PJ Parrish is the New York Times and USAToday bestseller author of the Louis Kincaid thrillers. Her books have won the Shamus, Anthony, International Thriller Award and been nominated for the Edgar. Visit her at PJParrish.com
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don’t do it unless you’re willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps. — Jim Harrison
By PJ Parrish
Yesterday was perfect. I am visiting my sister Kelly up in northern Michigan for three months, in a land of cherry orchards, turquoise bays, rolling vineyards, and prehistoric sand dunes that rise out of Lake Michigan like giant tawny bears.
My day started at the Breakaway Café, with strong coffee, a cherry scone, and the Times crossword. It ended on the patio with a glass of Cabernet Franc from the local Black Star winery and a copy of Jim Harrison’s novel The Beast God Forgot to Invent.
When in Rome, eat the local food, drink the local wine. When in Rome, read about where you are.
I love to travel. I love to read. And it has been my habit to try to read a novel set in whatever place I am visiting. My very first venture from home was to San Francisco way back in 1969, and along the way I read Frank Norris’s 1899 novel about the murderous dentist McTeague. On subsequent trips, I’ve gone through nearly every great San Francisco novel, including Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, which contains this passage:
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
My first trip to Paris in 1985 was with Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast as my guidebook. It was a cold spring and I was renting a fifth-floor apartment behind the Pantheon, and I think Hemingway and I frequented the same café:
Then there was the bad weather. It would come in one day when the fall was over. You would have to shut the windows in the night against the rain and the cold wind would strip the leaves from the trees in the Place Contrescarpe. The leaves lay sodden in the rain and the wind drove the rain against the big green autobus at the terminal and the Café des Amateurs was crowded and the windows misted over from the heat and the smoke inside. It was a sad, evilly run café where the drunkards of the quarter crowded together and I kept away from it because of the smell of dirty bodies and the sour smell of drunkenness.
On another trip to Paris, I slogged through The DaVinci Code, but that was fun only because of all the mistakes Dan Brown made. I mean, dude, you head south from Sacre Coeur to cross the Seine, not north.
On a three-week road trip through the French countryside, I was able to visit Nantes by reading Madame Bovary. And when I went to India for my nephew’s wedding, I probably should have taken Forster’s Passage to India, but I punked out and opted for The Life of Pi and, for some strange reason lost to me, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Oddly, McCarthy’s book ended up feeling more attuned to Chennai, where gaunt cows played chicken with cars in the dusty roads, the air felt too thick to take into my lungs, and humans pressed so close it felt as if we were all at the edge of the tired world with no where left to go but down.
When I took a trip to Vancouver, I couldn’t find a good local novel. But in the Paper Hound bookstore on Pender Street, a clerk sold me a copy of Vancouver, by David Cruise and Allison Griffiths. These interconnected short stories had a Michener-esque sweep that captured the city and its history so well I left it in our rental for the next tenant with a note “better than that guidebook you brought.”
Then there was Italy. Again, I should have gone with Forster (A Room With a View is one of my favorite movies.) But I was writing mysteries by then, so it was Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley. It’s a great book, but Ripley is so indelible, Italy can never really compete. But because I got food poisoning in Lucca, I did go look up this one passage for you:
Tom had dinner that evening at a restaurant down on the water called Zi’ Teresa. He had a difficult time ordering, and he found himself with a first course of miniature octopuses, as virulently purple as if they had been cooked in the ink in which the menu had been written.
If you are going to Italy, especially the Cinque Terre, I recommend you take Jess Walter’s wonderful novel The Beautiful Ruins. It’s a social satire about ’60s Hollywood but oh, those descriptions of the “rumor of a town” clinging to the cliffs above the Ligurian Sea.
A tight cluster of a dozen old whitewashed houses, an abandoned chapel and the town’s only commercial interest – the tiny hotel and café owned by Pasquale’s family – all huddled like a herd of sleeping goats in a crease in the sheer cliffs.
But then here is this: I was born and raised in Michigan. So how it is then that I have missed Michigan’s own Jim Harrison?
Harrison in photo from his New York Times obit
My friend Phillip, of Tupelo Mississippi, had to be the one to introduce us. Maybe it takes one good ol’ boy to know another.
Phillip gave me The Beast God Forgot to Invent just after Harrison died last March. In his 78 years, Harrison produced 21 novels, 14 books of poetry, a children’s book and a memoir. He was best known for his novella “Legends of the Fall,” which was turned into a not-awful Brad Pitt movie.
Harrison is not famous in the usual sense, though for some odd reason he’s a cult figure in France, maybe because he wrote well about food, including his account of flying to France for the sole purpose of having a lunch that lasted 11 hours, 37 courses and 19 wines. He was a man of huge appetite. His work -– what little I have read so far — is vivid, lusty, darkly comic, oft-lyric and unrepentantly violent. He writes about hunting, fishing, eating, drinking, smoking, screwing, mainly set in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He writes with a sort of hyper-masculine sensibility that might come off as corny if it weren’t so poignant, self-effacing, and even tender. Think Hemingway without pretentions.
I’m told he’s considered misogynistic. But Beast is one of his later books, so maybe he learned some lessons along the way. And in it he gives us some really strong women, who often get the best lines, including one from a woman complaining about life in Manhattan:
“There’s no nature in New York, and the closest you can get is an orgasm.”
We took a drive up into the Leelaunau Peninsula the other day. We stopped for tastings at vineyards, had lunch by a raging waterfall, and visited a rare book store, tucked around back of white clapboard house in the tiny village of Leland. The owner, an old guy who bore a passing resemblance to Jim Harrison, proudly showed me his shelf of Harrison first editions. I was sorely tempted, but $595 for “Legends of the Fall” was too rich for my blood. I’ll be seeking out a good trade paperback of that and the rest of those 20 other novels.
Maybe it’s best that I come to Harrison so late in my reading life. I have not lived here in Michigan since I left for Florida in 1973. Yet now, I am feeling a pull to this place that is very powerful. I think there is a part of me that needs to be reminded how beautiful this place is. How the birds, the sky, the smells, the food, even the variety in the color of the squirrels — it’s all unique here. Harrison’s book feels very real to me, like he is writing it only for me, explaining my soul-place to me, taking me deep into the dark woods and showing me things I have forgotten and, at this moment in my life, need to remember.
You can go home again. Sometimes, you have to. And it’s always best to go with a good guide.
I think every fiction writer, to a certain extent, is a schizophrenic and able to have two or three or five voices in his or her body. We seek, through our profession, to get those voices onto paper. — Ridley Pearson
By PJ Parrish
Picking a point of view is one of the most important choices a writer makes. Who are you going to trust to tell your story?
I’ll go out on a limb and say I think it is THE most important choice you make. Why? Because point of view — and how well you pull it off — is the most powerful way of developing that special bond between character and reader. And if you don’t create that bond, if you don’t make the reader invest emotionally in your characters, well, what you are putting there on paper is just a bunch of plot points.
So what’s your choice? A single narrator or do you need several? Should you go with first person, which provides immediate connection through the power of the “I” pronoun? Or do you chose third person, which gives you more latitude and depth, the freedom to paint on a larger canvas?
And if this isn’t enough to worry about, let me throw in a new wrinkle:
Intimate point of view.
In case you’ve been under a rock, intimate POV is all the rage in fiction right now, with editors gushing about it and pleading for it in their Track Changes. Which makes me want to dismiss outright as a fad. This, too, shall pass, like all the “girl” books gathering dust on the remainder table.
But the more I started thinking about it, the more I realized “intimate point of view” is really just another ratchet in our character development tool chest. Many of us are already doing this in our writing. And if you aren’t, well, maybe this is something you need to consider.
Now I have been trying to write this blog for two months. But this is slippery subject, and it’s hard to define. So if you read this and still go “huh?” the fault, dear reader, is probably mine. But I’m going to give it the old college try anyway.
One reason we chose first person is because it puts us right in the heart and mind of the protagonist. But with third person, without the anchor of the “I” pronoun, the intensity of that reader bond can be weak. I’ve read third-person novels that feel like I’m listening to an old transistor radio where the signal fades in and out and I can’t “hear” the protagonist’s feelings and thoughts clearly. When that signal wavers, I don’t bond strongly with the character and I lose interest in the story.
Why should you care about intimate POV? Because readers do. People read to have vicarious experiences. They want to walk the miles in your characters’ shoes, view the world as they do, feel their struggles, pains, triumphs and turmoils. The closer you the writer can connect with your characters, the greater the bond the reader will have with them.
So how do you do this? I think it helps to think of this as an extension of our oft-quoted writers axiom — Show Don’t Tell. In terms of POV, it becomes a matter of not merely describing feelings and thoughts but allowing the reader to enter the skins of your characters and experience everything just as they do. Third person intimate uses many of the best tricks of good first-person point of view. When you are in first person, every single thought and sensation is filtered through that one person. Which is one reason first person is easier to write and can feel more involving to the reader. But you can achieve the same bonding in third person if you are willing to dive deeper into intimate POV.
Okay, I tried to TELL you. Now let me SHOW you what I mean. Maybe this will help.
Bear with me but I am going to resort to using my own book here. I’m going to show you two versions, one a regular third-person POV and the second in a more intimate third-person POV. This is the opening of chapter 18 of my latest book She’s Not There. The set-up: This scene has my character Clay Buchanan at a moral crisis, what James calls a “man in the mirror” moment. (which I took literally, as you will see!) This is a huge turning point in the book and will set Buchanan on an irreversible dark path. I chose to put him alone in a quiet place so I could make his inner turmoil play in high relief by contrast. The first version is perfectly adequate and gets the job done. But in the second version, I am trying to immerse myself in this man’s soul.
CHAPTER 18 (adequate)
Buchanan stared at his reflection in the mirror and listened to the song playing on the jukebox. It was Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.” How pathetic, he thought, to sit in a bar and stare at yourself in the mirror. But then he realized that maybe this was what he needed right now – a good long hard look at himself that might lead to a moment of moral clarity.
He finished his second scotch and set the empty glass down in the trough of the bar. His thoughts returned to the questions that had plagued him on the plane ride back from Georgia: What would happen if he had to stand trial for Rayna’s murder? What could he do with all that money from the deal he had struck with Owen McCall? And what exactly was he going to have to do to get that money?
Now here is the opening as I really wrote it:
CHAPTER 18 (intimate)
Was there anything more pathetic than staring at yourself in a bar mirror? But maybe that’s what he needed right now, a good long hard look at himself. Confront the man in the mirror, stare deep into his soul. Find a bright shining moment of moral clarity.
