Category Archives: style

Thesaurus Love

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Let’s give a little love to the poor thesaurus. Because there’s a bit of writing advice that’s been floating around long enough to become a critique-group axiom. It has to do with the work of Mr. Peter Mark Roget (1779 – 1869) and the throwing of shade thereon.

I trace this back to an article written for the 1988 Writer’s Handbook (which sits on my shelf) by one Mr. Stephen King. It is titled “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully—in Ten Minutes.”

In said article Mr. King advises not looking at reference books when writing a first draft. Use them later if you wish. Except the thesaurus. “Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket…Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”

A similar edict was issued by the author of Robert’s Rules of Writing (a book I am not gifting to Brother Gilstrap): “The minute you pick up a thesaurus, you’ve muddied the waters. Into the clear running stream of your prose, you’ve introduced a foreign agent. Nothing sticks out in a piece of prose like the words you’ve plucked from those long lists of synonyms, each one more obscure than its predecessor.”

Not that these gentlemen have an opinion or anything. But I wonder, is such unqualified vitriol (or should I say contempt? Or disdain?) justified? I think not.

First, King offered his opinion in the context of writing a first draft. He didn’t want a writer stopping to grab a physical reference book off a shelf, thus breaking “the writer’s trance.” Just make a guess or mark the spot, and look stuff up after the draft is done.

That’s valuable advice for writing in “flow.”

But with the digital tools available to us today, you can find synonyms in under ten seconds. Flow isn’t the issue it used to be.

Second, both of the above authors assume that the word one is looking for is a “fancy” word, one that does not traipse easily into the writer’s mind. That word will always be “wrong” they say, because its obscurity will confound the poor reader.

However, it may not be a fancy word the writer is looking for. It might simply be an alternative to the word that he immediately typed. With a synaptical flex of the brain a preferable word may come easily to mind. But if not, a click opens the e-thesaurus for a quick perusal.

Example: In my fourth paragraph, above, I originally wrote A similar command. I didn’t sound right to me; not precise enough. No writing guru has a warrant to command anything.

So I clicked open my Mac dictionary, typed command and hit the Thesaurus tab. Up came this list: order, instruction, directive, direction, commandment, injunction, decree, edict, demand, stipulation, requirement, exhortation, bidding, request. I chose edict right away. This isn’t a “fancy” word, or a word I wouldn’t normally use. Boom, in it went, and I continued typing.

That’s the value of a thesaurus for me—it reminds me of words I do know but can’t quite put my finger on at the moment.

The thesaurus also gives me a more expressive word when I need it. If I type something like He walked into the room I might want a more descriptive word than walked. I can usually think up something better on the spot, but on occasion I’ll pop open the thesaurus for a quick look.

I also will use the thesaurus when editing my previous day’s output. The other day I was editing a short story about road rage, where I’d written that a character driving a car gave a hefty blast on the horn. A few paragraphs later I wrote The monster truck’s horn blasted. That’s what I call an “echo.” I don’t like using the same descriptive word in close proximity. So up came the thesaurus. I chose blared.

I know there are some who might say that’s too much “work” for so little “return.” To which I have a simple rejoinder: Bosh. (I also could have used nonsense, balderdash, gibberish, claptrap, blarney, moonshine, garbage, hogwash, baloney, jive, guff, tripe, drivel, bilge, bunk, piffle, poppycock, hooey, twaddle, gobbledygook, flapdoodle, crapola or tommyrot. But I digress.)

I’ll take this ROI every time, not only because it pleases me to do good work, but because I also believe most readers, even subconsciously, appreciate the effort. (Now is the time to repeat Twain’s oft-quoted aphorism (maxim, adage, precept, dictum): “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”)

By the way, you might want to hang on to your printed thesauri (yes, that’s a word), for who knows what AI will do to the digital versions? This is not an idle thought. A few weeks ago I was working on a post for my Substack, about the late George Foreman. I ran it through ProWritingAid and it flagged “Foreman” fifteen times, suggesting (in no uncertain terms) that I change it to “work supervisor.”

A final note: I went to the bookstore and finally found the thesaurus I wanted. But when I got home and opened it, all the pages were blank. I have no words to express how angry I am.

Your turn (chance, moment). Do you ever use a thesaurus? 

(Note: I’m teaching at the Vision Christian Writers Conference at Mount Hermon today, so will check in when I can!)

What Film Noir Can Teach Writers

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

You humble scribe with the “Czar of Noir” Eddie Muller

Recently, I joined my son in Hollywood for our annual ritual—dinner at Musso & Frank, followed by opening night of Noir City, the film festival at the Egyptian Theater hosted by Eddie Muller and Alan K. Rode of the Film Noir Foundation.

There’s always a pre-screening reception in the courtyard outside the theater, where many attendees come dressed in 1940s fashion. Local distilleries provide liquid refreshment, and a band with a torch singer performs vintage songs from the era (classic American film noir ran from 1941 and The Maltese Falcon to 1958’s Touch of Evil).

Just what is film noir, and why does it have such a loyal following?

As the French name implies, this is “dark film.” It always revolves around crime, and who among us hasn’t had a passing thought of such ilk from time to time? Even if it is just to wonder “Could I get away with it?” Film noir allows us to indulge that fascination without getting too close.

Film noir has a distinctive look—rich black-and-white (as opposed to neo-noir, like Body Heat). Indeed, cinematographers, like the great John Alton, were just as important as the writer and director. (See Alton’s masterpiece He Walked by Night sometime).

