KN Magazine: Articles
Resourcefulness 101: Marketing Your Novelettes / Wayne Zurl
So you’re pretty sure the novelette you’ve got sitting on your hard drive is a phenomenon waiting to happen. Thanks to the Internet, there are more ways than ever to get your mini-masterpiece out there, but you could waste a lot of time wading through search results without a proper guide. That’s where this week’s guest blogger, former cop and successful novelette writer Wayne Zurl, comes in.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Resourcefulness 101: Marketing Your Novelettes
By Wayne Zurl
What the hell can you do with a novelette?
Practically speaking, not much—unless you get creative. Wikipedia and other Internet sources define novelette as a story ranging between 7,500 and 17,500 words. Try and sell one sometime. They’re too long for those who publish short stories, and too short for a publisher who’s looking for a novella or full-length novel.
After I finished my first Sam Jenkins mystery novel, A New Prospect, and while peddling it to agents and publishers, I wrote stories for practice. Each was based on an actual incident I encountered while working as a cop in New York. And each ended up longer than the accepted short story ceiling of 7,500 words. But while the memories were fresh and my creative juices were flowing, I ended up with a bunch. So, I tried to flog them, too.
I hit a few of the mainstream mystery magazines and walked away disappointed. Each got rejected, but one acquisitions editor was kind enough to explain why. Basically, he said, “The story is good, but it’s too long.”
I sighed.
“Look, everybody writes stuff this length,” he continued, “but we can only publish one a year. So, if James Patterson sends me one and you send one, who do you think I’m going to accept?”
Nuts, I thought, aced out by someone who didn’t need the exposure or the money. So, I began to scour the Internet for a publisher who might like longer, more detailed and developed stories—real cop fiction—a series featuring the same cast as in my novel.
I found a relatively new company whose sole mission was to produce one-hour audio books and simultaneously publish them as eBooks. Coincidentally, stories from between 8,000 and 11,000 words (those in the novelette range) translate to fifty-five to seventy minute audios—not unlike the old time one-hour radio dramas to which my mother used to listen while ironing or cooking.
I submitted what I thought was the pick of the litter and crossed my fingers. Then I received an email. I hadn’t opened a piece of correspondence with such trepidation since I found that letter from my local draft board back in 1967. But, ha, success! She (the publisher) wanted the novelette called A Labor Day Murder.
From there, we built a good relationship and she published eighteen more novelettes. I worked with her editors and a professional actor who read my work. I felt like I (almost) had my own TV series. Not exactly on one of the networks, or even on cable, but I had an audience, and they liked the adventures of the boys and girls of Prospect PD.
Then, years later, after she had accepted three more new pieces and I was waiting for the promised contracts, I received an unexpected email. “Sorry,” she said. “For personal reasons, I must stop publishing new material. I won’t be sending the contracts. I’m not going out of business, but just won’t be producing anything new.”
I was back to my old dilemma: What do I do with three really good novelettes (I liked those a lot) plus the two more I had sitting in the hopper ready to send in? Head to the Internet.
After an exhaustive search—for me, because when it comes to computers, I’m only a step above clueless—I found Melange Books, LLC. They would accept submissions of novelettes and consider them for publication as eBooks. Okay, my “show” had been cancelled, but eBooks would be better than nothing.
I sent Melange a serial killer story called Angel of the Lord. The publisher liked it and asked if I had any others. I thought: Wow, a match made in heaven.
“Sure,” said I. “I just happen to have four more that have never seen a publisher’s contract.”
“Great,” said she. “Send them and we’ll see about putting them into an anthology and publish it in print and eBook.”
“Yahoo,” I said.
Well, not really. But I did send them, and in April of 2015 they released From New York to the Smokies.
So, what’s my point? If Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, or The Strand aren’t interested in your very long stories, they can find a home. I did it the traditional way. But if you’re more computer savvy than I am, and you have the ambition to self-publish, you can create audio books, eBooks, and nifty anthologies from your novelette length stories and people will buy them… thousands of them.
Now, here’s a bit of logistical reality. With audio books, MP3 downloads sell MUCH better than compact discs. I never incurred the expense of producing the CDs, but know it was considerable. So, if you’re producing your own audio books, stick with a downloadable version. You’ll find more distributors to handle it/them.
And always back up your audio with a published eBook. They sell even more copies. You’ve already paid for the cover image, so use it on a second product. Then, after your series takes off, offer package deals or “bundles” of several episodes at a discount price.
Wayne Zurl grew up on Long Island and retired after twenty years with the Suffolk County Police Department, one of the largest municipal law enforcement agencies in New York and the nation. For thirteen of those years he served as a section commander supervising investigators.
He is a graduate of SUNY, Empire State College, and served on active duty in the US Army during the Vietnam War and later in the reserves. Zurl left New York to live in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee with his wife, Barbara—not far from Prospect PD.
Learn more about Wayne at http://www.waynezurlbooks.net/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, 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.
*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.
Resourcefulness 101: Marketing Your Novelettes / Wayne Zurl
So you’re pretty sure the novelette you’ve got sitting on your hard drive is a phenomenon waiting to happen. Thanks to the Internet, there are more ways than ever to get your mini-masterpiece out there, but you could waste a lot of time wading through search results without a proper guide. That’s where this week’s guest blogger, former cop and successful novelette writer Wayne Zurl, comes in.Happy reading!
Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Resourcefulness 101: Marketing Your Novelettes
By Wayne Zurl
What the hell can you do with a novelette?
Practically speaking, not much—unless you get creative. Wikipedia and other Internet sources define novelette as a story ranging between 7,500 and 17,500 words. Try and sell one sometime. They’re too long for those who publish short stories, and too short for a publisher who’s looking for a novella or full-length novel.
After I finished my first Sam Jenkins mystery novel, A New Prospect, and while peddling it to agents and publishers, I wrote stories for practice. Each was based on an actual incident I encountered while working as a cop in New York. And each ended up longer than the accepted short story ceiling of 7,500 words. But while the memories were fresh and my creative juices were flowing, I ended up with a bunch. So, I tried to flog them, too.
I hit a few of the mainstream mystery magazines and walked away disappointed. Each got rejected, but one acquisitions editor was kind enough to explain why. Basically, he said, “The story is good, but it’s too long.”
I sighed.
“Look, everybody writes stuff this length,” he continued, “but we can only publish one a year. So, if James Patterson sends me one and you send one, who do you think I’m going to accept?”
Nuts, I thought, aced out by someone who didn’t need the exposure or the money. So, I began to scour the Internet for a publisher who might like longer, more detailed and developed stories—real cop fiction—a series featuring the same cast as in my novel.
I found a relatively new company whose sole mission was to produce one-hour audio books and simultaneously publish them as eBooks. Coincidentally, stories from between 8,000 and 11,000 words (those in the novelette range) translate to fifty-five to seventy minute audios—not unlike the old time one-hour radio dramas to which my mother used to listen while ironing or cooking.
I submitted what I thought was the pick of the litter and crossed my fingers. Then I received an email. I hadn’t opened a piece of correspondence with such trepidation since I found that letter from my local draft board back in 1967. But, ha, success! She (the publisher) wanted the novelette called A Labor Day Murder.
From there, we built a good relationship and she published eighteen more novelettes. I worked with her editors and a professional actor who read my work. I felt like I (almost) had my own TV series. Not exactly on one of the networks, or even on cable, but I had an audience, and they liked the adventures of the boys and girls of Prospect PD.
Then, years later, after she had accepted three more new pieces and I was waiting for the promised contracts, I received an unexpected email. “Sorry,” she said. “For personal reasons, I must stop publishing new material. I won’t be sending the contracts. I’m not going out of business, but just won’t be producing anything new.”
I was back to my old dilemma: What do I do with three really good novelettes (I liked those a lot) plus the two more I had sitting in the hopper ready to send in? Head to the Internet.
After an exhaustive search—for me, because when it comes to computers, I’m only a step above clueless—I found Melange Books, LLC. They would accept submissions of novelettes and consider them for publication as eBooks. Okay, my “show” had been cancelled, but eBooks would be better than nothing.
I sent Melange a serial killer story called Angel of the Lord. The publisher liked it and asked if I had any others. I thought: Wow, a match made in heaven.
“Sure,” said I. “I just happen to have four more that have never seen a publisher’s contract.”
“Great,” said she. “Send them and we’ll see about putting them into an anthology and publish it in print and eBook.”
“Yahoo,” I said.
Well, not really. But I did send them, and in April of 2015 they released From New York to the Smokies.
So, what’s my point? If Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen, or The Strand aren’t interested in your very long stories, they can find a home. I did it the traditional way. But if you’re more computer savvy than I am, and you have the ambition to self-publish, you can create audio books, eBooks, and nifty anthologies from your novelette length stories and people will buy them… thousands of them.
Now, here’s a bit of logistical reality. With audio books, MP3 downloads sell MUCH better than compact discs. I never incurred the expense of producing the CDs, but know it was considerable. So, if you’re producing your own audio books, stick with a downloadable version. You’ll find more distributors to handle it/them.
And always back up your audio with a published eBook. They sell even more copies. You’ve already paid for the cover image, so use it on a second product. Then, after your series takes off, offer package deals or “bundles” of several episodes at a discount price.
Wayne Zurl grew up on Long Island and retired after twenty years with the Suffolk County Police Department, one of the largest municipal law enforcement agencies in New York and the nation. For thirteen of those years he served as a section commander supervising investigators.
He is a graduate of SUNY, Empire State College, and served on active duty in the US Army during the Vietnam War and later in the reserves. Zurl left New York to live in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee with his wife, Barbara—not far from Prospect PD.
Learn more about Wayne at http://www.waynezurlbooks.net/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, 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.
*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.
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex / Raymond Benson
How do you get inside your opposite gender protagonist’s head? Clearly, it’s not impossible to write across gender lines—the success of “Harry Potter” alone dismisses that idea. But it’s tricky. Isn’t it? Raymond Benson, of Bond novel fame, lets us in on his process of transforming his authorial voice from male to female.
And I’m with him: I love it when the woman wins.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex
By Raymond Benson
Well, if that title doesn’t raise some eyebrows, I don’t know what will.
Seriously, we all do it—every writer at some point creates a protagonist who is one’s opposite gender. Even Ian Fleming did it for his 1962 Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, in which the story is told in first person by a woman... and 007 doesn’t enter the novel until the last third. There are plenty of female authors who write male characters, but how many male authors follow the exploits of female characters? To be fair, there are definitely a few out there. I’m one.
Speaking of James Bond, I was fortunate enough to be hired by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation 007 books from 1996-2002. When that gig was finished, I set out to create my own brand of suspense novels, and they were a very different kettle of fish. My original novels tend to be Hitchcockian thrillers, mostly about everyday people in unusual circumstances. And more often than not, the protagonist is female.
Strangely enough, I think I found my elusive authorial “voice” by doing this. I’ve found that I’m pretty good at creating believable female heroines—they range from ordinary suburban housewives who must rise to the occasion to overcome a threat, to kick-ass women who put on masks and fight crime and injustice.