Buchanan picked up his glass. What was that Michael Jackson song? “The Man in the Mirror”? How did it go? Something about making a change?
He finished his second scotch and set the empty glass down in the trough of the bar. On the plane ride back from Georgia, he hadn’t had anything to drink. He had needed his head clear to think. Think about what might happen if he had to stand trial for Rayna’s murder. Think about the deal he had struck with Owen McCall. Think about what he could do with two million dollars. Think about what he was going to have to do to get it.
Note that I didn’t use one “thought” or “wondered” or “realized.” Note, too, that the sentences are often fragmented to mimic the fleeting rhythm of real thought. Humans under stress tend to not think “straight.” The writer’s trick is to get the feeling of this and still keep the reader on track.
Back to the adequate version now:
Buchanan looked down into his empty glass, thinking now about what a ruthless man Owen McCall was, and what it must be like to have so much power that you could buy anything — including a woman’s life. And he wondered if he could ever be like that, do whatever it took to get what he wanted.
He shut his eyes because, suddenly, there it was again. His dead wife’s voice was in his head, haunting him, and asking the question he was too afraid to ask himself: What do you want, Bucky?
I just want you to be quiet, he thought.
“Excuse me?”
Buchanan opened his eyes to see the bartender staring at him. He blinked her into focus. He didn’t even realize he had spoken.
“All I asked you was if you wanted a refill,” she said. “If you’re gonna get ugly, there’s the door.”
He held up his hands. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Yeah, bring me another, please.”
Okay, it’s not bad. But this is a man so tormented by his wife’s murder that he thinks she talks to him from the grave. I use this device throughout the book, as if Rayna is what is left of his moral compass, if he would only pay attention to it. By this point in the book every time the reader sees the italics and her nickname for him “Bucky,” they know it is Rayna talking to him in his imagination. Also, by now, Buchanan is starting to “understand” that even his wife is turning against him. Here is how I really wrote it:
Owen McCall’s face came back to him in that moment, how it had looked in the car, stone cold gray in the slant of the streetlight, how there was nothing coming from those hard blue eyes, like all the man’s energy was directed inward.
Maybe that’s what it took. Maybe you had to filter everything and everyone out and laser-focus everything you had back into yourself to become a man like that—a man who was successful enough to buy anything on earth. Including a woman’s life.
Could he do that? Could he be the kind of man who would do whatever it took to get what he wanted?
But what do you want, Bucky?
Buchanan shut his eyes.
Tell me, Bucky. What do you want?
“I just want you to be quiet,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
Buchanan opened his eyes to see the bartender staring at him. He blinked her into focus.
“All I asked you was if you wanted a refill,” she said. “If you’re gonna get ugly, there’s the door.”
He held up his hands. “Sorry, I’m sorry. Yeah, bring me another, please.”
Another place intimate point of view can be really effective is when you have to enter a flashback. In this chapter 18, I realized I had to finally explain to the reader how Buchanan’s wife Rayna had been murdered. When you have to inject a flashback, as we all know, you want to get in and out as fast as you can. Flashbacks work best during what I call “quiet moments,” when your character is taking a break from the action and can “remember” and thus narrate for the reader what has happened in the past. Here is the adequate version of my Rayna flashback later in the same Chapter 18:
The bar had gone quiet and his thoughts moved in to fill the void. Usually, when he thought about what had happened ten years ago, his memories were fuzzy. But now, for some reason, everything was coming back to him with a painful clarity.
He remembered how hot it had been that September day, and how annoyed he felt because the baby’s asthma was bad, making him cry so much that Buchanan could barely hear the football game on TV. And his daughter Gillian had made such a mess on the rug with her toys. Rayna had come in the kitchen, grabbed the remote and muted the TV, demanding to know why he hadn’t answered the ringing phone.
He had ignored her, because he was angry about so many things. Angry because the AC was broke and they had no money to get it fixed, pay the mortgage or even cover the baby’s medical bills. He was angry, too, because he hated working as an insurance adjuster and if Rayna hadn’t gotten pregnant, he would have been able to finish his psychology degree. When he finally did look up at his wife, he realized she saw him exactly as he saw himself — made small and mean by his disappointment.
Here’s how I really wrote it:
He watched two guys finish their ping-pong game. The roar in his head had quieted. Even her voice was gone, for the moment at least. He knew this was dangerous, letting his mind go empty, because that’s when the memories slid in. And they were coming now, not like they usually did, like he was seeing them through a soapy shower curtain, but with a sharp, stabbing, awful clarity.
It had been hot that September day, with tornado warnings crawling across the bottom of the TV screen as he watched the Titans game. The baby was crying in the kitchen, making that awful wheezing sound he made when his asthma was bad, and Gillian had made a mess on the rug with her Shrinky Dinks. Rayna had come into the living room and grabbed the remote, muting the TV.
Bucky, didn’t you hear the phone?
No. Did it ring?
He hadn’t even looked at her. The AC was on the fritz, he was hot and miserable, thinking that this was his first day off in two weeks and all he wanted was to be out in the woods with his binoculars and birds. He was thinking about the late mortgage payment and the baby’s unpaid medical bills, thinking about his peckerwood boss and how much he hated working as an insurance fraud investigator. Thinking that if Rayna hadn’t gotten pregnant again, the money they had saved might have been enough for him to go back to night school and finish his psychology degree.
When he finally looked up at his wife, he saw something there in her clear blue eyes he didn’t want to see—himself, made small and mean, because this was never what he had envisioned for himself, and it was too late to go back and fix it.
Again, note the fragments and details — that’s how our brain stores its memories, in flashes of images, sights, sounds and smells. Also, by being in intimate POV, I try to establish some sympathy for Buchanan so the reader can maybe begin to understand his anger. This flashback goes on from here, and I kept it as short as I could but still gave the reader enough background so they could understand the depth of Buchanan’s torment. (He was brought up on charges for her murder but was cleared. Her body, and that of his infant son, were never found.)
Okay, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. And what you can do to make your character’s point of view feel more intimate. Here are some things to watch for:
Know your character inside and out: Intimate POV allows your story and scenes to be experienced from the inside out rather than “reported” from the outside looking in. But this is really hard writing. To pull this off, you must know your character intimately. Everything –- every word, the syntax, the accent, the idioms – must arise from the character’s background and experience. Unless you know your character’s inner most feelings, thoughts and motivation, you won’t be convincing. And you must be able to answer, at the deepest levels, WHAT THE CHARACTER WANTS.
Remember the movie Ghost? Whoopi Goldberg plays a medium who claims that spirits enter her body and talk to their loved ones. Of course, she’s a charlatan, until Patrick Swayze shows up and dead people really do start talking to her. There’s a great scene where the impatient ghost Orlando jumps into Oda-May’s body and takes over. This is what your characters must be free to do — jump into your consciousness and inhabit it so intimately that you and they become one. As Ridley Pearson puts it, you must be able to have two, three, five voices in your body. But when you the writer “speak” on paper, we should hear your characters, not you pretending to be them.
Cut out filter words. Filter words or phrases are you the writer relating things and action rather than letting the reader experience things “first hand” through the character’s sensibilities. You don’t need to remind readers that a character is “feeling,” “hearing,” “seeing” or “smelling.” Delete these words whenever possible. But while paring down, look for ways to inject something personal and telling about your character. Examples:
Adequate: He smelled the rotting dead body lying in the flower bed. Better: First came the sweet scent of roses, but as the wind shifted, the chemical cocktail of rotting flesh made him stop in his tracks. It was funny what you learned after fifteen years in homicide. Dead animals smelled different than dead men.
Adequate: Mary heard the screen door slam and felt the breeze ruffle her dress. Better: The screen door slammed. Mary’s dress waved. (stealing from Springsteen there!)
Limit Your Dialogue Tags. Dialogue tags are the words you use when describing the speaking character (e.g. she said, he shouted, he whispered, etc.). Get rid of as many of these as you can, without sacrificing clarity. Intimate POV works best when your character is alone, but when he’s not you must be careful to let the reader know who’s talking. If you are worried about clarity in thinking, shame on you — it means you are head-hopping in your POV.
Know when to stop: Not every scene needs to be written from an intimate POV. Often, you are just moving characters around in time and space and we don’t need to feel every single emotion they do. The intimate sensibility should always be there but sometimes it just hums along in the background as the action unfolds. Which makes it all the more powerful when you do pull out the stops and let Orlando jump into your body.
Frasier: I’ve had an epiphany. Niles: Oh, wonderful. We could use a second sentence.
By PJ Parrish
The following is a true story, I swear. A couple years back, my sister and co-author Kelly and I were sitting at the old card table behind a stack of our books just inside the entrance of Barnes and Noble. It was raining and business was slow. (One advantage to having a co-author: You have someone to talk to during book signings when the screaming hordes of fans aren’t exactly beating down the door.)
A lady came up to our table, picked up our book, read the blurb and asked, “Are there two of you?” (We get that question a lot, even when both of us are sitting there). We explained that yes, we were co-authors and that was our pen name there on the cover.
The lady said, “My sister and I are thinking of writing a book together. Do you have any advice?”
I said, “Do you get along well with your sister?”
“No, we hate each other,” she said.
The first rule about co-authoring: It helps a lot if you like each other.
Yesterday, Joe Moore gave us an excellent overview of what it takes to write with a co-author. Today, I’m going into the weeds with some of the more prosaic stuff you need to consider before you partner-up. And yeah, I apologize ahead of time, but it does involve lawyers.
Personalities matter
First consideration when thinking about collaboration: You have to like each other.
If you don’t, it will never work. Think about what happens the first time one of you says, “You know, I don’t think that scene you wrote really works. Maybe we should scrap it.” Do you have roughly the same sense of humor? Do you like the same kind of books? Could you share a hotel room if you had to?
As Joe said, personalities matter. You don’t have to be bosom buddies, but you do have to respect each other and get along. Because writing even just one book is a long process and if you can’t stand to be in each other’s company for an hour, how are you going to make it eight months and 100,000 words?
Geography doesn’t
Over the course of thirteen books and fifteen years, Kelly and I have never lived closer than 1,000 miles. I’ve been rooted in Fort Lauderdale while she has wandered the earth like Caine in Kung Fu. In the early days, we relied on long distance phone calls (expensive), then emails, and now – hallelujah! — Skype. This has made collaboration easy because with Skype, one of you can have a chapter open on the screen and work on it while the other sees exactly what you are doing. But we also try to get together once a year in the same place because nothing subs for actual face-time. Plus we like to drink wine together.
