The Hard Way – Keeping a Series Bible...Or Not

Do you keep a “bible” for your series characters and stories? If so, what does it look like? What does it contain? Do you use a specific program or just Word or Excel files? What do you put in it, how detailed are you?

by Paul D. Marks

I wish!

If I did it would make life so much easier. But why would I want anything to be easier? Why do anything the easy way when you can with even more ease do it the hard way?

I have good intentions to do bibles for all my work. But just like New Year’s resolutions, which start out bright and shiny and perky on January 1st, by the end of January—or sooner, much sooner—they’ve mostly fallen by the wayside.

I’ve tried keeping bibles for various things, such as my Howard Hamm series of short stories that’s been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. I have a couple of different Word files with various categories, everything from what furniture is in his house, and the layout of the house, to what gun he carries. I also started an Excel file. I made a chart in Word, distinct from the above-mentioned Word files. The problem is I don’t keep them up—any of them. I put a few things down then abandon the file, every time. So when it comes to the next story I have to go back to the earlier ones to see if X did or where Y lives, etc. And some readers remember those things a lot better than I do…

The problem is if you try doing a bible while you’re working on a project it slows or even stops the forward momentum. And you can’t stop writing, especially if you’re on a streak, to put X in the X bible category and Y in the Y category. If you do you might break your streak or forget where you were going, etc. So is it worth it to stop along the way?

And then, at the end of the writing day, when you could go fill in those blanks, well, who wants to do that? I’d rather be walking Buster.

That said, I’m working on the third in the series of Duke Rogers novels (White Heat, Broken Windows) and finding it frustrating to have to go back and look things up in the earlier books. You think you’ll remember everything but it’s really hard, especially when you’re working on multiple things at one time or have multiple series going.

I haven't read this book, but it looks like it might be good resource

It can be hard to remember what kind of gun X uses, what car Y drives, color, year—and that can change within a story, as where someone’s car gets blown up like Duke’s beloved Firebird in White Heat. So what’s he driving now? What cigs does Bobby in The Blues Don’t Care smoke? Viceroys. And Booker smokes Lucky Strikes. But I have to remember not to mix them up—which I did in the first draft of this post until I went and looked in the novel to verify. And Bobby drinks Bubble Up. What music does this character like as opposed to that one? Where does so and so live? If I describe his house/apartment this way have I messed up cause before it was that way? You can get mixed up.
Then there’s character arcs and relationships among characters—relationships that change. So am I picking up where I left off with that relationship? Timelines—same thing. And backstory. Habits, mannerisms, likes, dislikes. Physical details. Oh, how I wish I had a bible for these things.

When I started out I created forms (which if I can find any, since they’re from the old typewriter days, I’ll post here), some for characters and their backgrounds and descriptions. What they eat, music they like, etc. Some forms for rooms and how they looked. But I don’t do that anymore. I’m in too much of a rush. Too many things to work on—though that’s sort of penny-wise and pound foolish ’cause it would ultimately be easier to just look on a form or computer file. Now I mostly keep it in my head and often have to go back to previous stories in the series to get the details.

A sample character development worksheet

I write a lot my first drafts in screenplay format. And the script program generates lists of characters, locations, etc., that I sometimes transfer to Word when I begin working in it. That can be helpful, but becomes incomplete as I add or change characters in the Word version. And it’s also basically for a single story and doesn’t really act as a bible across several stories with the same character/s.

I believe Scrivener has a bible function. And I have a copy of Scrivener that I bought years ago. But the learning curve was so steep I gave up on it.

I keep thinking I should hire someone to do this, to make bibles for my various series. Easy job, you can work from home in your spare time—you know like those old ads at the back of magazines: Make Money Growing Mushrooms in Your Basement in Your Spare Time. Perfect for lockdown. Lousy pay. But if anyone’s interested…

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

The Blues Don't Care released on June 1st. I had my first virtual book launch party on Facebook and despite not really knowing what I was doing, it turned out pretty good. I want to thank everyone who came and everyone who bought the book. As usual, Buster seemed to get the most likes.

