Welcome to Writer’s Jail or Some Rules Need Breaking, by Josh Stallings

 Q: Crime fiction has tried and true conventions, such as a murder/crime in the first chapter (or soon thereafter), an investigation, believable motive, hidden clues etc. Add to this, the conventions for each subgenre, such as cozy or police procedural. Have you ever ignored or deviated from these established conventions? Do you find them restrictive or do you like working within them?

A: As a life long contrarian I have never been a fan of rules of any kind. But if you read a lot of genre fiction those pesky rules slip into your operating system unbidden. I don’t consciously think about these rules while writing. Writing feels like riding a wild horse down a skinny canyon trail. Hold on and pray that either me or the horse knows what we’re doing. 

That sounds oh so very punk. And likely not true. Over the years I’ve come to see that what some call rules, are actually tools for the writing tool box. When writing Young Americans I tried not to use any profanity. The book was a heist novel based loosely on my dangerously wild teen years in the 70’s. It does have some “bad language” as my son Dylan would say. But by setting that rule I found it made me more intentional about where and what expletives I used.

My first three books took place in the world of sex as commerce, and it was important that I wrote bluntly about the subject, even if it made some readers uncomfortable. After the Moses Trilogy, I wanted to dial back on being so sexually explicit. I had become desensitized and needed to reacquaint myself with the subtler side of writing. Modern cozies are a great place to find quieter ways of writing about adult subjects. 

I read for pleasure. I read to be reminded why I write. I read to adjust what I think is possible. I read to reset myself between books.  

Lately I have been filling my literary tank reading South/Central American writers.

 

Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo is mind bendingly dreamy or maybe nightmarish depending on your personal taste. It has all the elements of a crime story, or an adventure novel. There are multiple mysteries. But none of it follows a “normal” structure and it clearly makes up the rules as it goes along. 

 

Death in the Andes: A novel by Mario Vargas Llosa is a classic mystery. Three men have disappeared in a small Peruvian mining town leaving two Civil Guards to discover the who, how, and why of the case. It also has pishtacos (fat sucking cannibal vampires), a bar owner named Dionisio who behaves much like his Greek namesake Dionysus, murdered drug dealers, and more. It flows smoothly back and forth in time. It is unlike any crime book I’ve read and again it follows its own rules.    

   

The Old Man Who Read Love Stories: A Novel by Luis Sepúlveda is an adventure novel set in Ecuador’s Amazon basin. It breaks no rules, it is simply a brilliantly told tale and reminded me how good writing can be.

“The woman, Dolores Encarnación del Santísimo Sacramento Estupiñán Otavalo, was dressed in finery that had existed and continued to exist in those stubborn corners of the memory where the weeds of solitude take root.” — Luis Sepúlveda

My father called the frame of a painting a cage without which his artistic intentions would never be possible. We need constraints for our visions to take form inside. The work I’m most proud of often came from rebelling against english rules. In All The Wild Children I played with tense, moments from my past that grabbed me were in present tense, they live in my memory as real and right now. Other sections were told in past tense because old Josh was retelling them.

I broke tense rules in the 2nd Moses book. In hard boiled crime fiction books the rule is 1st person past tense. But in Out There Bad an assassin showed up who needed to be there. Their chapters were present tense, they had no past or future, they were a deadly force of nature, so this made sense to me. I don’t remember making a choice to do this, it came naturally when writing these chapters.

Rules in any book are set up in the very beginning. The author signs a contract with the reader about what kind of book it will be. 

On page two of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, he wrote;

“Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I don’t want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.”

Even if you were unfamiliar with McCarthy’s work, you would now know what kind of book you were in for.

The opening of my book Tricky finds a intellectually disabled man in a stand off with two LAPD officers. How that scene is written tells the reader of the book’s respect for humanity. If you pick up a book called Beautiful Naked & Dead and are offended by sex and violence, you didn’t read my contract with the reader. It was blatantly in the title.

Now go out and break as many rules as you can. If you serve any time in writer’s jail, I guarantee you will discover some great writers hanging out in the yard.