Tag Archives: Sue Grafton

Defeating the Next-Book Willies

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

September of 2009 was Dan Brown week in the world of publishing. It had been six years since his mega-hit The Da Vinci Code. There was a lot of excitement about his new book, The Lost Symbol. Doubleday needed a huge hardcover bestseller in the midst of what’s been called “The Great Recession.” They got one.

The book had a first printing of 6.5 million and sold a million in hardcover and ebook the first day. It debuted at #1 on the NY Times list and stayed there for six weeks.

So why did it take Dan Brown six years to write it? He explained:

“The thing that happened to me and must happen to any writer who’s had success, is that I temporarily became very self-aware. Instead of writing and saying, ‘This is what the character does,’ you say, ‘Wait, millions of people are going to read this.’ It’s sort of like a tennis player who thinks too hard about a stroke—you’re temporarily crippled.”

What happened to Dan Brown on a mega level happens to most writers who publish more than one book. A lot of unpublished writers think things will be just swell once they’re published, and that they can produce book after book with nary a worry. (Insert here the usual jeremiad about AI-slop.)

For those who take writing seriously, who want to keep producing good work, the writing sometimes gets harder, not easier, as some would think. I’ve found this to be true for myself and for many of my published writer friends.

Why should this be? I think it’s because with each book, we know more about the craft and, consequently, where we fall short. We raise the bar because we hope to grow a readership. We want to keep pleasing them, surprising them, delighting them with plot twists, great characters, and a bit of stylistic flair. We keep pursuing that storied “next level.” That can bring on what I call “The Next-Book Willies.”

Dan Brown dealt with TNBW by hanging upside down in “gravity boots.” It seemed to “help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.” But then: “My wife was very concerned that I would pull myself up into these gravity boots and not have the strength someday to get back down. I’d just be hanging there forever. So I now use an inversion table.”

Other writers have similar quirks:

Roald Dahl at least wrote sitting down, but insisted on climbing into a sleeping bag before doing so. Truman Capote (In Cold Blood; Breakfast at Tiffany’s) supposedly wrote lying down, a coffee – then a sherry, then a martini – in one hand and a pencil in another….Philip Pullman can only write in ballpoint on lined A4 paper that has two holes in it (not four)….John Cheever, in a 1978 Newsweek essay, confessed that the publication of a definitive collection of his great short stories was “in no way eclipsed by the fact that a great many … were written in my underwear.”

Victor Hugo (Les Misérables) allegedly asked his valet to hide his clothes and wrote in the nude – or at least, on cold days, wrapped in a blanket – so he could not go outside.

Here are a few, er, more normal practices I would suggest, all of which I’ve employed. Not surprisingly, the first is, WRITE. Start a free-form journal and just go. Begin entries with “I remember . . .” or “I really hate…” or “I wish…” This is not work on your WIP. It’s giving permission to your brain to come out and play. When you are working on your WIP, consider starting each stint with a Sue Grafton-style novel journal.

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

INCUBATE. For half an hour, think hard about your project, writing notes to yourself, asking questions. Back yourself into tight corners. Then put all that away for a day and do other stuff. Your Boys in the Basement will get to work and good things will start bubbling up. For an advanced session, try going 6 hours without phone, computer, tablet, or TV. (Think that’s easy these days? Just try it!) ! You can use a pen and paper if you like. I recommend doodling.

BLOOD TO BRAIN. If you want to try gravity boots, be my guest. What I do is lie on my back and put my legs up on a chair or bed, and then do some deep breathing and relaxing for 15-25 minutes. This is especially helpful to get through the afternoon blahs.

So what about you? Have you ever had the “next-book willies”? What do you do to overcome this, or other forms of writer’s block?

Writing Hardboiled Fiction

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

Would there be a Mike Romeo without Race Williams?

Scholars are pretty much in agreement that the first—and for a couple of decades the most popular—hardboiled series character came from the typewriter of the prolific pulp writer Carroll John Daly. His PI, Race Williams, appeared in over 70 stories and 8 novels, up until Daly’s death in 1958.

Today Race and Daly are all but forgotten, having been overshadowed by writers like Hammett, Chandler, Spillane, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. I think this is a mistake. The Race Williams stories, though not on par with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Hammett’s Continental Op, are still a fun, juicy read—exactly what America was hankering for during the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression.

Race Williams made his debut in the December 1922 issue of Black Mask. He became the prototype of the hardboiled private eye, with these features:

  • First-person narration, with attitude
  • Lots of action
  • Cynicism
  • Dangerous dames (the femme fatale)
  • A dearth of sentimentality
  • Violence to end things, usually from a gat

It’s clear that Daly’s style and popularity influenced Chandler, who took the PI story to its heights. And because of Chandler we’ve had a long line of popular PIs, including Robert B. Parker’s Spenser and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone.

Mickey Spillane, creator of arguably the hardest of the hardboileds (Mike Hammer), and at one time the bestselling author in the world, said Race Williams was his inspiration. In fact, in the mid 1950s he wrote a fan letter to Daly, who was living in obscurity in California. The letter said, in part:

Right now I’m sitting on the top of the heap with my Mike Hammer series, but though the character is original, his personality certainly isn’t. Sometimes I wonder if you’ve ever read some of the statements I’ve released when they ask me who I model my writing after. Maybe you know already. Mike and the Race Williams of the middle thirties could be twins.

Yours was the first and only style of writing that ever influenced me in any way. Race was the model for Mike; and I can’t say more in this case than imitation being the most sincere form of flattery. The public in accepting my books were in reality accepting the kind of work you have done.

