“When vultures surround you, try not to die.” — African proverb

By PJ Parrish

Hey, it’s good to be back at The Kill Zone. It’s good to be anywhere. (Apologies to Keith Richards). Holidays and a bout with RSV behind me, I’m ready to get going again. The fact that my Lions beat the NFC norsemen for the No. 1 seed has me doing a happy-dance. Just wish my dad Al were around to have seen it since he almost put his foot through the Zenith after a particularly brutal season back in 1959.

Today, I have the pleasure of critiquing a nice entry in our First Pagers. I took a liking to it when it first popped up on my radar. Maybe because it involves a mysterious priest and I loved the papal thriller Conclave. Best line of dialogue, delivered by a cardinal played by Stanley Tucci: “I could never become Pope on those circumstances. A stolen document, the smearing of a brother cardinal. I’d be the Richard Nixon of Popes.”

Our writer calls their submission a “psychological thriller with supernatural undertones.” Title: Campus of Shadows. (more on that at end). Here we go:

CHAPTER 1

My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. As I climb out of the car my nose shudders at the scent of something dead in the air. I glance around expecting to see a dead possum or a bird that flew into a window but find nothing. The tune, Bad Guy, blasts from the apartment’s inner courtyard. I can’t wait to get in there and check it out. I hesitate with my thumb on the lock button wondering how hard college classes will be, if I’ll be able to take it all in stride.

A constant ticking draws my attention to a vulture in a gnarled oak with branches twisted so low they could trip someone up. The vulture is the reason for the stench. It must have the remains of something stuck in its talons. A strange curiosity draws me closer like a rubbernecker on the highway and I spot a shadow hovering around it, a miniature cloud.

Maybe some fool around here feeds it. Spinning away, I discover a priest walking toward me from the courtyard of the apartment. His gait and his toothy smile are familiar. “Father Aether?”

“David Everest, how are you?”

“I didn’t expect you to be the first person I saw when I got to college,” I laugh, extending my hand.

“It’s been a long time.” His outstretched hand and mine connect.

“Oh,” he tugs his hand away. “I got a shock.”

“Sorry, I must have created static electricity when I slid out of the car. Didn’t you get transferred to Miami, Father?”

“I did. I was here for a… meeting. A soul freeing of sorts.” A bead of sweat trembles on his jawline. “Anyway, I have a friend whose daughter left something at home in Miami last week. I dropped it off for her.”

“That was nice of you.”

A gust of wind howls through the courtyard entrance blasting me in the face and tearing at his vestments. He shivers and backs away. “I need to go. Bless you, my son.”

As Father Aether hurries off, I’m glad he didn’t ask too many questions. I’ve hardly been to church since he did my first communion. The ticking sound starts again. The vulture is staring at me with a weird look like it’s waiting for something. “Get out of here you dumb scavenger.”

_____________________________

Let’s start with what I liked. There’s a nicely developed (if a tad undercooked) sense of tension right from the start. The main character is entering a new life and environment (college) and immediately interacts with a somewhat mysterious priest from his past. There are some atmospheric descriptive details — a hot gusty wind, gnarly oaks, and the shock-handshake is a nice touch. And then there’s that lurking vulture. (symbolism alert!)

Though written in first-person, the writer deftly handles the insertion of the protag’s name via the simple device of introduction with the priest. I pay attention to this sort of thing because too many folks writing in first person forget to identify their protag until too late in the chapter.

So, I’d call this a good start of a first draft. But it can use some beefing up here and there.

First, the opening line is very weak. My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. Unless this apartment is in a decrepit Victorian, a New Orleans whore house, or a remodeled abandoned Catholic church (oooh, I like that!), who cares what it looks like? Never waste your first line on something meaningless. Unless the description directly supports your mood, atmosphere or foretells something about character or plot, get rid of it.

Consider something like this as your opening, dear reader:

The smell hit me as soon as I got out of my car. Foul, like rotting meat, or that sweet-sewage stench that I had smelled  as a kid when I had wandered into the basement lab of my father’s mortuary.

I heard a loud hiss and looked up. A huge black bird with a bald red head was perched on the lowest branch of the oak tree. It was so close I could see its black-bead eye. A turkey vulture. But what the hell was it doing here on campus? We were at least ten miles from any landfill or scrub land. 

I know about turkey vultures since I used to live in South Florida. They are butt-ugly, creepy and they make this nasty hissing noise if you get close. They hang out along remote highways, or near the Everglades, maybe on farms. Never in urban areas. So for this charcter to see one here MEANS something is wrong. USE THIS!

The vulture is not supposed to be here. So make that foul smell work harder as a symbol of a rift in the norm.

An aside: Don’t know if you realize this, writer, but vultures have quite a role in Christian lore. They are considered a symbol of God’s judgment of shame, or a diseased spiritual condition. In Revelation 18:2, Babylon is described as being “a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird.”

Something to explore maybe: Birds are powerful symbols in all religions. In Hinduism and Judaism, they are even linked to exorcisms. Christianity is rife with bird symbols, good and evil.

Let’s talk about the sense of smell. It’s the single most powerful one in your writer’s toolbox. I’d like to see the writer exploit this more. And if you can, relate the smell — always — to something directly in the character’s experience. I made up the bit about dad being an undertaker. But see what it does? It personalizes the smell AND slips in a grace note of backstory.

Makes your descriptions work harder.

Other things: I’m not a big fan of persent tense first person. But that’s just my taste. What do you all think? I think it gets a little tiresome for most readers over the course of 300 pages or so.

I surmise that we are in South Florida here, given the turkey vulture and the reference to Miami. But is there some way you can gracefully let us know exactly where we are? Can you slip in where he’s going to college? Is there an UM ibis flag in an apartment window?

And let’s talk about the song “Bad Guy.” I don’t mind songs being tossed into scenes (unless it’s Coltrane blaring on the CD player while the dissipated PI drinks himself into a coma-funk — cliche!). Being an old fart, I had to look up “Bad Guy.” It’s by Billie Ellish and it’s about guys who put up a fake tough-guy front. I like that. But only if it means something about your plot or character. Otherwise, it’s just a gratuitous toss-in culture reference. Of course you can’t reprint lyrics in your book, but maybe, as your character goes into his apartment moments later, the song keeps bouncing around in his head — for some reason! Again, like the vulture — you felt compelled to put it there so make it mean something.

That’s it. Like I said, a good start. But look for places to go deeper, to give meaning to the bread-crumb symbols you are planting. But so far, pretty darn good.

Let’s do a quick, light line edit. My comments in red.

Campus Of Shadows Work harder to find a better title. “Campus” is such a blah geographic signpost word. We KNOW this takes place at a college. Ditto “Shadows” is dime-a-dozen title word in crime fiction, like “death” “darkness” “evil”.  You can do better. Finish your book. The real title might reveal itself as you move on. 

