Lessons Learned

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By Boyd Morrison

After four months of living in Los Angeles, taking acting classes and learning about the business side of Hollywood, I head back to Seattle today full of new energy and knowledge. What’s surprising to me is how much of what I learned about acting can be applied both to writing and to life in general.

I’d like to share some of the best words of wisdom I heard while I was in LA. Many of them come either directly or indirectly from my instructor Howard Fine at the Howard Fine Acting Studio. I wish I could take every single class the studio offers, but the foundation I got will serve me for years to come.

I thought about explaining these quotes’ origins and meanings, but I’d rather let them speak for themselves. I hope you find a few that make you look at your life or your writing in a different way.

“I have time.” (Said to yourself before taking on a new endeavor)

“The way you do one thing is the way you do everything.”

“If you can’t change one thing, you can’t change anything.”

“We judge ourselves by our intentions, but we judge others by their actions.”

“Control is a false god; do not pray to it.”

“Creativity does not live in the thinking mind.”

“It’s not who you know; it’s who knows you.”

“The tell of a lie is that the body has no muscle memory.”

“If a relationship is unimportant, the scene is unimportant.”

“Scenes are not about our emotions, but what we can do about our emotions.”

“Desire trumps everything.”

“Characters are in crisis at crossroads in moments of critical decision.”

“Comedy comes from one-hundred-percent investment in a silly issue.”

“Most people ask a question and want an immediate answer; an artist is willing to discover it.”

“You don’t need to be other than who you are, but all of who you are.”

“How we speak is conditioned by how we think we’ll be listened to.”

“You can’t make a mistake by caring too much. You can only make a mistake by not caring.”

“We care about the character in direct proportion to how much the character cares about anything.”

“Nobody wants less investment. The more you invest in the scene, the more the observer will be drawn in.”

“When you are interested, you become interesting.”

“You become self-conscious when your attention is on yourself, not on the other person in the scene.”

“If mistakes humiliate you, you will never create.”

 “Those who are the most present and have the most charisma are the ones who are most alive in their senses.”

“What becomes our truth is a story we tell ourselves over and over.”

How Important is Research and Authenticity in Fiction?

