KN Magazine: Articles
Dying for Dinner: Blu Cheese Chips and Caramel Apple Pie Sippin’ Moonshine
Dying for Dinner
One look at model and Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, and you’ll never believe that nachos or potato chips pass those lips. But she admits to a love of all foods, even the most treacherous of the deep-fried and battered. She told Fitness Magazine that she believes in doing everything in moderation. She allows herself to have what she wants, even if it’s fried chicken, and she keeps up with her exercise. We feel the same about moderation. While we try to make sure that we get lean proteins, fruits, and vegetables the majority of the time, it’s nice to go for the truly decadent every once in a while.
Blu Cheese Chips
By Cara Brookins
This classy cheese-lover’s dish was created for the launch of the psychological thriller, Little Boy Blu.
1 medium onion, chopped finely
2 tbsp. flour
2 cups milk
½ lb blue cheese, crumbled. (2 cups)
Salt
¼ tsp cayenne pepper
One bag blue corn chips (or thick cut potato chips)
Melt the butter in a saucepan and add onion. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly for 5-7 minutes. Stir in flour. Whisk the milk in slowly. Cook over medium heat, whisking constantly until thickened. (About 5 minutes.) Remove from heat. Whisk in the blue cheese. Add cayenne and salt.
Put half the potato chips in a large bowl and drizzle with half of the sauce. Add remaining chips and then drizzle with the rest of the sauce. Serve immediately.
Caramel Apple Pie Sippin’ Moonshine
By Ross Cavins
This recipe was handed down through the generations to my characters Clint and Waylon Easley, the stars of the first short story in “Follow The Money”, and the unpublished book, The Chasity Hustle. Their daddy used to make it every fall when the apples were ripe, and their mama would heat some up as a bedtime toddy.
The boys took up making moonshine in their late teens, but after blowing up their still twice, they started buying their hooch from Old Man Farley. When he went blind from a batch of his own shine, however, they began buying Everclear from the liquor store.
Whipped cream vodka and caramel candies were added over the years as the boys brought the recipe into current drinking culture. One time they even experimented with absinthe, and it took two months for Waylon to grow his eyebrows back.
This sippin’ moonshine is great over ice on a hot, humid day, or warmed on the stove and served in front of a cozy winter fire. Just don't sit too close.
1/2 gal apple juice
1/2 gal apple cider
1 cup white sugar
2 cups brown sugar
1 bottle Everclear (750 ml)
1/2 bottle whipped cream vodka (375 ml)
1 Granny Smith apple (pureed)
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp ginger
1/8 tsp cloves
4 cinnamon sticks (cut 1-inch pieces)
39 soft caramel pieces
Directions:
1. Remove all the caramel pieces from their wrappers. This’ll take a while, so you should be prepared to take a shot of vodka about halfway through to keep your strength up.
2. Cut apple into tiny pieces and puree in food processor.
3. Combine apple juice, apple cider, white sugar, brown sugar, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, caramel, apple, and cinnamon sticks into huge stockpot. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer, stirring occasionally to make sure caramel and sugars completely melt. Do not stick hand in the pot. Use a long stick, or possibly a wooden spatula.
4. After everything is liquefied, cover and let simmer for another hour while you watch a rerun of Justified on your VCR (or Netflix if you're technologically inclined).
5. Remove pot from heat and let cool for a while.
6. Add Everclear and vodka. Stir well.
7. Remove one mug-full of mixture and set aside.
8. Strain pot into mason jars using a wire strainer and funnel combination. Add 2 cinnamon stick pieces to each jar, seal, and refrigerate.
9. Watch another episode of Justified while you sip on your warm, newly created libation.
Cara Brookins is the author of seven published novels, and has been speaking at events since 2004. Brookins is also a partner in MySocialFam, a social media consulting company that she owns and operates with her four children. Brookins’ works include the adult thriller Little Boy Blu, the YA Timeshifters trilogy, Treasure Quest, and the middle grade Gadget Geeks and Doris Free novels. Her latest book, Rise: How a House Built a Family, is a memoir about leaving a domestic violence situation with her four children and building Inkwell Manor, their 3,500 square foot home, from the ground up with their own hands. Rise sold at auction to St. Martin's Press and will be available in the fall of 2016. Brookins has keynoted multiple events and has also given lectures and appeared on panels at national writers’ conferences, including Thrillerfest, Killer Nashville, Arkansas Literary Festival, and Bouchercon. Brookins also frequently speaks at universities across the country about writing and social media. CaraBrookins.com
Ross Cavins is a web developer and author of the award-winning book, Follow The Money, and the 2014 Claymore Award Finalist, Barry vs. The Apocalypse. A self-appointed disciple of Elmore Leonard, he writes from his home in North Carolina where he pretends that people pay him to do what he loves. His sense of humor is sort of like Disco; you dance to it even if you don't admit it.
These recipes are so good they should be a crime. If you concoct either of these great recipes, let us know what you think and send us a picture. We may include it here with a link to your website.
What are you cooking? Submit your favorite recipes. They can be based on your favorite literary character, your Aunt Clara’s, or some amalgamation of ingredients you’ve discovered that makes life worth living (nothing with arsenic seasoning, please). Make sure to include your contact information and explanation of the origin of the recipe. Send your submissions (to which you avow in a court of law that you have all rights to and are granting the nonexclusive rights to Killer Nashville to use in any form and at any time) with subject line “Dying For Dinner” to contact@KillerNashville.com.
Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.
Marketing Your Book 101: What Does Personal Branding Have to do With Writing?
Remember middle school when “reputation” meant everything? A little of that still exists today, except that as adults it’s more about commerce, and less about wearing the coolest clothes or hanging with the right people.
Marketing expert Erik Deckers explains personal branding, and ways to promote yourself that get people to associate happy thoughts whenever you come around, whether that’s in social media or in real life.
Erik will be sharing his knowledge at this year’s Killer Nashville. His sessions are a no-miss, standing-room-only opportunity.
What Does Personal Branding Have to do With Writing?
By Erik Deckers
As writers, we all need to market ourselves. We need to promote our “personal brand”. That’s how people know us and decide whether they like us and our work.
A lot of writers hate it when I tell them this. “I shouldn’t have to market myself. My art should speak for itself,” they say.
Maybe you shouldn’t, and maybe it should. The world is filled with very good writers who don’t believe they should do something so crass as marketing.
One of them sold me my latte this morning.
Or my personal favorite, “I’m not a brand. I’m a person.” (And they do it all pouty, with their arms folded, like a child being told it’s bath time.)
A brand is the emotional response people have when they see your face or hear your name. (With a company, it’s what happens when they hear the company name or see its logo.) Everyone creates an emotional response in the people they know.
Think of it as a Yay/Aww feeling. People say Yay and Aww when they see us coming or going. Whichever they say at whichever time is entirely up to you.
That’s personal branding. It’s what people think when they see us, hear from us, read our name, or hear about us when we’re not around. Other people call it reputation, but I wrote a book on personal branding, so I need to stick with the jargon in the hopes of selling a few more copies.
There are plenty of articles out there telling you what to do with each of the four basic social media tools—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging. Rather than do that, let me share three principles that will help you connect with people online and communicate with them.
Build Relationships
Social media is not a broadcast tool, although many companies and hucksters use it that way. It’s a two-way conversation tool that we’re forgetting to use properly. Think about your Facebook friends. You “like” things they post, and occasionally you comment. But unless it’s a vigorous political debate, most people don’t actually engage each other. We think we’re “talking”, when we’re really just having two one-sided conversations at the same time.
So what if we commented more, asked more questions, and had more conversations? How much deeper would our Facebook relationships be? What if you could do that on Twitter? Ask and answer questions, talk to people about books, or the news, or whatever’s happening in their lives. Talk to people and form online relationships. You’d be amazed at what you can learn just by having real human conversations on Facebook and Twitter.
This is an ideal way to build a reader base—these are your online “friends”. They’ll support you, because they like and trust you. There’s an old sales maxim, “People buy from people they like and trust.” Build online relationships with your readers, rather than just broadcasting news, and they’ll buy from/respond to you when it counts.
Gather Information
Social media is also a great source for information. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard about major breaking news on Twitter before I saw it on the news that night or the next day.
Think about people who are only informed by mainstream nightly news, or the morning paper. By the time they hear the latest news, social media users have gathered the information, processed it, and are formulating next steps.
You can gather information from people in your field, the literary world, or anyone else who shares news and information. Create Twitter lists and fill them with journalists, scientists, writers, agents, publishers, news organizations, and so on. This way, you can gather information in real-time, not on an artificial schedule—often eight hours after the fact.
Share Expertise / Entertainment
As a business writer, I’m always looking for people who will hire me as a conference speaker or marketing consultant, or buy one of my books. As a humor writer, I’m always looking for people to subscribe to my column or buy one of my humor books (once I get around to writing them).
As mystery writers, you want to entertain your readers, but if you also have a nonfiction side, you want to establish your expertise. Blogging is the ideal way to do that. Write about topics of particular interest to your target audience, or write stories that will keep your readers coming back for more.
Push that work to your blog, LinkedIn page, or Facebook author page as a way to share your expertise or to entertain. Since traditionally published books can take up to a year to reach readers, and trade journals are a slow and inefficient way to establish expertise, online channels can help you accomplish that in weeks and months.
You can even go so far as to share items from your Information sources with your own networks. This curation strategy will further enhance your Expertise in your field, or if you practice Literary Citizenship (see last issue’s column), you can further Entertain your own readers.
You can easily enhance your personal brand if you focus on building relationships, gathering information, and sharing your expertise or entertainment with your readers. All it takes is doing what you’re already doing—having conversations, gathering news, and sharing ideas—but with social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogging. If you can do that, you’ll build a positive personal brand, and you’ll have fun doing it.
Erik Deckers owns a content marketing agency in Indianapolis, and is the co-author of four books on social media. He is also a professional speaker and newspaper humor columnist, and was named a 2016 writer-in-residence at the Kerouac House Project. He spoke at Killer Nashville 2013, and will return again this year.
Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.
Live from the United Kingdom: Awaiting the Publicity Tsunami
In a recent Killer Nashville Magazine story, Authors Guild President Roxanna Robinson said writers must be more aware than ever before, and engage in heavy self promotion, particularly those who self-publish. While expat CJ Daugherty is not self-published, she has had to pick up the slack significantly when it came to publicizing her own work. You may be surprised at what worked and what didn’t and how you might be able to use her techniques to boost your own writing career.
Awaiting the Publicity Tsunami
By CJ Daugherty
When my first novel was published in 2012, I sat back and waited for the publicity to wash over me like a soft ocean wave.
It never happened.
I was befuddled. My novel was the lead title for a major publishing imprint in the UK. Surely that meant a publicity tsunami would crash down on me, probably destroying the small coastal village behind me, and creating a fjord of publicity that people would talk of in awed tones for decades.
The reality of modern publishing publicity is less tsunami and more kitchen sink. The average marketing and publicity spend on a debut novel today is around $2,000. That figure includes the postage it costs to send your books to reviewers.
Trust me when I say: this doesn’t buy much attention.
