By John Gilstrap

As a thriller author, I know all about testing the boundaries of suspended disbelief. As a consumer of thrillers, I do it all the time. Coincidences have to happen to make a story work, and as writers, it’s our job to make the coincidences feel organic to the situation the characters are enduring. For the sake of tension and drama, we stack the odds against our good guys. That way, when they ultimately prevail, the victory feels that much sweeter.

We’ve been watching a lot of streaming movies and television shows in our special viewing room over the past couple of months, and as the tropes stack up, I’m having a progressively harder time keeping my inner commentary silent, earning a few elbow shots from my beloved and more than a few harsh shushes. Consider . . .

. . . When crashing the drug den and the SWAT team is stacked up behind a ballistic shield and armed with enough fully-automatic firepower to topple Venezuela, why is Detective Danny Reagan with his pistol and designer ballistic vest out in front of everybody?

. . . Why don’t detectives ever just turn on a light? Instead, the search the dusty darkness of a suspects bedroom–or the basement where all murders were committed–with only the illumination provided by a tiny penlight.

. . . Why does our brilliant good guy wait till he arrives at the site of trouble before he chambers a round into his pistol? That means he’s been driving around all day essentially unarmed.

. . . After prevailing in the firefight in Room A, why doesn’t our good guy take advantage of the relative peace to reload before moving to Room B? Never bring old bullets to a new gunfight.

. . . For heaven’s sake, good guy or bad, just friggin’ shoot! You’ve achieved your goal. You’ve got your prey in your sights. And let’s be honest: At that point, while the victim very likely cares deeply that you intend to kill them, they’re not really going to be listening to the why. If they’ve got any sense, they’re going to be focused exclusively on either how to get away or to kill you first. Any way you cut it, your best call is to pull the trigger. Conversely, if you change your mind, your only move is to run like a bunny rabbit because only bad things lie ahead for you.

I make it a point to never pick on particular shows by name, but there’s one very popular program that makes my head explode every week. Let’s pretend there’s a show called “Trooper” and it features a character named Dalton Shames. To our knowledge, Dalton’s never had a conventional job, but it’s clear that he was raised by MacGyver. Give Dalton a can of Dr. Pepper, and he can turn a paper clip into a flame thrower.

Okay, I joke about the flame thrower, but he routinely produces a full-size 1911 platform pistol from the waistband of his trousers, right at the small of his back. His limp-wristed grip is all wrong for that gun (that’s a real description, not a pejorative), and none of the nations most draconian gun laws apply to him. Not even New York or Los Angeles.

In last week’s episode, a plucky 19-year-old is able to infiltrate the lair of a dangerous drug kingpin with the intent of kingpin regicide. It’s quite a feat given the army of armed guards. Dalton, in the company of the local sheriff, who has inexplicably ceded all law enforcement powers to this stranger from out of town, raid the compound themselves by ramming their way through the front gate. They have to keep the 19-year-old from being killed by the cartel, don’t you know.

Here’s the plan: The sheriff will hold off the army with his six-shot revolver while Dalton makes his way to the kingpin’s throne room, where the plucky kid has his highness dead to rights, but can’t bring himself to pull the trigger. Yada, yada . . . shot from off camera, kingpin gut shoots plucky kid, Dalton shoots kingpin and takes off running with plucky kid over his shoulder. Bad guys with rifles can’t hit a running target at ten yards, Dalton can’t miss with unaimed shots while running.

All is well but for this kid with a hole in his gut. Not to worry. There’s a horse veterinarian with a pouch of goodies who says he can help.

CUT TO: A kingpin’s yard filled with cop cars that would have been really handy a little while ago. But the vehicle we really care about it the ambulance with our plucky-now-gut-shot 19-year-old looking like a million bucks, all cleaned up, sitting upright in the stretcher while Dalton tells him everything’s going to be okay. Then Dalton allows the paramedics to close the back doors and drive him away.

Sigh.

There’s suspension of disbelief, and then there’s no element of this story is possible so therefore none of the story is engaging. I am without a doubt becoming progressively more curmudgeonly about these things, but I swear that lazy storytelling is becoming the norm.

In these days of Chat GPT and even simple YouTube searches, even uninformed storytelling is lazy. A car door has never been adequate to stop any but the smallest bullet, but ten years ago, not knowing that was forgivable. Now, there are entire channels dedicated to what stops what caliber of bullet. I have to assume that s true of every other once-esoteric subject.

What say you, TKZ family? How forgiving is the suspension mechanism for your disbelief?

By PJ Parrish

When I am anxious, I clean.. And since I am facing a flight to Detroit soon, I’ve gotten a lot done around the house these last couple days. Just hauled three bags to the Goodwill, including my 1990s skinny jeans and a cocktail dress I bought to go to the Edgars and never wore because I couldn’t figure out how to deal with a strapless bra. But my crowning achievement came when I found an old external drive while cleaning out my office.

