Category Archives: John Gilstrap

First Make Me Care

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By John Gilstrap

I’m tackling another first page critique this week.  I’ll start with the submission, and the see you on the back side with my comments in bold.
HAYWIRE
The Changeling


At five minutes past eight a.m., Amy Turner went upstairs and paused outside her son’s closed bedroom door, listening.


 “Peter, this is your ten-minute warning.”

 She rapped sharply on the wood with her knuckles. “Ten minutes and we walk out the door, Mister. You got that? Or else you’re taking the bus to school.”


 It was an empty threat. If Amy didn’t physically deposit her sullen 15-year-old at the front door of Venice High, he’d skip school again. Peter was about to fail the tenth grade due to his repeated absences, and it was only February. Amy sighed. Her son was incredibly smart, but after the divorce he’d become withdrawn, distant. She was at a loss what to do.

  Amy flung open the door with an angry flourish. Then she froze in her tracks, staring. Peter’s room, normally a hell hole of man-boy slovenliness, looked drastically changed. It was clean. The bed was freshly made with crisp linens and hospital corners. The buntings of draped clothes, the smelly shoe piles, the debris field of chips and God-knows-what-else on the floor, had vanished. Now you could actually see the brown carpet, which had been vacuumed. The room was eerily neat, as if a guest with OCD had tidied up before clearing out.
 “Peter?” Amy’s voice sounded thin in her own ears. No answer. Peter was gone.
 Oh my God he’s run away, like he said he would. She pivoted and thundered down the stairs, her thoughts already leapfrogging to panic mode. She visualized making frantic calls to the school, interrogating her son’s friends to see if they knew where he was.
 Amy rounded the living room corner, headed for the kitchen. Then she pulled up short. At the far end of the dining room table, sat Peter. He was spooning up cereal and quietly studying some notes. A couple of school books were stacked next to his elbow.
 “Oh thank God,” she gasped.
 Peter looked up and gave his mother a distracted smile. “Sorry Mom, did you call me? I’m trying to get through these notes—can’t believe I let myself fall so far behind in trig.”

 “It’s okay,” she said. “You’ll catch up.”
 Was this a joke? Peter never worried about school. She did another double-take as she registered his clothes. He had on a pair of neatly pressed chinos—chinos?—plus the Harvard sweatshirt her parents had given him the previous Christmas. Peter had thrown the gift into his bottom drawer, where it had remained. Until now.
 After pouring herself a cup of coffee, Amy studied her son from the corner of her eye. Maybe he has a new girlfriend, she thought. Either that, or a hobgoblin with a dark sense of humor had swapped out a substitute for her son. Amy held her breath, afraid of breaking the spell.

 “Your room looks amazing,” she finally ventured. “You’re not planning to join the military, are you?”
 “No way,” Peter gave her his old grin, the one she hadn’t seen in months. “I just decided that pig sty was getting old.”

 He reached for his ear to adjust his new Internet appliance, which he’d had for just a week. Shaped like an ear cuff, the blinking gadget was called an “e-Hook.” It was supposed to be the latest thing for connecting to the Internet. Amy hadn’t squawked about the price—she was hoping technology would make him a better multi-tasker. He needed to get better at something.
 “Hey, Mom.” The lights on Peter’s e-Hook flickered through his long hair, signaling a new connection. “Can you take me for a hair cut tonight after school? It’s so shaggy, it’s blocking my signal in hot spots.”

 Looking heavenward, Amy sent up a little prayer of thanks.

 Okay, let’s talk first about the good stuff. I like the way this author writes about mundane morning ritual. If you’re a parent, you’ve lived the first part of this scene one way or another, and it’s not easy to write well about something so common. I could feel the clock ticking. Nicely done.

Unfortunately, there’s no payoff.

This is another example of a first chapter that should have been a second chapter. Actually, no. This should have been a fourth chapter. By starting here, the author has put herself in the position of including back story with front story in the same paragraph (Note: right or wrong, I’m assuming that the author is a woman—which means there’s a voice to the piece, which is good).

Example: If Amy didn’t physically deposit her sullen 15-year-old at the front door of Venice High, he’d skip school again. Peter was about to fail the tenth grade due to his repeated absences, and it was only February. Amy sighed. Her son was incredibly smart, but after the divorce he’d become withdrawn, distant. She was at a loss what to do.

Another example: Oh my God he’s run away, like he said he would.

Do you see how the back story stops the action of the story, and in the process feels kinda clunky?

I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that the ET (ear thingy) is somehow affecting Peter’s personality. Based on that assumption, here’s my recommendation for the beginning of this story:

Start in Peter’s POV, where he’s living this same scene a day (or week) before. We’re with him as he pulls on a pair of jeans and shrugs into a sweatshirt that he pulls out from under yesterday’s underpants on the seat of his drum set. His mom is calling to him to hurry, and he shouts something teenager-y. With all his attitude, he thinks about the next math test that he’s going to flunk (who needs trigonometryto play in a band anyway?) When he finally passes his mom in the hallway, he throws off a comment about running away if she doesn’t get off his back.

