“It is never too late to be wise.”– Daniel Defoe

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I recently read Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe for the first time. I don’t know how I missed it during my educational training, but I did.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those books that has left indelible fingerprints (or footprints) on our collective language. When we think of a deserted island, Crusoe comes to mind, and the term “Man Friday” or “Girl Friday” is commonly used to refer to an efficient assistant. (Wouldn’t it be wonderful to know that one of our books would have that kind of impact several hundred years after its publication?)

Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719 and is considered by some to be the first modern novel in English. You wouldn’t think a book about a lone individual stranded on a deserted island for decades could be interesting, but I understand it was enormously popular during Defoe’s lifetime and has become one of the most widely published books in history.

Although the book’s sociological aspects might concern some in the 21st century, I found it to be a lens onto another time that I don’t know much about, and that made it particularly interesting. It was also a deeper and richer story than I had anticipated, with themes of self-reliance and redemption.

One scene, in particular, captures the imagination: the footprint scene. An article about Daniel Defoe on americanliterature.com  claims Robert Louis Stevenson felt the footprint scene was one of the four greatest in English literature. I don’t know if Defoe intended it, but it seemed to me to be a metaphor for life. Just when you think you understand the lay of the land, some small thing appears that shakes the foundation of your security, and everything changes.

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I had always imagined Daniel Defoe to be a kind of rough and ready type. How else could he write a novel about a man stranded on a deserted island who invents all kinds of novel (pun intended) ways to stay alive? But reading about Defoe’s life and looking at images on the web, I see Defoe as a proper English gentleman, complete with cravat and full powdered wig.

But what a time he lived in! Born in 1660, he was a child during the great plague in Europe that claimed over 70,000 lives. He lived during the lifetime of Sir Isaac Newton and some of the great explorers. It must have seemed like an era of unlimited possibilities.

Defoe wrote more than 500 books, articles, and stories. Interestingly, he was 59 years old when Robinson Crusoe was published, and his other famous work Moll Flanders followed that one.

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All of this thinking about being stranded on a deserted island put me in mind of a question we hear occasionally. Here’s a variation of the setup:

Suppose you were stranded on a deserted island for a week with no phone, internet, or other means of access to the outside world. You can pick one person to be on the island with you. Let’s say the other person has to be an author who is no longer alive.

Here are a few questions I’d ask Mr. Defoe:

Why did you decide to write Robinson Crusoe?

Why did you leave Crusoe on the island for 28 years? Wouldn’t a few years have been enough?

Were you surprised at the popularity of your novel?

How much were you paid for your book?

How did you know so much about surviving on a deserted island?

How did you come up with the idea of the single footprint?

Are you a plotter or a pantser?

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So TKZers: If you were stranded on a deserted island for a week with no internet, no phone, or other means of communication with the outside world, what author from the past would you want to spend that week with? Why would you choose that person? What questions would you ask?

By John Gilstrap

I have a problem with authority–a quirk of my personality that stretches back to my earliest memories of face-slaps and groundings. I can’t think of a single occasion when I was punished with out reason, or punished unreasonably, but I can remember dozens of times when I was given an order by my parents and I dug in my heels, knowing full well what I was getting myself into.

As I got older, my petulance moderated, but it has never gone away. I thrived in work environments where I was given goals to achieve, but foundered in jobs where I was told specifically how to achieve those goals. I don’t get along with micromanagers, and I push back with proportional force against anyone who tells me to do something that I think is wrong.

Enter the era of the pandemic. We don’t do politics here at TKZ, so I won’t delve into the specifics, but when people in power told me to do things that I thought were unreasonable, I became an angry man. I stayed an angry man for the better part of three years, and I’m not sure that I am yet 100% over it.

But I’m getting better. Events last weekend and in the coming week are bringing me much, much closer to normality. I’m teaching seminars again.

Last Saturday, at Shepherdstown Public Library, I taught a truncated version of my course called Adrenaline Rush: How to Write Suspense Fiction. The room was full of adult students, all of whom were free to breathe freely. It was a lively group, and the course went well. Next week, I will be on the faculty of the Midwest Writers Workshop at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, where I will teach that same course, plus one other on research techniques. I will also have one-on-one meetings with about a dozen writers to critique the first five pages of their manuscripts.

There will be group dinners and cocktail receptions. You know, like the old days.

