Tag Archives: Dean Koontz

The Art of the Outline

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

[NOTE: I had this post prepped before seeing yesterday’s Words of Wisdom. Consider this an adjunct to that discussion and let’s continue the conversation in the comments.]

Partial of J. K. Rowling’s outline for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

At my first ThrillerFest I went to listen to a panel of writers talking about their working methods. I was a bit late to the packed proceedings, so found myself a place to stand in the back. A minute or so later a writer of some repute came in and took the spot next to me.

At about that time writer Andrew Gross was talking about working with Mr. James Patterson (I think Gross was the first, or at least among the first, of the Patterson co-writers). He went into detail about the single-spaced, eighty-page outlines favored by the world’s bestselling novelist.

At which point the writer next to me issued an anguished sigh. He sounded like Sisyphus looking down the hill after his rock rolled back to the bottom.

After the panel, as we walked out, I said to him, “I take it you don’t favor outlines.”

To which Lee Child said, “I don’t even know what I’m going to write in the next paragraph.”

And there we have the two ends of the spectrum on the perennial question new writers ask: Should I outline my novel before I write it?

We all know there are various opinions on the matter. Generally the issue is robustly discussed, with pros and cons, and usually ends with, “Well, do whatever works for you.”

At the extreme ends, however, you will often be treated to voluble zealotry. I call these camps the NOPs and the COPs—“Never Outline People” and “Copious Outline People.”

Your hard-core NOP will often assert that never, under any circumstances, unless you are a complete and utter doofus, must you ever attempt to outline, in any form or fashion, lest your story become an empty shell or bloodless ruin.

I find such conviction fascinating, for nothing in art, or even life, is a matter of such certainty.

Those pressing for the copious outline can also be a bit too fervid in their advocacy.

There are, of course, some famous “pantsers,” such as Mr. Child and Stephen King. Both extol the value of their approach. But I herein offer a theory: those guys, because of their backgrounds (Child from TV, King from voracious reading as a kid) have story and structure wired into them. The outlines are actually there, unfolding in their heads. They’re not so purely NOP after all.

And there are famous outliners, with J. K. Rowling and James Patterson at the head of that class.

My conclusion: all ultimately successful writers outline, whether they write it down beforehand, house it in their brains as they go along, or some mix of both.

Further, outlining should be considered an art. And as with any art, the more you practice, the better you get at it.

I thought about this recently as I revisited the first craft book I ever studied, Writing the Novel by Lawrence Block. He has an entire chapter on outlining. His definition is as follows: “An outline is a tool which a writer uses to simplify the task of writing a novel and to improve the ultimate quality of that novel by giving himself more of a grasp on its overall structure.”

He quickly adds: “Because the outline is prepared solely for the benefit of the writer himself, it quite properly varies from one author to another and from one novel to another.”

That’s where the art comes in. No two jazz pianists are alike, but they all know the scales.

Among the NOPs there is an assertion bandied about which Block traces to the sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon: “If the writer doesn’t know what’s going to happen next…the reader can’t possibly know what’s going to happen next.”

Block doesn’t think this “logic” holds up. “Just because a writer worked things out as he went along is no guarantee that the book he’s produced won’t be obvious and predictable. Conversely, the use of an extremely detailed outline does not preclude the possibility that the book will read as though it had been written effortlessly and spontaneously….”

Block does not advocate the “copious” outline, but rather chapter-by-chapter paragraphs to describe the action in each, using only enough detail “so that the storyline makes sense.”

Nor is the writer chained to the outline. Inevitably, things grow and change as you write. In those places, Block emphasizes, be ready to deviate from and rework the outline.

That’s the art of it. Like a jazz riff, but still ending up with a coherent tune with an overall structure. (Yes, there is a school—a small school—of music eschewing any effort at tonal coherence, which creates an effect similar to having your head peppered with a nail gun. But I digress.)

My own practice is to outline 14 “signpost scenes” (explained fully in Super Structure). It gives my story coherence (kind of important for readers) and meaning (the latter by way of the “mirror moment”), but also gives me the freedom to riff my way from signpost to signpost.

I actually do my “pantsing” before I lay out my scenes. I start what I call a “white-hot document,” which is me writing fast, following my synapses wherever they lead. (David Morrell does much the same thing, asking and answering questions like “Why?” and “So what?”)

I’ll open each day by revising, cutting, and adding to the document. This is fun and exciting, as the story begins to bubble up and, most important, take shape.

Finally, I start laying out the signpost scenes and brainstorming scenes I’d like to see. Then off I go and write the thing.

I’ll leave the last word with a writer named Dean Koontz, who I’ve heard has sold a few books:

Occasionally I encounter a critic or a would-be writer who believes that an author should let his characters create the entire plot as they act it out. According to this theory, any pre-planned plot line is hopelessly artificial, and it is supposedly preferable for the writer to discover the direction of the story only as the characters discover it. In some arcane fashion, this is supposed to lead to a more “natural” plot.

Balderdash.

When a master furniture maker crafts a splendid Queen Anne-style table, is he being “artificial” merely because he follows an established pattern? Are the paintings of Andrew Wyeth “artificial” because the artist limits himself to a painstakingly realistic rendition of our world?