Commitment matters
The second biggest consideration is this: Do you have the same level of commitment? Writing novel is a long tedious process and if one of the partners lacks the energy, time or drive, one person ends up shouldering the load and hard feelings develop fast. I have a good friend who partnered up with a guy to write a thriller. He had the original concept and a rich research background; she had a track record in mysteries and the work ethic. Three guesses who ended up doing most the work. For half the money.
Tone matters a lot
What kind of book are you writing? I know a lot of solo writers who can’t answer this, but you must agree on this with a co-author. What is your sub-genre, if any? What style are you aiming for? And what will the tone be? You must agree on this before you write one word or the book will never be seamless. I just started reading Joe and Lynn’s book The Blade, and I have to admit admit I went in looking for the seams. But I am finding none. This is very important because if the book feels like it has two voices at work, the reader won’t buy it. It’s very jarring.
Okay, now let’s deal with the nuts and bolts. You have to get this boring stuff down right from the start with a potential partner. Please don’t — in the beautiful bloom of first love, when you are dreaming about movie deals and royalties — neglect the details. Don’t try to wing it or figure it out later. This kind of thinking makes for doomed collaborations. And many bad marriages.
INCOME If you are self-publishing: Be aware that with most outlets, only one name can be on the account. If you want to post your book on Amazon, for example, you can’t list both your names on the account. Which means that one of you must manage the account, pay out income, and at the end of the year issue the other person a 1099 tax form. If your name is on the account, your writing partner is, in essence, a contractor. You can both access the Amazon dashboard account, which solves the problem of cheating. But someone has to be the main person for the income stream. Also, if you consign to bookstores, they will likely want to deal with one name for accounting.
If you go traditional: Your publisher will want both your names on any contract. They will likely split all income and issue you each royalty statements and tax documents. Ditto for any good agent, who will also deduct expenses individually.
EXPENSES: If you are the kind of person who shows up on April 12 at H&R Block with a liquor box filled with receipts, don’t try co-authoring. You must keep impeccable records. Because some expenses will be shared; some will be individual. Shared might include: editing, formatting, cover design fees, Createspace costs, website (yes, you need one), postage, and any expenses relating to the book in general. Individual might include: travel you do separately, workshop and conferences, publications, organization fees, office expenses. Someone in the partnership has to be the caretaker of the shared expenses, keep good records, and issue the other an accounting for tax purposes. Believe me, this can get hinky. It doesn’t hurt to involve a good CPA in this.
WILL: You do have one, right? Shame on you. Well, you need one if you have a writing partner. It needs to cover what happens if one of you dies: Who takes over the business and how are past and future income distributed? Do you want your ex-spouse or rotten kids to retain your part of royalties or a possible movie deal? Who owns the pen name, if you use one? Get a lawyer.
PARTNERSHIP AGREEMENT: If you have an agent or traditional publisher, they will probably demand this. Even if you self publish, it’s a good idea to have one anyway. Our former agent demanded it, and my lawyer asked me for it when I went to get my will done. This spells out things like: How income and expenses are divided (50%/50% or some other variation?) Who owns the copyright? How is the pen name to be used? (ours stipulates only for “works created together and for no projects either of us might undertake individually.” This prevents your co-author, if you split, from using the team name). A “failure to perform” clause, which details what happens if one of you dies or is disabled, that you have the right to terminate the partnership. It includes a clause called “Warranties” which is a bunch of legal-ese that protects you both. And you need to get this notarized. I know…pain in the butt. Too bad.
Whew…still want to team up? Let’s move on.
ORGANIZATION OF BOOK STUFF Main File: Do you ever lose material or delete chapters by accident? Do you forget and work on the wrong version of something? Welcome to my world. Now, consider how far south this can go if there are two of you. So, figure out before you start who is better organized and let that person be – {{cue Godlike voice}} — THE KEEPER OF THE FILE. Someone has to be in charge of the latest working version. If you don’t do this, you might each be working on different versions of the same chapter. The Keeper has to also have an excellent back-up program like iBox. They must be vigilant about making sure the other person has the right material. This is not what you want to hear when you turn on Skype in the morning: “I finished chapter 9 last night but I think I was working on an old version from two months ago.” This has happened to us. We call our working version ONE BIG FILE. At times, when things are going badly, we have inserted a colorful profane adjective between “big” and “file.”
Chronology: Someone should keep a running chronology of the book as you progress. I don’t know how anyone writes a complex plot without keeping a running chronology of what happens in each chapter, but that’s just me. With a co-author, keeping a chronology really helps to keep you on the same page in your time-line and saves time when you go into rewrite mode. You don’t want to have this conversation:
“We need to go back and beef up the clues in that Paris morgue scene so Jacques Reacher can figure out he is chasing a one-armed man.”
“What chapter was that in?”
“You wrote it. Don’t you remember?”
“That was five months ago.”
“Well, let me do a search for it. What was the ME’s name?”
“We didn’t give him one.”
“Well, search for all the French stuff!”
“Can’t we just let this slide? No one will notice.”
“Yes, they will. I think we said the guy was missing his RIGHT arm but now the slash marks from the knife would tell Reacher that he’s left-handed.”
LONG PAUSE. “Okay…I’ll find it. Go do a run on your treadmill. You’re getting crabby.”
This is why you keep a running chronology. To save time and tsouris. Here is a part of our chronology for our current WIP:
CHAPTER TWO – day 1 Saturday April 6, 1991
Louis arrives at church and talks briefly with new boss Steele. Est. setting.
CHAPTER THREE – day 2: April 7
Louis finds his apartment and unpacks his mementos. Thinks about Joe. Brief reference to what happened in DOW with Steele.
CHAPTER FOUR – day 3 Monday morning April 8
Back at remodeled church. Team members show up. Steele gives brief intros and they take their cases.
CHAPTER FIVE – day 3 Monday late night
Emily comes and they go to dinner at bar and talk. Louis calls Joe.
CHAPTER SIX – day 4 Tuesday April 9
The meeting in the choir loft. As Louis is packing up file and getting ready to leave, he can’t resist asking Steele why? Backstory on what exactly happened in Loon Lake 5 year ago (in L’s thoughts) and what changed Steele’s mind about Louis.
CHAPTER SEVEN – day 4 Tuesday
Louis drives to Keweenaw. Meets Sheriff Nurmi and Monica. First reference to Sisu clue on Monica’s sweatshirt. Ends with L seeing the box in evidence.
In each chapter, we record the salient plot details, the first appearance of any character. We also record the calendar date as it happens in the book and what DAY we are in time-wise, so we can tell how much time passes between events. This latter DAY thing is important because you can see, at a glance, that you’ve let five days go by in your plot and nothing has happened. I update this with each completed chapter and send it to Kelly.
Character board. Now this is strictly optional, but Kelly and I have found it useful. You and your partner need to be on the same page when describing characters. We’ve found a trick: We agree on a famous person — like Mike Ditka was our sheriff and the actor Michael Rennie is Louis’s foster father — and sort of use him or her as a template. Over the years, we’ve even pasted them in a montage. This is fun and goes over big at workshops and signings.
Yikes…you’re still here? Boy, you must want this partnership thing bad. Okay, here’s the rest of the stuff you have to consider before you get hitched.
MISCELLANEOUS What’s your name? Are you going to use a pen name like Kelly and I do? Or do you use two names, like Joe Moore and Lynn Sholes? And whose name goes first?
Are you at about the same level in your craft? They say you should always play tennis with someone better than you. I don’t advise that for writing. Aim for someone on your own level. As Joe pointed out, you will each bring different strengths and weaknesses to the team, but your basic craftsmanship level should be the same. Now, if you are entering a partnership where one is charged with all writing and the other say research and editing, make sure you are clear going in that those are indeed the parameters.
Go to a writers conference together. You can learn a lot about another writer in a writer’s conference bar. Pick each others brains. As Joe said, talk, talk, talk…and talk some more. Consider it speed dating before you make the plunge.
Commit to a routine. Joe said this but I need to second it because it’s vital. Set a daily “meeting” where you get on Skype or phone and touch base. Maybe it’s for hours as you thrash out plot. Maybe it’s for 10 minutes. But you must maintain contact. And emails aren’t enough. Did I mention that you need to talk?
Support each other. Again, this is like a marriage in every way. You go into a writing collaboration because you want to believe that you can achieve something together that you can’t achieve alone. So tell each other the truth, but do so constructively and with kindness. Be honest. Don’t be afraid to send your less than best. You can send something that needs work; that’s why there are two of you. Yes, you want to do a good job but it is not important to impress your partner. And last but not least…
Bury your ego. You each bring different skills and talents to this and if one is far stronger at plot, let that person take the lead. Maybe you are better at character development. As the partnership goes on, you might find, as we did, that we learn from each other.
People ask us all the time if we argue or disagree about the book. Of course. We’re sisters. We’re writers. We have massive egos and decades of history together. But we understand that, in the end, there are really three of us in this partnership. So yes, we argue. But that third entity — the story — always wins.
“The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn’t get published. The average — or only slightly above average — detective story does…. Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.” — Raymond Chandler
By PJ Parrish
Okay, it’s time to talk about the F-word.
But before we do, I have to back up a little and first talk about ballet.
Back in my newspaper days, I spent 18 years as a dance critic. I was privileged to see every great ballet company in the world, and interview wonderful dancers. I also took a lot of classes, starting when I was a tubby little 12-year-old to around 35 when I finally hung up the toe shoes. I didn’t know it at the time, but ballet was really good training for becoming a crime novelist. Because both are based on finding magic within the formula.
A quick primer for all you ballet-adverse types out there. Bear with me, because you will need this when I get to Raymond Chandler:
Everything in ballet can be boiled down to five positions. There are only five ways to position your feet, five ways to hold your arms. But…
Everything in ballet -– from the classical precision of Swan Lake (1875) through the sassy sweep of Twyla Tharp’s Nine Sinatra Songs (1982) — flows out of this. Think about that for a second: Within one strict formula can be found myriad unique opportunities for self-expression.
One of my favorite ballets is George Balanchine’s Serenade. Balanchine was a genius. He sort of did for dance what Raymond Chandler did for the detective novel, building a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries, finding new permutations within the old formula, and changing everything that came after forever. Serenade was the Rosetta Stone for a new kind of dancer. Philip Marlowe, likewise, held the DNA for a new kind of hero.
