By PJ Parrish

There are countless good non-fction books out there on how to write novels. They’ve come up in our conversations here mutliple times over the years. Stephen King’s On Writing is probably most quoted here. Sometimes for its basic advice on craft:

The road to hell is paved with adverbs.

But sometimes for the personal truths he reveals that resonate with anyone facing a blank page:

I have spent a good many years since―too many, I think―being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.

Man, I can relate to that one. Or I suspect any of you out there can who have heard variations of “When you gonna get a real job?” Or “Why don’t you write someone good?”

Another books on craft have illuminated my way through the craft caverns. I love Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! The Last Book On Screenwriting. Because we can all learn stuff from good screenwriters. One of my fave quotes:

You can be near the cliché, you can dance around it, you can run right up to it and almost embrace it. But at the last second you must turn away. You must give it a twist.

But my favorite book on writing is Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird. This single quote helped change my writing style. It also helped me let go of my obsession with geometrically folded towels:

Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.

Okay, so I’m still anal about my linen closet but I no longer restack the dishwasher after my husband does it and when he helps me decorate the Christmas tree, I don’t rehang the ornaments after he goes to bed. I am still going to die someday, but at least I don’t fret about getting caught in old underwear when it happens.

Since I have been doing a lot of reading lately due to vacation, family business, and a bout with the RSV virus, I have also come to realize that novels have much to teach us about craft. Let me suggest just a few and what they have taught me.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

This book gave me two gifts: First, that theme is the backbone of every memorable story. Beloved grapples with huge social themes rooted in our complex history, but even our modest crime genre novels are elevated when the writer moors the story in theme. Beloved also taught me a valuable lesson early in my writing career: that I didn’t have the craft chops to handle a two-story plot. Morrison seamlessly toggles between two parallel stories; I learned that I had to abandon one of my early parallel plots to make my story work. Know your limits, perhaps?

Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris.

This book drove home for me what Kurt Vonnegutt preaches: Every character must want something, even if it is only a glass of water. Character motivation is one of the pillars of great fiction, and Clarice Starling is a stellar example of how “want” must go beyond the superficial. What does Clarice want?

1. To catch Buffalo Bill before he kills Catherine. (classic ticking clock plot)
2. To prove herself among the male FBI trainees. (classic underdog story)
3. To impress her boss Jack Crawford (in the book a relationship is implied)
4. To live up to the memory of her beloved sheriff/father who was killed in line of duty.
5. To silence her own inner demons. After her dad’s death, she is taken in by a relative on a sheep ranch where she tries to save a lamb from slaughter and as punishment is sent to an orphanage. (A story she reveals to Lecter). The book ends with Clarice sleeping peacefully. (The movie ending is better, imho).

The five levels of “want” are criticial to our understanding of Clarice, as they represent a descent into her psychological oubliette — symbolically as unsettling as the horrific basement well where Catherine is kept hostage. This relates to an exchange between Lecter and Clarice regarding Buffalo Bills’ motivation:

What need does he serve by killing, Clarice? He covets. How do we begin to covet? We begin by coveting what we see every day.

As writers, we must know what our characters want. Not just at the superficial level. We must be willing to explore the deepest dungeons of what they covet.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I  read this book 20 years ago on a trip to Chennai, India. It was August and it was so hot the aspalt steamed at night. There was something jarring in the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, in the cacaphony of bright colors, noise, and relentless press of too many human beings. In some moments, the city’s chaos felt apocalyptic. The imagery of McCarthy’s book haunted me:

Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. … The incinerated corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.

There is one scene I cannot get out of my head. The man and boy, surviving cannibal “bad guys,” discover a cache of canned food in a cellar. They sit in the rubble and eat peaches, a symbol of the lost world and of hope. What did this book teach me about writing? That imagery is the lifeblood of any powerful story. Not just passages of description but of that one telling detail, that can encapsulate your entire theme — peaches. McCarthy’s spare but evocative imagery taught me to be braver — and briefer — in my own descriptions. Less is more. But the “less” must be more effective.

Oh geez. I’ve flapped my gums too long again. I have four other books I wanted to talk about here, but I’ve run long. Quickly: Rowlings’ Harry Potter books taught me that a swift-flowing and sure-footed plot can make up for meh writing. Madame Bovary gave me the courage to write a male protag. (Louis Kincaid, c’est moi!) Charlotte’s Web (yes you can — indeed, must — kill off a sympathetic character).

What novels have made you a better writer?

Sitting in the back of our unairconditioned classroom one hot Friday morning, I couldn’t take my eyes off my high school English teacher, Miss Adams, as Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love echoed through my empty, echoing head.

She was splendid, and everything a sophomore boy could wish for.

Redheaded Rick Schaefer looked at me from across the aisle and raised his eyebrows in a Groucho expression. We felt the same about Miss Adams and we’d discussed her that morning while sitting in his van, listening to the radio. I figured he’d graduate and marry her, because the guy looked like he was in his late twenties when we were in junior high.

And then she made me love her more, taking my mind off losing her to Rick. “I’ll need a two-page paper fromn everyone on Monday morning.”

Groans filled the room as I considered endless possibilities. I knew I was a great writer, because I’d already been moved from reporter to photographer on our school’s newspaper staff. For some reason, evil Mrs. Pickles said I editorialized too much.

In her desk at the front of the room, Lucy, the teacher’s pet, raised her hand. “On what?”

“Anything you want to write about.”

