Category Archives: First Draft Blog

Go Home, Girl—Well, Maybe Not

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Ingrid Bergman, Gaslight

Ingrid Bergman in “Gaslight”

It’s come to the point that Twitter pundits have suggested a moratorium on books with the word “Girl” in the title. They might have extended the ban to dark covers with open type and a mysterious photograph suggesting rapid movement. The Stieg Larsson books started “The Girl” craze, and Vulture.com compiled a list of some 91 “The Girl Who/With . . .” copykitties, 2010-2014. That list doesn’t even include Gone Girl, The Girl on The Train (not to be confused with Girl on a Train), and Luckiest Girl Alive.

Those last books have become so popular a new literary subgenre has been created for them, variously titled: “chick noir” (ick) and “domestic thriller.” The “chick noir” label is justly reviled for implying “a lesser sort of noir, marginalized away from the ‘real’ noir,” and might have the unfortunate effect of turning away readers, says Kelly Anderson in BookRiot.

It’s probably not a coincidence that there’s also a resurgent use of the term “gaslighting.” (Gaslighting, of course, refers to the 1944 film Gaslight, in which husband Charles Boyer tries to rid himself of wife Ingrid Bergman by convincing her she’s insane. Once again proving there’s no accounting for taste.)

Domestic thrillers—and Gaslight was definitely a leading example—focus on everyday domestic life and relations with intimate partners. Through this ordinariness, they produce “their own brand of suspense—the disturbing feeling that it could happen to me,” says Dawn Ius in The Big Thrill magazine. Knowing whom to trust is a fundamental dilemma in people’s lives—especially women’s lives. Domestic thrillers play to that uncertainty, building an atmosphere in which “something’s-a-little-bit-off,” Anderson says.

Like other thrillers, domestic thrillers are about The End of the World as We Know It, but written in small letters, and one person in the “we” is usually the female narrator. Those narrators are deeply engaging and honest—at least readers must think so—and, Anderson says, they “do and say things that women know are against the code to say out loud.” As a result, many of these books are not just mysteries but also interesting character studies.

What’s notable is that many domestic thrillers are written by women. In New York Magazine, in a review of a great new boxed set of classic crime, writer Megan Abbott says crime fiction by women “has always been about more than solving a mystery.” By exploring the most compelling fears and pervasive anxieties of the times, domestic thrillers can show that “the darkest and most resonant tales are the ones that hit closest to home.”

My Jake Epping Experience

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James Franco

James Franco as Jake Epping in 11.22.63 from Hulu

I’m excited about Hulu’s eight-part production (trailer) of Stephen King’s complex 2011 time-travel thriller, 11/22/63, which will premiere on President’s Day. I listened to the book several years ago and found it both gripping and fascinating. You may recall that, in King’s novel, high school English teacher Jake Epping goes back in time to try to thwart the assassination of JFK. Unfortunately, everything he does has rippling consequences he cannot foresee. It turns out that “history doesn’t want to change,” and to try to get it right, he has to reenter the past more than once.

There’s a mysterious character—the Yellow Card Man—who Jake finally learns is in charge of tracking the revisions in history he’s made and making sure all those events play out in their own new way. If someone’s life is saved, for example, they need a future, for better or ill—one they wouldn’t have had without Jake—and one that has its own infinite repercussions. I’ll let you see the series or read the book to get the full flavor of how tiny and profound those changes can be.

So here’s my Jake Epping experience. Consultation with the editor on my Rome-based novel led to agreement that several of the characters need to be expanded. Alas, the book was already straining publishers’ preferences at 98,000 words. Adding means subtracting.

Now I’m working on a draft that will eliminate several characters. Like Jake, I’m taking them out of the story and revising the world I have envisioned. (If you’re a writer, too, you know how much time you spend in that alternative universe, filling it with people and objects and snatches of conversation!) All that has to be reimagined. While the roles of these late-lamented were more that of facilitating action, rather than major players, it’s still challenging.

Not only do I have to find plausible ways to get done the things these characters did (e.g., provide my main character with a place to stay; introduce her to the police detective who takes her case). It isn’t just a matter of changing names. In the way that you don’t talk to you best friend from high school the same way to talk to your boss (at least most of us don’t), the dynamics of the remaining characters’ interactions have to be adjusted.

Sometimes the whole point-of-view from which a scene is written must change. For example, a conversation in a cathedral is very different when seen from a priest’s point of view than from a criminal’s. Different speakers have different goals, different gestures and ways of speaking, and notice different things around them.