The opening of Serenade is breathtaking in its simplicity and promise. Seventeen dancers stand motionless on stage, one arm raised, feet parallel. Then, slowly, their arms come down together in first position, and a beat later, their feet turn out. With that one motion, they mutate from mere women into dancers, standing in the first position from which all movement flows. Go watch it and come back. It will only take 53 seconds.
Now, here’s the opening of Chandler’s The Big Sleep.
It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.
Like Serenade, this opening is breathtaking in its simplicity and promise. Right away, we know we are beginning a journey with a very special guide. And oh, those telling details. Who but a man who’s been on too many benders would point out that he was sober this time? And that last line? A lesser writer would have been content with: “I was going to see a rich guy.” Such delicious sarcasm and attitude!
Both Serenade and The Big Sleep are exemplars of two master artists working within the confines of their genres even as they explore and expand the formula.
So back to the F-word. Let’s talk about formula. I think it’s become a dirty word in our crime writing world, tossed around as a pejorative by folks who want to put us in our place. Some want to draw distinctions between genre fiction and literature. (“Her novel transcends the blah-blah-yada-yada.”) And some, even within our own circle, want to diminish writers who hew too closely to the bones. (“He’s working the tired old formula.”)
Years ago, I was on a panel about the future of the PI novel. There was a strange undercurrent to it, like it was put on the program almost as an apologia. It was like the conference organizers were accommodating the private eye novelist as the goofy cousin you seat at the kid’s table at Thanksgiving. Chandler himself, in a great interview with Ian Fleming put it this way: “In America, a thriller, a mystery writer as we call them, is slightly below the salt.” (Click here to hear the entire fascinating exchange.)
But I think the PI formula — and indeed, the entire crime fiction blueprint — has much to recommend it. Mainly because, as with ballet, once you master its fundamentals, once you understand the underlying structure and learn the basic “rules,” you are freed to swing for the fences.
I guess we should stop and take a hard look at that word “rules.” It’s a scary word because some of us think we don’t know the rules and others think the rules are there only to be broken. There have been a lot of rules doled out over the years regarding crime fiction. S.S. Van Dine’s “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” written in 1928, might be the most famous. Van Dine prefaced his rules thusly:
The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws—unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.
My favorite Van Dine-ism: “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.”
T.S. Eliot was a big fan of detective novels, and was compelled to publish his own set of rules, in 1927 in his literary magazine The Criterion:
The story must not rely upon elaborate and incredible disguises.
The criminal’s motives should be fairly predictable. “No theft, for instance, should be due to kleptomania (even if there is such a thing).”
The solution should not involve the supernatural or “mysterious and preposterous discoveries made by lonely scientists.
Elaborate and bizarre machinery is an irrelevance. Detective writers of austere and classical tendencies will abhor it.
The detective should be highly intelligent but not superhuman. We should be able to follow his inferences and almost, but not quite, make them with him.
Even Raymond Chandler himself couldn’t resist laying some laws. Here are his Ten Commandments For the Detective Novel:
It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law….If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
It must be honest with the reader.
Now of course you can see that Chandler’s “rules” are more in tune with our own modern sensibilities. He, like ballet’s Balanchine, pointed the way to the future. He, like Balanchine, took the old formula and made it new. Which is why we still read him today and we don’t read S.S. Van Dine or Ronald Knox.
It’s often said that we writers only recycle the same plots over and over. There are, in fact, only seven stories in the world, according to the writer Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch. Here they are:
man against man
man against nature
man against himself
man against God
man against society
man caught in the middle
man and woman
So Romeo and Juliet is reborn as West Side Story. Moby Dick resurfaces as Jaws. King Lear becomes A Thousand Acres in the hands of Jane Smiley. And don’t get me started on what Bram Stoker unleashed on us.
This post was inspired by Larry Brook’s post here last week on concept vs premise. Go back and read it if you haven’t already. As I said in my comment there, the current hit movie The Martian is really just an old plot, one Sir Arthur himself would recognize as Man vs Nature but transported to Mars. Before The Martian, we had Robinson Crusoe, The Swiss Family Robinson, PD James’s Children of Men, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, which was recycled into thecheesy Charleston Heston movie Omega Man.
Formulas are not, in themselves, bad things. And given the long and glorious history of the crime novel, it is something we should honor, not disdain. The “trick” for us is to find within the universal human experience, fresh things to say about our own times and situations.
The ballet Serenade ends on a mournful note, a man borne off by a female dancer who, to my mind, is a symbolic angel.
And then, there is the equally elegiac ending paragraphs of The Big Sleep.
I went quickly away from her down the room and out and down the tiled staircase to the front hall. I didn’t see anybody when I left. I found my hat alone this time. Outside, the bright gardens had a haunted look, as though small wild eyes were watching me from behind the bushes, as though the sunshine itself had a mysterious something in its light. I got into my car and drove off down the hill.
What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn’t have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
On the way downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn’t do me any good. All they did was make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again.
There is nothing new. Just new ways of making us feel.
“Fiction is the truth inside the lie.” — Stephen King
By PJ Parrish
We all tell lies. Some of us, like politicians, make it into an art form. But most of us just bump along through life moving along the lie spectrum from the little-white variety (“Of course you’re not too old to wear leopard leggings!”) to the whopper (“I’m a natural athlete.” – Lance Armstrong.)
We all lie. To prove it, I’ll start with a little Truth or Dare. Here are five statements about me. Which ones are lies? (Answers in a little bit.)
When I was 47, I was in the Miami City Ballet’s production of “The Nutcracker” directed by the acclaimed dancer Edward Villella.
I once stood on my head at Les Invalides, the place in Paris where Napoleon is entombed.
I interviewed Michael Jordan in the Bulls locker room for a story about “hang time.”
I was invited to a party on the royal yacht Britannia where Queen Elizabeth asked me what I did for a living.
Telly Savalas let me lick his lollipop.
Now, we writers are born liars. We have to be to create fiction. And the better we are at lying, the better our books tend to be. Okay, let’s elevate the conversation and call it “suspension of disbelief” instead of lying. We hear that phrase all the time, here at The Kill Zone, in reviews, and on panels at writers conferences. But what does “suspension of disbelief” really mean?
All fiction requires some suspension of disbelief, right from the get-go. We crack open a novel knowing what we are about to read is not really true. We strike a bargain of sorts with the author — we are willing to believe his story’s premise before we read even the first word. But that is a mere promise. The hard part for us, the writers, comes in maintaining that suspension of disbelief over the course of an entire story.
If you’re writing fantasy, horror, or science fiction, “suspension of disbelief” is a basic ingredient of the craft stew. In these unreal worlds, vampires fall in love, Harry Potter breaks the laws of physics and Virgin Air has daily flights through wormholes to Vega. That’s cool because these worlds are meant to be very different from our own. But what about the “real worlds” of crime fiction? What lies can we get away with in our quest for dramatic impact?
Time out for the answers to my true lies:
True, I was in The Nutcracker at age 47. I was only in Act I but when it was over, I wanted to do it all over again. The experience gave me a taste of the narcotic all performers feel.
True. Here’s the picture at left to prove it.
True, I interviewed Michael Jordan. It was on the occasion of Jordan’s comeback (first or second one, I can’t recall). Most the Bulls were nekkid or almost so. Mike was resplendent in a white suit. He was holding court surrounded by sycophantic sportswriters who all tried to elbow me aside. I was the ballet critic and talked to Jordan about the similarities between hang time and ballone (how dancers seem to float in the air). Jordan was fascinated by this but wasn’t happy when I told him Spud Webb was recorded by a physics professor as having the longest hang time in the NBA.
True. I was sent by my newspaper to cover the opening of the Bahamian parliament in 1977 and got to meet Her Majesty on the yacht. Liz did, indeed, ask me what I did for a living. I don’t remember what I said because I was absolutely impaled by her icy blue eyes. For the record, Liz is even shorter than I am. But her husband Phil was very tall, very gregarious, and had a little too much to drink.
Not true. I did get to interview Savalas. He gave me a big hug but did not let me lick his lolly.
Back to the issue at hand. Now, I can’t talk too authoritatively about fantasy, sci-fi or horror because I am not well-read in those genres. But I’ve read hundreds of crime books (and written a few), and I think some writers of crime fiction think “suspension of disbelief” gives them license to write whatever they want — damn reality or fact.
Which is a lie.
Crime fiction, in its way, is harder to write than sci-fi or fantasy when it comes to how much we can lie. That’s because while we crime writers are tethered to the realities of police protocol, forensics, legal procedures, we have to bend these truths in service of good plotting and dramatic tension.
I once heard a famous crime writer guy on a panel say that all crime fiction had to have verisimilitude. I used to think that was just a ten-dollar word for truth. But then I realized what he was talking about was not truth, but a conjured version of it.
Definition: Verisimilitude /ˌvɛrɪsɪˈmɪlɪtjuːd/ is the “life-likeness” or believability of a work of fiction. The word comes from Latin: verum meaning truth and similis meaning similar.
Verisimilitude is not truth. Verisimilitude is the “similar” to “truth.” So the our goal as crime writers should be creating a credibility that reflects the realism of human life. It’s as if, when we create our fictional crime worlds, we are asking our readers to view them through a mirror…not directly on, but by a reflection, slightly altered for dramatic effect.
So why do some crime books feel so wrong? Why do some characters feel so false? When does good suspension of disbelief slide into the muck of lazy writing? Here are some ways I think this happens. (You guys please add your own!)
Characters do outrageous things. Yes, a character can go rogue or surprise. But their actions must arise from the realities of their nature as you have laid them out. Have you ever read a scene and you find yourself shaking your head and saying, “I just don’t believe the hero would do this.” That’s the writer not laying down the psychological foundation for the character to act a certain way.
Characters do stupid things. Yes, it’s good to have your hero go mano-a-mano with the bad guy in the climax, but you have to set it up. I read a thriller a while back where the female detective, fresh off a hot date, goes up into a creepy old house after a serial killer — in her heels and without a gun. This is a variation of the dumb-blonde-goes-into-the basement thing.
But…but…Clarice Starling went down into the basement after Jame Gumm! Yeah, but Thomas Harris set it up brilliantly by having her show up at the wrong house and then, when she realizes the killer is there, she goes into the basement after him because she knows Kathryn is still alive and the clock is ticking. (Harris establishes this by telling us Buffalo Bill keeps his victims alive so he can starve them and loosen their skin).