The noir world grinds out rough justice. No bad deed goes unpunished. A guy makes one bad move years ago, and has managed to find a new life…until that past catches up with him to exact retribution (Out of the Past).

Sometimes, the hammer falls on a decent guy who makes one bad choice.

In Side Street, Farley Granger plays Joe Norson, a mailman working like a dog to support himself and his pregnant wife. One day he delivers mail to a lawyer’s office and, alone there, finds $200 in cash. On impulse, he takes it. What he doesn’t know is the dough is part of the lawyer’s extortion racket.

And then there’s a murder.

Soon enough, the bad guy is after Joe, and so is the law, considering Joe a suspect in the murder. Hoo boy. Can he possibly get out of this? We watch to find out, pulling for the guy. Noir justice happens, but exacts a heavy price.

Not all noir leads are good guys who make a bad choice. Sometimes they’re bad guys through and through, and we watch to see if he gets away with it (Touch of Evil). Heist noir (Criss Cross; The Asphalt Jungle) is like that.

Thus, shades of black and white mix, which is just like life.

And makes for compelling fiction, too. The character with a “moral flaw” is more interesting—and more realistic—than a pure, immaculate hero. We relate to characters like that because deep down we know we have flaws, too, and that should our flaws get out of hand, it will lead to disaster.

In a way, noir is like classic Greek tragedy. The purpose of tragedy was to create “catharsis” and warn us of what happens when we follow the dark side.

Thus:

  • Give your Lead a moral flaw, and show it via inner conflict and the “mirror moment.”
  • Indeed, give all your characters, even minor ones, a moral flaw. Even if those are never revealed, it help you come up with more original actions and dialogue.
  • Consider exacting a price the Lead must pay for justice to prevail, a “wound.”

If you want to explore film noir more deeply, I recommend Dark City by Eddie Muller (affiliate link). There are also scores of B-movie noirs available for free on YouTube.

Here are ten of my favorites:

The Maltese Falcon (1941, Dir. John Huston)
Double Indemnity (1944, Dir. Billy Wilder)
Out of the Past (1947, Dir. Jacques Tourneur)
Too Late For Tears (1949, Dir. Byron Haskin)
Act of Violence (1949, Dir. Fred Zinemann)
The Asphalt Jungle (1950, Dir. John Huston)
99 River Street (1953, Dir. Phil Karlson)
The Hitch-Hiker (1953, Dir. Ida Lupino)
Pickup on South Street (1953, Dir. Sam Fuller)
Touch of Evil (1958, Dir. Orson Welles)

Are you a film noir fan? What are your favorites? 

Write Like Melted Butter

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Back in the day (and for you kids, when an author of my vintage uses “back in the day” that’s a bit further than when The Big Bang Theory was a hit) there was a TV commercial for Thomas’ English Muffins. A narrator extolled the benefits of said breadstuff, then a smiling kid held one up and said, “And lots of nooks and crannies to hold the melted butter!”

I salute the ad man who came up with this line, because back in that same day the federal gummint guidelines had butter on its dietary hit list. Bosh, thought the ad man. That smooth, warm taste of liquified gold coating the taste buds is the most enjoyable part of this culinary treat.

Which is how I think about style in fiction. When the prose has nooks and crannies of “unobtrusive poetry” (as the great John D. MacDonald put it) my reading pleasure buds pop with delight and I am likely to search out more offerings from that writer.

Which brings me to the subject of metaphors and similes. They are the melted butter of prose.

For example, Raymond Chandler would have been just another detective fiction scribbler were it not for the magic of his style. Here are a few of my favorites:

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window. (Farewell, My Lovely)  

I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief. (Farewell, My Lovely)

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. (The Big Sleep)

Here are some from other authors:

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances. (Shakespeare, As You Like It)

“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, Fahrenheit 451)

She faced the children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit’s ears. (Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”)

She was the third beer. Not the first one, which the throat receives with almost tearful gratitude; nor the second, that confirms and extends the pleasure of the first. But the third, the one you drink because it’s there, because it can’t hurt, and because what difference does it make? (Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon)

I shall now lay down the rule (yes, I said it) for metaphors and similes: they must be in the words that the viewpoint character would actually say or think. If they are not, it is no longer unobtrusive. It’ll stick out like a garlic breath burp at a dinner party. (Hey, not bad.)

There is only one exception to this rule, and that is if the voice of the author is the selling point, the raison d’etre of the book’s allure. Old-school Omniscient POV (e.g., Dickens) had it. So did the post-realist novels of the 60s and 70s (e.g., Vonnegut, Pynchon). Almost always it is found in comic novels, e.g., Douglas Adams, and most abundantly in the writing of the late Tom Robbins. You read his books for the flights of literary fancy, the voice of mushroom-laced, hippie-dipped, Zen-flavored farce:

Every toilet bowl gurgled like an Italian tenor with a mouthful of Lavoris, and the refrigerators made noises at night like buffalo grazing. (Jitterbug Perfume)

Like a neon fox tongue lapping up the powdered bones of space chickens, the Rising Sun licked away at the light snow that had fallen during the night. (Skinny Legs and All)

It was as if the dishwater, as gray and oily as a mobster’s haircut, washed away his arrogant confusion. (Skinny Legs and All)

So how can you find your own melted butter? Wide reading of authors who do this well is, of course, a given. In addition, I offer a couple of writing exercises to expand your style muscle. Note, this means you do the heavy lifting in your own brain; it can’t be handed to you by a machine. It’s fun, costs nothing, and will improve all of your writing.

