I have to fly across the country frequently these days on family business. Because I’m a nervous flyer, I normally don’t think too much about the customer service during a flight–I’m too worried about the plane crashing. But last night’s experience gave me a new perspective on the topic of customer service. I’ve started to think there are some best practices in customer service which should apply to a writing career.

I should add that in addition to being afraid of flying, I’m prone to superstition, plus I resist changes to routine. On my recent cross-country trips, therefore, I have flown on the same airline, in the same seat on the same row, every time. Each of these flights turned out to be a pleasant experience (aside from my epic battles with white knuckle syndrome, which isn’t the airline’s fault).
Last night I took a different airline for the first time for my usual trip. It was the same airplane model, same seat and row. Only the customer service was different.

And how. Here’s the way it went down: the exact same trip, on two different airlines.

Airline A

Upon entering the cabin, I was greeted by a flight who asked me if she could hang up my coat for me. Another crew member distributed beverages before takeoff, and told us what types of food were available. The crew patrolled the aisle regularly, making eye contact with passengers and making sure needs were being met. They smiled at us a lot. They made us feel like they wanted us on their plane!

Airline B

Upon entering the cabin, I was ignored by the flight attendant, who was engaged in an animated personal discussion with a colleague. She looked startled when I asked where I could hang up my coat, and checked my ticket to make sure I was actually entitled to coat hanging privileges. The animated personal discussion continued during the preparation for takeoff, with brief, obligatory pauses to make announcements required by the FAA. The flight magazine was a month out of date, so we couldn’t discover what food choices would be available. When the flight attendant finally took our orders, I asked if the entree (it turned out to be pasta, hooray!) contained meat. She wasn’t sure, and didn’t find out. (The pasta did have meat, this vegetarian discovered later for herself).

The flight crew evidently enjoyed each other’s company a lot, because they spent the entire journey talking among themselves. At one point an attendant from another section came forward, looking distressed. This new conversation was punctuated by dramatic hand gestures. The distressed newcomer was even shielding her mouth from view of the passengers as she continued talking.

Having taped and watched every episode of AIR DISASTERS, I immediately suspected that the flight attendants were talking about some kind of problem with the plane.

“Is everything okay?” I asked one of them, when I finally caught her attention.

“Yes. Why?” She paused, and then it seemed to dawn on her why I’d asked the question. “Oh, we’re just talking about life. You know, girl stuff.”

“As long as you aren’t talking about broken-airplane stuff,” I said.

She retreated with a doubtful look on her face. The chat fest resumed.

When we eventually landed in Washington, three hours late, I discovered that I’d forgotten to pack my laptop, on which I’d written my post for today. So I’m writing this rant on my iPad, which hates interacting with WordPress. (Okay, that one’s not the flight crew’s fault.)

Customer Service and Writing

The flight episode gave me a new appreciation for the importance of customer service. I think writers would benefit by developing some best practices of our own in that regard. Here are some suggestions:

When using social media, don’t talk “at” people in a one-sided conversation. Engage in actual conversations.

Always maintain a friendly, polite tone in public forums.

Answer emails promptly.

In short, make your readers and public feel like you’re glad they made the decision to board your flight. They’ll reward you with return visits.

Can you add any customer service best practices that writers should follow? Or better still, anything we should avoid doing?

If you were to design the perfect mug for that first cup of coffee before you start writing each day, what would it say?

Jordan Dane @JordanDane

My guest today is Theo Gangi, the Director of the writing program at St Francis College. His stories have been anthologized in First Thrills, edited by Lee Child, The Greensboro Review, The Columbia Spectator and the Kratz Sampler. His articles and reviews have appeared in Buzzfeed.com, The San Francisco Chronicle, Mystery Scene Magazine, Inked Magazine and Crimespree Magazine. Theo and I first met in NYC when our books debuted in 2008 at ITW’s Thrillerfest. I’ve enjoyed his gritty writing ever since. Please welcome Theo, TKZers.

