Dear readers: I had my second eyeball surgery yesterday (run of the mill cataracts) and can’t see the computer screen quite yet. Well, I can see it if I cover the “new” eye but that’s makes it hard to type with one hand and my head hurts a little. Plus I just want to lay around, feel sorry for myself and watch Project Runway reruns. Actually, I feel pretty good because for the first time in 15 years, I can see without glasses. So considering how squeamish I was about having Dr. Louis slice off my lens and sew on a new one, I am pretty darn happy. If you are facing cataract surgery, buck up and do it.  

My sister Kelly is stepping in for me today. She’s working on a project helping a cop-friend write a non-fiction book. The experience has granted her some insights we crime dogs maybe don’t normally think about. Be back soon. — Kris

By Kelly (PJ Parrish)

We write about crime, death, torture, corpses, graveyards and cops and we do it very often with a glass of wine near our keyboards or across from each other at a restaurant table. It’s pretty easy for us to use our purple Post-Its to move one murder from chapter forty to chapter thirty five, because, when you write fiction, you can kill anyone you want whenever you want and then finish off the wine and go to bed.

Sometimes, with enough wine or after a particularly gruesome scene, Kris and I would wonder what kind of people we are to be able to write this stuff, and almost always, the answer is that no matter how graphic we may get, in the end, we know none of it is real.

But I have learned it’s far different when it is real.

I have had both the pleasure and discomfort in recent months of assisting a new author on a true crime novel. He is a police officer and he had a story he wanted to tell but he had no idea where to start. As writer of police procedurals, I needed technical information about his department. Outside a bowling alley one night, we struck a deal. I would do a little editing for him. He would answer my police questions.

I thought it would be easy. Like many authors, we have frequently done light editing and critiquing for charity auctions and occasionally for friends, and I suspected this would be no different. There were things I didn’t anticipate.

First was the author’s passion for his story. His need to tell the story eliminated any of the usual author ego issues and it made the editing more honest and easier. Second, I did not realize how different it would be writing about events and people that were real.

Over the next few months, as the story unfolded on my laptop, I found myself weighed down by the sadness of it. I started to think about the victim at the oddest times. I even found myself playing the “what if” game on the crime, building on the tragedy of a murdered police officer and making the nagging sense of loss for a man I never knew even deeper.

Now driven with a duel passion, we kept on.

But even as the chapters went back and forth over the internet, and the scenes started to come alive with more vivid images, and I began to see the finished project as publishable, the late night haunting continued.

I expected at some point, that the repeated exchanges of the same chapters and scenes would work to dull the emotional impact. But it didn’t. It got to the point where I would postpone sitting down to edit until I knew I had two days to be depressed afterwards.

Then I was allowed access to the crime scene photos. And I looked.

Now everything was real.

The project is nearly completed now. The author’s passion has not waned, and except for his heavy work schedule, I am sure he would prefer to write until dawn, even as he wraps up the final chapters. On my end, I continue to fill his pages with red ink, and the learning process for both of us goes on as a book is nurtured to maturity. And as strange as it sounds, when it is complete, I know I will miss it. I will miss the author’s passion and dedication and I will miss the people in the book, because in a way, telling the story allowed the victim to live once again, if only on pages and if only for a few months. I hope we have done him justice in our efforts.

I have thought recently about what I will ultimately take away from this experience. It is a complicated answer because I know I will reap some sense of satisfaction from helping a new author, and as someone who deeply respects law enforcement, there’s a part of me that is honored to have even penned a single word.

But I suspect that in the end, what I take away from this will be something far different and more meaningful.

By PJ Parrish

I might have to kill the bird.

Emily Dickinson’s poem is heavily with me this week. You know the line: “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”

I might have to tell a writer to give up on her story and start over. And believe me, I know how that stings.

Over the decades, I’ve critiqued hundreds of manuscripts. I’ve read countless manuscripts and short stories for contests, including for Mystery Writers of America anthologies and the inaugural year of the ITW Thriller Awards. Shoot, back in my newspaper days, I was a preliminary screening judge for the Pulitizers.

I’ve also done maybe a hundred charity critiques for writing conferences. Since joining The Kill Zone, I’ve done quite a few First Pagers. And I’ve had, oh, maybe 30 or so friends or acquaintances ask me to read their stuff. Some of them are still talking to me.

Let me interject here. I am not saying this to set-up a woe-is-me whine-fest. I’ve done this willingly, happily, and in most cases, with true affection for the brave souls who put themselves out there. But here’s the thing:

You can tell quickly if a submission is good. I’ve heard countless editors and agents say this, and it’s true. Screenwriter Josh Olsen wrote about this in The Village Voice in his essay “I Will Not Read Your F*%!ing Script.” (Click here for link. Warning: his language is salty.) Money graph:

It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you’re in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you’re dealing with someone who can’t.

(By the way, here’s a simple way to find out if you’re a writer. If you disagree with that statement, you’re not a writer. Because, you see, writers are also readers.)

I work hard on the critiques I do, whether it’s a full manuscript or 450 words for First Pagers here. I try hard to be truthful but constructive. I start with the notion that even in the rawest submission, there is something good to say.

Until there is not.

Every once in a blue moon, I get a manuscript that is truly hopeless. Such is my dilemma this week. I am critiquing a partial for a regional writer’s conference. And for the first time, I don’t know what the heck to tell this writer without coming off like a….fill in the negative noun of your choice.  I’ll go with arse because it’s the cleanest one I can think of.

So I will tell you guys. Because maybe it will help someone out there who might recognize, from this example, a misstep off their plot path or a failure of character construction. (Note: I have heavily disguised the details of this submission).

It runs five chapters and about 50K words. Quick synopsis.

Chapter 1: Opens fast with an already-has-happened abduction of two teenage girls. Opening line to the effect of: Greta could see nothing. They are blindfolded and bound, in the trunk of a car. Scene is all from one girl’s POV. Greta is thinking about where they are going and why. She hears one man say one line, “We know what your mother did.” Nothing else. Car stops, trunk opens. Greta senses bright sunlight creeping around the edges of her mask. End of chapter.

Chapter 2: Greta is sitting on a bench on a Miami Beach boardwalk, watching the sun go down. Lots of description of this. Her friend Ellen joins her. They talk about school and Ellen’s crush on a boy. They decide to go get something to eat then go to Club Salsa, sneak in with their fake IDs and meet some guys. They get in Greta’s VW and drive away from the beach. End of chapter.

Chapter 3: Opens at Mexican restaurant with long description of atmosphere. More dialogue about what they will do after school. Greta is upset that her mother expects her to become a lawyer like her. Ellen says she wants to go out of state to get away from family. They pay and leave. End of chapter.

