KN Magazine: Articles
2018 Killer Nashville Conference Takeaways / By Max Lopez
One of the most uplifting and simultaneously disheartening phenomena you may experience at a writer’s conference is being surrounded by hundreds of people doing the exact same thing that you are. Although it can be intimidating to see so many authors all working tirelessly to get their next book published, I was reminded this year at the Killer Nashville conference of the special community that Killer Nashville has cultivated over the years. Whether it was chiming in during lively discussions about what was and wasn’t working for them, or respectful debates between two authors living on the opposite ends of the social media use spectrum, it was easy to see why so many writers, publishers, agents and publicists find themselves returning to Nashville for this event every year.
If you weren’t able to come out this year, fret not! Here are just a few of the publicity tips and tricks for authors discussed during the informative and fun conference:
Looking for a new way to drive traffic to your site? Try Pinterest! After creating boards and pins with original content that tie to your book, you can link all your posts back to your site. One author claimed to have grown his website traffic by 50% after just a few weeks of cultivating an active account.
Team up with the authors you meet! Whether or not you have a blog, or have a blog that accepts guest posts, there are many ways to boost your fellow authors in a mutually beneficial way. Create Facebook groups to keep each other updated on your books, and maybe even team up to give away each other’s books online.
Social media may be important, but only if you enjoy it! When you’re thinking about investing time and effort into a platform ask yourself if it’s going to be something you dread doing every day. If you enjoy conversations and interacting with your audiences, try Twitter! If you have a knack for photography, Instagram may do the trick. What works for you is going to work for your brand.
Starting your online presence from scratch can be difficult but getting plugged into the communities that pertain to your book right off the bat can expose you to new ideas on how to connect with your audiences. Much like the research you do for your book, you can entrench yourself in those spaces. For instance, if your main character enjoys fly-fishing, go ahead and follow some fishing accounts or join a fly-fishing group. Thinking in these detail-oriented terms can help point you to a new group of people who will enjoy your book!
Perhaps most importantly: have fun. Writing is work, but when you’re having that writer’s block or not feeling so great about your latest sales numbers, don’t forget why you started writing!
A huge thank you to everyone that makes Killer Nashville happen, we hope to see you there in 2019!
Max López is a publicist and new author ambassador for JKS Communications in Nashville. With a degree and experience in journalism and business, he also has crisis management skills. An avid outdoorsman, he enjoys bringing energy and positivity to any team he's a part of.
Dramatic Infrastructure: Using Everyday Events to Deliver Emotional Impact / By Roger Johns
Success as a storyteller depends on understanding not only the mechanics of the story you’re telling, but also how to properly shape a reader’s responses to the events in the narrative. Readers quickly lose interest in writing that’s emotionally flat, but provoking, sustaining, and directing the reader’s emotional experience can be challenging.
One way to meet this challenge is to keep track of the everyday experiences that produce specific emotions and to examine their dramatic infrastructure to learn why they hold the power they do. Understanding events at such a basic level allows us to manipulate the facts without destroying an event’s capacity to evoke an emotional response.
This makes everyday events adaptable to situations beyond those in which we originally encounter them, greatly enlarging our toolkit. And it’s lets us separate the fiction our characters inhabit from the facts of real life. Putting real people on the page, explicitly or implicitly, can cause legal problems.
As a hedge against useful observations slipping from my memory, I keep a diary of emotion-laden experiences, along with the specific emotions they trigger, and I try to work out why they affect me the way they do, and how I can modify them to produce different emotions. Here are a few examples from my little black book.
A Suitcase Full of Sadness: The Power of Disrupted Expectations
Not long ago, two empty suitcases appeared at the foot of the bed in the guest room––a signal that my wife was gearing up for a business trip. I had been expecting to see a suitcase, but there were two instead of one. And they showed up a day earlier than I expected. These were minor deviations from the norm, yet their effect was palpable. Their power came from the fact that something was out of place (that second suitcase) and something was out of sequence (the packing was happening a day earlier than usual), and this disrupted my expectations.
After I noted that these details had affected me by amplifying my usual reaction to my wife’s imminent departure (sadness), the storyteller in me recognized their greater value and I began tinkering with the scenario. How could I modify the facts to provoke suspicion as well as sadness? The shoulder strap of an evening gown peeking out from under a business suit, maybe.
What about fear? If no suitcases had appeared (again, something out of place), even on the day I would normally expect them (something out of sequence), I might fear my wife had lost her job. Or, if there were three or four suitcases, instead of one, I might fear she was moving out and leaving me?
The key is to recognize that disrupted expectations affect our emotions, and the precise effect depends on the facts that hang on this basic scaffold. The facts could be details that are out of place or out of sequence, as they were here. But they could be anything the author cares to use. If one character uses an expression another character has never heard them use, it disrupts an expectation and raises the question of what that first character has been reading, or who they’ve been talking to, or where they’ve been. If a character who is chronically late, shows up early, an expectation is disrupted and an emotional response is triggered (surprise, happiness). Or, if a character who is chronically early shows up late a different expectation is disrupted, evoking different responses (worry, irritation).
Hey! You! Get Outta My Cab: The Power of the Totally Unexpected
The example above involved disrupted expectations, but what about completely unexpected situations?
Three or four years ago, my wife and I pulled into a parking spot at one of our favorite restaurants. Before we could get out of the car, a taxi pulled into the other end of the lot. This caught our attention because taxis in this area are uncommon. My wife and I watched as a well-dressed couple, a man and woman, exited the taxi from opposite sides.
The trunk popped open and a two pieces of luggage were lifted out and set on the pavement behind the cab. We were too far away to hear what was being said, but the couple’s gestures and facial expressions were enough. They were in the throes of a pitched argument––almost a shouting match. After less than a minute, the man climbed back into the cab and it pulled away, leaving the woman standing there with her bags. She quickly slid the strap of one bag over her shoulder, yanked up the handle of her other bag, and then stalked off, rolling one bag behind her and swaying under the weight of the other.
The overwhelming emotional response to this scenario was curiosity. Several times, over dinner, we speculated about what had happened and why. Even though it’s been years, it left such a strong impression we never fail to mention it when we find ourselves back at that restaurant.
The power of this experience came from three characteristics: its brevity, its unusual facts (a taxi so out of place, two people climbing out of a taxi to argue in the parking lot, one person abandoning the other) and rich vein of questions it exposed: What were they going on about? Why was the woman the one who was left behind? Where had they been going? Did the man continue on to the original destination or did he abandon both the woman and the destination? Were they spouses, lovers, business associates, or strangers who just happened to share a cab? What happened to the woman?
At a book talk I attended a few years ago, I had the privilege of listening to Michael Farris Smith describe the event that inspired him to write Desperation Road. He was driving down some highway in the Deep South, when he saw a woman walking along the road, a garbage bag slung over her shoulder. Due to the state of the economy at the time, this was apparently not an uncommon sight in those parts. What took him by surprise, though––what was completely unexpected––was the young girl walking hand in hand with the woman, along this busy highway. He had never seen anything like this and it haunted him until he wrote a novel in which he imagined some very interesting answers.
Both the couple from the taxi, and the woman and the girl walking along the highway, were unexpected glimpses of something far outside the ordinary, a turn of events that never fails to provoke a strong reaction. Curiosity and desperation are just two of them.
In his short story, That Bus is Another World, Stephen King leads us down the garden path through what looks like an ordinary day of being stuck in big-city traffic, and just when we’re not expecting anything much to happen, one of the characters does something utterly unexpected, leaving wide-eyed horror in its wake.
It’s brief, it’s bizarre, and it raises a ton of questions. And even though King uses this mechanism to elicit a sense of horror, I can easily envision the story producing feelings of transcendence, tenderness, hatred, or any number of other emotions, simply by changing a few facts, by having the character do something different but equally unexpected.
This three-factor scaffold, it seems, will support fact patterns that elicit just about any response you want, as long as you want the response to be intense.
No Room at the Inn: Passive-Aggression, Emotional Extortion, and Access Control
Passive aggression is an example of another fundamental structure rich in possibilities. Several months ago, I was booking a hotel room and I was doing it the old-fashioned way––by talking to someone on the phone. It should have been straightforward, but it wasn’t. The reservation clerk would ask me for a bit of information and just as the answer was coming out of my mouth, she would cut me off with a different question. If I tried to continue with the answer to the earlier question, she would cut me off again with something like “No, I need to get this first.”
This happened four times and with each interruption her tone became sharper and her sighs of exasperation got progressively louder. After the fourth time, I got fed up, told her I had to take another call, and then I hung up . . . and called a different hotel. I can’t say with absolute certainty that she was jerking my chain, but the timing of each interruption was so precise and her irritation grew so theatrical I was certain enough, and I felt justified bailing out of the call.
This was classic passive-aggressive behavior and, while it’s often just plain irritating (a sometimes useful emotion to evoke), it got me to thinking about how its fundamental structure makes it an incredibly versatile emotional trigger. This is because passive-aggressive behavior is an example of power in its most fundamental form––access control. The victim needs something, the aggressor controls access to what the victim needs, so the victim endures the aggressor’s abuse as the price of access.
Sometimes the aggressor is abusive because they feel generally powerless in life and this is a way to remedy that, albeit on a petty level. In other cases, the aggressor may have a darker motive like revenge or emotional manipulation, or the satisfaction of some sadistic appetite. With each different motive, this fundamental power equation triggers a different emotion.
Another way to use it is to explore the price the victim will be required to pay. In the case of me and the reservation clerk, her irritated tone and her dramatic sighs were her ways of letting me know she was getting what she needed. But it also told me she was charging too much. So, I cancelled the transaction and found accommodations where the price of a room didn’t include a tax on my dignity.
In Silence of the Lambs, FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling needs to stop a serial killer and her antagonist, imprisoned psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter, needs to watch people suffer. In order to stop the killer, Clarice needs access to the insights in Lecter’s head, so Lecter proposes a bargain. If Clarice will let him observe her anguish as she recounts painful childhood memories, he will grant her access to his psychiatric expertise so she will have a chance to rescue the killer’s latest victim.
But, how much emotional pain is Clarice willing to endure? Will Lecter raise the price as Clarice’s need grows more urgent? Will Clarice risk losing Lecter’s cooperation by only pretending to pay his price? Will Lecter risk losing access to Clarice’s agony by feeding her bogus information? Does Clarice control access to something Lecter is willing to pay for?
Using these price-to-be-paid elements of the power equation, Thomas Harris, the author, evokes a nearly endless sequence of emotions, keeping the reader on an emotional rollercoaster throughout the book.