While MMW is not an event reserved for college students, if past is precedent, young adults will make up a large percentage of the attendees. This will be my first encounter with that age group since the lifting of the moratorium on fun, so it will be interesting to see how the years of isolation have affected them. If the quality of manuscripts to be evaluated is any indication, the alone time has been harmful. I’ve done this conference a number of times in the past, and this year’s crop is in general of a lesser standard.

It takes a while for a train as big as the whole world to get moving smoothly again, but at least it’s once again being allowed to try. It’s good to be back in the saddle again.

By PJ Parrish

Well, I’m back. Sorry I missed my slot last time around, but I had to bury another laptop. My Microsoft Surface gave me The White Screen of Death. After a mild panic (I am bad about backing up) I bundled it off to my geek. He looked at the white screen and said, “Huh. Never seen that before.” You don’t want to hear those words from your dentist, your geek, or your lover the first time you’re doing it. Anywho, he got all my data and taught me how to retrieve it from the cloud-thingie. So, I just want to give you some advice, if you are computer-stupid like me: BACK UP YOUR DATA. There are a million good programs out there that do this.

Now back to our regular programming. Here’s a First Page Submission in what the writer calls “mystery crime fiction.” Give it a read and let’s talk.

Death at the Tenderloin

Another senseless murder was by no means unfamiliar to me.

As a San Francisco cop, I’ve seen cruelty to humanity for over a decade. As a seasoned detective, I’m desensitized—It’s just another death in the city.

The victim was a middle-aged man with a fair complexion and wavy graying black hair. He was average height, somewhat thin, and wearing what appeared to be an old worn-out pilot’s uniform with yellow stripes on his button-up jacket sleeves. He was found behind the Black Bunny Bar sitting, and arms crossed on his lap, legs splayed out straight, leaning against a dumpster as if taking a nap before hopping into the cockpit. If it were not for the apparent blunt-force trauma to his skull, a passerby could easily tag him as a homeless drunk.

Four yellow stripes unquestionably a captain, I thought.

The uniform sparked memories. I joined the U.S. Air Force Academy and graduated from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit program. The positives were two-fold. One, I became an elite of the elites. Second, it distanced me from a San Francisco street detective who ruled with an undeniable force on the street and at home—a retired vet who expected the utmost discipline from his only son. Instead of improving our father-and-son relationship, my triumphs worsened it. I was living in Quantico, Virginia, when my father succumbed to cancer, and three months later, I laid him to rest. Precious time had passed between us—an act I later questioned.

I looked at my partner, Brynn, to see her reaction to this atypical scene.

“What do you see?” I asked as I put on my floater mask to filter out the foul odors of decomposition.

Brynn was kneeling beside the body, her cracked lips slightly open. She lifted her palm in a give-me-a-moment gesture, perhaps trying to digest the gruesome scene.

You’ve seen nothing yet, I thought.

Brynn O’Reilly is a petite woman at 120 pounds. She is of Irish-American heritage with long ash-brown hair. She favors a black blazer as the Unit uniform, complemented with flared-bottom jeans and sage color boots to match her eyes. Only two years as a street cop and six months at the Major Crimes Unit, Brynn is known as a pit bull investigator. Her quick rise through the ranks came compliments from her family lineage, namely her father and grandfather, the current and retired chief of police. Nevertheless, she is a good detective with keen instincts and a thirst for sleuthing—from dissecting blogs to graffiti on public restroom stalls. Everyone leaves a footprint of clues is her modus operandi.

_____________________

Okay, let’s start with some obvious stuff. You have one chance to make a good first impression and hook your reader, There are four things you always want to avoid in your opening pages:

Don’t Be Boring. Whatever your opening dramatic moment is, don’t choose something that’s been done to death. Don’t open with a bad dream. Don’t open with your cop getting a phone call in the middle of the night. Don’t open with the protag navel-gazing. (ie thinking, musing, remembering, regretting the past).

This submission? Borderline. If you are opening with a cop checking out a dead body, you really have to work hard to make it feel fresh. Although I like one thing about the crime scene, other problems diminish it, for reasons outlined below.

Avoid the dreaded info-dump. Don’t bore your reader with information about the protag’s past in the early pages. Capture their imagination with a compelling character and an intriguing situation. Background info can be woven in later.

This submission: Two chunky paragraphs of backstory inserted too early before the dramatic opening scene has a chance to gel.