My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. As I climb out of the car you backed into the image here. Starting a book with “As I did…” is throat-clearing and passive. Be active: The smell hit me as soon as I… Can you imagine starting a fight scene like this: “As my heart raced, the bullet whizzed by my head.” No, you can’t.  my nose shudders at the scent of something dead in the air. I glance around expecting to see a dead possum or a bird that flew into a window but find nothing. I looked up. Then stay with the vulture The tune, Bad Guy, blasts from the apartment’s inner courtyard. I can’t wait to get in there and check it out. I hesitate with my thumb on the lock button wondering how hard college classes will be, if I’ll be able to take it all in stride. Put this down below, after the priest leaves. His feelings about going to college are out of place here and leech out the tension.

A constant ticking souds like a branch against a window or a clock. Vultures hiss. draws my attention to a vulture in a gnarled oak with low twisting branches twisted so low they could trip someone up. The vulture is the reason for the stench. It must have the remains of something stuck in its talons. A strange curiosity draws me closer like a rubbernecker on the highway cliche and I spot a shadow hovering around it, a miniature cloud. Not sure I understand what you’re going for here. Be clearer. 

Maybe some fool around here feeds it. Spinning away, implies fright. He’s scared? I discover see a priest walking toward me from out of the courtyard of the apartment. His gait and his toothy smile are familiar. “Father Aether?”

 There is a very gusty wind, you say. So use it. How about something more mysterious: I see a figure coming out of the courtward, head bent against the hard dry wind. He’s dressed in black robes, flapping around him like wings. (bird imagery!) As he nears, I see his white collar.

“Father Aether?”  

He stops. “David Everest, how are you?” NICE WAY TO GET THE NAMES IN

“I didn’t expect you to be the first person I saw when I got to college,” I laugh, extending my hand.

“It’s been a long time.” His outstretched hand and mine connect.

“Oh,” he tugs his hand away. “I got a shock.”

“Sorry, I must have created static electricity when I slid out of the car. Didn’t you get transferred to Miami, Father?”

“I did. I was here I’ve been here in Palm Beach or whatever for a… meeting. A soul freeing of sorts.” Exorcism? A bead of sweat trembles on his jawline. “Anyway, I have a friend whose daughter left something at home in Miami last week. I dropped it off for her.”

“That was nice of you.”

A gust of wind howls through the courtyard entrance blasting me in the face and tearing at his vestments. He shivers David is starting school somewhere in South Florida in August or September, the hottest months of the year. Shivers? and backs away.

New graph “I need to go. Bless you, my son.” This seems unnaturally abrupt. Did you intend this? If so, it needs something, a gesture perhaps, to predicate it. He glanced back at the courtyard, his eyes lingering on the second floor. He shivered, despite the heat. Or something better.

As Father Aether hurries off, there’s that “as” construction again. We all have our tics! I’m glad he didn’t ask too many questions. He didn’t ask ANY. I’ve hardly been to church since he did my first communion. The ticking sound hissing starts again. The vulture is staring at me with a weird look like it’s waiting for something. A little too spot-on. Of course they stare — they’re looking for carrion.

need new graph. “Get out of here you dumb scavenger.” Can you think of a juicier line or action? What is going to happen next? I assume he goes up to his new apartment? What can happen with the symbolic vulture that TRANSITIONS to what comes next? I can’t suggest cuz I don’t know your plot. But his dialogue line feels flaccid. 

So, that’s it from me. I’m sure our TKZ folks will have other helpful insights. Thanks for submitting, dear writer. Keep moving forward. Happy and healthy new year.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kalka.

By PJ Parrish

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal an ending. I have a good reason.

The plot setup: On a warm June day, a crowd of villagers gather in the town square. They’re there to hold an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. They come forward, and each villager draws a slip of paper from an old wooden box. The tension builds because, according to tradition, no one can look at their paper until everyone has drawn. The crowd is restless:

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving [the ritual] up.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘[ritual] in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns….”

Finally, each person opens their paper. Only one paper has a black dot on it. It is held by Tessie Hutchinson. The crowd parts and Tessie stands alone in the center. All the other villagers, men and women, old and young, begin to pick up stones.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

So ends Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” You can click here to read the whole story, though I’d guess most of you already have. It was pretty much required reading if you went to school after 1950. I hadn’t read it since oh, 1970 or so, but I did so today because I want to talk about fiction that leaves room for ambiguity and maybe even pain.

First, back to Shirley Jackson’s classic. It was published in The New Yorker, to great controversy and outrage, three years after the end of WWII at the start of the Cold War. With its twin themes of conformity and cruelty, many saw it as an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. It is debated anew today amid our politics of populism and cancel culture (source: not me, but Harper’s Magazine ciritic Thomas Chatterton Williams).

But Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin argued in an essay published last year that reading politics into the story misses the point. The story’s power comes from its disturbing ambiguity:

The author deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the ending of The Sopranos), asked whether The New Yorker had accidently left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why the story has retained its relevance: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness.

I’ve posted here before that I believe all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. (By the way, Sue had a good post on this yesterday, about identifying your character’s defining wound. Click here!)

I think making the reader uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing. The best literature, Ruth Franklin says, provides a vital service when we allow it to disturb us. Yes, what one person reads as discomfort another reads as aggression. But Franklin believes the idea that a writer should not offend someone is a recipe for bad writing.

The Lottery shocked people in 1948 because of its lack of a tidy message. It’s the reason it is still taught and talked about 75 years later.  Great writing can entertain, enlighten, and even empower, but it’s greatest gift to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. It is the ax, Franklin writes, quoting Kalka, to break up our frozen souls.

Many readers really hate ambiguous endings, thinking the open-ending negates everything that came before. I get that. When I read The Life of Pi, I felt really frustrated by the ending — Pi Patel washes ashore in Mexico after surviving a long time at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. On land, the tiger simply walks away into the jungle without looking back. Pi is left to grapple with the ambiguity: Is the magical story with animals the truth? Or is the truth what he later tells investigators, a dark horror story involving human violence and cannibalism.

I was a bit angry. What the? Is this a who-shot-JR dream switcheroo? What really happened? Which story is the truth? Was the tiger a hallucination Patel made up to block out the horrors of his real life?

Years later, I gave it a second read. I came at the story from a different place and to me, it became an allegory about faith, survival — and the healing power of storytelling.

But hold on a minute, I can hear some of you saying….

We genre writers work within certain guidelines and reader expectations —  The lovers must live happily ever after. The white-knight hero must vanquish the evil villain. How do we square the narrative circle that our readers crave? How do we provide the satisfaction of a well-resolved plot and still find room for ambiguity?

Can we color outside the lines?

