Category Archives: Kathryn Lilley

Hooking your readers with red herrings

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Red herring

  1. a smoked herring.
  2. something intended to divert attention from the real problem or matter at hand; a misleading clue.

A reviewer once said of one of my books, “Lilley has cornered the market in red herrings.”

I’m not sure whether that’s a slam or a compliment, but I do love planting a good red herring in my mysteries. One of the best red herrings of all time was The Red-Headed League. In this fun Sherlock Holmes story, the “league” is a falsehood to cover a bank robbery.

What makes some red herrings good, and others stink like yesterday’s…well, red herring?

Camouflage

Red herrings shouldn’t scream, “Hey, I’m a clue!” from the rooftops. Readers are smart, and they’ll be working to solve the mystery as they go. They don’t need you to stomp on ’em. The subtlety rule applies to all clues, not just to red herrings.

A fish before dying

You can plant a red herring before your victim turns up dead, right at the beginning of your story. At that point, your reader doesn’t even know who is going to get killed, much less whodunnit.

Dead fish need not apply

All clues, including red herrings, must serve to move your story forward. Don’t use your red herrings only as a way to throw the reader off. Make them integral to your plot or character-building.

Two-faced fish

In some of my books, I wasn’t sure who the villain was until very near the end of the writing process. I write all the clues so that any of them can be red herrings or valid clues, depending on the ending.

Are there any other rules that you follow when writing red herrings? What are some of your favorite red herrings in crime fiction?

Crazy-writer deadline syndrome

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By Kathryn Lilley

I recently sent a note of apology to someone who had requested information from me. I had been extremely remiss with this person–not sending her info on a timely basis, and forgetting to respond to emails. In my apology note, I lamely mentioned that I’d just emerged from a writing deadline, which to me is the equivalent of a free-diver trying to surface from deep water without blacking out.

“Oh, I didn’t realize you were on a deadline, no problem,” she replied in her gracious response, as if the deadline totally excused my flakiness.

This poor woman has to deal with writers all the time, I realized then. She’s used to us.

Then I started thinking about all my other deadline behaviors that could be considered annoying, or even strange, by family and friends. My crazy-writer deadline behaviors include:

The Big Tune-out

It’s not that I deliberately don’t listen to people (Okay, sometimes it is deliberate), but I frequently tune them out. This mostly happens when I’m on a deadline, which means it happens a lot. I might even respond to someone during a conversation, but not remember it later. It’s kind of like brain on auto-pilot.

To Kill a Magpie

When I’m out and about with my husband, I frequently dive for a pen and write detailed notes about our surroundings: the full moon hovering between two palm trees at night, a bag lady sitting in a bus shelter, the timbre of silverware clatter–I take notes about anything I can use later in my writing. Inevitably, I have left my notepad at home, so I drag home notes scribbled on scraps of things: a napkin, a flyer, even the back of a business card. My husband must think he lives with a magpie.

Hair on Fire

It’s predictable: Six weeks before any deadline, I go on a tear. This means that I’m a) Constantly hunched over the laptop, muttering, b) Setting the alarm for 4 a.m., then groaning my way to wakefulness over the course of several Snooze cycles, and c) Bounding out of bed at odd hours of the night to tap out some problem-solving idea that struck me.

I do not talk very much during this time. And when I do, it’s not pleasant.

So there it is. I could go on, but the length of the list is starting to make me feel bad about myself. I would like to feel that I’m not alone in my crazy-writer deadline syndromes. Have you any to share?

Take the crazy-writer quiz

Just found a fun quiz that tells you what kind of writer you are. (You have to be logged into Twitter) I’m Tom Wolfe, per the quiz.

Does being a writer make you a lousy reader?

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By Kathryn Lilley

I brought home many, many books from Thrillerfest. So many books that Delta charged me an extra fifty bucks for the sardine flight back to LA.

As soon as I settled into my seat, I opened the first thriller from my TBR bag. I was looking forward to it. The book had an eye-catching cover that was plastered with snippets of positive reviews, accompanied by blurbs from BNAs (Big Name Authors). Best of all, the story opened with a plane crash. I’m a nervous-Nelly flier, so I was ready to be terrified.

But ten pages into the book, I was yawning. Worse, I was getting irritated with the author.

As the pages dragged on, I started pulling apart each paragraph in my head, muttering things like, “This dialogue is way too symmetrical. You should have changed up the rhythm here, lost that attribution tag there. How the heck did you get those BNA blurbs?”