When I plugged it into the laptop, up popped NINE books my sister Kelly and I had abandoned over the last two decades. They ranged from dumb ideas for our series character (Louis Kincaid goes to Nevada and solves a murder at Burning Man!) to a really gruesome attempt at erotica called Tarentella. (Opens with an American woman ah…bobbing for apples under a table at an Italian restaurant). It was like an out-of-body experience reading this stuff. Who WAS this person who wrote this junk?

In the end, it was humbling but really instructive. It made me realize I learned a lot since 1998. So I thought I’d pass along the five writing lessons I got out of this:

1. Never let backstory go on for four pages or more.
2. Please, dear god, please let something happen.
3. Don’t write action scenes that sound like two squirrels fighting a death match on a metal bird-feeder.
4. Don’t let your protag sit there like a stump.
5. When it comes to description, metaphors and setting the scene, try to not mimic some Forties noir hack.

I’m going to show you a couple of our failures here in the hope you won’t let this happen to you. First up is First Page Self-Flagellation, my attempt at romantic suspense, circa 2005.

FRENCH TWIST

I should have shot him. I should have shot him right where he laid, right between the legs.

Let me tell you how close I came. I actually drew the Glock and leveled it at Sid’s nuts. I aimed at the right nut because I really wanted to hit the left one and I knew from experience that my Glock had a sighting problem to the side.

But I didn’t shoot. And Sid’s left testicle – and Sid — lived to see another day.

No, I eased off that trigger, turned around, and walked out of our bedroom, leaving my husband and his secretary Tammy all tangled up in blue percale. It was the right choice. If I had shot him I would have maybe gone to prison, certainly lost my job, and ruined a brand new set Ralph Lauren Southampton Seabreeze sheets.

I made a choice and I walked out. On Sid. On our remodeled home in Garden City Michigan. On my fifteen years on the Westland Michigan police force. On my idea of everything I ever thought I was supposed to be.

It was a choice that saved Sid’s life.

And maybe mine. Though that part is still up in the air.

“Madame?”

I looked up.

“Voulez-vous prendez un boisson?”

I stared.

The waiter rolled his eyes. “You want a drink?”

“Oh, yeah. Vin. Red. Rouge, I mean.”

The waiter slithered away and I went back to contemplating my new perspective on life. At this particular moment, my perspective is a corner table at Le Select cafe, at the intersection of rue l’Odeon and rue Racine, Paris, France. It’s about as far away from my old perspective as you can get.

I’m a cop, you see. Well, I was a cop. And I was a good cop, logging twenty-five years on the mean streets of suburban Detroit, busting kids for illegal skateboarding, rescuing cats from sewers and breaking up domestics at the Dunroven Retirement Village. I never caught a big case, but I was good. Good enough to make it to junior grade Detective but not good enough to make it to anything else that added one more word on my gold badge – a word like sergeant or lieutenant or God forbid, Captain.

There had been rumors that a female had made Detective Captain once, a long time ago. We had heard her name was Zelda Van Meister and she reportedly was shot and killed during a pursuit sometime around 1966, but no one could find any record of it and she wasn’t listed as one of our fallen officers, so no one seemed to know for sure. The old men who had been around in the sixties wouldn’t speak of her, but the women…

To us, she had become a legend and we spoke of her in whispers, as if she was a powerful spirit who continued to hang around the station to give us strength in mysterious ways.

__________________________

I kind of like the opening paragraph. But as you can see, the rest is backstory gone bad. (It goes on for three more pages). NOTHING HAPPENS. And I relied on TELLING about the protag (nameless!) instead of revealing her background and charcter by SHOWING. Here’s how I would write it now: New stuff in red.

FRENCH TWIST REDUX

I should have shot him. I should have shot him right where he laid, right between the legs.

Let me tell you how close I came. I actually drew my Glock and leveled it at Sid’s nuts. I aimed at the right nut because I really wanted to hit the left one and I knew from experience that my Glock had a sighting problem to the side.

But I didn’t shoot. And Sid’s left testicle – and Sid — lived to see another day.

No, I eased off that trigger, turned around, and walked out of our bedroom, leaving my husband and his secretary Tammy tangled up in blue percale. It was the right choice. If I had shot him I would lost my job as a cop on the Westland Police Force, maybe gone to prison and for sure ruined a brand new set of Ralph Lauren Southampton Seabreeze sheets.

I made a choice. It was a choice that saved Sid’s life. And probably mine. Though that part is still up in the air.

“Madame?”

I looked up.

“Voulez-vous prendez un boisson?”

I stared.

The waiter rolled his eyes. “You want a drink?”

“Oh, yeah. A glass of red wine, please.”

