Who needs to hang it up?

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by Michelle Gagnon

This is an ongoing discussion on one of the message boards I frequent, and I thought it was an interesting one. How long can a series continue before it sinks under its own weight?

When readers have latched on to a character or series, and whatever book follows in the progression is guaranteed to make the bestsellers’ lists, both publishers and authors are loathe to say Sayonara. But there are popular series out there that are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. And would those writers be better served by branching out into new territory? After all, if their name is established, wouldn’t most of their fan base follow them on whatever new venture they chose?

I’ll preface this by saying that I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I’m a huge John Sandford fan, and if he were to suddenly announce that Lucas Davenport was vanishing into the ether, I would be disappointed. Same with Jack Reacher, but for different reasons. What I like about Sandford’s books is that he has managed to keep them freash and interesting by varying the plots: some are more like spy novels, other focus on heists or serial killers. Plus, Lucas Davenport is one of the rare series characters who has actually evolved. I liked him at the beginning, but by allowing him to age and learn from life experience, I’m far more invested in him than I would be otherwise.

Paradoxically, the opposite holds true for Jack Reacher. He never changes. Thirteen books in, he still travels with nothing but the clothing on his back and a fold up toothbrush. And apparently he’s discovered that mythical fountain of youth, since he can still destroy pretty much anyone in a fight regardless of the fact that he must be approaching fifty by now. And yet, I don’t care. (I will say, however, that I secretly hope Lee Child someday branches off into a side series featuring Frances Neagley. Particularly after Bad Luck and Trouble, I want to know more about her and that company she runs). It’s the reason the Law and Order franchise is so consistently successful: you know what to expect, and Child always delivers it. He has the added liberty of being able to take Reacher anywhere in the world, from small towns to metropolises, and there’s no reason for him not to be there since he’s not locked into a job, tied to anyone or anything.

Others, however, have not been as fortunate. There are series whose books I devoured for five, ten, even fifteen books. But they gradually devolved into something that was either implausible or just plain silly. How long can you maintain a love triangle that never gets resolved? And for series set in small towns, how are we supposed to swallow the fact that their homicide rate rivals Detroit’s? I loved Karin Slaughter’s Grant County series, but after six books it was starting to suffer from Cabot Cove Syndrome: how could so many terrible things happen in a rural Georgia county? Who would ever move there with that level of crime? Property values must have been in the basement after the third serial killer in as many years passed through. Moving the series to Atlanta and combining it with her other series revitalized it for me.

So let’s hear it: who needs to hang it up? And what series have defied the odds and held your interest?

It’s got that new season smell

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by Joe Moore

It’s premiere season on TV and I’m excited. There’s a couple of returning shows that I really got into last year, and a few new ones that sound quite enticing. xfilesFirst, let me say that my tastes run toward drama. But not just any drama. I like stuff that’s outside the box. As an example, I was one of the original X-Files fans. I remember that Friday night in September 1993 when the show first appeared. I loved everything about it from the creepy music to the mysterious logo to the amazing anti-relationship between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. Their characters were strong from the start and stayed true to the end. I was also a big fan of Millennium, another of X-Files producer Chris Carter’s shows. Not as famous and successful as X-Files, but just as captivating.

So what do I look forward to this year? Fringe. It’s X-Files all over again, only in HD. Last week was the first show of the new season, and it had plenty of surprises and twists. There’s also a new show called Flash Forward. Here’s the premise: Suddenly, the entire world stands still for 2 minutes, 17 seconds. Chaos ensues. Cars crash, medical procedures are brought to a halt, and millions of other events are disrupted. A couple of FBI agents are assigned to investigate what happened and why. Advance reviews say the concept is fascinating and the story addictive.

Then there’s the return of Doll House on Friday nights. This one pulled me in last season and I’m looking forward to see if it can sustain imagemy interest a second time around. It involves a girl code-named “Echo” who is a member of an illegal underground group who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas. They not only perform unusual and controversial roles, but they literally become whoever their clients want them to be. It’s hard to look away.

And when I do need a laugh or two, the Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men are hard to beat.

So how about you? Are there any shows you’re looking forward to? How about ones you intend to avoid? Is this the year you break the ties to 24 or American Idol?

You might never upload a photo to Facebook again

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I’m a heavy Internet user, so I jumped at a chance last week to attend a Webinar (that’s a Web seminar, for you non-heavy users). Its purpose was to teach investigators how to use online techniques to research suspects, gang members, deadbeat parents, etc.

