KN Magazine: Articles

4/19/17 4/19/17

What Does It Mean to Write What You Know? / Patricia Bradley

Write what you know. It can be a very restricting piece of advice when taken literally. Sometimes we want to write on something that we don't have an in depth understanding of, and that's fine. In fact, I'd encourage it. When writing in unknown territory use your resources. Reach out to friends and professionals in the field. Write what you know, and learn what you don't.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Write what you know. We’ve heard that phrase so much, it’s become a cliché, and we often equate it with writing what we have personal knowledge of, as in a career. I’ve found writing what I know to mean much more.

When I sat down to start Justice Delayed, my first Memphis cold case novel, I stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page for a good two hours. It was as if everything I knew about writing had suddenly deserted me.

I paced a bit, got a cup of coffee, thumbed through a couple of craft books, and then remembered, write what you know. Okay, what did I need to know about the story? Before I can begin any story, I have to know my characters since my characters drive the plot.

That’s where I started to work—fleshing them out. And hit a wall. My heroine is a TV reporter, something I only know about from watching the news. I have no personal information about the job. But I do have a friend who is in the field and shot an email off to her for information. In a bit, I got an email back, and we communicated back and forth until I felt I had a handle on my heroine.

My hero is a sergeant with the Memphis Police Department. Again this is out of my realm of expertise, but I had a contact in the MPD Cold Case Division already lined up. A year earlier, he gave me a tour of the cold case and homicide departments along with his contact information, and I’ve kept the airways hot with texts and emails as I’ve written these novels.

When you know nothing about a subject, find someone who does.

I grew up in Memphis so the setting was just a matter of reacquainting myself with the area. However, part of the story takes place at Riverbend Maximum Security Prison in Nashville, a place I know nothing about. I quickly learned that not all maximum security prisons are equal. Every state has different procedures. But through a lot of research, I discovered a blog written by a person who taught classes at Riverbend, and she provided the information I needed, things like the prisoners, even those on death row, could have jobs. That surprised me. Again, find someone who knows what you don’t.

All right, so far I am not writing what I know. So where does it come in?

For me, the real meat of writing what I know comes into play with my characters’ emotions. While I’ve never killed anyone or even plotted to kill someone, I have had fantasies have plotted to get my own way about something. Haven’t you?

When I was much younger, I thought I knew what was best for almost everyone, and proceeded to plan the details. It’s only in looking back that I can see how wrong I was. But I vividly remember my single-minded focus to get what I wanted. Creating characters with that blind ambition works for your protagonists as well as your villains.

Another thing that helps me is remembering how it felt as a child or teenager to get caught doing something wrong. Or the emotions I went through when I covered up my wrong-doing. How I justified what I was doing and rationalized it even to myself. These are emotions we are all familiar with, and are emotions we can pour into our characters. And not just antagonists—let your protagonists wrestle with blind ambition. They’re also flawed, after all.

In writing what you know, remember your own greatest desires and fears. Maybe you’re afraid of spiders—you can infuse that fear into a character. I was locked in closet one time and didn’t like being in enclosed places as a kid. Still don’t. My heroine of Justice Delayed hates being in a place she can’t easily escape from. It was easy describing how she felt because I knew it.

Her greatest desire was to get the plum job of TV anchor, so she took risks. She also always felt she had to prove herself because she had survived while her sister hadn’t. Even though I didn’t have a sister who died, other events happened in my childhood that drove me to prove I was just as good as anyone else.

I can still remember as a child when we had indoor plumbing installed in our house and lying in the bathtub, thinking that when I grew up I was going to fill the bathtub to the top of the rim—our dad wouldn’t let us run over two inches of water in the tub. The reason being, more water cost more money, something we didn’t have much of. That desire drove me for a lot of years. Give your characters that kind of drive.

Writing what you know: dig deep and take your experiences, your hurts, your fears, your desires and write them into your characters. Then, you will have believable characters readers can identify with. Even your villains.

Patricia Bradley is the author of Shadows of the Past, A Promise to Protect, Gone without a Trace and Silence in the Dark. Bradley received the 2016 Inspirational Readers Choice Award for the third Logan Point book, Gone without a Trace, and has been a finalist for the Genesis Award, a winner of a Daphne du Maurier Award, and winner of a Touched by Love Award. Bradley is cofounder of Aiming for Healthy Families, Inc., and she is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Romance Writers of America, and Sisters in Crime. Bradley makes her home in Mississippi. Learn more at ptbradley.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.