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Our own Clare Langley-Hawthorne recently posted about getting professional (especially military) details right. She wrote a seemingly self-evident bit of wisdom:
In mysteries and thrillers we often have protagonists with a military or law enforcement background and, given that many of our readers will have similar backgrounds, we need to get the details right. As writers we have an obligation to do our research and try and paint as accurate a picture as possible.
And yet . . .
One of my favorite shows of all time is Law & Order, especially when Michael Moriarty was on it. As pure storytelling, it was an amazing achievement week after week. Using the same structural template, it managed to create compelling characterizations and unique plot details so that each episode seemed fresh.
But there is one thing about the show that drives me nuts. Well, two.
The first is when the detectives slap cuffs on a suspect. It may be on the street or in the workplace, but immediately they begin with their Miranda warnings: “You have the right to remain silent . . .anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law . . .you have the right to an attorney . . .” etc.
The only problem is that no detective (at least, no detective who knows what he’s doing) Mirandizes a suspect at the point of arrest. That’s because he wants the suspect to talk, to babble, to make statements, which they often do. And yes, those statements are admissible evidence, so long as they have not come as a result of accusatoryquestioning.   
Yet it is now a virtual cliché on cop shows and in fiction that at the moment of arrest the cops give the rights admonition. And because of that, the public largely believes that’s the way it should be done every time.
So you have the ironic situation that a reader could write to tell you your cop forgot to Mirandize a suspect, and why don’t you do simple research, fella?
Another item from Law & Order. They usually sit the suspect down in an interview room, separated by a table. Now thatis when you’d Mirandize, and have the suspect sign a written waiver.
Anyway, the questioning begins and it isn’t long before one of the cops (usually Chris Noth) loses his temper and starts screaming at or threatening the suspect.
But as my friend, interrogation expert and fellow author Paul Bishop, says, being aggressive like that only gets a suspect to clam up. Paul, a 35-year LAPD vet (30 of them in sex crimes) now teaches interrogation nationwide to law enforcement agencies. He says he raised his voice during an interrogation maybe five times in his career.
Another thing: Paul doesn’t want a table separating him and the suspect. The table cuts off his view of half the body language. Recently Paul gave a talk to some local SoCal writers on interrogation. He showed the way he did it, by putting his chair directly in front of the suspect, sitting so close their knees touched. He speaks calmly, asking strategic questions in order to get the suspect’s body to betray signs of anxiety.
I tell you, I was sitting in the audience as Paul demonstrated with the moderator, and I was ready to jump out of my seat and confess to something. It was awesome.
But is this ever shown in cop shows or fiction? More dramatic to have a cop throw a chair.
Which is why many writers, even longtime and bestselling veterans, choose the more dramatic alternative, even when it flouts real life. It is also well known that certain A-list writers don’t care much at all about research and flatly make up as much of it as they can.
Is anyone going to arrest them for it? Read them their rights?
So there may be a continuum here. For example, if you’re going to write about weapons, it’s my experience you better get that right, because there are too many gun aficionados out there who will rake you over the coals if you get a detail wrong.
But on the other side of the range, perhaps it’s not as crucial. I recall Lee Child talking about one of his books where Reacher is going through Georgia, a place Child has never  himself been. He received a detailed rejoinder about the impossibility of Reacher’s itinerary from someone who knew the particular roads in that part of the state. But as this error did not seem to impact sales, Child was more sanguine than disturbed by it.
Harlan Coben has also said he is of the “make it up” school of research. Doesn’t seem to have slowed down his sales, either.
Personally, I like to get things right. I’ll do on-site research here in LA, take pictures, walk the streets I’m writing about, feel the vibe of the neighborhood. When it comes to procedures and professional details, I also want to be accurate.
But I also recall something Lawrence Block wrote in the first book I ever read on the craft: Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print. Discussing research in general, and his Evan Tanner books (which take place in settings all over the world) in particular, Larry wrote, “Equipped with a decent atlas and a library of travel guides, it’s not all that difficult to do an acceptable job of faking a location. A few details and deft touches in the right places can do more to make your book appear authentic then you might manage via months of expensive and painstaking on-the-spot research.”
That’s really the point in fiction, isn’t it? We are all faking it, so the appearanceof authenticity is what we’re after. If a made-up detail can suffice for effect, why not?
Just don’t have your cops give Miranda warnings to your arrestees on the street, or I’ll send you an email.
So what’s your take on research in fiction? Are you a stickler? How important is it to you that bestselling writers get all the details right? (Note: I’m flying home today from Denver, so won’t be able to comment for a bit. Meanwhile, have at it!)

