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.  

Must Read Books or Books I Needed to Read, by Josh Stallings

 

Q: Any tips for summer reading?

A: I don’t know what summer reading is vs winter reading. Beach read? I sunburn in seconds, can’t imagine that would be fun. One of my favorite places to read is in the woods, foggy or even better soft rain falling through the trees. Add a bit of fire crackling and I’m in heaven. For a more nuanced look at what “summer reads” means, scroll down to Susan C. Shea’s post from Monday. 

Like most writers and readers I read all the time. I rarely read books at the time that they are being heavily promoted. This isn’t for some punk fuck-the-mainstream-I-only-read-indy-authors stance. I wish every writer myself included, got that billboard above Times Square, full page ad kind of push from their publishers. 

Back in the long ago we had what were called water-cooler conversations. People worked together in an office and instead of a personal water vessel in every hand, there was a common water cooler. Gathering around it co-workers would chat about that great new book. If you hadn’t read it you were left out of the conversation. I now work at home. I feel no need to be of the moment, culturally.  

I ready very slooowly, I will never get through all the books in my library. The how and why of what I read is partly because of my dyslexia. I didn’t thrive in scholastic settings. And I love learning thus I am an autodidactic learner, big ass word for “self-taught.” As it pertains to my reading choices, it means school is always in session. I chase odd ideas down, make connections, one book leads to the next. Sometimes I am chewing on a bigger problem and searching books to help me solve it.

Lately I’ve been swimming in the “I’m Getting Older Creek.” It is connected with my work in progress and my life at large. I wish I could pick up the phone and call my pops, ask him about growing older as an artist. I didn’t realize when he died that he would be gone so long. Then again Pops was always too busy living and creating to think much about growing older. Up until the end he had another life’s worth of projects fermenting. Maybe that is the trick, keep working and stay in the present. Life will do what it does regardless of my plans.  

Back to the question at hand. I started my search into growing old with Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, naturally. Holy crap, what a different novel this is from the one I read in my youth. More accurately, I was a much different reader when I first read No Country For Old Men. Back then I was stunned by Chigurh the hit man, his insane but structured world view was scary as hell and oddly relatable.

I also loved Llewelyn Moss, the hapless blue collar thief by accident was my kind of anti hero. The novel’s inciting incident comes when Llewelyn goes back to a murder scene to bring a dying man some water. He’s doing all the wrong things for understandable if not morally correct reasons.

Reading it today I see the novel from Sheriff Bell’s perspective. Bell is getting ready to retire from a job and an increasingly brutal world he has out lived. While wrestling with the heroic myth folks see him as, he needs to discover who he actually is.

I tried to put things in perspective but sometimes you’re just too close to it. It’s a life’s work to see yourself for what you really are and even then you might be wrong. And that is somethin I dont want to be wrong about.

           - Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

How did this lead me to read Dialogues of Plato I haven’t a clue. Plato is older than dirt, maybe that’s it.

To understand Plato and the context for his work, I went to Audible where I found The Great Courses, Plato, Socrates, and the Dialogues. Sixteen lectures by Michael Sugrue covering time, place and each of Plato’s dialogues. I would listen to a lecture while driving down to see our older son, then I’d read the dialogue discussed. 

Things I discovered —

Plato is funny, “Old age has a great sense of calm and freedom when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are free from the grasp, not of one mad master only, but of many.”

Wise, “Only the dead have seen the end of war.” 

A feminist,“If women are expected to do the same work as men, we must teach them the same things.”

He didn’t think that gender should hold a person back, but he did believe in a rigid class system. In The Republic Plato imagines a perfect society with four distinct classes. A special person could elevate one station, but not more than that. He believed the top class should never have more than four times the wealth than that of the lowest class. Any wealth above that four times would be given up to be spent on public works.

My take away, I see now how many of our thought structures come from Plato and Socrates. I also see how humans abandoned good knowledge in pursuit of amassing unbelievable wealth to the detriment of the planet and us folks living on it. 

This led me to a couple of streaming shows, one on MAX, “Fired on Mars” is a wonderful send up of what the likely outcome is of signing up for Musk’s or Bezos' Mars population plans. You think working in these billionaire’s non union factories sucks? Imagine doing it in a place where they actually control the air you breathe.