Side note: this effusive praise got into the hands of Daly’s agent, who began a lawsuit against Spillane for plagiarism! When Daly found out he was incensed, and fired her. He was actually delighted with Spillane’s letter because it was the first fan letter he’d had in 25 years.

Speaking of Spillane, and his lifetime sales of around 225 million books, what explains the popularity of Mike Hammer? According to Prof. David Schmid in The Secrets of Great Mystery and Suspense Fiction, the factors are:

  • Hammer’s absolute conviction about matters of good and evil
  • the way he keeps his promises
  • his brutally effective approach to problems and challenges
  • his impatience with the system
  • his fondness for vigilante justice

Most of these factors are baked into my own Mike Romeo series. To them I’ve added some unique elements, which is a key to writing any current hardboiled hero. You want to pay homage to the past, but you also have to make it feel new and fresh.

I look back and see a clear line of influence:

Carroll John Daly >> Raymond Chandler >> Mickey Spillane >> John D. MacDonald >> Mike Romeo

So the question of the day is: can you discern a line of influence in your own writing? How far back does it go?

Further Reflections on the Mirror Moment

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by James Scott Bell
@jamesscottbell

I enjoy getting emails and tweets from writers regarding the “mirror moment,” which is the subject of my book, Write Your Novel From the Middle. Recently I received two that I thought would make good fodder for a post (we at TKZ are always looking for good fodder).

The first email was a great question from someone who asked about the mirror moment in a long series. She used Sue Grafton’s alphabet series as an example. Should each book have a mirror moment? How can a series character go through so many changes?

I wrote back reminding her that there are two kinds of mirror moments. The first kind is about identity. It asks questions like, “Who am I? Why am I this way? What must I become?” It’s Rick in Casablanca.

The second kind is about death. It is the realization, “I’m probably going to die. The opposition is too great. How can I possibly survive?” That’s Dr. Richard Kimble in The Fugitive.

So I suggested that in any Kinsey Millhone mystery (and in mystery series in general), there could always be a realization in the middle that this case, this puzzle, this villain is the most perplexing or dangerous of their career. It looks like they could “die” (professionally) this time.

But that is not to say the character in any given book in a series cannot have a personal crisis of identity, too. Exhibit A would be the Harry Bosch books by Michael Connelly.

C is for confession: I have not read all of the alphabet books by Sue Grafton. I think I may have stopped around F. But the question intrigued me, so I went to the library and picked one of the later books at random—Q is For Quarry. I sat down and, as is my practice when mirror hunting, turned to the physical center of the book and just started looking around. Was there anything relating to identity? Or anything indicating this was the biggest challenge of her career?

Lo and behold, I found that it was about identity. Kinsey, who lost both her parents in a car accident when she was very young, has had a hole in her identity ever since. In this scene from the middle of the book, she is looking at a photograph of her mother. You don’t even have to know the details of the plot to know that this is the language of an identity-type of mirror moment:

I placed the frame on my desk, sitting back in my swivel chair with my feet propped up. Several things occurred to me that I hadn’t thought of before. I was now twice my mother’s age the day the photograph was taken. Within four months of that date, my parents would be married, and by the time she was my age, she’d have a daughter three years old. By then my parents would have had only another two years to live. It occurred to me that if my mother had survived, she’d be seventy. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have a mother in my life—the phone calls, the visits and shopping trips, holiday rituals so alien to me. I’d been resistant to the Kinseys, feeling not only adamant but hostile to the idea of continued contact. Now I wondered why the offer of simple comfort felt like such a threat. Wasn’t it possible that I could establish a connection with my mother through her two surviving sisters? Surely, Maura and Susanna shared many of her traits—gestures and phrases, values and attitudes ingrained in them since birth. While my mother was gone, couldn’t I experience some small fragment of her love through my cousins and aunts? It didn’t seem too much to ask, although I still wasn’t clear what price I might be expected to pay.

I locked the office early, leaving the photo of my mother in the center of my desk. Driving home, I couldn’t resist touching on the issue, much in the same way the tongue seeks the socket from which a tooth has just been pulled. The compulsion resulted in the same shudder-producing blend of satisfaction and repugnance.

Thus, any book in a long-running series can include subplot elements that relate to the hero’s identity and transformation.

Shortly after this I got an email from my friend, writer Rich Bullock. He told me he’d been watching Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and in the chapter titled “The Mirror Cave” Rey is being tempted by the dark side (what a shock) and challenged by Kylo Ren on her true identity. Rich told me it was smack dab in the middle.

So I checked out the DVD from the library, chucked in the player, and went to the scene. Rey has fallen into this mirror cave, and is hoping it will give her a clue about who she truly is. Kylo Ren is somewhere else, but able to communicate with her:

KYLO REN: Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.

REY: No! No!

REY (VOICE OVER): I should have felt trapped or panicked. But I didn’t. This didn’t go on forever, I knew it was leading somewhere. And that, at the end, it would show me what I came to see.

REY: Let me see them. My parents … please.

She touches the mirror. Two shadowy figures approach from the other side of the glass. But when the frost clears, Rey is looking at … herself!

I took a look at the DVD timeline:

Hmm, we’re 1:16 into a 2:32 movie. I’m no math whiz, but I believe you can’t get any more middle than that!

The mirror moment works every time.

(For more on this, see my post “Revisiting the Mirror Moment”.)

That’s it for today, kids. I’m on the road most of the day, but will try to check in later. Talk amongst yourselves, esp. those of you writing series characters. How do you handle any inner transformation?