Author Archives: Murderati

Five things I’ve learned

When I first hit the book scene as an author, I developed a talk called, "Ten things I've learned since becoming a published writer."

Some of the things were funny: There's a man in Texas who doesn't like to laugh . . . and is proud of it.

Others focused on what surprised me: No one is going to recognize you or stop you on the street to tell you she loves your book.

This weekend, I was in Roswell, NM as a guest of the Friends of the Public Library. I updated my Ten Things talk and wanted to share five items with you. They're personal — not dictums for everyone — but they're tidbits that are important to me and might help others on this particular road.

#1 The first job of a writer is to write.
Yes, I know that sounds obvious, but it took me a few years to figure out. I got so distracted in the marketing game that I kept losing focus of what's important. You have to write to be a writer. If you're not writing, you'll be a has-been before you ever become a does-have.

#2 Creativity must be nurtured.
There are several ways to do this. I've found unplugging — turning off the computer (especially the internet/email, no phone) is a big one. Taking walks and staring blankly into space works well too. And writing, writing, writing — without personal censorship — propels me into different and interesting directions . The more I do it and produce, the more ideas I have.

#3 "Edit" is the most essential word for any writer.
I don't care who you are, editing will make you better. It's part of writing the best book you can. The longer I'm in this career, the more I realize how words can be misinterpreted. Writing what I mean to write takes effort and a critical eye. Actually, it takes many critical eyes.

#4 There's no such thing as "writer's block" — at least for me — BUT there is such a thing as paralysis due to fear of failure/of not living up to expectations.
Most writers I know are great actors. We pretend to have faith in our work. Dig deeper and you'll find our fragile faith in ourselves, in our ability to effectively tell the stories we want to tell. We can be knocked to the floor with a bad review or a nasty email. When we're in that scary place of self doubt, it's difficult to continue creating. And it's easy to get stuck, to blame an absent muse, when what has really left us is our own self confidence.

#5 Word of mouth remains the most powerful way to make/break a career.
It doesn't matter if we Twitter or FaceBook, if we email or do public appearances, if we buddy up to bookstore employees or attach magnetic signs about our books to our cars, if we send out monthly newsletters or have contests — nothing will get us further than the real buzz of readers who love our work and want us to succeed. I know that many people believe that we can manufacture that buzz, and maybe we can through some of the methods mentioned above, but the bottom line is that person-to-person communication remains the single most effective tool to persuade others to buy books.

I don't want this to be a long post, so I'll stop here and throw it out to YOU.

Writers: What's something you've learned since publication?
Readers: What has surprised you about writers or their professional lives since you've become part of the literary community (You are, you know; you prove it daily by reading and hanging out in the blogosphere.)?

adapt or die…

by Toni McGee Causey

Allison and I were in New York last week for the bi-annual PASIC conference. It's a fantastic small con that allows its members to meet with a large number of industry professionals; I'm almost certain that the standing-room-only cocktail party had two industry reps to every individual member. We had panels with publishers, editors, agents, and long-time NYT novelists, and it was incredibly educational as well as just plain fun. (Best part, of course, is hanging out with friends and making new friends. I always come back to writing completely rejuvenated after conferences like this, but this one was especially helpful.)

One of the things discussed at the conference was how the Kindle and Sony e-reader are becoming more prominent and are changing some of the buying habits of the general public. There was an estimate that in a couple of years, there will be a million e-readers of some sort out there in the public's hands, and that doesn't include applications for phones like the iPhone. (There were over 12 million iPhones on the market as of last September–I can only imagine that number has doubled.) iPhones now offer several e-reader apps, including the Kindle and Fictionwise. Amazon's market share is increasing, and while it grew slowly in the past, it's growing exponentially now, so there's an anticipation of it capturing a larger market share. (There was an assertion that Amazon will be selling instead of other booksellers, not in addition to, which means the same number of books, but a shift in power of who's selling.)

There was another assertion made that I disagreed with, and that was that people who are purchasing online are not "browsing." The publisher who made this suggestion believed that buyers are going straight to whatever it was they wanted to purchase, buying that item, and then logging off. So "online" purchasing eliminated the impulse buying that going into a bookstore would net. I disagreed with this because I do browse the online stores. I actually find them easier to browse than a lot of bookstores because I can put in keywords and subject matter and things which I wouldn't have necessarily seen in the store will pop up there for my perusal. I've purchased dozens of books this way.

My question, then, was this: Given the growing popularity of the e-reader, isn't it logical to suppose that in the very near future, all college and high-school kids will be downloading their texts and workbooks and study guides and assigned novels… to their e-readers, which will be much much easier to carry around than the backpacks which weigh a ton now? And, given that as inevitable, wouldn't it be logical to assume that those kids coming up in middle school and grade school will get to a point where holding a book is a foreign thing–they'll have grown accustomed to having their books (many of them) in the palm of their hands. They'll be smart and savvy about how to find things online, between their e-readers and their iPhones and their laptops–and they'll probably make the majority of their reading purchases from downloadable files. And, given that, what is the publishing industry going to do to target that whole new crop of readers with their books? Targeted marketing? Implanted suggestions, like blog ads we have today? Why, for example, not have a link on a sidebar when the kid is studying a subject that then takes them to fiction about that subject? Or other non-fiction, even? Why not have novels related to subjects on "drill down" ads linked inside the texts or blogs that generation reads?

There wasn't a satisfactory answer, and I got the distinct impression that the publishing industry is thinking that if this happens, it's years down the line. I don't think they're thinking about the current exponential growth of technology. ("Twittering" was a brand new thing to a few of the people there…)

More importantly, I wanted to know what the publishers are going to do to cultivate these new readers and keep them interested in reading? The popularity of books like TWILIGHT and EVERMORE and, of course, HARRY POTTER, demonstrates that this group will read in large numbers, but it's short-sighted not to grant that they will also be mostly reading online in a few years. They're spending their entire lives online right now, reading tons of material–from blogs to surfing the internet. Sure, it's smaller bites than a novel, but what generation do you remember in the past which has done as much reading as the one we have coming up now?

I began "journalling" online over ten years ago. (Rob, I completely commiserate with the blogging topic-burn-out.) When I started writing online, the journalling community had less than a thousand online journals and I was friends with several of the "old-timers" who began the whole concept. I had found them back when there were less than a dozen online journals. When I started writing online, my family thought I was crazy ("Who wants to write about their life online?") and that this was a fad that would die down once the newness of the internet had worn off. I remember the uproar among "journallers" when the new phrase "blogging" came along. (They hated the term. They had a perfectly acceptable term and there was no use for something new.) (Irony, you see.) I started "journalling" when we had to hand-code the html and I learned enough to get by. (I hated it, and I was one of the "pansies" who thanked all that was holy and electrified when the WYSIWYG editors came along.) Then there was the shock… shock, I tell you, that someone would actually put an ad on a blog. I'm not sure that Satan taking over the internet would've managed quite as much horror and outrage. Then some bloggers like Heather over at dooce started making a living off the blog ads and a lot of other bloggers thought… hmmmm…. income… being able to sit at my computer and generate… income… from babbling… and the world as we know it changed.