Lecter’s behavior goes way past passive aggression. In fact, there’s nothing passive about it, at all. It’s pure emotional extortion. But the difference rests entirely on the facts. The fundamental framework in Silence of the Lambs is the same as it was for me and the reservation clerk: A controls access to something B must have, so B must meet A’s price. One set of facts produces irritation, the others produce shame, revulsion, fear, dread, hope, hatred, and craftiness. The emotional responses that the basic power equation can produce are probably endless.
Conclusions
Disrupted expectations, the completely unexpected, and the power of access-control are just three examples of mechanisms that can be adapted to deliver an emotional punch. They prime the pump, so to speak. Virtually any event or situation that evokes an emotional response can be used. The key is to understand the dramatic infrastructure of the situation or event so you can adapt it to your storytelling goals. After that, it’s simply a matter of dressing up the basic mechanism with the facts that produce the emotional experience you choose.
Roger Johns is the author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books, and is the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year (Detective ▪ Mystery Category) for his debut novel, Dark River Rising. The second volume in the series, River of Secrets, will be out on August 28, 2018. Roger is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club, Sisters in Crime, International Thriller Writers, and Mystery Writers of America. Please visit him at www.rogerjohnsbooks.com.
Spoiler Alert / By Ellen Whitfield
Could spoilers be a good thing?
Mysteries and thrillers have always been my go-to reads, and when I started working as publicist for authors, I was excited to get to work with so many talented writers who craft books in my favorite genre.
What I didn’t want to reveal to them, however, is that I am the queen of spoilers. I almost always read the end of a book before I get there, usually when I’m about a third of the way through and have a grasp on the characters and main plot points. I am especially guilty of this with mysteries, because I literally cannot wait to find out what happens.
And romances with love triangles? I cannot stand the suspense and I must find out how things shake out in the end.
WHY? Everyone asks me this, and I honestly don’t have a perfect answer. I think it has to do with wanting to be able enjoy reading the book without rushing through to the end and feeling stressed out about what might happen.
Before I started my spoiler habit, I was frequently disappointed when the murder was committed by someone who didn’t fit the profile I had put together in my head for the killer, and I would feel slightly stupid for not picking up on hidden clues that obviously pointed to one character. (I would make a terrible detective.)
But now, I more often than not close the final page of a book with a contented sigh because I have been able to follow the trail that the author laid down, and everything came together in a satisfactory manner.
Does it occasionally take away the enjoyment of the book? Every once in a while, yes. Earlier this year, I read The Woman in the Window, and I feel like that one may have been more enjoyable had I waited to find out both twists presented close to the end. (I’m really sorry, A.J. Finn.)
But more often than not, I find that I feel more relaxed and can focus more on the writing once I know how the story will end. I pick up clues that I may have otherwise overlooked, and I feel better about siding with certain characters, knowing they won’t betray me in a twist ending.
If I don’t peek, I find myself itchy and distracted, and not really enjoying the book, which is kind of the whole point, right? I still enjoy the build up to the eventual reveal and I think I’m still a fair judge of the story overall.
But authors, especially mystery authors, put so much work into crafting an intriguing tale, and I always feel like I’m betraying the way a story was meant to be read when I flip to the last chapter. I took an informal poll of some of the writers I work with, and I was surprised to find that they weren’t horribly offended.
Most of them said it’s the reader’s choice as to how they want to read a book, even the thought of someone immediately finding out what happens makes them feel a little icky. But one of them even said she herself was an offender.
I read a 2011 article that cited research from a UC San Diego's psychology department study to say that spoilers are misnamed: for some people, they enhance the story rather than spoiling it.
One of my authors presented a perfect analogy: "If someone wants to 'eat dessert' before dinner, that’s fine, as long as it doesn’t spoil their appetite for reading the book from the beginning, and as long as they don’t reveal the ending to someone else.”
If you are going to eat dinner anyway, does it really matter if you eat dessert first? Grab a bowl of ice cream, flip to the end of the book, and let me know what you think.
Ellen is a publicist at JKS Communications. With a strong journalism background, Ellen balances her understanding of “the other side of the desk” when it comes to media pitching with a true love of an avid bibliophile. She has been part of the community of journalists in her more than seven years experience in print media with such well-respected outlets as The Dallas Morning News, The Advocate (Baton Rouge and New Orleans) – where she coordinated books coverage for the paper, Waco Tribune Herald and others. Her experience on the editorial side of travel, community and lifestyle sections of newspapers, social media and online media is to the benefit of authors in a variety of genres. She has an eye for design and a passion for detail. A Louisiana State University graduate, Ellen lives in Louisiana with her husband, a newspaper executive, daughter, and (ever-growing) collection of 550 books.
R.I.P Malibu Barbie / By Jennifer Dornbush
The daughter of a death investigator shares how a toy from her unconventional childhood feeds into her career as a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist.
When I told some friends about a very unusual Barbie doll accessory my sisters and I used to play, they wanted proof. Not being able to recall where it last ended up, I emailed my family to ask who was in the current ownership of … the Barbie body bag.
The next day, I received a very distressing photo and email from the Newaygo County Medical Examiner’s office (aka Mom and Dad). What started as a simple quest to find the bag turned into an unorthodox correspondence.
Before you step into this email chain you need a little background on my family.
#1. My father was a medical examiner and my mother served as his office manager.
#2. They ran the M.E. office from their home. I and my two sisters often helped out.
#3. No, Mattel does not manufacture Barbie body bags. The body bag you see in the photograph is a sample version given to us by a vendor.
The emails began….
Subject line: Miss Barbie found dead according to Newaygo County Medical Examiner report.
Message:
We are sorry to inform you that little Miss Barbie was found lying in her case without any obvious signs of what caused her death. Therefore the medical examiner was notified. He came to examine the scene and then packaged her up in this adorable "Barbie body bag" to be taken off to the morgue for examination and autopsy. If and when we get a final answer to the cause and time of death, you will be notified. If this office can be of any further help in your investigation, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Within a matter of minutes, emails about Miss Barbie’s demise were bouncing around between the family.
First came denial …
From: Reporter Dornbush (me)
From the photo you sent, that looks like Skipper, not Barbie. Please confirm her identity.
From: The Newaygo County Medical Examiner’s Office
This email is to correct a grave error on our part about the name and person of the deceased in the white body bag in the pictures that were recently sent to you. It has come to our attention that we were mistaken in the identity of the person in the body bag. Records now indicate that she was "Skipper", Barbie's little sister. We do apologize for the mistaken identity and our office will do better in the future to make sure we have the correct identity of the person/s that our office is required to investigate.
Then came blame…..
From: Detective DeVries (my middle sister)
Reports from witnesses state that Skipper was cat walking down the runway when her arch enemy dropped the disco ball on her. She was rushed to the hospital where her arch enemy switched her IV to pain meds causing Skipper to hallucinate and stumble out into the hallway where a candy striper’s cart struck her and caused a fatal hematoma in the brain.
From: Sherlock Holmes Graeser (my youngest sister)
I disagree with your evaluation of the crime, Detective. During a recent interview, Skipper’s best friend confided that Skipper had an acrimonious relationship with Ken’s new wife, Malibu Barbie. She has reason to believe Malibu poisoned Skipper at their Dreamhouse.
From: Reporter Dornbush (me)
My sources familiar with the matter concur and say they believe Ken had a hand in her demise. He was overheard complaining to his spray- tanned friend, Steven, “I’m tired of driving Skipper everywhere in the convertible. She should grow up and get her own license.”
And then, overwhelming guilt when this answer arrived….
From: The Newaygo County Medical Examiner’s Office
The official autopsy report is in and the M.E. has found that after being shut up in her doll case for over a decade, Skipper died from an acute case of loneliness. She had no one to play with; no one to pay any attention to her; no one to take her places, no new clothes to try on. She languished away from lack of attention until she just gave up the ghost.
We all speculated that perhaps this was Mom’s way of telling us to get our old toys out of her house.
Finally, we arrived at acceptance….
From: Detective DeVries
Please pass along our condolences to the remaining family of Miss Skipper. We will consider this case closed.
From: Sherlock Holmes Graeser
I am sorry to hear of Skipper's death but am delighted to see how well the white body bag goes with her 70s style, flowered halter top dress. She was well-preserved and stylish to the very end.
From: Reporter Dornbush
I accept your official document on this matter but will continue into the investigation as journalism integrity compels me to do. In the meantime, I will run a flattering obituary in this Sunday’s paper. We ask that you please hold her body and belongings just a little while longer until we can get home to claim them.
Such are the antics of a coroner’s family. The place I called home and once relegated with great embarrassment has now become the cornerstone of my storytelling. I’ve embraced my uncanny childhood and it’s warped influence on me. But before I began fictionalizing the skeletons in my closet, I spent years trying to keep them there. [And yes, we had a real human skeleton in our family. His name was Sam and he lived in the barn. But that’s for another story.]
A plaque hanging on the wall of my office reminds me: Home is where your story begins. Write from that place. Especially if it makes you cringe.
Jennifer is a writer, speaker, and forensic specialist. Jennifer has several crime drama series being developed for television. Wanting to share her love of forensics with other storytellers, she scribed non-fiction work, Forensic Speak: How To Write Realistic Crime Dramas, published by Michael Wiese Productions, hailed as a north star to creating authentic crime dramas. As a forensic specialist, she has consulted with TV writers on network and cable TV shows. She regularly leads seminars and webinars on forensics and crime fiction and has taught screenwriting on the high school and university level and mentored new writers. Sign up for her newsletter and YouTube channel FORENSIC FRIDAYS at: www.jenniferdornbush.com
The Mystery That Starts With A Secret / By Emily Bleeker
Five months ago I stood in a courtroom filled with people. I handed the bailiff a piece of blue paper. She gave it to the judge. He looked down at me over a pair of bifocals, and that is when the truth spilled out, “I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I didn’t know. It will never happen again.”
And on that day I swore that I’d never, ever…forget to renew my vehicle registration online before the expiration date. And that was my first and only run-in with the law. In my life as a mom of four, you’d be more likely to find me in the pick-up line at school than watching a line-up, and the crucial decisions in my day usually include some “edge of your seat” problems like…is it too close to dinner to have a snack?
Though my search engine history would leave an NSA agent shaking his head and putting me on a watch list, the stories I write exist solely on the page and in my mind. I’ve always been drawn to mystery, thrills, with maybe a dash of blood and betrayal in the mix. I like to think/hope that this proclivity for the morose comes not from sociopathic tendencies but from a curiosity that started long ago.
