How to rite Killer Fiction (22 page)

Nouns

Nouns should be as specific as possible, which is why a lot of writers use brand names to say something about character, which can work in some cases but can also be a lazy way of avoiding real character creation. Narrative especially needs what the great writing teacher John Gardner calls "the closely observed detail," the one little thing that sums up a human being. Raymond Chandler was especially good at this; some of his minor characters stay in our memories a long time because he chose one perfect detail to convey their essence.

Make a list. Use the storyboard to write down everything you "see" in Mr. Big's office. Then hone the list by cutting the obvious, such as autographed pictures with the mayor and oversized ebony desks. Then pick one thing you haven't read anywhere else before and make that the centerpiece of your description.

Adjectives

If your nouns are nice and specific, why do you need adjectives? Because even a great noun can't always say it all. There's a difference between brand new sneakers and down-at-heel, unpolished oxfords. Like nouns, adjectives need specificity to be effective. "A pretty girl" doesn't say much, and neither does "intelligent green eyes." Give me a closely observed detail about that pretty face, or better yet, a mannerism that tells me the girl knows she's pretty. Give me a metaphor for the green eyes, or better yet, show me behavior that indicates intelligence.

Like medication, adjectives shouldn't be overused. Three in a row is probably too many, unless they say three very different things about the object or person being described.

Adverbs

Adverbs are a lazy way out. Part of writing one's way into the story (more on this in chapter ten) is getting it down on paper as fast as you can, so mistakes are made. People walk "quickly," and say things "sarcastically" as a form of shorthand so that the writer remembers what she wanted to say without stopping to find a better way to say it right then.

But in the rewrite, those adverbs need to be replaced by verbs that tell the whole story all by themselves and by dialogue that actually conveys sarcasm without having to tell the reader that's what it was meant to be. Let the character hustle or skitter or edge his way through the crowd, let him scramble like a quarterback or sidle like a snake. Let the dialogue speak for itself; if it's sarcastic enough, we won't need to be told that's what it was. Cut the adverbs and your prose will tighten like a Hollywood star after her first face lift.

Metaphors can be fun. More fun than adverbs, anyway.

Pronouns

A second reader helps with pronoun problems. You need someone to circle that third or fourth "he" and put a note in the margin: "who he?"Then you'll know to go back into the sentence and clarify whether Mr. Big Bad Guy shot your hero or the other way around.

Sentence Structure

I know what the problem is. We're writing prose, which means that one word comes before another word, and so on. But we want to show a scene in which a man picks up a stick and talks to his friend
at the exact same time.
So we write, "Picking up the stick, John turned to Sam," or "As he picked up the stick, John turned to Sam."

All right, that's not terrible, but it is clunky and the truth is, the reader doesn't actually care whether or not these two actions are happening at the same time. We've been reading for a long, long time now and we know that just because we read one thing first and the other thing second doesn't mean they happened separately. It's a convention, so that writing, "John picked up the stick. He turned to Sam and said" isn't going to confuse us.

This comes up a lot in action scenes. We want to create the movie action experience, so our characters slide out of car seats, grab guns out of glove compartments, shoot off a round, duck the rounds that are coming back at them, and shelter their companions all in the same overheated sentence. It doesn't make for fast-paced writing, just confused writing.

Short sentences that tell us precisely what's happening have more punch than long convoluted exercises in subordinate clauses. Any time your action prose is larded with "as" and "-ing" and "while," you're killing the jarring sense of sudden danger that is at the heart of action.

Stupid Dialogue Tricks

Dialogue should be the most natural thing in the world. I mean, we talk every day, right? We know how to do it and we hear other people doing it all the time, so how hard can it be to put talking on the page and make it sound natural?

Harder than it looks for a few reasons. One is that if we put in all the banal, silly, dumb stuff people really talk about in real life we'd bore our readers to death. A little bit of reality goes a long way on the printed page. Another problem is telling the reader who's talking so that they don't get confused. For some bizarre reason a lot of writers think they have to do much more than just identifying the speaker in order to write like real writers.

So when it comes to revising dialogue and its attendant prose, here are a few things to avoid:

• Repeating what the speaker just said. ("Harvey, don't you ever do that again," she scolded.) We just heard the character doing the scolding; why tell the reader that was what she was doing? Why not cut "scolded" and replace it with something more interesting, such as a description. ("Harvey, don't you ever do that again." Mama stood on the porch in her fluffy pink bunny slippers, her hair in rollers, hands on her hips.) We know it was Mama who spoke; we don't need "Mama said as she stood on the porch" or "said Mama, standing on the porch." Cut the extraneous little words and go for straightforward sentences.

• Working overtime to find substitutes for "said." Characters who giggle, snort, chuckle, grimace, muse, mumble, or screech their way through dialogue should be taken out and shot. Dead. Again, just tell me what the character said, and if you want to add behavior, put it in the next sentence. ("I don't know why you think I had anything to do with the murder." She giggled and fingered her pink sweater; her nails were bitten to the quick.)

• Using adverbs to make up for weak dialogue. Cut every single adverb and then look at the actual dialogue. Make it sound the way you told the reader it was.

