About James Scott Bell

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

My Seven Years on Kill Zone

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

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Hard to believe it’s been seven years frolicking in the blog fields of Kill Zone.

Seven years of putting out a regular Sunday post on writing and the writing life. With time off for good behavior (i.e., our regular Christmas break), I’ve done about 350 posts.

My first post was on July 26, 2009. I was so pleased to have been invited to join the regular crew, which at that time was made up of Kathryn Lilley, Joe Moore, John Ramsey Miller, Michelle Gagnon, Clare Langley-Hawthorne, and a fellow named Gilstrap. Good times! And they’ve only continued.

It’s been so cool to watch our readership grow, attesting to the quality of our contributors, both present and emeriti. Writer’s Digest and several online sites have taken notice of this, handing us their highest recommendations. We also have a robust community in our regular readers, who consistently post superb insights in the comments.

So how on earth does somebody come up with 350 topics on writing without repeating himself?

I’ll tell you: It’s easy if you love what you write about, and I love the craft of fiction. It’s endlessly fascinating to me to dig in and analyze what writers do and how they do it. I can write about the same topic –– for example, scenes or dialogue –– because I’m always noticing new things that work. I get excited because I can apply what I learn to my own writing, and then share it with others.

I also enjoy, from time to time, taking a look at the publishing industry. I came aboard TKZ just as digital self-publishing was starting to boom. In January of 2010 I wrote my first post on this topic right after Amazon announced its 70% royalty for indie authors. Looking back, I modestly note that my analysis seems pretty right on, except in one regard –– how the traditional publishers would react. I saw a great opportunity for new partnerships with authors. But the industry dug in and in many cases tried to prevent their authors from self-publishing anything.

Then came what I called The Eisler Sanction in March of 2011. That’s when everybody began to recognize that self-publishing was here to stay and that Amazon was going to be the 800-pound gorilla.

I’ve also posted the occasional personal reflection. I think it’s important that those of us who’ve been around the block, so to speak, give newer writers the benefit of our experience. There isn’t a writing obstacle or mental hurdle a writer faces that we here at TKZ haven’t gone through ourselves.

For the record, the post that got me the most hits was The Ten Events of the Highly Successful Writer.

Seven years!

And you know what? I’m ready for another seven. I’ve got a dozen ideas already queued up. And if this blog lasts, and the creek don’t rise (not really an issue here in Southern California), I’ll be coming up with many more.

Thanks to my blogmates for their consistent professionalism over the years. And thanks to you, our loyal readers, for helping make TKZ one of the premiere spots for writers to hang out.

So what brought you to Kill Zone for the first time? Any reflections on the site you’d like to share?

How to Describe a Character

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) and Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in Murder, My Sweet, the film version of Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Following up on my post on scene descriptions, I turn today to describing characters. The basic principle is the same: we want to create a feeling over and above a mere picture. And the way we do that is to filter impressions through the point-of-view character.

I’d like to break this subject down into two parts. First, how to describe the main character, the protagonist. Second, how to render the other characters through the eyes of the protagonist.

Main Character Description

There are two schools of thought when it comes to describing a main character.

The first is to give little or no visual info about the character. This allows the readers form their own picture. There’s a vividness that springs directly from the reader’s imagination.

This approach––minimalism––seems to be the preferred style these days. The exception may be category romance, which usually puts the main characters right on the cover.

If you want to offer a fuller character description, your challenge is two-fold. How much detail, and how to deliver it? In the past it was common to give full information via an omniscient POV, as in the beginning of Gone With The Wind:

Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Here eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin––that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.

These days, however, the more intimate Third and First Person POVs are favored. So how do you describe a main character without her sounding vain? I brushed aside a wisp of my auburn hair and focused my startling green eyes on him.

Here are a couple of ways:

Have another character provide the description

In my first Mike Romeo thriller, Romeo’s Way, I wanted readers to know Mike was in great shape and looked like a fighter. So the first scene finds him jogging and stopping to talk to a middle-aged woman trimming flowers (just before a church blows up):

She put out her hand. “Nell,” she said.

“Mike,” I said.

“Happy to meet you, Mike. Except …”

“Yes?”

“You don’t look like a flower man.”

“What do I look like?”

“Football player, maybe?”

I shook my head.

“Then what exactly do you do with all those muscles?”

“Are you flirting with me, Nell?”

She pushed her hat back slightly. “If I was thirty years younger, I’d rip your T-shirt right off.”