People Pegging

Go to a public place—a park, a coffeehouse, a mall—and people watch. Home in on someone for a few seconds, then write in your notebook the following:

  1. He walks like a __________
  2. If he were an animal, he’d be a ____________
  3. His mood is the color of a ___________

Detail Digging

Wherever you are, pick a random item within your sight—pen, cough drop, lip balm, glasses, book, cup. Then:

  1. Write five things this item reminds you of.
  2. How would an advanced-race alien describe this item?
  3. Imagine this item appearing in your novel. From your Lead character’s POV, write three metaphors—one based on sight, one on touch, and one on smell.

Spend just an hour doing one or both of these exercises and you will actually feel your style improving.

Which is so worth it. Raymond Chandler would have told you that. This observation was found in one of his notebooks after his death:

“Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.”

Don’t just produce. Monkeys can do that. AI is doing it now. Who cares?

Bring a little magic to your prose.

Write like melted butter.

Do you think about style when you write and/or edit? Do you search out fresh metaphors and similes? Do you love it when a writer is able to pull off “unobtrusive poetry”?

Little Things Add Up to Something Big

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

We have today another first page for critique. The author describes the work as “Spec Fic with Horror Elements.” Let’s have a look and talk on the other side.

Bankside warehouse (Wikimedia Commons)

Bankside warehouse (Wikimedia Commons)

Watch All Night

Joe shivered his way down the cobbled alley lined with old Bankside warehouses. The February sun barely touched the first of them, but a freezing gust blasted its way in from the Thames. Nasty long winter, this. All slashing winds and feeble light. Soon be inside, though.

He buried his hands deeper into the pockets of the jacket Dil had “lent” him. The one that happened to be in his size and not Dil’s… but at least he’d have only bought it second-hand for Joe. Once this Eldmill job started, he’d sneak some money back to Dil. Move out of the hostel. Save up for a course, something working with at-risk teens. Do everything right this time.  No dealing. No recruiting runners. No prison. 

That must be it, that next one coming up, tarpaulin lunging from the roof, whip-crackling. All the warehouses he’d passed had already been turned into something new. They kept their listed historic shapes, though, their brown brick and shaded glass. Outside the Eldmill, changing into a swanky apartment building, plastic-wrapped packages clustered. A rusty security gate lay on the pavement. A forklift idled nearby. Unseen construction workers banged and drilled. 

He stepped past a mud-splashed bollard dug out of the ground to make room for hauling the packages into the building. Now he’d arrived at his new job. 

Fancy new glass door, steel frame glittered from the safety of the manufacturer’s tape that still covered it. Across about forty feet of beautiful granite floor, a reception desk fronted in warm, yellow-beige marble welcomed you. Two blokes in hardhats and multi-pocketed work trousers crossed the floor, the taller man sputtering laughter across one of those eco-mugs, printed with smiling golden giraffes, at something his mate said. 

Joe stepped back. The heel of his trainers smacked into the unearthed bollard. 

‘I’m not going in there.’

JSB: Well, I am chuffed to bits (that means “pleased as punch” in England) about this offering from across the pond. Let’s have a butcher’s hook (Cockney for “a look”) in detail:

Joe shivered his way down the cobbled alley lined with old Bankside warehouses.

This is an action opening. It has a character in motion, not mere narrative description. The descriptive elements, including the weather, are woven in as we move along.

Note the vivid descriptor shivered. A lesser hand would have written, Joe walked down the cobbled alley. He was shivering. 

Tip: Train yourself to take just a moment or two to consider alternatives to “plain vanilla” verbs. If nothing comes to you, write on and look later. I find the best time for this is when I edit my previous day’s work. It’s not a heavy edit and I don’t linger, but always pick up ways to make the writing stronger.

The February sun barely touched the first of them, but a freezing gust blasted its way in from the Thames. Nasty long winter, this. All slashing winds and feeble light. Soon be inside, though. 

Excellent. We’ve got the time and place and weather. Evocative words: gust blasted, slashing winds, feeble light. And a hint of what’s going on. Joe is heading “inside” somewhere. I want to know where.

We’re also in deep POV. The narrative portions are how Joe would think about these things.

Tip: To get into deep 3d Person, try writing a scene in First Person, then switch it.

He buried his hands deeper into the pockets of the jacket Dil had “lent” him. The one that happened to be in his size and not Dil’s… but at least he’d have only bought it second-hand for Joe. Once this Eldmill job started, he’d sneak some money back to Dil. Move out of the hostel. Save up for a course, something working with at-risk teens. Do everything right this time.  No dealing. No recruiting runners. No prison. 

I love this paragraph. It has background info but it’s slipped in unobtrusively. Joe has “borrowed” (stolen?) a jacket from a character named Dil. Joe has an honest streak in him, wanting to get money back to Dil. We know he’s been staying in a hostel and wants to save up money so he can make something of his life, something good. Do everything right this time. He’d been a drug dealer. He’s been in prison.

We’re only in the second paragraph and know just a little about Joe, but we have a rooting interest now. We love characters who have known hard times but who aren’t playing the victim, characters who want to better themselves.

There’s also mystery about what the “Eldmill job” is. Good. A little mystery in the opening prompts us to read on.

