By John Gilstrap

Google is nice and convenient and all, but I miss the multi-volume encyclopedias of my youth. I used to take a volume down and read it like a book–okay, it was a book, but work with me here. So many fascinating facts to learn, people to meet and places to visit, all from the comfort of the living room.

But that was different than what’s required to research a book. When you’re telling a story that is outside the real world of what you already know, you’ve got to find the way to inject the verisimilitude necessary to make the story resonate for the reader.

HEADS UP: At the end of this post, I’m going to ask the members of my TKZ family to help out. I know we have folks here who write about topics that are completely alien to me. In the comments, please share the sources and websites that help you with the details of the worlds you create.

Consider faking it–making stuff up.

Research and writing are two different tasks, though for research junkies they can feel very much the same. In reality, especially if you’re on a deadline, unnecessary research is an advanced form of procrastination. As you approach the opening to the rabbit hole, ask yourself this question: Does this part need to be real?

Many of my books are set in and around the areas where I grew up, in the suburbs of Washington, DC–Fairfax County, Virginia, to be exact. Given the nature of the stories, though, where local politicians are corrupt and incompetent, I decided to create Braddock County, Virginia, which, if you know the area and pay close attention, you’ll recognize to be parts of not only Fairfax County, but also of Prince William and Fauquier Counties.

Think of the burden I’ve lifted from my shoulders. If I wrote about the Fairfax County Police (as opposed to the Braddock County Police), I’d need to know their command structure, the weaponry they use, their shift schedules and the details of their uniforms. The Braddock County cops wear whatever I tell them to put on.

Remember, that you’re writing fiction. By definition, it’s okay to make stuff up if it doesn’t ruin the story.

Wikipedia and YouTube

Your novel is not a doctoral dissertation. The sources you use to write your fiction don’t need to stand up to academic scrutiny. Keep it as simple as possible. For the subject matter I write about–weaponry, military tactics, machinery operation, etc.–Wikipedia and YouTube do for me everything that needs to be done. Almost.

Develop your stable of experts

Nearly everyone is an expert at something. As a Type A extrovert, when I meet someone, I chat them up and get to know what they do. If their life’s work is in an area relevant to what I write, we exchange business cards. When I’m back to my desk, I send them a brief email telling them how much I enjoyed our conversation and promising/warning that I will be giving them a call if I ever need assistance in research. No one has ever said no. Not ever.

My virtual Rolodex is filled with the names and contact information for people I’ll probably never speak to again, but they’re there if I need them.

It’s hard to replace real exposure

“Hey, Loo, just got a call from EOC. They’re detailing the wagon and crew to Twenty-Seven.”

Translation: “Excuse me, Lieutenant. Just got a call from the Emergency Operations Center and their sending the pumper and its crew to Fire Station Twenty-Seven.”

Every group, like every geographic region, develops a patois that is unique to them. The only way I know of to actually learn those speech patterns and traditions is to immerse yourself in that world. How do you do that?

You make a phone call and ask. Whether it’s the police station, the local hospital or an Air Force base, there’s someone on staff whose job it is to give you a tour and answer your questions. While you’re there, you trade business cards with as many subject matter experts as you can find.

Write around what you don’t know

Jonathan Grave has access to vast amounts of intelligence data that is collected by his right-hand-gal, Venice Alexander. Venice is a master computer hacker, with cyber skills that rival any expert in the world. Like Jonathan, I don’t understand how she does what she does, but she’s able to take an order from her boss and return vast amounts of information. And she does it all off the page, presumably between the chapter breaks.

I’m not a technology guy. As such, I know that the deeper I research the topic and present my research on the page, the greater chance that I’m going to get a very important something wrong. So, I write around the holes in my knowledge.

Okay, your turn

It’s a big world out there, and we’re all chasing different research rabbits down different holes. Please share your tricks and sources and websites for the topics near and dear to you. Consider them to be virtual business cards to help other writers find the information they’re looking for.

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It’s so f–n’ heroic.” — George Carlin

By PJ Parrish

One of the most important decisions a novelist faces is: Who is going to tell this story?

Well, that’s easy, you say. That’s the job of the protagonist, right? Well, it isn’t always that simple, I am here to plead today. This is on my mind lately because I’m watching an excellent TV series called A Small Light, which is the retelling of the Anne Frank story.

The story of the teenage diarist is ingrained in our culture. What’s the point of rehashing it? But A Small Light is told entirely from the point of view of Miep Gies, a young Dutch woman who risked her life to shelter Anne Frank’s family from the Nazis.

