Advice from a Novice

I'm six or seven books into my educational tour of crime fiction. I'm learning a lot. It's still the best homework ever.

Here's a list of some of the notes I've taken so far on what works and what doesn't in the books I've read. This is completely subjective. And as the title points out, it's a list of how-tos from somebody that hasn't. But I heard those monkeys were getting closer to re-creating Hamlet. If they can do that, I can give whatever advice I want!

1. Cut the pronouns. Lee Child is a master of this. You don't read about Reacher, "He found the door ajar. He pushed it open cautiously. He looked around." That's clumsy. Instead you read "He found the door ajar. Pushed it open cautiously. Looked around." Short, declarative sentences win the day.
2. Have a ticking clock. Yes, it was cheesy on 24. And yes, I'm speaking figuratively. The story has to have an impetus to move the characters to immediate action. Nobody wants to read about detective Will Solveitsomeday when they can read about captain Urgent Matters.
3. Decide on one familiar name per character. And stick with it. Nothing is worse that having the author switch between a character's first name, last name, pet name, nick name, rank, etc. Book characters don't have faces. We count on names for recognition. Don't confuse the reader.
4. Don't use dialogue as a plot mover. If the words coming from your character's mouth feel like you've extracted them to move along the story, revise. Readers notice.
5. Don't be afraid to cut. Be ruthless with your own work. I've just decided to chop off a 5,000+ word chapter. It doesn't advance the story, I don't come back to the characters. I can find a more effective use for that space (I think)
6. Don't be heavy handed with your opinion. If your character thinks his boss is a bafoon, you would do better to have the boss act as such and let the reader surmise than have the character state it. This also goes back to showing vs. telling.

The best advice of course is to do what I'm doing; read. Find what you do and don't like and work your manuscript accordingly.

Best of luck. I need it.

Oh, good luck to you too!

The Thigh Bone's Connected to the...Popcorn?

I don't usually watch commercials. The DVR has mercifully removed them from my tv routine. But every now and then if the tv is on in the background and my thumb is not glued to the fast forward button a few of the weasels manage to slip in. Which is ok. Because my backup is a well developed shield of indifference. I could care less what's being hawked. So the only time I take notice is when the volume goes inexplicably loud (thank you, congress, for fixing this) or something comes on that is so mind numbingly stupid I have to pay attention.

This is the story of a stupid commercial.

It starts with a man staring perplexed at a deep fried globe between his thumb and forefinger. The voice-over comes in with, "What part of the chicken is nugget?".

I'm with them here. Have you seen the mechanically separated slop that is a chucked nugget before the forming and frying? No? Then today is your special day:

It sort of looks like the end result of an elephant given a few gallons of Pepto Bismol to no avail.

We have forsworn chicken nuggets in our house. I prefer my meat product to possess the vague physical form of an animal. Now we eat Morning Star Chick'n Nuggets. Did you catch the replacement of the "I" with the apostrophe? That means they're soy. And actually very tasty. But I digress.

Next comes the assertion that, "We're KFC. Our cooks don't make nuggets, they make popcorn chicken!"

Excuse me? Exactly what part of the chicken is the POPCORN? I'm not writing this as a detached reflection. I'm recounting my immediate reaction. This is what I yelled--screamed--at my tv. How many stupid people did that line have to pass through on its way to my living room?

The commercial goes on to detail that popcorn chicken is in fact small pieces of the most premium breast meat (or the scraps left over from the larger pieces of their maltreated poultry, you decide which is more likely). But I'm no longer listening. I'm still trying to figure out just what part of a chicken is the popcorn.

I still have no idea.

You can watch the commercial here

A Witness Above

I've been neglectful in my posting. Almost as though I'm trying to read a large number of books in a short period of time while managing a job, a family, and my own manuscript revisions (ok--thoughts of revisions).

Since my last post I've read Janet Evanovich's first Stephanie Plum novel, One for the Money. If you're a fan of Robert B. Parker and you haven't read Ms. Evanovich you're missing out. It's almost like reading a female Spenser. In a word, hilarious.