A lucky few books get more. Last year, rumours swirled that a major publisher spent $100,000 publicizing one young adult novel by a debut writer. I have no idea if the rumours were true, but such a spend would be very rare. It usually only happens when a publisher has ponied up a seven-figure advance in a bidding war that got out of hand after too much espresso, or whatever it is that drives a publisher to throw a million bucks at an incomplete manuscript by an untested writer.
The vast majority of writers will experience what I did. I received a mid-level advance for my first book. My publisher sent the book to reviewers and paid for table placement in bookstores (for which I am eternally grateful). They also held a small gathering in their office for book bloggers, to which I was invited along with another author.
That was about it, as far as I can recall.
Welcome to the new normal.
At first I was frustrated—it is so difficult to get noticed in the crowded world of modern publishing. I longed for them to run an ad campaign, send me to book fairs, hold a tickertape parade—something flashy, you know?
When it didn’t happen, I took matters into my own hands. I couldn’t hold a tickertape parade for myself, or run ads on the London underground. But I wasn’t helpless.
Like every other writer, I had a blog from the beginning. Author blogs were all the rage in 2012, but they are largely out of fashion today. Blogs are time-consuming and fiddly, and not hugely interactive.
So my first act was to create a fan page on Facebook. It is a weirdly self-aggrandising concept—creating a “fan page” for yourself. But it’s just badly named. It’s not really a fan page. This is your permanent online billboard. It’s where you announce to the world, I EXIST and I AM WRITING AWESOME THINGS!! HERE THEY ARE!! LOOK!!
No one can stop you from having the world’s best Facebook page. It costs nothing. It can reach an infinite number of potential readers. In a way, it’s kind of amazing.
At the start, I studied the Facebook pages of authors in my genre. I found the ones I liked, and followed in their footsteps. This is the best advice I can give you, actually. See what successful authors do, and learn from them.
I kept that Facebook page busy, updating it at least once a day, regardless of what was going on. I used lots of images and posted lots of links. Kept it active. It grew slowly but steadily.
By the end of 2014 I had 3,000 followers on Facebook. Now I have 8,000.
I also converted my personal Twitter account into a public account, by changing the name to my author pseudonym. Anything you put on Twitter, the world will read. I recommend not keeping secrets there. At 140 characters, there’s only so much you can do with Twitter. I recommend being as charming and interesting as you can be, luring people to your books.
Twitter is where your readers can talk to you directly, and they love that. But this can make it a little overwhelming at times. I limit myself to a few visits to Twitter a day just because it can eat my writing time.
When my fourth novel came out last year, my publisher pushed me hard at Wattpad. Wattpad is an online publishing platform for aspiring authors. Unpublished authors can put their chapters up as they write them. It is unbelievably popular. It has millions of subscribers, drawn by the lure of free fiction. Here’s what I know about Wattpad—every single time you read about someone getting 1 million reads? They put their entire book up there for free.
Really good books get a million reads when they are put up for free in their entirety. So do really terrible books. The nice thing about Wattpad is it doesn’t discriminate. The bad thing about Wattpad is it doesn’t discriminate.
If you just put up a few chapters, expect a few thousand views. Most of them from existing fans.
Wattpad did not help my career. You want to know what did help my career? Youtube.
After the invisible publicity for book one, I decided to make a book trailer. Now, book trailers are usually pretty terrible. Plastic clouds float across the screen, then a still image of a pretty lady appears. ‘She thought she knew who she loved,’ the screen tells you. Then there are more clouds and a picture of a devastatingly handsome man. ‘But her love was a lie.’
Godamighty.
So at first, I didn’t want one. But with little else going for me in terms of publicity, I decided I had to have one. My husband is an aspiring filmmaker, so he made me a trailer, using free-to-use stock footage off websites that provide that sort of thing, and free-to-use music to go with it.
He is embarrassed by this book trailer now, but I quite like it. There’s lots of running around and odd, cheap music.
I put it up on YouTube and created a CJ Daugherty YouTube channel where it could live. It got tens of thousands of views.
That made me sit up and take notice. For my second book, we invested a little cash in the book trailer—around $1,200. We hired an actress and a local camera operator. We got permission to film at a local castle (this is England after all).
The second trailer did better than the first. Lots of book bloggers shared it. The actress received fan mail from around the world.
No TV stations wanted to interview me (not famous enough), so I got my husband to interview me (we just put his iPhone on a tripod in the living room), and I put that video up on the YouTube channel, too. Thousands of people ‘liked’ it.
After that, we began making more videos. We’ve made book trailers for every book I’ve written. Earlier this year, we made a six-episode web series based on the Night School series—it got 200,000 views in a few months.
Collectively, my YouTube channel has more than half-a-million views. No other social networking site I’ve used has had this sort of impact.
These days, whenever I have a new book out, I hit the ground running. I personally run a social media campaign to back up whatever my publisher is doing to promote me. I use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. I run Facebook ads, which I design myself—I set a budget of $9 a day, and run them in carefully chosen regions to a targeted audience. I run YouTube ads to promote my videos—setting a similarly low budget. I cross-link everything to Amazon, and have buy buttons prominently displayed.
Social media is free (or damn-near free) advertising. It takes time to build an audience, but once you get the hang of it, it can be better than a traditional ad campaign. You reach people all around the world—opening up new audiences for your work. It can be a game-changer.
That said, it’s not as good as a tickertape parade. But you can’t have everything.
A former crime reporter, political writer, and investigative journalist, CJ Daugherty has also worked, at times, for the British government. She is originally from Texas and attended Texas A&M University. She now lives with her husband in the south of England. Night School is the first in a five-part Young Adult series with an accompanying web series. Her books have been translated into 21 languages.
State of the Industry: Many Routes to the Book Promotion Finish Line… Pick One and Start!
Diving into cold water, ripping off a Band-Aid… Sometimes spontaneity and impulsiveness are exactly what you need. Nike’s ad campaign hits the nail on the head when it comes to exercising: “Just Do It”. In her first column for Killer Nashville Magazine, public relations expert Julie Schoerke offers advice along these lines for promoting your book and yourself.
Many Routes to the Book Promotion Finish Line… Pick One and Start!
By Julie Schoerke
You’ve heard the old adage, “just get moving,” when it comes to starting an exercise routine for better health.
Same is true as you “build your platform” or start spreading your wings in your new career—aspiring writer to published author.
You’re smart, you’ve got characters playing in your head, you’re all about the writing. But, wait! You need to become known, like you would at any other workplace. And you’ve got to start now! Wherever you are in the process, now is the right moment to start thinking about promotion.
Jenny Milchman, author of Cover of Snow, Ruin Falls, and As Night Falls, (view her books on our affiliate site, Amazon.com) had so many friends in the publishing industry and around the country by the time her first novel was published that you could hear cheers from New York to San Francisco.
Here is Jenny’s advice for those starting:
“It's never too early to begin promoting your book—you could say I started 10 years before getting published—although I didn't think of it as ‘promotion’. Instead, consider what we are really doing: building relationships that will do far more than sell books. They will enrich our whole lives.”
What can you do to engage as part of this community before you have a book deal?
Become a student of your genre and what’s happening in it— read the newest books, know the well-known works, follow their authors’ careers.
Attend author events at your local bookstore; get to know the staff and the authors coming through your city. Buy their book, and have them sign it that night! Don’t go home and order on Amazon!
Attend some meet-up writing groups (you can find them in just about any city online at www.meetup.com) or groups organized through your library or bookstore—become a part of a community of serious writers.
Make connections on social media: Become a true fan of authors, agents, librarians, mystery bookstores, and book industry insiders on Facebook and Twitter. Comment, like, and share their news with your followers.
Volunteer at your local book festival. Host visiting authors in your town or city.
And, of course, attend the Killer Nashville Writers’ Conference! Participate in writer’s workshops and retreats, honing your skills and perfecting your craft while making some great friendships along the way.
You do not have to do all of these things, or you may choose other ways to become involved. The first step is to do something.
A public relations expert with 30 years of experience and founder of JKS Communications, Julie specializes in developing winning book publicity campaigns for authors and publishers. www.jkscommunications.com
Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.
From the Classroom: What I Learned About Writing From The Movies
There is a saying that there are many paths to God. When learning to write, it seems, it is a similar journey. For author and screenwriter, Steven Womack, becoming a better writer made sense when he discovered screenwriting. He learned to build a story much like building a house, beginning with laying the foundation. Womack shares his story and how he continues to learn…from watching movies.
What I Learned About Writing From The Movies
By Steven Womack
I was around 15, maybe 16, when I decided that I wanted to spend the rest of my life writing. I had always been a reader, a lover of story. Even as a child, I tried to make sense of my own life by reading about other lives, both real and imaginary. When an English teacher in boarding school assigned Robert Penn Warren’s All The Kings Men, I was toast. That was it for me. This was the book that made me a writer. For the rest of my life, I was going to try to do to other people what Red Warren had done to me.
Unfortunately, that school experience was in the 1960s and my college time was in the early to mid-1970s, a period now characterized as one of “anti-literature”. Academics and writers alike were experimenting with new kinds of stories, stories that were unstructured, all about voice and emotion, stories that defied logic and rebelled against tradition, against craft.
Stories that broke all the rules…
However, in the process of being taught how to break all the rules, I somehow never learned the rules themselves, which is pretty much the opposite of the way it should be done.
As a result, even though I was motivated and driven and wrote lots of pages, I was going nowhere. In fact, over the course of my early years as a writer I wrote at least five completed novels, with uncounted others dying on the vine.
It was incredibly frustrating. I collected rejection slips galore, many with some fairly complimentary responses to the writing itself, which had become increasingly flowery and literary. I even had one editor—and this is hard to believe—who told me my work was too “good”, too literary for her. Readers want action, she explained, not literary writing with a bunch of thought and reflection and philosophizing.
She was right, of course. My stuff had come out of college creative writing classes and my own heady reading. What I was failing at was connecting with readers and giving them the experience that readers want.
I worked in publishing at the time—it was the mid-1980s by now—and one day, I got laid off. I was downsized before downsizing was cool. At the time, I was single, no kids, no mortgage, no debt other than a little of the usual, and was in my early Thirties. This, it seemed, was a good time to take one last shot at full-time writing. So I took the leap.
One day, while taking a break from my daily page output, I saw a newspaper ad for a screenwriting course in the Continuing Education Department at Tennessee State University. It was taught by Rick Reichman, a local Nashvillian who had gone to University of Southern California.
“Screenwriting,” I said to myself. “Now there’s something I’ve never tried. I’ve watched a lot of movies. How tough can it be to write one?”
In retrospect, this was an astonishing level of arrogance. It’s roughly the equivalent of walking onto Southwest Airlines Flight 8653, sauntering up to the cockpit, and saying to the pilot: “You know, I’ve ridden on a lot of airplanes. Why don’t you let me fly this sucker?”
