KN Magazine: Articles
The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney
Oh the mushy middle. It's something that we have all had to deal with. Sometimes working through it can be a daunting task. Failure to solidify the mushy middle can result in your book being left half finished and back on the shelf. This week's guest blogger, Kathleen Delaney, shares her insight on how to keep your book interesting from cover-to-cover!
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The first time I heard that phrase was during a writing class I took at UCLA given by three romance/ romantic suspense writers. I’m not sure why I took it, I don’t write romance, but I’m glad I did. It was the first class I’d taken that talked about how a writer got from point A, the awesome beginning, to point Z, the zinger that ends the book in a way that causes you to snap it shut, smile and become a fan for life. But they issued a warning which they empathized pertains to all genres, especially mysteries. Beware the mushy middle. The what?
Someplace between page thirty and fifty you need to take a break from all that dead body finding you’ve used to get the book up and running and slow the pace. Slow it, not bring it to a complete stop.
How do you avoid that trap? By making sure everything that happens in your story leads to something else. Even in the middle. Especially in the middle.
Your heroine may be at home, making a cup of tea, or drinking something a bit more fortifying, doing nothing, tired from finding the latest body. The phone rings. The call can’t be a reminder that the PTA meeting is next Thursday. Something in that call has to remind your heroine of something, or someone. It needs to set off a train of thought that propels her to take the next action. And, of course, in so doing she learns something important or walks right into the middle of a situation she could have done without, but which leads her one step closer to that zinger ending.
Middles can be filled with all kinds of mundane activities. In real life, most of our days are full of them. Cleaning the bathtub usually has little meaning other than you get a clean tub. In a story, that’s not enough. Her shampoo bottle is not where she always leaves it. The medicine cupboard door is slightly ajar, but she knows she closed it that morning. Or did she? She hears a door close just as she turns off the water but she’s alone in the house, or so she thought. Maybe none of the above happens, it depends on the story, but cleaning the tub needs some meaning if nothing more happens than we follow her thought process while she works on her suspect list as well as the tub.
Stories, especially mysteries, are built on tension. They start out with a bang, getting the attention of the reader while you build that sense of suspense, of danger. We have to let that die down a little so everyone, including the author, can take a deep breath before we start tightening things up again, then back off once more before we build to the final crescendo. Only, sometimes the mushy middle traps us with meaningless action, events that do nothing but stop the story cold. So, if you think you are caught in the maze of the middle and can’t find your way out, go back and take a second look at some of the things you’re people are doing. Does that conversation she has with the butcher do anything besides provide her with fresh ground round for dinner? If not, maybe you don’t need it. If she’s not figuring out how to prove her best friend innocent of murder while she’s ironing that shirt, let it stay in the basket. It’s not doing one thing toward solving the murder.
This was particularly hard when I was writing my first Ellen McKenzie real estate mystery, Dying for a Change. I wasn’t sure how to make the mundane events in Ellen’s life matter to the story. Then I sent Ellen on her first listing appointment. The significance of a casual statement from a ditzy seller didn’t sink in at first, with either of us, but it did later, and suddenly I understood. Later in the book another remark from another seller gives Ellen the last piece of the puzzle and we move rapidly from that to the zinger ending.
In Purebred Dead, Mary McGill attends a committee meeting. A chance comment sends her looking for someone who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. That starts a chain of events that leads Mary to find a murderer and adopt a dog.
Read your work in progress again. Don’t let that middle stay mushy, don’t let the reader plow through it, wondering what just happened has to do with the story, only to find out later, absolutely nothing. Make each event count, propel your story forward and don’t let your reader go until you get to that zinger ending.
Kathleen Delaney came to the writing life a little late. Instead, she raised five children, heaven alone knows how many cats and dogs, more than a few horses, and assorted 4 H animals. She also enjoyed a career as a real estate broker in the small California town of Paso Robles. Somewhere in there she found she wanted to write as well as read, and her first book, Dying for a Change, was a finalist in St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest. Since then she has written six more books that have received praise from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. The first in her new Mary McGill canine mysteries, Purebred Dead, is available in both hard cover and ebook form, and has recently been released in soft cover, just in time to greet the release of the second in the series, Curtains for Miss Plym. The third in this series, Blood Red White and Blue is scheduled for release in the U.S. on July 1. Perfect timing for a 4th of July book. Kathleen resides in Woodstock, Ga., with an exuberant dog and a grouchy cat. She has recently moved from a fairly large four-bed home into a small two-bed home and loves it. As she brought along her sofa which has been taken over by the dog, and her reading chair which has been claimed by the cat, they are content as well. Learn more at kathleendelaney.net
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney
Oh the mushy middle. It's something that we have all had to deal with. Sometimes working through it can be a daunting task. Failure to solidify the mushy middle can result in your book being left half finished and back on the shelf. This week's guest blogger, Kathleen Delaney, shares her insight on how to keep your book interesting from cover-to-cover!
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The first time I heard that phrase was during a writing class I took at UCLA given by three romance/ romantic suspense writers. I’m not sure why I took it, I don’t write romance, but I’m glad I did. It was the first class I’d taken that talked about how a writer got from point A, the awesome beginning, to point Z, the zinger that ends the book in a way that causes you to snap it shut, smile and become a fan for life. But they issued a warning which they empathized pertains to all genres, especially mysteries. Beware the mushy middle. The what?
Someplace between page thirty and fifty you need to take a break from all that dead body finding you’ve used to get the book up and running and slow the pace. Slow it, not bring it to a complete stop.
How do you avoid that trap? By making sure everything that happens in your story leads to something else. Even in the middle. Especially in the middle.
Your heroine may be at home, making a cup of tea, or drinking something a bit more fortifying, doing nothing, tired from finding the latest body. The phone rings. The call can’t be a reminder that the PTA meeting is next Thursday. Something in that call has to remind your heroine of something, or someone. It needs to set off a train of thought that propels her to take the next action. And, of course, in so doing she learns something important or walks right into the middle of a situation she could have done without, but which leads her one step closer to that zinger ending.
Middles can be filled with all kinds of mundane activities. In real life, most of our days are full of them. Cleaning the bathtub usually has little meaning other than you get a clean tub. In a story, that’s not enough. Her shampoo bottle is not where she always leaves it. The medicine cupboard door is slightly ajar, but she knows she closed it that morning. Or did she? She hears a door close just as she turns off the water but she’s alone in the house, or so she thought. Maybe none of the above happens, it depends on the story, but cleaning the tub needs some meaning if nothing more happens than we follow her thought process while she works on her suspect list as well as the tub.
Stories, especially mysteries, are built on tension. They start out with a bang, getting the attention of the reader while you build that sense of suspense, of danger. We have to let that die down a little so everyone, including the author, can take a deep breath before we start tightening things up again, then back off once more before we build to the final crescendo. Only, sometimes the mushy middle traps us with meaningless action, events that do nothing but stop the story cold. So, if you think you are caught in the maze of the middle and can’t find your way out, go back and take a second look at some of the things you’re people are doing. Does that conversation she has with the butcher do anything besides provide her with fresh ground round for dinner? If not, maybe you don’t need it. If she’s not figuring out how to prove her best friend innocent of murder while she’s ironing that shirt, let it stay in the basket. It’s not doing one thing toward solving the murder.
This was particularly hard when I was writing my first Ellen McKenzie real estate mystery, Dying for a Change. I wasn’t sure how to make the mundane events in Ellen’s life matter to the story. Then I sent Ellen on her first listing appointment. The significance of a casual statement from a ditzy seller didn’t sink in at first, with either of us, but it did later, and suddenly I understood. Later in the book another remark from another seller gives Ellen the last piece of the puzzle and we move rapidly from that to the zinger ending.
In Purebred Dead, Mary McGill attends a committee meeting. A chance comment sends her looking for someone who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. That starts a chain of events that leads Mary to find a murderer and adopt a dog.
Read your work in progress again. Don’t let that middle stay mushy, don’t let the reader plow through it, wondering what just happened has to do with the story, only to find out later, absolutely nothing. Make each event count, propel your story forward and don’t let your reader go until you get to that zinger ending.
Kathleen Delaney came to the writing life a little late. Instead, she raised five children, heaven alone knows how many cats and dogs, more than a few horses, and assorted 4 H animals. She also enjoyed a career as a real estate broker in the small California town of Paso Robles. Somewhere in there she found she wanted to write as well as read, and her first book, Dying for a Change, was a finalist in St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest. Since then she has written six more books that have received praise from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. The first in her new Mary McGill canine mysteries, Purebred Dead, is available in both hard cover and ebook form, and has recently been released in soft cover, just in time to greet the release of the second in the series, Curtains for Miss Plym. The third in this series, Blood Red White and Blue is scheduled for release in the U.S. on July 1. Perfect timing for a 4th of July book. Kathleen resides in Woodstock, Ga., with an exuberant dog and a grouchy cat. She has recently moved from a fairly large four-bed home into a small two-bed home and loves it. As she brought along her sofa which has been taken over by the dog, and her reading chair which has been claimed by the cat, they are content as well. Learn more at kathleendelaney.net
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney
Oh the mushy middle. It's something that we have all had to deal with. Sometimes working through it can be a daunting task. Failure to solidify the mushy middle can result in your book being left half finished and back on the shelf. This week's guest blogger, Kathleen Delaney, shares her insight on how to keep your book interesting from cover-to-cover!
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The first time I heard that phrase was during a writing class I took at UCLA given by three romance/ romantic suspense writers. I’m not sure why I took it, I don’t write romance, but I’m glad I did. It was the first class I’d taken that talked about how a writer got from point A, the awesome beginning, to point Z, the zinger that ends the book in a way that causes you to snap it shut, smile and become a fan for life. But they issued a warning which they empathized pertains to all genres, especially mysteries. Beware the mushy middle. The what?
Someplace between page thirty and fifty you need to take a break from all that dead body finding you’ve used to get the book up and running and slow the pace. Slow it, not bring it to a complete stop.
How do you avoid that trap? By making sure everything that happens in your story leads to something else. Even in the middle. Especially in the middle.
Your heroine may be at home, making a cup of tea, or drinking something a bit more fortifying, doing nothing, tired from finding the latest body. The phone rings. The call can’t be a reminder that the PTA meeting is next Thursday. Something in that call has to remind your heroine of something, or someone. It needs to set off a train of thought that propels her to take the next action. And, of course, in so doing she learns something important or walks right into the middle of a situation she could have done without, but which leads her one step closer to that zinger ending.
