I was teaching a writing class a couple of years ago and during a break, one of the middle-aged students came up to me with a question.

“Can we talk about the draft?”

“It sent a lot of people to Canada on extended vacations when I was fresh out of high school.”

“How long do you work on a draft?”

“Oh, that. Until I get through it.”

Budding Writer paused, thinking. “I mean, how long does it take you to get to the end?”

“That depends on Life. If everything lines up and I can really sit down and work, I can get a first draft finished in about three months, and the way I do it, the manuscript is pretty polished by the time I reach the end. I once wrote a draft in six weeks, but that’s rare.”

She wrote that down in her notebook, “Do you outline?”

“No.”

“I have to.”

“Well, you and I work differently. I sit down and put my fingers on the keys and start writing. The story unfolds, and I go with it through that entire session, however long it might be, fifteen minutes, an hour, or even three or four hours. Then the next morning I read through what I wrote the day before, and use that as a launch pad for the current day’s work. I do that every time until I type, The End.”

“What if your writing group has a suggestion about those pages and you have to go back and change them?”

“I don’t have a writing group, and you really don’t have to go back and change anything. Those are suggestions.”

Two deep lines appeared between Budding Writer’s eyebrows. “You just write all by yourself.”

“Yep. All alone.”

“My problem is that I keep changing things after my group makes suggestions, and I find that I spend weeks on one chapter.”

“Have you finished your first draft?”

“No.”

“How long have you been working on this manuscript?”

“About three years.”

“My suggestion is to simply sit down and finish your first draft without stopping for any more edits.”

“But….”

“Right. Butt. Put your butt in the seat and finish your first draft. In my opinion, you can come back and re-work those chapters that might be giving you trouble. You see, there’s no right or wrong way to do this. You have to find what works for you. I promise, there’s no formula, because if there was such a thing, everyone would be on the bestseller list with every book.”

“So is that’s how it’s done?”

“That’s how I do it.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking writers groups. I know many readers of this blog, and several of those who post each week, belong to such groups that offer much-needed support in writing, or simply in providing the camaraderie to discuss this strange, wonderful business we’re in, but it’s not for me. I just want to write.

Budding Writer needed that support, but it seemed as if she was caught in a loop of well-intentioned suggestions that tightened like a boa constrictor named Self Doubt until she couldn’t move beyond those few chapters.

Your first draft is just that. It’s a firehose to some as it pours out in a great torrent of words, a trickle to others as they struggle to craft that perfect sentence, but writers need to reach the end, to get it all down, however full of errors, typos, or plot kinks. Once it’s done, then you can go back and add all that’s necessary to streamline and fill out the story and make the manuscript readable. Then edit with a vengeance, but the completion of that first draft is absolutely necessary both physically and psychologically.

I understand Budding Writer’s issue. She likely juggled a job, husband, kids, dogs, bills, friendships and any combination thereof, including Life it’s ownself, putting down a few words here and there and not seeing the continuity of her work as a whole.

Then that chapter, or collection of chapters and all those suggestions began to gnaw at her and she needed to get it just right before she could move on.

It just doesn’t work that way for me. I wrote my first novel over a few fitful years, lost it to an electronic hiccup, and started over to recreate the whole thing from memory. Maybe that’s where my writing regime came from, because I hammered that second draft out within about a year.

Today I begin with fingers on the keys and get that rough draft down as the story unfolds in my mind. I follow it, pounding away at the keys as the characters develop and the story moves forward, not worrying about little details, until I get to the end.

I did all that alone, but after my first novel was released, I learned of an annual event called NaNoWriMo, which translates to National Novel Writing Month, which is sponsored by a nonprofit organization that “promotes creating writing around the world. Its flagship program is an annual creative writing event in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November.”

I like the idea, though I never signed up on their website, but the premise is solid, in my opinion, and it boils down to one true thing.

Sit down and write the damned novel!

Better yet if you can do it in a month. Fifty-thousand words translates into those old mass market paperbacks of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. Think Louis L’Amour, Micky Spillane, and even more recently when Nicholas Sparks wrote a short novel that did pretty well, coming in at 52,000 words. The title was The Notebook.

Robert James Waller’s blockbuster novel, The Bridges of Madison County also came in at 52,000 words. Hummm, is there a connection here?

