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.

By PJ Parrish

I was about fourteen when I read The Collector by John Fowles. Probably too young for a novel about a lonely pyschopath who abducts a young woman and keeps her captive in a remote English farmhouse. But in those days, during my peripatetic teenage existance, I was captive in whatever library was nearby. So I read a lot of inappropriate stuff, including most of Nabokov. Even today, novels about captives get to me, in a way other thrillers do not. I don’t mean thrillers wherein a child is kidnapped and the clock is ticking. Or even wherein the victim is long gone and the cold case haunt-hunt is on. I like the books where the captive still has a voice. This is what we have here with today’s First Page Critique. Not merely a captive. But a voice. Let’s read and then talk.

Never Spoken

She was eight years in chains. I think I’ve been in this place, one window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, bed, water, battery radio and a book, about 25 weeks now. She endured eight years in the book. I am a novice.

I’ve talked to no one. Well, I have grunted with; the faceless person that brings me food and water each day, but no talk.

I know why I am here. Money of course. Someone is probably telling some grand story about political values to those who will listen, the press loves that stuff. But I am pretty sure it is money.

And I am fine. No injuries. I sleep at night, read during the day, listen to the news, watch out the window. I am fed fresh food. Better than the packaged crap from Tesco. They probably do this to keep the evidence trail concealed. In the book she said she never knew if they were going to rape her or just kill her. They did neither, but they fed her well. Fresh food, no packaging.

She said rape or “just kill”. She thought killing was better.

I have learned sounds. In the book she says that where senses lack, sound is easiest to be entertained with. She said not to think about the why, as that will drive you crazy. She said make it all a game and play with it. So, I play with my senses. I didn’t at first, but it’s been a half year now. It is a game.

I can hear vehicles come and go outside. There is a door a few rooms away, that gives a creak, just before it latches with a click. Water runs in the wall from above, toilet flush or drain. I am starting to be annoyed by it, as if I am the second-floor tenant in a three-floor walk-up.

I hear the coffee in the morning, a moka pot, he makes good coffee. I hear his footsteps when he is walking to my hatch. I call it the doggie door, big enough to pass things through but too small to climb through unless I starve myself.

And I have the book. A book on being a hostage in first person narrative. A book he gave me without instruction, a guide on how to survive or die, my choice.

_________________________________________

I really like this submission. Yes, it has a couple of issues, including with its opening paragraph, which with a little tweaking can go from good to really tantalyzing. We’ll get to that in a second. But allow me a little rope so we can talk first about this sub-genre of captive narrators. What interests me in these novels is not so much the solving of the crime as the psychological push-and-pull in the narrative (or in many cases dual narratives).

In John Fowles The Collector, we are introduced to the abductor, Frederick Clegg. This first person narrive sets up his chilling, self-justifying thought process and his obsession with his victim Miranda. But part 2 switches to Miranda’s diary, and we see her as a completely different person that Clegg believes her to be. We get her perspective on her own fears, inner demons and, this being John Fowles, her thoughts on class struggle.

{{{{Spoiler alert}}}}

The ending is bleak. Clegg finds her diary and plans a suicide pact. Miranda dies from neglect. After he reads in the diary that she never loved him, he buries her body. The final scene is Clegg in a nearby town, stalking another young girl who resembles Miranda.

Another captive novel I liked is Chevy Steven’s Still Missing. The first person narrator is abducted but the narrative toggles between then and eight years later, where she is trying to re-piece her psyche via psychiatry sessions. (Hence the title, she is still missing).

And so to our submission. Like Chevy Stevens does, our writer relies heavily on sensory details to create tension and gain our sympathy. Here’s Steven’s description of the abduction moment:

I realized he was too close behind me. Something hard pressed into my lower back.
I tried to turn around, but he grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head back so fast and so painfully I thought a piece of my scalp would tear off. My heart slammed against my rib cage, and blood roared in my head. I willed my legs to kick out, run— to do something, anything— but I couldn’t make them move.

“Yes, Annie, that’s a gun, so please listen carefully. I’m going to let go of your hair and you’re going to remain calm while we take a walk out to my van. And I want you to keep that pretty smile on your face while we do that, okay?”

“I—I can’t—” I can’t breathe.