Last Monday on Pari's blog, a commenter mentioned that the primary target audience for crime fiction and thrillers was the thirty-and-over demographic. (I am paraphrasing here.) My first gut response was that if that were true, fiction would be dead within a generation. Two generations at best. I buy stuff online continuously; I cannot tell you how many emails I've received from people who sampled my first chapters on my site and then went and ordered my books online, but I've also received a lot of mail from people who found me because they'd just bought something online and used the browsing feature and found me accidentally. These are generally not the over-30 crowds who are shopping
like this–it's generally the younger generations.

I'd raised baby raccoons once–the original story is here–and they adapted to me as their "mom" almost instantly. They didn't even seem to mind. So, too, will the next couple of generations adapt to e-reading as their primary source for material, and if the publishing industry as it stands does not adapt now and start thinking about marketing to that audience and cultivating more of that audience, someone else will. Whether that means Amazon creates a publishing arm or someone else does as the need will become more and more obvious, the future will change how we get our material out to the new audiences.

What makes no sense to me, and seems to be shooting themselves in the foot, then reloading and aiming at the other… is the price publishers have for current book downloads. At the same price as many hard-backs or trades (with the exceptions of some special offers), it's almost as if the book publishing world thinks, "If we make downloading too expensive, the general public will stick to buying 'real' books and we won't have to worry about this e-publishing thing." That may have even been true a couple of years ago, but now? Now more than a million people will have access to e-readers and millions will have access to e-readers on their iPhones or similar phones (the Blackberry, I think, has a good internet interface), and that number will probably double within the next two years, and will grow exponentially as technology gets cheaper, more powerful and more user friendly.

People will download cheap, affordable items. Again, citing the source above, in September, Steve Jobs predicted that there would be a "billion apps by the end of the store’s first year of availability, sometime in 2009." Now, many of those apps are free, but many of those are not. I've browed the apps, and quite a few of the top 50 are $2.99 to $4.99. The top 50 of over a billion apps downloaded… can you see the market here? I can. Add to that the fact that people are spending money on using those apps to download entertainment–movies, songs, books. iTunes are 99¢ each. A Jack Reacher novel on Kindle? $6.39–for a novel released back in 2004 and is only $1.40 cheaper than the printed mass market. (Lee is one of the best examples of a super popular author with an extensive backlist.)

I've heard many authors explain that their online sales are a teeny tiny fraction of overall sales… and I can't help but wonder if that's because of the pricing. If I could download the entire Jack Reacher backlist on my iPhone for a couple of bucks apiece? I'd do it. I'd pay more for the newly released novel, but the older ones? I'd download if they were cheaper. There are a lot of newer authors I'd try if I could get their book online for three or four dollars. They'd make roughly the same money, I'd get to try them cheaply, and if I liked them, I'd buy their next book. The first mainstream publisher who starts seriously targeting that market has the potential to grab a huge audience. Sure, it's not what we're used to… but we are not the future of publishing. Our kids are. I want to be around, in their marketplace. They're going to buy stuff… I'd like it to be my stuff. [Can you imagine the first publisher to package their book with a hit song playlist? Or cross-market? Downloads available on blogs?] The profit margin doesn't have to go down for either the author or the publisher–the distribution method cuts out a tremendous burden of costs, so why not go for volume in the pricing system? There is a reason Wal-Mart is gargantuan in the retailing field, including book sales–lower prices. There is a reason iTunes are super popular–legal, cheap downloads.

Will downloading replace traditional books? No, not for many years at least. If you look at the car industry, for example, there is always going to be a desire by a group of people to have the old muscle cars–as gas-guzzling as they are–because there is an aesthetic pleasure in the owning and the handling and the beauty of such a car. But as great as they are, the industry as a whole moved away from that type of car for multiple reasons, and with the demands of global warming and need for cheaper, cleaner fuels, we're not going to go back to the era when those cars were common. I don't think books will be extinct… but I'd be willing to bet the midlist will change significantly. More critical to publishing's survival, though, is increasing the audience–growing it via capturing the teen market and selling to them as they get older.

We'd better adapt…

So how about you? Have you used an e-reader, ever? Purchased online? Is this something you're doing more of now?If you aren't, what about the kids around you? Do they like reading on their computers?

Congratulations to our own Allison Brennan, who is a RITA nominee in the Romantic Suspense category for this year's prestigious RWA award! Her SUDDEN DEATH is out in stores, now!

So, a Writer Walks Into a Bar…

By Cornelia Read

If you ever get to the point with writing where you feel that, as James Joyce once said, “writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives,” here are some jokes to cheer you up:

A visitor to a certain college paused to admire the new Hemingway Hall that had been built on campus.

“It’s a pleasure to see a building named for Ernest Hemingway,” he said.

“Actually,” said his guide, “it’s named for Joshua Hemingway. No relation.”

The visitor was astonished. “Was Joshua Hemingway a writer, also?”

“Yes, indeed,” said his guide. “He wrote the check.”

Q. Do you know the difference between God and an editor?

A. God doesn’t think he’s an editor.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, “Where’s the self-help section?”

She answered, “If I told you, it would defeat the purpose.”

A writer died and was given the choice of going to heaven or hell.

She decided to check out both options before actually signing up for one or the other.

First, the writer descended into the fiery pits of hell, where row upon row of writers were chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they typed, they were whipped with thorny lashes.

“This sucks,” said the writer. “Let me see heaven now.”

She ascended into heaven only to discover rows of writers chained to their desks in a steaming sweatshop. As they worked, they, too, were whipped with thorny lashes.

“Wait a minute,” said the writer. “This is just as bad as hell!”

“Not quite,” replied an unseen voice. “Up here you get published.”

3d7d8079bdc4cfc7d03cfa01fb5a9746_A_Chorus_of_Angels

Q. What’s the difference between publishers and terrorists?

A. You can negotiate with terrorists.

Once upon a time, a young boy professed his desire to become a great writer.

When asked to define “great,” he said, “I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!”

Now he works for Microsoft.

Q. How many science fiction writers does it take to change a light bulb?

A. Two, but it’s actually the same person. He went back in time and met himself in the doorway and then climbed onto his alter-ego’s shoulders so that they could reach the ceiling fixture. Then a major time paradox occurred and the entire room, light bulb, and both guys were blown out of existence. They continue to co-exist in a parallel universe, however.

Q. How many publishers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. Three. One to screw it in. Two to hold down the author.

Q. How many mystery writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. One. But she has to stop when she’s screwed it almost all the way in, then give it a surprising twist at the end.

Q. How many blurb writers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A. “A VAST AND TEEMING HORDE STRETCHING FROM SEA TO SHINING SEA!!!!”