A New Day, A New Genre

I admit it– the inspiration for my new novel A New Day in America was not mine initially. The somewhat notorious writer James Frey approached me with the idea for the tale of Nostradamus Greene and his daughter Naomi: a post-apocalyptic father-daughter survival story.

If I’d had a project I was in love with at the time, I’m not sure how I would have reacted. Screenwriters are accustomed to inheriting ideas and collaborating, but the mythology of the Novelist is the lone, solitary storyteller. However, once I found an inspiration to draw on, the work became mine as much as anything I’ve written.

The post-apocalyptic world—the desolate lands, the loss of the structure of civilization, the father who braves survival, and the daughter who has seen too much—recalled a story from my formative years.

Apocalypse stories, while set in the future, are actually a return to the past. The time after modern civilization would resemble the time before it. The landscape of feudal Japan felt just right. Samurai assassin Itto Ogami and his son Daigoro serve as a great model for Nostradamus Greene and Naomi. Doing some sketches, I even found some visual symmetry. The paradox of the killer-father character has a brutal simplicity. A man with a gun is a killer. A man with a gun and a child at his back is a hero.

The idea was freeing for a couple of reasons. For one, I had some much-needed simplicity, and in the past I’ve had a tendency to over-complicate my work. Second, I got to play with reality itself.

My first book, Bang Bang, is a hardboiled, botched-robbery sort of urban crime thriller. While the hero’s ability to rack up a body count of a dozen or so in a single night might stretch the realm of reality, the book is firmly set in the real world. For A New Day in America, writing in a post-apocalyptic world meant I could create the whole thing. I had to invent setting, history, events, and the all-important rules.

As a writer I always saw craft as a kind of minimalist-vs-maximalist approach. My biggest influence was Elmore Leonard, who famously didn’t write the parts the reader ‘skips anyway’, and once said he read Hemingway every morning before writing, to get the feel of reduction in his writing process. I love Dashiell Hammett, whose minimal approach to books like Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon would’ve made Hemmingway proud (‘The stuff that dreams are made of’ is an invention of filmmaker John Houston, and far too sentimental for Hammett). The idea being, don’t waste the reader’s time and attention on an eloquent description of a back alley, because the reader know what a alley looks like, and wants to know what your characters will do and say, not that there’s a garbage can that’s tipped over, or a couple of chicken bones in the gutter. The empty spaces of great noir are poetic in and of themselves.

When writing in a world that has suffered a recent apocalypse, you can’t get away with that approach. If you allow the reader the space to fill in your apocalyptic world, they will likely visualize some stock imagery from this movie or that. Mel Gibson will poke his head out of a tricked out Mad Max vehicle in the background. A zombie might appear in the reader’s imagination even though there are no zombies in your book. To write in a speculative world is to build one. Visuals such as a New York City skyline that looks like a king’s crown—skyscrapers line the outer rim, but nothing stands within.

The process required quite a bit of overwriting and then cutting, so the sense of the world was greater than the word count. World building aside, the fundamentals are the same as any kick-ass thriller: Danger, conflict, bravery, human connectivity and impossible choices. The America that’s reduced to rubble offers a vehicle for the same challenges that the best thriller heroes endure—back to the wall, knife to the throat, what do you do? How do you find a way to assert yourself on a world that’s gone to hell? Is your next move moral or practical? Can you save them all? Can you save the ones that matter most?

The apocalyptic scenario creates a series of Sophie’s Choice sorts of situations. I’ll relate it this way– say there’s a train bearing down the tracks full of ten innocent people. The track forks: one way is a brick wall. The other way is your child tied to the rails. You stand at the switch. Which do you chose?

I imagine most people would chose to save their child, as I would. But what if there’s 100 people on that train? 1,000? A New Day in America is about a father who makes the decision to save his child over and over again.

Question 1: TKZ Question for Discussion: If you could take a few non-essential luxuries in your survivalist bunker, what would they be?

Question 2: Have you ever written a book that wasn’t your original idea?