Ambiguous endings are polarizing, for sure. But when done well, they add emotional layers that make our readers confront their biases — and make us crime writers stretch the boundaries of our genre’s tradition.

It’s not easy to pull off. A well-done ambiguous ending comes from being in complete control of your narrative. It might make a reader uncomfortable, but if it feels logcial and well-earned, they will go with it.

One last point before I go. I said above that all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. That last part is important, if a tad off-subject. To write well, you have to be willing to take chances and not be afraid of challenging your readers. But you also have to be willing to challenge yourself. The best writing — indeed, all of art — comes from a private place inside you. Sometimes that place is painful to revisit. That’s just part of the work of writing.

Indulge me for one more minute. This is a scene from an episode of Dr. Who. The doctor goes to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, sees Van Gogh’s 1890 painting The Church at Auvers (my favorite Van Gogh). Struck by the fact that Van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime, he goes back in time and brings the painter back to modern-day Paris. Get out your hankies…

“He transformed the pain of his life into ecstatic beauty. To use your passion and pain to portray the joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”

Write well and without fear, crime dogs. I am traveling today to be with family but will check in with you all. Happy turkey day.

By PJ Parrish

So I got into an argument on Facebook the other day. No, not about that. It was over Jaws.

I posted something to the effect that I thought it was one of the greatest movies of all time. That prompted this response from a guy I came to call (in my head) Pencil-Neck:

“It isn’t even Spielberg’s best movie. It’s just commercial trash. Besides, the book is far better. You should read it.”

The gauntlet was thrown. Pencil-Neck didn’t have a chance.

Now, I admit I didn’t read Peter Benchley’s mega-seller when it came out in 1974.  Jaws was a huge success, the hardback sitting on the bestseller list for 44 weeks and the paperback selling millions. Steven Spielberg snatched up the rights a year later. You know the rest.

I finally did get around to reading the book — 35 years later. I had been invited by David Morell to write an essay for an anthology he was editing called Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, put out by the International Thriller Writers. All the good ones were taken by the time I got there — everything from Lee Child writing about Theseus and the Minotaur to Jefferey Deaver writing about Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File.  I chose Jaws because I think the shark ranks up there alongside Hannibal Lector as the greatest serial killer in all of fiction.

Then I read the book. Ah, geez. I was in trouble. The book was terrible.

I should have known just by looking at the cover. (I had to order a tattered used copy off Amazon). On the original cover, the killer fish looks like a toothless old dolphin. Compare that to the revised cover after the movie came out:

This is one of those rare cases, I think, where the movie improved on the book. The critics in 1974 were brutal, taking Benchley to task for “lifeless characters,” “rubber-teeth plot” and “hollow pretentiousness.” The Village Voice sniped: “If there’s a trite turn to be made, Jaws will make it.”

Alas, all of it is true. The craftsmanship is bad-pulp level. The characters are corrugated cardboard.The plot is bogged down with cheesy subplots, eratz-Cheever class warfare, supernatural omens and some gin-fueled adultry (including a cringe-worthy groping scene between the police chief’s wife and Hooper in a booth at a seafood restaurant.)

Get this: The shark gets its own point of view.

Worse: Brody doesn’t kill the shark. It dies of its own wounds and sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Now, I recognize that novels are more expansive, that subplots contribute to enjoyment, and that organizing a story around a theme is good. For Benchley, the theme was that humans prey on each other by instinct and impulse like, well, sharks. The Brody-Ellen-Hooper love triangle is thus not a messy sub-plot but the point of the book. The shark is mere metaphor for human viciousness.

Sigh.

I also recognize that movies are a different kettle of fish, that plots must be streamlined, debris cleared away, and character inner-musings kept to a minimum. Spielberg’s movie is pure genius in this regard. He jettisoned all the subplots. And he conveyed character through dialogue and action. He transformed Benchley’s moody passive-aggressive Chief Brody into a classic Everyman warrior, swept up in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey.

And he blasts the hell out of the shark at the end.

So, what did I write about for that anthology? Pretty much what I’ve told you here. But I acknowledged that the shark is a terrific character, the best-rendered one in the book. Whenever he appears on the page, he pulls the narration along in his wake and diverts our attention from the tedious human dramas on land.

Second, the book tapped into a primal but believable fear. Benchley broke a barrier between fiction and non-fiction, giving us a predator stalking the real world (a benign beach no less!) but also emerging from a place of darkness and danger. Chief Brody is all of us when he thinks (in a passage that I do like):

In his dreams, deep water was populated by slimy savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, demons that cracked and moaned.

Lastly, it’s a helluva serial killer story. As one character says to Chief Brody in the book: “Sharks are like an ax murderer. People react to them with their guts.” (yeah, well, quite literally, right?)

Are there lessons to be learned here for us book writers? Sure. I use the movie Jaws as an example in plot workshops — see Powerpoint slide above. This is because Jaws is easy to digest for inexperienced writers who get lost at sea with plots or drift aimlessly trying to figure out character motivation. Here are just a couple things we can learn from Jaws — book vs movie.

• Keep your subplots under control.
• Don’t get preachy in your themes
• Don’t whimp out with your ending and take the gun out of your hero’s hand.
• Don’t write icky sex scenes set at the Red Lobster.

What’s the bottom line? What did I finally tell Pencil-Neck? I told him I stood by my assertion that Jaws is a great movie. I conceded the book had its good moments. That great thriller novels always pack a visceral punch and stay with us long after we’ve turned off the light. Benchley created the second most famous fish in fiction. Not too shabby.

Benchley gets the last word: “It’s nice being a little rich and a little famous. But dammit, I didn’t intend to rank with Melville.”

So, crime dogs…do you have your own examples of book vs movie? What did you learn from comparing books vs movies? And don’t get me started on The Bridges of Madison County.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. — Ansel Adams

By PJ Parrish

Got a lot on the brain today: So the time has come to talk of many things: Of slip-on shoes, Scottish ships and ceiling whacks — of cabbage-heads and kings.

Shoes? I have to decde whether getting a pair of Skecher slip-ons will make me look like I’ve given up and am content to slip into old bat-hood.

Scottish ships? I’m just glad Jamie and Claire are heading back to Scotland because the last season of Outlander begins soon and I miss the moors and half-naked men in kilts.

Ceiling whacks? I have to find someone who can repair my bathroom ceiling because the plumber poked a giant hole in it while trying to fix the toilet. (Don’t ask).

Cabbage heads and kings? Politics….nope. We don’t go there here.

But politics is my jumping off point today. I was reading a column by David Brooks the other day wherein he posed an interesting question about election campaigns that relates to us novelists: How do you keep an audience’s attention?

