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.

Your Magnificent “What If” Muscle

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I’ve often thought of the imagination as a muscle. With proper care and exercise, it gets stronger. Leave it alone, and it atrophies.

For fiction writers, the imagination is our stock-in-trade. The healthier it is, the more likely the production of fresh, original writing.

One of the best exercises for the imagination is the “What if” game. Through daily practice you train yourself to ask “What if X?” in response to the stimuli—usually visual—that come your way in an ordinary day.

You’re driving and come to a stoplight. What appears to be an elderly woman pushing a shopping cart stuffed with belongings enters the crosswalk. Are things just as they appear? Probably. But not to your creative mind! So you ask:

What if there’s a bomb in that shopping cart?

What if the lady is the heiress of a large fortune, but went insane? Or was driven insane?

What if it is really a man in disguise and he’s on the down low because a contract has been put out on him?

The light turns green and off you go, letting the ideas simmer in your brain.

You pass a billboard of a happy family—smiling dad and mom, two laughing kids—at a theme park. Happy to most people, maybe. But:

What if Dad is a hit man on the side?

What if Mom is the assassin-for-hire?

What if one of the kids is an alien?

Two minutes have gone by and you already have six or seven ideas.

If you’re diligent about this exercise, your imagination muscle will churn all the time, often without conscious thought. Then the issue won’t be, Where do I find my next idea? but, How do I choose from all the great ideas my imagination has already provided?

As I look back at my own books, I think I can safely say that most of the ideas sprang from a What if conjecture. Sometimes that was the product of just sitting down and telling myself to come up with something. Several times it was me riffing off some odd news item.

Like an L.A. story that haunted me for a few years. A man shot his wife, drove to a freeway overpass, got out of his car and shot himself. He fell 100 feet onto the freeway below. His body smashed into a car, killing the driver, a woman.

I clipped the story from the newspaper and put it in my “idea box,” where I kept all sorts of clippings. Every now and then I’d look through the box to see what still interested me. This incident always did. Finally one day I asked myself, What if the woman in the car was my protagonist’s fiancé? I sat down and wrote an opening, in First Person POV, that ended with this:

This would have been simply another dark and strange coincidence, the sort of thing that shows up for a two-minute report on the local news—with live remote from the scene—and maybe gets a follow-up the next day. Eventually the story would go away, fading from the city’s collective memory.

But the story did not go away. Not for me. Because Jacqueline Dwyer was the woman I was going to marry.

Try Dying took off from there.

Here’s another one.

Years ago I got an email out of the blue from a fellow I knew in high school. It had been nearly thirty years since we’d communicated, and even back then he wasn’t a close friend. He said he’d found my website and saw I was a writer and thought it would be good to get together, and could he buy me coffee?

Unfair as it may have been, my immediate thoughts were: a) he has always “dreamed of” being a writer, and thinks I can help him; b) he has written a novel and can I help him find an agent?; or c) he’d like to tell me about Herbalife. My What if muscle was flexing, and went to: What if this guy wanted to do something to me? Or to my family? And why?

We spent a perfectly harmonious hour together, and that was that. Or so I thought.

It just so happened that about this time I re-read one of my favorite John D. MacDonald novels, The Executioners (basis for the Cape Fear movies, the original with Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum being the best). Talk about a spiral of suspense!

That’s when I knew I had my next novel. I wanted that spiral! My novel would be about a guy from the past who contacted my family-man protagonist for a friendly get together, but then…

The book was published by Zondervan and hit the CBA bestseller list. Now it’s back in indie iteration as Can’t Stop Me. What if it launches today at a special deal price? We shall see!

So are you intentional about asking What if? What do you do to work out your imagination muscle? How to you decide what book you want to write next?

Accentuate the Positive

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova, via Pexels

Happy Father’s Day! I hope all you dads out there get in some good relaxation time. Unless, of course, you’re with your young grandkids. There is no relaxing then! (But you wouldn’t have it any other way.) And I also hope you get a message you don’t hear much these days: You matter.

On another note, there’s a famous line in the John Ford Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. When the truth of who shot down Valance is finally revealed to a newspaperman, he refuses to run it. “This is the West, sir,” he says. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

I thought about this line via the following events:

Last Wednesday was Flag Day. It’s one day out of the year for Americans to honor the Stars and Stripes.

Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) and Dobie Gillis (Dwayne Hickman)

It so happened that on that day I picked a random episode of Dobie Gillis for my wife and me to watch. I was too young to appreciate this TV show in its first run, but I remember my big brother watching it every week. Based on stories by Max Shulman, the show centered on a girl-crazy high school student (Dwayne Hickman) and his beatnik friend, Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver, pre-Gilligan). The show actually holds up quite well, via its quick cutting and sharp dialogue (and, if you look fast, appearances by early Tuesday Weld and Warren Beatty).

In this particular episode, it is discovered that Maynard has legit ESP. He can tell what people have in their pockets, what they are thinking, and even predict the future.

