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.

Exposition in Your Opening: Less is More

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Here is another first page for critique. See you on the other side.

At the Edge of the Radiant Sea

If Larissa Jackson squinted hard enough, the blue tents massed on the plain below might almost look like the ocean. A barren strip of beige separated the refugee camp from the Atlantic, vast and forbidding under the glaring sun. And if she tried really hard, the faint din of two hundred thousand Slavic refugees could almost sound … like seagulls’ cries?

Except that the Arctic War, as it exploded across the Northern Hemisphere, had wiped out seagulls almost a decade ago.

Larissa shivered on the café’s patio. Despite the canvas canopy sheltering her, she settled her sunhat more firmly on her head. Eight years after the war’s end, the nuclear winter that had frozen the world under unending clouds of smoke was lifting. But the price for sunlight was skyrocketing levels of UV radiation, thanks to the tattered ozone layer, another casualty of the war.

Taking a final gulp of her milky coffee – now lukewarm, barely worth drinking – she turned away from the view, unease settling over her like a blanket of nettles. She wanted to be back in the bright sterility of her lab in Texas, not on the windswept edge of Portugal’s Algarve coast, about to enter a refugee camp.

She’d hoped a coffee would calm her nerves and wake her up after the long flight from Dallas to Lisbon, and the ensuing two-hour drive south.

But when she’d entered, the pastelaria was unlit, and its cold interior smelled of dirty dishwater. Glass cases that should be filled with a bounty of pastries held nothing but a few pastéis de nata, the iconic Portuguese custard tarts. Patch jobs of grey cement marred the black and white tiled floor. The spotted mirror behind the counter reflected the server’s thinning hair and scowl as he banged white ceramic cups onto metal shelves attached to the back wall. Dumpy, brown-haired, brown-eyed Larissa had never been a beauty, but even with fatigue written across her face and bags under her eyes, she looked indefinably healthier and more prosperous than anyone she’d seen since stepping off the plane.

Maybe the server had seen her get out of the sleek black sedan and assumed it belonged to her. He couldn’t know she was here on someone else’s orders.

***

JSB: We have a promising start. The first two paragraphs give us enough information to set the scene and offer quite a disturbance—a post-apocalyptic sea coast teeming with refugees. And I like that Larissa is trying to avoid thinking about the reality of it. I’m ready for some action. But—

Paragraph 3:

Larissa shivered on the café’s patio. Despite the canvas canopy sheltering her, she settled her sunhat more firmly on her head. Eight years after the war’s end, the nuclear winter that had frozen the world under unending clouds of smoke was lifting. But the price for sunlight was skyrocketing levels of UV radiation, thanks to the tattered ozone layer, another casualty of the war.

This is a paragraph of exposition. It exists only to feed us information. Larissa is merely a peg to hang it on. Keep this in mind: act first, explain later. Readers will happily wait for exposition if they are connected to a character doing something of moment. Larissa adjusting her hat is not the kind of something I mean. A scene needs to have some sort of tension or conflict, almost always by way of another character. I’ll have a suggestion about that later.

Paragraph 4:

Taking a final gulp of her milky coffee – now lukewarm, barely worth drinking – she turned away from the view, unease settling over her like a blanket of nettles. She wanted to be back in the bright sterility of her lab in Texas, not on the windswept edge of Portugal’s Algarve coast, about to enter a refugee camp.

Once again, the paragraph is exposition. This time the author wants us to know the precise location and a bit of character background. Again, don’t be in such a hurry to give us all this information!

You do have some interior emotion here, but I had trouble picturing a “blanket of nettles.” Or, more precisely, I didn’t have trouble—I couldn’t help seeing a bunch of spiky leaves stitched together draped over her body. Coming up with fresh metaphors for feelings is an ongoing challenge. We don’t want to use clichés, but we also need to avoid pictures that yank us too far out of the moment. And we don’t want to overuse them, either. Sometimes just write she turned away from the view and took a deep breath. 

Paragraph 5:

She’d hoped a coffee would calm her nerves and wake her up after the long flight from Dallas to Lisbon, and the ensuing two-hour drive south.

More background information. Do we really need to know this?