A case in point is my recent five-book serial featuring the character The Black Stiletto. It’s about a young woman in the 1950s who runs away from near-poverty and an abusive stepfather to New York City, where she becomes a legendary vigilante for five years, and then mysteriously disappears. But in the present day, a divorced dad approaching fifty is taking care of his elderly mother—she has Alzheimer’s and is dying—and he discovers that she was the infamous Black Stiletto. Thus, it’s two parallel stories—one in the present that deals with family and Alzheimer’s, and one in the past, which is about the Stiletto’s exploits.
The Stiletto’s portion of each book is in the form of a diary—that is, first person. How did I get the voice right? Good question! How did I get any of my female protagonists’ voices correct? I like to say, facetiously, that I used up all my testosterone writing James Bond, and now I’m forced to rely on whatever estrogen I have in my body.
But to examine this question seriously, I suppose the first answer could be that I really like women. Since they are from Mars, and we men are from Venus—oh, wait, is it the other way around?—it’s obvious they are a different species from my own. However, I have done my research, and that means living, relating, and empathizing with the wonderful creatures.
I have a mother and a sister with whom I’m close (my mother is 94 and still ass-kicking), a history of girlfriends, and one wife of twenty-eight years (and counting). I watch movies by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, and any film buff will tell you that those guys create excellent roles for women. The best answer I can give is that I ultimately find women to be more interesting characters because, in my very male opinion, they’re more complex! Men only think about two things (and I’ll let the reader figure out what they are), but there’s a lot going on inside a woman’s brain. A woman can multi-task better than any man. I find that kind of cool... and sexy, too.
I also believe I’m a feminist; I’ve supported women’s political causes my entire life. I think I understand where a woman is coming from, regarding what is important to the female gender. In fact, when Library Journal described the first Black Stiletto book, they called it a “mashup of the work of Gloria Steinem, Ian Fleming, and Mario Puzo, all under the editorship of Stan Lee.” I was especially proud of the Gloria Steinem part. I want women to win.
The only thing left to master is learning how a woman dresses, applies makeup, and chooses what shoes to wear. For those kinds of things, I ask my wife. She is a reader and is extremely helpful with that stuff. “No, she would never wear that.” That kind of constructive criticism. And the Internet is great for researching period clothing, though thrift shops are also good resources.
My wife is also my first beta reader, so she’s the first to clobber me with, “A woman would never say that.” When I wrote the first Black Stiletto book in the form of a diary, I gave it to another (female) beta reader who told me that had she not known a man had written it, she would have been fooled. So I thought maybe I was on to something.
Now, years later, after over ten titles starring women characters, I’ve completed a new stand-alone literary chiller featuring yet another female protagonist—this one a sixty-year-old romance writer! So apparently I’m pretty comfortable in another gender’s skin.
Temporarily, that is. When I’m finished writing for the day, I do manly things like throwing burgers on the grill, bending lead pipes around my waist, and entering raw egg eating contests. It puts hair on the chest.
Raymond Benson is the author of over 30 published titles, including the first four entries in the Black Stiletto series: The Black Stiletto, The Black Stiletto: Black & White, The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes, and The Black Stiletto: Secrets & Lies. He is most well known for being the official James Bond 007 continuation author between 1996 and 2002. In total, he penned and published worldwide six original 007 novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories. An anthology of his 007 work, The Union Trilogy, and a second anthology, Choice of Weapons, followed. His book The James Bond Bedside Companion was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America. Benson has published several other bestsellers and award-winning books, and has authored the novelization of a number of popular video games. Benson lives in the Chicago area. Reach him at http://www.raymondbenson.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.
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex / Raymond Benson
How do you get inside your opposite gender protagonist’s head? Clearly, it’s not impossible to write across gender lines—the success of “Harry Potter” alone dismisses that idea. But it’s tricky. Isn’t it? Raymond Benson, of Bond novel fame, lets us in on his process of transforming his authorial voice from male to female.And I’m with him: I love it when the woman wins.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex
By Raymond Benson
Well, if that title doesn’t raise some eyebrows, I don’t know what will.
Seriously, we all do it—every writer at some point creates a protagonist who is one’s opposite gender. Even Ian Fleming did it for his 1962 Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, in which the story is told in first person by a woman... and 007 doesn’t enter the novel until the last third. There are plenty of female authors who write male characters, but how many male authors follow the exploits of female characters? To be fair, there are definitely a few out there. I’m one.
Speaking of James Bond, I was fortunate enough to be hired by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation 007 books from 1996-2002. When that gig was finished, I set out to create my own brand of suspense novels, and they were a very different kettle of fish. My original novels tend to be Hitchcockian thrillers, mostly about everyday people in unusual circumstances. And more often than not, the protagonist is female.
Strangely enough, I think I found my elusive authorial “voice” by doing this. I’ve found that I’m pretty good at creating believable female heroines—they range from ordinary suburban housewives who must rise to the occasion to overcome a threat, to kick-ass women who put on masks and fight crime and injustice.
A case in point is my recent five-book serial featuring the character The Black Stiletto. It’s about a young woman in the 1950s who runs away from near-poverty and an abusive stepfather to New York City, where she becomes a legendary vigilante for five years, and then mysteriously disappears. But in the present day, a divorced dad approaching fifty is taking care of his elderly mother—she has Alzheimer’s and is dying—and he discovers that she was the infamous Black Stiletto. Thus, it’s two parallel stories—one in the present that deals with family and Alzheimer’s, and one in the past, which is about the Stiletto’s exploits.
The Stiletto’s portion of each book is in the form of a diary—that is, first person. How did I get the voice right? Good question! How did I get any of my female protagonists’ voices correct? I like to say, facetiously, that I used up all my testosterone writing James Bond, and now I’m forced to rely on whatever estrogen I have in my body.
But to examine this question seriously, I suppose the first answer could be that I really like women. Since they are from Mars, and we men are from Venus—oh, wait, is it the other way around?—it’s obvious they are a different species from my own. However, I have done my research, and that means living, relating, and empathizing with the wonderful creatures.
I have a mother and a sister with whom I’m close (my mother is 94 and still ass-kicking), a history of girlfriends, and one wife of twenty-eight years (and counting). I watch movies by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, and any film buff will tell you that those guys create excellent roles for women. The best answer I can give is that I ultimately find women to be more interesting characters because, in my very male opinion, they’re more complex! Men only think about two things (and I’ll let the reader figure out what they are), but there’s a lot going on inside a woman’s brain. A woman can multi-task better than any man. I find that kind of cool... and sexy, too.
I also believe I’m a feminist; I’ve supported women’s political causes my entire life. I think I understand where a woman is coming from, regarding what is important to the female gender. In fact, when Library Journal described the first Black Stiletto book, they called it a “mashup of the work of Gloria Steinem, Ian Fleming, and Mario Puzo, all under the editorship of Stan Lee.” I was especially proud of the Gloria Steinem part. I want women to win.
The only thing left to master is learning how a woman dresses, applies makeup, and chooses what shoes to wear. For those kinds of things, I ask my wife. She is a reader and is extremely helpful with that stuff. “No, she would never wear that.” That kind of constructive criticism. And the Internet is great for researching period clothing, though thrift shops are also good resources.
My wife is also my first beta reader, so she’s the first to clobber me with, “A woman would never say that.” When I wrote the first Black Stiletto book in the form of a diary, I gave it to another (female) beta reader who told me that had she not known a man had written it, she would have been fooled. So I thought maybe I was on to something.
Now, years later, after over ten titles starring women characters, I’ve completed a new stand-alone literary chiller featuring yet another female protagonist—this one a sixty-year-old romance writer! So apparently I’m pretty comfortable in another gender’s skin.
Temporarily, that is. When I’m finished writing for the day, I do manly things like throwing burgers on the grill, bending lead pipes around my waist, and entering raw egg eating contests. It puts hair on the chest.
Raymond Benson is the author of over 30 published titles, including the first four entries in the Black Stiletto series: The Black Stiletto, The Black Stiletto: Black & White, The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes, and The Black Stiletto: Secrets & Lies. He is most well known for being the official James Bond 007 continuation author between 1996 and 2002. In total, he penned and published worldwide six original 007 novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories. An anthology of his 007 work, The Union Trilogy, and a second anthology, Choice of Weapons, followed. His book The James Bond Bedside Companion was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America. Benson has published several other bestsellers and award-winning books, and has authored the novelization of a number of popular video games. Benson lives in the Chicago area. Reach him at http://www.raymondbenson.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.
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex / Raymond Benson
How do you get inside your opposite gender protagonist’s head? Clearly, it’s not impossible to write across gender lines—the success of “Harry Potter” alone dismisses that idea. But it’s tricky. Isn’t it? Raymond Benson, of Bond novel fame, lets us in on his process of transforming his authorial voice from male to female.And I’m with him: I love it when the woman wins.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Finding Your Voice… As The Opposite Sex
By Raymond Benson
Well, if that title doesn’t raise some eyebrows, I don’t know what will.
Seriously, we all do it—every writer at some point creates a protagonist who is one’s opposite gender. Even Ian Fleming did it for his 1962 Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, in which the story is told in first person by a woman... and 007 doesn’t enter the novel until the last third. There are plenty of female authors who write male characters, but how many male authors follow the exploits of female characters? To be fair, there are definitely a few out there. I’m one.
Speaking of James Bond, I was fortunate enough to be hired by the Ian Fleming Estate to write continuation 007 books from 1996-2002. When that gig was finished, I set out to create my own brand of suspense novels, and they were a very different kettle of fish. My original novels tend to be Hitchcockian thrillers, mostly about everyday people in unusual circumstances. And more often than not, the protagonist is female.
Strangely enough, I think I found my elusive authorial “voice” by doing this. I’ve found that I’m pretty good at creating believable female heroines—they range from ordinary suburban housewives who must rise to the occasion to overcome a threat, to kick-ass women who put on masks and fight crime and injustice.
A case in point is my recent five-book serial featuring the character The Black Stiletto. It’s about a young woman in the 1950s who runs away from near-poverty and an abusive stepfather to New York City, where she becomes a legendary vigilante for five years, and then mysteriously disappears. But in the present day, a divorced dad approaching fifty is taking care of his elderly mother—she has Alzheimer’s and is dying—and he discovers that she was the infamous Black Stiletto. Thus, it’s two parallel stories—one in the present that deals with family and Alzheimer’s, and one in the past, which is about the Stiletto’s exploits.
The Stiletto’s portion of each book is in the form of a diary—that is, first person. How did I get the voice right? Good question! How did I get any of my female protagonists’ voices correct? I like to say, facetiously, that I used up all my testosterone writing James Bond, and now I’m forced to rely on whatever estrogen I have in my body.
But to examine this question seriously, I suppose the first answer could be that I really like women. Since they are from Mars, and we men are from Venus—oh, wait, is it the other way around?—it’s obvious they are a different species from my own. However, I have done my research, and that means living, relating, and empathizing with the wonderful creatures.