This isn’t a complaint. This process is energizing. You might say that the characters being eliminated were extra furniture, and I’m cleaning house. It’s sharpening my focus, too. Like Jake, I’m trying to understand a world made new. Though a few darlings have been killed in the process, I’m confident my book will be better for it!

It’s Red Pen Time!

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editing, red pen

(photo: Nic McPhee, creative commons license)

BookBub marketing expert Diana Urban has advice for writers—and that’s pretty much all of us, right?!—about words to excise in our prose. You have probably heard many times about the importance of some of these, but yet, when I read the drafts of new writers, not to mention people who should know better (like me!), they are persistent problems.

  • Avoid passive verbs—the classic example “Mistakes were made” illustrates the problem perfectly. Who made those mistakes? Passive constructions remove the “actor” from the “act.” “The keys were misplaced.” Yes, but who should be looking for them?! With the passive, you never know; responsibility diffuses in a miasma of vagueness.
  • In fact, avoid auxiliary verbs in general. “I was standing at the window, and I was gazing at the sheep” may have been an acceptable dozy writing style 150 years ago, but today’s readers want to get to the point: “I stood at the window and gazed at the sheep, including that black one.” (Hero of the rest of the story, no doubt.)
  • I once had to cut 40,000 words out of a 135,000-word manuscript and found having people simply go to the window and look at the sheep took a lot fewer words than saying they stood up first. Unless a character has problems standing, it isn’t necessary to have them stand, then go. Nor do they need to stand up, as Urban points out, or conversely, sit down. Sit.
  • Similarly, it isn’t usually necessary to say “I started to call the police,” “I began wondering whether . . .” As Nike would say, just do it! “I called the police”; “I wondered whether . . .” Only rarely do you need the pause created by “I started to call the police, but he pulled out a gun and pointed it at me, and I laid the phone gently on the desk.”
  • Intensifiers, like “very,” “really,” (really bad, that), when perhaps your prose would perk up with a jauntier verb. Either something’s bad or it isn’t. How much badder is very bad? Similarly, “totally, completely, absolutely, literally.” Careless writers include phrases like “completely destroyed.” Redundant. Totally.
  • Removing “just” or, in my case, “even” is a bit harder, but they are superfluous most of the time.

Urban’s list continues, including 43 words to jettison. And, she demonstrates a handy way to find these stumblers in your own writing. It’s hard to do, because some of them are so prevalent they slip under the radar. I do searches for them in my prose and find them in embarrassing profusion, so I’ve taught myself to recognize them.

Naturally, what is questionable in the narrative part of your work may be acceptable—and desirable—as part of dialog. People rarely speak as precisely as they write, and a character’s persona may appropriately employ certain verbal tics. What’s important is that the writer recognize them for what they are. Absolutely.

Bees to Honey, Moths to Light, Readers to Books

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Anthony DoerrA recent post by “Sarah” for Written Word Media described four principles of book cover design that psychological research  shows influence most people. Although individual preferences of course vary, there are enough common denominators to help readers understand why they’re drawn to a particular book on the bookstore table and to help authors and designers increase the odds that their book is the one picked up. On my next trip to the bookstore, I’m going to check this out!

The Big Green Tent, Ludmila UlitskayaSymmetry in the placement of image, title, author name, and so on. The examples used include All the Light We Cannot See, in which every element is centered on the page, except the later-added National Book Award notice, which stands out by its very non-symmetrical placement. A recent book cover I found myself quite drawn to was that for The Big Green Tent, and you’ll see that it gets a check mark in the symmetry box, too.

The Long Fire, Meghan TifftSimplicity in design also gets points. A chaotic cover may suggest chaos within. Give a prospective buyer too many images and text blocks, and the eye doesn’t really know where to look. There are lots of bad examples (some hilarious), but a good one is The Long Fire. Only after you’ve started reading do you realize the smudging over the lips has significance, but you don’t need to understand (or much notice) that beforehand. Subtle. Simple.

Ghost FleetColor. While I’m notorious for saying, “I don’t care what color it is, as long as it’s green,” in fact a more universally attractive color is blue. As Sarah says, color conveys (or should) a lot about the book’s mood. Note the color similarity between All the Light and the techno-thriller Ghost Fleet. Romance novels tend toward red (hot!), chick-lit toward pink and purple, thrillers toward red and black, darkness and fog. Glance at the rack in an airport and you can pretty much peg the books’ genre without reading a word of cover copy.