Chapter 4. Opens with long description of Miami and Little Havana as Greta drives to the club. They sit in parking lot and a car with two guys pulls up. Description of loud music coming from the car. One of the boys tries to pick up Ellen as Greta hangs back. The two couples go into the club. End of Chapter.

Chapter 5: Opens with abductors ordering Greta and Ellen to climb out of the trunk and take off their blindfolds. Greta looks around at what appears to be desolate scrubland (The Everglades? She isn’t sure) and sees a small nondescript building. END OF SAMPLE

Okay, let me have it. Because I know you guys know exactly what is wrong here. Let’s hit the major points first, then I will get into more detailed issues.

First, the time line is screwed up. Like whiplash, screwed up. Chapter 1 is present-time action. But chapters 2-4 are all flashback, setting up “the normal world” of Greta and Ellen before the disruption (kidnapping). Second, in chapters 2-4, NOTHING IS GOING ON, PLOT-WISE.

I know what happened here. The writer fell into the trap that we (especially James) talk about often here. Writers want to create sympathy for their protagonists, so they feel compelled to world-build the characters’ nice lives before they get wrecked on the rocks. But this writer, in her heart of hearts, sensed the boredom of chapters 2-3, so decided to tack on a frontispiece frenetic action scene. Then she realized the plot corner she had painted herself into and three chapters later, jumped back to the present-time abduction scene.

I don’t know if she intends to keep moving back and forth between present and past. Gawd, I hope not. It’s exhausting for writer and readers.

The other issues:

Point of view: Except for a lapse into Ellen’s POV at the club for a few lines (yes, head-hopping in mid-scene), we are in Greta’s POV. Problem is, Greta not a very interesting narrator. The writer misses using what I call sensory logic when Greta is blindfolded. (For example, she says the car has moved onto I-95 but cannot see this).  Illogically, we get almost no feelings or thoughts from Greta about what danger they are in.

Dialogue: It is all trivial, banal girl chit-chat about college, boys, parents. Dialogue must do one of two things: Say something unique or say something uniquely. It should advance the plot and/or enhance character.

Description: The writer is in love with the sound of her own voice. Every chance she gets, she tells us what things looks like (hello, there are five senses!). Overwrought writerly imagery that does not sound true to a teenager’s sensibility.

Choreography: Moving characters through time and space is easy. Keep it simple and clear. This writer spends way to much time driving around (the abductors and the girls). The chapter should begin in situ: “The club was hot and crowded by the time they got in past the bouncer.” Not, they drove across the MacArhtur Causeway, passing through Overtown and finally reached Eighth Street, where they parked in a lot next to Club Salsa).

So I am sure you guys see the problems. My question is, what do I do with this? I usually try to suggest to struggling writers some possible solutions, some ways to get back on the true path. I don’t know, from a “mere” 50 pages what the nut story is. I’m guessing it involves something dark about Greta’s mom’s past that has caused the abductors to target Greta and Ellen. Geez, I sure hope so because we need some meat.

I truly don’t what to tell this person.

Actually, I do know. She has to throw this out and start over.

I’ve written often here that WHERE you choose to open your story is one of the most important decisions you make. You are parachuting your reader into a strange world and if you don’t pick the right moment, they will crash into the trees, the chute won’t open, or they will drift off into the ether. Most of the time, writers get into a scene too early. We get cops who are awakened by phone calls and told to come to the crime scene instead of opening with the cop at the scene. We get characters who think, ponder, muse and wonder before they finally act — Denise had long thought about killing Mark, but he had been a pretty decent husband for 20 years now. She remembered the day he proposed…

This writer, I think, got into her chapter 1 too late. By opening with the girls already blindfolded and “senseless” we have been deprived of an even juicer action scene of the actual abduction. So maybe open with them at Club Salsa and Greta notices a shady older guy following them. The creepy man disappears but Greta is shaken and tells Ellen they have to leave. Then, maybe in the lot, maybe in a dicey neighborhood, they are abducted.

What then? Well, we know, right? You stay in the present and keep your plot momentum moving forward. So how do you then rebuild the “normal” lost world? By switching perhaps to Greta’s mom’s POV after she realizes Greta is gone. By brief slashes of backstory via Greta’s memory. By bringing in other characters who can fill in the gaps. Action, then explanation.

Sigh, again. Back to my dilemma. I read and re-read this submission, trying hard to find something positive to say. I ended up in the same place Josh Olsen did. From his essay:

So. I read the thing. And it hurt, man. It really hurt. I was dying to find something positive to say, and there was nothing. And the truth is, saying something positive about this thing would be the nastiest, meanest and most dishonest thing I could do. Because here’s the thing: not only is it cruel to encourage the hopeless, but you cannot discourage a writer. If someone can talk you out of being a writer, you’re not a writer.

Hope is, truly, the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. And, as Dickinson goes on to say, “Sore must be the storm that could abash the little bird.” I am at a loss for kind words.

Bird killer, qu’est-ce que c’est?

p.s. I apologize for any typos today. Had cataract surgery Friday. Am fine but one-eyed until they get around to the other one. Argh.

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall. —  Eleanor Roosevelt

By PJ Parrish

Of all the things writers have to worry about, you wouldn’t think description would be at the top of the list. Yet I can’t tell you how many times this has come up in all the workshops I’ve done over the decades. The questions!

How much description do I need? How should I describe my main charcter? Did I spent too much time describing the haunted mansion? Should I describe the weather?  Speaking of weather, Elmore Leonard doesn’t have description. Why can’t I just leave it out like he does?

As someone who loves to describe stuff, I think of description is just one potent ingredient that goes into the alchemy of a great book. But “potent” is the operative word here. Too little and you’re missing a chance to emotionally connect with readers. Too much and you’re risking them skipping over your hard-wrought pages.

Where’s the sweet spot?

Some writers are renowned for revelling in description.

“Then the sun broke above the crest of the hills and the entire countryside looked soaked in blood, the arroyos deep in shadow, the cones of dead volcanoes stark and biscuit-colored against the sky. I could smell pinion trees, wet sage, woodsmoke, cattle in the pastures, and creek water that had melted from snow. I could smell the way the country probably was when it was only a dream in the mind of God.”  ― James Lee Burke, Jesus Out to Sea

Some writers opt for none. I had to leaf through five of my Elmore paperbacks until I found something that came close to description. From Mr. Paradise.

They’d made their entrance, the early after-work crowd still looking, speculating, something they did each time the two came in. Not showgirls. More like fashion models: designer casual wool coats, oddball pins, scarves, big leather belts, definitely not bimbos. They could be sisters, tall, the same type, the same nose jobs, both remembered as blonds, their hair cropped short. Today they wore hats, each a knit cloche down on her eyes, and sunglasses. It was April in Detroit, snow predicted.

• Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
• Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.

I can almost hear some of you out there mumbling, “Okay, but this doesn’t help me. What do I describe and how much do I need?”  I’ll try to help. But let’s have some fun first. Quiz time! Can you name the characters being described in these famous novels? Answers at end.

1. He was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate’s appraising a galleon to be scuttled or a maiden to be ravished. There was a cool recklessness in his face and a cynical humor in his mouth as he smiled.
2. [His] jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down–from high flat temples–in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.
3. He was a funny-looking child who became a funny-looking youth — tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of Coca-Cola.
4. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced — or seemed to face — the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished — and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I’d got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.
5. Her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever.
6. [He] was utterly white and smooth, as if he were sculpted from bleached bone, and his face was as seemingly inanimate as a statue, except for two brilliant green eyes that looked down at the boy intently like flames in a skull.
7. [He] had a thin face, knobbly knees, black hair, and bright green eyes. He wore round glasses held together with a lot of Scotch tape because of all the times Dudley had punched him on the nose.

Back to work. First of all, I come down on the pro side of description. As I said, it is one of the potent tools in your craft box. When done well, it creates atmosphere and mood, sets a scene, and gives your reader a context to the world you are asking them to enter. It also helps your readers emotionally bond with your characters, having them see, feel, hear and smell the story.

But I get why so many writers, especially beginners, get frustrated with description. Dialogue — good and bad — sort of spools itself out. Action scenes have a certain momentum that keeps the writerly juices flowing. But when you have to pause and face that blank page and come up with describing the scene or person in your head — well, it’s like trying to speak a foreign language. It get that. I really do.

Here’s the thing I have learned: Only describe the stuff that is necessary for readers to understand and connect to your story. Example: Your character walks into a room. If UNDERSTANDING THE ROOM SENSORILY adds to your story, then yes, you have to describe it. If not, don’t. Consider this example:

John opened the door and walked into the room. The smell hit him — decaying flesh but with a weird undernote of…what was that? Pine trees? The pale December light seeped around the edges of yellowed window shades and at first he couldn’t make out anything. Then details swam into focus — an old coiled bed frame heaped with dirty blankets. And suspended above the bed, hundreds of slips of paper. No, not just paper. Little paper Christmas trees. No, not…then he recognized the pine smell. It was coming from the air fresheners, those things people hung on their rearview mirrors. The heap of blankets on the bed…he moved closer. It was a body. Or what was left of one.

I made that up, basing it on a scene from the movie Seven where cops Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman discover a corpse. Love this movie…

Writing this scene in a thriller, of course you have to describe it. You filter it through the characters’ senses so the reader can experience the horror.

Now, if Brad and Morgan were just walking into any room, that had no SENSORY bearing on your plot, you’d write:

They entered the room. Bare bones furniture overlaid with dust. A quick scan told them it was empty, no sign anyone had lived in the place for a long time. Another dead end.

See the difference? Describe, but only when it makes a difference.

So where is your sweet spot? I can’t answer that. Like any skill, it’s something you have to practice, play with, and fine tune. It also is part of your style. Your way of describing things should be singular to you. You can watch that scene from Seven and your way of describing it should be completely different than mine.

One last point before we go. The biggest mistake writers make when describing is being overly reliant on sight. Be aware, when you the writer enter a scene, that you do it with sensory logic. Always consider the sequence of the senses. Smell is often the first thing you notice. Sound might be the primary thing triggered.  Sight is rarely the first sense to connect.

One more quick example from one of my favorite authors. I love how Joyce Carol Oates uses smell to open her description of the one-room schoolhouse she attended as a child in rural New York:

Inside, the school smelled smartly of varnish and wood smoke from the potbellied stove. On gloomy days, not unknown in upstate New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, gauzy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We squinted at the blackboard, that seemed far away since it was on a small platform, where Mrs. Dietz’s desk was also positioned, at the front, left of the room. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of these desks seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, designed to draw our eyes to it avidly, worshipfully, were paper squares showing that beautifully shaped script known as Parker Penmanship.

So, Oates is leading the reader into the room. Note the PROGRESSION of senses: First, you smell varnish and wood smoke. Next, you become aware of the quality of the light — gauzy from the windows and ceiling lights. Only then does Oates move to sight, and even then we have to squint to bring the scene into focus. Take note, too, of the small telling details she uses that make us build an image-painting of this room in our imaginations — desks in a row like a toboggan, old wood like horse chestnuts, and the one I love because I can remember it — paper squares of perfect Parker Penmanship.

Answers to quiz:

1. Rhett Butler Gone With The Wind
2. Sam Spade The Maltese Falcon
3. Billy Pilgrim, Slaughterhouse Five
4. Jay Gatsby The Great Gatsby
5. Lestat Interview With The Vampire
6. Harry Potter. The Sorcerer’s Stone.

Every morning, every evening
Ain’t we got fun?
Not much money, oh, but honey
Ain’t we got fun?

By PJ Parrish

Well, I am feeling pretty flush today. Got our November royalty statement from Thomas & Mercer for our book She’s Not There and I made $46.27. Hey, not too shabby for a book that came out six years ago. Then I got a royalty check from my ex-agent for one of our early Louis Kincaid book for $4.56. To top things off, I found a five dollar bill while walking the dogs yesterday.

So I figure now I can almost afford that nice bottle of Sancerre I’ve been eyeing.

Seriously — and we must be serious if we are talking about book revenue — I’ve been doing some thinking about what motivates us poor souls to keep writing. And let’s be honest — because we must be honest when it comes to money, right? — making a living at the writing thing is what any sane person aims for.

But man, it’s not easy.

I read an article in Publishers Weekly the other day. It was about an Author’s Guild survey of novelists’ income for 2022. I almost wasn’t going to write about this today because, darn it, we don’t need any more reasons to be depressed. But I think there’s a nickel lining in this.

I’m going to give you the highlights of the survey here in plain-speak because PW tends to get obtuse when it comes to money. If you want to read the whole thing, click here. Here goes:

The survey breaks down its numbers by types of authors (full time vs part, traditional vs self). The nut takeaway is that most authors don’t come near to making a living from their craft. Well, duh…

In 2022, according to 5,699 published authors who responded, the median gross pre-tax income from their books was $2,000. If you combine that with other writing-related income, it jumped to $5,000. That’s actually up 9% from the year before, adjusted for inflation. Most that increase came from full-time authors. (Their income was up 20% vs part-timers who saw a 4% decline.)

You still there? Come on, stay with me. If you wanna be a pony soldier, you gotta mount up.

