Is Your Protagonist "Different"?

 By Thomas Kies

I recently finished two books back-to-back that I enjoyed but for completely different reasons.  The Maid by Nita Prose and Holly by Stephen King.  

The Maid was described by the Washington Post as “A cozy mystery to take along on vacation . . . a lighthearted mystery that shines as Molly evolves and learns to connect.”

The book blurb for Holly reads “Holly Gibney, one of Stephen King’s most compelling and ingeniously resourceful characters, returns in this thrilling novel to solve the gruesome truth behind multiple disappearances in a midwestern town.”

These are two completely different novels with one interesting likeness.  Their protagonists are neurodivergent.  Until recently, I’d never even heard the term.  

According to Forbes Health "Everyone’s brain operated differently.  For the average individual, brain functions, behaviors and processing are expected to meet the milestones set by society for developmental growth.  For those who veer either slightly, or significantly, outside of these parameters, their brain functions could be classified as neurodivergent.”

It goes on to say,” Neurodivergent is a non-medical umbrella term that describes propel with variation in their mental functions, and can included conditions such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or other neurological or developmental conditions such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),”

The protagonist for The Maid, Molly Gray, is clearly autistic and utterly charming.

The protagonist for Holly, Holly Gibney, seems to be on the spectrum…and is utterly charming.

In spite of some of the descriptions, I’m not sure I’d describe the Maid as a “cozy”.  But it is fun to read and when you’re finished, you’ll feel good.

Holly, on the other hand, is grim, and as the book cover describes, “gruesome”. King’s writing is wonderful, of course, but I was happy to be done with the book.  

By the way, it was one of King’s more political novels.  He doesn’t pull any punches about people who refuse to get vaccinated for Covid, wear masks, and there’s no love lost for Donald Trump in the book. 

That’s not why I was happy when I got to the ending of Holly. While this was a mystery/thriller it was also classic King horror and this one got under my skin. 

In both books, the protagonist is “different”.  

Isn’t that what we want in our heroes?  We want them to be brave, of course, and driven, like a dog with a bone when it comes to solving mysteries and righting wrongs.  But we also want them to be different than regular people.  

The protagonists should be memorable and someone we care about.  A terrific example is Sue Grafton’s character Kinsey Millhone.  

And if it’s someone we don’t immediately identify with, we want to be fascinated by them, like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. 

Then there's the protagonists who are quirky like Monk and Columbo. My own recurring protagonist, Geneva Chase, has plenty of quirks of her own--drinks too much, makes bad life decisions, has questionable morals.  But she has a good heart and readers identify with her and like her.  

So, in your own “work in progress”, what makes your protagonist different?  What makes him or her likable? 

First Piece Published--Feeling Remembered.

 by Thomas Kies

As I was walking Annie, our dog, one morning, I thought about the first piece of fiction that I was lucky enough to have published back in 1979.  It was a short story called Fast Dancing Detroit Style.  No, it wasn’t a mystery story.  It was horror—an erotic ghost story. I was paid $250, I was 26 at the time and I thought I was hot as a box of matches.

After all.  I’d been published in Cavalier magazine, the same publication where Stephen King got his start. With the same editor that he worked with, Maurice DeWalt.  

And yes, Cavalier was a men’s magazine that featured some of the top writers of the time, but it was also filled with full frontal nude women.  I remember proudly telling my father about being published and a couple of days later he phoned me to tell me how humiliating it had been to go into an adult bookstore to buy the magazine. I’m not sure he ever told me if he liked the story or not.  

Cavalier was launched by Fawcett Publications in 1952.  The original format was to feature novels and novelettes by Fawcett’s Gold Medal authors like Richard Prather and Micky Spillane. During the 1960s, the magazine featured such writers as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Coover, Richard Gehman, Garson Kanin, Paul Krassner, John D. MacDonald, Albert Moravia, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Shelton, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Theodore Sturgeon and Colin Wilson.

Film critic Manny Farber had a monthly column in the 1960s. Stephen King was a contributor during the 1970s, and his stories were also featured in Cavalier Yearbook.

I followed up my first published story with more horror only to be turned down by Mr. DeWalt saying, “These are too much like Stephen King.”  Okay…I guess that’s not bad.  

I tried other magazines, mostly “pulp publications” like Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing, Weird Tales, Analog, and Strange Tales.  The cover pages, by the way, often featured illustrations of scantily clad women in the clutches of space aliens.  

I even submitted short stores to Playboy (no luck there) and Omni, a glossy four-color magazine devoted to both science fiction and science fact.  The editor was Ben Bova.  He was the author of over 120 books on science and science fiction, had won the Hugo Award six times, and was the president of the National Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America. 

He sent me a personal rejection letter on one of my submissions with a handwritten note that said, “,,,keep at it.  You’re a good writer.”  

That was in the 70s and 80s and I was raising a family and working full time at the Elmira Star-Gazette. I wrote short stories in my spare time on my manual typewriter at my desk tucked away on the porch.  On the wall next to my desk was a corkboard where I kept the rejections slips.  

Back then, you’d submit stories by hardcopy via the mail accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope so that if your story was rejected, you’d at least hear back with a pre-printed slip of paper saying that they were sorry they couldn’t respond personally and that your story just wasn’t right for their publication. 