The mirror trick

It is frowned upon by keepers of the craft to have a character pause in front of a mirror (or window or bright, shiny toaster) and report what she sees. I looked in the mirror and saw my red hair hanging there like a bunch of kelp. My jade eyes, which men normally went wowsers over, seemed dull and lifeless. Was I really that depressed?

You know what? I don’t think readers care about it as much as writing teachers and critique-group nannies do. So if you really want to put in such a moment, I’m not going to throw a pencil at you.

There’s an alternative: imagine what another character would see when looking at the protagonist.

I could just imagine old J.D.’s reaction. “What’s with those baby blues of yours, Hal? They look scared. And why don’t you just give in and cut your hair? You want to be a Viking or a lawyer?”

No matter what style of description you choose, be sure to put it somewhere up front, because it only takes a few scenes for your readers to lock in a picture. If you give them some startling descriptive element in the middle of the book, it will be jarring.

Describing Other Characters

Now let’s turn to when the POV character in a scene describes another character. As with setting, I have a checklist:

  1. How do you want the reader to feel about this character?

This is a strategic decision. What’s the tone and purpose of your scene? How will this new character figure into that?

  1. Using the sense of sight, make a list of what the POV character notices about physical appearance

Jot down five to ten items. As you go along, push beyond the familiar. See if you can find one “telling detail.” That’s one image that seems to sum up the entire character. David Copperfield’s first sight of the unctuous Uriah Heep begins:

The low arched door then opened, and the face came out. It was quite as cadaverous as it had looked in the window, though in the grain of it there was that tinge of red which is sometimes to be observed in the skins of red-haired people. It belonged to a red-haired person—a youth of fifteen, as I take it now, but looking much older—whose hair was cropped as close as the closest stubble; who had hardly any eyebrows, and no eyelashes, and eyes of a red-brown, so unsheltered and unshaded, that I remember wondering how he went to sleep. He was high-shouldered and bony; dressed in decent black, with a white wisp of a neckcloth; buttoned up to the throat; and had a long, lank, skeleton hand, which particularly attracted my attention…

What got me was “no eyelashes.” That’s surprising and vivid. And it goes with Heep’s character, for his is always secretly observing. He is not to be trusted. He’s creepy. Dickens captured all that.

  1. Consider the other senses

Smell, hearing (the voice), touch (a handshake) … think about these as well. I’d leave taste out of it (eww).

  1. What personal impression does the character make?

Here is where you can use the POV character’s personal interpretation, like we did with scenes. He wouldn’t stop talking. He was a New York traffic jam full of angry cabbies.

  1. Write the description, let it rest, then edit

Give it your best shot, then take a little break. Grab some coffee. Watch the news.

On second thought, don’t watch the news.

Then come back and tweak the description as you see fit. 

The grand master of character description was Raymond Chandler. He wrote his Philip Marlowe detective stories in First Person POV. Here’s Marlowe’s description of Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely:

He was a big man but not more than six feet five inches tall and not wider than a beer truck.

Here is the snarky voice of Marlowe, and the perfect image—beer truck. Chandler could have chosen anything. …not wider than a schoolhouse…not wider than a cow pasture. But those images would not be how Marlowe thinks nor how Chandler wants to set the scene. A beer truck is urban. It is for people who drink in bars. That’s the feel of the whole chapter, which takes place inside a saloon.

A few paragraphs later, Moose Malloy returns: 

A hand I could have sat in came out of the dimness and took hold of my shoulder and squashed it to a pulp. Then the hand moved me through the doors and casually lifted me up a step.

Not a big hand. But a hand I could have sat in. Then what that hand does to his shoulder, and not just lifting, but casually lifting Marlowe. Two lines, and we know this character is huge and dangerous and in control.

Additional Notes

You can characterize by comparing the person to something

Robert B. Parker does this in The Godwulf Manuscript: 

He looked like a zinnia. Tall and thin with an enormous corona of rust red hair flaring out around his pale, clean-shaven face.

I like what a middle-schooler once wrote as part of a metaphor exercise in English class:

John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met. 

Needs some editing, but perhaps with a little coaching this kid will be a writer someday.

Minor characters should have at least one unique, visual tag 

Minor characters are an opportunity to add spice to your book. Don’t waste their descriptions by making them plain vanilla. Give them at least one unique visual tag.

Instead of the doorman let me in try a doorman too fat for his faded green coat let me in.

You can characterize by what another character is not 

In my current WIP, a Mike Romeo thriller, he is describing the banal bathing-suited men and women at a Hollywood pool party. They are all pose and giggles. Mike observes:

A meeting of the American Philosophical Society this was not. 

