Five Simple Rules for Better Writing by Josh Stallings

 Q: What are the ten most important things you’ve learned in your time as a writer? Both useful and useless?

RULE #1 This is a business. Don’t spend hundreds of dollars to sell a few copies of your book. 

Two weeks ago I drove 1,300 miles to Austin Texas to read at Vintage Bookstore & Wine Bar where Scott Montgomery was hosting a Noir At The Bar event. I sold three copies, two to my niece. On a ledger sheet this made no sense. Clearly I’m no good at following rules, even my own. 

Intangible value added facts: Scott was the first book store person to push my writing, he turned Book People into my best selling venue. Over the years he has become a good friend. Also, my sister, nieces and nephews live in Texas. 

Best of all it was an opportunity for a road trip with my son Jared. We ate brisket burritos, Egyptian brisket, brisket and eggs. Driving across the west Texas wasteland at dusk a storm spit lightning bolts that stayed aloft long enough for us to really study them. Gallon sized raindrops exploded across the truck’s windshield. In a distant oil field, flames gave the horizon a hellish vibe. Before the reading we had an early dinner at “Old Thousand” where surrounded by family I had one of the finest Chinese meals of my life.      

It turned out to be a trip I didn’t know I needed, but I did. To cadge a phrase from Ted Lasso’s Dani Rojas, writing is life. So don’t forget to enjoy it.

RULE #1 AMENDED. Yes it’s a business, a long game brand building business. You never know if a person crossing your path might be the one holding your brass ring, or at least might invite you to an Egyptian BBQ food truck.  

RULE #2. Nope, not falling for that old trap. In the words of Dr Venkman: “I make it a rule never to get involved with possessed people. Actually, it's more of a guideline than a rule.” 

Guideline #2 Don't believe anyone who tells you the rules of writing fiction. Also don’t not believe them either. The hubris of thinking you know everything you need to about writing will inevitably lead to a poorly written draft. Sometimes you have to write a bad draft to get to the good one, but you don’t have to do it on purpose, unless you do, then bluster forward. 

I walk point on my writing journey. I am responsible for keeping the story safe, and sometimes that means trying things that feel silly. If a suggested change doesn’t make it better, I delete it. As a film editor I made the mistake more than once of showing a bad cut to a client hoping to prove it was a bad idea. They loved it and I had to see the bad cut go to finish. In books I am the client and the creator. Instead of showing a bad chapter, I assume the editor or agent or beta reader is smart or I wouldn’t be working with them, so I sometimes forget the note they gave and dig in to discover what and where the real problem is.

Guideline #3. My work can always be better, so I keep trying to make it better. Knowing this, I also need to know when to stop. Hit send. And take what I learned into the next book. I try to look at my writing in sections that I can put together later on a bookshelf. I will not judge myself by one book but by the ultimate body of work. 

Guideline #4. Marketing, by the time a book is out I’m already deep into my next book. My new obsession is all I really want to talk about. The book I should be talking about feels old and dusty. But not to readers. To them it’s a brand new shiny tale. Three years after finishing TRICKY, I’m in a packed room in the Idyllwild Library talking with book club members who are speaking enthusiastically about my work. I refuse to kill that buzz. Before going to book events I look through the published books, read over a few reviews (good ones only) and remember when that book was all I could think about. I remind myself these events aren’t about me, they’re about the readers. This way I come out of these talks feeling optimistic.

Guideline #5. Don’t yuck anyone’s yum. This is vital in both a writer’s life and life in general. 

Someone says, “I love carrot cake.” 

“What? Fucking vegetables for dessert? Yuck.” Is one way to go. Or “Nice. Triple chocolate fudge ice cream cake is my jam.” Might be a better response, if you don’t want folks to think you’re a dick.

Taste is personal. I am not the arbitrator of which books suck and which are brilliant. Putting down successful authors doesn't make me edgy or cool. Social media has convinced us that we need to “like” or “not like” everything with no real discourse on why and zero care for how it makes others feel. A world where we prove how smart we are by bagging on each other for misspelling or bad punctuation in a tweet, (or is than now an X?), instead of looking for the content of each other’s words we scream YOU USED TOO MANY COMMAS.