His gift is exploited by a local TV station, which brings Maynard on to demonstrate his powers in front of a panel of skeptical experts. Maynard proves his stuff. The station invites him back the next week in order to tell the world who is going to win the upcoming presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy!

Dobie tries to talk Maynard out of it. But for once in his life, Maynard is being treated with respect. The whole world is going to listen to him.

“Man, that’s like power,” says Maynard.

“Man, that’s like un-American,” says Dobie. “This is a democracy, Maynard! People have the right to vote for whoever they want. If you tell them who wins, people will stay home!”

Maynard is undeterred. On the night of the broadcast, Dobie stands outside the studio sending last, desperate thoughts to Maynard, who ends up doing the right thing. “Like, I don’t know!” he tells the host.

He’s unceremoniously tossed out of the studio. Dobie finds him and says, “Maynard, I’m proud of you! You’re one of the great Americans of all time. Paul Revere, Nathan Hale, Sergeant York, Barbara Frietchie…and my good buddy, Maynard G. Krebs.”

What struck my wife and me was how unapologetically patriotic Dobie was. How many high school students talk like that anymore? Who even knows who Nathan Hale was, let alone Barbara Frietchie?

Interesting that Dobie put that latter name on the list. Barbara Frietchie is the subject of a poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. The poem used to be taught in our schools. Kids would memorize it. I remember my dad reciting it. Based loosely on historical fact, it tells the story of an aged widow looking down from the attic of her house in Frederick, Maryland, as the occupying Confederate army, led by Stonewall Jackson, marches through. She sees them waving their flags, and puts out Old Glory on a flagpole. The soldiers shoot at it, shattering the pole. But Barbara grabs it and starts waving the flag herself. She shouts down at the soldiers the famous line:

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head, but spare your country’s flag,” she said.

“Barbara Frietchie” 1867 woodcut

Whittier certainly embellished the facts, but so what? He was creating legend. As with Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” the point was not realism, but idealism. Especially in context. “Barbara Frietchie” was penned during the Civil War; Whittier was a staunch abolitionist looking to inspire the North at a time when Lee and Jackson were beating the pants off it. A comment to an article on the background of the poem says it well:

The essence of “poetry” is not in detailed truths, but in the passions it appeals. Please don’t diminish yourselves by “seeking the truth/s of origin” in any poetry. Simply enjoy the story, the romance and the beauty of human actions.

In our fiction, we have that choice, too. Do we extol “the beauty of human actions” even through the most dire of circumstances? To Kill a Mockingbird comes to mind. So do my favorite thrillers.

And so does Dobie Gillis and all those family shows from the 50s and early 60s, like Leave it To Beaver. The standard criticism about those shows is along the lines of, “No families were really like that!”

Again, that misses the point. The shows were never intended to be cold reflections of reality. They were, first of all, entertainment. But they also carried positive, uplifting moral sentiments. In Beaver, for example, Ward would dispense essential wisdom to his sons. June would teach them to be polite, and how to behave in social gatherings. Wally would protect the Beav from the devilish whispers of Eddie Haskell.

In other words, these shows, as the old song puts it, accentuated the positive. Which is a good thing, in my view. Especially these days.

I’ve always liked this quote by writing teacher and novelist John Gardner, from a Paris Review interview:

I think that the difference right now between good art and bad art is that the good artists are the people who are, in one way or another, creating, out of deep and honest concern, a vision of life…that is worth pursuing. And the bad artists, of whom there are many, are whining or moaning or staring, because it’s fashionable, into the dark abyss….It seems to me that the artist ought to hunt for positive ways of surviving, of living.

What say you?           

Are You More Mystery or Suspense?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Early in my writing education, I read something about mystery and suspense that helped a great deal. The author said that a mystery was like a maze. The sleuth follows clues and red herrings, eventually getting to the answer.

But suspense is like a coil that gets tighter and tighter until the final SNAP.

You can have elements of both, of course, though which one predominates will determine your category.

Suspense is where I hang my keyboard, but almost always with a mystery attached. That’s why my favorite movie director is Alfred Hitchcock. Dubbed “The Master of Suspense,” Hitch wove tales that had you, as they used to say, on the edge of your seat.

I wish everyone could have the same experience I did when I saw Psycho for the first time.

It was in high school, and I’d never seen it, nor had I been informed about the plot. A friend of mine arranged for a showing in our high school auditorium one night before Halloween.

The place was packed.

The movie started, and there was Janet Leigh absconding with bank funds, and pulling in to rest at the Bates Motel.

Oh, man.

The suspense got tighter and tighter. The audience screams got louder, and loudest (me included) at the big reveal.

I shan’t tell you what that is, lest there be those unfamiliar with the film. (If this is you, you are lucky! Arrange to stream it when the sun is down and you won’t be interrupted!)

Books can be like that, too. The two scariest books I ever read are The Shining by Stephen King, and Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. The latter is nonfiction about the Manson Family, which lived in the hills about eight miles from my home. They made a miniseries about it which my roommates and I watched in college.

I had nightmares.