When I was younger, my mom, sister and I would watch that crime TV news magazine shows about real-life mysteries. I’d watch the beginning of the story with fascination as the happy pictures scrolled across the screen, and family members shared memories of a loved one lost, or maybe a loved one accused of a terrible crime. Though allegiances would change with each interview, the pictures didn’t. The smiles on the wedding day, the tender snuggles with newborn babies, the laughter recorded on a grainy video in a crowded room, all remained the same on the face of the victim or the suspect. In that fuzzy opening of the program, it was impossible to know, perhaps by design, who to trust.
And that’s how it works, right? Every good mystery starts with a secret and at least one person who is willing to go to great lengths to cover it up. And that is what I like to write about, this thing we all have in common—secrets. I think at first we all might say, “Secrets? What Secrets? I’m an open book!!” But they are there, deep down, things either no one knows about us or only our very trusted friends and family. Those are your secrets. And maybe you wouldn’t murder someone to cover them up, but that’s because you are you. My characters aren’t always as nice—'cause where is the fun in that?
So many of the questions I get when I talk to book clubs center around the “why” of these lies. Why didn’t she just tell the truth? Why did she hide this or that? Why? Why? Why?
As readers, we are far easier on fictional characters than we are on humans in real life or, gosh, even ourselves. Think about it—we clear away the clutter and unfolded laundry to take that picture of our kid for Instagram. We tweet about our blessed ten-year anniversary and not how we’ve thought about a divorce every day for nearly a decade. We post a grand thank you message on our birthday when most days we feel utterly alone. And these are the garden-variety secrets of our lives. Think of the vitriol and judgment that so much of social media and other online outlets vomit out at the slightest provocation.
Gosh, no wonder we are afraid to be real.
But, if I’ve learned anything from writing stories about people with secrets it is that hiding is not worth it. Though it makes for great, page-turning fiction, the only way to resolve the chaos, mystery, and turmoil in my character’s lives is to uncover the secret. Only then, when their greatest shame and fears are exposed, can there be growth and resolution in the story.
As social scientist Brené Brown explains, “Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.” I like to watch my characters run from their less than perfect pasts, but that’s because they are figments of my imagination. In real life, secrets end in shame, loneliness and worst case scenario—a true crime documentary. So let’s read about those juicy, tense, mysteries that come from scandalous hidden truths, and maybe even sneak in a show or podcast to keep our brains twisting. But as for me, I’ll leave that excitement on the page or screen and instead of running from my story, I plan on living it out in the open for everyone to see. I hope you will join me.
Emily Bleeker is a former educator who discovered her passion for writing after introducing a writer's workshop to her students. She soon found a whole world of characters and stories living inside of her mind. It took a battle with a rare form of cancer to give her the courage to share that amazing world with others. Emily lives in suburban Chicago with her family. Between writing and being a mom, she attempts to learn guitar, sings along to the radio (loudly), and embraces her newfound addiction to running. Connect with her or request a Skype visit with your book club at emilybleeker.wordpress.com
Writing for Young Audiences / Kathryn Berla
In my mind, the most difficult thing to write is a young adult because the writer must always keep her focus on the adolescent voice while conveying emotions that many adolescents aren’t fully equipped to put into words. And yet, these emotions will likely be the most intensely felt of our lives, setting the stage for how we move forward in our jobs, our marriages, our parenting. Everything. The profundity of this time of self-discovery is exactly what led me to write in the young adult genre.
GOING PLACES was my first foray into the world of mystery writing. Although it’s a young adult book, the mystery involves a much older man and his interaction with the protagonist. Once I got a taste for writing a bit of mystery, I was anxious to write another, this time allowing myself more freedom to explore it in an adult way. However, with one foot firmly planted in the young adult world, I didn’t want to stray too far. I simply wanted to allow myself more leeway.
Thus, THE KITTY COMMITTEE was born.
I’m more of a psychologically-oriented person and writer. What goes on inside a person’s head is always far more interesting to me than external events. What causes a person to be cruel or commit a crime? Why do others go along with it? What are the long-term consequences beyond just the immediate action and how can these consequences change a life?
Two books that I read in my younger years had a profound effect on me, raising questions about the burdens we carry forward from childhood into adulthood. One was Margaret Atwood’s CAT’S EYE and the other was John Knowles’ A SEPARATE PEACE. Combine that with my decades-long interest in sociopaths, and I had a theme I was anxious to explore. Sociopaths are different from you and me, and yet they live amongst us in more numbers than we might imagine. Often, they’re productive and successful people, a fact that I’ve learned through my research. We tend to think of them as monsters but that’s often not the case. In THE PSYCHOPATH INSIDE, neuroscientist, James Fallon, discovers during his own study about psychopathic tendencies that his personal brain scan showed all the physical markers that placed him firmly in that category.
Reading the relatively new young adult thriller, MY SISTER ROSA, led me back to the old classic, THE BAD SEED, and a new way of looking at the disorder. Perhaps in ancient history, more of us, if not all of us, were sociopaths. How could empathy, morality, and guilt be productive when the human species was in survival mode? Once we had advanced to the point of forming civilized societies, those same traits became critical. But does evolution simply erase unwanted traits in the blink of an eye? My dentist tells me that more and more people are born without the wisdom teeth we no longer have the use (or space) for.
So, what happens to the “normal” person who gets caught in the web of a sociopath when it’s leading nowhere good? Sociopaths can be keen observers of people. They can learn to fake the emotions they know are important to others but don’t recognize in themselves. Perhaps they do this on a subconscious level, perhaps it’s conscious. But if you spend a lot of your time observing others and how they react to different situations, you’re bound to gain insights that are helpful when it comes to manipulation.
In THE KITTY COMMITTEE, I explore this concept as well as the concept of survivor’s guilt of those who get sucked into the vortex of a sociopath. Because the events take place during the intense and uncertain period of adolescence, I felt more freedom to dig deeper by looking back through the eyes of an adult. And like all of my books, forgiveness, and redemption are at the forefront as the most powerful motivators in the human heart.
Kathryn Berla enjoys writing in a variety of genres including light fantasy, contemporary literary fiction, and even horror. She writes for all ages: children, middle grade, young adult, and adult. She's the author of the young adult novels: 12 HOURS IN PARADISE, DREAM ME, THE HOUSE AT 758, and GOING PLACES, which received VOYA Magazine's Perfect Ten rating. You can follow her on Twitter @BerlaKathryn Instagram @AuthorKathrynB and Facebook @KathrynBerlaBooks
Character Development in a Series / Karen Randau
Whether you’re writing a standalone book or a series, you need believable characters who cause the reader to feel something. The characters must change—from weak to strong, devastated to overcoming, or lonely to thriving in a satisfying relationship.
In each book of a series, the change should unfold before the reader’s eyes to create a satiating experience. Characters should travel a believable arc from book to book, and each book is a building block to who the character has become.
Believable Characters Show Relatable Traits
Your key characters need certain characteristics.
While often larger than life, they must be relatable to evoke the reader’s empathy, and they are never perfect.
They encounter obstacles and conflicts and have a huge dose of fear, but they develop into someone who faces their instead of shrinking away.
They fail, but they learn from their failures and overcome the obstacles you’ve put in their path.
Start with a Name
Names matter more in allegories than in commercial fiction but give your characters’ names a lot of thought.
Ethel is a good name for a woman born in the early twentieth century, but horrible for a contemporary girl. I often Google popular baby names of the timeframe and geography of my character’s birth. Research the name’s meaning.
If you want a character who is Slavic, big, strong, and violent, choose a Slavic name that Americans could pronounce and means something similar to your character’s description. For example, the Slavic name Nicholai is a variant of Nicholas and means victorious; conqueror of the people. You could use either version. Don’t forget to Google the first and last names together to ensure the combination doesn’t belong to a famous person.
Help Readers Visualize the Character
Sure, you must know the basic physical characteristics of all your characters (hair, eye, and skin color in addition age, height, build, piercings, tattoos, the sound of the voice, and physical imperfections). Advanced writers let the reader visualize the character in their own way rather than spelling out how the writer envisions the person. When possible, reveal physical characteristics through action and dialogue (showing) rather than by telling these traits (and not by the character looking in a mirror).
Backstory: Where a Series Becomes a Challenge
Backstory is everything that happened to your character before Chapter One and is what shaped that person into who they are today. You need not tell their whole backstory, and tell little—if any—in chapter one.
For my antagonist, protagonist, and key supporting characters, I create a one or two-page summary of their birth, siblings, where they grew up, educational level, political affiliation, spiritual beliefs, occupation, income, goals, skills/talents, friends, strengths, weaknesses, triggers, flaws, hobbies/pleasures, and anything important to their personality. Pick the few most relevant and reveal them through action and dialogue.
In my summary I like to include a photo I find online, but I avoid revealing who I envisioned in my writing. Let the reader imagine your characters for themselves.
Keep track of how characters in a series change from book to book. If you’ve planned an entire series, plot the character arc from the beginning of book one until the end of the final edition. If your process is to develop your story and characters as you write, think through the character arc for each book and keep it consistent with the previous books.
In my Rim Country Mystery series, protagonist Rita Avery started as a naïve, shallow person who cared more about fashion than her neighbors, and she rarely questioned the motives of her lying husband. The challenges and obstacles in the first book changed her, and the events in following books continued her transformation. By the fourth book, Rita is a savvy and compassionate private investigator who carries both a gun and anti-anxiety medication because of what happened in the first book.
You can find templates online for character development. Feel free to use the worksheet I developed for myself, found at http://www.karenrandau.com/character-development/. For a series, update your character summary with each book to provide greater depth and to decide which traits and backstory to highlight in your work-in-progress.
Karen Randau started writing as a way of life as soon as a teacher taught her to print Run Spot Run. She received a degree in journalism/public relations from the University of Texas at Austin, and had a career that spanned the industries of high tech, mental health, and nearly three decades at Food for the Hungry. Later, a seed of an idea turned into her debut novel, Deadly Deceit, the first in the Rim Country Mystery series, published in June 2016. The series now also includes Deadly Inheritance (January 2017) and Deadly Choices (July 2017). For more information, visit http://www.karenrandau.com/.
No Fear, Ish / Robert Mangeot
In fall here, the yellow garden spiders come out. If you live anywhere in North America, you may know the beasties I mean: monster ladies in monster webs, their bodies over an inch long and their leg span a couple inches more. When summer breaks, for a few weeks they make a hunting ground of my eaves and shrubs. Despite her size, this queen lady is harmless other than to the imagination.
Most of my life I’ve been afraid of spiders. Those darting legs. Creepy egg sacs. Venom, maybe. You never know in your fear place, do you? Yep, I steered clear of little spiders, big spiders, spiders on floors, spiders in webs, leggy spiders that aren’t technically even spiders but really harvestmen but try telling that to my racing pulse. Whatever is next-level down from the full-on willies, that was me and spiders. Less so recently, and for an unexpected reason: I wrote about one.