Maybe the next scene belongs to Amy. As she drives him to school she tries small talk. Or, maybe she’s off to work. Anyway, we learn about her troubles with Peter.

Next scene: Peter meets the guy who gives him the ET.

Next scene: Mom and Peter at war during dinner.

Next scene: We’re back to where the author started this piece.

The point of all this is for the author to take her time developing the characters. Make me care for them before you put them in harm’s way. If we know what the normal normal is, we can start the scene where the author originally started it, and from Amy’s point of view, the change to the new normal will be genuinely frightening.

I fear sometimes that we here in The Killzone violate my overarching rule for creative writing: there are no rules. We tell people to get right to the action. Sometimes, that’s not what the story really needs. Maybe we should tell people to get right to the interesting stuff.

I faced a similar challenge when I was writing my second novel, At All Costs (to be re-released in May). My heroes have been on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for over a decade, falsely accused of mass murders they didn’t commit. A random event exposes their cover, and their mission to prove their innocence. After countless false starts to begin the novel with high energy action, I realized that that wouldn’t work for this book. I needed to begin with normalcy so that the reader could commiserate with all that the characters were losing. To make up for the lack of action, I needed to make sure that normalcy was portrayed with a very strong voice. That’s what I did.

That’s what this author needs to do.

Okay, space break. Let’s pretend that I didn’t just re-write the author’s submission. Let’s talk now about the submission on its own merits.

In my first reading, I assumed from the first paragraph that Peter was much younger than fifteen. Thus, the second sentence of the third paragraph gave me pause.

Question: The story starts with Amy going upstairs to roust Peter. It ends with Peter downstairs. How did he get downstairs without Amy seeing him? I’m just sayin’ . . .

Lost in the Forest With He, Him, Them & Her

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By John Gilstrap
It’s my turn to take a stab at critiquing a first page.  In this one, we’ll see the downside of keeping characters’ names a secret from readers.  I’ll see you on the other side of the submission:
Darkness
Hunter, hunted? A simple matter of perspective. His perspective changed the instant the hunted vanished over the tree lined ridge fifty yards ahead. His chest tightened, his heart skipped a beat. He tightened his grip on the stock of his weapon.

The outer shaving of the moon had already gone down, leaving a black void in its wake. Like gauze, the Southern California smog absorbed the pin pricks of star light. Trees choked out what light was left, leaving the men in darkness. Silhouettes against the shadows.

Without words the five men, broad and rigid, assembled at the crest. Their weapons were poised like stone shadows standing sentry for the world. In his electronic ear piece he heard the hunt captain address them. “We can go in tight and drawn. We will have to lure it out to get it. Any other options?”

He peered into the blackness twenty steep yards below. Something stirred rustling the branches in the abyss. It was too dark to identify the myriad of shadows below. Most would be innocuous. Forest trees and shrubs. One would be a deadly predator. Hungry for them. His breath came shallow and tight. His hand sweat against the weapon stock.

Options? There were always options. An image of black curly hair and topaz eyes flickered into his mind. His chest constricted choking his lungs so he couldn’t inhale. No. She was not an option, he quelled the thought.

The men squinted in the dark to look at each other wordlessly. None of them had a better suggestion. It was settled then. He closed his eyes for the briefest moment and forced air into his clenched chest.

“Anderson, take two o’clock” he acknowledged his assignment with a slight nod and silently stepped into position.

He released his vice grip from the fiberglass stock of his cross bow and wiggled blood back into his numb fingers. He would have liked to lower the heavy weapon long enough to stretch his cramping neck muscles and rest his burning left arm. He’d been pointing the cumbrous weapon for eight straight hours.

***

Before we get to content, let’s talk a bit about formatting. It doesn’t show in the translation to blogger, but this piece came to me with some really funky fonts and bizarre line spacing. Folks, the only way to go is 12-point Times New Roman or Courier (though I think that Courier might have fallen out of fashion). In its original form, the piece was formatted with 1.5 spaces between lines, and then two spaces between paragraphs. I try to keep an open mind on these things, but I confess it’s hard not to think negative thoughts from the very beginning, along the lines of, “If the writer can’t get the simple stuff right, how on earth is s/he going to be able to handle the storytelling?

Little things really do matter.

Okay, now to the story itself. Maybe the best way to critique this piece is to recreate it below, and then comment. My comments are in bold type.


Darkness

Hunter, hunted? A simple matter of perspective. His perspective changed the instant the hunted vanished over the tree lined ridge fifty yards ahead. His chest tightened, his heart skipped a beat. He tightened his grip on the stock of his weapon.
I’m awash in pronouns. After presenting me with a choice between hunter and hunted—a choice that borders on cliché at its face—the author then presents me with a disembodied “his”. Whose? A beat later we learn that he sees the hunted disappear over the ridge. This is particularly confusing in light of the assertion that hunter vs. hunted all a matter of perspective.  If he can see the “hunted”, then isn’t he, by process of elimination, the hunter?