4/11/17 4/11/17

Location as a Character / Lisa Harris

Often times, we as writers get so caught up in the details of our characters and scenarios that we may put our setting on the back-burners. The setting is the difference between being alone in a dark alley and being alone in an open meadow. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Lisa Harris, shares her insight on just how important the setting is.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Try to imagine Frodo’s journey in The Lord of the Ring set not among the rolling hills of the Shire and the eerie volcanic region of Mordor, but instead the flat plains of Kansas. Or imagine if Anne of Green had taken place in the bustling city of modern New York instead of a farm on Prince Edward Island. The novels simply wouldn’t be the same, because the settings in both are an integral part of those series.

When I first started writing nearly two decades ago, a story’s setting was simply a necessity. I thought all I needed was a generic town in Anywhere, USA with a few descriptions sprinkled throughout, because the location didn’t fit into my focus on the story line. What I didn’t understand was how a well-planned and well-developed setting can suck your reader even deeper into the story. Which is exactly what a writer wants.

But how does a writer take a setting beyond a few paragraphs of descriptions and create a location that becomes an essential part of the story?

When I started writing my Nikki Boyd Files series, I began thinking through different locations that would not only be interesting to the reader, but that would also help set the tone for the series. I soon decided to set the books in the beautiful state of Tennessee where I once lived, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to narrow down the setting even further and find the perfect backdrop for an intense missing person case.

I started looking at the area around the Smoky Mountains. I read stories by people who’d walked the Appalachian Trail and told how the mountains themselves could be deadly with unexpected storms popping up. They were a place where one could disappear if they wanted to, and where others—including small planes—had somehow managed to vanish unintentionally without a trace. Thick canopies in the mountains were described by those lost in them as laurel hells, a terrifying place to discover you were lost. So not only did I find the Smoky Mountains beautiful and mysterious, but they became the perfect backdrop for when Nikki finds her own life in danger.

With my setting chosen, I decided to open my first book in The Nikki Boyd Files series, Vendetta, with a tense scene in Northeast Tennessee near the Obed River. Nikki is repelling off a sandstone cliff into a ravine, when her rope catches and threatens to snap above her. It doesn’t take long, though, for the tension to shift from the narrow ledge of the sheer cliff to the Smoky Mountains when a call comes through from her boss about a missing teen. As she and her team investigate the disappearance of the young woman, Nikki finds herself forced to relive her past when clues from her sister’s kidnapping a decade ago emerge, and Nikki discovers that her sister’s abductor is back. As she follows the clues deeper into the vast, mountainous landscape, the danger Nikki faces simultaneously intensifies.

For book two, Missing, I decided to switch the setting to the Nashville area, which gave the book a completely different feel from the sometimes sinister woods of the Smoky Mountains. Setting the book in the city allowed me to write very different scenes, including a confrontation with a sniper, a frantic boat chase after a possible murderer, and a tense hostage scene on the roof of an apartment building.

Right around the time of the book’s release last fall, I had the opportunity to return to Tennessee and visit the Smoky Mountains, a part of the state I’d never seen before. After spending hours and hours of research online, it was uncanny how it felt as if I was stepping back into a familiar place. I became my family’s tour guide to a place I might have never visited in person, but I felt like I knew. The craziest part, though, was that I kept expecting to run into Nikki!

Lisa Harris is a Christy Award finalist for Blood Ransom (2010) and Vendetta (2016), Christy Award winner for Dangerous Passage, and the winner of the Best Inspirational Suspense Novel for Blood Covenant (2011) and Vendetta (2016) from Romantic Times. She has over thirty novels and novella collections in print. She and her family have spent over twelve years working as missionaries in Africa. When she's not working she loves hanging out with her family, cooking different ethnic dishes, photography, and heading into the African bush on safari. For more information about her books and life in Africa visit her website at lisaharriswrites.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.