After a few more pages, my mental rewrite got too exhausting. Thriller #1 was a bust. I tossed it back into the bag.

Thriller #2 was a winner, but I still couldn’t get into it fully. Every time I hit a taut scene or a seamless transition, I detached and thought, “Okay, so how did this writer pull that off? What can I learn here?”

Unfortunately, being a writer has spoiled the reading experience for me. I can’t lose myself in books the way I used to. I’m like a nosy, jealous chef, sampling dishes and trying to figure out what spices were used.

My reading rut started about the time that I started writing my current series. I had no time to read due to a combination of deadline pressures and my day job. Now that I’m shifting gears to write in a new genre (and am sans day job, say hallelujah), I’m reading again. It’s like I’m mapping brand new waters, separating the sharks from the flounders. (I know: Block that metaphor!).

It’s good to be reading again. But darnit, the thrill is gone.

How about you? Does being a writer kill some of the joy of the reading experience?

Nobody Pinch Me

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By John Gilstrap
http://www.johngilstrap.com

I’ll start with an apology for shirking my blogging duties last week. I was at ThrillerFest and had neglected to plan ahead. I suppose I could have just ignored the parties and . . . Nah, people who know me understand that I am incapable of ignoring the parties.

Those who’ve been to T-Fest know that the parties there are different. Those other people in the bar or at the receptions aren’t just regular folks that you see at work every day. To a person, the people I met there in New York—from fans to fellow authors and everyone in between—were friendly, intelligent and fascinating. It’s what makes the conference a not-to-be-missed event for me every year.

I arrived on Wednesday afternoon on the heels of some media events in Boston the previous day, and I went to dinner with Jeffery Deaver. We had drinks at a little hotel bar on 44th Street, and then we ate at a largely forgettable restaurant whose name I’ve in fact forgotten. We were done by 9:00 and not yet ready to go our separate ways, so we wandered into the bar at the Algonquin Hotel. THE Algonquin Hotel, of Algonquin Roundtable fame.

That’s when it hit me: I’m living my own dream. Sitting there in such a famous room, I realized that had I been around in 1925, I might have had a place at the table. I might have participated in the conversations of those literary and critical giants, laughing at their jokes and maybe even offering up a few of my own. (Conversely, I might have been rejected as a commercial hack and banned from their presence, but this is my fantasy, so let me run with it.)

Now, of course, all of those giants are dead. Instead, I spent my time engaged in conversations with Joe Moore, Jeff Deaver, David Baldacci, Harlan Coben, Andrew Grant, Gayle Lynds, Joe Finder, Brett Battles, Kathryn Lilly and dozens more brilliant, witty writers. Forgive a moment of aggrandizement, but it occurred to me that collectively we might all be remembered as the next famed group. Given the level of talent in the room, I’m certain that at least a few will be tagged with greatness.

And I was there. God willing, I’ll be there again.

When I was a kid, I was in awe of writers and writing. I had little opportunity ever to meet an author in person, but on the occasions when I did, I stood there star struck. To think that I might ever join that elite club—if not as an equal, then at least as a colleague—was beyond my ken.

Yet there I was in New York, surrounded by talent. During the course of the next few days, I would have lunch with Anne Hawkins, my agent, and dinners with Michaela Hamilton, my editor, and Sam Franco, the producer who optioned Six Minutes to Freedom.

I’ll say it again: Agent, editor and producer. Never in a million years would I have dreamed that the guy at those meetings would be me.

Last Wednesday, as we sat in the Algonquin sipping scotch and chatting about whatever we were chatting about, I asked Jeff if he ever stopped to think about how cool this whole experience is, about how lucky we are.

“Every day,” he said.

Exactly. Every day. I am an author. I am what I’ve always wanted to be, and every day I wake up wondering what I did to deserve the good fortune.

And I pray that I don’t do something to screw it up.

Does anyone else find themselves amazed at where they are, and fearful that it might all go away?

Notes from Thrillerfest

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I just returned from my first Thrillerfest–it was a fantastic conference! Fellow Killers John Gilstrap, Joe Moore, and James Scott Bell were there, and it was great to see them. Thanks to everyone here for holding down the blog-fort while we were in NYC.

A few notes from the Thriller front:

Drumroll, please!