The survey points out that having other income-generating activities made a big difference — stuff like teaching, editing, ghost-writing, conducting events, or journalism. This is what the survey calls “combined income.”  The combined income of full-time, established authors (those who had written a book in 2018 or before) rose 21% from 2018 to 2022. But it was still only $23,329 — below poverty level. Income from books alone went from $9,997 to $12,000.  In other words, don’t quit your day job.

Our biz is still a story of the haves and have-nots. The survey found that the top 10% of established authors who participated in the survey had median book income of $275,000 last year. On the flip side, the bottom 50% had median book income of $1,300. The rich get royalties, the poor get sofa change.

I’ll wait while you go top off that scotch…

What about traditional vs self-publishing? Well, PW suggests there’s an emerging trend here. Book-related income for full-time self-published authors was $10,200 — much less than full-time traditionally published authors, who earned $15,000. BUT….full-time self-published authors more than doubled their book income in 2022 compared to 2018, to $19,000. Over that time, established full-time traditionally published trade authors’ book income only rose 11%, to $15,000.

What does this mean? That self-published authors are now significantly more effective at boosting their earnings than their experienced traditionally published counterparts. But we all here already sort of knew this, right?

And get this…

Publishers may be paying more attention to the threat from self-publishing. Newer full-time traditionally published authors saw their income rise in 2022 to $18,000, compared to $15,000 for their established counterparts. PW suggests that publishers have plenty of incentive to lure self-published authors.

Age plays part in this. The survey found that the overwhelming majority of authors under 55 earned their income by self-publishing. Even among authors 65 and older (which was the survey’s largest demographic), 41% reported earning the majority of income from self-publishing.

Some more takeaways:

● Traditionally published authors earned more in from nonbook writing-related income than book-related income ($5,000 vs. $7,400), while self-published authors earned more from book income.

● Romance authors had the highest median gross income from their books, out-earning mystery, thriller, and suspense writers by more than three-fold and literary fiction authors nine-fold. Graphic novelists ranked second.

● Black authors’ median book-related income was $800 vs. white authors’ $2,000. Participating white authors were 36% more likely to be traditionally published than Black authors (38% vs. 28%).

●The audiobook format is a dramatically underpublished growth opportunity: 55% of traditional and 64% of self-published authors have none of their books in audiobook format.

So, this brings me back to my question: Why do you do this?

True confession time: When I was starting out as a romance writer way back in 1980, all I wanted to make some money. I had read an article in a business magazine about all these housewives who were raking in the dough writing Harlequins.

{{Pause for laughter to subside}}}

I was working fulltime as a newspaper editor up in the management tree, but deep in my heart, I missed writing. Plus, how hard could it be to write a novel, right?

I wrote a partial manuscript called Her Turn To Dance, set in the New York ballet world. I shipped it off to all the New York publishers and sat back and waited for the offers to roll in. Seven months of crickets. Not even the dignity of a rejection form. I gave up and went back to doing employee evaluations. Then I got a letter from an editor at Ballantine Books. She apologized for taking so long, saying “due to the enormous volumn of admissions in the mail, I’m afraid we cannot keep up to date.” Then came this:

If Her Turn To Dance is still available, I would be very interested in reading the complete manuscript. Please send it to my attention here at Ballantine. Is this your first novel or have you published before?

Turns out that editor, Pamela Dean Strickler, was an ex-dancer. She found my partial manuscript in the slush pile. (Back then, you could send your stuff in without an agent). I still have her letter. They sent me a check for $1,250 (that’s me holding it below). A year later, retitled The Dancer, the book came out. 

I got lucky. An editor liked my stuff. Believe me, sometimes that is all it takes. Pamela died about ten years ago and I wish I had made an effort to reconnect and thank her. Because she turned me into a pro. And I was very lucky to go on, switch to mysteries, reconnect with my sister as a co-author, and have a long and successful career in publishing. I made some pretty decent money. But you know what? The money became secondary.

I was writing because I loved doing it. I was writing because it was what I had to do. That’s why I did it.

May your year be peaceful. May your pockets be full. And may you do it for fun.

“It is easy to be wise after the event.” — Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes

By PJ Parrish

I’ve been doing a lot of reading of my old stuff lately. It’s all in prep to get the last of our backlist titles re-packaged and up for download. What a chore — and eye-opener — this has turned out to be.

First, it’s a lot of grunt work. Some of our books are so old they hail from the dark ages of Word Perfect. (For the record, the BEST word processing system ever designed). There is no manuscript that I can feed into the Amazon maw. So here’s the primitive process:

1. Dig around in the dusty bins of the house to find an old paper copy of the book
2. Send it to our book scanner (Blue Leaf in Ballwin, Mo). Our guy Brad then rips the book apart, scans it, and sends us a Word document.
3. The manuscript comes back surprisingly clean. But it has quirks. The spacing is off at times, “t” often comes out “st” and Louis’s name is sometimes Louie. So I have to CAREFULLY read every single line. This is hard to do because:

• I am a bad copy editor.
• Reading for typos is like taking three Ambiens.
• I get caught up in the story and miss the typos. This is sometimes a good thing because I hit a passage and think, “Damn, I’m good!” This is sometimes a bad thing because I hit another passage and it’s, “What the hell was I thinking?”

Once I have a clean manuscript, I ship it off to my sister Kelly who has mastered the art of formatting. (If you don’t know how to do this, hire someone who does. Please. If you are self-pubbing, one of the biggest turn-offs to readers is shoddy formatting. It screams amateur.) So, Kelly makes it pretty with perfect chapter breaks, drop-caps, correct page numbering and a table of contents. We write new backcopy and design a new cover  (you can’t use your original publisher’s).

Covers, as we’ve talked about here, are important. Again, hire a pro! If you have series, it’s best to brand them with linking graphic devices, type faces and colors. We chose black backgrounds and an odd type face. Here a sample of the covers, original and new, for book we’ve just finished.

The left one, from our publisher Kensington, was adequate. But it looks dated now (design trends mutate!). I always disliked it because the only image is a nondescript (purple?) house that had no relation to the story. In our re-branding new covers, we’ve used a human figure on every book because we think it gives the reader a person to begin to bond with, be it a victim, protag or villain. (Also the necklace the dead girl wears turnss out to be a big clue).

So Thicker Than Water is available in ebook and very pretty trade paperback. Click here.  Now we take you back to our regular programming.

I’d like to return to my first point, way back in the first paragraph. Because this is what I really want to stress for you guys out there who are struggling with getting your first book out there in the world.

Eye-opening.

That is my biggest take-away from this experience of getting our old stuff back out there. Because no matter where you are in your writing, rewriting or editing process, you have to be willing to have your eyes opened. And your ego closed.