The outer shaving of the moon had already gone down, leaving a black void in its wake. Like gauze, the Southern California smog absorbed the pin pricks of star light. Trees choked out what light was left, leaving the men in darkness. Silhouettes against the shadows.

Full disclosure: When I’m in critique mode, I have a tendency to think too much, and maybe that’s what’s happening here, but this paragraph really doesn’t work for me. In order:

1. “The outer shaving of the moon had already gone down.” So, why report it? The author is describing something that isn’t there. And, just between us, didn’t the rest of the moon go down, too?

2. “. . . leaving a black void in its wake.” Wakes are left by movement. Doesn’t work for me here.

3. “Like gauze . . . absorbed the pinpricks of starlight.” To me, this means there are no stars showing. If there are no stars showing, then the image of pinpricks is superfluous and confusing.

4. “. . . men in darkness. Silhouettes against the shadows.” You need light for shadows, yet we’ve spent a paragraph describing profound darkness. Again, the images are battling each other and creating confusion.

5. Who are “the men”? Is OPKOAH (our protagonist known only as “he”) among them, or are the men in fact the hunted?
Without words the five men, broad and rigid, assembled at the crest. Their weapons were poised like stone shadows standing sentry for the world. In his electronic ear piece he heard the hunt captain address them. “We can go in tight and drawn. We will have to lure it out to get it. Any other options?”

I don’t know what broad and rigid men look like, but the sentence reads as vaguely pornographic. Weapons poised like stone shadows? Is the “he” with the earpiece the same he as OPKOAH? I don’t know what “tight and drawn” means, either.

He peered into the blackness twenty steep yards below. Something stirred rustling the branches in the abyss. It was too dark to identify the myriad of shadows below. Most would be innocuous. Forest trees and shrubs. One would be a deadly predator. Hungry for them. His breath came shallow and tight. His hand sweat against the weapon stock.

Sigh. Another unidentified he. At this point, I’m too busy triangulating POVs (since OPKOAH was watching people crest a hill, then this paragraph’s he must be with the he with the earpiece, right?) to pay much attention to the action. Part of me is beginning to think that OPKOAH might be the deadly predator who’s hungry for them. But, since I don’t know who them is, most of me has stopped caring.

I don’t toss out that last line to be mean, by the way. Reading is not supposed to be hard, and fiction is not supposed to require a decoder ring.

Options? There were always options. An image of black curly hair and topaz eyes flickered into his mind. His chest constricted choking his lungs so he couldn’t inhale. No. She was not an option, he quelled the thought.

Oh, good Lord, now we have a she. With eyes and hair that make a masculine pronoun choke. (Is the masculine pronoun OPKOAH, or a new one? I don’t know, but there’s an Abbott and Costello routine in here somewhere.)

The men squinted in the dark to look at each other wordlessly. None of them had a better suggestion. It was settled then. He closed his eyes for the briefest moment and forced air into his clenched chest.

Holy shit, now we’re back with the men. And they’re squinting. Together. A choreographed Gilbert Gottfried impersonation. I’m relieved, however, that the disembodied he was able to clear the hair ball and breathe again. Do chests really clench?

“Anderson, take two o’clock” he acknowledged his assignment with a slight nod and silently stepped into position.

 “Yes sir,” Anderson replied. “And what you like me to do with two o’clock after I take it?”

Okay, I added that part. Finally, one person has a name, but I have to take in on faith that the he who acknowledged his assignment is in fact Anderson, and not the nameless being who’s in charge.

Question: Are we to assume that the he who was introduced in the first paragraph—therefore establishing him as a point of view character—is somehow overhearing this conversation from 50 yards away?
He released his vice grip from the fiberglass stock of his cross bow and wiggled blood back into his numb fingers. He would have liked to lower the heavy weapon long enough to stretch his cramping neck muscles and rest his burning left arm. He’d been pointing the cumbrous weapon for eight straight hours.

Hmm. Anderson has a crossbow? No, wait, I bet we’re back with OPKOAH. The beast, maybe? Choke-hair with gender identity issues? Really, it doesn’t matter because I’ll not be reading any further.

The importance of POV cannot be overstressed. Confusion leads to frustration, which leads to early rejection.

Note to the author: Please understand that even in poking fun, I’m coming from a respectful place. It takes guts to submit stuff to a group like this, and I admire that. I also admire your desire to improve your craft, so I hope you take this ribbing in the spirit with which it was intended.

Domestic Television Wars

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By John Gilstrap
I’m embarrassed to admit that we are a ten-television family. It’s even more embarrassing that we are a household of two—just my wife and I, effective tomorrow when my baby boy moves into his own apartment. (Technically, since he’s still in the house today, we are an eleven-television family.)

