Orphan Thoughts and Great Openings, by Josh Stallings

Q: Have you had success taking an old, perhaps previously abandoned, manuscript and breathed in new life before selling it?

A: No… That is true, but maybe I can dig a little deeper. I was talking to my son Jared about his song writing. His current project is a band called Sprinkler Boiz. The process is working with a fellow musician who is creating instrumental tracks. Jared then creates lyrics and vocal tracks and they bounce back and forth until a song emerges. He said he scours his notebooks for orphan lines and thoughts, using them to build a song. It feels like his mind has built a wonderful pile of building blocks for him to play with. 

Back in my typewriter and pen days I saved every scrap of writing in an army surplus sailor’s chest that I dragged with me whenever we moved. Because of the basic disorganized nature of my brain, finding anything of value in ten-thousand scraps was daunting if not impossible. With the advent of computers I saved floppy discs of every draft, thinking I might go back and find gold. Problem was, I saved to obsolete formats.  

I ditched that real and virtual pile of orphan thoughts when we moved to the mountains. And I feel much lighter for it. I have come to see that my taste and world view is ever evolving. No matter how brilliant an idea was (and I doubt they were) I no longer live in that time. 

This isn't to say I don’t sometimes toy with an idea for a long time before it becomes a book. I worked on Tricky off and on for years before I became evolved enough as a person and skilled enough as a writer to turn those thoughts into a book. 

I have a book out on submission right now that I am writing a new opening chapter for. This has led me to think a lot about where a story should start. I cut trailers for a ton of 1980’s action films. They mostly start with a bang, and if they could they tossed into it the hero “saving a cat” so we knew they were good people even if they killed a mountain of nameless baddies. With books, the wisdom is you have less than twenty pages to hook a reader. But what will hook them is nebulous. 

Here is the opening paragraph from Lou Berney’s Dark Ride,

I’m lost, wandering, and somewhat stoned. This parking lot, when you’re in the middle of it, seems much vaster and more expansive than it does from the street. Or do I just seem much less consequential? That’s the question. One for the ages. It’s July, hot as balls. I stare up. The sky, pale and papery, looks like it’s about to burst into flame. How would you describe the sky to someone who has never seen a sky? You’d have to explain how it’s different every day. So many shades of blue, of gray. And we’re not even talking about sunrise or sunset. Plus the clouds! How would you describe clouds?

I’m hooked by the character's voice. I know from the book jacket that it’s a thriller, this character feels absolutely fresh in that context. He’s not a macho man or tough as nails woman, not a smart every-man, not even a petty criminal in over is head. Just a stoned dude who is content to be who he is, who is dragged into a moral dilemma and a dangerous world. 

Another fine opening is from James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss,

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

Now that sets a tone and tells me exactly the kind of writer Crumley is.

Emily St. John Mandel starts Station Eleven this way

No star burns forever. You can say “it’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Apocalyptic, and smart. Speaks of a huge event, but also locks me into the writer’s voice. 

Here is the opening line from my latest WP, 

The worst day of your life never begins on that day. It is the culmination of events. Some good. Some bad. Spend your life as a cop and you’ll recognize the connections between time, actions, and pain. A survivor’s pain is proportionate to how much they loved the victim. On July 21st 1984 Detective Hem Madsen sat in an unmarked police car unaware he was ten days away from the worst day of his life.

Will it make it to the final version of the book, or will it be a darling that needs killing? I guess I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Point is, where we start and how we write that opening sets the reader up for the rest of the book. It gives them an expectation we must fulfill. If it is done correctly it will pull in the readers that will enjoy the book, and might repel those who wouldn’t find it to their liking anyway. 

I personally am sucked in by character, and originality. What pulls you in?

Time to Be Inspired, by Josh Stallings

Q: Are there crime fiction books so good you hold on to them and re-read them? Name a few classics and inspirations.