In Cold Blood, Truman CapoteContrast allows some elements in the book cover to stand out more than others. A book by a new author will likely emphasizes the title. Truman Capote was pretty well known when he wrote In Cold Blood and the cover reflects that. When it was written, there was a lot of buzz about that book, and the cover was designed so you couldn’t miss it. Admire the single drop of blood. (Or is that a hatpin?)

Typography – I’m adding a fifth item here that unlike Sarah’s tips relies not on science but purely in the domain of opinion. Color choice, use of images, and density of information on covers all have styles and trends. Sometimes a designer innovates to make a cover stand out; sometimes designers just copy what has worked well for another book—thinking or hoping readers will make some association with these past successes. Typography has gone through or may still be in the middle of one of those copycat phases, in which the cover’s words are designed to look hand-written in chalk or crayon. I first noticed this technique with The Fault in Our Stars (2012). Three years later, there are a half-dozen uses of it in this roundup of “most anticipated” new books for fall 2015. At that link you can see 42 new covers and Sarah’s principles followed and flaunted. Which are most attractive to you?

With all this in mind, read NPR’s recent deep dive into the significance and impact of the covers of the 2015 National Book Award shortlist with new appreciation!

Deadly Ink: “Get Your Facts Straight”

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crime-scene-30112_640A panel at last weekend’s Deadly Ink 2015 conference represented a spectrum of views about the research lengths mystery writers go to. At the “as factual as possible” end of the spectrum was K.B. Inglee, a writer of historical mysteries who is also a history museum docent and reenactor (talk about living your research!), closely followed by Kim Kash, who seeks a realistic recreation of Ocean City, Maryland, where her fictitious characters and stories play and play out. Setting her mysteries there began when she wrote a tour guide for the city, a compilation of facts and contacts that has since served her well.

Tim Hall, who writes cozy-ish mysteries set on Long Island said his kind of story is so character-driven that what’s needed is enough research to make sure they remain internally consistent. No blue eyes on page 30 and brown eyes 100 pages later. Similarly, S.A. Solomon does enough research to ensure plausibility. A big gaffe makes readers start to doubt the whole story—a disaster for mystery.

Surprisingly, the one author of “alternative universe” mysteries, Roberta Rogow, said the science fiction audience is one of the most demanding. Any would-be sci-fi authors who hope they can “just make it up” soon learn otherwise. That pleasure is reserved for another genre: fantasy. And even there, devoted readers patrol for consistency.

A key benefit of research the panelists agreed is that it helps the writer avoid stereotypes, generalities, and clichés in their characters, places, and actions. When you know the exact particulars of something, you can describe it with greater exactitude. “I took the bus” becomes “I caught the packed bus from the Weekly Breeze office uptown near the Delaware border, down to DaVinci’s around Fourteenth Street. There was only standing room on the bus, it being dinner hour with everybody heading out for crabs, fries on the boardwalk, and happy-hour drinks.” (from Kim Kash’s Ocean City Cover-up).

Although Wikipedia can provide a quick overview of a topic for writers, it’s more useful in terms of pointing them in the right direction for further research. Hyperlocal resources are readily available online, though there’s no substitute for visiting the place being written about. Several panelists are devotees of “just talking to people.” While people’s time is valuable, especially that of professionals (cops, investigators, medical examiner staff), these writers have found that all kinds of people—most of whom seem to be would-be novelists themselves!—are delighted to share their knowledge.

Recent books by these Deadly Ink panelists:

  • K.B. Inglee – Her story “The Devil’s Quote” leads off a 2015 story collection And All Our Yesterdays—mystery and crime through the ages
  • Kim Kash – Her other Ocean City mystery is Ocean City Lowdown, and the book that started it all: Ocean City: A Guide to Maryland’s Seaside Resort
  • Tim Hall – He grew up in the Long Island area he writes about, but still has to keep up with the changes! Dead Stock was his first book
  • S.A. Solomon – Read her fine story “Live for Today,” published in New Jersey Noir, published by Akashic Books
  • Roberta Rogow – Her most recent series involves an alternative history of the Island of Manatas (Manhattan), volume 3 of which is Mischief in Manatas

Deadly Ink: Pros vs. Amateurs

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scissors, blood, editing

(photo: Guzmán Lozano, creative commons license)

The annual Deadly Ink mystery writers’ conference last weekend included an array of “howdunit” panels for authors to discuss their craft. The “pros versus amateurs” panel had a lively discussion of the choice of protagonist and the flaws their creators give them.