The MOAT (Mother Of All Televisions) is in our movie room. It’s a 106-inch hi-def front projection wonder with a sound system that could do structural damage to the house if I cranked it up loudly enough. It’s the ultimate man-cave that all too often is pressed into service for the screening of chick flicks. Hey, a deal’s a deal. When I consider what I no longer pay to go to a theater, I figure the movie room might just pay for itself one day.

While there’s a certain utility to the MOAT, the pure luxury of a television is the little flat screen we have mounted in the master bathroom. Make fun if you’d like, but it’s nice to do the morning chores with the morning news in the background.

Ours is a three-bedroom house, and we enjoy entertaining guests, so it only makes sense that each bedroom would have its own television. Then there’s one in my office and the one in my wife’s office. It’s nice to watch TV while cooking and cleaning, so there’s a tiny TV in the kitchen, as well.

When we built the house, our son was still in high school, so we wanted to have a place for him and his friends to hang out, so there’s a television in the downstairs family room. When all is said and done, though, the upstairs family room television gets the most use for routine weeknight viewings of network shows.

See how quickly it adds up? You’d think that that Mars/Venus tug of war on program selection would be a snap. Lord knows we have a lot of options. So, when I want to watch Military Channel and Joy wants to watch HGTV, there should be no controversy. She should watch her programs on one TV and I should watch mine on another.

That logic ignores the complication that after 26 years of marriage, we still like each other and prefer to be together instead of being in different parts of the house. Given our day jobs and my night job of writing books, we spend enough time apart, thank you very much. It’s nice to snuggle up on the couch to watch TV together.

Unless . . .

Well, there’s the rub. The unlesses, I mean. At the deepest levels of my soul, I give not a flying fig what Kate is doing with her Eight, and I’d rather put a fork in my eye than watch another episode of any hospital drama ever to be produced between now and the end of the millennium. Ditto Joy’s feelings toward R. Lee Ermy (one of my top five picks of people I’d like to have dinner with), the latest design of weaponry or colorized footage of World War Two battles.

The good news is that the dark days of choices are behind us now that it’s January and some of our shared favorites have returned. Here are our shared favorites, in no particular order:
American Idol
The Middle
Modern Family
The Big Bang Theory
Two and a Half Men (though this one is kind of on probation; it might have outlived its storyline)
Blue Bloods
Pawn Stars
American Pickers (I’m less an enthusiast than she)
Castle (also on probation, though getting better)
So You Think You Can Dance (okay, technically this is not on yet, but it’s essentially a continuum with American Idol)
I’m sure there are more, but those are the biggies.

How about you, Killzoners? What programs do you and your significant other share as favorites to be watched together?

A Peek Into Amazon Sales Figures

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By John Gilstrap
Since its creation a decade or so ago, amazon.com has provided one of the very few sources of sales feedback for authors. At a glance, we’ve been able to tell what our sales rankings are, as determined by whatever top secret algorithm they use to determine such things. If you’re obsessive about it, you can watch your numbers fluctuate wildly, from number 3,500 in the morning to number 350,000 in the afternoon. The trick is to decipher how rankings translate into sales.

As I write this on Thursday, January 13, the Kindle sales rank for my book Hostage Zero lies at 2,007—its first foray above the 2K mark that I’m aware of. Given that there are a bajillion books out there available to be ranked, though, one would think that that still represents a fairly robust sales velocity.

By contrast, the Kindle sales rank for Tom Clancy’s new book, Dead or Alive, sits at 28. Given the distance between the rankings—and the fact that we’re talking Tom Clancy—I wonder what that translates into in terms of actual copies sold.

As luck would have it, I’ve recently stumbled upon a website called novelrank.com, which uses algorithms of its own (or maybe just old fashioned spies) to monitor Amazon sales data and translate it into useable numbers. The results are interesting.

The Kindle Store has sold 73 copies of Hostage Zero thus far in the month of January, which earned it an average January sales rank of 1,718. Clancy’s Dead or Alive, with a month-to-date average sales rank of 21, has sold 253 copies in the same period. Last month, beginning with the book’s December 14 laydown date and a debut sales rank of 6, Amazon sold 493 copies of Dead or Alive from the Kindle Store. (I don’t have December figures for my book because I didn’t trigger the tracking function until January.)

For what it’s worth, the hardcover edition of Dead or Alive saw an average sales rank in January of 75 (it’s 105 now), with 1,010 hardcovers sold.

If the results gleaned from novelrank.com are reliable—and I have no way of knowing either way—my first impression is that the gross numbers seem low, though I admittedly have no basis on which to judge such things. The spread surprises me, too, with Clancy selling only 12-15 copies more per day than I do, despite a four-figure difference in ranking. Admittedly, that all must add up to a seven-figure delta between our incomes, but I would have thought his numbers to be several times what they are.

