Category Archives: writing craft

Why I Am Not Turning the Pages of This Novel

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Recently I posted about why I found a novel to be a true page-turner. I’m gratified so many authors found it helpful.
So I thought I’d share today the opposite type of experience: reading a mediocre novel I will not finish. (See also Friday’s question and comments). 

I’m not going to name the book, because I don’t believe in running down fellow authors. Nor will I quote anything verbatim. But I do think there are some important lessons to be learned.
1. An Opening Without Disturbance
The first-person narrator of this crime novel is moving through a setting, describing it, and then getting in a car and moving some more, then getting to another location and getting out of the car, and then talking to some people. This is, by definition, action. But it does nothing to hook the reader. Why? Because there’s no trouble, or even a portent of it.
What hooks a reader faster than anything else is when a character’s “ordinary world” is disturbed in some fashion. It doesn’t have to be big, like a gun fight or car chase. It just has to be something that sends ripples through the normal life of the character and makes us, the readers, wonder how the character is going to handle it. And that disturbance should happen on page one. I wrote more on the subject here.
2. A Voice Without Attitude
The key to narrative voice is attitude. This is especially true in the case of first-person POV. We have to feel we’re in the hands of a character who has blood rushing through the veins, who is passionate about something, anything. The voice has to be unique, not plain vanilla. We need to sit up right away and take notice, because the narrator catches our attention:
When I was a little girl I used to dress Barbie up without underpants. On the outside, she’d look like the perfect lady. Tasteful plastic heels, tailored suit. But underneath, she was naked. I’m a bail enforcement agent now—also known as a fugitive apprehension agent, also known as a bounty hunter. I bring ‘em back dead or alive. At least I try. And being a bail enforcement agent is a little like being bare-bottom Barbie. It’s about having a secret. And it’s about wearing a lot of bravado on the outside when you’re really operating without underpants.
That’s Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum in High Five. This is a voice I am interested in hearing from. I will note, too, that the second paragraph on page one is a disturbance. There’s a reason Evanovich is so successful.
3. A Cast Without Distinction
The supporting characters in this novel are what they used to call “stock.” There’s the cop who seems like every other cop. There’s a buddy who seems like every other buddy. And so on.
If your secondary characters are not what I call “spicy,” you have missed one of the prime opportunities to make your novel a page-turner. You can avoid this by simply rejecting the first picture that comes to your mind, and making list of five, six or seven unique alternatives in terms of looks and speech patterns. 

4. A Setting Without Menace
It’s one thing to describe a setting. It’s another to have the setting operate like another character, with potential conflict infused therein. In my book, Conflict & Suspense, I have a section on setting, and include this clip from Gregg Olsen’s Victim Six:
Even in the midst of a spring or summer’s day with a cloudless sky marred only by the contrails of a jet overhead, the woods of Kitsap County were always blindfold dark. It had been more than eighty years since the region was first logged by lumberjacks culling the forest for income; now it was developers who were clearing the land for new tracts of ticky-tacky homes. Quiet. Dark. Secluded.
Notice the words Olsen chooses: marred, blindfold dark. Quiet. Dark. Secluded. It’s right after this that the killer comes on the scene, and then the cops, and then everybody dealing with a setting of menace.
City or country, rural or populated, every setting holds the possibility not just for conflict between characters, but for being part of the conflict itself.
5. A Narrative Without Surprises
I’m stressing this more and more in my workshops. As I consider the fiction that I can’t put down, and that stays with me after I’m finished, it’s this element of the unexpectedthat keeps popping up in my mind. If I keep guessing what’s going to happen next, and it does, that’s called predictability.And predictable equals dull.
The late Elmore Leonard said not to write the parts readers skip. This novel had too many of those parts. So I put it down.


One final note: This was a self-published novel. It wasn’t terrible. The sentences were strung together so I could follow the story. But that’s not enough in this brave, new world. In fact, it never has been. As one veteran editor at Penguin put it, the kind of manuscripts they really have to watch for––in order to reject them––are those that are “skillful, competent, literate, and ultimately forgettable.”
Don’t settle for competent.
***
I’ll be teaching on how to get to unforgettable fiction at two major conferences coming up. This week it’s in Los Angeles at the Writer’s Digest national conference. I’m doing a 3-hour session on Friday called “Writing a Novel They Can’t Put Down.” Also a class on “Dazzling Dialogue” on Saturday.
In November, I’ll once again be with Donald Maass and Christopher Vogler for the big, four-day Story Masters, Nov. 7-10, in Minneapolis. Hope to see some of you there!


The Trilogy Trick – Guest Spot with Michelle Gagnon

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Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

I am very excited to have Michelle Gagnon as my guest, but she is definitely no stranger to TKZ. Many of you know Michelle was a former contributor extraordinaire to our blog and I’m excited to hear her thoughts on trilogies and her latest release. Welcome, Michelle!