How Things Have Changed

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A new Stephen King book hit the bookstores this week. It’s titled JOYLAND, and it’s much more like THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON than THE STAND or MISERY or DESPERATION or the Tower series or any of a couple dozen books that I could name. It’s published under the wonderful, indispensable, and at this point venerable Hard Case Crime imprint. The book’s appearance made some major news in those places where books are still news because if you want to buy the book, you’re going to have to buy The Book. There will not be an e-book version of JOYLAND for the foreseeable  future; yes, you’ll be able to obtain an audiobook, but something for your Kindle or Nook or other e-reader isn’t going to happen for awhile, unless you want to buy a copy of the book, tear out each page, paste it on Your Precious and…of course, you are not going to do that. 
There is a bit of irony here, given that one of the first e-books by a mainstream writer to be published solely as an ebook  — not as we know them now, but it was an ebook nonetheless — was a novella entitled “Riding the Bullet,” a chilling little ten-finger exercise that was written by, uh, Stephen King. You had to download some (free) software called “SoftLock” in order to read it. This occurred way back in 2000. There were other ebooks published, including a pay-as-you-go serial by King titled “The Plant,” but the format never really caught on until some smart folks at Amazon came up with what they came up with. King, however, was there at the beginning. There accordingly have been some who have now taken King to task over what they perceive to be his apparent one-eighty, somehow finding him to blame for the popularity of the electronic format since he was one of the first to embrace it with the same fervor that Jack Torrance embraced that rotting corpse in THE SHINING. I would disagree. King has made quite clear that his reason for limiting the format of JOYLAND to physical form isn’t to disown the child he midwifed at the turn of the century; he is doing it to help physical booksellers. This is not something new for King; those of us of some age will recall that King did an unapologetic tour of indy stores in 1994 to promote INSOMNIA, riding his motorcycle from city to city and making appearances to yes, mobs of people. There’s also a more recent model for this. A growing number of musicians are occasionally releasing some new songs only on vinyl, to support independent record stores.  Is he taking a risk financially, by limiting the format to physical books, and cutting out the impulse buyer? Possibly. Is Hard Case Crime? Almost certainly. JOYLAND won’t be available at the press of a button; it’s going to take some effort, and yes, some waiting to get it, maybe even some inconvenience. Some folks may feel it’s not worth the hassle.
But can I tell you something, as someone who loves his Kindle? JOYLAND is worth whatever it takes for you to get it. Let me go further than that: this is a book that should only see the light of day as an actual book. It’s a coming of age novel, with some mystery and romance and a bit of the supernatural thrown in, and it works as a physical book. JOYLAND is set in 1973, at a downheel amusement park on the coast of North Carolina, and I swear that as I turned the pages I could smell — very faintly — popcorn and taffy and ocean water and hear ferris wheel music rising up from between the pages. Am I given to imagining things? Maybe. But isn’t that what reading is all about? I don’t think it would be quite the same on an e-reader.
Let me now ask you: what was the last physical book (and we’ll count audio books in the mix) that you purchased? How long ago was it? And what do you think of what King and Hard Case Crime are doing with JOYLAND? Do you think that limiting its format to a physical product is a good idea or a huge mistake?

TKZ Spotlight: Basil Sands

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Note: We’re starting an occasional feature on Fridays called TKZ Spotlight, where we profile various members of the TKZ community. We’re kicking things off today by profiling Basil Sands, a thriller author and long-time TKZer. We love the way Basil keeps things lively around here with his creative observations in the Comments!

You can link to Basil’s books here.

BIO: Basil started out writing thrillers for podcast-audio serials that gradually developed into four novels, a novella, more than a dozen shorts, and many more to come . He’s also an audiobook narrator and has recorded for several best selling authors including many right here on The Kill Zone Blog, where he’s been a regular commenter since near the beginning in 2008.

Born in rural Alaska and raised among the Ohio cornfields, he longed for excitement. After injuries ended a stint in the Marines he worked as a restaurant manager culminating in a three year contract at the National Security Agency (Chef to the Spies). He’s also owned a computer shop, was a carpenter, farmer, actor, lumberjack, voice actor, Wilderness Rescue EMT, computer network admin, hotel maid, tire change mechanic, IT guy, Scoutmaster, college instructor, dynamite packer, talk show host, and youth minister. After 9/11 he spent three years as a sergeant in the Alaska State Defense Force Coastal Scouts and was recognized as Alaska Soldier of the Year in 2003.

Until a ski injury he’d been an avid weight lifter benching 420 lbs at age 40. Now he’s limited to a bit on the bike and a long walk each day…that and curling the occasional pint of Guinness…to work out the arthritic kinks.

He lives in Anchorage Alaska with his wife and sons.

Where do you live, and how does that setting (or another one you use) inform your writing?

As an adult I’ve lived in Alaska for nearly twenty years; three of my books, including my WIP, take place here. Describing something as majestic as Alaska sounds a lot different when you’re in it as opposed to interpreting it via Google Earth. There are many wild experiences in the Arctic that most people can’t fathom. For instance, at -40 F boiling water tossed into the air makes an audible“zziiip” as it freezes into perfectly round BBs before it hits the ground.

How does your background influence your writing?

