May I offer a suggestion to writers who are struggling with a manuscript?

I’ve talked with a number of folks who tell me they’ve been massaging a book idea for months, if not years.

“I’ve been working on this manuscript for five years and have about twenty thousand words. It feels like I’m going slow, because I keep going back to improve a paragraph here, or rewriting these sentences after I finished Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. And then I read James Lee Burke’s newest novel, and his descriptions are beautiful, so I went back…”

As one who says there are no rules in writing, I wait for Budding Author to finish.

“And because I have to write between taking the kids to school, my job, picking the kids up and hauling them to practice, I kind of get lost where I am and go back and read what I’ve written. That’s so depressing, because everything I have on paper needs work, so I go back and tweak it again –––.”

“Can I interrupt?” I grab Budding Author’s shirt for a good, old-fashioned shake, slap, and backslap.

“Please.”

“I assume you know the absolute basics of building a house.” We’re nose to nose as I continue. “You’ve seen them going up, right?”

“Of course.”

“So what do they first?”

“Draw up blueprints?”

“Good enough. They have an idea of how they want the floorplan to flow.”

“I suppose.”

“Bear with me here…” Slap, slap, slap. “The floorplan comes first, along with mental images of what a builder wants. From there the architect draws the foundation plan, then plumbing, electrical, elevations, everything necessary for construction. The foundation is the first step on site.

Budding Author raises both hands to glory. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

The next shake is for emphasis. “Visualize this. The floorplan is your idea of a story.”

“I can see the whole thing like a movie in my head, I just need to write it down.”

“Well, you see bits and pieces that flow, and that’s just fine, but all that visualization comes together on top of the foundation. Slab or pier and beam, it doesn’t matter, but it must be solid and square.”

“I’m getting the idea!” Budding Author’s eyes brighten even more.

I refust to turn loose of this person’s shirt, lest they quit concentrating. “Next comes the framing. All those wall have to go up to support the roof which is the first step to completion. The roof protects everything under construction below.”

“I thought we were talking about manuscirpts.”

“We are! But here’s what builders don’t do. They don’t finish the living room before moving on. There’s no electrical, plumbing, or sheetrock before the rest of the house. There are no windows when the rest of the house is still nothing more than sticks. No trim, fixtures, or paint. No carpet or flooring while they’re still framing the bedrooms. No furniture, drapes, pictures on the walls, or the installation of that sixty-inch television. Are you getting this?”

“Kinda. So what do the builders do, then?”

“They press on with the whole project as a whole, working forward to completion, and then they add all those final touches.”

“I get it! You’re saying write the damn book to the end and don’t get caught in that whirlpool of going back over and over to make the pages perfect before moving on to the next!” The light bulb goes on over Budding Author’s head and that excited individual dances with glee, tearing away from my grip.

“You’re right. Plow forward until you reach the end and then go back to edit, and edit, which is all the finish work in that house we were talking about.”

Budding Author rushes away to work and I smile in satisfaction, because it took me a good long while to learn how to get the first draft done by pushing forward to follow the story while it’s still fresh in your mind and evolving.

Follow the story. Write the book, then get out the paint and polish.

By John Gilstrap

For fiction to work–for it to feel right–countless tiny elements have to come together in a manner so seamless that readers are unaware that they are being manipulated. Clues have to be planted and red herrings launched so subtly that they don’t draw attention to themselves. And then there’s pacing–the key to providing all the information the reader needs to know in a way that doesn’t stop the story for a data dump. This can get particularly tricky in the middle of the story, when characters have to reveal details to each other that the reader already knows.

Over the years, I have developed a shortcut technique that I call the “em-dash interruption.” Here’s what it looks like:

Jake strolled into the kitchen, still buttoning his shirt. “Smells good in here. Are we–“

 

“You left the water on all last night,” Angie snapped. “Now the roses are overwatered, and they’re not going–“

 

“I’m sorry. I got the call from Aunt Lucy last night and I guess I–“

 

“You’re always sorry, Jake. I don’t ask you to do a lot around here but every time I do, there’s always something . . .”

 

He knew the speech by heart. How could he not? They’d had it twice a day since–

 

“And it has nothing to do with the baby! I know that’s what you think. I know that’s what everyone thinks!”

