On Short Fiction and Evil Masterminds / Author Robert Mangeot

Writing short fiction demands a different kind of mental training. While novels can luxuriate with expansive plots and subplots, short fiction requires jabs and punches. In this week’s Killer Nashville Guest Blog, author Robert Mangeot cleverly tells us how he went from short story unpublished to well-published. And how you can do the same. You simply have to let the masterminds do their job.

Happy Reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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On Short Fiction and Evil Masterminds

By Robert Mangeot

Inside us crime writer folk lurks an evil mastermind. Sure, some days the evil one may seem quiet, but always deep in our imaginations is a dimly lit chamber, walls blanketed in maps with dragons stalking the margins, a desk piled with jumbled notebooks, a shrouded figure clacking away in mad flourishes at the computer keyboard. Your inner mastermind is planning, planning, planning.

As crime writer folk, it’s likely you consider having your creative dark side pointed out as a compliment. And you should. If short fiction interests you, then unleashing that evil dude or dudette might be your call to adventure.

Flash to me outside a Manhattan bookshop, a gunmetal sky over SoHo, and an April mist slicking the rush hour streets: a perfect night for spying. You read that right. Espionage. Except I had only written a short story about spies, and the honor of it landing in the MWA anthology Ice Cold—which was launched that rain-slicked night at The Mysterious Bookshop—was borne of fruitful collaboration with my inner mastermind.

Killer stories require more than lightning bolts of inspiration. In crime writer-ese, a great short story is like a heist: intricate timetable, tricky execution, ticking clock. The story mastermind must identify and adapt to each and every obstacle in order to pull off the job.

Flashback to 2010. Flush with creativity, I had locked myself away to crank out stories. They stunk, every blessed one of them. I know that now, but in those heady days I fired off submissions, certain of a breakthrough.

Not so much.

Fast-forward through a trial-and-error montage of research, critique and useful rejection, add any Eighties arena pop soundtrack at your discretion. What kept me going was my stretch goal—selling a story to a dream market like MWA or Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Trust me, back then when I said stretch, it meant hyperextension. Whether or not I would ever get the dream acceptance letter, who knew? The important thing was the reach.

Fast-forward again through more rewrite and rejection to enlightenment. Finally I understood my stories, like heists without a getaway plan, they were never coming together. Characters, setting, plot, everything had to be crafted to bring out a connected whole. Poe—now there was an evil mastermind—called this “unity of effect.”

For that I learned to call on my mastermind, which means I also learned to pay as much attention to how I’m writing as to what I’m writing. After all, one story is just one story. My creative process is how I’ll write more and better. And so I’ve developed brainstorming rituals that summon the mastermind. He arrives feisty, demanding sharper ideas and I rewrite again and again and again. He forces me to slash away at the labor-of-love early drafts and darling sentences. The evil mastermind is editing, editing, editing.

Some key lessons from the inner mastermind about killer short fiction; he is five-fold:

The Brain: Amp up the premise until it is distinctively your own. Premises are infinite. Take risks. Have fun with voices, characters, and ideas. The price of a short story idea falling apart is pretty much zero, and if it improves your writing, I’d call that a success.

The Grease Man: Like tumblers falling in a picked lock, work every element into the connected whole. Subplots are for novels, asides for Shakespeare. Keep a short story slick and elegant.

The Insider: Do the research. Amazing next-level inspiration comes from having the context and interrelationships nailed. Also, before ever submitting somewhere, read several issues first. Know the target market cold, its submission requirements and editorial preferences. This is make-or-break with pro markets. No heist goes off without first casing the joint, right?

The Muscle: Short stories are all about compressed vibrancy. Find the compelling narrative voice that does the heavy lifting, especially with mood and characterization. Edit, edit, edit until the deeper story emerges and the words crackle.

The Getaway Driver: Start the story late, well after a novel version would open. Move quick, hit hard and get out fast, with a thematic roar that echoes long after the last word is read.

Simple, right? We crime writer folk understand simple doesn’t mean easy. But for me, that journey is becoming an adventure. The short story is dead? Feels pretty alive to me.

You know what else is alive? Your mastermind. Alive and hard at work somewhere in there, planning, planning, planning your story of the century.

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If you would like to read more about Robert Mangeot’s books please click here.