Don't Look Now HC C

Hi folks, I’ve missed you! So good to be back on TKZ.

With the success of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Hunger Games, trilogies are all the rage these days. In fact, when I first pitched an idea for a young adult novel to my publisher, they specifically requested a trilogy. I agreed, because hey, what author wouldn’t want to guarantee the publication of three more books? Besides, I’d written a series before. How much harder could a trilogy be?

The first one, DON’T TURN AROUND, turned out to be the easiest book I’ve ever written. The rough draft flowed out of me in eight weeks; it was one of those magical manuscripts that seemed to write itself.

I sat back down at the computer, confident that the second and third would proceed just as smoothly; even (foolishly) harboring hopes that I’d knock the whole thing out in under six months.

Boy, was I wrong.

Here’s the thing: in a regular series, even though the characters carry through multiple books (and occasionally, plotlines do as well), they’re relatively self-contained. In the end, the villain is (usually) captured or killed; at the very least, his evil plan has been stymied.

Not so in a trilogy. For this series, I needed the bad guy—and the evil plot—to traverse all three books. Yet each installment had to be self-contained enough to satisfy readers. 

Suffice it to say that books 2 and 3 were a grueling enterprise. But along the way, I learned some important lessons on how to structure a satisfying trilogy:

  1. Each book has its own arc. Well, that’s obvious, right? But what this really means is that book 3 can’t feel like a mere continuation of book 2. Even if your villain/evil plot spans all three books, you need to provide resolution at the end of each installment. This is a good place to employ what I’ve dubbed, “The Henchman Rule.” At the end of each book, someone needs to be held accountable; otherwise your hero/heroine won’t seem to be making any headway. And the best solution for this? Get rid of the main baddie’s number 2, his right hand man. My favorite example is the stripping of Saruman’s powers at the end of The Two Towers. Sauron must wait to be dealt with in The Return of the King, but his main wizard is handily dispatched by Gandalf (suffice it to say, I didn’t have much of a social life in junior high school). 
  2. Avoid “Middle Book Syndrome.” What I discussed above is particularly challenging in the second book of any trilogy. This is the bridge book, the one where the characters need to move forward in their quest, but not too far forward. Traditionally, this is also the book that concludes with your main character (or characters) beaten down, exhausted, and uncertain of the possibility of success. Which can be a pretty depressing note to end on, unless you also provide them with a key: something that will help them surmount obstacles in book 3. That key can be any number of things: more information about the evil plan, the villain’s only vulnerability, etc. But the main goal is to set the stage for book 3, while still wrapping up enough threads to keep your readers happy.
  3. Character arcs need to span all three books. In a standalone, the main character faces some sort of incident that jettisons her into extreme circumstances (ie: Katniss’s sister losing the lottery). An escalation of events follows: the character is forced to confront her own weaknesses, and to discover her hidden strengths. At the end of Act 2, the character is usually at a low point, facing potential failure. Then, in the final act, the character rises to the occasion and ends up saving the day. In a trilogy, these same rules apply: but the conclusion of each book corresponds with the act breaks. Example: at the end of The Girl who Played with Fire (#2 in the trilogy), Lisbeth is horribly injured; she needs to overcome that incapacitation in order to finally vanquish her father in book 3.
  4. Avoid information dumps. Always a good rule, but trickier with trilogies. While working on the final installment, I kept butting up against this issue: when characters referred back to earlier events, how much background information was necessary to keep readers from becoming irrevocably lost? In the end, I provided very little. The truth is, it’s rare for people to start with the third book in a trilogy; I’m sure it happens, but it’s the exception, not the rule. So what you’re really doing is giving gentle reminders to people who might have read the last book months earlier. Provide enough information to jog their memory, without inundating them. It’s a tricky balance to strike, but I’d recommend erring on the side of giving less, not more.

So those are my tips, earned the hard way. Today’s question: what trilogies (aside from those I mentioned) did you love, and what about them kept you reading?


Michelle_Gagnon_color_09_optMichelle Gagnon is the international bestselling author of thrillers for teens and adults. Described as “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo meets the Bourne Identity,” her YA technothriller DON’T TURN AROUND was nominated for a Thriller Award, and was selected as one of the best teen books of the year by Entertainment Weekly Magazine, Kirkus, Voya, and the Young Adult Library Services Association. The second installment, DON’T LOOK NOW, is on sale now (and hopefully doesn’t suffer from “middle book syndrome.”) She splits her time between San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Don’t Let Your Characters Act Like Idiots