Much like my previous post I feel the frontrunner doesn't need my compliments overflowing their plate. So let me focus on a novel I just completed by a writer with a bright future.

A Witness Above is Andy Straka's debut crime novel. It's almost a decade old, and he's written several more since. The protagonist is Frank Pavlicek, a discredited former NYPD detective living out his mundane life as a Private Investigator in a small West Virginia town, consoling himself from the deterioration of his family with his love for falconry.

The description of Pavlicek I've just given makes him sound damned depressing. He's not. Straka takes us quickly through the events leading him to where he is when the story begins, and fills us in on more of the backstory as we go along.

The plot itself involves a dead drug dealer discovered by Pavlicek, and his teenage daughter's implication in the crime. As the thread unravels there is deceit and uncertainty in droves. I had only fleeting suspicions of the ending before it came. This is much to Straka's credit. I don't expect to be kept in suspense of whodunnit, but of the resolution. When I get both I'm very pleased.

There were some moments where the dialogue felt pushed, like it was moving to serve the story and not true to the characters. But there were also some very entertaining exchanges, and by the end I was ready to read move about Frank Pavlicek.

I hope you all take a look. Mr. Straka deserves it.

Next up, The Kotov Syndrome by Russell Blake. It's free on iBooks and I'm in between trips to the library. Perfect combo.

After that I hope to get my hands on a copy of Antler Dust, by Mark Stevens. I swear I reserved a copy from the library, but now a search for the book and author comes back with nothing! Guess I'll try Amazon.

I'm still open to recommendations. Tweet me.

Book Reviews - The Killing Floor, Open Season

I'm fairly certain the Internet masses aren't clamoring for my review of a couple of books published more than a decade ago. But I've read them and I'm on the train without another to read. Maybe I should write a bit.
.
..
...
....
.....
......

For those of you that stuck around after my enthralling open, let's get to it.

I'm two books into my "20 books by Thanksgiving" odyssey. Judging by my current pace, it'll be more like a 10 book odyssey. I should probably stop referencing it as an odyssey and switch to calling it a three hour cruise.

First I read The Killing Floor by Lee Child. It was great. Jack Reacher is a great tough guy and I look forward to reading about him in the following installments. Mr. Child does not need my help to sell books, look up his rave reviews on Amazon.

Next was Open Season by C.J. Box.

This one was unique for a couple of reasons.

1) It was out of the scope of my usual reading material. The novel is set in the Wyoming Rockies. The protagonist is Joe Picket, a Fish and Game Warden. This is about as far away from Spenser's Boston as one can get. I'm not a hunter. I enjoyed my trip through Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks, but I certainly didn't traipse through the countryside and become an outdoorsman. But Mr. Box did a good job painting a picture of the landscape.

2) The first half of the book honestly didn't engage me. I might even have put it down if I weren't reading to absorb the features of published work in order to shape up my own manuscript. The characters felt shallow and cookie-cutter. The plot felt soft and inconsequential. The writing itself didn't seem up to par. But halfway through the characters filled out and the plot picked up it's clip. I realized the issues with the first half of the book we easily explainable. The characters were new, they had to be introduced. And Mr. Box was writing a normal family. It's easily to grab attention with Jack Reacher, arrested in scene one. But Joe Pickett is a family man, and the author wanted to put that across. The plot felt slow because of a crazy thing called exposition.

I'm going to touch a bit more on the exposition. I know that my manuscript needs to have better pace for the first third or so. The exposition drags it down. But it's nice to see that Open Season spent almost half the book setting things up. It means I can add movement instead of stripping the exposition that needs to be there.

The most valuable lesson I learned so far? Cut the pronoun usage. It doesn't have to be "Sam raised his gun. He took aim. He fired in earnest," when " Sam raised his gun. Took aim. Fired in earnest," works just as well and reads better.

Don't forget, I'm taking suggestions. I'm even reading some books from Twitter followers Andy Straka and Mark Stevens.

