DEAD ON WRITING –
A Book for The Successfully Disorganized, Down & Dirty, Functionally Challenged Fiction Writer in You . . .
Robert W. Walker
Preface:
“Writing is like shouting in the dark at stars too far to hear; like shooting in the dark at targets we don't always see, and once in a while we get lucky and hear a report back. We've hit our target. When first starting out, we do it not knowing enough about the tools at hand, or if we are holding our mouth right, or if the weapons we wield are loaded or sharpened. That is until we begin to practice and hit our stride, and soon writing, like firing off shot after shot, comes progressively easier on everyone, including the innocent bystanders we call readers-nice people who we don’t want to send screaming away from us for all our unintended results.”
—Robert W. Walker, author of Dead On, Deja Blue, Cuba Blue, City for Ransom & more. Writing from Somewhere, West Virginia, 2009
DEAD ON WRITING is brought to you by Professor Robert W. Walker, a native of Mississippi who grew up in Chicago. He has published over 40 novels in genre fiction, including historical mystery, detective crime thrillers, and suspense. His novel Unnatural Instinct earned the Readers Choice Award for best suspense novel of 2002 at the Love Is Murder Readers & Writers Conference (Illinois) sponsored by the College of Dupage. He has recently published his City series – City for Ransom, Shadows in the White City (also a Lovey-Award winner), and City of the Absent – which are gaslight era Hystery-Mystery novels using the Chicago World’s Fair as backdrop to mayhem. His other series is the Rae Hiyakawa modern day psychic detective chase called PSI Blue and Deja Blue. Summer of 2009 saw publication of Dead On, a modern day noir novel set in Atlanta and the Georgia woods. Rob has won a teaching excellence award from Bethune-Cookman College, and several writing awards from the Florida Freelance Writers Assn. for fiction and non-fiction. Many of his titles have been translated for Czech, Polish, Japanese, and British English editions. Several of his books have been juried and accepted at Tamarack, an exclusive West Virginia arts center and bookstore. Rob has taught at Mountain State University and at Mountain State Academy, and West Virginia State University. A graduate of Northwestern University with a Masters in English Education, he lives in Charleston, WV with his novelist-RN wife, Miranda, their children, and their dog. Rob can be found at www.RobertWalkerbooks.com as well as www.myspace.com/robertwwalkerbooks.com and is blogging regularly at www.AcmeAuthorsLink.blogspot.com
DEAD On WRITING is divided into SEVEN Sections:
The largest being a 2-Part Section on CRAFT & EXECUTION with sub-sets dealing with every aspect of the art (and science) of writing from research and details to character, setting, plot, and dialogue. This is large because in CRAFT and EXECUTION is where you earn your “unofficial” PhD in Writing.
The Third Section is devoted to REWRITING & EDITING, which ought to be considered as part of Craft as well.
The Fourth Section is on SELLING the manuscript to AGENTS, EDITORS, & PUBLISHERS in today’s unique markets, including online efforts.
The Fifth Section is on the business of PROMOTING, MARKETING, & BOOK SALES of the finished book.
The Sixth Section is on GRAM’S GRAMMA’ ISSUES, which sneakily really is part of Craft.
Finally, the Seventh Section is an ADDENDUM(B) of miscellaneous and extraneous material too good not to include.
Confessions from the outset: This book divides unevenly and in disorganized fashion as the philosophy here is that you need to perfect Craft & Execution before you can sell it to an agent, an editor, a publisher of any size or quality; that you first must bleed the ink, perspire the ink, and cry the ink; in short do the work. Second confession: I use my own material for examples/samples throughout because it is easier, simpler, cheaper, and I know the material—where it fits, when it fits to demonstrate what is needed to best teach you. So while on the surface it may look like I am just big-headed, trust me I am beyond an egoism. This business has knocked it out of me years ago. To reiterate, learning the ropes of writing is enough work to have otherwise earned you a PhD in letters had you sought out a program at a university.
In essence, when you go down the path of an avowed professional writer, you become a PhD candidate in writing—and most of the lessons, while teachable and learnable must come at a time when you, the student or candidate, are READY. In other words, if you are ready, the “master” appears. And if you are ready, read on and learn the craft and live with the tools and make the gargantuan but fulfilling effort. I started on the path at a very young age, wrote my first short stories in 6th and 7th grade and graduated on to write my first novel straddling my second and third year of high school. However, you can start on this marvelous journey filled with every imaginable emotion at any age.
There are a series of exercises in the craft section and more in the ADDENDUM(B) that I will point you toward and urge you to complete as you go. These are results-getting exercises that will end in product. Production of pages equals experience and practice. In a film class you work on volume, on production, and practice; a writing lifestyle must be the same. I call these exercises “finger exercises” for good reason. You can repeat any of them as many times as possible before you become sick to death of them. But you should absolutely take to heart their value, as you would practice sessions on a piano or practice in shooting baskets or practice in any endeavor. You may also want to take years—perhaps up to four years –just learning the craft and the art of writing before you dare go on the path of seeking to sell your “stuff”. That’s what I did and I sell a book a year on average. Now let’s jump right in on your unofficial by highly useful “PhD” effort, shall we? Let’s begin at the beginning but you may read any section of the ADDEN-DUMB at any time for the fun of it.
ONE: CRAFT & EXECUTION
BEGINNIGS & ESTABLISHING SHOTS –
No, this is not about booze. It is about making the right opening moves; not in a bar but in a bar in your story…or whatever setting you open with. First lines and first paragraphs which establish character and much more are absolutely crucial. True whether you begin with the weather or a cobra about to strike.