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

The other day I watched a thriller, and was enjoying it. Until the last act.
You know what I’m talking about. You get wrapped up in a neat premise until, like a soap bubble, it pops at the end through a series of missteps. Like these:
The lead character—a smart, good-looking but otherwise normal young woman––suddenly becomes a NASCAR-skilled driver, and plows her car into a bad guy who is shooting at her. Then she slowly gets out of her car and walks over to the splayed body and . . .leaves him alone . . .does not pick up his gun . . .does not make sure he’s dead or completely incapacitated! I mean, wouldn’t you think that a smart, good-looking, normal young woman would have seen a hundred thrillers where the hitman who is supposed to be dead suddenly shows up alive?
But: by not picking up the hitman’s gun, the young woman is left completely vulnerable should the main bad guy suddenly appear. Which, wonder of wonders, he does (complete with suspense-movie bumper music). He has shocked and surprised our smart young woman, and can now kill her instantly. But because over the last fifteen minutes this deadly, perfect-moves-each-time bad guy has for some reason been transformed into a doofus, she gets away. He chases her. He corners her. But he does not finish the job because he spends valuable screen time talking to the young woman about how he is going to finish the job (“Overtalkative Bad Guy Syndrome,” or OBGS).
Allowing, of course, good-looking but otherwise normal young woman to triumph! 
There is, for thriller writers, no more important RULE (yes, I said it, it’s a RULE, and if you violate this rule you get taken to the craft woodshed and flogged with a wet copy of Plot & Structure) than this:
Never allow any of your main characters to act like idiots in order to move or wrap up your plot!
Yes, characters can make mistakes. Characters can make a wrong move. Just don’t let it be an idiot move.
Here’s a simple technique to avoid this issue:
Before you write any scene, pause for a couple of minutes and ask yourself these two questions:
1. What is the best possible move each character in the scene can make?
Every character in every scene must have an agenda. Even if it is only (as Vonnegut once said) to get a glass of water. That’s how you create conflict in a scene, after all. Then, after noting the agendas, determine the best move each character would make in order to get their way.
2. What is the best possible move being made by the characters “off screen”?
Remember, while you are writing a scene there are other characters who are alive and kicking somewhere else. What are they doing? How are they advancing their agendas? This question will provide you with some nice plot twists, turns and red herrings. 

But if you get backed into a corner at the end, and just don’t know what to do, you can always have the main character wake up and realize it was all a dream. Works every time!

Or perhaps that’s an idiotic suggestion. How do you keep your characters in the smart line? What bad moves drive you crazy when you see them? 

When is “Dark” too dark?

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Nancy J. Cohen

One of the words I’ve been repeating in my works lately has been “dark”. You know, the man swung his dark gaze her way. He wore a dark suit. He had his dark hair brushed back over a wide forehead. Shadows darkened in a corner as he gave her a dark scowl.

Ouch.

This can be considered lazy writing, except I hadn’t even been aware of this fault until I ran one of the self-edit programs described in my personal blog at http://bit.ly/12iU9nZ. I embarked on a search and find mission to replace as many of these weak terms as possible.

Let’s start with clothes. Face it, men wear dark suits. To get a better idea of colors, I accessed this website: http://lawyerist.com/suit-colors-for-the-clueless/. Ah, now it became clear which colors are popular for men and suited to business. My descriptions of dark suits changed to black, charcoal, slate or navy. That’s a lot better than “dark”, isn’t it?

charcoal blazer

If you want to get even more particular, go online to a department store site like Macys.com and put in the search feature “suits, “blazers”, or “sportcoats” and you’ll get a wide variety of colors.

navy blazer

What about the character who has dark hair? Is it black or dark brown? Check this reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color. Instead of black hair, give your character raven, ebony, or onyx hair. Varying the descriptions adds spice to your story.

Jen4

Also watch out for redundancies like dark shadows & dark scowl. Both of these work well without the “dark” element.

Despite its ambiguity, this word is popular for movies. Witness Batman’s The Dark Knight; Thor: The Dark World; and Star Trek into Darkness.

The filmmakers can get away with it, but as a writer, you cannot. What other ambiguous words like this might you want to change?

How to Write a Novel Readers Won’t Put Down

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A friend alerted me this past week to an interesting “infographic” posted on Goodreads. The subject: Why readers abandon a book they’ve started. Among the reasons:

– Weak writing

– Ridiculous plot

– Unlikable main character

But the #1 reason by far was: Slow, boring.

Makes sense, doesn’t it? As I’ve stated here before, there is at least one “rule” for writing a novel, and that is Don’t bore the reader!

So if I may channel my favorite commercial character, The Most Interesting Man in the World:

Find out the things readers don’t like, then . . . don’t do those things.

I thank you.

Okay, let’s have a closer look.

Weak Writing

This probably refers to pedestrian or vanilla-sounding prose. Unremarkable. Without what John D. MacDonald called “unobtrusive poetry.” You have to have a little style, or what agents and editors refer to as “voice.” I’ll have more to say about voice next week. But for now, concentrate on reading outside your genre. Or read poetry, like Ray Bradbury counseled. Simply get good wordsmithing into your head. This will expand your style almost automatically.

