Acts of Malice

I was chatting with my father about my novel-in-progress tonight, and he made an interesting observation. My dad, you see, has been an advertising and marketing guy for most of his professional career. “We used to have a saying back in the days when I was making radio commercials,” he told me. ‘We called it ‘The Theater of the Mind’.”

With radio, you don’t have any visuals for the listener to see. You can’t literally show them a picture, and you have to paint the scene for them — through description, through sound effects, through dialogue. The visual image, for good or for ill, unfolds inside the viewer’s mind. If you did a good job painting the scene, that mental picture will be every bit as vivid as what you’d see on the television. If you didn’t do a good job, your listeners change the channel.

That’s how it is with books, too, only we don’t even get the luxury of a sound effect track. Description, dialogue, pacing and suspense have to carry the day. Because really, that’s all you have.

One writer I can think of who does this stuff very well is Jodi Picoult. In fact, I have to say I think she’s a preternaturally good storyteller. Her dialogue crackles, her description is as vivid as anything you’d see on a TV or movie screen, and her stories are so absolutely, gut-wrenchingly plausible that you can’t help get sucked in. She understands that a novel is an exercise of what my dad called “the theater of the mind”, and she writes accordingly.

So, how about it? Who are your favorite writers who get this concept? Which books or authors do you think don’t get it? Sound off in the comments!

Since I got my iBook (about which more at www.onemacwriting.com), I’ve been evolving a set of tools that works well for my writing. One of the indispensables on the Mac has been Notational Velocity, a sort of minimally structured free-form information capture tool. Alas, Notational Velocity is a Mac-only tool, so I hacked together a Windows program that works sort of like Notational Velocity. Basically, operation is like this:

• Type a note title in the small box at the top of the Window. The list of existing notes will filter as you type. Once you have the title for your note entered, press Enter to create or edit that note.
• Click out of the edit box or press the escape key to save your note when you’re done.
• You can also select a note to edit by double-clicking a note title in the note list, or by single-clicking on a note title and pressing Enter.

At this point, the note title is case-sensitive. In other words, “TEST”, “test”, and “TesT” refer to three different notes. This may change in a future version. Also, NVWindows does not synchronize with Notational Velocity, though I’m open to input on how to make synching work. The data is stored in a SQLite3 file called nvdata.db in the application directory. On the theory that a picture is worth 1,000 words (and yes, that IS Windows XP; I just have a visual theme that looks Mac-esque):

Download is available from: http://tsunix.taylored-software.com/~tlcravit/NVWindows_0.01.zip

Comments, feedback, bug reports, etc. to tammy@tammycravit.us are welcome, and will be responded to as time permits. This app is something I’ve been developing for my own use, so it’s not my highest priority at the moment.

As writers, and as human beings, we are all like rocks, worn into interesting shapes by the action of a thousand, or million, waves washing over us over and over. The individual impact of one wave might be insignificant at the time, but the cumulative effect of all of them later makes us who and what we are.

Over on Murderati yesterday, Alexandra Sokoloff asked the following question:

Authors, what would be your ideal list of three other authors to be compared with? Or who would be your three authors who influenced you the most as a writer? And/or – have you ever had a review that reminded you exactly what your mission was?

It’s funny - as I got to thinking about Alex’s question, I realized that the people who influenced me the most as writers often did so in other ways than the words they put on the page. And, in fact, some of my greatest influences aren’t writers at all. But they surely shaped who I am as a writer, who I am as a human being, and the truths I have to tell.

Here, then, in no particular order are some of my greatest influences:

Laura Lippman, who gave me a copy of Marjorie Williams’ unparalleled anthology “The Woman at the Washington Zoo”, which showed me a style of narrative I never got to experience writing for my local newspaper ten column inches at a time.

My first newspaper editor, a grizzled old newsman named Russ Stockton (who is now deceased, a fact which grieves me greatly). One of my first stories for him involved talking about my experience as a rape survivor, page one above the fold. Russ taught me in word and deed that writers need to be fearless in their pursuit to tell the truth, and not to pull punches.