A professional (police detective, private investigator, FBI agent, Harry Bosch) can do many things and get information that an amateur (a victim’s family member, the nosy neighbor, Miss Marple) cannot—and vice-versa. News reporters are in a somewhat intermediary position; they can get more information and have access to more sources than an amateur, but they still don’t have access to everything and may have to rely on the good will of the professionals to feed them vital clues. In general, non-professional investigators are much more likely to break the law in obtaining information than police detectives, who are thinking ahead to building a prosecutable case. They don’t want their evidence thrown out of court because their methods were improper. Private investigators who stray from the law risk having their license yanked. Of course, it’s when they do stray that things get interesting!

The idea of the lone investigator is strong in fiction, if not in real life, but amateurs often need to cajole the help of someone “on the inside.” If that amateur is a woman, when the case comes down to a confrontation with the baddies, “she has to end up doing the heavy lifting,” said panel moderator Jane Cleland.

The five panelists well illustrated the potential range of mystery-solving sleuths. Cleland’s New Hampshire protagonist is antiques appraiser Josie Prescott, whose profession (in nine books so far) brings her into contact with some pretty high-priced goods—the series has been called “the Antiques Roadshow for mystery fans.” I picked up her Blood Rubies about a fake—or is it?—Faberge egg.

When the authors were asked for a single word to describe their protagonists, what resulted was an impressive number of synonyms for “stubborn.” Here’s what else they had to say about their principals.

R.G. Belsky – Belsky is a former managing editor of the New York Daily News and metropolitan editor of the New York Post. It’s a natural that his series—three books so far—features prickly, big-mouthed reporter Gil Malloy, whose overriding motive in any situation is to get the story. Belsky says what was important to him was to have a character who operates out of a strong moral base. The most recent book in this series—“a personal ride through the investigative process of journalism” is Shooting for the Stars, probing the cracks in the closed-case murder of a Hollywood actress.

Sheila York writes historical mysteries set in Hollywood’s post-World War II Golden Age, and her protagonist is screenwriter, now reduced to script-doctor Lauren Atwill. Researching her scripts has given Atwill a plausible opportunity to acquire specialized knowledge—lockpicking, for example—which, well, why have a skill if you don’t use it? In a city where gossip reigns, poor Lauren is acquiring a reputation for having bodies turn up wherever she goes. In No Broken Hearts, fourth in the series, events soon make her wonder if these rumors about her are true.

Tim Hall writes “new adult” fiction (no hard-core violence), humor-filled mysteries set on Long Island and featuring Bert Shambles, whose name, Hall explains, “says it all.” He has a past brush with the law that requires him to stay employed, but he’s a bit of a ditz, a laid-back twenty-three-year-old thrift shop employee whose motto might be “If at first you don’t succeed, why bother?” Unfortunately, in addition to his brilliant career, Shambles also has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hall has two mysteries in this series. The most recent is Tie Died.

Annette Dashofy writes traditional mysteries whose main character, Zoe Chambers, is a female paramedic and deputy coroner in a rural Pennsylvania township where the main coroner takes the juicy cases and she deals with the leftovers. And yet . . . She teams up with the police chief when she needs a professional hand, but she’ll need a different kind of help to get over her biggest obstacle to advancement in her field: autopsies make her ill. The first in the series, Circle of Influence, was an Agatha Award nominee for Best First Novel; third and most recent is Bridges Burned, in which Zoe takes in the victims of an accidental fire as suspicions of murder flare up.

Kathryn Johnson is the author of two current series, including the contemporary romantic-

suspense series “Affairs of State,” whose third title, No Mercy, is coming soon. Her historical thrillers each feature one of Queen Victoria’s five daughters. The most recent is The Shadow Princess, about the oldest, Vicky. When her husband, briefly the emperor of Germany, dies, the novel has Vicky returning to London just as the Jack the Ripper terror grips the city. Crown Prince Eddy is a suspect, and she is determined to clear his name. The “princess” books are written under the pen name Mary Hart Perry. As protagonists, Victoria’s daughters can command quite a bit of assistance and are used to getting what they ask for; at the same time, their work is more difficult because they are so famous. (Writers also may be interested in Johnson’s latest book: The Extreme Novelist: The No-Time-To-Write Method for Drafting Your Novel in 8 Weeks.)