What I very quickly learned was that writing movies is a hell of a lot harder than I thought. For one thing, screenplays are very leanly written. In terms of word count, screenplays are more like long short stories or novellas—every word counts. There’s no room for sloppiness, distractions, sidebars or lack of focus. If writing a poem or a short story is a sprint and a novel is a marathon, then writing a screenplay is somewhere along the lines of an 800- or 1500-meter run, which as any runner will tell you, are the hardest races of all to run.
But there’s another consideration for a writer brought up in the counter-cultural, anti-literature, and non-traditional days of the 1960s and 1970s. Screenplays—movies—tell stories that are very, for lack of a better term, old fashioned. In fact, commercial Hollywood filmmaking is the last vestige of classical, three-act dramatic structure—the stuff of Greek drama, Shakespeare, and the classics.
The stuff Aristotle figured out about 2,400 years ago…
For the first time, I had a writing teacher who wasn’t concerned with sitting around in a circle on pillows reading our crap to each other and telling us how good it was, then opening a bottle of wine or lighting something up. Rick was all about craft and structure, as well as voice. “You start here, with an event, something actually happens that the audience can see… And it leads to something else, then another event, then another, and so on and so on, with increasing tension and rising stakes, until finally there’s some kind of climax and resolution.”
Stories, I learned for the first time, are about characters who want something, are willing to take action to get it, and encounter some kind of obstacle or conflict.
You build a story, I learned for the first time, the same way you build a house. First, you have to pick where you’re going to put the house; in other words, the setting. Then you have to have some kind of design you’re going to follow. Then you lay a foundation, frame up the skeleton. Then, layer by layer, you put in the systems, the electrical and plumbing, the walls, the ceiling. Then you dress it out, paint it, lay the carpet, do the trim work… Finally, you go through what contractors call the “punch list”, which is what writers call “rewriting and copyediting.”
I wrote a feature-length screenplay during Rick’s course, even though it was non-credit, continuing education and I didn’t have to. It was talky, overwritten, not very good… But it had something no other work of mine had ever had: an underlying structure.
I kept working and learning, even after Rick’s course was over. I took other courses (probably the most influential being Bob McKee’s weekend-long story structure boot camp for writers), and read stacks of books. I studied the Five Components of Narrative Structure that McKee talks about: The Inciting Incident, Progressive Complications, Crisis, Climax, and Resolution. Then I read Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces and really got an education in mythic structure, of how myth crosses all racial, ethnic, and gender lines. I studied Campbell’s Twelve Steps of the Hero’s Journey, then read and reread Christopher Vogler’s excellent expansion on Campbell’s work, The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure For Writers.
Then I started teaching screenwriting, something I’ve now been doing for over twenty years. And as any teacher will tell you, if you really want to learn something, teach it.
The life principles embedded in story, I learned (and continue to learn), teach us how to live our own lives. This is why story, why novels and movies, are so important to us as human beings. It’s not just entertainment or distraction; it’s the very stuff we’re made of. It’s something deeply ingrained in our collective unconsciousness. It’s in the gene pool.
This was all a revelation to me. During this time, as an experiment I wrote a romance novel that actually got me my first literary agent. Unfortunately, the agent was getting nothing but turndowns on the book.
So out of desperation as much as anything else, I took a novel I’d written twelve years earlier—a manuscript that had been turned down twenty-two times—and rewrote it. Only this time, I actually imposed some craft concepts, an actual dramatic structure, over the book.
Six weeks later, my agent called me and the first words out of his mouth were: “Sit down.”
That book became my first published novel, Murphy’s Fault. The year it was published, it was the only first mystery on the New York Times Notable Book List.
Now this is not to say that if you read these books, memorize the Twelve Steps of the Hero’s Journey and fill in the blanks, you’ll have a story that works. There’s still a lot more to it. You’ve got to actually have at least a little talent as a writer, as well as a premise that works, characters that are appealing and compelling, and some kind of an ear for dialogue. This isn’t about formula; it’s about form, an underlying dramatic form to storytelling that has served us well throughout the human experience.
It’s a roadmap for the journey, but you’ve still got to be headed someplace interesting.
Thirty years after taking my first screenwriting course, I’m still on a lifelong journey of studying story and trying to understand it, master it, and produce it. I’ll never figure it all out, but as Faulkner said in his Paris Review interview, if he ever figured out how to write, there be no point in writing. He’d just break his pencil…
So study the movies. You can learn more than you think, even from a bad movie (want to see a truly, horribly bad movie that perfectly hits the Twelve Steps Of The Hero’s Journey? Watch “Con Air”).
And good luck on this treacherous, exciting, whirlwind of a journey…
Five Books On Screenwriting Every Writer Should Read
The best books on screenwriting aren’t just about writing for the movies. They’re about storytelling and how to make it all work. Every writer—no matter what medium or genre you work in—can learn from studying screenwriting and movies. With that in mind, here are five books* that I consider the essential:
The Writers Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers by Christopher Vogler
Save The Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, by Blake Snyder
The Screenwriter's Bible, by David Trottier
Art Of Dramatic Writing, by Lajos Egri
Steven Womack is the Edgar and Shamus Award-winning author of By Blood Written and Dead Folk’s Blues, as well as about a dozen other books. His latest novel, Resurrection Bay, was co-written with Wayne McDaniel. Womack is also a screenwriter and has taught screenwriting at the Watkins Film School in Nashville, Tennessee, for the past twenty years. StevenWomack.com
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.
Understanding Your Social Media Campaign
By Tom Wood
I attended the Faith in Film Conference in mid-June—one of several seminars held during the weeklong Film-Com event in Nashville—and two of the panel discussions merit discussion here, even though this column is about self-publishing your book.
The first one was titled “Understanding Your Social Media Campaign”, the second “The Changing Landscape of Distribution”—a topic I will discuss in next month’s column.
Sounds a lot like issues faced by those of us who have self-published, doesn’t it?
Social media is essential when it comes to getting the word out about your product—yes, ultimately, that is what you must consider your work of art. You may have the best, most unique story in the world, but if you don’t get the word out about it, then nobody is going to read it.
Some are more adept at using—and understanding—the power of social media campaigns to promote and market your book. I think I fall somewhere in between: I’m good on some levels, but I don’t do quite so well in others.
A lot depends on what you’re trying to do with your book: is it mainstream or written for a niche audience? There’s a learning curve to properly using social media, and you may want to consult a professional for help if this is your weakness.
Hiring a public relations consultant can be expensive, but some have different levels of service, although you might have to do some searching to find someone within your price range. Again, it is important to know what you are trying to accomplish.
From personal experience, I will probably hire a public relations agency if I choose to self-publish my next book. I probably did two week’s worth of advance publicity for Vendetta Stone. The campaign should have started much, much earlier. But I hit the ground running and haven’t stopped yet.
There is so much you can do on your own when it comes to avenues like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked In, YouTube, etc. And there are other avenues of getting your message out and your books distributed.
A veteran sports writer and copy editor, Tom Wood has covered a variety of events ranging from the Iroquois Memorial Steeplechase to the Atlanta Olympic Games for The Tennessean in Nashville. After retirement, he continues his passion for writing, contributing to the Civil War-based anthology, Filtered Through Time and conducting an interview with Stephen King for Feast of Fear: Conversations with Stephen King. In the last year, Tom has begun writing Western fiction short stories, two of which have been published by Western Trail Blazer. “Tennesseans West” is his next project with four other authors involved. He is also an actor and can be seen in several episodes of the ABC series “Nashville”. He also coordinates the Killer Nashville guest blog series. Vendetta Stone is his first novel and he is working on the sequel.
Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale.
September Photo Prompt Contest Winner
"Piece of Life, Peace of Death" by Jaime Villarreal
Roger died, leaving his antique shop to his grandson Phillip.
Phillip received a letter with specific instructions, concerning the shop. The storefront sign is to always remain on: ‘CLOSED’. Unlock the doors at sundown and leave it unmanned until sunrise. Empty the tip jar before locking up in the morning.
He was sure that merchandise would be stolen overnight, but nothing ever was. Oddly, the tip jar was never empty in the morning. In one month’s time, there was enough money to cover rent for the shop and extra for leisure. Who was leaving the tips? And why? Phillip had an overwhelming need to find out.
One night, Phillip decided to unlock the doors and hide inside the shop. He waited for hours and eventually fell asleep on the floor. A tap on his shoulder woke him. He jumped to his feet, gasping in fright, “Grandpa? But how? You’re dead.”
“Yes, we are all dead,” nodded Roger.
Phillip glanced over his grandfather’s shoulder and saw strangers standing behind him. They were all scowling at Phillip.
“The dead come here,” said Roger. “They borrow their piece of life. Sometimes, it’s the only peace they find in death. And you’re taking that from them just by being here. The musicians were hoping to play tonight. That’s where most of the tip money comes from.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll make it right,” said Phillip, exiting the shop. He passed the storefront window and watched as the tuba and the case with the saxophone disappeared.
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be in Prison / Carter Wilson
It’d be pretty tough to write a compelling thriller if we all were limited solely to our life experiences. Sure, a few lucky (or unlucky) folks would have truly exciting tales, but for the most part, we’d write stories about paying bills, buying groceries, and coaching rec league soccer teams. Guest blogger and award-winning author Carter Wilson reflects on dealing with the amusing but tricky moments when readers start analyzing the disturbing parts of his books for insights into his personal psychology.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be In Prison
By Carter Wilson
I hate the adage “write what you know.”
Hate it.
But I don’t hate it because it’s wrong. As an author, there are plenty of things about your life woven into your fiction, and most of the time, this is done unconsciously. The car your character drives has a striking resemblance to your own. A few choice turns of phrase that you've been known to use pepper your manuscript. Your protagonist’s drink of choice is, coincidentally, a margarita on the rocks, two parts tequila, one part lime, touch of orange liquor, and a drizzle of agave nectar. No salt, not ever.
No, I hate that phrase “write what you know” because too many readers take it as an unalterable truism. By readers, of course, I mean family members. They mean well, God bless ’em, but boy, do they want to know where all that darkness comes from. It has to come from somewhere, because, you know, you write what you know, and if the villain in your book fancies choking out hookers and making totem poles out of their torsos, well, we may need to revisit that time you went to summer camp when you were sixteen. What exactly happened at Lake Chumpagawa, anyway?
My mom always wants to read my manuscripts before they go to a publisher. In an early manuscript, I struggled mightily with the protagonist’s motivation for the way he behaved in the arc of the story. Then it hit me that a lot of his actions could be better appreciated in the context of him having lived through a traumatic childhood event, and I added in a fairly disturbing scene in which said character, as a ten-year-old, is molested by his teacher. (Full disclosure: unless I'm suppressing something, that never happened to me or anyone I knew).
So my mom reads the story and, in perfect Mom-form, graciously tells me she likes it and notes out a dozen or so typos, but otherwise says nothing. A month later (A MONTH!) I’m visiting with her and she says she needs to ask me something. What is it? I ask. Of course, she asks if I’ve ever been molested. Now, at this point, I don’t even realize we’re talking about my book, so the question hits me like a foul ball hurling at my head out of the blinding sunshine. What? Did you seriously just ask me that?
Well, she says, it was in your book. And authors only write what they know.