Sue Grafton, who made time for an interview from a small-town newspaper reporter and was beyond gracious with me even though I caught her four days before she was leaving on a trip.

Elaine Charney, the first teacher I ever had who taught me to love learning for its own sake.

Two dear friends of mine who shall remain nameless here to protect their privacy. One is an attorney who fights tirelessly for the rights of the most young and vulnerable of our society’s members; the other, did battle on the front lines in the war for the children and now teaches others how to fight the good fight. From them, I’ve learned courage under fire and never giving up no matter what.

How about it? If you wrote down the people who’ve most shaped you, who would be on your list?
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I’ve been pondering lately why it is that people seem so fascinated with how we writers work. Readers — and those that aren’t — always want to know where we get our ideas, what tools we use, what process we use to weave a tale from thin air. Some would-be and beginning writers even study the techniques of their favorite bestselling authors, succumbing to the cargo cult thinking that replicating the process will reproduce the resulting bestsellerdom.

This focus on the “how” of writing always puzzles me a little, especially coming from non-writers. I can’t think of many other areas of life where we show similar curiosity. We don’t care what kind of blade our contractor puts on his Sawzall, so long the sink is in the right place when the kitchen remodel is done. We don’t really want to know the exact mix of pigments our painter uses, so long as our dining room wall ends up Tatami Tan and not some other color. We don’t even really care what brand of violin they’re playing on the CD in the car stereo — well, unless it’s a Stradivarius, perhaps.

So why the fascination with how writers work?

I think the reason is, perhaps, that the process of writing is the closest thing we have in today’s world to alchemy. It’s almost as though we possess a form of philosopher’s stone. But rather than transmuting lead into gold, the writer’s magic transmutes ideas and thoughts and the small snippets of ordinary lives into whole worlds and universes, and lets us share those invisible nowheres with other people.

To me, that is the true magic of writing. We can all create castles and dragons and princesses in our minds, or imagine killing a hated boss, or falling in love with a handsome and mysterious stranger. But the writer’s lapis philosophorum has the remarkable power to anchor that imaginary world into the physical one, and to create a portal between the two. We do more than lose ourselves in our fantasies: We create a way for others to enter them, to see the worlds we create, to experience the stories that play out in our imaginations, and to pass between those worlds as easily and simply as picking up a book.

If writing is the magic of today, and we are the sorceresses and mages of the modern world, it’s no small wonder that people want to know how we do it. After all, everyone always wants to know how the trick is done.

I’ve been reading an interesting book this week, Freeing Your Creativity by Marshall J. Cook. One of the concepts that Cook, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, talks about in his book is that of the Squelcher.

No, this isn’t a post about red herrings, the sort of devious wrong turns with which mystery writers like to ensnare their readers. Rather, it’s in response to a comment on the Murderati blog from my friend Pari Noskin Taichert, about throwing away a whole bunch of great prose because she realized her book started in the wrong place.

I’ve read a great many stories, especially in the critique groups I’ve belonged to, where it was clear that the writer had taken a great idea, run it off into the ditch, and left it there because she was afraid to backtrack and start over. There the stories that you read, finish, and then wonder “why didn’t the writer use Jane as the narrator instead of Igor?” or “why did the romance with Aaron spring up out of nowhere in the middle of the story?” or “why did Artie, who didn’t show up until page 273 of the book, turn out to be the killer, when George clearly had a more logical motive?”

I think that in many cases, the answer is that the author invested too much writing into the story before realizing that George would have made a better killer, that Jane really did have a more compelling voice, or that Aaron should have appeared sooner in the narrative. This is a problem especially common among writers who don’t outline — and I should qualify my biases by saying I ususally don’t outline, either, though I try to have a pretty solid idea of the major flow of my plot before I begin writing — but it’s not exclusively the fate of the non-outliners. Sometimes it’s easier to see these false starts in an outline, but sometimes characters have a way of surprising you and doing things you wouldn’t have expected, back before you understood them so well.