Creative Inspiration

I don't know what it is specifically that makes others write. I think we'd all like to be rich and famous but if that's your main motivation you're likely to quit after realizing how hard the publishing industry is.

We writers obviously have a love for the printed word. We're usually readers first. But what drives us to put pen to paper (or to be more current--fingers to iPad) and create?

For me the answer is appreciation and inspiration. When I read/view/listen to some piece of artistic expression that really strikes me as wonderful it fills me from top to bottom with appreciation for the work, and inspiration to create something that will have a similar effect on another.

Yesterday I was listening to Adele and was amazed (as I always am) by the haunting quality of her voice. Her music feels to substantial, so meaningful, so much more than the rest of the current music scene. Yes, I'm a writer of novels, and it's completely apples to oranges, but hearing her creativity fueled m desire to contribute.

I get the same feeling each week watching the extraordinary writing on Parenthood. The characters are written so well that I feel like I'm watching a real family. It makes me want to write full characters and believable dialogue like that.

It's almost like a big artistic pay-it-forward system, where we all inspire enough to put forth our best and, in turn, inspire further.

Thank you, fellow writers, for inspiring me.

Schindler's List

I watched Schindler's list for the first time over the weekend (and into the week...and for what seemed like an eternity. Not the duration optimized for busy parents watching in the space between the kids bedtime and our inevitable decline into exhausted stupor). It was of course great. I'm probably the last person on the earth to have seen it, so I'm certainly not going to sing it's praises like they're new.

What stuck with me most coming out of the experience is the way it hasn't stuck with me. At least not the way a book would. Yes, the treatment by the Nazi's was horrible. Yes, the emaciated, frail bodies of the Polish Jews were sickening. Yes, the exploitation of slave labor and breaking apart of families was deplorable. And yet...

None of it stuck with me. A few days later I don't feel like I'm still carrying the weight of their burden. And here's why that's interesting; after reading about the same events I did.

The detail described in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was so thorough, so precise, and so vivid that it sickened me for days. The characters I connected to in Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance were so full of life and strength, and I watched them wither away in body and spirit over the course of a thousand pages. There were times while reading and after that I felt physically ill for them.

The point is that as great a job as Steven Spielberg did on that movie (not to mention Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and the rest of the cast, including the inexplicably thin extras) there is no way to capture the true depth and breath, both in scope and character, of that event in a movie. Even if it is three hours.

Books connect in ways that film cannot. Sure, a picture is worth a thousand words. But how about a couple hundred thousand? Long live the written word! Now...if we could just get more people to read.
______________

Note: the one area that the movie succeed in a way that a book couldn't was the final scene wherein a procession of descendants from the Jews that Oskar Schindler saved made their way to his tomb and paid their respects. Seeing the sheer number of people who are in the world today because of him was much more powerful than reading a number (6,000).

Final Note: Yes, I know I'm missing the most obvious book to movie comparison - the book Schindler's List. So shoot me, I haven't had time to read it.

An Education in Crime Fiction

My next endeavor can be viewed as bass-ackwards (since I've already written a book) or an exercise in honing my craft.

I'm taking the vaunted advice gathered during by submersion in the shark tank to heart and setting up a reading list. I plan on reading 20 crime novels by Thanksgiving. This whirlwind tour is intended to educate me on the finer points of plotting, pace, forward momentum, and dialogue employed by published writers.

Here's where you come in: I'm looking for suggestions on which books to choose. Specifically in the mystery/thriller genre. I would most closely associate my style with Robert B. Parker (and hope to someday be good enough to inspire that comparison out of others). I'm open to any similar books. When in doubt, suggest a title, I'll certainly consider it.

Please be specific, give me a name and title, not just "anything by X". And if you're a writer, feel free to tout your own work, I'd love to read it.

This is no contest, there's no incentive to comment to win anything. But if you're reading my blog you're likely a lover of good books. And who doesn't salivate at the mouth to recommend a good book?

Recommend Away!