The answers to both of those questions are, of course, the same: No!

***

If a writer allows his characters to seize total control, he is actually allowing his subconscious mind to write the book without benefit of the more sober and steady guidance of his conscious intellect, and the result is fiction as formless and purposeless as much of what takes place in the real world, precisely the kind of fiction that frustrates most readers. (How to Write Best-Selling Fiction)

Comments welcome.

How to Learn to Write Novels That Sell

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I love the writing craft. I love it the way Adrian Newey loves race car engines. I love popping the hood, breaking out the tools, getting greasy, figuring out ways to build better fiction.

Maybe that’s because in the early years I had to work hard to make sense of it. I was not one of these happy geniuses that has the knack from the get-go. When I made my decision to be a writer, I found instant joy in setting words on the page. The only thing was, those words were not connecting with readers. People who looked at my stuff would say things like, “It’s just not working for me.” Or, “There’s something missing.”

So I doubled down on my study of the craft. I went to my favorite used bookstore and bought an armload of Grisham, Koontz, and King, and didn’t just read them; I studied them. I marked up the pages and made notes in the margins.

Ah, I see what he’s doing here!

This makes me want to turn the page!

I really like this character.

I bought books every month from the Writer’s Digest Book Club. One was Jack Bickham’s Writing Novels That Sell. The chapter on scene and sequel set off Roman candles in my head—an epiphany that I knew would change forever how I approached fiction.

I gave the next thing I wrote to one of my friendly readers, and this time he said, “Now you’ve got it.”

I felt like Orville Wright gliding over the sandy flatlands of Kitty Hawk as brother Wilbur waved his arms, shouting, “It works! It works!”

So if someone asks me what the best way is to learn how to write novels that sell, I’d put it this way:

Write a novel

I’m not being coy here. Write it the best way you know how. Don’t stop for any critiques, self or group. Finish the dang thing.

Then put it aside for three weeks. Print out a hard copy read it as if you were a busy Manhattan acquisitions editor looking at a manuscript on the subway. Have this question in the back of your mind: When am I tempted to stop reading? Mark those spots. But don’t do any editing.

When you’ve finished, make notes to yourself about the seven critical success factors of fiction as they show in your book: plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice, meaning. How are you in those areas? Be ruthlessly objective. A good beta reader can help. If you want to appeal to actual readers someday and convince them to part with their discretionary income, you need to know if there’s anything disrupting the fictive dream. Quite often you’re too close to the book to see it. Maybe even a lot of it. But don’t despair, because you can…

…Get better at writing novels

I got good at plot, structure and dialogue (because I’d spent a couple of years working hard to figure those areas out). I got published. Then I got a multi-book contract and had the good fortune to work with a truly great fiction editor. In his first editorial letter to me he told me what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear. I groused for an hour, then resolved not to have a chip on my shoulder. I followed his advice and lo and behold my books started to pop up on bestseller lists.

So, new writer, get yourself rolling on two tracks—writing and study.

It’s NaNoWriMo month, and all over the globe writers are aiming to produce a 50k novel in 30 days. That’s pressure, especially with Thanksgiving in there. The main benefit of this exercise is seeing how many words you can write if you set your mind to it.

So figure out how many words you can comfortably write in a week, considering your life situation. Up that figure by 10% and make that your weekly goal.

That’s the writing part.

Add to that a systematic study the craft. There are craft books and courses (I modestly mention). Just as you write to a quota, study to a quota. In 35 years of wanting to do this, not a week has gone by when I haven’t thought about, read about, or made notes about the craft of writing.

Does this sound like too much work?

Does a wannabe golfer just go out and start hacking away (also known as killing gophers)? Or does he get some basic instruction and put in hours of practice?

There’s an old story about a golfer approaching a hole with a big water hazard. He wonders if he should tee up a brand new ball and risk losing it, or use one of his old balls just in case. So he tees up the old one.

A voice from the sky thunders, “Use the new ball!”

Whoa. Obediently, he tees up the new one.

The voice says, “Take a practice swing!”

He steps back and takes a practice swing.

The voice says, “Use the old ball!”

You have to practice a proper and repeatable swing, friends, otherwise you just ingrain bad habits.

Readers don’t spend money to read your bad habits.

So:

Write a novel.

Remove all shoulder chips.

Learn.

Write another novel.

Keep learning.

Write like you’re in love.

Edit like you’re in charge.

Keep writing.

Anything you want to add?

Writing Sprints

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

There are many ways to write a novel. That much has been made quite clear on TKZ and in the comments thereto.

Some outline, then write. Some write and don’t outline. Many do it a bit of both.

Not many do it the Dean Koontz way. I shake my head in wonder at his method and output. In Dean Koontz: A Writer’s Biography, he describes it thus:

I go through a manuscript, slow page by slow page. Every page may be revised as few as twenty times or more than a hundred. Then at the end of every chapter, I print out and read it, because it looks different in hard copy. I pencil the changes in and then go back and include them. Then I go on to the next chapter.

Whew!

Of course, Mr. Koontz has been a full-time writer virtually his whole career, and has a work ethic second only to the harvester ant.

The rest of us mere mortals must find our own way. Especially those with what Brother Gilstrap calls “a big-boy job.”