4/4/17 4/4/17

The Durable Hauntings of Place / Philip Cioffari

The setting of your book is just as important, if not more important, than the characters themselves. Being familiar with your setting is crucial to keeping your story authentic and consistent. That's why it's important to do your research thoroughly. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger, Philip Cioffari, discusses his experience with knowing your settings.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Place has always been one of the strongest inspirations for my writing, and no place stronger than the place I grew up: the Bronx. Though I have set novels in other places — New Mexico in Jesusville, the everglades in Dark Road, Dead End — I keep returning to the Bronx for setting, as I did in my latest novel, The Bronx Kill.

I ask myself what is it about place that so stimulates my urge to write, but I have no ready answer. It’s one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of things. I particularly like old places, be it a funky railroad car-style diner, a pre-war tenement, Colonial or Victorian-era houses, dive bars, a deserted country road that leads to a ramshackle cabin, dank and shadowed alleys that lead to nowhere. The more time-worn the better. Without getting mystical about it, I feel a story lurking in places like these. All I have to do is uncover it — which involves both going deep inside myself as well as into the history and culture and atmosphere of the place itself.

And so, back to the Bronx.

I can’t leave it behind. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say, it won’t let me leave it behind. Though it has been more than four decades since I moved away from it — a mere seven miles but an altogether different world in New Jersey—I find myself returning to it several times a month. Field research, I call it. Keeping it alive inside me so I’m sure not to miss the stories it wants to offer. I walk the streets, visit the parks, all the old haunts. Friends and family have long since abandoned the borough, so it truly is the physical place — the brick, the playgrounds, those enduring alleys — that I’m connecting to.

Because stories don’t come to me all at once — they arrive in fragments over time — I don’t feel connected to the story until I have a firm grasp of the setting. In the case of my new novel, I had the title first. Over a decade ago, I’d been perusing a map of the Bronx and came across the name. The Bronx Kill is a channel of water (so named by the early Dutch settlers in NY) that runs between the Harlem River and the East River in the southernmost tip of the Bronx. It is a dangerous place, and very old. It’s barb-wired off from the rest of the borough, a forlorn wasteland of abandoned railroad cars and tracks, overrun by weeds and detritus: TVs, tape decks, tires, appliances of all kinds — a mishmash of things that are no longer useful. Gangs and drug dealers hang out there, as do the homeless. Bodies are sometimes dumped there.

My kind of setting — all I had to do was find the story to go along with it.

I began by writing several short stories about three teenage boys, friends since childhood who lived nearby it. I put them through several incidents which tested their values, their commitment to one another. But it wasn’t until I added a girl, Julianne, with whom they are each in love that the story began to cohere. (Bear in mind this process I’m describing occurred over a ten-year period.)

A fourth male was added — a beautiful boy known affectionately as Timmy Moon whom Julianne falls for and who, as a result, is envied by the three original friends. After this, I added the dare or challenge: On a hot August night, they decide to swim the East River from the Bronx to Queens. In the attempt, Timmy Moon drowns under questionable circumstances and Julianne’s body is never found. The three survivors take a vow never again to speak about the incident and go their separate ways.

One more element was needed to complete the story, and that came in the character of the older brother of Timmy Moon, an NYPD detective who holds them responsible for his brother’s death and vows to bring them to justice by any means possible.

So I began with setting and, piece by piece, built or found the story that belonged to that place.

Lest I’ve given the impression that the hauntings of place are mostly negative in their impact, I’d like to quote from the thoughts of my main character, Danny, towards the close of the novel.

“And walking the streets these days, despite all that had happened, he could feel with a clarity he hadn’t experienced before how much he loved even the most ordinary of things this place had to offer, like riding the EL, gazing down at rooftops and the suddenly miniaturized world of pedestrians and cars moving street to street.

And the streets themselves, the tingle he felt simply walking them, the vibrancy of sights and sounds and smells and small miracles, like the way a playground turned even the dreariest and most unlikely space into a joyful arena of games, a fortress against the ever-changing, threatening world.

In Florida he had never gotten used to the expanse of sky, the continual bright sun. Here the sky could be observed only in bits and pieces, between brick towers, through gaps in the steel webbing of the EL. So you never took it for granted; it was something you prized. Like the open space the rivers offered, so that even the grimy weeds and gnarled grasses of the Kill were things of beauty to be cherished.”

