Author Archives: James Scott Bell

About James Scott Bell

International Thriller Writers Award winner, #1 bestselling author of THRILLERS and BOOKS ON WRITING. Subscribe to JSB's NEWSLETTER.

On Starting a New Project

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Evan Hunter author photo from The Moment She Was Gone

Today is release day for Romeo’s Truth. (Ebook at deal price; print to follow shortly.) Tomorrow I begin working in earnest on Romeo #11.

I make it my goal to hit the ground running on a new project as soon as a book is released. I’ve written before about being like a movie studio. I want to have a main project and a few in various stages of development, waiting to get a green light.

Starting a new novel is always a high. I know there will be low points, like the “30k wall.” I don’t know why this happens, but I’ve heard other authors experience it, too. When I get to that mark I begin to think of the long road ahead, and also wonder if my foundations are strong enough. I look at my outline and structure. My main concern is having the hero locked into a death struggle. My definition of great fiction is that it is the record of how a character fights with death. Death comes in three forms: physical (as in the thriller); professional or vocational; and psychological/spiritual. The stakes have to be that high to generate optimum reader interest.

There’s always a way to break through the wall, or at least climb over it. Once that’s done, I’m off and running again to the end.

I always celebrate when I finish a book. Do something fun, like take my long-suffering wife out for a nice dinner. Or cook our favorite meal at home, which always involves a ribeye steak and nice bottle of California Cabernet, followed by a movie or one of our favorites shows, like a Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, or a Poirot with David Suchet.

 Before starting work on the new book, I pause. I’m anxious and ready to go, but there’s also a little knot of hesitation. How do I do this again? Write a whole book? Thriller writer J. T. Ellison once said, “It’s the whole getting started thing for me. I forget how to write a book. The first ten thousand words are like digging fossils from rocks.”

In a TV interview, Dean Koontz expressed a similar feeling, So he goes into a huge room in his huge house, where shelves are packed with all his books, foreign and domestic. He looks a them and says, “I did it before, I can do it again.” That’s Dean freaking Koontz! (Over 140 novels, 500 million sold).

So I have a little ritual. I settle into my chair with a cup of my favorite java. I look at the visual inspirations in my office. There’s a photo of John D. McDonald, pipe in mouth, typing away. There’s an author photo of Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, looking at me as if to say, “Don’t give me any excuses. Write!” There’s the black coffee mug with WRITER on it, which  I bought the year I decided I was going to be a writer, even though naysayers had told me I couldn’t learn how. I put that mug where I could look at it every day, which I did for the seven years it took me to sell my first novel.

Then I put on coffeehouse sounds via Coffitivity, wiggle my fingers, and start typing.

How do you feel about starting a new project? High, hopeful, or hesitant? Do you have any writing rituals?

Traditional Publishing Advice

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

It’s been 18 years already! Can you believe it? The Kindle came out in late 2007. So did a little device I like to call the iPhone. These twin explosions (to put it mildly) changed the world of publishing and reading—and even the culture—forever (I mean, in 2006 you never saw a mom or dad pushing a stroller in broad daylight with their face glued to a phone, as little junior or missy plays with a tablet with digital bunnies instead of looking at live birds flying in the sky).

In 2007 we had two major tragedies: The Sopranos ended and Keeping Up With the Kardashians began.

Evel Knievel, age 69, died in 2007 (shockingly, of natural causes). Tony Bennett, age 80, got married (but did he leave his heart in San Francisco? I certainly hope not).

Where were you in 2007? I was on the verge of signing a new contract with a major publishing house. Traditional publishing was my home. Back then all writers longed to make it through the gates of the Forbidden City.

Then in 2008 and ’09, seemingly out of nowhere, brand-spanking new writers publishing 99¢ Kindle books directly on Amazon started raking in huge bucks. The indie revolution had begun.

It exploded over the next several years, along with prophecies of the demise of traditional publishing. At the time I noted that reports of trad’s death were greatly exaggerated, likening the biz to Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta who was famous for getting bloodied but never going down.

And so today we have the two paths—trad and indie—firmly established, each with its own set of challenges. I have been a happy indie since 2012. It’s a joy to publish a book the moment I deem it ready. So I wonder what advice I’d give today to an author yearning for a traditional publishing contract. Let me give it a whirl.

  1. You’re going to need lots of patience. And by that I mean, lots.

Over at the Books & Such Literary Agency blog, Rachel Kent explains a typical timeline in trad publishing:

  • Revamping the proposal with your agent for submission to editors: 1–4 months
  • Agent pitching and selling the project: 2 months–2 years (sometimes longer and there’s no guarantee of a sale)
  • Contract negotiation: 2 weeks–4 months
  • Final book is due: 0–18 months after contract
  • Editorial revision letter back to author: Approximately 2 months after book is turned in.
  • Revisions done by author and sent back to publishing house: 7-30 days from the time the revision letter is received.
  • Galleys to author: 4–6 months after revisions
  • Galley corrections back to publisher: 7–14 days after receipt of galleys.
  • Book goes to the printer: 1–14 days after galleys are finalized.
  • Book ships to stores: 1–2 months after it is sent to printer.
  • Book officially releases: 1–2 weeks after stores receive the product.