Robert Mangeot lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with his wife, pair of cats, and a bossy Pomeranian writing partner. His short fiction has won multiple writing contests and appears in various journals and anthologies, including Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue from the Cold War. He serves as the Vice-President of Sisters In Crime, Middle Tennessee chapter. Visit his website at robertmangeot.com

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(Have an idea for our blog? Then share it with our Killer Nashville family. With over 24,000 visits monthly to the Killer Nashville website, over 300,000 reached through social media, and a potential outreach of over 22 million per press release, Killer Nashville provides another way for you to reach more people with your message. Send a query to contact@killernashville.com or call us at 615-599-4032. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks to Maria Giordano and author Tom Wood for his volunteer assistance in coordinating our weekly blogs. For more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com)

Writing History Right / Author Michael Tucker

I wish I had a dime every time my mother would say, “Truth is stranger than fiction.” She was right. Look to history, or read today’s newspapers, and you’ll find an abundance of stories where human action seems unfathomable to imagine, whether violent or charitable. In this week’s blog, author Michael Tucker drives home the point that when telling a story set in history, it’s important to get facts right, down to the most specific details. After all, credibility is on the line, and readers are savvy.

Happy Reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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Writing History Right
By Michael J. Tucker

Weaving actual historical events into the timeline of your story adds realism and color to the narrative and your characters. And it can be a lot of fun if, during your research, you stumble across some little known piece of trivia that causes you to say to yourself, “Gee, I didn’t know that.”

The process starts with selecting a time period. Will your characters be caught up in the Spanish Inquisition, or the Roaring 20’s? Or maybe they’ll be jitterbugging to the “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B?”

Whatever period you select, you want to get the peripheries right. By peripheries, I mean those little things that surround your characters, but are not necessarily integral to the storyline. What hairstyle should the women in your story have—a bouffant, beehive, or bun? Should your African-American hero have a Jheri Curl, Hi-top fade, Afro, or Dreadlocks? When did men begin wearing earrings, gold necklaces, and open-neck shirts that showed off chest hair thick as Bermuda grass?

If you work music into your novel, be sure the song is period correct. While I was writing Aquarius Falling, a 1964 period story that takes place at a beach resort, I added Otis Redding’s, “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” Perfect for the scene. Unfortunately, he didn’t record it until 1967. Luckily I discovered the mistake before publication, and learned a valuable lesson: memory can fail, so do the research.

In Aquarius Falling, my characters were tiptoeing through history; the events surrounded them, but they weren’t part of it. For the second novel of the series, Capricorn’s Collapse, I wanted my characters deeply immersed in the events of the time. I had to look into the future, allow the characters to mature, and find an event with which my protagonist, Tom Delaney, could credibly become involved. It turned out that 1972 was a honeypot of events that yielded delicious ideas.

The year started with a literal bang when the British Army killed twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters on January 30, in Derry, Northern Ireland, in what is referred to as, Bloody Sunday. On June 17, the break-in at the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate complex is discovered. The perpetrators are suspected of being connected to the Committee to Re-elect the President, a group with the unfortunate acronym of CREEP. PLO terrorists interrupt the Munich Olympic Games, which results in the murder of eleven Israeli athletes in what is now known as Black September.  A plane crash at Chicago’s Midway Airport on December 8, kills Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate conspirator, E. Howard Hunt. She is found carrying $10,000 cash.

The challenge here is to put together a plausible story that connects the protagonist to these historic events.

Historical Fiction differs from the genre of Alternative History. In the former, the fictional characters are pulled into the events of the time. Ken Follett’s, The Pillars of the Earth, works through twelfth-century England during the building of a great Gothic cathedral. In Atonement, Ian McEwan leads his readers through a lie told in 1934 that alters forever the lives of two lovers during World War II. Ruta Sepetys’s Between Shades of Gray exposes the oppressive regime of post World War II Soviet Russia in Lithuania.

Alternative History is what it sounds like—history altered. This genre is for those writers who really want to play God. The fictional characters engage in actions that change the outcome of history. One of the most recent applications of this is Stephen King’s 11/22/63, a time-travel effort to thwart the Kennedy assassination. Fatherland, by Robert Harris, offers a take on how the world would look if Hitler had won World War II.

Working historical events into your writing offers the pleasure of learning details that you may have forgotten about or never knew. And it gives you, the writer, the fun of saying, “What if…?”

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If you would like to read more about Michael Tucker’s books please visit our website.

Michael J. Tucker is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Aquarius Falling and Capricorn’s Collapse. He has also published a collection of short stories entitled, The New Neighbor, and a poetry collection, Your Voice Spoke To My Ear. His poem, The Coyote’s Den was included in the Civil War anthology, Filtered Through Time. Visit his website at www.michaeltuckerauthor.com

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Have an idea for our blog? Then share it with our Killer Nashville family. With over 24,000 visits monthly to the Killer Nashville website, over 300,000 reached through social media, and a potential outreach of over 22 million per press release, Killer Nashville provides another way for you to reach more people with your message. Send a query to contact@killernashville.com or call us at 615-599-4032. We’d love to hear from you. And, as always, thanks to Maria Giordano, Will Chessor, and author Tom Wood for his volunteer assistance in coordinating our weekly blogs.