The Blues Don't Care was reviewed on DiscoveringDiamonds.com and is short listed for their "Book of the Month."

"This story was a breath of fresh air, set in a familiar period, thanks to Sunday afternoon TV movies. Which means the author had to get his world-building right. The good news is - he did, and did it very well indeed."

I was also interviewed by Nancie Clare on her Speaking of Mysteries Podcast. You can check it out here.

And I did a Guest Blog on Stacey Alesi's BookBitch.com where I talk about how important conflict is in creating characters. I hope you'll check it out here.

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my website  www.PaulDMarks.com

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Butcher, Baker, Troublemaker

Most of us - most writers everywhere - do something else first, or do something else alongside. What bits of your other career(s) have you found useful in the business of writing and what bits have you had to ditch?

by Paul D. Marks

Generally, I don’t like to talk about most of my checkered past. Nothing illegal or anything like that, just checkered. Maybe Chancellor of the Exchequer (or should that be Chancellor of the Excheckered?). But if it’s the “ex” chequer wouldn’t that make one the Ex Chancellor of the Chequer? But I digress.

I did a lot of things before my vaunted prose writing career. Juggler. Trapeze artist. Tail gunner in a B-17. Gumshoe. Well, the only one of those that even comes close to true is gumshoe and that’s only because I’ve had gum on my shoe…more than once even.

As you’ll see below (and above, too), I think this Covid-19 House Arrest is getting to me. I think virtually all of our experiences, good or bad, come into play in our writing one way or another. I’ve done a lot of things, written for radio, rewrites for films, made deliveries for a small business, worked in the mail room for a big company, pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it (see the "about" section on my website for an abbreviated version of that story) and other things. But many things that play into my writing aren’t necessarily job-related.

Of some of the things I am willing to talk about:

I kidded the kidder:

I was visiting a friend on the set of “Mork and Mindy” during a rehearsal and I freaked out Robin Williams.  They were blocking.  No audience.  I was the only stranger there, someone he didn't recognize. He was anxious seeing a stranger on the set, having had some recent trouble with the tabloids.

He asked me if I worked for the National Enquirer. Strange question, I thought.  But I can give as well as receive, "Yes," I said, joking.  He freaked, though he didn't get nasty or anything like that, just uptight.  I finally told him I was kidding.  After the rehearsal he apologized.  It was fun kidding the kidder though.

I ran into him at a party for a rock star a couple weeks later. He smiled. We chatted a bit. He remembered “the incident”. He didn’t sic anyone on me. I count that as a victory. I don’t remember if I’ve used it in any writing, but it will make in there some day. But hey, I have to make this article interesting, don’t I? I did, however, use a Mork-Pam Da wber connection, Rebecca Schaeffer, as one of the inspirations for White Heat…


I did use this incident:

I went to a producer’s house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Boulevard. I drove up. Two Jaguars in the huge driveway. I go inside, nice (read expensive) art, nice (read expensive) furniture, expensive house (read insanely expensive) all the way around. Have my meeting with said producer and his partner and they want to option something…for free. All that ostentatious wealth and they don’t want to pay me for my property. That, in a roundabout way, made it into Broken Windows:

That was an easy one. But I was sick of being famous. I never asked for it. Sick of working for the Hollywood crowd, who thought they owned you just because they paid you, late more often than not, pleading poverty as they lived in the mansions above Sunset and drove Jags and Lamborghinis. Who knows, maybe it was all rented? Most of them were as much façade as the sets they filmed on. Which made me wonder about Susan Karubian? Why pick the Hollywood Sign to jump off? Another disappointed actress who didn’t know the ropes? Who didn’t know what it would take to make it in this town? She should have just gone home and slipped under the covers until the dream passed. Then she could have woken up one day with a smile and faced the world. After all, a new world’s born at dawn.