Note that chilling number: It can take up to 2 years for an agent to pitch a project with no guarantee of a sale. And if the book is published, there is no guarantee that it will sell in sufficient numbers to get another contract.

If it’s still your dream to be traditionally published, that’s fine. Everyone should pursue their dreams. Just be aware of the above, and:

  1. Don’t expect the system to change for you

It’s a glacially slow and frustrating process. It is what it is. I wish it was what it could be. So does writer and former agent Nathan Bransford. He recently offered a “Publishing Submission Bill of Rights” for the publishing industry which I like very much, including:

Article 1 – If you are a publishing professional who’s open for submissions, you owe everyone who follows your submission guidelines a timely response…

Article 2 – If you are an author or agent who doesn’t follow submission guidelines, you are not entitled to a response…

Article 3 – One month for queries and two months for manuscripts is an acceptable timeline unless otherwise agreed – If you’re a publishing professional who can’t stay on top of incoming submissions you should close for submissions, get more assistance, or request fewer manuscripts. Again, it’s unfair to authors to leave them in limbo with hazy timelines…

Article 4 – “Thanks but not for me” is not only an acceptable submission response, it’s better than saying something just to say something – The submission system should reward timeliness and clarity over detailed feedback…

Article 5 – If you receive “thanks but not for me,” you are not owed further clarification. Don’t ask. Don’t bog down the process or put undue pressure on agents and editors who simply say “not for me.” If they only have a gut feeling and don’t have anything helpful to add, don’t follow-up. Just move on.

All that said, the primary advice I’d give to a young writer seeking trad publishing is keep the main thing the main thing. The best book you can write is the main thing. And don’t be a snoot about learning the craft. Learn what works, and why, before you go off and “break the rules.” And don’t think AI is going to give you any shortcuts. If you rely on it for the writing itself, it will give you a competent product at the same time it melts your brain. And competent fiction does not make fans. Unforgettable fiction does, and for that you must tap your heart and your blood, and know how to translate them through craft.

Further advice:

  • No agent is better than a bad agent. Do your due diligence.
  • Educate yourself on publishing contracts, esp. the non-compete clause and the reversion of rights clause (tie the latter to royalties, not “out of print”).
  • Don’t hang your ultimate happiness on getting published. If you don’t make it, you’ll be severely disappointed. If you do make it, your books may not sell enough to keep you inside the Forbidden City. And if you do make it to the “A List” and think you’ll be eternally and gloriously happy, read the end of The Great Gatsby again.
  • Manage expectations, write and learn, and find your joy in the production of good words.

Carpe Typem.
Seize the Keyboard.

Over to you now. What’s your view of traditional publishing these days? Any further advice you’d give our hypothetical writer?

How Long Should a Series Go?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A little horn toot today as I announce that my tenth Mike Romeo book, Romeo’s Truth, is available for pre-order for Kindle. And at a special deal price, too. (The publisher insisted on this, and after a tense three-hour meeting I agreed to go along with it. Since I am also that publisher, I’ll leave it to the psychologists to figure out what’s going on in my head, a project my wife has been working on for 44 years.)

Ten is always one of those numbers you pause and reflect upon. A tenth anniversary. A tenth child. A tenth bagel. Thus, this series author wonders, wherefore art thou going, Romeo? How long should a series go?

I look at some of the big name series authors and am in awe. As of this post John Sandford has written 36 Prey books (#36 is coming out next year). And 12 Virgil Flowers books. He’s 81 years old and still cranking them out without employing ghost or co-writers or, God help us, AI.

And then there’s Michael Connelly, with 25 Bosch books, 8 Lincoln Lawyers, and 6 Renée Ballards.

(One interesting difference between Lucas Davenport and Harry Bosch is that Sandford has frozen Lucas’s age while Connelly has Bosch aging chronologically with each book, making Bosch about 74. Funny, but in the first Prey book, Rules of Prey, Sandford describes Lucas as having “straight black hair going gray at the temples.” Makes me wonder when Lucas started using Grecian Formula.)

Even dead series authors are still at it. Robert B. Parker is “co-writing” two series, Spenser and Jesse Stone, 15 years after his death. Ditto Vince Flynn, Stuart Woods, Clive Cussler and others.

How can that be? Money, of course. That’s why the traditional publishers of these books perform literary reanimation. It makes complete economic sense.

On the other hand, many a series that doesn’t earn enough dough is dropped, leaving the authors pleading for their rights back, which may or may not happen.

With indie publishing, the author is in full control of the length of a series. Money is a factor, but not the only one. Maybe a series is only making Starbucks scratch but the author still enjoys the writing. (I have no advice to pass along to those who produce by bot. The reward of working hard on a book and nailing it to one’s satisfaction is a joy that cannot be bought by prompt.) Sweating a novel is also fantastic exercise for the brain, which I’d like to keep healthy for the years I have on this orb.

There are also the readers to consider. If they’re pleased, I’m pleased. One reader offered:

“As others have said, this SERIES was hard to put down. The main characters were exciting and not one dimensional at all….I tried to figure out why the plots were so engrossing. There were no chapters…. Just a fast paced, hard hitting story line that flowed from one moment to the next and plot twists that kept one guessing. I hope Mr. Bell writes more in this series.”

