Run Writer Run

  

With so much buildup to release day, if a book doesn’t take off right away it can feel like a failure. Do you see your releases as a marathon or a sprint for readership?

 

You’ve heard the cliché about the best-laid plans.

 

It comes from a Robert Burns poem — “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”— which later inspired Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. I mention this because I began with poetry, then moved to prose, and from literary fiction toward genre. None of it prepared me for the business of publishing.

 

Once upon a time, I thought securing a publisher and a contract meant I could write the book and let “them” do the rest.

 

Nope.

 

Unless, of course, if the publisher believed you had a sure-fire blockbuster on your hands, then you might get a PR budget, and a gaggle of marketing gurus and their acolytes. That model has largely gone the way of the dodo. Publishing has gone corporate, and it has spreadsheets. It’s all about ROI, baby: Return On Investment.

 

A writer without a Big Five titan behind them faces one set of problems. A writer with a Big Five publisher but without the publisher’s confidence faces another: no budget, no bright lights, but the same expectations.

 

Sell or be dropped.

 

Sara Paretsky wrote about this changing arithmetic in her essay “Truth, Lies, and Duct Tape,” in Writing in an Age of Silence. The sales numbers that once constituted a writer earning their keep are now dramatically higher than when she debuted. Libraries once provided some of the bread-and-butter support that helped sustain writers. The landscape has shifted considerably since the essay appeared in 2007.

 

With social media, writers are expected to do something besides write: Perform.

 

Influencers have turned audiences into careers, sometimes fortunes, by cultivating a personality around humor, alleged expertise, lifestyle hacks, or whatever the algorithm happens to reward this week. Writers are expected to become personalities, too.

 

This isn’t entirely new. Tom Wolfe had his white suits and Homburg. Salvador Dalí had his mustache. Artists have always cultivated personas. What used to be called a signature is now called a brand.

 

The difference is that the brand is no longer ornamental. It is part of the job.

Publishers want momentum because momentum looks like sales. They want books that arrive with an audience attached. The release of a novel can therefore feel less like the beginning of a long career than a product launch with a very short fuse.

 

Which brings me back to the question: Is a book release a marathon or a sprint?

 

The answer, frustratingly, is both.

 

The industry treats Release Day like a sprint. Writers are told to generate preorders, reviews, interviews, posts, events, newsletter mentions, social-media buzz—anything that might convince the algorithms, booksellers, and readers that this is the book everyone is talking about.

 

But careers are marathons.

 

And the maddening thing about marathons is that you can train perfectly and still get rained on.

 

Publishing is full of variables a writer cannot control. Market conditions. Publicity budgets. Competing releases. Cultural attention. The whims of booksellers. An unexpected news event.

 

And then there is luck.

 

Writers don’t like to talk about luck because luck is an offensive business model. It suggests that talent and effort, while necessary, are not sufficient.

 

Walter Mosley is a useful example. He created Easy Rawlins, one of the great characters in crime fiction. But when he wanted to write science fiction or erotica or YA, publishers were less enthusiastic. They wanted another Easy.

 

Mosley has talked about the hustle required to get his ‘other work’ in front of publishers—pitching to one agent and then, sometimes literally, crossing the street to pitch to another. He has acknowledged how much he has owed to chance because a president was asked what he was reading on vacation and held up a copy of A Devil in a Blue Dress.

 

Luck is timing. It’s being in the right place when somebody happens to be looking for exactly what you have written. It’s a cultural moment, a famous reader, or a news event that makes your book baby suddenly relevant.

 

My own experience with EYES TO DECEIT brought that home.

 

The novel is my reconstruction of Operation Ajax, the joint CIA-MI6 operation that overthrew Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953 and helped restore the Shah.

 

When I wrote it, I hoped that readers who remembered the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis might see the connection: that crisis didn’t emerge from nowhere. History has a long fuse.

 

The CIA began declassifying material related to Operation Ajax in 2000 and completed the process in 2013. The history is no longer obscure. The connections between the 1953 coup, the Shah, the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis are part of the historical record.

 

I had hoped that a small segment of my peers remembered their childhood, and even smaller cohort of history nerds knew the event and could find Iran on the map. It’s niche, but 1% of 1% is still a respectable number of readers.

 

Then the news cycle handed me a gift, or so I thought.

 

Trump invaded Iran and declared victory 40 times.

 

Nope. It didn’t move the needle.

 

Relevance is not the same thing as readership, and that’s the lesson I keep coming back to here because we like to imagine that good books find their readers because, eventually, the universe sorts these things out. It doesn’t. There is no cosmic sales department.

 

A book can be good and mistimed; it can be both timely and invisible.

 

That’s why I have trouble thinking of a release as a referendum on the book itself. Release Day is a moment. A career is a body of work.

 

So yes, writers have to sprint. We have to show up and promote the book, and sometimes perform the literary equivalent of tap-dancing while juggling flaming copies.

 

The book doesn’t know what day it is.

 

And neither does luck.

 

Look Ma, I Made It! Or Did I?