Voice low and calm against my ear, he said, “Take a deep breath, Annie.”

I sucked in a lungful.

“Let it out nice and easy.”

I exhaled slowly.

“Again.” The room came back into focus.

“Good girl.” He released my hair.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I could feel the gun grinding into my spine as he used it to push me forward. He urged me out the front door and down
the steps, humming a little melody. While we walked to his van, he whispered into my ear.

“Relax, Annie. Just pay attention to what I tell you and we won’t have any problems. Don’t forget to keep smiling.”

As we moved farther from the house I looked around— somebody had to be seeing this— but no one was in sight. I could hear small sounds behind me, could tell he was doing something back there, preparing for something. I waited for the click of the gun being cocked. My body shook with terror. Was this it for me? My life was going to end with me facedown in the back of a van? I felt a needle stab into the back of my thigh. I fl inched and tried to reach back to touch it. Fire crawled up my leg.

When she wakes up, again Steven keeps with SENSORY DETAILS: the feel of a scratchy blanket, the faint scent of perfume. A pillowcase in the wrong color. This is what our writer today is doing well — the creak of a door and a click as it closes, the smell of coffee, the sound of running water and a toilet flushing above. The writer is giving us JUST ENOUGH sensory detail so we can FEEL her limited existence. The writer is trying to show us, not tell us, the horror.

Another thing I like about this submission: The mysterious book. It is introduced in the first paragraph, a veritable Chekov’s gun. Chevkov advised other writers: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Our writer tells us book was given to her so she can learn from a previous hostage how to survive. Nice! I have to trust this book will figure prominently in the plot. If not, well, I will sic Chekov’s ghost on you, dear writer.

Now, one last comment before we go to a little line editing. That opening paragraph. It has two terrific teases inbedded in it: The book. And the fact the book’s writer endured her captivity for eight years, and our narrative has a long rough road ahead. A really good set-up.

But if I might, I am going to suggest that the paragraph can be better. It’s a tad confusing as it. I don’t normally rewrite, but I can’t help it here. Maybe something like this:

She was here for eight years. I think I’ve been in this place for only about six months now. I am not chained like she was. I can move around my prison some. One window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, a bed, a water bucket, a battery radio. And one book. The book she left here. The book she wrote. Eight years…

I am a novice.

Now this might not exactly serve your purpose. But the book is THE TELLING DETAIL. I strongly suggest you break it out on its own. I also think the novice line needs to stand on its own, as it goes right to the heart of her mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I will ask the group: Do you think this needs a tad more emotion in her thoughts? She seems awfully at ease with her situation, given that the writer stresses what is tolerable, rather than terrifying, about it. I get no really gripping sense of terror from our narrator.

A quick line edit, as this is pretty clean. My comments in red.

She was eight years in chains. If you want to keep this detail, you have to tell us if the narrator is also chained. If you mean this symbolically, I don’t think you need it. I think I’ve been in this place, one window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, bed, water, battery radio and a book, about 25 weeks now. She endured eight years in the book. I am a novice. Like this paragraph kicker. But note rewrite suggestion.

I’ve talked to no one. Well, I have grunted with; the faceless person that brings me food and water small detail: You said she has water in her “cell.” each day, but no talk. She has a hatch or dog door, no? Can she see anything? A telling detail: what kind of shoes does he wear? Beat-up sneakers or shiny broques hint at something. You need to start building the bad guy in the reader’s imagination.

I know why I am here. Money of course. Someone is probably telling some grand story about political values to those who will listen. The press loves that stuff. But I am pretty sure it is money. You said she has a radio. Surely in 6 months she has heard news of her abduction. Why be so vague? WHO IS MISSING HER? You missed a chance to drop a nugget about her background. If this is about money, she comes from wealth, no? Can you give a hint? 

And I am fine. No injuries. I sleep at night, read during the day, listen to the news, watch out the window. I am fed fresh food. Better than the packaged crap from Tesco. So we are in UK. I only know that cuz I Googled Tesco. Might want to drop another hint. They probably do this to keep the evidence trail concealed. I don’t understand this line. In the book she said she never knew if they were going to rape her or just kill her. They did neither, but they fed her well. Fresh food, no packaging.

