Kay DiBianca

Chariots of Fire is one of my favorite movies. If you’ve seen it, you know it’s a great film about running. It’s well-constructed, beautifully rendered, and thought-provoking, and I occasionally watch it when I’m on the treadmill as an inspiration to keep huffing and puffing.

The film tells the mostly true story of two very different men, both exceptional runners, who are training to compete in the 1924 Olympics.

Harold Abrahams is a brash and confident law student at Cambridge University who boasts that he’s never lost a foot race. He follows it up by winning the College Dash, a race against the clock that had never been accomplished in the 700 years of its history.

Eric Liddell is the modest and devout son of a Scottish missionary who has determined his own future will be in the mission field. But Eric is also a remarkably gifted runner, and he wants to try his hand (and legs) at the Olympic track events before he returns to China.

The two men are headed toward an inevitable showdown, and their individual efforts comprise much of the film’s early scenes.

But the movie is about more than running and winning. That’s the obvious theme, the WHAT of the story. As the plot moves forward, a more subtle sub-theme emerges. The essence of the movie is the WHY.

Why were these men willing to spend so many lonely hours in the painful pursuit of a minute or two of glory that may not even happen?  A lot of people lust after a moment in the spotlight, but few are willing to put in the kind of grueling work these two did. There must be something deeper.

Perhaps the reason was revealed in a dinner conversation between Harold and Sybil Gordon, a talented singer/actress who eventually became his wife.

On their first date, she asks him, “Why running?”

He responds, “Why singing?”

“It’s my job,” she replies, but then immediately pauses and reflects. “No, that’s silly. I do it because I love it.”

Ah.

Several scenes later, Eric has a conversation with his sister who is urging him to give up running to return to the mission field. Trying to make her understand his desire to compete in the Olympics, Eric says, “I believe that God made me for a purpose, for China. But He also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure.”

* * *

Running and writing have a lot in common. To be serious in either field requires discipline, hard work, and perseverance. The runner paces himself/herself through long distances one step at a time just as the writer progresses word-by-word through his or her story. Along the way, one must develop the ability to deal with frustration, injury (running) or rejection (writing). These attributes are not for the faint of heart.

Now there’s no doubt the benefits in both areas are profound. Runners and writers enjoy time alone to explore their thought-worlds. Runners experience improved health, a sense of well-being, and even a boost to creativity. Writers often find a deeper meaning in their own existence when they offer the gift of their creative talent to the world. They might even make some money.

But is there something more? Like the runners in Chariots of Fire, serious writers seem to have a devotion to their chosen activity that transcends worldly reward. Perhaps it’s natural talent that draws them in, but there must be something deeper to hold them. Is it the challenge? The possibility of riches? The lure of fame? Is it the desire to create, to give a gift of oneself to a troubled world? Or is it simply the love of the craft?

* * *

The TKZ community is made up of writers who run the gamut from the relatively new like me to best-selling authors and authorities in the field. So there must be a variety of opinions on why each of us writes. I’d like to know. Why do you write?

 “Where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.” — Ian Charlson in the role of Eric Liddell in Chariots of Fire.

* * *

Saving One Life Is Like Saving the Whole World

Kathryn and Cece find themselves in another tangled web searching for a killer in order to save the life of a friend. Could the dead man’s watch hold the key to the mystery?

By John Gilstrap

I recently finished Lethal Prey, the latest edition in my Jonathan Grave thriller series (July, 2022), and as a subscriber to Microsoft Office 365, I noticed a function for the first time during my first-round edit of the manuscript. If you click on the Review button, and then on the Editor button, you can open up a world of useful editing functions. I am the king of typos, so it’s wonderful to be able to search by spelling errors, those underlined-in-red words that I never see because I watch my hands when I type.

You can also search by grammatical errors, and by “clarity” errors. It’s a pretty useful function, and it gives you the opportunity to add words like “gotta” and “friggin'” into the dictionary so the program learns.

This time around, though, I noticed a new function. I can search for “inclusivity errors.” This is, after all, 2021, which looks more and more like George Orwell’s version of 1984.

By way of background, I recently dealt with a Facebook PM exchange wherein a distressed reader complained that I had not included trigger warnings in by latest book. When I told her that the title Stealth Attack, combined with a cover image of a bullet and gobs of barbed wire, should have carried that water, she maintained that such was not enough.

Perhaps the gods are telling me that the time to retire is approaching.

