I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? — Terry Pratchett

By PJ Parrish

A while back, I blogged here about a writer from one of my workshops named Jess who was having trouble taming her backstory. It was engulfing her main plot and you guys weighed in and helped her straighten things out. Heard back from her this past week and while things are going better, she still is having a hard time getting a firm grip on her plot.

I told her to go back in our recent archives and read Lindsey Hughes’ excellent post on Cause and Effect. In a nutshell, to quote:

Cause and Effect: The Story Chain Reaction

A story is not just a string of things that happen. A story is a chain reaction.

This happens, therefore that happens.

• A character makes a choice, therefore something changes.
• A secret is revealed, therefore a relationship blows up.
• A plan fails, therefore the hero has to try something riskier, scarier, or stupider.

I thought Lindsey’s post was very revealing for helping anyone who is struggling to get their plot under control. Click here to read the whole thing. But it got me to thinking about back copy. You know, the pithy summary of a book that usually appears on the dust jacket,

So let me ask you today: Can you boil down your story in three or four graphs?

But why should I? (I can hear you taunting me.)

Well, if you’re self publishing, you have to come up wtih a succint and tantalyzing summary of your book to post on Amazon or on the back of your tree book. Or maybe you’re going to a conference and want to do a five-minute pitch to an editor. Or you’re querying an agent and you want to seduce him into reading your manuscript.

BUT…more to the point of this post today: You’ve driven your plot ball into the fescue and can’t see a clear path out. You need to re-focus your story. There is nothing more eye-opening than trying to condense the essence of your story down to a couple paragraphs that employ cause and effect. And as Lindsey suggests in her post, it can help you stop just ambling around and set you on the true plot path again.

I’m actually good at boiling down a story, probably because I once made my living writing newspaper headlines. It’s no accident that some pretty good novelists — Fay Weldon, Joseph Heller, Don Delillo — started out in the ad industry. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote streetcar sign slogans for $35 a week. Dorothy Sayers made a name for herself writing a mustard slogan before she got hot with crime novels. Salman Rushdie, who wrote ad copy while trying to finish his first novel, recalls taking a test for the J. Walter Thompson agency where, “they asked you to imagine that you met a Martian who mysteriously spoke English and you had to explain to them in less than 100 words how to make toast.”

So whenever I read good back copy, I get all a-tingly. Like this one:

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones and when the snow falls it is gray. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food – and each other.

That’s on the back of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It’s good because it captures not just the plot but also mimics style and mood of the novel.

On the flip side, there’s a lot of bad back copy out there. In the New York Times book review yesterday, there was an ad for a DIY “publisher.” Some sample “back copy”:

In the summer of 1863, an eighteen-year-old Amish farm boy feels trapped between his religious heritage and his fascination with the world outside his small Pennsylvania town. His solution is to leave home. And so begins his unforgettable adventure that will change his life forever.

 

Abused and mistreated, Jane grew up in the field of restraints which she calls a prison. And she hopes there is still an ounce of sanity left in her which leaves her with the choice of breaking away from the [title redacted].

 

[Name redacted] returns from the war minus a a leg and discovers that his wife has left him and his engineering business has shut down. Forced to re-invent his life, he and his family battle to overcome war’s damage.

None of these entice readers or capture the tone or mood of the books. They are wordy (“feels trapped”), filled with cliches (“unforgettable adventure”), vague on plot points, filled with generalities (“struggle to cope”), confusing, and devoid of any hint of conflict or suspense. And I suspect, that if I read any of these novels, they might all suffer from unfocused, meandering plots.

There’s no therefore there.

So, let me ask you again. Can you boil your book down to three or four graphs? Does your back copy reflect CAUSE AND EFFECT?  Again, to get a grasp on your plot, as Lindsey said, you must:

• Think dominoes, not beads on a string. A weak plot is often a bead necklace. Pretty scenes, one after another, threaded together because they all belong to the same story.
• A strong plot is a domino line. Each piece knocks into the next.

In back copy, you’ll often see certain trigger words used to set up the domino effect. Therefore is a fine word — nice for Descarte and Shakespeare — but a little high-falutin for us mere crime dogs. But…

BUT is a good alternative: Look at all the BUTS I have highlighted here in back copy I found on my shelf:

The Reverend Ronald Kemp came to the East End of London with definite ideas of right and wrong, which was only fitting for a minister of God. BUT the people of the East End had a few ideas of their own and the Rev. Kemp quickly finds his world torn asunder. — John Creasey’s Parson With a Punch:

FBI agent Kelly Jones has worked on many disturbing cases in her career, BUT nothing like this. A mass grave site unearthed on the Appalachian Trail puts Kelly at the head of an investigation that crosses the line…Assisted by law enforcement from two states, Kelly searches for the killers. BUT as darkness falls, another victim is taken and Kelly must race to save him before he joins the rest…in the boneyard. — Michele Gagnon’s Bone Yard:

Mickey Haller gets the text, “Call me ASAP – 187,” and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game. BUT when Mickey learns that the victim was his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow path, he knows he is on the hook for this one. — Michael Connelly

Here’s back copy for Sherrilyn Kenyon that’s corny as all get out but it it sets up some nice dominos:

He is solitude. He is darkness. He is the ruler of the night. Yet Kyrian of Thrace has just woken up handcuffed to his worst nightmare: An accountant. Worse, she’s being hunted by one of the most lethal vampires out there. And if Amanda Devereaux goes down, then he does too. BUT it’s not just their lives that are hanging in the balance. Kyrian and Amanda are all that stands between humanity and oblivion.

The buts set up the dominos.

As I was finishing this up, my student Jess emailed me. She read Lindsey’s post on CAUSE AND EFFECT and is excited to go back and give it another go. She is looking to jettison distracting subplots, But more important, she’s looking for missing buts.

It isn’t easy. But it can mean the difference between a meandering muddy brook and a clear swift-flowing river. Thanks for the piggyback ride, Lindsey.

Postscript: It took me a while but I found the story behind Dorothy L. Sayer’s mustard slogan.While working for S.H. Benson’s agency in the 1920s, Sayers created the hugely popular “Mustard Club” campaign for Colman’s Mustard. Her campaign featured the ubiquitous slogan “Has Father Joined the Mustard Club?”. She also created the “Three Mustardeers” for the brand.

By PJ Parrish

It’s awards season! Sunday was the Oscars. Won’t give you any opinions on winners and losers here. Just wanted to say I loved Jessie Buckley’s (Hamnet) acceptance speech: “Mom. Dad, thank you for teaching us to dream and to never be defined by expectations.”

Well said.

I’ve been thinking about awards this week because I am gearing up for my annual gig as chairman of the Edgar Awards banquet for Mystery Writers of America. I edit the program book every year, and we always come up with a theme. This year we’re paying tribute to the Best First Novels.

Why? Well, this year is the 80th anniversary of the Edgar. The only category that first year was Best First and the prize was taken home by Julius Fast for Watchful At Night.

Many freshman writers went on to become best-selling authors. Among the big names who hit a homer at their first at-bat are Patricia Highsmith, Ira Levin, Donald Westlake, Jonathan Kellerman, Stuart Woods, Martin Cruz Smith, Gillian Flynn, C.J. Box, Janet Evanovich, Michael Connelly, Patricia Cornwell, Walter Mosley, and Tana French. But if you go back and read all 80 winners (click here), you’ll find many more names that were never lit up in neon. Or those writers whose careers never even made it to cruising altitude.

Such is the capricious nature of winning an award. It can mean everything. It can mean nothing.

For our program book, we asked first novel winners to tell us what it meant to them. What it felt like. What it did for their careers. I wish I could share their answers here (can’t devulge pre-banquet night) because they are poignant and sometimes very funny. What each shares, however, is a humility and very human-ness. As one winner put it, getting that Edgar felt personal and communal all at the same time.