Steer clear of cliches. Crime fiction is fertile ground for this, and nothing will turn an editor off more quickly than stale Wonder Bread. Tropes that need to die: crusty vet cop teamed up with rookie (usually female). Vet cop whose wife or kid died so he’s drowning himself in booze. Crabby old boss chewing out rogue cop (Dirty Harry was there first). Vet cop with bitter ex-wife who tells him “you’ll never see your kid again.” The psycho sidekick who does the dirty deeds the hero won’t do. We could go on.

This submission? Old cop paired with relatively inexperienced female.

And last but most important: Don’t tell when you can show.  I’ve written several blogs on this subject because it’s so important yet so difficult to explain well. If you have problems with this, go back into the TZK archives. Lots of good advice there.

This submission? This is its basic problem. This opening is not badly written. It just relies too heavily on telling rather than showing.

What was the one thing that made me want to read on? The dead guy.

An apparent homeless man is found propped in an alley with his head bashed in. Nothing really interesting there. But the writer uses A TELLING DETAIL (not to be confused with show not tell). The air force uniform — especially the captain’s stripes —  is the best thing in this submission. It grabbed my interest in a way the protag did not.

But here’s the caveat: We see the victim not through an immediate and well-crafted scene of SHOWING via the protag’s sensory “camera.” We get the victim info book-ended by the protag’s backstory. We get lots of thoughts from the protag — about his state of mind (“desensitized”), about his education (air force academy), about his success at the FBI (he’s “elite”), about his father (estranged and dead from cancer), and waaaay too much details on his partner, right down to her weight.

What we DON’T get is a clear picture of the crime scene and a reason to care enough to turn the page. We are TOLD we are in an alley in San Francisco. But we can’t see it because there are no details, no description. We are TOLD the murder is “senseless” but there is no hard evidence of that yet. I normally don’t like to rewrite someone else’s material, but I want to make a point. What if we got out of the protag’s thoughts and started right with what the “camera” of his consciousness can show us?

The dead man was propped up against the Dumpster behind the Black Bunny Bar, legs splayed out, head bowed on his chest. He could have been a homeless guy sleeping off a drunk. Except for the black oozing crack in his head. And the uniform he was wearing.

It was black, the dress shirt drenched dark blue in the heavy rain. For a moment, I thought he was one of ours. Then I noticed the four yellow stripes on his left sleeve.

I recognized those stripes. My father was wearing that same uniform the day I buried him ten years ago. The dead man wasn’t a San Francisco cop. He was air force. A captain.

“You want a closer look, Jackson?” 

I looked over at my partner Brynn O’Reilly. Even in dim light of the alley, I could see the eagerness in her eyes. But she was waiting for me to move first. I didn’t want to. This was the fourth homicide I had been called to in the last month here in the Tenderloin. But that wasn’t what was holding me back.  

The point I am trying to make here is that it is always more powerful to SHOW your scene and your character’s reaction via action and dialogue rather than TELL the reader what is happening via thoughts. It’s okay to drop a HINT of backstory. That’s often intriguing and starts setting up your character layering. But never waste precious moments in the first pages with long backstory and always try to make it relate to what is happening in present time.

Okay, let’s do a quick line edit. My comments in blue

Another senseless murder was by no means unfamiliar to me. “Senseless murder” is a media-created cliche. The idea of “senseless” refers to homicides that lack an objective external motivation. There is no way the detective here can yet determine this. Also, it’s just not an interesting opening line. And it’s TELLING. If the cop does indeed think it is “senseless” SHOW us this via his action or dialogue.

As a San Francisco cop, more telling. His actions SHOW us he’s a cop. And find a more graceful way to SHOW us where we are geographically. I’ve seen cruelty to humanity for over a decade. As a seasoned detective, I’m desensitized—It’s just another death in the city. You are TELLING us his state of mind. SHOW it via action and dialogue.

The victim was a middle-aged man with a fair complexion and wavy graying black hair. He was average height, somewhat thin, and wearing what appeared to be an old worn-out pilot’s uniform with yellow stripes on his button-up jacket sleeves. He was found behind the Black Bunny Bar sitting, and arms crossed on his lap, legs splayed out straight, leaning against a dumpster as if taking a nap before hopping into the cockpit. If it were not for the apparent blunt-force trauma to his skull, a passerby could easily tag him as a homeless drunk.  Seeing a murder victim is a visceral thing, even for a vet cop. Way too much extraneous description. Hone in on the telling detail quickly.