One morning I woke up to a scritch-scratch sound. I turned over and saw the guy I shared a room with, Doug, sitting on the edge of his bed, looking at me and sharpening a knife.

He got a big laugh out of that. Me, not so much.

By the way, if you want to know what that whole Manson vibe felt like, Quentin Tarantino captured it perfectly in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There’s a scene where Brad Pitt goes to the Spahn Ranch, where the family was holed up. It’s a fantastic scene and absolutely right on in the creep factor.

Tarantino made another alternative history about pure evil, Inglourious Basterds (spelling is correct). I’ve never seen a more suspenseful scene than this opening, where the Nazi played by Christoph Waltz interrogates a farmer who is hiding Jews under his house. Talk about a spiral that gets tighter and tighter. Yeesh!

I bring this up because I’m about to re-release the most suspenseful novel I’ve ever written. I had that coil firmly in mind as I wrote it, and kept making it tighter and tighter until…well, I best not reveal anything further. Except, if you’ll allow a bit of shameless self-promotion, this clip from a review:

“You’ve got mail” equals “You’ve got trouble” in this impossible-to-put-down thriller. Bell’s straight-from-the-headlines tale will raise the hair on your neck for one important reason: it could happen to any of us. Empowered by his firsthand knowledge of the legal system, the Christy Award-winning former trial lawyer paints a picture of just how vulnerable our secrets—and families—are, in the age of Internet stalkers. First-rate suspense with a fiery action-movie climax! – Christine Lord, CBD Reviews

The title is Can’t Stop Me (formerly published as No Legal Grounds). As per usual, the Kindle version is up for the special pre-release price of $2.99 (regular will be $5.99). Go here to order.

Outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B0C6WGFBM1

Why do I lean into suspense? Maybe because I feel like the world is a tightening coil, where evil exists and does not sleep. We can either give in to it, or we can fight it; we just can’t ignore it. My fiction tries to work all this out. Isn’t that quest the basis of most dramatic action? From Homer and Aeschylus to John Grisham and Lee Child, the guiding light is justice.

What about you? Are you more mystery or suspense? Or something else? What does this tell you about you as a writer? I’ll be on the road this morning, but will catch up later. Have at it.

You Gotta Have Heart

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Apropos of our discussion on Artificial Intelligence last week—and the horrifying prospect of millions of books being produced (not written) every year (one indie “writer” has declared he is going to produce ten books a month)—I thought I’d say a word on behalf of humanity. Goodness knows we need it.

I decided to corner the machine with a question. I asked ChatGPT itself if there was any room left for flesh-and-blood scribblers. It answered, in part,

AI can generate text based on patterns and data it has been trained on, but true creativity and originality often stem from human imagination, emotions, and experiences. Human writers bring a unique perspective and the ability to create innovative narratives that AI may struggle to replicate.

Fiction writing often involves exploring complex emotions and human experiences. While AI can analyze and mimic emotions to some extent, it may not fully comprehend the depth and nuances of human emotions in the same way as a human writer does. Emotional intelligence and empathy are vital components of storytelling that are challenging for AI to replicate convincingly.

Emotional intelligence and empathy. In other words, heart.

We gotta have it. It’s the thing that distinguishes us from the machines. And if we want to keep selling fiction, we need to get heart onto the page.

That’s because discoverability is a challenge with a “tsunami” of competent fiction deluging the Amazon shores. Some of that challenge is overstated. We’ve had 15 years of competent and mediocre ebooks, and it’s not volume that sells over time, or gives an algorithmic boost to a backlist. Reader reviews do much of the curation and the best books rise to the top (not always, as we know, but the odds are better with superb book after superb book).

Now, of course, the tsunami is exponentially bigger and more terrifying.

Or maybe it’s more like Sharknado!

What is the answer? Simply this: we have to put into our books what the machines cannot replicate. And the most important thing they cannot replicate is you. Your heart, your soul, your vision, pressed through the craft you diligently study and apply.

Robert Frost famously said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” Meaning you’ve got to feel before you write.

You’ve got to write like you’re in love. Later, you can edit like you’re in charge.

Love, say the poets, is a kind of ecstasy that overwhelms. Even elementary school kids have ideas about love. Some time ago a teacher asked her class to define love. A few of the answers:

“Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they get to know each other.”

“When somebody loves you, the way they say your name is different.”

“Love makes you smile when you’re tired.”

“You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot.”

Tommy, age 6, nailed it: “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving lotion and they smell each other.”

So, to love your book, smell it! By that I mean, don’t forget the sense of smell, as Steve recently discussed. But not just the obvious smell. Find something unique. Unique is what the machines don’t find. Yet.

Want to see what I mean? Look no further than the great Raymond Chandler in The Little Sister:

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight.

No machine’s going to come up with that! Because it’s not rational, and it’s not meant to be. It’s meant to be felt.

Same with emotions. The machine will give you the obvious choices. Say your character is in a dark alley and hears footsteps. What emotion? Fear pops immediately to mind.

