“It’s the truth, even if it didn’t happen.” – Chief Bromden, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

By PJ Parrish

Liars are all the rage in publishing right now.

Whether it is that fun couple Amy and Nick Dunne in Gone Girl or that poor sot Rachel on the train, the character whose believability is compromised seems to be enjoying her day in the shadows. There seems, in fact, to be a whole sub-genre of Un-relies in YA fiction alone. (CLICK HERE).

I am just back from SleuthFest, the fabulous writers craft-con presented by the Mystery Writers of America Florida chapter, and one of my panels was on this topic. I shared the panel with my co-author sister Kelly, Debra Goldstein (Should Have Played Poker, pubbing in April) and critique group buddy Sharon Potts, whose unreliable narrator book Someone Must Die comes out this year. I have to admit, I had to do some boning up on the subject.  Unreliable narrators are, for me at least, like post-modern literary fiction — I sorta kinda almost recognize it when I see it but don’t ask me to define it.

But define it we did. Or tried. The Un-Rely is a slippery fish.

Gone Girl aside, these characters have been with us for a long time now. The unreliable narrator goes back at least as far as the murderer in Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart who tries to convince us that he’s not crazy –- he’s just an excitable boy! — even though he hears his victim’s heart beating under the floorboards.

True! Nervous — very, very nervous I had been and am! But why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed them. Above all was the sense of hearing. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in the underworld. How, then, am I mad? Observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The rogues gallery of unreliable narrators is long and illustrious. Poe begat Agatha Christie’s Dr. James Sheppard (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd) who begat Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim (Slaughterhouse Five) who begat Ian McEwan’s Briony Tallis (Atonement) who begat Dennis Lehane’s Teddy Daniels (Shutter Island).

So are unreliable narrators all liars or nut-balls? And is this someone you want running around ranting in your head for the next year as you write your novel?

I didn’t expect a big turnout for our panel, but we packed the room. Apparently, many writers want to explore this technique, but I got the feeling most don’t really understand what it entails. So before I throw out the PROCEED WITH CAUTION signs, maybe we first need to lay down a definition.

The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by Wayne C. Booth, a literary critic and professor who in 1961 wrote a book about narrative technique called The Rhetoric of Fiction. He wrote: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not.”

Well, that really clears things up, right? Try this one:

An unreliable narrator is a character whose account of the story and his commentary on it is supposed to be taken as authoritative, but for whatever reason the telling of the story and or commentary is suspect.

What are the “reasons” for the duplicity? Ah, there are many kinds of demons in the human heart and head. Here are the types of unreliable narrators I could glean from my research:

Bald-faced liars. These bad-boys take pride in playing mind games. As Holden Caulfield says, “I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.” Amy and Nick Dunne in Gone Girl are classic liars. One of the best liars might be Verbel Kent in the brilliant screenplay for The Usual Suspects. One of my favorite novels, Sandrine’s Case, by Thomas Cook features a really well rendered unreliable, Samuel Madison. His wife is Sandrine, who suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease, shutting down in stages, and finally is found dead by her own hand – or was she? The novel opens with Sam’s trial for murder but is one big juicy flashback that explores his marriage and the days leading up to the trial. Cook skillfully builds suspense with Sam’s narrative, dropping “clues” that can be read in more than one way. Sam isn’t very likeable and we don’t believe him. But then the ending is turns everything on its head.

The mentally ill: In Shutter Island Teddy Daniels is a bipolar mental patient who hallucinates that he is a U.S. marshal. In the film, A Beautiful Mind, we believe John Forbes Nash is a brilliant mathematician working undercover for the government, until about halfway through we find out he is a delusional schizophrenic. In Henry James’s Turn of the Screw, it is impossible to tell if what we are reading is a ghost story or the tragic tale of a young woman undergoing a breakdown. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the first-person narrator is Chief Bromden, a schizophrenic. In the first chapter, he says, “God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.”

The mentally altered or different: In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the narrator has debilitating insomnia that makes his grasp of reality suspect. Amnesia figures into the veracity of narrators in SJ Watson’s thriller Before I Go to Sleep, in the cult film Memento, and in my own book She’s Not There. Post-trauma Stress Syndrome colors the reality of the Vietnam vet in the film Jacob’s Ladder and in Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim, after the Dresden bombing, comes to believe he was abducted by a bunch of aliens. Vonnegut warns us about Billy with the book’s first line: “All this happened, more or less.”

The Naif: This narrator has limited knowledge due to a mental state or narrow world view. In Forrest Gump (Winston Groom’s novel, not the sentimentalized movie), Forrest’s 70 IQ gives him cognitive limits. We might also include here Christian, the 15-year-old autistic in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. And even Huck Finn, who is only 14 after all tells us, “Everybody lies.”

Children: By virtue of their innocence, limited experience and gullibility, kids can’t really be trusted. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the narrator is a 9 year old boy looking for his dead father after 911. In Emma Donoghue’s bestseller Room, the narrator is a 5-year-old who is trapped in a small room with his mother and talks to the furniture. He doesn’t lie, but he does say, “When I was a little kid I thought like a little kid, but now I’m five I know everything.”

Dead People: Can we really trust Susie Salmon to tell us the truth about what happened to her in The Lovely Bones? Is Nicole Kidman’s seeing dead people walking around in her manor house in The Others, or is she dead herself? And has there ever been a bigger case of denial than Dr. Malcom Crowe in The Sixth Sense?

Now here’s something to chew on:  All characters we create are in a way unreliable. Unless you are using a true omniscent point of view (wherein you the writer knows all, sees all and tells all), our stories are filtered through at least one consciousness and sometimes multiple prisms. One one person can know the “truth.”

