First Light a Fire

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A story is told of a writer reading some bad poetry to a friend in a cold apartment. The only heat was a dying fire. Finally, shivering, the friend cried out, “My dear sir, either put fire into your verses or your verses into the fire!”

Readers respond to heat. That’s why you need fire in your fiction (a nod here to TKZ emeritus Jodie Renner and agent Donald Maass). Let me offer a few “hot” suggestions.

Fire Up Your Openings

It all starts with your first page, which we here at TKZ write about a lot (click on “First-page Critiques” in the menu and you’ll get a graduate-level course on the subject).

A wise writer (I’m not sure who) said, “A story begins when you light the match, not when you lay out the wood.” Give us some heat from the get-go.

It doesn’t have to be high heat. Just something that disturbs the Lead’s ordinary world. A portent of things to come.

I’ve critiqued many a manuscript at writers conferences, and when I find a “lay out the wood” opening it’s usually because there’s too much backstory. The author thinks the reader has to know a certain amount of information to understand what’s going on.

Nix. Readers will wait a long time for background information if they’re seeing conflict happening on the page.

I’ve suggested two things for wooden openings that work 99% of the time.

Tip #1 is to go to the first instance of dialogue in the manuscript. Dialogue automatically means action, something happening between two or more characters. Then see how you can pump up the conflict in the conversation.

Tip #2 is the “Chapter Two Switcheroo.” Toss Chapter One and begin with Chapter Two. Works wonders! You can then “marble in” only the Chapter One exposition that is absolutely essential.

Fan the Flames of Emotion

When you come to a particularly emotional scene, overwrite it. You can always tone it down later if you want.

I like to do the page-long sentence technique. I open a fresh document and then write in the character’s voice for at least 250 words. No periods, just stream-of-consciousness thoughts, telling me how they’re feeling, not in a simple terms like “angry” or “sad,” but in vivid metaphors and physical reactions. Write write write…then set that aside and come back to it later.

Usually, I’m looking for that one line or image that is striking, that arose out of my subconscious as my fingers flew across the keyboard.

It’s worth the effort. We’re elevating our fiction out of the “pretty good” (tepid) pile and into the “fantastic!” (high heat) pile.

Combust the Conflict

Be sure to give every character in every scene an agenda. They should all want something. There are no seat warmers in fiction.

Put those agendas in opposition.

Even minor characters can add conflict if their goals get in the way of the viewpoint character’s objective.

Push your characters to disagree with each other. In dialogue, use the em-dash interruption every now and then (as I describe here and John there).

Enflame the Philosophy

In my opinion a great Lead character has, well, opinions. Some things should make them hot under the collar.

I like to do a Voice Journal for my main characters, and prod them with questions, one of which is, “What is your philosophy of life?” Then I sit back (as I type) and listen to what they have to say.

An important caveat is not to let the character get too preachy (John Galt to the contrary notwithstanding). The best way to present the material is through dialogue. Here’s a bit from the great film On the Waterfront starring Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. It’s about an ex-boxer, Terry Malloy, who now works as a strong arm for a waterfront boss.

When the mob murders a potential witness against them, Terry comes into contact with the victim’s sister, Edie. Not knowing Terry’s complicity in her brother’s death, Edie is drawn to Terry, as he is to her. Terry takes her to a dive for a drink. After some conversation, he says—

TERRY: You wanna hear my philosophy of life? Do it to him before he does it to you.

 

EDIE: I never met anyone like you. There’s not a spark of sentiment, or romance, or human kindness in your whole body.

            

TERRY: What good does it do you besides get you in trouble?

EDIE: And when things and people get in your way, you just knock them aside, get rid of them. Is that your idea?

            

TERRY: Don’t look at me when you say that. It wasn’t my fault what happened to Joey. Fixing him wasn’t my idea.

EDIE: Who said it was?

            

TERRY: Everybody’s putting the needle on me. You and them mugs in the church and Father Barry. I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.

EDIE: He was looking at everybody the same way.

 

TERRY: Oh, yeah? What’s with this Father Barry? What’s his racket?

 

EDIE: His racket?

            

TERRY: Yeah, his racket. Everybody’s got a racket.

 

EDIE: But he’s a priest.

 

TERRY: Are you kiddin’? So what? That don’t make no difference.

