Continue Trucking from James W. Ziskin

How do you avoid repeating yourself? Do you reinvent your approach to storytelling, or do you lean into what already worked and risk creative stagnation? 

Interesting question this week, especially the part about reinventing the approach to storytelling. I hadn’t thought of that side of repetition before, but it got me thinking about my first seven books, my last two, and my next one.

I prefer to write first-person narrators for my stories, and I doubt that will change any time soon. Does that mean I repeat myself or have fallen into a rut? Well, I don’t believe the risk of repeating oneself is inherently tied to the narrator, any more than it is to traditional timelines, dialogue, or descriptions. Or standardized spelling, for that matter. Storytellers have been inventing tales for millennia using first- and third-person narrators, and the well hasn’t run dry yet. I think it’s more in writers’ idiosyncrasies than in narrative point of view that repetition creeps in. Authors may lean on certain themes in their work, particularly in a series. Or they fall into the habit of re-writing similar situations. Maybe their protagonists fall into the antagonists’ traps over and over. And within specific genres, many tropes tend to come around again and again. The alcoholic PI, the rogue cop, the twisted villain, etc. So how do writers avoid repeating themselves and boring their readers?

I would guess that they do it with new characters and new settings. Detectives shouldn’t solve the same crime every time. They don’t bed the same dames, and they shouldn’t get beaten up by the bad guys either. (Unless they’re Jim Rockford. I love Jim Rockford.)

For my Ellie Stone books, I’ve tried to maintain verisimilitude and fresh perspectives by keeping Ellie on the move. I’ve written in this space before about Cabot Cove Syndrome—too many murders per capita in a small, fictional town—and I’ve avoided it by keeping Ellie on the road. New horizons and new crimes in every places as far flung as New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Saratoga Springs, the Adirondacks, and Florence, Italy.

Another way I keep things moving is Ellie herself. Over the course of seven books, she’s grown. She’s more discerning now, more mature, even as she remains a free-thinker, still playing by her own rules. But she’s smarter. More experienced. She no longer falls into romantic entanglements at every turn. She’s become pickier, I think.

My last two books are not part of a series, so at least there’s not the problem of recurring characters doing the same old tired things. But I still opted for first-person narrators. There’s no more effective way to show who your main character truly is than through first-person narration. (Provided your main character is your narrator.) Every word, every observation, every descriptive choice shows off your narrator’s personality and world view. That’s why I like telling stories that way.

In Bombay Monsoon, I created Danny Jacobs, a twenty-something narrator falling in love and into trouble in India during the 1975 Emergency. Danny’s narration is clearly different from Ellie’s, even if they’re both reporters. Danny is a naïf. Ellie, hardly. Danny is an idealist. Ellie is a wicked wit. But the two come from similar backgrounds. They could be cousins. Maybe I do repeat myself. 

And that brings me to my latest book, THE PRANK, which came out a week ago. For the first time in nine books, I wrote two narrators, a thirteen-year-old sociopath and his twenty-four-year-old English teacher. Jimmy Steuben and Patti Finch take turns, chapter by chapter, offering their own versions of events to the reader. This turned out to be exciting for me as a writer, but scary at the same time. Having never tried multiple narrators before, I was exploring plotting and characterization in a totally new way. New, not repeated, I hope.

My next project is a risky departure for me. I’m trying to tell a story that’s mysterious and magical as well. It’s set in New York City in the summer of 1977. There’s disco, Son of Sam, garbage strikes, and bank fraud. And a house—front and center in the story—that hates women. Tentatively titled Nights on Broadway, it’s definitely like nothing I’ve written before.

But, at its heart, innovative storytelling isn’t about structural tricks like narrators and location. It’s about making sense—or not quite—of the world through our own idiosyncratic vision. That vision shapes our stories, our characters, our wordiness, or economy of expression. You could ask a hundred writers to tell the same story, and it will be different in significant ways for each one. That’s not to say there won’t be similarities, of course. There are only so many dramatic situations, after all. But we all spin our tales to our own tune.

So what’s my advice for keeping your stories fresh? When I’m looking for a new angle or a bright new idea for a story—something to stimulate my interest as well as my creativity—I don’t look back. I don’t want to stay in the same place. I want to move forward. Do something new. Explore something a little different. The ideas don’t come easy. They’re hard to find, but they’re out there, somewhere down the road. Don’t ever give up looking. Keep going. Continue trucking. You’ll find them.

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THE PRANK…enigmatic and unnerving. The pace never flags for a second. This is some masterly plotting. I loved it.”

—Liz Nugent, author of Strange Sally Diamond

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