 With so much buildup to release day, if a book doesn’t take off right away it can feel like a failure. Do you see your releases as a marathon or a sprint for readership? 

Ah, release day. I remember it like it was yesterday, but it’s been two years. Two years! Where has the time gone? And yet, my debut novel is still chugging along doing its best to be great. Who would’ve thought? To be honest, I never really thought about longevity when I was dreaming this dream. In my fantasy my book would be published, then discovered by the masses immediately. Then, Hollywood would come calling. In that order. Spoiler alert, I was a little off in my thinking. Two years later, I’m still not sure if this book was a success or a snooze fest. 

As a fairly new author to the world of traditional publishing, I asked myself countless times, on my release day and many times since: What does the publishing world consider a success? 

Every time I see the cover of my book, I still remember every second of the day it was released into the world. My best friend and I went out to celebrate. We sat in a bar, just her and me, toasting over and over. There were hugs, and tears, and a lot of wine, as we watched it climb the charts until it earned that coveted orange banner. With every screen refresh the excitement grew as I realized people I didn’t know were buying and reading my book signifying, I was a number one best seller, at least for a few minutes. Yes, instant success.

But nothing breeds insecurity faster than putting something out into the world that you have poured your whole soul into for the judgement of the masses. It wasn’t long before the doubts started to set in. That first couple of months after my release, I asked a lot of my author friends with a lot more experience than me, how do you know if your book was a success or a dud, and learned there wasn’t a clearcut answer. I was looking for something like a concrete checklist I could follow. Was there a certain number of reviews, a dollar amount sold, or awards, that would equal undeniable success? 

Maybe you weren’t successful unless you got on the New Your Times Best Seller List, got called by Oprah, or sold your movie rights. I was looking for the magic formula needed for the publisher to say, good job, let’s do it again. Surprisingly, or maybe not, publishing can be a very weird and uncertain place, I’m learning; no one seemed to be able to give me a concrete answer. 

I had a healthy number of reviews, more than I ever dreamed of as an indie writer, mostly good. I earned out my advance within a few months of my release. My agent still answers my emails. And every month I still get a little spare change from the publisher. But I never received a nomination for any award. Oprah still hasn’t called me or added me to her best book list. And Hurt Mountain has still not been sold to Hollywood. Does that mean none of these things will ever happen? Who knows. 

What I do know is, yes, it’s been two years since my book had its moment in the sun. The last review I received was on August 06, 2026, a five-star from Pat D, verified purchase, thank you very much. Feels like a marathon to me. 

It doesn't have to be you | Bad reviews & one-star ratings by Faye Snowden

Question of the Week: 

Not every book can be a stone-cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable, nonetheless. Where’s the line for recommending a book to someone else?

I had the best plan for this post! It was going to be beautiful, perfect, and most of all, useful. It was going to be, as I tell my grandkids when they are happily making art, glorious! 

I planned on saying that good books are like good poetry. They show us the ordinary world in ways we’ve never seen before with the help of a strong narrative and electric prose. These are the books that change lives. I even had examples! Read Caste by Isabel Wilkerson and you’ll never think about race the same way again. Check out Ann Petry’s novel The Street because you’ll finally see how not one place in America is safe from the tragic beauty inherent in the Gothic. That book explores this country’s dark side.

And then I read James Ziskin’s earlier post on this subject and threw the entire plan out the window. Defenestration, y’all. (I absolutely love that word, and yes, I’ll say it every chance I get.)

Jim's friend Tim-because-that’s-his-name’s response to eating a bad meal at a restaurant (Eh, I’ll eat again), reminded me of my own rule about giving bad reviews. I don’t believe in badmouthing books in public. I know, hot take, but hear me out. 

I’m not saying that I’ve never given a bad review in my entire life. Many years ago I excoriated an absolutely terrible audio version of a book of poetry that I loved. A short time later I lamented over a prize-winning book that I couldn’t believe ever made it to the winners’ podium. Believe me, I thought, not everyone deserves a trophy. I might have gone on blathering forever about my unasked-for-opinions to anyone mildly interested, but then, something stopped me. 

I wrote a book.

To say writing is hard is the understatement of the century. But to say that writing is as easy as opening a vein (Red Smith), the scariest just before you start (Stephen King), or that easy reading is damn hard writing (purportedly Nathaniel Hawthorne) barely touch the daring required to stare down that blank page. And for myself, I would say that I learned how to write a novel on my first, my fifth, and frankly my sixth novel. Every writing session felt like stepping into the arena with a pissed-off, derisive lion who plays with his food. I don’t want my one- or two-star review to stop an author who is trying to find their rhythm and style. I figure if they are truly studying the craft and learning as they go, they may eventually write something recommendation worthy. 

Someone said to me once, “How will they know that the book is bad if someone doesn’t tell them?” Fair enough, but Baby, does it have to be you? If you don’t say something, does that mean no one will? Not their agent or editor or their beta readers? Not their fanbase, or even themselves looking back on something they wrote ten years ago and realizing with their now hard-won craft experience, is rubbish? 