For me, the daily writing quota has been the key. For most of my career the goal has been 6,000 word per week (I take one day off to recharge).

Early on, I’d sit down at my keyboard and type for as long as it took to reach my quota. Some days the words flowed. Other days it was like extracting moisture from a cactus.

Then one day I read something about exercise that helped change things. I always thought the benefits of aerobics was to do a certain minimum—say, thirty minutes straight of walking or jogging. But I discovered that three stints of ten minutes was just as good.

I liked that because I tend to get bored when walking, even if I’m on the treadmill watching a movie or listening to a book.

So now I try to get ten minutes of walking in early in the morning, to make twenty minutes later more doable.

And the same applies to my quota.

Even before I walk, I try to get some writing done. I sprint. I go for what I call a “Nifty 350.” Sometimes it’s just 250 (that number is important to preserve the rhyme scheme. I don’t know how to rhyme, say, 243, except with “afternoon tea.”)

Anyway, whatever I do makes the quota easier to complete later in the day.

I also carry my trusty AlphaSmart with me when I’m out. I may stop in at Coffee Bean and do more words there, come home, and do more. If I have to wait in an office, I peck out some words. (Young people always ask me what that is. When I explain that it’s just for text and runs forever on AA batteries, they’re somewhat astonished. I then tell them about rotary phones, manual typewriters, and Ed Sullivan. And words they will never hear, like, “Check your oil, sir?”)

Another benefit of writing sprints is that in between sessions my boys in the basement are working on the project. They send up notes for me to incorporate when I get back to writing. All they ask is that I send down some coffee and the occasional apple fritter.

Intentional writing sprints can serve you just as well. A friend of mine has written a several excellent legal thrillers on his commuter train ride to and from the city where he practices law.

So now I ask: Have you ever considered making writing sprints a regular practice? What is your method for producing the words (and I don’t mean by asking AI to do it for you!)

On Abandoned Projects

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I keep all my writing stuff in a dedicated folder on my Mac. I worked really hard to come up with a clever name for this folder. I call it “Writing.”

It has many sub-folders in it, absolutely stuffed with half-completed books, stories, ideas, concepts, first lines, clips of news items, and so on.

The other day I traipsed through the folders to see what I was doing ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. I found several abandoned projects, by which I mean novels I’d made pretty strong headway on yet never finished. Which caused me to reflect on why I might have set them aside.

One reason is that in those early years I was I was writing with reckless abandon. I was coming up with ideas, developing some of them but, for one reason or another, moving on to others. I’m sure you can relate.

So I came across a folder with a title I didn’t remember. In the folder was a document of 15k words, the start of a novel. In another doc in the folder were my notes on same. This project was twelve years old.

I opened the novel and started to read.

Wow, I’m really good! (I humbly thought). I mean, this thing took off like gangbusters. It was laying the foundation for one of those twisty, turny plots that would make Koontz happy and Coben proud.

It has a protagonist who keeps getting a recurring thought of two seemingly unconnected words: Gut bane. Obviously, this indicated a clue his memory wasn’t clear on. Just as obviously, somewhere deep in the plot, the connection would be revealed in time to solve the entire mystery!

I read on, loving myself more and more. At the end of the 15k, the last words written were: Gut bane.

I realized then I could not remember what they meant.

I quickly opened my notes. There I had laid out the basic premise and some notes on characters and scenes.

But not one word on the mystery phrase. Ack!

I did a Mac spotlight search for the phrase. It sent me right back to my abandoned novel-in-progress.

My wail of frustration reached the ears of my editor, the lovely Mrs. B.

“What on earth was that?” she asked.

“The sound of my million-copy bestseller circling the drain!” I said. I explained the situation.

“So why don’t you just make up something new for those words?” she said. She’s the practical one.

“It’s going to drive me nuts,” I said.

She smiled, and I know she was thinking, “You’re a writer, you’re already nuts.”

She is also the wise one.

I have put the Boys in the Basement to work, searching for the ephemeral synapse that holds the answer. But so far, bupkus.

So, note to self (and to you): Don’t ever leave a project without jotting down all the key plot points in that fertile imagination of yours. Even if you jump to something else, you may come back to this one, even years hence.

A few words about process. I’m a plotter, but when I’m in the creative mode, I let myself play. I have fits and starts in my writing folder. I still have a regular “creativity time” where I just let things rip. I play the Title game (make up titles and see what they spark), the First-Line game (boy, have I got some great ones…I just need the novels to go with them), and the old reliable What-if game.

But from now on, I’ll never stop on a project with a great twist without leaving myself a note on what the heck the great twist is!

Duh!

So, do you have abandoned projects of various lengths? Can you remember why you abandon them? Do you plan to go back and restart any?

No Risk It, No Biscuit

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

If everything seems under your control, you’re not going fast enough. – Mario Andretti, legendary race car driver

Bruce Arians

Recently we had a bit of a discussion on taking risks, as part of Terry’s post on rules for writers. Today I’d like to give risk more focused attention.

Remember back in 2021 when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won the Super Bowl by destroying the favored Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9? With a 43-year-old quarterback named Brady. And the oldest coach ever to win the big game, 67-year-old Bruce Arians.

