“One should be able to return to the first sentence of a novel and find the resonances of the entire work.” — Gloria Naylor

By PJ Parrish

I just wrote the two most fearsome words in the crime writer’s lexicon:

CHAPTER ONE

There’s nothing after that. Just an empty page. Just whiteness, as desolate and lonely as a snow-covered field in the Michigan woods.

Wait, that’s not bad! Maybe I can use that. . .

No. No, no, no. This book is not set in winter, you moron! You can’t drag out another over-wrought weather opening. Stop it! Besides, you used up all your snowy field metaphors in your second book. Yeah, I know it was 2001 and you’re counting on the fact that no one will remember. But you’re not going to get away with it. You have to be fresh!

I stare at the screen. The curser pulses like a dying heartbeat. Twenty minutes pass. The field of snow is still there. I start rifling through my cerebral filing cabinet for inspiration. I give up and Google quotes about how hard writing is.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it’s also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it’s like making love while having a tooth pulled. –Dean Koontz

Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. — Flannery O’Connor

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. — Joan Didion

Gee, thanks guys. I feel a whole lot better now. Not. Just knowing that every other writer has the same problems getting traction as I do does not make me feel any less inadequate.

Maybe if I blog about this, it will help. Okay, you can’t write your opening line until you know what your story is about, right? You have to have an idea. Or a concept. Or a note that you scribbled on that pad beside your bed. Or maybe a great title got seared into your brain after those three scotches. See James’s Sunday post here.

Wait, that happened to me once. I got an idea for a title — Island of Bones — and had no idea, concept or plot. All I saw was the title in my head, but everything flowed from there.  That book almost wrote itself.

Mostly though, whenever I start a new book, I stare at the empty white screen with a slow-burn panic building in my chest. Because usually I am one of those pathetic constipated creatures who can’t move forward on a story until I have the first line. (See Gloria Naylor quote at top).

Hey, the first sentence is important. Don’t we preach that all the time here at TKZ? A great opening line is a promise you make to your reader that they are in for something special, a hell of a ride. No pressure, right?

One of my writing heroes, Joyce Carol Oates, says “The first sentence can’t be written until the last sentence is written.” That is not some Buddha-esque mumbo-jumbo. Oates is saying that a great opening line comes from you the writer having a complete understanding of what your book is about at its soul.  And usually that is something you discover not at the first step but during the journey.

Which tells me that I shouldn’t be sweating this first line so much. I should just get something down and move on.  But the habits of this old dog die hard.

{{{Switch back to my other screen. Curser still blinking on snowy Michigan field. Switch back to blog screen.}}}

Maybe it’s helpful to try to pin down the qualities of a great opening line.

It can be vivid or surprising. It immediately sets off a spark in your reader’s imagination.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — 1984

It can be funny.

“I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” — The Lost Continent by Bill Bryson

It can presage something bad to come. Which is what our good First Page Critique submission yesterday was doing, I think, by having the main character jump off a building.

Some years later, on a tug boat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were places in a tub of cement. — Live By Night by Dennis Lehane.

Was Lehane paying homage to Gabriel García Márquez?

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. — 100 Years of Solitude

It can introduce the main character, or more specifically his or her voice.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.– Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

It can be a simple statement of fact, like the iconic “Call me Ismael.” But here’s my favorite:

I had a farm in Africa. — Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen. 

Such sadness in the mere use of that past tense.

It can set a mood.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. — The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

It can establish the theme.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. — Anna Karenina by Tolstoy

And it can plain beautiful writing. But that beauty has to mean something deeper in the story as it certainly did for Nabokov.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins.My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.

Sigh. Now I am really flummoxed. Or maybe just intimidated. Wait, I think something’s brewing. Be right back…

{{{Switch to other screen and type this}}}

CHAPTER ONE

Someone was following him. He had noticed it a couple miles back, but only because he was so good at tailing cars himself and had never been made.

{{{Switch back to blog screen}}}

My protagonist is skip tracer who’s great at finding people who don’t want to be found. But now he’s now trying to find his wife, who is dead — or is she? And everyone thinks he did it.

Okay, it’s not perfect. But it’s a start.

Photo by Annie Spratt from unsplash.com

I try not to be a Danny Downer when it is my turn in the Saturday morning TKZ barrel. That’s what I am today, however. 

There is a simple reason for this. Our libraries are under siege, and not from lack of funding. The barbarians are at the gate and in the parking lot.

I posted a blog here several months ago about one of my local library branches and how wonderful it was. I stand behind every word.  I think that many of us take them for granted in several ways. They were here for us when we were children and we assume they will always be here as a place to borrow free books, music, films, and graphic novels, among other things. We also might tend to forget that libraries were and are also places where kids could go to study. Additionally, libraries were also the original “safe space” before that term got co-opted by college students. Back in the day parents and teachers used to tell kids who were lost, were being bothered, or just needed a quiet place that they could go to “the library.” 