So, I found my copy of Cavalier from 44 years ago that I tucked away in a closet and reread my erotic horror story.  Could I have improved upon it?  Sure.

But you know, I enjoyed reading it.  Almost as much as I did when it first arrived in my mailbox a lifetime ago. But I think I'll stick with mysteries. 

Twilight Zone and Writing Truths

By Thomas Kies

Anne Serling, daughter of Rod Serling, posted a letter her father wrote to a high school student back in 1961,  It read:

The following comment would best represent how I feel about writing: Write and keep writing. Develop your own style. Respect another writer but never imitate him. Learn patience because it is as necessary as a typewriter—and never be afraid to speak out and say what you believe. This is the function of the writer—to call the truths as he sees them.

Sincerely

Rod Serling

Later on, Serling said, “The writer’s role is to be a menacer of the public’s conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus the issues of his time.”

When I was a kid, I recall sitting on the couch in my grandparents’ cottage on Waneta Lake in upstate New York watching shows like Ed Sullivan, Lawrence Welk, My Three Sons and Gunsmoke.  But my all-time favorite program was the Twilight Zone.  Rod Serling’s introduction as those surreal images flashed and faded on our screen scared the bejesus out of me.  “You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!”

At the time, I thought those episodes were written and produced just to give viewers the willies.  In reality, they were social commentary. 

In the episode called He’s Alive, a young Dennis Hopper plays a character who is clearly a fascist. He gets guidance from an unseen creature hidden by the shadows.  Eventually, he’s persuaded to kill, but ends up dead himself.  It’s finally revealed that the creature was the spirit of Adolf Hitler. 

Rod Serling's closing monologue warns that while Hitler may be dead, his spirit is kept alive everywhere where bigotry, racism, and white supremacy exists.

In an episode called Number 12 Looks Just Like You, young people are strongly encouraged to undergo a transformation. They have a limited number of features to choose from since in this world, everyone looks very much alike.  The upshot to this is “When everyone is beautiful, no one is.” It's a world that simply doesn't tolerate people who are different. 

In Monsters Are Due on Maple Street, an idyllic neighborhood is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world, power goes out, and there’s no phone, radio, or television service.  Rumors, theories, and false information run rampant, and the neighbors turn into a violent mob. 

Does that sound faintly like January 6^th?

I dare say that every episode of Twilight Zone had a message of some kind.  Some were banal and some were daring, especially for the time in which they were written and broadcast. But they all had a truth they were telling.

The point of this blog is that as writers, we not only should be telling a damn good story, but we should let our conscience guide us as well.  I try to do that with my books, and sometimes run afoul of readers.  Not many, but some.  

One of the guidelines Stephen King has about writing, is, “What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want. Anything at all . . . as long as you tell the truth.” 

What Scares Us?

 by Thomas Kies

Happy Halloween readers!!  Since today is the day when, according to the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain, we should be lighting bonfires and donning costumes to ward off ghosts…but instead, we’re putting on costumes and eating ourselves into a sugar frenzy—let’s talk about what scares us.

Full disclosure, I like scary stuff.  I like novels by Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and the late Peter Straub.  I enjoy the occasional horror movie like Rosemary’s Baby, The Thing, The Shining, and yes, Halloween.  I like going on ghost walks and ghost hunts.

Regarding ghost hunts—I wrote about one in my first book Random Road. That’s loosely based on a real ghost hunt I was lucky enough to join.  I was the president of the Norwalk Seaport Association at the time and one night we ferried a crew of experienced ghost hunters out to Sheffield Island.  The island is on Long Island Sound and boasts a wildlife refuge and a nineteenth century lighthouse and lighthouse keeper’s cottage.  

The island has no running water and no electricity and when you’re out there, it’s dark and deathly quiet.  While I sat quietly drinking a glass of wine at midnight at a picnic table, the hunters snapped photos, took electrical and temperature readings, ran audio recordings, and prowled around the lighthouse and the island. They brought back photos of “orbs” and one picture of a little girl’s face in a second-floor window as she was gazing out at us.  One of the hunters was a psychic or “intuitive” who told us there were three ghosts living out on that island.

The only spirits I saw that night were in my glass.

I sometimes write about things that scare me.  In my third book Graveyard Bay I wrote about White Supremacist crime gangs, the Russian Mafia, dungeons, and S&M…oh my! My neighbor read it and when I asked him how he liked it, he replied with a deadpan expression, “Gave me nightmares.” 

As a writer, that’s when ya’ know you nailed it, baby.

My wife, Cindy, and I are in the middle of watching the Netflix anthology Cabinet of Curiosities originated and hosted by Guillermo del Toro.  I’ve always enjoyed his work, especially his movie Nightmare Alley.  The ending was not only scary as hell but dripping with delicious irony. 

According to Mr. del Toro, this is what frightens him.  “The moment Lon Chaney is revealed as the Phantom of the Opera was one of those seminal moments in my mind. It scared me not because of how scary it looked, but because of how remote and majestic Lon Cheney played it. That gesture, so unique and so commanding and so full of power and rage and despair. It was truly a powerful moment.”