She said rape or “just kill”. She thought killing was better. Are you going to quote from the book at all? I think you should as it not only creates tension but HUMANIZES the previous hostage! You might want to start here. Rather than TELL us what she wrote why not begin to show it. Something like:

It was one of the many lines from the book I had committed to memory: “I don’t know if they are going to rape me or just kill me. I now pray it’s the second.”

I have learned sounds. A problem with first person is you have to use a lot of “I” to open graphs;.you have three in a row. Something simple like inversion: Sounds are important, I have found. In the book she says that where senses lack, sound is easiest to be entertained with. She said not to think about the why, as that will drive you crazy. She said make it all a game and play with it. So, I play with my senses. I didn’t at first, but it’s been a half year now. It is a game.

I can hear vehicles come and go outside. Try to make this work harder. Does she hear tires on gravel? The wheeze of an old engine. Can you make her more perceptive via what she hears, that she thinks she’s in the country vs a city? Six months is a long time. WHAT HAS SHE LEARNED??? There is a door a few rooms away,she can’t know that, only that it is nearby that gives a creak, just before it latches with a click. Water runs in the wall from above, toilet flush or drain. I am starting to be annoyed by it, as if I am the second-floor tenant in a three-floor walk-up. Again, she sounds oddly blase about her situation. Annoyed? 

I hear the coffee in the morning, a moka pot, A have a moka; it makes no particular noise so your sensory detail is off here. How can she know it’s a moka? He important misstep here. You said earlier she “grunts” at a faceless person who brings her food. Is this the same person? Make it clear that we are dealing with either one captor or a team. makes good coffee. I hear his footsteps when he is walking to my hatch. I call it the doggie door, big enough to pass things through but too small to climb through unless I starve myself.

And I have the book. A book on being a hostage in first person narrative. A book he gave me without instruction, a guide on how to survive or die, my choice. Again, look at your use of the pronoun “he.” If you are creating a John Fowles-esque bad guy, start to lay out the bread crumb hints more strongly. HE is faceless, soundless — for SIX MONTHS? Think about doing more with HIM. 

So, good work, writer. I think you’re off to a roaring good start. You have a voice. But now think about adding some emotion to your narrator’s voice. Watch for places to insert more details that start building up her background. And, most important, find ways to make your protagonist more than just a food-bearing schlub at the dog door. Right now, all we know is that he makes a darn good cup of coffee. Even this early in your story, he needs to be a threat — to her and for the readers to care about her.

By PJ Parrish

There are countless good non-fction books out there on how to write novels. They’ve come up in our conversations here mutliple times over the years. Stephen King’s On Writing is probably most quoted here. Sometimes for its basic advice on craft:

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

But sometimes for the personal truths he reveals that resonate with anyone facing a blank page:

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Man, I can relate to that one. Or I suspect any of you out there can who have heard variations of “When you gonna get a real job?” Or “Why don’t you write someone good?”

Another books on craft have illuminated my way through the craft caverns. I love Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting. Because we can all learn stuff from good screenwriters. One of my fave quotes:

You can be near the cliché, you can dance around it, you can run right up to it and almost embrace it. But at the last second you must turn away. You must give it a twist.

But my favorite book on writing is Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. This single quote helped change my writing style. It also helped me let go of my obsession with geometrically folded towels:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Okay, so I’m still anal about my linen closet but I no longer restack the dishwasher after my husband does it and when he helps me decorate the Christmas tree, I don’t rehang the ornaments after he goes to bed. I am still going to die someday, but at least I don’t fret about getting caught in old underwear when it happens.

Since I have been doing a lot of reading lately due to vacation, family business, and a bout with the RSV virus, I have also come to realize that novels have much to teach us about craft. Let me suggest just a few and what they have taught me.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book gave me two gifts: First, that theme is the backbone of every memorable story. Beloved grapples with huge social themes rooted in our complex history, but even our modest crime genre novels are elevated when the writer moors the story in theme. Beloved also taught me a valuable lesson early in my writing career: that I didn’t have the craft chops to handle a two-story plot. Morrison seamlessly toggles between two parallel stories; I learned that I had to abandon one of my early parallel plots to make my story work. Know your limits, perhaps?

Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.

