By John Gilstrap (Only my wife still calls me Johnny)

Last Saturday was the night of our annual Christmas party. It’s a catered event in our home where we host about 100 friends for an evening of food, drink and frivolity. Things were just getting started–I was taking coats at door and directing people to the various bars and food stations–when my wife’s urgent cries drew my attention to a 12-inch-high patch of flames on the dining room table.

“Oh, bother,” I said–or something like that. A lit taper had fallen from its base and had set the linen table runner alight. Linen burns pretty well with a bit of paraffin accelerant. However, it extinguishes quickly when you drown it with the water from a chafing dish. Thinking quickly, the caterer then covered the burn mark with a serving dish and the party was back on track.

About 18 hours have passed as I write this, and I realize that some blog topics are ordained. So buckle up as I set my writing creds aside and return to my previous line of work. For newcomers, that means 15 years in the fire and rescue service and 35 years as a safety engineer specializing in things that burn.

First, this video is mandatory. The first ten seconds or so will do. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Welcome back. Nothing about that video was doctored. Dry pine burns almost explosively, and it doesn’t care if it’s part of a tree, a wreath or a centerpiece. It also burns very hot. If the fire in the video had been in a real house, those superheated gases would have ignited all the furniture and wall coverings, creating an even hotter plume of gases that would have mushroomed along the ceiling to the rest of the house, self-propagating by all the additional items and structural members it ignited along the way. If it were a two-story house, the stairway would have been the internal chimney, and the Beast would have fed on everything up there.

Sobering Fact #1: You don’t have time. The Beast is coming, and you can’t stop it. Even if it’s not true in your one-off case, you have to assume it is true. If it’s after bedtime, and the smoke detector sounds, your reflex should be to call 9-1-1. If you live in an area that has “enhanced 9-1-1” service, you don’t even need to speak to anyone. The computer will know your address and the audio will tell the call taker everything they need to know. If it turns out to be a nothing burger of a call, well, that’s good news for everyone. Your house won’t have burned and the firefighters won’t have had to clean their equipment.

Sobering Fact #2: Everybody’s instincts are wrong.

• You keep your and the kids’ bedroom doors open because you want to hear problems. Remember the Beast in the hallway? He kills with his breath, not with his claws. Not only is he consuming all of the oxygen from the air, but the products of combustion from all that furniture and structural material are toxifying it with carbon monoxide and phosgene and oxides of nitrogen and God knows what else. Some of these gases are toxic at parts per billion, and if bedroom doors are open, they’re rolling right in. A closed bedroom door adds as much as 10 minutes of survival time in a house fire. Give the firefighters a chance to make a rescue instead of a recovery.
• You think you’re going to have time to rescue your kids from down the hall. You’re wrong. At least, you have to plan to be wrong. See everything written above. Honestly, you don’t comprehend how geometrically the Beast grows once he gets started. Dying in the hallway during a rescue attempt is not a rescue. It’s a tragedy. Likely part of a larger one.
• Your kids are going to run to you for help when things get scary. I don’t even want to write the rest. Read the paragraph above and extrapolate. Hands down, the worst day of my fire service life was when I found the bodies of two children under their parents’ bed. A part of me broke that night that still hasn’t healed.

Elements of a Fire Evacuation Plan 

• Every room has a way out–ideally, two.
  • If the CLOSED bedroom door is hot to the touch, the Beast is out there waiting to kill you. Don’t open it.
    • OPTION 1: If it’s safe, climb out a window.
      • Are your kids big enough/strong enough to open the window?
      • Do they know it’s okay to break the window if they can’t open it? (You need to tell them very specifically that it is permissible because you’ve spent their whole lives making it clear that windows are NOT to be broken.)
      • Is there a designated implement nearby that they can use to break the window?
    • OPTION 2: If the Beast is outside the door and window egress is unsafe, the only option is to stay put and await rescue.
      • Stay low and in plain sight
      • Make lots of noise. (Bedside whistles are a great idea.)
• Establish a meeting place outside and once there, stay there. 
• Do not hesitate. Hear the smoke detector, activate the plan.

Please consider this post to be my Christmas message of love.

We’re all extended family here at the Killzone Blog, and it so happens that the season of God’s greatest gift to mankind coincides in the Northern Hemisphere with the time of year when we stack the rules of chemistry and physics against ourselves by placing uniquely combustible fuels in close proximity to efficient ignition sources. There’s a reason why first responders refer to this time of year as Fire Season.

I don’t want to stress you out, but I do want all of you to take a look at every single display in your home. If having a real tree is important to you (or any real greens for that matter), make sure that they are moist and well away from direct sources of heat. Keep a pitcher of water near the fireplace in case a log falls out. You just have to cool it off enough to get it back into the fire box with the tongs. There’s no need to extinguish the fire in the fire box before you go to bed, but make sure that the logs are stable and won’t fall.

Candles out before bed. All of them. Don’t make me come over there and give you a talking to.

With all that lecturing behind me, I wish you all a wonderful Holiday Season, and I will see you on the far side of our annual hiatus!