What scares the master of horror Stephen King?  In many of his novels, characters go mad or lose their minds due to dementia, fear, or isolation like the Jack Torrance character in The Shining. When that happens, even well-intentioned people can do horrible things. In an NPR interview he did a number of years ago, King said, “That’s the boogeyman in the closet now. I’m afraid of losing my mind.”

Why are “haunted houses” and horror novels and movies so popular?  My own theory is that we know that, in the end, we’ll be putting that book down and all will be well.  When the lights come on at the end of the movie, we know we’ve had a good scare, but it wasn’t real, was it? 

It’s like being on a rollercoaster.  It feels like we’re facing death by moving at an eyepopping speed and dropping down the tracks over a cliff while your stomach is trying to figure out where it’s supposed to be. But at the end, we know we’ll be stepping out of the ride, legs weak, heart pounding, but safe.

So, it’s Halloween…what scary movie shall we watch tonight?  What will you be doing?

More danger

I’m officially a Midwesterner, moved in and (somewhat) unpacked in Orchard Lake, Michigan. I’ve dragged my writing chair to the corner of an office, near the window, where I can sit at 4 a.m. and write until dawn when sunlights drifts in and tells me to start my work day.

I’m whittling my way through a rewrite of a novel I sent to my agents, Julia Lord and Ginger Curwen at Julia Lord Literary, a couple months back. The book is what I hope will be the first in a new series set at a boarding school, a setting I left only a couple weeks ago, after living and working in that world for nearly two decades.

The feedback I got from Julia was simple: the middle dragged a little. “More danger,” she said. I don’t disagree (Stephen King, in “On Writing,” says, after all, “The editor is always right.”), but I’m into the revision and one promised cut –– a twenty-page section in which our protagonist drives out of state to locate the book’s other major player –– I’m not going to make. As I'm re-reading, I'm finding that too many clues are there to fully eliminate the section. I will, however, tweak to add “danger.”

As I'm working, I'm realizing the importance of nuance and that narrative tension can be controlled by subtle language moves.

I’m not changing the plot as much as I am adding and cutting words and lines, changes that punch up the risk and the consequences of a bad decision. In the book a man flees campus, his girlfriend is threatened with physical harm and that threat comes to partial fruition, and the narrator’s son goes missing. Questions that (hopefully) engage the reader and create narrative tension: Is the son with the fleeing man? Was the son taken? And who is behind it all (chasing the man off campus, the vanished boy, and the injured girlfriend)? These questions drive the book, and keeping them at the forefront of whatever decisions I make is important.

All of which has me refining the book's "danger" and even redefining the word. The physical need not take place if the threat of it exists. It's like the music in the horror movie. Toni Morrison said you can’t use fiery language to describe fire. I’m trying to create narrative tension with light brush strokes.

Here’s an example:


ORIGINAL

He heard something in my voice and sat up.

“Where was this picture taken?” I asked.

He held Liam’s laptop, squinting. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t recognize that room?”

He shook his head. “That’s Liam,” he said, “and that’s Taylor. Who’s the third person?”

“They aren’t looking at the camera,” I said, “but look at the picture in the background.”

“It’s Amy and Maggie.”

Given the photo, the person not facing the camera had to be Amy Boyd –– same hair, slight build.


REVISED

He heard something in my voice and sat up.

“Look at this picture,” I said.

He held Liam’s laptop, squinting.

“Recognize that room?”

He shook his head.

“You’ve never been there?”

“I don’t think so,” he said.

"I need you to look hard. Think."

“Dad, you’re freaking me out. I don't recognize the room. Is that where Liam is?”

I ignored the question and pointed. “That’s Liam. That’s Taylor. Who’s the third person?”

“They aren’t looking at the camera.”

“Look at the picture in the background.”

“It’s Amy and Maggie,” he said.

The person not facing the camera had to be Amy Boyd –– same hair, slight build. The location was on the file: Brunswick, Maine. It had to be Amy’s dorm room at Bowdoin College.

*

Aside from revision suggestions, during the call, Julia also shared some news: an agent at ICM, representing Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Bruce Norris and his screenwriter partner Caroline Wood, reached out to Julia to say the tandem likes my single mom/Border Patrol agent Peyton Cote and waned to talk to me about a “shopping agreement.” I spoke to Bruce and Caroline last week, asking about their vision for what a TV series might look like. It’s exciting because it’s different from one other foray into this discussion I've had. That time, the people who approached me hadn't actually read the series and wanted to move the character from her French-Canadian roots (the books are set in Aroostook County, Maine) to Arizona or Texas. Bruce, Caroline, and I will write a pilot and a pitch for what would be a one-hour-per-episode TV series based on the first book in that series, “Bitter Crossing" (which Caroline has read eight times). If it gets off the ground -- a big "if," of course -- my role will be as “consulting producer,” something I came up with, given I start at new (very) full-time job July 1.

Where does any of this go? Who knows? You and I both know many calls are made, but few shows actually are.

Getting out of the way

“Sometimes the story knows what it’s trying to say, and your job is to let the story speak.”

I said this to a student this morning. He had two pages written and said he didn’t know where to go from there. We were “talking through” his story, meeting 1:1 for a critique, and the more I listened, the more I heard him talk about his aspirations for the story, which seemed juxtaposed with what he’d written. In the end, we talked about several passages that seemed to speak to his original concept, and he went back to the drawing board, looking for ways to flesh those original ideas out.