Why I Cried Last Night

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woman writing

(photo: Mike Licht, Creative Commons License)

Earlier this summer, my heart sank. I was reading about yet another manifestation of the gender divide in agenting, publishing, marketing, and reviewing women-written fiction, which, even if unconscious, leads to and promotes a gender divide in the books readers choose, an issue I wrote about in my post, “Will Men Read my Book?” A vicious circle if ever there was one.

Subject Matter Matters

The essay was Nicola Griffith’s “.” She compiled data showing that not only have men won most of the major literary awards over the last 15 years, when women have won them, they’ve mostly won them for books about male characters. Think Hilary Mantel, the only woman to have won two Man Booker prizes, both for books about Thomas Cromwell, or Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winner The Goldfinch and its protagonist Theo Decker. (Rufi Thorpe has written an amusing, but pointed essay on what it’s like to have her first novel published and the tone-deaf reactions she received. Male at pool: “I mean, yours was just a novel about girls.” Author: “Yeah, I know that.” Male at pool: “I just don’t see how anyone could compare it to actual literature.”)

“Everybody kind of knows it’s true, but they don’t want to see it,” Griffith said in the Seattle Review of Books. Later in that essay, she says, “The way we’re brought up is that stories about men are important and stories about women are fluffy and domestic and kind of boring.” This page from a publisher of predominantly women-written mysteries is a revealing display of that preconception in action. It sends a clear marketing message: These are lightweight books. Not that there isn’t a place for such books and the readers who enjoy them. This publisher is just up-front about what they do and, inadvertently I hope, perpetuating a stereotype.

The Evidence Piles Up

In June, I groaned reading Kamila Shamsie’s essay in The Bookseller on another aspect of the gender divide. She, too, turned to statistics, analyzing The Guardian’s end-of-year book recommendations by some 252 cultural figures, mostly writers. The data showed that more men than women get asked to recommend; of those who are asked, more men than women agree to do so; and those men are more likely to recommend yet more men. Says Shamsie:

I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there’s a gender bias going on are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics, and that when men recommend books by men that’s fair literary judgement, while when women recommend books by women that’s either a political position or woolly feminine judgement. To these people I have nothing to say, except: go read some Toni Morrison. 

Desperate Responses

I pulled my hair and rolled my eyes as, over the summer, the reaction to this situation became increasingly creative, if quixotic. Shamsie has proposed that in 2018 UK publishers bring out only new titles by women. US writer Amanda Filipacchi tried to “pose like a man” for her book jacket photo when she discovered that in these pictures “The men looked simpler, more straightforward. The women looked dreamy, often gazing off into the distance. Their limbs were sometimes entwined, like vines.”

And white male writers have been urged to acknowledge that “the white male experience has been overexposed, at the expense of other experiences, for centuries.” Or, as American fiction writer John Scalzi has said, in the massive role-playing game of life, “‘Straight White Male’ is the lowest difficulty setting there is.”

Submissions (A Too-Apt Word?)

Right now, I’m in the middle of preparing submission packets for small publishers. It took two days to prepare three packets. I’ve been working on the current packet since Sunday, off and mostly on. Each publisher has different requirements, some puzzling. My novel, three years in the works, has been professionally edited by an award-winning mystery writer, professionally proofread, and the police-related parts reviewed by a former NYPD detective and terrorism expert. It’s in its, oh, eighth? draft.

Then yesterday, I read this the story by Catherine Nichols. Discouraged by the lackluster response (usually a one-line rejection or, commonly, no reply at all) to her agent query letters—you need an agent in order to approach most publishers—she began sending her materials out using a male pseudonym. Over a weekend, she sent six agents the same letter and same book synopsis and sample chapters she’d been sending and received five responses, with three requests for a manuscript. Ultimately, under her own name, 50 queries received two manuscript requests, whereas “George’s” 50 queries generated 17 manuscript requests. George is, she says, “eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.”

The agents’ comments to Catherine (similar to those I have received myself) consistently cited “beautiful writing,” which Nichols points out “is the paint job on top but not the engine of the book,” whereas they said George’s work was “‘clever,’ it’s ‘well-constructed’ and ‘exciting.’” It received lengthy critiques, not the typical form-letter brush-offs.