This book drove home for me what Kurt Vonnegutt preaches: Every character must want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Character motivation is one of the pillars of great fiction, and Clarice Starling is a stellar example of how “want” must go beyond the superficial. What does Clarice want?

1. To catch Buffalo Bill before he kills Catherine. (classic ticking clock plot)
2. To prove herself among the male FBI trainees. (classic underdog story)
3. To impress her boss Jack Crawford (in the book a relationship is implied)
4. To live up to the memory of her beloved sheriff/father who was killed in line of duty.
5. To silence her own inner demons. After her dad’s death, she is taken in by a relative on a sheep ranch where she tries to save a lamb from slaughter and as punishment is sent to an orphanage. (A story she reveals to Lecter). The book ends with Clarice sleeping peacefully. (The movie ending is better, imho).

The five levels of “want” are criticial to our understanding of Clarice, as they represent a descent into her psychological oubliette — symbolically as unsettling as the horrific basement well where Catherine is kept hostage. This relates to an exchange between Lecter and Clarice regarding Buffalo Bills’ motivation:

What need does he serve by killing, Clarice? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

As writers, we must know what our characters want. Not just at the superficial level. We must be willing to explore the deepest dungeons of what they covet.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I  read this book 20 years ago on a trip to Chennai, India. It was August and it was so hot the aspalt steamed at night. There was something jarring in the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, in the cacaphony of bright colors, noise, and relentless press of too many human beings. In some moments, the city’s chaos felt apocalyptic. The imagery of McCarthy’s book haunted me:

Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. … The incinerated corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

There is one scene I cannot get out of my head. The man and boy, surviving cannibal “bad guys,” discover a cache of canned food in a cellar. They sit in the rubble and eat peaches, a symbol of the lost world and of hope. What did this book teach me about writing? That imagery is the lifeblood of any powerful story. Not just passages of description but of that one telling detail, that can encapsulate your entire theme — peaches. McCarthy’s spare but evocative imagery taught me to be braver — and briefer — in my own descriptions. Less is more. But the “less” must be more effective.

Oh geez. I’ve flapped my gums too long again. I have four other books I wanted to talk about here, but I’ve run long. Quickly: Rowlings’ Harry Potter books taught me that a swift-flowing and sure-footed plot can make up for meh writing. Madame Bovary gave me the courage to write a male protag. (Louis Kincaid, c’est moi!) Charlotte’s Web (yes you can — indeed, must — kill off a sympathetic character).

What novels have made you a better writer?

“You do not realize how the headlines that make daily history affect the muscles of the human body.” — Martha Graham

By PJ Parrish

So, how you feeling today? Not so good? Stomach in knots? Head hurt for no good reason? Can’t sleep? Maybe you need to stop doom-scrolling on Facebook. Maybe you need to turn off cable TV.

Or maybe you just need a good walk in the woods.

I and others here have written often about how getting off your keister and going out in the fresh air is good for your well-being. And, more to the point for us crime dogs, how it helps you get the writing muscles going. So when I was paging through the New York Times book section Sunday, I was delighted to come upon an essay about just this subject, and I knew I had to share it with you.

The author, Dwight Garner, writes about the deep connection between reading, writng and physical health. But he admits that writers who work out are just not his kind of people. (“I run only when chased,” he admits). Writing is a sedentary job, he notes, and goes on to quote Harold Pinter that “intellectual arses wobble best.”

He seems a bit awestruck, though, by those authors who are exercise nuts. Dan (Da Vinci Code) Brown has his computer programmed to freeze for 60 seconds every hour so he can stop and do push-ups and sit-ups. Jim Harrison told the Paris Review that “I dance for a half-hour a day to Mexican reggae music with 15-pound dumbbells. I guess it’s aerobic and the weights keep your arms and chest in shape.” Now that I know this about Harrison, his books make a lot more sense to me.

There’s one basic problem with exercise, Garner asserts — it’s boring.

So you have to find ways to fool yourself into thinking it’s not. Boris Johnson, the ex-PM of Britain, claims that the only way he can do his daily run is if he recites poetry, specifically The Iliad, out loud in various voices. I’ll leave it to you to fill in the audio-visual there. Here’s a little help:

I used to listen to my iPod during my daily walks, singing as I went. But lately, during my 4-mile turns around the lake in the woods, I’ve taken to holding conversations with myself in French. I don’t know what’s more startling to my fellow path-mates. Hearing me belt out Bohemian Rhapsody or practicing “Un ver vert est dans un verre vert.” (a green worm is in a green glass).