I have a mother and a sister with whom I’m close (my mother is 94 and still ass-kicking), a history of girlfriends, and one wife of twenty-eight years (and counting). I watch movies by Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, and any film buff will tell you that those guys create excellent roles for women. The best answer I can give is that I ultimately find women to be more interesting characters because, in my very male opinion, they’re more complex! Men only think about two things (and I’ll let the reader figure out what they are), but there’s a lot going on inside a woman’s brain. A woman can multi-task better than any man. I find that kind of cool... and sexy, too.
I also believe I’m a feminist; I’ve supported women’s political causes my entire life. I think I understand where a woman is coming from, regarding what is important to the female gender. In fact, when Library Journal described the first Black Stiletto book, they called it a “mashup of the work of Gloria Steinem, Ian Fleming, and Mario Puzo, all under the editorship of Stan Lee.” I was especially proud of the Gloria Steinem part. I want women to win.
The only thing left to master is learning how a woman dresses, applies makeup, and chooses what shoes to wear. For those kinds of things, I ask my wife. She is a reader and is extremely helpful with that stuff. “No, she would never wear that.” That kind of constructive criticism. And the Internet is great for researching period clothing, though thrift shops are also good resources.
My wife is also my first beta reader, so she’s the first to clobber me with, “A woman would never say that.” When I wrote the first Black Stiletto book in the form of a diary, I gave it to another (female) beta reader who told me that had she not known a man had written it, she would have been fooled. So I thought maybe I was on to something.
Now, years later, after over ten titles starring women characters, I’ve completed a new stand-alone literary chiller featuring yet another female protagonist—this one a sixty-year-old romance writer! So apparently I’m pretty comfortable in another gender’s skin.
Temporarily, that is. When I’m finished writing for the day, I do manly things like throwing burgers on the grill, bending lead pipes around my waist, and entering raw egg eating contests. It puts hair on the chest.
Raymond Benson is the author of over 30 published titles, including the first four entries in the Black Stiletto series: The Black Stiletto, The Black Stiletto: Black & White, The Black Stiletto: Stars & Stripes, and The Black Stiletto: Secrets & Lies. He is most well known for being the official James Bond 007 continuation author between 1996 and 2002. In total, he penned and published worldwide six original 007 novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories. An anthology of his 007 work, The Union Trilogy, and a second anthology, Choice of Weapons, followed. His book The James Bond Bedside Companion was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award by Mystery Writers of America. Benson has published several other bestsellers and award-winning books, and has authored the novelization of a number of popular video games. Benson lives in the Chicago area. Reach him at http://www.raymondbenson.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.
Fact into Fiction / Andrew Welsh-Huggins
You’ve come to that horrible moment in your writing journey when, just as you’re leaving the harbor, a dark and ominous cloud front rolls across the sky. Rain starts to fall, big cold plops of realization that you are totally unequipped for this story, that no matter how much you think you know about coal fracking off the top of your head, you have nowhere near the expertise you need, and that Wikipedia is going to exhaust its usefulness pretty quickly (if even reliable, at that).
It’s a common moment for all writers. But for journalist-turned-novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, it’s a moment he knows how to navigate, thanks to his years of experience doing research. In this week’s blog, learn from a professional fact-finder, so that the next time you come to an “I-have-no-idea” moment, you have the skills to help you sail straight through. And for me, the 10-minute rule he cited on research and writing long are pure diamonds.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Fact Into Fiction
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“How much research do you do for your books?”
It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often at signings and talks, even more than the tried-and-true, “Where do you get your ideas?”
My usual response—“A lot”—should come as no surprise. By day, I’m a full-time reporter with The Associated Press, and my first two books were nonfiction on the death penalty and domestic terrorism, respectively. Both involved hundreds of hours of reporting, from poring over documents to conducting numerous interviews.
Despite all that, I’m the one sometimes surprised by my own answer. As a novelist, I figured, things would be different, a welcome break from my job as a fact-gathering journalist. You just make stuff up, right?
Wrong.
For starters, I found myself relying on my work experience more than I expected, whether setting scenes in courthouses or coffee shops, or loosely modeling characters after cops, lawyers, and politicians I’ve interviewed over the years. One of the subplots in my first mystery, Fourth Down And Out, involved a health-care financing company run like a Ponzi scheme. Incorporating that storyline was easy, based on weeks I’d spent covering the real-life $1.9 billon fraud case of suburban Columbus-based National Century Financial Enterprises.
Experiential writing only gets you so far, however, as I learned when it came time to write the book’s climactic scene, in which my hero, disgraced ex-Ohio State-quarterback-turned-private eye Andy Hayes, enters Ohio Stadium for the first time in twenty years to confront an old nemesis. Sure, I’d been in the famed stadium plenty of times, both as a reporter and as a civilian watching a game. But I quickly realized that neither casual knowledge nor Internet trolling was going to cut it. Trust me: when writing about the fanaticism of Buckeye fans, you don’t want to screw things up.
So I put my reporter’s hat back on and arranged a stadium tour. Thanks to that hour-long expedition, I timed Andy’s walk to a specific gate entrance, took pictures of the views he would see inside, and most importantly, counted the number of steps he’d have to climb to reach a particular luxury suite.
In a 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, Michael Connelly discussed researching his Mickey Haller books, “until I feel that the books feel of authority and have some realism to them.” When I left the stadium that day, I felt a similar sense of authority. Readers partial to the scarlet-and-gray might not appreciate my portrayal of rabid OSU supporters, but they can’t argue with that scene’s layout.
The reporting load was even heavier in my second book, Slow Burn, in which I combined a ripped-from-the-headlines arson fire near campus with another subplot, this time involving hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a drilling process used to free previously off-limits supplies of natural gas from deep underground.
I’d written a bit about the controversial extraction method as a reporter, since eastern Ohio, home to the Utica Shale formation, is a fracking hot bed. But I hardly knew enough even to be dangerous. Soon, I was trading emails with a retired state geologist who taught me everything I needed to know and more about permeability, magnetic resonance, and piggyback logs. My happy challenge became integrating all those facts into the story without interrupting the novel’s pace.
In mystery writing as in journalism, the one thing research shouldn’t do is slow down the creative process. “Make one quick effort to get the answer,” wrote Stuart Kaminsky, whose many novels include the Sarasota-based Lew Fonesca series. “If you can’t find it in ten minutes, keep writing and go back for the answer when you finish your manuscript.” I often write longer articles while I’m still reporting them, finding it easier to fill in gaps as I go than start from that awful blank page. Similarly, I plow through my mysteries’ first “vomit drafts” regardless of the facts. It’s good to be right; it’s also good to have something completed and in hand to be right about.
My life as a hybrid journalist-novelist shows no sign of abating. Despite years spent in and around the Ohio Statehouse, I turned to the building’s able historians, my notebook and pen at the ready, when writing Capitol Punishment, the third volume of Andy Hayes’s adventures, coming in spring 2016. After ten years in print journalism and another seventeen with a wire service, it’s the only approach to writing, fiction or otherwise, that I know how to do.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a legal affairs reporter for The Associated Press, is the author of the Andy Hayes mystery series, set in Columbus and featuring an ex-Ohio State quarterback turned private eye, including Slow Burn and Fourth Down And Out; and the nonfiction books No Winners HereTonight: Race, Politics and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States and Hatred at Home: Al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest. He enjoys running, reading, watching movies, spending time with family, and trying to remember why having a dog, two cats, and two parakeets seemed like a good idea at the time. He can be reached at https://andrewwelshhuggins.wordpress.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, 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.
Fact into Fiction / Andrew Welsh-Huggins
You’ve come to that horrible moment in your writing journey when, just as you’re leaving the harbor, a dark and ominous cloud front rolls across the sky. Rain starts to fall, big cold plops of realization that you are totally unequipped for this story, that no matter how much you think you know about coal fracking off the top of your head, you have nowhere near the expertise you need, and that Wikipedia is going to exhaust its usefulness pretty quickly (if even reliable, at that).It’s a common moment for all writers. But for journalist-turned-novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, it’s a moment he knows how to navigate, thanks to his years of experience doing research. In this week’s blog, learn from a professional fact-finder, so that the next time you come to an “I-have-no-idea” moment, you have the skills to help you sail straight through. And for me, the 10-minute rule he cited on research and writing long are pure diamonds.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Fact Into Fiction
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“How much research do you do for your books?”
It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often at signings and talks, even more than the tried-and-true, “Where do you get your ideas?”
My usual response—“A lot”—should come as no surprise. By day, I’m a full-time reporter with The Associated Press, and my first two books were nonfiction on the death penalty and domestic terrorism, respectively. Both involved hundreds of hours of reporting, from poring over documents to conducting numerous interviews.
Despite all that, I’m the one sometimes surprised by my own answer. As a novelist, I figured, things would be different, a welcome break from my job as a fact-gathering journalist. You just make stuff up, right?
Wrong.
For starters, I found myself relying on my work experience more than I expected, whether setting scenes in courthouses or coffee shops, or loosely modeling characters after cops, lawyers, and politicians I’ve interviewed over the years. One of the subplots in my first mystery, Fourth Down And Out, involved a health-care financing company run like a Ponzi scheme. Incorporating that storyline was easy, based on weeks I’d spent covering the real-life $1.9 billon fraud case of suburban Columbus-based National Century Financial Enterprises.
Experiential writing only gets you so far, however, as I learned when it came time to write the book’s climactic scene, in which my hero, disgraced ex-Ohio State-quarterback-turned-private eye Andy Hayes, enters Ohio Stadium for the first time in twenty years to confront an old nemesis. Sure, I’d been in the famed stadium plenty of times, both as a reporter and as a civilian watching a game. But I quickly realized that neither casual knowledge nor Internet trolling was going to cut it. Trust me: when writing about the fanaticism of Buckeye fans, you don’t want to screw things up.
So I put my reporter’s hat back on and arranged a stadium tour. Thanks to that hour-long expedition, I timed Andy’s walk to a specific gate entrance, took pictures of the views he would see inside, and most importantly, counted the number of steps he’d have to climb to reach a particular luxury suite.
In a 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, Michael Connelly discussed researching his Mickey Haller books, “until I feel that the books feel of authority and have some realism to them.” When I left the stadium that day, I felt a similar sense of authority. Readers partial to the scarlet-and-gray might not appreciate my portrayal of rabid OSU supporters, but they can’t argue with that scene’s layout.
The reporting load was even heavier in my second book, Slow Burn, in which I combined a ripped-from-the-headlines arson fire near campus with another subplot, this time involving hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a drilling process used to free previously off-limits supplies of natural gas from deep underground.
I’d written a bit about the controversial extraction method as a reporter, since eastern Ohio, home to the Utica Shale formation, is a fracking hot bed. But I hardly knew enough even to be dangerous. Soon, I was trading emails with a retired state geologist who taught me everything I needed to know and more about permeability, magnetic resonance, and piggyback logs. My happy challenge became integrating all those facts into the story without interrupting the novel’s pace.