But that’s predictable. Instead, human, go deeper. In his book The Emotional Craft of Fiction, Donald Maass says to pursue “third-level” emotions. What this means is, you think of the obvious emotion the character would feel in a situation. But then ask, What else would the character feel? And ask once more, What else? That’s the third level, the one that is surprising, which a reader experiences as delight.

An exercise I love is the page-long sentence. I choose a moment in my story where the character is feeling deeply. I stop and open up a fresh doc and write a sentence of 200-300 words, no stopping, in the character’s voice, talking about all the permutations of the feeling, going on tangents, coming up with metaphors, not pausing to edit. Once you get going, your Boys in the Basemet will send up things you didn’t know were there, and you’ll get at least one gem to polish and put in your text.

Your heart is doing an end run around your conscious and cliché-steeped mind.

So let the machines churn their mediocre-if-competent product. Make yours unforgettable. The secret ingredient is heart.

Speaking of which, I put a lot of my heart into a crazy book called Some People Are Dead: Part Essay, Part Memoir, Parts Unknown. These are short riffs on subjects—including my own life story—that arose randomly as I considered the obituaries of famous and not-so-famous people. These can be read as five-minute escapes from the world whenever such is needed (like, every day). The Kindle version is free for five days. Enjoy!

Over to you now. How do you get your heart into your pages?

We might as well end with the hit song from the musical Damn Yankees. In the song, heart is about grit, something else writers need in abundance, now more than ever:

Let’s Chat About ChatGPT

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Recently, I received the following email: “As a fiction writer, I’m intrigued by the potential of ChatGPT in my writing process. I’d love to hear your advice on effectively using it. Your insights would be invaluable.”

I’d love to be invaluable, but I don’t know yet what my advice would be. I’m still working it out. So I thought I’d open things up here at TKZ to help process the various issues. Which are many.

At the time of this writing, the bestselling writing book on Amazon is not Power Up Your Fiction (it’s #3), but a book on how to use ChatGPT for fiction. #2, by the same author, is a book of 500 prompts to feed the bot

Clearly, the concept of using AI as a fiction-writing tool is catching on, big time. I just saw a fancy, $300 video course being offered purporting to teach not the craft of writing, but the skill of prompting, with the promise of producing “amazing books” in “record time.” It warns that not fully embracing the world of AI means you’ll be “left behind” in the competitive marketplace.

Now, if you’ve played around with ChatGPT (and most of you have), you know it’s pretty amazing. And so, so fast. It’s like a personal, creative genie, with you at Aladdin’s keyboard. It can generate ideas, suggest plotlines, scenes, characters, even dialogue. It can offer you style suggestions and metaphors. It can even run over to Coffee Bean and pick you up a latté. (No, wait on that last one. I got carried away. But it will be here in time. Drones, anyone?) And it can produce the actual text you use in your actual book (the ethics of which are discussed below).

But as with any disruptive technology, there are potential problems.

As in the “tsunami of crap” that was once feared when self publishing became viable back in 2008. Imagine it now, when a bot can write a book in a matter of minutes, and uploaded to Amazon with the touch of a few keys. People are also touting AI’s ability to write book description and other marketing copy for you.

Then there is the plagiarism issue. What a bot comes up with may contain actual lines lifted from actual writers.

What about research? AI is certainly impressive, but it can also be wrong. And “opinionated.” What if what it reports as fact is really a mangling and shaping? What are the sources? Who fact checks the bot?

And then there’s copyright. As posed by the Congressional Research Service:

Assuming some AI-created works may be eligible for copyright protection, who owns that copyright? In general, the Copyright Act vests ownership “initially in the author or authors of the work.” Given the lack of judicial or Copyright Office decisions recognizing copyright in AI-created works to date, however, no clear rule has emerged identifying who the “author or authors” of these works could be.

And what about the humanity, oh, the humanity! If a bot writes all or the most of the book for you, are you still an author in the traditional sense of the word? Does that even matter?

The always prescient Joanna Penn has some observations:

The goal is to make every book resonate with your humanity even as you use AI tools as part of your creative and business processes.

***

AI tools can generate unlimited words in very little time, and never tire, never stop. But that doesn’t matter.

Your books are your ideas. Your prompts. Your curation. Your editing.

Your creative direction.

However you create — with or without AI tools — it’s more important than ever to find your voice and reach readers as one human connecting with another.

I do, however, see a personal cost. If I overuse AI for imaginative, generative work, I am not working my own brain cells on the same tasks. I believe imagination and cognition are “muscles” that slope toward atrophy when not being utilized. Atrophy, in advanced age, can become dementia. One reason to keep exercising the writing brain is to stay sharp and “rage, rage against the dying of the light” (h/t Dylan Thomas).

The art of writing is, in essence, your brain working to answer innumerable questions, such as:

  • What if?
  • Shall my Lead be a man or a woman? What are the advantages, disadvantages of either choice?
  • What setting shall I use? Real? Made up?
  • How should I end this scene so readers turn the page?
  • What does the voice of my Lead sound like?