Don’t put your protag in peril by making them stupid or inept. Do it by creating a crafty set-up. Shape the action leading up to your end-game situations so your confrontation is believable enough for reader to buy into.
Dumb police procedure, legal things, and forensics. You have to be in the ballpark with this stuff. In real life, cases drag on forever, test results take weeks to come back from the lab, court cases drone on without Perry Mason moments. But that is boring in books. So we writers have to condense time, inflate authority, cross boundaries, and yes, even make some stuff up — yet still make it feel true. This is not easy. It helps if you have some experts to fall back on. I’ve called on attorney friends for legal questions, on Dr. Doug Lyle to help me fudge forensics, and I have a retired state police captain on speed dial who keeps me honest but appreciates the fact I have to bend the truth for drama.
One of my favorite crime novelists, Val McDermid, has written two terrific non-fiction books on forensics. She has this to say on the subject: “By and large, I try to be pretty accurate in how I write about the science. But sometimes you do need to make changes for dramatic necessity – for instance, squeezing a test that would take three weeks into two days. That’s the area where we mostly fall down – compressing time frames.” Click here to read more.
Getting the police stuff right is really important to me. My favorite crime movie is Zodiac, the fictionalized story of the real Zodiac killer who terrorized northern California for a decade. The movie shows the drudgery, time-dragging reality, and soul-destroying futility of police work, yet remains dramatically riveting. And the case never got solved.
I can get anal about cop details. I’m writing a chapter this week where Louis is tracing the steps of a suspect that leads him to an apartment where he sees — surprise! — a crime scene premises seal on the door. Louis learns from the owner that a woman was murdered inside a week ago. The local cops have cleared the scene. Can Louis go inside? Can he seize evidence that he thinks is relevant to the OTHER case he is pursuing? I emailed my police captain, laying out this scenario. He wrote back (in part!):
“The Fourth Amendment only protects the “person’s” right from governmental action – the illegal search and seizure. Louis is “government” but the person whose rights might be violated is no longer a person — she is dead — so Louis could go in and seize her property and because she is not around to be prosecuted for the “evidence” he may seize then it is not a Fourth Amendment issue. Second, the owner has permission and the right to enter the apartment so if Louis asks and the owner gives permission for Louis to enter with him then he has the right to be there. Once there anything that he sees in plain sight that he thinks is evidence he could seize.”
Problem solved. Louis gets in, finds what he needs, plot moves forward. In reality, things would play out differently, my police captain said. But with this, I am in the ballpark of suspended disbelief.
Lost and Befuddled Amateurs. So what if your protagonist is not a cop or detective? What if they have no logical reason to get involved with the crime? This is a tough one, and one reason we get so many protags who are lawyers and journalists, as these jobs can dovetail with the crime world. Now, if you wrote cozies, your readers allow for a suspension of disbelief by default, buying into the idea of the civilian-savior. But you still have to set things up so the protag isn’t just an idle observer (yawn) but an active participant (Yay!).
I have been working with a writer through Mystery Writers of America’s mentoring program. Her book features an engaging protag who works in a florist shop. While delivering flowers to a rich matron, the protag finds her dead body in the foyer. Cops are called, of course, but the writer had a problem: She couldn’t justify a flower shop employee having access to the case — or even a reason to solve it. The scenes weren’t believable because the cops would never let a civilian on scene let alone into the case. But through tough rewriting and hard rethinking of her protag’s motivations, the writer solved the problem by making the protag a disgraced journalist who is desperate to clear her reputation.
She’s learned the lesson. Yes, you can lie. But it better ring true.
First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. ― Kurt Vonnegut
I had been storing this blog to run around Thanksgiving, but John D. MacDonald forced my hand this week, so I’m posting early. I want to take a moment to acknowledge the books and thank the authors who have helped me along the way.
Recently, I was asked by a writer friend Don Bruns to contribute to an ongoing series that has been running in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune called “John D and Me.” Cool beans, I thought, since other contributors included Stephen King, Lee Child, Dennis Lehane, Heather Graham, JA Jance, David Morrell…the list went on and on. Click here to read my article. Don’t worry…it’s short. I chose to write about MacDonald’s short stories because, truth be told, I hadn’t read many of the guy’s novels back then. But I had found a yellowed dog-earred copy of his short story collection The Good Old Stuff in a used book store, and at that time, I was struggling mightily to write my first short story.
Actually, it wasn’t my first. My first short story was way back in eighth grade. I was an inattentive student, but I had a lovely teacher Miss Gentry, who made us write a short story. The only touchstones in my little life at that point were The Beatles and my only dream was to run away to London. So I wrote about a lonely cockney boy who painted magic pictures. It was called “The Transformation of Robbie.” I got an A on it.
Miss Gentry
After class, Miss Gentry pulled me aside and said, “you should be a writer.” Twenty-five years later, I dedicated a book to her.
It should be noted that my sister and future co-author Kelly was also churning out short stories in those days. Her most notable effort was called “The Kill.” It was about a serial killer who knocks off The Beatles, one by one. We joke now that nothing much has changed: She still likes to write the gory scenes, I like doing the psychological stuff. I don’t have my early efforts, but she kept hers – see photo below right for the stunning cover she designed at age 11.
Fast forward to 2005. I am trying to write a story for the Mystery Writers of America’s anthology, edited by Harlan Coben. In addition to the big-name writers the editor invites, the anthology holds out 10 spots for blind submissions from any MWA member. I had a good idea for my story and four published mysteries under my belt. But I couldn’t get a bead on the short story’s special formula. What came so easy at age 14 wasn’t coming so easy at age 54.
So I cracked open The Good Old Stuff. Maybe it was because I had been reading Cheever and Chandler and was getting intimidated. But MacDonald made it look effortless. His stories, culled from his pulp magazine career, had an ease and breeze as fresh as the ocean winds. I realized I had been fighting an undertow of expectations, so I flipped over on my back and floated. The words flowed, the story formed. My first adult short story, “One Shot” got picked for MWA’s anthology Death Do Us Part. It was the second proudest moment of my writing life, right after Miss Gentry’s A.
Writing about MacDonald this month got me thinking about the debts I owed to other writers. Here are a couple I should thank:
E.B. White.Charlotte’s Web remains my favorite book of all time. I love it as pure story, but it taught me a very valuable lesson that all novelists should take to heart: Sometimes, you just have to kill off a sympathetic character.
Joyce Carol Oates. Lots of lessons from this woman about productivity and having the courage to write outside the boundaries of whatever box they try to put you in. But one book of hers had a huge impact on me — Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart. From this murky violent story of murder and race, I learned about the power of ambiguity, about the need to leave room in a story for the reader’s imagination to breath, to resist the urge to tie everything up in a neat bow. Also, she just makes me want to write with more metaphoric power. Check out her opening paragraph:
“Little Red” Garlock, sixteen years old, skull smashed soft as a rotted pumpkin and body dumped into the Cassadaga River near the foot of Pitt Street, must not have sunk as he’d been intended to sink, or floated as far. As the morning mist begins to lift form the river a solitary fisherman sights him, or the body he has become, trapped and bobbing frantically in pilings about thirty feet offshore. It’s the buglelike cries of the gulls that alert the fisherman – gulls with wide gunmetal-gray wings, dazzling snowy heads and tails feathers, dangling pink legs like something incompletely hatched. The kind you think might be a beautiful bird until you get up close.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. I still think about this story years after I read it. From it, I learned about spare writing and especially the power of one indelible image. Michael Connelly talks about this, too, about how one gesture, word or image can have so much more impact than an avalanche of description. Connelly talks about how he wrote about a cop who seemed the paragon of cool, how nothing about the horrors of his job seemed to bother him. Except for one telling detail – the stems of his glasses were chewed down to the nubs. In The Road, the image I can’t get out of my head, the one thing that stands in my mind as the symbol of post-apocalyptic survival, is canned peaches.
In the story, a man and the boy discover a cache of supplies in an abandoned farmhouse. Among them is canned peaches. Yes, it’s a delicacy in a time of starvation, but McCarthy also uses it as a symbol marking the split in the world between the fruit-eating “good guys” and the cannibalistic “bad guys.” Here’s an exchange between man and boy:
He pulled one of the boxes down and clawed it open and held up a can of peaches. “It’s here because someone thought it might be needed.” “But they didn’t get to use it.” “No. They didn’t.” “They died.” “Yes.” “Is it okay for us to take it?” “Yes. It is. They would want us to. Just like we would want them to.” “They were the good guys?” “Yes. They were.” “Like us.” “Like us. Yes.” “So it’s okay.” “Yes. It’s okay.” They ate a can of peaches. They licked the spoons and tipped the bowls and drank the rich sweet syrup.
I can’t eat canned peaches anymore because of this. I want to cry just thinking about.
Neil Gaiman. When I was working on our latest book She’s Not There, I needed to find just the right children’s book that resonated with my adult heroine. It was happenstance that I found Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. It follows the adventures of a boy named Bod after his family is murdered and he is left to be brought up by a graveyard. Which metaphorically is what happened to my heroine. I just started Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which, like my own book, is about the fragility of memory. I think what I am learning from Gaiman is the need to be original, to not follow the pack, to be true to yourself as a writer. He sums it up in this quote:
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that – but you are the only you.
David Morrell. Several years ago, David was the guest of honor at our writers conference SleuthFest here in Florida. This talented teacher, prolific writer, and editor of the anthology Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, and creator of Rambo no less, had tons of great advice. But here is the single line that impacted me as a writer.
Find out what you’re most afraid of, and that will be your subject for your life or until your fear changes.
David credits this lesson to another writer Phillip Klass (pen name William Tenn) who told David that all the great writers have a distinct subject matter, a particular approach, that sets them apart from everyone else. The mere mention of their names, Faulkner, for example, or Edith Wharton, conjures themes, settings, methods, tones, and attitudes that are unique to them. How did they get to be so distinctive? By responding to who they were and the forces that made them that way. And all writers are haunted by secrets they need to tell. David talks about this in his book The Successful Novelist: A Lifetime of Lessons about Writing and Publishing. Click Here to read the first chapter.
And last but not least…
Unamed Romance Novel. I read this eons ago as part of my education back in the days when I thought I was going to make a million bucks writing for Harlequin. This novel (I won’t use the title here) taught me perhaps the most valuable lesson of all, one that every writer – published or un – should take to heart. Here is the line from the book that did it:
She sat on the sand on Miami Beach and watched the sun sink slowly into the ocean in a blaze of orange and pink.