Four yellow stripes.  unquestionably A captain, I thought. Most interesting line in the opening. And you don’t need “I thought.” You’re in first person POV. 

The uniform sparked memories.Don’t tell us. Go right into a memory. But man, keep it brief as possible! All the rest of this is numbing backstory. Yes, it is important to establishing your protag’s character, but find ways to weave this in later as the action dictates. This really brings your plot to a halt. I joined the U.S. Air Force Academy and graduated from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit program. The positives were two-fold. One, I became an elite of the elites. Second, it distanced me from a San Francisco street detective who ruled with an undeniable force on the street and at home—a retired vet who expected the utmost discipline from his only son. Instead of improving our father-and-son relationship, my triumphs worsened it. More telling…I was living in Quantico, Virginia, when my father succumbed to cancer, and three months later, I laid him to rest. Precious time had passed between us—an act I later questioned. Conflict with a father figure is always interesting but this is, again, telling us. 

I looked at my partner, Brynn, to see her reaction to this atypical scene. Nothing is atypical except that uniform. Exploit this more!

“What do you see?” I asked as I put on my floater mask to filter out the foul odors of decomposition. You didn’t mention he was in decomp mode above. Depending on the weather, it might not be there yet. Get your forensics in order. 24-72 hours postmortem: internal organs begin to decompose due to cell death; the body begins to give off harsh odors; rigor mortis subsides. 3-5 days postmortem: as organs continue to decompose, bodily fluids leak from orifices; the skin turns a greenish color. So make your protag look smart. Have him zero in on the state of the body and SAY SOMETHING INTERESTING to his partner. He’s experinced enough to be able to estimate time of death. Right now, your protag isn’t very active. He’s reactive and  passive. Start making him a hero. 

Brynn was kneeling beside the body, her cracked lips slightly open. She lifted her palm in a give-me-a-moment gesture, perhaps trying to digest the gruesome scene. Perhaps? Again, make him look smart. Here is where you can insert something about her background.

I knew O’Reilly had been in homicide here less than three months. Before that, she had two years in as a street cop down in Altherton. Riding a nice safe alpha unit, answering false alarms. Not much chance to see dead bodies there. 

You’ve seen nothing yet, I thought. Not sure what this means. 

Brynn O’Reilly is a petite woman at 120 pounds. She is of Irish-American heritage with long ash-brown hair. She favors a black blazer as the Unit uniform, complemented with flared-bottom jeans and sage color boots to match her eyes. Only two years as a street cop and six months at the Major Crimes Unit, Brynn is known as a pit bull investigator. Her quick rise through the ranks came compliments from her family lineage, namely her father and grandfather, the current and retired chief of police. Nevertheless, she is a good detective with keen instincts and a thirst for sleuthing—from dissecting blogs to graffiti on public restroom stalls. Everyone leaves a footprint of clues is her modus operandi. Again, everything is TELLING. “Pit bull investigator” is a TELLING cliche. SHOW us that she’s tough. He TELLS us she’s good, has keen instincts and a “thirst for sleuthing.” (no cop talks like that, that’s you the writer talking). “Everyone leaves a footprint of clues” is kind of interesting, although it’s pretty standard thinking and this protag is supposedly FBI trained? If you want to use it, SHOW us via dialogue. Which you don’t have enough of in these pages, by the way. DIALOGUE IS ACTION.

“What do you see, O’Reilly?” I asked.

“Blunt force trauma. Maybe with an ax-like instrument.”

“The body was moved afterward. Somebody took the time to prop him up like that.”

She looked up at me then scanned the garbage littered aspalt. “Everyone leaves a footprint,” she said. 

So, forgive me, dear writer, for rewriting your opening some. I only wanted to make a point about how you can turn telling into showing. You’ve got some good stuff here. But find ways to make your protag (what’s his name, BTW?) do less thinking and more action. He’s coming off as an extra in his own movie.

A quick summary. Here are the pitfalls of TELLING

• Narrating the physical movements without being in character’s head.
• Use of too many ‘ly’ words in action or in dialog (i.e. She said impatiently, walked slowly, yelled angrily.)
• Use of stock descriptions, purple prose or lengthy descriptions of places (and people) especially those that have no bearing on the plot.
• Too many adjectives and cliches.
• Omniscient POV (distancing, describing from an all-seeing POV) A man getting hit on the head and pushed out a window would not notice “glittering shards of glass” as he falls six stories to the ground.)

