Category Archives: writing

No Dull Sentences!

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Award-winning novelist William Gay, who died just over a decade ago, was heralded as a new voice in Southern fiction from the time his first novel, The Long Home, was published in 1999. When I read a reviewer’s comment that Gay was “incapable of writing a dull sentence,” he sounded like someone to find out more about.

In an interview published in 2013, he talked about being considered an heir to Faulkner, O’Connor, and Wolfe, and said that his favorite Faulkner novel is As I Lay Dying, because in it Faulkner writes about ordinary people. That’s a hallmark of Gay’s own writing, and draws on a long career that included house-painting and hanging drywall to support his family by day, writing out stories by night. Understandably, given that schedule, his first book wasn’t published until he was in his late fifties. But he had been on that path since seventh grade, when a teacher noticed his incessant reading and gave Gay a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, as long as he’d talk to him about it afterwards. It became one of his favorite books.

Younger people would ask him whether they should write what they want to write, even though it might be a hard road to get it published, or should they turn to genre writing (which is no picnic to get published, either, I’d add). His advice was always that they should write what they wanted to write. I think that’s what lets you, as a writer, put your heart into it and gives you the fortitude to stay with it over time through revisions, more revisions, critiques, and seeking publication.

Many book marketing folks say authors should have their ideal reader, or audience, in mind. Gay disagrees. He believes that, if you do, “the work is going to be more bland, with the rough corners knocked off.” It makes a story more generic and he said he’s always tried to avoid being generic. Much of Gay’s work is dark and violent, coming-of-age stories set in the 1940s and 50s, in which a young person must confront evil. (Stephen King, who knows something about evil, said Gay’s darkest, most Southern Gothic book, Twilight,was his “best read” in 2008.NOT the vampires.)

Gay went on a publish several more well regarded novels and a short-story collection with the juicy title, I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down (2002). His story, “The Paperhanger” was anthologized in Best American Mystery Stories 2001.

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AI: Wild Hopes, Desperate Fears, and Plot Ideas

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Generative artificial intelligence taking over what we thought were uniquely human activities offers of-the-minute plot lines for mystery and crime writers. We’re accustomed to robot reporters covering high school sports and company earnings reports, but ChatGPT and its kin producing the Great American Novel-To-Be? What about AI creating art, video, and audio that mimics specific human voices? Whole new realms of possible crimes open up. A recent Washington Post article calls this an era of “wild hopes and desperate fears.” If the genie isn’t already out of the bottle, it’s certainly punched through the top.

“The capacity for a technology to be used both for good and ill is not unique to generative AI,” the Post article says. Other types of AI tools have downsides too. One that immediately raised skeptical questions is the idea of deploying AI in policing. A recent Guardian article by Jo Callaghan starts by describing the questions such a move would raise. While it makes sense to continue the long-standing practice of sending a robot to check out suspicious packages, San Francisco’s board of supervisors has planned to arm robots with lethal explosives, before pushback caused them to take a step back, maybe only temporarily.

Public confidence in the police has declined sharply in recent years, not just in the United States, but in England and Wales too, Callaghan reports. Meanwhile, it’s a job that “requires hundreds of judgments to be made each day, often under conditions of extreme pressure and uncertainty.” These decisions are informed by a lot of factors unrelated to the situation confronting the officer: past experience, recent trauma, temperament, attitudes and prejudices absorbed from the rest of society. Could AI, presumably relieved of all those extraneous factors, do better? Operate more fairly and efficiently? Maybe, maybe not.

“Narrow AI,” Callaghan explained, can perform specific tasks, like identifying the bomb in that abandoned backpack; “general purpose AI” makes more complicated judgments and decisions, even the kinds public safety personnel must make. The deep learning that enables general purpose AI results from feeding the system huge amounts of data. For example, having been fed millions of photographs of human faces, facial recognition AI can pick out suspects. We see this and other examples of AI creeping into novels and TV cop shows, where, for example, GPS data are used not only to develop “heat maps” of where crimes are likely, but also to predict specific suspects’ likely location or where to look for a missing person. You can see why some authors prefer to set their stories before 1970. The technology is a lot to keep up with.

Callaghan concludes, “Instead of debating what AI will or will not be able to do in the future, we should be asking what we want from our criminal and justice system, and how AI could help us to achieve it.” These are questions crime writers wrestle with too.

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Zoom Cat-astrophes!