I learned that it’s possible to use online techniques to find out information about almost anyone. Here are a few of the tips we heard:

Look at pictures that are posted by your suspect on social media sites (such as Facebook), and study the backgrounds of the pictures. Team logos, landmarks, or other things in the pictures can indicate where your subject is living. You might see drugs in the background, worth noting if you’re trying to establish drug-related connections.

Note any other people in your subject’s photos. That’s one way to discover gang associations or other criminal connections. Even if your subject keeps most of his uploaded information private, you might be able to find out information from his friends’ postings.

We were advised to always capture information as soon as we find it (Snagit was a recommended tool for screen captures), because the Internet constantly changes.

We learned how to refine Google searches on the web to focus and narrow down results. Using boolean operators to do searches, trying different spellings and search engines, and using cache to get archived information were some of the suggestions.

Some of the techniques will come in handy for my writing. One thing is certain–going forward, I’ll be much more selective when I upload personal information and photos. And I’m also happy that I use a pen name for my writing–there’s less surfacing of personal data that way.

Do you have any favorite search tricks or online research techniques? Are there any rules that you follow for uploading personal information online?

You’re Perfect. I’m Doomed!

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I was listening to a radio interview with James Wood, literary critic for The New Yorker, discussing his book How Fiction Works when the topic of the role of the critic came around and I was struck by one of the quotes (to paraphrase) that the critic should be interested in identifying how the writer failed to meet an ‘ideal’.

Now I’m sure all of us (as either readers or writers) have our list of top authors as well as books that we feel epitomize the ‘perfect’ novel – but the thought of constantly being measured against such an ideal is daunting. I started musing (and agonizing I have to confess) over how the concept of the ‘ideal’ affects how I write as well as how I read. My experience with book groups and writing groups has led me to suspect that while the concept of seeking perfection in the writing craft can be noble it can also be devastating. How many of us haven’t been stymied by the inner critic while writing – the one that says ‘this stuff is crap, it’ll never be as good as [insert appropriate esteemed author name here]’ or who hasn’t, as a reader, felt a novel pale in comparison to another to the point where all possible merits of the first book disappear completely?

It’s taken me a while to overcome that fear of failure and commit a first draft to the page but there’s no way I could complete a manuscript if I thought about the critics – especially not if they have some mythical ideal in mind (which no doubt no author could ever meet all the time!).

So – do you have an ‘ideal’ author or book that you think sets the standard? Do you ever feel intimidated by that in your writing? Who do you use as your ‘ideal’ when you think about honing and (dare I say it) perfecting your craft?

Hanging Upside Down and Other Creative Moves

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by James Scott Bell

Well, it is indeed Dan Brown week in the world of publishing, as our own Joe Moore and John Ramsey Miller have attested. And that’s a good thing. The business needs a shot in the arm. We need to see hardcovers flying off the shelves again. We need people sitting around Starbucks talking fiction, getting caught up in a story world.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the phenomenon of The Lost Symbol, as there was for The Da Vinci Code. But today I’d like to focus on another aspect of this event: the author himself.

This latest book was not easy for Mr. Brown. I mean, how do you follow a once-in-a-lifetime hit like TDVC? That book’s particular mix of vast religious conspiracy, symbology and fast paced action went spinning around on the wheel of fortune and hit the jackpot.

Brown cops to the pressure of following up. Regarding the long lag time between TDVC and The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown was quoted in the L.A. Times as follows:

“The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ … You’re temporarily crippled….[later] The furor died down, and I realized that none of it had any relevance to what I was doing. I’m just a guy who tells a story.”

Writers, attend to this. What happened to Dan Brown on a mega level happens to most writers who publish more than one book. A lot of unpublished writers think things will be just swell once they’re published, and they can produce book after book with nary a worry.

The truth is, writing fiction gets harder because we continue to raise the bar on ourselves. We do, that is, if we truly care about the craft. We know more about what we do with each book, and where we fall short. We hope we have a growing readership, and want to keep pleasing them, surprising them, delighting them with plot twists, great characters and a bit of stylistic flair.

But we can’t stroll down the aisle of “Plots R Us” and choose something fresh, right out of the box. (Although Erle Stanley Gardner was known to use a complex “plot wheel.” I guess he did okay. And, FWIW, Slate came up with its own plot generator for those truly desperate to cash in on the Dan Brown phenomenon). We are on a never ending quest for concepts, characters and plot. No matter how many books we’ve done, we keep aspiring to the next level.