Middles can be filled with all kinds of mundane activities. In real life, most of our days are full of them. Cleaning the bathtub usually has little meaning other than you get a clean tub. In a story, that’s not enough. Her shampoo bottle is not where she always leaves it. The medicine cupboard door is slightly ajar, but she knows she closed it that morning. Or did she? She hears a door close just as she turns off the water but she’s alone in the house, or so she thought. Maybe none of the above happens, it depends on the story, but cleaning the tub needs some meaning if nothing more happens than we follow her thought process while she works on her suspect list as well as the tub.
Stories, especially mysteries, are built on tension. They start out with a bang, getting the attention of the reader while you build that sense of suspense, of danger. We have to let that die down a little so everyone, including the author, can take a deep breath before we start tightening things up again, then back off once more before we build to the final crescendo. Only, sometimes the mushy middle traps us with meaningless action, events that do nothing but stop the story cold. So, if you think you are caught in the maze of the middle and can’t find your way out, go back and take a second look at some of the things you’re people are doing. Does that conversation she has with the butcher do anything besides provide her with fresh ground round for dinner? If not, maybe you don’t need it. If she’s not figuring out how to prove her best friend innocent of murder while she’s ironing that shirt, let it stay in the basket. It’s not doing one thing toward solving the murder.
This was particularly hard when I was writing my first Ellen McKenzie real estate mystery, Dying for a Change. I wasn’t sure how to make the mundane events in Ellen’s life matter to the story. Then I sent Ellen on her first listing appointment. The significance of a casual statement from a ditzy seller didn’t sink in at first, with either of us, but it did later, and suddenly I understood. Later in the book another remark from another seller gives Ellen the last piece of the puzzle and we move rapidly from that to the zinger ending.
In Purebred Dead, Mary McGill attends a committee meeting. A chance comment sends her looking for someone who isn’t where he’s supposed to be. That starts a chain of events that leads Mary to find a murderer and adopt a dog.
Read your work in progress again. Don’t let that middle stay mushy, don’t let the reader plow through it, wondering what just happened has to do with the story, only to find out later, absolutely nothing. Make each event count, propel your story forward and don’t let your reader go until you get to that zinger ending.
Kathleen Delaney came to the writing life a little late. Instead, she raised five children, heaven alone knows how many cats and dogs, more than a few horses, and assorted 4 H animals. She also enjoyed a career as a real estate broker in the small California town of Paso Robles. Somewhere in there she found she wanted to write as well as read, and her first book, Dying for a Change, was a finalist in St. Martin’s Malice Domestic contest. Since then she has written six more books that have received praise from Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Booklist. The first in her new Mary McGill canine mysteries, Purebred Dead, is available in both hard cover and ebook form, and has recently been released in soft cover, just in time to greet the release of the second in the series, Curtains for Miss Plym. The third in this series, Blood Red White and Blue is scheduled for release in the U.S. on July 1. Perfect timing for a 4th of July book. Kathleen resides in Woodstock, Ga., with an exuberant dog and a grouchy cat. She has recently moved from a fairly large four-bed home into a small two-bed home and loves it. As she brought along her sofa which has been taken over by the dog, and her reading chair which has been claimed by the cat, they are content as well. Learn more at kathleendelaney.net
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin
Writer's block can be one of the most common problems that writers of all skill levels run in to. The question, then, is what to do when it happens. Sometimes, when we get to a point where we can't continue to write anymore naturally, it can be a sign that the story may need some reformatting. This weeks' guest blogger, Paul Shin, discusses his experience with cutting your losses and structuring your book efficiently.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
You know the adage, “Don’t try to reinvent the wheel”?
This can also apply to how to structure a novel. Not always, but often, especially if you’re not a literary genius who can break all the rules and still deliver a satisfying ride.
Sometimes what feels like writer’s block is your story telling you that it isn’t working on its current path. When this happened to me on a previous novel, I cut my losses and made a fresh start.
For the story that would become my novel Half Life, I wanted to give myself a road map — an outline — because I knew it would take me a while to finish the book. Aristotle’s insight that a story has a beginning, middle and an end didn’t quite get me to a usable road map.
But just before I started writing Half Life, I happened to take a class on screenwriting — mainly to see how other forms of storytelling deal with structure. In that class, I learned how to break down that three-act structure, so I could apply it in a practical way.
Three Acts, Eight Sequences
Here are the building blocks of a three-act play. You don’t have to cram your story into this if it doesn’t fit. But if it does, you’ll be tapping into a form that has stood the test of time and can be deeply satisfying for the reader, even if they’ve never heard of the three-act structure.
In addition to using Half Life as an example, I'll refer to a movie many people may know — Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood Western — so there’s a common point of reference.
Act 1
Sequence 1: Introduce the protagonist and define what he or she wants.
In Half Life, the protagonist is Han Chol-Soo, a North Korean diplomat based in the U.S. He considers himself a patriot, and he wants to use his knowledge as a nuclear scientist to protect his beleaguered country.
In Unforgiven, the protagonist is down-on-his-luck former gunslinger William Munny. He wants to live a quiet life on a farm and provide for his kids.
Sequence 2: The inciting incident — the event that propels the story into motion.
In Half Life, Han’s wife runs away with their newborn son. Han must find her before his superiors find out or else risk dire punishment.
In Unforgiven, a cowboy cuts up a saloon hooker. Her friends pool their money for a bounty to kill the cowboy and his friend. In Unforgiven, sequences 1 and 2 are flipped. Changing sequence order happens quite often in storytelling. It’s one of the ways you can adjust the story’s pacing.
Act 2
Sequence 3: Protagonist’s first attempt to remedy the situation.
In Half Life, Han recruits his colleague, a man he suspects is an intelligence operative, to help track down his wife.
In Unforgiven, Munny decides to collect on the bounty and recruits his friend, Ned Logan.
Sequence 4: The second attempt to remedy the situation.
From here on out I won’t refer to Half Life since I don’t want to spoil the ride for those who haven’t read it, other than to say that Han’s friend cuts a swath of mayhem in the name of helping Han.
In Unforgiven, a gunslinger called English Bob tries to collect on the bounty but instead gets a brutal beating by the town’s sheriff, Little Bill. The same happens to Munny when he arrives in town.
Sequence 5: The third attempt to remedy the situation.
Munny’s posse kills one of the two cowboys.
Sequence 6: Fourth and final attempt to remedy the situation. At the end of Act 2, the protagonist either succeeds or fails in the original goal.
In Unforgiven, Munny and the Scofield Kid kill the second cowboy, thus ostensibly succeeding in their mission.
Act 3
Sequence 7: False resolution, a.k.a. the climax.
In Unforgiven, Munny learns that Little Bill has tortured and killed Ned. He goes into town and kills Little Bill and his deputies.
Sequence 8: Denouement. This puts the entire story into perspective.
In Unforgiven, it’s a very brief text sequence explaining what happened to Munny afterward.
So, that’s the basic structure I used to create the outline for Half Life. I’m glad that I did, because I took me more than 10 years to research and write the novel, and if it hadn’t been for the outline, I would probably have lost my way.
In literature, plot is sometimes looked down upon as banal. But only a bad plot is banal. A good plot is driven by the desires and imperatives of the characters.
Plot is the trunk on which you hang all the other stuff — all the pretty words, all the insightful observations, all the intricately crafted sentences that are but one punctuation mark or preposition away from collapsing under its own weight.
Paul H.B. Shin’s debut novel Half Life was published in September 2016 and follows a career as an award-winning journalist for more than 20 years, most recently for ABC News. He was previously a reporter and editor for the New York Daily News. He was born in South Korea and lived in London during his childhood. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more about Half Life, please visit the website at www.paulhbshin.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin
Writer's block can be one of the most common problems that writers of all skill levels run in to. The question, then, is what to do when it happens. Sometimes, when we get to a point where we can't continue to write anymore naturally, it can be a sign that the story may need some reformatting. This weeks' guest blogger, Paul Shin, discusses his experience with cutting your losses and structuring your book efficiently.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
You know the adage, “Don’t try to reinvent the wheel”?
This can also apply to how to structure a novel. Not always, but often, especially if you’re not a literary genius who can break all the rules and still deliver a satisfying ride.
Sometimes what feels like writer’s block is your story telling you that it isn’t working on its current path. When this happened to me on a previous novel, I cut my losses and made a fresh start.
For the story that would become my novel Half Life, I wanted to give myself a road map — an outline — because I knew it would take me a while to finish the book. Aristotle’s insight that a story has a beginning, middle and an end didn’t quite get me to a usable road map.
But just before I started writing Half Life, I happened to take a class on screenwriting — mainly to see how other forms of storytelling deal with structure. In that class, I learned how to break down that three-act structure, so I could apply it in a practical way.
Three Acts, Eight Sequences
Here are the building blocks of a three-act play. You don’t have to cram your story into this if it doesn’t fit. But if it does, you’ll be tapping into a form that has stood the test of time and can be deeply satisfying for the reader, even if they’ve never heard of the three-act structure.
In addition to using Half Life as an example, I'll refer to a movie many people may know — Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood Western — so there’s a common point of reference.
Act 1
Sequence 1: Introduce the protagonist and define what he or she wants.
In Half Life, the protagonist is Han Chol-Soo, a North Korean diplomat based in the U.S. He considers himself a patriot, and he wants to use his knowledge as a nuclear scientist to protect his beleaguered country.
In Unforgiven, the protagonist is down-on-his-luck former gunslinger William Munny. He wants to live a quiet life on a farm and provide for his kids.
Sequence 2: The inciting incident — the event that propels the story into motion.
In Half Life, Han’s wife runs away with their newborn son. Han must find her before his superiors find out or else risk dire punishment.
In Unforgiven, a cowboy cuts up a saloon hooker. Her friends pool their money for a bounty to kill the cowboy and his friend. In Unforgiven, sequences 1 and 2 are flipped. Changing sequence order happens quite often in storytelling. It’s one of the ways you can adjust the story’s pacing.
Act 2
Sequence 3: Protagonist’s first attempt to remedy the situation.
In Half Life, Han recruits his colleague, a man he suspects is an intelligence operative, to help track down his wife.
In Unforgiven, Munny decides to collect on the bounty and recruits his friend, Ned Logan.
Sequence 4: The second attempt to remedy the situation.