This is sometimes refers to as the Rashômon Effect. It comes from the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film Rashômon. It is a crime drama that uses multiple narrators to tell the story of the death of a samurai. Each of the witnesses describe the same basic events but differ wildly in the details, alternately claiming that the samurai died by accident, suicide, or murder. The point is that different witnesses produce contradictory accounts of the same event, though each version is equally sincerity and plausible — or suspect. I often recommend a viewing of this movie for writers struggling with multiple POVs.

So why are unreliable narrators so appealing?  I think it has something to do with our readers’ expectations within the “norms” of fiction coupled with the power of the twist. think of it this way: When a character starts to tell you a story, your natural instinct is to believe him and what he is describing, feeling or thinking. If the narrator tells you the sky is blue, you believe because he gives you no reason not to. Fans of crime fiction, in particular, tend to believe the narrator because often he or she is a person of authority (cop, investigator) who acts as a sort of guide along the way to us discovering the truth.

But sometimes, the person isn’t telling you the truth or the truth is being altered through artful lying or filtered through something like a mental illness. Or we find out that our guide is actually the murderer.  That’s the brilliant conceit in Agatha Christie’s seminal The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.  Nothing Dr. Sheppard says is technically untrue; he just hides the truth with his phrasing and omissions so we believe that he is innocent and loyal.

That’s what makes unreliables so fascinating. When the twist is revealed and we finally realize we have been lied to, the story can spin the story off into a totally new direction. But unreliable narrators are tough to pull off well. When badly handled, they can just made readers feel manipulated or confused.

So let’s talk now about some things you the writer have to keep in mind if you’re going to play this game. Here are some of take-aways from our SleuthFest panel and discussion.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Use Unreliable Narrators

Confess or conceal? Often, the narrator’s unreliability is made clear from the start – like Holden Caulfield telling us he’s a liar. But for more drama, some writers chose to delay the revelation until near the story’s end, thus delivering that great twist. This is common in thrillers. But here’s the problem with that – it can made readers angry. That happened with Shutter Island, I think. People either love or hate that book. Dennis Lehane is on record saying he wanted the ending to be purposely ambiguous. But a scan of Good Reads shows frustration and a lot of WTFs?

One of my favorite URs in all fiction, who tells us up front he is unreliable, is Odd Thomas in Dean Koontz’s novel of the same name. Here is the opening of Chapter One:

My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I am not sure why you should care who I am or that I exist… I lead an unusual life. By this I do not mean that my life is better than yours. I’m sure that your life is filled with as much happiness, charm, wonder, and abiding fear as anyone could wish. Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is. I mean only that my life is not typical. Peculiar things happen to me that don’t happen to other people with regularity, if ever.

 

For example, I would never have written this memoir if I had not been commanded to do so by a four-hundred-pound man with six fingers on his left hand…When at first I proved unable to keep the tone light, Ozzie suggested that I be an unreliable narrator. “It worked for Agatha Christie in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” he said. In that first-person mystery novel, the nice-guy narrator turns out to be the murderer of Roger Ackroyd, a fact he conceals from the reader until the end.

 

Understand, I am not a murderer. I have done nothing evil that I am concealing from you. My unreliability as a narrator has to do largely with the tense of certain verbs.

 

Don’t worry about it. You’ll know the truth soon enough.

Can you write well in first person? All first person narrators are unreliable in their own ways because they are filtering all events through ONE CHARACTER’S biases, experiences, and beliefs. But with unreliables, that filered is complicated by extraneous influences like illness, so it’s doubly hard to pull off. Also, to pull off a satisfying unreliable narrator, you must be fully within that character’s psyche. You must know them inside and out. If you have trouble plumbing the depths of “normal” narrators, then this is not for you.

Why doesn’t it work as well in third person? Sure, there are examples of successful third-person un-relys, but I think it’s hard to writer because it can make you, the writer, seem unreliable. Readers will accept a liar telling the story. But not if that liar is you. The writer needs to be able to “hide” behind his narrator.

Can you pull off a possibly unlikeable character? Now, most of us sort of sense it when we’re being deceived, and that creates an element of mistrust. So your trick in writing an reliable narrator is to create a character who has enough empathetic characteristics that we still relate to him even though he isn’t trustworthy. You also have to create a plot that is so juicy that that readers will turn the pages even though they may not like your protagonist. I think this accounts partly for the success of Gone Girl. As gruesome as Amy and Nick Dunne were, we couldn’t look away.

Think twice about using children. Now maybe this is my personal bias showing here, but I really don’t like books narrated by little kids. Teens, yes…but anything below about 10, and I get weary. Here’s why: If you are writing an unreliable narrator, you must be in an intimate point of view. If you are in an intimate POV, your words, phrases, syntax, description – everything – must be filtered through the sensibility of a child. I gave up on The Curious Incident because I found the stream of consciousness wearing. I couldn’t get past chapter three of Room because…well, all you parents out there, tell the truth: How long can you really listen to a 6 year old? Try 352 pages then go have two stiff drinks.
Which leads me to the next question you have to ask yourself before you consider using an unreliable narrator:

Are you going for gimmick? Be honest with yourself about this. If you are writing from a child’s POV or letting a mentally unbalanced person tell your story, ask yourself: Am I doing this because of a personal feeling or am I creating a gimmick in the hopes of standing out from the crowd?

And finally…

How much stamina do you have? Being in the head of an unreliable narrator can be exhausting for you the writer. Not just because of the demands of being in an intimate POV. But because you have to constantly reassess how much – or little – information you are dribbling out to the reader. You have to be in total control of a character who often is not in control of himself. It is hard for a rational person (you the writer) to “become” an irrational person. Which is also why so many serial killer characters feel wooden.

In my case, my character Amelia Tobias, is an essentially good person. But when a head injury gives her amnesia, she loses her grasp on reality. I did a lot of research on amnesiacs and tried to understand the fragility of their reality. But to be honest, I found it easier to slip into the skin of Louis Kincaid, a biracial man, than a woman who can’t remember her past and whose grasp of her reality is constantly changing.