Take a look at this list of 50,000-word novels that I lifted from WikiWrimo, they aren’t Stephen King-size doorstops, but they’ve all been pretty successful.

• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyby Douglas Adams (46,333 words)
• The Notebookby Nicholas Sparks (52,000 words)
• The Red Badge of Courageby Stephen Crane (50,776 words)
• The Great Gatsbyby F. Scott Fitzgerald (50,061 words)
• The Apostle Paul’s Epistles from the Bible (43,293 words. 50,190 if you count Hebrews.)
• Lost Horizonby James Hilton
• Shatteredby Dean Koontz
• Fight Clubby Chuck Palahniuk
• Of Mice and Menby John Steinbeck
• Slaughterhouse-Fiveby Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• The Invisible Manby H. G. Wells
• Gadsby: A Story of Over 50,000 Words Without Using the Letter “E”by Ernest Vincent Wright
• As I Lay Dyingby William Faulkner (56,695 words)
• The Giverby Lois Lowry (43,617 words)
• Speakby Laurie Halse Anderson (46,591 words)
• A Separate Peaceby John Knowles (56,787 words)
• Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury (46,118 words)

My own novels come in at 90,000-100,000 words, but like Mr. King, I get kinda wordy as the story progresses and the action builds. But here’s the bell I’m trying to ring. Your first draft does not have to be long. Hit that 50,000 word draft. Now you have a novel.

Then go back if you want and expand it with character development, settings, new plot twists that might occur to you, and all those seasonings that make a wonderful, successful book.

Now, put your butt in the seat and get to writing that first draft until you plow through to the end. Fifty-two thousand might be your lucky number.

By Elaine Viets

Feeling discouraged, writers? Tired of papering your walls with rejection slips?
When I feel down, I turn to the good book. Not THE good book, but a good book by Elaine Borish called “Unpublishable! Rejected writers from Jane Austen to Zane Grey.”

If you’ve been rebuffed by a publisher, you’re in good company. So was Agatha Christie. Borish says it took Dame Agatha four years to find a publisher for her first novel, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” – and then it sat on a desk for another eighteen months. The publisher suggested some changes to the ending, and Agatha made them. Belgian detective Hercule Poirot finally made his debut in 1920.
Agatha Christie wrote more than ninety titles, and “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” is still in print.
Beatrix Potter, the creator of Peter Rabbit and Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail, was a hybrid author. Her “Peter Rabbit” was rejected by six publishers. She used black-and-white sketches, since she was worried that color pictures would make the book too expensive for children. Beatrix finally self-published “Peter Rabbit.” It went through two printings.
In 1901, Beatrix submitted Peter Rabbit again, and the traditional publisher politely rejected it: “As it is too late to produce a book for this season, we think it best to decline your kind offer at any rate for this year.”
The next time Beatrix submitted the book, she had color illustrations. The first edition sold out before the 1902 publication. By 1903, sales were multiplying like, well . . . rabbits. She’d sold 50,000 copies, and lived hoppily ever after.

Dorothy L. Sayers’ books were definitely not for children. “Whose Body?,” the first mystery by the rebellious Oxford scholar, was rejected by several UK publishers for “coarseness” in 1920. Today, the risque parts wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The novel opened this way:
“Oh, damn!” said Lord Peter Wimsey.
Besides that four-letter word, Dorothy L.’s first book is about the disappearance of a Jewish financier, Sir Reuben Levy. Borish tells us, “When a naked corpse turns up in a bath, Inspector Sugg is eager to identify him as Levy.” Lord Peter says it can’t be “by the evidence of my own eyes.”
And the evidence? The body was (gasp) uncircumcised.
Dorothy L., desperate for money, revised her story, making sure the body could not be mistaken for a rich man. The deceased had “callused hands, blistered feet, decayed teeth” and more. An American publisher bought “Whose Body?” It was published in New York in 1923, and Dorothy was on the way to fame and fortune. Borish writes, rather gleefully, “consider the last words spoken by Lord Peter in the last novel: ‘Oh damn!’”

George Orwell had his masterpiece, “Animal Farm,” turned down by no less than T. S. Eliot, a big deal at UK publishers Faber and Faber. Like many in the upper echelons of publishing, Eliot missed the point when he rejected Orwell: “Your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm . . . What was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”
Another publisher, Fredric Warburg, took the book and paid Orwell a hundred pounds. Orwell had the last laugh – Borish says the book sold 25,000 hardcovers in the first five years.
Anthony “A Clockwork Orange” Burgess had a novel about his grammar school experience – “The Worm and the Ring” – rejected because it was “too Catholic and too guilt-ridden.”