You don’t have to describe everything at once 

It’s often a good idea to drop in descriptive details along with the action. Think of it as you would in real life. You see someone at a distance. You form an impression. As you get closer, you notice other things. It’s sort of like a camera starting with a long shot then moving in for a close-up.

Let me end this post with my favorite descriptive example of all time. It comes out of the popular Bulwer-Lytton bad opening line contest from several years ago.

With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

Any thoughts you’d like to add on the subject of character description? 

*** 

NOTE: For years people have asked when my writing seminar might come to their town. Well, now their town can come to my seminar. WRITING A NOVEL THEY CAN’T PUT DOWN is live. You can get all the info by going here. And here’s a little promo:

The Most Important Tip About Setting Descriptions

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

san-francisco-989032_1280How should you approach describing a setting?

I wager most writers come to that point in their project and immediately turn to the imagination. They let pictures form in their minds, then start to write down what they see. Some writers Google around and find an image they can look at before they begin.

Then it becomes a matter of choosing the details they want to include. However, there’s a subtle trap here that new (and even vet) writers may fall into: the setting description can end up as a dry stack of details:

The conference room was large and cold. It had a big table in the middle, with black leather chairs all around. There was a bookcase on the far side of the room and a credenza with a coffee maker on the other. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave a view of the city.

Now, there’s nothing illegal about this. It does the job in a functional way. But it’s also an opportunity lost. A great setting description doesn’t just paint a picture; it draws the reader deeper into the marrow of the story and the heart of the character.

Which brings me to the most important tip you’ll ever get about writing setting descriptions: 

You describe a scene not so the reader can see it, but so the reader can feel it. And the way they feel it is by knowing how the point-of -view character feels about it.

That’s why I’ve developed a seven-step checklist for myself for writing a setting description. It takes a little extra time, but I’ve determined that the stylistic ROI (return on investment) is worth it. Here we go:

  1. How do you want your character to feel about the setting?

This is the crucial first step, and it’s a strategic one. You know where you are in your story and what the character’s attitudes and emotional landscape are. You know what’s going to happen in the scene (note to pantsers: you’ve at least got some idea). Now you’re going to set the scene through the character’s perceptions about it. Your decision can be as simple as: I want my character to feel intimidated.

Note that you don’t have to name the emotion when you write the scene. In fact, it’s better not to. Let the setting itself create the feeling.

  1. Using the sense of sight, describe the things the character notices.

The items that come into your mind will now be filtered through the POV character. If you want to locate a picture via the Internet, go ahead. But as you look at it, pretend you are the character and try to feel what she feels. Make a list of the items your character doesn’t just see, but notices. This is a crucial distinction. We focus on different things depending on our mood. If you’re unhappy and you walk into a sunny hotel foyer, you might ignore the fancy art and notice instead a droopy plant.

Do a little voice journaling. Have the character talk to you in her own voice, expressing her feelings about what she notices.

  1. Use the other senses to add to the feeling.

Imagine what the character might hear, smell, touch, or even in some cases taste. Make a list.

  1. Look at the items from Steps 2 & 3 and highlight the ones that work best.

That didn’t take long, did it? Five to ten minutes. But if you’re having fun, do more!

  1. Bonus Supercharger: What is the character’s personal interpretation of the place?

Here is a powerful technique used by some of our best writers: when the character offers his own interpretation of the setting, it not only creates a sense of place, but also deepens the character for the reader. Double score!

Here are a couple of examples. This is from Robert B. Parker’s first Spenser novel, The Godwulf Manuscript:

The Homicide Division was third floor rear, with a view of the Fryalator vent from the coffee shop in the alley and the soft perfume of griddle and grease mixing with the indigenous smell of cigar smoke and sweat and something else, maybe generations of scared people. 

Parker uses sight and smell, but also adds generations of scared people. That’s from inside Spenser. That’s his own impression of the place. It tells me as much about Spenser as it does the setting.

Here’s a longer impressionistic description from John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee mystery, The Quick Red Fox. These are McGee’s feelings about San Francisco. (I apologize to all my friends in the City by the Bay!)

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

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

But she had lost it, boy. She used to give it away, and now she sells it to the tourists. She imitates herself … The things she says now are mechanical and memorized. She overcharges for cynical services.

I think it’s fair to say we know how McGee feels about San Francisco! One of the things that made this series so popular was passages like the above, where McGee riffs on such matters as setting, social mores and current events.