A: I evolve year to year not only as a writer but also as a reader. That’s true for most of us. As a teenager I attached my identity to the bands I listened to, books I read, movies I dug. It was a way to connect with like minds. I wore tight pants, long scarves, platform shoes, a leather jacket. 6’4” and skinny, I must have looked a sight, but I was a walking billboard to attract my people. 

We listened to Bowie, Velvet Underground, Eno, Queen. We read Hunter S. Thompson, Edward Albee, we did scenes from Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter. I read S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, but doubt I told anyone. I loved Cotton Comes To Harlem and Superfly. As an adult I find Curtis Mayfield’s classic Superfly soundtrack holds up better than the film. 

At sixteen I moved to LA. I was alone a lot and Raymond Chandler kept me company. I slowly discovered what I personally loved to read. Hard Boiled Crime consumed me for a long time. Here are a few writers that gave me a good grounding in the field:

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye is my favorite, but you can’t go wrong reading anything he wrote.

Charles Willeford, the Hoke Moseley series is gritty brilliance. Miami Blues is worth more than a few reads.

James Crumley, is the poet laureate of brutally self effacing hard boiled crime. Dancing Bear remains my favorite, and has the best last paragraph of any book I’ve ever read. 

Andrew Vachss, the Burke series introduced me to the possibilities of what a crime family of choice could look like, that and Bullmastiffs. He wrote about the pain of childhood abuse and the need for avenging knights in tarnished armor. Flood is the first in the series and the place to start.

James Lee Burke has published twenty-three Dave Robicheaux books. The first, Neon Rain is amazing, as are all that follow. Dave and Clete Purcel are opposites in some ways, but maybe more, they are two sides of a tarnished and pitted coin. They give Burke a chance to examine morality from two perspectives. Dave who does hard violent things to set the world right, but suffers guilt and spiritual pain for having done them. Clete acts to protect those he loves and if he feels any guilt, he drowns it in whisky. 

If you dig your crime fiction Hard Boiled these five writers will give you a grounding in the sub-genre. They did for me.

My evolution as a reader is taking me farther away from crime fiction. Don’t get me wrong I still read a ton of crime books. Just finished the amazing Naomi Hirahara’s Evergreen. A brilliant, tough LA novel that we all need to read.

I recently read Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. WOW! She is a bloody master of style and form. The three books are set in the same time and have many crossover characters, but each book feels stylistically entirely different. She has her characters drive the prose. I find writers working in speculative and sci-fi are freer from tropes and reader’s structural expectations; this is exciting as a reader and maybe impossible as a writer. All writing is a high-wire act, but Atwood walked over the Grand Canyon without a net or a wire. Moments in it took my breath away. 

A well written book will entertain. A brilliantly written one inspires.

Which books inspires you? Your list will be different from every other writer or reader’s.

What book am I waiting for today? 

Lou Berney’s A Dark Ride, out 9/19. Lou is one of my favorite authors, his work is full of thrills and chills and buckets of heart. He creates people you will not forget. Where ever he’s going in this new novel, I’m buckled up and ready to go. 

These Books Are Not For Burning by Josh Stallings

Q: The building’s on fire, what books do you save?

A: Easy, the books that matter are my signed editions. This year Thomas Pluck gifted me with signed first editions of most of James Crumley’s oeuvre. Tom knows how important Crumley is to me. The Moses McGuire trilogy is a love letter to Crumley’s tarnished drunken knights. Three books were missing, Dancing Bear, luckily my friend Steven Hertzog gave me a signed first edition years ago. That leaves only A Right Madness and The Wrong Case, (weirdly these are his first and last detective novels,) I will find them sooner or later.

So after I make sure Erika, our sons, and the four legged beasties are safe, I will run back in for the Crumleys and that’s it.

Charlie signed this to our son Jared after seeing his punk band play.