When you open a story, you really have to rework it and rewrite it so that those opening moments are pure gold…as pure as you can make them. Clear as you can make them as well as exciting as you can make them (excitement does not necessarily mean fireworks or car chases). Think of every good film that has SET the stage in the very first seconds and minutes of the film. These first shots establish time and place along with tension and character. Perhaps you might have a page or two to interest the reader in a character or the actions being taken by a character, but this can’t possibly happen if your story opens in a miasma of confusion in which we know nothing whatsoever of the setting, the time, the character, perhaps his or her occupation, where his or her hands are at the moment, what action(s) the character(s) are currently occupied with…what pie they have their hands in. HANDS are so important to characters; about as important as LEGS and FEET.
To become proficient at opening successive chapters beyond Chapter One, too, you’ve got to establish the basic Five W’s of Who, What, Where, When, and How or at least four of the above. With each new scene this job’s got to happen. All this has to be repeated over again with each geographical shift, point of view shift, time shift. Such shifts have to be carefully “glued” together by comforting road signs as with a time word or two such as since, before, then, now, when…
To become proficient at openings, read the back jacket copy of every paperback you can get your hands on, and tell me how many of these “interest” grabbers appear in paragraph one or two: Time period, setting with place names, character’s names (names have resonance), occupation of main character, chief tension or problem (the how and why that keeps us turning pages).
Take a lesson from the back-flap writers. In fact, become adept at writing your own “flap” to place in your query letter and synopsis. They say never judge a book by its cover, but when the flap is well written, go ahead—judge a book by its synopsis. Learn to write the most important short story you will ever need to write—the story of your story in its most elemental form, my dear Watson. (More on writing a salaciously sales-worthy pitch/back-flap can be found in the section on Marketing and Sales).
You can also use this in pitch sessions—the back-flap you write for your own book! You may want to begin with the word WHEN—as in:
Just when Inspector Alastair Ransom had cut off the head of one snake slithering about the gas-lit streets of Chicago in 1893, a second fiend raises his ugly head to mar the prosperity of the city and the success of the World’s Fair.
In one fell swoop, one sentence, you get the name and profession of the main character, the time period and the location and a teasing tension. Write the copy you’d like to see on the back of your book!
An opening line and paragraph and page ought to engage the reader and excite his interest, of course, but it also ought to plant the reader’s feet firmly in place, square into the moment, square into the story. But no beginning is of any use no matter how spectacular if the story fails to move forward and a plot or at least a series of engaging episodic events do not occur. A plot must become evident and fairly soon. To this end, a good faith attempt at writing a rip-snorting ghost story or mystery or at least a men’s adventure yarn is a great and wonderful tool for a writer to learn the craft of plotting.
PART II of Beginnings and Establishing Shots:
A young writer must write a mystery. But WHY WRITE MYSTERY?
This is a question my students fight me on, especially those who are most likely to fail at plotting. I want my students to write a mystery story in order to have their eyes opened to just precisely how plot works. The plot is not a limp clothes line to hang events on. Plot is a forward moving dynamic tightrope pulled taut by conflict. Plot is the event that begets the next event and the next. And in crafting a mystery—even one about a thieving weasel in a child’s story—a new writer learns far far more and far far faster the lessons of plotting than in any other genre or type of writing. Trust me on this.
Why do we write suspense, mystery, intrigue? What is the allure for both readers and writers of the mystery novel? I can’t speak for every thriller author, but I know why I write in this genre. It is for a number of reasons, not the least being MONEY. This is a hugely popular genre; in fact, seven or eight of the fiction titles on the current bestseller lists are mysteries or some sub-genre of the traditional mystery. Certainly money is not the only reason we authors of intrigue choose to write mysteries.
The mystery is always fascinating as it always pits our hero—someone not far from us in terms of character—against overwhelming odds. The payoff is always satisfactory, the loose ends always tied up, and if not in the prequel then in the sequel. We love this category also because it allows for a built-in structure, the comfy one that calls for a beginning, a middle, and an end like a well organized composition or a well oiled machine (but as in a Tarantino film, these elements can be jumbled).
We love mysteries too because the main character, whether PI or departmental cop, whether an Inspector Mom or an Inspector out of 1893 Chicago (City for Ransom, Shadows in the White City, City of the Absent), we relate even as our character “relates” to the real world. In no other category save perhaps the philosophical western is the human condition put on display. In the mystery, we go from misery to joy, love to hate, and in fact murder mystery is the very definition of passions gone amok.
Social issues of the day, common and not so common concerns of the flesh, all of it is fodder for the mystery. Why write the Who Dunnit, or the Why Dunnit, or the Way Off Base Dunnit? In the end it is just plain great fun and fulfilling to create a gumshoe, male of female or a team whose character(s) drives the plot rather than being driven by plot. And in what other genre is there so many fist fights, chase scenes, in short ACTION. A fine mystery is a film playing in your head. Besides Life’s a Mystery and Love is Murder, so to speak.
Still in the end, the final result and wish for the author is MONEY enough to feed his or her awful habit—the need to write more and to provide food on the table. True as they say, “There’s no poetry in money, and no money in poetry,” but there is or can be money in mystery. Why should only the crooks and CEO’s make crime pay? Now you too can make it pay and do it at your convenience with a successful author teaching an even more successful class right here in this text, a class aptly called:
WRITE TO SELL *
In this book-course we’ll take up CRAFT and EXECUTION – the basic elements that create consistent VOICE and the Elements of Style from Strunk & White to Jerome Stern’s Making Shapely Fiction. Useful and constructive information creating compelling lines via an authorial voice. Before you can sell a word, you must master this technique and if a poor kid from the North side of Chicago can do it, so can you master of dramatic active moving and flowing sentences that drive the dynamo of the story ever forward in a visually powerful flood that has readers ripping through pages. Again I am speaking of Craft, the art of writing well, and execution. This involves reading like a writer, observing as a writer, researching as a writer, re-thinking and re-writing as a writer must. In the end, it is all in the execution of your story or novella or novel.