A few years ago, I was doing passive idea-gathering on the internet (less charitably, goofing off), and I came across an article on giant tropical spiders who ate birds. A legit article from a legit source with legit pictures of the feasting in-progress. Genus Nephila, the article went. Forget my local ladies. A nephilid can boast a two-inch plus tubular body and a leg span wide around as your dinner plate, and the rain forest-y parts of Queensland and Southeast Asia are lousy with them. Birds, bats, snakes, all on her menu. Banana spiders are the common name, though more poetic minds dubbed them the Golden Orb Weaver. Their webs are super-strong and perfect for industrial uses from military to clothing to surgical supplies, which was the story hook: spider silk the stuff biotech dreams are made of.
Did I mention a leg span wide as your dinner plate? Go ahead. See for yourself. These ladies stalk plenty of YouTube clips. Inspired if freaked out, I put a giant nephilid at the heart of what became “Queen and Country,” published in the March 2018 Mystery Weekly. In the story’s early drafts, the spider queen was this malevolent force the principals searched in vain—and at some risk—to bag for Big Science. I gave the spider extra size and, with creative license, that serious venom to boot. No, my subconscious and I didn’t spare her any shock factor.
Something else happens when honing an idea: research. You know, facts and stuff. I studied nephilid diet, reproduction, hunting and feeding, day vs. nocturnal behavior, how she might walk, how she would behave in various weather conditions. And I studied her webs, the elaborate architecture spun in sun-glinting patterns, the parchment-y decorations she weaves in— stabilimenta, I would learn—that still baffle arachnologists as to exact purpose. Here was where the surprises started. The more real-world behavior I worked into my devil spider, the more rounded she became on the page. The more vulnerable. I came to root for her.
Research gives me more than just a better story. What I learn stays with me long after I’ve typed The End. I came to tolerate a spider encounter, to trap-and-release or live-and-let-live. After all, if there are spiders around, that means there’s lots of stuff spiders eat around, and those critters would be the root problem, wouldn’t they?
Look, I won’t claim to be cuddly with the things. If a house spider crawled on me now, I would leap none-too profile in courage from my chair. But I’ve come to enjoy our sharing space, with my local giant ladies especially. Every fall, my non-bird-eating queens break cover and spend their regal nights under my porch eaves. Last year, I described our resident queen’s stabilamenta pattern and web structure to my wife, how the spider would have to take her capture silk down soon, what with rain on the way. My wife asked how the hell I knew all that. And why, she didn’t add aloud.
Great questions.
The longer I’m at this whole writing thing, the more I realize what’s behind the ideas that I keep after. A desire to understand and, maybe in some cases, overcome. Thanks to a short story, these days I greet my fall spider friends with no fear. Ish.
Robert Mangeot lives in Franklin, Tennessee with his wife and cats. His short fiction appears here and there, including
ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE, LOWESTOFT CHRONICLE, Mystery Writers of America's ICE COLD, and the
Anthony-winning MURDER UNDER THE OAKS. His story "The Cumberland Package" was a finalist in the 2017 Derringer
Awards. He proudly serves as current chapter president for Sisters in Crime Middle Tennessee. When not writing, he
can be found wandering the snack food aisles of America or France.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Thick As Thieves: Writer Networking Made Easy / Sara Wigal
Oftentimes, new authors spend their creative time alone. You dream up your plot alone. You write alone. You edit alone. It can be a lonely job, and shifting gears to move into the next phase of your new mystery book’s life can feel terrifying. Once the writing is done, what comes next?
Publishing and publicity come next of course, but we’d be remiss to skip a truly crucial part of your evolving writing career: meeting other writers.
You may have already been involved with beta readers, whether that means paying for writing workshops, having friends in your local book club read over your manuscript, or finding independent groups of writers to work with on perfecting your book. But beyond editorial support, there is an enormous benefit to joining in communities of writers when you set off to publish; other authors (and soon-to-be authors) become your first readers, reviewers, and hopefully, also your friends.
The mystery world, somewhat ironically, is a genre in which I’ve found the authors to be particularly friendly and welcoming. Writers who spend all day dreaming up dastardly ways for people to die seem to have the widest smiles! Authors who research and catalogue the most gruesome of true crime murder scenes hug one another warmly at conferences, and even the biggest bestselling names always have a minute for mentorship, it seems. It’s bizarre. It’s wonderful! I love the mystery/thriller/suspense/true crime world of people, a truly loving, murder-obsessed bunch.
If you are a newly-minted mystery writer, how can you get connected with these kind “killer” souls? By showing up where they’ll all be! There are many conferences and writers’ groups to choose from, and here below are some of the main mystery genre ones to get you started:
August 23-26, 2018 Nashville
You can take a peek atthe schedule hereto see if anything catches your eye!
Thrillerfest(conference) put on byInternational Thriller Writers(organization)
Malice Domestic (conference)
Murder and Mayhem (conference)
Left Coast Crime (conference)
Bouchercon (conference)
Magna Cum Murder (conference)
Sisters in Crime(organization)
Once you’re involved, how can you take advantage of the networking opportunities? Here are a few tips:
Have a positive online life: “like” and comment on the posts you see from authors you admire on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram before you attend the conferences, and set up in-person meetups during fun cocktail hours! It’s always nice to go in and meet someone you already “know.”
Show up to your regional or local events and get to know your neighbors! You’ll feel like part of a posse when you go to more nationally-leaning events and see people you already know, this way.
Go to panels and meet the people you are sitting near. Ask them what genre they write in, connect on social media, and stay in touch to support one another’s work.
Stay after talks to speak to panelists and presenters. They volunteer for these gigs because they love answering questions from writers, typically, and will welcome conversation with you.
Offer to review other people’s books. Everyone always needs blurbs as well as positive Amazon and Goodreads reviews left online. If you have time, it’s an especially nice way to ingratiate yourself with your writing community if you can do this!
It can be hard to be the “new kid on the block,” but I assure you that there isn’t a better place to be the ingénue than with the thriller community. Make some fiendish friends!
Author bio: Sara Wigal is an Assistant Professor of Cinema, Television & Media and Director of Publishing at Belmont University, a unique undergraduate degree that equips students with necessary skills and knowledge to enter the book world. She serves the Next Chapter Society council which supports the programming made possible by the Nashville Public Library Foundation. She previously worked in literary PR, beginning as an assistant and working her way up to a Senior Manager role, shaping author brands and interacting with the media. Wigal has been published by The Tennessean, Publishers Weekly, and Writer's Digest.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Villains Are Characters Too / Maggie Toussaint
Writers often use “antagonist” and “villain” interchangeably. Though both labels may apply to the same character, there is a distinction.
An antagonist is a plot role. They aren’t necessarily evil. However, they are opposed to the protagonist, and their opposition drives the story conflict. In short, antagonists spend their time antagonizing.
Villains are a character type, not a plot role. They have evil motivations and actions. A villain isn’t necessarily opposed to the protagonist. According to Merriam-Webster.com, a villain is “a character in a story or play who opposes the hero; a deliberate scoundrel or criminal; or one blamed for a particular evil or difficulty.”
My forthcoming paranormal mystery, Confound It, has a villain and antagonists. In the story, multiple suspects are openly hostile when investigators start lifting the rocks of their lives. As for the villain, he removes his web of associates to stay concealed.
Multiple types of villains exist. The distinction is based on their path to villainy and the rottenness of their deeds. A list of five villain types, as identified by Nancy Kress in her “The Bad Guys” chapter of Dynamic Characters, follows.
Accidental—This villain’s character flaw is fatal and does him in. Often accidental villains feel regret. His fatal flaw remains consistent throughout the story.
Intentional—From the start this guy plans evil deeds. This villain needs texture, layered characterization, and quirks.
Surprise—This character is deeply embedded in the story, often disguised in a supporting role. He has no point of view (POV) scenes. For believability, plant hints that something isn’t quite right. Positive character traits before his evil action (such as charm, looks, and smarts) must mesh with negative perception of the same traits after-the-act (manipulative and self-absorbed).
Over-the-top weirdo—This villain is unrepentant, untextured, and downright abrasive. For best effect, this villain’s evil is pitted against the protagonist’s weakness. A few layered truths about the weirdo in the story will entice readers to believe his over the top actions.
Evil-all-around villain—This villain has no redeeming qualities. He’s evil out of stupidity, weakness, or selfishness. He ruins lives without a qualm.
Writers should craft layered villains complete with goal, motivation, and conflict. Reaching beyond the standard villain “3 Ms” of maniacal laughter, minions and monologues will add to plausibility.
A villain is the hero of his own story. He should have an identifiable human weakness or eccentricity. It’s best if his goal opposes the protagonist’s goal to provide maximum conflict. The hero usually stands in the way of the villain’s goal.
A sympathetic villain has strong motivation and will do anything for his goal, which may be evil. He’s antagonistic, often criminally so, and operates under his own code of honor. Prejudice or society’s mistreatment of him may incite his call to action. Some are prey for truly malevolent forces, a story twist I use in Confound It to raise the stakes.
Psychological, emotional, and story-specific elements help create a strong villain. For best effect, create complex, authentic, sympathetic (if possible), and conflicted villains.
The villain often serves as a character foil to the protagonist. He’s similar in some ways, but each needs an equal depth of character. Therefore, when the villain reveals dark truths, the reader buys into the villain’s character. This psychological challenge is often more memorable than if the villain attacks the protagonist with lethal intent.
The protagonist has fears she doesn’t want to face, but the villain exploits this weakness. Exposing truths the protagonist would rather deny prompts fear in the protagonist. The villain needles the protagonist with these dark truths, creating ongoing story conflict.
By inciting conflict, the villain forces the protagonist’s hand. Their final clash pushes the protagonist into saving the day. In my book Confound It, the villain entraps female sleuth Baxley Powell and forces her into his service. All is lost, or so it seems.
Villains must be stopped in a way that’s worthy of them. Irony and karma are good instruments of destruction. For instance, if a villain diverts a town’s energy to fuel his evil empire, the town should retaliate through his weakness.
Using these techniques, writers can create memorable villains. Readers will talk about that complex character long after the book is finished.