The waiter slithered away and I went back to contemplating my new perspective on life. At this particular moment, my perspective is a table at Cafe L’Alibi on rue Duc in what I’ve come to learn is a dodgier part of Paris. But the one-star hotel next door was all I could afford, and it was far from the Eiffel Tower as you can get, And as far away from my old perspective as I needed.

The wine came, but before I could take a drink, I heard a screech of tires and then a scream.

I looked out toward the street just in time to see two men grab a woman. She was fighting hard, screaming loud. One man ripped her hijab off her head, and as they pushed her into the car, I got a good look at her long black hair, whipping arround her terrified face.

I jumped up and ran toward the car. As it raced away, I caught the last three numbers on the plate — 445. It took me a second to realize my hand was poised on my right hip where my Glock used to be holstered.

See the difference? There’s enough backstory to establish her context professionally and emotionally. She’s trying to escape her past and yet she can’t escape what she is — a good cop. The rest of her backstory, including the cool stuff about Zelda can come in a later chapter. 

LESSON NO. 1: Yes, use some backstory to make us care about the protag, but get the story moving as quickly as you can.

Number 2: This is a stand alone we started very early in our writing partnership, before we decided to do a series instead. We were struggling with plot and our agent suggested some thrillers for us to read to get our gears going. Here goes nuthin:

MEMPHIS BLUES (good lord…)

Richard ran down the alley, gun out, breathing hard. The suspect turned left somewhere between the dumpsters or maybe before them. He couldn’t see. A streetlight flickered. Sirens wailed. Somebody yelled something over the radio but the words were static.

He jumped over a fence. The killer—he thought it was the killer—was a blur in a dark jacket, running ahead. The street names didn’t matter. He thought they were near Cowden Avenue or maybe over by Patterson Street.

The radio squawked again. He shouted into it, “I got him!” or “I lost him!”—he wasn’t sure what he said. It was lost in adrenalin.

A car screeched at the corner. Headlights hit the wall and made everything white. Then dark again. Richard slipped on something—ice, water, whatever—and slammed his shoulder into brick. His gun hit the ground. He picked it up, dropped it again, then ran. His heart hurt. He heard footsteps ahead. Or maybe just echoes.

He thought he saw a figure dart behind a stairwell. He pointed his gun and shouted, “ “Freeze!” But the guy didn’t. He ran harder.

The guy turned another corner. Richard followed but there were two turns, and he wasn’t sure which one. He went right. Wrong one — a dead-end alley. He turned back. The killer was gone.

He ran again anyway. His phone buzzed. His partner’s name flashed. He ignored it. A siren wailed closer. A figure darted ahead. He raised his gun. People screamed…people just people in the way. Richard lowered the gun and kept running.

At the next block, he stopped. Nothing. No sound. No one there. Then a door slammed somewhere. Richard ran to it, shouldered it open, went up stairs that smelled like fried food. A flouresent bulb blinked overhead. The hallway twisted left, right, then dead-ended.

He stopped. Listened. Nothing. Just his own breathing and a TV in another room. He looked around. Empty. He holstered his gun. Outside, another siren screamed. He leaned against the wall, dizzy, straining to hear if the killer was above or below or anywhere at all.

He couldn’t tell.

______________________

As we say here often, ACT first and EXPLAIN later. But do you see the problem? The chase goes on way too long, it’s numbingly repetitious, and as noisy as two quarreling squirrels.

We wrote this way back in 1998, and I can’t think of any way to salvage it. Because Richard is a cipher. He lacks personal context. He’s a faceless cop chasing a faceless guy with not a hint of motive. And Richard seems sort of dumb, doesn’t he? His thinking is fuzzy. (“He couldn’t tell…He couldn’t see…”) We confused obtuseness for suspense. Remember Hitchcock’s movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much? This is the man who knows too little.

LESSON NO. 3: Yes, open with a juicy action scene, but find a way to humanize your protag in the process. Make us care about them. And make sure your action choreography is fresh and vivid. 

Here comes number four. Try your best to stay awake.

MIDNIGHT PROWL

Sirens had been screaming all night long. A cop had been wounded in a gun fight on Getwell and Winchester, in the parking lot of the Pink Pony Strip club. A woman had been killed in a downtown alley for twenty-two dollars and a cheap gold crucifix. A fifteen year old boy lay in the morgue, a victim of a hit and run.

Nathan Snow glanced at his watch. It was not yet seven p.m. on a Friday night.

His eyes drifted to the short stack of folders sitting on the edge of his desk, near the Corona typewriter. Two were domestic violence homicides where the husband was caught standing over his wife’s dead body. The third was a thug who shot a rival in front of ten witnesses on Jackson Avenue in broad daylight. And to make his work even easier, all three pled out. Short investigations. No trials.