Let’s take the last one as an example. You can prompt ChatGPT to provide text in a voice with a certain background, or you can produce a Voice Journal to find it on your own. In the latter case, you’re working your own muscles. When you let AI do it for you, you’re not. And if your practice becomes prompt, prompt, prompt, prompt…with every choice and nuance…well, it’s the difference between training for, then running a 5k, and being driven around the track in a golf cart. What shape will you be in then? I’d be fearful of getting addicted. I mean, I’d love to sit and just watch movies with a never-ending cache of peanut M&Ms. But I don’t.

A major part of the reason I write is to keep my noggin working. If I make it to 100, I want to be healthy, sharp and outputting like Herman Wouk.

Now, I can see the value in using AI to suggest ways to go when your brain hits a cul-de-sac. Or coming up with ideas for a project. I kick around ideas with Mrs. B all the time, and there’s nothing artificial about her. I just wouldn’t want to get dependent on the ease of AI. I don’t want to meld with machine to the point where I’m like Keanu Reeves at the beginning of The Matrix.

What seems out of bounds is asking AI to generate actual text that you use on a page. Especially egregious would be to ask it to write “in the voice of” a favorite author, then passing it off as your own work.

Would it be any better if you made it clear on the cover and title page that you were assisted by AI? Like a James Patterson co-author? That’s an ethical question, but ethics is self-regulatory and there doesn’t seem to be a way to enforce that in the age of rampant mendacity in which we live.

Unless, of course, we get a visit from a Skynet terminator from the future.

So lots of questions without firm answers. That’s why I wanted to have this chat. How do you feel about these issues? How heavily are you using AI in your fiction writing? Any plans to do so? Are there any lines you won’t cross?

Little Cuts Bring Big Benefits

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Here’s a first page for critique. The title is Savage Gunman. Genre: Western. Have a look:

Matt Benson, a lefty, hit the massive Mexican, Juan Cortez, in the jaw with a hard right jab. Cortez’s eyelids fluttered and he took a few long steps backward on the hay-covered floor.

           The crowd in the packed back room of the saloon roared. A drunken cowboy hollered above the rabble: “That was a lucky shot, hombre. You still got this.”

           Benson crouched as soon as Cortez sprang back, charging at him. Whiffs of air swept by his ears as he imagined Cortez swinging high above his head in vain. He gripped his opponent’s tree-trunk thighs in a bear hug and used his body weight to shake the fighter until he tumbled onto his back. The thump was like an old oak thundering down from the final swing of a sharp axe.

           “Get up, you bastard,” Milligan, the saloon owner shouted. “I got a fortune on you. Now ain’t the time to lose.”

           Benson stood in a dizzy haze. It had been the longest fight of his life, and Cortez had worked him over pretty good for what had to have been at least a half hour at this point. His eyes couldn’t focus properly, but he took in the blurry crowd and wondered how much money in total they’d bet against him. He was half Cortez’s size and, once the men stripped shirts to fight, clearly had none of the etched muscles of the younger Mexican farmer. Years of hard work and probably even more fighting had carved those from stone.

           Cortez bent his knees to arch his legs. He shifted his arms about the straw stained with blood and mud and lord knows what else. But he showed no signs of rising.

           “Call it,” Benson said. “He’s knocked out. I won.”

           A bald man in the crowd put spectacles on his face and hustled into the improvised ring. Down on one knee, he pinched Cortez’s cheeks and checked the eyes and face.

           “His legs are up,” Milligan said. “He’s awake. Get on up now, son.”

           Benson found his shirt on the ground, pulled it over his head, and started to button it.

           “Not so fast,” Milligan said. “The doc hasn’t called the fight. Well, Doc?”

           The bespectacled doctor stood. “He’s not out cold. He’ll be alright.”

           “I’m no doctor,” Milligan continued, “but it sounds like the Mex can go another round. Hold your bets, gentleman!”

           Another roar erupted.

***

JSB: There is much to like about this page. It opens with action. There’s no backstory dump to slow us down. (One bit is nicely woven in by inference: …the longest fight of his life.) The opening follows one of my axioms: Act first, explain later. It closes with the fight still in doubt, so I definitely want to turn the page to find out what happens.

Thus, my critique today is about one simple thing: cutting what Sol Stein called “flab.” Watch how a few simple cuts gives greater momentum to the scene.

Matt Benson, a lefty, hit the massive Mexican, Juan Cortez, in the jaw with a hard right jab. Cortez’s eyelids fluttered. and h He took a few long steps backward on the hay-covered floor.

The first tip here, especially for a genre like Western (or hardboiled), is that shorter sentences pack a greater punch. This goes double for a fight scene.

Now, it may be important that we find out Benson is a lefty, and I presume the author mentions it because his jab is with the right. But how essential is it to know that from the jump? Act first, explain later.

Further, that info takes us out of a close 3d Person POV (Benson wouldn’t be thinking about being a lefty. He already knows that) into Omniscient. Please note, there’s nothing “wrong” with opening in an Omniscient POV and then “dropping down” into 3d Person. It’s just that it seems more popular today to get in close and stay there.