Q. How many screenwriters does it take to change a light bulb?

A. Ten:

1st draft. Hero changes light bulb.
2nd draft. Villain changes light bulb.
3rd draft. Hero stops villain from changing light bulb. Villain falls to death.
4th draft. Lose the light bulb.
5th draft. Light bulb back in. Fluorescent instead of tungsten.
6th draft. Villain breaks bulb, uses it to kill hero’s mentor.
7th draft. Fluorescent not working. Back to tungsten.
8th draft. Hero forces villain to eat light bulb.
9th draft. Hero laments loss of light bulb. Doesn’t change it.
10th draft. Hero changes light bulb.

Q: How many copy editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: I can’t tell whether you mean ‘change a light bulb’ or ‘have sex in a light bulb.’ Can we reword it to remove the ambiguity?

Q: How many editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Only one. But first they have to rewire the entire building.

Q: How many art directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Does it HAVE to be a light bulb?

Q: How many copy editors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: The last time this question was asked, it involved art directors. Is the difference intentional? Should one or the other instance be changed? It seems inconsistent.

Q: How many marketing directors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: It isn’t too late to make this neon instead, is it?

Q: How many proofreaders does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Proofreaders aren’t supposed to change light bulbs. They should just query them.

Q: How many booksellers does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Only one, and they’ll be glad to do it too, except no one shipped them any.

Three guys are sitting at a bar.

Guy #1: “…Yeah, I make $75,000 a year after taxes.”

Guy #2: “What do you do for a living?”

#1: “I’m a stockbroker. How much do you make?

#2: “I should clear $60,000 this year.”

#1: “What do you do?”

#2: “I’m an architect.”

The third guy is just sitting there quietly, staring into his beer, when the others turn to him.

Guy #2: “Hey, how much do you make per year?

Guy #3: “Gee… hmmm… I guess about $13,000.”

Guy #1: “Oh yeah? What kind of novels do you write?”

A male romance novelist was hiking in the mountains, and he came upon a shepherd who was tending a large herd of sheep that were grazing in the alpine meadow. The writer took a fancy to the sheep, and asked the shepherd: “If I can guess how many sheep you have, can I have one?”

The shepherd thought this was an odd request, but thought that there was little chance that the man would guess the exact number of sheep, so he said “Sure.”

The male romance novelist guessed “You have 287 sheep” to the shepherd’s astonishment, since this was exactly how many sheep he had.

The male romance novelist got excited and asked “Can I pick out my sheep now?” and the shepherd grudgingly gave his permission.

The male romance novelist selected his sheep, bent over, and swung the sheep over his shoulders to carry home with him.

The shepherd then asked “If I guess what your occupation is, can I have my sheep back?”

The male romance novelist was a bit surprised by this, but figured that it was unlikely that the shepherd would be able to guess his occupation, and went along with the deal.

The shepherd then guessed “Dude, you’re a romance novelist, aren’t you?”

The male romance novelist was very surprised and asked, “How did you know?”

The shepherd responded, “Put the dog down and we’ll talk about it.”

Q: How can you tell if a blonde writes mysteries?

A: She has a checkbook.

And speaking of Microsoft…

Got any more jokes? I could use a few….

Formatting a Manuscript

by J.T. Ellison

Last week, I mentioned that I'd formatted a new document so I could start writing THE PRETENDER, and Sandy chimed in with a question: What program do you use to write with? I thought it might be fun to hear how everyone does their prep work, including the program you use and how you format your manuscripts.

Let me say, for the record, that there is no one right way to do this, though there are ways to make your editor and agent submissions easy to read.

To start, use a word processing program that is universally accepted. I'm on a PC, and most of New York is too. I can't tell you how many time I get emails with attachments formatted for Mac. I can't open them, and I always have to go back and ask the sender to reformat it into something that my computer can open. Right now, Word 97-2003 seems to be universal, and if the Mac people could chime in here on what they have, that would be fantastic.

I use Word 2007, but when I e-mail my manuscript to New York, I save it as a 97-2003 document. This system works just fine, allowing me the more sophisticated tools of the newer version of Word and easy conversion for submission.

So when I get started, there are a few things I do to make my life easier.

First, a header. A typical header looks like this:

Centered at the top, with the name and title on the left and the page number on the right:

J.T. Ellison, THE PRETENDER Page #

I used to do page X of Y, but found that New York preferred just the page number.

Then you set your margins: 1 inch, all the way around. Now, I cheat when I've got a work in progress, because I'm taking pages to critique group and I want to maximize what I bring, so my margins are 1 inch at the top and sides, and .8 at the bottom. That allows for approximately 25 lines per page.

Font is a big deal too, for several reasons. You want your editor and agent submissions to be readable, first and foremost. So choose Courier, Times New Roman, or Arial, in 12 point. In Word 2007, I use Calibri, which is a version of Arial. It's easy to read, easy on the eyes, and allows my editor a lot of white space to edit.

Double space your lines. Do not insert a break between paragraphs. The first line of a chapter should not be indented, the rest of the chapter's paragraph starts should have a .5 indent. Begin the first chapter of the book halfway down the page. Some authors start every chapter halfway down the page – it's personal preference.

You'll notice that moving your manuscript between the fonts will change the page count. TNR will be the smallest, Courier the largest. A manuscript that comes in at 320 pages in TNR will run about 413 pages in Courier. Arial comes in at 339. Now here's the thing: we all want to think our manuscript is a big, hefty behemoth of linguistic goodness. But if you're using page numbers to determine your worth, it's easy to lie to yourself and make your manuscript bigger than it really is.

I use word count to determine the length of my manuscripts, not page numbers. Word has an automatic word counter, and that's what I use. It's simple, straightforward, and no amount of fooling with styles will change the essence of it.

A personal suggestion: whatever font you choose to write in, when you're done and doing a final revision to turn it in, change the font throughout before you print it out. The mind is an amazing creature, able to independently insert what you KNOW should be on the page instead of what actually IS on the page. Reading it through in a different font allows you to catch some of the errors you might miss otherwise.

I also format the style sheet for the page, so my chapter heading, paragraph body, etc., are uniform and I don't need to format each time I change something. In Word 2007, there are styles that you can open and adapt to your preferences. Very handy and simple, you just type your heading, click the style sheet for heading, and Bob's your uncle.

Chapter headings seem to differ from house to house. Chapter One, One, 1, are all used. It depends on the style guide of your house, so ask. My house spells out the chapter, so my headings look like this: One. Twenty-One.

Another personal suggestion. As I write, I change my chapters around, add chapters, combine them, break them apart. It's a very fluid event. And all those changes mean I end up having to renumber my chapters, which is a pain in the tuckus. For THE IMMORTALS, I tried something different. I didn't use Chapter numbers, simply started each new one with the word Chapter. When I was done, I went through and numbered them. So I had Chapter One, Chapter Two, etc. But since my house doesn't like the word Chapter, I needed to delete them. I waited until the last possible moment, because, as always, I ended up breaking a big chapter into two smaller ones, and that messed up the numbering. But… I used the find/replace function, and was able to go through and renumber them effortlessly, and delete the word chapter from each heading. Voila. I saved myself oodles of time that I usually waste trying to get it all renumbered.