When I read that line, I threw the book across the room. But then I picked the book up and put it on my shelf, where it still sits today. (Well, on my bathroom shelf). Because this book taught me that no matter how brilliant your metaphors, how original your story, how beguiling your prose, how deep your unexplored fears, if you have the sun setting in the east, nothing else is gonna work.
So who were your teachers, what were their books, and what did you learn?
“Good authors, too, who once knew better words / Now only use four-letter words writing prose / Anything goes!” – Cole Porter, 1934
By PJ Parrish
A convenient convergence of events led me to my topic today. And thank you, Calliope, because I had nothing to say until last Friday when I started the latest book by one of my favorite crime writers, and then Saturday, when I got a fan email from a lady in Vassalboro, Maine. And both got me to thinking about dirty words.
I’ll start with the fan email, because that’s easier. Here’s what she wrote to us:
Ladies,
I have been reading your Louis Kincaid books for many years and always look forward to the next one. But about your latest book She’s Not There I have to tell that despite the fact I liked the story, I did not like the fact you felt you had to use so much profanity. You don’t need this to tell your story. I plan to buy your next book but I think this is something you should reconsider.
I’ll get back to us in a second. Now, about that book I just started reading: I was really excited about this because I adore this author and the book had a juicy premise, great setting and interesting flawed hero. But I am now 63 pages in and there is this bad ringing in my ears.
I’m being F-bombed so much I can no longer hear the story.
This makes me sad because I so want this writer to succeed. But I think this writer has made a critical error: In an effort to shrug off a reputation as a solid series practitioner, the writer over-swung for the hard-boiled fence and wiffed. What should be a compelling story of a criminal redeemed is reading like a try-out for “The Wire.”
Okay, back to us. Here’s a personal caveat: All the books my sister and I have written contain profanity. In our hard-boiled PI-police procedural series, we think it’s near impossible to construct a believable world without the language of the streets. But over the course of fourteen books, we have drastically cut down on the profanity. Does this make us angels? Hardly, as the good lady from Maine (and others) have reminded us. But it has made me think really really hard every time I go to type a word in my chapter that here in this blog I would have to bleep out.
And if I am put off by too many F-bombs in a crime novel -– me, a person who has been known to curse like a pirate in real life –- maybe we need to consider what it might be doing to our readers.
Now, I don’t think this some weird church-lady thing. When I started to look into this, I was amazed at how many message boards are out there populated with readers looking for fiction without profanity – on such disparate sites as the crime blog The Rap Sheet to the Provo Utah City Library. On GoodReads, there’s a long thread called “Is It Clean?” where I sense a real longing for non-cozies without profanity, epitomized by this posting: “Does anyone know of an author that writes like Vince Flynn but without the language?”
These readers are not all fans of cozies or Christian fiction (though many are). Many, like the Vince Flynn fan, are looking for more realistic stories without gratuitous profanity. John Sandford’s fans evidently have complained to the point that his son, Roswell Camp, was compelled to statistically document (on his own website) a book-by-book decrease in the profanity in his father’s books.
There are different reasons why readers dislike profanity in their fiction. It can colored by religious conviction, personal morals or just plain old taste. Authors are guided by the same impulses. Mark Henshaw, a Mormon crime writer, wrote a blog “Why I Don’t Use Profanity,” saying, “My short answer to the question is: because my mother reads my books. My long answer is a bit more involved.”
Writers of romances, cozies or “traditional” mysteries (sorry for the clumsy labels!), are sometimes under guidelines for market targeting. For the Mystery Writers of America’s Mary Higgins Clark Award, the definition is there in the submission guide lines: “The book most closely written in the Mary Higgins Clark Tradition (my italtics) according to guidelines set forth by Mary Higgins Clark.” It goes on to list several criteria, the last one being, “The story has no strong four-letter words or explicit sex scenes.”
The Agatha Awards, given out by Malice Domestic, specify that the awards “honor the “traditional mystery….that is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others. For our purposes, the genre is loosely defined as mysteries that contain no explicit sex, no excessive gore or gratuitous violence.” No mention of cussing there, but I have seen blogs taking the awards to tasks for honoring books that contain profanity.
And then there’s the whole Pandora’s box of YA and Juvenile fiction, something I know nothing about, except that I have heard that the genres are evolving fast.
In a 2012 analysis of best-selling teen novels, researchers from Brigham Young University reported that kids encounter about seven instances of profanity per hour — and those characters with the dirtiest mouths are often the richest, most popular and best-looking.
They analyzed profanity in 40 teen novels on the New York Times’ best-seller list of children’s books targeting children age 9 or older. Some books were especially gritty. The novel Tweak clocks in with 500 profanities, including 139 F-words. There were 50 F-bombs in Gossip Girl, and 27 in the novel Tempted. The novels with the foulest language were typically aimed at kids 14 and up. Said one researcher, “I had no clue there would be that type of content in those books. If they were made into movies, they would easily be rated R, and parents have no clue.”
What about the rest of us? Where is the line for us and when can we cross it? And what exactly is profanity? We can maybe toss in a “God, that hurts.” And maybe a bitch or bastard or “damn, that’s good!” But beyond that, things get murky.
I tried to think of current harder-boiled writers I have read that don’t have profanity or use so little that I miss it. My short list includes John Grisham, Dean Koontz (gory yes but blue no), and Sue Grafton. This is what passes for cussing in a Grafton’s K Is For Killer:
I drank my beer, heart thumping. I heard her exclaim of surprise. “Look at this. Gaaaaaaad…” She dragged the profanity out into three musical notes as she scooped up her belongings.
I seem to remember Robert B. Parker’s books being pretty tame. Yet when Ace Atkins took the series over after Parker’s death, one critic, in an otherwise glowing review, suggested some readers might be put off by the saltier language:
Parker used obscenities in his books the way Spielberg used the color red in “Jaws”: when you saw it, it was blood and it was designed to elicit a visceral reaction. So, too, did Parker use curse words in his books. They were there, no doubt, he certainly wasn’t a prude. But they were only there when needed. Atkins meanwhile laces the four letter words in and out of the dialogue with a kind of reckless abandon.
Then there’s Lee Child. In an interview with Ali Karim at Shots e-zine, Child talked about why he never uses any profanity:
Although personally I always have used profanity in my speech, for some very subconscious reason, I just could not write it down on the page. I really couldn’t and I also then realized that it’s impossible to capture speech realistically unless you are prepared to fill up the page with four letter words – which is actually how highly stressed people speak. So I thought were into artifice here anyway, so let’s go the whole hog and make highly stressed, tough-guy speech with no four-letter words and see if it’s possible and I think it comes across as convincing. There are a certain number of people who are grateful that there are no four-letter words, and I have never heard from anybody who misses them and wishes I’d put them in.
Now, I could have sworn Jack Reacher swore. But I guess I am wrong. Lee Child might be dropping dirty bombs but no F-bombs. And Child is making an important point here, not just about profanity, but about how to write great dialogue. In crime fiction, foul language is justified on the ground that it is lifelike. But dialogue is NOT a mimicking of real speech; it is a sleight of hand (or ear) that gives the impression of humans talking within the shape of story. As Child says, in real life highly stressed people WOULD cuss a blue streak. But on the written page, that quickly grows tiring and trite, and stinks of a writer trying too hard.
So, where do I come down on this? Somewhere in the middle. I still believe it is a necessary element for the style I have chosen but every time I feel the urge to let loose with a stream of blue, I do one of three things:
Show Don’t Tell. Rather than putting a cuss word in a character’s mouth, I try to find a way to convey the attitude through action. Yeah, it’s harder but often more effective.
Fudge It. “Goddammit” is pretty strong stuff. A simple “damn” will do ya. Likewise, you can get around some words with substitutes, especially if the mood isn’t exactly boiling, like when a crusty old cop is joking around about a “f-ing dirtball.” JK Rowlings uses “effing” in Harry Potter books. And “friggin'” is a good stand-in for the f-bomb, although you should be aware that there is a a really filthy Sex Pistols song called “Friggin in the Riggin.”
Leave It Out. As Lee Child said, if you over-use profanity, it can dilute its power and it can make you, the writer, look inauthentic, and do you really want to be a poor man’s Pelecanos? One or two well-placed cuss words can be the spice you need at the prime moment you need it. Remember Rhett Butler’s exit line in Gone With the Wind: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Why do you think the American Film Institute ranks it No. 1 movie quotation of all time? Because it’s the only profane word in the movie and boy, what a punch it packed.
But…
Sometimes, you just gotta friggin’ use it.
So, yes, I use profanity in my books and will continue to do so. No, I don’t use as much as I use to and it isn’t because I’m afraid of offending someone. Sorry, dear reader, in Vassalboro, Maine, but it’s true. I use profanity with care and caution, because words have power. And finding the right word at just the right moment is my job.
I’m going to let another writer have the last word on this because she says it best, in my opinion: Take it away, Kathryn Schultz, in your essay “Ode To a Four-Letter Word:”
Do we need…a justification, beyond the one a writer might mount for any word, i.e., that it works? There is, after all, no such thing as an intrinsically bad, boring, or lazy word. There is only how it is deployed, and one of the pleasures of profanity is how diversely you can deploy it. Writers don’t use expletives out of laziness or the puerile desire to shock or because we mislaid the thesaurus. We use them because, sometimes, the four-letter word is the better word—indeed, the best one.
“Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them .”– Ray Bradbury
By PJ Parrish
I was watching one of my favorite movies recently, Sideways. I watch it over and over, not only because I enjoy it but also because of what it teaches me about writing great dialogue. There are a handful of these movies I return to again and again – Moonstruck, Casablanca, Bull Durham, The Godfather, Chinatown, Lawrence of Arabia, The Apartment — just to try to see how the magic is done.
So I get to the scene in Sideways where erstwhile novelist Miles has just learned his latest 800-page doorstop has been rejected yet again. Miles descends into a funk fog and laments to his friend Jack:
“Half my life is over, and I have nothing to show for it. I’m a thumbprint on the window of a skyscraper. I’m a smudge of excrement on a tissue surging out to sea with a million tons of raw sewage.”
Which brings us, quite vividly, to our topic of the day – the metaphor. One of our regulars, Jim Porter, has asked us to devote a post to the subject: “I quote Bobcat, when he was Bobcat. At some point, would y’all please write about metaphors–particularly the danger of mixing metaphors. I guess one question is, when is a metaphor finished so you can use another one? We covered this in college, of course, but I would appreciate a review.”
