The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with. — John Updike

By PJ Parrish

The first time I tried it I was five. I didn’t get very far, just up to the shopping center where a nice sales lady gave me a lollipop and called the cops. They stuck me in the cruiser and we drove around until I recognized our house. My mom didn’t even realize I was gone. Such dangerous times back in the Fifties…

The second time I tried it was about two years later. I was mad about something, so I took the jar of peanut butter and crawled out the milk chute. But it was really cold and I couldn’t get back in, so I sat on the swing set in the backyard until my mom saw me and let me back in.

I am a wanderer by nature.  Luckily, I am now married to a man who loves to travel as much as I do.  But he still gets upset when I wander too far ahead down the hiking trail.

I am going nuts staying put. Which is why I seem to be gravitating right now to books and movies about trapped people who run away.  I am re-reading one of my favorite books right now — Madame Bovary. It’s beautiful and great for many reasons, but I am particularly drawn to the idea that Emma Rouault , before she became Madame Bovary, had possibilities. But she married a Dick Decent, and now she’s imprisoned by the walls of her house and she’s bored stiff. Her only outlets are shopping and affairs. She tries to run away. Things don’t end well.

Books about women who run away (usually to find a better version of themselves) have always appealed to me.  I loved Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild, about her 1,000-mile solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail. (made into a decent movie starring Reese Witherspoon). Then there was Richard Yate’s novel Revolutionary Road, a devastating story about a couple trapped in a suburban hell. The tragic character is poor deluded April, who fails as an actress, marries for security, and dreams of running away to Paris:

“Sometimes I can feel as if I were sparkling all over,” she was saying, “and I want to go out and do something that’s absolutely crazy, and marvelous…”

Which reminds me of the line from one of the most famous runaway novels, On The Road:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who …burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

The main character Sal is depressed after his divorce and wants to run away. (Men running away in stories are seldom seen as neurotic. They are just…adventurous!) So Sal takes off with his friend Dean on a cross-country journey with the hope of finding…something:

“Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”

The trapped character who runs away to find the pearl is a classic fictional archetype/trope.  I created one myself in my stand alone She’s Not There, an amnesiac who, thinking her husband is trying to kill her, takes off on a cross-country run and eventually finds the truth. And herself, of course.

These characters can be really attractive in normal times. Right now, when we all feel so confined and isolated, they might speak to us in especially powerful ways.

I’ve been watching a lot of old movies lately. I doubt the programmers at TCM realize it, but they’ve been scheduling a lot of runaway movies lately.  In just one week, I have watched Kramer vs Kramer, Under The Tuscan Sun and Shirley Valentine.

Tuscan Sun has Diane Lane, freshly divorced and pathetic, taking off on a friend’s ticket to a “Gay And Away” bus tour of Italy. There, on a “bad idea” whim, she buys a broken down villa and tries to unblock herself enough to work on her novel, which she abandoned when she got married, — even as she takes up with the juicy Marcello.

Shirley Valentine is an English matron who was a firebrand in school but life intruded. Now she’s married to a schlub workaholic husband and making cocoa for her ungrateful daughter. She spends her days in her tiny kitchen talking to the walls and staring at a travel poster of Greece. A friend drags her along on a holiday, where she meets Costas and…well, it doesn’t end the way you’d expect.

And then there’s poor Joanna Kramer. She gave up a promising career to marry and have a child. But she snaps one day and leaves them both, disappearing into the feminist ether until she realizes she needs her boy — but not her man.

On my last plane ride, I watched Where’d You Go Bernadette? It’s about a self-involved neurotic architect who has lost her creative heart. She hates pretty much everyone because she hates herself. Or the version of herself she has become. Bernadette is really an unlikeable character and after the first half hour, I was ready to give up and watch ESPN, but the story got better. And then really good. And the ending is terrific.

But for women on the run stories, you can’t beat the golden oldie, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Anyone who says Martin Scorsese doesn’t get women needs to see this. Newly widowed Ellen Burnstyn packs up her surly pre-teen and heads west, hoping to make it to Monterey Calif where she will go back to the singing career she abandoned when she got married. Marooned in Arizona, she becomes a waitress and finds love in the arms of a hunky woke rancher Kris Kristofferson. But after she tells him to kiss her grits, things don’t turn out like you’d expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jFhv9mPqk4

Okay, to be fair, not every great runaway story stars a woman. Remember the ending of Mad Men? Poor tortured Don Draper, drummed out of the ad biz, escapes from New York and goes west of course. In an Eselen therapy session, listening to someone describe himself as food in the refrigerator that nobody wants, Don breaks down. The last image is Don seating in a lotus, smiling. Cue the music: the groundbreaking 1971 TV ad for Coca-Cola,  implying that Don will probably not escape after all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxtZpFl3pPM

I’d like to buy the poor tired world a Coke right now.

Any favorite runaway books or movies?

I was recently asked by a family member as to whether I had a preference with respect to being either buried or cremated. My immediate response, ala Bob Hope, was “Surprise me.” 