Paragraph 6:

But when she’d entered, the pastelaria was unlit, and its cold interior smelled of dirty dishwater. Glass cases that should be filled with a bounty of pastries held nothing but a few pastéis de nata, the iconic Portuguese custard tarts. Patch jobs of grey cement marred the black and white tiled floor. The spotted mirror behind the counter reflected the server’s thinning hair and scowl as he banged white ceramic cups onto metal shelves attached to the back wall. 

I like the detail work, the colors, the smell. But they are piled on. The author’s voice begins to intrude (the iconic Portuguese custard tarts) then takes on full volume when describing Larissa from an Omniscient POV:

Dumpy, brown-haired, brown-eyed Larissa had never been a beauty, but even with fatigue written across her face and bags under her eyes, she looked indefinably healthier and more prosperous than anyone she’d seen since stepping off the plane.

This is the author telling us what Larissa looks like, especially in comparison to others.  Now, I’m not saying this is fatal. Sidney Sheldon and Danielle Steel sold millions of books with just this kind of Omniscient POV. I just want you to be aware of what you’re doing and understand that if you’re not careful it can distance us from the main character.

The page ends with a potentially page-turning mystery: whose orders is she here on? But by this time I fear the reader might be getting antsy. Let me suggest an exercise. Try going to the first line of dialogue in your book and start there. Don’t give the readers any exposition except what you reveal in the dialogue itself. There will be plenty of time to get all the information in that the reader needs, but only after we have a real scene going on.

I think it was Elmore Leonard who said most of what the reader needs to know can be given in dialogue. That’s an overstatement, but writers often don’t give dialogue enough thought for exposition. I don’t mean the kind of dialogue known as “Here we are in sunny Spain” or “As you know, Bob.” The characters must sound like they are really talking to each other. A tip is to make the dialogue tense or confrontational. That “hides” the exposition.

NOT:

“Boy,” Larissa said, “the windswept edge of Portugal’s Algarve coast sure isn’t like my home base in Texas.”

“Did you have trouble getting here?” the server said.

“The flight from Dallas to Lisbon was all right, but the two-hour drive south was almost too much.”

RATHER:

“This is no place for a woman,” the server said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Larissa said.

“You’re here to help the refugees.”

“So?”

“Where are you from?”

“Texas, if that’s any of your—”

“Go back,” he said.

And so on.

One final note. I’m not sure if At the Edge of the Radiant Sea is the title of the book or the chapter. If the latter, fine. If the former, I’m not wild about it. It sounds “literary.” Try coming up with five alternative titles. Compare it with others in your genre.

You can write. You know how to string sentences together and have an eye for detail. All good. Now it’s a matter of being strategic with your exposition. Less is more on the opening page.

Thanks for your submission, author. Now let’s hear what others have to say.

How Chandler Overcame “Plot Constipation”

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Raymond Chandler

I’m having fun reading the selected letters of Raymond Chandler. He’s as entertaining in his correspondence as in his fiction. Plenty of opinions, yet also aware of his own foibles.

In 1945 he was under contract to Paramount (he had just written the classic screenplay for Double Indemnity, which was ironic as he loathed James M. Cain’s writing. “Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.”) The money was good, but the demand for original stories plagued him. That’s because Chandler was never one to grind stories out of “the sausage machine.” He believed that style and voice were more essential than plot, precisely the opposite of what Hollywood wanted.

But to keep a paycheck he needed to produce, and did, with mixed results.

A letter from this period talks about a method of writing Chandler happened upon out of necessity:

In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages like this: All dictated and never looked at until finished. It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not. But I don’t see why the method could not be adapted to novel writing, at least by me. Improvise the story as well as you can, in as much detail or as little as the mood seems to suggest, write dialogue or leave it out, but cover the movement, the characters and bring the thing to life. I begin to realize the great number of stories that are lost by us rather meticulous boys simply because we permit our minds to freeze on the faults rather than let them work for a while without the critical overseer sniping at everything that is not perfect.

Here at TKZ we’ve talked a lot about the tyranny of the “inner editor.” The writer, whether plotter or pantser, needs to get that first draft finished to truly know the story trying to emerge. Only then do you get to the “fixing” of it. In another letter Chandler wrote: “[Y]ou never quite know where your story is until you have written the first draft of it. So I always regard the first draft as raw material.”

I’ve told my students to write a first draft “as fast as you comfortably can.” Do a quick edit of the previous day’s work, then move on.

That broke through the “plot-constipation” for Chandler (although there’s no record of what became of that story; likely it went to the story department for an assessment and never got the interest of a producer).

