by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone

The English actor Edmund Keane, on his deathbed, was heard to remark, “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

In the same vein, I’ve always averred that beginnings are easy. Endings are hard. I can write opening chapters all day long. But to stick a novel after it, keep readers turning pages, and then wrap it up in such a way that it leaves them so supremely satisfied they go out looking for more of my books…that’s the hard part.

I’m fond of quoting Mickey Spillane’s admonition: “The first chapter sells the book. The last chapter sells the next book.” That’s why I wrote an entire tome on the art and craft of unforgettable endings.

Today I want to talk about process. Because with each novel I learn a little more about this incredible, wonderful craft of ours, always looking for tweaks to my approach. I’m thinking about that as I get ready to write the last scenes of my next Mike Romeo thriller. Specifically, I’m learning again the value of brooding—giving time to my mind to ponder, create, devise.

As an outliner, I always have an ending in mind when I start writing. It is subject to change without notice, of course. The exact details will have to be worked out. But the characters involved, the stakes, and the feeling I want to achieve are there.

I watch this scene in the movie theater of my mind.

Now I’m at the place in my WIP where Romeo is about to engage in a final battle with high stakes—the highest so far for my hero.

Here is where I slow down to brood.

For the last three weeks, even as I’ve been writing toward the end, I’ve spent time away from the keyboard just to think about that scene and the choreography of it. For everything to work, the setting is crucial. I know where it’s going to happen—at a particular spot in L.A. (shocker!).

I’ve spent a good deal of time on Google Maps to get the broad lay of the land.

I’ve driven to the location, taken pictures, and revised some details. (I like to use real locations in my books, though I reserve the right to tweak and even make things up as needed!)

I know exactly what I want to happen, and it’s starting to excite me.

That’s key. If the ending doesn’t excite me how is it going to excite the reader?

But as the scene has become more vivid, I’ve encountered some problems. This is a good thing. Overcoming plot problems is one of the skills we need to develop as writers. I’ve come to believe that any problem can be overcome if you give it enough time.

My problems included the right weaponry (how does Mike get what he needs?), the presence of police (how does the final battle happen with cops all around?), and the terrain (people on the street, cars, buildings).

For each one I did more research, watching the scene again as a movie in my mind. The nice thing about being a writer is that you don’t have to spend money on expensive re-shoots. A studio won’t shut down your production.

Brooding lets the Boys in the Basement do their work. I’ll be going about my non-writing business, even just sitting in a chair reading a book, when the Boys send up a note with an insight or a possibility. (I’ve got to remember to send them some donuts.)

I test every change by asking if it makes me more excited. If so, it stays in.

The last—and to me, the most important element—is resonance. Resonance is the very last note you leave with the reader. Like the perfect ending to a Beethoven symphony, it lingers with you long after the concert is over. That’s why the last page of my novel is always the one I work on most.

Remember that great opening scene in Romancing the Stone? The romance writer (Kathleen Turner) is typing her ending, which is shown onscreen. When we cut to her at the keyboard, she has just finished and is weeping copious tears. Her ending has captured her as if it were real life (which, in the film, it soon will be!)

“No tears in the writer,” wrote Robert Frost, “no tears in the reader.”

So brood. Watch. Edit. Brood some more. Then write those last pages for all they’re worth.

What is your approach to writing the ending of your novel? When do you know you’ve really nailed it?

Oh yes! If you’d like to get in on the ground floor of the Romeo series, the first book, Romeo’s Rules, is now 99¢ on Kindle for a limited time. Order here.

Outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B015OXVAQ0

By Elaine Viets

My first mystery was “Backstab,” which featured Francesca Vierling, a six-foot-tall newspaper columnist for the St. Louis City Gazette. Francesca wasn’t much of a creative stretch, since I used to be a newspaper columnist and yes, I’m six feet tall.
In my first series, I wrote about a newspaper world that is long gone. In “Backstab,” two of Francesca’s favorite local characters are murdered. One is the bartender at a landmark saloon, and the other is a rehabber – the local term for someone who remodels homes. Francesca is convinced their deaths are linked. Driven by grief and anger, she sets out to find out why the men were murdered. Francesca uncovers a secret someone has already killed to keep. And that if she keeps digging, the killer will have to murder Francesca, too.
When “Backstab” came out twenty-five years ago, I was so proud of it my Aunt Betty made me a miniature baby carrier for it. I loved going into bookstores to see if it was on the shelves – until I went into a bookstore in DC’s Union Station and asked for “Backstab” by name.
“Oh, yeah,” the clerk said. “We have it. That’s the one with the weird cover.”