I’m still up in New Jersey on family business and I am not getting outside much. And the only thing my brother-in-law seems to get on his TV is Say Yes To The Dress. So I am reading for hours a day. Reading is a lot like exercise. If you don’t do it regularly, you can lose the urge. Right now, I am working my way slowly through The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels by Pullitzer Prize winner John Meacham. It is an elegant, troubling, and ultimate inspiring recounting of America’s dark history. “In our finest hours,” he writes, the soul of the country manifests itself in an inclination to open our arms rather than to clench our fists.”

This is my balm until I can get moving again. As Don DeLillo said once, “I work in the morning at a manual typewriter. I do about four hours then I go running. This helps me shake off one world and enter another.”

I’m thinking of taking up yoga again. My physical therapist thinks this is a grand idea for my poor back. I dunno. I used to be quite the yoga-doer, could even do a proper head-stand and a serviceable crow pose. But I was never able to get that quiet-the-brain thing down pat. The world was always too much with me.

As the English novelist Angela Carter wrote, “Yoga improves one posture but not one’s tranquility.”

So that’s my new plan. Turn off the TV, return to yoga. Keep going for long walks, leaving early and taking the dog. Thanks for listening today. On this quiet muggy Sunday here in New Jersey, writing even just a silly blog post makes me feel better. May you find your own serenity in our roiling sea.

Dear crime dogs. Due to an unexpected family emergency, I am en route today to New Jersey. Not sure when I will be back or when I will have extra time. Didn’t have time to finish my planned post on anti-heroes. Will save my notes for my next round. So forgive me today for re-posting an old topic dear to my heart. Will try to weigh in during layover in Chicago. Thanks for your patience!

By PJ Parrish

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”–James Baldwin

I wanted to be a ballet dancer. This was way back in grade school, when I was as round as a beachball and rather lost. So I bugged my dad until he let me enroll in Miss Trudy’s School of Dance and Baton Twirling.

Did I mention I was chubby? Did I mention I had no talent? Neither stopped me. I had a ball trying and to this day, I can remember every step of my first recital dance. I eventually lost the weight but never the desire to dance. So around age 30, I took up lessons again. I did pretty good. Until I got to pointe. You know, the part where you shoe-horn your feet into those pretty pink satin shoes with a hard box at end and then you’re supposed to just rise up on your toes?

It hurts like hell.

So I gave up. Did I mention I had no talent?

Flash forward. I became a dance critic. Those who can, do. Those who can’t, well…

I got to meet and interview almost every famous dancer of my era, including Barshnikov, Margot Fonteyn, Bob Fosse, you name it, I also got to cover the birth of the Miami City Ballet, and became friends with the artistic director the late Edward Villella. One day, he asked me if I wanted to be in The Nutcracker. In the first act party scene where the parents do a little minuet-type of dance. I accepted. So I danced, in front of 5,400 people. I didn’t screw up. It was one of the most memorable nights of my life. To quote one of my favorite writers, Emily Dickinson:

I cannot dance upon my Toes—
No Man instructed me—
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,

This is my round-about way of getting to my topic — talent vs technique. See, I had the desire, but I didn’t have the body type, the turn-out of the hip joints. I knew the steps, sure, but I didn’t have that vital muscle memory that comes to all dancers after years and years of learning their craft. I didn’t have the music inside me that separates the mere dancer from the artist.

So it is, I believe, with writers.

Years ago, my friend Reed Farrel Coleman wrote an article in Crime Spree Magazine titled “The Unspoken Word.” It was about his experience as an author-panelist at a writers conference. Reed was upset because he thought the conference emphasized technique to the exclusion of talent.

Reed wrote: “To listen how successful writing was presented [at the SleuthFest conference], one might be led to believe that it was like building a model of a car or a jet plane. It was as if hopeful writers were being told that if everyone had the parts, the decals, the glue, the proper lighting, etc. to build this beautiful model and then all they needed was the instruction manual. Nonsense! Craft can get you pretty damned far, but you have to have talent, too. Writing is no more like building a model than throwing a slider or composing a song.”