 

EDIE: You don’t believe anybody, do you?

            

TERRY: Listen, down here it’s every man for himself. It’s keeping alive. It’s standing in with the right people so you get a little bit of change jingling in your pocket.

EDIE: And if you don’t?

 

TERRY: If you don’t? Right down.

EDIE: It’s living like an animal.

            

TERRY: All right. I’d rather live like an animal than end up like …

EDIE: Like Joey? Are you afraid to mention his name?

Write like that and readers will get fired up, too…for your next book!

So how do you turn up the heat when you write?

Murder in Paperback

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Once upon a time mass-market paperbacks dominated popular fiction publishing. You could walk into book stores, drug stores, grocery stores, even cigar stores and lunch counters, and find spinner racks stuffed with paperbacks. Romance, mystery, thriller, sci-fi, westerns, historical epics, you name it.

It all began in 1935 when English Allen Lane had a brainstorm, allegedly after spending the weekend visiting Agatha Christie and her husband. He launched Penguin books with ten books in paperback, including Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Links. In 1939 Robert de Graff started the first American mass-market line when he began Pocket Books. As this 2014 New Yorker article by Louis Menand pointed out, “[t]he key to Lane’s and de Graff’s innovation was not the format. It was the method of distribution.”

From the 1940s into the early 2000s they were a big part of publishing, and where indeed everywhere.

When I began buying fiction as a teen in the 1970s, all my purchases were mass-market paperbacks. I had built a small library by the time I met my future wife (at an after school job we both had while in high school, no less) and loaned her some novels to read once we started dating, after having discovered we had a mutual passion for books.

A section of our custom book shelves, sized for mass-market paperbacks.

Mass-market paperbacks were usually 4 inches or so wide, and 6 to 7 inches tall. Paper quality even in the 1960s and 1970s wasn’t great, but by the 1980s it had improved quite a lot, being more durable and often better printed than previously. They were still quite popular. Many of us waited to buy the mass-market paperback version of a new release by a favorite author, which was usually a year after the hard cover was published. Non-fiction was also published in mass-market. That was the format I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in while I was in college.

The thriving “paperback original” market persisted into the 1980s and early 90s. For a new genre author, it wasn’t uncommon to be initially published “only” in paperback.

So it surprised me when I began working at the library in 1987 that my branch had no paperbacks in its collection. None of the branches did. Apparently a decision had been made some time before I had been hired to stop buying them. This lasted for several years, so if a book was a paperback original we didn’t have it on our shelves. Patrons were disappointed, but the library had decided not to buy books in paperback because they wore out quickly. It cost money to put a new book in the computer system, as well as affix barcodes and spine labels. It wasn’t until sometime in the 1990s my library system began purchasing library books again.

It was hard because neighboring library systems did purchase them during that time, and we’d hear about it. Librarians want to provide “materials” (books, music, and later, video) which their patrons ask for and typically hate disappointing people.

We did have a collection of donated paperbacks, which we dubbed “Bring-Backs,” which filled a rollout cart with side shelving, and was a hit with our patrons, often being emptied out and needing to be restocked. Fortunately, we always seemed to have enough donations to keep it going.

When the library finally did resume purchasing paper backs in the 1990s, it was just a few at first. It took years for us to build up a collection. And yes, they did wear out faster than a hardcover. But if that was the only way a particular book in demand was available, we bought it. Patrons were pleased, save for the few holdouts who disapproved of the “pulp novels” and “lurid” romances we bought. Eventually, mass market paperbacks had a sizable presence on our library fiction shelves alongside hardcover and trade paper backs.

Mass-market paperbacks are still around, especially in romance and mystery, though sales continue to decline.

I’m self-published and all my print editions are 5.25 inches by 8 inches, so are close to the old mass market-size. We still have a large collection on custom built shelving at our house as well. Below is a photo of a part of those shelves:

Mystery and thriller readers still love to read in print, and that includes paperbacks, though more often the larger trade format is what is available.

I attended Left Coast Crime in Seattle this spring, and there were newly released paperbacks among the hardcovers. My haul of book giveaways included these paperbacks, one of which was the current “tall boy” mass-market paperback.

As an indie mystery author myself, I’ve been surprised to see my print sales being a greater percentage of my overall book sales, in contrast to when I published urban fantasy novels.