As a child I spent more time in my imagination than any other place.  I escaped the drudgery of life into my own world, one that I could shape. I read encyclopedias for fun then I’d recreate the drama of history with my little green army men, or run with my dog through the woods. We were Daniel Boone and his pet wolf, or secret agents searching for Nazi spies amongst farms and secret hay fields.

From the bio above you can glean that I’m sort of a ‘Jack of All Trades’ as the saying goes or maybe more like a ‘Basil of A Lot of Jobs’. Those various experiences, jobs, and locations have given me a general hands on perspective to a lot of topics.

How old were you when you first felt the urge to write, and what inspired you to get serious about honing the craft?

Creating stories has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. By the time I reached my teens I was performing in theater and choir, and dabbled in stand-up comedy. In my twenties I started writing my own one man plays about historical and biblical characters to perform before church youth audiences.

In 2006, at thirty eight years old, I found myself in an incomprehensibly boring IT job that involved lots of staring out the window like a Techno-Maytag-Repairman. Within weeks I was ready to staple my lips shut to stop me from babbling. Then one day a story popped into my mind while I sat there watching stuff not break. It developed into a script for a podcast audio-serial, then into a full fledged novel. Since that first one, I’ve known that I have to write these stories, and do it well.

What are some main themes you return to when writing?

“Wolves vs. Sheepdogs” and “Making hard choices”.

Your goals in life?

My life goals are simple. Love my wife and kids, and serve my God.

My writing goal is not so simple. There’s a story I’ve been brewing for 25 years, but know that I cannot put it onto paper until I really know how to write well. The stories I’m writing now are merely practice for that life’s work.

Which authors have most influenced your writing?

Louis L’Amour, Ken Follet, Fred Forsyth, Bernard Cornwell and Jack Higgins are the ones I’d list as most influential. But before I knew them, the initial fire was lit by George Remi (Herge) author of the Tintin comics.

Do you have a “day job”? Tell us about that. Does it inform your writing?

I am a Senior IT Specialist for the Dept of Veterans Affairs. It is the same one that I once described as “excruciatingly boring”, but I learned a few years back that when the government tacks ‘Senior’in front of your title and gives you 3 or 4 grade increases the boredom decreases exponentially.

My knowledge of what can and cannot be done with technology is very useful stuff. Additionally I sometimes overhear conversations or read the records of veteran’s experiences that have blown my mind, from Medal of Honor winners to some real life Jason Bourne types.

What are you working on now?

My current WIP is a somewhat ambitious novel for me, the first of what I expect to be a three book series about an invasion of America, seen through the eyes of a family separated in the initial attack. The teen sons are at boy scout camp, the father is driving home anticipating a romantic night with his wife when their world is ripped apart. The husband has to make a choice, rescue his kids or his wife. The kids know how to survive in the woods, and have adults leading them, many of whom are combat veterans. He chooses to find his wife first, only to discover her bullet riddled car containing what he believes is her mangled body. Unknown to him, she has been taken prisoner by the invader’s commanding general. While her husband and sons become guerrillas in separate ventures, the wife witnesses behind the scenes the efforts the general makes to capture and kill them. She will do anything to protect them.

The story is full of action, violence, romance and of course the scenery of Alaska.

First page critique: A BOTHER OF BODIES

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Here is a first-page submission titled A BOTHER OF BODIES, followed by my comments.  Then we’d like everyone to jump in.

Note: I’m posting from Tokyo using my iPad, which isn’t Blogger-friendly under the best of circumstances. So please forgive any formatting errors!

