Taking the city heat

Write what you know.

It's one of the golden rules of the game. There are many golden rules. Too many but this is the one that concerns me today.

But what does it really mean?

Well, shall I tell you what I think it means? That's a rhetorical question, of course. I'm going to tell you whether you want me to or not, otherwise this blog will be pretty darn short.

On the face of it, write what you know suggests you should only write, you know, what you know. In other words only what you have experienced on a personal level.

Obviously that's not something most writers do. Tolkien, for instance, was not a Hobbit, nor a wizard nor an orc. Ed McBain was not a cop, although Steve Carella did bear an uncanny resemblance to the author himself. Larry McMurtry was never a Texas Ranger.

However, what each of those authors did was make sure that they knew whereof, and whatof, they wrote. Tolkien was an expert on mythology and languages. McBain (or Evan Hunter or Salvatore Albert Lombino or any other names he cared to use) made it his business to understand policework. McMurtry, a Texan, researched and researched and researched until he knew his world.

And that, to me, is what the rule really means. Know your world before you write it.

That world may be a Scottish city, it may be a nuclear submarine or a galaxy far away but before putting pen to paper (figuratively speaking) the writer should know as much about it as possible.

A few years ago I both followed - and broke - the rule.

The Janus Run was set in New York. I am not from New York. I have visited (love the place) but could not do so for various reasons when writing this conspiracy chase thriller. I couldn't set it in Glasgow because the plot needed the pulse, the aura, that only a city like New York can offer. 

That was how I broke the rule.

It is also how I adhered to it, for the New York I wanted to write about was not the real one.

Okay, I can hear you scratching your heads so I'll try to explain.

I'm a huge movie fan. Too huge, to be honest. It's all the popcorn and hot dogs and I should go on a diet.

What I wanted to do with that book was create an action movie in prose, something that just kept moving. And although it was set in the present day, it was at its core a tribute to the 70s thrillers I love so much. Films like Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, The Parallax View, The French Connection, The 7 Upsm Across 110th Street, Report to the Commissioner. So the New York I wrote about was a movie New York, the one I have been researching for years. I took characters and tropes and even modes of speech from that era while also trying to make it as close to the real-life city as I could.

It made the book highly stylised. It wasn't a parody, it wasn't a spoof. It was designed to be an affectionate nod to those movies, as well as the writing of Ed McBain and Robert Ludlum and William Goldman.

Did I pull it off?

To an extent. It was read by people who had lived in New York and they said the setting was fine but I am certain native New Yorkers would raise a few eyebrows. I also made a rookie error regarding a gun which annoys me now. Most of the readers who have commented seemed to have enjoyed it. One even missed his stop on a train journey because he was so wrapped up in the story.

In my mind I succeeded because I did what I wanted to do. For some readers who were not aware of my intention it did not work quite so well and I get that, I really do. They didn't believe the backdrop, they didn't believe the dialogue, they didn't believe the characters. As such, it is my least successful novel.

But hey, them's the breaks, kid.

Would I do it again? I don't think so, not without at least spending time in the location. I know it can be irritating when a someone writes about your home town without doing the work. Google Earth just don't cut it.

I am still proud of it, though. I did what I set out to do, even though I kinda broke that pesky golden rule.

Yup, I'm a maverick that way.

Conference Envy

My fellow Type M'er, Thomas Kies, posted a report on Thrillerfest, a writer's conference held in New York this month and I confess I was seized by more than a touch of envy. I always learn something and meet new people at any conference and this one was full of terrific panels and workshops.

Thrillerfest sounds especially exciting. The line-up of speakers was spectacular. It was like a gathering of all the rich and famous in the mystery field. Conferences are also a chance to meet the not so rich and famous. I can honestly say some of my best friends are writers that I met at conferences.

Above is a photo from this year's Western Writers of America convention. It was taken at the Five Star party. In the middle is our brilliant editor, Tiffany Schofield, who is one of the most friendly persons in publishing. Her frontier series featuring historical novels about the American West has been a great hit both with librarians and readers.

I'm on the left. Having just discovered a western hat that fits I longer have to worry about my hair. What a relief. On the right is Irene Bennett Brown. I look forward to seeing her and her husband, Bob, every year. Irene and I have known each other forever. She and Bob started attending in 1978. Her book, Miss Royal's Mules, is a finalist for a Will Rogers Medallion Award. Her new book, Tangled Times will be published Summer, 2020.

Old friendships can be dangerous at conventions because of the temptation to spend all my time with people I already know and like.

I would love to go to Thrillerfest next year. I have a number of friends who attend. Plus this year a number of person's from Sourcebook were there. Sourcebook acquired Poisoned Pen last year and the conference would have been a great opportunity to meet representatives from our new publisher.