So did I scare you off? Does letting one of these types into your imagination sound like too much trouble? Well, it’s high risk but also high reward.  When done well, like in Thomas Cook’s Sandrine’s Case or Koontz’s Odd Thomas, you get a terrific twist that also delivers a poignant pay-off.  Or with a story like The Sixth Sense or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, you’ll have readers rewinding or going back over your book muttering in amazement, “how did she do that?”

Unreliable narrators can create intrigue. They can be huge sources of tension. Readers can take great delight in discovering the reasons why behind it all.  If you really want to try this, just be aware of the possible pitfalls.  I got through my encounter with an unreliable and though it was a challenge, it made me stretch in new directions as a writer.

So go ahead. Give it a try. You can do this.

Would I lie to you?

Writing a novel is gathering smoke. It’s an excursion into the ether of ideas. There’s no time to waste. – Walter Mosley

By PJ Parrish

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Too much pressure heading into February, a month that’s usually so dismal that they limited it to twenty-eight days. But this year, I relented.
I made a vow to myself to change my evil ways. This is not easy to do when you have a Medicare card in your wallet.

I made a vow to write every day.

And I owe it all to Walter.

Now, if you’ve read my posts here, you’ve heard me try to defend the idea that you don’t have to write every day, that you can get away with taking a day or week — or even a year off — and still be successful.

Who was I kidding?

Maybe it’s because the older I get the harder the writing is coming. Maybe it’s because -– and I so want to believe this – that you don’t ossify as you age but stay open to new ways of running your life. But I have reformed. I now work every day on writing. And here is the thing that changed my thinking.

Every January, I start working on the Edgar Awards banquet. Kelly and I have chaired this event for ten years now for Mystery Writers and we love doing it, mainly because as our reward for volunteering, we get to mingle with some of the best in our business every April in New York. I’ve got to meet Stephen King, Donald Westlake, Sara Paretsky, James Ellroy, Robert Crais, Ken Follett, and countless other writers who’ve been nominated or won the Edgars. You don’t breathe the same air as the Grand Masters without coming away with a few insights.

At 2014 Edgars with Reed Farrel Coleman, Jess Lourey and Walter Mosley

This year, the MWA Grand Master is Walter Mosley. I’ve been a fan of his books for years, and got to finally meet him two years ago when his book All I Did Was Shoot My Man was nominated for Best Novel. I also had the honor to be on an Edgar Symposium with him on the future of the PI, and he was very kind to this starry-eyed acolyte. As part of my chair duties, I have to help Kelly prepare his video tribute, so this month I’ve been researching everything he has to say on the subject of writing.

He’s got some great advice. Some of it comes in his 2009 book, This Is the Year You Write Your Novel. But the best stuff can be found in his videos. And it all boils down to his one credo – you must write every day.

Sure, I’ve heard this before, often from my long suffering co-author Kelly. We all have heard this before. But here is what finally made me realize I had to change:

“Writing is almost a place of dreams for me.”

That is Mosley talking about the subconscious. He goes on to talk about how the act of creating fiction necessitates that the writer enter a dream world and inhabit it fully. Not just visit whenever the kids are quiet and the dishes are done. Not just swing by for a quickie when the husband is off playing poker. And not just deign to show up if you feel like it.
If you want a reader to live in the world you create, you the writer can’t just rent that space. You have to own it.

Mosley believes that only through daily contact with your novel can you maintain the subconscious threads that will keep it alive. The constancy of entering that fictional world every day will force not just the process along (Yea! I just wrote THE END!) but will engender a richness and authenticity in your fictional universe that you won’t otherwise achieve.

I used to go days without writing then burn myself out writing in furious 12-hour sprints. I thought it was working, but what I didn’t realize was that in those days I was away, my characters’s voices were dimming to whispers, my settings were fading like old pastels, and my plot was drifting off into the blackest bayous.

Here’s how Mosley describes this stasis:

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do every day. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting to the unconscious mind. The process of writing a novel is like taking a journey by boat. You have to continuously set yourself on course. If you get distracted or allow yourself to drift, you will never make it to the destination. It’s not like highly defined train tracks or a highway; this is a path that you are creating discovering. The journey is your narrative. Keep to it and a tale will be told. Nothing we create is art at first. It’s simply a collection of notions that may never be understood. Returning every day thickens the atmosphere. Images appear. Connections are made. But even these clearer notions will fade if you stay away more than a day.

“Thickens the atmosphere.” God, I love that.

Now I am no angel. Decades of procrastination die hard. Sometimes old dogs can’t hear the call for new tricks, let alone do them. You guys undoubtedly have your own ideas on how to keep a daily pace and I’d love to hear them. Here are some of the things I do to force myself to return each day to my fictional world.

Just open the book

Sometimes just seeing your work on the screen gives you a jolt of confidence. Read that word count ticker-thing down in the left corner. Wow…I’ve made it to 43,034 words? Next thing you know, it’s an hour later and you’re up to 43,306.

Read yesterday’s work

Okay, your brain is bone-dry and you can’t face that sucky chapter 12. Open the damn file anyway. Do some rewriting. Even if you ignore sucky chapter 12 and go back and repave a pothole in chapter 6. Just the act of setting foot back in the fictional world will get you moving again. Or, as Mosley puts it:

One day you might read over what you’ve done and think about it. You pick up the pencil or turn on the computer, but no new words come. That’s fine. Sometimes you can’t go further. Correct a misspelling, reread a perplexing paragraph, and then let it go. You have re-entered the dream of the work, and that’s enough to keep the story alive for another 24 hours. The next day you might write for hours; there’s no way to tell. The goal is not a number of words or hours spent writing. All you need to do is to keep your heart and mind open to the work.