Anyway, back to inclusivity. Here are the suggested changes, presented in the order they appear in my manuscript:

Cocky should be overconfident. I confess this one made me laugh. It had never occurred to me that the root of “cocky” was actually a root . . . Okay, did you hear the filters fall into place? My wife isn’t sitting next to me, but if she were, I’d have just been pinched.

Countrymen is bad. Compatriots is better.

Gunmen really should be shooters. Is this really a point of friction?

Alderman is exclusionary. It should be council member. Except, you know, the character is an alderman.

Middlemen is a triggering word, apparently. I should go with intermediaries or go-betweens. But for the fact that this particular bit occurs in dialogue, I don’t have a lot of argument with it. I’m just not sure it’s worth a highlight.

Manned. Well, crap. I have sinned. Staffed is the Microsoft-approved alternative. “Staff the ramparts, humans!”

Man of the house should be head of the household.

You guys should be shortened to you. But for the fact that the “you guys” are both guys, this might have some merit.

In a description of a topographical map in which I describe contour lines as indicating elevations and tiny dots indicating manmade structures, Microsoft cautions me to choose between manufactured or synthetic as the better alternative.

Bottom line: I didn’t make any of these changes. That said, I’ve mentioned before that I spend a fair amount of time mentoring new writers on Facebook’s Fiction Writing group, and people are taking this stuff seriously. “People with prostates” and “people with ovaries” are a growing trend to describe what we used to call men and women.

Here’s my question to the TKZ family who is no doubt terrified to go on the record for an issue like this: Is all of this a passing fad, or is it going to stick?

Place is character. And all writing is regional. — John Dufresne.

By PJ Parrish

Man, do I need a vacation.

Like most of you, I haven’t been much of anywhere these past 18 months, and my itch to travel has gone from wanderlust to wander-horny. I love to go places I’ve never been before — anywhere! Be it the wooded path in Michigan I’ve never jogged down before to the Camargue in southern France.

We were scheduled to go to Provence last fall but that was cancelled. So I’ve had to content myself with binging on Escape To The Chateau and Stanley Tucci: Searching For Italy.  And I’ve read a lot of books.

Nina George took me to favorite old haunts and beyond in The Little Paris Bookshop. Georges Simenon took me to a Normandy fishing village in Maigret et la Vielle Dame.  Stuart Neville took me to northern Ireland in The Ghosts of Belfast. And I have just embarked to Newfoundland, piloted by Jim DeFede who recounts the true story of the villagers of Gander who took in 7,000 passengers stranded in the wake of 9/11 in his book The Day The World Came To Town.

These journeys and many others have helped keep me sane. The books have also gotten me to thinking about what makes for a great location in a novel. I’m a sucker for sense of place. I can almost forgive poor characterizations or lazy plotting if the location is well rendered.

I think sense of place is often neglected by writers who are just finding their feet. Maybe they believe that like description, it slogs down the plot. I believe, however, that if you don’t ground your reader in a sense of place, the characters never truly come alive.

As John Defresne says in his splendid writing fiction book The Lie That Tells The Truth:

“Place connects characters to a collective and personal past, and so place is the emotional center of story. And by place, I don’t simply mean location. A location is a dot on the map, a set of coordinates. Place is location with narrative, with memory and imagination, with history. We transform a location into a place by telling its stories.

The chapter that passage comes from is titled: “You Can’t Do Anything If You’re Nowhere.”  No place, no plot, nowhere man.

So, let’s try to get practical here. What can I tell you that might help you as a fiction writer, get a better sense of your place? That’s tough. I can only go by my own experience writing and reading. Place is often my jumping off point. In my Louis Kincaid series, I move him between southwest Florida and Michigan. But within that macro, I try to find specific mini-locations that speak me and help me put a frame around my character. These mini-locations have been: The Everglades, an abandoned insane asylum, a remote island in the Gulf, the vast emptiness of the Sleeping Bear sand dunes, and the rugged loneliness of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, with its abandoned copper mines. I have a thing for abandoned places.

For our stand-alone A Killing Song, Paris was the macro-location. The mini-location was the creepy network of catacombs beneath the city. We also took our readers to the Arab enclave called La Goutte d’Or, the strange park Buttes-Chamont, a dive bar tucked behind the Pantheon called El Melocoton.

We didn’t take our readers to the Eiffel Tower, the Tuileries gardens, or Cafe Deux Magots.

Why? Here is the best piece of advice I can give you regarding creating a sense of place: Don’t go with the obvious. Steer clear of all clichés. The more well-known and iconic your setting is, the harder you have to work to find within it the telling details that make it come alive in your reader’s imagination. Make your setting FRESH.