Or, rather, he went about the work of getting out of the way and letting the story reveal itself to him (and the reader).

This sounds much easier than it is. We all have great ideas, and the beginning of every story holds promise. Raymond Chandler once said, “There are no dull stories, only dull minds.” Stephen King described writing as akin to archeology –– the trick is to get the story out of the ground without breaking it. That’s a useful analogy, one I return to often, as a writer and a teacher.

It’s why outlining is so hard. What looks good on the outline might not work when you have to actually execute the game plan. The game changes as it’s being played. This is why my “outlines” are more like long, detailed character sketches, complete with motivations and maybe even a few lines of dialogue, things I think the character would say that helps me to define them (for myself and then the reader).

I’d love to hear more from the Type M community on the topic of getting out of the way of the story and letting it reveal itself.

My Process

 By Thomas Kies

I’m going to riff off of Donis Casey’s excellent blog this week about her writing process.  

Mine is best described as chaotic.  As a rule, I have a general idea what the book will be about and the location.  Sometimes I even have thoughts on what the plot will be and who the villain or villains are.

But not always.

The book I’m currently working on I’ve started six times already.  Not unusual for me.  At some point, about thirty or forty pages in, I either like what I’ve written, or I don’t.  Six times now, I haven’t liked what I’ve created.

Initially, when I started this project, I had an idea for an opening scene but wasn’t sure how it might work so I mentally filed it away.  Plus, it was a murder scene that felt a little gruesome to me.

But I recalled what Barbara Peters, my first publisher and owner of the Poisoned Pen Bookstore, had told me during a live interview online.  “All of your books open with a murder, each one a little more gruesome than the last.” 

After six false starts and a long walk around the neighborhood, I decided to scrap everything I’d done up until then and start over…using that scene I had originally envisioned. 

I love it.

Now I’m about thirty pages into the project and I’ve completely changed the direction I’m taking the book.  Do I know where I’m going with it?  Kind of.

Stephen King said in a Wall Street Journal interview, “The thing is, I don’t outline, I don’t have whole plots in my head in advance. So, I’m really happy if I know what’s going to happen tomorrow, which I do, as a matter of fact, I know what’s going to happen in the novel I’m working on. And that’s enough.”

Now, so I don’t start out with an outline.  That being said, at some point during the writing of the book, I know where it will end up and who the baddies are.  I just have to find a way to get there.

That’s when I start outlining what has to happen to move me to that final scene. 

Then at a certain point, I know I have to lay clues.  You can’t have a mystery if the reader doesn’t at least have some kind of chance to solve the crime. But the clues have to be subtle and that’s where I have the advantage.  

I can go back into what’s been written, like going back in time, and alter what I’ve created.  

The same goes with dialogue. Haven’t you had a conversation with someone and wish you could have said something differently?  I can do that. 

Back to laying the clues out.  You don’t want them to be too obvious or the reader will figure out who the baddies are about halfway through the story. What you want is to have them reach the end of the book, and slap their forehead and say, “I should have seen that coming.”

So, now, I’m going to take a walk down to the beach and then come back, sit down at my keyboard, and knock out another chapter.

Cheers and I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving.

Tidbits From the News

by Thomas Kies 

I worked for newspapers and magazines for over thirty years so I’m a news junkie, pure and simple.  A few stories jumped out at me this week.

The first one was about how the executives of six oil companies and various lobbying groups disseminated false information to the public about the how fossil fuels have had a major negative impact on climate change. 

That struck me hard, because that’s the basic plot of my last book. Shadow Hill.  In my mystery, a major oil company has commissioned their own “scientists” to write a paper on how climate change is part of the natural rhythm of the earth and that burning fossil fuels has a minimum, if any, effect. The company is hoping to stave off a bill moving through Congress that would cut their obscene subsidies and give the money and tax breaks to renewable energy efforts.

Last Thursday, the executives stuck to their scripts while testifying in front of a House committee, not quite admitting that they had delivered fraudulent information for years but claiming that they were all moving in the right direction with clean energy. 

According to the New York Times: Mr. Woods, the C.E.O. of Exxon Mobil, faced questions about company statements over the years that cast doubt on whether fossil fuels were the main driver of climate change. He said the positions were “entirely consistent” with the scientific consensus of the time.

He also said that a 1997 statement by Lee Raymond, then Exxon’s chief executive, that “currently, the scientific evidence is inconclusive” about the role of human activity in warming was “consistent with the science.” Two years earlier, the United Nations’ top climate science body had reached a consensus that global warming is occurring, and that the burning of fossil fuels was a significant cause.

Mr. Woods also said that Exxon Mobil now recognizes climate change, yet “there are no easy answers,” to solving it.

A second story I thought was interesting was from my old newspaper covering Norwalk, Connecticut.  It was about how Netflix is filming a movie based on Stephen King’s story called Mr. Harrigan’s Phone. The filmmakers are using various locations around the city as well as the neighboring town, Westport.

The plot of the story is that a young man, employed by an older man, buys his employer a cellphone.  When the man dies, the phone is buried with him, but the conversations continue…via that cellphone.  Yikes.