I’ll close by saying that I don’t judge other people for giving bad reviews, and I understand why readers need candid ones, but it’s just something I’ve chosen not to do, especially as a published author. I want writers to keep writing until they find their groove or decide that it’s not for them. Because as Octavia Butler said, “You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap... and then gradually you get better at it.”

And for the record, I would definitely recommend anything written by Octavia Butler regardless of how many stars it received.

 

I’ll Eat Again from James W. Ziskin

Not every book can be a stone cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable nonetheless. Where’s the line for recommending a book to someone else?

I have a great friend. Let’s call him Tim (since that’s his name). Whenever a restaurant meal disappoints him, he shrugs and offers, “Eh, I’ll eat again.” I think that’s a healthy attitude. Rather than taking to Yelp to bash the establishment and the wait staff, he moves on, unbothered, presumably taking away whatever good he was able to derive from the experience, albeit probably not in a doggy bag. 

I have the same attitude vis-à-vis my reading. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that some books will not be to my liking. If I come across one of those books, I don’t get angry. I don’t write cruel reviews. I pick up another book to read.

While I certainly have criteria that affect my choices, five-star ratings are not one of them. There’s entirely too much subjectivity in quality ratings on Goodreads or Amazon. I may not read a certain book because the subject doesn’t appeal to me. That doesn’t mean the book is lacking in quality. It only shows that I’m a fusty old curmudgeon who’s set in his ways. So, no, I do not seek out books with five-star ratings. I might end up with a book about serial killers, which—alas—I do not enjoy. No judgment implied here. Just not my cup of tea, which I don’t enjoy either. And yet, you can always find something worthwhile in a novel, even one that’s not your cup of tea, taste-wise. No book is perfect, and few “honestly written” books are trash, deserving of vitriol and one-star ratings.

As for recommending books to others, I try to stick to their interests, not mine, as a guide. 

I’m fond of saying “That’s what makes a horse race.” My dad used to say “De gustibus non disputandum est.” The French say “À chacun son goût.” We say “To each his own.” And if you truly dislike a book, that’s okay. Just remember two things: 1. Not everyone wants to hear about what you hate, and 2. You’ll eat again.

And now, here’s an amuse-gueule. Feel free to give it a rating.

Zero

Kjghkhg 

The Recommendation Line

Not every book can be a stone cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable nonetheless. Where's the line for recommending a book to someone else?

By Dietrich

In the previous piece I talked about why chasing only five-star books can turn reading into a status project, and why a solid three-star read can still be perfectly enjoyable. That leaves the practical question most of us face once we’ve finished a book: do I pass this one on?

The line, for me, sits somewhere past “I liked it” and short of “this will change how you see the world.” I recommend freely when a book did something specific and well: when it made me feel a particular emotion, when the prose had a texture I kept noticing, when the premise was handled with more intelligence or heart than I expected. I hold back when the pleasure was mostly tied to my mood, my history, or a very particular taste. And I almost never recommend something solely because it was “important” or “should be read.” Obligation is a poor gift.

There’s a practical test that helps. Would I hand this book to a friend without a long list of caveats? If the answer is yes, and if I’m not secretly hoping they’ll validate my taste by loving it, then it’s fair game. If I’m mostly trying to prove something—about the book, about myself, about literature—then I should probably keep it to myself.

A recommendation carries a quiet claim: I think your time with this will be well spent. When that claim is true, sharing a book is one of the better things we can do for each other. When it’s forced, it just adds noise.

A perfect recent example of this for me is Colson Whitehead's new book, Cool Machine, a conclusion to his Harlem trilogy, set against a 1980s New York backdrop. It’s a sharp, atmospheric novel that does exactly what a great recommendation should: it delivers its premise with immense heart and an unforgettable, rhythmic prose that stays with you long after the final page. It’s another example of a book I can hand to a friend, confident that their time will be well spent inside its pages — a book well worth sharing.

Okay, or The Best?

 

Terry here with our question of the week:

Not every book can be a stone cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable nonetheless. Where’s the line for recommending a book to someone else? 

 There are authors whose books I always buy. Mick Herron. Rhys Bowen. Eric Beetner. Anne Moose. Lou Berney. Thomas Perry. Tracy Clark. Among others. For me, they usually provide what I think of as a top-notch read. Occasionally there will be one that I think, “meh.” But with most of my favorite writers, “meh” is still better than the usual. 

 Seeking out a book to read mostly depends on my mood. I have a huge to-be-read pile, and it displays a wide range of reading, from cozies a la Ellen Byron to the police procedurals of Tracy Clark, to the dark vision of Jo Nesbo. You’ll find both known writers and unknowns. Some of them I’ve bought when I attended a book event and thought the book sounded like a good read. Some of them I have gotten in book bags at conferences. Usually I’ll read a few pages of those before deciding whether I want to lug them home. 