  1. Write the description using active verbs and concrete images.

At this point, let me advise you to overwrite the description. Don’t try to get this perfect the first time through. Feel it first.

  1. Let the scene rest, then edit.

I don’t do heavy edits as I’m writing a first draft. But I do go over my previous day’s work for style and obvious fixes. So come back to your scene the next day, or at least after a time away from it, and keep the following in mind as you edit:

Check all adverbs with a loaded pencil

If an adverb can be cut without losing anything (which is usually the case) cut it. Strive for a stronger verb instead. He shuffled across the room is better than He walked slowly across the room.

Check all adjectives

First, ask if they’re necessary. Test them. Sometimes cutting them makes the description more immediate.

But adjectives are in our language for a reason. If you keep them, see if you can make them more vivid. Icy may be better than cold, etc.

Beef up what’s soggy 

You may find a spot that needs more descriptive power. Here’s what I do in such a case. I write [MORE] in that spot then open up a blank TextEdit document. I like using TextEdit because it doesn’t feel “permanent” and I can play around. I’ll take several minutes to explore the moment, writing fast and loose, and then I’ll look it over and choose what I like. It may be just one line, or even one word. But if it’s the right line or word, the exercise is well worth it.

You don’t always have to describe a setting at the beginning of a scene

Vary where you put the description. At the top is fine, but sometimes get into the action first. Or start with dialogue. Then drop in the setting description. Readers won’t mind waiting if something interesting is going on.

You don’t have to describe everything at once

You can dribble in bits of description as you go along. This is especially effective as the intensity of the scene increases. Your POV character can notice something that wasn’t evident before, in keeping with the tone of the scene. Hemingway did this famously in his story “Soldier’s Home,” when the young man back home after World War I is feeling hectored at breakfast by his worried mother. Krebs looked at the bacon fat hardening on his plate.

Know when less is more, and when more is more

Deciding how much description to use for a setting is not a matter of formula. But here’s a little tip that will help: the more intense the emotions inside the character, the more you include in description.

For example, in an opening scene where the character is not yet in the hot crucible of conflict, maybe the description is brief. The first scene in Lawrence Block’s story, “A Candle for the Bag Lady,” has Matthew Scudder sitting in Armstrong’s, a bar. He describes it this way:

The lunch crowd was gone except for a couple of stragglers in front whose voices were starting to thicken with alcohol.

Block leaves it at that, because this is “normal” Scudder. He’s not feeling anything intensely yet.

But later, as Scudder is trying to find out who brutally murdered Mary Alice Redfield –– the “shopping bag lady” who inexplicably left him a sum of money in her will –– he investigates her last known residence:

Mary Alice Redfield’s home for the last six or seven years of her life had started out as an old Rent Law tenement, built around the turn of the century, six stories tall, faced in red-brown brick, with four apartments to the floor. Now all of those little apartments had been carved into single rooms as if they were election districts gerrymandered by a maniac. There was a communal bathroom on each floor and you didn’t need a map to find it.

So there you have it, friends. With a little thought and planning, you can turn run-of-the-mill descriptions into moments of stylistic magic. That’s the kind of writing that gets rewarded with word-of-mouth and future purchases.

So what is your approach to description?

What authors do you admire who do it well?

Writing Success is Yours for the Thinking

 

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Retro-Golf-Man-2-Clip-Art-GraphicsFairyFor some strange reason I decided to take up golf at the age of forty-one.

I informed my old college roommate, who was a superb high school golfer. The first words out of his mouth were, “Do you have a good psychiatrist?”

He knew whereof he spoke. My initial attempts at the game left many a chunky divot on the fine grasses of local courses. Scores of balls were lost in both natural and unnatural waters. So frustrated was I that one day, after yet another shank, I hurled my five-iron like a German hammer thrower. It whirligigged through the air before settling into the leafy arms of a eucalyptus tree. It is there to this day.

I took lessons, but it seemed like every time I tried to put something into practice my playing partners would run for cover.

I was about to give up the game when I came across an intriguing sounding book. It was called The Inner Game of Golf by a fellow named W. Timothy Gallwey. The book made an astonishing claim. You could actually lower your golf score simply by mastering what goes on inside your noggin. You could learn to relax, perform under pressure, and make a repeatable swing. You could learn to get out of your own way, so you were not overthinking everything. The game would even become fun.

I was ready for anything! So I spent several months working on my mental approach to golf. And you know what? I qualified for the U.S. Open and finished second!