As far as I know, print sales are still a very substantial part of a traditionally published author’s sales. Publishers Weekly summed up print sales for 2023 in this article.

Now we turn to two excerpts from the Kill Zone archives dealing with paperbacks, by Michelle Gagnon and Mark Alpert.

Recently, Dorchester Publishing, one of the country’s oldest mass market publishers, announced that it is abandoning traditional print books in favor of digital format and print on demand.

That announcement reminded me of a conversation I had with an editor at a conference a few months ago. She predicted that in the coming digital shakeup, hardcover print runs would be smaller, trade paperbacks would boom, and mass market books would vanish entirely.

I was skeptical. After all, the great thing about mass market books is that they remain almost as cheap (or cheaper) than digital downloads, and they’re ideal reading material for all of those places you wouldn’t take your Kindle/iPad: the beach, the tub, the pool. So why would this be the first format to fall to the digital ax?

The fact that Dorchester is the first to make this shift is particularly bad news for Hard Case Crime, the imprint that has revitalized the pulp fiction industry with semi-ironic works by major novelists such as Ken Bruen and Stephen King. Going digital stands in stark contrast to what publisher Charles Ardai was attempting to achieve–a return to the era of dime store novels you could tuck in your pocket. (On a side note, how ironic is it that Ardai, who made his money via the dotcom boom, is deadset on producing books in print?) In response to the Dorchester move, he’s apparently considering moving the entire imprint to a different publisher.

I was encouraged to see that in the article, a representative from Random House expressed faith in mass paperbacks. These days, most midlist and debut authors are only offered a mass market release. If that shifts entirely to digital content, it would be a shame. For me, the best part of the publishing process was the day that I opened a box to find a stack of novels with my name on the cover. I’m not sure that opening a pdf file would convey the same thrill.

Michelle Gagnon—September 2, 2010

My third novel, Extinction, will come out in paperback on Tuesday. I’m a big fan of paperbacks in general; of all the books I buy, only about twenty percent are hardcovers. The main reason is the price difference. Whereas the list price for the hardcover of Extinction is $25.99, the price on the cover of the mass-market paperback is only $9.99. The difference isn’t quite so extreme after discounting — Amazon, for example, sells the hardcover for $18.80 and the paperback for $8.99 — but it’s still pretty significant for all but the wealthiest book-buyers.

Paperbacks are also lighter and more portable. They fit inside the pockets of my winter jacket. They’re easier to hide (in case you’re embarrassed about what you’re reading). And they take up less space on your bookshelves, which is an important concern if you live in a smallish apartment with a spouse, two kids and all their paraphernalia. (Electronic books would be even better in that respect, but I just don’t feel comfortable reading them. I can’t really relax when I’m holding a screen. I can’t ignore the screen’s presence, which makes it hard for me to get lost in the story.)

Don’t get me wrong — hardcovers have their place. When I buy a book as a gift, I never get a paperback if the hardcover is available. And I love certain authors so much that I just can’t wait for their paperbacks. (I’m talking about you, Lee Child. And you too, Dennis Lehane.) But I’m a pretty patient guy. I’m dying to read Gone Girl, but I’m willing to wait a few more weeks until the paperback comes out. I’ll bide my time by reading a classic or two. (I’m reading Blood Meridian now. What a freaking amazing book!)

Speaking as a writer now, I love being published in hardcover. I’ve been lucky to have gorgeous book jackets for all my novels. And it feels good just to hold the hardcover — it feels substantial, weighty, lasting. But I’m a relatively unknown writer trying to reach new readers, so publishing paperbacks is crucial to broadening my audience.

Over the past year I’ve noticed that a few very famous authors are eschewing the hardcover route for some of their books and putting out paperback originals. Stephen King did this last summer with Joyland, which was a fun read (definitely not weighty!) and had a great pulpy cover. Taipei, a serious literary novel by Tao Lin, also went straight to paper.

And there’s one more advantage to paperbacks that I haven’t mentioned yet: the teaser. After I finish reading a fantastic paperback, I love turning to the last pages of the book and getting a sneak preview of the author’s next novel. I’m pleased to say there’s a teaser at the end of the Extinction paperback, previewing the prologue and first chapter of my fourth book, The Furies. That novel will be published — in hardcover — next month.