In mystery writing as in journalism, the one thing research shouldn’t do is slow down the creative process. “Make one quick effort to get the answer,” wrote Stuart Kaminsky, whose many novels include the Sarasota-based Lew Fonesca series. “If you can’t find it in ten minutes, keep writing and go back for the answer when you finish your manuscript.” I often write longer articles while I’m still reporting them, finding it easier to fill in gaps as I go than start from that awful blank page. Similarly, I plow through my mysteries’ first “vomit drafts” regardless of the facts. It’s good to be right; it’s also good to have something completed and in hand to be right about.
My life as a hybrid journalist-novelist shows no sign of abating. Despite years spent in and around the Ohio Statehouse, I turned to the building’s able historians, my notebook and pen at the ready, when writing Capitol Punishment, the third volume of Andy Hayes’s adventures, coming in spring 2016. After ten years in print journalism and another seventeen with a wire service, it’s the only approach to writing, fiction or otherwise, that I know how to do.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a legal affairs reporter for The Associated Press, is the author of the Andy Hayes mystery series, set in Columbus and featuring an ex-Ohio State quarterback turned private eye, including Slow Burn and Fourth Down And Out; and the nonfiction books No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States and Hatred at Home: Al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest. He enjoys running, reading, watching movies, spending time with family, and trying to remember why having a dog, two cats, and two parakeets seemed like a good idea at the time. He can be reached at https://andrewwelshhuggins.wordpress.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, 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.
Fact into Fiction / Andrew Welsh-Huggins
You’ve come to that horrible moment in your writing journey when, just as you’re leaving the harbor, a dark and ominous cloud front rolls across the sky. Rain starts to fall, big cold plops of realization that you are totally unequipped for this story, that no matter how much you think you know about coal fracking off the top of your head, you have nowhere near the expertise you need, and that Wikipedia is going to exhaust its usefulness pretty quickly (if even reliable, at that).It’s a common moment for all writers. But for journalist-turned-novelist Andrew Welsh-Huggins, it’s a moment he knows how to navigate, thanks to his years of experience doing research. In this week’s blog, learn from a professional fact-finder, so that the next time you come to an “I-have-no-idea” moment, you have the skills to help you sail straight through. And for me, the 10-minute rule he cited on research and writing long are pure diamonds.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Fact Into Fiction
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
“How much research do you do for your books?”
It’s one of the questions I’m asked most often at signings and talks, even more than the tried-and-true, “Where do you get your ideas?”
My usual response—“A lot”—should come as no surprise. By day, I’m a full-time reporter with The Associated Press, and my first two books were nonfiction on the death penalty and domestic terrorism, respectively. Both involved hundreds of hours of reporting, from poring over documents to conducting numerous interviews.
Despite all that, I’m the one sometimes surprised by my own answer. As a novelist, I figured, things would be different, a welcome break from my job as a fact-gathering journalist. You just make stuff up, right?
Wrong.
For starters, I found myself relying on my work experience more than I expected, whether setting scenes in courthouses or coffee shops, or loosely modeling characters after cops, lawyers, and politicians I’ve interviewed over the years. One of the subplots in my first mystery, Fourth Down And Out, involved a health-care financing company run like a Ponzi scheme. Incorporating that storyline was easy, based on weeks I’d spent covering the real-life $1.9 billon fraud case of suburban Columbus-based National Century Financial Enterprises.
Experiential writing only gets you so far, however, as I learned when it came time to write the book’s climactic scene, in which my hero, disgraced ex-Ohio State-quarterback-turned-private eye Andy Hayes, enters Ohio Stadium for the first time in twenty years to confront an old nemesis. Sure, I’d been in the famed stadium plenty of times, both as a reporter and as a civilian watching a game. But I quickly realized that neither casual knowledge nor Internet trolling was going to cut it. Trust me: when writing about the fanaticism of Buckeye fans, you don’t want to screw things up.
So I put my reporter’s hat back on and arranged a stadium tour. Thanks to that hour-long expedition, I timed Andy’s walk to a specific gate entrance, took pictures of the views he would see inside, and most importantly, counted the number of steps he’d have to climb to reach a particular luxury suite.
In a 2014 interview with The Daily Beast, Michael Connelly discussed researching his Mickey Haller books, “until I feel that the books feel of authority and have some realism to them.” When I left the stadium that day, I felt a similar sense of authority. Readers partial to the scarlet-and-gray might not appreciate my portrayal of rabid OSU supporters, but they can’t argue with that scene’s layout.
The reporting load was even heavier in my second book, Slow Burn, in which I combined a ripped-from-the-headlines arson fire near campus with another subplot, this time involving hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” a drilling process used to free previously off-limits supplies of natural gas from deep underground.
I’d written a bit about the controversial extraction method as a reporter, since eastern Ohio, home to the Utica Shale formation, is a fracking hot bed. But I hardly knew enough even to be dangerous. Soon, I was trading emails with a retired state geologist who taught me everything I needed to know and more about permeability, magnetic resonance, and piggyback logs. My happy challenge became integrating all those facts into the story without interrupting the novel’s pace.
In mystery writing as in journalism, the one thing research shouldn’t do is slow down the creative process. “Make one quick effort to get the answer,” wrote Stuart Kaminsky, whose many novels include the Sarasota-based Lew Fonesca series. “If you can’t find it in ten minutes, keep writing and go back for the answer when you finish your manuscript.” I often write longer articles while I’m still reporting them, finding it easier to fill in gaps as I go than start from that awful blank page. Similarly, I plow through my mysteries’ first “vomit drafts” regardless of the facts. It’s good to be right; it’s also good to have something completed and in hand to be right about.
My life as a hybrid journalist-novelist shows no sign of abating. Despite years spent in and around the Ohio Statehouse, I turned to the building’s able historians, my notebook and pen at the ready, when writing Capitol Punishment, the third volume of Andy Hayes’s adventures, coming in spring 2016. After ten years in print journalism and another seventeen with a wire service, it’s the only approach to writing, fiction or otherwise, that I know how to do.
Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a legal affairs reporter for The Associated Press, is the author of the Andy Hayes mystery series, set in Columbus and featuring an ex-Ohio State quarterback turned private eye, including Slow Burn and Fourth Down And Out; and the nonfiction books No Winners Here Tonight: Race, Politics and Geography in One of the Country’s Busiest Death Penalty States and Hatred at Home: Al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest. He enjoys running, reading, watching movies, spending time with family, and trying to remember why having a dog, two cats, and two parakeets seemed like a good idea at the time. He can be reached at https://andrewwelshhuggins.wordpress.com/
(To be a part of the Killer Nashville Guest Blog, send a query to contact@killernashville.com. We’d love to hear from you.)
Thanks to Tom Wood, 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.
Filling the Well / Dana Chamblee Carpenter
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the process of writing. There are so many things to remember, so many different rules to keep straight. Find a distinctive voice. Write what you know. Show, don’t tell. If we’re not careful, we may get so lost in craft that we never actually get a chance to do what we love: create.
In this week’s guest blog, 2014 Claymore Award winner Dana Chamblee Carpenter draws upon her expertise as a creative writing teacher in reminding us all to take a step back. Not just away from the keyboard, but away from our sensible grown-up selves, back into a time where it was possible to just play.
Find the magic again. Isn’t that why we do this, anyway?
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Filling the Well
By Dana Chamblee Carpenter
Often, we writers talk and blog about the WORK of writing—the craft, the discipline, the marketing, and the industry. We all know that a relentless assault on mastering this work is what leads to success.
But PLAY is as vital to a writer as any work we do.
When I taught my first Introduction to Creative Writing course, I really hammered the idea of working on craft and discipline, and my students turned in pieces that were polished and on time—every teacher’s dream, right? Not really. Not for me anyway. None of the stories took risks; none of them took me anywhere I hadn’t already been.
I wanted my students to write with courage, not to play it safe. But they were coming to the writing process with empty wells and looking at the world in the way they had been taught to see it. I wanted them to see it the way a writer should—uniquely, imaginatively, playfully.
Despite the many cranky, old memes out there suggesting that “kids these days” don’t know how to work, I realized pretty quickly that my students didn’t know how to play. But play fills our wells, lets us look for the magic in the world, frees us to see and feel and learn in new ways.
A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin confesses this secret of childhood to Pooh when he says his favorite thing to do is “Nothing,” which he defines like so: “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” Immediately after embracing this nothingness of play, Christopher Robin discovers an enchanted place that no one else has been to, that is not like the woods he and Pooh thought they were in, and in this new place “they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them.”
That’s where we want to be as writers.
But that kind of inspiration takes a certain kind of play—unstructured, aimless, without boundary or expectation—the play of “Nothing.” So I set about teaching my students how to play this way.
We discovered that we had to be intentional about setting aside time for play, just as we set aside time to write. Play won’t happen spontaneously as when we were children, because there are so many THINGS we do that there’s little unstructured time left (sadly this is true for many kids today, too). So we rearranged activities, pushed back against social demands, and took vows to constrain our tech time (email, texting, social media) until we had at least a couple of chunks of unclaimed hour-long periods each week just for play.
Ideally, playtime for writers should be solo time. Kids can play together and it stays play. Put a couple of grown-ups together and pretty quickly talk turns to serious matters of utmost importance that will scare away any playfulness.
My students were out of the practice of playing, and wrestled with the idea that they were wasting time when they could be doing SOMETHING. So I made them pretend at first—pretend to be kids full of wonderment at the world.
But soon, they were kids again. My students came to class talking about colors and coloring books, bubbles, silly string, playing on the playground, and making clover crowns. They talked about adventures at the zoo, the triumphs of eating a snow cone down to the syrupy good stuff at the bottom, of discovering some hidden path on a once-familiar walk.
They were alive, awake, and seeing the world like writers—beyond what was, imagining what might be; all the world over was with them.
And the stories they wrote—wow. Uniquely their own and most definitely inspired. (And we still worked on craft and discipline. They were still polished and on time.)
Too often I forget what I learned that semester. I let deadlines and word counts and worries over keeping up with all the social media and publication evolutions consume me. I give over solely to the WORK of writing, and my writing suffers. So do I.
When I was writing Bohemian Gospel, I sometimes worked myself into a frenzy, pushing life to the margins and focusing solely on crafting perfect sentences or burying myself in the historical research. At those times, I would get so frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t making any progress despite my frantic endeavors. And then one of my kids would come tug at my hand and ask me to play. We would go dance in the falling leaves, paint silly pictures, or build masterpieces with Legos.
When I went back to the work, I realized that what had seemed like stepping away from writing was actually stepping into creativity, into story. I had fresh ideas and new energy.
Even if you’ve never had kids or if the kids have grown up and moved away, you can still go play like a kid.
Remembering to PLAY is hard for most of us managing writing lives alongside all our other duties and distractions. But it is crucial that we fill our wells back up again, that we equip ourselves to see the world new every day.
Anyone up for a little bit of Nothing?
Dana Chamblee Carpenter's award-winning short fiction has appeared in The Arkansas Review, Jersey Devil Press, and Maypop. She has a short story in the new anthology, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded. Her debut novel, Bohemian Gospel, won Killer Nashville's 2014 Claymore Award, and Publisher’s Weekly called it a “deliciously creepy debut.” Bohemian Gospel, published by Pegasus Books, releases on November 15, 2015.
(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.