Ridiculous Plot

Thriller writers are especially prone to this. I remember picking up a thriller that starts off with some soldiers breaking into a guy’s house. He’s startled! What’s going on? Jackboots! In my house! Why? Because, it turns out, the captain wants him for some sort of secret meeting. But I thought, why send a crack team of trained soldiers to bust into one man’s suburban home and scare the living daylights out of him? Especially when they know he’s no threat to anyone. No weapons. No reason to think he’d resist. And why wake up the entire neighborhood (a plot point conveniently ignored)? Why not simply have a couple of uniforms politely knock on the door and ask the guy to come with them? The only reason I could think of was that the author wanted to start off with a big, cinematic, heart-pounding opening. But the thrills made no sense. I put the book down.

Every plot needs to have some thread of plausibility. The more outrageous it is, the harder you have to work to justify it. So work.

Unlikable Main Character

The trick to writing about a character who is, by and large, unlikable (i.e., does things we generally don’t approve of) is to give the reader something to hang their hat on. Scarlett O’Hara, for example, has grit and determination. Give readers at least one reason to hope the character might be redeemed.

Slow, Boring

The biggie. There is way too much to talk about here. I’ve just concluded a 3-day intensive workshop based, like just about everything I do, on what I call Hitchcock’s Axiom. When asked what makes a compelling story he said that it is “life, with the dull parts taken out.”

If I was forced to put general principles in the form of a telegram, I’d say:

Create a compelling character and put him in a “death match” with an opponent (the death being physical, professional, or psychological) and only write scenes that in some way reflect or impact that battle.

The principle is simple and straightforward. Learning how to do it takes time, practice and study, which you can start right now, today.

So what about you? What makes you put a book down? And related to that, do you feel compelled, most of the time, to finish a book you start? I used to, but now I don’t. Life’s too short, and there are too many books on my TBR list!

Interface: A Critique

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INTERFACE (a thriller)
First Page Critique

Tom Faraday awoke feeling like he had been sleeping forever, and immediately struggled to recall where he was, or how he had got there. Some nights, he reflected, you hope you remember. Others you hope you forget. Tom was not sure which category the previous night would crystallise under. Right now he was just feeling the after effects of what must have been an evening of extraordinary excess.

He rolled over in the hotel bed and blinked repeatedly. The alarm clock read 8:30 a.m. Next to the clock was his watch, and next to that an electronic card key for his room. Picking it up he saw he was at the Western Star Hotel, in Waterloo, central London. This seemed vaguely familiar, but a stabbing pain deep in his head was making it hard to think clearly. He slipped on his watch, a present from his mother, slid out of bed and padded across to where his suitcase lay open. From a small zipped compartment he retrieved paracetamol and swallowed them down with gulps from a bottle of mineral water. He then stumbled into the bathroom, and was greeted by a tired visage in the mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, hair unkempt, stubble unusually obvious. He stroked his chin distractedly, thinking he must have forgotten to shave the previous day.

Back on the desk he found an elegantly printed invitation, and as he read it his memories started to return. The card bore his name in calligraphic handwriting, and was to the launch party for CERUS Technologies’ new office building. Tom rubbed his eyes and thought hard. What did he know?
He knew his name. He knew his age: 26. He remembered his job. He was a lawyer at CERUS Technologies. And he remembered the party.

He remembered getting there by taxi, late on Friday night. He remembered William Bern’s speech. And he remembered drinking a few beers. And then a few more. Perhaps a lot more. Of the trip back to the hotel, he remembered nothing. Friday night had come and gone.

He stretched slowly and looked for another bottle of water. Apart from the headache he did not feel too bad. Hopefully no harm done, and the rest of the weekend to recover. The noise of a mobile phone ringing broke him from his thoughts. His phone. He retrieved it from his pocket, noticing the battery was nearly dead.

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Critique by Nancy J. Cohen

The opening line is great. It immediately draws me in, wondering the same thing as the character. Where is he, and what is he doing there? I would delete “he reflected.” We’re in his viewpoint, and that qualifier is unnecessary.

Crystallize has a “z” not an “s”.

Delete the “just” before “just feeling.” This is one of those overused words. For more info in this regard, please see my review of a fabulous self-editing program at http://bit.ly/12iU9nZ. The Smart-Edit software points out all the words and phrase you overuse and much more.

What kind of drug is paracetamol?

I’d separate into a new paragraph, “The noise of a mobile phone…”

The cell phone is in his pocket? Is he still wearing his clothes from the night before? Or did he get dressed in them?

So the guy is hungover from a workplace party. I’m intrigued, but I am wondering where this is going. Hopefully the caller will inject more information. You do point of view very well, and I have no problems with the pacing especially if a dialogue ensues.