The problem is that the space we know and love is being disrespected. People used to know how to act in a library. Everyone used to know, and if someone forgot the librarian said “Shhh” and you “shhhed.” That increasingly is not the case. Folks are using the space for naps, panhandling, hookups, and worse. They are harassing library workers and patrons, sometimes while under the influence of adult beverages and controlled substances and sometimes not. I’ve been to a couple of branches locally where I have had to walk a gauntlet of aggressive requests for money as I walked through the doors. I can deflect that type of thing quickly and effectively enough. What about the parent who isn’t so prepared, who is just trying to take their little kid into the library for storytime? They’ll probably just stop going. Then what? 

Don’t take my word for it about this. I found several articles regarding this issue, though it was this one that resonated most strongly with me. What reminded me about this issue, however, is a recent murder that took place in Columbus, Ohio, I don’t live in Columbus, but my profession occasionally takes me close to the area where the murder took place, a neighborhood called Driving Park. The killing occurred in the parking lot of the library that serves the neighborhood.  The library building, which was built a few years ago to replace an older facility, is the one bright spot on the street, which is not a commercial destination for anyone living outside of the neighborhood. I occasionally will stop in that library and browse for a few minutes if I find myself running early to an appointment. My observation is that the people who do use it — primarily students who live in the area — are well-served. The library does not suffer from a lack of resources. It’s a place where students can and do go to study quietly and without disturbance, where reliable online access is more likely to be obtained than it might be at home, and where the librarians are happily kept hopping by the requests for help. 

You can read an article about what happened at the Driving Park library here.  The police have the alleged shooter in custody. What is clear is that this incident didn’t occur because of an argument over who was going to check out the last copy of American Dirt.  It didn’t happen because two people wanted the same parking space. No, the reason for the killing was a street beef which caused more than a dozen knuckleheads to gather in the library parking lot because it was convenient. This is in a neighborhood where parents walk their kids to the library to give them a chance to do well. 

There is some discussion occurring under the radar on a nationwide basis about what to do. Some systems are retaining special duty police officers. There are some librarians who are objecting to this on the basis that the presence of a police officer makes the library less “welcoming.” I understand their point, though I would submit that the sight of a drunken adult dropping a dooky on the carpet in front of a five-year-old isn’t exactly a welcoming sight, either. Neither is the sound of gunfire or the sight of a knife fight.

I don’t know what we do here. The problem isn’t going to get any better on its own. It’s only going to get worse. And while the problem, in general, isn’t confined to libraries in disadvantaged areas it certainly impacts them harder —  places where libraries are needed the most — than those located in areas that are financially better off. The mother quoted in the article I linked to above is, I would guess, going to be less likely to let her child go to the library, with her or without her, if it is no longer assuredly a safe place — a safe space, if you will — either inside or out.  The kids are being scared away. The parents of those kids are being scared away. So where does a kid like that go, someone who could turn out to be anything from a teacher to a doctor to an astronaut with a little encouragement and a lot of available resources?

Is this a problem near you? If it is, are you hearing about it anecdotally or is it being reported in your local media? I take the sense is that it is happening primarily in metropolitan areas as opposed to those with smaller density populations. Am I wrong? 

Describe your very first story in a sentence or two and tell us the genre.

Mine was a children’s book.

Bull-headed squirrel learns the importance of family after a lightning storm traps him inside a fallen tree.

Frank Sinatra via Wikimedia Commons

It’s time for my final curtain, dear friends. This is my last official post for TKZ. It’s with a heavy heart that I write this, because I’ve had a blast with you the past several years.

TKZ was the first and only group blog for which I’ve written regularly, and I couldn’t have chosen a better one. I can’t think of a more experienced group of writers writing about writing on the Internet. While many other group blogs have become weighed down with self-promotion and infighting and prima donna grandstanding, TKZ has only gotten better with time.

You, dear readers, are our better halves. You’re talented and curious and smart. You make it a pleasure to show up–whether it’s to post or join in the comments. Please give yourselves a big round of applause.

It’s often a challenge for me to come up with blog topics about writing that I think will interest you. My interior life is chaotic, and writing fiction is still a mystery to me after three decades of writing. When I finish writing a book or story, the memory of how I did it dissolves with time like Kool Aid mix in water–and nearly as quickly. It’s tough to delineate a process that I can’t precisely recall. While I am a person of a certain age, it’s not that I’m going dotty. It’s just the way my ADHD brain works. I can hyperfocus on something so that it becomes a delicious experience that engages my senses so fully that I find it difficult to return to reality. It’s a dreamlike state, and, like a real dream, it dissipates and disappears. When things are going well, a dozen pages of writing is left behind. The challenge is dodging all the shiny objects that seem to throw themselves at me when I’m trying to get back to the dream again.