Dan Brown reportedly deals with all this by using gravity shoes. He hangs upside down, letting the blood rush to his head. Bats use the same method. But there are other options.

Whenever you are wondering if you’ve got the stuff to be published (or, if published, to stay that way), let me offer a few helps.

1. Write. This is the most important thing of all. Get “black on white,” as Maupassant used to say. Even if you feel like pond scum as an artist, just start writing. If you can’t possibly face a page of your project, write a free form journal about something in your past. Begin with “I remember . . .” Pretty soon, you’ll feel like getting back to your novel.

2. Re-read. Pull out a favorite novel, one that really moved you. Read parts of it at random, or even the whole thing. Don’t worry about feeling even worse because you think you can’t write like that author. You’re not supposed to. You never can. But guess what? He can’t write like you, either.

3. Incubate. For half an hour think hard about your project, writing notes to yourself, asking questions. Back yourself into tight corners. Then put all that away for a day and do something else. Walk. Swim. Work your day job. Stuff will be bubbling in your “writer’s brain.” The next day, write.

4. Turn off your Internet browser for a whole day. By which I mean, of course, first read The Kill Zone, then turn off the Net and write. Forget emails, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or anybody else’s space. A bit of downtime from all the noise is good for focus.

Mental landmines abound for writers. The key is not to let any of them stop you from writing, even if you have to hang upside down to do it.

So how do you get yourself going when the going gets tough?

Does Dan Brown Impress You?

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John Ramsey Miller

I am happy for Dan Brown, I’m happy for his publisher, Random House, and I’m happy for his broker. I think he deserves his success, even if I do not fully understand it. None of us knows what readers will hit on, but I do know that chasing a wildly successful book by taking the elements you feel are what struck the chord with the audience is usually a waste of good keystrokes. I don’t think most people can write what they don’t feel and hit home runs with an audience. You know what sells? Entertainment. I can break that down. Readers want to feel good, to know their dreams can be realized, that they can escape reality by getting involved, that good kicks evil’s wide ass, and that hope exists despite a great deal of evidence to the contrary.

Look at the how the lowly Vampire of a few years ago has suddenly been lifted to the heavens. We have vampires drinking synthetic blood, walking about in the daytime, flying like superman, fangs that open like switchblades, feeling emotions, being all sensitive, falling in love, and next we’ll have them procreating like the living, roasting garlic to sprinkle on their popcorn, and ordering scotch and Holy water on the rocks. And now werewolves, ghouls, witches, ghosts, zombies, voodoo priests, magical beasts of every description, are all lining up in the wings waiting their turn to elbow their way into the middle of the stream. Because readers want to feel fear from the safety of their armchairs, and triumph over it without breaking a sweat. They want to believe that there are things they don’t see in their own lives. They (we) want to imagine they can live forever, only if it’s just at night, and they want to believe in monsters, but want even their worst monsters to have a smidgen of goodness buried in there somewhere. And most people believe that animals in jeopardy are more important than people in the same fix. Seriously you can have a monster kill a child that toddles too close, but one that kills curious cats or protective dogs is beyond redemption.

Successful authors gravitate toward subjects, characters, and stories that attract them. I suppose I could write a convincing vampire novel, if I were interested in vampires it might even be interesting, but I’d rather write about gangsters. I’d love to write about the wild West. I’d like to back off to a time when there were no cell phones, few if any telephones, no TV sets and maybe just a radio here and there and newspapers instead of CNN.

The thing about Dan Brown is that his work isn’t a fluke. About anytime a writer is successful, critics pick at his style, impugn his accuracy, and generally rain poo-poo on his ability. Dan Brown is into his story, cares about his characters, and likes slaying giants. Brown is a great writer, and his financial rewards are well deserved because it is a gift to Mr. Brown for what he is offering them in exchange. Maybe Dan Brown won’t win an Edgar, or the ITW for best novel, or any other rewards his contemporaries can bestow. Like so many great commercially successful artists jealousy keeps those prizes away. But authors like Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, JK Rowling, John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen King, Stephanie Meyer, and Dan Brown, the people are voting, and they are voting yes, yes, yes. When millions of people think you are a great writer, the Nobel, Pulitzer committee, and the critics are irrelevant and should be. Would you rather have a line of awards on your bookshelves, or some producer from the Today show begging you for the fifteenth time to make an appearance, or a Gulfstream V taking you and your family to Europe so you can watch your book being filmed. For most authors I know, it isn’t even close. Of course, all of the above would be heaven.