From here on out I won’t refer to Half Life since I don’t want to spoil the ride for those who haven’t read it, other than to say that Han’s friend cuts a swath of mayhem in the name of helping Han.
In Unforgiven, a gunslinger called English Bob tries to collect on the bounty but instead gets a brutal beating by the town’s sheriff, Little Bill. The same happens to Munny when he arrives in town.
Sequence 5: The third attempt to remedy the situation.
Munny’s posse kills one of the two cowboys.
Sequence 6: Fourth and final attempt to remedy the situation. At the end of Act 2, the protagonist either succeeds or fails in the original goal.
In Unforgiven, Munny and the Scofield Kid kill the second cowboy, thus ostensibly succeeding in their mission.
Act 3
Sequence 7: False resolution, a.k.a. the climax.
In Unforgiven, Munny learns that Little Bill has tortured and killed Ned. He goes into town and kills Little Bill and his deputies.
Sequence 8: Denouement. This puts the entire story into perspective.
In Unforgiven, it’s a very brief text sequence explaining what happened to Munny afterward.
So, that’s the basic structure I used to create the outline for Half Life. I’m glad that I did, because I took me more than 10 years to research and write the novel, and if it hadn’t been for the outline, I would probably have lost my way.
In literature, plot is sometimes looked down upon as banal. But only a bad plot is banal. A good plot is driven by the desires and imperatives of the characters.
Plot is the trunk on which you hang all the other stuff — all the pretty words, all the insightful observations, all the intricately crafted sentences that are but one punctuation mark or preposition away from collapsing under its own weight.
Paul H.B. Shin’s debut novel Half Life was published in September 2016 and follows a career as an award-winning journalist for more than 20 years, most recently for ABC News. He was previously a reporter and editor for the New York Daily News. He was born in South Korea and lived in London during his childhood. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more about Half Life, please visit the website at www.paulhbshin.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin
Writer's block can be one of the most common problems that writers of all skill levels run in to. The question, then, is what to do when it happens. Sometimes, when we get to a point where we can't continue to write anymore naturally, it can be a sign that the story may need some reformatting. This weeks' guest blogger, Paul Shin, discusses his experience with cutting your losses and structuring your book efficiently.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
You know the adage, “Don’t try to reinvent the wheel”?
This can also apply to how to structure a novel. Not always, but often, especially if you’re not a literary genius who can break all the rules and still deliver a satisfying ride.
Sometimes what feels like writer’s block is your story telling you that it isn’t working on its current path. When this happened to me on a previous novel, I cut my losses and made a fresh start.
For the story that would become my novel Half Life, I wanted to give myself a road map — an outline — because I knew it would take me a while to finish the book. Aristotle’s insight that a story has a beginning, middle and an end didn’t quite get me to a usable road map.
But just before I started writing Half Life, I happened to take a class on screenwriting — mainly to see how other forms of storytelling deal with structure. In that class, I learned how to break down that three-act structure, so I could apply it in a practical way.
Three Acts, Eight Sequences
Here are the building blocks of a three-act play. You don’t have to cram your story into this if it doesn’t fit. But if it does, you’ll be tapping into a form that has stood the test of time and can be deeply satisfying for the reader, even if they’ve never heard of the three-act structure.
In addition to using Half Life as an example, I'll refer to a movie many people may know — Unforgiven, the Clint Eastwood Western — so there’s a common point of reference.
Act 1
Sequence 1: Introduce the protagonist and define what he or she wants.
In Half Life, the protagonist is Han Chol-Soo, a North Korean diplomat based in the U.S. He considers himself a patriot, and he wants to use his knowledge as a nuclear scientist to protect his beleaguered country.
In Unforgiven, the protagonist is down-on-his-luck former gunslinger William Munny. He wants to live a quiet life on a farm and provide for his kids.
Sequence 2: The inciting incident — the event that propels the story into motion.
In Half Life, Han’s wife runs away with their newborn son. Han must find her before his superiors find out or else risk dire punishment.
In Unforgiven, a cowboy cuts up a saloon hooker. Her friends pool their money for a bounty to kill the cowboy and his friend. In Unforgiven, sequences 1 and 2 are flipped. Changing sequence order happens quite often in storytelling. It’s one of the ways you can adjust the story’s pacing.
Act 2
Sequence 3: Protagonist’s first attempt to remedy the situation.
In Half Life, Han recruits his colleague, a man he suspects is an intelligence operative, to help track down his wife.
In Unforgiven, Munny decides to collect on the bounty and recruits his friend, Ned Logan.
Sequence 4: The second attempt to remedy the situation.
From here on out I won’t refer to Half Life since I don’t want to spoil the ride for those who haven’t read it, other than to say that Han’s friend cuts a swath of mayhem in the name of helping Han.
In Unforgiven, a gunslinger called English Bob tries to collect on the bounty but instead gets a brutal beating by the town’s sheriff, Little Bill. The same happens to Munny when he arrives in town.
Sequence 5: The third attempt to remedy the situation.
Munny’s posse kills one of the two cowboys.
Sequence 6: Fourth and final attempt to remedy the situation. At the end of Act 2, the protagonist either succeeds or fails in the original goal.
In Unforgiven, Munny and the Scofield Kid kill the second cowboy, thus ostensibly succeeding in their mission.
Act 3
Sequence 7: False resolution, a.k.a. the climax.
In Unforgiven, Munny learns that Little Bill has tortured and killed Ned. He goes into town and kills Little Bill and his deputies.
Sequence 8: Denouement. This puts the entire story into perspective.
In Unforgiven, it’s a very brief text sequence explaining what happened to Munny afterward.
So, that’s the basic structure I used to create the outline for Half Life. I’m glad that I did, because I took me more than 10 years to research and write the novel, and if it hadn’t been for the outline, I would probably have lost my way.
In literature, plot is sometimes looked down upon as banal. But only a bad plot is banal. A good plot is driven by the desires and imperatives of the characters.
Plot is the trunk on which you hang all the other stuff — all the pretty words, all the insightful observations, all the intricately crafted sentences that are but one punctuation mark or preposition away from collapsing under its own weight.
Paul H.B. Shin’s debut novel Half Life was published in September 2016 and follows a career as an award-winning journalist for more than 20 years, most recently for ABC News. He was previously a reporter and editor for the New York Daily News. He was born in South Korea and lived in London during his childhood. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more about Half Life, please visit the website at www.paulhbshin.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello
Technology is expanding and evolving quicker than ever. This can make keeping your book in the present tricky if you spend a while writing the book. So, what do you do? You can constantly write and rewrite to keep your book current, or you can pick a time for your book to occur and commit! This week's guest blogger, Sharon Marchisell, discusses her experience picking a timeline for her latest novel, Going Home.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Writing a novel in “the present” can be a challenge if your journey to publication is a long one. Technology changes quickly, requiring constant rewrites to keep your setting current. Not to mention the world leaders, global boundaries and political issues that keep your background fresh.
Your sleuth’s clever deductive reasoning and sneaking around suddenly doesn’t seem so extraordinary, or even plausible. And the bad guys can’t get away with as much as they once did. What about the cameras? What about caller I.D. and GPS tracking?
I recently picked up my first, still unpublished mystery, Murder at Gate 58A, to see if I could salvage anything. I started writing it in the late 1980s, when they had Smoking and Non-Smoking sections on airplanes. Pre-9/11 airport security was more lax; people without current-day tickets could actually walk onto the concourse to meet arriving flights at the gate.
In one scene, my heroine stops at a phone booth to make a call. Today’s readers would laugh out loud. What happened to her smartphone? Isn’t her car equipped with Blue Tooth? And where would she even find a booth with a working phone? Younger readers might even ask, “What’s a phone booth?”
Research trip to the library? Why didn’t she just Google her question?
I either had to do a rewrite just to purge anachronisms, or commit to writing a period piece. My once-contemporary novel is now a historical.
When I started writing Going Home in 2003, I had a full-time job and several outside commitments. I had about an hour a day to devote to writing, and I’m not fast. So I knew the journey to publication would be long. And I was right. After seven drafts and more rejections than I care to count, I finally got a contract from Sunbury Press in 2013, and the novel came out in August 2014.
Setting Going Homein “the present” would have been daunting. I decided right away that it had to be a period piece, eliminating the need for revisions just to keep up with the times. But what time? And then, how would I be able to keep myself there while I was writing, and resist the urge to give my heroine access to technology that had yet to be invented?
In 2003, our country’s wounds from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were still fresh. Everyone remembers what they were doing when the towers fell. Images of those planes crashing into buildings are tattooed to our retinas. The aftermath of 9/11 was a period in time I would never forget. And so I decided to set Going Home in October 2001.
“Why 2001?” potential readers have asked me. What does 9/11 have to do with the story? None of my characters were victims in the attacks, unless you count Jean-Paul's adoptive parents as collateral damage, killed in an automobile accident when they tried to drive home from Indiana after their flight was grounded. The novel is set in East Texas, far from New York City. But Michelle DePalma, my protagonist, was born in New York and lived there as a small child. I remember my New Yorker friends seemed to take 9/11 a little harder than everyone else. And Michelle and her husband both work for an airline. A former airline employee myself, I can attest that airline employees took particular offense to the use of our industry as a weapon of mass destruction. After 9/11, the airline industry was reeling; people were afraid to fly, and the security procedures we had relied upon had been invalidated.
The terrorist attacks on American soil left psychological scars on almost everyone. Going Home, which was inspired by my mother's battle with Alzheimer’s disease, opens when Michelle DePalma goes home to check on her elderly mother, Lola Hanson, and finds Lola hovering over the bludgeoned body of her caregiver. Alone. An instant suspect. Michelle is forced into a new care-giving role while trying to solve the murder, as well as face the fact that her mother indeed has Alzheimer’s, not just normal shell-shock brought on by the 9/11 attacks.
So that’s the long answer to, “Why 2001?” And writing about that period helped me process my pain, even though, like my characters, I was not directly affected by the attacks and thus have dubious right to that pain.
I just hope my next novel, Secrets of the Galapagos, set in “the present,” gets a publisher soon, before I have to think about making it a period piece, too.