Here are some strengths of SHOWING.

• Action that uses the senses, stays within the character’s consciousness and uses words and phrases that reinforce the mood of the scene.
• Strong verbs. (walked vs jogged, ran vs raced, shut the door vs slammed the door.)
• Original images and vivid descriptions that are filtered through the character’s senses in the present.
• One compelling adjective vs. a string of mediocre ones.
• Keep POV firmly in character’s head. (Establishes sympathy and connects emotionally.)

Think of this way. I just got back from Italy. Do you want to listen to me describe it? Or would you rather go see it, smell it, taste it for yourself? Yeah, I thought so. Make your reader feel like they are there.

I have a love/hate relationship with copy editors. They don’t know that.

We need them. Lordy how I need them, because no matter how many times the Bride and I read a manuscript, we miss something, and this current work in progress is no different. I thought I’d turned in clean pages, and once again a detail-oriented individual found errors that I’d missed.

One thing I hated as a high school student was to see all those red marks on an assignment. I’d worked so hard to provide what my English teachers required, remembering all the rules of grammar, and the vocabulary necessary to tell a good story.

But when they were returned, passed back down over disinterested shoulders to my seat against the wall, those corrections and questions sent a flush of anger through my body and it was all I could do not to rush up to her desk and point out everything she’d highlighted that was wrong…

…in my opinion.

Today I still feel that same flush at the notes on the right hand side of the screen, but choke it down because they’re usually right.

Usually, I said.

A few years ago a side note in the page proofs raised my ire. The editor questioned the spelling of a pistol carried by one of my characters. The note read, There is no hyphen in a Taurus Ultra-Lite.

In my mind, I called up this individual. “But you’re wrong! There is a hyphen.”

“No there isn’t. I looked it up online.”

“Well, you looked it up wrong, because the pistol I have here in my hand has a Taurus Ultra-Lite stamped into the frame.”

“You have a pistol!!!???”

It really didn’t go down exactly that way, but I do own a Taurus Ultra-Lite (a terrible revolver in my opinion and I wish I hadn’t bought it), and those words and that hyphen really are stamped into the frame, justifying my use of that weapon.

Another copy editor once pointed out to me that my use of “booger-bear” was wrong in a Red River manuscript. Now, I grew up in fear of booger-bears in the night, and often pictured them as a child-chomping monster resembling the Creature From the Black Lagoon, but with longer teeth and claws and red eyes that glowed in the darkness.

Brrrr.

When I read that side note, I laughed out loud.

“According to the Urban Dictionary, a booger-bear is a woman of loose morals.”

A river of comments rushed through my brain, but I resisted. However, I wanted to write back, “Never use the Urban Dictionary to confirm anything I include about rural America.”

These days I include a note to the copy editor which reads:

“Please do not edit the spelling or use of words in my dialogue, nor should you edit for proper grammar inside quotation marks. This dialogue is regional, and therefore written the way us Texans use those words and phrases.”

Booger-bear.

I also do not care about the current grammatical rules that insist on creating these odd-looking names such as Cross’s, Williams’s, or any other possessive. I’m old, and the AP Press Style book says the correct way to write the possessive case of Reavis is Reavis’, not Reavis’s. Reavis’ work will always read as such.

Please do not attempt to correct guns or calibers. If you don’t know that a .410 shotgun is a caliber, then stay out of this discussion.

That really isn’t one of my notes, but I’d like it to be, along with the following:

No, there is not town in Texas called Nashville. I know it’s in Tennessee, and I’ve been there in a fruitless search for real country music. I made it up because I write fiction. If I intend to use a real name, all I have to do is grab one out of the air, because I can’t seem to make up a town name that hasn’t already been used. I wanted to use Hogansville as an example, but when I checked, there really is a Hogansville, TX.

But I don’t hammer them, because these fine editors are simply doing their job to keep me honest, and to ensure that when my book hits the shelves it will contain as few mistakes as possible. Copy editors are essential and they give that final polish to a book.

Don’t be too hard on them.

On another note: Sourcebooks and Goodreads are giving away 25 copies of Hard Country, my first novel in the contemporary Tucker Snow series that will release August 1, 2023. The contest runs from July 8-27th. Follow the link below to enter, and good luck!

Oh, and feel free to pre-order your copy from your favorite online dealer.

https://srcbks.com/44dWkQ0