By PJ Parrish

It was early in my days as a mystery writer, and I thought I pretty much knew everything.

My first book got a really nice send-off from the great team at Kensington Books. The second book got an Edgar nomination. The third book in our Louis Kincaid series landed my co-author sister and me on the extended New York Times bestseller list.

I’m telling you this not to brag. But as a cautionary tale. Let’s keep going.

Then came book four, Thicker Than Water. From the start, my sister had reservations about it. I still remember what she said to one day when we were about 45,000 words into the first draft.  “It’s too….quiet,” she said.

She couldn’t quite articulate much more than that, it was just a feeling she had about the story. No one is murdered in present time; Louis is trying to solve a very cold case of a young woman’s death. The plot revolves around the dispicable man convicted of her murder, now out of prison, and two lawyers — one who put him behind bars and the other who died, knowing that he didn’t do much to prevent that. It is twisty, talky, and haunted by regret. Action took a rumbleseat to character. So yeah, it was a “quiet” book.

But that wasn’t the real problem. The problem was we let Louis get overshadowed by everyone else. He was the hero, yet we allowed the large cast of very colorful secondary characters to push him out of the spotlight while they strutted and fretted their grand hours on the stage.

Secondary characters are important. They can — and should — be a vital part of your story. No story can survive without them because they exist to support your protag and help propel the plot.

They are sounding boards, helpmates, or sidekicks. Iconic examples abound in crime fiction: Watson to Holmes, Cletus Purcel to Dave Robicheaux. Archie Goodwin to Rex Stout. Rocky to Jim Rockford.

They provide conflict and obstacles for your protago to overcome. Yes, this is what the antagoist does, but secondary characters can enrich a plot in small but significant ways — ie a police chief who constantly questions a detective’s methods.Captain McKay who dogs Dirty Harry Callahan to distraction.

They can be a love interest or companion. Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Dennis Lehane’s series. Siamese cats Koko and Yum Yum in Lilian Jackson Braun’s cozies.

They can be a foil, someone who provides a contrast to your protag. Nick Carraway to Jay Gatsby. Draco to Harry Potter.

They can be a mentor who helps keep your protag on the right track or see the bigger picture. M and James Bond. Dumbledore and Harry Potter.

As you can see, I’ve been thinking about secondary (and even tertiary) characters a lot. This is because I got hooked on Ted Lasso. Okay, I know it’s annoying to many of you when one of us goes nutso talking about a TV show you haven’t seen. But bear with me. Because I don’t think I have ever seen — or read — anything that does a better job with secondary characters than Ted Lasso. I strongly recommend you watch the series, not just for enjoyment, but for a great lesson in how to create and control a large cast of memorable characters.

Quick recap: Ted Lasso is a Kansas football coach who is hired to strategically tank a failing English soccer club. As head coach, he inherits a miserable quarrelsome team and an owner whose only goal is to punish her ex-husband by sabotaging his ex-team.

Digression: I thought Ted was a titular protag. But he’s actually a eponymous one. Jane Eyre = eponymous. The Man Who Would Be King = titular. Just saying…

The plot of Ted Lasso superficially revolves around the question of whether a guy who doesn’t know a red card from Red Bull can turn the franchise around. But the real drama comes from all the intricate and intertwined relationships and the paths of their individual character arcs. The show is about empathy, kindness, and human connection even as it tackles dark topics like mental health, addiction, and divorce with sensitivity and nuance. To say nothing about the chasms between fathers and sons.

Ted is the main guy. No doubt about that. As great secondary character Kathy Bates Libby Holden says in Primary Colors of the presidential candidate and his wife: “The Stantons are my sun. I lived my life drawing light and warmth from them.”

So it is with those in Ted’s orbit.

The show excels at crafting compelling secondary characters by giving them distinct personalities, personal growth arcs, and allowing them to drive storylines, even when not the main focus, creating a rich and relatable ensemble cast.

Ted is a classic fish out of the water, at soccer and his own life. But as the series goes on, Ted learns about his sport and the people around him, and starts to deal with his failing marriage, his anxiety and his father issues.

But as I said, every character in Ted Lasso has a unique personality, background and an important role in the story. Which brings us back to what we all, as writers, can learn from our second fiddles. Things to look for as you write:

Personal Growth Arcs
The secondary characters in Ted Lasso undergo significant personal growth throughout the series, developing new skills and changing their perspectives. Has-been soccer star Roy Kent is angry and unlikeable, but learns to let go of crippling grudges, forgive his enemies and himself.

Storyline Contributions
Secondary characters are not just background players. They often drive storylines and influence the main characters’ journeys. Team towel boy Nathan Shelley is ignored by the team and derided by his father, until he gets a chance to help coach. And become an unlikely plot catalyst.

Relatable Characters
The show focuses on creating characters that viewers can relate to, even if they are flawed or struggling. Team owner Rebecca Welton comes across as cunning and cold, hellbent only on destroying her ex. Her arc is redemption and atonement as she overcomes her loneliness to become a confident leader of men.

That’s just a few of the folks I came to love and root for. When I finally finished bingeing on the series, I felt exhilarated and sad, like I was saying goodbye to my family and best friends. Shoot, I admit it: I cried like a baby. Can there be any greater compliment to a writer?

One last note about my book Thicker Than Water. To this day, it remains one of my favorite books in my modest oeuvre. Because I love the people in the story. And because my sister finally, in the eleventh hour, figured out how to make it less “quiet.”

I spoke earlier about how, if you, the writer, are not careful, your second fiddles can out-perform your first chair. You have to find that fine line beween creating a vivid cast and not letting them take over. That is what happened to us. And worse, we took the gun out of Louis’s hand. We didn’t let him solve the case. We left it up to happenstance.

But…

In the second draft, Kelly found a way to put the gun back in Louis’s hand. So it was with Ted Lasso. He’s been running away from fatherhood for years, acting as dad to an entire team of grown men rather than the boy who needs him most. In the end, damn everyone else, he does what he has to do.

Keep writing, diamond dogs. And guess what? Ted Lasso is coming back for a new season.

By PJ Parrish

In the wee wee hours of the morning this week, I had an idea for a new story. Now, most things that happen around 3 a.m. usually don’t end well, and I should have remembered that, considering that the last time I was startled awake at that hour was when a coyote and neighborhood cat were squaring off in my driveway.