At the time, I was the president of the Florida chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and our board decided, after much debate, to purposely steer SleuthFest toward the writers “workshop” conference. We did it because attendees told us they didn’t want any more authors getting up there just flapping their gums telling tired war stories. They wanted authors to pull back the green curtain and show how it is done. They wanted to hear authors talk about how they created memorable characters, how they maintained suspense, how they built a structure, why they chose a particular sub-genre. That’s what we gave them.

You know, sort of what we try to do where at The Kill Zone.

But Reed did raise an interesting question in his article — can novel writing really be taught? I think it can and should be. I think unpublished folks can go to workshops, read books, and learn the basics about plotting, character development, the arc of suspense, the constructs of good dialog.

Does that mean they have the stuff they need to be a successful writer? No, it only means they might — if they work hard — have a chance of mastering their craft. And I don’t care how talented you are, you aren’t going anywhere without craft.

Let’s go to the easy metaphor here — sports. A person may be born with a natural ability for basketball. They may be tall, able to shoot hoops with accuracy and be a fast runner. But that’s not enough. There was this guy who played for the Chicago Bulls…I forget his name. He didn’t make his high school’s varsity basketball team until his junior year, and when he got to University of North Carolina, he told the coach he wanted to be the best ever. Yeah, he had talent. But he worked like a dog. He became the best.

When I teach writing workshops, I preface everything with this one statement: I can teach you the elements of craft but I can’t teach you talent. Anyone can learn to hit a baseball. But only a few are going to have Ted Williams’ eye. The rest are going to be the John Oleruds of the world — competent major league role players. And what’s wrong with that if you can at least get to The Bigs, have a healthy backlist and maybe take the kids to Disney World on your royalties?

Which brings me back to James Baldwin’s quote. There are, indeed, many “talented ruins” out there. And there are many not-so-talented writers making a good living from their books. Some even become bestsellers.

So where to I come down on the talent question? I agree with Reed. All good writers have some talent. But I also believe you can’t have talent without craft and desire. Peter Benchley once said: “It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.” True, Jaws is a little cheesy, but it was one of the greatest serial killer thrillers ever imagined.

By PJ Parrish

A couple weeks ago, I posted about a writer who was having problems taming her backstory beast. Click here to review. She was really struggling because she was beginning to realize she actually had TWO main plots but one was disguising itself as backstory.

It got me thinking about simple story structure. Which is never really simple.

Simple explanation: Story structure (also known as narrative structure or plot structure) is a way of ordering all of the events in your book. Every story has a beginning, middle and end.

Not so simple part: There are myriad ways you can present your events in a story. And that’s what got my writer friend in trouble. She was having a really hard time figuring out how to structure her story. I suspect many of you out there have fought the same battle.

I often think of plot structure as architecture. There are countless ways to build a house. You can have a simple ranch. This is your basic whodunit, thriller or romance with a solid linear plot. You go in the door and progress easily through the rooms. It might be a small ranch house; it might be a grand one. But it is always built to lead you through with logic, harmony and balance. Call it fictional feng shui.

You can have a three-story filigreed French colonial. Twisting subplots, big cast of characters, high intrigue, multiple points of view, complex time-shifting narrative, unreliable narrators, multiple suspects. (James Ellroy’s LA Confidental comes to mind) See photo below!

Then there are the butt-ugly houses. Maybe they started out as a basic ranch but the writer lost control and start just tacking on action scenes, distracting subplots, and dumb secondary characters, hoping this would dazzle readers and hide the sad fact that the writer didn’t really know what the hell they are trying to say to begin with. (See this mess below)

Or sometimes, writers can’t figure out what KIND of book they’re writing. They deperately mix sub-genres (am I writing a a cozy or hardbioled? Should I give my hero a girlfriend? Maybe he needs a dog who helps him solve cases!) and they end up with something like this:

And then there are the tri-level builders. This is where I see writers mostly fail. You remember these houses from the 50s and 60s. You go in the door but you can’t decide whether to go up, down or sideways. Is that the basement or the rec room? And where the hell is the john? This, I think, is what happened to my writer. She had two main plots, a couple subplots and she just couldn’t figure out the best way to get in the door. 