Sharon Marchisello is the author of Going Home (Sunbury Press, 2014) a murder mystery inspired by her mother's battle with Alzheimer’s, and a personal finance e-book, Live Cheaply, Be Happy, Grow Wealthy (smashwords 2013). She earned a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is a member of the Atlanta Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Retired after a 27-year career at Delta Air Lines, she lives in Peachtree City, GA, with her husband and cat, and does volunteer work for the Fayette Humane Society. Read more about Sharon at smarchisello.wordpress.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello
Technology is expanding and evolving quicker than ever. This can make keeping your book in the present tricky if you spend a while writing the book. So, what do you do? You can constantly write and rewrite to keep your book current, or you can pick a time for your book to occur and commit! This week's guest blogger, Sharon Marchisell, discusses her experience picking a timeline for her latest novel, Going Home.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Writing a novel in “the present” can be a challenge if your journey to publication is a long one. Technology changes quickly, requiring constant rewrites to keep your setting current. Not to mention the world leaders, global boundaries and political issues that keep your background fresh.
Your sleuth’s clever deductive reasoning and sneaking around suddenly doesn’t seem so extraordinary, or even plausible. And the bad guys can’t get away with as much as they once did. What about the cameras? What about caller I.D. and GPS tracking?
I recently picked up my first, still unpublished mystery, Murder at Gate 58A, to see if I could salvage anything. I started writing it in the late 1980s, when they had Smoking and Non-Smoking sections on airplanes. Pre-9/11 airport security was more lax; people without current-day tickets could actually walk onto the concourse to meet arriving flights at the gate.
In one scene, my heroine stops at a phone booth to make a call. Today’s readers would laugh out loud. What happened to her smartphone? Isn’t her car equipped with Blue Tooth? And where would she even find a booth with a working phone? Younger readers might even ask, “What’s a phone booth?”
Research trip to the library? Why didn’t she just Google her question?
I either had to do a rewrite just to purge anachronisms, or commit to writing a period piece. My once-contemporary novel is now a historical.
When I started writing Going Home in 2003, I had a full-time job
and several outside commitments. I had about an hour a day to devote to writing, and I’m not fast. So I knew the journey to publication would be long. And I was right. After seven drafts and more rejections than I care to count, I finally got a contract from Sunbury Press in 2013, and the novel came out in August 2014.
Setting Going Home in “the present” would have been daunting. I decided right away that it had to be a period piece, eliminating the need for revisions just to keep up with the times. But what time? And then, how would I be able to keep myself there while I was writing, and resist the urge to give my heroine access to technology that had yet to be invented?
In 2003, our country’s wounds from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were still fresh. Everyone remembers what they were doing when the towers fell. Images of those planes crashing into buildings are tattooed to our retinas. The aftermath of 9/11 was a period in time I would never forget. And so I decided to set Going Home in October 2001.
“Why 2001?” potential readers have asked me. What does 9/11 have to do with the story? None of my characters were victims in the attacks, unless you count Jean-Paul's adoptive parents as collateral damage, killed in an automobile accident when they tried to drive home from Indiana after their flight was grounded. The novel is set in East Texas, far from New York City. But Michelle DePalma, my protagonist, was born in New York and lived there as a small child. I remember my New Yorker friends seemed to take 9/11 a little harder than everyone else. And Michelle and her husband both work for an airline. A former airline employee myself, I can attest that airline employees took particular offense to the use of our industry as a weapon of mass destruction. After 9/11, the airline industry was reeling; people were afraid to fly, and the security procedures we had relied upon had been invalidated.
The terrorist attacks on American soil left psychological scars on almost everyone. Going Home, which was inspired by my mother's battle with Alzheimer’s disease, opens when Michelle DePalma goes home to check on her elderly mother, Lola Hanson, and finds Lola hovering over the bludgeoned body of her caregiver. Alone. An instant suspect. Michelle is forced into a new care-giving role while trying to solve the murder, as well as face the fact that her mother indeed has Alzheimer’s, not just normal shell-shock brought on by the 9/11 attacks.
So that’s the long answer to, “Why 2001?” And writing about that period helped me process my pain, even though, like my characters, I was not directly affected by the attacks and thus have dubious right to that pain.
I just hope my next novel, Secrets of the Galapagos, set in “the present,” gets a publisher soon, before I have to think about making it a period piece, too.
Sharon Marchisello is the author of Going Home (Sunbury Press, 2014) a murder mystery inspired by her mother's battle with Alzheimer’s, and a personal finance e-book, Live Cheaply, Be Happy, Grow Wealthy (smashwords 2013). She earned a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is a member of the Atlanta Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Retired after a 27-year career at Delta Air Lines, she lives in Peachtree City, GA, with her husband and cat, and does volunteer work for the Fayette Humane Society. Read more about Sharon at smarchisello.wordpress.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello
Technology is expanding and evolving quicker than ever. This can make keeping your book in the present tricky if you spend a while writing the book. So, what do you do? You can constantly write and rewrite to keep your book current, or you can pick a time for your book to occur and commit! This week's guest blogger, Sharon Marchisell, discusses her experience picking a timeline for her latest novel, Going Home.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Writing a novel in “the present” can be a challenge if your journey to publication is a long one. Technology changes quickly, requiring constant rewrites to keep your setting current. Not to mention the world leaders, global boundaries and political issues that keep your background fresh.
Your sleuth’s clever deductive reasoning and sneaking around suddenly doesn’t seem so extraordinary, or even plausible. And the bad guys can’t get away with as much as they once did. What about the cameras? What about caller I.D. and GPS tracking?
I recently picked up my first, still unpublished mystery, Murder at Gate 58A, to see if I could salvage anything. I started writing it in the late 1980s, when they had Smoking and Non-Smoking sections on airplanes. Pre-9/11 airport security was more lax; people without current-day tickets could actually walk onto the concourse to meet arriving flights at the gate.
In one scene, my heroine stops at a phone booth to make a call. Today’s readers would laugh out loud. What happened to her smartphone? Isn’t her car equipped with Blue Tooth? And where would she even find a booth with a working phone? Younger readers might even ask, “What’s a phone booth?”
Research trip to the library? Why didn’t she just Google her question?
I either had to do a rewrite just to purge anachronisms, or commit to writing a period piece. My once-contemporary novel is now a historical.
When I started writing Going Home in 2003, I had a full-time job
and several outside commitments. I had about an hour a day to devote to writing, and I’m not fast. So I knew the journey to publication would be long. And I was right. After seven drafts and more rejections than I care to count, I finally got a contract from Sunbury Press in 2013, and the novel came out in August 2014.
Setting Going Home in “the present” would have been daunting. I decided right away that it had to be a period piece, eliminating the need for revisions just to keep up with the times. But what time? And then, how would I be able to keep myself there while I was writing, and resist the urge to give my heroine access to technology that had yet to be invented?
In 2003, our country’s wounds from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were still fresh. Everyone remembers what they were doing when the towers fell. Images of those planes crashing into buildings are tattooed to our retinas. The aftermath of 9/11 was a period in time I would never forget. And so I decided to set Going Home in October 2001.
“Why 2001?” potential readers have asked me. What does 9/11 have to do with the story? None of my characters were victims in the attacks, unless you count Jean-Paul's adoptive parents as collateral damage, killed in an automobile accident when they tried to drive home from Indiana after their flight was grounded. The novel is set in East Texas, far from New York City. But Michelle DePalma, my protagonist, was born in New York and lived there as a small child. I remember my New Yorker friends seemed to take 9/11 a little harder than everyone else. And Michelle and her husband both work for an airline. A former airline employee myself, I can attest that airline employees took particular offense to the use of our industry as a weapon of mass destruction. After 9/11, the airline industry was reeling; people were afraid to fly, and the security procedures we had relied upon had been invalidated.
The terrorist attacks on American soil left psychological scars on almost everyone. Going Home, which was inspired by my mother's battle with Alzheimer’s disease, opens when Michelle DePalma goes home to check on her elderly mother, Lola Hanson, and finds Lola hovering over the bludgeoned body of her caregiver. Alone. An instant suspect. Michelle is forced into a new care-giving role while trying to solve the murder, as well as face the fact that her mother indeed has Alzheimer’s, not just normal shell-shock brought on by the 9/11 attacks.
So that’s the long answer to, “Why 2001?” And writing about that period helped me process my pain, even though, like my characters, I was not directly affected by the attacks and thus have dubious right to that pain.
I just hope my next novel, Secrets of the Galapagos, set in “the present,” gets a publisher soon, before I have to think about making it a period piece, too.
Sharon Marchisello is the author of Going Home (Sunbury Press, 2014) a murder mystery inspired by her mother's battle with Alzheimer’s, and a personal finance e-book, Live Cheaply, Be Happy, Grow Wealthy (smashwords 2013). She earned a Masters in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is a member of the Atlanta Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Retired after a 27-year career at Delta Air Lines, she lives in Peachtree City, GA, with her husband and cat, and does volunteer work for the Fayette Humane Society. Read more about Sharon at smarchisello.wordpress.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis
We have all been told, time and time again, to write what we know. It's such common advice in the writing community that we sometimes fail to think critically about what the advise means. Not all of us are going to be experts on every subject we write. This weeks' guest blogger, Samuel Marquis, revisits this age-old saying and gives it fresh light.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The clichéd advice to “write what you know” is one of the best and most misunderstood pieces of literary counsel given to suspense novelists. It has two components, and both are important in bringing authenticity to your fiction.
The first component is to write what you know based on your intimate familiarity with a professional occupation, event, or setting, which brings verisimilitude to your novel by having your protagonist and other characters move about authentically in the world they inhabit, as well as talk in the proper cultural dialect or techno-speak. The second component isn’t about professional occupations, events, or settings, but rather about infusing your novel with the visceral emotions that you yourself have felt through your joy and pain, suffering and triumph in the world.
My Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series (Blind Thrust: A Mass Murder Mystery and Cluster of Lies, Book 2 of the series, September 2016) is based on my nearly thirty years experience as a professional hydrogeologist involved in environmental health risk assessments, groundwater flow and transport modeling investigations, and serving as a groundwater expert witness in class action litigation cases. The authenticity factor is high in the series because my protagonist essentially does what I do for my job, but there is an important emotional component to the work experience I draw upon as well.
The first book in the series, my award-winning earthquake thriller Blind Thrust, is based on my experiences in California and Texas as a Registered Professional Geologist in assessing earthquake hazards and fault classifications on behalf of real-estate developers in environmental site assessments. The original inspiration for the follow-up Cluster of Lieswas drawn from my professional experience working on the Rosamond cancer cluster case in Southern California. Think Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Michael Clayton but set in Colorado.