Do Some Research

I know, I know…this is a siren call. But I have found this works wonders for me as a pump-primer. My WIP is about two unrelated cases: the discovery of two boys’s remains found in a box in an abandoned copper mine in Michigan’s U.P. and the murder, decades later, of a mega-church pastor hundreds of miles downstate. Stuck on a plot, I started researching religious ephemera about saints and discovered St. John Bosco – patron saint of lost boys. Bingo…the plot thickened. But don’t let research become a detour. Here’s Mosley on that:

There will be moments when you will want to dally over details. Do Georgia geese fly south in April or June? Is it physically possible for Bob Millar to hear the cult leader yelling from a mile away — even in a desert? Would the police arrest Trip if the women were allowed into the bar and were served by the owner? All of these questions are valid. Before the book gets into print, you should have the answers. But many writers allow questions like these to help them procrastinate. They tell themselves that they can’t go on until these questions are answered. Nonsense. Put a red question mark next to the place where you have questions and get back to it later.

Go for a  walk

Yesterday, I was working on a chapter where my hero Louis goes to the house of the dead pastor, after the place has been cleared by cops, just to see what vibes he can pick up on. My first draft was listless, filled with drab description. So I went to Google Street View, walked around Grand Rapids Michigan for an hour, and happened upon this house on Lake Reed. It was a modest clapboard Cape Cod cottage but it was dwarfed by the McMansions around it. Suddenly, I knew not just where the pastor lived – but how. The chapter now has a purpose, the scene has verisimilitude — and I have momentum. This technique worked for me best in our thriller The Killing Song, which is set in Paris. I had been to Paris ten times before writing it but I had never set foot in the city’s northern immigrant neighborhoods. A Street View tour of the shadowed streets of the 18th arrondisement gave me the insights I needed.

Write something else
Which is what I am doing right now. I am a daily runner, have been doing it for two decades now. But as I get older, my body is starting to object, so I make do with a long walk. So it is with writing. When you can’t face the run of your novel, open the laptop and start a short story, write a poem, start a journal. Work on your outline, if you use them. Just stay in the realm of the imagination somehow. Mosley again:

The only thing that matters is that you write, write, write. It doesn’t have to be good writing. As a matter of fact, almost all first drafts are pretty bad. What matters is that you get words on the page or the screen — or into the tape recorder, if you work like that.

 

It is now Monday, almost three in the afternoon. On this laptop, on an alternate screen, sits my work in progress. I haven’t touched it yet, haven’t even looked at it. But at least I opened it. So, if you’ll excuse me, I have somewhere to go now.

Thank you, Walter. You can have the last word:

How can I create when I have to go to work, cook my dinner, remember what I did wrong to the people who have stopped calling? And even if I do find a moment here and there — a weekend away in the mountains, say — how can I say everything I need to say before the world comes crashing back with all of its sirens and shouts and television shows? “I know I have a novel in me,” I often hear people say. “But how can I get it out?” The answer is, always is, every day.

Inspiration at breakfast at the Floridian

The craftless anarchy of the Beat poets on the one hand, and the extreme control of Henry James on the other, suggest that for most human beings, just as both freedom and discipline are necessary in life, serendipity and design must coexist in a work to make it readable.–Mark Helprin

By PJ Parrish

So I’m watching the Heat play the Mavericks the other night and I got curious as to how this odd game of basketball came to be. I mean, c’mon…giant men in shorts pounding back and forth on parquet and tossing a ball in a string hoop? Who came up with this idea?

The Heat was losing so I used the time to Google “origins of basketball” and there it was: the subject of my first Kill Zone post of the new year.

Now I didn’t know this at the time. I didn’t really come to the topic of today’s post until two days later on Sunday morning over my scrambled egg breakfast. But I am getting ahead of myself. Back to basketball.

It was invented in 1891 by a phys-ed teacher named James Naismith. He nailed two peach baskets to the wall of a gym and his students started tossing a ball into the baskets. But there was a problem. Every time a guy shot the ball into the basket, somebody had to get up on a ladder and take it out. That wasted a lot of time and it ruined the flow of the game. But eventually, the bottoms of the peach baskets wore out and the balls started falling through. This gave rise to a global billion-dollar industry we know today as professional basketball.

Fast forward to Sunday and my breakfast at the Floridian restaurant here in Fort Lauderdale. There I am, eating my eggs and reading my New York Times and in the back of my brain I am sweating over the fact that I haven’t finished my post for the opening of the Kill Zone’s new year. Deadline looms. I have started three different posts and all are meh. Then I open to the Sunday Review section and there it is on the front page — an article about serendipity in creativity.

The article points out that many of our modern conveniences, greatest inventions and scientific breakthroughs came about by someone stumbling on something by accident. You remember George de Mestral. He was the Swiss engineer who while hunting in the Jura mountains in Switzerland in the 1940s, looked down at the cockle-burrs in his dog’s fur and wondered how they got stuck there. Voila! Velcro.

Then there is Spencer Silver. He was a scientist slaving away at 3M trying to find a reuseable super-glue. One time he slapped some “low tack” adhesive on a piece of yellow scrap paper that was laying around the lab. Nobody noticed until five years later, a friend used one of the little adhesive papers to mark a page in his hymn book. Presto! Post Its.

The article in the Times (click here to read) goes on to pose two questions: Do some folks have a special talent for serendipity? And can we train ourselves to “cultivate the art of finding what we are not seeing?”

Now, as a writer, I think these are good questions for us. I am a huge fan of serendipity. First it is a lovely word, isn’t it? Sounds like a calliope tune carried on the breeze.
The word goes all the way back to 1754 and was made up by a guy named Horace Walpole. He read a Persian fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip. He got excited by the idea that the princes were “always making discoveries of things which they were not in quest of.”