By John Gilstrap

When Zero Sum, #16 in my Jonathan Grave thriller series hit the stands in 2024 as a “premium mass market paperback,” the paper copy retailed for $9.99 and the Kindle version cost $7.99. Fifteen books and as many years earlier, the standard mass market version of No Mercy, the first book in the series, retailed for $6.99, and for two weeks, the Kindle price was $0.00 before it skyrocketed to $2.99 after the promotional period expired*.

This coming February, when Scorched Earth, #17 in the series is revealed to the world, it will be in a trade paper format. If you’re not familiar with the jargon, trade paperbacks have the dimensions and font size of a hardcover, but with soft covers. Paper copies will retail for $18.95 and the Kindle version will cost $9.99.

For what it’s worth, I had nothing to do with this decision, and the decision itself isn’t about greed–at least not directly. Without wallowing too deeply in the weeds, the demand for mass market paperbacks has been dwindling for years, kept alive mainly by the reprints of last year’s bestsellers by big name authors. Those were the books you’d see in grocery stores and pharmacies and airports, but the real driver for the mass market were big box stores like Walmart and Costco, both of which announced that they would no longer be stocking their shelves with mass market paperbacks, with certain exceptions, including category romances.

This change concerns me. First of all, it’s change and I hate fixing things that don’t feel broken. I’ve always lived by the mantra, “Never try to make a happy baby happier.”

Trade paper has always been the format for literary fiction. At least that was the case in the United States. Thrillers were hardcover and mass market reprints. We are all creatures of habit. Will readers who generally trend toward hardcovers be more drawn to my books because they’re larger yet still softcover? Will mass market paperback readers who’ve reserved a specific spot in their briefcases for a small book be pissed off that they now have to carry something larger?

And there’s the price. Over the years, I’ve been blessed to be able to build a devoted fan base that’s willing to spend mass market prices for my stories. Will they stay with me as the price for the handheld book doubles? I guess I’ll find out. I worry less about my eBook fans because the price increase is less drastic, but it’s still change.

Now for the exciting part . . .

The format change has provided an excuse to re-release all of my Grave series in trade paper format. No Mercy and Hostage Zero will hit the stands at the same time as Scorched Earth. While all the concerns remain, it’ll be nice to see out-of-print titles returning to the shelves.

Good news for autograph collectors. If there’s one complaint I’ve heard more than any other over the years about the mass market format is that bibliophiles who collect autographs don’t like the way small paperbacks look on their shelves. I understand that, actually. And as the man signing the autograph, I confess that I will be happy to have a larger signing area on the page.

This brings us to the importance of pre-orders. I’m not a “please buy my book” kind of guy. I figure that if you have to beg, something’s wrong. In fact, I don’t even bring books with me to sell when I teach workshops. First and foremost, I’m not set up to be a retailer and have no desire to manage another layer of taxation. But also, I figure if I do my job right, people will be inspired to buy my books from a bookstore, or to borrow them from a library.

That said, if you’re inclined to buy my books when they come out, given the expanse of this change in the way of doing business, it would be extremely helpful for you to pre-order the book through your retail outlet of choice. Whether you prefer a physical book or an eBook, preorders send a message to the publisher and the marketplace in general.

So, what say you, TKZ family? How price sensitive do you think readers are? Are you going to miss pocket-size books?

=

*I’m proud to note that No Mercy shot to the #1 free book on Amazon, “selling” over 60,000 copies during that time. When the price returned to $2.99 the book remained the #1 overall Kindle bestseller for the next week. That was a promotional gambit that worked better than I’ve ever witnessed.

By John Gilstrap

As a thriller author, I know all about testing the boundaries of suspended disbelief. As a consumer of thrillers, I do it all the time. Coincidences have to happen to make a story work, and as writers, it’s our job to make the coincidences feel organic to the situation the characters are enduring. For the sake of tension and drama, we stack the odds against our good guys. That way, when they ultimately prevail, the victory feels that much sweeter.

We’ve been watching a lot of streaming movies and television shows in our special viewing room over the past couple of months, and as the tropes stack up, I’m having a progressively harder time keeping my inner commentary silent, earning a few elbow shots from my beloved and more than a few harsh shushes. Consider . . .

. . . When crashing the drug den and the SWAT team is stacked up behind a ballistic shield and armed with enough fully-automatic firepower to topple Venezuela, why is Detective Danny Reagan with his pistol and designer ballistic vest out in front of everybody?

. . . Why don’t detectives ever just turn on a light? Instead, the search the dusty darkness of a suspects bedroom–or the basement where all murders were committed–with only the illumination provided by a tiny penlight.

. . . Why does our brilliant good guy wait till he arrives at the site of trouble before he chambers a round into his pistol? That means he’s been driving around all day essentially unarmed.

. . . After prevailing in the firefight in Room A, why doesn’t our good guy take advantage of the relative peace to reload before moving to Room B? Never bring old bullets to a new gunfight.

. . . For heaven’s sake, good guy or bad, just friggin’ shoot! You’ve achieved your goal. You’ve got your prey in your sights. And let’s be honest: At that point, while the victim very likely cares deeply that you intend to kill them, they’re not really going to be listening to the why. If they’ve got any sense, they’re going to be focused exclusively on either how to get away or to kill you first. Any way you cut it, your best call is to pull the trigger. Conversely, if you change your mind, your only move is to run like a bunny rabbit because only bad things lie ahead for you.