But no, I got up, grabbed a pen and wrote down an opening paragraph. Let me share it here now:

The deep waters, black as ink, began to swell and recede into an uncertain distance. A gray ominous mist obscured the horizon. The ocean expanse seemed to darken in disapproval. Crashing tides sounded groans of agonized discontent. The ocean pulsed with a frightening, vital force. Although hard to imagine, life existed beneath. Its infinite underbelly was teeming with life, a monstrous collection of finned, tentacled, toxic, and slimy parts. Below its surface lay the wreckage of countless souls. But we had dared to journey across it. Some had even been brave enough to explore its sable velveteen depths, and have yet to come up for precious air.

Whee, doggies! What’s that smell?

Okay, I didn’t really write that. But I had you going for a sec, didn’t I. But someone DID write it. Actually, it was 1,476 people who wrote that, give or take a few. This gawd awful paragraph was created years ago by Penguin Books for a project called “A Million Penguins.”

Maybe you heard about it. The idea was to write a novel with a million collaborators to be called a “wiki-novel”. It was launched by Penguin Books in collaboration with Kate Pullinger on behalf of the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University.

This is what the Penguin folks said on their website: “We’ve created a space where anyone can contribute to the writing of a novel and anyone can edit anyone else’s writing….we want to see whether a community can really get together, put creative differences aside (or sort them out through discussion) and produce a novel.”

Anyone could call up the site and contribute to the story. Because the site got more than 100 edits every hour, Penguin imposed “reading windows” that froze the novel so that editors could read over what had been changed to get their bearings on where the story was going. Chaos reigned. A month in, Penguin mercifully pulled the plug.

I was thinking about the Penguin project this week after reading an article at Literary Hub about how AI is transforming our business, and why writers should embrace it. To quote the author Debbie Urbanski in part:

So here’s what I really want us to imagine for the purpose of this essay: An AI writes a novel and the novel is good.

This is what a lot of people, and certainly a lot of writers, are angry and scared about right now. That AI, having been trained on a massive amount of data, including copyrighted books written by uncompensated authors, will begin writing as well or better than us, and then we’ll be out of a job. These concerns over intellectual property and remuneration are important but right now, it feels they’re dominating the discussion, especially when there are other worthwhile topics that I’d like to see added to the conversation around AI and writing.

Such as: how can humans and AI collaborate creatively?

Which brings me to a third possibility to consider: Can AI and a human write a novel together?

Sigh. I dunno. She posits that there is a “collaboration” possible between writer and AI. And that’s where I get queasy.

I collaborated with my sister Kelly on 15 books and a lot of short stories. It was at times a fitful process but always fruitful because we were equals and more important, we recognized that there was a third party in the collaboration that was always going to win any argument — the story.

I’ve had a couple other experiences with collaboration. Jeffery Deaver and Jim Fusilli asked me to join 14 other writers for a novel called The Chopin Manuscript, published by the International Thriller Writers. Deaver got the plot in motion and we each had a chapter after that. It was fun, frenetic and in hindsight, not a bad novel considering the inevitable clash of styles and egos. I remember I gleefully killed off one of the main characters in a great chase through the Paris catacombs but Jeff overruled me. We went on to write two more “serial thrillers” for ITW.

Letting another brain into your writing process isn’t easy. It should be approached with only the greatest care and clear-mindedness. When it goes bad — and I know some writers who’ve had it go very bad — it conjures up the Infinite Monkey Theorem:

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact, the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times. The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.

Which is how I view AI. I’m a retired Luddite who has no real stake in this brave new world. But I know that I should be paying closer attention. I have a friend who has been asked to write a script about the history of the mystery genre. He is struggling mightily because the subject is both broad and deep. He resorted to ChatGPT. And damned if the thing didn’t spit out a workable script. But it has an oddly lifeless quality, like someone afraid to color outside the lines.

So what happened to The Million Penguins project? The university behind it published A Million Penguins Research Report. It concluded:  “We have demonstrated that the wiki novel experiment was the wrong way to try to answer the question of whether a community could write a novel, but as an adventure in exploring new forms of publishing, authoring and collaboration it was ground-breaking and exciting.”

Groundbreaking. Exciting. Sounds just like what they’re saying about AI. Or is that sound just the thundering footsteps of a million monkeys?

Keep coloring outside those lines, friends.

By PJ Parrish

I am gearing up for my annual gig as chair of the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Awards. This year is pretty special because it’s the 80th birthday of the venerable organization itself.

Digression: You’d think if you make it to your 80th anniversary, the appropriate gift would be something cool like diamond or platinum. Nope, the 80th is oak. What, for a coffin?

Well, maybe a coffin is apt, considering what we here all do — putting bodies in the ground. Anywho, we are going to honor MWA’s eightith by taking a look back to celebrate what was unique about each decade. So I’ve been boning up on crime fiction history this week. I am rather ashamed at my ignorance on this subject. Believe me, I have been trying for years now to get up to speed on my reading of our classics. But the MWA celebration is also forcing me to dig deeper into the less obvious writers and books.

And I’d like to pick y’all’s brains for some help on who and what books we should be including. More on that in a sec.

But first: Let’s review.

I suspect most of you know already that Edgar Allen Poe’s 1941 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is considered the first detective story. But do you know what is considered to be the first full-length mystery novel? That would be Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, published in 1861. Here’s the opening:

Chapter One

In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you will find it thus written:

“Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it.”

Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that place. Only this morning (May twenty-first, Eighteen hundred and fifty), came my lady’s nephew, Mr. Franklin Blake, and held a short conversation with me, as follows:—

“Betteredge,” says Mr. Franklin, “I have been to the lawyer’s about some family matters; and, among other things, we have been talking of the loss of the Indian Diamond, in my aunt’s house in Yorkshire, two years since. Mr. Bruff thinks, as I think, that the whole story ought, in the interests of truth, to be placed on record in writing—and the sooner the better.”

Not perceiving his drift yet, and thinking it always desirable for the sake of peace and quietness to be on the lawyer’s side, I said I thought so too. Mr. Franklin went on.

“In this matter of the Diamond,” he said, “the characters of innocent people have suffered under suspicion already—as you know. The memories of innocent people may suffer, hereafter, for want of a record of the facts to which those who come after us can appeal. There can be no doubt that this strange family story of ours ought to be told. And I think, Betteredge, Mr. Bruff and I together have hit on the right way of telling it.”

If you didn’t get through it, don’t feel bad. I tried to read this book to give it an honest chance but the sledding was too tough. If I were doing a Kill Zone First Page Critique on this, well, let’s just say I would try to be kind.  I did come across one phrase I liked:

Your tears come easy, when you’re young, and beginning the world. Your tears come easy, when you’re old, and leaving it. I burst out crying.

Such was the style of the age, right? Things got easier, thank goodness. About 25 years later, two guys named Holmes and Watson showed up in A Study in Scarlet. You might have heard of them. Probably the best-known detective and sidekick in the modern period. Without them, would Nero and Archie exist? Would Spenser have his Hawk? And how could Michael Knight manage without his Kitt?