In this book-course you’ll learn about TEASERS AND LURES – writing the shortest and most important story you will ever write – the treatment, logline, premise (whatever) of your novel. This sales tool is, among others, perhaps the most important single item that can sell or lose a sale in the marketplace of the agents, editors, and publishers you want to lure to your web…ahhh novel. You want to earn a reading, and you do that in the cover letter, the synopsis, the outline, and such lures and teasers as you can create. I will have you mastering this kind of writing, so stay with it!
In this book-course you’ll learn the ways of the MARKETING GENIUS – we all need more of it along with craft and execution. I want to turn you into a marketing guru with the many methods open to you to do SMART MARKETING in order to get your manuscript read by agents and editors who will want to grab it up, sure. But once it has been sold, you need a barrel full of tricks as well. This is a strategy that will set your finished book apart. These down and dirty techniques have proven useful in selling over forty novels to major publishers in New York City and to mid-sized publishers across the country.
While you read this book for techniques that work, you may well want to also have at hand one of my novels found at my website and easily ordered. When referring to opening and endings and middle chapter excitement, you should have a ready example at hand. However, there are peppered in and throughout this book many good and useful examples and samples—in fact it’s a smorgasbord of writing delights and finger exercises.
Continuing with CRAFT and EXECUTION of DEAD ON WRITING:
Some “damn good” Advice to Follow:
It's very hard for a writer so close to his own work (including a professional like myself) to see items and bothersome analytical needs and stuff like missing commas—or worse too many commas or semi-colons jammed in where commas need go—when the creative side sees and often fills in whole words even where they may be missing. (Whew! Take a breath . . . take notes…highlighter ready? Electronic blackboard?)
As far as the grammar rules go, if you have problems with these—as so many people do these days thanks to our screen-on-generation now, wherein if it isn't on a screen but coming out of a classroom or on a blackboard, it isn't worthy of anyone’s attention, well then join the crowd.
Could you follow that compound complex on top of complex last sentence? In a novel, if your reader gets lost, you have committed the number one writing sin of all—being unclear. Bringing your reader to a confusion at the cellular level of the sentence that cannot be followed. If you can’t make it sing, at least make it clear–great bumper sticker advice that. Call for Claritin. If it’s fuzzy and hard to follow, you’re in violation and ought be arrested for the biggest of the ten deadly sins of writing.
Yes, a question from the floor? I am asked by a young writer in all seriousness why some people—and he was naming no names—were such PEDANTS when it came to sentence structure and such thingies or thingys as the rules of grammar? My response (being an English and writing teacher) came fast and furiously as the question irritated me to no end. The question reminded me of the student who has no sense of history and does not want any either when we all know that what we do today determines our outcome for tomorrow—history!
Okay back to the constraints and restraints of rules of the road in writing: There are some ways to work around comma issues and semi-colon gaffs as in pay a professional, someone like myself who does freelance editing at cut rate prices to "fix" whatever issues a person has with grammatical "stuff" –and or find an instructor who really knows how to put it across (not all teachers can do it as well as they should, and most think they have but haven’t). Or find a friend or acquaintance who LOVES to edit stuff and will happily do it for you.
My young protégé’s response is immediate, and he says that's been done—50 times over—so that's not working (by the way if it is under 100 spell it out—fifty!)
So I take the young man aside and I say, “You know, son, there really are only like TEN deadly sins in writing, and most of us are committing only two or three of these offenses, and if someone can point out the pattern errors—serial killer errors—of the type that keep coming back at you, then once you SEE the connectedness of the error(s) and that it is the same error repeating itself like a recurrent nightmare, then and only then do you begin to feel a darn sight better about your single (or two or three issues).
At such an aha moment, when the writer himself realizes that he is not making every error in the fat English grammar text, but rather less than a handful—then he Learns with a capital L. People learn when they see the patterns and connections between and among things, and there are many such patterns and connects in the rules of the road in English and writing.
That does something for you, learning that your errors are not so enormous and not so terribly many that you can’t defeat them. For instance, you learn that commas travel with "fragmentary" lines the way that pilot fish shadow sharks. Remember fragments? Early each day—comma!—followed by a whole thought as in: I climb out of bed.) The three-legged dog of a sentence is the fragment ending in a period as in Early each day. Or it’s a two-legged stool of a sentence, which we fictionalists use handily and heavily in story writing since characters often TALK and THINK in fragments. You learn the converse is true that periods travel with complete, whole sentences or thoughts. You learn that a semi-colon is a comma that calls in its cousin the period because a comma alone can’t go with a whole sentence/thought.
This is what is meant when they say, "You must know the rules before you go around breaking them." And I would add to that that if you know you are breaking them, and it is obvious that the reader knows that you know that he knows, and everyone knows then you have tacitly agreed that you are breaking them with the reader’s understanding. Then it legitimizes breaking them. Perfect example: the great fantastic Richard Matheson's short-short story Born of Man and Woman. Breaks every grammar rule and spelling rule but it all works! Why? Because it is a story narrated from the point of view of a totally illiterate, abused yet intelligent and compassionate child (written in 1960). Matheson like the fabulous Robert Bloch—pure genius. Matheson wrote I am Legend by the way and Stir of Echoes. Bloch wrote Psycho, Night of the Ripper, American Gothic and many wonderful short stories.
One final word to my students is to read, read, and read in the field or genre you wish to write in, and also read widely in all areas, and to read as a writer reads—noting how a Matheson or a Bloch moves you. The more you read fiction, the more you pick up the cadence and the music of this unusual art form, the more your grammar will simply fall into grace . . . ah place.