In the same letter, however, Chandler identified a potential weakness:

I can see where a special vice might also come out of this kind of writing; in fact two: the strange delusion that something on paper has a meaning because it is written…Also, the tendency to worship production for its own sake. (Gardner suffers badly from this…grinding the stuff out of the sausage machine.)

Chandler nailed it. Just because you write something doesn’t make it good. And publishing junk over and over doesn’t make a career (it does make a persistent and rather annoying hobby). He believed that style (the writer’s “individual mark”) makes all the difference. Style (or voice) is a “projection of personality” but “you have to have a personality before you can project it.” Thus, if you’re cranking things out of the machine, or using a machine to crank things out for you, you may create something with, in Chandler’s words, “an immediate impact of competence,” but it will be “hollow underneath.”

Two lessons to draw from this:

  1. Write fast first drafts

When you get to a point of constipa…er, when you get stuck, jump ahead to another scene. You can go back to this spot later. Get to know your story first.

  1. Concentrate on voice as you write

Voice is not something you can fake. Neither can AI. I wrote a book about ways you can pan for the gold of your own voice. Put that on the page. It’s what will set you apart in this sea of conformity.

It’s also why we still read Raymond Chandler today.

Comments welcome.

Staying Afloat in the Roiling Sea of Books

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Blue-footed booby

I had another post I was working on, but life got in the way. So I thought I’d rerun a column on discoverability. It seems apt in this age of AI. Has anything changed? Where we go:

Discoverability is becoming as rare as the blue-footed booby.

According to Bowker, the outfit that registers ISBN numbers, over a million self-published books were issued ISBNs last year.

That’s a one with six zeros after it.

And understand, this does not include traditionally-published books, nor all the ebook-only titles without ISBNs.

Which means there’s a whole lotta books out there, and more added every year. (Most of which are bad. See Sturgeon’s Law.)

Industry observer Mike Shatzkin added this:

I had reason to learn recently that Ingram has 16 million individual titles loaded in their Lightning Source database ready to be delivered as a bound book to you within 24 hours, if not sooner. So every book coming into the world today is competing against 16 million other books that you might buy.

That number — the number of individual book titles available to any consumer, bookstore, or library — has exploded in my working lifetime. As recently as 25 years ago, the potential titles available — in print and on a warehouse shelf ready to be ordered, or even to be backordered until a next printing — was numbered in the hundreds of thousands. So it has grown by 20 or 30 or 40 times. That’s between 2000 percent and 4000 percent in the last quarter century.

Of discoverability, agent Rachelle Gardner recently observed:

How can any single book stand out in that large of a field? It’s very difficult. The problem is known as discoverability and it means the odds are stacked against us when we want to bring readers’ attention to our books.

This is why the publisher needs your help—it’s important to find your audience, that specific group of people who will like your book. They need you engaging with your audience, connecting with them, doing your part to make them aware of you.

Even with all this work, it’s still hard to make your book discoverable. It’s not anyone’s fault. Publishers are not conspiring to make life difficult for you. They’re not being unreasonable by requiring authors to participate in marketing. It’s simply the situation we find ourselves in—there are too many books, so we all have to work so much harder to each one stand out to its unique audience.

One line that jumped out at me is: the publisher needs your help. It used to be the other way around. A writer needed a traditional publisher to get into bookstores. If there were some marketing dollars in the budget, the publisher might arrange to have the book placed on the New Release table at the front of the store.

But now, with bookstore space shrinking, and marketing push going almost exclusively to the A list, authors writing inside the walls of the Forbidden City are expected to do audience building themselves (which has some authors wondering why the publishing houses still take the same royalty split as when they did all the heavy lifting. But I digress).

So how do you build an audience these days? The old-fashioned way. You earn it. (Hat tip to John Houseman).

Book after book. And more than one or two titles. You don’t hit a stride until you have several books out there to go with a steady pace of future production.

Another agent, Steve Laube, also reflected on the Bowker publishing numbers, and offered this advice:

  1. Write the very best book you can.
  2. Build an audience who will support your work (i.e. platform).
  3. Decide whether to self-publish (but only do it the right way) or go the traditional route (get an agent).
  4. Figure out how to launch a book.