Philip Cioffari is the author of the novels: Dark Road, Dead End; Jesusville; Catholic Boys; and the short story collection, A History of Things Lost or Broken, which won the Tartt Fiction Prize, and the D. H. Lawrence award for fiction. His latest novel is The Bronx Kill (Livingston Press, 2017). His short stories have been published widely in commercial and literary magazines and anthologies, including North American Review, Playboy, Michigan Quarterly Review, Northwest Review, Florida Fiction, and Southern Humanities Review. He has written and directed for Off and Off-Off Broadway. His Indie feature film, which he wrote and directed, Love in the Age of Dion, has won numerous awards, including Best Feature Film at the Long Island Int’l Film Expo, and Best Director at the NY Independent Film & Video Festival. He is a Professor of English and director of the Performing and Literary Arts Honors Program at William Paterson University. philipcioffari.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.

3/29/17 3/29/17

How Writing What I Didn’t Know Led Me to My Mystery Series and Beyond / Scott Graham

Write what you know. It's a phrase branded in the memories of writers everywhere. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger has a little something to say on the matter though. Write what you don't. Scott Graham discusses his adventures traveling across Texas and learning his craft.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

Write what you know. So goes the age-old authors’ adage.

Then again …

When I sought to switch from nonfiction to fiction writing, what I didn’t know—and wound up learning during a confounding road trip through Texas—led to the conception of my National Park Mystery series. From there, continuing to focus on what I didn’t know helped me develop the protagonist for my series and the personal challenges he faces.

For a number of years, my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed exploring new-to-us national parks across the West with our two sons—until we decided, one fateful spring break, to visit Big Bend National Park in far southern Texas. We set off as we always did, with a camper full of food and the plan to pull off the road to explore public lands as we passed through them along the way.

But we didn’t know our American history well enough.

As an enticement to lure Texas into statehood, public lands in the Republic of Texas were turned over to state ownership upon the creation of the Lone Star State in 1845. The Texas state government promptly sold off more than 216,000,000 acres of those newly acquired lands to ranchers and speculators. As a result, Texas today has one of the lowest percentages of public lands of any state in the nation.

Modern-day rural Texas is a seeming paradise of vast and beautiful expanses, yet the thousand-mile drive south through the state was far from paradisiacal for me and my family. Magnificent mountain ranges and windswept plains were fenced off from us, side roads gated and locked, rural highways lined with No Trespassing signs. All the way to Big Bend and back, we spent our nights in crowded, edge-of-town commercial campgrounds, boxed in by behemoth recreational vehicles.

The frustration of our Texas fence-out led my wife and me to an even greater appreciation of the public lands of the United States, showcased especially by America’s open-to-all-comers national parks. When I turned to writing fiction, I resolved to dedicate my new murder mystery series to celebrating “America’s best idea,” its publicly owned national parks.

Each book in the series, I decided, would be set in a specific park and would seek to capture and share with readers that particular park’s unique sense of place, beginning with that most iconic of America’s preserved landscapes, the Grand Canyon. Thus was the setting for the first book in my series, Canyon Sacrifice, determined.

But what, in the national park milieu, would comprise a workable profession for my protagonist?

I turned, again, to what I didn’t know for the answer.

I needed my amateur sleuth, Chuck Bender, to be an independent sort who could bounce with logical ease from park to park. The solution: Chuck would be a professional archaeologist, moving from one park to the next performing temporary, contracted archaeological digs in each. But while that profession for Chuck would serve my needs well, I didn’t know much about the field of archaeology.

I signed up for a course on the basics of the craft aimed at would-be volunteer archaeologists. When the lectures proved fascinating and the field work engrossing, I realized my readers likely would enjoy experiencing the field of archaeology through Chuck as much as I enjoyed learning the subject in preparation for writing my series.

Finally, I needed to load Chuck down with some personal baggage. Who, after all, wants to read book after book about a protagonist whose life is tranquil, composed, and trouble-free?

Once more, I turned to what I didn’t know to add strain to Chuck’s life. I gave Chuck—long a set-in-his-ways, middle-aged loner—a new family in the form of a headstrong Latina woman with two young daughters.

What did I, a middle-aged Anglo guy and father of two sons, know about Latino culture and raising daughters? Very little. But learning along with Chuck would enable me to share his missteps and confusion as he dealt with his new, unfamiliar role as an instant father in an ethnically mixed family.