If nothing else, novelrank.com is a fun tool.  It lets you type in the title of any book, and if someone has already triggered the tracking function, you can see how it’s doing.  If they haven’t then you can trigger it yourself.  It’s a shame that my friend and blogmate Michelle Gagnon is weaning herself from the Internet, or she’d be able to see how her sales are doing.
Okay, that was mean. . .


Compare & Contrast: Lightning Bug and Lightning Bolt

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By John Gilstrap
Well, it’s official. The keys to the asylum are now the property of the patients.

Just when I thought we’d hit the firewall of political correctness and Universal Nannydom, it turns out there’s farther to go. In an effort to protect the delicate sensibilities of our children (why is madness so often touted as protecting children?)—and, I suspect, to make life easier on overwrought and over-watched teachers who are so frequently thrown under the bus by their administrators—Auburn University English Department Chair Alan Gribben has rewritten The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one of the great works of American literature, to remove the n-word and other “offensive” terms so that the generation that considers John Stewart to be a journalist won’t have to think too much.

Professor Gribben told USAToday, “When the young reader is staring at the word five times on a given page and the instructor is saying, ‘Mark Twain didn’t mean this and you have to read it with an appreciation of irony,’ you’re asking a lot of the young reader.” Perish the thought. God forbid that school become a place for, you know, thinking and stuff.

It’s interesting that he focused on irony, because Gribben went on to tell USAToday, “All I’m doing is taking out a trip wire and leaving everything else intact. All [Twain’s] sharp social critique, all his satirical jabs are intact.” Read that last sentence again. I shudder that he a) uttered this nonsense without irony, and b) he’s allowed to teach English classes.

By the way, the good professor is also sparing us the offense of the words “Injun’” (yes, the famed bad guy is now Indian Joe—better, I suppose, than Oppressed Native American Joseph), and “half-breed,” which will now be half-blood. You know, like Huck Finn and the Half-Blood Prince. Perhaps we can exchange the raft for a flying broom.

Tell me this isn’t happening. I’ll stipulate that the n-bomb is perhaps the most offensive word in the English language, and that I would never use it in my writing, but how can anyone be so presumptuous as to change the work of one of the greatest writers this country has ever produced? It’s not even a dead word, for crying out loud. (Listen to the radio stations that teenage boys are listening to, if you don’t believe me.)

As offensive as it is, and as evocative as it is of bad times in America, the n-word is, at the end of the day, a word, and context matters. I can’t think of a single case where that particular word is used to better effect than in Huck Finn. The whole book is a treatise against racism and Jim Crow laws. Surely the chairman of an English department knows this. Talk about your slippery slopes! In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens routinely refers to Fagin as “the Jew” and trust me, he doesn’t mean it in a good way. Is it time to re-write that book as well?

Look, I readily admit that I don’t know how to teach an English class—I barely know my parts of speech, and I’m a lazy reader—but I know right from wrong, and this is wrong. Great literature is supposed to make you squirm and think. Teachers are supposed to embrace the squirming and transform it into learning moments, perhaps in spite of parents and administrators who are pre-wired to take cover if anyone takes offense. (One is reminded of the humiliating 1999 incident in which Washington, DC, Mayor Anthony Williams forced the resignation of senior staffer David Howard for using the word, “niggardly” (it means miserly) the appropriate way in the appropriate context during a meeting.)

In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Professor Gribben blamed his atrocity on the fact that such a great American classic is one of the most banned books in America, all because of the presence of the n-word. Now my head is going to explode. His mission is to enable book-burners.

Dammit, people of all colors are supposed to understand that Mark Twain was one of the great crusaders against racism. They’re also supposed to appreciate irony. And they’re supposed to be really, truly uncomfortable with some elements of history. That’s good for everyone, even the children.

When he wasn’t busy offending future soccer moms, Mark Twain was something of a philosopher. Among his many quotable quotes is one that goes something like, “the difference between the nearly-right word and the right word is the difference between the lightning bug and lightning.”

Professor Gribben is a bug.

Happy Holidays!

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imageIt’s Winter break here at the Kill Zone. During our 2-week hiatus, we’ll be spending time with our families and friends, and celebrating all the traditions that make this time of year so wonderful. We sincerely thank you for visiting our blog and commenting on our rants and raves. We wish you a truly blessed Holiday Season and a prosperous 2011. From Clare, Kathryn, Joe M., Nancy, Michelle, Jordan, John G., Joe H., John M., and James to all our friends and visitors, Seasons Greeting from the Kill Zone.

See you back here on Monday, January 3.

Best Chases and Shootouts

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By John Gilstrap
Following up on yesterday’s discussion of sex scenes in fiction, I thought I’d go the other way today and talk about violence, a fairly indispensible element of thrillers and mysteries.