One of my favorite episodes of the TV show Frazier is the one where Frazier is nominated for the Seebee Award, given out to Seattle’s best broadcasters. Frazier tries to be above it all, but he just can’t. He wants to win, dammit! But at the banquet, he finds out he is up against the aging icon Fletcher Grey. Fletcher has been nominated 11 times in a row and always lost. Fletcher’s date is his 84-year-old mother who has flown in from Scottsdale — for the 11th straight year. Fletcher is also retiring. Frazier tells his producer Roz, “if we win, they’ll string us up.” Roz says, “I don’t care. I’d crawl over his mother to win this award!”

Frazier loses, of course. His agent Beebee deserts him. Roz gets drunk on Pink Ladies.

Sounds like a couple award banquets I’ve been to. My sister Kelly and I have been lucky to have been nominated for some awards over the decades, and we’ve won a couple. Yeah, yeah, It is always an honor to be nominated. But I can’t lie — it bites to lose. I once saw a nominee’s wife burst into tears when her husband lost.

In 2002 we were nominated for the Edgar. We went to the banquet at the Hyatt. Got our hair done and put on sparkly dresses. Kelly’s son Robert rented a tux. I stayed stone-cold sober in the bar before. As soon as they didn’t call our name, I grabbed the wine bottle out of my editor’s hand.

Fast forward five years to the International Thriller Writers banquet. I went with no expectations. I sat between my agent and Ali Karem but I was filled with dread. Kelly couldn’t make it, so I felt pretty alone, despite all the good vibes from fellow authors. We might write hardboiled, but I am not. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I bolted for the lobby.

Jim Fusilli was standing there and barred my way and put an arm around my shoulders.  Each nominee was announced by reading the first line of their book. Ours is “The Christmas lights were already up.” I remember thinking, “God, that sucks.”

I heard the title of our book announced as the winner. I started crying. I don’t remember what I said on stage. This is what SHOULD have said:

“Thank you so much for this great honor. First, I want to thank the ITW judges who put their careers on hold for months to read hundreds of books. Second, I want to thank my fellow nominees. I am honored to have my book mentioned among their fine works. Third, I want to thank my editor who….”

This is what was REALLY in my head:

“God, I can’t believe I am crying! How pathetic and needy! Where’s the friggin’ stairs? I can’t see! Who is that man at the podium? Shit, I forget his name! THE LIGHTS! I CAN’T SEE ANYTHING! Do I have lettuce on my teeth? Agent…mention her name. My bra is showing, DON’T PULL AT YOUR BRA!! He’s handing it to me. Jesus, it’s heavy…don’t drop it…don’t drop it…don’t drop it. Say something nice about the other nominees! Can’t…can’t…can’t remember their names. YOU TWIT! You just sat on a panel with TWO of them this morning! Wait, wait…is it Paul LeVEEN or Paul LeVINE??? Forget it…buy them a drink later. I should have gone to the hairdresser before I left home. My roots are showing. JESUS! THE LIGHTS! Stop talking now…you’re rambling, you ass…Okay, leaving now. TAKE THE AWARD! Good grief…I’m here in New York City wearing Nine West because I was too cheap to spring for those black Blahniks at Off Fifth. Dear God, just let me just off this stage so I can get to the john and pull up my Spanx….

I made it off the stage okay. Here is the photo to prove it:

Did it change things for me? Not really. I put the award on my shelf, next to my ribbon for winning an ax-throwing contest in Maine. My career continued on its nice glide path. I wrote more books, I made a little money. But I do remember one thing very distinctly that night. I was at a low point in my writing back then, feeling a little discouraged because the WIP was stalled and I wasn’t getting much joy from the writing process itself. I wasn’t feeling that feeling James wrote about this past Sunday. (click here). The world wasn’t burning through me.

But my peers gave me a gift that night — a nudge to keep going. So maybe that’s what this award thing is — just a kick in the Spanx of simple validation.

Keep going, crime dogs. Get that book out of you and out there. Somebody out there will like you. They will really like you.

By PJ Parrish

Well, gee, thanks a lot, Sue.

Yesterday, my cohort Sue Coletta here at TKZ posted a blog about overcoming procrastination.Click here to read. I am fighting with this lately because I have a short story due for an anthology and it’s not going well. Sue suggested that I am not just lazy or unmotivated. (Which, in truth, I often am). Sue blinded me with SCIENCE!

She wrote that there is a conflict raging in my brain, a tug of war between my prefrontal cortex and my limbic system. The cortex is sending a signal to my limbic system that says, “C’mon, it’s time to work.” And here I must quote from her.

Because your limbic system is like an unruly teen who seeks only pleasure and avoids pain or discomfort, it often returns a signal that says, “Let’s do something else that feels good right now.”

I feel much better knowing there is something to blame for sitting on my butt watching Project Runway reruns while my garden goes primal and my short story is on a time-out. But to cut me some slack, I’ve got a lot of life things goes on right now and am battling a lingering bout with that flu bug that’s going around. So when the going gets tough around my house, the tough…

Fold laundry. (I’m very good at this)
Do the Spelling Bee in the Times. (must get Queen Bee status!)
Lament the retirement of Tim Gunn
Kill fire ants. Which have created a Saharan lanscape in my sad garden
Go to Home Depot for Amdro but wander around the hardware aisle 14/15, where arcane fasteners and screws are on display like trinkets in a Casablancan bazaar. (Pictured below: a Hex Washer Head Self-Drilling Sheet Metal Screw. I can waste a half hour trying to imagine what this is for.)

What I am trying to say here is that I think there is such a thing as good procrastination. Some days, the mind just cannot focus on the real task at hand — writing.

Here is a truth about writing that I believe intensely:

To write well and steadily, you have to give yourself over to a fantasy world. You are the godhead of that world. You are creating the landscape (let there be English moors!). You are moving your population through time and space (the plot is dragging. Let’s have Moses part the Red Sea!). And most importantly, you are making your make-believe people breath and live on the page with such heart and agility that they feel real.  Do you guys realize how hard that is? Do you know how rare is it when it all comes together in a great story? To write well, you have to enter a rem state. You have to give in to vivid dreams, an increased heart rate, with your brain engaged and limbs a tingle. And you have to do this while being completely awake, aware, and preferably sober.

(I often watch my dog Archie when he’s asleep. He barks, twitches, yips and lollops his legs. I watch him with envy, wondering what great stories he is creating in his mind.)

I know many of you are disciplined and dogged in your writing schedules. You write every day, no matter what. Some of you keep diaries of your output. You embed yourself in your fantasy world and stay there for hours. I can’t do that. I have tried, so very very hard. But it just isn’t how I roll as a writer.

When I was writing novels full-time, I had to force myself to write every day because I was on a contract to produce a book every 8-10 months. But I confess that for me, staying in that rem state every day was exhausting. At times, I even resented it.

So I learned to take breaks. I learned how to procrastinate productively. Mainly through physical activities like running or biking. Or sometimes just watching old movies. Or I just fold laundry. My mind clears and I go back to writing with an open heart. Sometimes I take a break for a day or two. Sometimes it runs a whole week. But here’s the weird thing…

Whenever I leave my story, I can always feel this thread keeping me bound to it. Even when I am away from writing, I feel a subconscious connection to it.

The idea of a string connecting worlds and people is common in myth, literature, and most religions. The astral cord, or “silver cord,” is a metaphysical concept describing a luminous and indestructible tether connecting the physical body to the astral body (soul/consciousness) during out-of-body experiences, sleep, or astral projection.

Allow me one final digression.