I should also point out that a jab, hard as one may be, usually doesn’t back an opponent up a few, long steps. True, this could be a defensive maneuver by Cortez, but the way it’s presented feels like cause-effect.

The crowd in the packed back room of the saloon roared. A drunken cowboy hollered above the rabble. “That was a lucky shot, hombre. You still got this.”

I like this. The words roared, hollered, rabble are vivid. I cut the colon because I don’t like ’em in fiction. It’s not needed here where a simple period will do. A comma is also acceptable. (Just don’t get me started on semicolons!)

Benson crouched as soon as Cortez sprang back, charging at him.  

Here’s a little thing, but crucial. This violates the stimulus-response equation. (See my post on the subject here.) We have Benson crouching before we know Cortez is charging. Simple to fix. Just put the stimulus up front:

Cortez sprang back, charged at Benson.
Benson crouched.

Notice I changed charging to charged. Be very careful about violating the laws of physics by putting in simultaneous actions that don’t go together in real time. Springing back up is one action; charging ahead is another. (Yeah, I see the semicolon. Very helpful in nonfiction.) This is a common mistake and one you should train yourself to spot.

The above also offers another tip about short sentences in an action sequence: you can occasionally make separate paragraphs out of them. That conveys fast motion. 

Whiffs of air swept by his ears as he imagined Cortez swinging high above his head in vain.  

I’m having a little trouble picturing this. If whiffs of air are by his ears, plural, that implies at least two missed punches. I can’t see one missed punch followed by another, especially “high” above Benson’s head. And I don’t get the whiffs being by the ears unless Cortez is punching up and not over Benson’s head. Fight scenes like this can benefit by the author walking through the action physically.

I’m also not sure Benson, in the moment, would be imagining anything. Further, we don’t need to be told the punches were “in vain.”

So my advice is to rework this sentence with stimulus-response in the right spots. E.g.,

Cortez threw a right at Benson’s head. Benson ducked. A whiff of air swept the back of his neck.

Next:

He gripped his opponent’s tree-trunk thighs in a bear hug and used his body weight to shake the fighter until he tumbled onto his back.

Every style needs variety, a changeup from time to time. So a compound sentence every now and again is a good thing. The only thing I’d say here is that the he is ambiguous. It could refer to either fighter, so just change it to until Cortez tumbled onto his back.

The thump was like an old oak thundering down from the final swing of a sharp axe.

I’d like to see a little more work on this simile. I get what you’re going for. It just seems a bit cumbersome to get there (e.g., do we really need to be told the axe is sharp)? With metaphors and similes, it’s important to tweak them to get them “right.” So play around with this one. Maybe try some alternatives for the same effect. What else thumps?

“Get up, you bastard,” Milligan, the saloon owner shouted. “I got a fortune on you. Now ain’t the time to lose.”

I’m not against exclamation points in dialogue. So if this is the guy shouting, make it “Get up, you bastard!” Milligan, the saloon owner, shouted. “I got a fortune on you Now ain’t the time to lose!” [Note the grammatically required comma after owner. Also note that technically shouted is redundant in light of the exclamation point, thus said is fine. But I’m not going to call a foul.]

Benson stood in a dizzy haze. It had been the longest fight of his life, and. Cortez had worked him over pretty good for what had to have been at least a half hour. at this point. His eyes couldn’t focus. properly, but He took in the blurry crowd and wondered how much money in total they’d bet against him. He was half Cortez’s size and, once the men stripped shirts to fight, clearly had none of the etched muscles of the younger Mexican farmer. Years of hard work and probably even more fighting had carved those from stone.

I took out the last line because carved from stone is a bit of a cliché. And Benson, in the condition described, wouldn’t be wistfully pondering how Cortez got his abs.

Cortez bent his knees to arch arched his legs.

Choose one or the other. The latter is more specific.

He shifted his arms about on the straw stained with blood and mud and lord knows what else blood-and-mud soaked straw. But he showed no signs of rising.

We’re in Benson’s POV, so lord knows what is a bit much. And also the wrong tense. Plus, it takes away from the image of blood and mud, which is vivid enough.

          “Call it,” Benson said. “He’s knocked out. I won.”
           A bald man in the crowd put spectacles on his face and hustled into the improvised ring. Down on one knee, he pinched Cortez’s cheeks and checked the eyes and face.
           “His legs are up,” Milligan said. “He’s awake. Get on up now, son.”
           Benson found his shirt on the ground, pulled it over his head, and started to button it.
           “Not so fast,” Milligan said. “The doc hasn’t called the fight. Well, Doc?”
           The bespectacled doctor stood. “He’s not out cold. He’ll be alright.”
           “I’m no doctor,” Milligan continued said, “but it sounds like the Mex can go another round. Hold your bets, gentleman gentlemen!”

This section is fine. Continued isn’t quite right, because Milligan addressed the Doc, and now the crowd. Again, no foul, but once again said does its job and gets out of the way.

Another roar erupted. The crowd roared.

 A change from passive to active tense here.

So, author, I hope you take all this not as picking nits, but showing the value of small cuts at the sentence level. I hope it will help make your story a knockout.

