Creating Emotion on the Page / Author Leslie Budewitz

I’ll never forget the moment when Romeo rides past the well-intentioned Friar Lawrence with that, oh, so important communiqué about Juliet’s poisoned slumber in Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet. I wanted to yell at the screen. Even though I knew the story and what was to happen, the depth of despair from that single act of dramatic irony where no words were spoken, said it all. In this week’s blog, author Leslie Budewitz writes about evoking readers’ emotions in much the same way. As writers we don’t say, ‘And now readers, it’s time to be sad, or happy.’ Instead, the reader is guided into understanding the characters and why the actions they commit are destiny. Otherwise, as Leslie, so aptly explains, the readers won’t feel anything!

Happy Reading!

Clay Stafford,
Founder Killer Nashville,
Publisher Killer Nashville Magazine

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Creating Emotion on the Page 

By Leslie Budewitz

Story lies not in what happens to our characters—whether they lose a spouse, stumble over a body, get sold into slavery—but how they respond to what happens. How events hit them deep inside, touch an old wound, trigger a struggle, lead to more conflict, and ultimately, growth and resolution. The purpose of plot is to force our characters into those challenging situations, where they must confront their internal conflicts, externalizing them in action. This is as true in the cozy mysteries I write as in literary fiction or any other genre. The tone and depth of exploration may vary, but the heart of story remains the same.

But if we tell our readers what our characters feel, they won’t feel anything. We need to evoke emotion by showing how our characters respond to emotional situations. How do they move when struck by grief, annoyed by stupidity, or baffled by absurdity? What happens to their faces, their voices? How do their feelings influence what they say—and how they say it?

First, we can call on our emotional experience. Then, we analogize from our experience to our characters. By analogize—a term lawyers use when comparing cases where the facts differ, but the same legal principles apply—I mean we take what we know, compare it to another situation, and picture what would happen then. I remember clearly how I felt physically and emotionally, and what I did, when a man I didn’t know walked in my unlocked dorm room while I was napping. I can extrapolate from my experience and imagine how my character would respond. (Turned out my intruder was a well-known thief, not a rapist, and didn’t realize my door led to a suite, not a single room, so I wasn’t actually alone.) A character assaulted as a young child, or who had witnessed a brutal attack, would bring to the same intrusion a more complex reaction, based on her own experience.

I used a similar technique in writing Crime Rib, the second in my Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries. My protagonist, Erin Murphy, was 17 when her father was killed in a still-unsolved hit-and run. Now 32, she finds a friend’s lifeless body alongside the road, apparently the victim of a hit-and-run. Ike Hoover, the undersheriff overseeing the investigation, was the deputy in charge of her father’s case, complicating her view of him. As I wondered how Erin would respond to him, I found myself walking around the house, searching mind and body for analogous situations.

I replayed an incident nearly 30 years ago when I took a walk near a golf course, saw a man keel over on the green, and ran for help, struggling to give directions to an unfamiliar place. I remembered watching in a courtroom when an older lawyer clutched his chest, stepped back from the podium mid-argument, and died. And I recalled a collision in front of my house fifteen years ago. The loud crack broke the afternoon. Dashing outside. Seeing a young man stumble toward me. Knowing I had to check his truck, that I couldn’t rely on his dazed assertion that he’d been alone in the cab. Mining my feelings, I realized I was recreating them in my body, all these years later. My jaw tightened, my breath thinned, sounds came at me as if filtered by a fog.

“[Ike] suppressed a smile. I sat and took the statement he handed me. Rereading my description of what I’d seen and heard on Saturday night brought all the sensations crashing back. My breath went shallow, and I felt the anxiety racing through my veins, headed for my heart.  I did not want to feel this. I wanted to walk away. My self-righteous words to Kim still echoed in my ears: Stacia deserves justice, too.”

How do we tap into emotions beyond our own pale? Emotional research. I often call on my doctor-husband’s observations of how people respond to stressful situations, emotionally and physically, and the long-term effects. To explore Erin’s reactions, as a teenager and a young woman, to her father’s death, I thought about everyone I knew who’d lost a parent when they were young. Me, at 30, is very different from 17, but a good starting point. My college best friend, at 21; and a high school classmate at 22, who later lost her husband when her son was only 4. A law firm colleague whose father’s death when he was 18 set him on a much-different path than he’d planned. I wrote what I knew of their experiences out by hand to get at the physical experience. To put in my body, so my writer brain could call on it.

I also found online guides for teens who’ve lost a parent and for their teachers. Kids sometimes have a not-quite-rational feeling that something unrelated to their actions must still be their fault, somehow, or that it marks them.

“Calling him by his first name wasn’t disrespect. Undersheriff sounds too much like undertaker to me, and it had been Ike who’d come to the village Playhouse to get me, during rehearsal, after my father’s accident. The association still stuck. Childish, maybe, but it wasn’t a feeling I could logic my way out of.”

A writer friend described her own teenager, a very different girl from Erin, but whose desire for black-and-white answers helped me flesh out Erin’s best friend Kim Caldwell. Now a sheriff’s detective, Kim’s reaction cost both girls their friendship, led to her career in law enforcement, and still plagues her.

“Kim and I had been best friends all through junior high and high school. Until my father died, the winter of senior year. That had been too much for her, and the night of his accident, I lost my best friend, too. Since my return, we’d run into each other a few times, but exchanged only small talk. Why she’d chosen law enforcement remained a mystery. …

Something slid down her left wrist and she shoved it back up her sleeve. A bracelet? A memory flashed across my mental screen and vanished.

“I’m sorry to have to put you through this,” she said. “Your family means a lot to me.”

Right. My family meant so much, she dropped me like a rock when my father died. Like it might be contagious. Like I had done something to her.

I nodded. Until I knew what was going on, I needed to be very careful.”

Only when we dig into our characters’ minds and hearts, their successes and failures, their stresses, dramas, and traumas, will we know how they’ll respond to events on the page. But if we’re willing—even when it brings back up our own painful moments—we can create characters our readers will want to know.

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About Crime Rib: 

“Gourmet food market owner Erin Murphy is determined to get Jewel Bay, Montana’s scrumptious local fare, some national attention. But her scheme for culinary celebrity goes up in flames when the town’s big break is interrupted by murder…

Food Preneurs, one of the hottest cooking shows on TV, has decided to feature Jewel Bay in an upcoming episode, and everyone in town is preparing for their close-ups, including the crew at the Glacier Mercantile, aka the Merc. Not only is Erin busy remodeling her courtyard into a relaxing dining area, she’s organizing a steak-cooking competition between three of Jewel Bay’s hottest chefs to be featured on the program.

But Erin’s plans get scorched when one of the contending cooks is found dead. With all the drama going on behind the scenes, it’s hard to figure out who didn’t have a motive to off the saucy contestant. Now, to keep the town’s rep from crashing and burning on national television, Erin will have to grill some suspects to smoke out the killer…”

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If you would like to read more about Leslie Budewitz’s books please click here.

Leslie Budewitz is the national best-selling author of Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, winner of the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Crime Rib, the second in the series, was published by Berkley Prime Crime on July 1, 2014.

Also a lawyer, Leslie won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction for Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law & Courtroom Procedure (Quill Driver Books), making her the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction.

For more tales of life in the wilds of northwest Montana, and bonus recipes, visit her website and subscribe to her newsletter. Website: www.LeslieBudewitz.com   Facebook: LeslieBudewitzAuthor

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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)

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)