Mark Alpert—March 22, 2014

***

  1. How about you? Did you read in mass-market? Do you still?
  2. What are you thoughts on the decline of mass-market paperbacks? Do you wish the format still flourished?
  3. When it comes to print books, do you prefer hardcover, trade or mass-market?
  4. If you are a published author, generally speaking how do your books do in print?

True Crime Thursday – Scratching One’s Way to the Top

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by Debbie Burke

@burke_writer

 

Public Domain

Kim Lien Vu, 46, owned two nail salons in Liberty Township, OH. She reportedly “developed animosity” with a competing business, Bora Bora Nails and Spa in nearby Monroe. In December 2022, Vu and employee Cierra Marie Bishop, 30, hatched a plan to burn down the rival store.

In text messages between Vu and Bishop, Bishop described experiments with various incendiary devices.

Vu directed a third woman, Makahla Ann Rennick, 19, to make an appointment at Bora Bora under a false name.

The final device was put into a small box.

On February 5, 2023, surveillance footage shows Bishop and Rennick entering the salon. While Rennick was having a pedicure, Bishop walked around the store with a package. Near the rear restroom, Bishop placed the package behind a desk.

Meanwhile, Vu established an alibi for herself by driving to Virginia, although she remained in contact via text with Bishop while Bishop was inside the store.

Later, a Bora Bora employee smelled gasoline, spotted the package, and put it outside in the dumpster. It soon caught fire.

Public Domain

 

Yeah, a genuine dumpster fire.

This video report shows the device before and after it ignited.

The trio was arrested and indicted by a federal grand jury in February 2023. In September 2023 Vu pled guilty, admitting she “conspired to commit malicious destruction via fire.” In April 2024, US District Court sentenced her to 46 months in prison. Bishop also pled guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

Business sometimes means fighting tooth and…nail. [Ba-da-boom!]  

~~~

TKZers: Do you know business competitors that carried their rivalry to extremes?

~~~

Debbie Burke’s thriller Deep Fake Double Down is a finalist for the Silver Falchion Award..

The Art Of The Em Dash Interruption

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By John Gilstrap

For fiction to work–for it to feel right–countless tiny elements have to come together in a manner so seamless that readers are unaware that they are being manipulated. Clues have to be planted and red herrings launched so subtly that they don’t draw attention to themselves. And then there’s pacing–the key to providing all the information the reader needs to know in a way that doesn’t stop the story for a data dump. This can get particularly tricky in the middle of the story, when characters have to reveal details to each other that the reader already knows.

Over the years, I have developed a shortcut technique that I call the “em-dash interruption.” Here’s what it looks like:

Jake strolled into the kitchen, still buttoning his shirt. “Smells good in here. Are we–“

 

“You left the water on all last night,” Angie snapped. “Now the roses are overwatered, and they’re not going–“

 

“I’m sorry. I got the call from Aunt Lucy last night and I guess I–“

 

“You’re always sorry, Jake. I don’t ask you to do a lot around here but every time I do, there’s always something . . .”

 

He knew the speech by heart. How could he not? They’d had it twice a day since–

 

“And it has nothing to do with the baby! I know that’s what you think. I know that’s what everyone thinks!”

I just made this up on the fly so you know as much about what’s actually happening in the scene as I do, but the point I’m trying to make is that you don’t need complete sentences to tell a story–especially when the details of the dialogue are secondary to the mood of the scene. In the example, we don’t really care what Angie is cooking or what is going to happen to the overwatered roses or even what Aunt Lucy wanted to talk about. What’s important is the fact that this couple is in crisis and there’s a way to convey the crisis in a snappy way.

Note, too, that I used the em dash to interrupt narrative as well as dialogue. I do that all the time. Here’s an example from Zero Sum, the Grave book to be released next month:

They weren’t upset that his boy had been killed—no, they didn’t give a shit about that. If it had been the original team of agents, they would have—

            Wait. Why weren’t they the original team of agents? 

Here, we have a character working through a problem in his head, asking questions, testing theories, and the thought process leads the character to have a lightbulb moment (the em-dash interruption of his own thoughts) that leads him to ask a question that is critical to the plot.