Mr. Bell will. I am already at work on Romeo #11. If you’re new to the series, you should know that you can read any of the books as stand-alone thrillers. Romeo’s Truth is a good one to whet your appetite for the others.

If you’re outside the U.S., got to your Amazon store and search for: B0FT6ZR4PJ

As I worked on the last lines of the book, I got that feeling that happens sometimes when an author finishes a project into which they’ve poured blood. A warmth, a palpable satisfaction. And I realized how much I love my characters—Mike, Sophie, Ira, C Dog. It’s that deep affection that comes only when you’ve walked side-by-side with people through a life-threatening crisis (even though it was a crisis of my own making!)

Thanks for listening. Now tell us about a series you love, and why. And if you’re in the midst of writing your own, how are you feeling about it?

Picturing Your Characters

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

One of my favorite noirs is the 1944 classic Laura. Dana Andrews plays a NYC detective investigating the murder of the beautiful Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). It becomes personal when he sees a framed portrait of Laura and is enraptured by it. And why shouldn’t he be? It’s Gene Tierney, after all.

I thought about this the other day when I read a story about the artist Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) and his painting “Portrait of a Young Woman.” The subject was Simonetta Vespucci, wife of Marco Vespucci who was cousin to Amerigo, the explorer for whom our country was named (history lessons are no extra charge here at TKZ). Sadly, Simonetta died at age 22 or 23, probably of tuberculosis. Botticelli was clearly captivated by her beauty. I am, too.

Sandro Botticelli, “Portrait of a Young Woman” (1485)

I understand the allure of the Mona Lisa. Her enigmatic smile has been the source of centuries of speculation, and even song. Do you smile to tempt a lover, Mona Lisa? Or is this your way to hide a broken heart? But I admit sometimes she frustrates me.

Simonetta invites. I gaze at her eyes and wonder what’s going on behind them. She wears the trappings of wealth—a head covering festooned with pearls and feathers, and a medallion that may have been the gift of Lorenzo de Medici, the Florentine who was patron to both Botticelli and Michelangelo, and whose brother Giuliano may have been Simonetta’s lover.

Is she thinking, How did I ever get into this mess? Or, I’ve finally found happiness and I am at peace.

Well, just like with Mona Lisa, it’s not the answer that counts, but the imaginings and the various pathways they open in the vast neural networks of the mind.

Which is why I always find a visual for my characters.

When I start assembling my cast I first choose a name. I usually use Scrivener’s Name Generator for this. I start a Character Sheet and write what their role in the story will be.

Then I go looking for an image. Several authors I know use AI for their character images. My preferred method is simply to search Google Images for “Middle aged fisherman” or “Thirty year old businesswoman.” Then I scroll around looking for a face, and especially eyes that spark something unanticipated in me. That’s the key. I want to be surprised. I’ll copy that image into the Character Sheet then write some notes on what the eyes are saying to me.

Later I can open up the Corkboard View and see all the faces at once. When I write a scene, I can put the picture of a character onscreen as I type.

In the years before Google I used to buy magazines with lots of pictures, like Us and People (and no, I didn’t buy that picture magazine). I’d go through them and cut out faces and toss them in a box. When I started a project I’d take out the box and play casting director.

Much easier now.

Shell Scott

In the 1950s, Richard Prather wrote a series of PI books that outsold all others except those by Mickey Spillane. His hero was Shell Scott, and his defining feature was a buzz cut of white-blond hair. The publisher, Fawcett Gold Medal, decided to put a picture of Shell on the books.

 

Travis McGee

In the 1960s, John D. MacDonald gave us Travis McGee, and Fawcett did the same thing.

[FWIW, Sam Elliott played Travis in a TV movie and didn’t fit the profile at all. Much better was Rod Taylor in a little seen adaptation of Darker Than Amber (1970). Catch it if you can. Taylor is spot on.]

Personally, I think it’s better when readers form their own picture of a series lead. When I first conceived of Mike Romeo I went looking for a face…and found one that was, and is, perfect (for me). But I shan’t reveal who it is. Let the readers form the image for themselves. That gives them a “personal” Mike.

But for my own use in a project, a picture is a portal into a character’s soul.

What about you? Do you like to find pictures for your characters? Or are the pictures in your head enough?

Trouble is Your Business

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Imagine the first storyteller. I’ll call him Og. He was out hunting for meat. He was about to bag him some wolf when he got surprised by a mastodon lumbering by.

Bummer.

He dropped his club and ran. He hid in some rocks. An hour or so later he came back to his prey and found it being devoured by a saber toothed tiger.

Double bummer.

Then Og had to trek back to the waiting fire. His tribe was sitting there awaiting some steaks (they were tired of berries and roots.) They looked at Og and grunted something which can be roughly translated, “Where’s the meat, man?”

Og was on the spot. His position as chief hunter-gatherer was up for grabs, depending on what he said next.

The last time something like this happened, and the tribe asked what went wrong, Og merely shrugged and threw dirt at them. This didn’t help matters at all. They seemed unwilling to give Og more chances.

So now Og gets on his haunches and says, “I was out hunting like always, and had a wolf in my sights. I threw a rock and got him right on the head. He went down. I was about to go get him when I heard this ROAARRRR!”

He pauses to take stock of the reactions around the fire. Every face is turned toward him. He can see consuming interest in their eyes.

He has them hooked.