I make it a point to never pick on particular shows by name, but there’s one very popular program that makes my head explode every week. Let’s pretend there’s a show called “Trooper” and it features a character named Dalton Shames. To our knowledge, Dalton’s never had a conventional job, but it’s clear that he was raised by MacGyver. Give Dalton a can of Dr. Pepper, and he can turn a paper clip into a flame thrower.

Okay, I joke about the flame thrower, but he routinely produces a full-size 1911 platform pistol from the waistband of his trousers, right at the small of his back. His limp-wristed grip is all wrong for that gun (that’s a real description, not a pejorative), and none of the nations most draconian gun laws apply to him. Not even New York or Los Angeles.

In last week’s episode, a plucky 19-year-old is able to infiltrate the lair of a dangerous drug kingpin with the intent of kingpin regicide. It’s quite a feat given the army of armed guards. Dalton, in the company of the local sheriff, who has inexplicably ceded all law enforcement powers to this stranger from out of town, raid the compound themselves by ramming their way through the front gate. They have to keep the 19-year-old from being killed by the cartel, don’t you know.

Here’s the plan: The sheriff will hold off the army with his six-shot revolver while Dalton makes his way to the kingpin’s throne room, where the plucky kid has his highness dead to rights, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Yada, yada . . . shot from off camera, kingpin gut shoots plucky kid, Dalton shoots kingpin and takes off running with plucky kid over his shoulder. Bad guys with rifles can’t hit a running target at ten yards, Dalton can’t miss with unaimed shots while running.

All is well but for this kid with a hole in his gut. Not to worry. There’s a horse veterinarian with a pouch of goodies who says he can help.

CUT TO: A kingpin’s yard filled with cop cars that would have been really handy a little while ago. But the vehicle we really care about it the ambulance with our plucky-now-gut-shot 19-year-old looking like a million bucks, all cleaned up, sitting upright in the stretcher while Dalton tells him everything’s going to be okay. Then Dalton allows the paramedics to close the back doors and drive him away.

Sigh.

There’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s no element of this story is possible so therefore none of the story is engaging. I am without a doubt becoming progressively more curmudgeonly about these things, but I swear that lazy storytelling is becoming the norm.

In these days of Chat GPT and even simple YouTube searches, even uninformed storytelling is lazy. A car door has never been adequate to stop any but the smallest bullet, but ten years ago, not knowing that was forgivable. Now, there are entire channels dedicated to what stops what caliber of bullet. I have to assume that s true of every other once-esoteric subject.

What say you, TKZ family? How forgiving is the suspension mechanism for your disbelief?

By John Gilstrap

I have been blessed with nice offices my entire professional life. Not that I’ve always had an office job, or that my office jobs didn’t take me out into the field for many days out of the year, but when I was in town, in headquarters, I always had a door and walls. In several of my Big Boy jobs, I could look beyond my door to see other toiling in the cubical farm, but I’ve never had to endure the challenge of trying to concentrate in a crowd.

Ninety percent of the time, my door remained open, especially in my true safety engineering days, working at the explosives plant, because the open door encouraged drop-ins. “Hey, John, there’s a problem, I think, down at Building 240 . . .” On the flip side, the open door allowed me to catch in the hallway that person I needed to talk to who was never in his own office.

If my office door was closed–or is closed today–it’s a rare enough event that everyone knows I need to be alone. Back in the day, it could have been because of a personnel issue or a classified project, but now it’s because I’m in the Zone, or on a phone call or doing a YouTube video or Zoom meeting.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I like comfort and I like my things. My stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I can be productive in a hotel room or sitting at a bar or in a coffee shop, but to feel at home, I want to feel special in my office space.

The office furniture I’d had for the past fifteen years or so was designed for a different time and for different priorities. My desk had a big cabinet for my tower computer and a slide out tray for my keyboard along with chases for a few cords. If I wanted to write with pen and paper–which I frequently do–I merely slid the keyboard into its slot and worked on the desk space. None of this affected the music I was listening to from the Bose CD player on the bookshelf.

Now, my laptop is my only computer. The keyboard tray is still the proper typing height, but I could no longer slide the tray in without closing the lid on the computer, which was also the source of the music or white noise I was listening to, not to mention the gateway to the internet research I needed to take notes on as I wrote by hand. It just didn’t work for me anymore, and after the move to West Virginia, the furniture didn’t really fit the space.

So, I designed myself a new office.

I like dark colors and I like the look of the hard surfaces. My old office provided just one horizontal surface and it was hard to access if I wanted to do anything by hand,. Here, the wrap-around design allows me to swing my chair around and have immediate access to more desk.

But let’s talks about some of the stuff.

This little guy never had a name but he was my childhood Teddy bear. One of my most prized possessions, he got me through some tough times.

On October 19, 1983 at 3:10pm, a contaminated batch of propellant for the Navy’s Standard Missile Program exploded about 400 yards from my office. The pressure wave blew in my window and collapsed my ceiling. This piece of shrapnel missed me.