I don't like posting on the day mine is due. I like to schedule it at 12:01 am so our early morning readers will have fresh content. This has been a very harried summer full of disruptions. Most of them were good. But still, my writing has been interrupted a lot. Then everything else lags too.

Better performance next time!

What I Write About

Last night I did an exercise suggested by Donna Alward and Nancy Cassidy, the authors of an article in Romance Writers Report (RWR)* about "Finding Your Core Story." Alward and Cassidy encouraged writers in search of their brand to look for the elements that appear in their novels over and over again.

I'm fascinated by marketing -- maybe because I'm not that great at doing it. I don't have the time to do it well or consistently. I'm also not sure how to market in a way that feels comfortable and true to who I am. But I do enjoy reading marketing books. I do research on mass media/popular culture in my other job as a criminal justice professor, so I'm always interested in how a good marketing campaign is developed and implemented.

The exercise recommended by Alward and Cassidy is a writer's version of what branding experts recommend for entrepreneurs and business owners. I found a pen and sat down to list the recurring elements in my fiction writing. I had no problem narrowing down to five: brainy and compassionate female protagonist; multicultural cast of characters; impact of past on present; social issues; ethical dilemmas.

When I thought of these elements as my "core story," I discovered something. In both my Lizzie Stuart series (featuring a crime historian and set in the recent past) and my Hannah McCabe books (police procedural novels set in the near future), the core story is about time/place/people. That sounds obvious, but what is important to me is that I show how my characters have been shaped by the time and place in which they live. Lizzie was shaped by her childhood and teen years in a small town in Kentucky in the late 1960s and 70s. Hannah was shaped by growing up in Albany, New York, an old city coping with rapid change.

As I really thought about this -- about how important the impact of  time and place on my characters is to my stories -- I realized this was what I was missing in my 1939 historical thriller. As I've written in other posts, I've been struggling with the structure of that novel. I have to move the characters from Easter morning 1939 in Washington, D.C. to the New York World's Fair that summer and finally to the premier of Gone With the Wind in Atlanta in December. I've been focusing on that and making minimal progress. This "core story" exercise reminded me that I have been putting the plot before the elements that matter most to me when I'm writing a book.

To make my thriller work, I need to stop what I've been trying to do. I need to go back to those character bios that I did and then put aside. Plot matters in a thriller, but -- for me -- the only thriller I'll ever be able to write needs to be rooted in how my characters are shaped by time and place.I need to allow my characters to think about and comment on their world in 1939. I have to let them respond to what is happening rather than try to move them through the plot.

That is my core story -- people in a time and place responding to extraordinary events in their lives. They are dealing with social issues, responding to ethical dilemmas, and fumbling their way through the relationships in their lives.

Now I understand why I am drawn to stories set in the past or future rather than the present. I need to be able to look back or look forward. It makes perfect sense that my new protagonist is living through the disruptions of post-World War II America.

*RWR is published by Romance Writers of America. This article appears in the September 2016 issue.

New York, New York!

I'm on a seventies retro kick lately. Those times were the formative years of my adolescence and early adulthood, and I don't have fond memories; I wanted the era to be done with and we should move on already. The way we process ''the good ole days" means that people are now cycling through the 1970s using the rosy-tinted lenses of nostalgia. To help ground me with the past I've watched some movies from that decade, specifically The French Connection and Taxi Driver. I saw both when they were first released, and at the time, neither impressed me. Mostly because I was young and those stories challenged my notions of right-wrong as I had little regard for moral ambiguity. What further tainted my appreciation--as it were--of the 70s was that I visited New York City at its worst.

Fast-forward to today. Every modern depiction of the city shows it as a polished theme park for the well-to-do. There might be shots of grungy alleys and forbidding sewers, but that's to establish mood. Pan the camera away and we're back to an urban landscape catering to the affluent and hip. Everybody seems lives in a spacious pad decorated with designer appointments, with a sweeping view of course. (However, not all who've lived recently in the city share this opinion. The comedian Emo Philips says that whenever he misses New York, he simply fills his humidifier with urine.) What jumps at me from movies like The French Connection and especially Taxi Driver is the unremitting grime and seediness. Garbage piled the streets. In TD, Robert De Niro lived in a squalid apartment that today is probably a million-dollar condo. His surroundings were filthy, his kitchen cabinet was a battered milk crate nailed to the wall, clothes hung from extension cords strung about the place. Even fancy destinations in the city were gilded in plastic tawdriness. In today's New York, everyone aspires to a bite of the succulent big apple and its promise of opulence and fortune. In the 70s New York, the decay sank everyone to the same filthy level. Mostly you wanted to survive without getting too dirty.