Publishers outdid themselves with boneheaded reasons to reject bestsellers. Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, “A Study in Scarlet,” was turned down by the prestigious Cornhill magazine because it was too much like the other “shilling shockers” already on the market. The editor said it was too long “and would require an entire issue” – but it was “too short for a single story.” Another publisher sent the manuscript back unread. A third bought the rights for a measly twenty-five pounds, and let it sit around for year. It was published in 1887, and then brought out as a book, but Conan Doyle didn’t get any money from that because he’d sold the rights. Worse, the book was pirated in the U.S. Doyle wrote a couple of historical fiction works. Then an American editor, looking for UK talent, had dinner with Doyle and Oscar Wilde and signed them both up. Wilde wrote “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and Doyle did “The Sign of the Four.”
These writers endured humiliation, insults, swindles – and in many cases, poverty – and still went on to write books that are read today.
Orwell talked about an embittered Russian who said, “Writing is bosh. There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry the publisher’s daughter.”
Obviously, we writers have to pay attention to rejections sometimes. My agent gave me a good rule of thumb: “If you get the same reason for rejection repeatedly – your plot isn’t twisty enough, or you have too many secondary characters – it’s time to pay attention.”
How many times have you ignored rejections?

Kings River Life says “Late for His Own Funeral” is “a fascinating exploration of sex workers, high society, and the ways in which they feed off of one another.” Buy my new Angela Richman, Death Investigator mystery here.  https://tinyurl.com/4dn2ydfd

I was listening to a podcast a few years ago that addressed the benefits of handwriting versus typing. The interviewee (I don’t remember her name) was a graduate student who had forgotten to take her laptop to a class one day and had to resort to taking notes by hand. To her surprise, she discovered she had retained more of the lecture information than she normally did. This led to a research project to compare the benefits of the two methods of taking notes.

The memory of that podcast recently prompted a question in my mind: outside of taking notes in class, does anyone write in long hand anymore? If so, what kind of writing lends itself to longhand vs. typing. I found some interesting information online.

*** 

In a 2021 article on whenyouwrite.com, Jessica Majewski summarized several benefits which I’ve paraphrased here:

Writing by hand is more focused. There are fewer distractions than using a laptop where there are constant temptations to check email or read the latest news story. Also, there are no word processing limitations when writing by hand. The author can draw a mind map, jot side notes, or doodle images without having to open another app.

But typing has its advantages, too. Doing research is a breeze if you’re on your laptop. Just hop over to another app to search out the information you need. Copy and paste articles into your research folder and keep going. But the primary advantage to typing is speed. And sooner or later everything you write is going to have to be typed into a word processor, so unless you’re fortunate enough to have a secretary to do the transition, you’ll have to do the additional work yourself.

But how do the different methods affect creativity? Majewski makes the following case in her article:

“When you are writing by hand, your cognitive processes are more involved than when you type and this can lead to some random springs of ideas. And at the pace of handwriting, you’re not worried about your hands outpacing your brain.”

In a 2017 article on qz.com, Ephrat Livni makes the following statement:

“Brain scans during the two activities also show that forming words by hand as opposed to on a keyboard leads to increased brain activity. Scientific studies of children and adults show that wielding a pen when taking notes, rather than typing, is associated with improved long-term information retention, better thought organization, and increased ability to generate ideas.”

That all sounds good, but does anybody actually write the first draft of a novel by hand? Well, yes. Here are a few authors you may have heard of who have written one or more novels by hand:

• Joyce Carol Oates
• Stephen King
• J. K. Rowling
• Quentin Tarantino

***

As an experiment, I wrote this blog post in long hand. My thoughts flowed as I was writing, and there was a sense of freedom in the process that was different from typing. Fortunately, I was able to read my own handwriting when I finished, and I transferred it to a Word doc.

Well, I’m almost out of paper, so I’ll stop now. We haven’t touched on another creative method: Speech to Text. Maybe we can cover that in a later post.

***

So TKZers – Do you ever write in long hand? What advantages or disadvantages have you noticed using handwriting vs. typing? Has this article convinced you to give handwriting another go?