What does serendipity mean exactly?

Hard to say really. It was voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. If you look it up, you get stuff like “fortunate happenstance” or “pleasant surprise.” But I think, when you apply it to creative ventures like writing, it becomes much more of a slippery fish, right up there with “voice.”

But here’s the thing: I am a true believer in the power of serendipity. It has pulled me across many a desert in my writing travels, giving me hope and nourishment when I am convinced I have dried up and will never produce another story of value ever again. I know I would not be a writer without it. My partnership with my sister Kelly was serendipitous in that I had been dropped by my romance publisher and Kelly was secretly spinning her wheels writing a mystery about some guy named Louis Kincaid. My husband suggested I give her a call.

Every one of our books since has had its own “happy accident.”

Dead of Winter found its footing and its villain only after a conversation I had with a good friend about his experiences as a pilot in Vietnam.

Paint It Black came from a family dinner as I listened to my brother-in-law’s son, who was doing a psychiatry residency, talk about a strange case he had about a black man whose delusions made him think he was a white racist.

The next book, Thicker Than Water, was about nefarious lawyers. But early on, I was writing a chapter in which Louis is interviewing a lawn maintenance man and suddenly, in my brain, I heard the screech of a bus’s air brakes. A second later, I typed that a young boy had entered the shed, just home from school. I hadn’t planned him, hadn’t talked to Kelly about him, but I knew the kid had to stay in the picture. Two hundred pages later the boy asks Louis: “Can a kid get in trouble for something he knows?” Turns out he knew who the killer was even though we didn’t.

Songs are often sources of serendipity for me. Our fifth series book, Island of Bones, came from one of my favorites by the J. Giels Band, “Monkey Island.” Here are some of the lyrics:

No one could explain it
What went on that night
How every living thing
Just dropped out of sight.
We watched them take the bodies
And row them back to shore.
Nothing like that ever
Happened here before.

On the east side of the island
Not too far from the shore
There stood the old house
Of fifty years or more
All the doors and windows
Were locked inside and out
The fate of those trapped in there
Would never be found out.

Kelly and I were twiddling our pens at a Borders signing one day and I showed her the lyrics and asked her “What happened on that island, you think?” We drew blanks until a lady came up to get her book signed and we asked her what she did for a living. “I’m a sociologist who specializes in the pathology of large families forced to live together.” Twenty minutes later, we had the plot for our next book.

A Killing Rain found its heart when I got lost driving in the Everglades and ended up in a place called Starvation Prairie (Where we staged the climax). Likewise, our story about Palm Beach society swells The Little Death found new dimension when I took a short cut driving to Belle Glade and ended up in a place called Devils Garden where there was nothing but a creepy abandoned cattle pen. (Where we promptly hid a beheaded victim).

An Unquiet Grave was another accident. We were revisiting our old neighborhood in Westland Michigan and decided to drive by the nearby mental hospital, Eloise, because it always had loomed large in our childhood memories. It was shut down except for a small museum, but we decided to walk the grounds, got lost and ended up in a large grassy field. I felt something underfoot, looked down and saw this:

Turned out we had stumbled on the asylum’s potters field where countless patients had been buried with only numbers to mark their lives and death — and a good story.

The next book, The Killing Song, was a happier accident. It came when my husband Daniel got tipsy on kir royales in a Paris café and started singing the Rolling Stones song, “Too Much Blood.” A tourist trip down into the Paris catacombs the next day nailed it.

And our most recent Louis Kincaid book, Heart of Ice, sprang almost fully formed from our brains when Kelly and the nice ladies at the Island Book Store told us about this abandoned hunting lodge on Mackinac Island.

Which brings us up to date with the latest, She’s Not There. This book is a mosaic of serendipity starting with the Zombie song title, which I heard on my iPod while jogging. Then I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog and he always posted a Poem For Saturday. That day it was devoted to an anthology Poems of the American South, and two spiky lines from Carolyn Wright’s “Lake Return” jumped off the screen at me:

Why I come here: need for a bottom, something to refer to;
where all things visible and invisible commence to swarm.

After that, Amelia’s journey to find her memories and life — her footing on the sandy lake bottom of her past — started to unfold in my brain and as the saying goes, all I had to do was run after her, pen in hand.

So when it came to serendipity, am I just lucky? I don’t think so. Even back in 1754, Walpole thought serendipity had two important dimensions: accidents and sagacity.
Accidents, he said, were the conjuncture of ideas, objects, intuitions, knowledge fragments etc. that in the usual course of things would not encounter each other.

But sagacity was the motor, he added. It is where your depth of experience, expertise, and craftsmanship (my italics) enter into the game and allows the unexpected to bear fruit. So for serendipity to work, you need a lot random encounters (accidents) and your creative disciplines (sagacity) to bring it to life.

It’s like what Seneca says about luck: It is just the intersection of opportunity and preparation. Or as Sam Goldwyn put it: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

But to return to that New York Times article for a moment: Can we writers learn to harness the power of serendipity? I think so. In fact, I’d plead the case that you need to, if you want to be a good writer.

Yes, you can learn your craft, you can read the books, you can go to critique groups. You can network at conferences, talk to agents and editors, and self-promote on Facebook until your fingers bleed. But isn’t it all for nothing if what you write has no feeling of surprise or joy? For your readers…or for you?

Here’s my takeaway: Yes, you must be sagacious. (See above). But you also must be willing to divert from the usual path, extend your antenna so high it hurts, look for hidden treasure and strive to make connections between it all.

You have to be what one person in the Times article calls a “super-encounterer.” Someone who can spend an afternoon searching through dusty Victorian journals on cattle breeding and find a use for it. You have to be a gatherer of string, a magpie cadging colorful pebbles. And you have to be willing to throw the occasional monkey wrench into your normal creative flow.