As a former journalist I know better than to bury the lead. During the conference it was announced that our own Joe Moore is the incoming co-president of ITW!

Joe moved onto the board of directors last October as Vice President, Technology, and will officially take over the co-presidency on October 1st 2009. He replaces James Rollins as he steps down due to term limits. Joe’s fellow co-president is Steve Berry. Joe and Steve are in charge of setting the direction for the future of ITW as well as acting as executive directors.

Congratulations, Joe! You deserve the honor; we’re proud to be your blog-mates.

Star power
Thrillerfest ’09 featured some of the brightest lights in the thriller-writing cosmos: Sandra Brown, Clive Cussler. Robin Cook, David Baldacci, David Morrell, and many more! We got to ask them lots of questions during the breakout sessions. I brought home many writing tips that I’m already putting into practice.

Panel fun

I was on a panel with NYT bestselling author Peter De Jonge and Kathleen Sharp, where we shared stories about what it’s like to jump from journalism to a career in fiction. I got a lot out of all the panels I attended, especially “Can you cross genres?” with James Rollins and Jon Land. I hate to miss anything, so I brought home CDs of many of the panels I was not able to attend.

Goin’ to the dogs

There was a dramatic K9 demonstration of “tactical” dogs (the preferred term instead of attack dogs) and explosives detection. The very brave Panel Master, Andrew Peterson, put on a padded sleeve to demonstrate how the tactical dog takes down a suspect. An ATF officer explained that the dogs think they’re playing a game when they attack. But this is one game that the criminals are bound to lose!

To sum up, Thrillerfest ’09 was indeed a thriller–I can’t wait until next year!

Self-Googling, and other writer’s compulsions

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When writers get published, we tend to pick up a few bad habits (actually, we usually pick up bad habits before we get published). These habits worsen over time, sometimes rising to the level of Writer’s Obsessive-compulsive Disorders (Wods).

Here are a few of the most common writing Wods:

Self-Googling

That just sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Self-Googling is when you set up a Google alert associated with your name. You’ll then get an email alert every time your name gets mentioned on the Worldwide Web. I’ve been Googling my name ever since my series hit the bookstores in ’07.

There’s nothing more gratifying than getting a Google alert that takes you to a positive review you’d known nothing about. Of course, there’s also a downside to Google alerts. Sometimes you get alerted about snarky reviews, the kind you could have gone all year without reading. Google alerts aren’t very “smart” as technology goes, so you can also get deluged by alerts about peoples’ names that are sort of like yours, but not really.

For example, my Google alert goes off every time Kathy Griffin (“My Life on the D-List”) is in the news.

How annoying is that? Let me put it this way–she may be on the D list, but Kathy Griffin gets mentioned on the Web a lot. Every time I get an alert nowadays, my first reaction is to sigh and say, “Dang. What’s that K-G-D woman up to now?”

You can also turn up downright weird stuff that’s posted about you on the Web.

Yesterday, for example, I got an alert about a blog that mentioned me. The blog’s content appeared to be a machine-translation of an interview I gave months ago. Swear to God, the following paragraph is a paste from the blog:

“Kathryn Lilley is a archaic receiver paragraphist who has written pressure disadvantage mystery novels. Her importune in advancement is a paranormal thriller and she blogs at The Kill Zone…I was born a pudgy indulge (9 pounds, 11.5 ounces!). When I was a teen-ager, my parents sent me to a residential eats clinic (read: bulky farm) in Durham, North Carolina.”

I spent some time puzzling over 1) who publishes that blog, 2) how I ended up on it, and 3) What the the heck is a “pudgy indulge”?

This is one mystery that may never be solved.

Checking Amazon numbers

Some writers won’t cop to it, but most of us check our Amazon rankings regularly. Often compulsively.

The problem with Amazon numbers (where the lower your number is, the better), is that they’re incredibly volatile. Amazon rankings bounce around faster than a Wham-O Super Ball.

So instead of compulsively checking my Amazon numbers on the Amazon site, I’ve started compulsively checking them at TitleZ.

TitleZ lets you track your Amazon numbers over time. You can even (pause for dramatic effect) get lifetime averages for your book’s rankings. Best of all, you can compare your book’s rankings to other books. So even when your lifetime numbers are looking bleak, you can always find an acquaintance’s book that is doing worse. Preferably an author you don’t like.