Speaking of Find/Replace. It's a brilliant tool, but it has limitations. Don't ever do a global find/replace and think you've managed a neat trick. You always have to look through the document. Name changes are especially tricky – we've all heard horror stories about writers who change a character name at the last minute, do a global find/replace, and end up messing up other words and names.

Saving and backing up your document is vital as well. I am notorious for multiple backups, simply because the idea of losing my work paralyzes me with fright. To start, my Norton system has a global backup. There's one. Second, I use a program called Mozy, which you can set to any specifications. Mine automatically backs up my files when I've been dormant for more than 15 minutes. Third, my document has both auto save and automatic backup, so every ten minutes Word does a global save on the open document, and when I save and close for the day, there is a backup copy made. That way, no matter what, you'll never lose more than ten minutes worth of work. Fifth, I email the manuscript to myself, so a copy resides on the server. Sixth, once a week I move a copy to a thumb drive. Also, every time I do a revision, before I type a single word, I save the document as a new file and do all the work in it. My file names read like this: THE IMMORTALS WORKING MANUSCRIPT, THE IMMORTALS V1, THE IMMORTALS V2, V3, V4, V5, etc. I do it like that because I work with the entire story in a single document. I know some authors take it a step further and save each individual chapter as they go – I think this falls under personal preference.

Sound like a bit much? NEVER. YOU CAN NEVER HAVE TOO MUCH REDUNDANCY. With that in mind, I've started using Dropbox, which allows you to move files between computers.

I also think it's a very, very smart idea to print as you go. That way,
in case everything else fails, you have a hard copy and you can input
it directly.

Anal? Yes. But it's how I work, and like NASA, I have failsafes in place so I'm never stuck out in space without my oxygen.

Like I said, there is no one right way to do this, this is just my way. I would love to hear how other authors do it.

Wine of the Week: Homemade Sangria

2 Liters Riunite Lambrusco
3/4 cup Brandy
1/4 cup Cointreau
1/2 cup fine white sugar
2 cups Orange Juice
2 Lemons, thinly sliced
2 Oranges, thinly sliced
2 Limes, thinly sliced
1/2 Liter Club Soda

Combine all the ingredients but the club soda and allow to ferment overnight. Add club soda, serve over lots of ice. Really Yummy!

The Killer Inside Us*

By Brett Battles

As writers of crime and thriller fiction, part of our job is to kill a lot of people. I know in my first novel the death toll probably reached two dozen. Thrillers tend to rack up the body count, but even in the most tame of crime novels it’s likely that at least one person has died.

Our job is not to only kill any number of people, but to often come up with new and exciting (perhaps a poor word choice) ways of doing it. Or if we recycle a method used before, do so by adding our own twists. Guns, poisons, knives, ropes, explosions…these are just some of the tools we work with.

And then there are the killers themselves, the characters who pull the triggers or set off the remotes. These people (who they are, and what motivates them) come from our minds, too. Perhaps they are inspired by someone in real life, but believe me, if an author can’t get into their minds, then all he or she will create is a cardboard cutout no one will find believable.

Call me crazy, but I doubt most writers of these kinds of books just came to the ability of being able to figure these things out only when they started writing crime and thrillers. Refined their skills, yes. But not having a predisposition already? I doubt it.

I’ve been a killer since at least junior high. Okay…that might not be completely accurate…I probably started off more a maimer than a killer, but the foundation was there.

Now before you go thinking this is some sort of confession of a heinous crime spree, just sit back, drink that coffee and chill. What I’m talking about is my imagination.

It undoubtedly started off with a lot of “what ifs.” What if the school bus lost its breaks and smashed into a light pole? What if JP, the junior high bully, got so mad he actually beat someone to death? What if that fake bomb threat someone called into school when I was in 8th grade had been real?

From there I would move on to the whys and the hows. What happened to the bus’ breaks? How could someone secretly motivate JP to attack someone else? Why would someone want to blow up a classroom? Multiple answers, especially to that last one.

These became stories in my mind…little mental plays that I would sometimes write down. Of course in the worlds I created the good guys would always come out on top. (I did, after all, win Citizen of the Year for my 3rd grade class, and have been know to trap spiders and crickets and carry them outside instead of killing them.)

There were other killing triggers, too, one of the best being an overheard conversation. “I think tonight’s the night. Tommy wants me to meet him at that abandoned house outside of town at nine.” Or…”Mark told me he is so allergic to peanuts that just a little bit of peanut butter would kill him.” Or…”Mr. Harris gave me a D for no reason. I could just kill him.”

These days I could get whole novels out of any of those lines.

The point I’m trying to make is that unlike a lot of my friends and fellow students, when I’d hear something like any of those things above, I would start to work them into a plot. I would figure out how to make that rendezvous at the abandoned house turn into the scene of a crime. I’d imagine “Mark’s” girlfriend being so sick of him that she secretly works some peanut butter into a cupcake she’s baked for him. Or I would figure out the best way a student could take revenge on the teacher who’s failed him.

Actually acting on any of these thoughts never crossed my mind in any way other than to use them in a story. But seeing these situations, overhearing these bits of conversations…my mind often goes to the dark place, wondering “what if.”

My God, if a psychologist had dug a little bit into my psyche as a teenager, they might have thought there was something evil at my core. But then if they dug a little deeper, they would have realized that it wasn’t an asocial desire to act out, but a curiosity of humanity…both the good and the bad.

“Hi. I’m Brett Battles, and I kill with my keyboard.”

So who’s with me? Are we a bunch of imaginary killers or am I certifiable? And while you’re at it, share one of those random events that spurred an idea.

* Apologies to the late Jim Thompson whose magnificent novel THE KILLER INSIDE ME I finally read for the first time last month.

Today a little bit of visual creativity. This is an amazing work, if a little odd at times. Well worth taking a look at.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Blog-Blocked

by Rob Gregory Browne

I have never believed in writer's block. I've always felt that no matter how dire things might seem, no matter how stuck you might get in a story, no matter how difficult it might be to start a story, as long as you put your fat ass in that chair and start typing, something will come.

Because it has to.

Every writer in this crowd — every novelist, at least — knows how wonderful writing that first book was. You may have given yourself a specific amount of time to write it or you may have simply written whenever you could, whenever you felt inspired. But your time was your own. You were
beholden to no one but yourself — and, quite possibly, to the family and friends you kept promising would one day hold your published book in their hands.

But again, as every writer in the crowd knows, once you get that publishing deal, you are under the gun. You must write or perish — and that's a completely different mindset.

That mindset, in fact, can often result in what Harley Jane Kozak calls Secondbookitis, in which the writer spends an entire year (depending on his or her deadline) screaming inside, a bundle of nerves and raw emotion, victim to late-night crying jags and a feeling of dread so pervasive that it's a wonder you can drag yourself out of bed and over to the word processor every morning.