Cinema Paradiso is one of my favorite movies. It is about a boy in a tiny Italian village whose beloved father figure Alfredo tells him to leave the village to find his way in the world. Never come back here, Toto, he says. At the movie’s end, the grown Toto returns to his village for the first time for Alfredo’s funeral. We don’t see Toto greeting his elderly mother. To track the reunion, the camera focuses on her knitting needles and yarn. As the mother heads downstairs to meet her son, we see the yarn unraveling and then it stops. The camera pans left to the window as they embrace. The thread between Toto’s two worlds is fragile but unbroken.

So it is with me. Yes, I procrastinate. But I am always pulled back. Sometimes it feels heavy like a good rope, pulling me back up from the depths. Sometimes it feels flimsy, like a kite string, ready to snap when some hard life wind blows through. Sometimes it feels like a cord through which some electric current pulsates.

But it is always there. I am away from my fantasy world but I am always tethered to it.

By PJ Parrish

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 retired from fulltime novel writing a couple years ago. (I had a great run and was time…no regrets). So over a span of oh, 40 years, I’ve had a lot of editors.

The good, the bad, and the ugly. And one, painfully indifferent. (We showed up at a major book fair and she didn’t know who we were).

I forgot who told me this early in my career — might have been one of my agents — but she said, “Your editor is not your friend.”  And that is true. Now, some writers are lucky to have deep and long-lasting friendships with their editors. But I never expected that. All I wanted was an editor who made my books better, an editor who made me better. An editor who believed in my work.

First, a definition. There are copy editors. Then there are line editors, Both are essential to your success.

I’ve had some amazing copy editors — the pickiest, sharpest-eyed, obsessive, anal-grammarians an author could ever wish for. They caught my misspellings, my lay-lie transgressions, my syntax sins. My last one, at Thomas & Mercer, was an ex ballet dancer who caught some errors that even this old dance critic missed.

My favorite copy editor was one I had for my British edition romance. I never knew his/her name but I pictured her as a spinster sitting in a ratty wingback by the fire in some Devonshire outpost surrounded by cats and towers of manuscripts. She 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. I loved that woman.

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. 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 cover flap that talked about a grizzly murder — which set off a whole new sub-genre, serial killer bears.

When you spend eight months to a year writing a book, you get so close to it sometimes you can’t see the forest through the faux pas. 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 free lance copy editor. She caught so many mistakes it made me even more paranoid about what still lay (lie? lain?) beneath.

Which brings me to why I am talking about editors here today, when I don’t even deal with them anymore.

When I made the switch from romance to mysteries, my first book Dark of the Moon, was acquired by Kensington Books. Kensington is an independent, Manhattan-based family-owned publishing house. The editor who took me on was John Scognamiglio.

This year, John is being awarded the Mystery Writers of America Ellery Queen Award at the Edgar banquet. It is awarded to “outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry.”

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Or a finer editor.

Now, all the folks at Kensington were grand to work with. When Kelly and I went to visit the Kensington offices, the Zacharius clan (the owners) treated us to a fabulous lunch. They got us blurbs and reviews and gave us a fabulous launch. The chairman of the board Walter Zacharius wrote a publicity letter praising our freshman book that began:

“I can count on the fingers of one hand those books which got me so excited that I couldn’t wait to urge all my friends and colleagues to read them right away. This means that Dark of the Moon is in select company.”

Then there was John.

He helped shape that debut book and all the others that followed. He was a line editor extraordinaire. In person, he’s quiet, taciturn. But on those revision letters that came, he was strong of voice, precise, and always spot-on with his criticisms. For our second book, Dead of Winter, his sharp eye helped us figure out a better ending with a great twist. The book got an Edgar nomination. And I’ll never forget his terse note on book three Paint It Black: “It’s too short.” He then proceded to help us find ways to beef up the plot and deepen the villain’s MO. The book made it to the New York Times list.

Maybe his best quality was that he believed in us, even when we didn’t believe in ourselves. He made us feel confident. He always made our books better.

I wish I had kept some of his revision letters to us. They would have been fun, and instructive, to share with you, especially those of you who don’t have a great editor standing behind you. The best I have is this old photo of Kelly and me standing in front of headquarters the day the clan took us to lunch in 1998. (I had two bellinis!)

So here’s great editors. I so hope they are still out there amidst all the sturm und drang in publishing today. And to John, a very belated but heartfelt thanks. I’ll buy you a bellini when I see you.

By PJ Parrish

Decisions, decisions…

We make thousands of them every day, and they run the gamut from the semi-conscious to the life-altering. Get up or hit the snooze button? Walk the dog now or hope he makes it until I get home? Buy or rent? Call up the ex-wife and tell her the truth? Send my son to rehab? Confront mom about giving up her car keys?

Since this process is part of our everyday life, you’d think making decisions would be rote when it comes to our writing. But it’s not. Just ask any poor slob who has painted himself into the plot corner and said, “Oh crap, now what?”

Was thinking about this a lot because I am critiquing a manuscript. I am doing this for a friend who is stuck, about a third of the way through, and asked me to take a look. Normally, I don’t do this for friends because I don’t have enough of them and didn’t want to lose this one. But he had some sucess with traditional publishing years ago, lost his contract, and was now going the self-pubbing route. And without an editor, he had wandered off his path.

Well, I read his stuff. It wasn’t bad. He’s got a solid grip on craft. But for the life of me, and despite doing countless First Page Critiques here, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Like him, I was stuck. So I asked him to be patient and set his manuscript aside. I came back to it with a fresh eye two weeks later, and it hit me immediately — he had not made enough decisions.

Here’s a quote from an essay about decision making from the writer Amos Oz. I had to run down some internet rabbit holes to find it because it is THIRTY years old! But when I re-read it, it feels as fresh as the first day I read it. (Click here if you want to read the whole essay in Paris Review). Money quote:

[Writing] is like reconstructing the whole of Paris from Lego bricks. It’s about three-quarters-of-a-million small decisions. It’s not about who will live and who will die and who will go to bed with whom. Those are the easy ones. It’s about choosing adjectives and adverbs and punctuation. These are molecular decisions that you have to take and nobody will appreciate, for the same reason that nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony in a concert hall, except when the note is false. So you have to work every hard in order for your readers not to note a single false note. That is the business of three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.

Isn’t that great? A good novel is made by careful and calculated decision-making. Not that there isn’t room for serendipity, flights of fancy, and raw passion. Yes, characters take on a life of their own, but we still hold their reins. Yes, we can’t anticipate every detour, but we can keep the car under fifty as we career down the road less written about.

Back to my lost friend. Like I said, there was some good stuff happening in his story. But he wasn’t in control of his decisions. He was like a guy thrown into a swift-moving river and had left his fate to the rapids and rocks instead of making an effort to steer toward a goal.

Years ago, I went on a white-water rafting trip on the Nantahala River (where part of Deliverance was filmed. That’s me middle right in the picture above). It was white-knuckle stuff, but I always had faith that our guide could get us through. He knew where the rocks and whirlpools were, when we needed to pull right, or when we needed to ford a bad stretch. He made decisions.

Okay, enough with the metaphors. I’ll give you some rocks to grab onto. Here are some of the biggest decisions you have to make:

1. Where do I start?
We crime dogs get drilled into us that a fast break from the gate is vital to mystery and thrillers. I believe you can risk a slow opening if it is well done, but I also believe that your POINT OF ENTRY is the single most important decision you make. Yes, the opening must be compelling and hint at what’s to come. But enter too early and you risk throat-clearing. (Detective awakened by phone call in night summoning him to crime scene.). Too late and you risk confusion. (What the heck is going on here? Who are these people? Where am I in time and place?).