Celebrating our success is a must. A little reward for a job well done is vital to keep motivated (and happy and healthy) in this difficult writing business. It doesn’t have to be much—just enough of a kickback to make it worthwhile.

It’s one thing to celebrate our personal achievement. It’s a whole other level to get satisfaction from celebrating others’ success. And it’s something we, as a collective writer community, should do more of. Celebrate others’ success.

What brought-on this post is Sue Coletta’s most recent success. Sue was the top-selling author at her publishing house in September. I can think of no other person who is as dedicated to their craft as Sue. And it paid off. Well done, Sue!

Recognizing success doesn’t have to be in the writing world. My friend just celebrated a blue ribbon at the fall fair won by her huge butternut squash. It weighed-in at 37.25 lbs. Sure, it’s a long way off the world record of 65.5 lbs., but it’s an impressive big gourd. Totally organic, to boot. It was grown through her neighbor’s organically-fed hens’ manure.

Our 34-year-old daughter’s success is impressive, as well. Emily recently packed up and moved to Ecuador where she’ll continue her online writing business as a digital nomad. So, congrats on your courage and adventuresome spirit, Em. OPD’s proud of you, and I celebrate your successful move! (BTW—OPD stands for Over Protective Dad which she nicknamed me in her teens.)

No. it isn’t only writing, moving, or squash growing success to celebrate. On a large scale, I celebrate NASA for bulls-eyeing an asteroid some zillion miles away. I celebrate the Ukrainian people’s resolve to repel an invader. And I celebrate Aaron Judge for hitting 62 homers this season.

On a smaller scale, I celebrate someone else’s success. That was the couple in my home town who stood up to City Hall and won the court-approved right to keep a noisy rooster in their backyard coop. That rooster services the organically-fed hens in my friend’s neighbor’s yard whose poop helped her score the blue ribbon.

What about you Kill Zoners? Tell us how you’ve celebrated others’ success.

by John Gilstrap

Full disclosure: I’m cheating again. I owe a book to my publisher on October 15, and it gets all my attention for a while. So, I decided I’d test everyone’s patience by recycling a post from January, 2017, in which I wrote about one of my favorite topics, which is things that go boom. I’m confident that the laws of physics and chemistry have not changed in the past five years, so the content should still be reliable. Here we go . . .

I’m going to continue my quest to help writers understand some of the technical aspects of weaponry so that their action scenes can be more realistic.  Today, we’re going to talk about some practical applications for high explosives.  It’s been a while since we last got into the weeds of things that go boom, so if you want a quick refresher, feel free to click here.  We’ll wait for you.

Welcome back.

When I was a kid, the whole point of playing with cherry bombs and lady fingers and M80s was to make a big bang.  Or, maybe to launch a galvanized bucket into the air.  (By the way, if you’re ever tempted to light a cherry bomb and flush it down the toilet, be sure you’re at a friend’s house, not your own.  Just sayin’.  And you’re welcome.)  As I got older and more sophisticated in my knowledge of such things, I realized that while making craters for craters’ sake was deeply satisfying, the real-life application of explosives is more nuanced.

Since TKZ is about writing thrillers and suspense fiction, I’m going to limit what follows to explosives used as weapons–to kill people and break things.  Of course, there are many more constructive uses for highly energetic materials, and while the principles are universal, the applications are very different.

Hand grenades are simple, lethal and un-artful bits of destructive weaponry.  Containing only 6-7 ounces of explosive (usually Composition B, or “Comp B”), they are designed to wreak havoc in relatively small spaces.  The M67 grenade that is commonly used by US forces has a fatality radius of 5 meters and an injury radius of 15 meters. Within those ranges, the primary mechanisms of injury are pressure and fragmentation.

For the most part, all hand grenades work on the same principles. By pulling the safety pin and releasing the striker lever (the “spoon”), the operator releases a striker–think of it as a firing pin–that strikes a percussion cap which ignites a pyrotechnic fuse that will burn for four or five seconds before it initiates the detonator and the grenade goes bang.  It’s important to note that once that spoon flies, there’s no going back.