At first, I thought Tom had memory loss and couldn’t remember how he got where he is. But he does seem to recall everything, except maybe the cab ride back to the hotel. Then again, where does he normally live? My questions tell you I am hooked and would read more. I’d be hoping, though, that something happens to tell me all isn’t right and things are going to get hairier from here on in. Good job and Happy Fourth of July!

Putting A Book Down

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Nancy J. Cohen

Do you ever put a book down if you’ve read a few chapters and can’t go farther? This rarely happens with me, but I can recall a couple of instances where I gave up. Normally, I’ll slog through and scan pages until the end, if the story holds any appeal at all. But sometimes it’s too tedious to continue and a waste of precious time. What are some of the reasons why we might stop reading? 
 
Too Many Characters
The book I’m reading now is one I really want to like. It’s science fiction with a strong female lead and starts off on a spaceship. I know her mission is about to go terribly wrong. The woman’s lover is an alien, and I can understand his race’s characteristics. But then we meet other crew members and a diplomatic contingent from another world. Numerous other races are introduced, and the author segues into multiple viewpoints. Now I’m getting lost. I can’t keep track of all the aliens with weird sounding names. If the story doesn’t focus on the protagonist and her human emotions, I may put this book aside.

My own first published novel employed multiple viewpoints and alien races. But since the story stayed mostly inside the heads of my hero/heroine and focused on their romance, the world building seemed to work. I won the HOLT Medallion Award with Circle of Light, so I wasn’t alone in my assessment.

Yet the current book I’m reading is just too confusing. I’m losing interest in the story because it’s too hard to keep the alien characters straight.

A mystery can have similar problems when too many suspects are introduced at the same time. I’ve been guilty of this myself, whether it is a dinner party or cocktail event or other affair which all of the suspects attend together. One chapter might contain a blast of characters, whereas the sleuth’s subsequent investigation focuses on one at a time. It’s hard to avoid this dilemma when all of the important characters appear together in a scene toward the book’s beginning.

Book Doesn’t Stand Alone
I picked up a book mid-series by a popular author whose work I wanted to read. The opening scenes left me totally lost. If you hadn’t read the previous books, you were clueless. A writer should never assume readers have followed along with her series. Each book should stand alone with enough explanations to cover previous subplots. On the other hand, this requires a delicate balance. You don’t want to bore your fans with repetitious material. Nor do you want to repeat what happened in previous installments unless it’s relevant to the current story.

Genre Lacks Appeal
I’ve judged contests where I have to read entries in a genre other than ones I prefer. I do my best to be fair, but if the story is peppered every paragraph with naughty words, for example, that’s going to turn me off. At that point, I’ll skim through the book. That’s why in my leisure reading choices, I stick to genres I know and love.

Story Meanders
Too many boring scenes where conversation acts as filler or the plot fails to advance will make me lose interest. Here I might skip ahead to get to the scenes where something happens.

Incomprehensible Language
If I am reading science fiction or fantasy and the world building includes too many made up words, I might get lost and lose interest. Every other noun doesn’t have to sound futuristic. Ditto for historical novels where the dialects are so strong as to be annoying.

Unlikeable Characters
I’ll rarely give up on a book because I don’t like the characters. These stories I might skim through to see if there’s a redeeming factor. But if I really don’t like the people, that might be cause to put the book down.

As a writer, keep these points in mind so you don’t make the same mistakes in your work. No doubt we’re all guilty to some extent, but try to avoid these pitfalls whenever possible.

So what are some reasons why you might not continue reading a story?

 