But we do it. We manage to sit our asses down (fat fat fat fat fat) and put our fingers on the keyboard and let them fly.

Because we have to.

So I don't believe in writer's block, simply because I can't afford to. I have a deadline to meet, so I meet it (more or less. Okay, Mr. Resnick, quit laughing).

Unfortunately, I have come across something that, while not potentially as devastating as writer's block, is certainly cause for concern:

Blogger's Block.

I used to write a blog called Anatomy of a Book Deal. For two years or so, I would write a new entry every two or three days and, at its peak, the blog was getting around thirty thousand unique hits a month. Since I was chronicling the evolution of my career as a virgin novelist, I had no trouble finding subject matter and blogging became part of my weekly routine. It was an effortless enterprise, a chance for me to share the wonderful experience I was going through at the time.

But I didn't just write the blog. I also became a comment whore. I went to dozens of writing blogs and commented on nearly every post I read. Part of this was PR and part of it was, again, the desire to share.

I think if you took all of my blog entries and all of the comments I made on other blogs over that period of time, you'd probably have enough material for half a dozen books. Extremely boring books, no doubt, but what I may have lacked in quality, I made up for with enthusiasm (wait — how did my sex life wind up in this?).

Then, shortly after the release of my first book (KISS HER GOODBYE, a great gift for your friends and loved ones), I experienced blog burnout.

And I wasn't the only one. Nearly all of my friends who were coming up with me at around the same time, had also been blogging furiously, and whenever the subject of blogs was brought up you could hear the collective groan all the way across the Atlantic.

We were all suffering from blog burnout.

And slowly but surely, we all began to blog less and less, many of us shifting over to group blogs like Murderati so that it became a twice monthly deadline rather than every other day.

But despite the burnout, I've still managed to come here every two weeks and find something to say. What I've had to say hasn't always been compelling — as evidenced by the low comment count at times — but at least I've managed to find something.

Until now, that is.

I am, ladies and gentlemen, suffering from a terrible, terrible case of blogger's block.

Even though I knew my deadline was approaching, that I had a post to write for Murderati, I could not for the life of me figure out what to write about today. Every time I thought about it, the wall would go up and that wall must be made of lead, because nothing can penetrate it.

I tried going back through all the recent Murderati posts to see if any of them would spur something, but no luck. I went to other blogs to see what they were talking about, hoping I could rip-off some interesting subject matter.

No luck.

So here I sit, writing about not being able to write. Or, more specifically, not being able to write a blog entry. Not an earth-shattering worry, I suppose, but it does raise some concern.

I'm blog blocked and I think there's only one thing that can save me:

Taking some time off. So, I've decided, for the next two weeks I won't be writing another blog post. No matter how much you might beg me, no matter how many comments you may throw my way, I will not be contributing to Murderati again until Wednesday, April 8th.

In the meantime, I have to ask you if I'm alone in this. Do those of you who write blogs ever feel as if you have just completely exhausted any and all subject matter to blog about? Do those of you who read blogs find your eyes glazing over when the writers of said blogs start to bitch and moan that they have absolutely nothing to say?

I'm beginning to understand the appeal of Twitter. You have 140 characters to get to the point. Will there be a day when one of my tweets goes something like this? —

"I'm tweet blocked."

What am I doing in this mystery?

by Tess Gerritsen

It's a question that every amateur sleuth must ask herself. Perhaps she's the one who discovered the body. Perhaps it's a friend or a colleague who's been murdered. But once the body's been found and the police show up, why would this mere civilian hang around and insinuate herself into the official murder investigation? Yet this is precisely what happens in just about every mystery featuring an amateur sleuth. The sleuth's motivation to get involved, to dig for clues, and perhaps even risk her own life to solve the mystery is the thorniest issue a novelist must deal with.

And it can't come down to mere curiosity.

I consider myself a curious person. If I hear about a baffling crime, I'll comb newspapers, talk about it with my neighbors, and tune in to all the local gossip I'm privy to. But you won't find me conducting my own interviews or sneaking onto crime scenes or following a possible suspect in my car. You certainly won't find me showing up late at night for some rendezvous with a killer. That's what I expect the police to do, because they get paid for it, and they're the ones with the bulletproof vests.

"But," you say, "what if the police are incompetent or crooked? Then you must step in to ensure that justice is done!"

I'm all for justice, but I'm also a coward. I'd rather skip the shootout, thank you. So would most people, which is where the problem lies in the amateur sleuth mystery. We all believe in justice, but it's hard to identify with a protagonist who risks her life to solve a crime when it's not part of her job description — certainly not if it's merely for the sake of curiosity. We'd think her foolish, and her motives unbelievable. And if your heroine isn't believable, you've lost your audience.

So what constitutes a believable motive for the amateur sleuth?

I think the motives that are most compelling are those that are deeply personal, with stakes that are sky-high. It's even better if the protagonist has her back against the wall and has no choice but to forge ahead or die. Back before I started writing about cops, I found that my biggest challenge was coming up with a good reason to involve my amateur sleuths in the mystery. My heroines were, for the most part, ordinary women thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Their jobs included microbiologist (CALL AFTER MIDNIGHT), copy editor (PRESUMED GUILTY), nurse (KEEPER OF THE BRIDE), female burglar (THIEF OF HEARTS), and astronaut (GRAVITY). Plus, of course, a few doctors. None of them were paid investigators. Rather, they were women who were forced to dig for answers — or they would suffer. Maybe even die.

What are some of the personal stakes that would force your protagonist become a sleuth?

A THREAT TO HER LIFE. I used this motive in GRAVITY, where the crew aboard the International Space Station has been infected with a bizarre new microbe and they've been left quarantined in orbit while they succumb one by one. My astronaut-heroine, Emma Watson, must investigate the source of this microbe in order to save her own life. And her husband must simultaneously investigate on earth, in order to save the woman he loves. If they fail, Emma dies. No one would question their motives for plunging into this mystery. The stakes are life and death.

A THREAT TO SOMEONE SHE LOVES. This is another motive that's absolutely believable, and one that I've used again and again over the years. In BLOODSTREAM, for instance, my character Claire is a family practitioner who's moved to a small town in Maine, right as an epidemic of teen violence breaks out. Her adolescent patients are acting weird and even killing their own families. Yes, that alone is a reason for a doctor to investigate, but I wanted the stakes to be even more personal for her. So I gave her a teenage son who is also beginning to behave strangely. He too is caught up in the epidemic, and unless she finds out the cause, she will lose him — and maybe her own life as well.

A THREAT TO HER CAREER. Defending your reputation or your livelihood is another powerful motive. I used this in HARVEST, where surgical resident Abby DiMatteo is forced to investigate irregularities in organ donations — or see her dream of being a doctor forever destroyed.