Okay, even in my biased opinion, the “bleeding newspaper and beer glass” cover didn’t work. I like my new cover much better.
“Backstab” has all the passion you find in first novels, but some parts went on too long, so I trimmed them. Others needed to be revised to keep up with the times, including Francesca’s visits to transvestite nightclubs.

But “Backstab” includes some funny stories from my time as a newspaper columnist in St. Louis. One favorite was a true story of a parking spot. St. Louis is a city where the parking spot is sacred — and never more so than on a snowy day. Those of you who have survived snowy winters know this.
There was a terrible snow storm. My friend Janet Smith shoveled out a parking space for her husband Kevin to use when he came home from work. Forget Romeo and Juliet, when a woman shovels a parking spot for her man, that’s true love. It took Janet two hours. When she finished, her yuppie neighbor pulled into the spot like she owned it. She refused to move her car.
Janet told her, “You are going to move.”
The yuppie said, “I’ll try.”
Janet said, “My husband gets home at five and you will be out of there.”
The yuppie said, “I’ll try.” Janet told her that she had two hours to move. The yuppie didn’t. So Janet called the police. Janet wanted her neighbor arrested for stealing.
The officer explained that the police couldn’t do anything. “There is no law protecting your spot,” he said. Then the officer said, “There is also no law that says you can’t water your lawn in February. If her car happens to be in the way, that’s too bad. You’d be surprised what that water does. It freezes doors and locks. It freezes wipers to the windshield and tires to the ground.”
Janet said, “But won’t the police arrest me?”
The officer said, “For what?”
Janet took his name, just to be on the safe side, and then she brought out the garden hose and watered her lawn. Too bad that yuppie didn’t move her car. The water froze the locks. Froze the windows. Froze the tires to the ground. She had an inch of ice on that car. It took the yuppie two hours to chip off all the ice.
So there was justice after all.

See what you think of my first novel. Backstab is now on sale for $1.99. Buy it here: tinyurl.com/2p83usfm  

By John Gilstrap

So, you’ve finally made it to the end of your manuscript. Your plot points are all where they need to be, the characters have the personalities you hoped for, and the climax will leave people breathless. Whether it took you four months or four years, it’s seemed like a long time coming, but the day has finally come to either ship it off to your agent, or to go about the business of finding one, or to do whatever needs to be done to independently publish.

But wait. Is it really done?

Remember that place in Chapter Seven where you struggled with the action, and you wondered if the action was really motivated? Maybe you should go back and read that one more time. Yep, sure enough, it’s not all that you had wanted it to be. Maybe it was actually better before you made the change.

So, you delay pressing the SEND button for a day or two and you tweak that section again.

Oh, crap! If you make that change, then the big reveal in Chapter Fifteen won’t be as powerful. Maybe you should change it back. Yes, definitely, you should change it back.

And there. On page 24, you used “which” when you should have used “that.” Oh, no! Did you make that same mistake again? Oh, hell, you never were really sure of the difference in every circumstance.

Oh, my goodness! Look at all the adverbs . . .

When is it time to stop editing?

That doubt circle I present above is something we all face, but sooner or later, that circle becomes a spiral that will drag your project to destruction. So, when is it okay to stop? Some things to consider:

It will never be perfect.

I cringe every time I read a book that I wrote a few years ago. Why did I use that stupid phrase? Why did I use so many words? Why am I incapable of understanding the proper use of commas?

Everybody’s inner quality control manager is different. A writer-buddy of mine hires two proofreaders to go over his manuscript before he sends it to his publisher and their copy editors. And every book still has a typo or two.

I don’t enjoy my buddy’s level of success, but my bank account is smaller, too, so I don’t do that. I start every writing session by rewriting what I wrote the day before. When I get to the end, I do one major editing pass to make sure that the story’s connective tissue is all there, and then I launch it.

Staring in the mirror doesn’t change the image.