I’ve used the same technique to introduce a startling moment for the character. Again, making it up on the fly:

Charlie needed to find himself another job, something better suited to his intellect. Security guard money wasn’t bad but goodness gracious, all he did was wander hallways and rattle doorknobs. Same doorknobs every hour, every night, and always locked. They could hire a trained monkey to do this gig. Hell, they could hire a trained–

 

What was that? Something made a noise from behind the

Here, we take a couple dozen words to anchor the reader with a character and then zing ’em with an em-dash interruption to jump the story along.

So, what do you think? Does this make sense? The blog entry is a bit short today, because I figured I covered the topic, and–

Wow!

 

Found But Not Lost:
A Dusty Ode To Our Genre

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By PJ Parrish

This is a story about treasure hunting.

I am a sucker for estate sales. We have a lot of them in summer up here in northern Michigan. My town, Traverse City, is awash in splendid old Victorians left over from the days of the logger barons. And we have hundreds of listing barns crammed with family flotsam.

Among the cool stuff I’ve gathered: A set of ten Baccarat champagne coups (eight bucks) Two circa-Forties prints of gaudy cockatoos from a Miami Beach hotel (how they got in a Michigan basement I can’t guess). A Paint-by-Numbers of a naughty can-can dancer. A pathetic sock monkey (I have a huge collection, the uglier the monkey the better). And a dirt-encrusted mantel clock from the Fifites that keeps perfect time.

But yesterday, I struck gold. An old antique store was going out of business here. You know the place — an old barn stuffed rafters-to-basement with jade jewelry, molting hats, rusty New Era potato chip tins, lethal looking pitchforks and creepy one-armed baby dolls.

I spotted a handsome looking leather book. It had heft and smelled like rotting candy.

A digression: That great old book smell? You’re not imagining it. It comes from the chemical breakdown of the books after they’re exposed to light and heat for a long time. The break down releases volatile organic compounds that create a palette of those old book smells — mainly almonds and vanilla but also toluene, which produces coffee overtones.

That old book smell has an official name — bibliosmia. In other words, what you’re smelling is the scent of a book slowly dying.

I had to save this one. The title on the spine was The Omnibus of Crime. The name was Dorothy Sayers. It is a compilation of detective stories she gathered together. It is pristine, first edition. I Googled it on my phone and it goes for about $300 among collectors. It bought it for $20.

It wasn’t until I got home that I found a leaflet stuck inside. It is the original Book-of-the-Month Club News. Sayers’ anthology was the August 1929 selection. Its price was $3. I think I got a bargain.

The book is over 1,200 pages and many of the stories are by names lost in the haze of our genre’s history. But there are some famous folks — Poe, Doyle, Stoker, Dickens, H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, Ambrose Bierce. Did you know Aldous Huxley wrote a short story called “The Giocanda Smile”? From that story:

Whatever she said was always said with intensity. She leaned forward, aimed, so to speak, like a gun, and fired her words. Bang! the charge in her soul was ignited, the words whizzed forth from the narrow barrel of her mouth. She was a machine-gun, riddling her hostess with sympathy.

The book is arranged historically, from the seminal roots of our genre in Latin, Greek and “oriental” primitives, logs through the “modern” contributions of Poe and Doyle, lurks through the shadows of vampires, witches and ghosts and ends with a section titled “Tales of Cruelty and Blood.”

Can’t wait to get to that part.

But I’ve just cracked the book, and first lingered in Sayer’s inspired introduction. I have to share my favorite passage from that intro, wherein Sayers argues why detective stories are, in the words of the Book of the Month Club editors, “sufficiently dignified”:

There is one respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advantage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristotelian perfection of beginning, middle and end. A definite and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or death. It has the rounded (although limited) perfection of a troilet.

Okay, I looked up a couple words for you:

Aristotelian: Coming from the philosophy of Aristotle, an emphasis upon deduction and upon investigation of concrete and particular things and situations.

No argument from us on that, right?

Troilet: A poem form, invented by 13th century French minstrels. It has — get ready folks — eight lines, with the first line being repeated as the fourth and seventh lines and rhyming with third and fifth, while the second line serves as a refrain in the eighth and final line and rhymes with the sixth. Most commonly written in iambic tetrameter but almost as often in iambic pentameter.

Let’s just say that Sayers is trying to tell us that a good detective story has a nice structure.