The fundamentals don’t change, do they? That’s why they’re called fundamentals. I’d modify the list a bit this way:

  1. Write the very best books (plural) you can, at least one per year.
  2. Keep learning and growing in the craft.
  3. Decide what kind of writer you want to be. If self-publishing is on your mind, consider:
    1. Can you be sufficiently productive?
    2. Do you have the discipline to learn basic business practices?
    3. Are you willing to invest between $500 and $2,000 for cover design, editing, and proofreading for each book?
  1. If traditional publishing is your goal, ask:
    1. Am I patient enough to wait up to 18 months for my book to come out?
    2. Will my agent fight for more author-friendly non-compete and reversion-of-rights clauses?
    3. Am I ready with a plan should my publisher drop me?

One word I do wish we’d get rid of is platform. For non-fiction a platform is desirable because there’s a built-in audience for a subject. But agents and publishers push this amorphous concept on unpublished fiction authors, which only adds to their stress and detracts from their writing time.

The best time for a fiction writer to build a platform is 2003. That’s when we weren’t so blog saturated that a new author might actually gain a following. That’s when we weren’t tossing away good writing time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram (and, worse, thinking that the latter venues are good places to sell books!)

As I argued a couple of years ago, we need to get out of “discoverability thinking” and into “trustability thinking.”

You should be thinking that each new offering is an opportunity to prove to readers that you deliver the goods. As you do this, time after time, trust in you grows. Consumers buy more from businesses they trust. Readers are consumers and you are a business.

This applies whether you are traditional or indie, commercial or literary, tall or short.

Or have blue feet.

So … are you about to dive into the cold Atlantic of content, knowing full well how vast and choppy it is out there? Have you taken swimming lessons (studied craft and market)?  

Or are you already swimming?

How’s the water?

It’s Still and Always Will Be About the Book

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

“The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.” – Robert Cormier

***

So there were these two authors back in the 1990s. The thriller market was exploding. An unpublished writer named Bell was studying the business and found stories about these authors. He decided to keep an eye on their moves. Maybe he could find out how to be a success at this game.

But the two writers did not experience the success they were looking for.

One of them spent a big bundle of his own money to jump start sales. But they didn’t jump. Reviews were tepid. His publisher let him go. Lesson learned: Gobs of promotion money wasn’t the magic key.

The other writer undertook a mammoth, self-planned tour of bookstores, with his car loaded with books. By this time young Bell had a couple of books out and signings set up with some stores close to home. At one store he found several of the energetic author’s books on the shelf. So he asked the manager how they were selling.

“Meh,” he said.

Lesson learned: A) human energy poured into hand selling is not the magic key; and B) “Meh” is not the response you want to hear.

The biggest takeaway should come as no surprise: Word-of-mouth is always the most important driver of success in the book business. Yes, even today, in the era (or should I say final day) of TikTok, it’s the book itself and how it lands with readers that is the key, magic notwithstanding.

A recent article in Jane Friedman’s Hot Sheet (subscription required) discussed the challenge of navigating book promotion in the “influencer age”:

Media fragmentation and the waning effects of the book review have entirely changed publicity. In its coverage of 25 Years of Changes to Book Publicity, Publishers Weekly wrote that, “For most of publishing history, there was one dominant mode of literary publicity: the book review.” For years now, book review outlets have disappeared, and the remaining professional reviews have declined in importance. In fact, a reporter for the New York Times has stated that a review in their pages doesn’t reliably sell copies. (One exception remains children’s books, which continue to rely on reviews.)

The challenge is particularly acute with fiction:

Although every publicity campaign is different, says Brittani Hilles, co-founder of Lavender Public Relations, “Generally, with nonfiction, you can bring media folks into the fold with the topic alone, while with fiction it often comes down to having media contacts trust your taste enough to dive into the read.”

There are some things that never change:

  • Your mom’s Wi-Fi password. She’s had it since 2010 and refuses to change it, even if the neighbors are stealing it.
  • That one coworker who “forgets” their wallet at lunch. They’ve been “forgetting” for years, but somehow always remember dessert.
  • The one sock that goes missing in the laundry, a universal mystery that not even quantum physics can explain.
  • The speed of the checkout line you choose. No matter what, it’s always the slowest.
  • The way your pet acts like it’s never eaten before. Despite being fed at the same time every single day, they’re convinced they’re moments from starvation.

And for books, as Celina Spiegel, co-CEO of Spiegel & Grau, explains, “The book has to be a book that people actually want to read. And no one can make someone like a book.”