Here at TKZ, we talk often about how a book is divided into acts. We all know how crucial it is to capture a reader’s attention early and set up Act. 1. We all know how easy it is to get bogged down and lose our way in Act. 2. We all know how horrible it is to get to that Act 3 and realize we’re barreling toward a plot abyss.

David Brooks suggests campaigns have a similar structure. So he asked novelists and screenwriters, how they do it. How do they build momentum and keep audiences in their grip? The answers were illuminating.

Playwright David Mamet says that no one tunes in to watch information — they crave drama. What is drama? Mamet: “It is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific acute goal.”

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells us that a fictional hero, like a good campaigner, must be seized by a strong, specific desire and they need to face a really big obstacle. A hero/campaigner also needs a clear and compelling plot. Here is the threat. Here is where we’re going. Here is what (me, the hero) is going to do about it.

Brooks then cites Christopher Booker’s book Seven Basic Plots. Booker writes that there are only a handful of iconic storylines in fiction — and in real life.

1. Overcoming the Monster.
2. Rags to Riches.
3. The Quest.
4. Voyage and Return.
5. Rebirth.
6. Comedy.
7. Tragedy.

He then links these plots to politicians, saying that a good politician tells a story about himself or herself. They create narratives that propell their campaign forward and help them connect with audiences. (Remember Mamet’s words: drama = good. information = boring)

Allow me one brief political aside: Brooks gives several examples of politicians who found their “plots.” For Ronald Reagan, it was rags to riches. For George W. Bush it was redemption: beating alcoholism and finding faith. Nixon, he suggests, saw himself as the classic David taking on the monster. (the establishment).

Likewise, as novelists, our protagonists need a life narration: They can’t know what to do (plot) until they know what their basic need is. (motivation). You, as a writer, can’t create a compelling plot until and unless you understand what your character wants, at her most basic level. (Hint: It’s not to solve the case).

Brooks wraps up his article by saying that politicians, like fictional heroes, can’t hold our attention unless they reveal something honest about their core. The hero cannot hold back. The hero has to let the reader into his inner self. He points to Obama as an arms-length overly-cerebral politician who failed to connect with voters — until he made his speech on race in 2008.

The novelist E.M. Forster said that there is only one overriding imperative in fiction: “Only connect.”

An audience — be it at a political rally or browsing in a bookstore — needs to feel a connection with the character, needs to understand what they want, needs to empathize with what they feel.

Which leads me to my last point.

You, as a writer, can’t find your audience, can’t connect with readers, until you find your own courage. Courage to do what? To open your an emotional vein and bleed a little on the page. Readers crave drama, not information.

I came across another article recently with this off-putting title: How To (Not) Think Of Your Audience As You Create. Click here for full article.

Don’t get huffy. It’s not as bad as you think. The writer was asking novelists and screenwriters who they wrote for — themselves or their audiences. All the respondants came down on the side of the audience. The one answer that most intrigued me, though, came from novelist Wiz Wharton, author of Ghost Girl and Banana. Listen to this:

Beginning writers often forget that rather than gatekeepers lying on the bones of aspiring authors, agents and publishers are also an audience for your work. Although the bottom line might be whether they can sell your material, they’re also looking for something that appeals to them on a heart and gut level, i.e. something they’re investing in personally. And I honestly don’t think it’s as simple as replicating what’s already out there. Yes, you should have a good grasp of structure and language and all those tools, but more than this, it’s the emotional truth of a project that will ultimately get you noticed.

One of the greatest joys of stories is how they vicariously allow an audience to rehearse emotional and physical scenarios, and when you write with truth you can take something specific and make it absolutely universal and resonant, whether you’re writing a Spartan epic, or a space western, or a domestic noir. Great ideas are everywhere, but it’s the authenticity of the world and its characters as seen through your unique voice and your unique perspective that’s going to make an audience stick around to see how things turn out.

I love that last part. Anybody can come up with a great idea. But it is the realness of your hero’s narrative — as filtered through the realness of your own life-plot — that captivates an audience.

Which leads us back to David Brooks. Cardboard politicians are a dime a dozen, cabbage-heads and would-be kings. The compelling ones? They’re rare. Like great fictional heroes, they hold our attention because they connect.

Write with truth. They will find you and follow.

By PJ Parrish (still with one paw but typing better, thanks)

I’m not the first person to ask this question and won’t be the last: What has happened to editors? Did all the good ones get sucked up into the alien ship back in ’45 with the lost airmen of Flight 19? If so, are they ever coming back?

Back when I was part of traditional publishing, I used to dread the day when the galleys arrived. Back in the those dark ages, you would get a fat package in the mail of the actual type-set book. It was pretty, until you looked closely. The galleys were riddled with typos, mistakes, and weird formatting. Now, I knew some of this was my fault. But these were the days when there were whole staffs of copy editors at our disposal to help make us poor writers look better.

Jump to present times. Or maybe not. Things are even worse now. With mergers of major publishers, cutbacks of in-house staff and out-sourcing, and a general decline in editing skills of young folks coming into the business, errata is everywhere. And what about those of us who self-pub? Who can we rely on to make sure our stories emerge clean and readable?

This is on my mind for three reasons today. One, I just finished reading a major novel that had so many typos in it I got angry.

Second, a friend who is still pubbed by one of the major houses called me to vent about the evils of Track Changes. This is a function within Word wherein an outsider (usually an editor) makes mechanical notes in the margins of your manuscript. I hated Track Changes. The whole vivacious give-and-take between writer and editor was gone. Nuance was lost. Emotion subsumed. Sort of like what happened when we starting texting instead of calling each other.

The third reason is that I am editing one of backlist titles, An Unquiet Grave, to reissue via self-pubbing. I am appalled at the typos and mistakes I am finding. And this book already went through the Simon & Schuster prettification machine.

Geez. What an old crab I sound like today. Forgive me.

Let’s back up with this diatribe. I got into this novel racket back in 1979 as a writer of mainstream women’s fiction. That was the euphemism of the era for big fat books about sex, power and dysfunctional families. I had a terrific line editor, but even more impressive was the quality of the copy editing in those days. Through the four books I did for Ballantine/Fawcett I was blessed with the pickiest, most obsessive, anal-grammarians an author could ever wish for. They caught my misspellings, my lay-lie transgressions, my syntax sins.

My favorite copy editor was the one I had for my British editions. This woman — for some reason, I pictured her as a spinster sitting by the fire in some Devonshire outpost surrounded by cats — dripped blood-red pencil all over my pages. At one point, she scribbled in the margins next to my French phrases: “I don’t believe, based on the English errors uncovered thus far in this novel, that we should trust the author’s ability to write in another language.” She also took me to task for my “crutches”: “This author has an unfortunate propensity to use “stare” and “padded” (e.g. he padded toward the door). Would suggest striking every reference.”

I hated that woman. God, how I miss her now.