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The wisdom of a piece of advice in Stephen King’s very useful (and actionable) book, On Writing, has come home to rest in my lap. Purring. Someplace amidst his good advice, he says, “Put the cat out.” In other words, avoid distractions. (No, this is not Save the Cat, that’s another thing altogether!).

Twice lately, I’ve had reason to bow to King. My mystery reading group was reviewing this month’s selection, when my Siamese, William, got his head stuck in a desk-top box of tissues and waved it wildly in front of the Zoom camera. So much for a focused discussion. (Video of an earlier, similar episode attached. Who says cats aren’t willing to conduct repeat experiments?)

Last month, I was the interviewee on a Zoom call about writing, my writing process, and my mystery/thriller Architect of Courage. Kim Ha of the Pennington public library did the interviewing. While a whole checkerboard of Zoomers watched, I had to get up, call my husband, and have him take William away, because he was playing noisily with a plastic bag. Wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard I glared. Talk about wanting to appear “professional”! You can see the interview in this YouTube video if you’re interesting in writing, etc., etc. The thoughtful Kim cut out William’s star turn, however. (I’m hoping that wasn’t the best part!)

So, meanwhile, put the cat out!

More Ways to Annoy Your Reader

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In the litany of authorial sins that readers object to, are quirks that require readers to reread or rereread a passage to figure it out. So said the hundreds of readers who responded to a recent Washington Post query, written up here (paywall).

One cause for having to reread a passage can be the abandonment of quotation marks—Cormac McCarthy is an author who omits them (though, I admit, I don’t mind rereading him).

Hilary Mantel had the opposite quirk. She kept the quotation marks but eliminated everything like “Cromwell said” or “said the Cardinal.” Some dialog passages needed several readings to be sure I had the words coming from the correct character’s mouth. Most confusing in Wolf Hall, but better in the later books.

Another annoying source of confusion are gratuitously complicated timelines. The structure of a book should make it easier, not harder, to follow. Even Sulari Gentil’s clever The Woman in the Library (my review) baffled me at times. In a plot like nesting dolls, you have to stay alert to a change in point of view. Is it the author writing or the author she’s writing about or . . . . ???

On to the complaints about characters, starting with “unrealistically clever children or talking animals.” No, please.

A big one we should have evolved past by now is sexy descriptions of women in non-sexy situations. I read a lot of cringy stuff focusing on a woman’s appearance, especially her figure, top and bottom. Need I mention such descriptions are almost always written by men? Turn the tables and write about male characters in such a salacious way, you see how awful it is. (See this column by Alexandra Petri, “If male authors described men in literature the way they describe women.” Or this essay by Prasanna Sawant, “The Bizarre Ways Some Male Authors Describe Women.”) I don’t believe the male authors are even aware they’re doing it. Appearance is what they notice about women in real life, so that’s what they put on paper, whereas the male characters just show up.

Readers also object to “disabled characters who exist only to provide treacly inspiration.” That holds for any character who is meant to demonstrate a point, like the protagonist’s open-mindedness: “Look, he has a Black friend, a gay friend, a loyal dog!” Authors need to give those friends and mutts something to do.

Then the readers got down to nitpicking. Somebody will object to almost anything, it seems: overused phrases like “his smile didn’t reach his eyes,” “she exhaled the breath she didn’t realize she was holding” (I encounter that one a lot). Even individual words would prompt readers’ to get out their blue pencils: burgeoning, preternatural, inevitable, lugubrious. In the comments on the article, one reader objected to “spelling based on sound, not a dictionary. Just read one novel that referred to riggers (not rigors) and emmersed (instead of immersed). I was stunned to read the author’s note in which she complimented her editor.” I, on the other hand, was pleased and surprised to see that such creatures still exist.

Post writer Ron Charles, who compiled these complaints, predicts that “somewhere some cynical, market-driven AI scientist is working on a novel-writing program that can accommodate all these complaints.” I hope not. Words written by a real person—blind spots and annoying habits and grammar lapses and all—are preferable to a formula any day.

Read Part 1 of this article here.

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How To Annoy Your Reader

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What pet peeves set readers’ teeth on edge? Washington Post writer Ron Charles wrote about them in this recent article. He asked members of the Post’s Book Club newsletter to let their opinions fly, and, he says, “The responses were a tsunami of bile” from hundreds and hundreds of readers. In case you’re working on a book now or even thinking about it, you’ve been warned.