 Sometimes I hear about a book that everyone reads and I’m compelled to read it. That’s how I knew about William Kent Krueger’s Ordinary Grace, probably one of the best books of the last twenty years. It won every award that year. Every year I try to read every Edgar nomination in the Best Novel, Best First, and Best Paperback categories. One year every single one of the Best Novels was astonishing. Any one of them could have won in another year. But sometimes I wonder what the award panels were thinking. 

 There are those rare times when a zillion selling “must read,” falls flat for me. I can think of more than one that I said, “What? Why would anyone rave about this?” I belong to a book club that reads mostly non-mysteries. And it’s amazing the number of times all of us have wondered why a book we read got mega hype. 

Occasionally when I want something to read, I play a game. I’ll pluck ten books from my TBR pile without regard to subject, genre or author, and read the first ten pages of each. Then, I’ll chose to read the one that draws me in.  I often don't get to all ten because I start reading  and am immediately caught up by one. That's how I sometimes read what others may think of as less than stellar, and yet still enjoy them.

I have read many books that in my notes about it I said some variation of, “Writing okay, plot pretty good, liked the characters and the voice. An enjoyable read.” So, it doesn’t have to be the best of the best for me to enjoy it. 

 Notice in all this I didn’t use the term 5-star. That’s because I don’t pay attention to the ratings. If it sounds like an interesting subject, I’ll read a few pages to see if the writing suits me. By that I don’t mean that I want to know if it’s the best writing I’ve ever read. I just want to know if the characters seem interesting, and if the writing is competent. I also notice something else, more indefinable---does the writer write in a rhythm that works for me. There are some books that seem tedious to me to read because the writer’s style doesn’t resonate. For some reason, the great Stephen King is not an author I enjoy reading. Believe me, I understand why people love his plots, but his books don’t resonate with me. It’s sort of like when I was a kid and we played jump rope. I was perfectly competent at the “forward” part. But I could never happily jump in if the rope was being swung backwards. Different rhythm.

 I love to recommend books. I like to do author signings at book festivals because people stop by to say hello and I enjoy talking to them about the books they love. I read widely, so even if they don’t like what I write, I have fun finding out what they do read, and why they like those books. If they ask for recommendations, I’m ready. Sometimes, it even works in my favor. I once had a long conversation with a man who reads only sci-fi. We kicked around a lot of books we had read in common, and I recommended some I thought he might enjoy. He was about to walk away and suddenly he turned back and said, “You know, my mom reads mysteries. I’ll buy one of yours. I’ll bet she’ll like it.” 

 Before I recommend a book, I usually want to know what a person likes to read. I  won’t tell a cozy reader to read Hugh Howey’s Wool. Nor would I tell an avid sci-fan to dip into Anne Moose's novels. If someone tells me they like short books, I probably won’t recommend Mick Herron. In recommending books, I’ll always be honest, though. I recently starting reading a book by an author whose books I’ve always loved. The latest fell flat, even though everyone I know who has read it raved about it. So maybe it was me. But I’m not going to recommend it. On the other hand, I sometimes read an unknown author whose books I find really enjoyable. So I’ll recommend those. It’s always nice to give other authors a boost.

 I have a few recommendations for your reading enjoyment:

James Ziskin just came out with a zinger of a book, The Prank. It's a great read.

Eric Beetner just wound up his Carter McCoy trilogy with A Wound That Will Not Heal. I love this series.

If you are a sci-fan who enjoys apocalytic novels, I highly recommend 51%, Matt Witten's latest novel.

And last, I just finished reading Rhys Bowen's latest standalone, The Castle in the Glen. As always, an engrossing read by one of our finest storytellers.

Not-Guilty-at-All Pleasures - by Matthew Greene

Not every book can be a stone cold classic. Do you seek out only the 5-star reads or is a book just as enjoyable if it is a 3-star read? Not an all-timer, but enjoyable nonetheless. Where’s the line for recommending a book to someone else?

I hesitate to call anything a "guilty pleasure." The term is a sly bit of linguistic trickery, a sneaky way of connecting with others over a shared interest (which is lovely) while communicating just how refined my real tastes are (which is, in my opinion, dickish). I'd employ this shady classification in circles where I wanted to appear intellectually superior to my own preferences, where I wanted people to be impressed with my typical taste and my bravery in admitting I'd been "slumming it" with some reality TV or bubble gum pop or (gasp!) genre fiction.

Perhaps my newfound hatred for the "guilty pleasure" moniker comes from the fact that many might classify my debut novel as such. It was, after all, a cozy mystery, a genre that has to fight to be taken seriously. (Funny how we do that with media that appeals to women...but that's a soap box for another day.) I don't mind the book being described as "fun" or "breezy" or even "an easy read." But I hope no one feels guilty for reading it or ashamed to recommend it.

I often think about books like food, and I think it's important to strive for a well-balanced diet. And, much like food, shame and self-consciousness just get in the way of enjoying some delicious things. Sure, you should make sure you get some meatier, more robust stuff in your reading diet, but there's nothing wrong with a snack, an indulgence, or even a dessert. 