If it sounds like I’m telling you that writing is magic that can’t be taught, I promise I’m not. I attended writing classes and workshops during the first six or seven years I was writing. (And I have to tell you that if you pay attention to the craft and critique pages here, and you write regularly, and read, you will get a solid writing education without paying a dime. Just sayin’…) Writing is not magic. It’s a combination of art and craft.

So, I hope you’ll forgive me for all the posts I didn’t write about how to plot, or create a character, or remind you to number those pages. (Seriously, Manuscript Rule 1 is number your pages!) We all have different strengths, and different gifts.

You know I love a list. Here’s a list of a few thoughts about writing and the writing life I’d like to leave with you.

— Read indiscriminately. Read the stories that you know will please you, and read stories and writers that will challenge you. Read out of your preferred genre and your culture and your comfort zone. Good writing is everywhere. Learn from it.

— Write bravely. I won’t lie. Brave is hard. The more of yourself–your feelings, your experiences, your ideas, your imagination–you put in your work, the better it will be. It may seem that both publishers and our contemporary society are currently offering writers very narrow lanes in which to write. It’s tough to be brave when you’re feeling pressured and walled in. Be brave anyway. That’s where your best work lies: beyond the walls.

–Let yourself be envious, then let it go. Too much envy is poisonous, but it’s a totally normal feeling. If you feel it, that’s okay. Let it motivate you to write better, be better. But use it and let it go before it turns on you. The phrase love and light sounds like the stuff of an SNL skit, but it’s kind of useful. Pile coals of kindness on the heads of those who make you itch with irritation. Their journey is not your journey, so keep your eyes on your own paper and do your own work. (Did I get enough platitudes in that paragraph?)

–Don’t be a dick. If you achieve any kind of success–from being the first in your writing group to sell a story, to being the only one at a table full of established writers to have made the bestseller lists–don’t be arrogant. Retain (or cultivate) some humility, if only because you never know when you’ll get surpassed or taken down, or by whom. Otherwise, it’s just a good idea to be nice. Cheer others’ successes. It’s true that someone might forget that you offered them congratulations on their Facebook page, but they won’t ever forget if you only ever talk about yourself.

–Don’t bore your reader. If you’re writing and you find you’re getting bored, stop what you’re doing immediately and try something different. If you’re feeling bored, chances are your reader would already have wandered off.

–Publishing is a crapshoot, and there’s an element of luck involved. Raise your odds by submitting (to an agent or publisher or beta reader) your best writing, packaged as a clean manuscript, and ask for help, advice, or representation in the most polite and charming way possible. Keep in mind that there are a huge number of not-very-well-written books alongside terrific books released every week. Just because you get a rejection doesn’t mean your writing is bad.

–Write what brings you joy. Or scares your pants off. Or makes you cry in a good way. That way lies authenticity (always good) and personal fulfillment (even better).

That’s it. I’m done. In Frank’s immortal words: I did it my way. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your kind attention. Stay in touch. Write like the wind!  xx Laura

By Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

Photos courtesy of Kat and Larry Martin

Today I’m delighted to chat with bestselling authors Kat Martin and L.J. (Larry) Martin, who’ve been together for 34 years. Between them, they have written well over a hundred novels.

Kat has written more than 75 historical and romantic suspense novels that have sold many millions of copies all over the globe. Larry crosses multiple genres, with bestselling westerns, thrillers, and nonfiction. He is also a founder and former owner of Wolfpack Publishing.

Here’s the inside scoop from Kat and Larry on their successful, long-lasting relationship.

DB: For most households, one author is quirky enough. How do two authors married to each other make it work?

Kat Martin

Kat: Actually, it has some advantages. We have the same friends, travel to the same conferences, are interested in a lot of the same subjects. We also understand the frustrations of being a writer, which are difficult for a non-writer to understand.

Larry: Ditto to Kat’s answers, plus we can read each other’s work and comment. For instance one time she was reading some female dialog I’d written and then drew a little mustache in the margin…I got it, my lady sounded like a dude.

DB: You met each other while working in the real estate industry. How did you each make the huge career change from real estate to writing?

Kat: Larry had already written a historical novel when we met.  He continued to work while I wrote my first book and we ended up selling both novels within six weeks of each other.

L.J. Martin

Larry: I had a giant year in the R.E. biz and never wanted to work that hard again. We had a little financial cushion, and needed it, and Kat was enthralled with my writing and said, “Hell, I can do that.” And did, far better. We’d always been avid readers, which is the basis of great writers.