When he was a young reporter, Gay Talese wrote something wonderful about his home town of New York:

New York is a city of things unnoticed. It is a city with cats sleeping under parked cars, two stone armadillos crawling up St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and thousands of ants creeping on top of the Empire State Building. The ants probably were carried there by winds or birds, but nobody is sure; nobody in New York knows any more about the ants than they do about the panhandler who takes taxis to the Bowery; or the dapper man who picks trash out of Sixth Avenue trash cans; or the medium in the West Seventies who claims, ‘I’m clairvoyant, clairaudient and clairsensuous.’”

Talese went on to gather all his string into a book titled New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey. In this new writing year, may your own journeys be so clairsensuous.

________________________________________________________

May I be allowed a postscript for some BLP? Our book SHE’S NOT THERE was on special Kindle discount this past month and though it has been out since Sept. 5, it took off and for one brief shining moment, we became the #64 bestselling paid book in all of Kindledom. Today, it’s still hovering around #100 and is #25 in mystery/thrillers and #5 in psychological suspense. It has also given a boost to our back list Louis Kincaid titles sales so our current  Amazon Author Rank is #24 in thriller. There are lessons in this for TKZ readers and I will try to gather this into a future post.  ALSO: Amazon will be running a discount of the tree-book version this month but I don’t have details yet. Stay tuned, and thanks for supporting the new book!

Eighty percent of success is showing up.” — Woody Allen

By PJ Parrish

I got my first rejection letter back in 1980. It was for a romance novel I had written. The letter came from Dell Publishing. It was short and sweet.

Dear Sir or Ms., Montee,

We thank you for the opportunity to consider your proposal or manuscript.  We are sorry to inform you that the book does not seem a likely prospect for the Dell Book list.

Because we receive many individual submissions every day, it is impossible for us to offer individual comment.

We thank you for thinking of Dell and we wish you the best of success in placing your book with another publisher.

Sincerely,

The Editors

Yes, they had crossed out (scribbled out really) “sir” and had sloppily inked in my last name. But dontcha love the elegance of the phrasing? “The opportunity to consider”  (the story I had sweated over for a year.) “Doesn’t seem a likely prospect…” (to ever see the inside of a bookstore). “We thank you for thinking of Dell…”  (like Dell is some real live person who actually wrote this?) “We wish you success in placing your book with another publisher…” (And don’t darken our doorstep again, you no-talent little twerp.)

I found this letter the other day when I was cleaning out my office.  Oddly, it was the same day I bought a new wallet and had to transfer all my stuff to the new wallet.  Tucked behind my old Social Security card, I found a tiny folded up, deeply creased yellowed piece of paper. On it was typed this:

I’d rather be a could be
If I couldn’t be an are
for a could be is a maybe
with a chance of reaching par.
I’d rather be a has been
than a might of been, by far
for a might have been has never been
but a has was once an are.

I have no idea when I typed that or where it came from. I don’t even know how long I have had it, though I suspect I have worn out many wallets since. But I do know that I have it for as long as I have been using a wallet so that means most of my adult years. The sentiment in that little stanza has carried me through many a bad patch and through many jobs.

I remember I had it tacked up on the bulletin board above my desk in my dorm freshman year at Eastern Michigan University.  I was there at the state college by virtue of a 2.5 high school GPA, mediocre SATs and a promise from my dad that he had just enough money to get through one year. After that, he said, I was on my own.  I got a job flipping burgers at Big Boy’s and ended the year with a 3.5 GPA, which led to a modest scholarship. I made it through the next three years on waitress tips and student loans.

I’d rather be a could be
If I couldn’t be an are…

When I graduated in 1972 with a teaching degree, there wasn’t a job to be had. But I had been working on the college newspaper for extra money and the adviser suggested I might be able to get a job as a reporter. Twelve rejections later from the largest newspapers in the Detroit metro area, I got hired as the editor of the Suburban Woman section of the Southfield Eccentric weekly. I was off and running…at $125 a week.

for a could be is a maybe
with a chance of reaching par.

I won a national award from the University of Missouri school of journalism for my women’s section and got a call from a guy at the Fort Lauderdale News who was looking for someone to run his women’s section. (Yes, that’s what it was still called in those days, young-uns).  I got the job, packed up my cat in my rusty VW, and moved to Florida.  I was 24 years old and not ready to run a daily feature section, let alone supervise a staff of nine, three of whom were in their 60s. Six months later, I was demoted to assistant and an older woman was brought in as my replacement.  I wanted to quit. But I went for a walk in the parking lot, cried, and went back upstairs to work.  Six years later, I was promoted to assistant managing editor.

I’d rather be a has been
than a might of been, by far.

It was a nice paycheck but I was writing performance evaluations instead of articles. They wouldn’t let me go back to being a writer because my salary was too high and I was the only female in management. So I bought a small typewriter and at night in the dining room, I wrote a romance novel called The Dancer. I sent it out to agents and maybe 30 of them even bothered to write back and tell me no. So I sent it out to editors directly. (You could do that in those days…see rejection letter above).  Rejections…too many to remember.  Many rewrites and re-submissions later, I got a letter from a woman at Ballantine Books. Someone had given her my manuscript. My story was about a ballerina who had to give up her career after an injury. The woman who bought my first book was an ex-dancer.  I was off and running…with an advance of $2,500.

I had four books published with Ballantine/Fawcett. I found a good agent. Life was good. Then, one day, the agent told me the publisher was dropping me.  No reason given. I wasn’t smart enough about the industry in those days to understand the numbers game, the Barnes and Noble Death Spiral, and the fact that no, your book doesn’t get placed in the front of the store just because it’s good.