So yes, market away to the best of your cost and ability and ROI. Even if you hate it. But most of all, every day, work on getting better at your craft. Surgeons do. Plumbers do. Bomb defusers most certainly do. Why should writers think they’re exempt?

Can you think of a reason?

Timeless Truths About Story

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

As storytellers, what do we know?

We know that people love to escape into stories in order to get some relief from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, aka life.

And we know that to the extent we provide that escape, we increase our odds of making some lettuce at this gig. And we know (or should know) that the craft of writing fiction is not some straitjacket around your creative genius, but a prism though which we refract and unleash the power of story. (See “Story and Structure in Love.”)

These truths do not change.

Which is why I was curious to see what a book offering “photoplay” (i.e., screenwriting) advice had to say…a book published in 1916!

A-B-C of Motion Pictures by Robert E. Welsh offers a short history of the movies and the business of making them. It has a chapter called “Practical Hints on Photoplay Writing.” Let’s have a look.

[The writer] must be certain that he possesses the power of observation that enables him to see the germs of stories in the little incidents that would ordinarily be passed by with scarce a moment’s thought.

This is the power of “What if?” It’s a muscle of the mind that can, and should be, developed by every writer. I used to read the newspaper (remember those?) looking for “what ifs” and marking them with a felt-tip pen. I would flip things around in a crime story (What if that robber had been a woman instead of a man?) or elevate something in an innocuous item (What if the president of the local PTA was on the run from the mafia?)

Most of the ideas would never go further, but sometimes I’d come up with a promising nugget. Like the news item that begins Try Dying and which landed me a three-book contract.

Exercise your head! Ask “What if?” all the time.

He must be gifted with the imagination that will enable him to create a full-bodied story—a plot—from this germ.

Anyone who wants to write full-length fiction needs to have “story sense.” This comes only through reading. Successful writers were readers as kids, or at least adolescents. So you have to have a certain acquired ability to know what a sentence is and how to string them together in some kind of coherent fashion. If you have that, you can learn and apply craft. As Welsh says:

Lastly, he must possess…the knowledge of dramatic principles necessary to relate his story in such a manner that the interest of his audience mounts steadily and is held to the end.

Boom! Can storyteller disagree with that? What’s the alternative? Not knowing or not caring about these principles? Writing merrily along with no thought about craft, then throwing up (and I use that term advisedly) untested, unedited books to befoul the marketplace and not sell?

What is plot? … It is a story woven around a central theme, which is usually a crisis in the lives of the characters. It has a definite beginning, which is at the time when the causes are born which gradually increase in strength and at the last give rise to the events which produce the climax, the height of the suspense and interest. It has a definite ending, which should come as soon as it has been determined whether the crisis overwhelms the characters or whether they pass through it successfully. The ideal plot is the plot of struggle, whether physical or mental.

Yes. I define plot as a life and death struggle met by a character exercising strength of will. Death can be physical, professional, or psychological. Think about the most popular novels of all time, and you’ll see a death struggle, an increase of “suspense and interest” leading to a climax followed shortly by THE END, thus avoiding anticlimax.

You do not have to follow your characters to the grave; the interest of the audience is over when the crisis is past. You may spoil the effect of a good story by trifling with its interest after that. That is part of the story-teller’s art that we spoke of as the third essential—the ability to know where to begin the story, so that no time is lost in useless detail, while at the same time making the necessary points clear, a knowledge of what incidents to introduce and how to group them so that they merge smoothly into the climax and the gift of stopping when the story is done.

Did you catch that? [T]he ability to know where to begin the story, so that no time is lost in useless detail. He would have loved our first-page critiques!

Make certain that your story is good by all the tests you can devise…

I have a great first editor (and wife), and excellent beta readers who see things I’ve missed. I know if I don’t fix them, readers will pick them up and experience “speed bumps” in the fictive dream. That increases the odds they’ll pass on my next book. No thanks. It’s worth the extra effort to polish the book.

Finally:

Typewrite your manuscript. Here are other rules of the game which the beginner often disregards: Write on only one side of the paper; use white paper about eight and a half by eleven; put your name and address on the first page of the manuscript; and, most important of all, enclose a stamped and addressed envelope for the return of the story should it be unavailable. Make carbon copies of all your stories.

