The Midas Touch

“If you knew that anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?”

From Jim

My last book. I would quit writing.

There would be no challenge. No wondering or hoping or wanting. There would be no dream. I can’t imagine a more dreary life. Who wants to end up like Midas?

Bear in mind that a superstar hitter in baseball only succeeds about thirty percent of the time. How boring if batting became a conga line.

And since we’re on sports now, if I knew that every shot I took on the basketball court would go in the hoop, I’d quit that too. And golf? Imagine if every shot were a beauty? Every putt in the center of the cup? I think I’d end up cheating against myself.

Even the NFL understood that extra points had become too automatic so they changed the rules. Much more interesting now that it’s no longer a chip shot.

And soccer? If they wanted to make it easy to score, they would have made the goal bigger, tied goalies’ hands behind their backs, and never come up with the offsides rule.

That said, I wouldn’t mind hitting 52% of my shots on the court and maintaining a two or three handicap on the links. And, I would love to sell more books. But if a genie promised me that everything I wrote would be a wild success, I’d lose interest in heartbeat.

“Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty.”
—T. Roosevelt

Overnight $uccess

If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

By Dietrich Kalteis

Doing what you love is anybody’s best shot at success. And I love sitting at my desk and making stuff up. And I don’t think any of us can predict what’s going to be a best-seller. I know if I tried to write what I guessed would sell, rather than writing what I loved to write about, it would be crap.

Okay, it sounds corny, but it’s the best thing in the world to get to do what I love every day, and that’s success in it itself. And if money follows, then that’s even better. Who’d turn it down? 

For most of us, it’s more of a slow grind than instant success. So, anytime I need a shot of perseverance, I recall that J.K. Rowlings was turned down a dozen times on the road to becoming the first author billionaire, Stephen King’s first novel Carrie was rejected thirty times, and Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce was bounced back over eighty times. The New York Times ran an article about him some years ago, the headline: Writer discovered after 23 novels. 

Writing every day is my best shot at standing out in a crowded field. And that need to write is an in-the-blood kind of thing. Being able to stay focused and positive helps, so does not thinking about success or the lack of it. And almost as important is reading and being inspired and influenced by great books.

And speaking of great books, since the Holidays are rushing up, I’ve listed some of the crime novels that I’ve read over the past year which stood out. As I’m writing this I just finished my friend Sam Wiebe’s second novel Invisible Dead, and I can tell you the guy writes like a champ. Then there’s Black Orchid Blues by Persia Walker, a bright and funny book. The Force by Don Winslow had to be the best-paced novel I read all year, and Razor Girl by Carl Hiaasen had to be the funniest. Also very funny and well done (and Canadian) are No Fury Like That by Lisa de Nikolits or One Brother Shy by Terry Fallis. 

I reread a couple of crime classics that stand the test of time, ones that I’d highly recommend: Miami Blues, from 1984, and New Hope for the Dead by Charles Willeford, published 1985, and The Moonshine War by Elmore Leonard, published 1969. As much as I enjoyed Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, I started his Jesse Stone novels and I loved Trouble in Paradise, the second in the series, published in 1999.

All the best to everyone over the Holidays.

What If?

For Dec 3

Today Terry Shames answers the question: If you knew anything you wrote would be published and successful, what would you write?

I always figured I’d write the great American novel, so if you had asked me this when I was in my twenties, that would have been the answer.  But when I actually started writing, everything I wrote turned into a mystery. Even my very first book, a science fiction book about aliens was really a mystery in sci-fi clothing. (This particular book has never again seen the light of day, so we’ll say no more about it.) After a while I realized that mysteries are clearly what I intended to write, so there was no sense in changing it.

That’s the short answer. The long answer is more complicated. I thought the first mystery I wrote would be published and highly successful. I really did think that, especially after it was snapped up by the first agent I queried. Lest you think I threw a bunch of words on the page and flung it out there, the book had been rewritten at least ten times, including the protagonist morphing from female journalist to female amateur detective….to a male cop. How’s that for editing! Alas, the agent was unable to find a home for it. By the time he told me it was a no-go, I had written a second book and decided to start fresh with a new agent. Exactly the same thing happened. This time with a very well known agent. And it continued to happen with two more books—each time with a seasoned veteran of an agent, each time with a rejection.

With every new book I thought, “Of course it’s going to be published and successful!” It took years of rejection and going back to the drawing board, to finally begin a series that took hold. That was my Samuel Craddock series.I feel as if in that sense, I have written books that are published and successful.

So I think I need to take the question one step farther: what would I write if I knew I would not just be published and successful, but wildly successful. Girl on a Train successful. Successful like Sue Grafton, Craig Johnson, Tana French, Michael Connelly, Lee Child, Susan Shea (okay, I slipped that one in to see if you were paying attention). To think of the answer to the question I need to think about the kind of book I would want to write. So many choices, so little time—thriller, police procedural, historic, foreign intrigue, caper, humorous, adventure, private eye….whew!

The answer is that every book I write I hope will be wildly successful. I don’t start a book thinking, “Gee I hope this book bumbles along and has a few readers.” I think, “This is great idea! What fun! I’m sure it’s going to be a huge success.” Then reality intervenes. At about 10,000 words my thought process is something along the lines of, “Maybe this is a mistake. I’m not sure this idea will work.” 20,000 words: “What was I thinking? This is going nowhere!” 30,000 words: “You can’t throw all these words away. Try to think of something to make it work. ANYTHING.” 40,000 words: “EEEEEEEKKK! Help!.” 50,000: “Just write the book.” 60,000: “Just finish the damn book!” 70,000: “Surely the edits will fix it.” Eventually I get to the editing stage, the first stage of which is, “What a hot mess!”

And then it goes through an amazing metamorphosis. Editing gets done, the book gets turned in to my publisher, it gets a good going over by my editor, my copyeditor, my proofreader. Final verdict: “Hey, this is okay! I think it’s going to be wildly successful!”  So I guess my final answer is, what would I write if I knew it was going to be published and wildly successful? Exactly what I do write!

And here’s the cover of my next book, which comes out January 9—the book I think is going to be wildly successful:

                                          

A Thousand Monkeys Walk Into A Room – And Start Typing Away

Scientists have invented a robot that can do your writing for you. You give it the basic plot and characters and it does the rest. Would you use it? Why or why not?

by Paul D. Marks

Aren’t some authors doing that already? Kind of doing factory farming writing – farming out their books to other authors. That seems kind of robotic to me.

And while it would be nice to have a robot take some of the burden off, I don’t think I’d do it. But like Sean Connery learned, “never say never.”

Part of what makes good writing is the author’s personal experience and how they interpret that experience and distill it into their writing. How s/he infuses their writing with their take on life. A robot or artificial intelligence would be missing that. Until they can truly experience life, not just have it programmed into them, their writing will lack a certain heart to it. And didn’t they try that with typing monkeys, thinking that eventually they’d come up with a Shakespeare play just by random chance. According to Wikipedia, “The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.” The same might be said for a robot. But, even if they could do it, having it programmed into them to whatever extent, it takes the fun and spontaneity out of writing.

Slate has an article about Shelley A.I., a bot that writes horror stories. ( http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/10/27/an_ai_bot_is_very_good_at_writing_horror.html ). I think the examples provided in the article show that the writing is, indeed, a bit “mechanical”. And, as they say in the piece, “The algorithms, like Shelley, still require human-made works to teach themselves how to create phrases and sentences from words, how to generate drama and rising action and climax, how to access a lexicon that delivers the right sort of tone and purpose, and more.” So it seems like robots or Artificial Intelligence bots have it one up over the monkeys, but I’m thinking that the A.I. writer still lacks something humans do, most especially life experience that puts what they’re writing in context and gives it a deeper texture. (I noticed that one of the commenters to RM’s blog earlier this week also mentioned this piece, so the word on A.I. Writer Bots is getting out.)

Wired also did a piece both written by and about robots or A.I. And maybe it works for non-fiction, at least a little better than for fiction. But for fiction it doesn’t seem like it would work, even if you wanted to do it that way. You can find the Wired story here: https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/ 

There’s something to be said for the human touch, whether in the market checkout line or at the bank…or in writing. Yes, the ATM or auto checkout line might be faster, but sometimes it’s nice just to have a face to say hello to and have it say hello back. Of course if they’re talking to their co-workers or on the phone, well screw ’em.

And while it’s nice to have “robots” or programs that can spell-check, offer up Thesaurus words or even check grammar (more on that in a minute) and analyze your story, you have to be the one to do the creative work. I don’t even like those programs that plot for you or do other similar things because they take the “me” out of the writing and without that the work could be written by pretty much anyone – or any bot –, so what then makes it unique? Plus, do we really want robots taking our writing jobs away?

Now to grammar: If you’ve tried using a grammar checker as a fiction writer you’ve probably found that it’s way too formal. It might work for non-fiction, but fiction is more free-form. And grammar checkers can drive you crazy. So though a robot or A.I. bot might be able to come up with a story it might be stiff and talk and walk awkwardly like Robby the Robot. You also have to be careful that your bot doesn’t mutiny on you:

VIDEO REMOVED

Someday there might be robots or AI with enough heart to create a good story. Or maybe, ultimately the human element just can’t be replaced.

***

And now for the usual BSP:

Please check out the interview Laura Brennan, writer, producer and consultant, did with me for her podcast, where we talk about everything from Raymond Chandler and John Fante to the time I pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it. Find it here: http://destinationmystery.com/episode-52-paul-d-marks/

www.PaulDMarks.com

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Get thee behind me, sort of.

Scientists have invented a robot that can do your writing for you. You give it the basic plot and characters and it does the rest. Would you use it? Why or why not?

by Catriona

This is a bad day to ask me. Ordinarily, I wouldn't entertain the notion. However, right now I'm trying to edit a book to give to my agent for her to read on the plane to Tokyo on the 23rd of December. I know the story is there somewhere, as are the characters. I know I can tighten the plot and fix the pace because I've done it before. I know which bits of  the prose need attention because I have a sense of smell and they stink. I can do it. I will do it. (I can't be responsible for my beloved agent getting stuck on a fifteen hour flight with a bad book.)

If I could just hand it over to the Plot-o-Bot, though? And, instead, spend the next three weeks responding to the editor's notes on a different book, which happened to land on my desk today? So that was done by the end of the year? And I could start next year with a clear desk? Tempting.

If I didn't like what the Editron did, I could always fix it in the next edit, couldn't I?

I'd never let a Myster-a-matic write a first draft, or a final draft, or even check page proofs. But I've got to tell you: if I could farm out tasks like "spread this sub-plot back through the early chapters" and "sharpen this relationship; it's boring" and "merge these two minor characters into one" [groan], I might well.

And I'd definitely let it write the synopsis. I'd let my blender write synopses if its typing was better. Wouldn't you?

Danger, Will Robinson....by Cathy Ace

Scientists have invented a robot that can do your writing for you. You give it the basic plot and characters and it does the rest. Would you use it? Why or why not?

Okay – so this is going to be a short one from me today, because my answer is simple...but read on, because there's some NEWS at the end of this blog you won't want to miss...

“No, thank you. I’m delighted you think you’ve invented a robot you believe can breathe life into the most basic elements of storytelling, but I have a question for you, ‘What have you been reading to even think this might be possible?’” 

I mean, seriously? Take the plot and characters of each Shakespeare comedy or tragedy and you have a ‘blueprint’ – give them to the Master, and you have wondrous works that speak to us today as they spoke to those who first saw them performed almost 500 years ago. That’s the human touch. 

Take the plots and characters of Agatha Christie’s works and give them to a thing and see what you get…a type of pastiche, lacking the human touch. Same goes for the works of any author. 

The human touch is what sets apart the basics of plot and character. The style of the author, their individual voice, beyond those of their characters. 

No. Nope. Not for me. Thank you. 

But if you could invent something that could do all my chores and errands for me, so there's more writing time available, I'd take it in a heartbeat! 

Cathy Ace is the Bony Blithe Award-winning author of The Cait Morgan Mysteries and The WISE Enquiries Agency Mysteries.  You can find out more about Cathy, her work and her characters at her website, where you can also sign up for her newsletter with news, updates and special offers: http://cathyace.com/

Available NOW for pre-order...coming December 11th...find out how Cait Morgan met Bud Anderson, how the WISE Women set up in business together...and more. 8 novellas, 4 short stories...a ton of murderous fun!Click here to connect!

I’m Thankful

From Jim

If you could choose between being incredibly popular, prolific and commercial like James Patterson or being a revered, admired writer who will go down in history as a classic which would you choose and why?

Short answer: Both. Who wouldn’t want to achieve financial and critical success?

Long answer: I’m thankful but motivated.

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There’s no trick to making a lot of money...

On the subject of financial success, I’m fond of quoting Mr. Bernstein, Charles Foster Kane’s business manager in Citizen Kane. “Well, it's no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want to do is make a lot of money.” That may be true. I can’t say for sure because I haven’t tried it. While I’d love to make a lot of money, I’ve always wanted more than just that. That’s why I wouldn’t steal to acquire wealth, for one thing. Or work for Donald Trump, for another. And that’s why I wouldn’t write and try to sell something I don’t believe in. 

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When vampire books were all the rage, I didn’t jump on that bandwagon and try to write one because they didn’t really appeal to me. I’m not criticizing vampire novels. I’m only saying I’m not interested enough to write one myself. The same way I’m not interested (or qualified) enough to write a physics textbook or a legal brief.

I don’t begrudge writers who reap wild financial rewards. Nor do I invoke Mr. Bernstein’s aphorism to describe their success. You can’t fool readers, at least not for long. If writers are finding success with their books, it’s probably because they’re doing something right. Something they believe in. We all have different interests and passions. That’s what makes a horse race. (By the way, the sixth Ellie Stone mystery, A STONE’S THROW, comes out June 5, 2018, and it’s about horse racing. Very exciting and there are horses! You don’t want to miss this one.) 

Excuse the BSP, but we were discussing horse racing, after all. Oh, right. We were talking about success and/or literary legacy.

Close parentheses.

The problem with achieving immortality in a pantheon of writers is that you’re no longer around to enjoy it. Kind of a hollow victory, isn’t it? Whereas money buys so many things, not least of which is a sense of accomplishment. 

So, for me, the ideal would be to achieve a balance between the two. A healthy dose of accolades and piles of cash. And both in this lifetime, please. But if that dream never comes true—if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose—I would have to go with what I’ve already got. That is I’m happy to be a writer. I’m thankful to have an agent, a publisher, readers, and some much appreciated recognition. Because it’s really all gravy, considering I’d be writing just the same even if I had none of that. Creating is the best part of writing, and I’ll never forget that.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

Write what you know

by Dietrich Kalteis

If you could choose between being incredibly popular, prolific and commercial like James Patterson or being a revered, admired writer who will go down in history as a classic which would you choose and why?

Popular, prolific and commercial or revered and admired — rich or famous? We all want to be recognized and rewarded for what we do. Yes, it would be great to see a line snake down the block at my next book signing. And if there was a lot of money and a movie deal to go along with it, yoohoo, I wouldn’t rip up the checks. But let’s face it, writing fiction is the love of making stuff up and telling a good story.

It took time to find my voice and the right fit (genre) for it. Once I had that, it wasn’t about chasing a market down a rabbit hole or guessing at a best-seller; it was writing what I love to write about. There’s a passion to it, and that’s like writer’s rocket fuel. And it’s great when the words just flow on the page.

Storytelling is an art, and trying to force myself to write something I don’t have my heart in would never work. It would feel like work at best. And worse than that would be trying to sound like somebody else while I take a stab at the next best thing — a sure way to end up with a pile of crap. Being influenced and inspired is something different, and that’s why I read what I think are great books, to help elevate my own writing.  

Putting on blinders and tuning out the world, not thinking about whether I’ve got a hit or miss on my hands is how it’s going to get done. Just focusing on the work, not letting in distractions. I’m at my best when I turn off the phone, shut my door, turn up the music and refrain from social media and email, and go play with my imaginary friends.

Besides the voice and sticking to what I know, I think it’s important be able to edit my own work, to know when I’m taking a bad turn on a first draft, when to cut a scene from a second draft, and know when I should set down the third one and call it done.

Write what you know, they say. Well, I haven’t done most of the things my characters get into, but I suppose there’s a bit of me in there somewhere. Maybe I write what I do because I like seeing justice served, like when the antagonists get what’s coming to them. Or maybe I like the levity and irony that often creeps into the stories. Overall, I aim to write the kind of stories I would like to read myself. That’s the way it works for me, writing about something that sparks my interest, then finding that groove and letting the words flow. And in the end, if the book becomes a hit, then I say yoohoo, bring it on.