I love ranch houses. They are simple, linear, and you can’t fall down the stairs or get lost in them. For all you scholarly crime dogs out there, this basic ranch house plot structure has a fancy name —  The Fichtean Curve. John Gardner usually gets credit for this in his 1983 book The Art of Fiction. But this sturdy structure has been basis for countless novels, especially commercial fiction.

Let’s break down the architecture. (I’m going to rely on Jaws as my example, because it’s a basic thriller plot that all of you know.)

Step 1: Rising Action

The story starts with some kind of inciting incident. What our own James calls a break in the norm. A murder, an abduction, a crisis of some kind that gets the narrative ball rolling. In Jaws, in the opening scene, a skinnydipping girl is devoured by a shark on Amity Island.

The main character has to WANT something. (to solve the case, save the child, catch the serial killer. And the WANT relates, in the best fiction, to some inner conflict for the hero. In Jaws, Chief Brody needs to figure out how to catch the serial killer shark.

The plot progresses through a series of crises wherein the protag faces set-backs that raise the stakes and things become more personal to the protag. In Jaws, Brody faces myriad obstacles, including the dumb mayor, free-lancing yahoos in skiffs, his own fear of water, and eventually the Ahab-ian shark-hunter Quint. Quint also represents one of the most effective tension-creating devices in rising action — a riff in the team.

Step 2: the Climax

Rinsing action is the bulk of your structure, but the climax is the apex. It could be a final battle or confrontation, a big reveal or giant plot twist. In Jaws, of course, the climax builds as the Orca slowly gets destroyed, Quint gets eaten, Hooper is lost, and Brody becomes isolated on the sinking mast, praying his last bullet will hit its target. Which it does in spectacular fashion.

Step 3: Falling Action

Also called the denouement. The bad guy is vanquished. The child is saved. The case is solved. We get to take a well-earned breath. Any plot loose ends are wrapped up. (Although not all stories have an extended falling action. Jaws’s denouement is brief.) But beyond tying things up, the purpose of falling action is also to give you the writer an opportunity to emphasize the theme of your story, and stress how the hero has been impacted.  It’s not how the detective works the case. It’s how the case works on the detective.

One last point, because I’ve gone long here today. There are many other ways to structure your story. And depending on how firm your grasp is on your craft, you might be comfortable with more complex architecture. We can talk about that another day.  But when it doubt, bet it all on the ranch.

By PJ Parrish

I was sitting in my favorite breakfast place, dipping my rye into my sunny-side-ups and reading an old paperback that I had found at a yard sale. It was by a mega-bestselling author, and frankly, I was smugly happy that I had paid only 50 cents for it.

I looked up to see a familar face. It was Tom S., one of my pickleball peeps. He’s sort of annoying, on court and off, the kind of guy who slams the ball at your head and then disingenuously apologizes for almost taking out your eye. So when he asked if he could join me, I was dearly tempted to go with the truth. But no…I try to play nice, on court and off.

“Sure, have a seat,” I said cordially.

He sat down, his eyes slipping secretly to the paperback lying wantonly by my coffee mug. “I see,” he said insightfully, “that you are reading a book by XX.”

“Yes,” I said affirmatively, nodding energetically.

“Do you like it?” he asked inquiringly.

I wasn’t sure how to answer. See, Tom’s trying to write a book and my kind-hearted sister Kelly had recently offered to give him a quick critique. His WIP was a hot mess but she patiently offered Tom some some good tips about plot structure, the differences between thrillers and mysteries, and character building.

Tom wisely picked up on my silence. “So,” he said interrogatively. “I take it you don’t like the book?”

“It’s sort of meh,” I said flatly.

“In what way?” he asked inquisitively.

“Well, I can’t quite put my finger on it,” I said perplexedly.

“How is the plotting?” he asked ploddingly.

“The plot was okay. But it’s sort of falling apart toward the end,” I added brokenly.

“That’s too bad,” he said sympathetically. “Anything else?”

“The characters were okay but kind of cardboard,” I said woodenly.

“Really?” he said shockingly.

“Yes,” I acknowledged.