Second was “I’m a Virgo” streaming on Prime. Activist film maker and rapper Boots Riley takes on race, police, and economic disparity all while having fun with super hero mythology. It’s all the amusement of “The Boys” minus the nihilism.

Both of these projects cracked the code to dealing with hard social justice issues in a lighthearted non-medicine tasting way. These led me to…  

Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway. It came out this last May and might have slid under my radar if not for brother Lark who voraciously tears through books like a starving great white would dig into a surfing contest. My first reaction was, it’s more hard boiled than noir. Second, I was afraid it was a near future alternate reality Raymond Chandler pastiche. Three pages in I realized the judgey part of my brain was completely wrong, I told it to shut the hell up and enjoy the ride. This is the story of a private dick who works mostly for the cops on cases involving Titans. Titans are billionaires, the point zero-zero-zero-one percenters. They live like gods while the rest are left to grab what crumbs they can. The Titans are tech giants who have found a way to live forever, almost.

The cost of immortality is losing part of who you were, and perhaps that’s not a bad bargain anyway.

Harkaway does what masters of noir and hard boiled have always done, shine harsh light on the brutal realities of societal injustices. And he does it with this snarky humor and punishing violence of both the physical and emotional kind. 

Lastly is a book that if I’d heard the hype I might’ve never read it. 

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” by Gabrielle Zevin is so damn good. It feeds me on every level. Emotionally tough and accurate. Structurally breathtaking. It is about creation in an artistic sense, the collaborations that it takes to do really fine work. Love both platonic and romantic. Friendship and the cost we pay and exact from those we love over unhealed wounds. Zevin also captures something I have been searching for, she plays with structure, knowing when to zip us years into the future, when to fall back to catch a childhood memory. She is in a class with Emily St. John Mandel and David Mitchell as far as story structure goes, she is also in class of her own. There are moments that had me wetting my pillow with tears, lost in the pages of Zevin’s creation. This writer deserves every ounce of success she has achieved.

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” may be the perfect “beach read.” As long as you don’t mind crying in public. But isn’t that why we wear sunglasses?  

To Be A Fly On The Brain, by Josh Stallings

Q: Which author(s) (living or dead) would you like to meet one-on-one to talk about the writing craft? What is it about their writing or life that most interests you?

A: My father, Tobias Jean, was a painter, a sculptor, a poet, a jeweler, and much more. He lived his life immersed in the river of creativity. Walking through a museum he never wanted me to read the cards beside a painting, the ones written by a curator giving the work’s context. 

“That,” he’d point at the painting, “Is the artist’s first statement in a conversation between them and you the viewer. The next line comes from you, what do you think about it on first glance. Later maybe you notice the deep powerful brush strokes, that is the next part of the conversation. This conversation between artist and viewer can last ten minutes or a lifetime.

I remember my father spotting Henry Moore’s sculpture Knife Edge. He gave it a smile of recognition, “There you are.” He had been in conversation with that work for many many years. He was fascinated with “the line” of a thing. He searched for a single simple line that could carry the weight of a object. One line with all the sensual power of a swan. Not a line that stood for a swan, but one that was a swan at its purest. His conversation with Knife Edge was more enriching than anything Henry Moore might have said about it, much less a curator.

I would give much to have another couple of nights with my father, drinking coffee and talking about the creative life. I wish I’d asked him more about what colors felt like to him. And how did he know when a piece was finished? I’d like to hear his laugh and riff about nothing important. Film editing, writing fiction, painting a dragon god, all come from the same place. But the tools used are very different.

Over the years I have become suspect of what we writers say about our work. It’s complicated to decipher our true motives for writing what we write or how we write it. 

Books are rich beasts. First there is the book we intended to write. Below that is the book we did write. And below that are the truths about ourselves that we never meant to tell anyone. When readers discover and point out pieces of me I was unaware I had exposed, I love it. It means I’m being honest down to a micro level.