While I was researching SIX MINUTES TO FREEDOM, President Bush invited Kurt Muse and me to Houston so that we could interview him for 20 minutes. We stayed for and hour and a half.

I was invited to teach a writing class to the military and civilians at Guantanamo. While there, I was interviewed by the base radio station, where I got a Fidel Castro bobblehead. The station motto is, “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard.”

I’ve been trading Jonathan Grave challenge coins for a while now–long enough to put together a nice collection. Every one of those represents service to the nation or the community. It warms my heart to look at them.

A little daily encouragement from Dad.

And now, finally, time to go back to work.

By John Gilstrap

Every parent has confronted some form of the same horrible moment when their child declares their desire for the unobtainable. Perhaps it’s the skinny, five-foot-four high school junior who wants nothing else in life but to be a professional football player. Or the 13-year-old aspiring ballerina who cannot walk across the room without tripping over her feet. What’s the right call here? Do we tell them the truth and shatter their dreams or smile and say supportive things, knowing that they will fail? We love them more than life itself, but coaches and lessons are expensive. And c’mon, there’s the opportunity cost of the time lost not pursuing something where they’d have a better chance of success (and which might more closely fit with the plan we’ve always had for their lives).

Do we presume failure and shut the door on their unlikely dreams, or do encourage them and hope for a Rudy moment? (If you don’t recognize the Rudy reference, stop reading right now and go watch the movie. With the family. Bring Kleenex.)

Now, let’s take it a step farther (further? I’m never sure). You’ve exhausted the carefully collected 529 Plan money to see your son, Billy, graduate with honors from a prestigious engineering school, and during the celebration dinner, he announces his plans to go to New York to try to be an actor on Broadway.

Or his plans to take a year or two off to work at a coffee shop while he writes the mystery novel that’s been floating around in his head.

I’m going to take a guess at what what your initial reactions would be:

• Like hell you are;
• I’ve raised an idiot;
• Do you realize how much money we just dropped on your education?
• You’re going to starve.

But Billy is no fool. He’s thought through all of these objections. He’ll come back with:

• I’m only young once. This is the best time to take chances.
• It’s just me. I don’t need a lot of money. I’ll find a way to feed myself.
• Mom and Dad, this is my dream. If it doesn’t work out, engineering will still be there for me.

This is where you tee up the failure speech:

• The entertainment business is brutal. It tears people up and spits them out. It’s soul crushing. (All of this coming from articles you’ve read, having never actually attempted to live the life you’re trashing.)
• You were born to be an engineer, not a writer or performer. (Translation: We’ve spent a lot of money on our dream for you. We’ve told all our friends that you’re going to be an engineer. They’re going to roll their eyes and scoff when we tell them that you want to do this. Just as we’re doing right now.)
• Even people who are successful can’t maintain their success. Even if you can sell that first novel for a lot of money, it might not sell through and your career could be over. Even if your first song is a hit, there may never be a second song. You don’t want to risk the humiliation of being a one hit wonder, do you?

Finally, when Billy goes forward with his stupid plan, you hope he’ll fail early and spectacularly enough that it will set his head straight. Even if you keep a good poker face, your real thoughts will likely shine through.

You will launch your beloved son into his future armed with the knowledge that pretty much everyone who’s ever loved him has their thumb on the scale for him to fail. Those aren’t the words anyone speaks, but Billy can hear the “I-Told-You-So Chorus” being rehearsed in the wings.

And in his heart of hearts, no matter what he says, Billy expects to fail as well. Let’s face it: The odds are woefully stacked against him. Of the tens of thousands of hacks who push books out every year now that gatekeepers are gone and self-publishing is easy, how many actually make enough to buy a decent meal, let alone fund a lifestyle? Ditto the thousands of members in the Screen Actors Guild who make little more than pocket change. Who the hell is Billy to think he can succeed when so many others fail?

The answer is simple. Billy is better than all those hacks. He just needs to make the world realize it.

He can start by projecting success. Billy didn’t make this shift from engineering to the arts on a whim and a desire. Yes, he has passion, but he also has talent. How does he know? Because he does. He knows when his stuff is bad and because of that, he knows when it’s good. In the arts, that’s what talent is. True talent. Having it is the key element that separates him from the dreck peddlers. It’s what separates Broadway from dinner theater.

When Billy goes to a reading or a literary event, he makes it his mission to introduce himself not just to the author, but to the author’s agent or publisher or publicist who will likely also be there. If he attends a conference, he will sit among the cadre of authors he knows he will one day join. He will work the room in a way that only a confident person can. People will remember him not for being cocky or loud or even because he had a nifty idea for a book, but because he was interesting.

The entertainment business–of which writing is a part–is a business of relationships, and people love to help interesting people.

If Billy’s smart, he will stay away from anyone who sneers at his decision to pursue his dream, taking solace from the fact that those who sneer will be the same ones who want to take selfies with him after his dream proves to be successful. Billy should make a commitment to himself never to apologize to anyone for the artistic path he chose.