“But this is a New York Times bestseller,” he interjected suddenly, jabbing at the book pointedly with his extended right index finger. “It got great blurbs. And all the reviewers loved it.”

“Well,” I said deeply, with a exhalation of a sigh. “I just don’t know what it was about the book that I found tiresome but there was something.”

Tom gave me a nod of his head, shaking it up and down, and then added a small, understanding smile, displaying his Chiclet teeth. “Well,” he said philosophically. “Some books are just like that.”

And with that, Tom rose and sauntered away, slowly and casually, slipping out the door, sidling across the parking lot, and disappearing into the almost rainy, slightly foggy, early morning Michigan mist.

I was left with my bad book and my thoughts. I was thinking about all the good advice I had heard over the years at all the writers conferences I had attended. Thinking about all the great panels I had sat on, even a really special heated one about talent versus technique. I was thinking, too, about all the wonderful posts here at The Kill Zone that tackle such a wide range of topics on our craft — everything from yanking yourself out of the muddy middle to the sins of the semi-colon.

Gina the waitress refilled my coffee and I returned to my mega-bestseller. Only a couple chapters to go, and even though I knew in my heart I should have tossed the book aside a long time ago, I was determined to finish it. Maybe I just wanted to get my full 50-cents worth. Then it came, this sentence:

“I could have saved her,” he whispered quietly.

I turned the book to its cover and looked at the author’s name. It was in huge block letters and bright neon pink, the name bigger than the title.

I flashbacked to a panel I moderated years ago at Sleuthfest. Robert Crais was our guest of honor and he was waxing eloquent about our craft. But it was one sentence he said in his keynote address that I was remembering at that moment: “Adverbs are not your friend.”

He didn’t say it lightly. He didn’t it dramatically. He didn’t even say it succinctly. He just said it.

By PJ Parrish

This was a good week. Found out my dog Archie doesn’t need $800 in dental work. My physical therapy is working wonders on my bad back. And best, I finally got some traction on a short story that I agreed to do for an anthology. In honor of all this, I think I deserve a break. Actually, I admit it. I just ran out of time this week to do a good thoughtful post on writing. So I hope you will give me a hard pass this week. I have a really good post in the works on backstory…I promise.

In meantime, let’s have some fun. I have been bingeing of late on old Turner Classic movies. In the wee wee hours last night it was Joan Crawford in a A Woman’s Face, a twisty noir wherein Joan plays a horribly disfigured woman who will do anything to get her beauty back, including blackmail to pay for a plastic surgeon. Does she start a new life or return to her dark past? A risky part for Joan, who fought hard to star in this remake when Garbo turned it down. Juicy stuff!

Anyway, this movie reminded me of a little quiz I saw in The Atlantic. I had to admit, I had trouble figuring out my answers. So I thought I’d ask you guys. Go get some Sno-caps and fill in the blanks:

1) Worst well-regarded film
2) Most overhyped film (note that this is slightly different from above; the first measures the absolute badness level, while the second measures the delta between reputation and actual quality)
3) Worst film to win a best picture Oscar
4) Most disappointing film (ie should have been good but wasn’t)
5) Worst movie, full stop. (Must have been a major motion picture release–no direct-to-video, or film festival torture tactics, please)
6) Worst movie with good direction (ie terrible script, awful acting, producer interference, etc)
7) Biggest unknown treasure

Here’s my picks:
1. Unforgiven (sorry, Clint)

2. Cleopatra (Just re-watched this on TCM recently. Even stentorious Richard Burton couldn’t save this toga dog)

3. Vintage version: The Greatest Show on Earth (Jimmy Stewart as Buttons, the murdering clown!) Modern version: Crash (a total wreck)
4. Godfather III (no contest. I will die on this hill)

5. Staying Alive (John Travolta as a loincloth-clad Broadway gypsy; a crass sequel attempt to cash in on Saturday Night Fever)
6. 2001. I have watched this a million times and still can’t figure out what the hell is going on at the end.

7. Cinema Paradiso (Okay, so it’s not unknown. It won best foreign film but it’s still my fave “little” movie. I also have a soft spot for Downhill Racer (Robert Redford going against type as a bastard Olympic skier.)

What say you? And thanks for letting me take it easy today. And now….HERE’S JOAN!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwm6MXIXMg