Then we jump forward to the 20s and 30s, the so-called Golden Age of crime ficiton, dominated by the grande dames Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In researching, I found one of the writers of this time, Ronald Knox, whose day job was Catholic priest, came up with his Ten Commands of detection fiction:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

I especially agree with number ten. One should always be prepared for twin brothers.

In something of a backlash to Christie et al, some writers, mainly Americans, began to reshape the detective formula. Puzzle-solving novels were too…clean. The thirst for realism begat the hardboiled school. It was every man for himself and nobody trusted nobody.

First out of the gate, I discovered, was Carroll John Daly. His pulpy stories – The False Burton Combs (1922), It’s All in the Game (1923) and Three Gun Terry (1923) – all became instant hits with readers, especially his PI Race Williams. Après lui le déluge of the usual suspects —  Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Dorothy B. Hughes, Ross Macdonald, Jim Thompson. The list is long, and you still hear echoes of them in much of today’s crime fiction. Without them and the characters they created, the world would not have been blessed with Dirty Harry.

Here’s a paragraph I wish I had written, from Dorothy Hughes’s classic In A Lonely Place. Which was also a helluva movie starring Bogart and Gloria Grahame.

Once he’d had happiness but for so brief a time; happiness was made of quicksilver, it ran out of your hand like quicksilver. There was the heat of tears suddenly in his eyes and he shook his head angrily. He would not think about it, he would never think of that again. It was long ago in an ancient past. To hell with happiness. More important was excitement and power and the hot stir of lust. Those made you forget. They made happiness a pink marshmallow.

Where did things go from there? Wow, that’s a topic for another post, maybe part II, since this one is running long. And I am still heavy into research mode, only up through the 60s so far. I have learned that our genre has grown many, many twisted and bountiful branches. I’ve been doing this Edgars banquet gig for about 25 years now, and every year, when I see the new list of nominees come out, I am amazed at the variety and vitality I see. It seems to me that crime fiction, since the 2000s, has become ever more inclusive, exotic, richly textured and, yeah, I’ll go there — less dependent on cliches, stereotypes, and worn tropes.

So, now I turn to you guys. I am putting together the program and will be asking some authors to write about a particular decade in crime fiction — 1940 to the present — why they love it. I’m also having a video made that celebrates each decade of MWA’s remarkable history, which includes not just the influential books but also the standout crime TV shows and movies of each decade.

Tell me what you gravitate to — authors, characters, eras — and why it moves you. You’ll be doing me a solid, bims and fellas.

O Muses, O high genius, aid me now!
O memory that engraved the things I saw,
Here shall your worth be manifest to all!
— Dante, The Divine Comedy

By PJ Parrish

I am dipping a toe back in the fiction waters this week because I got an assignment to write a short story for an anthology. Man, my gears are rusty because I have officially retired from novel writing and without the daily routine, everything sort of freezes up.

Apologies to those of you who struggle with these demons every day. But shoot, I feel like I’ve forgotten how to do this. Which means I am going to resort here to yet another metaphor.

Writing is like sailing in the ocean in the middle of a squall. I know because when I was young and living in Fort Lauderdale, I used to sail Hobie Cats competitively. The day is always sunny when you launch your Hobie from the beach and you’re all aglow with hardy-har-har-endorphins. So it is when you sit down and type CHAPTER ONE.

Then the storm hits and there you are, hanging onto a 16-foot piece of fiberglas and vinyl, hoping lightening doesn’t hit the mast and fry your ass. You are out there alone in the storm, out of sight of land, riding the waves and the troughs, hoping you can make it home. You might even throw up. This is usually around CHAPTER TWENTY for me.

End of metaphor.

I often wonder what keeps writers writing. Tyranny of the contract deadline? Blind faith? The idea that if you don’t you might have to do real physical labor for a living? All of those have worked for me in the past. But today, I am sitting here staring at my empty screen waiting for my muse to show up.

Now, let’s get one thing clear here. I don’t really believe in WAITING for a muse to show up. I get really impatient with writers who claim they can’t write until they feel inspired because frankly, 90 percent of this is writing DESPITE the fact your brain is as dry as Waffle House toast. Or as soggy, depending on which Waffle House you frequent. The last one I was in was off the Valdosta Ga. I-95 exit in 1995 and the toast was so dry it stands today as my singular metaphor for stagnant creativity.

But I do believe that sometimes — usually when your brain is preoccupied with other stuff — something creeps into the cortex and quietly hands you a gift. And these little gifts are what get you through.

There are nine muses in mythology — Calliope, Clio, Erato, Melpomene, Polymnia, Terpsichore, Urania, Euterpe, and Thalia. (who was Dobie Gillis’s unobtainable ideal woman, btw). The muses ruled over such things as dance, music, history, even astronomy. No muses for crime writers, unless you count Calliope for epic poetry but James Lee Burke has her on permanent retainer.

I don’t have just one muse. I’ve figured out I have a couple who specialize in particular parts of my writing.

First, there’s my dialogue muse. I call him J.J. because he sounds like Burt Lancaster’s gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in The Sweet Smell of Success. Always chewing at my ear saying oily things like, “I’d hate to take a bite out of you, you’re a cookie full of arsenic.” J.J. makes my skin crawl but man, can this guy write dialogue.

Then there’s my narrative muse. I call her Cat Woman because she slips in on silent paws, sings in a fey whisper and visits just as morning has broken. I sleep with blackout drapes, a white-noise machine and the A/C turned so cold the bedroom is like a crypt. So as I wake, there is icy air swirling and a soft swoooshing sound. And Cat Woman, whispering a long segment of exposition. I have learned to lay there, very still, until she is done, because if I get up to write it down, she vanishes.

My third muse is Flo, named after the waitress who worked in Mel’s Diner on the old Alice sitcom. Her voice sounds like the door of a rusted Gremlin. Flo’s Greek name is Nike (the goddess of victory) and her slogan is “Just Do It.” Because whenever those other muses fail me, Flo is there. She is the muse who knows that the only way I am going to get anything written is through plain old hard work.

I’d be lost without her. Who, or what, keeps you going?

By PJ Parrish

You can learn a lot about writing fiction from watching football. I figured this out recently after bingeing on both the NFL and college playoffs. (Yes, I have no life but it’s really, really cold here right now. Plus it gives me an excuse to eat potato chips and drink Dr Pepper spiked with Southern Comfort before five, so don’t judge me).