Claymore mines operate on the same tactical principle as a shotgun, in the sense that it is designed to send a massive jet of pellets downrange, to devastating effect.  Invented by a guy named Norman MacLeod, the mine is named after a Scottish sword used in Medieval times. Unlike the hand grenade, which sends its fragments out in all directions, the Claymore is directional by design.  (I’ve always been amused by the embossed letters on the front of every Claymore mine, which read, “front toward enemy.”  As Peter Venkman famously said while hunting ghosts, “Important safety tip. Thanks,Egon.”)

The guts of a Claymore consist of a 1.5-pound slab of C-4 explosive and about 700 3.2 millimeter steel balls. When the mine is detonated by remote control, those steel balls launch downrange at over 3,900 feet per second in a 60-degree pattern that is six and a half feet tall and 55 yards wide at a spot that is 50 meters down range.

The fatality range of a Claymore mine is 50 meters, and the injury range is 100 meters.  (Note that because of the directional nature of the Claymore, we’re noting ranges, whereas with the omnidirectional hand grenade, we noted radii.)

Both the hand grenade and the Claymore mine are considered to be anti-personnel weapons.  While they’ll certainly leave an ugly dent in a car and would punch through the walls of standard construction, they would do little more than scratch the paint on an armored vehicle like a tank. To kill a tank, we need to pierce that heavy armor, and to do that, we put the laws of physics to work for us.

Shaped charges are designed to direct a detonation wave in a way that focuses tremendous energy on a single spot, thus piercing even heavy armor.  The principle is simple and enormously effective.

The illustration on the left shows a cutaway view of a classic shaped charge munition. You’re looking at a cross-section of a hollow cone of explosives. Imagine that you’re looking into an empty martini glass where the inside of the glass is made of cast explosive that is then covered with a thin layer of metal.  The explosive is essentially sandwiched between external and internal conical walls.  The open end of the cone is the front of the munition.

The initiator/detonator is seated at the pointy end of the cone (the rear of the munition), and when it goes off, a lot happens in the next few microseconds.  As the charge detonates, the blast waves that are directed toward the center of the cone combine and multiply while reducing that center liner into a molten jet that is propelled by enormous energy.  When that jet impacts a tank’s armor, its energy transforms the armor to molten steel which is then propelled into the confines of the vehicle, which becomes a very unpleasant place to be. The photo of the big disk with the hole in the middle bears the classic look of a hit by a shaped charge.

Now you understand why rocket-propelled grenades like the one in the picture have such a distinctive shape. The nose cone is there for stability in flight, and it also houses the triggering mechanisms.

The picture on the right is a single frame from a demonstration video in which somebody shot a travel trailer with an RPG.  The arrow shows the direction of the munition’s flight. There was no armor to pierce so the videographer was able to capture the raw power of that supersonic jet of energy from the shaped charge.

Looming deadline notwithstanding, I will do my best to answer any and all questions, but I warn you all that I might be a bit slow on the keyboard.

(Morning, crime dogs. I am out of the country and purposely out of computer contact for four weeks on a two-year-delayed vacation. When you read this, I hope to be sitting in a Paris cafe, sipping vin de maison and stuffing my face with a croque monsieur. So forgive me, but I’m posting a couple of old columns. I will try to check in via iPhone. À bientôt!)

Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake. — John Cleese.

By PJ Parrish

I’ll never forget this piece of advice I got from my agent: “No one is waiting for your stand alone thriller.”

Immediately, my hackles went up. (As I wrote that, I realized I didn’t really know what a hackle even was so I Googled it. It is the hairs on the back of dog that shoot up when he’s angry). I said nothing to the agent, but hackles erect, I hung up the phone, and opened the laptop to finish my stand alone thriller.

See, we were eleven books deep into our Louis Kincaid series at the time, and the series had done pretty good thus far. We had a loyal fan base who really loved our character. We’d won some awards and cracked some bestseller lists. But here’s the thing: I had this idea for a serial killer book set in Paris and I couldn’t let go of it. The bad guy — a professional cellist — haunted my dreams at night and kept my imagination afire during the day. I couldn’t get anything done on the series book. The stand alone was a siren call.

Would it crash us on the rocks? Well, maybe. At the time, we were coming up on a contract renewal with our publisher and they were expecting a new Louis book. But Louis was, well, being sort of recalcitrant. The story wasn’t moving along because he just wasn’t talking to me. We clearly needed a vacation from each other.