He sat back in the chair, stretched and yawned, his gaze continuing to drift across the doodled ink blotter, the blue MPD mug that held his pens and pencils, finally stopping on his detective’s shield laying near the phone. It was a beautiful badge, as far badges went. Under the glaring florescent lights, the plating looked like it could be 24K gold. The only other spot of color on it was navy blue, the wavy curve of letters that read Memphis Police.

He reached down for his mug, taking a sip of the cold coffee, the bang of the door drawing his eyes up. Two detectives come into the squad room. Breaths still labored, jackets dusty from a take-down. Neither of them looked his way as they headed directly into George DeMille’s office, the Detective Captain of Homicide. The thin wood door closed hard, shaking the wall.

_______________

I’ve read worse. But I think you know the issue. It’s all thinking, wool-gathering, and gorming out. Yes, we are TOLD that a cop has been wounded, a woman killed, and a kid died in a hit and run. (Past tense). But what are we SHOWN? The protag Nathan sitting at his desk, yawning. So are we. Nathan is doing nothing. Even when two cops come in breathless and dirty from a “take down,” Nathan remains inert. I don’t remember this story well enough to suggest a make-over. But Nathan needs to get some dirt on him fast.

LESSON NO. 4: Never let your protag be a passive observer in your opening chapter(s). Don’t let some nameless spear-carrier steal the spotlight. Show something happening to your hero or at least hint that it will soon.

And that leave us with the final entry. I don’t blame you if you’ve left by now, but I think you might enjoy this one. It will make you feel like a better writer.

MOON OVER MACAO

I landed at night that wasn’t exactly night because the lights on Avenida da Praia Grande keep rinsing the sidewalks with this lemony glare that looked like the reflection off a fish you don’t want to eat.

Mateo Hernández, I thought, you should have stayed in Colón or at least Taos where the street names don’t have accents that make your tongue snag on your teeth. But here I was, boots knocking on the tile of the ferry terminal walkway at the Outer Harbour, surrounded by people pushing plastic suitcases that squeaked like they had small mice trapped inside.

I tried to walk like I knew where I was going—past the Rotunda de Carlos da Maia where buses the color of pea soup ground around in loops that seemed designed to make you dizzy. I cut toward Avenida de Amizade because someone on the boat had said casinos are good for getting lost in, and getting lost sounded like the opposite of being found, because I knew I was being nose-trailed by a person with shoes that slapped the ground with a rubbery insistence. Probably just a kid with a pineapple bun, except the shoes sounded the same every time I stalled at a crosswalk. When I paused to stare into a pawnshop window, where a gold watch glowed like a jaundiced sun, the shoes stopped, too.

I cut right on Rua da Palha, a wide street with scooters and taxis that grazed your hip bones like impatient fish. I kept going past stalls selling almond cookies and beef jerky sheets that looked like shiny red roofs, and I told myself don’t look back. But I looked back anyway because I’m not a hero. That’s when I saw a guy in a gray hoodie with the face of a man who lost a bet with his barber. He looked up. Down. Up. He pretended not to know me, which is easy because he didn’t.

There was another man, smoking under a dragon-stamped awning, and maybe he was watching me, too. Maybe everyone was watching me. The tiles were slippery, and my right heel kissed an old gum spot and stuck for a moment—then I was moving again, past a noodle shop where a woman slapped dough the way an aunt slaps your arm when she wants you to eat more. Her radio chirped a pop song from Cotai that had a chorus like “ai ai ai,” which is exactly how my knees felt.

________________________

There’s more but you’ve suffered enough. It’s tragically bad. Yes, we wrote it. (Kelly has visited Macao several times). But it’s a ringer. We wrote it for a workshop we taught about five years ago, focusing on description, scene setting and metaphors. We wanted our students to understand that it’s vital to world-build your settings, that metaphors can move your readers. We purposely overwrote to make our point. I hope you got as good a laugh out of this as I did.

LESSON NO. 5: Put a rubber band around your wrist. Every time you are tempted to insert a cliche, adjective, adverb or metaphor, snap it. Of course you need modifiers, and a well-turned metaphor at the right moment is a thing of beauty. But less is always more. And when it comes to creating your setting, bring it to life with clarity and without cliches. Not just with random street names you looked up on Google Street View.

And that, my friends, brings me to the end of my sad foray into the past. Like my skinny jeans and my misbegotten cocktail dress, some manuscripts should never be seen in public. I hope you have a few hidden in a hard drive somewhere.

One final thought. When I was re-reading my old stuff, I remembered something I had heard Michael Connelly say. By his late 20s, he had earned his chops as a crime reporter. But he wanted to write a novel. He made a deal with his wife that he would get four nights a week to work on his book.

Fast forward ten years. He had finished two novels. Both unpublished. Because he knew in his bones they weren’t good enough. He started a third called The Black Echo. It got published. It won the Edgar. Last I heard, he was still doing okay in the writing business.

Declutter, crime dogs. Put the past away. But always keep going forward.