Arians had followed a long and rocky career path as a quarterbacks coach in the NFL. He got hired and fired several times. His first year as head coach for the Bucs the team went 7–9. Then along came Brady and the Super Bowl.

Through it all, Arians had a saying that kept him and his teams motivated. He actually got it from a guy at a bar at a time when Arians thought his dream of being a head coach would never be realized. That saying is: No risk it, no biscuit.

Now doesn’t that sound like a quintessential football coach axiom?

As Arians’ cornerback coach, Kevin Ross, explained it, “If you don’t take a chance, you ain’t winnin’. You can’t be scared.”

What might this mean for the writer?

Risk the Idea

I think each novel you write should present a new challenge. It might be a concept or “what if?” that will require you to do some fresh research. My new Mike Romeo thriller (currently in final revisions) revolves around a current issue that is horrific and heartbreaking. I could have avoided the subject altogether. But I needed to go there.

My next Romeo, in development, came from a news item about a current, but not widely reported, controversy. It’s fresh, but I’ve got a lot of learning to do. I’m reading right now, I’ll be talking to an expert or two, and soon will be making a location stop for further research.

I do this because I don’t want to write a book in the series where someone will say, “Same old, same old.”

Admittedly, writing about “hot-button” issues these days carries a degree of risk. Especially within the walls of the Forbidden City where increasingly the question “Will it sell?” is overridden by “Will it offend?”

But as the old saying goes, there is no sure formula for success, but there is one for failure—try to please everybody.

Craft Risk

Are you taking any risks with your craft? Are you following the Captain Kirk admonition to boldly go where you have never gone before?

There are 7 critical areas in fiction: plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice, and meaning.

You can take one or all of these and determine to kick them up a notch. For example:

Plot—Have you pushed the stakes far enough? If things are bad for the Lead, how can you make them worse? I had a student in a workshop once who pitched his plot. It involved a man who was carrying guilt around because his brother died and he didn’t do enough to save him. I then asked the class to do an exercise: what is something your Lead character isn’t telling you? What does he or she want to hide?

I asked for some examples, and this fellow raised his hand. He said, “I didn’t expect this. But my character told me he was the one who killed his brother.”

A collective “Wow” went up from the group. But the man said, “But if I do that, I’m afraid my character won’t have any sympathy.”

I asked the group, “How many of you would now read this book?”

Every hand went up.

Take risks with your plot. Go where you haven’t gone before.

Characters—Press your characters to reveal more of themselves. I use a Voice Journal for this, a free-form document where the character talks to me, answers my questions, gets mad at me. I want to peel back the onion layers.

How about taking a risk with your bad guy? How? By sympathizing with him!

Hoo-boy, is that a risk. But you know what? The tangle of emotions you create in the reader will increase the intensity of the fictive dream. And that’s your goal! In the words of Mr. Dean Koontz:

The best villains are those that evoke pity and sometimes even genuine sympathy as well as terror. Think of the pathetic aspect of the Frankenstein monster. Think of the poor werewolf, hating what he becomes in the light of the full moon, but incapable of resisting the lycanthropic tides in his own cells.

Dialogue—Are you willing to make your dialogue work harder by not always being explicit? In other words, how can you make it reveal what’s going on underneath the surface of the scene without the characters spelling it out?

Voice—Are you taking any risks with your style? This is a tricky one. On the one hand, you want your story told in the cleanest way possible. You don’t want style larded on too heavily.

On the other hand, voice is an X factor that separates the cream from the milk. I’ve quoted John D. MacDonald on this many times—he wanted “unobtrusive poetry” in his prose.

I’m currently reading the Mike Hammer books in order. It’s fascinating to see Mickey Spillane growing as a writer. His blockbuster first novel, I, The Jury, is pure action, violence, and sex. It reads today almost like a parody. But with his next, My Gun is Quick, he begins to infuse Hammer with an inner life that makes him more interesting. By the time we get to his fourth book, One Lonely Night, Hammer is a welter of passions and inner conflict threatening to tear him apart. His First-Person voice is still hard-boiled, but it achieves what one critic called “a primitive power akin to Beat poetry.” And Ayn Rand, no less, put One Lonely Night ahead of anything by Thomas Wolfe!

In short, Spillane didn’t rest on his first-novel laurels. He pushed himself to be better.

He risked it for the biscuit. And he ate quite well as a result.

Over to you now. Are you taking any risks in your writing? Are you hesitant, all-in or somewhere in between? How much do you consider the market vis-à-vis trying taking a flyer?

The Three Types of Opening Lines

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

There’s a great Far Side cartoon (among so many great ones from the genius Gary Larson). It shows the back of a man seated at a desk. He has a pencil in his fingers, but his hands are grabbing his head in obvious frustration. In front of him are a series of discarded pages with MOBY DICK, Chapter 1 at the top. They say:

Call me Bill
Call me Larry
Call me Roger
Call me Al
Call me Warren

Ah, we’ve all been there. We often talk about the need for a grabber opening here at TKZ. That’s why we do first-page critiques. The goal is simple: make the reader want to—need to—read on.

If you can do it in the first paragraph, so much the better.

And with the first line, better still!

Terry sparked a discussion on opening pages earlier this week. Let’s drill down to opening lines. There are three types: Action, Voice, and Wood.