Southern author Maggie Toussaint writes cozy and paranormal mysteries. Confound It, book five in a series, is her latest Dreamwalker Mystery. The next book in the series, Dreamed It, releases June 2019. Maggie also writes a romantic mystery novella series. She’s president of the Southeast chapter of Mystery Writers of America and a board member of LowCountry Sisters In Crime. Visit her at https://www.maggietoussaint.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Solving the Book Publicity Mystery / Marissa DeCuir
A military-based thriller, a psychological escape, and a mysterious middle-grade fantasy—what do these things have in common? Well, each is a book. But no two books are exactly the same, and neither should be the promotion.
Your questions about publicity will be the same. Ask yourself:
What’s possible for my genre? What/who is my target audience? How can I directly reach them? What makes my book unique? What titles are most comparable to mine, and where were they showcased and successfully promoted?
What about my own personal story and background?
Where do I personally have ties?
What makes me unique as an author?
Where do I have networks of friends and family who would be willing to support my work?
Your answers will differ. Sometimes it will take you into the hidden corners of the internet. Sometimes it will be right in front of you.
Here are a few specific examples from real publicity campaigns to get you thinking strategically, thoroughly and creatively!
Samuel Marquis’ WWII trilogy and other thrillers: In Sam’s case, we wanted to connect with military fiction and other topic-related book bloggers and reviewers, especially to highlight the historical accuracy of these fiction titles. We also showcased Sam’s technique through guest articles. With Sam based in Colorado, outreach to local media and bookstores was a priority and resulted in him becoming a #1 Denver Post bookseller. Sam has since released eight books, but especially for his debut title, we needed to introduce him to readers who likely had no prior knowledge of his work. This is where knowing your audience is so important––we needed to find readers who enjoyed comparable titles in this genre. Garnering online reviews from readers on blogs, Goodreads, Amazon, etc., helped build a solid reader base to showcase genuine interest in a new author.
Kim Hooper’s psychological thriller: As soon as we saw Kim’s work, we knew it would be a perfect book club read. So we invited nationwide clubs to participate in a tour along the route of the novel’s main characters who traveled from California to New York. It also helped that Kim has a great sense of humor, which led to her making a hilarious video in the style of Jimmy Kimmel’s Celebrities Read Mean Tweets. While this was at heart a fun way to let readers get to know the person behind the book, it was also a worthwhile promotional opportunity - we launched the video exclusively through Hypable. Another important element to our work with Kim: Reading lists. It’s important to think about the reader and how and where they might enjoy a title. Bustle, for example, is one publication that offers reading list coverage!
D.E. Night’s middle-grade fantasy: Especially when writing for a younger audience, you need to think like them for promotion. What would have made you excited about a book in the fifth grade? What would make a parent excited about buying a book for their kids? For D.E. Night, we arranged author visits and offered copies of her book to middle school book clubs. We reached this younger audience through “Bookstagrammers” and “BookTubers” (Instagram and YouTube users who cover books). We also thought about how to make reading a fun bonding experience by encouraging mothers and daughters involved with certain organizations to read and discuss the book together. It was important to think about “tastemakers” in this genre. How do young people find out about books? In addition to social media influencers, youth librarians, middle school teachers, parents and writers for youth-specific outlets like Girls Life were instrumental in this middle-grade fantasy’s promotion.
Now you’re set to solve the mystery of book publicity! You and your book are unique, and it’s important to treat the publicity as such. That said, it’s still important to remember that you do share the commonality with other authors of being just that, an author. There are certain tactics that should be implemented for any book (optimizing your book on retail sites, getting a great editor, hiring a professional book cover-designer, and if you’ve got incredible accolades - flaunt them!) And you certainly will have shared experiences worth exploring and discussing.
There is no better way to connect with fellow authors than at events like Killer Nashville, which also provides opportunities to gain more accolades with the awards program. The author community is a supportive one. Lean on one another, talk through potentials of cross-promotion to your fan bases, and find comfort in your shared experiences.
Marissa DeCuir is the president and partner of JKS Communications, a book publicity and marketing firm. She was born into a newspaper-owning family and has written for USA Today, National Geographic and numerous other daily newspapers. As a former journalist, she’s always looking for the best hooks to utilize in each publicity campaign, helping readers and reviewers understand a book’s importance and purpose. She values fostering the relationship between writer and reader in an organic way, and believes in taking a personal and strategic can-do approach to help authors reach their goals.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Formula or Creative Freedom? / Mike Nemeth
You’ve finished your first novel and you’re proud of it. Your friends and family are proud of you. You may be savvy enough to predict the obstacles you face: early readers who misunderstand the story, rejections from agents, criticism from editors, an unexpected lack of interest from the media, reviewers, and bloggers. You clear these obstacles and wait for the royalties to roll in. Then you are surprised by one last hurdle: confusion over how to categorize your work for distribution.
Physical bookstores have relatively few categories of fiction and getting misplaced in the mysteries aisle when your book is an action-filled thriller isn’t the end of the world. Online bookstores, however, have a plethora of sophisticated and detailed categories to make searching millions of titles easy for sophisticated readers who know what they want to buy. No problem, you think, put my book in that huge, often-searched mysteries category and readers will find it. But wait, if your novel doesn’t conform to the definition of a mystery, it can’t be categorized as a mystery. Then it must be a thriller, you think. Well, it is if it conforms to the definition of a thriller. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep looking for a home for your story.
That’s what happened to me when I published my debut novel. I wrote a story without thinking about its sales category. I thought of it as a legal thriller, but the judges and lawyers were neither protagonists nor antagonists. The plaintiff and defendant played those roles so it wasn’t quite a legal thriller. Eventually, it qualified as crime fiction, a category in which a protagonist is an anti-hero who fights for moral superiority against faceless institutions. I had to wonder how many Scott Turow fans would wander into the crime fiction category to find a story that didn’t quite conform to the legal thriller formula.
As writers, we are faced with a dilemma when we write a story: will we follow a predefined formula for a genre, or will we write what our creative instincts tell us to write and let the chips fall where they may? Having learned from the confusion over my debut novel, I faced this dilemma with open eyes as I plotted a sequel. I tried to write this second story as a mystery but the characters don’t know there’s been a murder until it is unexpectedly solved in the climax of the story. Try as I might, I couldn’t force the victim to die at the beginning of the story. I experimented with the thriller category but couldn’t find a way to keep the victim alive either. Since the victim was an elderly woman, her passing hardly rose to the usual thriller standard of saving the world from disaster.
So, I wrote the story that I had to write without regard for genre formulae. This second novel will again be categorized as crime fiction. I’m okay with that. It is who I am as a writer. However, if you want to be a writer of mysteries, your first step should be to learn the definition of a mystery so your story conforms to the definition. If you want to be a thriller writer, learn the definition of a thriller and plot accordingly.
You are either a genre-focused storyteller or a freeform storyteller. Knowing who and what you are will make the writing easier and the distribution, categorization, and selling of your stories less confusing.
MIKE NEMETH is a novelist, blogger, former AAU basketball coach and retired information technology executive. “The Undiscovered Country” is the sequel to “Defiled,” a crime fiction thriller, which became a bestselling book on Amazon. Mike’s other works include “128 Billion to 1,” a nonfiction examination of March Madness, the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament. Mike lives in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife, Angie, and their rescue dog, Sophie.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Fiction: Dark & Light / John Hegenberger
These days, there’s a heavy-weight emphasis on dark fiction. You can go to any number of “Noir at the Bar” events in major cities across the country. It’s as if the criminal element of popular fiction has won the battle against the dogged or clever detectives, and we all might as well lay down and die. It’s grim, gritty, occasionally gory, and heavy as sixteen tons. “Another day older and deeper in debt,” as the lyric goes.
Maybe it started with Jim Thompson. Perhaps it’s a mutation from Stephen King’s popular horrors. Or we can blame James Ellroy. Whatever the case, it doesn’t matter.
Noir is only a sub-genre of mysteries, and not even that of fiction, itself. It’s the single black crayon in a rainbow box of Crayolas. Thus, a good story, more often than noir, can and should be based on the more colorful aspects of reality. Optically, black is the absence of all other colors; the opposite of light.
And what’s wrong with light? I like light. I like the Funhouse more than the Chamber of Horrors. I like Superman more than Batman. I like Arsene Lupin, Simon Templar, and Indiana Jones over Hannibal Lector or some soiled, addicted, vengeful ex-cop or ex-con. Let’s have a little fun in this house. Open the windows, switch on the lights. “Come on baby, light my fire!”
This is not some crazy pipe dream. Detective Stan Wade is a sort of realistic, self-deprecating, and average guy who is inspired to figure things out and help other people. Sure, he gets in over his head and there are dark moments in his life, but he doggedly goes on (with a lot of help from his friends) and cleverly finds the truth, justice, and the nostalgic 1950s version of the American way.
In those days, which you still can watch play out on multiple TV channels, everybody worried about Sputnik and the Bomb, smoked outstanding and mild cigarettes, loved Walt Disney, learned to surf and sing folk songs, watched color television and wide-screen westerns, drove finned gas-guzzlers while sneering at VW beetles, read trashy paperback books and gaudy ten-cent comics. Who does that today?
The Stan Wade stories are always bright and share a fondness for a time long gone too soon in a place that existed partly as a Hollywood fantasy and somewhat of a secret history of a hidden reality. Throughout it all, the tone is light, warm, yet much more jolting, bouncy, and dangerous than cozy fiction.
The events in Stan’s stories are, in fact, light enough that we can confidently and comfortably believe they actually might have happened; certainly could have happened; definitely, absolutely, positively should have happened . . . give or take a lie or two. Just remember, Stan’s #1 client is Uncle Walt, so his world and stories originate from “the happiest kingdom of them all.”
Nonetheless, I’m currently writing a short story to appear soon in a proposed anthology, “Columbus Noir.” Who does that? But a new Stan Wade book, Shortfalls, will be out this summer. So, light or dark, I’m buying the first round. Cheers!
Award-winning author, John Hegenberger has produced more than a dozen books since mid-2015, including several popular series: Stan Wade LAPI in 1959, Eliot Cross Columbus-based PI in 1988, and Tripleye, the first PI agency on Mars. His latest novel, The Pandora Block, is a high-tech, international thriller. Several of his short stories have appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine. His Stan Wade, LA PI novel, SPYFALL, won a 2016 Silver Falchion at Killer Nashville. Discover more at www.johnhegenberger.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
The Joy and Heartbreak of Changing Series Characters / R.G. Belsky
Gil Malloy has been my best friend for the past several years. We’ve been through a lot, Gil and me. Happy moments, sad ones, career success, scandal, near-death escapes from killers, Gil’s broken marriage, a second try at that marriage and a few torrid romances for Gil with other women along the way too.
But its time for me to move on and say goodbye to Gil Malloy—at least for now.
Because I have a new BFF named Clare Carlson.