VENGEANCE. While I've never used this as a motive, I think it's certainly believable. If someone I love were ever harmed, I would pull out all the stops to make sure the perp was caught. This is one instance where wanting to see justice served becomes intensely personal — and something I'd be willing to risk my life for.

I'm sure there are others — I'd love to hear from other authors what they've used to justify investigations by their amateur sleuths.

Any of these motivations would work for one book. And they'd give your character a strong, dramatic arc for the story. But if you take your amateur sleuth into a second book, or a third, you've got a few credibility problems. A reader can accept that your sleuth might wander into a murder investigation one time — but twice? Or ten times? Pretty soon you've got "Jessica Fletcher syndrome," where everyone around your sleuth seems to end up murdered. Authors do this all the time, of course; witness the many amateur sleuth series, some of them quite popular. They may have a healthy audience, but only because everyone agrees to suspend their disbelief and just go with the fantasy that any one person could be so unlucky as to keep stumbling into crime scenes.

The easiest way around it, if you want to write a continuing series, is to create a sleuth for whom criminal investigation is a job. When your hero is a cop, a medical examiner, or a private investigator, your job as an author suddenly becomes easier. Ever since I created the character of homicide detective Jane Rizzoli, I haven't had to twist myself into plot contortions, trying to come up with a reason why my heroine would investigate. Now it happens to be her job –and one she will have to do book after book after book.

Good bye, Jessica Fletcher.

Intellectual propertyless

by Pari

Can anyone tell me what happened to copyright?

Ever since I became aware of the Google Books Settlement, I've been wondering about this. For those who don't know the ins and outs of the settlement, welcome to the club. It's a cumbersome and strange world of legalese that I don't understand. The long and short of it is that Google decided to scan more than seven million books. The assertion is that most of these tomes were in-copyright but out of print –though my first book is still in print and definitely was when it was scanned — and that Google, through the goodness of its corporate heart, was doing this as a public service. Authors Guild didn't buy the altruism angle and there was a big lawsuit.

From what I gather, authors/publishers are now required to opt-in or out of this settlement by May 5, 2009. If someone opts in, he or she gets a one-time payment of $60-$300 and everything will be hunky dory. But Google will still have the complete book scanned and what's going to happen to that work over time?

Am I the only one who thinks this isn't such a spiffy deal?

Sure I want people to read my writing. But there's something that irks me about businesses profiting off of my writing when they didn't have squat to do with its creation or production — and that I won't receive any kind of continued payment for it.

Of course, the fact that Google is paying anything at all is, I guess, a victory of sorts. After all, there are fans (especially in the science fiction and romance worlds) and organizations that are posting complete books online without even paying a nomimal fee.

Still this Google settlement feels like a Pyhrric victory at best. I can't help wonder when Google is going to start selling subscriptions to its library of scanned books and how many millions or billions of dollars it'll make from our work (and what impact it'll have on brick and mortar libraries).

And what about organizations like BookShare.org? This nonprofit makes books available to people with vision impairments. As you know, one of my children could benefit from such a service. I found out that BookShare has The Clovis Incident in its database now. According to an email from Robin Seaman, "Publisher Liaison for Bookshare.org, a Benetech Initiative," I should really feel that this is an honor.

The scanning without permission is legal under something called the Chafee Amendment to the copyright law (1996).

Don't get me wrong. I'm happy that at least one of my books is available to people with vision impairments. I just want to be paid for my work.

Right now I'm feeling nickeled and dimed, like chunks of me are being chipped away, for no good reason other than businesses greed and people's miserliness.

Where in the world does this stop?

Why aren't readers outraged that their favorite writers aren't being paid? What other profession (except music) has this expectation that creativity doesn't deserve to be reasonably compensated?

How the hell are we storytellers going to make a living?

What say you, readers? Do you think writers should be paid? If so, who should pay them? Do you have any responsibility in the mix?

What say you, writers? Are you opting in or out of the Google Books Settlement? How do you plan to sustain your writing livelihood in an age when copyright for everyone, except maybe Disney (insert registration mark here), is coming to mean nothing?

Dual Personalities

By Allison Brennan

Toni and I are at a writer's conference in New York (PASIC–the published author chapter of RWA) and one of the great things about this conference is that because we're all published authors, so we tend to talk about issues that we're all grappling with as published authors of all levels, from #1 New York Times Bestsellers to debut authors.

One discussion point that came up several times was writing in two or more genres: when can you do it, how should you do it, does it help or hurt and should you take a pen name.

There are as many opinions as their are authors.

When romance writers are talking about writing in a second genre, it's usually taking a second genre within the broader romance genre. For example, a historical author also writing contemporary romantic suspense. Sometimes, however, it's a contemporary romance writer who decides to write a mystery series.

One of the hurdles we face is the possibility of ticking off our core readers. If we venture too far off the reservation, we risk losing our base. If we lose our base without gaining new readers, we're toast. This is why many authors take a pen name–it's a way of distinguishing between the two "types" of books. Nora Roberts/JD Robb are one in the same, but Nora Roberts is associated with big, meaty, sweeping romances and JD Robb is associated with futuristic romantic mysteries. Jayne Anne Krentz/Amanda Quick/Jayne Castle are all the same person, but Krentz writes romance/romantic suspense; Amanda Quick historical romance; and Jayne Castle paranormal romance. But we all know it's the same person.

Yet some authors write under one name. Julie Garwood, for example, writes both historical romance and contemporary romantic suspense.

But taking two or more names is not limited to romance sub-genres. Thriller writer James Rollins wrote fantasy as James Clemens, publishing simultaneously (one Rollins book, one Clemens book) two books a year. Now, Jim is adding YA adventures (Indiana Jones) under his Rollins name.

Perennial bestseller Dean Koontz wrote under many pen names in multiple genres–romance, supernatural, horror, suspense, science fiction–before writing exclusively under his name and ultimately reissuing most of his previously published books under his own name.

Stephen King wrote books similar to Stephen King under the pen name Richard Bachman primarily because he was so prolific (another reason why Nora Roberts took a pen name–though she also did it because she was writing a series completely different from her trademark romances.)

Janet Evanovich, however, writes both the Stephanie Plum mystery series and her romance/romantic comedy novels under her own name; and James Patterson writes both thrillers and YA supernatural thrillers under his own name. And our own Tess Gerritsen started in romantic suspense, moved into mainstream thrillers, and also wrote a historical mystery/suspense all under her own name.

When I'm done with my current WIP, I'll start my supernatural thriller series. We've already decided that I'll write the series under my name. I've considered the pros and cons of this:

CONS

1) I write romantic thrillers. My current readers may be upset because there is not as much romance in the books (those there will be a romance–but it'll be a multi-book romantic arc instead of resolved by the end of book one.)

2) It's a series with the same characters through all seven books (as opposed to creating new characters for each book.) Some readers might now want to get invested in a new series.

3) Some people don't like supernatural elements in their suspense novels–even when the books are grounding in the "real world."

4) Readers might pick up a book with my name thinking they're getting one thing, but disappointed because they get something different.