So, in that spirit, I thought I'd recommend three titles I've recently enjoyed that some might classify as "guilty pleasures." But I'd describe them differently...

With a Vengeance by Riley Sager - This book felt like a mashup Murder on the Orient Express and the TV show Revenge from a decade or so ago, and I couldn't put it down. I know Riley Sager has his detractors, but I'm consistently entertained by his books and would recommend them to anyone looking for a page-turning escape. To continue the food comparisons, this book feels like a juicy bacon cheeseburger and fries.

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill - It's interesting reading the criticisms of this book, because the issues identified by some readers were exactly what made it the right read for me at the time I picked it up. I tore through this book in a hospital waiting room, happy to give myself to its relaxed pace and character-focused narrative. On a day when I needed comfort, it was like a warm cinnamon roll and a tall glass of milk.

He's To Die For by Erin Dunn - This one is currently on my nightstand, so the recommendation may be premature. It's a gay rom-com mystery mashup that is completely delightful so far. I don't read a lot of romance (I find myself longing for something to happen) but there's just enough murder in this one to keep me wondering will-they-or-won't-they. This one hits like a frozen margarita and a basket of chips on a sunny afternoon.

Does every book have to be gourmet, nutrient-dense, or especially good for you? Absolutely not. If my reading life were nothing but chicken breast and kale, I'd be hard-pressed to want to spend much time with a book in my hands. So, here's to the not-so-guilty pleasures! 

When Writing Trauma Causes More Trauma by Poppy Gee

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction.

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of novels... yes, it does. And it's one of the biggest ethical dilemmas every writer must reckon with. 

It's understandable that a writer might process their own childhood trauma through their writing. The desire to make sense of the world is the reason most of us first put pen to paper. For me it was a daily diary I began when I was eight years old. It began with a list of the birthday presents I received -  a red scooter, clothing, a beach towel, a diary. Weeks later my entries consistently chronicled my frustration with my sisters over trivial matters, and my unfounded allegation that mum favoured them over me. According to my diary, everyone was mean to me. I was the Cinderella of the family - overlooked, overworked, downtrodden. My family would have a different perspective, of course. My diary only offered one perspective - mine. 

These childhood diaries were never intended for publication, and never will be. But what if writers who do intend publication weave the tales of their childhood trauma into their novels, without giving the other actors a right of reply? 

Now that I'm a published author, and I have in depth conversations with other published authors, I know that it happens more often than is publicly acknowledged. Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, friends, ex-wives and ex-husbands provide marvellous fodder for novelists. But sometimes, to a published author's discomfort and regret, friends and family don't like seeing their thinly disguised stories appearing in a novel. A sibling might have an entirely different point of view of family events, but because they're not a writer, they never get to present their case. Children might find distressing the portrayal of a character who bears an unflattering likeness to their own parent. This situation can be very hurtful and has the power to ruin relationships.  

I have used elements of childhood trauma as scaffold for an early draft. Later, I've erased or replaced all references to it. The emotion remains, but no identifying details. I feel that if you can't do that, if family members recognise situations, or feel identified in your novel, you shouldn't call it a novel. It would be more honest to call it a memoir, or autofiction. 

One author who was sued for repurposing other people's stories is Kathryn Stockett. She was sued by her family's maid Ablene Cooper who claimed the character Abileen was based on herself in The Help. (The lawsuit was unsuccessful due to the stature of limitations.) Authors from Hemingway to Capote reportedly lost friends after writing about them explicitly. Sylvia Plath's mother famously opposed the book The Bell Jar, describing it as a betrayal of the family. 

Other times, a successful book sits in the grim shadow of a questionable past. In Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Falconer, the protagonist is accused of a horrific murder. The author herself is one of several people who remain wanted for questioning regarding a murder that occured in Zambia in the 1990s when the author worked there as a conservationist with her husband. 

Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard exposed everything about his life in his work My Struggle. The series was an enormous success, published in 22 languages, and yet he says, 'it fills me with sadness everytime I talk about it.' He used real names, real situations, and people he cared about felt violated.

When I publish a book, I want my friends and family feeling genuinely happy for me. That's important to me. But maybe some people in our lives are awful, immoral, cruel or violent, and maybe they deserve to be unveiled. A writer might decide that they are prepared for the ramifications. 

But if you're not, my suggestion is, take the golden seed of the idea, write it as honestly as you can, then change every last detail over as many drafts as it takes. 

Trauma Top Five, by Catriona

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction.

Well, well, well. This little gem of a question has been sitting here like a troll under a bridge, hasn't it?

But how real to get? Here on a blog where I most often go for funny. 

[Writes and deletes multiple paragraphs]

On reflection . . . nope. Not doing that. All I'm going to say is that the three novels of mine where I've pulled most from my childhood are The Day She Died, A Gingerbread House and now The Dead Room. Fun fun fun.

All the details here

Instead of that, I've compiled a list of my top-five fictional childhood-trauma-and-its-aftermath (or otherwise) stories. Two novels, two films and one novel that's a film too.