Readers don’t like dreams. And why not? Is it because as you’re starting to get a mental grip on what’s going on in the story, you suddenly hit that “and then I woke up” line that means you have to mentally erase what you just read? Or, is it as one respondent said, “They are always SO LITERAL.” One example where this type of thing was handled very well was in Paul Cleave’s latest book, The Pain Tourist (my review here). There was never any confusion about whether you were in the comatose boy’s dream-mind, and he put together reality (what was going on around him in real life) and his mind’s protective mechanisms (the illusion that masked the horrible events that led to his coma) was quite astonishing and revelatory.

As you’d expect, readers take offense at historical anachronisms and factual inaccuracies. In essence, “say, dear reader, blah-blah-blah.” Too jarring. At the same time, unless an author is writing for twelve-year-olds, they shouldn’t avoid the occasional word that might send some readers to the dictionary. Not to be pretentious, but because it’s exactly the right word.

Readers want authors to write with authenticity. One respondent warned that “taking a cruise to Alaska is not enough to write a novel about the Last Frontier.” You can take the cruise and write the book, of course, if you bolster that with a lot of additional research.

Typos and grammar errors. Oh, boy. I confess I look up “lie” and “lay” nearly every time I use them (this was one of the errors singled out, along with popular misused homonyms). I’ve read it wrong so many times I don’t even know what’s correct any more. It’s worth the twenty seconds to check, so I don’t lie (ha-ha) awake at night, wondering.

Recently, I read a UK thriller where the author repeatedly used the wrong pronoun case. “He gave it to him and I,” “the book was for her and I,” etc. I was fuming. That’s something he should have learned in junior high. If you turn the sentence around, you see how bad it is: “he gave it to I and him.” And, while this particular error might be forgiven in dialog, because people do make mistakes while speaking, it kept appearing in the narration. This particular book was also, alas, morally bankrupt, so there was a lot not to like.

Readers complained about books that are simply too long. Especially books by best-selling authors Do they think “every word they write is golden and shouldn’t be cut?” one respondent wondered. And it isn’t just the book that’s too long, so are the prologues, chapters, descriptions, and everything else in them and especially those italicized passages. It seems italicized paragraphs hit a nerve with readers. Don’t do it, they say.

“What Readers Don’t Like” – Part 2 WEDNESDAY

Closure–Is It a Realistic Goal?

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote two web posts about a real-life murder that took place in Atlantic County, New Jersey, in 2012. Still unsolved. My summaries were based on a pages-long newspaper story by Rebecca Everett. Several of the people she interviewed said outright or implied that the mishandling of the investigation and prosecution kept the family from having closure.

“Closure” is something we hear a lot about after tragedies. But that seems a slippery concept to me. Is there such a thing, really? Or, after a violent episode are people haunted by some combination of guilt and wishful thinking that suggests they or Someone surely could have done Something? They don’t even have to say specifically what those Somethings were, though they may have specifics in mind. Do they tell themselves that they shouldn’t have let their teenager take the car on that rainy night? That they should have kept their child with a stuffy nose home from school that day? That they always knew there was something off about Uncle Max? And on and on.

Even in cases where a death isn’t unexpected, when it isn’t a sudden catastrophe, does this same second-guessing come into play? Do was ask ourselves, Why didn’t I insist she get her mammogram? Why didn’t I say I’d drive him to those AA meetings? Maybe I’m mixing up “closure” and “guilt” or “responsibility.” Or maybe they are somehow cousins.

You’d think the most unequivocal sort of closure would come in death penalty cases, in which victims’ family members are allowed to witness the execution of their loved one’s murderer. It turns out it doesn’t work that way. Not always.

Said the mother of a slain Houston police officer, “I wanted to be sure it was finished, and that’s why I went.” Possibly, this mother did achieve closure. “It was just too humane,” said the mother of a murdered daughter. No closure for her. (The first quote is from a 2017 New York Times story, the second from WebMD.) Perhaps the experience gives the viewer a feeling of retribution, but it doesn’t offer consolation. The loss is still real and present, the empty chair still there. Revenge seems to me a totally different animal than closure.

As a writer of crime fiction, I have to think about this, even in my stumbling way. Recently, I read a story about a private investigator whose client was murdered in a set-up the investigator himself engineered. Although I didn’t expect (or want) the fictional investigator to lapse into a full-blown depression, he doesn’t question his actions, take any responsibility for the death, demonstrate any regret. This struck me as unrealistic and unsatisfying. I guess you could say this particular character achieved closure with no trouble at all. He would have been a better person if he hadn’t.