PROS

1) Writers, like readers, often get bored writing the same type of stories. They want to try something a little different (or a lot different) in order to keep themselves fresh and engaged and creative. I'm ready to write something different.

2) When you have a good-sized audience who trusts you to deliver a good-story, they'll mostly follow you anyplace you want to take them. I hope my readers will trust me enough to show them a slightly different world.

3) You already have a name you've built–it would be almost starting at square one to write under a second name (including more time to market, another website, etc.) I don't have the time to manage two names!

One comment from agents and editors at the conference is that they cautioned us to writing a book "like" our last one. One editor said, "You need to deliver another book like the last and give your readers what they expect."

One argument is that you need to give them the same, but different, book. Another romantic suspense. Another cozy mystery. Another western-set historical. Another argument is that it's not the genre, but the feeling the reader has when they read your book that's important. Meaning, if you are known for delivering emotionally-driven stories, then you need to have emotionally-driven stories in all your subgenres. If you are known for your great puzzles in your mysteries, it doesn't matter if you set them in the future, the past, or any time in between.

I'll admit, I'm getting excited about embarking on this new adventure. It's an idea I've had for nearly six years, and I finally get to start writing it. But that doesn't mean I'm not scared of the potential pitfalls!

What about you? Are you willing to go with your favorite authors wherever they want to take you, even if it's a genre you haven't read before?

And because Toni said I had to, I just want to mention that my book SUDDEN DEATH comes out on Tuesday, March 24th. If you like romantic thrillers, I hope you run out to buy it this week. If you don't, I hope you run out and buy it this week . . . for your best friend, mom, dad, spouse, sister, brother, son and (I mean or!) daughter.

Creating Character – Jake Gittes

by Alexandra Sokoloff

Over on my own blog I have been doing breakdowns of different movies to illustrate the story structure techniques that I've been talking about here, and one of the films I'm analyzing is CHINATOWN, not just because it's a fantastic, classic movie, but because it's virtually one-stop shopping for all the story structure techniques I'm trying to illustrate.
And in the middle of this CHINATOWN story breakdown and analysis it struck me that the character of Jake Gittes is a virtual textbook all on his own on techniques of creating a great character. So while I'm trying to figure out how to handle doing a story breakdown that would fit on Murderati (they're very, very long, these things…) I did want to post on the character techniques that went into Jake Gittes that helped create a tragic and iconic detective for the ages.

And maybe coax some of you 'Rati to break down your own favorite character for us.

So, what IS it about Jake Gittes?
Well, first, they got Jack Nicholson to play Jake.
(Do that and your work is done, right?)
But that casting was no accident. Robert Towne wrote the part specifically for Jack Nicholson, who was NOT a star at the time, although he was rising. Towne used Nicholson’s voice, his mannerisms, his attitude, to develop a colorful, complicated fully-realized lead.
I’ve talked before about writing a character for a specific actor. And as authors, we can use this technique even more easily than screenwriters can – because we don’t have to go out and get the actor to play the part (and then compromise later with the ninth choice on our wish list). We can write any actor we please into any part we choose. So why not take advantage of that happy position of unlimited power?
Reread THE FIRM and tell me Grisham didn’t write that character for Tom Cruise (at the age he was when the book came out). Then look at Grisham’s THE PELICAN BRIEF – Darcy IS Julia Roberts, right? This writing-for-actors technique works, not just to create bestselling novels, but also to help you nail your intended actors when the book is made into a movie. (In fact Nicholson not only signed on to play the role, according to Polanski himself, Nicholson was instrumental in getting Polanski to agree to direct. That’s what happens when a smart actor has a vested interest in getting a movie made).
So there’s one major technique right there – Write for a specific actor.
But what else went into the creation of Jake Gittes?
Now, when you’re writing a detective as your main character, whether that detective is a cop, a PI like Jake, or an amateur, a lot of your choices are already made for you. You know there’s going to be a mystery, or a murder, or another crime – or a combination of all three of those things, and that the detective’s outer desire is going to be to solve that crime or mystery (and usually also to avoid being killed by the person s/he is pursuing). The incredible advantage of having all those choices already built in to a character probably has a lot to do with why so many authors and screenwriters choose to write in this genre.
The downside is that detectives have been done so often that it can be hard to do anything unique with the character.
Robert Towne hits a lot of classic points with Jake. I’d like to take them one by one.
1. Jake is a hero with a GHOST, or WOUND:
He used to be a cop working in L.A.’s Chinatown, where nothing was as it seemed and where Jake’s best efforts to help a woman ended up with her getting hurt instead. Though we never learn the details of the incident, apparently it was bad enough that Jake quit the police force and now is wasting his talents on divorce work. And the case he is about to take on will take him metaphorically and physically right back into Chinatown. He will be forced to relive his haunted past.
(And that recreation and reliving of a past trauma is a staple of drama for a reason: a lot of psychologists would say that that's the human condition, the "repetition compulsion": we all unconsciously seek out people, events and situations that duplicate our core trauma (s), in the hope of eventually triumphing over the situation that so wounded us.)
2. CHINATOWN is a “Hero Falls” story.
When we meet him, Jake seems on the surface to be doing pretty well. Whatever happened in Chinatown, it doesn’t seem to consume him. His business is good, he’s making good money, he’s not a broken down alcoholic or basket case, he keeps a sense of humor about things. But there’s a good reason the filmmakers start Jake on a fairly even keel.
For any story you write, there are certain big arcs that most characters fall into. One is a hero/ine who starts the story in emotional trouble if not actual physical trouble (generally brought on the emotional problem!), who takes the journey of the story, is forced to confront her or his deficiencies, overcomes them, and triumphs – to win a goal that was probably not the goal s/he started out with, but is clearly what s/he really needed all along. (This is the most common character arc).
A second pattern is an innocent hero/ine who triumphs over evil and opposition and wins her/his goal through sheer goodness. (THE WIZARD OF OZ and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE are good examples). The heroine and hero in those stories don’t have huge character arcs (although both characters gain in personal strength); the lesson for us (the reader or audience) is a more general one of how virtue and passion and doing the right thing are rewarded (and hopefully we the reader or audience are inspired by the story to be virtuous ourselves.).
A third pattern, though, is a hero who fails or falls. THE GODFATHER shows the moral fall of Michael Corleone (even as he rises in societal stature). CHINATOWN shows the fall of Jake Gittes, despite his sincere and determined attempts to do the right thing. While Michael Corleone makes the choices he makes deliberately (although the pressure of family history weighs heavily); Jake is a pawn, up against the greater forces of a malevolent universe. The only thing Jake learns in CHINATOWN is that his best efforts are useless; he should have learned his lesson long ago that the only way to survive is to do “as little as possible.”
So CHINATOWN begins with a protagonist who we come to understand is wounded, but doing better, and the mystery that presents itself to him as the case seems to offer a chance for Jake’s complete redemption (and the chance of love). The uniqueness of CHINATOWN, of course, and the reason it would not be made as a film today, is that the case that Jake (unconsciously) and we (consciously) hoped would redeem him destroys him instead.
This was a bold choice of the filmmakers (and it was not Towne’s original intention; it was Polanski who pushed for the tragic ending), and sets the story far apart from most Hollywood offerings; one might say it out-noirs most noir as well.
But there are other, more subtle techniques going on here to define Jake.