Chases are staples of suspense fiction. Film is inherently better suited to chases than books are, but some books have left me gasping for breath at the end. Chases are hard to write. The secret, I think, lies with the pacing of the prose. Shorter, rapid-fire sentences give the writing a quicker pulse that passes on to the reader.
Another staple is the shoot-out, which I think is particularly difficult to pull off on the page. Movies have a decided edge here, simply because of the audio track.

All this thinking about violence and its fiction elements prompted me to cobble together my own one-voter Best List:

Most Off-Puttingly Violent Novel:
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. If you’ve read it, you know why. If you haven’t read it, know what you’re in for. Just awful.

Most Off-Puttingly Violent Movie:
This category is complicated by all of the Saw-esque stuff that rolls through the theaters. Since bloody violence and audience gross-outs are the very point of these films, I think it would be disingenuous to call them off-putting. If you’re wired that way, you shouldn’t go to spatter movies. To qualify for this category, the film needs to be a “real” movie that happens to turn my stomach. The winner, for the second category in a row, is American Psycho. (Why, one might ask, would one watch the movie after hating the book. Good question, for which I have no good answer.)

Best Chase Scene in a Novel:
This one’s a slam-dunk for me: the final sequence in Frederick Forsythe’s The Day of the Jackal, in which Claude Lebel is closing in on the shooter. I’ve written here before how TDOTJ is the book that made me want to write thrillers. The entire book is taut as an over-wound watch spring, but that final sequence—which, now that I think about it less of a chase than a will-he-get-there-in-time sequence—is amazing.

Best Chase Scene in a Movie:
Goodness gracious, where to start on this one? As part of my arbitrary ground rules, I decided that only serious car chases would count. That leaves out Smokey & the Bandit, and nearly every other movie Burt Reynolds made in the seventies. Even that restriction leaves a big plug of movies. The best I can do is pick a few of my favorites.

We’ll start with the obvious: Bullitt. I was 11 years old when that movie came out in 1968, so I wasn’t allowed to see it in the theater. In fact, to this day, I’ve never seen it on a screen bigger than the living room television. I really should oughta do that. Anyway, I can extrapolate from the small screen to the big, and I’m well aware that that San Francisco chase sequence between the 1968 Dodge Charger and the 1968 Mustang GT—two of the hottest cars ever—forever reset the bar for car chases.

Next up: The French Connection. We’re in 1971 now, and I saw this one live in the theater. Holy freaking cow! I had never had an experience like that in a theater. What makes it particularly interesting—and sets it apart from many other car chases—is the fact that it’s really about a car chasing a train. Rumors abound that the sequence was shot without permits or permission from the City of New York, but I find them hard to believe.

The next winner is also from 1971, and premiered on the small screen: Duel, Steven Spielberg’s first movie. Starring Dennis Weaver as a motorist terrorized by the faceless driver of a big rig, this could be one of the most unsettling, unnerving movies I’ve ever seen. Certainly, it was the most unnerving movie that I had seen until that time.

Okay, my last entry in the Chase Sweepstakes comes from 2002: The Bourne Identity. Having Franca Potente in the shotgun seat for this wild ride through Paris provided a lot of eye candy (and great acting). I consider this to be the best car chase since The French Connection, made better by the fact that it was done the old fashioned way, without benefit of computer graphics.

Best Shoot-out in a A Novel:
You know what? Nothing comes to mind.

Best Shootout in a Movie:
Time for more arbitrary rules. In this case, war movies don’t count. I know that one could argue that the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan was one long shootout, I’ll concede that it may be the best action sequence of all time, but for some reason in my mind, it does not qualify as a shootout. Feel free to disagree. Here’s my list, in no particular order:

True Grit. I so hope they don’t get this wrong in the Jeff Bridges edition of this Western classic. That scene as Rooster Cogburn charges across the field with the reins in his teeth, Colt in one hand, Winchester in the other always works for me. “I aim to kill you Ned, in one minute, or see you hang at Fort Smith at Judge Parker’s Convenience. Which’ll it be?”/ “I call that mighty bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!” / “Fill your hands, you sonofabitch!” Really. Does it get better than that?

Tombstone. Okay, I like Westerns, and I confess that this 1993 classic is as much about great mustaches as it is about plot, but it is hands-down Val Kilmer’s best performance. Among many gun-toting set pieces, my favorites are the unpleasantries at the OK Corral (“You know what, Sheriff? I don’t think I’ll let you arrest me today.”), and the 20-minute retribution sequence that peaks with Wyatt Earp wading into the stream without cover and taking care of business. Great stuff.

The Untouchables. I know in my heart that this is not a “good” movie, but it is one of my favorite guilty pleasures, and it is chock-a-block with outstanding shoot-em-up set pieces, including a shameless rip-off of Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from the 1925 classic The Battleship Potemkin. This is Brian DePalma being Brian DePalma, with an utterly blind eye turned to history, but the movie really works for me. (“You got him?” / “Yeah, I got him.” / “Take him.” BANG!)