Oops. Sorry. That was a dream I had one night.

What actually happened was that I got better. I really did. I reached a point where I knew I could go onto any course in the world and not embarrass myself (except in the way I normally do at large social gatherings).

I bring this up because, like brother Brooks, I find a lot of analogies between sports (especially golf) and writing. And I believe the mental game of writing is every bit as important as typing and a good cup of java.

There are so many ways a writer can feel beaten down. Rejection, envy, discouragement over sales, self-doubt. These mental land mines threaten your productivity and growth, which are the engines of your writing career.

As someone who pursued the writing dream after being told you have to be “born” a writer; and as someone who has been making a living at it for twenty years; and as someone who has been through all of the slings and arrows of outrageous writing fortune — I finally decided to write a book about the mental game of writing. That’s why the title is, amazingly: The Mental Game of Writing: How to Overcome Obstacles, Stay Creative and Productive, and Free Your Mind for Success.

How Make Living Writer-printed version

The book covers everything from decisions, goals, courage, creativity, and growth to dealing with envy, stress, comparison, and burnout. It has chapters on increasing your joy, discipline, and production. There’s even a chapter filled with my favorite inspirational quotes from other writers. These can be a tremendous boost to you in time of need.

For example, before I was published, upon hearing again the “you can’t learn it” mantra, I came across this quote from Brenda Ueland:

“Work with all your intelligence and love. Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.”

That was enough to keep me going. I never looked back at those doubters again.

The legendary UCLA basketball coach, John Wooden, defined success as “peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming.”

That’s what I want you to have. Peace of mind because you took the steps you could to be the best writer you can be.

It starts by going mental.

The book is available here:

KINDLE

NOOK

KOBO

PRINT

So what are the major mental obstacles you’ve faced in your writing life? How did you overcome them?

Why Do You Want to be a Writer?

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Shakespear in Love

Why do you want to be a writer?

It’s a question worth pondering deeply, because your answer may be the key to your chances for success.
If you do find yourself to be a writer there are plenty of companies that offer a variety of tradesman insurance

Back in the old days, before 2007(!), if someone would have told me that they wanted to write fiction to make a lot of money, I would have advised them to become an electrician instead. Because when I started in this business in the early 1990s, I knew the chance to make a living wage from fiction was really low. You know, sort of like the Jim Carrey line in Dumb and Dumber. “So you’re telling me there is a chance!”

I think the statistic was that the median income from fiction writing was about $5,000 a year. Sure, there were the blockbusters––John Grisham, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Danielle Steel. But they were as rare as a sober wedding crasher.

Which is why I smiled at the advice Lawrence Block used to give. He’d say if you want to write a novel, take two aspirin and lie down and wait for the feeling to pass. Only if it persisted should you think about writing a novel.

In those days would-be writers huddled in the Dark Forest looking out with awe and fear at the impregnable walls of the Forbidden City. It was inside those walls that the New York publishing industry went about its business. There was also a massive, secured gate and a slew of gatekeepers guarding the place. These gatekeepers were called agents. To get invited inside the walls you first had to get one of those gatekeepers to take an interest in you. Writers would slink out of the Dark Forest and hand a gatekeeper some pages, then run back in and wait for a message of hope to arrive via carrier pigeon.

Which it rarely did.

But even if you got inside and became one of the favored few to be hired to push the grindstone of published fiction, there were no guarantees of long term monetary success. Many a writer whose product failed in the market was cast back over the walls, like that cow in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Then, in November of 2007, over in a distant part of the Dark Forest, a fire started. Fittingly, it was called the Kindle –– an e-reader for looking at books in digital form!

Monty Python cow

Behind the walls of the Forbidden City, with its printing presses churning, there was skepticism. Digital reading had been tried before, most notably by Sony, and had failed to catch on. People obviously preferred physical books, and always would!

What they didn’t realize was that this fire was spreading, and scores of writers in the Dark Forest were being warmed and fed. The digital self-publishing revolution had begun.

And proceeds apace, leaving open the question: Why do you want to be a writer?

Let me say this up front: there is nothing wrong with writing to try to make dough. That’s what many of the old-time writers did, especially during the pulp era. They saw a market and they wrote for that market, and if they were good they could eke out a living. See my recent post here.

But the ones who made it big, or lasted a long time in the game, were those who provided something more in their stories than just plot and character.

That more, I’ve been thinking of late, is love.

Now, before you put me down as a soft-soap, touchy-feely, pop-psych, flowered-shirt-wearing, encounter-session guru, let me explain.