Everyone who has seen any level of success in the entertainment business started as Billy. They all share the common elements of talent, drive, focus, more than a little luck, and the ability to see rejection merely as a slammed door that opened a window.

A lot of Billys quit. Most, probably. They go home to the “I-Told-You-So” concert and complain that the industry isn’t interested in new talent anymore. They’ll testify without evidence that traditional media is dying anyway. The real route to success, they’ll say, is doing it all yourself because even if they buy your book, they’ll turn on you like jackals if the book under performs.

As evidence, Whining Billy will regurgitate the one-hit-wonder trope of their friend John who was really, really good. The industry paid him a lot of money, and got behind his first two projects. They sent him on tours, and while the books were bestsellers, they didn’t earn back the money the company spent, and now nobody will return his phone calls. Poor John.

Whining Billy glosses over the lede here–that John had a hit. For a period of time, however short, he got to live the dream. He got to see his name on bookshelves around the world. And while he beamed with pride of accomplishment, the world belittled him because he didn’t do it twice.

Perhaps Whining Billy–having quit and started a garage band, or maybe gone into teaching creative writing classes–was unaware of the fact that while John was having trouble getting his phone calls returned, he was still in the game making calls.

Yes, we’re talking about me now. And perhaps it’s pure hubris, but I never stopped believing in my abilities during the dark times. I never once saw rejection as personal. I understood the quiet happy dances performed by that handful of veteran authors who’d never made a fraction of what I’d been paid for those under-performing books.

I didn’t care that large elements of my extended family celebrated my slump because it’s what I expected of them. I think they had a lot to do with my desire to escape into fiction in the first place.

That noise doesn’t matter to me. I can’t let it matter to me.

To the outside world, it looked like my slump ran from roughly 2001 to 2006, but what no one outside of my very tiny circle of trust knew was that I had made the pivot of a lifetime. I was researching and writing my first and only nonfiction book–the first book ever to receive cooperation from the Army’s super-secret Delta Force. That book became Six Minutes to Freedom, co-authored with Kurt Muse, whose story it tells, and when it was done, we couldn’t give it away to the Big Five. (Nobody cares about Central America, Special Forces is overdone, neither of us is a “journalist” and therefore we’re not qualified to write the story.) I actually had to fire my agent over the book because she refused to represent it.

That’s when I remembered that Steve Zacharias, then a senior executive (now CEO) of Kensington Publishing had always been a fan of my work. My new (and better) agent, Anne Hawkins, sent him the manuscript, and he bought it. Boom! I was back in the game, and the research for that book provided the launch platform for the Jonathan Grave series.

The success of the Grave series allowed me to launch my Victoria Emerson Series, and now my Irene Rivers thriller series. That’s thirty books and counting folks.

And Six Minutes to Freedom is slated to be released by Netflix as a feature film in 2027.

The human tapeworms who troll the interwebs either spreading promises of quick riches through self/hybrid/vanity publishing or spreading rumors of doom and misery in the traditional world are lying to you.

Talent. Relationships. Persistence. The ability to tune out the naysayers. Those are four legs on the stool that defines success in the entertainment business. We talk a lot about tying your butt to the chair and writing. Well, yes, that’s important. But you have to get out there and meet people, too. Build relationships.

Your work has been rejected? Ah, that’s a shame. Get over it and try again. And again. And again.

Or quit. There’s no shame in that. Just remember that it was your choice to quit. Dismissive agents or cranky editors didn’t make you quit. You chose to quit.

And somewhere, you left and editor or an agent hungry for exactly what you’d written. After fifty rejections, you’ll never know if you would have discovered each other on your 51st query.

By John Gilstrap

By way of reader orientation, this post is built on the premise that the universe of writers is divided into two broad categories–those who outline their stories before they get to the business of writing, and those who plow into the story on page one, not knowing where it’s going to go until they get there. That latter group writes by the seat of their pants, ergo they are “pantsers,” and I number myself among them.

In my mind, there really are not pros and cons to be discussed about one approach versus the other because the preferred approach is writer-specific and hard-wired. I’ve never been able to outline. Even in high school and college, when I was supposed to turn in those damn 3×5 cards along with research papers, I always did them last, after I had written the paper. And story wheels? They make my head explode. This is why writing programs like Scrivener, which so many of my writer friends love, are wasted on me.

Two weeks ago, my post here in the ‘Zone dealt with the perils of pantsing a short story–specifically, how it spun out of control in terms of length. I stipulate that if outlining-then-writing worked for me, that would have been a far more efficient approach. But in the end, my pantsing worked. Once I discovered the real story, I was able to trim off about 2,500 words and turned in a tale I’m quite proud of.

Last weekend, I attended an excellent conference called Creatures, Crimes and Creativity in Columbia, MD, outside of Baltimore. The first panel I was put on was about screenwriting–a format that is very strictly structured. You’ve got 120 pages to tell an entire story for a feature film. Around 20 pages for a half hour TV show, and you’ve got to pace for commercial breaks! (Full disclosure: I’ve written feature films, but I’ve done nothing with television.)