I did not free myself of the "fear" of grammar and what is right and wrong until I sat myself down and shouted, "If it sounds good to my ear, and it makes sense to my mind, then I will use it." This does not preclude revisions and self-editing and having friends edit your work, and then more revisions, but it is a great place to call your springboard—Sound and Sense. I got that idea from a poetry book I came across—stumbled on rather serendipitously—when a freshman in college, a book entitled: Sound and Sense.
Next question comes from a poet in the class who insists that anything can be poetry, and that poetry did not need any rules or to take any form or shape . . . Ohmygod! (Now there’s a poem in a single word—OhMyGod!) This young man states that a single word such as IT can be a poem. But who’d want to read IT? How much enjoyment can one get from IT, and hasn’t IT been done to death by Stephen King?
I grit my teeth and smile with lips pursed so no one can see my grinding molars here in class.
For those of you who want to groove on grammar, check out a book entitled The Transitive Vampire. For anyone who want a thorough going over with a kick in the teeth check out my Knife Editing Service found at my website where my motto is “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”.
Visit me at www.robertwalkerbooks.com to see if I practice what I preach. . . and when and where and how I move you, take some notes, reread that scene, and ask how did Professor Walker pull that off? How’d he make me laugh, how’d he get me to choke up with emotion, and how’d he so completely surprise me with that twist? It’s how I learned from Matheson, Bloch, and many another “master”.
Now let’s get away from grammar for a while, and let us consider one of the most crucial elements of any story—the Compelling Voice or Narrative Voice whether it is a first person story or a multiple point of view story. Take a read of this article I published some time back at my blog. Whether you write mystery or not, the facts here apply to the writing of any category of fiction, and Voice is the most elusive yet most important single element of any story.
THE PERILS of PAULINE IN THREE-PART HARMONY–
CRAFT COMPELLING FEMALE & MALE LEADS NO MATTER YOUR GENDER
PART ONE
To pull off the so-called “impossible” –getting into the head of the opposite sex and understanding from this point of view, surprisingly enough, surrounds elemental, fundamental reliance on a “woman OR a man of substance” that you embed and imbue inside the VOICE that you create for this character.
VOICE in any dramatic, commercial fiction relies on strong Active Voice over weak passive textbook, WAS/WERE-riddled voices (leave the qualifying voice to the politicians). These basic grammatical decisions (word choice, exorcising qualifiers for absolutes, using active verbs over passives and cripplingly slow helping verbs, and exorcising the verb to be) are the crucibles of language about which E.B. White wrote in The Elements of Style and supported by the fine book Writing Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern. Style comes out of extremely small elements you choose to make work for you—like any electrical plug in the wall. Or items you fail to utilize.
As small as the choice difference between say the word before and ago, maybe and perhaps, this is “shaping” voice. This “becomes you”--BECOMES your style. If you choose a folksy or shoddy or simplistic or complex or formal or informal voice, your reader will know it from the outset, and is normally willing to follow it, so long as this voice remains consistent and consistently believable. But a blowhard voice, a whining constant victim voice, or a wishy-washy narrative voice—no, nah, no way.
So is VOICE the single most important element of your story? Absolutely, and yet it is created of all the other elements and choices you make, from setting to dialect to no dialect to the difference between between and betwixt, leaped and leapt, or using a comma for a dash. I personally make a habit of using contractions, dashes, and mixing sentence types from simple to compound to complex to compound-complex. All my choices…all lessons we continually need to relearn with each book.
All good writing relies on the reader ‘falling for’ your Feminine or Masculine authorial\narrative voice, the point of view speaker, the mind you set your reader down into comfortably or awkwardly. If it is an ill fit, little wonder. The holy all of it is this: an author is a trick cyclist on the unicycle juggling twenty four plates in the air, spinning each ‘choice and decision and element’ at the end of long sticks all at once! Each plate, each stick, each prop is an important element, but they all culminate in the overall greatest EFFECT or illusion we writers create. The effect that your story has on the reader’s ear and mind’s eye. (A story is only as good as the lasting effect it has on a reader. Do you recall the details of your favorite child’s book?)
If I had said the writer is LIKE a trick cyclist rather than stating it as a fact, it rings a different bell, sends a different and less powerful blow. The use of LIKE and AS is terribly overdone in some “voices” in female-lead crime fiction. As are adjectives. As are adverbs. As is the use of passives, especially the WAS/WERE verb—a major killer of action and visualization. These mistaken choices riddle even a great deal of published fiction, and especially in the first person narrative along with the personal pronoun references to the narrator: I, me, my, mine, myself, often using the personal pronoun three and four times in a given sentence.
What a reader hears and pictures comes about as result of our giving him a believable SOUND in his head—along with images. The author’s voice, or the narrative voice (not always the same) or the character’s voice creates that sound. A “qualifying” character’s voice can be filled with qualifiers, but you are damned if your narrator or main character’s voice is riddled with qualifying, iffy, wishy-washiness. An absolute gives the same sentence the mental Kodak moments that look, feel, taste, smell, and sound like IMAGES. Images are made of this; they are not made of lines like: He was standing as if in a trance, and was soon climbing through a reddish fog that seemed to be lifting amid the treeline that almost acted as a filter to the sunlit Georgia hills. But rather: In a trance, Mick stood and climbed through a coppery red fog filtering through the Georgia treeline.