With the release in June of Yellowstone Standoff, the third book in the National Park Mystery series, and my recent completion of Yosemite Fall, book four in the series slated for release next year, I’m continuing to revel in figuring things out each step of the way along with my readers.

Write what you know? Sure.

But the real fun and challenge of fiction writing, I’ve found, comes from writing plenty of what I don’t know as well.

Scott Graham is the National Outdoor Book Award-winning author of eight books, including the National Park Mystery Series for Torrey House Press. The third book in the series, Yellowstone Standoff, was released in June. It follows 2014’s Canyon Sacrifice and 2015’s Mountain Rampage. Graham lives in Durango, Colorado. He writes the Prose & Cons book review column with fellow award-winning mystery and true crime author Chuck Greaves. Learn more about Graham, Torrey House Press, and the National Park Mystery series at scottfranklingraham.comand torreyhouse.org. Reach the author at scottgrahamdurango@gmail.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.

3/21/17 3/21/17

Four Basic Twitter Tips for Writers / Margaret Mizushima

Social media is becoming an integral part of self-promotion as a writer. One of the most popular outlets for writers to speak to their readers is Twitter. If you've never used Twitter before, the terminology and efficient use of it can be a daunting task. This weeks' Killer Nashville guest blogger, Margaret Mizushima, discusses her experiences with learning how to use Twitter effectively.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

When my agent suggested that I develop an author platform on Twitter, my first reaction was to go running into the dark night screaming, “Noooooo!” Previously, the only exposure I’d had to Twitter had been tales about my friend’s ex who spent hours glued to his phone tweeting out updates involving the minutia in his life. Who has time for that?

I finally agreed, and my agent, Terrie Wolf of AKA Literary Management (@AKA_Terrie), helped me set up my new Twitter account and handle (@margmizu). She also gave me tips that set the foundation for my tweeting strategy, and soon I grew to love this form of social media. I’ve combined my agent’s advice with that of my publicist, Dana Kaye of Kaye Publicity (@KayePublicity), and have added my own experience to develop four basic tips that I hope Twitter beginners will find useful.

Engage with others and be social. The writers’ network is very friendly; search out other writers and follow them. Run a hashtag search for #amwriting, #writing, or #author, and follow a few new writers each day, as well as libraries, booksellers, and others in the publishing industry. Chances are, they’ll follow you back. Be active and retweet for others.

Use #WW (Writer Wednesday) or #FF (Follow Friday) to mention a string of your followers and introduce them to each other. Others might start to include you in their own shout-outs, giving you a list of new people you can follow. Send good morning or good evening tweets to a friend or group of friends, or send someone a photo or link to an article that you think they might like.

One evening I posted a good evening tweet with a picture of a Colorado sunset—the sun disappearing behind a jagged mountain range in a vermillion blaze—to a group of followers from around the globe. Within minutes, they all joined in and we shared evening photos from Colorado, Boston, Chicago, Paris, Tokyo, and Dublin. Such fun!

Develop tweet content that matches your brand. For example, I write the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series about a sheriff’s deputy, her dog, and a veterinarian who solve crimes in their rural community set in the Colorado high country. I look for photos and articles about dogs, police dogs, animals and their babies, country life, the vet’s life, hiking, Colorado, the writer’s life, writing tips, and inspirational quotes. Sometimes other topics sneak in, but for the most part, these are my focus.

Tweet using content that others find interesting, and your followers will retweet them, which expands the number of people who might notice your tweets. Balance your tweeting content with a ratio of about ten non-promotional tweets to one promotional.

Develop a Retweet Friends list. You can set this up using the Lists function on Twitter. Note those who retweet for you and add these people to your list. Reciprocate by retweeting for them.

You can monitor your Retweet Friends list by using TweetDeck, which offers a free version that includes a tweet scheduling function. Set the program to watch your list, making it easy to catch your friends’ new tweets. (You can set it to watch a hashtag, too.) As your network broadens and more people retweet for you, you have potential to reach hundreds of thousands of tweeters, not just the group who are following you. There is communication power in the retweet network, and reciprocal relationships are key.