Every author has horror stories about bad editing. I had a copy editor who changed the color of key lime pie to green. Being in Manhattan, I guess she never saw a key lime  — which is yellow. But shoot, I was the one who had to answer the boy-are-you-dumb emails from fellow Floridians. And then there is the infamous Patricia Cornwell gaffe — the back cover copy that talked about a grizzly murder — which set off a whole new sub-genre, the serial killer bear.

Like I said, I am not abdicating my responsibility. But when you spend eight months to a year writing a book, you get so close to it sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest. You’re so intent on plot and character, you forget you’ve changed a character’s name halfway through. Or that it’s MackiNAW City but MackiNAC Island. Or that loons don’t stick around Michigan in winter…they migrate. One year I got so paranoid I hired a copy editor. She caught so many mistakes it made me even more paranoid about what still lay (lie? lain?) beneath.

So, now here I am, a retired writer who is still suffering from “galley” anxiety this week. Still dreading those typos, the errant error, the stupid mistakes. Do I hire another free lance editor? They don’t come cheap. But editing your own book is like trying to be your own lawyer — only fools do it.

I dread going into battle. Because these days, no one has my back.

Thanks for listening, friends.

By PJ Parrish

Mixed Breed Dog (Schnauzer-mix) raising bandaged paw with medical strips on its body

Good morning, crime dogs. I won’t be posting today. In fact, I am not typing this. I’m dictating. My husband is typing. Actually, he’s taking a break from yammering at me because I fell off my bike two days ago and sprained my wrist. He thinks an old fart like me shouldn’t be riding a bike, but shoot, you can’t curl up and die, right?

Anyway, I can’t type right now. And pickleball is out for a while cuz it’s my shooting paw. (leftie here). I feel a little foolish, because, get this — I wasn’t even moving at the time I fell. I had just pulled up to my favorite little watering hole here in town, Traverse City Whiskey Company. I go there to do my crosswords and partake of their cherry whiskey sours. I was dismounting the bike. I caught my foot on the crossbar (No, it’s not a boy-bike but I am very short and was careless). Down I went. At least it didn’t happen AFTER I had the whiskey sour — would have never heard the end of that one from the husband.

Whimper, whimper.

Here’s the warning. Live your life and if that means riding a bike at age 73, go for it. But don’t be stupid. Take your time. Watch what you’re doing. Wear a helmet. And here’s the big thing — if you fall, don’t stick out your arms to brace yourself.

What does this have to do with writing? Well, I can give you a tortured metaphor about trying to do more than you should if you’re getting long in the tooth. Like, don’t even think about starting a novel after age 60. Or don’t try to write something completely new after you’ve been doing one genre forever. Or don’t think you can’t try something challenging when the folks around you are telling you it’s too late.

Yeah, you might fall on your ass. So what? Get up and try again. By the way, the doctor told me that’s what I should have done — fall on my ass.

So mount up. Keep pedaling, keep moving forward, and feel that wind in your hair. If you have any left.

Peace out, guys. I will be back in two weeks.

By PJ Parrish

The opening line of a book is the single hardest line you write.

Many writers would disagree with that. But for my money, those folks are: A. lucky devils for whom all things come easy; B. diligent do-bees who can scribble down anything just to get started and then go back and rewrite or C. writers who aren’t really very good at what they do or maybe are just phoning it in.

I know, that sounds a little harsh. But I truly believe this. I have such respect and, yes, envy for writers who create great openings. I am not talking about “hooks.” Hooks are easy. I am firmly of the mind that anyone can write a decent hook. You’ve seen them, those clever one-liners tossed out by wise-ass PIs, those archly ironic first-person soliloquies, those purple-prose weather reports that substitute for mood.

No, not hooks. I’m talking about those rare and glorious opening moments that are telling us, “OO-heee, something special is about to happen here!”

We here at TKZ talk alot about great openings, especially for our First Page Critiques. We worry about whether we should throw out a corpse in the first chapter, whether one-liners are best, if readers’ attention spans are too short for a slow burn beginning.

A great opening goes beyond its ability to keep the reader just turning the pages. A great opening is a book’s soul in miniature. Within those first few paragraphs — sometimes buried, sometimes artfully disguised, sometimes signposted — are all the seeds of theme, style and most powerfully, the very voice of the writer herself.

It’s like you’re whispering in the reader’s ear as he cracks the spine and turns to Page 1: “This is the world I am taking you into. This is what I want to tell you. You won’t understand it all until you are done but this is a hint of what I have in store for you.”

Which is why, this week, I have been staring at a blank computer screen. I am trying to start a new book. (Yeah, I know I told you I am retired, but the urge is still there.) I have a good idea. I have outlined in my head the first couple chapters. But I don’t have a first line.

I sit here, staring at my blank Word document, as that cursed cursor blinks like a yellow traffic light in a bad noir novel.  I NEED that one line because it’s not just an opening, it’s a promise. A promise to a reader that what I am about to give them is worth their time, is something they haven’t seen before, is something that is…uniquely me.

Well, shoot. I’m rambling. I’ll let Joan Didion explain it. I have a feeling she gave this a lot more thought than I have:

Q: You have said that once you have your first sentence you’ve got your piece. That’s what Hemingway said. All he needed was his first sentence and he had his short story.

Didion: What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.

Q: The first is the gesture, the second is the commitment.

Didion: Yes, and the last sentence in a piece is another adventure. It should open the piece up. It should make you go back and start reading from page one. That’s how it should be, but it doesn’t always work. I think of writing anything at all as a kind of high-wire act. The minute you start putting words on paper you’re eliminating possibilities.

Didion gave this interview around the time she published her great memoir after her husband’s death The Year of Magical Thinking. The first line of that book is: “Life changes fast.”

Maybe I am more hung up than usual on openings because I have read some really bad opening lines. I won’t embarrass the writers here because they are still alive and I believe in karma. Oh what the hell, I will give you one because this writer deserves to be shamed:

As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand – who would take her away from all this – and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.

Okay, I cheated. That is one of the winners from the  Bulwer-Lytton bad writing (on purpose) contest. But didn’t you believe for just a moment there it was real?

Let’s move on to some good stuff. Right now, I am re-reading Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. Look at his opening line:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

There, in that one deceivingly simple declarative sentence lies the all tenderness, irony and roiling epic scope of Eugenides’s story. And I don’t even care that he used semi-colons.

And then there’s this one:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.”

That’s from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. This is the first line of a long paragraph of description that opens the book, yet look at what it accomplishes — puts us down immediately in his setting, conveys the book’s bleak mood and hints with those two words “out there” that he is taking us to an alien place where nothing makes sense — the criminal mind.