Okay, maybe this all seems a bit melodramatic for an author who’s only talking about a damn character in his mystery novels. But the relationship between a writer and his series character is an intense, complex one. We writers live with the character many hours a day; we direct what the character will do and say; and, more often than not, we wind up putting a good deal of ourselves into that character.
I wrote four books about Gil Malloy, a hard-driving New York City journalist who’ll do anything to break a front-page story. Gil is smart, talented, hard-working, outspoken (to a fault at times), irresponsible about most everything except his work and frequently can be a real pain in the ass. (I leave it to people who know me to guess which qualities of my own I put into Gil).
My new series character Clare Carlson—who makes her debut May 1 in Yesterday’s News—is a New York journalist too. But she’s a much more complex character. A onetime Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who is now the news director of a TV station, Clare tries to balance her old reporting instincts with the demands of being a high-powered media executive. She also has secrets buried in her past that come to light when she begins pursuing new evidence in the case that won her a Pulitzer 15 years ago—the disappearance of an 11-year-old girl from the streets of Manhattan.
Clare is slated for a second adventure with The Cinderella Murders in 2019.
The challenge for me of creating a new series character like Clare Carlson is to make sure she has some of the same qualities that made my readers like Gil Malloy. But not so many of Gil Malloy’s qualities that people feel she’s a kind of version of Gil in a dress. There were moments when I was writing Yesterday’s News when I decided to delete lines of Clare’s dialogue because I realized they were things Gil Malloy would likely say—not Clare Carlson. Then there’s the challenge for me too of writing a female character instead of a man and making that sound authentic. (No, I’m not just talking about sex scenes here, people!)
Of course, the good thing is that a fictional series character never really has to die. Lawrence Block wrote a series of Matt Scudder books early in his career that didn’t sell very well, went on to write other stuff—then brought Scudder back a few years later as a regular series character in A Stab in the Dark and the classic Eight Million Ways to Die. Robert B. Parker departed from his successful Spenser series to also write the Jesse Stone and Sunny Randall mysteries. Dennis Lehane started out by writing four mystery novels starring Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro before moving on to bigger stand-alone thrillers like Mystic River (although he did later bring Patrick and Angie back in another mystery novel years later).
My own first mystery novel featured a female reporter named Lucy Shannon. I then published four other mysteries without her before bringing Lucy back in my sixth novel. I also wrote a series of mystery novels in the early 90s about a TV reporter named Jenny McKay. Amazingly, I still get queries from fans who want to know why I don’t write about that Jenny McKay woman again. Of course, in real life, Jenny would probably be close to retirement age by now. But that hasn’t stopped me from working on a new project featuring the Jenny McKay character.
So, as I say goodbye to Gil and hello to Clare, I find myself overwhelmed by a lot of conflicting and mixed emotions.
I look forward to many exciting times in the future solving murder mysteries with Clare Carlson.
At the same time, like with any old friend, I look back with fondness on the wonderful moments I’ve spent with my pal, Gil Malloy.
Of course, like I said, nothing is forever.
Who knows …maybe one day Clare and Gil will even meet.
But that would be another book for another time….
R.G. Belsky is an author of crime fiction and a journalist in New York City. His newest mystery, Yesterday's News, will be published in May 2018 by Oceanview. It is the first in a series featuring Clare Carlson, the news director for a New York City TV station. Belsky's last book, Blonde Ice, was published by Atria in October 2016. It is the third in a series of books from Atria about Gil Malloy, a hard-driving newspaper reporter with a penchant for breaking big stories on the front page of the New York Daily News. The first book in the Gil Malloy series—The Kennedy Connection—was published in 2014 and Shooting For The Stars came out in 2015. Belsky himself is a former managing editor at the Daily News and writes about the media from an extensive background in newspapers, magazines, and TV/digital news. At the Daily News, he also held the titles of metropolitan editor and deputy national editor. Before that, he was metropolitan editor of the New York Post and news editor at Star magazine. Belsky was most recently the managing editor for news at NBCNews.com. His previous suspense novels include Playing Dead and Loverboy. Blonde Ice was nominated as a finalist for the David Award at Deadly Ink and also for the Silver Falchion at Killer Nashville in 2017. He was the Claymore Award winner at Killer Nashville 2016 and also a Silver Falchion Finalist in both the mystery and thriller categories. Visit him at http://www.rgbelsky.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Finding Your Voice / D.P. Lyle
So, you’ve sent your manuscript to an agent or an editor, and now you wait. Will they like it? Will they take you on as a client or publish your work? What makes them decide? Is it the unique premise or clever plot? Maybe the colorful characters? Or the snappy dialog and wonderfully-rendered setting?
No, the one thing agents/editors look for more than anything else is the voice. When they say they are searching for something fresh or something that speaks to them, they mean the narrative voice.
What is voice?
You’ll see many definitions. Mine is: voice is your distinctive way of telling your story. It comes from three things: knowledge, experience, and confidence. Here are some things you can do to help you acquire those tools:
Knowledge
Most things we learn along life’s journey come from others—an apprenticeship, of sorts. For sure medical school was that. So is writing. To write, you must read. Constantly. That will teach you what others are doing and how they’re doing it. Some writing will speak to you, other writing might not. You will gravitate to word choices, sentences structures, and the sound of some writers’ voices, but not those of others.
Your assignment: go to the library, your local bookstore, or even use online previews to read the first few pages of 50 books. Some will work for you—the operative phrase here is “for you.”
Take what speaks to you and embrace it in your own writing.
Experience
The great Australian writer Bryce Courtney often said that the secret to writing was “bum glue.” Glue your bum to the chair and write. So true. Write every day. Write your way. Copy the styles of the writers you like. Not that you will write exactly the same way but, rather, elements of their writing that work for you will creep into your own prose. This will evolve over time and before long—like riding a bicycle—you will be off and writing in your own voice.
Confidence
This, to me, is the key. Be fearless. Tell your story in your own words—your own voice. Don't worry about what others might think or whether it fits the so-called rules. Tell your story your way. Knowledge and experience breed confidence.
Art, Then Craft
Writing is an art and a craft. The art is the storytelling and the craft is making it cleaner and more publishable. Don’t let the craft kill the art. Don’t over-edit as you go. Write the story fast, write it your way, in your voice, then go back and clean it up. As Hemingway said: write drunk, edit sober. Get drunk on your writing, spill it on the page, then take a sober assessment and fix what needs fixing. Write fast, edit slow.
Repeat
Repeat the above steps throughout your career. Continue reading, writing, experimenting. Novels often seem so big that authors get tied up in the plotting, the juggling of characters and dialog, and this kills the creativity. Write shorter things. Start a journal and write scenes that come to you. Be fearless. Write your way. No filters. No critiquing. Just writing, and storytelling. Before long, what you learn will infest all your writing. It will become your voice.
In the end, your voice is yours. It’s personal. No one else has it. Only you. Let it out. Don't handcuff it or kill it. Let it guide you through your story. In the end, you will have your story, told your way. That’s always the goal, and it’s what agents and editors and, most importantly, readers are looking for.
D.P. Lyle is the Macavity and Benjamin Franklin Silver Award-winning and Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Scribe, Silver Falchion, and USA Best Book Award-nominated author of 16 books, both fiction and non-fiction. Along with Jan Burke, he is the co-host of Crime and Science Radio. He has worked with many novelists and with the writers of the TV shows Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women's Murder Club, The Glades, and Pretty Little Liars. You can visit D.P. Lyle at his website www.dplylemd.com You can read his blog at writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com.
(To become a Killer Nashville Guest Columnist, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
5 Tips to Understanding Genre in the Publishing Industry / Sydney Mathieu
Genre can be a tricky subject for authors. What categories of genre exist? Which one should I choose for my book? What if I’ve already decided on my book’s genre, but someone else disagrees? Does it even matter at all?
From most writers’ perspectives, the genre is secondary to writing the book they have in their head. Authors write books based on their ideas for character and plot—and that’s absolutely normal. However, genre becomes important when an author begins looking for an agent, finding a publisher, or starting a publicity campaign
Genre gives you a way to find an agent and gives agents a way to pitch books to publishers. Many publishers and divisions of publishers (imprints) specialize in publishing specific genres, and agents often have better connections with publishers in certain genres. Some agents specialize in children’s books, some mysteries, some romances. When you are trying to find an agent to work on your book, it’s helpful to know what kind of book you’ve written so that you can choose the best agent. When an agent specializing in your genre matches you with a publisher, you can be assured that the publisher will have a team of editors, publicists, and designers with a great understanding of how to produce a novel in your genre. This specialized approach ensures your title matches reader expectations.
Readers decide to read books based on their genre labels. Readers are used to books being categorized by genre, and each of those categories means something to a reader. For instance, a cozy mystery isn’t going to have gratuitous violence, and a thriller isn’t going to be a slow-paced character study. This makes it easy for readers who like certain types of books to easily decide if the book is right for them. This may seem like it simply narrows the audience and pushes people away, but it actually helps readers who will like your book find it, read it, and hopefully review it. There’s no benefit to having a reader who likes thrillers but hates cozy mysteries read a cozy mystery just to trash it on Goodreads because it wasn’t at all what they expected.
Your publicity and marketing teams can better target your market. There are plenty of publications (like Killer Nashville) that focus on single genres or groups of similar genres. If your book is incorrectly categorized or nebulously labeled “contemporary fiction” without further specificity (if further specificity is appropriate for your title), your publicity team may find it hard to convince niche genre outlets to cover the book, thereby missing a huge sector of your potential audience.
But my book is a “literary novel.” Some authors finish their books completely convinced they know the genre: literary. This may or may not be true, but more importantly, it’s typically not the complete truth. For instance, “Pride and Prejudice” is a literary novel, but it’s also a novel with a strong romance. “1984” is a literary novel, but it’s also a dystopian novel. These kinds of subcategorizations help your publicity team find readers. Unless you’re already established as a literary author, that label typically comes after one of your titles has gone through vetting by readers and publishing professionals who have declared your work “literary.” Most books and authors don’t start at that point; they grow to it.
Trust the professionals helping you. Sometimes authors write books, and they really just don’t know what genre it’s in. That’s 100 percent okay. That’s what your agent, editors, and publisher are for. They can help you either decide what genre it is or shape it into a genre that it’s already trending toward. Of course, not every book is going to perfectly fit into a single genre, and that’s okay. If you’re aware of how your book compares to similar titles, it can even be a unique distinction. It’s okay to write a “cozy mystery that’s a little edgier than usual” or a “dystopian novel with a private investigator–style mystery.”