Comments welcome.

Writing Sprints

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

There are many ways to write a novel. That much has been made quite clear on TKZ and in the comments thereto.

Some outline, then write. Some write and don’t outline. Many do it a bit of both.

Not many do it the Dean Koontz way. I shake my head in wonder at his method and output. In Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, he describes it thus:

I go through a manuscript, slow page by slow page. Every page may be revised as few as twenty times or more than a hundred. Then at the end of every chapter, I print out and read it, because it looks different in hard copy. I pencil the changes in and then go back and include them. Then I go on to the next chapter.

Whew!

Of course, Mr. Koontz has been a full-time writer virtually his whole career, and has a work ethic second only to the harvester ant.

The rest of us mere mortals must find our own way. Especially those with what Brother Gilstrap calls “a big-boy job.”

For me, the daily writing quota has been the key. For most of my career the goal has been 6,000 word per week (I take one day off to recharge).

Early on, I’d sit down at my keyboard and type for as long as it took to reach my quota. Some days the words flowed. Other days it was like extracting moisture from a cactus.

Then one day I read something about exercise that helped change things. I always thought the benefits of aerobics was to do a certain minimum—say, thirty minutes straight of walking or jogging. But I discovered that three stints of ten minutes was just as good.

I liked that because I tend to get bored when walking, even if I’m on the treadmill watching a movie or listening to a book.

So now I try to get ten minutes of walking in early in the morning, to make twenty minutes later more doable.

And the same applies to my quota.

Even before I walk, I try to get some writing done. I sprint. I go for what I call a “Nifty 350.” Sometimes it’s just 250 (that number is important to preserve the rhyme scheme. I don’t know how to rhyme, say, 243, except with “afternoon tea.”)

Anyway, whatever I do makes the quota easier to complete later in the day.

I also carry my trusty AlphaSmart with me when I’m out. I may stop in at Coffee Bean and do more words there, come home, and do more. If I have to wait in an office, I peck out some words. (Young people always ask me what that is. When I explain that it’s just for text and runs forever on AA batteries, they’re somewhat astonished. I then tell them about rotary phones, manual typewriters, and Ed Sullivan. And words they will never hear, like, “Check your oil, sir?”)

Another benefit of writing sprints is that in between sessions my boys in the basement are working on the project. They send up notes for me to incorporate when I get back to writing. All they ask is that I send down some coffee and the occasional apple fritter.

Intentional writing sprints can serve you just as well. A friend of mine has written a several excellent legal thrillers on his commuter train ride to and from the city where he practices law.

So now I ask: Have you ever considered making writing sprints a regular practice? What is your method for producing the words (and I don’t mean by asking AI to do it for you!)

Cutting the DULL from Your Scenes

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

George Horace Lorimer was the legendary editor of The Saturday Evening Post from 1899 to 1936. He brought the circulation up from a few thousand to over a million, and made it a place known for quality fiction.

In the early days of his reign he received a letter from an indignant author which read, “Last week you rejected my story. I know that you did not read it for, as a test, I pasted together pages 15, 16 and 17, and the manuscript came back with the pages still pasted. You are a fraud and you turn down stories without even reading them.”

Lorimer responded, “Madam, at breakfast when I open an egg, I don’t have to eat the whole egg to discover it is bad.”

Painful, but true.

We talk a lot here at TKZ about opening pages. We all know how important they are to agents, editors, and readers. But we should think the same way about every scene in our novel. And thus to the topic for today: Cutting the DULL from your scenes. To wit:

Description Dumps

We talk often about avoiding “info dumps.” That is, larding on exposition or description in a way that makes the story seem to stand still. Yet, we need to know the setting of a scene, too.

The way to go is to write not so the reader merely sees the scene, but rather experiences it.

The best descriptions are a) woven into action, and b) consistent with the mood of the story. Stephen King’s “All That You Love Will Be Carried Away” is a melancholy tale about a traveling salesman who is thinking of ending it all. Here’s the opening paragraph:

It was a Motel 6 on I-80 just west of Lincoln, Nebraska. The snow that began at midafternoon had faded the sign’s virulent yellow to a kinder pastel shade as the light ran out of the January dusk. The wind was closing in on that quality of empty amplification one encounters only in the country’s flat midsection, usually in wintertime. That meant nothing but discomfort now, but if big snow came tonight—the weather forecasters couldn’t seem to make up their minds—then the interstate would be shut down by morning. That was nothing to Alfie Zimmer.

You can go line by line and see how King uses mood words within the simple action of a man arriving at a Motel 6 with a depressed disposition.

Here’s the great Raymond Chandler, as his cynical PI Philip Marlowe takes a drive in Chapter 13 of The Little Sister. Notice how this tells us as much about Marlowe as it does about the setting. (I love it because I have taken the same drive many times, albeit on the freeway):

I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupés and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, and evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad.

Do you experience the scene like Marlowe does? How could you not?

So: Always describe your scenes in words that reflect the tone, which you’ll most often find in the mind of the viewpoint character.

