TKZ welcomes our guest blogger, Sandra Brown. Sandra is the author of over seventy novels including fifty-six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest is SMOKE SCREEN (August, 2008), and her new book, SMASH CUT, is scheduled for release in August, 2009.
By Sandra Brown
I can imagine the quizzical expression on the faces of most readers when they hear the title of my next book, SMASH CUT.
What the heck? Is that a noun or a verb? Neither? A little of both? A noun plus an adjective or a verb plus an adverb? Unless you work in the film industry or have a more than pedestrian knowledge of script writing, you probably aren’t familiar with the term. I’ve been a movie fan all my life, but I’d never come across that phrase until I started writing this novel and had to do some research into screen writing jargon, looking for a term that would apply to my story. Ergo – SMASH CUT. More on that later.
Most frequently asked question: Where do you get your ideas?
Most difficult question to answer: See above.
It’s tough for me to explain how an idea originated, because typically I don’t have a clue. Colleagues often cite personal experiences on which they base stories. Either they’re bald-faced liars (and I strongly suspect this of most of them) or, by comparison, I lead a much more boring life, because nothing ever happens to me that’s exciting enough to write about.
Not that I’m complaining. I’m a card carrying coward, so I don’t go looking for adventure. I avoid encounters with mean people, and certainly with wildlife, toxic plants, biting insects, and white water. I enjoy the great outdoors, but only if I’m appreciating it from behind tempered glass. My idea of camping out is staying in a hotel that doesn’t have room service after midnight. I have acute acrophobia, and I’ll go into the ocean only if the beach catches fire. I know, I know, I’m a barrel of laughs.
Where was I? Oh, right. I don’t have anything interesting to write about unless I make it up. And only sometimes can I say definitively how an idea came to me.
To an extent, SMASH CUT is an exception. Because I can tell you that at least part of this idea came from my family’s habit of dropping movie quotes into our conversations.
We’re all movie buffs. We have family standards, movies we never tire of watching, movies we’ve seen so many times we can practically recite the entire script but enjoy re-watching anyway. I think the familiarity makes these classics even more delectable, although the diehards who will watch a movie only once, vehemently disagree. These are also the people who will read a book only once. They are to be pitied. Probably a foundation should be started for them.
Anyhow, we in my family love movies of all kinds — funny, sad, scary, historical, contemporary, futuristic. Movies about war, cowboys, gangsters, love. Doesn’t matter. Our taste in films is as diverse as our taste in books. We like anything so long as it’s entertaining.
In 2006, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (Surely you’ve heard of the Academy Awards. . .) put together a list of seventy-five famous quotes and made a great looking poster out of it. Against a black background are a big gold Oscar and all these quotes written in different fonts. We had one framed for our media room, and it draws the attention of guests who get a kick out of testing their memories. Some of the quotes are easy to identify: “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” Some only film historians would be able to identify with alacrity. Many are from recent pictures. Others date back decades.
The point is, among my family members, we were able to identify all seventy-five films by title and the actor who spoke the line.
So our stockpile of movie quotes is extensive. We have a suitable quip for nearly every occasion and conversation. “Napoleon Dynamite” alone was a treasure trove. Whenever one of us drops in a line (and sometimes it’s said by several of us in unison), the rest of us “get it,” while an “outsider” is left perplexed, wondering what the heck we’re all talking/laughing about. We’ve tried to ameliorate this rudeness by describing the movie scene and the context in which the line of dialogue was spoken, but it frequently loses it’s punch in the retelling.
I guess you had to be there.
You may think this sounds like a real drag, something that only people with very little else to do would engage in, but in our defense, I can think of worse things families can do together. It’s a harmless pastime. But you’re probably asking what relevance it has to plotting a novel. I’m getting to that, I promise.
I suppose this family tradition was in the back of my mind when I asked myself, “What if?”
Now on this, my colleagues and I are in complete accordance. Every novelist asks, “What if. . .?” It’s a derivative of the childhood “Play like. . .”
So I asked myself, “What if quoting lines of movie dialogue wasn’t quite so harmless? Play like one’s preoccupation with movies was detrimental or, say, deadly?”
Hmm. Interesting. Follow that and see where it goes.
About the time I began doing that, I revisited an idea which had occurred to me several years ago but had remained on the back burner: Passengers in an elevator become the targets of a vicious crime.
Hmm. Interesting. Again, follow that and see where it goes.
Are the elevator passengers acquainted or perfect strangers? Is the elevator in an office building, city hall, hospital, military post? Who commits the crime? Who’s the unlucky casualty?
What I didn’t realize until later is that a crime committed in an elevator poses all sorts of terrible problems, not only for the hapless fictional passengers, but for the idiotic writer who put them there!
And how would said writer tie in that scene – which was vivid in my mind and demanding to be used after languishing in my head for several years — with the movie buff? What’s the connection? And maybe the movie buff’s preoccupation with the movies isn’t a bad thing, after all. Maybe it just appears to be a negative fixation, when actually. . .
You see how this works? I keep asking, “What if?” until the plot reveals itself to me. I think of a story that way. It’s an entity that is there all along, but one day decides to shoulder its way into my consciousness. I can’t really take credit for doing anything except writing it down and passing it along to you, although more frequently than not, that shouldering thing takes months. It can be a painful process, involving a lot of hard work, self-doubt, cursing, and gnashing of teeth.
Once I had the plot for this book, I began “collecting” movie quotes and memorable scenes to incorporate into the story. I commissioned every movie fan I know to submit suggestions, particularly favorite murder scenes. What I learned was that I’ve got some really sick friends and family members. But I must admit, I came up with most of the film lines and images that wound up in the book.
Now, about that title. Having done my due diligence on script writing terms, I learned that “smash cut” refers to an abrupt edit that’s specifically designed to shock, jar, or scare the living daylights out of the audience.
I hope you’ll experience a few in SMASH CUT.
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Coming up Sunday, June 14, our guest blogger will be New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry. And watch for future Sunday guest blogs from Robert Liparulo, Paul Kemprecos, Linda Fairstein, Julie Kramer, Grant Blackwood, and more.
Over the past six years I’ve been asked countless times by the press, fans, and friends about The Da Vinci Code. It’s a natural question since my stories are constantly compared to it. Dan Brown even provided a wonderful blurb for my first novel, The Amber Room, (calling it “sexy, illuminating, and confident . . . my kind of thriller”). I still like reading that comment from time to time. 