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https://twitter.com/tprgangi

http://theogangi.com/

Today we are pleased to present another first-page submission. This story is called BIRTHRIGHT. First, the page. Then my notes.

BIRTHRIGHT

She knew if she walked through the door, things would never be the same. It would be an admission of humanity. A bow to the ordinary.

She had been sent to inform and invigorate the people of Liberty so they could stand up to the coming onslaught. Even as she arrived the enemy grew as it traveled, dragging able-bodied men from villages as they passed and forcing them into servitude. To bring an entire village together and equip its people to do battle was a monumental task, one no mere mortal could hope to accomplish. That’s why the Council saw fit to send her to this place. It wasn’t a question of her ability, nor of her knowledge. It was a question of birthright. Her father was Leader of the Council. It was an incontrovertible fact that his heirs would step into his role when he relinquished it. It had always been that way. It would always be. Such was the way of her kind.

She stepped into the heart of Liberty, the center of the village, and slowly turned. The courthouse sat vacant—the laws of the land, as well as much of the building, long ago turned to dust. A tattered flag sagged on a pole in front of a tall brick garage. Then she saw it. The old gray-stoned library, heavily pasted with vines rooted to the mortar, bundling the building itself into a green-wrapped package. She stared up at the roof, at least thirty tridents high. The crane of her neck made her wobble. She had never looked up before; only down. She hurried to the doorway, slashed at the vines until the way was clear. What was inside stole her breath. She had never seen a book before. Now she was in an entire building of them. So many, she thought they might count as high as the stars. She breathed deeply. The scent of books was new to her and she paused to relish it. This was where it would all begin. After all, this was where it once ended.

KL’s Notes:

On the plus side, I should say that I like the opening line.

“She knew if she walked through the door, things would never be the same.”

It’s hard to write a first line that immediately grabs a reader. Well done!

I also enjoy the way the writer describes the moment the narrator first sees the library.

“Then she saw it. The old gray-stoned library, heavily pasted with vines rooted to the mortar, bundling the building itself into a green-wrapped package.”

That’s a good visual image.

But in other ways, this narrative runs into some craft-related headwinds. Here are some areas that could be improved.

A Case of Backstory Blues

The writer grabs my attention at Line One. But from there, things go awry. The story falls into a notorious swamp known as Backstory. The entire second paragraph gives nothing but character background. That information should be woven in later, after we are immersed in the main character’s situation. We preach this lesson all the time here at TKZ: Stay in the moment with your character and scene! Let us see her in action in the moment, and then tell us how she arrived at that juncture.

Character Challenge

As I read this page I was reminded of a film I saw last weekend, “Jupiter Ascending.” (A completely dreadful film, btw, but that’s for another review).  In that story, there’s a claque of one-percenter aliens known as The Entitled. The Entitled get to hog all the good stuff in The Universe because, well, they were born to rule.

As the title of this first page, BIRTHRIGHT, makes clear, the main character has arrived in Liberty village simply because she was born into the right family. I’m assuming the story will present at least two challenges: 1) Can she save the Lost World? 2) Does she have anything going for her other than her birthright?

Action Needed

Theodore Roosevelt famously coined the phrase, “Get Action!” I think this page could use some action. Or should I say, interaction. On my first reading, I assumed that the village of Liberty was totally abandoned. Then I realized that the character’s challenge is to mobilize the demoralized inhabitants. Shouldn’t we get some sense of someone else in this scene, or at least a reminder of that they exist? A secondary character would be an excellent way to introduce some of the backstory information that is dumped at the reader in the second paragraph. (For example: an enslaved villager suddenly sees the Council’s Heir materialize in town. How does he react?)

Wording Notes

There were a few awkward or confusing phrases here and there. (Redundant use of “heart of” followed by “village center”; “The crane of her neck made her wobble.”)

Final Notes

Overall, I think eliminating the early introduction of backstory, plus using action to show the character’s situation, would improve things immensely. Thank you to this intrepid writer for the submission!

TKZers, your thoughts about this page?