What is so terrifying about openings, I suppose, is that you only have so much space to work with. And, as Didion said, once you’ve moved deeper into that first chapter, that golden moment of anticipation is gone and then you are busily engaging all the gears to move the reader onward.

I read a lot of crime novels. I do this to keep up with what’s going on in our business but I also do it out of pleasure. But too many of them rely on cheap hooks. That said, here are a couple good openings from books I pulled off my crime shelf.

• We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped a girl off the bridge. — John D. MacDonald,  Darker Than Amber
• They threw me off the hay truck about noon. — James M. McCain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
• The girl was saying goodbye to her life. And it was no easy farewell. — Val McDermid,  A Place of Execution.
• I turned the Chrysler onto the Florida Turnpike with Rollo Kramer’s headless body in the trunk, and all the time I’m thinking I should’ve put some plastic down. — Victor Gischler, Gun Monkeys.

Not bad for one-liners. Then there are the more measured openings:

Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker – somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone. I’ve always thought the secret of dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length. That’s the rule. Don’t let it breathe in your face.

But my rule didn’t protect me.

That’s from Mike Connelly’s The Poet and it works because it succinctly captures his protagonist’s voice and the theme of the story.

I think this blog post has been therapeutic for me. I think I am going to quit obsessing about the first line and just get the story up and moving. The more I get to know my characters, the more they will open up to me. Maybe one of them will whisper that golden opening line. I can’t remember the exact quote, but Joyce Carol Oates has said that until she knows the ending of her story, she doesn’t know how to start.

I get that. As weird and convoluted as this might sound, sometimes you have to write the last line before you can write the first. Sort of like Picasso signing his painting. Because what a great opening but the writer’s true signature?

By PJ Parrish

Morning, folks. I am a little under the weather today, recovering from Covid. No worries. Am old but healthy and Paxlovid is doing its thing. (Go you little functional virus particles! Inhibit that essential enzyme!)

But shoot, this brain-fog thing is real so forgive me if this post is typo-ridden, terse, or turgid. (I worked hard on that alliteration). Speaking of working hard, here’s a pretty darn good submission for our First Page Critiques. Well, I tipped my hand, didn’t I? So much for writing suspensefully.

There’s still stuff here we can talk about and help the writer improve on. The writer calls this “real-world fantasy.” Not sure what the heck that means. But like I said, I am old and maybe out of touch. See you in a sec.

JULY ASCENDANT

Amidst the roar of the crowd, Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him pummel this time.

He tugged off his shirt and threw it aside. The audience jumped to their feet, screaming his name — and a few were even rooting for him. The rest were cursing him out, holding up touching homemade signs that wished him a happy and painful demise. For spectators of an illegal fight, they sure could make a guy feel special. Just to get ‘em going, he turned in a circle, waving, flexing, and grinnin’ like a fiend.

The entire time, he swept his gaze over the floor, looking for his opponent. There was Beverly, flashing him a thumbs-up, there was Uncle Ambrose, of course, chewing on his cigar, but where was the competition?

“Come on!” Johnny roared. “Bring him out!” And let everyone get home before midnight, hopefully.

“Ain’t he amazing?” the announcer said. “Seventeen years old, and ready for blood! Ambrose Girard’s undefeated champion! But will he fail tonight? Will Johnny Summer finally meet his demise? I think so, folks. Coming all the way from Alaska, let’s give it up for Kodiak!”

The crowd went wild as a man came from the back, his tight shirt practically plastered on his muscles. Huge was an understatement — if they had been on the same side, Johnny could’ve just hid behind him the whole fight. When he climbed in, the ring shook, and even the ref took a step back.

“A kid?” Kodiak scoffed. “That’s who I’m fighting? Really?” Kodiak cracked his neck. “This is gonna be easy.”

Johnny swallowed, rubbing his thumbs over his hand wraps. It just had to be bare-knuckle night, didn’t it? That meant he’d get the full force of every blow, and anything went, too, so he had a variety of ways to get pummeled. Fists, feet, death by biceps… the possibilities were endless.

He glanced to the side. Ambrose was glaring as usual, but Beverly, sitting in the front row, didn’t have a hint of doubt on her “Come on, you can do this, get ‘im, Johnny!”

He turned back at Kodiak. Right. He could do this.

Right?

The bell rang.

_______________________

Like I already said, I like this submission. It has much going for it. More on that in a moment. But as I re-read this for the post, I realized I might have made a dumb assumption. I read this as being set in present time or maybe even future-ish, set in a dystopian Escape From New York cage-match setting. Maybe it was because the writer tagged it “real-world fantasy.”  But the more I read this, I realized this might be in the past — say, the 1800s. Bare-fisted illegal fights were big biz back then.

So…which is it? Does it matter? Does the writer have an obligation, in the first 500 words or so, to let us know where and when the story takes place? I think they do, but given that this sample is tense and compactly written, I am willing to wait a little longer to establish time/place. What do you think?

Let’s talk about specifics. I sense a confidence in this writer, a good grasp of craft basics. So I’m not going to nit-pick there. I love the fact the writer chose a good moment to enter the story — just as the main character (I assume Johnny is such) enters the ring. We are literally entering the story with him. The writer could have entered too early — say with Johnny sweating it out in the locker room, thinking, musing, dreading, and his manager coming in to tell him it was time. The writer could have entered too late — say with Johnny supine on the canvas, spitting up blood.

Always keep in mind that one of the most important choices you make is WHEN to parachute your reader into the story.

I like the sense of suspense created here. Notice how the writer gracefully slips in the characters name and age. We know Johnny has been here before. He knows he feels scared and out-matched. We already want to root for him.

But…

Yeah, the more I like a submission, the more I but it.

What a great PLACE to open a story — a bare-knuckle fight arena. But except for crowd noise, what aren’t we getting? A sensory feel for what this place is like. I really think this writer has it in them to deliver better description, to make us experience this place better. Using all five senses does more than just establish place — it creates suspense!

What does this arena look like? Not enough details for me, and it might go far to telling us where we are in time and place. What does it smell like? Body ordor? Beer? The pungent eucalyptus/menthol of boxers’s liniment? My dad smoked cigars and I will never get that stink out of my memories.

And dear writer, don’t miss any chance to SHOW instead of  TELL. Don’t tell me people are holding “touching” signs or ones that wish Johnny death. What exactly do they say. Details, details, details — they add life to your setting.

You also missed another description chance — Kodiak. All we get is that he’s big. Get in Johnny’s head and senses here — what does he look like? I like that you said he’s so big Johnny could hide behind him. (but might “disappear” be a more telling word?) But you’re good enough to make this important minor character come alive. Maybe you can even make Kodiak represent something deeper to Johnny — not just an opponent, but a personification of something deep in Johnny’s psyche. Apollo Creed wasn’t just Rocky Balboa’s opponent — he was the personification of corporate boxing, a slick publicity-hound, the man that Rocky could never be. Remember that Creed had a bunch of nicknames?  “The King of Sting,” “The Dancing Destroyer,” “The Master of Disaster.”

