Tag Archives: Deadly Ink

Deadly Ink: “Everybody Wins”

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draft

The annual Deadly Ink conference held in northern New Jersey last weekend was loads of fun. Guest of Honor Wendy Corsi Staub was a lively presence and toastmaster Dick Belsky charmed. I saw a number of old friends, met authors I admire, and was delighted to be included on several panels. Yesterday’s post reviewed some of the discussion about “character.”

The Dark Side
The panel on noir stories and hard-boiled characters  risked bogging down in semantics but clearly demonstrated the many shades of black actually out there. Apologies if you’ve read this here before, but I offered Dennis Lehane’s definition of noir: In a tragedy, a man falls from a great height (Macbeth, the Greeks, Chinatown); in noir, he falls from the curb. Panelist Rich Zahradnik provided another good one: “In noir, nobody wins.”

Hard-boiled stories usually involve a detective who is not emotionally involved or is struggling not to be. Humphrey Bogart’s portrayals of Sam Spade (written by Dashiell Hammett) and Philip Marlowe (Raymond Chandler) epitomize the genre. Cynical and street-smart, not reliant on the intellectual powers of Sherlock Holmes or the “little grey cells” of Hercule Poirot.

The hard-boiled character nevertheless gets the job done. Occasionally crossing my path are books that are too dark. They feature down-and-out characters living in filthy apartments who smoke and drink too much; some of them can’t think beyond their next fix. I don’t find them interesting. With four strikes against them already, whaddaya know, they make (more) bad decisions. Give me a character who at least has the opportunity to make choices.

With me on this panel were Charles Salzberg (whose Swann character operates on the fringes of society, but has plenty of agency), Al Tucher (whose work features a smart and tough prostitute), and moderator Dick Belsky.

Location, Location, Location
In the session on story setting, historical mystery author Annamaria Alfieri said she chooses her location first (British East Africa, for example), then the time period in which that place offered the most interesting fictional possibilities.  

Panelists’ strategies for establishing a strong sense of place included attention to the small details and local idiosyncrasies (lots of research here, including site visits for contemporary works), plus making sure to describe the character’s emotional reaction to the location. If you could pick a San Francisco story up and move it four hundred miles south to Los Angeles, you should end up with a different story. New Orleans isn’t New York, and South Carolina isn’t South Dakota.

Of course, panelists and audience alike thought Al Tucher is onto something with his new book set in Hawai`i. “It’s a research trip.” Yeah, right.

This and yesterday’s post about “character” are a small sample of the conference’s varied and interesting program. Whether you’re a writer or a fan, be there in person in 2020!

Photo: Sebastien Wiertz, creative commons license

Deadly Ink: Characters

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Handwriting, boredom

Very possibly I made an impression on my daughter’s new in-laws last month when I said how, with most women, you can talk to them about their careers or their kids or what they’re reading, but in my case you could talk about blood spatter.

You might think this would have been a conversation-stopper, but my daughter’s new sister-in-law immediately launched into how her son had bled so profusely after knocking his head on the kitchen counter. “Oh yes,” I said knowingly, “scalp wounds. Lots of blood.” It pays to know your stuff.

I added to my trove of crime and thriller lore this past weekend at the annual Deadly Ink conference, an intimate group of crime and thriller writers and readers, mostly from New Jersey and its Manhattan suburbs. It’s a great place to expound upon crime-writing topics and to hobnob with other like-minded folk. Guest of Honor this year was energetic and down-to-earth author Wendy Corsi Staub, who participated beginning to end, and our Toastmaster was Dick Belsky.

I ended up on three panels, Character (you need them!), the Dark Side (who, me?), and Building Suspense. The only suspense was whether I could think of something useful to contribute. Regardless, the panels were all lively and fun and, since almost no one ran out screaming and demanding their money back, they may have actually been useful or, possibly, entertaining.

I had made some modest preparations for the Character panel and focused my remarks on what I’d brushed up on, character description. Sometimes writers describe characters readers only see once or twice. Not necessary.. Sometimes they give a complete height-weight-eye color (so often green, have you noticed?)-hair color-complexion rundown. Also not necessary, I said, except when these details are relevant to the story, like six-foot, full-figured Monica Ludd, who uses her size to intimidate (or seduce) in Maggie Gee’s new novel Blood, reviewed yesterday.

I cited Stephen King in On Writing, who says a character’s description begins in the writer’s imagination and ends in the reader’s imagination. No need for details. Let your readers fill in. When they do, they own the character and that’s exactly what you want! For King’s character Carrie White, all he said was that she was a high school outcast with bad skin and a fashion-victim wardrobe. What more is needed? We’ve all known and maybe sometimes been that person.

That led to a discussion of how the movie version of a character can become our indelible picture of a character—Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone, Robert Taylor as Walt Longmire—and what happens when that picture conflicts with our internal picture—Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher. Total fail.

Donald Maass (Writing 21st Century Fiction) further points out the paradox that the more unique you make your characters the more universal they are. Readers can latch onto some aspect of a character and relate to it, almost no matter what. What you don’t want are bland, generalized, two-dimensional characters with no unredeeming attributes. Give them flaws! Too-perfect characters are boring and not believable.

This excellent panel was moderated by Lynn Marron and included the estimable Jane Kelly, D.W Maroney, and Dick Belsky.

(Tomorrow: More from Deadly Ink)

“In a Surprise Move, God . . .”

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Inverted Pyramid, Louvre

photo: Derek Key, creative commons license

Is the inverted pyramid dead? That trusty journalistic technique that crams all the basic information about an event—the who, what, when, where, why and how—into the fewest possible words at the top of the story, then proceeds to fill in decreasingly important details?

Award-winning hard-boiled crime novelist Bruce DeSilva thinks so, and said as much during a panel at the recent Deadly Ink conference in New Jersey. DeSilva was a prize-winning journalist before becoming a novelist seven years ago and worked on stories winning nearly every journalism prize, including the Pulitzer.

DeSilva apparently was warming up for a turn on the Writer’s Forensics Blog, where he goes into the flaws in the pyramid in more detail, repeating this “what the Bible would have been like if a journalist wrote it” example:

In a series of surprise moves intended to bring all of creation into existence out of what leading scientists call the ‘singularity,’ before energy, matter or even time existed, God yesterday said, ‘Let there be light,’ according to reliable sources close to the project.

His point was that the transition from the artificiality of journalese to writing fiction is difficult. The two require a completely different voice. In fiction, the depiction of events is more realistic in that they generally unfold chronologically, with the wwwwwh answers coming near the very end, not in the first sentence or two.

Needless to say, other former journalists on DeSilva’s panel—including author Dick Belsky—pushed back. Belsky thinks the techniques of journalism, such as digging in and getting the story and grabbing the reader’s interest up front, do translate well. And, the profession provides a believable background for his character, investigative reporter Gil Malloy.

Fellow panelist E.F. Watkins said the hardest thing about her transition from busy newsroom to chair in a quiet office, alone, was learning not “to give things away too fast.” But, she knows how to meet a deadline and how to get her facts right.

According to DeSilva, the main lesson he learned from his journalistic career is that “writing is a job.”  A job you go to daily, in the mood or not, in the company of the muse or not. “You put your butt in your desk chair every day and write.”