But outline or don’t, the trouble comes when you realize you’ve made a mistake. To be fair, in some cases, authors don’t realize they’ve gone down a blind alley, and there’s not a lot that can be done about that. Hopefully, those folks have good critiquing partners and editors and the like, people who might tumble to things they’ve overlooked. But that’s another topic for another day. Today’s question is, what do you do when you realize you’ve gotten sucked into the wormhole, and getting out means blowing up a day’s (or month’s) worth of work?

This is where a certain attitude of detachment works in your favor. Remind yourself that your words aren’t your children. Remind yourself that electrons and ink molecules don’t have feelings, and your paper won’t feel wounded if you throw it in the recycle bin. Your thumb drive won’t ever go on Oprah to talk about how traumatized it felt when you re-formatted it. Erasers won’t leap screaming from your hands, shouting, “No! Don’t make us!”

You are a writer. The words have come before, and they’ll come again. And part of this job (hey, you did choose this crazy profession, right?) is throwing away the words that aren’t working, starting over when you have to, and clawing your way out of the blind alleys. Sure, it’s hard to see three days work tossed in the trash. But if your job is to produce the very best story you can, sometimes that goes with the territory.

“But, I wasted all that time!” I hear you cry. No, you didn’t. Going down a wrong turn might have been, in fact, the necessary step to discovering the truth about how your story needed to unfold. A map doesn’t help you figure out how to reach your destination until you know where you are on it. Sometimes you can’t see the right road until you look at things from the vantage point of the wrong one. When Thomas Edison was asked if he felt all the experiments which led up to his invention of the incandescent light were wasted, he reportedly answered, “Not at all. Now, I definitely know more than a thousand ways how NOT to make a light bulb.”

So don’t mourn the time spent in those wrong turns. Dust yourself off and, armed with the knowledge that you now know another way not to make a light bulb, go forward and reshape your story. Use the new-found direction you’ve won, and take your writing in the direction it needs to go.

Whether you’re writing mysteries, thrillers or even romances, a key part of any story is tension. Will the pretty young housewife evade the crazed killer hiding in her bathroom closet? Will the cop ferret out the mad poisoner, or will he strike again? Will the beautiful maiden find her Prince Charming and ride away into the sunset? If your story doesn’t have any tension, any element of unanswered question, your readers won’t have any reason to care about how it ends. And if they don’t care, they won’t keep reading.

There are myriad ways to create and build tension, but one of the most powerful tools in the writer’s arsenal is also one of the simplest: raise the stakes.

Thriller writers are especially adept at wielding this tool. Take a look at a good thriller, and you’ll see a steady progression: things get bad, then they get worse. Triumphs are followed by defeats and those by more defeats. The ultimate victory, when it comes, is always hard-won - which is part of what makes it satisfying. It’s hard to savor a victory that’s won too easily, or one that comes without challenge.

Let’s look at an example. Here’s the germ of a story, a beginning onto which we can build:

A woman is cashing a check at the bank when robbers storm into the place, guns drawn. In the ensuing confrontation, a guard is shot and killed and the woman is taken hostage.

But let’s look at some places we could introduce yet more tension into this framework:

• What if the robbers are themselves escaped prison inmates, who stole their guns from a nearby farmhouse? What if the leader of the gang is a convicted murderer who’s facing a needle if he goes back to prison? He’s dead anyway, so he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being ruthless and cold-blooded.

• What if one of the hostages is a fugitive on the run from justice? Or what if the mousy-looking guy in the corner just happens to be the man whose testimony put one of them away in the first place? Hey, stranger things have happened.

• What if our female hostage is a single mom with a small child at home? That’s not bad, but it’s a tad clicheed, so let’s raise the stakes a bit more. What if her son is seriously ill? Let’s say he’s got a chronic and ultimately fatal lung disease, and he needs a breathing treatment every eight hours. He’s at home sleeping right now, because mom was only counting on being gone for a few minutes, but pretty soon he’s going to wake up and need that treatment. And he can’t administer it himself.

If you’re a writer, what have you done in your stories to create tension? What are your favorite ways to raise the stakes? And if you’re a reader, how do your favorite writers keep your pulse racing?