I’m glad they’ve picked Norwalk for their movie location.  I’ve based my Geneva Chase novels in a fictional town called Sheffield, but in my mind’s eye, looks an awful lot like Norwalk. I always loved that town.  Rich in diversity, South Norwalk, or SoNo, has a wonderful vibe and fabulous restaurants.  It's also a great place to stage crime novels.

The last story I’ll tell you about is how one of the most popular Carmen Mola, one of the most popular crime writers in Spain, won the coveted Premio Planeta literary prize and the million euros that go with it.  The protagonist of Mola’s mysteries is a female detective by the name of Elena Blanco.

The surprise was when Mola was supposed to go onstage to collect her million euros, three men appeared instead.  As it turned out, all three of them had collaborated on the Elena Blanco books. 

When my wife saw this, she smiled and said, “See, it takes three men to write as a woman.”

I’m still not sure how to take that.  My protagonist is Geneva Chase, a female reporter.

I don't have any collaborators.  

October: Time for Scary Stuff

We’ve just flipped the page on the calendar to October.  Definitely one of my favorite months, it’s the time when the air turns cool and crisp, leaves on the trees magically transform into brilliant bursts of color, and football is in full swing.

Pumpkin spice lattes?  I might do one.  Only one.

October is also the month of Halloween, the time when nearly all the streaming services are showing horror flicks.  What is it about horror that we love so much? 

My theory is it’s like being on a really scary rollercoaster ride.  When you get to the top of the first rise and you’re just about to hit that precarious drop, your heart is pumping, your palms are sweaty, and there’s a scream in your throat you know you’ll be helpless to stop. In short, it’s terrifying and exhilarating, but in the end, you know you’ll be safe. 

We like sitting in a darkened theater to watch a scary movie or cracking open a horror novel if in the end we know it’s all going to be okay.

As close to a horror novel that I’ve written was Graveyard Bay. It’s the darkest of the Geneva Chase Mystery Series.  It’s the book that when I asked my neighbor if he enjoyed reading it, he looked away and muttered, “The ending gave me nightmares.”

What book or movie has stayed with you for a long time or scared you silly?

For me, there have been quite a few.  As I was growing up, I binged on weekend horror flicks like the nineteen-thirties version of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman. Back in the sixties, Aurora manufactured plastic model kits based on the old movie monsters.  After I’d put those bad boys together and painted them for my bedroom, I decided to read the old classics.  

Dracula by Bram Stoker had some similarities to the movie, but it was much scarier to read.  Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelly is a much different story than the movie starring Boris Karloff and I really enjoyed it.

Then I went through my H.P. Lovecraft phase.  It doesn’t get much darker than his Cthulhu Mythos.

My thirst for horror had taken root.  As I grew older, I read the likes of The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty.  That was pretty scary book, but the movie frightened the living hell out of me.  It was one time when the film was scarier than the book.

The book that gave me nightmares, however, was Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. It scared me so much I hated going down into the basement for any reason for years.  His book The Stand comes in a close second.  

And of course, since then I’ve read many of Mr. King’s novels as well as such horror writers as Peter Straub, Clive Barker, Dean Koontz, and Anne Rice.  

Just a quick aside, did you know that in addition to horror novels, Anne Rice wrote erotica under the names of Ann Rampling and A.N. Roquelaure? BDSM erotica...written years ahead of Fifty Shades of Gray.

So, I’m going to pour a glass of wine, pop some popcorn, and get ready to binge on some horror before Halloween gets here.  What are your favorites?

Sentences: The Intersection Between Reading and Writing

This summer, I read a handful of books I enjoyed, books that landed in various ways for me. When I read, I’m highly aware of authors’ prose choices and styles. Maybe that’s because I’m a writer; maybe it’s because I’m an English nerd. (I’m sure there’s an intersection there somewhere.) Regardless, my summer reading has me thinking about sentence-level writing.

I began The Radetzky March a month ago. The book has been a slow crawl for me, not because author Joseph Roth isn’t holding my attention. On the contrary. I find myself entranced by his language choices, reading and rereading sentences. Pitching the 1932 book to a friend the other day, I explained that one chapter “begins with a long description of a steak dinner.” My friend rolled his eyes. I know, I know. “But the language will keep you turning pages,” I said. This brings me back to Raymond Chandler’s wonderful statement: “There are no dull books, only dull minds.” In other words: What constitutes compelling fiction? Anything, if the writer can convey the message in an engaging manner.

So how does that happen? As writers, we need to carefully consider the question: How do we engage readers? Because if you’re publishing your work, you’re no longer writing only for yourself. Beyond creating characters readers relate to and want to spend time with, beyond a storyline readers find suspenseful enough to keep turning pages, how can we engage them?

As a reader, I love books that offer language that woos me. However, when I write, I write not as a reader, but as a writer. Again, there’s an intersection there, I’m sure, but I know my strengths lie in character and dialogue. I’m not a prose stylist of Michael Chabon’s ilk. I read The Yiddish Policemen’s Union four times the past two years and continue to laugh aloud at his dark humor and marvel at Chabon’s string of clauses and compound sentences.