I knew I had to try to become a writer one day back in 1988. I’d spent my first five years out of college trying to make it big as an actor. And I was good! You know how I know? I’ll tell you. I was in a small theater production of Hamlet in Hollywood. I played Rosencrantz (a little footnote: Laertes was played by an intense young actor named Ed Harris). So when the reviews came out in Drama-Logue, only one supporting player was singled out. The reviewer wrote, “James Scott Bell is nicely oily as Rosencrantz.”

Nicely oily! How did the major studios not pick up on that?

My acting did get me some commercials. I got paid. And then I got married. To a beautiful actress. And I decided we needed one steady income in the family. Since I was already nicely oily, I decided to become a lawyer.

Cut to that day in 1988 when my wife and I slipped out for an afternoon double feature. The movie I wanted to see was Wall Street. The other movie on the bill I knew very little about. Only that it starred Cher and was supposed to be pretty good.

That movie was Moonstruck. And it knocked me out. I wrote a bit about that in this post. The movie snuck up on me, pulled me in, made me laugh, but most important of all, it made me love the characters.

And I knew walking out of that theater that I wanted to make other people feel the way I was feeling. I wanted to be able to do that through writing.

So I went after it with everything I had. Because I knew now that I was in love with writing. As my training went on I also discovered that the best things I wrote had me feeling something akin to love, or longing, or deep connection.

In fact, I can’t consider anything I write to be truly finished unless, as I type (or edit) the very last lines, I feel a resonant satisfaction that whispers, This is it. This is just so right.

The way I felt the night I met the future Mrs. Bell at a friend’s party. This is it. This is just so right.

This is my counsel, for any of you seeking to make a go of writing as a career or at least a part-time vocation: Don’t commit to any project unless you can identify why you love it. Don’t go through the motions. Feel something intensely. Because the readers will pick that up. They’ll know. And that makes all the difference.

So now I ask you––why do you want to be a writer?

***

NOTE: I’ve got a couple of exciting, writing-related announcements coming up. If you’d like to know when they happen, be sure to sign up for my email updates by going here. I’ll also put your name in a drawing for a free book. Carpe Typem!

So Your Self-Published Novel is Just Sitting There

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Frank Gruber

Frank Gruber

Heard from a writer the other day who is frustrated that his two novels are sitting somewhere near the bottom of the Sea of Amazon, with nary a fish swimming by. He wondered if he should even bother writing another.

You know what I told him? Be thankful you’re not trying to break through back in 1934!

Yes, the Great Depression and the era of the pulps. You think you’ve got it hard? How about all those writers wearing out their fingers on manual typewriters, hoping to sell a story for a penny a word? How about the ones who pulled their life savings so they could move to New York for as long as the money lasted and make the rounds of the publishing offices?

Let me introduce you to one of them. His name was Frank Gruber. He was a successful pulp writer, then came out to Hollywood to write for the studios. In the 1950s he hit it big as a TV writer for Westerns. In1967 Gruber published The Pulp Jungle, a memoir of his time trying to break into that market. He moved to New York in July of 1934 with a plan to get published within six months.

My physical assets consisted of one portable Remington typewriter and my wardrobe which, aside from what I was wearing, fit very comfortably into one medium size suitcase. I had sixty dollars in cash, but paid out ten dollars and fifty cents of it for a week’s rent in advance at the Forty-fourth Street Hotel. I squandered another ten dollars over the long weekend, so that on Tuesday morning, when I went out to size up the pulp jungle I had approximately forty dollars.

I had one thing else … the will to succeed.

Because money was tight, Gruber ate a lot of “tomato soup” at the Automat (these were popular in the city, like cafeterias, where you put money in a slot to open a window that held a sandwich or whatever). Hot water for tea was free. So what a lot of people did back then was get a bowl for soup, fill it with hot water, pick up some cracker packs (free), sit down at a table and pour half a bottle of ketchup into the water. Voila! Tomato soup. There were days when this is all Gruber ate.

During his first five months Gruber completed forty stories.

All were rejected.

It was desperation time. Then Gruber got a call from an editor who liked him, but hadn’t bought his detective fiction. He asked Gruber to try a Western. So he wrote two stories and submitted them. Then he got a call from an editor he’d pestered, who knew Gruber was a fast writer. The editor said they needed an adventure story the next day to fill out the magazine. Could he do 5500 words overnight? Of course, Gruber said, without any idea of character or plot.