Imagine that. She had been holding that in for a month, trying to find the courage to ask me. Apparently, she had been calling my sister to recollect anything that could have happened. Of course, my sister recalled to her one time when she vaguely remembered a stranger asking me to go for a hike (and maybe this is the suppressed part) and thought the guy was a little creepy. That story, apparently, was the tipping point for my mother to finally ask. God, I felt horrible. I assured her that, to the best of my memory, the creepy hiker merely wanted to go hiking.
I've had other questions from family members, including, “who was that person based on?” Or, “why don't you like to write happy things?” And once, “What are you hiding?”
Maybe there is a deeply rooted psychological answer for why thriller/suspense/horror writers gravitate toward the dark, but I think the truest answer is this: darkness begets tension, and tension begets a good story. If I truly wrote a book based on what I know from my real life, it would be boring as shit.
So, just to make sure we can be clear here, the following is a list of things I have never personally done:
Crucify someone, literally (Final Crossing, 2012, Vantage Point Books)
Participate in the murder of a child when I was fourteen (The Boy in the Woods, 2014, Severn House)
Talk in my sleep about rape and torture fantasies (The Comfort of Black, 2015, Oceanview Publishing)
When I get gently worded questions about where all my darkness comes from, and how much of it is based on my life experiences, I usually just smile and politely mumble something about the book being fiction and relying mostly on my imagination. After all, an author’s imagination is their greatest tool.
But sometimes, when the mood hits me just right, I don’t reply at all.
I just look at them and smile.
Award-winning author Carter Wilson was born in New Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles before attending Cornell University. He is a consultant and frequent lecturer in the hospitality industry, has journeyed the globe both for work and pleasure, and as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. The Comfort of Black is Carter’s third novel. Carter lives in Colorado with his two children. Reach him at carterwilson.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be in Prison / Carter Wilson
It’d be pretty tough to write a compelling thriller if we all were limited solely to our life experiences. Sure, a few lucky (or unlucky) folks would have truly exciting tales, but for the most part, we’d write stories about paying bills, buying groceries, and coaching rec league soccer teams. Guest blogger and award-winning author Carter Wilson reflects on dealing with the amusing but tricky moments when readers start analyzing the disturbing parts of his books for insights into his personal psychology.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be In Prison
By Carter Wilson
I hate the adage “write what you know.”
Hate it.
But I don’t hate it because it’s wrong. As an author, there are plenty of things about your life woven into your fiction, and most of the time, this is done unconsciously. The car your character drives has a striking resemblance to your own. A few choice turns of phrase that you've been known to use pepper your manuscript. Your protagonist’s drink of choice is, coincidentally, a margarita on the rocks, two parts tequila, one part lime, touch of orange liquor, and a drizzle of agave nectar. No salt, not ever.
No, I hate that phrase “write what you know” because too many readers take it as an unalterable truism. By readers, of course, I mean family members. They mean well, God bless ’em, but boy, do they want to know where all that darkness comes from. It has to come from somewhere, because, you know, you write what you know, and if the villain in your book fancies choking out hookers and making totem poles out of their torsos, well, we may need to revisit that time you went to summer camp when you were sixteen. What exactly happened at Lake Chumpagawa, anyway?
My mom always wants to read my manuscripts before they go to a publisher. In an early manuscript, I struggled mightily with the protagonist’s motivation for the way he behaved in the arc of the story. Then it hit me that a lot of his actions could be better appreciated in the context of him having lived through a traumatic childhood event, and I added in a fairly disturbing scene in which said character, as a ten-year-old, is molested by his teacher. (Full disclosure: unless I'm suppressing something, that never happened to me or anyone I knew).
So my mom reads the story and, in perfect Mom-form, graciously tells me she likes it and notes out a dozen or so typos, but otherwise says nothing. A month later (A MONTH!) I’m visiting with her and she says she needs to ask me something. What is it? I ask. Of course, she asks if I’ve ever been molested. Now, at this point, I don’t even realize we’re talking about my book, so the question hits me like a foul ball hurling at my head out of the blinding sunshine. What? Did you seriously just ask me that?
Well, she says, it was in your book. And authors only write what they know.
Imagine that. She had been holding that in for a month, trying to find the courage to ask me. Apparently, she had been calling my sister to recollect anything that could have happened. Of course, my sister recalled to her one time when she vaguely remembered a stranger asking me to go for a hike (and maybe this is the suppressed part) and thought the guy was a little creepy. That story, apparently, was the tipping point for my mother to finally ask. God, I felt horrible. I assured her that, to the best of my memory, the creepy hiker merely wanted to go hiking.
I've had other questions from family members, including, “who was that person based on?” Or, “why don't you like to write happy things?” And once, “What are you hiding?”
Maybe there is a deeply rooted psychological answer for why thriller/suspense/horror writers gravitate toward the dark, but I think the truest answer is this: darkness begets tension, and tension begets a good story. If I truly wrote a book based on what I know from my real life, it would be boring as shit.
So, just to make sure we can be clear here, the following is a list of things I have never personally done:
- Crucify someone, literally (Final Crossing, 2012, Vantage Point Books)
- Participate in the murder of a child when I was fourteen (The Boy in the Woods, 2014, Severn House)
- Talk in my sleep about rape and torture fantasies (The Comfort of Black, 2015, Oceanview Publishing)
When I get gently worded questions about where all my darkness comes from, and how much of it is based on my life experiences, I usually just smile and politely mumble something about the book being fiction and relying mostly on my imagination. After all, an author’s imagination is their greatest tool.
But sometimes, when the mood hits me just right, I don’t reply at all.
I just look at them and smile.
Award-winning author Carter Wilson was born in New Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles before attending Cornell University. He is a consultant and frequent lecturer in the hospitality industry, has journeyed the globe both for work and pleasure, and as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. The Comfort of Black is Carter’s third novel. Carter lives in Colorado with his two children. Reach him at carterwilson.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be in Prison / Carter Wilson
It’d be pretty tough to write a compelling thriller if we all were limited solely to our life experiences. Sure, a few lucky (or unlucky) folks would have truly exciting tales, but for the most part, we’d write stories about paying bills, buying groceries, and coaching rec league soccer teams. Guest blogger and award-winning author Carter Wilson reflects on dealing with the amusing but tricky moments when readers start analyzing the disturbing parts of his books for insights into his personal psychology.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
If I Lived What I Wrote, I'd Be In Prison
By Carter Wilson
I hate the adage “write what you know.”
Hate it.
But I don’t hate it because it’s wrong. As an author, there are plenty of things about your life woven into your fiction, and most of the time, this is done unconsciously. The car your character drives has a striking resemblance to your own. A few choice turns of phrase that you've been known to use pepper your manuscript. Your protagonist’s drink of choice is, coincidentally, a margarita on the rocks, two parts tequila, one part lime, touch of orange liquor, and a drizzle of agave nectar. No salt, not ever.
No, I hate that phrase “write what you know” because too many readers take it as an unalterable truism. By readers, of course, I mean family members. They mean well, God bless ’em, but boy, do they want to know where all that darkness comes from. It has to come from somewhere, because, you know, you write what you know, and if the villain in your book fancies choking out hookers and making totem poles out of their torsos, well, we may need to revisit that time you went to summer camp when you were sixteen. What exactly happened at Lake Chumpagawa, anyway?
My mom always wants to read my manuscripts before they go to a publisher. In an early manuscript, I struggled mightily with the protagonist’s motivation for the way he behaved in the arc of the story. Then it hit me that a lot of his actions could be better appreciated in the context of him having lived through a traumatic childhood event, and I added in a fairly disturbing scene in which said character, as a ten-year-old, is molested by his teacher. (Full disclosure: unless I'm suppressing something, that never happened to me or anyone I knew).
So my mom reads the story and, in perfect Mom-form, graciously tells me she likes it and notes out a dozen or so typos, but otherwise says nothing. A month later (A MONTH!) I’m visiting with her and she says she needs to ask me something. What is it? I ask. Of course, she asks if I’ve ever been molested. Now, at this point, I don’t even realize we’re talking about my book, so the question hits me like a foul ball hurling at my head out of the blinding sunshine. What? Did you seriously just ask me that?
Well, she says, it was in your book. And authors only write what they know.
Imagine that. She had been holding that in for a month, trying to find the courage to ask me. Apparently, she had been calling my sister to recollect anything that could have happened. Of course, my sister recalled to her one time when she vaguely remembered a stranger asking me to go for a hike (and maybe this is the suppressed part) and thought the guy was a little creepy. That story, apparently, was the tipping point for my mother to finally ask. God, I felt horrible. I assured her that, to the best of my memory, the creepy hiker merely wanted to go hiking.
I've had other questions from family members, including, “who was that person based on?” Or, “why don't you like to write happy things?” And once, “What are you hiding?”
Maybe there is a deeply rooted psychological answer for why thriller/suspense/horror writers gravitate toward the dark, but I think the truest answer is this: darkness begets tension, and tension begets a good story. If I truly wrote a book based on what I know from my real life, it would be boring as shit.
So, just to make sure we can be clear here, the following is a list of things I have never personally done:
- Crucify someone, literally (Final Crossing, 2012, Vantage Point Books)
- Participate in the murder of a child when I was fourteen (The Boy in the Woods, 2014, Severn House)
- Talk in my sleep about rape and torture fantasies (The Comfort of Black, 2015, Oceanview Publishing)
When I get gently worded questions about where all my darkness comes from, and how much of it is based on my life experiences, I usually just smile and politely mumble something about the book being fiction and relying mostly on my imagination. After all, an author’s imagination is their greatest tool.
But sometimes, when the mood hits me just right, I don’t reply at all.
I just look at them and smile.
Award-winning author Carter Wilson was born in New Mexico and grew up in Los Angeles before attending Cornell University. He is a consultant and frequent lecturer in the hospitality industry, has journeyed the globe both for work and pleasure, and as a volunteer for Habitat for Humanity. The Comfort of Black is Carter’s third novel. Carter lives in Colorado with his two children. Reach him at carterwilson.com
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Pizza Guy / David Putnam
Public Service Announcement: A team’s only as strong as its weakest link.
Great. Glad we got that cleared up. Now we can move on to the really revolutionary stuff.
But wait, how are you going to make that cliché into an interesting story structure, or even just a memorable scene, for your groundbreaking police procedural thriller? Sure, it’s true for a group of cops the same way that it’s true for a sports team, but you can’t hold a reader’s attention by just telling them flat out. You have to find a way to make it interesting and new, through specificity. Longtime cop-turned-author David Putnam offers some real-life examples from his experience with weak links, or, as he creatively calls them, “pizza guys”.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The Pizza Guy
By David Putnam
Throughout my 31 years in law enforcement, I have run into many Pizza Guys. This is not necessarily a derogatory term; it’s more a classification, and one I coined out of necessity for officer safety. Other agencies, I’m sure, have their own names for them. Not only do they exist in every law enforcement organization, but they’re in every business as well.
I’m an avid reader, and have never seen an author make use a Pizza Guy as a main character—not in the way a Pizza Guy operates in real life. I have pondered using a Pizza Guy in my novels, but as yet have not found a place for one. And if I wrote the events in which I was personally involved with these guys, the reader might call foul and say, “That would never happen.”