Good, Og thinks. Let’s see if I can keep them that way while I figure out how to get out of this.

“I spin around,” Og says, “and there is a tiger with those long, spiked teeth. There is spit dripping off those teeth. His eyes were huge, as big as lakes! I could smell his fur. It smelled like death.”

The audience is leaning forward now. Og thinks, That went well. If I take time to describe things this way, it stretches out the story and the tension. And that bit about the smell, that was pure genius.

Og is beginning to develop a style.

He’s also searching for an ending, and so he lays out, beat by beat, a story of this encounter with the tiger and the ensuing fight to save his own life. He finally gets to the end and speaks of a mighty battle with the beast, until his ultimate triumph.

Someone in the audience asks, “So where’s the tiger?”

Og must think up a twist ending. So he comes up with the speculative fiction genre, and says the god of the mountains came down and took the tiger as tribute. He was about to call down fire from the sky on Og’s tribe. Og told him not to, that it would be bad, and he would fight the god if he had to. The god relented.

So Og has saved all their lives. Or so the story goes.

Well, the reaction of the listeners is so good that Og gets a double portion of berries. An attractive woman gives him a blanket of squirrel fur in honor of his exploits. One of the old men gives Og his best club. A couple of the younger tribe members hand over their favorite trinkets, and promise more if Og will tell more stories.

And Og thinks, Maybe I can make a living at this.

Og’s brother, who collects the booty, keeps 15% of it.

Og had more thrillers on his tongue.

Later, Og began to tell stories that were about his emotions. How he was having to deal with past demons, like his father flicking pebbles at him when he was a boy, and when he fell in love with a cave girl who later got stepped on by a wooly mammoth. Og starts calling these “character driven” stories, but knows they are based on the same idea: a high stakes threat to the character’s life and happiness.

And you know what? The essence of story has not changed—from Og to the early myths to the Greek drama to Shakespeare; from Jane Austen to Herman Melville to Mark Twain; from Dashiell Hammett to Raymond Chandler to Sue Grafton.

It’s all about trouble.

Trouble comes on a continuum, from the annoying to the life-threatening. When you can’t find your reading glasses that’s one kind of trouble. A kidnapped child is quite another.

Every scene in your book should have some form of trouble that produces emotions that are also on a continuum, from low-level worry to outright terror.

That’s your palette, writer. Dip into it each day as your write your story. Always be thinking How can I make more trouble? How can I make it worse?

Then stick the landing. Nail the ending. And readers will line up to give you a double portion of berries.

Are you making enough trouble? Do your openings disturb? Do you write “friend talking to friend” scenes that need more tension (watch out for eating scenes)? What are some of your favorite ways to make trouble (a la “bring in a guy with a gun”)?

Note: The link in the post takes you to an Og-inspired thriller that is on Kindle-sale for 99¢ this week. The book is Your Son is Alive.

How to Describe Characters

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I was reading a mystery the other day and noticed something—myself, pondering. I’d just read a passage describing a character. I shan’t print the actual prose, but here’s something I made up to give you the idea:

She wore a dress the color of jade. A platinum chain, deceptively thin on her smooth neck, held a diamond pendant. She had a sleek gold watch on her wrist, stacked against an array of jangling bracelets. Even her stiletto pumps whispered of indulgence and private fittings.

A couple of paragraphs later my brain sent me a message: Hey, I don’t remember a single thing she was wearing.

Which got me to thinking about what kind, and how many, physical details one should include. And my first thought is that one telling detail is much more powerful than a list. Consider this passage from The Godwulf Manuscript, a Spenser novel from Robert B. Parker:

Bradley W. Forbes, the president, was prosperously heavy—reddish face; thick, longish, white hair; heavy white eyebrows. He was wearing a brown pinstriped custom tailored three-piece suit with a gold Phi Beta Kappa key on a gold watch chain stretched across his successful middle. His shirt was yellow broadcloth and his blue and yellow striped red tie spilled out over the top of his vest.

This, IMO, is too much. And I was tripped up by broadcloth. What the heck is broadcloth? All those colors—red, white, gold. And what does “blue and yellow striped red” look like?

Here’s a better mix from The Americans by John Jakes. Carter Kent is a student at Harvard in the 1880s. Rebellious in nature, Carter got on the wrong side of his German professor.

In Carter’s opinion the man belonged in the Prussian army, not in a classroom. His curly blonde hair lay over his forehead in damp, effeminate ringlets. He had protruding blue eyes, and a superior manner, and loved to strut in front of his classes with a gold-knobbed cane in hand. He issued study instructions as if they were military orders, emphasizing them by whacking the cane on the desk.

Here damp, effeminate ringlets is striking. The gold-knobbed cane also. But here we have Carter’s impression of the man. Prussian army … military orders. And an action— whacking desks. That latter picture is one that sticks most in my mind.

Now let’s look at three character descriptions from the first page of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. It is, of course, in the POV of Philip Marlowe:

The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers. The parking lot attendant had brought the car out and he was still holding the door open because Terry Lennox’s left foot was still dangling outside, as if he had forgotten he had one. He had a young-looking face but his hair was bone white. You could tell by his eyes that he was plastered to the hairline, but otherwise he looked like any other nice young guy in a dinner jacket who had been spending too much money in a joint that exists for that purpose and for no other.