So I took up with the killer cellist. The book poured out of me, uncharacteristically. (I am a really slow writer). And it was really good. I’m not being immodest here. Every writer just knows when they’re onto something. it was solid plot-wise, filled with cool pretzelly stuff. It had a haunted protag, a prickly side-kick woman cop, and a charming villain who just had a hangup about garroting women with e-strings. It also had Paris’s catacombs, Miami’s decaying art deco hotels and crumbling Scottish castles.

What wasn’t to love?

The publisher grudgingly put it out. No promotion, small press run and an ugly cover. (see above left for original cover and right for new cover when we re-issued it). It got some nice reviews and didn’t sell well (though it sells fine now as a back list title). It remains one of my favorite books. We were dropped by the publisher not long after that.

Did I make a mistake?

My agent was probably just trying to tell me that we didn’t have the star-power name to write whatever we wanted, that we needed to rely on the safety our our serial reputation. Stay with what brung you to the dance, right? But no, I don’t think it was a mistake. Here’s my take-away for any of you out there who might be struggling with the fear that you might make a mistake:

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Okay, that’s not my words. Albert Einstein said them. But I believe them. If you write in fear of doing something wrong, you are doomed. Whether you are venturing into a new genre, experimenting with a different plot structure, or trying to write a short story for the first time, or just switching from the comfort of first person to third, you can’t be afraid to fail.

I had to write that book. I just had to.

But how do you know when you’re onto something good? How do you trust your instinct to stay with a story when your brain might be telling you to jump on the neo-fem-jeop bandwagon? (female in jeopardy but with a new twist, of course).

That’s a hard one. No one can answer that one except you. It’s part of that chimeric thing we call voice. Why would you want to be a poor man’s Jeff Deaver? Or another sad clone of Gillian Flynn? Write the book that only you can write.

Here’s something else to chew on: Sometimes doing something the wrong way is the only way to find the right way. Writing fiction is not a straight-forward process. Yes, there are basic tenets of what makes a story work — plot structure, dialogue, all the craft stuff we talk about all the time here. But even if you follow every “rule” to the letter, there’s no guarantee you’re going to succeed. If you concentrate on what is safe, what is trendy, what is sell-able (revelation: No one really knows what will sell) you will produce junk.

Maybe, after all your work, no editor will want to publish your book. Maybe, after you work hard to get it up on Amazon yourself, not enough readers will find it. Was it a mistake?

• Not if it helped you grow as a writer. Maybe you rushed your book into print before it was ready (ie not well edited or formatted). Sloppy doesn’t cut it.
• Not if it made you stronger. No one is ever going to be harder on you and than you are. Rejection comes with the business at every turn. Mistakes help you grow a shell.
• Not if it helps you find your way to your next story. And there always had to be a next book.

So, what’s my final takeaway from all this? What did I learn from my mistake of writing the stand alone thriller that no one was waiting for?

Don’t write the book you think might sell. You have to write the book that is tearing at your insides to get out.

Write the book that keeps you up at night.

Info dumps will kill the pace of a novel in a heartbeat, in my opinion.

Hopefully our readers are lost in the world we’ve created, but when an author pauses to jar them back into the physical pages by including blocks of details that can be successfully distributed at other times throughout the book, we’ve done them a disservice.

When descriptions, backstories, or elements are released at the volume of an open fire hydrant, all of those specifics will stall the novel’s momentum.

Timing is also critical. Is it necessary to stop the story with details about a person’s clothes, hair, or wrinkles? Why not introduce those characters with a detail or two, them build on that description as we get to know them.

Why not show them those elements? By showing and not telling, you can include more action, and keeping it in your character’s point of view, those factors are less noticeable.

Your protagonist can run fingers through thick gray hair. He can pop a button on a soft, often washed denim shirt he’d owned since college. She can unconsciously touch a scar across the bridge of her nose that she received in an auto accident when she was six and is now terrified of Mustangs. He prefers a Beretta M9 because he carried one in the military.

Imagine meeting someone at a party.

“Hello, my name’s Reavis Z. Wortham and as you can see, I have gray hair, though thin on top, and I’m kinda lanky, measuring in at five foot eleven inches. My polished black boots are ostrich skin, but I wear jeans and my shirts lean toward blue, because that’s my favorite color. Since I’m a fifth generation Texan, I wear a felt silverbelly hat. These brown eyes can look right through a person if I dislike them, and the crows-feet at the corners of my eyes tell a story.”