Point of Who?

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By John Gilstrap
www.johngilstrap.com

Those of us who choose to write in the third person limited point of view face a critical challenge after every space break: Who’s going to own the next scene? That choice affects virtually every sentence that follows it. It affects the action, the voice, the word choice . . . everything. Point of view selections even inform the direction that the plot is going to take.

Let’s say that we’re going to write a fictional account of the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. For the uninitiated, that engagement, fought in July of 1863, is widely considered the turning point in the war—the defeat from which the Confederate Army never fully recovered. More than 160,000 troops descended on a town of 2,400 residents, and at the end of three days of fighting, over 60,000 lay dead or dying, with many thousands more left wounded on the battlefield.

In our fictional account of the story, who will our POV characters be? If we choose to tell a story set among the commanders (George Meade for the Union, Robert E. Lee for the Confederates), it seems to me that it would be too limiting to assume the role of either commander, if only because their lives and decisions are so well documented. Instead, I would probably create a fictional aide de camp whose thoughts and observations I would record. I would imagine that this choice would have us writing battle scenes from a big-picture, strategic world view.

Maybe we’d want to tell the story of the battle from the POV of a rank-and-file soldier, in which case our story would be less about momentous command decisions than it would be about the everyday soldier’s life of unending boredom punctuated by blind terror. Our character’s view of the battle would not concern itself with troop movements on the grand scale, but rather from the very limited perspective of a man under fire choking on the stench of smoke and blood. If he could see anything, it would likely be the shoulders of the soldier in front of him.

Another option might be to tell the story of a Gettysburg resident, a civilian facing the horrors of war and its aftermath. Shall we choose a young woman who fears for the safety of her children? A middle aged man who feels guilt for not being part of the battle? Maybe the town doctor who is facing an unending stream of catastrophic traumatic injuries.

Whichever choice we make, the story will report on the same event, but the perspectives taken on that event will be wildly disparate depending upon our choice of POV.

Take the historical nature of the event out of play and the same challenges continue to exist. If we’re writing a divorce drama from the POVs of both husband and wife, we need to choose which perspective delivers the most drama for the scene where the lawyer reveals the investigator’s tapes of the wife cheating on hubby. If we’re writing a story about a kidnapping, we need to decide whether the actual snatching is best revealed to the reader through the point of view of the victim or the mother who sees him being spirited away.

These are really important decisions. How do you make them? Do you have to go back and rewrite your choices like I have had to do more times than I like to think about? For you first-person writers, do you face any kind of the same choices in your writing, or does the narrow window insulate you from them?

Reason to kill?

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By P.D. Martin

Today TKZ is thrilled to have a tremendous writer from the land down under join us, author PD Martin. In her latest release, Fan Mail, Aussie FBI profiler Sophie Anderson is working a case where fiction has become fatal. A popular crime writer is murdered and posed just like the crime scene in the dead author’s last book.

Could crime fiction incite someone to kill? This is a question I’m often asked, and it’s one of the themes I explore in my third book, Fan Mail.

Having done lots of research on murder and criminal psychology, my belief is that if someone is going to take another human being’s life, reading fictional accounts of murder is not going to push them over the edge. Having said that, we do live in a world where we’re increasingly exposed to violence and graphic crime-scene depictions.

Take the many successful (and entertaining) shows on TV: CSI, Bones, Law & Order: SVU…and then, of course, there’s Dexter. But have we really been desensitized?

A few years ago, after lots of meticulous research into horrific and violent crimes, I honestly believed I was desensitized, almost in a similar way to a cop. I’d imagined some horrible situations and written about them in detail. I was tough!

Or so I thought, until I met Victoria Police’s profiler, who gave me a list of law-enforcement text books to help with my research. I ordered them online and was so excited when they arrived; and the timing couldn’t have been better because I was packing for a week-long writing retreat. I threw the books in my luggage and headed down to the beach.