Use hashtags effectively. When you first start, stick to the suggested hashtags that pop up while typing your tweet, because people search for these and your tweets will stand a better chance of being read. Since I write mysteries, I usually include this string of hashtags with my tweet: #amwriting #Colorado #mystery. Sometimes I add #outdoor if there’s room.

Hashtags are also used to designate chats and trending topics, but you can learn about that later. Since hashtags and other repetitive messages are often abbreviated—you only have 140 characters/tweet—you might want a resource to look up definitions, like TagDef. You might eventually want to create your own hashtag, and if you do, use it consistently and frequently to tag your tweets for others to recognize.

I’ve grown to rely on Twitter to keep abreast of my friends’ news, writing topics, and organizational news and events. Once I learned to set up various hashtag and list watches on TweetDeck, it’s been easy to keep updated by spending only about ten minutes twice per day. The one thing that slows me down is the discovery of so many interesting articles, blogs, and websites that I’m compelled to check out. I hope to see you in the Twitterverse. Follow me and I’ll most likely follow you back. Enjoy!

Margaret Mizushima is the author of the Timber Creek K-9 mystery series, which includes Killing Trail (Crooked Lane Books, 2015), named debut mystery of the monthby Library Journal, and Stalking Ground (Crooked Lane Books, 2016). She lives in Colorado where she assists her husband with their veterinary practice and Angus cattleherd. She can be found on Facebook, on Twitter @margmizu, and on her website at margaretmizushima.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.

3/14/17 3/14/17

You Only Have I’s For You / Ross Klavan

As writers we are selling ourselves. We are taking our thoughts and funneling our imagination into stories. This week's Killer Nashville guest blogger, Ross Klaven, discusses his experiences with using your own experiences to create genuine work.

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford

Founder Killer Nashville

Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

An old writer friend, who disappeared into the wilds of Canada and changed his name, gave me this advice: “If they want to buy your writing, sell your writing. If they want to buy your voice, sell your voice. If they want to buy your face, sell your face. You’ve only got you, you’ve got nothing else to sell.”

OK, this was a downbeat guy and this was phrased in a downbeat fashion. Still, it’s got a nice ring to it. Like an actor, a writer has only him or herself to use but it’s how you use yourself and your vast experience that will either get you working or will leave you at the keyboard sitting immobile in deep freeze.

My film Tigerland (starring Colin Farrell) was based in my own infantry training in the U.S. Army. Two guys from the unit got in touch with me when the film came out many years after the fact—one said I’d embellished things but he understood it was a movie, and the other said, “It’s so accurate you must have a photographic memory.”

I’d also read most of the great war novels and seen the films. So, for me, it was a weird mélange of all that. I dropped the experience into the muck and let it ferment until it took on a quality of…I don’t know what to call it. Maybe it has no category or maybe the transmission of the facts of our lives into fiction is a fundamental human action in itself and needs no translation.

The same for my novel Schmuck which is based on a character very much like my father, a radio comedian in the 1950’s and 1960’s. This book sat stalled, I could not get things right. And then one night I dreamed that I was walking through an old time radio station—the studios, the newsroom—and everything was tinged in a green mist. When I woke up, I realized that everyone in the dream was dead, and because radio is based in sound and voice, the sound and voice of my draft was dead, as well. It needed a different narrative voice, not the one I was forcing on it (apparently) but one with a little more buoyancy. That change done, the darkly comic book took off.

Triple Shot, proved to be slightly different. My novella Thump Gun Hitched is about two LA cops who get into a lot of trouble and, off the force, get into even worse trouble trying to help each other out south of the border. To write this so that the reader wouldn’t throw it across the room in disgust, I screwed together a whole series of experiences and some you might not expect. I’ve never been a cop, but years ago I was a reporter and spent way too much time with the police. I was in the military and know a little about weapons. I’ve spent some time in the desert and love that kind of landscape even though it’s always got a touch of desolation, despair and danger. But all that mixed with two other elements—a guy that I spoke with once who taught unarmed combat to cops and soldiers and who’d been a cop until, at a party, he did something dumb and ended up doing time. And some of the great Western films. I’d loved those films, always wanted to write one … and that, I think, became the wheel that gave me distance and a voice and on which I could turn lots of disparate experience to make the story a hoot to read.