The sincere question and my flippant response brought to mind a story that my mother told me many years ago. A college professor of hers took her class to a graveyard near Cincinnati where they examined headstones. Over half of them bore the same year of death for those occupying the graves beneath. The reason for this, according to the professor, was that an illness — it might have been smallpox — had swept through a village adjacent to the graveyard, all but wiping the population out. 

I then found myself thinking about cemeteries generally. I have visited many graveyards and cemeteries in Louisiana — in Baton Rouge, St. Martinville, and, of course, New Orleans — but have neglected what is practically in my own backyard of Westerville, Ohio, just northeast of Columbus. While the Westerville cemeteries do not contain the remains of anyone of the notoriety of Marie Leveau or Huey Long, the very ordinariness of those who now rest hidden from view of the living  provides grist for conjecture. The collection of granite headstones and markers constitute what I have come to call stone libraries, which tell or hint at stories in words carved rather than printed or spoken. What follows are three of many.

1909 was a tragic year for the Ballard family. The document standing in evidence of that conclusion is a tombstone in Pioneer Cemetery. The cemetery is a relatively small plot of land which somehow has managed to constitute a tranquil island in the middle of a sea of commerce which has formed around it over several decades while Westerville made its transition from a farming community to a bedroom suburb.  The Ballard gravestone is large, though neither Ozymandias-sized nor ostentatious by any means. It notes the location of the remains of the three Ballards, being  Bessie L., Herman F., and Irma Ruth. It is Irma Ruth — remarked as “Daughter” — whose birth and death years are listed as 1909, who gives us pause. History has not recorded the reason for the shortness of her journey, but we can certainly draw the conclusion that she was not forgotten in her wake. Bessie L. and Herman F. are recorded as “Mother” and  “Father” rather than “Wife” and “Husband.” It is understandable if we conclude that a sorrowful chill permeated the home of Irma’s mother and father until their respective passings some six decades later. 

Otterbein Cemetery is a fifteen-minute drive north from its sister Pioneer and is tucked into the corner of a quiet residential neighborhood, not far from a private college.  The oldest part of the cemetery is in the back.  There one will find the grave markers for the Hanby family. Benjamin R. Hanby is a major figure in Westerville. Hanby was an abolitionist and minister but is best remembered now as a composer. You know his work. His song “Lovely Nellie Gray” was recorded by Louis Armstrong with the Mills Brothers, later by Bing Crosby, and as “Faded Love” by Bob Wills, but it is “Up On the Housetop” for which Hanby is most famously remembered.  Hanby’s compositions were popular but did not gain a wide audience until a half-century or so after his death in 1867 at the age of 36. The fame of his compositions aside, probably no one of that era would have been more surprised than Hanby himself to learn that in Westerville an elementary school, a small shopping center, and a street have been named after him. He might also be somewhat nonplussed to learn that the cemetery to which he is consigned, as well as the private college nearby, is named after his brother.  Hanby’s life was unexpectedly cut short thanks to a visit to a disease-ridden locale known by its residents to this day as “Chicago,” where he contracted tuberculosis and passed away after a short hospitalization. Hanby was survived by his family which included his father, who was also a minister, and his brother, who was a physician. I have no way of knowing but I would guess that as each of them wondered at the premature passing of their son and brother they must have concluded that neither of their fields of vocation fully possessed the answer to the question as to why a life so demonstrably full of promise was taken so quickly.   

A similar question was undoubtedly asked by the Kern family, who rest near the Hanbys in the Otterbein Cemetery. Ruth Ann Kern was consigned to dust at the tender age of 13 in 1863. She was so young, undoubtedly on the cusp of the promise of adolescence. Her death at that age could have come from any number of sources. Perhaps it is better that we don’t know.

In death, we mark the inevitable as tragic. The converse is true as well. The world is a dangerous place, one in which we — or most of us, anyway — drag our feet as we are inexorably tugged toward the final precipice. It is that tragedy and inevitability which, ironically, make our world and the stories we tell — the ones ultimately marked in those stone libraries — so interesting. It is one reason that I often tell people that boring, as a day-to-day state, is good. 

I looked neither long nor hard for the stories I have remarked upon. It took me about a half-hour to find them and others in two different cemeteries. There are undoubtedly more in cemeteries near you, waiting for you to give voice to what you find.

Today’s fun fact: the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery is that a graveyard is a burial ground located on the property of a church or occasionally on a family farm. A cemetery is a larger burial ground not usually affiliated with a church. I did not know that until today, demonstrating that life and death are learning processes. 

Good day and be well. And be boring, in your life but not your writing. 

Photos by Al Thumz Photography and used with permission. All rights reserved.

No one could ever call me a skimmer. Rather, I take my time while reading.

It’s mind-boggling to me how some readers are able to devour multiple novels per week. I have a friend who reads one novel per day and still finds time to write. Sadly, that will never be me.

Even when I get lost in the story, I can’t help but see the underlying craft. And I delight in the skill of other writers, highlighting passages (on my Kindle) or adding notes when it sparks an idea for my WIP.