The Two Power Questions Every Writer Should Ask

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell


So you’re writing along in your latest novel or novella, and you come to a screeching (or, at least squealing) halt. Your story seems stalled for some reason. You don’t know what scene to write next.
You sigh, get up from your keyboard, and go to the refrigerator. You take out some of last night’s meatloaf or scoop out some ice cream. Maybe you turn on the TV and watch a little TCM or whatever dismal talk show fills the late morning or early afternoon slot in the vast wasteland of visual media.
Finally, you slink back to your keyboard and . . ..you still don’t know what to write. You start to wonder, maybe the story itself is flawed. And if this is a novel under contract, and you have already cashed an advance check, and the deadline is, like, soon, you might also feel little trickles of sweat in the armpit area.
So what do you do? I have a suggestion. I call them the two writing power questions.
1. Is there enough at stake?
In my craft books, and workshops, I always stress that the stakes of a story must be DEATH. There are three kinds of death: physical, professional and psychological/spiritual. The core issue in your novel has to be one of these or the book will not be the best it can be.
For example, in a legal thriller—the kind where the story is about a trial––that case has to be a matter of professional life and death for the lawyer. In The Verdictwith Paul Newman, he is a bottom-feeding lawyer (no, that’s not redundant, thank you very much). He has lost all self-respect. He is drinking too much. His professional life is about over.
And then he gets this case. A family comes to him because one of their own has been rendered a vegetable by the negligence of a large hospital. Okay, maybe he’ll get a quick settlement, take the money and stock up on booze. But he goes to the hospital to see her. And suddenly he cares again. He realizes he is this family’s only hope. Facing huge odds, he takes the case to the limit. If he loses, it’ll be like a little “death.”  
That’s how it’s got to feel to your Lead. In a romance, the death is psychological. It’s got to feel to the reader that if the two lovers don’t get together, their lives will forever be damaged because they haven’t completed themselves with their soul mate. If it doesn’t feel that way, why read the book? Who cares?
Much literary or “character driven” fiction is of this kind. In Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, for example, the issue is whether Astrid, tossed into the foster care system, will come out whole or irretrievably harmed.
So, make this your first power question: are the stakes death? If not, backup and make it so.
2. How can it get worse?
If you’re stranded in a book, just ask yourself what is the next bad thing that can happen? What will make the character’s situation worse?
In Scott Smith’s classic, A Simple Plan, a normal guy falls into a scheme to score some drug money, maybe without anybody ever finding out. What makes the book so compelling is that it’s like a slow motion car wreck. You keep saying to yourself, Don’t do that. Please don’t do that. And then the character does it, and descends further into a pit that will eventually close around him.
Brainstorm for awhile. Make a list of the bad things that can happen. Come up with ten. Then, finally, ask: What is the absolute worst thing that can happen?
Look at the list and select the best ideas. Then put them in descending order, from bad to worse to worst. That becomes a plan for writing the rest of your book!
Whether you’re a pantser or an outliner, these two power questions can blast you through that wall, to the other side where completed novels grow.
How about you? What do you do when you’re not sure what to write next?

11 Keys to Making a Novel a Page Turner

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I had an exquisite experience the other day, the kind we as readers love, but we as writers don’t find often enough, namely: I got so caught up in a novel I lost the realization that I was reading at all. I was pulled into the fictive dream and did not want to put the book down. I set everything else aside so I could finish the book.
I can’t remember the last time that happened. Usually when I read fiction part of my mind is analyzing it: Why is the author doing that? Does this metaphor work? Why am I thinking of putting the book down? Ooh, that was a neat technique, I need to remember it . . .
This time, though, I was fully into the story. It was only when I finished the book that I took a breath and asked myself, What just happened? Why was I so caught up? What did this author do right?
The novel is Big Red’s Daughter. It’s a 1953 Gold Medal paperback original. I found it when I was poking around the internet for 40s and 50s noir. I love that period because the plotting is often superb, the writing workmanlike to excellent, and the effect every bit as suspenseful as anything written today—without the need for gratuitous language or description of body parts. The sexual tension was suggested, even on the book covers. Oh, those covers! Love ’em. I was drawn to this one:

And then I looked at the author’s name. I didn’t know him. So I did a little research and found out there’s . . . very little research available on John McPartland. I love discovering little-known authors, and McPartland certainly qualifies. So how pleased was I when I got the book and had this “can’t put it down” experience?
I’m not claiming that this is a novel that should have won the Pulitzer. But it is a prime example of what pulp and paperback writers of that era had to do to eat: write entertaining, fast moving, popular fiction.
They knew the craft of storytelling. Since I teach it and take it apart myself, I was anxious to try to discover what McPartland brought to Big Red’s Daughter. Here’s what I found:
1. A decent guy just trying to find his place in the world
Jim Work is a Korea veteran, back home now and about to go to college on the G. I. Bill. The returning vet trying to find his place is a vintage post-war noir theme, one the reading audience couldn’t get enough of. He wants a job. Wants to get along. Wants to find a girl and get married.
For a page-turner, you have to have a Lead character readers are not just going to care about, but root for. Even if you’re writing about a negative Lead (e.g., Scrooge) the audience has got to find something possibly redeeming.
Jim Work is not perfect. Readers don’t respond to that. But we are on his side, because he yearns to do the right things.
2. The trouble starts on page one
Here’s the first paragraph:
HE WAS DRIVING AN MG—a low English-built sports car— and he was a tire-squeaker, the way a wrong kind of guy is apt to be in a sports car. I heard the squeal of his tires as he gunned it, and then I saw him cutting in front of me like a red bug. My car piled into his and the bug turned over, spilling him and the girl with him out onto the street.
Turns out the other guy and girl are not hurt. The guy walks over to Jim and sucker punches him. He’s about to stomp Jim’s face into hamburger when the girl who was with him grabs him from behind.
The guy’s name is Buddy Brown. The girl is Wild Kearney (her real name. Love it!) And immediately Jim is drawn to her—another noir trope. She is a “bronze-blonde” but “looked like the kind of girl that would be with winners, not losers, top winners in the top tournaments and never the second-flight or the almost-good-enough. Not the kind of girl that I’d ever known.”
So here we have both violence and potential romance from the start. And the Lead is vulnerable in both toughness and love.
The rule here is simple: Don’t warm up your engines. Get the reader turning the page not because he’s patient with you, but because he needs to find out what is going to happen next!
3. Unpredictability
Buddy Brown seems to calm down, and invites Jim out to a house where some other people are having a party. Suddenly, this Brown fellow seems like he might be okay.  Jim goes along, because of Wild. And because he has a desire to work Brown over for the sucker punch, and maybe to start the process of getting the girl away from him.
Brown’s behavior throughout the book is unpredictable, but with an undercurrent of danger. He’s like a snake that could bite at any moment, but at other times seems friendly. You’re just not sure what he’s going to do next, because he is . . .
4. A nasty but charming bad guy
Buddy Brown is ruthless and sadistic, yet able to charm the ladies and the gents. At the house party Jim calls him a “punk,” and Brown says he is going to kill Jim for that remark. Jim tries to fight him again and Brown beats him up, but good. We get the sense Buddy could kill Jim without a second thought, but then he relents and is charming again. In Hitchcock thrillers the most charming character is often the bad guy (see, e.g., Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt and Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train). Such a character is much more interesting than a one-note evil villain. Which leads to . . .
5. Sympathy for the bad guy
Dean Koontz is big on this. You put in just enough backstory to understand why a guy would turn out this way. The cross-currents of emotion in a reader are experienced rather than analyzed, and that’s a good thing. Great fiction is, above all, an emotional ride.
In one scene, Jim finds Buddy drunk and stumbling around, because he knows Big Red Kearney (Wild’s tough-guy father) wants to hunt him down and kill or ruin him. Jim, in a display of 1950s loyalty to his species (sober men take care of drunken men), takes Buddy into a place for coffee. Buddy tells him a little of his backstory. When he was fifteen, growing up in New York, he and two friends got on the bad side of a local gang leader:
He looked across the booth at me, his bruised, pale face a little twisted.
“Mick and me, we run off from home. The boys came to my house and worked over my old man to tell where I was. He didn’t know, so they gave him the big schlammin. He’s never going to get over it. They caught Mick downtown somewhere and they took him out on Long Island, tied him up with wire, and burned him. You know, with gasoline. He was a very sharp kid, good dancer, lot of laughs when he was high on sticks. He got burned up.”
The slender, drunken boy was talking in his soft whisper, his eyes far away from mine, talking with a clear earnestness as if he were living it all again.
“I’ve never forgotten that year. I hid down near the produce market, sleeping in the daytime, going out at night to scrounge rotten fruit and stuff. The big rats would be out at night and I’d carry a stick and a sack of rocks. For two months I hid like that. Then it cleared up. The wheel got sent up for armed robbery and the other guys forgot about it. But I remember that year.”

 

Suddenly Buddy is humanized. Not that he’s any less dangerous. Our emotional involvement in the story thus deepens.
6. A spiral of trouble
In the first two chapters this guy Jim has a car accident, gets punched in the face, is drawn to another man’s girl, goes to a party where he gets in another fight with Buddy, and ends up badly beaten and bloody.  
And this is the good part of his next couple of days.
It’s a classic example of things just getting worse and worse as they go along.
7. A love triangle
Between Wild, Buddy and Jim. And while we’re on the subject, want to see how the best writers wrote about sex back then? Here is the only sex scene in the book, in its entirety:
I swung the car to the right on the rutted road over the dune, toward the surge of the waters of the bay.
It was a finding without a knowing. There had been a typhoon in Tokyo once when the wood-and-paper buildings ripped before the fury. This was a typhoon between two people––a man and a woman who thought she belonged to another man.
Then it was a knowing as enemies who were once friends might know each other.
After that it was a silence between two people who should not have been silent. We both knew now, we understood each other. We should not have been silent in that way. At last I held her in my arms again, and there was no storm, but there were no words.
We don’t need body parts, do we?
8. A crisp style
McPartland’s style never gets in the way of the narrative. He doesn’t strain for effect, and the resulting emotions are rendered naturally, sharply. After the sex scene described above, Jim takes Wild home.
She opened the door and was outside the car.
I was out and we stood there together. I brought her to me, but she was not with me. A tall girl in my arms, a lovely girl, a girl behind a frozen wall, a girl who did not speak.
Wild stood there after I put my arms down, and then there was a kiss, and we were close and warm there in the darkness, kissing as lovers do when the good-by could be forever. Perhaps Wild thought it would be.
It was over, still without words, and she went down the steps and pushed open the door. There was a rectangle of soft light just before the door closed behind her.
I was halfway in the car when I heard the scream.