Normally, I don’t give metaphors much thought. I’m of the mind that the metaphor (and its sister the simile) is a lot like sex. If you think about it too hard you’re not doing it right. But then I sat through a day of cable TV political news wherein I discovered that…
The goalposts had been moved…
And we need to level the playing field…
But that might lead us down a slippery slope…
Because all we’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…
And the solution is just a Trojan horse…
Makes me long for the good old days of top-rate political metaphor, like when Rep. Devin Nunes called the guys trying to shut down the government “lemmings in suicide vests.”
Metaphors and similes permeate our lives. I don’t think we even realize how much because they are so ingrained in our language, a sort of shared currency of comparison that we all use. We use metaphors to make sense of the world around us, to make the abstract concrete. We eat our hearts out and are starved for affection. We shoot down arguments and bottle up our anger. We open cans of worms and close the books on things. And while all of us have gotten to the fork in the road, more than a few of us lament the road not taken.
In simplest terms, a metaphor is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two seemingly unlike objects or concepts. By portraying a person, place, thing, or action as being something else, a metaphor gives us a more vivid description or helps us understand something better. When done well, a metaphor also ignites some special spark of recognition in your reader, where they say to themselves, “Yes! I see that! I know exactly what he is trying to tell me.”
Pause for definition: What’s the difference between metaphor and simile? (I sometimes get this wrong, but then I can’t get the lay-lie thing right either.)
Simile: Richard is as brave as a lion. Richard has a heart like a lion. My ex-husband is like a snake in the grass. Metaphor: Richard is a lion. My ex-husband is a real snake.
So how do we take these humble parts of speech and use them to enrich our novels? How do we turn the mundane into the sublime without resorting to clichés?
Aye, there’s the rub.*
*Metaphor, archaic. Origin: in ancient game of lawn bowling, a rub is a fault in the surface of the green that stops a bowl or diverts it from its intended direction.
I’m finding this topic hard to deal with. Good metaphors are like modern art or pornography. I know it when I see it but don’t ask me to define it. Maybe I’m just not the sharpest bulb in the drawer. I think it’s time for some examples:
Good Metaphors/Similes
“The water made a sound like kittens lapping.” — The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
“Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.” — TS Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
“Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” – Macbeth, Shakespeare.
“The sky above the port was the color of television, turned to a dead channel.” – Neuromancer, William Gibson.
“Her voice is full of money.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.
And one of my faves: “Honey, you are a regular nuclear meltdown. You’d better cool off.” ― Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham.
Here are two of Stephen King’s favorites, straight out of the great pulp tradition:
“I lit a cigarette that tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief.” – Raymond Chandler.
“It was darker than a carload of assholes.” — George V. Higgins.
Bad Metaphors/Similes
There are a couple reasons why things can go bad.
Cliches: Usually, metaphors fail because they aren’t fresh. Metaphors are at their most powerful when they are original, inciting new ways of looking at things. These are old and tired and should never appear in your novels: the elephant in the room, deader than a doornail, her hair was spun gold, his eyes were like emeralds and he had movie star teeth. No, don’t even use “Chiclet teeth” because it isn’t yours; someone got there before you.
Non sequiturs. Sometimes, the metaphor just doesn’t make sense. I always think of Yogi Berra here, though he was technically the master of the malapropism. (“Texas has a lot of electrical votes.”). Lawrence Harrison, an op-ed writer for the Washington Post, came up with a great word malaphor, which is a mash up of malapropisms and metaphors. Click here to see his hilarious blog devoted to it. The best example I found of this is from Stephen King’s On Writing, from a novel he refused to name:
“He sat stolidly beside the corpse, waiting for the medical examiner as patiently as a man waiting for a turkey sandwich.”
Why does this fail? Because what does waiting for a turkey sandwich have to do with patience? As Scooby-doo said, “huh?”
Here’s one of my favorite malaphors — and once again, it comes from politics. If you don’t get this, that’s okay. My wish for you, regardless, is that you live long and prosper:
“I’m presenting a fair deal, the fact that they don’t take it means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what’s right.” — President Obama
Mixed metaphors. I promised I’d get to this, Jim, so here we go. There’s a fancy name for mixed metaphors – catachresis. Who knew? This is where the writer gets his creative wires crossed and juxtaposes two unrelated comparisons in a single part of speech. Examples: She grabbed the bull by the horns of the dilemma . We have to get all our ducks on the same page. Let’s burn that bridge when we come to it. Here is a memorable one from Dan Rather: “They counted the votes until the cows had literally gone to sleep.” And Al Gore once reminded us that “a leopard can’t change his stripes.” A couple more:
“All at once he was alone in this noisy hive with no place to roost.” -Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities.
“Anyone who gets in the way of this cunning steamroller will find himself on a card-index file and then in hot–very hot–water.” — Len Deighton, Winter: A Novel of a Berlin Family.
“He had that reputation. Some people thought he was over it, but old dogs rarely change their spots.” — David Baldacci, Hour Game.
And here’s a doozy from a Pentagon staffer quoted in the Wall Street Journal complaining about efforts to reform the military: “It’s just ham-fisted salami-slicing by the bean counters.” Actually, there is something rather satisfying about this one, sort of like a Golden Corral all-you-can-eat word buffet .
Now here’s a caveat about mixed metaphors: Sometimes they can work. But you really have to know what you’re doing to pull this off. In the Len Deighton example above, I suspect he was purposely making his speaker sound obtuse. And then there are the rule-breakers, those writers who can juggle with chain-saws (don’t try this at home, kids). They mix and match metaphors to create an avalanche of style or an emotional effect:
“The moon was full. The moon was so bloated it was about to tip over. Imagine awakening to find the moon flat on its face on the bathroom floor, like the late Elvis Presley, poisoned by banana splits. It was a moon that could stir wild passions in a moo cow. A moon that could bring out the devil in a bunny rabbit. A moon that could turn lug nuts into moonstones, turn little Red Riding Hood into the big bad wolf.” — Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker.
And two lines I wish I had written:
“The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses. Nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.” — ee cummings.
Okay, time for some rules. Well, not rules really, because I don’t believe in rules when it comes to writing. But here are some guidelines about how to use metaphors and similes.
Keep It Simple, Stupid. Similes and metaphors should be useful, concise, and at best even memorable. If you work too hard at it, your exertions will show on the page. Like I said, it’s like sex. Bring your best technique, be creative, but relax, or it ain’t gonna happen.
Make Me Stand Up and Salute. An effective metaphor has the power to stir because it triggers a deep sense of recognition in the reader, relating to something in his experience and eliciting an emotional reaction. Often, the metaphoric connection is simplicity itself. This is a simile but it is one of my all time favorites from the late-great sportscaster Stuart Scott:
He’s cooler than the other side of the pillow.
Pure geometry!
Be Original: If a simile or metaphor doesn’t rise above the merely mundane, it won’t work. This is hard work, coming up with something that is uniquely your own. But this is where the book is made, where your voice emerges. Don’t go with what is facile, dull, easily digested. Don’t be content to be literal and tell us someone is as “beautiful as a young Elizabeth Taylor.” Find a new way to spark the reader’s imagination and let them fill in the gaps. When I was struggling to describe my female protag (who I envisioned as looking like a young Charlotte Rampling), I didn’t say she had high cheekbones and hooded eyes. I gave her a childhood memory about watching cheerleaders and what her father told her about beauty:
They’re plain arithmetic, Joey. You’re geometry. Not everyone gets it.
Here is one of my favorite bloggers Chuck Wendig on the subject. Click here for complete blog:
“Metaphors represent an authorial stamp. They’re yours alone, offering us a peek inside your mind. When a reader says, “I would have never thought to compare a sea squirt to the economic revolution of Iceland,” that’s a golden moment. The metaphor is a signature, a stunt, a trick, a bit of your DNA spattered on the page.”
Bend Me, Shape Me. Good metaphors are entertaining. They sneak up on the reader, tickling them, making them smile. Bend your images like Beckham and watch them soar and swerve. Don’t you love this one from Matt Groening:
“Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.”
If you are struggling with metaphors, read some good poetry. Emily Dickinson is a great place to start. (“Hope is a thing with feathers…”) Langston Hughes is another (if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly…”) But maybe this is the best metaphor ever?
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
Stay in Your POV: We hear a lot these days about writing from an “intimate” point of view. Basically, all that means is being so firmly in your characters sensibilities that every word, gesture, thought and description is filtered through their personal prisms. So that must include whatever metaphors/similes you assign to them. A metaphor must arise organically from the character’s experience, age, background and even geography. A woman who grows up on an Iowa farm isn’t going to produce the same metaphoric connections that a Manhattan socialite might.
In my latest book, SHE’S NOT THERE, my protag is a skip tracer but also an avid birder. That gave me many chances to extend the metaphor through the lens of bird-watching.
Whenever he was in a place like this, or any place where humans gathered, he saw himself as a big bird of prey — a peregrine falcon maybe — soaring high above and looking down at the world from all angles. He could see things that others, so intent on their little ground lives, could not. He could see the big picture.
Later, this man compares a person he is chasing to a crow because crows are the smartest animals on earth. He remembers watching a crow deposit acorns in the middle of a busy street so cars would crack them open. The crow even learned how to time the red lights to go out and safely retreat the nuts.
Pay special attention to where your character is from and look for ways to use that in metaphors. When my skip tracer notices the color of a man’s eyes, he doesn’t compare them to jade. He says they are the color of the Cumberland River on a cloudy day. Now, I bet you haven’t seen the Cumberland but I am trusting you can imagine a muddy rural river and supply the missing metaphor.
Know When to Quit
This was part of Jim’s original question to us here at TKZ and I think it is an important one: “When is a metaphor finished so you can go on to the next one?” I had a friend who did stand-up comedy and he used to talk about “layering” — taking a basic bit and milking it for a extra laughs. But he said you had to know when to stop. So it should be with metaphors. Usually, the simpler the better and you don’t want it to go on too long or it begins to feels forced, like it’s just you the writer showing off. I had to delete a couple bird metaphors from my book because it was losing its impact. Metaphors and similes are special; they are the jewels you add for extra sparkle, something to delight. Maybe it’s helpful to think of them as accessories and remember what Coco Chanel advised about that:
“Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.”
But how many per book or chapter? That’s something you just have to develop an ear for. Because writing is music, after all. And if the note feels false to you, you better believe it will be a clanger for the reader — and you don’t want a Metallica concert going on in your book. I resist the urge to insert too many metaphors — the birds! — which isn’t difficult because they come hard for me anyway.