*  *  *

     I stepped on the bathroom scale, gun in hand, and waited for a number to register. The screen seemed reluctant to settle, hovering between a couple of digits, neither of which made me happy. I aimed the Glock between my feet, closed one eye and was a twitch away from firing when my cell phone buzzed. I refocused. Put the phone in my sights and squeezed the trigger. The empty chamber clicked, the phone continued its annoying buzz, and the scale finally settled on my least favourite number.
            This was going to be a bad day. Kicking the scale under the bed, I scooped the phone off the night stand and checked the screen. It was my brother, Dean—or half-brother. We’re not entirely sure which.
            “Hey…”
            “Mabel, you better come out to the barn. Fast.”
            Barn?
            “Mabel? It’s important. It’s beyond important, you’ve got to get out here.”
            I was heading to the back door as soon as he called me Mabel. He rarely calls me by name. Uses Maybe instead, as in “maybe I’ll keep it, maybe I won’t”, a popular phrase our mother, Della, used during the seven months she carried me. Dean was three at the time.
            “I’m on my way. What’s happened?” I stopped on the porch long enough to stick my feet into an old pair of Dean’s rubber boots.
            “A corpse happened.”
            That stopped me cold. “You’ve killed someone.” I knew this day would come. It’s always the quiet ones.
            Silence. Okay, it was a stupid thing to say. If anyone was going to guess who put a corpse in a barn, they’d pick me. Dean was a big believer in turning cheeks. I was big on smacking them.
            “Don’t touch him. Or her. Or anything else,” I told him. “Have you called the cops?”
            I heard him sigh. Of course he hadn’t. People whose mothers are convicted con-artists never do.
            I manoeuvred the dew-slick stairs, one hand on the railing, the other still clutching the phone. “Never mind, I’m on my way.” 
            Stuffing the phone into my bathrobe pocket, I clomped down the porch stairs, then stopped to survey the scenery. Not a barn in sight.
            Dean bought this forty acre farm three months ago while I was in Toronto doing some fieldwork for the small, semi-legitimate security system outfit that employs me. 

My comments:

I really enjoyed this page! The narrator has a fun, snappy voice, very Janet Evanovich-ish. My own series features a heroine who battles her weight, so I appreciate the shooting-the-scale opener.

My only suggestions are nits, really, easily addressed. 

I got confused and had to reread the line, “Uses Maybe instead, as in…” It’s a clever line, though. As a possible fix I would use repetition from the previous line and revise as follows:

He calls me “Maybe,” as in “Maybe I’ll keep it, maybe I won’t,” a phrase  popularized by our mother, Della, during the seven months she carried me.

The sentence, “If anyone was going to guess who put a corpse in a barn…” might be stronger if written as
If anyone was going to put a corpse in the barn, it’d be me.

The sentence “Dean bought this forty-acre farm…” should read

Dean had bought this 40-acre farm…

The phrase, “security system outfit” sounds weak in comparison to the rest of the language for some reason to me. Could something snappier be found, perhaps? Also, it sounds like an alarm company as currently written, while I have the feeling it’s something darker than that.

But that’s it! I think this is a very promising first page. It’s rare that I read a manuscript that immediately strikes me  as having a likable, appealing voice, and this one definitely does. Well done!

TKZ’ers, your thoughts?


Putting A Book Down

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Nancy J. Cohen

Do you ever put a book down if you’ve read a few chapters and can’t go farther? This rarely happens with me, but I can recall a couple of instances where I gave up. Normally, I’ll slog through and scan pages until the end, if the story holds any appeal at all. But sometimes it’s too tedious to continue and a waste of precious time. What are some of the reasons why we might stop reading? 
 
Too Many Characters
The book I’m reading now is one I really want to like. It’s science fiction with a strong female lead and starts off on a spaceship. I know her mission is about to go terribly wrong. The woman’s lover is an alien, and I can understand his race’s characteristics. But then we meet other crew members and a diplomatic contingent from another world. Numerous other races are introduced, and the author segues into multiple viewpoints. Now I’m getting lost. I can’t keep track of all the aliens with weird sounding names. If the story doesn’t focus on the protagonist and her human emotions, I may put this book aside.

My own first published novel employed multiple viewpoints and alien races. But since the story stayed mostly inside the heads of my hero/heroine and focused on their romance, the world building seemed to work. I won the HOLT Medallion Award with Circle of Light, so I wasn’t alone in my assessment.

Yet the current book I’m reading is just too confusing. I’m losing interest in the story because it’s too hard to keep the alien characters straight.