Filling the Well / Dana Chamblee Carpenter
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the process of writing. There are so many things to remember, so many different rules to keep straight. Find a distinctive voice. Write what you know. Show, don’t tell. If we’re not careful, we may get so lost in craft that we never actually get a chance to do what we love: create.In this week’s guest blog, 2014 Claymore Award winner Dana Chamblee Carpenter draws upon her expertise as a creative writing teacher in reminding us all to take a step back. Not just away from the keyboard, but away from our sensible grown-up selves, back into a time where it was possible to just play.Find the magic again. Isn’t that why we do this, anyway?Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Filling the Well
By Dana Chamblee Carpenter
Often, we writers talk and blog about the WORK of writing—the craft, the discipline, the marketing, and the industry. We all know that a relentless assault on mastering this work is what leads to success.
But PLAY is as vital to a writer as any work we do.
When I taught my first Introduction to Creative Writing course, I really hammered the idea of working on craft and discipline, and my students turned in pieces that were polished and on time—every teacher’s dream, right? Not really. Not for me anyway. None of the stories took risks; none of them took me anywhere I hadn’t already been.
I wanted my students to write with courage, not to play it safe. But they were coming to the writing process with empty wells and looking at the world in the way they had been taught to see it. I wanted them to see it the way a writer should—uniquely, imaginatively, playfully.
Despite the many cranky, old memes out there suggesting that “kids these days” don’t know how to work, I realized pretty quickly that my students didn’t know how to play. But play fills our wells, lets us look for the magic in the world, frees us to see and feel and learn in new ways.
A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin confesses this secret of childhood to Pooh when he says his favorite thing to do is “Nothing,” which he defines like so: “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” Immediately after embracing this nothingness of play, Christopher Robin discovers an enchanted place that no one else has been to, that is not like the woods he and Pooh thought they were in, and in this new place “they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them.”
That’s where we want to be as writers.
But that kind of inspiration takes a certain kind of play—unstructured, aimless, without boundary or expectation—the play of “Nothing.” So I set about teaching my students how to play this way.
We discovered that we had to be intentional about setting aside time for play, just as we set aside time to write. Play won’t happen spontaneously as when we were children, because there are so many THINGS we do that there’s little unstructured time left (sadly this is true for many kids today, too). So we rearranged activities, pushed back against social demands, and took vows to constrain our tech time (email, texting, social media) until we had at least a couple of chunks of unclaimed hour-long periods each week just for play.
Ideally, playtime for writers should be solo time. Kids can play together and it stays play. Put a couple of grown-ups together and pretty quickly talk turns to serious matters of utmost importance that will scare away any playfulness.
My students were out of the practice of playing, and wrestled with the idea that they were wasting time when they could be doing SOMETHING. So I made them pretend at first—pretend to be kids full of wonderment at the world.
But soon, they were kids again. My students came to class talking about colors and coloring books, bubbles, silly string, playing on the playground, and making clover crowns. They talked about adventures at the zoo, the triumphs of eating a snow cone down to the syrupy good stuff at the bottom, of discovering some hidden path on a once-familiar walk.
They were alive, awake, and seeing the world like writers—beyond what was, imagining what might be; all the world over was with them.
And the stories they wrote—wow. Uniquely their own and most definitely inspired. (And we still worked on craft and discipline. They were still polished and on time.)
Too often I forget what I learned that semester. I let deadlines and word counts and worries over keeping up with all the social media and publication evolutions consume me. I give over solely to the WORK of writing, and my writing suffers. So do I.
When I was writing Bohemian Gospel, I sometimes worked myself into a frenzy, pushing life to the margins and focusing solely on crafting perfect sentences or burying myself in the historical research. At those times, I would get so frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t making any progress despite my frantic endeavors. And then one of my kids would come tug at my hand and ask me to play. We would go dance in the falling leaves, paint silly pictures, or build masterpieces with Legos.
When I went back to the work, I realized that what had seemed like stepping away from writing was actually stepping into creativity, into story. I had fresh ideas and new energy.
Even if you’ve never had kids or if the kids have grown up and moved away, you can still go play like a kid.
Remembering to PLAY is hard for most of us managing writing lives alongside all our other duties and distractions. But it is crucial that we fill our wells back up again, that we equip ourselves to see the world new every day.
Anyone up for a little bit of Nothing?
Dana Chamblee Carpenter's award-winning short fiction has appeared in The Arkansas Review, Jersey Devil Press, and Maypop. She has a short story in the new anthology, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded. Her debut novel, Bohemian Gospel, won Killer Nashville's 2014 Claymore Award, and Publisher’s Weekly called it a “deliciously creepy debut.” Bohemian Gospel, published by Pegasus Books, releases on November 15, 2015.
(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.
Filling the Well / Dana Chamblee Carpenter
It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the process of writing. There are so many things to remember, so many different rules to keep straight. Find a distinctive voice. Write what you know. Show, don’t tell. If we’re not careful, we may get so lost in craft that we never actually get a chance to do what we love: create.In this week’s guest blog, 2014 Claymore Award winner Dana Chamblee Carpenter draws upon her expertise as a creative writing teacher in reminding us all to take a step back. Not just away from the keyboard, but away from our sensible grown-up selves, back into a time where it was possible to just play.Find the magic again. Isn’t that why we do this, anyway?Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
Filling the Well
By Dana Chamblee Carpenter
Often, we writers talk and blog about the WORK of writing—the craft, the discipline, the marketing, and the industry. We all know that a relentless assault on mastering this work is what leads to success.
But PLAY is as vital to a writer as any work we do.
When I taught my first Introduction to Creative Writing course, I really hammered the idea of working on craft and discipline, and my students turned in pieces that were polished and on time—every teacher’s dream, right? Not really. Not for me anyway. None of the stories took risks; none of them took me anywhere I hadn’t already been.
I wanted my students to write with courage, not to play it safe. But they were coming to the writing process with empty wells and looking at the world in the way they had been taught to see it. I wanted them to see it the way a writer should—uniquely, imaginatively, playfully.
Despite the many cranky, old memes out there suggesting that “kids these days” don’t know how to work, I realized pretty quickly that my students didn’t know how to play. But play fills our wells, lets us look for the magic in the world, frees us to see and feel and learn in new ways.
A.A. Milne’s Christopher Robin confesses this secret of childhood to Pooh when he says his favorite thing to do is “Nothing,” which he defines like so: “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.” Immediately after embracing this nothingness of play, Christopher Robin discovers an enchanted place that no one else has been to, that is not like the woods he and Pooh thought they were in, and in this new place “they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky, and whatever there was all the world over was with them.”
That’s where we want to be as writers.
But that kind of inspiration takes a certain kind of play—unstructured, aimless, without boundary or expectation—the play of “Nothing.” So I set about teaching my students how to play this way.
We discovered that we had to be intentional about setting aside time for play, just as we set aside time to write. Play won’t happen spontaneously as when we were children, because there are so many THINGS we do that there’s little unstructured time left (sadly this is true for many kids today, too). So we rearranged activities, pushed back against social demands, and took vows to constrain our tech time (email, texting, social media) until we had at least a couple of chunks of unclaimed hour-long periods each week just for play.
Ideally, playtime for writers should be solo time. Kids can play together and it stays play. Put a couple of grown-ups together and pretty quickly talk turns to serious matters of utmost importance that will scare away any playfulness.
My students were out of the practice of playing, and wrestled with the idea that they were wasting time when they could be doing SOMETHING. So I made them pretend at first—pretend to be kids full of wonderment at the world.
But soon, they were kids again. My students came to class talking about colors and coloring books, bubbles, silly string, playing on the playground, and making clover crowns. They talked about adventures at the zoo, the triumphs of eating a snow cone down to the syrupy good stuff at the bottom, of discovering some hidden path on a once-familiar walk.
They were alive, awake, and seeing the world like writers—beyond what was, imagining what might be; all the world over was with them.
And the stories they wrote—wow. Uniquely their own and most definitely inspired. (And we still worked on craft and discipline. They were still polished and on time.)
Too often I forget what I learned that semester. I let deadlines and word counts and worries over keeping up with all the social media and publication evolutions consume me. I give over solely to the WORK of writing, and my writing suffers. So do I.
When I was writing Bohemian Gospel, I sometimes worked myself into a frenzy, pushing life to the margins and focusing solely on crafting perfect sentences or burying myself in the historical research. At those times, I would get so frustrated because I felt like I wasn’t making any progress despite my frantic endeavors. And then one of my kids would come tug at my hand and ask me to play. We would go dance in the falling leaves, paint silly pictures, or build masterpieces with Legos.
When I went back to the work, I realized that what had seemed like stepping away from writing was actually stepping into creativity, into story. I had fresh ideas and new energy.
Even if you’ve never had kids or if the kids have grown up and moved away, you can still go play like a kid.
Remembering to PLAY is hard for most of us managing writing lives alongside all our other duties and distractions. But it is crucial that we fill our wells back up again, that we equip ourselves to see the world new every day.
Anyone up for a little bit of Nothing?
Dana Chamblee Carpenter's award-winning short fiction has appeared in The Arkansas Review, Jersey Devil Press, and Maypop. She has a short story in the new anthology, Killer Nashville Noir: Cold-Blooded. Her debut novel, Bohemian Gospel, won Killer Nashville's 2014 Claymore Award, and Publisher’s Weekly called it a “deliciously creepy debut.” Bohemian Gospel, published by Pegasus Books, releases on November 15, 2015.
(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 V8 of Legal Thriller Writing / John F. Dobbyn
All right, so thrillers and mystery novels don’t always get the best rap from the high-falutin’ literary crowd. Can’t say I’m all that bothered: I don’t think Stephen King is losing much sleep over the opinions of the so-called elite.
All the same, we want to do more than entertain, don’t we? We want to give readers a thrill-ride, but we also want to share with them something memorable, something that will linger long after the adrenaline rush fades. In this week’s blog, mystery novelist John F. Dobbyn shares his strategy for making a lasting impact on readers’ minds.
Happy reading!
Clay Stafford
Founder Killer Nashville
Publisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The V8 of Legal Thriller Writing
By John F. Dobbyn
There’s a commercial on television that squarely hits the mark. A man or woman is just finishing a glass of sugary, flavored, carbonated soft drink. A slap on the forehead registers the realization that “I could have had a V8!”
This article is not a commercial for liquid vegetables, but the parallel to thriller or mystery fiction writing is on point. It is not difficult to find fiction in each of those genres that are the equivalent of a standard three-act drama. Act one is the set-up, with the introduction of a murder or threatening situation that one way or another sucks the protagonist into the plot. In act two, things go from bad to worse–or even seem hopeless. In act three, the mystery is solved, the killer is caught, the tension is defused, and the good guys win. The end.
In some ways, that’s the fictional equivalent of flavored soda water—not by any means to undermine the talent of the writer who has gripped the reader and provided absorbing entertainment for some three hundred pages plus. The reader’s thirst has been creatively quenched. But as with the soda in the ad, the story is missing something. There could have been so much more by way of nutrition, without sacrificing the taste. This will come, however, at the cost of sometimes-elaborate research.