That must be it, that next one coming up, tarpaulin lunging from the roof, whip-crackling.

Superb. A tarpaulin is not merely hanging from the roof, it’s lunging. And the sentence ends with the original and striking whip-crackling.

Tip: The power of a sentence can often be improved by moving the most vivid word to the end. Hemingway did this all the time, e.g., Villalta, his hand up at the crowd and the bull roaring blood, looking straight at Villalta and his legs caving.

The author does more of the same here:

Outside the Eldmill, changing into a swanky apartment building, plastic-wrapped packages clustered.  

How much better this is than clustered, plastic-wrapped packages.

It may seem like a little thing, but an accumulation of little things adds up to a big thing indeed: a vivid reading experience, the kind that makes fans.

A rusty security gate lay on the pavement. A forklift idled nearby. Unseen construction workers banged and drilled. 

Visual and audible details. I’m there. (Tip: Don’t overlook the underused sense of smell.)

He stepped past a mud-splashed bollard dug out of the ground to make room for hauling the packages into the building.

Not: a bollard covered with mud. 

Fancy new glass door, steel frame glittered from the safety of the manufacturer’s tape that still covered it. Across about forty feet of beautiful granite floor, a reception desk fronted in warm, yellow-beige marble welcomed you.

The one cavil I have with this is welcomed you. That’s a slight break from Joe’s deep POV. Might I suggest instead: Across about forty feet of beautiful granite floor, a welcoming reception desk fronted in warm, yellow-beige marble.

Two blokes in hardhats and multi-pocketed work trousers crossed the floor 

Blokes is exactly the word Joe would use.

the taller man sputtering laughter across one of those eco-mugs, printed with smiling golden giraffes, at something his mate said. 

The man doesn’t just laugh, he sputters laughter, and not with any mug, but an eco-mug. And not just an eco-mug, but one with smiling golden giraffes. What a nice, original detail that is.

Joe stepped back. The heel of his trainers smacked into the unearthed bollard.  

Not the heel of his shoes, but the more specific trainers. And it doesn’t hit, it smacks. The author is choosing vivid descriptors each time. The little things!

‘I’m not going in there.’

Thus ends the page. I don’t know what the author intended here. It seems as if Joe says this out loud. Or maybe it’s someone else who is identified in the next line. And I believe it’s a British thing to use the single quote marks. Like Brother Gilstrap, I’m not a fan of that mark, but then again I don’t want to be a stuffy Yank. If that’s how they do it over there, so be it. I mean, they like blood sausage, so there you go.

I’m also not a fan of characters speaking out loud only to themselves. In movies or on the page it usually seems false. Consider changing that to an interior thought.

At least, however, if it is Joe speaking, we want to know why he suddenly doesn’t want to go in. The page-turning mystery is planted. And that’s the main point of these first-page critiques. Do we want to turn the page? I certainly do.

In short, my British writer friend, Bob’s your uncle!

Chime in, TKZers. What do you think of today’s page?

First Light a Fire

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A story is told of a writer reading some bad poetry to a friend in a cold apartment. The only heat was a dying fire. Finally, shivering, the friend cried out, “My dear sir, either put fire into your verses or your verses into the fire!”

Readers respond to heat. That’s why you need fire in your fiction (a nod here to TKZ emeritus Jodie Renner and agent Donald Maass). Let me offer a few “hot” suggestions.

Fire Up Your Openings

It all starts with your first page, which we here at TKZ write about a lot (click on “First-page Critiques” in the menu and you’ll get a graduate-level course on the subject).

A wise writer (I’m not sure who) said, “A story begins when you light the match, not when you lay out the wood.” Give us some heat from the get-go.

It doesn’t have to be high heat. Just something that disturbs the Lead’s ordinary world. A portent of things to come.

I’ve critiqued many a manuscript at writers conferences, and when I find a “lay out the wood” opening it’s usually because there’s too much backstory. The author thinks the reader has to know a certain amount of information to understand what’s going on.

Nix. Readers will wait a long time for background information if they’re seeing conflict happening on the page.

I’ve suggested two things for wooden openings that work 99% of the time.

Tip #1 is to go to the first instance of dialogue in the manuscript. Dialogue automatically means action, something happening between two or more characters. Then see how you can pump up the conflict in the conversation.

Tip #2 is the “Chapter Two Switcheroo.” Toss Chapter One and begin with Chapter Two. Works wonders! You can then “marble in” only the Chapter One exposition that is absolutely essential.

Fan the Flames of Emotion

When you come to a particularly emotional scene, overwrite it. You can always tone it down later if you want.

I like to do the page-long sentence technique. I open a fresh document and then write in the character’s voice for at least 250 words. No periods, just stream-of-consciousness thoughts, telling me how they’re feeling, not in a simple terms like “angry” or “sad,” but in vivid metaphors and physical reactions. Write write write…then set that aside and come back to it later.

Usually, I’m looking for that one line or image that is striking, that arose out of my subconscious as my fingers flew across the keyboard.

It’s worth the effort. We’re elevating our fiction out of the “pretty good” (tepid) pile and into the “fantastic!” (high heat) pile.

Combust the Conflict

Be sure to give every character in every scene an agenda. They should all want something. There are no seat warmers in fiction.

Put those agendas in opposition.

Even minor characters can add conflict if their goals get in the way of the viewpoint character’s objective.