For most of my career, I worked SWAT, narcotics, special teams, Violent Crimes, and Criminal Intelligence. These teams were mostly comprised of men and women who’d proved their ability or competence, and were lucky enough to be chosen out of a crowded field of competitors. These teams can be highly technical, and it’s dangerous if every member is not competent and always paying close attention to details.
In a dynamic SWAT entry where the team has to cover and move, cover and move, each member has to be able to depend on each other. An error, even a small one, could be fatal. This applies to high-risk search warrants in narcotics as well.
The unfortunate circumstance in law enforcement—in any job where humans are involved—is that people are chosen for these positions, not because of their competence and ability, but because “He’s a good guy.” Or the guy did a special favor for a Deputy Chief, and the chief is repaying a debt.
The Pizza Guy moniker came about during a briefing on a big operation. As the case agent, I was designating team members and team leaders to execute search warrants at multiple locations. When I finished giving the instructions and asked if there were any questions, one member I had forgotten about, maybe subconsciously, raised his hand and said, “Hey, what about me?”
I looked around and said, “You’re going to get the pizza.”
Henceforth, whenever we had an operation and assignments were given out, there was always one slot left out for “The Pizza Guy”. In most cases, the Pizza Guy, if he were smart enough to figure it out, didn’t mind. He liked the status of being on SWAT, or on Narcotics, but not necessarily going through the door on a high-risk entry.
Here’s a classic example of a Pizza Guy. My team was running down a homicide suspect and we hit a house where the suspect had been minutes before. We’d just missed him. Inside the house, we found another male who was on parole and in possession of a firearm—a felony. We handcuffed him and set him on the couch, pending transport to jail.
When you have multiple Pizza Guys, you try to spread them out, put them on different teams, one each. That particular day, we were running with two. I asked the sergeant to step outside away from the parolee so he couldn’t hear us, leaving the two Pizza Guys to guard the parolee. Pretty soon, one of the Pizza Guys shows up outside to listen in on what the plan was going to be. A couple minutes later, the second Pizza Guy shows up outside and the sergeant says, “Hey, who’s watching the crook?”
We ran back in and the crook had fled with the handcuffs.
In another incident, our team worked a highly sensitive narcotic surveillance, a high profile conspiracy. We rotated the “eye”, the point on the surveillance. Our Pizza Guy took his turn. After a few minutes, I tried to raise him on the radio. He didn’t respond. I had to break from my position to check on him. He was asleep in his car, his seat back. I took a Polaroid picture in case he ever complained about running for pizza.
On the Violent Crimes team, I ran an operation trying to snare a crew of serial bank robbers. I had six teams of two, set up on possible bank targets that the crime analysis unit had given us. Each team of two sat in their cars in the bank parking lots, and if the robbery crew pulled up to rob the bank, the team would put it out over the radio and wait for back-up.
We’d been set up for three hours. Around lunchtime, dispatch advised of a silent alarm at one the target banks. Every team broke from their location and drove like hell to the bank being robbed. The team sitting in the parking lot of the bank being robbed was comprised of two Pizza Guys, and they wouldn’t answer their radio. When we got there, the Pizza Guys looked surprised. They hadn’t seen a thing. They were both eating tacos right in front of the bank.
A plumber driving by saw the suspect run from the bank, spewing red smoke from the dye pack in the bank money, and followed him. The plumber took a huge pipe wrench from his truck and chased the bank robber into a restaurant, where he held him at bay in the restroom until we could get there.
The use of a Pizza Guy in novel might work as in individual incident, but unless the novel was a comedy, I don’t think he would work as a main character.
David Putnam always wanted to be a cop. His career in law enforcement has spanned over 30 years. He has worked in narcotics, served on FBI-sponsored violent crimes teams, and was cross-sworn as a U.S. Marshall, pursuing murder suspects and bank robbers in Arizona, Nevada, and California. Putnam did three tours on the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s S.W.A.T. team, executing dynamic entries, hostage rescues, and serving as team sniper. He has also worked in Criminal Intelligence and Internal Affairs and has supervised corrections, patrol, and a detective bureau.
After 28 years of California law enforcement, Putnam moved to Hawaii where he worked as a Special Agent for the Attorney General, investigating smuggling and white-collar crimes. Putnam is now retired and lives in Southern California where he farms organic avocado trees, reads and writes, and attends writers’ conferences with his wife and fellow writer, Mary. The Replacements follows The Disposables in Putnam’s Bruno Johnson series. Reach him at http://dwputnam.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Pizza Guy / David Putnam
Public Service Announcement: A team’s only as strong as its weakest link.Great. Glad we got that cleared up. Now we can move on to the really revolutionary stuff.But wait, how are you going to make that cliché into an interesting story structure, or even just a memorable scene, for your groundbreaking police procedural thriller? Sure, it’s true for a group of cops the same way that it’s true for a sports team, but you can’t hold a reader’s attention by just telling them flat out. You have to find a way to make it interesting and new, through specificity. Longtime cop-turned-author David Putnam offers some real-life examples from his experience with weak links, or, as he creatively calls them, “pizza guys”.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The Pizza Guy
By David Putnam
Throughout my 31 years in law enforcement, I have run into many Pizza Guys. This is not necessarily a derogatory term; it’s more a classification, and one I coined out of necessity for officer safety. Other agencies, I’m sure, have their own names for them. Not only do they exist in every law enforcement organization, but they’re in every business as well.
I’m an avid reader, and have never seen an author make use a Pizza Guy as a main character—not in the way a Pizza Guy operates in real life. I have pondered using a Pizza Guy in my novels, but as yet have not found a place for one. And if I wrote the events in which I was personally involved with these guys, the reader might call foul and say, “That would never happen.”
For most of my career, I worked SWAT, narcotics, special teams, Violent Crimes, and Criminal Intelligence. These teams were mostly comprised of men and women who’d proved their ability or competence, and were lucky enough to be chosen out of a crowded field of competitors. These teams can be highly technical, and it’s dangerous if every member is not competent and always paying close attention to details.
In a dynamic SWAT entry where the team has to cover and move, cover and move, each member has to be able to depend on each other. An error, even a small one, could be fatal. This applies to high-risk search warrants in narcotics as well.
The unfortunate circumstance in law enforcement—in any job where humans are involved—is that people are chosen for these positions, not because of their competence and ability, but because “He’s a good guy.” Or the guy did a special favor for a Deputy Chief, and the chief is repaying a debt.
The Pizza Guy moniker came about during a briefing on a big operation. As the case agent, I was designating team members and team leaders to execute search warrants at multiple locations. When I finished giving the instructions and asked if there were any questions, one member I had forgotten about, maybe subconsciously, raised his hand and said, “Hey, what about me?”
I looked around and said, “You’re going to get the pizza.”
Henceforth, whenever we had an operation and assignments were given out, there was always one slot left out for “The Pizza Guy”. In most cases, the Pizza Guy, if he were smart enough to figure it out, didn’t mind. He liked the status of being on SWAT, or on Narcotics, but not necessarily going through the door on a high-risk entry.
Here’s a classic example of a Pizza Guy. My team was running down a homicide suspect and we hit a house where the suspect had been minutes before. We’d just missed him. Inside the house, we found another male who was on parole and in possession of a firearm—a felony. We handcuffed him and set him on the couch, pending transport to jail.
When you have multiple Pizza Guys, you try to spread them out, put them on different teams, one each. That particular day, we were running with two. I asked the sergeant to step outside away from the parolee so he couldn’t hear us, leaving the two Pizza Guys to guard the parolee. Pretty soon, one of the Pizza Guys shows up outside to listen in on what the plan was going to be. A couple minutes later, the second Pizza Guy shows up outside and the sergeant says, “Hey, who’s watching the crook?”
We ran back in and the crook had fled with the handcuffs.
In another incident, our team worked a highly sensitive narcotic surveillance, a high profile conspiracy. We rotated the “eye”, the point on the surveillance. Our Pizza Guy took his turn. After a few minutes, I tried to raise him on the radio. He didn’t respond. I had to break from my position to check on him. He was asleep in his car, his seat back. I took a Polaroid picture in case he ever complained about running for pizza.
On the Violent Crimes team, I ran an operation trying to snare a crew of serial bank robbers. I had six teams of two, set up on possible bank targets that the crime analysis unit had given us. Each team of two sat in their cars in the bank parking lots, and if the robbery crew pulled up to rob the bank, the team would put it out over the radio and wait for back-up.
We’d been set up for three hours. Around lunchtime, dispatch advised of a silent alarm at one the target banks. Every team broke from their location and drove like hell to the bank being robbed. The team sitting in the parking lot of the bank being robbed was comprised of two Pizza Guys, and they wouldn’t answer their radio. When we got there, the Pizza Guys looked surprised. They hadn’t seen a thing. They were both eating tacos right in front of the bank.
A plumber driving by saw the suspect run from the bank, spewing red smoke from the dye pack in the bank money, and followed him. The plumber took a huge pipe wrench from his truck and chased the bank robber into a restaurant, where he held him at bay in the restroom until we could get there.
The use of a Pizza Guy in novel might work as in individual incident, but unless the novel was a comedy, I don’t think he would work as a main character.
David Putnam always wanted to be a cop. His career in law enforcement has spanned over 30 years. He has worked in narcotics, served on FBI-sponsored violent crimes teams, and was cross-sworn as a U.S. Marshall, pursuing murder suspects and bank robbers in Arizona, Nevada, and California. Putnam did three tours on the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s S.W.A.T. team, executing dynamic entries, hostage rescues, and serving as team sniper. He has also worked in Criminal Intelligence and Internal Affairs and has supervised corrections, patrol, and a detective bureau.
After 28 years of California law enforcement, Putnam moved to Hawaii where he worked as a Special Agent for the Attorney General, investigating smuggling and white-collar crimes. Putnam is now retired and lives in Southern California where he farms organic avocado trees, reads and writes, and attends writers’ conferences with his wife and fellow writer, Mary. The Replacements follows The Disposables in Putnam’s Bruno Johnson series. Reach him at http://dwputnam.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
The Pizza Guy / David Putnam
Public Service Announcement: A team’s only as strong as its weakest link.Great. Glad we got that cleared up. Now we can move on to the really revolutionary stuff.But wait, how are you going to make that cliché into an interesting story structure, or even just a memorable scene, for your groundbreaking police procedural thriller? Sure, it’s true for a group of cops the same way that it’s true for a sports team, but you can’t hold a reader’s attention by just telling them flat out. You have to find a way to make it interesting and new, through specificity. Longtime cop-turned-author David Putnam offers some real-life examples from his experience with weak links, or, as he creatively calls them, “pizza guys”.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The Pizza Guy
By David Putnam
Throughout my 31 years in law enforcement, I have run into many Pizza Guys. This is not necessarily a derogatory term; it’s more a classification, and one I coined out of necessity for officer safety. Other agencies, I’m sure, have their own names for them. Not only do they exist in every law enforcement organization, but they’re in every business as well.