Then there is discussing craft with writers. What we say in public about craft is tinted by marketing, what we want readers to think we think. This may be even how we remember it, but memory is massively subjective. Our brains are big old justifying machines. They tell us what ever it takes to help confirm that our world view is correct.  This creates two realities, what we say happens in our minds when we write and what really happens up stairs when we type. 

Rather than talking craft, I’d like to be a fly on James Crumley’s or William Shakespeare’s brain while they were creating… Wow, that sounded much less creepy in my head than it looks on the page. What I’m trying to say is I’d like to see how they solved story and literary problems without being confused by their explanations.

Things I would like to do with master writers: I’d love to go fly fishing with James Lee Burke. The way he describes a river makes me want to stand in it with him. That or tour Bayou Têche with Burke as my guide. He writes a swamp richly beautiful, I’d love to have him show me what inspires him to step out of a tense crime novel and take the reader for a drift on the water.  

“I was conceived in a Morris Minor on the Mexico side of the border traveling between Ensenada and Los Angeles.” Is an opening sentence I never imagined typing while talking about hanging with writers. But it is important back story. Before and after my birth my family lived for a time in an artist’s colony in Baja. I was too young to have memories of that time, but it lives large in my mythos. Many a grand time took place south of the border. Much of Out There Bad the second Moses book took place in Baja. For that personal reason I would love to travel through the US Mexico borderland with Don Winslow, Cormac McCarthy, and Gabino Iglesias. They each are amazing writers with very different takes on the border. Their books have helped me sort out my own feelings on the the messy land between two nations. Reading about a location, even one I know well, from multiple perspectives creates a three dimensional picture for me to draw from.

Stop the presses. I may be about to actually answer the question… 

Here goes: I’d love to spend time talking craft with David Mitchell. He writes incredibly complex multi-character multi-timeline novels. Utopia Avenue and The Bone Clocks being among my favorites. What I want to know is how the hell he knows the exact moment to end a chapter so that it feels both natural and acts like a cliffhanger but free of the feeling that I’m being manipulated. And then how does he return to a storyline at the very moment I’m wondering about it. What is his trick? Skill and talent I suspect. Does he plot it out on the world’s largest whiteboard or does he intuitively know where he needs to be. David Mitchell, if you read this and find yourself in Southern California, I’ll buy dinner if you explain how you do what you do. 

Reality check: These are fantasy ideas. In the real world, I am lucky enough to count some amazing writers as true friends. When we get together we share what we’re working on at that moment. Talk about our struggles, stumbles, and successes. Hearing another writer’s struggles I feel less alone in my own. Having friends to share this journey with is one of the great gifts of a life spent writing.

“Don’t wait for the muse, just write, because you are the muse, and the only way the muse shows up is if you show up.” - Joe R. Lansdale, The Donut Legion 

Bookclub for Dyslexics by Josh Stallings

Q: Book club members are usually free to say anything about the book they just read. People attending author events usually say nice things or nothing. But what about when authors visit bookclubs? Do rules exist? Should we invent them?

A: I love books. I love reading, aways have. I’m not averse to clubs. When we were teens my siblings, friends and I built The My-O-My Club, a disco for teenagers. I’m currently a member of Costco, AA and AAA. 

Clearly I like books and clubs, but combine the two into a Bookclub and my dyslexic brain panics.

In school a reading list always felt like a long list of tasks I would fail. Yet as long as I can remember I have had a book  I was reading. Just slowly. 

When a friend tells me they are reading X and I should too so we can discuss it… Even though we start at the same time, by the time I finish the book, odds are they will have moved on and are thinking about a new book. 

Weird thing about my reading superpower, when I was in 3rd grade they ran some tests to try and figure me out. They discovered that my reading speed was several grades below where I should’ve been. My comprehension was several grades above where I should’ve been. Additionally, my vocabulary was advanced. Looking back I can see that my brain doesn’t allow skim reading. I have to read every word or they scramble. So when I read a book, I read every word. 

Knowing all this, you can guess that I’ve never been a member of a book club. I have yet to be asked to speak to a book club. I do love talking books, mine and other writer’s. I have opinions. Every reader does. A great book taps into our personal experiences. For that reason they effect each of us differently. I can talk craft easily, or why this book moves me.