There are three elements to a novel: setting, character, and plot. Each one has the potential to carry a cargo of education to the reader in an unobjectionable, unobtrusive, and even enjoyable way.
The setting, for example, could introduce the reader to the bizarre, the exotic, or even the familiar, seen in a new light. In each of my legal thriller novels, from Neon Dragon through Deadly Diamonds, the bars, back alleys, historic sites, and ethnic neighborhoods of Boston play prominent roles, as the action weaves in and out of them without slackening the pace. Readers have told me that they found themselves picking up “the feel” of Boston—one unlike any other city on earth.
The trick is what Spencer Tracy once advised Robert Wagner about acting: “Don’t let the audience catch you at it.” For a writer, this means that you should blend the sense of location into the action of the plot so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t realize he/she is being “taught.”
In each of my last three novels, as well as the next, Deadly Odds, I deliberately shift the action from Boston to areas of the world that could introduce the reader to previously unexplored countries or cities. I see the inclusion of local customs or peculiarities of art, or food, or wealth, or crime, or poverty, or any other kind of cultural insight as a gift to the reader. But it must be given invisibly as an integral part of the uninterrupted plot. It cannot sever the tension. If the book becomes a travelogue, setting has hindered the primary purpose of storytelling—don’t let the reader catch you at it.
The second element, character, can explore any aspect of human personality or psychology that the writer knows well enough to “demonstrate” through the words and actions of the fictional people. This can be tricky ground. Careful research here is essential; amateur psychology can be shaky if pushed too far. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be true.”
The third element, plot, has the most potential to carry disguised education. In my latest novel, Deadly Diamonds, a young native of Sierra Leone is abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and forced to work in the diamond pits. Eventually, he escapes, and has to find his way through the world of West Africa, which is consumed with the blood diamond trade. Instead of facing the tedium of being “taught”, the reader simply lives through the fictional action of the novel, and comes out the other end with knowledge that will long outlast the experience of reading a thriller.
The cost of providing the reader with this bonus is additional research on your part—perhaps even travel—that must precede the writing. But this education can be a bonus, particularly if the writer has chosen a compelling subject: the work will become a pleasure, and it will show in the writing.
One last thought. I’ve found that when I give book-talks at libraries or book clubs, the audiences don’t want me to focus as much on plot or characters or setting per se, but rather on the elements that I was hoping to teach without “teaching” through the novel—subjects like the Chinese Tong (Neon Dragon), horse racing (Black Diamond), international art theft and forgery (Frame Up), and blood diamonds (Deadly Diamonds). That is always a joy, because the reader has taken the bait of disguised education in a way that could lead to discussion and interest far beyond the present moment. That is what lasts beyond the reading, like the nourishment of a glass of V8.
John F. Dobbyn was born and raised in Boston. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston College Law School. Prior to entering law school, Dobbyn served in the Air Force as a radio and radar director of aircraft in the Air Defense Command. After practicing law for several years as a trial lawyer, he obtained a Master of Law degree from Harvard Law School, and subsequently accepted a position as Professor of Law at Villanova Law School. Dobbyn’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and he is the author of two previous Knight and Devlin novels, Neon Dragon, and Frame-Up. “Jack” and his wife Lois live in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Reach him at @JohnDobbyn on Twitter.
(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 V8 of Legal Thriller Writing / John F. Dobbyn
All right, so thrillers and mystery novels don’t always get the best rap from the high-falutin’ literary crowd. Can’t say I’m all that bothered: I don’t think Stephen King is losing much sleep over the opinions of the so-called elite.All the same, we want to do more than entertain, don’t we? We want to give readers a thrill-ride, but we also want to share with them something memorable, something that will linger long after the adrenaline rush fades. In this week’s blog, mystery novelist John F. Dobbyn shares his strategy for making a lasting impact on readers’ minds.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The V8 of Legal Thriller Writing
By John F. Dobbyn
There’s a commercial on television that squarely hits the mark. A man or woman is just finishing a glass of sugary, flavored, carbonated soft drink. A slap on the forehead registers the realization that “I could have had a V8!”
This article is not a commercial for liquid vegetables, but the parallel to thriller or mystery fiction writing is on point. It is not difficult to find fiction in each of those genres that are the equivalent of a standard three-act drama. Act one is the set-up, with the introduction of a murder or threatening situation that one way or another sucks the protagonist into the plot. In act two, things go from bad to worse–or even seem hopeless. In act three, the mystery is solved, the killer is caught, the tension is defused, and the good guys win. The end.
In some ways, that’s the fictional equivalent of flavored soda water—not by any means to undermine the talent of the writer who has gripped the reader and provided absorbing entertainment for some three hundred pages plus. The reader’s thirst has been creatively quenched. But as with the soda in the ad, the story is missing something. There could have been so much more by way of nutrition, without sacrificing the taste. This will come, however, at the cost of sometimes-elaborate research.
There are three elements to a novel: setting, character, and plot. Each one has the potential to carry a cargo of education to the reader in an unobjectionable, unobtrusive, and even enjoyable way.
The setting, for example, could introduce the reader to the bizarre, the exotic, or even the familiar, seen in a new light. In each of my legal thriller novels, from Neon Dragon through Deadly Diamonds, the bars, back alleys, historic sites, and ethnic neighborhoods of Boston play prominent roles, as the action weaves in and out of them without slackening the pace. Readers have told me that they found themselves picking up “the feel” of Boston—one unlike any other city on earth.
The trick is what Spencer Tracy once advised Robert Wagner about acting: “Don’t let the audience catch you at it.” For a writer, this means that you should blend the sense of location into the action of the plot so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t realize he/she is being “taught.”
In each of my last three novels, as well as the next, Deadly Odds, I deliberately shift the action from Boston to areas of the world that could introduce the reader to previously unexplored countries or cities. I see the inclusion of local customs or peculiarities of art, or food, or wealth, or crime, or poverty, or any other kind of cultural insight as a gift to the reader. But it must be given invisibly as an integral part of the uninterrupted plot. It cannot sever the tension. If the book becomes a travelogue, setting has hindered the primary purpose of storytelling—don’t let the reader catch you at it.
The second element, character, can explore any aspect of human personality or psychology that the writer knows well enough to “demonstrate” through the words and actions of the fictional people. This can be tricky ground. Careful research here is essential; amateur psychology can be shaky if pushed too far. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be true.”
The third element, plot, has the most potential to carry disguised education. In my latest novel, Deadly Diamonds, a young native of Sierra Leone is abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and forced to work in the diamond pits. Eventually, he escapes, and has to find his way through the world of West Africa, which is consumed with the blood diamond trade. Instead of facing the tedium of being “taught”, the reader simply lives through the fictional action of the novel, and comes out the other end with knowledge that will long outlast the experience of reading a thriller.
The cost of providing the reader with this bonus is additional research on your part—perhaps even travel—that must precede the writing. But this education can be a bonus, particularly if the writer has chosen a compelling subject: the work will become a pleasure, and it will show in the writing.
One last thought. I’ve found that when I give book-talks at libraries or book clubs, the audiences don’t want me to focus as much on plot or characters or setting per se, but rather on the elements that I was hoping to teach without “teaching” through the novel—subjects like the Chinese Tong (Neon Dragon), horse racing (Black Diamond), international art theft and forgery (Frame Up), and blood diamonds (Deadly Diamonds). That is always a joy, because the reader has taken the bait of disguised education in a way that could lead to discussion and interest far beyond the present moment. That is what lasts beyond the reading, like the nourishment of a glass of V8.
John F. Dobbyn was born and raised in Boston. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston College Law School. Prior to entering law school, Dobbyn served in the Air Force as a radio and radar director of aircraft in the Air Defense Command. After practicing law for several years as a trial lawyer, he obtained a Master of Law degree from Harvard Law School, and subsequently accepted a position as Professor of Law at Villanova Law School. Dobbyn’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and he is the author of two previous Knight and Devlin novels, Neon Dragon, and Frame-Up. “Jack” and his wife Lois live in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Reach him at @JohnDobbyn on Twitter.
(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 V8 of Legal Thriller Writing / John F. Dobbyn
All right, so thrillers and mystery novels don’t always get the best rap from the high-falutin’ literary crowd. Can’t say I’m all that bothered: I don’t think Stephen King is losing much sleep over the opinions of the so-called elite.All the same, we want to do more than entertain, don’t we? We want to give readers a thrill-ride, but we also want to share with them something memorable, something that will linger long after the adrenaline rush fades. In this week’s blog, mystery novelist John F. Dobbyn shares his strategy for making a lasting impact on readers’ minds.Happy reading!Clay StaffordFounder Killer NashvillePublisher / Editorial Director Killer Nashville Magazine
The V8 of Legal Thriller Writing
By John F. Dobbyn
There’s a commercial on television that squarely hits the mark. A man or woman is just finishing a glass of sugary, flavored, carbonated soft drink. A slap on the forehead registers the realization that “I could have had a V8!”
This article is not a commercial for liquid vegetables, but the parallel to thriller or mystery fiction writing is on point. It is not difficult to find fiction in each of those genres that are the equivalent of a standard three-act drama. Act one is the set-up, with the introduction of a murder or threatening situation that one way or another sucks the protagonist into the plot. In act two, things go from bad to worse–or even seem hopeless. In act three, the mystery is solved, the killer is caught, the tension is defused, and the good guys win. The end.
In some ways, that’s the fictional equivalent of flavored soda water—not by any means to undermine the talent of the writer who has gripped the reader and provided absorbing entertainment for some three hundred pages plus. The reader’s thirst has been creatively quenched. But as with the soda in the ad, the story is missing something. There could have been so much more by way of nutrition, without sacrificing the taste. This will come, however, at the cost of sometimes-elaborate research.
There are three elements to a novel: setting, character, and plot. Each one has the potential to carry a cargo of education to the reader in an unobjectionable, unobtrusive, and even enjoyable way.
The setting, for example, could introduce the reader to the bizarre, the exotic, or even the familiar, seen in a new light. In each of my legal thriller novels, from Neon Dragon through Deadly Diamonds, the bars, back alleys, historic sites, and ethnic neighborhoods of Boston play prominent roles, as the action weaves in and out of them without slackening the pace. Readers have told me that they found themselves picking up “the feel” of Boston—one unlike any other city on earth.
The trick is what Spencer Tracy once advised Robert Wagner about acting: “Don’t let the audience catch you at it.” For a writer, this means that you should blend the sense of location into the action of the plot so seamlessly that the reader doesn’t realize he/she is being “taught.”
In each of my last three novels, as well as the next, Deadly Odds, I deliberately shift the action from Boston to areas of the world that could introduce the reader to previously unexplored countries or cities. I see the inclusion of local customs or peculiarities of art, or food, or wealth, or crime, or poverty, or any other kind of cultural insight as a gift to the reader. But it must be given invisibly as an integral part of the uninterrupted plot. It cannot sever the tension. If the book becomes a travelogue, setting has hindered the primary purpose of storytelling—don’t let the reader catch you at it.