1. Marnie

Hitchcock's first collaboration with Tippi Hedren (although that's probably not the best way to describe how he worked with his leading ladies) struck me as clever to the point of genius when I watched it as a kid, but man it's clunky now. SPOILER ALERT. Marnie Edgar, you see, is scared of the colour red, thunderstorms and sex. Because when she was a kid she killed one of her sex-worker mother's clients with a poker, there was a lot of blood, and it happened during a storm. No loose ends there, right? The poster is a masterpiece of subtlety too.

2. Spellbound

Nearly twenty years earlier, Hitchcock had made a much more subtle film about PTSD, though. In Spellbound, Gregory Peck is a psychologist who has a phobia about dark lines on a white background. He's triggered by someone dragging a fork across a tablecloth, for instance. SPOILER ALERT. Ingrid Bergman, his colleague, eventually traces the fear to a murder on a ski-slope. Get it? But this memory has actually been masking another, earlier, trauma and even more guilt and misery. So, all round, a more sophisticated treatment about what a mind can do to protect itself. And Gregory Peck gets the girl too. I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

3. To Kill A Mockingbird

There's a shedload of things this novel exemplifies. Today I'm looking at Boo Radley. SPOILER ALERT. After a run-of-the-mill scrape as a high-spirited boy, young Arthur Radley is placed under life-long house arrest by his overbearing and sanctimonious family and becomes a recluse. (He always put me in mind of the women in Ireland who were incarcerated for having sex and spent their whole lives locked up until they were thoroughly institutionalised.) Harper Lee's portrayal of Boo is magnificent - and magnificently modern. We're still, today, getting fiction and news about mentally fragile people being dangerous. And here's Lee in 1960 showing a man who's villified by the ignorant or immature, recognised by the virtuous (Atticus!), and who remains benign to all but himself.

Isn't my edition gorgeous?

4. Dark Ride

I hesitate to call Lou Berney's Dark Ride feel-good. It's devastating, actually. But in this one particular it's a refreshing change from the tropes of childhood trauma and its aftermath. In it, stoner scare-actor Hardy Reed witnesses undeniable evidence of the physical abuse of two kids he crosses paths with. He doesn't know them but he pretty much immediately up-ends his laidback routine to save them from where their little lives are headed. Splendid stuff.

5. It's a Wonderful Life

And finally . . . or otherwise. George Bailey. He suffered a traumatic incident in childhood when his brother fell through the ice and looked to be drowning. Then there was the clump in the head, hard enough to leave him deaf in one ear, when the drunk chemist was about to kill a patient. And being passed over for adventure. Being in the shadow of his younger brother. Being becalmed in Bedford Falls and beset with chidlren. He should really have run amok with a machete, instead of giving that finial post a hard stare and saving the town.

the only photo I've got of IAWL - look closely

Cx

Issues by Eric Beetner

 Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction.

I often feel like I’m not doing this writing thing correctly. I’m not addressing hidden daddy issues. I’m not working out some near-death experience through my fiction. I’m just making stuff up.

Maybe my childhood was too normal. But when I tell stories from my youth to my wife, she thinks what I went through was tragic to a near-Dickensian level. I don’t agree, it was just our lives and all we knew, but as a child of divorce at a very young age who went to live with a single father in the 1970s when that was as rare as a Bigfoot sighting, I definitely lived a life more feral than most of my peers. Has that made it into my fiction? Perhaps.

We all bring our own experiences into our work whether we plan on it or not. I tend not to write a lot about mothers since I didn’t grow up with one around all the time. We didn’t even get weekends since we lived in different states. I didn’t have brothers so I write about brothers from a different perspective than someone who grew up with them. 

Likewise religion. Just not a part of my lived experience so I tend to leave it out or write characters who have had my same experience so I know I can get it right. Or I ask my lapsed Catholic wife questions.

I wonder sometimes how much a trained professional could tell about any hidden trauma or unsolved issues by solely reading my books. I’m sure a lot of myself can be found in those pages and in the characters. But how much can be trusted? I’m looking to write compelling stories above all else and if that means diverting from my own experience then that’s where I’m going.

I think I can see a kind of emotional restraint in my work that speaks to the very subdued and midwestern quiet of my upbringing. We were a more stoic, unemotional family, just trying to make our way through our unique situation, so I’ve never been prone to histrionics or wild expressions of deep emotions. Most of my characters share that quality, I’d say. I can write taciturn as well as anybody.

Maybe the simple act of writing crime fiction is a red flag for hidden trauma. Most will tell you that crime writers tend to be the nicest folks in real life. Perhaps it is because we have found an outlet for these deep-seated traumas so they don’t weigh on us like they might if we kept them bottled up inside.

In times of extreme emotion or moments of deep sadness as well as elation, I do try to focus on the feeling and remember it so if I need to I can describe that feeling on the page. Much of that comes in the tiny details: What you notice in a hospital room or what I could hear in the room where I sat with my father as he lay dying. The look of his skin or the specific wheeze of his respirator, this can all be details to put a reader into a true experience on the page. Not to exploit your own misery for entertainment, but to get it right for the moments that make someone say “Yes, I understand fully.”