To Warn or Not To Warn

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Author Jamie Beck has written an excellent post for Writer Unboxed summarizing the arguments for and against putting trigger warnings on novels. Does the novel deal with crime, violence, bad childhoods? If so, some people feel potential readers should be warned. Does the warning need to describe so much of what happens in the book (airplane crash, page 73; dog dies, page 159) that it gives the story away? Surely not.

But where’s the middle ground? And, is there one? There’s no single answer that can possibly fit every case, much less every reader. To customize their approach to the actual text of a manuscript, writers (and their publishers) have come to employ “sensitivity readers” when a book is about a culture or a disability that is not the author’s own (and sometimes even if it is). The goal—to avoid stereotypes, mischaracterization, bias and other problems—seems laudable. This issue blipped loudly onto my radar during the dust-up over Jeanine Cummins’s 2020 novel about Mexican migrants, American Dirt.

But authors have been quick to point out that the issue of “standing” can be a slippery slope. Can ONLY a Black person write about Black characters? Or ONLY a person with a mental disability write about a character with one?

In Nita Prose’s excellent mystery The Maid, the protagonist, Molly, has difficulty reading people, can be overly literal, and has more than a touch of OCD (not a totally bad thing, if she’s cleaning your hotel room). Some readers thought the author should have spelled out that Molly is on the autism spectrum. But is she? Should Prose have given Molly an actual diagnosis, one freighted with a lot of extraneous stuff? She didn’t, instead merely describing Molly’s thoughts and reactions in a very straightforward way.

I sympathized with the approach Fabian Nicieza took in his first highly comic mystery, Suburban Dicks. His acknowledgements express thanks to his multicultural reading group, by name, “for providing their thoughts on the cultural portrayals contained in the book and their understanding that its intent was to be an equal opportunity mocker.” An intent at which he most certainly succeeded. A reader would have to be extremely thin-skinned indeed to take his jibes seriously, but then we do seem to be in such an era.

Jamie Beck lays all this out, then reveals the conclusion she came to for her own recent book. Not only is her essay thought-provoking in itself, it’s prompted excellent comments from a range of other writers and readers. Take a look!

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Where Crime Goes, Fiction May Follow

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Photo: Vasanth Rajkumar

A recent lecture on the country’s dramatic drop in crime rates and “the next war on violence” dovetailed nicely with a Mystery Writers of America discussion on where crime-writing is headed.

Patrick Sharkey, author of Uneasy Peace, is a Princeton Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs. As you undoubtedly know, from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s or so, all across the country, in urban and rural areas, in large communities and small ones, crime rates—especially violent crime rates—dropped dramatically, with the greatest drops in the most disadvantaged communities.

Much as this decline was a cause for celebration, Sharkey says, this progress was always precarious because the go-to policies used to respond to crime—more prisons and police, more aggressive policing, and increased surveillance—weaken communities and build resentment and unrest in the population as a whole, especially in the populations most affected. These feelings boiled over most dramatically after the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Unfortunately, punitive strategies, Sharkey believes, are an ineffective response to the core problems.

Now, as we’ve read, the murder rate is increasing again (see the stats) from its low-points of a few years ago. What can be done to avoid the Bad Old Days? A different body of research that Sharkey has examined in detail shows that community-based organizations that focus on building stronger neighborhoods make a big difference in local rates of murder and crime of all types. He believes ample evidence exists to support a new model of crime prevention emphasizing community investment rather than individual punishment.

But will that happen? The covid epidemic has intensified the difficulty. It caused people to withdraw from public spaces and to return to them uneasily. It contributed to a notable rise in incivility. Also during the pandemic, gun sales exceeded any preceding levels (stats here). Confrontations and angry flare-ups happen; firearms make them more lethal. Covid and the associated isolation is also linked to unaddressed mental health problems in children, teens, and adults, some of which play out violently.

When author-members of MWA-New York met online last week to talk about where we think crime fiction is headed over the next decade, Sharkey’s assessment of the shifts in society were a useful backdrop for me. The discussion, led by Gary E. Ross, raised a number of issues that seem on the cusp of breakout. Clearly, crime fiction authors may want to take into account the increase in number of guns and unaddressed mental health problems.

In the background are other worsening problems that fiction might explore, like electronic crimes, unwanted surveillance, implementation of artificial intelligence models, the downside of Big Data (just don’t make me try to understand Bitcoin).

On the science side, our authors foresaw the increased capacity to bioengineer viruses and produce chemical weapons as likely to appear in fiction. The military’s cautious acceptance of what we used to call Unidentified Flying Objects and now call Unidentified Aerial Phenomena opens a lot of intriguing story directions. But, here on earth, the persistent and growing political divisions, domestically and internationally, create social instability where crimes can occur. All these will affect what authors may want to write about and (we hope) readers may want to read.