There are other writer’s compulsions. I recently added Blogpulse and Google Trends to my list of must-check daily sites. I won’t even pretend that Google Trends has anything to do with my writing. I simply have to know which search trends are Volcanic!, Spicy!, or Mild, on an hourly basis. Or else I die.

What about you? Do you have any writer’s compulsions/Wods that you can share? I have a book coming out on September 1st, so I’m in the market for a few more.

The best (worst) rejection letters

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All writers experience rejection. Most published authors get turned down by numerous agents and editors on the road to publication. Learning to deal with “No” is part of the writing process—I’d even say it’s an important part. You have to be able to handle rejection to stick with writing long enough to get anywhere.

But no matter how you rationalize it, being rejected feels like crap. So whenever we get the dreaded “Not for us” email or letter in the mailbox, it can be comforting to recall the rejection-war stories of other writers:

In his book On Writing, Stephen King describes the wad of rejection notes he had stuck on a spike in his bedroom, and the encouragement he felt when he finally got one that said something along the lines of, “Not for us, kid, but try again—you’ve got talent.”

NPR’s Liane Hansen did a story that told the story of how soon-to-be famous writers, including Jack Kerouac and George Orwell, were rejected by the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Possibly the best of the lot was the one that rejected Kerouac’s On the Road, in which an editor reportedly stated, “I don’t dig this one at all.”

My most memorable rejection came from an agent who had requested to read my manuscript on an exclusive basis. (My advice? Never give an agent an exclusive. It’s a better deal for the agent than the writer.) After keeping me in suspense for a long while, she eventually sent me an email along the lines of, “Dear Kathryn: I really wanted to like this story. But I just didn’t like the character; I didn’t like the story; I didn’t like the voice. In fact, I just didn’t like anything at all about it.” Ouch. Fortunately, the next agent who read the manuscript loved the story, agreed to represent me, and quickly got me a series contract.

What about you? What’s been your best/worst rejection letter thus far?

Getting unstuck: Dealing with writer’s block

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I thought about titling this post Coming unstuck, which lets you know how I feel about today’s topic: Writer’s block.

I never used to understand what people meant by “writer’s block.” I ‘d always felt immune to that scribe’s disease. When I wrote the first two books in my current series, I had a machine-like discipline. I’d get up at four a.m. every morning and write for at least two hours. No. Matter. What. My progress was always slow but steady. I wrote almost the same number of pages every day. My writing group members were in awe of me.

But then along came Book Three, and I went into a bit of a slump. Actually it felt more like an avalanche. Even though I loved the story I was working on, sometimes I’d find that days would pass without any progress at all. I eventually had to ask for–gasp!–an extension from my editor, who graciously granted it to me. But even then I kept running behind. Ultimately I made the new deadline, but barely. Now I have a recurring nightmare about missing the deadline, which has replaced my old nightmare about discovering that I’ve missed an entire semester of a class, just before the final exam.

So what exactly is writer’s block? I think the term is a bit misleading. It implies that the writer doesn’t know what to write about — such as a lack of inspiration, perhaps. In my case I knew the story I wanted to write, but I seemed to have lost the daily writing rhythm along the way. Maybe what I had was actually energy block. Or focus block.

So here were a few of my cures for The Block. All of them proved to be helpful at times:

  • Write 15 minutes a day
    You can write for at least 15 minutes today, even if you’re the busiest person on the planet. Doing that small amount per day helps you get the habit and rhythm back. Over time, your progress will add up.
  • Write at the same time each day.
    I think this is the single most helpful habit that will enable you to break through writer’s block. If you sit your butt down in a chair at the same time every day, your body starts to learn that this is the time for writing. Your writing flow will start to kick in at that time.
  • Free writing
    This technique is where you grab a couple of random words and “free write” them into your WIP for a set amount of time. Actually, this one has never worked that well for me. Whenever I try free writing, I get stuck at the same damned spot that I’m stuck in my regular writing. And then I get even more depressed about my writer’s block. But I know that free writing works wonders for some people. For great tips about free writing and other ways to break through The Block, I recommend Barbara DeMarco-Barrett’s book, Pen On Fire: A Busy Woman’s Guide To Igniting The Writer Within. (Guys can pick up a few tips too!)
  • Put your writing first
    I have many acquaintances who have endless reasons for not writing. Anniversaries, birthdays, conflicting deadlines, vacations, relatives visiting…you get the idea. Unsurprisingly, these people are frequently blocked writers. Your writing needs to be a first priority in your life, or you’ll be doin’ time inside The Block.