There comes a point in every manuscript where you’ve either nailed it or you haven’t. Staring at it longer, tweaking individual words and questioning decisions you’ve already made doesn’t advance the story. If you genuinely liked the story yesterday, give that fact as much weight in your heart as the fact that you’ve got doubts today.

A few typos won’t torpedo your project.

An asterisk to that would be that the first couple of chapters should be pretty friggin’ pristine. Once you get people hooked on the story, the tolerance for human error increases.

True story:

My first literary agent was “Million Dollar Molly” Friedrich with the Aaron Priest Literary Agency. This was in the mid-1990s. A friend/neighbor of hers said she had an acquaintance who’d written a memoir and would Molly look at it. With a cringe, she said yes and was handed a typewritten single-spaced manuscript on onion skin erasable bond paper. Despite every submission protocol being broken, she gave it a read and agreed to represent the book. The author was an unknown fellow named Frank McCourt, and the book was Angela’s Ashes. It did okay.

The lesson:

If the story is great, there’s lots of room for forgiveness of the little stuff.

So, TKZ family, when do you decide it’s time to launch your literary baby?

By PJ Parrish

I’m a sucker for good settings. Give me a bleak winter woods, a decaying Scotland castle, or a fetid bayou swamp, and I’m a happy-clam reader. Setting, to me, is a character, something to be rendered with great thought and tenderness. Like a good secondary character, it is always there in the background. It is the stage on which your drama unfolds. It is a prism through which you convey mood, tone and even your voice. Most importantly, setting can be an emotional echo chamber for your hero’s inner struggles.

To me, my character’s struggles are almost always reflected in the setting. It goes back to one of my favorite lines from one of the greatest setting novels of all time — James Dickey’s Deliverance:

“I was standing in the most absolute aloneness that I had ever been given.”

But like any good secondary character, setting must assert its presence distinctly but quietly, always in support of the hero and plot, never overshadowing either.

Which brings me to our First Pager today. We’re going to somewhere out in the wilds where a woman is dead in a kayak, with a forest fire raging nearby no less. The writer gives us only two geographic anchors — a village called Forbidden Lake and a large place called Campbell River. Because the cop is called a “constable” I’m guessing we’re in Canada. Google tells me that there is a Campbell River near Vancouver, British Columbia. And near that, an actual place called Forbidden Plateau. Is that the turf our writer is working here? Don’t know. But I’m all in for the ride. See you in a bit…

AT FORBIDDEN LAKE

Smoke from the forest fires had turned the sun into a red dot. In the lake, a faded yellow kayak bobbed gently next to a rotting dock, its occupant slumped over as if in deep sleep.

Detective Kenneth Tingle watched from the shore as paramedics maneuvered a small motorboat toward the kayak. There was no urgency in their movements as they untied it from the dilapidated dock. Even from his vantage point, at least thirty feet away, the gash on the woman’s neck and the blood on the kayak were indication enough: she was dead dead.

Directly behind Detective Tingle, a vacant lot stretched up toward the two-street village of Forbidden Lake. To his left, the Forbidden Lake Resort sprawled along the shore. To his right stood a run-down house that the lake was reclaiming as its own—the roof had more moss than shingles, the paint had peeled beyond recognition. A slight movement in one of the windows was the only indication that the house was occupied. Otherwise, Tingle would have assumed it was condemned.

He tried to scan the faces of the dozen or so people milling around, looking for a guilty expression, an averted gaze, or a perverted smile. But the smoke stung his eyes, so all of the faces were blurred into a mass of homogenous voyeurism. Despite the blur, he liked to think he could tell the difference between the locals and the visitors—the visitors had better posture, their movements more confident. The locals, or at least the ones he assumed were locals—a woman in long, flowing skirts; another woman in a crisp polo shirt and white visor; a few rough-looking men; a teenage girl with her arms tight across her chest—their body language screamed anxious defeat, as if a dead body in a kayak was something they’d come to expect.

Constable Artois appeared at his side, breathless.

“How was the drive?” Tingle asked.

“Slow. Visibility wasn’t great.” Artois’ forehead glistened with sweat. “How was the chopper ride?”

“Visibility wasn’t great either.” Tingle wasn’t a fan of helicopter rides in the best of conditions. He and the paramedics had flown from Campbell River through a dense screen of smoke. His stomach had been in knots, and he’d hated how the paramedics had expressed concern in the chopper—asking him if he was okay, if he needed a vomit bag.