Lucy raised her hand again. “I can’t think of anything.”

“You will. Just write down a few words–––.”

Lucy’s pale hand shot up again, but before she could voice another question, Miss Adams caught my eye and spoke directly to me in the back of the room. “Just write down a few words, and then more words will follow. Write anything you want.”

An experienced camouflage expert, I’d chosen the farthest desk from the front, and beside the window, hoping for a stray breeze, but she saw me anyway, and I’ve been thankful for that moment ever since.

I think of that bit of wisdom from a 22-year-old teacher every time I sit down to hammer out my weekly newspaper column, and it hasn’t failed me since I began writing it in 1988.

These past couple of weeks have been busy, and what with developmental edits on one manuscript, line edits on another, and finally finishing the edits on an upcoming anthology of short stories, I’d forgotten that today is the deadline for my Killzone blog.

So I put my fingers on the keyboard and started with the first sentence at the top of this page, searching for a topic. That led me to the calendar on my desk, and the realization that by the time you read this post, my 20^th novel will have been on the shelves since October 21.

Comancheria is the first in the weird western Hollow Frontier series, that has already stretched to three volumes. The Sound of a Dead Man’s Laugh, and What We Owe the Dead, will drop in October of 2026 and the same month in 2027, respectively. I’m already itching to get into the next one, but I have to finish my 10^th novel in the Red River series.

It’ll go quickly, because John Gilstrap and I hammered out the premise over several bottles of wine in a thousand-year-old French mansion.

My western horror novel came to me in a dream during the Covid shutdown. No, I wasn’t worried about getting sick and nothing was bothering me at the time. In fact, my stress level was way down, since we couldn’t get out of the house and all my honey-do chores were finished.

Maybe I’d figuratively and subconsciously put my fingers on the keyboard in my sleep that night.

After intense online research lasting a full fifteen seconds, I found that doctors in white lab coats proclaim that dreams typically last from 5-20 minutes, however, they can vary from a few seconds to possibly two hours. According to those guys with pocket protectors full of pens and probably a Slim Jim or two, we can have up to three or four dreams per night.

Well, that night I watched an entire movie in my head, complete with a clear plot, characters, details, a subplot, twists, and even dialogue. My eyes snapped open when it came to an end at 3:00 AM, and it wasn’t because I had to go to the bathroom.

That usually happens at 4:00 AM.

The Bride’s eyes snapped open when I woke up. I swear she’s some kind of harmless vampire. Truthfully, I can open one eye and look at her in the dark and both of her gray/green orbs will snap open as well. I don’t think the woman ever sleeps at all.

Honestly, I don’t know what color they are, because I’m colorblind, and I’m afraid to ask now. I’ll have to look at her drivers license the next time she goes for a walk.

I slipped out of bed. “I have to write.”

“Okay.” She returned to her dormant state of nighttime existence, probably adding to her mental honey-do list.

My office is just outside our bedroom door, so I closed her in and settled down at the desk.

Fingers on the keyboard, I typed the first line.

Miss Hattie Long’s husband died on their fifty-fifth anniversary and she lost much of her mind not long after.

Those words led me into a complicated plot set on the Llano Estacado in 1874. Texas Ranger Buck Dallas appeared on my computer screen, along with his good friend Ranger Lane Newsome. I didn’t have to come up with their names. They were part of the absurdely detailed dream that led to Buck’s torture, death, and a curse to walk the earth forever from a Comanche puha, Twisted Root.

Yeah, the word puha, (medicine man) was in that dream.

Here’s where the curse part comes in. Buck rises every morning with the sun, and falls dead at sunset. People tend to bury the dead, and Buck always claws his way back to the surface, pissed off and digging dirt from his eyes and ears. However, he’s a walking dead man, with a snake growing inside of his body that tends to argue with him whenever he’s in the grave.

He and Lane, after some serious discussion about Buck not staying dead as decent people should, are joined by three strange characters protecting a pregnant woman who is drawn by Miss Hattie to a magic spring in the heart of Comancheria.

By eight the next morning, I was thirty pages into the story that was the movie my subconscious created. I finished in six weeks of virtually nonstop typing.

As usual, writing is the easy part. Getting it published became a journey unto itself. After being turned down by two publishers who thought it was a strange idea, it was picked up by a western house––– that crawfished on the deal a week later.

But life has a way of leading us where we need to go. Last year I attended a panel of publishers at a writers conference (one was the crawfish) and became interested in what a gentleman from Roan and Weatherford had to say about publishing and gender-bending.

Later, he and I met in the bar, of course, (where good things happen at conferences) and in casual conversation, he asked if I had a manuscript he could look at. A week later, R&N agreed to publish Comancheria and gave me an unlimited series featuring my Rangers.

It is our hope that the blending of horror and westerns will draw the interest of younger folks, who aren’t typically readers of traditional westerns. With the death of mass market paperbacks, westerns will struggle. I believe older readers will welcome something different, quirky westerns that are outside of the William W. Johnston, Louis L’Amour, and Zane Grey estates.

Comancheria is a new idea, and I hope that Covid dream is the start of something big.

For your perusal, here’s an excellent article from Jeffrey J. Mariotte that appeared in the Western Writers of America’s Roundup Magazine a couple of years ago, providing even information on this mind-bending genre. I hope this link works. It did for me.

aug20-weirdwesterns

Oh, and thanks once again to Miss Adams, on helping me get started on this paper…uh, post.