always come easily. I’m never going to plot like Dan Brown. It’s simply not in my DNA. Moreover, I believe all writers, to some degree, write what we read. I grew up on series novels –– Parker, MacDonald, Chandler, Grafton, Paretsky, Burke (both Jan and James Lee) –– and I have no real interest in writing one-and-dones, stand-alones. Character interests me. I want to learn more about their lives in the vein Michael Connelly describes in his essay “The Mystery of Mystery Writing”: “The mystery has evolved in recent decades to be as much an investigation of the investigator as an inquiry of the crime at hand. Investigators now look inward for the solutions and means of restoring order. In the content of their own character, they find the clues” (Walden Book Report, September, 1998). I like to have a large canvas when I’m creating the arc of a character, a canvas that might span several books. I enjoy following a character, see her grow and develop and take on new challenges, and I enjoy books whose ill deeds expose moral ambiguity. All of this means the human condition is front and center in my plots: people do things, then, for relatively simple reasons.

So as I near the halfway point in draft No. 2, I’m taking inventory. The characters have come to life and are, fingers crossed, consistent and believable. Ditto the setting. The plot, though, has to be reeled in, simplified. I’m always looking for a way to find a twist at the end while honoring Poe’s and Chandler’s mandates that a mystery not only play fair with readers but also conclude with all necessary clues being front and center, unlike real-world crimes where aspects of the case always go unexplained. But much like the box marked “Christmas Lights” in my garage, this storyline needs someone to untangle it, and like that box in the garage, no amount of money will get my kids to do it for me. That means cutting and adding –– eliminating some red herrings, punching up other characters’ roles.

In the end, all I really want for Christmas is to not face draft No. 3.

Happy holidays!

It never gets easier

Writing never gets easier. Not for me, anyway. Not if I’m continuing to challenge myself.

I’ve written the first 30 pages of a novel-in-progress three times now, using two different points of view and even trying present tense.

Point of view is my largest concern anytime I start a novel. I think it’s the most important decision a fiction writer makes.

I’m several months –– but only three chapters –– into a new novel, one which I hope launches a new series. I want the book to feature a husband and wife team. The wife is a career-oriented power player in her profession; the husband is a cynical type who wants no part of his wife’s relative celebrity. I wrote the first three chapters from the husband’s third-person perspective –– he’s the outsider, viewing his wife, the most powerful person in their workplace. I didn’t love those pages. And, after writing three novels recently using the third-person perspective of a female, I was hankering to write from a male’s first-person point of view. (I grew up on Robert B. Parker and John D. MacDonald, after all.) So I scrapped the third-person opening, committed to the first-person voice of the husband, which moved him much closer to the action, while making sure the wife remains a large part of the plot from the start. I’m off to the races now.

No discussion of point of view is complete without also mentioning John Gardner’s “psychic distance” chart. In his book The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Gardner offers this wide-to-narrow camera lens view of the distance from which a reader views an author’s scene:

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

When you reach No. 5, you are inside the character’s head –– and not far from first-person. The benefits of using third person, especially in a crime novel, are clear: You can zoom in (as Gardner’s No. 5 illustrates) with nearly the precision of first-person; however, in third-person, the writer can also withhold information that might be hard to conceal in a first-person story. Michael Connelly, in a2003 BookPage interview, speaks of the challenge of withholding information from the reader when writing in first person: "When you go into first person, all bets are off. You find yourself feeling like you're cheating the reader if you hold anything back. I think that's one of the things that was good about the old [third-person] Harry; I was able to hold things back and kind of spring them on the reader when I wanted to."

While third person has many benefits, I’m a sucker for the intimacy of the first-person speaker. I like to be closer to to the character. Writing in first-person, to me, is like acting: I step into character and voice and record (and convey) the information in a manner true to the speaker’s worldview.

What it always comes down to is making the appropriate choices for the work at hand. After writing 100 pages to get 30, I’m hoping I’ve done that.

Writing empathy

I'm a six-foot-one, straight, white male, who 30 pounds ago was a college athlete, and am a guy who usually votes Democrat. The character I write is a female, who is ultra fit, also straight, and is a moderate; and she'd vote for whoever offers the best border-security policy. We don't have much in common, other than we both notice the nuances and the situational ethics involved in the criminal justice system.

Because of these differences, some of the nicest compliments I receive are from readers who say, "I assumed you were a female," when they come to a signing. Or, "How do you write the dating scenes from Peyton's perspective?" If I don't have time to really elaborate, I have a go-to response, something I hope is funny: "I live with a wife, two teenage daughters, a first-grade daughter, and am the dorm parent to 55 other girls. Hell, even my dog is a female." Sometimes, this draws a chuckle.

Jokes aside, though, empathy is the #1 attribute a writer must possess. You need to be able to stand in another's shoes and walk the proverbial mile. Especially in our genre. Michael Connelly wrote in his brilliant essay "The Mystery of Mystery Writing": "When it comes to the mystery novel the writer must be inclined to write what he or she does not know and never wants to."

That can be a frightening thought. Writers in our genre step into many roles that challenge us and our beliefs. For two hours a day, I'm an actor, playing the part of a 35-year-old single mom. I enjoy the challenge. And, despite Connelly's statement, I want to know Peyton's worldview and political beliefs. Do I need to be like Peyton Cote to write her well? No. Do I need to understand her to write her well? By way of an answer, Aristotle said, The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. I understand Peyton well enough.

At a time when empathy might be the most important skill one can possess, it's good that I learn a lot by thinking as Peyton would think. Our views on border and amnesty laws, for instance, certainly differ.

In the end, my moderate character teaches me a lot and challenges my views.