Further Reading:

Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, The Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence (2019) Order it here.

Social Fabric: A New Model for Public Safety and Vital Neighborhoods, March 2021. Get a copy here.

Halloween Countdown: The Story Behind the Story

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tiger, mask

If you asked, I’d say I don’t write horror, but two of my published short stories do include a ghost—maybe. The closest I’ve come to horror is a story Kings River Life published for Halloween 2021. (You can read it here.) “A Question of Identity” is a much-reworked and rethought tale originally written in response to a request for stories about masks. Because our home is full of masks, this was a theme I could resonate with!

In it, two preadolescent girls, neighbors and best friends, each receive a box with a Halloween costume in it—a fox for one and a tiger for the other. Where did they come from? No one knows. Few questions are asked. The moms are just grateful that’s one shopping errand they can cross off their very long lists.

When the girls put on the costumes, the unexpected happens, which is why it evolved into a story that’s much more about identity than Halloween. When they exchange costumes, their parents don’t recognize them, and even after Halloween is over and each girl has her own costume again, their effects linger. You may conclude that those new identities have a dark side.

It isn’t a mystery story leading to a solution, so you never know where the costumes came from, and that uncertainty contributes to the spookiness. As Charles Baxter says in his wonderful book, The Art of Subtext, “the half-visible and the unspoken—all those subtextual matters—are evoked when the action and dialogue of the scene angle downward, when by their multiplicity they imply as much as they show. A slippery surface causes you to skid into the subtext.”

At least, that’s what I was going for!

My Best (Genealogy) Research Tips

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library, Morgan Library
Morgan Library (photo: Jim Forest, Creative Commons license)

My best tip for any kind of research is straight out of comedian Jonathan Winters’s mouth in The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming! “We have GOT to get organized!” Knowing my own tendencies in the opposite directions—piles of books and papers, urgen notes that I can’t make sense of, numbers written down that mean . . . ? I have developed a number of habits—compulsions, you could say—to get past my disorder disability.

If you want to do genealogy or really any complicated or long-term, even short-term, research project, you might want to think about what “systems” (yes, I’m laughing) you can develop to make your life easier. Think of them as supports, not burdens.

A good example is maintaining a list of books you want to consult. A lot of information I need is online, but often a source lists a book or journal that isn’t. But it may be available in a library somewhere. HathiTrust lets me find out which US libraries have it (possibly even electronic copies).

I copy and paste the bibliographic information about these elusive publications into a file called “Library Searches,” organized by, naturally, library. When my genealogy club visits the New York Public Library, for example, I have a ready-made list of books that I know they have. A recent vacation in Virginia included two days in the Library of Virginia, ditto.

Another benefit of the list is that, during COVID, when I couldn’t visit to libraries, I could still request books through InterLibrary Loan. Given my flea-sized attention span, I naturally learned to write a few words in the description of each book about what to look for and which family, otherwise . . . When I’ve seen a book, I flag it in the list so that I don’t search for it again. (You hear the voice of experience.). My Library Searches list is now thirty-three pages long. Thirty-three pages! That may sound onerous, but bear in mind, it’s been built up one book at a time, over a period of years.

Creating footnotes (reference-type) is another good habit to develop. When you write down a fact, add a footnote, preferably with a link. While you can always delete excessive footnotes at some point, it is a cardinal rule of research that, if there’s a fact you neglect to document, that is the one piece of information you’ll want to double-check later. Again, I learned this the hard way. I keep a list of “facts sources” at the end of short stories when I’m working on them, for exactly that reason.

Knowing I would have time at the Library of Virginia, I copied and pasted the section of the Library Searches list into its own file and used it to query the library’s online catalog. When I showed up in Richmond, I gave the librarian my list with the call numbers, and she knew exactly what I was looking for. This advance online catalog research identified a number of promising books I hadn’t known about too.

With this next thought, you may think we’re wandering off into OCD territory, but I’ve found that libraries with family history information tend to have some books and records organized by county—early marriage records, will books, and the like. So I made a list of my ancestors who lived in each county and generally when. Again, this was something I could do in advance of my visit. And, when my bored husband turned up at the library to see whether I was ready to leave yet, I gave him that list, pointed him toward the county shelves, and he became an able research assistant.

Whatever systems work for you, they’re an antidote to the stress of trying to remember stuff. Help yourself out. Find a way to stay at least somewhat organized!