With regard to Cluster of Lies, visiting the town of Rosamond, reviewing the documents on file in the local library, and interviewing residents experiencing the cancer cluster firsthand had a profound impact on me, and I would not have written the novel without having worked on Rosamond directly. Like most environmental cancer clusters, the Rosamond cluster remains a mystery to this day, and unresolved real-world mysteries are always a good starting point for a thriller.
In the case of Cluster of Lies, it was both my professional experience and the emotional context that provided powerful fodder for the novel. Through my personal involvement on the project, I could not help but feel the sense of sadness, frustration, powerlessness, and anger of the families and townspeople adversely impacted. The palpable emotions I felt in investigating the cancer cluster ultimately enhanced the narrative power of the novel.
But most thriller writers don’t have the luxury of being an expert on their subjects based on their professional job, so the emotional component of “write what you know” is often more important to authenticity. In that case, it still helps to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding and appreciation for what your protagonist and other major characters do for a living.
That’s why I read everything I can get my hands on and interview as many qualified experts as possible for my novels. For my award-winning political thriller The Coalition, I spent an entire day at the FBI Field Office in downtown Denver meeting with FBI agents and staff members, and they were all amazingly helpful. And for my forthcoming Book 2 of my WWII trilogy, Altar of Resistance (January 2017) and my Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, I have a former U.S. Army Ranger as an advanced reader to make sure I get my soldier/spy lingo and my gunplay right.
Once you’ve done the mega-research, the key is then to resist the temptation to show off your research skills and overload your books with excessive technical and/or historical details, or to include a high level of detail without actually advancing the plot or having characters that captivate readers.
In the end, the objective is to immerse the reader in a new and exciting world while still moving the plot along at a furious pace and making the reader feel as though the details are not details at all, but at the very heart of the setting as well as the characters and their motivations.
To do that, you have to truly feel the emotions of your characters and both understand them and love them (especially your villains). If you succeed in that, then trust me, your readers will feel it too.
Samuel Marquis is a bestselling, award-winning suspense author. He works by day as a VP–Principal Hydrogeologist with an environmental firm in Boulder, Colorado, and by night as the spinner of the Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series, the Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, and a World War Two Trilogy. His thrillers have been #1 Denver Post bestsellers, received multiple national book awards (Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year, USA Best Book, Beverly Hills, and Next Generation Indie), and garnered glowing reviews from #1 bestseller James Patterson, Kirkus, and Foreword Reviews (5 Stars). His website is samuelmarquisbooks.com and for publicity inquiries, please contact Chelsea Apple at chelsea@jkscommunications.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis
We have all been told, time and time again, to write what we know. It's such common advice in the writing community that we sometimes fail to think critically about what the advise means. Not all of us are going to be experts on every subject we write. This weeks' guest blogger, Samuel Marquis, revisits this age-old saying and gives it fresh light.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The clichéd advice to “write what you know” is one of the best and most misunderstood pieces of literary counsel given to suspense novelists. It has two components, and both are important in bringing authenticity to your fiction.
The first component is to write what you know based on your intimate familiarity with a professional occupation, event, or setting, which brings verisimilitude to your novel by having your protagonist and other characters move about authentically in the world they inhabit, as well as talk in the proper cultural dialect or techno-speak. The second component isn’t about professional occupations, events, or settings, but rather about infusing your novel with the visceral emotions that you yourself have felt through your joy and pain, suffering and triumph in the world.
My Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series (Blind Thrust: A Mass Murder Mystery and Cluster of Lies, Book 2 of the series, September 2016) is based on my nearly thirty years experience as a professional hydrogeologist involved in environmental health risk assessments, groundwater flow and transport modeling investigations, and serving as a groundwater expert witness in class action litigation cases. The authenticity factor is high in the series because my protagonist essentially does what I do for my job, but there is an important emotional component to the work experience I draw upon as well.
The first book in the series, my award-winning earthquake thriller Blind Thrust, is based on my experiences in California and Texas as a Registered Professional Geologist in assessing earthquake hazards and fault classifications on behalf of real-estate developers in environmental site assessments. The original inspiration for the follow-up Cluster of Lies was drawn from my professional experience working on the Rosamond cancer cluster case in Southern California. Think Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Michael Clayton but set in Colorado.
With regard to Cluster of Lies, visiting the town of Rosamond, reviewing the documents on file in the local library, and interviewing residents experiencing the cancer cluster firsthand had a profound impact on me, and I would not have written the novel without having worked on Rosamond directly. Like most environmental cancer clusters, the Rosamond cluster remains a mystery to this day, and unresolved real-world mysteries are always a good starting point for a thriller.
In the case of Cluster of Lies, it was both my professional 
experience and the emotional context that provided powerful fodder for the novel. Through my personal involvement on the project, I could not help but feel the sense of sadness, frustration, powerlessness, and anger of the families and townspeople adversely impacted. The palpable emotions I felt in investigating the cancer cluster ultimately enhanced the narrative power of the novel.
But most thriller writers don’t have the luxury of being an expert on their subjects based on their professional job, so the emotional component of “write what you know” is often more important to authenticity. In that case, it still helps to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding and appreciation for what your protagonist and other major characters do for a living.
That’s why I read everything I can get my hands on and interview as many qualified experts as possible for my novels. For my award-winning political thriller The Coalition, I spent an entire day at the FBI Field Office in downtown Denver meeting with FBI agents and staff members, and they were all amazingly helpful. And for my forthcoming Book 2 of my WWII trilogy, Altar of Resistance (January 2017) and my Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, I have a former U.S. Army Ranger as an advanced reader to make sure I get my soldier/spy lingo and my gunplay right.
Once you’ve done the mega-research, the key is then to resist the temptation to show off your research skills and overload your books with excessive technical and/or historical details, or to include a high level of detail without actually advancing the plot or having characters that captivate readers.
In the end, the objective is to immerse the reader in a new and exciting world while still moving the plot along at a furious pace and making the reader feel as though the details are not details at all, but at the very heart of the setting as well as the characters and their motivations.
To do that, you have to truly feel the emotions of your characters and both understand them and love them (especially your villains). If you succeed in that, then trust me, your readers will feel it too.
Samuel Marquis is a bestselling, award-winning suspense author. He works by day as a VP–Principal Hydrogeologist with an environmental firm in Boulder, Colorado, and by night as the spinner of the Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series, the Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, and a World War Two Trilogy. His thrillers have been #1 Denver Post bestsellers, received multiple national book awards (Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year, USA Best Book, Beverly Hills, and Next Generation Indie), and garnered glowing reviews from #1 bestseller James Patterson, Kirkus, and Foreword Reviews (5 Stars). His website is samuelmarquisbooks.com and for publicity inquiries, please contact Chelsea Apple at chelsea@jkscommunications.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis
We have all been told, time and time again, to write what we know. It's such common advice in the writing community that we sometimes fail to think critically about what the advise means. Not all of us are going to be experts on every subject we write. This weeks' guest blogger, Samuel Marquis, revisits this age-old saying and gives it fresh light.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The clichéd advice to “write what you know” is one of the best and most misunderstood pieces of literary counsel given to suspense novelists. It has two components, and both are important in bringing authenticity to your fiction.
The first component is to write what you know based on your intimate familiarity with a professional occupation, event, or setting, which brings verisimilitude to your novel by having your protagonist and other characters move about authentically in the world they inhabit, as well as talk in the proper cultural dialect or techno-speak. The second component isn’t about professional occupations, events, or settings, but rather about infusing your novel with the visceral emotions that you yourself have felt through your joy and pain, suffering and triumph in the world.
My Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series (Blind Thrust: A Mass Murder Mystery and Cluster of Lies, Book 2 of the series, September 2016) is based on my nearly thirty years experience as a professional hydrogeologist involved in environmental health risk assessments, groundwater flow and transport modeling investigations, and serving as a groundwater expert witness in class action litigation cases. The authenticity factor is high in the series because my protagonist essentially does what I do for my job, but there is an important emotional component to the work experience I draw upon as well.
The first book in the series, my award-winning earthquake thriller Blind Thrust, is based on my experiences in California and Texas as a Registered Professional Geologist in assessing earthquake hazards and fault classifications on behalf of real-estate developers in environmental site assessments. The original inspiration for the follow-up Cluster of Lies was drawn from my professional experience working on the Rosamond cancer cluster case in Southern California. Think Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action, and Michael Clayton but set in Colorado.
With regard to Cluster of Lies, visiting the town of Rosamond, reviewing the documents on file in the local library, and interviewing residents experiencing the cancer cluster firsthand had a profound impact on me, and I would not have written the novel without having worked on Rosamond directly. Like most environmental cancer clusters, the Rosamond cluster remains a mystery to this day, and unresolved real-world mysteries are always a good starting point for a thriller.
In the case of Cluster of Lies, it was both my professional 
experience and the emotional context that provided powerful fodder for the novel. Through my personal involvement on the project, I could not help but feel the sense of sadness, frustration, powerlessness, and anger of the families and townspeople adversely impacted. The palpable emotions I felt in investigating the cancer cluster ultimately enhanced the narrative power of the novel.
But most thriller writers don’t have the luxury of being an expert on their subjects based on their professional job, so the emotional component of “write what you know” is often more important to authenticity. In that case, it still helps to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding and appreciation for what your protagonist and other major characters do for a living.
That’s why I read everything I can get my hands on and interview as many qualified experts as possible for my novels. For my award-winning political thriller The Coalition, I spent an entire day at the FBI Field Office in downtown Denver meeting with FBI agents and staff members, and they were all amazingly helpful. And for my forthcoming Book 2 of my WWII trilogy, Altar of Resistance (January 2017) and my Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, I have a former U.S. Army Ranger as an advanced reader to make sure I get my soldier/spy lingo and my gunplay right.
Once you’ve done the mega-research, the key is then to resist the temptation to show off your research skills and overload your books with excessive technical and/or historical details, or to include a high level of detail without actually advancing the plot or having characters that captivate readers.
In the end, the objective is to immerse the reader in a new and exciting world while still moving the plot along at a furious pace and making the reader feel as though the details are not details at all, but at the very heart of the setting as well as the characters and their motivations.
To do that, you have to truly feel the emotions of your characters and both understand them and love them (especially your villains). If you succeed in that, then trust me, your readers will feel it too.