The second element, character, can explore any aspect of human personality or psychology that the writer knows well enough to “demonstrate” through the words and actions of the fictional people. This can be tricky ground. Careful research here is essential; amateur psychology can be shaky if pushed too far. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between fiction and non-fiction is that fiction has to be true.”
The third element, plot, has the most potential to carry disguised education. In my latest novel, Deadly Diamonds, a young native of Sierra Leone is abducted by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) and forced to work in the diamond pits. Eventually, he escapes, and has to find his way through the world of West Africa, which is consumed with the blood diamond trade. Instead of facing the tedium of being “taught”, the reader simply lives through the fictional action of the novel, and comes out the other end with knowledge that will long outlast the experience of reading a thriller.
The cost of providing the reader with this bonus is additional research on your part—perhaps even travel—that must precede the writing. But this education can be a bonus, particularly if the writer has chosen a compelling subject: the work will become a pleasure, and it will show in the writing.
One last thought. I’ve found that when I give book-talks at libraries or book clubs, the audiences don’t want me to focus as much on plot or characters or setting per se, but rather on the elements that I was hoping to teach without “teaching” through the novel—subjects like the Chinese Tong (Neon Dragon), horse racing (Black Diamond), international art theft and forgery (Frame Up), and blood diamonds (Deadly Diamonds). That is always a joy, because the reader has taken the bait of disguised education in a way that could lead to discussion and interest far beyond the present moment. That is what lasts beyond the reading, like the nourishment of a glass of V8.
John F. Dobbyn was born and raised in Boston. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Boston College Law School. Prior to entering law school, Dobbyn served in the Air Force as a radio and radar director of aircraft in the Air Defense Command. After practicing law for several years as a trial lawyer, he obtained a Master of Law degree from Harvard Law School, and subsequently accepted a position as Professor of Law at Villanova Law School. Dobbyn’s short stories have been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and he is the author of two previous Knight and Devlin novels, Neon Dragon, and Frame-Up. “Jack” and his wife Lois live in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Reach him at @JohnDobbyn on Twitter.
(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
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Under the Microscope with Richard Helms: The Cradle of Criminality
Welcome to “Under the Microscope,” Killer Nashville’s very own exclusive Forensics Corner. We will unearth, demystify, and bring you interesting, factual information about the world of forensics from experts in various fields. From dead bodies, to suspicious substances, to computers with a mind of their own, this column will explore the macabre, gory, and unexplainable with the truth in scientific terms for writers to use at their will.
Writers who incorporate crime in their stories need to understand forensic psychology and its importance. Forensic psychology has become integral to crime solving, and is a valuable piece of the puzzle in judicial system. Those who practice forensic psychology may work with law enforcement agencies, or testify in trials as expert witnesses. They can come from different branches of psychology, like clinical or social psychology. In his debut column for Killer Nashville Magazine, author and psychologist Richard Helms takes us to the psychological origins of crime.
The Cradle of Criminality
By Richard Helms
In my novel Bobby J., I examined a fictitious Middle American urban juvenile detention center, and the impact that a single brutal crime committed by a teenager has on the lives of multiple people associated with that detention center, among others.
In many ways, this is my most autobiographical novel, given that I was the clinical director in a twenty-four bed locked juvenile treatment center in North Carolina for seven years in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Following that, I was the court psychologist for four counties in North Carolina for almost a decade, before retiring from active practice to become a college professor. My primary income during that decade came through grants from the Juvenile Crime Prevention Council, and from another organization called Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, so a great deal of my forensic work with the legal system focused on the juvenile courts.
Juvenile courts today are almost ubiquitous in the US, but this was not always the case. It’s a curious coincidence, but the battle for legal rights for children might not have occurred at all had it not been for an organization devoted to non-humans.
In New York, in 1873, a nurse named Etta Wheeler visited the home of Francis and Mary Connolly, and found their adopted daughter Mary Ellen Wilson chained to a bed, covered in bruises, and emaciated from a diet of bread and water. Nurse Wheeler, enraged by this cruelty, demanded that the girl be handed over to her, but the Connollys told her to mind her own business.
Unable to get Mary Ellen’s parents to hand over the child, and aghast at the treatment they believed they were allowed to inflict on her, Etta Wheeler approached local agency after local agency, seeking any organization with police powers, that might help her to liberate Mary Ellen Wilson from her monstrous parents. None of them would help her. Many stated that it was inappropriate for them to interfere in what they considered sacred parental rights. Others simply could not be bothered.
Desperate, and knowing that time for Mary Ellen Wilson was drawing short, Nurse Wheeler approached a man named Henry Bergh, and asked him to help. Unlike the other agencies, Bergh agreed to do whatever he was able.
Bergh petitioned the court to take charge of Mary Ellen. However, in order to gain custody of Mary Ellen, Bergh had to testify in court that she was “an animal”. This was because Bergh was the director of the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the only agency in New York that would advocate for Mary Ellen. The only grounds available to Bergh were to prove that the Connollys were violating the only applicable statute available at the time: cruelty to animals.
That’s right. True juvenile justice in this country for a human child was only available from the ASPCA.
Mary Ellen Wilson was placed, eventually, into the care of Etta Wheeler’s sister, and grew up to marry and have children of her own, whom she undoubtedly treated with greater love and humanity than she had ever received from Francis Connolly.
One of the reasons justice was so difficult to achieve for Mary Ellen Wilson was the fact that there was only one court system in the United States, and it was focused on adults. Children, who were largely seen as the property of their parents or guardians, had no avenue of last resort when their rights were violated.
Sixteen years later, in 1899, the very first Juvenile Court in the United States was founded in Illinois.
Many people believe that Juvenile Court is only a place for the meting out of justice to juvenile delinquents. In fact, a great deal of the work of Juvenile Courts in most jurisdictions of the U.S. is focused on prevention of delinquency, by providing interventions early in the developmental process for children at extreme risk of illegal activity.
As a court psychologist, I was charged with providing psychological evaluations to the court, in order to assist judges in making appropriate plans for intervening in the lives of youths headed for greater trouble. As such, I was always acutely aware that every evaluation I performed was, by definition, a developmental evaluation. Children and adolescents do not think like adults, because their brains and cognitive abilities are still forming until long after age eighteen.
In the average fifteen-year-old, for instance, the part of the brain that engages in rational decision-making, analytical activity, and future-oriented thinking (the prefrontal cortex) is very poorly developed compared with the part of the brain most involved in emotional responses (the limbic system), which is almost fully developed by the middle teens. Because of this, teenagers tend to make most of their decisions based on emotional factors, rather than thinking through all the possible physical/emotional/social consequences of their actions.
This is why you can get Marty McFly, in the movie Back To The Future, to do just about anything you want him to, simply by calling him ‘chicken’. It’s also the reason why, for far too many teenagers, the very last words they will speak will be, “Hey, y’all! Watch this!”
While supervision and careful guidance can help protect children and teenagers from their emotion-based decision-making, more direct preventive action may be necessary when it comes to stopping youthful delinquency before it becomes adult lifelong criminality. There are many warning signs that, if observed, might serve as impetus for such an intervention.
For instance, the FBI has developed a profiling tool called the McDonald Triad. After examining the histories of dozens of serial killers, they discovered some key actuarial variables that each of them had in common. They included bedwetting after age ten, fire setting as a child, and animal cruelty as a child.
The problem with the McDonald Triad is that it is not universal among children who grow up to be serial killers. While it may be a contributory factor to the overall developmental trajectory in children who do become serial killers, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause serial criminality in adults. One reason for this is that adult criminals are a heterogeneous population. They are not a one-size-fits-all class of people. Each adult criminal has different motivating factors that promote his or her individual criminal behavior.
One of the tasks of forensic researchers is to try to develop taxonomies of criminal behaviors. A taxonomy is nothing more than a system of classification, which allows researchers to place people into groups organized along common characteristics.
A researcher at Duke University named Terrie Moffitt has attempted to develop just such a taxonomy focused on juvenile offenders, based on the likelihood of continued criminal behavior into adulthood. She suggests that there are two primary groups of adolescent offenders. She calls the first group Life Course Persistent Offenders, and the second group Adolescent Limited Offenders.
Life Course Persistent Offenders tend to demonstrate significant levels of juvenile delinquency—including felony behaviors—beginning in early adolescence, and continuing long into adulthood.
Adolescent Limited Offenders, as their name suggests, only seem to engage in delinquent behaviors during adolescence, and stop as they near adulthood.
When Moffitt began looking closely at the developmental experiences of these two groups, she noted significant differences between them, which may be predictive of their life-long criminal potential.
Life Course Persistent Offenders, she discovered, generally demonstrate a clear progression of antisocial behavior across the lifespan, and continue antisocial behavior across all kinds of conditions and situations.
She noted a dependable progression of behavioral and cognitive problems in these children throughout childhood into adulthood, including: biting and hitting at age 4; shoplifting and truancy by age 10; selling drugs and stealing cars by age 16; robbery and rape at age 22; fraud and child abuse at age 30.
According to Moffitt, Life Course Persistent Offenders exhibit significant neurological problems during childhoods. They tend to have difficult inborn temperaments as infants that include irritability, strong mood swings, excessive tantrum behavior, and aggressive behavior toward other children that often results in injury.
Developmentally, Life Course Persistent Offenders present with a significant history of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, learning disabilities, and lower general IQ scores compared to general population.
Socially, Moffitt has determined that a significant number of Life Course Persistent Offenders could be classified in a peer status referred to as “rejected children” by two researchers named Wentzel and Asher. Rejected children are not accepted by many of their peers. They tend to be children whom no other children name as being ‘best friends’. Many rejected children are the product of homes in which their parents neither provide clear expectations and limits, nor provide a sense of acceptance and involvement.
These children are largely left to their own devices to learn the ins-and-outs of society, and they tend to do so with a marked preference for meeting their own elemental needs. As a result, they demonstrate self-serving behavior from a very early age, and continue to do so throughout life.
Children who later become Life Course Persistent Offenders tend to have lower self-esteem, feelings of insecurity, inferiority, and inadequacy, poorer impulse control, shorter tempers, and more readily aggressive behavior than their peers.
They also demonstrate what University of Vancouver psychology researcher Robert Hare describes as “Criminal Versatility”. Their crimes tend to be diverse, and often spontaneous and opportunistic. Their crimes tend to be progressive in nature over time, and may become somewhat more sophisticated. These individuals, as they progress from juvenile delinquency to adult criminality, may have significant periods of incarceration with progressively shorter periods between incarcerations.
Most importantly, Life Course Persistent Offenders probably represent between 5-10% of male juvenile court-adjudicated delinquents, and perhaps 2% of female adjudicated delinquents. It probably should come as no surprise that this small group of juvenile offenders account for an inordinately large percentage of actual crimes that come to the attention of juvenile court judges.
In contrast to Life Course Persistent Offenders, Dr. Moffitt has discovered that Adolescent Limited Offenders present with a somewhat less extreme history of problems. While, like Life Course Persistent Offenders, they begin offending during their adolescent years, they also stop offending around the 18th birthday (or earlier in states that have an earlier cutoff age for adult prosecution, such as North Carolina). Their teenage offending patterns may be similar to or identical to those of Life Course Persistent Offender adolescents in terms of severity, violence, and frequency, but they display these behaviors only during adolescence.