CRAFTING COMPELLING LEAD CHARACTERS
OF ANY SEX, RACE, CREED, CULTURE via VOICE and CHOICE
PART TWO
The human brain sorts its mail via images, so it behooves us to use verbs that carry the weight and smell of an image (was standing is weak beside stood; was climbing weak beside climbed, was about to decide is weak beside decided). We call on simile and metaphor and extended metaphor, but the absolute is even more powerful than these. Absolute detail, as in a name or noun, now that is a photo in the mind, as a specific; and a number is an instamatic shot for the mind due to its being an absolute and a specific. We can all see and agree that a six is a six, a thousand a thousand. Metaphorical language then and Verb Choice then create style and voice; and if we choose verbs that fire off shots of photographic moments as in SLAMMED, divorced, cuddled, crammed, leapt, jarred, frightened over the weak helping verbs as in the door WAS slammed or about to be slammed, we don’t hear the firing off of the “slam” itself. It has been muffled if not completely silenced. No SOUND EFFECTS to go along with the PHOTO.
Nothing really slamming there as it is “going to slam” or “going to be about to be slammed maybe” (see what I mean about politician-speak?) My fellow Americans, the bomb was defused by the heroic soldier, or the door on the Humvee was about to be slammed, or on its way to being slammed…well…they were thinking about maybe getting a divorce, they had sorta been cuddling, was cramming, was about to leap, was feeling a bit frightened perhaps but who really can tell? —THESE all REDUCE the photo or blur it considerably.
We clip ourselves at the knees when we overuse ly-words and qualifiers in which sentence the strong verb is relegated to a murmur somewhere along the line of thought. EXERCISE: Look up the word “qualifier” in any dictionary and then run like hell from them if you ever want to write dramatically powerful sentences. While at it, picture me a photo of what a WAS is in your head. What does it look like, feel like, smell and sound like? Run like hell from indulging in Was-es writing.
Most assuredly helping and passive voice verbs such as was\were SLOW the action and the firing of the photo in the brain of the reader if it gets there at all. Strong female VOICE carries the day in crime fiction with female leads who are SURE not unsure, and who do not qualify unless there is great good reason to do so. The ‘secret’ to creating strong voice, male or female is the same!
There is/was/has been no more insidious word in the English language to insinuate itself on sentences like a parasitic leech than the verb to be, and in particular the word WAS. Take a moment and picture for me a was in your head; next, define the word was in the manner you might define any action/active verb and you cannot. Picture was now in your mind and tell me what you ARE\WAS seeing? Do the same for throw/threw/thrown or torch/torched. Jessica bolted from her seat RATHER THAN Jessica was about to maybe stand up as she was sipping her coffee. Meredyth torqued up her language whenever Lucas Stonecoat entered her office. The man engraged her. Enraged is the verb, not was enraged, or was growing angrier by the minute. These examples of action over passivity “fire off” mental imagery and are far more photographic and strong like bull…strong in Voice than is this: Meredyth was (in the process of) thinking about perhaps torquing up her language whenever she was confronted by Lucas’s presence in her office. Lucas, by the same token, was nervously thinking about maybe entering the room. If you wish to write Passively go write speeches for politicians and Supreme Court justices, and others who are trying to save their backsides from their tongues.
MORE of CRAFTING the COMPELLING FEMALE or MALE VOICE in Mystery Fiction
PART THREE
(Oh man, Professor Walker…why’re we spending so much time on this Voice thing? ANSWER: Voice is the SECRET to all successful dramatic writing; without it, you fail utterly and completely, so pay attention.)
One consistent VOICE-style or Voice is the point of Part 1 and 2 of this diatribe on the single most important element of dramatic writing. This has not been about GRAMMAR but rather a pointed voice, strong and firm, photogenic-inducing and active, all called for in DRAMATIC fiction if you wish to keep your forward-moving-dynamo going forward and not stalling out.
Passive-sounding narrators—male or female—lack control and are hard to understand. If the authorial Voice suffers from undetermined and unclear points or images, blurring perhapses and maybes, the result is less than pointed or photogenic. Like it or not, we learn visually and we read visually, so that an entirely passive scene riddled with WASes and WEREs and ISes and AREs and HASes and HADs that often beget more qualifying is in effect NO SCENE at all but a telling rather than a showing. The DEATH of drama in and of itself as every writer of fiction knows. Take the example below that is the opposite of Dead On Writing but rather simply Dead Writing:
Mary was up at dawn. She was an avid runner, so she was instantly busy pulling on her sneakers and sweats. Soon she was out the door and was running to her heart’s content when she thought she might be looking at what seemed to be a drunken or ill person in tattered clothes. In a moment, she was fearful she might be confronted by a homeless man. He was wearing the usual garb of the homeless, and he was twice her size. In a word, he was intimidating. She was unsure of her next move. She stopped, bent over, pretended to tie her shoe, thinking herself safe from the man. But when she looked up, she found him staring straight into her eyes. “Mary, it’s me, your brother Ben.”
There are a total of ten WASes in the first six sentences of the TELLing example above. Sentences seven and eight are SHOWing sentences as they both rely on action verbs in Active Sentences, whereas the first seven are Passive Sentences. Notice how qualifying, how iffy the first seven sentences are, and how absolutely sure of herself both the character and the author become in the last two sentences thanks to the use of Active Verbs or Dramatic Verbs.
A storyteller who peppers his tales with qualifiers and passives manages to cut his own throat and is easily the example to point to in an exercise for what NOT to do in fiction and dramatic writing. Always being an absolute, always practice an ABSOLUTE stance over a qualifying one in fiction as in the lines from works on sale everywhere or works in progress by this author:
From PSI Blue: Psyhic Sensory Investigation
FBI Headquarters Secret Psychic Detection Lab modern day…
Special Agent Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa sat clothed in a virgin white terry robe, in the lotus position, electrodes attached and grounded to the open air copper pipe pyramid, a device she’d designed to enhance her psychic projections and astral journeys. A small sterile white mat lie before her, and on the mat lay six items she’d been asked to “read”. The objects held a strange communion with her. She fingered each item, tossing several out of the pyramid, holding onto other items as she went.