Ok that and the books Charlie Huston signed to me and my family. He has been a friend and supporter since I first stumbled onto the crime scene. That’s six Crumleys and seven Hustons. Nothing else.

Except for November Road, a brilliant book, and Lou Berney signed it with a wonderful note to Erika and I. 

Looking on my shelf Bad Boy Boogie screams, “Yo gonna let me fry?” How could I leave signed Thomas Pluck books behind? 

I have signed copies from my oldest best mate, fantasy writer Tad Williams. Young Americans is dedicated to him for good reason. We lived through so much, and more to go.

It’s been said that book are old friends. These are old friends written and signed by dear friends. Picking up Monday’s Lie, I remember Jamie Mason signing it at Bouchercon San Diego. I moderated a panel she was on. I had no idea we would remain good friends over the years. 

Every book here has memories attached of the book and the writer. When Erika couldn't make a conference, Catriona McPherson signed a copy of Scot Free to her.

The first time we met Terry Shames was at Noir Bar Los Angeles, she signed a copy of her first book to Erika. She remains one of my favorite writers and people. So yeah, her books are coming.  

What about Eric Beetner or Gary Phillips’ books? Johnny Shaw? Todd Robinson? Sara J. Henry? Hillary Davidson? All great writers and old friends. Yeah, their books are coming along. 

Stuart Neville added a drawing to his signature. As did Scott Phillips when he signed Ice Harvest. Got to keep those.

I have a copy of Chandler’s “Farewell My Lovely” published in Russia and signed to me from actor Victor Wong. He was in a movie I wrote and edited that was shot in Russia. This book has personal value and the back where it explains english idioms to Russian readers is priceless.

And the books of Ian Ayris, my brother from another world. Ian signed April Skies to me  praising my memoir, “It helped me more than you will ever know.” I feel the same way about his work.  

Ok, tally up time. I count thirty six heavy books that must be saved. Maybe I can drag those out of a fire in one trip… maybe… until Erika chimes in, “What about the children's books we read to the boys?” I look at the covers and remember reading to Dylan and Jared. I read Where the Wild Things Are so many times I could read it with my eyes closed, and I did some nights. 

I just asked Jared if he remembers any particular books he was read. “Yeah, Where the Wild Things Are, Everyone Poops, and Goodnight Moon.” The children's books survived the move to the mountains and the downsizing of our life, they will not burn. Not even hypothetically.

Erika’s beautifully bound with original art work Folio editions? Yep. Those are simply too beautiful to let burn.

Books have been a part of my life since before I was me. They are attached to memories, they are gossamer threads that help me drift back. Winnie the Pooh is a very little me lying on my father playing with a Steiff bear and hearing the words rumble up deep and rich from his chest. 

Peter Pan is my mother reading to us from the very book she was read to as a child. It was faded and magical. My mother was Wendy and we were her wild children.

What books would I save? 

All of them, clearly. Wouldn’t you?

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 

Kill the Backstory. By Josh Stallings

Q: How do you deal with backstory? How much do you need, and where do you put it? How do you know what to leave in, and what to take out?

I just finished reading Heather Levy’s debut novel, Walking Through Needles, it takes place in 1994 and 2009 from the point of view of two teenagers and later, adults. It is a hard book handled brilliantly. By jumping time frames she makes backstory feel immediate. It made me think, backstory must drive the story or be dropped. 

I’m editing my newest book and I hear in my head, “Dude, your research is showing.” You know those paragraphs you put in because you spent hours to discover the exact military vehicles bought by the LAPD in 1984? It’s the Vietnam era Cadillac Gage Commando V-100, or M706, if you’re wondering. I could give engine specs, but this info dump has slowed the essay down enough as it is. How about I go with  “LAPD was the first American police force to use tanks against its citizenry.” Readers don’t care about the rabbit hole I fell down to research the novel. 