Would I love to read faster? Absolutely. But when it comes to craft, I seem not to possess an OFF button.

What about you? Are you slow or fast reader? 

By Elaine Viets 

The 1914 movie serial “The Perils of Pauline,” was the ultimate cliffhanger. Week after week, Pauline escaped airplane crashes, searches for buried treasure, and multiple abductions. She was even carried away in a hot air balloon. But contrary to legend, the original Pauline was never tied to a railroad track, or nearly sawed in half by a buzz saw.
Pauline’s perils made great cliffhangers, and kept moviegoers crowding the theaters for some twenty episodes.
Cliffhangers are the hooks that make your readers keep turning the pages, pulling them into the next scene or chapter. Most cliffhangers come at the end of the chapter. If your readers are hooked, they’ll continue reading.

Here are some tips for good cliffhangers:
A cliffhanger should catch your readers by surprise.
Something unexpected has to happen: Someone threatens to jump off a bridge. Their car goes into a skid on a snowy curve. A door opens unexpectedly. Then, bam! The chapter ends.
Darkest Evening, Ann Cleeves’ new Vera Stanhope novel, has a perfect cliffhanger chapter ending. Vera follows a killer, who gets her alone and strangles her. I’ve edited out the killer’s name in this section, but you get the idea.
“As Vera began to lose consciousness, she thought that this was her fault. . . it was her pride again, making her think she was indestructible.
“Then the world went blank.”
I couldn’t wait to turn the page and see what happened to Vera. Not to mention the killer.

The Perils Of Pauline, poster, Pearl White, 1914. (Photo by LMPC via Getty Images)

Someone unexpected arrives. A crook, an innocent person, a cop, just in time. This person is a surprise. They abruptly break up the scene.
Someone leaves.
A bride suddenly leaves the groom standing at the altar. A couple is fighting, and he walks out on her. She suddenly quits her job.

Sometimes, the cliffhanger is a new piece of information.
Your character learns something. She’s not married legally to her husband after all because he never divorced his first wife.
Or, he’s not the son of the man he called father: the DNA test proved it.
Your character notices something. The detective sees the scratches around the door lock and realizes the house had been broken into. A wife finds lipstick on her husband’s shirt – scarlet lipstick. She never wears that color.
Your character figures something out. She finally understands the key to the puzzle the dead man left behind. He finally knows why his dead father wanted him to listen to the CD he left in his desk drawer.

Your character decides something. She’s going to leave her abusive husband. He’s going to rob the store to get enough money to feed his family.
She’s going back to school.
Your character feels something. I looked at my husband of twenty years, and wondered, “Why had I married him? What did I ever see in him? Maybe it was time for me to walk away.”
Or, I looked at his picture, and suddenly, I couldn’t see it any more I was blinded by rage.
Your character makes a demand. “Get me to the hospital now!” she told the cabbie. “There’s fifty dollars if you make it in ten minutes!”

How do you end a chapter with a cliffhanger if nothing new is happening? Give a simple pastime a feeling of foreboding.
Agatha Christie, in The A.B.C. Murders, does that. Tom Hartigan and Lily Marbury are out for a carefree night of dancing while a killer stalks the area. Dame Agatha writes:
“They danced on happily – in their conscious minds nothing but the pleasure of being together.
“In their unconscious minds something stirred . . .”
Your character doesn’t show up. In Jeff Abbott’s thrillers are chockfull of cliffhangers. In Cut and Run” Claudia is in a booth at a Mexican restaurant, waiting for Judge Whit Mosley, a man on the run.
“Claudia traced the beer rings on the worn wooden table, waiting for Whit, waiting to see if he was still the man she knew, afraid of what she heard in his voice.
“The nachos grew cold. Whit never showed.”
Whit’s no-show is a cliffhanger and one reason why Jeff’s books are page turners.

Give your readers a sense of menace.
Let them know your characters will be going off to a dangerous place or a risky situation. Or something has happened that will change everything.
Before She Was Helen, by Caroline B. Cooney has some first-rate cliffhangers. Like this one:
Helen thought, “Cold cases are solved by DNA and fingerprints.
“Her fingerprints.
“Which were on the doors and knobs at Dom’s and the Coglands’ houses.
Where the police would shortly be summoned to reunite a stolen artwork with its owner.”
Would Helen’s guilty past catch up with her? I kept reading to find out.

Tick-tock. Time is running out. This is a favorite plot device in thrillers.
“He looked at the clock. He had two hours before the terrorists blew up the bus full of school children. He had to find them.”
Unexpected news. Important information, or a person, shows up unexpectedly. End your scene with the protagonist receiving devastating news: his wife is dead. His office was blown up. Her partner was shot in a hold-up.

Cliffhangers you should avoid. Two of them are: “If I’d only known,” or “Had I but known.”
I ended a chapter like that and my editor cut the line. She told me it was a cliche.
Ending a novel with a cliffhanger.
Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it? But it often ticks off your readers and leaves them feeling frustrated. Don’t do it. Unless, like Pauline, your new episode is available next week.
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