On some level, every book is a memoir, right? At least 10% of it. We can’t write real people on the page if we don’t bring a little of our own blood to animate them. I’m sure it is naïve of me to think I don’t pull that much from my own experiences early in life. Maybe I’d be very surprised to find how much I do.

I know a scene I wrote once in a short story and then recycled again into a novel came from a moment I remember vividly from my youth. I must have been 7 or 8 and went out fishing in the Mississippi River with my grandfather in Iowa. We brought home some catfish and I had enjoyed watching them swim around the bucket. My grandfather was a walking embodiment of stoic and undemonstrative. When we went out we could spend and hour not saying a word.

We got back to his house and in the backyard he had a small table that was little more than a butcher block painted battleship grey. On that block, hanging off to the side, was a short lead pipe on a string. With no preamble, no warning, he lifted a fish from the bucket, set it on the block and dispatched it with a swift blow of the pipe. He then beheaded it, gut it, slid the unwanted portion into a bucket to use for fertilizer, and handed me the filets to bring up to my grandmother who waited in the kitchen with oil in a pan to make a fried catfish lunch. 

The sudden slaughter of the fish and the cold disconnect of my grandfather while that happened burned the moment into my memory so that I knew it had to make it into my writing at some point. 

Moments like that happen perhaps daily. What sticks with us is a mystery. It’s age, a smell attached to something, a specific song that played in the background. But once they burrow in, they’re bound to come out once we open the lid on our pasts and start digging for story. But it is those details that bring realism and relatability to any book.

Keep digging through your past and always know that the next trauma, the next moment of unexpected impact might be right around the corner and someday it’s gonna make a great scene in your next book.

An Uneasy Grace

 

 

Childhood trauma seems to inform a lot of literary novels. Do you pull from any fears, anxiety or trauma from your early life into your work? Seems like mining our own uncomfortable pasts is perfect for crime fiction

 

This week’s prompt makes me uneasy because I’m not inclined toward the autobiographical, or, more to the point, self-revelation in life or my fiction. The truth is, I’m uncomfortable discussing childhood and trauma. I understand the impulse. We want meaning from pain, but I’m wary of turning suffering into a performance.

 

We live in a culture that can turn every hardship into a badge of honor. When I was a kid, status among adults was being in therapy and having Quaaludes within reach. Today, influencers offer advice, progress notes, breakthroughs and setbacks as their brand.

 

I live in a country that fetishizes its military power, promotes aggression as morality and policy, and has a long cultural romance with the idea that the person willing to do the most damage is somehow the strongest.

 

The cowboy became the robber baron in the Gilded Age, the gangster during Prohibition, who became the corporate mafioso quoting Marcus Aurelius and The Art of War in meetings.

 

As a crime writer, I get it. Injustice is part of the landscape. It’s material. Violence is a tool, a threat, a consequence.

 

Newsflash, folks: life is trauma.

 

I haven’t met a woman who hasn’t had to deal with a predatory man. We live in a world where the media sometimes informs us, sometimes misleads us, and often lies outright. Violence is treated as morality while sex is taboo and censored. We are subjected to daily assaults on our cognition and emotions.

 

News update: real violence is not cinematic.

 

It is fast and almost always uglier. In my experience, people who know violence intimately understand this and don’t talk about it.

 

I’ve seen what violence does to people and families.

 

My father’s best friend killed his wife and then himself in front of their two children. Their son was institutionalized and never recovered.

 

I grew up with weapons within reach: a .357 in one nightstand, and a .45 in a desk across the room, a combat knife tucked beneath magazines. I can tell you what gunpowder from a shotgun smells like on a hot, humid summer day because it hits my brain with the same immediacy people describe where they were when Kennedy was shot, or the song on the radio when they experienced their first kiss.

 

And then there is my own experience.

 

I have no criminal record, but at sixteen I came close. A cop understood context and circumstance and cut me slack he technically shouldn’t have. We made a deal. I kept my end of it.

 

That is one reason I didn’t walk out of a state prison in my thirties.

 

If I seem deliberately vague, I am.

 

All I’ll say is that I very nearly committed the irrevocable. I’m not religious, but there was, in that moment of chaos, an uneasy grace: a strange calm and a clarity that I have never forgotten.

 

People use terms like PTSD and mention flashbacks and nightmares. It doesn’t work that way for me. If I’m awake at 3 a.m., it isn’t necessarily because I’m replaying some horrific montage of images.

 

I’m rehashing something I said or did wrong in a relationship forty years ago.

 

I’m quirky that way.

 

What may surprise people who have never experienced their dark side is that, under certain circumstances, you step outside yourself.

 

I did.

 

You become Other.

 

That, too, is grace. You do what you believe you must do, and you discover you are capable of things you never imagined. The textbook example we all know is the mother who lifts a car to free her trapped child.

 

The scene of violence that has haunted me longest, however, wasn’t human.