_______________________

First things first. The writing is clean, tight and well-crafted. No overwrought writerly writing. No hiccups or things that made me go, “huh?” I know that sounds like a low bar, but it’s not. Clarity and control are highly underrated qualities. This writer can tell a story.

I love the setting. Murders set in the remote wilderness are almost cliche in crime fiction, as much as neon-lit rain-stained urban streets are. But it works because the plot often transcends hero vs villain to hero also vs nature. Think Craig Johnson, William Kent Kreuger, Nevada Barr…

So this writer is off to a great start, I think. A small, probably insular village (shades of PD James and Georges Simenon!). A bigger-city outsider cop come to play hero. An evocative death scene. And did I mention, there’s a forest fire raging? So kudos, writer. The only thing I would tell you to improve is to find ways at every turn to make that setting work harder for your plot and your character. Your set-up is fine. Pepper in a few more descriptive details so we feel your setting more, especially if you can make it amplify tension. (See my edits that follow).

Now, I do have one issue. I think you need to pay closer attention to your forensics and police procedures. Keep in mind — if your setting is, indeed, not in the States — that readers will need grounding in foreignisms. Tingle, for example, comes from the big town of Campbell River. Is he local cop or Royal Canadian? Find a way to slip this in early. You also need to let us know if we are in Canada or not.

Now to some more detailed points. All we know from your narrative is that a woman’s (girl’s?) dead body is in a kayak with a “gash” on her neck. That’s really not enough information. Consider the time-line for any routine wrongful death discovery:

Someone discovered the body. They were probably able to determine she was dead. They then called 911. Does your village even have 911 or did the person call local constable? As you describe things, the body is close to the village. The constable would not have to come far.

Responding officer (constable) would come first. Your village apparently does not have EMT unit. Constable would find a way to get to the kayak and verify she’s dead. He would then call the larger city authorities and EMTs. Which is why, I assume, you have them helicoptering in.

So that brings Kenneth Tingle on scene. As a homicide detective, he would want to get as close to the body as possible. The kayak is tied to a dock. I like the idea the dock is rotting because it creates tension in accessing the body. Still, he’d get in a boat and go out. By leaving him on land, looking at the local crowd, he comes across as disinterested and even passive. GET HIM TO THE BODY. You can have him thinking about the locals later in a quiet moment.

Other points to consider: I don’t know how much time has passed between the body being discovered and your opening — you should tell us via Tingle’s thoughts. But by now, wrongful death would probably be determined, and there might be other officers nearby in waders and boats, assisting.

I understand your point about bringing in the onlookers now — it sets up your line: “Their body language screamed anxious defeat, as if a dead body in a kayak was something they’d come to expect.” And that creates tension because it implies this isn’t the first murder in Forbidden Lake. Great! Love it. But it comes at the expense, as I said, of making your hero look like a spectator and muser.  Which is death to a hero.

Get Tingle involved. Get him out there. Get him moving and doing. Not just thinking.

Okay, a quick line edit and we’re done. My comments in red.

Smoke from the forest fires had turned the sun into a red dot. In the lake, a faded yellow kayak bobbed gently next to a rotting dock, its occupant slumped over as if in deep sleep. Nice opening image.

Detective Kenneth Tingle watched from the shore passively as paramedics maneuvered a small motorboat toward the kayak. There was no urgency This phrase sort of drains the tension out of your opening. There can be a feeling of urgency even with a dead body in that the hero feels compelled TO ACT. I would have him in an inflatable raft approaching the kayak so he can SEE the body and TELL us what it looks like. Is she young, old? What is she wearing? Dark hair in wet strands like kelp across her face? in their movements as they untied it from the dilapidated dock. Even from his vantage point, at least thirty feet away, the gash on the woman’s neck and the blood on the kayak were indication enough: she was dead dead.  He already knew she was dead; that’s why he was called here. And again, he’s onshore, watching, thinking. ACTION FIRST, REACTION AND SECONDARY THOUGHTS LATER.  Also: a “gash” can imply something minor. Get a little more gritty here. SHOW US what he is seeing. 

Also an important point: If this woman/girl is local, the constable or someone would recognize her. Make that clear. It also increases tension, one way or another.