Notice there’s one telling detail—bone white. That’s striking, and that’s enough. The rest of the description is the impression the character’s looks make on Marlowe.

There was a girl beside him. Her hair was a lovely shade of dark red and she had a distant smile on her lips and over her shoulder she had a blue mink that almost made the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile. It didn’t quite. Nothing can.

Two specific details here—dark red hair and a blue mink—and both of them are wrapped up inside Marlowe’s impression. Here is a rich woman who doesn’t seem to care about the drunken Lennox (…distant smile…)

The attendant was the usual half-tough character in a white coat with the name of the restaurant stitched across the front of it in red. He was getting fed up.

Detail: white coat with red stitching. But the impression is what stays with us. I know what Marlowe means by a “usual half-tough character.”

Chandler then goes on to use both dialogue and action to augment the descriptions. Dialogue for the half-tough guy:

“Look, mister,” he said with an edge to his voice, “would you mind a whole lot pulling your leg into the car so I can kind of shut the door? Or should I open it all the way so you can fall out?”

Action for the woman:

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.

Finally, if you’ve got a character with a definite voice (and you should!) you can often capture the reader with just one line. Here again is the great Chandler:

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. (Farewell, My Lovely)

From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. (The High Window)

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. (The Little Sister)

Redoing the description that kicked off this post, perhaps:

A platinum chain, deceptively thin on her smooth neck, held a diamond pendant. I smelled trouble. Or was that her perfume?

Suggestions (not rules…ahem):

  1. Don’t give us a list. Look for that one, telling detail.
  2. Consider using an impression from the POV character.
  3. Augment the description with dialogue and action.
  4. Use the voice for all its worth.

Over to you now. As I sit here in my faded sweatpants the color of an old gray mare, and my L.A. Rams T-shirt with a hole in the left armpit, I wonder: Do you have the same reaction to lists of details (i.e., forgetting them almost immediately)? What is your approach to character description?

Ride the Lightning

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I got an email last week which I post here with the sender’s permission.

Dear Mr. Bell,

I’ve been reflecting on something I thought you might find intriguing, given your strong defense of flexible structure in storytelling and your view that both plotters and pantsers benefit from it.

I’ve come to think of it as The Paradox of Spontaneity:

Spontaneity feels wondrous because it bypasses conscious control. But it’s only possible because of preexisting order.

The metaphor that struck me is lightning. Rather than being random, it’s the sudden visible manifestation of a vast, invisible system of order, aka, the atmosphere.

It even goes a step further with what’s called the Schumann resonances, which describe how all lightning strikes worldwide combine to maintain a fairly steady “heartbeat” of the planet. Old-fashioned car antennas pick up on this. Watch closely, and they’re always vibrating, tuning in to this heartbeat like an AM/FM stethoscope.

The Earth and the ionosphere form a gigantic spherical resonant cavity, like the body of a guitar. Every year, roughly 1.5 billion lightning strikes excite this cavity, forming low-frequency electromagnetic waves. These waves settle at specific resonant frequencies, mostly around 7.83 Hz. Isn’t it amazing how so many “random” lightning strikes both originate from and sustain order?

And yet, people often say structure steals the heart of stories! They forget that even hearts must beat to an orderly drum, or they wouldn’t be alive.

It’s like we crave the romantic idea of “the pure waters of creativity” so much that we forget: without structure, you don’t even have water yet. Reminds me of a neat, little orderly formula called H₂O.

Since you’ve written so persuasively about structure as a friend, not a foe, to creativity, I thought you might appreciate the connection.

What a brilliant insight! Our world vibrates with a great cosmic heartbeat. It sends us signals, bursts, and we experience them as spontaneity. It is not chaos theory; it all comes from a connected web of structure and order, which is what holds everything together.

Imagine an Earth without gravity. We’d all be Starlink satellites. Gravity allows us to move around on the ground, to dance, to run for the end zone, to put our arms around each other and sing or pray or bring words of comfort.

All of this is wild and wonderful. Structure is beautiful.

Yet there seems to be a notion out there that a thing called “story” can exist apart from structure. That’s not possible. Heck, it’s not just impossible at the novel level; you can’t even write words, sentences or paragraphs without structure.

I write lehslitrr.

Oops, I mean thrillers.

As writers we all love to ride the lightning. Should we just wait for it to happen? Or are there ways to attract it? Let me suggest a few methods.

  1. The Bradbury landmine. Ray Bradbury’s brain was a lightning rod. It worked at night, sometimes in his dreams, but mostly at the subconscious level. When he woke up he’d record as quickly as possible anything that came to the surface—images, concepts, bits of a scene. Only later would he see what kind of structure was being offered.
  2. Outliners can use the “killer scene” method. One of the most enjoyable parts of my planning is sitting in a coffee house with a stack of index cards, writing down scene ideas which come to me in visual form. I don’t think about the outline at this point. I just ride the lightning. When I have 30 or 40 cards, I give it a day, shuffle the deck, and then start to assess what scenes I love and where they might fall in the story, or where they might be giving me new direction. With cards, it’s easy to move them around (which is why I like the corkboard view in Scrivener).
  3. Pantsers ride the lightning as they write, and do so right on through to a completed draft. Nothing at all wrong with that (it is simply a longer version of what outliners do in #2). At some point, though, structure and craft need to take a hand. I’ve read so many manuscripts (and more than a few books) by “discovery writers” that drag like a rusty anchor because they fail at the structural level.
  4. Ride when you’re not writing. You see an image, a billboard, a person crossing the street. Or you overhear a bit of conversation and find you imagination starts firing. Let it go.