Action

When the first line drops you right into some intriguing action, you’ve got it made. (All you have to do now is hang a novel on it. Ha!)

One of my favorites is from my man John D. MacDonald’s Darker Than Amber, a Travis McGee novel:

We were about to give up and call it a night when somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.

I mean, come on! We’re going to read until we find out who that girl is and why she was tossed in the drink.

James M. Cain’s opening to The Postman Always Rings Twice is aptly famous:

They threw me off the hay truck about noon.

Dean Koontz used to revel action opening lines:

Penny Dawson woke and heard something moving furtively in the dark bedroom. – Darkfall

Katharine Sellers was sure that, at any moment, the car would begin to slide along the smooth, icy pavement and she would lose control of it. – Dance With the Devil

Remember, dialogue is action, too (waving at Terry). Koontz used to write opening lines just to see what they sparked. This one hit him:

“You ever kill anything?” Roy asked.

When he wrote that, he didn’t know who Roy was or who he was talking to. So he wrote a novel to find out—The Voice of the Night.

In my humble opinion, my best opening line is in Try Darkness, a Ty Buchanan legal thriller:

The nun hit me in the mouth and said, “Get out of my house.”

I still like it.

That’s action. There’s also..

Voice

When the voice is clear, unique, arresting, and immediately tells you the kind of story it’s going to be, you’ll want to keep reading. Mickey Spillane wastes no time in Vengeance Is Mine!:

The guy was dead as hell.

Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum is a peach:

When I was a little girl I used to dress Barbie up without underpants. – High Five

Usually we’re going to be in First Person POV for voice. But not always. Here, for example, is the opening of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty:

When Chili first came to Miami Beach twelve years ago they were having one of their off-and-on cold winters: thirty-four degrees the day he met Tommy Carlo for lunch at Vesuvio’s on South Collins and had his leather jacket ripped off.

Notice that the leather jacket is ripped off and not stolen. The latter is neutral voice. The former is hot voice, setting up the tone of the book.

Wood

There’s an old saying: Your story begins when you strike the match, not when you lay out the wood. I like that. It holds true for any genre. But with literary fiction, and epic fantasy or history, an exception is sometimes made. Presumably, fans of these genres are patient at the beginning, knowing they’re in for a long, immersive ride.

Certainly, these genres can begin with action, as in Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara:

The sun was already sinking into the deep green of the hills to the west of the valley, the red and gray-pink of its shadows touching the corners of the land, when Flick Ohmsford began his descent.

All well and good, as the world building weaves in with the action.

Now have a look at the opening line of The Fellowship of the Ring:

This book is largely concerned with Hobbits, and from its pages a reader may discover much of their character and a little of their history.

And boy, howdy, do we get the history! Fifteen pages of it. This is laying out the wood. But fantasy readers do not seem to mind.

Similarly, David Morrell’s long thriller, The League of Night and Fog, also has a history beginning:

A phrase invented by the Nazis, the Night of the Long Knives, refers to the events on the night of June 30, 1934, in Austria and Germany.

The next eight pages tell us about Hitler’s rise to power, the advent of World War II, and the start of the death camps. It is dark yet riveting history. Morrell lays out this wood, and it stays with us, hovering over the action to come.

There you have it. Three ways to write an opening line. Try them out in your own work. I also recommend you play with all three as a creativity game and idea sparker. Who knows? One of them may jump out and grab you and say, “Now write me the novel, kid!”

And now, if I may, in the spirit of our occasional indulgence here at TKZ, a bit of SSP—Shameless Self Promotion. My latest thriller release begins:

The big, fat liar was dressed in yellow slacks, yellow golf shirt, and yellow socks.

The book is No More Lies. It’s a novel for which I got the rights back (former title: Deceived), and which got some of the best reviews of my career. Publisher’s Weekly said:

A master of the cliffhanger, creating scene after scene of mounting suspense and revelation . . . Heart-whamming.

And Romantic Times:

Bell delivers with this compelling and challenging story of greed, evil and redemption. Worthy characters bring to light situations that can be both beautiful and terrifying. This pure thriller with a roiling plot is not to be missed!

And because money is tight right now, I’m making it available on Kindle this week for 99¢. Grab it here. Outside the U.S., go to your Amazon store and search for: B0B836SCRY

Now back to our regularly-scheduled blog. Do you have an opening line you’re particularly proud of? Share it. Or share one from an author you like. Or both!

Dreams For Your Mirror Moment

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Half my life’s in books, written pages.
Live and learn from fools and from sages.
You know it’s true, oh
All the things come back to you…
Dream on!
– Aerosmith, “Dream On”

We’ve had several discussions about dreams here at TKZ. I believe the consensus rule of thumb (or, in deference to Brother Gilstrap, guideline of thumb) is never open with a dream. As Les Edgerton states in his excellent book Hooked: Write Fiction That Grabs Readers at Page One (Writer’s Digest Books):

Never, ever, ever begin a narrative with action and then reveal the character’s merely dreaming it all. Not unless you’d like your manuscript hurled across the room, accompanied by a series of curses. Followed by the insertion of a form rejection letter into your SASE and delivered by the minions of our illustrious postal service.

Ah, remember the days of SASEs and paper manuscripts?