When writing, I’m attempting to get what it is in my mind onto the page as clearly and cleanly as possible. (Stephen King, in On Writing, says writing fiction is archeology –– the goal is to get the story out of the ground intact.) When do the language and style choices occur? I’m certainly influenced by what I read, but I’m not thinking of “style” or “compound sentences” or “description.” I’m thinking of story, of character, of helping readers to visualize the scene in a way that is vivid.

I’d be interested to hear from others: How does your reading impact your writing? How aware of style and language choices are you when you write?

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.

Thou Shalt Hoard Notebooks

 By Thomas Kies

Starting today, I’ll be teaching my Creative Writing Class again for the next six weeks.  I always start the first class with introductions.  Then I ask each participant what they hope to get out of the class, what they enjoy reading, and if they have a work in progress. 

Then I spend some time talking about the basics that we’ll be exploring more in detail as the class moves forward.  I always start with some of Stephen King’s rules for writing.  Whether you like him or not, the man is prolific and successful and knows a thing or two about writing. 

First write for yourself and then worry about the audience—I like this advice a lot.  If I think too much about somebody reading what I’m writing, I’d never get a first draft done. 

Don’t use a passive voice--Using the passive voice distances the subject from the action of the sentence, which leads to less clarity and urgency. It can also add unnecessary words to your manuscript, since the passive voice generally requires more auxiliary verbs than the active voice does. You need a lot more space to say :The ball had been kicked by me" than to say "I kicked the ball."

Avoid adverbs, especially after “he said” and “she said”—It’s not that I personally NEVER use them, I just use them sparingly.  

Don’t obsess over perfect grammar—hell, sometimes I’ve made up words.  Not using perfect grammar can drive a copy editor nuts, but as King says, “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then to tell a story.”

The magic is in you—I’m not sure what he means by this, but I like it a lot

Read, read, read— I know what he means by this.  It’s really surprising to me that when I ask my students what they enjoy reading, there are some of them who simply don’t read anything. 

Turn off the TV—I’d like to add to that, turn off the internet.  They are both black holes of time. 

Don’t worry about making other people happy—I want to make my publisher, my agent, my readers, and my wife happy when I write.  However, I don’t obsess over the subject matter or how it’s written.  My fourth book comes out in July and there’s lot in there about Climate Change.  I know some people who simply aren’t going to like it. Oh, and spoiler alert, climate change is real. 

You have three months—King suggests that a first draft shouldn’t take more than three months.  Of course, his day job is writing books.  I have a day job that’s not.  I’m not going to take this one to heart. 

Stick to your own style—I read a lot, mostly mysteries.  Sometimes I have to go back and reread some of my own work so that I don’t subconsciously try to mimic someone else’s style of writing.  

Dig—According to King, “Stories are like relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.”  My read on that is digging deep into your own emotions and memories to get to something that connects with your readers.  

Take a break—I like to do this when the book is finished.  Walk away from it.  Don’t think about it.  But come back and look at it again with fresh eyes.  King says, “You’ll find reading your book over a six-week layoff to be a strange, often exhilarating experience.”

Leave out the boring parts and kill your darlings—no matter how clever you think a turn of phrase might be if it doesn’t move the story forward, throw the little bugger off a cliff.

The research shouldn’t overshadow the story—Not always as easy as it sounds.  I did a ton of research on climate science and the oil industry.  I kept wanting to show my work, but honestly, it’s best if it’s kept in the background. 

You become a writer simply by reading and writing— King said, “You learn best by reading a lot and writing a lot, and the most valuable lessons of all are the ones you teach yourself.”  There’s nothing I can add to that. 

I like teaching the Creative Writing class because it forces me to go back and look at the basics.  I like to use the NBA as an example.  Even the best players in the world are continually running drills and practicing their layups. Everything comes down to knowing and practicing the basics.

That being said, my wife set up new bookshelves in the hallway and I gave her carte blanche to come into my office and take the books with which she’d like to populate the new shelves.  Along the way, she found about seven notebooks in which I’d started a project, then set it aside.

I recall a saying that goes, “The first rule of writing is thou shalt hoard notebooks.”

Creative Writing 101

A week ago, I started teaching Creative Writing again at our community college.  We’re all wearing face masks, are seated at least six feet apart, and are using copious amounts of hand sanitizer.
It’s the first time I’ve done any public speaking in a face mask. It’s a little like trying to talk while underwater.

My first class is a bit of getting to know everyone.  What do they read? Who are their favorite authors? What genre interests you the most?

Next week, they’ll start reading their own work out loud. The rules of engagement for that are once the student has finished reading, scary enough, we will all applaud. Then we’ll talk about the work’s strengths.

Then, we’ll talk about ways we might make the work stronger.

But the first week, I talked about some Creative Writing 101 tips. Most of them come from Stephen King.

Tips like stop watching television. Instead, read as much as possible. I might add my own bit of advice, don’t slide down the internet rabbit hole. It’s too easy to move from the New York Times website to YouTube and watching puppy videos. King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Another one of his tips: don’t be pretentious. It took me a long time to learn that one. King said, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re a little bit ashamed of your short ones.”

Avoid adverbs and long paragraphs.  My editor has been ruthless about teaching me this. King said, “the road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

This is a tip that I really take to heart. Understand that writing is a form of telepathy. King makes the claim that an important element of writing is transference. Your job isn’t to write words on the page, but rather to transfer the ideas inside your head into the heads of your readers. He said, “Words are just the medium through which the transfer happens.”