Let’s take a look at one opening. It’s a little long but worth dissecting:

Dawn broke over Peachtree Street. The sun razored open the downtown corridor, slicing past the construction cranes waiting to dip into the earth and pull up skyscrapers, hotels, convention centers. Frost spiderwebbed across the parks. Fog drifted through the streets. Trees slowly straightened their spines. The wet, ripe meat of the city lurched toward the November light.

The only sound was footsteps. Heavy slaps echoed between the buildings as Jimmy Lawson’s police-issue boots pounded the pavement. Sweat poured from his skin. His left knee wanted to give. His body was a symphony of pain. Every muscle was a plucked piano wire. His teeth gritted like a sand block. His heart was a snare drum. The black granite Equitable Building cast a square shadow as he crossed Pryor Street. How many blocks had Jimmy gone? How many more did he have to go?

Don Wesley was thrown over his shoulder like a sack of flour. Fire-man’s carry. Harder than it looked. Jimmy’s shoulder was ablaze. His spine drilled into his tailbone. His arm trembled from the effort of keeping Don’s legs clamped to his chest. The man could already be dead. He wasn’t moving. His head tapped into the small of Jimmy’s back as he barreled down Edgewood faster than he’d ever carried the ball down the field. He didn’t know if it was Don’s blood or his own sweat that was rolling down the back of his legs, pooling into his boots.

He wouldn’t survive this. There was no way a man could survive this.

This is from Karin Slaughter’s Cop Town. Why do I like this opening? Because even though she uses a lot of description, the effect is visceral and immediate. She could have started with the shooting incident itself, but haven’t we all read that a million times? No, she dives into the bleeding heart of the scene by showing a cop carrying his dying partner. What is left UNSAID is compelling and makes us want to read on: What happened? Why didn’t he just get in his squad car and drive? Where is he going? Are both men shot? Turns out, Jimmy carries his partner to the hospital but does he survive?

2. Whose story is this?

Every story needs a protagonist. Duh. But sometimes, in the hurly-burly of writing, we can lose sight of who owns the story. The result can be that seductive secondary characters take over, or the villain becomes hyper-vivid. The protag-hero is, to my mind, the hardest character to create because you must invest so much of the story’s logic and impact in them that they can mutate from calm center to sidelined cipher.
Sometimes, you might start out telling the story from one character’s POV, believing he is your hero, but then a second character elbows into the spotlight. This happened to our book She’s Not There. I opened with a woman waking up in a hospital with concussion-induced amnesia and she has a gut-punch fear that her husband tried to kill her. So she bolts from the hospital and goes on the run. She’s my unreliable narrator protag, I thought. Until her husband hires a skip tracer to bring her home. It took fifty-some pages before I realized I had a full-scale dual-protag story on my hands. And I had to do a lot of rewriting to make it work.

Now this is not to say you can’t have a teeming cast in your story. Take Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. I was captivated by the protag Tom Builder, but whenever Follett moved away from Tom, I got impatient. Later in this massive book, the protag spotlight shifts to his step-son Jack. I missed Tom badly.

And be careful about setting up a false or “decoy” protag. This is a character that dominates so much of a book in its early going, that the reader begins to identify with her and invest in her journey. But then this character is marginalized (usually killed). Think of Marion Crane in Psycho, who dominated the movie for 47 minutes until Norman Bates became the putative protag. Stieg Larsson’s Mikael Blomkvist is a decoy protag, I think, because while most the plot’s machinery is built around him, Lizabeth Salander is the true action hero and embodiment of the story’s themes. At the very least, I’d consider them dual protags.

3. What am I trying to say?

I’m going out on limb here and say all good books have themes. Yes, your goal might be modest — you just want to entertain readers. But beneath the grinding gears of plot, even light books can have something to say about the human condition. A romance might be “about” how love is doomed without trust. A courtroom drama might be “about” the morality of the death penalty. Good fiction, Stephen King says, “always begins with story and progresses to theme.” And often, you don’t even grasp the theme until later in the book or even during rewrites.

What are your major and minor conflicts? What is the book’s theme(s)? What are the recurring visual motifs or symbols? What is the book’s tone and mood? Which leads me to…

4. What mood am I in?

When She’s Not There was in the Thomas & Mercer pipeline, my editor sent me a questionnaire listed some “mood” words — haunting, witty, intense, sweet, hopeful, psychological, somber, epic, tragic, foreboding, romantic. They were asking us this because they wanted the design and promotion to enhance our chances of marketing success. You, too, have to think about this as you write your book, whether you self-pub or go traditional. What kind of world are you asking your reader to enter? How do you want them to feel? Once you can answer this question, you then must use all your powers and craft to create what Edgar Allan Poe called “Unity of Effect.” Every word and image, Poe believed, had to be carefully chosen to illicit an emotion.

5. Where am I?

I’m often surprised at how paltry setting is rendered in crime fiction. We need to know where we are very early in the story, preferably inserted gracefully into the narrative flow via sharp description. Yeah, you can slap one of those tags at the beginning of chapter one — Somewhere in the Gobi Desert, Sept, 1904. I concede that you need sign-posts at times; I’ve used them myself. But they can be a crutch. As a reader, I prefer to be parachuted into a place and use my senses rather than have the writer stick a sign in my face.

6. Am I doing this for me or for the story?

The story always has to come first. You can’t kill someone off just because you’ve stalled in the middle and you’re desperate. You can’t let a character hog the story just because you’ve fallen in love with her or she’s easier to write than your protag. You can’t add a twist just because you think it will make you look clever. All twists must be organic, emerging from the plot, not from your “hey-watch-this!” writer-ego. Go back to question 2: Whose story it is? Well, it’s not yours; it’s your character’s. It’s not about you using fancy words or filigreed metaphors. It’s not about you trying to transcend the genre, win some award, or anything else. It’s about the people in your book.
As Elmore Leonard said, “Always write from a character’s point of view. Write in their language to keep the sense that it’s their story. They’re the most important thing.”

7. Does this make sense?

This is just a plea for simple clarity in three things: your writing style, plot structure, and character motivation. Let’s break them down:

Writing style: Don’t confuse your readers. Chose the simplest but most evocative words you can find. As Stephen King says, “One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is dressing up the vocabulary, looking for long words because maybe you’re a little ashamed of your short ones.” In other words, most the time a lawn is just a lawn, not a verdant sward. Be clear in your choreography when you move your characters through time and space. If someone enters a room, tell us. If you jump ahead three days in time, tell us. This is the “busy work” of fiction writing but it’s no less important. If your reader can’t follow the simple physical movements in your story, they will give up on you and your book.

Plot structure: Your story must have a durable thread of logic that runs from beginning to end. Events on your plot arc must emerge organically and not from coincidence. (no deus ex machina or long-lost Uncle Dickie from Australia showing up in chapter 40 to announce he is the killer) Your details of police, legal and medical procedure must ring true. Your twists and turns must be well-planned and hard-earned. Does the plot, as a whole, make sense? And if you write sci-fi, dystopian fiction, fantasy or horror, does the artificial world you create obey the rules of its own logic and does it FEEL believable?

Character motivation: Man, is this one important. I can’t believe I left it for last. Characters are your lifeblood and if you want the reader to believe in them, to care about them, to root against them or cheer for them, they must be multi-dimensional and “real.” They must conform to their own internal logic. They must be true to their personalities. We’ve all read books where we say, “Shoot, that guy would have never done that!” The writer has not done her job in this case, has not asked herself: “Does this make sense for this person to do this?”

Decisions, decisions…

So what about my friend’s book? First, he had allowed a secondary character (A sidekick) to steal the spotlight. I advised him to go read some Robert B. Parker books to see how Parker kept the titanic yet taciturn sidekick Hawk under control. My friend also didn’t quite know what he was trying to SAY with his book. He is trying to transition from police procedurals to softer suspense (actually trying to catch the cozy-fantasy trend that’s hot right now). I suggested to him that he was relying too much on his darker neo-noir habits. The mood was inconsistent, even a tad tone-deaf.