If we want to be perceived as peevish whiners, so be it. Buuut, from a sales point of view, telling a reader that they have bad taste will not endear you to them or make them want to run out and buy your latest tome.

I need to amend this, we have also lost the art of actual critiques. When I’m on a call with a fellow writer, say Thomas Pluck, we will delve into what works and doesn’t work in books we are reading. This week I compared the two books Jared and I listened to on our road trip, James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, and Dennis Lehane’s Small Mercies. Both are brilliant, both flawlessly written, both deal with racism in America. Ultimately what I needed to talk about was how they left me feeling. 

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store had me crying ugly tears as I drove through the Texas hill country, and yet the take away was one of hope. McBride’s personal alchemy is in finding the beauty in a hard world and the humanity in criminals and damaged folks. No pollyanna, he doesn’t shy away from the fact that there are evil motherfuckers out there. He makes no excuses for racists or abusers. But in the end, bad things happen to bad people and good things to good people. A cynic may say that is not how the world works, but I wouldn’t.  

Small Mercies had me crying as we crossed back into California. It didn’t give me hope, and it shouldn’t. It is an honest look at what hate does to a woman, a family, a neighborhood, our country. It does deliver an adrenaline pumping ending. It is victorious, and damned if it didn’t feel righteous. And this is where it gets personal, hope isn’t a necessary element for any book. But it is something I seek. If you’ve read my books you’ll know I look for a shard of sunshine even in the bleakest of times. 

I’m glad I read Lehane’s Small Mercies back to back with James McBride’s Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, they taught me something about myself as a writer and a human.

The last GUIDELINE, Write, write, rewrite, keep going. Every day you can find evidence that a seventy-five year old man sold his debut novel, that James Lee Burke had over 100 rejections before he was published, or that Raymond Chandler wasn’t published until he was in his fifties. Or you can find evidence that whoever you are and whatever you’re writing isn’t what they’re looking for. If the latter makes you angry and gets you typing, go with it. If the former gives you hope and gets you typing, go with it. Just get typing.

He said, she said.

This week we’re talking about dialogue tags, hints, tips and gripes.

by Dietrich

Dialogue Tags

There’s been a lot written about whether dialogue tags should ever be more than ‘he said’ or ‘she said’. 

“While to write adverbs is human, to write ‘he said, she said’ is divine.” 

— Stephen King

“The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But "said" is far less intrusive than "grumbled", "gasped", "cautioned", "lied". I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with "she asseverated" and had to stop reading and go to the dictionary.” 

— Elmore Leonard

Okay, some writers think it’s a sin to use more than said, and I don’t usually use more than that. And sometimes a dialogue tag isn’t needed if it’s obvious who’s speaking. 

I go for economy of words to give the text a flow, so ‘said’ usually does the trick for me. Maybe it just comes down to an individual writer’s style. I wouldn’t put a book down just because a writer used babbled, bawled, begged, bellowed, mused, mumbled, moaned, or muttered after a character’s words.

Hints and tips

The best hint or tip or words of advice I can come up with is don’t take too much of it as gospel. If a bit of advice rings true, take it, or whatever part that makes sense, and make it your own. 

Here are a few tips and pearls that work for me. 

“Read, read, read everything – trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.”  

— William Faulkner

“Know you’re writing something good even if nobody else does.”

— Dennis Lehane

“Never tell your reader what your story is about. Reading is a participatory sport. People do it because they are intelligent and enjoy figuring things out for themselves.” ― George V. Higgins

“Present the world as it is, rather than the way the reader wants it to be. I don’t care about twists or manufactured surprises.” — George Pelecanos

“My advice is, ‘Live every day as if your rent is due tomorrow.’”

— Carl Hiaasen

“When you're not concerned with succeeding, you can work with complete freedom.” — Larry David

“Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.” – Ezra Pound

Gripes

I’ve been guilty of it, but really, nobody wants to hear it. Maybe griping is like a release valve to let off some steam, but too much of it and it might cloud your day. So, just don’t do it, and don’t hang around it. It’s better to go look for something that doesn’t tick you off. Sorry if that sounds like another tip.

Deeper and Deeper

Paul here:

This week I’m thrilled to have Dennis Palumbo guest blog here. Dennis is a screenwriter (My Favorite Year, Welcome Back Kotter, and more), psychotherapist and the author of the Daniel Rinaldi series. His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand and elsewhere, and is collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press).

Dr. Daniel Rinaldi is a psychologist and trauma expert, who consults with the Pittsburgh Police Department and specializes in treating the victims of violent crime. And that’s something he knows about personally: Rinaldi’s wife was murdered in a mugging and he was shot. He struggles with survivor’s guilt. Now he’s on a mission to help others deal with their traumas, while at the same time getting involved in cases and helping to solve the crimes.

Head Wounds is the fifth Rinaldi story, preceded by Mirror Image, Fever Dream, Night Terrors, Phantom Limb. For more info, visit www.dennispalumbo.com .

Take it away, Dennis.

***

This week’s question: What difference do you notice between the prose in crime novels that were written twenty years ago and current ones? Do you think the writing has gotten better? Are the subjects different?

by Dennis Palumbo

The question is a tricky one, because no one regards the prose of such authors as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell or Ross Macdonald more highly than I do. These brilliant stylists could craft starkly beautiful sentences while still retaining both the suspense and the mystery that their novels promise.

That said, there’s little question in my mind that, in general, today’s crime fiction has broadened in its subject matter and deepened in its exploration of those areas. As good as the above-mentioned authors were, both their own prejudices and the social or moral constraints of their respective eras prevented them from addressing (except in the most covert way) issues of sexual orientation, racism and child abuse.

Twenty years ago, most readers expected little more than action, suspense and a cluster of red herrings in their mystery stories. It was also fairly customary to treat characters who strayed outside conventional norms (in terms of gender, race, moral dictates, substance use, etc.) in somewhat stereotypic fashion. They were still presented, even if occasionally with sympathy, as the “other.”

Moreover, the point of most crime fiction of decades past, even at the hands of such famous masters of the form, was to solve the mystery and reveal the killer. The whodunit still reigned supreme.

But times change, and so has crime fiction. From Richard Price to Gillian Flynn to Megan Abbott, the themes---and even the very goals---of these novels have expanded. Today’s crime fiction addresses and explores a much wider and more inclusive variety of characters and situations, from sexual identity to immigration to child abuse. These issues are now frequently tackled head on, and with a more empathetic and knowledgeable approach. Such “outlier” issues---and characters---are no longer the exception to the norm; they are the norm.

As a therapist, I can’t help but think that some of these narrative shifts in tone, theme and characterization are due to a more mature understanding on the readers’ part of the complexity of the human condition. Moreover, as psychological terms and disorders are more commonly (though often erroneously) talked about, readers expect today’s authors to have a more frank, thoughtful view of life today.

(I could make the argument, for example, that Gone Girl is as much a sly, snarky commentary of the state of contemporary marriage as it is a crime novel. It was as if Phillip Roth or John Cheever had turned their talents to psychological suspense.)

In my own novels, featuring psychologist and trauma expert Daniel Rinaldi, the narrative itself is usually informed by the emotional issues (often birthed by the trauma of violence, abuse, etc.) of the characters. As a consultant to the Pittsburgh Police, and in his role treating victims of violent crime, my protagonist’s clinical acumen can help shed some light on what might be going on. (Except those times when he’s wrong.)

The point is, I believe my readers expect that the psychological underpinnings of character, motive and general plot conform to what most of us understand as how real humans behave in the real world. 

Maybe, twenty or thirty years ago, most readers didn’t expect a crime novel to take such a deep dive into character, nor expect the narrative context to reflect so accurately the current state of affairs, either personally or politically. But nowadays, crafting a mystery (even a cozy) without at least a glancing nod at the realities of contemporary life seems antiquated, almost deliberately opaque.

I’m reminded of a comment made about the work of P.G. Wodehouse: as wonderful as he was, he wrote as though neither Freud nor Marx had ever existed.

I think the same sentiment holds true for today’s authors. We live in a rapidly-changing, media-drenched world whose mores and behavioral expectations are in turmoil; a time of global pandemics, terrorism, economic inequality, gender fluidity, sexual predation, and other social and political concerns. For crime fiction to stay relevant, I believe it has to, at least tangentially, acknowledge these issues.

Which, I’m happy to report, it appears to be doing. The best of today’s mystery fiction authors, from Dennis Lehane to Tana French, Scott Turow to Denise Mina, George Pelicanos to Louise Penny, deliver prose that is both beautifully crafted and cannily relevant to the times.

Of course, there will always be readers who enjoy the simple pleasures of earlier mystery fiction, whether the comfortable world of Agatha Christie or that of tough-guy Mickey Spillane.

But, if today’s best-seller lists are anything to go by, crime fiction is continuing to evolve and change, as is the society it inevitably mirrors.

Besides, as the author John Fowles soberly reminds us, “All pasts are like poems; you can derive a thousand things, but you can’t live in them.”

***

Thanks, Dennis. And be sure to check out Dennis’s books and find out more about him, and them, at his website (above).

~.~.~

And now for the usual BSP:

Broken Windows releases on September 10th and is available for pre-order now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Down & Out Books.

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Closing thoughts on opening lines

by Dietrich Kalteis

As a writer, what do you make of readers who flip to the end and see what happens last first?

Flipping to the end of a novel to find out how it ends is like reaching under the Christmas tree when no one’s around and unwrapping a present, getting a sneak-peek, then rewrapping it, and trying to act surprised Christmas morning. To me, that just ruins the moment. 

The ending to a good novel is the wrap up of everything that came before. At times the author may hint at several possibilities to a story’s ending, or throw some last minute twists and surprises to keep the reader from predicting the ending. Maybe for some people, novels should come with spoiler alert stickers. 

William Goldman said, “The key to all story end­ings is to give the audi­ence what it wants, but not in the way it expects.”

While the ending to a good story is like the punchline to a good joke, I’m more interested in the first few pages of a book — the opening. If it doesn’t grab me, I may not read much more before putting the book down. If it doesn’t grab me, I won’t keep turning pages to see what the ending holds in store.

There’s a lot of promise in a strong opening, and it’s hard to imagine putting a book down that starts like this:

Some years later, on a tugboat in the Gulf of Mexico, Joe Coughlin’s feet were placed in a tub of cement. Twelve gunmen stood waiting until they got far enough out to sea to throw him overboard, while Joe listened to the engine chug and watched the water churn white at the stern.

— Dennis Lehane, Live by Night

As Roy Dillon stumbled out of the shop his face was a sickish green, and each breath he drew was an incredible agony. A hard blow in the guts can do that to a man, and Dillon had gotten a hard one. Not with a fist, which would have been bad enough, but from the butt-end of a heavy club.

— Charles Willeford, Miami Blue

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. — James Crumley, The Last Good Kiss

Dennis Lenahan the high diver would tell people that if you put a fifty-cent piece on the floor and looked down at it, that's what the tank looked like from the top of that eighty-foot steel ladder. — Elmore Leonard, Tishomingo Blues

Great opening lines are real grabbers, but a great book is a combination of all the story elements that have to work together to keep me turning the pages. It’s the writer’s voice, the pace, plot, conflict, setting, and the characters and their dialog. And when it’s all working together, it’s like magic. I recently finished The Force by Don Winslow and it was like that for me, the story just fired on all cylinders. Another one I just read that was hard to put down was Trouble in Paradise, Robert B. Parker’s second Jesse Stone novel, and one of his best.

While I love to discover authors I’ve never read before, the greats are always worth revisiting because they just did everything so well. And although I already know the story’s outcome, I like to reread classics by Hemingway, Steinbeck and Salinger from time to time — those rare authors who mastered every aspect of a great story, from the opening line to the final scene. And there are great crime writers who I’ve read more than once — authors like Raymond Chandler, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, and Charles Willeford.

So, if a novel can be this great adventure, with a killer opening, interesting characters and dialog, with exciting and unexpected twists, and told in a voice that resonates, why flip to the last few pages to see how it ends?