by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

This week, my big-boy job took me to Islip, New York, where I was to deliver the keynote address for the Long Island Chpater of the American Society of Safety Engineers. I flew into Islip though a circuitous, cost-savings route that ate up nearly as much time as if I had decided to drive, and when I arrived at the airport, I confess that I wasn’t feeling all that well.

I checked into my Hilton Garden Inn–not a bad chain overall, but certainly not high-end–around 6:30, grabbed a very light dinner and then just settled into my room early. By 9:15 or so, I was asleep. Then, at 4:03, I was awake. Oh, God, was I awake.

I’ll call it a north-south stomach flu, for lack of a better term–and to convey the both-ends nature of the malady without invoking too much unpleasant detail. The good news is that all deposits were made in their appropriate recepticle, but I tell you, it was close. Thus began 8 of the most miserable hours I can remember.

It was so bad that I did something I’ve never done before: I skipped my speech. There just was no way. Standing was enough of a challenge. The thought of trying to deliver a speech–well, that would have ruined everyone’s morning.

Instead, I slipped the Do Not Disturb sign over my door knob, and I stayed in my room, where I tried desperately to sleep, while my body insisted on dehydrating. Then, around noon, the demon left me. I was exhausted–and empty, Lord knows–but my insides had settled. It was like flipping a switch.

But I was still in the Hilton Garden Inn in Islip, NY, where there’s no such thing as room service at midday. That meant getting dressed and getting into my car just to find something bland to eat, and something soothing to drink. There sure are a lot of Italian restaurants in Islip, NY. And delis; both of which I would have welcomed on any other day, but I was on a quest for toast. Or Saltines. I settled for a plain bagel.

I’m sure there are many things that are far worse than being tummy-sick away from home, but this week I had a hard time thinking of any of them. There wasn’t even anyone there to attend my pity-party. The good news is that I’m feeling better, I’m back home, and this is Friday!

So, what about y’all? Got any poop-n-puke stories you’d like to share?

By John Ramsey Miller

By John Ramsey Miller

With the most recent lawsuit against J.K. Rowling for situational and character theft, I’ve been thinking about the theft of story ideas or characters.

My novel THE LAST FAMILY was once obviously plagiarized. Lots of people who were unfortunate enough to notice it and many called for me with instructions to get a lawyer and sue their pants off. It’s been a few years since that happened, and truthfully I don’t even remember the name of the series. I only remember that it was another tossed-together-lackluster-ensemble cop show on TNT or some other cable network. I only watched it because someone who was incensed recorded it and sent me the VHS. The fact is that I didn’t consider suing, or even much care. I was absolutely astounded that the teleplay author was so devoid of ideas, and desperate, that he lifted parts of my novel, and didn’t even change the main character’s name. The character’s mother was both amorously inclined and inappropriate with her young son, Martin Fletcher, in my book as he was in the TV show. Racy stuff and one for which I received much grief from prudish readers at the time. The TV series was that was such a stenched-up load of crab crap that it died mercifully after one ho-hum season. I doubt there was one letter of protest. I know I did not generate one.And I adore bad television. I chose to see it a form of homage to what I believe was a decently written first novel.

There is thievery in the world––in every field of endeavor––but in thruth most of it is accidental or coincidental. Two people can have the same idea and write very similar characters, situations, descriptions, inventions, etc… There is an old saying––perhaps an English author of plays said it best––that there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s true. Could I write a book about wizards without wands, spells, oddballish characters? No. In England people use trains to travel, so wouldn’t it follow that young witches and wizards going off to boarding schools in England might involve train travel? Of the thousands of authors who’ve written about the subject over the centuries, how many have put wizards and train travel together, or flying on brooms, or casting spells, or called one by a certain name like Megamorte or Lord Infamil, or Grunhildabrande Lewis-Smithe Jones?

If the offending teleplay author had made my work better, I’d have been more flattered, but he merely had a character with the same name as mine and the same “unsavory”boy-meets-mama backstory that made him the horrific individual he became, and he dropped the poor man into an “alien-to-me” story that sucked frozen honey through a paper straw. I suspect the “idea” for the character and backstory came to the author via a “I’m-just-brainstorming-here” producer who’d read my book (or more likely heard about it from someone who had talked to someone who’d read some studio-reader’s coverage of it) and suggested the writer(s) incorporate his creative inspiration into the screenplay. In my experience, in dealing with Hollywood, the actual story and finished film is far less important than the placement of the credit and the checks it generates before hitting the screen. Writers can and will destroy perfectly good stories by taking even a modicum of direction from producers whose creativity runs to keeping up with which vehicle or cell phone is “in” this week. I can’t adequately portray in words how I feel about the integrity of producers in Hollywood. I’ll just say that, with a few shining examples to the contrary, that superficiality, betrayal, and limitless greed is the lifeblood of the film industry.