As Amos Oz said nobody ever pays attention to a single note in a symphony, except when the note is false..

By PJ Parrish

You tell a lot about a book from its back cover.

I love reading the backcopy of books. It can be a powerful selling tool, summing up in just a couple paragraphs the soul of a story, giving us a glimpse of the plot and characters, without giving away the guts. When backcopy is good, it’s an art. And when it’s bad…well, I guess we can blame that on some poor editor somewhere. (I’ve had my share). Or maybe the problem runs deeper than that. We’ll get back to that…

Years ago, I did a long detailed post about how to write backcopy. Click here, if interested. But what I’d like to talk about today is what is known as the tagline. In usually one to three sentences, a good tagline — like a newspaper headline — tells you in a glance what the book is, at its true heart. And like a well-rendered headline, a book tagline makes you stop for a second or two and maybe get seduced.

I ran across a good example of this recently when I finally cracked open a novel I had gotten for Christmas. It’s set in France, so the giver was sure I would enjoy it. So was I because the tagline was pretty good:

In love we find out who we want to be.
In war we find out who we are.

I won’t be coy. The book is Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. Now I know this is a hugely popular, even beloved, book. But dang, I just couldn’t get into it, and I gave it about 150 pages. Well written but just not my cup of tea. À chacun son goût.

But as I said, it got me thinking about what makes for good taglines. If you are self-publishing, you need to know about this because it really can make or break a sale for a casually browsing reader. If you don’t believe me, go haunt a (real) bookstore and watch browsers. They pick up a book, drawn maybe by spiffy cover art and then, almost always, they turn it over and read the back.

Movies are really good at taglines, probably because in the good old days, the movie poster was like a carnival barker trying to lure you inside. Here’s maybe my all time favorites:

In space, no one can hear you scream.

Alien, of course. But I like the tagline for the sequel Alien vs Pedator as well:

Whoever wins, we lose.

And then there’s the classic:

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity is a work of noir genius. Every line of dialogue is as sharp as the tagline itself. This should be assigned viewing for every writer.

And just because I watched the movie again the other night:

Okay, intermission! Time out for a short quiz. See if you can tell which movies match these poster taglines. Answers at the end.

1. You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies
2. When he pours, he reigns
3. Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.
4. The first casualty of war is innocence.
5. On every street in every city in this country, there’s a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
6. He was the perfect weapon until he became the target.
7. If you only see one movie this year … You need to get out more.
8. A man went looking for America, and he couldn’t find it anywhere.
9. Don’t get mad. Get everything.
10. She brought a small town to its feet and a corporation to its knees.

I’ve been lucky to have some great editors over my career who shepherded my books through the backcopy and tagline process. For An Unquiet Grave: Not Every Soul Rests In Peace. And one of my faves from my Thomas & Mercer editor for She’s Not There:

A past she can’t remember.
A killer she can’t recongize.
And they’re both catching up with her.

Just for fun I pulled some books off my shelf in search of good taglines. Some taglines are only one juicy line. Some are puns. Others can stretch on into mini-plot summaries. But all tease and tantylize:

• Yesterday was for youthful indiscretions. Today is for consequences. — Sue Grafton’s Y Is For Yesterday.
• A tough detective follows a lead back to a 1960s Borcht Belt resort to crack an unsolved crime — or was it a crime at all? — Reed Farrel Coleman’s Redemption Street.
• From a helicopter high above the empty California desert, a man is sent free-falling into the night…in Chicago, a woman learns that an elite team of ex-army investigators is being hunted down one by one…and on the streets of Portland, Jack Reacher — soldier, cop, hero — is pulled out of his wandering life by a code that few other people could understand. — Lee Child’s Bad Luck and Trouble.

Okay, that last one is not a true tagline, just a good summary. But I really like the tagline for the first Reacher movie: If he’s coming for you, you probably deserve it.

The best taglines distill the core emotional, thematic, or high-stakes essence of your story down into a punchy, memorable phrase. It serves as the HEADLINE above the rest of the backcopy, wherein you can go into more plot and character details. It also hints at the tone of your book — humor, noir, romantic.

Do you really need a tagline? Well, not if you’re famous. A scan of my bookshelf showed me that the bestsellers rarely have them because the big name is lure enough. Sometimes, the space is given over to a blurb from a fellow writer. And if you’re lucky, you’ve hit upon a fabulous title that needs no other help. A few from my bookshelf: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Something Wicked This Way Comes. To Kill A Mockingbird. Midnight In the Garden Of Good And Evil. And David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day because I am still doing my Duolingo French every day.

So, what about it? Can you write a great tagline for your book? Can you boil it down to its purest self and pour it out in one or two pithy lines? It’s hard. It’s an art even.

And at risk of depressing you, let me add a final thought. If you — or your poor overworked editor — can’t come up with a good tagline, well, maybe you’re not really sure, in your heart of hearts, what your story is really about. But that’s a post for another day.

ANSWERS

1. The Social Network
2. Cocktail
3. Interstellar
4. Platoon
5. Taxi Driver
6. Bourne Identity
7. Naked Gun
8. Easy Rider
9. The First Wives Club
10. Erin Brockovich

By PJ Parrish

My new year got off to a rocky start. Short story: suddenly huge water bill. Plumber says there’s a leak…somewhere. Enter Mike from Gulf Coast Leak Detection. Leak is under the lawn, not the house, he says. Bill: $500 vs $10,000 to repipe house. On New Year’s Eve, I splurged on a bottle of Veuve Clicquot.

So, in honor of good starts, here is some tasty brain lint about books and writers that I found for all us who are hoping for positive outcomes in 2026.

Actual photo of famous book critic Toby,

Sick Puppy

Decades ago, when I was writing my first romance, The Dancer, my cat Hilary walked across the keyboard of my Commodore and wiped out a quarter of my work. Noooo, I didn’t make a copy. But…John Steinbeck’s dog, Toby, ate half of the first manuscript of Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck didn’t make copies either and it took him two months to write it all over again.Steinbeck wrote to his agent: “I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.”

Hunka Hunka Burning Gov

Once, while doing some routine research on arcane FBI procedures, I got a screen message that said ERROR 451.  This is, I found out, is HTTP code for “Unavailable For Legal Reasons,” meaning the government doesn’t want you to see it. The code comes from Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 where books are infamously burned. It’s reassuring to know someone in Washington read novels.

My Golden Eye Will Be Watching You

Apropo of nothing in my life other than the fact I once got to interview Sting — The Police frontsman wrote the song “Every Breath You Take” at the same desk that Ian Fleming used to write his James Bond novels. Sting was renting the Fleming Villa in Goldeneye on the island of Jamaica while composing the famous track.

Which Might Explain Why the Coffee Tastes Like Bilge Water

Would you go to a coffee shop called Pequod’s? Whelp, that was what Gordon Bowker originally wanted to call his little coffee company because he was a Moby Dick fan and thought using the ship’s name was a nifty idea. His partner Terry Heckler thought naming a business after a doomed whaler was a bad marketing move. So now you can overpay for your Cinnamon Dolce Latte at Starbucks, named after the Pequod’s first mate.

The Allmanns, Jeff Spicoli and The Bard

Was listening to one of my fave boogie-down-the-road songs the other day — “Jessica.” Found out recently that the name — now among most popular for babies and dogs — made its first appearance in Shakespeare’s 1598 play The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare is also credited with making up over 1,000 words and phrases including “bookworm,” “bibliophile,” “critic,” “vanish into thin air,” and “gloomy.”  He also gave us “gnarly” and “pukey.” Aloha, Mr. Hand.

