By John Gilstrap

Finally! I no longer have to keep the secret: my nonfiction book, Six Minutes to Freedom, has been set up at Netflix to be a feature film with a projected release in 2026. I’ve known for at least two months now, but I had to wait for the announcement in Variety before I could go public. Jared Rosenberg will write the script and Toby Jaffe will produce. More on them later.

A romantic beginning.

Back in April, Joy and I were in Greece, celebrating her birthday with an al fresco dinner at the base of the Acropolis when my cell phone rang. Normally, a romantic dinner trumps a phone call, but not when the caller I.D. shows your Hollywood agent’s name, and there was no way he could be bringing anything but good news. With no current film projects in the pipeline, there was no conceivable bad news to deliver.

Good news indeed! One of the hottest new screenwriters in Hollywood–Jared Rosenberg, whose film Flight Risk, directed by and starring Mel Gibson and Mark Wahlberg, will be released in January, 2025–loves SixMin and wanted to sign an 18-month shopping agreement to turn it into either a feature or a long form series.

“Great news!” I said. “How much?”

“Well, nothing. It’s a shopping agreement. It gives him exclusive rights to package the property and shop it around and see if there’s interest. Maybe he’ll write a treatment, put together a production team, get actors excited.”

I was confused. “Aren’t you the person who told me that no one gets to do anything with my book without paying for the right? Pay to play?”

“That was before the writers’ strike,” he explained. “All the rules have changed. I think you should do it. This guy’s got horsepower now. He can open doors.”

I still wasn’t ready to leave the world I thought I understood. “How can he sell something he doesn’t yet own?”

“That’s the beauty of the shopping agreement,” my agent explained. With so much of the legwork already accomplished by the shopping entity, the author is in a stronger position than ever before.

Not insignificantly, let’s remember that the book came out in 2006. The opportunity cost of a potential mistake was pretty low.

“Let’s do it!”

Then Comes September . . .

. . . and word that 20th Century is very interested in doing a deal for SixMin. While I was busy not paying attention, Jared Rosenberg had joined forces with producer Toby Jaffe and together had been drumming up excitement for this great movie project. It was time for the agents to go to work.

And here’s where it got interesting because we’re all repped by different agents, each of whom is jockeying for the best deal for their client. Over the course of the next few days, we received, rejected, tweaked, countered, and tweaked again various dollar values and deal points, as I presume the other players were likewise doing. It felt to me that we were coming very close to a deal we could live with when . . .

Wait! Netflix wants to make the movie! The negotiation chess game just became three dimensional, with three agents negotiating deals with two studios, with no one knowing the details of what the others are asking for/demanding. This was the first time when I really understood the value of good representation.

Now it’s time for me to be a bit coy so as not to step on toes. When the dust finally settled, the production team was happiest with the deal they hammered out with Studio A, while the Studio B terms were far more favorable for me. I won’t say which player was A or B, but it’s rare in the movie business when the author of the source material is in able to negotiate from a position of power. The best terms for the production folks don’t mean much if they don’t own the rights to the story they want to produce.

Stuff happened behind the scenes, and now we’re set up at Netflix. Cool beans. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s feathers got singed during the back-and-forth.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a hand to play in Tinseltown. It feels good to be back. And for now–for this brief, shining moment in time–it looks like the movie will actually be made. (Everyone please do me a favor and knock wood now.)

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

By PJ Parrish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can we color outside the lines?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We recently had several folks over to the house for a get together…no. Let me start again.

Our house was a zoo last week when we hosted our youngest grandson’s 4th birthday party. There were about a million kids I’d never seen. I knew our own grandcritters and a handful of others and that was all. The same held true for the adults. The rest were strange little apes who set up a howl that lasted for two hours.

The kids were loud, too.

Family and friends made up part of the attendees, but there were a lot of people I’d never met.

To preserve my sanity, I found a nice corner of our outside kitchen counter and settled in with a couple of dads clutching adult beverages to watch the action. My daughters and the Bride opted for an old fashioned home birthday party. No bounce house. No petting zoo. And thank God for no Chuck E. Cheese insanity. Instead, they had old-fashioned games for the kids, including bobbing for apples, which resulted in only one near drowning.

Who would have thought they’d take their shirts off and go in headfirst?