She points out that the agents she approached were both men and women, “which is not surprising because bias would hardly have a chance to damage people if it weren’t pervasive. It’s not something a few people do to everyone else. It goes through all the ways we think of ourselves and each other.”

I wept.

Resources
VIDA, an organization dedicated to Women in Literary Arts
Sisters in Crime, helping women who write, review, buy, or sell crime fiction
The other side of the coin: Male writers who write as women
Historical Underpinnings of Continual Sexism in Publishing, Emerson College

“He’s Got a Gun!”

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gun, firearm, weapon

(photo: r. nial bradshaw, creative commons license)

The late Elmore Leonard advised budding crime-writers, “when your story starts to drag, have someone pull out a gun.” Maybe too many of us have been following that advice, because several recent books aim to inject more accuracy into the portrayal of guns (and other weaponry). Errors make some readers swear off a writer and, as the introduction to The Writer’s Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction
explains, “no wrath is greater than that of firearms enthusiasts.”

According to a recent post in Jane Friedman’s excellent “Resources for Writers” blog, written by Benjamin Sobieck, who also wrote the Writer’s Guide, above, here are key points about guns that writers should keep in mind to avoid those credibility-shattering results:

  1. Clip and magazine are not the same. A clip holds cartridges that go into a magazine. Most modern firearms don’t require a clip. But it sounds good, no? Clip: Manly. Magazine: Better Homes & Gardens
  2. Bullet is not the same as shell, round, or cartridge. You never find empty bullets on the ground after a shooting. Casings, yes.
  3. The whole pumping of a shotgun or cocking the hammer of a handgun is a sound cue from the movies, intended for intimidation, but, as Sobieck says, “less to do with looking tough and more to do with being stupid.” These extra and in most cases unnecessary pumps/cocks just “dump unfired ammunition onto the ground.” Why would anyone intimidate another person with a firearm, if it weren’t ready to fire? Good question. Ask your author.
  4. While this would seem to be an “it goes without saying” kind of thing, a character should never look down the barrel of a gun to see whether it’s loaded. Who’d be that stupid? I had a clip showing a tv character actually doing this, but it has disappeared. Sorry!
  5. And, perhaps the most pervasive of all gun errors in both news and entertainment media currently, the term “assault weapon.” This actually is meaningless. ANY weapon can be used for assault. The industry doesn’t use it. Sobieck says “tactical rifle (or shotgun), machine gun, submachine gun, fully automatic rifle,” or even “gun” are more meaningful than “assault weapon.”
  6. The term “automatic weapon” is often elided to mean either a semi-automatic weapon (which shoots one time with each trigger pull) or a “fully automatic weapon” which fires many times with a single pull. The idea of “automatic” weapons needs to be well defined. Fully automatic weapons are not very accurate after the first few shots because of recoil, so long, Rambo-inspired bursts of fire are actually useless if the goal is to hit anything.

Finally, in his book, Sobieck includes “Ten Golden Tips for Writing about Weapons,” which includes this advice: “If it’s in a movie or on television, it’s probably inaccurate.”

Novelist as Theater Director

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theater, stage

(photo: wikimedia)

A thrilling weekend in Williamstown and Lenox, Massachusetts, with a group of serious theater lovers—four plays in three days and rich presentations in-between. Unexpectedly, one of these presentations—a detailed review of the steps of play production—mirrored many of the challenges an author faces in preparing a work of fiction. Let me explain.

Once a theater company decides to produce a particular play its first step is to hire a director who will create the theatrical production. The director {the “author,” in this analogy and here you have to bear with me} helps build the creative team and find the cast {characters}, blocks the play and decides who does what when {plot}, and guides the aesthetic process of the production {editing}.

A large creative design team is needed to help put the play together. These designers take on various tasks, in keeping with the director’s vision for the play and what this specific production is to convey. While of course a director starts with a script, just as an author begins with a more or less firm idea, the way a play emerges in its staging is unique to each production. Literary critics have decided there are only about a half-dozen basic plots, which suggests much of what differentiates the tens of thousands of novels published each year results from loosely analogous attention to the same creative elements a play director must consider.

In theater, set design establishes the physical world of the play; costumes, makeup, and props help define characters. In novels, authors must use description of the scene, and the appearance and clothing of the characters for exactly the same purpose. Lighting and sound design help create a play’s mood and tell the audience “where to look,” just as authors establish mood and focus attention—or, in the case of a mysteries, misdirect it—on key information. Dialect coaches make sure the words come out the way a character of a given era, nationality, and class would say them, and on the page, dialog has to ring true, too.