I gave up.  I was devastated and depressed. I walked around the mall alot. My fabulous husband, who had told me I could quit my day job to write fulltime and that we’d work it out financially, finally told me I had to try again — or get a job.  So I started over, writing a really bad but heart-felt historical family saga.  An agent told me she liked the suspense in my writing and that I should switch to mysteries.  I wrote 200 pages about a Miami homicide cop whose husband and kids are killed in a drug-raid-gone-bad.  I showed it to the agent. She suggested it was a good idea, in a mystery, if someone gets killed in the first 200 pages. She told me to go home and read some P.D. James and start over.

for a might have been has never been
but a has was once an are.

I called my sister Kelly, who I knew was working in her spare time on her own book and said, “I have a proposition for you.”  Six months later, we finished the first Louis Kincaid book. It was rejected by 10 New York publishers before it found a home at Kensington Books, a fine family-owned house in Manhattan.  It didn’t sell that well but it got some nice reviews and one really scathing one from Kirkus. But Kensington asked for two more.

The second Louis book, Dead of Winter, was nominated for an Edgar. We were off and…still trotting. Kelly and I are now working on Louis book No. 13.

You’ve probably heard different versions of my story a million times and the stories of others who have struggled. But let’s remind ourselves that…

J.K. Rowling was just-divorced, on government aid, and could barely afford to feed her baby in 1994, just three years before Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, was published. When she was shopping it out, she was so poor she couldn’t afford a computer or even the cost of photocopying the 90,000-word novel, so she manually typed out each version to send to publishers. It was rejected dozens of times until finally Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave it a second chance after the CEO’s eight year-old daughter fell in love with it.

Stephen King was broke and living in a trailer with his wife—also a writer—and they both worked multiple jobs to support their family while pursuing their craft. They were so poor they had to borrow clothes for their wedding and got rid of the telephone because it was too expensive. King received so many rejection letters that he developed a system for collecting them. From On Writing: “By the time I was 14…the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.” He received 60 rejections before selling his first short story, “The Glass Floor,” for $35.  After dozens of rejections, he finally sold Carrie for a meager advance to Doubleday Publishing, where the hardback sold only 13,000 copies—not great. Soon after, Signet Books signed on for the paperback rights for $400,000, $200,000 of which went to King.

Fifteen publishers rejected a manuscript by e. e. cummings. When he finally got it published by his mother, the dedication, printed in uppercase letters, read WITH NO THANKS TO . . . followed by the list of publishers who had rejected his prized offering.

Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express, received a “C” on his college paper detailing his idea for a reliable overnight delivery service. His professor at Yale told him, “Well, Fred, the concept is interesting and well formed, but in order to earn better than a C grade, your ideas also have to be feasible.”

James Lee Burke’s novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was rejected 111 times over a period of nine years and, upon its publication by Louisiana State University Press in 1986, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

Michael Jordan famously said:  “I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot … and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. That is why I succeed.”

But maybe my favorite failure is Winston Churchhill. He had to repeat a grade during elementary school and, when he entered Harrow, was placed in the lowest division of the lowest class. Later, he twice failed the entrance exam to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He was defeated in his first effort to serve in Parliament. He became Prime Minister at the age of 62. He later wrote, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never, Never, Never, Never give up.” (his capitals, not mine.)

So, to all my fellow writers on these days after Thanksgiving, here’s my message. If you’re hitting that wall, if that wall is papered wall with rejections, if you’re filling your hard drive with tenth drafts — stop for a moment and give thanks for the power of failure.  It is what makes you strong, it what makes you better. It is what keeps you in the game.

Don’t give up. Tattoo this on your brain:

I’d rather be a could be
If I couldn’t be an are
for a could be is a maybe
with a chance of reaching par.
I’d rather be a has been
than a might of been, by far
for a might have been has never been
but a has was once an are.

I am on vacation in the wilds of France and might not be able to talk to you guys. So I have asked one of my critique group buddies Neil Plakcy to sub for me today. Neil is a great editor as well as being a prolific writer of several series. You can check out his books by clicking here. — PJ

By Neil Plakcy

It took two years for me to make it to top of the FBI’s most-wanted list in Miami. That is, the list of those who most wanted to participate in the eight-week Citizen’s Academy. I had to pass the security clearance and then wait my turn, and while I did plot ideas kept seething in my brain, waiting for me to get the true lowdown on Bureau operations so that I could make my crime fiction as realistic as possible.

Finally all my security clearances were complete and I was off to the FBI’s Miami office. I knew why I was there — I wanted to learn more about the functions of the Bureau to use in my crime fiction.

And I’d heard you got to shoot guns with the Special Agents.

Neil gets his FBI diploma.

But why were all the other people there -– the high school principal, the veterinarian, the accountant? Everyone I asked said something like someone had told them it was fun.
Fun? Sitting in a conference room for three hours a night, once a week, listening to a bunch of men and women in dark suits talk about paperwork and statistics? Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

I did learn a lot that I could use in my own writing. South Florida was at the time, and probably still is, responsible for more health care fraud than the rest of the country combined. Why, you might ask? Perhaps because of the high number of retirees in the area?

Think again. It’s actually because allegedly 98 percent of those involved in health care fraud are Cubans and Cuban-Americans, and there have been reports of money gained fraudulently going back to the island to fund Castro’s regime. One operation alone, Operation Severed Artery, investigated eleven infusion clinics that had defrauded Medicare by over $80 million.

We learned a lot about possible methods of real estate fraud, and the millions of dollars at stake. Lots of other great things too, but one of my favorites was the concept of curtilage.
The agent defined curtilage as the area immediately around your property. This means that an outdoor area can be legally coupled with the property it surrounds, even though it’s not part of the structure. This is important when it comes to what an agent needs a search warrant for.

If an agent sees something in the yard, it may fall within the curtilage. Trash in a bag next to the house, for example, would still be within the curtilage and the agent would need a warrant to search it.