I just made this up on the fly so you know as much about what’s actually happening in the scene as I do, but the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need complete sentences to tell a story–especially when the details of the dialogue are secondary to the mood of the scene. In the example, we don’t really care what Angie is cooking or what is going to happen to the overwatered roses or even what Aunt Lucy wanted to talk about. What’s important is the fact that this couple is in crisis and there’s a way to convey the crisis in a snappy way.

Note, too, that I used the em dash to interrupt narrative as well as dialogue. I do that all the time. Here’s an example from Zero Sum, the Grave book to be released next month:

They weren’t upset that his boy had been killed—no, they didn’t give a shit about that. If it had been the original team of agents, they would have—

            Wait. Why weren’t they the original team of agents? 

Here, we have a character working through a problem in his head, asking questions, testing theories, and the thought process leads the character to have a lightbulb moment (the em-dash interruption of his own thoughts) that leads him to ask a question that is critical to the plot.

I’ve used the same technique to introduce a startling moment for the character. Again, making it up on the fly:

Charlie needed to find himself another job, something better suited to his intellect. Security guard money wasn’t bad but goodness gracious, all he did was wander hallways and rattle doorknobs. Same doorknobs every hour, every night, and always locked. They could hire a trained monkey to do this gig. Hell, they could hire a trained–

 

What was that? Something made a noise from behind the

Here, we take a couple dozen words to anchor the reader with a character and then zing ’em with an em-dash interruption to jump the story along.

So, what do you think? Does this make sense? The blog entry is a bit short today, because I figured I covered the topic, and–

Wow!

By PJ Parrish

This is a story about treasure hunting.

I am a sucker for estate sales. We have a lot of them in summer up here in northern Michigan. My town, Traverse City, is awash in splendid old Victorians left over from the days of the logger barons. And we have hundreds of listing barns crammed with family flotsam.

Among the cool stuff I’ve gathered: A set of ten Baccarat champagne coups (eight bucks) Two circa-Forties prints of gaudy cockatoos from a Miami Beach hotel (how they got in a Michigan basement I can’t guess). A Paint-by-Numbers of a naughty can-can dancer. A pathetic sock monkey (I have a huge collection, the uglier the monkey the better). And a dirt-encrusted mantel clock from the Fifites that keeps perfect time.

But yesterday, I struck gold. An old antique store was going out of business here. You know the place — an old barn stuffed rafters-to-basement with jade jewelry, molting hats, rusty New Era potato chip tins, lethal looking pitchforks and creepy one-armed baby dolls.

I spotted a handsome looking leather book. It had heft and smelled like rotting candy.

A digression: That great old book smell? You’re not imagining it. It comes from the chemical breakdown of the books after they’re exposed to light and heat for a long time. The break down releases volatile organic compounds that create a palette of those old book smells — mainly almonds and vanilla but also toluene, which produces coffee overtones.

That old book smell has an official name — bibliosmia. In other words, what you’re smelling is the scent of a book slowly dying.

I had to save this one. The title on the spine was The Omnibus of Crime. The name was Dorothy Sayers. It is a compilation of detective stories she gathered together. It is pristine, first edition. I Googled it on my phone and it goes for about $300 among collectors. It bought it for $20.

It wasn’t until I got home that I found a leaflet stuck inside. It is the original Book-of-the-Month Club News. Sayers’ anthology was the August 1929 selection. Its price was $3. I think I got a bargain.

The book is over 1,200 pages and many of the stories are by names lost in the haze of our genre’s history. But there are some famous folks — Poe, Doyle, Stoker, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce. Did you know Aldous Huxley wrote a short story called “The Giocanda Smile”? From that story:

Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth from the narrow barrel of her mouth. She was a machine-gun, riddling her hostess with sympathy.

The book is arranged historically, from the seminal roots of our genre in Latin, Greek and “oriental” primitives, logs through the “modern” contributions of Poe and Doyle, lurks through the shadows of vampires, witches and ghosts and ends with a section titled “Tales of Cruelty and Blood.”

Can’t wait to get to that part.

But I’ve just cracked the book, and first lingered in Sayer’s inspired introduction. I have to share my favorite passage from that intro, wherein Sayers argues why detective stories are, in the words of the Book of the Month Club editors, “sufficiently dignified”:

There is one respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle and end. A definite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death. It has the rounded (although limited) perfection of a troilet.