You need some juicy dialogue in your opening. The exchange between Tingle and Artois is wasted cop banter. What if Artois is with Tingle in the raft and recognizes her? Now, that is juicy dialogue.

The next two graphs are well-rendered as far as setting goes, but I think they come too early in your opening and thus leach tension. Suggest having Tingle examine the body as well as he can from a bobbing raft, maybe with dialogue with Artois. Give him some quick thoughts and maybe directing EMTs to bag her and get her to land. Give him some forensic smarts — he can tell from the wound it was murder. 

Then I’d take Tingle back to shore. Artois can go handle the gathering crowd. Tingle can then watch the conveying of the body and in this quieter moment, can give us a very quick lay of the land of Forbidden Lake, the big resort and the rundown house. ONLY then would I have him turn his focus to the crowd. 

Directly behind Detective Tingle, a vacant lot stretched up toward the two-street village of Forbidden Lake. To his left, the Forbidden Lake Resort sprawled along the shore. To his right stood a run-down house that the lake was reclaiming as its own—the roof had more moss than shingles, the paint had peeled beyond recognition. A slight movement in one of the windows was the only indication that the house was occupied. Otherwise, Tingle would have assumed it was condemned.

He tried to scan squinted through the sting of the smoke to scan the faces of the dozen or so people milling around, behind the police tape. He was looking for a guilty expression, an averted gaze, or a perverted smile. But the smoke stung his eyes, so all of the faces were blurred into a mass of homogenous voyeurism. This line seems a tad overwrought in your nicely spare style. Despite the blur, he liked to think he could tell the difference between the locals and the visitors Is Forbidden Lake a big tourist destination as this implied? You need to make that clear. .  visitors had better posture, their movements more confident. The locals, or at least the ones he assumed were locals—a woman in a long, flowing skirts; another woman in a crisp polo shirt and white visor; a few rough-looking men; a teenage girl with her arms tight across her chest—The only place where you confuse me. A woman in a crisp polo shirt and visor screams tourist to me. their body language screamed anxious defeat, as if a dead body in a kayak was something they’d come to expect. Interesting line that creates a little tension but what comes before it does not support it. Try to be more specific. Something like:

It was July and Forbidden Lake’s tiny population was, as usual, swollen with tourists. Artois was having a time keeping them behind the police tape. Tingle squinted through the sting of the smoke at the faces in the crowd. He liked to think he could tell the locals from the tourists — the man in the crisp polo shirt and visor, the thin woman in the flowing dress focusing her cell phone camera, definitely out of town. The others were different — sun-roughed men in jeans and t-shirts, a teenage girl with arms crossed tight over her chest — locals, he suspected. In their slumped postures and grim faces he could read something strange, like anxious defeat, as if a dead body in a kayak was something they had come to expect. 

Constable Artois appeared at his side, breathless.

“How was the drive?” Tingle asked.

“Slow. Visibility wasn’t great.” Artois’ forehead glistened with sweat. “How was the chopper ride?” This is wasted dialogue. Does nothing to propel plot or increase tension and that is what you need in the opening pages. If you want to make a point of Tingle getting knotty in the copter, have Artois rejoin them and they can talk. But do you really want to waste precious moments on such small stuff so early?

“Visibility wasn’t great either.” Tingle wasn’t a fan of helicopter rides in the best of conditions. He and the paramedics had flown from Campbell River through a dense screen of smoke. His stomach had been in knots, and he’d hated how the paramedics had expressed concern in the chopper—asking him if he was okay, if he needed a vomit bag.

Okay, that’s all. Don’t let the blood all over your pages discourage you, dear writer. As I often say, the more I like your work, the more I want you to try harder. This is really good stuff and you’re off to a fine start. I would read on. Just be more careful with your forensics and take care that Tingle doesn’t become a wall flower at his prom. Well done!

Postscript. About your title. Love it. But I strongly suggest you lose the “AT” and just call it Forbidden Lake. It has resonance and intrigue. There’s good reason Dennis Lehane didn’t call his book “On Mystic River” or William Kent Kreuger didn’t call his book “In Blood Hollow.”