Speaking of quitting…as my Tupelo-born friend Phillip says, I’m wiped cleaner than a blackboard. So, it you’ll excuse me, I’m off like a herd of turtles. I know we’ve barely scratched the tip of the iceberg, but it’s time to get writing. So let’s roll up our elbows, put our shoulders to the grindstone and get back to rapsodizing and metaphorizing. Now go nail one out of the park!
I am busy with Edgar banquet duties this week, but I am confident you will enjoy this entry from my co-author and sister Kelly.– Kris.
By PJ Parrish
We write about crime, death, torture, corpses, graveyards and cops and we do it, usually, via Skype from homes 1,600 miles apart.
Despite the distance, it’s pretty easy for us to use our purple Post-Its to move a 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 your glass of pinot and go to bed. You might lay awake thinking about the book — whether the plot flows logically or if you’re characters act rationally.
But occasionally, usually after a particularly grueling writing day, or one glass of wine too many, we sometimes find ourselves wondering what kind of people we are to be able to write this stuff and simply move on to something as a casual as walking the dogs or sitting down to a meat loaf dinner.
The answer is that no matter how graphic we may get, no matter how monstrous our villain or how many bullets we shoot across the page, in the end we know none of it is real. But once I had a chance to discover just what it’s like to write when it is real.
A couple years ago, I had both the pleasure and discomfort of assisting a new author on a true crime novel. He was a homicide detective who had a story he wanted to tell about a murdered officer but had no idea where to start. As a published author working on a new book set in his city, I was in need of technical information about his department and its history. 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 relatively easy. Like many authors, as PJ Parrish we have done light editing and critiquing for charity auctions and occasionally for friends, and I suspected this would be no different. But there were a few things I did not anticipate.
First was the officer’s passion for his story. His need to tell the story eliminated any of the usual author-ego issues, but it also made for the occasional dust-up between us. Usually, that involved his need for absolute realism and my desire to take literary license for dramatic effect. Second, I did not realize how different it would be writing about real events and the people who were even more real.
Over the next few months, as his narrative unfolded on my monitor, I found myself unable to let go of the story. I laid awake and thought about him. I started to think about the victim at the oddest times, seeing his face in every cruiser I saw on the city streets. All of this filled me with an increasing the sense of grief for an officer I never knew and a deepening respect for one I did.
I expected that at some point 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 a couple days to get over my depression afterwards.
Then I was given access to the crime scene photos. And I looked.
Everything became real. And I knew then that what I do with my stories, as passionately written and personally satisfying as they are, still makes for a pretty easy job. A beloved job, one I am lucky to have, but a job just the same.
As we neared the end, the officer’s passion never waned, and despite his heavy work schedule, he continued to revise and rewrite, always looking for ways to sand down the rough edges and splash some color on the players. I often imagined him working late into the night, hunched over a cluttered old desk, a half-can of beer nearby and a cigarette dangling off his lip as he pounded out a few more chapters.
Over the summer, he continued to send me pages and I continued to mark them with red ink. Slowly the book matured into something publishable. But as we entered the third act of the story could visualize this book on the shelves. Also I realized that as tough as it had been, I was going to miss it.
I was going to miss the author’s dedication and our strange, brief, and fragile friendship that survived only as long as we were writing. I was going to miss the people in the book because, in a way, telling the victim’s story allowed him to live once again, if only on pages and if only for a few months. And I would have liked to have known these people, many of them heroes in every sense of the word.
But as with all stories, once they’re told and ready to be sent into the world, we have to learn to let go. It’s never easy, even with fiction, but this was particularly hard. But we did it.
Over the years, I have thought a lot about what I took away from this experience that now seems a lifetime ago. It’s complicated, still. I know I will always reap a sense of satisfaction from helping a new author, and there is great reward in that process. And as someone who deeply respects law enforcement, there’s a large part of me that feels honored to have even penned even one single word of this book.
The book, Echoes of Shannon Street, never did find a traditional publisher, but I was okay with that because someone had told the story, and that counted for something. But about a year ago, I found myself wondering if the author had decided to join the growing ranks of the self-published. It took only one search to find it –- he had never changed the title -– and in one click, I was “looking inside.”
I was surprised to see he had changed the opening — yet again — adding new imagery, suspense, and edgy action that kept me turning the pages. I was not surprised to see that the author had kept rewriting and improving, long after we first typed “THE END” many years ago. But I was surprised to see something else.
My name. Not only as Editor, which is honor enough, but also written on the acknowledgement page was this:
“To Kelly Nichols, who taught me how to write.”
Postscript: Echoes of Shannon Street has been made into a documentary, titled “Shannon Street: Under a Blood Red Moon, A Memphis Tragedy,” with proceeds going to the 100 Club, which aids families of officers killed in the line of duty. The movie adaptation begins filming in the Summer of 2016, with a release date of January 2017. You can also see a powerful trailer with actual crime scene images here.
As you know, I have trouble sleeping. Usually, it is because I can’t slow down the hamster wheel in my head. It is whirring around, filled with junk, to-do lists, misconjugated French verbs, woes real and imagined and regrets (I’ve had a few, too few to mention).
And then there are those story ideas floating around in my brain just as I’m trying to drift off. Those tantalizing fragments of fiction, those half-seen shadows of characters-to-be, those little loose pieces of plots just waiting to be sculpted into…
Books?
Here is the question I was pondering last night just before I finally drifted off: Is every idea worthy of a book? Does every story really need to be told? And then, in the cold light of morning, the answer came to me: NO, YOU FOOL!
You all know what I am talking about. Whether you are published yet or not, you undoubtedly have some of the following around your writing area:
1. A manila folder swollen with newspaper clippings, scribblings on cocktail napkins, pages torn from dentist office magazines, notebooks of dialogue overheard on the subway, stuff you’ve printed off obscure websites. At some point, you were convinced all these snippets had the makings of great books. (I call my own such folder BRAIN LINT.)
2. A folder icon in your laptop called PLOT IDEAS or some variation thereof. These are the will-o-wisps that came to you in the wee small hours of the morning, whispering “tell my story and I will make you a star!” So you, poor sot, jumped out of bed, fired up the Dell and tried to capture these tiny teases.
Here’s a picture of my PLOT file. Here are some of the WIP titles: Stud, Panther Book, Silver Foxes, Winter Season, The Immortals, Card Shark. Feel free to steal any of these.
Or maybe you’re one of those bedeviled souls who keeps a notepad by the bed — just in case. (Mine is right under my New York Times Crossword Puzzle Book and paperback of John D. MacDonald’s Ballroom of the Skies.
3. Manuscripts moldering in your hard-drive. Ah yes…the stunted stories, the pinched-out plots, the atrophied attempts, the truncated tries. (Sorry, when alliterative urge strikes, you have to let it out or it shows up in your books). These are the books you had so much hope for and they let you down. These are the books you went thirty chapters with but couldn’t wrestle to the mat for the final pin. These are the books you grimly finished even as they finished you. Maybe you even sent these out to either agent or editor and they were rejected. At last count, I have six of these still breathing in my hard-drive. And at least four others finally died when my Sony laptop did, lost to mankind forever.
So what do you do with all these ideas? You expose them to sunlight and watch them burn to little cinders and then you move on. Because — hold onto your fedora, Freddy — not every idea is a good one. Not every idea makes for a publishable book. And sometimes, you just gotta let go.
Let me give you a metaphor. I think you women out there will get this more readily than the guys. You have a closet full of clothes. Most of the clothes you never wear. But they were really good ideas at one time. Like that hot pink Pucci shift you found at the consignment store but makes your boobs disappear. Like those Calvins you haven’t been able to shoehorn into since 1985. Like that yellow blouse you got at Off Fifth that makes you look like a jaundice patient but you keep it because it is Dolce & Gabanna and you paid $59.99 for it.
I read a good blog entry a while back about “Shelf Books.” I am kicking myself for not writing down who coined this great term; I’m thinking John Connolly? Someone please help me if you know. The idea is that you sometimes have to finish a book just so you can get it out of your system and move on. Doesn’t that make sense? Sort of like cleaning out your closet of clothes that make you frustrated and sad, so you can create space for good new stuff?
We all have Shelf Books. Some are meant to be only training exercises. They teach you valuable lessons that you must learn in order to be a professional writer. I will never forget listening to Michael Connelly talk at a Mystery Writers of America meeting when I was just starting out. He said that he completed three novels before he wrote his Edgar-winning debut The Black Echo, because he knew none of the first three were ready to go out into the world. Fast forward fifteen years to last month when I moderated a panel at SleuthFest with our guest of honor C.J. Box, who told the audience that he wrote four books before he finally hit it right with Open Season (which, like Connelly’s debut, also won the Edgar for Best First Novel.) And I clearly remember reading Tess Gerritsen on her blog where she confessed she wrote three books before she got her first break with Harlequin. She also said how dumbfounded she was that some writers expect to get published on their first attempt.
I think I understand that last thing. I had the hubris to think the same thing myself when I was starting out. But it took me a couple tangos with bad ideas before I found a story that worked. I have also seen some of my published friends lose valuable time not wanting to give up on an idea because they got so emotionally invested in it. And I have seen many unpublished writers lock their jaws onto one idea like a rabid Jack Russell and chew it to death. We all can become paralyzed, unable to give up on our unworkable stories, unable to open our imaginations to anything else. I think it is because we fear this one bone of an idea is the only one we will ever have. Don’t let anyone kid you — even veteran writers get into this mindset, frozen with fear that they have dried up, that they will never again have another good idea.
For unpublished writers, two things happen when they reach this point:
They self-publish — badly. Meaning without getting editing help or good feedback.
Or they get smart, take to heart whatever lessons that first manuscript taught them, put that book on the shelf, and move on to a new idea.
Here is my favorite quote about writing. I have it over my computer:
The way to have a good idea is to have many ideas.
— Jonas Salk
You have to know when to let go. And you have to trust that yes, you will have another idea. Maybe a good one. Maybe even a great one.
I think I will now go clean out my closet. There is a gold lame thrift store jacket in there I need to get rid of. Here it is. It’s yours if you want it. Check out my ad on LetGo. I will even throw in my un-used book title STUDS.
When I took a trip to Vancouver, I couldn’t find a good local novel. But in the Paper Hound bookstore on Pender Street, a clerk sold me a copy of Vancouver, by David Cruise and Allison Griffiths. These interconnected short stories had a Michener-esque sweep that captured the city and its history so well I left it in our rental for the next tenant with a note “better than that guidebook you brought.”