The actors I know seem, for some reason, much more comfortable with using this level of “psychic reality” for their craft. I’ve known actors who used a momentary scare that turned out to be unnecessary (like being robbed with a toy gun) into a terrifying, believable fear on film. I’ve seen actors use hallucinations from an LSD trip, not to depict the surreal, but to put emotion on stage. Writers, often, seem either apologetic about how they use experience, as if it’s expressly forbidden to “write about yourself” or they see their everyday experience as mundane and not useable. Or they’re desperate to be thought imaginative, so nothing they write, they claim, has any basis in what’s hilariously called “real life.”

What you make up is most often—but not always—better than simple reporting. If you work in fiction of any kind, though, you know that everything has a fictive sheen to it. And it’s that little bit of distance on the mix of the so-called “real” and “unreal” that works, I think, and the understanding that if it’s you writing, then for better or for worse, you have nothing else, really, to offer besides yourself.

Ross Klavan’s novel, Schmuck, was published by Greenpoint Press in 2014. He recently finished the screenplay for The Colony based on the book by John Bowers. His latest writing project, Triple Shot, is a novella featuring fellow writers Charles Salzberg and Tim O’Mara. Nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, his original screenplay, Tigerland, was directed by Joel Schumacher and starred Colin Farrell. He has written screenplays for InterMedia, Walden Media, Miramax, Paramount, A&E and TNT. As a performer, Klavan’s voice has been heard in dozens of feature films including Revolutionary Road, Sometimes in April, Casino, In and Out, and You Can Count On Me as well as in numerous TV and radio commercials. In other lives, he was a member of the NYC alternative art group Four Walls and was a reporter covering New York City and London.

(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.

3/9/17 3/9/17

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.

3/9/17 3/9/17

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

(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.

3/9/17 3/9/17

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

(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.

2/28/17 2/28/17

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.

2/28/17 2/28/17

What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin

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.

Three Acts, Eight Sequences

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

2/28/17 2/28/17

What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin

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.

Three Acts, Eight Sequences

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

(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.

2/21/17 2/21/17

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.

2/21/17 2/21/17

Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

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?

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.

(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.

2/21/17 2/21/17

Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

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?

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.

(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.

2/14/17 2/14/17

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.

2/14/17 2/14/17

More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

(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.

2/14/17 2/14/17

More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

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.

(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.

2/7/17 2/7/17

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.)

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.

2/7/17 2/7/17

Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker

Happy reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine

The Art of Brevity

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.”

The Sound of Silence

Laura stared out of the windshield. The road ran off out of sight, disappearing into the horizon, mesmerizing in its seemingly magical disappearance.

Alone.

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.

(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.

Submit Your Writing to KN Magazine

Want to have your writing included in Killer Nashville Magazine?
Fill out our submission form and upload your writing here:

SUBMIT YOUR WRITING

KN Magazine: Articles

What Does It Mean to Write What You Know? / Patricia Bradley

Location as a Character / Lisa Harris

The Durable Hauntings of Place / Philip Cioffari

How Writing What I Didn’t Know Led Me to My Mystery Series and Beyond / Scott Graham

Four Basic Twitter Tips for Writers / Margaret Mizushima

You Only Have I’s For You / Ross Klavan

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

The Mushy Middle / Kathleen Delaney

What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin

What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin

What I Learned About Plot and Story Structure From Screenwriting / Paul H.B. Shin

Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello

Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello

Setting the Time / Sharon Marchisello

More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis

More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis

More to Writing What You Know Than You Know / Samuel Marquis

Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker

Less Is More Through Fragments of Imagination / Samuel Parker

Submit Your Writing to KN Magazine

Home

About Us
Press
Success Stories
KN Gives Back
Sponsor KN

Contact Us
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions

Conference

Register
Schedule
Conference Offerings
Who’s Who
Bookstore / Sign Books
Get Involved
Hotel Info

Awards / Scholarships

2023 KN Award Winners
The Claymore Award
The Silver Falchion Award
KN Reader’s Choice Award
John Seigenthaler Legends Award
C. Auguste Dupin Detective Award
Scholarships

KN Magazine

Search
Articles
Interviews
Reviews
Cover Archives
Submit to KN Magazine

2025 Sponsors