I turned my pickup left at the light coming from our neighborhood and accelerated onto the hot six-lane past a gravel truck, then a dump truck, then a pickup pulling landscaping equipment. Merging into the far right lane, I noticed several brand spanking new houses across a field that ten years ago was full of dove, but now contained nothing but rows and rows of houses marching toward the highway.

“Where’d those houses there come from? I don’t remember them being built.”

“Yes you do.” The War Department gave me one of her patented sighs, indicating that I’d once again taxed her in some way. “We talked about them the other day on the way to Greenville.”

“Oh, yeah.”

She was right. For the past year, I’d watched a variety of trucks cut a dirt path across the pasture and into what was once woods, only to emerge full of dirt, rocks, and unknown items covered with tarps. At the same time, other large trucks carrying equipment, sand, and concrete made even more inroads into the former woodland.

But I hadn’t noticed those houses so close to the road.

No one was in the lane ahead, so I gave the growing housing edition a second look. They’d drained a stock tank that held ducks in the wintertime and pushed down all the trees they could find with a bulldozer, not even giving them the dubious dignity of falling from chainsaws.

I squinted at the Tyvek-wrapped houses that would soon be hidden by brick walls, gates, and the most despicable trees every to disgrace a landscape, Bradford Pears. Then it hit me.

The new houses hadn’t registered because of my perspective. I hadn’t paid any attention to the last of the dead and dying trees still anchored at the edge of the road, and when I did, they framed the buildings and made them pop. It’s an old photography trick to catch the eye and make a photo more striking.

Perspective changes everything.

Webster defines perspective as the capacity to view things in their true relations or relative importance, including the appearance to the eye of objects in respect to their relative distance and positions.

It was my perspective that was off when I was looking at all that new construction, and I realized that’s true in everything, especially…

Well good Lord, the boy’s finally gotten to the point here, Ethyl! Hurry up with that popcorn and let’s see what he’s trying to say!

We all have a different way of looking at things, from opinions to politics, to real positioning of physical entities. It’s the same in writing. Perspective is how your characters view and deal with the events unfolding within a story, and you have control of all that.

Don’t get Point of View confused with Perspective. An author’s POV focuses on the type of narrator he or she wishes to emphasize. It concentrates on defining the narrator’s characteristics while perspective focuses on how the chosen narrator perceives and feels about what’s happening in the novel. There’s no need to belabor this point any longer, because my running buddy John Gilstrap covered this well in his last post, so give it a read.

And to add a personal note here, I hadn’t read John’s post until I’d finished this one. It seems that we’re on similar, but distinctly different paths this week.

Taking a note from personal experience growing up with an extremely annoying little brother, I often had to explain of what had just happened, while the Old Man stood there with his eyes flashing, before Little Brother told his side.

The story changed depending on which of us was telling it. And my version was always right. “He fell through the wall!”

“Did not! He knocked me through the wall, Dad!”

To me, it was a subtle but important different based on how we viewed the events leading up to that significant moment in our lives that day. Frankly, I was shocked that a small human could fly completely through two layers of sheetrock and into my parent’s bedroom without hitting the studs.

In the first book of my Sonny Hawke series, Hawke’s Preya, I switched perspectives between Ranger Hawke and the villain Marc Chavez, to show (show, don’t tell!) how each man thought he was right. From Chavez’s point of view, he was using a violent takeover of a small town trying to change the world to better for himself and others of like mind.

Ranger Hawke dealt with the bad guys according to the law and did what was necessary to save a class of high school students, including two of his own, from terrorists.

I tried something different in a later novel, alternating chapters mirroring the same events in a specific timeframe based on the perception of each particular character. One reader misunderstood what I was doing and complained that the chapters were repetitive, but I felt this real-time shift in perspective added richness to the story, and hope that individual was the only one confused.

Another thing to note is that readers often insert their own beliefs into your character perspectives, and you might hear from them, good or bad. I always find these emails and reviews fascinating and look forward to wondering exactly what they read and interpreted according to their own viewpoint(s).

One reader sent me an email lambasting my “beliefs” about firearms. That person called me an “Obama Groupie” and suggested that I was an anti-gun liberal. Less than a day later another email accused me of being a right wing Republican and said I was a gun-carrying, Bible-thumping warmonger.

It’s unavoidable, but let it roll off. If it happens to you, then your character’s perspective struck a nerve and as far as I’m concerned, you’re successful.

Write on!