I’m an avid reader, and have never seen an author make use a Pizza Guy as a main character—not in the way a Pizza Guy operates in real life. I have pondered using a Pizza Guy in my novels, but as yet have not found a place for one. And if I wrote the events in which I was personally involved with these guys, the reader might call foul and say, “That would never happen.”
For most of my career, I worked SWAT, narcotics, special teams, Violent Crimes, and Criminal Intelligence. These teams were mostly comprised of men and women who’d proved their ability or competence, and were lucky enough to be chosen out of a crowded field of competitors. These teams can be highly technical, and it’s dangerous if every member is not competent and always paying close attention to details.
In a dynamic SWAT entry where the team has to cover and move, cover and move, each member has to be able to depend on each other. An error, even a small one, could be fatal. This applies to high-risk search warrants in narcotics as well.
The unfortunate circumstance in law enforcement—in any job where humans are involved—is that people are chosen for these positions, not because of their competence and ability, but because “He’s a good guy.” Or the guy did a special favor for a Deputy Chief, and the chief is repaying a debt.
The Pizza Guy moniker came about during a briefing on a big operation. As the case agent, I was designating team members and team leaders to execute search warrants at multiple locations. When I finished giving the instructions and asked if there were any questions, one member I had forgotten about, maybe subconsciously, raised his hand and said, “Hey, what about me?”
I looked around and said, “You’re going to get the pizza.”
Henceforth, whenever we had an operation and assignments were given out, there was always one slot left out for “The Pizza Guy”. In most cases, the Pizza Guy, if he were smart enough to figure it out, didn’t mind. He liked the status of being on SWAT, or on Narcotics, but not necessarily going through the door on a high-risk entry.
Here’s a classic example of a Pizza Guy. My team was running down a homicide suspect and we hit a house where the suspect had been minutes before. We’d just missed him. Inside the house, we found another male who was on parole and in possession of a firearm—a felony. We handcuffed him and set him on the couch, pending transport to jail.
When you have multiple Pizza Guys, you try to spread them out, put them on different teams, one each. That particular day, we were running with two. I asked the sergeant to step outside away from the parolee so he couldn’t hear us, leaving the two Pizza Guys to guard the parolee. Pretty soon, one of the Pizza Guys shows up outside to listen in on what the plan was going to be. A couple minutes later, the second Pizza Guy shows up outside and the sergeant says, “Hey, who’s watching the crook?”
We ran back in and the crook had fled with the handcuffs.
In another incident, our team worked a highly sensitive narcotic surveillance, a high profile conspiracy. We rotated the “eye”, the point on the surveillance. Our Pizza Guy took his turn. After a few minutes, I tried to raise him on the radio. He didn’t respond. I had to break from my position to check on him. He was asleep in his car, his seat back. I took a Polaroid picture in case he ever complained about running for pizza.
On the Violent Crimes team, I ran an operation trying to snare a crew of serial bank robbers. I had six teams of two, set up on possible bank targets that the crime analysis unit had given us. Each team of two sat in their cars in the bank parking lots, and if the robbery crew pulled up to rob the bank, the team would put it out over the radio and wait for back-up.
We’d been set up for three hours. Around lunchtime, dispatch advised of a silent alarm at one the target banks. Every team broke from their location and drove like hell to the bank being robbed. The team sitting in the parking lot of the bank being robbed was comprised of two Pizza Guys, and they wouldn’t answer their radio. When we got there, the Pizza Guys looked surprised. They hadn’t seen a thing. They were both eating tacos right in front of the bank.
A plumber driving by saw the suspect run from the bank, spewing red smoke from the dye pack in the bank money, and followed him. The plumber took a huge pipe wrench from his truck and chased the bank robber into a restaurant, where he held him at bay in the restroom until we could get there.
The use of a Pizza Guy in novel might work as in individual incident, but unless the novel was a comedy, I don’t think he would work as a main character.
David Putnam always wanted to be a cop. His career in law enforcement has spanned over 30 years. He has worked in narcotics, served on FBI-sponsored violent crimes teams, and was cross-sworn as a U.S. Marshall, pursuing murder suspects and bank robbers in Arizona, Nevada, and California. Putnam did three tours on the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s S.W.A.T. team, executing dynamic entries, hostage rescues, and serving as team sniper. He has also worked in Criminal Intelligence and Internal Affairs and has supervised corrections, patrol, and a detective bureau.
After 28 years of California law enforcement, Putnam moved to Hawaii where he worked as a Special Agent for the Attorney General, investigating smuggling and white-collar crimes. Putnam is now retired and lives in Southern California where he farms organic avocado trees, reads and writes, and attends writers’ conferences with his wife and fellow writer, Mary. The Replacements follows The Disposables in Putnam’s Bruno Johnson series. Reach him at http://dwputnam.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
It's All About the Brand / Claire Applewhite
Branding is everything.
Think about it. Have you ever tried to convince your kids that the generic version of their favorite cereal or clothing line is every bit as good as the one with the familiar logo they’re dying to buy? Ever try to convince yourself?
We trust in brands, at least as a means of identifying our likes and dislikes quickly. Our favorite sports teams, restaurant chains, and department stores all have icons with which we associate, often on a deep emotional level.
As a writer, it’s crucial that you set yourself apart from the rest of the market by distinguishing your work with a brand identity. Sounds mercenary? Maybe, but as guest blogger Claire Applewhite points out, the greatest entertainment legends of our time capitalized on this marketing technique to build more than a fanbase—a legacy.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
It’s All About the Brand
By Claire Applewhite
The year was 1959.
Marilyn Monroe wowed us with her drop-dead white halter dress in Some Like It Hot. Elvis Presley shocked us with his sultry style, and I Love Lucy loved Lucille Ball, famous for slapstick comedy and her signature red hair. In 1964, the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show with “long” hair that barely grazed their collars.
These remarkable icons may be gone, but memories of their unique style endure. While the concept of the “brand” is not new, technological advances provide a fresh awareness that “brand” can create a timeless legacy. For the author with a well-defined brand, strategic opportunity awaits.
What is a “brand?” A brand represents the attributes that you present to your readers, and how your readers perceive you and your creative ability. Clearly, it is crucial to develop and deliver the right message. You must know yourself and your personal attributes before you formulate your message. To gain insight, some soul searching is unavoidable. Consider the following questions:
Why do you want to create this brand? What is your ultimate goal?
What do you believe in?
What are your fondest dreams?
Who, or what, do you love?
How do you spend your free time?
If you received an unexpected financial windfall, how would you spend it?
If you could be someone else, who would it be?
What do you consider an unforgivable mistake?
What is the thing you do best?
List some adjectives to describe yourself.
Now, assess your current image. Is it consistent with your answers? How does it compare to the image you want to present? What changes, if any, do you need to make to achieve consistency? This is the time to make them.
Do you want to focus on a particular niche within your brand? If you want to carve out a niche brand, work to become an expert in that area. Research the characteristics of that niche, so that you can anticipate customer expectations. Review the adjectives you used to describe yourself and compare them to the niche that you have considered. Are the two lists consistent with your brand?
I have always loved mystery and romantic suspense novels and movies, and found that I usually gravitated toward the “noir” style—a subgenre of the mystery genre that focus on themes such as hard luck, obsession, loneliness and despair. The criminal aspects of the plot and the protagonist are intertwined. The characters are usually doomed before we even meet them, but following their descent is somehow fun, as we observe their entanglement in a web of their own doom. Several of my books—the ’Nam Noir series, and Crazy For You—fit this niche nicely.
Speaking of your customers, how well do you know them? What is it about your work that they find unique? Ask them what they think you do best. Their answers may surprise you. Communicate with your readers on a regular basis. Advertise signings and appearances and use social media, or consider an online newsletter. Make your messages memorable, simple and clear. Always answer personal messages. Recently, I received an email from a student who got published. She thanked me for advice and encouragement, which meant a great deal to me. I really enjoy opportunities to get to know my readers, whether it’s a neighborhood book club, a book signing or a speaking opportunity.
Consider the acquisition of a logo. A logo is the bedrock, the very foundation of a brand, and represents what is unique about you and your work, in relation to the broader market. It communicates on a variety of levels to create a connection between you and your reader. The logo embodies the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It must be memorable, and elicit emotional response and brand loyalty from the consumer. If the medium is the message, the logo is the medium that communicates the message that defines your brand.
Marketing is complex, and is as crucial to your brand as your book. I am a St. Louis author and my books are set in St. Louis. St. Louis locales, expressions, and traditions are utilized whenever possible. Usually, there is a “giveaway” item with a book purchase. For example, to highlight the Coral Court Motel setting in St. Louis Hustle, a replica key chain accompanied each purchase.
I also use visual props and costumes. A cardboard version of Dr. Thomas Spezia, fresh from The Doctor’s Tale, joins Shelby Swain from Tennessee Plates and Bunny Dingwerth from Crazy For You. In addition to bookstores, schedule appearances in places that relate to your brand. I wrote the music and lyrics for my CD, Night Rain, to complement my books, and I have signed both in record stores.
Oh, and about that photo...
In my original photograph, I wore a suit. I thought I looked professional. In fact, I was told I looked like a banker, or as one man said, “You look like Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate.” I concluded that my creative image might have a problem. I consulted a professional photographer, and tried a different approach. The new photo appears on my website beside my logo, and by the biography at the end of each of my books, as well as synopses from my other novels.
Engage social media to convey and grow your new brand. Your brand is a valuable asset, and ultimately, the customer determines its worth and life cycle. Remember to protect it with trademark and copyright laws.
Finally, ensure that all types of social media communicate the same attributes of your brand. In everything you do, be consistent. Like Marilyn and Elvis, be an “original.”
Claire Applewhite is a St. Louis mystery writer and Acquisitions Editor for Smoking Gun Publishing, LLC. A graduate of St. Louis University, her published books include The Wrong Side of Memphis, Crazy For You, St. Louis Hustle, Candy Cadillac, Tennessee Plates, and The Doctor’s Tale. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Applewhite has served as a Past President of the Missouri Writers Guild and Board member of the Midwest Chapter, Mystery Writers of America. Organizational memberships include the St. Louis Metropolitan Press Club, St. Louis Writers Guild, Sisters in Crime, Ozark Writers League and Active member, Mystery Writers of America. She can be reached at www.claireapplewhite.com, www.clairedunoir.com or www.smokinggunpublishing.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
It's All About the Brand / Claire Applewhite
Branding is everything.Think about it. Have you ever tried to convince your kids that the generic version of their favorite cereal or clothing line is every bit as good as the one with the familiar logo they’re dying to buy? Ever try to convince yourself?We trust in brands, at least as a means of identifying our likes and dislikes quickly. Our favorite sports teams, restaurant chains, and department stores all have icons with which we associate, often on a deep emotional level.As a writer, it’s crucial that you set yourself apart from the rest of the market by distinguishing your work with a brand identity. Sounds mercenary? Maybe, but as guest blogger Claire Applewhite points out, the greatest entertainment legends of our time capitalized on this marketing technique to build more than a fanbase—a legacy.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
It’s All About the Brand
By Claire Applewhite
The year was 1959.