Remember that! Stock up on carbon paper and don’t forget that SASE!

Ahem.

And there you have some timeless truths about storytelling. Ignore them at your peril.

New Year’s Diminutions For Writers

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

So we’re off and running into 2025. We’ve had some discussions of goals and resolutions, as is to be expected. Today I want to talk about something else—New Year’s diminutions. The things you should resolve to do less of in your fiction. Here are three.

  1. Ditch Marshmallow Dialogue

Check this exchange:

“Hello, Becky.”

“Hi, Kelly.”

“So, how is everything at home?”

“Oh, you know, the same.”

“I do! I totally know about that. It’s like that at my house, too!”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“It’s good to know I’m not alone.”

“Yes it is. Awfully good.”

“Well, listen, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Really? I’m all ears.”

Unfortunately, at this point readers are not all ears. If they’re not asleep, they are wondering why they are bothering with this story.

Dialogue without conflict or tension is squishy and sweet.

Like a marshmallow.

Marshmallows are for hot chocolate and S’Mores, not fiction.

There is no sign of trouble anywhere in these lines. This is the kind of talk that goes on every day in countless coffee houses and kitchens, bus benches and laundromats. It’s the talk that comes out of people without any care or worry at the moment of speaking.

Or, if they are worried, are good at hiding it.

Which is precisely the kind of talk we don’t want in our stories.

We want care. And worry. And we want to see it, or at least sense it.

Make sure all the characters in your book, from the majors to the minors, have both an agenda, even if it’s as simple as (as Vonnegut suggested) getting a glass of water. Put agendas in conflict. Boom. No more marshmallow dialogue.

  1. Avoid the Expected

What makes a novel boring? I think the answer is easy: the reader expects something to happen, and it does. There is no surprise, no intriguing turn of events. And the characters are all out of the stereotype casting office. We’ve seen these people and this story before!

So try this:

Pause every now and then and think about your plot. Ask yourself what the average reader would expect to happen next. What are the stereotypical story tropes that immediately spring to your mind?

Take your time. Then ponder the list. All you have to do now is take the most obvious turns and do something different, maybe even the opposite of what’s expected.

When writing a scene, I always try to put in something unexpected. This can be as big as a new character or as small as a line of dialogue that is makes a reader think, Why on earth did she say that?

  1. Fumbled Flashbacks

The first question to ask about a flashback scene is, Is it necessary? Be firm about this. Does the story information have to come to us in this fashion?

A flashback is almost always used to explain why characters act a certain way in the present story. If such information can be dropped in during a present moment scene, that’s usually the better choice.

Be very wary of starting your novel in the present and going too soon to flashback. If the flashback is important, you should consider starting with that scene as a prologue or first chapter.

These are guidelines. In the hands of a good writer, a gripping first chapter, followed by a compelling flashback, can work—see the first two chapters of Lee Child’s Persuader for an example.

If you’ve decided that a flashback is necessary, make sure it works as a scene––immediate, confrontational. Write it as a unit of dramatic action, and not as an information dump. Not:

Jack remembered when he was a child, and he spilled the gasoline on the ground. His father got so angry at him it scared Jack. His father hit him, and yelled at him. It was something Jack would never forget . . . [and more of the same]

Instead:

Jack couldn’t help remembering the gas can. He was eight, and all he wanted to do was play with it.

The garage was his theater. No one was home. He held the can aloft, like the hammer of Thor. “I am the king of gas!” he said. “I will set you all on fire!”

Jack stared down at the imaginary humans below his feet

The gas can slipped from his hand.

Unable to catch it, Jack watched as the can made a horrible thunking sound. Its contents poured out on the new concrete.

Jack quickly righted the can, but it was too late. A big, smelly puddle was right in the middle of the garage.

Dad is going to kill me!

Jack looked around for a rag, anything to clean up the mess.

He heard the garage door open.

And saw his dad’s car pull into the driveway.

A well written flashback scene will not detract from your story. Readers are used to novels cutting away from one scene to another. They will accept a cut to a flashback if it is written with dramatic flair.

My “rule” of thumb is: One flashback scene in a novel is enough.

Over to you. What do you want to avoid in your own writing?

Carpe Typem in 2025!

(This post adapted from 27 Fiction Writing Blunders—And How Not to Make Them!)

 

See You Soon!