From Cuba Blue:
Off the coast of Havana, Cuba modern day…
The coast of Havana’s clear-blue tropical sea heard the mechanical cry of screeching rust-encrusted gears that suddenly slammed to a standstill. Several nautical miles north of Canal del Entrada, Cuba, the whining pulley ratcheted once, then twice with biting and chomping. Then it stopped dead again on the dimly-lit shrimp trawler Sanabella II. In fact, the unexpected stillness stopped all activity aboard ship, and save for the screeching hungry seagulls, the deafening quiet reigned. Wide-eyed, the men, frozen in position, stared first at the choaked-off windlass and then at one another afraid to breathe, afraid to hope. Fishing had been wretchedly poor.
From City for Ransom:
Chicago, Illinois, June 1, 1893...3AM
The newly formed and lettered sign tore at its chain moorings where it dangled over the modest brownstone house, the shingle reading Dr. James Phineas Tewes, Phrenological and Magnetic Examiner until a lightning strike hit it, turning it into an unrecognizable charred mess.
Across town to the sound of thunder, lightning, wind, rain, and the clock tolling 5AM, Alastair Ransom climbed from bed, unable to sleep, his skin afire with malarial fever. He dosed himself with a hefty tumbler of quinine and Kentucky whiskey. He imagined strangling Dr. Caine McKinnette for having run out of his supply of quinine and antimony. He breathed in deeply, imagining the pleasure of his hands around the good doctor’s throat. Then once more what really troubled him began invading his night: the awful, bloody murder case that’d fallen into his lap the day before.
THESE ARE ALL examples of opening with active verbs, the conscious choice of few to no qualifiers, no WASes please! Any elementary or high school grammar text is worth revisiting to rekindle these notions into fire in a writer’s gut. It’s the little things that make a female or male lead compelling. Revisit Passive vs. Active Voice, the handful of pages devoted to Qualifiers vs. Absolutes (voice), and while at it, look up sentence combining for the 4 types of sentences— Simple, Compound, Complex, and Compound Complex. Imagine it, what Shakespeare utilized we all have to work with—shapes already formed, voice choice, to qualify or not to qualify, to BE or not to BE, and whether tis nobler in the mind to use a hammer blow of a two word sentence like Jesus wept, OR rather to compound it, complex it, or compound complex it as in the following:
Jesus wept. (pow, zap, bang, zoom! Simple single/first base)
Jesus wept, and others watched. (rings different bell in compound set)
In his sixteenth year on the planet, Jesus wept. (complex adds fragmentary introduction)
Jesus, in his sixteenth year on the planet, wept.
introduction becomes interrupting fragmentary, and we ring another kind of bell)
Now the home run of a sentence, the big boy: Compound Complex….
In his sixteenth year, Jesus wept, while from afar, others curiously, cautiously watched.
(intro. Frag) S + V (intro. Frag) S + adv. + adv. + V
Each choice we make, every little choice, becomes a major decision, and it is for this reason many people do not write or do not write well. Writing is a science and an art filled with the magic of decision-making, as writing is really about making a thousand decisions per sentence, per paragraph, per scene, per chapter. Not all your stories need take on the same voice, but within that single story or novel, your ONE consistent is that you be consistent and true to the voice you choose—whether male, female, black, white, yellow or green. But your Authorial Voice must need have its own logic and consistent mindset or ‘psychology’. In other words VOICE is the most important element of your story…especially if you hope to make it uniquely feminine, sir…or uniquely male, ma’am.
In essence, you have to “become” your character before you can SOUND like her or him or it. Finally, write to your opposite” is my watchword as this forces you into a true writing challenge. So set your stories in exotic places you’ve never been with exotic characters you’ve never known. You’ll surprise yourself and by all means don’t allow the WASes to go up the Wazoo!
CRAFT and EXECUTION has more facets and sides to them than a diamond so we will next consider another huge and important element of dramatic writing – knowing your facts. The best fiction relies heavily on—guess what—nonfiction, details, facts, figures, science, or history. Research is extremely important to the backbone of a story whether it be about the Underground Railroad or DNA matching. The following goes into some detail about researching one of your main characters – the bad guy!
CRAFTING CRAFTY DIALOGUE . . . the Devil’s in the Details, yes, but also in the Dialogue.
Laser-like Dialogue—Why It’s Done & How It’s Done: Ever wonder why some authors’ dialogue simply snaps, crackles, pops and sparkles?
The Why of Dialogue: It seldom comes easy or on first draft. It’s a matter of a makeover and rewriting, but you already knew that writing IS rewriting.
Make your dialogue over into Laser-like Dialgoue – the sort that cuts to the bone for bone-chilling suspense, intrigue, romance, adventure, and mystery. But first you have to understand why dialogue is so important to the overall action of the story to fill in the action quotient and keep the forward-moving dynamo of your story pumping. Dialogue is like an infusion of fresh blood. It must reveal character, and it can do so much to build your character and his psychology as in: “Don’t call me Trina! Call me Kat.”
Dialogue can reveal dreams, goals, ticks, old and new fears as well as memories without resorting to long flashbacks. “I hate it when a guy smothers his face in the crook of my neck. Seen enough vampire movies that I worry he’ll take out a chunk.”
If dialogue does not do the job of revealing character, then it is there to push the story along. “I know exactly who you are, and there’s a reason I’m armed.” This says a lot about both speaker and listener.
Dialogue is meant to reveal character and/or give “push” to the storyline, push the plot forward. Narrative can plod the plot whereas dialogue can prod the plot. If dialogue is truly a DI-alogue, that is two people speaking, it must also show: actions and reactions to speaking parts from grimaces to shakes of the head to rolling the eyes to lighting up a cigarette or going for a gun. Dialogue works in tandem with the actors’ actions and facial expression—on both sides of the dialogue. It’s not just what is said but how it is said, how it is received, the reaction.