Marilyn Monroe wowed us with her drop-dead white halter dress in Some Like It Hot. Elvis Presley shocked us with his sultry style, and I Love Lucy loved Lucille Ball, famous for slapstick comedy and her signature red hair. In 1964, the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show with “long” hair that barely grazed their collars.
These remarkable icons may be gone, but memories of their unique style endure. While the concept of the “brand” is not new, technological advances provide a fresh awareness that “brand” can create a timeless legacy. For the author with a well-defined brand, strategic opportunity awaits.
What is a “brand?” A brand represents the attributes that you present to your readers, and how your readers perceive you and your creative ability. Clearly, it is crucial to develop and deliver the right message. You must know yourself and your personal attributes before you formulate your message. To gain insight, some soul searching is unavoidable. Consider the following questions:
- Why do you want to create this brand? What is your ultimate goal?
- What do you believe in?
- What are your fondest dreams?
- Who, or what, do you love?
- How do you spend your free time?
- If you received an unexpected financial windfall, how would you spend it?
- If you could be someone else, who would it be?
- What do you consider an unforgivable mistake?
- What is the thing you do best?
- List some adjectives to describe yourself.
Now, assess your current image. Is it consistent with your answers? How does it compare to the image you want to present? What changes, if any, do you need to make to achieve consistency? This is the time to make them.
Do you want to focus on a particular niche within your brand? If you want to carve out a niche brand, work to become an expert in that area. Research the characteristics of that niche, so that you can anticipate customer expectations. Review the adjectives you used to describe yourself and compare them to the niche that you have considered. Are the two lists consistent with your brand?
I have always loved mystery and romantic suspense novels and movies, and found that I usually gravitated toward the “noir” style—a subgenre of the mystery genre that focus on themes such as hard luck, obsession, loneliness and despair. The criminal aspects of the plot and the protagonist are intertwined. The characters are usually doomed before we even meet them, but following their descent is somehow fun, as we observe their entanglement in a web of their own doom. Several of my books—the ’Nam Noir series, and Crazy For You—fit this niche nicely.
Speaking of your customers, how well do you know them? What is it about your work that they find unique? Ask them what they think you do best. Their answers may surprise you. Communicate with your readers on a regular basis. Advertise signings and appearances and use social media, or consider an online newsletter. Make your messages memorable, simple and clear. Always answer personal messages. Recently, I received an email from a student who got published. She thanked me for advice and encouragement, which meant a great deal to me. I really enjoy opportunities to get to know my readers, whether it’s a neighborhood book club, a book signing or a speaking opportunity.
Consider the acquisition of a logo. A logo is the bedrock, the very foundation of a brand, and represents what is unique about you and your work, in relation to the broader market. It communicates on a variety of levels to create a connection between you and your reader. The logo embodies the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It must be memorable, and elicit emotional response and brand loyalty from the consumer. If the medium is the message, the logo is the medium that communicates the message that defines your brand.
Marketing is complex, and is as crucial to your brand as your book. I am a St. Louis author and my books are set in St. Louis. St. Louis locales, expressions, and traditions are utilized whenever possible. Usually, there is a “giveaway” item with a book purchase. For example, to highlight the Coral Court Motel setting in St. Louis Hustle, a replica key chain accompanied each purchase.
I also use visual props and costumes. A cardboard version of Dr. Thomas Spezia, fresh from The Doctor’s Tale, joins Shelby Swain from Tennessee Plates and Bunny Dingwerth from Crazy For You. In addition to bookstores, schedule appearances in places that relate to your brand. I wrote the music and lyrics for my CD, Night Rain, to complement my books, and I have signed both in record stores.
Oh, and about that photo...
In my original photograph, I wore a suit. I thought I looked professional. In fact, I was told I looked like a banker, or as one man said, “You look like Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate.” I concluded that my creative image might have a problem. I consulted a professional photographer, and tried a different approach. The new photo appears on my website beside my logo, and by the biography at the end of each of my books, as well as synopses from my other novels.
Engage social media to convey and grow your new brand. Your brand is a valuable asset, and ultimately, the customer determines its worth and life cycle. Remember to protect it with trademark and copyright laws.
Finally, ensure that all types of social media communicate the same attributes of your brand. In everything you do, be consistent. Like Marilyn and Elvis, be an “original.”
Claire Applewhite is a St. Louis mystery writer and Acquisitions Editor for Smoking Gun Publishing, LLC. A graduate of St. Louis University, her published books include The Wrong Side of Memphis, Crazy For You, St. Louis Hustle, Candy Cadillac, Tennessee Plates, and The Doctor’s Tale. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Applewhite has served as a Past President of the Missouri Writers Guild and Board member of the Midwest Chapter, Mystery Writers of America. Organizational memberships include the St. Louis Metropolitan Press Club, St. Louis Writers Guild, Sisters in Crime, Ozark Writers League and Active member, Mystery Writers of America. She can be reached at www.claireapplewhite.com, www.clairedunoir.com or www.smokinggunpublishing.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
It's All About the Brand / Claire Applewhite
Branding is everything.Think about it. Have you ever tried to convince your kids that the generic version of their favorite cereal or clothing line is every bit as good as the one with the familiar logo they’re dying to buy? Ever try to convince yourself?We trust in brands, at least as a means of identifying our likes and dislikes quickly. Our favorite sports teams, restaurant chains, and department stores all have icons with which we associate, often on a deep emotional level.As a writer, it’s crucial that you set yourself apart from the rest of the market by distinguishing your work with a brand identity. Sounds mercenary? Maybe, but as guest blogger Claire Applewhite points out, the greatest entertainment legends of our time capitalized on this marketing technique to build more than a fanbase—a legacy.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
It’s All About the Brand
By Claire Applewhite
The year was 1959.
Marilyn Monroe wowed us with her drop-dead white halter dress in Some Like It Hot. Elvis Presley shocked us with his sultry style, and I Love Lucy loved Lucille Ball, famous for slapstick comedy and her signature red hair. In 1964, the Beatles performed on the Ed Sullivan Show with “long” hair that barely grazed their collars.
These remarkable icons may be gone, but memories of their unique style endure. While the concept of the “brand” is not new, technological advances provide a fresh awareness that “brand” can create a timeless legacy. For the author with a well-defined brand, strategic opportunity awaits.
What is a “brand?” A brand represents the attributes that you present to your readers, and how your readers perceive you and your creative ability. Clearly, it is crucial to develop and deliver the right message. You must know yourself and your personal attributes before you formulate your message. To gain insight, some soul searching is unavoidable. Consider the following questions:
- Why do you want to create this brand? What is your ultimate goal?
- What do you believe in?
- What are your fondest dreams?
- Who, or what, do you love?
- How do you spend your free time?
- If you received an unexpected financial windfall, how would you spend it?
- If you could be someone else, who would it be?
- What do you consider an unforgivable mistake?
- What is the thing you do best?
- List some adjectives to describe yourself.
Now, assess your current image. Is it consistent with your answers? How does it compare to the image you want to present? What changes, if any, do you need to make to achieve consistency? This is the time to make them.
Do you want to focus on a particular niche within your brand? If you want to carve out a niche brand, work to become an expert in that area. Research the characteristics of that niche, so that you can anticipate customer expectations. Review the adjectives you used to describe yourself and compare them to the niche that you have considered. Are the two lists consistent with your brand?
I have always loved mystery and romantic suspense novels and movies, and found that I usually gravitated toward the “noir” style—a subgenre of the mystery genre that focus on themes such as hard luck, obsession, loneliness and despair. The criminal aspects of the plot and the protagonist are intertwined. The characters are usually doomed before we even meet them, but following their descent is somehow fun, as we observe their entanglement in a web of their own doom. Several of my books—the ’Nam Noir series, and Crazy For You—fit this niche nicely.
Speaking of your customers, how well do you know them? What is it about your work that they find unique? Ask them what they think you do best. Their answers may surprise you. Communicate with your readers on a regular basis. Advertise signings and appearances and use social media, or consider an online newsletter. Make your messages memorable, simple and clear. Always answer personal messages. Recently, I received an email from a student who got published. She thanked me for advice and encouragement, which meant a great deal to me. I really enjoy opportunities to get to know my readers, whether it’s a neighborhood book club, a book signing or a speaking opportunity.
Consider the acquisition of a logo. A logo is the bedrock, the very foundation of a brand, and represents what is unique about you and your work, in relation to the broader market. It communicates on a variety of levels to create a connection between you and your reader. The logo embodies the adage, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” It must be memorable, and elicit emotional response and brand loyalty from the consumer. If the medium is the message, the logo is the medium that communicates the message that defines your brand.
Marketing is complex, and is as crucial to your brand as your book. I am a St. Louis author and my books are set in St. Louis. St. Louis locales, expressions, and traditions are utilized whenever possible. Usually, there is a “giveaway” item with a book purchase. For example, to highlight the Coral Court Motel setting in St. Louis Hustle, a replica key chain accompanied each purchase.
I also use visual props and costumes. A cardboard version of Dr. Thomas Spezia, fresh from The Doctor’s Tale, joins Shelby Swain from Tennessee Plates and Bunny Dingwerth from Crazy For You. In addition to bookstores, schedule appearances in places that relate to your brand. I wrote the music and lyrics for my CD, Night Rain, to complement my books, and I have signed both in record stores.
Oh, and about that photo...
In my original photograph, I wore a suit. I thought I looked professional. In fact, I was told I looked like a banker, or as one man said, “You look like Meryl Streep in The Manchurian Candidate.” I concluded that my creative image might have a problem. I consulted a professional photographer, and tried a different approach. The new photo appears on my website beside my logo, and by the biography at the end of each of my books, as well as synopses from my other novels.
Engage social media to convey and grow your new brand. Your brand is a valuable asset, and ultimately, the customer determines its worth and life cycle. Remember to protect it with trademark and copyright laws.
Finally, ensure that all types of social media communicate the same attributes of your brand. In everything you do, be consistent. Like Marilyn and Elvis, be an “original.”
Claire Applewhite is a St. Louis mystery writer and Acquisitions Editor for Smoking Gun Publishing, LLC. A graduate of St. Louis University, her published books include The Wrong Side of Memphis, Crazy For You, St. Louis Hustle, Candy Cadillac, Tennessee Plates, and The Doctor’s Tale. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis. Applewhite has served as a Past President of the Missouri Writers Guild and Board member of the Midwest Chapter, Mystery Writers of America. Organizational memberships include the St. Louis Metropolitan Press Club, St. Louis Writers Guild, Sisters in Crime, Ozark Writers League and Active member, Mystery Writers of America. She can be reached at www.claireapplewhite.com, www.clairedunoir.com or www.smokinggunpublishing.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
How to Write Killer Emotions / DiAnn Mills
There are several things going on within a story: words, plot, characterization. But the thing that makes it human is the emotion. And the more emotion we can throw into our stories, the more they will resonate with readers.
DiAnn Mills provides a great checklist for helping us along. You might not be able to use all of her techniques within the same scene—or even the same story—but all are good reminders that we are human because we feel, and because we feel we are able to read words on a page and share a character’s joys and pains.