Perhaps the most noted guru in screenwriting instruction is Syd Field, and his teachings clearly influenced the advice given by my fellow panelists. By Page X you have to have the inciting event (or whatever it’s called), and then by page Y must come the turning point(?). Et cetera, et cetera, and on and on. Pantsing a screenplay, they said, is not possible.

Enter the contrarian. C’est moi. Of course you can pants your way through a screenplay. That’s how I find the story. The characters interact with each other, they do stuff and say things, and through that, the creative crew in my mind wakes up and gets excited. I’ll hammer out something that is jumbled and woefully long, but I’ll have a whole story. It’ll be crap, but first drafts are supposed to be crap.

Now that I know the story and I’m excited by the dialogue, future drafts are all about shaping the pile of poo first draft into the beautiful golden structure of a screenplay that works.

It bothers me that inexperienced writers attend classes and take what they hear literally. As a story is first unfolding, I think it would be soul stealing to think that a certain plot point had to happen by page 10. First drafts are all about story flow. Don’t let artificial structures get in the way of your imagination. Get it all out, then fix it later.

To be clear: Structure is king in the world of screenplays, and I’m not suggesting otherwise. I’m merely suggesting that you should not let those structural concerns clog your imagination.

By John Gilstrap

It was supposed to be a short story for an anthology honoring the US Marshal’s Service. Our own Reavis Wortham is the editor. He knows that my great grandfather, US Deputy Marshal Isaac Lincoln Gilstrap has a star on the monument in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, to fallen federal marshals, so he did me the great honor of inviting me participating in this anthology that includes many great writers.

The guardrails on this thing were pretty easy. Short story. US marshal. I even had a preordained main character–Ike Lincoln! I can slam this thing out in no time. What, maybe 2,500 words? Three thousand, max?

Okay, JSB, perk up. I’m going to throw you a talking point here for outlining! (Because I don’t outline.)

Here’s the premise: In 1906, Marshal Ike Lincoln has to escort a witness from Salina, Oklahoma Indian Territory (the area where my kin was shot and is now interred), to the territorial courthouse in Muscogee. There, he will testify in the murder trial of Zebadiah Wycliffe (the family name of the gang of renegade Cherokees who killed the real deal.)

Now, a premise is not a plot. I discover the plot by starting the story and seeing where it goes. Here’s the first image that came to mind:

            Deputy United States Marshal Ike Lincoln smelled the blood before he saw the body. He drew his Winchester Model 92 rifle from its scabbard near his right knee and laid it across his lap. Chambered in .45-40, the lever action repeater could drop any threat. He carried it with the chamber loaded and the hammer on half-cock. Out here in Indian Territory, most gunfights were settled with the first shot.

That felt like a solid start. No idea who the body belonged to or who shot him, but I figured it had to be a bad guy shot by good guys. Why? Well, because someone wanted to kill the witness.

Ah-hah! I had it! Zeb Wycliffe had family, and they didn’t want to see him hanged because of the testimony of our witness. So, they attacked this place and the attack was repulsed.

I said to myself, “Wait! Ike is the hero of the story. He can’t show up after the climactic gunfight.” Lightbulb moment: I’d started the story in the wrong place.

“Screw the lightbulb! I really like that opening!” I deeply wanted to make it work. So, I didn’t change anything. I forged ahead. That repulsed gunfight turns out to be just the first. Not all of the attackers die. And they didn’t run away. They retreated and regrouped.

Regrouped to do what? I didn’t know yet. Some sort of trap, obviously, but other than that, I didn’t know–though I did know that the story would crash and burn unless Ike and company didn’t somehow deal with that upcoming trap on their 30+ mile trek to Muscogee.

By now, I was a solid 1,000 words into a story that didn’t yet know what it was. That’s okay. I’m a professional. I’ve done this before. I did deeply wish that it didn’t read like a cliched high school writing exercise. You know, sometimes an original idea is good for a story.

I found story salvation in my literary comfort spot, which is placing a kid in jeopardy. So, now our witness had name. Tommy Farmer. Now, what about his age? Well, he had to be vulnerable, right? But he also had to be able to ride and shoot, given the story elements that likely lay ahead for him.

Yeah, okay. Okay, we’re on the move now. The 2,000-word mark is far in the review mirror, but that’s okay. Three thousand, 3,500 . . . those aren’t horrific numbers for a short story.

Our little posse is now Bonanza-ing along and I’m thinking. No, this isn’t quite right yet. What to do?

Got it! We’ll make Tommy totally friggin’ crazy with a homicidal streak.

DING! DING! DING!

All right. We’re on a roll now. Is 5,000 words too long for a short story? But it’s really, really good. And now I’m into the final action scene. we’ll get this puppy wrapped up in no time.

At 6,200 words, I’m thinking I might have an issue. Like, a really big problem.

Ooooooh. That would be a really good twist. Yeah, let’s see where that goes.

Twists lead to turns, don’t you know. Fictional actions have fictional consequences.

Dear idea factory: Please stop, already!

Then, finally, it happened. I found the ending. Final count at the end of the first draft: 8,569 words. (Note for the record: this is the first time Reavis is hearing this.)

Clearly, I have editing to do. Perhaps some restructuring, but not a lot of the latter. Fact is, I don’t have an assigned final word count, so that could be either good or bad.