What you can learn from football is pretty simple:

• Always keep moving downfield. (Don’t keep rewriting chapter 1)
• Have a good game plan. (Outline your story. ie be a wily plotter)
• If you don’t have a good game plan, be quick on your feet and don’t be afraid to just chuck the rock downfield and see what happens. (Go where the story takes you. ie be an artful pantser)
• Run north and south, not east and west. (Don’t get distracted by subplots)
• Surround yourself with good guys. (Character developement is everything)
• If you drop the ball, get up and get back in the game. (you painted yourself into a plot corner. Your character sucks. Boo hoo. Get back in there and fix it.)

But maybe the best thing I’ve learned from watching football that’s helped me in writing is this:

Stop with the clichés, already!

I watch a lot of sports, but I have to say football has to be the worst when it comes to really stale commentary. While watching the playoffs, I started to write some of the bad ones down. From my list:

• They haven’t got all their weapons. (too many injuries).
• You gotta go with what’s working. (not sure what that means)
• He’s hearing footsteps. (the receiver got spooked and dropped the ball)
• They get points the old fashioned way — up the middle. (they run alot)
• It’s gonna come back to haunt them. (missed the extra point)
• He’s got alligator arms. (wide receiver didn’t make the catch)
• They beat themselves.

And the saddest one:

• There’s no tomorrow.

I actually heard Tony Romo use that one. I did hear one phrase I liked that I had never heard before. Vikings QB Sam Darnold fumbled and a Rams rookie defender scooped the ball up and ran it 57 yards for a TD. The commentator said, “He got a room service bounce.”  Your eggs Benedict is here, sir.

All right, all right. I hear you. No more football talk. Okay, so I will talk about the book I am reading right now. It’s been on my to-read shelf ever since I brought it back from the Edgars a couple years ago. It was a nominee and it’s pretty good. But then things started to go, well, south. (cliché!)

I began to notice there were clichés creeping into the narrative. Like this: “It was a perfect storm of bad investigative techniques and lazy-assity.”

Now, I kind of liked the lazy-assity thing, but “a perfect storm?” A couple chapters later, he referred to a suspect roundup as “picking the low hanging fruit.” After that, I got distracted because I started to search for more clichés. And they came: eagle-eyed,” “burning question,” “at the crack of dawn,” “sick as a dog,” “uphill battle.”

Now, these are all sort of venial, the kind of everyday phrases we all slip into. Nothing as bad as “When they sprayed the Luminol, the room lit up like a Christmas tree.” But they aren’t fresh, and when it comes to fiction, shouldn’t we all be asking more of ourselves?

I have to stop and make a distinction here. Sometimes, it’s okay to toss in a cliché in dialogue. Characters have to talk like real people, and having a guy SAY he woke up “sick as dog” may not be the most sparkling dialogue, but it has a place, if you’re trying to show the character isn’t the…pardon me…sharpest knife in the drawer. But in narrative, I can’t give writers a pass for stuff like “He was ready to take the plunge.”

I’m going to finish reading the book because the plot is tight and I like the anti-hero protag. But I wish this writer had worked just a little harder on the small potatoes. (cliché!) It’s not his first book and it won’t be his last, because he’s talented. Which is why I am asking for more from him.

Being original is maybe the hardest thing we have to do in writing. Keeping all the plates spinning in the air is hard — plot, voice, character, dialogue, pacing, subplots, secondary characters, sense of place, description. This is why using metaphors and similes is darn difficult. All the good ones have been taken already!

• “The pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does–the pain’s like that, it rises and rises…” — John LeCarre.
• “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish.” — Raymond Chandler
• “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?” — Ray Bradbury.

The good ones aren’t all taken, not really. You have good metaphors and similes in you that not one other soul on earth can imagine. When you write, don’t settle for the dust on top. Dig deep to find what is unique in the way you see the world

But creating effective metaphors and similes is a topic for another day. I was going to write about that today but this post ran long. So let’s start with the easy stuff. For now, just go back into your work and find your little sins. Kill your not-so-darling cliches.

Get back in the game, crime dogs. Don’t leave anything on the field. Because there’s no tomorrow. Actually, for us writers there is, thank God. But don’t tell Tony Romo that.

“When vultures surround you, try not to die.” — African proverb

By PJ Parrish

Hey, it’s good to be back at The Kill Zone. It’s good to be anywhere. (Apologies to Keith Richards). Holidays and a bout with RSV behind me, I’m ready to get going again. The fact that my Lions beat the NFC norsemen for the No. 1 seed has me doing a happy-dance. Just wish my dad Al were around to have seen it since he almost put his foot through the Zenith after a particularly brutal season back in 1959.

Today, I have the pleasure of critiquing a nice entry in our First Pagers. I took a liking to it when it first popped up on my radar. Maybe because it involves a mysterious priest and I loved the papal thriller Conclave. Best line of dialogue, delivered by a cardinal played by Stanley Tucci: “I could never become Pope on those circumstances. A stolen document, the smearing of a brother cardinal. I’d be the Richard Nixon of Popes.”

Our writer calls their submission a “psychological thriller with supernatural undertones.” Title: Campus of Shadows. (more on that at end). Here we go:

CHAPTER 1

My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. As I climb out of the car my nose shudders at the scent of something dead in the air. I glance around expecting to see a dead possum or a bird that flew into a window but find nothing. The tune, Bad Guy, blasts from the apartment’s inner courtyard. I can’t wait to get in there and check it out. I hesitate with my thumb on the lock button wondering how hard college classes will be, if I’ll be able to take it all in stride.

A constant ticking draws my attention to a vulture in a gnarled oak with branches twisted so low they could trip someone up. The vulture is the reason for the stench. It must have the remains of something stuck in its talons. A strange curiosity draws me closer like a rubbernecker on the highway and I spot a shadow hovering around it, a miniature cloud.

Maybe some fool around here feeds it. Spinning away, I discover a priest walking toward me from the courtyard of the apartment. His gait and his toothy smile are familiar. “Father Aether?”

“David Everest, how are you?”

“I didn’t expect you to be the first person I saw when I got to college,” I laugh, extending my hand.

“It’s been a long time.” His outstretched hand and mine connect.

“Oh,” he tugs his hand away. “I got a shock.”

“Sorry, I must have created static electricity when I slid out of the car. Didn’t you get transferred to Miami, Father?”

“I did. I was here for a… meeting. A soul freeing of sorts.” A bead of sweat trembles on his jawline. “Anyway, I have a friend whose daughter left something at home in Miami last week. I dropped it off for her.”

“That was nice of you.”

A gust of wind howls through the courtyard entrance blasting me in the face and tearing at his vestments. He shivers and backs away. “I need to go. Bless you, my son.”