I can’t tell you much more about my book yet. The editors of the Book-of-the-Month-Club news are sort of stuffy and borderline snide in their introduction, burbling on about how the English write better detective stories than Americans, that the Russians had a влюбился on Sherlock Holmes and that Sayer’s collection is “an agreeable summer’s afternoon reading.” (Is that like a Beach book?). They finally, at the end, loosen their man buns and concede:

“But come! The Omnibus of Crime is intended to be enjoyed. We can think of no book that offers so sure and innocent a nirvana for an active mind.”

I guess that means they thought it was sorta kinda okay to like detective stories. I’d rather you listen to what Dorothy Sayers has to say about our genre. Her words are as relevant today as they were in 1929.

Man, not satisfied with the mental confusion and unhappiness to be derived from contemplating the cruelties of life and the riddle of the universe, delights to occupy his leisure moments with puzzles and bugaboos….The fact remains that if you search the second-hand book stalls for cast-off literature, you will find fewer mystery stories than any other kind of book. Theology and poetry, philosophy and numismatics, love-stories and biography, [man] discards [these books] as easily as his old razor blades. But Sherlock Holmes is cherished and read and re-read, till the covers fall off and the pages crumble to fragments.

Keep searching those second-hand book stalls. We endure, crime dogs.

влюбился = Russian for man crush

How Much Does Your Environment Influence Your Writing?

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You may have noticed my absence on the weekends lately. This summer, I vowed to take some “me time” and have fun away from the keyboard.

So, I’ve been spending my weekends on the seacoast of Massachusetts. I grew up two towns over from where I’m staying, so the area will forever have a special place in my heart.

When I first started writing, I focused on children’s books. Once I left the seacoast, I stopped writing for many years. Life, work, and bills got in the way. It wasn’t until I moved to New Hampshire that the writing bug bit me again. This time with a focus on thrillers. During my career, I’ve written psychological thrillers, ventured into true crime/narrative nonfiction, then combined my lifelong passion for wildlife conservation and veered into eco-thrillers, the genre I write in now.

As I stood on the seacoast that first weekend, staring at the same view of the Atlantic Ocean from my youth and young adulthood, I had an overwhelming desire to write children’s books again. With the wisdom and knowledge of life experience behind me, I decided to use the same theme as in my eco-thrillers only geared toward young, impressionable minds — Animals are guardians of ecosystems and caretakers of Mother Earth, but they can’t do their job if we keep destroying their environment (or hunting them to extinction).

*Side note: theme should organically emerge from the storyline. No one wants or needs the writer to stand on a soapbox. Let the characters actions and reactions reveal the theme.

The following weekend I outlined the story from start to finish, the salt air and melodic melody of waves powering my desire to help future generations by delivering an exciting plot with animal characters they can relate to, learn from, and love. When I drove home on Monday morning, and the seacoast vanished from my rearview, my mind reverted to action-packed eco-thrillers and vigilante justice.

A longtime friend asked how I could make the switch from kids to adults so easily. My response? Location.

The question made me wonder if other writers experience this.

How much does our environment influence the stories we write?

Would you write in the same genre if you lived in a different area?

If you’d stay in the same genre, would a different environment change the type of characters you create?

Lastly, if I hadn’t written children’s books when I lived on the seacoast, would the Atlantic Ocean propel me to write them now?

Maybe, maybe not.

After I wrote the first draft of a wild and fun adventure for kids, I researched some of these questions. And here’s what I found.

From the Ripple Foundation:

         Your environment directly affects different aspects of your writing, from your style to the topics you write about. Through experience, your surroundings, such as location, atmosphere, and culture play a significant role in your writing. 

            Writing is an artistic medium which can change based on the environment you are writing in… Writing in places where you may have emotional and cultural ties can help you easily communicate your feelings. 

That certainly held true for me.

            The ambience of your environment is a powerful characteristic that can affect your writing. Your brain constantly picks up information from your surroundings, and your senses affect your thinking. Things like air temperature, environment, weather, and odours are processed subconsciously by you.

The human brain never ceases to amaze me. Salt air and the ambiance of the Atlantic reignited my passion to write for children.

From Brainly.ph…

         The environment in which a writer lives can shape their perspective, attitudes, beliefs, and values, which can, in turn, influence the themes and messages in their literary works. For example, the Romantic poets were heavily influenced by the natural beauty of their surroundings, and their works often reflected their appreciation of nature and the importance of individual experience.