We are all telling variations of the same few stories that other people have ben telling since they grew imaginations and needed something to do to keep people gathered around the fire, or the children quiet, or keep the crowd from throwing heavy fruits at the stage. It is invariable that someone will step on your toes, or you on theirs without intending to do so, or knowing it is happening. Everything we see, hear, read, taste, or feel is shared by others and imagination is not exclusive or running on a separate and unique channel. I suppose I could have sued the producer or teleplay author, but that would mean I lost something real, and I didn’t see it that way. If that had ben a film that made millions, would I feel differently? No. That doesn’t mean I might not have been more tempted to sue since it would generate sales of my book for comparison purposes. I think the world is lawsuit happy, and I also think there are too few people with ideas and integrity.

Come on, I’ll have more ideas and better ones, I’m sure. I get upset when one of my children or grandchildren is sick or in trouble, but seeing my words or ideas regurgitated somewhere else isn’t worth a second thought. If someone wants to steal my words or thoughts, that is their ethical problem, not mine.

As authors, we can only write our stories and characters as we imagine them, and, heaven help us, if someone else out there imagined parts of it into their own, that’s just the way it is. I say get over it and go write another character or story worth somebody actually stealing because they can’t do what I can, or are too lazy to turn on their thinker. Life is filled with disappointments and heartache, and how you deal with them is what makes you who you are.

I received a list of questions the other day from a student in a PhD program that requires research into the nature of crime fiction and its place in modern culture. I gave him my answers to the questions, but I thought it might be interesting to expand his data base by seeking additional input from Killzoners. I present the questions here exactly as I received them.

Pick and choose as you wish:

1. What is the appeal of crime writing?

2. What do you think about our current culture of fear and how crime writing is responding to it?

3. Is the success of crime fiction an indication that we haven’t gotten beyond the genre’s infant years? Do the Victorian duplicity and its repressed voyeurism persist in the genre’s theory that every private life has a story of secret shame and trauma to tell?

4. Is crime writing about the healing quality of story-telling in the tradition of the shaman trickster tale? Does it offer consolation to readers touched by the corruption of crime – does taking up the pen offer the troubled writer an alternative to taking up the pint?

5. Is the post 80s resurrection of the crime novel another phenomenon of our contemporary sentimentality for the ‘noble savage’ in popular culture? Do we admire the inwards looking detective because life is confusing and all we have is hope that the deepest ‘I’ cannot be civilised, that this authenticity is incorruptible?

6. Would you agree that what most defines the genre are not its formal conventions, but rather the epic perseverance of its protagonists in a world where there is no healing, only constant movement towards it? Is crime fiction stoicism with a fancy for spectacle?

7. Does the detective writer sit in the same chair at the table of literature as a transvestite cousin at a family gathering? If you’re not 100% sure what a transvestite is as maybe you’ve led a sheltered life then you can continue reading this on Shemale hd. Do political correctness, tolerance and open-mindedness invite, indulge, excuse and pardon him, while his fabulous hat is studiously ignored?

Well, there you go, folks. Have at it.

Recently on one of the online writer’s forums, a new author asked the question: How can I learn to write like . . . ? And they named a few of their favorite authors.

Of course, the standard answer came back right away: Read, write, repeat. Someone else suggested that the author reread their favorite author’s book but concentrate on “seeing” the text rather than just reading it. There was the suggestion of creating an outline of their favorite book after they finished it. Still another said to listen to the audio book version while reading along on the hard copy. Note: buy the unabridged audio CD. Although, come to think of it, there is an advantage to listening to the abridged version while you read along; you’ll see how much can be removed and still make the story work. I often wonder that if they are able to create an abridged version of a book, why didn’t the author take all that stuff out to begin with? Was it really needed? But that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway, there were the expected comments that said, you’re you, not those other authors. Write your own story, not one that sounds like theirs. Just put your butt in the chair and start writing. Many suggested reading books on the art of writing such as On Writing by Stephen King and The Elements of Style by William Strunk. I would of course suggest Plot & Structure or any of my friend Jim Bell’s excellent instructional books on writing.

These are all great pieces of advice. But the original question was how someone learns to write like someone else. I believe you can teach skill and mechanics but not creativity. Even though everyone is creative to a certain extent, a true artist must be able to combine life experience and acquired skills with natural born talent. The talent is either there inside or not. And the ones that can nurture that natural talent and combine it with the lessons of life along with the mechanics of the trade have a chance at becoming artists, or at least artistic.