It excites me to no end when a reader tells me how much they enjoyed a book I’ve written and how they loved Geneva Chase, the lead character in my mysteries.  In their minds, she’s a real person.

Write every single day. King said, “If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind…I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace.” Amen to that.

When you’re finished writing, take a long step back. “When you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” He advises that take six weeks recuperation time after you’ve finished writing so you can have a clear mind to spot any glaring holes in the plot or character development.

I’ve found that to be immensely helpful.I’ve come back after I’ve left the manuscript in the drawer for a while and then look at with a fresh set of eyes.

The final bit of advice is to stay married, be healthy, and live a good life.

I like that very much.

Writers who inspired me to be a writer

As I write this, I’m on the 11th floor of the Hyatt Regency in Dallas attending Bouchercon. Last night, I had cocktails with Michael Barson and Warren Easley (both with Poisoned Pen/Sourcebooks) and Molly Odintz (an editor with Crimereads). One of the interesting topics of conversation was books we read when we were young who made us want to be writers.

It made me reach back and think about which writers inspired me to want to be an author.

The first that came to mind was Ian Fleming. Many, many years ago, I devoured every single James Bond Signet paperback that I could get my hands on. I vaguely recall that in those days they were an expensive sixty cents if you bought them from your local drug store. In school, all the boys (and some girls, too) would read them and then we’d trade those dog-eared copies like baseball cards.

To digress a moment, during our cocktail discussion last night, we talked about who portrayed the best James Bond in the movies. We couldn’t come to a unanimous conclusion. The three we liked the best were Sean Connery, Daniel Craig, and Timothy Dalton, not necessarily in that order.

We also talked about how, with the exception of From Russia With Love, the movies were nothing like Ian Fleming’s books. A good example that came up last night was Diamonds Are Forever. The book was about horse racing in Saratoga. There’s nothing about that in the movie.

Back on topic. One of the other writers who inspired me was John D. McDonald with his iconic Travis Magee series. He’s a beach bum who lives on a houseboat called the “Busted Flush” that he won in a poker game. He’s a self-described “Salvage Consultant” and “Knight Errant”. He makes his living by finding items that have been lost or stolen and taking a cut (usually half of what the item is worth).

Travis was a hero that didn’t seem to age although at the beginning of the series, he intimated that he was a Korean War veteran and somewhere along the way that subtly changed to being a veteran of the War in Viet Nam.

I was impressed that, even in the ‘60’s, he was a prototypical environmentalist, waxing poetic on how damaging encroaching human development was on the Everglades.

It wasn’t until about 1979 in The Green Ripper that Travis starts to slow down. In the last book of the series, The Lonely Silver Rain, Travis learns he has a teenage daughter and takes all the cash he has on hand and puts it into a trust fund for her.

Who can’t love that?

The last writer I’ll talk about is Stephen King. I recall that the very first book I read by him was Salem’s Lot. It scared me so badly that I couldn’t go down into our basement for months. I’d never been that affected by a book in my life.

The next book that I was transfixed by was King’s The Stand. The villain, Randall Flagg, stands out in my mind and I use him as the benchmark for my own villains. And the tunnel scene, scared me right down to my socks.

But King’s finest book, in my opinion, is his non-fiction memoir called On Writing. If you’re trying to develop your craft, it’s well worth your time.

One more digression. If you google how many books Stephen King has written, the answer is a vague “At Least 95”. The man is prolific.

I’ve left out dozens of other writers who have inspired me to write, but hey, I’m at Bouchercon. I don’t want to spend any more time in my hotel room than I have to.

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

Plot Points

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the benefits of outlining a novel before you begin writing. I’m still plugging away at it, and, having moved scenes and added and eliminated characters, I’m more committed to outlining than before.

To outline or not to outline? According to The Writing Cooperative website, Joyce Carol Oates claims, “The first sentence can’t be written until the final sentence is written.” And Ernest Hemingway said, “Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

It’s hard to argue with either of these two writers, and one of the major takeaways I have from this experience is that outlining allows me to see the story arc from thirty thousand feet. As the story takes shape, I can view the beginning, middle, and end and make decisions. For instance, I have made major plot revisions –– adding a backstory to clarify a major character’s motivation and cutting another character out completely –– before I begin writing.

In the past, I have written novels the way one drives at night –– writing “to the end of my headlights.” That is, writing each scene based on the scene that preceded it, and making plot decisions based on the previous scene and my instincts, guided by what I know about the character. This is an exciting way to write. The adage “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” can be fitting. I wrote This One Day (as K.A. Delaney) that way. I didn’t know how the book would end until I was thirty pages from the conclusion. And it was terrifying.

More recently, I pulled a hundred pages from the draft of a novel and eliminated an entire secondary plotline. Both revisions cost me months –– months that, given my day job (I’m a boarding school teacher, dorm head, department chair, and coach), amounts to large chunks of time that I simply don’t have to waste.

But opinions vary, and Stephen King says, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.”

I’d love to hear what my Type M friends say on the matter.