We’re back after a long and involuntary hiatus, about which more later. For today’s post, though, I wanted to share my response to a Murderati post by the inestimable Pari Noskin Taichert. Pari asks:

Does publisher brand matter at all? Do Harlequin or St. Martin’s mean anything anymore? Is Simon & Schuster still known for quality? Do Random House, Mira, Intrigue, Soho, Poisoned Pen or Tor carry any value-added as far as the customer is concerned?

I don’t know, but those questions beget more: Will publishers as we know them become such behemoths, slow moving beasts, that even traditionally-published authors will opt to self-publish in order to get rid of the middlemen (publishers and distributors)? When the big chains install print-on-demand machines in their stores, will there be any benefit whatsover by going the traditional route?

I find it interesting, from a business standpoint, that people seem to look at traditional publishing vs. self-publishing as an either/or proposition. It seems there are people who argue vehemently that traditional publishers are the only ones who matter, and others who argue with equal vehemence that the big publishing houses are pushing themselves to irrelevance.

My question is, why does it need to be an either/or?

Consider what happens when you shift focus from publishing to another business. Starbucks produces vast amounts of coffee, and has a great distribution network. They offer their customers a certain ubiquity, along with a consistency of product. They offer their suppliers access to a huge marketplace, and in return they likely receive those goods at a discount.

On the other hand, my friend Alma serves darned good coffee at the Mexican restaurant she owns. Alma has five employees, all family, and no aspirations of becoming a multinational corporation. And the fact that Alma’s coffee sales in a year wouldn’t come close to what Starbucks sells in a day doesn’t mean she should sell her coffee pot and move on. Some people love her coffee and look askance at the masses who pay twice as much for the same product from the green-apron folks. And, likewise, some people happily pay $4.75 for their morning latte while looking down their noses at Alma’s tiny restaurant.

So, who’s right? Which coffee is better? I think it depends on what you’re looking for. And, coming back to the publishing industry, it depends there too.

To stretch my metaphor a bit, the big publishing houses are rather like Starbucks — they offer great distribution and (potentially) marketing channels, and a certain consistency of product. The tiny presses and self-published authors, on the other hand, are like my friend’s restaurant — they don’t have the visibility of the big guys, but they can still make a darned good cup of coffee.

So, why should the publishing industry be any different than any other? Why couldn’t multiple business models coexist, giving authors the freedom to make choices — throughout their career — about which model would best suit their short- and long-term goals? Why does “published through a traditional publishing company” still make sense as a definition of who is and isn’t an author?

My friend Frank has written a couple of spy novels. They’re self-published, and they’re not (nor do they aspire to be) Frank’s attempt at becoming the next Clancy or Le Carre. But he’s sold a few hundred copies, and is now in his third print run of one of them. None of the big publishing houses would likely pick up his work. But he’s content to tell his stories to a few hundred interested fans, and it seems silly to me to argue that his choice isn’t a valid one.

Perhaps self-publishing isn’t the choice all of us would make, but it’s brought him the level of success he wants and a local fan base that enjoys his work. So what’s the problem? Why should he have to aspire to be a Starbucks, when he’s perfectly content with serving up a few hundred good cups of coffee?

Over on the excellent Murderati blog, Pari Noskin Taichert posed an interesting question: What is it, in the end, that makes a reader pick up a book? Is it the relentless crush of Madison Avenue pushing slick glossy ads and co-op space on the reading public? Or is it something more subtle that encourages a reader to try a new author or plunk down a wad of cash for a book from a familiar one?

This is an interesting set of questions, and it’s one I think the whole media industry (books, movies, music) struggles with. The simple fact of the matter is that publishers haven’t shown themselves to be vastly successful in predicting what people want to buy — we see just as many books and movies with huge budgets that fall flat as we do sleeper hits — even though they’d like to think they do. When you set aside all the hype and spin and buzz, that’s the reality.

So, can you predict what makes readers pick up that first book? I don’t think so. I think it starts with the sort of folks who’re willing to take a flyer on an unfamiliar name. To borrow from Pari’s analogy, they’re willing to sit down at the corner table and buy the lady another glass of Drumnadrochit or Glenlivet and strike up a conversation.