Let Them Eat Madeleines

I don’t remember why, but many years ago I decided I needed to read Proust. Naively, I cracked open In Search of Lost Time. It became my Everest. I had to conquer it. It took me two years. If you’re into torture, give it a go. At 1.2 million words, it is one of the longest novels ever written. Second longest is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, which only feels like 1.2 million words.

“A Feeling Of Sadness That Only Bus Stations Have.”

Jack Kerouac never learned to drive. He moved to New York City as a teenager on a scholarship to boarding school and then entered Columbia, so as any smart New Yorker would say, who needs wheels in the city? Through every subsequent adventure, across the country and back, down to Mexico, up from New Orleans, Kerouac always let his buddy Neal Cassady drive. Or he took Greyhound buses.

Paperback Rider

True story: When visiting DC years ago, I went to the Library of Congress on a lark just to see if my book The Dancer was there. Sure enough, it was! Then the other day, I read that In 2003, 2.5 million unsold books from the UK romance publisher Mills & Boon were used in the reconstruction of the M6 motorway. This is the company that bought the rights to my book The Dancer. My book never sold much — in US or UK — but it gives me some sick satisfaction to think that my little paperback might be helping some poor git find his way from Catthorpe, England to Gretna, Scotland.  Such is the stuff of immortality.

Happy belated new year, crime dogs.

You can swim all day in the Sea of Knowledge and not get wet. — Milo in The Phantom Tollbooth

By PJ Parrish

I spent yesterday in the cold rain hanging Christmas lights on my shrubs. And then they didn’t work. Yeah, yeah…I checked them all first. But they pulled a Griswald on me and only half of them went on. An hour later, a yanked them off and tossed them in the trash. Bah humbug.

So I decked the hounds in boughs of holly,  made a Hendricks Floradora martini and, like my lights, got half-lit.

.

Ever wonder where the word humbug came from? It wasn’t Dickens, by the way. It goes back to 1750, first appearing in The Student where it is called “a word very much in vogue with the people of taste and fashion.” This makes me feel marginally better.

A humbug is a deception, a lie. According to The Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose — dontcha love that title, so E.L. James? — to hum in English originally meant “‘to deceive.” It could also come from the Italian uomo bugiardo, which literally means “lying man.”

In the 1961 children’s book The Phantom Tollboth, there’s a large beetle-like insect known as the Humbug, who is a consummate liar. I had never heard of this book before a friend mentioned it in passing recently as one of his favorites and lent me his copy. Bah humbug…okay, so I read it .

The story concerns a sad kid named Milo who, bored to death at school — and by life — gets a mysterious package. Inside is a small tollbooth and a map of the Lands Beyond, leading to the Kingdom of Wisdom. There’s a note — “For Milo, who has plenty of time.” Milo begins a fantasical journey where he meets a companion dog Tock (so named for the alarmclocks in his fur), He leaves behind The Doldrums, and goes to the Word Market, where he mets the Spelling Bee and the lying Humbug, and then on to Dictionopolis. In the Mountains of Ignorance, they fight The Gelatinous Giant. The giant is a green Jello blob who takes a lot of naps, can change shapes on a whim, eats people, bugs and dogs. His weakness is he is afraid of new ideas because they make him sick to his stomach. Milo uses The Box of Words to defeat the giant.

I’m tempted, but I can’t recount it all here — it’s incredibly dense with the kind of details kids adore and double entendre lessons adults should heed. And writers would get  kick out of it. All ends well for Milo. He goes back through the tollbooth, “awakening” back in his bedroom, but convinced his trip was real. He finds a new note — “For Milo, who now knows the way.” The note say that the tollbooth is being sent to another kid who needs help finding direction in life.

So, crime dogs, on this holiday eve, as we look to a new year with hope, I wish you health, happiness with your loved ones, and sanity wherever you can find it. And that your Christmas lights work. Oh yeah, and that you keep writing. May you pick up some good stuff at the Word Market, find your way out of The Doldrums and keep marching on toward the Kingdom of Wisdom. As The Phantom Tollbooth told me:

“Milo continued to think of all sorts of things; of the many detours and wrong turns that were so easy to take, of how fine it was to be moving and, most of all, of how much could be accomplished with just a little thought.”

How fine is it just to be moving.

All I can do is read a book to stay awake. And it rips my life away, but it’s a great escape. — Blind Melon, No Rain.

By PJ Parrish

There’s a drought here in Tallahassee. My lawn is yellow. My herb garden is shriveled. The fire ants mounds are two feet high. Inside my house, the lights in my bathroom suddenly died. I can’t get the microwave to stop blinking ERROR. And my laptop mouse is acting like hamster on meth.

And my brain has stopped working. I can’t get my new short story moving again. And I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write about here today either. My husband sidled in and I whined, “I’ve got nothing to write about.”

“Well, write about that,” he said.

So here we are. I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe in the demon laziness. But after I read Kay’s post here from last Monday on gratitude, I knew I had to stop carping and do something. So I went for a walk. Walking is my mental Senakot. When I got home, I was able to at least face my short story again. Which led me to re-realize — you forget the really simple stuff at times — that I had to go back before I could go forward. So I opened up the file and look a cold hard look at what I had written.

Which brings me back to today’s post. I know we’ve covered this a lot, but I’d like to offer up, yet again, some good ways to get yourself out of a slump:

Take a hike. Get outside and get moving. Even if it’s just 30 minutes. Which is how long it took me to go to ABC Liquor yesterday and get some Hendrick’s Floradora gin.

Write something else. I don’t have any other WIPs right now. But I have you guys. And just the process of writing this blog got my wheels unstuck from the mud. If you have other projects — a story, an free-lance article, a journal entry — switch over for a while. Fingers moving on a keyboard is a good warm-up.

Read something. For inspiration, I chose one of my favorite books, Joyce Carol Oates’ Because it Is Bitter, And Because It Is My Heart. Check out this opening paragraph:

Little Red Garlick, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotted pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River, must not have sunk as he’d been intended to sink, or floated as far. As the morning mist begins to lift from the river a solitary fisherman sights him, or the body he has become, trapped and bobbing frantically in the pilings about thirty feet offshore. It’s the buglelike cries of gulls that alert the fishman — gulls with wide gunmetal-gray wings, dazzling snowy heads and tail feathers, dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched. The kind you think might be a beautiful bird until you get up close.

Watch Something. I get juiced by watching great movies because I learn from screenplays, specifically about how dialogue illuminates character. One of my favorites is Fargo because Marge Gunderson is such a pip. One favorite line:

Say, Lou, didya hear the one about the guy who couldn’t afford personalized plates, so he went and changed his name to J3L2404?

Take a step back. It’s vital to keep your shark-novel moving forward, lest it die. But it doesn’t hurt, when you’re stuck, to go back and re-read and maybe even re-write a little. When I faced my short story again, I realized I had veered off into a bad description ditch. I cut about 250 really lovely words. (There’s a reason they call it a short story) Pruning is vital for gardens and fiction. If you’re surrounded by briar, you can’t see the path.

Come up with an idea then do the opposite. Few of us are brilliantly original on first attempts. To get moving, we resort to stock characters, lazy description, confusing action and the obvious. If your setting is Paris, don’t authomatically plunk the hero down in the Louvre; set your scene in La Goute d’Or, the muslim enclave. Don’t make your sidekick a wizened old cop with a whiskey bottle in his desk; make her the brave tomboy George at Nancy Drew’s side. If you need a plot twist, don’t settle for smelly red herrings or cheap ticks. Oh my god, nobody shot J.R. It was all a dream! What, you mean Bruce Willis is really dead but only the kid can see him?