If there’s a takeaway for you, TKZ family, from this post it’s my recommendation that you always let a story drive itself. Especially during that first draft stage, just let it rip. Don’t squander any drama and chase the plot down every rabbit hole. Some will work out, others won’t, but that’s okay.

You can always fix it in post.

What say you? Have you lost control of any stories lately?

By John Gilstrap

Today’s Killzone post will reappear as a handout in a couple of weeks at the end of a panel entitled, “Settings and Secrets” at the always-terrific Creatures, Crimes and Creativity conference in the Washington, DC suburb of Columbia, Maryland. Here’s the setup, what the moderator has sent to us:

This weekend I researched “setting in novels” and found the following varying, although accurate depending on one’s viewpoint, definitions:

• The setting of a story is defined as the time, duration, and place an author chooses to write about.
• The four types of setting are: physical, social, historical, and psychological.
• The five types of setting in fiction: realistic setting, fantasy setting, science fiction setting, historical fiction setting, contemporary setting.
• The core elements of setting are time, place, mood, context.
• There are three different kinds of story setting: temporal, environmental, and individual.

As a self-schooled pantser who’s seen considerable success in the novel writing business over the past three decades, the one rule I preach the loudest to anyone who will listen is that there are no rules in the world of fiction. When I see definitions assigned to the elements of creativity, I feel my jaws lock. Then, when a hard number is assigned to those elements, I growl. Creativity defies numerical value, and I think it’s a mistake to set struggling writers’ minds wandering on a journey down that road.

Stories are about interesting characters doing interesting things in interesting places in interesting ways. There you have the traditionally accepted three elements of story: character, plot and setting. But they are not separate elements and they cannot be addressed separately. (Okay, that sounded like a rule–but it’s what works for me.)

Setting, per se, in most modern fiction, is important only to the degree that it establishes the place where scenes unfold, since every scene has to happen somewhere. All else being equal, a scene that occurs in an interesting location is inherently more engaging than a scene that occurs in an uninteresting one. Rocket science, right?

The secret sauce in making a setting pop lies in its presentation. I believe in filtering everything through the perceptions of a character with enough detail to orient the reader, but without so much description as to stop the action of the story. I like to stay with suggestive terms that let readers fill in their own blanks.

Irene crossed the threshold into a marble monument to money and poor taste. The footprint of the foyer equaled that of her first house, with pink veined walls that climbed thirty feet to an arched ceiling adorned with images of mostly-naked cherubs swimming through the heavens. Twenty feet straight ahead, at the head of the first flight of the grand staircase, at the spot where the risers split to form a giant Y, stood a stone carving of Carl Adams himself, dressed as Caesar, and looking far more fit than Irene imagined Carl had ever been.

In my mind, as a thriller writer, that setting is a utility for the future. Yes, it’s the place where the rest of the scene unfolds, but note that there’s no detail on the type of marble or on what the cherubs are really doing. There’s a dismissiveness to the tone of the description that lets the reader know that Irene is not a fan without having to actually articulate the fact.

Note that I said the setting was a utility. It’s a storytelling tool. It’s a leverage point for advancing plot or character. In my head, that foyer with the statue seems like a great place for a climactic gunfight, but because I truly am a pantser–I write without knowing what’s coming next–I don’t yet know if the story will take me back around to the mansion to make it happen.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that I decide that I do want a big scene of violence in the mansion and I want it to involve the structure being on fire. Well, okay, no big deal. Since marble doesn’t burn, I would go back to the description of money and poor taste and replace that veined marble with mahogany and ebony. Maybe there are vaulted wooden beams and the statue becomes something tasteless in the vein of a cigar store Indian. That would make a great fire. If that was that was the way I went, then I’d have to plant something in the setting that would provide a means of escape for my heroes.

In my stories, setting serves the character and the plot, and is the easiest element to mold to every other component of good storytelling. Depending on your genre and you character, be mindful of the level of detail. If your character is lost in the woods, is he going to be noticing the difference between pin oaks and live oaks and white oaks and red oaks? Or even the difference between oaks and maples? Hardwoods versus evergreens, maybe?

The key questions for you as the writer are, do your descriptions of setting advance both the plot and the character without upsetting the pacing? That’s the test.

By John Gilstrap

Close to a year ago, when I presented my short story, “All Revved Up and No Place to Go,” to the Rumpus Writers, the critique group of which I’ve been a member for roughly 15 years, the ten or fifteen seconds following the final passage were dominated by a heavy silence. I believe it was Ellen Crosby who spoke for the group when she said, “Oh, my God, I hate everybody in this story.”

To which I replied, “Thank you.”

“All Revved . . .” is, hands down, the darkest story I’ve ever written. You can find it in the recently published anthology, Bat Out Of Hell, edited by Don Bruns, and the story is inspired by the title of one of the songs on the famous Meat Loaf album from the 1970s. The story tells the tale of Ace Spade, an off-duty firefighter and search and rescue operator who’s trying to impress a young lady with his four-wheeling skills in the back woods of West Virginia when things go terribly wrong. After he wrecks his Jeep in the middle of nowhere, the man who they think is there to lend assistance turns out to be a killer who wants to hunt them down and kill them.