Writing about New York City? Take me places I haven’t seen in TV. Writing about Hong Kong? Give me the smells and sounds that movies cannot. Miami? Stay away from South Beach and Little Havana. San Francisco? No Wharf, Alcatraz, cable cars and go light on the fog. Stay away from tired place memes that are over-used so much they lose all emotional impact.

Your postcards from the edge must have an edge.

Okay, enough beating you over the head about cliches. What else can I offer?

Write what you know. This does not mean you have to visit all your locales. It helps. Boy, does it help. I’ve got a very good working knowledge of Paris but I had never been to La Goutte D’Or. I traveled every inch of its streets via Google Street View. But you can create a great location if you do your research the people, language and culture. Remember: What may be colorful and exotic to you as a writer is just normal life to the people who live there.

Compare and contrast. If your character is a stranger in strange land, use his experiences and memories of his normal world and contrast it with what he is observing. I did this often in The Killing Song with my American Matt, a Floridian who had never been abroad. I used his naivete, frustration, and fears to create the same feelings for readers.

What is the scene about? You need to pin this down before you begin piling in details of location.  Don’t just say to yourself: I’m going to set a scene at Muir Woods because I was there once and the old trees were cool. Figure out what needs to happen to your character FIRST and then make the setting enhance the plot and the mood. Watch this great scene in Vertigo where Kim Novak wanders among the ancient trees, says she’s thinking about “All the people who have lived and died while the trees went on living.” The haunting setting reflects her confused mood.

Use All Your Senses!

This is a tenet of all good description but especially for creating settings. The smells of an exotic street bazaar. The sounds of shrieking wild parrots in the palm trees of Miami Beach. The fusty smell of cold earth in a graveyard.  The simple sense of feel became critical in our book The Killing Song. Near the climax, Matt is forced to crawl through the narrow tunnels of the catacombs. He is claustrophobic, due to a childhood accident, and he’s terrified.

Shivering, I got up and moved on. I was dismayed to see the passageway starting to narrow again, and before long I was forced to my knees. The passageway continued to shrink until I was flat on my belly, looking into a hole about the size of a large heating vent.

I wiggled forward and twisted my body so I could shine the flashlight into the hole.

Bones. As far as I could see.

A brown, jagged carpet of them in a passageway no larger than a coffin.

I closed my eyes, fighting back nausea. I pulled in a deep breath and slithered forward into the hole. Eyes closed, I started a soldier’s crawl across the bones. I could feel the sharp edges rip at the sleeves of my jacket. I could hear the dry crunch, like beetles being crushed, as the bones broke under the weight of my body.

Don’t Overdo It.  It’s easy, during research, to fall hopelessly in love with your setting. You must know what to leave out. Dan Brown, who some might say never met a location he didn’t love, puts it this way: “Readers are interested in your characters and plot, so information about your world is best conveyed through a character’s sensory experience or through action.”

Use Visual Aids. I did this often with our Louis books. I made many treks into the Everglades or locations around Ft. Myers and took hundreds of photos that found their way onto an inspiration wall as I wrote. I found this photo of a “cataphile” while researching the Paris catacombs and it inspired the scene above with Matt:

I also keep old fashioned fold-up physical maps handy, which oddly give me a better sense of where I am in a book than any Google Map ever could. I often created my own maps of places I had made up, like the grounds of the abandoned insane asylum.

Imagine Your Story Is a Movie

Some of you have actually screenwriting experience. I do not. But I often can visualize my scenes as movies. I can see in my mind an establishing setting shot, long, medium or close up. If you can visualize this, you can really get your reader grounded in a reality of location.

One last example before I leave. I also re-read To Kill A Mockingbird this past year. I had to go back and find this for you, but it still strikes me as one of the best opening descriptions of place that I can remember:

Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop, grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow it was hotter then . . . bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

This is, of course, seen through Scout’s point of view. It not only establishes Maycomb as a tired place, but it is written as a recollection of Scout as an adult. We get a sense of poverty, idleness, and oppression that comes to underscore the story’s themes.

I’m off to research things to see near St. Remy de Provence. Yes, we are planning to go this fall. So I’ll let John Defresne have the last word:

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to write, so let’s write. We’ll chat later. Get out your pen and paper or fire up the computer. Pour yourself a coffee. Unplug the phone. Once you start, you can’t stop. Give yourself a half hour. Relax. Don’t think too much. You’re starting a journey, and you don’t know where you’re going. But you do know you’re going someplace you haven’t been before.”