Backstory is often things I discovered about characters in early drafts. My job in editing is only keep backstory where it is absolutely necessary. Tricky is the story of a detective trying to discover what happened the day of a shooting and more importantly who the suspect is. In many ways the book hinges on discovering Cisco’s backstory. What keeps the mystery going is how the backstory is doled out, and the fact that most witnesses that tell about Cisco’s backstory could be lying. I wrote entire chapters set in the past, used them as research and then tossed them out. I needed to write them, readers didn’t need to read them.

Tangent alert: Some research facts are needed, as proven brilliantly in Throw Mamma From The Train. A woman from Billy Crystal’s writing class reads from her MS, “"Dive... DIVE" yelled the captain through the thing. So the man who makes it dive pressed a button, or something, and it dove. And the enemy was foiled again!”

My backstory: At sixteen I moved to LA to study acting at The Lee Strasberg Institute. To build a character I was trained to start with biography. Know a character inside and out. Then forget it and simply be. 

No one needs to know that Detective Madsen’s grandfather was a Texas Ranger, and the truth of the Texas Rangers is darker, more racist, and evil than the myth we have been fed. Well no one except me. I need to know it to write honestly about Madsen. To understand a character I need to understand their backstory. The hat trick is to figure out what readers need and when? Early into Tricky I show a printout of Cisco’s rap sheet. It is the police record of an evil SOB. It is part of his backstory. I also introduce believable characters who swear Cisco is a good man, and incapable of doing the things they say he did. The tension in Tricky is delivered by this simple idea; are we our backstory or is real transformation possible?

I broke somebody’s cardinal rule by starting Young Americans with a flashback. A young girl works to open a safe while her grandfather times her. She is a safe cracking prodigy. I needed the reader to believe this fact from the get go. Next chapter she’s in her early 20’s, living in Humboldt dancing for a living. A character mystery is set in motion, why would a safe cracking wunderkind end up working in a low rent club in the sticks?

Catriona McPherson’s thrilling novel Strangers at the Gate hangs entirely on backstory. Discovering what really happened versus what people say happened is the difference between life and death. McPherson’s skill is such that I never once felt a writer’s hand on the mechanisms of suspense. It was scary as hell and felt natural and believable. 

Could you live without a backstory? The crime fiction trope where an amnesiac wakes to find a dead body in their bed, is fascinating and terrifying. The question of who are we without our history, is universally fascinating. 

Backstory can be used as a deception. Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl gives us two compromised visions of the backstory, both factually kinda true, both leaving much out. Who do you trust, when you can’t trust your narrator?

When dealing with backstory remember, “show don’t tell.” My least favorite note, until on my 6th book, when I finally understood it. Now I’m starting to see how it applies to backstory. 

A Telling) “Johnny Killjoy grew up on a farm in Driscoll county… blah blah blah…”

B Showing) “‘Boy, grab that calf’s feet and pull.’ Johnny was seven and felt the mortal weight of the newborn animal’s life in his hands.”

Both of these examples give you the information that Johnny grew up on a farm, but only one of them makes you feel what that did to him, how it affected his world view. You know, the stuff we actually care about.

“But I want the readers to know Declan grew up in Belfast.” I say rather stridently to myself. 

“Why?” Myself asks me. “Irish isn’t a character trait.”

Oh… So once I really know who the character is, I can discern what information is actually needed to deliver that person fully alive in three dimensions. Why didn’t I say that to myself in the first place?

Now I’m starting to worry that I got this whole idea wrong. Maybe backstory simply means a character’s biography… If that’s true, and it doesn’t enlighten or amuse, or move the plot or widen the mystery… Then leave it all out.

Four pages into James Crumley’s The Wrong Case, Milo Milodragovich lets us know that he is broke, and when he turns 52 he'll inherit his family’s fortune. Pure backstory and yet it explains why he acts like a man in limbo, a true slacker, before that term came to be. I love it even if it ruins my “leave all backstory out.” So I’ll amend my earlier statement, leave all backstory out… unless it works.