As regular Killzoners know, I don’t outline, so even I was surprised by the lengths to which our characters would go to stay alive. I don’t want to give to much away, but let’s just say that in the end, everyone acts in his or her best interests.

As a writer who’s carved a niche for myself by writing stories with moral clarity where good triumphs over evil, it was kind of refreshing to clean the creative pipes with a story where there really are no good guys–just . . . survivors.

Here’s my take on short stories: They’re not really part of an author’s permanent record, in the sense that I think they don’t necessarily reflect their true storytelling sensibilities. In a short story, I can feel free to kill a cat or cavort with vampires. I could even write a romance–even though I don’t think I’m actually capable of doing that.

This is why I cringe when I hear writerly advice given to newbies that they should cut their teeth writing short stories before they take on the burden of a novel. To me, that’s like telling a budding cook that they need to perfect the art of scrambling eggs before they bake Thanksgiving turkey. One has nothing to do with the other–or where the skill cross, the intersection is so tangential as to be meaningless.

It’s equally important to note that novel-writing skills can get you in trouble when crafting a short story. I was fortunate that submission rules asked for an approximate submission length of 8,000 words for Bat Out of Hell. If I’d had to turn in flash fiction, or anything under, say, 3,000 words, I would have considered myself unqualified from the start.

What say you, TKZ family? Are you a fan of short stories? Do you like to read them? Write them? Where do you go to find them?

By John Gilstrap

I posted here a few weeks ago that I am recovering from surgery on my lumbar spine–a two-level hemilaminectomy. (I just like the way the word sounds.) The surgery was successful, but like any invasion of one’s musculature and nervous system, recovery takes time. For me, that means resuming normal activity with one big asterisk: If what I’m doing at any time, whether walking, doing yard work, or shooting at the range, if the activity starts to hurt too much, I am to stop. There is no glory to be gained by pushing through the pain. Doing so today will just make tomorrow suck.

This advice occurred to me the other day as I was reading a piece posted on Medium entitled, “Write Like the Rent Is Due Next Week” by Felicia C. Sullivan. The piece begins,

My rent is due on Monday. I’ve listed four maxi dresses while shoveling down buttered pasta for breakfast. Refreshed my eBay store at least seven times in the past hour. I scan my home like a thief. What else can I sell?

The fascinating, extraordinarily well-written piece goes on at length to tell us that Felicia was “born to tell stories” while lamenting that “the romantic writer life” was a sham unless you had parents folding fat bills into your hands.” No one

 told me how far you’ll have to hustle to live with integrity. If I didn’t take the fancy marketing gigs, I’d have to hustle like my life depended on it. . . . I’d draft first lines while praying the ache in my mouth I’ve been ignoring won’t turn into another $3,000 root canal.

And then there’s this:

Creating art in the barbaric slaughterhouse that is late-stage capitalism, while you’re wondering how far and wide you can stretch a single dollar — it’s not romantic or noble, it’s messy, often erratic, and filled with crippling self-doubt.

Truly artistic writers, we learn, can no longer make a living, in large measure due to:

dwindling attention spans and an audience seal-clapping for simple prose. Easy stories. Happy endings.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen of the Readerverse, your selfish desire to be entertained by what you read is forcing some navel-gazing Bohemian aspirants into the position where they must consider the horror of, you know, getting a job outside their own minds and interact with three-dimensional people who exist beyond their laptops.

Want to make money off of your writing?

Dear writers and musicians and artists of all stripes: Get over your precious selves. I am 100% with you when you claim that the thing you create is art–even if it’s ugly or I don’t understand it. The imagination superhighway has no lanes. Let your colors and your chords and your characters run wherever they take you. That’s the beauty of art. It literally has no bounds, no definition.

The instant you put a price tag on it, though, and try to sell it to me, your art becomes a product, and you’ve surrendered the command chair to everyone else but you. If your masterpiece is a self-indulgent, depressing expose of your inner demons and you don’t care about “seal-clapping” readers, good on you. Just expect to sell fewer copies than the author who considers himself and entertainer and writes a potboiler targeting the largest possible audience.

This shouldn’t hurt.

When I read the angst inherent to Ms. Sullivan’s prose, which is amplified severalfold by some of the comments, I find myself confused. If it all hurts that much, why do it? Why not take a break from it? To posit that she’s “born” to inflict this kind of emotional pain on herself makes no more sense to me than to posit that one can be born to pull one’s fingernails out.

Precious few writers ply their craft full time, and one who’s very close to me chose to go back to a day job just to break the claustrophobia of fulltime writing.

Life is about priorities.

I cannot imagine a circumstance where writing would ever be the first priority in my life. That slot belongs to family, always and forever. And you can’t take care of your family if you can’t pay the rent. If you can’t pay the rent without having a day job, well, I guess that day job needs to be pretty high on the priority list, doesn’t it?

By way of shameless self-promotion, I’ve reactivated my YouTube channel, A Writer’s View of Writing and Publishing, with an episode focused on the very topic of Setting Your Priorities As A Writer. I invite you to give it a look if you get a chance.