But to help beginning writers try to answer that often-repeated question, I propose a simple but useful exercise anyone can do. For instance, if you are an aspiring fantasy writer who wants to learn how to write like JK Rowling, I suggest you retype one of her books. Open to page one and start typing the words into your computer exactly as they are composed on the page. What this will do is force you to "see" and “feel” the sentence and paragraph construction. It will make you aware of proper punctuation and grammar from a professionally edited book. And you will begin to feel the rhythm and pacing of the story more from the viewpoint of the writer than the reader. The physical act of recreating the text becomes an extension and enhancement of merely reading the work. Look at it as an exercise to build your writing muscles just as you would perform a workout at the gym to increase body tone and strength.

If nothing else, it will help you as a new writer to acquire proper writing skills directly from the voice and style of your favorite author. But what I predict will happen is that eventually you will break away from typing the book and begin to “see” your own story forming. It might take 20 pages or 200 pages. But if the creative gene is really there, the juices will start flowing, and your story will take flight.

Download FRESH KILLS, Tales from the Kill Zone to your Kindle or PC today.

By John Ramsey Miller

A female editor once told me that I wrote female characters better than most women authors she had worked with. My agent said the same thing, and I was flattered by it. Great compliments, coming from two knowledgeable women. I don’t know how well I actually write female characters, but I’ve known a lot of women, and hope I understand a little something about the opposite sex. Most of what I know I learned the hard way, which is how I learn most things, and I keep on learning as much as I can about my craft. Knowing people and human behavior is the part you never stop learning, and you have to understand individuals to understand relationships, which are always complex and interesting. I have been blessed to have known a lot of strong women and so most of the women I write are reflections of them. But in the course of publishing seven novels I’ve yet to have any woman ask me why I am qualified to write female characters. I have also written a lot of black characters and I am “porcelain” white and have never to my knowledge been anything else.

I recently heard a segment on NPR centered around a book a female author had written that was set in the deep South during desegregation. Just so happens I was right there at the exact time. This particular panel was discussing the fact that it was amazing that the author was white but had dared write from a black female character’s point of view. (I’m paraphrasing here from memory). A black man (I only assume he was black but it was radio) on the program said that in this particular case it didn’t bother him much as he was able to set aside the fact that the author was white and get into the story. The author obviously got it. Well, of all the audacity. It seems it was forgivable in this case because she did such a good job telling the story from that perspective and she got the dialog right enough to squeak by. Hell, I don’t see why a black author couldn’t write from a Klansman’s point of view if they wanted to, although I can’t imagine why he or she would. A writer writes from his or her experience and imagination based on his observations, and imagining the perspective of someone other than yourself is the stock and trade of a good author. James Patterson, a white man, writes Alex Cross, who isn’t, with perfect pitch. Why does an author have to be something to write it? Or why does he or she have to be specifically something to understand the character’s perspective? You don’t have to be a homosexual to write a homosexual character any more than you have to be a woman to write from the viewpoint of one. I get tired of hearing “You can’t write that!” “The Hell, I can’t! You just don’t want to read it.”

Censorship comes in many forms, and I hate it in any form it takes. I don’t write to hurt feelings, but characters are characters and I write what I see and hear. If I want to write a gay detective, which I don’t at the moment, I’ll write one without having to sleep with other men to qualify. If I want to write a lesbian cop, I can do it and I imagine I can do it convincingly. If I’m not comfortable doing so it will show in the work. Most of us are expected to write with kid gloves on and steer clear of certain subjects, and we all hate it as creative people have to. The market decides what it will or won’t accept and those rules change so frequently that we can’t keep up with them. Political correctness has less than nothing to do with a good story or the characters that we choose to depict.

Do you have to be a black person in Mississippi not write about what it is like being black in Mississippi in the 60s? If you saw it from a white boy’s perspective, you should still know what the black person was seeing and thinking. You don’t have to have been shot to know what being shot feels like, or give birth to imagine that mixture of pain and joy. You don’t have to have sipped from a “Colored Only” water fountain to know what that degrading experience felt like. If you watched “Miss Jane Pittman,” you felt her bravery, her pain, and the sheer determination it took to go to one marked “White Only” and how delicious the water tasted and how huge a step that was for her. I can write that, and so can you.

Let’s get real people. No area of writing should be off limits to anyone and it shouldn’t be. As artists, we owe our readers as good or great a book as we can produce, and that is the only limit we should be expected to place on our work. How many of you have had an editor or agent turn you away from what you wanted to write with a simple, “You can’t write that.”

by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Ever noticed that naysayers are a dime a dozen? Everywhere you go, there seems to be an unending supply of pessimists, doubting Thomases, bear-marketers and curmudgeons who seem to shine brightest when they can wallow in predictions for bad times. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember, but in recent years, the publishing world seems to have been inundated with pessimists, one half-empty glass at a time. “The book is dead,” we hear. “No one cares about the written word anymore.”

I’ve recently come to view these laments as the panicked cries of old-schoolers who see change on the horizon. I’ve known a lot of editors in my time, but I can’t think of a single one who was technologically on the edge. For them, the definition of a book begins and ends with the notion of ink on paper, classically bound in either paper or cloth. Looking out ten years, I’d say those folks have good reason to be fearful.