Push your characters to disagree with each other. In dialogue, use the em-dash interruption every now and then (as I describe here and John there).

Enflame the Philosophy

In my opinion a great Lead character has, well, opinions. Some things should make them hot under the collar.

I like to do a Voice Journal for my main characters, and prod them with questions, one of which is, “What is your philosophy of life?” Then I sit back (as I type) and listen to what they have to say.

An important caveat is not to let the character get too preachy (John Galt to the contrary notwithstanding). The best way to present the material is through dialogue. Here’s a bit from the great film On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. It’s about an ex-boxer, Terry Malloy, who now works as a strong arm for a waterfront boss.

When the mob murders a potential witness against them, Terry comes into contact with the victim’s sister, Edie. Not knowing Terry’s complicity in her brother’s death, Edie is drawn to Terry, as he is to her. Terry takes her to a dive for a drink. After some conversation, he says—

TERRY: You wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

 

EDIE: I never met anyone like you. There’s not a spark of sentiment, or romance, or human kindness in your whole body.

            

TERRY: What good does it do you besides get you in trouble?

EDIE: And when things and people get in your way, you just knock them aside, get rid of them. Is that your idea?

            

TERRY: Don’t look at me when you say that. It wasn’t my fault what happened to Joey. Fixing him wasn’t my idea.

EDIE: Who said it was?

            

TERRY: Everybody’s putting the needle on me. You and them mugs in the church and Father Barry. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.

EDIE: He was looking at everybody the same way.

 

TERRY: Oh, yeah? What’s with this Father Barry? What’s his racket?

 

EDIE: His racket?

            

TERRY: Yeah, his racket. Everybody’s got a racket.

 

EDIE: But he’s a priest.

 

TERRY: Are you kiddin’? So what? That don’t make no difference.

 

EDIE: You don’t believe anybody, do you?

            

TERRY: Listen, down here it’s every man for himself. It’s keeping alive. It’s standing in with the right people so you get a little bit of change jingling in your pocket.

EDIE: And if you don’t?

 

TERRY: If you don’t? Right down.

EDIE: It’s living like an animal.

            

TERRY: All right. I’d rather live like an animal than end up like …

EDIE: Like Joey? Are you afraid to mention his name?

Write like that and readers will get fired up, too…for your next book!

So how do you turn up the heat when you write?

Style Over Plot and Characters?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

He was 44 years old, an alcoholic, and had just been fired from his job because of his drinking. The Depression was in full tilt. Married, with savings running low, he had to find a way to make a living.

So he decided to become a writer. Ack!

Because of his background in business (he’d been an oil company executive for thirteen years), Raymond Chandler approached his new vocation systematically.

He started with an adult education course called Short Story Writing. He read pulp magazines, especially the famous Black Mask, with an analytical eye on what the writers did in their stories. He would make a detailed synopsis of a story by, say, Erle Stanley Gardner, then rewrite it in his own way, compare it with the original, then rewrite it again. That’s not a bad method for learning the craft.

What he didn’t see a lot of was style, a certain “magic” in the prose. (This reminds me of John D. MacDonald’s goal of “unobtrusive poetry.”)

Thus he began to type on strips of paper half the normal size. This forced him to put down choice words, and if he felt they didn’t work he could toss out the 15 lines or so and start again.

He kept notebooks, jotting down potential titles, story ideas, characters, and his observations of people, especially the clothes they wore and the slang they used.

His writing routine was based on time, not output (he was admittedly slow on the production side). He sat at his typewriter for four hours in the morning, until lunch. If the words didn’t come, he didn’t force the matter. If a writer doesn’t feel like writing, Chandler said, “he shouldn’t try.” (I have to disagree with the master here. But who am I to cavil? In 1939 he published The Big Sleep, got a bunch of Hollywood money, and became famous over time.)

He wrote to please himself and the reader. He once said in a letter, “I have never had any great respect for the ability of editors, publishers, play and picture producers to guess what the public will like. The record is all against them. I have always tried to put myself in the shoes of the ultimate consumer, the reader, and ignore the middleman.”

Of the two writers he was most associated with, he had this to say: “Hammett is all right. I give him everything. There were a lot of things he could not do, but what he did he did superbly. But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.”

And get this, from a 1947 letter: “I wrote you once in a mood of rough sarcasm that the techniques of fiction had become so highly standardized that one of these days a machine would write novels.”

Ha! (He also said technique alone could never have the “emotional quality” needed for memorable fiction. Looking at you, AI.)

For Chandler, the priority order of fiction factors seems to have been: style, characters, dialogue, scenes, plot. He was not a plotter. Far from it. In a 1951 letter to his agent, Carl Brandt, he wrote: “I am having a hard time finishing the book. Have enough paper written to make it complete, but must do all over again. I just didn’t know where I was going and when I got there I saw that I had come to the wrong place. That’s the hell of being the kind of writer who cannot plan anything, but has to make it up as he goes along and then try to make sense out of it. If you gave me the best plot in the world all worked out I could not write it. It would be dead for me.”

There are definitely plot holes in Chandler, the most (in)famous being who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep? When Warner Bros. was doing the movie, they sent a wire to Chandler asking who the murderer was. Chandler replied, “I don’t know.”