You’re up for this, writer. When it comes to description, don’t pull your punches. Land em hard and make descrption work hard.

Let me do a quick line edit to point out some other things I think you can improve on. My comments in blue

Amidst the roar of the crowd, Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him pummel this time. Not a bad opening but those first six words don’t work for me. First, “amidst” is a clunky and archaic word. It immediately slows down your pace. It belongs in a period romance, not a visceral fight scene. “Amidst the roar of the sea, Cathy could hear Heathcliff calling her name.” If you just delete that, you opening line is better. 

Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him kill this time. I know literally “kill” is not right but it’s stronger. And you can quickly turn it on its head:

Johnny Summer stepped into the ring, wondering who they would make him kill this time. The roar of the crowd swept over him, and for a second, he had to steady himself against the ropes. He hadn’t killed anyone with his fists, not yet at least. But that didn’t stop the crowd from screaming for it.

He tugged off his shirt and threw it aside. The audience jumped to their feet, screaming his name — and a few were even rooting for him. The rest were cursing him out, What specifically are they yelling? Details add suspense. holding up touching homemade signs that wished him a happy and painful demise. Same thing here. Details! For spectators of an illegal fight, they sure could make a guy feel special.

New graph here, I think. Just to get ‘em going, he turned in a circle, waving, flexing, and grinnin’ like a fiend. Cliche. This phrase is not yours. You can do better. Grinning but what is he really feeling at this moment?

The entire time, he swept his gaze over the floor, looking for his opponent. There was Beverly in the front row, flashing him a thumbs-up. There was Uncle Ambrose, of course, chewing on his cigar, but where was the competition?

“Come on!” Johnny roared. “Bring him out!” And let everyone get home before midnight, I like that you’re giving him a thought here, but it’s kinda meh. Is this man confident going into this? Is he tired of fighting? He’s only 17, but does he feel suddenly old and worn? Missed opportunity to begin layering in, via a few emotions and thoughts, some backstory hopefully.

“Ain’t he amazing?” the announcer said. “Seventeen years old, and ready for blood! Ambrose Girard’s undefeated champion! But will he fail tonight? Will Johnny Summer finally meet his demise? I think so, folks. Coming all the way from Alaska, let’s give it up for Kodiak!”

The crowd went wild Cliche! You can do better. And filter it through Johnny’s senses, not your own. The ring began to shake and it took Johnny a second to realize it was the stomping of feet. The noise didn’t even sound human anymore, and Johnny could hear the scream of pigs back on the farm as they were hit with electric prods. (Have it relate to something in his world!)

Johnny turned. There he was, a massive thing, rolling slowly through the crowd. Or something better, more specific to JOHNNY’S experience and background. How does this huge man APPEAR to Johnny from the FRAMEWORK of his senses and background (not yours). 

A man came from the back, his tight shirt practically plastered on his muscles. Huge was an understatement So it this. SHOW US don’t tell us. — if they had been on the same side, Johnny could’ve just hid behind him the whole fight. When he climbed in, the ring shook, and even the ref took a step back.

“A kid?” Kodiak scoffed. “That’s who I’m fighting? Really?” Kodiak cracked his neck. “This is gonna be easy.”

Johnny swallowed, rubbing his thumbs over his hand wraps. It just had to be bare-knuckle night, didn’t it? That meant he’d get the full force of every blow, and anything went, too, so he had a variety of ways to get pummeled. Fists, feet, death by biceps… the possibilities were endless.

He glanced to the side. Ambrose was glaring as usua. But Beverly, sitting in the front row, didn’t have a hint of doubt on her face? Is she is girlfriend? You could drop a hint of description here. He’s just a kid, after all, but here he is, in the man’s ultimate arena. You must have had a reason for putting Beverly in here. Make it mean something.

Need new graph whenever you have new dialogue. Come on, you can do this,” she yelled., get ‘im, Johnny!” Because you dropped the H, I am now assuming she’s cockney? Are we in London? 

He turned back to at Kodiak. What does he see on the man’s face? What is he thinking, feeling? Right. He could do this.

Right?

The bell rang. I like this part. Like how you set each into it’s own graph. 

Okay, as I said, I really like this submission. I think it’s a really strong start. But this writer is capable of much more. Work harder on your description and don’t stint. Get in Johnny’s head a little more and drops some hints about his background. HINTS! Just a few well chosen words or thoughts will create more even  sympathy for him.

I would definitely read on, and I don’t even like fight stories. But I like Johnny. Don’t be afraid to inject a little more emotion into him, even in this opening round. You need to spill a little blood onto your pages. Good luck, keep working, and let us know how it’s going.

By PJ Parrish

So there I was, on a panel at the Miami Book Fair. This was decades ago, and I was still a novice — I think my third book had just come out — and how I snagged a spot on this panel I’ll never know. My stuff was out only in paperback original, and back in those days, well, that was lesser-than.

I don’t remember the title of the panel. I do remember it was something smug-sounding. You know, like — Voice and Validity In Post-Mo Femme Fiction. Okay, I made that up, but dontcha just wanna slap whoever it is that names some of these panels?  Just once, I want to see something like this on a writer’s con program:

• Name Dropping. How To Do It Well, And Badly.
• The Unhappy Authors Panel
• All About Crystals, Rainbows, and Unicorns
• How To Corner And Pitch An Agent In The Lobby Can
• Men Who Cannot Stop Speaking and the Women Who Put Up With It
• Rambling and Off-Color Jokes By Almost-Major Authors
• Enough About Me. What Do You Think of Me?

And the last panel on Sunday morning in the half-empty auditorium because everyone has left early to catch their planes:

• This Is What Authors Look Like Who Drank Too Much Last Night.

I’ve been on that last panel more times than I can count. Hat-tip, by the way, to children’s writer Mette Ivie Harrison whose material (above) I borrowed.

Anyway, there I was. Sweaty, nervous and wedged between Carl Hiassen and some quasi-famous author whose name here I shall not reveal. I was pretty bad at public speaking in those days and sat there like a traffic cone. Our moderator was a dud, but Carl was a pure gent, trying to create a dialogue among us. Sensing my unease, he lobbed a few “what do you think?” softballs my way. One of them was: “Who do you write for?”

My mind blanked. I finally mumbled something into my mic about wanting to entertain readers, and maybe, if I was lucky, to emotional connect with them. Then I made what I thought was an okay joke: “And it wouldn’t be bad if I made a little money doing it.”

The audience, thank god, laughed. The quasi-famous author on my right grabbed my mic and said: “I don’t write for money. And I don’t write for anyone but myself.”