Heat. In many ways, this film is Michael Mann at his most self-indulgent. The movie is way too long, and way too talky, but the running shootout after the bank robbery might be the best gunfight ever filmed. Be sure to watch in with a good sound system.Wow, this is a long post. Okay, Killzoners, belly up to the bar. What have I missed?

The Art of the Editorial Letter

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By John Gilstrap
I believe that the editorial letter is an art form unto itself. This is the missive that a writer’s editor sends ahead of the marked-up manuscript to give a general sense of direction, and to pass along thoughts for ironing out rough patches in a story.

I’ve had a lot of editors over the years. One in particular loved to hear himself write, producing a 9 page editorial letter for me, single-spaced in 10-point Times New Roman. These were the days when you received an actual letter—you know, the kind with an envelope and postage. It was excruciating to read, and a nightmare to decipher.

For an editor, I imagine that the letter is a balancing act.  It’s tough to offer enough input without being too bruising to the writer’s ego. It also means knowing how sensitive your author is to such bruising.

My current editor is Michaela Hamilton of Kensington Publishing—truly the best in the business—and she has granted permission for me to share her letter regarding my next novel, Threat Warning (July, 2011) with our dear Killzoners. Her text is italicized here only as a means to keep her comments separate from mine. (I have omitted sections of the letter that might serve as spoilers to the book.)

I think it’s interesting to note how much of her input to my work parrots what we’ve been discussing in this space over the past year. Here we go:

Dear John,

I have greatly enjoyed rereading the ms of THREAT WARNING. It is an outstanding thriller.

Note to the sensitive among you: This is the last purely positive statement in the letter, and that’s the way it should be. “Outstanding thriller” is plenty enough affirmation from a big honkin’ New York editor. Hearing what works is pleasing, but in this context, it’s a waste of time. This is a repair mission, not a teaching moment.

Cuts are needed for pace throughout. Don’t over-explain. Your action and dialogue speak brilliantly for themselves. Keep pace moving.

I can hear Jim Bell shouting, “You go, girl!” Like authors everywhere, I have a tendency to over-indulge on explanation. She’s not telling me anything I don’t know in principle, but I can’t wait to see the sections she’s talking about. I thought it was pretty damn tight already.

Jonathan’s dialogue and internal monologues sometimes sound pompous. I understand that he’s a thinking reader’s action hero, but I don’t think he should talk or think like a Ph. D. candidate, especially in the middle of an action scene.

Translation: Quit slowing down your own story, Gilstrap! The reader will get it!

Some names struck me as odd or inappropriate.

She goes on to list the names that she thought were difficult, but I cut that section because the discussion gives away too much. The bottom line is that names need to be pronounceable, even when they are read.

Don’t resort to overused gestures such as shrugged, nodded, sighed, shook his head. These are ok occasionally, but in general, seek more vivid gestures that tell more about a character, help set a mood, and create visual dimension in the scene.

Guilty as charged. My problem here is that the ones she notes are the only conversational gestures that I know of. I stipulate that I overuse them, but if anyone has other gesture arrows that I can add to the quiver, feel free to speak up.

You know how I feel about adverbs. I’ve crossed out enough for a small country. Keep them to a minimum.

Comments like this make me smile. They show that my editor likes me enough to make fun outright.

I am also something of a nut about “moment.” It should not be overused. “Long moment” hits the same raw nerve with me as “very unique.” Use it if you want, but not too often, ok?

Again, I know I do this. I just have a hard time stopping myself.

Scenes in . . . need to move much faster. I don’t think thriller fans will want to sit through . . .; and the static scenes of . . . need to be kept short and punchy.

I know that’s a lot of truncation, but there was a lot of spoiler material in there. Note the emphasis on pacing, pacing, pacing. In a thriller, the phrase “static scenes” is synonymous with “scenes that suck.” Also, Joe, note her use of the semicolon. I’m just sayin’ . . .

Some other scenes also got too preachy for my taste. I’ve marked suggestions for cuts.

Pacing again.

Language: I suggest deleting the F-word and “Jesus” when used as an exclamation. I was surprised at how often the F-word appears in the ms . . . My advice is not to use it. Some people will object to it. But no one will object if it does not appear in the book. I’ve never seen a reader letter or email saying the book would have been better if it had a few more F-words.

Truthfully, this one surprises me a little. First off, I’m surprised that the F-bomb appears as much as it apparently does, and secondly, Michaela has never objected to it before. I think it’s a point well-taken. Clearly, I’ve got some crossing out to do.

Thank you for taking these comments into consideration. After you’ve had a chance to think about them, and to review the edited ms, please send me a new Word document incorporating all changes. I look forward to turning it in for production as well as rights submissions.