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Today commences our annual two-week hiatus here at TKZ. This blog has been hale and hearty since 2009, which is a testimony to the quality of our writers and commenters over the years. 

Blogging began back in 1994 when Justin Hall, a student at Swarthmore College, started publishing personal content on his website. He called it “Justin’s Links from the Underground.” This was his “log” on the web. A web log.

The term “weblog” came from Jorn Barger, a bearded James Joyce fan. Later, tech billionaire Evan Williams coined “blog” as both noun and verb, and “blogger” to designate one who blogs. As co-founder of Pyra Labs, he helped design the site Blogger which went public in 1999. (Williams would go on to co-found a micro-blogging site called Twitter.)

In 2004, “blog” was Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year.

Blogs took off in the 2000s, with professional and monetized blogs like TechCrunch, Gawker, and Huffington Post becoming major players in media, offering insights into technology, gossip, and news.

Writers started blogging, too. One of the most influential blogs was Joe Kontrath’s A Newbies Guide to Publishing, which gave practical advice to writers trying to break into traditional publishing. At the end of 2010, however, his blog morphed over into leading the charge for indies. 

On August 7, 2008, a date that will live in fame, a group blog for writers called Kill Zone made its debut. Of its original cast, only our great founder and admin, Kathry Lilley, and a fellow named Gilstrap remain. I looked up John’s first post and saw this:

I faced a storytelling crisis last weekend. Staring down the throat of an August 15 deadline for Grave Secrets (coming in June, ’09), I needed an ending. 

So the first Jonathan Grave thriller was coming. It came (with a title change to No Mercy).

I mean, I already had an ending from the initial drafts, but I needed an ending. A kick-ass final sequence that would leave the reader exhausted and satisfied. The one I already had took care of the satisfaction part, but it didn’t have the roller coaster feel that I wanted.

So I shot one of the characters.

What a great tip. It’s another side of Raymond Chandler’s advice: Bring in a guy with a gun.

And that’s what we’ve always been about here. Tips and techniques and advice and encouragement for our fellow writers. God willing and the crick don’t rise, we’re going to keep on trucking (Okay, Boomer) in 2025.

While you, dear writing friends, keep on writing.

Merry Christmas and Carpe Typem. See you soon!

Every Story is a War

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

My office bookshelves are stuffed with the writing books I’ve studied and highlighted over the years. They’re like old friends. They helped me learn to write salable fiction. I also have eight big binders of issues of Writer’s Digest, all sticky noted, because I’d gobble up the fiction column each month. When I started, Lawrence Block was the columnist. Later it was Nancy Kress. And later than that I shared the column with Nancy.

I sometimes go through these just to see what I was highlighting in those days and get some helpful craft reminders. Recently I came across one of Nancy’s columns titled “How You Can Make Your Story Into a Battlefield” (June, 1995).

In it she boldly states, “Every story is a war. This means every story.” Realizing this, you begin to think “not like a carpenter patiently building a house, but like a general ordering forces.” Further:

Every war includes these factors: combatants who know which side they’re on; something significant at stake; murderous action in which both sides are struggling as hard as they can to prevail; an end to the war through victory, surrender, exhaustion or default; some means of deciding who won.

This doesn’t mean you have to write bang-bang thrillers. The war can be inside a character. I’ve often said that a plot is how a character confronts death—physical, professional, or psychological (or a mix).

Do you write sweet romances? Well, unless the lovers fight through obstacles because they must be together or lose the deepest part of their lives (psychological death), the story isn’t full capacity.

This is even true of comic fiction. Why? Because the characters in the comedy must think they’re in a tragedy of epic proportions. Jerry MUST have the soup that the Soup Nazi makes! So much so that he will give up his girlfriend (who has offended the severe chef) so he can place his order.

Thinking in these terms will ensure that your scenes have significance. You won’t just be filling pages; you’ll be like Patton or Alexander the Great, field generals who were geniuses at moving troops in battle.

Again, this applies to romance as well as crime, character-driven and plot-driven.

Now, Voyager, which I wrote about here, is about a young woman psychologically damaged and suppressed by her overbearing mother. Her attempt to break free and become her true self is what the war is all about. The battles are fierce. So the mother drops her neutron bomb (**spoiler alert**) and has a heart attack. It’s implied she brought it on herself, so as to shackle Charlotte (Bette Davis) with permanent guilt.

That’s war to the death in a so-called “woman’s picture” of the 1940s.