(For ten more ways to “goose the muse,” see my TKZ post here.)

I was at a Starbucks once, looking out the window at the parking lot, when a scene from my WIP started playing on the movie screen of my mind. I have no idea how long I was like that, but at one point a man sitting in a chair across from me said, “Are you all right?”

“Huh?” I said.

“You weren’t moving,” he said.

“Ah,” I said. “I was working.”

“Working? What do you do?”

“I’m a writer.”

He looked at me with that expression of wonder and pity we sometimes get when we give that answer.

Thinking back, I wish I’d said, “I ride lightning.” He probably would have switched chairs.

What about you? Do you ride the lightning? When does it happen for you?

Don’t Leave Out the Good Stuff

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

It’s First Page Critique time. Here we go:

THE END OF THE SUMMER

TEN YEARS AGO

November. The rain started first thing that morning and Marc Newman listened to the fat drops splatter against the window panes. He sat at his desk, diddling with a pencil, watching the rain and ruminating. She was still on his mind. About nine-thirty the Sheriff and two deputies knocked on the front door. They were there to arrest him for murder. He had been expecting them for months.

He didn’t resist and didn’t say anything.

At the Sheriff’s office, Newman endured the fingerprinting, photographing his mug shot, and watching a deputy type up the arrest form. He was allowed to call his attorney, Harold deLuca.

That afternoon, he was taken from his cell to an interview room. A woman introduced herself as Assistant District Attorney Melonie Edgars.

He wondered why deLuca wasn’t there.  

She told Newman that he was being charged with the first degree murder of Lya Marie Reynolds. She wanted him to sign a paper indicating he understood his rights under Miranda v Arizona. He didn’t respond to her request.

“Mr. Newman, I’m here as a courtesy. We already have enough evidence on you to put in prison for the rest of your life. This is your chance to get your story on the record and that might help you during your trial. Tell me what happened on August 13th of this year.”

“I’d rather wait for my attorney to get here before I answer any of your questions.”

Edgars leaned back and sighed. “Guilty people always say that. Are you guilty of murder, Mr. Newman?”

He wanted to tell her to go screw herself but remained quiet instead.

“Did you know Lya Reynolds?”

He said nothing.

“She was only three weeks from her sixteenth birthday when you murdered her. Did you know that?   Her sweet sixteen. Turned out to be pretty bitter for her didn’t it.”

He looked away.

“Did you know she was pregnant when she was murdered?”

A tear rolled down Newman’s cheek. He didn’t try to wipe it away.

Edgars laid out several eight by ten glossy prints. “These were taken when we found her body. It was a vicious attack. Only someone who really hated her could have done this.   Look at them Mr. Newman. Look at what you did.”

“I . . . I, huh.” Newman gulped for air.   “I didn’t do this.”

“You’re a liar, Mr. Newman. And I can prove it.”

JSB: Writer, we have some work to do. Let’s roll up our sleeves.

Give Us the Good Stuff

There are two ways to render action on the page—scene and summary. A scene is showing us what’s happening in real time. Summary is telling us what happened.

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein explains:

Narrative summary is the recounting of what happens offstage, out of the reader’s sight and hearing, a scene that is told rather than shown.

An immediate scene happens in front of the reader, is visible, and therefore filmable. That’s an important test. If you can’t film a scene, it is not immediate. Theatre, a truly durable art, consists almost entirely of immediate scenes.

Just as every form of writing that is expected to be read with pleasure moves away from abstraction, every form of pleasurable writing benefits from conveying as much as possible before the eye, onstage rather than offstage.

The first half of your submission is all summary. Summary does not grab or engage. In fact, it should only be used to transition from one scene to another. Let’s say a guy has to leave his house and drive to the office. Unless the character is going to get into an accident, get shot at, or find a snake in his car, just write: John stormed out of the house and drove to the office.

But when there’s real conflict, real purpose, do not summarize it. Here, you open with a fellow getting arrested, taken to the station, and booked. All that is fodder for suspense, tension, worry. But you can’t create any of that in summary form.

She told Newman that he was being charged with the first degree murder of Lya Marie Reynolds. She wanted him to sign a paper indicating he understood his rights under Miranda v Arizona. He didn’t respond to her request.

Again, summary. Give us the good stuff! Interrogation scenes, like courtroom scenes, carry conflict by definition. Show show show!

All that being said…an author with a strong narrative voice can open with summary, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee), or with description, as in The Time It Never Rained (Elmer Kelton). Just know it takes some real wordsmithing to pull that off in a way that draws readers in.

Research the Good Stuff

We’ve got a lot of work to do here. The scene is implausible and needs the help of an expert (see Terry’s recent post and the comments). When you write about legal procedure and courtrooms, you need to nail the details (which often differ depending on state and local settings).

Our trouble starts with this: Here’s a guy who is suspected of murdering a pregnant teenager. The DA has “enough evidence” to put him away. How is this guy not in the clink? If the DA is involved and the case is heading for trial, that means there’s been an arrest, a booking and an indictment.