Good lord! I’d run from myself, or pour a stiff drink and hope the next person I meet will give me information about themselves and their lives a little at a time as we get to know each other.

Think back to a first date. Would you finish the evening if that individual pours out similar information in long, boring paragraphs?

Instead, let’s seed your character’s past, interests, or physical descriptions that are throughout the story.

Now, with all that said, rules are made to be broken. I’ve heard that it’s terrible for an author to put their character in front of a mirror to describe them, and that’s true most of the time.

However, I cheated with a mirror in my novel, Dark Places (which was listed by Strand Magazine as one of their Top 12 novels of 2015, so I know it worked). But I cheated in a creative way that gives the reader a backstory and attributes of two characters who we met much earlier in the book.

In Dark Places, my teenage female protagonist, Pepper, runs away from home in the late 1960s to follow Route 66 from Texas to California. Her dad, James, granddaddy Ned Parker, and a tough, mysterious character named Crow are on her trail. They fear she’s been picked up by a gang similar to the Hells Angels, and one of the three have to go inside a biker bar in the desert to get her out.

Of course I sprinkled physical characteristics for all the players on stage throughout the first and second act to give them depth, but now I needed to drill down even more so we can see who is most qualified to take on a biker gang.

They argue in a room in my fictional mid-century motor court and we learn which one is hard enough to take on the gang.

Here’s that except from the novel.

*

Crow and James were arguing about who would go to the bar where the Devil Rattlesnakes hung out. Standing beside the window, James fumed. “It’s my daughter in that saloon!”

Expressionless, Crow nodded. “I completely understand. But for one thing, we don’t know for sure she’s in there, and I kinda doubt it. What do you do for a living?”

“What? I run a hardware store.”

“Ever been in a fight, other than the one in the courthouse?”

James squared his shoulders. “Yeah. More than one, too.”

“Um hum. I meant after you got out of school.”

“No.”

“Any experience in law work, like your daddy there?”

“No.”

Crow tapped the dresser with a fingertip. “Come here.”

“What?”

Softly. “Come here.”

James joined him. Crow pointed at the mirror. “Tell me what you see.”

“I see us.”

“Right. Tell me what you really see. Truthfully. Describe…us. Start with you.”

“This is ridiculous.”

“It’ll explain what I’m trying to tell you, James. What do you see? Describe your head.”

James Parker looked into the mirror. “A head.”

Crow nudged him with a hard shoulder.

“All right. Short, graying black hair of a man in his late thirties. Cowlick. Two eyebrows, also black. Brown eyes. A nose. Two ears that need trimming, I guess. Lips, and a chin with a dimple.”

“That’s about right. Now, describe me.”

“A guy with long hair.”

“More detail. Lots of detail, more than you used on yourself, but don’t stop at my chin.”

James growled in frustration, low in his throat. He drew a deep breath. “Long black hair, like an Indian.”

“I am Indian, but you’re right. Keep going.”

“Hair that looks like them hippies, then. A scar across your forehead from the middle to your temple. Black eyebrows. Almost black eyes. Indian cheekbones. No mustache or beard though, like those hippies, but that’s because you’re Indian again. A nose that looks like it’s been broke before…”

“Twice.”

“Huh. Square chin with a horizontal scar in the cleft under your bottom lip. Scar on one ear. Wide shoulders. Some kind of necklace under your western shirt that needs washing, but it was expensive when it was new. Shirt’s hanging outside your jeans. You look tough.” He looked down. “Levis and work boots.”

Crow flexed his hands. “These?”

“Big hands. Big knucks. Lots of scars.”

Crow turned them over.

“Rough. Calluses.”

“So between me and you, who do you think has more luck walking into a rough bar full of bikers?”

*

We already knew a lot about those two, but it was necessary at that point in the story to pit James and Crow against one another in front of that mirror. It was timing.

Yep, I threw a lot out there, but paragraphs of information didn’t stall the story. Instead, I chose to show and not tell by providing those details in conversation, which flows naturally, hopefully making the readers part of the story. With what I provided, you were able to build those characters and see them in your mind’s eye.

Weave your story elements as you go. One quick sentence or two to set a scene, a couple of sentences further down to provide a backstory for your protagonist, or a phrase here or there are the building blocks of a successful story.

Remember, no dumping allowed.