Kress advises that as you begin writing you ask:

  • What are the two sides in this war?
  • What is at stake? [JSB: What form of death?]
  • How soon into the story do the two sides understand, intellectually or emotionally, that they’re at war? Or, if the characters don’t know yet that there’s a war on, can I at least make sure the readers know it?

Think about each move a character makes as a battle tactic, and each physical action and dialogue exchange as a weapon. These can be subtle and involve subterfuge or distraction, as well as direct assault. But they’re all employed to gain the victory.

Readers are always subconsciously asking: Why should I care? Draw battle lines in your story, and they will.

Comments and questions welcome.

 

NOTE: Today’s post is brought to you by Kellogg’s Corn …. no, wait. Brought to you by The Art of War for Writers.

Bleeding for Your Book

Posted on by

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

JK Rowling (via Wikimedia Commons)

I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings. Ours was a joy, all of us together, including the three grandboys. I greeted them as they pulled up to the house. They tumbled out of the car like circus clowns. The two youngest held favorite toys. But the oldest, 10, had a thick paperback under his arm. It was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He’s about halfway through it. My heart sang.

Hard to believe that the Harry Potter series ended way back in 2007. JK Rowling did not publish another book until The Casual Vacancy in 2012. That novel was a stand-alone for adults, with the language and themes to prove it. Was Rowling worried about the abrupt change in genre? Not a bit. In an interview she put it this way:

Harry Potter truly liberated me in the sense that there’s only one reason to write, for me: If I genuinely have something I want to say and I want to publish it. I can pay my bills, you know, every day. I am grateful for that fact and aware of that fact. I don’t need to publish to make a living.

We both know what it takes to write a novel, we both know how much blood, sweat and tears go into writing a novel, I couldn’t put that amount of energy into something purely to say I need to prove I can write a book with swear words in it. So no, there was no nervousness – and again I don’t mean that arrogantly. I felt happy writing it, it was what I wanted to do.

I think we can all agree that JK Rowling can pay her bills. But what do you think of writing a novel as “blood, sweat and tears”? (Churchill actually said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” But that was too long for a rock band, so it was shortened.)

It was not Hemingway who said writing was a matter of sitting down and the typewriter and bleeding (it was either Paul Gallico or Red Smith, or maybe both). But the sentiment is the same.

There does seem to be a small school of thought that says quality fiction knows not blood, sweat and tears. I don’t know about you, but I can tell a bloodless book within about 10 pages, if I haven’t set it aside by then.

I’ll add that you can’t just bleed on the page, as that only makes a stain. The sweat comes when shaping the blood into a narrative form readers can relate to. The tears indicate some frustration at times, and I contend if you don’t have those you aren’t pushing yourself beyond your current capacity. Of course, you’re not obligated to do that. But when asked what she aspires to as a writer, Rowling said, “To get better. I think you’re working and learning until you die. I can with my hand on my heart say I will never write for any reason other than I burningly wanted to write the book.”

There are also some who say you mustn’t let anyone else—editor or beta reader or spouse—opine about your story. Rowling doesn’t see it that way, and I daresay she’s sold a few books. Of her editor on The Casual Vacancy she said:

When he read the book, he singled out certain things about the book that I would have liked someone most to single out about it. I just knew I had the right person. It’s a very intangible thing. It’s like falling in professional love, isn’t it? And once you’ve got that, something clicks and you know you’re in safe hands.

We certainly made some cuts. I decided to move some things around, he made some great suggestions. The book is broadly what it was when I gave it to him. I didn’t change much but what we did change tightened it up a lot, which is what you want.

Rowling has, of course, gone on to write a hugely popular series of detective novels under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith. They are the product of, what do you know? Work.

I often start with a kernel of an idea then work out how to get there. I plan and research a lot and know far more about the characters than actually ends up ever appearing in the books. I have colour coded spreadsheets, so I can keep a track of where I am going.

It is how I have always worked. It was the same for the Harry Potter novels. It’s well documented the level of detailed planning that went into those.

JK Rowling is what I call a real writer. She could sit back and sip gin gimlets and collect sea shells for the rest of her life, but she won’t. She can’t. She writes.

What about you? Do you bleed for your stories? It doesn’t have to be absolute agony, a la Proust. But shouldn’t you have some “skin in the game”? Shouldn’t you “open a vein”?