You really have to be ruthless in rewriting. You have to make hard choices, sometimes about passages or whole chapters that need to be cut. You have to recognize that your plot foundation might be shaky. Or that your characters are cardboardy. I always tell folks one thing, going into a new story:

Write the first draft with your heart. Then write the second, third, tenth or twentieth draft with your head. We’ve now re-published ten of our old books. Yes, we did some rewriting on all of them. The first one, Dark of the Moon, we have yet to re-publish because we believe it has fundamental problems that need more than a normal rewrite can solve. Here’s some of the things we learned in this process with our freshman effort book:

We got preachy. Our protag, Louis Kincaid, is biracial. The issue of race is, at times, important in the plot but more often than not is tangential to the story. Still, a couple times we allowed Louis to sound pedantic. Here’s the thing about themes: The more dramatic your theme, the more you need to underwrite. Go at your theme — be it bigotry, spouse abuse, environment, gay rights — obliquely, and always through the lens of your characters, not through your writerly narrator. You can make your point but you can’t be didactic.

We fell prey to stereotypes. Dark of the Moon is set in a small southern town in 1983. Our dialogue was too dialect-dependent. Our characters came across as one-dimensional. And we managed to have nothing positive to say about the town itself. Remember: your setting is a character. Treat it with respect.

We lost track of “book” time. This was an issue in our first two books, wherein we didn’t account for lapses in time. We neglected to tell readers that X-days had passed or we didn’t account for holidays like Christmas. (Hey, readers notice that little stuff). The sequence of events must be clear in the reader’s mind. We now use timeline boards and chronologies.

We didn’t know what we wanted to say. I’m going out on limb here and say all good books have themes. I don’t think we understood this until about book 4. Yes, you 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.

We missed the theme in Dark of the Moon. Only now, as we rewrite it, are we understanding that the theme is every person’s search for home. For Louis, it was literally going back to the southern town where he was born and then understanding that it wasn’t “home” at all. The entire series now has a theme — Louis, a man who has walked uneasily in two racial worlds — trying to find his spiritual home.

I know you’re tempted to dismiss theme as mere enhancement. Le cerise sur la gateau, as the French say. But it’s essential. Try this experiment: Write the back copy for your work in progress — three paragraphs at most. Ha! Can’t do it? Well, you might not have a grip on what your story is about at its heart. Now often your theme doesn’t show itself until you’re well into your plot. Well, that’s okay. But when it begins to whisper, listen hard. Good fiction, Stephen King says, “always begins with story and progresses to theme.”

Eyes open, crime dogs.

Good morning, crime dogs. It’s been a while since I tackled a First Pager but this one intrigued me. It’s a mystery, the submitter tells us. And within the mystery are things we can unearth, to learn, as always. Catch you on the flip-side.

By PJ Parrish 

If Only Twice

Cora Jean sat in her new apartment, piled high with boxes of her belongings, wondering where to start and asking herself why she was even here. The musty odor of damp cardboard filled her lungs adding to her melancholy. She clenched her hands, stood up and paced the floor. “The boxes, the boxes,” she said. “The never-ending pile of smelly boxes.” She kicked one. Her eyes teared up. She reached into her jean pocket and pulled out a box cutter. She stared at her wrist. Her hand trembled. She pushed the button extending the blade. The shiny blade. The inviting blade. The mesmerizing blade. She inhaled, held her breath and closed her eyes.

“Be careful with that boxcutter.” A voice from behind her said.

She twisted around, tripped over a box and dropped the box cutter. The stranger caught her before she hit the floor. He helped her to a chair.

“Those things can be tricky to use,” the stranger said.

“Who are you?”

“Your door was ajar. It looked as though you might need help.”

“I know how to use this.” She picked up the boxcutter and held it tightly in her hand.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Lew. I was checking on someone in apartment 12 B.”

“You have friends living in this building?”

“Mr. Whitley in 12 B can be cantankerous at times but, most are friendly. Here, give me that.” Lew reached for the box cutter, gently took it from her hand and retracted the blade.

“I know how to use that thing.”

“I will help you open your boxes.” He put the box cutter in his back pocket. “Let’s see, you have five boxes. Where do you want to start?”

She rolled her eyes. “Five boxes! Where did you learn to count?”

“I see only five. How many are there?”

She turned her head slowly examining every corner of the apartment. She moved to the bedroom door. On the bed were two boxes.

“There are a bunch in here. See you’re wrong.”

“Okay, I’m sorry. I didn’t look in the bedroom.”

“There are so many I don’t know where to start.”

“Let’s start with the living room.”

“But they’re so big.”

“You can do it. One box at a time. I’ll help you.”

“The living room.” She compressed her lips. “Um, the living room maybe a good place to start.”

“Yes, the living room,” Lew said.

_____________________

As I said, this one interested me. There are some issues with it, especially with the critical opening paragraph and we’ll get to those. But let me say that I think this writer has potential and that this set-up scene can, with some work, make for a good opening. This is a great example of a submission that is pretty good but with some effective tweaking, can shine. First, what I like:

We know who were dealing with from the get-go. The two characters interacting here are named and their voices are distinct from each other — Cora Jean timid and troubled and the interloper Lew mysterious and vaguely creepy in his earnestness to help. I also like that the writer chose to place us directly in a disruptive situation — Cora feeling lost and even suicidal in a new home and confronted by a strange man. I mention this because many writers, dealing with a troubled character like Cora, would have given us paragraphs or a whole scene/chapter of her sitting amid her boxes moping, thinking, fretting and/or remembering what brought her to this point.

But no. This writer rightly drops us into the messiness and saves the backstory and “why” for later. If nothing else, that is a lesson to take away here. So, dear writer, you’re on the right road.

But…you can do better. The opening scene can be better. You can hook your reader with more tension. None of it requires major surgery. It’s a matter of little things adding up to big changes. Let me make a few suggestions.

Take a hard look at that first paragraph. It’s way too long and you’ve crammed way too much info and emotion into it. I have a hunch you felt it necessary to compact everything into one graph because Cora Jean is alone at this point. And maybe if you just kept going, in a sort of stream of consciousness, it would feel more urgent. But the effect is just the opposite. The opening line and graph should be a PROMISE of the mystery to come. A hint is always more powerful than a hammer.

And let’s talk about that box cutter. I love it! It’s so powerful but you missed an opportunity to make it work on two levels. (More to come on that). A box cutter is one of those “homey” but nasty gadgets. It’s so useful and well designed. Yet inside is hidden an awful weapon. One slip and your Ikea bookcase looks like blood-spatter scene. (Been there, cut that)

So Cora has a box cutter: Is it a benign tool to open something — or is it a deadly means to close something — i.e. her life. Chilling.

