By John Gilstrap

The crazy lady held a carving blade from the knife block on the kitchen counter, and she vehemently expressed her desire to hurt me with it. The year was 1990, plus or minus three. We were in her double-wide. The driver of my ambulance was in urgent communication with the EOC–emergency operations center–police were on the way, and the crazy lady (you got the CRAZY part, right?) stood between me and the door. I was armed with a radio and maybe a stethoscope. I suspect that drugs may have been involved because the crazy lady repeatedly sought counsel from someone only she could see. And apparently hear.

This was not my wheelhouse. We volunteers had no training for talking unstable people out of their murder weapons. While she seemed moved by my arguments that I had a young boy at home who needed me, the invisible sonofabitch had a convincing counterargument.

The confrontation ended without nuance. Crazy Lady had left the door open and when a critical mass of cops had arrived–I’ll stipulate that it took less than the seven hours that it felt–they hit her with the subtlety shown to a quarterback who fumbles the snap.

Happy ending. For me. I don’t know how it ended for her. Or her imaginary friend.

I’ve never written of this incident until right now, largely because it exposes me as a moron. Can you articulate the error that nearly got me killed? Read to the end for the reveal.*

Let’s turn this into a writing lesson.

For me, action scenes–fight scenes–are the hardest scenes to write. They’re also the easiest scenes to screw up.

My interaction with Crazy Lady involved countless thoughts, decisions and observations, all of which transpired simultaneously and in the space of a heartbeat.

In fiction, a heartbeat on the page can be a paragraph or a chapter. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” that length of time takes up a whole short story.

The secret to fast action is to write slow.

Let’s imagine a scene we all know: The Old West duel in the street. For my example, imagine that we’re past the build-up and the dread–think “High Noon” or “Firecreek”–and dial straight into the ditry deed of draw-and-fire.

The reality of the action will transpire over the course of a few seconds–five, at the most–but a one-sentence gunfight squanders drama and cheats your reader out of and exciting, engaging scene. So, how do we make it engaging?

Choose your POV Characters carefully, remembering that both shooters have something to prove or defend.

Arguably, the easiest POV characters for the scene are the shooters themselves–the guys (it’s always guys, right?) who are presenting their hearts and spines for penetration at 900 feet per second.

Are they concentrating on not being killed, or on killing the other guy? There’s a huge difference. Think about it: The best chance to score a kill shot means squaring your body across the target for a stronger stance that allows for better aim and trigger control. That also means making yourself a bigger target. Alternatively, you could blade your body to the target to make yourself harder to hit, but also creating a less stable shooting platform. What does it say of a character who thinks this way?

Are you presenting both POVs or just one? What are they thinking? What are they looking for?

Now, suppose that (one of) the POV character(s) is the 12-year-old child of one of the shooters. What does that do to your narrative? Okay, and the 12-year-old’s best friend is the child of the other shooter. Are they watching the duel together? What are their older or younger siblings doing?

Every element of story is about character.

If you write thrillers, your job is to make your audience scream for mercy. That means setting up seemingly irreversible collision courses for your characters. If one of my stories presents a comfortable moment for you to go to bed–or go to the bathroom, for that matter–I have failed.

In our street duel example, why didn’t Good Guy Greg just pop Bad Guy Bart in the back of the head and be done with it? Or the other way around? Did they consider it? Are their hands shaking?

In the real world, all of these thoughts and feelings and considerations whirl at the speed of synapse, but as the recorder of fact in the fictional world, it falls upon you to reveal these instinctive reactions in a way that feels fast yet is still discernable.

*Humiliating tactical error: I allowed Crazy Lady to block my access to the exit. If I could have left and gone to safety, the police response (God bless them!) could have been far less kinetic.

By PJ Parrish

You can learn a lot about writing fiction from watching football. I figured this out recently after bingeing on both the NFL and college playoffs. (Yes, I have no life but it’s really, really cold here right now. Plus it gives me an excuse to eat potato chips and drink Dr Pepper spiked with Southern Comfort before five, so don’t judge me).