Miep is just an ordinary girl trying to grow up in hard times. She’s a twentysomething slacker with no husband and no job prospects. She charms her way into a job working for Otto Frank at his company. But as the Nazis advance, Miep finds herself smuggling the Franks to the annex above Otto’s Amsterdam offices one at a time.

Anne is relegated to the margins as the story focuses on the growing relationship between Miep and Otto Frank. By shifting the spotlight to a secondary character,  the story comes alive and feels very fresh, even though we know the tragic outcome.

We mystery and thriller writers often use the word “protagonist” as a synonym for “hero.” The protag is the person who gets the call to action, solves the murder, rescues the missing child, saves the world from the incoming comet. But it’s often more complicated than that, especially given how much genre-bending and style experimentation is going on these days. The standard old blond with the great gams who asks the private dick to find her missing husband just isn’t the standard anymore.  We’ve grown beyond that.

I’m not even sure I even know what a protagonist is anymore. So let’s try some definitions. From Stephen Koch’s Writer’s Workshop: The protagonist is the character whose fate matters most to the story. I definitely buy that.

But the writer’s website Dramatica takes it one step further:

• A Main Character is the player through whom the audience experiences the story first hand.
• A Protagonist is the prime mover of the plot.
• A Hero is a combination of both Main Character and Protagonist.

Confused? Yeah, me too. Let’s go to an example most of us know — the movie The Shawshank Redemption. But let’s look at it through its source, Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.  In King’s iconic book, Andy Dufresne’s story of injustice and escape is narrated entirely by fellow inmate Red (Morgan Freeman in the movie). The book opens with a long recitation by Red on how he got to prison and ends thusly:

I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime. Yeah, I’m a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no problem at all. And it wasn’t.

And later, Red summarizes Andy’s opaque character:

I knew him for close to thirty years, and I can tell you he was the most self-possessed man I’ve ever known. What was right with him he’d only give you a little at a time. What was wrong with him he kept bottled up inside. If he ever had a dark night of the soul, as some writer or other has called it, you would never know. He was the type of man who, if he had decided to commit suicide, would do it without leaving a note but not until his affairs had been put neatly in order.

So in the book, who is the protagonist? I would vote for Red. Andy Dufresne is the story-driver, but Red, even though he is a “secondary” character, is the one whose heart and mind we are living in. More important, he is the one who changes the most over the course of the story. At the end, we shed tears not for Andy, but for Red.

A couple more prime examples of secondary characters who act as narrator-prisms for main characters and thus almost become “main” characters in their own right:

• Dr. Watson. The Sherlock Holmes books are written from his point of view, all observations of Sherlock solving the crimes. Witness:

“You have brought detection as near an exact science as it ever will be brought in this world.” My companion flushed up with pleasure at my words, and the earnest way in which I uttered them. I had already observed that he was as sensitive to flattery on the score of his art as any girl could be of her beauty.”

• Chief Bromden. In Key Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the primary conflict is between McMrphy and Nurse Ratched, but the chief is the consciousness through which we view this and Kesey’s views on mental illness.

I been silent so long now it’s gonna roar out of me like floodwaters and you think the guy telling this is ranting and raving my God; you think this is too horrible to have really happened, this is too awful to be the truth! But, please. It’s still hard for me to have a clear mind thinking on it. But it’s the truth even if it didn’t happen.

• Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. The true “hero” of the story is her father, Atticus, who defends an innocent man, confronts a lynch mob, and faces retaliation against his family. But the story emerges from the emotional prism of the narrator Scout. Like Red in Shawshank, Scout is the one who changes over the story. Thanks to Atticus’s heroism, she learns that evil can be lessened by compassion.

Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.

While researching this post, I found out screenwriters have a name for this type of character — Supporting Protagonist. Some writers chose someone who does NOT have a central role to narrate the story. A Supporting Protagonist is someone who would normally be a secondary character but is actually the main character. It can, as in A Small Light, put a fresh spin on what’s expected.

There’s another type of protagonist that I love — what I call The Hero To Be Named Later. This is a character who emerges out of the pack or obscurity and is called upon to save the day. The reasons might vary:

Shlubb turn savior (Chief Brody in Jaws who can’t even swim)

I Didn’t Raise My Hand! (Han Solo in Star Wars, essentially a jerk who wants nothing to do with anything where he might get hurt).