A mystery can have similar problems when too many suspects are introduced at the same time. I’ve been guilty of this myself, whether it is a dinner party or cocktail event or other affair which all of the suspects attend together. One chapter might contain a blast of characters, whereas the sleuth’s subsequent investigation focuses on one at a time. It’s hard to avoid this dilemma when all of the important characters appear together in a scene toward the book’s beginning.

Book Doesn’t Stand Alone
I picked up a book mid-series by a popular author whose work I wanted to read. The opening scenes left me totally lost. If you hadn’t read the previous books, you were clueless. A writer should never assume readers have followed along with her series. Each book should stand alone with enough explanations to cover previous subplots. On the other hand, this requires a delicate balance. You don’t want to bore your fans with repetitious material. Nor do you want to repeat what happened in previous installments unless it’s relevant to the current story.

Genre Lacks Appeal
I’ve judged contests where I have to read entries in a genre other than ones I prefer. I do my best to be fair, but if the story is peppered every paragraph with naughty words, for example, that’s going to turn me off. At that point, I’ll skim through the book. That’s why in my leisure reading choices, I stick to genres I know and love.

Story Meanders
Too many boring scenes where conversation acts as filler or the plot fails to advance will make me lose interest. Here I might skip ahead to get to the scenes where something happens.

Incomprehensible Language
If I am reading science fiction or fantasy and the world building includes too many made up words, I might get lost and lose interest. Every other noun doesn’t have to sound futuristic. Ditto for historical novels where the dialects are so strong as to be annoying.

Unlikeable Characters
I’ll rarely give up on a book because I don’t like the characters. These stories I might skim through to see if there’s a redeeming factor. But if I really don’t like the people, that might be cause to put the book down.

As a writer, keep these points in mind so you don’t make the same mistakes in your work. No doubt we’re all guilty to some extent, but try to avoid these pitfalls whenever possible.

So what are some reasons why you might not continue reading a story?

 

Pardon me, but aren’t you…?

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I’m in Japan this week! Thanks to a twist of fate, I had 4 hours notice to pack and get on a flight. Here’s where things got strange: As soon as I stepped off the plane in Tokyo, I was approached by a group of Japanese ladies. They shook my hand and smiled at me, while repeating something which sounded like “Ba-ba.” So of course I smiled and nodded back at them, which made the ladies beam twice as enthusiastically. 


Confusion set in. It eventually became clear that the Japanese women thought I was an American celebrity–some blondish middle-aged celebrity, I guess,   whose name sounds like “Ba-ba”. Later my friends and I tried to figure out the name of my mystery-celeb doppelgänger.  Someone suggested Julianne Moore, which was flattering, but doesn’t sound remotely like “Ba-ba.”

I just hope they didn’t think I was Barbara Eden. Even though Babs can still rock her “I Dream of Jeannie” harem outfit better than most gals her age, the septuagenarian is at least a couple of decades too old for my ego to be stoked.



Writers can have creative doppelgängers–not in how they look, but how they write. Have you ever been told, “You write just like Famous Writer Name“? If you’re not sure, try the tool I Write Like .    And tell us, who do you write like?

Honoring the Backstory

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by Clare Langley-Hawthorne

Our first page reviews often bring up the issue of backstory and how to incorporate it successfully (and judiciously) into a novel.  

In mysteries and thrillers we often have protagonists with a military or law enforcement background and, given that many of our readers will have similar backgrounds, we need to get the details right. As writers we have an obligation to do our research and try and paint as accurate a picture as possible. This can be a challenge for someone like me who has never been in the armed forces, trained in law enforcement, or (thankfully) had any exposure to war or its aftermath. I have to rely solely on research and my imagination. 

So far in my novels, I’ve focused primarily on the years prior to and during the First World War and  have the advantage of being able to access a huge array of first hand accounts, books, film footage and audio recordings dealing with the horrors associated with trench warfare. There are, however, only a minute number of veterans still alive from this war which means I cannot directly speak to them about their experiences as part of my research. In some ways though, this also makes my job a little easier, as there aren’t going to be many World War One veterans alive to challenge the experiences as I present them. 