Phone a friend. I am lucky in that I can call my co-author sister Kelly and together we can always find a solution. Maybe your friend is a critique group pal, someone with a cold eye who wants you to suceed. If you don’t have anyone, make someone up. Picture in your head a discerning reader; would that person let you get away with cardboard characters or a cliched plot? Talk to yourself. Out loud. It’s a conversation with someone who understands you.

And finally…

Keep your butt in the chair. I am really bad at this. I will abandon my post at the first muted trumpet call of the mundane. Laundry needs folding! Dog smells, must bathe! Lights have died in the bathroom so gotta go to get a new dimmer switch! No…stay put. If you shoulder-push on that rock long enough, it will eventually start moving downhill.

Remember, no one ever finished their book while roaming the lighting aisle at Home Depot.

Dance us out, Bee Girl!

By PJ Parrish

When I am anxious, I clean.. And since I am facing a flight to Detroit soon, I’ve gotten a lot done around the house these last couple days. Just hauled three bags to the Goodwill, including my 1990s skinny jeans and a cocktail dress I bought to go to the Edgars and never wore because I couldn’t figure out how to deal with a strapless bra. But my crowning achievement came when I found an old external drive while cleaning out my office.

When I plugged it into the laptop, up popped NINE books my sister Kelly and I had abandoned over the last two decades. They ranged from dumb ideas for our series character (Louis Kincaid goes to Nevada and solves a murder at Burning Man!) to a really gruesome attempt at erotica called Tarentella. (Opens with an American woman ah…bobbing for apples under a table at an Italian restaurant). It was like an out-of-body experience reading this stuff. Who WAS this person who wrote this junk?

In the end, it was humbling but really instructive. It made me realize I learned a lot since 1998. So I thought I’d pass along the five writing lessons I got out of this:

1. Never let backstory go on for four pages or more.
2. Please, dear god, please let something happen.
3. Don’t write action scenes that sound like two squirrels fighting a death match on a metal bird-feeder.
4. Don’t let your protag sit there like a stump.
5. When it comes to description, metaphors and setting the scene, try to not mimic some Forties noir hack.

I’m going to show you a couple of our failures here in the hope you won’t let this happen to you. First up is First Page Self-Flagellation, my attempt at romantic suspense, circa 2005.

FRENCH TWIST

I should have shot him. I should have shot him right where he laid, right between the legs.

Let me tell you how close I came. I actually drew the Glock and leveled it at Sid’s nuts. I aimed at the right nut because I really wanted to hit the left one and I knew from experience that my Glock had a sighting problem to the side.

But I didn’t shoot. And Sid’s left testicle – and Sid — lived to see another day.

No, I eased off that trigger, turned around, and walked out of our bedroom, leaving my husband and his secretary Tammy all tangled up in blue percale. It was the right choice. If I had shot him I would have maybe gone to prison, certainly lost my job, and ruined a brand new set Ralph Lauren Southampton Seabreeze sheets.

I made a choice and I walked out. On Sid. On our remodeled home in Garden City Michigan. On my fifteen years on the Westland Michigan police force. On my idea of everything I ever thought I was supposed to be.

It was a choice that saved Sid’s life.

And maybe mine. Though that part is still up in the air.

“Madame?”

I looked up.

“Voulez-vous prendez un boisson?”

I stared.

The waiter rolled his eyes. “You want a drink?”

“Oh, yeah. Vin. Red. Rouge, I mean.”

The waiter slithered away and I went back to contemplating my new perspective on life. At this particular moment, my perspective is a corner table at Le Select cafe, at the intersection of rue l’Odeon and rue Racine, Paris, France. It’s about as far away from my old perspective as you can get.

I’m a cop, you see. Well, I was a cop. And I was a good cop, logging twenty-five years on the mean streets of suburban Detroit, busting kids for illegal skateboarding, rescuing cats from sewers and breaking up domestics at the Dunroven Retirement Village. I never caught a big case, but I was good. Good enough to make it to junior grade Detective but not good enough to make it to anything else that added one more word on my gold badge – a word like sergeant or lieutenant or God forbid, Captain.

There had been rumors that a female had made Detective Captain once, a long time ago. We had heard her name was Zelda Van Meister and she reportedly was shot and killed during a pursuit sometime around 1966, but no one could find any record of it and she wasn’t listed as one of our fallen officers, so no one seemed to know for sure. The old men who had been around in the sixties wouldn’t speak of her, but the women…

To us, she had become a legend and we spoke of her in whispers, as if she was a powerful spirit who continued to hang around the station to give us strength in mysterious ways.

__________________________

I kind of like the opening paragraph. But as you can see, the rest is backstory gone bad. (It goes on for three more pages). NOTHING HAPPENS. And I relied on TELLING about the protag (nameless!) instead of revealing her background and charcter by SHOWING. Here’s how I would write it now: New stuff in red.

FRENCH TWIST REDUX

I should have shot him. I should have shot him right where he laid, right between the legs.

Let me tell you how close I came. I actually drew my Glock and leveled it at Sid’s nuts. I aimed at the right nut because I really wanted to hit the left one and I knew from experience that my Glock had a sighting problem to the side.

But I didn’t shoot. And Sid’s left testicle – and Sid — lived to see another day.

No, I eased off that trigger, turned around, and walked out of our bedroom, leaving my husband and his secretary Tammy tangled up in blue percale. It was the right choice. If I had shot him I would lost my job as a cop on the Westland Police Force, maybe gone to prison and for sure ruined a brand new set of Ralph Lauren Southampton Seabreeze sheets.

I made a choice. It was a choice that saved Sid’s life. And probably mine. Though that part is still up in the air.

“Madame?”

I looked up.

“Voulez-vous prendez un boisson?”

I stared.

The waiter rolled his eyes. “You want a drink?”

“Oh, yeah. A glass of red wine, please.”

The waiter slithered away and I went back to contemplating my new perspective on life. At this particular moment, my perspective is a table at Cafe L’Alibi on rue Duc in what I’ve come to learn is a dodgier part of Paris. But the one-star hotel next door was all I could afford, and it was far from the Eiffel Tower as you can get, And as far away from my old perspective as I needed.

The wine came, but before I could take a drink, I heard a screech of tires and then a scream.

I looked out toward the street just in time to see two men grab a woman. She was fighting hard, screaming loud. One man ripped her hijab off her head, and as they pushed her into the car, I got a good look at her long black hair, whipping arround her terrified face.

I jumped up and ran toward the car. As it raced away, I caught the last three numbers on the plate — 445. It took me a second to realize my hand was poised on my right hip where my Glock used to be holstered.

See the difference? There’s enough backstory to establish her context professionally and emotionally. She’s trying to escape her past and yet she can’t escape what she is — a good cop. The rest of her backstory, including the cool stuff about Zelda can come in a later chapter. 

LESSON NO. 1: Yes, use some backstory to make us care about the protag, but get the story moving as quickly as you can.

Number 2: This is a stand alone we started very early in our writing partnership, before we decided to do a series instead. We were struggling with plot and our agent suggested some thrillers for us to read to get our gears going. Here goes nuthin:

MEMPHIS BLUES (good lord…)

Richard ran down the alley, gun out, breathing hard. The suspect turned left somewhere between the dumpsters or maybe before them. He couldn’t see. A streetlight flickered. Sirens wailed. Somebody yelled something over the radio but the words were static.

He jumped over a fence. The killer—he thought it was the killer—was a blur in a dark jacket, running ahead. The street names didn’t matter. He thought they were near Cowden Avenue or maybe over by Patterson Street.

The radio squawked again. He shouted into it, “I got him!” or “I lost him!”—he wasn’t sure what he said. It was lost in adrenalin.