As Father Aether hurries off, I’m glad he didn’t ask too many questions. I’ve hardly been to church since he did my first communion. The ticking sound starts again. The vulture is staring at me with a weird look like it’s waiting for something. “Get out of here you dumb scavenger.”

_____________________________

Let’s start with what I liked. There’s a nicely developed (if a tad undercooked) sense of tension right from the start. The main character is entering a new life and environment (college) and immediately interacts with a somewhat mysterious priest from his past. There are some atmospheric descriptive details — a hot gusty wind, gnarly oaks, and the shock-handshake is a nice touch. And then there’s that lurking vulture. (symbolism alert!)

Though written in first-person, the writer deftly handles the insertion of the protag’s name via the simple device of introduction with the priest. I pay attention to this sort of thing because too many folks writing in first person forget to identify their protag until too late in the chapter.

So, I’d call this a good start of a first draft. But it can use some beefing up here and there.

First, the opening line is very weak. My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. Unless this apartment is in a decrepit Victorian, a New Orleans whore house, or a remodeled abandoned Catholic church (oooh, I like that!), who cares what it looks like? Never waste your first line on something meaningless. Unless the description directly supports your mood, atmosphere or foretells something about character or plot, get rid of it.

Consider something like this as your opening, dear reader:

The smell hit me as soon as I got out of my car. Foul, like rotting meat, or that sweet-sewage stench that I had smelled  as a kid when I had wandered into the basement lab of my father’s mortuary.

I heard a loud hiss and looked up. A huge black bird with a bald red head was perched on the lowest branch of the oak tree. It was so close I could see its black-bead eye. A turkey vulture. But what the hell was it doing here on campus? We were at least ten miles from any landfill or scrub land. 

I know about turkey vultures since I used to live in South Florida. They are butt-ugly, creepy and they make this nasty hissing noise if you get close. They hang out along remote highways, or near the Everglades, maybe on farms. Never in urban areas. So for this charcter to see one here MEANS something is wrong. USE THIS!

The vulture is not supposed to be here. So make that foul smell work harder as a symbol of a rift in the norm.

An aside: Don’t know if you realize this, writer, but vultures have quite a role in Christian lore. They are considered a symbol of God’s judgment of shame, or a diseased spiritual condition. In Revelation 18:2, Babylon is described as being “a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hated bird.”

Something to explore maybe: Birds are powerful symbols in all religions. In Hinduism and Judaism, they are even linked to exorcisms. Christianity is rife with bird symbols, good and evil.

Let’s talk about the sense of smell. It’s the single most powerful one in your writer’s toolbox. I’d like to see the writer exploit this more. And if you can, relate the smell — always — to something directly in the character’s experience. I made up the bit about dad being an undertaker. But see what it does? It personalizes the smell AND slips in a grace note of backstory.

Makes your descriptions work harder.

Other things: I’m not a big fan of persent tense first person. But that’s just my taste. What do you all think? I think it gets a little tiresome for most readers over the course of 300 pages or so.

I surmise that we are in South Florida here, given the turkey vulture and the reference to Miami. But is there some way you can gracefully let us know exactly where we are? Can you slip in where he’s going to college? Is there an UM ibis flag in an apartment window?

And let’s talk about the song “Bad Guy.” I don’t mind songs being tossed into scenes (unless it’s Coltrane blaring on the CD player while the dissipated PI drinks himself into a coma-funk — cliche!). Being an old fart, I had to look up “Bad Guy.” It’s by Billie Ellish and it’s about guys who put up a fake tough-guy front. I like that. But only if it means something about your plot or character. Otherwise, it’s just a gratuitous toss-in culture reference. Of course you can’t reprint lyrics in your book, but maybe, as your character goes into his apartment moments later, the song keeps bouncing around in his head — for some reason! Again, like the vulture — you felt compelled to put it there so make it mean something.

That’s it. Like I said, a good start. But look for places to go deeper, to give meaning to the bread-crumb symbols you are planting. But so far, pretty darn good.

Let’s do a quick, light line edit. My comments in red.

Campus Of Shadows Work harder to find a better title. “Campus” is such a blah geographic signpost word. We KNOW this takes place at a college. Ditto “Shadows” is dime-a-dozen title word in crime fiction, like “death” “darkness” “evil”.  You can do better. Finish your book. The real title might reveal itself as you move on. 

My new apartment complex is painted yellow with black trim and has a scrawny hedge bordering the single-story structure. As I climb out of the car you backed into the image here. Starting a book with “As I did…” is throat-clearing and passive. Be active: The smell hit me as soon as I… Can you imagine starting a fight scene like this: “As my heart raced, the bullet whizzed by my head.” No, you can’t.  my nose shudders at the scent of something dead in the air. I glance around expecting to see a dead possum or a bird that flew into a window but find nothing. I looked up. Then stay with the vulture The tune, Bad Guy, blasts from the apartment’s inner courtyard. I can’t wait to get in there and check it out. I hesitate with my thumb on the lock button wondering how hard college classes will be, if I’ll be able to take it all in stride. Put this down below, after the priest leaves. His feelings about going to college are out of place here and leech out the tension.

A constant ticking souds like a branch against a window or a clock. Vultures hiss. draws my attention to a vulture in a gnarled oak with low twisting branches twisted so low they could trip someone up. The vulture is the reason for the stench. It must have the remains of something stuck in its talons. A strange curiosity draws me closer like a rubbernecker on the highway cliche and I spot a shadow hovering around it, a miniature cloud. Not sure I understand what you’re going for here. Be clearer. 

Maybe some fool around here feeds it. Spinning away, implies fright. He’s scared? I discover see a priest walking toward me from out of the courtyard of the apartment. His gait and his toothy smile are familiar. “Father Aether?”

 There is a very gusty wind, you say. So use it. How about something more mysterious: I see a figure coming out of the courtward, head bent against the hard dry wind. He’s dressed in black robes, flapping around him like wings. (bird imagery!) As he nears, I see his white collar.

“Father Aether?”  

He stops. “David Everest, how are you?” NICE WAY TO GET THE NAMES IN

“I didn’t expect you to be the first person I saw when I got to college,” I laugh, extending my hand.

“It’s been a long time.” His outstretched hand and mine connect.

“Oh,” he tugs his hand away. “I got a shock.”

“Sorry, I must have created static electricity when I slid out of the car. Didn’t you get transferred to Miami, Father?”

“I did. I was here I’ve been here in Palm Beach or whatever for a… meeting. A soul freeing of sorts.” Exorcism? A bead of sweat trembles on his jawline. “Anyway, I have a friend whose daughter left something at home in Miami last week. I dropped it off for her.”

“That was nice of you.”