What about you? Have you ever wrangled with writer’s block, or energy block? Any solutions you can share?
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Coming Sunday, June 21, Paul Kemprecos tells us what it’s like to collaborate with Clive Cussler. And future Sunday guest bloggers include Robert Liparulo, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

Just say no to dialect, y’all

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I’m visiting my family in North Carolina this week, and was pleased to run across an article in a local paper that described the enduring value of regional dialects.

However, I don’t love it when authors use too much dialect in fiction. I think the over-use of dialect in dialogue is a huge story drag.

I once belonged to a writing group where a writer insisted on loading down his eighteenth-century naval adventure story each week with enough historically “accurate” dialect to sink a clipper ship. And what’s worse, he’d write phonetically accented dialect, so that it became taxing simply to wade through a few paragraphs. By the time his characters had been at sea for five minutes, I felt like I’d been reading for five hours.

But every time I suggested to him that there was too much dialect, he’d come back with, “But that’s the way people really spoke.“

And my thought-response to that was, so what? Reading it was hell.

With all due respect to Mark Twain, I think writers today need to convey dialect through techniques that don’t involve making the reader slog through irritating, hard-to-decipher dialect. We must try to give the rhythm of natural and regional speech without making readers suffer through a surfeit of “sanging,” “you’uns,” and “Oh, Law’s.”

These tools include:

  • Local phrases – The article I linked to earlier mentioned that mountain folk might refer to a child born out of wedlock as a “woods colt.” When you sprinkle local phrases such as that into your dialogue, your readers will know exactly the type of speech your character is using.
  • Slang – You can use slang to clarify a character’s speech, but I’d use this tool sparingly. Slang can make your writing seem dated. For example, how many eras could utilize the slang phrase “booty call”?
  • Grammar – a character’s use of grammar communicates a wealth of information about his or her education, socioeconomic status, and other personal traits. But again, use that tool lightly so that ungrammatical speech doesn’t become annoying.

But maybe it’s just me. In my writing group, I seemed to be the only reader who was highly allergic to dialect. What about you? Do you mind reading dialect in books? As a writer, what are some of the do’s and don’ts that you employ to portray a sense of dialect without turning off a reader?

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Coming up Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry. And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.

The Jedi-writers Strike Back

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I was happy to read that JA Konrath’s novella, SERIAL, has been the #1-Kindle Bestseller for the past nine days. (See his post yesterday).

Many of us have been speculating here about the potential impact of the Kindle on the publishing biz — now Konrath has leaped ahead and run his own home-grown publishing experiment over at Amazon. SERIAL (written under the name Jack Kilborn, penned with co-author Jack Crouch), is a free download. IMHO, the decision to make the download free was a stroke of marketing genius. The download brings with it branding and name recognition. And it’s a neat way to bump yourself ahead of the bestselling mega-authors, too.

Konrath announced the results of another Kindle experiment on his blog yesterday. Evidently in the month of May he made some of his smaller writings available for sale on Kindle. These were works he’d previously allowed readers to download for free from his web site. By selling those same works through Kindle, evidently he netted more than a thousand dollars in one month.

I was particularly interested to read about Konrath’s Kindle experiments in the wake of the recent news that scribd is now letting authors sell ebooks from the scribd site at an 80/20% revenue split. In a recent blog post, I mentioned that an established author (Kemble Scott) decided publish his latest book on scribd instead of going the traditional print publishing route. I just checked back over at scribd, and saw that Scott’s book, THE SOWER, has had 1933 “reads” at a list price of $2.00 each. And it’s only been posted a short time.

The way my fellow author friends are testing the ebook waters reminds me of that scene from Jurassic Park, where the guide tells the visitors that the dinos are testing the fences for weak links.

“They remember…” he says.

A few more good pushes, and some writers might actually figure out a way to do real business in the Kindle/scribd universe. It hasn’t happened yet, but that day might be coming.

I know that in terms of relative scale in today’s publishing landscape, most writers are more like scurrying mammals than T-Rex’s. But hey, we’ve got time and evolution on our side. Give us a few years, and the whole Terra unfirma could change completely.

But that’s just what I think.

What about you?

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Coming up on our Kill Zone Guest Sundays, watch for blogs from Sandra Brown, Steve Berry, Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.