Twelve hours later, at eight in the morning on a Saturday (when the story was due) he had the 5500 words, but no time for corrections. He took the pages to the offices himself.

Then didn’t hear anything.

He went back on Tuesday to see if they had rejected it. The editor said, “Oh, sorry, we forgot to call you. We pay on Friday. Can you give me another story for next month?”

Then the two Westerns he’d submitted earlier sold for a grand total of $34.

He was in!

But this was just the beginning. Even a successful pulp writer (who was writing for a living) was usually just a step or two ahead of the landlord. They had to keep producing, keep selling.

I poured it on in 1940, producing more than eight hundred thousand words. The more I wrote, the more I had to write. I was making commitments all over town and I had to deliver.

This was a common theme among the pulpsters. Gruber tells about a writer named George Bruce who used to throw parties in his small Brooklyn apartment. One night the place was jammed with thirty-plus people. At ten o’clock Bruce announced he had a 12,000 word story due the following morning. He went to a corner where his typewriter was and pounded it for four hours, ignoring the party swirling around him. At two o’clock in the morning he announced he was finished and poured himself a glass of gin.

Gruber also got to know perhaps the most prolific author of all time. His name was Frederick Faust, but you know him by his most famous pen name, Max Brand. When Gruber met him they were in Hollywood working at Warner Bros. Studios. Faust had, by that time, written and published approximately forty-five million words.

Frederick Faust, aka Max Brand

Frederick Faust, aka Max Brand

When Gruber asked him how on earth he did it, Faust asked Gruber if he could write fourteen pages in one day. Gruber said he’d certainly done so (fourteen pages is about 4,000 words), but had also gone two or three weeks without writing a line.

That was the secret, Faust said. He wrote fourteen pages a day, every day, “come rain or shine, come mood or no.”

That works out to one and a half million words a year.

The really remarkable thing about Fred Faust’s output was that he was the “biggest drinker” Gruber ever met. Faust would put away a thermos of whiskey during his morning writing hours. His lunch would be washed down by several more drinks. “When he went home at five-thirty,” Gruber writes, “he had a light supper and then settled down to his serious drinking.”

Faust was one of those extremely rare individuals who could drink like that every night and still operate in the morning. I do not recommend this method.

I do, however, recommend Faust’s seriousness about a quota. I’m a piker compared to guys like Faust and Erle Stanley Gardner. I aim for 6,000 words a week! But I can tell you my yearly output for the last 15 years. I keep track on a spreadsheet. This is the most important writing advice I know. [My best year, by the way, was 2010 – 347,768 words.]

So here’s my message for you if you’re tempted to pull a woe-is-me:

  • Your pulp forbears would shake their heads at how good you’ve got it. You can publish yourself and to a virtually unlimited market! Without cost! They would have thought that possibility was science fiction back in ’34.
  • If you don’t write to a quota, they’d have no sympathy for you.
  • If you don’t pay at least some attention to the market, they’d think you were daft.
  • If you don’t try to get better at your craft, they’d tell you you’d be better off as a plumber, and the sooner the better.
  • If you want to make it, they’d tell you to keep working, because the work never stops.

I wrote a little book some time ago called Self-Publishing Attack! In it are my five “absolutely unbreakable laws” for self-publishing success. While some of the technical items have changed since I published it four years ago, the laws that make up my system remain unalterable.

And the last law is: Repeat over and over the rest of your life.

Are you prepared to do that?

If you are, then somewhere Frank Gruber is smiling.

[NOTE: Gruber would be pleased as pulp to know that his signature series character from the 1930s is still around, in both digital and print. I refer to Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia.]

So what do you think of Frank Gruber’s Depression-era work ethic? Still valid today?

How to Write an Eating Scene

by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

In my workshops I warn students about scenes where two friends sit down for dinner orpeople-146963_1280 coffee and talk about life, the universe and the plot. The temptation is to have it all easy-peasy because, after all, they’re friends. The danger for the writer, though, is that without conflict or tension the scene takes on the dreadful patina of dullness. Which means it is the readers who lose their appetite … for reading on!

Sometimes I will hear the rejoinder that this is what we do in life. We have coffee with friends, we have dinner with pals. Why can’t we put that in our books?

Well, I say, you have fuzzy slippers in your life. Do you put them in your books? (Okay, well, if you do, put snakes inside them.)

Then I say that fiction is not a reproduction of real life. It’s a stylized rendition of life for a fictional purpose. And the most important part of that purpose is keeping readers glued to the page! A scene featuring “happy people in Happy Land” doesn’t stick.