What you can learn from football is pretty simple:

• Always keep moving downfield. (Don’t keep rewriting chapter 1)
• Have a good game plan. (Outline your story. ie be a wily plotter)
• If you don’t have a good game plan, be quick on your feet and don’t be afraid to just chuck the rock downfield and see what happens. (Go where the story takes you. ie be an artful pantser)
• Run north and south, not east and west. (Don’t get distracted by subplots)
• Surround yourself with good guys. (Character developement is everything)
• If you drop the ball, get up and get back in the game. (you painted yourself into a plot corner. Your character sucks. Boo hoo. Get back in there and fix it.)

But maybe the best thing I’ve learned from watching football that’s helped me in writing is this:

Stop with the clichés, already!

I watch a lot of sports, but I have to say football has to be the worst when it comes to really stale commentary. While watching the playoffs, I started to write some of the bad ones down. From my list:

• They haven’t got all their weapons. (too many injuries).
• You gotta go with what’s working. (not sure what that means)
• He’s hearing footsteps. (the receiver got spooked and dropped the ball)
• They get points the old fashioned way — up the middle. (they run alot)
• It’s gonna come back to haunt them. (missed the extra point)
• He’s got alligator arms. (wide receiver didn’t make the catch)
• They beat themselves.

And the saddest one:

• There’s no tomorrow.

I actually heard Tony Romo use that one. I did hear one phrase I liked that I had never heard before. Vikings QB Sam Darnold fumbled and a Rams rookie defender scooped the ball up and ran it 57 yards for a TD. The commentator said, “He got a room service bounce.”  Your eggs Benedict is here, sir.

All right, all right. I hear you. No more football talk. Okay, so I will talk about the book I am reading right now. It’s been on my to-read shelf ever since I brought it back from the Edgars a couple years ago. It was a nominee and it’s pretty good. But then things started to go, well, south. (cliché!)

I began to notice there were clichés creeping into the narrative. Like this: “It was a perfect storm of bad investigative techniques and lazy-assity.”

Now, I kind of liked the lazy-assity thing, but “a perfect storm?” A couple chapters later, he referred to a suspect roundup as “picking the low hanging fruit.” After that, I got distracted because I started to search for more clichés. And they came: eagle-eyed,” “burning question,” “at the crack of dawn,” “sick as a dog,” “uphill battle.”

Now, these are all sort of venial, the kind of everyday phrases we all slip into. Nothing as bad as “When they sprayed the Luminol, the room lit up like a Christmas tree.” But they aren’t fresh, and when it comes to fiction, shouldn’t we all be asking more of ourselves?

I have to stop and make a distinction here. Sometimes, it’s okay to toss in a cliché in dialogue. Characters have to talk like real people, and having a guy SAY he woke up “sick as dog” may not be the most sparkling dialogue, but it has a place, if you’re trying to show the character isn’t the…pardon me…sharpest knife in the drawer. But in narrative, I can’t give writers a pass for stuff like “He was ready to take the plunge.”

I’m going to finish reading the book because the plot is tight and I like the anti-hero protag. But I wish this writer had worked just a little harder on the small potatoes. (cliché!) It’s not his first book and it won’t be his last, because he’s talented. Which is why I am asking for more from him.

Being original is maybe the hardest thing we have to do in writing. Keeping all the plates spinning in the air is hard — plot, voice, character, dialogue, pacing, subplots, secondary characters, sense of place, description. This is why using metaphors and similes is darn difficult. All the good ones have been taken already!

• “The pain just increases like a violinist going up the E string. You think it can’t get any higher and it does–the pain’s like that, it rises and rises…” — John LeCarre.
• “His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish.” — Raymond Chandler
• “Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh?” — Ray Bradbury.

The good ones aren’t all taken, not really. You have good metaphors and similes in you that not one other soul on earth can imagine. When you write, don’t settle for the dust on top. Dig deep to find what is unique in the way you see the world

But creating effective metaphors and similes is a topic for another day. I was going to write about that today but this post ran long. So let’s start with the easy stuff. For now, just go back into your work and find your little sins. Kill your not-so-darling cliches.

Get back in the game, crime dogs. Don’t leave anything on the field. Because there’s no tomorrow. Actually, for us writers there is, thank God. But don’t tell Tony Romo that.