Choreographers and fight directors design the more complex or risky stage action. Stage-fights have to be both safe and realistic. (Realistic is easy, we were told, safe is hard.) Fiction has similar problems. A battle between two people or a hundred has to seem dangerous—even when it involves a continuing character who we know will survive to appear in the next book. At the same time, heroes must escape in a plausible way. They can’t get off too easily. A recent thriller I read had a confusing scene near the end, in which it wasn’t clear which shooters were inside their cars, in the street, along the wall, or wherever. I couldn’t visualize it, even after three re-reads. In my writing group, we call this a problem in choreography.

While the theater director has a whole team to take care of these essential component parts, the novelist works solo.

In casting a play, a director thinks about the skills and personalities of potential actors, and whether they can fill their roles. The author likewise must decide what type of person to create for the role they will play in the novel. How much can people such as those they describe believably stretch when facing the demands the plot places on them? How are other characters likely to react to them? At the same time, they must avoid creating stereotypes and “stock characters,” who would move through the novel like cardboard cutouts.

The whole process of rehearsing a play—from the initial read-through, to the blocking, through final rehearsals—echoes the editing process. Plays aren’t rehearsed just once; it takes time and myriad adjustments and refinements for all the creative parts to mesh together. Similarly, thinking of a novel draft as similar to a theater production, it’s easy to see the kinds of editing an author must do: tuning up all aspects of design/description, focus, realism, choreography, and character development to best serve the ultimate product—that best-selling, award-winning novel taking shape in the theater of the author’s mind.

5 Forensic Science Myths

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forensic

Mystery: why is this trainer so clean? (photo: West Midlands Police, creative commons license)

CSI’s wise-cracking investigators, expensive cars, and sexy co-workers with great hair? High on the drama scale, low on reality. Crime and mystery writers striving for drama and accuracy have to get past such exaggerated expectations. Deborah Cole, a forensic scientist with the New Jersey State Police, spoke to a recent meeting of the Liberty States Fiction Writers Group about forensic science myths.

The first is how television has primed people to believe that forensic science is infallible. The reality is that it cannot always provide definitive answers. Nor is it true that scientists never make mistakes or mess up the chain of custody. Sometimes “a good defense attorney can find holes,” she said. (Interestingly, criminals have become aware of the power of forensics and have learned from tv how to cover their tracks more effectively.)

Response is not as fast as people expect. Some states have only one crime laboratory, and crime labs are often small and outfitted with, well, not-the-latest equipment. As a result, they may have a backlog of testing to do, which adds to the time needed to complete tests (or whether they are ever completed at all, with unexamined rape test kits a prime example). Some tests themselves take a long time to produce results. Tests for different toxic substances must be conducted individually, and all this may take a month or more to complete.

Forensic scientists do not interrogate suspects and witnesses, regardless of what tv suggests. Not their skill set. And they certainly don’t make arrests. They may be called to a high-profile crime scene, but they aren’t there first (unlike in the UK’s Midsomer Murders tv series where the ME and crime scene team is always working away—with findings!—by the time the investigating detectives arrive). When they do visit a scene, they collect evidence to bring to the lab for analysis by someone else.

One scientist cannot handle an entire case. Forensic scientists are specialized (in the lab, their focus may be toxicology, chemical analysis, ballistics, and so on), which means that the evidence from a single case may be tested by a number of different scientists. The New Jersey State Police lab employs 130 scientists in different disciplines, and they are involved in some 35,000 cases a year.

Another reason one person can’t do it all relates to the Locard exchange principle: “whenever two objects come in contact with each other, there is always an exchange of material.” The practical application of this principle is that material from the clothing, floor, furniture, car, or other environs of the crime, which is gathered from the scene, from the victim, and from the suspected perpetrator (if there is one) must all be processed in different rooms and even by different people, in order to avoid cross-contamination.

Finally, Cole said (and she laughed when she said this), tv gives the impression that every day is exciting!

Further Information:

♦Useful for writers: http://www.forensicsciencesimplified.org/onducting Forensic ♦Research: A Tutorial for Mystery Writers: http://www.writing-world.com/mystery/forensics.shtml
♦Forensic workshops, including “TV v. Reality”: http://www.crimemuseum.org/forensic-workshops
♦Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us about Crime, by Val McDermid (2015)

 

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