Thoughts on a Reading Life

Like all writers, I’m a reader first. But my day job has me thinking about books, maybe, differently than some other writers might. Given that I'm a writer and a teacher, when I choose a book to read, I always have an eye toward my syllabus and a possible spot in my curriculum. I'm fortunate to get to teach a crime literature course twice a year, because many books I read for fun end up on that list.

But I read more than crime books. As a writer — and a human being, for that matter — I strive to have an eclectic stack beside my bed. And I read multiple books at once. Right now, I'm loving Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, a collection of intertwined stories, by Walter Mosley. This will make it onto my syllabus for the spring. I'm listening to the audio version of In Cold Blood by Truman Capote for maybe the tenth time. And I'm reading White Like Me,by Tim Wise, a memoir about white privilege.

I prefer the term "well-loved" over messy

It's often said that you can tell a lot about a person by what's on his or her reading list. I've always found it interesting to read interviews with writers to see what’s on his or her nightstand at the moment. Stephen King, for instance, says he reads about 80 books a year. He says he's a slow reader. By my math, that's about a book and a half a week, much faster than my pace, for sure.

Many writers read for inspiration. I certainly do. Not ideas so much as inspiration. Those are two different things, and the difference probably lies mostly in honoring intellectual property boundaries. When I get in a rut, I read. I remember working on the opening of Out of Bounds, a Jack Austen novel, and thinking the opening chapter was flat. I picked up Ian Rankin's wonderful book Let It Bleed, read the first chapter, and thought, I simply need to do better. I went back to the drawing board then rewrote the opening scene several more times, finally punching it up.

One never knows where he or she will find inspiration. I have always loved reading poetry, Philip Levine being at the top of my list. Poetry often offers a view of life through a sequence of images that teach us all a great deal about tone. Conflict is often present in poetry, but it isn't always obvious, and that's a good thing for fiction writers to remember.

These are some thoughts on my reading life. I'd love to hear others’ views.

The art of the summary

Can you summarize your novel in two or three sentences? This is a litmus test many of us use. It’s helpful, and when I can’t do it, I know I’m in serious trouble.

This happened to me recently. I was talking to my agents, driving, when they asked me to summarize the draft of a novel I’d finished. Having sent it off to them, I turned my attention to the next book I’d write and drafted a short synopsis for book #2. It’s brief. A 1+1+1+1=4 summary of what will happen and why. (The why is the fun part and much of that I flesh out as I write.)

What occurred on the phone was that I realized I couldn’t offer them a short, succinct account of what happened in the book and why. My failure to do this was, I realized, directly related to questions they had surrounding plot points. I exhaled and told them I wanted the book back. Now I’m eliminating a character and revising.

A couple things happened in this case. The first is that I spent more time writing this book (18 months, maybe two years) than I have ever before. That’s too long. Stephen King, in On Writing, recommends three months. With a day job, I can’t do that. But I usually spend nine months or so on a draft. This time, I got sick, spent a month in the hospital, and when I returned to the book, I’d lost the thread of the story, had to go back, read it all again and made changes along the way, complicating the plot.

I’m not Tom Clancy and don’t want to be. I like books that work because of the characters, not because of the plots. I’m interested in human motivations and moral ambiguity. I guess, though, if you give me several weeks alone in a hospital room to think and rethink a story, my ego gets the better of me.

So I’m back at it, revising and streamlining my book so that in the end no one will say I didn’t play fair. It starts (and hopefully ends) with a three-sentence summary.

#

In other news, my 17-year-old daughter Audrey and I are traversing the midwest this week, visiting colleges. We’ve driven 1,200 miles (and counting), starting in Maine, turning around at the tail end of Ohio, and driving back, visiting seven colleges in five days, and meeting track and cross country coaches.

Children grow up too damned fast!

How long is too long?

I wrote my first novel in about 15 months. It wasn’t very good. I rewrote it several times, and despite all that CPR, it still wasn’t very good. But it was finished. When I got my first book contract, I was obligated to produce a book a year. I finished those first few books in about nine months each.

I’m starting a new series, and the time I’ve spent on this book has me thinking I’ve gone back in time. Life is more complicated now. I have three kids, for one thing. I had a health scare this fall that threw a monkey wrench into my pace. But when I’m done this book, I will have nearly two years into it. Not long, maybe, to some. But for a genre writer, who thinks of himself as a series author, two years seems like a long time.

If you write series –– and I love the process of seeing a character develop from book to book –– two years is too long. Publishers want a book a year. I get that. I grew up eager for spring because I knew the next Spenser novel was coming. You can’t create a brand and then run out of the product.

But we’re not making widgets.

So how long is too long to produce a book? The simple answer is as long as it takes. You need to write the best book you can, especially when you’re launching a new series. And once you “have the voice, the next one is easier,” the saying goes. Maybe.

Stephen King, in On Writing, says three months is optimal. I see his point: you need to be close to the text to follow the plot development. I have an encompassing day job, so writing a book in three months isn’t an option. My way around this is to work in 50-page chunks, writing and editing before moving on. If I hit a wall or have to go a few days without writing, I go back and reread the entire book again. This prevents me from losing significant forward momentum.

So how long does it take me to write a novel? Hopefully not two years each time out. But the answer remains as long as it takes.

I’d love to hear from others regarding this question.