So we have the booking, and he watches a deputy “type up” the arrest form. Even ten years ago I doubt typewriters were used for this. Everything is computerized. And they wouldn’t let the suspect sit there and watch. He’d be in a cell. If he wants to call his lawyer, there’s usually a phone in a semi-private area they’ll allow a suspect to use.

As to the questioning itself, no ADA is going to tell a defendant she’s there to help him with his trial. Indeed, this ADA would not be talking to Newman at all because he has not signed a Miranda waiver and he’s asked for his attorney to be present before questioning. And yet the ADA goes on with her interrogation. She should be disbarred.

Perhaps you are setting up a later court hearing where the statements are thrown out by a judge. Most readers aren’t going to buy that. After years of Law and Order and myriad other TV shows and movies, we are well aware of Miranda and its meaning.

Side note: Unfortunately, there is a legal clinker on every episode of Law and Order. Whenever the detectives slap on the bracelets they immediately advise, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say…” Etc.

Problem is, in real life police do not give Miranda at the point of arrest. Miranda only comes into play when they begin to interrogate the suspect. Indeed, if the suspect starts mouthing off or says something incriminating on the way to the station, those statements are admissible in court. The cops want them to talk.

The bad effect of this trope is that some readers will object if you write the scene correctly. I enjoyed this thriller, but the author makes a huge mistake. When the police arrest Alan they do not read him his rights! How can the author not know that? 

That’s why, in my thrillers, if someone’s arrested I include a line or two, or an internal thought explaining the actual procedure.

End of rant side note.

Write the Good Beats, Cut the Useless Ones

A useless beat is redundant and makes a sentence flabby:

He wanted to tell her to go screw herself but remained quiet instead.

“Did you know Lya Reynolds?”

He said nothing.

We don’t have to be told he remained quiet instead. It’s obvious from the action.

He wanted to tell her to go screw herself.

“Did you know Lya Reynolds?”

He said nothing.

Reads better, doesn’t it?

Further, emotional beats need to be woven into the fabric of the scene in a plausible fashion.

“She was only three weeks from her sixteenth birthday when you murdered her. Did you know that?   Her sweet sixteen. Turned out to be pretty bitter for her didn’t it.”

He looked away.

“Did you know she was pregnant when she was murdered?”

A tear rolled down Newman’s cheek. He didn’t try to wipe it away.

It’s much too sudden for a tear to roll. It’s only been seconds from He wanted to tell her to go screw herself. What we’re missing are the beats where the inner turmoil heats up enough to start the waterworks.

How you write this depends on what you’re doing with the character. Did he do it? Is he feeling remorse? Or is this human pity for a victim of foul play? Whatever the answer, we need more to justify whatever he’s feeling, especially when it’s the opposite of what he felt a few seconds ago.

One minor note: You’re using the old-school double space after a period. No longer done.

Assignments

  1. Rewrite this opening without any narrative summary. Present-moment scene only. Put the good stuff in.
  2. Do your research on arrests, criminal referrals, and in-custody interrogations.
  3. Read the first chapter of Michael Connelly’s The Last Coyote. Bosch is on involuntary stress leave and forced into a counseling session with a police psychologist. It’s twelve-pages long. That’s how it’s done.

Let’s help the writer out further in the comments.

This Week I Saved a Darling 

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I write thrillers. That means I major in action. But I do have a lead character who is wont to share an opinion every now and then. That’s one of the things I like about John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee. There are times, briefly (which is the key), when McGee takes a moment to let loose on something. Here’s a bit from The Quick Red Fox:

And so we drove back to the heart of the city. San Francisco is the most depressing city in America. The come-latelys might not think so. They may be enchanted by the steep streets up Nob and Russian and Telegraph, by the sea mystery of the Bridge over to redwood country on a foggy night, by the urban compartmentalization of Chinese, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, by the smartness of the women and the city’s iron clutch on culture. It might look just fine to the new ones.

But there are too many of us who used to love her. She was like a wild classy kook of a gal, one of those rain-walkers, laughing gray eyes, tousle of dark hair –– sea misty, a little and lively lady, who could laugh at you or with you, and at herself when needs be. A sayer of strange and lovely things. A girl to be in love with, with love like a heady magic.

But she had lost it, boy.

Some object to these passages as “stopping the action.” I call it controlling the pace and deepening our bond to the lead character. 

So I wrote a paragraph of my next Mike Romeo thriller expressing an opinion. A bit later I came back to the scene and wrote another paragraph in a similar style. When I edited the first draft I saw that these two bits overloaded and overwhelmed the story. 

But they were so well written! (I humbly thought). I loved them! Which is the first clue that you have a “darling” on your hands. And we’ve all heard the old saw, “Kill your darlings!”

To me that always sounds like “Destroy your delight” or “Drown your puppies.” Yeesh! I mean, if something is your darling should your first instinct be to kill it? Sounds positively psychopathic.

A darling is at least owed a fair trial!

The phrase has its origin in a lecture on style delivered by the English writer Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch back in 1914. He said:

To begin with, let me plead that you have been told of one or two things which Style is not; which have little or nothing to do with Style, though sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament … [I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will presentyou with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

At least Sir Arthur was honest enough to call it murder! But murder requires malice aforethought, and that is a terrible way to think about a darling.