For more recent theatres of conflict, authors need to be ever vigilant regarding their research as there are many more veterans alive who will demand we get the details correct (and who will complain if we fail to do them justice). When it comes to developing a character with a recent military backstory, authors need to also be aware of the sensitivities involved – whether you’re dealing with a character who served in Afghanistan, a character involved in one side or the other during the Northern Ireland Troubles, or, perhaps, a CIA operative who had exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…whatever the backstory is you have to get it right. 

As we’ve also discussed in our first page reviews, when presenting a character’s  backstory you also have to be careful not to slow down the narrative pace of the book. All the details you have researched cannot be presented in huge, long-winded chunks, or your readers’ eyes will glaze over. 

Here are a few tips when it comes to developing and presenting a compelling backstory:

When developing the backstory (particularly a military or law enforcement one):

  • Do your research thoroughly. I cannot emphasize this too much. Read books. Talk to people currently in the field or veterans who have experienced the same conflict/trauma that your character has experienced. 
  • Make sure you understand the impact their training and experiences have had on their characters. 
  • Know how they would react in a certain situation (it would, for instance be unlikely that an ex-Marine would turn tail and run when confronted with a mugger – not unless you have created an appropriate backstory that would make this behavior entirely believable).

When presenting the details of your protagonist’s backstory, remember:

  • Show only the tip of the iceberg at the start (even though you know everything, don’t foist it all on the reader at once)
  • Use key, tantalizing, references at first to get the reader intrigued (e.g. rather than providing a long-winded paragraph listing all the protagonist’s experiences during the civil war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, you could just say: “After what happened in Bosnia, he wasn’t sure who to trust any more”…that way the reader wants to know what happened as it impacts the story).
  • Make sure the backstory is relevant to the main story you are telling. There’s no point having an elaborate backstory if none of the elements come into play in the main story. The backstory needs to have a direct impact on how your character thinks, feels and acts (and in a way that rings true and is compelling to the reader).
  • Use action and dialogue to draw out the backstory rather than narrative exposition. This will keep the pace and tension going. 


So do you tend to have protagonists with a military or law enforcement background in your stories? If so, how do you go about researching this and what pitfalls do you try to avoid when presenting your character’s backstory?

Do You Have Obsessive Promotion Disorder?

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James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

This past week I began the launch of  BLIND JUSTICE, a legal thriller.  It first came out over a decade ago, and now by the magic of rights reversion and self-publishing, it’s available again in digital form and print.

So here we have a promotional post about a book launch. If you have a blog, it should obviously figure into your marketing plan. But don’t just make it about the sale. Have your post do “double duty” by offering something else of value.
Like talking about a malady that seems to be striking more and more writers each week: Obsession Promotion Disorder. There is a fine line that runs between healthy marketing and OPD. To be a well-balanced and productive writer, you’ve got to stay on the right side of that line. 
How can you tell if you have OPD?
1. You wake up in the morning and your first thought is about your rankings.
2. You’re constantly disappointed by your rankings.
3. You refresh your Amazon book page every hour.
4. You spend days playing Algorithm Ping Pong (that is, trying to game Amazon’s system with compulsive tinkering, checking, tinkering, checking).
5. You spend more time on social media than you do on your next book.
6. The time you do spend on social media is overweighted with “buy my book” messaging.
7. You believe there is one “golden key” that will make your book go viral, and you look for it constantly (the King Solomon’s Mines Syndrome, or KSMS).
8. You tune out of conversations with your loved ones, who ask you what you’re thinking, and to whom you reply, “Oh, nothing,” when all the time you know what you’re thinking about — promotion.
9. You believe that promotion can override weaknesses in your book (this is a sign of HOPD: Hyper-Obsessive Promotion Disorder).
10. You believe that promotion is the true secret of both instant and long-term success, so you pursue it with a passion that leaves no time for studying the actual craft of writing.
OPD needs to be treated, and it starts by understanding that the best, most thought out, most “gamed” promotional effort in the world only gets you an introduction.
We used to have this gal in L.A. named Angelyne. All of a sudden, all over town, there were huge billboards of this blonde minx in a come-hither pose. There was one word on the boards, Angelyne, and that was it.