Yet you’ve buried this great detail amid the physical choregraphy of the opening graph. Let me suggest how powerful simple paragraphing can be:

Cora Jean sat in her new apartment, piled high with boxes of her belongings, wondering where to start and asking herself why she was even here. The musty odor of damp cardboard filled her lungs adding to her melancholy.

“The boxes, the boxes,” she said. “The never-ending pile of smelly boxes.”

Her eyes teared. She stood up and kicked a box. She reached into her jean pocket, her fingers curling around the peice of metal. She pulled out the box cutter and stared at it.

She raised her left arm and looked at her wrist. She pushed the button on the box cutter, extending the blade.

The shiny blade. The inviting blade. The mesmerizing blade.

Good stuff. But it can be even better. Some suggestions to work on:

Try harder to come up with a more compelling opening line. “Cora Jean sat…” is so passive and blah. And “her new apartment” and “her belongings” are superfulous. It is implied by the packing boxes.

Also, “wondering where to start and asking herself why she was even there” is you, the writer, telling us her state of mind, rather than showing the reader through her thoughts and actions. You need a bit of description! The smell of damp cardboard is good, but think harder about using Cora’s other senses to give us a FEEL for where she is, physically and mentally. Don’t tell us she feels “melancoly.” SHOW US. Something like:

The room was dark, yet she knew it was only just past three.  Shadows moved across the gray walls. Just the reflection of the bare tree branches outside the window, yet she felt like they were fingers reaching in to touch her. 

The room smelled stale, not just from the musty cardboard boxes piled all around her, but from something else, like an old woman’s perfume. She stared at the moving boxes, wishing she had remembered to label them. She had been in such a hurry, she had no idea what was in them. Her eyes welled with tears, as the thought came back to her again.

I have no idea of what I am doing here.

Use descrption and her sensory prism to show us her mood and emotions.

After you’ve established Cora’s emotions more vividly, then it’s time to move on to the action — the introduction of the mysterious stranger. You’ve done a pretty good job with this part. Nice dialogue, but watch that you don’t waste it on repetition or unecessary chattter. And make sure it is logical in its progression. I rewrote this a little:

“Be careful with that boxcutter.” A voice from behind her said.

She twisted around, tripped over a box and dropped the box cutter. “Who are you?”

“I’m Lew. “Your door was open and –”

She grabbed the boxcutter from the floor and held it out. “I know how to use this.”

He took one step back. “I was here to check on someone downstairs and walked by your door. You looked like you needed some help.”

“You have friends living in this building?”

He nodded but his eyes were still on the boxcutter. “Mr. Whitley in 12 B. He’s cantankerous at times but most folks here are friendly.”

He paused, seeming to stare at the piles of cardboard boxes. “You look like you could use some help with those.” He nodded to the boxcutter in her hand. “I know how to use that,” he said with a smile.

Cora Jean hesitated then retracted the blade.

I changed the dialogue up a little to stress a couple things. First, I don’t think it’s believable that Cora, being so sad and stressed at first, would allow a strange man to simply take the blade from her. It also makes her look weak. Why not let her keep it as she warily retreats (retracts the blade).

And this is the kicker: Note that I tried to make the line “I know how to use that” work harder for your characters. It now has a double meaning. Is Lew a good samaritan or a slasher? Well, read on to find out…

Also, one last point about your dialogue. You know how to craft it. But make it work harder. The dialogue you have after the blade thing is just taking up space. It is doing nothing to advance your scene or add to the tension. Good dialogue does one of two things: Says something unique or says something uniquely. Sure, sometimes people have to say mundane things to move your story along. But try hard not to use it in this fashion. Use simple narration instead: Cora knew there were six boxes in the living room and at least three more in the bedroom. She slipped the boxcutter back into the pocket of her jeans. “Some of them are heavy,” she said softly. “Yeah, I could use some help.”

So, good start, writer. Rework that opening paragraph to squeeze as much tension-juice out of it as you can. Make your dialogue work harder. Use some description to enhance mood. But based on this, I would read on, if for no other reason than to find out what Lew is up to. Thanks for letting us read your work.

“There are 500 million people on Facebook, but what are they saying to each other? Not much.” — Elmore Leonard

By PJ Parrish

Elmore Leonard was trending big on my Facebook feed this week. Everyone was quoting, but mainly misquoting, his famous Ten Rules Of Writing.

True confession time, she intoned gravely, I have read only two Leonard books. (ten bonus points if you get that reference).

Leonard is one of those titans whose stuff has been part of my cram-course in belated crime education. But like all writers, I’ve heard that he’s the Picasso of crime fiction, whose dialogue, in the words of one critic, is “like broken glass, sharp and glittering.”

But do his rules hold up? Well, I think this is a good time to go back and take a look. And I’ll be the first one to admit, I have broken almost all of them.

1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

I opened my book Island of Bones with a woman so desperate to escape her killer that she took off in a skiff in the middle of a hurricane. But generally I agree with Leonard here that in too many books, weather is a metaphoric crutch meant to telegraph the hero’s conflict or a mood of foreboding. Hey, it works in The Tempest, right? In the play, the small ship atoss in a raging storm is a metaphor for the characters, high-born and low, all at the mercy of natural events.

2. Avoid prologues. They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.

Sigh. Broke this one, too. In my book A Thouand Bones, I am telling the story of Louis Kincaid’s lover, Joe Frye. The entire book is a flashback to Joe’s rookie year but I felt I had to connect it to Louis, so I book-ended it with a prologue (wherein she tells Louis about a crime she committed ten years ago) AND an epilogue (wherein Louis accepts what she did). But again, I think prologues are usually unnecessary. They almost always indicate the writer is not in control of back story or the time element of their plot (linear is almost always best). Or the writer tacks on a prologue where he throws out a body to gin up suspense because the early chapters are slooooow.

3. Never use a verb other than ”said” to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ”she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

Have broken this one, too.   See no. 4. But if you’re into “grumbled, bellowed, snapped, begged, moaned” and the like, then I’m pretty sure that the stuff you’re putting between the quote marks isn’t up to snuff. And if I ever catch you using “he barked” I will hunt you down and bite you, she yelped doggedly.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ”said.” To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ”full of rape and adverbs.”

Guilty again. I have used “whispered,” “shouted” and “asked.” But I always hate myself in the morning.

5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

I hate exclamation marks! But yes, I have used them. Mainly when I have someone shouting. And what’s worse, I have probably written, “Get out of here!” he shouted.

6. Never use the words ”suddenly” or ”all hell broke loose.” This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ”suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

I have never used “all hell…” That’s really amateur hour, akin to “little did he know that…” But yes, “suddenly” has appeared in my books. I didn’t realized what a stupid tic it was until I re-read Leonard’s rules. Suddenly, “suddenly” looks really bad in my chapters. And I now see that the action feels more immediate without it.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly. Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ”Close Range.”