Samuel Marquis is a bestselling, award-winning suspense author. He works by day as a VP–Principal Hydrogeologist with an environmental firm in Boulder, Colorado, and by night as the spinner of the Joe Higheagle Environmental Sleuth Series, the Nick Lassiter International Espionage Series, and a World War Two Trilogy. His thrillers have been #1 Denver Post bestsellers, received multiple national book awards (Foreword Reviews’ Book of the Year, USA Best Book, Beverly Hills, and Next Generation Indie), and garnered glowing reviews from #1 bestseller James Patterson, Kirkus, and Foreword Reviews (5 Stars). His website is samuelmarquisbooks.com and for publicity inquiries, please contact Chelsea Apple at chelsea@jkscommunications.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker
As writers our achievements are measured in several ways. It is not uncommon for writers to talk about how many words per day they are capable of producing. However, what we often forget is that the quality of the words, and the weight that those words carry, proves to be the more important bragging point. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Samuel Parker, discusses his experience with writing short and powerful sentences in his new book, Purgatory Road.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
There is a scene from the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It where young Norman Maclean presents his father, his schoolmaster, with a piece of writing. Norman hands in his composition and his father marks it up with red, telling him “Again . . . half as long.” This happens several times until the writing is approved, thrown in the trash, and the boy runs off to fish.
The Art of Brevity
In a world where the mark of a “true” writer seems to be the word count tally of the day or week or month, brevity can be a sign of lack of discipline. However, brevity can be a valuable tool to wield and provide space for a reader to incorporate their own imagination into your story.
One of my favorite chapters in my book Purgatory Road has only 51 words. It looks a bit odd in book form, taking up less than a half page. But I feel it is one of the more unique chapters in the book, as it conveys so much more emotion, context, and suspense than what would have been accomplished at 10 times the word count. (For context, the couple is stranded in the Mojave for a long while when we arrive at this scene.)
17
Morning light skirted the eastern ring of the valley as gently as an Easter sunrise.
“Jack,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Jack . . . water?”
“No.”
“It’s all gone?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
They drifted in a daze between waking and oblivion.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you left.”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
Brevity causes you to be confident in the words you have chosen, and confident that the reader will add what is flexible and implied, giving them more investment and bringing the story to life with much more vividness as it becomes laced with their own imagination and memory.
One perfectly placed sentence can cut to the heart of a thought as quick as a Ginsu and with just as much ferocity. In fact, I think it can do more to impress on the reader the gravity of the story than burying them in superfluous prose.
The Sound of Silence
Music composition uses silence just as much as sounds. A pause or muted part allows the listener’s mind to wander, reflect, or ponder, as one writer said, “what it is that echoes in the silence.”[1] I would argue that sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter composition can accomplish much of the same effect. The problem that surfaces is our fear of trusting the reader to imagine our world in their own minds, to relinquish the keys of creation, and let a fragment echo in the silence and expand apart from the written word.
In Purgatory Road, I use fragments to a level that caused my editor a bit of concern. Sentences are not supposed to look like this; even Microsoft tries to flag our attention and scream, “This is wrong!” Below is an example of something I like to do in controlling the pace of a narrative with single words:
Laura stared out of the windshield. The road ran off out of sight, disappearing into the horizon, mesmerizing in its seemingly magical disappearance.
Alone.
She thumbed her wedding ring in absentminded play, the sweat beginning to seep out of her skin, causing the band to roll freely around her finger. She looked at it, its jewel sparkling, shining in the rays streaming through the glass.
The “Alone” gets grammatically flagged, but as read, it causes the reader to stop. A bullet. Even if it’s only for a fraction of a second, the reader has to contemplate that word in isolation. It’s more forceful than saying “she was all alone sitting in the car.” Alone. There is something slightly menacing in reducing the clutter and getting down to the raw bone of what you are trying to say.
The world is not binary, so this bit of advice will not work for all occasions. Some things need explaining, some do not. But I would challenge you to look at your recent work, the one with the mega word count that you celebrated to your friends on Twitter about, and hear the voice of Norman Maclean’s father as you reread it: “Again . . . half as long.”
You may surprise yourself by how a more direct and simple word choice cuts down to the marrow of the story you are trying to tell.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/08/silence_is_golden.html.
Samuel Parker was born in the Michigan boondocks but was raised on a never-ending road trip through the US. Besides writing, he is a process junkie and the ex-guitarist for several metal bands you’ve never heard of. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and twin sons. Read more at samuelparkerbooks.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker
As writers our achievements are measured in several ways. It is not uncommon for writers to talk about how many words per day they are capable of producing. However, what we often forget is that the quality of the words, and the weight that those words carry, proves to be the more important bragging point. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Samuel Parker, discusses his experience with writing short and powerful sentences in his new book, Purgatory Road.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
There is a scene from the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It where young Norman Maclean presents his father, his schoolmaster, with a piece of writing. Norman hands in his composition and his father marks it up with red, telling him “Again . . . half as long.” This happens several times until the writing is approved, thrown in the trash, and the boy runs off to fish.
The Art of Brevity
In a world where the mark of a “true” writer seems to be the word count tally of the day or week or month, brevity can be a sign of lack of discipline. However, brevity can be a valuable tool to wield and provide space for a reader to incorporate their own imagination into your story.
One of my favorite chapters in my book Purgatory Road has only 51 words. It looks a bit odd in book form, taking up less than a half page. But I feel it is one of the more unique chapters in the book, as it conveys so much more emotion, context, and suspense than what would have been accomplished at 10 times the word count. (For context, the couple is stranded in the Mojave for a long while when we arrive at this scene.)
17
Morning light skirted the eastern ring of the valley as gently as an Easter sunrise.
“Jack,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Jack . . . water?”
“No.”
“It’s all gone?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
They drifted in a daze between waking and oblivion.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you left.”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
Brevity causes you to be confident in the words you have chosen, and confident that the reader will add what is flexible and implied, giving them more investment and bringing the story to life with much more vividness as it becomes laced with their own imagination and memory.
One perfectly placed sentence can cut to the heart of a thought as quick as a Ginsu and with just as much ferocity. In fact, I think it can do more to impress on the reader the gravity of the story than burying them in superfluous prose.
The Sound of Silence
Music composition uses silence just as much as sounds. A pause or muted part allows the listener’s mind to wander, reflect, or ponder, as one writer said, “what it is that echoes in the silence.”[1] I would argue that sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter composition can accomplish much of the same effect. The problem that surfaces is our fear of trusting the reader to imagine our world in their own minds, to relinquish the keys of creation, and let a fragment echo in the silence and expand apart from the written word.
In Purgatory Road, I use fragments to a level that caused my editor a bit of concern. Sentences are not supposed to look like this; even Microsoft tries to flag our attention and scream, “This is wrong!” Below is an example of something I like to do in controlling the pace of a narrative with single words:
Laura stared out of the windshield. The road ran off out of sight, disappearing into the horizon, mesmerizing in its seemingly magical disappearance.
Alone.
She thumbed her wedding ring in absentminded play, the sweat beginning to seep out of her skin, causing the band to roll freely around her finger. She looked at it, its jewel sparkling, shining in the rays streaming through the glass.
The “Alone” gets grammatically flagged, but as read, it causes the reader to stop. A bullet. Even if it’s only for a fraction of a second, the reader has to contemplate that word in isolation. It’s more forceful than saying “she was all alone sitting in the car.” Alone. There is something slightly menacing in reducing the clutter and getting down to the raw bone of what you are trying to say.
The world is not binary, so this bit of advice will not work for all occasions. Some things need explaining, some do not. But I would challenge you to look at your recent work, the one with the mega word count that you celebrated to your friends on Twitter about, and hear the voice of Norman Maclean’s father as you reread it: “Again . . . half as long.”
You may surprise yourself by how a more direct and simple word choice cuts down to the marrow of the story you are trying to tell.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/08/silence_is_golden.html.
Samuel Parker was born in the Michigan boondocks but was raised on a never-ending road trip through the US. Besides writing, he is a process junkie and the ex-guitarist for several metal bands you’ve never heard of. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and twin sons. Read more at samuelparkerbooks.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker
As writers our achievements are measured in several ways. It is not uncommon for writers to talk about how many words per day they are capable of producing. However, what we often forget is that the quality of the words, and the weight that those words carry, proves to be the more important bragging point. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Samuel Parker, discusses his experience with writing short and powerful sentences in his new book, Purgatory Road.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
There is a scene from the film adaptation of A River Runs Through It where young Norman Maclean presents his father, his schoolmaster, with a piece of writing. Norman hands in his composition and his father marks it up with red, telling him “Again . . . half as long.” This happens several times until the writing is approved, thrown in the trash, and the boy runs off to fish.
The Art of Brevity
In a world where the mark of a “true” writer seems to be the word count tally of the day or week or month, brevity can be a sign of lack of discipline. However, brevity can be a valuable tool to wield and provide space for a reader to incorporate their own imagination into your story.
One of my favorite chapters in my book Purgatory Road has only 51 words. It looks a bit odd in book form, taking up less than a half page. But I feel it is one of the more unique chapters in the book, as it conveys so much more emotion, context, and suspense than what would have been accomplished at 10 times the word count. (For context, the couple is stranded in the Mojave for a long while when we arrive at this scene.)
17
Morning light skirted the eastern ring of the valley as gently as an Easter sunrise.
“Jack,” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Jack . . . water?”
“No.”
“It’s all gone?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay.”
They drifted in a daze between waking and oblivion.
“Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“I thought you left.”
“Nope.”
“Okay.”
Brevity causes you to be confident in the words you have chosen, and confident that the reader will add what is flexible and implied, giving them more investment and bringing the story to life with much more vividness as it becomes laced with their own imagination and memory.
One perfectly placed sentence can cut to the heart of a thought as quick as a Ginsu and with just as much ferocity. In fact, I think it can do more to impress on the reader the gravity of the story than burying them in superfluous prose.
The Sound of Silence
Music composition uses silence just as much as sounds. A pause or muted part allows the listener’s mind to wander, reflect, or ponder, as one writer said, “what it is that echoes in the silence.”[1] I would argue that sentence, paragraph, page, and chapter composition can accomplish much of the same effect. The problem that surfaces is our fear of trusting the reader to imagine our world in their own minds, to relinquish the keys of creation, and let a fragment echo in the silence and expand apart from the written word.
In Purgatory Road, I use fragments to a level that caused my editor a bit of concern. Sentences are not supposed to look like this; even Microsoft tries to flag our attention and scream, “This is wrong!” Below is an example of something I like to do in controlling the pace of a narrative with single words:
Laura stared out of the windshield. The road ran off out of sight, disappearing into the horizon, mesmerizing in its seemingly magical disappearance.