There is a character who is the protagonist’s mirror
A lot of Jake’s BACKSTORY, GHOST, INNER and OUTER DESIRE are dramatized through the character of Lt. Escobar. Escobar is Jake’s mirror – the man he could have been, in the position Jake could have been in now, had he stayed on the police force instead of quitting to go into private investigations. Escobar got out of Chinatown without quitting the force, and rose from there. When Jake is with Escobar we see Jake’s regret about quitting, his longing to be doing real police work (inner desire). Escobar is a character serves as both an antagonist, sometimes (actually dramatizing Jake’s internal opposition) and an ally. It’s terrific storytelling that Jake’s backstory is dramatized, brought to life with this character from his past.

The character’s inner and outer desires are in conflict
On the surface, Jake wants to do his not very taxing work, make money, and live the good life – doing, as he later says, “as little as possible.” This seems to mean he wants it easy, but we will find that he adopted this philosophy when doing his best to help someone resulted in tragedy.
Jake’s inner desire becomes more and more clear as the story progresses. From the beginning of his investigation of Mulwray, we see that Jake is both a very good investigator and a very passionate detective – he loves doing the work of uncovering a mystery, and his interactions with Escobar make us realize that he loved and misses police work. But even more – and he says this aloud – he wants to help people. He says to Evelyn that he wants to help her husband; after her husband dies he wants to help Evelyn, and when he finds out about Katherine he wants to help both women. So his inner desire is to use his substantial detective skills to help people.
So two great techniques going on there:
– Give us a character with inner and outer desires in conflict and let us see the inner desire start to triumph, and
– Dramatize the hero/ine’s inner desire – and have him or her state it aloud.
There are two characters who represent the hero’s good and bad angels, or two contrasting sides of his personality.
We see two conflicting sides of Jake in the dialogue and in Nicholson’s performance – he can be smart, sophisticated and charming; but he’s also crass, earthy and inappropriate. He’ll make an astute observation (like telling Evelyn that in his “métier” he doesn’t come across people who say they’re relieved to find out their spouse is cheating unless they themselves are cheating…) and then he turns around and undercuts it with a crude remark (he tells her that she changed her mind “quicker than wind out of a duck’s ass”)
These two different and often conflicting sides of Jake’s personality are physically represented by Walsh and Duffy, Jake’s operatives. Walsh is the serious, perceptive operative, focused to the point of being nerdy, and emotionally insightful and compassionate (he knows when to shut up and listen, he is the one who tries to comfort Jake in the final moments of the movie). Duffy is big, loud, crassly charming, and focused on sex and money – another side of Jake’s personality.
This is an easy technique to use and massively effective in developing both character and overall theme: you can see it in operation in Star Wars (Luke is a combination of the intellect of Ben Kenobi and the derring-do of Han Solo), and Star Trek (James Kirk is constantly having to balance the emotional id advice of Bones McCoy and the cold, rational superego advice of Spock).

There is a character who is the protagonist’s doppelganger.
Part of the eerie power of CHINATOWN is the relationship between Jake Gittes and Hollis Mulwray: the man he is initially hired to follow and whom he never actually meets. But Jake doesn’t just follow in Mulwray’s footsteps while on the case; he actually takes the same journey that Mulwray does: both investigating the water scam that’s going on and trying to help Evelyn and her daughter/sister. And both men are equally doomed. It’s a mesmerizing and haunting technique that gives this film a mythic resonance, and makes Jake more than just an ordinary hero, but a tragic figure.
The storytellers give the protagonist clever “business”.
There are scenes throughout the film that are deliberately designed to show how clever Jake is as a detective – some of the most memorable bits in the movie. Jake places a watch under the tire of Mulwray’s car to record what time Mulwray leaves the water pipe. He takes business cards from Yelburton, the Deputy Chief of the Water Department, and uses the card later to gain access to a crime scene at the reservoir. He understands instantly that something is fishy about a drunk drowning in the bone-dry L.A. River bed. He delights in torturing Yelburton’s secretary with his whistling and humming and wandering around the office and relentless questions until she caves and lets him in to see Yelburton. He steals the page he needs from a map in the Hall of Records by borrowing a ruler from the snippy clerk and then laying the ruler across the page and coughing to cover the sound of the page tearing. These often comic scenes are endearing and also make us admire and empathize with Jake. It’s a good idea to start becoming aware of how actors and filmmakers and novelists build character through this kind of business, and then ask yourself what kinds of scenes you could give your own protagonist to let his or her personality shine through.
The character goes to extremes
Another character trait that makes Jake unique is that he will not give up, even to the point of absurdity. For half the movie he has an enormous bandage plastered on his nose because it was cut by one of the goons working for the Water Department. You rarely see a protagonist in a thriller or drama looking like such a buffoon, but valiantly continuing the case in spite of it all, and it certainly sets Jake apart from most heroes.
The character has archetypal or mythic resonance.
And of course it helps that Jake Gittes is deliberately based on one of the all-time classic protagonists of world literature. Not that he has a lot in common with Oedipus, really, but even the slight resonance with Oedipus’s tragic blindness to his own culpability, and the deliberate references to the very first detective story, goes a long way toward making Jake a haunting character.
In the climax, the protagonist must confront his greatest nightmare
This is a very important point: in the climax of CHINATOWN, Jake finds himself (actually deliberately drives himself) right back into the same situation that almost crushed in him in his past. The climax externalizes Jake's GHOST, or WOUND: he is in Chinatown again, a wonderful, seedy, ominous visual, and he's trying to save another woman, two of them this time, when the last time all his best efforts to save a woman in Chinatown resulted in her getting hurt (in some way that was awful enough that he quit the police force). The lesson here is – spend some quality time figuring out how to bring your hero/ine's greatest nightmare to life: in setting, set decoration, characters involved, actions taken. If you know your hero/ine's ghost and greatest fear, then you should be able to come up with a great setting that will be unique, resonant, and entirely specific to that protagonist (and often to the villain as well.)
So what I hope you get from this post is a glimpse of how breaking down what techniques go into creating a specific character can teach you some tricks to use for your own characters.

So I'm curious – do the rest of you have certain protagonists, or just one, who are your models for what a great main character should be? Who, and why?

And happy, happy Equinox! Remember, what you do around this time has extra power, so make it good. 😉

– Alex

Chinatown Act One breakdown

Chinatown Act Two, part one breakdown

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Previous articles on story structure:

What's Your Premise?

Story Structure 101 – The Index Card Method

Screenwriting – The Craft

Elements of Act One

Elements of Act Two

Elements of Act Two, Part 2