Darlingcide should be outlawed, not encouraged!

Stephen King strikes the right balance. In his book On Writing King says the whole idea behind “kill your darlings” is to make sure your style is “reasonably reader-friendly.”

Thus, your darlings may be the very thing that distinguishes your voice from the vanilla sameness of so much writing these days, especially in the omnipresent AI epoch which we now inhabit. 

Which means sometimes a darling stays, sometimes it goes, and sometimes it gets a skillful edit. In my case, I did remove one of the paragraphs in its entirety. The other I clipped a bit, but it remains largely intact. 

It pleases me to write darlings. I do not summarily execute them. I let them sit, I look at them again, I have my wife render an opinion, and then I decide if they must go, stay, or get a loving manicure. 

And I know I’ve done good work when I can finally say, “Darling, you look marvelous!” 

Comments welcome.

“Your Book Deserves To Reach a Larger Audience”

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

“Everybody talks about the weather,” Twain wrote, “but nobody does anything about it.”

Yes, and everybody talks about Artificial Intelligence, and nobody can do anything about it. It’s here, it’s there, it’s everywhere. It’s Skynet, it’s HAL, and soon it may be telling you, “I’m sorry Dave, I can’t do that.”

Today I won’t revisit the pros and cons, complaints and commendations, misgivings and infatuations writers have with AI. Rather, I refer to a recent report from Microsoft on the professions most and least susceptible to disruption from generative AI.

Writers, we made #5!

  1. Interpreters and Translators
  2. Historians
  3. Passenger Attendants
  4. Sales Representatives of Services
  5. Writers and Authors

The professions least likely to be impacted are manual jobs like phlebotomists (people who draw your blood), highway maintenance workers, plumbers, massage therapists, roofers, and embalmers (stiff competition for this job).

First question is: what the heck’s the difference between writers and authors? It’s subtle.

A writer writes stuff (you’re welcome). But they may not own the stuff. A writer can be someone who produces content for someone else, a writer-for-hire, e.g., a ghostwriter. Clearly, AI is replacing them.

An author owns the stuff (and can therefore license it), and AI is replicating them. The big issue for us fiction writers is whether AI can produce more than soulless trope rearrangement. And whether authors who’ve spent years learning the craft and developing a singular voice can compete with AI in the marketplace.

This is not to say that authors should avoid all things AI—things like copywriting, book descriptions, marketing materials. For these AI is good and fast, freeing up time for writing more fiction and playing Connections. It’s free, too. Pro copywriters are out of a job. Trad publishing doesn’t use them anymore, not to mention any other business that produces sales copy—which is every business.

Series writers can upload pdfs of their books to Google Notebook, press enter, and boom—series bible. Need a recall all the plots in in your 15-book series? Ask your notebook for summaries, and there they are. Need to recall how recurring characters were described in every book in which they appear? Presto. Those are all good uses of the tech.

There’s a dark side, of course A big new scam is targeting authors via AI-generated phishing emails. These are slick (gone are the good old days of scam emails from Nigerian princes rife with shoddy grammar). They purport to be a from an actual person who works for an actual marketing firm. This person just loves your book and wants to help you reach more readers!

What they’re doing is scraping info about you from the net and using high-praise buzzwords to give you a dopamine hit.

I got one of these just the other day. It begins by saying she (a female name) recently “came across your book” (one dead giveaway is when it doesn’t give you the title. But other emails do). She was “truly struck” by the “raw emotion and depth of storytelling.” And I “deserve” to have my book reach a wider audience. Dopamine!

The email goes on to promise higher book rankings on Amazon and a “customized campaign” to increase exposure across “key global markets.” She has “just worked with an author in a similar genre” who experienced a measurable increase in sales (but doesn’t tell us who the author is). She invites me to receive a “complimentary review” of my current Amazon presence and “explore” how the company can help me out. The email signs off with Warm regards, followed by the name…but no link to a website (which, of course, does not exist).

I laughed then trashed it. I should have labeled it “spam,” for two days later I got a follow up, hoping that I and my family “are doing well” (that’s so nice!) and understanding that “life can get busy” and reminding me “I have a specific idea for a campaign that I’m confident could get your book in front of a huge number of new readers who are actively looking for exactly this kind of story…I’d love to share the details with you in a quick 10-minute chat or call this week. No pressure at all, just a conversation to see if it’s a good fit.”

The ultimate goal of this “good fit” is to get my money and access to my KDP account. What could possibly go wrong with that? (You can read about this scam at the invaluable Writer Beware website.)

This con feeds off our bottom-line desire—we all want new readers. Well, the anecdotal evidence suggests that many readers sense when a book is AI-generated (and consider it “cheating”) versus having a unique voice and style, which only comes via the hard work of learning the craft, writing, getting feedback, and writing, writing, writing.

Yeah, we have to concede that AI is getting better at plagiarizing generating competent commercial fiction that can provide a quick escape. But will it create a rabid fan? I don’t think so. Only blood can do that.

So does your book really deserve to reach a larger audience? Not if AI writes it for you. Do the work. Be the author. Bleed. Get better. And if you need a side hustle, learn embalming.

Comments welcome.