A car screeched at the corner. Headlights hit the wall and made everything white. Then dark again. Richard slipped on something—ice, water, whatever—and slammed his shoulder into brick. His gun hit the ground. He picked it up, dropped it again, then ran. His heart hurt. He heard footsteps ahead. Or maybe just echoes.

He thought he saw a figure dart behind a stairwell. He pointed his gun and shouted, “ “Freeze!” But the guy didn’t. He ran harder.

The guy turned another corner. Richard followed but there were two turns, and he wasn’t sure which one. He went right. Wrong one — a dead-end alley. He turned back. The killer was gone.

He ran again anyway. His phone buzzed. His partner’s name flashed. He ignored it. A siren wailed closer. A figure darted ahead. He raised his gun. People screamed…people just people in the way. Richard lowered the gun and kept running.

At the next block, he stopped. Nothing. No sound. No one there. Then a door slammed somewhere. Richard ran to it, shouldered it open, went up stairs that smelled like fried food. A flouresent bulb blinked overhead. The hallway twisted left, right, then dead-ended.

He stopped. Listened. Nothing. Just his own breathing and a TV in another room. He looked around. Empty. He holstered his gun. Outside, another siren screamed. He leaned against the wall, dizzy, straining to hear if the killer was above or below or anywhere at all.

He couldn’t tell.

______________________

As we say here often, ACT first and EXPLAIN later. But do you see the problem? The chase goes on way too long, it’s numbingly repetitious, and as noisy as two quarreling squirrels.

We wrote this way back in 1998, and I can’t think of any way to salvage it. Because Richard is a cipher. He lacks personal context. He’s a faceless cop chasing a faceless guy with not a hint of motive. And Richard seems sort of dumb, doesn’t he? His thinking is fuzzy. (“He couldn’t tell…He couldn’t see…”) We confused obtuseness for suspense. Remember Hitchcock’s movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much? This is the man who knows too little.

LESSON NO. 3: Yes, open with a juicy action scene, but find a way to humanize your protag in the process. Make us care about them. And make sure your action choreography is fresh and vivid. 

Here comes number four. Try your best to stay awake.

MIDNIGHT PROWL

Sirens had been screaming all night long. A cop had been wounded in a gun fight on Getwell and Winchester, in the parking lot of the Pink Pony Strip club. A woman had been killed in a downtown alley for twenty-two dollars and a cheap gold crucifix. A fifteen year old boy lay in the morgue, a victim of a hit and run.

Nathan Snow glanced at his watch. It was not yet seven p.m. on a Friday night.

His eyes drifted to the short stack of folders sitting on the edge of his desk, near the Corona typewriter. Two were domestic violence homicides where the husband was caught standing over his wife’s dead body. The third was a thug who shot a rival in front of ten witnesses on Jackson Avenue in broad daylight. And to make his work even easier, all three pled out. Short investigations. No trials.

He sat back in the chair, stretched and yawned, his gaze continuing to drift across the doodled ink blotter, the blue MPD mug that held his pens and pencils, finally stopping on his detective’s shield laying near the phone. It was a beautiful badge, as far badges went. Under the glaring florescent lights, the plating looked like it could be 24K gold. The only other spot of color on it was navy blue, the wavy curve of letters that read Memphis Police.

He reached down for his mug, taking a sip of the cold coffee, the bang of the door drawing his eyes up. Two detectives come into the squad room. Breaths still labored, jackets dusty from a take-down. Neither of them looked his way as they headed directly into George DeMille’s office, the Detective Captain of Homicide. The thin wood door closed hard, shaking the wall.

_______________

I’ve read worse. But I think you know the issue. It’s all thinking, wool-gathering, and gorming out. Yes, we are TOLD that a cop has been wounded, a woman killed, and a kid died in a hit and run. (Past tense). But what are we SHOWN? The protag Nathan sitting at his desk, yawning. So are we. Nathan is doing nothing. Even when two cops come in breathless and dirty from a “take down,” Nathan remains inert. I don’t remember this story well enough to suggest a make-over. But Nathan needs to get some dirt on him fast.

LESSON NO. 4: Never let your protag be a passive observer in your opening chapter(s). Don’t let some nameless spear-carrier steal the spotlight. Show something happening to your hero or at least hint that it will soon.

And that leave us with the final entry. I don’t blame you if you’ve left by now, but I think you might enjoy this one. It will make you feel like a better writer.

MOON OVER MACAO

I landed at night that wasn’t exactly night because the lights on Avenida da Praia Grande keep rinsing the sidewalks with this lemony glare that looked like the reflection off a fish you don’t want to eat.

Mateo Hernández, I thought, you should have stayed in Colón or at least Taos where the street names don’t have accents that make your tongue snag on your teeth. But here I was, boots knocking on the tile of the ferry terminal walkway at the Outer Harbour, surrounded by people pushing plastic suitcases that squeaked like they had small mice trapped inside.

I tried to walk like I knew where I was going—past the Rotunda de Carlos da Maia where buses the color of pea soup ground around in loops that seemed designed to make you dizzy. I cut toward Avenida de Amizade because someone on the boat had said casinos are good for getting lost in, and getting lost sounded like the opposite of being found, because I knew I was being nose-trailed by a person with shoes that slapped the ground with a rubbery insistence. Probably just a kid with a pineapple bun, except the shoes sounded the same every time I stalled at a crosswalk. When I paused to stare into a pawnshop window, where a gold watch glowed like a jaundiced sun, the shoes stopped, too.

I cut right on Rua da Palha, a wide street with scooters and taxis that grazed your hip bones like impatient fish. I kept going past stalls selling almond cookies and beef jerky sheets that looked like shiny red roofs, and I told myself don’t look back. But I looked back anyway because I’m not a hero. That’s when I saw a guy in a gray hoodie with the face of a man who lost a bet with his barber. He looked up. Down. Up. He pretended not to know me, which is easy because he didn’t.

There was another man, smoking under a dragon-stamped awning, and maybe he was watching me, too. Maybe everyone was watching me. The tiles were slippery, and my right heel kissed an old gum spot and stuck for a moment—then I was moving again, past a noodle shop where a woman slapped dough the way an aunt slaps your arm when she wants you to eat more. Her radio chirped a pop song from Cotai that had a chorus like “ai ai ai,” which is exactly how my knees felt.

________________________

There’s more but you’ve suffered enough. It’s tragically bad. Yes, we wrote it. (Kelly has visited Macao several times). But it’s a ringer. We wrote it for a workshop we taught about five years ago, focusing on description, scene setting and metaphors. We wanted our students to understand that it’s vital to world-build your settings, that metaphors can move your readers. We purposely overwrote to make our point. I hope you got as good a laugh out of this as I did.

LESSON NO. 5: Put a rubber band around your wrist. Every time you are tempted to insert a cliche, adjective, adverb or metaphor, snap it. Of course you need modifiers, and a well-turned metaphor at the right moment is a thing of beauty. But less is always more. And when it comes to creating your setting, bring it to life with clarity and without cliches. Not just with random street names you looked up on Google Street View.

And that, my friends, brings me to the end of my sad foray into the past. Like my skinny jeans and my misbegotten cocktail dress, some manuscripts should never be seen in public. I hope you have a few hidden in a hard drive somewhere.

One final thought. When I was re-reading my old stuff, I remembered something I had heard Michael Connelly say. By his late 20s, he had earned his chops as a crime reporter. But he wanted to write a novel. He made a deal with his wife that he would get four nights a week to work on his book.

Fast forward ten years. He had finished two novels. Both unpublished. Because he knew in his bones they weren’t good enough. He started a third called The Black Echo. It got published. It won the Edgar. Last I heard, he was still doing okay in the writing business.

Declutter, crime dogs. Put the past away. But always keep going forward.