DB: You are both exceptionally prolific authors. Do you have systems or routines for keeping up high production?

Kat: I don’t have kids, which gives me a lot of free time. Larry’s boys are grown. So that gives us a real time advantage. Also, we like what we are doing so mostly we would rather be writing than anything else. Well, I do enjoy traveling, staying in nice hotels and eating in gourmet restaurants. But we manage to work that in.

Larry: It’s productive to have “in-house” competition and an example to follow. Kat’s a voracious worker. I’m distracted by yard work, garden, photography, hunting…but her dedication always pulls me back. And both of us love to write.

DB: Do you brainstorm with each other on story ideas? Can you describe the process?

Kat: Larry writes his own books, his own way. No input from me. I appreciate his help with plotting and he also reads my action scenes and gives me input. Other than that, we pretty much work separately.

Larry: Neither of us slows down enough to get much input from the other. I help her occasionally with the male aspect: fistfights, firearms, survival, but that’s about it. I’m also preoccupied with publishing nonfiction, and enjoy that part of the biz.

DB: You often combine travel with research. This may be a chicken and egg question but do you visit locations with a plot already in mind, or do story ideas spring out of new places?

Kat: A little of both, I think. Sometimes we go places because one of us is working on a story.  Sometimes when we are traveling a new idea comes from the experience we are having at the time. Larry just finished a novel called The Blue Pearl, a high action thriller set around a cruise ship being taken over by terrorists. Our cruise was already planned. The story came to him before we left and the cruise helped with his research.

Larry: Most action books are a quest of some kind so the cruise was ideal with the addition of some really bad guys in exotic locations. I was able to interview the captain and security people and go everywhere on board other than the engine room. My prior thriller, The K Factor, was set primarily in North Korea and trust me, I didn’t go, and the cruise and great sights and wonderful restaurants in France, Spain and Portugal was more fun than researching lots of North Korean trials and tribulations…as much as I enjoy research.

DB: Describe a typical work day for Kat.

Kat: My day starts around 7 a.m. I enjoy my morning till around nine o’clock, when we either head to the gym for an hour, or I start going through email and doing some promotion. I like to be writing by 11:00, no later than noon, then write till the end of the day. After that I do some Facebook and a little more promo, then pour myself a glass of wine and relax for the evening.

DB: Describe a typical work day for Larry.

Larry: I hit the machine early, usually by six at least. When I smell the blood sometimes by four as I can’t sleep as my mind is plotting. Cup of coffee, sweatsuit, and I write until it’s time to shower and three days a week hit the gym to keep the brain blood flowing, then back to the word processor. Often in the P.M. I’m in the garage or outdoors, but I’ve already got my eight or ten in.

DB: How do you balance your individual creative idiosyncrasies in a long-term relationship?

Kat: Mostly he does his thing; I do mine. We overlap at the end of the day. He has a lot more diversified interests than I do. I’m fairly well consumed by my writing. Though currently, I’m on a remodel project for our new winter home, which has been agonizing and exhilarating.

Larry: It’s more than merely nice to have a beautiful, intelligent, woman with like interests seldom more than one story away. Most of the idiosyncrasies are left in characters in our books. We both love to cook, love a good glass of wine, love good dramas on TV or the theater, and each other’s company. What could be better?

DB: Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers of The Kill Zone?

Kat: I’ve got more Maximum Security novels coming out, including a new novella called Come Daybreak, which is one of my personal favorites. I’m hoping readers will be on the lookout for the books and that they enjoy them.

Larry: And I’m supporting Wolfpack Publishing, a company I co-founded and sold to my former partner, who still publishes my Westerns, and now that my non-compete has expired I’m into another aspect of publishing. No one does a better job with Westerns, and other fiction, than Mike Bray. Buttonwillow Books, my new effort, publishes my nonfiction and some for others. I’m currently enjoying publishing educational books by T. Michael Traser, an internationally recognized educator and a friend. If you’re a teacher, particularly one with English challenged students, check out the series ESL – Fun Games for the Classroom. Immigrant children who don’t master English are destined to be trapped in barrios and enclaves, and that’s not a good thing. And while you’re at it grab a copy of Rugged Trails, my latest western, suitable for young adults. Thanks for taking the time to chat with us.

~~~

Thank you, Kat and Larry, for opening up about your writing lives to TKZ readers.

Check out Kat’s books at katmartin.com and Larry’s books at ljmartin.com

~~~

3 Books for 3 Bucks – Special sale February 7-14, 2020. Debbie Burke’s thriller series is only $.99 each.  Click on title for “buy” link. 

Instrument of the Devil

Stalking Midas

Eyes in the Sky