Uninteresting Characters

Why does a story seem dull to a reader? In short, predictability. Subconsciously, the reader is anticipating what a character will do or say. If the character does do or does say something along those lines, the experience for the reader is boredom. “I’ve seen that before,” their sub-mind whispers. “Why keep reading?”

So: When you think about the scene you’re going to write, plan one action (even if it’s just a line of dialogue) a reader won’t see coming. A good practice is to make a quick list of the things the average reader might expect to happen…then don’t do those things.

Lethargic Action

Kurt Vonnegut said a character in a scene must want something (the scene Objective), even if it’s just a glass of water. I’d add that the Objective must be something essential. So if it’s a glass of water, the character better be dying of thirst.

So: Make the Objective an essential step toward solving the story question. The story question should involve death stakes (physical, professional, or psychological). Otherwise, why should the reader care?

Leaden Prose

John D. MacDonald went for what he called “unobtrusive poetry” in his style. He wanted sentences that “sing,” but not in such a way that it sounds like Ethel Merman in the shower. Like this, from Darker Than Amber:

She sat up slowly, looked in turn at each of us, and her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some gray ash where the fires had been.

Leaden prose, on the other hand, is like Amish furniture from the 1850s. Functional, yes, but that’s it.

So: Work on expanding your voice. I wrote a book about that. Do some morning pages where you write page-long sentences. Try things. Make up wild metaphors, not to use (necessarily) but to stretch. Read challenging prose, even in nonfiction. Read poetry out loud (I recommend Robert W. Service).

And remember Hitchcock’s Axiom: “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.”

The Heroic Vision

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Publicity shot from The Magnificent Seven (1960)

There are two kinds of heroes.

One is the man or woman who responds to an immediate crisis, and in rising to the occasion discovers who they really are. This used to be called “the testing of one’s mettle.” It’s the classic Hero’s Journey wherein a character arcs to a transformation.

The second kind of hero responds to a crisis because of a moral vision. The arc is not so much one of transformation but of vindication.

The first hero represents the triumph of an individual, which inspires the community.

The second represents the triumph of a vision, which inspires and strengthens the community. (Where there is no vision, the people perish. – Proverbs 29:18).

Many stories—both fictional and real life—involve the immediate response to a crisis. Think of Sully Sullenberger, who saved an entire plane of passengers by landing his suddenly incapacitated ship on the Hudson River.

Then there are examples of the heroic vision. I would define this as a view of life which combines duty, honor, and courage. Every civilization that manages to survive has told stories of heroic vision. Some of the best movies ever made have it.

One of my favorites is Sergeant York (1941) starring Gary Cooper in an Oscar-winning role. It’s the true story of Alvin C. York, a poor boy from the Tennessee hills who had to hunt to help his family eat, and in the process became a dead shot with a rifle. Drafted during World War I, he sought an exemption based on his Christian beliefs, but was later became persuaded that he had a duty to save lives in a just war. During a battle in France he used his rifle skills to take out a German machine gun nest that was mowing down American soldiers. Single handed he killed 25 of the enemy, and captured 132 more. For this he was awarded the Congressional Medal of —wait for it—Honor.

Another favorite is The Magnificent Seven (1960), the classic Western starring Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen and Eli Wallach. A re-vision of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, it’s the story of a group of gunfighters hired by a poor, Mexican village to save them from the plundering of a bandit gang.

At first, the seven take the job because the age of the gunfighter is over, and there’s nothing but menial jobs for them in town. But as they get to know the villagers, the heroic vision begins to take hold. It’s seven against forty, but they stay and fight because it’s the right fight. It is reminiscent of last stands like the Spartans at Thermopylae, and the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.

The movie has terrific dialogue, too. Like in the scene where Calvera (Wallach), the leader of the bandits, first encounters the gunfighters. He rides in with his men and finds Chris (Brynner), Vin (McQueen) and Britt (James Coburn) waiting for him. Calvera, not looking overly concerned, remarks on the new walls. “They won’t keep me out,” he says.

“They were built to keep you in,” says Chris.

Calvera mulls it over, and offers to make the seven equal partners. When asked about the poor villagers, Calvera answers with a vision (decidedly unheroic) of his own. He says to Chris, “I leave it to you. Can men of our profession worry about things like that? It may even be sacrilegious. If God didn’t want them sheared he would not have made them sheep.”

Oh heck, it’s better if you watch it:

So in your work, consider giving your Lead characters a heroic vision. Ask yourself some questions:

  • What do they believe about duty, honor, and courage?
  • Who or what would they die for?
  • What will their stand cost them? (A good source of inner conflict)

And flesh out your villain with a vision of his own. Why does he think he’s justified? Calvera has to feed his men, and these villagers were born to be sheep. The clash of visions makes the denouement all the more satisfying. (If you’d like to see how the seven answer Calvera, you can watch the rest of the scene here.)

Comments welcome.

Reader Friday: What Writing is Like

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James Salter, Wikimedia Commons

“In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.” – James Salter

What is writing like for you?