But enough said about Why dialogue is important except to add that dialogue is action in motion. Keep it moving as you keep characters moving, and if they must dialogue in a sitting scene, say in a car, what they have to say must be made fascinating. Speaking for pages about the weather or what they don’t know about a third character can be deadly – “talking heads” time. When you stop the action to describe a person (character), place (setting), or thing (another noun and nouns are static), or if you stop action of characters so they can speak or dialogue, you are already failing to write Laser-like dialogue. You want your speaking parts to cut like a laser. You don’t see any extraneous words in a joke, none in a comic strip. Economy of words is how characters in a story should behave. Speak as if the “balloon” of the quotation marks is “limited” and so you have only so many clips of space to say what needs saying. Think Twitter time where 140 characters is maximum.
Part II: The How of Dialogue—So much of this requires rewriting the dialogue.
Okay, let’s get off WHY dialogue is so essential to fiction and onto the HOW of making it more laser-like. (Aside: read stories without dialogue even from the masters of fiction and you will find the “telling” of the story is limited to one voice and it often has the style of a fable). Compare now the paragraph from the “blowhard” character we are all more apt to write in draft one to the rewritten paragraph wherein the same lines from the blowhard character are divvied up…sorted out as in what really happens when people actually dialogue and not stand for monologues:
EXAMPLE of times when a “Blowhard Character” gets all the juicy lines:
“Stay away from the windows. For all we know, Cantu’s tracked us down, thanks to Carl. Came knocking at the door, maybe in some sort of disguise. I suspect Cantu has hold of him. That certainly looks like Carl’s wedding band on the severed hand.”
EXAMPLE of Lines divvied among 3 characters instead:
“Stay away from the windows.” Rydell grabbed Kat roughly by the arm.
“You think Cantu’s out there?” she asked, studying the storm.
“Came knocking at the door, sure…perhaps in disguise.”
“So Cantu’s got hold of Carl?” asked Nora.
Rydell pointed to the thing that’d come crashing through the window. “Severed his hand to tell us so.”
Nora, cowering in a corner, swallowed hard. “C-Certainly looks like Carl’s wedding band.”
“And look at the nails.” Kat shivered.
The dead nails had been chewed to the quick. Nora near whispered, “Carl all right.”
Dialogue shows in its very nature; it shows instead of tells. When one character gets all the good lines, it reverts back to “telling” instead of “showing”…only now one of the characters is “telling” instead of letting us “see” for ourselves.
A couple of great exercises to do here to learn to create an economy of words spewing from various character mouths is to read religiously for a couple of weeks the comic strips. In comic strips every sort of inflection and communiqué trick can be eventually seen on the page inside the “balloons” of dialogue and you visually see how the speaking part “moves” with the narrative or what’s in the frame, what’s in the picture. In fiction, you need a similar marriage of speaker with his/her action set off in his/her “space” or paragraph. With each new speaking part, you indent. Even if Kat or Nora or Marcus say a mere single word, that’s a paragraph break.
Another terrific exercise is to write a 500-word story. Where you start, the shrink’s office, you end in the shrink’s office, closet-closet, basement-basement, or jewelry store no matter. Keep the geography tight and keep the dialogue going. Read a lot of good flash fiction. Some will revert to the fairytale or style of Aesop’s Fable structure to get the job done and no matter how compelling the story, without dialogue, it is essentially a retelling-telling as in fable format, a single narrative voice (perfectly fine if that’s what you like). Other fast stories and novels rely far more heavily on dialogue.
Allow your characters to talk and walk for themselves; create actors on a stage-page; real people who must speak to one another to sort it all out. Allow yourself plenty of space to write pages of dialogue you may never use. Practice makes perfect. One practice method that is fantastic is to write down the comic strip you are reading in story form retaining the words, replacing balloons with quotation marks, and retaining the images, what’s in each frame, and giving an indented paragraph to each speaker and his movements within that frame. Each speaker is a paragraph, each frame may or may not be a paragraph. This is an excellent tool also for dealing with three speakers or more in a scene. You do not change any words or what’s in the frames, but you can embellish them greatly to enhance the story and to improve you felicity with dialogue combined with narrative lines.
Another great exercise is to imitate an author’s work…emulate his or her dialogue. Imitation is flattery tenfold and as with painting, you learn technique not from the ether but from studying the style of a master craftsman at work.
When your dialogue can bring people to an aha experience, a memory, a tear, a laugh, this is powerful stuff. The dialogue between a mother and daughter in City for Ransom drew rave reviews from my editor at HarperCollins. Likewise, the dialogue between another mother and daughter in PSI Blue drew great comments from my editor at Echelon Press. My Shadows in the White City has garnered the best reviews of my career, which goes back to 1978 when I sold my first novel, Sub-Zero. Over the span of years and the experience and labor and lessons learned after doing some 44 “odd” mystery, suspense, horror, and YA titles under four pen names and my own name, I’ve learned to take a laser to “fat” paragraphs even in dialogue as these are essentially monologues and break them up with asides, actions, interruptions, and all manner of things that might intrude on someone’s trying to act the “blowhard” character. No one likes a blowhard, not even if his name is James Bond.
Marcus ushered them from the room, saying, “He’s found us; he’s out there.”
In the midst of the howling winds, a new sound filtered into the house: the terrible cries of what was left of Carl Jordan.
“Arm yourself, Rydell!” Katrina called out.
“Get downstairs, all of you.”
She halted halfway down. “Hold on. There’s no way out from here. Is there?”
“There’s a secret room.”
“Secret room?”
“A root cellar.”
“I’m not hiding like some rat in a root cellar.”