My friend Linda:

A long time ago, my friend Linda and I used to get in one of our cars, point it in a direction and drive. Go exploring L.A., from Pasadena to downtown to San Pedro and all points in between. It was fun. It was educational. We both love L.A. And we both love swing/big band music. So we’d also go to swing concerts, sometimes by unknown bands and sometimes by the remnants of the big bands from the 30s and 40s. We saw Tex Beneke, Glenn Miller vocalist and saxophonist, lead the Glenn Miller Orchestra. We saw Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell sing their hits Tangerine and Brazil. And more (see my article https://www.sleuthsayers.org/2020/04/it-dont-mean-thing-if-it-aint-got-that.html at SleuthSayers). (And, unfortunately, this was all before digital cameras and the pix aren’t digitized or even easy to find.)

All of this has paid off in my writing. I’m a rock ‘n’ roll kid but I’ve been lucky to be exposed to all kinds of music and see much of it in person, too. And that certainly helped in my writing of various stories/novels, especially my upcoming novel The Blues Don’t Care (June 1st, 2020), a crime story set amidst the jazz scene on L.A.’s Central Avenue during World War II in the 1940s.

And all that driving around L.A. has certainly helped when I write things set in L.A., which I do a lot and sometimes maybe too much.

Linda and I both worked in the film biz. And that, too, has provided a lot of fodder for things in my stories. My 2019 story Fade-Out on Bunker Hill just placed second in the Ellery Queen Readers Poll (see the virtual awards ceremony on YouTube). It’s part of my Howard Hamm series. In that story, which riffs off the classic movie Sunset Boulevard, Howard Hamm gets “lost” on a Hollywood backlot. Whenever I had a meeting or other occasion to be at a studio I would always wander the backlots. I love them and the magic they stand for. So when Howard does his backlot wandering in Fade-Out it’s really me reminiscing about those days, though he finds much more trouble there than I did...

There are various Hollywood types in many of the things I write and you can bet that all of them are based to one degree or another on people I’ve met or worked with, though sometimes several people composited into one.

Much of my early Hollywood experiences made it into a satirical novel that was picked up by a major publisher and then dumped when they kicked out their old editorial staff for a new one and, as a new broom sweeps clean, my book was swept out with the new. The moral of that story is don't write topical humor, because by the time my book was thrown, er, swept out some of the humor was already dated so it was too late to try another publisher without a major rewrite. Though I will probably rewrite it one day sans topical humor cause I still like the story.

Crew member and me on the Warner Bros backlot

And people often ask how much of you is in your characters. There's a little of me in all my characters.  Some corner or part of them is based on me—and those parts are, of course, based on my experiences.  Other parts are based on people I've known or have come across.  Of course, I write a lot about crime and murderers and I've never murdered anyone…except on paper.  But still, you can reach into the dark side of yourself and draw on that for inspiration.  At some point we all want revenge of varying degrees on people who dun us wrong and in a novel or story you can get that revenge without worrying about going to jail.  So you reach into that dark corner of your mind and write as if you had a get out of jail free card.

So everything we do or experience turns up in our stories, if not directly then indirectly.

And then there’s the other things I did that I can’t tell you about ….or as they say “I’d have to kill you”.

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Frank Zafiro grilled me for the Wrong Place, Write Crime podcast. I survived...and so did he. Hope you'll want to check it out. (And thanks for having me, Frank!)

https://soundcloud.com/frank-zafiro-953165087/episode-75-open-shut-w-paul-d-marks


Coming June 1st from Down & Out Books – The Blues Don't Care:

 “Paul D. Marks finds new gold in 40s’ L.A. noir while exploring prejudices in race, culture, and sexual identity. He is one helluva writer.”
                                                               —Michael Sears, author of the Jason Stafford series

Please join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/paul.d.marks and check out my website  www.PaulDMarks.com

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