A gust of wind howls through the courtyard entrance blasting me in the face and tearing at his vestments. He shivers David is starting school somewhere in South Florida in August or September, the hottest months of the year. Shivers? and backs away.

New graph “I need to go. Bless you, my son.” This seems unnaturally abrupt. Did you intend this? If so, it needs something, a gesture perhaps, to predicate it. He glanced back at the courtyard, his eyes lingering on the second floor. He shivered, despite the heat. Or something better.

As Father Aether hurries off, there’s that “as” construction again. We all have our tics! I’m glad he didn’t ask too many questions. He didn’t ask ANY. I’ve hardly been to church since he did my first communion. The ticking sound hissing starts again. The vulture is staring at me with a weird look like it’s waiting for something. A little too spot-on. Of course they stare — they’re looking for carrion.

need new graph. “Get out of here you dumb scavenger.” Can you think of a juicier line or action? What is going to happen next? I assume he goes up to his new apartment? What can happen with the symbolic vulture that TRANSITIONS to what comes next? I can’t suggest cuz I don’t know your plot. But his dialogue line feels flaccid. 

So, that’s it from me. I’m sure our TKZ folks will have other helpful insights. Thanks for submitting, dear writer. Keep moving forward. Happy and healthy new year.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea inside us. — Franz Kalka.

By PJ Parrish

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal an ending. I have a good reason.

The plot setup: On a warm June day, a crowd of villagers gather in the town square. They’re there to hold an ancient ritual, the meaning of which has been lost to time. They come forward, and each villager draws a slip of paper from an old wooden box. The tension builds because, according to tradition, no one can look at their paper until everyone has drawn. The crowd is restless:

“They do say,” Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, “that over in the north village they’re talking of giving [the ritual] up.”

Old Man Warner snorted. “Pack of crazy fools,” he said. “Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about ‘[ritual] in June, corn be heavy soon.’ First thing you know, we’d all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns….”

Finally, each person opens their paper. Only one paper has a black dot on it. It is held by Tessie Hutchinson. The crowd parts and Tessie stands alone in the center. All the other villagers, men and women, old and young, begin to pick up stones.

Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.

So ends Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery.” You can click here to read the whole story, though I’d guess most of you already have. It was pretty much required reading if you went to school after 1950. I hadn’t read it since oh, 1970 or so, but I did so today because I want to talk about fiction that leaves room for ambiguity and maybe even pain.

First, back to Shirley Jackson’s classic. It was published in The New Yorker, to great controversy and outrage, three years after the end of WWII at the start of the Cold War. With its twin themes of conformity and cruelty, many saw it as an allegory for McCarthyism or the Holocaust. It is debated anew today amid our politics of populism and cancel culture (source: not me, but Harper’s Magazine ciritic Thomas Chatterton Williams).

But Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin argued in an essay published last year that reading politics into the story misses the point. The story’s power comes from its disturbing ambiguity:

The author deliberately declined to wrap up the ending neatly for her readers, some of whom (in a foreshadowing of the ending of The Sopranos), asked whether The New Yorker had accidently left out an explanatory final paragraph. That’s why the story has retained its relevance: not because of any obvious message or moral, but precisely because of its unsettling open-endedness.

I’ve posted here before that I believe all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. (By the way, Sue had a good post on this yesterday, about identifying your character’s defining wound. Click here!)

I think making the reader uncomfortable isn’t a bad thing. The best literature, Ruth Franklin says, provides a vital service when we allow it to disturb us. Yes, what one person reads as discomfort another reads as aggression. But Franklin believes the idea that a writer should not offend someone is a recipe for bad writing.

The Lottery shocked people in 1948 because of its lack of a tidy message. It’s the reason it is still taught and talked about 75 years later.  Great writing can entertain, enlighten, and even empower, but it’s greatest gift to us is its ability to unsettle, prodding us to search for our own moral in the story. It is the ax, Franklin writes, quoting Kalka, to break up our frozen souls.

Many readers really hate ambiguous endings, thinking the open-ending negates everything that came before. I get that. When I read The Life of Pi, I felt really frustrated by the ending — Pi Patel washes ashore in Mexico after surviving a long time at sea on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. On land, the tiger simply walks away into the jungle without looking back. Pi is left to grapple with the ambiguity: Is the magical story with animals the truth? Or is the truth what he later tells investigators, a dark horror story involving human violence and cannibalism.

I was a bit angry. What the? Is this a who-shot-JR dream switcheroo? What really happened? Which story is the truth? Was the tiger a hallucination Patel made up to block out the horrors of his real life?

Years later, I gave it a second read. I came at the story from a different place and to me, it became an allegory about faith, survival — and the healing power of storytelling.

But hold on a minute, I can hear some of you saying….

We genre writers work within certain guidelines and reader expectations —  The lovers must live happily ever after. The white-knight hero must vanquish the evil villain. How do we square the narrative circle that our readers crave? How do we provide the satisfaction of a well-resolved plot and still find room for ambiguity?

Can we color outside the lines?

Ambiguous endings are polarizing, for sure. But when done well, they add emotional layers that make our readers confront their biases — and make us crime writers stretch the boundaries of our genre’s tradition.

It’s not easy to pull off. A well-done ambiguous ending comes from being in complete control of your narrative. It might make a reader uncomfortable, but if it feels logcial and well-earned, they will go with it.

One last point before I go. I said above that all good fiction comes from disturbance — not just for the characters, but for the writer herself. That last part is important, if a tad off-subject. To write well, you have to be willing to take chances and not be afraid of challenging your readers. But you also have to be willing to challenge yourself. The best writing — indeed, all of art — comes from a private place inside you. Sometimes that place is painful to revisit. That’s just part of the work of writing.

Indulge me for one more minute. This is a scene from an episode of Dr. Who. The doctor goes to the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, sees Van Gogh’s 1890 painting The Church at Auvers (my favorite Van Gogh). Struck by the fact that Van Gogh was ignored in his lifetime, he goes back in time and brings the painter back to modern-day Paris. Get out your hankies…

“He transformed the pain of his life into ecstatic beauty. To use your passion and pain to portray the joy and magnificence of our world, no one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”

Write well and without fear, crime dogs. I am traveling today to be with family but will check in with you all. Happy turkey day.

By PJ Parrish

So I got into an argument on Facebook the other day. No, not about that. It was over Jaws.

I posted something to the effect that I thought it was one of the greatest movies of all time. That prompted this response from a guy I came to call (in my head) Pencil-Neck:

“It isn’t even Spielberg’s best movie. It’s just commercial trash. Besides, the book is far better. You should read it.”

The gauntlet was thrown. Pencil-Neck didn’t have a chance.