Alone.
She thumbed her wedding ring in absentminded play, the sweat beginning to seep out of her skin, causing the band to roll freely around her finger. She looked at it, its jewel sparkling, shining in the rays streaming through the glass.
The “Alone” gets grammatically flagged, but as read, it causes the reader to stop. A bullet. Even if it’s only for a fraction of a second, the reader has to contemplate that word in isolation. It’s more forceful than saying “she was all alone sitting in the car.” Alone. There is something slightly menacing in reducing the clutter and getting down to the raw bone of what you are trying to say.
The world is not binary, so this bit of advice will not work for all occasions. Some things need explaining, some do not. But I would challenge you to look at your recent work, the one with the mega word count that you celebrated to your friends on Twitter about, and hear the voice of Norman Maclean’s father as you reread it: “Again . . . half as long.”
You may surprise yourself by how a more direct and simple word choice cuts down to the marrow of the story you are trying to tell.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/08/silence_is_golden.html.
Samuel Parker was born in the Michigan boondocks but was raised on a never-ending road trip through the US. Besides writing, he is a process junkie and the ex-guitarist for several metal bands you’ve never heard of. He lives in West Michigan with his wife and twin sons. Read more at samuelparkerbooks.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing … Maybe? / Claire Applewhite
It’s much too easy to find oneself wrapped up in the work of being an author. Writing has its own set of demands, and today’s authors are expected to also function as editors, publicists, marketing strategists, researchers—you name it. But, as any good writer can tell you, the payoff is in those moments where fantasy and reality intersect. It’s in these moments that inspiration strikes and the writing flourishes.
In this week’s Killer Nashville Guest Blog, author Claire Applewhite explores what it means enter into that give-and-take between the real and imagined.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Sooner or later, if a writer is fortunate, it happens. I’m referring to that magic moment when your hero rises up from the ashes. I’m talking about a connection.
I’m talking about 3:30 a.m., and you need answers. Suddenly, they appear.
You may not notice that you don’t notice. You may continue to type. Secretly, you might even rejoice that this human wannabe is finally pulling its own weight. You were beginning to wonder about that, I know. I know, because the same thoughts occurred to me, but, I digress.
I was, I thought, well acquainted with my Vietnam vet-turned-PI, Elvin Suggs. After all I’d put him through in The Wrong Side of Memphis, what else could happen to him? Oh, did I have a lot to learn!
The year was 2011. For a while, I had been researching the history of Coral Courts, a St. Louis no-tell motel. It seemed like the perfect place for a murder mystery setting. Why? Each bungalow had its own garage and private entrance. Of course, the motel staff was expected to exercise discretion.
I don’t struggle with writer’s block, nor do I wait for inspiration.to write. I have a goal of five pages a day, and that is my guideline. Around 3:45 one morning, I was trying to decide where Elvin Suggs was going after losing another round with Dimond “Di” Redding. My second book, St. Louis Hustle, was halfway complete, and yet I felt weary and frustrated. “C’mon Elvin,” I said, “what do you really want?’ In that isolated moment, I felt a presence I couldn't explain. Suddenly, I knew exactly where Elvin was going. Three months later, the first draft of St. Louis Hustle was finished! Still, I wanted to know: who provided the answer?
Faced with a quirky question without answers, I did what I usually do in such a pressing situation. I asked Google. It turns out, Elvin Suggs got himself a sweet spot on the Thrilling Detective website. Yes, he did. All by his lonesome.
And, he never told me.
I sensed my rising indignation. This was news! Why didn’t Elvin tell me?
FACT: Elvin Suggs is not a real man.
FACT: Elvin Suggs cannot talk.
Still, he could give me his new address. When is he most likely to visit? I’ve noticed a pattern: I am usually alone, it is typically around 4:00 a.m., and like a sizzling skillet waiting for a steak, the world that Elvin is about to enter is tense, threatening, and entirely too hot.
A writer that I admire once told me that she never had to rewrite anything that she wrote at three o’clock in the morning. I, too, have found that claim to be true. Indeed, a physician once observed that many critically ill patients expire between three and five a.m. At this time, in his opinion, the veil between the physical world and the supernatural is at its thinnest; those who might seek protection from demons are in a most vulnerable state. I know that if I am searching for answers, somehow they will be there if the setting feels alive, the action crackles with tension, and the characters possess a certain intrigue. Elvin is most likely to appear when a petite blonde arrives on the scene. Any scene will do, by the way.
And there is something else. One must disconnect from the known to connect with the unknown. After all, there is no need to engage the imagination to observe the familiar. The insight that allows the imagination to create something out of nothing demands a stiff tariff: an exchange of reality for stardust, the stuff that dreams are made of. So, dream on—until your dream comes true—or talks back.
Shore 'nuf.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing … Maybe? / Claire Applewhite
It’s much too easy to find oneself wrapped up in the work of being an author. Writing has its own set of demands, and today’s authors are expected to also function as editors, publicists, marketing strategists, researchers—you name it. But, as any good writer can tell you, the payoff is in those moments where fantasy and reality intersect. It’s in these moments that inspiration strikes and the writing flourishes.
In this week’s Killer Nashville Guest Blog, author Claire Applewhite explores what it means enter into that give-and-take between the real and imagined.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Sooner or later, if a writer is fortunate, it happens. I’m referring to that magic moment when your hero rises up from the ashes. I’m talking about a connection.
I’m talking about 3:30 a.m., and you need answers. Suddenly, they appear.
You may not notice that you don’t notice. You may continue to type. Secretly, you might even rejoice that this human wannabe is finally pulling its own weight. You were beginning to wonder about that, I know. I know, because the same thoughts occurred to me, but, I digress.
I was, I thought, well acquainted with my Vietnam vet-turned-PI, Elvin Suggs. After all I’d put him through in The Wrong Side of Memphis, what else could happen to him? Oh, did I have a lot to learn!
The year was 2011. For a while, I had been researching the history of Coral Courts, a St. Louis no-tell motel. It seemed like the perfect place for a murder mystery setting. Why? Each bungalow had its own garage and private entrance. Of course, the motel staff was expected to exercise discretion.
I don’t struggle with writer’s block, nor do I wait for inspiration.to write. I have a goal of five pages a day, and that is my guideline. Around 3:45 one morning, I was trying to decide where Elvin Suggs was going after losing another round with Dimond “Di” Redding. My second book, St. Louis Hustle, was halfway complete, and yet I felt weary and frustrated. “C’mon Elvin,” I said, “what do you really want?’ In that isolated moment, I felt a presence I couldn't explain. Suddenly, I knew exactly where Elvin was going. Three months later, the first draft of St. Louis Hustle was finished! Still, I wanted to know: who provided the answer?
Faced with a quirky question without answers, I did what I usually do in such a pressing situation. I asked Google. It turns out, Elvin Suggs got himself a sweet spot on the Thrilling Detective website. Yes, he did. All by his lonesome.
And, he never told me.
I sensed my rising indignation. This was news! Why didn’t Elvin tell me?
FACT: Elvin Suggs is not a real man.
FACT: Elvin Suggs cannot talk.
Still, he could give me his new address. When is he most likely to visit? I’ve noticed a pattern: I am usually alone, it is typically around 4:00 a.m., and like a sizzling skillet waiting for a steak, the world that Elvin is about to enter is tense, threatening, and entirely too hot.
A writer that I admire once told me that she never had to rewrite anything that she wrote at three o’clock in the morning. I, too, have found that claim to be true. Indeed, a physician once observed that many critically ill patients expire between three and five a.m. At this time, in his opinion, the veil between the physical world and the supernatural is at its thinnest; those who might seek protection from demons are in a most vulnerable state. I know that if I am searching for answers, somehow they will be there if the setting feels alive, the action crackles with tension, and the characters possess a certain intrigue. Elvin is most likely to appear when a petite blonde arrives on the scene. Any scene will do, by the way.
And there is something else. One must disconnect from the known to connect with the unknown. After all, there is no need to engage the imagination to observe the familiar. The insight that allows the imagination to create something out of nothing demands a stiff tariff: an exchange of reality for stardust, the stuff that dreams are made of. So, dream on—until your dream comes true—or talks back.
Shore 'nuf.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing … Maybe? / Claire Applewhite
It’s much too easy to find oneself wrapped up in the work of being an author. Writing has its own set of demands, and today’s authors are expected to also function as editors, publicists, marketing strategists, researchers—you name it. But, as any good writer can tell you, the payoff is in those moments where fantasy and reality intersect. It’s in these moments that inspiration strikes and the writing flourishes.
In this week’s Killer Nashville Guest Blog, author Claire Applewhite explores what it means enter into that give-and-take between the real and imagined.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Sooner or later, if a writer is fortunate, it happens. I’m referring to that magic moment when your hero rises up from the ashes. I’m talking about a connection.
I’m talking about 3:30 a.m., and you need answers. Suddenly, they appear.
You may not notice that you don’t notice. You may continue to type. Secretly, you might even rejoice that this human wannabe is finally pulling its own weight. You were beginning to wonder about that, I know. I know, because the same thoughts occurred to me, but, I digress.
I was, I thought, well acquainted with my Vietnam vet-turned-PI, Elvin Suggs. After all I’d put him through in The Wrong Side of Memphis, what else could happen to him? Oh, did I have a lot to learn!
The year was 2011. For a while, I had been researching the history of Coral Courts, a St. Louis no-tell motel. It seemed like the perfect place for a murder mystery setting. Why? Each bungalow had its own garage and private entrance. Of course, the motel staff was expected to exercise discretion.
I don’t struggle with writer’s block, nor do I wait for inspiration.to write. I have a goal of five pages a day, and that is my guideline. Around 3:45 one morning, I was trying to decide where Elvin Suggs was going after losing another round with Dimond “Di” Redding. My second book, St. Louis Hustle, was halfway complete, and yet I felt weary and frustrated. “C’mon Elvin,” I said, “what do you really want?’ In that isolated moment, I felt a presence I couldn't explain. Suddenly, I knew exactly where Elvin was going. Three months later, the first draft of St. Louis Hustle was finished! Still, I wanted to know: who provided the answer?
Faced with a quirky question without answers, I did what I usually do in such a pressing situation. I asked Google. It turns out, Elvin Suggs got himself a sweet spot on the Thrilling Detective website. Yes, he did. All by his lonesome.