Do you want to read on? I think you do.

9. A relentless pace with a tightening noose
The action of the story is compressed into a couple of days, so it really moves. Any time you can put time pressure on your characters (the “ticking clock”) it’s a good thing. And the stakes, as I argue in my plotting books, have to be death (physical, professional or psychological). In Big Red’s Daughter,it’s physical. A noose (Jim is accused of murder) is tightening around the Lead’s neck.
In the midst of the action there are emotional beats, too. But these never bog down the story, only deepen it. At one point Jim is put in a jail cell. Here is the longest emotional beat in the book:
The night loneliness engulfed me. I thought of Buddy Brown.
They’d find him somewhere tonight. Walking on a dark street between the hills. In his bed. Sitting alone in his room with a bottle. Sitting alone and laughing, with the brown cigarette cupped in his hand, the weed-sweet smell thick in the room. Maybe now an officer, hand on his holstered gun, was walking toward Buddy Brown in the lonely Greyhound waiting room at Salinas while the heavy-eyed soldiers and huddled Mexicans watched. Maybe a state highway patrol car was flagging down the MG on 101. Night thoughts. Night thoughts on a bunk, scratching flea bites.
They wouldn’t find him. It was a night truth, one of those things that you know as you lie awake toward dawn. Maybe they’d look for him, but they wouldn’t find him.
I moved restlessly on the sagging bunk.

10. Honor
In Revision & Self-Editing for Publication, I have a section called “The Secret Ingredient: Honor.” I think we are hard-wired to look for honor in others, and to want to act honorably ourselves when the chips are down. When Big Red Kearney shows up in the story, there is a bond of honor that he strikes with Jim, recognizing that Jim is not a punk like Buddy Brown. When this bond happens it makes you root for Jim all the more.
11. A resonant ending
I won’t describe what it is, lest people want to read the book. The last chapter is short, doing its job. There is no anti-climax. And for my money, it ends just right, with what I call resonance. It’s that feeling of satisfaction that the last note is perfect and extends in the air after you close the book.
I work on my endings more than any part of my stories. I want to leave the reader feeling like the whole trip has been worth it, right up to and including the very last line. I will sometimes re-write my last pages ten, twenty, even thirty times.
So there you have it. I’m not saying these eleven items are the only way to write a page-turner, but if you could get all of them in a book, that result would be practically guaranteed.
Big Red’s Daughter (complete with corny 60s cover re-do) is available for free here. 

What novelists can learn from song writers

Posted on by

Joe Moore
@JoeMoore_writer

Last Friday, a giant in country music passed away. George Jones was not only considered by many to be the greatest country singer of all time, but also one of the most self-destructive. His string of hits was fueled by a private life of booze that was nothing short of gj-1devastating. Once when his wife hid the car keys so he couldn’t go buy alcohol, he hopped on a riding lawn mower and rode it into town to the liquor store. He later parodied the story in a music video.

But despite the long chain of events that few mortals could survive, George Jones climbed to the top of the mountain and made a place for himself that will forever be the gold standard in country music.

His life was a soap opera that was mirrored in the songs he sang. His struggles with the demons of alcoholism are reflected in some of his album titles: “The Battle”, “Bartender’s Blues”, and the defiant “I Am What I Am”. But out of this self-inflicted carnage of a tragic life, one song emerged as arguably the greatest country song ever written: “He Stopped Loving Her Today”.

The song is performed with the singer telling the story of his "friend" who has never given up on his love. He keeps old letters and photos, and hangs on to hope that she would "come back again." The song reaches its peak with the chorus, telling us that he indeed stopped loving her – when he finally died.

It’s poignant, sad, and paints a heart-wrenching portrait of absolute love and devotion, as well as never-ending hope. Not only does it drill to the core of emotion, but it delivers the story with the few words.

So what does this have to do with writing books? Everything.

It’s called the economy of words—telling the most story with the least amount of text. It is an art form that songwriters must master, and novelists must study. There is no better example of the economy of words than in a song like ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’. Not one word is wasted. No filler. No fluff. Remove or change a word from the song and the mental picture starts to deflate. The story is told in the most simplistic manner and the result is a masterpiece. Every word is chosen for its optimal emotional impact. Nothing is there that shouldn’t be. It is a grand study in how to write anything.

I’m not suggesting that your 100K-word novel be written with the intensity of George Jones’ song. In fact, if it were, it would probably be too overwhelming to comprehend. But my point is that no matter who you are—New York Times bestseller or wannabe author, your book contains too many unnecessary words. If you can say it in 5 instead of 10, do it. Get rid of the filler and fluff. Respect the economy of words. Less is more.

For those that love George Jones, enjoy this video. For those that have not heard “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, click the link, listen and learn.

He Stopped Loving Her Today by George Jones