• Stopping the dialogue flow to give us interior monologue reacting to every word the non-viewpoint character says. Let the viewpoint character say what he's thinking, or, if his thoughts are the opposite of what he's saying, let him internalize once or twice, but let the dialogue take precedence.

• Dialect is out. Hinting at a character's ethnic background or regional origins by very subtle means is in. The occasional foreign word or "y'all" will do, and by all means, don't spell funny. Editors hate funny spelling. So do intelligent readers.

Scene and style, then, are the basic ingredients of a well-written, entertaining novel. Mastering the basics of scene creation and working toward a writing style that expresses your personality are important aspects of becoming the writer you want to be.

How you go about putting words on the page depends upon the kind of writer (perhaps even the kind of person) you already are.

THERE ARE two kinds of writers: those who want a detailed outline in place before they start to write actual prose, and those whose creative juices flow when they contemplate a blank piece of paper waiting to be filled with story. The second group regards an outline as a straitjacket, claiming it ruins the spontaneity they see as integral to the creative process. The first group looks upon the outline as a kind of first draft, a place where all the bugs can be ironed out before they have 170 pages under their belts. Each group tends to regard the other with suspicion: surely nobody could be crazy enough to write
that
way?

I call these different types of writers Outliners and Blank-pagers. My experience teaching writing tells me that most people are very clear which group they belong to: Outliners instinctively gravitate to the index card section of the stationery store. They are the people who never go to the grocery store without a shopping list (preferably one organized according to each aisle of said store), make reservations when they go on vacation, and carry huge day planners or tiny Palm Pilots so they can schedule dinner dates well in advance. Blank-pagers, in contrast, travel without reservations, seeking the adventure of not knowing in advance where they'll be spending the night. They like the excitement of living as well as writing in the moment.

Mystery writers tend to be Outliners, although there are notable exceptions to this non-rule. The form demands a certain precision; outlining is one way <>l testing the logical underpinnings of the mystery before

committing oneself to paper. You can plot out the murder in a straight-line narrative, make clue packages and timelines. You can draw up maps, family trees, and dossiers for each suspect. You can begin chapter one with a file folder crammed with detailed information.

Suspense, according to Joe Gores, "should never be outlined." His view—and it's a view endorsed by Elmore Leonard and Stephen King— is that the hero's frantic search for a way out of his dilemma is best created by the writer putting himself in that same dilemma. Write your way into a tight corner, these Blank-pagers recommend, and then write your way out of it in the cleverest way you can think of.

Neither way is wrong or right. Some writers begin in blank page and then outline when they hit page 100 or so; others draft outlines as rough guides and then throw them away when they get into the Zone. The key is to discover which basic process works for you and modify it as needed.

Expansion and Contraction_

Writing a novel involves cycles of expansion and contraction. At the beginning, both Outliners and Blank-pagers are likely to be in the expansive mode, casting their nets wide for inspiration. Could the murdered man have been a blackmailer? Why not? Or was he just someone who knew too much? Let's try that on for size. Or perhaps it wasn't Harry who was murdered after all; his wife, Betty, would make an even better corpse. Or, no, not Betty—how about Melanie, the mistress?

What mistress? Harry didn't have a mistress when I started this novel.

But it would be so much more interesting if he did.

And it would be even more interesting if Betty opened the door to the bedroom she shares with Harry only to find her rival's body, clad in a silk slip, lying dead on the chenille.

At this stage, the writer is open to possibility. Whether she is jotting her ideas on index cards or scribbling prose onto the page, she is letting her muse take her where it will. She is expanding.

At some point in the writing process, the wide net of expansion must give way to the focus of contraction. The Outliner organizes his material in advance of writing; he makes connections between characters before putting them on the page. This process is contractive; it leaves out anything that doesn't serve to move the story as a whole. Everything that's left is either part of the main plot, a subplot, or a red herring.

Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points

Somewhere in this process, the stolen diamond necklace that started the story may drop by the wayside. Or it may become a subplot, a clue, a red herring. According to Wheat's Law of the Conservation of Plot Points, nothing's wasted. If a mystery writer creates four solid suspects for the crime, and in the course of letting the vision change she decides to go with Number Three instead of One as the real killer, she hasn't wasted her time working up a straight-line narrative for One, because that will make a splendid red herring. How can the reader help but be convinced that One is the real killer, when the writer herself believed it for a while? The clue packages that point the reader toward One will make for a stronger red herring than the writer would have had if she'd stuck to her original plan. And Three as the killer will come as just the kind of surprise she had in mind in the first place.

Some writers follow Raymond Chandler's advice that when things go slack, introduce a man with a gun. Don't bother explaining who he is, or connecting him to anything right away—just send him through the door and let the characters react to him. Other writers suggest, "Deliver a package." What's in the package? Anything from a severed hand to a bomb—just so it's exciting and leads to more action on the page.

The conservation-of-plot-points part comes when the writer needs to connect that severed hand to the rest of the story. How
can
it connect when the writer had no idea it was going to happen until it appeared, as if by magic, on the P.I.'s battered oak desk?