If I were to put one rule into a book discussion group it would be that we remove vague value judgments. “It sucks.” “It was dull.” “It was great.” They give me nothing to chew on. 

“The fluid way they drift through multiple time periods was great.” That statements leads me to think about how some writers put time stamps at the beginning of chapters while others leave it loose and catch up the reader with a prop (a pager, or a payphone) to tap you into the year. The point is by being specific in how you speak about a book you lead others to join in. 

We live in an era of thumbs up or down. How many likes did the cute picture of my curated life get? We are left to feel that our’s and other’s feelings are more important than critical thinking. 

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian is a brutal book. Not in a blood orgy cheap way. It is bloody. But it neither glorifies nor condemns violence. McCarthy just shows it to us. Add to that his crystal clean prose. Like a poet he has no time for extra words. Hell he doesn’t even have time for quotation marks. I have been lost in his writing but I always catch up. Clarity is sacrificed for pace and rhythm. Do I LIKE Blood Meridian? No, that is too tame a word. I love it. I need it in the world. It was a hard read. I don’t know that I will ever read it again. Subjectively it’s brilliant. Objectively, I grew up with Quaker/nonviolence advocating parents who got violent with us kids. Then my father left when I was eight, leaving me confused as to what a “man” was or how to become that mythical beast. I used movies as a cultural starting point. The recipe they gave me was; two shakes of Taxi Driver and a pinch of Dirt Harry and just a splash of "Gravedigger" Jones. Confusing, right? I was also prone to irrational rages. This is a taste of the violent gumbo in my head that Cormac McCarthy helped me sort out. And that is personal. Critically I can say, McCarthy deals with the cost of violence to both the victim and the perpetrator. And I believe that is important to see in a book dealing with violence. 

I believe a book must be about something bigger than the plot. As a writer I don’t aways know what a book is about until I’m deep into the writing. Any messages we want to place in a book should be covert not overt. 

If I tweeted, “Intellectually disabled people are humans too.” I might get some likes. If I made it cleverer it might go viral. But if I wrote a book, say TRICKY and let the reader experience the truth of that statement. Introduced them to Cisco and had them spend time with a complex intellectually disabled character, I might help them have a richer sense of all the ways a neurodiverse person can be. 

What I like or don’t like is far less important than what moves me, helps me grow, and alters my viewpoint.

*****

Here’s a few more thoughts on neurodiversity -

https://crimereads.com/crime-fiction-needs-neurodiversity/

Story or style?

What draws you in as a reader?

by Dietrich

Well, I’ve got to say style before story, but style won’t go very far on its own. I want to keep turning the pages, and for that there has to be a story, a sense of where it’s all going. In fact, along with story and style, all the elements need to be strong. We’ve recently talked about the importance of first lines and openings. Sure, it’s the hook, but a story needs interesting subplots, believable characters and settings, possibly some surprises and unexpected turnabouts for the magic to happen.

Style is the author’s voice, the personality coming through the narrative, and the tone or attitude in the telling. And it’s a writers style that truly sets them apart, and whether it’s good is subjective to the reader’s opinion. Something for everybody. And I’m a little fickle that way, sometimes I’m in the mood for the schemes of lowlifes, other times I might kick back with Proust.

I love the writing styles of James Lee Burke, Patti Smith, Elmore Leonard, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Margaret Atwood, and many other greats. So, regardless of genre, modern or classic, a powerful writing style draws me in. A couple of examples:

“Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his mind. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted. 

– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

“Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or living it, let alone the fright of two creeping-off boys. Her past had been like her present--intolerable--and since she knew death was anything but forgetfulness, she used the little energy left her for pondering color.

"Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t." 

– Toni Morrison, Beloved

George V. Higgins wrote entire stories in just dialogue, and as the saying goes character is who we are when no one’s looking. And he could show readers some amazing insights through his characters’ speech. And Cormac McCarthy’s signature style is a rolling rhythm that’s sometimes haunting, sometimes fiery, always confident and stripped down to the bare-bones of punctuation.

For me, reading the works of the greats is not only inspiring, it also influences and helps shape my own work. Plus, not much beats reading a good book.