The only exception is when you alert the reader in the first sentence that it’s a dream, as in Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier). Even so, I would counsel against the dream-sequence opening.

As for a dream later in the book, I recommend doing it only once and only for the specific purpose of revealing the character’s emotions at an intense time. Dean Koontz does this in Chapter 15 of The City:

Eventually I returned to the sofa, too exhausted to stand an entire night watch. I dropped into a deep well of sleep and floated there until, after a while, the dream began in a pitch-black place with the sound of rushing water all around, as if I must be aboard a boat on a river in the rain … (etc.)

The exception to this advice is when dreaming is an integral part of the plot. See, for example, Spellbound (1945, dir. Alfred Hitchcock).

Recently, I discovered another way to use a dream. It’s a perfect device for a mirror moment. Those of you who’ve read the book know there are two types of mirror moments that can occur in the center of the novel.

One moment is when the character has to look at himself, as in a “mirror” (sometimes literally) and reflect on who he is, inside. Will he change for the better? The rest of the novel is about whether a fundamental transformation takes place (as it does in, e.g., Casablanca).

The other type of moment is when the character looks at her situation and realizes she’s probably going to die. The odds are just too great. For example, Katniss in The Hunger Games. In the exact middle she assesses her situation and says to herself, This is an okay place to die. The story question for such a moment becomes will the character gain the strength and smarts to fight and win against the odds?

Here’s today’s tip: Either of those moments can be given to us through a dream.

I was re-reading John D. MacDonald’s final Travis McGee book, The Lonely Silver Rain. In this one McGee is dispatched to find a stolen boat. When he does, he discovers a grisly scene—three horribly murdered bodies. A bit later someone tries to kill McGee. Then there’s another attempt on his life. Why? McGee has no idea, except that it must have something to do with what happened on that boat. He undertakes a laborious investigation to find the answer. But he keeps running into a wall. Thus, in the middle of the book:

The cold had awakened me from a dream. I had been in a poker game at an oval table, with the center green-shaded light hung so low I could not make out the faces of the men at the table. They all wore dark clothing. The game was five-card draw, jacks or better to open. They were red Bicycle cards. Every time I picked up my five cards, I found the faces absolutely blank. Just white paper. I wanted to complain about this, but for some reason I was reluctant. I threw each hand in, blank faces up, hoping they would notice. All the rest of the cards were normal. I could see that each time a winner exposed his hand. There was a lot of betting, all in silence. A lot of money. And then I picked up one hand and found they were real cards. I did not sort them. I never sort poker hands or bridge hands. The act gives too much away to an observant opponent. I had three kings of clubs and two jacks of diamonds. In the dream I did not think this odd. They were waiting for me to bet when the cold woke me up. In the dream I had been shivering with the tension of having a good hand. The shivering was real. 

Why did he dream this? McGee knows there are people out there to kill him, but cannot figure out who (he can’t see the faces of the other players). He has talked to many potential witnesses, to no avail (blank cards). The knowledge he does have may be misleading (like having three kings of clubs and two jacks of diamonds in a poker hand). The shivering in the dream is uncertainty, brought into the real world.

It seems to me a perfect way to show us “the odds are too great” type of mirror moment. A dream can easily be used to show the first kind, the “is this who I really am?” type.

To make it work, the dream should have those bizarre details we get in dreams—like blank playing cards which suddenly become cards of the same type. Of course, the symbols should relate somehow to what’s going on in the story.

A good dream sequence works emotionally on the reader. In some cases it may cause the reader to pause and ponder, trying to figure it out. Either outcome is a good one, as it gets the reader more deeply invested in the story—which is what every writer dreams of, yes?

Help! My Plot is Getting Away From Me!

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

(Today’s post is adapted from the book Plotman to the Rescue: A Troubleshooting Guide to Fixing Your Toughest Plot Problems. It is used by the kind permission of the author.)

Here’s a question I get from time to time. What do I do if I’m in the middle of my novel and there are so many things happening, so many characters running around, that I’m losing my way?

You would think this question would come primarily from “pantsers,” the If-I-knew-what-my-story-was-about-before-I-wrote-it-I’d-be-bored school of writing. But it arises with the plotter, too, who has perhaps been overly ambitious in the planning. As sometimes happens for the plot engineers, a sudden twist or turn or character may try to horn in at, say, the 20k mark, throwing the whole outline off.

So what do you do when you discover you’ve a) gone down that infamous rabbit hole; b) have plot points or characters popping up you didn’t plan for; c) are lost in a dark forest; or d) have fallen off a cliff into the bleached bones of the author’s graveyard?

I will allow you one wail of frustration.

Now let’s get a handle on things.

First of all, where are you, as the ad men used to say, “outline wise”? Do not skip over this part, pantsers, for you better have an outline, too.

Wait, what?

I’m talking about a “rolling outline,” one you put together as you roll along. When you finish a scene or chapter, write a quick synopsis of who the viewpoint character is, what he wants and what happens, as in: Ishmael gets depressed, decides to go to sea, and sets off to find a ship.

Scrivener is ideal for this because you can put the rolling outline on scene “cards” and view them on a virtual corkboard. But Word or even Excel will work fine, too.