The physical environment of a region can also influence the literature that emerges from it. For instance, writers living in harsh, rural environments may draw on their experiences of hardship and survival to create stories about resilience and perseverance.

From Princeton.edu…

         Scholars of great literature often are intrigued by questions that lie outside the pages of the text. For English professor Diana Fuss, one question that consumed her was: Where did my favorite writers write?

To find the answers, Fuss wrote “The Sense of an Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them,” a study of the living and writing spaces of four well-known authors.

In the book, Fuss described the smoky ambiance of Sigmund Freud’s consulting room, the view from Emily Dickinson’s bedroom window, the inhospitality of Helen Keller’s house, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of Marcel Proust’s bedroom. The purpose of the book was to understand how the writers experienced their writing spaces.

“When these figures inhabited these domestic interiors, what were they seeing, hearing, smelling and touching?” Fuss said. “What was the full sensory experience of inhabiting that space, and how did the domestic interior shape the acts of introspection that took place there?”

Fuss noted that Proust, who suffered from asthma, lived in a cork-lined room with heavy drapes to keep out natural light and air. The author of “Remembrance of Things Past,” a work suffused in sensory experience, “found it necessary to suspend the senses in order to write about them,” according to Fuss.

Her findings corrected some misconceptions. Dickinson, for example, has long been portrayed as a helpless agoraphobic trapped in a dark, coffin-like room in her father’s house. When in fact, Dickinson’s corner bedroom had the best light and views in the entire house.

“It was a room that invested her with scopic power,” Fuss said. “Far from being confined in her room, she in fact was a kind of family sentinel.”

TKZers, let me ask you the question I posed earlier.

How much does your environment influence the stories you write? If you’ve resided or spent an extended period elsewhere, did you write in the same genre? How did your stories change, if it all?

Time Getting You Down? Tune In To Radio Station KDRI

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. Oil on canvas

We’ve had some discussions about time recently. Brother Gilstrap opined about making time for the things that count. Garry laid out a grid of 100 10-minute blocks. Heck, Kay has a whole cozy series centered around time.

Just thinking about time takes time! The trick is not to go crazy about it.

Reminds me of some Dad Jokes:

Why did the woman put a clock under her desk? She wanted to work overtime.

Why shouldn’t you tell secrets when a clock is around? Because time will tell.

What does a wall clock do after it stops ticking? It hangs around.

Ba-dump-bump.

All seriousness aside, I’ve been a lifelong learner about what we call “time management.” There are tons of books out there on the subject, my favorite being the classic How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life by Alan Lakein.

To me, it all boils down to deciding what you want to do and then prioritizing the list.

I’ve used the A-B-C method. You look at your list and mark all the “must do” tasks with an A, the “want to do” tasks with B, and the “can wait” tasks with C.

Then you prioritize each letter with a number. Thus, A-1 becomes the first thing you tackle, followed by A-2 and so on. If you have time, you start on the Bs. Usually you don’t do anything with the Cs, until they move up to a B or an A.

I find taking a few minutes each morning to write a fresh list extremely helpful.

The other day I was thinking about time again because, well, the sands of time run on and our allotment gets a little less each day. Yet the things I want to do seem to keep expanding. The bucket for my list is a twelve-pound drum.

Pondering the possibilities can be overwhelming. I am reminded of the Donald Fagin song lyric: But tell me what’s to be done, Lord/’bout the weather in my head?

It’s like the static and program bits you hear as you keep changing the channels on a radio.

And that’s when an idea hit me. I needed to find the right station.

So I formed KDRI.

That stands for four columns: Know, Do, Read, Ideas.

Under K, I began to list the things I want know more about. It includes subjects like Alexander the Great, The Mongol Empire, George Orwell, Vikings, and secrets of the grill masters.

The Do list is all my tasks, with writing as top priority. I list here my WIP, my WIP-to-come, Substack posts, blog posts, and miscellaneous other projects. Then there are things I want to do and places I want to go.

Read is for the books and long articles I want to get to. A few of the titles on my TBR list are: Musk by Walter Isaacson, the autobiography of Jim Murray, Jerry West by Roland Lazenby, Nicholas Nickleby, The Raymond Chandler Papers, and The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories.