The only thing the girls didn’t resurrect was Pin the Tail on the Donkey. With our critters, there would have been a stabbing with the tail and the addition of paramedics would have just added to the cacophony.

Conversation wandered as the party wound down. What was a group of adults watching kids have fun evolved into a mixed confederation of grownups and tweens, young people between the age of 9 and 12.

I heard the twelve-year-old ask her mother, who was our youngest daughter’s best friend growing up, why I was wearing a tee shirt that didn’t match my unbuttoned aloha shirt. “Why is Da wearing that? The colors don’t go together. He should know that.”

“That’s because Da can’t help it.” Hanna has known me since she was seven, and I’m convinced she lived with us for a couple of years when she was a teenager. She was at our house all the time. In fact, I recently asked the Bride if we’d sent her to college along with our own girls.

Hanna gave me a sympathetic smile. “He’s colorblind.”

Hanna’s daughter looked at me with a frown. “You only see in black and white?”

I sighed. I’ve spent my whole life answering that question from adults. “No, I see color all right, but it isn’t they same as what registers in your brian.”

She plucked out the tail of her blouse. “What color is this?”

“I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

“Is it gray?”

“I’d be willing to bet it’s purple or something, but it’s green to me.”

“It’s turquoise.”

“It’s green.”

“What color is mom’s shirt?”

Remembering I was talking to a kid, I bared my teeth and smiled. “I don’t know. I’m colorblind.”

I’ve been caught in that endless loop before with those who can’t seem to grasp that I don’t perceive what everyone else sees.

The Bride picked out my clothes each morning when I worked full time and had to wear suits and slacks. As the years passed and I moved up in our organization, seniority provided some leniency and adjusted my wardrobe to jeans, white shirts, and a blue or black sports coat. There was a time before we were married when I dressed myself.

More than once I walked into my office to find my secretary with her hand out. “Give me that tie. It doesn’t match.”

“Last week you said it matched this shirt.”

“Nope. Your other shirt is a different shade. Use the black tie on the back of your door today, or don’t wear one at all.”

Color is an issue in writing, also. I’ve described sunrises and sunsets, the light on trees and vegetation, or the changing color of rocks, hill, or mountains without ever seeing what registers in most people’s brains. It comes from asking the Bride wha see sees as we pass, or sit on the edge of a drop-off to watch the sunset.

If I describe the subtle colors of a Craftsman house restored to it’s original paint scheme, it’s a cheat, because I looked it up, or asked her.

She gets those questions all the time. “What color are those clouds?”

“Salmon. Pinkish. Tope. Chartreuse. Vermilion. Persimmon.” She really doesn’t include all those at one time, but they’re examples of what I hear.

“You’re making those up.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Persimmon. If I don’t know the colors, how is persimmon going to help? What are those other colors I always have to ask you about?”

“Mauve. Coral. Lavender.”

“Just words. What color is mauve?”

“Dusty rose.”

“Sigh. Roses are red, or yellow So you mean red.”

“No.”

“Give me another color.”

She pointed at her shirt. “This is coral.”

It looked vaguely orange to me, so I gave up.

We recently hiked through Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle, and I spent half of my time asking her and the couple we were with about their descriptions of the canyon walls, or the vastly different layers we passed. As they walked ahead, I stopped and wrote it down in a small notebook.

The desert scrub plants I saw as silver, gray, or brown came in subtle shades I didn’t understand. I had to write them down, too, and when I set my novel, A Dead Man’s Laugh there, I resorted to my almost indecipherable notes.

For example, a creosote bush has, according to my companions, dark green leaves with brown-burgandy fruit. I saw waxy dark brown leaves with even darker brown buds. That’s because I’m red/green challenged.

It made elementary school art a living hell. My grades weren’t good because the crayons in class didn’t have their labels and I had no idea what colors I was using. trees were brown, grass probably turquoise, and people’s hair most likely began the punk movement.

According to Color Blind Awareness:

Being ‘red/green color blind’ means people with it can easily confuse any colors which have some red or green as part of the whole color. So someone with red/green color blindness is likely to confuse blue and purple because they can’t ‘see’ the red element of the color purple.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg for me. I can identify the basic colors, red, blue, yellow, orange, etc, if they’re neon bright, but subtle shades leave me in the gray dust.