These are tricks to take us from good writing to great writing.
Write with passion!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
How to Write Killer Emotions
By DiAnn Mills
The first step in writing killer emotions is to understand a character’s unique temperament, wants, needs, flaws, desires, goals, challenges, and backstory. Once you know your character, you can fill your pages with their deepest feelings. According to Tonya Reiman in The Power of Body Language, there are seven universal emotions: surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt. Your character needs to experience all seven, and you have to take them there. But how?
Experts state that up to 90% of communication is nonverbal. Character-driven body language allows the writer to show, not tell, what a character is feeling. There are plenty of resources available online offering codified body language for you, but you can do a lot of real-life research by exercising your powers of observation. Watch the people around you carefully, and you’ll find clues about their feelings hidden in what they are physically doing.
Another technique that invites the reader into the experience is the writer’s usage of sensory perception. Emotions surface naturally as the writer describes what the character sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches. The reader feels the character’s reactions and internalizes what is happening, much like children watching a movie. They select the character they want to be in the adventure, and are able to live the entertainment vicariously. Every word.
Symbolism, another literary device, touches the reader with emotion when a tangible item means something different than its physical property. A symbol cleverly inserted into the story—a word or phrase that points to a deeper meaning—provides a subtle way for the reader to understand the character’s internal workings. The weather, a number, rushing water, a quirky personality, the way the stars light up the night, and more.
Color inherently carries symbolic weight, and thus can affect the character and the reader. Here are a few examples:
Red is a passionate color that invokes strong emotions, while blue suggests sadness or serenity. Green symbolizes nature and growth, and purple often represents royalty, wealth, wisdom, and spirituality—and can also symbolize arrogance. Brown feels natural and down-to-earth, while pink feels romantic and feminine. White often signifies purity and innocence, and black usually reminds us of power, evil, death, and mourning. Gray blends the meanings of black and white, and symbolizes life and death in many circumstances.
Using emotions also means effective word choice. Diction is important and the sounds of our words usher in feelings. Novels involve conflict, and using hard consonants underscores the harsh sensations of stress and tension in confrontations. In gentler scenes, rely on words that end with “y”: they feel light, even fun—pretty, dainty, lovely, perky. Words with softer consonants are soothing. Adding a long vowel sound to a key moment can slow your reader’s heart rate.
The rhythm of our sentences also creates emotive responses. If a passage seems harsh when you desire to create a calm scene, then it’s time to edit. If your sentences contain a poetic lilt when you intend to show a violent scene, head back to the drawing board.
A bestselling writer purposefully places her character into heart-wrenching moments. Be honest. Be bold. Make the emotions raw. Hold back nothing. If you learn how to weave emotion and symbolism into your writing, you plunge your reader into your story and allow him or her to bond with a character who will never let them go.
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels.
Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists; won two Christy Awards; and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; the 2015 president of the Romance Writers of America’s Faith, Hope, & Love chapter; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, and International Thriller Writers. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.
DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
How to Write Killer Emotions / DiAnn Mills
There are several things going on within a story: words, plot, characterization. But the thing that makes it human is the emotion. And the more emotion we can throw into our stories, the more they will resonate with readers.DiAnn Mills provides a great checklist for helping us along. You might not be able to use all of her techniques within the same scene—or even the same story—but all are good reminders that we are human because we feel, and because we feel we are able to read words on a page and share a character’s joys and pains.These are tricks to take us from good writing to great writing.Write with passion!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
How to Write Killer Emotions
By DiAnn Mills
The first step in writing killer emotions is to understand a character’s unique temperament, wants, needs, flaws, desires, goals, challenges, and backstory. Once you know your character, you can fill your pages with their deepest feelings. According to Tonya Reiman in The Power of Body Language, there are seven universal emotions: surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt. Your character needs to experience all seven, and you have to take them there. But how?
Experts state that up to 90% of communication is nonverbal. Character-driven body language allows the writer to show, not tell, what a character is feeling. There are plenty of resources available online offering codified body language for you, but you can do a lot of real-life research by exercising your powers of observation. Watch the people around you carefully, and you’ll find clues about their feelings hidden in what they are physically doing.
Another technique that invites the reader into the experience is the writer’s usage of sensory perception. Emotions surface naturally as the writer describes what the character sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches. The reader feels the character’s reactions and internalizes what is happening, much like children watching a movie. They select the character they want to be in the adventure, and are able to live the entertainment vicariously. Every word.
Symbolism, another literary device, touches the reader with emotion when a tangible item means something different than its physical property. A symbol cleverly inserted into the story—a word or phrase that points to a deeper meaning—provides a subtle way for the reader to understand the character’s internal workings. The weather, a number, rushing water, a quirky personality, the way the stars light up the night, and more.
Color inherently carries symbolic weight, and thus can affect the character and the reader. Here are a few examples:
Red is a passionate color that invokes strong emotions, while blue suggests sadness or serenity. Green symbolizes nature and growth, and purple often represents royalty, wealth, wisdom, and spirituality—and can also symbolize arrogance. Brown feels natural and down-to-earth, while pink feels romantic and feminine. White often signifies purity and innocence, and black usually reminds us of power, evil, death, and mourning. Gray blends the meanings of black and white, and symbolizes life and death in many circumstances.
Using emotions also means effective word choice. Diction is important and the sounds of our words usher in feelings. Novels involve conflict, and using hard consonants underscores the harsh sensations of stress and tension in confrontations. In gentler scenes, rely on words that end with “y”: they feel light, even fun—pretty, dainty, lovely, perky. Words with softer consonants are soothing. Adding a long vowel sound to a key moment can slow your reader’s heart rate.
The rhythm of our sentences also creates emotive responses. If a passage seems harsh when you desire to create a calm scene, then it’s time to edit. If your sentences contain a poetic lilt when you intend to show a violent scene, head back to the drawing board.
A bestselling writer purposefully places her character into heart-wrenching moments. Be honest. Be bold. Make the emotions raw. Hold back nothing. If you learn how to weave emotion and symbolism into your writing, you plunge your reader into your story and allow him or her to bond with a character who will never let them go.
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels.
Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists; won two Christy Awards; and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; the 2015 president of the Romance Writers of America’s Faith, Hope, & Love chapter; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, and International Thriller Writers. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.
DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
How to Write Killer Emotions / DiAnn Mills
There are several things going on within a story: words, plot, characterization. But the thing that makes it human is the emotion. And the more emotion we can throw into our stories, the more they will resonate with readers.DiAnn Mills provides a great checklist for helping us along. You might not be able to use all of her techniques within the same scene—or even the same story—but all are good reminders that we are human because we feel, and because we feel we are able to read words on a page and share a character’s joys and pains.These are tricks to take us from good writing to great writing.Write with passion!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
How to Write Killer Emotions
By DiAnn Mills
The first step in writing killer emotions is to understand a character’s unique temperament, wants, needs, flaws, desires, goals, challenges, and backstory. Once you know your character, you can fill your pages with their deepest feelings. According to Tonya Reiman in The Power of Body Language, there are seven universal emotions: surprise, fear, anger, sadness, disgust, happiness, and contempt. Your character needs to experience all seven, and you have to take them there. But how?
Experts state that up to 90% of communication is nonverbal. Character-driven body language allows the writer to show, not tell, what a character is feeling. There are plenty of resources available online offering codified body language for you, but you can do a lot of real-life research by exercising your powers of observation. Watch the people around you carefully, and you’ll find clues about their feelings hidden in what they are physically doing.
Another technique that invites the reader into the experience is the writer’s usage of sensory perception. Emotions surface naturally as the writer describes what the character sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches. The reader feels the character’s reactions and internalizes what is happening, much like children watching a movie. They select the character they want to be in the adventure, and are able to live the entertainment vicariously. Every word.
Symbolism, another literary device, touches the reader with emotion when a tangible item means something different than its physical property. A symbol cleverly inserted into the story—a word or phrase that points to a deeper meaning—provides a subtle way for the reader to understand the character’s internal workings. The weather, a number, rushing water, a quirky personality, the way the stars light up the night, and more.
Color inherently carries symbolic weight, and thus can affect the character and the reader. Here are a few examples:
Red is a passionate color that invokes strong emotions, while blue suggests sadness or serenity. Green symbolizes nature and growth, and purple often represents royalty, wealth, wisdom, and spirituality—and can also symbolize arrogance. Brown feels natural and down-to-earth, while pink feels romantic and feminine. White often signifies purity and innocence, and black usually reminds us of power, evil, death, and mourning. Gray blends the meanings of black and white, and symbolizes life and death in many circumstances.
Using emotions also means effective word choice. Diction is important and the sounds of our words usher in feelings. Novels involve conflict, and using hard consonants underscores the harsh sensations of stress and tension in confrontations. In gentler scenes, rely on words that end with “y”: they feel light, even fun—pretty, dainty, lovely, perky. Words with softer consonants are soothing. Adding a long vowel sound to a key moment can slow your reader’s heart rate.
The rhythm of our sentences also creates emotive responses. If a passage seems harsh when you desire to create a calm scene, then it’s time to edit. If your sentences contain a poetic lilt when you intend to show a violent scene, head back to the drawing board.
A bestselling writer purposefully places her character into heart-wrenching moments. Be honest. Be bold. Make the emotions raw. Hold back nothing. If you learn how to weave emotion and symbolism into your writing, you plunge your reader into your story and allow him or her to bond with a character who will never let them go.
DiAnn Mills is a bestselling author who believes her readers should expect an adventure. She combines unforgettable characters with unpredictable plots to create action-packed, suspense-filled novels.
Her titles have appeared on the CBA and ECPA bestseller lists; won two Christy Awards; and been finalists for the RITA, Daphne Du Maurier, Inspirational Readers’ Choice, and Carol award contests. Library Journal presented her with a Best Books 2014: Genre Fiction award in the Christian Fiction category for Firewall.
DiAnn is a founding board member of the American Christian Fiction Writers; the 2015 president of the Romance Writers of America’s Faith, Hope, & Love chapter; a member of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, and International Thriller Writers. She speaks to various groups and teaches writing workshops around the country. She and her husband live in sunny Houston, Texas.
DiAnn is very active online and would love to connect with readers on any of the social media platforms listed at www.diannmills.com.
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, Emily Eytchison, and publisher/editorial director Clay Stafford for their assistance in putting together this week’s blog.
And for more writer resources, visit us at www.KillerNashville.com, www.KillerNashvilleMagazine.com, and www.KillerNashvilleBookCon.com.
And be sure to check out our new book, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded, an anthology of original short stories by New York Times bestselling authors and newbies alike.
“Murder, mayhem, and mystery! Every story in KILLER NASHVILLE: COLD-BLOODED is filled with suspense, sizzle and startling twists. I loved it!”
- Lisa Jackson, New York Times Bestselling Author
*Killer Nashville is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. If you purchase a book from the links on this page, Amazon will give Killer Nashville a small percentage of the total sale. Killer Nashville receives zero compensation (other than sometimes the book to review) from publishers who have been selected for the Book of the Day.
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