Now, I admit I didn’t read Peter Benchley’s mega-seller when it came out in 1974.  Jaws was a huge success, the hardback sitting on the bestseller list for 44 weeks and the paperback selling millions. Steven Spielberg snatched up the rights a year later. You know the rest.

I finally did get around to reading the book — 35 years later. I had been invited by David Morell to write an essay for an anthology he was editing called Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, put out by the International Thriller Writers. All the good ones were taken by the time I got there — everything from Lee Child writing about Theseus and the Minotaur to Jefferey Deaver writing about Len Deighton’s The Ipcress File.  I chose Jaws because I think the shark ranks up there alongside Hannibal Lector as the greatest serial killer in all of fiction.

Then I read the book. Ah, geez. I was in trouble. The book was terrible.

I should have known just by looking at the cover. (I had to order a tattered used copy off Amazon). On the original cover, the killer fish looks like a toothless old dolphin. Compare that to the revised cover after the movie came out:

This is one of those rare cases, I think, where the movie improved on the book. The critics in 1974 were brutal, taking Benchley to task for “lifeless characters,” “rubber-teeth plot” and “hollow pretentiousness.” The Village Voice sniped: “If there’s a trite turn to be made, Jaws will make it.”

Alas, all of it is true. The craftsmanship is bad-pulp level. The characters are corrugated cardboard.The plot is bogged down with cheesy subplots, eratz-Cheever class warfare, supernatural omens and some gin-fueled adultry (including a cringe-worthy groping scene between the police chief’s wife and Hooper in a booth at a seafood restaurant.)

Get this: The shark gets its own point of view.

Worse: Brody doesn’t kill the shark. It dies of its own wounds and sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Now, I recognize that novels are more expansive, that subplots contribute to enjoyment, and that organizing a story around a theme is good. For Benchley, the theme was that humans prey on each other by instinct and impulse like, well, sharks. The Brody-Ellen-Hooper love triangle is thus not a messy sub-plot but the point of the book. The shark is mere metaphor for human viciousness.

Sigh.

I also recognize that movies are a different kettle of fish, that plots must be streamlined, debris cleared away, and character inner-musings kept to a minimum. Spielberg’s movie is pure genius in this regard. He jettisoned all the subplots. And he conveyed character through dialogue and action. He transformed Benchley’s moody passive-aggressive Chief Brody into a classic Everyman warrior, swept up in Joseph Campbell’s monomyth of the hero’s journey.

And he blasts the hell out of the shark at the end.

So, what did I write about for that anthology? Pretty much what I’ve told you here. But I acknowledged that the shark is a terrific character, the best-rendered one in the book. Whenever he appears on the page, he pulls the narration along in his wake and diverts our attention from the tedious human dramas on land.

Second, the book tapped into a primal but believable fear. Benchley broke a barrier between fiction and non-fiction, giving us a predator stalking the real world (a benign beach no less!) but also emerging from a place of darkness and danger. Chief Brody is all of us when he thinks (in a passage that I do like):

In his dreams, deep water was populated by slimy savage things that rose from below and shredded his flesh, demons that cracked and moaned.

Lastly, it’s a helluva serial killer story. As one character says to Chief Brody in the book: “Sharks are like an ax murderer. People react to them with their guts.” (yeah, well, quite literally, right?)

Are there lessons to be learned here for us book writers? Sure. I use the movie Jaws as an example in plot workshops — see Powerpoint slide above. This is because Jaws is easy to digest for inexperienced writers who get lost at sea with plots or drift aimlessly trying to figure out character motivation. Here are just a couple things we can learn from Jaws — book vs movie.

• Keep your subplots under control.
• Don’t get preachy in your themes
• Don’t whimp out with your ending and take the gun out of your hero’s hand.
• Don’t write icky sex scenes set at the Red Lobster.

What’s the bottom line? What did I finally tell Pencil-Neck? I told him I stood by my assertion that Jaws is a great movie. I conceded the book had its good moments. That great thriller novels always pack a visceral punch and stay with us long after we’ve turned off the light. Benchley created the second most famous fish in fiction. Not too shabby.

Benchley gets the last word: “It’s nice being a little rich and a little famous. But dammit, I didn’t intend to rank with Melville.”

So, crime dogs…do you have your own examples of book vs movie? What did you learn from comparing books vs movies? And don’t get me started on The Bridges of Madison County.

There are always two people in every picture: the photographer and the viewer. — Ansel Adams

By PJ Parrish

Got a lot on the brain today: So the time has come to talk of many things: Of slip-on shoes, Scottish ships and ceiling whacks — of cabbage-heads and kings.

Shoes? I have to decde whether getting a pair of Skecher slip-ons will make me look like I’ve given up and am content to slip into old bat-hood.

Scottish ships? I’m just glad Jamie and Claire are heading back to Scotland because the last season of Outlander begins soon and I miss the moors and half-naked men in kilts.

Ceiling whacks? I have to find someone who can repair my bathroom ceiling because the plumber poked a giant hole in it while trying to fix the toilet. (Don’t ask).

Cabbage heads and kings? Politics….nope. We don’t go there here.

But politics is my jumping off point today. I was reading a column by David Brooks the other day wherein he posed an interesting question about election campaigns that relates to us novelists: How do you keep an audience’s attention?

Here at TKZ, we talk often about how a book is divided into acts. We all know how crucial it is to capture a reader’s attention early and set up Act. 1. We all know how easy it is to get bogged down and lose our way in Act. 2. We all know how horrible it is to get to that Act 3 and realize we’re barreling toward a plot abyss.

David Brooks suggests campaigns have a similar structure. So he asked novelists and screenwriters, how they do it. How do they build momentum and keep audiences in their grip? The answers were illuminating.

Playwright David Mamet says that no one tunes in to watch information — they crave drama. What is drama? Mamet: “It is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific acute goal.”

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin tells us that a fictional hero, like a good campaigner, must be seized by a strong, specific desire and they need to face a really big obstacle. A hero/campaigner also needs a clear and compelling plot. Here is the threat. Here is where we’re going. Here is what (me, the hero) is going to do about it.

Brooks then cites Christopher Booker’s book Seven Basic Plots. Booker writes that there are only a handful of iconic storylines in fiction — and in real life.

1. Overcoming the Monster.
2. Rags to Riches.
3. The Quest.
4. Voyage and Return.
5. Rebirth.
6. Comedy.
7. Tragedy.

He then links these plots to politicians, saying that a good politician tells a story about himself or herself. They create narratives that propell their campaign forward and help them connect with audiences. (Remember Mamet’s words: drama = good. information = boring)

Allow me one brief political aside: Brooks gives several examples of politicians who found their “plots.” For Ronald Reagan, it was rags to riches. For George W. Bush it was redemption: beating alcoholism and finding faith. Nixon, he suggests, saw himself as the classic David taking on the monster. (the establishment).