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t do a quiet scene with friends or allies in a Starbucks or a restaurant. The trick is to have something going on that gives off a vibration of tension. It’s not that hard to do, either. But the effect on readability is palpable.

Let’s have a look at an eating scene from Michael Connelly’s Echo Park. Harry Bosch is investigating an old murder for the Open-Unsolved unit of the LAPD. He’s asked FBI agent and profiler Rachel Walling for help. Bosch and Rachel had once been intimate, and have started up again, though they are uncertain about the wisdom of this.

In this scene, Connelly wants to give us a lot of information and theorizing about the case. That could easily make this a “talking head” scene. But Connelly knows better than that. Bosch has arranged to meet Rachel at a fancy downtown restaurant. The scene begins:

Bosch had lost track of time while in the library. He was late. Rachel was already seated and waiting for him. She was holding a large one-sheet menu that obscured the look of annoyance on her face as Bosch was led to the table by a waiter.

“Sorry,” Bosch said as he sat down.

“It’s okay,” she replied. “But I already ordered for myself. I didn’t know if you were going to show or not.”

She handed the menu across to him. He immediately handed it to the waiter.

“I’ll have what she’s having,” he said. “And just the water is fine.”

He drank from the glass already poured for him while the waiter hurried away. Rachel smiled at him, but not in a nice way.

So here’s the first tip: find some form of TENSION between the allies. In this case, Bosch is late for his meeting. Rachel is annoyed. We want to keep reading to see how this will play out.

Rachel then warns Bosch that he’s not going to like what he ordered. It was sashimi. She knows Bosch wants his fish cooked. Oops. But Bosch decides he better let it go and give Rachel the info he has.

This leads to the second tip: make the FOOD a source of discomfort. Bosch has begun his summary of the events:

It took him fifteen minutes and during that time their lunch was served. Of course it came fast. It didn’t have to be cooked! He felt lucky to be the one doing all the talking. It gave him a ready excuse not to eat the raw fish put down in front of him.

[As the scene moves on, Rachel finishes her sashimi. Bosch then pushes his own plate, which he hasn’t touched, over to her.]

“No, I’m not saying that Olivas was the killer. I am saying he was gotten to by the killer. He and O’Shea. The real killer came to them and made some sort of a deal.”

“Harry, this just sounds so …”

She didn’t finish. She pushed the sashimi on her plate around with her chopsticks but ate very little of it. The waiter used the moment to approach the table.

“You didn’t like you sashimi?” he said to her in a trembling voice.

“No, I –”

She stopped when she realized she had almost a full portion on the plate in front of her.

“I guess I wasn’t very hungry.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s missing,” Bosch said, smiling. “I thought it was great.”

Third tip: Use the servers to provide a well-timed INTERRUPTION. Here, Rachel was about to tell Harry how his theory sounded. But before she could continue, the waiter comes back to the table. This is a clever ploy, delaying the payoff, which is another way to say that Mr. Connelly knows how to make us read on.

Here is a slice from my novel Romeo’s Way. Mike Romeo is under cover in San Francisco, trying to get hired as security for a political campaign. Kat, the campaign aide he has made contact with, is interviewing him. Mike proved himself earlier that day, and now Kat takes him to dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf on the campaign’s dime.

“I can only get back so far into your past,” she said. “I get back to when you were fighting, but before that there’s virtually nothing. There was some fluff of a bio in a program once, but to be quite honest with you, it didn’t sound believable.”

“That’s because it was fiction,” I said. “They needed something, so I made something up.”

“Okay, then what’s the real story?”

“It’s not something I choose to publicize.”

“And that,” she said, “is what interests me.”

“I also believe in privacy. What I choose to keep private is nobody’s business.”

“Which means you have something to hide.”

“Everybody has something to hide,” I said. “Tell me about your sex life.”

Her cheeks flushed, obvious even in the candlelight.

“See?” I said.

“I could get really mad at this point.”

“But you won’t,” I said. “Because it’s not a good move. And my impression of you is that you make nothing but good moves.”

Before she could answer, the waiter appeared with the bottle of wine.

In this clip, I have used a fourth tip: CONFLICTING AGENDAS. Kat wants Mike’s full background. He doesn’t want to give it. They both want to test each others’ boundaries. And then the waiter interrupts.

So there you have it. Four simple ways you can turn a sitting-down-for-coffee-or-food scene into readable fiction: tension, food, interruptions, agendas.

Mix and match according to taste. Your readers will enjoy the meal.