We made this mistake in our first book Dark of the Moon. Set in the deep South, we felt compelled to drop some “g’s” and use some dumb idioms, and at least one reviewer took us to task for it. Here’s the thing: Dialect is hard on the reader’s eye. You can convey the feeling of it by judicious word choice, mannerisms, and sentence rhythm. We are in the process of preparing “Moon” for eBook and this has given us a second chance to go back and rewrite things. So y’all can bet we’re fixin’ to fix our mistakes.

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s ”Hills Like White Elephants” what do the ”American and the girl with him” look like? ”She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

Whew. Finally, one sin I don’t commit. I am a strong believer in less is more when it comes to character descriptions. I think if you tread too heavily in the reader’s imagination, you stomp out some of the magic from your book. Here is how I let readers know what my heroine Joe Frye looked like:

She had a flash of memory, of sitting next to her dad in a gymnasium during her brother’s basketball game, watching the cheerleaders.
I’m ugly, Daddy.
You’re beautiful.
Not like them, I’m not.
No. They’re easy to add up. They’re plain old arithmetic.
So what am I?
Geometry, Joey. Not everyone gets it.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

This one is hard for me because I love to write setting descriptions. But I have learned to pull back some. The best advice I ever heard on this comes from Coco Chanel who said you should put on all your accessories and then take all of them off except one before you go out. So yeah, I over-describe but then I go back and take off the pearls and leopard hat.

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.

Like all writers, I struggle with this one. When we’re deep in the writing zone, we can fall in love with the sound of our own voices. And sometimes, a passage will come so hard that you just can’t bring yourself to delete it. But you must kill your darlings. Lately, I feel myself “underwriting,” so maybe I am pulling back too far. But I still think it’s better to leave ‘em wanting more, not less.

11. If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I have nothing to add to that last one. It might be the single best piece of writing advice out there. If you’re working too hard, your reader will as well. Here’s the quote that hangs over my desk: “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” It was good enough for Nathaniel Hawthorne — and Leonard — so it’s good enough for me.

Phoebe ready for trick or treating

Postscript: I am en route today from Michigan back to Tallahassee, two dogs in tow. If I don’t answer to your comment it is probably because I am somewhere over Cinncinati or stranded in Big Daddy’s Burger Bar in the Charlotte airport. Happy Halloween!

Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. — Joyce Carol Oates.

By PJ Parrish

Yesterday, Sue posted her critique of a First Page submission. Click here to review. On first read, I thought it was pretty good but something about it was bugging me. Then I just looked at it instead of reading it. It hit me that the paragraphing wasn’t quite right.

Paragraphing? Who cares about paragraphing? You just hit enter when it feels right, right? Nope. Proper paragraphing is one of the most underrated tools in your writer’s box. So allow me to wander into the weeds today and talk a little inside baseball. (I worked hard on that mixed metaphor, by the way)

Two main problems with the submission yesterday: The writer had made the common mistake of burying thoughts and dialogue within narrative.

Second problem: All the paragraphs are about the same length. Why is that a problem? Because it goes to pacing and rhythm. No variation in paragraphs is boring to the eye and that translates to boring for the reader’s imagination. But if you learn to master the fine but subtle art of judicious paragraphing, you can inject interest and even tension into your story.

Let’s address problem one first. This opening paragraph is essentially narrative. But inserted within that is both dialogue and thoughts. Here’s the paragraph:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation. Unbelievable. “Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.” Her boss had clearly lost his mind. She spun on her hiking shoe, locking eyes with Senior Special Agent Matt Updike. Her fingers fidgeted with a button on her shirt. I deserve a second chance. 

Dialogue and thoughts are ACTION. They deserve to be lifted out of narrative and given lines of their own so the reader can emotionally latch onto them, and by extension, your character. This opening paragraph would be more effective (and more interesting to the eye) if it were deconstructed with better paragraphing:

Arizona Powers slammed her palm into the office wall, ignoring the stinging sensation, and stared hard at her boss.

“Are you kidding me? I’m not doing that. I’m a federal agent, not a babysitter.”

Matt Updike shoved his chair backward, rose and closed the distance between them in two strides.

“I’m not kidding. You are doing this,” he said. “You don’t have a choice.”

She could smell his stale coffee breath and see a vein bulging in his neck, but she resisted the urge to step back. Her boss had clearly lost his mind. But she wasn’t going to take this. She deserved a second chance.  

See the difference? The drama of the scene is enhanced by allowing the thoughts and dialogue to stand out — all by simple paragraphing. Here’s something interesting: The rewrite is LONGER but it reads FASTER. Why? Because the reader doesn’t need to ferret out the important thoughts and dialogue. It’s your job, as the writer, to mine out the nuggets for them.

Now let’s consider the basic question of length of paragraphs and how that affects your reader. How long should your paragraphs be? Sounds like a dumb question, but it’s not. You need to consider it deeply.

About five years ago, I did a very long post on paragraphing with a lot of examples, Click here if you want to review.  But let me re-quote this from Ronald Tobias’s The Elements of Fiction Writing: Theme & Strategy,

The rhythm of action and character is controlled by the rhythm of your sentences. You can alter mood, increase or decrease tension, and pace the action by the number of words you put in a sentence. And because sentences create patterns, the cumulative effect of your sentences has a larger overall effect on the work itself. Short sentences are more dramatic; long sentences are calmer by nature and tend to be more explanatory or descriptive. If your writing a tense scene and use long sentences [me here: or long paragraphs], you may be working against yourself.

I often liken writing to music. Composers use punctuation to speed up or slow down pace and musicians use types of “articulation” to enhance whatever mood they are going for — intense? dangerous? romantic? thoughtful?

Good writers use similar tools — punctuation, length of sentences and paragraphs (short and choppy or longer and measured?) to create an emotional response in their readers. The best writers understand this not only creates emotion, it provides variety on each page and over the whole book.

Pacing is not just aural, it’s visual. How your writing LOOKS on the page is important. Which brings us back to the paragraph. How many you use per page, and how long or short your paragraphs are should be conscious choices you make. Here is the same thought, expressed two different ways:

Fragments, the length of sentences, punctuation, and how often you paragraph can all work to give a particular pace. If you really think about, you’ll realize that you can use sentence and paragraph structure to create a feeling of speed or slowness, depending on what kind of emotional response you want to induce in your reader.

Okay, that gets my point across, right? But what if I structured the same thought this way:

Think of it! You can move a reader through a story fast. Their hearts will race!

Or you can slow them down and make them use their heads.