I had three secretaries in the twenty-five years I worked in school district administration. My starter secretary was a Texas wife, mother, and grandmother, who spoke with the slow drawl we all recognize here in the Lone Star state.

My second was from New Jersey. She had little accent until someone angered her, or when talking with her family, and especially her mother. That’s when Jersey came out thick and nasal, dropping her “r”s. You know it as “buttah” for butter, and the “a” sound changed in words like “towk” for “talk” or “dowg” for “dog.”

I tried to write “or” as “oa,” but that didn’t work in the above sentence. It does now, though.

Here we pronounce dawg.

She also took great delight in correcting my pronunciation of “pen.” Where I come from, we say “pin” and for the word “aunt,” “aint.” We also put those abandoned Jersy “r”s in words such as “worsh” for “wash,” and “winder” for “window,” and finally, “piller” for “pillow.”

“Open the winder and hang that piller case out to dry. Someone left a wet warsh rag on it all night.”

Thinking about her pronunciations this morning (and my own) brought up a trail of thoughts about how hard it is read someone’s work when they hammer us with local dialogue for an entire novel or short story. I recently read a story so filled with a character’s regional dialogue that reading became a 6,000-word burden.

Note to authors: You’re not Mark Twain writing Huckleberry Finn. I love that book, but the dialogue simply wears me out. Use it early in the story to give us that local flavor, or to identify a character, then use it sparingly throughout the book. I don’t need to be hit over the head with it until my skull is misshapen.

Here’s an example of Jim talking to Huck. “Pooty soon I’ll be a-shout’n’ for joy, en I’ll say, it’s all on accounts o’ Huck; I’s a free man, en I couldn’t ever ben free ef it hadn’ ben for Huck; Huck done it. Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de ONLY fren’ ole Jim’s got now.”

That’s all I need. Now, give me something easier to read.

But back to “pehns,” and writing instruments.

Authors of a certain age began with big fat pencils designed for little elementary school hands.

We progressed to clear, cheap Bic pens which became the norm, but for a period of time, refillable cartridge pens were all the rage in my elementary. I had one of those, but most of the ink went directly from the nib and into highly absorbent Kleenex tissues, which bloomed nice and blue while Miss Russell droned on and on about diagraming sentences.

Because of those psychadelic blooms, and a distinct lack of interest, I still can’t diagram a sentence.

My writing output began with a Smith Corona portable typewriter, though the volume of work between 1970 and 1988 was dismal at best. I made beer money with it, though, typing term papers and reports all during college.

It was a 286 computer that finally set me free, and I haven’t looked back since. They keyboard is my friend, and I’m danged fast on this thing. I used to write newspaper columns on yellow legal pads (when I should have been listening in meetings…do you sense a pattern here?), and typed them into a floppy disk to print out on a tractor drive.

Those were the days.

I can’t write longhand anymore. My handwriting is somewhat akin to that of a doctor with alcoholic shakes, and I can’t make out what I scribbled.

So all I do is make hundreds of notes on small pieces of paper, which I forget or lose until months later. Sometimes those notes make no sense, and I have to wonder what idea had been rattling around at that time.

Others are great, and I’ll find somewhere to plug them in on this WIP. If you can’t read the top scribble, it says, “square-headed cowboy,” and the second is a possible book title, “The Dead Don’t Smile.”

I know authors who write longhand. Bestselling author Marc Cameron, of Arliss Cutter and Tom Clancy fame, and I were at an in-conversation signing a couple of weeks ago and he discussed his method of getting the first draft down with a box of Blackwing 602 pencils and a stack of legal pads. When he’s finished, he types it up and gives the pencil stubs away to fans.

All I would have is a stack of pads full of hieroglyphic scrawls that I couldn’t read no matter how hard I squinted at them with one eye.

But then I got to thinking about signing pens. That’s kind of a big deal to some folks, and here’s a question for the hive mind (and truly the point of today’s post).

What pen is best for signing copies of my work?

Some authors prefer old-school fountain pens, but I can’t keep them flowing. I’ll leave them on the desk for a couple of weeks and then have to soak the ink away. That’s irritating, though I love the looks of those instruments both in hand, and the way they write.

I have half a dozen pen sets that were given to me over the years. One set came from my mother when I graduated college. Now an antique, the pen and mechanical pencil is hand-turned walnut, and I used it for so long the oil from my fingers has stained the wood so deep it glows with a soft polish.

I don’t use it though, because I’d leave it laying somewhere. Note: Now I’m of the age I can’t find things. I went to get them for a photo to use here, and can’t remember where I put them so they wouldn’t get lost.

Sigh.

To make signatures special in my mind, I use pens (pehns) from the 21 Club in New York City. It was the haunt of my original writing mentor, Robert Ruark, (who passed in 1964). The las time I was there, they gave me half a dozen of those black pins (Texas for pens), with gold lettering, and sometimes fans notice when I’m signing and ask about them. That’s fun.