Okay, I looked up a couple words for you:

Aristotelian: Coming from the philosophy of Aristotle, an emphasis upon deduction and upon investigation of concrete and particular things and situations.

No argument from us on that, right?

Troilet: A poem form, invented by 13th century French minstrels. It has — get ready folks — eight lines, with the first line being repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and rhyming with third and fifth, while the second line serves as a refrain in the eighth and final line and rhymes with the sixth. Most commonly written in iambic tetrameter but almost as often in iambic pentameter.

Let’s just say that Sayers is trying to tell us that a good detective story has a nice structure.

I can’t tell you much more about my book yet. The editors of the Book-of-the-Month-Club news are sort of stuffy and borderline snide in their introduction, burbling on about how the English write better detective stories than Americans, that the Russians had a влюбился on Sherlock Holmes and that Sayer’s collection is “an agreeable summer’s afternoon reading.” (Is that like a Beach book?). They finally, at the end, loosen their man buns and concede:

“But come! The Omnibus of Crime is intended to be enjoyed. We can think of no book that offers so sure and innocent a nirvana for an active mind.”

I guess that means they thought it was sorta kinda okay to like detective stories. I’d rather you listen to what Dorothy Sayers has to say about our genre. Her words are as relevant today as they were in 1929.

Man, not satisfied with the mental confusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos….The fact remains that if you search the second-hand book stalls for cast-off literature, you will find fewer mystery stories than any other kind of book. Theology and poetry, philosophy and numismatics, love-stories and biography, [man] discards [these books] as easily as his old razor blades. But Sherlock Holmes is cherished and read and re-read, till the covers fall off and the pages crumble to fragments.

Keep searching those second-hand book stalls. We endure, crime dogs.

влюбился = Russian for man crush

So, Hopeful Author, you came up with a great plot and over the course of several months, or years, you’ve hammer out 30,000 words in fine order. With the first act written, polished over and over, and massaged into a form you can live with, the next phase begins.

It’s the pesky second act that gives me headaches, and not because it’s hard to write, but because the whole world seems to slow down, and the words come slow. You might have experienced it also, when the universe conspires to keep you from writing, and all those carefully crafted characters develop minds of their own and refuse to move, lounging around, drinking coffee and puffing cigarettes.

“I can’t think of anything to write when I get to that point!”

This was a comment I heard the last time I talked with a group of writers. The young woman’s voice was full of tension, and frustration.

“I have a suggestion.”

The assemblage waited, pens poised…and in one instance, a woman held her fingers over the home keys on her laptop’s keyboard.

“Start a new chapter and throw a couple of your characters together. Start a conversation, or give them a nudge, and see what happens.”

Raised hands.

“That’s all?”

A voice came from the back. “What if it doesn’t go anywhere? I will have wasted those hours.”

“If nothing else, you’ve finished an exercise in creative writing. Delete those sentences, or pages, and give it another shot.”

Frowns. Eyebrows came together in dark lines over hooded eyes.

“Does that work?”

“It does for me, and remember, there’s nothing concrete about creative writing.” I quoted Miss Adams, my high school English teacher who still whispers advice in my ear on occasion. “Put words on paper, and those words will lead to others.”

Another question from under a raised hand sent us off into a new direction. “I keep working on this scene, but it won’t develop.”

“Maybe you’re trying to make your characters do something that’s not necessary at that time. It could be you’re wanting them to go against their fictional codes. Listen to your subconscious. Stop trying to make them do what you want, and approach it from another direction.”

“I didn’t know there would be so many complications.”

“None of us did when we started out.”

I experienced a similar lag this week. I finished the first act of a novel contracted with a new publisher, satisfied with the plot and excited about where the story was going. Then it happened. Act II refused to move.

I went back and read those pages and realized I hadn’t utilized a character to her full extent. It was time for her to walk on stage. We needed to hear her story. Putting her into an uncomfortable situation with little support from anyone she knew, I watched Victoria’s back stiffen with resolve and she moved the story forward in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

The story is rolling along today, and the tension is rising as fast as this summer’s temperature. Don’t let that second act slow you down. Once you’re through to the other side at around 60,000 words, it’ll be a downhill race to the conclusion.

Write away!