At the end of the day, a genre isn’t “what your book is.” Instead, it’s a tool for editors, publicists, and readers to describe your book to others to ensure that the readers who will love the book find it, and that’s what every author wants!
Sydney Mathieu is a digital marketing expert who creates innovative campaigns for author and publisher clients for JKS Communications. She is a well-respected book publicist with a graphic design background that makes authors' visual promotions and social media pop. She focuses much of her time on promoting authors through social media, Amazon SEO, Goodreads support, and creatively getting promotional material into the hands of tastemakers.
(To become a Killer Nashville Guest Columnist, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Building Characters the Hard Way / Roger Johns
Before I turned to mystery writing, I spent nearly twenty years teaching in collegiate schools of business. During those years, I had literally thousands of career-oriented conversations with my students. In the beginning, I often asked them “So, what do you want to be?” Eventually, I realized that question focused on academic ambitions to the exclusion of other legitimate considerations, so I began asking, instead, “Who do you want to be?”
This question provoked a lot of thoughtful and very interesting responses. Intuitively, the students grasped that their fortunes as a something would hinge greatly on their fortunes as a someone. We were all aware of the stories about one professional or another whose life became chaotic and miserable because their character, or lack thereof, made them unsuited to the demands of their job. And we were also aware of the people who seemed to effortlessly withstand the rigors imposed by their chosen path.
The message in the question and the lesson of experience was easy to grasp: Who you are matters.
After I retired from the academy and took up mystery writing, I was several years and a lot of false starts down the road with my stubbornly unfinishable first novel before I realized that, as a writer, I had been ignoring the focus on who that, as a teacher, I had so relentlessly tried to cultivate in my students. It was a humbling moment. As a writer of plot-driven fiction, I had unconsciously decided that plot was everything and my characters deserved only second-class status.
Consequently, my characters were mere plot devices––hand-waving, dialogue-spouting, paper cutouts tricked up with collections of traits, and quirks, and occupations. But they were lifeless, and they were not up to the task of carrying the plot. The light went on when I eventually remembered those long-ago “Who do you want to be?” conversations.
Lesson learned: As it is with actual people, so it must be with fictional people––who they are matters.
Even after this evolution in my thinking, and despite all the writing classes, how-to books, and many hours spent with critique groups––all of which moved me closer to where I needed to be––I still struggled. Even though I spent a great deal of time and effort constructing what appeared to be complete characters with integrated, functioning personalities, the characters and the story didn’t play well together. The problem, as I ultimately discovered, was that I was creating the characters and the story more or less independently of each other. And once a character was created, it became impossible to see her or him as anyone other than the person I had already meticulously assembled and described in my character write-up. If the story didn’t call for that character, things tended to grind to a halt.
Eventually, the insights that all the classes and books and critique partners had been building toward finally hit me: (1) fictional people are built the same way actual people build themselves—one experience at a time, and (2) the authenticity of a character’s action in the present is determined by how that character was shaped by experiences in their past.
Lesson learned: Instead of populating my story with prefabricated characters, I would let the demands of the story call their personalities into being.
Things began to work much better at that point. Whenever a major character needed to act in a particular way, I created a corresponding experience in the character’s backstory––something that would make that action in the story’s present seem credible and authentic. Every important present action was paired with a character-shaping past experience. Eventually, I accumulated a critical mass of backstory and the characters’ personalities ignited and were strong enough to undergird an entire story’s worth of action. At that point, the characters were able to authentically carry the narrative forward.
Building as you go, however, is neither fast nor easy. It requires delving into the psychology of your characters and finding new and inventive ways to portray their past. You will have to get to know them as if they were real people.
And, as it is with so many things in life, the solution to one problem can also be the foundation for another. And such was the case here. With so much backstory, the problem became when, how, and whether to reveal it––how to keep the character’s action authentic-feeling without disrupting the momentum of the story.
The answer to this problem is, simultaneously, simple but not so simple. It turns out that backstory can be revealed in any amount and at any time, as long as you are careful to make sure that it serves the story but doesn’t become the story. This, I learned from reading a lot of books, by paying very close attention to what worked and what didn’t, and from the many mistakes I made as I dragged my own characters into existence. Here are some examples.
ACTION NOW, BACKSTORY NOW
Revealing the backstory as the action unfolds can be tricky because unloading the past as the character acts or experiences an emotion can easily sabotage the flow of the narrative. However, if done correctly, this process can produce a fully-fledged character very quickly, and pull the reader deep into the story.
In the first six pages of her debut novel, The Black Hour, Lori Rader-Day delivers a master class in action-now-backstory-now. Amelia, the character who emerges from those pages is so clear and her story so compelling, that putting the book down becomes impossible.
We see a physically damaged woman who cycles through panic, pain, dread, embarrassment, joy, irritation, anger, defiance, despair, determination, a fleeting sense of accomplishment, and ultimately fear––all within the confines of a short walk from her car, into a nearby building, up a daunting flight of stairs, and then along a hallway.
As Amelia makes this short journey, the author ties each of her physical actions and emotional responses to a bit of backstory. Cleverly, as the character moves forward in time, the snippets of backstory move backward in time. And as the character propels her hurting body along its excruciating journey up the staircase, the author reveals the backstory by going further and further down the memory hole.
From the outset, the reader is left to wonder at the source of Amelia’s physical pain and her seemingly endless pageant of emotions. Each short description of action and its corresponding physical or emotional response is paired with a brief but perfectly calibrated piece of Amelia’s history, and each pairing works as a self-contained mini-drama all its own.
The effect is mesmerizing, and by the time the seven-word revelation of the source of Amelia’s troubles is given at the opening of the second chapter, readers will feel as if Amelia is someone they’ve known forever.
It seems that the secret to success, here, was in keeping the action-backstory pairs short and perfectly matched, having the character experience a multitude of emotional responses in a very short period of time, and withholding the critical piece of backstory––the piece that explains Amelia’s seemingly bewildering blizzard of emotions––until the end of the sequence.
ACTION NOW, BACKSTORY MUCH LATER
Sometimes a character’s actions and the revelation of the critical piece of backstory that supports it can be at opposite ends of the book. Such is the case with the All the Missing Girls, by Megan Miranda. The reader learns early on that Nic Farrell, the main character, has made a puzzling decision before the book even began––a decision that ended a once promising career and spun her life into a lower, harder, and mystifying orbit. The reader, along with other characters in the book, wonders why she has done this. The critical piece of backstory that makes this decision make sense is not revealed until near the end of the book. That’s a long time to keep a reader in suspense, but Ms. Miranda pulls it off perfectly.
At every turn, Nic is portrayed as likeable, self-sacrificing, a bit tragic-seeming, and a little haunted. As an underdog trying to begin life anew, we root for her. But forces from her old life begin to intrude and we resent that. Nevertheless, she persists in trying to make the best of her new life. Then new forces rise against her and we resent that too.
From beginning to end, Nic is portrayed as a very sympathetic character, someone who is easy to care about and bond with and, most importantly, someone whose struggle looks familiar enough that we feel the need to know her, and are willing to stick with her until we discover what it is that caused her to make the decision that so dramatically altered her life.
As the story progresses, Nic’s backstory begins to invade her present in the form of someone she used to know or thought she knew. This continually reminds the reader that one of the main impediments to Nic’s new life is her old life. Every new revelation from the past serves to increase the tension she is feeling in the present. We experience with her that paralyzing fear that comes from being suddenly reminded of something bad we’d rather forget, or the dread that rises when old events seen in a new light reveal some unsettling truth.
While there are surely many ways to bridge a book-length gap between a character’s action and the justifying piece of her backstory, I found this one very compelling. The character was easy to strongly identify with, and other elements of backstory were added in a way that aggravated the character’s present troubles while building toward the critical revelation at the end.
BACKSTORY AS MISDIRECTION
Sometimes, backstory can serve double duty. It can justify a character’s present actions while it accomplishes some other story objective at the same time. In
Dark River Rising, my debut mystery, I needed a credible way for Wallace Hartman, my police detective main character, to miss the fact that she was being followed. This was going to be difficult because up until this point the reader had seen her as someone with exceptionally high situational awareness. So I had her fall under the spell of a long-ago memory. A drive through a neighborhood filled with personal history triggers a recollection from her childhood when her two brothers played a mean-ish trick on her. Wallace is in such complete thrall to the memory that she fails to notice something she ordinarily would have. The memory is brief but it’s the kind of transporting reminiscence that we all experience from time to time, and because it involves Wallace being the victim of a prank, the memory evokes sympathy and the reader feels what Wallace feels. The reason for this bit of backstory is revealed when the reader is made aware of the follower but Wallace is not.
This double-duty use of backstory worked because both Wallace and the reader experienced the misdirection. It also makes use of the fact that all adults were, at one time, children, and childhood is an endlessly fascinating time of life. And, for better or for worse it was, for most of us, the period that had the greatest impact on who we have become. Consequently, it can also be the richest source of material out of which to construct a character.
There are, undoubtedly, many other creative ways to present backstory that work just as well as the ones explored above, and you will surely find them, either in your own writing or that of others. But, as with any creative endeavor, there is a bit of art to go along with the science. Trial and error is inevitable and must be embraced. And not all of a character’s backstory needs to be revealed. But a character’s response to a challenge of any significance will eventually have to be justified by something from the past. Otherwise, the reader will be baffled as to why the character acted as she or he did. Why does one character, faced with a home invader, calmly aim and fire at the invader while another character cowers or flees or calls 9-1-1? The reader will want to know.
As an academic, I developed the capacity to go on forever about, literally, anything––fictional character creation, included. So, if you’re inclined to share your thoughts and experiences on this topic, I would love to continue the conversation. Please write and let me know about your journey to discovering the characters that propel your fiction.
Roger Johns is the author of the Wallace Hartman Mysteries—Dark River Rising (2017) and River of Secrets (2018)—from St. Martin’s Press/Minotaur Books. Please visit him at www.rogerjohnsbooks.com, and email him here.
(To become a Killer Nashville Guest Columnist, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
How Writing Nonfiction Made Me a Better Storyteller / Charles Salzberg
I honestly can’t remember the first time I decided I wanted to be a fiction writer. Maybe it was soon after I learned how to read. Or maybe it was the first time I realized the magic of the written word, that it could take you places you’d never been, and take you away from places where you didn’t want to be. But of one thing I’m sure: as a shy kid, I took refuge in books like The Winning Forward Pass andThe Adventures of Robin Hood, and later, novels like Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day,The Adventures of Augie March, and J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, and Bernard Malamud’s The Natural. They saved me by showing me there were other worlds and other people with problems to overcome. It was all very dazzling and I wanted to be able to create a world I wanted to live in, instead of the one where I did.