Now, if you feel your plot is getting away from you, print out the current version of the rolling outline and do this:

Clean House on Characters

How many viewpoint characters have you got? This means you have more than one character with a storyline of their own. For example, in a traditional romance you usually have two viewpoint characters, the lovers. In a long historical or fantasy novel, you may have three, four or more.

If this is so for you, precisely define the following: What is each character’s death-stakes objective? (Death being physical, professional, or psychological.) If it’s not death, find a way to make it so, or drop this as a plotline. In the alternative, consider taking away this character’s viewpoint scenes and converting that line into a subplot. This means the character shows up in scenes told from another character’s point of view and (this is crucial) complicates the viewpoint character’s objective.

For example, you have a woman as a viewpoint character, and a man as another viewpoint character. The man’s plotline is not working out in a death-stakes way. You might remove him as a viewpoint, but have him show up in the woman’s plotline as a potential lover or long-lost brother or secret agent or alien from a parallel universe.

Clean house. Keep only the crucial characters.

For further study: The Stand by Stephen King, and Strangers by Dean Koontz. You’ll see how these authors make the several character lines work on their own terms before bringing the strands together.

Cut Scenes That Don’t Connect to Plot

Now that you are squared away on the objective of the main character or characters, assess each scene you’ve written so far. Ask:

  • Does the goal in the scene relate in some way to the overall, death-stakes objective of the Lead? If not, cut it.
  • Does the scene present an obstacle to the attainment of the objective, emotionally or physically or both? If not, why is it there?
  • If the scene is part of a subplot, how does it intersect with the main plot? How does it complicate matters for the Lead?

Write or Rewrite Your Pitch

If you’re a pantser, you may not have a pitch for your novel. After all, you’re still discovering what it’s about! Well, if you’ve done some thinking as this post suggests, you’ve made discoveries. Try putting them together in a pitch—250 words or less that would make someone interested in this story. Doing this will give you focus on where to go next.

If you’re an outliner, rewrite your pitch to include the elements you’ve uncovered. Get excited again about your journey.

Be sure to read Sue’s post on crafting a pitch.

Push On

Now finish your draft. Don’t do any more dawdling. You should have enough direction to push right on to the end. As you do, keep adding to your rolling outline. It will be helpful when you get to the editing stage.

Can you describe a time when your plot got away from you, or you felt lost? Is this a common occurrence for you? What do you do to get back on track? 

 

Your Guide to a Weekly Creativity Time

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

If I may riff off Brother Gilstrap’s recent post, I think there are generally two types of writers. There are “natural” storytellers. John is one of them. I think he’s shared this here on TKZ, but I remember him telling me about getting virtually the entire story for Nathan’s Run while on a long drive. How’s that for nice?

Other writers have to dig in hard ground to find, stimulate, and coax ideas. Then take the good ones to the workshop and figure out the best way to develop them into stories. That would be me. When I started out on this writing journey I dove into study of the craft. I devoured writing books and subscribed to Writer’s Digest. I read popular fiction analytically to unpack how successful writers did things. I studied movies with an eye toward learning structure.

And when it came to finding ideas worth turning into full-length fiction, I found I couldn’t sit there waiting for one to show up. I had to follow Jack London’s advice: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.”

Early on I read How to Write Best Selling Fiction by Dean Koontz. He has a section in there on finding story ideas. Among his suggestions:

Read widely. Newspaper stories can present the germ of an idea. Nonfiction on various subjects, too.

Write narrative hooks. Just sit at the keyboard and type hooks (first lines) until “you find one that is so intriguing that you simply must find out what happens next.” One day Koontz wrote:

“You ever killed anything?” Roy asked.

He had no idea who Roy was or what he meant. But he sat there looking at it and it came to him (“out of my subconscious mind”) that Roy should be a boy of fourteen. From there his imagination started chugging and he wrote two pages of a conversation between Roy and a boy he named Colin. When he was finished he knew the book was going to be about the duality of human nature (good and evil), that Roy was the villain, and that the book would be fast-paced and suspenseful. Indeed it was, and became an early bestseller called The Voice of the Night.

Titles. Write out titles by the bunch until one of them tickles your fancy.

Characters. Start writing about an intriguing character and pile on backstory details. When one starts to take on life, ask:

  • What does the character fear more than anything else in the world?
  • What would be the very worst thing that could happen to him?
  • What event would throw his life into complete turmoil?

So I scheduled a weekly creativity time. A half hour to an hour sitting in a local coffee joint doing these exercises, just letting the ideas flow. After a few weeks I noticed that my creativity muscle was growing stronger. Indeed, it began working “on its own.” I’d be driving down the street and see a billboard and suddenly I’d be asking What if? What if that happy couple clinking champagne glasses is about to be blown up by a bomb?

I kept all my ideas in a file. When one of them cried out for further attention I put into “development.”

My first step in the development process is what I call a “white hot document.” This idea comes from Dwight Swain’s classic Techniques of the Selling Writer. You start a document that is an exercise in “focused free association.” You just start writing what comes to mind, go off on tangents, explore rabbit trails. Ideas for scenes, themes, characters, plot developments—write them all down without any intrusion from your inner editor.

You put this aside and come back the next day to edit and annotate. You take what’s most emotional and exciting for you and develop it further with more free association. Do this for several days and you’ll have a solid foundation for a plot. Swain wrote: “The important thing, always, is not to sit idly waiting for the feathers to grow. Don’t just hope for ideas. Hunt them down! Find a springboard! Develop a plan of action!”

So unless you are a natural storyteller, make it a point to exercise your imagination on a regular basis. Play games. Go wild. You’ll find good ideas soon enough and your creativity synapses will grow stronger.

Then all you have to do is write the novel. And the one after that. And the one…

What kind of storyteller are you—natural or a digger in hard ground? Where do your ideas come from? Do you wait for them to show up or do you light out after them with a club?

How Far is Too Far With a Pseudonym?

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

A controversy over an award-winning female thriller author has broken out in Europe. That’s because the female thriller author doesn’t exist. “She” is really three men who have been writing under the pseudonym Carmen Mola. When one of their novels won a million-euro prize, the trio stepped out from anonymity to claim it.

The men, all in their 40s and 50s, denied choosing a female pseudonym to help sell the books. “We didn’t hide behind a woman, we hid behind a name,” Antonio Mercero told Spanish newspaper El País. “I don’t know if a female pseudonym would sell more than a male one, I don’t have the faintest idea, but I doubt it.”

But this ruse required a web of (shall we be gracious here?) fabrications to create the illusion of a real-life writer whose backstory itself was a marketing tool. They made Mola a “university professor and mother of three, who taught algebra classes in the morning then wrote ultra-violent, macabre novels in scraps of free time in the afternoon.” They even commissioned a noirish photo of a woman, facing away from the camera. It appeared on their agency’s website but has now been scrubbed. The three dudes are there instead, and appear quite happy.

Not everyone is fine with this.

Beatriz Gimeno, a feminist, writer, activist – and former head of one of Spain’s national equality bodies, the Women’s Institute – attacked the men for creating a female persona in their publicity for Carmen Mola books, over several years.

“Quite apart from using a female pseudonym, these guys have spent years doing interviews. It’s not just the name – it’s the fake profile that they’ve used to take in readers and journalists. They are scammers,” she said on Twitter.

Several questions arise. Is writing under a pseudonym always some form of “scam”? Or is it the sex change and fictional biographical details that are the sticking point?

In the “old days” a pseudonym was often used so a writer with a name could branch out into other genres. Agatha Christie was, of course, the most popular mystery writer of all time. Her name on a book meant clues and suspects and sleuths. So when she wanted to do romances she adopted the name Mary Westmacott to keep readers from confusion or frustration. She wrote six Westmacott books and managed to keep her true identity unknown for twenty years.

Evan Hunter (whose real name was Salvatore Albert Lombino!) always considered himself a “literary writer.” To earn extra dough he wrote police procedurals under an alias so the critics would not look at his “serious” work with a jaundiced eye. But as Ed McBain he produced a remarkable run of noir that made him a multi-millionaire. The truth came out eventually, though Evan was probably always a little jealous of Ed.

Some writers wanted to have more books published per year than a single contract would allow. Dean Koontz at one time was writing under nine or ten pseudonyms, including a female guise.

Then there is Stephen King, alias Richard Bachman. When he published under that pseudonym he included an elaborate backstory for Bachman:

Although King initially created Richard Bachman to experiment with literary ideas under the veil of secrecy, the author elaborated on his alter ego’s character to create a more comprehensive author bio. Apparently, Bachman wrote his novels by night, working on his dairy farm in New Hampshire during the day. He lived with his wife Claudia, mourned his son who had died at a young age in an accident, and underwent surgery for a brain tumor that isolated him from interviewers. King also included a picture of his agent’s insurance broker on the inside folds of the books.

Well, a bookstore clerk in D.C. did some digging when he found Bachman’s writing a whole lot like King’s. King was outed, and it ticked him off. He’d been planning to publish Misery as a Bachman. Now that he was “caught” he told the world that Bachman had died of “cancer of the pseudonym.” He went further, stating that Bachman’s widow had “discovered” unpublished manuscripts in Bachman’s attic: The Regulators (1996) and Blaze (2007)!

But what about men writing as women, or women as men? J. K. Rowling wanted to write crime fiction and wanted those books to stand on their own. So she chose a male pseudo, Robert Galbraith. And made up a backstory, that asserted Galbraith was “a former plainclothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry.”

The first book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, received generally positive reviews. But soon the secret got out—and sales of the book jumped 4,000%!

If you go to the Robert Galbraith author page on Amazon you’ll see a photo of J.K. Rowling, and this explanation:

J.K. Rowling’s original intention for writing as Robert Galbraith was for the books to be judged on their own merit, and to establish Galbraith as a well-regarded name in crime in its own right.

Now Robert Galbraith’s true identity is widely known, J.K. Rowling continues to write the crime series under the Galbraith pseudonym to keep the distinction from her other writing and so people will know what to expect from a Cormoran Strike novel.

So…is making up a backstory for a pseudonym out of bounds? Or is it just another aspect of marketing? Does it matter if the author is using a persona of the opposite sex? Do readers care if the ruse is discovered? Didn’t seem to hurt King, Rowling, or the Spanish guys.

What do you think, TKZers?