And, he never told me.
I sensed my rising indignation. This was news! Why didn’t Elvin tell me?
FACT: Elvin Suggs is not a real man.
FACT: Elvin Suggs cannot talk.
Still, he could give me his new address. When is he most likely to visit? I’ve noticed a pattern: I am usually alone, it is typically around 4:00 a.m., and like a sizzling skillet waiting for a steak, the world that Elvin is about to enter is tense, threatening, and entirely too hot.
A writer that I admire once told me that she never had to rewrite anything that she wrote at three o’clock in the morning. I, too, have found that claim to be true. Indeed, a physician once observed that many critically ill patients expire between three and five a.m. At this time, in his opinion, the veil between the physical world and the supernatural is at its thinnest; those who might seek protection from demons are in a most vulnerable state. I know that if I am searching for answers, somehow they will be there if the setting feels alive, the action crackles with tension, and the characters possess a certain intrigue. Elvin is most likely to appear when a petite blonde arrives on the scene. Any scene will do, by the way.
And there is something else. One must disconnect from the known to connect with the unknown. After all, there is no need to engage the imagination to observe the familiar. The insight that allows the imagination to create something out of nothing demands a stiff tariff: an exchange of reality for stardust, the stuff that dreams are made of. So, dream on—until your dream comes true—or talks back.
Shore 'nuf.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Thrill of the Kill / Merry Jones
Writing in the thriller genre is an experience unlike any other. Not only do we get our reader's palms sweaty and their hearts racing, but we often times get our adrenaline pumping while we write! As the excitement peaks we find ourselves ticking ever-harder at the keys until, before we know it, we have knocked out a few pages of thrilling literature. This week's guest blogger, Merry Jones, discusses her experience with trying to write a murder free thriller.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
In 2016, after writing a dozen thrillers, I decided to try something new: writing a book that didn’t include a single murder. I was going to switch it up and produce a novel that focused more on nuances of character than on twists of plot, more on relationships and society than on renegades and sociopaths.
I started out optimistic and fresh. With great enthusiasm, I followed the protagonist through her days, traced her routine, her interactions with husband, children, mother, friends and rivals. I let her inner life unfold, revealed her motivations, thoughts and, gradually, her backstory. I planted seeds of conflict in more than one of her relationships.
I made it almost to a hundred pages of Child’s Play (January 2017) before I had to kill somebody. I couldn’t hold out any longer. Couldn’t help it.
In a frenzy of fingers on keyboard, I dispatched the victim in a particularly nasty way. And I didn’t regret it. In fact, I felt satisfied. Enormously relieved.
As thriller writers, maybe you understand. Without murder or mayhem, the work seemed flat and dull. And not only that. I admit it: I enjoyed the kill.
Was it wrong? A weakness on my part? Does the murder reflect my dark world-view or something twisted in my psyche? Why couldn’t I write a murder-free book? With a universe of choices, why do I persist in choosing plots in which the protagonist faces violence and merciless, brutal slaughter?
Certainly there is drama that doesn’t involve killing. People suffer non-lethal dilemmas. They make bad choices. They have character flaws. Lose their wealth, health, dreams, innocence and sanity. Get betrayed by lovers, friends, spouses, and partners. Villains can be serial swindlers, serial liars or serial losers. They don’t have to be serial killers.
Even thrillers, theoretically, can be written without a homicide. Coups, conspiracies, contaminations and kidnappings are just a few crimes that can be conducted without a drop of blood. Clearly, countless volumes of great murder-free literature — including some of our genre — have been written through the centuries.
So why couldn’t I write just one. Why on page 97 was I compelled to kill the protagonist’s best friend?
It wasn’t just because of her nasal voice or the perpetually perfect highlights in her hair. Nor was it her compulsion to brag and one-up. No. The killing wasn’t about the victim. It was about me, my need to off somebody.
After days of disappointment in myself for not achieving my murderless manuscript goal, I’ve come up with some theories about why I failed. I wonder if any of you will relate.
The Game. For me, writing involves engaging in a game with readers. That game requires my characters to be caught up in a high stakes puzzle that they, along with the readers, are racing the clock to solve. Along the way, readers vicariously experience the characters’ risks and dangers. The greater the risks and the higher the stakes of failure, the more urgent solving the puzzle becomes. And the highest stake is the ultimate price: getting killed. I like urgent, so I set the stakes high.
Deity Complex. Writing about murder and death puts me in charge of mortality, at least in the world of the book. As far as the characters are concerned, I am God, the creator and destroyer, the one with the power to decide who lives, who dies. Even if it’s fiction, being God is a pretty good gig. And in that small pretend world for the short time it’s in my hands, death becomes manageable, controllable. Even sometimes sensible.
I get to see inside the bad guys. Because they are human, good villains (not an oxymoron) are not simply embodiments of evil. Like all of us, they are capable of both “good” and “bad” behavior. Their traits and motivations exist to some degree in of all of us, thus pressing readers--and the writer--to confront our own potentials for badness. But without committing dire and disturbing acts like murder, villains pale. The less daunting their choice of behavior, the less demanding its effect on readers—and the writer.
Finally, as a female, I like to create female protagonists who resist the traditional socio-political roles of passive, weak and vulnerable victims. By standing up to murderers, winning battles with the highest stakes, destroying or even killing villains, these fictional females can serve as metaphors for real women—and anyone else who has struggled to survive and/or defeat injustice, brutality and misfortune.
These are the rationales I’ve come up with for killing my characters. Do any of them apply to you?
Merry Jones is a versatile author, having written suspense novels, thrillers, mysteries, humor and non-fiction. Jones lives outside of Philadelphia where she teaches creative writing, belongs to many writing organizations including the Philadelphia Liars Club, and sculls on the Schuylkill River. Her third novel in the Elle Harrison thrillers series, Child’s Play, was released in January 2017. Reach her at merryjones.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Thrill of the Kill / Merry Jones
Writing in the thriller genre is an experience unlike any other. Not only do we get our reader's palms sweaty and their hearts racing, but we often times get our adrenaline pumping while we write! As the excitement peaks we find ourselves ticking ever-harder at the keys until, before we know it, we have knocked out a few pages of thrilling literature. This week's guest blogger, Merry Jones, discusses her experience with trying to write a murder free thriller.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
In 2016, after writing a dozen thrillers, I decided to try something new: writing a book that didn’t include a single murder. I was going to switch it up and produce a novel that focused more on nuances of character than on twists of plot, more on relationships and society than on renegades and sociopaths.
I started out optimistic and fresh. With great enthusiasm, I followed the protagonist through her days, traced her routine, her interactions with husband, children, mother, friends and rivals. I let her inner life unfold, revealed her motivations, thoughts and, gradually, her backstory. I planted seeds of conflict in more than one of her relationships.
I made it almost to a hundred pages of Child’s Play (January 2017) before I had to kill somebody. I couldn’t hold out any longer. Couldn’t help it.
In a frenzy of fingers on keyboard, I dispatched the victim in a particularly nasty way. And I didn’t regret it. In fact, I felt satisfied. Enormously relieved.
As thriller writers, maybe you understand. Without murder or mayhem, the work seemed flat and dull. And not only that. I admit it: I enjoyed the kill.
Was it wrong? A weakness on my part? Does the murder reflect my dark world-view or something twisted in my psyche? Why couldn’t I write a murder-free book? With a universe of choices, why do I persist in choosing plots in which the protagonist faces violence and merciless, brutal slaughter?
Certainly there is drama that doesn’t involve killing. People suffer non-lethal dilemmas. They make bad choices. They have character flaws. Lose their wealth, health, dreams, innocence and sanity. Get betrayed by lovers, friends, spouses, and partners. Villains can be serial swindlers, serial liars or serial losers. They don’t have to be seria
l killers.
Even thrillers, theoretically, can be written without a homicide. Coups, conspiracies, contaminations and kidnappings are just a few crimes that can be conducted without a drop of blood. Clearly, countless volumes of great murder-free literature — including some of our genre — have been written through the centuries.
So why couldn’t I write just one. Why on page 97 was I compelled to kill the protagonist’s best friend?
It wasn’t just because of her nasal voice or the perpetually perfect highlights in her hair. Nor was it her compulsion to brag and one-up. No. The killing wasn’t about the victim. It was about me, my need to off somebody.
After days of disappointment in myself for not achieving my murderless manuscript goal, I’ve come up with some theories about why I failed. I wonder if any of you will relate.
- The Game. For me, writing involves engaging in a game with readers. That game requires my characters to be caught up in a high stakes puzzle that they, along with the readers, are racing the clock to solve. Along the way, readers vicariously experience the characters’ risks and dangers. The greater the risks and the higher the stakes of failure, the more urgent solving the puzzle becomes. And the highest stake is the ultimate price: getting killed. I like urgent, so I set the stakes high.
- Deity Complex. Writing about murder and death puts me in charge of mortality, at least in the world of the book. As far as the characters are concerned, I am God, the creator and destroyer, the one with the power to decide who lives, who dies. Even if it’s fiction, being God is a pretty good gig. And in that small pretend world for the short time it’s in my hands, death becomes manageable, controllable. Even sometimes sensible.
- I get to see inside the bad guys. Because they are human, good villains (not an oxymoron) are not simply embodiments of evil. Like all of us, they are capable of both “good” and “bad” behavior. Their traits and motivations exist to some degree in of all of us, thus pressing readers--and the writer--to confront our own potentials for badness. But without committing dire and disturbing acts like murder, villains pale. The less daunting their choice of behavior, the less demanding its effect on readers—and the writer.
- Finally, as a female, I like to create female protagonists who resist the traditional socio-political roles of passive, weak and vulnerable victims. By standing up to murderers, winning battles with the highest stakes, destroying or even killing villains, these fictional females can serve as metaphors for real women—and anyone else who has struggled to survive and/or defeat injustice, brutality and misfortune.
These are the rationales I’ve come up with for killing my characters. Do any of them apply to you?
Merry Jones is a versatile author, having written suspense novels, thrillers, mysteries, humor and non-fiction. Jones lives outside of Philadelphia where she teaches creative writing, belongs to many writing organizations including the Philadelphia Liars Club, and sculls on the Schuylkill River. Her third novel in the Elle Harrison thrillers series, Child’s Play, was released in January 2017. Reach her at merryjones.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Arthur Jackson, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
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