Ideas is for my creativity time, capturing ideas for later sorting The best way to get good ideas is to come up with lots of ideas, assess, and throw the weak ones out. Mostly these are story ideas that I’ll look at for further development.

Each day I look at the columns and write my priority list, as described above. (And I do mean writing, with a pen on a piece of paper. There’s something empowering about doing so.)

I include exercise time, eating time, a power nap, and leave some time for discretionary goofing around. I start early and go till about 4 p.m. The rest of the day is wife time: dinner, maybe a movie, maybe play a game, or just talk. Of course, that’s subject to change if we have friends over, go out, or life tosses in one of its many intrusions.

Sunday is a day of rest. I usually try to catch up on my reading.

I’m mindful of not getting too obsessive over this. As Sue said in her comment on John’s post, “Balance is key. I learned that lesson the hard way.”

But I also know that a few minutes of planning can pay off in productive dividends.

So next time the static is getting you down, try tuning in to KDRI. It’s free!

What are some things you have in your KDRI columns?

Those Stubborn Characters

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So, Hopeful Author, you came up with a great plot and over the course of several months, or years, you’ve hammer out 30,000 words in fine order. With the first act written, polished over and over, and massaged into a form you can live with, the next phase begins.

It’s the pesky second act that gives me headaches, and not because it’s hard to write, but because the whole world seems to slow down, and the words come slow. You might have experienced it also, when the universe conspires to keep you from writing, and all those carefully crafted characters develop minds of their own and refuse to move, lounging around, drinking coffee and puffing cigarettes.

“I can’t think of anything to write when I get to that point!”

This was a comment I heard the last time I talked with a group of writers. The young woman’s voice was full of tension, and frustration.

“I have a suggestion.”

The assemblage waited, pens poised…and in one instance, a woman held her fingers over the home keys on her laptop’s keyboard.

“Start a new chapter and throw a couple of your characters together. Start a conversation, or give them a nudge, and see what happens.”

Raised hands.

“That’s all?”

A voice came from the back. “What if it doesn’t go anywhere? I will have wasted those hours.”

“If nothing else, you’ve finished an exercise in creative writing. Delete those sentences, or pages, and give it another shot.”

Frowns. Eyebrows came together in dark lines over hooded eyes.

“Does that work?”

“It does for me, and remember, there’s nothing concrete about creative writing.” I quoted Miss Adams, my high school English teacher who still whispers advice in my ear on occasion. “Put words on paper, and those words will lead to others.”

Another question from under a raised hand sent us off into a new direction. “I keep working on this scene, but it won’t develop.”

“Maybe you’re trying to make your characters do something that’s not necessary at that time. It could be you’re wanting them to go against their fictional codes. Listen to your subconscious. Stop trying to make them do what you want, and approach it from another direction.”

“I didn’t know there would be so many complications.”

“None of us did when we started out.”

I experienced a similar lag this week. I finished the first act of a novel contracted with a new publisher, satisfied with the plot and excited about where the story was going. Then it happened. Act II refused to move.

I went back and read those pages and realized I hadn’t utilized a character to her full extent. It was time for her to walk on stage. We needed to hear her story. Putting her into an uncomfortable situation with little support from anyone she knew, I watched Victoria’s back stiffen with resolve and she moved the story forward in a direction I hadn’t anticipated.

The story is rolling along today, and the tension is rising as fast as this summer’s temperature. Don’t let that second act slow you down. Once you’re through to the other side at around 60,000 words, it’ll be a downhill race to the conclusion.

Write away!

Reader Friday-Revisions

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Ah, revisions, revisions . . . music to our ears, yes?

Maybe, but today we’re going to talk about a different kind of revision. Not the kind that produces blood, sweat, and tears. Not the kind that makes us want to throw our notebooks and laptops against the nearest tree and go for a long walk.

What, then?

Which path do I follow now?

All of life on earth is just one big revision. And for some of us, there came a time when we read something that changed us forever, sent us down a new path, or brought the next step we needed to take into clear focus.

Here’s the question for us to ponder, and hopefully share today:

Tell us about a book or story that changed your life, revised your thinking, maybe sent you down a new path you hadn’t considered before, or thought you could never negotiate.

(Mine will be in the comments.)