But here’s the thing. We remember Chandler, and place him atop the pantheon of hardboiled writers, because of what he emphaszied—his style. I mean, look at some of these gems:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Ana’s that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. – “Red Wind”

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish, and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles. – The High Window

I lit a cigarette. It tasted like a plumber’s handkerchief. – Farewell, My Lovely

There was a sad fellow over on a bar stool talking to the bartender, who was polishing a glass and listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream. – The Long Goodbye

She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. – The Little Sister

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. – Farewell, My Lovely

“I’m an occasional drinker, the kind of guy who goes out for a beer and wakes up in Singapore with a full beard.” – “Spanish Blood”

The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back. – The Long Goodbye 

So, my writer friends, what do you think? Is style the secret ingredient over plot and character? We usually talk about the importance of character within a plot, or vice versa. But Chandler worked hard for that “magic” in his prose and, well, his books are still selling!

When to Be a Crazy Dumbsaint of the Mind

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Jack Kerouac

Every college boy who wanted to be a writer back in the day when I trod the quad of my institute of higher education, went through a Jack Kerouac phase. This usually followed a Hemingway phase. In my case, I went through both simultaneously, which will blow your mind, man.

Hemingway, master of lean prose; and Kerouac, who spilled words on paper like Pollock tossed paint on canvas. Both authors had the added attraction of a personal brand—Hemingway, the man’s man, running with the bulls; and Kerouac, the “angel-headed hipster” driving freely across America in search of beatitude, with a jazz soundtrack.

Kerouac (1922-1969) was dubbed the bard of the Beat Generation for his novel, On the Road (1957). He famously typed it on a 120-foot-long scroll of paper so he wouldn’t have to stop his flying fingers. In three weeks, fueled by Benzedrine and coffee, Kerouac produced the first draft of the book that made him famous. I do not recommend this method.

A second novel, The Dharma Bums (1958) cemented his reputation.

After that, in the humble opinion of your scribe, his prose became increasingly unreadable. No doubt his drinking had something to do with it—booze killed him at the age of 47.

He once typed out his writing advice, and from the looks of it he was, perhaps, stimulated. Fasten your seatbelt:

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog

Okay, pause to catch breath. Yes, Kerouac was a “wild” “crazy dumbsaint” writer. Because of that, some of the prose in On the Road is exquisite. Like this oft quoted passage:

…and I shambled after as usual as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

But I can’t let #5 go without comment. The form of his later books seems to me to get increasingly messy (experimental) like the floor of a VW microbus driven across country by the Merry Pranksters. I think his “spontaneous prose” worked best in On the Road and The Dharma Bums because those already had a structure—they are really autobiography with the names changed, and much of the material was already in Kerouac’s journals. He was recording his experiences, not making up fiction.

  1. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
  2. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  3. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  4. Accept loss forever
  5. Believe in the holy contour of life
  6. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  7. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  8. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  9. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  10. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  11. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  12. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  13. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  14. You’re a Genius all the time
  15. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

This all reads more like a window into Kerouac’s writer-mind than, say, an outline for a writing workshop. But there is one takeaway I might recommend.

I think the pursuit of writing gems, of style that elevates certain moments in your novel, is worth it. Maybe now more than ever what with AI cranking out colorless, soulless prose. Want to stand out in the tsunami of AI-generated cr*p? This is one way to do it.

What I do when I come to a moment of intense emotion is start a fresh document and begin “wild…pure…typewritten pages” telling “the true story of the world in interior monolog.” I type without “literary grammatical and syntactical inhibitions” to get to “bottomless from bottom of the mind.” I stay “submissive to everything, open, listening.”

When I’m done I’ll have 250 – 500 words of be-bop prose rhapsody, “swimming in language sea.” From that I can select, rearrange, tweak, and choose the best parts. Maybe even just one sentence, but that sentence will be choice.

So did any of these “tips” resonate with you? Blow as deep as you want to blow.

How to Make Sentences Sing

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Edmund Burke, the eighteenth century member of Parliament known for his rousing speeches, regarded every word in a sentence as “the feet upon which the sentence walks.” He said that to alter a word—exchange it for a shorter or longer one, or give it a different position—would change the whole course of the sentence.

I thought about that recently while reading a thriller. It was good on the plot and character levels (which are, of course, absolutely essential). It started off like gangbusters, and carried me through the first three chapters.

But as it went on, I found myself without that feeling of compulsion to keep reading, as one has with the best fiction experiences. I wasn’t in a rush to turn the page. Naturally, as a writer and teacher of writing, I paused to ask myself why.

The answer came to me almost immediately. The sentences were all merely functional. They were like Dutch furniture. They did their job, but nothing more. I’ve quoted this many times, but it’s worth repeating. John D. MacDonald, writing about what he looks for in an author (including himself), said, “I want him to have a bit of magic in his prose style, a bit of unobtrusive poetry. I want to have words and phrases that really sing.”

Is that something worth going for? I think it is. MacDonald rose to the top of the mass market heap in the 1950s in part because his writing was a cut above what one critic called the “machine-like efficiency” of his contemporaries.

So let’s have a look at things you can do to make some of your sentences sing.

Rearrange

Consider this as the first line of a novel:

The small boys came to the hanging early.

Okay, fine. It works. But what if we did it the way Ken Follett does it in The Pillars of the Earth: 

The small boys came early to the hanging.

Feel the difference? On a subconscious level, it elevates the effect. Hanging is the most vivid word, and putting at the end gives the sentence snap and verve. A novel with sentences like that can mean the difference between a good read and an unforgettable one.