You can’t get them today, though. Covid killed the pre-prohibition club that had been open for over 90 years.

I’ve used a variety of rolling balls, and many almost skidded off the page. I loved them all, but as I said, I lost them and can’t remember which ones were the best.

I do not like signing with Sharpies. Period.

So, to all the authors out there, which do you use as your “signing pehn,” and where do I get one to try out?

It won’t be this one, though. It’s a scary weapon, I think.

By John Gilstrap

I have been blessed with nice offices my entire professional life. Not that I’ve always had an office job, or that my office jobs didn’t take me out into the field for many days out of the year, but when I was in town, in headquarters, I always had a door and walls. In several of my Big Boy jobs, I could look beyond my door to see other toiling in the cubical farm, but I’ve never had to endure the challenge of trying to concentrate in a crowd.

Ninety percent of the time, my door remained open, especially in my true safety engineering days, working at the explosives plant, because the open door encouraged drop-ins. “Hey, John, there’s a problem, I think, down at Building 240 . . .” On the flip side, the open door allowed me to catch in the hallway that person I needed to talk to who was never in his own office.

If my office door was closed–or is closed today–it’s a rare enough event that everyone knows I need to be alone. Back in the day, it could have been because of a personnel issue or a classified project, but now it’s because I’m in the Zone, or on a phone call or doing a YouTube video or Zoom meeting.

It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I like comfort and I like my things. My stuff. Don’t get me wrong. I can be productive in a hotel room or sitting at a bar or in a coffee shop, but to feel at home, I want to feel special in my office space.

The office furniture I’d had for the past fifteen years or so was designed for a different time and for different priorities. My desk had a big cabinet for my tower computer and a slide out tray for my keyboard along with chases for a few cords. If I wanted to write with pen and paper–which I frequently do–I merely slid the keyboard into its slot and worked on the desk space. None of this affected the music I was listening to from the Bose CD player on the bookshelf.

Now, my laptop is my only computer. The keyboard tray is still the proper typing height, but I could no longer slide the tray in without closing the lid on the computer, which was also the source of the music or white noise I was listening to, not to mention the gateway to the internet research I needed to take notes on as I wrote by hand. It just didn’t work for me anymore, and after the move to West Virginia, the furniture didn’t really fit the space.

So, I designed myself a new office.

I like dark colors and I like the look of the hard surfaces. My old office provided just one horizontal surface and it was hard to access if I wanted to do anything by hand,. Here, the wrap-around design allows me to swing my chair around and have immediate access to more desk.

But let’s talks about some of the stuff.

This little guy never had a name but he was my childhood Teddy bear. One of my most prized possessions, he got me through some tough times.

On October 19, 1983 at 3:10pm, a contaminated batch of propellant for the Navy’s Standard Missile Program exploded about 400 yards from my office. The pressure wave blew in my window and collapsed my ceiling. This piece of shrapnel missed me.

While I was researching SIX MINUTES TO FREEDOM, President Bush invited Kurt Muse and me to Houston so that we could interview him for 20 minutes. We stayed for and hour and a half.

I was invited to teach a writing class to the military and civilians at Guantanamo. While there, I was interviewed by the base radio station, where I got a Fidel Castro bobblehead. The station motto is, “Rockin’ in Fidel’s Backyard.”

I’ve been trading Jonathan Grave challenge coins for a while now–long enough to put together a nice collection. Every one of those represents service to the nation or the community. It warms my heart to look at them.

A little daily encouragement from Dad.

And now, finally, time to go back to work.

By PJ Parrish

I was about fourteen when I read The Collector by John Fowles. Probably too young for a novel about a lonely pyschopath who abducts a young woman and keeps her captive in a remote English farmhouse. But in those days, during my peripatetic teenage existance, I was captive in whatever library was nearby. So I read a lot of inappropriate stuff, including most of Nabokov. Even today, novels about captives get to me, in a way other thrillers do not. I don’t mean thrillers wherein a child is kidnapped and the clock is ticking. Or even wherein the victim is long gone and the cold case haunt-hunt is on. I like the books where the captive still has a voice. This is what we have here with today’s First Page Critique. Not merely a captive. But a voice. Let’s read and then talk.

Never Spoken

She was eight years in chains. I think I’ve been in this place, one window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, bed, water, battery radio and a book, about 25 weeks now. She endured eight years in the book. I am a novice.

I’ve talked to no one. Well, I have grunted with; the faceless person that brings me food and water each day, but no talk.

I know why I am here. Money of course. Someone is probably telling some grand story about political values to those who will listen, the press loves that stuff. But I am pretty sure it is money.

And I am fine. No injuries. I sleep at night, read during the day, listen to the news, watch out the window. I am fed fresh food. Better than the packaged crap from Tesco. They probably do this to keep the evidence trail concealed. In the book she said she never knew if they were going to rape her or just kill her. They did neither, but they fed her well. Fresh food, no packaging.