Or, God forbid, they could adapt.

According to an article in this week’s Publisher’s Weekly, ebook sales at B&N accounted for 3% of total book sales last year, up from less than 1% the year before. The absolute numbers might not be staggering, then the trend certainly is. Run the figures in your head, and you quickly see that the old-fashioned brick-and-mortar bookstore represents a pretty regressive business model. (As I blogged last week, even I, one of the Luddite hold-outs, got a Kindle; and if I can be converted, anyone can.)

For the sake of argument, let’s proclaim the book as we currently know it to be on a terminal course. (I personally believe that there will always be a vibrant market for bound books, but that $25 cover price for what will essentially be a reproduction antique will be a hard sell.) On the day the last printing press were to stop, the market for stories would still be thriving. People would still be reading.

How do I know? Watch how the members of the younger generation entertain themselves. They’ve got their iPhones and their social networking, but what are those, essentially, but words? When I was a kid, we rotted our minds by watching endless hours of bad television (“My Mother the Car,” anyone?). These days, television viewership is plummeting like a comet as kids turn to other forms of storytelling. Even gaming is storytelling. That’s what we do, folks. And with each new Internet fad comes new opportunities for people with imaginations to shine.

If J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyers have proven nothing else, it’s that the new generation craves entertainment on the page. And if the scourge of vanity presses has proven nothing else, it’s that quality still matters.

While the $25 hardcover is great for the publisher, I don’t see how it can sustain itself against the lower-priced competition. As the hardcover goes away, so does the stigma of the paperback original, and the hugely different distribution systems for the two formats. My crystal ball shows this being a heavy blow to authors who’ve grown used to 7-figure advances, but a tremendous opportunity for the vast sea of writers formerly known as midlist.

I think the publishing business is today where the transportation business was in the 1920s. The fact that automobiles rendered horse-drawn carriages irrelevant didn’t mean that people stopped traveling; it just meant that modern convenience trumped tradition. I assume that buggy wheel manufacturers who adapted to making automotive wheels did pretty well, even as the whip manufacturers found themselves with way fewer options. Carrying the analogy even further, remember that Henry Ford made a bloody fortune by producing a product that was specifically priced to be affordable.

What do you think? Do you see the publishing world imploding on itself, or do you agree with me that this is a great time to be a writer?

by John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

I’ve mentioned before that I have a day job with a trade association in Washington, DC, and I’ve alluded to the fact that the job keeps me on the road a lot. I might not have been clear, however, on the definition of “a lot.” During the month of February, for example, I have not spent a single day in my office–every day has been on the road somewhere. The first two weeks of March aren’t looking much better, although a chunk of that will be spent at Left Coast Crime in Los Angeles.

I get to spend most weekends at home, though, and I genuinely love what I do. Airports, airplanes and hotel rooms provide ample opportunity to take care of the writing side of my life, so for the most part, when I’m home, I’m there in both body and spirit. Good times.

Reading, books, on the other hand, is a pain in the neck when you have to schlep books on and off of airplanes. But there’s a solution.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, I finally broke down and bought a Kindle, and I’m already in love. Each morning, for the bargain basement price of $11 a month, the Washington Post is delivered directly to my briefcase, where it takes a spot right next to the books I’ve purchased, and one outstanding manuscript that a friend of mine asked me to take a look at. It’s thinner than a children’s book, weighs virtually nothing, takes up no space in my briefcase, and holds more books than I have probably read in my entire life. I’ve also subscribed to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and heaven knows what else I’ll find enticing.

Really, the Kindle is the coolest toy in years. And yes, in case you’ve got a good memory, I am in fact the man who wrote an entry on this very blog about a year ago entitled, “Kindle Schmindle.” I am man enough to admit that I was way wrong before.

So, with that side of my brain and persona slogging ever so slowly into the 21st century, I now confess that the other side–the creative one that tells stories–is moving back toward the 19th century. I’m handwriting my manuscripts more than I ever have, fountain pen to quality paper. I think I probably wrote 50% of Hostage Zero (July, 2010) by hand, and thus far, I’ve written every word of my next novel by hand. Barnes & Noble sells really nice leather-bound lined journals made of quality paper, and I take one with me wherever I go. No batteries to run out, no switch to turn off during takeoffs and landings, and a solid, tactile connection to my writing. It could be a passing fad for me, or it could be the future; only time will tell. For now, though, it feels right.

Sooner or later, of course, I have to type what I have written into a submittable form, and when I do that, I make many, many changes and corrections, so I don’t want to overblow the intent here. Still, it occurred to me as I put down my Kindle and picked up this computer for the first time to write something other than an email, that even as things change on the surface, maybe important things never change much at all.