You know how when you’re in an awkward social situation and you think of a great comeback — two weeks later? What I should have said was “I think they call that literary self-abuse.” But I didn’t. Nobody said anything. Dead silence in the room. Mercifully, the moderator pulled the plug soon after.

I never forgot that author. She had a big name and a couple of big literary awards. She’s dead now, but you can still find her books on Amazon if you look hard. But I never forgot what she said that day,

What a bunch of bull-crap.

Who do you write for? Carl knew the right answer. All of you guys out there know the right answer. Sure, you write for yourself because it’s something you love doing. But it’s like playing the piano or gardening. Why play the piano if there is no one there to listen and be moved? Why toil in a garden unless the moods of passersby aren’t lifted by the roses they see?

And what is so wrong about wanting to make a living doing this? Even if it’s just to keep your dogs in Greenies.

So yeah, guys, write for yourself. It can make you feel dumb at times. It can make you feel wonderful at times. It humbles you, teaches you, heals you, Write because it makes you hear the beat of your own heart. But never, ever, forget that there is someone else out there who wants to hear you. Who might need to hear you. Maybe you’ll just make them chuckle. Or feel less lonely on a bad day. Or maybe you’ll change their life in some small way.

A couple years back, I had a story in a Mystery Writers of Americ anthology called “One Shot.” It was about a man who is emotionally crippled by a haunting childhood memory. The character and his best friend had been playing with dad’s revolver and the gun went off. The memory was, as often is the case for little kids, only half-there, obscured in a haze of pain, fear, and regret. But the adult character remembers the dead boy had been bullied as gay and he comes to realize the boy had killed himself. But a cabal of parents and priests had convinced him it was his fault.

I got an email about a year after the story was published. It was from a father whose gay son had shot himself. The writer told me the story had helped him come to grips with his own guilt and with his decision to leave his church. He thanked me for the story. Even as I write this, I can’t think of him without great emotion.

Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid to put yourself in your stories. And when you feel the time is right, don’t be afraid to put yourself and your stories out there. You need to connect.

I ran across this quote the other day, which is what clicked my memory of that poor lonely quasi-famous author, and what inspired this post. It’s from author Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The unread story is not a story. It is little marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live, a live thing, a story.”

Send yourself out into the world. Someone out there is waiting for you.

By PJ Parrish

This is a story about treasure hunting.

I am a sucker for estate sales. We have a lot of them in summer up here in northern Michigan. My town, Traverse City, is awash in splendid old Victorians left over from the days of the logger barons. And we have hundreds of listing barns crammed with family flotsam.

Among the cool stuff I’ve gathered: A set of ten Baccarat champagne coups (eight bucks) Two circa-Forties prints of gaudy cockatoos from a Miami Beach hotel (how they got in a Michigan basement I can’t guess). A Paint-by-Numbers of a naughty can-can dancer. A pathetic sock monkey (I have a huge collection, the uglier the monkey the better). And a dirt-encrusted mantel clock from the Fifites that keeps perfect time.

But yesterday, I struck gold. An old antique store was going out of business here. You know the place — an old barn stuffed rafters-to-basement with jade jewelry, molting hats, rusty New Era potato chip tins, lethal looking pitchforks and creepy one-armed baby dolls.

I spotted a handsome looking leather book. It had heft and smelled like rotting candy.

A digression: That great old book smell? You’re not imagining it. It comes from the chemical breakdown of the books after they’re exposed to light and heat for a long time. The break down releases volatile organic compounds that create a palette of those old book smells — mainly almonds and vanilla but also toluene, which produces coffee overtones.

That old book smell has an official name — bibliosmia. In other words, what you’re smelling is the scent of a book slowly dying.

I had to save this one. The title on the spine was The Omnibus of Crime. The name was Dorothy Sayers. It is a compilation of detective stories she gathered together. It is pristine, first edition. I Googled it on my phone and it goes for about $300 among collectors. It bought it for $20.

It wasn’t until I got home that I found a leaflet stuck inside. It is the original Book-of-the-Month Club News. Sayers’ anthology was the August 1929 selection. Its price was $3. I think I got a bargain.

The book is over 1,200 pages and many of the stories are by names lost in the haze of our genre’s history. But there are some famous folks — Poe, Doyle, Stoker, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce. Did you know Aldous Huxley wrote a short story called “The Giocanda Smile”? From that story:

Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth from the narrow barrel of her mouth. She was a machine-gun, riddling her hostess with sympathy.

The book is arranged historically, from the seminal roots of our genre in Latin, Greek and “oriental” primitives, logs through the “modern” contributions of Poe and Doyle, lurks through the shadows of vampires, witches and ghosts and ends with a section titled “Tales of Cruelty and Blood.”

Can’t wait to get to that part.

But I’ve just cracked the book, and first lingered in Sayer’s inspired introduction. I have to share my favorite passage from that intro, wherein Sayers argues why detective stories are, in the words of the Book of the Month Club editors, “sufficiently dignified”:

There is one respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle and end. A definite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death. It has the rounded (although limited) perfection of a troilet.

Okay, I looked up a couple words for you:

Aristotelian: Coming from the philosophy of Aristotle, an emphasis upon deduction and upon investigation of concrete and particular things and situations.

No argument from us on that, right?

Troilet: A poem form, invented by 13th century French minstrels. It has — get ready folks — eight lines, with the first line being repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and rhyming with third and fifth, while the second line serves as a refrain in the eighth and final line and rhymes with the sixth. Most commonly written in iambic tetrameter but almost as often in iambic pentameter.

Let’s just say that Sayers is trying to tell us that a good detective story has a nice structure.

I can’t tell you much more about my book yet. The editors of the Book-of-the-Month-Club news are sort of stuffy and borderline snide in their introduction, burbling on about how the English write better detective stories than Americans, that the Russians had a влюбился on Sherlock Holmes and that Sayer’s collection is “an agreeable summer’s afternoon reading.” (Is that like a Beach book?). They finally, at the end, loosen their man buns and concede:

“But come! The Omnibus of Crime is intended to be enjoyed. We can think of no book that offers so sure and innocent a nirvana for an active mind.”

I guess that means they thought it was sorta kinda okay to like detective stories. I’d rather you listen to what Dorothy Sayers has to say about our genre. Her words are as relevant today as they were in 1929.

Man, not satisfied with the mental confusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos….The fact remains that if you search the second-hand book stalls for cast-off literature, you will find fewer mystery stories than any other kind of book. Theology and poetry, philosophy and numismatics, love-stories and biography, [man] discards [these books] as easily as his old razor blades. But Sherlock Holmes is cherished and read and re-read, till the covers fall off and the pages crumble to fragments.

Keep searching those second-hand book stalls. We endure, crime dogs.

влюбился = Russian for man crush