Everybody was asking, Who is she? She has to be somebody, because, well, she has billboards!We were all waiting for the big reveal (ahem) of Angelyne and her talent.
Never happened, because Angelyne really didn’t do anything. She apparently had some backer (or a stash of her own money) to pay for the billboards. So what was the point of all the publicity? It got her attention, all right. But nothing ever came of an Angelyne career.
So, writer friends, you can push all the promotional buttons you want, but if the book doesn’t deliver the goods for a large swath of readers, it’s all for naught.
Your time would be better spent early in your career in an intensive, all-out effort to learn and practice your craft. Go to classes, read good books (see this starter page), head to a conference, write a quota of words every week and get feedback on those words via a critique partner or group or a good editorial service, like Writer’s Digest 2nd Draft.
When you finally get something published, spend no more than 20% of your time marketing. Maybe even less after the book is launched. Spend 80% or more of your thinking, training, planning and producing time on writing. (This 80/20 rule applies, BTW, whether you are self-published, traditionally published, or both).
Write this down and post it somewhere: The only sure way to “game” the system is to be a good, solid, dependable and consistent producer of new work.
Yes, of course you need to put a promotional plan in place. You should have a crisp, easy to navigate website which includes a place for email signups for your non-intrusive updates (they are non-intrusive, right?)

You should specialize in one or two social media platforms (and learn how to use them without being a boor). You should know your way around your Amazon author page. You should make an informed decision about using KDP Select or not (and, once the decision is made, quit obsessing about it). And so on.
But make it as much a “turn-key” operation as you can. Adjust it from time to time, but keep it largely on auto-pilot.
Then spend the vast majority of your time becoming and remaining a great writer. That is not a matter of slapping words down, getting a killer cover and then promoting like a madman. It’s a matter of writing with craft and purpose, over and over. It’s about learning how to please readers with the thing they actually spend money on: your books.
What about you? Have you ever showed any signs of OPD? 

Here Lies Love

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By Mark Alpert

Last night my wife and I went to a show called “Here Lies Love.” The musical was written by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) and it got a good review in the Times, but it turned out to be even better than I expected. And the reason has everything to do with the staging. If the show had been produced in a more conventional way, I probably would’ve hated it.

It’s a musical about Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines. The story is similar to that of “Evita” – a beautiful young woman marries a dashing politician who turns into a heartless dictator. Imelda became a figure of fun in 1986 after her husband Ferdinand was deposed and her cache of 2,700 pairs of shoes was discovered, but the show treats her story seriously. The actress who plays Imelda is a wonderful singer, and she does an excellent job of showing the character’s transformation from naïve beauty queen to imperious dragon lady. Still, the treatment is kind of simplistic, cramming forty years of Philippine history into ninety minutes and a dozen songs. If I were watching it in a typical Broadway theater, I’m sure I would’ve been underwhelmed. My inner critic would’ve huffed, “I already know this story! Can’t you tell me something new?”

But I wasn’t sitting in a typical Broadway house. “Here Lies Love” is staged in a smallish room in The Public Theater that’s decked out like a disco, complete with mirror balls and artificial fog. The audience stands around an oddly shaped platform on which the actors sing and dance, and you don’t stand in one place for very long either, because after every scene the stagehands shift the platform to a new position and shepherd the crowd to another part of the room. And on every wall are video screens that display historical footage of Imelda and Ferdinand. When the actor playing Ferdinand Marcos makes his entrance, he’s accompanied by a cameraman who shoots video of Marcos mingling with the audience, shaking hands and slapping backs. At one point, Marcos put his arm around me and together we smiled for the camera, and when I saw my complicit face on the video screens I felt a weird sense of guilt. Through the magic of theater, I got a brief glimpse of what it’s like to support a dictator.

In other words, the story came alive. The historical figures became three-dimensional, full of energy and sex appeal, their skin glistening with sweat.

I want to do the same thing with the characters in my novels. I need to think of new ways to make them come alive.