She said rape or “just kill”. She thought killing was better.

I have learned sounds. In the book she says that where senses lack, sound is easiest to be entertained with. She said not to think about the why, as that will drive you crazy. She said make it all a game and play with it. So, I play with my senses. I didn’t at first, but it’s been a half year now. It is a game.

I can hear vehicles come and go outside. There is a door a few rooms away, that gives a creak, just before it latches with a click. Water runs in the wall from above, toilet flush or drain. I am starting to be annoyed by it, as if I am the second-floor tenant in a three-floor walk-up.

I hear the coffee in the morning, a moka pot, he makes good coffee. I hear his footsteps when he is walking to my hatch. I call it the doggie door, big enough to pass things through but too small to climb through unless I starve myself.

And I have the book. A book on being a hostage in first person narrative. A book he gave me without instruction, a guide on how to survive or die, my choice.

_________________________________________

I really like this submission. Yes, it has a couple of issues, including with its opening paragraph, which with a little tweaking can go from good to really tantalyzing. We’ll get to that in a second. But allow me a little rope so we can talk first about this sub-genre of captive narrators. What interests me in these novels is not so much the solving of the crime as the psychological push-and-pull in the narrative (or in many cases dual narratives).

In John Fowles The Collector, we are introduced to the abductor, Frederick Clegg. This first person narrive sets up his chilling, self-justifying thought process and his obsession with his victim Miranda. But part 2 switches to Miranda’s diary, and we see her as a completely different person that Clegg believes her to be. We get her perspective on her own fears, inner demons and, this being John Fowles, her thoughts on class struggle.

{{{{Spoiler alert}}}}

The ending is bleak. Clegg finds her diary and plans a suicide pact. Miranda dies from neglect. After he reads in the diary that she never loved him, he buries her body. The final scene is Clegg in a nearby town, stalking another young girl who resembles Miranda.

Another captive novel I liked is Chevy Steven’s Still Missing. The first person narrator is abducted but the narrative toggles between then and eight years later, where she is trying to re-piece her psyche via psychiatry sessions. (Hence the title, she is still missing).

And so to our submission. Like Chevy Stevens does, our writer relies heavily on sensory details to create tension and gain our sympathy. Here’s Steven’s description of the abduction moment:

I realized he was too close behind me. Something hard pressed into my lower back.
I tried to turn around, but he grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked my head back so fast and so painfully I thought a piece of my scalp would tear off. My heart slammed against my rib cage, and blood roared in my head. I willed my legs to kick out, run— to do something, anything— but I couldn’t make them move.

“Yes, Annie, that’s a gun, so please listen carefully. I’m going to let go of your hair and you’re going to remain calm while we take a walk out to my van. And I want you to keep that pretty smile on your face while we do that, okay?”

“I—I can’t—” I can’t breathe.

Voice low and calm against my ear, he said, “Take a deep breath, Annie.”

I sucked in a lungful.

“Let it out nice and easy.”

I exhaled slowly.

“Again.” The room came back into focus.

“Good girl.” He released my hair.

Everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. I could feel the gun grinding into my spine as he used it to push me forward. He urged me out the front door and down
the steps, humming a little melody. While we walked to his van, he whispered into my ear.

“Relax, Annie. Just pay attention to what I tell you and we won’t have any problems. Don’t forget to keep smiling.”

As we moved farther from the house I looked around— somebody had to be seeing this— but no one was in sight. I could hear small sounds behind me, could tell he was doing something back there, preparing for something. I waited for the click of the gun being cocked. My body shook with terror. Was this it for me? My life was going to end with me facedown in the back of a van? I felt a needle stab into the back of my thigh. I fl inched and tried to reach back to touch it. Fire crawled up my leg.

When she wakes up, again Steven keeps with SENSORY DETAILS: the feel of a scratchy blanket, the faint scent of perfume. A pillowcase in the wrong color. This is what our writer today is doing well — the creak of a door and a click as it closes, the smell of coffee, the sound of running water and a toilet flushing above. The writer is giving us JUST ENOUGH sensory detail so we can FEEL her limited existence. The writer is trying to show us, not tell us, the horror.

Another thing I like about this submission: The mysterious book. It is introduced in the first paragraph, a veritable Chekov’s gun. Chevkov advised other writers: “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.” Our writer tells us book was given to her so she can learn from a previous hostage how to survive. Nice! I have to trust this book will figure prominently in the plot. If not, well, I will sic Chekov’s ghost on you, dear writer.

Now, one last comment before we go to a little line editing. That opening paragraph. It has two terrific teases inbedded in it: The book. And the fact the book’s writer endured her captivity for eight years, and our narrative has a long rough road ahead. A really good set-up.