Overwrite And Cut

When I get to an intense emotional moment, I like to pause and start a text doc and write a page-long sentence. I just go, putting down everything I can think of without pausing to edit. As an example, here’s an actual sentence from John Fante’s classic Ask the Dust, in the voice of a young writer named Arturo Bandini in 1930s Los Angeles.

A day and another day and the day before, and the library with the big boys in the shelves, old Dreiser, old Mencken, all the boys down there, and I went to see them, Hya Dreiser, Hya Mencken, Hya hya: there’s a place for me, too, and it begins with B, in the B shelf, Arturo Bandini, make way for Arturo Bandini, his slot for his book, and I sat at the table and just looked at the place where my book would be, right there close to Arnold Bennett, not much that Arnold Bennett, but I’d be there to sort of bolster up the Bs, old Arturo Bandini, one of the boys, until some girl came along, some scent of perfume through the fiction room, some click of high heels to break up the monotony of my fame.

Write something like that, and keep going. Then you rest a bit, come back to it, and choose the best parts. It might just be one sentence, but it will be gold and will make your book glitter.

Cutting Adverbs

Sometimes a sentence sings best when it’s lean. Which brings us to the subject of adverbs.

Stephen King said, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”

In Stein on Writing, Sol Stein advises cutting all the adverbs in a manuscript, then readmitting only “the necessary few after careful testing.”

That’s good advice, and not hard to follow. Do a search for –ly words and see if you can’t cut the adverb or find a stronger verb.

Be especially (!) vigilant with dialogue tags. Elmore Leonard (who is quoted much too often these days, he said solemnly) called using an adverb to modify said a “mortal sin.” Perhaps a venial sin. I’m not a Robespierre about this, sending all adverbs to the guillotine. But do make them state their case before you “sentence” them.

Resonance at the End

The last sentences of your book are the most important of all. They may be the ones that get the reader to order another of your books immediately, as opposed to ho-humming and finding something else to read.

One of the most famous ending sentences in American Lit is from the short story that put William Saroyan on the map. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” was published in 1934, the height of the Depression. It’s the story of young writer who is starving to death. He walks the streets, looking for work, but there’s nothing for him. He’s down to one penny. He returns to his room, becomes drowsy and nauseous. He falls on his bed, thinking he should give the penny to a child, for a child could buy any number of things with a penny. The story ends:

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was all things at once—the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.

That one word—unalive—is not in the dictionary. But who cares? It’s meaning is obvious. Saroyan could have written dead, but that wouldn’t have any zing. And the word perfect at the end is so surprising given the context that it leaves us pondering, feeling, perhaps even weeping. In other words, there’s resonance, that final, haunting note hanging in the air after the music stops.

Man, oh man, that’s worth reaching for.

Brother Gilstrap has written about the importance of last lines. His favorite is from To Kill a Mockingbird:

He turned out the light and went into Jem’s room. He would be there all night, and he would be there when Jem waked up in the morning.

Another resonant ending is from The Catcher in the Rye:

It’s funny. Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

And this, from my favorite Bosch, Lost Light:

I leaned forward and raised her tiny fists and held them against my closed eyes. In that moment I knew all the mysteries were solved. That I was home. That I was saved.

My advice is to write your last few sentences several times. Each time, say them out loud. How do they sound? How do they make you feel? Go for the heart. Teach them to sing.

Discuss!

Do You Bleed on the Page?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

One of the more ubiquitous quotes about writing out there, almost always attributed to Hemingway, is: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Great quote, eh? Only problem is, Hemingway never said it, never wrote it, and probably never even thought it.

So why is he considered the source? Because some quote aggregator back in the 1970s thought it sounded like something Hemingway would say. You know, the running-with-the-bulls guy, the likes-to-box guy. He’d be all about blood.

Not.

Later, the line was given to him in a mediocre TV movie called Hemingway & Gellhorn (2012). So now you see it almost daily on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, along with another thing Hemingway never said: “Write drunk. Edit sober.” I’m starting to feel like that Britney Spears guy. “Leave Ernest Hemingway alone!!!!”

The real source for the blood quote comes down to a choice between two writers: Paul Gallico (author of The Poseidon Adventure) and the great sports columnist Red Smith. In a 1946 book, Confessions of a Story Writer, Gallico wrote:

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don’t feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you’re wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

This is good advice. You can write competent fiction without feeling. Heck, that’s what AI does. But you won’t get that deep connection with the readers—and turn them into fans—unless you pour your own heart’s blood into the characters and your prose.

Shortly after Gallico’s book came out, the widely-syndicated columnist Walter Winchell quoted Red Smith as saying, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” It’s likely, then, that Winchell and/or Smith paraphrased Gallico.

Smith apparently liked the blood metaphor, for in a profile in 1961 in Time magazine, he was asked how hard it was to produce a sports column every day. “Writing a column is easy,” he replied. “You just sit at your typewriter until little drops of blood appear on your forehead.”

This has a different meaning than the “bleed on the page” quote. It’s an obvious reference to the agony of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44). Smith was talking about the agony of having to come up with a fresh column idea every 24 hours (not easy!) and then write it in his singular style.

Putting these two sentiments together, I find it essential to feel something when I write a scene. Music helps. I have a playlist of various moods taken from movie soundtracks. I need an inner vibration to make a scene come alive.