Yes, it’s legal. Police can search your trash without a warrant.

Trash in a bag out at the curb, however, is outside the curtilage and can be seen as having been abandoned. Therefore the agent doesn’t need a warrant to search it. It was fascinating to get an inside look at so many of these issues. And we got to shoot those guns, too, at a Miami-Dade police range where we lined up to fire different weapons.
We shot the Glock 22, with 40 caliber ammunition. That’s the FBI agent’s standard handgun.

The long-barrel gun was an H&K MP5, 10 millimeter, with a long barrel. It can be used in semi-automatic or full automatic mode, though we only shot in semi-automatic.
The shotgun was a Remington 12 gauge with a 14-inch barrel. The shorter barrel is important because it’s easier to conceal and to carry in and out of vehicles.

It was kind of funny watching my classmates, many of whom were middle-aged women in high heels, experiencing the kickback from the guns. Fortunately, there were many agents there to help us out. It was a real blast (no pun intended), but I also enjoyed the graduation ceremony, where I was presented with my certificate by the Special Agent in Charge.

Interested in taking part in a Citizen’s Academy? They are offered through field offices around the country. For more about the program, and how to apply, CLICK HERE.

Neil Plakcy’s golden retriever mysteries have been inspired by his own goldens, Samwise, Brody and Griffin. He has written and edited many other books; details can be found at his website, http://www.mahubooks.com. Neil, his partner, Brody and Griffin live in South Florida, where Neil is writing and the dogs are undoubtedly getting into mischief.

By PJ Parrish

Now that I have your attention…

No, I am not going to talk about sex again. Not even bad sex with a limp penis, which as we writers know is a helluva lot more fun than good sex. I want to talk about finding the heart of your story. And to do that, you have to try this little exercise:

Get out your book or call up your Word doc manuscript. (For our purposes here, “book” means published or un, completed or not. “Book” is that thing that has been keeping you up lately.)

Open it to page 69. Read what is there. I don’t care if it’s a full page or the last two lines of a chapter. (If you hit a blank page, you have permission to use either 68 or 70 but that’s as much cheating as I allow.)

This page — this single page — capsulizes your entire book.

You don’t believe me, do you. I didn’t believe it either until I tried this experiment. I did it a couple years ago at the request of Marshal Zeringue, executive director for the Campaign for the American Reader. Marshal has this terrific blog wherein he promotes reading. Sez Marshal: “The goal of this blog is to inspire more people to spend more time reading books. I’ll try to do that by shining a little light on books that I like and think others might find worthy of their time and attention.” CLICK HERE to see his blog.

He also came up with the Page 69 Test. He was inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s suggestion that you should choose your reading by turning to page 69 of a book and, if you like it, read it. Zeringue tried it with Richard Dawkins’ The Ancestor’s Tale, and was so taken with the results he devised the Page 69 writers challenge.

On his blog, Zeringue has asked dozens of writers to answer the question: Is your page 69 a good place to get a sense of your book?

When I first picked up Marshal’s gauntlet, it was for our book AN UNQUIET GRAVE. (CLICK HERE to go read those results) But the other day, I decided to apply the test to our newest book, so I cracked open SHE’S NOT THERE, which was just released this month. Here is our page 69:

“When you call her phone, does it ring before it goes to voice mail?”
Tobias shook his head. “The police told me the phone was turned off. They said that’s why they couldn’t use the GPS to find it.”
“They can trace the phone’s last location. Have they told you anything?”
“Yes. They said her last known location of the phone was about two miles from where her car was found. But they never found the phone or her purse.”
“What about the car’s GPS?”
“It doesn’t have one.”
“And you don’t know where your wife was going?”
Tobias shook his head slowly. He picked up his glass, staring down into it for a long time, then finally took a drink.
“What do you know about the accident?”
“Not much. They said the car spun off the road in the Everglades.”
“Everglades?” What was your wife doing driving alone in the Everglades?”
Tobias stared at him for a long time, as if he were trying to figure something out. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know.”
What the hell did this guy know?

Here’s what has happened before this. A woman wakes up in a hospital, bruised and with a concussion. She has no ID and can’t remember how she got there. All she had on when she came in was a Chanel dress and a 10-carat diamond. But when she hears her husband’s voice (Tobias), she freaks and bolts from the hospital, sensing he tried to kill her. The husband has hired a skip tracer to bring her home and the tracer is interviewing the husband for the first time. Does it give a good sense of the book? Oddly enough it, does. As truncated as it seems, the passage crystalizes a main plot point. The skip tracer suspects Alex Tobias, a rich lawyer, has something to hide, and he knows that every marriage has dark currents running beneath. So the skip tracer’s final thought on that page — what did the guy know? — is the existential question behind the whole plot. This is a husband who actually knows nothing about his wife. Which is why he might have tried to kill her. Or not.

I have to say that I went into this experiment a skeptic and emerged a believer. When I first did this years ago, I thought it was a bunch of hooey. But I think it reveals a kernel of truth about both our books. Each passage, in its way, gets to the heart of our story.

Okay…back to your own page 69. How does it work for you? What is there on this one single page that somehow serves to represent the very heart of your book? Think hard. It’s there. If it’s not? Well, maybe, just maybe, you haven’t really found the heart of your book yet.

Let me know what you found out. Be brave and share your 69s here and let us be the judge!

Postscript: I am on vacation this week, roughing it in the wilds of the Loire Valley. I wrote this before I left and I think I will be able to answer. If I can’t…talk amongst yourselves! Also, our book is finally out..The South Florida Sun-Sentinel critic Oline Cogdill calls it “captivating.” Author Hank Phillippi Ryan, calls it “Taut, tense, and twisty—this turn-the-pages-as-fast-as-you-can thriller is relentlessly suspenseful.” Here’s the LINK.