Adding Depth to Your Story / Guest Blogger Philip Cioffari

The bottom line for writing fiction (and I would also say nonfiction) is telling a good story. While Samuel Goldwyn’s advice of “if you’ve got a message, send a telegram” might be true, it defies a long tradition of creating context in crime and thriller fiction. In this week’s blog, author Philip Cioffari outlines his own path for creating relevance of premise in his latest novel Dark Road, Dead End. Using his technique, any story can be taken to a new level of pertinence and—as a result—can resonate to a larger audience, as well as educate and entertain.

Here’s long-time Killer Nashville attendee and instructor, Philip Cioffari.

Happy Reading!

Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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As writers of fiction, our first (and arguably, our only) obligation is to tell a good story, this notion is an extension of the art-for-art’s-sake view of creative expression. In other words, art needs no justification beyond itself. It isn’t required to serve any purpose other than the pleasure it brings. That being said, I’d like to examine for a moment the ways in which good crime fiction can tell a captivating story at the same time it engages the social issues of the time in which it is written.

One might argue that all fiction, including crime fiction engages—in one way or another—the social order of its time. Most visibly, perhaps, it does this by reflecting moral and philosophical values via a character’s thoughts and actions, the choices a character makes to survive in a world which is almost always—in the case of crime fiction—depicted as harsh, fearsome and unforgiving. So man’s conscience is almost inevitably put to the test in any given story. But there is a strain in crime fiction that engages social issues to an even greater degree. I think, for example, of Jaden Terrell’s new novel, River of Glass, with its concern with the horrors of human trafficking, and Stacy Allen’s new novel, Expedition Indigo, which addresses the need for preserving historic artifacts in the public domain rather than for private gain.

In my own case, I’ve long been a supporter of mankind’s conscientious stewardship of our planet and its resources. I wanted to address that issue in my writing and, because I’m a novelist and not an essayist, I wanted to meld my commitment to being a good storyteller with my concern for the environment. My frequent trips over the years to the Florida Everglades provided me with the setting to accomplish that end.

I was appalled to learn that the trade in exotic and endangered species of wildlife is a multi-billion dollar industry. It stands as the world’s third largest organized crime—after narcotics, and arms running. In the state of Florida, it is second only to the illicit trade in narcotics. Despite an international ban on such trafficking, there are many “rogue” nations that do not enforce the ban and that turn a blind eye towards those who violate it. And to be sure, worldwide, there is no shortage of those willing to engage in wildlife poaching and smuggling. One reason for this is the lucrative rewards for such activities—as one U.S. Customs agent put it, “Pound for pound, there is more profit for smugglers in exotic birds [and other wildlife] than there is in cocaine.” Another appeal to the criminal mind is the low risk of being apprehended. This is a consequence of the fact that most customs agencies are understaffed and over-worked and must turn their attention to higher-profile crimes, like the trade in narcotics and guns.

The way the black market system works is this: animals are poached from all over the world, smuggled illegally out of their respective countries, then shipped thousands of miles via land and sea, and ultimately smuggled into the country of destination. The U.S. and China are the two largest consumers of such contraband. But Southeast Asia and Europe are not far behind.

I wanted to shed light on this situation, to call attention to it and—because I’m a writer of fiction—do so in as entertaining a way as possible, hence the noir suspense/thriller format of my new novel, Dark Road, Dead End. My main character is a U.S. Customs Agent in South Florida, investigating a wildlife smuggling operation based in the Everglades, a nefarious network so large it supplies endangered species to pet stores, individual collectors, and roadside zoos across the country, as well as to “reputable” municipal zoos willing to close their eyes to the illegal source of the animals they wish to exhibit. The danger he faces comes, ironically, from both sides of the law.

The more we know about such illegal operations, the more of a part, however small, we each can play in resisting them: for example, by verifying the legitimacy of the origins of the pets we buy. And the more current issues we include in our fiction, the more relevant it becomes to the readers.

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If you would like to read more about Philip Cioffari’s books, please click here.

Philip Cioffari is the author of the noir thriller, Dark Road, Dead End. His previous three books of fiction are: the novel, Jesusville the novel,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 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. Visit his website at www.philipcioffari.com

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Have an idea for our blog? Then share it with our Killer Nashville family. With over 24,000 visits monthly to the Killer Nashville website, over 300,000 reached through social media, and a potential outreach of over 22 million per press release, Killer Nashville provides another way for you to reach more people with your message. Send a query to contact@killernashville.com or call us at 615-599-4032. We’d love to hear from you. And, as always, thanks to author Tom Wood for his volunteer assistance in coordinating our weekly blogs.