Wearing sensible shoes and a dress with the hem only a few inches above the floor, stuffy old Mrs. Murphy stepped from behind her desk and scanned the room full of bored high school juniors. I figured she couldn’t see me, because my buddy Gary Selby and I practiced the now lost art of Classroom Invisibility.

We developed that carefully honed skill by sitting still as posts in our fifth grade math class seven years earlier, and wishing ourselves invisible for an hour a day, every day, in the hope that Miss Exum wouldn’t call on us to work a New Math problem on the blackboard. After the authorities abandoned arithmetic the year before, I was a lost soul wondering exactly how letters and symbols forced themselves into simple and understandable numbers and fractions.

Each time Miss Exum called our fellow inmates to the board for their fair share of torture, Gary and I remained perfectly still and willed ourselves to blend into the back of the room. We became one with the scarred, wooden desks so old they had inkwell holes in the upper right-hand corner of the writing surface.

In fact, at the end of that year when we rose to leave math class on the last day of school, Miss Exum was shocked to see that the desks had been occupied at all.

This camouflage worked just as well years later in English class, and Miss Murphy’s eyes skipped across the room. “Now that we’ve completed this section on Emily Bronte, your assignment for the weekend is a five-page report on the topic assigned specifically for each of you. Write these down please as I read the titles. Carolyn Anderson, your paper is entitled, A Discussion of the Victorian Themes in Jayne Eyre.”

Since my name was spelled and pronounced differently than Carolyn, and I had no idea what she was talking about, I drifted off into anticipation of a squirrel hunt I’d been promised for the next day. As imaginary bushytails scampered through my empty head, Miss Murphy went through her alphabetical list of tortures until she finally came to the last two.

“Gary Selby. Social Class Separation in Wuthering Heights.”

He groaned beside me. “I only read the comic book version.”

She frowned at the two empty desks in the back and finally located him. “Selby, have you been here all this period?”

“All semester.”

“You’re out of order on my rolls.”

“Wish I could help.”

She glowered in our general direction. “That just added a page to your report, mister.”

I grinned. “Smooth move, Ex Lax.”

She heard me and checked her class roll again. “Humm. Wortham.”

We made eye contact for the first time that year. “Yes ma’am.”

“I don’t recognize you.”

“It’s me. Five foot two. Brown hair and eyes.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Maybe you should do something to make yourself distinctive.”

“I’ll grow a handlebar mustache.”

“That would work.”

I went to work on it as she considered her notes. “Your paper will be titled, The Significance of Windows in Wuthering Heights. All right class, I’ll need those on my desk when you come into class on Monday.”

The bell rang and we disappeared like puffs of smoke.

I went hunting the next morning with the Old Man and finished Saturday off by hanging out with my cousin. Sunday arrived and I squirmed beside my grandmother on a hard church pew, vaguely remembering I had something else to do.

It was about six that evening and our black and white TV was tuned to reruns of Disney’s Wonderful World of Color when I remembered I had a paper due. I found the scrap I’d scribbled on and panicked at the title.

There were windows in Wuthering Heights???

I dug out my copy from underneath a pile of Louis L’Amour and Mickey Spillane paperbacks and flipped through the chapters. Yep, the author talked incessantly about windows.

I glanced out the similar opening in my bedroom and had an idea. I wrote, “Wuthering Heights was a good book. The windows in Wuthering Heights looked outside at the sky and moors that are big fields of grass that are not like the grass in the yards we have on my street….”

It drifted on from there and writing as large as possible, sometimes only five words to a sentence, I scratched out the assignment. Mom kept that paper for years, (along with the next year’s particularly well-written ten-page research project entitled, Voodooism), but it somehow vanished through the years.

We know today that windows in Emily Bronte’s work represent the barriers in that society, and I can go on about trapped emotions, Catherine’s memories, good and evil, life and death, and how Heathcliff symbolically let Catherine’s spirit inside by opening a window, but I wonder if Emily had all that in mind as she penned the manuscript.

I’ve always maintained she just wanted to write an entertaining story about her world. What do you think?

Like Miss Emily, tell your story and let the academics hash it out later.