“It has a doorway that takes you up under the deck and out of here if necessary. Just do it. Get the kids in there, now. Nora, you too.”
Again in the distance, they heard the unmistakable howl of a male voice telegraphing horrible pain.
“Maybe we’ve bitten off more than we can chew, here Kat,” he told her as she led Nora and the children into the basement.
“What’re you going to do?”
“Call Tim maybe. Get more guns up here, hunt Cantu down like the animal he is.”
“ “Look, is it possible the storm could’ve got hold of Carl instead of Cantu?”
“Not likely this is paranoia, Kat. This is his work.”
“All right. Agreed. Call in the cavalry.”
“Just too much at stake here with the kids. It’s not just us against him anymore, Kat.”
Nora rejoined her children, but Kat stayed beside Rydell, who whipped open his cell phone and dialed 911 to get hold of Grimes. “Damn phone’s not working.”
“Battery? What?”
“Interference.”
“The storm?”
“Cantu. He’s an electronics genius, remember?”
“You think he’s jamming your signal?”
“Try your phone.”
She did so with the same result—static, no ring tone. “Maybe it’s the storm…maybe.”
“You think? Come on, Kat!”
“Tell me it’s possible.”
He stared long into her eyes. “Sorry, I’m done with wishful thinking.”
“Then he is out there?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s got Carl.”
Again Carl’s keening cry cut through the storm. “ That’s not some bobcat you hear.”
Final word. Clip, cut, prune, shorten, use conjunctions. Think economy of speech as if saying too much hurts a character. Often less is more. You are not writing Shakespeare and in today’s fiction market a Shakespearian monologue doesn’t work. Even the mad scientist in your science fiction story, regardless of his having all the answers as in Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, has to be treated like any other character. The other characters can’t allow speeches from anyone. If you want a speech, you go to a political rally.
Go back and examine every paragraph in your story and ask, “Can I scene it out? Can I turn this from narration into moving, speaking actors on my stage-page? If it is already a dialogue and it is a hefty three, four plus sentences, can one or more of those lines be turned into a question, an objection, an exclamation from another of the characters to “break up the blowhard” and turn the diatribe into a dialogue?
Laser-like dialogue happens when you reduce, reduce, reduce. Good luck with your dialogue and in the meantime, open any of my eleven Instinct titles or my 4 Edge series titles for more examples, or go to PSI Blue, open a page of dialogue and study, study, study. One of the reasons that the Chicago Tribune called Shadows in the White City “historical fiction at its best” is the time and effort I put in on making my dialogue sing and laser-like in its structure.
MORE “STILL” ON DIALOGUE:
Monologue to Dialogue –Writing Tips from a Pro & a Prof --
Two things can turn me off on page one, sometimes paragraph one. They both have to do with the narrative voice. One are piled on passive sentences riddled with the word was which is like saying "take my word for it, it was cold, it was damp, it was blue, it was deep, etc." And the second one is a piling on of qualifying words and phrases as in "it seems, it may be, possibly, perhaps, about to be, getting there, I think." These two aberrations destroy any sense of dramatic moment and forward moving story or character building.
An old book I can’t recall the author was entitled How to be Brief. I read it when I was in Junior High. I can’t say that I am always brief, especially when discussing something close to my heart or ranting on an injustice—my thing. However, when editing a piece of writing you can’t be too brief. Script writers know this well. The economy of words in a scene in scripts amazes me. Some scripts have fewer words than a lot of poems. Paul Newman won an Academy Award on a handful of lines he spoke in The Road to Perdition, and the entire movie has so little dialogue but the words are powerfully right on. Economy of words in dialogue is something I still work at today.
Off top of my head let me paint a paragraph that needs for the author to come back to it and “dialogue it” because as is, even written in an “active voice” style lacks the drama that dialogue could bring to the scene. First in “rough draft” it is:
Thomas thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye slip beneath the sofa. Alexis saw the expression on his face and winced. She wondered what they were doing here in the house where Laurel Cooke was murdered the night before. She grabbed Thomas by the arm and asked him exactly that, but he shook loose, going deeper into the interior. He mumbled something about their maybe finding something the cops had missed. “I think we’re breaking the law, here, Thomas. This is a crime scene. Maybe we oughta go.” He ignored her, going deeper, in search of the blood spatters. “I wanna see where Laurel died.” He said it as if he had no choice.
On a rewrite consider what I call “dialoguing it” –that is asking far more of the characters. Asking them to walk, talk, move on stage, and to put their five senses to work. The scene above is converted to the one below in far more “Showing” fashion, in far more dramatic fashion as in a stage play or film or TV script:
“Did you see that?” Thomas jumped as he spoke, pointing to the creaky floor boards between sofa and boarded up window. “Thought I saw something slip under there.”
“Something? What kinda something?” Alexis inched closer to Thomas and his flashlight.
“Probably just a mouse.”
“What’re we doing here, Thomas?”
“What’s it look like? We’re poking around.”
“In the place where they found Alexis’s body we’re poking around!”
“She wasn’t murdered here, just dumped here by her killer.”
“How do you know that?”
“Overheard those cops talking last night after she was discovered.”
“Whole town was looking for her.”
“Yeah, maybe her killer, too.”
“Whataya mean?”
“Killers often join in the hunt.”
“For their own victims?”
“Sure, yeah. It’s how they keep up on what the cops know and don’t know.”
“You mean like you did--eavesdropping?”
Thomas frowned and shook his head. “Yeah, like I did, but I’m no killer.”
“What else do you know about Laurel’s killer?”
“Well I’m no FBI profiler but—” he hesitated. His beam found a far back room, door slightly ajar. “I think that’s where they found her, in there.”
“But what? You’re not an FBI profiler but what?” She didn’t want to focus on the other room or the circle of light on the door ahead.