No, the real magic, in my mind, is what happens next. Once the reader’s invested that metaphorical glass of scotch, the lady’s got to have something to keep the evening moving forward. To me, that comes down to two frustratingly fuzzy intangibles: you have to tell a good tale, and you have to build a relationship.

I don’t think marketing a book is about glossy ad slicks and Carney hucksters shoving co-op space at a handful of books. I think the aim is to get those handful of brave souls to tell their friends, “hey, you HAVE to check out this great book I just read.” It has to connect with them, speak to their souls, so that when the next book comes out you’ve already done a few rounds of flirtation.

I think series characters are one way to achieve that goal — we all enjoy tuning in to the latest exploit of Kinsey Millhone or Sharon McCone. But I think that’s because we feel like we have a relationship with those characters, so picking up a new book is a chance to drop in on an old friend. But that’s not the only way to do it — I’ll pick up the next Louise Ure standalone for the same reason I’d be inclined to go on a blind date if my best friend was doing the matchmaking. It’s all about relationships, and we can have them with the character or the author.

Over on his Technium blog, Kevin Kelly has a fascinating post about where value comes from in an Internet-based society where everything is digital and the raw bytes are copied continuously from the moment they enter the ether. You should read Kevin’s excellent post, but to summarize, Kevin feels that value in the Internet era won’t come from the traditional mechanism of placing a strangle-hold on the distribution model. Once the bits are out of the bag and out on the wire, distribution is uncontrollable. All those who attack the digital problem through copy-protection and DRM are starting themselves out behind the 8-ball. And that’s no place from which to win the game.

Rather, Kevin says, value in the Internet era comes from eight of what he calls “generatives” - intangible qualities that themselves carry value even when copies are free. Kevin’s generatives are:

1. Immediacy - I’ll pay to get it now, even though I might be able to get it for free later.
2. Personalization - I’ll pay to get something special, something tailored specifically to me.
3. Interpretation - I can get the information for free, but I’ll pay to find out what it means.
4. Authenticity - I’ll pay to make sure I’m getting what I think I’m getting. (Think “autographed copy”).
5. Accessibility - I’ll pay to get it in the time, place and medium I want.
6. Embodiment - I’ll pay to get the information in a tangible form I enjoy. (This is why J.K. Rowling sold 2.7 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in the U.K. during the first 24 hours on the shelves, despite the fact that scanned copies of the book were available on BitTorrent within hours of the book’s release.)
7. Patronage - I’ll pay to reward the author/musician/etc. for their creative work if I like it.
8. Findability - The information might all be out there, but I’ll pay to find what I’m looking for without having to search everything that’s out there.

Admit to someone that you’re a writer, and one of the first questions out of their mouths is usually “Where do you get your ideas?” Some people will even suggest that you should take their ideas and write them…splitting the money 50/50, of course.

I wonder why it is that there’s a public perception that the ideas are the hard part.

For me - and, I suspect, for most writers - ideas are like air. They’re all around us, and there’s far more of them than any of us can possibly use. All it takes to spark an idea in me is a newspaper article, a snatch of overheard dialogue, and the answer to the questions “why?” and “what if?”

The hard part, as any writer knows, is turning the idea into a fully-formed story.

But really, when you come right down to it, most of the ideas out there — at least in crime fiction — are variations, in one way or another, on a few basic themes. Greed, lust, wrath, envy, pride: All of these can form the kernel of a successful story.

In fact, here’s an idea, for free, as a special bonus for the readers of this blog: A woman, tired of living with her no-account spouse whose constant low-paying jobs don’t afford her the lifestyle she wants (greed, envy) takes up with an older, more affluent man. Together, they hatch a plot to kill the woman’s husband (wrath). Meanwhile, the husband has discovered his wife’s infidelity. He perceives her infidelity as an insult to his masculinity (pride) and sets out to kill both her and the man she’s cheating with (wrath).

Now, all you have to do, my faithful readers, is actually write the story. Let me know when you’re done and I’ll tell you where to send my half of the money.

Of course, maybe I should just write the thing myself. That is an awfully good idea…