 

A friend’s dog stepped into the street and was hit by a car. I watched the dog die and my friend become inconsolable. Somehow, that stayed with me more than the things that should have been harder to forget.

 

I have a soft spot for animals.

 

All that is to say that I haven’t emerged unscathed.

 

I still look for entrances and exits when I enter a room. I notice whether people are left- or right-handed. I register what is closest to me that I could use as a weapon. I dislike having people behind me. I become edgy in conversations when I can’t see the other person’s face.

 

Most days I have a dim view of the species. I often think we are screaming apes in clothes.

 

People tell me I have a dry and dark sense of humor.

 

They’re probably right, but it’s a defense mechanism and I know it.

 

In the years since, I’ve learned that you can never truly know another human being, just as they can never completely know you. I’ve had enough experience not to trust easily, but you have to know and trust yourself.

 

That is what I bring from childhood and trauma into my fiction. Not specific events, necessarily, and certainly not autobiography. What I bring is an understanding that the line between ordinary and terrible is thinner than we like to believe.

 

That matters when I create characters.

 

I’m less interested in the question, What happened to this person? than in the more difficult question: How did it change the way they understand the world?

 

Trauma doesn’t have to produce a damaged person in the conventional sense. People survive. They adapt. They become functional. They become successful. They can be funny, intelligent, competent and perfectly capable of getting through an ordinary Tuesday.

 

But survival can come with a price.

 

It can alter what you trust. It can alter what you notice. It can alter what you think other people mean. It can make uncertainty intolerable. It can make a person extraordinarily good at reading danger while being remarkably bad at understanding safety.

 

That is where trauma becomes useful to a crime writer.

 

My current work in progress, HUNGRY GHOST, the sixth Company File novel, illustrates this.

 

One of its central characters is Tania, a Hungarian-Russian orphan. Stalin liquidated her family. She was severely traumatized and abused, and as a result she is poorly socialized. She is also highly intelligent, multilingual and manipulative when necessary. She has killed, including once in self-defense, and in an earlier novel she took the initiative and killed believing she was helping ‘uncle’ Sheldon, only to discover later that she had been manipulated into it by Allen W. Dulles.

 

Tania could have joined the Company. She could have gone to the Mossad. She turns both down. She goes solo.

 

That decision makes sense to her, and that’s crucial.

 

A character doesn’t have to make sense to us. The character has to make sense to herself.

 

Tania’s logic is often eccentric. She can rationalize violence. She is a functional adult, but she doesn’t trust permanence. She has survived too many incompatible truths.

 

The novel opens with her arriving in Budapest, with revolution and Soviet reprisal in the air. It is a bittersweet homecoming. She is in her early twenties and following a lead to find a man she met briefly as a child, a man she believes betrayed her father and ultimately led to the annihilation of her family.

 

Tania’s real wound isn’t simply what happened to her.

 

It is the destruction of certainty.

 

Her epistemology has been damaged.

 

She cannot tolerate unanswered questions.

 

That gives me something much more interesting than a conventional trauma backstory. Her history becomes a force acting on every decision she makes. Her need to understand the past affects whom she trusts, what risks she takes, how she interprets evidence and, ultimately, what she is willing to do to get an answer.

 

If I had to reduce Tania to one sentence, it would be this:

 

Tania is a highly intelligent survivor of political terror whose greatest strength is adaptation and whose greatest weakness is her need to believe that the past can still be explained.

 

The crime writer’s job, as I see it, is not to diagnose the character or explain her to the reader.

 

It is to put pressure on the wound and see what happens.

 

That is also why I’m cautious about using my own experiences too literally. Autobiography can tell you what happened. Fiction has to ask what happens next.

 

My most recent novel, FOUR ON THE FLOOR, also touches that territory. Shane recognizes something of himself in an assassin. I won’t say more. What lies behind that character’s actions is part of the novel.

 

But the connection between that book and HUNGRY GHOST are the questions:

 

What does prolonged exposure to violence and uncertainty do to a human being?

 

Does survival make you stronger, or merely better adapted to surviving?

 

Can you learn to trust again?

 

Can you distinguish danger from the memory of danger?

 

And perhaps most difficult of all: can you accept that sometimes there are questions to which there are no answers?

 

That last one is where Tania eventually has to go.

 

By the end of HUNGRY GHOST, she has to accept something her entire life has taught her to reject: sometimes you don’t get an answer.

 

That, I think, is the difference between mining your past for material and allowing your past to inform your fiction.

 

I don’t have to put my childhood on the page. What matters is what it taught me to notice.

 

Vigilance. Uncertainty. The knowledge that people can surprise you, for better or worse. The knowledge that someone can survive terrible things and still be funny, intelligent, competent and profoundly wrong about something that matters.

 

Those are things I can give to a fictional character. The character gets her own history, her own logic and her own choices.

 

That is probably as autobiographical as I’m willing to get.

 

And perhaps that is enough.

 

As for the inevitable darkness at 3 a.m., the best thing you can hope for is an uneasy grace.