Default Diva. (Ellen Ripley in Alien, who just wants to collect her paycheck and go home with her cat)

Not So Innocent Bystander. (Michael Corleone in The Godfather who sulks in the shadows until the Sonny sets).

Let’s look at the last two (two of my favorite movies, by the way). Alien opens with an ensemble cast — the crew aboard the salvage freighter Nostromo. We assume the protagonist is Captain Dallas, given his cool stewardship. But as the xenomorph picks off crewmen one by one, Ripley emerges as the badass leader.

I’ve saved the best for last. The Godfather trilogy, taken as a whole, is about Michael taking over the family business and losing his soul. But in the first movie, Vito Corleone is vividly the protagonist, with his sons in orbit around him. Sonny dismisses Michael as “that sad thing over there.” It’s not until halfway through the movie that it becomes clear that Michael is the protagonist. His father shot, abandoned in the hospital, Michael whispers: “Just lie here, Pop. I’ll take care of you now. I’m with you now. I’m with you.”

Michael has looked in mirror. A protagonist is born.

There’s a Deadline Beast lurking in the near future, so this post will be brief, for me.

You’ve heard or read this before, but even writing today’s post revealed some laziness on my part and I cleaned up several pages of my work in progress.

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” Anton Chekhov

“In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don’t say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.  C.S. Lewis

The late E. L. Doctorow, author of twelve historical fiction novels said, “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader – not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

And then there’s King Stephen who is always delicate as a chainsaw. “Your readers, without even realizing it, will love you for it, because it engages them, it draws them into the story. If you show, you don’t need to tell. If she kicks him in the balls, the reader gets that she’s angry. You don’t need to say it.”

In my personal writing experience, this is one of the hardest things to learn, second only to finding your writing “voice.”

The following is from my newest work in progress, a traditional western.

One of the newer glassy-eyed inmates with a wispy mustache passed us at the same time his stomach growled, looking for a place out of the searing sun and somewhere safe to eat. Swift attacks to steal our twice-a-day allotment usually spilled more than they gained. Escobedo had only been in Purgatorio for a week, and in those few days the slender man lost half of his rations.

He sat only a dozen feet from us norte americanos and wolfed down his meal. The two fresh cuts over one eyebrow and the opposite cheekbone was proof of another hard night.

Andelacio Morales rose from where he squatted with a clot of other prisoners near the long row of outside cells and swaggered across the bare yard. Even me and the boys steered clear of him when we could, but from the look in Morales’ eye, that was about to change.

Morales’ worn-out shoes crunched on the yard’s gravel and sand packed hard by decades of footsteps. The prisoner in for life towered over Escobedo who kept his eyes lowered to the tin plate between his knees. The young man’s head ducked and what little spirit was left in the newest inmate evaporated.

As I said, this piece isn’t yet finished, but this example avoids weak telling words and phrases like “I heard,” (Morale’s crunching footsteps) “He felt,” and “was afraid” (Escobedo’s fear demonstrated in the last sentence). Telling words, and phrases pushes the reader out of the story. Don’t tell us that your characters are happy, sad, scared, giddy (I especially hate that word), hot, hungry, or mad.

You want readers to be in the scene, and not on the outside looking in. Your writing should pull readers into the world you’ve created so they can use their senses based on their own memories and experiences.

Examples:

Tell: The sound of gunfire reached his ears.

Show: The hard, flat reports of gunfire came as almost physical blows.

Tell: The wildflowers were pretty.

Show: The prairie was a carpet of color, nodding and swaying in the wind.

Tell: He smelled bacon when he walked into the café.

Show: The aroma of frying bacon wrapped him in comfortable memories of vacations and café breakfasts.

Tell: She heard the sound of birds in the trees.

Show: Birds flittered in the branches, and a mockingbird went through her repertoire of songs.

Tell: Bill was divorced.

Show: Bill’s fingers absently went to the pale skin on the fourth ring of his left hand, feeling was as strange as his empty bed.

“You don’t write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid’s burnt socks lying in the road.” —Richard Price

Show, don’t tell, allows the reader to experience the story through actions, words, subtext, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through your explanations and descriptions. If your character is afraid, let them feel his pounding heart, or the sharp pain in her stomach. A shortness of breath is terror, and the urge to flee is natural.

Pick out a couple of pages in your own WIP and clean them up as I get out of here. Don’t tell readers something is terrifying, like an impending deadline. Show them.