But if I might, I am going to suggest that the paragraph can be better. It’s a tad confusing as it. I don’t normally rewrite, but I can’t help it here. Maybe something like this:

She was here for eight years. I think I’ve been in this place for only about six months now. I am not chained like she was. I can move around my prison some. One window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, a bed, a water bucket, a battery radio. And one book. The book she left here. The book she wrote. Eight years…

I am a novice.

Now this might not exactly serve your purpose. But the book is THE TELLING DETAIL. I strongly suggest you break it out on its own. I also think the novice line needs to stand on its own, as it goes right to the heart of her mindset.

Speaking of mindsets, I will ask the group: Do you think this needs a tad more emotion in her thoughts? She seems awfully at ease with her situation, given that the writer stresses what is tolerable, rather than terrifying, about it. I get no really gripping sense of terror from our narrator.

A quick line edit, as this is pretty clean. My comments in red.

She was eight years in chains. If you want to keep this detail, you have to tell us if the narrator is also chained. If you mean this symbolically, I don’t think you need it. I think I’ve been in this place, one window, barred and filthy, lights too high to reach, bed, water, battery radio and a book, about 25 weeks now. She endured eight years in the book. I am a novice. Like this paragraph kicker. But note rewrite suggestion.

I’ve talked to no one. Well, I have grunted with; the faceless person that brings me food and water small detail: You said she has water in her “cell.” each day, but no talk. She has a hatch or dog door, no? Can she see anything? A telling detail: what kind of shoes does he wear? Beat-up sneakers or shiny broques hint at something. You need to start building the bad guy in the reader’s imagination.

I know why I am here. Money of course. Someone is probably telling some grand story about political values to those who will listen. The press loves that stuff. But I am pretty sure it is money. You said she has a radio. Surely in 6 months she has heard news of her abduction. Why be so vague? WHO IS MISSING HER? You missed a chance to drop a nugget about her background. If this is about money, she comes from wealth, no? Can you give a hint? 

And I am fine. No injuries. I sleep at night, read during the day, listen to the news, watch out the window. I am fed fresh food. Better than the packaged crap from Tesco. So we are in UK. I only know that cuz I Googled Tesco. Might want to drop another hint. They probably do this to keep the evidence trail concealed. I don’t understand this line. In the book she said she never knew if they were going to rape her or just kill her. They did neither, but they fed her well. Fresh food, no packaging.

She said rape or “just kill”. She thought killing was better. Are you going to quote from the book at all? I think you should as it not only creates tension but HUMANIZES the previous hostage! You might want to start here. Rather than TELL us what she wrote why not begin to show it. Something like:

It was one of the many lines from the book I had committed to memory: “I don’t know if they are going to rape me or just kill me. I now pray it’s the second.”

I have learned sounds. A problem with first person is you have to use a lot of “I” to open graphs;.you have three in a row. Something simple like inversion: Sounds are important, I have found. In the book she says that where senses lack, sound is easiest to be entertained with. She said not to think about the why, as that will drive you crazy. She said make it all a game and play with it. So, I play with my senses. I didn’t at first, but it’s been a half year now. It is a game.

I can hear vehicles come and go outside. Try to make this work harder. Does she hear tires on gravel? The wheeze of an old engine. Can you make her more perceptive via what she hears, that she thinks she’s in the country vs a city? Six months is a long time. WHAT HAS SHE LEARNED??? There is a door a few rooms away,she can’t know that, only that it is nearby that gives a creak, just before it latches with a click. Water runs in the wall from above, toilet flush or drain. I am starting to be annoyed by it, as if I am the second-floor tenant in a three-floor walk-up. Again, she sounds oddly blase about her situation. Annoyed? 

I hear the coffee in the morning, a moka pot, A have a moka; it makes no particular noise so your sensory detail is off here. How can she know it’s a moka? He important misstep here. You said earlier she “grunts” at a faceless person who brings her food. Is this the same person? Make it clear that we are dealing with either one captor or a team. makes good coffee. I hear his footsteps when he is walking to my hatch. I call it the doggie door, big enough to pass things through but too small to climb through unless I starve myself.

And I have the book. A book on being a hostage in first person narrative. A book he gave me without instruction, a guide on how to survive or die, my choice. Again, look at your use of the pronoun “he.” If you are creating a John Fowles-esque bad guy, start to lay out the bread crumb hints more strongly. HE is faceless, soundless — for SIX MONTHS? Think about doing more with HIM. 

So, good work, writer. I think you’re off to a roaring good start. You have a voice. But now think about adding some emotion to your narrator’s voice. Watch for places to insert more details that start building up her background. And, most important, find ways to make your protagonist more than just a food-bearing schlub at the dog door. Right now, all we know is that he makes a darn good cup of coffee. Even this early in your story, he needs to be a threat — to her and for the readers to care about her.