I was an English major in college, and after a short detour that took me to law school for a year, I found myself needing a job. A friend suggested, because I read a lot and because I could write, that maybe I ought to become a magazine editor.
Sure. Why not? And so I managed to get a job in the mailroom and New York magazine, in its heyday, with writers like Tom Wolfe, Nick Pileggi, Nik Cohn, Gail Sheehy, Pete Hamill and John Simon, writing for a magazine edited by the legendary Clay Felker.
It didn’t take long to realize I did not want to be an editor. They were overworked, and seemed chained to their desks, while the writers, who popped in and out at odd hours, seemed to be having all the fun. That’s what I wanted to do, and so after three months I quit to become a freelance magazine writer.
The choice was odd, because I’d never wanted to write nonfiction. In fact, I looked down on it. What was so hard about going out and interviewing people, or watching an event, and then writing down what you heard or saw? That wasn’t very creative. Now writing fiction, that was the real accomplishment. But writing fiction wasn’t going to pay the rent, and so, somewhat reluctantly, I became a magazine journalist.
It turned out to be the best thing I could have done, because I learned so much about writing fiction from writing nonfiction.
The first and most important thing I learned was that fiction and nonfiction writing aren’t much different. Nonfiction, especially in those heady days of the New Journalism, used fictional techniques. Scenes had to be created. Dialogue had to be spoken. And, a cohesive story, with a beginning, a middle and end, had to be told. And so, writing magazine articles allowed me to sharpen my fiction writing skills.
Another important thing I learned as a journalist was to scrupulously keep to a word count. That means, making every word count. It means going over your copy numerous times to make sure there’s no “fat.” It means looking critically at every word, every phrase, and every sentence, to make sure it’s necessary. This, as it turned out, became a very valuable skill to have as a novelist.
Another unexpected bonus was having to go out there and meet new people, people with interesting jobs, people different who thought different from me, people who were different from me. And so, for instance, there was the time I had to write a story about a skip tracer, a profession I knew nothing about. But once I did, I decided to give that profession to Henry Swann, the protagonist of the Swann series.
I also learned important research and interviewing skills, which came in handy when I’d research novels. For Swann Dives In, I interviewed a rare book dealer. For Swann’s Way Out, I learned about the art business and the movie business. And for my latest novel, Second Story Man, I learned burglary techniques by reading about the subject and interviewing cop friends.
In the end, I developed a well-earned respect for journalists and I’m pretty sure I’m a much better writer for my experience not making stuff up.
Charles Salzberg is the author of the Shamus Award-nominated Swann’s Last Song, Swann Dives In,Swann’s Lake of Despair,Swann’s Way Out, and Devil in the Hole, named one of the best crime novels of the year by Suspense magazine. His latest novel, Second Story Man, was just published. He teaches writing the New York Writers Workshop where he is a Founding Member, and he is on the board of MWA-NY. Visit him at www.CharlesSalzberg.com.
(To become a Killer Nashville Guest Columnist, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
Character Naming: A Very Important Process / D.P. Lyle
How important are character names? Do they make or break a story? Can a name suggest a character's personality? To answer these questions, let me share something I learned from a master of crime fiction—-Elmore Leonard. It was many years ago at the now-defunct Maui Writers Conference that I met Elmore. He was one of the featured speakers. As fate would have it, I had the opportunity to sit and chat with him about writing for about 45 minutes on two separate occasions. I used that time to not only get to know this gracious and funny man but also to pick his brain.
He is known as the master of dialogue, and for good reason. Every writer should read his work as each is a textbook for dialogue writing. But, I was more interested in his characters. They are always deep and complex and so well drawn. So I asked him if he did character sketches or exactly how did he create such wonderfully flawed people. His response was that, no, he didn't do character outlines or anything like that but rather he would spend weeks, sometimes months, thinking about a character. At some point, the character’s name would evolve. And once he had the name, he knew the character.
The beauty of this struck me instantly. What he was saying is that he lived with these characters for those weeks and months until he knew them. And once that familiarity was established, the name appeared. Basically, he mentally created character sketches. The results were classic crime fiction. I mean, could Chili Palmer be a neurosurgeon? No, only a loan shark. Linda Moon is, of course, a lounge singer, and Raylan Givens is the perfect name for a US Marshall from the coal mines of Kentucky.
So what's the take-home message? Live with your characters, get to know them, and the name that fits will come. I'm sure, like me, you've named characters and began writing a story only to realize halfway through that the name you chose just simply didn't work. The reason? You didn't know the character well enough yet to know what that character's name must be. But, if you live with the character for a time, a better name will appear, one that fits the character like old jeans.
I’ve always believed that your protagonist should have a short, clean name. One that pops. One that’s easy to say, and type.
You’ll likely type it more than any other name in the story, so don’t make it long and complex. Mort works better than Mortimer. Unless, of course, the character is a Mortimer. A longer, tongue-twisting name might even annoy your readers. So, keep it simple, if possible
Also, it’s wise to have only one name per character. For example, let’s say Admiral Adam Jones, Commander of the Pacific Fleet appears in your story. If you call him Adam, Jones, Admiral Jones, the Admiral, the Fleet Commander, etc., you risk confusing the reader particularly early in the work while they are trying to sort everyone out. So call your protagonist Jones and maybe Admiral Jones and stop at that. Obviously, in dialog this might change as one or more characters might know him as Adam, but in the narrative keep it simple. Choose one name and stick to it.
Same goes for your main characters. Are you going to use their first or last name to identify them? Will you choose Adam or Jones, in the above example? This choice might be determined by the type and tone of the story, by local and cultural norms of the setting, and by the time period of the story. For example, in the South, we tend to call folks by their last name. In the end, it’s up to you, but whichever you decide, be consistent.
In medicine, blood type O-negative is termed the “universal donor” because it’s least likely to cause a reaction and, if in an emergency situation where blood must be given quickly and without going through the matching process, it’s the safest choice.
Is there a “universal” character name? You bet. Elizabeth. Think of all its iterations: Bette, Beth, Betty, Betsy, Liz, Lizbeth, Lizzie, Lisa, Liza, Libby, Lea, Lettie, Bee, Bess, Bessie,
Eliza, Elise, Elsa, Ellie, Etta, Ilsa, Izzy, and others. Each of these evokes a different feel for the character.
Choose your character names carefully. You’ll be living with them for many months, even years.
D.P. Lyle is the Macavity and Benjamin Franklin Silver Award-winning and Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, Scribe, Silver Falchion, and USA Best Book Award-nominated author of 16 books, both fiction and non-fiction. Along with Jan Burke, he is the co-host of Crime and Science Radio. He has worked with many novelists and with the writers of the TV shows Law & Order, CSI: Miami, Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Judging Amy, Cold Case, House, Medium, Women's Murder Club, The Glades, and Pretty Little Liars. You can visit D.P. Lyle at his website www.dplylemd.com You can read his blog at writersforensicsblog.wordpress.com.
(To become a Killer Nashville Guest Columnist, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
"Based On" or "Inspired By" a True Story? / Manning Wolfe
When I give my PowerPoint presentation, “Legal Issues for Authors,” I’m often asked if my legal thrillers are based on actual events that happened to clients in my law firm. I always stutter a bit when answering this question because the answer is yes and no. Attorneys already get a bad rap for qualifying every answer, so I try to slip in an explanation without too much legalese.
While all of the books in the Texas Lady Lawyer Series are based on true stories, they are not the factual series of events that actually occurred in each case. Is that “inspired by” or “based on”? Where is the line?
Terms Defined:
A story that was “inspired by” actual events is primarily fiction, but the writer gets the idea from something that took place in reality. The resulting novel takes its inspiration from the true events without claiming to represent anything that may have actually happened. The characters are usually original to the novel or only vaguely resemble the real-life participants.
A story “based on” actual events is more exact. Sometimes the names of the people and places are retained. Unlike a biography where some degree of accuracy is expected, the story is based on reality, but liberties are taken. The core elements, such as events, themes, and main characters serve as representations of themselves, but time may be compressed or secondary characters pressed into an amalgamation for efficiency.
Examples from Published Books:
With these standards in mind, my legal thrillers are inspired by truth and launched from actual events. I use the legal facts that are in the public records or media and stop short of revealing anything that was confidentially shared by a client. In other words, I use the truth as a jumping off place to tell the story of re-named characters that are fictional when the novel is finally published.
In Dollar Signs, my clients were two brothers who signed a billboard lease without realizing there was an option in the fine print to purchase the land under the billboard. In reality, the brothers didn’t bring the lease to me until the sign company sued them to obtain ownership of the land through a technicality in the law. In a meeting one day, the younger brother said, “Why don’t I just burn the damn thing down!” Of course, he didn’t, but the idea stuck with me and when I wrote the novel, it begins with the brother burning down the huge billboard and hanging off the catwalk dangling above the cars below. Merit Bridges, the Austin attorney in the Texas Lady Lawyer series takes over from there to take on the Goliath corporation and defend the brothers.
In Music Notes, the second in the series, Merit Bridges represents a down-and-out guitarist, Liam Nolan, who’s slain near the Lady Bird Lake with his own Stratocaster. The probate that develops after his death involves a young University of Texas student who believes that Liam is his father. In comes the villain, a music manager out of Los Angeles, and trouble ensues. In real life, my client, in this case, was the estate of the musician who had died. I changed the name of the famous guitarist and disguised his illegitimate son. The court records are public and used in the plot, but the majority of the story is fiction. The battle over the assets is exaggerated from the true story, but the law used to solve the probate issues is similar.
In the upcoming Green Fees—to be released in the Spring of 2018—Merit Bridges represents a young golf pro who dreams of playing the PGA tour. I won’t expand on the legal issues here, as the book is not yet published, but the true story involved a contract between a golf sponsor and the young pro as the jumping off point.
Bottom Line:
In all three books, the stories “inspired by” true events are developed “based on” a true story. The jumping off points and settings are true in all three cases, but the development of the story, characters, and resolution are all created in my imagination.
Manning Wolfe is an author and attorney, with one foot in the business world and one foot in the creative realm. Her business experience, combined with her vivid imagination, manifests in quality services for clients, as well as compelling storytelling for readers.
Manning writes cinematic-style, intelligent, fast-paced action-packed legal thrillers with a salting of Texas bullshit. She is writing a series of Texas Lady Lawyer novels based on her main character, Austin attorney Merit Bridges. Manning’s background as an attorney has given her a voyeur’s peek into some shady characters' lives and a front row seat to watch the good people who stand against them. Visit her at www.manningwolfe.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Column, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Joseph Borden and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s editorial.
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: