writing

which way to the scene of the crime?

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

One of my excellent beta readers, not habitually a reader of mysteries, commented that U-town does seem to have a lot of murders and that she probably wouldn't like to live there.

A sensible thought (though there are other reasons that a sensible person would want to live there), but it made me think of the requirements of the mystery story. Different genres always have requirements, or at least tropes. Fantasy stories often have quests, for example (though detective stories have them also). Romance stories often have "good" girls and "bad" girls (or "good" boys and "bad" boys).

And mystery stories must have mysteries. And the detective must find the mysteries. On a fairly regular basis. Even to the point of statistical unlikelihood.

With amateur detectives, you just have to suspend disbelief. How did nice Miss Marple come upon so many murder victims? If that bothers you, mysteries probably aren't for you. The writers on the TV show Murder She Wrote used to refer to Jessica Fletcher as the "Angel of Death" because, wherever she went, people died. And at no point in all those episodes, over all those seasons, did she say, "Wow, this is really statistically unlikely." (Even apart from the fact that most people would have found it rather depressing.)

There was a wonderful comment on this in one episode of the audio series Sapphire and Steel. There, the "famous amateur detectives" turned out to be serial murderers. They went around the world killing people and then framing others for the murders, because (as they explained) how else could you get to be "famous amateur detectives"? How else would you find enough murders to solve (and then be able to solve them)?

With Jan Sleet, she's somewhere between an amateur and a professional. She was a reporter (she doesn't work at it very much these days, though she'd probably still identify herself as a "gal reporter" if somebody asked her profession), and it appears that one of the things she reported on was murders, but we haven't really seen that part of her life.

Now, she's somewhat official and somewhat amateur. Some mysteries are brought to her, but she still comes upon them accidentally more often than the rest of us. Which is fine with her.

Speaking of which (in case you thought this post wasn't going anywhere), our detective has just wandered into another mystery, this one by accident and coincidence. Sometimes she seeks them out, but not always.

More of Stevie One is posted. The new parts start here.

storytelling lessons from all over

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

On one hand, obviously novels are different from video games, and movies are different from comic books, and so on.

But, on the other hand, all of these are different ways of telling stories, and there are lessons you can learn from one form to apply to others.

I've noticed that some different bloggers have drawn storytelling lessons from forms other than prose novels, and I thought it would be nice to collect them in one place.

First of all, my posts have mostly drawn lessons from movies:

Christine Zilka wrote a very interesting post about lessons she learned from participating in a performance art piece:

Jo Eberhardt has started a series about lessons writers can learn from roleplaying games:

Tiyana White wrote about what she learned from a video game:

the end of part two

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 6 Comments

More of the story Stevie One is posted. The new part starts here. This is the conclusion of Part Two of the story.

I was going to split this up, post some today and the rest later, but I decided this was better. On Stephen Watkins' blog we've been talking about exactly what a "scene" is, and when you post serially a "scene" is pretty much one post, one day's excerpt.

A couple of times I've been on blogs where people have talked about where to break chapters, should it be a cliffhanger, and I never really have much to contribute. I have no theories about this; it's pretty much always a gut decision. I sometimes write something and think, "This would be a good curtain line," but then it doesn't end up working that way.

In one of the Nero Wolfe mysteries (called Plot It Yourself), Wolfe is investigating a series of plagiarism cases. In each cases, it's different person bringing the charge (against a different writer), but Wolfe gets the idea that the cases may be related, and compares the manuscripts on which the claims are based. He discovers they were all written by the same person.

He identifies similarities of punctuation, sentence construction, and specific words. Then he says:

A clever man might successfully disguise every element of his style but one – the paragraphing. Diction and syntax may be determined and controlled by rational processes in full consciousness, but paragraphing – the decision whether to take short hops or long ones, whether to hop in the middle of a thought or action or finish it first – that comes from instinct, from the depths of personality. I will concede the possibility that the verbal similarities, and even the punctuation, could be coincidence, though it is highly improbable; but not the paragraphing. These three stories were paragraphed by the same person.

That's how I feel about deciding where to break excerpts in serial publication.

a pane of glass

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 4 Comments

I emailed back and forth a few times with Laura Stanfill (when we were preparing for my guest post on her blog) and she mentioned that my writing in Stevie One is "clean and accurate."

My response in email was:

I liked your comment about Stevie One being "clean and accurate." That's really what I aim for. One of my beta readers made a similar comment about the mystery story book, and I was very pleased.

I try to have as little "style" as possible, since I think of my writing as a window. I want people to see through the words to the story being told, and if they're concentrating too much on the words and the style, that's like when your eyes refocus from the events outside the window to the smudges on the glass.

I don't think all writing needs to be this way, by the way. There are certainly writers who I read at least partly for the sheer wonder of their sentences (Henry James and Thomas Pynchon come to mind – I said somewhere that every sentence of Pynchon's is better than any sentence of mine), but I think my strengths are elsewhere (probably connected to the fact, as I've talked about on my blog, I've learned more about storytelling from movies than I've ever learned from books).

I think I'm (very slowly) getting better at this. When I go back and look at A Sane Woman, I still like it a lot, but there are a few things about it that I would simplify if I was writing it today. ASW was written over a long period of time (especially for such a short book 🙂 ) and the final section changed POV to first person. This was for two reasons.

One reason was that the detective had arrived to solve the mystery, so the narration shifted to her "Watson," but the other reason was that at that point, over a decade since I'd written the first chapters, I couldn't really write in the same voice anymore. I'd learned a few things in the intervening years (for one thing, I'd written a different novel during that time). I could have imitated my younger voice, but it would have been like doing an impersonation. The two are not that different, one is a progression from the other, but they are not the same.

Then I was talking about this with Astoria (who did the cover art for A Sane Woman) and she said that for artists your style starts with your body – your hand, your arm, how you hold the brush – and this has a big effect on how your style develops.

Of course, you can imitate someone else's style (see F for Fake 🙂 ), but that's all it will be, an imitation.

The same is true of musicians. It's obviously true of singers (no two people are born with the same voice), but it's true of all musicians. I remember reading an interview with Elton John and he talked about the days when he'd worked as a session musician. He'd realized very quickly that he was limited as a piano player because he has small hands and (I believe this is how he put it) "stubby fingers." He had to develop his skills and his style within those limitations.

I think writing is not that different. Not everybody starts with the same equipment, and you don't get an infinite number of choices about what kind of writer you're going to be, what style you're going to have. I read a comment recently (I forget where) about a recent comic novel that told the story of a young writer who tries, for commercial reasons, to be a different type of writer than he is. I can see the potential for humor in that situation.

Fortunately, there are a lot of different ways to write well. As I think of movies, some great directors move the camera a lot, some almost never do. Some use a lot of close-ups, some might have only one or two close-ups in a picture. Some prefer to work on location, some prefer to work on sets. Some love CGI, and some avoid it whenever they can. Some directors also act in their pictures, some edit their own pictures, some write their own scores, some even shoot their own pictures. Some would have no idea how to do any of those things.

Everybody starts with limitations, like Sir Elton's stubby fingers, but that can help focus and direct the direction you can go in. Limitations (and there are always limitations) can be a great impetus to creativity, as genre limitations are (I talked about that here).


More of Stevie One should be coming by mid-week. I'll post something here when it's ready.

the job of writing

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 2 Comments

For me, the ultimate test of a magazine is that I often read articles about subjects that I'm not actually interested in, either because I learn things or just because they're well written. I've talked before about how I always read Joan Acocella's dance articles in the New Yorker even though I don't care about dance.

Well, that's also true of the New York Review of Books. However, I've never paid that much attention to the NYRB website, which I've always found to be rather disorganized and unpredictable. But the most recent issue of the magazine had a little ad for the blogs on the website, and the title of one of the stories caught my eye: "E-books Can't Burn."

That was intriguing enough, so I went to the website and read that and also another post by the same writer which was just as interesting. (Typically, even though "E-books Can't Burn" was featured in the print edition of the magazine, I had to use Google to find it on the website.)

"E-books Can't Burn"

This made me think of my post "(Mostly) Not Sentimental About Books." As it says, books are just a long series of words. But he took the thought a lot further than I did, into different areas.

"The Writer's Job"

This really clarified some of my unease about a lot of the way fiction writing has become a career path these days. The paragraph about self-promotion really caught my eye, too. It doesn't sound like a job I'd like, I can tell you that. And "Literary fiction has become a genre like any other" definitely fits in with what I've observed. I could go on, but the whole thing is worth reading.

Both pieces are by the same writer, Tim Parks. I'm definitely going to follow his posts from now on.

writing in balance

~ Anthony Lee Collins ~ 5 Comments

When I was young, I was really into the mystery novels of Ellery Queen. There was one book in particular that always stuck in my mind. In it, a famous novelist was murdered, and the detectives discovered a locked room in her house, adjoining the room where she wrote. Another woman had lived in that room, in secret, apparently as a prisoner, and she had actually written the books which had made the novelist rich and famous.

This setup stayed in my mind for years (decades, really), but I didn’t know the title of the book. I didn’t remember anything else about it, and I wasn’t even 100% sure that it had been written by Ellery Queen. In the pre-web days, it was a lot harder to find out the answers to these sort of questions, and in any case Ellery Queen books are not much talked about these days (and there are a lot of them – quite a few of the later ones ghostwritten – and most of them are usually out of print).

But then I found it, I think from a summary on Amazon. It’s called The Door Between. I immediately bought it and read it, of course, and I quickly realized two things.

One was that I had remembered those few details accurately. The other was that it was badly written.

The early Queen novels were pretty classicly cerebral, but this one appears to reflect a desire to be more muscular. All the male characters seem to yell all the time, and mostly they seem to be about to punch each other. There’s a hard-boiled detective character who’s a pileup of cliches. He’s apparently there as a foil and contrast to Ellery Queen, who’s so unmuscular that he’s still wearing his pince-nez glasses (they would be done away with soon after).

There are some cringe-worthy Asian stereotypes, too (both Japanese and Chinese). And I don’t accept the argument that this is just a reflection of the times (the book was written in 1936), since the Philo Vance books – which were earlier and which were a big influence on the Queen books – are almost completely free of this sort of thing. In fact, Vance often earns the scorn of the official police by treating people of other races, including servants, the same way he treats white people.

The main character in The Door Between, a teenage girl, spends most of the early pages being unaccountably grumpy (after an early life which is reported as being entirely sunny). Then she realizes that she Needs To Be Marrried. She pursues and catches a fiance (this whole part of the book is pretty painful), and then she spends the rest of the book being accused of murder, repeatedly. She reacts to each accusation by weeping, usually clutching the lapels of some man’s jacket, and feebly protesting her innocence. All the man around her seem to fall in love with her, for no apparent reason, even to the point of fiddling with the evidence to keep her from being accused again. Which never works, of course.

But, that being said, the story is great. The cental premise (the prisoner who actually writes the books) is powerful and plausible. The solutions are clever and well set up (it was a standard trope in Queen books that there would be a series of solutions revealed, each one completely airtight but each one then exploded by new evidence being discovered). And the book ends as some of the Queen books from this period did, with a public reveal of the “solution,” and then a scene where Ellery confronts the actual murderer with the final explanation, which will never be made public.

This was the great theme in the middle-period Queen books, that revealing the truth behind a murder can often cause more harm than good. Quite a few of the books in these years explored different aspects of this idea. I haven’t really used this yet in the Jan Sleet mystery stories, but I’m sure I will. I’m quite influenced by Ellery Queen, as I’ve talked about here and here and here.

But there’s a reason I’m writing about this here, which is that, as I re-read The Door Between now, I wonder how’d react if I was reading it for the first time now. I’m a lot more discriminating than I was when I was a kid, after all. Would I stick it out, getting past the bad writing, to find how how good the story was? Maybe not.

I was thinking about that when reading an indie novel recently. Within a few paragraphs, two words were used incorrectly, one sentence was very badly constructed, and one word was misspelled. I was tempted to chuck it. No matter how good your story is, if people get turned off by your words and your sentences, they may not finish your book, and in any case they’re much less likely to buy your next one.

As we’ve talked about before, here and elswhere, indie books don’t get the benefit of the doubt. So, my point is that indie writers need to be sure everything is correct, particularly things which really only require a dictionary.

“Ellery Queen” was actually two men. One did the plots and the other wrote the words. With The Door Between, one was firing on all cylinders and one wasn’t. For those of us who do both (which is most writers, of course), we need to be sure our words live up to our ideas (and vice versa – I’ve read blogs for example where every word is used perfectly and every sentence is a thing of beauty, but the writer has absolutely nothing to say).

Anyway, there’s my point. The Door Between has given me a lot of pleasure, but only because I read it for the first time when I was very young. Otherwise, I would have missed out on all it had to offer me.