Okay, here’s the thing: I don’t have to make any of these changes. My name is on the cover, after all, and the things we’re talking about in the editorial letter are not of the magnitude that would cause the manuscript to be rejected. I will make the changes, however, because they’re all valid comments. Folks, there is nothing more valuable to a professional writer than a professional editor.

If possible, I would love to receive the revised ms the week of Nov. 29.

Well . . . I’ll try.

How Far Do You Go?

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Brother Gilstrap mentioned yesterday that it was his job as an author of thrillers to give his readers a wild ride. ‘Tis true, of course, but it got me to thinking about what happens when we climb aboard a horse which we expect to be a stallion but which seems, at least out of the gate, to be a foal. It has happened to me, and I daresay at some point it happens to everyone who reads a fair number of books: the first couple of pages grab you, but twenty or so pages into the story you find that the grip is becoming looser by the paragraph.

My question to you is, how deeply do you go into a book before you check out? What is your line of demarcation? Do you give the author a chance to change your mind? Do you immediately hang it up? Or do you hang in until the bitter end? For me, if I’m not immediately enjoying a book by a familiar or favorite author, I go one-third of the way into it before I even think about calling it quits. If I’m reading a book by an author unfamiliar to me, it’s a bit more complicated. If the narrative (or my mind) seems to be wandering before I’m one hundred pages in, I may consign it to my “later” pile in favor of something more immediately appealing. The same is true if I have no idea what has been happening during the thirty pages or so I just read, or can’t recall, in the words of the famous limerick, who has been doing what and to who. At that point I tend to put the book down wet.

But what about you? How far do you go? A few pages? A few chapters? One-third? One-half? Or do you engage in the literary equivalent of speed dating: the story has to impress you in five minutes, or you’re done?

*******

What I’m reading: The Emperor’s Tomb by Steve Berry. Worth reading for the mention of abiotic oil alone. And for so much more. Berry is a master of rendering the complicated and complex interesting and exciting. And yes, it’s a wild ride.

Last Lines

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By John Gilstrap
Over the years, we’ve devoted a lot of space here at The Killzone to the importance of first lines, but in the grand scheme of things, I spend far more time in my own writing fretting over the last line.  I’ve lost track of the books that have held me solidly in their spell all the way till the last couple of pages, only to betray my devotion by short-changing me on the ending.  I vow never to do that.

As a writer of thrillers, I think it’s my job to give my readers a wild ride, filled with exciting twists.  I work hard to make my characters seem alive to readers, and I’m often harder on the good guys than I am on the bad guys–at least for a while.  I owe it to my readers to bring the story to a satisfying ending.  That doesn’t mean that I promise a “happy ending” necessarily, but I do guarantee a sense of peace when the journey is over.  It’s the kind of commitment that I think breeds trust between a writer and his readers.

Now that I’m writing a series, I face the additional challenge of leaving enough of a cliffhanger to compel readers to look forward to the next book without also incurring their wrath by making them feel baited and switched.  To pull all of that off within the time constraints of my contract, I have to know the point to which I am writing the story.

All too often these days, I read books by brand name authors who seem to end their books by running out of words.  The plot develops, climaxes and then . . . I’m at the back cover.  One of the most egregious examples in recent years is John Grisham’s A Painted House.  I actually wondered if I had picked up a defective book where the last chapter had been removed.  Don’t get me wrong: I think Grisham is a great story teller, and as I read it, I thought that House was one of his best.  And then . . . thud.

An even more famous example is Stephen King’s The Stand.  There I was plowing through hundreds of thousands of words, loving it, loving it, loving it, and . . . what are you kidding me??

Here’s the thing about this three-act structure most of us adopt in our writing: A story had a beginning, a middle and an end, and each part is equally important.  There’s no room for laziness.  Every component of every scene needs to pull the reader forward.  The last scene is most important of all, I think, because that’s what the reader will remember forever.

I haven’t always gotten it right, either–at least not if you read some of the letters I’ve gotten over the years.  Nathan’s Run in particular has generated a number of letters from fans who wanted one more chapter.  In fact, the chapter they craved was in my original draft.  I took it out and reinserted it four or five times before I decided to leave it in the drawer.  Without giving too much away, I thought–and I still think, but am less sure–that the story ended when the action ended, and that the final feel-good knot-tying chapter was a step too far.

Of course, I’m the curmudgeon who believes that JK Rowling’s biggest misstep in the largely-wonderful Harry Potter saga is the final chapter–the coda, really–of The Deathly Hallows.  I would rather have imagined the future instead of having it spelled out for me.  It didn’t ruin anything for me; it just felt like one too many bits of storytelling.

What do y’all think?  Any favorite endings out there?  Terrible ones?

For me, the best closing line ever written, bar none, comes from To Kill A Mockingbird: “And he’d be there when Jem waked up in the morning.”  It tells us everything we need to know, and let’s us just float on the satisfaction of time well spent.