Likewise, as novelists, our protagonists need a life narration: They can’t know what to do (plot) until they know what their basic need is. (motivation). You, as a writer, can’t create a compelling plot until and unless you understand what your character wants, at her most basic level. (Hint: It’s not to solve the case).

Brooks wraps up his article by saying that politicians, like fictional heroes, can’t hold our attention unless they reveal something honest about their core. The hero cannot hold back. The hero has to let the reader into his inner self. He points to Obama as an arms-length overly-cerebral politician who failed to connect with voters — until he made his speech on race in 2008.

The novelist E.M. Forster said that there is only one overriding imperative in fiction: “Only connect.”

An audience — be it at a political rally or browsing in a bookstore — needs to feel a connection with the character, needs to understand what they want, needs to empathize with what they feel.

Which leads me to my last point.

You, as a writer, can’t find your audience, can’t connect with readers, until you find your own courage. Courage to do what? To open your an emotional vein and bleed a little on the page. Readers crave drama, not information.

I came across another article recently with this off-putting title: How To (Not) Think Of Your Audience As You Create. Click here for full article.

Don’t get huffy. It’s not as bad as you think. The writer was asking novelists and screenwriters who they wrote for — themselves or their audiences. All the respondants came down on the side of the audience. The one answer that most intrigued me, though, came from novelist Wiz Wharton, author of Ghost Girl and Banana. Listen to this:

Beginning writers often forget that rather than gatekeepers lying on the bones of aspiring authors, agents and publishers are also an audience for your work. Although the bottom line might be whether they can sell your material, they’re also looking for something that appeals to them on a heart and gut level, i.e. something they’re investing in personally. And I honestly don’t think it’s as simple as replicating what’s already out there. Yes, you should have a good grasp of structure and language and all those tools, but more than this, it’s the emotional truth of a project that will ultimately get you noticed.

One of the greatest joys of stories is how they vicariously allow an audience to rehearse emotional and physical scenarios, and when you write with truth you can take something specific and make it absolutely universal and resonant, whether you’re writing a Spartan epic, or a space western, or a domestic noir. Great ideas are everywhere, but it’s the authenticity of the world and its characters as seen through your unique voice and your unique perspective that’s going to make an audience stick around to see how things turn out.

I love that last part. Anybody can come up with a great idea. But it is the realness of your hero’s narrative — as filtered through the realness of your own life-plot — that captivates an audience.

Which leads us back to David Brooks. Cardboard politicians are a dime a dozen, cabbage-heads and would-be kings. The compelling ones? They’re rare. Like great fictional heroes, they hold our attention because they connect.

Write with truth. They will find you and follow.

By PJ Parrish (still with one paw but typing better, thanks)

I’m not the first person to ask this question and won’t be the last: What has happened to editors? Did all the good ones get sucked up into the alien ship back in ’45 with the lost airmen of Flight 19? If so, are they ever coming back?

Back when I was part of traditional publishing, I used to dread the day when the galleys arrived. Back in the those dark ages, you would get a fat package in the mail of the actual type-set book. It was pretty, until you looked closely. The galleys were riddled with typos, mistakes, and weird formatting. Now, I knew some of this was my fault. But these were the days when there were whole staffs of copy editors at our disposal to help make us poor writers look better.

Jump to present times. Or maybe not. Things are even worse now. With mergers of major publishers, cutbacks of in-house staff and out-sourcing, and a general decline in editing skills of young folks coming into the business, errata is everywhere. And what about those of us who self-pub? Who can we rely on to make sure our stories emerge clean and readable?

This is on my mind for three reasons today. One, I just finished reading a major novel that had so many typos in it I got angry.

Second, a friend who is still pubbed by one of the major houses called me to vent about the evils of Track Changes. This is a function within Word wherein an outsider (usually an editor) makes mechanical notes in the margins of your manuscript. I hated Track Changes. The whole vivacious give-and-take between writer and editor was gone. Nuance was lost. Emotion subsumed. Sort of like what happened when we starting texting instead of calling each other.

The third reason is that I am editing one of backlist titles, An Unquiet Grave, to reissue via self-pubbing. I am appalled at the typos and mistakes I am finding. And this book already went through the Simon & Schuster prettification machine.

Geez. What an old crab I sound like today. Forgive me.

Let’s back up with this diatribe. I got into this novel racket back in 1979 as a writer of mainstream women’s fiction. That was the euphemism of the era for big fat books about sex, power and dysfunctional families. I had a terrific line editor, but even more impressive was the quality of the copy editing in those days. Through the four books I did for Ballantine/Fawcett I was blessed with the pickiest, most obsessive, anal-grammarians an author could ever wish for. They caught my misspellings, my lay-lie transgressions, my syntax sins.

My favorite copy editor was the one I had for my British editions. This woman — for some reason, I pictured her as a spinster sitting by the fire in some Devonshire outpost surrounded by cats — dripped blood-red pencil all over my pages. At one point, she scribbled in the margins next to my French phrases: “I don’t believe, based on the English errors uncovered thus far in this novel, that we should trust the author’s ability to write in another language.” She also took me to task for my “crutches”: “This author has an unfortunate propensity to use “stare” and “padded” (e.g. he padded toward the door). Would suggest striking every reference.”

I hated that woman. God, how I miss her now.

Every author has horror stories about bad editing. I had a copy editor who changed the color of key lime pie to green. Being in Manhattan, I guess she never saw a key lime  — which is yellow. But shoot, I was the one who had to answer the boy-are-you-dumb emails from fellow Floridians. And then there is the infamous Patricia Cornwell gaffe — the back cover copy that talked about a grizzly murder — which set off a whole new sub-genre, the serial killer bear.

Like I said, I am not abdicating my responsibility. But when you spend eight months to a year writing a book, you get so close to it sometimes you can’t see the trees for the forest. You’re so intent on plot and character, you forget you’ve changed a character’s name halfway through. Or that it’s MackiNAW City but MackiNAC Island. Or that loons don’t stick around Michigan in winter…they migrate. One year I got so paranoid I hired a copy editor. She caught so many mistakes it made me even more paranoid about what still lay (lie? lain?) beneath.

So, now here I am, a retired writer who is still suffering from “galley” anxiety this week. Still dreading those typos, the errant error, the stupid mistakes. Do I hire another free lance editor? They don’t come cheap. But editing your own book is like trying to be your own lawyer — only fools do it.

I dread going into battle. Because these days, no one has my back.

Thanks for listening, friends.