The first thing I did when I arrived was to unpack the books and start flipping through one…and then I saw it. The first page the book opened to was a photo from a crime-scene in which a woman had been raped then murdered. The killer had tied her down and posed her in a disturbingly revealing way. Next photo: a dead woman with both of her breasts cut off. Next photo: a decomposing body. Next photo…I think you get the picture. In that instant I realised my so-called desensitization wasn’t real. They say a picture tells a thousand words and in the case of crime-scene photographs, it’s certainly true. The new set of books disturbed me, but they also made me understand my character, Aussie FBI profiler Sophie Anderson, so much more intensely – to be faced with these photos every day and go on….it’s definitely one of the hardest jobs in the world.

I’m thankful that I write fiction because I can make stuff up and no matter how graphic and horrific, I know it’s not real. And this is also a large part of why I don’t think crime fiction can, or would, incite someone to kill. It is fiction, and no matter how descriptive or well written we know it’s not real. Law-enforcement text books on the other hand…they could be very scary in the wrong hands.
So I’m curious: what do you think? Could reading crime fiction serve as the catalyst for actual crimes?

PD Martin – Phillipa Deanne Martin – is an Australian author with a background in psychology. She has written four novels featuring Aussie FBI profiler Sophie Anderson, of which the first three are currently available in North America – Body Count, The Murderers’ Club and Fan Mail. See www.pdmartin.com.au for more information.

The Dan Brown flagship

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By Joe Moore

tls-brown The waiting is over. THE LOST SYMBOL by Dan Brown hit the store shelves yesterday. Love him or hate him, this is a big deal in the world of publishing.

First there was the long 6-year delay. Then the street talk that Brown would never write another book. Then the possible title: THE SOLOMON KEY. Then the revealing of the anticipated cover. And now the day has come. It’s here—all 5 million, first-print-run copies. Now the big questions are: Will it sell as many copies as THE DA VINCI CODE(80 million)? How long will it sit in the number one slot of every bestselling list on the planet? And is it as good as TDC and ANGELS AND DEMONS? Here are two advance reviews:

The Los Angeles Times calls it “. . . like any roller coaster – thrilling, entertaining and then it’s over.”

The New York Times calls it “sexy” and “impossible to put down.”

So what does this publication mean for us thriller authors? The way I see it, if all of us are ships in a naval battle group, THE LOST SYMBOL is the admiral’s flagship aircraft carrier pulling us in its wake, setting the course, and identifying the potential destination. When TDC came along, it created a whole new cottage industry of thrillers that contained secret societies, lost treasures, relics, scientific and religious conflicts, and other like-minded themes. I know that for me, it helped build interest in four of my novels. But in the bigger picture, it created a hunger. Just like Indiana Jones movies renewed an interest in the dark side of the 1930s-1950s, the Nazi, religious antiquity, and archaeology, Dan Brown and his books have continued to feed that hunger. A hunger that will potentially spill over to other books and writers. Because, once readers finish THE LOST SYMBOL, hopefully they’ll be hungry for more. The void must be filled.

Here’s an example from Library Journal where one of my books is mentioned.

I’m excited not only for Dan Brown, but for all thriller authors. This guy is shooting full-court 3-pointers, but the thriller team is ultimately the winner.

Do you plan on reading THE LOST SYMBOL? Do you consider it a thriller genre-boosting event or just another high profile novel by a famous writer?

Contagion

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This week’s post will be brief because I woke up this morning with flu-like symptoms that have been making me feel achy-breaky most of the day. Authorities tell us that any flu this season can be assumed to be H1N1, formerly known as swine. The good news is that most cases are going to be relatively mild. But don’t take that for granted–the husband of a close friend of mine (who suffers from asthma), spent three weeks in St. James Hospital here, and it was touch and go for a while after it it settled into his lungs as pneumonia. If you have any type of lung or pulmonary issues, and you come down with flu, don’t wait before getting treatment. Do it right away.

The flu has fallen out of the media spotlight, but it has spread to just about everywhere by now. Here’s the CDC flu map, in case you haven’t been following the story lately.

Muscle aches aside, I do want to pull the topic back to writing, so I’ll list some of my favorite stories involving viruses: The Andromeda Strain, The Hot Zone (nonfiction and not well written, but it did scare the hell out of me). And now I’m putting Robin Cook’s Contagion on my TBR list. I saw Mr. Cook speak at Thrillerfest, and it’s amazing how brilliant and prolific as an author he is.

What are your favorite medical thrillers? Did any scare the bejeezus out of you?