One huge distinction between Life Course Persistent Offenders and Adolescent Limited Offenders is the nature of their developmental divergences. Adolesent Limited Offenders, as a group, demonstrate fewer identifiable neurological and cognitive problems. They have much better social statuses compared to Life Course Persistent Offender adolescents, and tend to have learned how to get along with others better during childhood. Adolescent Limited Offenders tend to demonstrate higher levels of self-esteem, and better emotional regulation and behavior inhibitions.
More importantly, they tend to be better at learning from their mistakes, which means that they can begin to engage in greater behavioral and emotional control as they near adulthood, in contrast to Life Course Persistent Offenders, who do not appear to readily learn from their experiences, and as a result make the same mistakes over and over into adulthood.
The offenses of Adolescent Limited Offenders are more likely to involve behaviors symbolizing adult privilege and autonomy from parental control (vandalism, theft, drug and alcohol offenses, for instance), and their offenses tend to be more geared toward acquisition of financial gain rather than expression of anger and frustration.
As I mentioned earlier, I came to regard every psychological evaluation I conducted for the juvenile courts, during the time I worked as a forensic psychologist, to be—first and foremost—a developmental evaluation. By examining the historical, educational, intellectual, physical, and social histories of youthful delinquent offenders who were sent to me for evaluation, I could begin to develop a sense of their long-term potential for continued criminal behavior. In a sense, that was what the judges were asking for—some way to determine just which level of intervention would be most successful in deterring the children and adolescents who came into their courts from a life of crime.
With the possible exception of true psychopaths—who are born with physical brain deformities that more or less determine their antisocial life course—lifelong criminals are made rather than born. They are very carefully shaped by their life experiences, by their neuropsychology, by their parenting, and by their psychosocial relationships with their peers. In the time of Mary Ellen Wilson, there was no real way to intervene in these destructive developmental trajectories, because there were no social institutions such as the juvenile courts that cared enough to try.
Today, because of the work of people like Etta Wheeler, Henry Bergh, Terrie Moffitt, and many, many hundreds of others researchers, legal scholars, and direct service providers, we have the tools to recognize the danger signals in children and adolescents, and to help those children move from a path that would otherwise guarantee a life of crime, to a new path of personal responsibility and achievement.
Richard Helms retired from active practice in 2002, after a quarter century as a forensic psychologist, to become a college psychology professor at a North Carolina community college, where he now teaches Forensic Psychology as one of his course offerings. The author of eighteen novels and numerous short stories, Helms has been nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award five times, the Short Mystery Fiction Society Derringer Award five times, twice for the ITW Thriller Award, and once for the Mystery Readers International Macavity Award. He has won the Derringer Award twice, and the Thriller Award once. In addition, he has been nominated four times for the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award. His most recent novel, Older than Goodbye, was released by Five Star/Cengage in October 2014. He is presently working on the fifth novel in his New Orleans-based Pat Gallegher Series, and the first title in a new private eye series set in Charleston, SC. Richard Helms and his wife Elaine, the parents of two grown children, live in a small town in North Carolina. www.RichardHelms.net
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 Cocktails: The Last Ticket
This month’s exclusive Killer Nashville Killer Cocktail: The Last Ticket
Mark “Spaz” Morris takes us to 1941 and the upscale Casablanca nightclub of Rick’s Café’ Américain for this month’s concoction.
Spaz loves the idea that everyone is hiding in plain sight. Everyone knows who is involved, but like a game of chess, players must determine whom they can trust. There are two tickets to freedom, and we know who’s going to get them.
The key here is subtlety just like Killer Nashville’s pear-infused gin martini. As you sip, in the distance you will hear “As Time Goes By”.
The Last Ticket
A Killer Nashville Signature Martini
Ingredients:
2-ounces Hanna Gin
½-ounce St. George Spiced Pear Liqueur
Lemon twist
Ice
Directions:
Pour liquor into martini glass and swirl it around to coat the glass. Pour the rest of the liqueur into a shaker tin with ice.
Add gin to the shaker, and shake.
Strain into the coated martini glass.
Rim the glass with the lemon twist and drop in the glass.
Enjoy!
Send us pictures and comments of you and Killer Nashville’s “The Last Ticket”. We’ll share them here along with a link back to you.
About Spaz:
Spaz started in the restaurant/bar business back in 1984 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana when he was a student at Louisiana State University. Instead of becoming a chemical engineer, he became a social legend instead, he says jokingly. He later transferred to Knoxville, Tennessee, and received a Bachelor’s in marketing from the University of Tennessee in 1989. He has worked in biker bars to 4-fork-setting restaurants. An avid traveler, he has lived in 13 states and visited 40, so far. He enjoys reading sci-fi and sci-fantasy books. He currently holds court at Red Dog Wine and Spirits in Franklin, Tennessee. Check out the store: www.reddogwineandspirits.com.
The Last Ticket™ and © 2015 Killer Nashville. Killer Nashville is a ® Federally Registered Trademark. All rights reserved.
The Writer's Life: Suspects, Secrets, and Sleight of Hand
There is an art to writing a great mystery or thriller. Certain elements must be in place with strategies to throw off even the smartest of readers. This would be basis of Jaden “Beth” Terrell’s latest installment on the foundations of writing a novel. If you’ve been working with Beth so far, the plot and characters are starting to take shape. Continue with us and by the end of the lessons, you’ll have a novel that no editor or agent can possibly resist.
Suspects, Secrets, and Sleight of Hand: The Art of Misdirection
By Jaden (Beth) Terrell
It would be a pretty dull crime novel—not to mention a short one—if all we had were a sleuth, a victim, and a villain. Without other suspects, there is no mystique. No misdirection. We read about red herrings and sleight of hand, but what exactly are they? Where do they come from, and how do we use them?
Red Herrings
In a mystery or thriller, a red herring is a clue used to misdirect the reader and divert his or her attention away from the real solution. The origin of the phrase is a source of some debate, but according to common lore, it came from the practice of dragging herrings, smoked for up to ten days until they turned reddish brown and acutely pungent, across the trail of a fox or hare to misdirect the hounds. Presumably, this was a test of or challenge to their ability to follow a scent.
Beginning writers often misuse red herrings, throwing in random clues or events that, while they may indeed obscure the killer, give their novels a disjointed feel. The most effective red herrings, though, aren’t random. Instead, they grow from characters and their motivations. Done well, the writer’s attempts at misdirection are invisible until the end.
But how do you pull this off?
Suspects
When it comes to suspects, there are a few differences between mysteries and thrillers. In a thriller, it’s possible for the protagonist to know who the villain is and spend the whole book trying to catch him. Not so in a mystery. If your only suspect is the villain, there is no mystery. This means you need several people who could plausibly have committed the crime. I like to choose anywhere from three to six, including the villain. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume we’re writing a mystery.
Motive
All of the suspects should have a motive, even if it’s not immediately apparent. From their perspectives, the victim wronged or threatened them in some way. Let’s say our victim is a bulldog news reporter with a secret history of blackmailing the wealthier subjects of her investigations. Suspect 1 might have been ruined financially and personally by a story the reporter wrote. Suspect 2 has learned that her husband and the reporter are having an affair. Suspect 3 is being blackmailed. Suspect 4’s son committed suicide after the reporter exposed him as the perpetrator of a cyberprank. Suspect 5 stands to inherit a fortune if the reporter is out of the picture. All five suspects have a reason to hate the victim, but those motives may not be clear in the beginning.
Opportunity and Alibis
All, or almost all, of your suspects should have had the opportunity to commit the crime. One or two should have ironclad alibis that will ultimately unravel. One or two should have weak or no alibis. You might choose to have one character who couldn’t possibly have committed the crime but who can’t or won’t reveal her alibi. Maybe she’s trying to protect a loved one, or maybe her alibi is that she was committing a bank robbery on the other side of town. Two people, such as a married couple, might alibi each other, each thinking the other is guilty. The villain might have either a cast-iron alibi or should appear, for some reason, not to need one (e.g., she or he is someone so beyond suspicion that it never occurs to anyone to check for an alibi). Mix it up, making sure everything logically progresses from what’s come before.
Secrets
Several of the innocent suspects should have their own secrets—reasons for not being completely forthcoming with the protagonist. Maybe one is hiding an affair, another is gay and not out of the closet, another grew up bouncing from foster care to juvenile detention facilities and has nothing but mistrust for anyone in authority. Another might be trying to protect either the real villain or someone she or he thinks might be. Another might feel like the crime was justified and that the person who committed it should be commended rather than punished. And so on.
These reasons should be as varied and plausible as possible, each suspect as developed as necessary. There are no throwaway characters. For each suspect, go back to the character questions we discussed in previous lessons and answer the ones that seem relevant—the ones that will define that person’s character and bring him or her to life for you and your reader.
Use the following chart to help you remember who your suspects are and what each one’s driving motivations are. For each character, fill in the following information:
Relationship to victim: Is this person a friend, relative, co-worker, spouse, family member, etc. of the victim?
Motive: Why might this character plausibly commit the crime?
Alibi or Opportunity: Could this character have committed the crime? Does she or he have an alibi, and if so, is it genuine or fabricated?
Secret: What reason might this character have to lie to, evade, or otherwise refuse to cooperate with the protagonist?
Connections: Does this character have connections to the villain, detective, or other suspects?
Defining Traits: What are this person’s defining characteristics? What would the detective notice first about him/her? What motivates him/her? What are his/her driving desires? In this box, you might also add any false clues that might lead the detective toward this person.
Suspects:
Download or Print a FREE Suspect Worksheet - Created by Jaden (Beth) Terrell
Sleight of Hand
Misdirection will often come from the deceptions, evasions, and machinations of the suspects. Keeping in mind that they’ll act in their own self-interest, think about how they might realistically make your protagonist’s life more difficult. Will they lie? Try to cast blame on another character (either maliciously or out of a sincere belief that this person is guilty)? Will they be overly helpful but clueless? Think about whether or not any of these people might have left physical clues that will mislead your main character, or whether they might have obscured genuine clues, either intentionally or by mistake.
There are other ways to use misdirection, but we’ll talk about those once we start writing scenes. For now, just have fun getting to know your suspects. Use the character development techniques we learned earlier. You may not need to go into as much depth as you did for the protagonist. Just do what you need to feel comfortable with these characters, trusting that more will emerge as you write.
Jaden Terrell (Beth Terrell) is a Shamus Award finalist, a contributor to “Now Write! Mysteries” (a collection of writing exercises by Tarcher/Penguin), and the author of the Jared McKean private detective novels Racing The Devil, A Cup Full of Midnight, and River of Glass. Terrell is the special programs coordinator for the Killer Nashville conference and the winner of the 2009 Magnolia Award for service to the Southeastern Chapter of Mystery Writers of America (SEMWA). A former special education teacher, Terrell is now a writing coach and developmental editor whose leisure activities include ballroom dancing and equine massage therapy. www.jadenterrell.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.
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.
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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.
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