The Bride, the editor I sleep with, corrected those descriptions in A Dead Man’s Laugh to match what she saw in the canyon and I sent the manuscript off.

We always talk about using all our senses in writing. The scent and taste of chocolate. That one I can easily identify. The squeak of metal as a swing set moving in the wind. A smooth tabletop, or the hard slap of a gunshot.

For those of us who are colorblind, these descriptions are hard and we have to find a way around them.

I sincerely hope you don’t suffer the same malady.

By PJ Parrish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have this fascination with houses.

It might have originated with my grandparent’s old homestead. Peeling wallpaper, bare wire bulbs, and push-button switches, it was an old, old structure with no air conditioning, or plumbing for that matter, but it had a tin roof that thundered under a heavy deluge and huge double-hung windows that rippled in the evening light.

My grandparents moved from that one to a much smaller frame farmhouse with indoor plumbing and a window unit, but no functional kitchen sink until I installed one nearly twenty years later. That homestead still figures in some of the stories that flow from my fingertips.

But the one I want to discuss today was about two hundred yards from my grandparent’s place, slumped in the middle of a washout pasture. With nary a drop of paint on the outside, the nine-hundred square foot (and that’s a guess) house was abandoned probably ten years before I hit the ground.

I was told one an old bachelor uncle I never met was the last inhabitant, but he was an influence on my life, and ultimately, my writing. From the looks of the interior, he one day picked up, packed up what he wanted, and walked away, leaving a life unremembered.

When we were kids, my cousin and I often visited that former residence that could have been the set for a slasher movie. Four long-dead trees reached skeletal arms into the air not far from the structure. They’d provided shade when he lived there, and were likely planted by the long-forgotten builders.

Two others had fallen across what was once a main dirt road leading from Arthur City to Chicota, Texas, and had flanked the house. The state built a new creek bridge and re-routed what was to become Highway 197, leaving the old dirt trace to fade into obscurity.

Sad, because the house under discussion and another unpainted domicile belonging to my blind great-great aunt Becky faced that same track, as well as the Assembly of God Church.

NOTE: After the re-route, the men of that small community engineered a way to lift the church and turn it 45-degrees to face a different oil road. To me, fascinating.

I loved to visit that great-uncle’s house that smelled of dirt dauber’s nests and ancient mouse droppings. The door was gone, as well as the windows on either side, likely salvaged for another build somewhere, giving the illusion of a blank, wide-eyed expression of open-mouthed shock.

The porch sagged, and inside, the bare, warped floors undulated like the surface of the ocean,. The rusty sheet-iron roof bent and curled toward the sky, loose sheets creaking in the wind that was responsible for its eventual demise.

It had a kitchen with one counter and two holes in the surface to hold dishpans. The doorless cabinets still held dishes and bowls. Dust-covered utensils on crusted plates were evidence that he’d eaten and left. A rusty iron bedstead with a frazzled cotton mattress took up the lone bedroom floor. Straight-back wooden chairs with cane seats sat in the silent living room, roosts for birds that spend the nights there.

As adventurous kids, Cousin and I often crept through the dead house in silence, looking at the remnants of life. An old suit coat lay tossed in one corner, a bed for stray dogs or coyotes. A pair of work pants hung on a nail driven into the bedroom door where he left them.

After poking around without touching a thing, we always walked out onto the rotting porch to look toward the south. Two gullies extended from the yard at an angle of embrace. They would eventually erode all the way to the structure itself. One was full of tin cans, glass, and whatever refuse he had no use for. It was his version of a landfill.

I was grown and married the last time I visited the house. Defying the odds, it was still standing, though slumped and completely worn out. The pants still hung behind the door, thought the chewed coat was nothing more than a few fibers. A rat snake had taken up residence in the now floorless kitchen, and slithered away when I stood in the door and consider my own memories, and possibly what Uncle had seen.

It’s gone now, bulldozed over for a new build thrown up with little or no character.

That old house somehow took up space in my psyche, and I’d like to think it eventually had something to do with my college career in architecture.

It’s there in dreams, and daydreams, and I can’t tell you why.

It was a dead house that meant nothing to me, but somehow influenced my life and writing.

Is there some special thing or place that still haunts you, as this former home does me?