And while I wouldn’t describe myself as “agonizing” (Proust-like) over my style, I do go over my words at least three times. There’s the daily editing of the previous day’s work; then the first read-through in hard copy; and a final polish. I pursue that “unobtrusive poetry” John D. MacDonald talked about. The effort, for me at least, is entirely worth it.

Mega-bestselling author John Green (Turtles All the Way Down) put it this way:

[W]riting is difficult for me. Sometimes it is difficult because I do not know what I want to say, but usually it is difficult because I know exactly what I want to say but what I want to say has not yet taken the shape of language. When I’m writing, I’m trying to translate ideas and feelings and wild abstractions into language, and that translation is complicated and challenging work. (But it is also — in moments, anyway — fun.)

It is indeed fun, and fully satisfying, to sit back and look at something you’ve written and think, “Ya know, that’s pretty darn good.” Maybe that’s what Hemingway meant when he (really) said, “For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.”

So…do you ever think of yourself as “bleeding” on the page? Should you?

Down in the Writing Weeds

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I love talking to fellow writers who are craft nuts. I love getting into the weeds to discuss things like adverbs, POV violations, and whether you should use a comma in the phrase “Oh God.” (On that last one, strict rules of style say yes. I say it depends on how the character is reacting—somberly or fearfully?)

Today I want to discuss four weed words (and I’m not talking about euphemisms for a certain plant). This is about as granular as you can get, but where else but on a famous writing blog can all this be hashed out? Try discussing dialogue attributions with your insurance agent, or exclamation points with your CPA!

So, TKZ community, let’s hack some weeds.

Then

I sipped my flat Coke and gave her the head start she’d asked for. Then I picked up my change and left a buck on the bar. I went out the door, up the stairs to the street. (Lawrence Block, A Ticket to the Boneyard)

The word Then is used here for rhythm. The action isn’t “hot.” The author is controlling pace. I do this myself. When the action is hot, I don’t use Then. I cut sentences to the bone. But if things are a bit slower it comes in handy.

There’s another use of the word then I like. It’s when you want to emphasize an emotional moment.

She came to me then and put her arms around me.

Strictly speaking, you don’t need then. But then again…ahem…it has a subtle and enhancing effect.

Suddenly

This word gets a lot of chatter down here in the weeds. Some say you never need it, as the action itself should prove the suddenness. One of Elmore Leonard’s “rules” (discussed here this past week) is: Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”

First off, this “rule” can confuse newbies, who might think you should never use suddenly at all, not even in dialogue. Obviously false.

But Leonard was talking about narrative. We have to remember that he wrote his books in 3d Person. In 3d, the word Suddenly is coming from the author. It’s a “tell.” There are better ways to convey such moments (see commenter Marilynn Byerly’s examples in Brother Gilstrap’s post).

But in First Person, Suddenly is perfectly acceptable. In my latest thriller, Romeo’s Rage, I have a scene with Mike and Sophie at an eatery where a minor protest is happening. Mike is confronted by the gadflies and their upraised camera phones. He starts confounding one of them with verbal jiu-jitsu.

“Shut up!” shouts the gadfly, and it looks like things might get heated.

Suddenly, Sophie was by my side and looking at the cameras.

That’s how Mike experiences the moment. It’s like an internal thought. And since this is First Person, we can go there. Without the Suddenly, readers might think Sophie was standing next to Mike all the while, instead of showing this new side of her—a willingness to jump into a fray.

Here’s another example of an internal thought, from another Mike. Hammer, to be exact, in Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me, Deadly. In chapter one Hammer has picked up a mysterious woman wandering on the road. He is going to take her into New York to drop her off, but another car speeds in front of them and stops, causing a crash. Mike jumps out of his car, and so do men from the other. Gun shots. Mike takes a sap to the head. Down he goes. As he fights to come to [italics in original, and notice our friend Then making an appearance]—

It was like a sleep that you awaken from because you had been sleeping cramped up. It was a forced awakening that hurts and you hear yourself groan as you try to straighten out. Then suddenly there’s an immediate sharpness to the awakening as you realize that it hadn’t been a bad dream after all, but something alive and terrifying instead.

Now, just for the heck of it, let me say something about all hell broke loose. I think most of us would agree it’s a cliché and that it’s better to show what the breaking hell looks like.

But in First Person you can use a cliché if you freshen it up, as in All hell broke loose and kicked every dog in the neighborhood.

That’s fun to do.

Very

This one I usually avoid. It’s flabby and indistinct. An exception is when it’s used sardonically in First Person POV, as in: Needless to say, when he saw the toilets, Sarge got very upset.

And, of course, a character might use it in dialogue.

But in narrative portions, don’t write: He was very big. Instead, write something like: He was the size of a beer truck.

Had

This one is constantly overused by writers when the narrative goes into the past. Consider:

She had grown up in Boston. When it came time to apply to college, she’d chosen Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. and Yale. That didn’t please her father, who had made his sentiments known to her in no uncertain terms. They’d had a lot of arguments over that.

Here’s a rule for you (that’s right, I said rule): Use one had to get you into the past, but after that you don’t need it.

She had grown up in Boston. When it came time to apply to college, she chose Wellesley and Bryn Mawr. That didn’t please her father, who made his sentiments known to her in no uncertain terms. They argued a lot over that.

Nothing lost, and the narrative is crisper.

I now put down my Weed Wacker and invite comments. What other weed words or phrases do you see popping up in our wonderful craft garden?