It’s all in how your sentences look on the page.

The first is measured, more academic in pace, meant to make you slow down and digest the thought. The second is lively and urgent, making you anticipate an important climax-point. Neither is correct. They are just two different styles of pacing, word choice, sentence length and paragraphing to different affect.

I think most of us here, being in the crime business, know we shouldn’t write a lot of long paragraphs. You can get away with some, especially in description. But these days, too many long paragraphs per page looks “old-fashioned” or worse, “textbook.” It worked for Dickens and even for a stylist like Delillo. Not so much for the rest of us today.

Are any of you out there art folks or designers? Then you understand the value of “white space” or “negative space.” Simply put, negative space is the area around and between a subject. It appears in all drawings, paintings and photographs. The “subject” below is enhanced by the negative space surroudning him. (Notice, too, the crop lines that make for an even more compelling negative/positive composition!)

Paragraphing provides white space. Don’t believe me? Go read Elmore Leonard.

Ray Bradbury said that each paragraph is a mini-scene and when you hit ENTER you are helping your reader enter a new scene, thought or action. I’ll leave you with one more example. It’s from one of my favorite opening pages from a novel.

It was a pleasure to burn.

It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

Montag grinned the fierce grin of all men singed and driven back by flame.

That’s the opening to Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. I love the way the first line sits there all alone, like a roadside sign that you’re entering hell. Then he gives us this amazing loooong graph with gorgeous imagery and the nonchalance of the unnamed man. And then, a third paragraph — BAM! — he gives us our arsonist-star by name.

Bradbury could have made this all one graph. But no, he chose three. Your turn. Choose wisely when to hit enter.

“Often when you think you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.” –Fred Rogers

By PJ Parrish

A sequence of events this past month has been making me chew on a pretty important question: When is it time to stop writing?

I don’t mean stop writing whatever you’re working on. That’s a relatively easy decision that might mean abandoning a book that’s going nowhere and finding a new story to tell. I’m talking about the R-word.

Yup, this makes it official, crime dogs. I am retiring.

It is time to stop writing books. I know this now with all my heart. I have been thinking about this for about three years. Back then, like all of you, was feeling really at sea and done-in by the Covid scare. I figured it would pass and I would go back to my work in progress.

But now I know, this is it. Time to stop, hang up the cleats, and ride off into the Michigan sunset. Don’t fret for me. I am really happy with this decision. I just wonder why it took me three years to finally come to terms with it.

Here’s the thing. I am getting old. I am healthy and reasonably well off, thank God. But I want to use my time more wisely, while I still have the marbles and mobility to do so. As I said, some events of late have helped me to this place. I have two dear friends who are fighting cancer battles. Both are doing okay right now (one friend, who was really sick, now is back to skating in his over-65 hockey league!). But my time with them now is especially precious. As it is with my husband and small family. Also of late, I have had several writing friends confess privately that they are worn out and want to pull back from the publishing rat race. All are successful, have nice backlists and contracts. Several came home from the Bouchercon writer’s con with Covid and feelings that there are other ways they want to spend their time and money. I sense a retrenchment among the old guard.

Here’s the second thing. Writing is work. It’s not a physical thing. Writing takes no toll on the body. But it devours your time and energy. Alice Munro said, as she retired, “I don’t have the energy anymore.” Yes, writing is joyful and sure as hell beats filling potholes or waiting tables. But if you’re doing it right, it is a job. More so now that it has ever been, as the traditional publishing support system has deteriorated. You have to punch that time-card, at least five days a week.

John Updike used to rent a one-room office above a restaurant, where he would report to write six days a week. John Cheever famously put on his only suit and rode the elevator with the 9-to-5 crowd, only he would proceed down to the basement to write in a storage room.

I’ve been working fulltime since I was 18. I don’t want a job anymore. I have other things I want to do with those 40-plus hours. For health reasons (chronic back pain), I need a consistent exercise regimen. I want to travel more. I want to devote time to friends, family and my dogs. I want to keep my garden going. I want to learn more languages. I want to go back to the piano lessons I had to give up ten years ago. I want to read for pleasure. If things work out, I’d like to go live aboard for a while.

As Mr. Rogers says, when you’re at the end of something, you’re at the beginning of something else.

I think we make it hard on writers to retire. Maybe it’s because we imagine them as magical machines that produce pleasure just for us. As Don Winslow said, as he announced his retirement a while back, “I think a lot of people don’t expect writers to retire. They expect us to just keel over at the keyboard.”

Stephen King tried to retire but it didn’t take. In 2002, after almost dying in a bad accident, King said he was walking away from his horror show. But he barely slowed down, and just released his 64th book this month. More power to him.

When Lee Child retired, he handed care of Reacher over to his younger brother, and retreated to a ranch in Wyoming, where his only neighbors are moose and mountain lions. He claims he will never write another book.

Child said one reason he’s retiring from his series is because he struggles to identify with a younger audience. “I’m rapidly getting out of date,” Child told the Australian Financial Review, “and Reacher has always been behind the curve with technology.”

The timing was right, he says. “I had made myself a promise based on reading other people’s series … that I would never phone it in, and I never have. I cannot keep this up forever.”

I really get this one. I had a really great run that lasted almost 30 years. I made some money, won some awards, made the bestseller list. I have lovely memories of meeting fans and reading their emails and letters. I never phoned it in. No one wants to be the Brett Favre of crime fiction.

With our last series book, The Damage Done, we left our character Louis Kincaid in a very good place. We didn’t realize at the time it would be the last Louis book, but now as I re-read its ending, I know his character arc has come to a full, almost spiritual, conclusion.

And as Lee says, no one wants to be an anachronism. Through my work with the Edgars, I get a front row seat on the next generation of crime writers. Our genre is changing and as Brian Wilson wrote, I just wasn’t made for these times.

So what does retirement look like for me? Sort of like it does for Lee Child. “I’m going to buy a real comfortable sofa, and I’m just going to read for the rest of my life,” he says. “I was born in Europe. I have no work ethic.”

Like me, he feels the pull of other interests: “I’m an extremely poor guitarist,” he says, “and I may try to get better.”

But what about The Kill Zone? I’d like to stick around, if that’s okay with you all. I won’t have any new books to tout and I can’t contribute a whit about what’s going on with AI, YA, Amazon’s ACX, Binkist, or any other trend with initials. But I can help new folks with critiques and maybe start conversations here about what makes for good storytelling because that never changes.

So, be happy for me. Think of me as Mr. Chips, dawdling in the TZK doorway, going on and on about the value of friendship, the beauty of craftsmanship, and the need for reverence of our grenre’s forebearers. Haec olim meminisse iuvabit. 

Peace out.